An: This chapter is late and short, and I'm sorry for that, but I'm afraid I have more bad news. This story will be going on a slight hiatus although with how long I've been taking to update you might not even notice a difference. The reason for this is that applications for my school's animation program are due soon with an acceptance rate of a whole sixteen percent. Since I came to this school mainly for this program, I'll be dedicating all my time to working on my portfolio and application which means I won't be working on this story until everything is complete.

I didn't want to make you all wait another two weeks for a chapter, so I decided to release this chapter now even though it doesn't have as much content as I would like. Not to say this chapter isn't important, but it's more set up than anything else. Hopefully you all still enjoy it, and I'll see you when I see you.

Maybe if Jaune pretended really hard he could convince himself that it was all a dream.

"Don't bother trying to ignore me, kid. I'll just send Neo over to your new fancy penthouse if you hang up," Roman said putting an end to that thought.

"How do you know that! We literally just moved in? Did you put a tracker on my scroll?"

"Ah, a response and with loads of energy too. That's good because you're going to need to pay attention."

"Don't change the subject! I've put up with it until now but this it too far. How are you doing it? Is it magic? Are you looking through my eyes like they're video cameras?"

"Calm down, I'm not getting that intimate with you."

"Then how are you doing it?" Jaune asked again, not liking how causally Roman was dismissing his right to privacy.

"What even makes you think I'm tracking you? I'm Vale's greatest thief and greatest caretaker. My intuition and information network is second to none. Knowing my understudy's every move is child's play."

Jaune fell back onto his bed accepting that he was never going to get an answer. "What do you want from me?"

"You don't need to make it sound like I'm forcing you to do this."

"So, I can refuse?"

"No, I just don't like the way it sounds."

"Roman, it's like two in the morning, could you just get to the point?"

"I have a job for you. Ever heard of Mt. Glenn?"

"No."

"Well, it was before you were born and Vale likes to keep it hush hush nowadays. It was an expansion project. It was supposed to solve all of Vale's overpopulation problems and it was advertised as a paradise for people who choose to move there. Tax breaks, the city lifestyle with a country feel, imperturbable grimm defenses, the whole shabang. But, turns out the grimm defenses weren't so imperturbable. The city fell and a lot of people died. Now it's nothing more than a rotting relic of the past."

"So, what's with the history lesson?"

"You see I'm going to have business in Mt. Glenn fairly soon and there's a few things in Mt. Glenn that need removing before then, supernatural things. I'm not able to leave Vale at the moment thanks to other obligations, so I'm tagging you in."

"You want me to go Mt. Glenn? I just got back from a trip. I really don't want to head off again so soon."

"I know about Atlas. It's the reason I waited to call you."

"Of course, you do," Jaune groaned. "Can't you just take care of it while you're there?"

"No can do. I'll be bringing some company and they aren't privy to my other job, and I would like to keep it that way."

"What business could you have in Mt. Glenn if it's not caretaker related? Are you just there to ransack the place? That's pretty low even for you."

"The most wanted, and most handsome, thief in Vale wouldn't stoop to petty scavenging; besides, that place was picked clean by vultures long ago. Anything of value it long gone. I'm going there to do a little, let's say, excavating. Nothing for you to worry about."

"Favor or not, I'm not helping you commit crimes."

"You won't be," Roman said. "I'm just asking you to sterilize the place. It will be good for everyone. Think of it as a training exercise."

To say Jaune was wary would be a big understatement, but if it hadn't been for Roman, he would probably be at home, sulking, or working as a sales clerk. In a way, he did owe him, and it wasn't like Jaune had anything else lined up. The hardest part about solving otherworldly problems were finding them in the first place. "What do you need me to do?" he resigned.

"Glad you're finally seeing it my way."

"This also better not be counting as one of my phone calls!" Jaune clarified. It would be just the type of thing Roman would try to pull.

"Relax even I'm not cruel enough to do that when I'm the one asking. What you need to know it that Mt. Glenn it currently filled with echoes and you need to get rid of them."

"Echoes?"

"Echoes are exactly what the name implies, reverberations from the past where people died none to peacefully."

"Great, so I get to deal with another haunting. At least this time they'll be actual ghosts."

"Don't let your entertainment media infect your thinking. Ghost are jut fiction created by people who didn't know any better. Echoes aren't people who couldn't pass on they're simply bundles of negative emotions and a person's last memories that sort of materialized into their own entity."

"Seems like ghosts with a small technicality."

"If you want to call them ghosts, then fine, that's not the important part. Ever wonder why grimm are drawn to places where negativity once was, I mean really thought about it? It's not like negativity is a particle that just lingerers around. Emotions don't work that way but echoes do. They keep the negativity train running and the grimm recognize that."

