Chapter 8: To Show the Power of Flex Tape, I Sawed This Team in Half!

"I mean the police are alright, but Huntsmen and Huntresses are just so much more romantic and exciting and cool and really, gyah, you know!"

— 13 —

"Wake. Up!"

I hit the floor face-first. My eyes rolled in my head. Why the hell did the floor only feel cold to my nipples? Aw, goddamnit. I sat up to find my blanket and pillows scattered on the floor. Weiss stood before me, hands on hips.

For some reason I smiled. "You're cute when angry. But you'd be cuter if that anger wasn't aimed my way."

"What are you doing, Jaune?" Weiss demanded.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and realized I was a little hungover. "Fixin' to tell you to sit your pretty ass down and let me nap."

"Yeah. Sleeping," she snapped. "You rile Blake up about the White Fang, get her to convince us to help, and all the while you're asleep instead of doing something useful. Typical!"

Drowsiness left me like my ex-girlfriend. I leapt from the floor to my feet in a single motion that teased trickles of pain from my chest wound. My hands grasped her shoulders as I said in excited and slightly broken German, "Has Blake for me you won over? Damn, I love that girl. Yes! I knew Blake could go by."

Weiss brushed me away like I were a caterpillar intent on eating her battle dress. "Are you actually drunk right now? I can't understand a word you're saying."

I snorted a laugh, looking around the room for my gear. "No, my Atlesian is just pretty lackluster. I understand and write better than I speak. Sounding non-borked is tougher for me than two-dollar pig steak."

I might as well have been a venomous snake trying to threaten her from a mobility scooter, the way she looked at me. "You're mocking me."

Shaking my head at her, I tried to put on a pair of worn-jeans that, since my arrival, had grown a few gray spots from accidentally ashing cigarettes on them. "No, genuine. Were I mocking you, there'd be no ambiguity. But, maybe you could teach me the finer points of your tongue."

"Vale has some truly terrible euphemisms," Weiss said, throwing her hair over her shoulder. She was fully armed and dressed for battle. Red sunset light trickled in through the window behind her, making Weiss already look faintly bloodstained from battle.

"Tell me about it," I said, reaching under my bed with a boot. When I didn't find what I wanted, I got down on the ground to root around. Nothing there but my bookbag.

"We got rid of it," Weiss said unhappily, sucking slightly on her bottom lip.

I got up fast enough to make myself dizzy. "What? That was premium zero-carb sustainably-sourced organic Vacuo fire-water!"

Her expression didn't change. "It was whisky. We flushed your 'medicine cabinet,' too."

I advanced on her so suddenly that Weiss actually flinched back. "The fuck?! Du Hurentochter!"

Weiss held her ground, having no room to move backwards from me. In my boots I was a foot taller than her. She had to crane her head back at a funny angle to meet my eyes. I breathed heavily onto her. I felt a cold sweat at the nape of my neck. There was something strangely appealing about having her this close to me, the dim heat of her against my bare chest, the scent of her breath and body. The way her ponytail ruined the perfectly manicured symmetry of her body and attire.

The alien, downright juvenile fantasy that she felt the same way, if even for a moment.

She spoke with a heat barely contained under very precisely chosen words. "I can smell it on your breath, you low-life."

"Oh my, this high siddity little chica calling me a low-life, how'm I gon' ever recover?" I asked in a mocking voice, baring my teeth. "So what if I'm a little bit drunk out there?"

"If we're doing this, Jaune, we're not going to have you drugged out of your icepicking mind. That's how we all die."

"Might as fuckin' well have left me here!" I said, throwing my hands up. It distantly occurred to me I was holding my gun, XO. I'd been trying to get it into my holster when she had dropped the bomb.

"Yeah," Weiss said, expression grim. "Then a certain someone pointed out if we did things my way, you'd just follow us and get us killed another way."

Teeth grit, I scoffed. "Who's the smarter, Blake or Shadow?"

