"Ya'll hear that? Private Cobin here want's to be special forces!"

"Shut the fuck up, Vogels." Cobin, the 19 year old private said from his seat in the back of the HMMWV.

"What?" Vogel's said, turning around from the shotgun seat to eye his comrade, "How're you going to pass selection if you can't even deal with me giving you a bit of shit?"

Cobin scowled. "Vogels the stupidity that comes out of your mouth is so incredible I think it may be radioactive, so stop talking before I become infertile or some shit."

"Oh shit, big man with big words!" Vogels said, "Your fucking MI POG friends over at the S2 teach you those?"

"Yeah, all while you were busy gettin' the clap from sharing a flesh light."

"Both of you shut the fuck up!" Sergeant Pinkerton said. "I'll fucking push both of you out the damn door and you can run along beside the truck!"

"Yes, sergeant." They both muttered.

Before this first deployment, Cobin would never have thought that sand could be so ravenous, so unstoppable. All the time it felt like it was getting inside of him, tearing at his skin. Even when he laid down to sleep at night in the back of the truck, he felt it in his mouth when he gritted his teeth. He didn't mind the sun, he didn't mind eating MRE's everyday, or carrying over a hundred pounds of gear, he didn't even mind getting shot at that much, but he loathed the sand.

Three months into deployment and this day was like any other; another dirt road and another mounted patrol. The other day, a drone had picked up what someone, somewhere had thought was "suspicious activity" along this MSR, so they mounted up and rolled out to drive straight down it in a convoy of HMMWV's that could probably be seen from a hundred miles in every direction. Thus was counterinsurgency. Today, though, it seemed to be taking a lot longer to get over with than normal.

"Sergeant, why are we going so fucking slow?" Cobin said after a few minutes, "Who's leading the convoy?"

"It's Sergeant Groth and his squad, you know how he likes to be cautious." Pinkerton said.

"Aaahhhhh, okay." Cobin said, now understanding. Sergeant Groth was that NCO, the guy who took care of his guys like they were his kids. That sort of mentality had its ups and downs. Sergeant Pinkerton, by comparison was an apathetic alcoholic whose enlistment period was up as soon as they got back from deployment, and boy was he ready to take his veteran's benefits and run. Pinkerton mostly left his men completely alone to their own devices until one of them got him in trouble. Sergeant Groth was that guy who would come to the bar at 0200 on a Saturday to pick up his drunk privates so they didn't get DUI's trying to get back to the barracks. Solid dude, but maybe a little overbearing.

Suddenly the ground beneath them rocked and their ears rang as the sound of a blast filled the air around them, even through the thick metal of the HMMWV. Over the static of the radio there was suddenly somebody yelling "STOP STOP STOP ALL VEHICLES HALT." Cobin attempted to squeeze his face as much as he could against the glass of the window to try and see up ahead of the truck in front of them, but to no avail.

Sergeant Pinkerton grabbed the handset from the dash of the truck. "What the fuck is going on up there?" He asked, all proper radio etiquette going straight out the window.

The radio squawked, and then responded with "All vehicles this is vehicle Kilo Three Alpha, the convoy has been hit by an IED. Looks like the first couple of trucks in the line…"

Then everything went black.

"God may hate both of us, but the Devil welcomes only me…"

…

Cobin opened his eyes, and the dream was over.

He had allowed himself to drink maybe a bit more than he should have on Sunday night. He had continued to drink and read after Blake left until the english language became more like post-graduate calculus, and then he put the book down, closed the garage, and drank some more. It was a mature, high-functioning-alcoholic drunk and not a freshman-year-of-college-sorry-I-puked-in-your-fridge-dude drunk. But it was a significant amount of alcohol none the less and when Cobin awoke the next morning he found that the intolerance for the stuff he had developed after 4 months deployed in a dry country had definitely carried over trans-dimensionally.

