String Theory

Ashley Lily was so nervous she felt sick. She stood on the deck of a boat, as it lazily drifted from Vale to Patch. She could hear Dusty vomiting his guts up into the water, and Schwarz was next to him, keeping him from falling over the railing. Sylvie stood next to Ashley, simply being there for her as the latter tried and failed to keep her aunts' reaction from echoing in her head.

Ashley had literally drank bleach once - she had been twelve and mistook a cup of it for water after playing outside. She slugged it down in one go, made a 'yuck' face, and found Ecru in the laundry room to ask for 'less weird water'. Ten years on, she still vividly remembered Ecru screaming so loud that Srebro, shovel in hand, crashed through the walls between the garden and her family, and the neighbors came running over. For years she had nightmares not about what she'd done, or what she later learned it would do to her, but how Ecru had reacted to it. Tears had been streaming down the woman's face, her voice was hoarse for days afterwards. The first time she'd fought a Grimm hadn't been as scarring or as terrifying as the look on her aunt's face and the sound of her voice as she squeezed Ashley close to her.

When Ashley spoke to her aunt today, Ecru's reaction had managed to be so terrifying that it immediately brought that memory to mind, and replaced it handily. Ecru had gone from dead tired to fully awake in a heartbeat, and Ashley had never, in her entire life, heard her aunt speak so calmly and sternly. Like watching a wheel spin so fast it looked like it wasn't moving at all, her voice was completely level, her instructions crystal clear: Don't go back to Beacon, don't even call in sick. Don't tell anyone where you're going, start walking and don't stop for anything. Come home. Right. Now.

Ashley had just finished staring down a gods-damned assassin with a mask more advanced than Atlesian military technology, in the middle of an underground super-bunker that served as a home for the world's deadliest outlaws, after worming her way through a nightclub that was a front for the most dangerous people in the world. She had been told she'd invoked the name of a boogeyman that scared other boogeymen, and by those interactions, had learned she had been walking around with the assassin equivalent to a billion lien, cash.

And yet, what made her nearly tear up from fear was the utterly calm, rapid-pace reaction from her aunt.

There was no denying it, there was no rationalizing it. She had stepped into something big, even bigger than that damn nightclub and what it represented. There was a thread connecting everything, from her aunts' dead team leader twenty years ago to headmasters and living legends going to war against the king of crime, and she hadn't tugged on it - she'd tied it to an anvil and dropped it!

She turned to Sylvie, who stirred next to her in the moonlight. "Did I fuck up?"

Sylvie regarded her for a moment, as the boat bobbed up and down while it cut through the waters. "I can't answer that, Ashley." She said, honestly. "And…" She said, the word passing through her throat with strain, as though she had to physically push it out of her chest. "I…" She paused, frowning out at the water in front of her. "I don't know how to help you." She reached up and placed her hand on Ashley's back, the movements stiff, robotic, and clearly unnatural to her. "But… You…" She let out all the air in her lungs in a frustrated huff - she wanted to help Ashley, but she hadn't the foggiest how to even try. "You have had adrenaline course through and drain out of your body several times in a short period. This would affect anyone's emotional state. Add on that you are in a stressful situation, and you are facing problems you could never have been prepared for, and your current state is understandable. It will pass." She rubbed Ashley's back, "all you are doing is seeking information. Doing so is never a bad thing. It allows us to make informed decisions." She looked over and up to Ashley, her expression troubled - communicating to her that she knew this wasn't a good way to help Ashley, and she was disappointed about it, but also that it was all she was capable of.

That brought the waterworks. All the stress and worry and the 'am I crazy' and the 'am I overthinking things' and the 'holy shit, holy shit, I'm in a mob bar I'm going to die' finally welled up and released. Sylvie looked at a complete loss as Ashley let her head hang and let it all out, but she kept doing what she could and just stayed with her. She didn't cry, or sob, she just stopped holding it in, let the tears flow as she tried to prepare herself for what the hell she was sailing into.

They left Vale and reached Patch in less than five hours. Ashley had no damn idea how, why, or where Ecru had managed to get a boat and a captain to bring her over so late, but she didn't question it. Nor did she question Ecru and Blue's presence at the docks when they arrived. She noticed that the woman was still in her pajamas, but didn't have the strength to ask if she'd gone straight to the port and waited the entire time. The woman didn't say a word - she took Ashley in her arms the moment the boat slid into port, and squeezed her as tight as she could. Ashley remembered how this had squeezed the air out of her when she was little, when had that stopped?

Ecru held her for several long moments, completely ignoring the awkward 'we're here' cough that Dusty let out. When she finally let her niece go, she shifted to holding her cheek.

"I'm sorry, baby." She said, her own voice trembling with emotion. "Baby I am so sorry."

Ashley held her aunt's hand against her cheek, words failing her as, with each passing second, she realized anew that this was deeper than she could have imagined. "Ah… Aunt Srebro's coming home?" She finally pushed out, though the effort exhausted her.

Ecru nodded, blinking heavily, trying to stay as strong as she had over the scroll despite the problem literally coming home to her. "I already texted her. She's just a couple hours out. Local job, finished yesterday. I'll talk to you tonight, right now if you want… But it would be better if we waited."

Ashley looked into Ecru's dark eyes for a long time, a war raging within her as she wrestled with wanting this all to be over, for the stress to go away, and just wanting both of her aunties.

She nodded, and stepped to the side. "This, is, uh -"

"I'm Schwarz, ma'am." Schwarz took over.

Ecru frowned, examining Schwarz. "She told me you were in your thirties. What kind of idiot makes this career change this late?"

Schwarz took it in stride: "Same kind that wants to be a Huntsman, ma'am." He said with a nod.

Ecru grunted, and turned her eyes to Sylvie.

"Sylvie."

"She said you don't talk much."

"She's correct."

"Why?"

"I don't have much to say."

Ecru turned to Dusty next. He was still green from the boat, but did his best to stand up straight. "Hi, Miss Lily, I'm Dusty. Come from the farms up north. Nice to meet you, though I wish it were under -" He stopped as the boat ride got its last shot in, and he did his best to drop to his knees and throw up into the water.

"I like that one." Ecru pointed at Dusty, who was managing to vomit and apologize at the same time. "I know how teams work. Her other aunt was part of mine. I know if I tell you all 'thanks goodbye' you'll just come anyways, so instead I'll say if I even think you've repeated anything you hear tomorrow, I swear to the gods, no exaggeration, I will kill you."

"Auntie Ec…" Ashley cringed.

"I understand, ma'am."

"Understood."

"Wouldn't dream of it, Miss Lilly!"

At length, they gathered up Dusty and all returned to Ashley's home. Blue led the way, tail lazily wagging, while Ecru took Ashley's hand and didn't let it go for anything. When they reached the house, Ecru let them in, quickly acquiring some ginger ale for a thankful Dusty, and putting Schwarz to work setting up pillows and blankets for him, Sylvie, and the big man. Ashley initially took a step towards her room, but knew from intuition and general logic that she was in for something bad in the morning, and just wanted the comfort of friends and family, so she grabbed linens for herself and joined her team in the living room. No one commented on it, and the Lily household was filled with silence soon after.

They awoke some hours later, the moon still high in the dark sky, when Srebro arrived. She tried her best to keep quiet and spare them her arrival, but she had the deck stacked against her: Ashley had lived with her, Sylvie was a light sleeper, Dusty was used to waking up the moment he heard activity, and Schwarz, though he slept through the door opening, didn't sleep through the kick Dusty sent his way. Greetings were exchanged, and soon Ecru was brought back downstairs, where she made coffee and tea for those of them that drank it. There was silence around the table as everyone took their first sips and let the atmosphere shift over from waking up to business.

Ashley, feeling guilty for having disobeyed their wishes and wanting to spare her aunts the decision of getting right to it or asking what all had happened, chose to start. She told them the story, how she overheard them talking but waved it off, all the way to her brief trip through Junior's the night before and the assassin in the tech-mask. As she expected, the strongest reaction came when she revealed she'd given Ozma her family name - Srebro's hand shot over to Ecru's arm, fast enough that Blue meandered over to her and put his head in her lap with a light whine. Ecru's entire body went tense, but she just bade Ashley keep talking.

When she finished, the former and the retiring Huntresses digested the story.

"So smart." Came Srebro's distant compliment, as she smiled sadly at her niece.

Ecru's was a more sardonic, "one point of failure. One point of failure, every time."

There was another brief period of silence, as everyone around the table waited for the two to gather their wits and finally end this little saga.

Srebro was the one to speak first. "You need to understand that nothing you're about to learn changes who you are." She said, softly, but with an ironclad conviction. "The only reason we waited to tell you was because we wanted to wait for you to be ready. To understand the nuances of the world enough that you could understand that you and your parents are different people… And though they did everything they could to protect you from their decisions, you may have to pay for them in some way. We wanted you to enjoy the simple life while you had it, before…"

"That's why we called Ruby. We were hoping she could buy you those last few years. We told her what we're about to tell you… But she already knew almost everything." Ecru picked up, as she fiddled with her coffee cup. "There… Really is no easy or believable way to tell you this, so we're just going to ask you to take what we say at face value, okay?" She looked over to Ashley, who steeled herself and nodded.

"Your mother was a terrorist. She caused the Fall of Beacon, and the Breach of Mistral."

"Your father was an alien, and even if he was on our side, he helped her every step of the way.."

Silence.

Then:

BANG!

All eyes shot towards Dusty, who slammed his hands on the table. "Holy fuck I know this one!" He then immediately clamped his hands around his mouth, realizing what he'd done, but that didn't stop Schwarz from literally punching him in the groin.

