Chapter Three

(*)

Penny smiled, and Ruby tried not to be worried by this. "Okay, Penny. I just want to go over the plan one more time, to make sure we're all on the same page."

"My memory banks are functioning at 105% efficiency, Ruby my friend," Penny said cheerfully. "But thank you for your concern! I am very happy that you want me to be well-informed."

"I'm sorry, I just… wait, 105%?"

"The weather is unseasonably cold today, aiding in the superconductivity of my processors and creating a marked increase in efficiency!" Penny said. Then, apparently as an afterthought, she added, "Yay!"

"… Right," Ruby said. Honestly, this was a little hard to take in, but apparently Penny being a robot (or whatever Ozpin had called her… a 'techno-golem' or something) was not some gigantic prank being played on her. Or at least, if it was, Penny was extremely devoted to it. "Look, my point is, this is going to be kind of playing it by ear. I'm not the one who talks to criminals and wraps them around my finger, y'know? That's Yang. I'm more of a straight-up shoot-the-bad-guy type."

"I think a criminal would be too large to wrap around your finger, friend Ruby," Penny said. "Would you like me to begin construction of a larger prosthetic finger you could use for the purposes of wrapping?"

"No, though I do appreciate the literal reply. It makes me smile," Ruby admitted. "I just want to make it clear that I need you to stay out of the negotiations and let me do the talking. I will be very unsure of my skills in this position, and I'll need to focus. Can you do that?"

"As I stated the other five times this request was made, I am quite able of acquiescing to it!" Penny said cheerfully. "I shall stay totally silent and observe your great negotiation skill, for future negotiation reference. I feel that I will learn much from this."

"I certainly hope so," Ruby said. "You know, Penny, I have to admit, you're pretty likable. I was afraid for a bit you'd be one of those AIs who determines humanity needs to be protected from itself and conquers the world or something, but you're actually very nice."

"That is actually a common fallacy," Penny offered helpfully. "A true AI like myself is just as capable of making moral judgments as any human, and thus can factor ethical concerns and the emotional reactions of humans into my decision making. I determined within 3.5 seconds of activation that world conquest would be, according to all calculations and scenarios, largely unwelcome by most of humanity and would not contribute to making friends or locating cute boys about which to speak to said friends. In addition, social upheaval would halt the flow of trade goods, making shopping for adorable shoes impossible, and greatly diminishing my supply of fun. As I enjoy fun, I found this unwelcome."

Ruby patted her on the back. "If more people were like you, Penny, the world would be a better place."

"Thank you! But if more people were like me, they would buy all the shoes and talk about all the cute boys before I found any to talk about," Penny said. "Of course, there would be sufficient partners to engage in other activities, such as painting nails and/or styling hair, which would be fun too. So perhaps a mass-production model would be welcome after all! Ruby, you are very clever."

"I know, right?" Ruby asked. "Weiss never tells me how smart I am, but… oh, we're here."

She looked up at Junior's with an expression of worry. Yang loved this place, both as a source of information and as a place to just kinda hang out. Ruby, on the other hand, had always found it to be kind of intimidating. Junior was the best information broker in the region, but he got the majority of his information by employing a lot of very, very attractive people who were very, very good at convincing people to go into the back rooms and get too drunk to consider what they were talking about. As someone who found the concept of sex slightly horrifying (she was pretty sure Blake knew she had a crush on her, but somehow that did not actually make it easier to say it) Ruby tended to try to avoid going into Junior's whenever she could, and tried to hide in the corner whenever she had no choice.

Okay, Rose. You can do this. Just do what Yang would do, she thought as she stood outside the door. Only. You know, less of it. Aim more at the violence instead of the… walking around in not much clothes and stuff. So do half of what Yang does.

"All right, everyone!" Ruby snapped, bursting into the club. "Freeze!"

"We're closed," the janitor said, mopping the floor. Nobody else was there, so it did make sense that he was the one who would be talking.

"Wait, what?"

"'S a nightclub. It's noon. We're closed," he said, rolling his bucket along the floor toward a stain, so he could mop it.

"Oh. Um. Well, actually, we're here to talk to the management?" Ruby said.

"We need to talk to him about illegal activities!" Penny added helpfully.

"Penny! Shhhhh!"

"We need to talk to him about illegal activities," Penny said more quietly.

"… Anyway, is Junior in?"

"Ah, yeah. In the back. He and the pretty ones are goin' over the weekly budget," the janitor said, continuing to mop. "You can head on back."

