Chapter 13: Tri-Spy


BEDLAM

Just enough to assure himself that she hadn't run away while he had been detained by Neopolitan. That's how long he let himself watch Blake before returning back to the 'new base'. His brothers had quickly declared it such, despite his distaste for the building... I suppose it is really only the single room that has my ire, though. Brazen came out of the torture chamber when he returned to the gutted warehouse. Bedlam had mixed feelings about that, too.

Neo doesn't matter. All that matters is Blake, so as long as Neo stays out of my business she and Brazen can do whatever they like.

"Still secure here?" Bedlam asked, suddenly suspicious of his clone exiting the illusionist's prison.

"Yeah, she's sort of sick I think. Until she's over that, I don't think I'll make much progress dealing with her." Brazen sat down beside the desk.

Bedlam narrowed his eyes and smelled the air. "How do I know you're you and not one of her illusions? You've got her smell all over you."

"Ilia is attracted to Blake, but I never minded." Brazen responded after taking a few moments to think of something that both of them should know that Neo would not.

Bedlam nodded and moved to sit down beside his twin. "I like this white cloak. Not sure why; it certainly isn't good for hiding in."

"Hiding in plain sight?" Conjectured Brazen, "I'm assuming you still don't mind about Ilia."

[We have not had much chance to talk, you and I, since the split], Bedlam motioned, ignoring the tangent about the chameleon-faunus. [Do you think we made a mistake using the ring so quickly?]

"We were sort of in a rushed situation, but I'm not sure that I'm the one to ask about that," Brazen replied, [seeing how you did name me as such].

Bedlam reached up onto the desk and grabbed an apple, "if we all succeed in our missions, what happens then?" He bit into the apple. [Will we become one?]

Brazen shook his head, [why waste the power?] "This is working out pretty well for us so far."

Bedlam almost said something biting about him being the only one making any real progress in his mission, but then... if it hadn't been for the Relic, he may well still be tied down in the other room instead of being free. [If I bring Blake back to my side, which of my sides will she want to be by?]

"I'm not going to get between the two of you. Neither will Dom," Brazen immediately assured him, then with a sly look said "unless you ask us to get in bed with the two of you..."

Bedlam pondered. And thought. And considered slowly the proposition and its possibilities; how did the old saying go? Two heads are better than one, or something like that? "...maybe if Blake wanted to try it. Maybe that might convince her to come back to me. Maybe that's what she saw in Wukong and his team of human huntsmen." His face flashed with jealously for a moment. "Damn pretty-boys!"

"Ah, fuck them I say." Brazen held up his middle finger, then signed [kind of helps us against the competition].

Bedlam smiled, Brazen having cheered him up, if only slightly and if only for a brief moment. Blake would see the power they wielded: as the bearer of the Relic, from his alliance with Hazel and Cinder's master, Salem. She would finally understand that he had been right all along and, more importantly, fully capable of realizing his dream of liberating their people for all time. He imagined her kneeling before him, humbly. "I told you I'd take care of you, Blake. Now we can be together, free at last from all obstacles.

"Dominic should be getting some clothes to replace the ones of mine that you got wrecked," Brazen added as an afterthought.

"I'm terrible at picking out clothes, though. I always relied on Blake to do that sort of thing..." Bedlam pouted. What if Blake didn't like how he looked in whatever clothes Dominic scrounged for him? Appearances were important for matters of the heart!

"How hard could it be to get pants and stuff? I'm sure he'll do fine. On that note, though, can I have my clothes? I'm getting sick of being cooped up in here today, I have some stuff I should go out and do."

Bedlam finished his apple, then stripped out of Brazen's pants, shirt and the disguise. Brazen put on the clothes and handed Bedlam Neo's scroll, "make sure she doesn't die."

Bedlam looked at the image of Neo, now covered up but still tied down to the table. An idea struck him.

"Wait. What's the range on connection between the camera and the scroll?"

Brazen shrugged as he fiddled with the cloak. "No idea; it probably runs... off..."

"Yeah, if it runs off the city's network-"

"You could just take the camera-"

"Put it somewhere more useful!" Brazen and Bedlam finished the thought together, grinning.

"It sure is a pain having to hike all the way up the mountain to spy on Blake all the time."

"You think you can get in and out of there without getting caught? I only know what you've told us about it; didn't you say there were guards?"

"They'll be no match for me and my years of experience as a saboteur. I'll get in, plant the camera in the living room, and be out before they're any the wiser. It'll be like that first night I wore the grimm mask on a mission – in and out, nice and quiet."

