Chapter 12: Fresh Air

"A cantri! A cantri , amiidkhari!"

Weiss slipped easily under the Ursa's attempt at disemboweling her and rapidly thrust six times into its chest, silver steel parting black flesh with the ease of a needle through linen. The moment she felt it discorporate, she dodged through its smoke and spun to slice the head off a Beowolf that thought it could get her while her back was turned. Another Ursa tried to intercept her, and she rolled between its legs and gave it some new orifices for its trouble, before leaping up to land on a freshly-conjured staircase of glyphs and skipping up out of the melee as the horde bayed and clawed at her heels.

It'd started simply enough. Weiss and Taffeta had been coming up on the first location when they'd spotted some Beowolves prowling in the clearing ahead. Weiss had signalled a stop, and they'd hunkered down to gauge the pack's strength before proceeding.

Then, without more than a half-second of warning, something had tried to take Taffeta's head off.

Weiss hadn't even seen what did it, but it smacked her clear out into the open, and Weiss had immediately leapt from cover to protect her as she got back up. By the time she did, the two of them were quite surrounded.

Initially, Weiss had been uncertain about their odds. She'd snap-counted at least thirty Beowolves including two Alphas—one of which had presumably been what clobbered Taffeta—and around a half-dozen Ursai. There was also a lot of noise coming from the treeline, enough for at least twenty more Grimm. A pack this size could threaten an entire town.

Which was, after all, why the Kingdoms put so many resources into training Hunters.

Weiss stopped atop one of her glyphs and raised her Myrtenaster high. She spun the chamber to hardlight Dust. A blue glyph appeared over her head, beads of light spinning around the circumference. Weiss took a quick look around her, held her breath, and visualized the whole field of battle.

She wouldn't have enough for all of them, but this would certainly help.

She let go.

The beads became spears. The spears flew.

Weiss opened her eyes, observing the newly-rising clouds of black all around her. Twenty-seven. Not bad at all.

She continued firing from above as she conjured a new pathway and ran towards the far end of the field, where the sound of percussive lightning was interspersed with—

"Ei khar! Khar, khar, KHAR!"

Weiss felt her lip twitch upward as she arrived overhead. She'd suspected the shy and soft spoken Taffeta might turn out a bit more confident on the battlefield. She hadn't expected the girl to make Yang's battle-rage look like play fighting.

The comparison had some weight to it, too. Taffeta ripped and tore her way through the pack, bare-handed but for the heavy-knuckled gloves that wrapped her fists, which turned each punch into a brutal electrocution. Unlike Yang however, she had four of them, which made for a somewhat incredible maelstrom of blows raining down on anything within her reach.

One of the Alphas had circled round towards Taffeta's back. It started to charge, and Weiss launched herself downward. Skipping off a plate-sized glyph, she flipped around and slammed down onto the Alpha's back, driving her sword between its vertebrae. She jumped up again before it could slump to the ground, casting walls of ice to guard Taffeta's flanks.

Taffeta shot her a grateful glance, before letting out a roar and leaping directly into an Ursa's embrace. Latching onto its jaws with all four hands, she ripped its mouth open and materialized two more arms, which pulled a pair of handguns from the rack on her back.

"K'kisha anaz vaam," she growled, and fired down its throat.

Not to be outdone, Weiss started casting waves of fire into the horde, quickly thinning the chaff. The other Alpha, stuck between an inaccessible aerial target and a whirling ball of lightning, bullets, and death, decided on the safer option; it grabbed one of its younger compatriots by the neck and hurled it at Weiss. Weiss took the minion's head off with a single clean slice, only to find the Alpha leaping to follow. She took a step back, conjuring a battery of ice-lances, but before she could launch anything a screaming maroon blur slammed into the Alpha mid-arc. The Alpha yelped as it and its assailant careened off-course.

They both struck the ground hard, the momentum sending Taffeta rolling through the muddy grass. She scrambled back into motion, tackled the Alpha to the ground before it could recover, and wrestled the monster into a chokehold. With one final roar fit to match the beast, she wrenched her arms and snapped its neck.

