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A merry surge of freezing wind swept over the frigid treetops; it rattled frozen pine needles and shook clumps of snow that clung to the branches. These were old, dark and imperious forests far from the machinations of civilization.

Except on that day, when quite a few uncivilized machinations converged. Above the dark sea of trees, even above the tough and freezing wind, flew several aircraft. Two were emblazoned with the proud flags of Atlas, but a third with no markings followed them closely. A mean red line shot out from the front of it, cutting a bloody slice through the white clouds and slashing open one of the aircraft's sides. Then it went in for the kill, launching a missile that collided with the aircraft's open wound and blasted a hole straight through it.

The poor plane swirled down feebly, gushing out black smoke as a hurt creature underwater would gush blood; the billowing and acrid smoke marred the serene white sky.

Inside the larger plane, panic ensued. "Damn it!" shouted one man as he clutched his rifle; holding the weapon was surely useless against the attacking aircraft, but it gave him slight comfort. "Who the hell is that?"

"And how'd they even know we're here!" shouted another woman who hefted a shotgun. Ten of them had been sitting around the dim, large and mostly empty inside of the transport plane. A couple had even been napping. Now, their heartbeats all slammed wildly with adrenaline, uncertainty and even a little fear.

"Shut the hell up you nanny-livered hooligans!" barked their captain, who shouted to be heard over his squabbling subordinates, the roaring engines and the turbulent wind just outside.

"What does that mean?" asked a skittish private. "I have a healthy liver!"

"It means," the commander said, hefting a huge pistol in one meaty hand, "that you should shut the hell up before I make you!" He pointed one sausage-finger to the only thing in the spacious cargo hold: a large coffin-like crate. Lined with steel and locked with fist-sized hinges, the sarcophagus sat in imposing stillness.

On top of it lay a board of checkers with pieces in starting positions, a half-finished puzzle of a golden retriever in a field of pink flowers, an almost-completed game of Go Fish and a gaggle of orange-juice boxes with straws sticking out of their tops. The soldiers had been prepared for a long, boring flight.

"Obviously they're here for that!" said the commander. Spittle flew from between his bared teeth. "So that means they're not about to blow us up! They're gonna board!"

He brushed his harsh gaze around the five soldiers before him. "So when they do that, it's our job to stop them!"

The soldier with a healthy liver shuddered. "But what if they do blow us up? Like what if they want to destroy that thing and not take it?"

"Uh…" The captain trailed off. "That would not be good…" He shook his head and forced himself to be angry again. "Shut the hell up Private! I don't think I've ever hated you more than I do in this moment, and I've always hated you!"

"Please Cap, I've already heard that enough from my dad, and my therapist said—"

They heard a thump! on the plane's roof. Sparks suddenly fell like fiery rain that fizzled out before hitting the ground; wisps of acrid smoke curled out and swirled around the sparks. A jet of flame cutting through the firm steel hull hissed and popped as it did so.

"Weapons ready!" shouted the beefy commander.

"Sir yes sir!" replied Private Nanny-Liver

"I still hate you!"

A hot orange X had been cut into the roof, and the soldiers heard the roaring wind above it more clearly now through the gaps. They trained their guns on the point of attack, fingers hovering just over the trigger.

They did not expect an explosion, but that is what they received. A charge placed over the breach blasted through the hull. Shrapnel tore apart the juice boxes, lodged into the checkerboard and scraped and scratched the soldiers where it managed to pierce their hastily thrown-on armor.

The absolutely freezing and whipping wind gushed down into the hold, creating a vicious and disorienting racket; a smoke grenade followed. The grey smoke swirled violently as the wind rushed around, creating a vortex of dusty smog. Only then did someone jump down through the hole and into the hold.

He landed on the sarcophagus. His maniacal laughter could be heard even over the wind: loud, unhinged and dastardly. The couple of soldiers who had their bearings—Private Nanny Liver and Captain Meaty Hands—squeezed off a few futile shots. The interloper, however, jumped up high above their bullets and came back down like a tempest.

It was over quickly. A kick there. A slash here. A punch there. A headbutt here. An unnecessary and frankly rude lick there. Then it was done.

"Ugh…" Captain Meaty Hands stood over the unconscious body of Private Nanny Liver; his magnum had been knocked out of his meaty hands, but he still raised said meaty hands in imposing fists. Or at least he tried, since the overwhelming pain from the slash in his side made his legs shake.