He sat up in bed a bit too fast and gasped as this feeling of a needle making it's way into his frontal lobe overcame him. He put his face in his hands and shook his head, he could already tell that this was going to be a very bad morning. His one solace, he thought, was that it was Monday and everyone who would normally have nothing better to do than come bother him would probably be quite busy with the start of a new week. It would certainly be an unfortunate time for one very chipper, scythe-wielding girl to drop in on him from the skylight like a spider monkey from hell. Or an assistant professor with an attitude problem. Or a super angry blond. Or…

Cobin shook his head. Hangovers were not the time for such horrifying contemplations. When he was finally able to stand and drag himself over to his dresser, he didn't even bother with his clothes, he just sat in the office chair and squinted through half-closed eyes as he made a extra strong batch of coffee and watched it brew. I am NOT going to be doing that again, he thought as he impatiently waited for his caffeine.

As he sat back and sipped his coffee in nothing but his boxers, slowly feeling the toxins drain out of him, he thought about how he might fill the coming day. Now, for most people the day after a night of heavy drinking meant sleeping until the afternoon and then hiding under a blanket with their eyes glued to a screen or something similar, but this was not the not the Cobin mentality. Despite how much he drank when he was not deployed he always hated the feeling of having wasted time when he woke up the next morning, and always was compelled to compensate to the point he would get antsy and irritable if he didn't. Typically, this meant going to the gym.

Yes, that was it. He would go to the gym. He remembered that Professor Goodwitch had modified his security access to allow him to use the gym next to the main combat arena. So now that he had a destination, he picked himself up out of the chair, chugged his coffee and reached for his clothes. Now, he didn't have any good gym clothes, but he figured the next best thing would be his ACU's, which he hadn't worn since he got back from the hospital. They didn't breath very well but they were meant to take a beating and be worn under the hot desert sun for long periods of time, and he had lifted in them plenty of times before while on deployment.

He got dressed into his trousers, boots, socks, and undershirt but once again left his blouse behind. Once he was finished, he walked out of the office space that was his sleeping quarters and onto the main floor of his shop. Years and years of people screaming at him about being "detail oriented" apparently paid off because the very first thing he noticed was a small piece of paper hanging off of the hydraulic lift in the middle of the shop floor. As he got closer, he saw that it was a small yellow sticky note. He grabbed it off the lift and brought it close to his face to read the very fine print scribbled across it. It read: "I closed the skylight for you, looks like whoever used it last left it open. Sorry if I woke you up! -Ruby"

Cobin looked up from the note and sighed. "I've literally slept in a three feet deep hole the in ground in a combat zone in the desert, and never in my life have I felt quite this vulnerable," he said, thinking out loud. He shook his head and shoved the note in his pocket, and started making his way toward the door.

When Cobin got the gym he was happy to see other students there doing their morning workout routines before their first classes started. Thankfully, there seemed to be no one he knew so he could work out and observe in peace. Although he was always genuinely interested in improving or maintaining his level of physical fitness, he had another motivation for going to the gym that morning. He had a theory that was slowly developing about the "Auras" that these people were able to generate, and he figured the gym was the best place to test it out. His theory was that an Aura didn't actually make one stronger or give someone more power per gram of muscle mass than someone from Earth, but that the force field around them simply became stronger and more reactive in a directly proportional manner to the power that was applied against it. In his mind, he related it to water; a non-viscous liquid that you could move through with ease, especially if you were just running your hand through it or dipping your toes in it over a dock, but if you jumped off a bridge and hit water going in excess of a hundred miles per hour, it's no different than hitting concrete at a hundred miles per hour. This, he reasoned, was the only way that the students could perform all of those incredible aerial maneuvers and literally have bullets bounce off of them, all the while he was able to hold his own in a simple boxing match against one of the school's top fighters.

The important part of this theory was that, if it were true, it meant that there was a bottom threshold of energy where the Aura couldn't protect someone at all if the power behind the attack was too little to make it reactive. Basically, you can't shoot someone in the face with a shotgun, but you can still slide a knife into their brain stem.

