Team SALTY

Chapter 4

"This, apparently," she answered Ruby's earlier question once she got close to the group, simultaneously dispelling the hover.

Toshika allowed her hand to flop downwards, her ears following suit. A slight pout erupted on her face. "Really? Making me carry you?" she asked Yache, trying to sound offended.

It didn't really work, but she tried.

Lorem, on the other hand, was looking at Yache with something akin to interest. She has some form of magic? He marveled at the thought. I wonder if she could help me with my magecraft experiments...

Ruby stood frozen, staring at Yache with wide eyes. Which was mutual, though on Yache's side it was mostly unintentional. She just had naturally wide eyes, okay?

"You're a spider," Ruby helpfully stated.

"Guilty as charged," Yache agreed in the same voice.

"And I'm a fox, Ruby, welcome to Remnant," Toshika deadpanned, ruffling her hair.

Ruby immediately snapped out of it and whacked Toshika's hand away. "Hey! It just surprised me, okay?" she fired off at the fox Faunus, then looked to Yache. "Sorry, you just- I haven't seen any bug Faunus before."

"Arachnid actually. But either way, no problem," she shrugged. "I'm more interested in certain words that I seem to have heard being said. About sufficiency of velocities, specifically," she said, looking across the three other members of this group, barring Blake and Weiss, whom she already knew. Sort of. Kinda.

Ruby frowned and glared suspiciously at Toshika. "You suuure there's no conspiracy?"

Toshika winked her way and gestured to the four of them that hadn't been there in the original timeline. "Conspiracy no. Cool things to come, yes."

Malachite sighed. "So much for trying to be subtle."

"Subtlety and I belong in the same paragraph as the word Not," Toshika fired back.

Malachite gave her the most deadpan stare he could, but he just received an at this point almost trademark grin back. He sighed again, shook his head, and holding a hand out to the spider girl he took the initiative to introduce the group. "Anyway, I'm Malachite Seolfor, and these are Weiss Schnee, Ruby Rose, Lorem Ipsum, Toshika Corona, Huey, and Blake." He gestured to each in turn, getting a wave or other sign of acknowledgement from each.

Lorem gave a lackadaisical two finger salute when his name was said, with an accompanying "Yo!"

"Sup, spoder," Toshika said, waving Yache's way. Not just with a hand, but with three tails. "Welcome to the nuthouse. Mind the cinnamon roll and the clueless man." She pointed out Ruby and Malachite in turn. "Also, we have ice cream." One of her tails pointed at Weiss, ensuring it was out of the heiress' view.

Weiss' response was a stiff nod, which was at least better than the frown he had been half expecting toward the obvious Faunus… assuming she actually was a Faunus and not something completely different, of course. Malachite had never heard of a Faunus with that many animal traits, after all. The same applied to Toshika, actually. He assumed it was because of a paperwork error somewhere, similar to what had happened to his own paperwork when he had been setting up his reincarnation.

"Hi! I'm Ruby Rose, and this is Crescent Rose!" Ruby cheerfully introduced herself and her truly massive scythe to Yache, whirling the latter off her back, mechashifting it midair, and planting the blade straight into the concrete.

Malachite winced before asking, "Ruby, how often do you have to pay for property damages?"

Ruby looked to Malachite and raised her eyebrows. "Huh?" she asked, confused. "What damage?"

Malachite just stared, silently judging, at where Crescent Rose's blade was embedded in the walkway.

"I've likely got her beat by a fair bit anyway, even if it was just once." Yache responded in her place. "Don't ask. Will be funnier if you find out yourself."

Ruby looked down at where Malachite was looking and jerked Crescent Rose out of the cobblestone, revealing the perfectly smooth, undamaged material beneath. She looked back at him and gave him a tiny, adorable smirk.

"Damn it, I can't believe I forgot about that," Malachite griped, palming his face. "Sorry about that, back home, they didn't build the roads with the slight mix of earth and gravity dust most roads use, so they don't repair themselves. Dealing with all the minor repairs from people doing that got annoying fast."

