The first one to wake up that Sunday was Memnol, keeping up his habit of sleeping as close to eight hours as possible without going too far over. He looked around in the darkness of the unlit room just as it was last night from where he leaned against the corner of his bed and the wall. As he looked slightly over from where he was, he saw that while Jaune and Pyrrha weren't right next to each other, they had ended up close, facing each other, and had noticeably leaned towards each other during the movies, well except to themselves, they hadn't seemed to realize it. Looking over a little bit more he saw that more than just Jaune and Pyrrha had ended paired up, though he heavily suspected that the case of Nora and Ren was far less accidental, at least based on how Nora seemed to have, at some point, gotten under Ren's blanket while still keeping her own, doubling up on the blankets for herself, although based on the outline of an arm under the shared blanket from Nora over Ren that may have just been a nice side effect of the coincidentally sloth-like hold Nora was going for. Based on the look of one of Ren's arms, either he slept deep enough for Nora to move it and never woke up once in the night, or he didn't exactly object to the arrangement.

Memnol checked himself over mentally, and decided to go over the past week, since it seemed as good a time as any, "Saturday, yesterday; second planar voyage, followed by the combination key creation, Gate Key, Boots - or shoes in this instance - of Swiftness, then this sleepover, although it may not be over yet. Regardless, note to self, slip out after I've taken inventory and set the servants to breakfast. Friday; land negotiation, Crunch Zone was created, the Sewer Lair was cleared out, and the new minions were sent to collect materials. Productive, I'd say, and also nice to discover Weiss is the one with a sense of humor for actual wordplay. Thursday to Tuesday; Nothing of interest, aside from library progress. I should be able to finish reading the nonfiction by tomorrow or so at the latest if I give some more attention to it. Monday; I cast Discern Location for Ms. Xiao Long to find Raven Branwen- whom I have no particular recollection of seeing in person or through Scry or Scry-like effect, which is necessary for the spell to work. Given the distances involved and that the earliest possible, if not apparently probable, time I could have seen her was 16 days ago after my banishment, as well as her location upon my casting, she must have some method of rapid non-standard transport accessible within a time period of roughly 2 weeks. I have no greater details I can determine, but I do know that I will not recognize her appearance on sight until I Scry her successfully at least once, and that I have in some way seen her before. Again not too helpful, but worth noting. Finally the previous Sunday, confirmation that Weiss knows The Game as any noble or noble-equivalent ought to, and knows how to 'lose' properly, and the first planar expedition occurred."

At the end he checked how he'd shifted when he fell asleep, and found that he hadn't shifted as much as usual. Sure, he had slunk lower than he started and his arms had been at slightly odd spots, but he hadn't ended up grabbing at his own robes or similar today. Though in fairness, one of those was likely due to him keeping a hand on Loom throughout last night. Regardless of that, he still felt somewhat more rested than normal. He collected his things from the bed where he put them down last night and carefully stood up to quietly slink past all of them into the main hall, where he set the servants on getting a well-sized breakfast prepared. In the meantime before they might wake up, Memnol went through the door on the other side of the wall from the one to his room and sat down in the study room, which was connected to his own bedroom by another door in the right wall. At the very corner on the left wall was a five-foot door, leading to a hallway connecting the study to one of the two main food storages in the mansion.

He sat down at the main table and managed to finish that Spellglyph a few moments before the bedroom connecting doors opened to show both teams up, though looking mostly groggy, with Pyrrha and Jaune standing far enough apart it was clearly deliberate.

After a sound off of varyingly enthusiastic "Good Morning"s, the first one to speak was Yang, who, while she had taken it slowly and stopped after a point, seemed the worst off, and like she definitely underestimated the kick of Moon Rum.

Yang said, "So, uh, you got any showers in this place?"

Memnol said as he pulled out his spellbook, "Through the doors on both of the far corners of either of the guest rooms, each pair on a side is the same as the other except for the mirroring to maintain symmetry, they're mixed shower/baths, five by ten. There is also a slightly larger shower connected to my room by the double doors opposite the ones your standing in if you need one larger than the others, it's ten by twenty."

After a short moment of discussion and seeing that the showerhead in the larger shower was also proportionally larger, it was decided that the girls would take the first turn with the showers, and since there were six of them and five showers, Ruby and Yang would just share the larger one, being family and all.

