For roughly the three hundred fiftieth time, Yang woke up in her bed at Beacon, on the day that everything had once gone all kinds of wrong. And for exactly the thirty-second time, began performing her near-perfect day-one checklist to un-wrong it.
"Three years down the drain because of debris," she grumbled, trying to mentally prepare herself for the coming years.
First things first. One day at a time. One thing at a time. Coffee, then Ozpin's office.
She stopped worrying about her team worrying about her being gone about the third time she'd done this. Right about now, as she ascended toward the Headmaster's office, Blake would be waking up.
Right about now, as she stepped out of the elevator, coffee in hand, Weiss would be waking up, probably annoyed at various things.
Ozpin looked up from behind his desk and spoke, "Miss Xiao Long, I wasn't expectin-"
"Can it, Oswald, I'm here to unmess your mess."
The old Wizard's eyes narrowed, recognizing the situation for what it was, "I see. Well, welcome to the club, I suppose."
Yang silently thanked a previous iteration of Ozpin for telling her some of his previous names. They were as good as passwords into his deepest inner circle, he had said, and that being true made things much easier for her.
She laid her scroll on his desk and tapped the interface briefly, then the entire display flashed red, with a Black Queen depicted prominently, before flickering and returning to its original color. Then she copied a file from her scroll to the desk.
"May I ask what you just did?," Ozpin inquired.
"Like I said, I unmessed your mess. There was a virus in your computer allowing remote access, and I just purged it with a program I wrote just this morning." At some point around iteration one-fifty, she had realized that she had, effectively, infinite time, and picked up programming. Two hundred iterations later, she was a master of computers.
A computer wizard, some might say.
"How many times have you done this?"
"This specifically, or this whole thing in general?"
The old Wizard thought for a moment, which Yang took to mean that he'd figured out that he was better off not asking for the time being, and took the opportunity to tell her Headmaster what to do with the file she had copied to him, as well as a general rundown of everything happening under his nose.
"You know, this is the fortieth time we've had this conversation, or a conversation like it, and I still feel pretty great about telling you what to do."
"Yes, well, not all of us can be blessed to relive their life every time they die."
"You're just mad because my curse is way more thought out than yours."
"Don't you have somewhere to be right now?"
She checked her scroll for the time, and cracked a smile, "Right, time to go make a trained assassin with robo-legs look like a complete idiot." At this point, kicking Mercury to the curb was less of a challenge and more of a cake walk.
"Right. Best of luck," Ozpin said, as if this were the most normal thing in the world, sipping his coffee.
"Eh, I don't really need luck for day one anymore," she countered, turning to return to the elevator, but not descending before getting in a final shot,
"Oh, and have fun being fourteen again."
She heard Ozpin gag on his coffee, and, content that she had gotten all the cheap laughs she was going to get before everything went to hell, started mentally going down the list, remembering what she could change and what couldn't be changed, and preparing herself to run damage control.
Step one, Clean up Ozpin's computer.
Step two, tell Ozpin everything he needs to know.
Step three, give Jaune relationship advice so he won't fumble his talk with Pyrrha.
She checked her scroll for the time. Unfortunately, she had lingered too long with Ozpin, and step three would have to be moved back. There simply wouldn't be time to tell Jaune what he needed to know before her fight with Mercury was scheduled to start.
She continued down the list:
Step four, win against Mercury, do nothing in response to Emerald's illusion. Just keep walking.
It had taken her twenty iterations to uncover what had happened. It had taken her thirty more to figure out that simply beating Emerald preemptively wasn't an acceptable solution, and another thirty to figure out that all she had to do was ignore it when it happened. She reminisced about her own rationalizing at the time:
Worst case, the illusion feels real and I get hurt. Best case, nothing happens, I walk off stage and get all kinds of accolades, and they look like fools.
Oh, how she wished that were true. How she wished that doing that would've been the end of her problems.
She rubbed her right palm, appreciating what she had for the moment. She had figured out a long time ago, around iteration sixty, that she could prevent the loss of her arm, but she and others would suffer worse fates down the line for it.
Some things can't be changed.
Her thoughts drifted to Blake. Her constant companion in many iterations. More than just a friend several times. She had always made time to foster their relationship. She had many early resets for her efforts, but a few that lasted for the whole duration.
She remembered yesterday, three years from now. She had been at the finish line. It was about to be over. About to be free to live her life with Blake.
And then she had been crushed by debris.
Maybe, this time, she would invite Blake on for the ride.
She likes books, right?