[X] Someone seeking to talk with Three, but not fight them. A... Friend? Of some sort?
Some sort of radio reported, and Pyrrha managed to comprehend a voice talking about someone. Somebody... Looking for Three? But not a bad thing?
In front of Pyrrha, Three's back straightened, and her movements became more...
Fluid. Excited. Something like that.
She turned to Pyrrha, as she pulled a needle out of the draws next to her, and jammed it into the red-haired girls arm.
"That should counteract the painkiller faster." Three noted. "Make you aware of what's happening more. The initial surgery has been a success and I want to move you to the other lab before I play with your brain. But for now..."
Three paused, turning back to Pyrrha.
"On the other hand, I don't want you making me look bad..."
Her hand went back into the drawer, dropping the needle and pulling out a scalpel. She took another step towards Pyrrha, and her arm suddenly blurred towards her throat.
Pyrrha's eyes went wide, and a sudden fear for her life shot through the haze of confusion, bolstered by the shot Three had delivered. Her Semblance went into action, pushing against the scalpel with magnetic force to push it out of Three's hands. Pyrrha watched it fly into the distance, before she heard a click and suddenly pain
She screamed, her hands rushing on instinct as her head jerked back. She felt two arms move forward, and one clashed against a restraint while the other reached and touched nothing, and the pain in Pyrrha's eye intensified
It hurt. It hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt it...
She... The vision in her right eye was gone, she couldn't see anything out of it, Three was looking vaguely annoyed in front of her as she reached above Pyrrha's head and she could feel something dripping down her eye and and
Pyrrha felt something, some sort of metal machine, clamp down over the right side of her face, and after a moment, she couldn't feel anything coming from it.
"How bothersome." Three sighed. "I have bits of eye all over my dress now. And I was hoping to look my best, too.
Her eye, her eye, she'd forgotten in her panic and confusion and the machine had read her Semblance and her eye it-
Before she could realise what was happening, Pyrrha felt a pinch at her throat, and tried to look down. The machine clamped over the right side of her head held her in place, and after a moment, Three pulled a scalpel out of Pyrrha's neck, before putting a hand over the cut.
"And... " Three hummed a little song. "There."
Three pulled her hand away, and though Pyrrha could feel a drop of blood down her neck, she couldn't feel the open wound anymore.
She opened her mouth, to ask why. Why Three was doing this, why she had just cut Pyrrha's throat to heal it, why she was here, why any of this was happening. But she couldn't bring herself to speak.
No matter how hard she tried, no words would come out.
"It's a makeshift solution." Three said to herself. "Her Aura might heal the scar and displace the fragment left behind. I'll have to operate to remove her vocal cords properly later, but for now, she should be quiet."
A tear rolled down the left side of Pyrrha's face, as she silently sobbed to herself.
Damn it, damn it. She couldn't do anything. Three had gone all this to her so casually, and she couldn't do anything to fight back...
Three looked at Pyrrha for a moment in contemplation.
"No, no." She muttered to herself. "'Cute' is supposed to be a happy thing. Tears are too easily associated with sadness, melancholy. Joy sometimes, but your expression isn't suited for that. Tearing out your other eye would be too messy. Perhaps I should remove your tear ducts when I operate to repair the damage on the other eye. It'd be..."
Three trailed off, yawning slightly, before wiping a splash of blood off of her face, and looked over at the door.
"She's here." She noted to herself, as the doors swung open. The light blinded Pyrrha for a moment, as a silhouette stepped into view. Then the doors shut and the light faded, revealing the newcoming.
She looked a lot like Three, Pyrrha noted. In the way her face was constructed, at least. Her hair was whiter, her clothes matching it, and her eyes a different colour, but the face looked so similar. Right down to the marking on her forehead, for the number one.
"Sister." The girl in white asked.
"One." Three breathed, and the girl in one stepped forward.
"I've been looking for you for a while." One continued. "And the others. I found Four not long ago, and a my contacts have passed on that Two is in Vale."
