Alright, here we are! I have little to say. Like nothing.

Start Chapter 44

Jaune had never been given official training on how to fly a bullhead. Of course, he knows how, because after he'd arrived with Cinder back at Evernight, Tyrian had volunteered to take him aside and show him how it is that the crafts are controlled.

And boy, he had not been a natural.

Still, he'd managed to not get himself killed long enough to generally learn the ropes. And so, behind the console of the bullhead that is currently about ninety-percent of the way through carrying them to Mistral, Jaune finds himself… pondering.

Jaune feels this is fair. There's a lot to ponder. For one, Cinder is out here in Mistral looking to investigate the orphanage that had allowed her to be adopted by the Madame, who had rather severely abused her. She had, also, lived in Atlas, and had, from what Cinder says, never actually been to the orphanage in Mistral to meet her, or so much as talk to the orphanage staff before she'd been shipped off halfway across the world.

The entire thing reeks, at least from Jaune's view. Cinder seems to think so, too, given she very much seems ready to act in a violent manner if and when they arrive at the orphanage.

Jaune isn't feeling particularly kind to a bunch of potential human traffickers, either.

The second thing to think about, and this is the big one…

Is the fact that Salem is just… letting them fly away from Evernight.

No guard. No threats beyond the implicit. Nothing.

It has him feeling rather suspicious.

And yet there isn't much else for Jaune to do other than to keep them flying straight towards their destination.

So that is what he does.

/

It's around an hour and a half later that Jaune and Cinder touch down at their destination.

Calling it a destination might honestly be overselling it, however.

The place is nothing more than a barren field of what looks to have once been wheat. Jaune himself doesn't know much about it, but given that everything around them looks about as dead as can be, Jaune can't help but feel this place likely doesn't see as much attention as it needs in the modern day.

As they get out, Jaune inspects his own outfit, which he'd picked out for this mission especially. Mistral isn't quite as cold as Atlas, but it's still only beginning to crest towards spring, and so the chill in the air is enough that Jaune's thrown on an overcoat over his shirt, which is just something that Salem had had laying around. Apparently, one of Salem's enforcers in the past had been a large as well.

Cinder is wearing a long trench coat which flares out at the back. To Jaune, it makes her look like a child trying to pretend to be an adult, but he's also not going to say that, since that would be super mean.

"I recognize this place." Cinder mutters below her breath. "Vaguely, but…"

Jaune turns to her, because this entire trip is, really, for Cinder.

She's the reason they're here, and Jaune plans on doing his best to keep her in his immediate line of sight. This has the potential to go badly fast.

And… well, if they're lucky, maybe they can save a few people in a bad situation. But those are thoughts for later. Potential thoughts, even, that might not come true.

They don't even know if Cinder's orphanage still exists.

So, that's their first goal.

"Do you know where the orphanage is relative to this?"

Cinder looks around, seemingly getting a lay of the land. Beyond their field are miles and miles of empty plains, and beyond those, some small hills. They're far too distant from Mistral itself to see the city, but for a human trafficking operation, being remote is likely one of the major goals.

Again, Jaune's judging without actually knowing the truth, it's just…

He takes Cinder at her word. She'd been, according to her, nine or ten when she'd been adopted. That's more than old enough to remember things reliably. He has memories from back then, at the very least.

"I think it wasn't that far?" Cinder says, but she doesn't sound certain. "I remember that we came out here to play on occasion. It was far, but not too far. The people at the orphanage would've come after us if we went out too far. At the time I thought they were just worried about us, but looking back…"

Jaune nods his head. Either explanation would work in that scenario; a normal orphanage wouldn't want to let vulnerable children wander off when there could be Grimm lurking about.

But…

He sighs, forcing himself to stop thinking about these things.

"Do you know the direction?"

Cinder points, somewhat uncertainly, towards the south, towards where two hills form a valley in the distance.

"I think… that looks familiar."

"Well, worst case, we get a better view of the surrounding area from up high." Jaune tells her. "C'mon. We'll make some ground before we stop and eat. I don't know about you, but after being sat down for the last hundred years or so in that bullhead, I'm itching to move my legs."

Cinder seemed to agree, and so away they went.

When Cinder had told him that she recognized where they were, he had sort of assumed that meant that they would come upon the orphanage quickly. That is very much not the case. They walk for over half an hour and crest the top of the hills that they had seen earlier before Cinder finally stops them, and points down at a rundown building.

"That's it. But… it's empty." Even from their height, the orphanage is clearly abandoned. "They must've changed locations."

It wouldn't have made much sense for a normal orphanage to move locations. But for a human trafficking organization that had been doing its best to not be caught by Mistral's officials, picking up and moving does make some sense.

Unfortunately, however, that means that the two of them are now out in the middle of nowhere with no landmarks to guide them any further beyond what might still lie below. With no idea as to whether or not the organization that had once housed Cinder even still exists.

Still, they decide to make their way down towards the abandoned building.

