We're Calling it a Success
Chapter 7: Rest and Reconnoiter
Ruby's Log, Day 3, 9:55 a.m.
Mission Status: The plot thickens.
Update: To think Weiss wanted to keep camping instead….
Personal Status: Still doing okay.
A certain red-cloaked huntress graciously accepted the trays that the hotel breakfast service had brought up to their room. She and Weiss had both slept in as well, the better to replenish depleted auras and low energy, and they had subsequently decided not to get too adventurous again until they'd taken a look at their prize from the previous night.
Weiss sniffed, unable to fully resist the allure of a nice brunch on an empty stomach. "What have we got?"
"Looks like pancakes, syrup, sausage, eggs, orange juice… wait, syrup?"
"Syrup?" The fencer looked up at her sharply. "I've heard of it, but…"
"Yeah, I know, I kinda just expected it to…"
"Vanish?"
Thousands of kilometers away, a young redhead sat at a workbench, doing routine maintenance on her grenade launcher. She was known for her bravery, her skill at arms, her chipper outlook, her strength and loyalty, and her many, many quirks. As a result, her husband didn't question it when she suddenly sat bolt upright and stared intently to the northwest, sniffing at the wind. Something tickled at the back of her mind, the sensation that she was supposed to be doing something, but the thought maddeningly eluded her. Sighing, she returned to work.
"I guess we finally found Nora's maximum range," Ruby shrugged, "Go figure. Let's see, we also have a big box of fiber supplements."
"I don't want to know."
"Fair enough. That's it for brunch. Now, what do we have from the data dump?"
Weiss cleared away enough space on the little table for them both to eat, but hung on to two of the scrolls, putting them back down when everything was situated. "Apparently the hotel security was telling the truth… as they knew it. The scroll you synced to the local CCT shows our location here." She tapped the map on the disposable scroll, a glowing dot marking a point on the edge of Solitas, on the far eastern edge of Atlas's territory.
"Our scrolls, on the other hand, show us sitting directly on the east tip of Alo, several hundred kilometers north of our drop site - basically, right where we thought we were... and considerably west of Atlas."
Ruby chewed and swallowed a mouthful of pancakes. "Oh my God, these are so much better without Nora." She cleared her throat to give herself some extra time to think. "So someone builds a city out here, but sets things up so that the people who live here don't know where they are? How does that work? Who would fall for that?"
"Almost everyone, when you think about it." Weiss leaned back and tapped her scroll against her chin thoughtfully. "The distance from any Atlesian city to the fake location is too far to safely travel by land - huge portions of that area get no protection from huntsmen or the military. Local settlements might spring up nearby… but they'd have no reason to have heard of Bifrost. Travel by ship is likely to fail as well, as a big stretch of the ocean route there is, well…"
"Kraken country?"
"I was going to say 'heavily Grimm infested,' but yes. That just leaves air." Weiss pointed her scroll at Ruby for emphasis. "So let's say you only schedule night flights for your civilians and contractors. How many people still know how to navigate by the stars? Most people get on a flight and immediately try to remove themselves from the experience by drinking, watching a movie, reading a book, or just passing out."
The caped huntress smacked a hand to her forehead, "Aaaaand they have to take their scrolls offline while the plane or airship is in flight, so they'd only get the plane's local connection. They'd never see the coordinates jump. And at night, they'd never see ocean beneath them."
"Precisely."
"That's great for moving families in, but what about before, when there wasn't anything here? If there's one thing two years of watching Vale get rebuilt has taught us, it's that it takes a lot of materials and effort to build a city."
"Yes. That's the distressing part. I'd hoped that this was some rogue element operating out of Atlas, but the Atlesian government itself is obviously involved on a wide scale. Cities that don't evolve out of settlements over time, including this one, pretty much demand an investor that can print their own money. The SDC has built little mining towns on its own, and in less time, but this…" Weiss trailed off. "I suspect that we'll find out more at the site out west. Or if the decoder finishes. What's the remaining time on that?"
"Sixty-one hours, give or take a few minutes."
Weiss arched an eyebrow at her. "Really."