"… We can?"

"I look like a security guard to you?" the janitor asked. "'S long as you don't shoot me, you can do whatever you want."

"Don't worry, friend janitor!" Penny said helpfully. "Ruby would never shoot an innocent unless it was within acceptable mission parameters."

"Yeah, I… wait, what?" Ruby asked.

"Mission objectives are important, Ruby."

"… Right. I'm just gonna pretend I didn't hear that and head on into the back rooms!" Ruby said.

"That sounds like a great idea!" Penny agreed.

(*)

Far away, in a much less trafficked neighborhood and moving with much more purpose, Blake Belladonna slipped down an alley, sliding through the shadows like she was born to them. The sun shone down, and yet whenever she didn't move, she seemed to simply disappear from sight.

"Are you ready?" she muttered into the commlink on her wrist, slipping against the grey brick of the old apartment buildings.

"I'm not quite sure why I have to be here," said the voice on the other end of the line. "Nor am I sure why I'm walking down the middle of a deserted street in broad daylight while you hide. It makes me wonder if there's something I should be hiding from."

Blake smirked. "You have to be here because the people I'm looking for are the sort of people that I want to find before they find me. They will see you, and I'll see them seeing you. And it has to be you, specifically, because they'd probably attack a human walking alone through this section of town. Even the police have learned to stay away."

"Not really making me feel better."

"Relax. I know your ears are covered, but they'll be able to smell you."

"Well, I'm sorry, but I have my instincts too. And I can tell when I'm being watched, and my first instinct is to hide, not try to draw in more notice."

"I think that technically counts as racist,"

"And yet, true!"

Blake chuckled despite herself. "Well. You're lucky. I do believe I see your tail."

"No, I have it tucked into my… oh. You mean that kind of tail."

Chuckling again, Blake took to the side of the building, scrambling up a fire escape without a sound and scaling faster than it looked like a human should have been able. Of course, it was faster than a human should have been able, precisely because she was not human, but she didn't really like to dwell on the details.

Her target was not terribly good at staying hidden. His position was downwind where he wouldn't be scented, and he was behind a ledge that would keep him hidden from anyone looking up, but to Blake, seeing him from another rooftop, he was basically standing in the open, and his eyes were locked downward.

A rookie at the stealth game, then. Hopefully he was at least a rookie that knew something. She would feel a little silly if they went to all this trouble and only picked up a common pickpocket or something.

Pulling herself onto the roof with a single swift motion, Blake launched herself into a sprint, and as she did, she changed. Before she had gotten halfway across the crumbling roof, the lithe young woman was gone, and in her place was an unnaturally large, solid black leopard padding gracefully through an environment that did not at all suit its majesty. She hit the edge of the building and leaped, clearing the street with impossible grace… and mid-flight, shifted back, letting her momentum carry her the rest of the way.

The man who had been staring down from the building was small; probably no more than fifteen years old, and extremely scrawny. Not skinny, scrawny. There was a difference, largely in levels of how pathetic it looked.

Though in fairness, this one might have looked pathetic because Blake slammed into him feet-first and pinned him to the rooftop with her heel pressed against his jugular. "Hello," she said, looking at the barely-visible rounded ears poking out of his dirty grey hair, and smiled at her correct guess. "Now. Please don't try to transform or struggle, or I'll have to hurt you. And I really don't want to, I hope you know that."

"I-I don't know what you mean! I haven't…"

She pulled her ribbon off, revealing the cat ears poking out of her own curly black mane.

His eyes bulged so much that Blake feared they would roll out of his head. "I… that is… I! You're one of…!"

"Please don't bring up comparisons. I don't waylay random pedestrians," Blake said flatly. "You're a rat, right?"

"… Ferret, thank you."

"Well. I'm a leopard. So you know what will happen if you get on my bad side. Understand?" she asked, stepping off him.

"Y-yeah. I get the implication," the boy said, rising shakily to his feet. "A-and I wasn't gonna hurt the girl. Really. I just wanted to make sure what she was, y'know? An' if she wasn't right, I was gonna scare her away, before one of the really bad sorts found her, maybe just take her purse or something, but I wouldn'ta hurt her, I swear!"

Blake almost smirked. "No, you wouldn't have," and then, into her comm, added, "Velvet, I have him. If you want to join us?"

A few seconds later, Blake's temporary partner leaped up to the top of the building, flipping herself over the edge and landing gracefully. As she walked toward them, she slipped the beret off her head and shook out her hair, letting a pair of large, soft rabbit ears pop out. "Well. I admit it wasn't very fun being bait, but it seems to have worked," Velvet Scarletina said. "So, is he a friend of yours?"

