Howdy folks! It's been some time. How are you. I hope you are fine. I am very fine, since I finished college and am taking a year off. Uh, I know I haven't been updating, which to be fair I did warn you about, but, well. I didn't expect the hiatus to last this long, TBH. I intended to wait a bit longer with this, perhaps until V9's release was actually announced, but CRWBY said it'd be in 2022, May is ALMOST halfway through 2022, and I need the sweet sweet positive reinforcement of viewer comments. So sue me. Plus, I'm finally done with my college internship and I wanted to celebrate.
Ehehe, anyways. The fabled Jinn chapter! Or, well, pre-Jinn chapter. Obviously the explanation is long enough, it deserves its own section. And I am not going to update that chapter until V9 gives us a canonical explanation for what the portal-void is and what it does, if only so I can consider which parts of canon to keep and which parts to pitch out the window at terminal velocity. WHEN that happens, if you're not in the mood to see me pretty much recap the entire series, you can skip Ch12 and move straight to Ch13, since the Jinn chapter ended up being so long I had to split it in two, and I'll be posting both chapters at the same time, because A) I'm not a monster and B) they were meant to be the same thing originally anyways.
The inn that they had selected was…nice.
Weiss felt that she could perhaps be forgiven for her mental cringe as she said that: this place was more than a bit removed from the bright, airy suites in the guest house she and the others had stayed in while at Haven. It was…damp, with mildew on some of the more discreet corners of the room and suspicious scuttles that she didn't at all like within the walls.
Still, needs must as the devil drove, and this inn was on the outskirts of the settlement, with some thick shrubbery around the road nearby to provide cover. At least the beds didn't seem to have any insects, and they were marginally assured of not being robbed, since they would be cramming two teams into two rooms and that would leave at least one person able to stay on watch at all times during the night. They also hadn't brought any camping equipment, instead planning to beg some off of Jaune and Pyrrha's relatives in Argus or buy some in that same city.
Their luggage was quite sparse, actually. Their weapons, obviously, and all the equipment needed to maintain them, from whetstones and polishing cloths to Dust and ammunition. They all had some spare changes of clothes, some hygiene supplies, some emergency rations in case they were stranded in the wilderness en route to whatever destination they chose, and some money for the casual expenses of about a day.
Nothing else.
It may perhaps have been wiser to rent one of the guest rooms specially reserved for traveling Hunter teams, or trainee teams, but they had all decided against it. Team JNPR and the others at their meeting had distrusted anything that was too close to Lionheart, and RWBY and Jaune were wary of doing anything that might leave tracks. They weren't used to trying to plan long-term, to be untraceable to both ally and foe, and so they dealt with that in the only way that they could.
Overcompensation.
Did they truly need this much secrecy? Probably not, Weiss acknowledged. But –and it was the crucial but that all their scheming hinged upon– they didn't know what would be just enough and no more. In that case, naturally, the wisest thing to do was to overshoot.
It was a strategy Weiss was very familiar with, as the heiress of one of the wealthiest families on Remnant. If one had a product, the best way to compete with one's rivals was to (privately) assume that their product was equal or better than yours, and adjust your campaign strategies to match. Publicly, you would naturally tout your brand as the best to have graced the industry since its inception, but privately, unless you were willing to plant spies in your rivals' companies, you had no idea of where you truly stood amongst the pack in terms of your raw product.
Assume the worst, plan for the best.
As a singer, had Weiss needed perfect pitch and poise and stage presence? Probably not, no. Had she ruthlessly pushed herself to achieve all of them anyways? Yes, because any one of those would've been enough to catapult her into fame, but all three at once immortalized her. In business, overcompensation in your own department and overestimation of your opponents secured your place at the head of the pack, just as long as you didn't overreach yourself. If you expected your rivals to be twice as good as they actually were, your subsequent counterattack would leave them gasping in the dust.
So no, they probably didn't need this much secrecy. What could be more natural than Hunter trainees using Haven as a waystation on their way to visiting friends and family in Argus? No one would suspect a thing, but if they were unlucky enough to be caught as they slipped off at night to access the Relic, the subsequent consequences were far more drastic and immediate than they would be if they were caught slipping off here. Since RWBY and Jaune knew that they were novices at simultaneously avoiding attention both criminal and official, it was safer to eliminate as many risks as they could, even the entirely theoretical ones.
Weiss refused to admit that her fingers were tense as she gently spun the revolving chamber on Myrtenaster again, making sure that it wouldn't catch and jam at a crucial moment and fail to discharge the Dust she'd be using to fight. She'd been doing this for ten minutes at least, spinning the revolver section of her weapon around and around like she wanted to play Mistral Roulette with herself.
The atmosphere in the room was tense, to say the least. They'd split up in order to make sure that no one interfered with either of the two rooms they had rented, and Ren and Nora had chosen to stay in the one across the hall. Well –chosen might be a bit of a misnomer, since neither she nor Jaune had discouraged them, and they both knew that Ren and Nora would naturally stick together if someone suggested the idea of two-person teams. Technically, all three of them could stay in one room while Weiss guarded the other for her team.
Weiss didn't think she could bear it.
The gears of Myrtenaster clicked and whizzed as she restlessly spun the chamber again, her eyes watching the brightly colored Dust cartridges spin around and around in the silver of her hilt without really seeing them.
"Can you stop doing that?" Jaune asked from where he was leaning against the wall, one arm draped over his knee, his legs stretched out on the bed he'd claimed for his own. His voice had a tinge of uncharacteristic irritation to it.
"Sorry." Weiss clasped the spinning chamber to stop it, and flicked her wrist, locking the weapon shut. She lowered Myrtenaster with a sigh, the tip of her rapier brushing against the grimy wooden floor as she looked up and over at him from her place sitting on the side the bed opposite his.
"It- its fine." Jaune sighed apologetically, covering his face with one hand and slumping a little more, acknowledging that his words could have been seen as brusque. "It's just-"
"No, no. I understand." Weiss told him, unoffended. "It was…probably getting on your nerves."
"Heh." The ghost of a smile flickered under his hand, Jaune not moving from his slumped position. "Just a little."
Weiss's lips curled up in a brief, faint smile of her own in response, before it faded. She looked down at her rapier again, shifting to lay it over her knees as she stared at that narrow slice of her reflection. It was…odd, to see her old outfit, her old clothes, her old hairstyle. She touched a lock of her white sidebangs, pushing it away from her face just a little, looking at the pale, darkened scar that slashed down across her eye on the left-hand side. It was more prominent than it used to be –than it would become, she supposed. It'd only been a few months since she received it, after all.
She hadn't really paid attention to it in a while. Weiss remembered, when she had truly been seventeen, that she'd just seen it as a pesky thing –easy enough to cover with makeup, but impossible to hide in the way it pulled the skin of her forehead tight, subtly inching her left-hand eyebrow up, putting it just a hair higher than the other. Weiss didn't particularly care about the supposed marring of her face: she had gotten that scar because she had finally realized that she didn't need to be perfect, that perfection would not earn her what she craved. It just irked her because she couldn't fix it, couldn't change that subtle mismatch of her eyebrows on her face.
Weiss was sure that if she ever fell in love, her paramour would naturally call it endearing or adorable or any number of things, but that didn't mean it was any less pesky of a physical flaw now.
As with so many things, however, more important matters had superseded her mind and drawn her attention, and Weiss had put aside the scar on her face and what it represented ages ago. She brushed her fingers lightly down the line scored across her cheek, marveling at the feel of it for the first time in years, encountering it as though it was the very first time since the bandages had been removed.
It was very odd, how things had all changed.
"You know, you never told us how you got that." Jaune's languid voice came after a few moments, interrupting her reverie, and Weiss's fingers dropped from her cheek as she looked up.
