Note: Bit of a looser chapter today. Still getting back in the swing of things. We're finishing up another story now, but once that is done, we hope we can start doing weekly chapter updates. Enjoy.

Basic training.

5:00 AM.

Every day.

Ruby awoke to the sound of alarms blaring. She would be rushed into her uniform and forced outside. The fatigues they made her wear Atlas colors. It made her feel like she wanted to rip off her own skin.

The drills happened outside in the cold. Atlas Academy was powered with an artificial atmosphere, and yet it gave Ruby no comfort from the burdens of the high altitude. They would be forced to work out before the sun had risen. Two hundred pushups. Two hundred sit-ups. Running laps around the perimeter of the Academy. All in the dark. All in the cold. Every breath felt like she was fighting to stay alive. Ozpin had implied that the Atlas instructors would keep separate from the Beacon students. If that was the case, it was another lie. All students worked out together, and no one watching would be able to tell the Beacon students apart from anyone else.

Unless they looked for quality. Ruby noticed the additional gasps and strained grunts from familiar faces. They weren't used to the temperature, the pressure, the constant screaming from drill instructors blaring down on them. Huntsmen in Vale were a distinct entity from the military, even if their true colors blended together more often than anyone would care to admit. The staff's training was unusual if not effective. Atlas Academy had no such distinction or interest in the unorthodox. They were going to treat them like soldiers all the way through, and many of the Beacon students were not prepared for that. Not at this height. The stares of judgment from the Atlasian students were maybe worse than the screaming of the instructors. The other students already treated them like aliens. Failing at basic training just gave them an easy excuse to look down on them.

Most of them. Pyrrha, of course, succeeded at everything. She beat every test that the instructors threw at her. She would outrun every student with hundreds of pounds of gear strapped to her back. The Atlas students watched her with envy, and Ruby couldn't help but do the same. Occasionally, Pyrrha would glance back at her. Her gaze was colder than the weather.

Ruby would always get distracted. How much did she suspect? What did she already snitch to Ozpin? The drill instructor would notice her looking to the side and make her do twenty more pushups.

There were still classes. Ruby could excel in that. Aura training. Huntsmen history. Weapon studies. She was good at that. It came second-hand to her. During those courses, they made her wear a different uniform. It was too tight on the neck and she still hated the colors. Beacon was so much more relaxed about uniforms. She can't believe she actually missed Beacon. The structure of the classes was different than she was used to. She found herself whisked away from her teammates more often and thrown into smaller groups with people she wasn't too familiar with. She would be taken to some smaller lecture hall in some other spot in the labyrinthian complex and taught specialty subjects. High-level battle tactics and squad communication. Field therapeutic behavior. Teammate psychoanalytics.

She was particularly good at sniper training. Atlas Academy had a dedicated sniper range built within one of its wings. Eight hundred meters of a wide, open shooting range, and all the time in the world to practice. The Atlasian students who joined her those days had standard, sniper-sword kits. When she walked in with her ghastly, oversized Crescent Rose, sticking out like a sore thumb, the glares just got worse. But she impressed the others soon enough with her skills. The Atlasian teacher even complimented her. The kind words felt almost disturbing, unearned, even though she knew they were genuine. That was perhaps the worst part of the experience. The artificialness of it all. The lingering sense that behind every smile was a scowl.

In Beacon, everyone received focus for their combat style, but they were all equal. In Atlas, they selected a path. You were either a leader, or you weren't. You were bred a general, or a grunt.

Goodwitch was almost always there in some capacity. Ozpin assigned her as their babysitter, and her watchful eyes never gave Ruby or her teammates a minute alone. She stood out from the rest of the Atlas staff, seldom bothering to dress herself for her occupation anymore. Ruby wondered what the Atlasian students thought of this strange, unkempt woman in sunglasses that stalked them around the campus. She would slump in the corners of lecture halls, hover over them during lunch, and trip them while they exercised. Ruby heard whispers from the other students that it wasn't the real Goodwitch. The real Goodwitch, the rumor went, died during the assault on Beacon, and this new Goodwitch was an actor or her secret twin. It was the only way to explain her shift in personality and appearance. But Ruby knew the truth. This Goodwitch was the real one. Vindictive. Studious. Manipulative. A snake in a pencil skirt.