Ruby brought her free hand to her mouth and gasped, horrified. "That poor concrete!"

The spider Faunus chuckled and folded her arms before continuing. "Either way, I'm Yache Ruhm. Pleased to meet you all. I'd show off my weapon as well, but, uhh…" she shrugged, "God Eater's still a work in progress. I have a backup, but it ain't that impressive."

As she said that, she looked at the three people here who clearly weren't entirely… normal, in more ways than one. "As a side note, I think that we need to speak properly about all of this when we're done with the initiation," she stated, frowning, "Because I have no idea what the hell's going on. Or why, for that matter."

"Welcome to the ignorance party," Blake spoke up, her head still in her book. "I've got no idea what's going on either."

Toshika grinned her way and shrugged. "You know what they say about curiosity," she teased the hidden kitty.

Said cat Faunus gave her a dark, entirely unamused look, to which the fox Faunus just smirked back.

Lorem chuckled. "Well this is going to be a fun year." he grinned. "Shouldn't we be making our way to the… was it the ballroom or the auditorium?"

"There's a difference?" Toshika snarked back, tossing her hair over her shoulders. "How many huge, empty rooms can Beacon have, anyways?" She gestured around to the huge campus, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. "I mean it's way bigger than on the screen, yeah, but still. Three? Four? At max?"

Blake's ears twitched under her bow and she looked up, finally having a use for herself in the ongoing conversation. Without letting go of her book with her hand, she used the other one to dig her scroll out of her pocket and flip it sideways so she could use it. A couple of moments later, she had the answer. "Seven, apparently."

Toshika found her momentum cancelled with the abrupt stop of gale-force winds hitting a passenger jet. "...Oh."

"...So which huge empty room do we go to?" Lorem asks. "I'd like to get there before we need to be there." It would be nice to be early for once…

Weiss pulled out her own scroll and began looking through it. "We should have a good half an hour to get there," she stated. "The opening remarks won't be starting for another forty-five minutes."

Malachite nodded, following along with Weiss' reasoning. "That'll give us plenty of time to find advantageous positions for the speech and meet with anyone prominent enough to network with immediately."

Weiss continued, apparently caught up in the explanation. "Anyone who can't be recognized on sight doesn't need to be courted before making additional observations."

Toshika turned to Weiss, looking very surprised. "...Huh," she lamented, glancing up and down Weiss' body as if there was some secret that she'd just become aware of, but in actuality attempting to verify that the woman in front of her was really Weiss Schnee.

Weiss' query was hesitant. "...What?"

"That's smart, makes sense, and has some merit," Toshika explained. She leaned over and peered at the wielder of Myrtenaster. "Are you sure you're Weiss Schnee?"

"Excuse me?" Weiss asked, obviously affronted. "Are you calling me a fraud?"

"Really, Toshika?" Malachite cut in with a shake of his head before Weiss could do more than bristle. "At this point I can't tell if you're trolling or serious."

Toshika blinked in his direction, tilting her head to the side. "There's a difference?" she asked, echoing her earlier words.

The green clad youth sighed. "Why am I not surprised," he muttered. "Why wouldn't the heiress of a Remnant-wide super company be smart and make valid points?"

Next to him, Weiss nodded, "Thank you."

Toshika raised an eyebrow his way, turned to look Weiss over again, and returned her disbelieving gaze to Malachite. "Two words, bro," she declared, throwing up a tail instead of her fingers for each one. "Uptight. Princess. Who hasn't been given the Speech of Ports yet." She screwed up her eyes and looked to the sky, sticking out her tongue. "Okay that's actually eleven words, but still."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Malachite replied. "But Weiss has been perfectly cordial with me, once we got over our family tensions."

Toshika looked at him like he was nuts, but then she remembered. "Ah, right, for a moment there I forgot that you decided memory erasure was a good plan," she lamented, sighing dramatically. "Woe is I for I must carry us through the darkness of ignorance!"

"What are you two talking about?" Weiss asked, looking between Malachite and Toshika.

