"What have you done."

Miltia tilts her head back off the edge of Jaune's bed and glowers at the finger currently depressing the stop button on her music player. "Hey, that was totally my song."

"What. did you do. to my room."

His imaginary friend smiles—evilly, and quite so—at Jaune's squinty-eyed glare. "Your room was so boringly drab," she drawls. "I just gave it a little personality."

Personality… is putting it lightly. She might as well detonated a small sun in his room. He can't even imagine how she managed to swap out his bedsheets and curtains with blonde fabrics, paint his walls and ceiling a garish goldenrod, and cover his desk, closet, lamps, even his bathroom door in neon yellow duct tape within the four hours it took him to attend afternoon classes and scarf down a quick dinner.

"You told me yellow was your color," she simpers.

"But…" Okay, so maybe he'd told her the meaning of his name and how it was supposed to reflect his personality and individuality, but… "Just… no."

Melanie braces her arms against the floor and performs a back handspring off his bright canary bedsheets. {Ha, you'll never fall asleep with that color of fabric in your eyes.} "Admit it, Jauney-boy," sings Miltia. "It's totally your thing."

"It's just a name."

He rubs his eyes tiredly as he slinks into his recently remodeled dorm room and casts his scroll onto his desk. The device pops open upon impact and immediately projects the last screen Jaune had accessed—a ten-page paper on the history of faunus and creatures of Grimm, due tomorrow.

In the beginning, Monty created the world… aaaand that's all he's got.

"At least I won't be falling asleep anytime soon," he grouses, blinking in the brilliance of his new-and-improved room as he robotically activates his scroll's laser keyboard. Maybe he'll stay conscious long enough to inject some actual content into this essay… but he'll probably just use his BS generator to pad his circular anti-content with meaningless fluff and superfluous terminology. He'll probably even space out for the entire thing and let his muscle memory and brilliant subconscious do all the work.

His fingers have just begun to fly over the keyboard when a knock sounds at his door.

Before a conniving smirk can spread its way across Miltia's face, Jaune sternly points at his closet door. "Hide!"

Miltia's smile flips upside down. "But Jaune—"

"I'm not having another Russel incident."

"Oh, come on. He hasn't spread wild rumors yet."

"Only because I slammed the door on his head. He stares at the ceiling and drools during class now, so no, I'm not going to repeat that with everybody who visits my room. Now get in the closet before I shove you under the bed or something."

"That's a great idea, hiding between the bedsheets! It'll be like a christening of your new—hey!"

Maybe it's because she's made from his own aura, but he and his puny little arms manage to heave her body in the general direction of the closet with such force that her feet momentarily leave the ground. It's all good though, because somehow, the younger girl manages to not faceplant into the sliding door. In fact, she executes a cool little dance spin that swivels her body through the small crack between door and frame, slipping silently into the darkness.

Jaune cautiously leans up against his dorm entrance. "Uh, who is it?"

"It's me!" comes Ruby's muffled voice. "Um, do you already have somebody else over? I… I can find you later…"

"No!" Jaune yanks the door open so violently that the Mouse flinches. Or maybe she's just recoiling away from the sudden onslaught of his newly redecorated residence's obscene jaundice. "See, empty room!" he screams (as innocently as possible). "Just me. Nobody else. Except you. Just you and me and no other girls and/or women. No funny business going on here, no siree."

An awkward moment of silence follows, in which Jaune swears he hears faint cackles emanating from the closet.

For some reason, Ruby's face is rapidly turning the color of her namesake. "J-J-Jaune, I'm not here for—I just need help with my p-physics homework…"

"Uh. Yes. I can help." He shoots a longing glance over his shoulder at his scroll and his hopeless essay and almost takes back his word… except then, beyond his desk, he swears he spots an evil green glint of a mischievous eye with the depths of his closet.

{Awwwww Grimm no.}

He bounds into his room, scoops up his scroll, and slips into the hallway next to Ruby. "Let's go somewhere else," he barks, locking up his room and shoveling his small companion towards the stairs. "Somewhere where somebody can't spy on us."

Monty above, the image of the Malachite's wickedly green gaze within a haze of darkness is going to haunt his memories for days to come. This can't go on. She told him that she'd enrolled for this semester as a late transfer, so she should be getting her own uniform and room any day now… yet she's stuck around anyways for no discernable reason other than to screw with him. If she messes with him one last time…

"J-Jaune," she squeaks nervously.

