Roses in the Snow

by PrayWaits

Team RWBY has been assigned to each other, and the clashing personalities have some... growing pains to get through. In Roses in the Snow there will be wholesomeness, friendship, love, and war. The gods and origins of the world have been changed from canon, and we'll get to know the bad guys on a much deeper level. And Team RWBY may not be able to stop them.

40. Squall 4-3

Everyone was looking at Ruby, waiting for her.

A part of her was a little annoyed with Weiss. They both knew the same stuff when it came to this playbook—in fact, Weiss probably had more memorized than Ruby did. She should be able to explain this and let Ruby be left alone for a little bit, but…

But no. She was team leader because she was supposed to do this stuff. If she wasn't good at it… well, she had to be good at it.

She just wanted to be left alone.

It was her fault for planning to do this today. She'd known this day was coming, she just… thought she'd be handling it better. She was a Beacon student now, after all! But, if anything, she was handling it worse than usual. There was a bright light that kept popping up at the corner of her vision that looked like it might be the edge of a white cloak…

But every time she turned, there was nothing there. Nothing in the Rose Dimension, either.

It was impossible to stop the little spikes of hope every time the light showed up, though. No matter how much she told herself it wasn't… wasn't her, she still…

Still hoped.

'Dumb. You're dumb, Ruby. A big, dumb dolt.' She was just letting herself get heartbroken over and over every few minutes.

"Rubes?" Yang asked. She reached a hand out to Ruby.

"Hm?" Ruby lifted her eyes from the binder she hadn't really been looking at. She wanted to step back out of Yang's reach and get away from the hug. It didn't help her, didn't make anything better. But she knew it helped Yang. Made Yang feel like she was making things better for Ruby.

So she let Yang pull her closer and put an arm around her shoulder. It wasn't bad or anything. Ruby liked hugs. She just… kinda resented the ones Yang and Dad gave her when it came to… to this. They didn't help.

"Whatchu got?" Yang asked.

"Right." Ruby pushed her attention down to the task at hand. They needed… um… "Weiss, could you make an ice statue civie in the middle of the board?"

"Of course!" Weiss agreed, uncharacteristically eager.

Yang had obviously talked to her and Blake. Weiss had been trying really hard all day not chew Ruby out in her usual Weissy way, and Blake had been quietly watching her since she and Yang had brought in breakfast. Maybe Ruby should be mad about that, but she wasn't. She didn't really feel anything about it. It was always going to happen.

Weiss waved her sword like a lovely wizard, blue light shining down the base of the blade, then disappearing and reappearing rising up from the glyph that Weiss had summoned at the center point of the board.

The board was neat. It was impressive and cool that they had this giant chessboard now.

The statue formed at the center point of the board, on a point instead of a square like the intro diagrams that Winter had drawn. There were different placements later in the book, especially when it started dealing with groups of multiple civilians and caravans and stuff, but this was fine for figuring out the system.

Ice Dust sculpting was apparently pretty hard 'cause the person Weiss made was… not as pretty as her painting. Still clearly a person! There was a circular...ish head on top of blocky, rectangular body that had what Ruby supposed was an arm sticking out of the side.

"It's supposed to be waving," Weiss said quietly, looking bummed.

"Shoulda made it give us the finger," Yang joked, earning a grumpy squint from the princess.

"Thanks, Weiss," Ruby said.

"Mhmm!" she chirped, rolling up and back on the balls of her feet.

Did she have any idea how obviously weird she was being?

It was kinda cute, though. Super serious grumpy-grumps Weiss being willing to be a chipper, eager-to-please doofus for Ruby's sake was really nice.

"Okay, so that's the civilian we're protecting," Ruby started.

"Spiky the Snowman?" Yang asked.

Blake cracked a small laugh, then quickly covered her mouth with a hand, looking embarrassed.

"Blake, why?" Weiss sighed tiredly. "It wasn't even funny."

"It kinda was," Blake pouted.

"It really wasn't."

"Thank you, babe," Yang grinned at Blake. "Don't listen to Miss Snowflake-Up-Her-Butt."

"Hey!"

"Alright," Blake cut them off. "Let's focus. Ruby?"

Darn. If they'd started bantering with each other, Ruby might have had a few moments to be alone again.

She glanced down at her binder to get her thoughts in order. It was weird; a few months ago she would have felt Weiss' neat and orderly binders and laminated playbook would have been over the top and stale, but… some part of her liked it. Like there was a voice in the back of her head that found the organization incredibly pleasing.

It was too distinct and antithetical to Ruby for it to just be Weiss' influence.

Was this a sign she was growing up? Becoming adulty?

Nooooooooo!

What was next? Spreadsheets and checkbooks? The kinda stuff Mom always had to do 'cause Dad hated doing it even more than she did.

Now he had to do them all.

She shook her head and forced herself to focus. "'Kay. So we treat this like a normal chessboard. Let's say that way is the letters and that way's the numbers. The idea behind this is that instead of either memorizing a bunch of different formations and stuff or just talking out everything like we did on our Hunt, we can just call out positions based on a chessboard and give roles based on chess pieces."

"How does the second part work?" Blake asked, walking closer with Weiss to bring them all into a small huddled circle.

'I was getting there,' Ruby thought grumpily. Then she mentally slapped herself. Blake was just showing that she was engaged.

"We all know how all the chess pieces move, right?" Ruby asked.

Blake and Yang both nodded, though Weiss raised an eyebrow at Yang.

"What?" Yang snapped. "I've played chess, Ice Queen."

Weiss just shrugged with a skeptical look on her face and turned back to Ruby, who shook her head disapprovingly. Weiss scrunched up her nose apologetically, then whispered, "Sorry. Continue."

"So, as an example, there's the black knight."

"Edgy," Yang said.

'Just let me finish, please.'

Ruby smiled as best she could. "So Blake, if I were to tell you to run Blake Knight at, uh, B7, then you'd go over there—and keep in mind, the size of the board is relative. Out in the field we'd call out a bigger square size, like fifty feet or a hundred feet or something."

"Mkay," Yang said as Blake nodded quietly, their ways of saying they were listening.

"So the knight's job is to be the mobile-y scout, like what we were doing this weekend. Knights aren't stuck in the square they're assigned. You can move around within, like, I think it was a three by three area centered on your square?" Ruby looked to Weiss for confirmation.

"Yes, by default. But you could also call, say, long knight or wide knight. A long knight would be free to move vertically up and down the board, so you could be watching an entire flank, and a wide knight would move freely horizontally, so you would maybe be guarding the rear or moving back and forth in front of the group."

Yang let out a whistle. "How many modifiers are there?"

"Lots," Ruby answered grudgingly. She wished Weiss hadn't added the 'wide and long' thing. Made this feel really complicated. Which it was kinda, but it should be easy for them all to learn in steps. It was pretty intuitive. "Don't worry too much about that yet. The first modifier to learn is the colors. If you're running black knight, then if you find any enemies you let us know and engage them all stealthyish or whatever. I think Winter called it harassment?" She flipped to the index in the back—because of course Weiss' sister had an index (and a table of contents) for her playbook—to double check. "Yeah, harassment."

"How do I let you know and stay stealthy?" Blake asked.

"Uh, I think this assumes we have Revenger ear pieces on," Ruby said. It wasn't really addressed in here, but Winter seemed to write this under the assumption that the team would be able to communicate with each other across any distance, so it seemed a decent conclusion.

"Okay. And if I'm a white knight?" Blake asked.

"Don't engage, just call the bad guys out and then track them. Basically, if you're running black, you attack, and if you're white you defend. Basically."

Crap, she just said 'basically' twice.

"More like white is more passive, while black is more aggressive," Weiss corrected. "Like both the rooks attack, it's just black tries to push the enemies back away from the king and white holds where they are."

"True," Ruby agreed. That was what she'd meant.

"Rooks are the castle-lookin' ones, right?" Yang asked.

Weiss raised her eyebrow again.

"I'm just making sure I know the names! I know what they do!"

"Oh, do you?"

"Yeah, the castles—er, rooks—are the grumpy heterosexuals."

'Hetero—that means they only like boys, right? Seems pretty dumb.'

When she turned, Ruby scratched at her nose and bit down a laugh at Weiss' look of utter perplexion.

"What?"

"'Cause they only go straight," Yang finished with a grin.

It took a moment for the joke to click for Weiss, and when it did she facepalmed so hard she left a pink circle on her forehead.

"Well," Ruby said, trying to bring the conversation back, "you're probably going to be our grumpy heterosexual most of the time, Yang."

"What?! No way!"

"Rooks are the vanguards. Their job is to charge enemies as soon as they're spotted and either push them back or hold them, like Weiss said."

"Well, there's solo and signal r—"

"Weiss!" Ruby cut her off. "Not now!"

The look of shock on Weiss' face made Ruby think she'd been snappier than she thought. She didn't think she'd sounded angry or anything, but Weiss looked… offended? Spooked? Hurt? It was hard to tell what her expressions meant sometimes.

"I just—I meant, don't overcomplicate things yet," she said quickly. "Let's all get the basics down first."

"Right," Weiss agreed lightly, turning her eyes down to her binder. "Sorry."

"N-, don't be sorry. I just—"

"I''m fine!" Weiss rushed out. "Don't worry about it. Keep explaining. I'll stop adding complications."

"You sure?" Ruby asked.

"Yes."

"You're both a couple of snowflakes, you know that?" Yang grunted.

"Shudup, Yang," Ruby and Weiss both said together.

There was a long, awkward pause as Ruby tried to figure out if she was supposed to apologize to Weiss more. Today sucked, but it would double suck if her bad mood made her damage her friendship with her partner. Weiss eventually gave her a little nod of encouragement and gestured at her binder, though, and it felt like maybe they were okay and Ruby was just being paranoid.

"Um, right," she said, moving on. "So that's the knight and the rook. There's also the bishop. They pretty much stay in position if we contact an enemy. Black bishops attack baddies from range and white ones play defense around the civvies. Weiss is probably going to be our bishop with her magical Dustiness."

Weiss raised her chin and gave Ruby a pleased smile. It was a much more pronounced smile that her usual ones. Was that her way of letting Ruby know that she wasn't angry?

Probably.

"You could do it too, right?" Blake asked. "Sniping?"

"Yeah," Ruby agreed, "but Weiss can do a lot more defensive stuff to protect the civvies. Make walls and stuff."

"Maybe she should have a ranged weapon too?" Yang offered. "To let her do stuff from the backline without spending Dust?"

That was an idea Ruby could definitely get behind, but it depended entirely on Weiss, and the face she was making looked like Yang had just shoved a lemon up her butt.

"I think you should consider it," Ruby said as amicably as possible. "It would just be good for you to have the option, especially if you run out of Dust while we're on the road."

Weiss glanced down at the rapier strapped to her hip. "But I don't want to change Myrtenaster," she protested.

'What?... Oh!'

She thought they were talking about making her sword an also-a-gun weapon.

"You don't have to!" Ruby reassured her. "You can just also carry a gun or, like, a bow or a rocket launcher or something."

"I don't see Weiss lugging around a rocket launcher," Blake grinned.

"Me neither, but I'd like to," Yang added. "That would look funny as heck."

"No it wouldn't!" Weiss huffed. "I would look... totally badass!" She looked to Ruby for backup.

"Yeah!" Ruby chirped helpfully.

"But I'd rather not have a rocket launcher."

"Aw."

Blake ran a finger across a page in her playbook as she spoke. "Are there other pieces? I'm guessing the civilians are the king. Is there a qu—"

The white light appeared at the corner of Ruby's right eye, this time accompanied by a high-pitched ringing, like the peal of a bell. She glanced, trying to be subtle about it because she knew she'd look crazy, but nothing was there.

She could have sworn there were white petals in the light. Or was it the edge of a cloak flapping in invisible wind? Or a glowy hand reaching out?

Maybe Ruby was going crazy. This weird light and noise was definitely new. Was she getting old and senile already?

"Rubes?"

Yang's voice and hand on her shoulder pulled her back.

"Huh? What? Sorry."

There was a telling pause before Blake spoke. "I was just wondering about queens and pawns? I just found it in here, though. I can just read it if you, um…" She looked at Yang for help.

"Nah." Ruby shrugged off her sister's hand. She needed to put that dumb image out of her mind. "We probably won't have pawns. Winter does. She uses them for the Atlesian soldiers that apparently sometimes help the Atlas huntsman, but I don't think Vale does that?"

She looked at Weiss for confirmation, but Weiss gave one of her tiny one-shoulder shrugs. "Probably not."

"Right. And the queen does everything the other three pieces do, depending on what they feel is needed in the moment. Black queen goes for the aggressive behaviors, yada yada."

"Couldn't we all just be queens?" Blake asked.

"Yaaaaas, queen!" Yang drawled.

"Why?" Blake sighed, giving Yang a sullen glare.

"I dunno. Felt like it was appropriate."

"You need help, hun."

"Buy me dinner first."

Blake rolled her eyes and turned back to Ruby. "Sorry."

