Moving down the street with a show horse's canter, Yang was in high spirits. We all followed behind her, shuffling down the cobblestones. She made us stop for a moment while she haggled with some street vendor. The man carried his livelihood on his back. He had a large cask of wine with him and would dispense glasses of the bitter red stuff to his customers for a small fee. He charged extra for the glasses of course. Wise buyers brought their own.

She handed the man a large sack of gold coins with a rich jingle. He opened it, took a coin out, and bit it. Feeling the coin bend under the stress of his teeth was proof enough. The vintner took the sack and smiled. By the end of the whole exchange Yang had a cask of wine the size of a boulder hoisted over her shoulder. As we resumed our walk through the streets of Beacon proper Yang began to sing a familiar tune,

Down by the sea

Where there is naught

But you and me

Never the same

That fleeting blue

Wadding for shells

That azure hue

Paddling past

Then came the gray

Then came the black

Taking away

My only love

I had heard it many times before. It wasn't uncommon to hear our father sing that same shanty. On lazy Sunday mornings, with little to do, we would hear him belting out those lines with such enthusiasm. Some of my fondest memories come from those sunkissed days.

Blake was asking Yang if she would spare her a glass of wine from the cask, but she refused. She wanted to wait until we had arrived at the function before opening it. Blake's ears drooped, disappointed with Yang's restraint. As we began to reach our destination Yang turned to me and began to speak, "You know you're going to die right?" She said facetiously.

"W-what?" I stammered.

"Your fight With Cardin? You won't make it out of it alive you know."

"Glad to hear my sister has faith in me."

"No, My dear little strawberry, I have more faith in you than you could possibly know, but you have to understand," she explained "I ain't nothing if I'm not a realist."

"You don't even know what realism MEANS!"

"I know what it means,"

"What's it mean then?"

"It means you don't take shit; Means that when shit stinks you say something," She stated, with the plain confidence of a professor of philosophy. I had a hard time mounting any defense against her argument. I mean, what could even be said?

She told me about the others who had challenged Cardin in the past. Many of his peers had taken issue with his thorny personality before and many had challenged him to battle. He toppled all of them. Kabir The Doomsinger, Iradin Slither, Tiamat The Burning, Fox Alistair, and countless more; all of them were broken and folded under Cardin's heel. He was known for his brutality in combat, fighting more like a beast than a man at times. He did not strike or swing, but rather he would lunge and crush. He would break and tear and maul. That froth-mouthed fool had no honor. Wielding a giant mace, whose head was the size of a melon. Violence was his prerogative and his main objective in combat.

I could understand why Yang was worried for me. Whatsmore, I recognized her tactics. She would seldom confront me about things directly. She would often use humor to defuse tense situations or allude to how she really felt. And she had been doing this for as long as I could remember. I loved my sister dearly, but I wished that she would just speak plainly to me. If she could simply say what she meant and not hide her intentions behind a hundred layers of innuendo, then I could honestly say that I would love my sister more than anyone else. She would be nothing less than the keeper of my heart. However, that isn't going to happen. So instead I simply asked, "Why are you telling me all this? Do you think that I'm scared of Cardin?"

"I never said that," She replied "I just thought that you should know what you're getting involved with."

"I'm not a child anymore. If I was then I wouldn't be attending the same school as you. I can handle myself."

"Is that so?" She asked with a dampened smile. My sister loved nothing more than to baby me. At times it was frustrating, but what is a younger sister to do? Perhaps I should have simply been born sooner. I was silent for the rest of our walk, having lost all interest in chatting with my sister. Weiss had asked Yang about what to expect from the gathering. She explained that it was a bonfire party hosted by one of Beacon's secret societies. They called themselves The Brothers Grimm. A tight knit group of luvvies and poets, The Brothers Grimm loved nothing more than shekanery and foolishness. Vandalism, theft, and absurdist japes at the expense of others were all things they did with some regularity. When they weren't being a public nuisance the group could be found at their base of operations. They made their roost in an abandoned theater on the edges of Beacon proper, far from campus. It was believed that they would put on macabre performances with skulls and bones they had robbed from shallow graves. If I had known we were going to be cavorting with them I never would have come. As Yang went on to tell us about the troupe's self proclaimed leader, Weiss chimed in, "How are they a secret society if everyone knows about them?"

"Can't say for sure, but don't ask them that. They'll get mad," Blake answered. We had gone far from the city by then and came across a forest. Yang and Blake and Weiss entered. Though I was much more hesitant, Weiss gestured to me to come forward.