"Hmm?"
"Your scar." There was nothing but dull, absentminded curiosity in Jaune's eyes as he touched his index finger under his own eye, raking it down as though tracing the path of a tear.
"Oh. That." Weiss huffed a little, smiling. "Nothing too terribly traumatic. You know my Armor Gigas summon?"
"What, the big guy with the armor?"
"Mmhm." Weiss moved to lay Myrtenaster on the bedside, neatly crossing her legs as she refocused on Jaune. "After I began training as a Huntress, there was naturally intense pressure on me to attend Atlas Academy. Since I wasn't cooperative with that idea –even back then, I was beginning to think space from my father would be a good idea– his secretary had a number of Geists possess the suit of armor and challenged me to fight it on Jacques's orders. If I won, I was allowed to attend Beacon. If not, in Atlas I would stay."
She rubbed a finger pensively over the lower edge of her scar, under her eye.
"Allegedly, it was quite as powerful as a mech, and even though I did manage to defeat it –as you can tell by my Semblance– it punched me in the face, knocked me a fair distance, and in the process managed to tear through my Aura. I was…rather inexperienced at the time, so I wasn't as good at consistently keeping it up as I perhaps should have been."
"Wow, a whole half-year ago." Jaune snickered, and Weiss threw her pillow at him with a wry smirk, knowing exactly what he meant by that. Jaune caught the fluffy missile before his face with both hands, grinning slightly.
"Dolt." she said without any anger, as he lowered it onto his upraised knee. "I'll have you know that I am impeccably skilled nowadays."
"Impeccably." Jaune repeated with an exaggeratedly solemn expression, tossing the pillow back towards her bed. Weiss laughed a little, swinging her legs, and Jaune chuckled with her as they both lost their tension, just for a few moments.
Weiss could see it creeping back in on Jaune as their laughter trailed off, though, his eyebrows pinching together and his mouth drawing down. He shifted a little as the knee he had propped up in the air curled inwards, towards his chest, and the hand draped atop it clenched into a fist.
"Listen, Weiss…" Jaune began, his eyes sliding aside, shadowing with guilt. "About when we were on the paths, when I dropped you…"
"No." Weiss's voice cut abruptly through the air, as sharp as it had ever been when she was seventeen. "You are not about to apologize for me falling from the paths. So help me, I will skewer you if you even suggest that you were responsible."
"But I had you!" Jaune blurted, swinging his head around to look at her again with anguished blue eyes. "I was helping you to the exit, I should've kept an eye on Cinder, I should've known that she would go for us, if I hadn't let you fall then Winter would have-"
Weiss whipped the pillow at him, decidedly harder than she had last time, her face locked in a snarl as Jaune was forced to dodge by sheer reflex, leaning sharply to the side.
She got to her feet as he looked back at her, wide-eyed.
"Do not presume to dictate to me how the fight would've gone." Weiss said crisply, stepping over and leaning across the bed to jab one finger into Jaune's chest. He flattened his leg and leaned back away from her in response, pressing against the wall as her finger dug into his sternum. "You don't know what would've happened. Perhaps if you blocked her attack, Cinder would have swept in to take care of us personally, and then she might've gotten to Vacuo and had a kingdom's worth of hostages to massacre! Perhaps she would've killed all three of us and led Salem through the Central Location!"
She raised her hand sharply, as though to slap Jaune across the face as he flinched just a little. She didn't move, though, just holding her palm there near his jaw, threateningly, as they locked eyes.
"You. Don't. Know. What. Would. Have. Happened." Weiss enunciated slowly and clearly, her gaze needlelike. "And if you say one more word about how everything that has ever gone wrong in the entire history of our fight against Salem is somehow your fault or your responsibility, I will rattle that dense brain inside your skull until you see sense."
Jaune swallowed a little, not saying anything for a few seconds. Then, slowly, tentatively, like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, a sheepish smile peeked through his expression.
"Sorry, Weiss."
"Keep it in mind." she sniffed, lowering her hand as she straightened up to stand before his bed. "Really, you're almost 20 years old. I would've thought you'd finally outgrown your self-centered mindset."
"Oh look who that's coming from."
"I am a paragon of modesty and restraint." Weiss said with faux haughtiness, tossing her hair a little. She wasn't entirely exaggerating: while she could definitely understand the survivor's guilt of supporting a friend and then having them torn away from you on the battlefield, adding any mental strain to the already complex cocktail they were all dealing with was inadvisable. It was not Jaune's fault that she had been lost: he was human, as were they all, and humans made mistakes. It was not his responsibility to account for every move Cinder might've made on the battlefield –not his sole responsibility, anyways, not any more than it had been Weiss's.
They could play the blame game for hours, probably. It was Weiss's fault for not holding onto him more tightly, for not fending off Cinder long enough for him to heal Penny, for not fighting more scientifically during the whole encounter and conserving her Aura so that she could've helped Jaune shield them from Cinder's final attack. It was Winter's fault for not keeping herself between Weiss and Jaune, the two most vulnerable members of her party, during her duel against Cinder; for not flying faster to catch Weiss as she fell; for not using the Maiden powers to shoot down an icy platform for her to land on. It was Jaune's fault for not keeping an eye on the enemy as they retreated, for not reacting in time as Cinder hurled her fireball, for not using the pulse of Gravity Dust in his shield to boost them to safety.
It was Cinder's fault for attacking them in the first place.
Weiss's eyes softened when they met Jaune's again, seeing the reflected anguish dwelling in the back of them.
"It wasn't your fault." she said after a moment, not at all playful now, her voice quiet. "And I wouldn't blame you if it had been. And…and it would've killed me if I didn't come with my team."
"Yeah." Jaune took a deep breath, and Weiss mentally winced at the unintended consequences of that statement, knowing that the remains of JNR had been left behind. "Yeah, I know."
Weiss swallowed thickly and raised her hand again.
"I'm warning you." she said, holding back tears of her own. "Don't –don't marinate in your guilt. I don't care how much Aura you have, I will slap you silly."
Jaune choked out a short laugh, tilting his head back to bump his skull against the wall, looking up at her.
"I thought you were slapping me sensible?" he asked, his once-bright blue eyes dull, darkened, even if they were framed by the same puppyish smile she remembered from Beacon. A strangled half-laugh burst out of Weiss at his reply, and she felt several tears spill over the edges of her eyes, as though shaken free by the slight movement of her head.
Weiss was completely unselfconscious as she moved to crawl onto the bed beside him, putting her back against the wall, and she was unselfconscious when she felt his arm drape over her shoulders. She was unselfconscious as their fingers wove together, unselfconscious as they squeezed each other's hand. Jaune may have been renewing his relationship with Pyrrha –and well done to him– but he and Weiss were still friends, and Pyrrha didn't understand what they had gone through.
She wouldn't have understood why Weiss and Jaune just needed this moment to cry, Weiss weeping silently as she squeezed his gloved hand, Jaune's body occasionally shuddering with a gasping sob as he tightened his arm, pressing her closer against his side. Tears were healthy, Weiss knew, a natural way to reduce and release tension and grief, and in her opinion, they had not shed nearly enough of them. Certainly not Jaune, who must hide his releases of tension and trauma behind closed doors and cover them with loud noises.
Weiss had spent her life trying to be strong, trying to be perfect, and her soul had grown proud and defiant.
But even she had her limits.
Even she knew that there were times when you just couldn't be strong any longer.
They'd had months to try and distance themselves from the memory of Atlas, and they had. For Weiss, at least, it was becoming more and more like a nightmarish dream, a shuddering thing of darkness and fear that she was glad to be free of. She had coped, as best she could when the business of being a Huntress, of dealing with Salem, was continuously thrust in her nose.
