And here's another one! This time with almost none of the main cast featured!

Yeah, this is going to be an obscure character's extravaganza!

The Leftovers

(Inspired by Spider-Man: Spider Island and RWBY: Grimm Eclipse)

This story begins right in the middle of the Fall of Beacon, following Team BRNZ as they fight their way through the hordes of Grimm and White Fang attacking the academy and are picked off one by one. Nolan is separated from the rest of his team as Brawnz and May go off to try and rescue Roy, only to find him dead and themselves surrounded.

Soon enough, Brawnz is taken out by the Grimm and May is wounded. As blood pours from her and everything goes cold, her left eye tingles and her vision goes cold.

A flashback reveals that after their match in the Vytal tournament, Team BRNZ had been approached by their former opponents in Team JNPR, resulting in the two teams sharing a meal with each other and getting along well, with Jaune Arc and May Zedong in turn getting comfortable with each other over the next few days that they would have with each other. However, the last time that they would speak to each other would be when Jaune spots Pyrrha sitting on her own in the corridors of Beacon, prompting the two of them splitting up and ending their last encounter before everything went wrong.

The story then picks up sometime later with Glynda Goodwitch as she leads the efforts to rebuild Vale, having to rally the students and teachers together, as well as the leftover city officials and workers, police officers, and Atlesian soldiers, into all coming together to put their kingdom back together. However, tensions between Atlas and Vale over the recent events of the Fall (what with their drones being hacked and their pseudo-invasion of their home) as well as generational conflicts from the Great War decades ago threaten to tear the relief efforts apart before they can even begin.

Meanwhile, the criminal underworld of Vale is just as smarting from their wounds as everyone else. Junior is dead, and as such his criminal empire now falls to Melanie and Miltia Malachite to lead and rule over. Through their perspectives we learn of their time in the Spider, their relationship to their mother in Lil' Miss Malachite, and how they eventually fell in with Junior and his gang. Their perspectives also highlight their resentment of those who have had it better in life than them and their lack of desire to help anyone else, though their hand may be forced when elements of the criminal underworld begin to move against them and the people around them...

In another part of Remnant, Cardin Winchester has finished corralling his wounded teammates together as they meet his father, Venta Winchester, a politician on the Valerian Council. Venta makes clear to Cardin his plans to rebuild Vale through strengthening their ties to their outlying settlements and villages, but desires to keep away from one particular town called Arcadia simply out of spite. Cardin shares this desire, and it is revealed that the Winchester family has a particular hatred, and strong sense of rivalry, with this town and their founders in particular...

And in this town, an awakened and wounded May Zedong makes her way to the Arc family household - having been told of where it is by Jaune before the Fall - and passes out on their doorstep. The Arc sisters and their parents take her in and treat her, and May finds herself as a guest of their household. However, interracial tensions between May and the Arc sisters would flare up as old resentments between Vacuo and Vale would begin to cloud their perspectives.

As you can tell, the biggest theme that runs through this fic is old grudges and resentments, exploring how they can cloud judgement and confuse perspectives, and how those same grudges can get in the way of progress if people do nothing but cling to them with abandon and make every decision based on them.

What's worse is that something is hiding away in the darkness and shadows of the ruins of Vale, provoking the remnants of the criminal underworld into panicked action and sulking away in the outskirts of Vale. Something dark, something malevolent, and something very familiar...

When Valerian authorities come to Arcadia in order to bring it into the fold, the Arcs find themselves in the ire of the Winchester family. As it turned out, the House of d'Arc (the Arc family's ancestors) and the House of Winchester had been on opposite sides of the War of the Roses, a Valerian civil war that had left the kingdom split in two over who should take the crown after the last monarch's death. The House of d'Arc had been on the winning side of that war, and the Winchesters had resented them for it ever since, explaining why Cardin had targeted Jaune during the first volume in Canon.

However, the tensity of the following negotiations would be broken by raiders attacking the town and stealing away many of the people who live there. The inability for the Arcs and Winchesters to cooperate thanks to their old grudges with each other allows more people to be taken right from under their noses. Cardin's animosity, as a Valerian nationalist, towards May, a Vacuoan refugee, does not help the situation.

As they arrive back in Vale, Cardin finds himself meeting the company of Melanie Malachite, the two of them seemingly hitting it off, though Melanie is only using Cardin to get Junior's gang back in power and take control of Vale's rebuilding governmental structures.

Back in Arcadia, May would find herself confiding in the Arcs that she has a secret of her own but is unwilling to share it. The need for that secret is soon revealed as Arcadia is attacked by bandits once more, alongside mutated Grimm with green spikes punching through their skin and out of them.

May's secret is revealed when a silver flash leaves her covered eye, killing all the Grimm, and she is revealed to be a heterochromatic Silver-Eyed Warrior. A girl with only one silver eye.

In Vale, Glynda receives the report of these Grimm and the arrival of the Arcadian populace from their devastated settlement but is told nothing about May. Nevertheless, she has her suspicions.

As the Arcs and the people of Arcadia arrive, they are met with resentment from the people still living in the city walls. The Winchesters aren't any help in easing tensions at all, and the Malachites just keep stirring the pot for their own ends. Glynda does the best that she can, but tensions are at an all-time high, and now the raiders from before have begun to strike at the city's walls.

But there's something not right about them.

They're the people of Arcadia, only now they're... different. More violent. Filled to the brim with a pulsating green goo where their blood should be.

And now they've taken Miltia.

