"Miltia Malachite doesn't exist," repeats Jaune slowly.

A long silence. What isn't the green-jacketed guard saying? Is he choosing his words carefully? Does he think that Jaune is an ignorant idiot? Or is he still wondering why Jaune was staring at the seat of his tight white pants earlier?

Jaune keeps his gaze deliberately focused on his sneakers as Ren works the spear loose. Finally, he has to say something. "I totally talked to her two hours ago."

Belatedly, he remembers Pyrrha's warning. She hadn't exactly told him why it was so important to keep silent about Miltia… but hey, the Sheep helped him by kickstarting his aura. Plus she wanted to keep meeting him to help him with his chakras. It's not like she'd have any ulterior motives in assisting him, right? So it only makes sense that he reciprocate her kindness by believing in her existence, right?

That's something he'd never thought he'd say.

Ren remains quiet. The guy seems to like long silences. Jaune decides that from here on out, he can probably expect the guy to pause for max awkwardness before responding.

"Ah."

{That's it? That's all he has to say?}

Jaune chuckles uncertainly. "So what is this, a conspiracy theory?"

As if things couldn't get any more awkward… "Exactly."

{What does that even mean blxkdnsldnfos}

"The King's Horses are fairly adamant that everybody believe that."

"Um… so, if I told you that I've been living underneath a rock for most of my life, how would you—"

"Malachite Technologies," Ren clarifies understandingly.

{Okay. That's something. Finally.} "So you don't believe it?"

"I was hired by the Teeth to befriend and protect their heiress Schee because of that incident," he replies curtly. "I remember the girl clearly. If what you say is true, then it can only mean one thing."

"What?"

"Brace yourself."

Jaune is still pondering the significance of that preparatory statement when Ren yanks the spearhead free. He plummets to the ground, screaming for all of half a second before something cold and hard slams his jaw shut—slams into his entire body, actually. Something solid and secure that he can't help but wrap his limbs around for security as they hit the ground roughly.

Everything finally stops.

Jaune unclenches his entire face and stares up into the emerald eyes of a certain Pyrrha Nikos. She's carrying him in her arms like a true warrior with a recently rescued damsel in distress, and he certainly isn't helping with the image by smooshing his face against her breastplate for all he's worth. "U-u-uh, Pyrrha!"

She lets him get to his feet and claps her hands free of imaginary dust with a grin, either totally ignorant or super courteous about his unintentionally perverted ways. "I'm glad you're okay," she says before lifting her eyes to Ren. "And thank you too!"

Jaune is too busy stuttering broken apologies to notice Ren tossing Pyrrha's javelin down before silently leaping upwards into the leaves of the tree above; by the time he remembers the business about the Malachites, his second opinion has already disappeared. Ah well, he'll just have to pester Pyrrha after dinner about it.

The spear somehow falls right back into Pyrrha's upstretched hand, whereupon she smacks it against her armored side. The weapon begins to collapse then, folding into itself gracefully until it resembles a short sword. "I did not want to miss," she smiles, hooking the sword into a belt at her waist, "But at the same time I did not want to hit anything valuable."

{Did her eyes just drop…? No, focus.} "Not that I'm not grateful to you for breaking my fall—twice—but, uh, how did you manage to…" He trails off, hoping she'll get the hint.

Pyrrha has the grace to look abashed. "I heard you screaming through the air on my way to the lakeside."

Jaune looks at her skeptically. "That's practically on the other side of campus."

"Thus my concern," Pyrrha nods. "It's been a while since I've had such a short-distance target."

The skepticism transforms into a wary side-eye. "Really."

"I had to scale back the strength quite a bit to avoid punching a hole in your neck," she continues unawares, "Or worse, tearing the clothes right off your body." The side-eye Jaune gives her is now not so much skeptical as it is incredulous, yet it all goes over Pyrrha's head as she quickens her pace. "I suppose we did not have to locate each other using our scrolls after all," she muses, "As it is currently dinner time, and I smell meat."

She offers her arm to him, and he's quick on the draw this time, hooking his arm to escort her in the general direction of delicious foods.

