Just a Crazy-Man: I didn't know you were into RWBY. (For those of you who don't know, Just a Crazy-Man was a big fan of SGD, my epic Stargate fic from a few years back)

Happy1K1nob1: *in Arnold Schwarzenegger voice* It is here.

Darth Cruel: In my opinion, there's a lot of potential in an inverted SI, and it's something I wish showed up more often. I think I've seen one for Mass Effect, one for Stargate Atlantis, and that's it.

First of all, it turns out somebody else had already explored a premise broadly similar to Emergence. It's called The Power of Dust, it's written by StorSpeaker, and it's way better than this so you should go read it. The big difference is that I'm trying to keep this as mundane and realistic as possible, with us and them clearly separated. And I'm not going into backstory. Yet.

Moving to fewer perspective shifts, toward focusing on one or two characters rather than an ensemble cast. Let me know if you prefer this or more slices. I may also move to longer, less frequent chapters, but not until this arc is finished.

As an aside, Ruby is hard to write. I'm too much of a cynical bastard to accurately portray childlike innocence. That's why she doesn't get enough screen time.

6: Finding The Team

Sam

"I have to find them!" the red blur screeched as it shot past us. How as she even moving that fast? That shouldn't be humanly possible. In fact, I don't think it is humanly possible.

"Hey!" I shouted at it. "Stop!"

"Ruby!" Cliff called from beside me. "Ruby, stop!"

She kept going, speeding off back into the field. Damn, that girl was fast. "Should we-"

Cliff shook his head. "No point. We'll never catch her."

I took a deep breath. "RUBY! WE HAVE TO TALK!"

"So talk!" I heard a high-pitched voice reply from the field.

"Look, if they're here, you're not going to find them. Not like this!"

"Then are you going to help?"

Me: "No!"

Cliff: "Yes!"

"So come out here and help!"

A pause. "Weiss! Blake! Yang!"

"You're not going to find them that way!" I shouted into the field. "Damn it, Ruby!

I got a shrill shriek for a response. "I have to find them!"

"You'd stand a much better chance if you would fucking listen!" I shouted back.

Cliff tried a different strategy. "Ruby, if they were here, you would have found them already."

She zipped in front of us and stopped, almost appearing right there. Her expression was angry. "What if they can't reply? What if they're injured, or they're hiding, or there's Grimm..."

It occurred to me at that point that Ruby's grey eyes were shining more than usual. Yes, her eyes were always shiny, which hadn't really occurred to me before but now that I thought about it... it was kind of creepy.

"Then we'll find out!" I snapped. "But we have to do this the right way."

"Look, you may be fast," Cliff reasoned. "But that doesn't mean you can search faster. You're going to still be limited by your ability to actually see your friends. I'm going to be generous and say your perception is two to three times better than an Earth baseline human- that's just a guess for the sake of argument. I'd say that means you can search two time faster, but I don't think it scales that way. But you're still inherently limited to a search rate of maybe a few times faster than a normal human, which is pretty god damned slow."

Confused, she asked, "What did you just say?"

"He basically said it won't work."

Ruby slumped to the ground, cradling her head in her hands. "What am I gonna do?"

"Lots," I replied. "We can get the rest of the group in on this, start searching the area. We can ask around and see if anyone's seen them. And we can put out some ads on the internet, too."

A thought occurred to me. I asked Cliff, "Hey, does that guy still do the drones?"

"Mitch? Yeah, he's just built a new one, actually."

"Do you think you can-"

"Maybe. I might have to bring him in, though."

"Don't tell him more than you have to." Seeing his hesitation, I added. "Hey, man, you're probably better at figuring out what to say and what not to say than I am."

"Yeah, it's saying it that's the problem."

"I'm sorry," Ruby said quietly.

"Sorry for what?" I asked.

"Crying like a baby," she replied, standing up.

She was like, what, 15? All this shit must be overwhelming even a girl who fights monsters. Cliff would have something to say about context and norms and shit like that, but I just say, out of her comfort zone, even if her normal comfort zone is somewhere I'd stay the hell away from. This is probably a couple steps past that.

"You're fifteen, you haven't even finished school, and now you've been thrown into another universe and you can't find your closest friends, you're not even sure if you can find them," I summarized. "This is totally acceptable."

"But I'm supposed to be a Huntress! I'm supposed to be brave, and courageous, not sitting down and crying like this!"

"This is an out of context problem, even for a Huntress," I replied, summoning all my movie cliche knowledge. "Besides, you're a Huntress-in-training, right? Nobody expects anyone to get it right the first time."

"Thanks."

"No problem," I replied, smiling.

Cliff's phone rang, and he answered it. "Yeah?"

"Is that Ben?"

"Close. It's Jen."

"Mmm."

"Uh-huh, we found her... Searching, yep... Yeah, we've pretty much came to the same conclusion... Okay, that makes sense, yeah... Well, I'm operating under that assumption as well... Oh, we're going to try to borrow a drone from Mitch... Hmm, good point, we'll have to-... Okay, we can do that... Meet back at Ben's?... Sure."

"We're heading back to Ben's," Cliff stated, sticking his phone back in his pocket.

"What?" Ruby asked.

"We need to get organized, figure out a plan," I told her.

"Oh... right. Okay."

I reassured her, "Look, I know you're anxious. But it's only going to be a couple of hours."

Cliff added, "Essentially, we're trading away a small chance of finding them immediately for a much larger chance of finding them soon. Given that Earth is much safer than Remnant, I think that's a fair tradeoff."

Ruby was quiet. "Yeah. Okay."

We gathered once again in Ben's apartment. It was definitely too small for this. His kitchen table only had three chairs, leaving me leaning against the fridge, Cliff against the couch, and Isaac on the floor. There was a package of President's Choice cookies on the table, which was quickly disappearing.

