Blake was expecting the grimm to be on top of the dorms but hadn't particularly wanted it to be there. All the practical reasons for why it shouldn't be there existed, things like possibility of being spotted, the poor footing which could lead it to make excessive noise, so on, so forth. There was also the practical problem of having to deal with a canine grimm, something which was a bit less than ideal for a cat faunus. No personal reasons, just instinct. It made things just a little bit awkward. She trusted it, mostly, she just didn't really feel comfortable with it like Ruby or Yang did.
And that's why when she pulled herself over the edge of the roof she let out a bit of a sigh. The wolf was sitting on its haunches with its ears perked, probably listening to something in the building. It was a bit pointless since the beast didn't understand language from what the Faunus had seen. It could indicate things but what it wanted from an object or person was unclear. Well, that's what she knew from what Yang had said. Blake had seen the grimm just about as many times as Yang but hadn't prodded the grimm for information before. Wasted time, probably.
"You really shouldn't keep testing your luck." Blake warned. She spoke because standing in silence with the grimm as it tried to get its point across would have been incredibly awkward. She'd follow Yang's example here, maybe it could understand some things? "What do you want?"
The grimm looked as if it was thinking for a moment. It tilted its head to one side for a moment before picking a scroll up off the ground and activating it. Blake was about to ask it if it had stolen that one but held her tongue. The answer to that was undoubtedly 'yes' and asking would yield no results. She watched curiously as the beowolf picked up a memory extension and slotted it into the screen.
Alright, that's a little bit more suspicious. It couldn't have stolen that from a store, could it? As she was thinking about that the grimm approached on three limbs carefully like some sort of dog-gorilla. She took a half step backward and it immediately stopped and tilted its head again. Weiss isn't this jumpy about the grimm and she's seen it twice. Blake mentally chastised herself before approaching to see what it was trying to show her.
Red finish? That's not something they hand out here. The faunus took the offered device and checked it quickly to see where it could have come from. The white style was common and often handed out to students since they were high-utility and fairly robust. They were expensive mostly for their ability to detect the aura around it and turn it into a reading a hunter or huntress could use on the fly in combat. Red ones like this were often used by law enforcement or experienced hunters. It lacked the aura detection and that allowed it to have stronger shielding. What has it been up to that it found a military-grade scroll? Someone would notice it had gone missing and used internal tracking to get it back.
Focusing again on the screen itself she was surprised to see it was… A kid's learning program. Specifically one for the deaf. It helped them learn what words meant in context by playing a little scene then letting someone select a word during the scene to see what it would do. The green outlined person was the one influenced so it was really difficult to miss what was going on. She'd seen advertisements for it online every once in a while and sometimes ads ran for it before vids… She was starting to mentally cut herself off when a question popped up because there would be no answer.
When she looked back up to the grimm it seemed to nod before taking the scroll back and inserting another memory extension. It looked at the screen for a moment before poking at a few things with some intent. So it made good use of Jaune's scroll when it had the chance.
She was surprised when a smooth and slightly accented voice said 'dictionary' in a deliberate way. The grimm snuffled before holding the tablet out for Blake to see. One the screen was a listing of words in alphabetical order with definitions. It was, as the voice clip had said, a dictionary. She nodded absentmindedly and swiped across the screen to see that it was actually a very detailed dictionary-thesaurus-encyclopedia. Selecting the word apple gave a general definition, synonyms, antonyms (somehow), and a long entry on what apples were and where they were grown, so on and so forth.
She had to return to the home screen to check the brand, but once she was there the emblem of the Remnant Compendium further compounded the oddity. It was an expensive resource and renowned for being an excessive reservoir of knowledge that included texts that came from antiquity. She wanted one of these but her scroll didn't have nearly the capacity for it. Hell, she was surprised an external drive had the capacity for it.
The grimm still looked a bit expectant so she spoke this time. "Yes, it's a dictionary."
It grumbled it's agreement as Blake continued to poke around the device. One contact, zero personalized settings, no files, no music, no net history. It has literally nothing in it. That was impressively bizarre. She had managed to keep from asking any questions rhetorical or otherwise until now but she had to shake her head. "How did you break into a factory to steal a newly minted scroll?"
Handing the device back she looked at the grimm expectantly. It of course didn't do anything because it didn't know what was being asked of it. After a moment she pantomimed using the device before pointing to the grimm, which huffed again before doing whatever it was doing. It sat on its haunches and turned so that Blake could see if she stood at an angle.
It started with the scenes. At the menu where the player could choose the scene fifteen of a hundred had been completed, according to the counter at the top of the screen. It chose one that it had already done and watched intently as the scene played out. It showed a little girl walking up to the counter of a fast food restaurant ordering some fries then leaving. It was fairly short, probably thirty seconds, and when it was done it returned to the start. A black bar along the bottom showed five words that could be chosen.
As the girl approached the door the grimm selected 'close' which made the doors slam shut, the girl walked into them and the scene paused again asking if it wanted to return to the beginning of the scene. It was fairly simple, and the grimm seemed to understand since it used the end of a finger to circle around the door. It selected the word and copied it, though it checked by putting the word into the scroll's search box to check. It spent twenty seconds checking each character to see if they were right.
