Vale, Schnee Ammo Plant, Schnee Estate.

Vale, caused by RWBY's discovery of Roman's plans.

Schnee Ammo, Estate to capitalize on flow of reinforcements towards Vale, which leaves Atlas with weaker defenses. However plans are disorganized, causing slow(?) followup.

Schnee Ammo to weaken Gov't's war capability, steal supplies, weapons.

Schnee Estate to decapitate SDC? Was I mistaken for part of Atlas's synthetic aura program?

Why could I be mistaken for synthetic? Sudden arrival on Schnee Estate, surrounded by one week by scientists and doctors. Could be mistaken for technical team to construct me on Schnee grounds.

Why am I here?

Likely:

-Insane, coma, fever dream. Can't wake up. Maybe if I think hard enough I can change things.

Probably:

-ROB. Hopefully Friendly ROB, hope not BROB.

-Murphy.

-BOTH MURPHY AND ROB?!

Unlikely:

-Xanatos Gambit by Mr. Schnee/ other people. Probably am not target of whatever device brought me here.

-Remnant needs Earth perspective on stuff. But why?1/1

Fuck no:

-Chosen one.

Game Plan:

- Survive

- Learn

- Thrive

(haha, fuck no)

(Why not equestria)

To not snap: Focus on details. "thought experiment" is mantra. Keep self occupied. Am I doublethinking myself? thought experiment thought experiment thought experiment

I stared at my laptop screen, totally exhausted by the hours I had spent weeping out my frustration as I organized my thoughts in a text document, creatively labeled: . Seeing the kingdom of Atlas from the airship's observation deck had been the exact moment when reality finally sunk in for me. I remembered bumping into crew as I made my way down the corridors and puking my guts out into the toilet as images of blood and guts flashed before my eyes. Winter had come by to drop off dinner, which sat untouched on the table.

My stomach rumbled and I sighed as I ground my palms into my eye sockets. "Goddamnit. I'm a wreck."

"Fuck it." I reached for the cold dinner and started eating. Mashed potatoes with gravy and mixed vegetables for the side. Some sort of beef stew for the main dish. The food did make me feel a little better, though I would prefer it hot. Serves me right for being a bitch.

I took a quick shower when I was done and got into the clothes I'd been lent when I got here. The striped gray and white off-duty uniform clashed against my sneakers, but clothes were clothes. I picked up the tray and made my way to the mess to return it, standing aside to let the crew pass whenever I encountered them. Some of the crew seemed to have recognized me, and the looks they gave me were either annoyed or sympathetic. I tried to ignore them.

I left the tray in the deposit area and walked over to one of the windows. The airship was patrolling the skies above Atlas as its complement of escorts cycled in and out from their CAP missions. A pillar of smoke billowed over the horizon and stained the sunset brilliant red. Firecracker-like explosions flared and burst amid the rubble of the complex. I figured it was the SDC munitions plant that had been struck yesterday.

The Kingdom's towers were all slate-gray blocks of glass and concrete, while the architecture of the suburbs was more varied, though trended towards utilitarian collections of regular shapes. Some of the older buildings looked more ornate, while newer ones were sleeker and more 'high-tech' in appearance. The parks were mostly Japanese-style gardens on a massive scale. Brutalist architecture and zen minimalism were characteristics of Atlas, apparently. It was a perfect match for the snowy peaks of the Sentinel Range that bordered the Kingdom's northern sector.

I played with the touch display on the windows, zooming in and out on various neighborhoods and industrial sectors, and I spent a few minutes watching swarms of workers and robots weld together the sections of a military airship while a finished one lifted off and flew elsewhere, its fresh hull gleaming in the sunlight.

I almost jumped when I noticed the tall wolf faunus in off-duty uniform standing to my left. He was looking at the ruins of the plant. "Don't they know that what they did will only make it worse?"

I really didn't want to discuss this right now, but I felt his pain. "I'm Carlos." I forced myself to say.

He looked a little miffed, but I guess he understood because the look disappeared from his face almost instantly. The fact that I looked like a wreck probably helped.

"Weird name." He said. "Ash. So, I heard you came up from the Schnee place?"

"Yeah. I was staying as a guest when they attacked. Now I'm going to be staying aboard for a few weeks while they sort things out." Technical truth, that first part. I wanted to change the topic. "Have you seen Lieutenant Schnee?"

"The LT?" His brows furrowed in thought. "Last I heard, she was debriefing the Captain."