"I guess if you don't come back Dom and I will at least know where to find you this time."

Bedlam shot him a sour look. Too soon, Brazen. Too soon.

"I'll test out the connection range of the scroll." Brazen said, so Bedlam tossed his clothed look-alike Neo's scroll. "If it reaches to the bakery on the other side of the neighbourhood, I think it'll be safe to say that it runs off the city grid."

While Brazen went off to do that, Bedlam braved the padded cell to see how much work it would take to move the camera. It wasn't a large thing, but it wasn't small, either. Larger than a scroll. I could probably stick it under the living room table or something, he thought. It wouldn't give him much in the way of a video feed, but he would be able to overhear Blake and her new friends.

Neo stirred behind him but he ignored her. She was a useless human, as far as he was concerned, and so long as she remained tied down he was all too happy to pretend that she didn't exist at all.

The device had a dust battery, he discovered as he examined it where Neo had stuck it into the foam wall. She had likely used the stool to get it up there, since she was so short. The dust would power it for weeks, easily, which hopefully should be more than enough time. He did not particularly wish to have to make repeated entries to Blake's guarded house, just to change a dying battery. Once would be dangerous enough as it was with the concentration of hostile fighters there.

"If I go in at night, most of them will be asleep..." he said to himself. "Yes. It will work." He waved at the camera, hoping Brazen was watching, and resolved to come back to grab it later once his theory about its range was confirmed; for now he needed a moment to relax. He spent a bit of time cleaning Blush on the desk. Not that he planned to use his rifle much in the city – it would attract undue attention – but the weapon hadn't really enjoyed being brought through the sewer into Mistral, and he had not made time before to clean it out.

Brazen returned, Dominic alongside him. "Guess who I found at the bakery?" They chimed. Brazen tossed Bedlam a warm baguette, split down the middle and slathered with butter.

"I told him about your plan for the camera; it works all the way to the bakery so I think our conjectures were accurate."

"It's a solid idea, if you can pull it off without getting caught," Dominic added. "Unless it is part of your plan to get caught? I don't want to rain on your parade but just because it worked out in our favour this time, I wouldn't deliberately get caught again."

"Yeah, no more getting caught!" Brazen said, whacking Bedlam on the shoulder with his own baguette.

Bedlam rolled his eyes. These two guys, sheesh! I get caught one time and they act like I'm a total novice.

"Here, clothes for you so that you can run off and do your stealth mission. I'll watch the prisoner while you two are out."

[Where are you going?] Bedlam asked Brazen.

"Ah, nowhere special. I need to grab some basic medicines and stuff for Neo so that she recovers faster. I'll try and set up a meeting with Hazel, too. With trust being what it is between us I'm not sure how that'll go."

"Wouldn't it be easier to just meet him at the airship?"

[Long walk] Brazen complained with his hands. Dominic and Bedlam accepted that; after all, it was part of the reason for Bedlam's spy-camera operation. Brazen muttered under his breath, "if I hadn't been so worried by you wrecking our aura, I might have thought to ask him stuff on the walk back into the city..."

Bedlam took his new clothes out from the bag. Fair-trade, faunus-friendly, sleek black pants and shirt with a frumpy dark robe that would hide his face within its shadow. As he kept digging clothes out of the bag, a scowl came to his face: like some cruel joke, Dominic had seen fit to add a new white blindfold for him, as if he might've missed the sensation.

As he made to complain to his clone, realization struck as he saw the letters on the other side of the lengthy receipt. He might be a terrorist, but the clothing industry was the real villain in Remnant. Just look at all these surcharges and taxes! He knew Mistral was corrupt but this was ridiculous. He wondered if Beacon had provided Blake with her schoolgirl outfit, or if she had had to scrounge lien together to buy it in order to fit in with her humans.

No wonder most people seem to just wear the same clothes each day, changing styles only when the changing season permits it. Even if they aren't living in the woods at a terrorist camp, nobody sane can afford many outfits.

As he finished putting on the new clothes, a thought struck him. Neo had only managed to spot him because she'd recognized his face on the train. He wasn't going to fare well with his mask - it was too well known - but he needed something to conceal himself with. He went into Neo's room and looked at the blindfold abandoned on the floor.

I'm not going to make any progress working on my aura's extrasensory perception if I don't exercise it.

