Chapter 1: Two of a Kind
Chapter Text
Dramatis Personae
Earth
X: An android with many titles—Maverick Hunter, hero, Mega Man X, Father of All Reploids. Hates all his titles.
Zero: a warbot and the deadliest Maverick Hunter. Known with both fear and awe as the Red Demon.
Signas: a reploid, commander of the Maverick Hunters.
Dr. Rieman: a human scientist.
Alia: a reploid and navigator for the Maverick Hunters.
Sigma: avatar of the Maverick Virus.
Remnant
Ruby Rose: a Huntress-in-training and a smaller, more honest soul.
Weiss Schnee: a Huntress-in-training and heiress to Remnant's largest pile of wealth.
Blake Belladonna: a Huntress-in-training, Faunus, and ex-terrorist.
Yang Xiao Long: a Huntress-in-training and half-sister to Ruby.
Ozpin: Headmaster of Beacon Academy and a wizard.
Cinder Fall: a villain.
Glynda Goodwitch: deputy headmistress of Beacon Academy. Not actually a witch.
Salem: actually a witch.
WINDOWS TO THE SOUL
Capacitors whined as they reached full charge. An emitter glowed, bursting with latent potential. In a split second, all the stored power was released as plasma, blasting force coupled to the heat of a small sun, consuming all before it like a ravenous beast. It impacted a robot with no regard for its armor or structure; it melted and blasted everything in its path until the remaining scraps fell to pieces while burned metal and ozone filled the air. And still the plasma raced on, diminished but ever fierce.
It was an astonishing display of technological might, the yoking of primal forces to sophisticated machinery and engineering.
It was also utterly mundane. The work of a moment. Something that required no thought to perform and merited no recollection.
To anyone else, it was power bordering on the divine. To Maverick Hunter X, it was the stuff of everyday life.
Because before that plasma bolt had spent itself, he was charging another shot in his off-hand buster, before unleashing it with the same precision and fury on another hopelessly outmatched robot.
Battons. An ancient design. Someone had obviously hoped that older designs like Battons would be less prone to infection.
X knew better.
Alert.
Without laying eyes on the incoming enemies, X stepped forward like a lunging fencer and fired the thrusters in his feet to dash away. Two Battons had tried to attack his blind spots. That might have worked on a lesser Maverick Hunter. It never would on X.
X planted hard, fired the thrusters again to leap into the air and half-spin. One arm – and so one buster - tracked each Batton.
Two shots. Two kills.
He ran a sensor sweep of the area, probing, searching. That looked like the last of the Battons.
"Thank you, Mega Man!"
X, through long practice, resisted the urge to wince. To this day, he resisted comparisons to his ancestor. He was a different sort of machine from the ancient hero, engaged in a different kind of conflict, and he knew better than anyone how little he merited such praise.
Especially when he knew, as that human did not, that the fight wasn't over.
"X!"
He tracked the noise instantly, targeted an eruption of junk from a nearby wreck, and caught sight of his target before it had fully emerged.
Targeted.
Fired.
One, two, three low powered buster shots, intended more to annoy than to impede, bit into the shell of this new enemy. It was protecting itself with the shells of destroyed robots, layers of ablative armor that burned under plasma's touch but allowed no breakthrough. Even as X closed, he took in his foe.
It had once been a civilian-standard replica android, humanoid in form but with large, boot-like feet for balance, and a helmet-like head behind its face. Now, though, it had wrapped itself in plates of armor, and its right arm was replaced completely.
Replaced with a repeating rocket launcher.
X knew even without his Tactical subroutine's warning that a miss from that weapon was more dangerous than a hit. A hit would hurt him without breaching his armor; a miss would slaughter the humans he was protecting.
No time for half measures, then.
Even as the reploid leveled the launcher to aim it, X was dashing forwards even faster, the distance between machines vanishing like fog. He didn't pause, didn't stop to engage. Instead, he lunged again and lowered his head like a ram.
His reinforced helmet, with all of X's weight and momentum behind it, smashed into the reploid attacker like a cannonball, flinging it from its feet.
In a long-practiced maneuver, X recovered his own balance, stepped on the repoid's chest to pin it down, and aimed the buster he'd been charging during his assault.
For a split second, he looked into the reploid's eyes.
And saw red.
The tell-tale sign of terminal infection.
X had known it would be there, but it broke his metallic heart all the same.
And then those corrupted eyes vanished beneath the fury of plasma.
After a few seconds, the superheated metal started to cool, rapidly, as metal does, glowing bright as any funeral pyre. There was nothing left that resembled a reploid's face or head.
It hurt. It always hurt.
In a way, X was glad. He hoped the day never came when he could kill someone, even someone lost to the virus, and not feel it. Who would that person be?
Now, the battle was well and truly over, brief as it had been.
He backed away and turned to take in the site. Clustered in the shelter of what had once been a house was a team of humans in yellow plastic anti-contamination suits. They carried tools, mostly simple ones, and nothing with a microchip.
Virus clean up crew. It was a necessary and incredibly dangerous job, made more dangerous by the virus acting to protect its spread by killing the crews. That the crews were human let the virus satisfy two imperatives at once.
Which was why the crews needed protection.
Which was why X was here.
"All clear," he called over to them. They cheered, and a few called out to him by name or title.
He let the praise wash over him. A balm for a weary soul.
Even if their cheers were laughably minute compared to the problem at hand.
Their foreman started barking orders and the cleanup crew got to work again. It was backbreaking work, X knew, but only humans could do it safely.
Assigning reploids to clean up a site where the Maverick Virus had been active… would be a sentence of damnation.
The comms unit built into X's helmet crackled to life. "X, this is Hunter Base."
"I'm here," X replied.
"We have priority tasking for you. We're recalling you to Hunter Base. A replacement escort is en route. You'll take their transport to your new mission."
X frowned. "This site is still hot," he said.
"Commander Signas is aware of the risk."
The risk, X knew, of secondary infections. Only X and Zero, for reasons more assumed than understood, could resist the Maverick Virus. Any reploid was at risk, even other Hunters.
And when Hunters went Maverick…
X shuddered. "Are we sure?"
"It's priority tasking."
X sighed. Everything was a priority. He needed to escort this cleanup crew, but there were five more crews just on this continent that needed him or other escorts. There were four more hotspots with suspected virus activity, there were rapid reaction forces that needed to be ready to fight the virus at any moment, plus there was the gaping wound in the planet that was the Eurasia crash site…
Too many places for X and Zero to be at once. If there'd been five Xs and Zeros it would have been too many places. Other Hunters had to fill the gaps, and other Hunters were susceptible. They got infected. They spread the virus.
A vicious cycle. Every year it got worse.
The Maverick Hunters were stretched to the breaking point. Commander Signas knew it as well as X did.
And if Signas was still calling this a priority…
"Standing by for pickup," X said.
"Roger."
Swish.
This was… a lot of grimm.
Swish.
More than Ruby Rose had ever seen before.
Swish.
Maybe more than she'd ever seen before… combined?
Swish.
Huh. She might have to do that math later…
Bone-white claws whizzed past her face, centimeters from slicing into her nose. The grimm's follow-through brought its muzzle close to Ruby's face, snarling to show off teeth sized for terror rather than eating, its skin blacker than night, its soulless red eyes full of hatred.
Ruby's silver eyes looked back unblinkingly. She gave the grimm a mild smile.
Swish.
A sweep of her scythe caught its ankle; a tug from Ruby cut through its leg; a follow-up sweep tore open its ribcage before it could recover.
The beast– monster? Demon? Professor Port kinda confused her on this point– the grimm immediately began to evaporate.
Which was nice… except that two more grimm were on her before the first one had fully dissolved.
She leapt towards one of them, planted her boots on its face, and flexed her Aura to kick off hard into the air, hard enough to maybe snap something in the grimm from the recoil. As she somersaulted backwards, she hit the mecha-shift controls on her scythe; by the time she was right-side-up again, Crescent Rose was in its sniper rifle form. The second grimm that had been chasing her ate a .50 caliber round through the eye that evacuated the not-actually-brains its skull held; it was half-dissolved before it hit the ground.
"Coming through!"
Ruby jumped backwards, and good thing, too. A team of sophomores– that was Team CFVY, wasn't it? So cool!- barreled into the gap where Ruby had been, smashing through grimm like it was their job. Which, well, it would be, eventually…
With a moment to herself for the first time in ages, Ruby glanced around. CFVY's arrival wasn't a moment too soon; they'd taken the pressure off of Team JNPR (who'd shown up so soon, Jaune had been watching his scroll, she owed him some cookies!) and Team RWBY– her team!
Team RWBY needed all the help they could get, because they were dead on their feet. Elegant Weiss, agile Blake, bulldozer Yang… all of them were on their last legs.
They'd been fighting all night, they'd been fighting all through the day before, Yang and Weiss had had their Auras broken in battle on that stupid train. It was a lot! They'd regenerated just enough Aura to get back in the fight, but they were running on fumes now.
Although the dregs of their Auras were still enough to draw grimm to them like moths to a flame…
Better them than the civilians around them, Ruby thought as she limbered Crescent Rose and started sniping the grimm. (Blam!) Grimm were normally kept out of the city of Vale by its walls and border defenses (blam!), but the once-blocked, now-broken train tunnels had given the monsters a way to bypass it all.
The thought of grimm loose in civilian areas (blam!), of the sheer carnage that would follow…
No. Ruby would fight and die to prevent that. That was what a Huntress did (blam!), she was sure of it, and even if she didn't have her license yet, Ruby knew–
Ping.
Ruby's magazine was empty. Her hand went to her waist and closed on air.
Oh. Yeah. She'd been fighting all night, too. And she'd fired lots of sniper rounds.
She reversed Crescent Rose's mecha-shift, felt the comforting weight of the scythe in her hands.
Close combat it was, then.
And then, as a Bullhead-class airship passed overhead, a figure dropped from it to ground level– a figure, Ruby could tell even at this range, that was scowling so hard her face might stick there.
Ruby gasped.
Professor Goodwitch, deputy headmistress of Beacon Academy, had joined the battle.
They were saved.
Professor Goodwitch had dropped to the side of where Team CFVY was making an absolute mess of things and attracting all sorts of attention; that gave her a nearly-clear shot at the hole in the ground created by the crashing train. Grimm were still streaming from that hole to join the battle as she stalked towards it, but she couldn't be bothered with them. She didn't even glance at the occasional grimm that charged her, swatting them effortlessly away, until she reached what she thought was a good range.
She extended the hand with her weapon in it, pointed at the train, and made a motion like she was lifting.
The train moved.
Then the debris started moving.
Then the rubble and masonry and wreckage– all the things punched out of the way by the train crash– all started moving.
Professor Goodwitch's Semblance was crazy strong, Ruby knew, but even for her, this was a flex.
With the power of her soul alone, Professor Goodwitch shoved the train back down underground, then lifted all the wreckage and smashed it down into the hole atop the train. All of it plugged the hole– messily, but effectively. Dust and dirt puffed away as the invisible force of Professor Goodwitch's Semblance packed her impromptu seal down, compressing and tightening and jamming until there was no hope of dislodging it short of sustained high-yield explosives.
No more grimm made it through.
The breach was sealed.
And without the constant flow of reinforcements, the grimm that had made it into the city were dispatched in short order. Even exhausted trainees had enough oomph to finish off the stragglers.
The fighting wound down; the ringing of gunshots and the roaring of beasts faded to nothing. Ruby turned to check on her team. Yang, long mane of blonde hair and all, had flopped to the ground on her butt, with even that minor impact causing her Aura to flicker alarmingly. Weiss' dainty frame was shaking with the depth of her gasps. Blake had pressed herself back against a wall like it was the only thing keeping her from falling, like she was trying to merge with the shadow it cast.
But they were all okay. That was what mattered. Ruby smiled as tension left her.
She turned back towards the breach and found herself face-to-face with Professor Goodwitch, whose expression of aggravation hadn't faded in the slightest. That expression vaporized all of Ruby's other thoughts and left her grasping for things to say.
"Well?" said Professor Goodwitch.
Ruby's brain turned to mush and oozed out her ears beneath that stare. Needing to fill the silence and having lost the capacity for critical thought, she blurted out the first thing that entered her mind.
"Do we get extra credit for this?"
Professor Goodwitch's eyebrow twitched.
Once upon a time, X would have returned to Hunter Base by teleportation.
Once upon a time, in this case, was… gosh, less than a year ago?
Eurasia's crash had changed everything. X was reminded of that as his transport skirted the crash site. Eurasia was supposed to have been a space colony– and was rumored to have been a generation ship. An attempt to escape the endless cycle of violence the Maverick Virus had unleashed on the world.
The virus had found its way onto Eurasia, despite all their planning, all their precautions, and turned it on Earth. The Maverick Hunters had destroyed enough of it that its crash hadn't triggered nuclear winter, but when that was "the bright side"…
The damage to the environment was still immense, to say nothing of the battle that had–
X blinked.
He remembered so little of what had happened that day.
He remembered deploying to the crash site. He remembered returning to consciousness outside the crash site. In-between–
X blinked.
The point was, Eurasia had wrecked Earth and space alike. The teleport system, maintained as it was by orbital satellites, was less than a patchwork now, fraying and tearing. The Hunters didn't dare use it outside of desperate emergencies, which this wasn't, apparently.
A priority, but not an emergency. Odd.
What was odder was that the transport didn't deliver him to Hunter Base, as he'd expected. It turned north too early, taking him up towards Sakhalin Island.
His curiosity was well and truly piqued. He hadn't been to Sakhalin; couldn't recall many, if any, Hunter missions there.
Which meant… not many Mavericks there.
Given the virus, an absence of Mavericks could only mean an absence of reploids in general– no hosts, no virus. For that matter, even the pilot of this transport was human, a fact that X had barely registered at first.
Someone was taking extraordinary care to ensure the virus didn't come to Sakhalin.
And that meant Sakhalin was being used for something important.
X felt echoes of old excitement, shadows of the joy of discovery. The curious parts of him, so long buried beneath endless fighting, perked up. Something new was happening. He wanted to know what.
Sakhalin was a long, narrow island, bracketed by mountain chains and dense coniferous forests (that these days were thinning and sickly). As the island stretched to the north, the pines gave way to subpolar tundra, lands that were marshy and wet during the short summer and froze into forbidding wastes the rest of the year. The transport didn't take X that far north, instead coming to a hover in the central valley halfway up the length of the island. As it descended, what had appeared to be a gap between treelines split open, revealing a landing bay beneath the surface.
The interior was cold, if warmer than the air above, and the hangar had room for only two transports plus a single, lonely door. Standing by the door were two of X's comrades.
X almost smiled. 'Comrade' was a sorely inadequate word to describe Zero. Was 'blood brother' good enough if neither of them had blood?
With his long blonde robo-hair, elaborate red-and-white armor, and forbidding expression, Zero cut an imposing figure. Those who knew his combat record, and his past as the Red Demon, were even more intimidated.
X… rather less so. There's only so many times a person can die for you before you stop fearing them.
X's logic filters started to choke on that odd construction, but higher consciousness knew it was valid.
Signas was hardly less intimidating. His chest was festooned with ornamentation to reflect the decorated Commander of the Maverick Hunters he was, while his helmet now took the shape of a musketman's hat. That was not mere decoration; the interior of the "hat" had additional cooling systems, letting him overclock his processors that much more. A vital consideration for someone whose job was to make decisions.
