"Ms. Nikos." Weiss said, arching an eyebrow as she stared straight down Milo's barrel.
Ruby had entirely failed to inform either Jaune or Pyrrha that Weiss existed. Predictably, the heiress had received the same welcome as Ruby when she dashed up to the pair on her glyphs moments later.
"Weiss Schnee." Pyrrha said back politely, sheathing Milo behind her back in exactly the same smooth motion as before. Exactly the same, Ruby noticed.
Pyrrha looked back and forth between them, Weiss standing there with her arms crossed, Ruby still lying on top of Jaune on the ground. She put on a polite smile, hands on her hips.
"And...Ruby? I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you yet."
Weiss shot Ruby a peeved look, reminded suddenly of the young girl's existence, and Ruby shrank a little. Yup, she was mad about Ruby running off.
Honestly, though, Ruby would do it again.
Oh, wait. Pyrrha was still waiting for an answer. Pyrrha Nikos.
"Um...hi!" Ruby said. Wait, she'd already said that. Um...
"You're really good at putting Milo away!" she squeaked. Why had she said that?
Pyrrha looked back at her, still smiling, but clearly confused. Ruby blushed, looking down, and she felt a hand land on her head, ruffling her hair.
Exactly two people in the world ruffled her hair - Yang and uncle Qrow - and they both did it to annoy her. This felt different, more of a pat and less of a noogie, which was good because Jaune was wearing rough leather gloves-
Ruby blushed even deeper, realizing she'd been hanging on to Jaune for uncomfortably long now. She zipped to her feet, hands behind her back, looking down at the boy.
Jaune was lying backward on his elbows, perfectly relaxed, clearly suppressing a laugh.
"Pyrrha, this is Ruby," he said, gesturing at her. "We met on the airship. Ruby, this is Pyrrha."
"Right!" Ruby said. "Nice to meet you Pyrrha."
She stuck her hand out, and Pyrrha shook it, looking slightly bemused.
Ruby would've thought she'd feel more awkward meeting someone famous, but she was so awkward in general that it actually felt pretty normal.
"Oh, and this is Weiss!" Ruby said.
"We've met," the three of them said, all at once.
Oh, right. She'd seen the three of them all talking under the tree before she'd left to hunt.
There was a moment of awkward silence. Jaune was still smiling, but was also rubbing the back of his head, looking maybe a little bashful. Weiss was glaring at him with her arms crossed. Pyrrha was looking back and forth between the two of them, still smiling politely. Oh, wait. Ruby recognized that smile. She'd seen Pyrrha wearing it a lot during press conferences.
Ruby felt like she was missing something.
Jaune stood up, dusting himself off.
"We should move along." Weiss said. "We're still on a time limit, and finding you two took a while."
Pyrrha turned to look at Jaune, raising her eyebrows.
"Oh, come off it." Weiss said. "Do you realize how much time Ruby spent tracking this idi...this guy down? She isn't about to let him out of her sight now. I'm stuck with her, and you're stuck with him, so let's get going."
What? Why would Pyrrha be...
Oh. Ruby hadn't quite put two and two together on that one yet. In her defense, she'd been a little distracted.
Pyrrha Nikos as a partner...she couldn't decide whether Jaune was a very lucky man, or a very unlucky one.
Some of the small social cues she'd been getting since they arrived were starting to make sense. It reminded her uncomfortably of the way she felt when Yang's friends were around, actually. Was this how it was going to be now? Every time she saw Jaune, Pyrrha would be there, the two of them sharing significant looks she couldn't parse?
Aaaaaaaargh.
"We should obviously stick together," Jaune said, sounding surprised it was even a question. "We're all headed to the same place, and this forest is dangerous. Four is better than two."
"Not necessarily," Pyrrha replied. "Four people will attract more Grimm. And we'd be able to cover more ground in pairs. We could arrange a signal, so whoever finds the temple can alert the others."
"The whole forest is jammed," Ruby jumped in. "Both the CCT and the local mesh are down."
Pyrrha nodded. "I was thinking of a flare."
"If we do split up, it wouldn't make sense to pair me with Ruby," Weiss said, turning to look at Pyrrha. "We both have semblances that let us move quickly. I can bring at least one person along, and I suspect she can too. If I went with you, and Ruby went with Jaune, we'd be able to cover a lot more ground."
Pyrrha was still smiling politely, but it was starting to look more than a little forced, at least to Ruby's eye.
What was going on? Were they fighting? Over what?
"I think we should stay with our partners." Pyrrha said, voice chipper.
