Transcript 1: Secrets

A cloud of birds flew over the ragged coastline on the west of Vale, screeching loudly and descending in front of a few young children in the traditional feeding spot. But as the seagulls continued begging for chips, one bird broke off from the beach and flew over the water towards the island of Patch. The trip itself wasn't unusual, many seagulls made the trip from the mainland, but this bird was not a seagull.

It was a crow.

Black feathers ruffled in the sea breeze as the bird quickly crossed the narrow strait between Vale and the little island, and then changed direction to dodge nimbly between the closely packed tree trunks on the island. It soared upward and roosted in the tips of a tall pine at the edge of a clearing. A clearing with a small two-storey house with a small garden out in front.

The movement caught the eye of one Taiyang Xiao-Long, and he stared through the window into the red eyes of the animal, before rolling his own eyes as the bird flapped down and disappeared around the side of the house. A moment later, a knock came from the door, and Tai opened it.

"You've got to stop doing that, one day the girls will catch you."

"Not if I check first, like I just did and like I always do."

Tai's half-hearted attempt at concern dissolved into a smile as he hugged his brother-in-law.

"It's good to see you, Qrow. What's up?"

"Thankfully, not too much." replied Qrow, stepping inside as Tai closed the door. "Ozpin's been a bit more paranoid lately with the attacks early this year and the whole Amber situation, asked me to check the forest out for the students before it all starts for the year."

"And how is Amber? I've heard the new equipment didn't look too promising in the first few days. Has she improved since then?"

Qrow's hand automatically went towards his hip as he searched for his flask of hundred-proof. His eyes fell to the floor.

"She's as good as dead, Tai." The cap came off and he sculled half the flask before finally slamming it down on the table. "It failed."

Taiyang recoiled at Qrow's unexpected news, and quickly responded before he knew the pain really would start to set in.

"But… how? What happened? She was fading fast, but I thought the aura pod had stopped her decline?"

"She's not exactly dying… yet. But I wouldn't call anyone in that state really alive anymore. Not when you're…" Qrow stopped, an icy dagger piercing his gut as he recalled that terrible moment Amber's fragile body lay drooped in his arms, aura broken and unresponsive despite weeks of supposed "healing".

"Why isn't it working?" protested Tai meekly as the situation began to take hold. He wasn't as close to the current Fall Maiden as most others in Ozpin's group, and he himself wasn't called on by Ozpin nearly as often these days, but he still knew Amber well. Qrow had helped train her to the next level and helped her to harness her powers in the early days of her Maidenhood, and had often called on Tai for assistance. She was very young back then, not much older than his own girls now, and had only stopped coming around for sessions in the last year before the attack. After that, when she could easily outmatch Qrow and Tai together in every possible situation, and hold her own in a fight even without her powers, she had settled into a full time protector role.

Which made it all the more perplexing how she was ambushed so effectively in the first place.

"We don't really know. Not even Oz, with his knowledge of his own magic and its capabilities. The power hasn't really been split like this before. We don't know what it has taken out of Amber, or if it was the Vault that really did the damage when she opened it. I don't suppose we'll ever have a complete answer, you know."

Tai fell silent, and looked out the window towards where Qrow had come from. His brother-in-law followed his gaze.

"Ironic that it happened at this time of year, isn't it?"

"It's terrible." Tai responded.

"You're damn right it's terrible. And those students don't even have a clue. They don't know about the maidens, or about Amber, or why they should care about the forest even if they did know." Qrow's voice became frantic. "It's supposed to be pointing back to a happy time, and they should know about that."

A worried frown creased Tai's brow as he placed his hand on Qrow's shoulder. "You know they can't learn all about that, Qrow." They locked eyes for a moment, before Qrow dropped his gaze again, and drained the remaining alcohol from his flask.

"I know, Tai" he responded bitterly. "And that's what's so terrible about it all. About this whole thing. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of losing those close to me, and most of the time nobody can ever know."

"We still know, Qrow. The girls too, they might know one day, and they've been a great help to me since Summer disappeared."

Qrow shook his head. "I'm not placing that burden on children," he said. "I've hurt enough people as it is. And what reason would they have to know, anyway?"

"Really? You know the answer to that already, admit it to yourself. Ozpin's going to find out eventually, and then it won't be long given we're already inducted. A silver-eyed daughter of Team STRQ? It's only a matter of time."