"Based on how Toshika has been acting," Malachite began, "it looks like we'll be explaining things to all three of you, but I'd rather wait until after team selections, if we're going to be sharing. It'll save time if we don't need to repeat ourselves however many times."`

"We could do that," Toshika sarcastically fired back, "or we could be like a certain wizard and keep our potential teammates in the dark! That'll go fine, I'm positive."

"I'm… going to assume this would make sense if I knew what you're talking about," Malachite stated dryly. "And I was hoping to keep things as quiet as possible, not keep teammates in the dark."

"Quiet," Toshika repeated. She glanced at Yache, Lorem, Ruby, Weiss, down to her own chest, and then back to Malachite. "Us. Right."

Malachite looked around at the others and had to admit defeat. "In my defense, I forgot almost everything about the rest of you guys… and I meant keeping things quiet from, presumably, the wizard you mentioned and certain other parties until it's too late for them to do anything about it."

"The moment we arrived is when that ship sailed," Toshika declared assuredly, smirking. "Honestly, and I know you do know this one, we're all extreme overkill for Remnant." She pointed a tail at Yache to underscore her point. "And if sexy spoder's comments about wanton destruction are any indicator, it's likely that the wizard I'm talking about already knows some janky shit is up."

"Pretty much" Yache responded shamelessly.

"Be that as it may, that doesn't mean I want to broadcast it," Malachite stated. "I get enough attacks from people as it is without giving people another reason to come after me. The White Fang is bad enough. I don't want to deal with religious nuts, too."

Toshika's smirk morphed into a gigantic grin, signaling the teasing that was about to arrive. "So that's how it manifested? Neat," she commented. "Anyways, that ship will also sail by the time we're done here. You know it, I know it, and I'm pretty sure our compatriots know it too." She jutted her thumb backwards over her shoulder at Beacon itself. "They and the poor, innocent little ones on this planet are the only ones in the dark on that." She immediately winced, realizing what she'd said, and glanced at Ruby and Weiss apologetically. "No offense."

Ruby, for her part, just looked at Toshika askance. "Wuh?"

Malachite pinched the bridge of his nose, saying, "I'm sure saying that won't cause any misconceptions at all."

Weiss bristled again before abruptly calming down. "I feel like I should be offended, but I'm not quite sure why," she noted. "Nothing Toshika said is actually offensive."

"You… should probably get used to that," Malachite reluctantly suggested. "One of her favorite pastimes is provoking reactions from people."

Toshika grinned, smug satisfaction pouring from her every being, and shrugged. "It's a thing. You don't have to like the thing, hell I'd be happily surprised if you did, but you should probably at least prepare for the copious amounts of total bullshit attending battle school with me will bring. And the headaches. And feeling offended at things you don't know to be offended at. And probably having your beliefs of how the universe works taken out back and shot like Yeller."

Lorem rolled his eyes, looking very amused. "I blame you if that happens." He jokingly griped.

Ruby was following what Toshika was saying, but only for so long. Then one of those headaches her new Yang-with-fluff stand-in mentioned blossomed as she tried to actually comprehend what she'd said. "Oww," she complained, reaching up to rub her head.

Toshika immediately extended a tail to give Ruby comforting head pats, something that banished the growing headache immediately. Her tails were unbelievably soft. "Don't think on what I say too much, Rubes. Half of it's basically infohazard. The other half is fuckery. And like, thirty percent is nuggets of wisdom."

"That's… more than a hundred…" Ruby tried to protest, but she lost her will to keep talking. She melted upwards, cooing a little at the soft fluff on her head. It was actually really nice. She needed to put Zwei on her head and see if it felt the same.

While that was going on, nobody seemed to notice as Yache quietly walked up to Blake, stood to the side of her, and pulled out her scroll, apparently also beginning to read something. They looked so similar, at least in posture if not in the number of limbs, that it must have been intentional.

Blake took a moment to glance at Yache from the side, not turning her head, and snorted after she took in the spider Faunus' stance. She returned to reading her book, this time with a smile on her face.

