Qrow Branwen slid down the hallway like a shadow, making no noise on the carpeted floor, not even his cloak disturbing the atmosphere as he passed.
It was about three in the morning. Nobody was awake at this time; REM sleep had kicked in by now, and wouldn't begin to shift for a good couple of hours yet. This was his window; he needed to move now if he wished to succeed.
His senses were on high alert, everything from his sight to his touch boosted to the absolute maximum by adrenaline and Aura, the slightest shift in the component gasses swirling around him immediately drawing his attention to the source.
If he was caught...
No. Better not to think about it.
Finally, after an agonisingly high-tension ten minutes, he reached his destination. He paused, taking a deep breath as he prepared himself mentally. This was going to be a true test of his skill as an infiltrator, and he needed to bring his A-game.
He stood like a rock for ten seconds, and if someone had passed him by, they might have been forgiven for dismissing him as part of the wall, he moved so little.
Then his bloody-red eyes snapped open, the door was pushed wide, and he was moving.
A flick of the wrist brought a plastic bag into his right hand, and clapping his hands together burst it, releasing the powder within. It was just flour, harmless to breath in or have lying around, while focussing his Aura around his eyes would prevent it from gathering there. However, as it filled the air, it served to show him where the laser beams of the alarm system were.
He leapt, still moving swiftly, and space twisted around him. His cloak seemed to extend for a split second, forming a dark wrapping that stretched into infinity as it encompassed his body. Then, Qrow Branwen was gone; instead, there was a dusty old crow with red eyes, which immediately began to carry out some highly unlikely aerial acrobatics.
It took some seriously fancy flying, including angled dives through just-barely-there gaps, flying in the gap between the ceiling and a beam (and on one occasion, the floor and a beam), and at one point he even found himself flying sideways.
But he managed, and emerged from the other side of the system without it being tripped. There was another twist, and the dark Huntsman rose from his crouched position, letting out an incredibly quiet sigh of relief.
Eyes turning forward, he scanned the area. It seemed largely normal, but something was nagging at him...
Acting on a hunch, he gently pressed the fingers of his right hand to the floor, calling on his Aura.
It spread like a pool of blood, its rusty scarlet glow pressing against the walls in a shimmer not unlike the sides of a swimming pool. As it spread further, his inhumanly sharp eyes worked with his instinctive sense of location, afford to him by his Aura – almost like an extension of his touch.
Parts of the floor were raised, just barely, hardly more than a millimetre – but the grid pattern confirmed it. Pressure sensors.
Nodding idly to himself, the Huntsman glanced at the walls to either side. The shadows of the early morning were no barrier to his eyes, and he could pick out the ever so slight reflections on the lenses of the sensors affixed there. 'Hm. Motion sensors, perhaps? Heat? Cameras?'
He couldn't be sure what they were exactly, but he needed to get past them one way or another. Still, he was a professional – it wasn't like he'd come unprepared.
Dust was too big a risk – its emissions could be detected by some specialist equipment, and considering just how valuable his prize was, he had to assume that everything here was bleeding-edge, Atlas-black-op-wishes-they-had-this stuff that probably wouldn't be on the market for at least three months.
The man behind the defences was rather well-connected after all.
Focussing his mind on the area before him, Qrow reached inside his suit jacket, retrieving a large sheet of material which reflected the small amount of light that touched it like a disco ball, its crinkled, silvery surface not making a sound as he wrapped it around himself.
Moment of truth, now. The grid extended for roughly three metres, leaving a clear space before the next door which was only just large enough for his feet – and he needed to land there, perfectly balanced, after a standing start long jump, while ensuring his foil covering didn't fall off.
Piece of cake.
There was a grunt of effort which barely escaped Qrow's throat as he leapt, a slight whistling the only indicator the air gave of his passing as its split around him. Judging by the lack of alarms, his foil had apparently worked, and he landed flawlessly before the final door with a tiny smile of self-congratulation.
He removed and re-folded the foil, returning it to his pocket as he examined the portal before him.
Just large enough for a man to walk through, it was a solid hunk of metal. He knew for a fact that it was three feet thick, and set into the wall around it – which was just as reinforced as the door itself. There were no structural weaknesses to exploit, and the room beyond was airtight.