Compared to those two, X was almost plain, with a below-average stature, baby-blue armor, oversized feet, and bulging forearms.
X was modest, but not ignorant. He knew his visage was used in motivational and propaganda imagery the world over. His service record spoke louder than his appearance. How a symbol looked, ultimately, was less important than what that symbol meant.
X felt the emotions of his friends (nerves, trepidation, anxiety) as if they were his own. His Suffering Circuit was the most powerful of its kind. It let him know all three of them were on edge about this strange turn of events.
It was less lonely that way.
"We're all here, then," said Signas, and he walked to the humble door which was the only exit from the hangar. A button and speaker were beside the door; he pressed it. "Commander Signas and Maverick Hunters X and Zero are here."
"Acknowledged," the speaker buzzed back. "Stand by."
There was barely time to wonder what that meant before the door opened and a short, wiry human, skin pale from lack of sun, looked out at them. "H-hello," he said, visibly swallowing. "My name is Dr. Rieman, team lead for this project."
"What project?" said Zero, cutting to the point with typical aplomb.
"I'll tell you once we're inside. Follow me."
Beyond the door was an antechamber, little more than a place between doors, but X wasn't fooled. He detected defenses hidden behind panels in the walls, and the sturdiness of the far door was impressive… but not invulnerable.
Zero was picking up on the same things. "That door wouldn't hold against a determined Maverick assault," he said.
"Nothing would, really," said Dr. Rieman. "It's not supposed to. It's just supposed to buy time while we destroy all our data."
X and Zero shared a glance, and both updated how important this errand must be.
Dr. Rieman put his hand into a tube beside the door, barely bigger than his wrist, and gripped a handhold inside. After a second, there was a flick, and a tiny needle pricked his thumb. He barely reacted.
"DNA scanner?" Zero said.
"That's one of its tests, yes," said Dr. Rieman, withdrawing his hand.
"Does it hurt?" said X.
"You get used to it."
"Welcome back, Dr. Rieman," said a human voice. There were several loud clangs of locks opening before the door eased open like a crypt unsealing.
Beyond was a waiting elevator. Dr. Rieman entered it; his guests followed. It began a slow, smooth descent.
Dr. Rieman looked like he was itching to say something, but X wouldn't rush him. It took him several more seconds before he'd gathered his courage. "Is it that bad, up there?"
The Maverick Hunters gave the scientist incredulous looks.
"They don't let us out much," said Dr. Rieman, wringing his hands. "We've heard… things… but none of us have left the lab, let alone Sakhalin, for… uh, eight months?"
Another meaningful glance between X and Zero. Since before Eurasia fell, then.
"It's bad," said Zero bluntly.
"I figured it had to be," said Dr. Rieman, his knuckles turning white as he twisted his hands together. "They're reading you all in to the project, now."
"What project?" said Zero.
"Project Odyssey," said Dr. Rieman. "I know you don't know what that is, but… well, that's why you're here."
The elevator door opened. There wasn't much to see, at first, just a hallway with doors to either side, and one, much larger door at the end. X could feel air recirculating, hear machinery, sense the surprisingly large power flows behind the walls.
Dr. Rieman watched the elevator doors shut before he spoke again. "So… you know better than we do how the world's gotten worse since Eurasia fell."
Zero snorted; Signas nodded diplomatically.
"You've probably also guessed that Eurasia wasn't truly a space colony," said Dr. Rieman. "It was going to be a generation ship. A vessel sent to another world to establish life there."
"Until the virus got there," said X quietly.
"The virus doesn't want anyone getting away," said Dr. Rieman soberly. "But that might be the only choice we have. If the planet keeps suffering like this, and wars keep happening, and the virus can't be eradicated…"
"The only way to truly eradicate the virus would be to destroy any technology that could host it," said Zero.
"And that's untenable," said Signas. "The world's already damaged enough that we need that same tech to sustain human life."
"Not to mention that we're talking about the demise of the reploid species," X said morbidly. "Losing one of the planet's sentient races to save the other."
"To fail to save the other," Signas said.
"...yeah, maybe it was dumb of me to ask how bad it was," said Dr. Rieman bashfully. "Anyway… if we can't beat the virus, we started thinking, What if we could escape it?"
"Hence Eurasia," said X.
"And there are similar ideas floating around," Dr. Rieman said with a nod. "Space elevators, moon colonies… but they all run into the same problem. If we go to any of those places, we need high technology to survive once we get there."
"High technology the virus can infect," said Zero sharply.
"Exactly. That's why Project Odyssey is taking a different approach."
Dr. Rieman started walking down the hallway, his eyes set on the far doorway. The Maverick Hunters followed in his wake.
Through the larger door was something… underwhelming.
On a raised pedestal was an empty arch, large enough for several reploids to walk through in line abreast. It didn't look like much, and there was nothing on top of, beyond, or through it. If not for the substantial power lines X noted leading into the thing, he would have thought it mundane.
But this wasn't the sort of place that built monuments to nothing.
"Where does it go?" he asked.
Dr. Rieman smiled, his satisfaction vast.
"Cyberspace."
Only because he knew Zero was X able to act in time; reflexes alone would have been too slow. But he knew, he could predict, and so he was able to get a hand on Zero's forearm before Zero grabbed his beam saber and dashed forward.
Dr. Rieman staggered back. "W-what're you doing?"
"Cyberspace," spat Zero, "is the realm of the virus."
Signas took a measured step backwards, but Dr. Rieman stood firm. "Yes and no. We know the virus exists partially in cyberspace, that's one reason we've never been able to eradicate it. We know it interacts with cyberspace, because when the virus overtook Eurasia and Eurasia crashed, the sheer quantity of virus allowed cyberspace to bleed over into our dimension– of course, you two know that, you were there."
X blinked.
No data.
Dr. Rieman, expecting a response that never came, swallowed dryly. "N-no offense, sorry if it's… uh… the point! The point is that, yes, the virus has a presence in cyberspace. But the virus didn't create cyberspace. Cyberspace existed first. It doesn't stand to reason that the virus is the only thing there.
"What's more, the Eurasia incident showed that more than just energy or data can pass between cyberspace and realspace. Matter can, too. And that raised some… tantalizing possibilities!"
Dr. Rieman was caught up in his words, now– words he'd been dying to say for a long time, if X was any judge. Dr. Rieman didn't understand the danger of Zero seeing a potential threat. It was like a bull seeing a red flag, except that this bull had a beam saber and no patience.
X met Zero's eyes and tried to engage him in silent conversation. Zero was numb to such things… except with X.
Zero tugged his arm slightly, checking the strength of X's grip.
X never wavered.
Zero's eyes tensed.
X stayed neutral.
Zero released his saber; X released his arm in turn. "Keep talking," Zero said, crossing his arms in what he absolutely would not call a 'huff'.
"Right," said Dr. Rieman, gaining steam. "If matter could bleed over from cyberspace into our world, that means matter exists in cyberspace in the first place! And that matter could transit from one plane to another." He paused. "'Plane' isn't really the right word, but the math is… well, I don't think you have the equations for it. 'Plane' is close enough."
"Go on," said Zero as his hands tightened.
"Yes, yes. Well, using the data from the Eurasia incident, and from all the studies of the virus done to date, we were able to reverse-engineer the process. That," he waved at the arch, "allows the creation of a stable connection between our world and cyberspace."
X looked at the arch, intuited the next steps. "Stable enough to send matter through?"
"Not only to send it through, but to get it back," said Dr. Rieman, his face overcome with excitement. "Intact. Unaltered. Virus-free."
Zero snorted. "The virus not being somewhere is no proof it won't be there later. If you disagree, ask Okinawa. Well, what used to be Okinawa."
"That's not the point," said Dr. Rieman. "Because there was one other possibility to explore. If cyberspace touches Earth, could it touch other dimensions, too?"
Project Odyssey.
"Cyberspace isn't an end," said X as clarity came. "It's a means."
"Precisely," said Dr. Rieman, clapping excitedly. "Space? The moon? Those are places we still need technology for human survival, and so still invite the virus. But if there's another world, another habitable world, that we can touch through cyberspace… then the people of Earth can have a new home away from the virus. Away from anything the virus could infect."
"Assuming there are other planes," said Signas, ticking items off on his fingers, "assuming you can touch them through cyberspace, assuming you can put a machine into cyberspace that can open the way, and assuming matter can transit from one plane to the next through those portals."
Dr. Rieman's smile was bigger than ever.
"The probe reported back from the new world last week."
Next time: Dialectic
Chapter 2: Dialectic
Chapter Text
"Do you think we're in trouble?"
Ruby Rose was kicking her feet restlessly beneath the chair she sat in. Professor Goodwitch had taken them straight back to Beacon Academy, and further on to the Emerald Tower, the tall building with the headmaster's office in its crown.
Now Ruby and her team waited outside the headmaster's office where Professor Ozpin was conferring with Professor Goodwitch and Professor (Doctor!) Oobleck, the assigned faculty for this mission before everything went off the rails.
More like on the rails, what with the train and everything, Ruby thought with a snicker. Within an instant, though, she smacked herself in the face.
"What is it?"
Ruby turned to her half-sister, Yang Xiao Long, and glared. "I heard a pun in my head, and I heard it in your voice."
"Alright!" said Yang with a smile bright enough to light up the room. "Rent-free living!"
Ruby tried to pout at Yang, but disapproval tended to just bounce right off of her. With her magnificent mane of blonde hair and megawatt smiles, Yang seemed at first glance like a ball of sunshine. If you were unlucky, your second glance might reveal a ferocious temper. Ruby, though, knew that neither of those lazy characterizations captured all that Yang was.
Ruby looked away from Yang before she could be infected by her older sister's smile. "I was just worrying about if we're in trouble."
"That's a more appropriate worry than hoping that Professor Goodwitch gave us extra credit," said Weiss with typical frostiness. Although Ruby wouldn't make the same "Ice Queen" jokes Yang did on a daily basis, she had to admit her half-sister had a point. Between Weiss' all-white wardrobe, cold demeanor, and snowflake heraldry, the jokes made themselves. Being heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, a corporation rich enough to buy continents, made her like a light nobility, too. All… royal? Regal? Was 'regal' a word?
Ruby had a rough time with words.
Especially when face-to-face with Goodwitch!
Ruby covered her face with her hands. "Ugh, I can't believe I said that! There were so many things I could have asked her instead of that!"
"I thought there was no harm done," said Blake without much of either intonation or gesture. "You don't know what you can get away with until you try it."
"Are you sure that's the attitude you should be going for right now?" Weiss said to Blake.
Blake blushed and looked away. It wasn't a common look for her—the blushing, not the looking away. Blake spent a lot of time hiding. Sometimes Ruby genuinely couldn't find her; for a tall girl with long, dark hair and striking amber eyes, Blake sure was good at disappearing into the background. Sometimes Blake was there, but not, like, there there.
Ruby recognized someone who'd suffered, and left it well enough alone. Yang and Weiss had enough sense to (mostly) follow suit.
"Look at it this way," said Ruby. "The only reason we were even on that mission is because Professor Ozpin made an exception to the rules. He wanted us to go see if we could find bad guys out there. He can't be upset with us for doing what he wanted, right?"
"You'd be surprised," Weiss said quietly and without meeting anyone's eyes.
"Yeah," said Yang, "I don't think he wanted us to start a fight which ended in some terrorists using a train to punch a hole into downtown Vale and draw in the grimm. Missed that part of the mission brief."
"Well," sputtered Ruby, "if we hadn't found the White Fang out there, the Fang would have launched the train on their own timetable. With a lot more bad guys on it, too! Things would have been way worse!"
"True," said Yang. "And we did catch that Torchwick guy. Great job soloing him, Blake."
Blake modestly brushed some hair behind her ear.
"It's settled, then," said Ruby. "We are definitely not in trouble."
The elevator leading to Professor Ozpin's office opened and Professor Goodwitch stepped out, looking as stern as ever.
"We're sorry we didn't mean it we promise never to do it again we're really very sorry!"
Yang, Blake, and Weiss facepalmed as one.
Professor Goodwitch sighed. "It's good you're aware that your actions have consequences, but you're not in trouble."
"Oh," said Ruby, nearly collapsing in relief. "Good to know."
"Dr. Oobleck spoke highly of your performance during that mission," Professor Goodwitch went on, "and it was a situation far beyond what first-year students should have had to handle. That said, I'm sure you know it could easily have gone much, much worse."
They all nodded, extra vigorously from Yang and Weiss, neither of whom had covered themselves in glory during their solo fights on the train.
"That's why, in lieu of punishment, your team will write a report on what you could have done better."
Ruby's jaw dropped. "But... but that is punishment!"
"No," snapped Professor Goodwitch, "it's education. And, in case you've forgotten, you are students at this Academy."
Ruby felt like her insides had just been wrung out like a sponge. "I hadn't forgotten, ma'am."
"Good." For a moment, Professor Goodwitch's face softened. It became something other than what Yang liked to call (well out of the professor's earshot) resting witch face.
"I don't know how you did it," she said, "but you found something no one else was able to. You spoiled what could have been a catastrophe and walked away intact. The fact that you lived to fight another day is…" She took a deep breath. "A relief."
"It's, um, a relief to us too?" said Ruby in a vain attempt to fill the silence.
And just like that, resting witch face was back. "Entirely too much of which was due to luck," she said, her voice like the crack of a whip. "Now, if you're smart you'll start on your report immediately while the details are fresh in your minds, but…" she inhaled nasally as if the next words would cause her pain, "...Professor Ozpin doesn't require your report until classes resume."
Ruby was very impressed with herself that she didn't erupt in cheers. It was a near thing.
"So, for now, you're released," said Professor Goodwitch. "Most of your peers' missions won't wrap up for another two weeks. Until then…" Professor Goodwitch seemed extraordinarily reluctant to say what came next, "you're on your own recognizance."
The word recognizance bounced around Ruby's skull without ever hitting a neuron. To her relief, Weiss seemed to sense her confusion and bailed her out. "We assure you that we will act with utmost discretion."
"I've heard that before," muttered Professor Goodwitch, but she walked past them out of the room all the same.
Her teammates were smiling at each other like they'd gotten away with something; Ruby just felt relief, like a weight that had been pressing down on her and squeezing everyone against the walls of the room had vanished. It was a good feeling.
"So…" said Yang, her smile turning dangerous, "wanna bounce around campus and see what trouble we can find?"
"No," said Weiss, her voice as cold and sharp as a sword made of ice.
"It's sleep time," said Blake.
"We have been running on four hours or less of sleep over the past …" Ruby checked her watch, "... 36 hours?! How did that happen?!"
"Time flies when you're having fun, I guess," said Yang.
"Alright, team," said Ruby. "New team activity! Our next mission is: nap time."
"The probe reported back last week?"
Dr. Rieman was beside himself with excitement. "Yes! We opened a portal to cyberspace, used small, simple robots we built in-house to put a second prototype portal machine into cyberspace, and successfully opened a second portal from cyberspace into somewhere else. Then we passed a probe through both portals and to the far side."
"And?" said Signas.
