I'm gonna do something a little different with this chapter.

I usually stick away from taking any other perspective than the protagonist, but there's a situation where a second perspective I think will really help the story, so I'm going to do a rare perspective switch!...I'm sure nobody really cares, and probably wouldn't notice anyway, but hey, figured might as well mention a new change to my writing style =D

Enjoy!

Chapter 5

Kicking her feet lazily, 'Neo', as she had begun associating more with the name, felt bored.

Two years had passed, filled with mainly being a criminal alongside Roman. Yeah, a full two years since she had gotten her interface, and two years of getting stronger whilst trying to get a handle on exactly what she was going to do. She knew outright that the reason Roman and Neo worked for Cinder was because either they did those jobs for her, or they would be burned to ashes. That was where her plans mostly focused, on the whole 'burned to a crisp' thing, because the reason for that was the Fall Maiden powers, something she was very interested in.

If she could find and kill Amber, gaining the powers of the Fall Maiden for herself, it would be both good and bad. Good because holy shit having power like that at her fingertips would be really useful, but bad because it would put her right in the forefront of the war between Salem and Ozpin. Before she was scared of that to the point of not even considering it, but after the year she had spent accruing power, now she was not so certain that Salem would be a threat if she could acquire the powers of the Fall Maiden.

Not when she had some plans for making herself even more powerful than she already was.

Name(s): Layla, Neopolitan

Class: Slum-child

Level: 57 (3,057/57,000 EXP)

Title: Partner-in-Crime - +25% damage when within 50 meters of Roman Torchwick

Health Points: 625/625 - 5% Regeneration Rate (81.25 Per Minute)

Aura Points: 640/640 - 7% Regeneration Rate (102.4 Per Minute)

STR: 17 (+12)

VIT: 13 (+5)

DEX: 52 (+14)

WIS: 16 (+2)

LUK: 26 (+17)

Perks:

Trainee Body-builder - "Not skippin' arm day once brah!" - Grants +1 to STR per rank. Increased by weight-lifting. Current Rank: 12

Novice Tanker - "Please stop hitting yourself with a brick." - Grants +1 to VIT per rank. Increased by taking damage. Current Rank: 5

Novice Athlete - "The FitnessGram(tm) Pacer Test is a multistage-" - Grants +1 to DEX per rank. Increased by exercising. Current Rank: 14

Inept Book-worm - "Jeez, you have ADHD or something?" - Grants +1 to WIS per rank. Increased by researching. Current Rank: 2

Trainee Gambler - "You're unluckier than a female whore in a gay bar!" - Grants +1 to LUK per rank. Increased by playing games of chance. Current Rank: 17.

While she hadn't skimped on gathering experience, she had quickly discovered that her perks were honestly godsends.

At the start, she had stupidly thought they wouldn't really be as useful as pure levels, but honestly, for early-on gains, they were great. Plus, levelling her Gambler perk was honestly a cakewalk with Roman around, since the man never left home without at least two decks of cards in his jacket, he adored playing card games and would take the chance to do so pretty much constantly. If they were waiting around for mooks to load things, he would whip out a deck and start playing then and there, even if he was just playing singleplayer games like 'Napoleon at St. Helena', something she honestly had never heard of before and assumed was bullshit until he forced her to learn it.

Other than that, doing the other kinds of training usually required actual effort. Weight-lifting was achieved by getting wrist, ankle and waist weights, because it counted as weight-lifting even when she was just wandering around Vale. Exercising also was constantly counted as simply doing anything physical. Her Book-worm perk was neglected quite heavily simply because while she enjoyed a good book, it had to be a good book, not a dry and dusty academic text as the 'researching' bit basically stipulated, so aside from a few necessary reads or lucky breaks like needing to search some archives for information, she never levelled it. And her tanker perk rarely rose since she just kept on pushing her dexterity higher, taking less damage as a result.

It had gotten to the point that Miltia and Melanie both adamantly refused to fight her anymore, because every time they struck, she would either just not be there, or would abuse her Gymnastics proficiency to literally contort out of the way, sometimes making the twins very uncomfortable in the process, either through proximity or just in the way she had moved, sometimes both, much to her amusement and their disgust and revulsion.

