Fall!

The thought came unbidden to Jaune's mind, and the fingers of his left hand curled still tighter around the thick metal railing of the airship. The ship itself was enormous, and the people around him, many looking around his age, were walking on it as if it were firm ground. To Jaune, though, the wind whipping his bangs into his eyes, the mere sight of flags and banners tied to the ship's rigging flapping chaotically in the breeze, and, worst of all, the occasional tiny lurch as the ship's position was righted served to remind him that without a doubt, there was a small mountain's worth of empty air between safety and the thing he was standing on.

Jump!

Right after takeoff, he had felt fine, or at least more apprehensive about attempting to enroll at Beacon Academy than about flying to the city of Vale. After the painful and confusing ordeals of the past week, he had hoped briefly that the ride on the airship was the beginning of a new and brighter part of his life, like a ride on a magic carpet out of some old tale. As the vessel climbed higher and higher into the air, though, Jaune felt a nervousness that grew into a terror as he stood at the rail.

Not a terror brought on by actually wanting to jump, but a terror at why the urge presented itself anyway. Was this just something that happened when you went up very high in the air? Were any of the other passengers on the dirigible panicking like he was?

The longer he laid his gaze upon the familiar woodlands and sparse homesteads, the more a chill crept into his heart. The higher air, he had learned in his time away from home, lacked even the familiar, comforting aroma of fragrant pinewood. It was crisper, cleaner, emptier. It was, as Jaune thought correctly to himself, the furthest he had ever been from the place where he had been born. The idea brought both untold dread and fascination, and he found himself nearly unable to tear his eyes away from the ever-shrinking farmhouses, shacks, and fortifications below. Forcing himself to breathe deeply, he swallowed and tried to to force away the thought of what it would feel like, to launch himself over the rail, to see the expanse rushing up at him with the wind in his hair-

Fall!

"-okay?"

A small, shy voice suddenly cut into his thoughts, and with a jerk of his gaze, he found himself staring at the top of someone's head.

"Um..."

Looking down, he saw a small girl, a few years younger than him by the look of her, clad in a black and crimson corset and skirt, fixing him with a concerned stare. As their eyes met, the corners of her mouth turned up into a small smile. "You don't look so good. First time flying?"

"Yeah," he croaked, before clearing his throat. He shook his head a little, and turned to flash what he hoped was a cocky grin at the girl. "Even a hunter-in-training gets nervous when they're a mile in the air, y'know."

The girl beamed. "Ooh, are you going to Beacon too?" Before he could reply and give voice to his surprise that someone so young and slight was also training to be a warrior, she continued, "Oh, of course you are! I mean, you're carrying a sword, obviously you know how to use it!"

She didn't notice him narrow his eyes when she mentioned the longsword strapped to his back, its hilt protruding over his left shoulder. Though he barely felt the weight of the heavy blade, he was still getting used to feeling that the weapon belonged to him. In part, of course, because it didn't.

"I'm Ruby, Ruby Rose!" said the girl cheerily, ignorant of his anxiety. She extended a tiny hand to him, which he shook gently. "So, are you a swordsman?" she asked, and then blushed slightly before hurriedly following up with, "What's your name?"

"Jaune-" he answered, and his breath caught in his throat. "...Fortuna," he finished. Ruby didn't seem to notice his hesitation, and seemed eager for him to get to her first question. He quickly tried to think of something a local hero would say. "And yeah, greatest swordsman in all of Kawanaka."

Ruby nodded with interest before replying, "Where's that?"

He couldn't help but snort. By her innocent expression and wide eyes, she clearly hadn't meant to sound insulting, but Jaune was hard-pressed to think of a more dismissive response. Judging by Ruby putting up her hands in a placating gesture and stammering out an apology, she realized too late just what she'd said. "Oh gods, I didn't mean it like that! I, I was never good at geography, I'm from Patch and I really don't know Vale that well-"

He chuckled and waved off the apology. "Ha, it's fine, it's a pretty small town. Honestly there were only about a dozen warriors in the whole village."

"And you're the best, huh?"

Jaune braced himself. He put on the smile he'd practiced in the mirror and dredged up the story, the not-technically-a-lie that he'd rehearsed for days. "I beat the guy who was the best, so that makes me the best! But there's no reason I can't get better, right? So..." he gestured broadly at the cabin of the airship behind them.

Ruby nodded, accepting his explanation, but her eyes were drawn to Jaune's right arm, extended towards the ship (his left hand kept a tight grip on the ship's railing). His clothes were somewhat incongruous, she noticed, as on his left hand he wore a fingerless leather glove, while on his right, the glove was full and extended to his elbow, and from beneath his light armor she could make out a series of bandages woven tightly around the entirety of his arm.

Seeing that she was peering at him intently, he lowered his hand and tried not to look like he was hiding it. "So, what about you?"

She seemed to forget about his appearance as she went into a perky spiel about how hunting ran in her family, how much she loved modular weapon technology, and how much she wanted to train alongside her older sister, who had also started her training in Signal Academy before being invited to Beacon.

