Jaune splashed water on his face and looked at his reflection, unusually gaunt-looking in the bathroom's torchlight. He took a deep breath and ran over the schedule again in his head. He was staying awake - he'd grab some coffee from downstairs to help with that - while his teammates rested, so he could stay on vigil for Ruby. If she still hadn't returned in two hours, he would rouse Ren and Nora so they could all go search for her. He wasn't sure where they would start, having already scoured the stretch of forest where they had last seen her, but hopefully she would show on her own, and it wouldn't be a problem.
The torch flickered low for a few moments, causing Jaune to look at its reflection as it flared back up. Weird. Looks like a fresh torch. What kind of crappy materials are they working with out here? He went ahead and wiped his face off on his sleeve, picked up his weapon from beside the sink, and headed out, making his way to the main floor of the inn.
===+My Pretty+===
The door to the roof opened and Jaune stepped out into the chill night air. Walking out onto the largely stone roof and holding a small steaming cup, he used his free hand to pull up his hood against the cold. He stopped at the edge, looking out to see the dimming lights of the festival beginning to simmer out, and took a sip. He started to consider what he should do to pass the time, and had just about settled on training with his weapon, when he heard a loud noise behind him; the sound of something heavy falling over. Startled, he dropped his coffee and whirled around, reaching for his sword and gritting his teeth against the pain of some of the hot liquid splashing against his ankle.
A man had collapsed onto the roof, right outside the door Jaune had used to ascend. It was a wall guard, in simple armor and carrying a scoped rifle. He slumped heavily to the ground, and Jaune, after only a moment's confused hesitation, ran to check on him. "Hey, are you alright!? Talk to me!" He kneeled down to feel for the man's pulse, but found nothing. The guard was dead. Jaune considered what to do next, hesitating again. It was rare for him to find himself in such an inexplicable situation.
Four feet behind him, silent as the depths of space, Salem stood idly, hands clasped as she listened to the boy's thoughts with mild amusement. Exhaustion and fatigue were being wrestled by will and logic, flickers of sad empathy for the guard, and over it all a curtain of grief and pain. Mildly intrigued, the witch took a deeper look into that and was struck with modest surprise to discover that he was mourning the pretender maiden that Cinder had made such a fuss about slaying. Small world.
But that momentary flight of fancy ended as Jaune stood, having made up his mind about his course of action, to alert the other guards at once, before rousing his comrades. It was irrelevant. Salem reached out and took hold of the back of his neck, paralyzing him instantly. "Cut off the head of the snake, and the body dies," she muttered quietly.
===+My Pretty+===
Surprising no one, a cold, rocky floor in a cell in a castle in the middle of an inhospitable grimm-infested waste was rather uncomfortable.
Recent events had more than tired Ruby; she felt drained, hollowed out and lifeless. But try as she might, there was no sleep to be found in her cage. Wherever she tried to lay, there was always some piece of rock or patch of damp that simply made it impossible, no matter how thickly she tried to bundle her cloak over the problem area. But the terrain wasn't the worst part.
As she lay on her back in about the twentieth pitiful attempt to find comfort, staring upward, she reflected on how nobody in the world liked the feeling of being watched. But at least they only had to be worried about people watching them. And the feeling of being stared at by another human being was something Ruby would easily take in trade against being watched silently and keenly by several dozen Grimm. As she had first started to lay down, she had become aware that the building she was in lacked a ceiling; above her, perched on crumbled stone and silhouetted against the red sky, were nearly a hundred small, birdlike Creatures of Grimm. Uniformly there were jet black feathers and blood red eyes, but she could see a lot of different varieties; nevermores of course, and also more of the vulture-like ones she had seen earlier, as well as some that more closely resembled kingfishers, though more ragged and wicked looking. She could have even sworn one or two of them were just ordinary crows.
She stared at the birds, and they stared at her, the only sound the occasional rustling of their feathers. Ruby wished she knew more about her silver-eye powers that everyone seemed to make such a big deal out of, if nothing else so she could blast the creepy flock away. Unfortunately, she had to settle for sighing in exhaustion. For minutes more, she closed her eyes and continued lying there. Her back hurt, but she had become too tired to care. Until, that is, she shifted position slightly, and noted that a piece of loose rock moved with her.