Certain, it unloaded the scenes and loaded the dictionary. It typed the word in manually while using the word it had pasted as a guide. It would check to make sure an entry would show up then to Blake's confusion emptied the search results. It returned to the main screen and then started leafing through 'manually' in the dictionary format. It approached the 'c's and then compared the second letters to the 'l' until it found all the words that started 'cl'. It took a good minute but eventually it found close the manual way.
Having now found it twice it pressed a speaker icon and the same smooth voice from before said 'close'. It played the same word four times before looking to Blake who stared back for a moment before getting the implied request.
"Close." She repeated. The grimm seemed pleased before looking down at its scroll and collapsing it. It looked expectantly at Blake who nodded. "Same thing." Blank. "Yes, closed."
The grimm was pleased and returned to its work to find another example. Blake watched for a few minutes before she came to believe that this was intentionally set up. By having the child's scenes and the dictionary the wolf would eventually learn language. It would take a while and would be crude but the understanding would eventually develop. It also would explain why it had access to the materials. It would be impossible for a beast to find an untouched scroll and even more so to purchase and activate the programs. Someone had gone out of their way to invest money in the wolf.
Who? In all of Vale teams RWBY and JNPR were the only ones that knew there was a grimm inside the walls. At least they should be. Of course the scroll disproved that. There was a chance that the beowolf had come across all of it in a fluke but that seemed incredibly unlikely. So someone found the grimm and decided that it needed to learn, and in deciding that they must have known that it was ancient.
So a teacher from one of the academies or a hunter. Probably someone on campus then, but who?
Her ruminations were going nowhere fast so when the grimm prodded her so it could demonstrate its process again. She watched, distracted, as the grimm tried to puzzle out a much more difficult scene that had the words 'stop', 'go', 'yes', 'no'. It knew what yes and no meant but was having trouble discerning what the difference was to their parallels. They seemed to have similar results despite the fact they were obviously different words. She tried to point out the differences after a while when it was obviously struggling, to minimal success.
Over the next half hour or so she determined a few things about learning a language when you had no concept of language. First, imperatives with nuance were almost indistinguishable from other imperatives without nuance, and they were nearly impossible to explain in simple terms, so it was better to just lump them all together. Nouns were easy, an apple was an apple. Just don't try and explain why a fruit was somehow all of those things. Verbs in general were easy, keep them simple. Running and dashing and sprinting all meant the same things in general, just try to keep them straight. Finally, the only adjectives worth explaining were colors.
In fact the colors were fairly useful. It used colors to refer to people, Blake herself as Black, Weiss as white and so on. Mostly based off of hair color as it could see, which she decided worked just fine. Actual names would work better, but she left that for now. Jaune and Sun probably would find being called Yellow 2 and 3 annoying after a while.
By the end of the hour she was actively trying to teach the grimm some of the concepts with basic luck. She had a bunch of nouns nailed down, some basic verbs, a few color adjectives, enough that they could command and query of the wolf easily. It remained that it couldn't speak, but there was no getting around that. It didn't even try to speak as some animals did in movies, it just listened and huffed or grumbled its yes and no. Which were actually surprisingly clear since they sounded functionally similar most the time.
The scroll beeped to let them know it was low on power and the screen flashed twice. How long has it had this? More questions she was asking herself. Three week battery life and it's used all of it up. Hm.
Blake was feeling better about the grimm after doing the teaching but it was still a bit discomforting to let it know where they slept. Eventually her better nature won and she took the scroll in her hands. She put in her contact info, Ruby's and Yang's. They were mostly just in case since she was planning on doing something specific. She pulled her own scroll out and started a video call which the grimm answered without any hesitation. Probably the shiny 'answer call button'.
She jumped down from the roof to the dorm window, sliding inside before walking to the bathroom to grab a mirror. In the screen she could see the almost confused gaze of the beowolf who seemed to be shifting in place.
Mirror in hand she walked to the window again and found the charger which she used to keep her scroll powered during the night. Taking the cord she set it on the sill then carefully placed her scroll there and plugged it in. The mirror now came into play as she attempted to position it so the grimm could see it was being plugged in too. She then switched from camera display to screen display and activated a cursor to circle the power indicator which was now yellow and showing a small charging animation.
She could hear the wolf make a sound of understanding. It didn't move, probably because it could hear the sounds of people exiting their dorms to head to dinner. Instead Blake climbed back up the building and took the scroll from it. She pointed to the sun and made a circular motion which she had managed to get across as sign language for day and stopped when her finger was pointing to where the sun would be in the morning, then pointed down.
The grimm mirrored it in acknowledgement, which actually surprised Blake. Not because it did so, that was expected since she managed to teach time of day to it in terms of a hand, but how well it did it. Beowolves had a lot of lateral motion in their arms but not a lot of vertical, and the wolf had just made a full circle easily, something that Blake was pretty sure should be impossible. An evolutionary trait? She guessed. This was the first time she had seen any evidence aside from the white armor. Internally shrugging she inclined her head to the grimm and waved a goodbye, which it returned.
They parted ways then, Blake off to dinner and the Grimm to do whatever it did during the night.
AN: Chapter 14 next where the influence of the polls shall be exercised! So far it looks like Yang and Glynda are going to be involved. Atlas is only a point behind, and Coco/Ozpin are only two. Regardless, it shall be exciting :D