RWBY: Book of Thieves
The Menace in the Machine – The Wrench
Getting across the small village was a lot more difficult for Weiss and Yang than it was for the red-and-black half of their team. For one thing, neither of them had their teammate's natural athleticism – Weiss hardly exercised anything except for her brain and Yang was unnaturally clumsy when it came to jumping rooftops, typically breaking everything under her foot and falling flat on the ground. So the white-and-yellow duo had resorted to sneaking through the streets and dark alleys around the patrolling minions. Weiss silently wished they had thought to do this mission at night instead of the middle of the day when the sun was shining its brightest past the storm generating airship overhead. And the fact they wore the brightest colors of the team didn't help in any way – seriously, Weiss needed to consider investing in darker clothing.
But with Yang's thieving skills and a whole lot of dumb luck, the pair silently crossed the village without much trouble. Though, there was one moment when Weiss accidentally kicked a trashcan, alerting a nearby patrolman who was walking their way to investigate. Yang had balled up her fist ready to punch the guard's lights out the moment he came around the corner, but luck was thankfully on their side when a stray cat just happened to scamper past. It raced out into the street as the guard watched it go, tilting his head curiously. Yang looked to still be considering whether or not to punch out the guard, but Weiss grabbed her bicep and shook her head quietly. The guard grunted and walked away a few seconds later, thinking nothing of it, and Weiss let out a relieved sigh.
"That was too close," Weiss muttered.
"I think you should have let me clock him," said Yang, pouting. "We would have had one less guard to deal with then."
"You'll get your chance to bash some skulls," Weiss assured her. "C'mon, the radio tower should be just down the street."
They circumvented the block through the back alleys where security was lowest to avoid another incident. They crouched low as they took cover behind a dumpster (which, unfortunately for Weiss, seemed to be loaded with what smelled like rotting fish and expired mayonnaise), peeking around the edge cautiously as their eyes fell on their target.
To many, it looked like an ordinary coffee shop that had been abandoned for a long time, which seemed to be a running theme with this town, Weiss mused. The visibly broken windows had been boarded up hastily that many of the planks were slanting slightly, the green-and-yellow awning had dozens of large holes like swiss cheese, the metal chairs and tables of the outdoor section were tipped over and rusted, and the logo on the front door was so faded that they couldn't make out the shop's name. But, of course, there were some things that stood out. Namely, the giant, glimmering radio tower planted on the café's roof, bright bulbs blinking rhythmically in active use, and the pair of brutish security thugs leaning on either side of the door, both looking extremely bored and carrying shotguns.
Weiss and Yang pulled back behind the dumpster; Weiss clamped her nose with her fingers to block out the smell.
"Yeah, that doesn't look suspicious as hell," Yang said sarcastically, gesturing to the guards. "It's totally normal to have guards packing heat in front of a shutdown coffee shop."
"At least we know we're in the right place," said Weiss nasally. "Next part is getting past the guards."
"I'll take care of it," said Yang, grinning madly as she whipped out her double sawed-off shotguns. "Ember and Celica need the exercise."
"Your delusion of referring to your guns as actual people aside," said Weiss with a blank star. "How about we do something that won't signal ever goon within a five-block radius."
"And what do you have in mind, genius?" Yang asked, stowing her guns begrudgingly.
Weiss tapped her chin, thinking for a moment, then into her pocket and pulled out her smartphone. The white-haired hacker tapped on several buttons and pulled up a lot of screens filled with numbers that Yang couldn't make heads or tails of.
"I thought you couldn't get a signal without Watts finding us," said Yang.
"I can't," Weiss admitted. "But I can still use the applications on my phone as long as I'm not connected to the local router. And as it just so happens, one of my applications is a short-range, wireless hacking program I developed with Aiden Pearce, one of my gray hat accomplices stationed in Chicago. If I do this right, I can remotely hack into the guard's cellphones and send them away." She held up her phone horizontally, the screen looking like it was in photo mode, but with two green squares blinking over the guard's pockets. "Just need to establish a connection…aaaaand…."