The chance to do something rebellious, to exercise even the slightest amount of freedom, seized Ruby like a flame, and a small shot of adrenaline shot up her spine. She rolled over quickly, grabbed the jagged pebble, and with a high-pitched yell, hucked it through the bars and at the enemy birds. They took off in a panicked flurry of beating wings, swirling around each other for a moment. There was a cacophony of sounds before they spiraled into the air together, flying away against the crimson sky. Ruby watched them fade, smiling against herself. She lay back down with a satisfied sigh... and within a minute, fell asleep at last.
===+My Pretty+===
Ren's eyes opened, and he sat upright in total darkness. It was hard to say what had woken him; the room was completely without light, and quiet. There wasn't even a breeze. But even though he was tired, Ren simply knew he was supposed to be awake. He pulled himself out of bed and began the task of retrieving his clothes, finding them easily despite the low visibility. After dressing like clockwork, he collected his thoughts and left, opening the door and stepping out into the hall.
Wooden walls and floors. It was only dimly lit by lamps, so his eyes didn't require any adjustment. Standing still, he took a moment to reflect on what he was doing out here... why had he woken up so suddenly? He couldn't remember what he had been dreaming about...
Ren closed his eyes, took a breath, and focused on his Aura. He was more talented at manipulating it than his teammates, having focused a significant amount of his training on channeling it. In particular, he had always excelled at using it to sense other entities, by their souls or lack thereof. Casting his own soul outward like ripples in a pond, he could feel everyone in the building, including Nora... but not Jaune. He furrowed his brow at this oddity. With no better notions, he opened his eyes, stretched, and set out to find his teammate.
As he walked, he continued to muster his aura as best he could; he was still sleepy, and the extrasensory power was wobbly as a result. He made his way to the staircase, with stairs leading both up and down, and began to climb upward, focusing on his breathing as he went. Suddenly, he paused, foot still in midair over the seventh step. Something felt odd. Now that he was more woken up, he was sensing something he had missed before... for a moment, it felt like there was a grimm in the building, but... no, that wasn't quite right. Like a grimm, but not a grimm. Not like a grimm, but definitely a grimm. Whatever it was, it didn't exactly have a soul, but it didn't exactly lack one either. It was almost like it had the opposite of a soul.
Ren was snapped out of his focus by several loud squeaking sounds; he looked down to see rats, over a dozen of them, running in terror down the stairs, fleeing from something above. He realized that the strange feeling had been coming from above; whatever this being was, in was on the next floor. He gave his arms a flick, snapping his pistols out of his sleeves and into his hands. Now armed, he began, cautiously, to move upstairs.
The last few rats passed him by as he reached the top of the flight. He took a moment to steel himself, and kicked the door open into the next hall, bringing his guns to bare. It was identical to the hall below; all wood, dimly lit, lanterns. And just like the one below, it was vacant. All the doors to the rooms were closed, and the corridor was quiet. He walked forward slowly; his shoes were soft and quiet, and his astute situational awareness allowed him to avoid spots on the floor that could creak loudly. Ren was a ghost as he stalked ahead. He thought about turning back to rouse Nora, but Jaune's absence on top of Ruby's brought a certain mild panic; he wanted to at least identify what was up here, figure out what he was dealing with, before he left.
A sudden chill breeze. The lanterns all flickered and died, plunging everything into blackness. Ren froze in place; he was not startled, but it would be foolish to move without knowing what he was moving into.
The light returned, and Ren was no longer alone. At the end of the corridor, Salem stood patiently, smiling serenely at him, her hands clasped in front of her. She almost looked like a shop attendant waiting on an indecisive customer. Ren took aim quickly, but the lanterns died once more, before relighting after only two seconds, and the corridor was empty. To be safe, he pulled both triggers, firing a burst at where the creature had been standing, but they simply punched holes into the wooden door beyond. The shots echoed in the quiet passage.
Ren wasted no time turning parallel to the corridor; now his chest and back were facing the immediate walls, and he had one gun pointed in each direction, his right at Salem's last location and his left back at the stairway he had come from. He began to look back and forth between the points, waiting for a shot.
"I don't know what you are," he said to the darkness, "and I don't know what you've done to my friends. But we have travelled far, abandoning comfort and friends in favor of hardship and fear. We have sacrificed everything in the path of a singular goal with meaning both grand and personal to us. And I speak for our entire group when I insist that you will NOT be stopping us here today."