Ruby didn't like this, but she didn't even know what was going wrong, let alone how to salvage it.
"Let's hold on a minute," Jaune said. "We shouldn't start arguing over how to split up when we don't even know what we're doing yet. We have a lot of time here. We can afford to spend a little bit of it planning.
"And besides," Jaune continued, grinning, "I'm pretty sure we all skipped lunch. Why don't we eat an early dinner, talk things over, and figure out what to do next?"
~o~O~o~O~o~
The four of them sat in a circle on the side of the river, Ruby's cloak laid out like a picnic blanket, enjoying a surprisingly tasty dinner of fire-dust-roasted fish and a few energy bars Ruby had been keeping in her skirt pockets. Jaune had lost his pack in the fall, and nobody else had brought food, but Ruby's semblance made catching fish from the river trivial.
"Jaune," Weiss said in-between dainty bites, "I'm not just going to drop this. You need to tell us something. Your aura is clearly fine, better than average even, if it managed to normalize your mangled legs. But we can't ignore the fact that it didn't do a thing to stop the force of that catapult. When we run into more Grimm, we won't be able to fight effectively unless we know whether or not you can take a hit."
"Assuming we all stay together." Pyrrha interjected.
"Yes, " Weiss said, voice polite to the point of sarcasm, "thank you for the correction, Ms. Nikos. Assuming that."
"Just Pyrrha is fine," the tall girl said, smiling.
"Of course." Weiss said, smiling back.
"Weiss," Ruby said, "I don't think Jaune wants to talk about what happened."
Pyrrha nodded. "Why don't we just drop the subject?"
The smile fell off Weiss' face. She took another small bite, not breaking eye contact with Pyrrha.
Jaune swallowed the mouthful he was chewing, fishing a tiny bone out from between his teeth.
When he spoke, it sounded a little bit hesitant. "Look. Weiss, Ruby, I'll be as honest as I can be. I don't want to lie to either of you. That...isn't the sort of person I want to be. But that's exactly why I can't talk about it. I can say that I don't expect what happened on the cliff to happen again."
Weiss kept pushing. "If her body language is anything to go by, Ms. Nikos here knows a lot more than we do. Why can't you extend us the same measure of trust?"
Pyrrha shifted a little. She didn't look nervous, exactly, but Ruby could see what Weiss was picking up on.
"It isn't about trust," Jaune said, his voice firming up. "If it were up to me, I'd tell you everything you want to know, right now. But I can't. The only things Pyrrha knows are things she discovered in the process of saving my life after the fall, and I asked her to promise me she wouldn't talk about them. I'm sorry, but I won't say anything more about it."
If it were up to him? Who else was involved? Ruby was getting more confused, not less. It also bothered her, for some reason, that Pyrrha and Jaune had this shared secret now. Maybe Weiss felt the same way, and that's why she was pushing so hard?
"Hmph," Weiss said. "Fine. I suppose I can respect that. You're sure it won't happen again?"
Jaune looked at Pyrrha, who nodded.
"It won't. Unless I run out of aura the normal way, of course." Jaune cracked a smile at that, but just the thought made Ruby feel like a heavy weight had settled in her stomach.
"Good enough, then." Weiss sniffed. "Just so long as you aren't a burden."
"I think Jaune will be able to pull his weight," Pyrrha said. "Assuming we all stick together, that is."
Weiss sighed, resting her head in her hands as if begging for patience.
Dinner had been nice, the four of them pooling resources and figuring out how to feed everyone, but the atmosphere was starting to feel a little tense again. Ruby fidgeted and looked at Jaune, but he wasn't paying attention to her.
Weiss spoke again, and when she did her tone was slightly more formal, the same way it had sounded when she'd apologized to Ruby earlier.
"I think maybe we should talk about things." she said. "There seems to be more than a little unspoken animosity here, and this really isn't the time or the place for social games. It doesn't seem fair to Ruby, even ignoring the fact that it's a distraction from the forest full of Grimm."
Pyrrha looked a little bit surprised at that, but Jaune nodded.
"I agree. I, uh, didn't want to bring it up just in case it made you uncomfortable..."
"I don't think you did anything wrong, Jaune." Pyrrha said.
"I won't comment on that," Weiss said, before Jaune could respond. "But I'm certainly not blameless. Incidentally, Pyrrha, I'm sorry if I've been sniping at you. It was stupid and defensive. I should've attempted to talk things out explicitly right away if I felt uncomfortable."
Pyrrha seemed a little taken aback, but she nodded, rubbing one arm with the other. "I'm...sorry too."
"Guuuuuys," Ruby whined, "What's going on?"
