Chapter 12
The rest of my day yesterday was patrolling for further signs of the Creep besides the sewage outlet. But there was nothing else around the city that indicated a Creep sighting. Guess the fight yesterday really tired him out. Sure didn’t stop this morning's news from talking about it, as well as the polices own progress on the investigation.
Lisa: “After many supposed sightings of the mysterious reptilian creature, it’s existence has since then been proven when photos and video footage of a destructive brawl between it and the Scarlet Spider were submitted yesterday. Said brawl resulted in the destruction of an office building and a residential street before the monster disappeared. And on top of that, the police have found evidence that the creature is, in actuality, the missing Grey Merlot, who had been experimenting with reptile DNA in an attempt to regenerate his missing arm, and mistakenly transformed himself into this mindless beast. The police are now trying for solutions to capture Merlot without hurting him beyond the point of no return.” Knowing everything that we do, it was a bit hard to focus on school. Especially Weiss, with her evident signs of exhaustion, probably from lack of sleep in the analysis last night. This didn’t go unnoticed by our teachers, but they all let it go because of her known track record. Well, all except for Ms. Greene, the one teacher in this school who is ALWAYS exhausted from her work, and asked to see Weiss after class.
Ann: *yawwwwn*”Now, Ms. Schnee, I’ve noticed your apparent exhausted state today. This is the first time I’ve ever seen you like this. So, I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything*yawn*going on with you.” Evidently on the verge of falling asleep.
Weiss: “Don’t worry, its nothing serious. I just didn’t get very much sleep last night while working on an experiment I’ve been doing.”
Ann: *yawn*”Right. You're a full-on science girl from an R&D company. Look I understand your work is important, but so is your own wellbeing.*yaaaaawn*Take from me, I pushed myself past my own limit a long time ago and drove myself into this... mess you see right now. All because I made no time for myself, and only worried on my work and students.*yawn*I Just don’t want anyone to end up like me.”
Weiss: “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
Ann: *yaaawn*”You’ve got a good thing going here. I don’t usually do this, but I’m gonna let you in on something. On my free periods, I sneak in a nap in the infirmary. You have gym next but there’s no way you can go through with it without hurting yourself in your current state.”
Weiss: “So what are you saying?”
Ann: “Come with me.” They make their way to the infirmary, so find the doc not there. “Okay. I’m gonna write you this sick note. You’re gonna take it to Port. And then you’re gonna come straight back here for a nap.”
Weiss: “You want me to lie to get out of class!?”
Ann: “Would you rather you potentially collapse and fall on your face on that hard ass floor?*yaaaaawn*Just do as I told you. I don’t wanna see you get hurt, so please just take a rest, alright?” Weiss was finding it hard to argue with her.
Weiss: *sigh*”Fine.” She takes the note and heads for the gym, where she finds the other students heading into the changing rooms, and Coach Port over at the ball rack. “Coach Port.”
Port: “Ah! Ms. Schnee. It’s about time you showed up.”
Weiss: “Well unfortunately, I can’t stay. I’m not feeling especially well, so I had this note written to rest in the infirmary.” As she hands him the note.
Port: “Hmm. Well, this is certainly a first. You've never called sick like this before.”
Weiss: “Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.”
Port: “Ah well. Your grades are all extraordinary, so I’ll let this slide. Just try to take better care of yourself, okay?”
Weiss: “Right. Thank you, Coach.” She heads back to the infirmary to find Ms. Greene already asleep in one in the beds. “Straight to the point, huh?” Weiss sets an alarm on her scroll before take a bed herself. Meanwhile, we cut to Jacques and Glass in the SDC after seeing this morning’s report.
Jacques: “That fool! How could he be so reckless!?”
Glass: “To be fair, you were being rather unreasonable with your request.”
Jacques: “Watch it, Glass! I’m not above firing you for insults alone right now. Consequences be damned! Things were bad enough with Cinder, but now we have two messes to clean up!”
Glass: “At least this time it was an accident, and not with malicious intent.”
Jacques: “Accident or not, it still puts tons of people in danger, which creates liabilities for the company and cost us tons of Lien!”
Glass: “Nice to see you still have your priorities straight, sir...” Sarcastically.
Jacques: “No doubt the police will try and ask us for help developing a cure for him. But no matter. As soon as he’s back to normal, he is so fired!” As he glares over the city. Back to Weiss as her alarm goes off and she awakes. Ms. Greene is still asleep over on the other bed until the actual school bell goes off.
Ann: “AH! What!?” Then she realizes where she is. “Oh. Right. Uh, how are you feeling?”
Weiss: “Better, actually. Thanks for this.”
