Author Notes: This fic is brought to you by the CFVY Shop gang and Quarantine: Stay the fuck inside! We'll see how far it goes, but I'm mostly here for fun. This story isn't going to be super shipping focused. However, in this house we love and support Polyparents and the Nation of Pollination (Not you, Enabler). So if you are vehemently opposed to those concepts popping up, then here's your chance to jump ship. Otherwise, not my problem.

Momentum Transfers

Chapter 1

See, the thing about death, is that nobody wants to be reminded of it. People might act like they do, sure. They'll send their 'thoughts and prayers', flowers, edible bouquets; make it seem that they have some investment in thinking about your health and longevity. In reality though, these are coping mechanisms to help ward away something they aren't ready to confront; you're honestly just a bystander.

They want to smother your hospital bed with get-well cards and sparkly, limp balloons to obscure the real face of the issue. Because if they did look it in the face, then maybe they'd see something a little too familiar and way too real looking back at them; and then they'd get uncomfortable.

Yang had realized that she, too, made most people uncomfortable now; this was because, about six months ago, she'd come down with a case of missing the majority of her left arm and a lot of skin on her left leg. Before the accident, she generally had the opposite effect with most of the people she met. Yang could have walked into a Texaco, her high school, a police station, or the Tom goddamn Thumb, and anyone whose eyes she met then would have been generally happy to return the favor.

Now though, not so much. Now, whether the people in question were her old high-school friends or the aging cashier at the Seven Eleven, there was always a flicker across peoples faces. Like a record player skipping a beat; and then the warmth would sour into pity or some variation of it.

Previously, Yang hadn't really considered herself to be a popular girl; because in good ole Patch, Texas you needed to be several magnitudes more straight and Christian to become truly popular. Even the sports she was into weren't that mainstream (nobody in Patch cared about girls hockey - she'd had to play in the next big town over, and was lucky to do so). Overall, she'd honestly considered herself someone who stood out from the herd. She'd taken pride in her rebel status, in fact.

However, Yang now realized that she had had things pretty easy. Not perfect, mind you, but still. Life had, up until this point, been kind to her. Getting smeared down a desert highway at seventy miles per hour had a tendency to really put things like that into perspective for a person.

Things were different now, and she'd been doing her best to accept that. It was difficult, though, because people kept telling her sister or people in her daily orbit what a 'shame' it was. It was a shame. It was such a shame, such a tragedy. See the thing was, though, Yang didn't think it was a shame that she was still alive and still had most of her body in functioning order. It was a kind of a miracle, honestly, because she shouldn't have walked away at all. But that? That's not what people were talking about, because that's not what people saw.

She had a prosthetic, technically, but she didn't want to wear it. Not yet. Yang wanted to ingrain the truth into her brain first. She wanted to absorb the fact that most people hadn't really seen her, Yang the person, before; but Yang the pretty athlete, with both her arms and all the skin on her legs.

She'd told her parents that verbatim, when they'd asked her why she still wouldn't wear it. Her parents were good, lovely people that she adored with her whole heart, especially when she wasn't feeling like static soup in a tin can. She'd known she was really worrying them, but didn't believe she genuinely made them uncomfortable; she questioned that when they'd told her that she and Ruby would be going to stay with their uncle in Oregon for the summer.

"I just want to stay home," she'd told them. "Why do I need to leave?"

"A change in scenery will help, Yang," her father had insisted, for the hundredth time.

Her mom hadn't looked too sure about that, herself; Yang hadn't argued, but she went to bed early and didn't answer the door when her mom knocked on it later to check on her.

Last year, Yang would have jumped at the chance to go on an adventure with her sister to Oregon. She loved road trips and had always wanted to go to the pacific northwest. It was breathtakingly beautiful, unlike flat ole dusty Patch, and there was so much you could do, too. Hiking, mountain climbing, biking, camping, all the good stuff they used to do when she was younger; all the good stuff she didn't want to miss out on now or have dangled right in front of her.

