"Ren, I need a favor."

Ren reluctantly raised his gaze from the art book he was flipping through. Even the team dorm room, Ren reflected sadly, was no sanctuary from the generalized madness that was Beacon. "What kind of favor?"

Jaune nodded to himself, then stepped into Ren's personal space. "Hit me."

Ren sighed. "Again?"

"My life is just crazy these days," Jaune said, and he gave a fully body shake. "I need help to get through it with a cool head."

"My semblance doesn't actually make you calmer," Ren pointed out. "It just masks the outward manifestations of emotion and keeps them bottled up."

"Good enough for me," Jaune said flippantly.

"Fine," Ren said, giving in. Really, it cost him almost nothing and made Jaune happier, so why not? "Why not", he realized, seemed to serve as an organizing principle for his life…

He closed his eyes and centered himself, embracing the idea and sensation of non-existence. The now-familiar feeling poured over him like a bucket of cold water, lending isolation from the outside world, keeping his insides inside.

He opened his eyes and reached out for Jaune. Jaune was squirming and wiggling so much it took a few tries before Ren could get a good grip on him. When he did, Jaune immediately went still. For a moment, it looked like his colors had all faded, like he'd gone gray all over.

Then he smiled and stepped away. "Perfect! I feel much better! I think I could take on the whole world now!"

Ren wanted to point out that his semblance was not a euphoric, but what would be the point? "I'm glad," he said instead.

"You're the best, Ren," Jaune said. "I owe you some spinach dip."

"Hard pass," said Ren decisively, having gotten more than enough of Jaune's spinach dip—both kinds—during their Boys' Night In. If Jaune heard Ren's protest, though, he showed no sign. Strutting proudly, he left their dormitory.

Ren hadn't understood 'the placebo effect' before Beacon, but Jaune was making the concept very clear to him.

"Aww, isn't that adorable!"

Ren winced. "Nora, when did you get in here? Where were you?"

"Don't worry about that, worry about your budding bromance!" Nora said, clapping her hands eagerly. "This is a beautiful thing to see—two lost, lonely souls, caring for each other's emotional needs…"

Ren's eye twitched. "He asks me to help him calm down, and I do it so he'll stop bothering me. That's as deep as it goes."

"Exactly!" cheered Nora. "You give each other what you each need! You're a matched set!"

"Who's a matched set?" asked Pyrrha as she entered the team's dorm.

"Ren and Jaune!" Nora gushed.

Pyrrha froze midway through closing the door. "Excuse me?"

"I was just noticing how cute it is when Ren and Jaune help each other out," Nora said, and the smile she wore seemed even larger than usual. Deliberately so, maybe.

Pyrrha swallowed thickly and shut the door behind her. "Is that so?" she said with a tremble in her voice.

"Wouldn't they be adorable together?" said Nora. She bounced over behind Ren's chair. After a moment's fiddling, she held her scroll alongside Ren's head. Out of the corner of his eye, Ren saw she'd pulled up Jaune's picture.

The sight was causing Pyrrha to turn pale and shiver. Ren sighed. "Pyrrha, I promise you I'm not interested in stealing your man."

"Of… of course not," Pyrrha said, her voice almost a sigh; she sagged in relief.

For a moment.

Pyrrha's relaxed expression fell victim to a depressed one in the blink of an eye. "It's not like he's 'my man', anyway," she mumbled.

"Well, we just need to escalate, then!" said Nora, stepping in front of Ren and folding her arms. Ren studiously paid no attention. "Ready for Step Three, or do you wanna skip it and go straight to Four?"

"Three," Pyrrha said, determination rising up in her to meet Nora's challenge. "Then Four shortly afterwards. We might add in one of the minors to go with Three."

"Heh heh," Nora cackled. "I gotcha."

Pyrrha almost smiled—and then saw Ren. "I mean," she hastened to add, clearly mortified, "not that we're up to anything, or… anything."