"I need a change of scenery anyways," he adds hurriedly. "We can't always do things behind closed doors, right?"

"Eep" is all she can say in response as they burst out of the stairwell into the Dragon common room. Jaune is so concentrated on making a straight beeline for the dormitory exit, clambering over obstacles like couches and pool tables and other faunus, that he doesn't notice Sun and Yang camping out in the corner.

He practically explodes into the great outdoors of late evening, Ruby just barely maintaining her balance as she rides upon his wake. "Right-o," he declares. "So. Homework?"

The girl's eyes dart about skittishly, like a mouse trapped in a corner. "Out here?"

"Yeah, why not?" He flashes what he hopes is an easygoing grin in her direction. "Where we can be one with…" He would have finished his sentence with nature, but… well, let's say if Ruby's face was a voice-activated bomb, things would have ended fairly messily. "…Ruby? Are you feeling okay?"

"…"

"Um. Ruby." {Is she holding her breath?} He gingerly grasps her by her tiny shoulders. Well, at least, they look tiny, but Monty above does she have dense muscle mass underneath that velvet cape. "Deep breaths, okay?"

Even as his fingers curl around her deltoids, he can feel her freezing up at his seemingly electric touch. About the time that he's thinking he should release her before she chokes herself to death, a torrent of words explode from her lips: "YANGTOLDMETODOIT."

For a second, he's not quite sure what just came out of her mouth (well, aside from a good amount of spittle. Gross.) "Say that again?"

"She said practice makes perfect. Which it does. But people are different than weapons. Especially boys! They're like a completely different battlefield." She turns the full force of her huge, wobbly, silver eyes upon him. "And then there's you…"

His legs feel weak. "W-What about me?"

"You're… weird."

{Your ego has taken a critical hit!}

"You say all the things that most guys usually say, but how you say it is totally different. It's like you're not even saying it! Or you're—"

"Whoa whoa whoa. Hold on. When you say most guys, you better not be referring to Sun. But he is not your standard man, y'know."

She glowers at him indignantly. It's like the glare of a mouse: obviously incensed, but still adorable all the same. "Sun is not the only guy I know," she sniffs. "There's Neptune too."

Based off Ruby's apparent role models (or, at the very least, her older sibling and related superiors), certain pieces begin to fall into place. He could smirk, but his face flushes crimson instead. "They sent you to my room, didn't they."

Ruby's physiological response is confirmation enough, even as she immediately snaps, "No! I needed…" She takes a breath, takes a moment to settle her scattered thoughts, and turns thoughtfully towards him. "Y'know, Yang told me that life is like a gun."

{Wut.}

"She always said to aim high—that way, even if you end up shooting low, you'll still hit closer to your mark than if you didn't compensate for aerodynamics and gravity and wind velocity."

"…Wut."

"What don't you get? Life is also a gun!" she emphasizes. "Making friends is like operating a gun! Flirt first, and if they turn out not to be the One, then you can make peace as friends." She bops her fingers together nervously as Jaune gives her some strong side-eye. "That's what Yang said…"

Any words he has for her about she should not be looking to Yang and Sun for life lessons get stuck in his throat when Ruby abruptly stills, seamlessly transitioning from a curious rodent into a predatory huntress. "…What's—"

Almost faster than his eye can track, she seizes the closest object she doesn't value—Jaune's scroll—and sends it straight at a tree. The beginnings of indignant squeak are just moving past his lips when a disembodied hand materializes out of nowhere and catches it.

"Destroying school property during a non-combat situation is highly discouraged," comes a familiar voice.

"The same could be said," she counters, though she can't seem to tear her slightly awed eyes at the Talking Hand, "for eavesdropping."

For a pregnant moment, Jaune is floored. Seeing as she went through such lengths in the past to conceal her existence, he's not even sure whether or not to stammer her name—until she makes the decision for him, manifesting in a ripple of air, a transient heat wave in the middle of the cool evening environment.

"Hello, Ruby." Penny chirps, awkwardly extending a hand. And it's totally awkward, like she glanced over this tradition of greeting from a textbook in passing before executing said tradition: elbow locked and fingers splayed equidistant from each other. As if that wasn't enough, Penny's other arm twitches occasionally, like a suffocating fish that feels like it really should be going somewhere or otherwise doing something meaningful but flopping to a still, quiet death instead. The sincere smile on her face just barely tilts the situation from Uber-Uncomfortable to Maybe-Okay. "My name is Penny. I am Jaune's assistant."