Dr. Rieman walked to a monitor and displayed a written summary of the probe's findings, narrating as he went—though he was hardly looking at the screen; X was sure Dr. Rieman had the report committed to memory. "Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, with traces of carbon dioxide and water vapor. Gravity about .98G. Atmospheric pressure 99 kilopascals. Average temperature of 22 Celsius."
X blinked. "It's… a doppelganger for Earth."
"It even has brightness variations consistent with a day-night cycle," said Dr. Rieman, who looked to be resisting the urge to clap with every word. "The day is less than 25 hours long, with 13 hours of sunlight wherever the probe is. Overall brightness is in spitting distance of Earth's. Even the soil samples came back as ideally suited to supporting terrestrial life. It's perfect."
"What about threats?" said Zero brusquely.
"Hard to say with just the one probe," said Dr. Rieman, "but after a week nothing bad's happened yet. That said, the probe detected one more, massively important detail." He sucked in a breath, held it for dramatic effect. "Radio waves. Artificial ones."
Radio waves.
Wherever the probe had ended up, there were people there.
X was overcome with amazement.
All through human history, people had wondered. Are there other worlds out there? Or is Earth unique? Are we alone? Or are there other people out there? If so, what are they like, what have they learned that we haven't yet?
If there was life out there, what did that mean about humanity? If there wasn't, what did that mean? The invention of androids added a second sentient species to planet Earth, but was that a second sentient species added to the universe?
All those questions—questions that were part of X's cultural baggage, that he would have loved to ponder if the virus had ever given him a break—had just been thrown into chaos. Some were answered; some were more complicated than ever.
"Are the radio waves indicative of a threat?" said Zero. "High frequencies, high pulse repetition frequencies, anything suggestive of targeting?"
"No," said Dr. Rieman. "Nothing like that. It's more like comms traffic."
"Is there any chance we've done a loop?" said Signas. "What you described sounds so much like Earth, did you consider the possibility it is Earth? That maybe cyberspace connected you not to another world, but to a different place on the same world?"
"We did consider that," said Dr. Rieman, "but the radio waves were a big help there. They're using a different tech base from ours. We discerned that they were data transmissions, but we couldn't translate the protocols. They didn't conform to any earthly standard."
Zero shook his head. "It's no good. A society communicating by radio waves is an advanced one, and advanced societies aren't going to let a billion strangers walk onto their planet."
"We won't know that until we try," said X, consumed by hope for the first time in years.
"If some other civilization opened a portal to us," Zero said sharply, "would we let them barge on in and swamp us?"
"We'd tell them it was a bad idea," X replied, "but that's because of our virus situation here on Earth. We don't know the situation on this other world, and we won't until we find someone and talk to them."
"Our thoughts exactly," said Dr. Rieman. "In fact, that's why you're here."
Six eyes snapped to Dr. Rieman's.
"No," said Zero, instantly, because while Zero was socially inept, he was more than capable of seeing an incoming attack.
"You see—"
"No!" repeated Zero. "You'd take one of us off the front lines for this experiment? Risk losing us on another planet with no way back, surrounded by tech-savvy and possibly hostile natives, on the far end of cyberspace? No. That's insanity."
"Why not any other reploid?" said Signas reasonably.
"Security," said Dr. Rieman. "The only way to be confident a reploid has never been exposed to the virus is to get them factory-fresh. Even that's no guarantee, and we absolutely must keep the virus away from this new world or all of this is in vain. Besides, we don't want a factory-fresh reploid having to do diplomacy for us."
X winced in sympathy. Social intercourse was hard enough for him, and he had years of practice and decades of simulation under his belt; for a newbuilt, it was a minefield.
"Send a human, then," said Zero—words, X realized, that only Zero could have said. Neither X nor Signas could have suggested a course of action that put a human at risk of bodily harm. The Three Laws of Robotics forbade it.
Zero, of course, was a different animal.
"We considered it," said Dr. Rieman, numb to the lawbreaking he'd just witnessed. "And when I say "we", I mean the Federation government. This isn't just some scientist-run-amok thing, I'm speaking on behalf of the powers-that-be. Anyway, we don't know enough yet about how cyberspace impacts human psychology or physiology."
Zero scowled. "All of this is moot if humans can't travel through cyberspace in the first place, isn't it? What good is finding a new home if they can't reach it? Maybe that should be your priority."
"And we're building some experiments to test for just that," said Dr. Rieman. "But time isn't on our side. We have to move as fast as we can."
"Why?" said Zero impatiently.
"Security," said X keenly. "Every day is another chance for the virus to discover this place."
Dr. Rieman gave a somber nod. "We've done well to keep Project Odyssey hidden this long, but that can't last forever. Especially once we start using the portal more. We have to save time at all opportunities, so we can know our options before the virus discovers us the way it discovered Eurasia.
"And one way to save time is to use machines for exploration instead of humans, because we know reploid consciousness can traverse cyberspace intact."
"We do?" said X with a frown.
Dr. Rieman nodded, and said, "Sigma."
X's various subroutines continued on their merry ways, but higher consciousness had taken that word like a brick to the face.
Even the mention of Sigma was enough to make X hurt and his Tactical subroutine request more system resources. Sigma had been the greatest Maverick Hunter, once, had been a person X admired and respected.
How had the virus taken him? When? Why?
X didn't think he'd ever have the answers. Maybe they didn't matter in the end. All anyone knew was that Sigma was part of the virus, now. It weaponized his knowledge and memories. It operated with strategy and deliberation that should have been impossible for mere lines of code, no matter how sophisticated, but were within Sigma's formidable abilities. It even wore his face during its worst outbreaks.
Six times X had destroyed that face. It never stuck.
Because, as Dr. Rieman had said, the virus existed in cyberspace and realspace both, and whatever was left of Sigma did, too.
"So," said Dr. Rieman, pulling X back from his despair, "yes, we'll work up to testing how humans deal with cyberspace. In the meantime, because we know reploids can handle it, we'll use what we have, to use the time we've got."
"Neither of us are reploids," said X.
Dr. Rieman's mouth opened, but no sound came out, and deep confusion settled in.
It was the second reminder to X that most scientists were specialists, not generalists. Dr. Rieman, no matter how deep his mastery of his specialty, knew no more robotics than a layman.
"Reploids are based off of me," X elaborated. "I'm not one of them."
X didn't bring up Zero, and Zero volunteered nothing. That was for the best.
"Right," said Dr. Rieman, recovering, "right. Oh! I remember now, that's why you're immune to the virus, isn't it?"
"It's a gray area," said X. If anyone had known why, knew what property of X made him immune, X would have extended that protection to every reploid on the planet. Every attempt to study him and replicate his defenses had failed.
"Well… yes, we did get an opinion from someone on our staff," said Dr. Rieman as he pulled up another document. "We think you're close enough for cyberspace purposes. After all," he added with a forced laugh, "you were involved in the Eurasia incident, you experienced the cyberspace bleed-over and came out the other side. No one has the practical experience with cyberspace that you do."
Maybe, X thought sourly, but he didn't know what, if anything, he'd learned from that experience. He tried to reach back, tried to think back to what it'd—
X blinked.
"This sounds worse and worse every time you speak," said Zero with a deepening scowl, once again pulling X back to the present. "You want to send someone on a suicide mission? Fine. Send me."
"Zero…" began X.
"Send me," Zero said fiercely, but that wasn't anger flashing so brightly in Zero's eyes.
"No."
X and Zero turned to Signas, who'd spoken for the first time in minutes, it felt like. X knew Signas hadn't been passive during that time, but actively weighing his options. X was curious where he'd ended up.
"This is a mission, at least in part, of diplomacy," said Signas. "We have to establish relations with the people of that new world. We can't send you, Zero, for the same reason we can't send a newbuilt. Diplomacy is beyond you. You can't be the person who speaks for Earth."
Zero's face twisted in anger, but he turned away; he knew as well as X did that Signas was right.
Which left, by process of elimination, X.
"We're risking half of our immune Hunters," said Zero, voice pitching down to a growl of frustration. "We're overstretched already, and this is a huge part of our strength, frittered away on the longest of long shots."
"It being a long shot is why we have to do it," said Signas.
Zero's face whipped towards Signas, sending his robot-hair flicking behind him. "Explain."
Signas looked at the portal and clasped his hands behind his back. "Do you know how big space is, Zero? Can you even imagine it? In this solar system, we have eight planets, a star, and a huge number of dwarf planets, planetoids, and asteroids, and all of that matter occupies an infinitesimally small percent of the space in the solar system. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is bigger than 110 Suns lined up side-by-side. It's 3,406 solar diameters to Neptune. Just to Neptune's orbit, mind you—with virtually all the space circumscribed by that orbit, 3,406 Suns, squared, times pi, just empty. I can't simulate that, Zero. I can't model it. I can say the words in the abstract, I can do the math, but my processors reel at trying to put that in context and make it make sense. Space is too big.
"Finding anything with a shot in the dark like Project Odyssey has odds even I cannot fully compute. You could spend millennia opening doors to random points in space and never hit anything but void. The fact that they stumbled upon another planet, and not just a planet but a habitable planet… if it hadn't already happened, the possibility that it might happen would not be worth discussing."
"Unless there's some property of cyberspace we don't grasp yet," said X.
"Our ignorance makes our odds worse, not better," said Signas. "That Project Odyssey found anything is so unlikely the only word my Thesaurus can supply is 'miraculous'.
"I can't pass up a miracle, Zero. We don't get enough of them to throw them away."
Zero, X knew, didn't have the words to fight that. He looked instead at X, eyes filled with anguish, before he turned away in a huff.
X understood… but he knew, too, that Signas was right.
Which meant, no matter how much Zero protested, that there was only one way forward.
X turned to Dr. Rieman.
"What's the plan to send me through?"
Professor Ozpin sipped his hot cocoa and looked out from his office atop the Emerald Tower.
It was a fine view. In the foreground was Beacon Academy, all elegant towers and cobblestone walkways and marble statues and garden spaces. A place of learning, fostering the next generation of Huntsmen and Huntresses, the great line against the dark. Ozpin felt no small pride in Beacon's success; every day it stood, every graduate it produced, was proof that he was spending this life usefully.
Further out was Vale City, the beating heart of the kingdom. Cosmopolitan, bustling, prosperous, growing… it had its warts, to be sure, it had its faults. By Ozpin's standards, though, by what he knew of cities elsewhere and in older times, Vale was a grand thing. Progress.
It was good for heart and soul to see signs of progress. Especially when that progress was under threat.
His gaze lost focus as he lifted it more, and he looked out to the ocean, to the lands beyond the sea.
The Black Queen was moving.
This plot to breach Vale's defenses and let the grimm in… the Queen's hand was at work here, and this move was prelude, not trio. What did it accomplish, what next move did it enable?
Well, he thought with annoyance, it gave Ozpin's political enemies in Vale a cudgel to use against him. They'd gotten some of his responsibilities and powers stripped. That wasn't the Black Queen's endgame, though. It was preparatory. What came next?
Ozpin didn't know. It was like trying to solve a puzzle with only two-thirds the pieces, all upside-down, and none of them edges.
People had no idea the magnitude of the fight taking place every day behind closed doors. That was for the best; that was how Ozpin wanted it. Fear and panic just drew the grimm, fed them, brought them to humanity's doorsteps. No, best to keep it all undercover.
That correct choice, unfortunately, increased his degree of difficulty in sussing out the truth of the Queen's latest gambit. Wheels within wheels, the long struggle taking its latest turn, and Ozpin couldn't yet see its shape.
He took another sip, let his vice ground him.
Well. He knew better than to wallow in uncertainty. The old, old battle wasn't the only pressing matter. The new had its place, too.
He looked to his desk, to where extraordinary images had been sent to him. Images of a strange machine, origin unknown.
He'd shared those images with very few people, and those few had no clues to share with him. He'd taken a chance and shared them with General James Ironwood, his counterpart at Atlas Academy. James had shared the image with even fewer people, and come back with even less information.
If Atlas, the most technologically-advanced Kingdom on Remnant, was baffled by this device…
Ozpin took another sip.
Was this the Queen's work? Was this another movement in the prelude, introducing a melody he couldn't yet hear?
Possibly.
If so… he needed to know more, without tipping his hand that this had caught his attention. He needed someone to travel to the backwater where the device had been found. But who? Sending anyone from Atlas to investigate would attract too much attention. Even sending his own agents would be noticeable, considering how very small the island of Patch was.
Patch…
The word gave Ozpin pause.
Because he knew people who had family on Patch. People with plausible reasons to go back to Patch. People with a habit of sticking their noses in obnoxious places and finding things they ought not find.
People who had completed their training mission early, and now had two and a half weeks with no pressing obligations.
Ozpin took another sip, then smiled.
It was time for Team RWBY to take a school-approved mini-vacation to Patch.
Next time: Contact
Chapter 3: Contact
Chapter Text
Patch was a small island off the coast of Vale. It was the home of Signal Combat School, a small fishing fleet, a town that existed to service the school and fishing fleet, and basically nothing else. The town wasn't in the top twenty for population in Vale's territory. If Weiss looked at a map, her eyes might skip over it completely.
It was such a backwater that the primary transit between Patch and Vale was a sea-going ferry rather than an airship. With as cheap as Gravity Dust could be when you bought in bulk, the savings for using a ferry had to be small.
No, Weiss was not resentful.
"Not a fan of ships, huh?" said Yang from entirely too close by, her grin in one of its more obnoxious modes.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Weiss said with poise and command befitting her upbringing.
"And the fact that you're in a centerline seat in the middle of the seating area when most people are up and walking around means nothing?" Yang said.
Weiss scowled. "Nothing at all."
"Right," said Yang as her grin intensified. "Nothing at all."
For someone who acted on her emotions rather than her brain, Yang was obnoxiously insightful. It wasn't fair, Weiss thought bitterly.
"We're almost there!" said Ruby as she jogged over to her teammates. "Weiss, how are you liking the ferry? Isn't it great?!"
"My family has yachts that are bigger," Weiss said almost reflexively.
"Oh," said Ruby, "so this is all old hat to you. You're a pro at the whole ocean thing, huh?"
"Swing and a miss," said Yang almost gloatingly as she looked at Weiss.
Weiss crossed her arms. "Just because my family owns yachts doesn't mean I was ever on them."
Ruby's face cocked to the side like a confused puppy, which was kind of what Ruby was, honestly. "Why would you own a yacht and not use it?"
"That's the point, actually," said Weiss. "How rich must you be if you can throw millions of Lien towards maintaining a hole in the water you might not ever use?"
"Uh…" said Ruby, clearly not familiar with the concept of conspicuous consumption, "really stinking rich?"
"Yes, Ruby. Owning the Schnee Dust Company means my family is really stinking rich."
Weiss noted that her voice was flat when she said that. At another time in her life, she might have said it to gloat. Now she found herself vaguely embarrassed by it.
Being at Beacon was changing her. For the better, she hoped, but still... If she ever went back to Atlas, would she even recognize it anymore? Would it recognize her?
"It looks like money can't buy comfort on the ocean any more than it can buy a clean conscience," said Blake, and she did sound like she was gloating.
Weiss threw scathing eyes in Blake's direction, as if trying to remind Blake to respect their uneasy detente, but Blake languidly slipped away to look out at the water again.
Soft chimes rang above. "This is your captain speaking. We are coming up on the approach to Patch harbor. Please have any belongings and dependents ready to go and within reach, we'll be bumping the pier in ten minutes."
