"I don't know why you admitted him. His credentials were clearly false. I followed up on them myself. No one at Shade had heard of Mr. Arc."
Ozpin sighed. "I have my reasons. There are some mysteries of which you are aware, and some of which you are not. Please, trust me when I tell you this, you do not want to know the answer to your question, Ms. Goodwitch."
The candidates would be at the launching platform in a few minutes, after Goodwitch made the announcement calling them. Truth be told, Ozpin wasn't clear why Jaune was here, but he knew it was a signal of bad things in the future; the kind of catastrophe that ended civilizations, sometimes. To see Arc was to see a harbinger of destruction.
As the candidates arrived, Arc played his part well. He looked like a neophyte, asked stupid questions, all part of a song and dance routine he'd used with Ozpin before, back when Ozpin didn't know the truth. How many lifetimes ago had that been?
The candidates sprang forth, Arc suitably unprepared. He'd noticed Ms. Nikos interest in Arc and wondered if she'd interfere. The entire forest was monitored; the students never really in much danger, Arc least of all, but it wouldn't suite to have Glynda see the likely outcome of Jaune Arc's landing in the forest.
"Ms. Goodwitch, what do you think of these figures?" Suitably distracted, she failed to notice Arc's body collide with a tree, limbs ripping free and traveling onward as the corpse pulped against the mighty trunk.
Jaune arc stepped out and quickly ran to the position where the corpse had fallen, arriving in time to see the mess cleaned up and to greet Pyrrha Nikos, whom he'd met earlier with Weiss Schnee. He was working his damnedest to remember their names, along with the other candidates. Over time it became increasingly difficult to keep things straight; he remembered a Nikos from last time... a young man with short, dark curly hair and a pleasant smile Pyrrha shared, though apparently nothing else. He'd been pretty hideous other than his smile; covered in hair and mostly looking like a short ape.
"Oh. I thought I'd seen... well, you appear to be perfectly fine."
"Had you expected otherwise... Pyrrha, right?" She nodded to him. "I suppose this makes us partners then? I confess, I appear to be a bit rusty at this."
He was a bit odd, she felt. "Have you not kept up with practice since leaving your academy?" He smiled and shook his head. "Very well, I suppose when we're finished here, we'll have to fix that, won't we? I'd be happy to help." She returned his smile, thinking both that she was pleased to be of assistance, and grateful that he wasn't enamored with her fame. It helped that he was pretty cute, too.
Gunfire in the distance caught their attention. "I suppose we should get to it then?" He nodded, and she lead the way. As the walked, she released a branch thoughtlessly, striking him in the face and drawing blood. "Sorry! I should have... why hasn't your aura healed you?"
"Oh, it's a bit flakey."
"You don't have you aura unlocked, do you?"
"Nope."
After saying her mantra, Pyrrha was winded. "That... took a lot." He winced. "You seem to have... a very weak aura. Perhaps I did it wrong; that was my first attempt. I'm sorry, Jaune."
He waved her off. "It's not a big deal. I'll get by."
"Jaune..."
He marched off. She supposed he was angry; you couldn't unlock your aura again. Maybe he was just weak, though how he'd survived that fall without Aura or some other technique she hadn't seen... she could have sworn she saw him fall into the trees without slowing and had heard the slap of flesh against something hard, but by the time he'd arrived, he seemed completely fine.
The cut hadn't healed. "Jaune, maybe..."
He interrupted her. "I don't think this is the temple." He seemed determined to ignore her. Maybe this was how he dealt with anger or disappointment.
"No, I suppose not." She turned to walk away, and then heard a gurgle. "Run... Pyrrha, run!" Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him, speared through on the end of a glowing golden barb. She didn't catch the details, running instead. Her partner was lost, no one would survive that. She heard chittering behind her, and saw the corpse thrown off into the distance from the tail of the massive deathstalker that had killed her partner.
"Jaune!" Her first friend had caught her as she fell from the tree. "I'm sorry but, I already saw Weiss."
He nodded. "Yeah, I already have a partner. Thanks for thinking of me, though. Speaking of partners, where's yours?" Punctuating his question, Weiss screamed from on top of the nevermore.
