Chapter 1: Summer Blooms
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"…Found her in one of the… rooms, professor…"
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"…And who is this Ozpin? Another… project?"
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"Please Lil… I need you to trust…"
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"…come back to bite us! Do not expect… y help!"
"Well, good news professor! She's just feeling the effects of a bad concussion, and what appears to be electrical backlash."
Hazel eyes glance over to one of his school's many medics, an unimpressive man whose name escapes him at the moment, before gazing back at the woman lying in the medical wing—Ruby Rose, his mind reminds him. Quite honestly he should have been more prepared for the woman's arrival, he knew it was going to be happening any day now. 'Though I do wish she came with more time before the beginning of this academic year, even if by a few days.'
"Very well," he says to the medic, his voice as always quiet and calm. "She should be awake within the hour, please send miss Rose to my office when she wakes."
"Of course, professor Ozpin!" he hears as he turns towards the doors, grip already back on his cane and his destination ever clear in his mind.
'Now to get things ready for miss Rose here, would not do good for a woman not even set to be born for ten more years to be walking around without any papers.'
With a groan, shining silver eyes slowly and drearily flutter open, glancing around curiously. Where was she? The hospital wing? 'Did I really get that damaged by the backlash? And… who brought me here, Blake? Professor Goodwitch?'
"Ah, you're up! You're up!" a surprisingly cheerful voice cried, silver eyes rolling looking for the origin. An enthusiastic medic, one Ruby didn't recognise, smiled brightly at her. "It seems like professor Ozpin's intuition is as strong as always, I wasn't expecting you to wake for a few more hours but the headmaster was sure you'd be up within minutes of his leaving!"
Ruby frowns slightly. "Was I really that hurt?" The medics all knew she healed fast, it was in her files because of how dense her Aura is and the simple nature of her soul.
"Erm, well…" the medic responds, glancing down at his scroll. "With how hard it looked like your head hit the wall, and how serious the concussion seemed to be… we all expected you to be out of commission for the whole day while trying to recover, even with your Aura active." He flicks his finger along the scroll a few times, cycling through was Ruby assumes to be medical documents. "But we realised your Aura is incredibly dense, especially for a new student like you."
…'Wait…'
"New student?"
"Hmm?" he hums, glancing back up at her. "You are one of the new students for this school year, are you not?" His voice carries no hint of humour, just sheer curiosity. Maybe he's new? Ruby's pretty sure that all the medics at Beacon know her and her team… especially Yang. "Speaking of… professor Ozpin and professor Sycamore would like to speak to you in Ozpin's office," he says, missing the look of confusion in Ruby's eyes. "Probably to ask what you were doing in a locked, unused room… and what knocked you out in it…"
The medic walks away, grumbling something about 'New students fighting and the school year hasn't even started', turning back to her briefly. "Well you're awake and no longer seem to be experiencing the effects of that concussion, and the stray electricity still in your body seems to have dissipated, so you're free to go whenever. Though if the headmaster and deputy headmistress want to see you, you should probably go to Ozpin's office ASAP."
And with his part said, the medic leaves.
'Professor… Sycamore? Deputy headmistress? What happened to Goodwitch?' Ruby thinks, quickly and quietly moving herself out of the bed, pleased to find that her cloak—her mother's white one, given to her by her dad after she outgrew her red one—was folded on a table next to where she lay, and the rest of her outfit was still on.
'And what did he mean when he said "unused room"?' she thinks, fitting her cloak around her shoulders with the cross pins and buckling her boots tight. 'I've been using that room for my extra-curricular work for over two years now, all the staff knows that.'
Ruby sighs and glides out of the medical wing, positive that if Ozpin wanted to see her, he'd at least be able to answer her questions. 'Plus I can tell him that I about my progress!' she inwardly cheers, a bright grin overtaking her face. 'I'm not positive the method will work on humans, or how exactly we'd be able to regulate how far back or how far forwards you would go, or how much gravity Dust would be needed to stall time in that large an area…'
Ruby stops suddenly when she reaches the courtyard of Beacon, her confusion returning to her. Just yesterday all the trees were indicating the middle of autumn—the leaves changing colour as they died and fell off their branches and the air cool and crisp heralding the coming of winter. Oum, it had been raining yesterday and yet…
The trees Ruby sees in the courtyard do not show any of those signs.