"Assistant?" The younger girl's eyes zip between Jaune and Penny. "You have an assistant?"

"Ah, uh, erm—"

"I help Jaune," Penny offers helpfully, "to not break things. For instance, school property. Or his legs."

"Hey!"

"Hm. Okay, very true."

"Hey!"

"I have concluded," Penny pompously proclaims, "that you are a suitable companion for Jaune, Ruby, which is why I have only now revealed myself to you."

At Ruby's apparently confusion, Jaune fills in some gaps in the story—mostly about the invisible friend who always seemed to show up at just the right time to prevent Jaune from dying horribly.

After giving the girl a moment to process this, she continues, "My assessment is thoroughly supported by the directly proportional relationship between your proximity to him and your pheromonal—"

Some sort of steam pressure seemed to have been building up within Ruby's cheeks as Penny speaks, turning her face a fiery crimson until she passes the point of no return. Her mouth opens and releases the pressure in a keening wail not unlike a firetruck-red kettle of boiling water, blocking off the rest of Penny's words and also rendering him momentarily deaf.

In the middle of his girl-induced disability, however, an idea blows his mind so violently that, if his mind had been represented by a light bulb, his friends would have been ducking to avoid shards of exploding glass and flickering tungsten filament. "Secretary!" he roars, overpowering his companions into silence. He quickly loops an arm around the orange-haired girl, partially to look all buddy-buddy with her, mostly to interrupt her by poking her in the side or something should she attempt to contradict him. (Except her body is so rock hard that he severely doubts that she's ticklish at all. His masculinity whimpers a little.) "Uhhhh yes! Penny is secretary… for Team Jaune!"

Ruby seems to shrink into herself at his words. At least the blood pressure seems to be redistributing itself from where it'd gathered at her cheeks. Jaune barges ahead again, "And since you're part of Team Jaune too, that means you can get in our action. Just the three of us."

Crap, he said something wrong there. No, actually, he didn't. It's not his fault Ruby's head is swimming with innuendos. {Monty above though, can a face become that cherry? Maybe it's just a faunus thing. Quick, plow ahead anyways and say something even more stupid to get her mind off the current phrase.}

"She'll do your physics homework for you!" he blurts.

His fingers are not as fast as Penny's tongue; the words haven't even tumbled beyond the reach of his lips before his traitorous assistant grins, "I will do no such thing."

He spitefully jabs two fingers spitefully into her side and gets two bruised fingertips for his trouble.

"I will, however," she continues, "physically demonstrate the purpose of your physics class."

Intrigued, a different side of Ruby steps out from behind the dangerously blushing deredere. "But… I already know how—"

Penny blips out of sight. With his arm around her, he can feel the moment she whirls out of his grasp; and because they were within such close proximity to each other, he can even make out a few tiny shifts in displaced air as his second imaginary friend dances a few steps away before he loses sight of her. But from Ruby's perspective, when Penny materializes not half a second later about two inches to the left of her nose, Penny might as well have teleported. "What about eleventh dimension calculations?"

Whatever she might have said next is cut off when Ruby drives a fist into her nose. A tiny fist, yes, and not at all propelled by gauntlets that are also rocket-launching shotguns. Penny's nose might as well have been harder than Ruby's punch, for all the damage that it could have done; Penny stumbles back anyways, probably more in shock.

"I'm sorry!" the younger girl immediately cries, though she stops fretting the moment Penny stares at her, completely uninjured. "I… I just… well, I just don't see why I need math when I have instinct."

Penny tilts her head curiously. "Math is never wrong."

"My gut feeling is a lot faster."

"And what," Penny proposes, "if I were to stuck my fist so far up your gut that your oocytes began shooting out your mouth?"

Okay, that was distinctly not Penny. Not only the demeaning words, but even the inflection of her voice, the brazenly flippant attitude, the intense green eyes glaring from behind an orange fringe… familiar memories shift beneath his consciousness, and though he tries to recall the relevant one, nothing comes to mind.

Thankfully, Ruby doesn't seem to have taken any offense. A somewhat… crazed smile spreads across the younger girl's lips as she keys a number code into her scroll. "Wanna demonstrate that to me again?"