To make sure that she knew where everything was, Yache decided to look through the Academy's map. The fact that it let her interact with Blake in her language was only a side benefit. Yache was way too aware of how confusing some universities were about their layouts. If there was something that Hogwarts got right, it's that sometimes it felt like the stairs used Maurits Escher's paintings as inspiration for their geometry.

So, apparently Beacon has an auditorium-sized sauna. Which is also sometimes used as an informal smithing room, sometimes at the same time. And to reach it, you have to go up the stairs near auditorium 23, then down the stairs near auditorium 37, and then use the stairs that bypass the second floor and go down to the first floor immediately. Okay, makes sense.

Yache only noticed that she'd been quietly mumbling all of this when she looked up for a moment and saw Blake look at her with a raised eyebrow. Not quite knowing how to eyeroll with five eyes, Yache instead settled for a huff.

"Experience", she explained to Blake, relaying that after years of navigating such places, she was just used to weirdness with elevation and other such architectural inconsistencies. Blake's eyebrow slowly went down, and they both returned to their devices.

On the other side of the group, Ruby nearly purred into the fluffy fox tails serving as her standing cushion.

Toshika had the smuggest grin to end all smug grins on her face. "I think I win the floof contest," she nonchalantly declared, perking up her fox ears one at a time. She accidentally whacked one of her Balls with the tip of her left ear. The wince that erased her smug was pained and agonizing, but not because of any kind of injury. Her Aura prevented that.

No, it was because when the round metal met an unstoppable object, the Ball lost and rang like a gong.

Ruby jumped straight up out of the floof cocoon and had Crescent Rose in a combat stance in less time than it took Toshika to blink. "WHERE'S THE BAD GUY!?" she shrieked.

Blake startled out of her silent-off with Yache, then winced in actual pain as the high pitch of the tiny ringing metal pierced her sensitive, totally hidden from everyone ears underneath her bow. "That was pleasant," she deadpanned. There was no way she'd be able to read her book now. She sighed to herself and put the novel away in her bag.

"Very pleasant," Yache agreed. Unlike Blake, she continued to look into her scroll, apparently used to sudden loud noises from her past life. That is, until she looked up for a moment and stuck a finger in her earhole, wiggling it a bit. "Okay, seriously though. That was loud enough that I'm now partially deafened. Again."

"I didn't even hit it that hard! With a fluffy ear! Come the fuck on!" Toshika complained.

Malachite looked at the orb critically. "That sounds pretty flat. You should work on the harmonics some. It'd be less irritating that way."

"Maybe add an actual bell inside each of them," added Yache. "Two benefits: better harmony when you smack into something, and you get to annoy your enemies with your jingle balls."

Toshika stood there for a few moments, stunned, while a smile slowly grew on her face. She turned to Yache and threw up her hands. "Haha, excellent!" she abruptly cackled. "You can still pun!"

Ruby groaned in pain, planting her scythe into the ground just so she could bang her head on the shaft.

"This is going to be an interesting year…" Lorem muttered before looking over at Toshika. "Maybe have different tones for them, and try to make music while you kill Grimm?"

"Fantastic idea, Swordguy!" Toshika heartily agreed, bobbing her head. "I wonder if I can get them to vibrate with my Semblance…" One of her Balls drifted down towards her hands and she started to look slightly constipated, sticking her tongue out the side of her mouth in concentration.

Blake saw the fox begin yet another tangent and realized the… whatever this group she'd somehow found herself included in were doing wouldn't end soon unless someone ended it for them. "We need to actually go into Beacon if we're planning on joining the school this year, guys," she helpfully piped up.

The rest of them, excepting Yache, still being a fellow quiet person next to her, focused their attention on Blake for a few quiet seconds. Despite the fact she could see them visibly considering what she said, that many eyes on her made her ears try to fold back inside her bow. The other obvious Faunus who almost seemed to revel in her animal traits in a way Blake really hadn't ever seen before was the worst, though, and not just because she somehow felt naked under the fox's gaze.