"I've missed you." Three teared up, something someone would expect to see in the heartwarming resolution to a movie or something. Except with more torture happening just out of focus.
One looked back at Pyrrha, and sighed.
"I see that you've kept yourself busy." One noted. Three froze.
"...I-"
"Don't." One interrupted, looking at Pyrrha. "Has anyone been able to link you to this?"
"...Most have been broken to my will." Three admitted. "But there was an escapee who was getting away. A girl with blonde hair who saw me. My people haven't reported that they've found her yet, or that she's gotten away-"
One turned away, pointed an arm towards the back of the truck, and sang. For a moment, she held a note, and as the note died, there was the sound of a great detonation.
Three looked at One for a moment, awestruck. "You-"
"I saw the explosives when I was coming to find you." One dismissed. "Anyone inside the building will be dead by now. If this girl is outside of it, my people will track her down and kill her soon enough. Nobody saw me, and I was last seen in Atlas a few days ago, so nobody has any ideas I'm here."
Pyrrha tried to make a sound. She wasn't sure what sound she wanted to make, only that she wanted to make one. Was it a scream? A whimper? A curse? It was something, but she wasn't able to manage it.
After all this, Mordred was going to be killed anyway?
Was it all for nothing, then?
"I've prepared orders for an airship to arrive at a destination near here in a few days." One continued. "I flew ahead to see you, and I'm glad I did now. I found your Disciple, too."
"You found Octa?" Three asked.
One made a brief disgusted face at the name.
"...I found him." She repeated, not saying his name. "He'll be on the airship that arrives soon. For now..."
Three spoke up as One trailed off. "I have another location nearby. I was hoping to finish preparing my new doll there. It shouldn't take long."
One looked back, at Pyrrha chained up on the wall.
"This will be troublesome if people realise who she is." One pointed out. "It'd be smarter to just kill her and leave her in the rubble."
Pyrrha closed her eye, feeling the tears fall freely from it.
"But I want to keep her." Three objected. "I've already put the mechanical heart in her. It would be expensive to lose it."
One frowned. "Mechanical- In that case, it would be for the best you did. Leaving evidence like that behind would just raise questions."
Three stepped forward, and hugged her sister.
"Thank you." Three said, sounding almost happy as she squeezed her sister. "I... Thank you."
One briefly played with Three's hair, which had grown to halfway down her back in the time since Pyrrha had last paid attention to it.
"It's growing faster." One noted. "Your trait has been growing more, then?"
Three paused, then suddenly backed away.
"I forgot." She spoke up, though quieter than before. "Your growing trait. Your senses grow more sensitive over time. I hope I didn't cause you any pain there, One."
"Nothing I can't manage." One replied. "People who aren't aware of it meet with me often, I have to be used to dealing with it."
Pyrrha tried to struggle at her restraints for a moment, one arm flailing wildly against it while the other-
...Oh. Phantom limb syndrome. She still expected the arm to be there, on some level, so she could feel it move to a degree, even though.
Her sobbing intensified, for a moment.
What was everyone going to think after this? The managers of the tournament had never really cared about her too much, but they were still fond of her. Would they feel guilty over losing her? The people she had fought, some of them had given the token niceties. How many of them would regret not knowing what happened to her?
What would her mother feel when she found out?
...Everyone had always expected so much of her, and now she was going to be carted away, and she'd never see them again.
Some great Huntress she turned out to be.
Pyrrha sobbed silently a bit more, and for a time, she couldn't bring herself to care anymore. She was powerless here. She couldn't do anything. Trying had just gotten her...
Three turned to look at her after a time, Pyrrha vaguely recognised. She also vaguely recognised a needle poking into her arm. But after that, everything went black.
There was silence for a moment, as the old man and young woman looked at the paper they were writing on.
"...You seem upset." The old man noted.
The girl nodded. "...I am, I suppose."