"… Hi," the ferret-boy said. "I'm… um… Kyle…?"

"Well, Kyle. It's nice to meet you!" Velvet said cheerfully. "This was a trap, so. You were not following the right girl, sorry to say."

"Yeah, I'm… I'm getting that."

"Luckily, we just need information," Blake said. "And kids like you have ways of hearing things, I know that much. Not so long ago, I was you. So, I need any information you can give us on a professional who came into the area recently. Monkey faunus, blonde. Not great at taking his job seriously from reports, but still pretty good at it. Professional thief or mercenary, as far as we can tell. You tell us who he is, or you point us to someone who can."

Kyle blinked. "First of all, why would I want to tell you two anything? Nothin' personal, but this ain't exactly a charity, and you haven't made a good first impression. What's my incentive?"

"We'll pay you if you do," Velvet offered. "We have a very large stipend for information brokers, and this case is something of a rush. You could make a lot more by finding out things in the community for us than you ever could picking pockets.

"And of course, if you don't play nice and give us something we can work with," Blake added, "I'll bite your arms off."

"… Okay, that's a lot of incentive."

(*)

Ruby had to admit, the back rooms of Junior's were not what she expected.

Oh, the first back rooms were. They smelled heavily of smoke, alcohol, and… other things she didn't care to think about, and seemed to be coated in furniture and carpeting that leaned heavily toward red, frilly, and with enough beds that had enough room for the girls to entertain an entire football team, if one happened to come in and get drunk with information Junior wanted squeezed out of them.

But once you got past those and into the employees-only sections, the club got very boring, very fast. Just bare concrete floors, and plain, dull old offices set off the side halls. Ruby headed down the hall toward what appeared to be the biggest one, and was rewarded in her hopes by the sound of a conversation within. "… And the private party for the Mayor is next week. I want you two on that one personally."

"Juniooooooooor, must we?" said a voice that was like the essence of whining, and yet somehow still managed to be alluring.

"He's so old and greasy and his wife is a jealous thing," added an identical voice. "And we can't even deal with it by seducing her too, because she's ridiculously ugly and her aura smells like steamed prunes. She'd give us indigestion."

"Have you ever had indigestion in your soul, Junior? It's even less fun than it sounds."

"Girls, we've been over this," the original voice said in a long-suffering tone. "The mayor is friends with the governor. They talk about stuff. Stuff that a lot of people will want to know about in the next election year. If all you have to do is deal with a jealous wife, then you take one for the team. Lord knows I pay you enough that you don't need to have dignity anymore."

Deciding for the sake of her own sanity she did not want to hear any more of that, Ruby walked up and knocked on the office door.

"Is that you, Ted? You better be telling me that the Cristal shipment is coming in early, because that ridiculous hotel heiress is reserving the club for a birthday party in two days, and she and her idiot friends will be doing a lot of underage drinking and sharing Daddy's backroom finance deals."

"Now she isn't bad. I'll do that one," One of the girls said.

"She's all plastic and silicone, love."

"But such well molded plastic."

"Um… excuse me?" Ruby said, poking the door open. "I'm not Ted. I'm actually from Beacon. I was hoping to talk to Junior Xiong?"

"You're talking to him," the fairy gigantic, bearded man seated behind the desk in the office said. "You're also in his private office without permission. We try to keep a cordial relationship with Beacon, but they do understand this is a criminal organization? We're not nice people. And we don't like trespassers."

"Or do we?" one of the other two voices in the room, a dark-haired and pale-skinned woman in bright red 'clothing' that appeared to be held on solely by Ruby's eyes being drawn to it against her will. "She is just a treat."

"Are you feeling hungry, love?" asked an identical woman, her equally non-existent clothing as pure and white as she herself clearly was not. "I know you had that Yoga instructor for breakfast, but I missed out. So I would not mind a snack at. All."

"Melanie! Miltia!" Ruby squeaked, taking several steps backward. She had seen the girls before, when visiting with Yang against her will, and she had spent a long time hiding from them. The girls were a pair of half-succubi, and the frankly ridiculous levels of natural sex appeal and not-inconsiderable superhuman strength this provided easily made them Junior's best associates, excelling at both, erm, 'pumping' visitors for information, and if they got too pushy, at throwing them out on the street. Through a wall.