"...It would be a waste to come all this way and then miss our chance by not even going in," Malachite agreed.

Toshika pouted for a few seconds, but eventually relented. "Fiiine," she whined, dropping her… Blake refused to call her weapons what she'd named them, even in her own head.

Lorem sighed in relief. "Okay, good. I seem to have a talent for getting lost though, so if I vanish part way there, don't worry, I'll make it in time. Probably. I hope… Maybe this time I won't end up in Vacuo on my way to somewhere within five miles of Atlas…" He muttered the last bit just softly enough that Toshika, Blake, and Yache were the only ones that could hear him.

Toshika's eyes widened and she almost beamed at Lorem, a new opportunity for messing with someone located by her trolldar. The twin fluffy sensors of her needling sense locked onto him and kept pointing at him, even as she turned her entire body towards him and shifted stance into something similar to his. "You get lost that badly?" she asked, sounding innocent but only truly so to those who couldn't see the pleased look on her face, "Can you successfully navigate straight hallways, or are we going to need to hold your hand?"

Yache blinked a few times, and tore her attention away from the scroll to stare at Lorem.

"Are you, perhaps, related to a certain Masaki Andoh?" she asked half incredulously, half humorously. "Green hair, green eyes, once got so lost that he ended up on the wrong side of the world?"

Lorem stared dead ahead, staying silent, a look in his eyes that a certain red reaper had only ever seen in her uncle's before now.

Ruby, clearly the person with the highest empathy in the impromptu group, put Crescent Rose away on her back. She approached Lorem and placed a comforting hand on his arm, trying to ignore the clear muscle underneath her palm. "You okay, Lorem?" she asked softly.

For once, Toshika didn't snark. Even she knew when things were getting delicate.

Lorem gave Ruby a grateful smile, whatever past horror once more buried. "I'll be fine, thank you Ruby. It's just… something I'll need to try to work past. On the plus side, if you want me to avoid any ambushes on the way to a destination, I just need to be told to bring my team to every hostile. I do have a hard time tracking though." he said, trying to lighten the mood a little.

"...Oh my gods you're a Stormtrooper," Toshika blurted out.

Ruby whirled around and glared at Toshika, trying to get her to shut up, but that failed as soon as the fox Faunus had her realization.

"I can aim just fine, thank you very much," was Lorem's immediate reaction.

"Except at enemies by your own admission," Toshika pointed out, smugly satisfied. "Which makes you a Stormtrooper."

"My skill with firearms is not the same as my lack thereof at getting places." Lorem said, almost as if he'd said this several times before. "I can aim a weapon, I cannot follow a path. No matter how much I wish the latter weren't true…"

"...Soooo," Toshika reasoned, drawing out her word. "Your feet are Stormtroopers."

"...I wish I could deny that. I really do." came the disgruntled response. "It doesn't apply when I'm kicking someone though."

"What's a Stormtrooper?" Ruby finally asked.

A blonde, lost looking guy in lightweight armor walking by at that exact moment happened to overhear Ruby's question. Being the helpful person he was, Jaune sought to fill the little red reaper in on one of his favorite pastimes. "Stormtroopers are the guys in white armor from Star Wars. They're part of the armies of the Empire that follow around the Dark Lords of the Sith and do their malevolent, evil bidding!" he ecstatically exclaimed, turning and merging into the rough circle of unusual people. "They, uh… they're really bad at aiming, though."

Toshika noticed him, her eyebrows rose, and then he started talking. She seemed downright surprised at his knowledge. Once he was finished, she held up two tails. "Okay, one; How the hell does Jaune know what Star Wars is?" she asked.

Jaune gasped. "How do you know my name?"

Toshika looked over at him and gave him the best deadpan, unimpressed look she could. She looked back at Malachite and rolled her eyes. "You know, I can kinda see now why Lisa used an excuse. It's easier than explaining," she mused, much to Lorem's confusion.

