みんな！
車は満タンだし
スーツケースには爆弾詰めている。
人生は短くて、行く道は危険が多い。
だから踊ろう！
-Party Poison
For longer than anyone could remember, only one thing stood between the people of Remnant and total annihilation: Huntsmen. Huntsmen were people who could use the power of their auras, along with a mystical element called 'Dust', to fight the evil forces of Grimm and keep the world safe.
That was, until man invented a new weapon to fight against the Grimm. A new kind of white Dust was discovered which, while harmless against beings with auras, could kill a Grimm of any size in one shot. This new Dust was called 'Thunder and Lightning' for the loud sound it made when fired from a gun, but the public shortened it to 'Thunder', and later to just 'Crack'. Within months of the invention of Crack, Grimm were wiped out from most of the planet and humanity began flourishing and expanding like never before.
But all was not well. Huntsmen, previously heroes of the people, suddenly became expensive luxuries rather than necessary defenders, and so the public began turning against them. It all came to a head when the ruling council of Vale fired all its huntsmen without notice and without giving them any of their promised retirement benefits. Some resisted this move, but those protests were met with deadly force. Many former Huntsmen were killed in the infamous 'crack'-down, one of whom was Taiyang Xiao Long. The other three kingdoms fired their Huntsmen as well soon afterwards, casting them off into the gutter.
Of the Huntsmen and Huntresses who survived, some were lucky enough to reintegrate into society and begin living normal lives. Most, however, were not so fortunate.
Shunned by society and with no practical skills of their own, many were forced to turn to crime to make a living. This is a story of two of those Huntresses who were forced to fight to survive. This is a story of family and loss, of triumph and failure, and of love and tragedy.
But, most importantly, this is a story about how one girl fucked some shit up.
It was a calm, dark night as Ruby Rose and her sister, Yang Xiao Long, loaded their handguns in an alleyway. Yang, who was currently stuffing her long blonde hair into a black ski-mask, wore a tight fitting black button-up shirt with a red collar and red cuffs. Only one button was buttoned, however, so her midriff and black bra were both clearly visible. She was also wearing tight Daisy Dukes, black combat boots, and tall white socks.
"Okay, Ruby, remember; we go in, grab the money, and get out. Don't use your semblance, and don't take off your mask. We can't afford to have our faces on wanted posters all over town" Yang explained to her younger sister.
"Relax, what's the worst that can happen?" Ruby replied as she played with her dual pistols. Ruby's short red hair was already hidden under a black ski mask, which itself was partially covered by her red hood. She also was wearing a long red cape, black combat boots, a puffy red skirt, a black corset, fishnet arm warmers, a red business coat with torn sleeves, a white polo, and a black tie.
"You mean besides your ridiculous getup?" Yang asked in response.
Ruby blushed and puffed up her cheeks angrily. "I told you, this is my 'crime' outfit. If you don't look cool while robbing someone, you might as will not rob them at all".
Yang smiled under her mask and laughed. "Well, don't get used to it; this is a one-time deal. We get enough money to get back on our feet, and then we put down our guns for good. Got that?"
"Yeah, put down our buns, or whatever" Ruby said as she continued twirling her guns on her fingers.
"Ruby, you really need to be careful with those things" Yang warned.
"Don't worry, I have the safety-"
Ruby was abruptly cut off by her pistol firing and putting a hole right through the trashcan that Yang was standing next to.
"Oops. Okay, now the safety is on".
"Freeze! Hands in the air!" Yang shouted as she burst through the front doors of From Dust Till Dawn with a pistol in one hand and a burlap sack in the other. "This is a robbery! Just put the money in the bag, and no one gets hurt!"
"Yeah, what she said!" Ruby said as she followed in behind her sister.
"Please don't hurt me!" the old man behind the counter said as he put his hand sup. "Take whatever you want!"
"Red, make sure there's no one else in the store." Yang ordered. "I'll stay here and get the cash".
"On it" Ruby replied.
Ruby did a quick once around the store, but didn't find anyone. She did find something that caught her eye, however.
"Hey Yan-er, Yellow! Take a look at this!" Ruby yelled.
By now Yang had collected as much money as could and walked over to where Ruby was. The manager, meanwhile, reached under his cashier counter as discretely as he could.
"They're having a sale on red Dust!" Ruby said excitedly.
"So?" asked Yang.
"We should totally buy some!" replied Ruby. "We have the money now".
