Delivery 1: Origins

My name is Jaune Arc.

I'm just a normal guy. Seventeen years old. Down on his luck, high on a chance to become something.

Beacon wouldn't have me... of course they wouldn't. I didn't have the training, the knowledge - I didn't have what it took to be a Huntsman.

So I got a different job. Something simple. Delivering pizzas. It's not glamorous, it's not heroic, hardly pays well, and my boss is... weird - But it gave me something to work toward, I guess. So I did, and things were normal at first.

At first.

It wasn't supposed to end up with this way; not like this. I'm just a pizza guy.

So why is it up to ME to save the world!?

Jaune stood in front of Salem.

The wind howled, burrowing about the wasteland like a hundred tornadoes were on the scene. And it was sharp, like blades - Jaune felt like his uniform and cap might be torn apart, but his skin? No. The edge of wind was too weak.

He'd survived worse.

The icy tundras and blizzards, hot deserts - beasts of incredible size and shape, the cruelest of bandits. Jaune had faced them all, and maybe they weren't always a victory, but the point was that he'd survived.

And the pizza was still fresh.

But back to harbinger of ultimate evil...

How many Huntsmen had fallen in her wake? How many slain by her hand? How many orders undone by this witch?

Everything was cold, in hellish landscape that replaced his beautiful city, as frozen as the icebox at the shop. And his boss would continually pummel him with his back scratcher for not cleaning it properly.

And he never even cleaned the damn thing! Jaune did not need to see his boss's gross back hairs. Stupid old man.

His eyes narrowed even though his heart quaked, and Salem looked back at him unfazed. Unbothered. This woman knew no fear; her favorite topping was anchovies, after all. And she liked her crust soiled in garlic - she wanted onions caked into the dough.

That couldn't be good on her bowels.

Bodies littered the ground by the hundreds, but not corpses. Salem wouldn't go through with it unless he failed. This was her game - the game she always played when she dialed the shop.

She didn't just want the pizza. She wanted the premium adventure package.

… Which they didn't have, but when you tipped like she did, Jaune's boss made him do anything the customers wanted. Anything.

And people were into some weird… unpleasant… fucked up shit. Oh, the humanity! Deliveries on cold nights in a maid outfit. The fact that the customers wanted that was scary enough, only made worse by the fact that his boss already had one! Singing happy birthday to Grimm as they tried to eat him alive! And that creep Tyrian loved to be hand fed while talking about how 'interesting' Jaune was. Those wide, crazy eyes - lips licking in anticipation. It was no wonder he slept with his night-light now.

Jaune had learned very quickly in this profession that hunger drove people mad.

But he'd underestimated how much.

And as Salem's evil eyes bore back into his, he wondered what he could say. No, he couldn't say anything. It wasn't his job to speak, it was only his job to cu - come. (God damn it, Bleiss.) It was job to deliver!

"Hello, Salem." He said simply.

"Ah, Jaune," Salem greeted, a grin stretching about her face as she regarded him, "A pleasure to have you again! I'm surprised to see you made it so quickly."

"I was in the neighborhood."

'Of a desolate Grimm wasteland?' Jaune's mind asked, trying to see a shred of believability in his own words. But he knew that would be his downfall; the supernatural didn't concede to the laws of the mortal world.

He could not appear normal to Salem. He had to sate her desire for destruction and mayhem.

With bravery, and maybe a little ham and pineapple.

"It seems you were; however, this is another matter entirely - I'm afraid your place isn't here. You have brought me pleasures I have never known. Never would I have thought that baked bread and melted cheese could come together so... perfectly," The woman visibly shivered, but not from fear - instead, from the excitement of knowing what was coming her way.

"For this I am thankful. But to stand amidst my domination of this world... well..."

Upon raising her hands, darkness took the skies, it covered the entire world in its smoky miasma. Grimm rose in great numbers. Hundreds, thousands. Thousands of hundreds. Hundreds of thousands.

Zzrt! Zzrt! Zzrt!

Numbers. Not unlike... not unlike... a ticket machine!

His blood boiled. Familiarity, consequence for failure. Thirty-minute time limits across the board. Jaune Arc was a man pushed to the absolute brink in his endless mission to bring cheesy comfort to his customers.

Unless they ordered light cheese, which was a different matter entirely.

Order like a normal person for fuck's sake!

