"So, you ready?" you ask, presenting Ruby with your sword.

"Heck yeah, I am! I've been wanting to play with other weapons since I GOT here!" The tiny tinker eagerly accepts your sword and places it onto a workbench. Reaching into a pair of thick gray overalls, she withdraws a screwdriver and a magnifying glass. Immediately, she begins inspecting everything about your Synstylae close-up, going over every inch of treated steel.

"Well?"

"Hmm… Looking at it closely, I should still be able to make it shorter and add some stuff, but maybe not everything. Some extra bits might mess with the balance, and it's already off as it is… Give me some time and I'll make it just right for a guy like you!"

"Alright, thanks!" you say, watching Ruby get to work. Luckily, she seems to forget that you're even there, allowing her to work diligently without her social anxiety kicking in. If there was one thing about Ruby that you knew, it was that she had trouble being watched like this, but you guess tinkering was the one thing she threw herself into.

You spend some time watching Ruby screw, unscrew, hammer, and tink away at your weapon. Though she was happy to do it alone, you feel you better watch just so you wouldn't be left completely blank when you did your own tinkering; you hope to be a good huntsman one day, so proper weapon maintenance was on your list of things to learn.

Though Ruby kept pulling out all sorts of foreign contraptions you don't recognize, you pick up the basics of tinkering with weapons. It helps that you have a comparatively simple sword to her intricate scythe, but you learn how to pull it apart and piece it together, at least. You didn't need to do much maintenance wise, considering it was just a slab of steel with a trigger, but Ruby goes over the slightest mechanisms over and over again, figuring it all out.

Over the course of an hour or so, you watch Ruby take your sword apart. She manages to separate blade from hilt from mechanisms from ports with a few deft touches, gliding over the metal and bindings without a second thought. It's only when she starts putting things into different things that you start to lose it; you can tell sword from the scabbard, but Ruby starts throwing in things with engines and model numbers and sequences until it's a bunch of mechanical gibberish. The real surprise doesn't come until she grabs the long red blade and takes it over to some form of tool in the workshop. After a few measurements, she places it in a vice and gets to work.

Without so much as a word, Ruby uses the workshop tool to somehow slice your blade almost in two. You feel like that was kind of a big deal, considering that she just broke the sword essentially, but she immediately takes the point-end and puts it to an automated grindstone. You watch, too stunned to ask what her plan was, leaving the expert to her work. Thousands of sparks fly from the flame Dust-treated blade as the sander sloughs of bits of metal, collected into a neat pile via a slot system.

When your sword blade's top half reaches whatever threshold Ruby wanted it to reach, she takes the bottom half of the blade and finds another tool. She compares the size of the two halves, marks the overlap, and activates the tool, which begins hollowing out the bottom half of the blade. A few minutes later, and Ruby presents you with your new blade, the top half resting inside the bottom; it's far shorter than previously, but she also demonstrates how it would extend to just shy of the full length it was after she puts in a mechanism.

"And once I add in this…" Ruby says, showing you some sort of track that can slide up and down, "It can extend with a new trigger. I'm pretty much going to have to modify the handle completely so it can support it, so would you mind gathering the shaved metal please?"

You nod as Ruby gets to work installing the slide track onto your extending blade. She instructs you to place the Dust-steel shavings into another tool, which begins heating up to melt them. By the time she finishes the extending track and mechanism, you have a small cylindrical ingot of treated metal to repurpose. Ruby instructs you to place it into a lathe, which further refines it into a spike.

"Okay, and now I'm almost done with the handle…" Ruby says, holding up the sun-themed guard of your previous handle. She installs something or other into it, then attaches it to the blade "Gimme the pommel." After you hand her the red spike, she bores a hole into it, then attaches it to the bottom of a cylinder. "And… one more thing…" Ruby takes the spiked cylinder and attaches it to a matching piece, which she then screws and nails into the handle. "Done!"

"Really?" you ask, surprised weapons were so… modular. Ruby wasn't so much making changes to a weapon so much as installing new software. Everything was easily swapped out, and you didn't have to touch any settings on the workshop machines, so the weapons here must be made to be customized to the nth degree, and standardized to some degree.

"Yup! Go ahead and try!" Ruby hands you your newly improved blade. "I couldn't put in everything because it would ruin the balance, but you should be able to do a lot more with it!"

Immediately, you feel that your sword is lighter. Quite a bit of the blade had been removed so it could be compacted, but it was still a pretty heavy item. The shorter size of the blade made it so much easier to swing around, especially with one hand; a few practice swings already let you know that you're much, much faster than swinging the two-handed version. As if on cue, Ruby instructs you to, "Pull the bigger trigger!" Once you do, the blade top shoots out of the bottom half, doubling the length of the weapon to a more familiar great sword size with an accompaniment of sparks

"Woah," you exclaim as you suddenly have your great sword back with a powerful click. You feel the weight of your weapon focus towards the top half of the sword, meaning that this form was now well-suited to heavy, arcing swings that would carry all the weight to a powerful cleave. You pull the trigger again, causing the blade to slide back into itself, returning it to a manageable length. "That's awesome!"

