Believe or not, it was looking at the RWBY tropes page that I got the idea for how Penny could legitimately survive and change things. We are picking up at the battle where she is supposed to die. For all Penny fans, fingers crossed that in season 6 she lives. Robots are harder to kill than humans, AIs less so.
Disclaimer: I don't own RWBY
It was another wonderful day in the Vytal Festival that Penny experienced. Minus the incident with Subject: Yang and Subject: Mercury altercation the previous day. Today, she was picked to fight Subject:Pyrrha. Penny decided to be cautious. She read the champion's files and saw that her Semblance was Polarity. Something that she should be wary about.
Why you ask, you see Penny isn't normal. She was never normal. This girl wasn't born in a hospital, rather she was built in a science lab. Penny is an android or to be specific, a Gynoid. A machine meant to emulate a human and become a weapon.
The world Penny Polendina was built in wasn't exactly safe. Remnant had shadowy monsters called the Grimm, seemingly born with the sole purpose of destroying both man and faunuskind. Many of them bearing the shape of humanity's primal fears.
To combat them, the world itself provided dust. A natural material that allowed people to wield nature's wrath against the darkness. They come in the form of ores or crystals. To the point that there was an actual tree that slowly grew powerful dust. No one knew where it truly came from but didn't question it. This material powered all of Remnant's machines and served as ammunition for their weapons.
Robots have small dust powered generators that require the material every week. Many of these robots were built to combat the Grimm. Penny was the odd one out of all of them. She relied on dust as a supplementary power source or backup generator. Rather, she ran on Aura.
Aura is the materialization of the soul in living things, even animals. Grimm don't have souls therefore they don't have Aura. Robots should be the same except someone forgot to tell Dr. Polendina, head of the R&D Division that when he built Penny. He managed to create an aura generator that gave life to his daughter.
After breaking a fundamental law of the world, he presented his daughter who was just an upper torso without arms to his superiors in the Atlesian military. With his breakthrough, the Kingdom of Atlas gave enough resources and support to the man to improve Penny and recreate the phenomenon. He was somewhat successful in that regard, making a prototype human sized shield generator that zaps any Grimm getting close to it.
Dr Polendina had the best of the best to 'teach' his daughter to fight. By teach we mean upload information to her until she became fully sentient. Something Aura has the power to give. When his daughter dif became 100% sentient it caused quite a shock amongst the higher echelons of the military.
Paranoid bastards wanted to destroy her in case she wanted to destroy the world. Thankfully, none of those were in a high position. Besides, only the Grimm and humanity get to obliterate the world. Not atlesian robots, that would be insulting to hunters and criminals everywhere.
Penny thought of many things as she headed to the arena to fight. How to fight Pyrrha, ways to counter and not to die. There was a bit of emphasis on the last one. She only lived for 3 years, she wants to do what no other android has done. Live out a life.
There were alerts in her processor minutes later just seconds before Pyrrha should sever her limbs with her own weapons. Penny was locked in place as her opponent's semblance was put on overdrive. Her body was wrapped in pain as she thought of ways to get out of her situation alive. Her thoughts turned to the word semblance.
Aura is the materialization of the soul. Those that have Aura can have a semblance. Penny has aura, therefore she has a semblance. The gynoid with a heart attack that should be implausible called upon her aura in a last resort to not die. In a second just before her probable death, she unleashed her newfound power.
And then the sky fell… Penny felt free.
I had a bit of fun writing this. Something about logic is just satisfying when it works. I'll let you guess just what Penny's (hopefully canon) semblance actually does. If you want more, let me hear it and I'll update it.
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