Okay, time for a rewrite.
This story needs it, the silly way I tried to make game mechanics mesh with Ruby being able to shoot longer range than like 20 metres was just dumb, so I'm doing away with that, as well as a few other things. I'm also going to implement my typical writing style of a single focal point, rather than jumping between perspectives. However, (spoilers) Ruby will still be losing her left eye for the reason that I'm a bitch who likes hurting her own characters =P
Also, Ruby is going to be more mature, as in this story she has spent a few years training, none of canon having happened aside from a few assorted events. So she's going to be less happy-go-lucky, as a few years being a huntress and seeing the world for what it is would dampen her childish enthusiasm slightly. I think after a few times of failing to protect a village from all the Grimm would get to even someone as upbeat as Ruby, having to deal with the aftermath of those attacks as well.
So yeah, I hope you enjoy ^.^
Chapter 1
As Ruby glanced around her little private workshop, tucked away in a corner of Beacon where nobody would bother her, she had many thoughts, none of which were that this would be the last time in a long time, potentially forever, that she'd lay eyes on it.
The spare blades for Crescent Rose hanging from the wall, the reloading workbench covered in dust phials and casings, the spare metal for projects, the earmuffs she'd oh so carefully modified for her own personal needs. All of it screamed home to Ruby, and she knew every piece of it intimately. Lifting her sweetheart from its position on her back and laying it down reverently atop one of the few benches scattered around the workshop, Ruby extended it into scythe form and began swiftly taking it apart.
It had been a while since she'd done a full disassembly of her beloved weapon, and it showed. Several of the more hidden components were visibly worn, with even fewer still showing dangerous signs of potential breakage. In a mecha-shift weapon, especially one as complicated as Crescent Rose, having a single component fail was almost always a guarantee of complete failure if she tried to switch the weapons form. The most common failure would simply be that the weapon would jam during the process, but she'd heard tales of some weapons violently exploding as residual dust was released into the moving parts and ignited, which would be a death sentence in the middle of a fight against Grimm, a fate Ruby would prefer to avoid.
The moment her weapon was in pieces on a workbench, she began cataloguing all the parts which were damaged, setting them aside and making plans to either make the parts herself, or order in the more specialized parts, when her scroll went off with a shrill cry, making Ruby's ears twitch uncomfortably, informing the crimsonette that Ozpin had requested her presence in his office immediately. Sighing, Ruby laid down the part she was inspecting and threw a last look around the workshop, sighing at the work she'd have to do to get her beloved back into tip-top shape, before leaving the room, locking it behind her with her scroll and making her way at a brisk pace towards the tower.
On the way there, however, Ruby was stopped by a glowing red light appearing from a gap between two of the school buildings, and something that vaguely sounded like people talking. Shrugging her shoulders, Ruby entered the gap, taking a step back when she saw a red portal hovering a foot in the air in front of her, and could hear voices that sounded normal, though garbled somehow, sort of like when she tried talking to Qrow just using her scroll and he was too far away. Taking slow steps forwards, Ruby tried peering through the portal, though it appeared to be simply a black tunnel going to absolutely nowhere.
Noting this, Ruby resolved to inform Ozpin about the portal when she saw him. While she would normally have been plenty happy about jumping through a mysterious portal to who knows where, she didn't have her team with her, they all went to Vale for something, and her sweetheart was currently sat in a million pieces on her workbench, so she wouldn't be able to protect herself properly.
So of course, that meant the portal had to make her life difficult, suddenly losing form and flooding towards her as a bleak and blood-red tide that engulfed her.
The first thing Ruby could sense was a ringing sound.
It was the kind of ringing she'd hear if she fired Crescent Rose too much without protecting her hearing. After a few moments, however, Ruby was wishing her senses stayed muted, as a throbbing headache made itself known, feeling like an Ursa was smacking her in the head, and at the same time, her eye felt like somebody took an ice cream scoop to it. It was times like those that she hated the extra hearing her faunus ears afforded her, as they magnified the sound to a horrendous degree.
When she tried to open her eyes, Ruby felt a cold chill run over her body when her right eye opened like normal, but her left eyelid felt like something was attached to it, and try as gingerly as she might, she couldn't get it to open. Her attempts were immediately stalled when Ruby saw her current location. A small circular black room, with a bright blue light above her, the only furnishing being the small white cot bed she was laying in. Wincing at the light, Ruby lifted herself up, her solitary eye looking around carefully.