Ruby, on the other hand, was completely hyped. Yang's little sister had been trying to cheer her up since the accident that winter, something else that Yang felt more than a little guilty over; and Ruby had completely fixated on the chance for them to go do something cool together. Even if Yang could dig up some of her old rebelliousness and tell her parents she wasn't going, she didn't have the heart to take this trip away from Ruby. The next day, she'd agreed to go.

So it was that the Rose-Xiao Long sisters wound up in Beacon, Oregon for their summer vacation.

…

Uncle Qrow was a lanky rascal of a middle-aged man, who still believed he was a lanky rascal of a twenty something year old man and had not yet gotten the memo. He had converted his weird old house into a weird old roadside attraction called the Lifted Vale, and would lure bored tourists off their drive to the coast and shake them down. He was, to be honest, a complete crook; but he was, to be fair, an honest crook.

Yang and Ruby had only met Uncle Qrow twice before, and they had both been young enough for the event to not really stand out in the passage of time. He would always send racy postcards around the holidays like clockwork; and every year for Halloween he would send their dad a bottle of crown royal and a bunch of those sugar covered marshmallow peeps.

Dad would then eat the mallows and drink the crown in one sitting with mom on the sofa; and sometimes, they would get sad when they thought Yang or Ruby weren't watching. Despite this odd, yearly ritual, their parents had firmly been of the belief that this bizarre, crooked man-child would be the perfect person to foist Yang and Ruby on for the entirety of summer vacation.

Their first week at the Lifted Vale had been a period of adjustment. They shared a room in the attic, which was actually pretty sweet. Ruby was excited about the whole thing, from the resident goat to the overall rugged appeal, and had chatted up a storm as they unpacked.

Though Yang wouldn't admit it, it honestly made her feel a little better that they were sharing a room again; because if she woke up from a night terror or with phantom pains, then bam, there was Ruby. Ready to talk to her about classic boy bands and the merits of kpop, whether or not grapes or grapefruits were named after each other, and why English speakers don't speak the way they spell. Ruby always made dark things instantly more bearable, like a talkative, somewhat awkward nightlight.

Despite Yang's initial reservations, the only major downside to this arrangement that she could conceive of was the fact that they were technically working all summer. Working was a generous label, though, because Yang had had real jobs before; and Lift Life was less genuine labor, more flex-taping the antlers back on the stuffed rabbit head while Uncle Qrow distracted the tourists.

In fact, so far? It was even kind of fun. Their Uncle employed two other teens around her age. Jaune, the handyman, whom Yang had already asked to 'give her a hand' multiple times and gotten some pretty good reactions; and then there was Blake, who. Well. Did something? Mostly she just read behind the counter and smarted off to Uncle Qrow, despite his daily promises to fire her; Yang respected her commitment.

When Uncle Qrow was leading a train of surprisingly eager tourists about the place, pointing out the ghoulish things in his collection that he swore to Christ above were all real, they usually had the gift shop floor to themselves. Jaune or Blake would play fight over the radio or play riddle games, which Blake would always win. Meanwhile, Ruby would snoop in all the stuff they weren't supposed to do any snooping in, and Yang might try on overpriced sunglasses that were supposed to help you see spirits.

That was another thing about Beacon, too. Yang had immediately noticed that the town their Uncle Qrow lived in was a genuinely weird place. The kind of place that her parents would love; and it honestly shocked her that her cynical old uncle lived up here, but their family didn't.

There were regular UFO sightings, for one. People would go missing in the nearby national parks, and apparently, Beacon was a hotbed for missing persons cases of a similar nature. Aliens, sasquatch, poltergeists, shadow people and wendigos – that last one had made her nervous, a little excited, even. Yang had always been a big nerd for cryptids and mythology, and this place had immediately rekindled that old spark.