"Don't worry about him," Nora said as she waved a hand in front of his eyes; he didn't blink. Useful trick, that. "He doesn't know what 'three' or 'four' mean, and he knows better than to ask."

"The less I know, the better," Ren agreed.

"See what I mean? 'Plausible deniability' is his middle name! Lie 'Plausible Deniability' Ren!"

He frowned at that. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Exactly!"

There was a knock on RWBY's dorm room door. Ruby, loathe to break from reading her comic, looked around to see if someone else could answer. Unfortunately, she was alone, so it was up to her. She marked her place, grumbling all along, and dropped from her under-engineered bunkbed.

"Hey, kid."

There was a very short list of people who could call Ruby Rose "kid" without sending her into sputtering indignation. Somehow, Coco Adel had invited herself on to that list. Ruby still wasn't sure how it'd happened.

All she knew was that, if she could bottle whatever it was that Coco had, she'd make a fortune.

"Hey," said the self-consciously uncool Ruby. "What brings you over to the little people dorm?"

"You're not little, you're fun-sized," Coco said breezily, before tipping her sunglasses down to look at Ruby directly. "You're right, though. I need you to do something. Go tell your buddy he needs to check himself before he wrecks himself."

There were far too many indefinites in that sentence for Ruby to handle. "Huh?"

Coco jerked a thumb behind her at the JNPR dorm door. "Jauney-boy over there has been sniffing after my Bun-Bun. Asking about what her schedule is, which evenings she's free, stuff like that."

That didn't seem like Jaune. "Really?"

"You bet. There's a line between adorably bashful and creepy, and he's on the wrong side of the line. I thought I'd give his friend—you—a chance to wave him off before I have to put the fear of the gods into him."

Ruby felt like she didn't understand anything that was going on.

"I know he crashed and burned with that Weiss chick," Coco went on. "Not that I blame him for trying, she's a snack, but I can see how he'd want to take things a little cooler the next time. Still, he's gone a bit too far the other way."

It was the mention of Weiss that finally made the puzzle pieces fit together in Ruby's head. She burst into laughter.

"'Scuse me?" said Coco with an arched eyebrow.

"Jaune isn't trying to ask Velvet out," Ruby said through her humor. "It's not like that at all!"

"That makes it a little more creepy, not less," said Coco, and she hefted her handbag that was absolutely not just a handbag.

"It's fine!" said Ruby, hastily waving Coco off. "It's about… you know."

It was Coco's turn to be mystified. Ruby thought for a moment, then fluttered her cape. She could almost see the light bulb going off above Coco's head. "Oh," the older girl said, before smiling broadly. "Really?"

"Yup," said Ruby with a satisfied pop of the 'p'.

It was Coco's turn to chuckle. "Velvet's not involved in any of that."

"I know that," said Ruby conspiratorially, "and you know that. But Jaune… I was gonna let him figure it out on his own."

Coco gave Ruby a wink. "Well played, girlfriend." She settled her sunglass back into place. "You have the over, then?"

"Not telling," Ruby said smugly. Ha! She was winning a round against Coco Adel! That was a happy little adrenaline shot.

"Fair enough," said Coco, angling away leisurely. "See you around, kid."

Pyrrha was in agony.

As the Red Huntress, she had Jaune's attention. That was good; that was better than she had going as Pyrrha. But how could she parlay that into a relationship? She had him hooked, but she didn't know how to reel him in.

It was a confounding problem, and one of the few her friends couldn't help her with. If she had a problem in history or philosophy, Blake was right there; in Dust theory or application, Weiss was only too eager to expound; in math or engineering, Ruby and Nora were all over it; in survival or aura manipulation, Ren was at the top of the class. Even Jaune, though sorely lacking in base knowledge, was an object lesson in study skills and diligence.

There wasn't a class, in other words, where Pyrrha didn't know someone who was between an expert and a savant in the field.

That made Pyrrha's problem all the more aggravating, because there wasn't a class on People and Relationships, and if there had been, Pyrrha knew that her friends would be flunking it.

