Team BXPS had a lot to work through.
They spent the whole evening and much of the next morning catching up and coming to new understandings. Blake explained her past in the White Fang, how and why she broke away, and how she'd come into conflict with the Vale Branch over the weekend. Penny explained as much of herself as she was able: waking up on campus, gravitating towards Beacon, joining the team, having to slip away overnight to do maintenance…
"And now you're not gonna leave us behind again, right?" said Yang. "Even when you think you have good reasons?"
Penny started to say that she couldn't be certain what the future might hold, and that she couldn't promise anything in good conscience—until she saw that Yang's eyes had turned red and her hair was luminescent. "Right," she said.
Yang nodded; the glow subsided and a smile took its place. "Great!"
"So, to sum up," said Weiss, "Blake was an actual child terrorist and is on the run from her old terrorist friends, and Penny is a combat-ready gynoid with amnesia."
"Don't forget 'Garnet is amazing'," added Penny.
"That's one word for it. And what about you?" Weiss said, turning fierce eyes on Yang. "Are you hiding any earth-shattering secrets of your own? Anything you want to share with us before our lives get turned upside-down again?"
Yang scratched the back of her head and looked unusually awkward for her. "Well… my birth mother may or may not be the bandit queen of Mistral. Does that count?"
Weiss buried her face in her hands and muttered in Mantletongue.
"Weiss appears to think that counts," Penny whispered.
"No shit," said Yang. "But hey, I get that whole 'food allergy' thing now. You just didn't want anyone to see you not eating."
"It was plausible," said Penny.
"Super strength isn't your semblance, either, is it?" said Yang.
"No, that is simply how I was built."
"Which means," said Blake, "that you potentially could still unlock yours."
"I hadn't considered that," said Penny. "Do you think so?"
"Everything about you is unprecedented," said Weiss, "but you have all the ingredients for a semblance. I'd say it's in play."
"Sensational!" said Penny.
"It explains a lot of other things, too," said Yang. "Like why you almost never actually shower but you still never stink."
"And why you don't get tired," said Weiss.
"And why your memory is so good," said Blake.
"Hold up," said Weiss, turning an accusatory finger on Penny. "You have a literally photographic memory and you still let me try to stump you? I'd never be able to stump you!"
Penny twisted a little. "You were so determined, and it was helping you study, so it seemed like it was doing more good than harm. I was certainly not trying to frustrate you!"
She hiccupped.
"And that part makes less sense," said Blake. "If you're a gynoid, why would you ever need to hiccup?"
Jiminy gave Penny the software equivalent of a stern look.
"I'd rather not say," said Penny. "It's a pre-programmed response that I do not control. It is benign, though."
"Unlike this… this, what, mystery directive, program, thing?" said Yang.
"That's right," said Penny, looking down shame-facedly. "This unaccounted-for subroutine is sensitive to matters of security, especially regarding the White Fang. I did not encounter any problems while we were acting against the White Fang, so it must have deemed that it didn't need to intervene. I can't be sure it will stay dormant."
"In the short term, it might," said Blake. "As long as we stay engaged against the Fang."
"But I don't believe it will forever," said Penny. "I believe, now, that it's the reason I feel compelled to check if the people I meet are Faunus, and why I'm alert for certain types of deception. If I could get rid of it I would, but I don't know how."
"You're handling it pretty well so far, I'd say," said Yang. "Aside from that big argument in the library."
"I've been meaning to apologize about that," Penny said to Blake. "I would never say such hurtful things on my own, and I deeply regret what came out of my mouth."
"It's like I told you before," said Blake. "It wasn't you who said that. It wasn't the real girl. Apology accepted."
Penny closed off visual processing so that she could feel relief with more of her being. What a difference! Anxiety was such a drain—so many cycles wasted.
"I think I need to apologize, too," said Blake. "Not for what I've done before, but for what we're getting into."
Her teammates looked at her. Tactical, based on how Blake had acted at other times attention fell on her, expected her to shrink away and try to appear small. She didn't; she sat straight and looked at them steadily.
"You know, I honestly thought I'd get to relax for a bit," she said with a wry smile. "I thought… going to Beacon… I thought school would be hard, but it'd just be petty drama, small things. My biggest worry would be grades, and those don't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. I thought I would have time to decompress and cosplay being normal. I wondered what that would be like, to have small worries. Mundane problems.
