It was actually making Akelarre feel rather nostalgic to walk next to the piers and jutting cement walkways of the shipping district, the lapping of water a sound that at once had her mind trying to fill in so many blanks and yet did wonders to calm her down. Even the faint scent of grease and oil in the air was calling back snippets of memories that appeared for just a moment before being snatched away.

The trip to Vale had been anticlimactic. Mercury drove her to the gates and she walked past the guards without any fuss. They were there to protect from Grimm, not perfectly ordinary young women like her.

The directions she followed on her scroll were handy, as was the device itself, but her screen of Grimmsects was even more useful at keeping an eye out for her surroundings.

At long last she veered away from the piers and onto a long service road, leaving the bright sun behind as she walked into the shadows cast by tall buildings. Finally, she arrived at a brick building with arched windows that were blocked from the inside and a doorway flanked by two men in pristine suits. It didn’t fit the surroundings at all; too clean, too shiny and the neon sign hanging above the door shone with a purplish light that just felt wrong in an industrial area.

The Club was where Roman supposedly had his base, or at least, that’s what he had told Cinder when asked. She already had a few thousand insects of the normal sort scouting out the interior as she walked to the front door. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello young Miss,” one of the guards said. “How can I be of service?”

She smiled at him. “I’m here to see Mister Torchwick.”

The tension in the guard’s shoulders was there and gone in a heartbeat. “I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree, Miss.” He smiled and tipped his hat back, brown eyes scanning her up and down as though searching for weapons.

She tilted her head to one side, hood pooling on her shoulders as she did. “No, he’s in there,” she said. And it was true. Unless Roman had a cigar-smoking twin brother that also liked to hang around Neo while sitting in the VIP lounge, in which case she was ready to admit to being wrong.

“I’m sorry Miss, The Club is closed until tonight, and I’m certain that Mister Torchwick isn’t here besides.”

Akelarre frowned. She had to get to him. How foolish would she look if she wasn’t able to do even that much? By the same token, she didn’t want to hurt the guards at the door. They were probably Roman’s subordinates and he seemed the sort to take it personally if she forced her way past them. “I really need to see Roman,” she said.

The two guards shared a look and the younger of the two, the one talking to her, shrugged and lowered his hand from his side where he had been reaching for a dagger tucked under his coat. “How about I escort you inside and you can meet Junior. He runs The Club. He might be able to help you, yeah?”

Her frown turned into a grin. “Thanks!”

The entrance of The Club was just a short passage that ended at a pair of red doors which opened onto a huge dance floor. It was empty for now, no one dancing to the slow thrum of electronic music playing in the background.

Along the edges were normal booths and a huge bar that ran across the left side of the room, with drinks on racks behind a counter where stools waited for customers.

“Hey Chris, who’s this?”

Two young women were walking towards Akelarre, twins by the looks of them, one in a poofy red dress and another who was slightly taller in heels and an equally poofy white dress. They flanked her, Red to her left and White to her right.

“This young Miss wanted to see Mister Torchwick,” the guard said. “But I told her he wasn’t here and that I’d bring her to Junior instead.”

“Hrm,” the one in red said. “We’ll take care of her from here.”

Seeing as he was dismissed, the guard bowed once and stepped back out of the way and towards the doors. Akelarre watched him go for a moment before turning back to the two girls. “Hi, I’m Akelarre. Roman is waiting for me,” she said.

White snorted and looked at her sister while crossing her arms. “Doubt it.”

“I don’t think Roman would want someone like you,” Red said as she eyed Akelarre up and down. “You’re not quite womanly enough, if you catch my meaning.”

“Maybe you should draw her a picture, she seems a little too slow to get it otherwise,” White added.

Red laughed and it sounded off to Akelarre’s ear. “I’ll ask Neo if she has crayons laying around.”

“Neither of you is very professional,” Akelarre said. “I hope you don’t actually work for Roman.”

They bristled at that. “Who do you think you are?” Red asked.