With all of them having gone for the showers, that just left a meeting of the men in the study, if you could call Ren asking if there was any tea available and Memnol sending servants to just bring the tea and breakfast to the study instead, Memnol memorizing his spells for the day then hitting himself with a Prestigiditation and passing it around to the others to freshen them up some out of courtesy, and roughly thirty straight minutes of relative silence afterwards as Ren and Jaune woke up more and ate as the beginning of a meeting. Or if you could call it something as important as a meeting given that the most they discussed so far was how the last week had been.

A little while into the idle conversation, Ren said, "Is something on your mind Memnol?"

Memnol raised an eyebrow spot slightly and asked, "Nothing particularly important at the moment, contrary to usual. Why do you ask?"

Ren said, "You've been looking between me and the wall now and then for the past few minutes."

Memnol said, "Ah, I see."

Jaune, now kind of curious, said, "What is it?"

Memnol said, "I was just thinking that if the currently Ms. Valkyrie added a stripe of green to her hair it would finish up all the pairings."

Ren suddenly coughed like something went down the wrong pipe for a moment once he fully processed 'currently', before asking, his voice slightly higher, not breaking but certainly emoting differently than normal, "Pairings?"

Memnol said, "The two current green and pink complementary pairings, eyes and clothes, which can be-" he paused a moment as he idly took out a piece of paper and a pen, and started marking out what he was saying, "-represented as making either a square, parallelogram, or other form of tetragon. Now, with this, if you don't terribly mind, I'd wager you and Ms. Valkyrie have on the whole reached a comfortable point in your, pardon the term if it seems inappropriate, relationship, though if you would admit it to yourselves it could still bend and shift around some amount, correct?"

Ren just nodded and said, somewhat unsure, "Yeah, roughly. How…"

Memnol said, "In that case, an old con trick of saying something generic and double-sided enough that most people only see the side they want to believe. Is the stripe in your hair natural or chosen?"

Ren said, "Natural," though by his tone you could tell the question behind it, why it would matter.

Memnol said, gaining some amount of true intensity and passion as he spoke and wrote all over the paper, "Yes, I see, that adds further then. Quite simply, adding a stripe would make it into three complementary pairs, which could allow for- yes those combinations into forms are rather interesting now that I've my mind on them, I haven't seen one that was truly like that in a while now, and with three different possibilities, accounting for the hexagon form lacking an inverse due to that being identical to rotation and the nested equilateral trigon forms necessarily being, what with them being inverses, a complementary pair on the meta-level, then the three forms only reinforces it all as now the overall meta-structure of possibilities is itself a trigon, though only isosceles and not equilateral as would be ideal, and with it being brought on by deliberate choice, then that would only further cement the meaning of the entire structure. Wait, what if- yes! Rather than an isosceles, the meta-structure could the formed by mirroring and layering the inverse equilateral trigons in a layout such that each end would connect to the hexagon's inner angles creating a single super-form, with the internal component forms complex yet perfectly balanced, mirrored, and contained precisely by the hexagonal form, and this new overall structure would also in itself lack an inverse once rotation is accounted for! Of course however, in order to form the super-form from the meta-structure, there would have to be some form of potent unification at play, otherwise it would just remain in the previous meta-structure where it could shift between the three various forms which, while all stable, lack the even greater stability of the super-form. Hmm…"

Partway through, when Jaune and Ren had more and less lost understanding of what Memnol was saying, they went back to slowly enjoying breakfast, only partly listening due to the sheer enthusiasm oozing from Memnol on the subject, which indeed had quite the amount of geometry by the sound.

Ren said eventually, "So, what is all of that supposed to mean?"

Memnol said, "If you'll take stock in geometric pseudo-divination, your relationship would likely be a highly stable one, to the point where a full split would be, well it'd only be a possibility in that a notably rabid statistician will force you to acknowledge that it is technically not zero, though even they must admit it appears slightly less likely than underwater spontaneous combustion."

Memnol continued to muse again in silence for some solid number of minutes, and as Ren was drinking some tea and thinking on that, Memnol continued, "Yes, I've decided. Simply contact me and I'll do as I can at the time to assist, pay for it out of pocket myself even, when you and Ms. Valkyrie decide to marry."