Ultimately, another few minutes later, they come upon what might have once been a rather humble abode. It's about the size of one of the homes that Jaune had grown up around in his home town of Domremy.

But it's also entirely abandoned.

What might have once been a quaint locale is now rotting and taken over by nature. The wooden support beams on the edges of the structure have evidence of termite damage, and there are animals of all kinds skittering out of the house as the two of them enter into it.

For the most part, he's just watching how cinder reacts. To say that he's worried about her would be quite the understatement. She looks like she's spacing out, and while that isn't at all unexpected…

"This was…" Cinder's voice trails off as she points off to her left.

She steps forward into an adjacent room, and Jaune follows. The room is in a hell of a state, but regardless, he thinks he can tell what it had once been.

This had been Cinder's bedroom, and, likely, where all of the other children who had stayed here at the orphanage had slept, too.

Cinder steps into the space gingerly, her head on a swivel. The details of the room have all but faded in the time since Cinder had left, but…

The wallpaper is still there in some spots, with little designs of strawberries. There's a toy bear absolutely caked in dust, and seemingly being used by a colony of insects as a home. Below one of the mattresses is a dirty adult magazine, clearly too mature for a child to have, but then, Jaune knows for a fact that most children would hoard something like that like their life depended on it.

All in all, it seems like a stereotypical room one might find in an orphanage. The kids look like they'd been packed in like sardines, but if the orphanage had just had a very low budget, that's not out of the question.

Jaune's just not quite willing to give the people here the benefit of the doubt. Not with what Cinder's told him.

"That was my bed." Cinder points towards one of the top bunks in the middle of the room. "I slept there for years. I… when I first… I don't know, gained consciousness, I was there."

"And you lived here for…?"

"I don't really know how old I was when I first got here." Cinder explains. "I left when I was around nine… maybe four or five years?"

He nods. Cinder looks about a bit more, and Jaune, ultimately, decides to let her. Cinder takes in the space, looks around, and, eventually, begins to grow upset.

"This place… they just sold me to the highest bidder?"

They don't technically know that's the truth, even if it's a very worthy suspicion.

"Why?" Cinder eventually asks. "Why would anyone do that?"

"I don't know." Jaune answers, because questioning evil; true, actual evil, is something he's found himself doing before. And in the end, he'd been unable to come up with anything at all.

Cinder had once been the topic he'd considered. The Cinder of his time. The one in front of him is…

Different? Is she?

She must be. She will be. He'll make sure of it.

And then Cinder raises a hand, superheated thanks to her semblance, and places it against the wooden bedframe beside her. Smoke rolls of it immediately, and Jaune can smell the beginnings of a fire immediately.

"Woah, woah!" He steps in, taking Cinder's hand away. She snarls at him briefly, before remembering who he is. "What are you doing!?"

"Burning this place to the ground!"

"Why!?"

"What!? Because this place is a pox on the world. Even if there had been people here, the people who did this to me, I'd have still burned it down!"

"No, we shouldn't," Jaune says, inserting himself into this. He looks over at the fire, still manageably small, and rips off his overcoat.

He smacks it against the fire, trying to smother it, and has some decent success.

"What are you doing!?"

"If this place was a den for human traffickers, there might be some sort of evidence we can pick up here!" He yells over at Cinder, the fire now fighting back and beginning to lick at his coat. "Go fetch me some water or something else to put this out! If this goes down, our chances of tracking the people who did this to you go with it."

Cinder… stares at him for two or three seconds, before seemingly being startled back into action by the post she'd set on fire falling off of the bed, and hitting the ground. Unfortunately, it's also wood, but Jaune moves fast enough to cover the entire thing with his coat.

It's going to utterly ruin it, unfortunately, but hopefully he can deny the fire any oxygen, and prevent it from continuing to burn.

Cinder runs off, and, fifteen or so seconds later, she comes back with a bucket filled with what looks like rain water, probably forgotten outside ages ago. She gestures for him to move back, and he does just that.

The water douses the few embers that had remained, and finally, it's done.

Jaune lets out a breath of relief, even as Cinder looks away, seemingly ashamed.

"You need to think before you act." He says, taking on his teaching persona.

"I know that."

"You know it. Do you practice it?"

Cinder growls out under her breath, far ornerier than when last he'd been teaching her. Then again…

He recognizes this sort of behavior, now. Some of his younger sisters had been like this with Saphron when she'd tried to help them with homework, or other such matters.

When their prides had been injured, they'd been unwilling to hear out Saphron's points, regardless of whether or not she had been right. In the end, what Saphron had done had been to…

"Cinder," He kneels down in front of the girl, takes her hands, and holds them there until she meets his eyes. "I'm not upset with you, okay?"

Cinder doesn't look like she believes him.

"I understand that being here is making you feel horrible. And that's not your fault. You're not to blame for that. I think I'd feel terrible in your place, too. You're not stupid or foolish for being overwhelmed and angry."

"…I feel stupid."

"You shouldn't."