Weiss turned to her. "Another cultural misunderstanding, I suspect. The three of us had a rather mutually unpleasant social interaction earlier."
"What happened?"
"Well," Weiss said, looking around. "From my perspective, I attempted to have a conversation with Pyrrha, who I thought would be a useful ally to have at Beacon. I don't mean that to sound cold. I understand that friendships here are conceived of slightly differently, but I expected the relationship to be mutually beneficial.
"In any case, I attempted to have a conversation with Pyrrha, and was unable to because of frequent and crass interruptions from Jaune here. Once again, this is my perspective. I don't mean to imply that it's the only correct one, or that Jaune was being intentionally malicious. In any case, I grew somewhat irritated at these interruptions, and grew significantly more irritated when Pyrrha seemed to become angry at me as a result. Although she tried to be polite about it, it seemed clear that she wanted me to go away.
"It seemed to me that Jaune was being incredibly rude, and that somehow I was being blamed for it. Worse, my potential relationship with Pyrrha, which I valued quite highly, was being damaged. I said some unkind things which I now regret, and here we are."
Weiss stopped talking and took another bite of her fish, glancing around. Pyrrha was looking up at the sky, polite smile still on her face, but Jaune was looking right at Weiss.
"Crass comments?" Ruby asked, looking at Jaune. She suspected this was a rather drastic sort of cultural misunderstanding; Jaune seemed like quite the gentleman, in her opinion.
Jaune rubbed the back of his head again, grinning a little awkwardly.
"I...well, um. Uh. First of all, Weiss, thank you for being, well, open to talking, I guess. I'm sure it wasn't easy."
"Easier than you might expect, actually. It's strange people don't do it more."
"Right. Anyway, I'd feel like a real jerk if I wasn't open back. From my perspective, I was having a nice conversation with Pyrrha, I was happy and in a good mood, and then this other girl walks up, and, well..."
Was Jaune blushing?
"I happen to find this girl attractive. Not, like, I take leave of my senses or anything, but she's attractive, and, well...
"OK, promise not to laugh, but I don't really have much experience with girls. I mean, I grew up with sisters, but we didn't really live near many other people, and, um, I realized very quickly afterward that I might have been taking some of the shows I grew up watching too literally, which was obviously stupid, because I knew they were exaggerated, and I'm rambling now..."
Jaune coughed into his hand.
Ruby was having a little bit of trouble sorting through her emotions.
She felt something strange she couldn't unpack at the thought of Jaune being attracted to Weiss. She'd never really had a male friend before, and it was kind of weird to know one of her friends was attracted to one of her other friends. (If Weiss was even a friend yet.) She definitely felt sad that Jaune had gotten rejected, but she also felt relieved for some inexplicable reason.
She felt embarrassed for Jaune. Which was awful, she knew the last thing he probably wanted was everyone feeling embarrassed on his behalf, but there you go.
She felt an enormous amount of sympathy. Swap a couple of gender norms, and she could see herself giving the same blushing, rambling rant some day. Mixed with the sympathy, she felt a strange sort of reassurance. If even someone like Jaune could be this awkward sometimes, maybe there was hope for her.
She wanted to give him a hug, but she still felt sort of weird about the last one, and it seemed inappropriate right now.
"Anyway," Jaune continued, "I'm sorry I made you feel uncomfortable, Weiss. I didn't mean to, but it was still my fault."
"Apology accepted." Weiss said.
That seemed to settle that. All three of them turned to look at Pyrrha.
She was blushing too, oddly enough.
"Um..." she said.
There was a brief period of silence.
"I...I really hope this isn't rude." she said carefully, looking at Jaune a little nervously. "But, well, Weiss mentioned cultural misunderstandings before, and in Mistral, we don't really...that is, there are certain things we don't really talk about."
Pyrrha turned to look at Weiss.
"I feel guilty, because you were both so forthright, but I don't really..."
"That's perfectly fine," Weiss said, without missing a beat. "The goal here isn't some sort of quid-pro-quo exchange of emotional vulnerability, the goal is to get the group social dynamic into a healthy place. I don't understand why you became upset with me earlier, but if you don't feel like you can discuss it, I'm sure I'll be able to manage."
"I wasn't upset with you," Pyrrha said. "It was more that I was upset with...the situation. I don't feel like you did anything wrong, Weiss, at least before you tore into Jaune like that. And now I understand how you were feeling, at least."
Weiss nodded. "That's good enough for me. Is there anything else you'd like to resolve?"
Pyrrha shook her head, looking down at her lap. "No."
