Chapter One


Big Little Box


She was dead.

That part she knew.

What in her triple-flavored ice cream treat's hallowed name she was doing on a street when the last thing she remembered was Ruby holding her hostage and letting Salem's pocket dimension collapse around them, she didn't know.

And what a treat that was, to see the goddess laid low within her home and Remnant finally returning to a calm balance without the siblings. The fact she could nab Ruby and also remove her from the playing field was a nice bonus.

The fact that she could not feel her within her body was a heinous offense. She ignored the world around her, sinking into her soul to find a metaphysical shimmering ball of multicolored Aura hovering in the dark ether. It didn't need to be a ball. Heck, it could be a toroid or a butterfly or even just not there but that was how she learned to visualize her Aura.

And it was alone, not even a hint of the dark crimson soul tinged with silver she stole from Death's possession.

The acrid smell of a fossil-burning contraption forced her from her mindscape, awakening an old memory she thought she suppressed several millennia ago when she obliterated a good chunk of humanity lest they destroy themselves in a convoluted nuclear armageddon or famine caused by overpopulation. She opened her eyes to witness dozens of cars swerving with abandon amid a metropolitan, not anything too different from the innermost city districts. What she appreciated about finally obliterating their reliance on fossil fuels was removing the smell of burning petrol and diesel. Consumer-grade vehicles on Remnant relied almost exclusively on hydrogen fuel cells, a nearly infinite source of energy that only gave off water as a byproduct, while military-grade vehicles used a combination of that and fire Dust.

It didn't take too long to remember which city this was, not with a ginormous clock towering above almost everything on this side of the river, along with a similarly big Ferris wheel just on the riverside. If those two iconic buildings didn't clue her in, the Basic accent specially crafted to lure people in to the point they ruled over an empire on which the sun never set, put the last nail in the coffin. She honestly thought the dreaded British English accent died out with the Atomic Armageddon, though at least she now knew this wasn't Remnant. Well, not her version of Remnant, this one being several [REDACTED] years before the first semblance of what would be the five kingdoms even dared peek from the ashes of nuclear winter.

Why she ended up in a country where people drove on the wrong side of the road stumped her.

Her deal with her patron demanded her immortal soul after her premature death at Ruby's hands. Yet she was here, in an alternate timeline, far in the past where she once roamed in the shadows behind governments and pulled strings. In a time far before Ozpin and Salem, before Grimm, and before Hunters, before that extra chromosome for Homo aurae appeared.

A soothing melody played off in the background, typical of a city with millions of inhabitants. So at least her audio faculties still worked after the haunting void of Salem's dimension overtook them and led to their presumed death. Couldn't quite confirm if she died or was just transported here by something, or if the void just didn't like matter in its territory and it just spat her out at the nearest dimension. Her eyesight still worked as she took in the colorful array of humans bustling about on the busy street on their way to work. She inspected herself, finding her usual attire on her body. Legs were still there, good, both of them actually. Arms, good, still could choke a motherfucker. Boobs, perky and still there. Two eyes, nose, ears, chin, hair. Yup, all still there.

Shockingly soothing music still played in the background as she skipped away from her point of entry into this universe before she stopped dead in her path. She'd forgotten something incredibly important and she couldn't quite believe it'd taken her ten steps to remember it. Her usual electromagnetic plate wasn't on her back and therefore neither was her parasol, a weapon of immense destruction and potential she all but traded for Crescent Rose.

How the fuck was she supposed to dive off tall buildings or from planes with impunity? Oh sure she could just do what she did when she broke into Schnee Tower and reinforce her entire body to take the freefall impact but that was pedestrian Hunter. And, you know, the rapier hidden within its body was also kinda important, forged sometime after her birth by her half-brother and then re-forged with her blood after her first war. Not to mention it cost enough to buy Atlas and still have enough left to splurge a few days in a Vacuoan casino with a penthouse suite thrown in.

Hmm, Yang better have kept her weapon in perfect condition for whenever she broke from this universe and fought her way back.

Ugh, she didn't even have any other weapons. Blake carried a literal arsenal of knives and she didn't even bother stealing any. That part made her frown more than anything. She'd stolen just to satisfy an itch before and she didn't even consider going after Ruby's little Hunters. To be fair, those knives were a dime a dozen but it was the principle of it all dammit. Conversely, Blake probably wouldn't have even noticed.