"Who's Shadow?"

I made a flippant gesture to the poster hanging over Shadow's bed.

"It's tacky and cliché, but I can see why someone might hang it up," she said with a slightly perplexed crease over her constrained anger. "So what?"

"Lord a' mercy!" I growled, throwing my hands up and stalking away from Weiss. I holstered XO harder than needed and put on my hoodie and pieces of armor with rough motions.

"Stop being Grimm bait and focus, Jaune."

"I am focused, sugar-lips," I snapped, pulling the straps of my armor taut as they'd go. "Forgive a boy for not wanting to bloody his hands again without something to ease the process William Munny style."

She made an almost mockingly skeptical face, which died a quick death when she caught the look in my eyes. A rare moment of silence passed pregnantly between us. Just the sound of me making sure I was fully armed with sword, revolver, and explosives.

I hefted a sigh. Stared at my feet to find the effort to speak. Finally made a limp-wristed gesture at her. "Can you—can you get me my gasoline. Please?"

"Come again?"

"'Please.' I know the word might not be in your vocabulary, but I assure you us lowly peasants use it all the time."

Her lips pursed again. "I'll be outside with the rest of the team."

With that she gingerly stepped past me and left the dormroom. I sat back down on my bed and ran my hands over my face. The hangover behind my eyes whispered, "Just a little hair of the dog and I'll go away."

"I know," I replied. With a slight sniffle, I checked the time on my phone, then to the location marker for Eishundo on its navigation app. Head west from campus, take the orange metro line north till you hit Tarberry, thence northwest-by-west along the periwinkle.

North and south worked funny on Remnant, a fact I'd only picked up during a survival class where we were taught to make our own compasses. It was a small thing, but the magnetic direction I expected to point north instead pointed south. On Earth the north pole is, technically speaking, its magnetic south pole due to the actual direction of the planet's magnetic flux. It seemed the only real change that way here. Remnant's maps still indicated north as the top and its sun still rose in the east.

Compasses were especially popular among newer Huntsmen. Apparently a lot of students flat-out couldn't navigate by the stars, a consequence of sentient life here being mostly relegated to the four biggest sources of light pollution on the planet. Growing up thinking the night sky is this black void dominated by a shattered moon does that you. Some people freeze up when they first go beyond the all-devouring lights of the Four Kingdoms. I'm told that's called the starlight shudders.

I lifted my eyes and shook my head free of those thoughts. This was the product of a mind insufficiently inebriated. I got up to check the bathroom. Sure enough everything but my skin care products (which Shadow or Blake had locked up in the small countertop cage marked "Weiss's—don't touch, JAUNE") was gone, down to the caffeine pills and doctor-prescribed painkillers.

My phone vibrated.

Mittens has added you to TEAM BASS

Mittens: We should split up and arrive together separately near the place. Four students going out armed together to Eishundo might attract their attention and scare them off

?: Jaune, go the long way

Had I really never gotten Shadow's number?

You: Which is?

Netflix: Sixth route down on the Pathz app.

You: Just checked. That's ~30 minutes slower

Mittens: Trust me I know what I'm doing

Mittens: No way they'll make a move until the crowds are nearly gone

You: And where y'all going?

?: Working it out here

Of course. They were all together in person.

I decided I had time for a shave and teeth brushing after all.

— 14 —

"Excuse me, young man, are you from Beacon?" a woman asked.

I inhaled slightly, slipping out of my reveries to look at her. The train jostled me where I stood holding onto one of those hand-hooks that hang from the ceiling. I didn't care to sit down in much the same way as I always took the stairs. Just something I did.

"Cry your pardon, ma'am?" I said reflexively, more to buy time to organize my thoughts than anything. Clear the mental fog.

The woman, early thirties perhaps, smiled at me from her seat. "With manners like that, you must be! I'd ask where you were going on a weekend night like this, but I can't help wonder if it's some secret school assignment. Doubt you students would be out partying or drinking or whatever, huh?"