He decided that he would wear the blindfold as much as possible going forward, to train. To remind himself of the consequences for failure, for capture by the enemy. Yes, outside of when he was using the binoculars to spy on Blake, the blindfold would be on his face. Covering his brand, hiding his identity, training him to be better. Training his suite of keen faunus senses to a state of readiness for the trials sure to come in his quest.

Dominic and Brazen asked him about his fashion accessory, and seemed to accept the idea once he'd explained it to them. Neither seemed to want to follow his example, instead saying that the best part of being multiplied was being able to test out new ideas. Bedlam left the warehouse, letting his nose, ears, and aura lead him up through the city streets.

Back to Blake.


NEOPOLITAN

She had no idea how long she had laid on the table for. She was comfy and warm now, though that hadn't been the case earlier. Adam was occasionally caring for her now, but he was also the one who had neglected her to the point that she had gotten sick! Or maybe she had just caught one of those horrible faunus-diseases Roman had warned her about when she had touched him; she tried to remember the symptoms and names of those but only a few sprung to mind.

Chicken pox? No, she'd had that when she was a kid and Roman said she couldn't get it twice.

Mad cow disease? If she had her scroll she could look the symptoms up on the Net. The name indicated similarity to her plight: she was in the grip of an angry cattle-crested criminal.

Adam had also been the one who shoved the cattle-prod down her pants: just enough to tantalize, not enough to finish the job. Her mood had bounced from one extreme to another for what felt like days: horny, angry, scared, horny again, congested, tired, then slightly hungry, but also horny. When he had finally come back in to tell her that she wouldn't be killed by him and his faunus followers, she had been somewhat delirious. She certainly hadn't been in the clearest state of mind. Presently swaddled in blankets and pillows that he seemed to have bought for her, she tried to think of what she had done when he had come into the room after leaving to have his short nap. If I get free of this, the first thing I'd do wouldn't be have a nap, Neo thought to herself.

He'd wanted her to help him find Cinder. He'd insisted she delay her rightful vengeance upon the woman so that he could torture some answers out of her. That could be fun. Neo thought that Cinder deserved a particularly gruesome death for costing her Torchwick, of the life she had scrounged together for herself from society's scraps, from her skills and Torchwick's ingenuity. I'll take an ice-cream scoop to her eyeballs, Neo fantasized, then I'll get creative and mean.

She had expected Adam to be a bit more sadistic to her as a prisoner, after what she had put him through – see: the cattle prod – and given the stories she had heard about him and his White Fang cronies. Wasn't he the one who had taken seven board-members of the SDC hostage a few years ago, mutilating them one by one until the company had conceded to the ransom demands? Hadn't he personally slaughtered scores of humans across Solitas and Anima before going to Vale? Hadn't he been the one leading the White Fang as they slaughtered the people at Amity and Beacon? Not that she was complaining about being allowed to keep herself intact – it just struck her as out-of-character, or at least contrary to his dark reputation. The only reasonable conclusion she came to was that he was just pretending to have forgiven her so quickly for what she had put him through, which begged the question: what's his angle? He was certainly planning something, but for the time being she couldn't understand what devious plot he was weaving around her. Instead of sore and scared, her captivity had just left her frustrated in a variety of ways.

Of everything that had happened after he'd come back in, what pissed her off the most was that he definitely didn't understand that she was mute; she had assumed at the start that he knew, but by the time his dick had gotten in her mouth it was clear that he just thought she was being stubborn.

Ah, the dick. She remembered – and regretted – biting that when she sneezed. Not her finest moment. It was far worse than even her earliest nights carousing through Vale after liberating herself from her parents and school. Adam hadn't gotten angry, though, like her dates had back in Vale when she had demonstrated insolence towards them. Lucky for her, because it wasn't like she would have been able to get away from the retribution she had expected afterwards. She had nobody left to smooth things over for her anymore. Torchwick wasn't around to get her out of this bind with a wave of his cane and a clever word.

She couldn't even try to run away!

Adam seemed to have realized she was sick at that point, after she'd bit down on his member. Using his semblance on her made her feel good – an understatement, of course – but not better. Apparently it was not a magical panacea for her illness, so he'd then put some of her clothes back on; he'd gotten her warmed up in a way that didn't involve her hormones. He'd heated up a bucket of water for her with the fire dust in his sword before she'd passed out. Later, though she didn't know how much later, Adam came back in and removed the camera without looking at her – like he had been angry at her, pointedly ignoring her presence. Then he'd come in again later with more blankets, some pillows, and medicine; no longer angry or ignoring her, he'd checked her temperature and fed her a bit more even though her appetite was temperamental. At least I'd not puked all over his shoes or something really gross, yet. She'd not had the medicine among her few things, and he'd not had it on him when she had captured him, so he must have gone out and risked getting caught by the authorities just to make sure she got well. She must have slept for longer than she thought, since it would have taken him a while to get the medicine and the pillows.

