So I watched French Dispatch, pretty good! Want to check out the other live-action Wes Anderson movies. I liked Fantastic Mr. Fox, too.

They occupied a new safehouse. After cleaning up the last one of their grisly work, Jaune and Neo brought their newest catch to a little basement under the boarded up remains of a restaurant.

Their quarry, a man known only as Blaire, had not uttered a word so far. That was less because of his willpower and more because of the duct tape covering his mouth. That would not stay the case.

Jaune, as it turned out, was better than Neo at interrogating. Her skill boiled down to waving a knife in front of somebody's face and occasionally using it. Jaune held more finesse. You had to balance pain, respite, fear and hope in just the right ways in order to promptly and accurately extract what you wanted. It could be easy to pressure a prisoner into saying stuff that's not true just because that's what they think you want to hear and what will make you stop. It made Neo actually value him a little.

They threw Blaire up against the cement wall of the dusty basement. Creaky wooden beams covered in cobwebs held up the board and plaster roof above them. Rotten carpet crunched underfoot as Jaune approached Blaire.

He leaned down and ripped away the duct tape. Blaire's beady eyes, so used to the clarifying sheen of prescription glasses, stayed pointed down at his lap.

"You're meat," Jaune said. "Something I learned a long time ago is that every person is just more meat. Blood, skin, muscle, bone, guts and all that. Nothing more. You can guess at all the things I'm going to do to you."

Jaune grabbed a wad of Blaire's gelled black hair and yanked it up.

The captive met his glare with eyes that were simultaneously removed and determined.

Jaune scoffed and let go, letting Blaire sag back down. He turned to Neo and shook his head. "This guy's not gonna talk."

Neo scowled and threw up her hands. What do you mean by that?

"You can tell with some of them," Jaune said. "You can really tell. Just by looking them in the eye after you got 'em, you know whether or not they're gonna talk—"

"Scum."

Jaune whipped around, looking down at his prisoner. Neo also—as quickly as her wrapped and swollen ankle would allow—rushed to get in on the action.

"What did you say?" Jaune asked.

"There's a word for you," Blaire said. "You're scum."

Jaune sneered. "Think you can give us some attitude, huh?"

"The little girl will get killed like her friend did," Blaire said. "And you"– he feebly kicked Jaune's foot with a polished leather loafer –"are going to wind up dead like your old team. So will your new one." Blaire licked his lips. "That's all the information I have to share with you two."

Jaune kicked him in the face, cracking his nose with dirty sole of a sneaker. Blaire flopped back against the wall, grimacing in pain with pain.

He licked his lips, a dry tongue tasting the blood that flowed from his broken nose. "You… if only you had been through what we have been through. You don't know what it's like to be with people who finally give you purpose. You don't know what it's like to see your wife get killed by some gangsters with their filthy dog tails wagging—"

Jaune kicked him in the face again. "Save your sob story for the Gods," he said. "I don't want to hear it." He turned to Neo. "We just have to be patient with him. Wait a few days, don't let him sleep or give him anything to eat or drink. All that will put him out of his mind, might make him slip up and say something useful. Otherwise, we're not getting anything."

Neo scowled. She pulled out her knife, clearly thinking she could succeed.

"Fine," Jaune said, "but don't do anything bad. He's got to be relatively healthy after you don't get him to talk."

Neo scoffed and pushed Jaune aside. Her small hand wouldn't normally do much damage with a shove, but she purposefully pressed it up against his chest before he could stop her. He winced in pain as his wound flared up again.

"Bitch…" he muttered under his breath, but not quietly enough for her not to hear. He wanted her to.

He shuffled away as Neo waved the knife in front of Blaire's vacant eyes. He headed for the creaky steps that led up into the abandoned restaurant. He and Neo had to sleep on the floor there, tiles covered in dust and rat shit. Still not the worst place Jaune had ever slept.

With each step up he took, however, he was reminded of his poor condition. The muscles in his legs shook he pulled himself up. When he brought his arms up for a stretch, just about every fiber and tendon he had protested painfully. Each living cell that constituted his meat-sack of a body was sore.

The hard floor wouldn't exactly help with that; but at least sleep was sleep.

