"Please, stop..." a meek voice squeaked out amidst the chorus of howls and laughter that boomed across the cafeteria table. The pleading cry was practically yanked out of the timid Velvet as she squirmed and attempted to dislodge her head from the tightly-clamped hand that held her long rabbit ear like a vice.

"Haha, I told ya it was real," boasted the owner of that hand, Cardin. Across the table sat the three lackeys that made up the rest of his team, if it could be called that; the four of them together behaved more like a loose pack of stray animals than like any other team she'd met in her time at Beacon. Even the way they stuck together seemed hostile- not out of genuine bonding or even common belief, but merely out of greater disdain for everyone else around them.

"What a freak," one of them echoed, as if just waiting for the chance to demonstrate that aimless antipathy.

'What did I do to deserve this...?' Quickly realizing the futility of her protests against the torment of this meatpuppet's apparent curiosity about her anatomy, she turned her thoughts inward. 'Why...?' Why was this happening to her? This was her table; since the day Velvet's team formed last year, the four of them had laid claim to this section of the dining hall without a single incident.

How fitting that on this of all days, when her teammates were nowhere to be found - when Coco was off trying to scramble together last-minute plans, when Fox was squeezing extra training into an already precariously occupied week of assignments and study, when Yatsuhashi had skipped lunch to pour into textbooks in the quiet refuge of the library - when everyone had seemingly coincidentally abandoned her, that this would be the day that pack of vultures would turn their cruel sights on her.

Though truthfully, she realized, if any day had had the bad fortune to invite such torment, it would have to be this one. After how her day had been going, she could hardly have been surprised when Cardin and his satellites approached her and invited themselves to take a seat.

Velvet, the meager and unassuming faunus girl, was not having a good day.

7:41 a.m.,
Velvet's eyes slowly pried themselves open, half-buried into her tawny pillowcase. She blinked several times before even testing to move a muscle, seemingly not convinced that she was fully roused out of her unconsciousness yet. It would take minutes still, but she soon became physically aware enough to conclude that she was indeed awake. Her morning routine would begin with a coffee and a brisk jog, and by now she reckoned she might as well just stay awake until her 6 a.m. alarm.

... Her alarm?

A fleeting thought jolted her out of her post-slumber haze as she practically flipped over in bed to check her scroll. 'No, please don't tell me,' she started, fumbling to press the home button on her scroll sat on her dresser. She pressed the button once, twice, three times... and no screen would appear. 'It died?!' With an uncharacteristic grunt, she slapped her forehead and dragged her hand down her face, as if to shame herself into never again neglecting to charge her scroll by smearing this memory into her brain through the pores of her skin.

Looking around her room, she noticed a distinct lack of familiar snoozing faces; Velvet was used to being the first one on her whole team to wake up. Now, not only was she the last, but she took long enough that the others had all gotten dressed and started on their ways?

The bunny scurried out of her bed and scrambled over to the check the bathroom clock. 'TWO HOURS?!' She shouted internally. She was close to two hours behind her schedule. In a rush, she ran over to make her morning beverage only to find the last scoop had already been claimed. She looked to the top of the lid in her hand as finally she registered the note scrawled on the top: "SORRY! OUT OF COFFEE- I'LL GET MORE TODAY. ~CoCo~" Frozen at the counter by a sudden wave of frustration at her situation, hardly even able to take notice of her leg as it begin rapidly bouncing up and down in place.

Though she was reluctant to admit it at first, the drink her team leader had introduced her to had rather quickly grown on her, and only now could she admit to realizing how deeply it had seeped into her and woven itself into her morning ritual. The thought of facing the sluggish day ahead of her without its caffeine in her system - especially given that she was going to be deprived of her morning exercise as well - wracked her mind as her fist balled up. With a huff, she shook her head and pressed forward, changing her clothes as quickly as she could. 'I'm late! I'm late!' were the only words that were left running through the hare's mind as she hurried to barely make her first class.

