The Girl in the Tower story was shown in both the Fairy Tales of Remnant animated series on RoosterTeeth's website and in the book of the same name.
"I'll give you this, if nothing else." Scarlet harumphed, folding his arms. "You've certainly improved the scenery this time."
By this, he meant the dim, cavernous, empty space soaring up around them. While the Vault of the Spring Maiden had been a sinuous and twisting thing of naturally sculpted rock and tree, and the Vault of the Winter Maiden a crystalline cavern of mythic proportions, the Vault beneath Beacon resembled nothing so much as a large, abandoned church.
Upon exiting the elevator that brought them here, the visitors were greeted by the sight of two rows of wrought-iron sconces that burned with an emerald flame, affixed at regular intervals to rectangular pillars that flanked a long, mysterious nave that stretched onwards into gloom.
Arched clerestory windows soared above these pillars, although the leaded, swirling glass was tinged a uniform green, and they let in no light at all. The ever-burning flames, held in shallow dishes with no fuel, were the only source of light down here, creating an eerie green glow that reflected in streams off the highly-polished tile floors.
This was a sacred, private place. Every inch of the vault breathed that feeling, the stones dark with age, the flames flickering with sorcery. The weight of secrets and undisturbed silence was heavy in the air, and everyone's voices were unconsciously hushed, unwilling to stir the leaden atmosphere.
Teams RWBY, JNPR, SSSNI, Penny, and Neo were all in one of the two stubby transepts that crossed the vault, with a rather incongruous set of two corkboards and a whiteboard pressed up against the blank far wall, and a ring of folding metal chairs ranged around them. Most of these chairs were occupied, but a few were not.
Ruby, standing in front of the group, clapped her hands together and affected a bright smile.
"Okay!" she chimed, her silver eyes flicking from one member of the group to another. "So, now that everyone's present and accounted for, we can start Beacon's second Counter-Conspiracy Conspiracy meeting. First things first: RWBY, JNPR, Penny, and Neo are all on the same page right now, right?"
There was a chorus of nods and mumbled agreements.
"Right, so Team SSSNI, you guys are the last to get filled in." Ruby continued, sheepishly wilting just a little. "Which is, you know, not intentional or anything, you guys just couldn't come with us to Mistral."
"Ah, no hard feelings." Sun said breezily, waving one hand. "Besides, you guys are gonna fill us in now, right?"
"Totally! We asked our questions –er, question– over in Mistral, and we laid out what we found in front of Ozpin. Now that we've gathered all the pieces together, we're gonna lay 'em out in front of you." Ruby said, and then performed a mock-bow, waving Jaune –who had been standing beside her– forward. "My esteemed bestie here will take the introductory part from here."
Without glancing to the side, Ilia clamped a hand down on Sun's shoulder, stopping him from vibrating quite so fast in his excitement as Jaune stepped forward. Standing more or less firm under everyone's attention, JNPR's leader coughed nervously into his fist.
"Well, uh, who's heard the story of The Girl in the Tower?" he asked, lowering his hand and scanning the group.
Penny, Neptune, Ilia, and Sun all raised their hands. Scarlet unfolded his arms slightly to make a seesawing motion with one hand, and Sage just frowned.
"Right… ah, you know, it's a fairy tale." Jaune continued. "So, to summarize for anyone that doesn't remember it… a long time ago, there was a king, and his wife died in childbirth, and he ended up locking his daughter in a tower to, like, protect her from the outside world or something. He used his magic to prevent her from leaving the tower, and he hired a bunch of soldiers to protect his castle, and as the years went by, he went, uh, kinda crazy. You know-"
Jaune wiggled his fingers briefly at the others.
"-twisted by envy and spite and paranoia, all that jazz. Anyway, he ended up loving his daughter as a possession rather than a person, and she was trapped in that castle until she was… sixteen-ish, I think, when she got the idea to write a plea for help on pieces of paper and scatter them out the window, since the spell on it only stopped animate objects. The story of her being trapped in the tower spread, and a bunch of knights tried and failed to rescue her, dying in the process, until one guy eventually made it through and broke her out of the castle, and then they lived happily ever after."
As Jaune came to a brief halt, signaling the end of the story, Scarlet unfolded his arms and began to slow-clap, somewhat sarcastically. Jaune flushed slightly.
"The point is," Ruby said, coming to her best friend's rescue. "-that that story's kinda important to what's going on now. What we've told you guys so far –the conspiracy, Lionheart– is small peanuts compared to what's coming, so from here on out, there's no going back."