"You don't have to apologize for her," Ruby said, doing her best to smile. "I'm very familiar with the Yang."

"Heh," said Yang.

"But to answer your question, we could, but… apparently it would be bad? Page sixteen has notes from Winter about using some of this stuff and experiences she had. She says 'never use more than one queen, if that'."

"Why?"

"Because if everyone's just doing what they want, there's no point in using a playbook and callouts," Weiss said, using her 'duh' tone.

"Yeah," Ruby said. She tried to sound nicer than Weiss had as she explained, "When your teammates are running a knight or rook or bishop, you know what they're going to do. Queens aren't predictable, which means you don't know what they'll do on contact with an enemy until they say it, which… is apparently 'comm clutter'? I dunno. Winter says it's bad."

"We believe her?" Yang asked.

"Of course we believe her!" Weiss snapped.

"Okay! I was just asking!" Yang still looked at Ruby questioningly anyway, making Weiss huff and stamp a foot like a cute little primadonna princess.

"We believe her," Ruby repeated. "She's apparently really fricken good. Even Professor Awesome thinks so, 'member?"

"I'm just sayin', she's Weiss' sister and Weiss is wrong about basically everything all the time."

Weiss snapped her binder closed and raised an imperious finger at Yang. "Now listen here you—"

"Weiss!" Ruby interjected. Weiss cut off immediately and turned to Ruby. "Relax. She's just joking."

The imperious finger wobbled, then lowered as Weiss deflated a bit.

"Well… it wasn't funny," she grumbled with a pout.

For whatever reason, that made Yang laugh. "I'm curious what you were gonna say there, though," she said. "Listen here you… what?"

"I don't know," Weiss pouted at the ground. "I hadn't thought that far yet."

Yang snorted. "Well let me give you some options for next time. You could use 'glorious specimen', or 'beautiful babe', or 'ferocious war—"

"Can we at least try to stay on track, please?" Blake sighed.

"Yes, please," Ruby agreed, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. When she looked back up, Yang was looking at her with a surprised expression on her face that Ruby didn't really understand.

"Right, sorry," her sister said. "So… uh, queen does a lil' bit of everything?"

Ruby nodded. "Not all at the same time. You choose which one based on what you think the situation needs. It should be somebody that can do any of the roles decently. Winter was the designated queen for her team, though in the notes it says she usually ran white rook."

"So they usually didn't have a queen?" Blake asked.

Ruby shook her head. "Like I said, Winter thinks knowing what your team's gonna do is pretty important."

"If Winter was their queen, does that mean Weiss could be ours?" Yang asked.

Weiss immediately shook her head.

"Why not?"

They'd talked about this together, Ruby and Weiss, and a moment's pause told Ruby that Weiss didn't want to explain it to the group herself.

"Weiss' sister is a lot more aggressive in fights than she is," Ruby said. "And also…"

She wasn't sure she was supposed to say the next part.

Weiss gave her a grumpy look—not like she was grumpy at Ruby, just grumpy at the situation—and said, "And also my sister is actually able to use the other half of our semblance. Being able to summon your own army is probably pretty helpful when playing a rook."

"I kinda want to see that," Yang admitted quietly.

Weiss sighed, then straightened her back and met Yang's gaze. "Well, I'm sure you'll end up meeting her someday."

"I'm sure you'll figure out how to summon yourself before then," Blake said gently.

Weiss looked unconvinced as she turned to Ruby. "So are these all the basics you wanted to cover? Should we try practicing some positions and callouts or something?"

"Uh, sure." Ruby wanted to throw something. This kinda thing, the team strategy sessions? This was the kind of thing she dreamed about. She should be super excited about this, but she just… she just felt tired.

The issue might be dreams themselves. She knew the images that would visit her in her sleep tonight. Dreaded them. It was a weight on her mind that had been there all day, and it wouldn't leave until she suffered through them.

Pewp.

She wished she'd thought ahead and planned this strategy session for another day so she could properly appreciate leading her first team tactics training with her team.

If she asked, she knew her teammates would agree to postpone it, no questions asked.

No questions because they already knew what was wrong.

"... we do it?" someone said.

"Hm? Oh, um…" Ruby looked around the massive chessboard they were standing on. "Let's just try moving to the right spots first, get everyone used to figuring out how the grid works."

Everyone seemed to agree with that plan, so Ruby walked over to their icy civvie snowman. "Weiss! Go to… D four?"

Weiss immediately walked forward two steps to get to the center of the square they were all in, then turned to look blankly at Ruby.

"Oh," Ruby said. "Yeah, I guess that's where that is, huh…"

Weiss smirked a little bit.

"I mean… Good job, Weiss! You passed the test!"

"Uh huh."

"Tsch! Um… Blake, F two!"

Blake looked around, counting squares from the edge of the board. After about ten seconds, she marched a couple squares away, then turned to look at the group questioningly.

"One more over," Weiss called, pointing.

Blake turned to look at the edge of the board again, counting again, this time pointing to each square as she counted. "Crap," Ruby heard her mutter after a second before moving one square over horizontally.

Ruby gave Blake a thumbs up when she turned back to them.

"Yang! Go to…"

"H eight!" Weiss cut in.

Ruby couldn't help but grin at that, though Yang took a couple moments to figure out where that was before she glared at Weiss.

"Well?" Weiss huffed. She made a shooing motion. "Go on, participate in the exercise."

"I'll… give you some exercise!" Yang muttered as she stomped off to the far corner of the board.

"What?" Weiss asked, looking at Ruby for an answer.

Ruby just shrugged and thought about what came next. "I guess I should probably do it too, huh?" she wondered allowed. There was probably a good way to do this…

"Okay, after you move, you get to tell the next person where to go!" she called out.

"Whaaaat?!" Yang yelled from her corner.

"After you go, you tell the next person where to go!" Ruby yelled back.

"Oh, okay!... So is it my turn?!"

'Uh…'

"Yeah!"

"Weiss, go to A one!"

"No, you have to tell me where to go!"

Yang gave her a grumpy face and muttered something to herself. "Fine! Go to… whatever this one is!" She pointed at a square next to her.

"You just completely defeated the point of the exercise!" Weiss shouted.

"I'll defeat your face!"

When Weiss tittered a little laugh, everyone looked at her.

Her laugh trailed off. "... What?" she demanded.

Ruby turned away from her goof partner and kicked on her semblance to run over to Yang.

Earlier today when she'd used her semblance for the cute little kid, she'd been weirded out to find that the normally completely red Rose Dimension had a couple random smears of white light in it. This time, the new coloration was even more pronounced, the ice squares on the chessboard glowing blindingly, her teammates all looking like they were made of white Dust magic. Ruby's body, too, was white instead of the normal red.

And when she started moving, she could have sworn someone was following right behind her. Or above her? Or… there was somebody… somewhere.

And the noise was louder too, the ringing vibrating her ears even though it sounded like it was distant. Like a far away… was that a scream?

She spun around at least three times trying to find the presence, to find Mom, but… nobody was there.

Her hopes were getting raised and dashed and it sucked and she didn't know what was going on with her Rose Dimension but it scared her. The Rose Dimension had always been the way it was, and it was hers, and now it…

Now it was being weird and different and she couldn't control it and didn't want it and she juST WANTED IT GONE!

She broke out of her semblance before securing her footing and stumbled to a stop in front of Yang.

