Chapter 1

Ruby Rose grinned at the rising sun, watching the immense red globe creep over the edge of the horizon as dawn's rosy fingers stretched over the surface of the world. The great grass sea swirled with a light breeze and thin, rosy clouds cut the reddening sky into bloody ribbons.

Rising slowly from her perch atop the plain, brown clay house, she leapt down the slightly-slanted roof and landed gracefully, the familiar feeling of her flight suit forming and moving around her like a second skin. She jogged excitedly across the field that surrounded the modest farm, checking in one shuddered window and checking to make sure her father was still abed. Indeed, Taiyang yet slept - snoring thunderously and Ruby smiled, pressing her palm to the shudders softly in the way she always did before going out. Wishing him good rest and silently bidding him farewell until they met again.

She turned and darted away from the farmhouse, following the familiar dirt path cut through the shoulder-high grass. Everywhere she looked she saw the same sage-green grass - jungles dividing the orderly, darker green rows that denoted farmers' fields. Soon he air began to hum with thousands of sounds - Grazers loaning, insects humming in the tall grass. Notably absent were the sounds of land speeders carrying farmers to and from their work, or the sound of heavy machinery reaping and harvesting the hearty, wheat-like stalks that thrived in Mandell's soil.

The small farming town soon loomed over the grassy knolls - a collection of fifty or so homes built of the same clay in varying shades of brown. Moisture vaporators stuck up from the clear-cut earth like bristling hairs, and figures bustled about the town, preparing for the day's festivities.

It was a Bothan holiday. Ruby didn't fully understand what it was about - the language of her silken-furred neighbors was still a mystery to her after all these years. Taiyang said it had something to do with independence, but he also urged Ruby not to interfere. Despite their usual tolerance of outsiders, the quiet farmers of this world found the presence of other races - especially the two quiet humans - a little curious, if not outright suspicious. Ruby supposed she couldn't blame them. If half the things she picked up listening in on

She made her way into the village quickly, passing by shopkeepers decorating the facades of their stores and running errands. She stepped out of the path of a landspeeder and continued on her way towards the old building at the far end of the town.

According to Taiyang, the old building was a warehouse that used to store all the harvested crops from the surrounding farms. As people started building their own underground silos to contain the recently collected grains however, the old building gradually fell out of use. One night a fire ripped through old compound, the flames leaving only a gutted shell. Nobody went towards the old storage shed now - who had the time, let alone the reason, to do so? Most folks assumed that the large structure at the north end of the town was just a vacant lot, scarred from fire and abandoned by those who built it.

It was perfect.

Ruby checked over her shoulder a couple times as she moved deftly around the edge of the building, making sure nobody was watching or following. She skipped over the wide, retracting door and continued to the back of the building. Another immense door was located here, but Ruby ignored it and went through the smaller maintenance door by the side. The door was locked - as per usual - but a bit of scrounging in a patch of scraggly brush off to the side revealed the etched key card. Slipping the rectangular object into the lock, she waited and listened for the click before stepping inside. A rush of chill air, cooled overnight and laced with the familiar scents of coolant and burnt metal washed over her.

She closed and locked the door behind her, deftly sliding the key under the door and into the brush on the other side once more. She turned and nearly jumped out of her skin at a pair of orange eyes gazing at her from the dim interior of the warehouse.

"Gah! Eth! Don't sneak up on me like that!"

From deep in the gloom, the Zabrak grinned, pointed teeth bared in a sign of bemusement that had become less and less intimidating as the years went by. He stepped out, the thin light filtering through filthy windows illuminating his tanned skin and the dark brown tattoo lines that etched his face. He stepped to the wall and flipped a heavy switch, filling the expansive interior with artificial light.

Now it was Ruby's turn to smile as the familiar surroundings took shape in the light. High shelves stacked with parts and tools - scavenged and salvaged from aging farm machines and scrapped landspeeders. The Zabrak turned away from Ruby and returned to what he had been working on - an exposed panel of mechanics and wiring connected to something immense and beautiful, hidden from prying eyes beneath an expansive white tarp. He knelt and went to work on the panel, hands deftly organizing and reorganizing the tangle of inner workings with practiced motions.

