As soon as the car pulled into the mansion's underground parking lot, Solar threw open the door and darted out in a heartbeat. She flew straight pass the gates in lightning speed, not even bothering to bring her school bag along with her as it will only slow her down. She needed speed and she was sure one of her helpers would eventually bring it up to her room for her. That could wait for now. 

"Wait Ms Kim, you forgot your bag-" her personal chauffeur called out but the former only ignored, not bothering to look back and quickened her steps. 

She raced up a flight of stairs to the top floor and paced through the dark hallway before reaching a familiar dead end. She halted to a stop and almost knocked her head onto the grey wall in front of her. Her eyes quickly surveyed the premises for any bystander or helper loitering around at the moment. The coast was clear.

Then, she traced her fingers along the corners of the wall she was facing, all the way down to the bottom and stopped right above the carpet. She curled her fingers inwards and dug under the edges of the red velvet carpet she was standing on. As her fingers sandwitched inbetween the carpet and marble flooring, she slid them around smoothly until they collided with a tiny piece of metal rod stickin out from the ground.

"Found it!" she thought to herself.

Without hesitation, she used her nimble fingers to bend the 1 centimeter long metal rod to the side at 90 degrees before twisting it exactly 360 degrees in a clockwise motion. Solar knew she needed these to be precise.

Click! Solar smiled upon hearing the familiar high-pitched clicking sound coming from the wall, while she stood in anticipation for the reveal.

It had been way too long since the last time she had done this but she could still vividly remember exactly what she needed to do.

On the wall of the seemingly dead end, a fragment of its surface cracked open and started protruding out. A clear rectangular shaped block of see-through fine glass shot out, with a glowing outline of a palm printed on top of its surface, like those finger-scanning machines from generic spy movies. Solar immediately placed her right palm on the block of glass and shifted her fingers around to match the correcponding fingers on the white palm print. Almost instantly, the white palm print beneath lit up and turned to the colour of green.  The security system has instantly identified Solar after the successful fingerprint scanning and commenced the system unlock sequence immediately. 

Click! A deeper click sound emerged from behind the wall to break the silence.

Before she could react, the wall in front her suddenly split right down the middle and separated into two vertical rectangular sections before opening wider and revealing a room of darkness hidden behind. The room finally saw the light of day after 8 years of neglect from its owners.

Solar took no time to stare in awe and hastly entered the secret entrance before the 'doors' silently but effeciently shut behind her in a flash. The secret entrace to the passage closed within miliseconds and all the cracks on the surfaces suddenly disappeared to reform back into the huge flat grey wall again. The wall was back to normal again, as if it had never opened before.

These hidden high-tech special features could be randomly found all around the huge mansion, but were all perfectly disguised and hidden in plain sight. All thanks to Mr Kim, of course. He was a man who kept way too many dark secrets that he also became one of the most paranoid beings Solar had ever known, even more paranoid than her skeptical self. He always gone on about how someday someone's going to assasinate him in his sleep and many other overly-dramatic ways to die. There was no doubt that he had unknowingly passed this trait down to his daughter. It was both a blessing and a curse to the Kim family.

Mr. Kim spent a fortune redesigning his house in complete secrecy and planting his entire mansion with several secret rooms for hosting secret conferences, secret passage ways that led to several alternative exits if he ever needed to escape in an emergency and even secret weapons hidden at different corners to be used in case of an attack. These were just necessary precautional safety measures he built, at least to feel more secured and help him sleep better at night. 

"Always better to be safe than sorry" was one of his signature lines. It was cliché but he made his point. 
 

The pitch dark passage way led to a specifc small room that Solar went through all these troubles for. The entire room automatically lit up in an almost blinding white glow as soon as the motion sensors had detected the pressure of Solar's foot against the glass flooring. 

"Welcome back, Kim Yongsun ssi," a robotic voice in the room greeted the girl, who immediately rolled her eyes in annoyance upon hearing her birthname. 

"Urgh! I really need to get Appa to update the system every now and then," Solar thought as she shook her head in dismay.
 

It was the first time she was back here in a good 8 years now. The last time she was here, her late Omma was still alive. The room felt so familiar yet so strange at the same time. It felt weird to be present in the room alone, she really missed her late Omma's company.

Solar only ever visited this room when it was absolutely necessary to seek a private space. Nobody, not a single soul in the household knew that this existed. Not even the loyal helpers, kitchen or cleaning workers had a clue; despite having been working here everyday for almost half their lifespans. Mr. Kim made it clear that as long as anyone knew about any of his rooms, he will silence them and completely demolish it to destroy all evidences of it ever existing before. He could not afford to let anyone find out about them, not even his own family members who occassionally came over to visit during the holidays. Only his late wife, Solar and himself knew about them. He knew too well not to trust his family as they could always plan an attack to overthrow him since he was the eldest with the most successful career. Let's just say that the Kim family was not one of the most bonded or cohesive families and had a history of lifelong drama til this day.