Cobin shook his head. He had to stop relating everything to how he could most effectively kill someone. It was a bad habit and he felt no reason to develop a plan of action that involved bringing harm to any of these people. Still though, the theory remained in his head as he went about his own routine. He did several sets of different kinds of bench presses and deadlifts, going a bit easier on himself than he normally would have, as he couldn't be entirely sure how his body had coped with being ripped from one reality to another, if it was the same body at all. As he did this though, he carefully observed the students around him, making note of how much weight their own routines involved in comparison to how well built they appeared. This was by no means fool-proof or scientific, but as he observed he didn't notice anything that appeared abnormal; there were no guys or gals built like twigs who were deadlifting 350, and no one was making an example of super-human like strength in any other form. This he figured, meant his theory had merit; muscle mass meant the same here as it did on his planet, regardless of how strong someone's Aura was.

He finished his last set on the bench and began walking to the other side of the gym toward the treadmills, figuring he'd get a bit of cardio in before he left. As he was making his way there, he "accidentally" bumped into a student walking the other way. They exchanged quick apologies and the kid quickly forgot about it, but it was important to Cobin. When he had bumped into the student, he had felt nothing out of the ordinary, no magical forcefield pushing back against him. There was this very slight, almost unnoticeable buzzing feeling, something like electromagnetism, but it was nominal and did nothing to counteract the force of his shoulder against the student's. He ran a mile or so on the treadmill in silence, thinking.

When he exited the building, he stopped and took a minute to breathe, admiring the fresh air and the beautiful day. After a moment he sighed, rather disappointed in himself; he didn't like the fact that he was spending so much mental energy on figuring out how to exploit the weaknesses in the people around him, it wasn't doing him any good and he'd much rather be able to focus on something actually productive. He just decided he would have to be more vigilant with shoving those thoughts out his head and replacing them with new ones.

Then suddenly off to his right, he heard a faint female voice say "Cardin stop I just want to go eat!" The voice sounded afraid.

Cobin turned to see four boys in a half-circle around a girl who had her back up against a wall. Cobin did pause for a minute, observing the girl's long, rabbit-like ears, but then the big guy in the center, the leader probably, said "You don't need to go to the cafeteria, just eat some grass, rabbit-girl!" Whatever curiosity Cobin had about the girl was suddenly replaced by a well directed, well-managed anger. He was already hungover, tired from working out, and generally upset with himself, but seeing this sort of thing pissed him off to no end.

It was Drill Sergeant Cobin time.

…

For the first time since Friday, the members of team RWBY had ran into their counterparts in JNPR that morning at breakfast. That's the way the weekends normally go, no matter how much you like someone, if you work with them everyday you probably don't make any extra effort to see them on your off hours, but that was alright. They ate and chatted, and left the main dining hall together to head for the combat arena; it was Monday morning which meant sparring matches for the first years. As they made their way there, they began to get into a bit more detail about how their weekends had gone, including their interactions with a certain soldier…

"No way," Pyrrha said, "he really beat you in a straight-up fist fight?"

"Well, I wouldn't exactly say he beat me," Yang said, her ego instinctively shielding itself, "it was more like a draw. But yeah, dude can fight. Even without an Aura or a Semblance."

"That's crazy," Jaune said.

"Maybe he's an alien!" Nora said, springing into the conversation.

"He is an alien, Nora," Lie said.

"No but… I mean a cool alien, like a super strong lizard man in a human suit!" She said, her eyes gleaming as her imagination teamed with possibilities.

"I don't think that's how that works, Nora," Ruby said.

"I haven't seen how tough he is first hand," Blake said, "but I think he's a lot smarter than he really lets on to."

"What do you mean?" Pyrrha asked.

"I don't know, he just has this like scary level of observational ability," Blake said, "but at the same time it's really not scary because you get this sense that he wouldn't use it against you."

"Hmm," Pyrrha said, thinking.

"You should really go talk to him yourself, Pyrrha," Ruby said, "I think you'll find he's a pretty sweet dude."

"I'll think about it," Pyrrha said.

They were getting close the academic hall that housed the main combat arena, and as they rounded the final corner that would lead them to the front door, they all stopped in their tracks, and stared wide eyed at the scene that was taking place before them.

