Even throughout her travels in Mistral, Ruby doesn't forget her teammates—of course she doesn't. How could she ever? With every step she takes on their journey, she finds herself missing them more and more. Going on without them feels like trying to keep walking with only one leg, like a vital part of her has been cut away, leaving her to try to flounder along without it.

Jaune, Ren, and Nora do their best to help, and they're great company, but they can't replace the hole left in her by Yang, Weiss, and Blake's absences. Ruby still feels painfully lonely at times. But just because she's hurting doesn't mean that she gets to quit. She won't just give up because things are hard. No matter how much her heart aches, she keeps pushing forward.

Besides, it's probably selfish of her to lean on the remnants of team JNPR so much. Her friends have their own losses to grieve. Although Ruby misses the rest of team RWBY more than she could ever say, at least she has the comfort of knowing that they're still alive, even if they're far away.

Her friends don't have that comfort. Pyrrha is dead, after all. There's no chance of her coming back, or of Jaune, Ren, and Nora being reunited with her again. So Ruby does her best to swallow down her pain as best she can and cope on her own. And she keeps going.

It would be easier if she could at least talk to her sister and her friends, or at least get a text from them about how they're doing. So she could know that they're safe. But that's not happening anytime soon, since they're all well out of scroll range. Yang is back in Patch, Weiss is in Atlas, and wherever Blake is, it's far enough out of range that her messages don't get through.

That doesn't stop her from pulling out her scroll from time to time to shoot off a text, only to remember at the last second that her message won't go through. It doesn't stop her from imagining Yang's response to a funny sign she saw when they entered a village, or how much Blake would have loved the bookstore in that last town they stopped to get supplies in, or how Weiss would be fascinated by the new dust combinations they'd been working with.

Team RWBY is never far from her thoughts, no matter how vast the distance between them is.

The first time it happens, Ruby doesn't even realize what she's done until after she's already sent the text. Today had been a particularly gloomy day, an unexpected rainstorm preventing them from leaving the village they'd been staying in like they'd intended to. On their way back to the inn they'd been staying at, Ruby had spotted a pair of sisters that reminded her so much of her and Yang when they were younger that it takes her breath away.

Out of habit, she'd whipped out her scroll and texted Yang about it. An error message pops up a few seconds later, informing her that the message could not be sent. The disappointment quickly jolts Ruby back to reality.

But it's not all bad, Ruby realizes that night as she lays in bed. Even if the text didn't actually get to her sister, she still feels a little better for having sent it. It's the closest she's gotten to talking to Yang in months. Somehow, it eases the pain in her heart just a bit, this attempt at communicating.

So the next time she's tempted to text Weiss about she and Nora had been experimenting with her semblance and that Weiss should totally give it a try next time they see each other, she goes ahead and sends the message. She texts Blake about how she and Ren had discovered that they both shared a love of reading, and that maybe the three of them should form some sort of book club. Yang gets all the bad jokes and puns she can think of while they're traveling.

And if she's a little more vulnerable and open in her messages than she would be normally, it's not really a big deal. It's not like her friends are receiving her texts. They're all lost in the void, unable to go anywhere due to them being out of range.

What Ruby doesn't plan for is when her friends are finally in the same place once more, all those messages that she'd over the months she'd been traveling would finally be received.

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