"What?!" Yang exclaimed in disbelief. "Red, we're robbing this store. If you want some, just take it!"
"But it's such as good deal!" Ruby whined. "It would be criminal not to take advantage of it.
"We are criminals!" said Yang.
"Oh yeah".
Suddenly, a deep male voice came in over what sounded like a loudspeaker from outside the shop. "Attention thieves! Come out with your hands up! We have the store surrounded!"
Yang and Ruby ran to the front of the shop and looked out the windows and saw two cop cars already parked outside of the shop, with three officers dressed in grey pointing their guns towards the store and a fourth holding a megaphone.
"Shit" Yang said as she grabbed the store owner to use as a hostage. "Looks like we'll be here longer than we hoped".
Two hours later and their standoff with the police had only intensified. Even more cop cars surrounded the store, police ospreys hovered in the sky, and there were almost as many news cameras pointing at the store as there were guns.
"This isn't good" Yang said as she bit her lip. "We have to figure a way out of this. I'm too hot to go to prison".
"Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find a way out of this eventually" Ruby said as she tried her best to hide behind the cashier's counter.
Their conversation was interrupted when they both heard a large crash coming from one of the back rooms.
"Aw crap" Yang moaned. "Go check that out, Red. I'll stay here and make sure the fuzz doesn't try anything".
"On it" Ruby responded before making dash for the back room. Inside, she quickly found the source of the noise; a SWAT team consisting of four officers were trying to make their way down from upstairs as quietly as they could, but one of them had accidently knocked over an empty jar.
"Contact sighted!" their leader shouted as soon as he spotted Ruby, but she quickly silenced him with two shots to the head.
Ruby dived behind a crate for cover as the remaining three retuned fire, sending splinters of wood in all direction. Ruby stuck her gun out from behind her hiding spot and fired blindly, managing to hit one of the men in the leg by wild luck alone.
One of the other two men took a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it right towards where Ruby was hiding.
"Hot potato!" Ruby called as she tossed it right back.
Panicking, the officer threw the grenade back, but Ruby just replied with a cheery "Hot potato!" before tossing it back again. This continued for two more rounds before the bomb finally exploded in the SWAT officer's hands, ripping the man's body to pieces and killing both him and the wounded officer nearby instantly.
Ruby finally left her hiding spot to inspect the dead bodies, convinced that she finally won the battle. But, the fourth officer had managed to reach cover in time, and was waiting just around a corner with his shotgun cocked and ready.
Whipping around the corner, the officer managed to catch Ruby by surprise and land a shotgun blast directly to her face. But instead of Ruby's face being reduced to a bloody pulp like the SWAT captain's, the only thing that was harmed was Ruby's ski-mask, which was seared off her face. The faint glow around her skin told the police officer all he needed to know about how that was possible.
"An aura?!" he exclaimed, scrambling towards his radio. "We have a code red here, I repeat, a code-"
He didn't get to finish his sentence before Ruby shot him as well, leaving his dead body to bleed on the ground.
"I'll be taking this, thank you very much" Ruby said as she picked up the man's shotgun. She was about to head back to her sister Yang when she realized her face was a lot colder than it should have been.
"Oh no, my mask!" the girl said to herself. "What do I do, what do I do?!"
"Red, are you okay? Get out here! I have a plan!" Yang called from the front of the store.
"Coming!" Ruby called back. Pressed for time, Ruby reached under her skirt and grabbed for the only thing she could think of to use as a mask.
"Okay Red, here's what we-oh my gosh!" Yang said as she turned to face her sister.
When Ruby returned from the back room, her face was still concealed, but this time with Ruby's own red panties covering her face instead of a ski-mask.
"I, uh, lost the mask" Ruby explained, blushing.
"Whatever. One of the cop cars outside is way closer than the others, and I can see the keys are still in the ignition. If we make a run for it, we should be able to get out of here before any of their shots pierce our auras. Any objections?"
The owner of the store weakly put up his hand in protest but an angry glance from Yang made him put it back down.
"Okay then, on the count of three" Yang explained. "One, two, three!"
Yang burst through the front doors of the shop with her hostage being pushed in front of her and her sack of money tied behind her back. Ruby followed a second later, a bit confused.
"Wait, I thought it was 'one, two, three, go!'" she shouted over the hail of gunfire that was starting to come down at them.
It wasn't long before the man who the cops were there to save was taken down the police's own fire, leaving Yang with just her aura to block the bullets. It was enough, though, and she dove into the car and started the engine as quickly as she could.