"Hey!" Yang moved toward her to help her up, but Ruby raised a hand to stop her. "You okay, Peanut?"

~~~"You okay, Peanut?" she asked as her daughter ran to her, her little face scrunched up like she was about to cry. "What's wrong, honey? Yang! What did you do to your sister?"

"Nuffin'!" Yang pouted, still sitting in the living room playing with the girls' action figures.

"I don' wanna be a Gwimm!" Ruby whined, her bottom lip pouting out adorably.

'Just like her mom,' she thought smugly.

"You won't, sweetheart," she said, picking up the little doofus. "Yang, did you tell Ruby she's going to turn into a Grimm?"

"No!"

"Yes!"

"Ssshhh," she hushed her child, patting her head. "You won't turn into a Grimm, honey."

"Yang sed dere's Gwimm peopuw and if-if-if my auwa is bad den I get Gwimmed!"

"Well Yang is ridiculous."

"Widicuwous? Wha's widicuwous?"

"Yeah, what's 'widicuwous', Summer?" Tai asked, walking into the room with his supermodel grin and swagger.

"Your daughter," Summer replied archily.

Tai snorted a laugh. "I shouldn't have needed to ask." He walked over to give Ruby a rub on the back. "Why you caterwauling, Peanut?"

Ruby looked up at Summer, teeny little eyebrows scrunched up in confusion.

"Raven's not here to be impressed with your big words, blondie," Summer muttered to her teammate.

Tai's smile faltered a little.

"Sorry," Summer said immediately. "I didn't mean, I just meant…"

'I just meant that she's not in the room, not that she left.'

"Am I a Gwimm?" Ruby asked, cutting into the crushing sadness that had crept into the room.

"No, silly," Summer whispered.

"Grimm?" Tai asked, an eyebrow raising as he visibly tried to shake off the emotional stab he'd just received. "Yang, what did you say?"

"Nuffin!" Yang flailed her arms a bit, the toys in her hands bending a bit under the strength of her unnaturally strong toddler grip.

"She told Ruby she was gonna turn into a Grimm if she gets hit by one," Summer explained, walking over to sit down in front of the grumpy girl. Ruby squirmed a bit as she was brought back to Yang, but Summer quieted her with pats and forehead kisses.

"Why would say something like that, Yang?" Tai asked, coming over to sit next to his daughter. "Grimm aren't something to joke about."

"But it's true!"

"No, it's not."

"Then where do Apogee come from?"

"Apogee?" Summer and Tai asked together.

"The people Grimm!" Yang punctuated the statement with a swing of her arms, smacking one of her action figures into the ground. Its head popped off.

"Yang!" Tai exclaimed.

"Nooooo! Titamium Man!" Ruby cried, throwing herself out of Summer's arm to try to wrestle the toy away from Yang.

"Stop it!"

"You bwoke him!"

"Stop, he's mine!"

"You have to shawe!"

Summer and Tai struggled to pull their little tykes apart, and Tai took the extra step of taking away the decapitated super hero from Yang and handed it over to Ruby.

"Nooooo!" Ruby wailed again, clutching her action figure to herself with one hand and trying to reach out towards the separated head with the other. "I'ww save you!"

Summer grabbed the little head and fussed with trying to reattach it as Tai talked to Yang. It was made impossible by Ruby's clumsy attempts to help, her little hands doing nothing but getting in the way.

"Are you talking about Apathy?" Tai asked her.

Yang, who was desperately trying and failing to push herself out of Tai's vice-like grip, blinked up at her dad. "Uh… meebee?"

"You can't get turned into an Apathy by getting hit by a Grimm, silly. They're not werewolves."

"Then where do they come from?" Yang asked as she got back to trying to squirm away.

"Uh…. evil goo puddles."

Yang stopped again to frown."Huh?"

"Goo puddoows?" Ruby asked, the distraction as she looked at Tai giving Summer the time she needed to pop Titanium Man's head back on.

Ruby let out a surprised gasp. "Titamium Man!" She hugged the little figure to herself, in the process hugged Summer's hands too because she couldn't be bothered to wait for Summer to let it go. Summer gave her little girl a squeeze and a kiss on the h~~~

"Ruby?" Yang asked, reaching out again to steady Ruby, who had somehow fallen to her knees and was clutching her head.

"I'm fine," she huffed quickly, pushing herself to her feet. "Ice was slippery."

"But what's wrong with your head?"

"N-nothing, I'm fine." She took a moment to look around and get her bearings again. She still felt like she was back in their living room at home, holding… what? What had she been holding? The scene was slipping away from her like a dream she'd just woken up from.

"Rubes?"

"This is G eight by the way," Ruby said. "Weiss!" she yelled, turning. "C… six!"

Weiss immediately scampered over to the right square—well, Ruby just assumed it was right because it was Weiss and she didn't feel like she needed to double check. Weiss walked with her hands fanned out at her side, probably to show confidence or something, but Ruby thought it made her look like a cute anime princess.

"Blake, B four!" Weiss called out. Ruby had been about to tell her to do that, but it seemed Weiss had figured out the order Ruby wanted to go in.

They continued in RWBY order for a couple minutes before it became clear that Yang and even Blake were losing interest. Ruby couldn't blame them. This was kinda boring. Just walking from point A to point B.

A part of her wanted to let things stay like this, just quiet and boring so she could try to remember that scene. It was… a memory? One of her memories from when she was little, right?

But… she had a responsibility to her team. She needed to keep things interesting. if Yang got bored of doing this kinda thing on their first attempt, she'd never want to do it again, and Ruby couldn't let that happen. The Ruby of tomorrow would be really mad at her if she did.

She was about to slip into her semblance and changed her mind a split second later. She instead just ran over to an empty square next to Yang, raising her hands up and making them into claws.

"Rawr!" she roared.

Yang blinked at her. "Uh… hi there, Peanut."

"I'm a Grimm!"

"Pretty cute for a Grimm."

"Call me out!"

"Huh?"

Ruby waved her hands around a bit. "Call me out! Let your team know what square I'm on!"

"Ooooh." Yang smiled at her, then looked around. "Uh, Grimmsicle at E five!"

"No," Ruby said.

"Oh, E six!"

Ruby gave her a nod, then ran over to Blake.

"Rawr!"

Blake laughed and smiled at her, then yelled at the other two, "Cute little Grimm on F two!"

Ruby gave her a high five, then ran over to Weiss.

"R—"

"If you roar at me, I will bite you."

That… sounded like a fun challenge more than a scary threat to Ruby. "Rawr!" she finished.

Weiss glared at her, then sighed and held out her hand. "Give me your finger."

"What?" Ruby blinked.

"You roared, so now I have to bite you. I won't let you make me a liar."

"Shouldn't you have to, like, chase me down or something to bite me?"

Weiss rolled her eyes. "Goodness, no! That sounds exhausting." She waggled her hand pointedly. "Gimme."

Ruby obeyed, walking over and giving Weiss her hand, mostly 'cause Weiss' tone and expression seemed to dismiss any possibility that she wouldn't. As soon as it was above her hand, Weiss snatched Ruby's pointy finger and pulled it in to bite the tip.

"Ach!" Ruby squeaked, not because it hurt—it didn't, with her aura—but because it felt like it was supposed to.

Weiss smirked at her and let go of her hand. "Grimm on B two!" she shouted.

She was really hard to figure out.

… This was really cute though.

Ruby ran around for a good ten minutes with this exercise. She'd skipped running with Weiss today because she'd felt so cruddy this morning so she didn't mind this. A few minutes in, she added roles, giving her teammates colors and pieces when she arrived pretending to be a Grimm, then asked them how they'd respond. Everyone got the hang of it pretty quickly.

It was a couple minutes into that part when her scroll buzzed.

Popsy-Wops: hey Pnut

Popsy-Wops: how r u today

Ruby smiled. She'd been wondering when she'd be hearing from Dad, but she hadn't realized how nice it would feel when she did. And he only ever used 'r' and 'u' when he was trying to "connect with the young people", 'cause he hated it.

Doofus.

Me: good

Me: doing some TaCTiCaL tRAinINg with the team rn

Popsy-Wops: oh? what kind of TaCTiCaL stuff?

Ruby sent him a picture of a couple of pages from Winter's book. The most complicated ones with chessboard diagrams with lots of labels and columns of text.

Popsy-Wops: o.O

Me: :D

Popsy-Wops: Well… hope ur having fun. Give me a call tonight?

Crap. It would be way harder to convince him everything was okay over voice. Not that she was sure she had convinced him with this, but looking at what she'd sent him, it looked like Normal Happy Ruby talk.

Me: okie

She focused back to the training and was about to run to Blake when she heard the rapper-dog bark noise of Yang's scroll getting a message.

Ruby turned to give her a squinty eye. "Is that Dad?"

Yang made a nervous duck face and pulled her scroll out. She slowly rolled it open and glanced at the screen. "Uh… no, it's Omi."

Ruby could absolutely tell she was lying from her face and the hesitation, but she got kinda caught on the lie itself.

"You still talk to her?"

"What?! Of course I do. Talk to her and Marina, like, every day."

"Oh." Those two were Yang's best friends for years. Ruby wasn't sure why she thought Yang wouldn't talk to them anymore. Maybe she just felt like… going to Beacon took Yang's life on a completely different path, so she'd move on?

Ruby didn't really have any super close friends she was leaving behind though, so maybe her views were skewed there.

"Go play Grimm with Blake," Yang grumped at her, trying to sneakily tap at her scroll.

"Fine, but you still suck at lying!" Ruby ran off.

"I'm—! Ugh!"

They worked for the next twenty minutes, adding little bits and arguing about what they should change and what they should keep from Winter. Weiss just wanted to keep everything because sisterly loyalty, probably, but there was definitely some stuff Ruby thought they could trim down and edit. It seemed like Atlas huntsman were also given standard military gear? There was stuff about calling out ammo trades or throwing grenades and stuff that was worded like it applied to every team member that couldn't for Team RWBY. It was weird. Ruby always thought a huntress' loadout was supposed to be personal and specialized. It seemed like Atlas was kinda… uniform.

Icky.

So that stuff could be taken out. They also needed to figure out some callouts specific to individuals. The person that needed the most would be Weiss. Her semblance and abilities were the most mallable… mallab… malleable?

Changeable!

She could do a lot of different things with it and customize her glyphs in a bajillion ways. Yang only really had to worry about on/off for her semblance and had a pretty one-note fighting style of 'get in your face' and Blake's semblance and style couldn't really be applied to any team maneuvers because it was so localized to her. Ruby needed some phrases for sniping versus scything and ways for her teammates to call out targets for her, but her semblance was just a means to facilitate her doing that. It didn't need its own callouts.

They landed on "one punch!" to tell Yang to use a big semblance hit on a target. Weiss and Blake didn't get it 'cause they're uncultured, but it worked for Yang and that's what mattered. "Dance with [enemy]" was Blake's cue to make an enemy target her and then bamboozle him with shadow ninja dodges.

Ruby wanted it to be "shadowstep" but Weiss and Blake insisted that was too wordy and 'comm cluttery'.

Pbbt.

At some point during all of this stuff Ruby forgot she was sad. This was all just too much fun.

For Ruby, Yang wanted "reap [enemy]" to be what they called when they needed Ruby to rose over and give a monster a choppy-chop, which Ruby really liked. Made her feel cool as heck. It was probably mostly going to be for Blake and Weiss because they couldn't hit super hard, and it would be easier and faster for Ruby to come over to wherever they are than it would be for Yang.

It was when they were trying to figure out sniping callouts for her that Professor Awesome showed up.

"Oi! What you doin'!" he yelled with a goofy accent. "You're supposed to have a teacher here if you want to spar!"

"We're not sparring!" Ruby called back. "We're tacticianing!"

The professor squinted at her as he walked into the arena, then turned to survey the giant chessboard. "Wait, is this Winter's bigbrain chess piece maneuver shit? I mean… stuff?"

"Yeah, you know it?" Ruby asked. The other three were trotting over and Weiss perked up a bit.

"A little. Winter used it with the Atlesian soldiers she was leading. Tried to get me to use it too, but I didn't really get what was going on. Felt like I needed a giant manual to follow everything."

Ruby held up her binder.

"... Well damn, there's actually a manual," he grumbled.

"Do most teams not do this?" Blake asked.

Rustyboi shrugged. "All teams develop a call system of one sort or another. I don't think most are complex enough to warrant… that." He pointed at Blake's binder. "But there's nothing wrong with it. Especially if you start learning and developing it this early. Just be aware that when you work with other teams, they're probably not going to know what's going on."

"Unless it's Winter," Weiss said with a smug smile.

"True, but hopefully you're not getting deployed in the areas she gets sent to."

Yang crossed her arms. "Is she really that good?"

Awesomeheart looked at Weiss, then at Yang. "... Yeah. So!" He clapped once, loudly, the sudden movement and noise making Blake hop in place. Yang couldn't see it from where she was standing or she'd probably be laughing her butt off. "Since ya'll are already here, whadaya say we just get started with class?"

Ruby turned to consult with her te—

"Sure!" Yang agreed immediately.

Yeah, she was probably reaching the end of her attention span for tacticianing.

"Dope. Well, it's gonna be a pretty chill start. We'll run some situations for about thirty minutes, then we'll have you girls two v two!"

"Sweet!" Ruby and Yang both said at the same time.

"I call Yang!" Blake squeaked quickly.

"Hahahaha!" Yang threw an arm around her partner. "See guys, Babe knows who the best is."

Blake gave a sheepish shrug from under Yang's arm. "I dunno if we can beat them, but I do not want to fight against you. I don't want to have any heart attacks today."

Yang grinned like an idiot, putting her free hand on her hip.

Weiss rolled her eyes and turned back to the Brofessor. "What does 'running situations' mean?"

"Just, like, hypotheticals like 'pretend I'm a Deathstalker' and then you girls work through how you deal with it."

"So it's tacticianing like what we were doing!" Ruby realized excitedly.

"I'm… not sure tactician is a verb, but yeah, it's kinda like formations and positioning. More specific, though. More about what you do in a fight with an enemy than how you move around the battlefield."

"So the funner stuff," Yang said, narrowing her eyes teasingly at Ruby.

"'Funner' isn't a word," Weiss sighed.

"That's a losing fight, Weiss," Blake grinned.

"... Yeah, nevermind."

"... So, shall we get started?" the professor asked.

Everyone gave their various forms of 'heck yeah!'

"Alright, let's start with just singles." He walked a bit away and then turned back to them. He raised his hands up by his head and tapped his fingers and thumbs together like pincers. "Skree skree! I'm a deathstalker running at you, Ruby. Your teammates are all busy fighting other Gridiots. What do you do?"

"Uh… kill you?"

"A Deathstalker? All by yourself? How would you do that?"

Ruby scrunched up her face. Deathstalkers were really tough. They had thick armor on most of their vital spots and protected their vulnerable face with their dumb giant claws.

"Um… If I put enough aura into her, I can probably slice off its legs with Crescent Rose."

The professor nodded. "You'd need to hit it in the back of the knee joint. You could probably pull that off with a scythe, but you'd need to be ridiculously fast and accurate. Could you pull that off?"

"Yeah! I can use my sembl—"

Thinking about her semblance made her remember that intrusive white light and voiceless scream in her Rose Dimension and her improving mood completely fell out from under her feet. Thinking of the light made her think of the day it was, which made her think of Mom, and suddenly Ruby's fear of the weirdness in her semblance was now tied to Mom in her head.

'Nonononono.'

That had nothing to do with Mom. Don't connect her to that. That wasn't how Ruby wanted to remember her.

An image formed in Ruby's head, one she didn't understand. Mom turning to look in her direction, though it felt like Ruby wasn't actually there. She was smiling, silver eyes shining, her white cloak blowing lightly in some wind Ruby couldn't feel. And the cold, white light that was invading the Rose Dimension was all around her, bright enough the Mom was almost silhouetted by it.

And the noise was there. It sounded completely different from the bell-scream that Ruby had heard earlier, but somehow still distinctly the same source. It was quiet, echo-y, light… rhythmic, like a voice. Something about it was female.