This appeared to be the way to make Ren lose his cool the most, given that his immediate reaction was to briefly choke on the amount of tea he was drinking for about half a second, followed by inhaling, coughing, and nearly sputtering simultaneously, which managed to get the tea more spots than not, mostly messing up the breakfast foods already on the table, and causing Jaune to question after a startled sound, "How do you drink tea that hot?!"

Ren, after a few solid seconds of trying to process, the pink now on his cheeks firmly remaining despite his mental effort, just said, "Aura. Worth it for good tea." Then he looked at Memnol, and rather than say or ask anything else, he asked, "When?"

Memnol replied, "A Faunus I may not be, but Illithids just as well have darkvision. Neither of you appeared displeased this morning, but then again you were unconscious at the time, but then yet again, that means that at least one of you quite deliberately chose that, and should the other have noticed, they didn't seem to stop it in any noticeable way."

Jaune asked, "Huh, what do you mean?"

Memnol said, "Not my place to tell. Secrets have power, Mr. Arc. Even poorly kept ones, secrets have power."

At this point, as the breakfast stuff had been mostly rotated out and before they could continue, most of the girls returned to the study, now dressed for the day, though as far as they could tell Nora was still busy. With that they traded places, all of them to eat breakfast while the guys went off to the showers or baths. Memnol closing the door behind him as he went, as his guests did, went for a proper shower.

Only to see, as the bathroom door opened, a fully dressed Nora Valkyrie quite clearly waiting and giving him a 'come in' and a 'be quiet' gesture.

Memnol closed the door behind him and said, "I presume you heard myself and Mr. Ren, Ms. Valkyrie?"

Memnol could tell that she seemed to have shifted her energy from bubbly to nervous earlier, and in a few moments Nora said, "You think adding a green streak could really bring us together like that?"

Memnol chuckled for a second and said, in a way that was practically identical to the way one would teach a child something, "It wouldn't just be the streak alone that would cement it at its most potent. It would require meaning and purpose behind it, understand? Just doing so now, without any greater meaning, wouldn't work as well."

Nora nodded and said, "I see," before managing to switch right over back to bubbly and say, "Well, that's all. See you once you're done!"

Before Nora moved much at all, Memnol said, "Ms. Valkyrie."

Nora turned on her heel and said, "Yeah?"

Memnol said, "Firstly, how did you manage to slip past Ruby and Ms. Xiao Long?"

Nora said, "I hid under the bed."

Memnol nodded and said, "Quite simple. Secondly, before you leave, I'd recommend running the sink mildly warm, wetting your hair, taking a towel for it, and entering through the main hall entrance. They already believe you're just still in the shower, might as well let them figure the cover on their own, although if you want extra certainty, add some touches of water around the collar of your shirt as well, applied from the inside and up."

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Nora said, "Oh, thanks!"

The moment Nora was out, Memnol locked the door, chucked another Prestidigitation at his clothes, and let himself relax for some time with a proper bath, even if it had the proportions of a shallow swimming pool.

After some time in, Memnol sighed, and even knowing it wouldn't actually reach, turned to an old sort-of habit, and after reminding himself that he was the one to specify just how sound-proof the design of each of the walls was, said, "Vecna, we know that I will bring it back, into an age so great that to call it golden would be demeaning. We know you can't aid me here, or actually hear me, but you know that's not quite as big a deal for me as it would be for a lot of the cult. Regardless, the reason I'm speaking to you. Their potential marriage, and my offer to fund it. I've done the geometry on it, we know it would be incredibly stable, and so far as I can see, it would lean towards Law, and converting Valkyrie to Law would be nice, or at the least away from Chaos, every little bit, and all that sort. But you know that that isn't the real main reason, of course. It would get me a frankly incredible amount of goodwill and trust and such from both of them, and while I'm not too hopeful on Valkyrie's end, we know that Ren could easily be useful. I wasn't lying yesterday. You know that it would be nearly perfect if I could get Ren as an ambassador, a fellow man of Law, or so I believe and hope at the moment, he would stand as an ideal for both local and foreign to strive to by then, with barely a few nudges from now. They'd all see or at least hear about him; calm, reasonable, with a stable and happy marriage, in a highly respected office, who's acknowledged for his work and is confident without particular arrogance. He would be envied, and when they'd all look to see just how he got there, how he had all he has, they'd see Law. You know that to have him as one of the first would set an incredible precedent as well."