"I understand." The older man sighed. "It's... Hard. Not to interfere, when you think you can change something for the better."
"How do you handle it?" The girl asked. "You've been doing this for so long, you have to have a way of handling it."
The old man took a moment to think about it.
"You could have interfered." He noted. "It would have been easy. A potential branch was there, if you intervened. But what would that have meant?"
"I could have saved Pyrrha?" The girl asked. "I could have stopped Three?"
The old man shook his head.
"I'm afraid actually killing an Intoner is beyond us." He noted. "Even both of us combined. But perhaps you could have escaped with Pyrrha, right under Three's nose. What would that have led to?"
"...Three would see me." The young woman noted. "And know that there's someone acting against her, and able to watch her closely enough."
"And then we have One." The old man continued for her. "Who is paranoid enough that any such action would have led to her dismantling the structure of Mistral looking for the one responsible. Our allies could be found out and taken care out, people would likely die or be broken... All to save one girl."
"...I still don't like it." The girl moped.
"That, I can't help you with." The old man nodded. "There's only two things you can focus on. First, consider the consequences. I've made enough mistakes in my life by jumping at the first chance, and we both know what that led to in the past."
His gaze turned to the wall for a moment, as he relived the memory. The girl left him to his thoughts for a minute, before drawing his attention again.
"...And the second thing?" She asked.
"We can think of the future." The man said. "And how we can change things so soon. It won't be long before I'll be able to clean up my mistakes, and if you view this as one, consider the pieces as they stand."
The girl sat, deep in thought for a moment.
"People are going to notice." She mused. "And even if I haven't been to Mistral myself, considering who her father is, I would assume that one of your friends has taken Mordred out of One's reach?"
The old man nodded.
"In which case, she may suspect what happened to Pyrrha." The girl continued. "And if she does, her teammates will know before long. Once One makes her move, the location of the Intoners will be common knowledge. Mordred seems rebellious enough to respond to Three's presence the moment she knows about it, and even if our people won't make a move..."
She looked over to the side, where several symbols were attached to a wall as posters. The White Fang crest, a purple emblem resembling a circle with a vertical eye in the middle, and an ominous black sigil.
There was no need to talk about what they represented.
"...Do you really think she's going to make a move soon?" The girl asked.
"I find it likely." The man responded. "Which would mean that there's enough blatant force uniting against the Intoners soon enough that they could justifiably think that another mysterious attacker belonged to one of those factions."
The girl looked up at him.
"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" She asked.
The old man smiled. "Let's follow Miss Xiao Long's path for now. Even if she's not in the thick of things in the next few months, keeping tabs on her progression would be necessary to properly understand what is happening with her."
The girl nodded, picking up the recent recordings and putting them in a folder in the corner. The old man looked over her shoulder as she did so, and picked it up, moving it under some other folders.
"What are you doing?" She asked.
"You're filing it after Miss Xiao Long met One." The old man noted. "This happened before then."
"But if you file it like that, it doesn't make sense." She objected. "You go from Yang looking for Ruby to something completely unrelated."
"It'll be more difficult to find these records if they're out of order." The man pointed out.
The woman took a moment to consider it. "...I can manage."
"If you say so." The man nodded, putting everything back.
The girl nodded to herself, and opened up another, clear file, to begin recording the next steps in Yang's journey.
Ugh, there's so much nothing... Skip ahead, skip ahead...
Lets do it like this. A lot of time is going to pass, and there's some thing s Yang is going to do no matter what. Overtrain herself to compensate for nearly dying against Dito, watch the news, go to school, interact with Ruby. In the month long period the next record should cover, what else does she do?
[X] Hang out with Two, Cent and the orphans a lot. Two kept inviting her over and the orphans seemed to enjoy her visits.
[X] Trained the magic thingy with Qrow. He was rarely around, but walked her through the next step when he was.
[X] Miltia had been upset last Yang saw her, and the yellow haired girl thought she should talk to Miltia about it.