Act 3 (Urban Panther) has officially begun!

A few notes. Urban Panther will have the same number of chapters as the last two acts, but it will be shorter overall. My Japanglish is also not very good, especially since Russian English has been drilled into my head quite a bit from the last act.

This is definitely lighter, fluffier, and a little bit sillier than the last act. Call it a little bit of a breather before Stolen Flame. Writing Blake is harder than Weiss but easier than Ruby, I think.

Also, this chapter is technically chronologically out of order. See if you can figure out why.

21: We Know That Cat Girl

Isaac

"Hey guys, I think you should see this," I called from behind my laptop.

"Why, what is it?" Sam asked from the living room floor.

I didn't want to spoil it without showing them first, so I just said, "Just come look. And Ruby and Weiss should see it too."

"Come on, Weiss!" Ruby said to her friend.

"Ugh, fine," I heard the ice heiress respond.

"Why are you looking through that otaku shit?" Sam asked from behind me.

"I was looking for Blake," I replied automatically. I wasn't lying, not technically. I was looking for Blake, but I did find of this stuff really neat, which is kind of embarrassing.

"So, did you find her?" Ruby asked excitedly.

"Maybe." I clicked the play button.

"Why does the video always have to be so crap?" Cliff complained immediately. While the video was 240p and vertical, probably taken by an idiot with a cellphone, it really wasn't that bad. Some people just had high standards.

"Just watch the video," Sam snapped.

The video was fairly simple and fairly short. It showed a bunch of girls dressed as cats in what looked like a Japanese apartment. What caught our attention was the girl in black and white removing a black bow from her head.

Ruby, of course, immediately blurted out, "Was that Blake?"

"I think so, what do you guys think?" I scrolled the video back and played the segment again. "It could just be a really good cosplay."

"I think it looks like Blake," Ruby confirmed.

"I can't be sure, but yes, that looks like Blake," Weiss confirmed.

"So, it's Blake?" Sam asked.

Weiss shrugged. "We should probably confirm it."

"But you think it is."

"Yeah!" Ruby shouted.

Sam slammed his hands on the desk. "Fucking finally, we've found Blake!"

Blake Belladonna

"So, what's going on?" I asked again.

After meeting the three faunus, they had enthusiastically said something about a friend that looked like me and invited me to come with them. With no idea about where I was or what was going on, I reluctantly followed.

Though they looked and acted friendly, I kept my guard up. Appearing harmless was a difficult skill to master, but a very useful one to have. I had no idea who these girls were, except that they seemed to be faunus and acted like schoolgirls.

I carefully observed my surroundings as I followed them through the streets. The signs were mostly in a language I didn't recognize, but there was some Valic mixed in. I noticed a lot of stores selling electronics or Anime or Manga merchandise (whatever that was), and a few street signs with foreign sounding names. The place was packed with people, more people than I had seen in one spot before. It was unnerving.

Soon the people thinned out and the brightly coloured stores gave way to dirtier, duller ones. The buildings became less glamourous and commercial- these were probably dwellings. One of the girls I was with gestured excitedly to one of the buildings. We walking into a small lobby, rode a tiny elevator, and another cat faunus waved us into a cramped apartment.

This was getting creepy. I hoped they weren't planning something, or worse, in with the White Fang.

Inside was a gathering of cat faunus. All cats. There were at least a dozen of them in the room. All spoke the same unrecognizable language, though some of them greeted me in broken Valic. I noticed one of them was dressed almost identically to me. She winked at me.

Somehow, it all felt off. I was far too disoriented to place it at the time, but it just didn't feel right. Not wrong as in a "it's going to go horribly wrong" kind of way, just... like something was missing. Like something didn't fit.

Then Yuko wanted to video the gathering. I didn't understand why. Didn't they realize they were opening themselves to persecution? I argued it, but I don't think she understood what I said, and I didn't understand what she said. I went along with it anyway, probably against my better judgement.

I was tired, I was confused. It was when we all made mistakes, and when we could least afford it.

"What is this?" I repeated as Yuko packed her camera- a bulky, crude-looking thing that was probably pretty old- into her bag.

"What is this?" she echoed, gesturing around. "Oh... oh! Gathering of Nekko- cat girl!"

"I understand who you are, but why are you gathering?" I repeated. I had asked this question before and gotten a nonsensical answer. Maybe this time it wouldn't get lost in translation.

One of the other girls, who had black ears, whispered something in her ear- her human ear. Yuko giggled. "Oh, it is just fun!"

I guess I had to accept that as the best answer I was going to get. I decided that I at least wanted to know about the girl dressed like me. "And why is... huh, where did she go?"

"She?"

"There was a girl here that was dressed like me," I said, looking around and seeing no trace of her.

"Oh, she is Blake Belladonna from RWBY. She has to go."

"I'm Blake Belladonna." Was that really so hard a concept to grasp?

I hadn't accidentally created a shadow clone in my confusion, had I? No. Unlike some people, I had better control over my Semblance than that.

"She is also. Akemi is name of her."

That didn't make any sense at all. "But you just claimed she was me."

Yuko laughed and I got the impression that what I was trying to say wasn't getting through to her at all.

"You keep ears hidden under the bow," Yuko said after I went quiet. "Why you do that?"

"I keep them hidden because I don't want the world to know who I really am," I replied carefully. "I want people to know me as a person, not as an animal or a thing. There's a lot of prejudice and hate in the world."

"Then why you wear them?" she asked, confused.