Today was another demonstration in professor Goodwitch's Convocation in Combat - a mock combat symposium class - and today, some first-year students had been selected for the duels. All of the teams Velvet remembered from her class were standing around the center stage, along with quite a few new faces. And two of those faces were currently standing on the sidelines awaiting their summons, with very different attitudes about the situation, judging by their facial expressions and body language.

The class had gone by relatively the same as it always had, though there was a rather disconcerted air that followed the mock battle after seeing how drastically uneven the duel had proven to be. Velvet had trouble making out much of the action from behind her taller teammates, but she had repeatedly noticed a vaguely annoyed Coco checking her scroll, biting her nails and sighing at various points.

After the class adjourned, Coco strode out of the auditorium with a stretch, followed by the rest of team CFVY. Velvet piped up first, "Hey Coco, um... is everything alright today?"

Without turning to face her, the leader replied, "ah, yeah... I guess." She sighed and rubbed her temples. "I dunno. I'm trying to get together with that friend from the other night, but everything's just getting messed up."

'That friend,' Velvet always thought it was funny how courtly and aloof Coco was with the details of her personal life. It was never 'my girlfriend' or 'that guy I met at that rad scene downtown' or 'the cutie from class who let me borrow their notes', it was always just 'that friend'.

"Velvet..." Coco turned to face the faunus girl, head-level with her ears, and rubbed the back of her own neck as she looked off to the side. "I know I said we'd hang out tonight..." Velvet stopped and her eyes sank to the ground knowingly.

An uncomfortable pause washed over the two, eventually broken by Velvet. "We can do it some other time..." she resigned without an attempt to conceal her disappointment.

Coco sighed and shook her head as she winced. "I'm sorry Velvet. I'll make it up to you, I promise. I'll make it up ten-fold!"

The group continued to their dorm, a noticeable drop in their pace. Eventually all three of Velvet's teammates parted to go about their own business, and Velvet was left alone with her thoughts.

'I just can not catch a break today...' She plopped back on her bed, ears flopping across her pillow and smacking against her headboard. "Ow!" She exclaimed, quickly tossing to her side and gently rubbing away the pain. 'Thanks, universe. I didn't need you to prove my point, but thanks, I guess...'

After settling in to take a nap, waking up and messing about on her scroll for an indeterminable period of time, boredom eventually outweighed her defeated lethargy and she hopped back out of bed, deciding that getting a proper meal would do her well.

Soon after, she sat at her table, the familiar made unfamiliar by the lack of her friends. It was an eerie feeling, and one that brought back memories of an awkward girl on her first day at the prestigious academy, burying her head into a tray of vegetables, mashed potatoes and juice. Simultaneously she wanted friends and wanted no one to notice her, no one to talk to her, no one to look at her, knowing exactly what feature they would hone in on first.

She was not that girl anymore, but those fears still plagued her and in this crowded environment, she felt herself reunited with that younger Velvet as she buried her head down into her tray.

After finishing her salad, the unmistakable sound of boots walking up to her and stopping to sit down, the feeling of bodies crashing down on the seats beside her, and the expectant, judgmental gazes of complete strangers alarmed her. She looked at the new faces and sheepishly gulped down her last bite from the bowl. "H-Hello," she sputtered out, waving feebly at the four faces gathered around her.

"Care to help me settle a bet?" The boy who sat next to her implored, wielding a deep and determined stare. Instantly, she recognized him from convocation and she remembered just how mercilessly and aggressively he'd tossed around that other boy- and, unnervingly, how much utter spite lingered in his face after their fight. She remembered every detail about his unrefined movements and his reliance on power over form. Impact over technique.

Now was no different from then. The face before her morphed into the exact same embattled glare she saw in that mock battle. But now, she was his opponent. He reached out and grabbed her by a rabbit ear and she cried out in protest. It was an unheeded plea, and his grip only tightened the more she fought back. This was how he handled everything, she was sure. It was apparent in class, and it was clear now. Impact over technique. Force over etiquette.