"What you are feeling IS NOT pain! You understand?! It is MILD DISCOMFORT…"

…

"Hey, warriors!" Cobin shouted at the group of boys harassing the rabbit eared girl. When an NCO prepares to belittle or embarrass an underling, it is always preferable for them to refer to that person with a term of endearment in a facetious or sarcastic manner. A Staff Sergeant might call his Marine a Devil Dog; A Petty Officer or a Chief might tell off his Shipmate; and for the Army the prefered term was Battle (a shortening of "Battle Buddy"). Because none of those made any sense without context, Cobin decided that Warrior would suffice. When the four boys all turned their heads toward him, he pointed at the ground in front of him and said, "Get the fuck over here, right now."

The three smaller boys all looked to the giant mass of muscle that Cobin had correctly assumed was their leader. The larger boy didn't give any directions or indications, and simply began walking toward Cobin casually, taking his time to show that he didn't much care what this unknown person thought of him. The three other boys followed in tow, all smiling or giggling. The leader was obviously used to his size being enough to intimidate people, because when he got within a stride of Cobin and the smaller man didn't even flinch, a look of concern came over his face.

"Took your sweet goddamn time, didn't you?" Cobin snapped.

"Okay," the leader laughed dismissively, "and who are you?"

"I'm your new goddamn instructor, that's who the fuck I am." Cobin said. Every sentence was snapped out of his mouth like a whip now, there was no turning back.

The confident look on the boy's face melted and quickly turned to panic. "Oh, sir, um… we were just having fun, laughing with our friend over there."

"Bullshit," Cobin said, having none of it, "what was so goddamn funny?"

A genuine look of fear was now spreading across the large boy's face. "We were laughing about, uh, how… she's like an animal, you know?"

"She's the animal?" Cobin yelled, causing the large boy to take a step back, "You look like the only goddamn animal around to me! Did they splice your shit up with a goddamn gorilla?"

"Wha...what?"

"Holy dog shit you're stupid, there's probably some dog in there too! If I rang a fucking bell would you drool, Pavlov?"

"How does that… what?"

Cobin looked like he might spontaneously combust with rage. "Say 'what' to me ONE MORE goddamn time, warrior. Make my fuckin' day!"

All of the eyes of the boys around the gorilla were already wide and filled with fear, and at this point his eyes grew to be the same. "What?" He muttered out in panic.

"That's it!" Cobin yelled at them, "Get down, all of you, right the fuck now, push ups, GO!" The Drill Sergeant voice was irresistible, and all four of the panicked boys did as they were told and got down and started pushing. They were out of sync with each other, their form was awful, and they weren't going all the way down. It was only making Cobin madder. "HOLY SHIT!" He yelled at them, "You all look like a soup sandwich, made with a bag of smashed assholes! Get down! Arms parallel to the marching surface! Go!"

"The what?" One of the boys said, looking up at Cobin from his front-leaning-rest.

"THE GODDAMN GROUND THAT'S WHAT!"

It took them a few seconds, but finally all four of the boys found themselves low in the pushup position. Cobin took notice of at least one of them who already appeared to be struggling. Superhuman my ass, he thought. "Alright, let me explain something to all of you," He said as he paced back and forth in front of the small formation of scared teenagers, "when you bully, when you haze, you are making this team weaker. You are counteracting the reason that you are here, making negative progress toward your goals. When you harass and exploit a fellow warrior who might very well save your life one day, you are wasting this institution's time. Even more than that, you are wasting my time, and for that you will suffer greatly." Cobin stopped his pacing directly in front of the leader and looked down at the boy, confused and distraught. "This is what's going to happen, when I say 'up' you will go up, and sound off with 'I will not haze,' when I say 'down' you will go down, and sound off with 'fellow warriors.' Do you understand?!"

All of the boys weakly responded with "Yes, sir" or some variant of it.

"I can't HEAR YOU!" Cobin shouted.

"YES SIR!" they rang out in unison.

Cobin almost wanted to say, 'Do I look like a fucking officer to you?' but he controlled himself, and simply said "Up!"

