Chapter 24

"Nope."

The small redheaded girl handed back the notebook to Ruby before standing back onto the chair and leaning into the remains of the ruined washing machines.

"Ah, really? What's wrong with this one?" Ruby looked at the seventh in what was now a series of possible designs for Ume's new arm.

The girl in question didn't even turn from her task before replying.

"Well, for one, the design you made shows very clearly that it's also a gun."

"So? Guns are cool!"

"Guns are dangerous." She countered as she rummaged around in the destroyed machine.

"You have a sword on your arm!"

She actually rose her head up from the mess and looked at Ruby.

"A sword cannot misfire, overheat or, in this case, hit anyone by accident who isn't within my very short arm's length. Can you hand me a wrench?"

Ruby crossed her arms and pouted.

"Those things only happen if you mishandle a gun. If you keep regular maintenance it's perfectly safe."

"Uh huh, what makes you think I know how to do that?"

"I can teach you!" She squeaked out the same argument she gave Ume the other six times.

"Which won't be necessary because my new arm is not going to also be a gun."

She started to glance around towards the tool box and tried to absently lean over to get the wrench while leaning over the edge of the damaged machine. The dirty t-shirt rubbed against the metal edge, but she was still short and her arms dangled as she tried to reach for the wrench. Ruby reached over and picked it up, handing it to her.

"Thank you. Anyway, it also can't have an external motor design, it'll snag the fabric of my sleeve."

"But there's not enough room otherwise, not with your sword." Ruby turned and picked up a burnt ruined husk. "And if this happens every time you... do whatever you did, it's clearly not efficient."

The burnt piece of wood was intricately carved with more of the squiggles Ume called seals. Several of the squiggles were burnt all the way through, making round holes that went through it.

"That's why we're making a metal sheath this time, though I need to get enough metal out of here and…" Ume seemed to be tugging hard on something until Ruby heard a clang and the redhead held out in her single hand the washing machine motor. "Still in one piece. It's pretty small too."

She turned it over, looking at it. It was about the size of two or three apples bunched together.

"It's huge. You're the one who said we needed to stay compact." Ruby looked forward. "What are you going to do with it anyway?"

"Take it apart, see how it works, see what I can replicate and link to the seals." She set it down on the table. "I mean, what else is anyone going to do with it?"

"Not much after you destroyed it." Ruby shrugged.

"Hey! That wasn't my fault! They took my clothes without my permission."

"They were trying to be nice, though I guess it makes sense that if someone washed it with all the things you could carry they would come out like that."

Ruby was well aware that Ume's other two arms were destroyed in the washing machine as well, she had been nearby and been one of the first to get to the washing room where the machine had exploded leaving three fourths of Team CRDL dazed and confused.

"Wait, does that mean you caused the first…"

"As I said, it's not my fault." Ume huffed out. "And don't go telling anyone about it either. I get enough flak from Professor Goodwitch about what happened."

"Is that why she doesn't like you?"

Ume shrugged her shoulders as she hopped off the chair.

"That or maybe because of that comment about her skirt. I know you said they're combat skirts, but isn't it just awkward jumping around in that thing?"

"Not really." Ruby said. "They're layered after all, and I wear tights too just in case. I don't think Weiss's skirt would flip up even if she didn't have the layers, her glyphs mess a lot with gravity and stuff."

"Really? Is that how she can fight in heels?"

"I don't know for sure, I do know she can dance in them though."

"You've seen her dance?"

"She does it when she vacuums." Ruby said, flicking out her scroll. "Wanna see?"

"Damn right I do."

Ruby leaned down to hold the scroll level with the smaller girl. It was a bit surreal dealing with someone shorter than her. While there were some people in her class who were, she didn't really hang out with them and all of Yang's friends were bigger than her cause they were 17. It was nice in a way, it didn't make her feel like the odd man out at the lunch table. No, even if she was the same height as Ume the other girl would definitely be odder, though in a cool way.

The girl let out a light laugh as the video ended with Weiss realizing she had been caught and yelling at the camera for its deletion.

"She should dance more often, she looks more peaceful that way."

"Well, it's not like there's much call for it. Though I guess there is going to be a dance for the festival."

