(Quick Note: Strong language throughout)

As I stated before, The Layman was kind enough to write a few of these chapters for me, in particular for the characters he personally created. You've met Rosey the Faunus back in chapter 3, now sit back and enjoy his second Ruby, a shy, polite and reserved young woman…


"Fucking piece of shit bastard cocksucking pissfuck anal cunt stain licking MOTHERFUCKER!"

Each curse was punctuated by an anger fueled punch, reducing what used to be a skull shaped, metallic head into a pile of slag waste. Her fist was covered in oil and blood, all of it hers; Ruby Rose may have been the strongest person left on the planet, and was a veritable one woman wrecking machine, but she was, by all outward indications, still human, and she had the scars to prove it. (Her right eye in particular, though not all of them were as visible.) There already wasn't much left of the robot's chassis, having already been demolished by the vengeful Huntress so that it's upper torso and left arm remained.

A few minutes and several curse words later, she finally ran out of steam, giving one last emotion fueled punch at the pile of scrap beneath her before standing back up, kicking the remains into the nearby ruined building. She glanced around at the battlefield, more scrapped robots littering the ground. She brushed a strand of hair out of her remaining silver eye, wishing that she hadn't finished off the last of her booze reserve before rushing into the fight. That, or a warm body to help fuck herself senseless, gender be damned.

"Fuck," she sighed, "another day, another fucking step closer to annihilation…"

"What was that, Ma'am?" suddenly came over her earpiece, yanking the Huntress out of her lamentations.

"I said I fucking got 'em," she responded, louder this time. She reached down and picked up Crescent Rose, her precious Sweetheart, from the rubble where she'd tossed it earlier. "'Course, that just means more are gonna show up here before long, so I think we can safely say that this quadrant is also FUBAR'd like the last five."

"If you say so, Ma'am…"

"Whatever…" She folded CR up and hung it on her belt, making her way back to the LZ. "I'm heading back now, make sure you're in the air before I get there." With that she cut the connection and sprinted off, letting herself cut loose a bit as she headed to reunite with the other soldiers.

She wasn't really in a hurry to return to the CCT tower, ambivalence and indolence were the order of the day for her. Though she did enjoy messing with people, and if she made the grunts under her command sweat a little, then that was just one more way she could get herself off later.

As she ran through the razed city she used one of her many knives to slash at the random sentry bots she passed in an attempt to get some of their attention; might as well make this a challenge, after all. Sentry bots typically were just meant to alert the other robot troops to anything their orders said to pay attention to, but they also had a self defense protocol they defaulted to when under threat.

Really, her mere presence should trigger that by this point, honestly…

Still, those that didn't immediately crumble to the ground turned their visual sensors in Crimson's direction, following after her until she'd gathered about a dozen or so tails in her wake.

"Ma'am, we're reading several hostile chasing after you–"

"What was that? You're breaking up; it sounded like you just said want murderbots to swarm the Bullhead and rip you all limb from limb…?"

She heard the sound of the other soldiers scrambling, more Bullhead systems activating as machine components roared to life. Heh, works every time…~

She spared a moment to glance back at her pursuers. "So, I don't wanna sound racist or anything…but you lot all look the same to me. Did your mom fuck a garbage disposal or something?"

There was no way her words actually offended the bots, but she liked to think they did.

At least then she'd actually be able to affect these damn things…

The Bullhead sudden appeared in the distance, rising over the ruined buildings like a hawk cresting over the tree line. Unlike a hawk, however, the moment it came into view it released its missile payload directly at Ruby.

"Perfect.~"

This was a play she'd done many times before, though with some trial and error on the part of her squad: she waited until the missiles were almost directly on her, way too close for any normal person to dodge. Ruby wasn't a normal person, or even a normal Huntress anymore, and just before she would've been hit by one of the deadly projectiles she leapt up, lightly landing on the shaft of one the missiles before jumping to the next one. She sometimes liked to the kick the missiles at her pursuers, but these things didn't deserve the flash, so they simply impacted the ground in balls of deadly flames, ripping the bots to shreds.

After launching herself off the last missile in the pack, Ruby whipped out Crescent Rose and fired a shot behind her. The added thrust helped propel her the rest of the way to the Bullhead, catching onto the handle of the sliding door on the left side as it ascended into the sky, leaving the destroyed bots to litter the landscape.