Ruby knelt beside him, peering into the belly of the Zabrak's subject. "Have you been working on the atmospheric stabilizers?" she asked, trying not to let her excitement show.

Eth sighed. "I've been doing what I can, but Ruby I-"

"Will it work?" she inquired giddily, no longer concerned about disguising her anticipation. Eth held up a hand, forestalling further questions.

"I've been working on it for a while now, but I haven't had a chance to test either of them. Ruby, you need to understand - this isn't something that we can afford to make mistakes with. So far we've limited ourselves to low-altitude flights for good reason, but if there's a failure testing these in atmo-"

"Yeah yeah," she said impatiently, "engine failure, plummet, high likelihood of a fiery death - Eth, I get it, but will it work?"

The Zabrak sighed. "I told you, I don't know. I haven't had a chance to test it. In any case, we need to go - the festivities are starting soon and we need to get these babies," he patted the side of the tarped goliath appreciatively, "out of the area before there's too big a crowd to avoid drawing attention. Besides, it's been a couple weeks since we flew last - better to get some low-alt time in before we try anything extreme."

Ruby was disappointed but understood where her friend was coming from. A knock came from the nearby end of the warehouse - on the other side of the huge metal door. Eth and Ruby both froze before they heard the telltale pattern of the knocking and Eth breathed a sigh of relief. "It's Cardin," he said. "I told him to go get the landspeeder. C'mon."

The immense metal portcullis ground open as quietly as a bucket of oil allowed it to, revealing the broad figure of Cardin Winchester. The heavyset human was tapping his foot expectantly, but his dour expression brightened slightly at the sight of his friends.

Cardin as a few years older than Ruby or Eth, and was a farmer through-and-through. He was the eldest of eight children and lived on a small farm about twenty kilometers north of the village. Like Eth, he had met and bonded with Ruby over their mutual status as foreigners to the predominantly-Bothan world. Cardin wasn't a technological prodigy like his friends, and the very concept of flying instilled in him a fear that few things could. Despite these, Cardin was powerful and smarter than he let on, and had proved more than once to be a good friend to both a Ruby and Eth.

"We need to go," he said simply, grabbing a tow cable and connecting the front of the tarped machine to the back of the stocky landspeeder. Eth and Ruby quickly went to work gathering everything they would need for a flight before shutting the doors of the warehouse as Rast pulled the precious cargo out. The door shut and sealed and Ruby and Eth jumped in the back of the landspeeder, all three and their belongings disappearing into the grass before anyone could spot them or ask questions.

The landspeeder moved at a pace bordering on ponderous for several kilometers - out into the deep grasses where no farmers had seen fit to establish themselves. The grass here was shorter - cut down or pressed flat by thoroughfare in a large, roughly-circular patch. The landspeeder keener to a halt and the trio stepped out, going to work quickly stripping down and setting up the tarped masterpiece. Ruby grinned as she and Eth finally removed the covering, revealing their pride and joy beneath.

On a heavy flatbed, equipped with repulsorlifts to propel it above the ground, were two old starships. Decades, if not centuries old, the two old birds meant more than anything else in Ruby or Eth's eyes. Battered, patchwork, paint-and-oil-spattered jumpships.

Beautiful.

The final checks were performed with practiced actions and before long Ruby found herself clambering up the side of her ship, pulling on a helmet and settling into the familiar seat. It wasn't designed for comfort, but she loved it, and the array of dials, switches, gauges and levers laid out before her in the cockpit gave her a rush of giddiness she found it hard to explain.

A crackle in her ear informed her that Eth had switched on his commlink, and she turned on her own, speaking several times into the helmet's internal microphone to ensure that all was working correctly. When the Zabrak's voice chirped back to her in her ear, she smiled and flashed a thumbs up before lowering the cockpit and sealing it in place.