She tapped the screen and Yang's ears instantly caught the sound of two separate ringtones going off at the same time. The blonde brawler peeked around the dumpster as the guards whipped out their phones, staring at something that popped up in their screens. Yang didn't know what they were looking at, but one of the guards looked up at his partner and gestured to the side with his head. A moment later, both guards were heading down the street at a run.
"What'd you do?" Yang asked her partner curiously.
"I sent a message saying someone spotted the Rose Gang on the other side of town and need they backup," said Weiss with a proud smile as she pocketed her phone. "Now come on. It won't be long before they figure out the message is fake…. Or they won't, but I'd rather not take my chances."
They quickly crossed the street to the door. As to be expected, they found the door locked when they tried to pull it open. Seeing that there was no way of opening the door electronically, Weiss dropped down to one knee, pulled a couple of pins from her hair, and went to work on jiggering the keyhole.
"My lockpicking skills aren't really the best," she admitted. "But give me a couple of minutes, and I should be able to – " Her sentence was cut off when Yang suddenly slammed her boot into the door, flinging it open as the latch snapped, Weiss holding her pins up to nothing. "Or we could just do that."
"Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones," said Yang smugly.
"That philosophy suits you well," Weiss muttered under her breath.
The pair stepped inside and shut the door behind them, but it wouldn't shut all the way because Yang had broken the lock; Weiss only hoped that the guards were too stupid to notice anything.
The interior of the old café was uninterestingly normal. There was a counter on the far side of the room, a faded sign hanging crooked on the wall behind it, rotted wooden tables and chairs were toppled over, and, to Weiss's disgust, the walls were covered in a hideous quantity of mold; Weiss actually pulled out her personally embroidered handkerchief to cover her nose and mouth.
"Ugh, this is disgusting," Weiss grimaced.
"Then we better hurry up and find the way inside, Princess," said Yang nonchalantly.
They spread out and started looking over every inch of the abandoned coffee shop. Yang walked over to the counter, hopped over it, and looked underneath, expecting to find some sort of hidden lever or switch that would open a hidden door or something. Sadly, all she found was a pile of rotted fruit, a bunch of cups, and an old magazine for a Faunus edition of Playbunny; Yang looked to make sure Weiss wasn't looking before she pocketed it. The white-haired hacker, on the other hand, was making an effort to avoid touching everything. The sight of the mold and the rotten wood brought on the urge to vomit violently, and had to choke back the bile rising in her throat with great effort. But Weiss understood the urgency of their mission – and she really wanted to get back behind a computer where she belonged – so she started moving away the rotting furniture…using Myrtenaster to poke at them from a good distance away.
"Seriously, Weiss," said Yang, rolling her eyes as she bounded over the counter. "Stop being so prissy. We're never going to find the way inside the way you're doing it."
"Well, excuse me!" Weiss snapped. "I am not laying a finger on anything in this disgusting establishment! Just look at it – I mean, my god, I don't even know what half this stuff is!"
"You don't see me complaining," Yang remarked, holding up a mold-covered chain to emphasize her point.
"That's because you're an uncouth heathen!" said Weiss. "You grew up in the middle of the woods and slept on dirt. I, on the other hand, was raised like a normal human being."
"With a jewel-encrusted golden spoon in your mouth," Yang retorted savagely
"Listen here, you rude barbari – AAAAHHHHH!"
Yang spun around just in time to catch a flash of white hair before it vanished into the square hole that suddenly appeared in the floor. A thrill of panic ran down her spine; Yang practically smashed the moldy furniture out of her way and dropped to her knees at the edge of the hole, peering down inside of it. Unlike the rotting, wooden structure that surrounded them, the hole seemed to open up to a narrow tunnel made of polished steel with a series of rungs bolted to the wall leading down into the shadowy depths below. It appeared that Weiss had accidentally stepped over a trap door, and while Yang would normally have found this hilarious, she was more concerned about her partner's well-being.
"Weiss!" She shouted in a panic. "Weiss, are you okay?"
"…Yang, get down here, quick! I found it!" Weiss's voice carried from below.
Sighing in relief, Yang carefully lowered herself down into the hole, opting to use the ladder this time. She cautiously descended down the secret tunnel until her feet touched the linoleum floor at the bottom, turning around to a short hallway where she saw Weiss standing at the end with her back turned to her, apparently distracted by something in the next room. The blonde brawler crossed the corridor and walked up to her partner's shoulder, tilting her head back as she looked around the room with an impressed whistle.