But this was bad, and he knew it to be. Salem was the ultimate evil, and even as she bit into a fresh slice, the string of cheese oozing from her lips as she bit down, Jaune never forgot it. No... it reinforced it.

Shouldn't a Huntsman have been handling this?

Life worked in strange ways, Jaune didn't know whether this was right or not. But he always showed up, and he rang that doorbell - fresh orders in hand.

From there it was a roll of the dice.

Just like now.

"You know my motto, Salem."

She didn't nod, but the forward tilt of her head showed him that she understood. She pointed a single finger at him, and millions of Grimm converged as one. They weren't unlike many other foes Jaune faced, be they White Fang or even bandits. They were all the same. Irredeemable monsters hell bent on getting him over the 30-minute mark.

At times they succeeded.

But this time, they wouldn't.

"Delivering hot justice for customers..."Jaune whipped open the box in hand, the hot smell of sausage and pepperoni wafted into his nose. Seeping into his skin, it ignited his aura, and it gave him the greatest power in the world.

The power to deliver.

"And cold vengeance to crime!"

Jaune Arc took a single slice, grease dribbled on his hand.

And leapt into battle.

Waaaay before all that happened...

Jaune fought for air as he tumbled into the parlor, then fell into the seat as he tried to take back the air stolen from him.

He was never going to that side of Mistral again!

And then his boss came out, shaking a fist full of tickets as he yelled - mumbled? Groaned? Either way, his eyes were squinted shut at a right angle, which meant he was angry. But then, this man never opened his eyes anyway - so he always looked angry.

Or maybe he just hated Jaune. He was sure that was the case.

The shopkeep directed him to all the boxes on the counter. And Jaune's heart sank upon seeing the total lack of space there. Dozens upon dozens... upon dozens... of piping hot boxes, ready to be delivered.

"Sir, I need rest!" Jaune whined, "Can I please go home?"

But the boss prattled, dentures threatening to pop out any second. On and on went the maniac, smacking Jaune on the head with a stick of celery. Why did he even have those anyway!? They weren't on the menu!

He'd only taken on this job because Beacon rejected him. He hadn't even gotten to see the campus; his forgeries were figured out and he'd gotten in trouble for it. Thankfully the professor of Beacon saw fit to drop the charges - his greatest punishment a mere slap on the wrist.

He didn't want to go home, so he'd done what he had to. Gotten a job in Vale and a shitty apartment and ta-da, a new life.

Whatever that amounted to.

"Alright fine, old geezer!" Jaune got up bitterly, taking the next pair of orders in hand. He headed out the door but stopped to yell back again, "I hope you have a hernia!"

The shopkeep howled.

"Don't you talk about my mother like that!"

Jaune burst out the door, closing just as a kitchen knife rammed into the frame. How this man could aim properly with closed eyes was beyond him. Sighing, he stopped to look at everything he was facing now.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way.

Maybe being a hero was out of the question, but he'd taken up this job with the hopes of doing the best he could in it. Maybe making something more of himself. It was supposed to be normal, easy.

But it wasn't.

They'd taken to him, every customer - good and bad alike. It was nonstop now.

He looked down at his ticket, two simple words. For the four crazy people who kickstarted this rollercoaster, Team RWBY. There was no going back now. He'd made too many friends... and too many enemies.

People were out for his pizza.

And Jaune would have to deliver.

Every order invited madness, pain, excitement, pain, adventure... did he mention pain? There was a lot of that. Mostly on his end. And humiliation. Couldn't forget that. And saving the day. That too. He had to wonder how that happened.

He was just a pizza guy.

Or he was supposed to be.

So Jaune Arc made his way for Beacon, delivery was on the horizon, and he prayed that this time, he wouldn't get caught up in anything crazy.

Fat chance.

In the beginning, there was a server. I was there, and I was talking about a new idea with my fellow server-goers. The idea was awesome, actiony and emotional - it was gonna be amazing.

But then this arose, quickly overtaking the original idea, stealing not only the attention of my friends... but myself as well.

Welcome readers, to the Pizza Boy Jaune Anthology. Where I, along with many other writers will write about the misadventures of Jaune and his life as a pizza guy. It's wacky, it makes no sense, it lacks plot structure - and that is the beauty of it.

Write one yourself if you want to! Join our madness! But this is not a serious story at all, just some fun that I'm having with my pals in our server.

Thanks for reading, I hope you liked it and I'll be seeing you.

ISA