It was a simple matter to climb inside the craft after that, announcing "Good news: everything's dead now." as she collapsed against the bulkhead, holding her hand out and making a grabbing motion.

A moment later a canteen was deposited into her waiting palm.

It was very quickly emptied of its contents once Ruby put it to her lips.

They were getting closer, uncomfortably so. Humanity had somehow manage to hold out against the deathbot assault for a good while now, but this was ultimately a war of attrition that they weren't going to win. Every victory was pyrrhic, merely holding back the inevitable for another few days or so, a week if they got lucky. Morale was a constant concern for everyone, not just the brave and foolish souls that picked up a gun and fought back against the inevitable.

The alcohol only did so much to dull the weight of that unpleasant truth…

"Um…Sergeant?" one of the soldiers asked. (She didn't bother registering details anymore, not when it was unlikely they would survive beyond whatever mission they got stuck on.)

"*gulp…gulp…!* Ah…! …the fuck you want?"

"We just received new orders from the Commander."

Ruby's eye went wide; in the decade or so since that fateful date at the 40th Vytal Festival tournament she'd seen things that no one should be subjected to, atrocities of war that she's assumed were a thing of the past, yet there was still one thing able to break through that jaded front and put the fear of the gods in her.

Or rather, one person able to do that.

She had to actively fight her instinct to reflexively gulp. "…what are they?"

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Escort duty.

Motherfucking, goddamned escort duty.

If there was one thing someone action oriented like her hated, it was just sitting around babysitting someone who probably couldn't handle a stiff breeze, let alone taking a hollow point round to the chest.

"Fucking balls!" Ruby griped, laying on the wing strut of the Bullhead, "Couldn't even let me get a quick fuck in before this, could you, Commander?"

The Commander had said 'immediately', and one didn't say no to the Commander.

"Oi, where's the dead meat we're supposed to watch?" she called down to her squad. They'd set down by one of the few outposts Humanity still had under its control, supposedly to pick up someone who was 'one of our few remaining options to end this'.

"Trix and Mac say they just finished rounding everything up," the pilot informed her, "They should be right up with the POI."

"'Bout fucking time!" She hopped to her feet in a single, swift motion and walked off the wing and onto the ground. "I've got a date with a barrel of moonshine and/or someone's genitals when this is all over."

"…whatever you say, Ma'am."

It wasn't actually a long time, only a few more minutes, but soon a portion of the ground split open as an elevator platform rose to the surface. There were numerous boxes stacked on one side, her two other squad members standing in front of it with their weapons at the ready. Flitting around the boxes was a man wearing a dirty lab coat, with shaggy, oily looking hair and what appeared to be a heavy set of goggles that completely obscured his eyes. He was saying something in a screechy, nasally voice, but fucked if she actually cared at this point; she was counting the seconds until they all got back to the CCT tower.

"Alright, get this shit loaded," she called, heading over to sling one of the boxes haphazardly over her shoulder, "we're burning daylight here, people!"

"Be careful with that!" the man screeched, "You have no idea how monumentally important those parts are to my work!"

"Yeah yeah, 'power of science', yada fucking yada…" She then chucked the box toward the aircraft. "Blow me with all that shit; if your precious 'science' was fucking worth a damn, then we wouldn't be on the brink of fuckin' extinction right now, would we?" She stomped back over to the scientist, leaning right into the man's begoggled face and causing him to squeak in fear. "So you can take your 'monumental importance' and kindly shove it up your ass, ok?"

The man shivered in place, understandably intimidated by the intense woman burning a hole through his face. "…w-would it help if I said this could help make all of this not happen?"

He received a flick in the nose for his efforts, giving him a bloody nose. "MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!" he wailed through his hands.

"Just fucking get on the ship and shut the fuck up until we reach the CCT." With that said, she roughly brushed past the man, heading over to the above ground entrance to the complex and leaning against the door.

The worst thing about escort missions was that hardly anything ever happened to make them interesting. The Creatures of Grimm weren't a threat anymore now that the deathbots had all but spread over the rest of the world (ironically supplanting the very threat they were meant to guard against) and anything that they hadn't already obliterated or assimilated was apparently deemed not worthy of their attention. This translated to a relatively easy trip to their destination and a downright boring trip back again.