"Finally," said Weiss, though as she stood a large wave hit the ferry and sent it rolling, nearly knocking her off the high-heeled shoes she wore as a matter of course.
Yang found this inordinately funny.
"I don't get it," said Ruby. "We've been on airships plenty of times and it's never bothered you, what's so different about this?"
"An airship is a lot faster and smoother than this," Weiss muttered.
"Are we remembering the same airship rides?" said Yang.
"Yeah," said Ruby, almost bouncing as she moved in circles around Weiss' position, speaking and poking from every direction. "Faster, sure, I'll give you that, but the airship from Beacon down to Vale is way rougher, especially when they do the vertical descent down to - Oh, and the airship ride out to Mountain Glenn, that was way rougher and we didn't even land, that was a combat drop, and then-"
Ruby's voice coming from all the different directions was making everything worse. Weiss summoned her Aura and called upon her semblance.
A spinning glyph, the size of a manhole cover with no depth, and shaped like a circumscribed white snowflake, appeared in Ruby's path. Ruby smacked into it and crumpled to the floor.
"If you're going to interrogate me," Weiss said sharply, "can we at least do it civilly?"
"Sure," Ruby croaked.
"I can't explain it, okay?" said Weiss. "The way the ocean and waves make us roll back and forth… I just don't like it."
"Gotcha," said Ruby.
"At least it'll be over soon." Team RWBY followed the general motion of the passengers towards the quarterdeck, and in so doing, Weiss caught her first glimpse of Patch.
The island was heavily forested and craggy. The only lowland area in the north hosted the island's lone settlement, while an elevated spit swept out from the northwest in a graceful eastward arc, half-enclosing the lowland to form a natural harbor. Atop the spit, Weiss saw, was a collection of yellow brick buildings which had to be Signal Combat School, one of the feeder schools for Huntsmen Academies like Beacon.
"Didn't you and Yang attend Signal?" said Weiss.
"You got it," said Yang. "Of course, my sister here was such a hot property that she didn't have to spend her full time at Signal, just jumped up to Beacon two years early at age fifteen. She's pretty awesome that way, huh?"
The compliments would have sounded more sincere if Yang hadn't been giving Ruby a noogie as she said them, to much undignified spluttering from the younger sister.
Seeing that kind of familial relationship made Weiss feel some kind of way. She turned her eyes back to the island. She could see most of the settlement, now: One primary road that ran up along the base of the spit, lined on both sides with tall buildings that looked like all-in-one stores and residences. It was the sort of small service industry town that sprang up to support institutions like fishing fleets and schools.
"Can you point to where your dad lives?" she asked.
"Not from here," said Ruby, having wrestled free of Yang's headlock at last. "Dad built our house out in the woods past the end of town. It's nice and quiet out there."
"Ruby," said Blake as the corners of her mouth ticked up, "I don't think anywhere the two of you live counts as 'quiet'."
Ruby made more indignant noises, Yang gave a bold smile and a proclamation of "damn right", while Weiss gave Blake an approving nod.
"I guess you'll see for yourself," said Yang as the ferry pulled into position. "Ladies and more ladies, we have arrived."
Zero and Signas were gone, back to their normal duties. It made sense; having them return and be visible helped conceal that anything abnormal was happening. Camouflage against the virus' attentions.
That knowledge didn't help X's feelings of dislocation and loneliness.
X liked being around people. He was an android, built in man's image, and so he was a social creature. Not to the same extent as the old robot masters, whose primary directive of help out could only be satisfied by the presence of people they could help; a solitary robot master was courting, or already suffering from, deep distress. No, X liked being around people in the same way humans did, drawing strength and comfort from others of like mind.
X being in the Maverick Hunters was as important for X as it was for the Hunters.
Even at the best of times, though, there were walls. Walls of hierarchy. Walls of role. Walls between Hunters and civilians.
X being ancient, surrounded by newbuilt Hunters whose life expectancy was under two years, was a wall.
X being the progenitor, the android all reploids were replicas of, was an enormous wall. (He rejected any public attempt to label him the Father of All Reploids, but he couldn't control what people said about him in private.)
And now, this mission would impose the ultimate in isolation, putting up walls of dimension between him and everything he knew. There was no way to know how long it would take for him to find the residents of this new world; even if he succeeded, there'd be walls of language and understanding that he might never overcome.
His future was a lonely one, and he dreaded it.
As ever, he could share none of this.
What good would it do anyone for X to be afraid? To be visibly frail and feeble? To be anything less than a paragon of resilience and hope?
He'd worn a hero's face for a long time, now. He wondered, sometimes, if it was his own.
He took a deep simulated breath to steady himself. In front of him were the official orders for the mission. Dr. Rieman had spoken true: the highest levels of the Federation were gambling X on this long shot.
If X were to suspend his modesty and take Zero's point to heart, gambling X meant gambling a huge portion of the Maverick Hunters' combat strength and one of exactly two virus-immune Hunters. It was as high-stakes a move as X could conceive.
But what was the alternative? A slow spiral to extinction? A vicious cycle of infection and war with a logical, inescapable end?
If any humans were able to escape that doom it would count as victory.
Signas was right. They had to try.
X signed his acknowledgement.
"We're ready to go, then," said Dr. Rieman.
"Right," said X, and he rose.
In moments he was back in the portal room, which today was bustling with activity. Several of the arch's panels were open for people to inspect or operate on, while other techs were sitting at control panels or running through checklists.
Dr. Rieman walked X to a table where one of the other scientists was standing. No single brain, X knew, could encompass all parts of this project. It was naturally the work of a team.
His Analysis subroutine flagged an exception.
Yes, fine, one brain could, but that man was a one-in-twenty-billion genius, and long dead, so who cared?
"When you get to the new world," the scientist said, indicating a large rectangular satchel, "plant this relay as close as you can to your entry point. You can use it to send signals back to us."
"Because sending data through cyberspace is far easier than sending matter," X said, parroting the briefing he'd been given. This was review, but X didn't mind it.
"Right," said the scientist. "We're likewise setting up a relay behind you in cyberspace. As long as you keep the packet size small, you can get the messages through cyberspace and back to us in under a minute. We'll be monitoring for your signal 24/7. If you have to retreat, or whenever you're ready, we'll open the door for you."
"How confident are we that nothing will happen to the portal machine in cyberspace?" said X, looking meaningfully at the people doing last-minute checks on the arch in the room.
"The first article is always worst," said Dr. Rieman firmly. "We built the second with all the lessons we learned building the first. It's better. More reliable."
"Plus we have it reporting to us regularly," said the other scientist. "Heartbeat report along with the results of integrity checks. We'll know if something happens to it long before you need it."
You hope, X thought but didn't say. He'd dealt with enough newbuilts to know when to let optimism slide. "Alright."
Another technician appeared with another pack and opened the top to show him. "E-tanks," he said, "engineered for maximum energy capacity rather than high energy transfer rate. They're a little larger and will take up to half an hour to consume, but they've got twice the juice of a standard E-tank. Each one will keep you going for days, depending on your activity level."
Depending on if I have to fight or not, X translated. "Right."
The tech opened the side pockets and showed X some capped metal tubes. "Raw materials slurries. If your self-repair needs more material, ingest these."
X nodded. "Anything else?"
The tech looked momentarily star-struck. "No, because… well… you're Mega Man X. You have the Variable Tool System. I can't give you any capabilities you don't already have. Our priority was to give you enough resources that you can figure it out yourself."
That brought a wry smile to X's face. The tech calling him "Mega Man" had made him uncomfortable, but at least he'd called the Variable Tool System by its original name and not the name that had captured the popular imagination.
As for being told to "figure it out"… well, that was Situation Normal, wasn't it?
That was an old, old joke. We've been doing so much for so long with so little, we're now qualified to do anything with nothing.
It occurred to him that no one else was remotely as qualified for this mission as he was. It was an odd feeling.
"That's it," said Dr. Rieman as people started clearing away from table and arch alike. "We're at T-minus five minutes, people. Sound off."
"Input power, standing by."
"Navigation, standing by."
"Stability, standing by."
"Secondary portal control, standing by."
Dr. Rieman looked at that last reporting station, which was a cluster of three people around the largest bank of monitors and controls. "Heartbeat check?"
"Steady, all systems reporting green."
"Alright, that's everyone. We'll do this on schedule, by the book."
X wanted to snort. Had they actually written a book for this? He'd be surprised. Maybe just for the opening procedures; there was no book to possibly encompass what would happen when he stepped into cyberspace.
The only reliable procedure for handling the unknown was to send in Mega Man X.
"T-minus three minutes. At the ready…"
Blake was in no way ready for the mayhem that was the Xiao Long household.
She'd thought she'd be prepared, since she had to deal with Yang and Ruby's exuberance on a daily basis. Apparently, they'd been holding back at Beacon, because the moment they were back home they were an explosion of chatter and activity, especially with their father added to the mix… and Taiyang Xiao Long, she discovered, was able to match his daughters' energy with ease.
Given her own family relationships, it made Blake feel Some Kind of Way.
Taiyang was slightly taller than Yang, with fuzzy blonde hair the same color as Yang's, some neatly-trimmed facial hair, and a build that suggested he juggled boulders for funsies. It took four minutes before he was ready to look anywhere but at his daughters. When he did, it was to Weiss first.
"Weiss Schnee," he said, naming her before she could speak. "You've been in a lot of the letters and messages I've gotten from my girls."
Weiss' eyes widened; if Blake had to guess, Weiss was used to people knowing her, but not like that. Considering how poorly she'd treated, well, everyone during those early days…
"All good things," said Taiyang with a broad smile, letting her off the hook. "They've said you're good people, and I believe them."
"I'm… glad," said Weiss. "For what it's worth, they've spoken glowingly of you."
"Glowingly!" he repeated. In one motion he got Yang in a pseudo-headlock and ruffled Ruby's hair, making both girls squawk. "You've never said anything 'glowing' to my face!"
There was some familial wrestling-adjacent behavior, which left Blake and Weiss both feeling lost. Blake felt like an intruder; Weiss looked like she didn't know how to deal with being so secondary.
After a few more seconds, Taiyang turned to Blake. His eyes were a warm blue, matching neither Yang's lavender nor Ruby's silver—odd. "You must be Blake, then."
"Yes, sir," she said. "Thank you for inviting us into your house."
"My house? You're on my girls' team. It's your house, now, when you want it to be."
Guilt percolated in Blake's gut.
His eyes flicked to the bow atop her head. "You can take that off, if you want," he said.
She froze in place.
"You're not the first person to use a bow like a mask," he said gently. "You can keep it on if it makes you comfortable, but you don't need it here."
"Oh," she said lamely. Surprise was keeping her brain from braining.
"Anyway," he said, looking away, "thanks for looking after Zwei while I was out."
The dog, which Blake had barely noticed amongst all the other chaos, gave a bark from somewhere around her ankles.
"Wow, she can jump!" laughed Taiyang.
Blake shame-facedly got down from the kitchen counter. Stupid dog.
Luckily, the spotlight shifted off of her, and she took the opportunity to do what she did best: run away. Grabbing her bag, she went up the stairs.
"Last bedroom down the hall," came Taiyang's voice. So much for a clean getaway.
The upper floor's layout gave Blake pause. There were five doors: one opened to a bathroom, and two were at "the end of the hall". Blake tried one of them and discovered both led to the same room, an extra-large bedroom with two beds in it, and markers suggesting a wall had once separated this space into two rooms. This had to be Yang and Ruby's room, judging as much by what was present as by what was missing. There were outlines on the walls where posters had been and open gaps on the bookshelves. Conversely, one side of the room had piles of comics and weapons catalogs, while the other had motorcycle magazines and a dial-a-weight dumbbell set.
But if this was Ruby and Yang's room, and another was Taiyang's, then who did the other room belong to?
Blake was strongly tempted to sneak a peak, but she stuffed the impulse down. She absolutely did not need any jokes about curious cats right now.
No stereotypical behavior from her today, no siree.
She saw herself in a mirror, moved to stand in front of it. Her eyes drifted, slowly but surely, to the bow.
You don't need it here.
She hoped it was true. She knew it was true amongst her team; if Taiyang was like them in other ways, was he maybe like them this way?
She stared at the bow for long moments, then raised her hands and pulled it apart, revealing two black cat's ears rising above her long, dark hair.
Concealing her Faunus heritage had its advantages, but it was uncomfortable. The cool air against her ears, after the discomfort and heat of having them pinned inside the bow, was a relief. She sighed.
"I thought I'd never escape that nonsense," said Weiss as she entered the room.
Once again, Blake instinctively leapt away; this time she found herself on one of the beds.
"Don't run off on my account, again," said Weiss, before she did a double take.
Blake felt her hackles rising, felt a retort ready itself in her mind.
Weiss looked away. "I hope you don't put the bow back on because of me."
"Are you going to make it weird?" said Blake, and she heard the challenge in her own voice, almost like it belonged to another person. Old habits, dying hard.
"Why would I?" said Weiss, and though her voice was haughty, she kept her gaze on her luggage rather than meeting Blake's eyes.
Because your family's treatment of the Faunus is notorious across Remnant, was what Blake wanted to say. She kept the words down. Weiss was trying to do better, tentative and uneven as her progress was, and that made her leagues different from the rest of the Schnees. Blake couldn't hate on Weiss for being a Schnee any more than she'd accept someone hating on herself for being a Faunus.
Actually articulating any of that, though, was a chall—
Boom.
The beds rattled and the mirror shook like it was trying to fall from the wall.
Blake and Weiss' eyes met, and for a moment, they were truly united—joined by their mutual attitude of Nope towards going downstairs anytime soon.
Blake opened her bag, pulled out one of her favorite novels, and plopped down onto the bed.
Ah… books. One of life's truest, simplest joys.
Sadly, having read this book before meant it went quickly, and Blake had already been two-thirds of the way done with it. As she wrapped up, she noticed that the downstairs had gotten a lot quieter. "Want me to go check if it's safe?" Blake said to Weiss.
"Better you than me," said Weiss, absorbed in her scroll.
Blake walked out of the room and was almost to the stairs when she heard a knock on the door.
She froze. Her bow was still in the bedroom.
It was one thing going without it amongst her team and, apparently, Taiyang. Blake wasn't about to risk showing herself to a stranger. No, she'd wait up here until the stranger left.
Taiyang opened the door—though, curiously, he looked around before he did. Blake drew back, instinctively pulling out of sight, and just in time as his eyes swept across the stairs.
Seeming satisfied, Taiyang opened the door. "Hermes! How are you doing?"
"Fine, fine," said a figure Blake couldn't really make out from her hiding spot at the top of the stairs.
"What brings you by? This is the weekend, and neither of us are on weekend duty at Signal."
"I'm just giving you a heads-up. The headmaster's thinking about putting together a search team."
"A search team? What for?"
"Some civilian was out in the south of Patch, doing a lumber survey or a mining survey or something, I don't know, but they came back to town saying they found something crazy. Some sort of 'alien machine'."
"Alien machine, huh?"
"I know, sounds dumb, huh? Probably something that fell off an airship while it was dodging some grimm. Anyway, the headmaster got 'em to shut up about it, but only by promising that he'd send someone to check it out."
"And you think 'someone' means faculty?"
"Maybe. He's thinking about it."
"Great."