"H-Hello?" She asked quietly, standing and walking to the wall, then pressing her hands against the glass, hoping to see something through the glass, anything to indicate she was talking to somebody. "Hello? Is anybody out there?" Asking again, Ruby strained her ears, pressing the top of her head against the glass and listening intently for any sounds, any vibrations, anything at all, but to no avail, as all she could hear was her own whining breaths.
Huffing, Ruby instead looked herself over, happy to note that she was still wearing the outfit she had on when she left her workshop, though her bullets were missing and some of the clothing was a bit ruffled, which meant she'd been searched while she was unconscious, a thought which made Ruby shiver. Looking at her arms, Ruby noted a bandage was wrapped around one of her arms, a small piece of gauze being held in place, so Ruby at least knew that whoever was holding her didn't want her to die from infection of an open wound. Raising her hands to her ears, she quickly ran her fingers delicately over them, sighing when she couldn't feel anything abnormal there.
Heading back over to her cot, she sat cross-legged on it, wrapping her red cloak around herself for comfort as much as warmth, breathing deeply of the slight smell of home and keeping her ears sharp for sound, and letting her openable eye drift closed, though it snapped open again at the reminder that one of her eyes refused to open. Feeling around her eye, Ruby made out a long and thin divot that had been carved through her skin, starting above her eye and ending below it, the divot disappearing on her eyelid and continuing below her eye. She could also feel what felt like either staples or stitches running along her eyelid, holding it closed.
Feeling her panic rising slightly, Ruby was grateful for a distraction, in the form of a very light hissing sound, followed by a regular clanking sound of boots on metal, and watching as a section of the glass cylinder she was contained in rose up, revealing a walkway and a small group of people stood watching her. Several of them looked like Atlesian soldiers, in rigid uniforms and with what looked kind of like large pistol-gripped cameras held in ready stances, their weapons aimed a few inches wide of their feet, whilst the others were even more unique, one an obvious scientist, another in a mechanic's outfit and the final one, taking up the middle, in a military uniform, so probably their leader.
A polite cough interrupted Ruby's inspection of them, she looked back at the man in the centre, who seemed to regard her with a mix of suspicion and interest. "Apologies for the rough room and board, it's not every day an alien artifact folds into itself and deposits an abnormal human girl on our doorstep." At the word alien, Ruby's face scrunched up, a fact definitely not missed by her observers. "I'm sorry, but does alien mean something different to you? Vahlen told me you probably speak English, but we can't be 100% sure about it without speaking to you."
"I...I know what alien means, but what do you mean, English?" Ruby asked, tilting her head. English...she honestly had no idea. It sounded weird, Eng-lish, and not something that she had ever heard someone say before. She repeated it a few times, testing it out and deciding she didn't really like it. But then again, it was like that with learning Mistralan from Ren, she had never liked that much, but in the end came around to it.
"Well, we're speaking English right now." The man in the middle responded quickly, watching her like a hawk and making her feel more and more uncomfortable as he watched her. "I hate to say this, but...well, the easiest way to put this is to just ask. Do any of these words mean anything to you: Earth, America, England, France, Japan, Germany, Africa, China, Russia, India?"
Ruby shook her head in sequence to each word, not recognising a single one. She associated England with English, so maybe it was a language, but that still begged the question of how she hadn't heard of it in Geography, something that all Hunters and Huntresses outright needed to know in order to actually do their jobs. "I mean, earth is another name for dirt, but aside from that, none of those words mean anything to me, why?"
Shaking his head, the man in the middle rubbed his forehead. Before he could respond, the man to his side stepped forwards with a sad smile on his face. "It means you are probably a long way from home. Wherever you came from, you probably aren't on the same world anymore. And, before you ask, we cannot send you back. The anomaly which brought you here can only be replicated if we find another of the same device, and after the hell our operatives went through to retrieve it, I doubt we'll ever find another, not unless we defeat the aliens entirely. My condolences." The man said sadly.
Ruby's face fell when he told her she wasn't on Remnant any longer, then rose when she realised that meant they possibly had brought her there themselves, which meant maybe they could send her back. That was of course dashed by the words he spoke afterwards, leaving her distraught. "I can give you some good news though little one!" The sudden voice caught her attention, stopping the tears that were welling up in her eyes upon the realisation that she might not have any chance to go back home. "I can at least prove that, despite the astronomical chances, you are definitely based off a human."
Ruby blinked, staring at the woman before dropping her head into her hands. "Why would you give her hope like that?!" The man she had pegged as a mechanic growled. "The way you said it sounded like you had some grand plan for her, at this point she probably doesn't give a damn about appearing to be like us." Ruby smiled sadly at him, shaking her head as she pulled her cloak around herself.
