"Now remember Mina; in order from top to bottom are the Fire, Ice, and Lightning crystals – channel your Aura through the wrong one and you won't get the effect you're looking for, even if it doesn't blow up in your face."

Mina nodded; Weiss of course meant well, even if she was being perhaps a bit overcautious, "But of course Weiss; thank you for assisting me,"

"Dust is volatile stuff; I could hardly let a friend with your… handicap risk blowing herself up to modify a weapon with it by herself…" The Heiress shrugged off the thanks, "Although I am curious as to what prompted this… modification…"

"Who cares? It's totally awesome! Let's go try it out!" Ruby piped in excitedly.

Weiss rolled her eyes and gave her partner a light smack upside the head, "Ruby, remind me; what is the cardinal rule of Dust manipulation?"

"Ow..." the Crimsonette grumbled, before begrudgingly reciting the words, "Dust is a tool, not a toy, treat it with respect' –Now will you please stop hitting me!?"

"I will once you get it through your head that you can't just play around with Dust all willy-nilly!"

Mina smiled; while she had initially only requested Weiss's help making the modifications to sanguine Heart, when Miss Rose had gotten wind of what she meant to do, there had really been no keeping her out of it, and so the three of them, rather than two, had started for the workshops after classes had concluded for the day. In light of Team RWBY's most recent skirmish with Mr. Torchwick – or more to the point, Mr. Torchwick's mechanized battle suit – Mina had arrived at the conclusion that Sanguine Heart needed a bit more… punch, as Miss Xiao Long would have put it. The solution that she had arrived at, with Weiss's help, was to incorporate Dust Crystals into her gauntlets, and thereby lend their elemental properties to her fighting style; as Weiss explained it, she should be able to use her Aura to manifest each crystal's particular element onto the lengths of her razor wire, thus providing a bit more stopping power in the unlikely but possible event that she exhausted the driving charges on all eight of her stakes that she generally carried. This problem too had been unexpectedly addressed by Miss Rose, however, who insisted upon being helpful rather than simply gawking at the work being done; Her idea had been to integrate a three-chambered revolving mechanism into each of the stakes fit to accommodate Dust-infused shotgun shells in place of solitary driving charges, in one fell swoop tripling the usability of each as a high-impact projectile and providing an additional payload of Dust – which as Miss Rose was keen to point out, meant she could part with the detonation circuits in the gauntlets because she could now trigger the charges with her Aura instead. Mina did most of the assembly herself, save for tooling the new revolving chambers which Miss Rose eagerly tooled herself – all the spatial awareness in the world couldn't help Mina read a simple diagram, it seemed – but now the work was done, and it was time to test it out.

"Ooooh~ This. Is. Gonna. Be. Awesome!"

Weiss sighed as they continued through the halls towards the practice range, "You and weapons Ruby…"

"What? It's exciting!"

"Let us hope that it is all as practical as it is exciting…" Mina sighed, "Not that I lack faith in your knowledge and craftsmanship, but…"

Weiss nodded; Mina didn't need to finish, "You didn't just want to tinker, you want to improve,"

Mina nodded her confirmation, "Yes… whatever it takes…"

Ruby mellowed, picking up on the tone of the discussion as they went, "Blake, huh?"

"Yes…"

"She can't keep going like this…" Weiss shook her head with a sigh, "I know she likes the library, but spending every spare moment of every day using the computers to trawl the internet for useful rumors…"

Ruby's face fell, "I wish she'd let herself relax…"

"She has it in her head that she has to do this," Mina responded, though her sympathy with the sentiment was obvious, "At this point I can only aspire to be prepared when she is ready to ask for help…"

"The way I see it, we've done all we can until something else happens; it's all well and good that Blake wants to find our next step without the waiting, but there's a lot of ground to cover southeast of Vale…"

"I suppose…" Ruby reluctantly agreed with her partner.

Mina had never been one for maps or geography herself for obvious reasons, but she trusted Weiss's judgment, "Then indeed all that remains is to be ready when she either finds some useful information, or when something happens,"

There was a break in the rather somber conversation as the three passed through the blast door that separated Beacon's test-firing range facility from the rest of the campus. Apocryphally, the entrance to the indoor testing facility was so robust because, at some point – though the estimates ranged from eight to seventeen years prior – someone had attempted to engineer a new Dust-based explosive device, and the results… had not been pretty. The present facility, which had been erected to replace the charred husk of its predecessor, was built much more sturdily, to include the entrance, which might otherwise have been its weakest point. Mina tried to focus on the amusing accounts and rumors concerning the subject which she'd heard from Professors Port, Oobleck, and Peach at various times rather than the root cause that had brought her here though – that and the practice session which Weiss had taken the liberty of arranging for her – those were much less disconcerting than to think about what Blake was doing to herself because of their investigation and how she, Mina, had no way to furnish any real help.

