Road to Utopia - NCT

22 - Super Secret Spy Adventures

(A/N - This is Chenle's POV. I told you it's not that ominous. I also forgot to mention the lab is on the second underground floor too.)

It was time for Taeyong's plan. I wasn't really happy following him around for the day since he was my best friend, but I couldn't risk any problems for the group.

Looking back on it, Jisung was never supposed to be friends with me, and I was never supposed to interact with someone who looked like they wouldn't help our cause. But after Jisung handed me a lollipop on the first day of high school, saying that I "looked lonely and could do with a friend" (he wasn't wrong; transferring to a whole new area of Korea was hard), it was hard staying away from him. Sometimes it would just be us sitting in the library doing our own thing, other times we would go to the arcade (before the Utopia Party banned them) and use our week's worth of pocket money trying to beat each other's high scores.

Life was much simpler then. I didn't have to do missions, but I would help to recruit members. Jisung should never have gotten in this life, but hearing about his biweekly therapy sessions made me question their intentions. On the outside, he seemed like a normal boy, but his explanations of his sessions made me think otherwise. I guess that's why Taeyong made me drop subtle hints that the government weren't good (he never noticed them) so we could study their intentions closely.

I yawned. Waking up at 6am to see if he was awake was not a clever idea, especially as Jisung rarely woke up before 9am, sometimes 10. I was about to fall back asleep when I heard the door on the right of my room open. Jisung was awake?

I didn't want to follow him and leave my room yet, so I opened the surveillance cameras on my computer. It was yet another one of sugar daddy Soo Man's idea to keep cameras around the place, but only the leaders knew about them (Taeyong told me for this mission, but it did mean I would have to watch myself when stealing Doyoung's snacks out of the pantry at 4am).

Obviously, he made his way to the kitchen for breakfast and greeted Ten and Winwin, who were on the island. Opening the pantry, he grabbed his favourite cereal and milk (not forgetting a pack of gummy worms) and slowly ate it. Why anyone was awake at this point confused me, but I hoped it was worth it.

After painstakingly watching him eat cereal and gummy worms afterwards for twenty minutes, he finally got up and made his way to the basement. That was my cue to leave my room, stuff a croissant hurriedly in my mouth and follow him down without him seeing me. Maybe later I would make myself known, but right now I wanted to remain covert.

I noticed him entering the lab, so I hid around the corner. Usually, they kept the door open unless they were working with explosives and to my luck the door was open.

"Hi Jisung, do you need anything in particular?" Jungwoo's soft voice greeted him. I remained low and peered my head around the door frame so I could see what was going on.

He shook his head. "No, I just wanted to see the new facilities properly without so many people around, if you don't mind? What are you working on?"

"That's fine. This," he pointed to the various beakers filled with concerning colours of liquids, "is supposed to create an antidote for ricin poisoning, at least that's what Shotaro said."

"Ricin?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, he left a note saying whoever came down here first needs to mix these ingredients for a ricin antidote."

"Okay? And do you think it works?" He inched himself closer to a shelf with other named antidotes.

"Not sure. The only way to test it is on humans and animals, something I'm against. I'm sure Lucas wouldn't mind. Feel free to explore the place but don't touch the cupboards marked with tape."