"How do I get rid of them?"

"If there were just a few you could destabilize their existence with any number of special spells, but with how many are bound to be there, that would be impractical. You'll have to do it in mass by liberating them from their worldly bonds.

"Exactly what you do to ghosts." Jaune mumbled "So, how do I put them to rest."

"No idea."

Jaune waited a few seconds for Roman to hit him with the punch line.

It never came.

"What do you mean you don't know!" he yelled probably loud enough to wake Emerald.

"You can't blame me for this. At most you get half a dozen echoes when a small frontier town goes under, easily taken care of with option one, but Mt. Glenn was huge. Even if just half a percent of the population produced an echo, they'll easily number in the thousands. Massive population centers don't just collapse daily, and none of the caretakers that had that book before you wrote about any cities they had to exorcise, so as far as I know, the situation at Mt. Glenn is entirely unique."

"So, you've decided to stick the problem onto me." Was it still too late to hang up and pass it all off as a dream? "Please tell me you have at least an idea about what to do."
"Didn't I say that I don't."

"Roman!"

"Fine, there's no need to get so angry. I've been thinking about this for a while and here's my best theory. Echoes are just negative emotions and memories, so in theory if one of those components were to be removed, the echoes would fall apart. There's no way to take away their memories, but it should be possible to give them a new one. If you can do something to give them a happy memory, their negative emotions should just wash away."

"How confident are you in this. You didn't get it from any entertainment media, possibly a ghost movie, did you?"

"I'm hurt you would think that." Jaune couldn't see it but he could tell that Roman was whipping away a fake tear. "For your information, I do have some evidence to back this up. Anyone can create an echo when they die, doesn't even have to be tragedy just sad enough to them. The point is caretakers don't go around destroying every last one of them, yet somehow Remnant isn't overflowing with the things. Echoes generally stay around whatever their memory pertains to, whether it be a place or a person. The conclusion is that echoes "naturally" eradicate themselves. My guess is that when an echo sees something happy, like the family of the person who died moving on and returning to normal, the positive memory outweighs the bad and the echo ceases to exist. In places where there's no happiness to be found, however, like Mt. Glenn, an echo will just stick around indefinitely."

"Makes sense, but running around giving every echo a happy memory doesn't seem any more efficient than using a spell."

"You won't have too. Saying there's multiple echoes might have been a little misleading. Echoes don't have any real form, so when there're close together they kind of just meld into one another like different gases. Unique and separated enough where a spell will only destroy one sentience, but interwove enough where showing one a happy memory will infect the entire group, and since all of the echoes there should have memories relating to the fall of Mt. Glenn, a happy memory about that should collapse every one of them."

"How do I show them a happy memory about the fall of Mt. Glenn?"

"That is where my brain power ended," Roman said, reluctantly.

Jaune groaned into his scroll. "Let's say I do figure out some way to do that. What if you're wrong and it doesn't work?"

"Then you have to come up with something else. It your job after all and I'm counting on you not to screw it up. So, good luck." And then Roman hung up.

He just hung up.

Jaune wanted to be angry, he really did, but honestly, he was too tired. Better to just deal with it in the morning.

Jaune woke up sometime around noon, and quickly realized that dealing with Roman's insane request would not be any easier. Clearing Mt. Glenn of echoes was going to be a monumental task. It made everything else he and Emerald had accomplished look like a joke, and he didn't have a clue about how to go about it.

Reading up about echoes from his journal hadn't help. It was all mostly what Roman had said with a few extra details. For one you couldn't actually see echoes or interact with them in any conventional way. Trying to kill them with bullets or blades would be as pointless as attacking the wind.

A problem because even if echoes didn't pose any danger by themselves, the grimm they drew very much did, and as long as they remained the grimm would just keep coming. Jaune didn't even want to think how many grimm must have made a home in Mt. Glenn where so many echoes had been for so long. He and Emerald would be swarmed the moment they arrived—and wasn't arriving itself going to be its own problem. Vale probably didn't have any sightseeing trips, and Roman hadn't offered anything.

He was going to have to give Whitley a call.

He also needed to inform Emerald.

He found the girl still asleep on the couch, curled into his onesie. It would seem that both of them had needed the extra hours of rest. She was not happy to be woken up, and even less so when he told her about their new job.

"I don't take orders from Roman Torchwick," she stated.

"It's not an order. It's a job that I accepted. It's no different than anything else we've done."

"Really? So, what would happen if you called Roman right now and unaccepted his job?"

Jaune turned away. "I imagine that one night we would fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of Mt. Glenn the next morning."

"So, we're his slaves."

"It's not that bad. We're just doing his favor."

