Playing For Keeps - Ch 55 (Adv) - Cards On The Table (Patreon)

After one last kiss that left Bia flushed and gasping, I suppressed the urge to muss her hair and makeup further and slipped outside, making my way down to the street. As I passed the next building, Qrow stepped out of some bushes and joined me.

“You've got some lipstick on your mouth.”

“No I don't,” I retorted… before instinctively wiping my lips to check.

Qrow raised an eyebrow. “I was joking. Did you actually kiss her in your grandmother's house?”

I shrugged. “Dinner went pretty well.”

“Except for the part where you got launched out a window.”

Yeah, but in light of that kiss… “…Worth it.”

“Already trying to juggle two girlfriends as a freshman,” Qrow shook his head. “I don’t know if you remind me more of Tai, or myself.”

“Not sure which of those is less of a compliment,” I snarked. “Let’s get back and regroup.”

“So, what do you think?” I asked back at our safehouse. “Is the idea I outlined at all feasible? I’m under the impression that Bia or I will catch Callows’ attention even if Leonardo doesn’t, since he’s bound to want her dead for maiming him and he’ll be expecting me to already be dead of poison.”

Qrow scratched his stubble. “Maybe. We’d have to make sure the trap doesn’t look like one, and I’m hesitant to underestimate him again.”

“He’s crazy, not stupid,” I agreed. “We’ll probably have to visibly split up. But I figure you’re still a wildcard who can back us up through an open window.”

“Only stays a wildcard as long as no one knows how it works,” he reminded me.

“Touché. I knew I should’ve picked up some flashbangs.”

“I’m gonna have to veto the idea of flashbanging a hospital for what I hope are obvious reasons,” Qrow drawled, and I gave a facetious snap of my fingers.

“Dang conscience, making it harder to deal with psychos,” I quipped. “What do you think, Leonardo?”

“I also must caution against the careless use of even less-lethal explosives,” the headmaster frowned.

“I meant of the actual plan,” I deadpanned.

“Oh, yes. Well, naturally I have concerns about the safety of patients and potential for collateral damage if your lure is successful, but it does seem likely to garner our target’s attention. I gather Miss Álikos will be assisting you?”

“That was the idea,” I nodded. “It’s always good for people to see Hunters outside of our actual duties.”

“True,” Leonardo stroked his chin. “I do have a Freshman team who are quite popular with young teens; perhaps a good addition if you plan to visit the children’s wing…”

“Callows is the only reason I wasn’t starting with the children’s wing.”

“We’d have to brief them at least a little bit,” Qrow pointed out. “Honestly, I don’t love the idea of bringing more students into this.”

“I’ll be able to sense him when he gets within a half-klick,” I reminded them. “That should give us a bit of heads up.”

“Only if he doesn’t blitz us,” said Qrow. “But it’s better than nothing.”

“So how do we minimize risk to the patients?” I prompted. “All I can think of is somehow sowing the rumor such that it seems harder to approach the hospital itself, and easier to ambush us before or afterward.”

“We can’t control him, so we need to control as many variables as possible,” Qrow took on a lecturing tone. “For instance, if we can give him an easy route in without it looking too suspicious, we can have some confidence in how he’ll approach.”

“There is always at least one Hunter or Guardsman stationed with the hospital’s security force,” Leonardo offered. “They would also need to be briefed regarding the sting, but perhaps an ‘accidental’ double-booking of that duty might occur on the day you’re planning.”

“So we have them prioritize protecting patients, while we focus on pinning Callows down,” I surmised. “We need to restrict his movement somehow.”

“I may be able to assist with that,” Leonardo said. “But will it be enough?”

Qrow and I exchanged a look. “I think the two of us could take him, especially with Bia helping, but only if he doesn’t find a chance to flee.”

“When are you planning this?” Leonardo asked.

“In the next day or two, presumably. Our mission doesn’t exactly have an end date, but I do have responsibilities back in Vale. My teammates want to participate in the Tourney, and I need to meet with Torchwick as well to see if I can get the underworld to at least stay neutral regarding the White Fang and the Enemy’s agents.”

“You’re not bringing your team in on that meeting, are you?” Qrow asked.

I shook my head. “Maybe Blake, but not the others. I assume you’ll be tagging along?”

“Yeah, I’m sticking around until the tournament anyway.”

The tournament… I thought, glancing at my ever-growing [To-Do List]. That’s right, there’s another hazard in Mistral that I haven’t been considering in my plans. It’s probably past time I warned the Guardians about Cinder, but I’m counting on dealing with them later, so I’ll need to balance what I reveal with convincing them to leave her be… and hopefully without any lies that can be directly disproven.