Piercing and manic golden eyes stared at him through the billowing smoke. As the monster approached, its wicked smile came into full view.

"How heroic," said Tyrian Callows. He licked his lips, slowly.

"You won't…" the captain tried to maintain his honor to the end.

"Oh won't I?" Tyrian cackled again and launched himself into a spinning back kick; his boot thwumped against Captain Meaty Hands's meaty head. The good soldier flew into the wall and collapsed to the floor.

"Ha! Hahahahaha!" Tyrian cackled violently, himself convulsing uncontrollably as if his maniacal laughter was a virus.

The cockpit door hissed open. Tyrian cut off his self-gratifying mania; he hopped back and trained his bladed wrist-guns at the door. His own scorpion tail crept up from behind his back, ready to sting.

A man stepped through. The door slid shut behind him. As the last of the smoke was sucked out of the hold, his face and form were clear.

"I shall stop you here, you insidious villain," said Arthur Watts. The wind whipped up his hair and even his mustache.

He met Tyrian in the eye, and for a tense moment, the two stared each other down.

Before Tyrian cackled again. "Ha ha ha! Hoo hee ha!" He laughed like a child and gripped his stomach.

"What?" Watts asked, "my hero impression is that bad?" He held up his hand, gripping an imaginary award. "Ladies and gentlemen of the academy…"

"Well"– Tyrian wiped a tear from his eye –"you should really start practicing more if you want to trick all your friends."

"Oh worry not," Watts said with a shrug, "tricked they shall be." He turned to the cockpit door and kicked it. "Take that!" he shouted then.

"Oh?" Tyrian raised an eyebrow.

"A testimony from the pilots that I really put up a fight," Watts explained. Then he cracked his neck, cracked his knuckles, stretched his arms and—

Punched himself in the face. Very hard.

"Sure you don't want some help there?" Tyrian asked with a giddy smile.

"As if I would give you the satisfaction," Watts replied. "If anyone is going to assault me, it will be me." He jammed his knuckles into his ribs and winced, hoping that the ensuing bruise would be worth it. "And besides… you are already going to be having some fun."

Tyrian laughed slowly and sadistically, a scary sound that came up from his gut. It reminded Watts how much he really did not quite like his partner in crime.

After a few more blows, Watts helped Tyrian with the sarcophagus. They cleared the soldiers' games off the top and undid the clasps that kept it held in place on the track below it. They braced their shoulders against the crate and shoved it toward the back of the plane.

"Alright," Watts said. "Just pull the red lever over there to open up the back and ride it on down. You are certain the pilot can intercept you mid-air?"

"Only the best for this!" Tyrian insisted. "Anybody nasty enough to get on Atlas's Red List sure has the skills we need!" He rubbed his hands together, actually excited at the potentially deadly and certainly insane maneuver he was about to pull.

"Well you can certainly get on the Red List and be an unskilled idiot," Watts replied with disdain. "That's how most people get on it in the first place."

"Oh don't worry," Tyrian said. He looked into Watts with his corrupt, beady eyes. "I'm sure you'll be there soon enough."

Watts frowned. "If all goes according to plan, the Red List will have all the importance of a housewife's grocery list."

"Or house husband! Don't be discriminatory, Watts!"

"I—"

"It's actually a pretty good show, too, The Way of the House Husband."

"I did not really like the animation style much," Watts admitted, "couldn't finish the first episode."

"Well you could try—"

"I presume you only enjoy the show because you imagine it's yourself and Salem."

Tyrian frowned. For a few long seconds, the only sound in the cabin was the whipping wind. It seemed louder now than it had been a moment ago.

"Well… anyway"– Watts waved his hand as if he was batting away a fly –"there's already too much on my watch later list." He stroked his mustache. "Enough of silly banter. Let's just get the properly painful part over with." He ruffled his mustache nervously. "And don't you dare overdo it."

"Hehe, just turn around and try to relax."

Watts didn't like the way Tyrian smiled as he said that. The plan, nevertheless, required it. The plan he had made himself.

"Oh regrets…" he muttered as he turned his back to Tyrian. He shut his eyes and tried to lighten his aura around his back.

Tyrian licked his lips, for he always enjoyed seeing others in pain; especially when he was the cause of said pain. His stinger rose high in the air.

"Gah!" Despite his best efforts, Watts cried out as Tyrian's stinger dug into his back. Tyrian's venom seeped into his flesh and into his blood; the pain got worse every second.

