Crashing the Party 2.4

Twilight

Ruby was feeling rebellious. After dinner, she asked to go to town to get a magazine. Dad said to be back in an hour, but Ruby figured she wouldn't be back for at least an hour and ten minutes! She considered maybe going for an hour and a half, but she didn't want to make Dad too nervous. He was already freaking out because Yang was leaving for Beacon in a few days, and he expected that.

Ruby went to From Dust Till Dawn, her favorite place to get magazines. It was a Dust shop, so she could get stuff for ammunition and stuff at the same time, and sometimes there were parts there she needed too. But first, she usually looked through the magazines to see if there was anything cool to buy.

There usually weren't a lot of people in the store, especially after dinnertime, but tonight there were. There was a boy maybe a little older than Ruby, and his big sister; the boy said something to Ruby, but Ruby didn't really want to talk to him or know what to say so she just ignored him. A couple other girls, definitely older than Ruby, came in later, and Ruby just turned up her music some more to drown out their conversation. She listened to her music, and started to figure out which magazine to buy. When Atlas Today had cool Atlesian designs it was really cool, but this week's was all boring stuff about the economy and people wondering why Dust was being stolen a lot, and nothing else really caught Ruby's eye, so she was probably going to get Weapons Magazine.

Ruby had her music on really loud—it was good music, and it usually kept people from bugging her—so she only noticed a little when the other people came in. First was one guy, then a bit later a bunch who Ruby didn't pay attention to until something exploded. Explosions in a Dust shop—which the shop basically was, even if Dust was only one of the things Ruby bought—were a really, really bad thing.

Ruby looked around the store. It was bad. There was a bunch of broken glass, and the front window was broken, and there was a kinda messy hole in the door's glass, and there were bugs everywhere, and a bunch of people too. Some of them had black and red suits and hats, and black and red are usually bad colors, so they were probably bad guys. (Ruby wore red and black, too, because it was cool to look a little like a bad guy when you weren't. Same with the corset, and the scythe and the hood too, though she had other reasons for liking those.) Dad didn't really approve of the idea, though. Anyways, a couple of them were fighting with the boy's big sister over a red sword, and it looked like another had beaten up one of the chatty girls, so they were probably bad guys anyways. And there at the front of the store was…that guy from the news! The criminal guy! Ruby didn't pay much attention to the news, but she wished she did sometimes. But she had paid enough attention to recognize him, and kinda remember he stole Dust and stuff.

"Hey! What's going on?" Ruby asked bewilderedly.

The boy exclaimed, "Get down, stupid." He was hiding from some of the bad guys behind one of the shelves, though in clear sight of the ones fighting with his sister, with some bags of Dust and jars next to him. "Or else let me know if anyone's coming. Say, do you know what would happen if I mixed the green stuff and the blue stuff?" He was wearing white, and looked really scared and the bad guys were winning, so he probably wasn't with them.

"Are you okay?" Ruby inquired.

"Just fine," the boy snarled. Or maybe it wasn't really a snarl, he was just really angry. "My friends might be dead, but—"

The other people did look like they needed help. Luckily, Ruby pretty much always had Crescent. She didn't need him yet, though. She just ran at the two bad guys fighting the big sister.

The boy shouted, "No, dolt, I didn't—"

Ruby leaped into the air and kicked one of the bad guys in the face, knocking him backwards. She pushed off him to slam into the other one, throwing him off-balance. The boy's sister got ahold of the sword they were fighting over. Ruby hit the floor awkwardly but bounced back up gracefully.

"...say anything against you beating up all of the guys, carry on," he muttered. Ruby nodded at him and saw that the bad guys and the thief from the news were all watching her. He gestured towards Ruby, and a third bad guy angrily ran at Ruby, but tripped. The fourth just stared dispiritedly at the other three on the ground.

"You were worth every cent," Roman sighed, "truly you were."

The two behind Ruby got up and started to move towards her. She spun around and drew Crescent Rose, her sniper-scythe. She knocked one bad guy into the other. While her back was turned, the fourth charged. Ruby charged back, harder, knocking him out the window; she followed.