She slumped off to the riverfront, a dark thundercloud materializing above her and pelting her with rain. The people around her either didn't care for her theatrics, far too embroiled in their daily toils, or gave her a wide berth when the rain started sloughing off her, dampening her hair and clothing. Lightning and thunder further dissuaded any curious onlookers.

Her frown twisted deeper as she continued down the river walkway to the continued amazement of the public. It wasn't the warmest of the days, and she couldn't for the life of her remember the climate of this area, but everyone around her wore autumn clothing. They were probably just shocked she strutted about completely soaking wet without so much as shivering. Her illusions really were good like that.

What wasn't good was that the soothing music kept following her no matter how far she walked from the point she woke from. First one street went by and she chalked it up to it simply being loud. She gave it two streets to the point she glanced around in visible confusion. The people around her didn't seem to hear the music at all, too consumed in taking videos of her magical rain cloud.

She wrapped her illusions around her and disappeared from human vision. The peons all exclaimed in shock at her trick but she didn't move, rather taking out her scroll and flicking on the screen. Immediately, she took notice of the lack of any connecting networks, the standard Remnant scroll only tuned to communicate with the CCTS towers. A few very weak wireless networks pinged on the system interface but she wrote them off as maintenance systems used to interconnect public features and surveillance. Nothing too different from the usual Remnant interconnectivity.

Okay, bigger problem.

She was poor.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

She spent decades amassing so many stolen funds she alone could fund the White Fang's insurrection without so much as denting one of her savings accounts. Did she cause several recessions by drastically reducing the amount of circulating currency? Maybe. But no one could prove that. She did have to actually move funds into an investment account to help prop up the economy after her mistake.

And she couldn't even ask for any discretionary funds from the Schnee heiress because the chances they all ended up together in one dimension, let alone on the same planet, were smaller than her liking for pistachio ice cream. Heck, Roman was useful for organizing heists to net them cash for their own extravagances. Pickpocketing the white collars in the financial district would sate her needs for the moment, but seriously hampered her need for money to just throw at problems.

Not like she needed a personal jet right now seeing as all she wanted was a pair of noise-canceling headphones to stop the pleasant tune from drilling further into her psyche. She seriously considered taking a dip in the polluted river just to drown out the sound but no matter how hard she plugged her ears with Aura or wrapped hard light around herself, the sound kept coming. It just kept playing, a maddeningly melodic vocalization of something. It wasn't a voice but neither was it any instrument she recognized, just a tune harmonizing across this city.

She rarely ever encountered psionics in her many, many years, usually isolated to massive galaxy-spanning empires tucked into the far reaches of a known universe. Other empires didn't like engaging with them due to their mental magics but they usually imploded due to some psionic catastrophe. If she didn't press the big red button to start it anyways.

But one of their most annoying traits was mental attacks or, in this case, a soothing melody designed to distract her from her moping. It was a pleasant distraction but she did not like or appreciate something bypassing her mental defenses so effortlessly to the point she never detected it to begin with. No matter how much she thickened or re-instanced her shields, the song remained at the same volume.

She dipped across the river and it still sang but it didn't get any louder, unlike when she crossed back over and went back to where she appeared. As if taunting her, it cranked up in volume just a tad, letting her know she was heading in the right direction. Every street she passed, it became just a little more, the tune switching to almost be happy. That didn't exactly help when a car nearly flattened her into roadkill and she facepalmed hard, mentally cursing at leaving her invisibility illusions up.

The song changed to reflect the incident, laughing at her misfortune kindly. Not maliciously, as she expected from a psionic entity, but chuckling at her lack of hindsight. Like a friend. A psionic omnipresent friend she hadn't yet met and wouldn't leave her alone.

Great, she had another Yang to deal with.

Eventually, she came upon a hospital. Just like any hospital, it smelled of cleaning supplies; a bitter antiseptic scent combined with citrusy soaps. On top of the very tiny smell of blood she reveled in. Random thoughts best suppressed as there wasn't a battlefield to indulge her wanton masochism. It didn't look any different from any other building aside from the slowly gathering rain clouds above them. It wasn't even the building producing the incessant music.

No, that privilege belonged to a beaten blue police box just across the street from it. She didn't quite know what a police box was or what function it served but it was part of the establishment so it already grated on her nerves. Seriously, she paid her taxes just like any other good citizen but stop telling her she couldn't do this or that. She instinctively reached to her side for her parasol and grasped only air, her medium of Aura cut off and prevented from obliterating the strange box.