Qrow scowled, a little unsteady as the heavy drinking, even by his standards, began to slowly take effect.

"I won't let him."

"It will happen anyway. I'm tempted to tell them now, but I can't bring myself to do it. We… we know it will happen, Qrow."

Taiyang Xiao-Long put his face in his hands. "That's why Summer's gone. When Ruby was born, our joy was so short-lived that we barely had time to smile before we realised. She had silver eyes, just like her mother. I can't tell you how many months it took for Summer to stop crying over the fact that her precious daughter would be dragged into this war, and it broke me too. Yang loved her baby sister, but never knew what those eyes really meant. It was a great comfort to us before Summer left that she became the greatest older sibling you could wish for little Rubes."

Tai shook his head slowly from side to side as he continued to speak.

"Summer couldn't bear the thought of her girls losing that innocence, even if Ozpin is our friend. So one day, she left. I woke up one morning and she was gone forever. It took me many years and many tears to figure out why. At first, I wondered, was it some secret mission of Ozpin's? Had she somehow been overcome by the Grimm before she could use her eyes, or been targeted by Salem? But I slowly realised Ozpin had to have been telling the truth. This was a Summer secret, and that only meant one thing. She had gone to Salem and confronted her, hoping her eyes would defeat the ultimate evil, and paid the ultimate price. And in the end, I told myself, could it really ever have been anything else?"

The house remained silent as Tai continued to sit, and Qrow tried to decide whether he should say something, but never really getting anywhere as the huge hit of alcohol made its way into his system. Eventually, he stood up, tottering about unsteadily, and tripped over Zwei's dog bed as he made his way out of the room.

"If you're going to get drunk," Tai called indignantly, raising his head from his fingers, "Make sure you don't pass out somewhere the girls will see you when they get back."

He turned his head to study the news station he had been watching before Qrow dropped in, and his eye fell on the clock in the corner of the screen. Twenty past twelve. Time for him to get back to the school himself, he thought. But although his teacher's office in the small combat school on Patch was barely five minutes' walk away, the trip seemed an untraversable eternity in his current state. He reached for his scroll and dialled in the number for Headmaster Indigo.

"I think I'll take the rest of the day off."

Transcript 2: Battle Begins

A black Grimm owl thumped into the forest floor, transfixed by a long blue shaft. As it disintegrated and Gale stooped to pick up one of the two dozen arrows she carried in her sheath, Lina remarked how quiet it had been in the first twenty minutes inside the forest.

"It's very odd," she mused. "This place was supposed to be much worse than what we went through during initiation, and yet we've seen barely more than a handful of Grimm."

"We're taking a pretty similar path to Team LIHT," decided Jasper. "But they're in front of us. Maybe Terra used her negativity semblance to draw the Grimm into one area before clearing out."

"Do you think they know we're behind them?" Gale asked him, having to slow her long strides to match the others' careful pace.

"I don't know. But that's why we're taking it easy, their team is well set up to lay traps like that, and I'm starting to think following their cleared path is a waste if we're not using it to catch up."

"I'm game to move left and head towards those back three temples," said Nero. "We're losing points if they're just going to reach the other one first."

"Sounds like a plan," replied Jasper. "Alright team, time for Silent Lift-off!"

The four members instantly jumped into a tight circle, with Gale bringing one end of the bow down to the ground in their own team's specialised stealth manoeuvre. First Lina, then Jasper were launched into the air, angled a few degrees to their left, and came to rest in the red sea of leafy branches a stone's throw away. They quickly leapt from tree to tree, moving in the same leftward direction from which they had been launched.

Now Nero stepped onto the bow and drew Draw, just as Gale frowned in concentration and the familiar blue flash washed over her body as she activated her semblance. The timing needed to be exactly right for this to work, but Nero wasn't worried, the team had practised this exercise hundreds of times and he knew Gale would be excited to try this in the field for the first time.

Gale flung Nero in the direction Jasper and Lina had disappeared earlier, and immediately crouched and jumped herself, her powerful legs sending her reduced mass soaring through the air like a giant grey and brown frog. As she passed Nero just above the tree line and continued to fly upwards, Nero spun the whip and directed a blast of gravity dust down to the forest floor below. The purple bolt hit the ground and sent the mat of red leaves sky high, before slowly floating down and destroying the last ten metres of tracks. That was one of the advantages of using gravity dust, thought Nero. It didn't scatter loose items nearly as much as a fire dust explosion, and instead of a crater of cleared dirt, with any luck it would look like no-one had ever been there, their footsteps disappearing abruptly as they swung through the trees out of sight.