"Guess that'll be fun." Ume said as she grabbed the notebook off the table, her still greasy hand smudging the pages a little bit.

"Anyway, we still need to get some proper blueprints laid out and some designs. You did say the engraver can rotate the metal?"

"It'd be easier to do if it's a sheet, but yeah, it should."

Ruby picked up the design. "Is it really no good?"

"Actually I like the design you did for the multi-jointed pulley system, been having trouble getting it to not snag on our earlier designs."

Ume pointed at the picture with her wrapped sword arm. It was still covered in the tape and cushioning to prevent its edge from hitting anything.

"You like it?" Ruby said. "I have a similar setup in my baby, though not quite as many. It turns and locks when I set it in scythe mode."

Ruby looked at the picture and started making notes.

"Though we'll need some metal wheels in there if you want anything sturdy. I can't believe you made that arm almost entirely out of wood."

"Metal is more expensive where I come from, and as I keep reminding you, that and all my previous arms are prototypes. As will this one be. Though if we can get an engraver to accurately put the seal into a metal sheath it will fix the overheating problem when I make lightning."

Ume set the paper down on the desk with the other scattered torn and mussed up notes she had retrieved from the wreckage.

Honestly, Ruby couldn't make heads or tails of anything without pictures. Ume had read them to her and remade a few, but the parts about squiggles made no sense to her, or how it was powered.

"If we could get a dust battery in there it'd be way easier to run the engine."

"Until it runs out, and then I need another dust battery."

"Why are you so firm on that, couldn't you just get a bunch and store them in your wraps?"

"It won't matter, because they aren't rechargeable. Dust isn't common where I'm from, Ruby, so once I run out that's it and that means back to square one." She leaned over the desk. "Chemical batteries might work, but then I have to keep with the possibility that they might break and burn the inside with battery acid."

"Well, if you have to use the squiggles, couldn't you just change them to get more energy?"

"The seals work by collecting ambient electricity to charge, so I don't know what increasing the juice for inputting would take or even what it would do. They aren't my seals, so trying to change the design would have, well, explosive results."

"But why? It's just a design, a weird design, but a design. Why would changing something change it so much?"

"Because seals are, well, they're like..." The girl's face paused in thought. "I guess, it's like a hunter weapon, like it's personal. An extension of that person's style and preference. Sure, other people could use it, though not as well, and sure, someone could try and change the weapon, but not being the maker it could be disastrous. Where I'm from seal making is considered an art because people who make seals have to make them from the ground up. There is no method that is actually repeatable, it's all from scratch so no two seals from different makers are alike."

"Then why don't you make your own seals?"

"The short version is, I really don't have the patience, or the mindset." She sort of bobbed her head left to right. "I've tried, but the entire process frustrated the hell out of me. The advice I got on it didn't help, nor did trying to find "my style"." She used air quotes.

"I dunno, I've always prefered the mechanical side of things. Machines are predictable, even more complex machines are usually just variations of a handful of different parts which all do roughly the same thing, just on a different scale. There's also a lot more solid knowledge about it and manuals in stuff just about dealing with it, so you don't have to just go in blind and hope it works. It's just not the same for sealing. It's why I leave that much to my sister. She designs all the seals I use."

"She must be pretty good at it with all the things you do with it."

"I actually have no scale for how good or bad she is honestly, because people who make seals are so rare. A lot of the time, the stuff she makes just doesn't work. Sometimes it works, but it's too strong, or too weak, and almost all the time it blows up in her face. About the only thing she can make reliably is storage seals."

Ruby really didn't get it, but then she didn't get the seals at all. By all accounts they made no sense, but then maybe that's why Ume didn't understand them either. Ume, despite all the things she did or could do that didn't make sense, she generally did. As far as Ruby could tell she didn't say things she didn't mean, she didn't do anything without a purpose and she didn't mince words or hesitate when she needed help on something.

"Well, those are pretty amazing." Ruby pointed out as she looked at the curly designs.

"We're still going to have to work around it, the energy output is at least scalable for now." Ume said, picking up a pencil and starting to sketch. "A motor would help with that, but there's the issue of weight and balance."