But that coping was done now. Much of it had been simple denial, just waiting for the future, of pushing dealing with this off to tomorrow, tomorrow. They could wait to deal with this until they found out whether or not they could recruit Neopolitan. They could wait to deal with this until they got to Haven. They could wait to deal with this until they got Raven to open the Vault. They could wait to deal with this until they asked Jinn their question and got her answer.
But their time had come.
There was no more putting it off.
Ruby and the others were at this very moment searching out Raven Branwen, and Weiss found that she could no longer bear the strain of trying to pretend everything was alright, that she could deal with this. Tomorrow had become today, and she found her heart quailing at the idea of visiting the Vault. What would Jinn say? What would she tell them?
Weiss didn't want to hear that this wasn't real. That was the terror that haunted her dreams and lurked in her nightmarish visions of the future after that fatal moment when they asked their question: what if this wasn't true, what if this was all some illusion that her mind had built around herself as she faded into the nothingness that was the void beneath the paths?
What if she was alone –perpetually and truly alone? Her body couldn't be recovered from the central location, and there was no telling if the soft blackness she had fallen into was part of the never-ending nothing between reality and the afterlife. Was Weiss's body still plummeting through that abyss, her mind caught with it, dreaming of the sort of world she had wished to have, a world in which she and the others had returned to their beginning in time to stop the apocalypse?
What if she had slipped off the map of the world, and she and all her friends were caught adrift in those unknowable fathoms, never reaching each other, never waking, never escaping?
Weiss woke sobbing into her hand, sometimes, biting into her knuckled fist as she climbed out of the nightmares of that reality, of meeting with Jinn and Jinn leaning down to inform her of that terrible truth as her mind warped and fractured, and her illusion of the world fractured with it, finally realizing her situation for what it was. Loneliness was the poison of her life, and to be condemned to an eternity of it-
The tears choked Weiss even now as she thought of it.
Jaune was no better, she supposed. The only good solution for him was that if this was some sort of, of time travel, if their souls and memories had somehow been yanked back to the beginning. If this was some kind of dimensional thing, if they had slipped into a different, earlier reality, then he was faced with a terrible choice, for Nora and Ren were still alone in the place they had left, but if he wanted to return to them, he would have to abandon Pyrrha, Pyrrha whom he had loved far more than he had ever loved Weiss. His feelings for her were a crush, a brief infatuation that he had thankfully grown out of. Pyrrha was his partner in all ways.
Depending on Jinn's answer, the team that Jaune had fought and bled and almost died for might be splintered again.
Depending on Jinn's answer, Jaune might be alone again.
No matter what answer Jinn gave, Jaune's self-placed illusion that he had returned to the old, peaceful Beacon team he'd had would be gone, because Pyrrha and Nora and Ren would know what had happened to them all.
So yes, they needed to cry.
They had all cried: Ruby had cried for weeks after they'd come back, mostly late at night and into her pillow so that she wouldn't disturb anyone else. Blake had cried when she'd thrown away the ribbons she'd used to hide her Faunus ears, and when Ilia had replied that she'd come to Vale Weiss had found Blake in a training room later, stabbing the chest of a dummy over and over again with Gambol Shroud as she sobbed with wrought-out pain and guilt from a day long past. Yang had cried when she bumped her regained arm on the desk, not from pain, but because she could feel from it again and the shock of that reminder had upset her already-fragile emotional equilibrium. They had kept their tears to the boundary of their dorm room, to hidden places –but oh, yes, they had cried.
They had all cried, and they had been better for it.
So Weiss wept, letting the tears slide down her face without restraint and without shame as Jaune squeezed his arm around her and she leaned into the warm pressure of his body. She clenched her hand tightly around his own, taking what comfort she could from her friend, and knowing that he was doing the same for her. They both cried, and when they were done, there was an almost palpable lessening of the tension in them and around them.
And then Weiss did the hardest thing she could at this moment.
She got up.
She stood from the bed and moved over to the bathroom, leaving Jaune behind as she started up the faucet to wipe away the memory of her tears with ice-cold water.
She had cried, and now she would keep moving forward, because Weiss was a Huntress, and she could never afford to give up. She had wept, cleansed her system of the horror and sorrow that afflicted her, and now she could continue to renew her assault on the world that had beaten her down. She reminded herself of that with sharp, almost angry scrubs of the dishtowel against her cheeks, and when she put it down and looked into the mirror, her shoulders were sharp and firmly set.
She could do this.
They could do this.
The ping of Jaune's Scroll interrupted her thoughts, and Weiss might've tripped –if she weren't as flawlessly coordinated as she was– as she scuttled out of the bathroom, almost slamming the door against the wall in her hurry.
"What is it?!"
"They- they did it." Jaune half-laughed incredulously from where he still sat on the bed with reddened eyes, looking at the message function on his Scroll. "Blake says they convinced Raven to come help them, and they should be back by midnight."
Weiss sagged against the wall in relief.
They'd done it.
She sucked in a deep breath, then blew it out again through her teeth as she straightened back up again.
"I suggest you clean yourself up." she said, gesturing to Jaune's still-tearful face. "I'll go talk to Ren and Nora –we can hold a more general meeting when we get back, decide if we want to attempt the Vault tonight or tomorrow."
She didn't say the words, but she could see them in the steely, half-nervous glint in Jaune's eyes as he stood up and hurried past her into the bathroom. She knew that they were both thinking it.
We're almost there.
Tension crackled almost palpably through Blake and the others as they swept through Mistral's dirt streets, heading swiftly for the inn they'd been given the address to. They had everything they needed, all the components to make up a flawless plan: now they just needed to execute it, and Blake wasn't the only one feeling restless. Whenever they had to stop for traffic or to let someone pass, Blake caught the sight of the still-disguised Neo's leg jiggling, like she was impatiently tapping out a beat with her foot, waiting to join in on a dance she was forbidden from. Yang was rubbing her thumb almost obsessively over her curled index finger, a nervous tic she'd picked up after she'd lost her arm and could have smooth metal rubbing against each other, and Ruby was humming impatiently, a lilting series of a few notes that burst out of her at random intervals rather than any specific tune.
Pyrrha, who had significantly less context, was still on edge, her disguised eyes flicking around almost pathologically as she followed in Neopolitan's wake.
Blake would've been the natural choice to lead the way under most other circumstances, since she was a Faunus and the streets were almost completely dark, but this was Mistral, and it was better to have someone like that to guard everyone's back. Neopolitan could take the lead and guide them through the tangled mess of backstreets and alleys, rising steadily towards a flattened gulch on the mountain slope near Haven Academy, and the series of dark wooden buildings nestled within.
No one was about at the inn, thankfully, when Neopolitan pushed open the door to the common room. Well, there was nobody in the conventional sense, at least: the proprietor was sitting behind the bar, flicking through what Blake was fairly certain was a raunchy magazine, both feet propped on the bar itself. Their group got a glance and a slight lowering of the magazine as they entered, but no more, which Blake supposed could only be due to the fact that Jaune and the others had warned ahead as to their presence.
Also, it was fairly standard practice in Mistral not to go looking for trouble: they were a group of five Huntress (trainees), all armed to the teeth, and if they wanted to make use of the rooms here, that was their business as long as they didn't try to shoot the place up. Since they didn't show any inclination towards robbery, murder, or arson, they weren't worth paying attention to.
Blake had never been more grateful for an incurious attitude in her life as she and the others swept up the creaky stairs. Despite the late hour, Nora was fully dressed when she popped out into the hall the moment their footsteps sounded on the floorboards, grinning at them.
"Hey guys!" she chimed, ushering everyone into the room they'd rented. "We got takeout and a table, ready for our plans of world domination!"