It made sense enough, considering both her parents had run a paranormal investigation team for twenty years and counting. Mom used to let her read some of their old case files when Yang would bug her enough; and there were some stories her parents had that still made her arms break out in goosebumps. There was something thrilling about the supernatural that had always intrigued their family; except for, perhaps, Ruby and Uncle Qrow. Definitely not Uncle Qrow, actually.

Despite running a business that regularly made money off paranormal tourists, Uncle Qrow was firmly in the camp that legends and stories that surrounded Beacon were just that. Stories. Stories made by guys like him to make money off people who were, perhaps, identical to the bouquet sending, thoughts and prayers crowd that Yang had grown so disillusioned with.

However, Yang wasn't so sure about that. Even back in Patch, she'd known regular people who'd had experiences that they couldn't really explain; things they often spoke about with a sense of wonder and quiet uncertainty. John, her bike mechanic, had once told her how he'd been followed by a Skinwalker during a long, lonely drive through Wyoming; and one of Ruby's sophomore friends regularly saw ghosts, though she didn't like to talk about it.

In the end, Yang was obviously not entirely sure that there were completely inexplicable things in the world, let alone Beacon. She just had an instinct about it; or perhaps, this resurging interest in the supernatural was her way of dealing with her own discomfort, from looking death in the face a little too closely herself.

However, this curious rekindling would reach a new peak, on the afternoon that her Uncle Qrow decided to send his one-armed niece out to nail signs up by the road.

…

"This is complete bull donkey," Yang grumbled to herself, slowly picking her way around the ferns. "No one's even gonna read these."

She knew she could have asked Ruby to help her, and her little sister would have been more than happy to do so; but Ruby had sacrificed enough of her time already helping Yang out, and she did not want her to feel obligated. Besides, wasn't she supposed to be the one to help Ruby when she needed it?

This wasn't about Ruby, though, this was about Uncle Qrow. He had a tendency to ask Yang to do chores of a surprisingly difficult nature; no hesitation, no further consideration, just "Yang! Go do this weird thing that might sometimes be a little bit unsafe!" Which, ya know, she physically could do. But who the hell asks people with one hand to go hammer something? Was it because she was the oldest? Because she was tall? Who knew how that man's mind actually worked?

Shaking her loose blonde hair over her shoulders and regretting not wrangling it into a ponytail that morning, Yang sighed. She was close to the hiking trails that paralleled the road into town and got some pretty good traffic; this was far enough.

She shrugged her backpack off and crouched, pulling out the signs for the Lift, the nails and hammer. Then she stood and stretched, staring bemusedly at the various spruce trees.

"Eeny, meeny, miny….Mo," Yang picked an oddly shaped tree a few feet away, picked up the hammer and sidled up to it. Spinning the hammer in her hand, she aimed the teeth of it at a spot a little below eye level; she would put a divot in the bark first, and then try to wedge the nail in before hammering.

She swung. A deep, vibrating thrum shook through the tree and up her arm; the forest echoed as if Yang had struck an anvil and not a living spruce. She inhaled slowly, and lowered her arm, violet eyes wide.

"What?" she murmured aloud, dropping the hammer by her foot and touching the 'bark'.

It….wasn't bark. The weird, dead spruce tree was not a tree at all, apparently, but some metal construction. Yang briefly wondered if it was a very artistic radio tower, before brushing the notion away. Still, why else would this thing be out here?

Her fingers brushed over the surface further, and she realized it wasn't the entire tree that was metal, but a fake panel; finding the edge, Yang dug her finger tips in and pulled. It swung open with a loud creak.

Inside the secret tree compartment sat a rusted device that may have been an old radio controller. Curiosity mounting, Yang played with the switches, flipping all of them back and forth. Behind her, a mechanical grinding started; she turned to watch a trap door in the forest floor open. Was this one of Uncle Qrow's forgotten tourist contraptions?

"What the," she nosed over the edge of a small hole in the moss covered forest floor.

There, at the bottom of the hidden compartment was…a book.

