Cinder supposed that she should be pleased with the result of the meeting with Adam and Roman. They had not argued with the substance of her plan and the modifications they had proposed had been designed to make it work better and to increase operational security. She realized that she had been looking forward to humiliating them and resented them simply treating it as a matter of business. She also was irritated at herself for allowing the fight to happen, but she had been concentrating on Adam and Roman who had both behaved themselves.
It had been agreed that initially a team of twenty White Fang members would work with (in reality, for) Roman in Vale. The numbers would increase over time. A team of eight would primarily be involved in robberies and heists. The others would transport the dust which was stolen to safe warehouses within Vale. Roman had said that, for the time being, he did not want to know the ultimate destination of the dust. The team of Faunus with Roman would deliver it to be a rotating series of storage points outside Vale and later the team under the command of the chainsaw wielding lieutenant would collect it and take it to the base outside Vale.
Cinder was to fund the acquisition of trucks and bullheads and wages for the White Fang members living in Vale. Most travelling outside the city would be done at night as Faunus night vision made travel without lights feasible. Roman had offered to help arrange recruitment drives for the White Fang in Vale as he would be able to identify suitable venues and bribe people to look the other way.
Roman had stated clearly that he was from Mistral, that he was used to working with small groups of professionals and that he was intolerant of stupidity or inefficiency. While he believed himself to be an equal opportunity jerk and was equally rude to humans and Faunus, as the staff working for him would all be Faunus, they would have to take it on trust. He said that he realized that, because much of the work would be lifting and transportation work, he was unlikely to be receiving the best and brightest of Adam's troops, but that it would help if there were a few competent NCO equivalents who could discipline the inefficient or less intelligent workers without him having to be involved. Adam had nodded and said that a Faunus called Perry would supervise the transportation crew.
She asked Roman to wait with the others and had a final word with Adam. They discussed the arrangements for Mountain Glenn and the work which would need to be done to clear the railway lines. He confirmed that an initial survey suggested that it would be feasible to clear the debris from the track within the time frame. Explosives and replacement track would be needed. Cinder agreed to fund the reasonable costs of this. She thought to herself that she should ask Hazel to deal with the funding and project supervision aspects. She would be busy in Haven while Watts and Tyrian lacked people skills. Although Salem had plenty of wealth she did not appreciate being taken for a ride.
At the end he said to her "I and the members of the White Fang are prepared to put up with some temporary irritations and humiliations for the good of the cause. Do not ask me to like it or thank you for it. It is probably for the best that the girl displayed her skills today as it will reduce the risk that my soldiers will react violently to his provocations and sneers. However, while I can rely on him to look after his self-interest, I do not trust him."
Cinder smiled as she left the tent. It was interesting that Roman had decided to try and make her think that he needed to keep Neo around for protection and that Adam seemed to agree with him. She had not expected Roman to admit to such vulnerability. On the other hand, Adam had not seen Roman fight and he was a better fighter than his appearance suggested. Anyway, she had decided on her plan and had heard nothing so far which would cause her to change it. It was also to the good that Adam did not trust Roman and assumed that at least one (and probably more) of the people seconded to Roman would be monitoring his behaviour and would report any signs of Roman preparing to flee the city to Adam.
She returned to the truck. She saw that Neo had positioned herself behind the wheel for the return trip with Roman beside her. Mercury got in the front next to Roman while Cinder and Emerald sat in the back.
She realized Roman was talking about college life at Haven. While the remarks were primarily addressed to Neo, they were clearly also aimed at Emerald, Mercury and herself. He was talking about the uniform and commiserating with all of them about how drab it was, although better than the Atlas uniform. He said that in his day it was compulsory for the female student to wear short skirts and knee high grey socks. He said that while he had appreciated it back then, in retrospect it had not seemed fair on the female students. He asked Cinder "Do you know whether Leo allows the female students to wear trousers nowadays or at least longer skirts or warm tights."
He then carried on "Most of the dorms are quite good and three quarters of the students have their own bedroom, albeit quite small. Unfortunately as you will be late arrivals you will probably have to have one of the old style dorms, as the second to fourth years get first pick and in the first year the Mistral combat school entrants have usually reserved the best of the rest. Perhaps Cinder can arrange for a swap, although she may feel that it would look suspicious for your team to get preferential treatment. Still you get used to it unless you are sharing with a heavy snorer. Emerald, Mercury I trust neither of you are heavy snorers? If you are lucky you may get one of the sets with two bedrooms, so you are only sharing with one other person. You will have to ask Cinder if you would be sharing with Mercury, her or Emerald. It is also important to sort out a bathroom rota in the mornings."