Akelarre smiled, aware that they could see her lips pulling back even with her hood on. “I’m Akelarre. I like bugs. Do you like bugs?”

“What?” Red asked. White just scowled in disgust.

Akelarre flung her Grimm arm out, and with that motion two black forms zipped out from the sleeves of her cloak and shot towards the sisters. Neither reacted in time to stop the heavy, clinging weight of a bug from landing on their chests.

As one, both sisters looked down.

The black, bone covered tarantula wasps on their bellies looked up.

“Don’t scream,” Akelarre said, her tone even and calm. “They get really excited when people scream or are afraid.” She had the wasps wiggle their butts a little for emphasis, and to show off the three-inch-long barbed stingers they had. “I’m going to go see Roman now.”

They two girls were hyperventilating by the time she reached the far end of the room and started making her way upstairs. Taking pity on them, she had her little cazadors fly off the twins and zip back towards her. She wouldn’t want the twins to accidentally squish one of her cuddlewasp buddies.

Climbing up the stairs landed her in a little corridor, rooms with numbers on their doors off to one side and bigger rooms with small bars in their corners and tables and couches on the other. The numbered rooms all had beds in them, very dirty ones judging by the sorts of bugs she was finding.

Wrinkling her nose a little, she pushed on towards the last of the VIP sort of rooms, opened the door, and stepped right in.

Roman was halfway out of his seat, cane coming up towards Akelarre when he registered who it was and slumped back down. Neo, for her part, had disappeared from Akelarre’s vision, but the bugs she’d placed on the diminutive girl were moving around the room. “Hello, Roman,” she said before turning to a completely barren and unremarkable corner. “Hi Neo!”

Neo waved at her, while still not being visually present, and Akelarre waved back. She was amused to see Neo looking around as if she was being pranked.

“Do you make a habit of scaring people like that?” Roman asked.

“Not usually on purpose,” Akelarre replied a little sheepishly. “It does happen often, though.”

“Right,” Roman said as he got to his feet and stretched. He gestured at a table sitting at the far end of the room next to a large one-way window overlooking the dance floor. “Want to take a seat?”

“Of course,” Akelarre said. She turned towards Neo. “Will you be joining us?”

The world splintered like a pane of glass cracking to reveal Neo standing with her arms crossed and a dangerous pout in place.

“You can see through her illusions?” Roman asked as he took a seat. “Oh, she’s going to love that.”

“It’s not so much that I can see through them. It’s just that I can still feel where she is despite not seeing her.” Akelarre pulled out a chair across from Roman and sat down, legs together and hands on knees. “Should we just start?” she asked.

Roman leaned back into his own seat, pulled out a cigar from in his jacket followed by a zippo, then lit up. “Cinder tells me you wanted to chat?”

“Not just chat, Mr. Torchwick, I want to plan.”

He nodded and made a waving motion with his cigar-filled hand that left smoky rings in the air. “Yeah, I remember you want to take over Vale’s underworld.”

She nodded. “I will.”

Neo, who looked as if she had gotten all of her pouting done, stomped over to Akelarre’s side, wiggled her behind a little, then flopped down onto Akelarre’s lap. Akelarre only just moved her hands out of the way fast enough for them not to be squished by Neo. Neo’s head didn’t even reach Akelarre’s chin from where she sat.

“Yeah, well sorry to break it to you, sweetheart, but that’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, and the old kingpins that are already in place won’t take kindly to a little girl--no offence--trying to take their hard earned positions out from under them. Even I don’t cross them lightly and I’m the best.”

“I have resources that should help,” Akelarre said as she wrapped both arms around Neo and brought her close. Neo was turning out to be a very cuddly friend... “And time is not an issue, though I would rather start sooner than later.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “And why are you trying to do this, exactly?”

“A friend asked me to, as a favour of sorts.”

Roman just blinked, then looked at Neo who shrugged in return. “A favour?”

“She helped me when she didn’t need to, gave me a home and acted like a mother that I didn’t deserve. I owe her a lot. And it’s for the betterment of mankind that I do this, so it’s not like it’s something I would be against to begin with.”