The chamber was roughly as big as the coffee house upstairs, but was drastically cleaner and unnecessarily bright with its sterile white walls. It reminded Yang of the hospital room she stayed at as a child when she came down with the flu and Raven demanded the cowering doctor to cure her at knifepoint. The wall opposite of them was completely concealed by what must have been over fifty television screens, each one displaying crystal clear images of various parts of the town and the guards patrolling through the streets. They must be the town's security cameras, Yang thought. Below the wall of monitors was a console that stretched from one wall to the other decorated with hundred of bright and flashy buttons and a comfortable-looking leather chair resting next to it, currently empty.
Weiss made a sniffling noise and Yang looked at her with a raised brow as she wiped and imaginary tear from her eye.
"It's…beautiful…," said Weiss dreamily.
"Nerd," Yang muttered.
"A little appreciation wouldn't kill you," said Weiss, leering at her partner. "After all, how many times has that disgusting mop of hair you call a head been pulled out of the proverbial fire because this 'nerd' was intelligent enough to provide an adequate solution to the problem – "
"Yeah, yeah, skip the speech already," Yang waved her off; Weiss puffed out her cheeks and glared angrily. Yang gestured to the wall of screens and asked, "What's up with all the cameras. I thought this place was just supposed to have that router thing you were talking about."
"Obviously this is the brain of Watts's entire network," said Weiss, pivoting on her heel and walking up to the control console. "The wireless router, the communications array, the security system – he literally put all his eggs into one basket. Not exactly the smartest move on his part, but it works out better for us." She pulled out the chair and seated herself. "I had only made plans to hack his wireless network, but with this, I'll be able to monitor his entire operation without his notice. If only I hadn't thrown away my laptop…."
"You mean like this one?" said Yang, pointing to something on the far end of the console.
Weiss rolled the chair over to Yang and suddenly felt a newfound appreciation for her teammate. The blonde brute had found a laptop inserted into a specially designed slot on the console, which likely connected the computer to the security system. And it looked much more advanced than the simple computer that they had stolen from a Radio Hut and Weiss had to constantly modify to keep up with the ever-evolving electronic world; and it was ridiculously compact that Weiss could fit it in her purse. The only thing she could critique about it was drab brownish color scheme and the exaggerated cursive "W" splashed across the cover.
"Well, Watts clearly get a doctorate in good tastes," said Weiss," but that's something that can be settled for later. Now let's have a look see…." She flipped open the laptop, which immediately flickered on, and Weiss tapped a few keys while humming thoughtfully. "Well, good news and bad news. The good news is that I think I can access Watts's mainframe and download all the codes to the security around town, all of which we can take with us back to the hideout."
"And the bad news?" asked Yang.
"Watts is a genius and for good reason," said Weiss, frowning, as a blue screen popped up and she started inputting what seemed like random digits at hyperspeed. "His firewalls and anti-hacking programming are unlike anything I've ever seen before. Not even the computers in the Atlas military have these kinds of defensive barriers. Normal hacking techniques would be useless against this thing."
"But the great Snowpea is anything but normal, right?" said Yang, smirking.
"Naturally," said Weiss haughtily, tapping away with renewed determination. "Watts has issued a challenge and I am never one to back down. Just give me a few minutes and I'll be able to tell you his shoe size."
"Why would I want to know his shoe size?" asked Yang with a raised brow.
"I wasn't being literal, I was just being – ugh, you know what, forget it," Weiss groaned, shaking her head exasperatedly. "I'm going to need at least ten minutes before I can get in. Watch the entrance in case those guards decide to show up."
"Hey, what're you doing in here?!"
"And speak of the devil," Yang muttered sarcastically before she and Weiss spun around towards the door.
The two men that had been guarding the coffee house had returned, flanked by eight astonishingly similar-looking guards, making a total of ten burly men having to squeeze themselves through the narrow tunnel; all of them were carrying their shotguns, Yang noted.
"See, I told you there was something weird about that alert we got!" one of the guards declared.
"No, you didn't," his partner dismissed. "You kept going on about how they make curly fries curly."