"I know, right? If I wanted to read fairy tales, Signal's got a library full of 'em. Still, if the headmaster says he wants us to check it out, we'll go."
"'Duty calls' and all that jazz."
"Well, it might be calling you. You're on the shortlist of people he's thinking of sending."
"Oh, come on. My daughters are visiting this week!"
"That's always the way, eh?"
"Do we at least know where this thing was?"
"Down south, a klick southeast of the inland cliff."
"That's close enough, at least. Thanks for the heads-up."
"No problem. By the way, your zucchinis look amazing. How do you do get them to grow like that?"
"Well, part of it's how you plant them—c'mon, I'll show you…"
The door clicked shut.
The moment it did, Yang appeared from beneath the kitchen table.
The moment after that, the closet door popped open and Ruby tumbled out.
Sighing, Blake walked down the stairs.
Ruby stood, dusted herself off, and zipped between Yang and Blake (almost scaring Blake back up the stairs). "We all heard that, right?!"
"'Alien machinery' sounds like a fun time," said Yang, her smile taking on a decidedly devil-may-care aspect.
"And that area's part of our old stomping grounds," said Ruby, nearly vibrating in her excitement. "I bet we could sweep it in no time."
Yang's eyes tracked up to Blake. "You in, Blakey?"
Blake gave her best indifferent shrug. "I guess. I don't have much else going on."
Ruby did a fist-pump, and so missed Yang giving Blake a knowing grin, which was just wrong. Blake wasn't curious because she had cat ears, she was curious because she was insufferably nosy and hated boredom, so there.
"Well, it's nice to hear things quiet down a—what are you all doing?"
Weiss had reemerged and was coming down the stairs behind Blake, but as she looked across the faces below, she came to a halt. "Oh, no, I know these looks."
"What looks?" said Ruby, playing at innocence and failing magnificently.
Weiss crossed her arms. "We are on vacation. This is no time for us to be looking for trouble."
"We're not looking for trouble," said Yang. "We're just wandering across our home island, and if we find some trouble, or some trouble finds us, well, that sort of thing just happens, you know?"
"No," said Weiss firmly, even giving a bit of a stomp. "We are not doing this, we are not… er…"
Weiss, Blake knew, was at her best in reasoned argument, where she could give as good as she got. But Ruby had access to weapons that bypassed the brain completely and left reasoned argument slobbering in the dirt.
Ruby stepped onto the bottom step, looked up at Weiss, and unleashed Pleading Face.
Weiss' eye twitched.
"Please, Weiss?" said Ruby, silver eyes huge and slightly moist. "Won't you come with us? Who else can we trust to keep us out of trouble?"
Weiss visibly struggled.
"Please?"
"…oh, fine," said Weiss, bowing her face in defeat.
"Yeah!" said Ruby with a whoop. "Operation Poke-the-Ursa is a go!"
"I already have regrets," said Weiss. "How do I keep letting you do this to me?"
"Because you're my BFF!"
"No."
"Grab your gear, ladies," said Ruby, as cheery as before, but with iron in her voice. "We're going exploring."
X plunged into the unknown.
Cyberspace was like the inside of a kaleidoscope. All around him, colors strobed in violent, fluorescent shades. There wasn't any proper light or dark, only different shades of jarring colors chasing each other across his field of vision, as if someone had overlaid a color wheel atop reality and given it a whirl. Sensory processing gobbled up more and more resources as it tried to make it all make sense. It didn't help.
X swapped to infrared to try and escape the overload. That just made everything a blur, wiping out all distinctions between objects and background. Every surface around him was the same temperature as the air.
And there was air, here, he was sure of it. He felt the pressure of it, felt it resist him as he waved a hand around. Well, that was one good thing.
Giving up on infrared, he swapped back to visual and tried to focus.
It wasn't easy, but he started to figure that surfaces, like the platform he stood on, were always a darker and cooler color than the everything-else. That helped ground him, as it were. He looked up and saw other platforms above him, laid out haphazardly at random heights in random shapes, blotches of solid color against the prismatic backdrop. Every few seconds, a smaller shape would flit from one platform to another. These smaller shapes, at least, had constant color and form: they registered like yellow comets.
That constancy helped X track them, though they stood out better or worse depending on which swirling colors were around them. They didn't come any closer to X, or at least, not to where X was standing; they kept up their seemingly-random traverses. When they reached a platform, though, they left X's sight, leaving him unable to check how many there were or what they did when they reached their destination.
Analysis noted that X was personifying the comets. He was thinking like they were moving with purpose. Possible fallacy. They could very easily be some… naturally (?) occurring phenomenon, like the platforms.
Higher consciousness wasn't so sure.
Whatever the comets were, they hadn't seemed to notice X, so he looked around more.
Dead ahead was the second portal generator, built more than a meter away from the edge of the platform—even if something knocked it over, it was too far to simply fall off.
The notion of "edge" made X wonder. Was there more cyberspace below? Was he on just another platform, like the comets?
X's rangefinder confirmed what his optics told him, which was that this plane/plain (Thesaurus judged both words were equally applicable) extended indefinitely to his left, but came to an abrupt end to his right. X walked towards the edge, equidistant from both entrance and exit portals. From a vantage a meter from the edge, he could see the fractal colors of cyberspace stretching some distance below, but no other platforms below his own, only above.
X pondered for a few more seconds, then came to a decision. He raised his left hand and activated what that tech had mercifully called by its original name, Variable Tool System, but which the world knew as the Weapon Copy System.
He dialed up Tunneling Missile. He'd figured out ways to use that weapon without launching it, letting him drill down into most any surface.
What was cyberspace made of, and could he drill into it? Only one way to find out.
He pushed the Tunneling Missile-turned-drill into the surface of the platform.
There was a squealing sound, and for a moment X thought he'd blunt the drill as sparks flew up from the surface. Then there was give as the drill bit, and X realized the sparks couldn't be sparks, because he registered no temperature as they pattered against his leg.
They looked… almost like symbols, perhaps. Translucent numbers and symbols fluttering into existence as they were dug up by the drill, fading just as quickly.
Whatever the platform was made of, it was solid enough that the drill could dig down into it, and when X had gotten up to his forearm, he knew he had a good enough anchor. He tested his weight against it, once, twice; it held firm.
Good. Now, X could look over the edge of the plane without fearing that he'd tumble off. He didn't know what was below him, and until he did, he needed to make absolutely sure he didn't fall.
Getting down prone, he pushed his face towards the edge of the platform and peered over the edge.
Oh.
Cyberspace didn't extend all the way down. Cyberspace stopped.
Somewhere below him—ten meters, maybe? Depth was impossible to judge—the strobing colors simply… ended. Didn't exist. There was an emptiness beyond, and around, a vaster emptiness with no limits and infinite depth, like outer space.
Not… quite, though. The color was wrong, more bluish than space, and while it had star-like speckles, they were in more and different colors. Too, there were things floating slowly down though the void. Analysis compared them to glowing cotton balls, fuzzy orangish-yellow puffs lit from within.
X followed them down, letting his optics track them until he was staring straight down.
Directly beneath, there was a bright light—not solid, irregular, but too bright and chaotic to make out any shapes within. It was like looking at the far end of an upside-down tunnel. This space, this void—he had no way to plumb its dimensions, even radar registered no returns, but higher consciousness knew (in a way that threw all his algorithms into soft resets) that this void was like a funnel, and that light was the bottom.
Tactical screeched at him that falling would likely be the worst thing ever. Higher consciousness was inclined to agree.
Pulling himself away from the edge, X reversed his drill to free his hand and looked to the exit portal, the one leading to (what an entirely too-amused technician had called) Planet Y. X walked to the portal generator, which was already up and humming at the ready, having been started up remotely by Dr. Rieman's team. All he had to do was push the literal big red button.
X had to appreciate that someone on the team had a sense of humor.
It was the only button to push, the most obvious thing to do. Even knowing how this was all supposed to work, knowing it was set up to be as simple and approachable as possible, X almost expected some disaster to befall him the moment he touched the button.
Well. Even if something would, he still had to push it, didn't he?
So he did.
He was almost disappointed when he wasn't immediately crushed by a falling anvil.
Instead, the portal generator whirled to life, the empty center of the arch filling with bright lights, bursts of colors that swirled like waves in a whirlpool, a spirograph of space and time, violent and absurd even by cyberspace standards.
After another five seconds, it went still as the surface of an empty pond, and looked like it was filled with blue gelatin. That, Dr. Rieman had explained, signified good connection. The generator would only maintain that for ten seconds before automatically cutting out.
X appreciated that. Time pressure helped to focus the mind.
Before his doubts could really dig into him, X stepped forward and, for the second time, plunged through the veil of the universe.
"Well, it sure is a machine."
Yang had been ready to search all day for the mystery machine, but in the end it had been embarrassingly easy to find. They'd first gone to the inland cliff (shying away from its crest for reasons she and Ruby didn't explain and that Blake and Weiss, mercifully, didn't question), then gone down the eastern side of it using paths cleared by generations of deer and Beowolves. They'd split into pairs of two to follow the two main branches of the path, and less than a kilometer later, Blake and Yang had come upon a strange machine, lying smack in the middle of the deer path.
It was short, only coming up to Yang's knees, and sat on a wheeled carriage. Its body had arms and cameras, what was probably a radio dish of some kind, and other pieces and parts she couldn't identify even that loosely.
"I just messaged Ruby," said Blake, waving her scroll where Yang could see it. "She hasn't responded yet, but…"
There was a distant, but rapidly approaching, whooshing sound, along with what sounded like a… siren?
Yang tracked the sound; it was heading back towards the cliffs, then down again towards…
…and Ruby arrived, Weiss slung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, if sacks of potatoes could scream bloody murder.
"Put me down, put me down!"
"Heh, sorry, Weiss!" said Ruby as she set Weiss down, before staggering some. "Woah, don't usually use my semblance for long runs like that, gimme a… oh, oh, is that it?!"
Ruby recovered from her nausea in record time, and started zipping around the alien machine, looking at it from every angle and babbling incoherently.
Yang counted off the seconds. When she reached ten, she said, "Well? What is it?"
Ruby backed off until she was in line with the rest of her team. "After a thorough examination, I have… deemed?... decided… that it is…"
"Yes?" said Blake.
"…an… alien machine!"
Yang could have sworn she saw a tumbleweed blow by, but those weren't native to Patch.
"Is it dangerous?" said Yang.
"Nah, no weapons," said Ruby, sounding almost disappointed.
"Nothing you recognized as a weapon, you mean," said Blake. "If it's something alien, couldn't they have weapons that don't look like weapons?"
"Maybe?"
"Probably not on a probe," said Weiss.
"Who says it's a probe?" said Ruby.
"Look," said Weiss, drawing the rapier from her hip and pointing the tip at a dark area below the machine. "It took soil samples, see how it drilled down there?"
"Ooh, is it maybe a Dust prospecting machine, then?"
"Unlikely. The Schee Dust Company doesn't use automated prospectors." No one would know that, Yang reflected, better than Weiss Schnee herself.
"Maybe someone new's busting on to the market," said Ruby, her excitement undimmed. "Maybe…"
"Wait—what's that?!"
X's foot touched down.
He nearly stumbled, disoriented by the change in, well, everything from cyberspace, but he caught himself without flailing.
He'd arrived on Planet Y.
It was a major milestone, but it might be the last one for a while. He had no idea how long it'd take him to find the people of this world, how long it'd take before he could communicate with them, nor how long it'd take to discern if they were hostile.
"Wait—what's that?!"
He turned, saw four heavily armed teenaged girls pointing a variety of eclectic weapons at him, and sighed.
…apparently, that long.
Next time: Welcome to Remnant
Notes:
OMAKE
X: What a strange world. I wonder how different it is from Earth.
Team RWBY: [points weapons]
X: Wow, just like home!
Chapter Text
Something flickered in Ozpin's awareness.
He thought he'd imagined it—his mind playing tricks on itself to distract from the mountains of paperwork heaped on his desk—but the sensation lingered. Something… strange. Something all but unknown to this world for centuries.
The world had changed. In a profound- nay, magical- way.
And, he reflected, if he'd noticed, there was no way she hadn't noticed…
Continents away, a fist pounded at a table. The table was made partially of wood and partially of "don't ask if you know what's good for you".
"Your Grace, what's wrong? Are you in pain? What can we…"
"The world. It's changed. Something's changed… Cinder. Get me Cinder."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Don't move."
X heard the words clearly and comprehended them perfectly. This upset him. There was no good reason he should be able to understand alien language, just like there was no good reason these people looked human, why was—
His logic filters mercifully punted that line of reasoning from higher consciousness. He could deal with that when there was time.
In the interim, Motor Control kept him perfectly still as only a robot could be.
"Who are you?" barked the largest of them, a girl with golden locks standing in a boxer's stance.
"What are you?" said a girl with an off-center snow-white ponytail and holding a rapier.
"What are you doing here?" demanded a third girl with black hair and… cat ears? In addition to normal human ears? X briefly thought they were some sort of cosmetic, but a glimpse with IR showed they were real and attached and perhaps even functional.
"One at a time," said the smallest of them all, a girl in a red hood. She was holding what appeared to be a most unusual bolt-action rifle; X saw extra assemblies and moving parts that made him wonder.
Little Red slightly lowered her rifle, keeping it limbered but off-target. "Hi. I'm Ruby Rose. Can you… well, can you even understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes, I can," answered X.
"Good," said Ruby. "So, um… could you introduce yourself?"
"My name is X," he said. "I traveled here from planet Earth."
"He is an alien!" said the blonde, with what X thought was a mixture of excitement and shock. Those were good, since neither of them were fear. There was unusually little fear, for that matter. He'd expected a lot more, but his Suffering Circuit was sure.
The girls felt wariness, and they were still pointing weapons at him with very practiced grips, but X got the impression they weren't planning to attack yet. Was this just how their culture worked? Did they draw on any strangers they met?
"That machine," said Ruby, gesturing at Dr. Rieman's probe. "Is that thing also from… where you came from?"
"From Earth," said X. "Yes, it is."
"Cool," she cooed.
"Not cool," said the girl in white. "This is how invasions work. Successive waves, each one gathering more information to prepare the way for the main attack."
"Even the most benign kind of exploring works that way," said X.
"Are you a robot?" said the cat-eared girl fiercely; her grip was firmest and her oversized pistol was aimed at his face.
"More than a robot," X said gently, having had to correct many, many people on this point over the years. "I'm an android."
"Wait… android?"
Ruby lowered her weapon completely while looking at X with wide, bright eyes. They'd looked gray to X at first glance, but the more he looked, the more he was convinced they were silver—and not some sort of prosthetic or augmentation that he could tell. There was something uncanny about them, something piercing, like she could see straight through his armored carapace, but he found he didn't feel threatened. It was disorienting.
"What difference does that make?" said the girl in white, but Ruby wasn't listening.
She approached slowly, her weapon loose at her side. "I'm not gonna hurt you," she said softly.
X doubted that she could even with her weapon, but didn't correct her. He kept still as she approached until she was within arm's reach, meeting her gaze with his own. Without breaking eye contact, she lifted one hand, reached up, and pressed the palm against his chest.
If something was supposed to happen, none of X's senses detected it. Yet higher consciousness reeled for reasons it couldn't grasp. Thesaurus noted that there was a difference between being in someone's sight and being seen, and that X felt seen.