After a long moment of silence, he let out another sigh and said, "You know that I'm not overly torn up about my banishment, that I almost consider it a blessing of sorts in hindsight, freed from the meddling of gods. Although, you actually earned your godhood, which is among one of the greatest reasons I actually respect you. We know what was likely the actual reason I got banished, I wasn't just coincidentally enthralling a bunch of elves, although they do last longer. It was a deliberate attack against Moonbow's church. You know that I intended to overthrow her, take her place in the pantheon, probably kill her to be safe after stamping out whatever worship of her I could find, make a big show of it and all," he let out a brief laugh, "I even had my whole portfolio planned out. The Moon, obviously, Law, Magic, and Secrets. It would've been a full well coherent combination, too, more related than elves and the moon, I think. I suppose keeping the blood war going might've had a hand in it too, since if she discovered that plan, she full well could've believed that I'd side with Asmodeus. Although," another pause, "You know that I've always venerated you above him. You both have my respect of course, but you more so. You earned it, you were, well, a man once. Like me. Well, that's been enough of my rambling semi-prayers for now. Thank you for listening Vecna. Tricks of the Hand and sight of the Eye guide me."

Memnol soon got out and rather than put back on his old Boots of Tracklessness, instead went for the new Shoes of Swiftness, which Memnol felt the effects of immediately. He was twice as fast as a start, had better motor control like from some well-made Gloves of Dexterity, he knew he could keep his balance without trying or take a fall much easier, climbing and jumping too, and he could even dodge through a fireball or lightning bolt with a few motions the way a rogue could, even if he still didn't exactly understand how, beyond, of course, Magic. He knew when he had the shoes made they'd be extremely useful, he'd used similar before and leaving footprints again was a small price to pay to him, but he'd forgotten just how useful they were. Disguised as a pair of respectable dress shoes, instead of the traditional, but rather more obvious, boots with lightning bolts on them. The lightning bolt designs were on the inside of the shoe, at the bottoms of the soles, in this case. The fact that they were a perfect fit and always would be, as most worn magic items resize themselves to the wearer, was just a bonus at that point.

Soon enough he was heading back to the study, no longer needing Loom as assistance now though still carrying it with him, and heard the tail end of whatever Nora was saying, "... Worth it."

He decided to put his skills at hiding in plain sight, or rather within 10 feet of any shadow that wasn't his own, to use and slipped in to listen properly. To his own surprise, Blake's eyes followed him, and he remembered his newfound size might have counteracted some of his skill. Although Blake soon returned to looking into the distance, as she seemed to be trying to figure something out by the look on her.

Just after Memnol had come in, Jaune said, "That reminds me, who still has their favor left?"

Memnol chose that moment to speak and stop hiding, surprising a few of them, "Yourself, Mr. Arc, as well as Ms. Nikhos, Mr. Ren, and Weiss. Hm, Team Warn, if rearranged."

At 'the trying to speak without being obvious' look Weiss gave him, he added telepathically to her, "What you are likely thinking of is the reward, not the favor, as you seem to have forgotten."

Memnol sat down and said, "I hope I was a satisfactory host so far. It was agreeable to have you all around last night."

Pyrrha was the first one to notice, and said, "You're not using Loom to walk anymore, you've recovered?"

Memnol said, as a deliberate non-sequitur that only implied it was related to the question, "I've even made myself a pair of properly respectable shoes."

After a pause to have a drink, a sign of an obvious topic change, Memnol said, "Oh, I realize that it's been brought up twice before but never acted on, Ruby?"

Ruby said, "Yeah?"

Memnol said, "Would you care to try an adamantine blade in your scythe for a time?"

Ruby beamed, and said, "YesabsolutelyrightnowImean- Please?"

Memnol laughed a moment and said, "I believe this is the case from what I've seen, but to confirm, is the blade in some way detachable or removable from the rest of the scythe itself?"

Ruby nodded, not bothering over trivial things like words or thinking too hard about his question when an entirely new metal for weapons was waiting.