Team SSSN(I) exchanged glances. Even Sun seemed somewhat serious for once, and it was him that turned back to Ruby and the others, giving her a firm nod. His blue eyes were steady, his body uncharacteristically still.
"Right, well." Ruby exhaled shortly, as though a diver taking a deep breath before the plunge. "That whole story, the girl in the tower –it's true. Almost every bit of it. A very, very long time ago, all the people on Remnant did have magic, and there was a young woman imprisoned by her father, and a handsome knight did break her out. The only thing that's different from the fairy tale…"
"Is that they didn't live happily ever after." Blake finished grimly from her spot sitting with the others. Beside her, Yang nodded.
"Right. What actually happened, is that the knight got sick and died." Jaune said, shifting slightly from foot to foot. "And the woman, Salem, wasn't able to cope with that, so she went to petition the Gods, one after the other. She tried to ask the God of Light first, but He said no, to let Ozma –her husband– rest. Salem refused, and went to ask the God of Darkness instead."
"When she tricked Him into actually granting her wish, the Gods argued." Ruby said, picking up the thread of the story. "They smote and remade Ozma a bunch of times right in front of her before the God of Darkness realized that He'd been tricked, and stopped reincarnating him. The Gods decided to punish Salem for her hubris by making her immortal, making it so she could never, ever rejoin Ozma."
Ilia looked sick. The rest of Team SSSNI just looked slightly disturbed.
"Salem didn't learn her lesson." Yang continued, her face set in a scowl. "She decided that since she had been able to trick the Gods, they weren't infallible, and she could make them suffer, even if she couldn't get them to take away her curse. So she traveled around the world, turning humans against the Gods by lying to them about how she'd stolen her immortality, and eventually gathered an army to oppose both the God of Light and the God of Darkness."
"Only, that didn't work either." Jaune said with a grimace. "When humans used magic, the gift that the God of Darkness had personally given to them against Him… He destroyed them all. Every last human on Remnant, except for Salem."
The green light from the emerald flames shone sickly on everyone's skin as a stunned silence fell, giving them an unhealthy pallor. Sun's eyes were blown wide, Scarlet's mouth dropping open, and Ilia's freckles bleached white against her skin. Even those that had heard this story before were ashen and pale, sickened by such a catastrophic act.
"Disappointed in their creations, both the Gods left." Jaune continued after a hard swallow. "The God of Light vanished, and the God of Darkness rocketed through the moon, which is why it's shattered now. Salem was left alone for… well, who knows how long, wandering the world as the ruins of civilization were slowly overcome by Grimm. She blamed everything except herself for what had happened, but she was so deep in despair, that when she found the pools that spawned Grimm… she jumped inside."
Everyone, without exception, shuddered.
"It changed her." Ruby said. "It didn't kill her, like she wanted, but… it changed her. 'A being of infinite life with a desire for pure destruction.' Even when humanity and Faunus came back to the planet, Salem still hated everyone and everything. She lived alone in the wild forests, until Ozma came back."
"But wait, he was supposed to be dead." Neptune cut in, his voice shaky. "The gods said he was supposed to stay dead, right?"
"In a rather stunning display of hypocrisy, it seems the God of Light changed His mind." Weiss responded crisply. "He came to Ozma in the afterlife, after humanity had been erased by the God of Darkness, and offered him a choice. Ozma could return to Remnant, where humanity was a fraction of what it used to be, and give them a chance to become whole again. The Gods left four Relics –of Choice, Creation, Destruction, and Knowledge– behind on our world, and if Ozma managed to bring all four together, it would summon the Gods back to Remnant, where they would judge us. Judged favorably, they would return to dwell here, and restore our magic. Judged poorly, and they would wipe our world from existence."
"When he learned that Salem, the woman he loved, was still alive, Ozma didn't hesitate to agree, even if it meant ceaselessly reincarnating into other people until he put the Relics together." Blake continued, her voice dry. "Even when he was warned that the person he actually loved was already gone. He returned to Salem anyways, and even if he didn't tell her the whole story, he couldn't hide the fact that he was troubled about the divisions that had sprung up between the new humans. She offered him the chance to become gods –or pretend, anyways, since the people wouldn't know any better. They were immortal, after all, and they had magic that no one else did. What else could they be, but gods?"