'Is that Mom talking?'

Just as Ruby wondered that, the vision faded. It was so fast Ruby hadn't even finished a blink before the image came and went, yet it was still burned into her brain.

What the heck was that? Was that a memory? No, Ruby was pretty sure she'd never seen that. Was it just Ruby visually combining the two things that she was thinking about? Was the light actually Mom? Was she really trapped in the Rose Dimension like Ruby had always thought? Hoped.

Maybe the light was Mom's only way to communicate with her? White and red were her colors, just like Ruby's were red and black. So maybe the Rose Dimension being red and white now was Mom's influence.

Now that she thought about it that way, it seemed so obvious. Why had she been scared of the light before?

Because… because it felt… off. Wrong. The light had felt cold, the noise angry. She hadn't thought it could be Mom because it felt, deep down, like it couldn't be. But… maybe Ruby just misinterpreted it? It was new and weird and maybe she had just assumed that meant it was supposed to be scary. If she used her semblance again and stayed in long enough and really looked and listened, she could find—

"... lose you?"

Ruby blinked up at the person in front of her. Who…? Oh, Professor Rustheart. Right. She was in the Battle Center. With her team.

"S-sorry, what?"

"Did I lose you? Am I not a convincing enough Deathstalker?" He clacked his 'claws' a couple times with a grin.

"Sorry, Professor," Weiss said. "Ruby's a little distracted today. We've been working on the 'tacticianing' for two days and she's been zoning out thinking about it."

The lie came so easily to her, Ruby was kinda surprised. She hadn't expected that from Weiss. Although being in rich-people-business-world, maybe lying was something she'd had to learn? 'Rich people are evil liars' was something Dad and Uncle Qrow talked about sometimes.

"Fair," Professor Awesome said easily. "But no zoning out when a big clicky-clacky mofo is charging at you! I'm very scary!"

Ruby couldn't help but smile and was filled with gratitude for this goofy man-child for so quickly and easily pulling her mind away from her scary thoughts. Part of Ruby wanted to just fast forward a few years real quick just to see if Yang ends up being a silly professor just like him. She could see it happening.

"So like I was saying," Professor Rustheart continued, "Deathstalkers are tough and fast and decently intelligent, so I'd be careful about being too confident that you could just run up and start lopping legs off it like it's a buffet at Red Lobster."

"Can I try practicing it?" Ruby asked. She was fairly certain she was awesome enough to do it, but practice couldn't hurt.

"Not… really?" he answered.

"Aw, why?"

Professor Awesome frowned a bit and looked down at his feet, then back up to Ruby. "'Cause… I'm not a Deathstalker?"

"... Oh. Right." Now that she thought about it, Ruby wasn't really sure how she'd thought practicing this was going to happen.

"Then what's the point of this?" Yang asked from behind Ruby.

"Same as usual," the professor answered. "Let you figure out how you'll handle situations ahead of time so you don't hesitate in the moment. And we'll do some of these with guys in pairs so you can work out what kinda combos you want to do."

"Why don't we have robot Grimm to practice on?" Blake wondered aloud.

'That would be awesome!' Ruby thought. She didn't really have the energy to say it, though. She wasn't feeling particularly effusive anymore.

Darn light.

"Atlas does, a little bit. I think they use them to mostly train their soldiers to target weak points. They found it isn't very good for huntsmen training, though."

"How does that make sense?" Weiss snipped in her Weissy tone.

"Because the huntsmen were breaking them. A lot. It's a huge cost sink, and I think they decided it was better training and more helpful to the kingdom to just have the huntsmen train by going out and killing Grimm for real."

That didn't sound super convincing. Ruby wanted to beat up a big robot Deathstalker. Money sounded like a lame excuse to not let her.

"Also, I think the AI isn't too developed, so the robots don't really move well or act like the Grimm, so I imagine it wouldn't be super helpful for anything more than being a glorified target dummy anyway."

That… was a bit more convincing. There were a lot of Grimm out there and they were all freaky and weird with the ways they move and behave and the abilities they have. Atlas barely had functioning human-robot soldiers, they probably couldn't manage Grimm.

"Next!"

They went through each of the girls, then each of the pairs, then each combination of three, then all four of them. Each time, the discussions and debates on the best way to deal with the Deathstalker got longer. The general consensus was the same as what they'd decided for their chess strategy: Blake should just dodge and back up because she couldn't hit it hard enough, Weiss should just lock it down because punching through its armor would require more Dust and aura than it was worth, and Yang and Ruby should just… hit it really hard. From prior experience they knew that Yang couldn't do too much to one of these big poopers without having a decent amount of charge in her semblance, but when she couldn't give it the squash, Ruby could come in to give it the choppy-chops.

(Because Crescent Rose is awesome.)

They then repeated this thought exercise for dealing with Nevermore, though this took less time as Team RWBY had now had a fair bit of experience dealing with those stupid birbs.

"... but yeah, if you can get up there, I do think you could slice through its wings, Blake," the professor said. "Though it might take a bit more aura to pierce it than you might be willing to use while you're still a young grasshoppah."

Weiss squinted at the man with a 'you're weird' face, but everyone else laughed.

"So, we could go through this again with Goliaths," he continued, "or we could get to the fi—"

"Fighting!" Yang yelled. "We've been standing around talking too much."

Blake immediately started stretching, using Yang's shoulder as an anchor as she loosened up her hamstrings. Weiss moved over to stand behind Ruby, giving her a small smile when Ruby glanced back at her.

"Alright then," Professor Awesome laughed. "Partner up th—uh… alright! Let's get started! Two of you over there, two of you over there, sync your myAuras with me. Same rules as before; if you get dropped to thirty percent, you're out. No headshots, if someone's aura flickers, yell for everyone to stop, yada yada. You know the drill."

Ruby started bouncing on her feet as they prepped for the fight. Even through her mood, the excitement of an upcoming fight thrummed through her body. Looking across the few dozen feet that separated her from her sister, she felt like she was back at home training with Yang in their backyard while Dad watched over them.

But there was also an anxiety to it. She'd need to use her semblance in this fight, she knew, but what would it be like? How would things be different?

"You wish to fight me, little grasshopper?!" Yang called out.

A smile tugged at Ruby's lips, the angst sliding off of her. She couldn't not return the dramatic fight banter! It was a tradition between her and Yang.

She unfurled Crescent Rose and lifted it up to point it at Yang. "Last we fought I was but a learner, but now I am the master!"

"Only a master of cookies, Darth!"

Ruby lowered her weapon a bit. "... Yeah, that's fair!"

"What's the plan, dolt?" Weiss huffed quietly. She looked a little nervous.

"You got anything in your Dark Knight contingency plans for Blake?" Ruby asked.

"What?"

"Think you can take Blake?" she translated.

Weiss frowned a bit, then nodded, squaring her shoulders.

"Alright," Ruby said, accepting Weiss' quiet confidence. "I'll distract Yang. I've never been able to beat her, but I can make her take a long time trying to get me. You take out Blake and then come help me two v one Yang?"

"Okay," Weiss almost whispered. She flicked her sword's cylinder open to check it, which was probably a nervous tick 'cause Ruby was pretty sure Weiss had the cylinders memorized.

"You might want to make a big wall cutting the two of them off at the start to stop Yang from rushing you," Ruby added. The other two's plan would probably be to rush down Weiss and beat her up fast and then deal with Ruby.

Although Weiss could glyphs to get up and away from them. Maybe they'd go after Ruby together first?

Hard to know. Ruby and Weiss could both be pretty slippery.

"Okay," Weiss said again. "Okayokayokay."

Definitely nervous. She was watching Yang closely.

Ruby wasn't sure how this would go. Weiss was a pretty solid contender for second best fighter in the class after her fight with Pyrrha, but Yang was… well, awesome, and her fighting style probably wasn't something Weiss would be able to deal with easily.

But hey, who knows? Weiss has her notebook of fight plans for everyone in their class. Maybe she had devised some anti-Yang strategy.

From the look in her eyes, though, she probably hadn't. Or if she had, she wasn't very confident in it.

No matter. Plans never survive first contact with the enemy anyway. They'd just need to fight and be awesome and hopefully be awesomer than Yang and Blake.

Which would be hard 'cause they were pretty awesome.

"Alright! I want a good, clean fight!" Professor Awesome yelled from behind the shooting range cubbies. "No biting, no scratching, no hair-pulling… no licking, no wedgying, no… twerking?"

Everyone turned to give him a look.

"I'm sorry! People usually tell me to shut up before I get that far! Uh… fight!"

'Might as well dive into it,' Ruby told herself. She slipped into her semblance.

The whiteness was still there, now covering everything, though it looked like the opacity on it had been cut in half or something, because Ruby could see red underneath it. Weirdly, things didn't look pink because of it. It was… just very clearly a red world with a white overlay.

And even in the second Ruby spent looking around, she felt something—or someone—exert some sort of effort and the whiteness dimmed a bit in places, making Blake and Yang and the battlefield around them all getting pronouncedly more red.

Was… was Ruby doing it? She hadn't tried to dim the light, hadn't even known it was possible, but maybe it was subconscious?

Yet she couldn't shake the feeling like someone else was doing it, like there was someone turning down the lights.

That sense that there was someone standing behind her was there too, unshakeable even when she turned to find nobody there. Again. Other than Weiss a bit off to her side, of course, who was looking at Ruby expectantly and questioningly.

Right. The fight.

She rushed forward, charging straight for Yang who was sprinting right at her too, Blake running at a bit of a curve behind her.

Obviously, Ruby covered ground faster, so they met on 'their' half of the battlefield despite Ruby's late start. Aas she came up to Yang, she slipped out of her semblance and slashed horizontally right at the center of Yang's torso. She wouldn't be able to stop or move to the side in time. Her only options would be to duck or—

Yang jumped, doing a quick spin and half-flip in the air. She ended up upside-down above Ruby and punched down with a shotgun blast, a gravity shell that sent her higher and let her finish her flip.

Ruby spun Crescent Rose above her head to block most of the pellets in the shot, then turned and charged at Yang again as she touched the ground. She swung across again, forcing the same jump-or-duck decision on her sister, but from prior experience she expected…

Yep. When Ruby swung at her, instead of trying to avoid the hit, Yang stepped forward inside the blade and blocked the snath with her forearm.

The first time she'd done this in one of their duels it had taken Ruby completely by surprise and Yang had been able to grab Crescent Rose and rip it out of her hands. The second time, Ruby had pulled backwards to smack Yang in the back with the blade and that had caught her by surprise. The response the Yang had settled on was something that Ruby didn't have much of an answer to other than running.

When Yang's free hand jabbed out to Ruby's face, she was ready for it, slipping into her semblance and two-stepping a quick little half circle, placing herself between her sister and Weiss again.

The white was pretty much entirely gone in the area around her, though shining brightly a bit of a ways away, almost like it was framing the fight, making it the only thing in focus.

Ruby spun, slicing, knowing that Yang would be ready to block it. When she did, Ruby smiled. They'd done this dance before. It was familiar, yet still so much fun.

Yang shoved Crescent Rose to the side and rather than try to fight her sister's push, Ruby twirled with it and turned it into a slice from the other direc—

Something grabbed onto Crescent Rose and jerked, cutting off her attack. Before she could figure out what it was, Yang stepped into her face and went for a gut punch. Ruby tried to semblance to mitigate the blow but found resistance when trying to pull Crescent Rose. It wouldn't go with her.

Before she had a chance to puzzle it out, Ruby got suckerpunched.

The thing she noticed first was how all the air that she had ever breathed suddenly just poofed away. Then the pain came. Not too much because of her aura, but still a lot because Yang was strong, and then the impact took effect.

Ruby was thrown backward and whatever was binding Crescent Rose refused to give, so Ruby had to. She let her weapon go and slipped into her semblance to help get her feet under her.

Unexpectedly, being in the Rose Dimension was… helping her recover? Her breath came back quickly and the pain from the punch faded into background noise, then away completely.

She didn't really have time to think about it, though. She looked over to where Crescent Rose was on the ground.

Oh.

Dumb Blake and her ridiculous physics-defying ribbons.

Gambol Shroud was in its weird hooky form, the ribbon at its base wrapped around Crescent Rose's snath, the other end in Blake's hand. She must have been channeling her aura all the way through it. Ruby couldn't pull other auras into the Rose Dimension.

Yang ran over to Crescent Rose and hooked a foot under it, kicking it up and over to Blake.

"Don't let—"

A shiny blue missile flew in from behind Ruby and blew up right in Yang's face. Suddenly, she was encased in ice, a big blue-white shiny block of ice that had long shards extending out in the direction opposite from where it had come.

Ruby grinned. That was one way to shut Yang up.

The ice was already cracking, though. Yang was probably forcing her aura out to weaken it. Ruby needed to move.

She rose-dashed at Blake, who was struggling to hold Crescent Rose in her empty hand and looking very confused. Clearly, she hadn't been planning on stealing Ruby's weapon.

Good. Ruby would have to teach her a lesson anyway, though.

She ran right up to Blake and popped out, grabbing Crescent Rose with both hands and slamming it into Blake's chin, Darth Maul style.

"Agh! Hey!" Blake sputtered, staggering back as she let go of Ruby's weapon and blinked at her in surprise.

Ruby couldn't help it. She laughed. The sheer incredulity in Blake's face was priceless.

She'd apparently not expected Ruby would get aggressive enough to just come facecheck her, but she'd stolen Crescent Rose gosh darn it!

Blake's expression switched to grumpy and she went on the attack.

Now Ruby had never been on the receiving end of a Blake Attack before and… ho boy. She was a freaking blur.

From the sidelines, Blake's semblance hadn't seemed super powerful to Ruby, but now that she was having to deal with it, it was freAKING OBNOXIOUS! While Ruby was fast, Crescent Rose was big and heavy and it meant that there was a lot of downtime between her attacks and that meant that her attacks were just slow enough that super-ninja Blake always had her shadowdodge ridiculousness ready whenever Ruby counter attacked.

Plus, Blake had two weapons to strike with, her sword and her bladed sheath, and it was a hard time keeping track of both.

And she kept getting little nicks in on Ruby.

She didn't hit very hard so each strike didn't take much of Ruby's aura, but when she was getting a bunch of hits in and Ruby was getting none… the math wasn't going to favor Ruby.

They'd been duking it out for a little over ten seconds when Ruby finally made contact. She swung high and Blake dodged low and in the other direction, and instead of trying to swing back at her, Ruby spun like she had against Yang. She used her semblance at the start of it to make it go faster, hoping it would catch Blake off guard, and it did.

Crescent Rose's point slammed into Blake's chest and she stumbled back with an, "Oof!" Ruby stabbed at her with the blade at the bottom of her scythe and Blake was off balance enough that she couldn't dodge in time. The poke made her take another step back, and Ruby followed it up with an upward twirl that caught Blake under the chin.

She got knocked on her butt.