Weiss redirected her ice-spears to strike down the last few Beowolves as they tried to avenge their senior. A few wet thunks, and silence fell.

Weiss dispelled her glyphs and dropped to Taffeta's side. The girl was kneeling in the mud, panting heavily as she recovered. She wiped her brow with a spectral hand, before re-racking two of her gloves and both of her handguns and dispelling the extra limbs. At some unseen command, the rack folded up to lie flat against her back.

Weiss reached out to her, and Taffeta gratefully took the assistance in hauling herself to her feet. "That… was a lot more than I expected," she wheezed, trying and failing to brush mud off her overalls.

Weiss stared at her in frank bewilderment. "Yes, and you chose about the most exhausting possible way to deal with them."

Taffeta flushed and looked away, and Weiss immediately regretted her choice of words. No matter how she fights, she's certainly not Yang. "…Quite effective though," she added lamely, searching for something to redirect the conversation. "What you were shouting before, that was Old Mantellian, wasn't it?"

Taffeta perked up, surprise quickly fading into understanding and mild embarrassment. "Oh yeah… of course you'd know." She shook herself, standing up a little straighter. "My family moved to Vale from Mantle when I was two, but my parents taught me the language as I grew up… along with some of the old traditions," she twirled a finger absentmindedly through her curly black hair. "And… well, war cries are a tradition."

A nostalgic pang hit Weiss as she busied herself with unfolding her map. "That's wonderful," she said. "I… was never allowed, when I was training in Atlas. Such displays of emotion are considered 'vulgar' or 'unprofessional,' by the nobility." She tapped a finger to her cheek in thought. "Perhaps I should get into the habit…"

Taffeta laughed a little, before quickly clipping it off. Weiss shot her a subtle smile, glad to see the girl's shoulders loosening. She focused on the map. By her reckoning, they were practically on top of the marker. "Help me find a large enough tree?"

"R-right!"

They walked to the edge of the clearing and quickly selected an old oak. Weiss manifested a series of platforms, taking out the camera drone as she did. It was a metal orb, mango-sized, with a camera on one end and an array of tiny thrust vents spread across its surface. A tiny smidge of gravity Dust lay in the center, presumably.

"Can I ask you something?" Taffeta called up to her.

Weiss found a crook in the bark and gently lodged the drone such that it would stay put for now, but would still be able to fly out when activated. "That depends on the question," she called back, stepping back down her glyph staircase and dismissing it with a snap of the fingers.

Taffeta scratched her head. "Ummm…"

She held that pause for a while. If Weiss had been a little younger (and a little less familiar with a certain rosy dolt's social anxieties) she would have raised an eyebrow or tapped her foot. Instead, she sat beside the tree and motioned Taffeta to join her. "We're ahead of schedule, and it is lovely out" she said. "We can take a short break if you like."

Taffeta tried for a smile. "That'd be good, yeah." She sat down beside Weiss, putting noticeable space between them.

The wind was a low murmur through the trees, and the sun shone lightly in the wild blue sky. The field before them was churned and scuffed and charred form battle, but even so she could see that there were flowers that had survived between the scorch marks and footprints. It was comforting, somehow; the way nature thrived despite the presence of the Grimm.

"So…" Taffeta started. "Your… girlfriends."

Weiss suppressed a sigh. "Yes?"

"How did you, um… how?"

"Can you clarify the question?"

"S-sorry!"

"It's alright, but I can't answer what you can't ask."

"Right." Taffeta stared at her boots. "How… did it happen? How did you all start dating?"

Weiss tilted her head, confusion blowing off the haze of mild annoyance. "Well," she responded, "Ruby asked me out Friday evening. I said yes. On Saturday, we decided to celebrate with a team outing, and we ended up admitting our feelings to each other that night."

"J-just like that?" Taffeta asked. There was something odd in her voice, something that it took Weiss a moment to parse out as hope.

