Ruby woke up hanging off her bed at an invertebrate angle. She clenched her abs and swung her body upright, then wiped at her eyes and looked around. Sunday mornings weren't usually this quiet. Toeing on her slippers, she went into the hallway to investigate. When no sounds of breakfast cooking or weird stuff from Yang and Blake's room announced themselves, she went to brush her teeth and wash her face.

There were plenty of reasons Blake and Yang might both be gone. Yang worked Sundays, for one, and Blake often drove Yang to work and then took her car somewhere for some sort of online business thing she ran. If she felt alone, Ruby could have sent Weiss an invitation to hang out via their school email addresses, but thinking about Weiss reminded Ruby of how she'd freaked out and ditched fencing, which in turn made her want to bash her head into the mirror. So no Weiss. Either way, Ruby was going to have the run of the house today.

She wandered into the kitchen and put some egg whites on a skillet. Yang hadn't bought a toaster yet, so her usual staple, the toaster strudel, was unavailable. Ruby resigned herself to protein and pulled out some bacon as well. She finished off her breakfast with a green plastic cup half-filled with chocolate milk.

"I'm tasting some...whole milk, perhaps with syrup mixed in? The fats are really enriching the palate, just marvelous," Ruby said to herself, adopting the affectations of Professor Port for her milk tasting. Then she collapsed into giggles. There weren't that many jokes funnier to her than the ones she told herself. She washed up her dishes and made her way back to her room still chuckling.

She threw herself onto her bedspread and stared at the wall. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. But something caught her eye. Carved into the top drawer of her nightstand was a tiny red bull. Sitting upright fast enough for blood to rush to her head, Ruby opened the drawer. Inside it, she found a red rotary phone. On the nine, she found another bull. The trail of bulls had lead her here, but what was she supposed to do with it?

She took a closer look at the bull carved into the drawer. It, too, had a tiny number inscribed within its borders. On a hunch, Ruby went all the way back to the front door, and found that every bull had a number inside, so small that she'd missed them the night before. Committing each one to memory, she put together a ten digit number beginning with 706, the local area code. It wasn't a far stretch from there to dial the number on the red rotary phone in her nightstand.

Deep from under the house, she heard something thunk into place, like a hammer hitting a block of wood in a Rube Goldberg machine. Then the floor began to vibrate slightly, as if an engine beneath the hardwood had just come to life. Ruby watched in amazement as a hidden panel in the floor opened up on a tunnel that went straight down. Red lights set into the side of the shaft lit the way, glinting off the coppery rungs of a ladder. As far as she was concerned, there was no choice. Ruby swung her legs into the pit and began crawling her way down.

The air inside the dark was dry and warm, not cool or damp as Ruby might have expected. As she descended, white and yellow lights shone along with the red, slowly acclimating Ruby to more and more light as she went underground. Finally, Ruby's foot jarred. She had expected to land on another rung, and instead hit hard stone. She let go of the ladder, turned around, and saw the laboratory.

"Sweet baby Jesus," Ruby said. "Blake has got to see this."

Qrow turned on the faucet, wincing at the watercolor red stain his fingers had left on the already filthy public sink. He thrust his hands under the white stream and sang the Alphabet song; one of his previous jobs had been in nursing, and he was nothing if not hygienic. Once his hands were clean and white, the only red being that under the skin of his well-scrubbed knuckles, he pumped some foaming soap into his left hand, lathered up, and rinsed again.

His phone rang. Qrow's ringtone was "Mr. Roboto". He hummed the song while he dried his hands with rough brown paper towels, making sure to put all of his rings back on when he was finished before plucking his phone out of his pocket. His phone cost him ten dollars at a Dollar General, and he would throw it away and buy a new one after this call. Qrow's employers always knew his new number without being told.

"Is it finished, Qrow?" asked the voice on the other end. It was pleasant, and not particularly gendered, although he did detect a slightly feminine timbre in the cool enunciations. He decided he would call her Dorothy.

"You betcha," Qrow replied. He walked around to an open bathroom stall. All the others but this one were empty, as was the way of highway rest stops at this hour. In the only occupied stall, a young woman was pinned to the cheap tile wall with a sword. Her mouth was still open as it had been when Qrow had impaled her, her death-shriek captured. "You want me to cut off her ears and bring them to you?"

"That won't be necessary," Dorothy said. Qrow pulled the sword out, and the body of the woman began to smoke, then smolder. Presently flames erupted from the woman's nostrils and mouth, and she burned to ash in seconds. Qrow flushed the ashes down the toilet and went to wash his hands again. "That is actually not why I called you."

"Oh, yeah? What can I do for you, boss? I am nothing if not a convenient source of roadside assassination."

"This job is more investigative. The Spring Festival in upstate Georgia can wait a few more months for your...ah, intervention. I am more concerned with the middle regions of the state. With Oaksville." Qrow sighed impatiently.

"For the last god damned time," he said, "Adam is dead. Need I remind you that I was there?" The voice waited a few seconds after he stopped.

"Are you done?" Qrow sighed, which was as much as he could be expected to capitulate, so Dorothy pressed on. "We detected two and a half "heartbeats". One of them matched Adam's very closely. One was an unknown element. The last one, though, is uncomfortably close to yours. And they are all in the same house—Adam's house. So, Branwen, despite your assurances that your family was no danger to us, we see your own flesh and blood rubbing shoulders with a man we are to suppose that you killed with your own two hands. We are sending you to investigate. If you fail...don't fail." She hung up, and Qrow tossed the phone in the toilet.

He picked up his sword, and gave it a sharp look. The steel blade split into segments and folded into a cube with only the handle remaining in shape. Then he walked outside, got into his car, and set his GPS to Oaksville.