Ruby paused. She should let Blake get back up, right? Like she'd won that bout. Now she'd get back up and they'd go again.

After a second of reeling, Blake rolled backwards and then vaulted up to her feet, landing in a fighting stance glaring at Ruby.

"That was cool," Ruby stated honestly.

Blake smiled a little, then stuck her tongue out and went back to attacking.

This time she changed things up. When she charged, Ruby swung at her and Blake did a cartwheely flip over Crescent Rose kinda like the way Yang had jumped over Ruby early. Not as high a jump, though it didn't need to be, and she apparently launched herself out of her semblance duplicate. She landed on one foot, then the other, and she flicked her wrist in a weird motion.

Somehow her ribbon wrapped around Ruby's ankle and she yanked, pulling Ruby's leg back and sending Ruby to her knees. Ruby caught herself with her free hand to keep from falling completely over, but as soon as she did Blake's knee slammed into her face.

Her aura protected her, but her cheekbone still throbbed from the hit.

Blake was taking too many lessons from Yang.

Ruby fell over and swept her bound leg out, catching Blake in the ankles and by surprise. Blake hit the ground and Ruby took the couple of seconds it bought her to unbind her own ankle from that ridiculous ribbon so she could use her semblance again.

Her opportunity to look up again showed her there was now a giant ice wall splitting the battlefield, fifteen feet high and Ruby couldn't tell how thick. Weiss was vaulting over to her on glyphs.

When Ruby pushed herself to her feet, Weiss sent a blast of ice Dust that looked like it was heading straight for her. She ducked and the magic detonated behind her. Blake was in the middle of a backflip when Ruby turned to check, dodging the spikes of ice that exploded up.

"I thought I was supposed to fight Blake!" Weiss yelled as she got closer.

'Yeah, some stuff kinda happened,' Ruby thought. It was clear that Weiss bad at adapting, but, like, come on.

There was a crash of shattering glass as Yang shotgun-punched her way through the wall a dozen feet away.

Instead of sharing any of those annoyed thoughts with Weiss, Ruby wordlessly rushed at Yang, figuring Weiss would just default to the original plan of fighting Blake.

Yang's punch had cleared enough ice that she could shove her arm through the wall (which was actually pretty thin), but she'd need to break through a bit more to be able to step through. She pulled back to wind up another punch when Ruby got to the other side of the hole she'd made and leveled Crescent Rose in her rifle form at her face.

"Uh-oh."

Yang through herself to the side, but Crescent Rose's high-caliber round clipped her arm. Ruby saw her stumble before losing vision of her behind the wall.

With one big leap in her semblance, Ruby jumped over the wall and landed in front of her sister.

They went back at it, their familiar dance drawing smiles on both their faces even as they tried to conk each other on their heads.

Yang kept moving her head, though. Hmph! Jerk.

Even more annoyingly, Yang kept the fight close to the wall. It limited the moves Ruby could make with Crescent Rose. Swung into the wall, the blade might get stuck. Swing away from the wall… well, she couldn't, really. That really only left her with vertical slices, which Yang kept backing away from.

Ruby tried moving around her sister, getting different angles, but Yang refused to step away from the wall, so it was always limiting Ruby in some way.

For all her blustering goofiness, Yang was pretty smert.

They fought for at least half a minute, Ruby carving lines into Weiss' wall while Yang gave her the occasional painful punch or kick in between all her dumb dodging. Then, in a fast turn of events, Yang suddenly had Ruby's head in her hand and slammed it into the wall.

"Aaggh!" Ruby squeaked as she slumped to the floor, head ringing.

"You okay?" Yang asked worriedly, kneeling down to steady Ruby with a hand. All the fight and adrenaline in her eyes was gone, replaced with big sister worry.

Ruby whined a "Hnngh!" at her and whipped out a lame punch that just bounced off Yang's shoulder. She rolled away and grabbed around blindly, mumbling, "Where's mah scythe? Gonna cut you up."

Yang grinned and stood back up, hands on her hips as she gloated over Ruby. "I know what it's like to lose."

Crap. Hadn't Ruby lost this bout? Did Yang win a monologue?

Well, Ruby was on her butt and super dizzy.

"To feel so desp—"

"Yang!" Blake's voice shouted from the other side of the wall. "I could use some help!" Shortly after, she swung over the wall a little ways away.

"Yeah, hold on!" Yang turned back to Ruby. "Where was I? Um… Ruby, I am your father!"

Ruby frowned at her.

"Yeah, no, that wasn't it," Yang agreed. "Uh… See, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke." Behind her, Weiss pranced over the wall and looked over. "Dropped at the fir—"

A spear of ice slammed into Yang's back and sent her reeling, tripping over Ruby and landing on her face.

"Wei-eiss!" Ruby and Yang both yelled.

She'd been about to lunge at Blake, but Weiss paused and looked over, expression confused as heck. "What?!"

"I was monologuing!" Yang whined.

"She was monologuing!" Ruby whined at the same time.

Weiss blinked at them, then looked at Blake, who shrugged. They both looked back at Ruby and Yang for a moment, then Weiss rolled her eyes and went back to her lunge, resuming their duel.

Ruby and Yang both stood and brushed themselves off.

"You totally butchered your monologue, though," Ruby informed her sister.

"Yeah, I forgot which one I started with."

"Yeah."

"So… back to fighting?"

Ruby nodded, then dashed forward, trying to catch Yang off guard.

It didn't work, of course. Ruby usually tried to do this after the post-bout monologues. Yang caught on to it many years ago, when they were but young munchkins.

Yang slapped Ruby's slash down with a scary amount of force and lifted her leg, twisting her foot so that she pinned Crescent Rose. Clever, and really cool, but she looked a little off balance. Ruby pulled on the switch for her ammo feed, then pulled the trigger. The grav round launched her back. Yang's foot got yoinked forward and she careened backwards, stumbling to catch her feet.

Instead of waiting to touch ground and jump back at Yang, Ruby slipped into her semblance and pushed herself forward with it, bringing Crescent Rose down to bonk Yang right in the head. She was about to pop out of her semblance to get the hit off when she noticed that Yang's fist suddenly went from red to the bright, intrusive white. It swung out and Ruby instinctively dashed away.

If she'd kept going with her attack, that punch would have caught her right in the stomach when she'd exited her semblance.

The light… had warned her? It was helping her? Was her semblance evolving? Or was…

Was it really Mom?

Any more thoughts about it were cut short as Yang rushed at her. They went back to their dance, though thankfully they were away from the wall so Ruby had more room to attack. It also meant Yang had more room to dodge, but Ruby still managed to get a couple heavy hits in. She got hit back, but… that was a hazard with fighting Yang.

Eventually, she was able to force Yang into a precarious position where she had to jump to avoid Ruby's swing and Ruby was in a position to follow up before Yang touched the ground. She dashed forward to cleave at Yang's shins when suddenly there was a peppering of loud pops and a bajillion tiny impacts slammed into her back, forcing her off balance.

Blake shot her in the back!

Ruby wheeled around to find Blake running at her, sliding and slashing at Ruby's ankles.

"Switch!" Blake shouted at Yang as Ruby jumped over her.

Ruby grinned. Weiss had Blake on the run.

Yang seemed to accept that, running past Ruby to attack Weiss, but then Weiss used a glyph to vault over her and another to launch herself after Blake.

"Would! You! Stop!" Blake huffed as they got back to their duel. Ruby paused for a moment to watch because she hadn't gotten to see how their fight was going yet and couldn't help but be impressed. It was like an anime fight, both moving insanely fast with their swords, slashing and thrusting in series of quick bursts. Blake was actually faster than Weiss and, had she been able to go on the attack, she probably would have been winning. She couldn't attack, though, because Weiss was using her Dust and glyphs to keep up the attack where her sword skills were lagging behind. Try as she might, Blake wasn't able to use her semblance to get completely out of the blasts of wind and water that Weiss was exploding out around her, and it was even harder because Weiss kept throwing out her black 'pull' glyphs around Blake. They weren't strong enough to bind her, but they did slow her down.

Yang rushed back after Weiss right in front of Ruby and that prompted Ruby to get back in the fight. Soon they were all in a big 2v2 melee, Yang trying to hit Weiss, Weiss trying to hit Blake, Blake trying to hit Ruby, and Ruby trying to hit Yang.

It was wild and hectic, blades and fists and Dust magic and bullets flying all over the place.

Ruby laughed with delight and Yang echoed her. This was so much fun!

She took a few random hits from Blake and Yang just because she was looking the wrong way at specific moments. After a bit, she found that putting less power in her attacks to keep her scythe moving with her swings helped because it meant she could more easily get Crescent Rose in place to block. Her offense got worse, but the defense was worth it.

Weiss was doing a little bit better than Ruby in one way, though worse in another.

For the first, she had an easier time attacking while defending herself at the same time because she kept throwing glyphs up between herself and Yang. It slowed Yang down enough that Weiss could more or less keep up her relentless attack on Blake.

For the second, though… Weiss was very clearly not as happy and comfortable with the chaos of the 2v2. Whenever Yang broke through her glyphs and advanced enough to tag a hit on her, she would flail around and panic and try to space herself further away, only to get chased down. Her attacks got sloppier as she tried to watch out for Yang while attacking Blake.

Eventually, Yang got a solid punch off right into Weiss' hip and sent her sprawling with a hilarious "Aaggghhghgh!"

It couldn't have hurt that much when Weiss had aura protecting her. She was probably just surprised and upset that she'd been hit and being overly dramatic.

Ruby rushed to her defense, flying in to body check Yang, whom she promptly bounced off of. Blake rushed at her and kept her too busy to try to help Weiss any more.

She'd only traded a couple blows back and forth with Blake, though, when another random impact in her back ragdoll tossed them both away from each other. The surprise of suddenly flying through the air flipping over and over kept Ruby from reacting for a couple moments, and when she semblanced to right herself, she turned to see what happened.

A quick glance showed Weiss with her sword in the ground and Yang sailing through the air away from her like Ruby and Blake had.

'Big wind explosion?' Ruby reasoned out.

As if prompted, strands of white light faded into existence, spiraling out around Weiss.

'Highlighting the wind magic ! can't see?'

The light faded away again as soon as Ruby had that thought, like it was saying "yep, you got it".

'What the heck is this?'

Ruby pushed the thought away and rushed over to Weiss.

When she touched down in front of Weiss, who was currently reloading the revolver cylinder in her sword, Weiss jumped.

"Just me," Ruby said to reassure her.

Weiss let out an anxious breath in response. "This is so stressful!" she hissed. Her fingers were shaking a little bit as she tried to slam Dust cartridges into Myrtenaster's cylinder and she was missing a lot because she kept glancing up to keep tabs on Blake and Yang.

"Relax," Ruby said lightly.

"Hnngke!" Weiss shot back, her response just an expression of annoyance and frustration.

That was fair. Ruby had never found being told to relax ever actually helped her relax.

She knew why Weiss was so stressed, though, while Ruby was having so much fun. Ruby was enjoying the fight but Weiss was focused solely on winning.

"We got this, Weiss."

She wouldn't be able to talk Weiss out of her anxiety-inducing competitiveness. Especially not now. Best option was to just try to convince Weiss there was no need to be stressed because they were definitely going to win.

"You messed Blake up, and I got some good hits on Yang. We got this."

Play to her ego a bit.

It worked. Weiss took a deep breath and steadied her hands, letting her finish loading her Dust quickly.

Yang and Blake were taking their time, walking as much to each other as they were to Ruby and Weiss.

"Same plan?" Weiss asked, content with the breather.

"Um… no. I think we should both just go for Blake. She's gotta be close to thirty. A couple big hits from Crescent Rose should be enough."

"I can try to wall Yang off again."

"Yeah. Go a bit thicker and taller this time. She's gonna want to go through the wall instead of around it 'cause she's Yang. Make it harder for her."

"Okay."

Blake and Yang met up a dozenish feet away and talked to each other in low voices, Yang pacing back and forth behind Blake, bouncing on her toes. Ruby was happy to give them the chance to talk, just like she and Weiss had.

What would they try to do? Probably the same plan Ruby had: focus one of them down. It would… probably be Weiss? Right? It would be easier to go after her than Ruby. Probably.

Although Weiss had a lot of ways to be obstructive.

"I was just telling Blake that I hope she brought some butter and jam!" Yang grinned.

"No you weren't," Blake muttered.

"'Cause you guys are toast!" Yang finished.

…

"... Wow," Weiss sighed

Ruby laughed. Then charged.

Yang charged back.

When Ruby semblanced around her to swing at Blake, she assumed Yang would keep running at Weiss.

She didn't.

Ruby dodged Yang's kick at her back entirely by accident, skipping past it as she tried to get a follow up swing at Blake's head.

'Looks like they decided going after me would be easier than Weiss.'

She had to go on the defensive for a couple seconds, but then a flash of blue appeared and Yang was suddenly cut off from her by a giant wall of ice.

'Nice.'

Weiss fell from the sky on the other side of Blake and she and Ruby backs the ninja against the wall.

"Weiss, you're really annoying," Blake grumbled.

"Thank you!" Weiss replied with a smile.

They could hear Yang trying to shotgun punch through the other side of the wall.

"You suck, Weiss!" she yelled.

"I know!" Weiss chirped delightedly.

Ruby started the fight back up, swinging laterally at Blake's hips to make the attack as hard as possible to dodge.

Blake still managed to dodge it because of course she did, jumping up five feet to sail over Crescent Rose. When Weiss lunged at her, she used her semblance to pirouette to the side while in midair, which was… awesome. But as she was about to touch ground, Ruby managed to get Crescent Rose in place to hook Blake's foot as she landed.

With an "eep!", Blake fell to the ground and Weiss poked at her stomach, letting out a stream of Dust, trapping Blake in ice.

"Uh…" Ruby said. Did that count as knocking Blake out of the fight? And did Blake have air in there? Yang was able to break out, but did Blake have enou—

Blake turned into a shadow and suddenly appeared outside the ice, shivering on her knees.

"So freaking COLD!" she yelled, turning to swing up at Weiss with the last word. Weiss parried, then sidestepped Blake's followup attack with her sheath and Ruby dove forward to slam Blake in the chest with the top of Crescent Rose. She went sprawling.

"YANG!"

"I'm… coming!" Yang shouted back. Sounded like she was still punching her way through the wall.

Stubborn doofus.

Blake pushed herself up and staggered back to get away from Weiss and Ruby. "Just go around, idiot!"

They went back to fighting, but through the noise and action Ruby was still able to faintly hear Yang's "ugh, fine!"

They needed to finish Blake quickly.

As it turned out, Blake was apparently really low on aura because one random, almost incidental hit with Crescent Rose two seconds later made Professor Awesome yell, "Blake's out!"

"Maaaaan," Blake breathed, on her knees and shoulders slumped.

"That was anticlimactic," Ruby pouted.

"A bit, yeah," Blake agreed. "Go beat the crap out of my stupid partner, yeah?" She got up to walk towards the sidelines as Ruby giggled.

"You got it."

Yang rounded the corner and stopped to glare at them. "How dare you!" she yelled. "I will avenge my bae!"

"Did it ever occur to you to not bang your head against the wall like a useless idiot?" Blake grumped at her as she walked by.

"... Not really, no."

Blake sighed and shook her head.

"You should just surrender, Yang," Weiss declared. "It's two on one."

"Hey, threesomes are fun," Yang said, followed by a dumb eyebrow waggle.

"What?" Ruby asked.

Weiss slapped her forehead. "Just beat her up."

"Can do!"

Ruby launched herself forward and Yang matched the movement, launching herself with her shotgauntlets and swinging for Ruby's hea—