Ten minutes of tree-hopping and rustling leaves later, Jasper put up a hand and they silently dropped back to the forest floor, scanning through the dense brown tree-trunks for any signs of other teams or black shapes that might be Grimm.

And straight away saw the clearing not fifty metres ahead of them.

"Wowwww!" exclaimed Gale.

"I can't believe it!" muttered Lina. "Right in front of us! You couldn't see a thing up in that mass of branches!"

"I know!" said Nero. "But I didn't see this one when coming down from the cliff. I thought there weren't any for a good half an hour or so?"

Lina shrugged her shoulders and raised her arms in a dismissive gesture. "Professor Goodwitch didn't exactly tell us how many there were, did she? Only that there were more than a dozen. The true number could be a lot higher than twelve."

"I suppose so."

Weapons readied, the four quietly moved up to the edge of the trees and looked for signs of other teams. Satisfied they weren't about to be ambushed, Jasper jogged forward and inspected the grey remains in the centre of the clearing. He negotiated piles of grey rubble and decaying splinters, mostly decomposed to pulpy dirt, and a few blackened streaks mostly covered by dust. Jasper pried up a thick slab of concrete, finding nothing, and let it fall back to the rest of the foundation with a clatter.

"There's nothing here!" he called, as the others made their way over to inspect the ruins. "Has somebody beaten us to this one?

"I don't think so," said a frowning Lina. "Nobody's been here for a good while at least, there aren't even any tracks or many signs of Grimm."

"Ooooh," Gale's eyes darted between her confused teammates, cupping a hand to her lips in a stage whisper. "It's a mysteryyyy!"

"Quit mucking about, this might still be a trap" scolded Lina. "We don't know for sure this isn't a ruins site."

"It's fine, Lina" soothed Nero, touching her on the shoulder. "It's just an… well it's just an old house by the look of it."

"I know, I know," she replied, wrapping the tip of her tail around his legs, then pulling away a little as she decided this wasn't the time for intimacy. "It's probably a house."

"What's the spooky old house doing in the spooky old woods?" purred Gale, fluttering her hands in front of her face. "Nobody knowwwwwws!"

"Oh come on," sighed Lina as she re-holstered Autobeat and began marching northwards. "Let's get out of here before she really gets carried away."

"Amazing," said Ozpin as the group headed towards the edge of the clearing. "They found it. No other team has stumbled across that little house in nearly a decade."

"You didn't put a sceptre there?" asked Glynda Goodwitch.

"No, no sceptre. It's not one of the ruins sites, just the little place I used to habit so long ago. You could nearly see past the forest two hundred years ago, now it's miles of trees on each side."

He shifted uneasily. "It was a lot cosier before Salem destroyed it."

Unbeknownst to Team JNGL, there was something significant in that house, but it wasn't a sceptre. Underneath that pile of rubble, under the dust of the decades and centuries before, something a little more macabre lay buried.

A body, thought Ozpin. One of his former hosts, who had died protecting the forest.

"We should be getting close by now," said Lina, ducking past a branch that her teammates practically had to bend double to move under.

"About time!" said Gale. "I wonder what it looks like?"

Her curiosities didn't have to wait long to be satisfied. Barely a hundred steps later, the red roof began to thin out again and the leaf litter gave way to a peculiar dark cobblestone floor with similarly coloured pillars of what appeared to be some sort of granite. Many lay scattered and broken, a pile of jumbled fragments on the stony grey surface, but a large central pillar remained standing. Inside a large opening at chest height was something much less dark and foreboding. Something covered with a clear glass lid, to prevent the sweet odour of the tree sap escaping.

The first sceptre.

"There it is!" pointed Jasper, sighting the prize inside.

A brown octopus of flailing hair brushed past his face and Gale streaked towards the pillar, Lina following in hot pursuit. She pressed her face up against the glass with round eyes and a rounder mouth, as though the pink and gold artifact was some kind of tropical fish in an aquarium.