Two weeks passed. Just two weeks, but it felt like an eternity. Two weeks of non-stop training, waking up, running, jumping, climbing, shooting, studying, sleeping, and then it repeated all over again. She learned to keep her mouth shut and her back straight. She barely communicated with her teammates outside their dorm, and even then, their conversations were reduced to whispers and short bursts. Without the bonding of similar training and a fear of their words being overheard, they nearly became strangers to each other. Of course, they couldn't let that happen. Not after all they had been through. Team RWBY wasn't breaking apart that easily.

Most of their conversations were if they noticed any changes from the Atlas staff. It was obviously hard to discern between Atlas being normal dicks and Atlas being vengeful dicks—as Blake put it, at least. As far as they could tell, neither Coco nor Pyrrha had bothered telling anyone of their meeting from the first day of school. However, they couldn't press the issue with them. Their attempt at making allies had gone so disastrously that they were all afraid of raising the topic again, and given how easily Pyrrha had been set off by the sheer mention of Ozpin's wrongdoing, the last thing they needed was to trigger another explosion. Ruby still didn't know what was up with that woman. Months after knowing her, Ruby couldn't understand her behavior. She texted Nora and Ren about it, but they just claimed it was a "personal issue". Whatever that meant. Regardless, they didn't speak, and if there were problems with them from Ozpin or Ironwood, they didn't know about it. Ruby supposed she would take that as some sort of victory.

Day Fifteen.

5:00 AM.

Ruby would be woken up early by the sound of blaring alarms.

She sighed. Back to training.

Dr. Noetal tapped her pencil against the side of her head, then proceeded to jot something down on her clipboard. Yang sat patiently in the opposite chair. The doctor's new office was more cramped than her room back in Beacon. She hardly had the time to personalize anything. There was only a desk, and a computer, and the two chairs they sat in. Yang wondered if the room was making it hard to breathe, or if it was just the stress. When the psychologist sighed, she was expecting the worst.

"Well, you seem fine," Dr. Noetal stated. There was a slight hum of optimism in her words, but her face was still riddled with caution. "Unfortunately, I don't know enough about your specific condition to make a confident judgment. Branwen's disease is barely mentioned in the literature I could find."

"But… do you think we can return to combat?" Yang asked. She had been forced out of training for weeks, having to watch her teammates struggle while she sat on the sidelines. Part of her knew she should be thankful for avoiding the hardships of basic training, even if she knew she would handle it easily. But she never felt more useless than she did knowing she couldn't back up her friends if they needed her.

Dr. Noetal shook her head. "Honestly? I'm not sure."

Yang pouted. "Come on, Doctor. I'm good to start physical training again. If Ozpin is that worried—"

"Ozpin has nothing to do with this," Dr. Noetal said bluntly. "He left your medical suspension up to me, and the only thing I care about is your health. If your mental state isn't stable, I don't want you engaging in dangerous activities."

"I swear, I'm okay now," Yang said innocently. Dr. Noetal eyed her with suspicion. Yang couldn't really blame her. It was only a month ago that she snapped and tried to kill Ruby. Having her split personality healed in such a short time was bound to raise some eyebrows.

"Look, Yang, I understand," the Doctor insisted. "You look fine. You haven't had any incidents since you came to Atlas, you're communicative, your memory tests are perfect—you have been taking the paliperidone and the bupropion I've been prescribing?"

"Every day."

"You seem okay to continue your studies, as long as doesn't involve physical activity," Dr. Noetal confirmed. "What I'm concerned about is what will happen when you're placed under physical stress."

"Doctor, I'm not sure if you heard, but I did fight a giant monster recently."

"I heard."

"And I was attacked the first day I showed up here," Yang reminded her. "I've been under stress, and I haven't cracked. Doesn't that count for anything?"

"It does," Dr. Noetal explained. "But your symptoms took years to manifest, and they didn't become severe until several months of Huntress training. I'm more worried about what will happen when you are placed under repeated stress than what will happen tomorrow."

"Is there anything else I can do?" Yang pleaded. "Like, how am I supposed to prove that I can handle stress if you won't put me under stress?"

"I know it's frustrating," Dr. Noetal said sincerely. "The worst part of rehabilitation is when you think you're finally ready to go back to normal, because it always happens before you are actually ready. People tend to overestimate their own abilities. Improving ourselves takes time, and recovering from a mental illness requires a lot of hard work. And you have been putting in the work. Don't think I haven't noticed. Your recovery is extremely impressive. But the last thing that I want is your illness spiking up because I put you back into training before you were ready. That would be negligent, and worse, dangerous—to yourself and others."

