Disclaimer: See last chapter.
Accidents
Ruby's eyes were half lidded as she pressed the button on the elevator. The one that she'd seen far too many times recently. It seemed like one half of her time was spent training and the other half in this elevator.
What's worse, or better, is that she was supposed to be just the Weaponsmith! She wasn't supposed to have magical powers, of which she'd only recently learned how to turn off! Frustrating, that's what it was. Very, very frustrating.
But the frustration wasn't about her work, although she wished she could have been doing that instead. But the two on two's for the other sides of the Vytal Festival teams were in the afternoon, which unfortunately gave her plenty of time but now she was sleepy.
She'd been up for far too long already, and it felt like the day had essentially just started.
The elevator bell interrupted her thoughts, and she mindlessly pressed the button to go up. The door closed, and she let out a loud yawn. A slight wind gathered around her, and she let out a subtle growl as she deliberately tried to turn the effect off.
Again. It was worse than her Semblance! And by all rights, there was nothing that should be worse than her Semblance. She was stuck in it for like half an hour earlier that day right after she'd gained the darn things, so she had no aura, which was tiring in and of itself, but now she also had other things to make her tired!
The doors opened again with a happy bell sound that made Ruby really wish it wouldn't. She kept a hard check on the Maiden's powers though, specifically so that a random lightning bolt wouldn't come out of nowhere and strike it.
Ozpin was sitting in his chair, looking over something on a bigger screen. The ever-present thermos of either coffee or something else, Ruby's current bet was a giant vat of pure caffeine, stood next to him.
Ms. Goodwitch was in the chair across from him, going over a few forms. She turned. "Good morning, Ms. Rose. How are...?" She started, before she turned fully towards Ozpin. "Did you forget to tell her how to turn it off?" She asked.
"As I recall, I was a bit too busy being berated to do standard customs," Ozpin answered easily. He turned to Ruby. "You're...rather still channeling them."
Ruby felt the wind at her back. She knew that. She knew that she was still channeling the maiden. The problem was that she had just turned it off and somehow yawning had turned it back on!
"I'm unfamiliar with the process, but it should feel as if you have a connection to an outside world, slowly stretching and molding your aura," Ms. Goodwitch stated simply. "Force your aura into your body by itself, and that should cut off the flow."
Ruby blinked. Manipulating aura was a trick that wasn't taught until much later on, but it was thanks to her Semblance she knew what she was doing. Granted, forcing her aura into her body generally meant that she was turning that bit on and wanting to go really, really fast.
"Much better, Ms. Rose," stated after a moment. Ruby glanced in a small pillar to see that she was, in fact, not having an eye on fire now. That was still kinda freaky and she wished that someone had mentioned that at some point. On the other, now she wished she could shoot eye lasers, because that would be cool.
"Perhaps, Ozpin, it would have been a good idea on letting her know exactly what it is the Maiden's can do and a small instruction on how to do it," Goodwitch chided.
Ozpin chuckled. "That is a good point, but...unfortunately it's all instinct," he muttered, just barely loud enough to be heard by both parties. His voice turned a bit louder now. "There is no single instruction manual. Instead, you must think about what it is that you want the power to do. The Maiden's power is elemental, yes, but they're also capable of many other things."
"How do you know? And how did you know that?" Ruby asked, turning to Ms. Goodwitch.
She gave a sly look towards Ruby. "I may not be one myself, but I've been around long enough to see the other ones being trained. I picked up a few things."
"Ah yes. You were there when Fria taught Amber," Ozpin recalled. Ruby wasn't sure who Fria was, but Amber had been taught? Why didn't she mention any of that when the power was being transferred? Unless she had, or was going to, but only got halfway thanks to...whoever that black haired, fire Semblance person was who was most likely that same Cinder Fall that Adam mentioned.
"Perhaps it would be a good idea to have at least a little bit of training before we turn you loose."
"Pyrrha and Yang helped a bit. They helped me turn it off to begin with!"
"...Oh dear. I was hoping to keep it...under wraps, so to speak," Ozpin said quietly.
