Ruby and Jaune walked down the airship ramp together, chatting amicably. Well, Ruby was doing most of the talking, but Jaune seemed interested.
Ruby wasn't quite skipping, but her feet were thinking about it. She'd made a friend, without Yang's help. Wait, was Jaune a friend? He was certainly acting friendly.
"You've really never heard of the color hypothesis?" Ruby asked.
Jaune straightened his hoodie a little.
"No. Maybe my parents used a different name for it?"
"Oh. That's possible. I can just explain it real quick, it's not very complicated. Well, I guess some versions of it are."
"O...kay?"
"There's basically two parts. Or three, I guess. It's really poorly named, because it's more of a cluster of observations and explanations than a single hypothesis. The first part, which pretty much everyone agrees on, is that color affects people's psychology. Like, bright red is dangerous, pastels are calming, that sort of thing. There was this great study in Atlas where they gave people sugar pills instead of medicine for psychiatric disorders, and sure enough, red sugar pills worked measurably better as stimulants and blue sugar pills worked better as depressants."
They got to the bottom of the ramp and started circling around to the baggage area, Jaune listening intently.
"The second part, which is a little more contentious, is just the observation that people with differently-colored hair tend to have different personalities. I mean, it's not that contentious, because it's obvious as all get-out. People with yellow hair like yours tend to be outgoing, confident, good with people, that sort of thing. People with black hair are more withdrawn, introverted, intellectual. People with red hair tend to stand out somehow. A lot of them become athletes, hunters, things like that; professions that put them in high-stress situations where they can excel."
"Wow."
"It's not like your hair color decides your entire fate, of course. There's plenty of politicians with black hair, and plenty of blonde professors. And it can be hard to disentangle the actual patterns from superstition, especially since the superstitions become self-reinforcing. If all the kids with red hair get put onto sports teams and pushed really hard by their parents, it's easy to see how that would become self-perpetuating."
"What happens if you dye your hair?"
"Great question! That's most of how people have tried to separate the fundamental effects of hair color from the social effects. It turns out dying your hair moves you a little bit in the appropriate direction, but not as far as having that color naturally. It moves you even farther if you chose to dye it. And boy, it gets really complicated when you start getting into mixed colors, or multiple colors. A lot of people in Mistral have black hair, and there's been a trend for the last decade to dye just a small patch of your hair with your favorite color. Makes it pretty hard to study the color hypothesis in Mistral. And it isn't just hair, either. The clothes you wear, your accessories, all of these move people around on the color chart in complicated ways."
"Sounds complicated."
"Yeah, it's crazy complicated. And there's a lot of pseudoscientific bull floating around. You probably wouldn't know if you grew up in the countryside, but in larger towns you can find people who do 'color readings' for you. They look at your hair, your eyes, your skin, the clothes you picked, and then they tell you a bunch of vague stuff about who you are and what you want. Some of them even claim they can tell the future."
"Eesh."
"Yeah, I know, right? But anyway, the third part of the color hypothesis is the most contentious. It's basically the body of speculation around why colors have these effects on people. Some people think it's almost all social reinforcement. Some people think it's a hereditary thing - some early group of humans evolved yellow hair and outgoing personality traits at the same time, and whether or not you have yellow hair is just a marker of how many of your ancestors came from that group. Some people think that it's hereditary, but more direct than that, like the way bear and mouse faunus have different personalities. And some people believe that your colors are an expression of your soul."
"Your soul?"
"Yeah. There's a surprising amount of evidence for that, incidentally. Your aura has a color, first of all. And the normalizing effects of aura are really extreme on color changes. It's way easier to change the kinds of clothes you wear than to change your color scheme. If I were to start wearing white and blue, my aura wouldn't protect the clothes at all. And dying your hair is almost impossible. The dye job has to be important to you in some way, or it fades almost immediately."
Jaune looked over at her, his eyes aimed slightly above her own. What was he - oh. Ruby looked away, suddenly feeling awkward. Her own red highlights were far from a normal dye job, but she didn't really want to bring that up right now. It tended to put people off.
The porters finally got Ruby's luggage off. She had considerably more than most people: a small day bag of personal items, two huge trunks with ammo and parts for Crescent Rose, and a third smaller trunk for Ember Celica. Yang was planning to keep them maintained with the school materials, but Ruby liked to be prepared.