Still, while it was the easiest option, she still had enough Aura left to channel her Semblance and crush the box within a hard light prison. Immense invisible planes of light formed around the musical construct and slowly crushed inward.

And it didn't even come close to budging, the music switching to patronizing. Seriously, it continued to play, not even struggling against her Semblance as she exerted a tremendous amount of force onto this silly mortal creation. And while she didn't throw her stat points into strength like Yang, she wasn't any lesser of a titan, able to suppress even Ruby at the height of her reign, though consent still seemed to trump them all.

Funny how such a seemingly inconsequential thing killed several gods.

She eventually relented her assault, the music switching from its tone to a welcoming entrance. Her invisible grip dissipated without any other person the wiser and she futilely sighed. Bringing out her avatar in the midst of the city would be far too overkill even for her and it was a massive bitch to cloak, the very illusions it wove from permeating energy it would take another few hundred layers to cover. Not to mention it would probably cause the elderly and those with a weaker constitution to simply collapse and die from the pressure. She'd pulled it out only once in the past [REDACTED] and that was to answer Ruby's challenge.

Still not entirely sure how she manifested a corporeal titanic being without so much as having a lick of physical abilities but she tried not to think about it.

So with few options left other than bashing her brains into the nearest wall, she hopped, skipped, and jumped over the wide street, and walked up to the infernal machine. It chimed as if to welcome her and she suddenly had the image of a disembodied hand and a door appear in her mind. Okay, slightly more annoying than just a melody but considering she only communicated with hand signs, she let it slide.

The moment she knocked, the wooden door opened up in a blinding blast of light. Thanks, mystery machine, try and blind people less. After she blinked through the sunspots, she took in a rather large room that couldn't possibly fit within the confines of the box. The music actually cut off entirely as she realized that, becoming a windchime both in sound and the image in her head. While she didn't speak png or jpeg, there also wasn't exact iconography for amusement.

She took a step back, leaned over to the side to confirm it wasn't some sort of illusion, poking the box and then taking a quick loop around it before shrugging for the benefit of whoever was inside. The lack of any verbal language between them wasn't lost on her to the point it almost satisfied and made her smile. For so long she had to either carry a scroll or use a hand to communicate with others. Besides, it wasn't the first time she'd ever seen or even been inside a pocket dimension, just the first one contained within an easily accessible three-dimensional object.

It was almost definitely on purpose.

The chimes changed to a low undulating hum when she stepped into the room. From an initial glance, it looked incredibly dingy, raw metal combined with circular lights strewn across a dome ceiling to make it all look industrial. Yet it was warm, contradicting everything her eyes saw.

There wasn't anyone to greet her yet she didn't expect anyone who badgered her into coming here after tracking several streets away to make themselves vulnerable. The image and sound of windchimes reappeared, mocking her about the assumption she made and she thought of a volume dial turning down, letting the entity know its intrusion wasn't welcome.

It beeped dejectedly yet she felt the presence of music and images disappear to a quiet drone just on the outside of her senses, waiting to converse eagerly.

The central console in the circular room was an absolute mess of control systems, everything from an ancient rotary phone to a toy hammer strewn about the hexagon. A central column shaft pierced the ceiling and floor through it, containing some sort of contraption she last saw within a nuclear reactor core. No fuel as her shields weren't under constant radiation assault.

A warning screech echoed in her ears as she attempted to press a button, every light turning a dangerous red. She thought of an image of a question mark and the entity responded with a series of disturbing beeps meant to convey confusion and then their planet with a red dot, probably signifying itself. Another image of her pressing the button moved the dot to another part of the planet yet she couldn't for the slightest see what determined where that location was in spatial-temporal terms on any of the screens.

She let it know she couldn't read the circular language strewn across every screen and she got a return image in response of a tall man in a brown suit and sneakers of all things. Not nice Oxfords or Derbys but casual ratty sneakers. So this ship wasn't meant for her and already had a pilot.

That thought got swiftly rebutted as she realized she'd broadcast that in return, windchimes playing briefly and then turning into an Uno reverse card of all things. The pilot wasn't actually the pilot then but more of a guideline or unwilling passenger who got dragged along.