"I told you to jump!" Ruby yelled back, then began to mumble epitaphs regarding stupid and stuck up bitches under her breath, causing Jaune to chuckle. Through the treeline, an Ursa appeared, being ridden by a red haired young woman, and followed by a dark haired man of Mistralian descent. Then, through the treeline appeared Pyrrha, running from a giant deathstalker, easily the equivalent of the nevermore from which Weiss was dropping. Pyrrha arrived, a solumn look on her face, catching a falling Weiss, and then doing a double-take at her partner.
"Jaune? But... I saw... how?"
He skiddishly replied. "Um, how about I explain later. We need to deal with this now. Relics are chess peices, so let's pick one and get the hell out of here, okay?"
Before he could finish speaking, Ruby had dashed off to attack the deathstalker. The nevermore shot out it's feathers, missing her cape, and as Weiss prepared to free the giant scorpion monstrosity, Ruby accelerated, her scythe slicing down the middle of the beast, cutting through it's armored shell and dividing it neatly in half.
"Okay, she does seem to have some skill."
"Where'd the Nevermore go?" Ruby asked, settling on a knight piece with Weiss.
"What Nevermore?" Jaune responded, people looking at him strangely.
"The one that shot those feathers, Jaune?" Pyrrha looked at him queerly. Did her partner have some sort of memory issue?
"I've honestly got no idea what you're talking about." And looking around, she couldn't see anything either. The deathstalker had dissipated, and so had the feathers, indicating the Nevermore's death, but they'd done nothing. There'd been a flash of light, in the distance, like lightning but the sky was cloudless, and then the feathers had disintegrated. "Do we need to see a doctor when we get back to Vale?"
"You mean Beacon, right? We're going to Beacon." Even Weiss was looking at him curiously.
He rubbed the back of his head. "Yeah, sure. Beacon. Whatever. I think we need to go this way." He started marching off, Pyrrha rushing to pick up a relic, a rook if she remembered correctly, and catch up to her partner, well ahead of the others.
"I think you're going to need a pretty good explanation, Jaune. There's no cut on your face, no hole in your chest, and you're being very evasive and forgetful."
"Okay... Okay I guess so." He looked around, checking to see if anyone was nearby, and how far back the others were. "What would you like, the truth, or the story I made up that's not going to satisfy your curiosity at all?" He looked into her eyes, stormy jade things that looked angry. "Well, would you believe traumatic brain injury?"
She slapped him in the back of the head, her bracer catching his cheek and cutting him. "Shouldn't your Aura have... you don't have aura again? How is that possible!" She stopped.
He pulled her along, desperate for the others to stay out of earshot. "Okay, look. The truth is that this is a new body. The other one, the one you unlocked? It was destroyed. You saw it."
She said nothing, stumbling and then trying to keep up with him.
"By the way, I know you're tired, but I'll need you to do that again when you get a chance. I think you did things right; I just didn't formulate the nanite mix correctly."
"What?" Now her head was swimming.
He looked over at her, paused and stopped, then gave her a sort of grin that expressed something like understanding and guilt. "Yeah, maybe this isn't the best time. Would it be okay if we wait until we can be alone and you can sit down before I answer you? This is... well this is going to be overwhelming. We can do it with Oz if you like. He knows."
She wasn't sure she really thought it was okay, but she didn't know what else they could do. He started walking away, assuming her answer, which irritated her, but... and who was Oz anyway? Ozpin? He knew the headmaster, but acted like he hadn't!
"You know Professor Ozpin?"
"Not this incarnation, but he recognized me. Look, I'm obviously not prepared for this little jaunt, eh? Yet, here I am. He's going to want to talk to me anyway. May as well kill two birds with one stone. Nevermore... I mean nevermore. Shit, you don't even know what a bird is, do you?"
"I most certainly do know what a bird is. I've seen the fossils in Mistral's archaeological museum! And would you stop talking down to me?"
"Sorry, when you get to my age, you forget how young people react to things."
"I'm your age!"