While he kept a smile on his face, the longer she talked, the worse he felt. Here he was, faking his way into Beacon with forged transcripts and claiming to be some great fighter already, while this Ruby could build her own complex weapons and was apparently personally invited to attend Beacon after the Headmaster witnessed her stopping a robbery. Not for the first time, he wondered if this 'all-or-nothing' approach to getting into Beacon was going to end with him sitting in prison for a few years. But also not for the first time, he remembered what was waiting for him back home, namely, the possibility of spending the rest of his life in a cell. If there was ever a point where he could have turned back, he reckoned it must have been before he got on the airship. As of that moment, though, he was set on his course, trying to make it seem like he was as enthusiastic about life as his new compatriot was.

"-and so I know that scythes are usually thought of as impractical, but that just means they're harder to master and harder for the bad guys to counter! Not that you can ever go wrong with the proven methods, I'm sure you know all kinds of cool sword techniques!" she was saying.

"Uh," he began.

"Hey," she continued, "I heard some people saying that there are a lot of transfer students from Mistral this year, 'cause of whatever's going on over there. They're supposed to be, like, spear experts, maybe you'll wind up in a team with one of them, and it'll be just like in that movie, Five Hunters! And maybe," she paused for a split second, only noticeable because of her otherwise breakneck pace, "maybe we'll be on a team together!"

"Yeah, maybe," he agreed, returning her warm smile. He let go of the rail and extended a fist to the young woman. "It'd be pretty lucky to have a partner like a Grimm reaper!"

Her broad grin showed off her straight, slightly grayed, teeth, and was no less brilliant for it. She punched his outstretched fist lightly, her knuckles briefly meeting the coarse and sun-blanched leather covering most of his hand. "I think the Greatest Swordsman in Hananaka will make a great sidekick for the Caped Crusader!"

"Hey, not that I'm complaining, but how come I'm the sidekick when I'm older?"

"Heh, it's simple: I'm younger, but we're both first-years! That means I'm the equivalent of at least half a year older than you!"

"Oh, that's how it is, huh? Alright, sempai, I'll follow you to the end of Remnant!"

She paused, and shifted her gaze to her left, as her reddened cheeks puffed slightly. "Um...'sempai'? Is that something they say? On the mainland?"

As the two newfound friends swapped scraps of regional dialects, the ship, propelled by the finest fuel-grade Dust available, in the estimation of His Majesty's Department-Treasurer's Committee for The Transportation of His Majesty's Subjects Within and Throughout The Realm Enduring, drifted with a calm wind. Its engines, proprietary secrets, churned away in the belly of the ship. To hear them up close, they would undoubtedly offend the ears of most people with the capacity to hear. Yet, standing on the deck of the massive vessel, one could just make out the hum, individual clangs and bursts melding into a stoic drone.

As Jaune followed Ruby to meet her sister and look out for exotic weapons, he began to pick up on the steady tone, and found he could keep it in focus, hold fast to it and ground himself. He would later marvel at having been unable to hear it at once. As he turned towards the ornately-decorated cabin for passengers, he looked out again at the horizon, where the sun was approaching its zenith, and heard once again an echoing impulse in his mind:

Fly!

Notes: It's been a while since I've written anything, so I apologize for any visible rust. Here are some details that you may or may not care about.

My idea for this story is to portray the action in RWBY as simultaneously on a larger scale, with a bit more grounding than what I feel the series tends to do. The story will mostly follow Jaune, Ruby, Blake, and Pyrrha, as they all attempt to start new periods in their lives. This first chapter alludes to Jaune's Dark and Mysterious Past (TM), but subsequent ones will explore Ruby's feelings on the Dust store robbery, Pyrrha's connection to political turmoil in Mistral, and Blake's attempts to reconcile her ideals with the reality of what the White Fang is becoming.

As far as I can tell, Jaune's hometown is never named. However, since some of the settlements in Vale's woodlands have a Japanese naming convention, I decided to run with that and throw in traces of non-English languages to depict the linguistic diversity that I think would probably exist in a world where at any given time, an incursion of monsters could physically cut a small settlement off from the rest of the realm. "Kawanaka" roughly means "in the river," and in reality is not the name of any settlement to my knowledge, however the "Kawanaka-Fudo" is a Buddhist shrine and monument in the city of Bungotakada in Japan's Ouita Prefecture. The term "sempai," also spelled "senpai," is a term of address and honorific used for a person who is considered, even informally, one's senior at something, usually school or work.

Politics will be an important topic in this story, and I plan to flesh out more details about the actual government of the "kingdoms." In the series, the kingdoms are called such, but I don't recall there ever being talk of a royal family, just Councils as governing bodies. As something of a political junkie, I find myself fascinated by fictional governments and how they function or fail to function, so expect a certain amount of realpolitik and talk of political disputes.

There will be OCs and crossover characters, though the latter won't be showing up for a while. I hope you've enjoyed this first part, please review and let me know what you liked or didn't like!