Author's Note: Hey all, it's been a while, but I now present JNPaRody, a wacky series of shenanigans that come a little too close to live-action TV.
This all started long ago in the hiatus between Volumes 2 and 3, when sarista wow and I contemplated how RWBY could have been different if the two main teams were switched. The result was JNPaRody, a tween sitcom knockoff wherein JNPR takes center stage but Team RWBY still steals the show.
I don't have an update schedule for this fanfiction, but it's ongoing. The trench coat guy in this "episode" is intended to be a one-off character.
The preview image is from a T-shirt design in the Rooster Teeth store.
On an ominous day, the people of Vacuo felt a sitcom on the horizon and made Sun leave before it could reach them. The dread passed above the boat he boarded, stretching between sky and earth all the way toward a certain dorm in Beacon Academy.
The next morning, a rooster crowed on a tree branch outside the window of Team JNPR, though there was no reason for a rooster to be in there in the first place. A bunch of bodiless voices burst into laughter.
Inside the dorm room, Jaune woke up. "Another day, another six-hour span to pain myself with a course load of classes," he said to another, smaller round of laughter. He wasn't aware of the noise. He saw Pyrrha get up in the bed beside him, stretching while she blinked away her sleep. Nora was already awake, bouncing on her mattress. The squeaking sound of the bending springs seemed to wake Ren, who leaned up silent as usual before blinking into a frown. He turned away from his teammates, eyes narrowing as he slid the covers off of his body.
A moment later Pyrrha turned, her brush mid-stroke in the locks of her gorgeous red hair. "Guys?" she said, and her teammates looked at her. "Do you feel something's wrong with today?"
Ren opened his mouth, but Jaune said, "No, seems pretty normal to me."
He reached under his bed for his shoes, then made a dramatic gasp. Everyone else snapped to attention.
"What is it?" Pyrrha asked.
Jaune surfaced. "I've lost my first-edition anniversary issue of Space Pirates Adventure!" he said to a tremendous burst of laughter unbeknownst to them. There was a silence from his teammates.
"Your comic book?" Pyrrha said.
Jaune started pulling the covers off his bed. "It's really important to me! I camped out to be first in line and everything!"
"Couldn't you…get a new one?"
"Pyrrha." Jaune looked away from opening his pillowcases. "You don't understand. It was a signed edition. With a holographic cover!"
"Oooh, so you could feel the galaxy with you as you followed the intrepid adventurers?" Nora said.
"Totally like that!"
"Great," said Nora. "Always good to be on the same wavelength as team captain." She straightened in a salute, then listened to the bedsprings creak under her as she rocked on her mattress.
Jaune put down the pillowcase and started pacing as the morning clouds parted to reveal the sun. "This is bad. I gotta go find it before someone else takes it." He left the room. His teammates silently conferred with one another, and then Pyrrha shrugged and followed him.
"Well, the adventure to recover Jaune's lost comic book is underway," Nora said, hopping off her bed and landing at a perfect standstill in front of Ren. "We gotta hurry! The comic could be cold, lost. Or stuffed inside some freakazoid's backpack and turning moldy!" There was another round of laughter. Ren scratched his head, then looked at Nora standing in front of him with her hands on her hips.
"Nora," he said, "do you feel like something is…off, about today?"
"What do you mean?"
Her cheerfulness was not unexpected. "Like, do you feel there's a change in the air?" Ren persisted. "A ripple somewhere in space? As though we've been transcended to a dimension that is the same and yet completely different from our own?"
Nora laughed, waving her hand. "You've been reading too many comic books. Come on, let's go."
She skipped out the door. Ren followed her, still suspicious, and they moved down the red hallway rug past the closed door of Team RWBY.
Ruby was having a dream about corgis and electric sheep. A faraway peal of laughter flittered into the image of a corral full of static cling, and her mind went blank. She woke up and paused to think.
"Morning, guys," she said, lifting the cover of her tent. "Funny dream I was having. Literally funny. There was laughter…"
"No, mine too," said Weiss below her. "I thought I heard it outside somewhere."
Blake was sitting on her bedside, staring at the door. She was quiet, brow creased in unsettling patience as Yang leaned against the wall with her arms crossed.
Ruby got off her bed. Her teammates leaned forward as she inched across the room, her each step heavier than the last. She reached the door, turned the knob, and opened it. There was nothing in the hall. As she stared into the emptiness, her teammates fanned out behind her.
"Uh, that's weird," said Yang.
Weiss took a step forward and tripped, knocking Ruby over. Blake and Yang jumped back as a roar of laughter punctuated their teammates' fall. Ruby landed stomach-first on the red rug, Weiss winded on top of her, and as the leader felt the vibe of an audience lingering on her face, she realized with growing dread that this was not the Remnant she was used to.
