Three days. It has been three days since he decided to write a RWBY fanfiction, and he still didn't have any idea of what he should write about. No matter how hard he tried, when it was about the story he was supposed to be writing, he was drained all of a sudden of all his creativity. It wasn't like he didn't try to solve his problem but apparently there wasn't such a trick that could work out in his favour. Rewatching all three seasons? It didn't work. Reading someone else fanfiction? It didn't work either. Watching any kind of TV series, movies or anime to get an inspiration? Pretty much useless. Listening to music to increase his creativity? Nada. If this was what others writers had to get through for each one of their stories, then it was no wonder it took them so long to complete just one.

For what it felt like the uptenth time he watched the screen of his computer and tried to write something down: "After six months has passed since the Fall of Beacon..." No, that couldn't work, he just glissed over six months like it was nothing without a single explanation; frustated the author deleted the few words he just wrote and tried again: "Everything was falling apart, her team, her friends, even Beacon Academy itself..." Once again he got the feeling that something wasn't right about it, he just could understand what.

"Maybe you're trying too hard to make this a dark and gloomy story!"

" It could be that, but then i don't know if..." Suddenly he interrupted his answer when he realized that someone had just talked to him. Moving his chair away from the desk, the writer looked around himself to find whoever was in his room; even if the only light was from the lamp on his desk, he could still see pretty well what was around him.

At first he stared at the door, which was still closed, then he turned to the window, which was also closed; apparently nobody was in the room with him. Maybe he was just tired and his mind was playing trick on him, so he rubbed his eyes and returned to his computer, determined to at least write down a paragraph that could be acceptable. But before he could write anything the misterious voice, definetely female now that he took notice, spoke once again: "Weren't you saying something before?"

If the first time he simply moved away his chair, this time he almost knocked it down once he sprung up; he looked around more carefully, going as far as looking in his wardrobe, under his desk and, despite how silly it could be, even under his bed and he still couldn't find anyone. The writer wanted to brush it off as being just his imagination, but for it to happen twice in a row was more than worrying and he still had the feeling that something was different in his bedroom; trying to calm down he made his way toward the screen sitting on top of his desk, thinking that going to sleep and continuing after a night of rest with a cleaner mind was for the best.

"Hold on, you give up already? But we haven't even started yet! That's so lame!"

Apparently the misterious woman, no, she sounded younger so she had to be a girl, anyway she had to disagree with him; he stayed still, moving just his head trying to figure out where she was, only to grow nervous as for the third time he found nobody in sight. That's when the revelation hit him and he realized what was going on: "That's it, i must have fall asleep and this is a dream!"

"Wha- No it's not! Don't be silly!"

Once again he heard that voice, not only bashing his idea once again, but, as he realized with genuine dread, somehow sounding familiar. Despite what the voice said, the writer decided to ignore her since she was just a voice in his head, but then again, that would mean that there was a voice in his head and even in his non-existent medical knowledge he knew it was usually a bad sign; of course there could have been simply another explanation, he finally went nuts! What his horrible Physic highschool teacher, the tests of his Engineering course and more bumps in the head that he could remember had failed to accomplice, had finally happened thanks a piece of work that didn't even existed yet; if that was really the case then the next best thing to do was probably buying a straight-jacket and turning in at the closest asylum, but first he needed to be sure of it and so he did what in the heat of the moment he thought was the fastest way to prove his theory.

"Who are you... No! Better yet, where are you!?" If he was going crazy he could at least get acquainted with the source of said madness.

"Up here!"

He turned his head to the ceiling and once again saw nothing.

"A bit lower!"

Lowering his gaze he stopped his eyes on a painting he hanged on the wall a couple of month before after he bought it back at a convention; said painting depicted a wolf laying on a rock just above sea-level, while the moon high in the sky gave to almost everything a bluish glow thanks to the mass of water below. There was however something new on it, an almost invisible red speck in the distance, and if he was to judge by how it was getting bigger and bigger, it was closing in and fast. It wasn't long before he could make out a human silhouette, wearing a mixture of both red and black clothes, and that was when something clicked in his mind.

"No..."

The writer finally remembered where he heard that voice before and if possible it made him even more scared than the possibility of having lost a few screws in his head.