"Alright," Weiss spoke, wresting Mina from her melancholic reverie as the Heiress proceeded up to the control booth with Ruby, "If you move onto the range, I'll key up a few of the AK-130 drones as test targets,"

"Right,"

This was much better. One could only while away so many hours in the gym before it ceased to occupy the mind. Indeed, since Blake had shut herself in the library more and more, Mina had in her turn logged a great many more hours in Beacon's fitness facilities, less because she felt that she needed additional exercise – she did not – than in the vain hope that, after the gym closed, she'd showered, and finally returned to the dorm at God only knew what hour of the night that Blake would have been there, but alas; the library, it seemed, was open nearly all hours. When that stopped helping, she'd begun sparring with Miss Xiao Long and Miss Nikos by turns, both armed and empty-handed, and for a while at least, it had helped. She would pick up a few throws from Miss Nikos here, finally make good on her promise to Miss Xiao Long to show her how she'd fought the brawler and win all those months ago there, but while it felt good to have some measure of purpose to her days, it was all ultimately busy-work. This too amounted to the same, Mina supposed, but at least there was a concrete goal in mind of her own to provide at least the illusion of a meaningful accomplishment, although she'd never much been one for illusions.

As the first row of drones took their steps onto the range though, Mina activated her Semblance and all her anxieties fell silent. Inter arma enim silent leges – the drones took the field and suddenly everything was simple again. No troublesome right or wrong, just action and consequence, No helpless idling whilst Blake exhausted herself, and no need to hold back. just her and some lifeless androids whose sole purpose was their own destruction. As illusions went, this was a serviceable one, at least for now.

Eight targets… Mina drew two of her stakes and slotted them each into a loop of her either gauntlet, Four ahead, two to either side…

As the drones raised their arms to take aim and fire, Mina bolted left and ducked into a roll as the firing commenced. She sprang back to her feet behind the two AK-130s which she'd resolved to deal with first, and using her stakes to pull lengths of wire loose, she swiftly clotheslined the two machines. Of course an android had no lungs and could not suffocate, and lacking a jugular, the maneuver was similarly useless – at first. While the security drones turned-training aids made to turn back to face her again, Mina took a deep breath and channeled her Aura through the bottom-most crystal she'd integrated into her gauntlets, causing blue arcs of lightning to crackle to life along the exposed length of her wires. The effect was nigh-instantaneous; the electricity jumped from her razor wire to the metal hulks of the drones, shorted out their circuits, and the automatons collapsed in a heap. Dimly, she was aware that Miss Rose was cheering for her, but that was irrelevant – there yet remained targets to subdue. Slipping the stakes free of the wires again Mina hastened to pitch first one, then the other at the two foes across the way, each stake impacting its own target. She used her Aura again to trigger the reaction in the Dust-shell operated driving mechanisms, and in response to her will both discharged, resulting in one gutted machine fraught with purple-blue sparks and another heap of wreckage beside it, this one encased in ice as the actual stake had bored through the machine and clamored to the floor just beyond the improvised Glacier.

That could be problematic… She thought in a strictly analytical sense as she drew two fresh stakes and slotted both onto the loops of her right glove, turning her attention to the remaining four androids, frost shells, it would seem, make unsuitable driving charges…

The remaining drones proved cleverer than their fallen peers, as two of them deployed their arm-blades whilst the other two provided surpressing fire. To compensate for this change of strategy, Mina moved to place one of the now melee-oriented drones between herself and the ranged targets, parrying an attempted opening thrust with one stake and thrusting the other through the side of the drone's head, destroying the machine's core processor, and then moved on to cover behind the other drone as it attempted to slash at her. She caught the blade in a cat's cradle of blade wire, and as she held it, she put her Aura through the Frost Dust crystal now set into her gauntlet, and a frigid cold moved from the wires to the automaton, and ice crystals began to sprout upon and entomb her foe, in much the same way that the Frost-dust driving charge had done with one of the previous drones, save that this machine suffered no trauma as it was encased.

Mina took a moment's shelter behind the improvised mountain of ice, but in short order could hear that one of the remaining two drones had broken off its suppressing fire and was closing for melee combat as well. Mina absently let the corner of her mouth curl up; the charging drone was rapidly closing on her position, and the other was stationary about eleven yards distant. Perfect.