At least with the Grimm they'd occasionally try to attack people in transit…

On a whim she took out Crescent Rose again and shifted it into its sniper mode and peered through the scope, scanning the distance on the off chance that there'd be something for her to shoot at: already ruined buildings, the occasional tree that somehow managed to escape the carnage, a pack of wolves skulking around a small rock formation.

Nothing worth her time or attention.

Welp, time to empty her flask again…

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

The trip back to the CCT sadly went by without incident, and the minute they touched down Ruby had hopped off the Bullhead and made a beeline for her quarters, loudly announcing "Fuck all y'all, I'm going home!" whenever someone tried to engage her.

She now lay in her bunk, her tits on full display. (She was only half under the covers.) On her side was another body, even more naked, snuggling against her side in the afterglow of passion. There was also someone curled up on the floor next to the bed in one of the sheets that had gotten tossed around during the fucking.

Ruby had a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth, taking a very satisfying drag on it. She glanced at her partner spooning her side, a woman slightly younger than she was with two-toned yellow and black hair, giving her a once over; she'd been too focused on eating the woman's cunt out before, and hadn't really given the rest of her body much thought.

The woman looked to be about Ruby's size back when she was fifteen: petite, slight, and soft. This chick must have spent her time around the CCT, because she barely had any muscles on her to speak of. Probably slept around to pass the time, something Ruby would do if she didn't get such a thrill from combat. The figure on the floor also had feminine curves, though the sheet they were wrapped up in prevented her from getting a good look at their body. Their hair was a shade of russet brown and was cropped short, so they were probably part of the Resistance like she was.

She glanced back to the woman at her side. At one point in time Ruby had looked like her, unblemished by life and the horrors she lived through, and least physically. Tossing her cigarette into a half full can on the opposite side of the room (another bullseye) she reached over and brushed a tuft of hair out of the woman's face. She still had both her eyes, unlike Ruby…

Not for the first time did Ruby wish that things had played out differently; everything had happened so fast on that fateful day, seemingly all at once, and it was only after the point of no return when she'd learned who was responsible for all of this…

Who she could have killed then and there to stop this.

How she could have saved everyone had she known…

She sighed. "No use getting your hope up, kiddo…"

All of a sudden the door to her room slammed open, an imposing silhouette standing in the threshold: officer's cap, shoulder epaulets, and a half cape cut a recognizable figure, one whom rarely made social calls.

"Sergeant Rose, at attention!" Glynda barked, startling per partners awake as well. They both proceeded to scurry out of the room in their state of undress, leaving Ruby and Commander Goodwitch alone.

Ruby slowly stood up, letting the sheets fall of her equally naked body. "Something wrong, Commander?" she asked.

"I gave you explicit orders to report directly to me upon your return," the older woman said, "yet instead you choose to ignore that order and engage in a night of bacchanalia!"

"…with all due respect, Commander, what part of that is out of character for me?"

Glynda looked like she wanted to smack the silver right out of her remaining eye. "That is not the point, Sergeant; I'm aware of how you like to conduct your missions, so like it or not you have the responsibility to brief us on any pertinent information you might learn."

"My squad–"

"Informed me that you spend the entire trip drinking," the former teacher interrupted, "not relaying information to them. Speaking of which, why did the VIP you were meant to protect show up with a bloody nose?"

"…clumsiness?"

This earned her a smack across the face for the crack.

"I expected better of you, Ruby Rose…," she sighed, "If you weren't our best combatant…"

"Permission to speak freely, Commander?"

Glynda looked down, meeting Ruby's eye. "No, Sergeant, you may not return to your R&R. Get dressed, then follow me; I have something I need to discuss with you."

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Twenty minutes later both women stood in an adhoc laboratory space facing a large machine that looked like it came straight out of an old sci-fi movie, the ratty scientist from before flitting around it.

"…you're legitimately shitting me right now," Ruby remarked, "This contraption is a fucking time machine? What, did space aliens give him the blueprints for it?"

The scientist suddenly whirled around in Ruby's direction. "For your information I've been developing this utter miracle of Science since before you were born, girlie; you should be praising the ground I walk on for my brilliance!"

"Wanna come over here and say that?"

"No thanks; I prefer the rest of my blood just where it is."