"It turns out, I don't even get to pretend to be normal."
Yang grinned at Weiss for reasons that were unclear to Penny.
"It's like I said earlier," Blake went on. "I'd be in this fight like it or not, but I do want to be involved."
"You don't have to convince me to fight the White Fang," said Weiss. "They've been after me my whole life. Not that they were wrong to target the SDC," she said fumblingly, and Penny could almost see different ideas in conflict in Weiss' neural net. "It's just… well, like you said, the Vale Branch needs to be stopped."
"I concur," said Penny, and left it at that—which seemed to be enough for the mystery subroutine. She probably needed to name it at some point, just for ease of reference, but to give it a name would dignify it, and Penny didn't think it deserved dignity.
Yang put an arm over Penny's shoulders. "As if I'd let you three get into trouble without being there to tank it for you. I'm in."
"Just one teensy problem," said Weiss.
"Yeah?" said Blake.
"We're on restriction," Weiss said. "We can't do what we did before and take the fight to the White Fang. And, as our professors pointed out, we're bad at that part. We need a lot of training before we can do that properly and safely."
"So we'll start with the assignment they gave us," said Blake. "Which means I get to say some of my favorite words."
They all looked at her expectantly.
"Let's go to the library," Blake said, and smiled.
The bell rang.
"…after classes," she added reluctantly, and grabbed her notebook as she headed for the door.
Penny leaned towards Yang. "Why are 'after classes' some of Blake's favorite words?"
Team JNPR was overjoyed to see Penny back with her team, safe and sound. Classes prevented too much discussion of these points, though Penny promised more details later. In fact, the opportunity for just that presented itself as noon approached.
For the first time, Penny joined the rest of her team at the lunch table, where they sat opposite Team JNPR. Naturally she did not have a tray of her own, but stealth was no longer as important; she'd told her team, and she intended to tell Friend Jaune as well at the earliest opportunity.
When Jaune came to sit down, she greeted him with her brightest, "Sal-u-tations!" Instead of returning the greeting, however, he turned to hold his tray away from her.
"Penny! Are you sure it's safe for you to be here? What about your food allergy?"
"I am in no danger," said Penny, yielding to Tactical's direction to address safety first. "I don't have a food allergy, I just needed an excuse to avoid the cafeteria. Although," she added at Jiminy's behest, "my exact words were, 'the food here is prepared in a way incompatible with my health', which is technically correct."
"The best kind of correct," said Weiss.
"Good backup, partner," said Penny. Weiss turned her attention to her food, but the corners of her mouth did quirk up.
"I don't really get it," said Jaune even as he sat down.
"That's because a whole lot a stuff happened this weekend," said Yang. "We have soooo much to catch you all up on. You have no idea."
"Ha!" said Nora, standing and slamming her hands down on the table. "Well, we have so much to catch you up on, too!"
"It's not a competition," said Ren wearily.
"It can be," said Nora. "C'mon, don't you want to tell them what an awesome weekend we had?!"
"It not exactly a long story," said Ren.
"It doesn't have to be a long story to be an awesome one," said Nora. She looked at BXPS with a savage grin. "How about it? We'll swap stories and see who had the awesome-r weekend!"
"You're on!" said Yang.
Blake and Jaune exchanged looks which Penny interpreted as commiseration over having lost control of their teams, again.
"Here we go!" said Nora. "The grand tale of Team JNPR's weekend!"
Jaune was walking from the dorms towards one of the school buildings while reading a book. The book was titled "Advanced Basic Aura for Experienced Beginners". It was taking almost all his attention, with only a little left over to keep him on the walking path. He was paying no attention to anything, or anyone, else.
So, as he passed by the administration building, he didn't see Russel Thrush standing between the bench and the bushes in the garden space, a wicked smile on his face and a sign that said "Kick Me" in his hands.
When Jaune passed by the garden space, he walked right past Russel, who reached out to attach the sign to the unsuspecting Jaune. Before he could make contact, though, he yelped and disappeared into the bushes with a (wait for it) rustle.
Jaune walked on, studying like his life depended on it. He was so deep in thought that he didn't see Dove perched on top of the Statue of the Hunt. He didn't see the water balloons in Dove's hands, either.