"As none of you have been to the Mistral combat schools, you may need to watch out for the traditional hazing rituals in the first few weeks. Neo, unless Cinder is happy for you to go full Miss Piggy, it might be a good idea to make sure you always use the facilities in the dorm or that at least two of you, Emerald and Cinder accompany each other to the communal facilities."
He carried on in a similar vein including describing the forms the hazing took until they reached the drop off point for Neo and Roman.
Mercury had then taken over the driving duties, and Cinder asked whether they had anything to report.
Mercury said, "Roman said Adam was dangerous and driven and that he was not a person who Roman would want to have with a grudge against him."
Emerald said, "It seems that Bear Faunus was not that popular with women. Quite a few came up to Neo and congratulated her. Roman was his normal smug self when he came out."
Mercury asked, "Do you think that fight was a set up?"
Cinder thought about it and replied "Adam either expected or had told the Faunus to give offence, expecting that Roman would have to grin and bear it. I suspect Roman told Neo to be ready to take offence on her own behalf and made it hard for the Bear Faunus to back down. After all, being told that a five-foot girl dressed in pastel colours carrying a parasol is a bodyguard is not a plausible threat. The skinning threat meant it was unlikely that an apology would be forthcoming. However, Roman will no doubt say that he hoped that it would defuse things by making people laugh."
Mercury said, "It may have been provisionally planned, but she was enjoying herself. Either Roman is a better actor than I thought he was, but he did seem concerned that she might carry out the skinning threat."
Cinder asked if Mercury had filmed the fight. He said yes although he had tried to be discrete about it, so may not have caught all the action. He stopped the truck and handed the scroll over to her. Cinder watched Neo's face and she did seem remarkably gleeful when she walked towards the concussed Faunus. It was slightly reminiscent of Tyrian. She asked Mercury to send the footage to her scroll.
Mercury had then volunteered some of Roman's earlier stories about life at his old alma mater and his advice to Neo. It had apparently included advice on dealing with touchy feely, drunk Mistral rich boys and the extent to which it was considered permissible to beat them up.
Mercury then asked "Emerald, do you know what he meant when he talked about going full Miss Piggy? It clearly meant something to Neo, but it rang no bells with me. Is it a TV show reference?"
Emerald replied that "It meant nothing to me either, but from its context it clearly suggests the use of disproportionate violence."
They stopped off at a cottage a mile out of town which belonged to a property company ultimately owned by Salem. Cinder unlocked the trap door and went down to the basement where a Seer was kept and reported to Salem. Salem thanked her for the report and said that there would be a conference call with Watts, Tyrian, Hazel and Lionheart the day after tomorrow to discuss the plans before moving on to the next stage. Salem repeated her offer to help train Cinder in the use of the powers she had just obtained.
Cinder then contacted Lionheart, described Neo, showed him a photograph and the clip of her beating up the Bear Faunus and asked a few pointed questions regarding the school uniform and dorm allocations. She also indicated that she expected that her team would be allowed to respond to sexual harassment, bullying and hazing forcefully.
Lionheart agreed that black tights would be an alternative to the knee high socks this year. He did ask that Cinder bring along a birth certificate for Neo as one of his deputies would be bound to demand it. He said that he would far prefer it if she and her team did not cause lasting damage to the other students – for one thing the worse bullies tended to belong to the most influential families in Mistral. He had confirmed that it was a tradition at Haven for a significant minority of the local students to bully outsiders at the start of the first year. He had tried to stop it, but too many members of staff thought it was character forming and ignored it. He would give thought to what Cinder and her team could do to shorten the acceptance process.
Cinder thought to herself that she was not certain she would be able to keep her own response proportionate, let alone Neo's. Emerald and Mercury would probably be fine at calibrating their response as their early lives had been tough enough that they had learned to swallow their resentments and wait for an opportunity to seek revenge.
He offered her a suite in the attic with two single rooms and one twin bedroom, but only had one bathroom. She said surely there was something better he could do for her, when she realized that Watts was with Lionheart.
He had drawled, "Leo, I think you have already indulged dear Cinder enough. If you offer her a better dorm, surely it would be perceived as showing favouritism to a team of nobodies. Indeed, I would expect that it would significantly increase the risk of sustained bullying. It would also draw attention to them at an early stage. I do not think this would suit our Queen. Cinder, I am afraid that you will have to learn to accept a level of discomfort and humility in the service of Salem."