Preflight checks went off without a hitch. Engines were stable, coolant running clean, fuel was plentiful and stabilizers were working. Dampeners were green, comms were green, all across the board lights showed green. Ruby cracked her knuckles and flexed her hands over the controls of the starship. Outside Cardin shook his head, wondering how his friends could get so much enjoyment out of what he had repeatedly referred to as "deathtraps."

With a surge of excitement, Ruby flipped her favorite switch and felt the earth fall away as the ship slowly rose into the air. The fields of wheat dwindled as she climbed, and soon she found herself gazing at blue sky all around. Grinning like a madwoman and slamming the accelerator forward, the ship shot off.

The skies all around rushed by, clouds and earth alike soaring past. Ruby angled her ship's bearing north - away from her home - and let the course take her where it may. She relished the feeling of the controls and cheered into her helmet's commlink, eliciting an outburst of Eth.

"Ruby! Slow down! Stay with me, OK? Don't get yourself into any trouble if I'm not there to help." Ruby ignored him, blazing through the sky and dropping lower down towards the earth. The grass gradually gave way to rockier, rougher terrain. Low canyons began to dig into the earth, and soon spires of red-brown rock began to rise, forming twisted spires and wide arches. Ruby dived into this new challenge with gusto, her ship zipping through the spaces and darting among the sharp cliffs and bluffs.

She heard the hum of repulsors from outside her own ship and looked over her shoulder to see Eth's own craft hovering above her own, safely out of the canyon's twists and turns. "Ruby!" he cried over the comm. "Be careful; the adjustments I made to your stabilizers might have had an effect on your dampeners - slow down!"

"You wouldn't be saying that if you knew what this was like!" Ruby hooted in response. She tweaked the controls of the ship just a little and in response the craft knife-edged through the gap between a pair of rocky columns. The ventral and dorsal sides of her ship passed within feet of the rocks on either side and the proximity alert howled inside the cockpit. It had a hard time eclipsing Ruby's own cry of triumph.

She pulled up and found herself coasting several hundred meters above the ground again. Eth's ship pulled up alongside hers.

"Don't even get me started on how stupid that was," he said, shooting her a disapproving look through the space between their craft. Beneath her helmet, Ruby beamed.

"Got one more trick I'd like to try out," she said mischievously. Eth obviously knew what she was thinking.

"Ruby, don't even think about it - if you try to break atmo with this thing, you'll be lucky if you turn into a fireball and plummet back to the ground. In all likelihood, before that you'll suffocate, freeze and implode. Come on, Ruby - use your head here."

"Trust me, Eth," she said, "I've thought about this for a long time." With that, she began to ease the controls into an upward path. The craft began to climb steadily, altimeter showing the number rising at a ludicrous pace. The cloud layer broke away and the sky began to darken - blue faded to grey, grey to black. A million glowing pinpricks dotted the horizon and the inside of the cockpit grew very, very warm.

Ruby felt a bead of sweat roll down the inside of her helmet, but she pressed on. Superheated air pressed at the outsides of the cockpit and a wave of fire seemed to wash over the craft. A brief check over her shoulder showed another fireball in hot pursuit. So Eth had decided to follow. Good. He needed to loosen up a bit.

Atmosphere broke like a glass dome and Ruby found herself gazing at the siren stars in a whole new way. The worldly bonds of her home fell away like velvet slipping between her fingers, and she instead found herself gazing out at the immense mural of burning, shimmering pinpricks sewn amidst the immeasurable black void.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" the Zabrak asked over the comm. Ruby could only nod inside her own helmet. "After all these years," Eth said, "I've never forgotten what it looks like. It was barely a child when I came here, but it hasn't changed. Still wide. Powerful. Incredible."

"Yeah," was all Ruby could say. Eth sighed into his transmitter.

"We should get back, Ruby. Sooner or later our families are going to start wondering what's become of us. Besides, I don't want to keep Cardin away from his lot too long either." Again, Ruby nodded, still overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the galaxy.

