"Hmm..."

Neo watched in amusement as Roman stroked his chin, looking up in the air, deep in thought as he considered something.

The something in question? The gigantic airship that had just flown over their heads.

Roman stared at it, looking for all intents and purposes like he was sizing it up. She saw his head tilt this way and that as his hand brushed over an imaginary beard.

"...Nah," Roman said finally, "Probably not."

Neo found herself agreeing.

Stealing the thing wouldn't be too hard. Keeping it, on the other hand, would be.

She followed Roman inside, walking past the twins, and the bar, to his back office, where the large board was set up.

Roman considered it for a moment, before turning to her. "So," he rubbed his hands together, "We've got to find out who, or what, is making people vanish into the night like my ex-wife with the house."

Neo nodded, waiting for him to go on.

Roman looked at her for a moment. "...so, I lied when I said I had a plan. Any ideas?"

She raised an eyebrow. "..."

"Of course I told the huntsman I had things worked out," Roman rolled his eyes, "I needed him to back off and that was the best way to do it."

Neo looked unimpressed. "…?"

"Well, that's what we now need to figure out," Roman sighed, "How to turn that lie into something resembling a truth. Unusual for us, I know, but needs must."

Neo thought it over for a moment, before tapping her ear.

"Yeah, the 'plant a tracker and follow it' plan was the first thing I thought of, but there are problems," Roman mused, "For one, who can pretend to be a helpless potential kidnap victim? I know you can disguise yourself, but I need you in reserve in case any fighting is needed, and we don't have anyone else with your kind of skill. If who we're thinking is behind this, I don't think it'll be easy to fool them with the same trick again."

Neo stared at the board, mulling his objection over. After a moment, she looked back at him. "..."

"Don't pretend?" Roman raised an eyebrow, "How do you propose we do that?"

"…?" Neo raised a question at him.

"How do you catch fish? With bait and a hook," Roman looked confused at where the conversation was going, "And probably a load of other things that I don't know or care about because the only time I ever went fishing was as an excuse to dump a body."

Neo remembered that one. Good times. "…?" She asked again.

"The best kind of bait? Bait that looks realistic, I suppose," he leaned back against the wall, "Are you going somewhere with this, Neo, or are you just throwing unrelated metaphors around to try and sound more intelligent again? We already know that we need realistic bait."

Neo gave him a dirty look.

"Okay, okay," Roman raised his arms in surrender, "I get it, it was only once. Seriously, Neo, where are you going with this?"

Neo folded her arms. "..."

"Use real bait?" Roman's eyes widened in comprehension, "Oh. Oh," he began considering the possibility, "Yeah, that could work. No need for acting, no need to worry if our double-agent is going to get found out again... but how would it work?"

"..."

"Yeah, planting trackers is obvious, but how, exactly, are we going to pick out potential kidnap victims? Our network is good, but even I don't know exactly who's going to be walking home alone on a given night."

Neo grinned. "..."

"Make some?" Roman opened his mouth, then shut it again, "Ha… and here I thought working with the good guys was killing our edge," he shook his head in amusement, "Yeah, that should be easier. It'll still take time to pull it off without raising suspicion, but I think it's doable…" he opened his scroll, and began typing on it, "Okay, first of all, I'm going to need to make some orders and send some instructions out… good work, Neo. I should have known I could count on you."

Neo felt herself preen. Only slightly. She waved to leave.

"Sure, sure," Roman waved her out of the room, "Go do whatever, I've got some work to do."

She left, feeling satisfied at another job well done. She noticed the Twins at the bar, looking decidedly comfortable, and felt her curiosity crop up again. They were oddly fine with working for Roman, given the circumstances of their recruitment – they had never had any trouble with the pair, and they seemed to approach their work with the same level of professionalism and commitment they had back when they were Junior's people.

This was odd.

She made her way over to them.

Melanie noticed her approaching first. "Oh, hi, scary boss lady."

Neo felt amused. "…?"

Of course, normally someone could not convey what they wanted to effectively without speaking, or perhaps using sign language or the written word. Many who glanced at Neo and Roman's interactions assumed that Roman knew what she was trying to say because they were, figuratively, as thick as thieves, and that he was extremely good at reading body language.

That wasn't it. Granted, he was extremely good at reading body language, to the point where he could even do it in a fight and predict what his opponent was going to do next – but Neo, on the other hand, was absurdly good at expressing herself through body language alone, to the point where she could effectively hold a conversation with anyone without actually opening her mouth.

