Hi guys! I'm sorry it took so long to update but I just got back to university and I'm still trying to work out a schedule for my free time so I can update more regularly. I'm also still on the hunt for an editor to read through these things before I post them. But never fear, I will have one before I post the next chapter, so here's hoping for improved quality! Anywho... On to the story!
Weiss looked at her watch for the tenth time in the last two minutes. 3:10 where are they? She had been sitting at this poor excuse for a café for the last half hour, waiting for her contact to show up, sipping on tea that hardly deserved to be called such. Is this swill what regular people normally drink? Sighing, she reclined slightly on her seat and took another look at her watch. Deciding that she had wasted enough time, she stood to leave and was immediately barrelled to the ground by a red blur.
"Oh my gosh! I am so sorry! I didn't mean to run into you, I was just in such a hurry and I wasn't looking where I was going. Oh, I'm in so much trouble!"
Weiss opened her eyes and found she was looking into the two most intriguing pools of silver, never before had she seen eyes of that colour. In them she saw experience that should have far surpassed the youthful innocence of the face surrounding those eyes. She realised how close those eyes were to her own and fought down a blush before realising she was on the ground with a strange girl on top of her, and she was still talking.
"Get off me, you dunce!" Weiss exclaimed, cutting the other girl off.
"Oh, right. Sorry. Let me just-" The strange girl struggled to get off of her before finally getting to her feet and sprinting to the back room faster than Weiss thought humanly possible.
Weiss grunted as she stood back up and was about to leave when she noticed a piece of paper sitting on her table that wasn't there before. She picked it up and gave it a quick onceover.
Meet me at the back entrance.
She looked around for whoever could have put the note there, but found that the only other people in the café were a group of teenagers sitting in a booth on the other end of the café. That only left-no, it couldn't have been. Crunching up the note she left the dingy little café, walked around the little building and found herself in a back alley that smelled suspiciously of fish, looking at a little shed attached to the back of the coffee shop. She walked the couple steps to the rickety door at the front of the shed and raised her hand to get knock, but before she got the chance the door opened and she was ushered in. Once again she found herself lost in those twin seas of silver.
"Hi there! I'm your partner, and I'll be heading this job. You can call me Red!"
Wait, what? She looked the girl over carefully, a black pair of jeans hugged her legs in a way that showed off her curves yet remained modest. They complemented the ratty red hoodie she wore that despite being at least two sizes too big she still managed to pull off to retain a look of childlike innocence. This was the professional criminal she hired? She couldn't be older than seventeen! This had to be some trick, there was no way she was going to work with a girl who was at least two years younger than her.
"No."
Red stopped her rambling and looked at Weiss incredulously. "Sorry, what did you say?"
"I said no. There's no way I'm going to let a child run a job that can get me thrown in jail for life, or worse. Where are the other members of the team?"
Red flushed and looked at the ground before mumbling, "They won't be here for a few weeks so they told me that I was taking point and to meet you so we could get prep work done."
"Well I'm going to make to and sort this whole mess out myself." She reached into her purse to grab her phone and was met with nothing. "Great, I must have left it in that sewer people mistake for a café." She turned to open the door and go back to the café.
"Wait!" Weiss froze and turned to look at Red who was still standing in the same place. "You're phone's on the desk."
She turned back and moved to the desk sitting by the far wall of the shed. Now that she was actually observing her surroundings she realised that what they were standing in was less of a shed and more of a garage that was connected to the café through the back. All around her screens buzzed as they displayed everything from stock prices to every news channel she could think of in more languages than she cared to know. In the middle of the giant room was a table with a laptop, different tools and parts of machines, and an assortment of strange looking blueprints.
She reached the desk and found her phone sitting in a pile of identical phones, plugged in to one of the many computers. She turned it on and was met with a message telling her that an installation was complete. She read this and turned to glare at Red. "What did you do to my phone!?" she screeched. Her phone was her life, she kept all her plans on it, including the ones that were a little less than legal.
"N-N-Nothing! I swear!" Red looked about ready either faint or flee to another country.
"Then why does it say that something has finished installing on it?"
"I-It's just so you don't get caught."
Weiss took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. "Never mind. I'm going to call Ozpin right now and sort out this mess." She unlocked her phone and started typing in the number to contact her associate when she read received a message from the man himself.
Red is leading the job. This is non-negotiable.
Weiss looked between her phone and Red in disbelief. The hooded girl merely snickered before saying, "He keeps a live feed going whenever I meet with a new client. Mr. Ozpin and my uncle can hear everything in here."
"Your uncle?" Weiss asked, Red simply nodded. "Well, that explains it." She said irritably.
"Explains what?" The younger girl asked.
"Why you're leading this job."
"Still not following."
"Instead of paying for a professional your uncle decided to send a child to do a job that is costing me more than you can imagine."
"Hey! I'm plenty good!" Red exclaimed indignantly.
"Oh please, you can't be older than-what? Fifteen? Sixteen? I'm not about to risk my life babysittin-" Weiss looked down to read the message that had interrupted her tirade:
Red is best and only option. Take it or leave it.
Weiss gaped at the phone. This-this girl-was her best option? How could that be? With the amount of money involved she was sure she was going to meet some thirty-something women who overflowed with elegance and confidence. Instead she got this girl in her late teens in her ratty yet admittedly, adorable, ensemble. With the oversized hoodie that still seemed to hug all the right places despite its bagginess, and those jeans that hugged her legs so well, leaving little to the imagination-
"Eighteen."
Red's small voice brought Weiss back to the present, pulling her thoughts away from a direction that she knew her father wouldn't tolerate. The heiress looked back up and was met with twin pools of silver that glowed with agitation. Lost in those pools Weiss was sure she'd replied with something clever along the lines of: "Huh?"
Those spellbinding silvers seemed to glow brighter at that. "I said I'm eighteen. And one of the best conwomen you will ever meet. Now how about instead of complaining about it Ms. Moneybags, we get down to business and you tell me what my job is."
Weiss felt her stomach drop. How did this girl know she was rich? She had purposefully worn the cheapest clothes she could find and had even taken a taxi here, instead of using her personal driver, Geoffrey. What else could this girl know about her? While Weiss was reeling from being figured out so easily, Red had just put on a pot of coffee, and was typing something into one of the computers that lined the walls of the garage-like shed that sat behind a crappy café in a crappier part of town, before sitting at the table in the middle of the room and looking at her expectantly. Taking a deep breath, Weiss sat down and prepared to explain the nature of the job they were about to undertake.
"We need to attend a party."