The cheers and screaming of the Vytal Festival were in no way dimmed by the shocking events prior to the opening ceremony –events that were even now being recounted by Lisa Lavender in her characteristic crisp manner in Amity Arena's locker room television, although her voice was drowned out, somewhat, by the thousands of feet drumming above Team JNPR's heads.
"-explosion in Vale's Central Plaza is confirmed to have been linked to the terrorist activity in Mountain Glenn. However, thanks to the brave actions of Hunter students from both Haven and Beacon, and the timely arrival of Atlas's fleet, no casualties occurred. Another student team from Mistral, supposedly here for the Vytal Festival, was revealed to have had a hand in the attack: three out of the four members have been arrested, with the fourth, Harlequin Mint, remaining at large."
A picture of Neo with black pigtails and sharp green eyes, presumably taken from her fake ID card, grinned out of the screen briefly.
"Sources indicate that this name may be an alias, and caution is advised in approaching her." Lisa continued gravely as the picture shrank to share space with her. "This plot was uncovered during a training mission from Beacon Academy, wherein Doctor Bartholomew Oobleck and his team of students came across a White Fang base in the ruins of Mountain Glenn. Evidence at the scene and eyewitness testimony from the arrested Faunus indicates that this foiled attack was backed by Cinder Fall of Team CEMM, for a purpose or purposes as yet unknown. While the exact goal of the attack remains unclear…"
"You wanna turn that down, Nora?" Jaune suggested, and she turned away from the screen as he grinned sheepishly. "I mean, for the strategy meeting and all…"
"Totally!" Nora chirped, and thumbing the remote, dialed the volume back until the only real sound was the droning roar of the crowd over their heads, muffled by several dozen meters of steel and concrete. She then hitched herself around on the bench to face her glorious leader.
"Right." Jaune clapped his hands together and rubbed them nervously. Team JNPR was gathered in their own little corner of the locker rooms, already suited and booted and ready for battle. "So, uh, we're all clear on how we want to play this going forward?"
"Assuming that Cinder left any contingencies should her… plans…" Pyrrha looked a little queasy as she said this, and who could blame her. "…get interrupted, those contingencies will rely on our logical performance."
"Which means we should perform illogically." Nora chimed in, wrapping an arm around Ren's neck. "Like this guy! Boy, I hate this guy!"
"Nothing that obvious, Nora." Ren said with all the patience of a guy used to being manhandled, rolling his eyes gently.
"Uh, yeah." Jaune smiled a little. "We've all been performing really well in combat class recently-"
To the surprise of literally no one among the counter-conspiracy group.
"-and Pyrrha, of course, is a championship fighter. Our team's probably the hot favorite to win, at least among the first years."
Nora grinned.
"We're gonna lose the bookies so much money." she whispered excitedly to Ren, squeezing him tighter. He sighed, but it was the fond sigh and not the beleaguered one.
"Losing on purpose is one thing." Pyrrha said, and the shadow of a frown crossed her face. "But it's harder to lose believably than you might think. We're all very skilled, and most –if not all– of the watchers we actually want to fool are experienced fighters."
People who would be able to tell they were holding back, in other words. The cheering crowds above them might be hoodwinked by a cry and a dropped weapon, but the Vytal Festival was a Hunter event for a reason. Anyone with enough combat training and battle experience would easily be able to see how deliberately they moved, how they lined themselves up for a missed block, how easily they dropped or lost their weapons.
They needed to lose, but they needed to make it look convincing, and that was a much taller order –especially with Pyrrha never-lost-a-bloody-fight Nikos on their team.
The reason why they wanted to lose –why they wanted to drop out of the fight lineup as soon as possible– was obvious, of course. Cinder Fall was locked up in an Atlas holding cell somewhere (and long may she rot there, Nora thought with a private glance at Pyrrha), but they didn't know what plans she did and didn't have for if the worst occurred. Tricking the students into attacking each other relied on Emerald's Semblance, and Emerald was similarly imprisoned, but there was just no telling what Cinder had in place as backup.
Hence, sabotage.
The cleverer a plan was, the more moving parts it had to jam, and the visions Jinn had given them had shown that Cinder was a very, very clever planner. She wove together an intricate web of conspiracy and failed dreams and violent hopes and used her enemies' strengths against them to bring everything that they had built crashing down –but she still relied on hard data, facts, assumptions, same as anyone else.
In the original timeline, Cinder Fall might have been able to control the matchups, but she still relied on the students to carry themselves forward in the tournament. In a way, it didn't matter who the preliminary inciter was –anyone who would lash out upon being attacked would do. It was up to Mercury and Emerald to position themselves accordingly.
