The elevator door dinged merrily, signaling the car's arrival and warning all who entered its doors that there was no escaping its cheery interior now. Or maybe Cinder was just projecting.

It was strange—in an entirely normal way—that even after the tower's total reconstruction someone had seen it fit to outfit the elevator with the exact same chime. Or at least she thought it was the same one as she stepped into the blindingly orange elevator car. A holographic attendant smiled pleasantly, the picture of a perfect young man, prepared to assist her.

The holographic attendant, unlike the elevator car it commanded, wasn't a carry over from the original tower. If it were, she hadn't crossed paths with it during her previous visits. Its face was handsome in a forgettable sort of way, and its body shape was… Cinder stopped herself short of actually ogling it though. She was in the elevator for a reason, and it wasn't to be disappointed by the narrow shoulders of a hologram.

"Headmistress' Office."

The hologram offered no warning before the elevator began smoothly accelerating in the entirely expected direction of 'Up'. Cinder scowled lightly at its immediate obedience—annoyed that the car had begun moving while she was shifting her weight. The older holographic assistants had given warning about their actions and even displayed very soothing hesitancy at times. Their appearances had been much more pleasing too, though she wasn't quite sure why, and she refused to look into it for the sake of her own sanity. Something about the inhumanity of the old, pretty, models—their bodies, their behavior, their expressions—just left Cinder far more at ease than the unhesitating obedience she had just experienced.

It was at this exact moment that Cinder realized she had become old.

She had already experienced the life of a bitter, solitary woman; had demanded her subordinates follow her orders immediately and perfectly like the untouchable goddess she thought she was. But now she was annoyed that her commands were being followed immediately and perfectly. She didn't have the excuse of hating the elevator, or even being late to her appointment to draw her ire towards the machine; she just wanted to be dissatisfied by something in her astonishingly comfortable new life. Maybe she wanted to find a reason to leave it behind, or maybe this was just in reaction to feeling like everything was going too well to be true. Maybe that's why she was so anxious about whatever the Queen Bitch of Beacon wanted to talk with her about.

She came to the conclusion that elevator rides were amazing for self-reflection. And that she hated them for it. But at least that train of thought momentarily distracted her from wondering just why the old bat had asked her to come in on a Friday while Cinder was still technically on investigative leave.

For all the words the summons contained about Cinder's 'Speciality Knowledge', 'Expertise' and 'Academic Duty', it had expertly avoided actually saying what she was needed for. Without a doubt it had been composed by someone accustomed to a level of secrecy rivaling even Watts'.

She wasn't about to admit she was worried—not even to herself—about entering the seat of power of yet another seemingly-immortal witch of a woman who held sway over her present and future, and who wielded immense physical, social, and political power besides. But she was certainly aware of the parallels.

At least this time her escort wasn't a cackling manchild with breath like anchovies and mint.

The elevator ride was mercifully short, ending before Cinder could fall further into depravity. With another heinously pleasant 'ding' the doors opened directly into a penthouse office already populated by a small number of people which was just slightly larger than the expected 'one' of Glynda Goodwitch.

Of course, the owner of the space was present, and had probably been aware of Cinder's exact location since she'd stepped foot onto Academy Grounds that day. Glynda calmly lowered her steepled hands, and Oscar stiffened at her side slightly, as Cinder exited the car and exchanged her reservations for airs of confidence, approaching the assembly in long strides.

With their backs turned Cinder didn't recognize the three who stood around or—in the case of the two women adorned with red and white feathers respectively—leaned on, a single chair set just between Cinder and Glynda's desk. Her view of whoever sat there was blocked by an especially broad man, but as he shifted slightly Cinder caught a glimpse of pink hair and an umbrella hanging from the arm rest.

Wait… Not an umbrella.

A parasol.

Cinder didn't need to see the face of the chair's occupant to know they were smirking like the devil in a sex shop. She was always smirking about something . And a smirking Neopolitan was a dangerous Neopolitan. Meaning she was always dangerous. Cinder's combat instincts flared to life as a pulse of her Aura revealed a living presence just a few steps behind her. She was relatively sure Glynda wouldn't allow a brazen assassination to occur in her office, but why else would Neo be here? Her two most prominent skills were murder and charades. The presence was closing in—Cinder didn't have any more time to react before her window to do so closed—possibly permanently.