It was all rather sweet, her treacherous thoughts formed a picture of the renegade faunus going out of his way for her sake, buying the soft pillow she now snuggled at such great risk to himself in a city that wanted him dead. She tried to deny such ideas, arguing that he was still an enemy. He's just using you, she chided.

I wish he'd use me more! Great. Now the rogue half of her brain had teamed up with her lower-brain. Rationality was getting outnumbered!

He just wants you for your semblance, nothing more! She pleaded to the hormone-addled bits of her body. We could do so much better than some awful faunus like him, what would Roman think?

Roman's dead and would want us to be happy and full-filled! Came the retort from below, putting special emphasis on the last syllable. Great, now they had puns: her sanity could not handle humour of this magnitude. Neo felt her resolve wavering. Neo felt her reservations about Adam slipping away as the minutes of isolation ticked by.

Maybe he only saw her as useful because of her semblance, but she certainly was enamoured with his just as much! Burying her head up into a pillow he had provided for her, her imagination returned to her earlier fantasy of retiring to Menagerie. Living in the balmy clime with Adam and her big retirement package she'd discovered in his pants – and she didn't mean the wallet. She'd been with a lot of guys over the years, but Adam was possibly the most reciprocal one she'd entertained to date. Maybe it was just his semblance, but then again people did say that a person's semblance was a reflection of their soul.

His semblance was amazing: it felt like her hand had been given a million tender kisses when he used it on her, though there had been a sharp pain at the end as she climaxed, like a sour aftertaste. If what he had claimed was true, she had felt the sensation, the pleasure, of her oral ministrations reflected back at her.

And while she would never admit it, the final bite hadn't ruined the experience for her: it had sent her over the edge and turned her brain into pudding akin to what he had fed her prior.

Not that it was much of a contest, but still: best orgasm she'd had in months... except the one she'd had while he'd still been tied up as her prisoner, after she'd sucked him off for a longer while. No wonder she hadn't been able to get him to cum, which protected her tarnished pride in her seductive talents. He'd cheated the first time, then told her his secret the second time so that she was aware of what was happening. Which one was better? Neo wondered, and worried that if the second instance won out it would say something about her.

Was she some sort of closet masochist?

She chose to believe that Adam's semblance just made anything bearable, so long as the balance of pleasure was greater.

In any case, Neo had blacked out after each taste of his reflective semblance. She needed to give his dick a proper apology for biting it, and he had gotten out of his bonds before she could introduce him to the wet snugness of her lower lips, rocking hips, and inner bits. That would surely be the best way to overcome her speech disability and affirm their partnership!

...if it was a partnership. Neo furrowed her brow and thought about it all again. He hadn't ever appeared to be offering her a partnership, had he? He hadn't even been treating her like an equal. He had been treating her like a pet. Like an animal, like how she had seen Roman treating the White Fang he had been coerced by Cinder to ally with. While there were certainly worse things to be than the pampered human-pet of a faunus rebel leader, she felt like she could probably do better than that even if her body and mind had decided that she couldn't do better than him. She had to uphold Roman's legacy, right? Which probably meant not taking shit from Adam anytime soon.

No, she wouldn't be his pet. She'd form a quick partnership with the faunus, kill Cinder, then retreat to Menagerie to enjoy life to the fullest in the tropical sun. Her feminine wiles and charms would ensnare his virgin heart - and other virgin parts of his anatomy which had her interest - and he'd forget all about that Belladonna bitch in no time at all. Even if he did harbour lingering feelings for the black cat, it wasn't as if Neo lacked the means for a little sexy dress-up role-play; yes, she liked her signature hair colour, but that didn't mean she didn't look fine as a black-haired temptress, too. Cavorting in leisure on the sandy beaches of the continent humanity had ceded to the faunus people, Neo and Adam would be able to indulge every lustful kink she could imagine - and if Neo had one thing, she had an overactive imagination!

So now she lay on the table, swaddled up like a newborn infant in fresh dry sheets, feeling comfortable for the first time in a while. Her hair was still a wreck, dangling over the edge of the table; she was still a prisoner, she wasn't feeling at all fabulous, but at least she had a smidgen of hope for something further off than tomorrow.