He continued with having them do push ups for maybe ten more repetitions, then switched it to sit-ups, all the while having them constantly repeat the same phrase over and over again. After a while of sit-ups he went to jumping jacks, then back to pushups. Normally there would an entire playbook of obscure Army exercises he could use to torture ate-up privates, but something told him that in this situation if he said 'The Leg Tuck And Twist!' he probably would have just been met with blank stares, so he stuck to the basics. After not too long of this, fatigue began to show even in the face of the gorilla, which was the goal. Nobody, no matter how strong, got through a good smoking session without hating their life.

He had them in the front-leaning-rest again and one of the boys dropped to his knees. Cobin got down on one knee in front of him and said, "What the hell are you doing, warrior?"

"It hurts, sir!" The boy mutter weakly.

"No," Cobin said, "What you are feeling IS NOT pain! You understand?! It is MILD DISCOMFORT! Come back and tell me about pain when you get shot or when one of your limbs gets ripped off. In this path you have chosen in life, you're going to spend a lot of time quite uncomfortable, if you're not okay with that, I would seriously reavulate your life choices."

"Umm, excuse me…?" Cobin heard a small voice say from off to his side. He looked toward the source of the voice to see none other than Ruby and the entire team of people that had come to greet him the morning he had been released from the hospital.

Oh fuck, he thought. He stood up, and directed his attention back toward the four boys on the ground. "Alright, warriors, saved by the fuckin' bell. Get the hell up! Move with a purpose."

There was a collective groan as they all stood, looking dazed and sore and tired. Cobin stepped up the gorilla and folded his arms, looking the large boy straight in the eye. "You can't treat other students like that," He said. His tone of voice had changed, going from Angry-As-Fuck Drill Sergeant to Calm-But-Demanding Drill Sergeant. "When you do that, try to break other people's will, put them down for no reason, you are making that person -who's life you may depend on one day- less effective at what they do. You're part of a chain that's only as strong as it's weakest link, so why are you banging on it with a hammer? Square your shit away and realize that there's a lot more important shit in life than what you think is funny. Understand?"

"Yes… yes sir," The gorilla said, shaken but understanding.

"Secondly," Cobin said, "when you're out in public and you pull shit like that, people are always watching you. Especially when you're out with normal people, the people who think you're some great warrior who's there to protect them. When you insist on acting-a-damn-fool in front of those people, they lose faith you in. But not just you, all of you; this academy, every huntress and huntsman in the world. You are a representative of all of your kind when you're in public, and the minute you do something that makes all those civilians with their little happy lives believe you can't protect them, it no longer matters how good you are at it, it no longer matters how strong you are when nobody's looking. Because those people don't feel safe anymore, and that's why you do this, above all else. Don't forget that." The gorilla didn't speak this time, he looked to ashamed of himself to say anything, he simply nodded and diverted his eyes. "Okay, get the hell on to class," Cobin said.

The four boys quickly grabbed their things and ran off into the building. When Cobin turned back toward Ruby and her friends, he saw the eight teenagers just staring at him in some sort of shock. He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. "It's been a long morning," he said.

Suddenly, the rabbit eared girl was in front of him. "Um… thank you," she said timidly, looking down.

"Are you alright?" he asked, completely shrugging off the act. The girl just silently nodded, so he returned it and said, "Good, now go to class." And with that she ran past him into the building. When he looked toward the other students again he smiled and said "Hey, Ruby. Look at you, all crew'd up. What's up?"

"What in the world was that!?" She asked, exasperated.

"I don't know," Yang said, "But it was awesome."

"It's sort of a long story," Cobin said, "do you all have a class to get to?" He asked, and was met with general nods from the group. He just quickly explained that he had seen those four boys ganging up on that girl, and so he had stepped in. He asked if they wanted to meet up later so that he could explain in more detail and they all agreed they would meet up at the academy cafe for lunch. Then the group of students ran inside to get to their sparring matches.

…

"Okay, so what was all that about?" Ruby asked, repeating her question from before.

