RWBY Through Worlds

58: Vagabonds, Ne'er Do Wells, Insufferable...

Neo didn't mind doing an odd job for Shine, she hardly expected that nothing would be asked of her in return for the big favor...she was still reeling from that.

At least she was more polite than Cinder. Beyond that Neo cared little about who's side she was on.

Going to the rundown building she'd visited before, she slipped inside one broken window.

She easily changed her color to the dark, dismal one of the room inside, so that she'd have been entirely invisible unless you had very good eyes.

It took some wandering around, and stepping over abandoned rubbish, to find any part of this building that was occupied. Perhaps it had once been a factory from the looks of the piping inside, back when Vacuo was a territory of Mantle, and more prosperous...if you could call it that.

 Neo had little luck finding anything like a door, but she was sure it looked more recently opened in the center of the building.

Less dusty too.

However her luck turned up when she heard footsteps.

Some odd figure suddenly flew across her path, and towards some wooden planks in the floor...then it opened them, the trapdoor was hidden with the ordinary flood panels, it seemed to be lifted up by some wire.

The figure slipped down inside it and shut it.

Curious, Neo snuck closer and found the wire with some difficulty.

Well, this was a stroke of luck indeed.

She took a snapshot of it with her scroll.

She lifted the door up soundlessly as a mouse and slipped through it, there was a stairway right under it.

She tiptoed down it, making no noise still.

"That you Kip?" a woman's voice, about 40 or so from the sound of it, called.

No response.

The other person, she now saw as she lowered herself down the stairs, was a boy...she thought...it was kind of hard to tell, a lot of him was a very odd shape, and metallic looking.

Also he had metal wings sticking out of his back but these folded into it a moment later.

"You had better make yourself scarce," the woman's voice said, she sounded bit muffled now. "My friend is coming over. We've got to run some tests. This might be the big night."

Neo supposed she didn't mean having a lark.

She softly stepped further in and kept along the wall.

There were machines and cages everywhere down here. Lit by fire dust candles, and there were blueprints and paper strewn all over the place. Along one wall there were test tubes, and a fridge that was probably an incubator, though Neo lacked the scientific savvy to know this.

She knew a payload when she saw it though.

She slipped beneath a table and started taking more pictures, luckily the scroll made no sound that you could hear over the loud humming of machines, the clanking of something the woman seemed to be doing, and the wheeze of some bellows.

"Kip, are you alive in there?"  the woman called impatiently.

Finally the boy-metal thing said rather flatly. "Yes mother."

"Well good, I was beginning to wonder," she said, finally she came out from behind some kind of machine.

She wore working clothes, had goggles and her frizzy purplish hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail. She looked younger than her voice suggested, but older than Neo.