I woke up with the sun in my eyes. The bed was really very comfortable, and the soft warmth of the covers that kept me from the cold air made it very tempting to sleep in. I managed to haul myself out of bed and into the bathroom to make myself presentable. I was out of it in a few minutes freshly showered and with minty clean breath.

I'd thought about my situation some more while in the shower. Sooner or later, I'd have to explain that I'm not from Remnant. Then I'd have to explain how I knew how things were. Or perhaps they knew something already, and were hesitant to discuss. Mr. Schnee seemed to give off the impression that he knew something about my situation already. He seemed to be taking what I had said at face value.

So far, some things weren't adding up. I didn't like it, but I'd have to live with that fact for now. Perhaps I'd gone insane and this is my mind's way of coping?

I stretched and yawned, then made my way to the nightstand and looked into the drawers for things I had missed yesterday. I had ended up with a Scroll and a wallet, it seemed. I checked the wallet for identification and came out with my college ID. The Scroll's biometrics were keyed to me as well, and it seemed that it couldn't get a good read on my Aura. Whether or not that was because I had one was on the list of things to consider.

I had come up with a rough idea of what I should do.

1. Learn to survive – White Fang or Grimm, I wouldn't be able to get home if I died.

2. Learn about the world – Knowledge is power. I needed to get a good understanding of the world I was in.

3. Learn skills.

4. ?

5. Profit.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.

I sighed and laid back down on the bed. The reality hadn't sunk in yet. I wasn't sure of anything at all, and here I was creating some sort of survival plan because I treated this like a thought exercise. I would be fooling myself if I said I wanted to go through with it. Where was I really, anyway? Was I going insane? I wanted to cry, and I took that and crushed it in with the others I'd been holding in for so long it had become tiring repress. Not giving a damn about anything was a lot of effort apparently, who knew?

I tried to rationalize my arrival here as a vacation of sorts, to keep me away from the problems of home in an interesting place. It just made me feel like the floor was about to drop out under me at any moment.

I felt tired, so I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep. But sleep wouldn't come. There were too many questions begging to be answered. And I would answer them, even if I had to lie to myself in the process.

I stood up and made my way to the library. I needed to make myself useful. The first step I needed to take was to learn.

Learning about the world proved to be a much more daunting task than I'd anticipated. Stacks of books towered around me, accumulated after hours of reading and cross-referencing. I was halfway through a textbook on the properties and applications of Dust, and it boggled the mind when compared to conventional science, a textbook of which I had open on my laptop.

"Studying for an exam?" A familiar voice asked. "That's quite a lot of books."

I shrugged. "It passes the time, and keeps my mind off things."

She picked up the book I was reading and closed it so she could read the title as I grasped for it. I was glad that she'd stuck a finger in between the pages. "Dust: A Primer on its Properties and Applications."

She put it back down in front of me, there was a kind of tension in her eyes. "Planning to tinker with it?"

"Yeah, I suppose. I've got to learn about a lot of things though."

"Well-" She stopped, and put a hand on the page I was reading as she looked around. "Did you hear that?"

I opened my mouth to ask, then thought the better of it and shut my trap. I heard the faint sounds of cloth in motion that coincided with quiet footsteps. Someone was lurking in the shadows.

She gestured to a light panel a short distance away. I could make it there and back in a few seconds if I ran. That would be too loud, so I slid out of my seat and slowly made my way to the switches while Winter dropped into a fighting stance.

I got the logic. Our intruder's eyes would be dark-adapted, so suddenly raising the light levels would temporarily blind them. There! I reached the panel and jammed the illumination way, way up. The lights flared and I saw a Faunus in a tight-fitting bodysuit cover their-his eyes before jumping away. He sent a flurry of blades towards us. I ducked and covered my head as a few of them thudded into the wall just above me, while Winter deflected the ones aimed at her with quick motions of her saber.

Her motions were measured and efficient as she slid forward and lashed at him with thrusts and slashes from her weapon, which were in turn deflected and parried by the assassin's arm blades. I froze. I didn't know what to do.

He jumped over her and landed in front of me with a cheshire grin. "So you're the Schnees' pet project." Pet project? They must have mistaken me for Penny!

I stopped thinking and reacted. I thrust my head forward and slammed my forehead into his nose and then hit him up the chin with a book from a nearby shelf. Though it didn't do any damage and merely pushed him back, it allowed Winter to get between us.

"Good work!" She said as I sat down on the floor, rubbing my forehead. It was like slamming my head into concrete. My sight was gray around the edges and my forehead throbbed painfully.

I felt a rush of cold air as Winter activated a glyph and skated forward with the faunus in her hand. She slammed him against a pillar with enough force to crack it and send a tremor throughout the room. He fell limp and Winter tossed him to the floor.

I looked at my hand. It came away smeared with blood. Damn. I was squishy. Second. Where was security?

"Hey." I said as Winter walked towards me. "Where's security?"

"I don't-" She froze as something clicked. "Something's up. They should have been here minutes ago."

Winter held out a hand to me, which I took and used to pull myself up with my non-bloody hand.

"What now?" I asked, wiping my forehead on my sleeve with a wince as I walked back to my laptop and started packing it up into its bag. "Safehouse?"

"Yeah." She nodded.

"But why here? Why now?"

"The White Fang are known to strike multiple targets." She said with a an angry frown. "First there was the strike on Vale yesterday, followed up by a bombing on one of our ammunition plants. Father left to survey the damage this morning. And then… here."