Cobin sipped his cup of cheap cafe coffee, "I told you, I saw those four students ganging up on that girl, and I didn't like it, so I stopped it."

"There's a difference between putting a stop to something and public humiliation." The girl with the deep red hair said, "You looked like you had done that before."

Cobin nodded. Their little group had commandeered a small table on the patio of the school cafe, or "The Spotlight" as it was so originally named, and had secured several extra chairs from the other tables so they could all sit in an uncomfortable huddle around it and stare at Cobin. "Maybe about midway through my time in the Army, I did a stint as a training NCO, or a 'Drill Sergeant,' as it's called. Basically I took people that were not soldiers and I made them into soldiers, and in the beginning stages of that process I did a lot of what you saw out in front of your arena today."

"So you were a teacher?" Weiss asked.

"Ha! Not exactly, being a Drill Sergeant is a bit different than being a teacher. Sure, you're providing someone with knowledge but really more than that you're correcting the things about them that make them inefficient as a member of a team."

"But why did you get so mad?" Ruby asked.

Cobin looked at the girl. He had to admit, there was something genuinely terrifying about her, but at the same time she managed to show an equally genuine level of concern for him. "I wasn't actually that mad," he said, "sure, when I see someone being that stupid I get a bit pissed off, but not nearly as bad as I was pretending to be."

"But what's the point of all that negative reinforcement?" The red haired girl asked, her tone a bit accusing. "Punishment isn't always the answer."

"No way," Yang said, "Cardin and his little crew of weasels needed to take a beating like that."

Cobin returned his attention to the red head. "It's 'Pyrrha,' right?" he asked.

"Um, yeah," she said, a bit surprised by the question.

"Good to know, looks like I might be here awhile so I might as well start putting names to faces." Cobin said. "When training people in the military you don't really frame it in terms of 'punishment.' Instead, it's 'corrective action.' Punishment is just beating somebody down without a game plan to help them back up. In an ideal world, when you're working with a soldier who has a problem, you break down that part of him that's causing that problem and rebuild it so that he can function properly as a member of a team and do his job."

"I still don't see how what you were doing amounts to that." Pyrrha said. She didn't look upset, the girl was way too composed for that, but her tone and the way her back stood straight said otherwise.

Cobin shrugged, "I can understand that. To you I probably just looked like an angry old guy yelling at a teenager," he said. "Would you like me to explain it further?"

This guy's attitude was putting Pyrrha off her guard; he wasn't getting defensive or angry, like she might have expected. He was totally understanding, composed, and unimpeded by her accusations. He seemed like he just wanted to teach her. "Yes," she said, deciding to give him a chance.

"Even though it might just look like stupid anger there's a bit of science behind this," Cobin said, "when you're a drill sergeant you basically have this very strict set of rules that dictates how you respond to your soldiers in training. The tone is very harsh, I will admit. When you see a behavior like that, like bullying, you have to demonstrate immediately the consequences of those actions. You have to associate that behavior with pain, so later in life they don't have to associate it with death. But then, when you're done with that, you have to find a way to identify with soldiers and make the problem real in their eyes. Like that guy…"

"Cardin," Pyrrha said.

"Yeah, him. That dude is all ego, so I knew the best way to make the consequences real for him would be to relate it to how other people perceive him. The goal wasn't just to make him feel terrible about himself, it was to make him a better team player. As an instructor I don't want him to never recover from that, I want him to come back as a better person so that he contribute, because everyone has some redeeming value. And really, if nothing else I'm sure that dude can carry the ammo for everyone else." Cobin laughed, "But really, it's just a different teaching mentality. If you don't agree with it that's fine, I don't really see you as the type of person that that sort of reinforcement would work on, nor do I see you being the kind of person that would do something so destructive anyway."

"Regardless," Weiss said, "Cardin has had that coming for a long time, you should not feel at all bad about it," She hmpf'd.

Pyrrha remained silent for a minute, before saying, "I didn't mean to sound so accusing. That's just not the sort of thing we're used to here. The training we undergo is much more individualized than that of the military. I guess it was just a shock."