Ruby stood in the street, letting Crescent unfold into its full glory. Everyone inside the store and most of the people on the street watched her; Ruby even felt someone watching from a nearby rooftop. Ruby smiled and decided to show off. That was pretty cool… Ruby spun Crescent around several times before slamming its blade into the ground and turning off her music.

"I don't know why I bother," the thief sighed angrily as he stepped through the broken window. "Well, Red," he added cheerfully, "I think we can all say it's been an eventful evening." He tossed his cigar on the ground and crushed it. "And as much as I'd love to stick around," he stated before pointing his cane at Ruby aggressively, "I'm afraid this is where we part ways."

He shot Ruby, who jumped really high and landed. She looked around perplexedly, before noticing the thief quickly clambering up a ladder on the side of the building she felt someone watching from. Ruby quickly turned to the store. "Are you all alright?" she inquired.

"I'm fine," the boy said at the same time as a girl Ruby hadn't noticed asked someone to call someone else. The shopkeeper just grunted and nodded. Ruby turned and readied herself cautiously, before firing Crescent Rose and propelling herself into the air. She alighted gracefully on the roof, and saw both the thief and a blonde girl sprawled over in one corner of the roof. "Hey," Ruby declared.

"Persistent," he muttered quietly. Ruby glared at him, and thought he heard something on the ladder before a tiltjet rose out of the alley noisily. He quickly climbed into the airship and turned, before taking out a Fire Dust crystal. "End of the line, Red!" he hollered. He threw the crystal onto the roof, right in front of Ruby, and shot it accurately.

The crystal exploded noisily; Ruby heard three things through the crimson soot left by the explosion. The first was someone landing on the roof, the second was the thief chortling loudly, and the third was someone else crying out on the ladder. As the dust settled, Ruby saw that a blonde lady on the roof in front of her, with a white blouse, artfully-tattered purple cape, and black tights. In her hand was a sort of wand thingy. Ruby grinned widely as she watched this lady—surely a Huntress—swing her arm wide and send bolts of violet energy at the tiltjet.

The thief ran forward and out of sight; the tiltjet started to pull away, but with another wave of her weapon, the Huntress conjured dark clouds above it. With a downward swing, shards of cyan ice fell from the cloud, impaling themselves in the machine.

From the front came another lady, a darker-skinned and dark-haired one with black high heels and a short red-and-black dress with glowing orange patterns on the sleeves. Ruby couldn't see much of her face, but her eyes were glowing, and so were her hands. The red lady on the titjet hurled a bolt of flame at the Huntress, who blocked it. The roof under her glowed and exploded, but the Huntress backflipped out of he way.

The red-hot fragments of roof hadn't all hit the roof when she flourished her weapon, causing the fragments to glow lavender and collect into a twirling spear-like spike, which the Huntress hurled at the tiltjet powerfully. The red lady blasted the spike, but the Huntress reformed it and struck again. The tiltjet tilted to the side, and the spear's fragments ran along the top before looping around in front of the red lady. She waved her arms, and the fragments all exploded in midair.

With the spectacle no longer distracting Ruby, she felt someone watching her. She turned and saw the boy from the store leaning on the little wall at the edge of the roof.

"Don't mind me," he breathed quietly, "I'll help in a sec."

Ruby turned back around, readied Crescent Rose, and shot the red lady several times. Her leg twitched a few times, but she still blocked each shot with a burst of energy from her hand before gesturing at the roof with her palm. The roof glowed orange-white, and Ruby leaped at the boy, knocking both of them off the roof. They hit the ground with a thud.

"Not that I don't like girls throwing themselves at me," the boy said weakly, "but I think I might have broke something."

"I'm sorry!" Ruby apologized apologetically. "Are you okay?"

"Ah...no, I don't think I broke anything, but my leg definitely hurts."

Ruby hopped off him quickly and watched the tiltjet fly off into the night, then watched the Huntress leap gracefully off the roof to examine the people on the ground—Ruby, the boy and the other people in the shop, the bad guys, and the cops starting to arrive.

Ruby dashed over to the Huntress with her Semblance, which allowed her to run really fast. "You're a Huntress!" she exclaimed.

The Huntress looked back at Ruby.

"Can I have your autograph?"