"Ozma went along with it, for a while." Ruby said. "They made a kingdom, a family… he even had four children with Salem. But the way she seemed to enjoy the conflicts between their people and others, the way she seemed to be trying to conquer the world rather than actually unite people… he didn't like it. Everything came to a head the night that they found out their daughters could use magic just like they could: he told Salem about how the God of Light wanted him to unite humanity, the Relics, everything. Salem rejected his mission, saying that they could just replace humans with their children instead. Ozma refused, and tried to sneak their kids out and escape in the middle of the night."
"They died." Jaune said without preamble, swallowing the lump in his throat as SSSNI's expressions turned to horror. "Salem found them as they were trying to get out, and she and Ozma fought. All the kids died, and Ozma, too. After that, he spent centuries either avoiding or trying to deal with Salem, and eventually he realized that if he wanted humanity united, Salem would have to go."
"At some point, he found all four of the Relics the Gods had created." Pyrrha said, speaking up for the first time. "And to keep them safe from Salem, who wanted to collect them while humanity was still divided and thus destroy herself and everything along with her, he put them in special vaults, and created the Maidens."
"He also," Ruby coughed sheepishly into her fist. "Built places to train warriors on top of these vaults, to make sure that they were constantly surrounded by people who could and would fight to protect them."
Ilia's jaw swung low.
"The academies?!" she gasped, and Ruby nodded.
"More important than the academies, though, are the Maidens." Jaune cut in, sweeping everyone with a steady glance. "The Maidens have magic power, sure, but the Vaults beneath the schools are each keyed to a specific Maiden, and they don't open unless that Maiden is there to open them. Amongst other things, Salem and Oz are fighting over the Maidens so that they have control over the Vaults, even if Ozpin is technically the one who actually holds the ground they're on."
"Hold up, Ozpin?" Sun asked, bringing his head up. He pointed one finger at the ceiling high above them. "Like, Headmaster Ozpin, the guy in charge of this school? That Ozpin!?"
Do you know of any other Ozpins? Neo asked with a glitter of her Semblance, raising an eyebrow.
"Uh, yeah, that Ozpin." Jaune agreed, rubbing the back of his neck. "He's the most recent… incarnation of Ozma, I guess you could call him."
Scarlet made a muffled noise of understanding.
"So that's how all this fits together, then." he said slowly, leaning forward and resting one forearm on his knee. "We're just the latest generation of front-liners in their bloody divorce."
"Erm, well, I wouldn't call it a divorce…" Ruby mumbled, poking her fingers together.
I would. Neo chimed, her expression unrepentant. Subtly, at floor level, Ruby's foot scooted out and poked her ankle, to which Neo responded with a slight eye roll as she shifted and recrossed her legs, one over the other.
"Anyways, that's that on all the background stuff." Jaune said with faux brightness after a long moment of silence, clapping his hands together like Ruby had before him. Neptune almost fell off his chair.
"There's more?!" he gaped, and everyone not on Team SSSNI winced, shuffled, or averted their eyes.
"Well…" Nora began, somewhat gingerly. "There's what happened to the Fall Maiden, to start with."
There was a resounding silence as everyone stood before the glass-and-mechanical tomb that held Amber, the Fall Maiden, a dais cloaked in shadow at the other end of the vast Beacon vault.
She was… well, she didn't look at all healthy, to be honest, and no one had to ask why she was on life support. Her skin was drawn taut over her thin frame, her eyes slightly sunken back into her skull, and her breathing rattled faintly even through the thick casing around her. Jokes, catty comments, or even anything but honest observation seemed disrespectful, nigh-on blasphemous, like they were standing at the bedside of a dying patient.
Not entirely inaccurate, really.
"So someone did this to her… to steal the Maiden powers?" Scarlet asked aloud, his fingers trailing over the curved glass plate that allowed them a visual of the woman inside. He was beginning to come around: the story Ruby and the others had told them was fantastic, ridiculous, but… even when he set aside his automatic emotional reaction, even when he was no longer caught up in the flow of their story and automatically believing whatever fit in with the flow of the tale… this specific bit of evidence was setting off alarm bells.
The woman inside this casket was dying, her dark face drawn and pinched beneath the scar tissue, languishing in a fucking life support tube deep underground. Why the hell was she down here, instead of in a hospital wing? Scarlet had a number of tart opinions about the headmasters and teachers that ran the hunter academies, but callous, heartless, those words were never a part of his insults. They wouldn't just chuck an injured woman in a bin and then bury even her very existence deep beneath the schools –not unless there were extenuating circumstances.