Beacon had fallen far. It looked like the family member you know from your youth, a favorite cousin or a fun uncle, who you remember being bright and fun and happy. But then you see them again after ten years, and time has been particularly unkind to them. Their eyes are sunken, the skin is taught, their hair is ruffled, their clothes are ratty and it seems as if the vitality you once knew in them is gone, both in body as well as mind. A depressing sight that reminds you of the fate that might strike you one day, if you have not already slipped into that dark spot yourself.

Except it had not been a family member, but a place they called home. It had not been a decade, but a week.

Team RWBY and the three remnants of team JNPR, along with Qrow, other hunters and the volunteers from Beacon's studentry who were willing, came upon their home and felt this way.

Fires started by the Enclave and rogue robots in many places raged until they exhausted all there was to rage at. A couple of the large dorms were blackened and burned husks of the impressive and comfy places they once lived and slept in.

They all tried to ignore the bodies they saw. It was Qrow and the other adults' job to take note of the corpses' locations. The kids were sent around the perimeter to clear away any Grimm lingering around. There were none.

Ruby wished that there had been some. Then she could take out some of her anger, her bitterness and her grief on a mindless and mean enemy, the destruction of which would not weigh on her conscience in the slightest.

Instead, a forcible silence weighed on her and all of them. Silence is generally associated with emptiness, but now it felt very much like the opposite. The silence was a thing, a thick fog or a sloshy liquid, that morphed around them. They needed to push through it. They tried to breathe, but the air was thick with the silence so suffocating. All the worse that they did not dare talk to one another in that place. It felt wrong to speak on a site so recently violated.

The noon sun hung high above them, but it filtered weakly through a cloudy fall sky, so that the light itself sagged down grey and uncomforting. Ruby squinted and trudged, scythe in hand, around the perimeter of the campus.

Her team circled around, each trying to focus on looking out for enemies, but they all invariably spent more time looking forlornly at their shattered home. They eventually came to the spot where it all began: the launch pads that had hurled them out into the Emerald Forest. They all quietly took spots on the inert launchers.

"This sucks," Yang said bluntly. Nobody could have worded it better.

Ruby scowled and looked over her shoulder at the corpse of her home. The big buildings that weren't burned still stood with the promise of emptiness inside them, no comfort.

Ruby stomped towards it.

"Hey!" Weiss called after her. "We have to stick to our assigned path!"

Ruby kept on marching up a dirt path. The others followed quietly, leaving only a listless and defeated Weiss to sigh and catch up to them.

Ruby only stopped when she reached the garden. She stood just before a dark patch of old blood staining the smashed grass.

"Oh goodness…" Pyrrha whispered as she stopped beside Ruby. "The Grimm must have carried away the body."

Ruby almost shook her head. She almost recounted what she had seen. For this was the exact spot. This was where Jaune had done the horrible thing. She squeezed her eyes shut, desperately trying to beat back the images of her boyfriend swinging down his awful, mean sword—

"Hey!" It was Nora who shouted out, holding something high above her head.

"What is it?" Pyrrha asked. She took hold of Ruby's shoulder, directing her away from the spot of the murder.

Ruby said nothing.

"Oh no…" Ren muttered as they congregated around Nora.

She held the twisted remains of Crocea Mors. Jaune's infamous weapon, a nasty thing he had found in the wasteland, now had nothing to offer. Its shaft was bent at a right angle, and the chains dangled ineffectually. Broken in the same way as a corpse with a snapped spine.

"He…" Nora's voice shook, and so did her hands. "He still sent us that text…"

"He never liked that sword anyway," Pyrrha said. "I think he hated it."

"He did?" Blake asked.

"Oh yes," his partner replied. "He never spoke of Crocea Mors fondly. He only ever talked about its ability to hurt. It is a weapon utterly devoid of any mercy, useless for anything but brutality. It is like cruelty made manifest."

Nora dropped it to the ground, and they fanned out around the garden. None gave it another look. None mentioned the dried red blood still clinging to the limp chains.

Yang furrowed her brow in confusion. "What the…" As they stepped into the center of the garden, they saw something unexpected and confusing:

A crater, a big crater that only could have been caused by a concentrated and especially vicious explosion. The ground that it gouged out was completely blackened. A breeze picked up some of the smell from the crater's crust, and they all gagged. It was an acrid and despicable odor unlike anything they had smelled before; it was like a tire burning, like fresh soot, like dust from a house long abandoned. It was all of those and none of them.