By that, Blake saw that one or another of Team JNWR had gotten a couple trestle tables from somewhere, and loaded them down with steaming boxes of buns, noodles, and stir-fry vegetables. Jaune, Ren, and Weiss were already seated, leaving room for the rest of them as Neopolitan breathed out a nearly-audible sigh and released the illusions on both herself and Pyrrha.
It had been a while since Blake had eaten anything from Mistral, and while the cheap delivery stuff from A Simple Wok was vastly inferior to what Ren could whip up, food was food, and this particular food happened to be hot, flavorsome, and filling. She also hadn't eaten anything since a few energy bars and packaged sandwiches on the train around mid-afternoon, and so despite how antsy Blake was, she folded her legs easily, sitting at the small table inside the rented room with the others, and reached for a box of buns.
"I figured everyone should eat before we got down to discussing plans and stuff." Jaune explained as everyone got settled, the knees of his much-longer legs poking up above the edge of the table as he delicately balanced a bowl of broth in his hands. "I don't think we can order any more at this time of night, but, uh, we can share rations to fill in the corners if anyone's still hungry afterwards."
"Food!" Yang cried gleefully, thumping down on Blake's other side. "Oh, man, I've been looking forward to this."
"You like Mistral food that much, huh?" Nora asked curiously, chin in one hand and elbow on the table at her place beside Ren.
"Eh, I've been looking forward to dinner." Yang said cheerfully, and rubbed her hands. "And eating is practically a combat sport at the Xiaolong-Rose house. You ready to lose, Ruby?"
"I could snatch your noodles right off your chopsticks if I wanted." Ruby said with narrowed eyes as she clicked her own like a pincher several times, a fiercely competitive expression crossing her face, before she blinked and glanced to Neopolitan. "Uh, you're not allergic to anything, are you?"
Neo waved her hand dismissively, already scooping up a box full of dumplings.
"Cool." Ruby said, glancing back to her sister and swiping a packet of sauce. "Poke me if you're not getting enough and I can share rations with you."
Blake narrowed her eyes a little. It was Ruby's nature to take the leadership position, to guide and let others follow, but this was a bit…
Ah.
An attempt at winning loyalty.
Blake was familiar with the tactic, since it was the driving force behind a lot of the White Fang's recruitment strategies. Depending on how desperate someone's circumstances were, a warm meal and a shoulder to cry on could win you their heart in its entirety. They'd think well of you, and so it was easy to ask for favors: for keeping silent on using their home to store some documents, for perhaps letting a White Fang soldier crash on their couch for just a night, for helping pass out fliers. You built up the good feeling little by little –favor by favor, kindness by kindness– implicitly reassuring the target that it was all fine because nothing bad happened when they lent out their couch, when they held onto files or flash drives, when they passed around leaflets.
Then, by the time the good feeling was flowing all around and they'd made friends in the organization, close the deal. Offer them a place as a new recruit themselves, as an official sympathizer, as an ally.
From there it was a terrifyingly short step to a full member, and then a fighter, and then a front-lines terrorist.
It was, perhaps, a little of the sunk-costs fallacy. The people the White Fang recruited had made friends in the organization, or had been welcomed with open arms by people who protected them, rescued them, and so it was completely natural for them to defend that same organization, those same friends, with all their energy. But the more emotional investment they put into it –the more friends they lost on raids, the more injustices they saw– the harder it was to remain objective. Emotions clouded your judgement. Stubbornness dictated that you stay and finish the fight. And then, suddenly, you weren't a sympathizer anymore, you were pressed into service as a fighter, and you took that gun gladly, because it meant that you had a chance to strike back against the people who had taken your friends, who had kept you and everyone you loved down.
It was as effective as it was insidious.
Blake wasn't entirely sure Ruby would be much good at it, though. She could be a bit obvious when it came to using other people, and Neopolitan was a full-time criminal who was almost certainly well-acquainted with the means most criminals used to acquire loyal recruits.
Was that how she and Torchwick had gotten together? Neopolitan certainly seemed loyal to him, and height aside, their ages didn't seem to match up. Blake had only seen them together once, at the White Fang rally when Torchwick had been showing off the stolen Paladins, but…Neopolitan had been content to wait on the sidelines, watching Torchwick perform: there was a subtle element of hierarchy there. It wasn't master-pupil, or parent-child…they seemed equals in all other respects, but the fact that Neopolitan had no qualms with him taking the reins argued that Torchwick had her respect and therefore occasional subservience.
Given that Neopolitan seemed to outweigh him in skill by a lot at this point, in Blake's view, that argued that Torchwick was older than her, or at least had more experience.
It was possible that they were siblings, but Blake didn't think it likely. Genetics didn't lie: both criminals skewed towards opposite ends when it came to height, with Torchwick much taller than average while Neopolitan was possibly the shortest woman Blake had ever seen. Their hair and eyes didn't match up. Neopolitan didn't have a last name, to Blake's knowledge, but given how close she was with Torchwick, if they were blood relatives, it didn't make sense for her to have abandoned it at some point. Lastly, there was no record of their being relatives in the legal system, though Blake had only checked that recently and it was perfectly possible that Neopolitan or Torchwick had edited what little records they had at some point.
It was reasonable to assume, therefore, if they weren't related and Torchwick was the senior member of the partnership, that he had been the one to recruit Neopolitan at some point, possibly with the very same tactics Ruby was attempting to mimic. Neopolitan had let slip that she was a graduate of Lady Browning's Preparatory Academy for Girls –that, if Blake ever had the chance, would be where she would start looking for the woman's backstory.
She narrowed her eyes at the petite criminal slurping her way through a bowl of noodles.
Threaten my team, will you? Not on my watch.
Since everyone at the table –with the exception of Neopolitan– was at least physically teenaged, Blake and the others inhaled their food quickly, nursing the remainder with contended expressions as their postures relaxed a little, some of them sprawling backwards.
"So, you managed to convince Raven?" Weiss asked delicately, stirring her chopsticks inside her bowl.
"Mmhm." Yang nodded, and gave a slight burp. "But she's not gonna help us with anything again ever, so whatever we plan to do in the Vault, we gotta do it then."
"We've got her Scroll number, and we're going to call her in once we get there." Ruby added, and then bit a fortune cookie in half. "Sho really aw we got ta do ish ge' dere."
"According to Neopolitan, getting there won't be that hard." Blake said, piercing the diminutive mute with another glare. Neo, unperturbed, slurped up a single noodle. "There's a crack in the mountainside that leads into the Vault chamber that she thinks she can get us into, and once we're in there, getting up to the Vault door can't be that hard."
"Sooooo…what, we're planning on whether or not we go tonight?" Nora asked, having upgraded to resting her chin in the palm of both hands, elbows against the table as she looked thoughtfully at the others. RWBYJN looked at each other, and shrugged.
"Pretty much, I think." Jaune said as they looked back, scratching the back of his head. "I mean, we don't really know when it'll be good versus bad to sneak out of here and through the woods, and the longer we wait around, the more chance that someone'll figure out that something's up."
"Not to mention the fact that Raven Branwen might figure out a way to go back on her deal, somehow." Pyrrha agreed, her eyes sharp. "The longer we give her to counterplan, the more risk we're in. She didn't agree to helping us out willingly, and I think that if she can figure out a way to betray us, she will."
"Mistral operates at all hours." Ren said, his expression calm. "Though sneaking out of the inn itself might pose some challenges, it won't be immediately suspicious to see us on the road at night, since everyone else out at that time will be up to something equally nefarious."
"Okay." Ruby said with a short little nod, her eyes scanning everyone at the table. "So, by a show of hands, who figures we should sneak out of here tonight, as soon as we clean up, and visit the Vault beneath the school?"