"Time and a place, you asshole! Shut up!" Schwarz hissed, as Dusty just nodded - already knowing he'd screwed up.

Ashley shook her head, swiping her hand through her hair as she tried her best to process her aunts' words. A part of her wanted to disbelieve them, especially given how ridiculous their blunt declarations had been, but the rest of her knew that they wouldn't make this up, and something like this really had been something that could only be started by ripping off the bandaid. How could one gently approach this? Especially with how fragmented her own understanding was. They wanted her to take them at face value, so she bit back her doubts and tried to.

The problem was what the hell she would comment on first. She raised a hand, but it faltered, shaking as a dozen different thoughts got jammed up in her throat, trying to be the first out.

"An alien?" She finally pushed out.

Ecru took in a long breath, and let it out in a heavy sigh. "Yeah."

"Uh… Are, uh…" Ashley looked down at the table, staring right through it as she shook her head. "Are… Are we talking little green man, rubber mask, or unknowable horror?"

Srebro answered this one, "frankly… We have no idea. He's Human, indistinguishable from us except the planet he came from. We don't know if his kind came first, or us. We don't know what, if any, differences there are between us. We don't know how two Human species exist, just that they do."

That actually made Ashley feel a bit better, in a small way. Just like her aunts said: She was still her, still Human, even though she was also… Technically an alien.

Sylvie decided to pick up for her and give her a moment to think. "Are we to understand then that the Hidden Kingdoms were also from this other Human planet?"

Her aunts nodded. "We think that was a story the Kingdoms perpetuated so no one would ask too many questions." Said Srebro.

"We figured their idea was it would take so long for us to defeat the Grimm - if we ever do - that when we finally explore all of Remnant, enough time will have passed that they can say the 'Hidden Kingdoms' must have fallen."

"You think? You figure?" Ashley noticed.

Srebro nodded, "that's at the end of the story… But suffice to say, until you told Ozma your old name, no one knew you existed. Your parents gave you to us to hide, because their enemies had found them and they feared their return to the world stage would put you in danger."

"The second Faunus Rebellion?" Ruby had said her father had ended it.

"The day after your father dropped you off, he ended the war."

"He was that powerful?" Ashley couldn't comprehend the idea. "Or… Is?"

"Is." Said Ecru, "or… Assuming he's alive, but if Taurus couldn't kill him, and no one went after him after that reporter chick fizzled out, then there's no way he's dead."

"There's no other way to say it but magic, love." Said Srebro. "His species… Their semblance is literal magic. Or at least his was. He can do anything."

Schwarz raised his hand, "how about, before we keep jumping around, we start from the beginning. Go back to terrorists and aliens." A beat, "actually, go back further. We're taking what you say at face value because you asked, and because it would be cruel to make this up, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Do you have that evidence?"

"Uh, can I -"

"You shut up, we're mad at you." Schwarz gave Dusty a light smack on the back of his head.

Ecru produced Goud's bag - which, Ashley noticed, seemed to be heavier than when she'd given it to them. Out from this bag came a small box, which Ashley actually recognized:

"Your… Jewelry box?" She got an ominous feeling, given that one of the few times she'd ever seen both aunts genuinely furious had been the time she'd tried to break into it to see the things inside.

Ecru silently cracked open the box - revealing hundreds of small glass vials, each of which contained even smaller things Ashley could scarcely identify, both because of their size and their bizarre - and appropriately - alien appearances. The only one Ashley recognized immediately was a vial that held a pile of miniature glass Garden coins, which reminded Ashley of the encounter that finally convinced her she really needed to leave the Garden.

I'll be damned, they really hired a super criminal to keep an eye on me. Ashley's soft scoff went unheard, as she tried to parse the absurdity of the fact, and how the woman must have reacted to what had likely been the easiest paycheck of her life.

Ecru dug through the box until she reached the bottom and produced the only unique vial inside - one that had a piece of paper taped to it. There were several things written on it, most crossed out. At a glance, Ashley saw 'Luke, I am your father', 'Batman is Bruce Wayne', 'Spoiler Alert', and 'It was his sled', but the one the writer finally settled on was: 'Secrets the universe doesn't know about'. Ecru banged the vial against the table, cracking it like an egg and causing its contents to grow several times their size.

Pictures. Dozens of them, alongside some notes that, at a glance, seemed to be directed more towards Ecru and Srebro - explanations of what the contents were, with an ominous 'for when you'll need them' at the bottom of one.

Ecru pulled the top two pictures from the pile. The first one was of a planet, taken from both sides, but not at all like Remnant. It had two titanic landmasses, as well as two enormous masses of ice at the top and bottom, all of which were surrounded by deep blue oceans and white clouds.

On a hunch, Ashley turned the picture around, and saw that it had indeed been captioned. The top half of the back was written in a script she couldn't recognize - bulky, blocky letters almost entirely made up of straight lines in varying configurations. Below that, however, was what she assumed to be the same thing, but written in Common:

Earth.

Like Remnant, but with less cool-looking continents (You fuckers got dragons!), fewer animal people, no (confirmed) demons, something like six times the necessary number of bombs to wipe us all out, significantly more mundane conspiracy theories, and a military budget big enough to fight God.

Mostly harmless.

"You can read the notes he left behind for us, too, but they mostly just reiterate what he wrote on the pictures, and explain the tools he left in the box." Srebro assured her, "that, is a picture of his home planet." She said, as Ashley passed it around. "He had a lot of data and technology left over from when he arrived here, and he kept meticulous care of it all." She then passed the second picture over, and Ashley had to blink a few times when she saw it.

Save one, they were older by a good ten years, but she recognized every person in this picture.

On the left was an older, and heavily scarred Goud Etiolate. He had a smile on his face, but Ashley could tell it was the practiced, tired kind one got so used to putting on that they could fool almost anyone. It was good, but she could see it was fake.

To his right was Cinder Fall. It took her a few moments to recognize her, but remembering what her aunts had just said provided the connection she needed to drudge up the old memories. Ashley remembered reading about her, how she'd summoned a wyvern and caused Beacon's ultimate fall, and how she'd died in the final battle of the war, but here she was: Alive and well, and far less disfigured than her husband.

Most shocking of all, however, was the little ten year old girl in between them. Wearing a cute Atlesian school uniform, her dark hair tied up in pigtails, missing a few teeth and proudly holding up a report card showing all A's was her. Ashley. She was looking at a family photo, ostensibly taken because 'look ma! I'm smart!'

Ashley looked up at her aunts, the picture shaking in her hand. "Goud?" She croaked.

"Nebo." Said Srebro.

"Aldric." Said Ecru.

"And…" Ashley couldn't finish, instead just pointing at the orange-eyed woman to Goud's right. Her aunts just nodded.

A terrorist, and an alien.

Ashley limply let Sylvie take the picture, as she tried to process that.

" 'A bad woman, a worse man, and an honest-to-god angel.' " She heard Sylvie read out. "I would point out, as Grimm's Advocate, that this is not ironclad evidence." She passed the photo over to the boys. "It could have been doctored."

Ecru gave Sylvie an unamused look, "the magic growing-shrinking things and the alien letters aren't good enough?"

"No."

"What would be?" Ecru asked, sounding as amused as she was challenged.

"The onus is on you."

"Nevermind, I like this one."

"I believe them." All eyes shifted towards Ashley, as she took another photo.

This one was a selfie of a younger Goud, seated in what looked like a dining room in an airship. He had his hand up, thumb and pinkie extended, and had in frame Cinder Fall again, as well as a young, gray haired man and a violently green-haired woman. Cinder didn't seem to notice the picture being taken, focused more on a cup of coffee and something on her scroll, while the green haired girl seemed to be deliberately ignoring Goud, and the gray-haired one was giving it an expression that could only be described as 'huh?'.

She didn't recognize the other two from any history books, but it wasn't hard to conclude that was because they were casualties in Cinder - and, apparently, Goud's - war on Remnant. Ashley flipped the picture over.

Left to right: An idiot about to lose every single visible limb and organ, an idiot about to lose two, advantage-her, back-to-back, four-on-one fights, an idiot about to die by her own weapon, and an idiot who's waiting to be smited (smitten? Smoted?) by a god.

"You don't need my particular semblance to know what to look for in doctored pictures." Ashley threw away all pretenses and just grabbed the entire pile of pictures, rifling through them. "And I'm beginning to realize the things you said about ideas and people were meant to prepare me for this."

Fully half of the pictures were of her, Goud, and Cinder as a family, ranging from age ten all the way back to her as an infant. She didn't fail to notice in her fervor how there didn't seem to be any photos of Goud and Cinder, only of the three of them, and even then, in none of those photos did they seem very intimate. There was almost always some kind of distance between them, a lack of contact, or just a general stiffness. Was there something she wasn't noticing, or did the two terrorists actually get married and stay together because they had a baby? What kind of sense did that make?

The other half of the pile consisted of snapshots Goud had taken during his war. Each picture had a similarly irreverent caption on the back, describing what it was and giving her a small peek into the nature of the captioner.

Looking at a picture of her playing in a great big field of beanstalks - of all things - Ashley asked: "Why don't I remember this?" She got the vaguest sense of deja-vu whenever she saw pictures of the older Cinder and the scarred Goud, but chasing that rabbit led her exactly nowhere.

"He had a device, it wiped your memories." Ecru explained, "he did it to… Ensure you never stayed up at night, asking when they would come back."

"At the risk of repeating myself, we still haven't started from the beginning." Schwarz pointed out.

Ecru and Srebro exchanged glances, the latter nodded to the former, who took in a deep breath. They took turns, picking up for each other when the other faltered or needed a moment to recover. The story they told was the one they themselves had been told - or rather, that Goud, or Aldric, or Drake, or whatever he wanted to be called, had told to Ecru, who relayed it to Srebro. It was fragmented by time and memory, boiled down to its basest elements, but nevertheless provided the answers Ashley had sought.