"It looks… almost alive," remarked Lina as she too poked her head over the ledge, and indeed it did. A golden staff with a bulbous centre sap reservoir and smaller interconnected chambers running down the body almost like a pink spider. The sap seemed to be moving around in shimmering patterns, and the whole artifact almost seemed covered in an ethereal glow you could just see out of the corner of your eye.

"What's taking them so long?" said Nero, keeping guard with Jasper just outside the edge of the stones.

"Not sure, they might be getting excited over the looks," replied Jasper. He turned and cupped one hand to his mouth. "Hey! We need to be getting on soon, there's other sceptres…"

Nero felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, and his grip tightened on his whips involuntarily. His eyes flicked through the forest nearby, then onto the other side of the clearing nearer to the girls, but the trees were still. The feeling grew stronger, but as yet he could see no one.

"Jasper, I think we're…"

An explosion of orange hair burst through the ground in front of him, and immediately an equally orange sabre struck a huge blow at his ankles. As quickly as it had appeared, the torso dropped with a rumble back through the dirt as a massive electricity dust bolt slammed into Nero's back. He toppled over with a startled gasp and Jasper whipped around to spy Brett Salmon with a smoking double-barrelled shotgun, just fifty metres behind them.

"REGROOOUUPP! GALLLLEEE, LINAAAA, AMBUSH!"

"Ground, ground!" sputtered Nero as he regathered Draw and Quarter and dived up a tree. "Tamarin's using her Quicksand semblance!"

"Get up high!" called Jasper as Gale and Lina pelted towards them. "We can't afford to lose anyone this early!

A mean trick, trying to take out our best fighter like that, thought Gale as she entered battle mode, watching while the rest of Team BTTR appeared from the woods like wraiths. She pulled out her oversized, overmodified katana and grinned as she met Ram Peter's chainsaw blade with a firm wrist.

Grenades and bullets rained through the lower parts of the trees as the two pairs fought, while Nero swung higher and higher up the boughs of a Forever Maple. He stopped and checked his scroll, panting heavily as he brought the screen up from his belt. Just 40%. Those two unexpected blows had really done a number on him and made him a liability despite his skills in close combat. He needed to find somewhere he could overlook the battle, and perhaps use his helix attack away from the action, without much risk of his aura being pushed into the red zone by an encounter.

Which didn't look likely given the tuft of red hair which was rapidly drawing closer from below his position.

Nero tossed out his right hand and swung another couple of limbs higher as another yellow electric blast sizzled past his shoulder. He couldn't run. If Nero tried to escape, he was a sitting duck with his back turned, no matter how many trees away.

He leaped off the top of a tall Forever Fall Redwood and helicoptered down to the ground using Draw and readied himself as Brett followed suit. Jasper was still too preoccupied playing whack-a-mole with Tamarin to assist him. Nero knew he was the better fighter of the two, but Brett was still at full aura, so he would have to be careful not to take much damage in this encounter.

It didn't get off to a great start.

Brett transformed his rifle back into quarterstaff form and faced Nero as the two slowly circled each other, shuffling to avoid the still thickly-packed tree trunks near the edge of the clearing. Nero ducked behind a thicker trunk, drawing Brett in, then burst back out the same direction he had disappeared, swinging Quarter in a flat, wide arc. Brett sprang over the hissing metal just as it reached his legs, then fired another electricity bolt from the nearer end of the staff, which Nero deflected using Draw. He adjusted and threw the Quarter's coils around the exposed end of the staff and tugged viciously, but Brett anticipated the move and clung on with all his might. As both Brett and weapon were drawn in he planted both feet in Nero's chest in a savage blow, releasing the whip from Nero's grasp and sending him flying across the dirty red forest floor.

Nero coughed and his chest heaved. He must be running awfully low by now. Desperately, Nero twirled Draw as Brett thundered towards him and blasted him flat on the ground with a powerful gravity wave, then curled the whip around his ankle and threw him into a nearby tree. The move stunned Brett, but he picked himself up far quicker than Nero had hoped, and again began moving purposefully towards Nero. Nero's second attack was countered by a blast wave of Brett's own – damn that semblance of his, Nero thought hurriedly, it was the perfect counter to his weapons, and it was no wonder Brett specifically had chosen to target Nero.