Yang scowled. "Do you really think that we're going to hurt people again?"

Dr. Noetal pursed her lips. She spoke sternly. "That's not necessarily what I meant. I meant that your teammates are going to need you at full strength, and you can't afford to be a weak link in the chain."

"That's what I'm asking, though," Yang said with bitterness. "Do you really think that we would hurt the other students?"

Dr. Noetal's expression remained stern. "How confident are you that you won't?"

Yang sat on the answer for a long moment. Dammit, she hated therapy. She hated sitting around being useless. Worse, though, she hated knowing the doctor had a point.

"Not confident enough."

"I'm sorry, Yang. Genuinely," Dr. Noetal sighed. "You're close, though. I'll check you again next week, and if your progress is keeping up, I'll reconsider."

Yang rolled her head back and sighed. She wanted to protest harder, but she had to remain as calm as possible in front of her therapist. The last thing she needed was even more setbacks. Perhaps that was the Yin within her, always wanting to break free and fight something. Regardless of what she wanted, she would have to trust Noetal's judgment. The doctor had always been straight with her, and though she had a lingering suspicion that she was just as deep in Ozpin's pockets as the rest of the staff, she seemed genuine in her assertions. She just had to wait. One more week. Hopefully.

Yang pushed herself up to her feet and walked toward the exit. "Well, thanks, Doctor. I'll see you next week."

"One second, Yang," Dr. Noetal stopped her. "I just wanted to ask something really quick. I noticed you have a different tendency to use various pronouns when referring to yourself."

Yang blushed and tried to downplay it. "Oh, that? That means nothing."

"I don't care what pronouns you use, Yang," Dr. Noetal said earnestly. "Varying pronouns can be a helpful way of formulating one's own identity. If there is something you want to be called—"

"It really doesn't mean anything," Yang insisted. "I just… say what comes to mind. Sometimes it's one thing. Sometimes it's something else."

"Okay. I believe you," the Doctor nodded. "Just know that you can use whatever you are comfortable with around me. There's no judgment from me."

Yang considered that for a moment. She quickly turned to leave, but gave the doctor a final nod of approval. "Thanks. Appreciate that."

Blake's sleeping schedule had always been fucked. At Beacon, she would stay up all night, hunting through the hall. In Gunhound, there would be days where she never left her bed, crashing straight for fourteen hours. She didn't remember when she stopped sleeping normally, but the fact she was able to function properly as a Huntress and an assassin was a testament to her adaptability. At Atlas, however, she didn't have a choice but to sleep normally. Their schedule didn't allow for her usual flexibility.

Frankly, it was nice. Weirdly nice. If she wasn't constantly going through an existential crisis, it might have even improved her mental health. As it was, it helped her from falling off the deep end. Sleep was the only time in Atlas she felt mildly secure. It was one of the few times she could count on all of her teammates being beside her. In her dreams, she could be anywhere else.

So, it was only a matter of time before that got ruined too.

It was one in the morning. Their dorm room was dark, chilly. The blankets were not nearly efficient enough for the cold. Blake shuddered under her covers when she felt the mattress next to her vibrate. Her enhanced hearing could pick up the buzzer of her Scroll even in her deep sleep. She tried to ignore it. Unfortunately, her Scroll went off again. And again. And again. Why the hell didn't she turn that damn thing off at night? It was just her habit. A stupid one. She opened her eyes groggily, roused from her slumber. The glowing light of the Scroll illuminated her face. She checked her surroundings. The others were asleep. She intended to join them soon. That plan flew out the window when she saw the number. She didn't recognize it, which meant it only could have come from one source.

Glynda Goodwitch was texting her.

It didn't matter how many times Blake blocked her number. She always found a way around it. Why wouldn't she? Blake quickly learned that texting was Goodwitch's favorite means of harassment. Every day, several times a day, Goodwitch would send her text messages containing all sorts of lovely things. Sometimes she would text her things such as, "I'm going to carve your fucking eyes out," or "You would look so pretty gagged and bound in my basement you fucking bitch." Sometimes she would just send an infinite stream of slurs, both anti-Faunus and anti-gay. Once, she sent a string of twenty messages back-to-back describing an incredibly detailed rape fantasy. Goodwitch quite liked the sexual forms of torment. Blake would be in the middle of class only to glance at her Scroll and see five unsolicited dick pics scoured from the internet. The other night before bed, Goodwitch texted Blake a picture of her in the shower. How many people's privacy she had violated just to obtain that image was something Blake didn't want to know. It was endless.