Memnol said, "Then as soon as we can get to the detached blade, I can convert it to-"

By then, Memnol was interrupted by Ruby rushing out with her Semblance, Yang checking her scroll confirming that she was moving extremely fast towards the weapon lockers, and by the time she could even say that Ruby was in the workshops, then returning, then back inside with Crescent Rose mostly unfolded and Ruby straight out cradling the detached blade and scythe in her arms.

As Memnol stood up, Ruby had started asking, "Okay, convert? How do we do that? Do you have a room in here that we're going to use, do we need to go back to the workshop? How's it going to affect the weight? Heavier, lighter, and the-"

Memnol finished casting Perfected Polymorph at that point, and said, "There, it's adamantine now, and assuming you made it from steel, then it should still be the same weight."

Ruby stood there for a moment, looking at the dark metal, before rushing back out in a blur.

Memnol said, "Well. I admit, adamantine is quite the useful metal, but that's certainly a new reaction."

Yang said, mostly to her team, "I think we should leave her, she'll be at it for a while."

Weiss said, "What exactly do you mean by 'at it'?"

Yang said, looking at her scroll, "She's already at one of the training rooms-"

She was interrupted when her scroll vibrated, and in her shock at the image that popped up that Ruby sent, Yang just said, "Huh. Apparently some of the dummies have a center of reinforced steel."

At the looks of confusion, Yang turned around her scroll, to show a photo of one of the normally quite sturdy training dummies, with a clean cut, right through the steel apparently at the center, bisecting it horizontally. Then another photo came through as everyone was looking at the first, showing the blade's still extreme sharpness, undamaged after cutting through, clearly afterward as the dummy's halves were in the background.

After Yang turned the scroll back to herself and saw the new picture too, Weiss had said, "Memnol, how hard is adamantine?"

Memnol said, "To adamantine, most things that aren't also adamantine are about as effective as a thick stack of paper. Don't bother worrying for the blade, Ruby could cause quite the amount of architectural damage if she ever let it drag."

Weiss said, "So you've just given Ruby a super-metal that she knows can cleanly cut reinforced steel?"

Memnol said, "Incorporated into her scythe directly."

At this, her team shared a meaningful look.

After a few moments of silence, Memnol said, "Well then. I do hope I've been a good host, and managed this 'sleepover' to satisfaction, but I'm afraid I've some various plans for today that mean I simply must be leaving somewhat sooner than later. If nothing else, I'll likely see you all in class tomorrow. Until next time, pleasant day and evening and such to all."

With that, Memnol disappeared, though rather than teleport, as you can't properly teleport into or out of an extradimensional space like a Magnificent Mansion, he used his Amulet to Plane Shift over to his Sewer Lair's astral location, then again to the material version. Once there he collected his Bag of Holding and further improved Amulet of Creation, as he had now decided to call it, though he tossed the Amulet back so that way Move Earth, a spell with a rather self-explanatory name, could be added onto it with a command word, to cut out the casting time. This was followed by setting the remaining Wight on making a third Wight. From there, with some amount of re-sorting what went into what pocket, pouch, bag, or haversack later, coupled with the Decanter water to ice to Polymorph that into stone, and judicious use of Wall of Stone, a Fabricate, and Disintegrates to clean up any lingering mess he didn't need, and Memnol had begun to dedicate the next hour and 20 minutes in real-time, 40 hours for him, to making a Stone Golem. Although by the end, the actual time taken would be around 2 hours real-time, given that he had to leave to eat roughly every quarter of an hour- roughly 8 hours for him - and one of those stops was to a White Fang base, where he followed the same pattern of finding a lone guard or lookout, incapacitating them in some way, in this case it was paralysis from a Death Attack, which was somewhat less fortunate for them than being knocked unconscious, and extracting and munching on their brain. Feel open to insert suitably harrowing dying thoughts for this particular White Fang grunt, if you wish. That and the Wright had made the other one rather quickly, so he set both of them to making another two Wrights, and while 5 total might have been mildly cramped for the sewer lair, it would work out far better in the proper lair, or at least that's what Memnol thought of it.

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Back with the teams, they had soon left the mansion, Team JNPR going to their dorm to manage some homework they hadn't finished quite yet, Team RWBY to go collect the R of the team. Of course, it took them a little while given that Yang gladly took the time to just slightly brag to any of her friends she passed about spending part of the weekend in a literal mansion with feasts and drinks.