Extenuating circumstances like, say, if this woman truly was one of the mythical Maidens, taking care of her in public facilities would shorten her life drastically, due to coming down with a sudden acute case of assassination.
There was no reason to keep an obviously ill and dying woman hidden like a dirty secret deep below the schools like this –even in a state-of-the-art life-support pod– unless she truly was a dirty secret. And what kind of secret was worth hiding like this?
Human experimentation went like any other branch of science, Scarlet knew: you needed multiple subjects to make sure your hypothesis was sound, and this woman –Amber– was the only person down here. None of the teachers matched her coloring, so she wasn't an illegitimate relative that they needed to hide for some reason. And there was no Semblance he could think of that could damage someone to the point of needing to keep the patient in a coma without actually killing them.
There was no reason at all to keep a patient like this in the cold, dusty vaults beneath the school.
Not unless Team RWBY and their friends were telling the truth.
Not unless she really was a Maiden, and it was a choice between hiding her away under the school like this, protected by the legions of students above her, or leaving her out in the open like crippled bait for the ones who had hunted her down to begin with.
"Is she… gonna come out of it?" Neptune asked tentatively, tapping the glass higher up with one finger like it was a fishbowl.
"Doubt it." Blake said. Her lips were pinched into a thin line as she looked at the comatose woman. "Whatever they did to her, it ripped part of the Maiden powers away, and the Maiden powers are tied to the soul, so…"
"She's dying, isn't she?"
Sun was the one to voice what was on everyone's mind, and in an uncharacteristically calm, cool voice to boot.
"Yes." Pyrrha bloody Nikos sighed in response, from near the back of the group. RWBY and JNPR had hung back, leaving the others to investigate what was clearly not new to them. "Yes, Sun, she is. The machine is keeping her alive, but it's a delaying tactic at best."
"Not that I'm advocating to let an innocent woman die, but shouldn't they just…" Sun made a vague movement with one hand, like stabbing a knife. "Put her out of her misery? S'what they do in Vacuo, when someone's not gonna recover. A quick death's better than dragging it out in misery, attracting more predators to you and your people, is all I'm saying. It'd be doing her and all the rest of us a favor."
"It has to do with the Maiden powers." Ruby said. "They can't let her die like this, because her powers will probably pass to the person who attacked her."
"Okay, now you've lost me." Scarlet said, turning and stepping away from the tube to face them. "Ozpin and Salem are fighting over the Maidens, sure. The Maidens open the Vaults that the Relics are inside, fine. But what's all this about the power passing onto another person?"
"When a Maiden dies, her power gets channeled to another young woman." Jaune said, his jaw tight from where he stood beside Pyrrha. He was staring at Amber with an odd, intense expression in his deep blue eyes. "Usually, it's the last woman in her thoughts. If that person isn't applicable –if it's a woman that's too old, or someone who isn't a woman at all– then the power goes to a young woman at random. Any woman on the face of Remnant that's below the cutoff age."
"Ooh." Scarlet winced, but Jaune wasn't done.
"What's a problem here is that Amber's power was split –her attacker took part of the Maiden powers, so when Amber dies, not only is that woman likely to be the last person she thought of, Amber's remaining Maiden powers are going to seek out their other half. They're going to go straight towards the person who attacked her."
"Cinder." Ruby said, and it was strange to see her squishy little face twist with dislike. "Cinder Fall. She's the one that attacked Amber like this, stole her powers, and she's going to be coming to Beacon to finish the job."
It was all starting to spiral into a tight, irretrievable pattern. The conspiracy that threatened the schools, the reasons behind that conspiracy, and why a woman who was so clearly a career criminal had decided to side with a bunch of first-year trainees. This was making a dangerous amount of sense, and Scarlet had never been more thankful for the weight of Hook and Darling on his hip.
Because there was one thing about all this that was still ringing false to him.
Surprisingly, though, it was Sage who spoke up and asked the question lingering on the tip of Scarlet's tongue.
"There's no way you just happened upon this information by criminals discussing their plans. How do you know all this?" Sage asked RWBY and JNPR directly, and Scarlet winced, sweat running down his back. He tried to unobtrusively lay his hand on Hook, but six different pairs of eyes locked on him at once. These guys were good –far better than a team of first-years should be. If SSSNI tried to fight their way out, it'd be tough.