Penny's eyes glimmer once before she blips out of sight once again. The younger girl reacts instantly, her body interestingly going slack as her silver eyes dart back and forth with increasing frequency. A split second later, her entire body tenses like a spring before she bounces gracefully away from a sudden flash of neon green—a sword that buries itself into concrete with a very solid gachunk.

An exclamation of surprise is still bubbling up Jaune's throat when Ruby swerves abruptly. Her giant crimson cape obscures her movements as she twirls on a toe and flows in a completely different direction; nanoseconds later, a glowing green blade sinks into the ground where Ruby would have been. And it doesn't stop there; it seems like Ruby is so hyperaware of her environment that she can extrapolate Penny's attacks and dodge them before they even happen. Never mind that Jaune has no idea where Penny's disappeared off to, or where her massive darts are even coming from; before a gachunk can send vibrations through the soles of his feet, the crimson ghost that is Ruby is already rippling away from it.

"Eleventh dimensional calculations," echoes Penny's voice, not from anywhere around him but straight from his scroll, "are incomprehensible to the normal faunus mind. It is not something I can teach to you without hefty use of a supercomputer's processing power. That is not applicable in a combat situation."

Ruby's words, distorted by the Doppler effect as her distance from Jaune constantly changes, twitters, "I'm doing pretty fine on my—"

Without warning, she hurtles towards Jaune. He's not too busy leaping out of the way to see the second neon sword embedding a small tatter of red cloth into the courtyard like a minor trophy. He is too busy, however, to feel the roar of exhaust before it's too late.

The stars are so pretty tonight. Twinkling as they patter upon his face…

Hold on a second.

"You're not dead!" Ruby bawls, promptly burying her face into his chest. The sudden jarring motion travels up from her site of impact and jiggles his skull and painfully reminds him just what happened… however long ago. Penny doubled her darts to throw Ruby off, Ruby unexpectedly darted in his direction, he hastily leaped back to get out of her way… and he looks up to confirm that yup, Ruby's rocket-powered locker containing her sniper scythe landed on his head.

"I assure you, I have been monitoring his physical status for the past half-hour. Though his body momentarily entered a standby state to more efficiently repair the trauma done to his cranium, he has always been in the clear."

"Penny…" Jaune groans. "Was it really that bad?"

When Ruby lifts her face off his chest, a large snot bubble drops from a nostril and just… hangs there. In a disgustingly endearing way. Endearing for now. It better not disconnect from her cute little nose and splat on his shirt. Please no. "I thought you were deeeeead," she blubbers.

"You are alright now," dodges Penny, "and that is what matters. On that note, Ruby, I officially call an end to this physics demonstration."

"What." In a blink of an eye, Ruby's tears (and snot, thank Monty) magically sloops back into their respective orifices. "No! Crescent Rose just got here. We haven't even started the fun stuff!"

"Jaune—"

"—is fine! Look at him!"

"Hey."

"I killed Jaune for thirty minutes just to get Crescent Rose here to take you on. I cracked open his noggin so we could fight."

"HEY."

"Uh, I mean, do physics homework. Sorry Jaune."

"That's not what I meant."

"I am of the firm belief," Penny replies, "that we should take Jaune back to his room to fully recuperate. We can decide upon further instruction when we finish that task. After all, despite your admirable desire to battle, you still have homework to turn in tomorrow, do you not?"

"Aaaaaargh, did you just hear yourself? This is a combat school, for Monty's sake! And you're saying we should not do combat to do homework! Ugh…"

"If it consoles you any, we could come up with battle nicknames while we escort Jaune back to his dormitory. Research has indicated that forming an alias separate from one's true identity prompts one to assign and focus on certain attributes of that character. In your case…"

"The Crimson Terror!"

"…Yes. Quite possibly."

Jaune grins up at Ruby's heroic pose. "What about the Ruby Rose?"

"Shut it, you. My parents were mean." And just like that, she's relapsed into the adorable pile of Cute he's come to know and… like. {Appreciate! I appreciate her little sis vibes. Yeah.} Even when the words are threatening, the way she says them just reminds him of a snarling little mouse, with her round silver ears and tiny pink nose. "What about you, Penny? When I'm about to cut you up into bite-sized pieces with Crescent Rose, what name am I going to scream?"

Penny smiles, but she doesn't say anything while she roughly yanks Jaune to his feet. And the smile on her lips is a bit darker than he remembers. And her voice is pitched a little lower, a little rougher around the edges, sending a familiar bite of apprehension stinging the tips of his nerves when she replies,

"You can call me the Canary."