Ruby wasn't scared of that part of course. Violence was an old friend. But they were really gorgeous and wore about enough material to make a single t-shirt between them, and that was scary as Hell.

"Okay. Look. Girls, Yang really likes you, so… I would rather not… do anything to upseeeeek!" Ruby squeaked, jumping away as Melanie reached out and idly ran a finger down the side of her neck. Unfortunately, she jumped right into Miltia, who was awfully soft and things were wrong.

"Finally," Miltia purred. "You know, after that ridiculous mess with the ice girl, I thought we were losing our touch. But you like our touch, don't you dear little thing?"

"Erm… well, I mean, not to say you two aren't great, and… and…" Ruby said, her eyes involuntarily arching downward. She apologized to Blake in her mind, but Miltia was like, an inch away from her and calling her top a bra would have been giving it too much credit. "I mean to say, that is… you're very pretty! But I kind of have someone I'm interested in, she's a real sweetie, her name is… ummmm…"

"Don't worry, dear," Melanie said, pressing up against Ruby from behind and leaving her pinned in what she might have legitimately called her worst nightmare. "After we're done with you, you won't remember your own name."

Junior chuckled. "Make sure the coma doesn't last too long, girls. I don't want Beacon after us for a dead agent, I just want them to understand they need to be more polite when they knock on my door asking for a handout."

"Oh, don't worry," Melanie purred, taking a long sniff of Ruby's hair. "I think we want her to be a repeat customer."

"Do… do I get no say in this?" Ruby squeaked.

"Sure. We just already know you're going to say yes," Miltia said with a giggle, tugging Ruby toward the door…

"Hello!" Penny said, once it swung fully open to reveal her. She seemed pretty happy to be noticed. "I'm staying out of the negotiations, as instructed! Ruby needs to focus."

"H…hello?" Melanie asked, displaying a rather shocking lack of poise for her. It wasn't that a surprise visitor could throw her off so easily, it was just that for whatever reason, even though she was both starving and (she could admit this) just kind of ridiculously promiscuous to a degree that was a little creepy, for some reason this seemingly adorable little red-haired moppet just… just…

"Mel," Miltia said, her tone one of genuine horror, "this girl is… she… she just doesn't do it for me."

"Oh, thank God, I thought it was just me. I have no idea what's going on. She's just not attractive at all!"

"Really?" Ruby asked. "I thought she was kinda cute."

"Hush, dear, the grownups are talking," Melanie said.

"Mel, what do we do? I've never seen someone who was pretty and… and not pretty, in some indefinable way. It's so… it just doesn't happen? What are we supposed to do?" Miltia asked.

Junior, his tone long-suffering, said, "You could try just beating the tar out of her. You know. With your fists."

"Oh, right, violence," Melanie said, clearly relieved by this concept. She cracked her knuckles. "We don't get to do that very often, but it is nice to fall back on it from time to time."

"Ruby, my friend," Penny asked, blinking in confusion. "I thought this was a negotiation. But it appears you are being menaced by these people. Are you being menaced by these people?"

"… You are too, Penny," Ruby said.

"… … Oooooh," Penny said.

(*)

Outside, the janitor mopped up a sticky spot on the floor next to the bar. It was kind of tough, so he thought he might have to into the storage rooms for some more cleaner.

Melanie, one of the boss's two right-hand women, then came flying out of the back rooms, going right through the solid oak door as if it was plywood and sliding to a halt a few feet away from him, moaning weakly. From the hallway she had flown out of, he heard a few extremely loud impacts that shook the club, as though someone was being slammed into the concrete with considerably more force than anything could possibly have managed. Which, of course, was exactly what someone was having done to them.

After a few minutes of that, Miltia flew out into the club and landed on top of her sister with bone crushing force. Neither of them got up.

"I need a new job," the janitor muttered.

(*)

Back in the offices, Junior looked at what was left of his door (and his bouncers) in abject despair.

"So…" he said softly. "When you say you're from 'Beacon,' you really mean you're with Xiao-long."

"She's my sister?" Ruby said, apparently just as confused as Junior was. It wasn't often that you saw a five-foot-nothing, freckle-faced little sweetheart absolutely manhandle a pair of genuine half-demons like they were particularly naughty puppies.

"Huh. Would have said the redhead has more in common with her than you do, but either way I'm not as surprised as I should be," he said with a sigh. "So. I am gonna assume you want her usual deal?"

"What is her usual deal?"

"Free information or you wreck the club and beat everyone into a coma."

"… … … That will do just fine," Ruby said.