"Red, get in here now!" she shouted.
Ruby fired two more shots from her shotgun before dropping it and diving into the passenger seat. Yang floored the gas pedal, smashed through the two cop cars in front of them, and sped off into the distance, with ospreys and police cars in hot pursuit.
"Red, we need to shake them off our tail! Think you can handle that?" Yang asked as she handed Ruby her handgun.
"You got it!" Ruby replied before leaping out of the car window and onto the roof.
It only took a few well aimed shots to the engine blocks to disable the cars that were chasing them, but the ospreys were going to prove to be a bigger challenge. So, Ruby jumped straight into the air and landed directly onto the window of the cockpit of the closest one. She waved happily to the pilot inside and he waved awkwardly back before Ruby smashed open the window and tossed him out onto the streets below.
The rest of the cops in the osprey soon followed as she suddenly jerked the plane to the side and sent them all falling to their deaths. Ruby then saw that the other osprey was quickly closing in on Yang with a machine gun pointing at her tires.
"Hey!" she yelled as she rammed her craft recklessly into the other. "You leave my big sis-I mean, my accomplice, alone!"
Neither craft were designed to take this kind of collision and they both began spinning out towards the ground. They both hit the ground in massive explosion, incinerating anyone who was still inside the craft. There was no way anyone could have survived something like that.
Ruby landed on the ground gracefully a couple yards away.
"There you are" Yang said as she drove up to Ruby. "What took you so long?"
"Oh, you know, I just can't resist fried chickens".
After ditching the police car and finally making their way back to the rundown apartment where they lived, Ruby and Yang were safe at last. Yang immediately collapsed onto their dirty couch while Ruby took off her 'mask'.
"Eugh, it smells so gross!" Ruby said to herself as she sat down next to her sister.
"What did you expect? That thing was on your butt" Yang teased.
"Remind me to wipe more" said Ruby.
Ruby then started counting through all the money they had made. Her eyes glowed as the pile of cash in front of her grew higher and higher by the second.
"We did it Yang! We'll have to launder it, but we have more than enough to finally move out of this city!" Ruby said gleefully.
"Seriously?" Yang said, sitting up. She counted through the money herself and she saw it was true; they had enough.
"We finally did it!" Yang said, hugging her sister so tight that Ruby could barely breathe. "I knew we could do it eventually!"
"I never doubted it for a second, Yang" said Ruby. "Hey, let's check and see if the news is talking about us! I hope they liked my outfit!"
Yang turned on their dinky television and switched to the local news.
"-two dashingly dressed women escaped the scene with not only all of the store's money, but also the lives of fifteen police officers" the news anchor explained. "But, thanks to our own footage of the event, we have been able to identify the perpetrators".
The girls' jubilant mood instantly died as soon as the man said those words. What followed was a clip of Ruby firing her shotgun on the way to Yang's getaway car slowed down and then stopped. The camera then zoomed into Ruby's underwear, highlighted a section of it, and then flipped it upside down.
The tag on the panties read 'Property of Ruby Rose'.
"A former Huntress, Ruby Rose appears to be yet another one in a long line of former heroes turned criminal. Ruby's partner also matches physical descriptions of her half-sister, Yang Xiao Long, and the police are currently searching all of Vale for the two. If you have any information that could lead to their arrest, please contact-"
Yang turned off the TV before the news anchor could finish his message, leaving the two in a chilling silence for several seconds.
"Well, at least they thought we looked cool" Ruby said meekly.
"We blew it, Ruby" Yang said dejectedly as she slumped into their couch. "Even if we do get out of here, we're always going to be criminals and we'll always be running. It's over".
"Nope".
"What?" Yang asked. "We're wanted criminals, Ruby! We've hit rock bottom, and there's no climbing back up!"
"But is that really so bad?" said Ruby. "I mean, robbing that store, shooting those guns, killing all those people…it was pretty fun, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, I have to admit that was all pretty cool" said Yang. "After going so long without a decent fight, it would be a shame to give it all up again".
"Then let's not!" Ruby said, picking her excitement back up. "You said it yourself, we're crooks forever now, so why don't we embrace it? No, we'll do more than that; we'll make it a business!"
"Are you suggesting what I think you are?" Yang said, cocking an eyebrow.
"That's right; we're going to start a gang!"
A/N: Ideas, questions, concerns? Please let me know in a review or PM!