Atlas Academy
Headmaster's Office
It had been hours since he'd spoken with Ozpin, yet General Ironwood's mind still wasn't quite comprehending what he'd been told.
The idea of life existing outside of Remnant's confines was one constantly debated by scientists from across all four Kingdoms, and there was never a conclusive answer. Dust, for all its infinitely varied uses, was completely inert outside of Remnant's atmosphere. The most they could do was examine the surface of the shattered moon, and Ironwood personally doubted that there was any life left on it after whatever cataclysm left it torn asunder.
And now here he was, one of only two men on Remnant who finally had the answer. There was life out there, amongst the stars, and a whole other planet full of it. A planet without Grimm, yet engulfed in war all the same. It was all rather hard to believe, but then again, so was Salem, at first.
Ozpin had called each of the headmasters and the rest of his inner circle, but there was one familiar face not among the assembled. Qrow's absence was rather surprising—the man never missed an appearance, not even when drunk out of his mind. Ozpin refused to answer Ironwood's inquiries as to his location. As much as Ironwood didn't want to believe that Oz was hiding something from him, he wasn't making it easy.
Those questions had to wait. He'd been given a mission. While Theodore and Leonardo were bidden to simply tend to their own businesses, and to report any portals that opened in their respective Kingdoms; Ironwood had a tertiary task. Not only was he to defend Solitas, but he also had Atlas' top scientists working on finding a way to either open one of these portals themselves, or stabilize ones that had already opened.
Only he'd been told the truth of what was beyond those portals. Not Theo. Not Leo. Him, and him alone.
"General Ironwood, sir!" A voice called from outside his office. "Operative Sterling. I've got a report from Doctor Polendina's team."
Doctor Polendina? He'd just reported to Ironwood personally not even thirty minutes ago about Penny. It was next to impossible that the situation had evolved so quickly without it being drastic enough for another call.
"Come in, Operative," Ironwood replied, hitting the button on the bottom of his desk that unlocked the door. Sterling stepped inside, thumbing at his scroll nervously as shot a glance over his shoulder. Once the door closed, he visibly relaxed.
"Sorry, sir. You said this stuff was classified, and things have been really tense over there ever since the news broke," Sterling explained. "Anyway, Doctor Polendina wanted me to let you know he has a working theory on the nature of those portals. He'll give you his report shortly."
"How shortly, Operative?" Ironwood asked, raising an eyebrow. Odd that Pietro hadn't come to him directly, especially if it was something this big.
"He says that he's not sure about Mantle's cybersecurity, sir.."
"I'll have my people look into that when I can, we have a lot on our plates right now. Our classified communications are secure, I can tell you that much. If the good Doctor is worried, he has our encryption keys."
"Right, right…" Sterling didn't seem any more at ease.
"You're dismissed, Operative."
Sterling nodded, and exited the room. Brothers, the poor man worried too much. Then again, it wasn't just his ass on the line if there was a breach in security. Ironwood knew that feeling all too well. Once the doors closed, Ironwood immediately set about opening an encrypted channel to Pietro. If this was so important that he had a runner deliver the message, then he obviously had something big to report.
The main display, normally reserved for the world map or similarly large displays, now lit up with the image of Pietro Polendina, who seemed to be contentedly puttering away at something or another in his office in Mantle.
"Pietro?"
The old man started slightly, his walker rapidly pivoting towards the screen. Once their eyes met, relief crossed his features, and the old inventor smiled. "Ah, General. I suppose you got the message I sent you, then?"
"Operative Sterling came all the way from Mantle to deliver it," Ironwood replied. "I assumed it was important."
"It is, indeed. Tell me, is this a secure channel?"
"Our comms are encrypted and being spoofed throughout Atlas' private servers. No one will hear this conversation but us," Ironwood assured him.