"I really don't think we own him anything. He saved that faunus all on his own, and tacked on that favor as a whim. Honestly, it would've been better for us if he hadn't save her at all."

"What do you want me to do?" Jaune asked. "We can't fight him and we certainly can't reason with him. If he says we own him, we do, no matter how absurd his logic is."

"As far as I can see, you're the only one indebted to him. What goes on between the two of you has nothing to do with me."

"Are you saying you're going to make me go to Mt. Glenn alone?"

Emerald bit her lip. "No, I didn't say that."

"Then we're in agreement."

"We really aren't."

"No, but the bottom line is that I have to go to Mt. Glenn. The only things up for discussion are the details, and we can hammer out those over some food."

"You really are selfish."

"You're the last person I want to hear that from," Jaune said, leading them into the dining room.

There wasn't much of anything they had on hand since they had just moved in, so the two of them had to settle for a bowl off-brand cereal for breakfast although it was actually their lunch given what time it was.

It was quiet at first, both parties thinking it over until Emerald asked the obvious question. "When are we leaving?"

"Whenever Whitley can arrange it. Roman didn't give me a hard deadline, but I have a feeling the sooner the better."

"I sure he'll love that. Haven't even been back in Vale for a full day and we're already crawling to him for help. It's not enough he got us this house or a ride back from Atlas we still need more. He'll probably think we're idiot. We'll be luckily if he doesn't look for a different set of caretakers to sponsor."

"Makes me wonder how we ever got by without his support."

"Had we! Stumbling from one incident into the next losing money doesn't really sound like getting by."

They shared a laugh at that. It was a good laugh, something Jaune hadn't done for a while Everything had been so chaotic recently that he never got to stop chance to relax, appreciate what he had done. Eventually the laughter and the moment tapered off and the silence returned.

"This is going to be the biggest task we've ever done," Emerald said tapping her spoon against her bowl.

"Yeah it is."

"And we're not going to get a lot of time to prepare."

"I suppose not. Grimm aside those echoes aren't going to go away without a plan."

"A plan you don't have."

"I'm open to suggestions."

"Buy a straw hat and a camera, and walk around like Mt. Glenn is the biggest tourist hotspot in the world."

"Heh, wouldn't that be something if it worked." Jaune brought a spoon of what was mostly milk, at this point, to his mouth and looked at Emerald. "What would you say if after this we took a break."

Emerald look surprised. "Am I going to get that trip to Vacuo?"

"Nothing that big. Just staying here doing whatever and having fun. Not worrying about the next monster that's going to appear or the next curse that's being prepped."

"I wouldn't say no especially after this forced labor—sorry, job, but this doesn't really sound like you, mister hero. You sure you won't go running off the minute a cat gets stuck in a tree. Maybe get Roman's help and let him hold it over you."

"Hey, I'm not that bad," Jaune argued. "I can ignore things."

"Really?" Emerald said dragging the word out.

"Yes really. I've let you and Roman run free despite being criminals, and in case you've forgotten, I've robbed a museum and worked for the mob."

"Of course, you're such a bad boy."

"You don't need to be so obvious with your mocking."

"Aw, I'm sorry I hurt your pride. Need me to kiss it to make it all better."

"I take it back. It's not the job I need a break from it's you."

Whitley wasn't angry or irritated from getting a call so soon; in fact, he was ecstatic. He wanted to know every detail about what they were doing. The day a Schnee was told to calm down would've gone down in history had anyone known about.

"So, you need a way to get to Mt. Glenn." Whitley said after Jaune explained everything, only excluding Roman's name.

"Can you do it?" Jaune replied.

"I'm the heir-to-be of the SDC company. Do you really think I can't organize a single flight?" There was a slight pause. "Although I suppose there might be a slight problem."

"What is it?"

"I'm surprised you can't figure it out considering General Ironwood should have an entire fleet of airships parked above the city about now."

"I haven't seen anything like that."

"Hmm…they must be running late. Winter won't be happy she loathes tardiness. Perhaps I should give her a call and inquire about the delays."

"Do you often call you sisters just to antagonize them?" Jaune asked.

"I would never," he denied using the same overdramatic tone Jaune would use when he was accused of pranking his own sisters. "I am Atlas citizen. I have a right to know why precious fuel has been wasted on a trip that took longer than it should have, fuel my taxes pay for."

"Like you pay taxes, and doesn't the Atlas military buy their fuel from the SDC, so longer trips actually make you more profit."

"Oh yeah, I guess it slipped my mind," Whitley obviously lied.

