Isaak Kämpfer
Neutral - Cipher Employed
Phenac City - Cipher HQ

I was sitting in my bunk, awake as usual. The night had passed by without so much as a wink of sleep, despite my best efforts. My hands clutched the sides of the bed tightly, white knuckles threatening to burst with any more pressure. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply, exhale all the anger and fear. It didn't work. I forced myself to let go and lay back. Other grunts and soldiers stirred around me, waking up or getting ready for basic duty. We all silently understood each other pretty well, all silently moving within the complex machinery that was the Cipher Organization. "We're all just doing what we need to to stay alive and out of the fight," I mused, reaching for the bottle of ... whatever it was. My painkillers were in the cargo pants which hung sloppily over the dresser next to my bunk. I popped the bottle open quickly, rattling out two of the small pills. I thought I recognized them as the last of the flupirtine I had looted from some hostile grunt on my last mission, but with my tiredness all I saw was a pill which promised to bury those memories which robbed me of sleep and soothe the pain in my hands. I swallowed them quickly, not even needing water to take them with anymore. I waited a moment, and started getting dressed.

Today was supposed to be a boring day where I got to play wait and see if they need something with the higher ups. I was grateful for the down time, but it had been a week since my last op, and I was getting restless. I liked having distractions, and there wasn't really much to do around the grunts. They had their own routines, and most of them weren't interesting company. Not that I really wanted to talk to anyone anyways. When I did it was usually to have a target to practice on for training, but even that got boring since most of them knew my tricks, or feared to become one of the few cases where I had sent my ... less fortunate targets to the infirmary, often with broken bones, sometimes with emerging signs of psychosis. I twisted my neck as I walked around, waiting for that reassuring ... there it is ... *CRACK*.

I walked to the small room which was designated as my "waiting room". Whatever the hell that meant. It had a desk and two chairs, a pinboard, and a speaker from which I would receive my summons. I looked at the pinboard, which was still covered with intel from the last op ... building blueprints, notes on guard rotations, patrol routes, sticky notes littered with theorized camera locations. Weeks of spying, hacking, small scale infiltration. I started unpinning the board, abjectly placing papers together for the file. I looked over to the book case. It was filling up rapidly, binders of intel did that. There weren't too many which had been relevant recently, but it was good to keep that kind of stuff on hand. Never know when I might have to break into the same place again... I turned and looked at the binders. Cipher HQ, Pyrite Colosseum, Pyrite Jail, various buildings collectively placed in the Under, Agate Village, Mt. Battle... there weren't many places I hadn't visited in Orre, though my visits never seemed to come with invitations.

Yup. Today might just be a boring day. Damnit, please let there be an op for me...