Using her stakes as icepicks, she hoisted herself to the top of the mound of ice. Her footing was hardly stable, but it didn't need to be; all at once she poured her Aura through the Burn crystal and slung the stakes in her hand as though they were flails. She could not see it, but the wires smoldered and glowed an angry red as they hewed through the air and tore through the charging android. Mina avoided the hail of bullets from the last drone as it adjusted it's aim by allowing herself to slip back down the front of the ice. As she slid to the bottom, Mina performed her best impression of one of Weiss's pirouette moves, letting more and more length of Sanguine Heart's wire loose as she went until, on her last revolution, the extended saw of steel cord and fire sundered the final target's torso from its legs, and it exploded as it fell.

Objective complete… Mina opened her eyes, and the escape was over.

"AWESOME!"

As Weiss and Ruby made their way over from the drone control booth, the Heiress used her glyphs to collect the two stakes that Mina had discarded mid-battle, and thusly levitated them Mina's way as she approached, "Indeed, well done,"

"Mmmm…" Mina nodded, "It will certainly serve – although I am afraid that frost shells will not do for the stakes…"

"But why? It was so…" Ruby cracked up a bit, "Cool~"

Weiss rolled her eyes, "Maybe so, but if she'd thrown with the wires attached, she'd have been stuck…"

"Oh…" Ruby rubbed the back of her head embarrassedly, "I guess I got carried away… probably should have thought of that…"

"In truth, Miss Rose, no harm was done; this sort of thing is why we have a test range, if I am not mistaken," Mina reassured, though her conviction slipped ever so slightly with each passing word, "I need only replace the shells with fire or lightning to fix the problem…"

"Yeah okay…"

Weiss glanced furtively between Mina and Ruby before she spoke again, producing her wallet from her pocket, "Say, Ruby, why don't you take this…" she produced a hundred Lien note, "and go buy a box of Burn shells to replace these Frost ones – feel free to use the rest for spare parts for Crescent Rose or something-,"

"Done!" Ruby snatched the offered note, but as she turned on her heel to bolt for the airship station, she pivoted back with a suspicious look on her face "Wait a minute! I'm not gonna come back here to find that one of you tied the other up or something this time, am I?"

Mina couldn't help a little giggle, "Ah, the nostalgia…"

Weiss Schnee on the other hand, was not amused, "No. Ruby. Nothing of the sort will take place…" She spoke with a visible effort to control herself, but then the dam broke, "NOW GET MOVING BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND!"

"Eeep!" And with that, the Crimsonette was gone in a flurry of rose petals.

Weiss sighed, shaking her head, "Well, now that we're alone, want to talk?"

Mina's teeth clenched, but then she relaxed, "I… Weiss, I am not certain that I can keep this up… I want her back…"

Weiss awkwardly pulled Mina into a hug – a clumsier feet than it perhaps ought have been given that Mina was a fair few inches taller and pounds heavier, "It's Okay Mina…"

"No, it is not!" Mina objected to the condolences, but she didn't pull away from the embrace, and got choked up as she continued, "This is scarcely more than escapism, Weiss… I simply train, and tinker and none of it helps! No matter how much I accomplish or improve, I hate having to sit by like this… What is there left for me to do?"

"Shhh…" Weiss tightened the hug, and then looked up at Mina, "I guess waiting isn't working for you, huh?" Mina shook her head, "I guess dealing with neglect takes practice…" A slight note of anger crept into her voice at the word 'neglect,' but she controlled herself, "Alright… plan B; the dance is coming up next week; ask her to it. I promise it will be nice – Goodwitch just put Yang and I on the planning since Team CVFY is out longer than expected-,"

"She won't go…"

"You let me worry about that," Weiss shook her head, "Or more specifically, let Yang worry about that – hopefully while she's dealing with Blake for you, I can preserve some semblance of class for the event…"

Mina chuckled despite herself, "If I did not know better Weiss, I would say that you were taking advantage of my situation…"

"Perish the thought," Weiss rolled her eyes, but smiled nonetheless, "Do you think you're okay now?"

Mina finally returned the hug and nodded – her eyes were watering a bit, but she didn't cry, "Very well…"

"Good," Weiss nodded, "Now… what say you we do a little shopping? You're going to need a new dress…"

Author's Note: Okay, so a little more of a look at just how fragile Mina can be, and also how her friendship with Weiss progresses – but is no substitute for Blake. So yeah, I'm going to alter the dance arc of course, but it will happen, so hopefully you can look forward to that. At any rate, I do love to hear your opinions and suggestions. Until next time, have a good one.