Across the table were three other faces leering at her in similarly expectant wide-eyed glares. This had been a premeditated assault, Velvet could tell. They were clearly very experienced predators, and likewise, she was all-too-experienced prey. They tracked her. They waited until she was alone. And then they moved in to attack.

Only... she wasn't alone. She was in a school cafeteria, at a very populated time of day. A sea of people surrounded her - students and faculty alike - and the sound of her surroundings enveloped her, reminding her that she was, at all times, in every direction, mere feet away from entire teams of peers. She was perhaps the least alone one could possibly be, at least physically, and yet, no one would help her. Not a single body in her vicinity seemed up to the task of intervening in the harassment she'd been selected for. Or... they didn't think of her as deserving any better in the first place.

After what felt like ages, the brutality ceased and she was set free. The hand clutching her ear finally let go, but the feeling it imprinted on her remained. The ache lingered on her rabbit ear and would keep it's grasp on her mind as long as she could still feel it. She was free from her harasser's hand, but as her mind replayed the scene over and over again, she was still trapped in the moment and she was still alone in the crowded dining hall.

A couple of feet away, Velvet noticed one particular table whose eight occupants had been a little bit too overt about eyeing the scene that had just unfolded. As she looked closer, she recognized one of them as the other boy from the mock battle today- the one who had been pitted against the very same brute that had just violated her space. 'At least I'm not the only one who's had to deal with that monster today,' she thought as she looked to the ground and shuffled along. 'I guess...'

As she walked away, her head hung itself in shame and her pace hastened. The tray of now-unappealing cafeteria food shook in her unsteady grasp as she walked as quickly as possible to find some remote refuge where she could finish the last of her meal- if she even wanted to by now. She lifted a hand up to conceal one half of her face as tears streamed down her cheeks. Ultimately, she thought it would perhaps be best if she left the cafeteria entirely. She discarded the tray and uneaten lunch and made her way back to the one place where she knew she could find a brief respite of comfort and safety.

Velvet broke into a scurry as she fled to the haven of her team's dorm room, taking care to avoid looking at any of the bodies her peripheral vision could still detect through her irritated, teary eyes. She tried her best to tune out everyone and everything in her path and only envision herself in her bed, in the safety of her covers, and hopefully alone so that she could cry in peace and get the last dreadful memory out of her head- or at least push it back, into the same dark corner of her mind that held countless other memories of trauma and discrimination because of her heritage.

Soon she reached her building. Her wing, her floor, her hall... her dorm. The door came closer and closer into sight, and as Velvet approached, her heart stopped and she sank to her feet. She was not getting into her room any time soon.

Hung on the doorknob was a familiar black beret. A stop sign. A warning to trespassers: Danger ahead. Proceed at your own peril. This beret, a flashy fashion statement by day, doubled as Coco's personal 'do not disturb' sign. And right now, she had a friend over.

Opposite her room, Velvet sunk back into the wall and her head hit the surface with a thud. She looked up to the ceiling and closed her eyes, hoping she could just disappear into the blackness that enveloped her vision as tears broke yet again. Her legs gave way and she sank helplessly to the floor, arms on her knees. The only sound left in the world was the shuttering of her eyelids as her tear ducts emptied themselves onto her face. Her head fell into her arms and she poured all of her remaining lucid effort into stifling whatever breaths and sniffles might be heard by any of the nearby rooms' occupants.

There was nowhere for her to go, and she had never felt more exposed in her life. She was an outcast once again. Alone, vulnerable, scared, and far too hurt to care about hiding it now. She had nowhere left to run, nowhere to hide- she had nowhere, full stop. There was no place for her and for the first time in years, she felt utterly unbelonging in this world. She screamed inside herself, pleading for one last refuge, begging that she could just find just one last place to feel welcome, even if she had to completely vanish from this plane to find it. Inside her mind, all of her life's pain seemed to rekindle at once, set alight by how utterly displaced she felt. All of her emotion was consumed by the flame and as the last of her tears dried off on her sleeves, she felt the embers scatter to the wind.