"Yep." The caped huntress gave her a cheeky grin, "Like I said, hacking is boring."
"Well, we can't just sit around the hotel for two and a half days." The Dust mogul planted her hands on her hips, her pious and imperious tone set to maximum. "I say we go poke around Bifrost. We can look for navigational landmarks, assess the health of the economy, and check the morale of the population with a sampling of their entertainment industry."
NOW
"Wait," The team leader held up a hand, grinning wickedly, "I remember you saying you wanted to go sightseeing, do some shopping, and maybe catch a movie."
"Of course not, Ruby. That would be goofing off in the middle of the mission," Weiss visibly resisted the urge to elbow her partner. Honestly, it's like I'm the only one that remembers that Glynda is in the room.
She needn't have bothered - The headmaster was a teacher with enough years of experience to simply sense bullshit when she heard it. "Don't worry, Miss Schnee, your actions so far will only be viewed as ambiguous white-collar crimes by the Council," Goodwitch's voice was bone dry, but at least it was better than her not-shout. "You've still got to catch up to Lady Armed Assault and Dame Grand Theft Auto."
Yang snorted, "Those nicknames don't even work as comic book villains."
"I'm sorry, I'm a little distracted with how I'm going to keep Beacon open after this fiasco." Glynda sighed. "Go on."
Yang's Log, Day 3, 10:55 a.m.
Mission Status: Oh man, someone should really check on those CCT Tests.
Update: Alright, let's try this again. Story of my life, really.
Personal Status: What is this stuff, robot cancer? Ugh.
Blake wasn't the only one to sleep in.
Yang woke up, having elected not to set any particular sort of alarm. She'd found herself remarkably wrung out from the previous day and two ungodly-long drives, and figured her partner would call if something truly pressing came up.
So it was that the blonde huntress rose a little before eleven, wondering idly what city she was in. That hadn't happened to her since the war, but she'd been nodding off when what's-his-name had dropped her off in this town, and if anyone had mentioned the name, she didn't recall it now. She did feel remarkably refreshed, albeit with a twinge of unease that she doubted could be blamed on a hangover. Her drinking from the previous night had occurred long before she'd gone to bed, she'd sucked down a prodigious amount of water prior to crashing, and while she usually didn't taunt her partner about it, Yang's alcohol tolerance made a mockery of anyone who wasn't either a career alcoholic or twice her size. The second caveat she had added grudgingly on the ill-fated night that she and Yatsuhashi had gone round for round and she'd wound up under the table for the first and only time in her life. In retrospect, that was not my finest hour.
That said, her morning routine didn't really put her at ease. Blake was probably going to be a little upset with her, true, but the bigger issue was that the odd glowing… cracks, for lack of a better term, were still present on her arm. In fact, it looked like the condition had spread slightly. Yang thought back over the trucker's advice from the previous night, and sighed. Staying home for a while was out of the question, at least while she had a mission. Besides, that wasn't really the favored Xiao Long strategy for dealing with any particular difficulty. It felt too much like… well, like how she'd tried to deal with losing her team and her arm after the fall of Beacon. No, she'd just finish the mission and take this to Beacon's infirmary.
In the meantime, she didn't see any particular reason why she needed to let the world know about this. Her teammates would start asking questions, for one thing, and that would get them closer to discovering her other problem. That just wouldn't do.
I need to hide the arm. Some bandages would be a good start, but even the white wrappings were a little suspicious. She needed something more substantial, and that was a bit of a problem, because her wardrobe these days was basically a testament to a young woman who A) knew she looked fantastic and B) was also her own space heater. The good news was that Yang knew how to dress in layers - and Weiss had provided her the means to do so with limited space.
One wouldn't think that an entire duster could fit into a belt pouch, but then, one probably didn't have enough experience with Adel-brand storage. The coat came with some… mixed memories, when she got right down to it, but it would serve admirably as a cover-up for her arms. The blonde shook the heavy garment out and put it on - the extra heat wouldn't bother her at all - and gave herself a good once-over in the mirror. Yep, still looks badass.
She just didn't quite feel badass enough to match the image. Even so, she set out boldly to face the day, certain that it would at least be more pleasant than the previous one.