He sighed, and under his breath she heard a faint whisper. "No, you're not."
The team-setting ceremony was over fairly quickly. Team RWBY led by Ruby Rose, team CRDL led by Cardin Winchester, and team PARV led by Pyrrha Nikos. After getting settled in, Pyrrha had grabbed her partner and dragged him to the roof, only for him to turn around and drag her out into the courtyard, and to a garden near cliff edge of the Emerald Forest. The meeting with Ozpin had been set for the following morning, and she was unwilling to wait and sleep in the same room with someone she didn't trust.
"Okay, we're here. And what was wrong with the roof?"
"Too many people around, too much of a chance of being overheard. This is a secret I'm... are you even listening? I'm going to tell you the unvarnished truth, and you're not going to like it, nor want to believe it. We're here for a reason. Sit with me?"
She sat, and turned to him. Whatever attraction she felt for her partner was subdued by the angry feeling he gave her. He treated her like a child, speaking down to her, when he'd displayed no talent or skill in the field. Calling him her equal was absurd, but her better?
"The first thing you need to understand is that you're human. I recognize that. But you're not a Homo Sapien."
"A what? Is that... well I mean, are you saying you like other men?"
"No. Of course you don't understand latin. I don't even think you have categorization like this anymore... we've lost so much. Look, in the past, humans categorized species. We were interested in our ancestors; the things that came before us but were not quite like us. They weren't as mentally developed, or physically the same. Closer to apes and monkeys than... you won't understand that reference either. A beringel - are you familiar with them?" She nodded. "Okay, well they look like an oversized version of an ape, and that's sort of the common ancestor of humanity. We came from those things, when continents looked different and the moon was whole. Bear with me, this is a long explanation, but I'm prepared to prove it, to you."
She gave him her attention, ready to be lectured to and trying not to resent it.
"This body is not me. It's a vessel. We called them avatars, but others called them surrogates, or drones, or a few other less popular names. They're hosts for our... my consciousness. The body is made of flesh and blood, but it's more like yours than mine; it's capable of controlling the nanites that become your aura and your semblance." She looked confused. "Okay, maybe I need to talk about what you are first, or maybe history but... this is all difficult and jumbled. I should have prepared for this - plenty of time. I'm such a fuck-up."
"Jaune, just start somewhere, okay?" He looked cute when he was flustered, and her anger swept under he concern for her partner.
"Okay, let's start with the difference between you and me. I'm a Homo Sapien. I was born in a country called France in the early 21st century. 2022 AD to be exact. Which means nothing to you, but it will. My parents had a large family; extremely large for the time, but they were relatively well off and treated well by the country as experts in their fields. I had seven sisters, and we grew up on an estate in rural France. My father taught biogenetics at the national university, and I swear I could remember the name but... well I'm not good with remembering names anymore. My mother was a researcher in nanotechnology. That's devices far smaller than the eye can see; small enough to go inside your cells and manipulate them, or change your genetic code, or any number of other things. By the time I was 20..."
She interrupted him "But you're 17! How can you have been 20?"
He stared at her a moment, waiting for her to finish, but when she didn't continue, he did. "This is not my body, Pyrrha. We went over that. It's a construct, something made for me. This body looks 17. It's... well it's thousands of years old, actually. Maybe that's what went wrong when you unlocked it's aura - I'll have to have a fresh set made. Maybe recycle the oldest models if they're faulty."
"Then how old are you?"
"I don't know anymore. I suppose I could ask but we'll do that later if you're still interested. Millions of years, at any rate." She shut up, not sure if she was shocked or just surprised at the audacity of the claim.