A spin on her heel and a parrying swipe with her metal arm proved her fears correct. The illusion of empty space shattered like glass in front of her and Cinder locked her eye on what exactly she had just saved herself from. It wasn't the stabbing tip of Neo's long stiletto as she had anticipated, but the hooked end of the parasol now pushing on her wrist. A wrist which was now doing all it could to keep Neo's considerable strength at bay.

There was no smile on her face though, just an uncharacteristic snarl that Cinder could only read as nearly animalistic rage. The idea that Neo's still held so much of a grudge gave Cinder an unpleasant feeling at the base of her throat.

Both of them looked at the stalemate for a heartbeat and then back to one another. Neo's face shifted into a more familiar theatrical pout of disappointment, and she continued to try and force her weapon closer to Cinder's face. Cinder presented her best haughty grin in return. She hadn't started today looking for a fight, but Cinder also wasn't about to back down from such a direct challenge either.

Now that she had the opportunity to actually think, the flow of the combat-to-come began to unfold in her mind. A mental game of possible openings, counters and checks played out as they matched glares. The idea of throwing the tri-color tart out of one of the many large windows briefly crossed Cinder's mind, but she looped back around to 'murder is probably off the table' and switched gears to Plan B.

"You seem riled up, Neo," Cinder said as she furrowed her brow in mock concern, attempting to delay just a few more seconds as she sent the signals to her arm to start opening its reservoirs. As the nearly imperceptible particulate began to fall from her joints, Cinder dropped her act and claimed the first move of the fight. "Why don't we talk it out like grownups?"

Neo frowned and quirked her brow almost sarcastically at Cinder's words, but the slackening of pressure from her parasol told well enough that she had taken the bait. That, and the hard yank to the wrist that attempted to unbalance Cinder soon after.

She had been expecting something like it, but it was still next to impossible to completely prepare for a shift in balance without prior warning. Cinder stiffened her elbow and leaned into the pull, using its momentum to both keep the parasol in a semi-controlled lock on her wrist and close the distance between them. Upon reaching Neo, she tightened her arm across to her opposing shoulder and tumbled across Neo's back in an attempt to disarm her as quickly as possible.

Neo wasn't having any of that , and though she did release the parasol momentarily it was only to reverse her grip and perform a maneuver similar to Cinder's but with an added level of acrobatics, swinging herself across the floor in a controlled shin slide and attacking Cinder's footing from an unexpected angle. It likely would have ended the fight then and there if Cinder had attempted to stand her ground completely.

As it was, her left arm was awkwardly stretched across her waist and hips, but with a brief twisting tumble Cinder was again untangled while maintaining the hook at her wrist.

Both her and Neo were left in crouched positions with the contest of strength resumed, this time as a tug-of-war instead of a shoving contest. Due to the angle Cinder quite literally couldn't lose her 'grip,' and Neo seemed to understand the stalemate.

Neo reversed her pulling into a directed push and used the blunt end of her parasol to knock Cinder's blindside with enough force that she bumped against something wooden—likely a bookcase or shelf, though Cinder wasn't very concerned with the details—and dislodged the hook from around Cinder's wrist. Though slightly dazed, Cinder took the opportunity to flashforge a dagger just in time to deflect a stab at her biological shoulder away and down.

Before she could capitalize on the opening she had created, Cinder was lifted into the air along with Neo and brought to float at opposing sides of Glynda's large wooden desk.

"Councilwoman," Glynda said with a cold anger as she gently lowered both Cinder and Neo into standing positions, "I would ask that regardless of your understandable feelings towards the newest member of my staff, you refrain from damaging my collection of first edition Wukongs."

Cinder might have felt insulted that her life was apparently less of a concern than some books on a shelf, but she was too busy watching for another sneak attack to really be listening to the vampire.

The fact Neo had attacked her at all was confusing to Cinder. Her old instincts had been wrong so often in the past few months that to have them actually prove correct was strangely dissonant. Of all the places she expected to be attacked, the fancy penthouse office of the head of her new occupation didn't make the top ten list. Of all the people who had every right to seek their pound of flesh from her, Neo was the first to actually make a real attempt. Mercury wasn't exactly nice to her, but he'd also never tried to kick her teeth in either.

Neo huffed indignantly, then quickly stepped back towards the group of three accompanying her and passed off the parasol while making several quick signs with her open hand. "Apologies Ma'am," said the large man in the center as the woman in red accepted the weapon with a bored look on her face. "The Councilwoman would like to know why, and uhh I'm quoting here, 'why the Grimm…"—He cleared his throat in clear discomfort—"Grimm-dick loving bitch whore of Salem's outhouse is here'."