"No, it's fine, sh-she just wanted to h-help me." Ruby said slowly, stumbling over a few words as her mind was still mulling over the fact she wasn't on Remnant anymore. She didn't even have Crescent Rose! And now they were talking about aliens and looking at her like she was some kind of freaky monster to examine...though, that was mainly the one on the left who had 'proved she was based off a human', as if she didn't already know she was a faunus.
"Well, how about some introductions, since I'm afraid you're going to be our guest for a while it seems. I'm Central Officer Bradford, many of our operatives call me Central. That over there-" He gestured over his shoulder to his left. "-is Chief Science Officer Vahlen, the one responsible for figuring out how to kill those freaks up above, and in front of me is Chief Engineer Shen, the man behind fabricating our tech, or as the operatives put it, the creator of cool stuff." Vahlen was too busy to say much, instead opting for a nod while she continued typing away at her scroll, whereas Shen kept his smile on his face, waving at her when he was introduced, to which Ruby responded in kind, raising her arm and waving, then noticing the bandage on her arm.
"Oh, that'd be my doing." Vahlen said when Shen elbowed her and nodded towards Ruby, who was inspecting the bandage on her arm. "Unfortunately I had to take a sample from you to make absolutely sure you were at least close to being human, and I may have been a bit over-zealous with my tissue extraction. My apologies, but you must understand that working on hostile alien specimens may have...dulled my inhibitions a little, as Raymond here seems fit to remind me every 5 minutes."
"Over-zealous? Doctor, with all due respect, you were planning to take a lot more than that!" Raymond said, gesturing towards Ruby's arm while she picked at the bandage. Ruby peered closely at the bandage, and her hand flew to her eye when she moved her arm to the left, reminding herself once again about her closed eye. "Oh, that. I'm afraid that when you arrived, you landed amongst the ruins of where the device that brought you here was inhabiting, and there were a few...jagged edges. You weren't critically wounded, but I'm afraid your...eye was gone." Shen said slowly.
"G-gone? Oh." Ruby said, sitting herself against the edge of her bed and re-wrapping herself in her cloak, watching them with her one good eye. "Any m-more nuggets of tr-truth for me?" She cracked a very small smile at them with her little joke, closing her eye after a moment. "I'm Ruby...Ruby Rose, Huntress-in-training." Re-opening her eyes, Ruby put some of her not inconsiderably talent to work reading their reactions to her words, smiling a little more. "And yes, if you're thinking what I think you are, then you're right, I know how to fight." She then extended a hand and twisted it a little.
"Though...it seems something isn't quite right."
Hearing the door hiss over, Ruby twisted to look at it, smiling as she saw Shen entering.
"Heya Shen!" She said earnestly, grateful that he had give her another visit. So far her stay at XCOM had been filled with mainly just pure questioning. Who was she, what did she do, what was she, why was she there, those kinds of military-style questions, usually repeated several times in a single session to try and catch her off-guard. Shen was the only one who actually talked to her like a person, which quickly evolved as they realised their shared love for engineering things.
"Hi there Ruby. Now, Central doesn't like this, but I don't really care, so I'm warning you now. He's expecting this to go perfectly, which means no accidental explosions, no misfires, nothing to give him anything to use to justify keeping you in here, alright?" Ruby could only slowly nod, her mind racing about what Shen had planned. "Well, then, I'm sure this chamber is stifling you by now, so, shall we be off?"
Ruby paused, staring at Shen in disbelief. "Really?" She asked quietly, her face drawing to such a smile that it looked like it'd snap in two with how wide her smile became when Shen nodded. "I...Thank you Shen!" She yelled, slipping past his guard to wrap her arms around the older man, who simply resigned himself to patting her back. Maybe it was overstepping her bounds, but she had been locked in that...censored word room for literally weeks if not months with nothing to do but eat, sleep, answer questions and...do the embarrassingly unmentionable when she wasn't sure if she was being watched.
"That's fine. Now, we shouldn't take too long, or Central will likely get a bit uppity at us. Follow closely, and...don't be too excitable towards the operatives, some of them will probably be a bit jumpy at seeing you just walking through the Anthill." Nodding along, Ruby fell into step next to Shen, hands swinging freely as Ruby enjoyed simply being able to walk more than a few steps at a time without having to turn.