They all figured it was from some Enclave bomb, so they turned their attention to other things. In Ruby's case, she stepped around the crater's edges and stopped. A low wall stood just in front of her, bounding a soot-covered and black pool. The water looked gross.

And in in the middle of the pond stood the twisted and charred remains of the cherry blossom tree that she knew Jaune had liked so much. It had once been a symbol of such serenity. Now it too was a corpse.

"No!' Blake cried out. "No!" Her scream was ragged and raw and blood-curdling, so full of desperate grief that it made Ruby's skin scrawl and her heart skip a beat.

When Ruby turned around, she saw her friends cover her face with her hands, chest heaving as heavy sobs clawed up her throat. She collapsed to her knees, inconsolable.

Ruby ran to her teammate and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. "What's wrong? What's wrong?" she whispered quietly, but Blake didn't answer. She cried and buried her face in her hands.

"Oh gods…" Weiss said. She backed away from something laying among the battered flowers. "This…"

Ruby looked over her shoulder as Yang nudged in to take her partner and best friend in her arms. Ruby instead walked to where Weiss stood. Her stomach dropped when she saw the grisly sight before her.

Adam Taurus's head, bloated and decaying, lay on the ground. For a moment, she made eye contact with it. The lifeless eyes stared out and seemed to accuse her, seemed to jealously yet coldly envy her for her vitality.

Ruby turned away.

"Blaire!?" Acting Commander Shade roared at his subordinate. "How the hell did we let that happen?"

Far outside of Vale, in an overgrown and forgotten town, the Enclave was busy evacuating their base. They were ordering—for now—a near full reorganization of their forces outside of Vale. Better to let things take their course in the city.

"Tonight!" Shade yelled. He wore his Enclave helmet, the imposing thing with bulbous eyes, and glared at another man wearing an identical uniform. Through sheer gravitas, the armor on Shade seemed to be much larger and scarier. "We vacate everything we have tonight!"

"But the Commander—"

"Will live, the Doctor assured us of that; and if she was wrong, she dies." He looked up to the sky, where the sun quickly fell down to the world below. It was well into fall now, and the days were getting shorter. Soon it would be winter, and soon night would dominate.

"We need to secure our workshops in Mistral and move them around," Shade said. He scowled. Blaire was a strong man, and he would reveal nothing; but no one was perfect, and there were ways to pry out even little hints from prisoners. The smallest of cracks in a castle's foundations could send it all toppling down.

"What of the new recruits?"

"Get them out too."

"They may not be ready—"

"Consider it an early loyalty test," Shade said. "If they are truly committed, then they will follow. Because this is the time. Now is the time."

The man's head hung tiredly. He was shirtless and lashed to a chair. Open wounds covered his whole shivering body. Blood covered his skin. His eyes were sunken, almost hollow. His stomach was frightfully contracted. Each one of his bony ribs stood out through his skin. His was stricken by such thinness that malnutrition was the only explanation, that of the cruel and forced kind.

It looked like all his effort was needed just to move his lips a little bit. They quivered and shifted, uttering a single word. "Mistral…"

Jaune cupped his ear and leaned in close, hoping his prisoner would say something more.

"We need…" Blaire trailed off. His eyes were so thoroughly bloodshot as to be completely red. They could see nothing anymore.

Jaune huffed. "The bastard's just repeating the same thing now," he said. "Hasn't said something new for hours." Neo leaned against the wall beside him, looking with disgust at their prisoner.

Jaune slapped Blaire again, but the half-corpse was now so far gone as to not even register pain or touch. It was practically removed from the world now, driven deep into delirium by their treatment.

"We need to start moving," Jaune said. "It's been a few days since we bagged this guy, and he's actually 'somebody' in the Enclave." The second goon they'd kidnapped had told them that the Enclave was withdrawing their resources from Vale. "So if we spend too much time here, we're doing nothing but putting ourselves in danger."

Neo slipped out a knife from her pocket.

"Go for it," Jaune said. He turned away and climbed the stairs. He heard something behind him, a final gurgle and a spasm. He didn't look back.