And then, nothing.

Velvet sat silent in the hallway for an amount of time she could no longer even perceive. Time felt different to her. She felt different to her; whenever she was alone and feeling introspective, and looked inside herself, she could feel her own self-awareness like a reflection in the mirror. She could see herself from the perspective of an actual outsider She could feel how timid she was, how much she wanted to hide from the world, how much she wanted to blend into the background, or surround herself with the few people she could come to trust. She could reach out and touch it like it was a tangible object sitting right next to her. Like it was her sitting right next to her.

But right now, she couldn't feel any of that. It all fell away into distant scenery in her head, far away from that self-awareness mirror inside the room of her mind. All she could see in that reflection right now was anger, and all she wanted to do in this moment was find a deserving face, and smash it.

If anyone were there to observe the scene, they would know what it looked like to see a bunny break. Velvet sat against that wall still as a statue for so long that any passerby would surely have been convinced she was a performer, trained to resist her muscles' itch to move and intent on fighting every breath she took to show no signs of life. If they came close enough, they would soon notice the smallest movements of her facial muscles beginning to twitch, followed by her cheeks, her eyelids and ultimately, her long rabbit ears. Even closer and they would see her eyes dull to a haze, with both the void of a veteran hunter's thousand-yard stare and the controlled bloodlust of an assassin.

As she roamed the halls, less a student and more a force of nature looking for a disturbance, Velvet overheard a conversation. A tall redhead with golden armor and curiously anxious body language was talking to a pair of dark-haired girls at a nearby bench. A distant memory inside of her mind stirred up a recollection of seeing the three girls sitting together not long ago- in the cafeteria.

"Have you seen Jaune?" The tall girl hesitantly asked the two seated girls. Velvet remembered the name. 'Jaune...' The seated girls frowned and shook their heads, one of them returning to eyeing the cover of her book.

"He hasn't come back from training yet?" Replied the other girl. "Yang said she ran into Jaune on her way back from the gym." Right, Jaune- that was the name of the face she recognized from the table. The one plastered on the holo-board in Glynda's auditorium. The one who might, if she were lucky enough to find him herself, lead to a run-in with a certain deserving face.

It was not much longer before she found the locker rooms, and heard the distant commotion. The voices jumped out at her, even muffled by the walls and distance she knew she would find her mark soon.

A thought occurred to her in her excitement. She turned to the brown box perched at her backside. The same one she was seldom seen without. She reached in to pull out a camera- her camera. Her own personal armory. She tiptoed around a corner and snapped a quick picture of the scene as she finally laid eyes on the two boys. Jaune was held in a haphazard grapple, his arm twisted behind his back forcing him into a kneeling position as Cardin held the back of his neck. Silently, Velvet slipped away into the distance as she activated her weapon.

Moments later, she traipsed out from around the corner, delinquent eyes focusing on Cardin like an eagle, and her hard light replica of the boy's weapon dragging behind her. As she stared head on, her gaze trying to burn a hole in the side of his head with the heat of its dead intent, she reached her arm up and dragged the mock weapon against a row of lockers leading up to the scene of the scuffle.

Hard light scraped against metal and reverberated down the locker room as she approached, gradually and resolutely. By the time she reached them, the blond victim had all but fallen to the floor. "Oy, Tiny!" a mocking voice chided from amidst the hoarse cries of Jaune Arc, begging under the grasp of his tormentor.

Cardin blinked and turned his head to face the new voice in the room. As his eyes set on a familiar pair of long ears, reaching up to barely the level of his chest, he grinned viciously. "Oh, you again," he laughed. "Do those freakish ears not let you know when two men are having a private conversation?" He shoved his blond victim to the ground and narrowed his eyes at the newcomer. "Or did you just come back 'cause you like having them pulled?"

The beleaguered wanna-be hero Jaune summoned up all the strength his spirit had left to muster as he placed his weight back on his legs and stood up to defend her. Though he could barely stand still on his own, only managing to pull himself up to his feet by leaning on his shield, he looked like he was intent on trying to defend her.