Jaune was already holding his two bags. One was a large camping backpack, the other a small day bag like hers. Ruby hesitated for a moment - should she ask for his help carrying the trunks? She was certainly strong enough, but three trunks was more than a little unwieldy. Yang had helped her get them to the ship, but since she was nowhere to be found-
"Hey sis!"
A hand clapped Ruby on the back, hard enough to knock her off balance a little bit. She stumbled forward half a step, looking over her shoulder at Yang with a peeved expression.
"Yang! Where have you been?"
"I was just catching up with the Signal crew. Jess, Annie, some guys you haven't met."
Yang squeezed Ruby's shoulder a bit as she said "some guys you haven't met", stepping forward to stand next to her. Ruby got the hint, for once.
"Great. Er, Jaune, this is my sister Yang. Yang, this is Jaune. I ran into him on the airship."
Jaune's quirked a smile at that. He turned to look at Yang, his eyes going up and down her once, which made Yang smirk. Ruby would've felt a little put out, but this happened every time and she was basically inured to it at this point.
"We noticed." Yang said, stepping forward with her hand out and giving Jaune a wink. "You two made quite the scene."
Ruby blushed, but neither of them were really looking at her. Jaune grasped Yang's hand and shook it. They were making a lot of eye contact, but maybe that's what socially competent people did when they shook hands?
"It wasn't all that bad," Jaune said, holding onto Yang's hand for maybe a second too long before letting go. "It made for a pretty good icebreaker. We ended up spending most of the flight talking to this couple from Mistral. Interesting place, sounds like."
"Oh, I'm sure." Yang said, stepping back and clasping her hands behind her.
"You two both went to Signal, then?" Jaune asked. "Ruby told me she didn't really know anybody."
"I guess I'm a lot closer with the other Signal students. Ruby here got moved ahead two years, so most of her friends are still back there."
"Oh yeah, she mentioned that."
"Did she now?" Yang asked, glancing slyly at Ruby. "Between you and me, she's a real prodigy. Professor Ozpin invited her to apply personally. Ooh, she makes me so proud."
Yang reached over to ruffle Ruby's hair, but she never had a chance. Ruby was unusually quick even without her semblance, and she ducked away, puffing out her cheeks and glaring back.
"Yaaaaaang" she whined.
Jaune was laughing, and it took a second for Ruby to convince herself he wasn't laughing at her.
"Oh man," he said, "it's fun to see someone else getting the older sister treatment for once."
"You have an older sister?" Yang asked, turning back to him.
"Seven of 'em."
Yang's jaw dropped.
"Seven? Guess you didn't realize how lucky you are, Ruby. Even two of me would be a nightmare."
"It wasn't so bad," Jaune continued.
The two of them kept talking, chattering about unimportant things. Ruby had preferred the previous conversation about colors, but it would be weird to just bring it up again now.
Somehow this always happened with Yang: her sister had something to say, or a question to ask, and she ended up driving the whole conversation. Ruby never managed to get a word in edgewise, or if she did it felt like she was blurting out an awkward interruption.
"Well, we should really be going." Yang said after a while. "These trunks aren't going to haul themselves."
"I could give you a hand, if you want." Jaune offered.
Yes! Ruby almost said, but before she could get it out Yang was already waving him off.
"Don't worry about it, I'm sure you need to go get settled in too. Our storage lockers are right next to each other. Thanks for taking care of my little sister, though. I'm sure we'll be seeing you around."
Yang winked at him again. Some sort of message seemed to pass between them, totally opaque to Ruby.
"Alright." Jaune said, smiling. "I'll catch you two around then. Here, let me give you my scroll if you need it." Jaune held out his scroll. Yang already seemed to have hers in hand. She bumped the edge against Jaune's, a soft beep affirming the exchange of contact information. Ruby had to rummage around for an awkward second, but soon they'd bumped scrolls as well.
"Soooo," Yang said once Jaune had walked away, her voice raised into that nettling pitch of sisters everywhere. "A boy, huh Rubes?"
"Yaaaaaaaang!"
~o~O~o~O~o~
By the time Ruby and Yang made it to the amphitheater for their class's commencement speech, it was already mostly packed. Ruby stood on her tiptoes near the back, trying to look for Jaune in the crowd, but she was too short to see very far.