And Blake knew it was toothless. Goodwitch couldn't really hurt her. She couldn't fucking touch her. If she could have, she would have already done it. Goodwitch just wanted to get under her skin. The worst part was that it was working. Blake had no idea how. She thought she was tough enough to deal with something so empty as threatening texts. But the persistence was slowly burying itself into her mind, where every time she looked at her Scroll, she felt a horrible dread at what she would see next. Photographs of her mother? Elaborate torture scenarios? Child abuse imagery? Goodwitch had leeway to get away with anything, and there was nothing Blake could do about it. All she could do was wait with morbid curiosity at what terrible thing Goodwitch would send next.

So, Blake stared at her Scroll. One new text had come her way. A video attachment. She knew better than to open it. She knew she should have just gone back to sleep. But against her better judgment, she decided to look at what video Goodwitch had sent her.

It took her all of two seconds to realize she had been sent a link of a Faunus getting lynched.

Blake shut off her Scroll and jammed it underneath her pillow. Her hands were shaking, and she forced herself to lie on her back and take deep, steady breaths. Steady, she told herself. Remain steady. Don't let her break you.

She closed her eyes, trying to get the footage out of her head. Easier said than done. She had seen so many Faunus beatings in her lifetime and it never became easier. A single frame of video was enough to put her back in a crowd of protestors, mustard gas filling her lungs, blood dripping down her face, children screaming and crying out around her. It brought her back to the death of her father, and the way the Huntsmen laughed as they assaulted him. It brought pictures of Adam after his rilling—and thinking of Adam resurrected another host of complicated emotions that she didn't want to think about. Her blood boiled. Her heart was nearly beating out of her chest. She wanted to scream. But she had to remain silent.

Four more months of this.

Four more years of this.

Blake didn't get any sleep for the rest of the night.

"Again!"

Weiss focused, pushing her hands out in front of her. Three golden chains emerged forth from the ground and launched in front of her. Their targets, several test dummies twenty meters away, were pierced through their skulls. Weiss drew in her breath and pulled back her palm. The chains retracted, racing toward her with loud rattles like a cobra's hiss.

"Good job, Weiss!"

Ruby's encouragement was nice, but Weiss felt her words were insincere. Maybe that was just the self-doubt talking. She had done what she set out to do. Ruby managed to finagle private training sessions between the two of them every other day. Ozpin wanted Weiss's Fable power training to be done with Goodwitch, but Ruby convinced him that Weiss learned more efficiently under her command. Ozpin didn't have much of a choice but to buy it. After all, he couldn't do anything without Weiss's cooperation, and if she wanted to be with her girlfriend, she would get time with her girlfriend. Granted, the cameras watching them stopped them from doing other things, but time with Ruby was a valuable commodity. Even in a place like a modified shooting range, there was still an heir of intimacy—when things weren't getting stabbed, of course.

"Thank you," Weiss sighed. She wiped the sweat from her brow. She didn't realize how tiring summoning the chains were. Usually, she only had to keep them out for short bursts, but mastering them required a lot more energy than she expected. She rationalized that this is what Semblances felt like, though she couldn't be certain. Ruby didn't like referring to Weiss's Fable abilities as Semblances. Always the nerd, she insisted on giving her powers unique names. Ruby insisted that there was significant historical value; after all, naming the abilities of a Fable was crucial to understanding them. Weiss obliged her, even though said names were usually awful. It was cute watching her try. After a hundred attempts, they agreed on names that Weiss felt retained some dignity.

Henceforth, summoned material objects like her chains were known as Melodies.

Summoned living creatures such as her frog were called Phantoms.

Ruby wanted to name the giant Royal Toad as well. Weiss wanted something elegant like Figaro or Despondence. Ruby chose the name Large George. Weiss wasn't able to argue her way out of that one.

"I think you have summoning the Melodies down," Ruby stated, approaching Weiss from behind and resting her hand on her shoulder. "I want to try incorporating it into your combat style next. If you can combine Myrtenaster glyphs with the Melodies, that would be a powerful combination. Because then with your sword, you could be all stab stab, but then also shoot the chains like… woosh."

Weiss smirked, trying not to laugh at Ruby's enthusiasm. "I'm sure I'll learn how to stab very efficiently with you around."