But killing Penny…
Nora's fists clenched.
That smacked of more specific planning. Yang might've been tricked into "breaking" Mercury's leg, but even at her angriest she wouldn't be able to rip Penny apart. The fact that Cinder had deliberately paired Pyrrha and Penny against each other meant that she had studied every competitor –their weaknesses, their strengths, their Semblances– and made plans for each. What if Ruby's team had chosen their leader to go forward instead of Yang? What if someone had knocked Penny out of the running with a lucky shot?
Plans within plans within plans…
Of course, no matter how diabolically clever these plans may or may not be, they still relied on one simple fact: that all of the students involved would try their best.
Everyone who entered a tournament competition wanted to win it –all of Cinder's ensuing machinations hinged on that perfectly logical assumption. Of all the students, these ones were the strongest, and were the likeliest to make it to the finals. Of those finalists, these ones had these weaknesses, could be exploited in this way. The idea that someone would deliberately lose the Vytal Tournament wouldn't even factor into her schemes. It was like a Hunter going out to fight Grimm and then calmly laying down before its claws.
Team RWBY, Team JNPR, Penny –they were the strongest fighters in their respective schools, and so of course, barring someone else's schemes, they would make it to the finals. The best fighters would naturally make it to the top of the combat tournament, and so Cinder would make her contingency plans around that –even if she wasn't here to orchestrate, she'd leave strings for her allies to pick up, to manipulate the finalists in this way.
So Team RWBY, and Team JNPR, and Penny if she could manage it, were going to bomb out of the tournament. If they could manage it, they'd go down in the team rounds, be booed out of the stadium, and then put every ear to the ground and every eye to a crack, waiting to stomp out whatever tricks Cinder had left behind. This latter part of the plan was the only reason they had reversed their earlier idea to just sit out of the Vytal Tournament completely –they needed the access that tournament badges would grant them, to make sure they wouldn't miss a thing, and with how narrow the selection was to enter this high-profile event, Ozpin couldn't just manufacture an extra set of badges and hand them over to non-competitors.
It was inconvincible that the Invincible Girl, Pyrrha Nikos, wouldn't be in the final rounds –and so when she wasn't, any plans built around manipulating her would come crashing down on the spot, particularly when Cinder wasn't actually around to correct the errors in said plans.
Simple.
Perfect.
Foolproof.
Now all they had to do was actually lose convincingly, and that –as Pyrrha had rightly pointed out– was going to be a challenge in and of itself.
"We can act overconfident –for the first round, at least." Nora said. "Like oh, we've got Pyrrha Nikos, why even bother trying. And then when all the rest of us get knocked out, the team we're fighting can wear her down on their own. Everybody'll curse our names, but it'll be put down to a normal mistake."
Jaune hummed, not looking entirely convinced.
"That'll work for the first round, but if they spark her competitive spirit and Pyrrha manages to whip that team on her own-"
Pyrrha looked sheepish, since they all knew that outcome was entirely possible.
"-we'll look really suspicious if we make the same mistakes in the doubles round."
"That can wait, perhaps." Ren said. "Once we do or don't make it through the preliminaries. There's a bit of a gap between the team fights and the doubles, anyway. We'll have time to sort things out."
"Maybe we can spin that you wanted to put someone other than Pyrrha out on the field, to give them the experience." Nora mused, rubbing her chin. "Like, you realized we massively fucked up and Pyrrha was carrying our team, so you voluntold me and Ren to get out there and show everybody that we're not completely useless without her."
"Before we reveal, in fact, that we are completely useless without her." Ren said, smiling faintly.
Pyrrha made an unhappy noise, making them all look at her. Her face was downcast, one hand rubbing her arm, and Nora immediately smelled a problem.
Pyrrha's next noise was one of shock as Nora launched herself off the bench to grip Pyrrha by her shoulders, staring into her eyes with the intensity of a thousand suns.
"You know we don't actually rely on you, right?" Nora asked, narrowing her eyes. "Everybody on this team could probably kick your ass if our backs were to the wall."
Pyrrha blinked at her, and then her face crumpled up as she began to giggle a little.
"That's -snrk- that's very kind of you, Nora." she snorted, making Nora grin as she let go. Pyrrha's brilliant smile faded a little. "I was just thinking –if we do lose, you do realize that many people are going to be… quite vocal about their disappointment. We're talking news reports, online articles… maybe even people shouting at you guys and sending death threats."