"Looking for something?" Yang asked, smiling and nudging her a little too hard in the ribs.
Ruby looked back at her, pouting.
"What are you teasing me for? I finally talked to someone, like you're always telling me to. You aren't really providing a lot of positive reinforcement here."
Yang giggled, the smile still on her face.
"You did great, Rubes. Just...too much of a good thing can be bad, you know? You come on a little strong sometimes. You were clinging to him like a barnacle. Keep that up, and you're either going to scare him off or give him ideas."
"Aaaargh." Ruby said, putting her head in her hands. "Why does this have to be so gosh-darned difficult? Do this, don't do that, oh whoops, you did too much of this. Isn't there a manual or something?"
Yang started to answer, but was interrupted by the sound of a clearing throat, amplified through the hall. Ruby couldn't see, but she assumed the speech was starting.
The crowd quieted down, and professor Ozpin began to speak.
"I will keep this brief. You have traveled here today, all of you, in search of knowledge. Knowledge of our world, past and present. Knowledge of the many sciences, from the laws that govern men to the laws that govern dust. Knowledge of the Grimm, and how they may be hunted. Knowledge of hidden things, which you will not hear even the slightest hint of outside these grounds. Most importantly, you have come here, whether you know it or not, seeking knowledge of yourselves.
"I will be blunt with you: the price of this knowledge is steep. What you learn will be dangerous, and the lessons will be hard. The knowledge preserved by this august institution is not a burden I would wish on anyone against their will. You have not yet begun your education, but once you have fully enrolled, I am afraid that you will not be permitted to withdraw from Beacon. The cost to Vale of half-trained hunters and huntresses is too steep.
"If any of you are uncertain, or if you are here for any reason except your own personal convictions, I implore you to speak with myself or Ms. Goodwitch. You will all be given tonight to reflect on your decision. Tomorrow, you will have your initiation. It will approximate, to the best of our abilities, the difficulty and peril of a career as a hunter or huntress. At any time before, during, or after this initiation - until the very moment you are brought onto this stage and swear to keep Beacon's secrets as your own - you may decline to be included in the entering class. Such students are always free to return in the future, should they change their minds. Once again, if you are uncertain, I strongly encourage you to seek our advice tonight.
"It is an ancient tradition, dating back long before the founding of the academies, that those who fight the Grimm be taught to think for themselves. In the spirit of that tradition, I will leave you with a saying, well-known among graduates of Beacon, and you may attempt to puzzle out its meaning for yourselves while making your decision tonight: 'A hunter is someone who is allowed to be unhappy.'"
A smattering of polite applause followed professor Ozpin's speech. Ruby and Yang exchanged slightly confused glances.
Another voice took over the microphone, feminine and stern. That must be Ms. Goodwitch, Ruby realized. She went over the administrative details of lodgings for the night - they weren't being given rooms yet, apparently - and when to arrive for initiation in the morning.
Ruby made sure to pay attention, but in the back of her mind she was chewing over the headmaster's words. "A hunter is someone who is a allowed to be unhappy."
Looks like she was ahead of the curve again, she thought glumly.
~o~O~o~O~o~
Once Ms. Goodwitch was done speaking, the amphitheater slowly started to empty out, Ruby and Yang exiting with the crowd. The soon-to-be-students spilled out onto Beacon's lawn, and Ruby realized the sun was fairly low in the sky.
Despite Yang's advice, Ruby sort of wanted to talk to Jaune again. She told her sister she was making a quick bathroom run, which she went through with for deniability, ducking back into the building they'd just exited. When she was done, she walked out and stood on top of the steps leading down to the campus, looking out over the gathered crowd.
She looked around for blondes, eyes scanning quickly. There was some girl she didn't know. There was another one. There was Yang, already back with her friends from Signal. Ruby felt a little excluded again, even though she'd been the one to ditch Yang this time.
Ah! There. Jaune was standing off to the side under a tree, talking to some redheaded girl. Ruby felt her stomach tighten a bit.
The girl was tall, nearly as tall as Jaune. She was also stunning, at least in Ruby's opinion. She had an athletic build, almost a little boyish, with plenty of visible muscle. Her hair was the brightest, fullest red that Ruby had ever seen, and she kept it back in a long ponytail.
Actually...wait. A sense of recognition was tickling the back of Ruby's mind. That was...
