Six watched as the rest of her...rescuers(?) dispersed around the camp. Some went to meet with others already at the camp, others attended to beasts in a makeshift barn, and the remainder set to work preparing items for purposes the eluded the girl.
Six took a moment to pause from her meal and glance at Mono, who was being carried over to a small building that seemed to be a...hospital? Hopefully not with a caterpillar like doctor like the last hospital they had visited.
Speaking of which...
Six thought back to the signal tower. Back to where Mono had broken her music box...and pulled her away from that mess. They'd ended up jumping through a portal to escape the mass chasing them, which had lead them here. Six and Mono had initially been cautious of the newcomers, until they offered her a snack.
Hey, she'd been hungry!
At least everybody had stopped looking like sausages, steaks, and cooked chicken...
Mono had been a bit more cautious, but the travel to this location appeared to have taken quite a bit out of him, since he'd only gotten a few steps before falling over, exhausted. The newcomers had helped him up, but in the process they'd knocked the bag off his head...and given Six a good look at his face.
Mono was brave. He was kind. He had risked his life to rescue her from the strange tv realm.
So why did he look so much like the Thin Man who'd taken her there in the first place?
Six was...exceedingly conflicted by what she had seen. She didn't know how to feel - people rarely looked so much like another person without some relation. Was the Thin Man Mono's father? Brother? Cousin? Mono himself?!
Movement to her left took Six's attention away from Mono. A glance revealed that it was a large lizard, coming to the fire for warmth.
Six wondered how such a lizard would taste, before dismissing the thought.
Taking one more glance at Mono, Six went back to eating.
She didn't know how to feel about her friend. But she'd figure it out. Eventually.
XXXXX
Sitting in a small wooden hut, the lead Vortigaunt turned his mind inward.
No presence other than his companions was found.
It seemed impossible.
Yet somehow, it was true.
They were free.
Free from the yoke of the Shu'ulathoi.
Free from the yoke of the Nihilanth.
Free from the yoke of anyone.
Yet freedom had come at a cost - through the vortessence, the throng knew that they were very far from their kin. It seemed they were in another universe entirely, one distant from the Combine and Xen. Far enough that they would likely go unnoticed by the Universal Union for...quite a while. Especially since the Combine had other foes to face.
The feeling of liberation was bittersweet - the Vortigaunts knew that though they had been freed, the rest of their kind would still be subservient to the Nihilanth. And soon, they would be forced to make war upon another version of Earth - where the race known as humanity, the one who's members had welcomed them here, were natives of. A war that could only end one of two ways - either the Nihilanth won and conquered the world of humanity, or man won and killed the Nihilanth...which would allow the Combine to notice both Xen and Earth.
Either way, it would be a terrible fate for all of their kind.
And yet, perhaps there was a way to avert or at least mitigate this.
The two who lead the group that had rescued the throng felt...different from the others. It was hard to tell how, but it seemed they too were travelers from another universe or five. Perhaps they offered a solution.
All in good time, though. First, the Vortigaunts had to address other concerns - they're escape had been so sudden that they barely had any food with them, and only a small clutch of antlion eggs. Enough perhaps to start a small colony, but how long could the brood last?
For now, the Vortigaunts could only hope that whoever had taken them here had acquired more antlions...and that they hadn't broken lose just yet.
XXXX
Her eyes fluttered for a moment before opening, and the first thing Ruby Rose saw was a wooden roof. Groggily, her eyes began to focus, which didn't really help her situation.
Closing her eyes again, Ruby groaned. "Weiss? Blake? Yang? Are you okay?"
Ruby had meant to say that more emphatically, but she still wasn't feeling at one hundred percent. Or even twenty five percent.
No vocalizations answered her question, but Ruby quickly found her teammates in the same room as she was, all out cold but thankfully alive.
Now that she had determined that her friends were okay, Ruby turned her mind to a different question: how had they gotten here?
Ruby had remember their assignment - Professor Ozpin had allowed a few teams to go on a second mission two weeks after the breach had been sealed (apparently after quite a bit of negotiating with the Vytal Council), and in this case, he'd allowed them to investigate some strange reports coming from a small dust mine within the kingdom's borders. Once again, Professor Oobleck had been assigned to go with them, and he allowed (and in fact almost demanded) them to take Zwei along.
Professor Oobleck was odd. Even compared to some of the weirder students who'd come over to the Vytal Festival.