Case in point, Melanie and Miltia.

"Well, like, is there a better description I can use for you?" Melanie shook her head, "You're the joint-boss, you're a lady, and you're scary as all hell."

Neo shrugged. It was a fair description, admittedly.

"So what do you need? Another job?" Miltia joined the conversation now.

Neo shook her head. "..."

"A question?" both of them blinked at the same time.

Creepy.

"What question?"

"…?"

"Why no hard feelings?" Miltia repeated, "What, you mean about working for you guys?"

Neo nodded.

The twins shared a look, then Melanie shrugged. "What hard feelings could there be? Junior paid us, so we worked for him. He double-crossed you, it didn't work."

"And now you guys pay us," Miltia continued, "So we work for you. It's just business. As long as we're making money, we're good, and despite being a total asshole, Roman really knows how to make money."

Neo felt some bemusement. That was, frankly, one of the most mercenary things she had ever heard, and that was an impressive feat in and of itself given her life up to now. "…?" She tilted her head curiously.

"We double-crossed you before because you weren't paying us," Melanie said, as though it was the simplest thing in the world, and to them it probably was, "But now, you are paying us, so we won't try anything."

"We know where our bread is buttered," Miltia agreed, "Doesn't matter who's holding the knife."

The implication, of course, was clear to see. As long as they were well-paid, Melanie and Miltia didn't really care. If they weren't well-paid, or someone else made them a better offer, however…

Still, that made them manageable. Easy to predict.

"Say," Miltia then spoke up again, "We've got a question for you, too."

Neo raised an eyebrow.

The twins shared a look. "...We know you can speak," Melanie began hesitantly, "So why don't you?"

Ah, this. The question anyone who heard her speak asked her. Well, anyone who heard her speak and actually survived.

These two might actually understand it, given their priorities and outlook on life. She considered what to tell them.

"Scarcity," she said quietly after a moment, "Breeds value."

She felt that the way the sisters perked up and eagerly leaned in the moment words came out of her mouth proved her point nicely.

When she had something to say, be it important or mundane, serious or mocking, long sentence or one-word statement, people listened.

Roman once told her that words were the most valuable currency on Remnant. If that was the case, she wasn't about to inflate her personal economy. She wasn't like Roman, who always seemed to have something interesting to say – so she would make whatever she had to say interesting by virtue of the mere fact that she was saying it at all.

Melanie and Miltia looked thoughtful. "I don't get it," Miltia admitted.

"I do," Melanie nodded, "You remember that limited edition designer dress we saw the other day?"

"The super expensive one?"

"Yeah."

"Think that, but with words instead of dresses."

Miltia blinked. "Oh. Right! I get it," she paused, then scowled, "Wait. Does that mean you're saying that what we talk about is less valuable because we talk, like, all the time?"

Neo simply smirked, and turned to leave.

The pay-off was always better if you had to make them think about how you just insulted them, after all.

"And in other news, in light of the recent disappearances, Vale City Police are considering moving the Curfew forward to eight PM-"

Lisa Lavender's afternoon news broadcast ended abruptly as the television was turned off.

"Hey!" Yang objected from her place on the common room sofa, "I was watching that!"

"While playing that game on your scroll at the same time?" Blake looked amused, "Wow, Yang. If you're this good at multi-tasking, I guess I don't need to worry about having to let you copy my notes from class any more. After all, clearly you can easily pay attention to the teachers while you-"

"All right, all right," Yang hastily conceded the point, "Maybe I wasn't watching it. But still, what gives, Ruby? You could have at least asked."

Ruby sighed. "I'm sick of it."

"Sick of what?" Sometimes, Blake genuinely couldn't tell if Yang was simply being oblivious, or if her blunt questions were some kind of masterful ploy to get people to open up about their problems. She tended to assume the latter – while Weiss and Blake were both academically intelligent, Yang was someone, probably the only girl on the team in fact, who she would describe as being 'socially intelligent. She understood people and how to speak to them like nobody else Blake knew.

"You know what, Yang," Ruby dropped herself onto the sofa with a frown, "I'm sick of hearing about all of this going on out in the city while I'm sitting in here doing… oh, I don't know," she gritted her teeth, "Sparring practice, or falling asleep in Port's class, or homework!" She clenched her fist, "We're supposed to be huntresses! We should be doing something about it!"