Everyone raised their hands –WBY, JNPR, and even Neo.
"Right." Ruby swallowed a little. "Okay, so, when we get to the Vault, we're gonna need to follow some ground rules. One: no questions."
"We've managed to ascertain that the object within the Vault works something like a search engine." Weiss said, cutting in gracefully. "Unfortunately, once it has been activated, it has a limited number of said questions, and recharging can take decades. As far as we know, there are two questions that remain available, and both are spoken for."
"Someone from Ruby's team will ask the first question, since they've known about the conspiracy the longest and have been working on the phrasing of it." Jaune said, getting nods from his teammates. "We've promised the second question to Neopolitan, though, as payment for taking our side."
"Which means no questions, from anybody." Yang said heavily, placing one arm on the low table and leaning over it to stare piercingly at Ren and Nora. "From when we've activated that thing until when we're done, don't say anything that ends with a question mark, or it might count as a question for the Relic to answer and we'll lose what we need. Got that?"
Nora mimed zipping her lips shut as Ren gave a short, cool nod. Pyrrha nodded as well, looking down at the glossy, chipped surface of the trestle table and frowning in thought.
"Rule number two, when we open the Vault, we'll leave Raven at the door with me." Ruby said. "Everyone else goes inside to grab the Lamp, and once you reach it, I'll use my Semblance to catch up."
Team JNPR blinked –even Jaune.
"What? Why?" Ren asked, narrowing his eyes a little.
"The Vault security is…complex." Weiss said after a moment of consideration, looking down and slightly shifting her mug of tea. "Apparently, there's a time-dilation effect involved in everyone standing outside once the object inside is used –and we don't trust Raven Branwen not to try and grab the Relic and make a run for it. If Ruby uses her Semblance to dash inside and meet us the second before we use the item, Raven won't be able to do anything…untoward."
Like seal us in. Neo's Scroll chimed grimly.
"Yeah, like that." Yang agreed, shuddering.
"Okay, so here's the game plan." Jaune said aloud, nudging several sticks and bowls into place on the table as everyone leaned forward to look at his diagram. "Once we break into the Vault chamber, we climb up to the door. Once we're there, we call Raven. She uses her portal to Yang and opens the Vault. Team JNPR, Neo, and the rest of Team RWBY walk into the Vault to grab the Relic while Ruby waits outside with Raven. Once we reach the Relic, Ruby uses her Semblance to rush in with us, and we ask our first question."
He nodded to Neopolitan, too caught up in planning to be curt.
"Once we get our answer, its Neopolitan's turn, and she uses the second question for whatever she wants to use it for. With the Relic then –recharging, we put it back, Ruby uses her Semblance to pull us all out of the Vault, and Raven seals it again. We should be careful to make sure she doesn't steal it, but otherwise, then we're home clear. We can hang around in the Vault cave for a little bit to discuss what we learned, since it's pretty much the most secure place on Remnant right now, and then depending on what we learned, we head on back to Vale via our camping trip cover. Any questions?"
"Did your secret government puppetmasters make the Relic thingy as a way to ensure loyalty?" Nora asked, eyes shining, and Jaune blinked at her.
"What- no, it's not a- how does that even work?" he spluttered. "How does answering questions earn anyone's loyalty? It's not like a reward system or something."
"AHA!" Nora jabbed her finger at him, half-rising to her feet. "You didn't deny your ownership of dark puppetmasters! I'm onto you, bub!"
Ren reached up to grab Nora's shoulder and tugged gently, pulling her back down onto the floor.
"No further questions." he sighed, longsuffering patience in both voice and expression.
"We should probably be careful of anything Raven does or says." Pyrrha added, her face grave. "She seemed like she might try and use our divided loyalties against us, if she had the opportunity. Back at the camp, when Yang had almost gotten her to agree with us, she made a point of asking everyone else if they were okay with this. If we're not careful, she might be able to disorganize us at the very least, even if we obviously would never betray each other."
Neopolitan audibly puffed out a breath, blowing her bangs up in a way that seemed very Excuse me?
"…present criminal excepted."
Neo then grinned and touched a finger to her forehead in ironic salute.
"Okay." Weiss said with a sigh, folding her hands in her lap and turning to the others. "So, how are we going to sneak out of the inn?"
It had been quite a long time since she'd had a night mission, Blake mused as she and Neopolitan snuck their way through the city, everyone else pressed in close behind. Oh, sure, there'd been plenty of tasks that took place at night in Atlas, but with the constant shining glare of the Dust lamps, it didn't seem quite as…right, to call them night missions. Everything was too bright, too illuminated, too glaringly obvious all the time, even in the shadowy nooks of Mantle. No matter where you were, some kind of streetlamp glowed like a sunrise over the rising and falling buildings.
But this was a proper night mission, with nothing but her and her allies and the rustling wind for company in the stygian darkness of Mistral. Neopolitan was leading them towards where she remembered the crack Cinder had made to be, and Blake was leading the others with her Faunus night vision –rather childishly, since everyone except her and Neopolitan were holding hands, moving in a long daisy-chain of people as Yang followed in Blake's footsteps and Ruby followed in Yang's and Weiss followed in Ruby's, and so on. This way, it was much easier to stick together, as well as navigate the dark, muddy streets.
They needed that ease, since Neopolitan had apparently only seen this exterior crack once: and, moreover, she'd seen it after Cinder had broken out of the Vault, something that had obviously not yet happened in this…timeline. Reality. Whichever.
Blake was also willing to bet that Neo hadn't seen it after moonrise, but that was, after all, only speculation.
Neopolitan obviously couldn't go much wrong at the start, since they were just heading for the base of the mountain near Haven, but the closer they got, the trickier it would be to pin down where she wanted to go. For once, Blake and the others would be of no help, since Yang was the only one who had ever entered the Vault chamber before –and she'd done it from the top. They were going blind, putting their entire trust in Neo, and the only reason Blake was allowing this was because at this current moment, Neopolitan had just as much reason to want to find and access the Vault as they did.
Neopolitan had also regained something through whatever had happened to them –her old partner Torchwick– and she undoubtedly felt just as worried about whatever consequences or costs were involved as Team RWBY. Neopolitan could not enter the Vault alone, since Yang was the only one with Raven's Scroll number. Neopolitan would be uncomfortable facing off against Raven alone, watching for potential betrayals.
Right now, she needed them, as disposable cannon fodder and tools if nothing else, and Blake trusted that.
She did not trust Neopolitan herself.
Not by a long shot.
Still, Neopolitan was surprisingly astute in how she led them. Blake watched with growing interest as she trotted along a road that led towards a distant orchard, only flicking occasional glances from side to side as she briefly lit up her Scroll to show her way. The petite criminal had yet to hesitate or look lost, and she was retracing her steps in the dark to a place she'd only been to once.
"Impressive." Blake murmured, and Neopolitan flashed her a smug, toothy grin.
The smile faded, however, as they turned a corner, following a very scenic bend in the road around the mountain, and Neopolitan paused.
She flashed her Scroll light towards the mossy, lichen-covered rock, moving away from the group and stepping closer. A pensive frown twisted Neopolitan's normally-catty expression, and her multicolored eyes scanned over the fault lines in the rock, looking for one that was familiar as she moved to within arm's reach of it. Blake and the others slowed to a stop behind her, no one making a move to help. Blake had no idea what to look for, and everyone else's vision could probably be summed up to: dark blur rising next to them that was probably the rock face of the mountain, lighter grey blur that was the road under their feet, bright flash of light from the Scroll panning over rock.
"Uh…" Jaune's voice broke in after a few seconds. "Did we…find it?"