The lights died and returned, and Salem stood thirty feet to his left. Ren looked to her and fired a controlled burst, but again, darkness, and when the light returned, she was gone. More dark, more light, and she was twenty-five feet to his right. He fired. Dark, light, gone. Dark, light, twenty feet to his left. Another burst, predictable results: dark, light, gone. The pattern continued, with Salem getting closer and closer with each passing phase of darkness; sixteen feet to his right, twelve to his left, eight to his right, five to his left... finally, she stood at point blank range, her smiling face inches away from the barrel of his right gun.
Ren turned his gaze upon her, narrowing his eyes, believing he had finally gotten ahead of the pattern, and pulled the trigger...
In a way, the resulting click that informed him he had expended the last of his ammunition was louder than any of the shots. Salem quickly reached out to put a finger to his forehead, paralyzing him and causing him to fall to the floor. "I don't know. You looked stopped to me."
===+My Pretty+===
It hadn't been a very pleasant nap, plagued by uncomfortable dreams, but in her exhausted state Ruby was still mildly irritated to be woken by what felt like something sharp poking her in the face. Her eyes fluttered open to the blurry sight of something, so she quickly sat upright and surprise. "AH! Wuggawhat?" She blinked several times at the little creature next to her.
It was certainly no grimm, that much was clear immediately. It was mostly rust-colored, and looked like a kind of insect or spider about the size of her hand, which it scuttled along next to, prompting her to pull her hand away in alarm. After a second, she decided to simply get her entire body away from the thing, so she quickly shuffled to her feet and backed away a few steps, growing momentarily dizzy from standing up too fast. The little creature didn't pursue her; it just stopped where it was and looked up in her direction.
Ruby rubbed her eyes and took another look at the bug in the dim red light of her cell. She now realized that it wasn't an animal at all; it was actually mechanical, made of whirring metal parts and bolts. She kneeled back down for a closer look, and it slowly crawled towards her. It came to a stop a few inches away and stared again. Her silver eyes directly met the two tiny little cameras that seemed to serve as the robot's eyes. She could see tiny gears and cogs working within its body, and a shard of the purplish crystal growing in abundance all over Salem's domain wired into the center. Something about the circular lenses of its eyes, combined with the clockwork seemed oddly nostalgic, like it reminded her of someone.
This feeling was solidified when she noticed the emblem carved into its thorax, like a perfectly circular gear.
"...Professor?"
===+My Pretty+===
Like Ren, Nora woke very suddenly, but the disturbance for her wasn't anything so ethereal as a bad feeling; it was the very immediate and tangible sound of gunfire from above. Leaping from her bed, Nora wasted no time seizing her weapon and shouldering her way out of the door. She could see the door to Ren's room standing open, which shot an immediate dose of panic into her mind, not helped by her realizing that the gunfire she heard sounded like StormFlower. "REN! JAUNE!"
Ignoring the last straggler rats that scurried from the stairwell, and quickly configuring her weapon into hammer form, she slid to a stop at the bottom of the stairs and looked up, listening for anything. The ruckus had stopped; all seemed quiet now, aside from some confused yelling from people throughout the building who had been awoken by all the gunfire. Nora began to barrel up the stairs, still yelling for her partner. "Reeeeennnnn!" She reached the top to find the door broken open and lunged into the hall, spotting Salem as soon as she came to a stop.
Ren was nowhere in sight, but Salem was already watching Nora as she came into view. Nora stared back at the thing before her, caught off guard. "Lovely evening, isn't it?" Salem said politely. "I don't get out much anymore, so it's nice to be able to take in the local atmosphere when I can."
Jaune was the team's strategist, but Nora listened when he talked. And from what she had learned, it was a bad idea for her, with her weapon, to take on an unknown opponent in close quarters. Nora whirled around in place, swinging Magnhild wide and slamming it into the wall, the grenade loaded into the head detonating in a burst of pink lightning that blasted the wall into a shower of splinters. Salem, actually taken by surprise by this turn of events, watched as Nora jumped out into the night, standing on the head of her hammer and launching herself away.
Combat-rolling to a stop on an opposite rooftop, she turned and reconfigured Magnhild into a grenade launcher and fired a single canister at the hole she had just made, caving it in with debris in another blast of pink; she hoped that this would buy her time. With that done, she took a few steps back and waited; the hope was that if Ren or Jaune were around, they would have heard the explosion and would come to her. She stood in the night air for several seconds, finger on the trigger.