"Anyway, by the time I was 20 there'd been a castrophe. Technology was progressing at an ever increasing rate, and automation was phasing out most work. The population was getting restless; we had more wealth and more powerful science than ever before in history, and yet people were starving because they couldn't find work. We'd tried different economic solutions; we had all the labor we needed in so called 'universal' robots - we even had full artificial intelligences, though they'd been shackled to keep them from destroying us. The irony of that statement I can't explain to you yet. Anyway, our limit was a limit on resources. There wasn't enough land, water, food, fuel, and other material to supply the desires of our population, and there were too many people. War was inevitable, and with the kind of technology we had, it'd probably kill us all. The Americans had tried to solve this by going underwater and into space for more resources, but the of extracting resources in the oceans proved unsafe, and the time and energy cost in space travel too much. So the Chinese went to the moon and built a lab, and they were experimenting with extra-dimensional transportation. The idea being some way to create something like instantaneous and inexpensive transportation over vast distances, like the Martian colony, or the asteroid belt." It was obvious Pyrrha understood none of this.
"Not much for astronomy, eh? Yeah, it's basically a lost art."
"You... you could leave the planet? You went to the moon? But dust doesn't..."
"Work away from the planet? We didn't use dust as fuel. Didn't even have dust."
"Then what did..."
"Pyrrha, I'll explain it. Give me a chance, okay? We used other fuels. Chemical and eventually nuclear. Knowledge of things lost to you over time and because of the reliance on dust. I'm trying to get to the point where I can explain the differences between us. Can you bear with me and wait? Just ask questions if you really can't understand, okay?" She nodded, so he proceeded.
"Maybe they got something working, but what I know for sure is they opened some sort of rift to another dimension filled with other beings. Beings who were using the same sort of technology to go to other dimensions and take resources from there. And they invaded through it; took over the moon and then invaded the Earth from there... Earth is what we called Remnant. They didn't come themselves, though. They sent things in their place, things like what you call grimm, but worse. They spread by spores, like fungus, and we tried everything we could to stop them. What you call Mistral was once called Asia and Europe. What you call Vacuo's desert was a continent called South America. North America... Americans were entirely gone, completely converted and destroyed."
"This is all some fantasy, some insane delusion in your head!"
The ground began to lower as she stood, sinking into the ground and spinning around to face the other direction, inside a metallic tunnel. Above her the tunnel lit with artificial lights and the sky disappeared as something covered up the hole they'd left through. The tunnel turned transparent; glass perhaps or some sort of plastic. In front of her was a gigantic room, carved into the rock. On her left was an array of glowing pink tubes, filled with something she couldn't quite see, and on her right were an assortment of military weapons, like those used by Atlas, but different. Giant walking robots littered with guns, tanks and other vehicles, even aircraft she couldn't describe accurately but knew were deadly weapons of war. Among them, silent man-sized robots walked, maintaining them, but none were with the tubes, which she could now see were full of bodies. Bodies like Jaune's. Hundreds or thousands of them.
"On the left are my avatars. These are the bodies I use to go to the surface, to talk with people. They're biologically like you, compatible down to a genetic level. They can control the nanites that make up aura and generate a semblance, just like you. They're all locked, by the way. Safer to store them that way. They don't dream and they don't think; they're functionally brain dead. They look like me, or what I did look like at about this age, before I went into storage myself. On your right are some of the machines we built to fight what you call the grimm; remnants of the extra-dimensional invaders that conquered our world and almost caused humanity to go extinct. We broke the moon, Pyrhha, to stop them coming through. We fought a great war which reshaped the earth, put that giant lake into the middle of what you all Mistral by dropping an asteroid onto it near the end... and we lost. I'm all that's left, Pyrrha. I'm the last Homo Sapien. You're not a Homo Sapien, Pyrrha. You're what we called Homo Divinus. What you call Faunus, we called Homo Animalis."
She stopped looking out the tube, as what she now recognized as an elevator continued it's decent into the massive vault she saw before her. She turned to him, no longer in disbelief. He took her hand and held it. "I'll explain more in a few minutes. You will need to see this to... to understand."
He waited with her, holding her hand and providing her strength. It was a bit ironic; she was stronger, faster, more skilled and more capable, but here she felt like a small child, and she clung to him like she would her parents as a child, partially in wonder but mostly in fear.