"It's just not natural!"
"Wow, they picked up on our trail fast," Yang complimented.
"It probably didn't help that you pretty much wrecked the door when we came in," said Weiss, giving her partner a pointed glare. "They likely saw that the latch was broke and called in reinforcement. Ugh, I knew I should have gone solo for the mission."
"Relax, princess," said Yang dismissively. "I can handle these losers – you just get the…thing that we need."
Weiss rolled her eyes, sorely tempted to remind her teammates why they had gone to all this trouble, but thought better of it and turned back around in her seat. Yang, meanwhile, ran her hand through her long mane of golden hair, flashing the guards with a seductive gaze, then crossed the room toward them, purposely swaying her hips for added effect. The guards seemed befuddled, glancing at one another as if expecting the other to answer some unasked question. Yang stepped up to the guard leading the pack, smiling in a mysterious way, tracing a single digit down his chest –
"Uh, can I help you with something?" the guard questioned bluntly.
You could practically hear the record screeching in the background. Yang blinked and looked up at the guard, who was giving her an unusual expression like he thought blonde brawler was some foreign creature; she had never seen anyone look at her that way before. Coughing awkwardly, Yang pressed on, regaining her seductive gaze and pearly smile.
"Aw, we are so, so sorry," Yang practically purred; a trick she perfected on Blake (until she ruined it with a cat pun). "We didn't mean to break into your super-secret hidey hole; we're just a couple of curious kittens."
"You kicked in the door, broke into private property, and now your friend is hacking our boss's stuff," the leading guard recounted. He lifted the barrel of the shotgun squarely at Yang's face, who amazingly did not flinch or back away. "That goes way beyond curiously. You're stealing."
"All right, all right, you caught us," said Yang, raising her hands in mock surrender. "We've been very bad girls. But we've learned our lesson." She gave him a flirty wink, folding her arms under her breasts, intentionally raising them. "Come on, let's kiss and make up."
It was the oldest trick in Yang's arsenal – use her sex appeal to lower the enemy's defenses, draw them in, and then send them flying across the room with a killer right hook to the face. She had been using this trick ever since she was fifteen when she trashed Hei "Junior" Xiong's club as a distraction while her fellow tribesmen looted their safe without notice; Raven had never been prouder of her daughter. But as Yang puckered her lips for the pretend kiss that would lure him in, the guard stunned her with a hand to the face instead. Dumbstruck, Yang looked up at the guard, who was giving her a disgusted look – wow, no one had ever looked at her like that before.
"Do we look like a bunch of American trash who are so easily distracted by winks and big bosoms?" the guard snorted contemptuously. "We're proud Englishmen. We only prefer the finer things in life, and that includes our women."
"Although, your friend is rather appealing," one of the other guards said, gesturing to Weiss. "Now there's a real woman. Just the right amount of sass and class."
He other guards nodded and mumbled in agreement, some of them even looking at the white-haired hacker with half-lidded eyes and wistful sighs. Weiss, who could hear everything, smirking with a sense of victory as she redoubled her efforts on the laptop. Yang looked like she had been slapped in the face with a trout, jaw dropped and eyes wide as she looked between her partner and the guards who were admiring her. Yang slapped herself in the face to wake herself up, sputtering.
"W-w-wait, wait, wait, wait!" she yelped hysterically. "You're telling me…you think she" she gestured to Weiss "is more attractive than me?" she pointed to herself.
"Oh, without a doubt," said the leading guard automatically; his friends murmured and nodded their heads in agreement.
"HA!" Weiss shouted over her shoulder triumphantly.
Yang paused for a moment, taking a deep breath through her nose, letting it out through her mouth, turning back to the guards with an apathetic stare.
"All right…," said Yang, cracking her knuckles in a threatening manner, "now I'm going to hit you twice as hard."
At that last comment, the guards quickly took aim with their shotguns, but Yang had already made the first move. She lunged for the leading guard, grabbing him by the front of his shirt, then pulled him around in a tight circle before tossing him flat into another guard. She noticed another pointing his rifle at her head, knocked the barrel away with a backhanded slap, then flipped forward and delivered a powerful dropkick on his head. Yang immediately launched herself at the next guard, sending him flying across the room with a devastating punch to the gun, then moved into a spinning heel kick at the next guard's jaw, tossing him to the floor. She back fisted a guard coming up on her rear, disorienting him, shot a quick jab to the guard in front of her, then proceeded to kick them both to the ground.
