Ninjas of Love

Homecoming

Charlie trudged straight past her, his Stetson pulled low over his face, so as to obscure his identity. Behind him, Kerian was staggering along, swaying from side to side like a maize plant in the wind, holding an empty bottle of Hooch in his left hand and an empty bottle of Tanqueray in his right. Weiss looked up at them briefly, her piercing eyes peeking out over her coffee cup, and audibly sighed. This sound triggered Blake to stare over the top of whatever it was she was doing on her scroll, before her eyes quickly darted back to the screen's sickly white glow.

"Kerian," Billy shouted at his clearly intoxicated teammate, "did you spend all the money on alcohol?" Kerian pointed at Billy, as if to confront him before falling down in a slump onto the pile of cushions Blake had used to make her primitive reading den. She glared at him, but decided to let it pass, as he began to snore and drool onto one of the beige cushions. "Well," Charlie answered in lieu of his friend, "he didn't spend quite all of the money on alcohol."

Charlie walked over to the central coffee table with a newfound spring in his step and emptied out his jacket pocket of myriad different plastic cards, all bearing different Lien numbers. "So just how much do you have there?" Weiss asked, the appearance of money having very blatantly snatched her attention away from the black coffee she was nursing (she didn't actually like it, she just couldn't have milk in her coffee and soy milk curdles horribly for those among you who aren't vegan). "I present to you, Miss Schnee." Charlie replied, adopting his best impression of a provincial English butler serving his much wealthier mistress, "Forty thousand, four hundred and sixty five Lien."

Everyone's jaw proverbially dropped, save for Weiss, who, as a direct consequence of spending many of her formative years as the heiress to her father's Schnee Dust Company, saw such sums as merely pocket change. "And quite how did you stumble across the money?" Emily asked, inquisitively. Before Charlie or his sleeping teammate could answer, Yang butted in. "I bet they robbed a bank!" Ruby looked at her dismissively and fed in a theory of her own. "I reckon they became in-demand gigolos!" Blake sighed and quietly argued, "They probably went to one roulette wheel, got lucky and called it quits."

"Nearly right." Charlie affirmed, meowing at Blake to ensure she knew what he meant, "we went and won some bets on darts. Well, the town drunkard over there did. I was preoccupied with actually winning at darts. And then preoccupied with dragging him away from the bar, lest he haemorrhage all our money into booze." Kerian showed no sign of stirring. "So, I guess this is a joint effort, in that- despite Kerian's best attempts to fuck our simple mission up- I made it back here with most of the money still intact."

Yang and Emily looked at each other as if to discreetly laugh at Charlie's good-natured yet evidently frustrated verbal decimation of the transfaunus, while Ruby just stared at Charlie in awe. "So, what are you going to do with so much money?" Ruby asked, gesturing toward the Kilimanjaro-like pile of plastic on the coffee table, hovering perilously over Weiss' drink.

"Well, Miss Rose.."
"Quit that crap, you absolute helmet. It's Ruby."
"Well, Ruby," the young huntress nodded enthusiastically to this, "I'm going to take my friends out back into Vale later on a big, badass, manly..." Charlie cleared his throat. "SHOPPING SPREE!" He shrieked in his most enchantingly melodic, yet disturbingly effeminate and camp voice. "We're gonna go get scrolls, and clothes, and probably some marshmallows, because goddamn, I love marshmallows, and maybe you can come along too?"
"Sure, I'd like that." Weiss replied, showing- for the first time- some amenability towards Team BECK. "I meant Ruby, and Yang if Em wants her to come."
"Oh, I want Yang to come, for sure!" Emily quipped, sending roars of laughter around the table, not least from the buxom blonde herself who took a good minute to compose herself again.

"Then I suppose it's settled. We'll head out into Vale later, and we'll go get all the gubbins, tat and generalised crap that we need for our stay at Beacon Academy. Is that ok with you guys?" Team BECK, Ruby, and Yang all nodded in unnerving unison, thus confirming the upcoming trip (well, there's what Chapter 20 is gonna be for you- so don't say I never give you anything.)