Still, she initially just came over to get the music to stop playing and now spent the time arguing with someone she couldn't see in a control room she couldn't touch without said entity getting mad and spamming mental images at her. The now familiar chimes returned with a vengeance, this time with the central console appearing and then refusing to leave the forefront of her mind. She dared not kick it out of the potential for the psionic to wreak havoc on her mind and take away the sanctity of her mind, the chimes disappearing and a somber piano playing. A golden thread wove from the console and danced along the room within the mental projection, swirling into many shapes.

She didn't focus on that though, feeling the omnipotent and omniscient power thrumming along those threads. It threatened to overwhelm her mind, a mind that had already seen universes born and burn with impunity. This entity could shatter a mortal within mere seconds at full strength without even meaning to. She forced the image away, harshly shoving the entity aside and getting a set of pitiful drones in response. Her legs failed her at the scant memory of the golden threads, collapsing to her knees on the harsh metallic grid surrounding the console. The illusions keeping her shields and armor in place shimmered in response to the detected threat, the entity crooning to answer her and sending various images she could only interpret as comforting.

Very rarely did she encounter anything that could begin to threaten her, and with her paranoid avoidance of any psychic empires, those threats became almost entirely physical in nature. She wiped the tears of frustration from her eyes. So many [REDACTED], so many enemies slain, so many civilizations raised with many more leveled into shadows of history, and still, she had to bow to this one. For all the faults in her DNA, inherited from the moment of her birth, psionic abilities remained the ideas of fantasy. Very rarely did Semblances ever develop to affect minds, a genetic quirk keeping the massive potential for growth and damage from their hands, and she hesitated to modulate her chromosomes on the high chance she irreparably damaged her illusions.

It was a great boon Ozpin and Salem used her as the genetic template for humanity after their ascension to godhood, inadvertently keeping that away from their destructive tendencies.

She staggered to a stand while the psionic chimed away in her mind, attempting to encourage her in its weird way of images and noises. She batted them aside, pulling herself onto one of the seats with sweat running down her forehead. All this power, this crushing and oppressive power contained within this machine, a sentient being that could annihilate all life with a fractional effort… and it spent the time and effort consoling her. She didn't understand it, much like how she could never understand Ruby.

Ruby could and would frequently clash with her advisors and the Councils of Remnant to eventually get her way after exerting her pressure, but she didn't need to. She alone could decimate every politician with ease, doubly so with her pet assassin in Blake under for command. She was everything Cinder Fall attempted to become, a monarch in all but name, wielding so much power she could subjugate the planet at the height of her reign, yet she clung to the ideals instilled in her by her training and her team, keeping to ruling her Hunters with an iron fist.

Maybe irrationality kept them sane or maybe their rationality was different, despite how she so often claimed similarities between them. They might have been reborn in similar circumstances but they each developed their own personalities, hers to cause chaos and keep life in check, and Ruby's to protect life and instill order.

Perhaps that was why they so often clashed together and kept coming back with almost fanatical zeal to one another.

The noise and images stopped altogether, leaving her with her own thoughts for a good moment. Why? She asked, unable to think of any image to push to the entity and resorting to Basic, a language that survived no matter where or when she went. In return, a warmth wrapped itself around her, bolstering her to move. A door appeared in her mind and she heard it open off to the side.

She forced herself to move, letting the warmth overtake her for the moment, choosing to trust in it and taking the energy it offered freely. The hallway that opened up for her followed the same scheme as the central room but she didn't particularly mind it. While she basked in luxuries without shame, there was a time and place for everything. Curiously enough even with that thought, she got a series of angry noises and she instinctively apologized with a hurried reply.

The hallway meandered for a bit, certain rooms closed off to her view and she didn't fault it. She was a stranger who didn't know her but could keep suppressed at the slightest hint of a threat. Again the pitiful chimes made their way into her mind like earworms, letting her know it wouldn't use her power like that but she had no reason to trust it.

She eventually found her way into an enormous library, reality warped heavily to fit several floors together within this small box on top of however many other rooms it had scattered about the place. A comfortable chaise illuminated by a lamp waiting for her with a cup of barely steaming tea on a nearby stand. A book rested on her seat and she set it aside for now, glancing at the title and scowling at it.

It read "Interdimensional Engineering for Dummies".

The chimes returned before she felt the entity leave her entirely, leaving her alone.

She barely managed to finish drinking her tea before sleep overwhelmed her, a faint melody soothing her nightmares away just as the darkness claimed her. She barely noticed the blanket appearing out of nowhere, curling up with it.