As he made her way through the guards, the ones she had already knocked down were starting to get back up, dazed and bruised but otherwise still in fighting shape. Good, Yang thought, she wasn't done pounding on their tasteless losers.
But as she repeatedly slammed her fists into one of the guard's chest, she didn't notice one of them coming up behind her with their shotgun until she heard the rifle cock. Yang spun around on her heel, eyes wide as she stared down the barrel of the shotgun only a foot away from her face, the guard's finger tugging around the trigger in slow motion. Her heart pounding erratically against her ribcage, adrenaline pumping wildly in her veins, Yang didn't even realize she had whipped out one of her sawed-off shotguns until she pulled the trigger at the guard's face at pointblank range.
A stunned silence filled the chamber; the guards looked thunderstruck as one of their own hit the floor, going limp. It was a truly stunning to witness one of the thieves who considered themselves heroic to commit such a heinous act. But there she was, standing over the body of the guard splattered in patches of red…and orange…and yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet? Everyone's horrorstruck expressions turned to befuddlement. They looked around at yang, who had pulled out of the shotgun shells from her weapon, rattling the contents inside.
"Paint gun pellets," said Yang matter-of-factly, replacing the shell inside her gun. "I'm not a monster."
The guards let out simultaneous sighs of relief…and then charged at Yang with renewed vigor.
As this was all going on, Weiss was humming Beethoven's Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor under her breath to drown out the noise of Yang wailing on the poor, hopeless guards who thought they stood a chance. She had been making a decent amount of progress in hacking into Watts's computer, but the processor was taking an unrealistically long time for something that was supposed to be a state-of-the-art piece of technology. It was almost like the mission plot of a video game. Having one of the guards slump disoriented on the console next to her did only distracted her further.
"Do you mind?" said Weiss, before punching him in the jaw and knocking him out. "A little peace and quiet isn't too much to ask for."
Back in the fight, Yang shoots one of the guards in the chest, throwing him back, while kicking another that was coming up behind her, before spinning around and launching him into the air with an uppercut. She quickly ducks underneath another guard's shotgun before dropping him to the ground with a sweeping kick. The blonde brawler immediately jumps to her feet, running up to another approaching guard, then uses him as a springboard to launch herself at another guard on the side, knocking him out with a solid right hook to the face. The guard she kicked off of aimed his shotgun at the back of Yang's head, but Yang sharply turned and took a shot at his knee, dropping him into a kneeling stance, before stomped the bootheel in his face, effectively knocking him out.
Yang looked over her shoulder and spotted two guards coming her way, both having discarded their rifles when they realized how futile it was. Big mistake, Yang thought smugly.
The blonde martial artist crossed the chamber and shouldered one of the guards in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, then knocked him out with a spinning kick to the head. She then turned to his partner, who came swing at her with brass knuckles, but Yang effortlessly knocked the hit with her forearm while she pressed the barrel of her shotgun under the guard's chin. The force of the blast lifted the burly guard off the ground, which opened up an opportunity for Yang to slam her elbow into his stomach, followed immediately by a sharp kick that sent him flailing to the wall on the other side of the room.
One of the few guards left standing charged at her directly swing his shotgun around like a blunt instrument. Yang rolled her eyes amusingly. She knocked away his shotgun with her own weapon, pulled out its twin from its holster, and unloaded half-a-dozen shots on the guard's chest, painting him in every color of the rainbow. Yang didn't wait to see if the guard was able to stand or not before she lifted him into the air with an uppercut followed shortly by a strong punch to the abdomen that threw the guard to the wall.
Meanwhile, made a delightful humming noise as she tapped a few more keystrokes on the laptop.
"Just a few more digits aaaaand – we're in!" Weiss declared, tapping the last key with a flourish. The screen popped open to several windows at once, displaying several documents and schematics that were too complicated for an average person to understand. Grinning, Weiss shouted over her shoulder, "Yang, I got access to the network!"