It's moments like these when he feels like he could fall down at Pyrrha's feet in gratitude.

Moments like entering the cafeteria and not having to worry about where to sit.

Hey, the concept is actually a lot more important than you'd think. It's the first day of school. Well, not quite, seeing he still has to pass Initiation, but today is the first time that all the students are gathering together in an open social setting. He swears that 70% of the eyes in the eating commons flicker in his direction, evaluating and processing his presence by Pyrrha's side. It might not be a conscious effort, but they're probably already subconsciously associating him with her.

See? First impressions are important.

But there's more. There were already first impressions to be had during the headmistress' opening speech. Dinner is one step further. Students will be banding together here, drawing connections via mutual friends, expanding their social networks and laying down the groundwork for tight friendship circles.

If what Dad says is true—that women go crazy over confidence—then right now, women should be taking note of his name and number. Okay, well, maybe he's not lady-killer great {yet, heh heh heh}, but definitely a lot better now that Pyrrha is on Team Jaune. At least, on his end, his eyes aren't picking out details of the ground at his feet as he and Pyrrha get in the food line, but rather surveying the cafeteria with… what is this strange feeling? Not the usual insecurity or doom, but… whoa. Positivity.

Yang is the most eye and ear-catching spectacle in the cafeteria; she's loud and proud and flashy as she love-taps the faunus around her, maybe catching up with summer stories. Still, she maintains a physically close distance with Monkey boy who'd assaulted him, flirtatiously bringing Sun close before abruptly diverting her attention to another male. Sun on his part handles himself with an almost calculated carelessness, taking Yang's bouncing act in stride while keeping up his own conversations. Together, the two play the part of Zodiac's power couple, keeping their many friends close…

Weiss sits close to the center of this party, a chip of pale ice in the middle of rowdy firestorm. She keeps shooting murderous looks in Yang's direction for their apparent encroachment into her table space, and though Yang never even glances in Weiss' direction, the icy frowns seem to buoy her passionate excitability even more. However, when Blake gently lays a hand on Weiss' arm and murmurs a couple words, the ice princess finally gives up her futile attempts and settles for daintily using chopsticks to bring tofu salad to her mouth. Her remaining guard, Adam, drives away encroaching faunus using pure intimidation factor alone.

Ren must be off-duty or something, because he's not even in the area. Nora's standing in line and waves at him and Pyrrha excitedly. Because she's already pretty far ahead, though, Jaune just settles for waving back with a smile. A girl standing next to her, one with rabbit ears atop her head, cringes at his gesture; Nora doesn't miss this, nor does she pass up the opportunity to begin teasing the bunny girl, causing her to blush scarlet.

Then there's Melanie on the opposite side of the room, also surrounded by a smaller but tighter group of female faunus all dressed in varying shades of white. Interestingly, Miltiades is nowhere in sight, though Cardin stands watch over the girls, his arms are folded crossly over his barrel chest as he regards Jaune with an intense expression.

Pyrrha nudges Jaune playfully. "Looking good, Jaune."

"Aw, really? Stop it."

"No, truly," she insists. "Compared to our initial encounter outside the gates of the Academy, you seem to have gained quite a bit of confidence. I suppose your warm-up battle with Ruby went well?"

Just like that, his tiny blossom of beautiful confidence dies a quiet death. "Uh. I guess I didn't tell you just why I was screaming."

"Oh!" A thoughtful appearance passes across her face. "I was wondering how you managed to gain such a high upward velocity…"

"Well, you see, I violated her—" he notices the horror of Pyrrha's expression and rushes his words, "—weapon, it was her weapon!" When the expression doesn't abate in the slightest, he hastily elaborates, "She was super touchy about me grabbing her scythe sword weapon of doom wrong. And then I sat on it to keep it away from her—" If anything, the horror on Pyrrha's face triples in intensity, causing Jaune to hang his hand in embarrassment. "Y'know, I'll just go stand in a corner and bang my head into the wall now."

"Well, you've expressed shame at your earlier act of dishonor," concedes Pyrrha. "But I'm not the person you should be apologizing to."