He added "The young girl seems to show potential which I am sure will interest our Queen. Will you be introducing her in the same way as you did Emerald and Mercury?"
Cinder scowled at the end of the call. She would have preferred it if Hazel had been with Leo. Watts enjoyed playing on Leo's fears rather than calming him down and was competing with her for being Salem's MVP. He was also quite good at playing on Cinder's own insecurities, the girl was seven years younger than her and might be a fallback option for maiden collection.
In Haven, her fears were being justified. Watts was relaying to Leo stories of Cinder's fondness for the good life and suggesting that he would need to provide her with a maid, silk sheets and room service. While Leo knew that Cinder and Watts did not get on together and were rude to each other as a matter of principle, there was enough truth in the jibes to reinforce his horror at Cinder being in the academy as a notional student for the next half year.
Balancing his fear of Cinder and Salem and his fear of discovery by Ozpin was a spur to Leo's creativity in both imagining problems and coming up with solutions.
Leo was scared that Glynda or Ozpin would decide that something was wrong about the team when they arrived for the Vytal festival or that the other teams from Haven would comment on their oddity at the festival. He was happy that he could explain away Mercury and Emerald as being mustangs or tribal members who had aced the practical tests. They would also be left well alone by the rest of the student body after the first week or two as clearly being tough enough to look after themselves but having no social influence. Perhaps he would suggest that they hinted at gang connections from outside Mistral City.
While he would not go as far as Watts in remarking on Cinder's being a bit long in the tooth to be a student (and certainly would not dare think, let alone say, that perhaps she should be offered a role as matron), he would have been a lot happier passing her off as a graduate student. He suspected that she would need to be away from Haven sufficiently often for her non-attendance in classes to be noticeable. Another source of anxiety was that she would be expected to attend combat classes and he wondered how far she would hold back especially as she would be coming to terms with her new powers. Perhaps he should offer her a position as a teaching assistant or a junior professor as that could give her more freedom to travel around and he could justify sending her to the Vytal festival as a chaperone or perhaps a personal trainer.
He had nearly lost it totally when Cinder had sent him the photograph and description of Neo. There was no way he could pass her off as a mustang or as a tribal nomad. If she was as stylish a fighter as the clip suggested and Cinder claimed, then if she had been born in Mistral she would have been competing in the Mistral regional tournament for the last few years or at least the combat school events. While she would have fallen foul of the anti-Valkyrie height rule for the regional tournament, the sponsors would have worked around it with built up heels or even just a good old fashioned bribe to the doctors to say that she was just over the height limit. She had not been and so she would have to be passed off as home schooled and born in Vale. This would require a fake set of parents unless he went with the option that she had been orphaned in the last few months and this had resulted in her late application to the Academy.
Ok, he would have to go with a recently orphaned, mute, home schooled midget from Vale who had been admitted at the last minute and looked too young to be at Haven. That was before one even got to the multi coloured eyes and hair. He therefore expected that the latest set of entitled mean girls from the Mistral combat schools would decide that she would be their first victim. If she dealt with them in the way she had dealt with the Faunus that would risk escalating matters. It was one thing to fight off your bullies and gain respect that way, but it looked like she enjoyed humiliating them which was not something which people found it easy to forgive and forget. He would suggest that Emerald and Cinder walked round with her for the first week or so and make it clear that mess with my team, you mess with me that would prevent things going too wrong.
Perhaps it might warn people off if he made certain she was one of the first people in the combat ring when term started. That was probably true for Mercury and Emerald as well. If they were clearly Vytal festival contenders, they would cease to be regarded as deserving to be hazed. He would need to discuss with Cinder exactly how good they were and how good they should admit to being. While the TV rights for the Vytal section process brought in valuable revenue for the Academy, it might be best if they did not distinguish themselves too much. If they were clearly the best team in their year, let alone Haven as a whole, they would become persons of interest to the Mistral media and their back stories would be analysed obsessively. The danger was the girl had star quality and likely would become a fan favourite. He made a note to suggest that hair dye be applied before she arrived and coloured contact lenses obtained. He would also suggest that a more conventional weapon than a parasol be adopted and would insist that a drabber combat outfit be worn or even that she fight in the academy uniform
He groaned as another sleepless night seemed ahead of him. He flipped through the resumes of the students that had not already been promised that they would be on the team they wanted, hoping that he could find a plan B he could present to Cinder.