"Not sure." Blake replied, watching Neopolitan lean close to a darker section of the rock, pressing her face and her light against it at the same time, trying to see how deep the crack ran. "Think we can risk more light?"
Neopolitan shook her head fiercely, still with her eye locked on the crack. Blake deferred to the only other person with even the slightest hint of covert operations experience and folded her arms, waiting.
The petite criminal finally stepped away from the crack and flipped her Scroll up to that the light illuminated her from below, like a particularly haunting specter. That backlit face rippled pink, changing to Ruby's, and Neopolitan swiftly angled her flashlight down at the crack, showing her finger pointing towards it.
"You…want me to use my Semblance to squeak through and see if the cave's on the other side?" Ruby asked hesitantly. Neopolitan flicked the light up again to illuminate her face and nodded, dropping the illusion. She then took two steps away and angled her light at the crack to throw it in spotlight, holding her Scroll steady. Ruby took a deep breath, moving towards the front of the group.
"Okay…" she mumbled, before taking a ready stance and thrusting one foot behind her, like she was ready to dash straight forwards into the rock face. With a flicker of red and a flutter of rose petals, she was gone, and Blake held her breath. There shouldn't be a problem with this if Neopolitan was right, but if she was wrong, Ruby might find herself jerked to a halt within an open space less than an inch across, with solid rock pressing in on her from all sides. Blake didn't know enough about Ruby's newly-evolved Semblance to know if she could survive that.
A few tense seconds passed, before a sudden flash of light winked out from inside the crack, a thin line of radiance stabbing out of the mountain's face and falling across the road.
"I think this is it." came Ruby's voice, sounding quite odd as the echoes of a larger rocky space were muffled by squeezing through the thin cleft in the rock. There was a moment of silence as Blake saw the bright light on the other side of the crack shift, swinging upwards. "Oh, yeah, definitely. There's a big orange glowing tree and everything."
Blake's shoulders unknit, tension flooding out of her. They'd found it –first try.
"Oh wow. Is it just me, or are you scary competent?" Nora asked with the same thought in mind, eyeing Neo with unfeigned admiration. Neopolitan grinned and performed a sweeping bow, even if Blake was pretty much the only one who could see it clearly.
"Right, okay, so I'm coming back!" Ruby called faintly through the rock, and there was another red blur before she was standing on their side again as everyone moved to gather around her. "It looks like the bottom of the Vault chamber is mostly circular, with a lake in the middle. There's a spur of rock up towards the top, with the tree and the Vault and everything. There's a few…um, stalagmites? at the bottom with us, but no stairs or anything to the top."
"Stalagmites rise from the floor, stalactites hang from the ceiling." Weiss said with a short huff, folding her arms. "Not like it really matters. If you can speed us all through the crack, I can use my glyphs to get us to the top."
"Okie-dokie!" Ruby chirped, saluting them all cheerfully, before she dropped her hand and straightened up. "Uh, how are we doing this? My team first, then Neo, then JNPR?"
"Sounds good." Jaune said, while Nora whined and grabbed Ren's arm in the dark, shaking him excitedly as Blake heard her complain about not getting "to see the super secret Vault first."
She rolled her eyes fondly, but then there was no more time to roll her eyes as Weiss and Yang stepped closer to her, huddling together, and Ruby swept them all up in her cape. A disorienting blur of sensation later, and Blake had her knees spread and trembling as she tried to keep her feet on a slick rocky floor, the scent of damp stone filling her nose and chilling her beneath her clothes. She hated getting transported with Ruby's Semblance –one's sense of balance was determined by the inner ear, and Blake had four of them, which meant that on the rare occasions when she wasn't in control of how her body moved, and her sense of direction was shaken, her brain got four conflicting answers on which way was up.
The resulting vertigo was not an enjoyable experience.
Weiss had apparently remembered this, since her hand was quickly on Blake's shoulder, helping center her, and then Yang's warm touch was on her other shoulder, the two holding Blake between them as they helped her straighten up.
It was bright in here: bright enough that a human would actually be able to see the difference between the stalagmites rising around them and the brownish stone of the floor, as well as the cool grey-blue water of the hidden pond. The hidden lake? It was fairly big, covering enough of the chamber's floor that only a thin strip of "beach" remained for them to stand on.
Blake looked up, craning her neck back as the other two let go of her, and saw, as Ruby had reported, a huge spur of rock projecting from the mountainside high above them, leading back towards Haven. Several dim struts hinted that this spur was either not entirely natural or supported by manmade material.
The walls of this enormous cave were even higher than the spur, but caught between them, branches spreading out on either side of the projection of rock, was a fairly sizable tree. Blake squinted at it, her eyebrows furrowing: the tree itself seemed fairly normal for Mistral, in that it was green and sinuous, but…there were glowing things caught in the leaves –petals or fruits, she couldn't tell from this distance. They twinkled like orange stars in the distance, peeping through the green.
Blake shrugged to herself as there was a rustle behind her, and the click of heels on stone. Ruby blurred back and forth one more time, retrieving Team JNPR and leaving them all hidden within the mountain as everyone took a moment to look around, taking in the Vault chamber.
"Right, well…" Weiss rolled her shoulders a few times as the others murmured in excitement, drawing Myrtenaster. "I suggest we get as close to the rock as possible, since it's a waste of Aura to have us run upside-down along the ceiling to get there."
"Okay."
"Sure."
"Right on."
Everyone moved in an ambling sort of mob around the edge of the lake, towards the place closest to where the spur of rock connected to the cave walls. Even the other members of Team RWBY were fairly sedate, and Jaune, and Neopolitan. Blake supposed she could understand that: for some of them, it was a tension that went beyond nervousness right into calm, and for others, it was simple acceptance of the inevitable. Barring a last-second betrayal from Raven, they would get into the Vault. Unless someone from NPR asked a question they shouldn't, RWBNJ would get everything they needed.
They were past worrying now.
"All right, everyone step back, please." Weiss said briskly as they reached the wall. "And once I've got them, I'd like you to hurry, as I can't keep this many up for very long."
Once everyone had complied with those words, she lifted her rapier and then pulled it back as though drawing on a bowstring, one hand close to her chest and the other thrust out, presumably for balance. Weiss flicked the tip of her weapon upwards slightly, like she was ushering away a fly, and a mathematically-precise line of shimmering white glyphs appeared and streaked up the wall –just as they had during that first initiation, when Ruby had dashed up the cliff to decapitate that Nevermore.
Nora, predicably, was the first up, practically diving at the wall in her eagerness to climb up and explore. She ran up the cliff face with giddy laughter trailing behind her, and Ren shook his head fondly before stepping up onto the first glyph to join her. One by one, they set foot on the wall and climbed, going from vertical to horizontal as all nine of them quickly ascended in a line, going as fast as they could to spare Weiss's Aura.
She was, naturally, the last of them up, but in the moment between Weiss's landing and her own ascent, Blake had plenty of time to look around.
Near the base of the wall, where the spur of rock connected to the mountain itself, there was a green, semicircular wrought-iron gate that fanned out around what she guessed to be the elevator platform that moved from Haven to here. The shaft above that platform had several glowing blue rings that were seemingly cut into the rock, proving her guess. Those were Dust conduits if Blake had ever seen any.
The huge rocky cliff they were standing on was actually wedge-shaped, with the thinnest end towards where they stood and the flattened platform broadening as it got to the Vault proper. The floor was paved, with concentric patterns of masonry around a gold-rimmed blue path that speared out from the center of the elevator bay like a single-person carpet. This path led to three circles of increasing size, the largest and last just before the Vault door itself. Each of these blue circles had a design frosted on it, something like the stylized lily Blake had seen on various fantasy coats-of-arms.
