Fewer and fewer people were respecting Agent Oganesson these days; after her run in with The Nearlymen and Agent Zinc (or whatever he went by now) she’d started giving a few of her Islands of Stability agents undercover work: if they came across any Red Forest activity to let her know. Of course, strictly on the books, Red Forest did not exist in any reality where ARECON was active, and so to ask her people to investigate missions, events, happenstances, and operations relating to the crimson trees was akin to the average MI5 operative asking one of their own to investigate ghosts.
However, as Oganesson walked one of the back roads of the market-town Glawen - a few miles from Parish-on-the-Wolds where, it seemed, everything kept happening - towards an old mill recently converted into an industrial estate (by a caravan park no less), she felt a pang of pride that her instincts to believe the rogue zinc-agent were justified. Something had been found in the mill, and it reeked of Red Forest activity.
Two police officers were stationed at the entrance, listening to the latest Ed Sheeran album on shared headphones, chatting amicably amongst themselves that his work had found a new depth since his marriage; they nodded once and lifted the cordon, so Oganesson could approach Agent Dubnium, one of the only one of her undercover crew who believed in her insights.
They were a tall, stocky person with long hair down their back somewhere between an adventurous socialite and a stoner, wearing a suit jacket from their mother’s hand-me-downs, the rest a male array from H&M, smoking from a thin, slab vape pen: pomegranate flavour, “Two guys were sniffing around. Looked like our lot, but they didn’t have periodic names,” they said, blowing out another plume, using the vape to tell Oganesson to step through a hole in the brickwork that they had removed the chain-fencing from, “Grey suits, dark red ties. It had to be them.”
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