She had a slightly awkward cadence to her speech, like an introvert trying her best to get out there and meet people. If not for the kindergarten-age girl asleep in her arms, I'd almost think she were trying to work up the nerve to hit on me.

"No, ma'am," I said soberly, shaking my head. A cold sweat dampened my back. "Us students do not do that."

Which wasn't true in the slightest. I'd been to plenty of parties with other Beacon students. But if the woman wanted to think students at Beacon were somehow better than students of other schools, I wasn't about to ruin her worldview.

"Well, whatever it is, it looks hard."

My brow creased. "Why do you say that?"

She gestured her head toward me. "That look on your face, all dark and brooding."

"That's just my chest," I said. At her expression I continued, tapping at my armored breast. "Took a claw from a beowolf. Every time the subway hits a bump it stings me."

Which wouldn't be the case if they hadn't flushed not only the hydrocodon but also the ibuprofen!

Her eyes widened. "Wow!" she breathed. "You've actually fought Grimm. My husband is a Huntsmen, y'know. I'm really hoping he'll be back for her birthday." She gave a slight jostle to the girl in her arms. "He never really talks about his time outside Vale or about the Grimm. Whenever I ask he just gets this look in his eyes, same sort of one you had on you a moment ago. Always changes the subject."

She hesitated, then added, "Could you tell me? If that's okay with you. About what Grimm are really like in person, I mean. Fighting them."

"Imagine those catty girls from high school you hated," I said with a small chuckle. "Now imagine you took away their phones so they couldn't take selfies, made them seven-foot-tall monsters with claws and fangs, and set them loose to see what happened. That about sums 'em up in my experience."

She snerked. "Well, don't you have a way with words. What's a phone?"

I gave her a puzzled look and withdrew mine from a pocket. "This here thing you use to look up funny videos of cats."

"What, a scroll?"

I looked from her to the phone. "Uh, yeah. Scroll. Sorry, I was using a term from where I'm from."

"Where, Patch? I was wondering about your accent."

"Sure am, ma'am. Beacon recruits from far and wide."

"When I met my husband I wanted to be a Huntswoman. We were both kids when we started dating but he was older than me. I asked his help to figure out how to make my aura work," she said with a wistful edge. "He always refused. He knew as soon as I had one I'd try to apply to a school and he didn't want me leading the kind of life he did. And, well, without one, if I wanted to fight Grimm, I might as well just cover myself in gravy and hike out to Mountain Glenn."

My boots were suddenly very interesting to me.

She realized something and suddenly laughed. "Oh, look at me. I'm rambling. My mother always did say I droned on like an old biddy. Sorry!"

I flashed her a smile. "Happens to us all, ma'am."

The metro came to a stop in a station. The woman carefully got up. "Not your stop?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Can't stop here. This here is bat country."

She gave me a funny look. "It was nice meeting you, young man. Keep doing well at school. And if you ever meet a handsome Huntsman named Haakon Solstrahl, you tell him he better be getting his daughter one heck of a birthday present!"

"Will do," I said, watching her go.

My gaze soon fell back to my phone. Or, scroll? I searched up the term "phone" on my scroll's search engine and got dictionary terms like phoneme and homophone. Zero results for "telephone" or "cellphone." I'd been in Vale for, what, over a month and some change now. How the hell had I never noticed the thing I kept within inches of my dick at all times wasn't called a phone but a scroll?

I stared blankly ahead as the train pulled out from the station. How many other local terms was I missing? Sure, I had me an accent, but you'd think after all this time I'd've been better able to adapt to the local terms. Picked up on a few of them, at least.

That hadn't happened.

You've had your head up your drunken ass this whole time.

The thought rustled cattle in my belly until I reached my stop.

— 15 —

Team BASS met up at a small café a few buildings down and across from the Eishundo Dust retailer. Night had already fallen, which this season happened at a later hour.