Jaune glances at Yang's group of friends to find Ruby staring at him. He quickly looks away, just a little paranoid that her super sensitive mousy ears have been somehow listening into their conversation. "Uh-oh-o-o-okay."

Pyrrha tilts her head and leans down in the direction of his down-turned face, her crimson hair descending like a curtain to fill up his vision. "Okay what?" she teases.

"I'll talk to her after dinner," Jaune finishes nervously. Preferably when the two of them are alone and not surrounded by classmates eavesdropping on how he sat on her preeeeecious weapon. Aw man. It had been a great way to keep himself safe at the time, but Pyrrha's disapproval just makes him feel really, really stupid now.

The redhead smiles approvingly. "I'm sure you w—"

"JAUNE!" Nora explodes into existence between the two of them, forcing both back a couple steps. Slung over her shoulder like a bag of potatoes is a girl already wearing the school uniform. "Here Jaune you should totally meet my new friend!"

"Nora! Please put me down!" said girl squeaks, kicking her little legs at Nora's chest. Alas, the action upsets her balance and causes her head to slide down Nora's back while her wiggling lower limbs kick up her small plaid skirt—resulting in Jaune first seeing her hot red panties before he even sees her face.

…The gods of the universe must hate him.

"Nora!" Jaune and Pyrrha cry simultaneously, both shielding their eyes. The damage is already done, however; Jaune can already feel those judgmental glowers directed to the back of his head, as if the flashing of Nora's unfortunate friend is somehow his fault. And it might just be his vivid imagination, but Jaune winces in pain when the laser glares of Ruby and Weiss bore into his skull. They're probably wondering if Jaune has mysterious booty-revealing powers.

Nora is wearing the hugest shit-eating grin Jaune's ever seen when she says, "Jaune, meet scarlet underwear!" She whirls around 180 degrees to present the furiously blushing face of the bunny girl from before. "Velvet Scarlatina, welcome to Team Jaune."

"Eep!" Velvet freezes comically in mid-struggle before slumping in defeat over Nora's shoulder like a wet noodle. "Somebody, end me now."

Pyrrha places one hand on Velvet's hip. "Let's stop humiliating the poor girl, Nora," she says gently.

Jaune glances at the cafeteria ceiling in embarrassment as Velvet returns to solid ground with Pyrrha's help. "Uh, hi there."

"Eep." Velvet bounces behind Pyrrha, her long brown bunny ears quivering like leaves in the wind.

How is he even supposed to approach this situation? "Good… to meet you?"

"Jaune, you dork!" mutters Nora, scooting right up to Jaune's ear conspiratorially. "Do you get out much? She's obviously head-over-paws in—"

A giant pink hammer descends out of nowhere and pounds Nora into the ground, complete with a small explosion of pink smoke and glitter hearts. "Nora," rebukes Ren, stepping up next to their group then with guilty weapon in hand. "You little brat."

"I love you too, Ren!" Nora chirps, popping back up with absolutely no injury to her body besides a large heart-shaped imprint on her orange head of hair. "Aaaaand I'll take that back." She snatches the sledgehammer from Ren's hand, quickly folding and compressing it into a portable grenade launcher.

It's definitely saying something when Jaune's mind accepts this multi-functional weapon transformation without much more than an offhanded {huh, that's cool} thought.

"Team Jaune, huh?" Ren remarks.

"I'm his official manager. Seats are filling up quick!" She slaps Velvet's rear end without a second thought as she declares, "Our resident Rabbit has already secured hers with a deliberate show of her own red hot seat."

"Eep!" With this final farewell, Velvet bolts.

Nora whisper-shouts at Jaune, "Wasn't sure if it was just the panties or not, but I have a feeling she has the hots for you."

Pyrrha face-palms in secondhand embarrassment.

Then Ren asks, "May I join?" while keeping his face carefully neutral.

Jaune trips and face faults onto the ground, paralyzed in shock.

"I don't know," Nora says, one finger tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Though your application is definitely pretty strong—Director of the Zodiac speedsters, third-year senpai to us ignorant first-years and all—it's nothing compared to Scarlatina's bombing presentat—"

Ren sighs and slaps his own behind. Pyrrha joins Jaune on the ground in a traumatized face fault as Nora whoops, "You're in!"