Maybe that was why they were such good friends with each other, Pyrrha reflected morosely. None of them knew how to people. Who could she possibly go to for relationship advice? Nora? Pyrrha had quite enough experience asking Nora for help by then, thank you. Besides, if Nora knew how to ask someone out, she and Ren would have been together together years ago. (Pyrrha, certainly, did not miss the looks Nora gave Ren when she thought no one was looking.) Ren was an even worse option for complementary reasons. Obviously she couldn't ask Jaune himself.

What about Team RWBY? Even the idea of asking Blake for relationship advice was laughable. Blake might as well have surrounded her personal feelings with an electric fence and sniper nests. Ruby treated social awkwardness like a competition, one which she never lost. Weiss would have been the perfect person to ask for advice on business negotiations, but she was only now learning not to apply the same logic to personal relationships.

That left Yang.

Pyrrha fretted about approaching Yang. She didn't think Yang was much of a gossip, but out of the people in her friends group she'd interacted with Yang only slightly more than Blake. She didn't know Yang in any meaningful way.

But who else was there? The only other students she knew at all were Neptune and Sun, and they were practically strangers; Yang was a bosom buddy by comparison.

The only advice she'd ever ask of Team CRDL was how they managed to walk and talk at the same time with a collective IQ of six.

The faculty? In theory, getting the advice of older and wiser Huntsmen sounded like a good idea. In practice, this was Beacon's faculty. Professor Goodwitch gave the impression that "have a relationship" never made it on to her to-do list. Professor Port would no doubt use such a question as an excuse for two hours' worth of extended anecdotes that would somehow communicate nothing. No one had cracked the code on what Professor Peach's office hours actually were.

Pyrrha imagined asking Professor (Doctor!) Oobleck about relationships.

Now that was a one-way ticket to Nopesville.

Calling her mom had occurred to her, and she'd toyed with the idea for a while. Her mother would want to help, would try to help… but her mother also knew nothing about the Huntress lifestyle. Pyrrha was the first in her family to have her aura unlocked, let alone attend an Academy, a tournament, or even a combat school. There was so much context to Pyrrha's current mess that her mother just wouldn't have.

Her old trainers and handlers were cordial enough people, but the last thing she wanted was to give them personal information they could package and sell to the gossip-industrial complex. It had to be someone she knew personally rather than professionally.

Which returned her, once again, to Yang.

Finding a surreptitious time and place to meet Yang was easy enough, and Yang was generous enough with her time that she accepted the invitation readily. When Yang entered the open sparring room, however, it occurred to Pyrrha that she might have given Yang the wrong impression.

"I think I got the wrong impression," Yang said.

Pyrrha glanced down at herself. She was wearing her school uniform; Yang was in workout clothes. "I'm sorry!" Pyrrha said.

"I mean, unless you wanna spar in your uniform," said Yang, slinging a duffel bag off her shoulder and, in a single smooth motion, tossing it over the shoulder of a nearby practice dummy. "Buuut it doesn't look like that's what you had in mind."

"My mistake," Pyrrha said, blushing furiously. "Great, now I'm so embarrassed I'm not sure I can have our talk."

"I mean, I came all the way down here, you might as well." Yang went to the wall, grabbed a few of the box-jump boxes, and sat down on one. Tossing the other to Pyrrha (who caught it one-handed), she put on a brilliant smile. "So, what's on your mind?"

It was amazing how Yang could seem to take up all the air in a room. Her smile was blinding. "How do you do that?"

"I cheat." Yang lowered her scroll and turned off its flashlight.

"Oh."

"It works really well," Yang went on, giving a sneakier grin. "Smiling, I mean. And when it doesn't, then it's time for the punching. Bright smiles and hard punches solve just about everything!"

Pyrrha felt her face turning into a death mask. "Is that right?" she said as her insides collapsed in upon themselves.

"Sure is!"

Regret. Deep, abiding regret was the only thing Pyrrha could feel.