They started from the beginning - the very beginning, revealing to Ashley Ozma's true nature as an immortal, reincarnating wizard, and his marriage to and war against the Grimm Queen herself. From there, they moved to her father's magical abduction and his arrival on Remnant, meeting her mother, creating his plan to infiltrate the 'Legion of Doom' and eventually make contact with Ozma's 'Justice League'. Though they admitted they either couldn't remember or were simply unaware of the true breadth of his crimes, they explained that any crime that could be committed, had been committed by both of her parents between their meeting and the end of the war. Murder - a mind-boggling amount of murder! - terrorism, warfare and war crimes, a web of lies and deception, Aldric's endless manipulation and constant betrayals of his closest 'friends', his sanctioning of the murder of his own teammate, and on and on it went.

Her mother, though her list of crimes was comparatively small, was not more innocent by comparison - she planned the Fall of Beacon and the near destruction of Mistral. She murdered and stole the literal souls of four women ranging from fully adult to an actual child. She orchestrated Aldric's murder of his own father and never told him, and unlike her father, who worked for some twisted sense of a greater good, her mother had done everything she'd done for simple, greedy, selfish power, and had seemingly only realized that she might have been the baddy when she was promptly betrayed by everyone she knew.

Only to travel through time, refuse to learn her lessons, and continue to seek her goals by any means - up to and including convincing one of the Maidens to walk willingly to their death to spare her family and her tribe.

They spent a full hour on that one alone, and Ashley was pretty sure there wasn't a single person at the table that truly understood how the hell there ended up being two versions of her mother beyond Dusty throwing his hands up and saying 'a wizard did it'. Sylvie promptly tried to rip his ear off, because he still didn't have permission to talk.

Ashley had just as much trouble comprehending that her father had become a literal God by the end of it all. The basic structure she understood - magic was magic, he used a loophole to grant himself omnipotence - but the extreme escalation just caused wires in her head to cross, not at all helped by the fact that her aunts didn't know anything about that beyond what they'd been told: Her father told Ecru he'd become a God, and solved all of his problems with a literal deus ex machina.

From there, Schwarz pre-emptively covered Dusty's mouth as Ecru and Srebro promptly began confirming conspiracy theories left and right. All four Kingdoms covered up the truth, covered up her father's existence and her mother's survival, gave the credit to RWBY and JNPR, pardoned Roman Torchwick, and implicitly supported Adam Taurus' rise to power by not intervening. This inevitably led to the second Faunus Rebellion, which Mistral was actively losing so bad that Ruby Rose invoked her father, leading to his return to Ecru's house and requesting Ashley's asylum. He wiped her memories, challenged Taurus, crippled him so badly he was still eating through a straw, and then went to Mistral to kill so many people on both sides they had to stop fighting.

"Initially, I never wanted to tell you anything about him or your Mom." Ecru admitted at the end. "But Srebro convinced me you deserved to know. I hope you believe me, Baby - we were going to tell you."

Ashley did - she remembered their earnestness during the semester break, the pain in their voices as they tried to set the foundation without giving everything away. A part of her genuinely wondered if, in some twisted 'I know you know I know' thing, that that had been their way of either telling her, or putting her on the trail so she would open herself up to the madness that was her origins. Intentionally or otherwise, they set her loose on a trail that led to her being willing to hear out wild conspiracy theories, that rapidly proved to almost universally have some nugget of wisdom to them.

By the time they were finished, the morning had long since bled into the afternoon, and Ashley needed time to herself. They all broke apart for time to process, with Ashley meandering outside into the backyard. She leaned over the porch, her head spinning as she tried and overall failed to process everything she'd been told today.

It was all awful, being told she was the daughter of two godlike super terrorists. She could barely comprehend the bodycount they supposedly had between them, and she frankly couldn't comprehend the implications of her father's mere existence. He was an alien, but he was human. There was life out there in the universe, and it was them. What did that mean? Who came first? How did Humanity happen twice? Were there Faunus there?

And… She rubbed her aching forehead. Why did he do it? According to her aunts, he went from 'trying not to die' to being a card carrying supervillain on a whim, overnight. There had to be more to it than that, but her aunts were woefully ill-informed on that front. All they knew was that he'd done it, and that despite ostensibly volunteering himself as a double agent, he was dedicated to the dark half of his role. He betrayed his friends, killed his team mates, and used everyone in so doing.

Sure, 'to beat the bad guys', 'to kill Salem' was the answer, but that was a simple answer to a complex question, and Ashley knew it. There had to be more to it, she could feel it. Her aunts, those people in the Garden, even Torchwick and Ozma talked about him like he was some kind of boogeyman, a monster right out of legend. He couldn't have just done this on a whim, but 'to beat the bad guy' wouldn't have required enough dedication that he'd left such lasting scars on everyone.

And my mother. She raised her head, looking off into the trees that separated settled and wild Patch. He calls himself 'worse', but… Was he? No, she shook her head. Cinder Fall was, evidently, a known quantity. Aldric had his 'noble' reasons for what he did, and the question of said nobility came in his methods and the dedication to them, but her mother? She went from ordinary girl with a largely ill defined past to being willing to spark international - and, later, interstellar! - wars, solely for power's sake. It was the oldest story in the book, everything she did was in service to herself, all she cared about was furthering herself, and the only reason some alternate timeline version of her turned at all was because she realized damn near every person she'd abducted had a problem with that, and also weren't fans of mass slaughter.

The fact that her mother had turned was noteworthy, but Ashley suspected she knew the reason why. Given her mother's core desire was simply acquiring power, in all likelihood she did not care about anyone else. Not those other two from the pictures, not Salem, Torchwick, or Taurus, not the other surviving Terrans, no one. The sole exception was her father, quite possibly because of everyone in the world, he was the only one who showed 'unquestioning loyalty' and an ability to keep up with her at every step. When she learned that her one and only trusted ally was also a traitor, that probably shook her enough that she was willing to consider alternative viewpoints.

While admirable, that didn't change the fact that this only happened because it was all finally brought home to her. Indeed, there was straight up evidence in the form of the 'real' Cinder, the one that hadn't been displaced from a different timeline, to prove that without that shock to her system, she would have kept going until the end. This meant that, whatever the specific circumstances may have been to turn her from darkness to the light, it had been a one in a million shot. Random chance. Otherwise, she was on a path that ended in her father killing her.

Although… As much of a known quantity as she seems to be, how did I come out of all that? Ashley asked herself, her brow furrowed and her lips dragging downwards. The general 'why' of her mother was known enough to infer most everything else, but that left a big question in the form of Ashley herself. Was she the mother of all 'oops babies'? Or had this comic book of a life actually gotten even stranger at some point and she'd popped out of it? Did the omnipotent Aldric play a part, since he was ostensibly the reason her 'redeemed' mother still existed in this timeline?

And that was all ignoring the bevy of other questions there were to ask. Her father was the unknown quantity. He was an alien for Brothers' sake! There was literally no way to be more unknown than him! There were all of the questions surrounding him, and only fragmented accounts from her aunts to try and dig away at those. She knew barely anything about him, and those that surrounded him. If Aldric had done all of these heinous things, that explained why so few of RWBY and seemingly none of JNPR were willing to fight on his behalf, but why was Ruby Rose willing to go to bat for him? If Ozma was that untrustworthy, then had she actually given up the game by telling him her name, or had he known from the start? Hell, come to think about it, she should probably read her aunts the riot act about that one. They'd let her go right into the Grimm's den and seemingly never thought it might be a bad idea.

She shook her head again, gritting her teeth. No, that wasn't fair. She was just confused, and that was frustrating her, but she shouldn't just start lashing out at everyone for it. Her aunts weren't dummies, and they were operating in a world where the rules didn't make sense anymore. There was no way Aldric would have left her in Ozma's front yard if there was a chance she'd get made. Doubly so since there was no way he would have failed to account for the likelihood she would awaken her aura and her doing what every kid did - wanted to be a huntress. Not only was Aldric the man with the plan, but he was the alien with the alien plan! There was no way to understand how he thought or how he got to his conclusions, there could be some kind of bizarre, arcane, cultural something-or-another going on in his brain that just had him literally think differently than everyone here. As much as they may have hated the man that wore Goud's mask, her aunts believed he cared about her, and thus trusted him that far.

It may very well have been that Ozma had sensed Aldric and Cinder's sparks of magic in her and just mistook her for one of the Maidens returned.

An alien! She swiped a hand through her dark hair, a smile threatening to undo her frown as she realized that was another of Dusty's stories turned out true: Apparently there was, indeed, an alien wizard out there, and the Kingdoms had, indeed, been spending a lot of time and money looking for witches. Whether or not they still existed, she had no idea - hell, there could be eight of them now, given that there had been two quad-maidens at some point.

Ashley felt her scroll vibrate, and idly retrieved it.

A text from Dusty:

"Hey, I'm sorry I was an idiot at the table, but I just got… Really excited. I realized I recognized the story your aunts were giving us - I read it when I was a kid! It was what got me into all this stuff, actually, it was so cool! Stupid as all hell, but so are all of 'em (Except the one about Atlas trying to make sun bombs, I believe it 100%), and that's why they're fun! Magic aliens, Mistrali Space Lasers, secret cabals, like - how do people come up with that stuff?"

Ashley's brain was a little too fried to read through all of Dusty's shit. She knew him well enough not to be angry at his little mistake, but she was going through a lot at the moment, and wouldn't be surprised if she went back to the table and promptly learned her grandparents on one side were genocidal maniacs, and on the other side were vengeful gods. She felt bad about it, but dammit, she figured if there was a day in her life to be a bit selfish, today would be it. She started skimming.