"Cleaning that up is going to be a pain." Jaune sighed and sat down tiredly at a ratty booth beside a boarded-up window; slim cuts of lights came in through cracks between the planks. He was still sore all over, and the wound in his chest—although healing remarkably quickly—still ached.

Neo came up the stairs a bit later, then sat across from him at the booth. She pulled out her scroll, then smiled at a message she received. She typed something, snapped her fingers and showed it to Jaune.

"A whole bullhead?" he remarked. "You've got a guy who owes you so much that he'll give you a whole damn bullhead?"

Neo nodded.

"You're sure he'll really do it?"

Neo scowled. She typed out another sentence on the scroll and showed him.

"Well yeah, I guess that's a pretty big debt. And a pretty good threat."

Neo snatched a folded-up map of Remnant from a pile of papers and spread it out on the table. She took a pen, clicked it and marked an X in blue ink; she had designated a coastal town far to the east. She then drew a dotted line across the ocean and marked another X at their destination.

"You wanna fly to this town and then get a ship to Mistral?" he asked.

Neo nodded.

"And you've got another friend who can get us across the ocean?"

Neo nodded again.

"Right…" Jaune crouched forward and drummed his fingers against the table. He asked Neo for the pen. He tapped the pen's tip against the city of Vale and scoured the nearby countryside. "It was…" He mulled over memories in his mind, pensively trying to recall the map which he had stared at and tried to commit to memory. The map in the letter.

He tapped the pen on several different points around Vale, tracing his way past Mountain Glenn, and then suddenly it came to him. He recognized the arrangement of landmarks and found the exact bend in the right river. He marked an X there as well, where the map noted just a few hills. He scrawled in little words: New Refuge

"We need to make a detour here," he said.

Neo scowled suspiciously.

"Trust me, I've got a friend who will really want to help us."

Neo raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah." In that moment, it was decided. "I'm coming with."

"Why won't you tell us?" Ruby demanded. She scowled up at her uncle, angry at him in a way that she had never been before. She had not been angry with anyone like this before, actually.

They stood again in the cramped hotel room that had been assigned to the two teams. Qrow had—unwisely—decided to come and give them a pep-talk. He had not expected Ruby to ambush him.

"I knew that you were all keeping secrets from us," Ruby said. "But I just trusted you. I can't do that anymore! Our home is ruined! Jaune is gone! The Enclave is more dangerous than ever!"

"Now listen—"

"And what about the maidens?" Ruby questioned. "What's up with them? Are all the other schools going to get attacked soon, too?"

Qrow scowled and glared at Pyrrha, who meekly looked at the floor. Ruby stepped in between them and caught her uncle's eyes.

"Don't be mad at her," she said. "She told us everything just now when we got back. Don't be mad at her for sharing your crazy story! What else have you been keeping from us?"

"I don't—"

"Do you know more about my eyes?"

"We—"

"Do you know about where Jaune is?"

Qrow clenched his fists.

"Kid, if you would just listen to me—"

"I want to know!" Ruby shouted. "I deserve—"

"Shut up!" Qrow snapped. He had never—never—raised his voice at his niece. "I've had it up to here"– he raised his hand high above his head –"with brats acting like they have the right to all the secrets of the universe!"

"Right?" Ruby seethed, not bowing in the slightest. She was fueled by more anger than she had ever been before. "I just lost Jaune, I just lost my home and—"

"And what!?"

"And this!" Ruby lifted her robotic hand in a tight fist, brandishing it before Qrow like a smoking gun in a courtroom. "I have this! I deserve answers! I do!"

"Ruby…"

She stomped up to him, scowling so furiously that everyone in the room, her uncle especially, could hardly believe it was her. She jammed a metal finger into Qrow's face. "Tell. Me."

He looked at her hand, and the power in his eyes faded.

He sighed. He looked around at all the other faces in the room. They were nervous, shocked by Ruby's outburst. But when he met their eyes, they each and every one of them hardened and stared him down. They each and every one of them wanted the same thing.

Qrow swallowed a rock down his throat.

"Alright kid…" He patted Ruby's shoulder. The anger had left him. How could it not?

"You… you might all want to sit down."