"When we went to Haven, we asked the Relic of Knowledge." Ruby said, slowly taking her eyes away from Scarlet's weapon to look at him dead-on. Her gaze was calm and steady, and despite his suspicious nature, Scarlet felt himself wanting to believe her. "Jinn. She can answer three questions every one hundred years, about the present and past but never the future, and she always tells the truth. We also…"
Ruby took a deep breath.
"…c-come from the future." she finished in a wincing, cringing sort of voice –the sort of tone one used when one knew that what was coming out of their mouth sounded like absolute bullshit. "My team, Jaune, and Neopolitan."
"This isn't our first time learning about Salem and all her nonsense." Yang added in support of her sister, folding her arms and cocking one hip. "Some shit happened with the Relic of Creation, though, and we got sent two years back into the past. Things being what they are, we didn't and don't plan on sitting around doing nothing, which is why we reached out to all our old friends-"
"-and started gathering allies." Penny finished, twisting her fingers together. Since she hadn't been counted in the back-from-the-future list, Scarlet had to assume she'd been filled in before the rest of them, probably when Weiss was in Atlas over break. "That is why all of us were brought here, isn't it?"
"Pretty much." Jaune scratched the back of his neck in the harmless, affable way that he did, and some of the tension seemed to drain out of the group. "We know what's coming, but the more people that know, the more that we can prepare and plan. And you guys are all our friends. We couldn't just leave you out to dry."
"So…" It was Weiss's turn to wince, Weiss's turn to look as though the prim heiress was stepping on glass in bare feet. "Do you believe us?"
Scarlet looked at the vast and mysterious vault stretching out all around them. He looked back at the girl in the tube. He debated internally for several moments.
Sun, naturally, had none of the same reservations or reserve and took only a full thirty seconds to come to his conclusion.
"I believe you." he said, his tail swaying slightly behind him as he planted his feet firmly and looked at Team RWBY. "This is all way too crazy to be made up."
"Same." Neptune added, folding his arms from beside his best friend.
"Mm." Sage nodded. Ilia copied him, her eyes fixed on Team RWBY.
There was a pause, and Scarlet carefully folded his arms as everyone looked at him, expectation clear in their eyes.
"I believe you." he said with a reluctant sigh, and caught identical flashes of relief in Team RWBY and JNPR's eyes. "But-" Scarlet held up one finger as their gaze sharpened again, before swiveling it to point at Ruby Rose. "I want to know, if you were all so bloody prepared to deal with this, why you came back from the future. I want to know more about this "mistake" you made with the Relic of Creation. And I want to know everything that went down, from here to the moment you came back."
"Full context?" Yang tried with a weak smile, and Scarlet fixed her with a dagger-like glare.
"Full context." he agreed, shifting his arms a little as he resisted the urge to reach for his weapon again. It would only set them off. "You spun us a sob story about why we should fight Salem, sure. Why should we fight alongside you, and not, oh, I don't know, the bloody headmasters of the schools? If me and my team are putting our lives on the line for this, why are you the best people for the job?"
RWBY and JNPR exchanged wincing glances –Neo just looked a tiny bit sheepish, which immediately sent alarm bells ringing– before they all looked back.
"This is gonna take a bit." Ruby said. "Wanna go back and sit down?"
Team SSSNI (and Penny Polendina) sat on the cold, creaky metal folding chairs and listened to the cascade of information pouring forth from RWBY and JNPR, although it was mostly Jaune that was explaining, and his teammates were looking alternatively pale or awkward as he described things. They talked, and talked, and talked, going all the way back to the beginning and explaining the steps they had taken as they had stumbled onto the path of this ancient feud.
What Scarlet had not foreseen or planned for –although if anyone asked, yes, yes he totally had– was the fact that with roughly eight people all trying to tell the same story, interjecting or correcting or adding on small details as they went, it would've been all but impossible for them to keep a fake story straight.
After all, Team SSSN got details wrong about things that had actually happened when they were all dragged up to face a teacher for whatever bullshit someone (usually Sun) had done. For this many people to all try and tell a story long enough to cover two years, well…
…he wouldn't say it would be impossible for them to make up such a story and for everyone to stay consistent as they told it, but it would certainly be very, very, very hard.
And depressingly enough, as far as his skepticism was concerned, they did manage to stay fairly consistent. There were a few laughed-off mistakes of 'oh wait, I forgot about that' or 'no, this happened first,' but by and large the entire story was flawless from start to finish, with no obvious gaps in consistency or truth. Which meant, overwhelmingly at this point, that Team RWBY and their friends were telling the truth.