"No. No. No! Nononononono! No! No! No!"

While he didn't stop to freak out, he tried to flip the painting so that it would face the wall but despite his best effort it didn't bulge an inch.

"No! Not happening! Not real!"

He then tried to pull it off without better result before launching himself into a frantic search for anything to cover the painting, he knew there wasn't much time left since he could already made out more features of the the approaching red-clad menace. When said menace was close enough for him to confirm his worst fear he did what was the next best course of action in his predicament; so he hid under his desk, covering his ears while closing his eyes shut, waiting for the incoming tragedy. He waited for anything to happen. He then waited some more. When he realize that nothing capable of shattering the last remnants of his sanity, which he was sure must have been already pretty frail, had happened yet he finally opened one eye to get a quick glance of his surrounding before getting out of the desk and confirming that nothing seemed to have changed.

Finally calming himself to what he thought was a decent enough amount, he found himself questioning yet again his own sanity, already sure that the last five minute must have been some kind of schizophrenic episode. So it was more than understandable why he tensed when he heard someone knocking at his door and even more understandable why his face froze in a mixture of surprise and pure unaltered terror once he saw who it was. Standing in front of his door there was a girl younger than him of a few years wearing a bunch of red and black clothes, a red cloak being the more eye catching one, but the things he was staring at with the same barely restrained fear one would usually experience if he was to run into a bear while being outside camping, were her hairs, short, black and red tipped, and her silver eyes.

In other words Ruby Rose was in front of him.

Ruby Rose, a fictional character, a fictional character he was trying to write about, a fictional character that, as the name suggested, wasn't supposed to exist, was standing in front of his door while moving her weight from a foot to another, almost as if she was waiting for him to let her in. For what he thought were ages he simply stared at her without even blinking, hoping that she would just disappear so that he could go to sleep and forget all of it, but most likely she had other plans.

She cleared her throat and said: "Hi there! Nice to meet you, i think you already know me, sort of..."

Awkward silence was filling the room until she tried once again to start a conversation.

"Sooo... this is... not what i was expecting, how about you let me in?"

At that moment something probably turned on in his head, since his eyes gained back some life and he realized what she just asked .

"Uhh... What?"

That didn't mean he achieved the mental clarity required to answer, although asking anything else from him after what had just happened was probably too big of a stretch.

"Yeah, i mean right now i'm here and you are there and you standing there still and you weren't saying anything and it was just awkward... but now we can like, i don't know... oh right, you have something to do and so i have to help you out!" she finally managed to complete her sentence before placing her fist on her hips and grinning as if she just won a marathon.

She just spoke as if that was some sort of everyday routine and he had just to do his part so that everything could go on as usual; of course that could only made his next question even less of a surprise.

"The hell you're talking about!?" he almost shouted "What is that i have to do? Why are you here? How?! You shouldn't even exist in the first place, let alone moving inside paintings and going around at night knocking on people's doors offering your help!"

Feeling his legs getting weaker thanks to all the unexpected stress he stumbled back before collapsing in his chair.

"This... this is too much! Is this a dream or am i hallucinating? This can't be real! It's just all in my head, it has to be!"

"No it's not, well not exactly... it's so complicated..."she said as she was now sitting on his bed.

"How is this suppose to make anymore sense? It's already complicated so, pretending for a moment that this is somehow happening for real, would you care to explain what in the goddamned hell is going on?!"

He didn't care if it was real, if he was mad or if there was any other kind of Twilight Zone mind-screwing explanation, the only thing he cared about was for anything to make even as little sense as possible, as long as he had something to make the whole ordeal a bit more reasonable.

"Well, to start it's not like i'm real..."

"Who would have thought!" he replied sarcastically.

"But that doesn't mean i don't exist!"

"What is that supposed to mean?!"

"Just what i said."

"That make just as much sense as saying that i'm alive but it doesn't i mean i live!"

"It's not the same, it's just... i told you it was hard to explain!"

"At least try!"

She took a deep breath before frowning in what he thought was some sort of pose for deep-thinking, before trying to talk again, this time slower and with a lower tone, while looking him in the eyes as if to make sure he understood what she was saying: "You know how people make stories? Fairy tales, novels, mythology, urban legends or campfire stories? Sometimes they become more than that."