He didn't even see when the water balloons popped in Dove's hands without Dove ever throwing them, leaving a confused (and soaked) Dove flapping in the breeze up there on the statue.
Jaune's focus was unbreakable. Impenetrable. He had eyes only for the words in the book. Did he see Sky loitering along the side of the path? No way. Did he see the stick in Sky's hands? Nuh-uh. Did he see how Sky went to shove the stick between Jaune's feet to trip him, only for Sky (and the stick) to disappear from the area, their only trace being a bunch of loud grunts and snapping sounds? You bet your butt Jaune noticed none of this.
He only looked up when he was approaching the school building's door, where he saw Cardin standing just outside, looking both pissed and perplexed. Piss-plexed, if you will.
"Hey, Johnny boy," said Cardin with a scowl. "You seem… unscathed."
"Thanks? I think?" said Jaune.
"Well, we can fix that," said Cardin, grinning cruelly. "Have you eaten lunch yet?"
"Not yet," said Jaune.
"In that case, you must be hungry," said Cardin, raising his hands and cracking his knuckles, pop-pop-pop, pop-pop-pop. "Maybe I could make you a sandwich."
"That'd be awfully nice of you," said Jaune. "What kind of sandwich?"
"A knuckle—" Cardin began, but he trailed off as his eyes looked past Jaune for a moment, then widened in surprise and fear. "Um, I mean, uh, h-ham and cheese!"
Jaune blinked. "Sounds tasty, I guess."
"So I'll go see about that," said Cardin. The larger boy edged away, then broke into a run as he cleared the building.
"Huh," said Jaune to himself. "I wonder why he did that. What could he be running away from?"
"Hello again!"
"Oh, hey Pyrrha," said Jaune, turning to look behind him. "I didn't see you there."
"You don't say," said Pyrrha.
"I do say," said Jaune. He frowned. "Did say? Have said? …Never mind, not the point. I was just going to my Aura tutoring session with Professor Violet."
"Good for you," said Pyrrha. "How long does that usually take?"
"About an hour and a half," said Jaune. "Why do you ask?"
"Oh, no reason," said Pyrrha, and with a smile she walked away.
"You know, Cardin never did come back with that sandwich," said Jaune.
"I could talk to him about that," said Pyrrha with an alarming gleam in her eye.
"Thanks, but it's not that big a deal. Anyway," Jaune said looking at Nora, "how was that the story of my weekend? All I did in it was walk."
"That wasn't your story, sillyhead," said Nora. "That was Pyrrha's story." Jaune was visibly confused, but before he opened his mouth to insert his foot up to the knee, Nora was rolling along. "Your story goes more like this!"
Jaune had many responsibilities. Some were to himself, like training and studying and getting better. Some were to his team, like training and studying and getting better. And some were to his school, like training and studying and getting better.
("I get the message, Nora." "Hey, hey, I don't tell you how to suck, so you don't tell me how to narrator!")
But some of his responsibilities were to his family, and this morning he'd decided to own up to that responsibility by writing them a letter. Once he got back from breakfast, he sat down at his desk in the team dorm, got out pencil and paper, thought things over for fifteen minutes or so, and began to write.
Dear mom, dad, and all seven of my sisters whose names I won't tell my team,
Hello from Beacon! I'm doing very well here. I'm getting enough to eat, don't worry about that. The food here is good, and there's so much that I'm eating more than I ever have, although we exercise so much I think I've actually lost weight.
I feel like I'm getting better by the day. My grades don't show it yet, but I'm sure they will by the end of the semester. And maybe, some day soon, I'll get to the point where these missions only almost kill me instead of barely not kill me, and that'll be real progress.
My teammates are the best in the world. Ren is like the brother I never had. He is a total bro, my best bro, and I'm sure our bromance will take off any day now. Nora is the best thing to ever happen to Remnant and every day I get to be around her is a privilege. Oh, and did you know we have that girl from Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes on our team? Wild, isn't it? Apparently she's famous and everything!
I suppose I'm supposed to say sorry for running off with the family sword, but it's working great for me, so I'm not sorry-sorry. I may turn it into a grenade launcher soon, though, and if I do I'll apologize for that, even if it'll be totally awesome.