"Right, right… anyhow, I just completed my analysis of the Scroll readings on that portal. Both sets of data indicated a massive Aura spike when bodies passed through, but not from the registered owners of the Scrolls. No, these portals appear to be Semblance-esque projections from an unknown source of Aura," Pietro explained, pulling up a diagram that covered the top right corner of the screen. "See, the moment that the students approach, there's a spike in Aura levels that does not dissipate until, presumably, they pass through it. What is interesting is that before we lost signal, the Scroll did not note a complete loss of that foreign Aura projection. There seemed to be some sort of 'white noise' on the other side."
"Interesting," Ironwood replied. "Have you found a way to open up a similar portal? I have Specialist Schnee ready to deploy and hold one open until it can be properly stabilized."
"No, unfortunately." Pietro adjusted his glasses and swiped the image away, before swiping a series of documents onto the shared screen, all of which immediately began to download. "The reports are enclosed, but we didn't manage to find much of anything. Now, I'm more of a cybernetics and robotics man than an astrophysicist , but I don't think we're going to be able to open something up on our end. This was an entirely unique energy signature. Someone made these portals, General, and I have a feeling that any attempt at studying them will have to happen on their time."
"Right, right... " Ironwood sighed, pulling the documents up and giving them a quick scan. Sure enough, nothing but duds. Not a single instance of even getting a start on opening a portal. "Damn. What about communications?"
"Nothing as of yet. Doctor Nila's only getting static, but we'll continue attempting to reach those Scrolls."
"Let me know as soon as you succeed. As I said, everything is ready to cross the threshold as soon as we make a stable connection. I have my best operatives and a platoon-strength unit of AK-200s ready to deploy."
"Understood, General. Thank you for your time. I'll give you a status update on Penny next week."
"Please do." With that, Ironwood closed the call. Pietro was one of Atlas' most brilliant minds, even if he was getting up in age. Though he was right about his specialties, he sold himself far too short; he was just as good at leading a team of scientists as he was in his own field, regardless of what that team's objective was. That portal wasn't going to stay open without him.
He just hoped it would come soon. The longer they were without an exit, the longer Beacon's teams RWBY and JNPR would be stuck on the other side of it with no support, supplies, or infrastructure. Even if this 'XCOM' continued to protect them, it sounded like they were still in great danger.
Earth
The Avenger
Yang figured that these XCOM guys wanted help, they'd told RWBY and JNPR as much directly to their faces, but she'd barely even taken her shoes off and she was already being asked to saddle up with them. Not that she was going to complain about getting some action, but man, they must be desperate.
Fyodor was the one who called her up, and as it turns out, he was also the one in charge of the mission this go around. Just as well, from what it sounded like he was one of the few people on the ship that JNPR felt they could trust. That was a plus as far as Yang was concerned. However, something had been nagging at her from the moment the man rapped on the door of the Remnant resident's bunk room and demanded her and Weiss to accompany him.
"What in the name of the Brother Gods do you need four swords for?" Weiss asked, stealing the words from right out of Yang's mouth. Indeed, the moment the pair had stepped out of the door, the first thing Yang noticed was that Fyodor had a pair of strange-looking swords strapped to his hips. The hilts had a small extension at the end, though for what purpose, Yang couldn't deduce, and the points were split into two prongs with some sort of port in between them.
"Because I like to keep spares," Fyodor stated conservatively, resting his palm on the hilt of one of the swords.
"Yes, I can understand the merit of keeping a spare weapon on your person, but four? What could possibly go wrong that you would require not one, not two, but three separate weapons? Your weapon designs look shoddy, but I was hoping they might be a bit more functional than that."
'Oh, boy,' Yang thought to herself, 'I guess old habits do die hard.'
"The Arc Blades are actually very well-made, considering our lack of resources, snizhka," Fyodor corrected her. "They're just… in the testing phase. We're not exactly an organized military with government backing anymore."
"Yes, a blind man could tell me that. Tell me, what part of these 'Arc Blades' is actually a 'blade'? I don't see a sharp edge on any of those things, and they don't even have a point. What exactly do you intend to do with those, bludgeon something to death?" Weiss asked, as haughty as the day Yang had met her. Fyodor seemed surprisingly patient with her, but Yang wasn't about to let Weiss test that patience if she could help it.