Granted, the short corridors of the Anthill weren't conducive to straight and long walks, but it was better than the confinement of the cell she had been locked up in for so long. And, with each step Ruby took, she swivelled her head around to look at her surroundings. Talking with Shen about the place was nice, but seeing it all in person was awesome, more awesome than anything she'd seen at home. Though that might just have been because the only thing she'd seen for however long she'd been kept confined was featureless one-way glass.
Closing her eyes, Ruby took a deep breath through her nose, marvelling at the dozens of smells permeating the air, reminding herself of the first time she truly leaned upon only her sense of smell for guidance. A hint of roast beef here, a strong smell of sweat over there, Ruby revelled in being able to smell more than just the people who entered the container she was kept in, though she noted that she could also smell incredibly strong scents that she couldn't discern. She could also hear so much more, there were so many voices all occurring in such a small area, and so many voices she didn't even recognise.
Rounding a few corners, Ruby noted how many people were actually in the base, and a surprising few of them actually noticed her, seemingly too busy with their tasks to care that she was even there, though maybe the fact she was walking beside one of their big-wigs was the reason. She'd had a good laugh with Shen when they talked about how he came across the title 'creator of cool stuff', and apparently being known for that was enough to make him the most valuable person in the Anthill, aside from the elusive Commander, someone Ruby was repeatedly assured both knew of her presence, and she would likely never see.
If she did, she'd probably either be dead soon after or they'd won the war. The only people in the base who actually knew what the Commander looked like was Shen, Vahlen and Bradford, so for all she knew that grunt eating a sandwich could be the Commander, or the woman walking down that hallway with a datapad. Safety in obscurity was definitely logical to her, it was like how most people didn't actually know who was commanding an Atlesian Huntsman team at any one time, their leader could have been any of the group.
Turning the last corner, Shen quickened his step, throwing open the door to the most beautiful sight in the world, a wide flourish in his arms and a smile on his face. "Welcome to my workshop! I'd have loved to take you into the foundry proper, but Bradford was snippy enough about even letting you leave that chamber, let alone coming to my workshop. So, we'll just have to make do."
Most of what Shen said was disregarded by Ruby, who was jumping from workbench to workbench with a gleam in her eye, cataloguing everything she knew about and things to ask Shen about. Taking a deep breath in, Ruby frowned at the smell of...fireworks? Taking a few more sniffs, Ruby followed her nose towards one of the workbenches, completely missing the careful look Shen fixed her with. Sniffing closer, Ruby crouched down next to one of the sets of drawers and stopped short when she came across an odd-looking and old-smelling rifle tucked away, with several rounds sat next to it. Ruby immediately put distance between herself and the drawer, throwing a wary glance at Shen, who had a bright smile on his face. "Bradford would kill me if he knew I left that there." He said with a wink towards Ruby's dumbfounded face.
"You're joking? You-...WHAT? You...I...I don't even." Ruby floundered, settling for simply stepping forwards towards the drawer slowly, making sure Shen could warn her if he didn't want her to, arriving at the drawer and slowly picking up the weapon, pulling the bolt back and breathing a sigh of relief when she saw it was unloaded. She knew, outright KNEW this was a test. "So, you got a firing range I can shoot this thing at?" Ruby said with a smirk, lifting the rifle to her shoulder with one hand and putting her other hand to her hip. A smirk that Shen matched with a smile as he gestured towards a door off to the side of his workshop.
"Hold on Ruby. Hand me that rifle. While I trust you, it'd be a bit too risky to just hand you a working rifle like that. The trigger wouldn't actually work if you loaded a round in and pulled it now, the firing pin was removed, so even if you tried to shoot me, all that'd happen is that the gun would click." Nodding, Ruby scooped up the rounds for her new toy, putting them in her pouch and walking towards the firing range, handing the rifle to Shen as she passed.
Though, to call the room she entered just a firing range was a gross dis-service to the amazingness on display. Holographic depictions of aliens met her, and Ruby noted that many of them were similar to what Shen had described to her when prompted. She recognized the frail and tiny bodies of the Sectoids, the equally frail but lanky Thin Men, and the opposite end of the spectrum with the hulking mass of a Muton being dwarfed by what could only be a Sectopod.
Suddenly, even after hearing the stories of the aliens attacking this world, Ruby felt a pang of fear at the sheer sight of those aliens, particularly the Chryssalid. Shen had told her stories about how Chryssalids reproduced on the battlefield, forcibly implanting embryos in dying hosts and how, after a short period, their young would burst from the corpse. If she didn't already have trouble sleeping, she had no doubts that the Chryssalids would give her something to be scared of.