Fate seemed to love taunting him, dangling a potential companion after so cruelly ripping Rose from him those many weeks ago. He'd tried to vacation across the multiple resort worlds to forget about her but she never failed to appear in the reflection of a window, or the foam of his coffee, or the various clouds, or the random bag of crisps thrown his way. She taunted him the worst in his dreams, stuck behind the wall of Canary Wharf in another dimension, the price he paid for not only her survival but the survival of both parallel universes.

He let the Tardis drift off in space for hours without any set course, letting her manage avoiding any celestial bodies. She didn't particularly seem to mind, faintly brushing against his mind to reassure him she was still there. She had had a different bond with Rose, perhaps the only bond she'd ever willingly formed with a human being after the countless years of accepting his companions. Accepting the Vortex had doomed his previous reincarnation yet she had done it to save him from their worst enemy, letting Rose take her in fully.

It had nearly killed her but they had little choice in the end and they had succeeded.

The Tardis mourned in her own way, a sad violin playing underneath the usual chatter she made on a day-to-day basis, notifying him of a distress signal he needed to answer or a new flavor of ice cream she wanted him to discover. Most of the time it was because she felt it was his duty as a Time Lord but now he knew it was a gentle reminder to help him move forward. Not forget about Rose entirely but just get him through the moping phase to the point he could take care of himself and go back to being the Doctor. It was always like this with every companion lost, either to time or death or voluntary withdrawal.

Martha Jones was a refreshing change from the other people he'd come across. She asked the correct questions when the Judoon scooped up the hospital and took the existence of alien life fairly well for the relatively isolationist humans in the early 21st century, but most importantly, that spark of curiosity shone brightly within her. She'd learned and adapted to what'd been thrown at her, unafraid to push forward and stand up for herself. That was what he needed to keep him traveling and he couldn't deny her at least one trip for her performance.

His faithful machine did most of the adjustments, guiding him back to the same day of the incident, just a few hours afterward to the late evening. He found her just leaving the bar after a spat with her family and he offered her a trip, just one trip to astound and amaze her. She initially didn't believe his claims to travel in time and space but a quick jaunt to the past cemented her belief, another point in her favor when all she did was ask a few questions instead of running away in fear and denial.

She even passed the test of pedantic banter, trading witty barbs just as well as any of his earlier companions while stirring at memories best left suppressed. He gave a little performance of flipping many levers and thumbing more buttons until finally, the Tardis lurched into the Time Vortex when he released the handbrake. Through the absolute chaos of the shaking control, the Tardis swung around a monitor to face Martha, eschewing the ingrained Gallifreyan for the more widely used English.

"Umm, Doctor?" She called out amidst a violent shake that forced her to grab onto the console for dear life. "You said you didn't have a crew."

"Nope." He yelled back succinctly, dodging another monitor as it swung around on the central column. "I really should considering a Tardis is supposed to have six but I seem to manage. Rose helped out now and then when…" He tapered off sadly, refusing to meet her gaze before immediately switching to a happy smile she could tell was fake. "Why do you ask?"

"There's someone in your library." She passed the monitor to his side, taking refuge in a seat and clinging to the guard rails.

"Wot?!" He exclaimed, fishing a pair of glasses from his pockets and brandishing them. Sure enough, there on the screen, displayed in English for Martha's benefit, showed the life signs of everyone on board. He growled at his cheeky Tardis, switching the settings back to Gallifreyan. She registered two heartbeats within the main control room, well technically three but she could differentiate those, and another resting heartbeat in the main library, extremely low but solid. "That's impossible."

He sprinted from the room about as well as a fledgling bird, careening harshly into several walls until he could stagger against the hallway. A couple more violent shakes made him lose his footing until he ended up sprawled on his back on the carpeted library floor. A floor that wasn't shaking due to his erratic piloting and kept explicitly stable by his Tardis's will. Martha came tumbling just after him, laughing all the while at the rollercoaster of motion. The change from the violence and the quiet stifled her, wonder for the huge room overtaking her. She climbed to her feet and immediately went to the nearest bookshelf, finding hundreds of titles just in one area with almost all of them written in something decidedly not English.

The Doctor groaned at his decidedly shaky journey here, thinking he had finally gotten used to his own flying only for the Tardis to throw a tantrum for his renegade treatment of her. She usually didn't mind but even she felt Rose's loss and was allowed her moments. Half the time she flew herself so why she felt the need to punish him escaped him. He dusted his suit off and finally noticed the chaise tucked off to the side of the door with a discarded blue blanket folded neatly at the foot of it.