Oh wow, that was Pyrrha Nikos. Ruby recognized her now. It was strange to see her in person, instead of on a scroll.
Jaune said something, and Pyrrha giggled, closing her eyes and putting her hand over her mouth. Ruby recognized that gesture. Yang did it a lot.
As Ruby watched, a third figure sauntered up to the pair. "Sauntered" was definitely the right word, she walked up to them like she owned the tree and everything around it. Wait, Ruby recognized her too! It was the scary girl from the plane, with the white hair.
Ruby's stomach tightened another notch, then slowly released as she realized that there was no way in the world she was going to go bother Jaune while he was talking to those two.
The white-haired girl seemed to be saying something to Pyrrha. Ruby turned away; she didn't want to be caught staring again. She looked down at her shadow - maybe twice as tall as her? It was getting toward the end of the day.
She had a few hours before bed. Might as well do something productive with that time. She sent a quick message to Yang on her scroll so her sister wouldn't worry, then turned and headed for the cliffs.
~o~O~o~O~o~
When it comes to Grimm, geography is king. Every human settlement of any note is placed such that the surrounding geography gives it an edge against the Grimm hordes. Beacon had unusual requirements in this regard. As an academy for hunters, it needed to be close to large populations of Grimm. But it would be something of a distraction if those Grimm could swarm the campus whenever they chose.
Mistral had originally been settled high in the mountains, simply because Grimm didn't like to climb, and even nevermore didn't fly too high unless they reached truly gigantic size. Information on Beacon was scarce, and her dad and uncle refused to talk about it with her, but she assumed it wasn't an accident that the academy had been built atop a sheer cliff.
Ruby peered over that cliff's edge, staring down. Several small streams ran over the side, water falling and falling until it dispersed into mist above a sprawling forest of verdant green trees.
Ruby smiled to herself. There was probably an official way up and down, but for now...
She leaned forward, savoring the moment when her center of balance tipped just slightly too far, and she was past the point of no return. Then, she was falling, tumbling down and down and down, her heart leaping into her throat as some primal part of her brain became convinced she was going to die.
She savored that feeling too, for a moment.
Then she spun in the air, whipping Crescent Rose from behind her and extending him to his full length. She reached her mind into him through her aura, the same way she'd unfolded him, feeling every nook and cranny she'd designed, every awful hack and beautiful solution it took to cram a customizable high-impact sniper rifle and a combat scythe together. She found the gravity round chamber and rotated it into place. There was a satisfying click that she felt in her bones rather than heard.
The cliff was tall enough that she'd probably reach terminal velocity. She aimed Crescent Rose down and a little to the side, eyeballing the angle she needed to land properly. One of her long-term goals was to build a mechanism that would let her control exactly how much gravity dust was in each shot, to make things like this easier. She had a prototype, but the time between shots was too high to be practical.
She waited until the last possible moment, the ground rushing up to meet her, then fired three quick shots, the strange physics of the gravity dust instantly adding a vector to her velocity without any sensation of acceleration. Now she was flying up, very slightly, and to the side, but slower than she'd been when coming down.
She was going maybe 20 miles an hour now? That wouldn't strain her aura too much. She curled into a ball as she hurtled into the foliage, branches whipping against her and further slowing her fall, until she finally hit the ground and skidded the last ten feet or so.
The woods around her were very quiet, and deceptively beautiful. The sun was still in the sky for another hour or two, and she took a moment to enjoy the way its fading light played across the trees.
She was going to feel like a real idiot if her guess about where Beacon kept its Grimm was wrong.
Ruby's heart was beating fast from the fall. That was good, it would help her get in the zone.
She was already down from not being able to work up the courage to talk to Jaune. Yang and her friends didn't help. Yang was always trying so hard to make time for her, and that just made it worse, when she knew her sister was basically hanging out with her out of pity.
This would be easy today.
She closed her eyes, and thought about her mother.
She went over the few clear memories she had of Summer, one by one, to remind herself what had been. Then she thought back to the day they'd heard, how upset Yang and her dad had been. How she'd started crying without knowing why, aware that they were hurting even though she was too young to understand what was wrong. Then she went through the damage, the empty hole in their lives, all the little things that had been slightly off, slightly colder. The anniversary four years later when she'd heard her dad crying through the walls while she tried to fall asleep.