"Hey, we're all in shock." Cobin said, "I'm sure you haven't forgotten that we all exchanged a decent amount of ammunition less than a week. And yet here we are, having coffee." He raised his cup and winked. "Two weeks ago today, out of all the things I would have expected for myself, this would not have been on the list."

"Are you a giant lizard in human skin?!" Nora blurted out.

"Uh…"

"Nora!" Lie said, "Not an appropriate question!"

"So where were you two weeks ago?" Pyrrha asked.

Blake perked up suddenly, "Yes, I was wondering that, too."

Cobin sighed and leaned back in his chair. He looked around the table at the huddle of students, covered in weapons and armor as casually as if it were sweatpants and flip flops. "That… is also an inappropriate question," he said, "at least for right now."

Pyrrha nodded, "I understand," she said, and there was a general nod of consensus from the group, except for Blake who just gave him a very hard and disappointed look.

"Thank you," he said, ignoring the black-haired girl's glare. "You should all head to your cafeteria and actually grab something to eat before you have to go back to class. Go on." He said, softly but firmly.

The students all began to get up from their seats, and moved away from the table in a mass toward the cafeteria. All except Blake, who stood and just silently looked at him until the others were just out of earshot.

"You're not as quick with your words today. I hear a hangover will do that sort of thing to you," She said, and then turned to leave.

"Hey!" Cobin said, getting her attention. Blake stopped moving and looked back at him, but with the same disapproving look on her face. "Listen to me," he said, "I like you, I like your friends. I don't know jack shit about this world but it really doesn't seem like such a bad place. But don't, do not, play this game with me. I am not a teenager, I am an old ass man, so if you've got something to say to me I'd recommend you do it more directly."

"But that's just it though, you're treating us like kids." Blake said, "You've seen the way we fight, we're obviously not unfamiliar with whatever you've been through. You're just assuming that, and treating us like children while at the same time trying to make a connection to us. It doesn't work like that, I won't allow it to work like that."

"I'm assuming nothing," Cobin said, "I just said that this was not the place or time." He paused, hesitant, "Do you really want to know something?" he asked.

Blake nodded, but slowly. "Yes," she said.

"There's going to be a time when I have to talk about it. I know because that's the way it always happens. There's going to come a time when I have to say everything, because if I don't I will absolutely destroy myself." He locked eyes with her, "And you want to know something else? I've been on this planet for less than seven days and I've met maybe ten people. I have no real relationships, I don't really know anyone, and nobody really knows me either. But out of all of those people I've met, that I've barely scratched the surface of, you're probably the one I'd most likely talk to."

Blake's eyes got wide, but then normalized again, and she directed them to the ground. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Me too," Cobin said. "Now go get some lunch."

She nodded, and he watched as she ran off after her friends. When she was out of sight, he put his face in his hands and shook his head. His hangover still hadn't subsided.

…

Sorry I didn't get around to finishing this up yesterday. I couldn't find a good ending point for it. This chapter was like a standardized test you go into and come out of with absolutely no idea how you did on it. I've been totally wiped the past couple of days and I can't honestly tell if it's affected the quality of my writing or not. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed, and that you're still interested in sticking around for the next chapter.

A couple interesting things I found out:

1. The word that Pyrrha's name is derived from, "Pyrrhic" is defined by google as "Of a victory won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for the victor." That's what this character is named after. That should keep you up at night.

2. Yang is/was not a stripper. Okay, so I never watched the Red/Yellow/Black/White trailers before I actually started watching the show. There's this episode in the first season I think where they're investigating the whereabouts of Torchwick and Yang goes to a shady part of town to meet a guy that supposedly "knows everything," and when they get there it's a strip club and the guy who owns the place calls Yang "Blondie," a definite stripper name. Having not had the "Yellow" trailer to reference this information with, my brain made the awful assumption that she worked at the club under the name "Blondie." Does this make me a terrible person? That's for you to decide.

I might miss again tomorrow, but I'm going to try and crank out three or four chapters between Thursday and Monday. Goals, goals goals.

Thanks for reading!

-Wahs.