Oh.

Weiss sighed and shook her head. "Not exactly. This weekend is when everything clicked into place, but that's hardly the whole picture. It took years of building trust, respect, and friendship to work up to this point, not that we realized where it was all heading at the time. And even with all of that, we were still incredibly lucky that our feelings lined up the way they did."

Taffeta nodded glumly. Years of social conditioning had taught Weiss how to read people, and Taffeta's emotional landscape was about as subtle as a volcano. "Why did you ask?" Weiss prodded gently, having a pretty good guess at the shape of the answer.

"It's… silly." Taffeta tangled a finger in her hair. "And I barely even know you, so I really shouldn't be bothering you with my problems."

Weiss rolled her eyes. Time to be direct, then. "Let me guess?" she said, trying to keep her tone as neutral as she could. "You've got a crush on several people. One of them is your teammate Hikari?"

Taffeta nodded, her eyes cast down.

"And Ruth?"

Another nod.

Weiss felt a sympathetic pinch in her gut. "And you haven't told them, of course."

"N-no. They're… already dating, and they're a really cute couple, and I… didn't want to break that up. I… was going to tell Hikari…" Taffeta buried her face in her hands. "…But then I panicked and told her I had a crush on Heather instead."

Weiss's lip twitched, as the last puzzle piece slotted into place. "And was that true, by chance?" she asked.

Taffeta hung her head and nodded. "I'm… such a mess," she mumbled.

Weiss sighed. Life shows us strange mirrors. She reached out and laid a hand on Taffeta's shoulder. The girl jerked, surprised, but didn't pull away.

"Falling in love makes messes out of people," Weiss said, as gently as she could. "And falling in love three times over doesn't exactly make it easier. That I know from experience."

Taffeta hunched her knees up against her chest. "I just don't know what to do. I mean… like you said, you were lucky. I'm… so scared they'll say no."

Weiss took a deep, deep breath. "I can't give you much advice, but I will say… tell them anyway."

Taffeta swallowed. "B-but—"

"You're already in love," Weiss cut her off. "They might say yes, or they might break your heart, but you'll never know unless you speak up. And… take it from someone who's been there more than once… it's better to know than to wonder."

Silence came to them, mixed with the sound of songbirds in the trees, finally returning now that the battle was over.

Not quite sure what else to say, Weiss shifted the subject. "So why were you so fixated on Yang earlier?"

"H-Hikari suggested I should 'make more gay friends,'" Taffeta mumbled. "And… I've always thought Yang's fighting was really cool, so Hikari thought I could 'get in' by asking to train with her."

"And then Orlovski paired you with me, and you figured that since I'm also obviously queer I might also have some advice or experience."

Taffeta blushed and nodded. "I'm really sorry."

"Oh stop that, you sound like Pyrrha." Weiss squeezed Taffeta's shoulder as she closed her eyes to think. "I'm sorry I can't offer more advice. Like I said, I've only been in a polyamorous relationship for a few days myself." She held up a finger before Taffeta's face was finished falling. "But! I know someone with more experience who might be able to give you some better guidance. Once this mission is done, I'll try and put you in touch with her."

Taffeta's face brightened considerably, though she remained somewhat wary. "Oh! You, don't think she'd mind?"

Weiss thought back to the crate of books in the dorm room, and the sweet little handwritten notes tucked into each and every one. "Honestly? I think she'll be delighted."

The faint crack of gunfire echoed from somewhere out in the forest, reminding them of where they were. Weiss made to rise, but Taffeta sprang up first, offering her a hand. Nonplussed, Weiss took it.

"I think it's about four miles east-southeast," Taffeta said, pulling out her map. Briefly, Weiss wondered if she'd imagined the emotional girl from a moment ago, until Taffeta hurriedly wiped her face on her arm. "We're here, right?" she said, pointing to the clearing.

Weiss nodded, slipping into the same professional cadence without comment. "Your reckoning matches mine. Let's head out now—we should have about an hour left; more than enough time if we up our pace a bit."