The leaves are a bright green, as they would be towards the end of summer in Vale, the air was warm and slightly humid, and there wasn't a single leaf on the ground of the courtyard like there should be. Ruby doesn't even see any indication that it had rained yesterday, even though it had been pouring the entire day.
Not only that, but the trees themselves seem to look… shorter, younger—and the courtyard is completely bare of students, sans the fourth-year TA. 'It's the middle of the day on a Thursday, where are the students?'
"Umm… excuse me, miss? Are you alright?"
Shocked out of her thoughts, Ruby turns to look at the voice. Next to her stands a woman that Ruby, ever since the night Ozpin invited her to join Beacon two years yearly, had become very familiar with both in her appearance and the feel of her Aura.
Except here she stood, looking almost twenty years younger.
"Uh—buh—guh…!"
Glynda, or who Ruby thinks is Glynda, arches an ever elegant eyebrow at her stuttering—though her eyes and face still held the worry they had a few seconds prior.,
"Do you… need help getting to the hospital wing, ma'am?"
"U-Uh… n-no, thanks for asking…?" Ruby manages to stutter out, shooting the deputy headmistress 'That apparently isn't the deputy headmistress anymore! And is twenty years younger!' a quick "sorry" as she quickly turns her attention back to the clocktower that held Ozpin's office.
'I… no there's no way, I don't remember activating my Semblance after Blake left… an illusion? One of Em's?'
Ruby sighs tiredly, furrowing her left hand into her hair and ruffling it slightly. 'No even Em's illusions can't reproduce the feel of someone's Aura…' She frowns slightly, humming as she walks into the tower and up to the elevator. 'Is it possible I'm still unconscious and dreaming, but the discharge jolted my consciousness to be active inside of my dream…?'
"…No, that's absurd even for me," Ruby mutters aloud, stepping into the elevator and directing it towards Ozpin's office.
Ruby spends the entire ride up to Ozpin's office listening to the calming whir of the machinery powering the elevator and her soft breathing, attempting to calm herself and clear her mind. She knows that any conversation she's going to have with professor Ozpin, a man just as mysterious after two years of constant one-on-one conversations and mission debriefings as he was the night Ruby met him, would need a clear and calm mind. If only so she could look for any deeper meanings in his words or avoid potential, subtle manipulations.
A ding announces her arrival as the door opens, the office of the headmaster looking just as it did every other time Ruby had visited, if with a few less papers than she's used to. She sees two people at Ozpin's desk, though only one of them is someone she recognises.
'Ozpin… also looks younger…'
The other is someone Ruby doesn't recognise—"professor Sycamore", she assumes. And despite her apparent role at Beacon and her stance next to Ozpin, usually taken up by Goodwitch or Qrow, Ruby doesn't recognise her at all. She imagines she should have seen at least a picture of the alleged deputy headmistress, the one before Glynda Goodwitch assumedly, but the sight of the woman is completely new and foreign to her.
The instant Ruby steps out of the elevator, twin sets of hazel eyes turn towards her.
"Ah, miss Rose," Ozpin starts, giving Ruby a slight welcoming smile, "glad to see you're awake, your accident last night gave you quite a bump—I was worried it might have knocked a few years of your life out of you."
Ruby's eyes narrow ever slightly, but she opts to stay quiet, letting the headmaster carry the conversation.
"Professor Sycamore," Ozpin continued, shifting his eyes to the woman next to him and waving towards Ruby. "This is miss Rose. She's a… late addition to the coming academic year."
"It's nice to meet you, miss Rose. I look forward to teaching you."
Not giving Ruby a chance to respond, she gives Ozpin a slight nod and walks past Ruby to the elevator, gracefully sliding into the car and going back down to the bottom of the tower.