“That reminds me,” I said slowly. “Qrow, would you recognize the woman who attacked Amber if you saw her again? Or the people with her?”

Qrow frowned. “Probably. Why?”

What to say…? I pondered, before realizing my contact with Torchwick and Neo — and the fact that I’d already told Qrow about Pawn — gave me a perfect excuse for several of the things I shouldn’t know. “Because according to Neo’s Scroll, they’re here in Mistral.”

“Who exactly is Neo?” Leonardo looked lost.

“Roman Torchwick’s partner,” I clarified. “Goes by Neopolitan. She’s an illusionist, and the two of them have been coerced into stealing Dust for the past few months–”

“Torchwick hardly has to be coerced to steal anything,” Qrow scoffed.

“Touché,” I said again. “But come on, the two of them wouldn’t keep stealing Dust in particular if it were up to them. They especially wouldn’t be working with the White Fang. Torchwick fancies himself a gentleman thief; he’s in it for the challenge and the money. After this many high-profile robberies, supply in Vale is rock-bottom, but despite the price hikes none of the Dust they’ve already stolen has hit the black market.”

“Ergo they aren’t making any Lien from it,” Leonardo reasoned. “What are they intending to do with so much Dust?”

“Nothing good, but that’s not my point right now.” Taking a deep breath and popping [Eagle’s Splendor] for good measure, I dropped the bomb. “I cloned Neo’s Scroll, and from what I’ve read of their comms, the Dust robberies aren’t Torchwick’s or the White Fang’s idea, they’re hers. A woman with black hair, and two accomplices. Neo, being able to disguise herself, was tapped to make a fourth ‘teammate’, and they enrolled themselves at Haven.”

Leo looked incredulous. “You’re saying they’re pretending to be students?”

“You have to admit, it’s not what anyone would expect. We know they’re targeting the Vytal Festival; showing up with the students would give them an ideal amount of time to scout things out for whatever the final phases of their plan are. Not to mention putting them inside Beacon.”

[Deception successful! Acting has increased by 1!]

Oh thank fuck that worked. Still, I grimaced at the furious expression on Qrow’s face.

“How long have you known this?” he snarled. “Why didn’t you say something sooner!?”

“I didn’t bring it up because we’ve had other things to worry about,” I replied, not answering the first question. Which I’m sure he noticed but hopefully he won’t press on that. “She wasn’t our priority coming here; Leonardo was. Then on top of that we added dealing with Callows, then Spider, and even the Albains. Jumping into a fight with a group that took down a Maiden isn’t smart.”

“For someone who made such a passionate speech about not treating Autumn like a mushroom, you certainly decided to keep the rest of us in the dark about this. Here I thought you cared about her.”

Oh, you son of a–!

“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” I snapped. “Do you think I like knowing that bitch is this close and not doing anything about it? But killing her here doesn’t guarantee Amber gets the rest of her soul back, and that’s my priority. For all we know, it would send the Maiden powers straight to Salem! Don’t act like you don’t understand triage, and don’t you dare insinuate I don’t care about Amber, ever again!”

“We’re on the same side, Qrow,” Leonardo soothed. “Jaune is right, we should deal with one enemy at a time.”

“How is ignoring her supposed to help?” said Qrow. “Walk me through how leaving her alone when we know where she is helps Autumn.”

“First off, as long as she’s playing student and sitting in class, she’s not out setting things on fire,” I pointed out, glaring. “As long as she thinks her cover is intact, she stays somewhere we can keep an eye on her. This is particularly helpful for us because, secondly, she’s planning on putting herself right into our hands when Haven students show up at Beacon for the Tournament.” Qrow opened his mouth again, but I bulled onward. “And that matters because thirdly, in case you forgot, Ozpin has a machine in his basement that transfers souls, which is the only way we might be able to guarantee Amber’s soul ends up back where it belongs!”

[Persuasion successful! Charm has increased by 1!]

Qrow grimaced, but closed his mouth again, obviously acknowledging my point.

“Let’s leave this subject for tonight,” Leonardo suggested, barely flinching when Qrow clicked his tongue. “Jaune, I notice you’ve been careful not to describe this woman; why is that?”

I sighed. “Because I don’t know how much contact you have with various students, and I didn’t want to put you in a position where you could slip up. Now that I’m certain they’re planning to come along with the Haven delegation, the best thing we can do right now is ignore her.”

“And if I don’t know which student she is, there’s no risk of me acting differently and accidentally tipping her off,” he surmised.

