A short high-effort shitpost fic to distract myself in the middle of final exams season. I'll sort something out for To Shatter Fate, just lemme finish my exams first.

Jaune stared giddily at the twinkling sparkles floating off of his fingers, bright and golden-yellow even in the warm midday sun. Sitting down on the soft grass in a courtyard of the school, he smiled in satisfied elation.

His semblance... that's what this had to be, wasn't it?

With a determined fire in his heart, he finally, finally, made up his mind.

He could tell them now; it was the right thing to do, after all, wasn't it? Especially now that he had his semblance... whatever it was...

Surely, by getting it off his chest, things would get better, wouldn't it? Everyone always said that admitting a lie is better than holding it in— and his transcripts surely counted as one.

It was the right thing to do, Jaune Arc concluded. Not as he'd get Betrayed, let alone Trapped, would he?

They were in a school, not the military...

Pah, he was being overdramatic. Not as if their reactions would be that bad...

~/{}/~

"You abhorrent filth!"

Weiss Schnee screamed as she stabbed at Jaune in his rusted, iron cage, where he'd been confined for the last three days.

"Oh Gods! It really is that bad! Aiiieeee!" Jaune wailed in pain and abject terror. "I thought this was just a school, what the fu- ack!" -Another stab.

"This is practically a military school, Arc, what did you expect?"

"Not this obviously!"

His prison was like a large birdcage, big enough to hold him inside, so long as he crouched down with his knees against his chest. The room the two were in was a uniform pattern of grey stone bricks, lit by the sickly-yellow light of a chandelier on the ceiling.

Just then, Yang Xiao-Long entered the Beacon Dungeons. –Dungeons. He really wished he'd read the map and realised there were freaking dungeons here, and what that meant, before he lied his way in.

"Hi Weiss, I've decided to turn around my life! I'm going to follow the rules and study properly from now on!"

"That is... quite sudden." Weiss turned to face her in the doorway. "Are you serious? Normally, by all means, you're the last person I'd expect to care about someone breaking the law like he has."

"Really?"

"Yeah... it's almost as if some outside force has warped your personality to fit a narrative, and not let you act as you would normally..." Weiss mused, a pale finger to her chin.

She put her hands on her hips. "Oh well! Good thing you're here, Yang, this rat here broke the rules. And as we all know, there's nobody on Remnant as straight-laced as Yang Xiao-Long. Breaking the rules in front of a stickler like her is tantamount to suicide."

"W-what!? That doesn't sound like her at all! How could she change so drastically at the drop of a hat, feels like BS to m– ow!"

"Quiet, you! Don't draw attention to how flimsy this is! Yang! Come over and beat him up, but in a very specific way to make him feel homicidally vindicated later!"

"Huh?"

"Yeah! I'm going to beat you up for that reason, now!" Yang cheered, then beat Jaune up for said reason. But in a specific way, where he'd feel homicidally vindicated later, if he were so inclined. If there was an audience, they might even root against her in the future, in that case.

A mis-angled punch from Yang shattered the brittle bars of the rusty cage, and Jaune scrambled to all fours after collapsing out.

"I– I think I'm gonna–" he heaved. Blood spattered out from his mouth, because vomiting is lame, but bleeding is cool and hardcore.

"Oh no! Now he can escape punishment for his crimes!" Weiss shrieked, hands on either side of her face in shock. "Yang, my lowly vassal, do something!"

"O-of course, lemme... just– ack!" she threw up over the stone tiles, (this time, it was just plain vomit, since that's just plain pathetic and nowhere near as cool and edgy as bleeding is).

"W-Weiss..." she groaned, "I punched that rusty metal pretty hard, even through my aura... I think I've got tetanus..."

"That's no excuse! –aaand he's gone... hah..." she sighed, "Never mind."

Yang threw up again behind her.

"Gods, Mr Ozpin! Sir, you have to help me!" Jaune cried, scrambling over to the Headmaster that he'd been fortunate to find as the first man he'd seen in three days. "Weiss and Yang from team RWBY have gone crazy! I've been Trapped, and Betrayed!"

The rest of the students, a colourful crowd composed from across all year groups, gathered in the castle grounds to stare at the tattered rags that Jaune was clad in. He didn't care. The sun felt holy on his skin after three days without it.

"Oh really now?" Ozpin took an uncomfortably long sip from his White Monster Energy can. Weird, he'd thought the old man wasn't the White Monster Energy-drinking type. Whatever, as long as he could help-

"Yes, I am aware, Mr Arc. You've been missing for three days." Siiiip.

"What? S-so you, er, you're gonna arrest them, right? They locked me in a cage and abused me like an animal! They're fucking crazy!"

"That they are, Mr Arc, that they are." Ozpin agreed.

Jaune almost let out tears of relief, but found he couldn't, because he was too dehydrated.

"-However, I will have to expel you, of course."

"W-what?" Jaune's mind shuttered to a halt, like the scratch of a record.

"Tell me, Mr Arc..." Ozpin pulled an OLED model Nintendo Switch with white Joy-Con controllers included, out from his blazer. Jaune's OLED model Nintendo Switch with white Joy-Con controllers included. He could've sworn he'd left that in his dorm, under his bed. The teacher's glasses caught the sun's light, obscuring his eyes with the glint. "...what is this?"

"I– er– what?" Jaune blanked.