"OK." Weiss said. "Don't feel like that has to be final. If you change your mind, we can reopen this discussion later. Jaune, is there anything else you'd like to resolve?"
"No," he said. He seemed to have gotten his confidence back, looking Weiss right in the eye. "Weiss, thank you for doing this. It was...a little direct, maybe, but I think it was for the best."
Weiss nodded firmly, as if that settled everything. "Thank you. Alright, that was productive, but we should really move on to the main topic. Does anyone know how we might go about finding this temple?"
~o~O~o~O~o~
Ruby ran her fingers through the grass, trying to figure out how she could explain the thing she wanted to say. The grass was warm and dry from the sun. She closed her eyes, and she could just barely smell it between her fingers.
That meant nothing had grazed here recently. That strong, nostalgic smell everyone associated with grass was actually the smell of a freshly-cut lawn. When green leafy plants were ripped, whether by lawnmowers or grazing animals, they released a variety of chemicals to help the wound heal, some of which were volatile enough that they dispersed through the air and produced a strong smell.
It was amazing, when you thought about it, that you could tell whether grazing animals had been here hours or days ago, just by how the grass smelled. It was amazing. The world was so complicated, so insanely saturated with details, and all of them were connected.
That was what she wanted to explain. That everything was connected, and if they understood the world well enough, if they could just see those connections, they could follow them right to the temple.
Just like how she'd followed the Grimm to Weiss, and then Jaune. She'd wanted to know whether Jaune was north of her or not. Well, how would the world look different in those two cases? What was connected to Jaune's location? Which of those were connected to her, or could be?
Because that's what the method of tracking was. A long string of connections between Jaune's location, the mysterious senses of the Grimm, that Grimm's attention, the way that attention shifted the Grimm's body, the way the light from the sun reflected off that body, the way the carefully crafted lens in her sniper scope focused the light into her retina, the way the activations of the rods and cones in her eye stimulated electrical patterns in her brain when enough of them were hit at once - and the connection was complete, Jaune's location and her thoughts, linked by a causal chain.
It was beautiful. The world was beautiful. It took her breath away, when she stopped to think about it, to pause and let the grandeur of it overwhelm her.
"Ruby?"
Jaune's voice interrupted her thoughts.
"Do you have any ideas?"
Oh. She'd sort of lost track of the conversation. The sense of majesty unraveled as she looked up, rejoining the conversation, but she didn't mind. She could have it back whenever she wanted.
"Oh! Um, sorry," she said, "I sort of lost track of the conversation."
"You didn't miss much," Weiss said.
"You looked like you were thinking about something," Jaune added, voice hopeful.
Ruby's heart began to beat a little faster. She'd always been good at puzzles. They could probably figure it out, if they looked at the problem the right way.
She didn't feel like she could explain how everything was connected, not in a way that would make sense, and she didn't want to ruin it, to mumble her way through an explanation and leave an ugly facsimile of what she saw in people's heads.
That was fine though. She'd just start working on the problem.
"I, um," she said, voice a little squeaky. "I kind of have a method for working through problems. Do you mind if we run through it, real quick, if we don't have any other ideas?"
"I don't see why not," Pyrrha said cheerfully.
The mood of the group wasn't fully healed. They weren't exactly acting like friends yet, but it was leagues better than it had been half an hour ago.
"OK," Ruby said. "First off, what do we know? Any details you can think of, no matter how unimportant. No analysis yet."
She got out her scroll to jot them down.
Pyrrha started to speak, but Weiss interrupted her, reciting as though from memory. "You will make your way north, fighting through the legions of Grimm which inhabit the forest, and attempt to locate an abandoned temple which was discovered here long ago. The temple is no more than a day's travel on foot, but getting there will be a challenge for most of you."
Ruby nodded, writing down the salient parts.
"There was more, though." she said.
Weiss frowned. "I don't think there was."
"Just off the top of my head," Ruby said, "he said we would 'delve' into it. He said we would retrieve one of the relics they had placed there. Ooh, he said they placed them in the inner sanctum. There might have been other things."
"Ah. I see what you mean," Weiss said, looking thoughtful.
"I'm afraid I don't," Pyrrha said, looking between them. "How does knowing what we need to do once we get there help us find it?"
"No analysis yet!" Ruby said. "Any other facts?"
They all thought for a moment.
"We know that multiple pairs will delve into the same temple," Jaune said. Ruby flashed him a smile and nodded, writing it down. Almost certainly useless, but he understood. The tiniest facts could turn out to be important.
"We also know, or can at least assume, that some reasonable number of people will pass initiation," Weiss added. "That rules out a surprising number of scenarios."