Ruby refocuses on Ozpin, the curiosity and question shining in her eyes, almost pleading for an answer. "Professor…?" she hesitantly starts, the confusion annoyingly clear in her voice. "What… what's going on?"
"I'm sure you've seen the state of the courtyard, looking and feeling several months too early from what you remember and without any of the rain from the previous day." His grin remains on his face as he leans forward, elbows coming to rest on his desk and his fingers intertwining with each other. "And you're aware that miss Goodwitch is not currently my right-hand woman, at the moment it is a woman whose name was lost to your generation after the rise of teams like Team STRQ and Hunters like James Ironwood."
Ruby's eyes narrow further, Ozpin's words rattling through her brain. "So, I'm actually…"
"Miss Rose," Ozpin interrupts her, his grin turning somewhat sly, "do you know what time is?"
She groans the instant he finishes his question, the urge to bash her head against a wall suddenly filling her. She did, she did activate her Semblance when the Dust machine blew last night—she hadn't meant to, but after a decade of learning and trying to master her Semblance it was obviously second nature when it came to dodging out of harm's way.
But… wait…
"How do you know, professor Ozpin?"
His smile turns from the sly grin to his normal kind, if secretive, smile. "What you must understand, miss Rose, is that I asked you that question already knowing the answer." At her confused—again—look, he continues. "You see, miss Rose, I was born with an… incredibly unique Semblance. My very existence, since I unlocked my Aura many years ago, was scattered across time—effectively making me immortal and eternal. But as a result, my consciousness has experienced and is experiencing every single timeline so long as I was able to perceive it—and that includes giving you, a prodigal genius in physics the likes of which hasn't been seen in almost five hundred years, the idea and drive to decode what time is on a level no one has done before—at least, without the benefit of having a time based Semblance."
He pauses momentarily, glancing into Ruby's eyes. "Are you following along so far?" At her slightly shaky nod, Ozpin continues. "When I gave you the idea, I did it knowing you'd succeed and that, because of a simple and easy mistake, you'd find your way… here, twenty-three years in the past, in the same year that team STRQ begins attending Becon."
The office stands silent for almost five minutes, Ruby's mind preoccupied with countless questions. 'He knew I'd mess up and go back in time? He planned on it happening? Ozpin's consciousness is scattered across time? What does that mean for him—what does that mean for me?'
"What… what should I do, professor Ozpin?"
He looks at her for a moment, pity and regret filling his gaze. "Let things happen as they do, miss Rose," he responds, taking a sip of his coffee. "But I must warn you—time does not like being defied and being denied. If there is something that needs to happen, it will make sure you confide and make sure it happens. You'll know when that happens, trust me."
Ruby nods, and watches when Ozpin pushes a couple sheets with a scroll lying on top next to a credit card. "These are the papers with your new identity, confirming your existence, as well as your scroll and a card connected to a bank account with money for you to buy a new wardrobe and the parts for a weapon."
"You have five days before orientation day, miss Rose. I recommend you work on designing yourself a new weapon, something other than a scythe if I could give a suggestion. Make sure you have it done by initiation. Any questions?"
Ruby shakes her head, walking up to the desk and grabbing the objects.
Her hand stops when she catches site of the name.
She can practically hear the morbid humour in Ozpin's voice.
"Welcome to Beacon, miss Summer Rose."
AN: I'll be doing my best to minimise the amount of author notes I have in chapters—I'll be using them to either answer questions or say a few things. Quite honestly I don't know how frequently I'll be updating this story, anyone that looks at my profile can see that I can pretty randomly lose interest in writing a story and I want to pace myself with this specific one to try and maintain my interest and desire to write it.
If I have time before getting to Ruby/Summer designing her weapons in the next chapter or the chapter after, I'd greatly appreciate weapon ideas. Something fitting agile, hit and run combat and fitting a svelte build. I want the range aspect of the weapon to be a bow and arrow, but I have no idea what I want for the close ranged combat aspect.