"Took your sweet time," Shadow said with a puss on her face. She adjusted her top hat.

I didn't reply, just sat down in silence. My eyes went from Shadow's to Weiss' and finally Blake's. Seemed she was calling the shots this op.

"We haven't seen anything yet," Blake said from above a cup of heavily milk-laden tea.

Weiss leaned against the café window and looked out towards the dust store.

The girls continued to occasionally talk between themselves. Observations. Thoughts. Occasionally ordering drink refills. Standard stakeout stuff. I idly drummed fingers on my armored bracers, in part because of the vague nicotine itch in the fingertips. It was all in my head, I knew. Merely a desire for a thing because I couldn't have it. I knew from experience I wasn't in withdrawal yet. Give it another two days without any opioids, booze, or amphetamines and—I knew from personal experience back on Earth—I'd actually start to feel it. First would come the sweats, the shakes, and then nausea.

Had to focus on something else.

The café was oddly familiar. You might expect its like in any sleepy college town. The ceramics cups here were stylized so the tops of the mugs looked like a square with rounded edges. I didn't recognize some of the pastries on display under the glass at the front of the shop. One of them came in orders of six and looked like a confectionary version of tuna sushi. I hadn't eaten since yesterday.

"He's concealed carrying," Wess said, gesturing a finger at a man outside. "You can tell by how he walks. No holster. Tucked into his waistband."

"See if he circles the block again," Shadow said.

Blake nodded.

It occured to me I was tapping to a tune on the little café radio. What was music really like on this world? I'd heard music that reminded me of modern R&B and salsa, mostly whatever junk Jaune already had on his scroll or some drinking songs I'd heard at a party or two. The sounds a culture makes and what those sounds mean and represent are some of the best ways to understand a culture's Zeitgeist.

Watching out the window at the downright trickle of people out on the streets at this hour, I found myself wondering what sort of music Faunus made. Or, hell, people associated with the White Fang. To that thought I wound up softly humming that song by the Cranberries about the Troubles and the IRA. Did Faunus have their own songs like it? Was there even a name for the conflict with the White Fang like the Troubles?

The more I let my sober head wander, the more questions bubbled. It made me want to drink.

"I think I prefer you this way," Shadow said, nudging me with her elbow. "Woulda done this a long time ago if I knew it was this easy to get you to shut up."

My gaze shifted her way. She had a small plate with the remains of what looked like finger-sized Greek cannoli. It made me miss the sponge docks and gyro shops of the Greek town of Tarpon Springs back in Florida.

"Yeah," I said. I reached for the pocket where I usually kept my cigarettes only to remember these whores had thrown those out too. I stopped myself and took a long pull from the glass of water I'd ordered. "It ain't easy, babe."

I chastised myself internally. I didn't know if Shadow was a girl or a boy or trans or genderfluid or whatever. I'd just let my tongue run there.

Shadow merely gave me a skeptical look. She didn't seem to really have a follow-up to that, so I took up the mantle.

"What's your name?"

She cocked a brow. "Huh?

"You. What is your name?"

"You don't know?"

I gestured across the table. "Blake and Weiss I know, just often choose not to use. Yours I never learned."

"I told you before," she said, leveling me a gaze. "It was pretty loud and apparent when Ozpin made us a team."

I said nothing, merely meeting her gaze.

She compressed a sigh. "J. Shamrock."

I nodded. "Shamrock. Clever. Does the J change with you?"

She rolled her eyes and finished her finger-food cannoli.

Idly running a hand over my holstered revolver, I tried something else. "Thank you, by the way. For trusting me so far. Out here. Doing this."

"Not like we could stop you," Blake said, eyes moving from the window to me.

Weiss looked up at Blake from the cup of tea in her hands. "Nor you, come to think. I know stopping those degenerates is important, but you two were oddly adamant about this."