Somewhere in the city of Vale, a catchy theme song played.
Team JNPR hurried down the courtyard. They ran into Glynda, who had parked a Beacon golf cart next to the grass. Her large teacher's scroll was open in front of her, and when she looked up to see the freshmen, the distorted whine coming from her device grew louder.
"Hey, Professor, what's going on?" asked Jaune.
"I'm not sure," Glynda replied. She pressed a couple buttons, worrying the pulses on the screen into tangled static. "My scroll's going haywire today and I don't know why."
"That's too bad. Well, gotta go now and learn more about the history of Vacuo," Jaune called over his shoulder as Glynda continued walking down the courtyard.
The bell rang, and as though the world had flipped around, JNPR was in their seats in Oobleck's lecture hall. Oobleck seemed more over the top than usual, neglecting the disheveled state of his tie and glasses in the rush of his lesson. Pyrrha and Ren took notes as fast as they could to keep up, while Nora opted for doodling in the margins. Jaune twiddled his thumbs, still preoccupied with his dilemma, and tilted his seat back as casually as he could.
From the corner of his eye, he caught someone watching him. He looked at the table behind him to see a guy around his age with bushy black hair that was barely fitted under a gray hat. He was wearing a brown trench coat, and slouched by himself at the end of the room. His smile grew wider at Jaune's acknowledgement, and he nodded. Jaune nodded back, then waited out the rest of the period.
"So 12 pages of notes today…that's Oobleck for you…" He was on the courtyard again, thumbing through the pages. In the background, Yang walked into a pillar and started looking around in bewilderment. Jaune was so distracted by his notebook, he didn't realize he had a visitor.
"Hey," said the trench coat guy. Jaune jumped, sending loose papers flying. The guy was standing behind one of the many small hedgerows planted inside squat brick walls. His hands were in his pockets. He said, "You buyin'?"
"Uhhh…I'm not sure what you mean," Jaune replied.
"I mean the good stuff. The great kalamazazoo. You know…" the trench coat guy gripped the inside of his pockets and aired open the hems of his coat. "The things people like us can't resist."
"I think my parents warned me about this stuff," said Jaune.
The other guy groaned. He whipped open his coat. Jaune jumped back in surprise and amazement.
"You're a comic book dealer!" he said.
A massive roar of disembodied laughter followed this statement, continuing as the trench coat guy's smile widened, dimples in his cheeks. He nodded a little longer than necessary, renewing the laughs. Neither party heard the sound. Jaune came closer to the look at the issues packed inside the coat's many pockets.
"Betty Boo and the Investigation Troupe…Double Cabin Campbell…The Great Kalamazazoo! You have everything! This is awesome. Actually." Jaune faced the trench coat guy again, his trust assured. "Have you seen a first-edition copy of Space Pirates Adventure? I lost it earlier and it's, you know, kind of special."
"Oh yeah, I totally found that!" The trench coat guy turned around and took out a random comic and a permanent marker. He scrawled some words over the comic's title, drew a pirate hat on the main character, and assembled the others with various mustaches and buccaneering attire. He turned back around for the reveal.
"I saw a couple guys making off with it in a golf cart and got it back vis-a-vis my excellent negotiation and black belt skills," he claimed as Jaune's face glowed in awe. "And since I made the effort," the trench coat guy said, pulling the comic out of Jaune's reaching, "I think some reimbursement is in order. Say, 25 lien since it's a special edition?"
Jaune paused. "Uh, well. That sounds fair," he said, and brought out his wallet. The trench coat guy snapped the lien in two fingers and gave Jaune the comic.
"Nice doing business with you. See ya, dude." The trench coat guy closed his pockets and shimmied backwards behind the plants, waving his arms while the laughter sounded. Jaune waved back and returned to his dorm.
"So any luck on your investigation?" Pyrrha asked when Jaune walked in.
"As a matter of fact, yes! This guy fought off some thugs for it and charged me compensation."
"The guy did what now?" Nora asked, leaning over on her bed.
"He saw some guys leaving the school with my comic and dueled them to get it back!" Jaune said, proffering the comic as proof.
The rest of his team took a blank sweep at the cover. "Jaune?" Ren finally said. "Are you sure that's your comic?"
"Well, why not? He had a whole collection of them in his coat!"
"He was just…dealing comics on a closed campus?" said Pyrrha, having to pause at the absurdity of her own sentence.
"Well, when you put it that way, it sounds unwholesome. He got me my comic right here!" Jaune insisted, pointing at the cover for emphasis.
Pyrrha pointed back at it. "That looks like he used a Sharpie to draw mustaches on the main characters."