"So then we made millions selling the pelts to fur traders who made them into fabulous scarves!"

"Ten lien, actually," Ren corrects, neatly cutting his grilled chicken breast into perfect cuboidal bite-sized pieces. "And only because Nora wouldn't stop hounding them."

"It was my adorable puppy eyes," insists Nora, wolfing down her third plate of food. "Nobody can resist my ridiculously cute puppy eyes."

"I did."

"No ya didn't!"

Pyrrha swallows her mouthful before speaking. Surprisingly, she's eating even more meat than Nora is. Probably to fuel the huge guns that she's packing. "You two sound like you go way back."

Nora grins, "We were communicating telepathically as fetuses."

"We didn't meet until we were ten."

"Telepathy knows no distance," she defends. "Especially once you're in the same pack."

Jaune pulls upon his scarce knowledge of faunus from the history of the war to ask, "Don't Snakes usually go solo?"

"See? It was our telepathic connection from birth that brought him to me," Nora explains brightly.

"I caught her breaking into my food stash."

"IT WAS FATE!"

Nora's exuberant outburst draws more than a few stares from their neighbors, most of who immediately return to their own food. At this point, Jaune notices that Yang's huge conglomeration of friends has extended a branch in their general direction, bringing the popular faunus around them. They're all either incredibly attractive, like a slim redhead with a key-shaped blade hanging off her hip, or they're in possession of weapons of mass destruction, like Ruby with Crescent Rose. Tifa waves at Pyrrha pleasantly while conversing with a spiky-haired blonde with an oversized wide-blade sword magnetized to his back, but her eyes slide right over Jaune as if he doesn't exist.

Which reminds him, Pyrrha was supposed to tell him about Miltia! Only now, Pyrrha is pretty engaged in talking with Nora and Ren, and it sadly doesn't look like she's about to slip away anytime soon.

"I managed okay without Ren when he was off doing his guard-guarding-guardiggity things," Nora is saying. "In fact, over the years, we even developed a secret long-distance signal to keep tabs on each other."

"It's not very secret when you scream it at the top of your lungs."

Pyrrha laughs, quipping, "If you followed them around using your, eh, secret signal for years, I can see why the heiress Schnee regards you in the way she does."

"Meh, I figure I'll just avoid her as much as possible for the rest of the year," Nora chirrups. "What about you, Jaune? Got any fun war stories?"

Jaune can hear his heart pounding in his ears as three pairs of eyes fall to him. He can't really fabricate a convincing tragic story of love and war and everything in between within three seconds, so instead he mumbles the truth: "I… um… didn't fight."

The responses are varied, from Ren's narrowed eyes to Pyrrha's glance of concern. After two seconds, Jaune can't help but stare at his empty dinner plate—until Nora blurts in her usual tactless manner, "Everybody fought. Somehow, some way."

Ren's awkward pauses are nothing on the silence that's stretching between them right now.

"Everybody has their own story," Pyrrha finally assures, resting a hand on Jaune's shoulder.

"No, I didn't mean it that way," Nora backpedals. "At least, the way I think that you're thinking of the way I think. Which it isn't. What I meant to say is that, even if you didn't fight, you had to have had some sort of—"

"You're digging yourself into a hole," Ren interrupts. "And not the good kind."

"If you're looking for a story," Pyrrha offers, "I fought at Fort Hospice."

That's a definite conversation stopper. Even Nora has the tact to limit herself to "Oh. Wow."

"Pyrrha, you don't have to recount that experience," interjects Jaune quickly. Really, she doesn't, because if Tigers value honor in everything, then her memories of that battle (and her impression of humans) must have been pretty horrible. "Especially not to cover my butt."

"I wouldn't have mentioned it if I didn't want to talk about it, now would I?"

A small detail that had been niggling at the back of his mind finally makes it to the surface. "Hold on a second. How old are you?"

Nora slaps Jaune on the shoulder playfully. "You don't get out! Basic rules with the ladies: you don't talk about weight or age."