"It also let her be even more smug," Malachite added dryly.

"True," Toshika agreed. Another turn of her head and a mere two seconds later, with a knowing smirk to her lips, the fox Faunus replied to Jaune's question. "I'm psychic."

"Yup," the green-haired youth sighed. "Just like that. Memetically vulpine grin and everything."

"Literally," Yache added, having continued reading something on her scroll by that point.

"Wait… Who's this Lisa you three are talking about?" Lorem asked, sounding immensely confused.

"One of the best girls in the multiverse," Toshika informed him. "And a downright fox." She then neglected to say anything else.

"Or the worst," Malachite added. "It really depends on who you ask, though I think most of us would approve of her, at least in some regards." Turning to Toshika, he added, "And Star Wars came out years ago."

Toshika raised her eyebrows. "Huh. That's new." Then her eyes widened and she let out a little gasp as she realized how Ozpin had managed the meme the day before. "So that's how Ozzy knew that meme!"

"It was one of the highest grossing movies, ever," Weiss confirmed. "We saw an increase in dust crystal purchases that lasted for months."

"I bet it slowed down when they realized you would need more than a single type of dust to make a lightsaber," Malachite posited.

"Yes," Weiss agreed, "and using more than one crystal in sequence that way tends to be less than advisable."

"The ones using the hard light Dust were fun," Jaune commented. Under his breath, he grumbled, "Even if my sisters never wanted to play with me."

"If only my semblance worked on things I saw on a screen…" Lorem's contribution was quiet, but he seemed a touch smug for some reason.

Toshika blinked, surprised, and turned to look askance at Lorem. "Now that I'm paying attention, how are you doing the swords thing?" she asked, confused. "Aren't you supposed to turn into a fuckoff huge firey rage dragon?"

Ruby's eyes widened and she once more beamed at the sword-toting deceivingly normal guy. "You have a fire semblance too?"

Lorem grinned. "I don't have a fire semblance, no. Toshika? I decided to change some things around, which leads me to how I do the sword thing. I am the bone of my sword after all."

Toshika stared at him for a few moments, processing what he'd just said. "...Huh," she eventually said. "Neat. Fate, Magneto Omega, or something else I've never heard of?"

"Fate, I thought that would have been obvious from the weapons I showed off. I'm just a passing-through Pseudoservant anyway, remember that."

"Well, if we weren't on the road before, we certainly are now…" Yache mumbled under her nose. She was, apparently, really invested in whatever she was currently reading.

Malachite sucked in a breath and manfully resisted the urge to massage his brow. Here he was, trying to be a somewhat normal headmaster masquerading as a student while the other three people who'd decided to come into this life apparently decided to see how much they could break the world. He hoped the last one, the one Toshika had referred to as a pet, would be somewhat reasonable, but he highly doubted it. He was sure things were only going to be getting crazier, and, as the probable designated straight man, he could already feel a building headache.

Elsewhere a certain small black fox sneezed, looking around in confusion at the sudden allergies, before returning to his computer, manifesting arms of illusion to manipulate it. Arranging for the White Fang to attack the restaurant that Winter Schnee would be at for the seventeenth time this year would be amusing, and since some of his students would be there it'd double as dodging practice. Giggling, he decided to add an assignment to his syllabus this year, in addition to his normal extra credit of pranking Ironwood, of spying on Winter. Her levels of paranoia at this point were incredibly amusing.

Toshika turned back to the group and wagged the tip of her second tail. "As I was saying, and for two…" she continued, but seemed to lose her pace. A moment later she sighed and dropped her tails. "Actually yeah no, I got nothing. Seriously, how the hell?"

Yache folded her scroll and walked back up to the main group. "I think we were talking about how we should probably go and find the room that we're supposed to go to for the reception" she reminded her. "Speaking of, I found the announcement. It should be room one oh seven, third furthest one from us on the map."

Lorem shook off his confusion and looked at the group. "I swear to whatever higher power is listening, if I don't arrive with the rest of you I'm kicking that higher power between the legs."