Just a book? Really? Did I find Blake's secret stash or something?

Yang stared in bewilderment, before scooping the dusty thing out. No one had handled it in years, that much was obvious. It was bound in brown leather, and the front cover had a picture of a three eyed black bird.

"Huh. Spooky."

Without further ado, she opened it, blowing some of the dust and cobwebs away. On the inside of the cover, the name of the person who owned the book was missing, having been torn out. Yang flipped the pages, finding one of the first entries; it was, apparently, a journal.

"We've been studying the secrets of Beacon, Oregon for the past several years already, and the paranormal happenings surrounding this place only grow more and more fantastic."

Yang felt her heart speed up as she started rapidly flipping through the pages. Intricate drawings, taped in photographs of cryptic beings, and cramped yet neatly legible handwriting covered every page; up unto a certain point at least. On one of the last filled in pages, Yang found another journal entry.

"I am being watched. Worse, I know the contents of my mind are no longer safe. Try as I might, I can't completely shake him. I am afraid…"

Goosebumps prickled across Yang's arm; briefly, the tinge of a phantom pain in her left arm spiked her nerves.

"I have convinced the others to leave and have purged our databanks of anything that can aid him. I am going to hide this book as well. Remember. In Beacon, there's no one you can trust."

Yang mouthed the last sentence to herself, fixated. So fixated, in fact, that she did not hear the twigs crunching quietly behind her.

"Grarrrr!"

Yang screamed, jumping away several feet. Behind her, giggling impishly, was her goofy little sister, wearing that rubber Sasquatch mask she had bought in one of the local shops. She even had the nerve to do the brat dance.

"Hahaha! I got youuu! I. Got. You!"

"Ruby, you little shit-"

Ruby placed her palms on her rubber monkey man cheeks, laughing silver eyes peeking out at Yang as she gasped in faux shock.

"Yang! Such language!"

Yang rolled her eyes, her breathing and heart rate returning to normal; she was still holding the book. Her sister zeroed in on it instantly.

"Ooh, what ya got there?"

Yang hesitated, before moving closer to show her; cryptic warnings or no, she knew she could trust Ruby above anything else in this world. Even if she was, sometimes, a little shit.

"It's a journal someone kept in this secret compartment. See? It's really spooky, actually," Yang explained, holding the book flat open in her palm. "It's full of paranormal investigation stuff! Somebody went through a lot of trouble to hide it, apparently."

"Oh neeaat," Ruby picked it gently out of her hand. "Ha, aww, look at this little guy? What is he? A 'kitsune'? Heh, cute."

"But this just proves what I was saying to Uncle Qrow," Yang nodded, watching as Ruby flipped through the rest of the journal. "Whoever wrote this? They were looking into all the bizarro stuff that happens around here. And apparently something happened to them! See, how it just mysteriously ends like that?"

"Yea! Ooh, this is some X-Files kind of creepy, huh?" Ruby declared sagely through the rubbery mouth of the Satch-mask. "Do you think it's, like, an elaborate prank? Or for real?"

Yang hummed in thought. She supposed it could be something like that.

"I dunno? I guess it could be either, but still, I'm definitely keeping this."

"Sweet," Ruby chirped. "Oh! Did you want some help with the signs? Blake said Uncle Qrow sent you out here alone to hammer stuff, of all the dorky things."

Yang shook her head but smiled, moving to put the signs back in the bag.

"Thanks, but nah. He never specified how fast I had to put them up, which was his mistake. I wanna go read this."

"Ooh, wait for me!"

Without further ado, the sisters scampered off through the overgrowth and greenery towards the Shack. They didn't notice the shadow slinking off further into the forest after their departure.

More Notes: Thanks to WhatOtherPlanet for the beta, and to SoulStealer1987, Sgt Chrysalis, Shockfactor and Juniorthib for contributing to this kookiness. Ya'll should go read their stuff if you haven't already.