Hope that he would let her out once she recovered, treat her with some degree of respect: either for her powerful semblance, or for the rest of what she could offer him.

Hope that she would get a chance to carve Torchwick's insignia into Cinder's corpse-flesh. Get a chance to hear the woman beg for mercy from Neo for her role in Torchwick's demise before she ran out of air in her lungs to beg with.

Hope that the moron-faunus would realize that she was not stubbornly defiant, not stuffed up with sick snot, but mute. Once her aura recovered from the illness she could use her semblance to make text that he could read. It would be a while before her aura recovered enough to manage that, though.

She still wondered how Adam's aura had recovered so quickly after she captured him and shattered it. He was very mysterious like that. Combined with his tortured handsomeness defined by countless scars and that semblance of his, Neo was sure that Roman would forgive her for her attraction to the powerful terrorist. Neopolitan looked down her chest, where perched atop the layer of blankets lay Torchwick's hat. One of Torchwick's hats, she corrected. He'd had dozens of them, all identical. There hadn't been a body to recover when she'd flown in the White Fang's bullhead to the wreckage of the Atlesian ship where Roman had been left after Little Red's little trick with her parasol. Neo had just taken this hat from their hideout when he never showed up. She'd learned he was dead from the Malachite twins, who'd heard it from Junior who'd heard it from the police – who in turn had heard the story from some Huntsman.

All Cinder's fault. It was her plan!

She imagined Torchwick's face as she remembered it, the way he held his cane and the acrid smell of his cigars while he grinned over some successful heist or swindle. The way he patted her head as she stood beside him while he plotted and schemed. The absolute freedom his lifestyle had given her, freedom she'd always craved. The best days of her life.

Despite faint hope, disbelief that what Miltia had said was true, Torchwick wouldn't have stood her up at the rendezvous if he was still alive, and everyone she heard from corroborated that he'd died up there. Died fighting, completely opposite of how either of them wished to go; no, we each would much prefer to die peacefully in our sleep, surrounded by luxury. At least his death was noted. People had known his name, had talked about his death because he was important. He got that at least. She had wished and imagined that he had somehow survived, but after a few months and the arrival of summer those fantasies had faded away. Her semblance's illusions of Roman had nothing on the real deal, and eventually she had realized that living in a world of pretend was not really living at all, so she had shattered her illusions. Leaving her with only hatred. Anger.

Regret.

Her mental image of Torchwick morphed into Adam, his face the one she had seen on the televisions as his attack on Haven had been thwarted: a masked devil of a man, more rage than flesh. They both had red hair. Both criminals. Each openly racist, but willing to work past that with the other for a larger scheme. Big egos, a need to be recognized by the masses. So many similarities, when she compared them.

Both were dum-dums.

Maybe she just had a type? None of Junior's boys had been anything like Torchwick or Adam. Maybe that was why those were just passing flings, blackmail set-ups, or cheap meals for her.

I'll work with Adam as his partner, she decided, and this time I'll keep the dum-dum alive!

With her goals clear, her mind focused entirely on ejecting the sickness from her as fast as humanly possible so that she could put her ideas into motion. It would just be a simple exercise of 'mind over matter'. Not even the nascent fetish of having her soon-to-be partner breed her while wearing Torchwick's hat distracted her for longer than a minute. Than five minutes. For no longer than half an hour.

...

Okay, it might have distracted her a bit longer than that, but it wasn't like the sickness was responding to her silently shouting at it to vacate her body, either, so one could forgive her frustrated fantasies focused on a towering faunus gripping her tightly, her stretched arms grasping upwards to cling onto the horns nestled under the hat while her body slid up and down his toned torso.

I need fresh underwear, she lamented.


BEDLAM

The clothes weren't right. They were loose around the waist, tight in the crotch, and they felt itchy on his legs.

Oh gods, Bedlam thought, I hope they didn't make this from faunus-wool. He actually had to check his pants at one point to make sure that they were actually men's pants. At least Dominic hadn't screwed up that much... but already Bedlam developed plans to pass the outfit off to one of his clones: Dominic if possible, Brazen if not. He held the blindfold in his hands; he blamed the irritation of the rest of his new outfit for distracting him, not letting him concentrate on further developing his aura-sight ability like he'd hoped. Moreso, it didn't really make sense for him to try out the new ability, still unperfected, while undertaking such a delicate task.