Blake's Log, Day 3, 1:13 p.m.
Mission Status: Yang checked the CCT tests, right?
Update: At last! Someone who knows things.
Personal Status: Still peeved that I got myself into a duel. Goodwitch will flay me alive.
"'D fing I don' get," said Anne around a mouthful of food, "Is wha' happen' to make Beacon -" she swallowed, "-send a team of huntresses out here all of a sudden."
Blake shrugged. She would make a claim to better table manners, but the truth was that she had inhaled her meal and was already finished. "It was more inevitable than 'sudden.' There isn't much urgency to our mission - we were sent out here because Vale got permission from the Council of Nations to establish a communications outpost out here. They thought the area was uninhabited and would be waist-deep in Grimm, so they posted a job on Beacon's mission board to do it." The cat faunus gave her fox companion a wry grin. "And then Ruby saw the part about exploring strange new worlds and going where no huntress has ever gone before and browbeat us into signing on. Heck, this mission isn't even a secret. We had to go to this photo-op thing with some of Vale's leaders the day before takeoff. It was on the news that night: 'Team RWBY Reunites to Tackle Alo.' I guess the hype train has no breaks, but that's still over the top for a scouting mission."
"Did you guys break up or something?"
"Well, no, but we haven't been able to do much as a team since the war, so the media tends to blow it out of proportion whenever we manage to reconnect."
Anne stared at her blankly, chewing and swallowing another mouthful. "War?"
Blake returned the stare. "The Autumn War? Everyone versus everyone, and then everyone versus Salem? It was kind of a worldwide event."
"Not out here." Anne blinked a few times. "Sounds rough."
"That's… certainly a word for it." The huntress sighed, and gave Anne the short version. The opening scattered shots, the slide from suspicion to anger to demonization and hate as Salem pushed and pulled at loose threads until Remnant's house of cards came tumbling down.
And how, bit by bit, it had been put back together. Remnant had proved more resilient in the end than Blake would ever have guessed, rallying around one simple, honest soul.
When she finished, the other faunus let out a quiet breath. "We'd heard there was… trouble, from time to time. I didn't realize it had gotten that bad. And the White Fang really…"
"Yeah."
"Including the part with-"
"Oh yeah."
Anne went quiet at that before turning upbeat once more. "Can't believe they actually put Adam Taurus in charge, though. I told him the genocide thing would never work."
Blake leaned forward. "You were White Fang?"
"Sure, back when Ghira an' Kali were headin' it up. I don't suppose you've met them?"
A smile twisted its way onto the huntress's face despite all of Blake's efforts to the contrary. "I guess you never got my last name."
"I never got your first name, either. You were too busy scarfing down that fish."
"Sorry." Blake cleared her throat and extended a hand. "Blake. Blake Belladonna."
"Bl- no." Anne's expression took on more shock then when she'd seen Blake shoot a man. "Wow, you grew up! Little Blake... you couldn't have been more than twelve when I last saw you."
"Yeah, I could have spent my childhood better," the cat faunus supplied awkwardly.
The sheriff waved that off, though, "Ah, we all do dumb things. You probably learned a lot as Adam's Girl Friday."
"I did other stuff for the Fang!"
The fox ears twitched. "Like what?"
"Like…" Blake hesitated, not sure why she was a hairsbreadth from bragging about her former domestic terrorist activities. "Never mind. I left when they started getting a little too radical. Signed up to be a huntress and the rest is history. What prompted you to leave?"
"The same thing, sort of. Some of the new blood – Adam included – decided on the faster an' more violent approach. I got tired of spending more time arguing with other faunus than with humans. I got the job offer to come out here and, well, the rest is history."
"How exactly did you get a job offer for this?" The cat faunus raised an eyebrow hard enough that her ear flicked involuntarily along with it. "Chamber seems kind of… close knit."
Anne fixed her with a level stare, "You mean backwards."
"I…"
"Ha!" The half-smirk returned. "It's alright. Chamber is like Vacuo taken up to eleven, with a 'backwoods Vale' motif stapled over it. Add in that Vacuans are usually seen as vulgar, ignorant, an' incurious, and assumptions are gonna get made."