These four walls were completely coated with strongest titanium formula that could withstand the impact of up to a bomb explosion and not crumble under the immense pressure. These thick walls also made it favourable for the Kims to talk in complete privacy and safety as no spying technology or eavesdroppers could possibly hear soundwaves beyond these soundproof walls. It was a perfect hiding spot! 

Solar went straight to turn on the outdated desktop computer on the table which had been left here previously to rot over the years of neglect. She proceeded to plug her recently retrieved prized possesion from a certain Blonde girl, into the USB port. 

"You better not have touched anything inside, you little squirt!" she reprimanded Moonbyul in her head as the slight reminder of the girl's cunning actions sent her heart pounding faster in pure anger.

Upon getting her precious Appa's thumbdrive stolen, Solar was desperate to check if any of its contents had been tempered with, erased or worse, been extracted out. These contents were highly confidential so she could only open them in this safe box she was currently inside of in total isolation and security. There could be nowhere else that was safer than where she was at this point in time.
 

During this entire month being away from it, she was sure that it was plenty of time for the person who got a hold of the thumbdrive to hire the best hackers to crack through the initial security code, access its contents and do basically anything they wanted with them. They could have stolen important illegal AI information from it and use them for their own purposes or duplicated and resold them to other secret societies. It could be way worse as they could have used these as evidences to sue and sabotage her Appa's company.

Besides, Moon Intelligences were their biggest industrial rival company and would win millions in return if they successfully sabotaged and brought SMART Kim Global down into total bankruptcy. It was obvious that they naturally had ill intentions and motifs to bring down such a powerful competitor in the market. The depths of illegal information contained inside the thumbdrive could easily put thousands of employees behind bars, get the company and various investors bankrupt and maybe even a death sentence for Mr Kim if the court was brutal enough. At this moment, the possibilities were pretty much endless and that only made her mind spiral into worse paranoia by every passing minute. 

"Loading, please wait." These 3 words on the screen taunted her as she grit her teeth in frustration, and growing impatience.

The atmosphere was tensed and she almost forgot to breathe. She sat in complete silence and impatiently slammed the keys on the keyboard as she waited for the old dinosaur computer to awaken after years of deep hibernation. Patience was not the girl's best trait, clearly. 

Suddenly, the screen flashed into a full white home page before a blue little pop up window appeared over it. Instinctively, she punched her login username and password in before clicking the 'enter' button. Soon, a plain black wallpaper replaced the white page, signalling her successful login ino her old account. 

"YES!!! OMG finally!" she exclaimed in relief and quickly double-clicked on the thumbdrive's folder and anticipated for the usual security login page to appear.

Instead of seeing the usual pre-installed security login page to key her special security pin numbers in, Solar was taken aback when the folder opened immediately but directed her to a collection of a few folders with unfamiliar previews of unknown documents. Solar gasped, not in shock but in rage as she proved her own theory to be true. They have indeed successfully hacked through the security system she pre-installed beforehand. 

"Damn it! They got through the security system?! That means they must have already read through everything in there. !!!!" she freaked out.

The girl was growing more anxious and silently praying that they did not change too much of the contents inside. 

She sighed restlessly while dragging her mouse cursor over and stopping right above the first folder. It had an unfamiliar folder name compared to the ones she had previously set for the Masquerade Ball's presentation with the company respresentatives. She gulped nervously and was deeply terrified to reveal what was inside and how much had been altered or extracted. She knew she was already in deep trouble at this point and cursed herself for being so careless for losing it in the first place.

"I'm so ed! Appa's definitely going to skin me alive for this!!!" Solar thought as she feared the worst was about to happen.

Too afraid to look, she covered her left hand over her eyes while she double clicked onto the mouse with her right hand. Within seconds, a new window popped up and revealed several strange documents and even some pictures. She double clicked on each one of them and sunk deeper into her seat in utter confusion at what she saw. She was puzzled that she could recognise all of them but they were not what she was looking for.

"Wait WHAT?! These are just a bunch of stupid soft copies of textbooks and notes from class? Where's everything else?! Where did they go?!" She thought to herself, wrecking her brain as to why this was happening.

She sat in silence for a while as she brainstormed thousands of possible explainations for this. This did not make sense.

Then, it hit her! She had been fooled the entire time! Solar realised that she had gotten a dummy thumbdrive, in replacement of the actual one! It made perfect sense now. The dummy thumbdrive looked identical but it was not the real one as it failed to have the security code and contents inside. It wasn't the original! 

Solar smacked herself on the forehead when she realised how oblivious and stupid she had been this entire time. She was way too caught up in anger to think logically. She got trolled.
 

"HOW DARE SHE TRICK ME?!!" Solar thought as she slammed her palm onto the desktop. 
 

Solar was always one step a