Or giving us away deliberately, at least before your oath, I finished. From the complicated expression on Leonardo’s face, he was thinking along the same lines. Still, if not for that very oath, I wouldn’t have included him in this conversation, and I hoped he realized that too.

“Fine,” said Qrow. “One more thing and I’ll drop it for now: If Autumn’s attacker is already here, why bother sending Callows?”

“I’m not sure Callows was sent at all,” I replied. “I’m not sure either of them even knows the other is nearby, and if so I’d really like to keep it that way.”

Qrow looked to be chewing his tongue, but he gave a curt nod of agreement.

“You think he’s acting independently?” Leonardo asked.

“The impression I’ve gotten of Salem is that she doesn’t have much of a sense of urgency,” I said. “Her little cabal seem to just do whatever they want, pursuing their own grudges, the left hand never knowing what the right is doing. Maybe she’s accounting for all those independent actions as facets of some master plan, but I think it’s equally likely she just knows that all of them are going to cause problems for us and doesn’t care beyond that.”

I took a long, slow breath and tapped [Gaia’s Pulse] to help control my temper. The feeling of a thousand-odd souls in the 800+ square-meter area of [Detect Aura] washed over me, and as ever the sensation helped me put things in perspective.

“Back to the current plan, then,” I said after a moment. “I’m guessing we’ll need time for the information about my hospital visits to disseminate. Should we plan for spreading the rumor tomorrow, and then go for it on Tuesday?”

“That should be enough time for word to spread, between me and the Familias,” Leonardo agreed. “I’ll coordinate with the Council to make an announcement which they’ll endorse, and by tomorrow afternoon the whole city will know.”

“You’re going back to work tomorrow, then?”

“Indeed,” the headmaster agreed. “Best if the students don’t realize anything occurred this weekend at all. Will you be joining me? Perhaps you could audit some classes.”

“I’ll consider it,” I said, looking to Qrow. Need to bury the hatchet, at least for now. “Do you have more business in the city? I can hang around Haven tomorrow.”

“I suppose…” he allowed. “I was meaning to check on SAFR anyway. Hopefully I can get hold of them without having to go down to Kuchinashi personally.”

“That’s an idea,” I said, and Qrow looked at me incredulously.

“You want me to leave the city before we finish dealing with Callows? That’s a terrible idea.”

“No, no,” I waved him off. “But you can easily be seen leaving the city, right?”

“Making you a much more tempting target for Callows tomorrow,” Qrow caught on immediately. “Okay, I can get behind that if you’re gonna be at Haven all day. Maybe you can even make a show of blowing off your guards on Tuesday to make yourself more tempting as bait.”

And now it’s my turn to throw a bone. “I’ll pull together some dossiers for you to pass on to the group.” I paused, then added more quietly, “For the record, I was planning to do that anyway once we got back, after we met with Torchwick.”

Qrow harrumphed, but didn’t restart the argument, for which I was grateful. Instead, he turned back to the headmaster. “All right, then let’s get back to planning this reverse-ambush. Leo, you’re gonna handle locking down an area; where can we pick that’s relatively private…?”

Leonardo and I made our way up to Haven before dawn to clean up the mess Tyrian had made of his office. Fortunately, that was easier than it might have been. He called his secretary and gave him the day off, while I shoved all the scattered papers into my [Inventory]. Righting his desk, I used the interface to sort similar papers, then dropped them back on his desk in piles.

“What on Remnant was that?” Leonardo asked, hanging up the call and staring at the neat stacks.

“Pocket space,” I replied. “Just something I figured out how to do. Amber seems to think it’s magic and I don’t know enough about the subject to disagree, but I also haven’t dug into it much.”

“Well, it certainly simplified this job,” he allowed, moving to sit at his desk and pulling a bag from his own pocket, from which he unpacked a typical Remnan computer.

Personal computers were a bit less common on Remnant, since Scrolls were almost universal and were more powerful than even cutting edge mobile phones on Earth. Most places you’d expect to see a computer or laptop, there was simply a holographic screen that could be synced to nearby Scrolls. The screen would become the display while the Scroll itself could then be expanded to act as the keyboard.

Places like libraries and the CCT towers had stationary computer terminals, and so did a lot of office desks, but from what I’d seen most people preferred the more mobile devices and would go for a tablet-sized Scroll — which could also use the ubiquitous standard-sized Scroll as a keyboard — before considering buying a stationary computer.

I took a seat on one of the ruined chairs in Leonardo’s office and pulled out my black Scroll, ignoring the Atlas Military data dump in favor of the folder cloned from the secretary’s computer, and soon enough I had pulled up the school’s records on the team I was looking for.