After Shen walked in behind her, fiddling with the rifle and handing it to her, Ruby turned her attention to sighting in the old weapon, wishing for yet another time that she'd brought Crescent Rose with her, though she knew XCOM would have taken it apart to be analyzed. After a few moments, she managed to zero the old-fashioned scope to a very casual hundred meters and sent the Muton projection downrange, sighting in and steadying her aim on her target.
Comfortable with the weapon, Ruby looked around for a moment before frowning, unable to spy any good earmuffs. After a moment she saw the rack, and realised with a severe case of frustration that of course, they were all normal earmuffs, not built for a faunus. Grabbing one of the pairs, Ruby fiddled with it for a moment before turning to Shen. "Uhh, do you mind if I take this apart real quick? I kinda need to protect these." Ruby sheepishly asked, wiggling her fur-tipped ears at Shen, who merely waved her back into his workshop.
After a few moments, Ruby zipped back into the room at a frustratingly human speed, her now thoroughly deformed earmuffs snugly protecting her sensitive ears. "Ta-da." She announced proudly, grabbing two more pairs of earmuffs and throwing one to Shen, slipping the other over her normal ears and grabbing her rifle again, shouldering it with a sigh and placing her eye behind the scope once again.
After a brief few moments of preparing herself, Ruby aimed, released her breath, and fired, marvelling at the kickback this tiny weapon had, though she mentally slapped herself as her talks with Shen had told her about how they didn't have dust on this world, instead doing everything with gunpowder. Ruby rubbed her shoulder, which was a little sore from the kick she hadn't been expecting, Ruby opened the bolt first, then looked back down the scope, smirking to herself when she saw the neat little black mark the bullet had left on the forehead of the Muton, and devolving into laughter when she pulled her vision from the scope and saw Shen looking at her in surprise.
"So Shen, how many can I fire?" Ruby asked, picking another round out of her pouch, rolling it across her fingers and smiling at him. She was genuinely overjoyed to finally get a chance to shoot again. Ruby had taken Crescent Rose out many a time to simply shoot trees, Grimm, and occasionally just the ground itself, and nothing beat the feeling of the weapon in her hands pulling against her and sending pure death downrange at her target.
"As many as you can get ahold of, Ruby. I need to speak with Central quickly, but you can stay in here and practise with that rifle if you'd like. Just promise you won't leave the range until I come back, alright?" Shen said, striding out of the room with a quick wave when Ruby nodded and slipped the bullet between her fingers smoothly into her weapon. She slid the bolt home, aimed, and fired off another shot, this time prepared for the kickback.
Exhaling, she twisted then pulled the bolt back, watching the casing fall and plink against the ground. She could smell the scent of fireworks and smoke, which was thick and heavy in the air, and she knew that it was the gunpowder that the bullets used, since there was no dust to be had on 'Earth'. Slipping another round into the rifle, Ruby left the bolt open while she sent the target back further, fiddling with her scope and zeroing it to the correct range.
The great thing about an indoor range was that she didn't have to worry about wind. Picking the gun up, Ruby closed the bolt, took up a shooting stance, sighted in on the target, then readied herself and fired once again. There was something so...different, and so visceral about firing a gun that had so much knockback despite having so little actual impact on the target compared to a dust round. It kicked her harder than gravity dust rounds, yet hit only with the force of a regular neutral dust bullet, if not weaker.
After a few minutes and a dozen rounds fired at varying ranges, the door opened again. Laying the rifle down and turning to thhe side, she saw Bradford, or 'Central' as he preferred according to Shen, enter alongside the aforementioned engineer as she plucked her earmuffs off. "Alright then, Ruby, if you could?" Shen said as a way of explanation, gesturing downrange. Curious, Ruby looked at Bradford, and when he simply did nothing, she turned and slipped her earmuffs back on, then picked up the rifle, taking one of the final rounds from her pouch and pulling open the bolt.
Slipping the round inside, Ruby slid the bolt shut and hefted the rifle, sighting in on her target and, after a brief moment to steady herself, let her shot fly, striking the target as surely as all her other shots, then removed her earmuffs again. "I see what you mean." She heard Bradford say as she turned to look at them, cocking an eyebrow. "You'd probably be able to give quite a challenge to our own marksmen all things considered." Ruby smiled, shrugging as she spoke.
"Hey, I told you about what I do, I wouldn't be a very good huntress if I couldn't."
So, rewrites...should be fun =D