"Ah, the life of a celebrity." Nora pretended to swoon, making Pyrrha smile a little again, even if it was wan. "Whatever, they come bitching to me, I'll stuff Magnhild up their ass and pull the trigger."
"Are you sure you'll be alright?" Penny asked, her face pinched with concern as she watched Ilia move with swift purpose around Team SSSNI's dorm room.
"Hmm?" Ilia paused and looked up from where she was folding one of her spare jackets. "Yeah, I'll be fine. I've camped out in Grimm territory before, don't worry."
"Yes…" Penny couldn't help but draw the sound out worriedly. Oh, she understood the logic behind Ilia's move, of course. Her position bunking in Team SSSNI's dorm room had always been tenuous and unofficial at best, and now, when things were inevitably spiraling towards the climax of Cinder's plans, she could not afford to be discovered here. The vault beneath the school had its own dangers, particularly when they did not know the nature of Cinder's backup plans (if any truly existed).
So Ilia spending a few days camping on the outskirts of the Emerald Forest was the wisest decision to make under these circumstances. No White Fang members to discover her, no officials around to question her presence, just Ilia and the wilderness.
And lots and lots of Grimm.
"Besides," Ilia huffed, smirking a little. "I'll have backup."
"Arf!" Zwei panted lovably from near her ankles. His dewdrop eyes glistened, ready for adventure, and his stubby tail wagged excitedly. Penny, without much success, tried not to melt into a cooing puddle of infatuation. Zwei had his Aura activated, so perhaps his Semblance was mind-melting adorability…
"Honestly, I feel like I should be asking you that." Ilia continued, glancing up from her duffle bag and looking across the room at Penny. Distracted from her puppy daze, Penny blinked, and Ilia elaborated, "Will you be okay?"
"Thanks to you, I am socialization-ready!" Penny answered with a grin, saluting crisply. Ilia smiled, but shook her head.
"No, I meant with the…" She waved her hand vaguely, before finally coming out and saying it. "The Vytal Festival."
Penny's smile dimmed even as she lowered her hand. Ah, yes. The first time she… died.
To be brutally honest, even when she had been trained, raised, programmed as a protector, Penny had never really thought about death. A cynical person might say it was because she was programmed to protect –because having a sense of self-preservation was detrimental to her primary duty of protecting others– but Penny knew that wasn't true. She knew what death was, how it made other people feel, how it was irreversible.
But she had always thought of it –when she thought of it– as something distant: sad, yes, but distant, like a far-away fairytale. Death was something that happened to other people, people she didn't know. Friends of acquaintances she saw sometimes in the military compounds. Civilians they had seen on missions. Historical casualty lists. Nothing, nobody that she knew.
This, Penny knew from her educational data, was fairly typical of newborns and young children. Death was a concept and a distant one, an idea more than an accepted fact. It was like learning about a distant climate –all very true, yes, scientifically accurate to a fault, but it didn't affect anyone or anything you actually knew. Out of sight, out of mind, and death was –quite properly– very, very out of sight for people as new to the world as she was.
Real toddlers knew, but they didn't understand.
Penny had known and understood, but death was out of her sight and completely out of her mind as she sailed through her life with a smile.
Until Weiss.
Until the future.
Until the Vytal Festival.
And suddenly, it wasn't Death is a thing that happens sometimes, it was You are going to die. Penny was supposed to die within a few days, if everything had gone unchanged, and the knowledge of that was like suddenly running into a brick wall.
Oddly enough, she hadn't been afraid. Not at first. It was like… the knowledge was so sudden, really, that all Penny could do was blink, poleaxed. She was supposed to die? Oh dear. That was… well, that was something. That wasn't good.
But then eventually, slowly, as the days turned into weeks and Penny prepared with the others, she thought of all her friends here at Beacon and the way her father clutched her hand as Weiss had explained her death to them and the sudden feeling of I don't want to die! had welled up inside her like a spiraling, silent scream.
Death seemed so much more real now, so much sharper. Penny didn't like it.
"I think I'll be fine." she said carefully. "After all, everybody is planning to cheat our way out of the tournament, and Pyrrha has promised not to use her Semblance at all if she can help it."
That, honestly, had been almost as upsetting as hearing about her death had been. Pyrrha hadn't known, in the future that now wasn't. She had gone to her death under the assumption that Penny's blood was on her hands, and hadn't lived long enough to see the truth –that even if she killed Penny, Penny had still survived.
Thinking of Pyrrha like that made Penny's heart ache, even if she didn't have a proper one. Pyrrha was so kind, so humble, so ready with a smile and a hand whenever Penny needed one. The thought that she had carried the responsibility of Penny's death into her own demise was agonizing.