Ruby gave a gentle smile. "You're like Penny," she whispered. (X took a careful note: did this world have androids, too?)
Whomever Penny was, Ruby backed away, and her smile blossomed. "He has a soul," she announced to her team, to their collective astonishment.
X's astonishment, too. Souls were a difficult philosophical concept. Many of humanity's brightest minds had spent their whole lives attacking the problem with mixed results. X had wrestled with the concept himself, back when he was newly activated, but that'd been years and years and six Maverick Wars ago; his battles against the virus hadn't left him much time for contemplation.
But her face and voice were so certain. She radiated sincerity, so much and so clearly it made him wonder if she could lie. It made him… it made him want to believe.
A part of him cracked.
It had been so long.
Tactical noted that Ruby's words had affected the others, too. One by one, they lowered their weapons, as if Ruby had said the only thing that mattered.
What a strange planet this was.
"You know that just because he has a soul doesn't mean he's good," said the cat-eared girl.
"I know," said Ruby, "but it does mean he deserves a chance."
Even the cat-eared girl let her weapon go to her side at that, and there were clicks all around as safeties engaged.
"Right!" said Ruby with a clap of her hands. "Let's do better introductions, now. I'm Ruby Rose…"
"You said that already," said the girl in white testily.
"…that's Weiss, my partner and BFF…"
"No."
"…that's Blake, and that's my sister, Yang. Together, we're Team RWBY!"
Even as X updated their identities, his Thesaurus hiccupped. "You're Ruby, of Team RWBY?" he said, repeating the perfectly-matching pronunciations.
"Yeah, our headmaster's a wierdo," said Yang.
X took another note.
"We're Huntresses!" said Ruby, throwing her hands in the air.
"We're trainees," Weiss said, enunciating like each syllable was a sword to carve up Ruby's words.
"We're Huntress trainees," Ruby said.
"Does that explain the weaponry?" X hazarded.
"You bet," said Ruby. "Ooh, wait, are you armed?"
X hesitated, as his weaponry wasn't something he was particularly proud of, and he definitely didn't want to appear threatening… but there was no mistaking the eagerness in Ruby's eyes, and the others were more wary than scared. "Yes," he said. "I'm armed."
"Can you show me? Can you?!"
"Ruby, stay focused," said Weiss. "This is an alien. I, for one, want to know what he's doing here."
"I was sent to establish diplomatic relations," X said with something like relief. "You're right that we sent a probe first, just to see what this world was like. We didn't know if our technology could find any world at all, let alone a world we could safely visit. But once the probe showed there was civilization here, we needed to talk to the leaders of that civilization."
"That makes sense, I suppose," Weiss said. X was surprised she didn't question why a diplomat was armed—it's a question he would have asked, for sure. Maybe all diplomats were armed, here.
"So… you want us to take you to our leaders?" said Ruby.
"That would be nice," said X.
"That'll be Professor Ozpin," Ruby said with a nod.
"Wouldn't it be the Vale Council?" said Weiss.
"One, we're Beacon Academy students, and he's our headmaster, so he's our boss," said Ruby. "B, I don't know how we'd get this guy to the Council because none of us, you know, know anyone on the Council, or even where their building is."
"Number Four Memorial Avenue, at the intersection of Fall and Choice Streets," said Blake, only for her to immediately blush. "Which I know for totally innocent reasons."
"And third," said an undeterred Ruby, "Ozpin's the guy who sent us on this vacation! He even recommended Patch! You think it's coincidence we wind up where the alien appears? After Ozpin sent us to Mountain Glenn? After he sent us after Dr. Merlot? This was his plan, duh, he just didn't tell us! Which means he's the guy we need to report back to!"
Weiss looked very impressed. "That's… surprisingly reasonable. I didn't think you could be that cynical."
Ruby's face turned stiff. She leaned in Yang's direction. "Uh, is 'cynical' good or bad?"
Yang, unhelpfully, shrugged.
And with every exchange, X's sense of foreboding grew.
However intelligent or capable these children were, they were children—yes, humans carved out "teenager" as a separate age group, but it was still below the age of majority for "adult" activities like voting. These children, though, were distressingly heavily armed, and seemed to be in dangerous situations as a matter of course.
Was this Earth-like planet's pleasant environment deceptive? What dangers lurked that made child soldiers normal?
There was only one way to know.
"I need to talk to your Professor Ozpin as soon as possible," he said.
"We can make it happen," said Ruby.
"Can we?" said Weiss with an arched eyebrow. "I don't have Professor Ozpin's scroll number, and I don't think you do, either."
"Nope," said Ruby with a pop of the 'p', "but my dad works for the headmaster of Signal, and he has a direct line to Ozpin. Easy peasy lemon squeezy."
"You want to bring an alien robot to Ozpin?" said Weiss.
"Android!" said Ruby, cutting over X's own objection. "He's not a robot, he's a person. He has a soul even if he doesn't have squishy guts." She gave him a wink, leaving him feeling baffled but pleased. And warm. So warm.
He thought he'd be numb to compliments or people rising to his defense. He'd gotten to that point on Earth, he was sure. How was this still effecting him? He recorded that as an Analysis task for later.
"We're really doing this," said Blake with some disbelief. "A real alien showed up, said "Take me to your leader", and we're doing it."
"Damn right," said Yang. She walked forward and extended an open hand. "I don't know if they shake hands on your planet, but if they do, let's shake, because I'm Yang Xiao Long, and I'm telling you 'Welcome to Remnant'."
X shook as the uncanny feelings grew. Bad enough that gestures like hand-shaking were the same across dimensions for no good reason; the fact that they called their planet Remnant felt ominous in the extreme.
He was far too diplomatic to say that.
"On behalf of planet Earth, the pleasure is mine."
Signas was discovering, to his dismay, that no one alive knew much about cyberspace.
After his visit to Sakhalin, he'd resumed his duties as commander of the Maverick Hunters, but he'd also quietly started reviewing the available literature on cyberspace. (There were upsides to being built with a whole think tank's worth of processing power.)
He'd already taken the biggest risk of all by agreeing to send X to Planet Y; before he took any more extinction-level gambles, he wanted to know the terms better.
To his disappointment, there was frustratingly little to study. Even wielding his clearance as commander hadn't gotten him very far.
The main thing he learned was that the only human with any real understanding of cyberspace—the human who, for all they knew, had created cyberspace in the first place—was Dr. Wily.
Mad scientist Dr. Wily.
Increasingly-unhinged-attempts-to-conquer-the-world Dr. Wily.
One-in-twenty-billion-genius Dr. Wily.
And Dr. Wily had destroyed virtually all records of his research out of pure spite.
After Wily's death, with no records to work from, no one was able to reproduce any of his work. Cyberspace fell into the realm of conjecture; it gathered little attention and less talent during the technological stagnation of the post-Light era. The subject wasn't seriously reexamined until after the start of the Maverick Wars. The Maverick Virus defied all expectations: it behaved in ways mere programming couldn't, that mere nanites couldn't, so people grasped for more novel explanations.
At last, the topic of cyberspace had gained urgency.
Which brought Signas frustratingly close to the present day, because they hadn't fully confirmed the Maverick Virus existed until the Third Maverick War.
"Sir?"
Signas, embarrassed, refocused some of his attention. He had enough computing power that he could usually parallel process; losing himself down the cyberspace rabbit hole while on duty was shameful. "Apologies. What is it, Alia?"
"Zero's requesting another assignment," Alia replied.
"Very well," said Signas.
"Sir," said Alia, calmly but firmly, "he's been bouncing from assignment to assignment for forty hours without a break. He's well past the point of diminishing returns."
"Ah. Let me guess: you tried to tell him that, he refused, so you escalated."
"Yes, sir."
Signas cracked a long-suffering smile. "Why are our best Maverick Hunters the most obstinate ones?"
"I'd call it an occupational hazard," Alia replied, and Signas couldn't tell if she was joking or not.
The Maverick Hunters' navigators were charged with directing and supporting the field Hunters as they prosecuted their missions. Alia was the senior-most navigator, with an uncanny knack for spotting things others missed and no indulgence for nonsense. Her expertise meant Signas typically assigned her to supporting X and Zero on the highest-stakes missions.
Physically, she was nothing special, a converted civilian reploid with light, peach-colored flak plating and short blonde robot hair. Her female appearance was designed to appear non-threatening to help ease human-reploid relations. It also resulted in most people not taking her seriously enough the first time they met her.
That never lasted. She didn't let it.
Like now. The most dangerous Maverick Hunter on Earth was pulling one direction, and Alia unblinkingly dared to pull the other.
"Give him one more assignment," Signas said, "then pull him back for refit and recharge."
"Yes, sir," Alia said, but she didn't turn away.
"Is there something else?"
"I don't know," she said daringly. "Is there? You've been awfully preoccupied with something."
"Yes," Signas admitted. No point in denying; when Alia dug in on a position, it was always because she had her receipts.
"Is it related to X's leave of absence?"
Signas suppressed a grimace. Of course Alia, of all people, would notice that. "Yes."
"Is there a disclosure plan? When will I need to know about it?"
Signas had been thinking about that. The odds of a secret spilling were proportional to the cube of the people who knew it. Alia would never willfully leak, but mistakes did happen, and the virus could ultimately upend everything. That Alia had survived so long was remarkable, but no guarantee she'd continue to do so.
On the other hand, he'd need help sooner or later, especially if X was successful. Besides, she'd already noticed X's absence.
"There are some developments I'm waiting for," he said. "I've made a kind of investment. Overclocking Zero is helping us cover in the short term, but that won't last forever. When it becomes untenable, I'll tell you why."
She nodded. "Thank you, sir." She put a hand to her headset as she turned back to her console, already transmitting, "Zero, new assignment coming in, stand by…"
Signas smiled. He had a good team, and he hated not being able to share everything with them in the name of security.
It couldn't be helped. This was a "survival of the species"-level matter.
He frowned.
Survival of the human species, anyway…
Because he'd spent a long time looking at all the different ways this could go. Even in the absolute best-case scenarios he could imagine, where Planet Y welcomed Earth's human population with open arms…
…that still left reploids stuck on Earth with the virus. They couldn't flee, because even the possibility of the virus getting to Planet Y had to be avoided at all costs.
Signas' species was still trapped on the road to extinction.
The only hope left was that they didn't drag the humans to hell with them when they went.
"Is there any way for you to look, um, less robot-like?"
Team RWBY had taken X up to the grounds of a school, though it appeared that X had misunderstood the type of school. At first, seeing classrooms and children in uniforms carrying books around or doing physical training, it had looked like a typical Earth school, but the steady pop pop of firearms told him something different.
What kind of world was this, where children were trained in firearms before legal adulthood?
Ruby looked abashed, but insisted, "It doesn't bother me, but we were told to try and keep this quiet, and you stick out a little bit."
"This is a start," X said as he took his helmet off. Beneath it was brown robot hair arrayed in an artful, permanent mess, as if helmet hair was his default state.
He held his helmet up before his eyes and looked at the red jewel in its crown. "You don't realize just how significant this gesture is. I'm showing a lot of trust in you."
Weiss raised an eyebrow. "What kind of world do you come from where you feel the need to be in armor all the time?"
X gave a wry smile. "I'll explain that to your headmaster."
"Suit yourself," said Ruby. "Oh, look, our Bullhead is here!"
Updating his records with the airship's type, X noted it looked like any number of vertical takeoff and landing craft from Earth's long military history. It had a central fuselage with large bay doors on the sides, and two wings with a pivoting turbine at the end of each. What stalled him out was when he flipped over to infrared to map it more fully and its turbines barely showed up. The air coming out of them was, somehow, colder than ambient.
Whatever cultural oddities this world might have, it was surely still subject to the laws of thermodynamics, right?
Team RWBY boarded the airship without hesitation, compelling X to follow. As the Bullhead lifted off, he asked, "What do you use as fuel for these?"
The looks he got ranged from quizzical (Ruby) to amused (Yang) to unamused (Blake) to critical (Weiss). "Dust, of course," Weiss said. "Wind Dust, primarily."
This was less than illuminating. "What do you mean, 'dust'?"
All four reactions intensified.
"Do they not have dust on Earth?" said Weiss in the tones of someone who can scarcely believe their words.
"We might," X said hesitantly. "What would you say dust is?"
"Elemental power in crystal or granular form that serves as energy source, propellant, or raw materials," said Weiss.
X nodded. "Thank you. Now I can say confidently that Earth does not have dust."
"That. Is. Amazing!" said Ruby.
"How does your technology even, like, work?" said Yang. "What do you even use for power if you don't have Dust?"
"Electricity," said X.
"You mean what you get from Lightning Dust?" said Weiss.
"...Maybe our tech bases aren't as compatible as I thought they might be," said X. After he'd met humans who spoke English, he'd dared to hold out hope for more similarities, but this difference was a wild one.
"No, but seriously," said Ruby, "how do you even…"
The airship bounced and rocked and a brief alarm blared. "We have grimm, starboard side," came a voice, presumably the pilot's. "Could you students deal with it?"
"All over it," said Ruby as she and her team drew their weapons. "Pop the starboard bay door."
"Roger."
Moving as one, the students crowded around the bay door, blocking almost all of X's vision out that direction. Then they started firing, though in increasingly wild ways. Ruby was the most normal, firing with her rifle, followed by Blake with her pistol. Yang was firing what seemed like shotgun blasts from the gauntlets she wore, except she was shadow boxing to unleash each round.
And Weiss? Weiss had her rapier extended, and different colored streaks of energy were bursting from its tip despite no firing mechanism X could see.
Elemental power that serves as energy source... and Weiss had seemed the most perturbed he wasn't familiar with dust.
That's what she was using for her attacks, wasn't it?
X, curious by nature, found himself dying to give their weapons a more extensive scan.
He heard distant, inhuman shrieks, and had to wonder what had his hosts' attention like this.
"That's the last of them," said Ruby as she and her team backed up into the bay and shut the bay door. "We're clear," she called loudly.
"Thanks," said their pilot. "We don't usually see Ravagers on this route, not more than once a month tops, but this is the third time in five weeks. I don't know why they're getting more aggressive."
"No problem for us," said Ruby before she turned to her team. "And I got the high score."
"Duh, sniper," said Yang. "If they'd gotten into punching range I would have flattened you."
"I got two at once with that ice block," said Weiss. "That should count extra, I think."
"Two what?" asked X.
"Grimm," said Ruby automatically.
"Grim what?"
The stares that ensued were even harder than the ones after his questions about Dust.
"Are there no Creatures of Grimm on earth?" said Weiss.
"I don't really know what you mean by that," said X.
"Oh, man!" said Ruby. "You figured out how to have tech without relying on Dust and you have no grimm? Earth must be a paradise!"
X didn't dare speak, and he squelched all attempts from Emotion Signifying to communicate nonverbally.
"Yeah, that's the loudest silence I've ever heard," said Yang.
"And Mr. Diplomat here is armed and armored," said Blake as she eyed him warily. "Earth must have some kind of threat."
"It can't be anything as nasty as the grimm, though," said Ruby, turning her attention back to X with a pleading expression. "Can it?"
"That's one of the things I have to talk to your Professor Ozpin about," said X. "I have to learn all I can about your Remnant, and share what I know of Earth, so that we understand each other better."
"That's not actually an answer," said Weiss with fierce eyes.