Watts's whole body shook. He fell to his knees. His breathing became ragged and uneven, and he stopped breathing altogether for several seconds at a time. He collapsed onto the floor. All the while, the spot where Tyrian had struck him in the back felt like a hot fire poker had stabbed into his skin and was now being ground in and twisted. That pain also spread throughout his bloodstream, making his whole body ache and sizzle.

"Bon voyage, Mr. Hero!" Tyrian yelled with a cackle as he pulled down on the lever and hopped onto the sarcophagus.

Angry wind poured into the hold like a vicious flood from a hurricane rushing across the beach. It pressed Watts down into the floor, whipped his suit around and him and clawed at his exposed skin. The whole plane rocked with turbulence as the change in pressure and drag from the open ramp completely disrupted the aircraft's flight.

"Woo hoo!" Tyrian whooped in delight as the sarcophagus rattled on its rail and slid out the plane and off the ramp; he disappeared into the white fog.

The temperature in the hold plummeted even further; and in that instant, all Watts's mind could think about was the death-inducing pain in his back and the very real threat of frostbite. A threat he had forgotten about when devising this plan, although it really should have been obvious that things would get very cold very quickly when high in the air above an arctic forest.

Watts had a double-major in Computational Science and Mathematics as well a Ph.D. in the former; none of that included courses on villainous machinations.

Well, that Ph.D. program had taught some lessons, but those bitter thoughts were for another time.

As it were, he barely mustered the strength to cover his ears with his shaking hands; his fingers were turning purple like ripe grapes. He could only hope that the pilot realized that the hold was open and quickly flipped some sort of switch to close it again.

A pair of feet stumbled past Watts. He rolled his eyes just enough to see the shaky legs of a man, one of the soldiers Tyrian had beaten down. The man stumbled to the lever controlling the plane's ramp, gripped it, grunted and pulled it down. A shrill siren sounded as the ramp pulled up. The wind died down and things seemed to be okay.

Then the plane shuddered again; hot orange lines formed along the walls. One laser managed to penetrate the hull entirely and slash into the hold, forming a smoking scorch mark on the ground.

"Ah hell!" Captain Meaty Hands grunted as he stumbled back from the lever. He kept one hand to his side to slow the bleeding. "Stay down Doc!"

"Urgh…" Watts couldn't muster much of a response at that moment.

The plane shuddered and listed to the side, for a laser had just slashed the wing. Those idiots were supposed to pretend to be trying to bring the plane down, not actually shoot it down.

"Bastards…" Watts grumbled through gritted teeth.

"My thoughts exactly Doc!" replied the Captain, shouting to be heard over the turbulence, the siren and the wind.

The cockpit door slid open and a co-pilot shouted back into the hold: "They're pulling away! A couple jets have been scrambled and are on their way!"

"Oh thank the gods!" shouted Private Nanny Liver, who had just managed to get back to his feet.

"You shut the hell up!"

"But Cap—"

"That was the good news!" yelled the co-pilot.

Good news?

"Bad news is we're gonna crash!"

Watts narrowed his eyes. While he still mostly felt only the screaming pain in his back, he also became deeply aware of a growing rage.

"Good news again, we're probably gonna live!"

"Probably?"

"Nanny Liver if you don't shut up—"

Watts closed his eyes. He shook with anger and pain alike. One particularly frustrating thought came across his mind:

I'm going to die with idiots.

"Woo hoo!" Tyrian shouted as their plane landed.

Said aircraft had been an outdated transport craft abandoned by the Atlas military, now outfitted with a gangly-looking laser that was duct-taped to the bottom. There was also now a huge metal sarcophagus sticking out the top of the plane where it had smashed right down into it.

Sitting on the sarcophagus was Tyrian. He was blue from the cold, but that didn't hold back the manic smile on his face. Below him, the cockpit door popped open.

"Ho ha!" shouted the pilot. "Ace has still got it!" An older man with greasy gray hair and a corn-cob pipe hopped out of the plane. "Yeah baby that's what I'm talking about!"

They had rattled the plane's engines and pushed it to a dangerously high heat as they fled at the highest possible speed away from the site of their heist. Now it had landed on a frozen lake, blowing away heaps of snow and clearing for themselves an icy landing pad.

"If that wasn't the best thing I've done since that summer five years ago when I rode a jet-ski blindfolded then I don't know what is!" Ace shouted.

"Hehe…" Tyrian laughed quietly as if sharing a special joke with himself.

