READ PLEASE

I have been in a car accident this morning where another driver sideswiped me as he skidded on ice and sent me into a ditch. I'm okay - shaken but okay - but will be spending the whole day filing an accident report, dealing with recovery, then dealing with insurance and trying to find a car so I can get to work this week. It's all going to be a mess.

As such I won't be able to finish this chapter today. This is what I got done in a spare moment last night, that I was going to complete today.

I'm only posting it because the site says I can't post "notices" only and they have to be on a chapter so here is a fragment of a chapter.

Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 36

Given the last place they'd seen the anomaly it made sense to start in Team YWRN's room and search through their belongings. Yang had been willing to let them – or her – in and her dog follow, though she hadn't wanted to stay and talk much.

"You're lucky your boss isn't here," said Yang, on her way out. "Or I'd introduce him to my fists for making Ruby cry."

"Woof," said Jaune, stood right next to Blake. "You're a bitch. Woof."

"Good boy." Yang rubbed Jaune's hair before she left.

"So," said Blake. "What's it like-"

"Not a word. Gather their underwear."

"What? Why me? You're the sniffer dog."

"I'm nether a dog nor a girl so me going through their underwear is a breach of trust." Jaune moved over to a set of drawers set aside for Ren and started going through those. There was no reason to think the anomaly would go into a man's drawers, but no reason to think it couldn't either. "Even if what we're doing is already a breach of that."

It really was. Blake sighed but accepted his reasoning as she worked her hands through the piles of colourful garments. The Schnee's was filled with far too much frill and far too many shades of white, grey, and pale blue. Yang's was an epileptic seizure. It wasn't enough to just search sadly; she had to gather and pull the drawers out, then set them on the beds. The whole point was to test each set against the I AM DOG anomaly and see if any of them interfered with it and caused it to falter.

"You're not going to have to try these on to see if it cancels out yours, are you?" asked Blake.

"If I was then I'd have forced you into this faunus rights be damned." Jaune sighed and looked at the three sets of drawers. There wasn't much point getting Ren's. "Let go of the leash when I start. You're going to be the one who tells me if the illusion fails. If it doesn't, I'll hand the leash back to you."

"Alright."

Blake let go and was immediately faced with Jaune's transformation. That suggested a transitionary period between one state and the other and that wasn't the case. One moment he was a man and the next he was a dog. There had been no change, physical or otherwise. It was more like she blinked, and it was over.

He trotted on all fours over to the first drawer and shoved his face into it. Blake tensed, but then reminded herself it probably wasn't his face he was using. She hoped not anyway, otherwise she wouldn't be able to look at him the same way ever again. That went double when he removed his face from the Schnee's drawers and went to Yang's, then came out about twenty seconds later with a purple toy in his mouth. Blake slapped her hand to her face.

"Please tell me you're holding that with your hand."

"Grrrr…"

"I'm going to hope that is a yes. For the love of dust, Jaune, put it back. Put it back."

He spat the object back into the drawer and rummaged through Nora's to no avail, then, for good measure, she pulled out Ren's. There was no reason to think an anomaly reported solely by girls could be in a man's underwear, but also no reason to think it couldn't be. They just didn't know enough about it. Sadly, there was nothing. Jaune carried the leash back to her in his mouth, which offered some small relief since when she took it and he became human again, the leash was in his hand.

"You didn't actually shove your face in there, did you?"

Jaune frowned. "No. I used my hands. Why?"

"No reason. So, it's not here."

"It's not here," he agreed. "It makes sense since we saw it here weeks ago and it's known to be capable of roaming." He helped her slide the drawers back into the units. "We needed to rule out the possibility, though. It's a shame because this would have been the easy way out."

"Compared to…?"

He sighed. "We're going to have to check every room one after another."

"You're joking…"

He was not, in fact, joking. Jaune and her worked their way through well over a hundred dorms by the time the afternoon came around, and probably through over a thousand pairs of underwear. By the end of it all they were worn out, irritated, and Jaune was complaining of tingling in his fingers from what she hoped was too much fabric conditioner. His hands might just have been aching from so much work.

I can't believe I'm being paid as much as I am to stand and watch a guy play with girls' underwear. Where did I go wrong? Oh yeah, the White Fang. That's where I went wrong.

At four in the afternoon, Jaune called a stop. It was when lessons ended and the dorms and corridors would be filled with far too many people to operate freely, and of course there would be all too great a risk of the anomaly moving around using all that cover – or maybe it moved from person to person. Blake peeked under the table and pulled the waistband of her skirt out to check, breathing a sigh of relief when she found the same pair she'd put on that morning.