"Maybe," said Ruby, cutting in on X's defense, "but he's coming to Beacon to learn about the grimm. That's why we came to Beacon, too! So this kind of works out as far as I'm concerned."
Weiss gave one look at Ruby and swallowed her remaining objections.
"So Beacon Academy is where you learn to fight the grimm," X said.
"You bet," said Ruby. "It's the best Huntsman Academy in the world!"
"Excuse me?" said Weiss.
"I know what I said," Ruby teased.
"Jingoism aside," said Blake, "there are four Academies, one in each kingdom. Smaller communities have to get graduates from the main kingdoms, or find other ways to make do."
X detected more than a touch of bitterness in Blake's voice as she said this.
"Do you have anything like that on Earth?" said Ruby.
"What, monster hunting schools?"
"Or, like, big schools in general."
"Sure," said X. "Most large cities have some institute of higher learning, often more than one. And some universities are in small towns, that are kind of built around them."
"Did you attend one of them?" said Ruby.
"Not exactly," said X. "My education has been... different."
"Oh, yeah," said Ruby easily. "Android."
"That's right."
"So you were just programmed knowing stuff?"
"Less than you think," said X, though he screened the regret out of his voice.
"You're being awfully cagey with us," said Weiss. "For someone who's asking to know a lot about our planet and way of life, you aren't sharing much."
"I suppose," X said, "but my experiences aren't typical. You won't learn much about Earth if I tell them."
"Then there's no downside for you, is there?" said Weiss with an air of challenge. "You give away nothing worth hiding."
X smiled wistfully. It occurred to him that it had been years since he'd had to tell his origin story. He'd been famous almost since his first waking moments, doubly so after a couple of Maverick Wars.
"I was the first android," he said. "To ensure I'd be safe, my creator put me through thirty years of ethics and responsibility testing while suspended in a semi-conscious state. But my location and status were lost, so no one found me for another seventy years after that.
"So some of my schooling was programming, sure, and some of it came during those long years of dreaming in that tube. The rest of it, everything else I know, came from the School of Hard Knocks, and I was enrolled in that under a year after I was woken up."
"A hundred years is a very long time to spend alone," said Weiss in barely audible tones. Ruby nodded agreement as she pulled the edges of her cape around herself.
"Your parents ditched you for thirty years and that was the plan?" said Yang, and X could feel her anger like a physical force. "And then they abandoned you for another seventy years after that?"
"Everyone who was involved in my construction died," X said simply.
The anger faded from Yang, and the entire team nodded in various kinds of acknowledgment. X's Suffering Circuit let him hear the song of loss coming from each of them, even if their losses were different ones.
They felt for his tragedy, but it wasn't outrageous to them: they could all relate in some way.
Was this a uniquely tragic team, or was all of Remnant like this? How many people on this world had felt this kind of sorrow? How common was it?
And what did that mean for this being a refuge for Earth's humans?
"Oh, look, you can almost see it from here!"
Ruby had turned and was pointing out a window. X could feel each of the children distancing themselves from their own sorrows, could hear the song fading. It was... unusually emotionally mature, for their ages. And they could all do it. It made him wonder, as so many things did. Was that a quirk of biology? Of training? Of natural talents coincidentally found in similar measures in these girls?
He felt a small measure of guilt. He would have loved to have been a researcher if the virus had given him the chance. His curiosity was insatiable, and sending him to Remnant was giving him so many chances to indulge.
Like now, as the team moved to where they could look out and he followed.
"Vale," said Ruby proudly. "The capital of the Kingdom of Vale."
"That seems redundant," X said tactfully.
"As redundant as Ruby of Team RWBY?" said Blake dryly, saying what X hadn't dared.
"It's just how they did the names," said Weiss. "Like Vacuo, capital of the Kingdom of Vacuo, or Mistral, capital of the Kingdom of Mistral." She tossed her head slightly. "I like it that way."
"You would," said Yang.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that whoever was in charge of the names had the same stick up their butts that you have up yours," said Yang.
Weiss gave a dignified sniff. "I just think proper terminology is important. It's useful and proper to have terms that accurately reflect their referents."
Yang's grin was insufferable. "Then maybe you can explain why Remnant has four Kingdoms but zero kings."
X was the android in the bunch, but he thought he could see Weiss's brain blue screen.
"I just think it's pretty," said Ruby.
X moved to where he could see. He drank in an intact, bustling, well-planned city sitting at a beautiful intersection of landforms. On the plateau overlooking it stood gleaming towers and pleasing architecture of what had to be this 'Beacon Academy'.
"Ruby," said X, "I think you're right."
Ruby smiled and wiggled in place. "You hear that? I get to be right. A winner is me."
Weiss's brain crashed again.
Next time: See Me As I Am
Notes:
OMAKE
Taiyang: So, you found a stray, it followed you home, and now you want to keep it.
Ruby: Yep!
Taiyang: A stray what, exactly?
X: Yo.
Chapter 5: See Me As I Am
Chapter Text
"Zero! It's Zero!"
Zero smiled savagely as he dropped into the midst of his foes.
It took him less than a second to scan around and confirm them as enemies. They were mostly humanoid reploids, some feraloids, none of them rated or designed for combat, yet of the seven mobiles, five had modified their chassis to carry an integrated weapon, and the remaining two were carrying handheld busters.
The eighth figure was another civilian reploid, unarmed, strapped down to a table. No threat.
Tactical put a tag on the strapped-down reploid to ensure it didn't become a threat, then dedicated the rest of his prodigious processing power to the mobile threats.
Not that they were much more dangerous to Zero than the one that couldn't move.
The two Mavericks holding busters turned to point them at Zero. Too slow. Zero's Z-saber leapt to his hand, eager to come to battle.
A fencer's lunge took the coherent energy beam into and through the Maverick's chest armor, carapace, core, carapace, armor—in one side, out the other, as easily as a needle through cloth.
Zero recovered his lunge and whirled. The Z-saber was as ravenous in slashes as it was in thrusts. The second Maverick was bisected before it could take aim.
No hesitation. No pause. Surprise was for lesser minds.
Zero dashed forwards, boots flaring with light from the rocket assist. His off-hand formed a buster and shot a Maverick twice, flooring it, even as his main hand raised his Z-saber. A downward slash tore a Maverick's torso open; fire erupted from it as insulation melted and power surged.
Four kills, five seconds.
Not his best, but not bad.
Two Mavericks dove for cover; the other raised a rocket launched and aimed at Zero.
Zero calculated its trajectory, ducked his shoulder so it'd sail over him, and dashed forwards again. As the rocket exploded harmlessly against the warehouse wall behind him, a rising slash split the Maverick open from crotch to crown.
The remaining two Mavericks aimed busters at him from behind the cover of crates. Zero leapt into the air, out of their lines of fire, and threw four quick shots at one of them. Miss, face, neck, face… not the most accurate volley, but plenty to melt the Maverick.
He landed in front of the crate the final Maverick was using as cover. Rearing back, he kicked it with monstrous strength—strength he rarely needed when firepower and agility sufficed, but which was handy to have on-demand. The crate bowled the Maverick over, dropping and pinning it. Zero leisurely walked around its edge and slagged the Maverick before it could even begin to wiggle free.
That left one reploid. The one strapped down on the table.
Zero turned towards it. Its eyes were wide, though Zero—as always—didn't know what that meant.
"The Red Demon," it gasped.
Zero's jagged memory couldn't be relied upon for much, but knowing what people called him… he remembered that. "That's right."
"They were…" the reploid sim-swallowed. "They w-were talking about how they would spread the virus. They brought me here to… oh, god, I'm infected, aren't I?"
"How long have you been here?" said Zero.
The reploid's eyes closed. "Long enough. They were just… keeping me here until they were sure it took."
"I see," said Zero.
"I won't… I won't be a vector," the reploid with shaky voice. It turned its face to the ceiling. "Do it."
Zero nodded. "I honor your courage."
Slice.
The warehouse was quiet.
Zero scanned more, scanned harder, looking for any more opposition, any other enemies, anything else he could destroy.
All clear.
What a letdown.
Fun, but too quick. They were downsides to being the best.
Zero frowned at himself. With these being civilian models, they couldn't get much more dangerous, so the only way to extend the fight would have been for there to be more enemies… and there being more enemies would mean more infected reploids, and that would make X sad.
In that case, it had to be good that the fight was short.
Zero's programming rebelled against the notion, but Zero was used to fighting his programming.
Still…
There was nothing left to do here now, and his circuits thrummed with unspent energy and infernal need. He dialed up Hunter Base. "Base, Zero, mission complete. Flag area for clean-up crew. Eight bodies, with probable secondary infections."
"Zero, Base, roger," came Alia's voice.
"Requesting new assignment."
"Negative," said Alia. "Report back to Hunter Base for recharge and refit."
"No," snapped Zero. "I have enough charge to keep pressing." He wouldn't use numbers over channels that could be intercepted, and he didn't want Alia second-guessing how much charge was "enough".
Alia stood her ground. "This is an order from Commander Signas, Zero. You are well past the point of diminishing returns. Pushing on is an unacceptable risk. Recall now."
Zero ground his teeth together, trying to cudgel words into the right order. Talking wasn't his strong suit, doubly so when trying to work around possible interception.
Another area where he missed X. When X wasn't around, it felt like a void, like even more pieces of his systems were missing. And X had never been further away.
Without him…
Words failed Zero.
"Roger," he said, hating every letter.
He left in as much a blaze of energy as he'd arrived.
"See?" said Ruby. "No one's looking at us at all!"
"That's because so many teams are out on mission no one's around to look."
"Weiss, let me have this."
Weiss rolled her eyes but held her tongue. Ruby did have a point: there were still a few students and faculty about campus, but none of them gave RWBY or their guest a second glance.
"Like I said," Yang said as if reading Weiss' mind, "pro Huntsmen have some wild styles. In a place like this, there's no such thing as a strange appearance. Remember Shion Zaiden? Most people wouldn't even try to pull off threads like those. You haven't met my Uncle Qrow, but he's got a wild look, too. Hell, Jaune walks around in half-plate a good chunk of the time and no one says a word. Next to all that, our pal is normal."
Weiss glanced at X to see how he'd taken being called Yang's 'pal'. No response at all. She respected his discipline. "I suppose," she allowed. "I'm not that used to Huntsman culture. I moved in the circles of Atlas' elites and Atlas' military, and those circles are a lot more uniform."
"You mean a lot more boring!" Ruby said, sticking her tongue out.
Weiss' knee-jerk reaction to disagree with Ruby died a quiet, lonely death. "You're not wrong."
"Lien for your thoughts?" Yang said to X.
X had been scanning around, a frown building on his face. "Is everyone so young?"
"Not everyone," said Yang. "There's that Haven team, remember? Team…"
"Clementine," Weiss said firmly.
"…yeah, I'm never calling them that. Anyway, half their team is older, right? That Cinder chick has to be in her 20s. And isn't there a third-year team that has a couple students in their 30s?"
"The exceptions that prove the rule," X said quietly. (Weiss wanted to say 'under his breath', but she didn't think X needed to breathe, and didn't know how to ask to be sure.)
"Is that strange to you?" asked Ruby.
"Yes and no," X said.
"…okay?" Ruby tried to smile; it looked more like she had a toothache.
"We're here," said Blake. It left X off the hook; Weiss really would have wanted just 'yes' or just 'no' from the alien, not that non-answer.
Maybe Ozpin could do better.
The building with Ozpin's office, known unofficially but universally as the Emerald Tower, was one of the tallest on Beacon's campus, second only to the Cross-Continent Telecommunications building. There were better views to be found in Atlas, Weiss knew, and far grander buildings, but the Emerald Tower was fine enough for a second-rate Kingdom.
In moments, Team RWBY and their alien guest were in an elevator, and its door was opening to let them into Ozpin's office.
Weiss hadn't been here before, and for a moment was taken aback by the panoramic windows and the slow, low ticking all around. She looked up, then down, and saw giant gears slowly turning—clockwork, all around.
Who needed mechanical clockwork in this day and age? Atlas wouldn't have tolerated such outmoded machinery. What would X, an android, think of this? If it looked backwards to Weiss, it must look little more advanced than wooden clubs to X.
Anxiety rising, Weiss glanced at X, but he appeared not to notice his environs. He had eyes only for the man on the far end of the room.
Ozpin was staring back over his small glasses, his mouth slightly open, something very intense in his eyes. He was leaning against his cane for support more than usual.
Weiss felt energy between X and Ozpin, something tense and crackling, like dry lightning. She understood none of it, but she didn't dare get between…
"We're back, professor!"
Weiss cringed as Ruby, clueless as ever, stepped forward.
Ozpin blinked, collected himself, returned to his usual expression of elderly benevolence, and nodded. "So I see, Miss Rose."
"This is X," she said.
Ozpin's eye twitched.
"He's an android, and he has a soul," Ruby went on.
Weiss wanted to disappear into a hole in the ground, never to be seen again. Why Ruby thought those were the words to say, here, now…
"Thank you, Miss Rose," said Professor Ozpin. "Please take your team to the anteroom three floors down. I will contact you with further instructions in a few minutes."
"Oh," said Ruby, taken aback. She looked back and forth between Ozpin and X, both of whom had become as blank and impassive as the floor. "But… I thought since, you know, we found him, we'd get to know…"
Weiss' patience snapped. "Of course, sir," she said. Grabbing Ruby by her hood (Ruby made a sound between a gargle and a yelp), Weiss pulled her team leader back into the elevator; Blake and Yang followed obediently.
"What was that?!" said Ruby as the elevator door slid shut.
"He wanted us to leave so they could talk," said Weiss.
"Duh," said Ruby, "and I wanted to hear what they had to say!"
"I'm not sure I do," said Blake, arms crossed and shoulders hunched as if she were chilled.
"Anyone else feel that crackle between them?" said Yang.
"Yes," said Weiss, even as Ruby said "No".
"Yeah," said Yang, looking up at the office above. "I wanna know what they're saying, too… but preferably from a safe distance."
"I don't get it," said Ruby.
"Good."
X and Ozpin looked at each other across the length of the office. The only sound was the gears all around clacking along in time. Steady, steady, like the heartbeat of the world, and with as little rush. Both gave the impression that stoic silence was a lifestyle choice and patience the highest virtue.
They were being active in their own ways. Both were taking the other's measure. Both were looking deep, and both had tools more profound than sight.
Click.
Clack.
Click.
Clack.
"You're like me," X pronounced after five minutes.
"I'm not an android," said Ozpin.
"No. But you are ancient."
Ozpin smiled mildly. "My hair may have grayed early, but that doesn't make me ancient."
"You've watched generations come and go," X said. "You've watched people blossom and fade around you, while you lived on and on. Just like me."
Ozpin's face went flat. "What you're suggesting sounds impossible."
X shrugged. "I'm new to this world. I don't know what's impossible here. All I know is how you feel. If there's one thing I can trust, it's my Suffering Circuit."
Click.
Clack.
Click.
Clack.
"You have more insights than that," Ozpin said. "You know things. Things no one else knows. Things you wish you didn't know."
"That gets more true the more I learn about this planet," said X.
"It was true before you came to Remnant. As it has been for me."
Click.
Clack.
Click.
Clack.
"I feel," X said, "that if I could trust you fully, we'd get along famously. But neither of us will ever be able to share everything we hold locked in our hearts."