Like the Vault in Atlas, the Haven Vault itself took the form of a natural rocky spur, but unlike the Atlas chamber, where the Vault looked like a frozen, many-branched blueish crystal of enormous size hanging in the air like a beehive, the Vault at the end of this stony spur looked like a series of enormous stalagmites, made of the same rock as the cave walls, fused together with roots digging into their cracks –or, perhaps, a very small mountain range crowned by a twisting, spreading tree.
Rather than the mathematic, geometric squares and rectangles of the Atlas Vault, the golden, faintly glowing door to this Vault was made of a series of what looked like three or four enormous stylized metallic sunflowers layered over one another, with overlapping saw-shaped edges that moved in an alternating pattern towards the top of the twenty-foot door. They were covered by a darker gold pattern of spiraling, curling fronds, like ferns or wheat, that ran over multiple sections without breaking.
The Haven Vault was also actually attached to the stony projection –no climbing required– and Blake saw tumbled boulders and grass creeping in around the edges of the circular central section at the end, scattered with more of those orange…petals. Those glowing flickers were flowers, glowing a dull orange, like sleeping coals nestled amongst the branches.
Everyone took a moment to take in the glow of the flowers in the tree, unwontedly silent. Even Nora was quiet, staring up with wonder in her turquoise eyes.
That changed when Pyrrha, who was standing in front of everyone else, stepped curiously forward. She happened to be on the central blue path, and the moment her foot touched the first of the three larger circles, there was a soft ring, almost a chime, as the floral design in the center glowed blue-white. Pyrrha hastily stepped back as everyone backed away from the path, hands flying to their weapons as they split to either side of the center of the wedge –but the blue light just spread outwards like a pool, reaching the edges of the large circle before flooding down the path towards the elevator. It also slowly ran ahead to light up each one of the other two circles, leaving them glowing the same blue as the Relics as the floral designs in the centers shone white.
The moment the final, largest circle lit up with a soft whoosh, there was a rustling sound, and the chamber grew even brighter as Blake looked up, her eye caught by movement in the tree. The flowers were glowing brighter and spreading. Even as Blake watched, she saw several petals flutter free, falling like leaves down to the ground –and presumably the cave floor far below, even if none of them had seen said petals.
That was odd. Orange petals, falling like leaves –wasn't that Fall more than Spring?
Blake shrugged to herself as everyone slowly, cautiously let go of their weapons. The Vault inside Atlas was green and verdant, a direct contrast to the snowy tundra of Atlas. Who was she to attempt to explain the mystical nonsense of the god-made Vaults?
Or…had they been god-made?
Blake thought on that as they all began to walk forward, moving as a ragged crowd again with no real leader in mind, just forerunners. In Jinn's vision, the gods had simply said that the Relics would be somewhere on Remnant, and yet the strange, space-warping nature of the Vaults seemed to argue more than merely magical intervention. But the Vaults were also keyed specifically to the Maidens, which were Ozpin's direct creation.
She sighed mutely in frustration even as her eyes roamed with everyone else's, taking in the mystical space. There was too much she just simply didn't know –even now. Candidly speaking, she barely knew more than the common layman about these Vaults, about the spaces that held the Relics and how the Maidens were keyed to them. Blake supposed that in the end, though, in this particular case, it didn't matter. Whether the Vaults were merely the places formed around the Relics as they had manifested on Remnant, or if they were a magical safe made solely by Ozpin, was irrelevant. They knew how to open them, and they knew how to use what was inside two of them, at least.
One of Blake's feline ears flicked in irritation as a petal landed directly on it, and she heard Ruby giggle. Similarly, Nora's sense of awe was already lost, and she was eagerly collecting as many falling petals as she could without getting in the way of their progression towards the Vault door. The glowing orange petals were cascading around them like snow now, soft and silent.
"This place is amazing." Jaune murmured, looking at one he had caught in his palm. It faded away into glimmering, dustlike motes as he blinked, and Nora gave a whine of disappointment as her fistful of petals did the same. "What are these?"
"No idea." Yang said, flicking another off her shoulder. "Neopolitan?"
Neo gave an eloquent shrug. Blake narrowed her eyes as she noticed that the petite criminal had her parasol out, cocked insolently over her shoulders again. A reasonable person might say that that was because she was ready to fight Raven if she needed to –but Blake was not willing to trust that far. After they'd asked their question, any reason Neo would previously have to trust them would be gone –which meant that it would be a prime time for her to sink her knife into their backs.
"Whatever they are, it doesn't matter." Ruby said as they reached the central circle, fanning out a little. "We're here to do a job, and that's all that matters."
She looked to Yang as everyone nodded, and then unsheathed or unfolded their weapons. Blake held Gambol Shroud ready in pistol form: there were enough melee fighters here, she and Ren would need their firepower. They backed to the edge of the platform to give themselves room: Weiss, similarly, stepped around to the opposite edge as she flourished Myrtenaster down by her side, ready to cast glyphs without having to do so over everyone's heads. Pyrrha and Jaune lifted their shields, flanking Yang on either side, and Neo skipped over to stand beside Weiss, taking a position that would give her the freedom to use her Semblance to vanish and ambush. Nora lifted her hammer from between Weiss and Jaune, and Ruby strode over to stand directly beside the Vault door, spinning Crescent Rose out in scythe form.
"Yang?" Ruby asked, looking towards her sister.
"On it." Yang said, whisking out her Scroll. There was a tense few seconds as she dialed, and then another few as the Scroll rang.
It connected after almost a minute.
"We're ready. Use your portals and come through." Yang said brusquely, and presumably received an equally curt answer.
A swirl of red and black energy tore open the space in front of Yang, and Blake tensed, her ears folding back as she bent her legs a little. Being at the edge of the stone platform gave her room to fire, yes, but it also meant she was much closer to being knocked off –and it was a long, long fall to the bottom. She readied herself, but didn't fire as a black-clad leg with a flared hem stepped through, low black heels clicking on the stone of the floor. A woman resembling Yang to a startling degree stepped out of the circular portal, which quickly died behind her –the same face, but weathered with time, the exact same wild mane of hair, but black rather than blonde.
Raven's outfit was that same mixture of black and red, a short thigh-length black dress with a low collar and red shoulders, covered by elbow-length gauntlets in the same shade of dark crimson and a matching wide, layered belt pulled tight around her middle. A sword with an excessively large sheathe hung at her side, and Blake remembered Yang's warning that the scabbard was actually a rotating chamber for a variety of Dust blades. That was clever –even if her sword was broken, Raven could still deal damage, and having a variety of blades meant a variety of Dust types.
She also wore a huge Grimm mask, far larger and more ornate than anything in the White Fang –it was bigger and more complex than Adam's, even, covering her face down to the chin and stretching back to the middle of her head, more of a helmet than a mask, with multiple slits for vision.
That intimidating visage swayed from side to side slightly as Raven took them all in, and Blake tightened her grip on Gambol Shroud. A Maiden as well as a powerful fighter –this woman had beaten Cinder, and that was a milestone that they hadn't been able to reach even as a team.
"I see your friends have multiplied." came a dry, brisk voice. It was the voice of a commanding woman, someone who was effortlessly in control, and Blake's tongue flickered over her lips as she thumbed the trigger of Gambol Shroud. Raven would be a tough opponent if it came to a fight, she could already tell. Surprise might be crucial.
"Friends tend to do that." Yang replied, equally unimpressed. "Vault, please."
Raven gave a quiet little scoff, but stepped forward. Everyone pulled in after her, keeping a wary and respectful distance, as she strolled towards the door, heels clacking. There was a soft hissing sound as she paused before it and the flames around her eyes ignited, but as Blake suddenly realized, the multilayered mask hid those flames, giving the illusion that nothing had changed. Blake doubted it was a favor to them: that kind of bulky, intricate mask wasn't something Raven would just have lying around, and Blake had heard Yang talk about how Raven had kept a decoy in her camp, a false Spring Maiden to mislead her enemies.