Well, not this time. Penny set her jaw, a determined spark glinting in her eyes. Cinder might be gone, but she may have left traps behind, and those traps wouldn't catch any of her friends –of that, Penny would make sure.
This was not the first time Roman had been caught.
In fact, this wasn't even the first time he'd been caught by the legitimate forces of law and order, nor the first time he'd been tossed into a cell. The stakes were… significantly higher than he was used to, sure, but this was nothing new at bottom. He fucked up the assignment, got caught, got cuffed, and now had to wait upon either his captors or his backers to decide what to do with him. This was pretty much par for the course.
And he would've been significantly more concerned if his getting arrested hadn't also been part of the plan to begin with. A dangerous criminal like him, with activated Aura –naturally they'd leave him to the militaristic Atlesians so kindly hovering over Vale. Naturally, Ironwood's paranoia would put him on one of the main battleships, which meant that when Neo came to bust him out while everyone else was distracted, they'd be in a prime position to take the whole thing over.
So everything was fine. More than a bit ahead of schedule, but still, technically, all according to plan.
Cinder's presence across from him in the hall of cells had been significantly less according to plan, as was the presence of Minion 1 and Minion 2 in the cells flanking her. Roman was a consummate professional who knew not to gape at his boss like he knew her when they were marched by, especially when the plan was to bluff like he was the one in charge –but, like, come on. Cinder Fall getting caught?
Maybe Neo's oh-so-secretive little friends were actually good for something. It wasn't like Cinder to misstep this big, and even when it was Ironwood who brought her in and Vale who found the evidence, Roman could read between the lines. Cinder had been able to operate unmolested in Vale and Mistral up until recently… up until Neo came to him and said that they needed and had found an out.
It had been exceedingly difficult not to smirk.
His amusement, however, had been swift to drain away, and it wasn't because of his situation. The abysmal meals and sub-par living conditions were to be expected from Atlas prison transport, who wanted their guilty-until-assumed-innocent prisoners to be as uncomfortable as possible before their trials. It wasn't because of what had led up to this, either.
Having a bunch of snot-nosed brats crash in on his plans in Mountain Glenn was fine. It wasn't his fault and he had done everything Cinder could've asked for to try and at least salvage their plans.
Getting trounced by one of said brats –eh, it wasn't fine, but he could live with it, particularly when she'd left him alive to actually live with it.
Getting caught by Atlas was fine. This was, technically, kinda, still according to Cinder's plan, which meant it wasn't his fault and he wouldn't get roasted alive for fucking up. Plus, he had complete faith in Neo's ability to bust him out.
Cinder and her two minions getting caught too was fine. He wasn't smug about it (not visibly, not if he wanted to continue staying alive), but it was nice to know that he wasn't the only one to be enjoying Atlas's not-so-tender hospitality.
Cinder being perfectly calm about being caught?
Yeah, no.
That scared him shitless.
Roman had been raised in Mistral, had worked his way up from the absolute bottom rung of the criminal underworld in both Mistral and Vale to where he was today. He knew gangs and mafias and terrorists and information brokers and every manner of dastardly do-badder under the sun, and had a working relationship with most of them. He knew the rules, knew how you played the game when you were weak, when you were caught, when you were strong, when you were working tenuous allegiances and didn't want to rock the boat.
Cinder was not playing by those rules.
He'd known that from the beginning –fuck, that was why he hadn't just slammed the door in her face when she'd come knocking in the first place. It was stupid to refuse someone clearly Huntress-level to her face, so he'd hemmed and hawed and committed to a small bit of work for her –nothing big, not like he was sealing the deal, but enough to get her off her back while he looked for answers. That was all part of the ritual of cooperating with other criminals: you had to know where everybody stood before you actually committed to a working relationship.
He'd found a big fat resounding zero, and that was not normal. Criminals didn't just sprout fully battle-ready from the ground: someone had trained and taught Cinder, given her the tools and experience she needed to contact and use him. That was one thing Roman's time in the Spiders had taught him thoroughly: everybody had connections, ties, pasts.
A Huntress whose license was stripped. A remnant of some massacred crime family. An orphaned survivor of a frontier village decimated by Grimm. People came from somewhere, and if you had the connections and talent, you could track them back through their lives no matter which kingdom they came from. The less traces they had, the more they had to hide, and the more dangerous they were. Someone like Cinder –a powerful fighter, a cunning schemer– should have been known to the criminals in the city she came from, or should have been listed in the official records she had –for whatever reason– left behind.