"Stow it, Sergeant." Glynda barked, instantly shutting Ruby up. "You'll forgive its appearance; our priority with this isn't to make something aesthetically pleasing, it's to potentially set things right right again."

"…so does it work?" Ruby asked. "I highly fucking doubt you'd put so much stock with this if it didn't."

"'Does it work?'" the ratty scientist scoffed, "Please, of course it works! Quite a brilliant stroke on my part, if I do say so myself; for the lay person, it essentially rips open a tunnel in the fabric of space and time, launching any matter on the platform through the continuum to another point on the timeline. Sadly, as far as I can tell it's just a one way trip, so whatever or whoever gets sent back is going to stay there. Not that we can do multiple trips anyway, the amount of power require to make even a small jump is positively astronomical–!"

"That'll do, Doctor." Glynda then faced Ruby directly. "The plan is to send one person far enough back in time before Apocalypse Day happened to inform and equip those in that time to prevent the catalyst that triggers this future from happening."

"And you're actually considering this cockamamie scheme because…?"

"Because at the rate things are going, humanity might actually become extinct; we honestly have nothing left to lose at this point."

Something everyone knew deep down inside, but refused to actually say out loud out of a lingering sense of optimism. Ruby knew it as well, though she typically elected to not care and simply kill what she was told. Honestly, if humanity was finally wiped out, herself included, then at least she'd finally have a moment's peace and wouldn't have to deal with all the survivor's guilt she'd accumulated over the years.

But the thought of finally seeing all her friends again, of saving them from all the destruction and hardship they'd have to endure… it was tempting, even if it was an insane prospect.

And hey, what was a little more insanity added onto her own brand if it?

"You're gonna ask me to make the jump, right?" she intuited.

Glynda nodded. "You're the most resilient person I've ever know, Ruby Rose. If there's anyone better to survive the process of traveling through time and changing the future, I can't think of any who are still with us."

"You got it, Commander," she nodded, "I've been meaning to cash in my vacation days anyway."

"You don't have any vacation days," Glynda pointed out.

"Wh'evs, I'm still taking them." She headed over to the platform in the middle of jumbled machinery, twitching deliberately as she passed the scientist (causing him to flinch reflexively in turn). "Not gonna lie, I fucking miss my damn dog." She began to step onto the platform, only to stop mid step. "If I'm fucking doing this, I'm doing it shitfaced or else I might start having second thoughts."

"…go let the quartermaster know I said your booze in on me," Glynda sighed, Ruby grinning as she rushed out of the lab to go get sloshed. Once she was out of earshot, Glynda turned back to the scientist. "I take it you have the failsafe measure operational?"

"Mostly, there's just a few bells and whistles that need attending to, but I can have the Dust Resonance Bomb fully function within an hour."

"Good." She let out a heavy sigh. "I just hope that is successful in preventing this future from happening… I'd just as soon as not be remembered as the woman who initiated the final solution…"

to be continued…?


Designation: Remnant-0404 (Error – World not found)

Type 4 Post-Modern World
Class 0 Population – No applicable HF (Human/Faunus) Ratio
Grimm Threat NOT DETECTED

Environment: BLACK
Integrity: BLACK
Culture: BLACK
Dust/Aura: RED
Deviation from Standard: 23.66%

Special Note: Ah, yes… this is one of those worlds that just cuts off. Rain and I have been working incessantly to find out what's causing this phenomenon, but so far we've found no real clues or leads. I only hope that one bridge it formed at the last minute was able to send someone or something to safety; no timeline deserves to just vanish without a trace.


Author's Note: Crimson is an interesting one – she's appeared in both Distorted Mirror Images and Sins of the Future, the latter of which was The Layman's answer to arguably the most popular fanfiction in the entire RWBY fandom. I'll let you figure out which one. Crimson herself was created very specifically to be a Mary Sue character, practically unbeatable in combat and very much able to break the rules at will. Thing is, in the hands of writers who actually care, no one can remain a true Mary Sue for very long… Crimson Thorne inevitably became a more well-rounded character with real depth and nuance to her with each of her appearances. At least, I think so. Who knows where her story will eventually end?

Next chapter: It can be argued that Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' series is one of the most influential pieces of fiction ever written, and one of the few series I've ever managed to finish. That said, it was only a matter of time before I tried to throw a gunslinger into this series…

=^..^=