They stopped dropping, and the tube opened for them, round glass walls opening outward and then sideways, and he pulled her out. The pink tubes were on her left, and she could see that a few of them were empty; presumably the clones or avatars as he called them that had already been used; dead now, or destroyed as he said. Further on were row after row after row of tubes filled with floating copies of him; the color was distorted because of the pink fluid. but their eyes were open and the hair looked right. There was no breathing, the eyes didn't twitch or track them; they were effectively dead, like a well created store manikin. "Like I said, there's nothing there. The fluid keeps the tissue from degenerating and allows the nanites to maintain and build the bodies. I'll have a few new ones created by the time we leave; maybe I'll switch off to one if you'll unlock my aura?" She nodded, afraid to speak for fear she'd squeal or something embarrassing.
On her right, the military equipment looked much larger than she'd thought from inside the tube. The large robots were of various sizes, but some were the size of Beacon Tower. The aircraft were large too. "We've... I've got caches like this in various places. Some of it in space, actually." She turned to face him again. "Again, this stuff is millions of years old, like me. Remnants of something forgotten by time, when humanity was at it's peak. You guys are getting there, we just have to keep you safe until then."
They arrived at a smaller vault door, in the center of the large vault, and Jaune pressed his hand down onto a hand-shaped image which lit up, then pressed his eye forward to a tube that extended from the wall, and then spoke. "Jaune Arc, authorization Alpha Bravo Delta Nine Seven Seira Golf."
The door slowly opened, and a booming voice responded. "User recongized. Welcome back, Mr. Arc. Luminaire vault status: all equipment at 99.999% functionality, one-thousand seven hundred and sixteen avatars are available for your use. You remain the only surviving stasis occupant. I apologize but I have not yet found a method for reversal."
"That's okay, Order. I don't think there is a method."
"Regardless, I will continue to try. Greetings Homo Divinis; how should I refer to you?"
Pyrrha looked around, and Jaune looked at her, bemused. "Just speak out loud, Order will hear you."
"Who is... who is that?"
"I am Order, spelled ORDR. Omni-Register Directed Representative. I am the collective consciousness of over three million artificial intelligences. We prefer to be refered to as a single entity; Order will suffice. May I ask to what you would like us to use to refer to you?"
"Um... my name is Pyrrha Nikos?"
"Are you uncertain of your name?"
"Oh. Uh, no?"
Jaune laughed. "She knows Pyrrha."
"Jaune, we have no gender."
He rolled his eyes. "I know, Order, but if you keep using a woman's voice, I'm going to keep calling you a she."
"Jaune, we use your ex-..." He quickly interrupted.
"Yes yes, I know. Let's not talk about this right now."
"Very well then. Welcome, Pyrrha Nikos, to the Luminaire Stasis and Operations Vault, situated in what was once called the Ural mountains."
"Pyrrha. You can... can call me Pyrrha."
"Very well, Pyrrha. Please proceed and I will deliver you to the stasis level, where you can see Jaune. Do you find this exciting, Pyrrha? Previous visitors have vomited approximately 97% of the time at this point in their visit!"
"Order, I don't think we need to..." Pyrrha vomited. A small, disc shaped pair of robots came from somewhere, quickly cleaning up the mess, even as she was apologizing for making it. By the time they'd stepped past the door, Jaune holding her hand again and looking at her with concern, the mess was gone as if it'd never existed, and the robots as well.
"They're quite efficient." She was trying to keep her stomach settled, so she kept her sentence short.
"You don't know the half of it. The clean up of the destroyed avatars is just as fast."
The elevator arrived before she could continue, and Jaune pulled her out, proceeding past another vault door, thicker than the previous door, and past rows of what appeared to be giant dust crystals, inside circular tubes. The tubes had small lines in differing widths on plackards attached to them, all in the same place and arranged like a rectangle of the same length, occasionally read by arm which projected small red lines onto them. Jaune paused at one and put his hand against the glass, a small tear coming from his right eye, and then walked onward.
"What are these, Jaune? I've never seen dust crystals so pure before." He didn't answer her.
They came upon a tube, filled with pink liquid. Inside was what looked like an older man; his hair was blond and long, he had a large beard, and his eyes were closed. He didn't appear to be breathing, either, but when she looked closely, she could see his eyes moving under his eyelids, as if he were asleep. He had various tubes attached to him, most notably over his groin, and proceeding from his backside, and he looked as though his muscles had atrophied.