Four easily-recognizable faces stared back at me, each with their own self-assured smirk, and I memorized how they looked as real people instead of computer models.

Team CMSN (Year 1)

Cinder Fall*

Mercury Black

Emerald Sustrai

Florentine Nyktipolos

Cinder was regal-looking, with a heart-shaped face, plucked eyebrows, and winged eyeliner around amber-colored eyes just a shade darker than Blake’s. Emerald looked just the same as when I bumped into her before, with dark skin, mint-green hair, and wine-red eyes. Mercury looked cocky and lazy, dark grey hair falling over– Wait, does he… actually have silver eyes? I guess they could just be grey, but I should run that by Ozpin.

[Mental note added!]

The last member had black hair tied up in twintails, bright green eyes, and an impish grin that I would have recognized as Neo’s even if I didn’t remember her Vytal Tournament disguise. A note in her file marked an excused leave of absence to care for personal matters.

Fuck me, three of them didn’t even bother coming up with fake names? At least Neo put in a modicum of effort. I guess because she didn’t want to draw Spider’s attention?

And what’s with the continuous references to Italy? I grumbled internally. Rome, Naples, now Florence; none of those cities exist on Remnant! I had generally accepted that the majority of pop culture was somehow the same here as on Earth, or else had an ersatz version that was close enough as made no odds, but every so often a particular reference would stick in my craw. Whatever.

Dismissing Neo’s profile, I pulled up Cinder’s instead, inspecting the higher-resolution photos of the beautiful brunette. So she just showed up on enrollment day and nobody questioned why she was a grown-ass woman? I could maybe buy the others being Academy age, but she’s got to be at least 25.

Then again, younger than average students like Ruby could find themselves invited, so maybe it was also possible for older students to enroll? I hadn’t seen any at Beacon, but absence of proof wasn’t proof of absence.

Screenshotting their team lineup, I forwarded it to Qrow.

DM: Ohm -› Scarecrow | Monday 07:41

Ohm sent a photo!

‹Ohm› its Jaune btw

‹Scarecrow› I gathered. I’ll admit they do look like the people I saved Autumn from. You’re sure?

‹Ohm› entirely. first three are Amber’s assailants, green eyes is Torchwick’s partner

‹Scarecrow› Fine. Give me what you have so I can pass it to Oz.

‹Ohm› roger roger

Let’s see, what can I reasonably gather from Haven’s records and Neo’s Scroll? And what can I include from my remaining metaknowledge that won’t raise too many questions about how the fuck I know it?

Name: Jaune ArcLevel: 61 (Next: 63.35%)Title: Academy StudentRace: HumanAge: 18Job: Journeyman HuntsmanClass: PaladinSemblance: The GamerHP: 8301/8301MP: 4461/4461STR: 223 (100)CON: 279 (102)DEX: 162 (54)INT: 136 (51)WIS: 110 (52)CHA: 156 (53)Points: 112Money: 1,008,990LStatus: Cursed – Yellow Death [High]

A/N: If you’re enjoying this story, feel free to check out my discord server at https://discord.gg/H6V854Fvbg

I must have rewritten the conversation at the safehouse three or four times with different reveals and angles. It was also supposed to be a small snip, but it kept expanding until it became the bulk of this chapter. Still not completely sure this is the best route, but it’s what we’re going with.

‘Less-lethal’ is a more accurate term than ‘non-lethal’, although (at least in the US) they are not legally distinct, and it is not required for a ‘non-lethal’ weapon to be unable to kill, just not intended to.In the case of a flashbang (properly a ‘stun grenade’), despite the deflagration being subsonic, permanent hearing loss has been reported; additionally, the concussion can cause further injury, and the metal-oxidant reaction can still cause fires if there are flammable compounds nearby.

SAFR (‘Sapphire’) is the team from RWBY: The Grimm Campaign. They are still doing their own thing, unrelated to this story, but Qrow mentioned wanting to check on them in Chapter 44, and this is the first chance he’s had.

I know the fandom vaguely settled on CMEN for Cinder’s fake ‘team’, but as funny as the ‘seaman’ joke is, I found myself debating between CMNE (‘carmine’) and CMSN (‘crimson’) and ended up settling on the latter.

For Neo’s alias: As Jaune’s narration implies, Venetian is the English adjective/demonym for Venice, just as ‘Neapolitan’ is for Naples.Nyktipolos (Greek: Νυκτιπολος, ‘night-wandering’) is an epithet of Hecate, goddess of magic and three-way crossroads; Hecate’s Roman counterpart was Trivia, which is Neo’s birth name.