Back to the mine - apparently there had been reports of strange creatures showing up in there and attacking miners. Strangely, they'd also attacked the Grimm, and since Grimm usually only attacked animals that intruded on their territory, the fact the reports mentioned repeated fights indicated that either something was making the Grimm more aggressive or the strange creatures were a great danger in their own right. Ruby had a feeling that her team probably shouldn't be handling this kind of mission, but they'd insisted, and Ozpin had bent the rules to allow them. Again.
Also, there had been reports of masked figures visiting the mines. If they belonged to the White Fang, maybe they could explain what Roman had been planning - for all her naivety, Ruby knew that neither the White Fang nor someone like Roman would breach the wall unless they had a bigger plan in mind.
The quintent (hextet?) had spent about a week examining the mine before things started going crazy - they'd found something mechanical inside, only to be confronted by a humanoid looking Grimm with bird wings, only for all of them to be confronted by what Ruby could best describe as squids crossed with bats. Before they could fight them, a portal of some sort (accoridng to Yang) had opened up and they'd fallen through, knocking them unconscious. Well, except for Oobleck.
Ruby really hoped he was okay, since he hadn't fallen through the portal with them.
What had happened after that was unknown, but Ruby knew two things, and that was enough to figure out a third one.
They weren't dead, so that Grimm had finished them off.
They were in a building, which meant that someone had taken them there.
Thus, someone must have at least repelled the Grimm and rescued them. But who did that?
Any furhter thoughts Ruby had were interrupted when a nearby door was suddenly thrown open. In came a green hexapod, followed by a little boy about half her age.
"Come back! This isn't a nursery!"
The green creature paid no mind to the boy calling to it, and instead dashed toward Ruby, who reflexively reached out and caught it.
Now that she had a good chance to look at it, Ruby noted that it was drooling...and that it looked oddly cute.
"...You're awake."
Ruby let out a shocked "eep!", realizing that she briefly forgotten about the boy's presence when she had caught the creature. "Um, yeah! I am!"
"Well, that's a relief."
"Thanks!...Oh! I'm Ruby!"
"Call me Eddy."
"Okay...Um, I'm sorry if this sounds weird, but were you the one to rescue me?"
"No, that would be some of my friends. Also, I need to tell one of the...nurses, that you're awake."
"Oh. Okay."
"Thanks," was Eddy's reply, before he turned to look at someone else. "The red girl is awake!"
The reply he got sounded like gibberish to Ruby, but that pailed in comparison to what happened next: entering the door frame was a truly bizarre looking figure. Their skin was green, which wasn't too surprising, since some faunus had that skin color. But most faunus didn't have that skin color with an extra set of arms. And no faunus had either of those traits with the body shape that this figure had.
Ruby glanced down at the creature in her arms, which was now crying.
Then she glanced back up at the figure in the door frame, who was now talking to Eddy.
...Just what had they gotten into.
XXXXX
Atop a stack of seeker corpses, the winged grimm stared at the guardians of the village.
The guardians stared back at him.
The staring contest lasted fifteen seconds before the grimm lowered his eyes.
This was not how things were supposed to go. Too many things had gone wrong.
All because of that miserable machine.
It had known once the creatures started showing up that it was facing a deadline - their aggression toward his kin had forced them to call upon those of the light and the few humans who worshipped his kind. Their kin called them death cultists, he called them useful. Of course, the increase in grimm activity and his followers' visits had alerted the hunters, who like moths to a flame had zeroed in, bringing their might to extinguish his. They'd even brought a silver eyed warrior with them, one of a line the winged grimm had recognized. Why must it be this line of all lines? This line seemed to be making so much progress destroying the one who had stolen his might, so perhaps he could let them go free and save himself some work. But no, they had to stick their noses in where they did not belong.
At least the humans in these caves had intelligence. When the beasts had moved to attack all of them, the humans and their allies had focused on the beasts, seeing which target was a bigger threat. In turn, he had decided to aid them - four novice huntresses who were already unconscious were hardly a concern to him.
Of course, now that the fighting was settled, he had no idea what to do next. These people did, though. So it seemed in his best interest to follow them until he found a way back home.
...Eh, they had no aura. They wouldn't even provide a snack if he tried to eat them.
XXXXX
AN: Yeah, another interlude.
I've got a ton of things I won't elaborate on until the end of arc notes because they're not really relevant right now, but I will say that I massively bumped up my inclusion of RWBY in this story and that I haven't watched too much of the story except for fight scenes for over a year now. So I apologize if the characterization of Ruby seems off.
The great grimm/the winged grimm is meant to look like a fallen angel.
Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!