It was an odd choice of phrase, but I guess wherever this was, it was a place where Valic wasn't widely spoken. I knew what she was talking about and I was surprised by how casually she spoke of such a horrible act. Maybe it was more common here- wherever here was.

"I don't think I could stand to lose them. For better or for worse, they're part of me." I wiggled my ears for emphasis.

Before she could reply, I stood up and asked, "Yuko, where are we? Where is this place?"

"Tokyo, close to Akihabara."

"I don't know where that is," I admitted. "Are we in Vale or one of the other kingdoms?"

Yuko laughed at that. "You so funny! This is Japan!"

"Where's Japan?" I asked.

"Here!" The girl energetically strolled up to a large map labelled "The World" attached to a wall. It was definitely not Remnant. There was one large continent labelled "Asia", a smaller one attached to it labelled Africa, a small one labelled Australia, and two joined ones labelled North America and South America. And if I was looking at the smaller labels right, there were at least a hundred regions, all implied to be populated.

None of it made any sense. It had to be some kind of joke. "What is that?"

"It's the world! Earth!" Yuko exclaimed. She pointed to a chain of islands off the coast of the large continent. "This is Japan!"

Then she pointed to parts of North America. "You are from United States? Or you are from Canada?"

"I'm from Vale," I said half-truthfully. The map must have been a joke- it looked nothing like Remnant and Vale wasn't even on it. Where was here, really?

How did I get here? It was then that I realized I couldn't remember.

It wasn't a matter of hitting my head and ending up somewhere else, or being drugged. I would have remembered that. But I couldn't remember what happened just before I got here, and I couldn't remember anything concrete from recently. Just feelings and images that fluttered away. I remembered the docks, confronting Torchwick and the White Fang, and I remembered the break at Beacon...

"You so funny!" Yuko repeated, interrupting my thoughts.

I grabbed her gently by the shoulders, my yellow eyes staring intensely into her brown ones. "Yuko, I'm serious. I don't know where I am, how I got here, or what I'm going to do."

She looked concerned before making an exaggerated waving motion and proclaiming, "Oh, if you don't have lodging, why you didn't just say so! You can stay with me! My parents no speak english, but they are okay."

Well, at least I had a place to stay, even if everything else was insane. My hand brushed against the grip of Gambol Shroud. That was one friend I could always rely on.

Sam

"Looks like we've got a message back," I announced. Right away, everyone began crowding around my laptop.

"Can we make this quick?" Isaac complained. "I start at eight thirty tomorrow."

"Nobody cares, Isaac," Ben snapped half-jokingly.

"Calm down, guys." I read out the message.

"Yes is Belladonna Blake beautiful. She can look very nice but confused about thing. Us is the Akihabara district of Tokyo. I confuse it, translating to just get lost in your message. Sorry for my confusing English. She can be of course the companions come, Weiss Ruby RWBY area of many things like play of costume. Following are some e-mail."

"Did she use Google Translate?" Cliff muttered.

"Probably," Isaac replied.

"So, what do you think?" I asked.

"What do you think?" Isaac reflected.

"I don't know, it's all butchered," I said. I looked at Cliff. "What do you think?"

He threw his arms into the air. "What the hell, I'm less Japanese than Isaac!"

Isaac grinned. "I'll take that as a compliment."

"Dude, you have squinty eyes and your hair is Asian," I told him. "Your mom barely speaks English."

"Fuck off, I'm culturally Canadian," Cliff insisted. "For Christ's sake, I don't even like anime!"

I shrugged. "Okay, whatever, just tell us what you think."

"Without confirming or denying any cultural heritage, I would classify this as a maybe," he evaluated mock-thoughtfully.

"I think we should go and check this out," Isaac said.

"So we should just rush in without a plan or even decent knowledge of the situation?" I said sarcastically.

"Yeah, that's pretty stupid," Cliff agreed.

Isaac shrugged. "It worked last time."

"That's terrible logic," Cliff pointed out.

Isaac was persistent. "It's Japan, not Ukraine. The worst case, we got a trip to Japan, preferably with RT's money."

"You people are idiots," I heard Weiss mutter.

Cliff heard her, too. "Hey! You may be a badass huntress in a prestigious combat academy, but do you know what I'm in? Computer Information Technology. I don't run ops every day."

Um... what? I voiced, "What are you even trying to say?"

Isaac muttered. "Yeah, I mean, what was that?"

"I think he's trying to say you don't know what you're doing," Weiss snorted.

"Do you think they'll actually give us money?" I asked, changing topics before Cliff could respond.

"Ruby can do her puppy dog face on live webcam," Cliff jokingly suggested.

"Which one?" Ruby asked rhetorically. Well, at least, I hope it was rhetorically.

"If not, well, it's not like you guys are poor," Isaac muttered. "Look, we can try to confirm if she's there, but we might not be able to know until

"Can't we ask for a video?" Jen suggested.

"We couldn't tell from the video," I pointed out.

"It was a pretty bad video," Ruby said.

"I think we should check it out in person," Isaac repeated.

I glared at him. "You just want an excuse to go to Japan instead of doing school, don't you?"

He smirked. "Yeah, kinda."

"And you want to spend someone else's money, too, don't you?"

"Yeah. Preferably Monty's, but like I said, you guys have money too."

There was a chorus of objections, some more rude than others, and head shaking.

I sighed. "So, who actually does have money to burn and wants to visit Tokyo?"

We all stared at Ben. Hey, his fault for always bragging.

"Oh, fuck you..."