It sank in then. Jaune turned the cover back to himself with the hollowness, realizing his mistake. A moment of heaviness passed.
"He lied to me, guys," Jaune said quietly. The comic tightened in his fist. "And now I'm going to get my money back. Who knows, he might be holding my comic hostage!"
"I'm sure it's very scared, wherever it is," Ren said as Jaune boldly raised the defaced comic as symbolism for the cause. The blond leader marched out, Nora close at his heels, and after another shrug in the day, their more levelheaded teammates joined in.
On a patch of bricks in the school gardens, Team RWBY huddled in a line, crouched in various positions and on the alert. A few seconds later, a hawk cried in the distance.
They all heard the laughter at once. Ruby leaned over, checking back and forth for the perpetrators, but the action only made the laughs louder. She fell back in line, palms up.
"What is going on here?" said Weiss.
The mirth died down as she was speaking. Yang tried next.
"So we're all hearing it? I didn't just go nuts after walking into that pillar?"
"Yang, you're always nuts," said Weiss, to a mild "Ohhhh," in the background. "But we are all definitely hearing that bizarre laughter."
"But where is it coming from?" said Blake, grabbing her bow. "We have to stop it!"
"Okay, guys, new Team RWBY mission: find the strange repeated laughing thing that apparently only we can hear," said their leader. She tapped her chin as she thought about how weird that sounded.
"All right," said Yang. "What's the plan?"
They stood there, uncertain looks on their faces, and the laughter came back.
JNPR popped up from a row of hedges near the edge of campus, Nora lifting the lid of a nearby garbage can to check inside. They saw their perpetrator moseying towards the sophomore dorm.
"How are gonna catch him before he rips anyone else off?" Jaune said.
"We call him liar, liar, pants on fire?" Pyrrha suggested to a spurt of laughter they were all blessedly oblivious to.
"That's not going to work for a first-edition comic book con artist," Jaune said. "Okay, guys." He raised his fake issue in lieu of a sword. "We'll have to stop him ourselves."
They marched into battle. The trench coat guy had neared the doorway of the dorm and slipped his hand inside his coat to tuck his wares more securely in his pockets.
"We need to find a way to expose the fake comics," Ren said.
"I've got it, and it is a perfect plan with no chance of failure," Nora announced, making a grand gesture to the golf cart Glynda was still driving around campus. "Pyrrha, you're gonna have to use your powers of innocent schoolgirl seduction to pull this off." Nora waggled her eyebrows, clicking finger guns at her comrade. Pyrrha responded with a slightly open mouth, not sure if she liked where this was heading.
In the golf cart, Glynda was still trying to figure out where the bizarre frequencies on her scroll were coming from. The mass of gadgets she'd brought to aid her search rumbled inside the wooden carrier hitched to the back of the cart. Coco Adel was sitting shotgun, sipping a cup of coffee and holding Glynda's scroll to mutter directions.
They saw a strange movement from the corners of their eyes, and turned to the left. Pyrrha Nikos was moving slowly toward them, leaning one foot ahead of the other as though walking along a tightrope. She wobbled more than once, throwing out her arms to regain balance. Glynda slowed the cart to a halt, and she and Coco continued to witness the procession. Oddly, they thought they heard laughter in the distance somewhere.
Pyrrha had been too focused on her form of perambulation to take note of their response. She reached the idling cart and fell heavily onto it, bending her elbow on its roof to recover coolness. She swung one leg back and tapped the toes of her boot into the courtyard bricks. She looked up. "Hey," Pyrrha said, making finger guns at the other two and squinching her face in the approximation of a novice flirt.
The cart's occupants said nothing. Coco looked down at the scroll in her lap as a fresh burst of waves glided across the screen. A tiny collection of letters appeared in yellow at the screen's bottom, and she leaned in to read it.
[laugh track]
"Miss Nikos, what are you doing," Professor Goodwitch said.
"I'm…wondering if you figured out what was making your scroll go haywire earlier," Pyrrha said, her tone lilting in the middle of her improvised line.
Coco and Glynda looked at each other. "No," Glynda told Pyrrha, one hand on the wheel. "We were just trying to figure it out now."
"Oh. Well, you know as they say, happy trails and…good sailing!" Pyrrha replied.
"What?" said Coco.
"I don't know what you mean, what," Pyrrha shot back, her every sentence further invalidating her façade. "But, um, all the activity on your scroll really shows, the answer is probably here somewhere!"
She panned a flat hand to gesture around the area, her smile tensing. Glynda conferred with her scroll again.
"The concentration is a lot higher here," she said, not noticing the continual message of [laugh track] flashing on the screen. "It's strange. Am I going crazy? I think I'm picking up voices here."