Blake gave a mental sigh. Once again, Ruby's ideal of how the world should work was coming into conflict with how the world actually worked. That if bad things happened, good people should stop them, and that was the end of it. There were many days when she honestly wished she, like Ruby, wasn't as cynical as she was - self-trained to expect the worst, because, between both the actions of the White Fang and the treatment of Faunus that had led to said actions, she had seen and experienced some of the worst humanity had to offer.

She frowned at herself for the thought. That wasn't really fair to Ruby at all - the younger girl had, after all, suffered her own tragedies. She knew from what little she had picked up from both Ruby and Yang about the topic that the death of Ruby's mother and the subsequent break-down of her father had left a deep scar that still refused to heal. She wondered, not for the first time, how Ruby managed to fit her own bad experiences into her optimistic, some would even say naive, world-view.

"Okay," Yang nodded, "So what should we be doing instead? What's your plan?"

That brought Ruby up short. After a few moments of thought, she slumped. "I don't know," she said miserably, "But anything has to be better than this."

"Ruby," Yang began gently, "I get it. I really do. It makes me want to grind my teeth and punch something every time I hear about another person going missing. But there are dozens, hundreds even, of people trying to fix this already. We can't always be the ones to save the day, you know. Sometimes we've gotta let someone else have a turn."

"The authorities have more resources and experience handling this sort of thing than we ever will," Blake offered, "I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of it. If we get involved, we might even hurt their investigations without knowing it."

"Hurt whose investigations?" Weiss asked absently as she walked into the common room.

"Ruby feels like we should be doing something about the disappearances," Yang explained.

"Oh, are we finally having this conversation, then?" Weiss sat down on the sofa with them, "I wondered how long it would take," she blinked at the surprised looks she got, "What? Ruby has been getting more and more agitated by this every day. It was always going to reach a boiling point eventually. So, fill me in, where are we so far?"

"Blake and Yang were just telling me that we can't solve all the problems by ourselves and we should leave it for the police and huntsmen to deal with," Ruby offered.

"Ah, good, that saves me some work. Well then, Ruby, I have two questions for you," Weiss began, "The first would be, why do you feel that we, personally, should be the ones to resolve this, and not any of the multiple other groups and organisations, all of whom far more suited to the task than we are, who are trying to do the same thing?"

"Well," Ruby thought about it for a moment, "The day at the docks. The big fight, with the White Fang guys and that Adam guy and Penny," she winced, probably still remembering the girl getting sliced in half, "What did we do?"

"I almost got myself killed, you nearly did as well but not before knocking a White Fang leader all around the docks, and then we were saved by a criminal before Weiss and Yang brought down two drop-ships full of White Fang members," Blake listed off.

And hadn't that been an eye-opener. Before the incident at the docks, if you had asked Blake, objectively, who the most dangerous fighter on the team was, she would have said it was either Yang or herself. Now? It was Ruby. It was definitely Ruby.

It took everything she had and intentionally acting out-of-character to catch Adam off guard and even land a hit on him. Then, right as she was about to get killed, Ruby appeared and battered him around like a training dummy in one of the most one-sided minutes of combat she had ever witnessed. Unfortunately, it still hadn't been enough, but seeing what her team leader was capable of when she really cut loose at just fifteen years of age certainly made her wonder just how good Ruby was going to be when she was seventeen, or twenty, or twenty-five.

"Nope," she was brought back from her musings by Ruby shaking her head, "You're looking at it all wrong, see."

Blake tilted her head curiously. "How so?"

"Well, that Adam guy wouldn't have been caught if not for us, right? And all of those White Fang guys would have gotten away too if not for Weiss and Yang coming in and wrecking their drop-ships."

"I still can't believe I did that," Weiss mumbled, still smarting from the month of detentions she had gotten for commandeering one of the School's own drop-ships.

"Well," Blake conceded, "Yes, that's right, I suppose."

"So, we helped," Ruby said simply, "Not the police, not the official huntsmen, not the Atlas guys coming in on those super-cool flying ships, us. And then what did you two do?" She pointed at Blake and Weiss.

"The press conference," Weiss replied softly.

"Yep!" Ruby gave her a thumbs up, "You went on the TV and then you helped, again," she stressed, "You know I don't normally pay attention to that kind of stuff, but even I've seen the stories on the news about people who used to be in the White Fang turning themselves in because of that speech you did."

Blake blushed uncomfortably, the instinctual response she still hadn't managed to repress when people praised her for doing that conference.

"You three are asking me why I think we should start helping," Ruby folded her arms and glared at them all, "I'm not saying that. I'm saying that I don't think we should stop."