"I'll just wait, then." I continued playing with the window display. "Could you tell me about the ship? Nothing classified of course. I'm just curious."

"Sure."

I learned that I was aboard the AMAS Glory Dawn, a Greyhound-class assault landing ship. She had a crew of 350 and had quarters for a regiment of troops alongside facilities for roughly 500 combat robots. She was technically a military airship, but was among other things an interim safehouse for SDC personnel while the ones 'downstairs' were swept and secured. She would be handed over to the combat schools by the beginning of the term and would become essentially a glorified school bus and training campus for the Atlesian combat schools like other aged airships.

Ash had managed to show me to the rec area before leaving to begin his shift in the CIC, and I occupied myself with the game machines. They were surprisingly similar, and the most glaring difference was the fact that holograms were everywhere. I found myself scoring major points on a Time Crisis-alike to kill time. Anything to keep me distracted from my thoughts. The recoil system was a bit more hardcore than I was used to and it had been a challenge to get my aim right for the first few lives.

Player two joined in and we shot some mooks for a few minutes in silence.

"Hey." Winter said. "How're you holding up?"

"Fine. Just…" I sighed. "Trying not to think about it."

She said after a little while. "You've got to let it out and deal with it sooner or later. Now, I'm not gonna force you to talk or anything. You do that on your own time. Just… don't wait too long. It'll fester, and it'll hurt more than anything."

"I'll try." I covered her with the machine gun while she reloaded and moved around to get a better position. The mooks fell down and we advanced screens.

I think we managed to get to the end of the third level before that Mad Dog ripoff dropped a half-dozen grenades into our position and killed us. I shot out my initials on the high-score list. 5th place. Winter said it wasn't bad for a newbie. There was a massive divide between my score and 4th place, which signified who the 'pros' were.

I put down the light gun and turned to Winter as I swallowed down my apprehension. "Can we talk?"

"Sure." She patted me on the shoulder and smiled.

"Do I have an Aura?" I asked as we leaned over the railing, wind in our hair.

"We don't know." She said. "Consensus says you do, but we didn't try to activate it."

I wondered. "Why not?"

"Figured it would be up to you when you woke up."

"Oh." I sucked in a breath. The air was cleaner than back home. "Can we do it now?"

"Sure." She said. "Close your eyes."

I felt something linger over my forehead, probably her hand, and I felt a wash of static radiate from a point in my skull and throughout my body. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and as the static feeling traveled down my arms and legs and doubled back on my toes and fingers, up again into my torso. I expected her to chant something.

"So…" I asked as I opened my eyes. "Is it done?"

"One way to find out."

She cast a glyph, and then threw a punch at me. Time slowed to a crawl and sped up at the same time. I couldn't move, but I felt something push her fist away just enough for it to meet only air.

"Hey!" I frowned at her as she threw another punch at me, which similarly veered off-course. My forehead throbbed as she tossed more punches at me, each meeting the same fate. Her firsts rushed by my ears, but never connected.

She leaned back, apparently satisfied. "Alright. So I got a read on your Aura."

"So I have one?"

"Yeah." She nodded with a big, cocky grin. "It doesn't absorb the force of attacks like most people do, it deflects them. Which is cool because it usually means that your aura takes less damage per hit, but it's also dangerous because very powerful, very sudden attacks could power right through and hit you directly. Sniper, and you're dead."

"Okay." I raised an eyebrow. "So, I've got to keep alert and moving right?"

"Yup! Your Aura can probably do a lot of other things too, since it's a manifestation of what makes you, you."

I looked up at the sky, wondering what exactly that means. "Well, at least I'm not that squishy anymore." I looked back at her. "How do I control it?"

"That depends. We'll have to find out what makes you tick."

"Ah." I breathed. As long as I was distracted. "And I guess we're going to find that out next?"

"Yup!"

"Thought so."

Winter subjected me to a battery of physical tests that left me panting for breath on the practice area's soft floor. My everything burned with exertion, and I think I pulled my soul. I just wanted to close my eyes and drift away on the absolute comfort of the stiff foam under my back. She had worked me into the red with just a few punches, and that hit that got through and slammed into my shoulder still throbbed. I was probably bruised under my clothes.

"Fuck…" I groaned. "Is this the last one?"

"For now." She grinned.

"Oh joy."