He tried to remember what it was that made him walk away from thirty years of dedication to the cause currently led by Ozpin. Fear meant that he could not return to the fold, but frankly he really hated Mistral and its leaders, and he had been ready to take the bait when offered. Ozpin had surely meant well when he had supported him as headmaster of Haven, but the rulers of Mistral had never taken him seriously. They had treated him with contempt because he was a Faunus and had interfered in his running of the Academy as much as they could. Hazel Rainart had offered him an opportunity to get back at one of the people he despised most in Mistral and had not appeared to be an agent of Salem. Once he had taken that step and a few more, the fact that he had been working for Salem was disclosed to him. Cinder and Tyrian between them had made it clear to him that unless he continued to cooperate the evidence would be released to the real rulers of Haven and to the other headmasters and if he betrayed Salem he need not bother making retirement plans. He had therefore plenty of incentive for telling himself that undermining the regime in Mistral as well as weakening the SDC and the military in Atlas were aims he had in common with Salem and the loss of one maiden, while regrettable, was not the end of the world.
Roman had been reasonably content with how the day had gone. At the very least, Cinder would ensure that the worse potential problems for Neo at Haven would be alleviated, at best she may be starting to look for a different plan. He had played a hunch that Cinder would be looking for assistance from the White Fang and had prepared his spiel accordingly. It helped that there was enough truth in the spiel for him to deliver it convincingly. Taurus had been tougher and more ruthless than he had expected, but clearly had talked himself into believing that he was going along with Cinder because it fitted in with his own plans rather than because he was scared of her. Roman had no illusions – his chances of survival were a lot better working with her than defying her.
He hoped that Mercury and Emerald had passed on his assessment of Adam to Cinder. If she felt she could control him without holding Neo as a hostage, that might make her more willing to reconsider taking Neo with her to Mistral.
He had enjoyed winding Cinder and her team up about student life at Haven. It was the second richest academy and certainly the one which was the most comfortable for its students. Most of the students were fine - his own team had been good people and the tensions within the team had never been worse than two people being attracted to the same person. However, generally in each year a quarter of the students were extremely unpleasant to outsiders and those they considered inferior including Faunus. He had not been exaggerating that much in describing the bullying and sense of entitlement of the worse of them. While most of them grew out of it, and even apologized to their victims by the end of the second year, it was not fun to deal with. It was of course possible that things had improved since then or that this year would be on the pleasanter side of the spectrum. He doubted that and thought that the unexpected absence of Pyrrha Nikos might exacerbate the bullying problem. He suspected many students would be disappointed that they could not be on the same team as her and would be even more willing than usual to lash out at their inferiors.
He wondered if he had hit a nerve when describing the worse behaviour of the female bullies in his year. The licking of the shoes and the toilet cleaning stories had caused a suggestion of flames in the eyes which suggested that anyone trying to bully Cinder would risk incineration. He still hoped that Cinder may decide that it would not suit her to become a student at Haven and that might allow Neo to stay in Vale.
He had also planted the seeds of doubt about how much of a loose cannon Neo was and that only he could restrain her. Some of that had not actually been intentional, the Bear Faunus had used some of the words most likely to press Neo's buttons and the second command to stop had been necessary. He had made certain that he praised her for how she took down the Faunus and that she had conveyed a sense of insanity perfectly.
He was expecting Cinder to require him to order Neo to restrain herself at Haven and was rehearsing how best to convey a sense of I will try but will not guarantee it will work if the provocation is too great. The fact that it seemed that Cinder had her own trigger points might make that an easier sell than he had feared. He had checked with Neo that she was happy with his proposed version of her backstory which while untrue in detail, was psychologically plausible.
He had passed on the message from the twins to Neo and she had scrolled them a message confirming that she would be there. It was odd to think that, apart from him, the twins were probably her best friends. They had all arrived in Vale together after his and Neo's last job in Mistral. They had been grateful to Neo and had kept in contact with her since then.
In some ways it was a pity that when they had committed crimes in Vale, Neo had used an illusion to hide her distinctive features. That meant that he could not claim that bringing her to the Vytal festival would bear a significant risk of her being recognized and suspicion thrown on the rest of her team.
He checked his scroll for messages. Junior had confirmed that he had passed on the questions to Little Miss and would let Roman know when there was a response.
As expected, Cinder had asked about the birth certificate. He decided to delay a reply until the morning. He could honestly say that neither of them had the real certificate, they could not easily obtain a copy of it and that they had never needed to produce a fake certificate while they had been in Vale so had not bothered obtaining one. Still there was plenty of time for Cinder to obtain a fake and she suspected that she could get a week's grace at Haven if needed.