It was 4 days before the Vytal Festival that the weather happened. It was the rarest weather of all- A Hurricane Blizzard. Due to this, Beacon had to shut it's gates to avoid damage to the school, which was 3 foot deep in snow. No student dared to go outside. Gary threw Legion out the door, and once it hit the ground, he transformed it into a thermometer, which he retrieved. "-100 degrees? Why aren't we freezing to death?"
Down in the boiler room, many flame Dust users were keeping furnaces lit, them going out every few seconds or so, due to the impossibly cold weather. "Harell,
take my shift." A woman said. Harell was a rather new person to the lighting of furnaces, but knew engineering well enough. However,
he accidentally overheated a furnace, causing the metal inside to melt, creating pools of liquid iron.
The emergency caused the other workers to panic, and their furnaces overheated as well. The boiler room exploded, killing everyone inside...And knocking out the electricity.
Team GRAY felt the tremors and saw the lights go out. "What the hell was that?" Gary walked outside of his dorm to see that everything was pitch black. There was no sun inside of this accursed weather, and Hurricane Blizzards last for 3 days, tops. Gary realized how dire the situation was; no one had power for 3 days. The only option was to stay inside and keep the buildings warm themselves.
Team JNPR ran outside of their dorms as well, Jaune running into Gary. "Hey, watch it! If you haven't noticed already, it's pitch black. There's no electricity going on."
Jaune slowly got up, legs hurting. "Oh, Uh, sorry. Do you know if this is permanent?"
Gary nodded. "Beacon runs on a completely separate power source than Vale. If it got knocked out, something must have destroyed it."
Suddenly, the students got a message from Ozpin on their tablets.
"Grimm have entered Beacon. Keep your wits about you. These are...Different. These Grimm stick to shadows, becoming completely invisible. They will whisper into your head, tricking you into following them into the darkness, and they will all come at you at once. Do not listen to them. YOU CANNOT FIGHT THEM!"
Was what the message said. Everyone was getting nervous now. If this was a threat that could not be killed, how were they to deal with this?
Team RWBY suddenly came bursting out of their dorms, too.
"Gary? Did you get the message?" Asked Blake. Gary nodded. Ruby looked worried. "Whatever these things are, we all have to stay together! It seems like they use mind tricks or whatever!"
Suddenly, they heard something move down the hall. Everyone screamed and fired a weapon down the hall, blowing open the wall to the other set of dorms in the building. Team CRDL went outside of their dorms.
Gary thought they were going to get angry, until he saw the nervous and scared looks on their faces. Cardin spoke in a shaky voice.
"Don...Don't worry...If this is any time to panic...This is the time. You didn't...See it, did you?" Gary shook his head.
"I'm not sure, but if it's in this building, everyone needs to stay with their teams."
The rest of team GRAY came out. Rhea was shaking. "Gary, I'm scared."
Gary hugged her. "Don't worry. I think everyone else is, too." Another group came out of their dorms,next to team CRDL.
They introduced themselves as team GEOD, Genocide, lead by an average looking girl named Genocide Forenzic III. "I see there's an emergency about. Got any ideas?" She asked everyone. No one had any ideas, really. And then one popped into Gary's head. "Ozpin said that these creatures cling to the shadows to become invisible. So if we can repair the power outlets, maybe we can actually kill these things." Everyone else agreed that was a good idea, until Yang spoke out.
"Wait, wait, wait. It's freezing out there." That statement made Gary rethink his plan. "We need a moving heat source...But first, I'm getting a candle. It's really damn dark." He walked inside of his dorm to light a candle. He had a little trouble, dropping matches on the ground and putting them back. He decided to take the matchbox with him, just in case.
All of a sudden, he heard screaming right outside. Gary put the candle inside of a lantern and ran outside. Only Yang and Ruby were there, looking like they just had a heart attack.
Gary spoke. "Wha-" Yang and Ruby screamed extremely loud, Gary covered their mouths. "Quiet! Shh..." Gary thought he heard footsteps going downstairs, the thumping going on for about another 20 seconds, until it was dead silent. "Now, what happened?"
Ruby was explaining in a cracked voice. "They got everyone else... They got dragged into the shadows, disappearing... Yang lit herself on fire, and they backed away... But everyone else is gone..." Gary stood up and held his lantern.
"I'm sorry. But we need to activate those lights. It's about a 15 minute walk to the main building, and there's an elevator to the basement, which I doubt works. The basement is where the powerbox is located. But how are we even going to get out-" Gary moved his lantern behind him,hearing whispers and seeing giant, red eyes. He put the lantern handle in his mouth and grabbed Yang and Ruby, all 3 of them screaming. He got the 3 a couple floors down.
He began to take deep breaths. "Alright. Is everyone okay?" They nodded.
"Alright. Where are we now?" Ruby answered. "2nd floor, I think. We still need to figure out how we're going to go outside...Wait! Gary, can you form a working flamethrower?" Gary transformed Legion into a Flamethrower. "Yupsy-daisy."
"Good. I've got a plan." Yang was impressed. "YOU have a plan? That's not very often." Ruby explained her plan.
"There's coolers made to resist temperatures inside of the basement. If you can lock the heat away in 3 of those, we might be able to escape! And I can lift them." Gary saw nothing wrong with it, and they went downstairs, onto the 1st floor, where the set of stairs stopped. "Hey, how do we get to the basement?"
Asked Yang. Gary answered. "It's through the storage room, for some odd reason. The storage room is a left from the mess hall, Cmon!"
Behind him, a nearly-silent whisper was being uttered, and dark clumps from the wall began to move onto the ground, forming a human figure, composed entirely out of darkness, with red eyes.
