"Star Beam!" The cheerful sound of a very, very distraught Vita could be heard over the noise coming from her phone. Resolute to ignore reality for as long as she could, she had hidden herself away watching a stream of the famous magical girl Star Nova, chanting the characteristic catchphrase as the vigilante streamer subdues another common criminal. The only interruption to this poor display deep in the bowels of their makeshift safe house* (might not be that safe) was the constant buzzing of the phone as a call seemingly tried to reach her, the name of the caller half the reason she was trying to ignore reality.

"This has been going on for far too long." Frice finally gave up on reason and just grabbed Vita's phone off her hands, clicking the call in order to connect Vita with this strange figure named Matt. Much to Vita's shock. Since she was still acting like a child, Frice figured she might as well do the honors. "Hello?"

"<Hey, that's a sweet voice. Are you Vita's landlady or something?>" Something about the voice on the other side was sleazy and shameless, even from just the first message.

"A friend."

"<She has those? Well, it's a good thing to hear, never thought I would see the day, ah ah ah. Is she around? Got to talk to her.>"

Vita snatches the phone from Frice, pulling it off her hands with enough force to nearly tear a finger off... or at least she hoped. Mostly, Frice just returned the device without a fuss. "What do you want?"

"<Ouch, is that how you treat a friend? How did you manage to ensnare such a sexy voice then?>" Click. And just like that the call was over. Well, as much as Frice wanted to complain, Vita puts her arm up (while holding the phone of course) to signal for her to wait. Moments later, as if by premonition, the phone starts ringing again and she picks it up once more. "<And here I thought all those months would soften you up. Fine, fine, here's the news. You know Kevin, right.>"

"Yeah, the fat security guy."

"<Bingo. Well, Kevin sure earned his paycheck last night, he was looking at the footage from the entry area and saw the unmistakable sight of the Second Daughter of the Raven clan. You know, mafia stuff.>" Vita had a bad feeling about it, her eyes turning towards Ami.

"Ami?"

"<What? Who's Ami? No, Frice D'Alfera? You two were seen together, you're telling me you don't know who that is!?>" He had a whole speech about how badly the unemployment must have been to her but that just caught him off his game.

Oh. Right. Her head gently turns towards Frice who was looking a bit annoyed at the whole call. "Ah. We might have not formally introduced ourselves."

"<What the hell have y->"

"Can I call you later?" And Vita ends the call. Alright, that was... not the ideal way to start the day. Now where was her stream again..?

The phone vanishes off her hands and lands in Ami's hands. She sure felt antagonistic towards her at the moment, no way that just /free/. Whatever that even meant??? "Alright, alright. So. It's possible someone saw you at the exposition... hall... thingy yesterday. You didn't tell me your face was RECOGNIZABLE!?" Very important detail when trying to go undercover, as far as Vita was concerned.

"The title 'Second daughter of the Raven clan' is not exactly a formal title, it's simply a mark of my existence. Besides, that's my sister, I'm the older one. Of course she stole my title too."

"Older by how much?" Well, might as well dig in now.

"Two minutes." The whole room goes silence, with Vita and Ami exchanging a pair of looks that categorically placed them in an opposing position to Frice in some imaginary scale.

"..." No one really says anything for nearly a minute.

"It still counts." Her attempt at saving face was not successful.

"So you're twins?" Alright, time to just... roll it back to the topic at hand.

"Fraternal twins, her hair is far more messy than mine." Oh, that's *a* difference, for sure.

Right.
Vita was going to need a blackboard for this. Luckily they did have one in this storage. Somehow? "Where did you find this?" It was perfectly serviceable. A bit cracked on the side but nothing that affected the utility. It was so fitting for the moment that Vita could not push past it. "This place is half torn up, I haven't had a good night of sleep in two days and there's just a RANDOM blackboard with chalk around." Her eyes once again focus solely on Ami. Seriously, all that talk about being out of juice and she still kept pulling random stuff out of her hat whenever they looked away. If only it was useful stuff, not like she couldn't write on a wall or... something.