"No analysis yet!" Ruby said again.
"Er...we know that we were fired into the forest at random," Pyrrha said. "So our ability to find it doesn't depend on our starting position."
Ruby rolled her eyes, electing not to say that they weren't doing analysis yet for the third time, and wrote it down.
They went back and forth like this for a bit, until they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Ruby used that time to look at all the things they knew, sorting them into likely and unlikely leads.
"Alright," she finally said, "now it's time for analysis. Let's start thinking implications. What does it mean that the place is a temple?"
There was silence for a bit, until Jaune said, hesitantly, "It means that people worshipped something there?"
Ruby nodded. "Mhmm, mhmm. And what does that mean?"
Weiss spoke this time: "It means it's old, for one thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the modern organized religions in Vale call their places of worship churches."
"I think that's right," Ruby said. "There might be cults that still build temples, but the building being old matches with Ozpin saying it was discovered long ago, and it being an important enough structure to use for initiation. And what does that mean?"
"How old is 'old'?" Pyrrha asked. "I don't know much Valian history."
"Probably pre-kingdom era," Ruby said.
"That helps a lot, then," Pyrrha said. "Or, I think it does. At least in Mistral, almost everything build in the pre-kingdom era is somewhere in the mountains."
"Something similar is true in Vale," Ruby said, "although there's more variety in the geographic features people used to hide from the Grimm. I think caves were a popular choice. Older Grimm can't fit inside, and younger Grimm have trouble navigating them to find people."
"They'd need food," Jaune piped up. "And water. It was harder to transport things over long distances in the pre-kingdom era. It was a lot like the frontier is today."
Ruby cast her eyes out to the river, thinking.
"Probably not in the middle of a forest, then," Weiss mused.
"I was just thinking the same thing!" said Ruby excitedly. She flipped off of her notes and over to the maps on her scroll.
"Let's see," she said. "It looks like the forest abuts a mountain range to the northeast. There are only a few sources of freshwater, the largest of which is this river, although there might be snowmelt if it's high enough up."
"Food is a problem if you go too high," Pyrrha said.
"If it's close enough to ground, they could just dig a well," Jaune added. "It's not that far down to the water table in most places."
This was amazing. Ruby didn't need to prod any more, she was having trouble integrating information as fast as they were generating it.
"Do you think we should pay attention to the word 'delve'?" Jaune asked.
"Absolutely," Ruby and Weiss said at the same time. They exchanged a look, and Weiss waved for Ruby to continue.
"Professor Ozpin chooses his words carefully," she said.
Weiss nodded firmly.
"In that case, it's probably underground. You don't exactly delve into the grounds of an open-air temple."
"But that means it could be anywhere," Pyrrha said, "even in the forest itself."
"Probably not deep in the forest," Weiss answered. "Having an 'inner sanctum' suggests that it's fairly large. With primitive transportation infrastructure, a large temple would require an even larger settlement nearby, and it can't all be underground. They'd need fields to grow crops, at the very least."
Ruby looked at the map again. "There are no terraces of arable land in the mountains like in Mistral, so they'd have to farm on the ground. If we're trying to find the people who lived near the temple, then we're probably looking for a cave system abutting a large tract of flat land. If we can find something that looks settleable, we can probably search for the actual temple entrance by hand."
Ruby frowned.
"These maps don't have enough resolution. Let's head north and see if we can find any karst. We can start with the area near where this river winds through the mountain range, maybe? That's probably the most likely place for a settlement."
There were nods all around. Ruby was starting to feel excited. Now that she knew Jaune was safe, she was finally able to relax and enjoy the actual initiation. She'd always found tests fun, and this one was no exception.
Although, now that she thought about it...
Ruby's stomach dropped out. She'd forgotten something very, very, very important.
Yang.
Was her sister OK?
Ruby felt a little bit of panic rising up, but she pressed it down, forcing herself to think.
Yang could take care of herself. She was probably fine.
But Ruby still wanted, no, needed to make sure her sister was safe.
Finding Yang would be hard. Ruby had landed close to Jaune, but Yang could be anywhere in the forest.
Although...there was one place she knew Yang would be headed, a single salient location they had both been connected to before they entered the forest. If Ruby's group got to the temple before anyone else, they could camp near the entrance and wait for Yang to show up.
Ruby set her mouth in a hard line, looking back at the map.
Maybe they could find the temple today, before the sun set.
~o~O~o~O~o~
Author's Notes:
* Thanks to Appliciousness for beta.
* The next update will be on Sunday again