Several paragraphs later, she hit the end:

"Anyways, the point is - I found it again! And since it's all actually real, well - maybe it will help?"

Attached to the end of the text message was a slew of files, a few videos, several long audio files, and one particularly large text file simply titled: The Record. Frustration lost to curiosity, and then bleeding back into things when she realized she had no idea if this was organized in any particular way, she clicked on one of the files at random.

YXLAudio3 popped up on her scroll, seeming to be halfway through a conversation:

"- back to Vale, I go right to Ozma. I'm not his biggest fan, but if there's one person that can undo whatever Aldric did to me, it's him, and he owes us… All of the favors. Plus I'm somewhat convinced he was himself curious about what happened on the ship. It took a couple hours, and I cannot even begin to try and understand what all he said he did, but eventually I got those lovely memories back! And guess what?" There was the sound of clothes rustling, and a table creaking, the next audio came louder, as though the person was leaning over the microphone. "I remember it all. Every single second of him and I on that ship, and I'm not just saying it's there now, like my sixteenth birthday party is just there, no - I can't forget it. I remember every single second as though it's happening right now. I remember the betrayal, I remember all the soldiers and that weird language, I remember Aldric shooting me, and I remember him cutting my gods-damned arm off! A stray thought and I'm back there, soaking wet, standing in the rain, getting my arm cut off on repeat. Was that Ozma being who Aldric thought he was? Was that some kind of backup plan on Aldric's side? Some kind of fuckup on all sides? Weird magicy stuff? Who the hell knows!"

Ashley frowned at her scroll, needing a few moments before she recognized the voice: It was Yang Xiao Long!

"And after that?" Came an unfamiliar woman's voice.

"Alcohol, dead Grimm, and a lot of not thinking."

"Fair enough. So, did you ever tell anyone where he is?"

There was a deep sigh. "Thought about it, but what would it change? Ruby can talk to him, even back then I was pretty sure Ozma already knew, Pyrrha would have tried to bring him back, Jaune, Ren, and Nora wanted nothing to do with him, Blake hates him in a completely different way, and Weiss… I'm honestly convinced she actually thinks he had a point."

"What about his team?"

" 'Oh hi, you guys remember me from school? Your old leader was an alien and his psycho-bitch girlfriend killed your other teammate so he could save my sister. Have fun with that!' "

Ashley stopped the file and went back to the directory, seeing there were six total 'YXL' files, seven 'PNAudio' files, and just one 'NA-GEAudio' file. The video files were mostly labeled 'The Record' followed by numbers, but there were a few that had strings of numbers. She clicked on one of the number string files and was shown just a few second video clip of a ranch house. Ashley shook her head at a sudden feeling of vertigo when she saw the ranch house, almost ready to say it looked familiar.

Hell… She clicked on 'NA-GEAudio'. For all I know, it is familiar. There was several seconds of silence from the file, long enough to make her wonder if it was corrupted, until the sound of a squeaking door confirmed it wasn't. I'm… Really going to need to process -

"You're… Nebo Aldric." Said the unfamiliar woman, stopping Ashley dead.

"And you're perceptive."

Oh my god… Ashley stared at her scroll, feeling a little numb as she heard her father's voice.

"My name is Rosemary Ashmore." Said the woman, in a tone that suggested she almost expected him to know the name. "I'm a… Photojournalist. I have my own -"

"If you're trying to sell a magazine subscription, I applaud your tenacity, but I only read tabloids and clickbait articles - and you won't believe the reasons why. Unless you're going to tell me how to launder money, in which case I'll buy a few dozen so you'll never tell anyone." Aldric interrupted her, "I know why you're here. You know why you're here. Let's drop the pretext." He bluntly continued, before she could hear him walk away. His voice wasn't as deep as she thought it would be. She'd thought she'd get something like out of a superhero movie, a voice deep like granite rock, but this was soft, airy, a little affable even, but overall it just sounded tired.

Ashley listened to the entire thing, from the moment 'Ashmore' knocked on his door, to the moment she finally stopped running and realized her scroll was still recording. Hearing his voice and his own words were sobering, and she listened to it a second time just to hear it again. Then, finally, a third time to replay and repeat key points in the recording and digest them. From there, she went to one of the video files that shared their name with the huge text file.

She saw him. It seemed to have been taken not long after the crash that brought him to Remnant. He had a distant look in his eyes, as he read off the list of supplies he'd scavenged from the wreck. He didn't necessarily look happy, but he looked a hell of a lot less harrowed than he did in some of the photos taken by Srebro and the ones with her and her mother. At one point he picked up a brassiere the size of his head and started riffing on it until he couldn't contain his laughter anymore. After this, he began discussing his state of survival and his strategies to continue doing so.

It was strange seeing this, seeing Aldric ostensibly before he'd become a legend so powerful the implication of his return scared Remnant's deadliest and most ruthless. Here, he wasn't even the double agent yet, he was just a kid - younger than her! - surviving an airship crash, coming to terms with it, and trying to keep his spirits up. As shown by the next video, which opened up with him severely wounded and bandaged, he had no idea where he was or what he was in for, he didn't even realize that he technically did know, he was just trying not to die!

And he went from this kid, to… The image of the scarred man, his eyes and arm replaced by cybernetics, a thousand yard stare in his eye, came to mind. Him.

Ashley spent the entire day listening to the audio files, watching the videos, and then reading the text file. She kicked herself a bit for somehow managing to do it all out of order, but she had seen enough of those artsy 'out of order' movies to be able to keep track of it. She didn't even realize how much time had passed until her scroll notified her that its battery was almost dead, and all that accomplished was getting her out of the sun and into her room so she could plug in.

She read past the setting sun and through the night. She didn't stop reading until the next morning, when she'd finally gotten through every word, every second of audio and every moment of video. She was left alone during all of this - she was certain that Dusty had told her aunts and the rest of SSAD what he'd given her.

Reading it all was, in a word: Heartbreaking.

She had been right - there had been more to it, and it all boiled down to one thing, really. Aldric had been exactly what everyone else was at some point in time: A dumb, idealistic kid. Sure, he seemed to have these quantities in excess of everyone else, but he'd just been a kid shoved into an awful situation. He'd been kind of like Schwarz, actually - living one completely innocent life, absolutely unrelated to the complications of the world around him save only for his living in it, and then shoved into it and given the choice to roll with it or resist. The difference, she told herself, was that Aldric had come from an alien world - one without Remnant's inherent problems. His species wasn't at risk of extinction, there weren't monsters constantly testing cities, they were just living lives, building monuments, writing history. Schwarz had been ready for what he'd done, on some level, whereas her father had been pulled away from his home by Ozma and Salem, and he'd made a very, very poor decision.

There was a logic to it, and that was how he approached it: He knew the future, basically, and he had an 'in' with the darker aspects of Remnant. He should leverage these two things in service of the light. This was fine so far, and he even recognized he would have to do bad things in order to pull this off, but there was understanding these things and knowing them. He understood them, he named them and listed off the awful things he would have to do, but he didn't really know those things until he'd actually started, and by that point, he had dedicated to it, and needed to see it through lest he render pointless everything he'd done. He was a dumb, idealistic kid, who made a dumb, idealistic decision, and promptly suffered for it. It was a miracle he didn't break sooner under this pressure, and that he'd managed to make it all the way to the end!

Ashley really wasn't fond of how many of these thoughts rang as familiar. Her aunts had both said all of these things at some point or another before and during her time at Signal, and like her father, she'd heard, listened, and ultimately rejected these things. She'd made her decision and dedicated to it, so damn it, she'd see it through to the end!

Just like her father had.

This, alongside his own words, helped give her perspective on him. It helped turn him from an unknown mystery into a known quantity, like her mother - he even helped make her mother an even more known quantity!

At the end of the day, she found herself agreeing and disagreeing with his self assessment. He was convinced he was a bad person, and to a degree, she thought he was right. A good person wouldn't bury as many bodies as Aldric had, a good person would - as Aldric himself had termed - do the right thing, even if it wasn't necessarily the correct thing. That, however, was paradoxically what made Aldric a good person as well: He understood evil, for he wore it and acted it out. He embraced it and did the evil things such that others wouldn't have to. Sometimes the world needed people like that - sometimes wars needed to be fought, and soldiers had to kill each other. That didn't make them bad people, it made them willing to do the hard thing to prevent people back home from having to do so. Sometimes huntsmen and huntresses had to kill people instead of Grimm. That didn't make them evil, that made them willing to do a bad thing for good reasons.

Nebo Aldric had decided to play a role. He chose to be the spy, the double agent, working with the bad guys to help the good guys - for the given value of the terms. He knew he'd have to do terrible things to pursue this objective, but also possessed the necessary wider context to know that he was doing the correct thing. He knew where the line that divided good and evil was, and though he was just spinning the wheels for a while, he soon was able to come up with an actionable plan to end it all that didn't rely on his false assumption that 'the plot would work it out'. He created contingencies in case he failed, to ensure that his crimes still had some meaning in the end, and he always held himself to his own standards, always judged himself as harshly as he could, to keep himself on the true path.

Then, when his job was finished, he took himself out of the equation, but for three conditions: Ozma, Cinder, and Taurus, and he'd proven this. Taurus acted up, Ruby Rose asked for help, Aldric delivered, and went back to non-interference. Rosemary Ashmore arrived on his front door, interrogated him, promised to reveal his secrets, stole his secrets, shot him, and left, and he hadn't so much as stepped foot out of his door between then and now. She wasn't one of his return conditions, so despite it directly benefiting him, he didn't lift a finger against her.