~~~She ducked under the punch that was heading for her face, then popped into her semblance to dodge the follow up uppercut.

Her petals spread out far and wide in a circular burst, her sense of feeling spreading with them. Each petal had a sense of touch like the back of a hand, giving her a sense of the air currents around her and the forms of her teammates where they collided. Each petal also gave her a rudimentary sense of sight a few feet around them. The world shrank to the 25-ish feet around the center of her petalburst, everything in shades of white and red.

She zeroed in on one of the petals behind Tai and pulled herself into it. The many petals that had scattered coalesced back together and Summer reformed. The lunge she sent into Tai's back connected with his side but he twisted with the hit to mitigate the blow and sent an elbow at Summer's face.

Or rather, sent a golden couter at Summer's face.

This was bad. This fight was going on too long. Tai's semblance-armor was coming into place. His gauntlets, vambraces, couters, sabatons, and greaves were all in place, shining golden around his skin. The pauldrons were starting to form from that hit Summer just gave him, motes of golden light weaving and cross sectioning around his shoulders.

If he got his cuirass formed Summer and Qrow would never be able to bring him down. They either needed to knock him out now, fast, or find a way to remove him from the fight long enough for them to deal with Raven.

He had a way of making himself impossible to ignore, though.

A couple dozen feet away, Qrow and Raven were hacking away at each other, fighting with a ferocity that could only be chalked up to sibling rivalry. Twin rivalry, really. Neither could let the other win a one on one. And neither would. They'd fight each other to a standstill until Tia or Summer intervened.

And Summer would have to. She wasn't going to be able to take Tai without Qrow.

She used her semblance again to avoid the gut punch coming her way and moved as far as she could from Tai. A flick of the switch on the shaft of her halberd set Blossom to shift into its rifle form. It was a slow transition, the weapon and the tech behind it new and experimental, but once she was holding long barreled semi-automatic rifle in her hands, Summer conclusively decided it was the coolest thing ever.

She sent two shots at Raven, the first of which hit the girl in the ribs, the second whizzed past her ear as she turned to glare in that way only Raven could glare.

Summer had to roll to avoid another fist from Tai and sent two more shots at Raven at a run. The first missed, the second Raven blocked with her sword. Qrow dashed at her and started swinging his greatsword in impossibly fast arcs and the fights went back to the 1v1 duels for the moment. Summer mostly just ran away from Tai—which was insanely hard to do because he was way too fast for a guy that was also so tough and strong.

Honestly, whoever balanced this blonde buffoon had no idea what they were doing.

She did her best to just dodge without hitting back because she didn't want to damage Tai's aura and feed his semblance, but there were times when she had to actively block his blows or hit him to move him back and create space.

It meant that his pauldrons were fully formed now and the first lines of light were starting to weave his cuirass around his torso.

They were doomed.

She semblance away and took another shot at Raven. It hit her in the back of the head and made her stumble and left her open to Qrow cleaving down onto her shoulder and knocking her to her knees.

Summer lost track of what was happening over there because she had to refocus on avoiding Tai's goldlight armored fists, but a few seconds later the air split and cracked open with a red wound behind him.

Raven lunged out and suddenly Summer was fighting a 2v1. She fended for herself okay, using her halberd more like a bo staff to parry Raven's slashes and moving to keep Raven between her and Tai.

Raven still got a few hits on her before Qrow was able to come to the rescue. He dove right in between their opponents and forced himself into their faces. Summer felt the uncomfortable formless tingle of Qrow's semblance crawl over her skin and she could tell from the concentration that he was full blasting it.

She double semblance-skipped away to get out of Qrow's aura and turned back to shoot at Raven and Tai. Qrow kept them both occupied, turning into an absolute menace as he switched Omen to its scythe form.

Against any other opponent, Raven and Tai probably would have sliced them up and stomped them into the ground, but the full effect of Qrow's semblance kept them from pasting Qrow. They were skilled and precise so they didn't just fall on their faces or impale themselves, but they missed a lot and were starting to get dangerously close to hitting each other.

Raven tried to chase after Summer and get away from Qrow, but Summer was able to keep moving back and Qrow was fast and aggressive enough that he kept himself in Raven's face. And Tai's. At the same time. Somehow.

He was a quick little cutie.

Summer ducked the doorway of the fort at the center of this arena to try to lead the fight into the structure just like she and Qrow had planned.

When she got into the doorway, Raven stopped and squinted at Summer.

Summer shot her a smile. "'Sup, bestie?"

Raven seemed to reach some sort of realization, her eyes widening. Summer was pretty positive she'd just figured out what was going on and that her smile and 'sup' couldn't have possibly given the game away. She'd been practicing her bluffing. The Branwens had insisted.

"Tai, don't—" Raven started.

Tai crashed through the wall next to her, stone and mortar shattering apart. Throwing himself into the wall damaged his aura quite a bit, resulting in his semblance bursting more armor around him. The cuirass was now complete and the greaves formed in a single instantaneous flare. All that was left was the helmet and he'd be the full Golden Knight.

'Crap. We're not going to be able to bring him down.'

Their only hope was going to be Qrow's semblance.

Tai took a step toward Summer but as his foot touched the ground, the ceiling above him caved in. The last Summer saw of him before he was buried under rubble and a cloud of dust was him doubled over with his arms above his head, shielding him.

That was gonna make his helmet.

Raven started to back away, not worried about Tai (which was fair, he was gonna be fine) and clearly aware of how dangerous it was to fight in the fort with Qrow, but Qrow attacked her from behind and forced her into the building. Summer was tempted to switch Blossom to its melee mode and charge Raven. Together, she and Qrow could bring her down pretty quickly.

But getting into Qrow's semblance could spell disaster. It got more effective as more people and things got into its radius—simply because it had more variables to work with—and there was no way for Qrow to protect Summer from it.

He hated that.

Summer backed through the halls, burning through the rest of her 15 round magazine and loading the next one as Qrow pressed Raven after her. Thuds and rumbles echoed off the walls letting them know Tai was starting to pull free of the pile of stone they'd left him under.

'Hurry up, Qroooow.'

Omen was back in its sword form and Qrow was slashing in wide arcs at Raven that scored the walls. Raven was able to keep up blow for blow, but Summer's potshots were taking their toll on her. One of Qrow's strikes on the wall caused a crack up the wall and Raven was barely able to throw herself to the side as a chunk of ceiling rained down on her. She slammed a shoulder into the opposite wall and when Qrow swung at her hip she wasn't able to properly block it. The heavy hit was damaging enough that Raven's red aura flared at her side.

Summer put two more shots in her back, then Raven pushed herself back away from Qrow and slipped on a piece of rubble. She caught herself on a forearm and let out a pained hiss right before Qrow stabbed down into her stomach.

She kicked him away and staggered to her feet. Summer shot her again, once in each boob. Raven slashed wildly out at her. "Summer! You stop that right now!" she shouted, having to parry an attack from Qrow halfway through her sentence.

Summer giggled. "Nu!"

Whether or not Raven heard the reply was questionable because just then Tai, in his fully imbued, almost 7 foot tall armored golden glory, burst through the wall. Again.

He liked doing that.

Somehow, he was lucky enough that Qrow's semblance didn't drop three floors of ceiling on his head. That 'lucky' idea went away when he tried to kick Qrow, though, because when Qrow dodged and stabbed at Raven, she dodged right into Tai's foot.

She wasn't even done rolling across the ground when Professor Ozpin's voice rang through the halls, "Raven's out!"

"Damn it!" Raven shouted, slapping the ground.

She was gonna be mad about being the first one out and was gonna want to take her frustrations out on Tai. He was a rock, so he wouldn't mind, but Summer wouldn't want to watch it. She was gonna have to work overtime tonight cheering Raven up. Bestie Time would need at least two extra scoops of ice cream.

But for the here and now, Summer and Qrow needed to find some way to bring down Tai. Which… was probably not possible. His gauntlets now had spikes and sets were forming on his vambraces.

In a massive burst of speed, Tai dashed at Summer, a spiked fist hurtling for her solar ple~~~

Yang's fist caught Ruby right in the jaw and she flipped twice in the air from getting clotheslined.

"Ruby?!" Yang cried before Ruby even hit the ground.

Ruby groaned, on her back on the ground trying to blink the stars out of her was vaguely aware of the massive amount of pain in her face, but she was too distracted trying to hold on to the images that were fleeing her brain. Yang was there, punching and stuff, but… bigger and armored. Ruby was… not there. It felt like she was there but… she'd been holding a weapon that wasn't Crescent Rose. There was… a pretty ninja girl that was almost like Blake, but… different. Angrier, and competitive, like Weiss. And was—

"Are you okay?!" Yang asked her, kneeling down by Ruby's head.

"Sshh!" Ruby hissed. "I'm… I'm trying…"

'...trying to remember.'

She lost her focus when a flash of blue-white exploded above her head, right in Yang's face. The ice that erupted and spiked out around the impact zone through Yang back and rolled Ruby away.

"Weiss!" Yang yelled.

Ruby pushed herself up and saw Weiss stop and frown.

"What?!"

"Stop fighting! I punched Ruby in the face!"

Weiss looked over at Ruby, then back at Yang. "Is-Isn't that what we're doing here?"

"Rubes, are you okay?" Yang asked again, walking back over as Ruby found her feet. "Why didn't you dodge? You looked like you spaced out or—"

"I'm f-fine," Ruby stammered. The images were gone, now. All that was left was a weird impression of getting charged at by a 7 foot tall armored Yang, even though she knew it wasn't Yang.

Ruby flailed her hands around and found that she wasn't holding Crescent Rose. Where…? Oh. It was on the ground under the conical ice explosion Weiss just created.

She ran over to pick it up, ignoring Yang's worried words. There was a driving need in the back of her head for her to keep fighting, this unshakeable feeling that there were two fights she needed to resolve.

Crescent Rose felt heavy in her hands after… the… spear (?) that she felt like she'd been holding. Or… was it a poleaxe? No, halberd! That was it.

Like… like Mom.

'Blossom.'

The connection shook her to her core, but she still felt the nagging buzz in the back of her head that she had two fights that needed resolution. She had to keep fighting. There wasn't time for her to think about what that was or what it meant.

Her first clumsy swing was so easy for Yang to dodge that Yang gave her a concerned frowned. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Sh-shut up and fight me!" Ruby squeaked breathlessly.

"... A'ight."

She punched out and Ruby blocked the hit with her snath and stumbled back a bit.

"Are we fighting again?!" Weiss called from a few yards away.

"Yeah!" Ruby and Yang yelled together.

Ruby and Weiss were a little clumsy fighting together. They both kept trying to go for the same openings. Ruby was pretty sure Weiss should be fighting around her 'cause Ruby got less attacks in but heavier hits. Weiss should be the setup, and Ruby should be the finisher, right?

Yang figured out that they were a bit out of sync and was using that to her advantage, dodging both their attacks at the same time.

There was an itch in the back in her brain, a reminder of how well she—er, Mom—had fought with… who was that? Uncle Qrow?

Yeah.