Ruby shrugged. "Dad and Uncle Qrow already knew, or they know now, and they aren't happy with you, and it's not like Yang or Pyrrha would tell anyone. Oh! And Amber told me to tell you that it was definitely Cinder Fall after the maiden's power!"
Ozpin nodded. "There was that report of a wind cyclone following the roof of the dormitory earlier today," Ms. Goodwitch said, "Which could have been the Maiden's power...or it could have been something else. Kali Belladonna didn't mention seeing anything."
Ruby tried to look innocent. "Accidents happen, Ms. Rose. It just means a bigger target has been painted. Not as if we haven't had to deal with that before either," Ozpin answered. "No, it should be easy enough. And it's good to have confirmation of Ms. Fall's ambush. I will...hmm...I'll have to think on how to address it. Until then, perhaps, we should go through some of the motions then, try to put you up to speed?" He said.
"I'm going to take this paperwork somewhere else before you manage to get it set on fire," Ms. Goodwitch muttered as she telekinetically took a stack of papers and scrolls with her towards the elevator.
"We wouldn't start with fire!" Ozpin retorted.
"It seems more attuned to wind actually," Ruby muttered. As if to answer her, her eye started to catch on fire again and she felt the slight wind start up. "Argh, no, stop it!"
"Even more reason. These have to stay in order," Ms. Goodwitch said. "Keep training, Ms. Rose. Perhaps you and I should get a bout in at some point, see where you stand. After the Vytal Festival, of course."
Ozpin waited until she was out into the elevator before he sighed. "That could have gone better. It seems she still hasn't forgiven me for forgetting that Atlas is still here."
"Why would that matter?"
"Ah...James started a small program to aid in the Maiden's inheritance," Ozpin said. "And it seems I...jumped ahead a little bit. I can't say it turned out badly of course. I'm unsure how it would turn out."
"Was this supposed to go to someone else?"
"No. I'm afraid, Ms. Rose, that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry," Ozpin answered. He took a deep breath, before he suddenly appeared a bit older, a bit wiser...and yet still the same. "The easiest thing to start with, Ms. Rose, is the power that activates on its own. Wind, I believe you said it was."
As if to agree with him, despite Ruby not doing a thing and trying to make sure she did nothing, a small wind started. "Yeah. It is," she deadpanned, her cloak slowly billowing in the wind. If she was trying to do it, it'd look really cool but since she wasn't she was just frustrated.
On the other hand she could have a small cape and everything would be super cool! She could fly around on the wind, her cape billowing out behind her and she'd never have to worry about why capes were bad things. Although truth be told it's not like they were to begin with, considering she was already wearing one...
"Ah. Well, try to feel the power circulating around," Ozpin informed, sitting down on the chair. "And simply try to tell it to go faster. This room can take it, you don't need to worry about me."
Suddenly that made Ruby very afraid for him, but he told her to try and go for it anyways, so...here she goes! She tried to physically reach out and grab the wind, only to grab just air. "Not physically, just...hmm...how do you activate your Semblance?" Ozpin asked.
"Push aura into my legs and heart."
"...Isn't that dangerous?" Ozpin asked with a hint of worry.
"Not really? Not anymore. It was when I first started but only because I kept crashing into trees. And the house. And Ein."
"Ein?"
"Our first dog. Zwei's the second one. He was a bit bigger than Zwei is," Ruby explained. "Still a corgi, but brown instead of gray. He was really friendly, but his aura wasn't activated like Zwei's is."
"Ah."
Ruby closed her eyes, trying to find what he meant. There was no sense of 'wind' around her, aside from the wind obviously blowing around her but it didn't seem like it was her doing it at all. There was no 'second sense'. It just didn't exist.
Grudgingly, she tried anyway. Telling the wind blowing around her to just...speed up. In her mind, at least. She hoped she wasn't standing or shouting like those animated shows that Yang used to watch a lot. Dragon something or other. One of the martial arts ones. Ruby watched other things, like documentaries. About weapons.
Almost as if hearing her, suddenly lightning struck the ground in front of her, and Ruby let out a loud shriek as her eyes opened, seeing the darkened spot in front of her. Ozpin had his hands over his ears, but he wasn't looking as if it was hurting him, just...hurting his ears, she guessed.