Her wait came to a sudden end as the blockage simply blasted itself apart. Salem, holding her palm out, stepped from the light into the night air, stopping at the edge and gazing down at Nora as she lowered her arm. "You asked for it!" Nora yelled up, taking aim again. She emptied her launcher, firing all of her remaining grenades. Before they could find their target, a swirling black-and-red portal appeared before Salem, the rounds going in. A second similar portal appeared behind her, and the cylinders emerged and flew off into the sky, leaving pink trails of smoke behind. As the portals vanished, Nora grumbled in frustration and relocated.
Turning around, she ran across the roof while opening Magnhild to reload. She slipped grenades in one by one and jumped a gap onto the next roof. Behind her, Salem smiled, before dissolving into a swarm of flies; nasty, ink-black little things with mean red eyes. The swarm flew after Nora, barely visible in the dark. The girl in pink kept moving, jumping from roof to roof and snapping her launcher shut again, now heavy with a fresh reload. Her attention was drawn by a noticeable buzzing sound to her right.
Looking as she ran, she couldn't see much at first, but after a few seconds began to notice dots of black swarming in the lamplight. The first few flies caught up, flying in from the side and attacking her with stings, chipping away at her aura bit by bit. Nora fired two grenades at the swarm, but the explosives just passed through, detonating against the wall in the distance. More flies moved in, and dozens of them swirled around her, straining her defenses. She slid to a hard stop and tried something else out of desperation; she flipped her launcher back into a hammer and began swinging wildly, the head passing through the swarm. It didn't do much, but she began detonating the grenade loaded into the top repeatedly, which at least seemed to disturb the swarm, but not by much.
"Come on!" she yelled, before turning and simply jumping off the roof. This at least bought her a moment as the swarm whirled in surprise for a moment; she demolished several crates with her landing and took off across the cobblestone street, making for an opposing alleyway. The flies pulsed after her, and began catching up quickly. Nora hurried another reload, fumbling a grenade in her hand. "Come on, come on!" she kept repeating, growing increasingly flustered and panicked. How was anyone supposed to fight flies?
The swarm caught up. Once again, they surrounded her, biting and stinging. Dropping her still-unloaded weapon, Nora simply tried the last-ditch tactic of swiping at them with her hands. The last of her aura crackled away in pink, and the stingers began to find unprotected skin. "Argh!" she yelled in pain, finally dropping to the ground and simply holding her arms up in a vain final attempt at self-defense. Slowly, but quite, quite surely, the paralyzing stings began to take effect. Her arms grew numb first and dropped, and Nora could only sit and grimace, eyes shut tight, as the assault continued. Frustration and fear forced a tear out of her eyes nevertheless.
Finally, the fight was over, and Nora keeled over and was still on the cobblestone. The swarm abandoned her, coalescing back into Salem, who stood over the young huntress, still smiling. "Thank you for that, all of you. It's been so long since I've had a chance to stretch my legs. Of course I could have simply compelled you all to come with me, or simply sent another proxy... but oh well. The past is the past." As she spoke, something scuttled out of the shadows.
The spiderlike grimm was nearly the size of a car, with a small head and thorax compared to its long, spindly, daddy-long-legs style limbs, and a huge, bulbous yellow abdomen that glowed yellow; it was translucent, and inside, suspended in some kind of amber-colored liquid, Jaune and Ren floated, unconscious. Salem snapped her fingers, and the creature scuttled grotesquely over to Nora to collect her as well.
===+My Pretty+===
A short time later, Salem walked calmly up a forested hill outside of Rust. The captor grimm scuttled slowly behind her, weighed down by the three teenagers it carried. Salem stopped, and turned to look at them. They all appeared to be awake now; able to feel but unable to move, unable to breathe but unable to die. They stared in blank, helpless horror, eyes darting around to take in their situation. They kept looking back at Rust; the village was still quite visible from up here. Salem looked at the village, and back at them.
"Ah, of course," she said. "Thank you so much for reminding me."
She looked down at Rust, raised her hands, and gave a dismissive clap. Nothing happened at first. After a few moments, there was a low growling sound, and dots of red in the darkness. Beowolves began to creep from the shadows, slinking through the foliage and downhill towards the village. There was a crashing sound, and an ursa lumbered out of the trees to follow them. With a withered cry, several large nevermores suddenly passed overhead.
As Jaune, Ren and Nora watched helplessly, the Grimm descended on Rust.
AN: Wow. Is it me, or did that take forever? Sorry, finding energy and inspiration for this story has been a challenge.