"How so?"

"Sometime they become real."

Silence was the only thing in the room for a few seconds, until the writer managed to stammer out some words: "Real? You mean all of a sudden i could meet Red Riding Hood or find an actual monster under my bed?"

"No, i mean yes, but not always, just when... i'm trying to tell you just wait!"

He was taken by surprise by this outburst, if she really was who she claimed to be, that was something he wouldn't have expected from her.

" Sometimes people put a lot of thought into something and sometimes they do it with so much force and passion that what they were thinking about stop being just a piece of fantasy and gain some sort of existence."

"You mean if i think really hard of a mug of hot chocolate, it's going to appear in front of me? That could be helpful!"

"Don't joke about it! And no, not in that sense."

"Then in what sense does it make it... sense?"

"In your sense, i mean, when you think of it in your way, it happens in that way."

"Still waiting for that sense to get to me."

She shot him a glare, and once again he find himself thinking that it was something out of character from her.

"Alright, let's try this way" she said before pausing herself for a bit before resuming.

"The real Ruby Rose never existed, however, since you put so much thought and mental strain on your idea of her, i come to exist even if in only in some very extraordinary situation."

"My Ruby Rose? Does it mean there are more out there?"

"It's what i'm trying to tell you, given enough people that put enough energy to it, there are as many Ruby Rose as those people, however they're not all in the same place since the mind which created them isn't the same."

"Now you lost me" the writer replied.

He took a deep breath trying to give some semblance of order to his thoughts and then, when he was sure his question would cover all he wanted to know, he asked: "I kind of get that you're a reflection of my idea of Ruby Rose or something like that, but since you seem so sure about your physical existence..."

"Why wouldn't i?"

"... then how did it happen? How can an idea become something in the flesh? And what does it mean "not all in the same place", there is some sort of "Imaginary Friends Country Club" hidden around where all of you spend your time when you're not shattering other people believes about reality?"

For a while she seemed to be gathering her thoughts, then she took a breath and talked once again: "Do you know how a brain works? Things like thinking or remembering can all be explained as a combination of electric pulses moving around; since electricity is a form of energy, that means that a lot of it is used when a brain is doing some intense work, all those reading about brain waves could tell you as much. What they don't tell you is where that energy ends up."

For a moment he didn't understand why she became silent all of a sudden until he was finally hit by the meaning behind her words.

"So you want me to believe..." he said, albeit slowly and with quite a low voice "You want me to believe that i thought of you so much, that the energy released in the air was enough to create you? Pardon me if i don't, but i think something like that simply ignores most law of nature, so no, i don't believe it!"

"As always you got only half of it right" she said while sighing "Yes that's the basic idea, however i wouldn't go as far as saying you created matter out of nowhere, shaped it in the form of a sentient being and gave it memories that didn't existed before."

"Then could you stop being so roundabout when talking and just said it out already?!" he all but screamed.

"Fine, just don't complain it's too hard to understand when i'm done with the explanation!" she replied, obviously irked by his attitude "I maybe be a fictional character, but that brain of yours spent so much time thinking about how i might act, how should i talk and everything else needed for your fanfiction that in the end it said "screw it, it's too much work, let's make someone else to take responsibilities for this" and some time late, boom, i come knocking at your door and start a pointless conversation all about my suppose existence and corporeality. There, are you satisfied?"

He remained silent for almost a full minute, too dumbstrucked to do anything else until finally he managed to come up with some coherent words: "I still don't get it."

Seconds ticked by as she stared at him in complete silence; if one was to look closely one would have noticed the twitching of her left eyes and, if one was to look even closer, the symptoms of a forcefully restrained scream. Just as he thought she would stand up and shout at his face, she took a long if somewhat ragged breath, closed her eyes for a few moments and then, as she opened them once again, began to talk: "Do you remember when as a kid you used to talk to your teddy bear?"

"How could you know about..."