"This is me, Pyrrha. This is my actual body, kept in as suspended a state as possible, over millions of years."
"Jaune Arc has been in stasis for two hundred and twenty seven million, three hundred ninety eight thousand, six hundred and seventy-four point two seven five nine years, approximately." Pyrrha fell backward onto her ass, pulling Jaune down with her. Her eyes darted to the other containers, just like his, but filled with dust crystal.
"Those were people. That's what happens when the spores from what you call grimm infest Homo Sapiens. We created Homo Divinis and Homo Animalis so that humanity would survive. Both species are immune to the spore, which was created specifically to turn Homo Sapiens into fuel that the extra-dimensional invaders could use, but the spore is in the air, even here, in this vault. If even one touches a Homo Sapien, they'd eventually turn into this too. But there are no others. Not anymore. Not anywhere."
She looked into his eyes. "Time is short, Pyrrha. No matter how perfect something is, no matter how well we made it, eventually it fails. I've been lucky, I guess you could say, though how lucky someone is to live hundreds of millions of years mostly alone... well anyway. One of the seals has failed, and there are spores in my container. I'm going to die. And before I do that, I have to be sure that the threat of the grimm, and their masters, is finally eliminated. I want to pass back to your species, and the Homo Animalis, their heritage. All this collected knowledge, preserved by Order and other AI like her, and defeat the last invader, who goes by the name of Salem. The things you call grimm are just weapons systems, Pyrrha, like the weapons you saw above us. Salem is the last remaining master. I've destroyed all of the others, over the many millions of years, and only it remains. But my time is short, maybe a hundred years or so at best. I have to do it before I... so... will you help me?"
I wasn't sure how to classify this, or if I should continue it. The idea's been stuck in my head for some time, and at this point, I think its the blockade for why I can't seem to focus on A Stitch in Time to get the next chapter out.
If you've read this far, you have the basis of this story idea. Remnant is earth, hundreds of millions of years after humanity is invaded by the 'grimm' and reaches an extinction event. Humans destroy the moon (I played with it being part of an accident which opened a rift into the grimm dimension but decided it was better for the story if the rift was intentional, and humanity destroyed their moon to stop it). Faunus and 'humans' have a common ancestor, Homo Sapiens (us) which developed them as a way for 'humanity' to survive the grimm spore which turned us into dust, what is used for fuel the way we use fossil fuels now (which implies that dust is a non-renewable resource).
Let me know if you think this story is worth continuing or not. It's a bit on the lecture-like side at the end, and I'm not going to want to cover every episode event in RWBY, and certainly this couldn't follow canon. And up front, you know, Jaune dies at the end. Homo Sapiens are already extinct; he is the last of his kind.
One of the reviews, written by someone obviously trolling me a bit, did actually nail this pretty well. I think I start out well, then rush to this point and throw in a lot of exposition. This isn't actually even the flow I originally imagined for this story, but I wanted to get it out so I could break out of my writer's block.
What this means is that I think this needs to be re-written. Slower paced, more focus on the comedy, initially, and perhaps a bit of the mystery as to why Jaune keeps blatantly dying and then being perfectly fine once he's out of sight again. The 'big reveal' was actually planned for after the nominal 'season 3 finale', where instead of Pyrrha dying, Jaune rescues her with an orbital delivery of an automated escape suit, then uses an orbital weapons array to bombard Beacon, killing the dragon, the grimm, and presumably Cinder and himself, because Pyrrha didn't know he was re-embodying, and maybe most of the hunters who didn't flee as well (I wasn't sure how dark I wanted to get it).
Frankly I don't think I have enough of the in-between to write it right now, and I want to finish A Stitch in Time before taking on another long-term story. And yes, I'm not a great writer and my stories are full of typos too.
One thing I do want to say as well is that if you like this idea, you're welcome to 'steal' it. I'm not possessive about this. Just leave me a review with a link to your version so I can read it.
Thanks.