"Weiss, I think you're not giving these guys enough credit," Yang said. "They-"
"Yang, this is a serious matter. If it's a 'blade', where is the edge?"
Fyodor sighed, stopping dead in his tracks and turning around slowly, before dropping to a squat in front of Weiss and taking one of the swords off his hip. He smiled at her, in the way that only a man who wants the conversation to end as soon as possible could smile, and pointed at the edges of the weapon. "These are not sharp, because they are not the blade. The blade is a low-heat, high-voltage tesla array powered by a lithium-ion battery. It's like a taser, except I can cut you with it."
"With all due respect, that thing looks like it's going to fall apart if you breathe on it improperly, Weiss said, folding her arms. "Where do you even feed the Dust into it? How is any electricity going to be conducted without Electric Dust?"
"Why the fuck would I put dirt and debris in this?" Fyodor asked, his composure steadily cracking.
Weiss' eyes widened, shifting from the blade to Fyodor, then back to the blade, then to Yang. Yang shrugged her shoulders in response. This place was apparently pretty different from Remnant, so them not having Dust didn't really shock her. It would definitely make ammo consumption a problem, but she didn't need Ember Celica to be loaded to be lethal.
"No, you dolt, that's not what I was suggesting!" Weiss started, "I meant-"
"Weiss. I don't think they have Dust here," Yang explained, looking to Fyodor before continuing. "Right? Like, no Fire Dust, no Ice Dust, yadda yadda yadda?"
"No, the only dust on this ship is the shit that fills up your lungs every time you touch any of the ancient alien garbage on board," Fyodor replied. "What do you mean by 'Dust'?"
"Our weapons are powered by Dust crystals with various attributes," Weiss explained, regaining her bearings. "My Myrtenaster carries a variety of Dust payloads, for example. If you don't have Dust, how do your weapons even function?"
"Like I told you just 30 fucking seconds ago," Fyodor explained, "the swords run on a lithium-ion battery that sends a charge to two emitters. There's a vent along the spine of the blade that forces the low-heat, high-voltage plasma out of the sides of the weapon and over these little metal plates on the side. These do have cutting edges, if you swing hard enough, but thanks to your friends who came before you, we decided to try something else with them. Ideally, you never have to see that."
A short pause followed, before Weiss broke the silence with a bemused 'hmph.'
"Is that it?" Fyodor asked, rising to his full height once more. "I like to be early for the briefing if I can, and you've wasted a good amount of my time."
"I apologize if you're offended, but I simply wanted to better understand what I'm working with here. Your technology level is obviously a fair bit behind that of Remnant," Weiss explained. As haughty and obnoxious as the wording was, Yang knew that she genuinely meant no offense. At least, she thought she knew that. "If there was a means to get back in contact with my father and siphon Dust here, maybe-"
"I do not want to hear about your daddy or his Dust, we have a job to do, rozpeshchenyy dytyna, come on, we're already too late for my liking." With that interruption, Fyodor started off down the hall, his patience finally at its limit. Weiss seemed indignant that he walked off while she was in the middle of trying to offer assistance, in her own Weissy way. Yang simply sighed, following after him, with Weiss bringing up the rear in a huff.
"I was only trying to offer a solution," she said.
"No need to try and convince me," Yang replied, watching as Fyodor stopped at a door and slammed his fist against it twice.
"Cole! We're going!"
There was no response on the other side of the door that Yang could hear, but after a few seconds, it opened to reveal Cole, who had much shorter hair than when Yang had seen him previously. He had some sort of big gauntlet on his right arm, far bigger than Ember Celica, with what appeared to be some sort of fuel tank on the side, marked with a fire hazard sign. 'Flamethrower gauntlet. Not bad.'
Weiss didn't offer her 'advice' for the rest of the trip, and Fyodor got a hold of Jerry and Phil without incident. From there, it was straight to Grace's office.
Once they arrived, Fyodor peeked in, and was evidently bid to enter. The rest followed, with Yang bringing up the rear. As it turns out, Pyrrha and Jaune were already there, sitting in front of Grace's desk, with Pyrrha looking unusually agitated.