"Right!" Taffeta said, gathering up her gear. She paused, as she slipped her pack on. "Hey, uh, Weiss?"

"Hm?"

"…Thank you."

"Y'know what I love, Blake?"

Blake cast her eyes at her partner. "Is it me?" she asked, innocently.

Yang crossed her hands behind her head, stretching as they walked. She seemed to shine like gold in the dappled light under the trees. "Nope," she said.

Blake rolled her eyes. "Oh no, what a shame. Guess our relationship is a sham then."

Yang snickered. "Yup. Guess we'll just have to carry on with this loveless marriage until we die. Truly, ours is a woeful world."

Blake almost laughed, but a bitter little thorn pricked her throat before she could. She looked away from Yang, eyes drifting to the deer trail under her feet. "Do you… really think we'll last?"

Yang lowered her arms, her face falling. "You mean us, or us?"

"I mean…" Blake made a big gesture with her arms. "The past couple days have been lovely, and I don't want it to end, but… relationships cool off. It's how it's supposed to go. I'm just worried it won't be sustainable in the long run."

"Well… we were," Yang said, with an artless smile and a hapless shrug.

"We were together for six months."

"We've been together for six months," Yang corrected.

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, and I'm calling you on it." Yang laid a hand on her shoulder. "We didn't break up to do this y'know. And if this poly thing does turn out to be unsustainable—if Weiss suddenly decides she hates us, or it turns out me and Ruby really can't coexist… I'd still stay with you, y'know?"

Blake felt a little sting in her chest. "Even if it meant breaking up with Weiss?"

Yang stopped walking abruptly, and Blake tensed, immediately regretting what she'd said.

"Blake?" Yang kept her voice carefully calm. "What does that mean?"

"Sorry, that… that was the wrong way to say it." Blake sighed, turning around to face Yang honestly. "Last night just… felt worse than I expected."

"Me being intimate with Weiss?"

Blake nodded. "I don't want you two to have to stop, but… I need to figure out how to be okay with it first."

Yang took a deep breath and focused intently on Blake. "Okay," she said. "Thank you for letting me know, and…" she looked away. "For the record, I'm sorry I did that without asking you—or Ruby—first. Weiss and I actually… well…" She blushed. "We stopped halfway."

Blake's ears perked up. "What? Why?"

"Well, we… kinda… felt bad about exactly this?" Yang shrugged. "I mean don't get me wrong, I care about Weiss a lot and she's super hot—"

Blake found herself nodding at this point. Weiss was very hot.

"—but you matter to both of us too," Yang continued. "And… it's hard to see the point in enjoying this thing if we're not all enjoying it, you know?" She stepped in closer, hesitating before initiating any kind of physical contact. "I… honestly don't know what I'd do if you and Weiss made me choose, but I'm not going to just start fawning over her and ignore you."

Blake felt her a smile breaking out of her, and she stepped in to hug Yang tight. "Thanks," she said, softly.

"Of course," Yang murmured, scratching Blake's ears gently, just the way she liked it. "So… hey, let me make it up to you."

"Hm?"

"I told you me and Weiss had plans on Friday, right?" Yang asked. Blake nodded. "Well… let's all get together on Thursday."

Blake's eyes widened. "Yang, you don't have to—"

Yang shook her head. "Don't get me wrong, I still want a one-on-one date with her in the near future, but I think all four of us should talk about what that looks like first. You'll want to spend some alone time with our little Snowflake too, won't you? And Rubes?"

Blake felt her face heat up . "…Probably," she acknowledged.

Yang kissed the top of her head and let her go. "I'll ask them when we get back," she promised. "Now c'mon, let's finish this mission and get home."

They soon reached the spot marked on the map. A creek ran through a picturesque little glade, whispering over the rocks and exposing the roots of a huge oak. Blake tucked her drone in between the roots, concealed enough that the Grimm wouldn't notice. Grimm didn't seek out technology after all, merely destroying it when they happened to run across it.