Thus, he began to describe all that had transpired, all that had caused it and all that it would cause:

Basically, it starts with the four maidens. You all already know about that, don't have to explain it much. Ozpin's actually named Ozma, around five-hundred old. It's his semblance, lets him keep hopping from person to person until he's strong enough to recreate a new form for himself.

Well, for the last few centuries, he's been leading the Brotherhood of Steel. We're an even older group that goes back a thousand years, ever since the first spread of the Englo across Remnant. We're dedicated to keeping the relics safe from the rest of the world. They're magical artifacts that hold power, too much power.

There are four major relics, each one at a different one of the four main schools. It was done that way a thousand years ago, four vaults for four relics. Each one is sealed behind a riddle that only top members of the original Brotherhood knew. Now, not even we know what the riddles are, let alone their answers.

But we got an extra level of security put in a few centuries back after a Brotherhood scribe tried to break into one of the vaults. Now, I kind of need to describe a bit more about Ozpin—or Ozma. Essentially, his semblance allows for manipulation of the soul. He affected my own soul so that I can turn into a bird (I can show you later). He changed the souls of his four daughters too, trying to make them immortal like him. He only sort of succeeded. He essentially made their souls immortal, along with the power held in them. The person each soul fuses with, though, isn't immortal. So basically, when his daughters all died, their souls wandered Remnant until they could find young women similar to their original forms.

That's the four maidens. We wanted Pyrrha to take on one of them, but she said no. The issue is that the Fall Maiden had been attacked months ago and put in a coma. Atlas provided a machine that could transfer her soul to another host safely. See, the maiden powers are already destructive enough on their own, let alone posing a danger to the relics. And when one maiden dies, the soul usually travels on to whatever girl it is that the maiden lost thought of, so we figured it would go to her killer. Oz used this to add more security to the vaults with seals that only the maidens can break—

Yeah, it's all confusing, and yeah, it sounds like bullshit. But this stupid lore has been built up over centuries; it's history, and history ain't always easy to wrap your head around. Now don't interrupt me.

So yeah, these maidens are the first locks to a bunch of super-powerful magic things that are behind another set of locks, ancient riddles.

How does that bring us here? Well, we cultivate maidens through the academies. One such maiden was a girl named Dorothy Goldstone. She was an awesome student; I should know, we were in the same class. She was Goodwitch's partner back in the day. She ticked all the boxes: smart, strong, loyal.

The biggest advantage was her semblance: Grimm awareness.

Basically, she could sense whenever there were Grimm around. That's we all thought it was, but we were wrong. It was worse.

See, her semblance wasn't Grimm awareness; it was Grimm affinity. Not only could she feel Grimm, she could relate to them, even control them to an extant. She could feel what they felt, know what they knew. She never told anyone, because she was afraid of how we would react.

And she wanted to be a maiden. She wanted to ever since she had been told what it was in the first place. She was that type that was always working harder and harder to prove herself, and no matter what she did, it didn't seem to be enough. So, when the last winter maiden was on her deathbed, we flew Dorothy out to be with her.

She kept care of the winter maiden until she died. Then she inherited her power.

And that's where everything went to hell. See, the maiden's souls lost their own uniqueness, but they didn't lose their power. They essentially act as huge amplifiers to the aura and semblances to whoever they take over.

That means Dorothy's semblance pretty quickly got out of control. She started attracting Grimm, and she stopped wanting to fight them. Only then did we realize what her semblance really was. She would go out to find Grimm, and when she reached them, they wouldn't even attack her. She started talking more about this fairytale she had known growing up, the story of a witch called Salem who had made the Grimm. She said that, as a kid, she had kept having nightmares about the witch chasing her. And now she was having those nightmares again.

She started acting more erratic, less like herself. She said she could talk to the Grimm, and she liked doing it. We brought her back to her home in Mountain Glenn, hoped that some time with her family would calm her down. We were wrong.

She absolutely freaked out, and she started a whole damn Grimm stampede. The city got overwhelmed, and she escaped. We tried to chase her down for years. A long time went by.

Summer led a team one year to investigate a report about a witch who controlled the Grimm. She was the only person who came back alive.

She managed to make her way back to the nearest town. She was halfway dead when she made it back, and she barely had enough time to tell one of our agents there what had happened:

Salem had killed them.