Weiss was the first to reply. "I've planned this conversation out in my head for days," she admitted, "And I never imagined your reply would sound that convincing."

Yang chuckled, "Yeah, she does have a point. We're already kinda knee-deep in saving the city, really, aren't we? But what was the second question, Weiss?"

"Oh," Weiss recovered from the back foot she had seemingly been put firmly on, "The second question was; do you really think that we, students not even out of our first year of training, are ready to handle a city-wide menace that is eluding the police and the other authorities while making dozens of people disappear?"

"Doesn't matter," Ruby said firmly, "If I stood by and did nothing while even a single person got taken away, or hurt, or even killed, because I didn't think I was ready to stop it? I wouldn't deserve to be a huntress anyway."

Blake felt any retort she may have had die on her lips.

There it was. The other side of the naivete coin. Sometimes, Ruby would say something, or do something, that made you honestly wonder if, on the day she truly realised that the world didn't work the way she thought it did… she would simply put on that glare of hers, then buckle down and make it.

Blake felt a hint of shame creep up as she considered Ruby's words. Hadn't she left the White Fang to fight injustice, to help people, to atone for her crimes? And yet, here she was, telling a real hero that they shouldn't try to help because it was someone else's problem.

She glanced at Yang, who had that look in her eye that she often had around Ruby – full of pride, with a hint of worry. She could tell the older sibling was convinced. Blake glanced over at their other team-mate.

Weiss, for her part, stared at Ruby for a moment, before bringing her hand up to grasp the bridge of her nose and letting out a long-suffering sigh. "One of these days," the heiress said wryly, "We're all going to learn to stop underestimating you. Fine, okay. You make very good arguments. Not logical ones, but good ones non-the-less. We're saving the day, yet again. So what's the plan?"

That cut Ruby's moment short. The girl underwent a startling metamorphosis from confident world-saver to socially-awkward teenager as she pressed her index fingers together. "Erm…"

"You don't have one, do you," Weiss sighed, "Well, that's an excellent start."

"Well, er," Ruby tried to salvage the situation, "You and Blake are both smart! Do you have any ideas?"

Weiss frowned. "I'm afraid things like this aren't really my forté, Ruby. My private schooling on how to deal with kidnappers basically amounted to 'Don't go too far away from your guard detail and never speak to anyone who hasn't been vetted by the Schnee Dust Company.' As you can imagine, that advice lost practicality quite quickly as I grew up."

Blake thought about it as they all turned to her. "Well," she mused out loud, "If I wanted to catch the person or thing that was kidnapping people, I'd want to try and catch them in the act."

"Well, yeah, but that's easier said than done," Yang pointed out as she leaned back into the sofa, "There's a load of people in Vale and any one of them could be a victim."

"Right," Blake agreed, "But what if we gave them a fake 'victim' of our own?"

Ruby, easily having the best head for tactics of any of them, grasped it quickly. "So we lure them out with our fake helpless kidnap victim, then catch them red-handed?"

"Exactly."

"That could work," Weiss tapped her chin in thought, "But who would play the victim? Blake and I are too well-known, and I'm not sure either of you two could fool someone into thinking you were helpless anything, unless Ruby went without Crescent Rose, which is absolutely NOT a risk we are going to take."

They thought it over for a moment.

"So, basically, what we need," Yang began slowly, "Is someone really, really crappy. Someone so crappy that, just by looking at them, you can tell how crappy they are and there is absolutely no way you could possibly imagine that someone could fake that kind of crappiness."

"I would have put it differently, but yes, I would think so," Weiss agreed.

They all shared a long look.

"No," Weiss objected immediately, "Absolutely not."

"Why not?" Yang asked, grinning.

"Pyrrha will kill us. Kill us dead," Weiss stressed.

"Nora would probably back us up, though," Ruby chirped, clearly pleased with the idea.

"And Ren will go along with whatever Nora is doing," Blake mused in agreement.

"She will murder us so comprehensively they'll have to burn our birth certificates so that we were never born in the first place," Weiss shook her head in desperation, seeing that she was clearly outvoted, "We'll be the ones who disappear, and not because of terrorists or monsters!"

"So, it's settled, then," Ruby nodded firmly, "Let's go ask him now."

"I really don't think this should count as being 'settled'! Wait, where are you going?! Everyone? I really think we should put it to a vote – actually, hold on, let's not do that, but even still – wait, come back!"

"Hi, Jaune!" the blonde-haired boy looked up from his comic to see Ruby, standing in front of the rest of team RWBY, beaming at him, "We need your help!"