"You're pretty strong, right?" Ruby leaned down. She knew the girl had picked up Jaune the other day from what Pyrrha told her. It was really startling to learn that Jaune had such a severe allergy.

"It'd still throw me off, and it is a prototype for a model to be used by everyone." She looked up. "Which is why, it has to be lightweight, easy to use, easy to maintain and if possible easy to produce inexpensively."

"That sounds like it would be really hard to do."

Ruby knew her weapon alone probably cost thousands of lien to make. It used top grade materials after all, it was the same with many hunter weapons, they were designed to be top of the line and last against harsh combat conditions. What Ume was trying to make, even if it sounded simple, was probably fairly complex. While there were replacement limbs available, they were really expensive. A lot of older hunters couldn't afford them and had to retire as a result.

But then, if it could happen, then a lot of people would certainly be happy. Ruby couldn't fault Ume on that at all. People got hurt all the time and though some people with semblances could heal it was not only rare, but it was almost impossible to find someone who could regrow limbs.

"Oh, almost certainly, but anything worth doing is rarely ever easy."

The redhead smiled at Ruby as she picked up the motor again.

"Now let's crack this open and see how we can integrate it into prototype number eight."

I thought I was pretty good at mechanics. I believed I had a good grasp of machines and how they operated. I wasn't an engineer of course, but I could understand how the strain and energy of a machine could be processed so it could do a task. I knew how to make things straight so they didn't tangle, and move things around. It seemed to be working, that it would manage to move properly with the new parts. Until the damn thing burst into flames.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…"

I practically hurled the smoking chunk of metal and wood off my arm across the room. The outburst startled Danny, who was sitting on the table grooming himself. He then jumped off the table and ran to the corner, away from the smoke.

I ran as well, though towards it as I held out my arm and summoned a small water jutsu to douse the flames. There was a fire extinguisher on the wall, but you needed two hands to operate it and I was still currently down to one. The water smothered the flames, but it was still a smoking wreck. Thankfully the workshop was well ventilated and the smoke was taken away as I approached the mess that had taken up several days work.

Picking up the arm, I flipped it over to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. It was burnt on the inside, though not completely destroyed. I could see the smoke still seeping out of the small engine that was set to the side. It wasn't a very strong engine, just one put together from a kit to try and see if it could take some of the burden of movement off the seals. But now it was burnt out completely.

Reaching inside, I pulled out the metal sheath for my sword to examine the seal engraved with a machine. I'd recreated the design and we'd put it flat and bent it to shape, I'd then embedded the special ink into the design before putting a coating on it to prevent it from washing away. The design was intact and still plenty warm at that.

"Maybe it pulled in too much power."

Danny started to move closer as I looked at it, smelling the smoke and making a wincing face.

"It's not that bad." I said as I started to open the chassis.

It was around that time my scroll started to vibrate. Pulling it out I saw the timer I'd set for dinner had gone off. I let out a sigh and stood up.

I was on strict orders not to push myself after what happened in the forest by the nurses. Which meant I couldn't skip meals or stay up late. I tried to explain what happened, but that just made the nurses even more concerned about it. Honestly, it's like they'd never heard of simple exhaustion before.

Given, chakra exhaustion was a little different. Sometimes it came as a massive crash, much like the crash of adrenaline that lasted a few days, sometimes, like what happened to me, it made you catatonic. It was because the body was running on minimum chakra expenditures, so it drained someone's focus and made them only react to immediate threats. If you added combat drugs to the mix it amplified the effect and caused you to simply black out. I was well acquainted with that of course, but since I didn't have any combat drugs I hadn't done so since the concussion forced me to during initiation.

Not that I had much cause to exhaust myself here.

Letting out a sigh, I leaned down and Danny jumped on my shoulders as I headed off. I started absently checking my messages. I had one or two from Neo, mostly she wanted me to check out a cafe, I.E. she wanted me to pay for her to clean out their ice cream stocks, a couple of updates from Coco's fashion blog that I followed on the Codex, a message from Nora saying she accomplished her goal of getting Jaune to work out this morning with accompanying pictures of him laying exhausted flat on his back, some links to interesting history articles from Oobleck and some reminders for end of semester testing I got from the student media network.