"But you said–"

"I said you need to think before you act. That makes you impulsive. It doesn't make you stupid. I was uh… more than a little impulsive myself, once." Getting forged transcripts to make it into Beacon on little more than a whim had been one of the dumber decisions he'd made in his life. "Basically just… don't set things on fire without really thinking about it first."

Cinder grumbles, but there's a tiny, almost absent smile on her face. Clearly, she'd thought his joke at least a little funny.

"But anyways, I think if we take a look around, we might be able to find some evidence that will lead us to… well, wherever these people went. Shall we?"

Cinder nods her head, and so, together, they make their way back out into the main room of the orphanage.

"Which room did the people who owned the orphanage actually live in?"

"Over there, in the back."

The place Cinder's pointing to is another rotting wooden door. It's barely hanging onto its hinges as is, and when Jaune walks up to it to open it and get them inside, it gives up the ghost, and quite literally plops right down onto the floor.

"Huh." He remarks.

Cinder passes by him, unamused by the fallen door.

The room they step into is slightly better off than the rest of the house, but that's only because many of the objects and items within it are made of metal. There's a desk in the center of the room that's made of wood, and that hasn't held up all that well, but there are plenty of metal filing cabinets lining the walls that, aside from the dust, look to be in relatively decent shape.

He walks over to one of them and opens a drawer at random. Inside are quite a few files, although most of them look more related to billing than anything they might actually be after.

Still, he brings one out, and starts looking through it. Anything to give them something to go off of will be good. A company name, or a distributor, or hell, even the names of one of the people who had worked here.

He doesn't find much of value. Other than learning that the place had once been called 'Sunny Smile Orphanage' – just about the most stereotypical name he's ever heard – and learning that they had paid their water bill circa eleven years ago, there isn't much to be gleaned.

So, he moves to another filing cabinet, and then, when that one produces nothing as well, another. This goes on for about twenty minutes, during which Jaune grows a bit doubtful about whether or not this place really had been the front for a human trafficking organization.

He's not entirely sure what he'd expected. He knows, deep down, that it can't be as simply as finding a giant sign up that says 'we're actually bad guys' or something, but this all seems incredibly mundane.

And of course, it is as that very moment that Jaune steps on a particular plank of wood, and it caves out beneath him.

He gives a rather undignified yelp as his body drops a good few feet. Luckily, the hole hadn't been wide enough for him to entirely fall through it. He swears as he feels a few cuts opening along his legs, and knows without seeing it that some splinters of wood have gone through his pants and into his skin.

They're going to be totally ruined; those nice new pants he'd bought in Atlas. In all fairness, he had bought them in white, so he had really been kind of asking for this.

"Are you alright!?" Cinder rushes over to him, and he nods. The pain he's experiencing might be crushing for a non-huntsman, but he's been beaten, stabbed, exploded, set on fire… wow, he's really had quite a lot of things done to him. This doesn't even crack the top one hundred.

"I'm fine. Give me a second to pick the splinters out of my leg." He sighs. "I just wish this place wasn't falling… apart…"

His voice trails off as he lifts his foot out of the hole. He'd initially expected it to be a normal sinkhole of some kind, something that might form under a house that hadn't been lived in in what seems to be a few years. That are some sort of underground vent or heating system.

Instead…

What lies within the hole are stairs, and they lead down. Deep into the dark, and the earth.

Jaune stands up, even as Cinder kneels down, and begins prying at the wood with her hands. Eventually, she grows frustrated, and brings out her weapons, which are a prototype of what will later come to be Midnight, the weapons she'd used prior to becoming the Fall Maiden.

If Jaune has his way, they will be the only weapons she ever needs.

She stabs down, and begins cutting at the wood with her blades, superheating them to increase their cutting power. It works well enough, and Cinder is able to cut away at the wood entirely, revealing a channel just barely big enough for Jaune to fit through, and one Cinder can squeeze through with ease.

Still…

Jaune brings out his scroll, and turns on the light. It illuminates around fifteen feet down the hole, and shows that below them, the ground evens out, before disappearing down a dark passage.

"Well…" He remarks, swallowing on some spittle at the back of his throat. "That is not a good sign, I think."

Cinder says nothing. She simply jumps into the hole without hesitation, and Jaune, after a moment spent rolling his eyes, follows behind her.

As he lands, he kicks up dust, and a few spiders and other insects scurry away. His aura is up and primed, prepared for any sorts of traps that might lurk down this hallway.

If he hadn't been suspicious about this orphanage before, he would've most certainly been suspicious now.

It's not exactly natural for an orphanage to have a secret tunnel, after all.

His brow furrows, and without even realizing it, he's reached down, and planted a hand atop his nameless blade. It's not the familiar pommel of Crocea Mors that he's grown so used to, but it's better than nothing.

"Come on, Cinder." He says as he steps in front of her.

"We're going to find out the truth of this."

He draws out his sword and shield, holds up his scroll light with his shield arm, and leads them further into the dark.

End Chapter 44

Alright, we get our first glimpses of Jaune and Cinder's Mistralian adventure! Going to leave it at that, since I am tired.

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