Board Thread:Role Plays/@comment-25924729-20160209062713/@comment-26130256-20160212080356

Azulius looked over the briefing quickly, trying to find anything that stuck out at him.

"Wow," he began after a minute. "Could Ozpin have been any less specific here?  This doesn't look like his style at all." Adding in Laura's apparent stress, plus the fact that Ozpin had given the assignment to her alone, instead of with her team or any backup, and something was fishy. But what exactly, he couldn't say.

Blackstone, meanwhile, simply nodded at the story. With just the "Pil-" slip-up, he already had a pretty good guess of who really sent the maid to Vacuo, but he was in the business of discovering secrets, not telling about them. Azulius was plenty smart to figure it out on his own, given some time.

"But back to the matter at hand.  Almost the entire city belongs to some gang or family.  It's gonna be impossible to figure out who you're looking for without some more info."

"What he said," Yami agreed. "For example, let me draw some things out for you." The Faunus pulled out his scroll opened it to tablet size, then called up a map of Vacuo. "Where we're at here and all of this region," he traced a silver-dollar sized blob of downtown, which changed colors. "belongs to a group they call the White Hatchets.  And this area, in the industrial district is the Clockspring Gang."

"I thought Clockspring's turf was bigger than that," Azulius frowned, suddenly worrying how much his mental map of the city was out of date.

"They've been losing ground to the Blackbriars," Brick explained, drawing in another, larger shape on Yami's scroll. "First they called in some backup from Atlas, then I heard some rumor about Leaf Clockspring himself getting really sick.  Any way you slice it, not the best time to be a Clock."

The exchange continued for several minutes, with everyone sans Blackstone drawing in more groups, including such lovely names as the Barracuda Syndicate, the DUVs (Drunk, Ugly, and Violent), the Spectres, Ancients, and several crime families with obviously Vacuan last names, including the Cardamoms. But the impressive bit was that, out of the patchwork map of the kingdom, the Cardamom's territory covered a solid quarter of the city. When one added in the groups that were their allies, the amount was just under half.

"That's a great list, boys," Sangria remarked, picking something from under her nail using her sword. "But Laura said that there was a job in Vale, so all she really needs to worry about is the groups big enough to have a presence in Vale."

"Great point, Sang," Brick agreed, changing gears to making the coin vanish and reappear in his hand. "Some of the Triads definitely have folks in Vale.  The Blackbriars are based in Atlas, but they definitely have assets internationally also.  The Cardamoms, obviously, have people everywhere, so it could have been them.  And I heard either the Will-o-Wisps or the Firenze family have been working on expanding too.  But each of those groups has their different habits and hangouts.  Any of those names sound familiar?"