He took a deep breath and focused his mind on that task, ignoring the irritation of the new clothes. Infiltrate Blake's house, plant the camera somewhere it would catch their conversations, get out without being detected. He was lounging about around the house for an hour before sunset, watching team RWBY and their minions milling about around their base. He would be best to do it at night, when the inhabitants were asleep and all he would have to worry about were the token guards Ghira had brought in to protect his darling daughter. They were alert, but he was a professional at these sorts of things, experienced. He'd be able to pull this off.

"Come on Jaune, we can do another fifteen sets before you call it quits!" The bubbly-redhead shouted at her blonde compatriot, somewhat in view of the subtle spying eye of Bedlam, but well within his keen faunus hearing's range.

Jaune looked at his shield and shook his head. "No way, Nora. My scroll says I'm already wavering around 30 percent and you know Qrow doesn't want us to get too low while we're still in the city." He turned his shield to the energetic hammer-holder, baring the scroll he had embedded into the back of the boss of the shield. "We're lucky he let us train at all."

That's clever, Bedlam thought. It would let the huntsman keep an eye on his aura levels, and those of his allies, without having to reach for his scroll - a good thing to have on hand in a fight. I wonder if I could do something similar with my weapon. It gave him something to think about while waiting for Jaune and the rest to go to sleep when shadows gave way to darkness in the streets of Mistral.

The broken tail of the moon glowed brightly in the sky. Bedlam took a long gasp of the city's night air. This was his people's time to shine, this was when he was strongest: when the moon was the light in the darkness, he did what had to be done to lead his people to salvation. Blake had said so, when she had still seemed to believe unquestioningly in him and the cause.

He saw the ebon-haired object of his desire through a second-story window. Brushing her hair, wearing her pyjamas. The humans had made her weak, had made her follow their sleep cycle. She had been assimilated. Tarnished by her time spent with them, weakened. It filled him with rage, and he had to rationalize with himself to not simply rush in right then to cut a swath through the humans she had surrounded herself with.

Best to avoid that, he was finally able to convince himself. They certainly had him outnumbered and, without relying on exceptional good luck on his part, would probably overpower him before he killed more than three of them. If the blonde human had a scroll in his shield with his teammates' auras registered on it, it would certainly cause an alarm to go off if any such humans auras were shattered whilst they slumbered. Safe to say that RWBY had a similar setup. Their teams seemed so close, he could even imagine that all of them had one another's auras monitored on their scrolls. Even on the slim chance they didn't have such foresight: could he take the risk with his life and mission at stake? Well, I might at least be able to take out the Schnee before they put me down...

An honour better left to Brazen or Dominic. Plus, if he stayed his blade now, having Blake hurt Weiss as a way of showing her renewed loyalty to him would be just as much fun. Blake, clad in lingerie, kneeling in front of me while Weiss writhes on the floor, straining against her bindings. Muffled cries of protest blocked by a gag as Blake rises to do my bidding, to show that she understands that humans - all humans - are our enemies.

Or our slaves. Blake begins to remove the clothes from Weiss, constantly looking back to me for approval for each motion... Bedlam shook the fantasy from his mind. There would be time for those later, when he was not in the middle of his latest mission.

The seven guards patrolled around the house in groups of three, one of them remaining at the front door. They all had their scrolls running comms, keeping up idle chatter. Most of it was about how much they wanted to get back to Menagerie. You should have stayed in Menagerie, but that is between you and Dominic now, you race-traitors. If he was trying to take them down, he'd have a tough time of it. Ghira must have made sure they knew the importance and danger of their job – in the heart of the city, Blake was surrounded by potential enemies. Bedlam didn't imagine he was alone in scouting the house's defenses. Mistral was notorious as a den of criminals who'd love a valuable political hostage like Menagerie's princess. He surmised that the guards probably had unlocked auras, given the local hazards, so that taking down one or three would probably alert the others to the intrusion, just as how damaging any of Blake's friends would alert the others' scrolls. Perhaps not quickly enough to save their own treacherous hides, but certainly enough time to alert the residents and the authorities. Ghira might have set them up like that specifically to deter him; his old mentor seemed to think that Adam was completely given to crazed bloodlust now - sadly for Ghira, Adam had managed to get his mind in order. He wasn't Dominic. He didn't care about the White Fang anymore. All he cared about was taking care of this nagging Blake issue. Bedlam could just avoid the guards entirely, letting Ghira's entire setup work against Blake and her teammates: with no alarm raised and the guards fine in the morning, they would not think anything was amiss and the candid camera would capture everything. Or so Bedlam hoped.