"Well, we should probably get down to business," I began. "Finding Ruby's team."

"If they're here," Ruby muttered past her cookies.

"We're assuming they are," I replied. "First step is to organize a search, get back out there and look-"

"No, that's a bad idea," Cliff interrupted immediately.

I glared at him. "Aren't you the one who suggested it?"

"Yeah, but now that I think of it, we actually shouldn't," he self-corrected. "Those fields aren't public land, they're private land. So if we try searching them on foot, we could get arrested for trespassing. And if there's one group of people we don't want in on this, it's the police."

"Fuck the police," I quipped, eliciting a bunch of laughs. I added seriously, "But, no, you're right, we definitely don't want to get arrested. But what can we do?"

"Shouldn't we get the police to help?" Ruby asked between bites of cookie. She'd already eaten most of them, and there were only a few left now.

Cliff just laughed a loud, ironic laugh. "Yeah, that's gonna work out real well. Hey, we're looking for these girls who we have no relation to and don't know anything about. Oh, and a quick Google search shows that they aren't even real. We'd probably end up being charged with trolling the police, if they don't just throw us in the loony bin!"

Ruby blinked. "Uh..."

Isaac was more gentle about it. "Remember when Blake ran off and you tried to find her?"

"How do you- right. Yeah." Ruby nodded.

"It's like that."

"Not really," Cliff said, ignoring the glares we were giving him. "It's not really anything like that. The problem then was with Blake's past. The problem here is that the people we're looking for are fictional characters."

"It's like that."

I shrugged. "Whatever. Bottom line is that we don't want to report this unless we absolutely have to. The police are more likely to hinder than to help."

"Okay," Ruby replied after eating the last cookie. Damn, she can go through those cookies fast!

"What about Search and Rescue?" Isaac asked.

"You're joking, right?" Cliff snapped. "Same problems as the police. Missing persons is out, too. Any official channel, in fact."

"Well, if we can't search ourselves and we can't go through anything official, what do we do?" Ben asked. "I'm not paying for a private investigator and you're all too poor to afford one."

"We still have a few other options," I replied, pausing to actually figure out what those options were.

The first would be to put out "have you seen this person" messages through other ways of communications. Facebook would probably be the best, asking our friends if we've seen these people and to ask if their friends have seen them. Maybe we could misuse Craigslist, too. I don't think they have a missing persons section, but we can just spam and hope for the best. Sadly, this was probably our best shot.

The second was getting a drone from Mitch, but that's Cliff's department. I have no idea how good those would be at looking at the fields where Ruby arrived. So, maybe this would work, maybe not.

The third was to go downtown and ask random people if they had seen any RWBY cosplayers lately, but I don't think that would be very effective.

And, of course, that was assuming they were here at all.

"We're going to ask around on Facebook if anyone has seen them," I announced. "We can make it sound really important-"

"It is important!" Ruby interrupted loudly.

"You'd be surprised what people pass over here," Cliff replied.

"Ruby, do you have any pictures of your team?"

"Of course," she replied. "I have lots!"

"Good. Ben, Jen, Isaac, I want you to pick out some pictures and put up some posts. Put them up on your Facebook, if you've got any other social media, maybe some local forums or the Vancouver Craigslist or something. I know that between the three of you, you'll be able to figure it out."

"Got it."

While Ben, Ruby, Isaac and Jen disappeared into the computer room to figure out the pictures, I raised the issue of the drones with Cliff. Mitch was his friend, not mine. In fact, I thought Mitch was kind of an asshole.

To be fair, I'd only met him once, and I was kind of drunk.

"Cliff, I still think we should do the drones thing if we can," I told him.

"Yeah, I'll text Mitch," he replied, taking out his Galaxy S2 i9100. The reason why I knew exactly what phone he had was kind of funny. I had once mistaken it for an iPhone, and he had taken the next thirty minutes beating the how and why it was not an iPhone into my head. Even still, I forgot most of the details laced into the web of profanity.

A moment later, he received a reply. "Says he finished a Skywalker with a lot of battery capacity just last month. He also says that if he pulls some of those batteries, he can fit in a digital camera that will give us a much better chance of seeing something. Finally, he says that he has to be there to run it."

"Skywalker?" I asked, snickering. Cliff began to explain, but I waved him off. "Nevermind. Does he really have to be there?"

"Well, it kind of is his plane, and it's new, too. I think he wants to use this as a kind of test."

"Isn't he going to ask what we need it for?"

Another round of texts, then Cliff shrugged. "I get the impression that he doesn't care."

"Good. How soon can he do it?"

Another minute of texting, then a sigh. "Next week. When we're all at school."

"That means we have to rely on him alone," I asked. "Do you trust this guy?"

"Do we have a choice?" Cliff replied. "Look, he's willing to do this for free, on his time. I think we may need to trade a certain degree of trust for that."

"Such as?" I asked, then realized that he was talking about what I had just brought up.

"What we're looking for," Cliff replied.

Okay, so he did want to know that. "Tell him we're looking for some of our... friend's friends. Give him physical descriptions only. And tell him to call as soon as he finds anything."

"Got it."

"Well, I don't think he likes the vagueness, but he's willing to go with it." Cliff said after thirty seconds of silence. "His exact words are 'whatevs man jus need excuse wanna try my drone'."

"Hey, Sam," Ben called. "We're done."

"Did you post?"

"Yeah, on all our Facebook, my Twitter, spammed Craigslist and a few others," Ben replied, clearly unhappy about it. "They're probably going to think this is some kind of viral marketing, though."

"We've gotta try, man. We gotta try."

"So, what do we do now?" Ruby asked quietly.

I sighed. "Now we wait."