But… but she'd gotten the impression from the memory that they'd been fighting together for a while. She and Weiss wouldn't have that kind of synergy yet.

"H-hey!" Weiss whined suddenly.

Yang had caught her sword and it went without saying that Weiss couldn't win the tug of war to get it back.

Ruby was about to blast Yang with a gravity round to force her off, but Weiss had an idea of her own. She used the Dust in her sword and the wind magic flowed down the blade. When it reached Yang's hand, though, it freaked out, probably not reacting well to touching another person's aura while it was still getting cast.

The resulting explosion made both Yang and Weiss let go of Myrtenaster and sent all three of them flying. Yang crashed into the ice wall and cratered into it, shearing off part of the top and sending it crashing to the ground.

Ruby got tossed too but managed to dig the tip of Crescent Rose into the ground to slow herself and land on her feet. She ran back and jumped at Yang, who was currently trying to unbury herself from the wall of ice. But when Ruby got to her, Yang kicked out a foot and…

Well, she'd clearly been storing up a lot of hits with her semblance.

Her aura flickered and Ruby hit the ground hard. She rolled and each impact hurt way too much.

She was gonna have bruises everywhere.

"Ruby's out!"

"What?!"

"Hahahaha!" Yang cackled.

"You just lost twenty-four percent in that hit!" Professor Rustbutt yelled.

"That's….! Crap." That figures. That weird… not voice, but impression in the back of her mind that was craving resolution to the fight seemed sated and Ruby got the feeling like Mom's fight had ended the same way.

Decked by a Xiao-Long.

Ruby trudged over to where Blake was standing and they both gave each other stink eyes.

"I got one-shot," Ruby pouted.

"I saw."

"Stupid Yang."

"Agreed."

Blake held her scroll out to show Ruby their myAura page. "You guys got her pretty low, though."

Ruby was at 26%, Blake at 28%. The ones that mattered right now, though, were Weiss and Yang, who were at 57% and 42%.

"Dang, yeah. And Weiss is pretty low too."

"She better be," Blake huffed. "I hit her. Like, a lot." She made a grumpy face, but there was a hint of a pout in it.

"Don't worry, Blake," Ruby said, patting her teammate's arm. She felt like saying something, maybe along the lines of 'you'll start hitting harder when you get stronger from working out with Yang', but she was in such a weird headspace from that memory and couldn't bring herself to voice it.

"I don't even know who I'm rooting for," Blake mused. "On the one hand, Yang is dumb and shoulda helped me, but on the other hand, screw Weiss and her stupid glyphs."

That got a snort out of Ruby.

Weiss was skating around Yang with her glyphs, poking with Myrtenaster and managing to avoid getting hit.

She was getting a lot of hits in herself, but they weren't doing much and Ruby knew Yang well enough to be able to tell she was letting herself get hit.

A few more pokes and Yang's patience was worn out. She reared back and punched out with both hands, letting loose two gravity blasts. Yang was launched backwards and enough of the buckshot hit Weiss that she skidded back, stumbling until she steadied herself with a glyph. She wasn't able to recover in time to dodge the giant chunk of ice from the wall that Yang chucked at her. She yelped as she was knocked to the ground by the giant projectile.

Yang rushed forward with two quick gravity blasts and got to Weiss just as she was standing back up and caught Weiss around the neck with one hand.

"Hey—! AGGH!"

Yang twisted and threw Weiss by her neck over ten feet into a still-standing portion of the ice wall with enough force that cracks spidered out from where Weiss impacted. Somehow Weiss managed not to flicker, but she also couldn't get her senses back in order before Yang came at her again.

Yang bounded forward and delivered a shotgun-blast punch that must have been using her semblance because Weiss was sent through the wall and tumbled out the other side with chunks of ice.

Now her aura flickered.

Ruby glanced Blake's scroll to see Weiss was at 32%. Yang was at 37%. In the last few trades, Weiss had lost 25% of her aura and Yang had only lost 5%.

"Oof." Ruby muttered.

"Oof," Blake agreed. "That's my partner, by the way," she added with a grin.

"And my sist—hey, I thought you weren't rooting for her!"

"I was on the fence, but then I remembered I like winning, so I wanna be on the winning side of the fence."

Cute, and funny, but all Ruby was able to muster was a half-hearted smile.

"... You okay?" Blake asked, apparently noticing the lackluster reaction.

"Yeah," Ruby replied. She was desperately trying to hold on to whatever that memory—and she knew it was one of Mom's memories, now, because she remembered Blossom—but it was slipping away. All she had now was the knowledge that it was Mom and impressions of people that were getting overwritten by Ruby's teammates.

They must have been Team STRQ, right? The big, golden Yang must have been Dad. The angry Blake must have been Aunt Raven. And that fourth person was… Uncle Qrow? Maybe? It was weird, though, 'cause the emotions that Ruby—that Mom—had associated that person were love. Like what Ruby was pretty sure was romantic love. So… maybe that was Dad? Not the big, golden person?

The specifics of the memory didn't matter half so much as whatever the reason was that Ruby had seen it, though. If Mom really was still out there like Ruby so desperately hoped, then why and how were her memories in Ruby's head?

What… was Mom here? Like, giving her these memories? Was that the presence Ruby kept feeling behind her?

But that would make Mom a weird ghost. Which would mean she was d…

Nah, that couldn't be it.

"Weiss is out!" the professor yelled suddenly, startling Ruby back to reality.

There was what looked like a spiky igloo of ice out on the battlefield with a pacing Yang stalking around it. At the declaration, Yang threw her hands up in the air with a "Woohoo!"

"WHAT?!" Weiss shrieked, the igloo exploding out in a radial shower of tiny ice daggers. "HOW?! She didn't even hit me!"

Professor Rustheart blinked a bit in surprise at the outburst. "Your little icy Sphere of Invulnerability used enough aura to put you below thirty," he called back. He walked out to meet the stomping Weiss and skipping Yang halfway and waved at Ruby and Blake to follow him.

"What?" Weiss huffed in disbelief, pulling out her scroll to check her aura levels. "I had no idea I was that low!"

"I mean, after I yeeted you through your own wall, that prolly shouldn't surprise you," Yang grinned.

"I hate you."

"What was your plan there, anyway?" Yang continued. "Were you gonna tunnel out from under your igloo or something?"

Weiss rolled her eyes haughtily. "I was just trying to give myself some time to take a breath and figure out what to do."

"Ah. Well… that worked."

"I hate you."

"Don't be grumps."

"I'm not 'grumps'."

"You seem grumps."

"Shut up!"

"Alright ladies, let's all take a breath," the professor said, hands out to placate. "Weiss, relax. Yang, stop being an a-butt."

"I'm not religious," Yang replied, grinning.

"Really?" Blake asked incredulously. "You know what an abbot is but you've never heard 'indubitably' before?"

"Don't education shame me."

"I meant don't be a butt," Professor Rustbutt clarified. "I was gonna phrase it a different way but it has been explained to me that I can't talk like that while being a professor."

"What's the point of winning if you don't get Be A Butt rights?" Yang grumbled. When she got an unimpressed glare from the Rusty, she pouted and turned to Blake. "How awesome was I? Like, just the awesomest, right?"

"Yes yes," Blake agreed admonishingly, patting Yang on the arm. "Very awesome. Now stop being a butt."

"Pbbbt."

Weiss was sulking a few feet away from the group, poking the ground with Myrtenaster. Ruby walked over to hook an arm around the girl's elbow and drag her into the circle. She didn't really have the energy or focus to find the words to cheer Weiss up so she just held on to her arm and tried to be silently supportive.

What should she do about this weird memory-vision crap? She could… could maybe ask Dad or Uncle Qrow about them, see if they actually happened. If they had, that meant they really were memories. And if they hadn't…

Then maybe Ruby was just going crazy.

If it was the second, though, should she ask people about the visions? Dad would definitely get all worried and stuff, and Uncle Qrow… well, he'd be pretty chill about it. Whether or not he'd stick around long enough to hear the whole story was a different issue, but he probably wouldn't judge Ruby for being crazy and would keep it a secret from Dad if Ruby asked. Probably.

Ruby could try to find Aunt Raven and ask her about it.

Ha.

Other than that, she couldn't really—

Wait. Someone else was there. Professor Ozpin! He was overseeing the fight! Ruby could ask him about it. He might remember if that fight happened and maybe what these visions and ghosty presence were. Maybe. He was old and wisdomous, he probably knew something, right?

Of course, he could also, like, kick Ruby out of Beacon or something if it turned out she was just crazy.

Ruby really hoped she wasn't going cr—

Ruby rocked back and forth a little as someone shook her gently. "Ruby?" Weiss asked in a way that gave Ruby the impression that they'd said something to her and she'd missed it.

"Hm?"

There was an awkward pause before the professor spoke up. "I was just asking how you felt about that fight."

"Oh. Good."

There was another pause during which everyone looked at each other with varying expressions of worry and confusion and Ruby realized she needed to give more.

"I think we needed to focus more on just shutting Yang out of the fight, maybe?" She looked at Weiss.

"But Blake just ran to her!" Weiss complained.

"Heck yeah I did."

"Hm," Ruby intoned. "Well maybe… um… I dunno. We more or less executed our plan and I can't think of a better one. How could we have won that?" She looked at Professor Awesome, both because she actually had no idea and because she wanted to make someone else talk.

He shrugged. "It's entirely possible you couldn't. What you should focus on is how you performed and the things you could have done better. Ruby, you spent too long trying to fight Yang when she was on the wall. It put you at a big disadvantage and could have spent that time going after Blake."

"Oh. Yeah, okay."

"And Weiss, you're still panicking and taking too long to adapt." Weiss glared at the ground and the professor quickly added, "Which is fine! These things don't get fixed in a day. Just keep it in mind and work on it. Blake, when you were sparring with Weiss you got very visibly frustrated and it made you sloppy as the fight progressed."

Blake's eyebrows scrunched up. "Her freaking glyphs! They're so annoying! And the Dust casting! I couldn't do anything!"

From Blake's angry, exasperated tone, Weiss seemed to shrink back and look upset, but Blake noticed and reached over to give Weiss' shoulder a rub.

"I'm not mad at you, hun. I had a lot of fun. Best sword dance I've had in a while."

Weiss smiled a little. "You know, your dual-wielding sheath-sword is annoying too. You attacked so freaking fast."

""Yeah, but you managed it really well with those pull glyphs."

"Positioning them was hard, though. You kept dashing around with your semblance."

"Ahem!" Yang exclaimed suddenly, making everyone look at her. "If you two are done bashfully jerking each other off, I'd like to hear about how awesome I was, please and thank you!"

The rest of them all looked at each other for a moment, then Weiss turned to ol' Rustyboi. "Can we go, Professor?"

"Heyyy!" Yang protested.

"Sure," the professor agreed. "I'll send Ruby the videos of the fight."

"Thank you."

Weiss walked off, Ruby and Blake following behind her.

"Guys, c'mon," Yang called behind them. "Don't be jealous…. Guys, come back…. Guys?!"

Blake giggled quietly.

"I'm fine, Dad," Ruby stressed for the uberteenth time.

It wasn't really true, like, at all, and it was getting even less true with the stress of watching Yang try to sneakily helicopter big sister in her peripheral vision.

But how was she supposed to explain "Mom's spectrally-ghost memories are invading my head and discoloring my Rose Dimension"?

'Well, I guess you could explain it just like that, Ruby.'

…

Nah.

"Alright, well as long as you're sure, Munchkin," Dad replied.

"I'm sure."

"... Alright," Dad sighed. "Wanna talk to Zwei before you go?"

Ruby lit up. "Sure!"

A couple sounds later and the sound of loud, panty dog breath came through her scroll's speakers.

"Hey, Zwei!" Ruby chirped.

More heavy breathing.

"Zwei?"

"His tail is wagging!" Dad called out.

"Dawwwwww. Zwei, can you give me an 'aroooo'!"

"Arf! Arf arf!"

"Zwei, no she's not—!" Dad muttered from far away before bringing the phone back to his face. "Ugh. He ran to the door. He thinks you're here."

"Awww! Noooo! Zwei, I'm sorry!"

"Winter break can't come fast enough for this lil idiot," Dad said. "He misses you guys. And I do too. I've been having to take him on, like, a dozen walks a day."

"Oh, yeah? That's the only reason you miss us?"

"... Yup, that's it. Only one."

Ruby turned to give Yang a 'can you believe this guy?' look but Yang apparently thought she was getting caught with her helicoptering because she quickly raised her dumb fashion magazine to cover her face and tried to pretend she was reading.

What a goomba.

"I'm hanging up now," Ruby declared.

Dad let out a chuckle that made Ruby feel even more impetuous and pouty. "Alright, Peanut. Love you lots."

"Love you littles."

"Call me more often, 'kay?"

"Meh. Only if Zwei's around."

"Arf!"

Ruby closed her scroll before Dad could say any more. They were both terrible at ending conversations, usually taking about 10 minutes to say "bye" before actually hanging up, but Ruby was super tired right now and wasn't in the mood for all of that.