Your loving son/brother,
Jaune D. Arc
P.s.: Send more cookies. The last batch vanished without a trace.
"That is not what my letter said!" said Jaune.
"What I'm hearing," said Nora, her expression becoming more dangerous by the syllable, "is that you want me to read your mail so I can tell these stories more accurately."
"That's absolutely not—"
"Nuh-uh, I know what I heard, no backsies."
Jaune looked helplessly at Ren, who shrugged in return. "You get used to it," said Ren.
"Easy for you to say when she's not telling wild stories about you," said Jaune.
"Alright, Ren's turn," said Nora. "Time to tell the highlight of his weekend!"
Ren casually raised an eyebrow in Jaune's direction, but said nothing as Nora started up once more.
Ren had an intense interior life. He appeared to have all the calm of the surface of a mountain lake, but underneath that calm surface layer, a garden of eels was engaged in a bloodthirsty, no-holds-barred death battle for mountain lake supremacy.
As Ren came home from breakfast and his teammates split off in separate directions to do all their important daily tasks, Ren turned to his own important daily task: he sat on his bed and meditated.
It might have looked like he was doing nothing, but Ren was engaged in fierce inner struggles of the mind and soul, contending with strong emotions and existential questions, like how to navigate societal expectations about what your relationship with your platonic life partner ought to look like.
For hours he struggled with these questions, letting them clash in his spirit beneath that ever-calm surface as passion fought with passion. It was so exhausting that after two hours of sitting motionless while the war raged on, the only thing he was capable of doing afterwards was taking a nap.
So he did.
"I love a happy ending," Ren said in a choked-up voice.
"That does sound exhausting," said an impressed Penny.
"So he spent an entire day doing nothing?" said Weiss dubiously.
"And it was some of the most productive nothing you'll ever see," said Nora. Ren nodded in agreement; Weiss looked like combining the words "productive" and "nothing" had crashed her Thesaurus.
"What about you?" said Yang. "What shenanigans did you get up to over the weekend?"
"I went to the Forge," said Nora, and her smile looked positively wicked. "I was playing around with new Dust mixes beyond my standard home brew."
"You make your own ammunition with your own Dust mix?" said a startled Blake.
"Of course I do," said Nora. "Name the Dust that explodes pink, why don't you!"
After a second or two, Jaune tentatively said, "There isn't one, right?"
"Glad to see you learned something," said Nora. "Sure, my typical Burn-Wind mix is perfect for almost everything, but it's still fun to try different stuff when I get the chance. So over the weekend I went down to the Forge to whip up some new ammo to see what trouble I could cause. And that's where the fun started!"
"Good morning, Miss Valkyrie," said the forge master on duty.
"Morning, sir!" said the modest genius. "I'm heading over to my usual workstation."
"About that," said the forge master. "I've made a new addition there."
Nora looked, and saw a speaker attached to the side of the worktable she typically matronized.
"With it being so loud in here most of the time," said the forge master, "and you getting up to such crazy things, I've had to streamline my responsibilities." He held up a remote control that was typically used for emergency shutdowns of forge equipment and other safety-related purposes. "If I push this button, that speaker will blast out, "Nora, no." That's your cue to stop whatever it is you're doing."
"Okie dokie, sir," said Nora with a salute. "I'm sure that will be super effective!"
The forge master looked at her with intense suspicion, like there was no innocent explanation for her looking this excited about being personally monitored, but he could detect no trace of sarcasm or evasion from our noble heroine. "Alright," said the forge master, "run along."
Nora saluted again and flounced over to her station. There she gathered vials of Dust along with the outer shells of grenades awaiting full assembly. Nora had been building up to this moment for a couple of weeks. She wanted to experiment with a new kind of Dust mixture for her famously devastating grenade barrages. The explosive power of Burn Dust and the high-pressure blasts of Wind Dust had served her well, but what if she could do better? What if, by lacing the inner casing of the grenades with Stone Dust, she could increase the amount of shrapnel she created? Amplify the explosion with spikes of rock driven by the same forces that devastated the target directly? The carnage would be awesome!
That was the thought, anyway, but getting the mixture right was always tricky. Dust chemistry was like if you took a normal chemistry book and tossed it in a cauldron filled with only the very finest psychedelic drugs.