"You've got quite a team picked out there, Fyodor," Grace said.
"I figured it best if we bring a couple more of the kids along," he replied.
"Solid plan, but we got a problem—we don't have any idea what they can do. Weiss and Yang, right?" Grace turned her attention to Weiss first. "You have 'Semblances' like Pyrrha does?"
"As a matter of fact, we do," Weiss replied. "Mine allows me to create 'Glyphs' that can levitate objects or force them to move in certain directions, slow down or speed up time in a localized area, or create platforms for my team to walk on in unsteady terrain. I can also use specialized 'summons' that assist me in combat."
"That sounds awful useful," Cole stated, nodding his head.
"Yes, very good, you—wait, run that part about 'time' back again?" Fyodor seemed dumbstruck, looking at Weiss like she'd just proclaimed herself the will of the Brothers made manifest.
"I can slow down or speed up time within range of my glyphs," Weiss repeated.
Phil let off a quiet whistle. "Bordel de merde…"
"What's the catch?" Jerry asked. "There's gotta be a catch."
"I need Dust to perform most, if not all of these feats. I can still perform certain summons and utilize certain glyphs without it, but I won't be able to manipulate time or levitate objects without Electric and Gravity Dust."
"Well, unfortunately, we have no such thing," Grace said. "If that's the case, I'm giving you a direct order from the top, Weiss– do not use those functions unless absolutely necessary to complete critical mission objectives or to save a life in the field. Once you run out, you're out until we open a bridge for you to get back home. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Excellent. Yang?" Grace's attention now turned to the blonde brawler, and she couldn't help but feel a little put on the spot. Weiss went into all that detail about how great and useful her Semblance was, and here she was with…
"Well," Yang replied, softly punching her palm and cracking her knuckles leisurely. "I hit. Hard."
"That's it?" Phil asked. "You hit things hard?"
"Yeah. Really, really hard. And if I get hit, I hit that much harder."
"You're a goddamn human perpetual motion machine," Jerry noted, nodding his head slowly. "Freddy, you're a genius."
"I didn't know what they could do until just now, honestly," Fyodor said, attempting to maintain some semblance of modesty. "I picked Yang because she looked tough."
"Good pair of eyes you got there, cap'n!" Yang acknowledge, flashing the man a grin. A little ego boost was nice once in awhile.
"And me?" Weiss asked.
"I don't know. I had a feeling that there was something off about you," Fyodor explained. "Turns out I was right. You're a bougie freak of nature."
"Indeed," Cole agreed. "Yet to meet anyone else that can tell time to bend over."
"Well, I suppose I'll take that as a compliment," Weiss said, a bit prickly. "Anyhow, what exactly did you call us in here for?"
"A briefing," Grace replied, hitting a few keys on the computer at her desk. In response, the wall behind her split open to reveal a screen that extended outwards, and lit up with a map of some sort of city. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the ADVENT Tokyo Metroplex. We're gonna be inserting near Edogawa and beating a path to our primary objective, the old Shūbun Dynamics building. An organization called the Think Tank is sheltering an important VIP there that needs extraction, and ADVENT's looking for him all over Eastern Tokyo. If we don't get there soon, they're gonna dust him."
"Who's the VIP?" Jerry asked, leaning against the wall behind Jaune and Pyrrha. Yang noticed Pyrrha moving her hand just slightly, her Aura flashing around it dimly as Jerry's hand gently opened and closed. Something was going on there, evidently.
"Our target for extract is Dr. Klaus Reiben, graduated top of his class at RWTH Aachen in Germany," Grace explained, pulling up an image of the man in question. He certainly didn't look much like any doctor Yang would want to see– he was a grizzly looking man with a skeletal beard, a noticeable scar on his left cheek, and a sloppy, barely-trimmed mop of black hair. "Dr. Reiben's the Think Tank's main authority on intrauniversal astrophysics and string theory."
"English?" Cole asked, rolling his eyes.