Those weren't the actions of an out-and-out evil man. They were the actions of a man that had done terrible, heinous things, understood and knew this, and judged himself accordingly.

Aldric was a good, and bad man.

He was, in other words: Just a man.

And like all people, he sought to protect his child from his sins. When Ruby Rose had sought him out, and he knew he could no longer care and protect for his child, he did what all he was still capable of and ensured she would be cared and protected for. He even went a step further and altered her memories, ensuring she had a level of - albeit temporary - closure that few other children in similar circumstances would have.

Did that sound like a bad person?

Ashley leaned back in her bed, digesting everything she'd learned over the past few days. A terrorist, and an alien wizard. A largely known quantity, and the very definition of an unknown one. A selfishly idiotic woman, and a naively idiotic man. Then there was her: The daughter of two of the most influential people ever to exist, at the tail end of one of the wildest emotional roller coasters she'd ever experienced.

Now what? She asked herself, staring off into space in her dark room.

What did she do with all of this?

Was there anything to do?

It wasn't like she could go to each and every person her parents had wronged, and say she was really, really sorry. Not only was that not feasible, but it wouldn't solve anything, if it did anything at all beyond pissing the people off. Beyond that, there really wasn't anything to do with or about all of this. This wasn't a movie, there were no immediate problems to solve that would make everything all bright and shiny at the end. Technically she was living in the good ending - the world had been saved, Aldric beat the bad guy. Nothing had been destroyed that couldn't be fixed, people had died, but vastly more had lived. Countries had been shaken, but none had fallen apart.

Even the individuals she knew of, the ones named in the Record, weren't really in a position where they needed her help or would benefit from it, save only Ruby Rose, and again - what could she actually do there? It wasn't like she could go out and find her and stop her - not only did she not know how to find her, but she was loyal in a way Ashley didn't understand until just a few months ago. She was the daughter of someone she loved, she thought she was in trouble, and she knew Torchwick the same way Aldric did: As this criminal mastermind that wouldn't hesitate to use resources at his disposal. Even if Ashley was willing to bet that Torchwick was just keeping her in his back pocket as he had for a decade now, Rose wouldn't be. She'd have to force her to stop, and the only way she could do that is if she actually did have magic powers, but that would take so much time to learn that her hero would either be done or dead by the time she could do something.

So everything was different, but everything was also still the same.

In the morning, she'd still have to put her socks on.

On Monday, she'd still have to go to school.

She'd just do so knowing her Dad had sold his soul to save the world.

That. Sucked. She wanted to do something, but what was there to do?

Aldric had effectively solved all of his problems on his own, and maintained that there were only three things he would come back for. One, he'd promptly solved, another had quite possibly solved itself and was remaining completely placid despite unlimited power and zero supervision, and the third had going for him the fact that he'd been fighting for and in Humanity's best interests for thousands of years.

Dammit, Aldric wasn't being a good source of angsty daddy issues. He had a mysterious past, but he, her mother, and her aunts had turned her into someone that understood its necessity. Her mother had arguably been straight-up evil for a while, but had given herself such a redemption arc that her blood knight father let her walk free. He'd abandoned her, but had valid reasons why and had left her with people he probably knew would tell her eventually. He did bad and evil things, but was clearly a much harsher judge of himself than his kid ever could be, and didn't try to defend himself on any of that. He was out hidden in the middle nowhere, prime material for a quest to hunt him down, but had also one hundred percent allowed all of his thoughts and motivations to remain circulating in the wild. He had enemies, but absolutely none of them were interested in entering conflict - save one, who he thoroughly crippled and embarrassed on an international stage.

She had the perfect makings for a girl with daddy issues, and yet the only one she could really come up with and hold onto was that her dad wasn't giving her any issues, just a lot of confusing and conflicting feelings, which was natural in general, let alone for someone in her situation.

I get that this isn't a movie, or a game, or anything like it. She told herself, after rubbing a sudden wave of lethargy from her eyes. But… Am I really expected to just… Go to school on Monday? Is there really nothing I can do with all of this?

She ran over the list again, but couldn't come up with anything. Her mother and father both had solved all of their problems and paid all of their debts. There was nothing to make right. Frustrated by this, Ashley finally slid down until she was laying in her bed, her head nestling into the pillow. She knew the answer was just 'keep moving forward', but she nevertheless couldn't imagine how she was expected to do that after today. If anything, it just gave her an appreciation for why her aunts had wanted to wait to tell her these things. Even if that direction was 'towards Grimm', at least after graduation, she'd have a general direction to go in after this, as opposed to hurrying up and waiting for three and a half years.

No one to apologize to… No one to save, nothing to make right. She thought, as she felt her eyes grow heavy. The world was saved, the evil was destroyed… She yawned. The Beacon teams got incredible careers, Mom got all the power and freedom she wanted, and Dad…

She frowned.

What had her father gotten out of all of this?

He had power, but he'd never wanted it even before this life, and he never really cared for it except as a means to an end once he got it. He'd gotten victory, but for a war he'd never had any stake in until being conscripted against his will. He technically had freedom like her mother, but was isolating himself as penance for his crimes. He had the ability to go back to his planet, but every government on that world would hunt him for his power once they knew he was back. He'd briefly had Ashley, and whatever home life his relationship with Cinder provided, but he decidedly didn't feel anything for the latter, and he'd given up the former when his life had come back to haunt him.

Ashley's eyes drifted open, as her tired mind made further connections her waking one might not have.

Of everyone named in Aldric's Record, while certainly they all were scarred by his actions, the only one who hadn't had the ability to move forward and leave him behind was Myrtle, and he'd moved heaven and earth to try and give her that chance. Everyone else was able to heal and move on, to make a life for themselves.

Not him.

Of everyone named in the Record, the only ones who had suffered major losses were the deaths carried out by him. Past that, they hadn't lost anything irrecoverable - one could even argue that damn near everyone in the Record was still at the beginning of their lives. Anything they had lost were roadblocks they could heal and recover from in the following decades. Everyone further had pretty much everything they'd wanted in life - even those who had suffered unique pains at his hands, like Jaune Arc's identity crisis and Blake Belladonna's continued rebuilding from the damage of the White Fang, still broadly had what they wanted and were making the best of it. Jaune was a legend, a wandering Huntsman known the world over, and Blake was having a direct hand in the healing and advancement of Faunus causes.

But not him. He'd lost everything, and had nothing to show for it. Nothing he wanted, anyways.

And finally, of everyone in the Record - hell, of everyone he'd affected - they'd all been given the chance and the ability to just move on. They all had the opportunity to just wash their hands of things they couldn't change and leave it all behind. They all had the ability to rebuild their lives and pick up the pieces. The damage was severe, but only in a few cases was it completely irreparable.

But not him. He was in exile, quite possibly stuck reliving his sins on a daily basis, and robbed of his only chance at healing and moving on.

Ashley sat upright, brow furrowing and eyes darting back and forth as she realized there was something she could do. There was a problem that remained, that she could potentially fix. Perhaps it was arrogant to think she could. Perhaps it was naive as well, but, well - she was the daughter of two extremely arrogant and extremely stubborn people, who had clawed their way to functional godhood. She didn't care if she could, if she wanted to, she would. The way she could make right her father's sins wasn't by helping those he'd wronged, but would rather be by bringing him back to the world he'd protected. She'd make it right by giving him the chance to heal.

The last seed of darkness in the world was the one Aldric was using to torture himself for his sins. Maybe she could bring him into the light? So few people forgave him because he'd never given them the chance, instead abandoning them and the world with their most recent memories of him being the pain of betrayal, but it had been twenty years. While she couldn't say one way or another if he ever would be forgiven by those he'd wronged, she was willing to bet most - if not all - of them had moved on from this, and they might at least be willing to absolve him by telling him this.

Her aunts were a perfect example - if she accepted their story about the aftermath of Goud's death as an allegory for Aldric, then they'd told her that though they hated him for a long time, they had eventually gotten over it. They might not forgive him, and they might not be willing to go back to how things used to be, but they had, at least, moved on.

Or maybe not moved on, that wasn't correct, it implied that it was all in the past, that they'd left it behind and it no longer had any hold over them. Rather, they had moved forward. It still affected them, it still hurt, but they'd had the chance to move past it. To trudge ahead and heal simply by time passed. The pain Aldric was putting himself through in his exile was a pain her aunts had recovered from. Just knowing that would help him, she knew this, and if anything even remotely similar happened with everyone else in the Record, maybe that would be enough to make right his last wrong:

His absolute refusal to believe in himself.

This… She nodded to herself. This could work.

Nebo Aldric, her father, had saved the world.

But no one had ever thought to save him.

So, if no one else would, Ashley was going to change that.

She had waited until everyone had woken up the following morning before dropping her latest bomb. She wasn't sure if the whole day was enough for everyone to digest the paradigm shift, but the atmosphere that morning told her that everyone was ready for whatever the next step would be. So, after helping her aunts make everyone a hearty breakfast of 'we've been shopping for two people for the last six months. There's coffee, tea, cereal, and milk, help yourselves', she let them all know what her next stunt would be, in the same vein as bashing her head against the wall until she got into, and through, Signal academy.

She was going to hunt down her father! No, not to beat his ass, or get answers, or anything else one would expect, she'd do it because damn it, he deserved something approaching a happy ending, didn't he?

Ashley's aunts had the expected reaction:

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?!"

Just not from the expected person, as evidenced by all of the wind in Ashley's sails utterly vanishing under the sheer, wall-shaking force of Srebro's raised voice. Even Ecru mentally stumbled a bit, giving the red-faced giantess a wide-eyed glance while the rest of SSAD wisely kept their mouths shut, and their faces full of cheap, graciously offered cereal.