This, of course, was why Nora always tried her experiments in the Forge and not in her dorm.
She broke out the appropriate vials and began to arrange the grains as she desired. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the forge master looking suddenly alarmed. He drew his remote and pushed a button.
"Nora, go!"
And Nora smiled as a recording of her own voice cheered her on, because the forge master would have to wake up much earlier in the morning if he wanted to place limits on Nora Valkyrie. And by "wake up earlier", Nora meant "build things designed to restrain her in places she couldn't reach and sabotage".
The forge master's horror grew as he pressed the button again, and Nora's voice cheered her on again with a cry of, "Nora, go!" Suitably energized, Nora grabbed the vial of Stone Dust, un-stoppered it, and tipped it towards the open casing of the grenade…
The bell rang.
"Aww, man!" said Nora. "We were just getting to the big finale!"
"Another time," said Penny. "It was fascinating to this point!"
"Hold on," said Yang, "all that took so long we never got to say what we did this weekend, and that was the whole point!"
"Obviously, nothing you did could be that epic," said Nora.
Blake glanced at Weiss. "Weiss, summarize."
As everyone stood to clear their places, Weiss started counting off on her fingers, creating the aural equivalent of a bulleted list. "Over the weekend, we…
-Found out Blake was raised as a child activist and radicalized into a child terrorist before abandoning the cause,
-Found out Penny is a combat-ready, amnesiac gynoid trying to resist her racism protocols,
-Confronted one of Blake's former comrades trying to pull her back in,
-Investigated a series of Dust robberies,
-Tracked the robberies to a warehouse,
-Engaged in a firefight with terrorists inside said warehouse,
-Nearly got vaporized, surviving only because Penny somehow made friends with a laser cannon on legs,
-Got arrested,
-Got bailed out by Professor Goodwitch, and
-Got put on academic probation for the rest of the semester."
Team JNPR faced Weiss with eight blinking eyeballs.
"That about covers it," said Blake, and Team BXPS left the cafeteria.
"We'll talk more later, Jaune!" Penny promised on her way out the door.
Team JNPR had collectively not moved as they tried to process this avalanche. "Did…" said Jaune with a swallow. "Did anyone else not get, like, half of what she just said?"
"More than half," said Pyrrha.
"Oh, good. I was worried it was just me."
Nora looked to Ren. "Sooo… we did have the awesome-r weekend, didn't we?"
"No, Nora. We did not."
"Damn!"
"I don't believe one word of what Nora just told us," said Weiss.
"I believe that Ren did nothing all day and then took a nap about it," said Yang. "That checks."
"Maybe," Weiss said grudgingly, "but the rest of it? Not a chance! She made it all up, I'm sure."
"She did seem awfully complimentary of herself," said Blake. "'Every day I get to be around her is a privilege'? Really?"
"I'm honestly surprised she knew the word 'existential'," said Yang.
"She's so weird," said Weiss.
"Calling her weird implies that we are normal," said Penny, her brow knit in thought. "I don't think we can make that assertion."
"Even by our standards," Weiss insisted.
Penny didn't know enough about 'weird' and 'normal', and she was starting to appreciate that nothing about her situation was normal. She'd just have to take Weiss' word for it.
As the team continued its trek towards their next classroom, Yang said, "Hey, check it out. There's renovation work going on at the Forge."
Penny peered more closely than her teammates could match. "I do not believe that is renovation work. It appears to be repairs. Wow, what a powerful coincidence! The Forge is conducting repair work right after Nora told a fictional story about causing damage to the Forge!"
No one responded, communicating instead via increasingly worried and uncertain glances.
"It was a fictional story that Nora told," said Penny. "Right?"
More glances.
"Right?"
Author's note: This was the actual writing process for this chapter:
Me: The past few chapters have been really intense and lacking in JNPR, let's tone it down a little, catch up with them...
Nora: Actually, I'm gonna hijack this chapter and unreliably narrate the shit out of it.
Me: Yes, ma'am.
Anyway, this marks the end of the second major story arc. "War Machines" will be on hiatus next week; I'll be posting two one-shot stories in the interim. "War Machines" will resume on 11 July. Cheers.
Next time: Seeing Stars