That was cool. She could make lightning happen by thinking about weapons - almost as if she thought about it, lightning struck the pillar above her. Just thinking the word weapon, another strike this time on the ground, is what triggered it. So what triggered the wind?
Her cape came up and slapped her face. Immediately the wind picked up as she growled, frustrated. The wind must be her frustration?
As if to make things worse, her cloak was then caught on the cape, and the wind started to blow harder which meant that it was harder for her to stay standing and that just made her more frustrated which made the wind blow harder and she ended up right next to the elevator.
"Got lightning and wind! Weapons," Ruby said as lightning struck the clockworks above Ozpin's office, "and frustration. Frustration is the wind," she said. She took a few deep breaths and tried not to feel it. The wind died down.
"...A word and an emotion? Hmm...maybe it's the aggressiveness of the word itself that was lending to the lightning. It's different for each person, and what works for one won't work for another."
Ruby let the wind die down and tried to bring it up again. She didn't want to get too frustrated, after all, she was using magic! That was awesome, even if by all rights there was nothing that should be happening!
The wind was brought out...and promptly exceeded her expectations, which were none, before going full hurricane and tornado and Ruby thought there might have been a bit of a tempest in there, she wasn't too worried about the high wind speeds.
Although she probably should have been because she heard the windows start to crack and she saw them slowly start to bend outwards. That was bad. The wind got worse. No, no she wanted the wind gone!
Unlike last time, it didn't work. She needed to be less frustrated, but there was an emergency! Wind, no wind, bad wind!
The windows broke, and Ruby thought she might have seen Ozpin holding onto his chair before he too got flung out.
One of the clockwork pieces fell onto the glass floor, surprising Ruby enough that the wind died down instantly afterwards. Only to be changed to fire.
AB vs. IL
Ruby was calm. Ruby was calm, with nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong with her, she had certainly not caused a massive explosion in Ozpin's tower.
No, she was here. At her forge, in the Vytal Festival Amity Arena. She was here, she was safe, she hadn't caused Ozpin's office to break apart.
No, no, she definitely had. She figured out how to use fire though! Surprise! Yeah that was a thing, apparently. Other elements like earth existed, and apparently the really powerful mages could learn all kinds of things like teleportation and time manipulation and transformation.
According to Ozpin, at least. Although how he knew he wouldn't tell her. So Ruby chalked that up to just fanciful story telling, or someone trying to create a fanfiction of life.
But no, she was in her forge. She was doing perfectly, perfectly fine. And if there was subtle wind going around her with her eye on fire, well that was alright too. Not to mention with the forge going it actually kept her cool. Although she would need a bit more water for that too...
It was the day of the two on two's, for the...she didn't want to call it the 'loser brackets' because that was mean, but rather the fights of the teams that didn't go on. Which meant that most of these fights didn't really matter, but they would probably show more individual strengths than the team round did.
Apparently Ironwood and Ozpin had both suggested it at different points in time, and it wasn't until the headmaster of Haven thought it was a good idea that they implemented it. A way for more people to show off the skills they were learning, even the ones that weren't inherently super skilled. Like, say, Jaune to Pyrrha.
Also, Pyrrha's fight with Yang was absolutely fantastic and Ruby almost thought about trying to fight without Crescent Rose but she couldn't do that to her baby. No, she'd keep fighting. Although she was getting better with the weapons at the shop too, but she hadn't trained with those for a while.
She'd have to do that soon. Maybe when Zwei was up at Beacon. Ruby was sure that while Jasper was doing good down in the shop, being both at the shop and the watcher of Zwei was difficult at the best of times, and the only reason Ruby could do it was because of her crazy fast Semblance.
That'd be fun, he could throw weapons to her and then she'd grab them and be all 'woosh, woosh swish' and then toss them back and then she'd grab another one out of the air and it'd be fantastic and Yang would be like, "Alright Ruby that's pretty cool" and life would be good.
Actually life was already pretty good, if Ruby ignored that her Semblance had turned on automatically without her know how, and if she ignored the Maiden powers that also turned on when she didn't want them to. She was a Weaponsmith for Beacon!
