Cards of Remnant

Chapter 33: Burning the Candle - Part 1

Watching her targets from the shadows, Emerald found herself about as confused as ever dealing with Team RWBY. And she was only spying on half of them.

"Showdown! Three! Two! One!" Ruby and Yang shouted at each other, each sister rapidly shuffling their decks in front of their dorm room. "Draw!"

The Slifer Red and Obelisk Blue instantly stopped shuffling their decks. Each of them flipped over the top cards.

"Ha! Angel Trumpeter!" Ruby grinned. "Nineteen hundred attack points–oh, darn."

Yang wagged her drawn monster in her sibling's face. "Sorry, sis. Vice Dragon. Two thousand. I win."

"Ugh. Fine," Ruby sighed. "You get to pick Team RWBY's reps to the Tag-Duel Showcase. But then who's gonna emcee the match if you're in it?

"I talked to Sun about it. He's okay with filling in for that duel," Yang said. "Heck, if Blake ends up coming, she might even save him a dance. Make up for what happened in the courtyard."

Emerald had heard about that. The buzz through the academy was that the monkey faunus who'd snuck into the last semester's exchange program had politely asked Belladonna to the dance in Beacon Courtyard. If she'd just turned him down, that probably would have been the end of it, Wukong and his team provoked a lot of exasperation even among the students that liked them. But apparently, the secret cat faunus had flipped out at him, the crowd's attention drawn by the normally quiet girl's sudden bluster of rage. Then, she'd stormed off and… well… a lot of unkind words were being thrown out the rumor mill about her mysterious moodiness.

"You know, if Blake and Weiss don't end up coming to the dance, it's gonna be you and me tag-dueling by default," Ruby pointed out, only for an uncharacteristically morose shadow to flutter over the pipsqueak's face. "Hopefully, I won't drag you down with my stupid 'no Fusion Summoning', no magic, supposedly 'not-normal' knees–"

"Ah, ah, ah! Don't start getting down on yourself like that," Yang chided her sister, playfully ruffling the shorter girl's dark hair until the younger sibling began to laugh. "That just makes this whole thing a win-win for me if Blake decides she'd rather relax with a good book instead of coming to the dance. Or Weiss decides she wants to duel. I'll get to watch you two duel while you're wearing your cute-as-a-button, handpicked outfit. You have picked one, right?"

"Oh, yeah," Ruby replied, digging around in her jacket pocket. "I've mostly been looking through the available away missions for after the dance, but I did bookmark the first outfit I saw on Bargain Bin's website."

Yang immediately paled. "Bargain Bin?"

Ruby shrugged as she fished out her scroll. "I don't exactly have much lien left after this month's card catalog, Duel Monsters Monthly, dust for my custom experiments, not to mention cookies and strawberries. But I think I found something pretty good. No heels at least."

Emerald severely doubted that. Not the lack of heels, but that she'd found something good at Bargain Bin, Vale's one-stop shop for pawned, stolen, previously-used everything. She'd known some guys on the streets who'd stripped corpses and sold the clothes to the place for a tidy profit.

Yang did her best not to cringe as she gazed at her sister's scroll. "Are those bullet holes?"

"It's within my price range," Ruby shrugged.

Yang bit her bottom lip with internal agony, only for a pensive look to cross her face. "You should show this to Weiss. Maybe she's learned how to fix some stuff up from her butlers."

Emerald barely contained a snort, even Mercury looking up from his comicbook long enough to smirk from where he leaned against the wall next to her. Even if the butlers knew how to do that kind of stuff, no way the heiress was ever allowed to wear anything without a five-digit price tag after a small army of tailors were through with it. And given she was just as much a fashionista as her blonde teammate, that was probably one of the few elements of growing up with a hundred silver spoons in her mouth that Weiss wouldn't complain about.