"Firstly: Councilwoman, I will not have you using language like that around my students. Signed or spoken. Secondly: because among other qualifications, she is quite possibly Remnant's foremost expert on the situation at hand."

Cinder quickly turned to face the Headmistress in surprise at the familiar wording. She had assumed that was mostly flattery. "Is that so?"

"And now that she's here, we can get started." Glynda stood up from her chair with an impressive amount of grace for someone in their late eighties—Aura or no—and with a gesture directed the entire room to follow her back towards the elevators Cinder had just ridden up.

Right. Don't explain what you need me for, then, Cinder fumed but obeyed. She wasn't looking forward to being trapped, however temporarily, inside the epiphany elevator with her own personal murder midget. But she had a rule about not saying 'no' to someone who could crush her skull from across a room, or control her work schedule to assign her to the campus childcare facility as additional help.

The elevator opened just as the Glynda reached the door. But as she stepped in, alongside Neo and her entourage, Cinder was prevented from following by Neo's small gloved hand held out in a clear 'stop' signal. Without lowering his eyes to see the rapid signs which followed—not that Cinder could really tell through those gaudy red glasses of his—the large man again translated with only minor hesitation. "The Councilwoman requests that the—and again I'm quoting here—'The fart jester of stupid ugly town' not ride in the same car as her. She's worried that the… stench of bitch will rub off on her."

"Language."

"Apolog-."

Glynda cut him off with a hand while glaring at Neo like a lioness might glare at its next meal. " You have nothing to apologize for, Mister Xiong. I would remind the Councilwoman however that until the Vytal festival, gods willing, this is my academy. And she will conduct herself in a manner befitting her position while she is here."

Neo rolled her eyes but raised her left hand and drew an 'X' across her chest with her right.

Glynda accepted the gesture with as much grace as ever and looked back towards Cinder again. "Very well though. Cinder, Oscar will fill you in on the way down."

There was a part of Cinder that wanted to give some kind of retort or protest about being treated like a peon, but then she realized she was being handed a way out of spending even a single extra minute with the gelato gremlin. Deciding that her pride would survive the blow, Cinder silently nodded in assent and took a tactful step backwards out of mindless habit when her eye caught sight of Neo's hand moving discreetly in front of her body. A single raised finger that Cinder had no issue translating was briefly visible just as the doors closed between them.

It was a trivial, juvenile, and just plain dumb gesture, but it still ignited a fire in Cinder that she hadn't gotten the last (proverbial) word in. A few years ago she would have been prying open the hydraulic doors and tearing her way through the metal cabin just to punch that smug bitch in her face until her Aura was reduced to scraps and her blood stopped flowing.

She began to see red, the corners of her vision tightening into a tunnel of darkness with only the elevator doors in focus. Her hands ached to carry out the violence she had in mind, and her legs trembled as the desire to move began to build. Her Semblance began to pull at the dust she had spread across the room earlier, lifting it from around the room and bringing it back to its mistress before returning to her arm's reservoirs nearly silently.

The elevator door dinged open not long after that, pushing her to step aboard and begin the most infuriating counter she could imagine to Neo's slight. Cinder was going to meet the malted mongrel with her best impersonation of Ruby's infinite patience and forgiveness head-on.

But before she could, she needed to know exactly what she was about to walk into. She had just the source to tap for that information too.

"Well? Fill me in then." Cinder took what she pretended was a calming breath, though it may have come across as agitated. "Where are we going? And what am I supposedly such an expert on that I'm being sent cryptic text messages and paraded in front of that joke of an elected official?"

"Medical B1," Oscar said calmly, answering her question with a command to the hologram lift operator, and handed over a scroll tablet. It was filled with a student's incident report that was mostly gibberish to Cinder except for the name—Reaper Abyss, of course —and the field for Grimm involved.

Succubeetle.

It was a cutesy name to give one of the most trauma-inducing creatures to have ever crawled its way from Salem's disturbed mind. Soul-devouring abilities aside, they could burrow and meld their essence with nearly anything as a kind of ambush predator—Including the living human body of a certain young firebrand seeking the powers of a Maiden.

"Last night, during a training exercise, teams ORNJ and SLVR stumbled on a collection of 'cool old swords' in one of the caves they were supposed to be clearing Grimm out of." Cinder swiped through the file as he spoke, finding images of the rusted blades in question and a growing sense of dread in her stomach as she gained more information.