"How did that stereotype even get started?"
"The fuck if I know. Never really cared to find out."
Blake's thoughts froze halfway to her next response. Anne had spoken with a straight face, but there was the tiniest twitch at the corner of her mouth. A short bark of laughter escaped from the huntress and the sheriff joined in a moment later. "Wow, you had me for a second."
"It's what I do." The fox ears waggled playfully. Something buzzed at her hip, and she glanced down. "Ah hell, I have to take this. It could be a few minutes…"
"I'll wait."
"That's sportin' of ya." Anne got up and left enough money on the table to pay for the meal before walking out. Blake leaned back and sipped at her drink, feeling better than she had all day. This was easily the best encounter with a former White Fang member she'd had since her failed effort to redeem it prior to the war, and better yet, they seemed to have a few things in common. She'd been starting to think that Chamber was chock full of total idiots – the duel had offered plenty of proof of mass stupidity in action – but maybe they had a better grip than they let on.
Thinking back over the previous twenty-four hours, Blake had to admit that maybe 'stupid' was the wrong word for it. The Leadwater townsfolk had seemed polite and relatively helpful right up until Yang's robot reveal. That had seemed to trigger some kind of group neurosis and a lot of very poor decision making.
Blake added it to the list of questions she was sitting on. She hoped Anne was as sharp as she seemed, because given half a chance the huntress was going to drain her dry of info… and hopefully make a new friend. She had few enough chances in her line of work.
Violet's Log, 2 days, 12 hours until launch, 1:30 p.m.
Mission Status: On Schedule
Update: Ugh, Meetings
Personal Status: Today's the day! I get to meet her.
Violet fidgeted as she waited. Knowing her history, one would think she'd be good at waiting, but it simply wasn't the case. She understood the need for Team Meetings, especially since she was the one that insisted on calling it a team (She was proud of having come up with the 'Team VACM' moniker, even when Cal asked if it meant that they sucked. Cal was mean), but she still didn't like wasting time while waiting for everyone to show up.
Especially when there wasn't much of a point to it. They could teleconference – hell, they could holoconference. Anne was doing it right now. The slightly lagged image of her leaned against a barely-visible ghostly wall, presumably somewhere in Chamber. Cal could have done the same thing, but no. He was coming here in person, citing a perfectly reasonable security concern thanks to the two huntresses in town. And he's late, as always.
It wasn't that the room didn't have anything interesting to look at. Indeed, the chamber at the top of the central control tower in Bifrost had quite a bit going on. Banks of monitors hung from the ceiling and sat ensconced in numerous workstations around the edge, even as the windows provided the best view – literally the best view in the world – of Bifrost sprawling out in all directions. From here you could see everything from the distant mountains to the sparse airship traffic to the open window and yellow crime tape where Ruby Rose had made her emergency exit from the adjoining CCT sub-tower the night before. But with no one else manning the stations and only a distracted Anne for company, it was just a bunch of junk that she couldn't tinker with.
Actually, Wisteria was running behind too, but not by much. The lift doors opened and Bifrost's administrator stepped out. "Sorry I'm late, I was tied up in some meetings with Captain Haegan about the rank and column."
"I feel like there's a killer insult there if you rephrased it," Violet mused.
Anne detached herself from her wall. "Yeah, something like… I ranked your mom on my… column… no, that doesn't work…"
"I… the rank of…"
Wisteria crossed her arms, "I refuse to be a part of this."
Anne tried again, "Your mom's ranks is-"
"I put my column where your mother is rank." The new voice from the elevator cut them all off. Calico 'Cal' Sterling clanked his way into the room on artificial legs, brushing a rather fluffy white lock of hair out of his face with a metal hand and tucking it behind a curled horn. The older man delivered the line with all the joy and good cheer of a bear with a rash. "There. That's the joke you're all looking for. Let's get this meeting started."
Wisteria's eyebrow quirked upward, "We were waiting on you."