This silence gave Srebro the chance she needed to keep up her momentum: "Ashley Guilliman-Lily, that is the dumbest thing I've heard you say since you said you wanted Ecru's shotgun even though you knew an eyesight semblance would lend itself well to being a sniper! This isn't hauling yourself up through Signal through sheer stubbornness, this is Nebo Aldric! You YOURSELF told us that the entire Vale Garden practically began to melt down just because you said his name!

"Torchwick found you - do not interrupt me!" She interrupted herself, when Ashley opened her mouth. "Torchwick found you and immediately put you in his back pocket. Just because he didn't do anything to or with you in six months doesn't mean he wasn't going to - don't interrupt me!" Ashley's attempts to correct her normally soft-spoken aunt were again forestalled. "Ozma learned about you and immediately went to tell Torchwick, it doesn't matter that Torchwick already knew, that's what Ozma did! I know the reason Torchwick's holdings are burning down is because we called Ruby, but that's my point! Your existence and his name alone are sending shockwaves all over Remnant! What do you think will happen if you bring him back?!

"Yang promised to kill him! The only reason she didn't when he ended the war is because she was out cold! General James Ironwood loathes him like he loathed Cinder, how do you think he'll react if it looks like Aldric is making moves all of a sudden? Especially considering that he's shown he can wipe out two armies in a day, and especially after people are moving in his name!? Do you think he'll stay still if he learns he came back because of his daughter? He'll only get more scared, Ashley! And what about Ozma, or your mother? They both expect him to stay wherever he is because that's what he said he'd do. They're all supposed to check and balance each other, if he suddenly changes course - regardless of whoever prompted it - how will they react?!" She demanded, breathing heavily as her rant wound down.

Srebro fell back into her seat. "Ashley, I can't begin to relate to what you're feeling right now - none of us can. But I can at least understand why you want to do this - and I love you for it! I'm proud that your first reaction after learning all of this is how you can help people! But your father put the world on a knife's edge, and the only reason it's not falling one way or another is because he's staying out of it. Even if hardly anyone knows about him, even if he could - and did - walk around in public in Atlas for ten years, the unfortunate reality is the right people do know that can cause a lot of problems because of how much he scares them!"

"Srebro -" Ecru softly placed her hand on Srebro's shoulder, but Srebro either didn't notice, or outright ignored her.

"And I haven't even mentioned how much danger that would put you in! If he scares the wrong people enough, they might get desperate enough to come after you! That's why he left you with us! You couldn't even fight off a couple dozen aura-less thugs without getting covered in your own blood, what would you do if a Gardener came looking for you? Or an Atlesian Spec Ops?! And if you're worried about him - and again, I love you for that! - you should consider what his response to that would do to him. If Ironwood, or Torchwick took after you to hurt him, and he went full Master on them like he did to Salem, do you think that would leave him in a better or worse place than he is now?"

"Srebro -"

"And we don't even know how he even is now! For all we know he's healed and moved on like you said! It's been just as long for him as it has been for all of us! Or he might not even be alive! Nikos found him drunk and suicidal once, and even if he kicked that, the reporter woman shot him with his own gun!"

"Srebro!" Ecru smacked her hand on the table, snapping the other out of it. "Take a breath! Please!" The woman did just that, seeming to go a little light headed now that she'd run out of momentum and had let out the emotional outburst of a lifetime. "Good, now…" Ecru turned to Ashley. "Baby, are you out of your fucking mind?"

Ashley had to admit, of everything Srebro brought up, she hadn't actually considered the last two points. She figured there would be political fallout - hell, she expected it - but also figured that everyone's fear of Aldric would be as beneficial to him as it was dangerous: They were terrified of him, yes, but that also meant they wouldn't do anything unless he did something. They'd be too scared of his reprisal! Sure, there might be people like Yang Xiao Long that proved problematic, but they likely had balancing forces that would at the very least prompt them to just stay away from him, if they weren't willing to line up with Ashley's theory that time had gotten them to move on.

This theory technically covered Srebro's first point - that any response from Aldric to moves against him could have blowback on him. If he didn't give people reason to act, and nobody would act without reason, then they had the time to help him heal and move on. Despite this rationalization, the very, very real likelihood that doing anything might either hurt him in the long run, or cause him to backslide, was something to be concerned about. However, while it was a concern, Ashley was willing to rank it pretty close to being a non-issue because of Aldric. This was the same man who promised to not interfere with wider affairs but for three conditions, and for almost twenty years he held true to that - even his time raising Ashley was limited solely to raising her, he didn't do anything to the wider world around him until he was invoked to deal with Adam Taurus. So, if in the severely unlikely event someone used her to get to him, and he retaliated, it would end after that retaliation, as long as things didn't escalate from there.

The problem posed that she couldn't cover, however, was the fact that Aldric just straight up might not even be alive. She'd listened to Ashmore's interview enough times to know for certain that he had been shot, and as Yang said, he was fully willing to lay down and be killed. By his own words, Ashmore was 'Remnant's representative' to him, she 'got to make the choice for Remnant', and she shot him. Add two and two and her father simply might not be alive right now. This titan whose name gripped the world in fear, this man who loopholed the universe into omnipotence, killed an immortal demon woman, slayed two gods, and then gave it all up, murdered by a greedy reporter who then tried and failed to capitalize on his story.

Frankly, she had no damn way to determine if that was the case.

Worryingly, that was quite possible.

Fortunately, Ashley had an answer ready to go regardless of these facts: "I don't care."

Dusty spat out his food, Schwarz stopped halfway to another spoonful, and Sylvie gave her a curious glance. They then looked over to her aunts, who each wore looks of outrage, shock, and a little pride.

"Oh?" Ecru said, her voice filled with the chill of a Mom who was ready to absolutely dominate an uppity child.

"Did any of you listen to the files Dusty sent yesterday? Ashmore's interview of him?" Ashley asked, "I think he put it best. There's the correct thing, and then there's the right thing. The correct thing is to let him be and take the safer, smarter route. I know that technically that's even what he wants, but that's not the right thing. The right thing is to save the man who saved all of us." She leaned forward, frowning as she looked off into space. "And… Think of it this way: What did you really expect me to do when I learned?"

Her aunts blinked, silence was her answer.

"I can't account for what memories I have of my parents as genuine or not. I can't sort out what I know and what I've learned, but I can parrot back what you've given me. He and my mother gave me to you because you knew Goud more than you knew Nebo. You knew the heroic persona he created, not the reality of the alien. They gave me to you two so you could raise me in that image, and…" She shrugged, "I might not be the best judge, but I like to think you did exactly that. You taught me right from wrong, you helped me believe in good and evil, all of that. So… When you told me the truth, what did you honestly expect me to do? Keep going on, living my day, killing Grimm, just with added context? I can't say I can accurately predict where I would be after four years of Beacon training, but I like to imagine that I'd still broadly be the same person, so that means I'd still reach the same conclusions you taught me to." Ecru and Srebro shared a glance, their eyes wide.

"That is to say… It doesn't matter how I was told, when, or why. Once I knew these things, I'd have made this decision regardless." Ashley nodded sideways, to her team. "We've said a lot over the last few months that we'd probably max out at street level when we graduate. That maybe as a team with a lot of experience under us, we'd be able to punch above our weight, but past that? We were never going to be legends. We'd make a difference, yes, but not ever on a big picture level. But this?" She sighed, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. "I'm not vain enough to be doing this just to do something big. But this is something, something no one else may ever be able to do. A life no one else may ever be able to save. More than that, it's the right thing to do.

"Everyone else has moved forward. I can even say with confidence that my mother has moved forward, given that he went into isolation and she did… Whatever, then went and found him. If she did the same thing after we all split apart, then she's still been living a somewhat normal life. But… Him? He's been out there, alone, all this time. He needs help, and he needs someone who won't just accept it when he says 'no'." She understood and respected why Ruby Rose never tried, and why Pyrrha Nikos let him go after finding him, but what those things taught her was that her father needed a firmer touch, a kick in the pants. He couldn't be coaxed onto the true path, he needed to be shoved into it. "Nebo Aldric left exactly one loose end at the end of all his stories: Himself. I'm going to close that loop, I'm going to find and do whatever I have to, to help him. However long it takes: I will bring him back.

"So I'm not telling you this to start a debate. I'm not asking if I can do this. I'm telling you - this is happening."

Of course, she could say that all she wanted, she could put on all the bravery and confidence she had in her, but she had no clue where to begin - something her aunts pointed out. She thought her journey would be stalled here as she realized they had a point, but six heads were better than one, and, given her aunts knew her better than to argue against her apparently genetic stubbornness, they were all put together.

Turns out, the answer was easier than it seemed at first glance. Initially, Ashley took one look at everything she knew and put it on a map - on one end was her house on Patch, and on the other, Aldric's location-in-exile. At first glance, everything she knew could not trace a path from one end of this map to the other, she expected it all to peter out right around the point where only four people knew where her father was at all: Yang Xiao Long, Pyrrha Nikos, Cinder Fall, and Rosemary Ashmore. Two of them were completely inaccessible - Fall was just MIA entirely, and Nikos was unknown - Ruby had intended to contact her, but the lack of her presence on the news appeared to suggest that such efforts had, for whatever reason, failed. Xiao Long might technically be an option, but not only did she not know where the blonde brawler was, she was pretty sure the woman would be even less inclined to help Aldric's daughter than she was to help the reporter. Ashmore was similarly a big old 'shrug' - Dusty and Sylvie spent a few hours trying to track her down on the CCT, while Schwarz returned to the mainland to retrieve their weapons from Beacon. By the time he returned that night - with ill tidings of more than one teacher stopping him to ask about her as opposed to him or the rest of their team - they had come up with nothing. Nobody knew where Ashmore was, her website had been inactive for years, and she had closed all social media accounts even further back. She suspected that Ozma might know how to find Aldric, or at least might be able to find out, but for all the ground her aunts were willing to give, going to him for help was something Ashley was pretty sure would literally get her bound and locked in her room.