"Your Ruby Rose, your head, your memory... remember? Good. Moving on, while the teddy bear was real, his conversation skill weren't, it was you who used your imagination to make him talk; you could said that its use was the same of a puppet in a stage performance, to give something to focus on so that one could forget that he's watching what in truth is very elaborate monologue. Now imagine to use, instead of a puppet, something much more convincing, something that could actually be passed as a true person made of flesh and bones, someone that thanks to those very elaborate monologues could help you gain the kind of insight on something that in any other case would require someone else to be a partner in your brainstorming."

"And that someone would be..."

"Yes, that would be me."

"So how all that talk about things becoming real and the power of brain waves fits in all of this?"

"It's part of the package, to make a more believable "puppet", your brain subconsciously used more than its usual share of energy to made one; you know how they say on average we use only 10% of our brain? Now you know what happens when you use more."

He remained quiet for almost a full minute then, with some clear doubts still clouding his mind he asked: "So... what are you exactly?"

"As i said, your brainwaves are nothing more than electricity pulsing trough your brain, as you should remember from your studies that means your constantly surrounded by a feeble electromagnetic field. You know what else is classified as a manifestation of electromagnetic force? Light. So in layman terms, your brain have successfully made an hologram far more advanced that what scientists could ever hope to achieve. Congratulation!"

"And my brain has done this to help me finish this fanfiction..."

"Yep!"

"And so the reason why you know me and sometimes act out of character as if you weren't Ruby Rose is because you're something made out of my self..."

"Yep!"

"Which would mean that you're actually something closer to a split personality of mine..."

"More or less..."

"And how would this not make me an absolute nutcase?"

"Hey, you done it not me! How should i know?"

"Of course... of course... of bloody course!"

He rubbed his faced, turned his head to the ceiling and with a voice as tired as humanly possible he asked: "What have i done to deserve this?"

"You decided to become the god of workaholic thanks to a fanfiction; if you did so for your physic exam now you would probably be talking with Newton about applying his laws to the orbits of satellites."

"You're not helping."

"Probably because it's not what i was supposed to help you with in the first place."

"Somehow i agree with you on that and that alone is disturbing."

"Nah, you're just getting used to it."

"Which would be even more disturbing."

"Your not as fun as i thought you would be."

"I thought you knew me already and how are you supposed to think in the first place?"

"You really want to start that kind of argument?"

"Fair enough."

Both remained silent, each one of them thinking about the words that had just been said, none of them with any idea of what to say next. In the end, it was the writer to once again break the silence, asking what should have been a very obvious question: "Now what?"

"What kind of question is that? I'm going to help you of course!"

"Can you... not now? I still need to wrap my head around all of this."

"Fine. It not like i need to be anywhere else, so i guess we can wait until tomorrow" she said, now definitely more cheerful than before.

"Alright..." he replied, somewhat surprised by the sudden change in her mood "Then could you get out my room so i can sleep?"

"You know that i'm still part of you in a sense, right?"

"Yes, but since this peculiar part of me looks like a girl still not of age, i think we can agree that i'd still find this a little disturbing."

"Then it's no problem, you could have said that sooner. I'll be going, see ya!"

"Wait, how do you plan to..." he began to say, until he found himself standing sit in his bed, half wrapped in the covers and no imaginary-holographic-subconsciously-made-double-personality girl standing around "...leave..."

He took a look around himself. The door was still closed, his computer was turned off and his table clock told him that it was the earliest hour of the morning, not the middle of the night. And of course there was nothing out of the ordinary.

"Was it just... a dream?" he asked himself doubtfully "I should stop to tire myself on that damn story if this are the result. That's it! I'll try one last time this evening and if i can't come up with anything... well i think it's high time i get rid of it, after all it has been just an empty page with a title for almost half a week."

Taken his decision, he got out of bed, motivated to start his day with same resolve he just used to dismiss his piece of work. He didn't took notice however of something falling of his covers to the floor, fluttering slowly as if expecting someone to see it and take in all of its detail, before finally landing with a sense of finality, not unlike a court mallet announcing the innocence or guilt of those judged by its owner. It was a red rose petal.

A.N. This is my first fic, it's something that has been floating in my mind for a bit and i needed to write it down. Please review, i need some constructive criticism if i want to get better so as long as you're civil enough, open your mind about what you think of my story. Thank you again and see you around!