Melanie goes into a rage about this, and redirects all of her attention into finding her sister, roping Cardin and his team into her search as well. Glynda is quick to learn about his team's antics and drills them for any information that they have, all the while forcing herself to put pressure onto the Arcs to give up whatever secret they're hiding.

But it is May and the Arcs themselves who find out what's going on. Trailing one of the former residents of Arcadia underground, May and the Arc sisters find a trail of chasms and tunnels, freshly dug and running underneath the outskirts of the city, connecting to Arcadia, and trailing all the way to an old facility in the buried ruins of Mount Glenn.

There, they find the droids and brainwashed bandits and mutated Grimm gathered together, now formed from a horde into an army, with a familiar foe at their head...

Merlot

Doctor Merlot has returned, ready to enact his revenge.

Merlot has been building an army. A military of mutated men, machines, and Grimm. Now with his forces at an all-time high, and the ability to infect others in turn, he now moves to attack Vale and take over the city, before spreading out to the rest of the world and taking on Salem herself.

But now May and the Arc sisters have discovered him and his army, and race back to Vale to warn them.

The only one who listens to their warnings is Glynda Goodwitch. Everyone else is too busy with their own resentments and hatreds to care.

But someone else does listen. Melanie Malachite. She and Cardin encounter her sister, Miltia, as part of an advanced scouting team for Flugel and Merlot. The red-dressed girl is mutated by the green mutagen, snarling and mad. Melanie cannot bring it in herself to kill her.

May and the Arcs decide to go out and confront the enemy themselves, unwilling to deal with all the drama of hatred back in the city. However, they are quickly run off by Merlot's forces, but are able to capture footage of the monsters overrunning settlement after settlement. It's enough to get Melanie and a reluctant Cardin on the table alongside Glynda, May, and the Arcs.

Soon, the monsters attack and the people of Vale are forced to put aside their grudges and work together to survive. However, as their ranks begin to thin out and Merlot takes centre stage in the assault, May comes up with a plan, and reveals her single silver eye to Glynda and the others.

Up in Beacon, Merlot approaches the frozen body of the Grimm Wyvern atop the shattered tower of Beacon and begins to peel away its stone hide, injecting the monster with his mutagen and merging himself with it.

In Vale, Glynda had been having the remaining Atlesian military officials in the city reverse engineering the aura transfer machine into a transmitter. Now, they planned to hook up May to the machine and plant it at the highest point of the city, being one of the skyscrapers. Realising that the green mutagen inside of the infected people and Grimm are made with Grimm matter as well, Glynda and May plan to use the transmitter to throw out May's silver eye power as far across the city as it can go, killing off the mutagen and curing the people below.

However, as they work to make this a reality, Merlot attacks them. He has merged with the Grimm Wyvern and transformed into a monstrous new form, now ready to take over the rest of the city and move to take the rest of the world, spreading his new form of Grimm along the way and ascending them to the true rulers of Remnant.

Glynda, Melanie, Cardin, and the Arc family team up to hold him off, but it is a tough battle, and they are losing. Merlot is too strong for them, and he is wearing them down with each attack. One by one, they all begin to fall to Merlot and the mutagen, turning into more supplicants for his army.

There was nothing left between him and conquering the whole of Vale.

Nothing except May Zedong.

And now she's ready to make her play.

With the aura transmitter at full blast, May flares out her silver eye and pushes it into the transmitter. A single second later the blast is projected outwards across the whole of Vale, killing the mutagen and freeing the infected from their enslavement. Merlot, having become so intimately entwined with the Grimm matter and the Wyvern, is killed in the process, and his forces are all wiped out in a single blow.

In the aftermath of the brief war, Vale continues to rebuild what was devastated, only now they are more willing to put aside their old grudges to build a new future. It's not a perfect peace, but it's much better than what came before.

Miltia has been cured of the virus but has been put into a coma from it alongside hundreds of others. Some have woken up immediately. Others have taken longer. The rest might never wake up at all. Melanie plans to stay by her sister's side until she does. Cardin asks her out, but Melanie turns him down. However, she isn't completely against the idea of going out with him, even though he is from a higher standing of life than her. Before she would've hated the idea, but now she wasn't as opposed to it.

Meanwhile, the Arcs and the Winchesters finally bury the hatchet of their old rivalry and bury their resentments towards the other, whilst at the same time the Arcs properly welcome May into their family (promising to introduce Jaune to her properly when he gets back home), and Glynda is left to rebuild the city alongside a new cadre of trusted fellows.

And then the CCTnet flickers on worldwide, and the face of Ruby Rose fills the screen...

May's journey isn't quite done yet, though. Over the course of the story, she has been fascinated by a chest in the Arc family home, taking it with her when they make a new home in the city of Vale and opening it there. Inside is a pure white cloak, and an old journal.

A journal belonging to Summer Rose.

As it turns out, Summer Rose somehow knew Jaune's parents, and had had her last talk with them before she went missing, when Jaune was too young to remember her. She had left with them her cloak and journal, and May was eager to use her first days as an unofficial member of the Arc family to return them both.

So she, alongside the Arc sisters, take the chest and items within them to Patch, and to the doorstep of Taiyang Xiao Long.

The last scene of the story is May Zedong-Arc and her new sisters presenting the chest and items within to Taiyang and being invited inside...

And that's the end of this story! I quite like this one. It doesn't feature any of the main characters (in any major roles), and we get to explore the side characters and their dynamics in ways we had never imagined before, as well as old concepts and villains as well!

It's pretty neat!

So as always, if anyone wants to pick this or any of my other ideas presented here previously, then please do! Just send me a PM when you're ready to use one of them, and from there on out it's all up to you!

Until then, Titanmaster 117 out!