So it seemed like her search faltered at its very first step!

Until, while sulking outside and watching a bird fly about, an idle thought about how stupid a crow would have to be to misnavigate its way to an island led her to an epiphany. She realized that, for all her differences with her parents, 'doing the stupid thing' seemed to be something she shared with them, to some capacity. Sure, she wasn't picking fights with demigods on just a few weeks of training, or throwing down against hundreds of soldiers with no helmet, or - frankly she thought her mother had him beat here - actively working with a devil to war against gods, but Ashley was capable of some stupidity all her own! For instance: She didn't know how to locate any of the people that might know where to find Nebo Aldric.

But she did have a coin - that itself was worth something like ten thousand smaller ones - that could buy her effectively endless favors with the people who could find them! Hell, by raiding the little box Aldric had given her aunts, she found herself in abundance of these little glass coins, she could effectively go on a shopping spree down there and still not have made a dent in her inherited, ill-begotten savings!

Oh yes, it was probably one of the dumbest things she could do here. There were probably even several different ways she could solve this problem, but she couldn't think of them, and she had a hunch that the Garden followed a particular trope - she was willing to bet her entire quest that they were the kinds that didn't just do a job, there was no monkey's paw here, if she asked them to do something, they'd do it well. This was their job, they were professionals, and they would perform their dark duties to the absolute height of their skill. To wit: She was pretty sure they would get done the things she wouldn't even have considered because they held themselves to that high of a standard. She had this particular intuition based partly on what she saw herself, and what little she could glean from the Record - this was a multi-kingdom underground society of the world's darkest people, the kind of people that would absolutely kill someone if they thought they'd been shorted on a task or slighted in a report, and despite all the ingredients for a catastrophe, they held themselves together seemingly without flaw.

Sure, last time she went there she'd invoked Aldric's name, whipped the place up into a frenzy, and might have had her life threatened by someone hilariously more powerful than her, but that had been a mission of discovery. They had no idea what they were getting into. This was a mission with a clear goal, and they already knew how to accomplish it - they just had to get in, talk to the guy, grab the intel, and get out. They wouldn't mention Aldric's name, they wouldn't deviate from the course, they would do their business and leave as fast as possible.

Even if Dusty wanted to try 'assassin food'.

So, after some more convincing and arguing with her aunts, SSAD found themselves at Junior's Bar once again. Although going to the place in broad daylight had been an issue, Ashley's hunch that flashing a coin at the guy that came out to tell them to piss off and come back after dark had proven true, and they were let in. Seeing a nightclub during daylight was a novel experience for the young woman, who watched the legion of janitors and custodians picking up the aftermath of the night's festivities. She could see all the trash, detritus, discarded and trodden food all over the place, and yet in the immediate areas of the custodians she could also see the shininess and lustor of the club beginning to peek through again. It actually gave her something of an appreciation for why someone would want to own and operate a place like this. Left to their own devices, they kept to their focus and soon hit the elevator and plunged deep beneath Vale.

Knowing where to find the information brokers - a helpful 'third floor, Florists section, past where we saw Ozma and Torchwick' from Sylvie - as well as remembering where the stairs were let them skip the awkward wandering they had done the first time. They still ran across the occasional assassin and the less occasional staff member, which prompted a brief discussion between Dusty and Schwarz over whether or not the rank-and-file here were 'normal people' like them, or retired criminals, and if the former, did they actually know what they were doing on a day to day basis. This discussion kept things from growing too quiet, but no consensus was reached before they reached the 'Florists' section. Much like the conference halls before it, it was an oddly sterile looking hallway lined with doors, several of which were locked with a red 'working' light flashing above the door. They eventually found a door that had a green 'open for consultation' sign, and after a moment to gather their wits, they entered the room.

It was a surprisingly small office, there was a desk immediately in front of them, bookshelves on the walls next to them, and a small television on the far wall which instantly muted upon their arrival. It felt like stepping into a cube torn out of a library, but Ashley didn't dwell on this as the chair spun around, revealing a woman that seemed exactly as tall - or as short - as Sylvie. She had the elegance and distinction of a woman who had approached the midpoint of her life as gracefully as possible, hardly appearing to have aged at all but for the narrowing of her features and the sharpness in her eye.

The woman's eyes instantly locked onto Ashley, whose head recoiled when she realized that they, like her hair, were heterochromatic. Like her hair, one eye was a deep shade of brown, while the other, the brightest pink Ashley had ever seen, bright enough that her immediate instinct was to believe it was artificial in some way. The woman's eyes remained locked onto Ashley, who momentarily thought it was because she had been at this game so long she knew who was the ringleader, until she realized that there was recognition in the woman's eyes.

Oh gods, there's no way. "Are you the damn PI?" She was a little sick of this, but her frustration was mostly born from the realization that she'd plain forgotten to bring this up to her aunts. She'd told them about the woman that had stopped their descent into the Garden, but had completely blanked on finally closing that particular loop and learning that, yes indeed, her aunt had hired an assassin to keep an eye on her.

The woman blinked, her head recoiling as the recognition in her eyes bled away to amusement. Her lips pursed, her cheeks tightened, and her shoulders began to twitch in silent laughter as she shook her head. Ashley rapidly realized two things, one leading to the other: That this woman was completely mute, and was assuredly not the PI. It was the former that struck a chord in Ashley's mind, and as the woman held up a finger and began typing away at her computer, Ashley realized why:

"You're Neo."

The woman paused a moment, shifting her gaze from her computer to Ashley. Her lips pursed again, and her eyebrow lifted upwards, more amusement flared in her multicolored eyes, but this seemed less 'oh you're cute' and more 'this was unexpected!' She nodded to Ashley, and then indicated one of the two chairs in front of her desk. Ashley took one, and while Dusty and Schwarz stared each other down, challenging each other for the rights to the second, Sylvie just plopped down and took it from them.

"You're the mute assassin that…" She stumbled a bit, suddenly realizing that no word really felt right to refer to him. 'Dad' felt strange because she didn't have that bond with him, 'Aldric' felt odd to her Valean sensibilities, 'Nebo' just sounded bizarre - and she wasn't sure anyone even knew him by that name - and 'my father' felt like it implied there was a connection between the two. "He… Talked about in the Record." 'He' still had a note of strangeness to it, like Aldric was some kind of myth whose name shouldn't be invoked, but then again: Wasn't he? Just saying his name had gotten all of this to happen, from Ruby Rose instantly being willing to war, to the Garden going into a quiet panic. Avoiding the name, while dramatic, at least took the edge off, and ensured that everyone was on the right page: If you knew who 'he' was, then you were 'in', and you got to avoid freaking anyone out that might be listening.

She suddenly had an appreciation for why the guys in movies actually did this beyond cliches and the pronoun game.

Said appreciation was annihilated when Neo's response to this was to clap a thin hand over her face and silently laugh again. Her eyes filled with mirth, this time giving off the air of 'how precious!' while she grinned so wide it wrinkled her eyes. Ashley just raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to finish, but this just seemed to set her off even more, and it took a full minute for the dead silent giggle fit to end.

Although the end wasn't natural: "Uh… What's happ - oh, wait, uh, Hi, I'm -"

Neo stopped on a dime, turning her suddenly razor sharp 'you ruined it' glare right on Dusty, who shrank underneath it, his very ability to speak wilting away. Despite the enormous size difference between the two, Dusty still managed to seem the rat, and Neo, a full-blown lioness.

Once she got her point across, Neo let out a breathy sigh, rolled her eyes, and returned to typing away at the computer. A moment later, it began speaking: "Before we really start, let me shoot in the dark: Do any of you speak sign language?"

There was no response.

The assassin shrugged, her every motion radiating 'I figured', before she queued up the next bit for the computer to spout off:

"You would be amazed how easy it is to make a few scroll calls to the right people in the Garden, flag your faces, and funnel you towards me. The only thing that surprised me isn't that you had the gall to come back after the uproar you caused, but that you managed to time it so I didn't have to wait more than a day! Believe it or not, I hate it here - not just the Vale Garden, but all of them. Before it was a matter of professional courtesy, the safest places also ironically being the most dangerous, but now it's mostly just because half of the people that want to hire me are doing it because they think I have a line on 'Him', and they're hoping a few extra coins in my purse will buy leniency if he ever comes back." As the computer spoke, the woman's eyes didn't move away from Ashley's, staring at her so unflinchingly that the sheer intensity would rival Ozma's uncanniness. "The funny thing is, I do have a line on him, but not like Ruby does. I'm more being a good…" As the computer paused, effecting the woman searching for a good word, she lifted her hand and tilted it back and forth. "... Partner, I guess is the right word, though he would say 'ally'. I was there when the reporter woman found you, and I knew Torchwick would keep you in his back pocket the instant he put together who you were. So, once nothing came of her little 'exposé', I decided to keep tabs on you, so I could flag down Ruby and let her know to raise the alarm if anyone moved against you."

Neo raised her hands, "I admit, this was partly motivated by the fact that back then I hadn't been married, and thought I might actually get another shot at 'His' pants." The glare in her eye showed zero hints of shame, and the amusement only grew when Dusty choked on his tongue after the words settled in. "But now it's… Well, professional courtesy again, but of a different kind. Your Mom - oh, she did a great job at keeping a lid on all this, let me tell you, but -"

The computer kept speaking, but it was drowned out by a loud, "wait, my Mother?"