Honestly the entire plan relied heavily on Blake and her friends talking freely in the living room of the house about something relevant to their plans for the future that he could capitalize on. It was much more likely that he'd just have a better ear to listen to Jaune's team complaining about training regimens; a front-row seat to a group of teenaged girls complaining about make-up and their outfits and boys they erroneously considered cuter than him.

As he made his way into the living room, he had to wonder why Blake would assume that he would go through the trouble of trying to fight the guards outside before coming for her: she had been on stealth missions with him often enough to know that he could do things without killing when the occasion demanded it. The only answer that made sense to him was that she had thought that the sight of the Menagerie militia faunus outside would remind him of his defeat at Haven and make him forget his training...

The other two think that my focus is a weakness, he preened, and maybe they were right about it when it got me caught by Neopolitan, but now it is working in my favour. I am the only Adam who could have done this job right. Even if all three of him had stormed the house, slaughtering the guards and humans, he doubted that would satisfy him. Their deaths would be too quick, too clean; it wouldn't be proper payback to Blake for her betrayal.

He looked around the living room. He could put it under the coffee table in the middle of the room, but if anyone decided to lie down on the floor and look up they might see the camera there. There was a lot of seating, but there were more of them living in the house. Someone is bound to sit on the floor and see it sooner than later. He looked under one of the plush couches; there was enough room under there for the camera to fit in, and he would even be able to see through the lens a bit. He reached under the couch to feel for a place to fit the device in, only to find something cold and hard already there. Curious, he lifted the couch up a bit and was alarmed to see a listening device already there; he gently lowered the couch to the floor.

Mistral. The government, or perhaps some local criminals, had beaten him to the punch and was already spying on RWBY. Or, more accurately, spying on what Ghira said while visiting his daughter. The moment the local powers had realized a foreign leader was in their midst, of course they would bug anywhere he might talk privately with his confidants and family.

If I leave the microphone in place, then the locals will know what I know if Blake's people do anything relevant in this room. If I remove it, they'll suspect that Blake or her allies found it and destroyed it: will they try to put in a replacement? Will they punish her or her team, or would that just be an awkward diplomatic incident for them?

Probably not. With the faunus militia in town to public acclaim, and their ranks of huntsmen decimated by Hazel and Lionheart's machinations and increased grimm attacks after Beacon, the human government is at the mercy of Ghira. If the microphone was planted here by criminals, they probably planted it before RWBY even arrived at the house and won't risk a confrontation with academy trained fighters – especially since they're law-abiding foreigners. It was funny, in a way, that the humans of Mistral had found themselves conquered by the pacifist, if only temporarily.

Another thought came to him: it could even be something that Lionheart put into the room for Salem and her minions, before Ghira arrived. Bedlam wondered how much Cinder and Lionheart had known about Blake's friends' plans before they had arrived at Haven for their confrontation; who knows, it's not like I can ask either of them now. Bedlam could think of nobody else interested in Blake's affairs, so after due consideration he crushed the microphone in his hand. Even after all that you've done to me, Blake, I still find myself having to protect you from your own incompetence. Maybe he had not taught her as well as he had hoped; certainly she had strayed from his philosophy, but to be so blatantly unaware of her own home being bugged... shameful. Despite his shame as her teacher, he hoped that if some Mistralian operative was actively listening he had blown out their eardrums by crushing the device; even traitors like Ghira and Blake were marginally better than human spies in his book. Looking around the room, he saw what might be a better alternative to putting the camera under the couch, since that location might be examined by whatever persons had planted the microphone. He went over to the wooden dresser by the wall and opened one of the drawers.

It would suit his purpose.

It was empty inside; the temporary residents hadn't had any need for the extra storage space, so the furniture was completely decorative during their stay. He put the camera in the drawer and unscrewed the handle, leaving a hole to let the camera see through. Would they notice that the handle is missing? He went into the kitchen and grabbed a thin knife and began to whittle the handle, boring a hole through the centre of it to make it less suspicious, letting the flakes of wood fall into the drain of the sink.

It was slow, delicate work, and took longer than he would have liked. Long enough that his faunus hearing detected the creak of a floorboard, then of a stair. Like a ninja, he leapt up onto the counter, then pressed his body up to the corner of the ceiling with his feet pressed against the cabinetry. One hand against the ceiling, the other against his Blush on his back, poised to shoot Wilt out to defend himself from Blake.

