The International Secret Intelligence Agency. ISIA, as you knew it. Being a private secret agent was by no means an easy job, but you’d always loved it. Coming in as a rookie after college had been especially harsh, the more senior members having no trouble hazing you and making you feel like nothing but fresh meat.

Thankfully, you came in with one other new recruit: Quentin Antoniuk. He was quiet and a bit broody, and yet, you’d impossibly hit it off. Having a comrade was a welcome relief, the two of you growing together. You gradually uncovered the warmer man beneath his defensive shield, getting to know him as one of your closest friends. However, after a couple years, Quentin was offered a higher paying job at a rival agency, DINC (Democratic Intelligence Network Collective). He left, and you didn’t hear from him for nearly a decade.

That’s why it was so disarming when, ten years without any news of what he’d done or where he’d been, you learned that Quentin had… died. He’d been sent on a mission to lure a black market dealer with fake uranium, and ended up fleeing with real uranium and the payment for it, four other DINC agents left dead. The jet he’d left in then crashed, and his charred corpse was identified by dental records.

It felt wrong, somehow. The Quentin you knew was good beneath the protective facade he put up; he never would’ve crossed his own agency like that. So when your phone rang with an unknown number, and it was his voice on the other end, you were filled with relief.

With little preamble, he told you he’d been framed, that the murders had all been an elaborate plot by a mole in the agency. He whispered some hushed coordinates, promising to explain everything when you got there, lest the phone be somehow tapped.

You now found yourself in the Russian wilderness, hours from the nearest town. Finally, you saw it: a large cabin, well hidden within a dense copse of pine trees. There, you knew, Quentin was waiting.