Yang quirked an eyebrow. "But you didn't ask me here for the punching, and you're pretty good at fake smiles, so I'm guessing either you've already tried those two or they won't solve this problem."

"They won't," Pyrrha said, but her dread did not abate. "Yang, how many relationships have you been in?"

That slipped under Yang's guard. She blinked like she'd caught a fist to the face. "Oh, man, this is super not a smiles-or-punching situation, is it?"

"Just answer the question, please."

"Wellll… none."

Pyrrha felt her jaw drop.

"What?"

"Not even one?" said Pyrrha, trying hard to convey the fathomless depths of incredulity she felt.

"Why's that such a surprise?" said Yang.

Pyrrha reached out a finger to point, but, after a moment of second-guessing, just waved her finger at Yang's everything.

"That's fair. I mean, people asked me, sure. And I let them keep coming, because it was fun and I enjoyed the attention. It was a game to me. I just never said 'yes'. What," she said with a hint of mischief, "do they not have groupies on the Junior Regionals circuit?"

"If there are, my trainers kept them at a fair remove," Pyrrha said, not playing Yang's game. "That was part of the persona, you know? The Invincible Girl. No one can touch her—or even come close. I rarely met my peers on the circuit, never mind outsiders."

"Woof, that got Yangsty. It was different for me. I… had too much else going on." She hesitated, and Pyrrha spotted a whole world of unvoiced issues lurking underneath. Yang stuffed it all back down without explaining, though, and forced on a strained smile. "But hey, learning experiences all around!"

"Learning. Right," Pyrrha mumbled as she sank back into her own feelings. "I think I'd be much happier learning if I didn't feel like so much was at stake."

That seemed to strike a chord with Yang. She looked at Pyrrha a bit more closely, then stood up and dragged her box across the space between, so that she could sit next to the Mistrali girl. Once they were side-by-side, Yang threw an arm across Pyrrha's shoulders. "Tell you what," Yang said affably. "I might not have experience with relationships. But… I'm sort of dancing around having one."

That caught Pyrrha by surprise. She was torn between a Nora-esque curiosity and a Ren-ish none-of-her-business. "Oh?" she managed.

"Yep," said Yang easily. "So, instead of telling you what I've done in relationships, how about I tell you what I plan to try?"

"That sounds lovely," said Pyrrha. It was a reflexive response, the sort drilled into her from publicists' training, but she really did want to know, even if she wasn't sure how much of it would be useful.

"I learned all of this from my dad. Ever hear of the 'five love languages'?"

Jaune walked up the dormitory hallway with a series of sighs.

He looked rather the worse for the wear. His hair was a bird's nest of twigs and leaves. His hoodie was soaking wet, while his pants were caked in mud. Some combination of water, dirt, and mud covered the exposed skin of his neck and face. His aura had already patched up the scratches that had recently covered his hands. No such repair was forthcoming for his dignity. He was bowed forward in the resigned slump of someone dragging themselves under the weight of frustration.

He was a much-bedraggled Jaune Arc, that was for sure.

He exhaled again, and it was a chorus of moans, a symphony of groans. It was enough that Team RWBY's dorm door opened, and Zwei's head popped out.

"Mrr?"

Jaune stopped, blinked heavily, and looked towards Zwei. "Velvet Scarlatina," he said, "is not the Red Huntress."

"Arf!"

"Well, you could have told me that before." Jaune sighed again, with enormous inflection and gravitas. A puddle formed beneath him as he slowly dripped dry. "I'm going to shower, then I'm going to bed. Wake me in a week."

"Arf!"

The HuntsMan: a standing challenge to the necessity of tragic backstories. Will he be able to get back on the trail of the true Red Huntress? Does Pyrrha have the audacity to break two laws at the same time? Will Zwei do anything besides be cute? And why do I use the word "seaweed" fifteen times in one chapter? Find out next time in THVTRH:NON Episode Five: Seaweed and Seaweed-ibility. (Okay, seventeen times.)