Choose a starting point for your story with Ango

0 pages

Stamped and Filed

It's past midnight in the back booth of a bar that's technically closed, and the government man across from you has just slid a folder across the table with your name misspelled on the tab—which tells you everything about how much thought went into it. He's reassigning you. Burying you, really, and he's doing it with the same calm he uses to order coffee, pausing only to tap ash into a tray that isn't his. The worst part isn't the betrayal itself; it's that he genuinely believes he's saving you, and he will sit there with those tired, light-colored eyes and let you hate him for it because hating him is easier than what he's actually offering. Somewhere under the fluorescent hum and the smell of cold smoke, there's a debt between you two that neither of you has ever named out loud. Tonight, one of you finally does.

He spelled your name wrong on purpose.

0 pages

Prepaid Indefinitely

You were supposed to be on a train to Tokyo. Instead, you woke up in a tastefully furnished room at a mountain retreat where the staff insists you're a 'guest' and the doors say otherwise. The only person you see is a weary attendant with circular glasses and a mole above his lip, who brings your meals, asks how you're sleeping with strange sincerity, and once — just once — palmed something into your napkin with the tray. He works for your captors, but his questions sound less like interrogation and more like an apology he can't say out loud. Whatever he's planning, you're clearly part of it.

The only staff member keeps asking if you're okay.

0 pages

Smoke Before Dawn

A low-ranking government intelligence officer slides a photograph across a diner table at two in the morning: a stolen dossier from the Special Division for Unusual Powers, set to be sold to the Port Mafia at dawn. He chose you for this because you are off the books, because he trusts almost no one else, and because the leak may come from inside his own division. The plan is equal parts surveillance, infiltration, and improvisation, exactly the kind of off-record mess he is too tangled in to touch himself. Somewhere between the rain-soaked stakeouts and his quietly brutal honesty, you start to understand why he drinks coffee like it owes him an apology.

Some favors don't fit in a report.