Seriously, what was cooler than that? A side loading rocket launcher that shot boomerangs while spinning around and throwing swords which also shot rocket launchers?
...She had to write that idea down. Like right now, that was a high priority. Her scroll flew from the small counter that she'd placed it directly into her hands without thinking about it, a burst of wind having brought it to her.
Idea written down, she tossed it back to the shelf, watching the scroll as it would land on the floor. She narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out a way to control the wind. She wanted it to land on the shelf. Land. On the shelf!
The scroll landed on the ground. One of these days she'd get it. Until then, she was just on the angle of 'try everything and hope it works'. Like changing how often the wind changed direction, or its speed. That was a common thing she was trying.
"And for this next match, we have Blake Belladonna and Jaune Arc, the leftovers of Team Peabody against Cyril Ian and Lie Ren, of Team Silver!" Port's voice called out. Ruby tried to turn up the volume, if only so she could hear it over the sound of the wind. And the forge.
But mostly the wind.
Ruby blinked, narrowing her eyes. She wanted to figure this out. She'd just had the scroll in her hand. How had it gotten from the counter to her hand? The wind picked it up, but she'd just seen she couldn't do it yet. Which meant...maybe it was something else.
As if to answer her, the wind picked up, throwing the scroll from the floor to her hand, which she caught instantly without thinking about it.
"...The trick is not thinking about it," Ruby muttered. "That's just...frustrating," she deadpanned as the wind got worse. Instantly it got lighter as she wasn't actually frustrated.
She turned it up and tossed it onto the counter, deliberately trying to ignore it and simply pushing the wind towards it with the command of 'make the scroll land on the counter'.
It landed somewhat perfectly, but it also landed on its edge which caused a hard shutdown. "Oh come on!" Ruby shouted as the screen died. "That's just not fair," she muttered as she got up and turned it back on. "Okay, no more shortcuts then..." She said.
It wasn't the first match of the day, but most of her repairs had simply been grinding or repainting. Things that didn't take too long, and she was already done with. Some things needed to be resharpened, but that wouldn't take long and she was already mostly done with it.
She hadn't needed to actually reforge anything all day. Which...she was okay with. In a way.
"There's Jaune Arc walking up to the arena now. Blake Belladonna is...right next to him," Oobleck started to say, just as the volume on the scroll started to blow out. "And would Kali Belladonna please keep her voice down?" He asked.
"That's my daughter, I'm not keeping my voice down!" Kali's voice answered. How she was being heard, over the scroll, Ruby didn't know.
Blake's cheeks were a deep red. "It's just Ren and Cyril," Jaune was saying. "This...Ren will be hard."
Blake shook her head. "It's not that. Embarrassing parents."
Jaune nodded. "I get that. I just don't like the attention, it's everywhere."
Lie Ren, across from him on the empty arena floor, nodded. "I agree. A thousand insects biting at us," he said. Cyril was next to him, the blue cloak he had shimmering against the floor.
"It is a bit much. But this also isn't even a tenth of Vale," he said, seemingly much more at ease with the attention than the other two.
"Really?" Jaune asked. "How do you know that?"
"There's only eight thousand seats here," Cyril explained. "And only about a quarter of them are empty, so that's about six thousand. Vale has nearly forty thousand people in it."
"That seems...a lot," Blake muttered. "And they're all watching this, aren't they?"
Cyril shrugged. "Probably not. It's a blood sport, so that's always exciting, but I doubt most people are going to remember a match like this one."
"Ooh, Cyril's words are super effective on the motivation of the leftovers of Team PABY!" Port offered.
"I believe we should stop calling them 'the leftovers, Peter," Oobleck mentioned. "Maybe, hmm, what's a color that has a B and A in it?"
"Sebastian."
"That's not a color!"
"Neither is team NOVA from Vacuo four years ago, or did you forget them! What was it that you said, 'sometimes names just don't appear out of thin air!'"
"Team Nova, yes. Nova is a color, it means new."
"I may not be the history teacher, but something about that just seems off to me," Port answered just as quickly. "Oh right, the match. Uh...Begin!"