A burgundy ear twitched.

"Cardin, no," Jaune plead. To the boy's credit, he did seem able to, at the very least, summon up a fairly convincing stern quality to his voice. But it was too late to play pretend right now, and she wouldn't hear any more of his hollow display of bravado. "I won't let you hurt- ahhh!"

Velvet leaned to the side, placing her hands around the boy's arm and shoulder, and practically threw Jaune to the ground herself, brushing his performative heroics aside the way one would swat away a distracting fly. 'Sorry- you had your chance to play hero back at the lunch tables, kid,' she thought. As she turned her sights to Cardin - to her prey - she found herself surging with violent desire, and in the moment, in this situation, with the day she'd had, she honestly couldn't find it in herself to resent it- nor to resist it. "You wanna dance so badly, meathead?" Amber eyes lifted up to leer at the bully, piercing through thick strands of auburn hair. "Why don't you find a partner who can stay on their feet?" She grinned smugly as she taunted him, an alien thrill coursing though her body. "Unless... you're scared I'll knock a few too many rocks loose in that hollow tree trunk you call a head!" Her free hand twitched in anticipation as she swung her hard-light replica over her shoulder. She pulled back down on the handle to swing it forward and point it at him.

Cardin's smile gave way to gritted teeth, and the rest of his composure quickly caved in to follow. "Who do you think you are, rodent?!" he barked back, turning his frame to face her completely. Even as his sinewy neck puffed up, straining his windpipe to add more gruff rasp to his voice, a certain intonation had belied a slight hint of surprise in his reply.

Velvet had to stifle an unexpected laugh, and answered him simply and plainly, in words even he could understand. "I'm a bad dream~" she retorted, almost in singsong. Her lips curled up at the edges as she swung her weapon - his weapon - back over her side and lowered her stance. He nodded and grinned intently, accepting her invitation.

Next day,
Reunited with her teammates, Velvet the timid faunus girl sat and quietly munched on her sandwich in the loud dining hall. Fox and Yatsuhashi were talking over the latter's notes for today's quiz while a staturely Coco was sipping some freshly brewed coffee from her mug. Noticing Velvet's thermos, she smiled at her teammate. Velvet smiled back at her leader and tilted her head, the motion accented by her long ears sagging to the side.

"Oh, Velvet," Coco began as she reached into her bag and pulled out a large pouch with a dark brown label. "I picked up some more of your favourite while I was out yesterday," she teased.

Velvet quickly cupped her mouth with a hand as she giggled, which her ears once again animatedly emphasized, swaying lightly with every individual beat of her laughter. "Oh thank you, Coco!" She beamed back. "I don't want to know what I'd be like without a fresh cup to start the day!"

Out of the corner of her eye, Velvet noticed four new figures file into the dining hall. Two of Cardin's gruff lackeys held the door open while the third followed in, their leader's arm draped over his shoulder for support. All four of them stomped over to whatever vacant spots remained at as quick a pace as their limping leader's legs would allow, ready to glare at anyone who's eyes lingered in their direction for too long. Cardin kept his head low and stared to the ground as if trying to burn a hole in it with the heat of his gaze.

"I don't know, Velvet, it's hard to imagine you being difficult!" Coco praised as she took another sip of her brew.

As Cardin's teammates helped him over to a free table, the tall leader lifted his head up and found one pair of eyes glued to him. The glare he'd painted on his face so thickly this morning instantly melted away as he took in more of his onlooker's features: the eyes' amber color, the auburn hair draped in strands around them, the lips curled beneath them and the long ears that accented every movement of the faunus girl's head as she followed him with her stare.

"Hey Coco!" Velvet protested playfully, as her eyes stuck to Cardin. "I can be a tad mean when I wanna!" She winked. He broke eye contact and sat down, back facing her. The two girls shared another laugh and carried on with the rest of their lunch happily. Velvet was having a good day.