"She's never going to pull something like this when we actually need it, is she?" Frice nodded. Ami shook her head. The lack of words made it all the more dire.

"Right. So. Here's the situation." Best to focus her mind on something else. Picking the chalk, Vita takes the time to outline their situation as best as she could. Information? Low. Difficulty? High! Danger? It was easier to talk about which steps weren't literally a minefield of potential end points to this robbery plan. Stepping past the front door might be one but after that call, she wasn't so sure anymore.

"Basically. We don't know where it is. We don't know all the steps needed to get there. And we don't know how many people have their eyes on us now." In practice it couldn't be that many since no one had attacked this warehouse yet... but who knows what that means with how shifty and unclear Ami was about everything. For all she knew it was only when she took a step outside this safe haven that the world would crash on top of her.

"So we're not doing the heist?" The general groan from her co-conspirators did seem to offer a relatively clear answer. "Well, we don't need to jump into the full plan right away. Why not do something simpler. Like just getting a bunch of data?" Despite sleeping for so long, Ami did seem to have a reasonably acceptable understanding of how the modern world worked. She was more aware than most clients Vita used to deal with.

"Well... that's not the worst idea, I suppose." Considering that it took half an hour for their face to be found, it was far from a good idea but something of a middle option before the real thing. "I know my way around the system so I could set up a scrapper process to get it done... and people do tend to leave their station unlocked when they go get a coffee and stuff..." Humans, the final frontier of security issues. "The issue is that we wouldn't really get anything out of an intern's account or anyone like that. Hell, I don't even have anything juicy to write here and I worked there! All the info I have on that rock mineral stuff is pretty much research material, you can find the papers online." She was getting off topic, maybe even a bit nostalgic for the job that took her arm.

"So we can't think about this particular target right now. What can we do then?" Frice figured that grounding her back on the subject should help. "As great as risk management can be, we won't get anywhere without an actual hit of some kind. Especially with all this heat on us." As she feared, Ami was becoming more of a risk than an asset.

"Idon'tknow." Shrug. Vita wasn't exactly a mastermind, she had joined the group two days ago. Why the hell would she know the first thing about what to do here?

Which meant it was time for Frice to take over. In a sense, she should have done this sooner. While the idea of getting a rare material wasn't terrible, targeting an extremely well established and vital organization so early in their career was foolish. The growing pains of a new venture, she tried to tell herself. Standing up, Frice makes her way to the front of the board, slamming her hand against the dark green surface and waiting for Vita to sit back down.

"As far as I can see, we have a total of two options." It was time for her to put her experience and knowledge to use. "We need three things as an organization. Resources. Influence. And territory."

The outline wasn't clear. Territory was far from relevant in their current position. Influence even less so. Resources? Nil, nada, the vault was empty.

"Our best bet would be to rob a liqueur store at the current point."

Both figures looked a bit... distant. Neither Vita nor Ami looked all that interested in hits on neutral locations like a store, especially not a small business.

"You do understand what you joined, don't you? Even in the scenario where we tried to heist a well established laboratory the possibility of something going wrong was always present. This life isn't for the weak of heart." That only seemed to make the mood worse between them.

Frice had nothing but scorn for Ami, who was responsible for this whole mess in the first place but she was nowhere as negative towards Vita. Even now it was oddly rare to for the full realization of her case to be seen. Stress helped, of course, but it was clear Vita had developed plenty of coping mechanisms to deal with her missing arm. She was always facing slightly to the side with her arm in front. When she was on the blackboard she made sure to hit the board hard in the middle to try and grab attention towards it. The sleeve of her shirt was pulled into the shirt itself, providing a smooth visual that while unusual took active awareness to notice. It was easy to forget how vulnerable she was. "5 minutes break." Placing the chalk back on the table Frice steps out to smoke something, an awkward silence filling the room.