What I didn't get was a message from Ruby, which was unusual since she had gone into town to look at the prices for some better engines and send me pictures. Skimming through I sent a text to her.

Hey, what happened to you today?

I started walking out before I got the buzzing back.

It's complicated.

I blinked as I walked out the building and texted back.

Complicated how, did you forget about the engines?

There was the dots of an incoming message as I headed into the cafeteria. The buzz came while I was in line and I didn't look until I'd sat down.

There was an argument between Weiss and Blake, then Blake ran away and I'm not sure what to do.

An argument? About what?

I started eating before the message came back.

I don't know if I can talk about it.

I tapped my fingers, did I want to know? Well, yes, but the point was, should I know? I didn't know Blake very well. Well, scratch that, I didn't talk to Blake very often. Blake was very good at schooling her emotions, so nothing really showed. The only reason I could tell what she was feeling was because I was effectively cheating. In fact, she hid very well that she was almost as angry as I had been when Cardin started bullying Velvet. It was part of the reason I was so upset neither she nor anybody on her team did anything about it.

I also knew Danny liked her, enough so that he would seek her out whenever he felt the urge and she would sometimes physically bring him back to me. Danny wasn't generally a bad judge of character and Blake always handled him gently, as she did me when I passed out in the library. Still, it sounded like a private matter and even if Ruby really did want to talk about it, it was probably something better discussed in person rather than over a scroll or by text.

Did you want to go into town tomorrow to look at parts? The engine blew up when I tested it earlier so we'll need to go find a new one.

There was a pause on the other line before she typed again.

I guess, but what if Blake doesn't come back by morning?

I let out a sigh and typed.

Assuming she has left Beacon it's not likely she'll leave Vale. In the city there are few things that can compete with a huntress, even one in training, so I doubt she'll be in any immediate danger.

I set my scroll down and started to eat again before the words hit the screen.

What if she doesn't come back?

I leaned down and thought about it. Could Blake probably disappear into Vale and never come back, yes, yes she could. Would she? Depends really, but she had just settled in with her team. She had been apprehensive about her surroundings for a good bit before finally relaxing into her everyday surroundings. She liked her team, she liked her partner and she liked Beacon, especially the library. She probably wouldn't just leave and not come back, especially if she just ran off. She probably left all her stuff behind, otherwise they would have been able to catch her. Still, Ruby was clearly worried and unless I gave her something more solid than "she probably wouldn't do that because of logic" it wouldn't really cut it. People weren't logical, after all.

Then we'll just have to find her and bring her back.

I didn't get an immediate reply for that, but then I probably wouldn't. If it reassured her, it reassured her. Regardless, I started thumbing through the scroll and assessed my options. I'd essentially just made a promise to Ruby. Ruby who helped me with my own projects with enthusiasm without asking anything in return, Ruby who was essentially Jaune's best friend, and Ruby who despite a rough start had been part of the group to safely get me to Beacon after I passed out in the forest. It wouldn't do for me to be unprepared to help her when the time came.

Going onto the Stray. Been a bit hectic, I got suspended from my job, which, well it's not great. I'm thinking of opening a , though I have to think about what I can offer. Obviously I wouldn't make chapter releases only, as fanfiction is supposed to be free fun. I suppose I could do art, you guys have seen some of my drawings on tumblr, I could also make jewelry or give story advice if someone really wanted it. I wouldn't take too much input on the story, though I'll take song requests. Still not sure how to do that, but well I need to get another job, hopefully in my field now that I've graduated but that's not likely right away, if only because of the situation of companies firing senior staff so hey can be replaced with new people they can pay less than the people who were fired re-enter the field looking for the same entry level positions I'd apply for but beating me out cause they have years of experience.

It's not a great situation for college graduates.

Anyway, I'll be trying to alternate every other week with PITD and Sugar Plums, I got a bit delayed because I live in the southeastern US and had some difficulty connecting due to outages caused by Hurricane Irma. Another hurricane is coming in about a week, which is going to be super funtastic.

Anyway, reviews are welcome.