Isabelle sat on a rooftop about 3/4 a kilometer away from the meeting place, absently twirling a small ring in her fingers. She'd swiped it earlier from a man who'd had a little too much to drink this afternoon. It wasn't worth much, but it was pretty, and she liked it, so she was going to keep it. Izzy held the ring up so that the faint blue glow of the signal lantern could be seen through the hole. So this was it, huh? This was the night she finally met her new companions. She sighed a bit at the thought. All of her thieving career (which, admittedly, was only a few short years so far), she'd operated alone. Working as part of a small team wouldn't be [i]too[/i] major a change for her, but it would still be a pretty big one. She hoped they wouldn't mess her up in the future. She hoped she wouldn't, either.

Finally, the moment she'd been waiting for appeared: the small gap in the archers' patrols that would allow her to slip past. Here in the Royal City, even the rooftops were guarded day and night, so she'd had to memorize a few locations and patrols in her line of work. Slipping the ring into a small satchel she kept around her waist, she stood up and stretched. She'd only have a moment to get through this undetected, but the thrill was [i]definitely[/i] worth the risk. She braced her left foot and waited. [i]One... Two...

Three![/i]

Isabelle took off, running swift and silent across the rooftops. She leapt from one to the other, taking a somewhat zig-zag path across. At three individual points, she encountered guards both around and beneath her, but just as she'd planned (and prayed, just a bit), they were looking in the opposite direction every time. Finally, with one last leap and a double front flip for style, she landed in front of the blue-lit meeting house and stuck the landing.

"Thank you, thank you!" she said quietly to no one in particular, bowing to the imaginary applause for her performance. She allowed herself the fun, but then it was time to head in. She knocked the secret knock, and the latch quickly opened, allowing her inside. She walked through what appeared to be a dark, decrepit hallway, but led to what was actually an amazingly well-constructed safehouse. [i]Wow,[/i] she thought. [i]Remind me to hire the architect if I can ever achieve my dream home.[/i]

Walking into the room, she was just in time to hear a man with incredibly poofy clothing asking a very, very, VERY heavily-armed man smoking a pipe, "What do you do, sir?"

"I'll go out on a very wide limb and say that he's the guy who kills people," she answered for him. She was going to die someday anyway; poking fun at a big man with the miniature arsenal at his waist was, in her opinion, a pretty bold way to go. "Yes, yes, I know what you're wondering: 'How can a little girl have discovered our hiding place?' Well, first of all, I'm actually 18. Second, believe it or not, I'm actually on this team. So, starting today and onward, we're all going to be teammates!" she said, throwing her hands up in the air excitedly. She had no idea how they were going to respond to that. She was hoping it'd be funny.