Fuck.
Fucking sodding fuck on a stick.
He did not want to get involved in this –even if he saw no moral choice otherwise.
Between the various explanations of all the bullshit that had gone on behind the scenes, though, it was a good two or three hours before everyone, SSSNI included, were all finally up to speed and all on the same page, and Ruby Rose got up again to walk over to the whiteboard.
"We've told Ozpin about all of this." she said, drawing his name and underlining it. "We didn't tell him about the fact that Neo's come back, or that she's working with us, because we want to have something in our back pocket. Plus, y'know, the less people know about them betraying Cinder, the safer it'll be for her and Torchwick."
"Question." Sun raised his hand like they were in class, except he hardly even did that even when they bloody were in class. "Are we actually working with Oz, or nah?"
"We're working alongside him." Blake said in a remarkably polite sidestepping of that particular question. Scarlet narrowed his eyes at her, and she caught the look, meeting his gaze evenly.
"We're trying to keep a middle ground, here." the dark-haired Faunus elaborated. "Ironwood didn't trust anyone but himself to handle or solve the problem of Salem, and Ozpin focused on keeping the status quo steady and spread his net too wide, trusting the wrong people to help him."
"Lionheart, of course, is a bloody sellout." Scarlet grumbled, and oh, he was trying hard not to think about the fact that his own headmaster probably would've sold him and his teammates off to the bloody Grimm Queen in a few years. Ruby gave him a sympathetic nod.
"It's a delicate balancing act," Lie Ren said, his voice quiet but firm. "-but if we act on our foreknowledge of how the Fall of Beacon plays out, between both informing the relevant authorities and acting out our own plans on the fringe, we should be able to avert the whole thing."
"Fingers crossed." Yang said, rapping her knuckles against the edge of her chair. A few of the others copied her.
"Okay, so." Neptune awkwardly clapped his hands together, and paused. "What are our plans going forward?"
"Cinder and the White Fang will need dealing with." Weiss said, folding her own hands in her lap. "Our plans in that direction were rather nebulous, since we weren't quite sure all this was real…"
She coughed sheepishly and continued.
"I-in any case, with Cinder and her minions, we planned to try coaxing Emerald out of the fold, or at least shielding her after they were arrested. Since we've told him most of what happened, we assumed that Ozpin and the others would arrest whatever fake team Cinder and her minions were pretending to be the moment they entered Beacon."
"But we'll need a Plan B in case he doesn't." Jaune said. "Always have a Plan B."
"True, and Ozpin did tell Ruby that he planned to move cautiously in order to make sure that no one slipped the net." Weiss nodded to him, and glanced towards Team SSSNI. "Ideas?"
"I could try talking to her." Ilia offered, a little tentatively. "I mean, we're kind of in the same boat… with the whole, uh, defection thing. We could reach an understanding?"
Ruby hummed, audibly impressed, and turned to excitedly scribble Operation Save Green From Mean: Super Besties? on the whiteboard.
"It wouldn't be suspicious, either." Neptune said, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin on his folded hands as he leaned forward a little, visibly becoming more and more interested. "I mean, if we were all, like, chatting her up and stuff. If her job's to blend with the student population, we'd be helping her keep her cover, right?"
"Ooh." Ruby's eyes shone, and Scarlet rolled his own, just a little bit. She was clearly enthused by any idea that involved friendship.
"What are we gonna do about Cinder, though?" he asked, speaking up for the first time in a while. "If she doesn't get fingered by Ozpin?"
Most eyes turned to Neopolitan, who, showing how seriously she was taking this, looked down and thoughtfully rolled her lip between her teeth rather than smirking at them and offering a sassy comment.
Assassination? She finally shrugged, looking up.
"Mm." Now it was Jaune's turn for his eyes to glint with interest as he made a thoughtful sound. Sitting beside him, Pyrrha looked to be an odd mixture of flattered and embarrassed.
Ruby, meanwhile, was busily drawing an angry stick figure on the whiteboard, sprawled stomach-down with a bunch of weapons stabbed through its back. It had a mop of short messy black hair, an eyepatch, and its cartoonishly sharp teeth were bared in a fierce scowl.