The fact there was precisely zip on either side was a giant, glaring red flag.
So when someone who walked and talked like a Huntress but wasn't on any of the licensed databases or known to any of his criminal contacts (or their contacts) walked in and politely asked you to start robbing Dust on a scale that no one but a terrorist or an army would need, you smiled with all the charm you had and did what the nice lady said, because whether either of you would admit it or not, she had you by the balls.
Roman could bluff with the best of them, and that was why he knew better than anyone that you didn't just do this kind of shit without some kind of backing. There was someone behind Cinder, someone powerful enough to not only train a Huntress this formidable, but to do so without a trace on either side of the law –and erase any other traces there might be of Cinder's past prior to that. As extensive as the Spider's network was, as experienced and cunning as Lil' Miss was, Roman knew that even she couldn't manage that.
A complete unknown waltzing into the criminal underworld of Vale was one thing –these guys played for peanuts, nothing like it was back in Mistral. But doing it in the way that Cinder did –dragging the White Fang in after her, asking him to rob more Dust than any one person could ever possibly need– that was telling.
She was getting ready for something big, something that would change the face of Vale as he knew it. Roman wasn't stupid, he could see the pattern, even if getting even the tiniest hint to her plans out of Cinder was like pulling a Grimm's bloody teeth. Did he want to get in the way of someone who was confident enough to plan something that used all of Vale as a staging ground, and treated the White Fang and a master thief like him the way most gangs treated their errand runners?
Nope, no ma'am, no siree, here's all the Dust you asked for and have a nice day.
So yeah, Roman had known from the beginning that Cinder was the bird riding the wings of a storm she herself intended to create, and had planned to keep his head down and weather it as best he could alongside Neo. More and more recently, Neo had wanted them to back out and find someone to take Cinder and her boss down –and the way things were looking, it seemed like their mysterious allies had definitely managed to put one in the eye of the person backing Cinder– and Roman had to admit, as long as they could survive it, that was looking more and more like the wiser idea.
Because here was the thing, see.
Cinder was caught. Atlas explicitly planned to lock them all up and throw away the key whether or not they spilled the beans, execution and life imprisonment being thoroughly not off the table, what with the whole endangerment of all of Vale thing. Sure, Neo was scheduled to at least break him out, but Cinder had never exactly held their loyalty through anything but fear, and she damn well knew it. It was entirely possible that Neo would bust him out and leave Cinder and her lackeys to rot.
And yet even when General Ironwood came to bellow at them, even when their crimes and probable punishments were listed off, Cinder was calm. Amused, even.
That was freaky.
Brat 1 and Brat 2 at least reacted more logically. Emerald was pale-faced, shaky, and locked within herself like any rookie prisoner, all but rocking back and forth on the single hard bench they got, raking her hands through her hair, panicking. Even when she tried to mimic Cinder's glacial calm under interrogation, the best she could do was look frozen and stiff.
Emerald was damn lucky they were all held in solo cells in the main airship's brig: the jailbirds Roman was used to would've eaten the girl alive for showing such open fear –not that, with her abilities and her training, they wouldn't have to wade over several dead and bleeding bodies to get there. Emerald might be panicking, but it was the barbed and thorny panic that meant anything she even perceived as an attack would receive a knife to the eye.
Mercury was calmer, but his calm, too, was something Roman knew and was used to. It was the sullen, barely-checked calm of someone used to taking a beating and knowing that there was little he could do right now but knuckle under and wait for his luck to change. It was resentment smoldering beneath the façade of patience, rather than actual unruffled calm. And there was fear, too, however much Mercury tried to disguise it: Roman could see the tension in him whenever the interrogations came, recognize the way Mercury's words dried up, trying to divert attention away from himself.
Perfectly normal, natural reactions to getting arrested, in other words. Brat 1 was freaking out because she'd heard all the horror stories and never been imprisoned before, never been so thoroughly caught. Brat 2 was annoyed at getting outsmarted, however implicitly, and concerned in no small way himself at what the future might hold for him.
But Cinder?
Nope.
The way Cinder acted, this was an exceptionally cramped spa arranged for their sole benefit, and Ironwood's interrogation tactics merely the visitations of another school's teacher. She didn't give anything away –of course she didn't– but she met him with unruffled calm, poised smiles, and the occasional dry remark. She chatted, conversationally, talking about how she'd found Beacon so far and the differences in styles between here and Haven and oh General, don't be silly, why would she arrange a terrorist attack? I thought you'd gotten over this nonsense.
No fear, not even the ghost of it.
And call him paranoid, but that had Roman deeply concerned.