Qrow's call to Taiyang ended for the fifth time when another voicemail asked him to leave a message. Instead, he shoved his scroll into a back pocket and snarled into the night, "Answer me, dude."
He pounced off the street-side after a final deep breath of downtown's concrete jungle. In mid-air, he winced, his bones mangled like a fistful of twigs, and ebony feathers sprouted out of his hair. His feet left pavement and gravity below. Wind glided under his arms, both of which snapped at awful angles during his transformation.
Not one second passed before his change completed, all bones and muscle becoming a different form: the crow smaller than an average house cat.
He flew through the cover of midnight, avoiding the auras of streetlamps and dodging bat colonies. He zoomed out of town, pursued by the most relevant figments he'd seen.
Wire netting covered the ceiling.
Bread loaves looked wooden and covered with fuzz. Fruit was sunken in and browned. Fish steaks rotted on entree platters.
Fungus and toadstool grew in the corners.
Qrow ducked beneath the boughs of a patch-oak tree. His passage shook several branches and nicked his glide. A screech owl who was perched on one of them stayed where it was, even though not all predators forgave a smaller bird like him so easily.
The landscape of town transformed as he made progress from facilities and complexes into parks and homes. Tiny insects whined beneath grass lawns.
Soon, the suburbs flattened and expanded into plantations, while the buildings turned into barns few and far between.
Animal pastures wafted with fertilizer and fur.
Qrow found train tracks at last, to which he dipped lower and picked up speed. It's as though he couldn't get away fast enough; he couldn't reach where he needed to be in time.
"Our god has only revealed their voice to our founder so far…. Look how far we've reached and how many people we've met." Mantis' voice sounded out of focus and drunk in Qrow's memories. "How many people we've met. People we've met. How far we've reached. Look how far…. Our god."
Qrow clued in on the implication at once, connecting what Mantis told him to the camera he'd broken. Was it the same device that captured Summer's likeness during her past visit to Noonday Lodge? He didn't know how long he was stunned in Mantis' threshold while processing this cult's outreach, but even after he'd flown so far, a part of him still lingered there.
The faces and names of local celebrities covered sections of a map of the country-side.
Summer Rose—someone pinned a side-view photo of her plus her daughter upon the location of their hometown.
Heather—someone spotted her between the heads of her bar-room customers.
Taiyang Xiao-Long—someone pinned his grinning profile over the nation's capital city.
The ID's of hunters.
Teachers through their classroom windows.
Head ministers exiting their chapels.
News anchors at the desks of their daily channels.
Restaurant staff entering their kitchens.
Dozens of similar paparazzi snapshots had located people of influence among Patch's settlements.
Qrow didn't have any answers.
He didn't know what to do.
However, nine of those photos were nailed over Spot including his partner. Since Taiyang couldn't pick up his scroll, this demanded a visit once and for all.
What Qrow had seen was fading into silhouettes at the back of his head, but questions replaced them. Questions, concerns, nightmare scenarios circled his mind for hours while he flew. They haunted him. He didn't have the answers, so his anxiety made them up—the worst ones about the fate of his friends, the founder and their god's identity, and the evilest intentions where their influence appeared greatest.
The cult showed interest in a school, in its teachers—an institute where two little nieces began their new year.
"Her daughter is the sweetest."
Twenty-four hours later, Qrow picked open a window at Signal Academy with his beak and landed upon the tile floor of a bathroom. Its ceiling lights stayed dark. His talons clacked upon every step. Stall doors blocked the contents of four toilets and a black garbage bag covered one of four urinals.
He sagged after all this time, his energy spent. Joints ached where his wings met his body. Soreness spread through his chest and legs. Where he was alone at last, no wildlife stalking him nor light sources spotting him, he relaxed. This bird form had carried him across the country-side overnight and then mingled all day on campus roof-tops. He hadn't slept for over thirty-six hours.
He couldn't rest, yet, though.
Trolley wheels and the humdrum tone of an old man approached the restroom. Qrow couldn't see beyond the door, but the footsteps closing in paralyzed him inches within his hiding spot. He couldn't let a civilian discover his trespassing, or else it made his reconnaissance more difficult. Kill the man? No, then it became an investigation into himself.
Qrow alighted upon a stall door's edge closest to the window, where he held his breath.
The trolley wheels squeaked along.
Whoever passed inches away was more oblivious than a rodent under an owl's talons. They limped onward without being any wiser. The sounds of their passage diminished. After the last and furthest trace, Qrow counted sixty seconds straining his senses the whole time, but no one interrupted.
He exited the restroom into a landing sanitized with chemicals, where stairs descended to the ground level and more stairs ascended to the third floor. Red letters overhead glowed, and silence prevailed so dense in this part of the building, he heard electricity in the EXIT sign.
A whole neighborhood away, someone's hound was wailing.
A passage stretched at least one hundred feet to either side. Long expanses of windows dominated one side revealing that hour's darkness and far-off lamp-posts whose auras made the hallway dim orange.
He studied the name on a nearby classroom door but moved on when it didn't ring a bell. He ignored teacher name after name after name, in his search for Taiyang's door, first.
An elevator door chimed somewhere distant and out of view.
He hopped to the closest crossing of hallways in the sound's direction, before noises of the custodian emerged from it: their rolling cart and a limp in their gait.
They grunted.
Qrow stiffened. Was he had?
"Who's there."
A flashlight beam filled the intersection, where only a wall vertex guarded Qrow from view.
"Show yourself."
Adrenaline pumped him. Every bird talon flexed on the cool ceramic tiles. Qrow's first instinct to kill the old man spoke again. Why was it more difficult to suppress his deadly reflexes than it was to simply leave the way he'd come?
"Bloody kids." Darkness resumed with a flashlight's click and footsteps receded. The custodian let it go quicker than Qrow did, and he was alone once more, counting sixty seconds.
His fight initiative subsided while his heart-rate slowed to normal. Clicks of his beak almost resembled a man's nervous chuckling.
Many times that night, they encountered each other close enough to shiver Qrow, but his stealth avoided the old man within an inch of being found.
In the building's gymnasium.
At opposite ends of a hallway.
Along the stairs between two levels.
Qrow couldn't find Taiyang's classroom between the ground floor and level three.
Instead, he pulled down fish-netting from the gym's ceiling, which was identical to the criss-cross wires in Mantis' hideout.
An award case in the main lobby displayed a picture of his eldest niece, a chubby little blonde outfitted in the white gi of her training dojo. The other martial arts trophy winners stood in the same picture as her, but they dressed in Signal Academy's colors of black and green. Their greens were the same minty hue in Mantis' necktie.
They had to be coincidences, though.
He was over-analyzing things.
The school and a cult? That was crazy thinking.
He exited school the way he'd come and perched on the building's roof-top. Humidity made the air thick and sunk through his feathers. Clouds smothered the stars and moon overhead, but orange glow reached his belly from dozens of lanterns. Ahead of him, many more facilities awaited his search for Taiyang.
Please, anything prove to him that the cult wasn't worming its way into Signal Academy.