They continued tossing around ideas, both for themselves and for supporting Ozpin and the other teachers. The future-returnees definitely seemed enthused about helping the others improve their skills –something which Scarlet was looking forward to a lot– and in general making sure that they weren't the only ones at Hunter level… or, well, not first-year trainee level, at least.
"You said something about a breach in the outer walls, right?" Sage said. "What if we used that to make sure Cinder and her team got arrested?"
"Good idea." Ruby replied, scribbling an angry trio of stick figures being knocked over like bowling pins by a cartoonish train before writing the words Operation Derail the Pain Train above them. One figure had the same eyepatch and black hair, the other had prickly spikes of hair drawn up like a volcano, and the final figure had a bowler hat and a cane in one hand.
Neo coughed pointedly, drawing Ruby's attention, before she looked back to the board and laughed sheepishly, erasing the third figure with her sleeve.
"Sorry, Neo. Forgot he's technically on our side now."
"A lot of this is going to rely on how Emerald reacts, I think." Pyrrha said thoughtfully. "I know we want to help extract her before she… makes any regrettable mistakes, but there's larger things at stake here. What if she doesn't cooperate?"
Ruby and several of the others looked conflicted.
"Then we can still pull the train idea, for one thing." Sun said, waving towards the scribble-covered board. "With our guys on the inside, we know exactly when and where it'll go down, so we can do some arranging, get Cinder and her minions in a spot we can bust 'em, and then pack the whole team –uh, minus Neo– off to jail. That's, like, almost part of their plan anyway, right?"
"We tripped the Breach early, in our original timeline." Weiss said. "We've gathered since that it was meant to further destabilize Vale, either just before or during the Vytal Festival. That being said, Torchwick's arrest and incarceration on Ironwood's ship was definitely according to Cinder's plans."
"So she shouldn't be too freaked out when she gets caught." Neptune said, rubbing his chin. "At least, she should still be thinkin' everything's going her way, more or less."
"Much as it hurts me to say it, Sun's right." Scarlet said. "We can worry about helping out someone on the wrong path once we've got the maniacs trying to destroy a Hunter school safely locked behind bars."
Neo snorted.
You're cute thinking bars would do anything.
"Oh, sod off! It's a metaphor."
"So we're liking the train option." Ruby said in a valiant attempt to get them back on track, circling the doodle she had drawn several times with a black-tipped marker. "If Ozpin doesn't deal with Cinder and her minions when they show up at Beacon, like if they escape or whatever, we can always hit them with foiling the Breach. With Torchwick and Neo, we'll know when they start that, and when it'll be ideal for us to swoop in and put them all in jail! Er, almost all of them, anyway."
Neo took her hand off her parasol.
"If we want to be facing criminals of this caliber, though, we need to get stronger." Penny said, looking worried, though not necessarily about Neo. "All of us, not just the people who didn't come back."
Team RWBY looked at each other and nodded.
"So, see what Ozpin does when Cinder and her team show up, train to be able to take down the bad guys on our own, and get ready to thwart the Breach." Jaune summed up, ticking off the points on his fingers. "Not bad for our first planning session, right, guys?"
Scarlet glanced at his fellow counter-conspirators.
Team RWBY and Jaune Arc's expressions were clear: the Fall of Beacon would happen again only over their dead bodies. Nikos and her other two teammates seemed nervous, but just as determined –which made sense, given as they had actually seen the future that the others had described. Neo looked equally determined but far more bloodthirsty: Scarlet got the feeling that the Fall would happen over other people's dead bodies, if she had her way.
And his own team?
Well, of course Sun looked oh-so-excited at the thought of a new adventure on the horizon, his eyes practically shining and his tail flicking like a cat's. Still, there was a tension in him, a readiness that showed he was fully aware of just how dangerous this could end up being.
Neptune looked to be the most nervous of all, but his shoulders were set in that painfully stiff way that told Scarlet he was going to go through this whether he was comfortable with it or not –a stance quite familiar to him, who had seen it countless times when Neptune was (failing) to chat someone up.
Sage, of course, was as content to follow the flow as ever, his eyes thoughtful and downturned, but in no way reluctant.
Ilia seemed nervous as well, but as an ex-terrorist, her anxiety was mixed with a sharp and desperate determination to see things through, to whatever end that came. Penny, sitting beside her, had her chin held high and her shoulders back, green eyes blazing with an unprecedented amount of grit as she looked at the board full of their crudely-drawn plans.
Scarlet sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair.
Really, how the hell had they gotten caught up in this?