As she stood, she heard a rustle in the leaves above. She looked up, hand flying to Gambol Shroud's hilt, but it was only a bird. A crow, or maybe a raven, looking down at her with strange, red eyes.

Blake stared back, the hairs on the back of her neck rising. She kept her hand on the hilt, not quite lowering her guard.

The bird ruffled its feathers and continued to stare.

"Blake, something wrong?"

Blake inclined her head, and Yang noticed the bird, which had now shifted all its focus to her. "Huh."

Something was wrong . Blake wasn't sure what, but she somehow just knew.

Yang seemed to feel it too. "Uh, hey buddy!" she called up to the raven. "You good?"

Blake hiked an eyebrow as her girlfriend waved . "Yang? That's a bird."

"It's a corvid," Yang countered. "They're super smart. They'd land next to us and even play with us when she was younger." She looked up at the bird contemplatively. "Actually… Ruby always insisted it was the same bird. That you, buddy?"

The bird ruffled its wings again, shifting from claw to claw. It looked… agitated.

Yang's smile dropped. "Huh. A raven that hung out with us when we were kids. And it always flew away whenever dad or Uncle Qrow showed up."

Blake's eyes narrowed as she recalled the name of a certain ex-parent. "Huh."

The raven suddenly took off, fluttering up through the treetops and away.

Yang and Blake stood there for a solid minute, peering up through the canopy.

"Weirder than a three-armed snake," Yang muttered.

Blake snorted. "Weirder than what?"

"Mister Winchester?" Alizarin asked. "You've been quiet." The 'as usual' went unsaid.

"Just got nothin' to say," Cardin responded, clasping his hands behind his head as he lounged with his feet up on his desk. "I think CRDL's doing fine."

"Very well," Alizarin sighed. The sigh was faintly echoed around the room—three years on, and Cardin still refused to talk about anything at these meetings. In the beginning he'd even tried to use the information other students revealed here to start trouble, but if there was one unwritten rule at Beacon Academy it was that you didn't violate the sanctity of Leader Club. The upperclassmen had delivered that message with a black eye or three.

Ruby, personally still held out a little hope. Alizarin was maybe the most patient person she'd ever met. If anyone on Remnant could get Cardin Worstchester to spill his guts, it was probably him. Maybe someday.

"Right, well, how about you then Miss Adel?"

"We've got a little turbulence," Coco admitted, leaning back in her seat. She took off her glasses—the regular ones she wore on the rare occasions that her prescription sunglasses weren't practical—and started to clean them with a little cloth. "The CFVY machine is tough to maintain but we're all putting in the effort. We did have some grievances come up over the break, but we're working on resolving them. Biggest issue right now is external: Velvet's really spooked about going to Mistral for the Vytal Festival." She scowled. "With White Court on the upswing, I honestly can't blame her."

A hand went up, and Coco waved them to speak.

"What's… White Court?" asked HTHR's Heather.

"Human Supremacists," Coco said, not even bothering to hide the angry glare she sent to Cardin's side of the room. "In Vale you hear about the Southern Pike Society. In Atlas you hear about Vox Humana. In Mistral, it's White Court."

"Oh…" Heather sat back down with a nervous frown. Her rabbit tail twitched, and Ruby's heart went out to the girl.

"That's a difficult position to be placed in," Alizarin said, "and an absolutely valid concern." He sighed, running a hand through his thinning hair. "For what it's worth, I believe the headmaster is planning to make an announcement after initiation in regards to the issue."

"He damn well should," Ophidia grunted, speaking up from beside Ruby. The senior crossed her arms—her rolled back sleeves revealing the beautifully-patterned snake scales covering her skin, along with the thick scars cutting through them. "I've got a few friends at Haven, and they're all treating the campus like a fortress right now. Things are bad in Mistral, worse than the news says. I know I'm jumping my turn here, but this is all I've got to say anyway; OOAK isn't going to the festival, and if your team's got faunus in it and you give half a shit about their safety? You better talk to them now and figure out how to keep them safe."