"Well, wait no longer." The tall ram faunus plugged his scroll into the room's central projector and powered it up. After some fiddling with his file browser, he brought up a wealth of data on their guests. "Team RWBY. Founded eighty years after the Great War at Beacon Academy and assembled by Professor Ozpin. Trained there for one year and participated in the fortieth Vytal Festival tournament, making it as far as the finals before being disqualified due to what we now know to be a frame designed to incite the Grimm. Got tangled up early and often in the schemes of Cinder Fall and, later, the entity the various kingdoms dubbed 'Salem,' and then participated in the Autumn War once it got into full swing."
Wisteria leaned forward. "On whose side?"
"Theirs," Cal snorted. "The Autumn War was a serious clusterfuck-"
"Language," Anne chastised.
The other faunus gave her a withering look. "I've heard you swear worse than that. Over vending machine mishaps."
"Yeah," The fox ears twitched as Anne smirked, "But you have a minor in the room."
Violet roller her eyes. "Ugh. I've heard lots of grown-up words."
"And that joke is old enough to drink. Moving on." The screens shifted to show the huntresses in action, before, during, and after the war. "The four were – for a number of reasons that still aren't entirely clear – instrumental to defeating Salem and figured prominently at the Salem Accords, though their actual influence on the proceedings is questionable. After the war, they agreed to keep working as a team, though they're frequently out on independent action."
The images shifted again, replacing team shots with those of Ruby Rose. "I'm gonna skip over the parts everyone knows and focus on what's relevant to us. Team RWBY is the highest ranked team operating out of Beacon. I'd say 'highest in the world' but the rating systems between the huntsman bases aren't standardized. Possible hype inflation aside, going by the results from their last twenty-odd missions, including some toward the end of the war, they're certainly competent, and unfortunately have enough depth that they can stay flexible, allowing two or even three of the team's members to handle any given task as needed."
"Records of them get spotty during the last half of the war as communications continued to break down, but they each picked up a frightful amount of experience in applied violence and general strategy. Their record indicates that they're willing to fight dirty… to a point. Kidnapping, bribery, blackmail, theft, property destruction, and simple assault don't seem to bother them, but there are no known records of torture or other war crimes, barring the incident at Fort Chiaroscuro, which has been officially blamed on the White Fang. After the war, there are no known incidents of them killing as anything other than a last resort, though some particularly tough criminals have lost a body part or two to Crescent Rose."
"That's their general attitude and code of conduct." Cal switched the views out, "Abilities-wise, they're like any other huntress team. Four distinct and well-developed semblances, their effects relatively well known from the tournament, though cleaner and more focused now. Ruby Rose has improved her hand-to-hand combat in an effort to rely less on that giant hedge trimmer of a weapon. More importantly, she's been enrolled online at Atlas's Titanworks training facility – something that is known to the staff there but not the general public or, for that matter, the rest of the students – studying cyberwarfare and brushing up on her engineering fundamentals, plus picking up new techniques for weapons development. Weiss Schnee hardly needs a briefing as she's been a semi-permanent fixture in the news since her father's arrest. Her constant struggle with the board of directors has taken up what free time she has outside of hunting, but based on Beacon's mission board there's no reason to believe her skills haven't been maintained."
"Blake Belladonna has been learning the fundamentals of raw Dust manipulation and trying to repair human-faunus relations the hard way since the war, with mixed results. Yang Xiao Long spent a little while trying to stay out of the public eye until apparently realizing that was impossible. While the confession extracted from Mercury Black prior to his incarceration cleared her name – sort of – concerning the Vytal Festival incident, her usual tactics during the war raised some serious questions about her mental health. Add in that the media loves to play up the dash of controversy that she adds to Team RWBY whenever there's a slow news day, and Xiao Long has apparently just decided to roll with it and continue her duties as a huntress. Beyond her fighting skills, she's apparently quite the driver and a reasonably competent mechanic."
"Breathe, Cal," Violet teased.
Wisteria grinned, "That was a lot to dig up in a short time. Benefits of our guests being so famous, I suppose. What's your analysis on their threat?"