Ann: “Just remember to take care of yourself going forward. Now excuse while I go grade everyone's work.” She heads out to her classroom while Weiss heads out to her place. Everyone makes it there, me already in my suit.
Ruby: “Hey, Weiss? Are you okay? I noticed you weren’t at gym today.”
Yang: “You were also pretty drowsy all day.”
Weiss: “I’m fine. I just didn’t get much sleep last night. Ms. Greene helped me get some rest during gym.”
Blake: “Wow. Never thought you would actually ditch class, no matter what subject.”
Weiss: “She was just worried about my health. But I’m okay now. Good thing too. Cause we still have bigger problems.”
PENNY: “Ms. Schnee is right. The Creep is still on the loose, and could still strike at the food supply. Thankfully, I was successful in synthetizing a single dose of antidote. All that’s left is to find Dr. Merlot.” As I grab the syringe of antidote.
Ruby: “The sewers are my only lead right now. I’ll start my search from the outlet I found last night.”
Weiss: “We’ll set up somewhere in the town square. The town center will help make sure we have optimal signal coverage, in case you get lost down there.”
Blake: “Then let's get to it.” We all split up at town square and I make my way to the outlet as they find a place to set up. Once I find the outlet tunnel, I can hear them on the com link.
Yang: “You sure about this, Sis? Looks pretty nasty in there?”
Blake: “We don’t have a choice. It’s either this or wait for the next attack, and we don’t when that’ll be.”
Ruby: “Okay. I’m going in.” I try to mostly stick to the pipes above to avoid getting soaked. The scanner helps me navigate through for a bit, but I have to pay attention to all the turns or I could get lost. Especially in case my systems lose signal. I go on for a while until I find myself in a central reservoir. The amount of ingenuity that goes into the kingdoms is immaculate. I jump across into a work area where I find myself on solid ground. Though, what’s weird is that there's no one here. You'd think there would be people here managing the place. “Where is everyone?”
Blake: “Good question...”
Yang: “You think the Creep got to them?”
Weiss: “Hey, don’t even think like that! This is creepy enough as is!” Goin further into the facility, I find my answer... everyone had gathered into this room and something had broken in through the east wall and slaughtered them all!
Blake: *gasp!* Blake is in state of fear.
Yang: “What the hell!?” Weiss feels sick to her stomach and gags a bit. I stand in absolute shock as I notice all of the teeth marks in the bodies and the claws marks everywhere. Then I hear a subtle roar from the hole. I cautiously swing through into another empty room with fenced off piping in one wall and some fans in another. I slow my pace as my spider sense goes off, and I start hearing an ominous hiss. I keep hearing the hiss for a minute before my spider sense goes off again, and I look up to see Creep’s tail incoming and I end up smacked across the room and into the fence.
Ruby: “Agh! I think I found him...” Creep drops from the ceiling and... looks a bit bigger than last time. That's when the notices some of his skin flaking off, and when I look up, I see his skin up in the ceiling pipes.
Yang: “Aw, gross!”
Blake: “He’s been shedding... This could be a problem.”
Ruby: “Hey, Doc. Ready for your annual physical.”
Creep: *ROOOOAR!* He goes on the offensive with trying to swipe and bite. I try to get the jump on him, but he grabs me out of the air and smashes me against the fence and into the pipes behind it, before chucking me across the room again. Once I recover, I dodge a few more attacks before slamming him down from dropping into him from up high. I take this chance to try and inject him, but... the needle just bent!
Ruby: “Crap!” He gets up and throws me off him. “His skin’s gotten too thick, I can’t pierce it!”
Blake: “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Yang: “Any other ideas?”
Weiss: “Only one, but it’s a bit risky. You gotta try and inject him in his gums when he opens his mouth.” He jumps up clings to the solid stone wall and proceeds to throw pieces of the wall at me as I zip up to him to try and engage aerial combat, and he smacks me away back to the floor before jump up through the ceiling and onto an upper level of the sewers.
Ruby: “Oh no you don’t!” As I follow him up, and he keeps going until he once again reaches the streets. He runs a rampage as through the busy streets as I give chase and eventually catch up, once again slamming him into the ground from my dropping impact. I try to get in front of him and force his open, but he recovers too fast and tries to bite my arm off. I’m just lucky I’m quick enough to dodge before that happens. Though the second I land from jumping back away from his bite, he spins and smacks me away again with his tail, and right into a building with a front entrance behind support beams. I’m sent crashing through one of these beams and a bunch of rubble falls on tops of me, trapping me while the Creep gets away again as the cops show up. By the time I get the rubble off of me, it’s too late. The Creep is long gone and I’ve lost the trail. “Shoot.”