She glanced around, making a point of lingering on a few human team leaders, including Ruby, who matched her eye and nodded firmly.

Ophidia was one of the only faunus leading a team at Beacon, and one of the most outspoken activists on top of it, to the point where she'd drawn criticism for being openly supportive of the White Fang. She and Ruby didn't get along super well personally, but Ruby still had a lot of respect for her and what she stood for.

And this was something they agreed on wholeheartedly. Ruby made a mental note to thoroughly check in with Blake about the situation before they made any definitive plans for the next semester.

"Thank you, Miss Jet." Alizarin cleared his throat. "Let's see, who else do we have… ah."

His eyes drifted over to the girl beside Jaune. "Miss Tudor? I believe you're the last one who hasn't spoken."

Rose looked up, and Ruby resisted the urge to glare at her.

As it turned out, being named after a common and popular flower meant that you occasionally ran into name collisions. Rose Tudor was the third other 'Rose' Ruby had met, though thankfully she was the only one attending Beacon.

Un thankfully, she was the leader of team ROYL, and was a complete jerk.

Something was… off though. Rose didn't irritably brush off Alizarin's attempts at engaging with her. Instead, she seemed… out of it, staring off into the middle distance, chin on her palm. She nearly jumped out of her skin when Bristol tapped her on the shoulder. "Y-yeah?"

Alizarin gestured. "You have the floor."

Rose shrank back into her seat, eyes darting frantically around the room but particularly lingering on Cardin. "Can I pass, sir?" she said.

A quiet wave of surprise passed around the room, and Ruby doubled down on her focus. Something was officially up.

Rose had spent her first two semesters at Beacon gluing her team to CRDL's hip, to the point that a lot of students already thought of them as a parcel. She'd apparently even dated Cardin at one point (which Ruby refused to think about ew gross ).

So the fact that she suddenly looked terrified of him was setting off every alarm bell in Ruby's head. A glance at Jaune and Coco showed that she wasn't the only one who'd noticed.

Alizarin seemed to be picking it up as well. "Miss Tudor, I will also remind you that my office hours are open to all my students, and that I can schedule private meetings at your request, if there's ever an issue you don't want to discuss with the rest of the class. There are also a multitude of resources I can direct you to, if you should need them."

Rose swallowed loud enough that the whole room could hear it. Slowly, she sat up straighter, her eyes regaining a little of their glint. "Thanks, but… oh, fuck it all. Yeah, there's something I'd like to say."

Alizarin's eyebrows rose, and he gestured for her to proceed.

Rose took a long, long breath.

"First, I want to apologize. Last year I said—and did—some things that… well, they were fucked up. I know I can't take any of that back, but…" She paused, laughing under her breath. "Some stuff went down over the break, and it clarified my perspective. A lot. "

Ruby gave up on picking her jaw off the floor. She distinctly remembered having to help Weiss hold Yang back after Rose slipped Blake a coupon for cat food at lunch. And herself having to be held back by Jaune when Rose called her big sister a few choice words in this very room.

Alizarin coughed. "I think many of us appreciate that, Miss Tudor—"

"And that's the other thing."

Rose paused, hands clasped white-knuckle tight, and said, "I'd prefer if you started calling me Mister Tudor."

…

Cardin opened his mouth.

Without even thinking, Ruby said, "Cardin? We all know where you sleep."

Cardin shut his mouth.

The leader of team ROYL shot Ruby a grateful nod. Ruby… didn't quite know how to feel about that just yet.

Alizarin blinked slowly, the glow of his eye flickering out and then back in. "I see. Is there another name we should be using then, Mister Tudor?"

"Still Roze, but with a Z."

"And pronouns?"

Roze paused, for a long, long moment.

"They/them, if you don't mind."

Alizarin regarded thoughtfully. "I've had nonbinary students who prefered the neutral title 'Mx.' Would that suit you better than 'Mister' by chance?"