"A clever way of posing the question," Ren offers sagely, "Is to ask how young they are."

Pyrrha just smiles ruefully. "I was thirteen years old at the time, had a basic handle on javelins, and happened to be close by. They drafted me right away on emergency call."

Jaune tries to imagine who Pyrrha was when she'd been shoved into the middle of the Fort Hospice battlefield. Had she started growing into the graceful woman she is today yet, or had she still been a clumsy child? Well, maybe not clumsy if she had that insane accuracy… but what boggles his mind the most is that Fort Hospice was early in the Faunus War. How much of Pyrrha's life was spent as a warrior on the bloody front lines? Was that the 'five years of combat training' that the headmistress had talked about in her opening speech? How many days of her teenaged years had Pyrrha spent not as a soldier, but as just a normal girl, or a student, or a significant other?

{She definitely isn't any less well-rounded though despite that though.}

{Yeah just look at those curves huehuehue...}

Of course, it's Nora that spews out her questions first, her eyes wide. "Oh my Light! What did you do? What were your firsts? Did your Semblance activate then? How did you feel when you did all of that? Give me all the juicy details!"

Jaune tries to lean in close to Pyrrha and the telling of her story, only to find an unexpected hand on his shoulder keeping him back. He startles and twists around to find Blake looming above him. He can't see any sort of dark aura wafting off her body, but he certainly feels a heavy intimidation factor from her weighing down on his head and cringes in response.

"I need to borrow Jaune here for a second," says Blake quietly.

Pyrrha glances between Jaune's and Blake's faces, her expression uncertain. She's probably thinking the same thing that he is: that what's happening right now eerily mirrors the first encounter they had a couple hours ago. It's only now that Jaune realizes what that might have meant to the Tigress: that, in a moment of uncertainty, he'd trusted the Cat over her. Maybe it hadn't meant that much to her at the time, as they'd only just met. Maybe it doesn't mean much now either, but Jaune would like to think that he and Pyrrha are fairly good friends now. This time…

"Hey Blake," Jaune says. "Sorry, but I'm in the middle of team building."

Nora's eyes light up with an excited sparkle. "Oo, are you applying to Team Jaune too?"

The Cat's lip curls at she stares the Dog down. The Dog happily stares right back, not giving a fuck. After a charged moment, Ren diplomatically waves a hand towards the slight gap between Jaune and Pyrrha. "Would you like to take a seat?"

"Only if you first show us your—" is all Nora gets out before Ren uses chopsticks to toss a chunk of chicken meat towards Nora's mouth. The Dog cuts herself off to reflexively snap up the food.

Blake's hand tightens on Jaune's shoulder, her fingernails digging into his skin. He doesn't remember her having fingernails that sharp though. Maybe they're retractable? Are retractable fingernails possible for faunus? "Jaune, I need to talk to you."

Pyrrha smiles, though it's more out of grace than any real happiness. "Is this something you can share with the team, or is it for the leader's ears only?"

Blake smiles as well, though the fact that her pupils, now mostly hidden by her black bangs, have obtained an ominous red glint… it's really starting to freak Jaune out. And the fingernails digging into his shoulder feel a lot more like claws. "Even the youngest of roses can wilt in an hour if left untended," she quotes mysteriously as she unhooks her hand from his shoulder. Jaune unconsciously sags in relief as the Cat leaves them.

"She's creepy," Nora announces. "Even if her panties had dancing purple elephants on them, I don't think she'd make it in."

"Too many secrets," mutters Pyrrha, almost to herself.

"A poet," muses Ren approvingly.

Jaune doesn't say much, only watching Blake as she stalks towards the cafeteria exit. A lot of faunus have finished up their meals and are in the process of leaving, including a lot of Yang's lesser groupies. And one significant friend. Jaune would have pegged Ruby as one who would have stuck around longer to hang out with the popular kids, if only because she holds the position as Yang's moe younger sister. Maybe Ruby wants to strike out her own path? Except the young teenager is morosely ignoring everybody around her as she walks away from him and straight out the doors.

Blake's parting words spring to mind again as Jaune launches himself to his feet in horrified realization.

{Ruby Rose.}