"Low to middling, unless they figure out what's really going on, in which case it gets much higher," Cal grunted and shut the projector down. "Huntsmen are, pound for pound, the most dangerous combatants and agents on Remnant, but the war showed that they have limits. Huntsmen are at their best when fighting Grimm, of course – that's what they train to do and the mostly-mindless Grimm are more willing to oblige them by acting and attacking in a predictable manner, allowing Huntsmen complete control of the conflict. Beyond that, Huntsmen are also very dangerous when on the attack – that much ability and firepower concentrated into a few people is hard to counter conventionally."
"Where they start to break down is defending against non-Grimm attacks or punching through heavy firepower while under time pressure. And the bigger the area they have to defend, the worse they are at it. There are still conventional militaries for precisely that reason – tens of thousands of guys with guns are better at protecting a border than one girl with a weird weapon and a funny outfit, no matter how much of a badass she might be."
"Which just leaves the question of how to deal with team RWBY." Wisteria shook her head. "I'm afraid that we have a couple of things working against us already. Weiss Schnee and I have a personal history-"
"They hate each other," Violet supplied.
"Thank you, I was getting to that. This means that Schnee is unlikely to grant the benefit of the doubt or take my word for it regarding our operations here. Indeed, we've already seen Miss Rose break into the CCT tower to pull a data heist. If Vi's calculations are correct, they won't get to anything good before it's too late, but we can't afford much in the way of delays. We also don't know where Belladonna or Xiao Long even are."
"Actually, Blake's in the diner right behind me," Anne broke in, stunning the room momentarily. Her image flickered as she looked between them – or at least, between where their images appeared to her. "Her partner apparently skipped town, heading north, but we had lunch. She seems nice."
"…" Wisteria considered that for a moment. "What's your general take on her?"
"I can almost smell the frustration. She managed to wind up in a duel, of all things, though she's acting like she regrets it. I don't think she realizes how close she is to a boiling point." The fox faunus flicked an ear. "I bet I could flip her if I tried."
"Preposterous," Cal snorted. "The one thing that repeatedly appears in the team's files is how close their bond is. I should also point out that subverting Belladonna means finding a way to do the same to Xiao Long. The pair are apparently living together now and have a distinctly unprofessional relationship-"
"Yes, but right now they're not together physically. I think you're forgetting that they've been running around in Chamber for a couple of days now. Including the… unique weather?"
Cal raised a grey eyebrow. "You're suggesting they have the Scream?"
"They're showing signs of it, both of them, though I haven't seen any physical traces on Blake. They could be under her clothes though – I mean we're not that friendly."
"Regardless, the strategy we want to employ here is to delay." Wisteria broke in smoothly, stepping forward and into the light from the projectors. "Team RWBY may, strictly speaking, be opposed to our plans – or likely would be, if they knew what they were – but attempting to confront them gets us nowhere. Indeed, given their current celebrity status, attempting to kill them might backfire spectacularly even if we were successful. To that end, I believe I can keep Miss Rose and Miss Schnee occupied until the product launches. At that point, it won't really matter what they do. Anne and Cal, if you could be so kind as to keep Belladonna occupied and find Miss Xiao Long, that would be ideal."
"What about me? Wisteria, I'd really like to-"
"Meet Ruby Rose, yes." The administrator tapped at her oversized scroll for a moment. "Actually, that would likely be a good idea. Any new information is welcome, and the more distractions the better, so… knock yourself out."
Anne nodded even as Violet visibly struggled to restrain a squeal, "I'll stay on Blake then. Wouldn't hurt to feed her a bit of juicy info about the Scream to keep her away from Slate Ridge."
"I'll keep digging, see if I can find anything else to give us an edge in a worst-case scenario." Cal's eye lazily drifted to the combat feeds. "Betcha I can find some weaknesses before the day is out. And I'll keep an eye out for Xiao Long, of course."
"It seems we all have a plan, then." Wisteria bowed her head gracefully before preparing to close the connection, "We've come too far to blow this now. No one do anything too rash, please."
Ruby's Log, Day 3, 5:26 p.m.
Mission Status: CCT Tests haven't failed yet, so I think that means we're winning?
Update: A surprising amount of huntressing is waiting.