She got up and headed to her closet but caught the ping of Yang receiving a text before she got into the bathroom.

Even the phone call hadn't gotten Dad to stop snooping on her with Yang. Though, to be fair, Ruby probably hadn't been very good at convincing him she was "fine".

Maybe she should get Weiss to teach her how to fake fineness better.

She threw on some pajamas and trudged back out to the room and shambled into her bed, snuggling and cocooning herself under the covers. After a little bit, she noticed Yang sneaking peaks at her from behind that dumb magazine.

"Yang, you're dumb!"

Instead of giving any sort of comeback, Yang just jerked the magazine back up to cover her eyes again.

"That just makes you look guiltier!"

"Yer face!"

Ruby rolled her eyes and was about to roll over when she spotted a little streak of white just beyond the edge of her mattress. It slowly rose up and up until Weiss was peering at Ruby with half her face revealed. She looked like a pretty little whackamole.

"... Hi," Ruby said, not really sure what she was supposed to say or why Weiss was being so cutesy.

"Hi," Weiss said back, and something about not being able to see her mouth made it funny.

Ruby let out a little giggle before asking, "Whatchu doin'?"

Weiss blinked. "... Nothin'. Just… hanging out."

"Did… did you just make a pun?" Ruby asked incredulously.

"Noooo… Yes." Weiss' penciled eyebrows knotted together in consta… consti… consternation!

"Will you ever be able to live down the shame of punning?" Ruby teased. "You're basically Yang now."

Weiss' eyes narrowed. "How dare you?" she whispered, then slowly sank back down until she was out of sight again.

"Hey, Weiss."

Weiss popped back up, eyes wide.

"You're cute."

Only the very top of Weiss' cheekbones were visible but it was enough for Ruby to see them turn a happy pink. "Your face!" she squeaked after a moment of sputtering, then disappeared again.

Ruby's smiled lingered for a long while as she rolled over and got comfy. She usually liked to sleep facing the room instead of the wall but if she caught Yang sneaking concerned glances at her again she was gonna throw the dummy all the way back to Patch.

The smile faded, though, as Ruby remembered what tonight would bring. The nightmare was the same every year: a red world covered in the black and white of Grimm, flashes of fangs and claws and blood, and the sounds of roaring and biting and Mom screaming—which was a weird thing to dream considering Ruby had never actually heard Mom scream. Her brain must have made up the noise.

It was almost an hour before Ruby's eyes finally closed and stayed closed.

.

…

…..

~~~The sky was a smear of red, spattered with stormy clouds, the rock beneath her feet so dark in this bloody twilight it might as well have been black.

The ruins of a castle by a lake stood before her. The roof of an entire wing had collapsed, rubble and lone pillars stabbing up into the air like spears the only things to mark what had once stood there. On the side opposite, facing the lake, a spire situated at the corner of the outer wall that might once have held a bedroom had fallen, a spiral of stairway open to the sky visible where the head of the spire had left the rest of the structure behind. Between these two points was the entry hall, barred by a grand doorway that somehow still stood tall, and what might have been a feast hall, holes in the walling marking where stained glass windows had once been displayed.

This place must have been beautiful.

The stone of the rubble had darkened from time and dust and weather so it was impossible to tell the original color, but Summer liked to imagine it was white.

Like a fairy tale.

So this was where Oz and Salem had lived together. There was something darkly poetic about the beautiful white castle falling into blackened ruin the same way the relationship of its two inhabitants had.

'Damn, Summer. Put your inner Raven away,' Summer chastised herself.

She stood on a tall hill about a mile from the wreckage. Between her and it were Grimm. Not too many, but enough that it looked distinctly abnormal, and the way they all shambled with single-minded focus towards the castle made it look even more so.

They would never reach it, though. Whenever a Grimm got within a few hundred feet of the doors a burst of what Summer had to assume was divine magic would blast it away. A wave of fire conjured beneath a pack of Beowolves. A wave from the lake crashed over an Ursa and when it petered out the monster was nowhere in site. The ground cracked open to swallow a Deathstalker. A bolt of lightning struck a Goliath dead in an instant.

If only all that power could be used to protect people.

The Summer of a couple months ago wouldn't have understood what she was watching. She'd known Salem had slayed Grimm, the Dark God, and taken his power, and had thought that Grimm had, well, created the creatures of Grimm, so why was his power killing them now?

But she'd talked with Oz. Gotten the full truth out of him. Discovered that Grimm was the 'God of Chaos', not Darkness or Evil, and had never created these creatures, that they were from a source altogether different and more terrifying than the two gods. The idea that he'd created them had been started by his sister, Aurora, the bossy butthole merged with Summer's soul, when they'd first landed in Remnant.

Oh, right. The gods weren't from this world.

Still something Summer was having a hard time accepting.

They'd been fighting, Aurora and Grimm, because of something that had happened in their home plane. So Aurora had lied to people, turned them against Grimm, convinced them that the nightmare creatures that were suddenly rampaging across their lands were his make and doing.

Aurora's goal had just been to give people a common enemy, according to Ozpin, to make them easier to unite as was her way, considering she's the 'Goddess of Order'.

Sounded like a bunch of apologetic drivel to Summer, but she hadn't said that to Ozpin's face.

Now Salem was bound in this castle. Oz hadn't been able to kill her, so he'd imprisoned her in their home instead and left as it all fell to ruin around her. She was unable to leave but her power still extended far enough around her that it was blowing up Grimm in the area, keeping them from reaching her.

She must be lonely.

Before, Summer hadn't really known what she'd intended to do when she got here.

The first idea she'd had was to make sure that the bindings on Salem were holding, maybe tighten them somehow if she could figure out how they worked. The mental image she had in her head was manacles tying Salem down to the floor, though rationally she knew it would probably be… well, not that. Definitely magical. Ozpin said he'd used all four relics to create Salem's prison. So… what would that look like? A cage made of magical, glowy bars? Maybe Summer would just have to, like, stuff some towels in the crack under the door to keep Salem's semblance ability in so she couldn't get in people's heads anymore.

So Summer could convince Raven to come home.

The second option was to try to kill Salem, but Summer doubted she'd be able to. Ozpin and the four Maidens couldn't do it together. There was, like, no way Summer could. Especially after she'd gotten Oz to remove as much or Aurora's power from her as possible and lock it away in that statue's lamp.

It had made Summer weaker to do that, but it had made Aurora weaker too. Weak enough that she wasn't able to manifest to Summer anymore, which was all Summer had wanted.

The more she looked at this sad, desolate landscape, though, the more Summer liked her third idea.

To just talk to Salem.

Summer had no idea what had happened between her and Oz to make them fight. Ozpin said she'd turned evil, but… he'd also lied about a lot of stuff.

Maybe… maybe Salem just needed a friend? Maybe if someone just talked to her she wouldn't be so mad and would stop using her mind-screwy semblance on innocent, unsuspecting Ravens.

Like, how could she not be angry at Ozpin, Aurora, and the world in general right now? Summer was pretty sure if she'd gotten into a fight with Qrow and he'd decided to bind her in their home and leave her there alone for eternity, she'd probably be upset too.

So Summer would try the best weapon she had at her disposal: her smile.

With a quiet huff, she yanked Blossom from the ground where she'd planted her and restarted her trek to the castle. There was a visible circle of completely overturned ground around the keep/entry hall that marked the radius of the god-power-death-circle, the permanent aftereffects of where the earth had been used in some way to slay Grimm. She had to skewer or shoot a few Grimm along the way before she got within that radius, and then that itself became a whole other issue.

Luckily, it seemed like Salem (or maybe her god powers, if it was a subconscious thing) didn't consider her as much of a threat as the Grimm, but she or they still didn't like her too much. She had to dodge several waves of fire and water, random pin-point explosions, sudden shifts in the earth that created huge rock slabs to crush her.

… No lightning strikes, though. Which was good. Summer probably couldn't dodge lightning.

It was… actually kind of fun? It felt like she was playing a platformer in real life. The tumultuous ground, random environmental hazards, and occasional monsters felt like a video game.

Except she had only one life.

She still got through okay, only a couple close calls. Her semblance made traversal like this pretty easy. There was a safe haven of space within a couple dozen feet of the massive doors where the chaos magic didn't seem to strike and Summer took a second to catch her breath and pat her skirt and cloak straight.

There was so much dust and ash in the air here that her cloak as practically grey at this point. She'd have to wash this soooo many times when she got home. Tai was gonna be so grumpy.

Finished fixing herself up, Summer walked right up to the door and stopped, hesitating.

Was she supposed to knock? If Salem was, like, tied down or something then she couldn't really answer the door, but what if she wasn't? What if she was free to roam around the house (or what was left of it) and just couldn't leave the confines of it? Or something. That seemed like a magicy hocus-pocus way for it to work.

Well, it couldn't hurt to knock first, right?

Summer cleared her throat and straightened her back, then gave three quick raps with her knuckles.

From the sheer scale of the ginormous oaken doors, she'd been expected big booms from her knocks, but all she got was tiny, quiet thunks.

Kinda lame.

There was no way anybody could hear that from inside, right? Should she knock again?

Probably, but if someone had heard the knocks and then she knocked again so soon after then she'd kinda look obnoxious.

She waited for what felt like an appropriate, respectful amount of time (probably too long) before she knocked again, harder this time.

"Hello?! Salem?! Uh, Miss Salem?! Goddess Salem?!" Summer called out. "I don't… actually know what you like to be called. But… are you there?!"

There was no response. There was plenty of noise in the background, random battlecries from Grimm and the eruptions of magic that slayed them, but nobody answered Summer's knocks or calls.

She waited a little longer, then decided that Salem must be unable to answer the door.

It was as struggle to push them open herself. It made her wish Tai was here, though every other fiber of her being was glad he wasn't. After what felt like a full on Xiao-Long workout's worth of huffing and puffing and straining, Summer got the double-doors to slowly grind open until there was an opening big enough for her.

She took a step inside and paused to let her eyes adjust to the sheer darkness in here. Smoky, dim red light streamed into the wide foyer through the crack in the door, the angle making Summer's shadow absurdly long as it trailed down the steps and across the marble floor.

And right at the edge of where her shadow stopped, Summer saw a figure. A woman. She was laying facedown on the floor, so still Summer almost thought she was dead. She was about to step forward to check when the head jerked in a creepy, almost zombie-like way.

Summer's heart skipped a beat.

'Calm down, Sumsies,' she told herself. 'You're just jumpy 'cause this place is kinda freaky.'

The prone woman raised a hand up, seeming to shield eyes from the light, and started trying to push herself up. Even in the gloomy, colored lighting, Summer could tell this woman—Salem, presumably—was deathly pale and so skinny she probably could have been a zombie.

Salem struggled to push herself up on atrophied muscles until she was able to get on her knees, propping herself up on her arms. She tilted her head up to the light and slowly, slowly opened her eyes.

Summer prided herself on not being a judgemental person. She never made assumptions about people from the way they looked or how they spoke or anything.

But this woman right here? Her face?

She looked evil.

Skin unflushed, lifeless, red veins visible underneath it. Hair that was the same lifeless white. And eyes…

There were no whites to her eyes. They were black instead. And her irises…

They were a burning red.

Not a pretty, soft red like Qrow's and Raven's. Their eyes were like warm hearthfires.

Salem's eyes were like forest fires. Angry and blazing.

Yet they were somehow cold, like two dying suns.

'Don't judge, Summer. Looks don't define people.'

Her words hardly reached her own ears, but she was too terrified and uncertain to move.

She stood statue still in the doorway as Salem blinked slowly at what might honestly have been the first light she'd seen in centuries. The pseudo-goddess struggled to turn her head and look around, taking in her surroundings.

There were four pillars erected equidistant from each other around her. There was enough of a textured look on the stone that Summer might have guessed that had etchings or carvings of some sort on them, but it was impossible to tell with so little light.

It didn't matter anyway. Whatever these bindings were, however they worked, it could wait until after they talked.

Though an itch at the back of Summer's mind told her talking was a mistake.

She ignored that itch, though. This lady had been locked up for centuries. Regardless of how scary she looked, she probably needed a friend.

Summer swallowed thickly. "H-hello," she said, her nervous voice croaking and not carrying much at all.

It didn't seem to matter. Salem's eyes snapped to Summer's face.

Spooky silence filled the air for a moment as Summer waited for a response that didn't come.

"... Um… I'm Summer," she started, still quiet. "And I think you're… Salem? Right?"

Salem's head tilted, her eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward a bit, like… like she was looking past Summer? Or… through her?

…

No.

Inside her.

Just as Summer came to the realization, Salem came to one of her own, seemingly recognizing something in Summer, and Summer suspected what.

Salem's eyes widened, the coldness gone, now all forest fire. Pure, untamed fury.

"No!" Summer cried out instantly, raising her hands. "I'm not her! I'm not Auro—"

Salem screamed, venting a rage that had been stoking for ages, and all Summer was aware of as her body broke apart was sheer, blinding pain and that infernal noise.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Ruby woke, screaming.