OMAKE
"You walked across Anima?"
Oscar's face was twisted in bafflement. It made Ruby self-conscious. Team RNJR, along with Oscar, were resting in their Mistral safehouse while Qrow ran one of his many inscrutable errands. (How he managed to disappear so quickly and so completely, Ruby would never know.)
"I mean, yeah," said Ruby, and the way Oscar said it made all sorts of doubts and insecurities well up in her.
"Why?" Oscar pressed.
"We had to get here somehow," Ruby said, masking her doubts with indignation. "With a lot of the normal routes down, we had to improvise. What about you, how did you get here?"
"I took the train," Oscar said slowly.
Ruby's jaw dropped. "There are passenger trains in Anima?!"
"Quite a few of them, even I know that," said Oscar, "although getting here was the first time I rode one. There's the Argus Limited going around the east side of Lake Matsu, and there's the…"
"Okay, okay, I hear you," Ruby said, "but I don't remember seeing even a single railroad track the entire time we were walking across Anima!"
"Really?" said Oscar. "Can you show me the route you took?"
"I don't think we can," Jaune said. "We didn't have a map for half of it."
They could almost see Oscar losing confidence in them with every word they spoke.
"We got here by sea, and landed in the west…" Nora began.
"Well, that was your problem," said Oscar. "If you'd taken a ship to the port in the south, Sirocco, you could have taken a train straight from there all the way to Mistral."
Ruby's face turned whip-fast on Ren and Nora. "You two are from Anima! Why didn't you tell me that?"
"Pfft," went Nora, "you think we ever took the train? Think we've ever even been in a train station?"
"We wouldn't have had money for a ticket until our last year at Refuge," Ren agreed. "So we never learned anything about the railroads."
"How did you get to Beacon, then?" Ruby demanded.
"Commercial airship, with tickets provided by Refuge for all their graduates going to Beacon," Nora said snappily. "Good thing, too, because someone spent most of our emergency fund on a tea set and tea supplies before we left."
"There was no way to know if they would have decent tea in Vale," Ren said, clearly defending a well-fortified position. "That was an emergency."
"There were tons of ways to know if they had decent tea in Vale!"
"So," said Oscar, trying doggedly to run his point to ground, "instead of taking a ship to the southern port of Sirocco and taking the train, or taking a ship to the northern port of Argus and taking the train, you took a ship to the western port, and then just walked across Anima's long axis?"
"It sounds really bad when you say it like that," Ruby said bashfully, "but yeah, that's about the shape of it." She twisted awkwardly for a moment, then rallied. "You know what, though? I'm not sad we did it the wrong way. Think of all we did on the road! We got into so many different adventures, and did so many different things. We fought in a ton of battles and bulked up on real experience. It wasn't a waste of time, it was a training trip! And Uncle Qrow always says, A day in the field is worth ten days in the classroom. Just think how many classroom days that road trip was worth!"
A glow rose in Oscar's eyes for a moment; when it faded, they'd changed colors slightly, and Oscar's voice was two voices at once. "Is that correct, Miss Rose?" said Ozpin. "You think you've learned so very much from your experiences?"
Ruby looked stricken, as if regretting the last ten minutes of conversation. "Um… yeah?"
"Well then," said Ozpin, smirking slightly as he drew his cane and extended it, "you should have no problem demonstrating what you've learned under duress. Breaktime's over, students. Back outside."
Four groans answered him. "Nice one, Ruby," muttered Ren.
"I didn't know he was listening! I didn't think he'd take it like that!"
"You meant just her, right?" Jaune tried desperately.
Ozpin's smirk grew. "You've followed your leader this far on your 'road trip'. You can follow her to the training floor."
Nora moaned. "Worst. Road trip. Ever."
End.