The youngest girl, the one they called Ruby, shuffled into the room with all the subtlety of a zombie clad in flower-print pyjamas.

"...cookies-mmmmm...secret-treats-mmmmm… must have you..."

Bedlam didn't let down his guard, wary of a trick, but it seemed like the girl was sleep-walking. She shambled up to the fridge and opened it, taking out a resealable container full of cookies which Bedlam suspected the girls had baked during their boring stay in the house after the battle. A letter taped to the container read 'RUBY DO NOT EAT', clearly visible even for human eyes in the light of the open fridge.

She opened the container and ate one of the cookies. She wasn't sleep-walking. She was sleep-eating! Bedlam smiled, appreciating her utter disdain for the laws others would impose on her. Then he remembered that she was one of the humans who had helped ruin Blake.

If it wouldn't screw up my mission, I would drop down right now and stick my sword through her, he thought. That'd teach Blake to make friends with human scum.

Blake, his mind thought of his darling. Her bedroom must be close, he thought as his back pressed up against the ceiling. This is the closest I've been to her since Haven. He almost felt like his aura was touching hers. Was she dreaming about him, upstairs in her bed? Did she remember all the time they spent together, for the more-than-a-decade they'd been together in the White Fang? He recalled how she had blossomed while he had known her: how her martial skills had come to rival his own, how her body had grown...

He felt his own body doing some growing of its own, straining against the tight fabric of the pants Dominic had somehow thought were appropriately designed. He tried to stop thinking about how Blake looked.

He failed.

He spent the better part of ten minutes perched, uncomfortably with his erection pressed against his trousers, on the cabinetry while the girl ate several cookies at an agonizingly slow pace. She seemed to wake up enough to realize what she was doing, though she ate another two cookies before returning the cookies to the fridge, then washed it down with a glass of milk. After a furtive look around to make sure nobody had witnessed her deed, she tip-toed back upstairs thinking herself the stealthiest thing to ever walk.

The real claimant to that title dropped back down to the floor without a sound, readjusted his pants by tugging at the hem, then swept over to the dresser where he replaced the knob of the drawer handle. Nobody would notice anything amiss, and he'd have some visual input from his plan rather than just audio.

He escaped the house as he'd come, undetected by Ghira's guards stationed outside: a shadow flitting through the tree, across the rooftop and away from their refuge. High on his success, he strode down the streets in his uncomfortable disguise - blindfold reincluded - and considered what to do next. He pulled out the scroll and confirmed that he was able to receive audio and visual stream from the planted camera.

It pleased him. It was another step towards bringing Blake back to his side: learning more about her plans, her friends, and what they had that had convinced her to stay with them instead of returning to him.

He decided to find his way to a weapons shop, to buy some ammunition for Blush and use a workstation to modify Wilt's handle to accommodate holding his scroll. He wanted to make it so that his scroll could be unfolded from the handle as needed, removing the need for him to reach for it in his pants with a hand he probably wouldn't be able to spare during a fight. It wouldn't be as convenient as Jaune's shield, but it was still a sound idea. He'd certainly be more prone to lose his scroll – or his pants – before losing Wilt, right? Especially in a fight.

Since RWBY had set themselves up in a neighbourhood that housed a fair number of huntsmen and mercenaries passing through Mistral, it didn't take him long to find a nearby dust machinery shop. He only had to wait a half hour – desperately trying to wear in his new pants all the while – before the shopkeeper showed up to open for business. The man accepted Bedlam's lien and one of the fake huntsman licenses he kept in his wallet, allowing Bedlam free reign in the crafting station room while he went about setting up his dust displays in the front of the store. Adam claimed one of the stations for himself, the protective barrier placed to prevent one person's work from sparking at their neighbours serving to give him valuable privacy as well. He removed his blindfold and laid it on the flat of the work table, then detached the handle of Wilt from the rest of the blade and attached it to the lathe. He began work, measuring the length of his scroll and sketching up some ways to let the screen of the scroll roll out from his handle. Springs. He needed springs, so that it popped out quickly on command.

Neo's scroll sat to the side as he worked, playing the dark scene of the unoccupied living room. Nothing was happening. Blake and her friends were still asleep, lazily sleeping in.

Bedlam's progress on his weapon was slow, since his attention so often found itself pulled towards the dark screen despite the inactivity there. He didn't want to miss anything.