Cinder couldn't move her eye from the scroll in front of her, too focused on drinking in as many details as she could about a situation out of her worst nightmares—one that just so happened to be happening to someone else this time around. "And judging by the existence of a medical report…?"

"... Reaper tried picking one up and found they couldn't put it down again."

She finally reached the images of the aftermath of Reaper's lapse in judgment as Oscar finished speaking. Their entire right hand was currently not a hand, and was instead a large bony protrusion resembling a sword, overgrown with blackened flesh and bulging with angry yellow veins near the base. The rage Cinder had successfully quelled less than five minutes before flared back to life.

If it had been any other Grimm involved, she wouldn't have cared so much. But it was this Grimm and someone had fallen prey to it, so here she was being enraged by the incompetence of established leadership, again .

By the time she registered the chime of the elevator's arrival and Oscar's pleas for her to calm down, Cinder was already storming her way with single-minded determination. She ignored the receptionist, she ignored the various orderlies and nurses, she ignored people she didn't even see as she blazed her trail through the labyrinthine hospital towards the Grimm ward.

She identified the room she was looking for by the group standing in front of its observation window like the morons they were—isolating the student could only be magnifying their fear and anxiety, strengthening the Grimm. Without care for their hushed conversation, Cinder burst through their shoulders and pinned Glynda against the wall with more force than was probably necessary. "What the hells were you thinking?"

Despite her age, Glynda didn't so much as flinch at Cinder's temper. And despite the situation she didn't scoff, demean, or belittle Cinder's outburst. She looked at Cinder with the eyes of someone who blamed themself for a lifetime of loss. "That despite my many failures as a Headmistress and teacher, I knew at least one person with intimate knowledge of how best to deal with a Grimm cohabiting their body," She gestured with a tilt of her head toward through the window just to her left. "and a Student in need of exactly that kind of person right now."

Cinder followed the gesture and saw Reaper on their second hospital bed in less than a month, skin pale and knees clutched to their chest by a single hand squeezing so tightly their knuckles were the same shade as the sword awkwardly lying across the rest of the bed by their side. Cinder didn't need to see any of those signs to know exactly what they were feeling while outside their door the adults bickered about where blame fell.

Fear.

Pain.

Hunger .

As she remembered her own experiences of living with a Grimm inside her, she realized that she was one of those bickering adults too. She wasn't responsible for teaching students about the various types of Grimm and their dangers, but there was a feeling that she was responsible for failing to teach them. And Cinder hated failing.

A hand on her shoulder prompted Cinder to finally look away from the window, and toward the bear of a man who she had assumed was simply here as Neo's entourage until now. "I… Is there anything you can do to help my Rea, Miss Fall?

Cinder let Glynda go and turned to face him directly instead of trying to see him around her blind side. "Mine was forcibly burned out of me by Ruby's Silver Eyes. Along with my arm and my eye." Cinder touched her metallic hand to the eyepatch. She could almost feel the sensation of the Succubeetle trying to claw its way deeper into her in a desperate bid to escape the Silver light. "Nothing compares to the pain, except for the feeling of that thing inside you, slowly eating away at your sanity and soul. But make no mistake, I will put her through it as quickly and as I possibly can. If they're lucky recovery will only take a matter of weeks, but I'll reach out to—" Cinder hesitated as she considered who could facilitate physical therapy for prosthetics; Yang was a familiar possibility, as was Mercury. Though she really couldn't call either of them friends, she felt Mercury might actually respond to a message for once if it was to help a common student recover. "—a colleague here at the academy to give them the best chance I can."

The man's face fell, he had clearly been hoping for some kind of alternative to what amounted to magical amputation. "Is that… the only way? Fighting in the tournament is important to them, it's why they wanted to come to Beacon in the first place. Even with a prosthetic, they won't recover in time if you're telling the truth. Is there anything, anything at all, that you can think of that might let them compete? Some Aura thing, waving a magic wand, experimental Dust therapy, anything?"

Cinder thought about what he said for a moment. She would prefer just calling up Ruby and getting it done as soon as physically possible. But she was willing to entertain his question at least. Aura techniques were mostly useless against a creature which ate aura. Magic isn't a viable option either, unless there's a Maiden nearby and no one told me . So that leaves…

"Your first two ideas are wishful thinking at best, but Dust… I know someone who can answer that question for both of us."

A/N:

2 months of quarantine and only 1 chapter... but it's x2 length. I'll take it!

Thanks to my Betas, WhatOtherPlanet, MellowYelloww, and ShockFactor

You are loved, remember that.

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