A truck sped out of the tree line, rushing toward the plane. The rusted old thing plowed through the snow with big wheels, clanking as it did. Stopping just short of the plane, a short girl with big foggy glasses and rotund pink earmuffs popped out of the side.

"Well now," Ace said, "where we going next?"

Tyrian dropped down. His wrist blades gleamed, reflecting the pale and crisp light of the cloudy, frigid sky. The snow around Ace turned red. He fell to the ground.

"Oh goodness…" the short woman turned away, nervously rubbing her purple bunny mittens together.

"Don't be like that, Miss Omsk." Tyrian rolled out her name through his lips like a hiss. "He was a war criminal, in case that helps you sleep better."

"It's not an issue of conscience," Omsk said. "I just don't like blood." She rubbed her mittens together again. "And this cold is simply awful."

"Aren't you a Mantle native?"

"Doesn't mean I like the cold." She looked up to the sky. Clouds snuffed out any hint of blue, and a dim sun was beginning to creep down to the horizon. No other planes were in sight. "Let's just get out of here."

Tyrian hopped back up onto the plane and Omsk backed the truck up beside it. Tyrian kicked and pushed at the sarcophagus, rattling it and the entire plane as he did so. Eventually, he managed to tip it over just enough for its own weight to send it toppling out of the dent it had wedged itself in and falling into the truck's bed.

Omsk hurriedly threw a tarp over the sarcophagus as Tyrian scurried into the plane. She got back into the driver's seat, and Tyrian came out with a satchel. He laughed excitedly dramatically hurled it into the snow by the plane.

He hopped into the truck beside Omsk, who scooted over in her seat a few inches to get just a little further away from him.

"You really want to step on it right about now," Tyrian said with a wide smile.

Omsk slammed a fuzzy boot down onto the pedal, and the truck lurched forward. Just as they reached the tree line and got the old tires off the lake, the satchel Tyrian had left exploded.

The blast rocked the plane; but more importantly, the ice underneath began to crack and groan. The explosion echoed and reverberated through the quiet trees, accompanied only by the sound of creaking ice and a chugging engine.

Omsk slowly got back onto an old trail, keeping her eyes on the rear-facing mirror. Then she blinked. Suddenly, the plane was gone. It had been there, but then it simply was not anymore. She barely saw the top of the old thing disappear under the thick ice as it all sunk into the deep and merciless lake. The plane's last pilot followed.

Then Omsk sped up again. She ignored all of Tyrian's attempts at odd conversations, such as when he asked if she had ever seen a snake eat itself or if she had ever tried to make a cat be friends with a mouse. She was tempted to answer when he seemingly innocuously asked her what her favorite kind of curry was (the answer was the green kind from southern Vacuo), but she had the sneaking suspicion that he would still somehow manage to twist the conversation to be about the futility of mankind or the power of pain or something edgy like that.

Instead, she looked past her foggy breath and focused on the road.

Small rough roads crawled like centipedes through the thick forests in this part of the north, used once upon a time by hardy workers employed to cut down trees, strike the earth and skin the thick-furred creatures that called this kind of place home.

It took hours, and the dark and the true cold of the land had set in by then, but they reached their destination. An abandoned dust mine set in the side of a hill in the middle of the forest.

The rickety remains of buildings stood forlornly around them; nothing more than frozen beams of wood that stubbornly stood even as the rest of the buildings had fallen remained like sad monuments. Omsk drove past it all and into the mine's dark maw. They passed under a rusted sign labeled with three simple letters: SDC

The truck's cracked headlights illuminated the tight stone space inside the mine. Gravel crackled under the tires and the engine rumbled. Then Omsk parked, and the lights went out and the tires stilled and the engine died.

She pulled up a small dust-powered lamp from between her feet, flicked it on and hopped out the car. "If you would close the doors, that would help us not freeze to death," she told Tyrian.

"I do enjoy not being a popsicle," Tyrian said as he hopped out the truck with his own lamp. He hurried to the entrance. Rusty hinges squealed painfully, but he forced the doors into position. Relief from the growing winds outside immediately welcomed them.

"Here," Omsk said, chucking a blanket at him from a crate stashed by the wall. She then pulled out and turned on a portable heater and huddled by it as it warmed up.

Tyrian caught the blanket and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he held up the lamp and looked deeper into the mine: all he saw was a tumble of rocks.

"A cave-in put this place out of action a few decades ago," Omsk said. She rubbed her mittens together and hunched over the heater. "Then the SDC found better deposits out in the Eastern Plains anyway, so they shifted gear. More and more people started pulling out after that. Logging is done further west now. Most of the good fur has been depleted or just gets made in farms or factories.