Ruby smiled. Smiles didn't come often in Atlas. She took what she could get. "There's something else I wanted to try, though."

"Team attack?"

"No."

"Does it involve… ugh, Large George?"

"No, it does not involve Large George," Ruby claimed. "I've been thinking about the Fables. Or, the Reveler, more specifically."

Weiss groaned. "What about him?"

"Okay, here me out," Ruby started. "One of the things that Zelina's book mentioned was that Fables have the ability to distort reality and that they also had a 'realm unto their own'. I'm assuming that reality distortion refers to Melodies and Phantoms, but the 'realm' refers to those illusions the Reveler performed after he kidnapped us. Remember?"

"Remember when I got my face nearly sliced off and you died?" Weiss asked dryly. "Hard to forget."

"Right," said Ruby. She proceeded to explain to Weiss some of her thought process. To this day, she didn't fully understand what happened during the God's Arm. The less she recalled about that horrible day, the better. What the Reveler did to her was unforgivable. However, it was, in some sense, fascinating. She had initially assumed that the Reveler, being a sort of God, could warp reality as it pleased. A true God could surely bend physics in whatever manner it desired. However, since learning it was not a God at all, Ruby had begun to think more clearly of its limitations. For example, she reasoned that its summons was limited. Its Melody was golden chains and its Phantom was Royal Toads. The Miner, the lesser Fable she had also witnessed during the God's Arm, had a Melody of toxic fumes and a Phantom of bergkwoks. It meant that, unfortunately, Weiss was limited to summoning only Large George.

"All right," Weiss said, following along. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, I still don't really understand what happened during the God's Arm," Ruby explained. "If the Reveler can't warp reality limitlessly, it probably couldn't have summoned that giant crystal maze, or your house, or those mannequins he used for the test. Given that all of our injuries disappeared once you killed it, and if it was really limited in what it could summon, my theory is that everything that happened in the God's Arm once we blacked out just happened inside of our heads."

"So, it wasn't distorting reality at all," Weiss said understandingly.

"Right. I think. Maybe," Ruby noted. "My guess—and I would probably need to see a lot more Fables in action to test this—is that all Fables have three abilities. They can summon a material object of some kind, they can summon a living creature, and they can project powerful hallucinations into the minds of their victims. When we were trapped by the Reveler, none of those events actually happened to us. We were all just experiencing those things in our heads."

"But we all had the same experiences," Weiss countered, "and we remember what happened to one another. How could we talk to each other if we were trapped in our own minds?"

"That's why I added the maybe," Ruby confessed. "I really don't know how the Reveler's hallucinations worked. I don't even know how it was able to be killed in one of them. But none of that is even really my point. My point is… if you stole the Reveler's Melodies, and the Reveler's Phantoms…"

Weiss immediately understood, and the idea was as interesting as it was terrifying. "You think that I could summon those hallucinations, too?"

"It's just a theory!" Ruby said quickly. "But that would be cool, right? Or at least something to consider."

"I think I would be dangerous," Weiss claimed. "These Fable powers are already a lot. I don't know if I would even want to be projecting things into the minds of other people."

"I understand. But I'm curious to know if it would work. If these summons are the key to stopping the Grimm, we have to take advantage of them however we can, right?"

Weiss wasn't sure how much she agreed with that. She still didn't feel like she even deserved these powers. She gained them by accident, and all of a sudden, everyone was expecting her to be some kind of savior. She was dancing close to the edge of powers she didn't fully comprehend, and no cute nicknames from Ruby could disguise the fact that if she messed up, a lot of innocent people could get badly hurt. That pressure was overwhelming. Assuming Ruby's theory about those summons was correct, and assuming she even could do something like that… did she really want to push her powers further by tampering with people's minds?

"You just want another excuse to name my powers," Weiss chastised her partner, keeping those darker thoughts to herself.

"No," Ruby insisted. "I already thought of what I would name it. The Astral."

"That's…" Weiss paused for a moment. "That's actually not terrible."

"Thank you," Ruby said. She held her arms out in front of her. "Does that earn me a hug?"

Weiss laughed. "After coming up with Large George? You're lucky we're still dating."

A buzzer sounded off in the shooting range. Their temporary reprieve was coming to an end. Whatever training Ruby had planned would have to wait. Weiss groaned. Nothing good could ever last with them, could it?

Basic training.

5:00 AM.

Every day.