Chapter 1
"No! No! No! No! No!" Ruby groaned, punctuating each 'no' by hitting her head on her cluttered desk. "None of this is right!"
Yang gave her sister a sympathetic grin. "You need to relax more Rubes. If this was an easy job then everyone on the planet would be doing it."
"But the exhibition is in just a month Yang! This is my chance to prove to everyone just what I'm capable of." She sighed and turned back to the mass of crumpled blueprints on her desk. "Instead I'm just proving to myself how stupid all my ideas are."
"Well maybe you should try for something other than a combat droid." Yang suggested while glancing over a sketch of one of the latest failed candidates (basically just a mass of gattling guns on legs, reflecting just how much sleep deprivation had caused Ruby's creativity to wane). "Its a popular category for first year robotics majors, so if you come up with something different it will stand out more."
Ruby pouted. "But they're cool Yang. And besides you're one to talk considering you built Blake."
"Yeah but Blake is ten times cooler than anything else the others are going to build."
Ruby couldn't argue with that statement if she wanted to. Blake was Yang's main project, and a constant work in progress that she always found new ways to improve and upgrade. They took the form of a humanoid robot encased in sleek, black armour resembling an insect's carapace. At Ruby's complaints about how boring they looked, Yang made the addition of a pair of feline ears a tail to them, much like a faunus.
"In any case Ruby," Yang continued, "you need to realise that there is not a single person in Beacon who doubts you. You'll definitely come up with something that will prove what a great choice they made in moving you forward two years. Right now though, you need to sleep. Humans aren't built to run on cookies and red bull. I'll help you brainstorm in the morning."
"Yeah, you're probably right Yang." There was no chance that she would much done this late in the evening, especially considering that she had pulled two consecutive all-nighters to clear out her homework schedule for the coming month. She forced herself out of bed and staggered over to her bed, collapsing into it without bothering to change. "Goodnight sis."
She was asleep before Yang even had the chance to respond.
Ruby looked out onto a utopia, clean and shiny and new. Buildings made of a crystalline substance, tooled with intricate, flowing designs towering far beyond her sight.
"So beautiful" She whispered in unrestrained awe.
"Too true." Came a voice from behind her. A hand traced its way down her back. "And the city looks pretty nice as well."
Ruby slowly turned to see the source of the voice, and was met with nothing less than the otherworldly beauty of an angel. Beautiful sky blue eyes, hair as white as freshly fallen snow, and, most incredible of all, wings that looked like they had been forged from stardust. Ruby opened her mouth to try and respond to the vision of beauty that stood before her...
...and woke with a start. A quick glance at the clock informed her that she had only been asleep for four hours. Of course this didn't actually matter to her at all, as there was nothing in the world that could force her back into bed now.
She now knew what she was going to create.
On a secluded beach on the other side of Vale, a crack in the world formed, and a shrouded figure stepped through. They were not familiar with the realm that they had entered into, knowing of it only in the lore of their people, but that is not to say that their presence here was aimless. Indeed, they had a very clear goal, one that they had been raised all their life for, one that their people had sacrificed everything for, for this one golden opportunity to reclaim what had been stolen from them.
They could not afford to act in haste, lest a fatal error be made, but the figure was not in haste. They had more than enough time to familiarise themselves with this strange new world and to prepare for the task at hand, so really their success was an inevitability by this point.
The progenitor will be destroyed.