In a small corner office, one of many such offices on the second floor of a small shopping mall, a meeting was taking place.

The room was unassuming and drab. Grey wallpaper fraying with age and neglect rimmed the entire office. There were nearly none of the personal touches most workers will apply to their corporate jail cells over the course of a career. Only a single, stainless steel desk with an in and an out tray and two chairs. The ‘in’ tray was notably fuller than the out - which contained nearly no paperwork at all.

In one cheap office chair, sitting behind a desk was a woman. She had dirty blonde hair tied back in a severe bun, and wore a sharp business suit that looked as though it had come directly to the office from the early nineties. The suit was so full of awkward padding and starch that It left the body beneath it almost completely masked from view.

This was a problem for the man sitting in the other chair. One much smaller and cheaper even than the office depot chair the woman sat in. It rendered her small physical tells, such as the tensing of muscles that much harder to read. And presently, he very much wished he could gauge how angry she was.

“So you see, the current Agent Thespian believes he has adequately surpassed our usual mission count to qualify for retirement…” the short balding man said, resisting the urge to wipe sweat from his face and inwardly cursing Thespian.

“I heard you the first time Playwright.” snapped the blond woman. Her tone never straying from it’s cold impassive drone, and yet still somehow managing to convey immense displeasure.

The balding man - Playwright - took a slow, deep breath. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t perfectly aware that his boss would be displeased by one of their best agents quitting without training a replacement. Their organization had existed for nearly as long as America itself, and for all that time there had always been a Thespian. Just as there was always a Playwright. It was the nature of the Troupe that agents take on and train an apprentice when they made it to middle age, since it was rare for people in their line of work to survive long enough to retire at a normal age.

But the current Thespian, a young man barely scraping the age of twenty-eight, was so good at what he did, so completely without remorse or a need for downtime, that he had demolished the previous record holder for early retirement.  Since no one had foreseen his prowess - or if they did, they didn’t expect him to retire early - he had never been assigned an apprentice.

Which put the Troupe in a very uncomfortable position indeed.

“I might be able to convince him to stay on…” began Playwright, as he trained his considerable intellect on finding a way to couch his next statement.

“But there will likely need to be… concessions.” at this, the blond woman, who’s clenched jaw and pinched eyebrows had relaxed momentarily, immediately leveled a baleful glare at him. Daring him to look away, silently demanding that he submit himself to her displeasure.

“Agent. Playwright.” she finally said, her cold voice came out clipped, pronouncing each vowel with a sharp succinctness reminiscent of a headmaster remonstrating a particularly troublesome student.

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“I have no fewer than three situations worldwide that require an agent. Three operations, meticulously plotted out, researched, and paid for by clients who do not take kindly to delays.” the woman inclined her head towards the towering stack of paperwork labeled ‘IN’ on her desk before continuing.

“I don’t care what he wants. Just get it for him and get him back to doing his job.” her decree made, she turned back to her work, clearly dismissing a chagrined Playwright.

“He wants to take a long term assignment-" Playwright began, before being cut off.

“Good. Here.” his boss said, deftly yanking a sheaf of papers from the stack on her desk and proffering it to him. When she wiggled it twice more and he didn’t take it, she finally bothered to look up at him again. Ostensibly to see what was wrong, but more likely so she could threaten him. Playwright thought it best he cut the second possibility off before it could come to fruition.

“In Canada!” he blurted, firmly resigned to the embarrassment if it meant he could avoid punishment.

“...Canada?” the woman repeated, confusion crossing her face and breaking the perfectly emotionless visage she had been affecting since he had entered her office.

“But nothing happens in Canada!” she exclaimed. Which was not entirely true. A great many things happened in Canada. It was just that, none of those things were of relevance to the field of international espionage and intrigue. Still…

“Thespian has assured me that if you ‘Get off his dick’ then he will be sure to train an adequate replacement for himself.” Playwright had to make sure to raise his pudgy hands and make quotation marks in the air as he spoke.

While he was comfortable paraphrasing overt rudeness to his superiors, he was most certainly not comfortable with being punished for it. And very few people were qualified enough to get away with merely being ‘punished’ for it. Thespian was one of them, and since Playwright was only here because of him to begin with, he felt comfortable implicating him.

A myriad of emotions flickered across the womans face. Relief, Annoyance, and Disgust to name a few. Playwright pointedly chose not to notice it. Not outwardly anyway. He was pushing his luck as it was speaking on behalf of the walking libido he was nominally supposed to be in charge of.

Finally, the blonds face settled into a look of resignation as she accepted the situation for what it was. She nodded once, and took a moment to reconstruct her professional demeanor. That done, she returned her attention to Playwright.

“...Fine. But he has to report to office here every month to update me personally as to all connections and inroads he’s making there with law enforcement and otherwise. If he is on the payroll, he will work.” the woman’s gaze drilled holes into Playwright, who had the good sense to look cowed even though inwardly he was sighing. Thespian had told him this was likely where the conversation would turn and had preemptively agreed to those terms well before their superior had ever thought of them. Not for the first time, Playwright found the cunning agents talent for foresight both awe inspiring and tremendously annoying - as he had a penchant for cryptic advice and carefully worded non explanations. Thespian was many things and unfortunately, unrepentant shit disturber counted among them.

Playwright waited an appropriate amount of time to give them impression he had to think about it, then nodded curtly in agreement.

“I will inform him.” he said, thankful for the conversation to be done. He slowly rose from his seat and forced his hands to be still instead of brushing himself off as he stood. Thespian had once told him that small gestures like that were what truly made a conversation, and that dusting ones self off when leaving a meeting implied you were trying to cleanse yourself of the experience. A message Playwright most certainly did not want to send his boss. It was an unfortunate hazard of the profession of spy that casual murder by your superior wasn’t something one could brush aside out of hand as impossible.

He carefully walked the two steps to the closed door, opened it and slipped out.

Inside the office, the blond stared at the door for a few moments after he left. Her mind whirred with thoughts and plots as casually as most other people breathed. She was thankful that Playwright was too scared of her to bother actually asking her such trifling things as ‘why’. She would have been hard pressed to mask her panic at Thespians sudden exit.

At least he would return home once a month to ‘report’ to her. Afterall, it wouldn’t do to relocate the entire organizations offices just so she could more comfortably make a booty call, now would it?