"Cool!" Yang replied as she causally kneed a guard in the groin before shooting him in the face. "That means don't have to worry about Dr. Frankenstein spying on us, right?"
"How do you even compared the two – you know what? Never mind," Weiss shook her head. "It's much more than that. We can intercept Watts's calls, access his personal files, even use his own security network to or advantage. Speaking of which…,"
As Weiss's eyes roamed the television screens above, they fell on a certain camera that had a view of Dr. Watts walking down the street with his armored guards, speaking with, to Weiss's surprise, Winter and some boy she didn't know. And in the topmost corner of the screen, barely out of the camera's range of vision, Weiss spotted a flash of red running along the rooftops.
"I've got eyes on Ruby!" Weiss announced. "She's following closely behind Watts. And guess who's joining the party – my sister."
"Officer Ice Queen?" Yang said in disbelief, briefly pausing from punch one of the guards in the face. "She's here, too. That's just perfect."
"I'll try to establish contact with Ruby," said Weiss, tapping furiously along the keyboard. "Intercepting transmission frequency…establishing connection…inputting security code…checking audio…and…that should do it."
After inputting the last keystroke, the laptop came to life with a lot of noise that sounded like rustling clothing and heavy footfalls on concrete – this was no doubt Ruby running across the rooftops trying to keep pace with Watts and Winter. Weiss briefed a glance up at the security feed watching her sister along with the mad doctor, but Ruby was keeping out of sight, only betraying brief glimpses of red in the corners. She knew Ruby was too good to get caught; she had been the one to map the cameras in town in the first place. Over the laptop speakers, she heard Ruby's footsteps come to a grinding halt and paused in silence. Because of the quiet, the audio was able to pick up audio of a few people talking, though they sounded far away and made it difficult to hear:
"Sooo…how did you figure out that Ruby Rose is here?" one voice, likely the young boy with Winter, asked candidly. "Most people don't know they're around until they've already been robbed."
"Well, I am certainly not 'most people'," an older voice, likely Dr. Watts, sniffed condescendingly. "If you must know, I caught their little hacker trying to sneak their way into my personal data system. Now, a man of my brilliance easily caught on to their schemes right away, and attempted to return the favor by hacking back into their system. Unfortunately, they caught wind of it and promptly destroyed their computer before I could properly track it. A shame, really, but it just goes to show the difference in our level of skill and intellect."
"Is that son of a bitch actually gloating? It wasn't even that good." Weiss growled irritably.
Weiss was nearly thrown out of her chair when Ruby suddenly screamed over the speakers. For a moment, she thought the Rose Thief might have been attacked and tried searching for her on the security monitors. But when she didn't see anything out of the ordinary and went back to her laptop, she realized her mistake – she had unknowingly turned the microphone on.
"Weiss?" Ruby hissed very loudly in surprise. "Weiss, what are you doing? I thought this line wasn't secure."
"It is now," Weiss said smugly. "I've successfully integrated myself into Watts's network, and even found myself a new laptop in the process – talk about a win-win. Now we can communicate without interference and even poke around some places that the doctor wouldn't want us to. Of course, we ran into a little trouble along the way."
The moment the words left her lips, a guard smashed into the panel next to her, resulting in a frightened screech from the white-haired hacker. Weiss spun around in her chair and glowered at Yang, who has clutching a guard's crotch in an iron grip; the guard was squeaking in a high-pitched voice, begging for mercy.
"Will you stop throwing henchmen into the computer, Xiao-Long!" Weiss snapped.
"My bad!" Yang apologized, then punched out the guard.
"Speaking of sisters, do you know who's on the island right now?" said Ruby.
"I can see her through the street cameras," said Weiss, looking up at one of the security monitors focused on Winter and Watts. "This operation has become exceedingly more difficult…but we also may be able to turn this into an advantage against Watts if we play our cards right…."
The White Rose pair paused in their own talk when Winter struck up conversation, specifically about Weiss. The white-haired hacker felt a sense of pride as she recounted the many accomplishments that brought down several corrupt organizations as the legendary Snowpea in her head. Embezzling, false claims, inside trading, violation of environmental laws, corporate fraud, antitrust violations, and bribery were all crimes that she had exposed back in the day. But her crowning achievement was without a doubt the downfall of the Schnee company when she revealed that the CEO was committing a large number of labor and safety violations against Faunus workers. The outcry had been too great for the German government to ignore and the Schnee Company had gone bankrupt in a handful of weeks, despite her father's best attempts to sweep the whole thing under the rug.