Roze's eyes widened. "I've… never heard that before. Yeah, that'd be good, thanks."

Ruby watched Cardin out of the corner of her eye. This wasn't the first time someone had come out in Leader Club—Ruby distinctly remembered the day last October when Ophidia brought up being genderfluid in response to Ember realizing she was trans. Generally speaking, there were always a small minority of negative reactions. Often, the loudest of these came from Cardin.

Right now, he looked… calm. Stone-faced, even. Which was maybe more worrying than anything else.

Roze cleared their throat, straightening their back and schooling their features. "Most of you can already see the problem. I don't expect my team to react well, but it's going to be a rough three years if I don't tell them. I'm… open to advice on what to do next."

Heather's hand went up.

"Yeah?"

"Tell Louis first," Heather said. She looked away from their eyes, biting her lip. "Please don't ask me why."

Roze looked confused, but seemed to accept the advice after a moment. "Aight, thank you."

…Which incidentally was the first time Ruby had ever seen Roze be polite to a faunus. What happened over break!?

"Anything else?" Alizarin asked. When Roze shook their head, he clapped his hands loudly. "Well, I think that brings us to the end of our session today. Mx Tudor, I'd like to speak with you briefly after class. The rest of you are dismissed."

Ruby drifted over to Florence and Coco as the students filed out. "So uh," she said.

"That was a thing," Coco agreed, casting a glance over her shoulder. "I think we should all be keeping an eye on Cardin for a while."

Florence and Ruby both nodded in unison.

With that out of the way, Coco turned her attention to Ruby with a friendly smirk. "Anyway, how's the not-quite-single life treating you, squirt?"

Ruby grinned, flushing all warm and gooey with the reminder. "Pretty great!" she said, giving Coco a big thumbs up. "Thanks for the help, again."

Coco ruffled her hair affectionately. "No problem. You dorks are cute."

"So Ruby," Florence said, throwing her arm around Coco's shoulder. "Since you happen to be around, I wanted to let you know that we're doing a bit of a get-together on Sunday. It's just gonna be CFVY and FLWR, but we figured we'd invite you and yours since, y'know—" she smirked "—fellow sinners and all."

"Oh, uh, maybe!" Ruby thought about it for a second. "Um, sorry to ask, but… is there gonna be alcohol?"

Coco and Florence looked at one another. "There doesn't have to be," Coco said, her voice turning serious. "Is that a thing for you?"

Ruby nodded sheepishly.

"No booze then," Florence tapped a fist to her heart. "You have our word."

Ruby felt a big smile land on her face. "Thank you! I'm sorry if that's weird or whatever."

"Nah, it's cool. We all got stuff," Coco said. "We're probably gonna start at…" She glanced at Florence. "I dunno, three? Three-thirty?"

"Four-thirty," Florence said. "And we'll end it whenever people get sick of party games."

Party games! Ruby beamed. "Great! I'll have to ask everybody else, but it sounds fun! I'll let you know as soon as I do!"

"Sounds good," Florence extended a fist, and Ruby bumped back. "See you then, Ruby."

"Later squirt!"

"See ya!" Ruby waved. She headed outside, breathing in the fresh spring air with a smile on her face.

She had about half an hour free because of the way her schedule mismatched with the rest of the team's, but that wasn't enough time to get much studying done. Plus, it was a really pleasant spring day, and she was fidgety from sitting around inside all morning. A run along the southwest cliffs would be a nice way to stretch her legs and get some air in her lungs.

…Plus her girlfriends would be getting back to the southwest gate just about when she arrived, which was a nice bonus .

She dug her headphones out of her school bag and synched them to her scroll. As she fiddled with the music, she started off down the path to the locker rooms to grab her running clothes, a nd Crescent Rose.

You could never be too careful around the forest, after all.

Notes:

Thanks to FriendOfYggdrasil, Sgt. Chrysalis, Juniorthib and Shockfactor for the read-throughs as usual! And thank you for reading!