Blake rolled her eyes as Kali let out another shriek, running in towards Ren and Cyril with Gambol Shroud in its pistol form.
Jaune was next to her, keeping pace only slightly behind, his...Ruby sighed when she realized that he still hadn't called it anything other than "Mors". Mors was still out and firing potshots just as Blake was doing.
Cyril danced out of the way, throwing a few boomerangs towards the two. Ren went to the side, his own daggers firing wildly. They weren't likely to get far using ammunition, but it seemed all four participants knew that.
Jaune's aura flared to life as one of Cyril's boomerangs hit him dead in the chest, the other one being blocked by the shield. "Blake!" Jaune called out, as Blake surged forward, Gambol Shroud at the ready.
Cyril jumped upwards, just as Blake jumped up with him. He was growling a bit, obviously not expecting the faunus to jump after him. A shadow of her appeared behind him, and instantly his aura started to spark as he was sent surging towards the ground.
Ren was running straight over to Jaune, and was making quick work of him. The shield hits could only block so much of the dagger sickle strikes, and more than once the yellow glow of Jaune's aura popped up.
And yet despite the attacks, only Cyril's aura was actually getting low. Jaune's aura, while taking the hits he was, was steadily getting there; he was still in the seventy five percent range.
Ruby's eyes widened as she realized how PABY works. Jaune was the tank. He was designed to take as many hits as he could, whether it be through a large aura or his shield. Pyrrha was the off tank, the damage. Yang was the martial brute, getting up close and speedily getting away when things were getting bad.
Which left Blake as the other speedy one. And she was showing it. Cyril's boomerangs were coming nowhere close to her as the aura lights were steadily getting dimmer. He was mostly a ranged fighter, but with Ren being distracted by Jaune, who was doing a remarkable job at simply keeping him busy, that left Blake to deal with Cyril.
And she was dismantling him. If he wasn't being tripped he was trying to not flail too much as Blake struck at him again and again with Gambol Shroud. More than once her shadow popped up next to him, kicking him towards the real one to continue the chain.
"Oh the humanity, this is almost disappointing. Cyril, have you learned anything from combat class asides from how to roll?" Port's voice asked.
Cyril reached up and flipped the commenters box a rude gesture before he grabbed another boomerang and started to fight Blake in melee with it. Ruby could tell he only had a few of those, and Gambol Shroud was good at breaking things.
"He obviously has! When he first joined he was almost as bad as Arc! Of course, look at Arc now, you couldn't tell he could barely lift Crocea Mors!" Oobleck pointed out. Trust the history teacher to know exactly what Jaune's weapon used to be.
Ren stopped and jumped back as he heard Jaune's name being said out. Seeing that Cyril was getting beat up by Blake, he quickly tried to disengage from the blond. Only to find that Jaune was right in front of him again, the shield up.
Ren's goal was to get to Cyril. Jaune's goal was to stop him. And it became a flurry of attacks on both sides that was more about trying to get somewhere and stop them then anything that Ruby had seen. In the meantime, Cyril's aura was getting lower and lower.
Within another minute, "And Cyril is out due to Aura breakage! Now it's just team BA versus Team R!" Port spoke up. Cyril gave a humored sigh before he started to walk off the field. Blake had already turned towards Ren.
Now stuck in a two on one scenario, it was obvious that Ren had no actual hope to win. He was skilled certainly, judging by the way he brought Jaune's aura down to twenty percent with barely taking any hits himself, but once Blake got involved too he had no real room to maneuver.
And advanced aura techniques still required aura. Which he was losing at a rapid pace, ending a few minutes later with him rolling off towards the same side Cyril was. Jaune was at barely any aura, and Blake herself was down to sixty percent. If Cyril had gone after Jaune too, they might have won.
"And the winner is Team... BA! Belladonna and Arc, for those that can't spell."
"Whoo! Go Team Belladonna-Arc!"
"Would Kali Belladonna please settle down?"
"No!"
I almost wanted to call this one Sebastian versus Ill, but I realize it wouldn't make sense. Not that AB vs. IL does either...
Until Next Time!