The hairs on the back of his neck, a prey instinct that evolved in the early years of the Time Lord species and one eventually copied by millions of others. He spun about to find what or who could've evoked such a response, unable to spot an obvious figure, and then immediately connected to the Tardis, asking if she'd known about this intruder and only got a giggle in reply. Not a windchime sound or image of a laughing girl but an actual soundbite of a woman's laughter.

A pair of pink eyes gleamed at him from a corner of the library specifically darkened to hide them, thrumming with light and energy that had him taking a step back. He was immediately on guard, glancing over to make sure Martha was safe and he sighed in relief she didn't seem to draw this intruder's attention. "Hello there." He brokered, stepping forward with his hands raised non-threateningly. "I usually don't have any stowaways, in fact, I think you're the first one I've ever had."

A small woman stepped from the shadows, her head cocked in curiosity. She carried no visible weapons, carried nothing even remotely threatening, except for a white marker board. He actually felt the need to crouch to speak to her with her not even reaching a meter and a half in height. She wore an odd ensemble of clothing: a short evening jacket with a leotard underneath all tucked into a pair of dark jeans and white calf-high boots. Her hair caught his attention the most, a multi-colored trifecta of brown, white, and pink that wasn't dyed and seemed to shimmer slightly where they collided with one another.

Most humans didn't walk on the balls of their feet, ready to move, nor did she make the slightest sound with her footfalls.

She wrote on her board instead of answering him directly, a simple "hello" scrawled in all caps for easy legibility. She didn't stop moving towards him all the while, stalking up and making a few passes around, judging him. That was all he could think about her actions and movements, feeling quite uncomfortable under her wandering gaze. "Hello, I'm the Doctor."

My name is Neo. She hastily wiped her previous message with a convenient magnetic eraser and wrote her reply. Again she wiped the board clean and wrote in a smaller, more concise script, the Doctor patiently waiting for her to finish. I'm not a stowaway. I knocked and was let in.

"Most people can't even see my ship but you not only saw her but she actually let you in." He mused, gently taking her whiteboard and doodling a smiley face on it. She brightened visibly at his willingness to connect with her, doodling her own set of emojis along the border. "You can't speak, can you?" He added morosely, those big brown eyes staring down at her. She swatted him playfully and mimed a knock which he understood immediately. Of course, she let someone in because they just knocked, that was just like his Tardis.

Again she wiped the board and scribbled down her answer. She refused to leave me alone with her incessant music. He blinked several times at her message, glancing back and forth between her and her board. It took several seconds for it to register in his mind.

"You can hear her?" He exclaimed, shocked.

She has a gender? Neo furrowed her brows. It wasn't like Basic actually had a gender-neutral pronoun, deferring to the plural they/them whenever needed. She didn't like that on principle, refusing to term a singular entity but she could understand the other gender-neutral 'it' could be slightly more offensive. Still, she didn't particularly mind the philosophical conundrum of referring to the sentient machine as an 'it', especially if it didn't seem to mind and understood she was using it to avoid an inaccuracy rather than insult it by referring to it as an object. I refer to her as an 'it' and she doesn't mind.

"The last time someone did that, she got incredibly vexed, bollocks." He trailed off, scratching the back of his head. "Well, you're here now. She saw something in you so you can stay, for now, I guess. Have another guest on board right now. Come along." He spat out all rapid-fire, gesturing off to the other side of the library and disappearing into a flutter of a brown suit and worn trainers. She forgot how absolutely annoying the British version of Basic was to listen to, smooth as a worn pebble, but incredibly aggravating to hear some of the words they used or created.

His other guest was a young, tall woman. Fairly attractive by earth standard but nothing in comparison to her Ruby. Oh, the stories she could tell of Ruby and her beauty: her crimson hair maintained short to allow her ease of movement, the muscles and Aura that allowed her to carry Crescent Rose, a symbol of her reign, and slaughter those who stood in her way, and those delectable eyes… those orbs containing the might of the void that could strip away her defenses with just a glance, delivering torment and nightmares. The horrors those eyes contained tingled her every nerve and she almost, almost liked her better than ice cream.

She'd find her way back to her… and this universe would burn if it stood in her way.