"We haven't walked this far through mud and insects just to turn back now," She said "Come." We made our way through bushes and undergrowth. There were no paths carved out in the thicket. Calling forth my aura, my body was swathed in a faint red glow momentarily. From then on the path became much easier. Thistled vines moved across my skin smoothly and left no abrasions. The rest of my team soon followed and summoned protective auras around themselves as well. Yang's aura burned so hot that vines and ivy would curl and turn black upon contact. Bark would crackle as she walked by. Blake moved through the woods with a nimble grace. Almost as if she was moving with the foliage rather than avoiding it. Weiss, on the other hand, was struggling. Our sweet little sugar plum fairy was having a miserable time in the forest. She would trudge and trip and twist her way through the path, the whole time barely staying upright.

Coming to a clearing in the woods we finally found them, The Brothers Grimm. They had put up a large wooden edifice in the middle of the clearing. There were a few people working around it, throwing old, dry branches 'round the base of it. The edifice was in the shape of an owl with its wings spread wide, though it had the face of a man and many masks hung from it. Many of The Brothers were wearing masks as well. It was an easy way to distinguish the fools from those who still had their wits about them. A cursory glance around and I spotted some familiar faces. Pyrrha was there with her team's leader, Jaune Arc.

Tall and blonde, Jaune was a golden retriever who fancied himself a poodle. Nothing he did seemed to fit him. Though he was the leader of that particular company of hunters, team JNPR, he wasn't compelling. I couldn't imagine men laying down their lives for a cause led by him, let alone conceive of a world where those same men would even listen to him in the first place. Though he chose to fight with a sword and shield, like a proper knight, he wasn't particularly strong. Though he was a buffoon, he had somehow managed to win over a small piece of my heart. It was neither lust nor infatuation, but rather a subtle admiration. His skills were nowhere near where they needed to be for him to make a life for himself at Beacon, but somehow he persisted. There were days where he would be exhausted, days where he looked half dead, and then the days after that where he would come back to do it all again. Such resilience! I wanted to go over and greet them properly but Yang put her hand on my shoulder, "Come with me. We're gonna meet the man in charge around here,"

"Don't care," I shifted away from her using my semblance, "Didn't ask either!"

"Come on, Ruby. I thought you liked Luvvies!"

"Not these ones I don't!" I shouted it out of necessity, having cleared a considerable distance with the speed of my semblance. Appearing behind Jaune through a flush of rose petals, I poked him with my finger. Jaune jumped and yelped.

"Hi, Ruby," he greeted me. Pyrrha had placed laurels on his hair and was weaving together another set of them. She asked if I wanted one and I couldn't help but say yes. Fixing the laurel to my head, I struck a pose. Thinking I looked rather gallant, I asked Jaune, "What brings you to a place like this?"

"Pyrrha asked me to come along," He said "She said it would be good for me to do something other than study, or train, or study new ways of training…"

"AND," Pyrrha interjected, "it's also nice to have you around." Jaune managed a meager laugh. "I'm serious! You're a good friend," She continued, "Besides, where would I be without my bodyguard?" Pyrrha smacked him gently on the arm.

"I've seen you pin a Nevermore to a tree from 100 yards out. Something tells me you can take care of yourself just fine without me."

"Oh, but that's not true. Think about it," In a low, rhye whisper she told him, "What would I do? A girl all alone in the woods with strange men. Why bother rejecting them one by one when I can simply cling to your arm and pretend that we are to be wed?" She had leaned into him to deliver that last part. Their gazes held for just a second too long and I felt like I was interrupting something.

"So, my job is to keep you from drowning in an ocean of penises?" He asked

"Precisely," Pyrrha grinned

"Keep them away from me, too. You shouldn't have any trouble with that right, Jaune?" I felt myself reaching for the place where my scythe usually was, but it wasn't with me, "Burning both ends of the candle is good for it, last I heard." Jaune let out a small groan. It was good seeing them again. I hadn't talked with Jaune and Pyrrha for at least a week. Our coursework had gotten a tad more difficult. The professors were also urging us to take on field tasks that would put our practical knowledge to the test. That particular development had a lot of the other acolytes rather on edge. They all had different levels of experience when it came to working in the field, some of them had never even been in a proper fight. The kind of fight where one person wants the other dead. So I suppose it was good that I got to catch up with Jaune then because there was a good chance that I might never see him again. I knocked on a piece of wood to prevent my thoughts from becoming reality.

Pyrrha asked me what my plan was for dealing with Cardin. She also revealed to me that she was the one who threw the chair leg at him and escalated the incident. Though she tried to offer me an apology, I declined it. I would have done the same if I was in her situation so there wasn't any need to apologize. "The plan is this," I pointed to the ground, "To have him at my feet, on his knees, and begging for mercy."