Jaune didn't call him out on it knowing it would only lead them further into a tangent. It was actually a little surprising that Whitley would allow them to get off topic in the first place. Back at the mansion he had wanted to get everything done as effectively as possible. Maybe his and Emerald's visit had influenced him more than they thought. Up in the air if that was a good thing, especially since Whitley new humor was straight from Emerald's book, but it was nice to see Whitley being a little more causal around him. This was a business call, though, and they needed to get back to it.

"Why is Atlas bringing a fleet of warships into Vale anyways."

"Unfortunately, that is information I'm not privy to." Whitley admitted. "The official claim is to support Vale's effort to crack down on the White Fang and the dust thefts, but that fleet is overkill in the extreme. It's like Ironwood is preparing for war. All that much force is going to do is alarm the people of Vale, drive any criminal elements into hiding and make Atlas out to be over reactionary, militarized nuts. There has to be another reason, and I'd bet the Schnee fortune that Beacon's headmaster has something to do with it."

"That's a problem for another day, and something you can look into while we're away. For now, Emerald and I need a transport to Mt. Glenn. Why is Ironwoods war fleet a problem for you?"

"Like I said it's only a minor one. I can arrange a bullhead to get you there, no problem, but with an Atlas fleet there they're definitely going to be monitoring the air traffic. They're going to notice an unscheduled flight leaving the city."

"That's fine," Jaune said. "Even if they see it leaving, they won't know where we're going, and even if they do, it's not like this is a super-secret mission or anything."

"Is it not? The Vale council really doesn't like anyone talking about Mt. Glenn. I doubt they'd be happy to find an unknown variable poking around over there. Maybe unhappy enough to get you forcible removed and possibly even detained."

That would be bad, Jaune summarized. He knew the moment he became a caretaker he would be towing the line of the law, but it had always only been in the back of his mind since he wasn't actually doing anything down right illegal—at least he tried not to. This mission came straight down from Roman Torchwick, though. Even if Jaune didn't say anything and a connection between him and Roman couldn't be proven, Emerald was unlikely to survive custody without being found out.

"A single unusual departure wouldn't be enough for Atlas to contact the council, though." Jaune reasoned.

"You're right, getting you to Mt. Glenn isn't going to warrant anything more than a footnote. The problem is how you're getting back. Mt. Glenn is out of range of the CCT tower. How am I going to know when to send your pick up?"

Jaune hadn't thought about that. Their mission didn't have an exact completion date. He and Emerald might only be there for a few days or entire weeks if they couldn't figure out what to do. Walking back might have been an option, but the barriers, both natural and artificial, that were meant to keep grimm out would probably also do a good job at keeping them in. Not to mention the dangerous grimm that would be waiting around every corner thanks to all the negativity there. It wouldn't be like that mostly peaceful walk through Forever Fall. They would have to fight for every inch.

"How are people usually retrieved from grimm territory?" Jaune asked to really no one in particular. "Surly not all huntsmen missions have a set deadline."

"Under normal circumstances, I could send a bullhead every day or every other day to see if you were finished, but that's not going to work and I'm sure you know why?"

"The Atlas fleet."

"Exactly, one flight won't be noticed, but a constant stream is bound to draw suspicion. Even if I have them all marked for SDC use, they'll just call Father which will cause questions that I won't have answers to. Unless you're suggestion I tell the truth."

"That will get us all thrown into the lonny bin," Jaune cursed. "What I'm I going to do?"

"Don't worry about it." Whitley said. "As you're sponsor these are the types of problems I have to deal with, and I think I might have a solution. Just leave it to me. I'll call you later if it works outs. Until then expected a flight around tomorrow morning." And then Whitley hung up.

He just hung up.

Jaune sighed. What was with people doing that to him recently.

He got up from the couch he was sitting on and step out onto the penthouse terrace. There was a pool and plenty of other luxuries, but Jaune had come for the air and the view. Sadly, the view wasn't the same one he had grown attached to over his short stay. A dark shadow had fallen over the city of Vale. Jaune could partially see the fanatic pointing and flashing of scrolls from the people so far below.

The Atlas fleet had arrived.

Author unknown

The God of Darkness' spell should have wiped humanity away, and yet we're still here. Roaches picking over the carcasses of those who weren't so fortunate.

How is that?

Did the God of Darkness have mercy on us? Of course not.

Did the God Light select a chosen few to survive? No, he left just as disappoint as his brother.

Were those of us that survived resistant to the spell or just somehow stronger. Ha. Humans are not so special. We aren't capable of challenging a god or surviving any of their divine judgments. Any who think otherwise our fools, the same ones who got us into this mess.

We are nothing to the gods of light and dark, yet we persist.

The only explanation is that something else interfered. Just as we are nothing more than insects when compared to their power they are no more than annoying pest when compared to the power of something greater.

After all, there was a total of three, and we will always remember Thee.