As for her proficiencies, aside from those useful to her, many went utterly unused. Her Animal Friend perk was one that got sidelined because while it was a nice thought, it wouldn't be useful to her. After she'd handled all her issues, up to and including beating the snot out of Salem and Ozpin, then she could stop and do things like that. So, she focused on grinding things that were useful to her, at first using the twins as her target dummies, and when they backed out of it, she took to being a vague sort of a vigilante.

Not doing any stupid or daring deeds like thwarting a giant crime ring, just roaming around and finding anything vaguely criminal to shut down, pretty much always petty crimes, and doing so by exclusively using whatever means she had to in order to train her chosen proficiencies, always under the same casual and anonymous appearance. It helped that because of her proficiencies, she didn't really have any kind of combat style, her attacks were always the most optimal in her repertoire to counter, same with her dodges or blocks or anything else, meaning that 'Neo' and 'Vigilante' could never be put together because as Neo, she would always be using Hush, whereas when she was fighting otherwise, she fought with pretty much anything from her fists to a piece of rebar and everything in between.

One thing that did however niggle at her was the fact that she knew she had already attracted attention. Exactly how she knew was thanks only to her foreknowledge, because nobody else would question seeing a regular black crow every so often. But she did know, she knew exactly what that meant having used her Semblance to hide herself as she peered directly at the bird with a pair of binoculars from her inventory, and it made her very uncomfortable to know that a certain Qrow was watching her, which meant that a nosy Chessmaster was possibly looking to see if she would make a valuable pawn or not.

But, as she thought about it, she started to weave that into her vague plans as well. What Ozpin wanted was to beat Salem, though how exactly he would achieve that neither she nor he knew, since she was literally cursed with immortality and the only that might work involved bringing the gods back to Remnant, where they would take one look at the split between Faunus and Humans, laugh, then crack the planet like an egg. That might not work either though, there was nothing to say Salem wouldn't be ignored and left to literally just float through space, meaning nobody won. Wait...that was a thought she'd need to hold onto, in case she ever got dragged in front of the Bitch Queen herself.

On second thought, Bitch Queen was better left for Cinder. Salem just wanted to die, at least as far as Neo recalled, having not actually ever seen how RWBY finished up, so pointing out the simple fact that the Gods would return, they would judge humanity, and would probably then leave her floating in space until gravity pulled her to another celestial body, or perhaps straight into the sun, whereby she would be trapped for eternity, or at least until the Gods finally decided to end her suffering, if they ever did. "Hey Neo, catch!"

Blinking, Neo glanced at Roman, one arm reaching out to grab ahold of the object on a collision course with her head. Tipping her head to the side, she examined it. "We hit it big for once, that's half of the down-payment for our next little heist." Looking at the metal tin, then at Roman, Neo raised a single eyebrow towards him. "No, seriously, open it." Doing so, Neo was caught just a little flat-footed at the colour of the Lien cards.

Each of them was a sunny yellow, more commonly regarded as Gold Lien cards. Each one was worth a million Lien, which was pretty much equivalent to ten thousand pounds per card. Glancing at Roman, Neo fixed her eyes onto his and simply stared at him until he got uncomfortable. "Yes the job is going to be pretty dangerous and difficult, but come on, when has a heist ever let us down?"

Rolling her eyes, Neo made a sign that Roman didn't even acknowledge, too busy looking straight back at her. Looking at the tin of golden cards, then at Roman again, Neo put the lid back on and tossed it up into the air, finally reforming the words that were on her sign. "What are we doing?" Roman, in response, smirked, a smirk that was quickly wiped off his face when an inconspicuous and totally-not-related-to-Neo shoe smacked him between the legs. His aura protected him, sure, but it was still a perfect nutshot.

"Well, that's the kicker. We're going to be fetching a hostage for someone." Blinking, Neo prepared to give Roman a few whacks around the head to remind him that it was his idea to not get involved in human trafficking or anything that couldn't be swept under the rug easily enough. The police wouldn't hunt them down quite as viciously if they kept to robbery and extortion, but if they started kidnapping people, that was when the fuzz would get on their case in a much more difficult-to-evade fashion. "...Alright, since you need more convincing, let me tell you something about this job."