"Yup!" Ruby says, bouncing. "The weight will be a bit different than what you're used to, but you're still used to a great sword, so you still have access to it! Plus, you can swap mid-strike, too!"

You swing a few times in the short sword mode, then do an overhead strike, pulling the trigger partway through. The blade extends, the extra weight and momentum easily enough to break a defense or carve a monster.

"Oh, oh, pull the other trigger!"

You happily oblige Ruby and flick the other trigger. The handle shoots out with a significant force, doubling the length of it. It's now far easier to wield two-handed, and the spike Ruby added would make an excellent captive-bolt style driver. You start doing more practice swings, switching in an out of the one-handed and two-handed modes of your sword. It immediately feels a bit more natural, especially now that the sword can be moved easily with just one hand; you're significantly faster, but you keep your heavier striking ability with the extending blade.

And of course…

You pull the third and final trigger, wreathing your blade in flame. You've gotten used to the heat from battle, and you notice nothing is lost in the transition to a trick weapon. The flames coat the blade in both forms, greatly increasing your capabilities in a battle.

With a final few swings, you return your sword to its compacted form. Instinctively, you motion to put it back into its sheath, but remember that it was in the table, not your back.

"It's okay! I do that all the time training," Ruby reassures. "I still need to mod your sheath. It won't be able to do anything, but making it fit the smaller form would allow you to wear it in your hip, which is a bit easier to draw."

"That sounds great!" You test putting your sword away at your side rather than your back. It's immediately apparent that doing so would allow you to draw faster, and the shorter sword length would prevent you from having to put too much effort into retrieving it. "Everything seems improved! Thanks so much!"

"Aww, it was nothing…" Ruby says, shuffling in her step. She grabs her hood and covers her blushing face with it. "I just knew you needed the help, so…"

"No, really, Ruby. I can't wait to have another go at training."

"Well, I'm glad I can help! You'll catch up to Yang in no time!"

"You're no slouch, either. I'll aim for Jaune at the moment, then set my sights on the experts."

Ruby hides in her hood again, unused to taking compliments.

You smile at Ruby, hoping to help her get over this sort of thing. She was far too shy for someone as skilled as her at being a huntress; even in the brief times you've seen her fight, she was already leagues better than most of the other students, even ignoring you and Jaune. Heck, her, Yang, and Weiss all seemed a step above. You haven't seen much of Blake (something you hope to fix), but you imagine she's pretty good herself, and her skill with such a complex weapon was unparalleled.

After a breath, Ruby calms down a bit. Even though her cheeks are still a bit flushed, she asks, "So, while you're here… You said you weren't very good at weapon maintenance, right?"

You look dejectedly at the floor. So far, you've been coasting on the fact that your weapon was limited in its complexity, being A Big Sword and nothing else. Your only maintenance up until this point was sharpening it and making the igniter could pull. "I'm not. And now that I have a lot more to go over…"

"Come here, I can help you out. I needed to work on Crescent Rose, so you can watch me do a bit of work and then I can help you with yours."

"That'd be great." You walk over to Ruby, who hefts her shockingly heavy scythe onto the workbench. Gods, even though you've felt the power boost Aura gives you and felt how easy it was to swing your great sword with it, Ruby's weapon looked like it weighed as much as her. Though she was maybe 5' tall, a hundred pounds was a hundred pounds, and judging from the sound her weapon made when it impacted the bench, it was minimum enough to shatter bone if dropped on a foot. How she held it at all was astounding. Her Aura control must be incredible!

"Okay!" Ruby says, grabbing a chair and scooting up surprisingly close to you. It seems she forgets a lot of her shyness when she's working, as you're now basically rubbing elbows with her as she starts explaining her mechanisms. "So this is the firing mechanism. It activates via this trigger here, which…"

You spend the next while watching Ruby disassemble and reassemble her weapon, pointing out all the complex stuff going on inside of it. She's a surprisingly good teacher, as she quickly skips over the more complicated, customized mechanisms she added while slowly going over the basic stuff in pretty clear wording. You easily start to put names to plates and actions to triggers, and quickly catch on to the things going on in Synstylae. You leave the workshop with a pretty good grasp on how to tear apart your weapon and fix it, plus keep it from jamming and stuff like that. You're very, very thankful that such a complex thing about this work could be put into words you understand. You thank Ruby, but not after Yang drops in to remind you that you owe the two dinner; it's a small price to pay for such an in-depth lesson, and Yang even went out of her way to shadowbox with you, so it ought to even out.