Something hardened fractionally in Blake's expression. "I wouldn't have believed it if Jaune didn't have that video. It still doesn't entirely make sense why they're doing this."

"Why not? Those faunus might as well have stealing in their blood. They could literally be doing anything better and they don't."

"You say like that they have a choice." Blake spoke with measured restraint. "How many no faunus need apply signs have you seen here just lately? How many have your family put up in Atlas, even?"

"Some jobs just require a human touch," Weiss said with a primm little shrug, keeping her tea perfectly balanced.

"And you wonder why people like the White Fang exist."

"Not really, no," Weiss replied, shaking her head. "They're faunus. They lie, cheat, and steal. It's just the way things are. People like that don't deserve any sympathy until they actually try to better themselves instead of blaming it all on humanity."

Blake was drumming fingers against the tabletop harder than needed. "At least you admit they're people."

"Whoops, I misspoke," Weiss said with a little laugh. From the way she looked at us I imagined she hoped we'd find it funny too. It got a snerk from Shamrock if nothing else.

"They're all going to die," I said soberly.

Weiss cocked a brow. "I mistrust faunus same as the next girl, but isn't that going a little far?"

I shook my head. "Not what I mean. The White Fang, how their endgame is going to play out. In a roundabout way what we're doing here today is going a long ways to saving all faunus."

Blake watched me with a mix of skepticism and vague mistrust.

"There's two ways to defeat an insurgency: time and blood," I continued, meeting Blake's eyes. "Time requires superior counterintelligence on the enemy, like what that video was for us here. You need an ironclad self-discipline and restraint, for us meaning an ability to discriminate White Fang from good faunus just trying to live a normal life. Have to focus on preventing as many deaths as you possibly can until you can break their will and get them to bargain with you. If you lack the character for that, all that's left is blood."

"Which means?" Weiss asked, tilting her head fractionally.

I set my gun on the table. "You go to where the enemy and his people call home and you kill every one of them. You make it so the enemy has no one left to recruit. Genocide."

"I've heard you butcher language before," Weiss said with a perplexed look on her face, "but you're sober. What's that word?"

"Genocide. Gens, a race or people. 'Cide from caedo, to kill or cut. Exterminating an entire kingdom from the face of the planet." I looked up at them and continued. "It can be systematic and organized it, or it can be the second coming of the Rape of Nanking. Either way, you butcher as many men, women, and children as you can, innocent and guilty alike. Sorting them's a job for God, not mankind. And you do it as fast as possible before the folks back home and your own soldiers become too horrified and lose their backbone."

Blake's lips were like a small scar just below her nose. "If the White Fang keeps doing what it's doing, someone's eventually going to do that. They'll realize what worked in the past will work again and justify everything with photos of some cute little human girl the White Fang killed. The Four Kingdoms will make a wasteland and call it peace."

"And we'll do anything to prevent that," I said with a firm nod.

We sat there in silence, Blake and I regarding one another from across the table. This had to be the first time in her face there wasn't this faint air of disgust or dislike aimed at me.

Weiss finished her tea with a grimace. "Sheesh, aren't you two grim? They're faunus. Just give them a good spanking and they'll run home to Menagerie with their tails literally between their legs."

"Would you shut up?" Blake said. Her words might as well have been venom-tipped barbs.

"Excuse me?" Weiss demanded.

"You heard me," Blake said evenly.

Shad—uh, Shamrock whistled and waved her hands. "Hoi, ladies, focus here. No hating each other. That's what we have Jaune for."

I nodded. "Yeah, don't make me start trying to flirt on you. I'll do it; I'm crazy!"

I'm ashamed to admit that actually worked. Weiss shivered and Blake just made an unpleasant gesture. But, hey, I'm useful!

"How do you think I feel about it?" I asked, hand to my breast. "How'm I supposed to think all Mötley Crüe for y'all when none y'all even got cute Dixie accents? All these Yankee accents ya got. Yuck!"