Nero backed up further and further, pressing him closer to the firefight where Gale, Lina, Ram Peters and Ally Teal were battling it out, and he knew he couldn't escape further damage if he got too close. He suddenly threw himself back towards his attacker, hoping to fight it out hand to hand between the repeated blasts and counterblasts the two threw at each other. If he could just get his other whip back he might…

Jasper's hammer thudded squarely into Brett's back and belted him clean past Nero and straight into Ram Peters, where the stunned leader's remaining aura reserves were whittled down by an enthusiastic Gale and Lina.

"Th.. thanks," puffed Nero. "He nearly got to me there."

"Nearly?" grinned Jasper. "I saw him kick you straight in the ribs, that's a funny definition of 'nearly' you have there."

"Where's Tamarin? Is she around, or did you stop her?"

"Oh she's down alright," said Jasper, putting an around Nero's shoulders as he staggered to collect his fallen fire dust whip. "I'll admit, the first few times she vibrated up out of the ground were very disconcerting, but it was only a matter of time once she lost the element of surprise. Tamarin's vision is pretty dreadful underground, and when your opponent stops moving around and making vibrations of their own, it's actually a massive disadvantage because she can't tell where you are. I don't know why Tamarin hasn't learned that yet, it didn't take much to stop her after that."

He swung his gaze over towards the other fight, where Ally Teal and Ram Peters were frantically trying to gain the upper hand against Gale and Lina, but the sight of Brett's form sprawled out on the ground beside them wasn't doing their composure any favours. They glanced towards Jasper and Nero every few seconds, and an idea struck Jasper.

"TRUCE!" he called towards the quartet, cupping his hands around his mouth. They stopped short in surprise, and backed up to avoid any backstabbing during this sudden ceasefire.

"Ally, Ram, as you can see, Brett is out of action and he'll have to return to Beacon in a few minutes as his aura is nearly spent. Same goes for Tamarin, so it's just the two of you remaining."

They leered at him suspiciously, but he put his hand up and continued.

"Now, I know the odds aren't in your favour – the four of us could take you pretty easily – but there's no guarantee Nero wouldn't go down in the process."

They nodded. That had been the plan in the first place, Ram thought with a wry smile, but it hadn't exactly turned out as planned.

"So we'll let you go… on two conditions. One, you don't follow us and try and ambush Nero again… and two, you give us the rest of your earth dust and fire dust. You can keep the rest, and whatever Brett and Tamarin have, we can't use those as easily."

"Oh come on, you can't be serious," replied Ally with a slight hiss. Her forked snake tongue often gave her a slight lisp when she was exasperated like this.

"Please," replied Jasper. "I may be stripping you down a bit, but I'm not so cruel as to kick you out of Beacon if you fail this assessment early on. I won't prevent you from getting a few more points before you go back to Beacon yourselves."

"We won't be going back any time soon," scowled Ram.

"Well," smirked Gale, two fingers over her mouth in a contemplative pose. "If we don't MAKE you go back…"

"Oh fine, fine," said Ally, unloading a magazine of fire crystals, which Lina gleefully snatched up. "We'll go."

After Gale retipped her earth arrows and filled her pockets with the remaining earth dust from the other end of Brett's staff, the two groups split off, the remaining duo from Team BTTR heading south-west and distinctly opposite to the direction the others were travelling. Meanwhile, a somewhat recovered Tamarin and Brett sat up against the cobblestone and granite at the edge of the ruins site, waiting for their aura to return to safer levels before travelling back through the red leaves towards Beacon Academy.

"I enjoyed pinching stuff from them way too much," decided Jasper as rolled the first sceptre in the blanket beside the other two items he had tied around his shoulders. "You guys tell me if I ever look like becoming a psychopath, alright?"

"Don't worry," mumbled Lina, shaking her head. "I'm sure we'd remember to tell you."

But there was one vital thing which, astonishingly, none of the four had remembered to do in the confusion surrounding the ambush. It had been plain, right in front of them, as blindingly obvious as Gale's change in hair colour.

The dye. The smelly, ammonia-based brown hair dye lay snug up against the sceptre, so close and yet so far to achieving it's intended purpose of masking the sceptre's scent. The sweet, sappy smell from the sceptre wafted over Jasper's back as Team JNGL traversed their way towards the second ruins site, mostly unnoticed by the four.

But something else noticed. The Grimm didn't need to feed, but rather chose to, and though that usually extended to humans and Faunus from the negative emotions, and the sweet sap was a rare exception.

An exception with a lot more behind it than meets the eye.