His focus shifted to the keypad in its centre. This was the only way to gain entry; to know the entire thirty-character-long code, to be able to input it in under two seconds on the first try, and to simultaneously utilise the exact same amount of pressure on each push of a button.
There was no mistake – only a Huntsman, or someone with the same training, could hope to get through this door.
Thankfully, Qrow had that training. And he'd managed to get the code from a...reliable source.
Elsewhere, Glynda Goodwitch lay on a couch in the Beacon Staff Lounge. She was currently sleeping while her Aura dealt with the rather incredible amount of alcohol she had downed over the course of a conversation with a certain colleague of hers.
A colleague who was so very, very dead when she woke up.
In a blur of motion that precious few people could have followed accurately, the dark Huntsman input the code. There was a quiet beep, and he pressed both his hands to the right-hand-side of the door, using his entire body to slide it to the left.
It was took some serious work, even with his Aura and long years of training on his side, but eventually the slab of metal had been pushed aside, allowing Qrow access to the room beyond at long last.
It was a cavernous space; the ceiling was shrouded in darkness, as were the walls. There were no lights, and the air felt like it rarely circulated.
It was also piled high with crates.
They were upon one another, below one another, beside each other, and in some cases they seemed to have somehow interfered with the fabric of space and time to be inside one another.
Well, that was about par for the course. The stuff in those crates was powerful in a way that very little short of Dust crystals like the one powering the Amity Colosseum could boast of. It was near-eternal, a maker of Gods and a crowner of men.
And Qrow was now the second person in history to have laid eyes on Ozpin's near-mythical Coffee Hoard.
The Huntsman just stood there for a long moment, staring at it in awe. It was beautiful, in a way; he could feel it reaching out to his soul, singing sweet nothings of energy and wakefulness, enticing him with its smell and its taste, begging him to just reach out and have a taste-
A hand clamped down on his shoulder, and Qrow realised he had been shambling toward the mountain of coffee beans like a zombie. Twisting, he found himself faced with the silver-haired Headmaster himself, expression unusually sombre.
"So." He began, tone mystifyingly blank. "You've found your way to my inner sanctum."
Not even waiting to see if the Huntsman replied, amber eyes shifted to stare down the great amalgamation of wood and coffee. "It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone would get in here – quite honestly I expected it would be Glynda. I've been betting with myself about when she'd finally get curious enough to try and find the door to go with the instructions I gave her."
One black eyebrow was raised at that, but Ozpin ignored it. "This is both my greatest treasure, and my most cursed possession."
Another eyebrow went up, and the headmaster expanded on his answer. "It is true, that I value coffee above a great many things in this world. Paperwork. Food. Other drinks. Sleep." He paused. "Paperwork."
The man shook his head. "But nonetheless, I have come to know the truth of the matter." He turned his gaze on Qrow. "Coffee is more than a drink, Qrow. More than a taste, and a texture, and a smell. It is more than simple beans, or a powder, or even a physical existence.
"Coffee is..." He cast around for a word. "More. More real. Its existence is simply...more defined."
One hand, the one not currently holding the cane which had been the headmaster's symbol for years, gestured to the mountain. "Gathering so much of it together in one place...it has consequences." The silver haired man let out a long sigh. "By the time I realised my folly, it was too late. The accumulated weight of this much coffee on the fabric of reality threatens to tear straight through it at the slightest provocation."
Qrow just...listened. He wasn't really sure what else to do. His boss, the headmaster of Beacon, one of Vale's greatest Huntsmen ever, was telling him that the pile of coffee in front of him was capable of tearing a hole in time and space.
He felt a headache coming on.
As he stared dumbfounded at the man, one silver eyebrow finally made its ascent. "What? You didn't think I drank that much coffee just because I liked the taste, did you?" A porcelein mug, seemingly conjured from thin air (and sometimes Qrow wondered what Ozpin's Semblance really was, when a steaming mug of coffee could apparently conjure itself from molecules in surrounding space just so the man could drink it) raised to his lips as he took a swig.
"Honestly, Qrow. That would just be ridiculous."