Locking eyes with Roman, Neo waited for his elaboration. "Now, you know I'm not in the business of pissing off my clients, but this job is a special one for me, because the hostage we're expected to fetch, well, she's important to a lot of very powerful people. So, it's my plan to do the job, take her to the rendezvous, but tip off those who she is important to. We skedaddle with our pay, the hostage gets rescued, you can work your girl-power magic on said hostage so you can make friends with her, and badda-bing badda-boom, we're living it up on easy-street." Slumping, Neo asked herself how she ever got tangled up with Roman. His final sentence was just enough for her to not stab him, repeatedly, and in as many painful but non-lethal spots possible, though it set off just about every alarm bell in her head.

"I hope you got over your sea-sickness though, we're going back to Patch for this one."

On the ferry over to Patch, Neo was silent...well, more silent than usual.

Not once did she try to jab him with Hush, nor throw up a sign telling him something random and probably infuriating, like the time she told him that the second floorboard from the right wall under the rear-left leg of his desk wasn't a good place to hide his 'erotic materials'. He was a healthy young male with needs after all, and he wasn't ashamed to know that fact, but she didn't have to reveal that kind of information right in the middle of a meeting with a group of Junior's men. He still sometimes got asked if 'Dusky Girl' was his favourite magazine brand or not.

No, she was...contemplative was really the only word Roman could think of for Neo's current situation, and that was confusing. In the two years he had spent hanging around with Neo, learning about her from the perspective of a man actually living and working with her instead of just looking at a model, at pixels on a screen, while many things had really surprised him about her, one thing that didn't surprise him was that she rarely thought things through properly. That didn't mean she was stupid, far from it, some of the plans for their heists had come from her after all, but she wasn't the type to contemplate, and yet, the entire boatride to patch so far had been spent with her mismatched eyes looking out towards the approaching island.

It was as though something had caught her attention, something that she couldn't properly understand, but what it was completely eluded Roman. As far as he was aware, she hadn't done anything different, nor had she seen anything that might make her contemplative...unless she had discovered the place he hid his 'materials' in after she had revealed it so casually, since some of the magazines weren't quite of a...how best to say it...'normal' persuasion. Not gay, he had a sword between his legs and wasn't interested in getting close to any other meat-based swords, or swords in general really, Melodic Cudgel was perfect as it was, but just more provocative than normal magazines of that type were.

But if that was the case, why did it confuse her so much? He hadn't found any, yet, but Roman was absolutely certain Neo had at least one or two of that kind of thing hidden somewhere, it was inescapable! So no, it wasn't likely she'd found his materials, though that still left the big question of just what had grabbed Neo's attention. After giving it quite possibly more attention and thought than had gone into the majority of their heists and coming up blank, Roman did the only thing he could think of. "Lien for your thoughts?"

He asked her directly. That didn't mean he didn't take precautions, his 'gentlemans' area was protected by the best impact-absorbing and heavily-reinforced protective cup money and blackmail could buy, having learned his lesson in not pissing the diminutive girl off unless he wanted to gamble his ability to have children in the future. Thankfully for his continued ability to procreate and leave brothels with satisfaction at a 'job' 'well-done', Neo didn't seem interested in kicking him between the legs.

And that just made him even more concerned. After a few moments, she sighed and glanced at him, then back at Patch, before shrugging. Roman waited to see if she'd sign anything, continuing when she didn't. "I mean, that job we did on Patch went fine didn't it? Sure, being on an island means if things go tits-up we're gonna have a harder time getting back off said island, but that's why you are so important." He winced faintly as she rolled her eyes, apparently not quite liking the insinuation that he only kept her around for her Semblance and not the fact she was an absolute terror in combat, as well as being appreciable company, in more than one regard.

Not that he'd broach that kind of subject first. While he had very reasonable suspicions that Neo's devotion to Roman wasn't just out of loyalty, even the expensive-as-fuck cup protecting his private parts would not withstand Neo deciding that her new punching bag was one of his most treasured body parts. "So, how about this. You tell me what's eating away at you, and I'll do my best to figure out the best way to solve it." After a few more seconds, and just as Roman was about to give up and go find the ferry restaurant for a bite to eat, Neo flipped up a sign that made him feel as though ice replaced his blood.

"I feel like this job is the start of our deaths."

So, Roman's perspective.

Short, probably too many genital references (I mean, I don't know how the male mind works, so all I can do is work off of how my fiancé acts, which is bad because of how much I've corrupted him!), and not really doing a lot, but hey, I haven't written for this story in absolute ages so meh, take from that what you will!

Hope ya enjoyed it none-the-less!