"Really?" said Pyrrha, almost breaking character. "I only hear us."
"No. It's gotta be around here somewhere," Coco said, getting out of the golf cart. She held the scroll in one hand, scanning it along the environment until its static cleared up right in front of Pyrrha. Glynda came to a stand next to her, frowning at the screen. There was a pause.
"Is this a joke?" Glynda asked.
"No, it's not a joke!" Pyrrha said. "I mean, if this were a joke there'd have to be a punchline."
She made a fist and weakly jabbed the air a couple times. Coco raised an eyebrow, the edges of her front teeth barely resting on her lip. She checked the new frequency the scroll had picked up.
"It appears something about Miss Nikos is making the technology react," Glynda said, making Pyrrha dart her eyes in oncoming panic. "We'll have to investigate. Coco, bring out the rest of the equipment."
"Got it," said Coco, who was honestly not as concerned and had really volunteered in order to get out of chemistry. She put her coffee on the cart's roof, then moved to the carrier to start untangling a nest of wires connected to contraptions Pyrrha had never even seen before. Both she and Glynda were watching, Pyrrha with rising fear at the thought of unknown scientific testing. While the others were occupied, she swung an arm, sending a metal rod from the carrier 50 yards through the air.
"Oh no!" Pyrrha said as Coco and Glynda jerked to attention. "The frequency must be taking your supplies!"
Coco and Glynda ran off to retrieve the item. Pyrrha dashed into the golf cart, nabbing the coffee on top of it before hitting the gas pedal. She took a long sip from the cup as she wheeled the mobile all the way around.
In the meantime, Jaune and Ren were on the trench coat guy's tail. "Stop in the name of the law, thief!" Jaune yelled like the heroes in the TV shows. "This is a matter of justice!" The few people present turned to him quizzically.
"That man is a fake comic book dealer," Jaune accused, pointing to the trench coat guy. "And he's gonna keep ripping people off!"
The trench coat guy put up his hands. "This guy's got a screw loose." He turned away with a smooth open motion of his palms. "I only sell real comic books, never tampered with. And I consider roughhousing with me to get to them a violation of my personal boundary."
"Oh, I won't need to roughhouse," Jaune said, and in the next moment, Pyrrha plowed into the unlawful seller with the golf cart.
He hit the cart on the way down. Comics flew from his coat, slapping across the brick path to reveal themselves as obvious hoaxes. The trench coat guy froze as everyone in the vicinity paused at this development.
Pyrrha leaned out of the driver's seat. "I'm sorry!"
The fake comic book dealer was escorted off campus not long after the laugh track had subsided. Coco shooed Nora out of the cart's wooden carrier, dumping the retrieved rod inside before she climbed into the driver's seat. She took hold of the wheel, her face closing into a newly estimating look back at Pyrrha, and then she drove off, leaving the two ladies of JNPR standing on the grass.
Jaune and Ren caught up with them. "Well, that was something," Jaune said with a bit of victory along with not knowing what to say.
Ren followed. "Looks like our underground comic con man won't be returning to Beacon."
"He certainly won't," Glynda said, walking to them with riding crop in hand and scroll under her arm. She pushed her glasses up, which she seemed to do whenever someone was making a mess of things, and crossed her arms before continuing to address JNPR. "Well, I'd say you did a fine if nontraditional job clearing our campus of one troublemaker," she said as the students puffed their chests. "But I have just one question." Her face fell flat. "Shouldn't you be in class?"
JNPR's faces were stricken with sudden memory. They took a step back. "Yeah, totally!" Pyrrha said.
"What can I say, fighting crime has some terrible costs!" Jaune followed up.
Their eyes turned to Glynda's, and then they all disappeared. Glynda watched them head for the main building before she went to estimate collateral damage.
"Well, that was a real unusual day," Nora said as they filed into their dorm that evening. Her teammates fanned out from behind her, then crashed.
"I feel like I could sleep for a week," Pyrrha said as she lay spread-eagle on her bed.
"It is a relief to have this over," Ren confirmed while sitting on his.
Jaune took off his shoes, but his brow was lowered when he slid them under his bed. "Yeah, today was something, but I'm still annoyed. I still don't know what happened to my comic book."
He bent to tuck his sheets in, then paused when he heard a wrinkle. He reached under his mattress and pulled out a stapled collection of paper. "My comic!"
The groaning was heard all the way across the hall.
Out in the gardens, the sun was halfway below the horizon. Team RWBY stayed frozen on the brick patch, trying to ignore the aches in their bodies.
"So…how long do you think we'll be here?" Ruby asked.
None of the others replied. In the far distance, there was laughter.