“Right,” Roman said even though it was pretty clear that he didn’t care. “Well I’m not going to be the one to stand between a girl and her delusional dream. What sort of resources are we talking here?”

“I have lots of money,” she said and Roman nodded at that. “Then I have myself. I’m pretty good in a fight. Then we have all the Grimm. I don’t control all of them, but those I don’t control will at least listen to me. Oh, and we have Cinder, who is very competent.”

“Wait, back up, sweetheart. The Grimm?”

Akelarre gestured and dozens of black and white Grimm slid out from her cloak and clothes and down the back of her hair, all of them congregating on the table. Spiders and wasps and bullet ants and more besides. “The Grimm,” Akelarre confirmed.

Roman had backed up in his seat, cigar forgotten in one hand. Neo, for her part, was looking between the Grimm and up to Akelarre’s face under the hood. She decided to help by having one of her spiders pull the hood off. Roman’s eyes widened at the sight of her face.

“Shit,” he said. She could sense him reaching for his cane and Neo tensing on her lap.

“There’s no need to worry, I’m not here to hurt anyone,” Akelarre said.

“Of course not, you’re just a Grimm. Grimm are all perfectly cuddly, aren’t they? I was just getting up to go pet a Beowolf is all,” he said as he rose out of his seat.

“I wouldn’t, their fur is all bristly and hard. Unless you pet them on the tummy where it’s softer.”

“I think you’re missing the point here,” he said.

Akelarre sighed and tightened her hug on Neo. “No, I don’t think I have. Sit down, Mr. Torchwick. I was telling the truth when I said that I wasn’t here to hurt you.”

“You’re a Grimm, I probably look like a tasty snack to you,” he said.

“Was that innuendo?” she asked.

Roman blinked slowly and even Neo leaned back and perked an eyebrow.

“Or not. Anyway, Mr. Torchwick. If I wanted to hurt Vale I would probably just sabotage a section of the wall, then have a few thousand Grimm rush at it in the middle of the night. With the number of Grimm around the city the defenders would run out of ammunition far sooner than I would run out of Grimm. But that’s not why I’m here.” With a mental command she had all of the Grimmsects on the table scurry away and back onto her person. “I’m here to take over Vale’s underworld, and I want your help doing it.”

Neo poked Akelarre under one boob and when she looked down it was to see Neo pointing at her own face, one eyebrow raised as though curious.

“Oh, yeah, you can help too, Neo!”

“Wait, Neo, you’re okay with this?” Roman asked.

Neo’s response was to shrug one shoulder.

“Are you just saying that because you want to sleep with her?”

Neo pressed her fingers together and fluttered her eyelashes innocently.

“S-see,” Akelarre said. “It’s nothing like that. Neo just trusts me.”

Neo dropped her hands and gave her a flat look.

Suddenly Akelarre felt three people walking towards their room, the twins from before and another man who was exceedingly tall. “We’re about to have company,” she said while pulling on her hood.

The door cracked open and the three walked in. The girls took positions on either side of the tall man while focusing a pair of glares onto Akelarre, and the tall man crossed his arms. “Hey, Roman,” he said.

“Good morning, Junior. Glad to see you joining us on this merry occasion. Your distraction is immensely useful.”

“Hello,” Akelarre said.

Junior eyed her, then Neo who was sitting cradled on her lap. “You’re the one that hurt Melanie and Militia?”

Akelarre shook her head. “I didn’t hurt them at all,” she said. “They were being impolite, so I tried to be nice to them and showed off some of my pets.”

“And your pets happen to be car-sized bugs?” Junior asked.

“Some of them, yes, but the ones I showed those two were much smaller than that.” She smiled at Junior, then gestured to one of the empty seats at the table. “Do you want to sit down? I was just finished convincing Roman that helping me take over Vale’s underground was in the best interests of humanity.”

“I think I could use more convincing,” Roman said.

Akelarre shook her head. “Now now, Roman, think of it this way; you’ll be providing me with valuable resources at an early stage. It’s the perfect time to invest.”

