Spy School / 国安附中

Harmony goes to a special school.

Read the comic associated with this story!

One day when Harmony was about to graduate 6th grade, Sky came to their apartment a-knocking. Entity answered the door, saw Sky's MSS uniform, and freaked out¹.

"Wh-What did I do?"

"Why, if there's anything you did, that was giving birth to a wonderful daughter! Is little Harmony home?"

Entity called Harmony out. Sky told her that she could get enrolled in the Middle School for Young Officers in Training Affiliated to the Ministry of State Security of the Republic of Bauhinia. Ministry Affiliate for short.

Harmony was initially reluctant, but Sky told her that Sugarcane, her best friend, was also attending, so she said yes. Frosting warned Harmony to think it through, though she knew that there's no stopping Harmony.

Later, Harmony and Sugarcane were assigned their very first practice mission — to recruit the daughter, Jelly, of the cultural attaché of the Westavian Embassy in Flower City, Checkers.

They had been here for more than a year now, and the MSS thinks that if he was a spy (because all cultural attachés are), he would've started working by now.

Jelly didn't have any friends. Her dad was busy with work, and her mom was forced to stay in Westavia, so Jelly was always quite lonely.

So, Harmony and Sugarcane, faking their names as "Joy" and "Pony," made friends with her.

They played, had fun, became BFFs. But soon, the spy school students started asking Jelly to get into her father's room and stealing stuff out.

But as Harmony and Sugarcane's feelings for Jelly grew, they realized something: if they did get evidence for Checkers' espionage, he would be deported, and would for sure take Jelly home with him.

They didn't want Jelly to leave. They had to find a way to keep Checkers in Bauhinia.

So their focus shifted. Instead of gathering evidence that Checkers was a spy, they started to find a way to force Checkers to defect.

They soon found an opportunity, but also a ticking clock: a purge was going on back in Westavia. Checkers might be called back at any time. They had to get Checkers to defect before he went back to Westavia.

Harmony and Sugarcane planned to blackmail Checkers themselves using the dirt collected by Jelly. (What dirt? He has a Bauhinian mistress? Tofu stop being obsessed with mistresses it's becoming your deux ex machina ok maybe they're going to fake Checkers being a Bauhinian mole and threaten to let Westavian Intelligence Service know unless he actually becomes a mole. But they ain't gonna hit them up with a phone call. Think it through.) They did this without notifying anyone else at spy school. But Sky knew everything anyways. They've fallen into his trap. He had expected this, though if they were better students and followed orders exactly, they wouldn't have fallen into it.

One morning, Harmony found a rope hanging down from her window bars. She lived on the third floor, and there were narrow bars fitted over the windows for baby safety. There was a door in the middle that could be opened². The rope clang to a bar on a hook. Harmony had no idea how that got here. She went to school and promptly forgot about it.

The next day, when they were playing, Jelly suddenly said she was dizzy and felt sick. Harmony and Sugarcane suspected that she was about to get a heat stroke. The closest place they could think of to get to was Harmony's home. So they went there.

They laid Jelly on Harmony's bed and turned on the air conditioner, sliding the window shut. Harmony got a cup of water for her.

All the while, her top-secret textbook from spy school was lying haphazardly on her desk, right beside the bed.

Jelly downed the water and asked for more. As Harmony took the empty cup, she also asked Sugarcane to bring her a wet towel to put over her forehead.

Sugarcane didn't know where the towels were. Harmony said that she would get the towel and gave the cup to Sugarcane. They both left the room.

Jelly sprang up from the bed, swiped the textbook off the desk, slid the window open, bonked the bar window open, and leapt out of there, lowering herself down with the rope she hooked on.

The noise alerted Harmony and Sugarcane. They ran back to her room, only to find the air conditioner, looming over an empty desk, blowing into the open window.

They clumsily climbed down the rope too, Harmony and then Sugarcane, in hopes of chasing Jelly. When they hit the ground, they were greeted by Sky, who handed the book back to Harmony.

"Let's get to school."

It was around four in the afternoon on a Saturday. They got into Sky's car and went to his office at Ministry Affiliate.

It was there where Sky explained to them that everything Jelly gave them, the "evidence" stolen from her father, was fake. Completely made-up.

Jelly, he told them, was a student at the Westavian equivalent of Ministry Affiliate. She wasn't even in the same grade as Harmony and Sugarcane; she was in ninth grade already, having been trained for two previous years. She was pretty short, which made her suitable for faking a seventh grader. And in liking her too much, they had ignored all their professionalism and fallen into her trap. If Jelly successfully got the textbook, Westavia could've gotten an advantage over Bauhinia for years to come.

Anyway that's the story of how our future officers learned the first lesson at Ministry Affiliate: Never grow attached to your agents.