RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC31: Falling Up (Cinder and Co.)-3

Cinder could not leave Argus till the matter of the theft was more settled--and remained stuck there for days.

Shine and Wally left after the second one, once they'd spoken to all of the team as well.

They said they'd be back soon, but not soon enough for all of their students' peace of mind.

The Grimm had shaken everyone up. Cinder found that her own arrival was overshadowed by it, which was perhaps a relief--it was also weird. She was treated with relative civility by the others because she could answer their questions and so they were able to put aside the awkwardness.

Working on a project together was a good way to get past awkwardness, just not a method Cinder liked.

Fay was informed of what happened but didn't urge Cinder to return until the authorities cleared her to do so.

Winter was fairly sure that Teach and Calico would not dare show their faces in Eurus seeking revenge--it would be too much of a risk--but she wanted to be quite sure no one else knew where Cinder was hiding.

They couldn't find any reason to think that Annie Bonne, as the desk clerk's name had turned out to be, or Mary Leer [think the spanish word], the guard at the gate who'd been unhelpful and then vanished along with her, had known who Cinder was before Teach had, or had traced her to Eurus.

But they just couldn't be sure.

Cinder thought Argus was a more easy place for her to get discovered and wanted to get out of it, but she was still stuck there for days anyway.

Emerald broke up the monotony by hanging out with her, perhaps out of pity.

Oscar did also, but he said he wanted to get her perspective for his book.

Cinder obliged him out of boredom.

She found Fay's indigo fabric while she was there--she had nothing else to do.

Oscar recovered from the experience as quickly as he usually did, and chalked it up to just another adventure in the line of trying to help people. Yang said he ought to have a frequent kidnapping card benefit.

Royal? Well, he enjoyed the attention he got from his coworkers but had a hard time covering for Cinder by coming up with other reasons why he would have been involved. He also said he'd seen too much and gotten kidnapped because of it. It was the truth, just not the whole truth. He left it vague when they asked how he learned about it.

Roman and Raven and Neo all spent days trying to ascertain how far the smuggling had gone, and the numbers only made them angrier. It amounted to thousands of lien every other month at least, perhaps more.

They questioned Cinder more about what she'd figured out. The plus side to this was that Roman stopped making snide remarks to her.

Neo didn't, but Cinder didn't understand most of them anyway.

Raven didn't enjoy this kind of detective work very much. She'd prefer to find out secrets than to find she'd been robbed--ironically perhaps.

"I want to find those two pirates," she said finally, to Winter and Qrow. "I'm sure we could break this Grimm trade ring if we could figure out where it was starting from. They would know. Whatever Shine says about evil, we aren't just allowing them to do this. On this scale especially."

"What if we can't stop them?" Winter looked a little pale. "What if, even if we were to stop this ring, they'd still find a place to use Grimm? If it's not just capturing them, it's controlling them somehow...or thinking they are."