“This isn’t a business.”

She tilted her head to one side, chin rubbing against Neo’s brown and pink hair. “It isn’t? I always found that business and crime and government were all quite similar. They are all very human things, after all.”

Junior cleared his throat. “Alright, so the bug thing was an unfortunate accident, right?”

“It wasn’t an accident, but it was unfortunate,” Akelarre agreed.

“Yeah, well try to keep unfortunate things to a minimum while in my club, alright?” He seemed ready to leave and drag his two incensed subordinates with him but paused to give Roman a look. “You can vouch for her?”

“Between you and me, if she wanted the twins dead they wouldn’t be shaking their pretty little fists at anyone right now.”

“Right,” Junior said. “That’s good enough for me. Pardon the interruption then.”

“Of course.” She gave them a little wave. “Have a nice afternoon.”

When Junior pulled the door shut behind him Roman turned back to her. The distraction had served to calm him down, at least, and maybe so did the act of hiding all of her bug friends. It still took a while before he spoke. “I don’t get you,” he said with a point of his cigar in her general direction.

“That’s okay, Mister Torchwick,” Akelarre said with another beaming smile. “As long as you can give me what I need, then we’ll all be fine in the end.”

“And what you need is information. Fine,” he said, before tapping his cigar against the rim of an ashtray. “What do you need to know?”

“Who leads the underground, how is it run, what kinds of services are available and how does the average person deal with them?”

He took another puff and blew out a perfect ring before he started. “Vale’s underground, as you call it, ain’t so much of an underground as you would think. You can divide it into three parts, I suppose. The gangs who actually run things, the folks that make money in interesting ways, and the bastards at the top who make sure nothing gets too complicated. I guess you might call info brokers and launderers and smugglers a fourth part, but they usually mind their own business.”

“That sounds perfectly normal,” Akelarre said.

“Yeah, sure. See, Vale ain’t Atlas. We’ve got plenty more thieves and drug peddlers than we have knife fights and assaults. The council’s mostly to blame for the state of things. Drugs are dandy as long as they keep folks happy, so smaller gangs that sell weak stuff only get slapped on the wrist. Those that sell things like Turkish Delight and Cauldron Cakes get hit hard. Addicts tend to lose their marbles and that attracts the Grimm. But I probably don’t need to tell you about that.”

“So how is everything organized?”

“It’s barely organized. But if you’re looking for some sort of structure, there are three gangs that have managed to tough it out. The Merchants, the Suits, the Knights of Vale, and if you’re feeling really generous you might call the Strays a gang.”

“The... Merchants. Are they a bunch of druggies who spend half their day high and the other half making everyone around them miserable?” Akelarre asked.

Roman blinked. “No. They’re actually fairly respectable. For criminals. Mostly they do money laundering, some smuggling, and they have high end gambling halls here and there in the nicer parts of the city. I hear their boss is a council member.”

“Oh,” Akelarre said. “Well, it’s an unfortunate name.”

“Merchant? They sell things. It’s a perfectly reasonable name,” Roman said.

“Right, right. The others?”

“The suits are based in this very building,” he said with a grand gesture. “Junior runs them. They’re nice enough. Some buying and selling of good acquired in interesting ways, some lighter drugs. Nothing too heinous.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“The Strays are some faunus that hang around the docks. Wannabe White Fang but with none of the backbone. And the Knights. The Knights are bad business. They’ll pick up kids from the towns around Vale, talk them up on the idea of living in the big city, then use them to make the crap they peddle on street corners. Strong stuff. Nasty stuff. The VPD are always cracking down on them but they’re like cockroaches.”

“So, instead of wiping the slate clean I could just subjugate the Merchants and the Suits, then wipe out the Knights?” Akelarre asked. She started to run her hands through Neo’s hair; she wondered what the girl used to keep her hair so soft.

“I’m not sure if everyone would agree to that,” he said.

She gave him her best smile. “I'm sure they’ll come to agree with my way of doing things.”