"Playing coy?" Ozpin sighed. "Can't say I'm surprised... given that you're a Gamer, Mr Arc."

A resounding gasp burst from the crowd of students, echoing across the entire courtyard.

"H-hey! You can't say that with a hard-R!"

"Gamer."

"Oi-!"

"Gamer."

"St-"

"Gamer."

"How are you still employed!?" Jaune cried.

"Jaune!? Jaune!? Tell me it's not true! Tell me you're not a- a Gamer!" a new voice, entered from the sidelines.

Jaune's blue eyes widened to find Pyrrha pushing her way to the front of the crowd, her distraught face wet with tears.

"Pyr? I don't get it? What's wrong with playing the odd videogame?" Jaune asked, "I mean, I get it's kinda cringy to call yourself a 'Gamer' as if it's a real hobby, but-"

A resounding gasp burst from the crowd of students, echoing across the entire courtyard.

"See? He admitted it!" Weiss yelled from the crowd. More calls for violence erupted from the body of onlookers.

"Burn him!"

"We demand a public execution!"

"Cut off his Internet access!"

Pyrrha fainted, swooning and falling into Nora's arms. Ren looked on in disgust. Next to a bristling Weiss, a green-faced Yang weakly trudged to the forefront, clasping her hand, followed by a Blake that had a gaze like she was looking at walking garbage. Curiously, Ruby was conspicuously absent, but Jaune was too panicked to really care.

"Ahhh! They're here! Save me!" Jaune wailed.

"I will save you, Mr Arc... from yourself. You're hereby suspended from Beacon academy, until you better yourself and touch some grass, or die trying."

A resounding gasp burst from the crowd of students, echoing across the entire courtyard.

"D-Die trying!?" Jaune gulped, looking down at his kneading fingers, palms sweaty and his knees spaghetti.

The world narrowed around him, and at that moment all he saw were his hands, over his Clarks velcro school shoes.

A flickering glow from his clammy hands sparked something within him that day. His azure eyes rose, meeting Ozpin's hazel orbs with a glint of madness, terror and distilled Sigma Male energy.

This was the day that Jaune Arc learned what it truly meant to Live in a Society.

"Fine, then." Jaune stood tall, and rove is eyes over the entire crowd, with a firm frown. "That was a careless threat, Ozpin." he spat to the side, his subconscious Gamer instincts directing the wad of saliva at Blake's feet, the nearest minority he could target present.

"You should know, that Gamers never die; we just respawn."

A resounding gasp burst from the crowd of students, echoing across the entire courtyard.

The streets of Vale were rough, and hard.

To survive for an entire weekend, Jaune had to get a job... and so his searching brought him to the only place that would hire open, public Gamers like him. The covert ones had it so much easier... ha, if only he'd appreciated those halcyon days, like last Tuesday, more before he knew the truth.

He raised his head, pulling down his skull balaclava to reveal the lower half of his face, and its maddened grimace as he stared at the blue sign above the storefront.

GREGGS, it read.

"Retail... ahahahahaha! Of course... curse you Society!"

With a wicked, cynical, nihlistic laugh, he marched through the automatic doors.

Into the Belly of The Beast...

~/{}/~

"-Jaune? Is that you?" the attendant behind the bakery chain's counter asked, as he handed over his CV.

"Ruby?" he double-took. He hadn't recognised her in her full GREGGS uniform of matching blue crocs, socks, trousers, polo shirt and neckerchief. All of which were emblazoned with the company logo of four bright yellow squares. "What're you doing here?"

She was sitting behind the counter, applying lipstick far too wide across her face, in an exaggerated, wild smile. Behind the fake 'smile' though, she was frowning in confusion.

"I was suspended, Jaune, like three days ago. How did you not notice?"

"Three days? Your psycho teammates locked me in a cage for that long, too. What a coincidence..." he muttered.

"Yeah, that sounds like them..." she chuckled. "They sure love their sudden, out-of-character torture. What're you doing here, then?"

"I was outed as a Gamer..." Ruby winced at that, and Jaune appreciated the sympathy. But... "Wait a minute... what about you?"

Ruby was the nicest girl he knew... which, by his standards right now, wasn't saying very much, he realised.

"Me?" Ruby pointed a finger at herself. "Extreme homophobia."

"Ah," Jaune nodded. "That'll do it."

Author notes:

My God, this physically hurt to write. This is a cringekino crack parody fic making fun of those 2 million "betrayed Jaune" stories where the one guy is TRAPPED and BETRAYED by everyone for no reason in an extremely OOC way. Seriously, at least use Mercury or something, that guy's cooler. The title is... well, look up "TRAPPED AND BETRAYED" on Youtube. Greggs clothing is real too, BTW, I literally saw a shop full of it IRL. You're an absolute madlad if you rock that drip.

The 'plot' here is that his Semblance *is*『OOC』, (literally, that's the ability, and so it warps reality and the character writing to be this way... which itself is parodying the usual writers for these fics– whoa, meta). Does that technically make this psychological horror? Eh, who knows. Homophobic Ruby is here, too! This'll be a sideline thing, it only took me an hour to type this all up. Feel free to tell me more edgy meme stuff to use for when I continue it. Make a it maximum parody of the rest of this... genre? Expect the cringe and based levels to escalate, for sure.

To Shatter Fate is still the focus, obviously, but I want to actually be able to focus on it when I write it, which I kinda can't when I have a final exam in two days.