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" I tried to stop my hands from shaking as I bundled up the power cable. "Strike repeatedly at multiple locations, keep the authorities off-balance. What bothers me is the lack of cohesion. I'd have struck all at the same time instead of delaying."

She gave me an odd look at that, and then nodded. "The fact that multiple targets were attacked could mean that there were plans in the works. But that the attacks were unsynchronized could mean that something has affected the plans."

I grew up in a country where terrorism was close and common. . There were no less than two Islamic militant groups active alongside Communist militants. I'd moved closer to where they were most active beginning high school, but it had never affected my life directly. And now here I was in the middle of an attack, and likely a target. Safe to say, I was afraid. I forced that down too. Treat this as a thought experiment.

"You done over there?"

"Yeah." I was done in more ways than one.

"Alright."

She bent over the prone assassin and stripped him of his gear, then tossed a pair of heavy bracers at me. I fumbled with the first one, but caught it nonetheless. I caught the second without a hitch and put them on. Flexing my wrists this way and that switched the bracers from arm blades to punch daggers, and then to firearms of some sort. She tossed me a bandolier of ammunition and I spent a little time putting it on and adjusting it to fit.

"I'm sorry to do this, but…" I looked away. I heard her stab the man.

I forced down the fear, revulsion, and puke that tried to explode out of my gut with cold logic. He meant to kill us. There was no way to bring him along and keep him secure if the mansion was under hostile control. At least it had been quick. I breathed through my nose as I forced myself to pretend everything was merely a thought experiment.

She placed a hand on my shoulder and I opened my eyes as she herded me towards the door. I noticed how she positioned herself to keep me from seeing the corpse. Had Ruby and the others killed before? If they did, how did they deal with it?

The hallway was empty, though I could hear the sounds of fighting echoing in from somewhere else. How had things gone FUBAR so quickly? I had been reading and everything was alright, then suddenly I was being escorted out of a warzone. I bit my lip and suppressed the jitters. The bracers and bandolier were heavy, and I wasn't sure I could even use them properly.

I hadn't even noticed that I was breathing heavily until Winter told me to calm down.

She pushed me into cover, a bust on a marble pedestal, as a pair of faunus turned the corner and spotted us. The response was almost immediate, and I could hear the bullets snapping overhead before they carved divots into the wall and floor. The noise was deafening and earplugs made their way onto the list of things I was wishing for. I curled up as much as possible.

I heard Winter release a kiai and somebody slammed into the wall with the sound of splintered wood. More gunfire and ricochets, then moving machinery and the clash of metal on metal. I peeked out of cover. One faunus was down, slumped against the wall as he looked around dazedly. The other had transformed his gun into a claymore and was dueling with Winter, whose lighter blade was being knocked aside by the weapon's superior weight and momentum.

I sucked in a breath and bit my lip as I flexed my left wrist. The bracer opened up as the firearm components moved into place and locked together as I braced my arm with my other hand to reduce the shaking. Winter had been knocked down to her knees by the claymore's downswings. I cursed myself for not figuring out how to fire earlier.

I clenched my wrist, and my arm was torn out of my grasp by the recoil of the burst. I gritted my teeth and steadied my aim again, ignoring the throbbing that made its way up my arm. The second burst was more on target, and the faunus's aura flickered as the rounds hit home. He turned to face me as the claymore transformed back into a rifle, Winter forgotten.

I froze. He brought his weapon up. His finger began to tighten around the trigger. And then the tip of a blade thrust out of his chest. He crumpled to the ground as bullets whizzed above my head.

I think I passed out then, because the next thing I remember was waking up on a bed. It was stiff compared to the one in my room, and I was kept from falling by a set of guard rails. A medical bed? Given the engine noise all around and the beeping coming from my right, I figured I was riding on an ambulance or transport.

I brought a hand up to my throbbing forehead and felt the bandage there. I remembered lacerating it open on an assassin's face. My left arm was in a plastic tube of sorts and supported by a sling. Had I broken it when I fired the bracers? My head hurt.

"He's awake, Lieutenant." A voice off to my right said. I didn't know its owner.

"Thank you." Winter came over and looked at me with a wry smile on her face. "I resent dragging your unconscious butt all the way to the transport."

"Sorry." I looked away.

She patted me on the shoulder. "Hey, I was kidding. You did good out there."

I nodded, though the act made my head ache. I wasn't in the mood for it. She patted my shoulder and went to talk to another person. A soldier, going by the armor and uniform. The medic ran me through a battery of tests, and then gave me a cup of water and some painkillers for my headache.

I felt more useless than ever. I couldn't help but feel that the attack on the Schnee estate was motivated at least in part by my presence as the words 'pet project' echoed in my mind. It was likely that I was merely guilty by association, that I was a victim of my circumstance. But it was also possible that the Schnees were also a part of the puzzle of my appearance on Remnant. Mr. Schnee certainly gave off the impression that he knew more than I did.

There was also the fact that I was far from being an asset to my supposed caretakers. I couldn't fight. The bracers had made that a certainty. I knew nothing about the world, about Dust, about the politics, its economy, the politics of its economy. All I had were half-formed ideas and thought experiments.

I closed my eyes and let myself go to sleep. Dreams drowning under a horde of murderous faunus and robots made for an uneasy rest.