The Facility was so secret that it didn’t really have a name.  Its existence was known only to base personnel and the highest ranks of the South Korean general staff.  Situated on a remote island on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, the Facility was a secret that the South Korean government had not even shared with its ally, the United States.

Its purpose was to conduct military research which could safeguard the Republic of Korea against its insane neighbour to the north.  In fact, it was on the verge of a breakthrough on Project 86 – a supersoldier formula that promised to make any military confrontation between the two Koreas a very one-sided affair.

Project 86 was designed to enhance everything from physical strength to endurance to mental ability.  It did what it set out to do in spades.  In fact, the problem was that it was sometimes too good at enhancing subjects.  The formula was too potent, and created undesirable and unpredictable results on female subjects especially.

Clearly there were still problems to be worked out.  Still, those weren’t the problems on anyone’s mind right now.  There was a much, much, more important issue at hand – samples of Project 86 had gone missing.

Alarms blared as uniformed security personnel scrambled to their stations.   The Facility’s front gates were sealed and armed men patrolled the perimeter with barely restrained dogs.  The drone of a helicopter could be heard overhead as it swept the darkness with a searchlight.  Patrol cutters circled the island like school of hungry piranhas, their crews scanning the water with night-vision equipment.

Little did they know, it was no use.

The culprits had escaped long before Facility security had even known that the formula was missing.  By now, the thieves were already on their way back to Seoul on a small black motorboat with their stolen cargo.  Sitting comfortably inside the sleek watercraft were seven female figures.  They were the world’s most talented cat-burglars.

Of course, most of the world knew them as something else entirely.

***

The seven members of Ace of Angels poured into their backstage dressing room after their latest concert.  The women were dressed in black leather outfits, their costumes for their hit song “Like a Cat”.  It amused them that the music video for that song depicted them as cat-burglars executing a complex heist.  What better way to conceal the truth than to hide it in the open?

They were all chatting excitedly, still coming down from the rush of performing and the rush of their heist the night before.

“Chanmi, where did you put the goods?”  Asked Jimin, their leader.

“I locked it in the safe like you told me to.” The youngest member of the group replied. 

Jimin walked over to the safe concealed in her dresser and punched in a combination on the keypad.  As the door swung open, a cloud of pink gas poured out of the safe and filled the dressing room.  The group had not noticed the slight leak that had occurred in the transport cylinder overnight.

“Chanmi you klutz, you forgot to…” began Jimin right before she slumped over.  The rest of the group didn’t even have a chance to react before they too slipped into unconsciousness.

***

They were all over the news.  Newspapers, TV, and the internet were all covering the disappearance of K-Pop group Ace of Angels.  As far as anyone knew, they went missing from their dressing room after a concert.  The backstage crew saw them go in but found only an empty room and a strange odour when they went in hours later looking for the group.

People speculated wildly about North Korean kidnapping plots, intentional promotional gimmicks, even alien abductions.  Days passed.  Then weeks. 

No one had seen or heard from any of the members of Ace of Angels.

No one connected the dots of what had really happened.

No one could have predicted how they would reappear, and how they would reshape the world forever.