"You still like to just make up words when sober?" Shamrock asked, lowering a pair of invisible sunglasses at me.

I had a vague sinking feeling like when the woman on the train corrected my phone as a scroll. "No, like, I'm referencing this band and its song about traveling the country and going to strip clubs."

"A what?" Weiss asked.

Something inside me faltered. "Y'know, like, places to pay to live nude girls a-dancin'."

She wrinkled her nose. "Those are still legal in Vale?"

"I think they're more popular in Mistral and Menagerie," Shamrock added.

"So you want us dancing nude for you like faunus?" Weiss asked.

Blake was whiteknuckling her cup of tea. Amazing she hadn't snapped any worse than she had.

I let out a low groan and rolled my eyes. "Naked in general, really. If I thought I could date you, I would. I'd love to get you naked. But I don't think that's a card in any of our decks. Mostly because I'm playing Uno here and y'all doing poker."

Weiss recoiled. "I thought you said you weren't going to hit on us! Do you want me to start arguing with Blake again?"

Blake messaged her eyes and let out a long sigh. "Oh my gosh, would you all stop being stupid for five minutes!"

"I've occasionally considered it," I said blankly.

She didn't reply. Instead he glanced out the window. "Look, something's going on out there. That girl with the fox ears there? She's circled the block three times on her boyfriend's arm."

Christ but was I grateful we were about to go fight terrorists instead of having two girls argue. Lord have mercy on my soul.

Weiss set her cup of tea on the table. "Outline of a weapon under her coat. Same as that guy we saw earlier"

"Same girl from the video?" Shamrock asked.

"Yeah," Blake said.

I adjusted the strap of my chestpiece. "Anyone notice the plane?"

All I got were funny looks.

"Skyport isn't too far from here," Weiss said.

I gestured to the window. "Unmarked VTOL craft. I spent some time watching it before coming in earlier. It's flying without any lights on. Only saw it thanks to it going before the moon. It's how I reckon they'll make their escape."

"He's right," Blake said. "That does sound like something they'd do."

"They're not expecting something to go wrong, but the VTOL will be there soon so they can do a quick smash-and-grab."

"But not soon enough it'll attract attention before they're done."

"We should work to block off any stairs in the building foremost," I said. "That'll be where they go at the first sign of real trouble."

"Only half. The rest will split and go for the fire escape out back," she said, shaking her head.

Weiss arched a brow. "You both seem to know a lot about the White Fang and how they'll operate."

Blake's gaze was even. "I do my homework."

They looked to me as if expecting some clever justification. Maybe for me to make some clever out-of-universe reference about how I received formal education on counter-criminal and counter-terrorist tactics. A sharp use of doubletalk to prove my self-insert-y superiority.

I shrugged. "I'm a fortune teller. It's my duty to tell what people are going to do."

Somehow that seemed to be about the answer they were expecting from me.

"Streets out there look pretty empty now," Shamrock said. "Foxy and her boytoy are window-shopping out front the closed store across the street."

Weiss stood and put a tip on the table. "Here comes our cue."

"Shamrock, you go around back the Dust store," Blake said. "Weiss, with me. Corner them as soon as they go in. And Jaune."

"Mm?" I said.

"Don't die."

"Just a suggestion, not an order," Weiss added primly.

I stood, grabbing my gun off the table. "Don't worry, I get off to the idea of dying more than to your tits," I said, standing. "And besides—feriens tego!"

a/n: I mean there was that one bit in the show where Weiss called faunus evil and wanting to wipe out humanity, even if this chapter slightly plays that up. It's a shame racist Atlesian jokes against faunus don't get as many laughs outside Atlas High Society as inside, huh, Weiss?

Feriens tego, Latin "Striking I defend." Motto of a cover organization of the Ulster Defense Association, who were parliamentary paramilitaries during the Troubles who fought the IRA.