She was hiding who she was.
Blake didn't know what kind of weakness that was, or what the cause for it was, but it was a weakness in this stony shell of a woman, and Blake locked onto it. She mentally tabbed the information, knowing she might need to learn more about this for other encounters later…if there was a later.
She watched Raven hesitate just the briefest moment, before the woman gave a sigh that was almost inaudible even to Blake's feline ears, and placed her hand on the door. For a few moments, nothing happened, and Blake could sense the members of Team JNPR tensing up. RWBY and Neopolitan knew that Raven was the Spring Maiden, that there could not possibly be any trick, but all Jaune's team knew was that Raven had some kind of Semblance that was crucial to opening the Vault –and Semblances evolved. She could be trying to trick them…
Then a delicate chiming, tinkling sound began, and blue light crept up the swirling fronds that decorated the doors, starting from the very bottom of the threshold. Slowly, the light swirled up to the top, and there was another slight pause.
Blake looked at the others, and they all looked at Yang, who shrugged.
The fronds abruptly pulsed with a flare of light as Raven jerked her hand away, a light which faded almost immediately as the spokes of the flowers jerked to life. Slowly, they folded in on themselves, curling up towards the wooden frame of the Vault door like a series of collapsing fans, clicking like gears the whole way.
What they revealed was nothing short of incredible.
It Atlas, it had been grass: a field of grass as far as the eye could see, dotted with a few sprigs of yellow and blue flowers. Here, it was a hot, shimmering vista of golden sand, with brownish particles rising from the three dirt-like circles of diminishing size that led to the Lamp. It was like a mirage, except real, somehow, and Blake's ears perked in curiosity.
"Alright." Raven scoffed, turning away from the Vault. She waved to it. "I did as you asked, so hurry up and get out of my way."
Suspicious glances were exchanged all around, but Blake slowly, cautiously put her weapon away with everyone else. One by one, they stepped over the wooden threshold and into the desert, and Blake blinked, her eyes scrunching up, as they began to shimmer at the edges too, like they might melt into a heat-haze at any second. When she looked down at her arm, patches of it were faintly blurry, like a chalk drawing in rain. That was almost as unsettling as the sudden soft give of sand under her feet, but she swallowed her discomfort and kept moving with the others. This was a Vault: it was pathologically impossible for there to be any danger here aside from what they brought with them.
Moving across sand and dirt that almost seemed to resist their footprints, the group gathered in a rough circle around the Lamp: WBY and JNPR all in a line, with Neo standing between the two teams and an open space directly opposite her, giving Ruby a clear path to a Relic. Pyrrha, Nora, and Ren were all staring at it with wide eyes, and even Blake had to admit that the Lamp was fascinating as it hovered above the small, vaguely podium-like brown rock at the center of the last circle. Faint twists of blue fluttered away from it like smoke, or perhaps even more petals –in this waving, uncertain light, it was almost impossible to tell.
A moment later, Ruby was there in a flicker of rose petals, and Blake's chest tightened as Ruby picked up the Relic and spoke, knowing that they had all arrived, at last, at the moment of truth.
"Jinn."
You never appreciated how much subtle noise there was in the world until it stopped.
A dead silence unlike any Blake had ever known –before she used the Relics– suddenly swamped them like a cloak, and her eyes flicked aside. There weren't any snowflakes to halt mid-tumble through the air, no Penny to stop mid-termination, but there was certainly Raven, frozen at the outside of the Vault, mid-blink, orange petals glowing and still in the air around her, and that was more than enough to tell Blake that it had worked.
Cyan smoke flickered from the Relic, fountaining out, as everyone took an involuntary step away. The Lamp rose into the air slightly, giving a gentle spin, and that smoke quickly curled and funneled upwards, coalescing into the shape of a large, blue, glowing, curvaceous woman, who wore nothing but her long cobalt hair and some golden accessories: earrings, a few cuffs, a choker, and of course, the chains. They dangled from cuffs on her wrists like broken shackles, with several more strung about her waist like a belt: there was even a fine gold chain that she wore like a headband. More of that smoke rose faintly from her skin like a fine mist, cascading down to form something like a skirt.
"Mmm…my, my." Jinn stretched in the air, before spinning slightly to drift out of their circle and then turn to regard them. "It has been quite a long time since I was summoned inside my Vault."
Her eyes drifted over Blake and the rest of her team, and one eyebrow rose, before her eyes flicked back to regard them as a group.
"I am Jinn, a being created by the God of Light to aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge, and graced with the ability to answer three questions every 100 years." she announced warmly, spreading her arms in demonstration. "I am unable to lie, and I have the full knowledge of everything and everyone on Remnant up to the present moment, though I am unable to tell the future. You're in luck, as I am still able to answer two questions this era."
She then folded her arms, tilting her head and still smiling at them as her eyes danced with amusement. She knew –of course she knew, Blake realized with a swallow, but the knowledge still hit her, somewhat, that Jinn knew that they were not the same people that had first arrived at Beacon. Awareness implied that Jinn really did have answers as to what happened to them, and that was something that Blake wasn't entirely sure she was braced for, even after weeks of thought.
"Tell me, what knowledge do you seek?" the spirit asked patiently.
Everyone looked to Ruby, and Blake realized with distant amusement and more immediate gratitude that rather than risk asking all the numerous questions that were no doubt seething in her brain, Nora had actually gone so far as to clap a hand over her own mouth, holding it shut.
Ruby swallowed as she felt their eyes, but took a step forward. Jinn's eyes followed her, the spirit still wearing that inscrutable smile.
"Why and how have we –we being my Team RWBY, Neopolitan, and Jaune Arc–" Ruby began, speaking carefully and slowly. "-gotten to the point where we found ourselves here after falling from the Central Location made by the Staff of Creation, Ambrosius?"
Jinn's lips curled upwards, and she gave a soft chuckle.
"An incredibly precise question." she said as Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren traded bewildered looks, thankfully too stunned for the moment to interrupt. "I will tell you this much before I answer –you don't need to work on closing loopholes with me as much as you do with Ambrosius."
"Wait, hang on a second." Nora said, her hand dropping from her mouth as her face twisted in a frown of confusion. "I thought we were asking about the conspiracy-"
"What's going on?" Ren asked, narrowing his eyes.
Pyrrha looked to Jaune with betrayed eyes –as did Neo, who had leaped away from him and half-drawn her sword from her parasol, her eyes wide.
"Jaune, what is she tal-" Pyrrha began worriedly, moving to touch his shoulder –but the world suddenly cut out in the very middle of her syllable, like the flick of changing channels a television screen.
One moment they were all there, clustered around the podium in the center of the Vault: a millisecond later Blake found herself in a familiar white void, like the world had been suddenly cut away from her with a knife. Like before, she was utterly alone, with neither sound nor sight around her, and like before, it took a good twenty seconds before color and shapes rippled out around her feet. She swallowed, hard, one last time, and then braced her shoulders to meet whatever story the Spirit of Knowledge was about to tell.
This was it.
"Once upon a time," Jinn began smoothly as blue smoke billowed outwards, forming a cozy Dust shop, lit warmly against the darkness of night. Faint rock music drifted from the back of the shop, where a slight, short figure in a bright red hooded cloak read magazines. "There was a girl with a small, honest soul. And her name…"
A man in a dark suit lined with red grabbed the girl by her shoulder and whirled her around, revealing headphones that framed a face with bright, startled silver eyes.
"…was Ruby Rose."
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