"The most valuable thing around here now is the isolation."

"And that's why the lab is all the way up here."

"Yup. A lot of different labs, supposedly, but nobody other than the top brass know about all of them."

"Figures," Tyrian said. The cold and the long trip had managed to mellow him out. "Lucky the one we know has something so useful."

"Yup."

Tyrian stalked to the heater and leaned over her. "Well?"

"Uh?" Omsk looked up at him, suddenly feeling a little more skittish. "What?"

"Are you going to go work on that thing I just went out of my way to snatch?"

"Right now?" she complained. She patted a mittened hand on the heater. "I would kind of like to get warmer first."

Tyrian's tail raised up behind him. The stinger twitched in the air.

Omsk hustled to the truck and climbed onto the back. She grumbled to herself as she saw Tyrian smile and sigh as he sat right on the heater. He probably didn't care so much for being diligent as he did for getting rid of her and hogging the warmth for himself. She didn't call him out.

Omsk patted her mittens on the sarcophagus's locks. She pried open a panel and then took off a mitten so she could work a number pad. Her fingers instantly stiffened in the cold air, so she rushed. Remembering what Watts had told her, she entered the five-digit code: 11111

Somebody had missed the class on secure passwords.

The locks along the sarcophagus clicked and sprung open. Omsk grunted and put all her strength into lifting the case. Her short arms shook with the weight of the steel-plated cover. It didn't help that Tyrian started laughing at her.

She huffed and got the top onto her shoulder, then shoved it up the rest of the way. It swung over. The sarcophagus was open. She looked down into it.

A kid in his late teens. That was what it looked like. With skin pale as snow and hair black as a starless night, he struck a handsome figure. He seemed to be sleeping. Or dead.

Omsk blew warm air on the frigid fingers of her naked hand and picked up a scroll-pad inserted into the side of the crate with her mittened hand. She turned it on and flipped through orange screens that lit up her face in the dim cave.

"Can you fix it?" Tyrian asked. "Watts said he broke it."

"He corrupted a few key lines of code to stop it from functioning," Omsk answered as she held up a cable connected to the scroll-pad. "I just need to fix the changes he made, and we're good."

She waved the end of the cable over the kid's face. The skin at his right temple shimmered. In a perfect circle one inch in diameter, his skin morphed into a metallic grey. Then that fluid skin rippled and receded, exposing a port into his metal skull like that for a computer. The cable flashed green, and a corresponding light flashed from the port.

Omsk plugged the cable in, and her scroll-pad immediately flashed with new menus and options. She put in a host of passwords, a new one for each menu she opened. She navigated through them and accessed complicated graphs and long lists of code. She expertly weaved through the fields of numbers and disjointed words, deftly finding and fixing errors like a hawk spotting and diving down to mice in a vast field.

She made one final adjustment and saved the files. Then, by an act of repetitious muscle memory, she made a mistake. She pressed the power button

"Oh crap—"

The kid's eyes flew open, revealing inhuman glass. They were unmistakably cameras. Then the same metallic substance that formed his skin seeped out from around the eyes and covered them. They shimmered and changed color. Shiny, crystalline eyes of purest blue looked curiously at Omsk. He blinked.

Omsk squeaked in surprise and nearly fell back off the truck as the kid sat straight up, moving as swiftly and automatically as a crankshaft fresh from the assembly line. He peered around at the cave, innocently confused. Then he looked back at Omsk. He smiled.

"Salutations!"

Wuh? But where is Jaune? Who's this? Just you wait!

I'm excited to start this. I'm aiming for it to be on the "short" side for fanfics, which is around the length of your usual book lol. Certainly much shorter than my other fic.

Whereas my other fic, Not All those Who Wander are Lost, is an edgefest that's been meandering on for years, I hope to keep this much more lighthearted, better paced and wrapped up relatively quickly.

I'll also be following a plot distinct from the show's, with some original worldbuilding and my own take on some characters. I've read enough fics that follow the same plot and have written one myself like that to now want to deviate significantly. Isn't that the point of fanfics?

But hey, if you're interested in a neat Fallout/RWBY fic that I started when I was a cringey teen and has since gotten better (I like to think), go check out NATWWAL. I've recently done a bit of a soft reboot for that fic, moving the plot and pacing in a different direction. Writing that story's definitely taught me a lot.