I hadn't been in the best of shape before I got here, and I still wasn't. My lifestyle had become sedimentary, a personal term for post-sedentary, after I had given up on life and decided to rot away in my room. Though I still retained some definition from when I used to play soccer, and the yardwork that I could be persuaded to do often entailed chopping off thick branches with a machete so not everything was lost. Hopefully.

I looked up at Winter. She hadn't even broken a sweat. She bounced on the balls of her feet to keep herself moving as she beat up a training robot with a flurry of kicks and punches, while dancing out of the way of its retaliations. That same robot had knocked me on the flat of my ass three times in a row. Her foot snapped up with a yell and the robot's head recoiled backwards as its 'eye' dimmed. It fell in a heap.

"Go Team Winter… yay..." I managed to clap thrice before I fell asleep.

The shooting range proved to be more enjoyable than physicals I had been enduring the past few days. I had already gotten some of the basics of aiming and shooting down from years of light-gun gaming, and a few posture corrections and some getting yelled at by the instructor had me beating personal records as I gunned down metal and paper targets alike. More cerebrally entertaining however, was learning how to maintain the firearms under the quartermaster's watchful eye.

The quartermaster, with some prodding by Winter, had given me a right-handed pistol and walked me through its disassembly and reassembly a few times before telling me that I had five minutes to make it left-handed and reassemble it into working condition.

I had learned that Remnant weapons came in three flavors: Mass-produced weapons like the Schnee Armories Model-19 Mark-11 pistol I had in pieces on the table. It could unfold into a tonfa for fighting in close quarters and could be used as a flashlight in both modes; The second type of weapons were sold as kits and individual parts, like Warhammer figurines and gunpla back on Earth. An example of those were the bracers wielded by the assassin, which Winter pointed out after disassembling them; The third were scratch-built weapons designed, optionally forged, by their wielders. Huntsmen and Huntresses usually used those kinds of weapons. To do so was a rite of passage into adulthood, and signified that the wielder was ready to take on the world.

It took me several tries to get it the reassembly time under ten minutes. Now I was just working to get it under five.

"Six minutes and forty five seconds." He grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. "Keep up the good work and you'll be an adult in no time!"

I nodded and started disassembling the thing again. Being distracted meant that I couldn't see blood and death whenever I closed my eyes. He must have seen something because the smile on his face disappeared.

"We need to talk." Winter pushed the lid of my laptop down so I could look into her eyes. "You've been running yourself ragged for weeks!" One and a half weeks, actually.

I yawned. I was very tired. "I'm fine."

"No you're not!" She growled. "Look at yourself in the mirror, will you?"

I knew what she meant, but I had to keep going. I had to keep myself distracted

"You haven't been getting any sleep. You've got bags under your eyes. They're bloodshot. Your hair's a mess. The buttons on your shirt are all wrong. You fell asleep while firing a rifle for Dust's sake!"

"What else am I supposed to do!?" I spat. "I have to learn to survive in this godforsaken place!"

I had forced myself into a rhythm of working myself to exhaustion. When I wasn't training physically, I was on the firing range. When I wasn't doing that, I was reading until I passed out. I wanted to stop seeing the blood. I wanted to learn how to survive. Maybe both. Winter had been proud of my effort the first few days, and then that had dissolved into concern after the first week.

"And you are!" Her voice softened. "You are. But you're pushing yourself too hard. C'mon, it doesn't take a shrink to know something's bothering you. Grimm, everyone you've met thinks so!"

"Winter." I gritted my teeth and swallowed something I wanted to say, but didn't mean. "I'm not from here, okay? I just want to go home."

"I know." Her voice was quiet. "We've got contacts in all four Kingdoms looking through the citizens' records. We-"

"Well you can stop!" I snapped. "I'm not from around here! Not from Remnant! I'm probably not even in the same universe!"

She looked at me like I had snapped. I know I sounded like it. I felt like it. I screwed my eyes shut and forced myself to keep going. "You know the story. I was just wasting my life away, then something comes along and sends me to fuck-knows-where like I'm in some shitty sci-fi story."

Truth be told, I was just denying the fact that the chances of me going back home were practically zero. I think I was crying already.

"And the attack… every time I close my eyes, I hear gunfire and stabbing and screaming. I see people die. I could rationalize to myself all day. I could pretend everything is a thought experiment and I could push it all deep down, but there's only so much I can take. I think this is-this is it…"

I remembered Winter holding me in her arms as I sobbed into her shoulder and broke down completely.