Soon enough the Team reunited in time to see Ruby being reassured that she wasn't in any sort of trouble for this, and they could absolutely handle a good number of dummies being utterly trashed. Once again, for some reason that was hard to discern, the academy that trained the people who spent their lives to serve as a constant vigil for civilization was apparently rather well funded.

Once they had properly gotten back together, Ruby saw Blake's expression and asked, "Hey Blake, is something up?"

After a visible moment of internal debate, Blake sighed and said, "I need a thesaurus and something to write on."

Ruby said, confused, "Sorry?"

Blake said, "No, my bad, I mean I've been trying to figure out who we can talk to about the whole, conspiracy, the clue that Memnol gave us. I've been thinking of it like a mystery novel, but I feel like I just barely can't figure it out like this. Does anyone remember exactly what he said?"

Without missing a beat, Weiss said, "'You may speak to the black-winged one, and he who works behind his face, for the two conspire beneath the aftermath of their fraud.'" Then, after a brief pause, Weiss said in response to the looks she got, "I wrote it down. Exact wording matters a lot in The Game. At least, I've always been told that."

The rest of the team decided to roll with it and went off to the library to try and figure it out, although that task would take them a few hours, since they kind of put it off to also end up doing homework, and also play a round of Remnant: The Game first. Well, one normal round, then messing with the rules for the next few rounds.

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Later on, Memnol had finished with the golem and had just put the finishing touches on it. Now that it should be complete, all he had to do was try and give an order, and it would confirm or deny some of his thoughts and help with quite the amount. Memnol ordered the golem to take two steps backwards and three steps forwards.

A few moments later, it was one step ahead of where it started, and Memnol felt like he was as well, though in a distinctly less literal sense. With this Memnol confirmed that there were indeed elemental spirits that could be used to bind and complete Golems, and that made Memnol hopeful that it meant there would also be elemental planes, and slightly more importantly, proper elementals. That meant, to Memnol's enjoyment, summoning spells were probably 'back on the menu'.

Memnol stepped outside of the Crunch Zones to spend the remaining amount of roughly an hour real-time for the Amulet Wright to finish, since apparently it was genuinely cheaper and faster for him to build a golem, and sat down for a moment, taking some brief time to think about his current plans, and just how to go about them, letting idle or semi-related but not fully related thoughts drift through his mind.

Ardent into Wyrm Wizard seemed like a decent idea for now, since even if there wasn't an actual dragon or similar available, they weren't strictly necessary, and he had often wanted to try out 'the other kid's toys', to put it one way. An arcane Miracle did have quite the appeal to him.

He got up, and decided that he may as well look into what he saw last night. He invisibly teleported off to an alleyway near the harbor, and walked out visible. Walking for a while to a new cafe, he bought a newspaper, enjoyed the reactions of the employees when they noticed, and sat down to have a proper read through.

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"Tower!" Blake said suddenly, smacking her hand against the table as she got it, and continued when the rest of the table looked at her, "It did take a thesaurus to figure it out; A synonym for fraud is con, the 'aftermath' of that in the hint is spire, and spires are found at the tops of towers, so below that would be the tower itself!"

After a moment of thinking, Ruby's head shot up in realization and she said, "Headmaster Ozpin. The two most important towers in Vale are the CCT Tower and Beacon Tower, and the beacon tower-"

Yang picked up, "Is a clock tower, and his office, where he works behind the clock face. And since he's the headmaster, it's his tower and his clock face."

Ruby said, "Then who's the Black-Winged one?"

Weiss said, "Someone who works closely with Ozpin, since the two 'conspire' together, at least. He didn't give as much on them, so let's just think, what obviously has actual, literal black wings?"

After just a moment, before most of them could really switch over what they thought about, Blake said, "Ruby, Yang, didn't you guys say you were related to that huntsman who took Memnol on that reinforcement a couple weeks ago?"

Yang said, "Yeah."

Ruby picked it up and said, "That's our uncle Qro-" and stopped the sentence dead.

After saying it out loud, it just felt obvious, and she shared a 'what in the world does this mean' look with her sister.

It was, in fact, obvious enough that Weiss straight out asked them, "How did you not see that?"

When they gave their answer, well, rather than prioritize what was possibly more important, Weiss instead could only say one thing while Blake sat in surprised silence,

"It's spelled with a Q?!"