That was as far as she got. She heard a distant growl, then another, then more than she could count. She opened her eyes, blinking away the tiniest hint of tears, and looked around. A pack of beowolves was closing on her, slowly, taking her measure.
The creatures were horrible. They were dark, inky black, and they looked wrong against the backdrop of the forest, like someone had ripped ugly black holes into a beautiful painting.
Ruby felt her throat tighten. She hated Grimm. Everyone said they hated Grimm, but they really hated the idea of Grimm. They hated thinking about them, mostly. Ruby hated the Grimm themselves. She hated knowing that they still existed. She couldn't see one without every part of her crying out to destroy it. When she'd been younger, Yang had had to pull her away from the hunting grounds, telling her that if she took the time to rest and train, she could kill more Grimm tomorrow, or in a year.
They shouldn't exist, she thought to herself. Her mental voice sounded raw in her head, strained. They're wrong. They shouldn't be here.
They were so ugly it stung her eyes to look at them. She couldn't stand it, couldn't countenance a world where these things still existed, where they roamed freely, rending people and families and civilization itself apart with malicious indifference.
One of the beasts stepped closer, the lure of her negative emotions overcoming its drive for self-preservation. These beowolves were very young. Ruby was still holding Crescent Rose, his weight so familiar it was forgettable, like eyeglasses perched on her face. The beast growled again, louder, and lunged at her.
The second it was in the air, Ruby felt her semblance in the back of her mind. The excitement, the urgency, the stimulation, the fear for her life and her cold anger and her beating heart and the tiny hint of curiosity as she wondered how most efficiently to carve the beast into pieces, all of these things flowed together into a river that spilled out into her head and down her spine.
Ruby sprang forward as the world slowed, pushing as hard as she could against the soupy air, overcome suddenly with the need to destroy these things. She brought Crescent Rose up in a savage slash that took the beast's head off mid-leap. Its blood gushed out, a slow-motion geyser, and Ruby's soul sang with satisfaction at its end.
~o~O~o~O~o~
Boom
A pause.
Boom
Another pause, slightly longer, so that she started to fall.
Last one.
Boom
With the final shot, Ruby carried herself up and barely over the lip of the Beacon cliffs, landing softly on the dirt. Using gravity rounds to move up a specific distance was much easier, but it might start to get expensive if she did this every day.
She straightened, stowing Crescent Rose behind her back, to find herself face to face with a shield of swirling purple energy and a very irate-looking Ms. Goodwitch. Behind the woman and to her left stood professor Ozpin, who looked considerably more amused.
"Ah," he said. "Ms. Rose. Pleasant evening, isn't it?"
Ms. Goodwitch spoke before Ruby could gather her wits and respond.
"What." the huntress ground out, teeth clenched. "Are you doing here? Did you receive permission to leave campus?"
Ruby flinched. The calm peace she always felt after a hunt was shattered into a million tiny shards. Oh no oh no oh no. Was this against the rules somehow? Was she going to be kicked out of Beacon the first night she was here?
"Now, Glynda." Ozpin said, voice calm. "I did go to great lengths to impress on the incoming class that they are not yet students here, and may leave at any time. Ms. Rose appears to have taken that invitation rather literally, but..."
"But what, Ozpin?" Ms. Goodwitch snapped over her shoulder. "She was in the Emerald Forest. Alone. After dark."
Glynda whirled back to Ruby, dismissing her purple construct with a wave. "Do you realize how foolish what you did tonight is? You could have died."
Ruby looked down at the ground, lost for words. Fighting Grimm after dark was definitely asking for trouble, but she'd done it plenty of times before and nothing bad had ever happened. In some ways it was better; Grimm grew less cautious after dark, and she could pull more at once.
Besides, her semblance was tailor-made for escaping from bad situations. If her aura had gotten low, she would have just left.
She utterly failed to say any of this to the fuming teacher in front of her. She tried to speak, but it felt like a hand was squeezing her throat shut.
There was an awkward silence, while Ms. Goodwitch waited for an answer and Ruby totally failed to provide one.
Ozpin cleared his throat.
"Glynda, why don't you finish seeing to the construction of the launchers. I'll escort Ms. Rose back to Beacon, and see that she fully understands our policy on appropriate use of the Emerald Forest.