Personal Status: Hungry
The Frost Plaza was an impressive enough place in its own right, the multi-story shopping multiplex being large enough to backdrop the northern skyline of the city, but the diner the huntresses had elected to visit had figured out the real secret to success. One would think that being situated near the building's pinnacle and far away from the collection of other restaurants that, in a lesser mall, might have been called a food court would damage a business that relied heavily on foot traffic, but the diner's owner had gotten the last laugh by garishly decorating the outward-facing windows with simple, large images of delicious food and the name O'Malley's in brilliant neon lights. It stuck out a bit from the ultra-swanky and clean look the rest of the place was going for, but that was what made it so brilliant. It was the first thing Ruby and Weiss had seen on the way in, and it was the first thing they thought of later when it was time to eat.
More importantly, the owner had private seating. Not private rooms - the place didn't have enough space for that - but the seating arrangements were such that the two huntresses wouldn't be recognized from outside the diner or, indeed, from most angles within. Even famous and popular huntresses got recognized and mobbed less often than movie stars, but it could still be a problem. Despite the newsreels, Ruby Rose had never personally appeared on the big screen, and the one film made about her had made her considerably taller and bustier (Ruby had met the actress, briefly. She seemed pleasant). Weiss, despite being famous prior to attending beacon, actually looked considerably different than the most well-known images of her, and her greater variety of clothing aided in avoiding an iconic single look. In spite of this, they'd started to notice a few whispers and stolen glances before they'd ducked into O'Malley's.
To top it off, they'd gotten a window seat that gave them a fantastic view of downtown Bifrost and the tower complex. A couple of VTOLS still patrolled the CCT, their lights visible against the last flickering traces of sunlight.
"Well, that was all pretty good." Ruby stretched again, working feeling back into legs and shoulders that had gone stiff from sitting still too long, first at the movie theater and now here. "I dunno why you didn't want to see the vampire movie, but-"
"Just drop it, please."
"'Kay." The cloaked huntress turned her scroll from 'emergency codes only' - a mode that most huntresses got installed on their scroll for situations where they didn't want to be completely out of touch, but did want to be undisturbed - back to its normal mode. "So what did you think?"
The white-haired huntress dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin before laying it on the table. "Well, I liked the lead actress, and her romantic counterpart wasn't too bad, but I thought the ending was a little rushed."
"What?" Ruby blinked, "I meant the city, Weiss. Bifrost."
"I know. I can have my little jokes too." The former heiress considered for a moment before answering. "To be honest… I'm impressed. Even if it means complimenting something Wisteria is a part of, I can't deny that the scale of the city is unprecedented outside of the Kingdoms. Even then, it has to be the largest settlement this part of the world has ever seen." She looked out the window at the city beyond. "Which makes the following question even more unnerving: what are they all doing out here? If the primary local industry is this black site out to the west, it has to be massive."
"Yeah, I'm wondering about that too." Ruby idly fiddled with the straw on her drink. She'd ordered chocolate milk, because she'd found that no one questioned the drink order of a young woman wearing a cape and carrying a weapon that could peel off dreadnought armor. "The secrecy just seems so weird. When they rolled out the Paladin-260's, they were bragging about it weeks ahead of time. In Vale! Security is one thing, but when you're a few days from release..."
"I think that's the core of it. Products get hyped; events get kept a secret. They're not just creating something. I think they're going to do something with it."
The two huntresses exchanged a look. "Did you just feel a chill?"
Weiss shrugged, "We are sitting next to the window."
"Very funny." Ruby was about to ask something else when Weiss's scroll beeped. The Dust mogul glanced at it before looking up at her partner sharply. "It's a message from Wisteria. She's inviting us to take a tour of, and I quote, 'a revolutionary new platform for launching products that will change the face of modern industry and popular culture.' It would be scheduled for tomorrow morning."
"She sounds… confident."
Weiss frowned, "That sounds like a quote from a sales brochure, but she wouldn't be this cagey about it if it were a real product. She'd have rubbed it in our faces by now."