"The guy deals with wormholes and portals," Jerry answered, "or at least the science behind them. So, that's the play then, Commander? We're trying to get this guy's knowledge?"
"Exactly," Grace said with a wan smile. "Dr. Reiben has agreed to work with us once he's extracted. Once he arrives, I'll have him explain his latest findings, but needless to say, I think we might be onto something big here. That being said, the problem is getting to him. We were planning to do this quietly, but ADVENT has scaled up their patrols and is hitting every known Think Tank safehouse in Tokyo. They don't know where he is, but one of the doors they're looking to kick down just happens to be the safehouse he's at currently. The Think Tank doesn't have any safe area to evac him to within an actionable distance, so they're asking us to make the save."
"Do they have assets on site?" Phil asked.
"Don't know," Grace replied. "Due to the nature of the op, we're going in light and fast. Spider Suits only, keep your excess gear to a minimum. The safehouse is on the 4th floor of the main offices, but ADVENT's gonna be kicking down the doors by the time we get you there. Firebrand will decide your insertion point by eye. Your best bet is to grapple up the side of the building. Kids, there are some wrist-mounted grappling hooks in the armory. Make sure you each grab one before you get on board the Skyranger."
"Got it," Jaune replied.
Yang couldn't exactly mount something to her wrists while wearing Ember Celica, but at least Weiss' glyphs gave her a method of getting up the walls. The look Weiss immediately gave her made it clear the heiress had the same idea.
"Any more questions before we mount up?" Grace asked, turning specifically to Weiss and Yang. "I know you haven't really been told much about how we operate, or why we're doing what we're doing, so I want you to understand this is a no bullshit zone. I'll answer any questions you have."
"Why exactly are you looking for a specialist in wormhole theory?" Weiss asked.
"You tryin' to send us home already?" Yang asked, faux-offended. "We just got here."
"Well, about that," Grace started, pulling up a file and opening it to reveal a spectrogram. "Dr. Reiben sent us a message earlier this morning. Take a listen."
With the click of a key, Dr. Reiben began to speak.
"This is Rübezahl. Commander Cheng, I do believe I've finally figured it out. It has taken me years, so many goddamn years, but my God I've finally figured it out. The aliens have been using what appear to be using some sort of tethers to allow for rapid intrauniversal wormhole travel. It's the only way to explain how they travel that fast. Regardless, I'm sure you already knew that, that's not what's so exciting to me. You see, the aliens have scaled back their deployment in the past few months, and now I know why- the portals are no longer 'tethered'! Their stability is completely shattered! We're only seeing consistent alien activity in certain sectors- the Amazon jungle, the Arctic Circle, and other such isolated areas. The aliens aren't even bothering with portaling in those super-aliens of my late colleague's to deal with your operations anymore- all of their reinforcements are locally stationed units, and they're not being reinforced at nearly as quick a rate. Something got between their portals and their bases of operation, and I believe the children may have something to do with it. If you would be so kind as to hurry to meet with me, I would like to discuss this matter more in depth personally."
With that, the file automatically closed, and Grace turned back to face Weiss. "Does that answer your questions?"
"Somewhat. So, this doctor believes that our arrival has stymied these 'aliens' you've been fighting?"
"Exactly," Grace replied. "And considering the kind of stuff you can do, that's the best thing that's ever happened to us. You're the kick in the ass we need. That being said, we'd like to get you home when your business here is done, and Dr. Reiben's gonna help us do that, and figure out where the aliens are running the show from. Two birds, one stone."
"Sounds good to me," Yang said, nodding her approval. "Guess we're gonna crack some alien heads, then. When are we getting started?"
"Right now, if there's no other questions. We're burning valuable hours here," Grace replied, turning her attention to the XCOM guys one by one, stopping at Jerry. "How's your hand doing? I know the adjustment's been rough, and we still don't have any MELD."
"I get by," Jerry replied, looking to Pyrrha with a smirk, which she returned in kind.
"Good to hear it. Fyodor, you're green to go. I'll let Reiben know you're saddling up."
Fyodor nodded, and started heading for the door. "Alright, let's get this done."