Project IZ*ONE: Secret Files

Cat and Mouse: Part 1

"Hey, Kkura? Earth to Sakura?" A woman's voice calls to the tech girl as she was engrossed with something on her PC.

"H-huh? Oh, Chaeyeon. Sorry, what is it?" Sakura responds to her girlfriend, quickly closing the file she had been looking at. The younger girl notices it, but decides not to pry.

"Yujin and the others have been training for a few months and they wanted a challenge, remember? My sister and ITZY are visiting today, and you said you'd observe IVE play a capture-the-flag game against them to see how much they've improved."

"Ah, of course! I'll go to the control room and set it up in a bit." The Japanese girl says quickly. In truth, she'd been so busy lately that she'd forgotten about it, so she tried to play it off. Sakura was just about to get up and change out of her usual sweats and baggy shirt when Chaeyeon grabbed her hand.

"Are things okay with you, Kkura? It feels like you've been out of it lately." Chaeyeon asks. As always, the younger girl could see right through her, but Sakura didn't want to let it show. The project that's been consuming her time recently is something only she could know about.

"Just a bit stressed lately with the events of the past couple months." Sakura replies, which wasn't a complete lie. The things that have popped up recently with the other IZ*ONE members weren't big missions that required all of them to be present, but when a lot of small problems pile on, you begin to feel their effects.

Though Chaeyeon knew there was some truth to what her girlfriend had said, she was still a bit disappointed knowing there was something else she was hiding. When they'd gotten together last year, things were great. They'd go on cute dinner dates, Sakura would teach Chaeyeon how to play some video games, and Chaeyeon would give Sakura some dance pointers. Since they both had different interests, it was nice to share them with each other.

It wasn't until Nako and Hitomi had sent that android over that things began to change. The tech-girl spent a whole week in their room trying to figure out how the machine ticked. Once she was done with that, things didn't get better. There was this file that Sakura had begun to work on that she'd always close whenever anyone entered the room. Since she wasn't the confrontational type, Chaeyeon wanted to wait patiently for the older girl to open up to her like she usually did. There comes a point though when enough is enough. Of course, couples could have secrets, but when they start to affect the relationship, one side has to speak up.

"Alright, Kkura. If you need anything, just let me know, okay?" Chaeyeon eventually says with a smile. Today would not be the day she would break.

~~~~

"It's nice to see you again, Yujin, Wonyoung!" Chaeryeong greets as she sees the two tall girls waving at her group the second they enter campus.

"Thank you for agreeing to this, unnie!" Yujin cheerfully says. "Our team was only formed a couple months ago, but that doesn't mean we'll be pushovers!"

"We wouldn't expect anything less from a group that has the two of you. I heard you're the leader? I hope you've given the newbies a lot of pointers." Yeji, ITZY's team leader, says in response. Every couple of weeks after the events at Jeju, she and her four friends would visit campus as promised to train and compete in capture-the-flag events. So far, they had a 16-11 record, having faced many different combinations of IZ*ONE and other trainees. Since they were always teammates in these games, it only made sense that their record would be better than the mix and match teams they faced. Normally, JYP would be against going out so much, but their president, Park Jinyoung, agreed that training with other mutants would definitely improve their skills and keep them on their toes. There were already a lot of memorable matches like the time Minjoo managed to invisibly walk all the way to their flag and sneak it to the goal line unnoticed. The one where that Japanese mutant, Murashige, joined was really interesting too. Meanwhile, Ryujin would always brag about being 5-0 against any team that had Yena on it, much to the duck's annoyance.