"Pretty sure that's what she's planning to do tomorrow morning." Ruby swiped the check before Weiss could grab it – her partner tried to pay for everything, either out of lingering guilt or some weird sense of civic responsibility to her teammates. "Maybe she wants to make a proper show of it? We should accept, though. Don't want to come off looking suspicious."
"Even though we do anyway." Despite the words, Weiss's tone was one of agreement. "Well, let me take a look at what I can find out about Wisteria's latest activities back in our room before I accept. Maybe I'll be able to get a better sense of what this might really be about."
"…all citizens be advised, the air mass moving in from the southwest might meet up with the cold front scheduled to really hit Bifrost this evening. Conditions are about right for a blizzard, and while the city administration assures us that they will do everything they can to keep the roads open and the utilities functional, you are urged to stay indoors after dark. The arid conditions to the southwest have added quite a bit of dust and airborne particulate matter to this air mass, so expect 'dirty snow' like we've seen a couple of times in the last month. If you have small children or pets…"
Ruby fought to keep a pout off her face. She and Weiss had parted ways in the hotel lobby, with Ruby electing to stretch her legs, possibly even go for a long walk while Weiss dug into what Wisteria Industries had been up to lately, but she had gotten distracted by the dire reports coming from the lobby screens – reports that had put her in a rough mood. Putting aside the fact that she was listening to the local weather channel instead of enjoying the city, it sounded like the whole shebang was about to be shut down for a while, which would really put a damper on their mission – especially if they decided to hit the mystery facility to the west at some point.
Still, despite the many miracles of Dust, no one had yet developed long term and stable weather control, so she'd have to plan around it. Sighing, Ruby got up from the presumably swanky (she honestly couldn't tell) couch and took to wandering about the lobby, as terrible at sitting still as ever.
She'd made it around three times before she paused by the door, not quite certain of what she was looking at. She was pretty sure it was her reflection, but the colors were all off. In fact, it almost looked like a photo negative of her – tanned skin, white hair, blue, black, and white outfit, complete with a hooded cloak. The reflection had her exact height, though, and had her exact facial shape and build.
And then the revolving door spun and Ruby found out that it wasn't a reflection at all. A delighted smile lit up the features of what was apparently her long lost palette-swapped twin. Ruby had a moment of panic, wondering if perhaps her father had impregnated a third huntress and never told her or Yang, but then the stranger spoke, waving somewhat nervously despite being less than two meters away. "H…hi Ruby Rose! I'm Violet Spinel. I have been dying to meet you."
Author Notes:
Wow, this one took a while to get out. NaNoWriMo segued into the holidays and then work went nuts. By the time I could sit down and breathe again, it seemed like Volume 4 was nearly over. While this is - strictly speaking - free entertainment and I don't have deadlines, it's not like you're obligated to read my story and offer delicious feedback, so for anyone waiting on the story to progress, I am *very* sorry about the long delay.
There is a silver lining, though - not only is my writing momentum back, but the pause let me make a couple of adjustments to the plot that make this fic Volume 4 compliant. While I got caught off guard by the additional family members (three parents and a brother that spontaneously started existing in Volume 4) and didn't nail down every twist in Volume 4, I was close enough that I could make some tweaks keep this fic in line... for now. I'm not going to wait for Volume 5 to find out about the rest, though, so from now on I'm just going to run with my assumptions.
I know I promised Winter would show up on Day 3, but... we're not done with Day 3 yet. In the meantime, the *other* reason this chapter took so long to get out was due to the high volume of original character content. OCs are, by and large, not the reason people read fanfics - few readers go looking for RWBY Stories to read about non-RWBY characters. That said, I wanted to have someone to drive the conflict and didn't feel right shoehorning an existing character into that role. The result is Team VACM (Vacuum). I'll let you judge how they do for yourselves, but I'm making it a personal goal to keep the focus on Team RWBY... which is why VACM spend nearly their entire 'screen time' talking to or about RWBY.
Anyway, next chapter we'll see just what's up with Violet's fangirling. Is she a creepy stalker? Will Ruby tell her to buzz off? Will Blake get the answers she craves? Is the Scream just a public safety scare? Will Nora ever steal Team RWBY's syrup again? Find out next time!
As always, reviews and feedback are appreciated.