Gary noticed something out of the corner of his eyes and raised his lantern towards it. He saw a crowbar. "Good, we can use this to pry open the basement doors. Even though Legion would be better."
They entered the mess hall. Yang got a chill. "For some reason...I don't like this place." The 3 took a left, and the doors shut behind Ruby and Gary, leaving Yang in the mess hall.
"NO! NO! LET ME OUT!" Yang turned behind her to see the dark figure walking towards her. She fired a shell, only to see that it went completely around the missile. Yang banged on the doors more.
"GARY! RUBY! HELP ME! NOOOOOOOO!"
The door opened, and the duo saw Yang get dragged off into the distance by the darkness itself. "YANG! YANG!" Ruby was yelling. Gary grabbed her arm. "STOP! It's going to come after us, too. The only way we can save everyone is by getting that power active. Let's go!" Ruby sniffled a bit, holding back tears.
They opened up the basement door and went down into it. Suddenly, the basement boxes moved around, flying dangerously fast, until they formed oddly curved walls.
"Oh my god. It's a maze. A maze to the coolers."
Gary tried chainsawing through the boxes with Legion, but the boxes unleashed a shockwave that knocked Gary back, regenerating as they did so. "What the hell is this? Ruby, take the left. I'll go the right." Gary went to the right. He found another fork in the maze, and went left. He turned right, right, left, forward, left, until he reached a dead end. He turned around; only to get these words whispered in his head.
"Dead end!"
Ruby heard Gary scream. "GARY?!" Ruby found where Gary had been taken,
Legion lying on the ground in it's flamethrower form. "DAMN YOU! SHOW YOURSELF!" The Grimm suddenly formed it's shadows into the shape of a minotaur, with glowing eyes. "How's this?" It whispered.
It ran towards Ruby. She grabbed the flamethrower and pulled the trigger, igniting the beast with green fire and causing it to sink back into the ground as a shadow. She grabbed Gary's lantern and proceeded on. She must have been going for around 10 minutes until she found the coolers. Once she did, the boxes all went back to their positions, one that would've crushed her, had she not dashed out of the way. She heard a clapping sound going. "It's just trying to mess with me, it's just trying to mess with me..." She kept muttering to herself.
Ruby was on the brink of breaking and losing all sanity. She then remembered the coolers. She kept the flamethrower in a constant stream, until all of the ice in the coolers melted and it was warm, like a hot spring. She lifted it back upstairs, she cut open two holes in the bottom for her legs, and she walked outside. The cooler was working, she didn't feel cold.
However, through a slit she cut open, she could see the shadowy creatures, hovering around the snow. There were dozens of them, all casually floating around, like spirits.
Ruby made it to the main building unharmed. However, once she removed the cooler, the dark blobs suddenly stopped moving. Their eyes suddenly glowed red, and a gigantic, dark hand was emerging behind her, out of the snow. She ran forward, the hand absorbing more and more dark blobs until it became like a wave of pitch black water. She kept turning inside of the hallways, hoping to throw it off, but it was no use, the wave kept turning, as well. She entered the basement, flamethrower in hand, and lit 2 boilers that still worked.
The light acted as a shield against the darkness, leaving it unable to get in, and it eventually gave up.
Ruby was incredibly close to losing sanity, muttering to herself, making some paper dolls of her friends, until she found the hole in the wall that led to the power room.
She noticed a few pieces fell out of the giant generator, and she picked them all up. She found the places where the first 2 fit, and was almost there. When she went to place the 3rd one, the slot located in a place she had to reach into, a dark hand grabbed her, making her shriek. More dark hands grabbed her, attempting to drag her into the generator. She took this opportunity to insert the part. The darkness became angry, beginning to bite and claw at her arms. She could do nothing but resist the pain, as her free hand went for the switch that would activate the generator.
As soon as she felt like her arm was about to fall right off, she managed to flip the switch on the generator, light coming back to the school and the darkness taking a physical form. The dark hands grabbing her looked like little monkeys, and the generator grinded them into pieces. The dark blobs outside lost power, as well. She got out of the basement to find that all of the "darkness" was turned into Grimm, looking like giant lizards. She pulled out her scythe with a psychopathic smile.
"So, who's first?"
The lizards seemed to scream as Ruby hacked them to pieces, one by one, eating limbs, letting her full Hunger take effect. She went back to the dorms, finding Gary punching a lizard to death, ripping it's limbs off and then brutally snapping it's neck. He noticed Ruby come in. "Oh, hey. Everyone's back. Seems like everyone was in a state of suspension, trapped inside of shadows inside of this big, black room. Genocide got us out. She broke out of one herself, and she cut us all down, too. The lights came on when we couldn't defend ourselves any longer, and we kicked ass." Ruby kissed Gary on the cheek countless times. "I was close to snapping because you got taken! Everyone is back! Yay!" Gary pushed her off of him. "Yeah, everyone's back. Still, what were those Grimm? Why have they only been seen here...?
" Ozpin stood in his office. "Tell the rest of the Shadows to retreat. The students win this round, but this is only the beginning of the end." Glynda nodded and used a Dust spell, making all of the lizards retreat from Beacon.
Author's Notes: Hey, it's cold here in California. I also realized there's arctic storms going on. I watched the premiere of Teen Wolf season 4 recently, and I got this idea. But why did I make it so long? Anyways, unlike most Authors; I think it, and I type it. Next thing I know; Boom. Chapter done. I'm not sure how to continue the Festival arc, though. So I will need some time to think. Also, Genocide. After this chapter, I'll probably start on Genocide's story. She's another character I made up. That's all I can tell you. Until then, happy new year! And if you're one of those people freezing their butts off, I feel sorry for you.