Neo blinked, and swiped the pause button to shut the computer up. She tilted her head, prompting Ashley to continue.

"What - what does - she - huh?!" Ashley's brain was short circuiting, as she tried to comprehend that her mother had been active as recently as her initial escapade in the Garden.

Neo's hand returned to her face, the look in her eyes now was one of 'oh how cute', mixed with, of all things, disappointment. She tapped away at the keyboard, and soon her proxy said: "Oh wow. For all you've taken from your parents - his eyes, her bones, his build, her chest - you really didn't inherit their cunning, did you?" Neo shook her head in time with the computer, Ashley only a little surprised at how good she was at making this all feel as though it were her naturally speaking and emoting. "But, I guess it's evened out by the fact that you managed to get both doses of their stubbornness." The woman shrugged, "anyways sweetie, even before I mellowed out, I was never the type to spoil someone else's game. So I'm sorry about that, but if you can't put that together, then that's on you."

"What?!" Ashley was still so stuck on the fact that her mother was in play to completely miss the jab at her expense.

Neo rolled her eyes, "or their quick wit, it seems, but that may just be because you led a different life."

"I -" Ashley shook her head, and tried to bring order to her thoughts by forcing the conversation back on the rails: "Why are you here?" She was willing to buy that the assassin had kept tabs on her, and could understand that she was here because of the trouble she'd stirred up the other day, but that didn't explain for what reason Neo was here.

Neo pointed at Ashley in a 'now you're getting it!' way, and then hit a button on her keyboard.

"Your Mom - oh, she did a great job at keeping a lid on all this, let me tell you, but if you can believe it, Junior is actually more scared of me than he is of her. I like to think that's because Torchwick once had me sneak into his loft and leave a broadsword dangling over his testicles, but it's probably because he's one of the people that thinks I can get in touch with 'Him', so despite Cinder's best efforts, for all her power and all her control, her point of failure was a pretty woman in Atlas who had just finished a long day of work and was looking forward to a much longer night of anything but." At this, she turned to Dusty and winked, and her elegant, teasing smile grew an air of mischievousness as he turned bright red. Ashley spared him a glance as well, and saw his legs tensing up, suddenly feeling as though the only reason he hadn't gotten up and sprinted out of the room was because he wanted to stay with his team.

"And the fact that Ruby had come to me for help with her little war also clued me into things beginning to move down south." Neo added, after a pause and a swing of her eyes back Ashley's way. "So when -"

"Wait, Ruby came to you and you said no?"

Although Neo rolled her eyes, when they settled back on Ashley, they were filled with such an ice-cold, devilish amusement that Ashley didn't need Neo to type up a new response to know she'd been dead wrong. "Did you not hear me when I said I'd just gotten off of a 'long day of work'...?" Neo asked, before she settled her chin on her hand, teasingly. "Just because I found someone else doesn't mean I don't remember how much fun it was to stick knives in peoples' backs for your father. Or did you think I retired because you saw my more legal work?" She cast another half-lidded gaze Dusty's way. "I know he has!" Another wink, and another silent giggle as Dusty tried to not be the biggest person in the room. "I bet he has." She looked over to Schwarz, whose response was a shameless shrug, which got a 'you're no fun' roll of the eyes from Neo. "She…" The computer paused long enough for Neo to lock eyes with Sylvie, who stared right back, unblinkingly. "Probably needs a duster." She turned back to Ashley, leaving an unphased Sylvie in her wake.

"No, Sweetie, I didn't tell Ruby 'no'. How do you think she knows where to strike? Or how she hasn't been running into his heaviest hitters? And besides." Neo shrugged, "I never actually got to work right next to Aldric, but going out and having fun with my beau makes me really wish I'd gotten at least one chance. It's some of the best fun I've had in years. No amount of 'keep our skills sharp' quick little one-night-hits can compare." She then leaned in, and the computer finished with: "And post-job sex is some of the best you'll ever have. You'll learn when you're older." She winked again.

"You really are a psychopath." Ashley gawked, finding herself agreeing with her younger father: This woman freaked her out.

"Just imagine what my son will turn out to be." There was a brief pause, and the woman let out a long, wistful sigh before the computer spoke up again. "Oh, I really, really envy Cinder. I'd genuinely hoped I'd get something more than memories when he finally gave in. I can't imagine what that would have looked like."

"Please stop." Dusty squeaked, putting words to everyone else's thoughts as Ashley shuddered at the images the woman conjured in her head.

Neo eyed Dusty mischievously, and Ashley didn't need her semblance to tell she was formulating how to continue torturing the poor guy. Before Ashley could intervene, Neo's computer began speaking as quickly as she could type: "I honestly think he used his semblance to close off my cer -"

"Quit it." Sylvie cut in, somehow managing to overpower the computer despite not raising her voice. "I don't think the staff would like to hear you're not doing your job."

Neo's complete and undivided attention shot towards Sylvie, though her eyes shone with amused curiosity.

"You're not killing anyone today. You predicted our return. You're in this office. You set this up to function as our information broker whenever we finally made our return. Therefore: If you keep doing that -" She indicated Dusty, who was busy shuffling his legs and trying to rub the blush off of his face, while Schwarz next to him seemed caught between laughing at the situation and feeling bad for his younger friend. "You're not doing your job. I remember where I saw the last sentry, and if you do not stop, I will get up to tell him you're refusing service."

Schwarz picked up, patting Dusty on the back. "You've already kind of told us you still like to work out of the Gardens. Would be a damn shame if you got fired because you were having a little too much fun." He said, with an exaggerated shake of the head.

For the first time since they'd come here, Neo looked impressed. After typing her next response, she turned to Ashley. "It occurs to me that there is something you inherited from him… Both of them, actually. You play along!" She wagged her finger at her, before indicating the rest of SSAD. "They don't. I suddenly find myself wondering if it would have been more or less fun if he'd done something similar, but I digress." She turned to Sylvie, "if you want me to cut to the chase, then fine. I've been helping Ruby, Junior told me you showed up, then he told me that Cinder tried to keep everyone quiet after you basically set the place on fire. I figured this would convince your aunts to finally come clean, I figured you'd probably want to find him whenever you did learn about everything, I got here yesterday and set things up, and here you are." She turned back to Sylvie, "happy?"

"Yes."

Neo lifted her hands and bowed her head, as though to say 'you're welcome, your majesty.' She then turned to Ashley, silently asking her what questions she had.

It actually took Ashley a few moments to remember why they'd come here in the first place. "Uh… Right - I'm trying to find him." Neo rolled her hand in a 'get on with it' fashion. "I know Ruby Rose is -" Neo began nodding in addition to rolling her hands, as though saying, 'yes, yes, get on with it.' A little frustrated, Ashley got on with it: "Rosemary Ashmore, Pyrrha Nikos, and Yang Xiao Long know where he is. Where can I find any of them?"

Neo smiled and gave a light clap of her hands, as though saying 'There we go!'. She then held out one of her hands and waited. Ashley was a little ashamed to admit it took her another few awkward moments to realize that she was asking for payment, and fished out the glass coin to deposit in Neo's hand. The assassin gave the valuable piece of glass an appreciative glance, but the song and dance she proceeded to perform to appraise its genuineness seemed more for show than anything else. At length, when she was satisfied she nodded once, then opened the desk, whereupon she retrieved the exact change Ashley was owed, completely ignored the 'wait, where do I put these?' that followed, and got to work on her computer while SSAD divvied up the dough.

It took so little time for Neo to acquire the information that Ashley suspected she'd had it queued up and ready to go, though if she was putting on this little song and dance just because she liked playing with her food, because she wanted to get back at Sylvie, or because she was actually concerned the younger faunus would carry out her threat, Ashley wasn't sure. She suspected it might be all of them, but abandoned that train of thought when the computer started speaking for her again.

"Pyrrha's the easiest, Ruby asked me to find her right before she told me what she was about to do. It's rather mundane, but it's simple - she left civilization a little while ago. Someone was taking a joyride up north and saw, I quote: 'A million Grimm' were 'migrating' in that direction, so she grabbed her old simp and went to investigate. There's technically been an update since, but it was just her sending word by courier saying she found the herd." Neo gave Sylvie a look, "and just so someone doesn't claim I'm not doing my job, I have been pinging her scroll. Technically I've been doing so for a few weeks now - I'm kind of under contract to get in touch with her for Ruby - but regardless, she just isn't in range of the CCT network. She could be on Earth for all the computers know.

"Past her, while I can't say she'd be the smartest one to go after, Yang Xiao Long was last seen drinking and fighting her way through Vacuo as of yesterday. In case you're curious, Ruby did try to talk to her and the others, but she didn't tell any of them about you, and they had the expected reactions. The Rens even left her on 'read'. The Reporter Chick is closer: That idiot still lives in Vale, although she abandoned her last… Three apartments because they were either egged by other idiots or harassed by conspiracy nuts. You'll find her living as a hermit on the border of the agri-and econo-districts." After sending her the relevant data, Neo then gave Ashley a look that said, 'please don't be this stupid.' "Is there anything else you want to ask about?"

Whatever Neo was trying to imply as a better option, Ashley couldn't come up with, so instead she said: "Can you have an airship waiting on us? Something with auto-pilot, can take us anywhere we need?"

Neo's look was halfway between, 'are you serious?' and 'you're really not good at this.' She closed her eyes and shook her head, before nodding and waving SSAD out of the room with a quickly typed, "come back tomorrow, it'll be ready."

From there, SSAD left the Garden as fast and as surreptitiously as they could.

Their next stop: Rosemary Ashmore.