Minkyung is a little bit nervous.

It’s unique for her—she usually isn’t so on edge. 

But today is different.

This job is strange. It’s too easy. It’s not like she has a hard time usually, but there’s something about this one that feels too good to be true. A large sum of credits at stake for what? Stealing one little USB drive from a loosely protected embassy? It can’t be right. 

She shakes her head, and furrows her brow. None of this matters. She gets the job done, and she can get the money—enough to buy a new ship—and she can fly off to a vacation planet like Praxis or something. Take some time for herself.

Minkyung finally snaps back to reality. She’s currently perched on the roof of a building hundreds of feet in the air, and she has a job to do, god damn it. She taps her wrist, activating her holo-watch, quickly pulling up the map of the ventilation system for one last scan. Eyes flitting over the details, she tries to take it all to mind. A pretty simple layout. After her second prison escape, she’s become pretty confident in her ventilation tunnel navigation skills. The small flashing red dots on her screen inform her that there’s only about 20 guards in this building—a small amount for a structure of its size. 

She unclips the multi-tool from her belt, shutting off the holo-watch as she does. Carefully, she unscrews the cover of the grate next to her that leads into the tunnels she will have to navigate. If she was feeling a little more showy, she’d burn a hole right through the metal of the roof, but the goal of this job was to remove the desired item and cause as little disturbance as possible. No fun tricks. Save that for the museum heists. Snapping her goggles over her face, Minkyung lowers herself through the grate and lands with a soft metallic thud in the inner tubing of the embassy. 

On her knees, Minkyung begins the crawl to her desired location: an office on the very top floor. There should be about two guards outside, she remembers from her briefing. The briefing itself was very odd—the client had requested to meet at a junky burger joint located on an asteroid, and they had worn a full helmet and a voice-changer the entire time. She knew clients liked to keep things confidential, but what was the big deal with just one USB? Perhaps it was government secrets. Secret codes. A map to a lost treasure. Whatever it was, it was at least worth a million credits. A million credits that would soon be Minkyung’s if she didn’t this all up. 

She’s been lost in her thoughts for so long, that she almost doesn’t realize she’s arrived where she needs to exit—a vent above the door to the office, which is indeed flanked by two guards. Neither are wearing masks or any sort of breath protection, which means she can do this the easy way. Minkyung digs into a pouch attached to her belt, and pulls out a small white capsule. She pulls a silver disk from her bag and sticks the capsule Pressing a button on the disk, she pulls the mask hanging around her neck over and nose, before tossing the disk between the gaps of the vent and sending it falling to the floor below. The disk bounces on the floor with a hollow clang, right in-between the two guards, who turn to look down at it with surprise on their faces. As they both realize what it is, a poof of white dust explodes from the disk, filling the hallway in a white cloud. Both guards are engulfed by the smoke, and Minkyung watches with a smirk as they collapse to the tiled floor. She pulls up the map on her watch once more—quickly, as she knows she only has about an hour before the guards awaken from their little slumber and she needs all the time she can get—and confirms there are no remaining guards in the area. Once again, it feels just a bit too safe. Not her problem. An easy job is an easy job, she reminds herself. Quickly, she unscrews the vent, leaning it up against the inner walls of the tunnel to screw back on during her escape, and drops to the floor.      

The dust in the air is already dissipating—it only works for a few minutes after release form the disk—but Minkyung leaves her mask on for safety. Looking around the hallway, she notices two security cameras oddly off. Her eyebrows cross. Something is definitely not normal here, she decides. She tries to scan them with her goggles—but they’re completely dead. Not even any backup batteries inside. The door is only protected by a single keypad, not even a fingerprint sensor. It’s as if they are just asking her to walk on in. Didn’t the client give her this map? She hadn’t considered it, but why did it only show location of the guards? Not security cameras or… other people in the building? She tries to scan the room past the door with her goggles and gets nothing. Extra strange. A sense of dread itches at the back of her neck, and she opens up the menu of her holo-watch, scrolling through the settings until she finds what she needs to provide an extra sense of safety. “Activate emergency teleport button.” Minkyung rarely uses her emergency teleport function, as it costs an insane amount of ship fuel and usually burns up an entire teleporter battery, but something tells her that whatever’s beyond that door might require her to make a quick escape to her ship. A small, bright blue button pops out of the wristband of her watch, and she sighs. She’s just being paranoid, really. If anything, all the times she’s managed to get away from whatever—cops, investigators, bandits, bounty hunters—is going to her head, and now she’s afraid that something might be too easy. It’s ridiculous. But better safe than sorry, she supposes. Using her goggles to scan over the thumbprint residue on the keypad, she punches in the code with her gloved hands. The door slides open. 

She sees both exactly what she expected, and what she didn’t expect at all at the same time. A group of officers in Galactic Enforcer uniforms, all pointing their ray guns her way.

“Kim Minkyung, freeze where you stand!”

And with that, she presses the blue button on her watch and disintegrates into a thousand blue particles.