"One of these days," she said, "I'm going to see it all."

"What all?" Eth asked her and Ruby took her hands off the controls only for a moment to gesture at the space that surrounded them.

"This. The galaxy. All those stars and the planets and the people… Eth, I'm going to see it all. Even if it takes me the rest of my life."

There was a long silence before she finally looked over and saw that Eth had removed his helmet inside his cockpit. His head was bare beneath the light of the sun and the innumerable distant stars and he turned to look at her and smiled.

"Come on," he said again.

They had just begun to bring their ships about when Ruby felt something for the first time. It would not be the last, nor was it anywhere near the most potent example of the strange, mysterious force that bound and acted on all things. But it was the first, and because of that and what happened next, Ruby would never be able to forget.

It started as a strange feeling; fingers running down her spine and triggering something deep within her. Instantly her eyes began to dart about, searching frantically for the source of the disturbance. She did not have to look for long. Space itself warped and crackled before a thunderclap echoed across the empty expanse of space and Ruby's vision of the stars was eclipsed by death and destruction.

The ship was gargantuan - a thousand times the size of Ruby or Eth's craft and painted all over with strange symbols. Its hull was black and cruelly shaped, and red lights glowed from within cracks and fissures on the surface of the vessel - shining through like blood seeping from a wound.

"By the living stars," Eth said in amazement through the commlink. It was only moments later that the other ships appeared. They poured from within the immense vessel like insects disturbed from their hive. They swarmed outward; brutal, knife-shaped craft bristling with armament that immediately began descending to the world below. Ruby broke out of her lockjaw for a moment to register what was happening.

"It's the Sith!"

AN - So this is something that I crammed together in one day, due to my noticing a series of pictures on the RWBY subreddit of the main cast in the Star Wars universe. So, I made this. In a way, this chapter functions similarly to the "Red" trailer, in that it introduces Ruby and gives us our first glimpse at a galaxy far far away, soon to be shaped by four colorful young ladies.

On the story side, what did you think? It only occured to me once I started writing that Star Wars and RWBY are perfectly set up for a crossover fic, and I'm excited to be working on this as a side project when I'm not collaborating with my friend Al_Hats on our other fic "Bellringer" (which RWBY fans should totally check out something something shameless self-promotion).

I make no promises with release schedule but I'll try to get a chapter of this out when I'm not busy with other things. So until next time, thanks for reading, and may the force be with you.

Discrepancies and Notes

When - This story is set around the end of the Jedi-Sith cold war and the resumption of conflict between the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire, circa 3642 BBY. For those of you who don't care to do the math, this is roughly the same time as the "Old Republic" MMORPG. The Jedi and Sith are in an uneasy stalemate after the Sith nearly decimated the Republic in the Great Galactic War and the last few years have been fraught with tension, fear and uncertainty interlaced with border skirmishes and proxy wars. The mid and outer rim are largely lawless and nobody expects the peace to last long. Unfortunately for them, they're right.

Who - Just like RWBY, the story will focus on four young girls shaped by (and actively shaping) the course of the re-emerging conflict. Without giving away anything about the other three, you can already see that in Ruby we have our classic "Farm boy/girl learns how to fly and ends up getting caught up in the middle of a galactic war, which they may or may not tip the balance of because they may or may not be force-sensitive." Sound familiar? It should - that's basically the plot of A New Hope. Expect lots of repurposing of side characters from RWBY (you already met Cardin) into their new environment and plenty of antics and action to come from that.

How - I plan to keep this as true to the Star Wars source material as possible, at least insofar as the structure of galactic politics, military and the actions that occurred throughout the course of the conflict that we find ourselves introduced to rather quickly. The chapters will alternate between the POV's of the four principle RWBY characters and will occasionally overlap. You'll just have to wait and see ;)

Please be sure to leave a review and give me whatever feedback you have to offer. Next time, we meet the second of our protagonists and take a backseat as she… goes to work.