And based on the way Winter responded to Watts over the radio, it didn't sound she was too upset about it in the least, much to Weiss's silent jubilation.
"I think that's about enough info we're gonna get out of this recon," Ruby muttered over comms. "Weiss got her computer set up and we got a hold of a uniform from Watts's personal guard."
"That'll make it easier to move around, at least," said Weiss.
"We still have one problem," Blake suddenly joined the conversation, speaking in a low, soft tone. "How am I going to get back to the hideout? I can't run off without these three knowing what's up. I'll be caught right away."
"We need some kind of distraction to get Watts to send his guards away," said Ruby.
"I'm already on it," said Weiss smugly. She was practically leaning over the keyboard, fingers flying furiously, muttering to herself out loud. "Accessing infostructure…searching for the most heavily guarded area…hmm, Laboratory 6 looks promising…. Rerouting system mainframe…activating alarms…aaaaand – voila!"
Yang had finished knocking out the last of the guards with a flying kick to the face when a shrill alarm screeched around the room; she jumped with a frightened yelp, accidentally discharging a couple of shots from her guns that nearly took out Weiss's head. The television monitors were flashing glowing red "WARNING!" signs across their screens. Yang rushed over to Weiss's side, who was calmly staring up at the monitors as she watched the heated exchange between Winter and Watts; the latter was intensely trying to keep the former from following the sound of the alarm.
"Who – where – how - what happened?" Yang asked in a rapid-fire voice.
"Relax, I just set off a false alarm to give Blake an escape route," said Weiss, tilting her head up at the screen. Watts had just gestured his personal guard to leave and watched them disappear from the camera's range of vision, Blake unknowingly among them. Weiss went back to the computer, tapping away quickly. "Just let me make a few more downloads to make sure Watts can't backtrack us and then we can leave."
"Nice work, Weiss," Blake chirped over the comms. "I'll break off from the rest of these goons as soon as I'm in the clear."
"That's good, but did you notice the way Watts reacted when the alarm went off," said Ruby. "He looked really bent out of shape when he thought this…'laboratory 6' was being broken into. He wouldn't even let Winter check it out, even though he thought it would be us."
"Watts is definitely hiding something in that lab," said Weiss. "Something he doesn't want the police finding out about. We'll have to investigate later. Everyone should head back to the hideout so we can compare notes."
Ruby and Blake's communicators clicked off and both were likely heading back to the hideout at this moment. After a few more minutes of type, Weiss finally stood up, closed the laptop, and stowed it away in her messenger bag.
"We're all set," Weiss told Yang. "Let's head back to the others…. We should probably barricade the door on the way out, just to make sure that one of the guards gets the chance to warn Watts about what we did here," she quickly suggested, looking around at the tangle of unconscious guards that Yang had thoroughly beaten. "And take their phones, while we're at it."
"Don't you think someone is going to come check up on their eventually?" asked Yang, thought nonetheless following orders and retrieve the guard's phones from their pockets.
"I have a few ideas spinning around in my head," Weiss informed her. "If we do this right, we'll have the Watts pages of the Book of Thieves before midnight."
Yang didn't ask what her teammate what her ideas were – she had long since learned to trust Weiss's plans. So, after removing all of their phones and anything that could help them make contact with the other guards, Weiss and Yang climbed back up the ladder, closed the trapdoor, which blended perfect with the rest of the withered floorboards, and pushed several rotten tables and chairs on top to bar it off. The white-and-yellow pair poked their heads cautiously out the door, looking up and down the street, and then dashed quickly into the shadows of the alleyways.
To those wondering, yes, I did mention Aiden Pearce from Watchdogs as a friend of Weiss's – it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. Who knows, maybe someday, I might actually give him a cameo appearance with Weiss in the future.
Much like last time, I am currently putting up a poll on my account page the same time that this chapter goes up. There will be three this time, each with a completely different type of job. The mission with the most votes will be first and then the job with the second most after.