Summer's death was the last time we heard anything about Dorothy—Salem—for a while. Then the Fall Maiden was attacked. Grimm attacks became suspiciously coordinated. We got word of a Grimm cult with a goddess. Groups like the Enclave and the White Fang started working together, connected in some ways to that cult. It doesn't take a genius to put everything together.

And you, Ruby? You're stuck in things whether you want it or not. You've got the silver eyes. A lot like my ability to shapeshift. Oz granted the gift of the silver eyes to several of his closest knights a long time ago. Since then, it's gotten passed down from generation to generation. Now, you're the last one left. Your eyes let you smite evil, in whatever form that may be. You'll strike at the very spirit of Grimm and the souls of the damned. That's why you were able to smash Bishop's aura to pieces and turn all those Grimm at the Breach into stone.

"And that's pretty much everything."

What he told them was mostly true, and of the truth that was told, it was not the whole truth

All Qrow could do was shrug. "The world's crazy. Now there's Salem and that Cinder girl, the Fall Maiden. Two Maidens stacked against us; and Salem used to be such a goody-two-shoes that she memorized just about every story about the Brotherhood we still had, so out of the very few people alive who could answer the vaults' riddles, she'd be one."

"Did you check?" Pyrrha asked, her voice tentative with fear. "Did you check the vault at Beacon?"

"Yeah, I went back there as a bird only hours after everybody evacuated. The first seal—the one that requires the maiden to break—was open. But not the second seal. Thank the gods, it looked like the riddle was too esoteric, even for Salem.

"But only Ozpin can remake those seals, so the vault now is pretty much open to anybody who wants a crack at the riddle. We've set up a constant watch with loyal hunters, the last of the Brotherhood in Vale."

Qrow sighed heavily and leaned back against the door. "There you have it."

The kids took a while to digest all the information. It sounded absurd, but at the same time, it made sense. With all the craziness going on, an equally insane explanation was required.

"So…" Ruby's face was grim. "What do we do now?"

"You," Qrow said, pointing around the room at each kid, "are going to stay put."

"Like hell we are!" Yang said. "That bitch destroyed Beacon! She killed our mom!"

"Yes you are," Qrow growled. "You've all got targets out on your heads. For your own safety, you're going to stay in Vale. Help rebuild things. We're going to keep investigating, and if we decide we need more power"– he glanced to Ruby (specifically, her eyes) –"then we'll call."

"And what about Jaune?" Ruby asked. "You said you didn't know anything about where he is. Were you lying about that, too?"

"No." Qrow scowled. "No, I don't know where he is." The anger in his eyes felt raw, but for the first time in that conversation, Ruby felt that the anger wasn't directed towards her.

"Now you all get some rest," he commanded. "And don't try to do anything stupid, for once. You don't have any leads. You don't have any idea how to get them. And no, you won't be getting them from us. So calm down for the first time in your lives.

"I know you all like to jump the gun, but now's not the time for that." He stomped across the room and ripped open the curtains. He tapped on the glass. "Just look at that." The building right across from them was full of blown out windows and bullets holes, caused by rogue robots.

"See? This place needs strong hands to rebuild. And the surrounding towns are in danger of Grimm. If you really want to kill something, then you'll probably be called on some of those."

Ruby crossed her arms, still displeased.

"Don't feel like we're tossing you in time out," Qrow said. His voice wasn't angry anymore, so much as worn out and tired. "You'll be doing good work. Helping people."

"While the bad guys keeping running around out there."

"Try to chase them, you die." Qrow stared down his niece and didn't blink. "That's the truth of it."

He walked wordlessly from the room. He slammed the door shut.

Ruby seethed. She marched up to the door and slammed her metal knuckles straight into it. The girl was not known for her raw strength, but now she cracked and splintered the wood with her fist.

Nobody in the room could calm her down. They were just as mad.

"But he has a point," Weiss, ever the voice of reason, said. "There's still a lot of good work that can be done here. We won't be doing nothing. And we really don't have any leads—"

"Actually," Blake said, "I know a place where we can start…"

Big info dump, but there's (some) of the lore that I made up for this story. I got frustrated with canon's, so I just made my own. Kinda just wanted to get it out of the way now, set the stage for everything.

Be sure to check out my other fic, too!