Weiss: “Are you okay?”
Ruby: “Grgh... A little banged up, but otherwise fine. But I’ve lost the Creep.”
Blake: “Not like you can even use the cure right now. You need a new needle.”
Weiss: “Let’s meet back up at my place and come up with a new plan.”
Ruby: “On my way now.” I start swinging through the city on my way to Weiss, after spending a minute figuring out exactly where I am. As I’m swinging, the cops below are tending to the citizens and the damage, including Uncle Qrow and Vernal.
Qrow: “This is getting out of hand, Tomo. The kid has a good heart, but she clearly hasn’t gotten down the ‘citizen safety’ part of the job yet.”
Vernal: ‘Even superheroes aren’t perfect, Branwen. Not to mention that she’s only one person.”
Qrow: “You’re just proving my point. She clearly doesn’t know what she’s doing yet. We can’t rely on some inexperienced kid to handle something that’s clearly too big for her.”
Vernal: “You say that like we’re faring any better against this thing.”
Qrow: “At least I can admit that instead of charging straight into danger like that despite it being way over my head.”
Vernal: “All the more reason why I feel like we should try to work with the Spider instead of criticizing her.”
Qrow: “Yeah. Whatever you say, ‘Captain’.” As he walks away. Back with us, we meet up at Weiss’ and replace the needle before gathering at her dinner table.
Yang: “So now what are we supposed to do?”
Blake: “His skin has gotten too thick to use the needle so we need to go for his gums instead.”
Yang: “But the only problem there is that, no offense to Ruby, but with his clearly superior strength, he’s not going to make doing that easy. Not without the risk of losing her arm.”
Ruby: “And every minute we waste leaving him unattended, he continues to shed his skin and grow bigger and stronger.”
Weiss: “Which gives me an idea how we can stop him.”
Yang: “Lay it on us, Princess.”
Weiss: “If the Creep follows the natural rules of a regular lizard, then that means he also has all the same weaknesses too. Most notably-”
Blake: “The fact that reptiles are cold blooded.”
Ruby: “That’s right. Reptiles tend to slow down and when forced into freezing environments. If we can get him somewhere under similar circumstances, it’ll eventually weaken him to the point where he won’t be able to fight back as I force his mouth open.”
Yang: “And where are we supposed to do that? He’s more than shown he’s capable of breaking through pretty strong walls, so we can’t just lure him into any old freezer, he’d be able to break out before the cold can’t effectively get to him.”
Weiss: “That’s why I have somewhere in mind we can lure him to without worrying about that.”
Ruby: “Really?”
Weiss: “Like always, Father quite often only thinks about himself and the company profit, so has had special bomb shelters built around Remnant in case of nuclear fallout. One such shelter is just outside the city. It’s quite large to fit himself and his most important staff, and because he never wishes to split from the life of luxury, the temperature can be adjusted. And of course, as a fallout shelter, the thing is built to withstand nuclear warheads. Containing a large beast like the Creep shouldn’t be a problem.”
Blake: “So we need to somehow lure him to the shelter, seal him inside and drop the temperature to weaken him.”
Ruby: “I’ll need to go in with him so I can wear him down and immediately seize the moment to inject him when it comes.”
Weiss: “There’s just one problem though. Everything in the shelter can only be controlled from the control room by either a register SDC member, or a blood member of the Schnee family through handprint scanners for identification. Which means I’ll have to go in with you.”
Ruby: “What? Weiss, no! I’m not putting you in danger like that! There has to be another way!”
Weiss: “Now doesn’t that sound familiar...”
Ruby: “Huh?”
Weiss: “These were exactly the same kind of concerns I had when I found out you were the Scarlet Spider. And just you said you needed us to be able to trust you to handle this, right now I need to do the same, and trust me to be able to do this. Because if I don’t, then this city will continue to suffer.” I just look on still hesitant. “Please just... trust me. I want to be able to help. I can do this.” I’m still hesitant... but I know she’s right. She extended her trust to me like this. So now it’s my turn to do the same and not doubt her.
Ruby: *inhale, exhale*”Okay. I’ll leave the temperature to you.” She just smiles at me.
Yang: “Okay. But even with that settled, we still need a way to actually lure him there.”
Ruby: “Leave that to me. I just need to grab some fish from somewhere and use it as bait to get him to chase me there.”
PENNY: “Then now may be the best time to act. I've hacked into the city’s security towers and have detected trouble at a nearby fish market about two blocks away.”
Ruby: “Perfect. Come on, gang.” As I put on my mask. “We’ve got a Creep to hunt!”