"Hm," said Ozpin thoughtfully. "Miss Rose said you were an android."
"That's right."
"A machine."
"That's right."
"It's… interesting to hear a machine talk about how he feels."
"It's accurate, though," said X with a touch of defensiveness.
"I'm inclined to agree. Miss Rose certainly would."
"Miss Rose is a child."
"True," Ozpin granted. "But the eyes and minds of children are wondrous things, aren't they? We have experience, we instantly pick up on patterns they never see. But they? They're the ones who can best see the new. They think thoughts that would never occur to us."
"Is that why she's at your Academy at her age?" said X. "I noticed she's the youngest by a fair margin."
"She's here because she earned it," said Ozpin. "She's a prodigy. We badly need her talent."
"Because of the grimm?"
Ozpin blinked. When he spoke, his voice was wary. "What do you know of the grimm?"
"Only what you tell me," said X. "We don't have them on Earth."
Ozpin's demeanor cracked as a weary sigh fell through. "Then you are most fortunate."
"That's the first time anyone's ever said that about me," said X.
Ozpin appraised X for another moment, then reached to a set of controls for his desk just outside of X's line of sight. After a few moments of navigating through holographic menus, an image appeared.
It was shaped vaguely like a bear, but its skin was black as the void of space, while white bone-armor and bone-spikes protected its limbs and back. Its face was covered by a bone-mask, while its fangs were too large to be much use for eating—the beast couldn't even close its mouth properly. And its eyes: pupil-less, red, malicious.
They spoke to X, prickled against his deepest subroutines. Even a still image like this activated his combat systems.
"The Creatures of Grimm take many forms," said Ozpin. "The Ursa is one of the more common, and one of the less dangerous—though even a single Ursa can kill many civilians if unopposed.
"But many grimm are more exotic and much more dangerous," he continued as more images appeared. "King Taijitu—the two-headed serpent. Deathstalker—the giant scorpion. Manticore—the fire-breathing chimera. Nevermore—the harbinger bird."
Every image Ozpin displayed brought some new horror to light. All of them shared the same schema of black skin, bone armor, and red eyes, but their shapes were as different as could be. All biologically improbable, all wildly different from each other, and all of them seemingly built as much for menace as for function.
X struggled to appreciate the scale of things until he took a closer look at the Nevermore picture. There was an airship there, a Bullhead like the one that had brought X to Beacon, and the Nevermore dwarfed the Bullhead.
"The grimm are attracted to negative emotions," said Ozpin gravely; he didn't flinch at the sharp, disbelieving look X gave him. "Sadness. Anger. Loneliness. Rage. Despair. The grimm follow these emotions with single-minded purpose: to destroy humanity and all its works."
X surveyed the pictures again, his face betraying nothing. "This is why you have child soldiers?"
"Child trainees," Ozpin corrected with force. "Beacon's purpose is to educate the Huntsmen of tomorrow. They're the ones who will hold the line in the future."
X's face tightened. "'Hold the line' implies a delaying action."
"Less delay, more defense. The grimm give us no respite and they're incapable of mercy. Every day is a struggle against the dark. Every human settlement was carved out of the wilderness by force of arms. They're maintained the same way."
X blinked. "You can't beat the grimm, can you?"
"One grimm can be slain," Ozpin said. "Our Huntsmen cut them down by the score. But the Creatures of Grimm writ large are endless. They were here before humanity arose, and if we don't keep fighting, they'll be here long after we're gone. Everywhere humanity has gone on this planet, we've found the grimm already there, waiting for us. Ready to push us back."
"There's no way to cut them off at the source?"
"If there were," said Ozpin with a helpless spread of his arms, "we would have done it ages ago."
X fixed Ozpin again, assessing him with the full power of his Suffering Circuit and decades of experience. Ozpin looked back, seriously but implacably.
X looked at the pictures. "I'd like to see one."
Ozpin raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
"I may be an android," X said, "but I know as well as anyone… there are things that can't be understood as data. There are things that must be seen. That must be felt. You can tell me about the grimm all you want, but until I see one, I won't understand your struggle the way I need to."
Ozpin nodded slowly. "Can you fight?"
The smallest of smiles ticked at the corner of X's mouth. "I can."
Ozpin looked for another moment before pressing a different button on his desk. "Miss Rose."
"Ahh! Where'd that… oh, there's the speaker. Um. Hi, professor?"
"Our guest would like to go down to the Emerald Forest," Ozpin said, looking at X all along to let X contradict him. X didn't. "Take him down there and accompany him. Do try to keep him safe."
"Um… professor? Does he know the forest is full of grimm?"
"He knows," said Ozpin. "It's rather the point."
"Oh. In that case… yes, sir!"
"Meet him on the first floor," Ozpin said, before killing the channel and leaning back in his chair.
"Thank you," said X.
"I don't think I'm doing you a favor." Ozpin took a long, deep inhale, breathed it out. "You know as well as I do that knowledge can be a terrible burden."
"I do," said X, his voice a little raw. "But men like us can't afford blissful ignorance."
"Too true," said Ozpin, before he half-smiled. "'Men like us'. I was given to believe there were no men like me."
X mirrored him. "It's less lonely this way."
"Another argument for you having a soul. This connection we feel, these similarities we sense... we're both old, old souls. Even if you have a young man's face. It doesn't suit you."
"I feel like I could say the same to you," said X.
Ozpin chuckled. "This is not a young man's face. But... I think I know what you mean." Ozpin raised his mug as if making a toast. "Enjoy the Forest."
As she walked across campus towards the cliffs, Yang snuck occasional glimpses at their alien weirdo. He'd put his helmet back on, and something about that act had sparked a deeper change.
It reminded her of her dad.
Taiyang had been a professional Huntsman, and a damn good one. Even if she hadn't seen him in the field much, his team, STRQ, had a legendary reputation in Huntsman circles, and if even half of what she'd heard was true…
...not that her dad would tell her either way...
Yang felt a familiar resentment rising within her, and just as routinely pushed it back down.
The point was, her dad could be a combat monster when he wanted to, but he was a teacher at Signal Combat School instead. He spent his days teaching kids as young as eleven. The gap between his power and their defenses was vast. He could break them like twigs without effort—no, purely by accident, if he didn't exercise incredible restraint.
So, even when he had so much power, he could only ever let himself use a little bit of it.
That's what X felt like, to Yang. Someone strong, but who spent most of his time trying not to be.
The thought made Yang's heart race. She couldn't wait to see what X had in store for them.
Beacon sat on a mesa. On the west side was the river basin that fed Vale City. To the east were the cliffs overlooking the Emerald Forest. As Team RWBY neared the eastern cliffs, Yang saw the forest stretching out before her, klick after klick of untamed wilderness. Old-growth trees that rivaled Beacon's towers in size rose before her, the gaps between them filled in by young, ambitious trees pressing up amongst their seniors, until the scene looked like a carpet of green. In the far distance she could almost make out some ruins and a ravine that brought back only the fondest memories.
The Emerald Forest was where Team RWBY had been forged, in fire and Dust and metal and soul.
"I guess I should have asked this earlier," said Ruby, sounding nervous and failing to meet X's eyes, "buuuut… do you have a landing strategy?"
"A what?" X said.
"We're gonna jump off the cliff," said Yang. "Can you follow, or do we need to wait for you to go around?"
X looked taken aback, but he rallied and looked over the edge of the cliff for a few seconds. "Yes," he said. "I can get down safely."
"Awesome," said Yang, and she turned a devilish grin on her teammates. "Last one down's a rotten egg!"
And she threw herself from the cliff face, her teammates' protests shrill and distant in her ears, drowned beneath her own laughter.
Falling head-first towards the canopy, Yang rolled her shoulders to limber up, then deployed Ember Celica. Her weapons unfolded from their travel form as bracelets into their shot-gauntlet form, extending down her forearm and up over her hands.
For someone always looking for ways to punch harder, Yang's choice of weapon had been simplicity itself.
The trees were getting awfully close, now…
Yang punched both arms perpendicular to her fall and fired with both gauntlets.
The recoil, which she didn't buffer with her Aura, gave her a sideways shove. She did a half-somersault to bring her feet under her, targeted a branch, saw she was going to overshoot it—perfect.
She kicked against it as she passed it, bleeding a little bit of her vertical velocity, translating some of it to horizontal. There, another branch in the next tree in line; she fired her gauntlets behind again to set up her approach, kicked against that branch, too, then the side of a tree trunk, every bound turning her freefall into a parabolic arc.
One, two more, and then she was at ground level—tumbling rolls burned the last of her momentum, and she popped up to her feet, an unbridled smile on her face and adrenaline coursing through her veins.
"Nailed it," she said.
"Took you long enough," said Weiss from the base of the next tree in line, leisurely inspecting her fingernails.
"Oh, there you are," said Ruby from behind. "I didn't realize you hadn't landed yet."
Blake stepped out on a sturdy branch of the tree beside Yang, then dropped to the forest floor, speaking no words but saying everything with the smirk on her face.
"I know who the rotten egg is," said Ruby in a sing-song voice.
Yang laughed. "Me, too." She turned back towards the cliff and pointed. "It's X."
X was sliding down the face of the cliff. The toes of his boots (or were those just his feet?) were pressed against the rock; the friction as X descended was sending showers of rock and dust down around him.
"Messy," said Ruby.
"Remind me," said Weiss waspishly, "how many sniper rounds do you fire purely for recoil when you descend?"
"A totally reasonable number!"
"Don't you think it means something," said Blake, studying their guest closely, "that he's armed, armored, and has a landing strategy? Just what kind of 'diplomat' are we dealing with?"
Childish thoughts slipped away from RWBY as they studied the alien. His motions bore the hallmarks of long practice.
"Someone who's done a lot of fighting," said Yang, speaking wholly from her intuition.
Blake nodded. "That's how it feels to me, too."
"Kinda makes it interesting," said Yang with a grin.
"For a given value of 'interesting'," muttered Weiss, who just had to have the last word, but Yang would forgive her this time. Weiss couldn't really help herself.
X's head never turned to look behind him, but he sprang from the cliff face as he neared the ground. The bottoms of his feet flared with light as he touched down lightly.
"Not a bad landing strategy," said Ruby.
"I have a few options for the job," X said, looking faintly amused. Yeesh, and Yang had called Blake stoic. This guy made Blake seem as bouncy as Ruby. "I'm guessing landing strategies are something Beacon teaches?"
"Nah, you're supposed to have one before you show up," said Ruby as she turned to walk into the forest.
"Unless you're Jaune, apparently," said Weiss sourly.
"Hey, he got down okay," said Ruby, rallying to the defense of her friend. Yang respected the impulse, and wished it was for the sake of a worthier target.
Weiss apparently felt likewise. "He got down safely because Pyrrha pinned him to a tree like a memo on a corkboard. If she hadn't helped him, he'd be dead."
"He'd be maimed," Ruby said weakly. "His Aura would have saved him."
"Do you remember how bad he is at using his Aura? Especially at the start of first semester? I'm telling you, he'd be dead."
Ruby looked pained, and Yang took that as her cue. "Phew, what's that smell?"
Weiss turned in a panic, but Ruby was faster, slapping a hand over Yang's mouth. "Heh heh," she said with shaky looks at X, "nothing to worry about, my sister totally wasn't about to make a rotten eggs joke to our android alien ambassador!"
Somehow, that was what made X smile. "Maybe you should let her, next time," he said.
Even as Yang pumped a fist in triumph, Ruby fell away from her, and then kept falling into her own personal pit of despair.
"Don't say we didn't warn you," said Blake.
Next time: The Scourge of Remnant
Chapter 6: The Scourge of Remnant
Chapter Text
The Emerald Forest reminded X of temperate rainforests on Earth. Old, old growth, free from the usual constraints of moisture or soil nutrients or climate, limited only by time and biology.
There were only pockets of them left, back on Earth, and ragged ones at that. All plant life was suffering as more and more toxins entered the ecosystem. By the Fifth Maverick War, many ecosystems could be sustained only through significant mechanical intervention, so that the forests seemed as artificial as they were natural. And that was before Eurasia fell.
More wounds dealt to the world, a planet slowly bleeding out…
No.
X attached a suspense timer to those ruminations and banished them from higher consciousness. Those dreary thoughts were no good to him here. He needed to focus.
Because this forest, though vibrant and growing, also evinced recent combat. In some places, trees (especially smaller ones) had been violently felled, while residual scorch marks spoke of recent explosions. As quiet as the forest seemed, X knew it had been a battlefield in the past.
If he'd understood Ozpin correctly, it would be a battlefield in the near future.
"Soooo…" said Ruby, looking over her shoulder from her second-in-line position as the team walked single-file through the forest, "what exactly did you want to see?"
"The Creatures of Grimm," said X. "Your headmaster told me I could find some here."
"Well," said Blake from the front of the line, "we're heading to the forest temple. We know we'll find some between here and there."
"But you could speed things up," said Yang from behind X, last in line.
"How?" said X.
"Negativity," said Weiss. "Grimm are attracted to negative emotions. Bad feelings draw them in."
"So," said Yang cheerily, "if you wanna conjure up some grimm, let 'em know how awful you feel."
…interesting. That aligned with what Ozpin had said. X's skepticism melted away as he considered Team RWBY.
They all seemed so exuberant. Was that a front? Forced positivity to keep the foe at bay?
Delegating that question to background subroutines, X focused on the bigger question. Was it safe to lower his defenses like that?
His knee-jerk reaction was No, of course not! He always had to be the one to keep his chin up. He had to be the one to carry the weight of the world, because he (along with Zero) was the only one who could. Every time someone else tried to take some of the burden, it broke them.
This… even this line of thinking was fraught.
Just considering the facts of his situation, plainly and frankly, was dangerously close to opening the dam.
But these girls… they were expecting it. He wasn't Atlas or Mount Sumeru holding up the world, because he wasn't on his world. Here in Remnant…
Could the android with the strongest Suffering Circuit ever built turn it on himself, for once?
Could he allow himself the luxury of feeling his own pain?
…okay. Okay. He could do this in a measured way.
He opened the dam just a little bit.
And felt a spike of grief that pierced him more than any Maverick's blade.
So many people had tried to help him and paid the price. Zero. Zero again. Dr. Cain. Iris. Middy. Mack. Flame Dragoon.
He felt his footsteps slowing; Motor Control was starved for resources as the weight of all the lost souls dragged him down.
Not just his friends, but his subordinates, too, like Magus. Soltado. Airek. Camaron. Grumman.
He came to a stop as the list of his failures stretched on and on into infinity. People he'd known and treasured, and the countless souls he'd never met, all putting their trust in him and watching him fail them.
Like all the people in Abel City and Dopplertown and Laguz Island and Sky Lagoon and Reploid Nation and Eurasia and the Nightmare Zones…
The crushing weight of loss would drag him to the core of this alien planet…
"Awoooo!"
Tactical pinged, pinged again, pinged again, and finally, finally X was able to pull himself out, to plug up the dam, to soft-reset higher consciousness and attend to his senses.
All around him, the girls had drawn their weapons.
"Shit, how much negativity are you packing?" said Yang. "You must have called down every grimm in five klicks!"
"Beowolves up first," said Ruby as the team wordlessly moved around X into a square formation—escort formation, why would they, that was how people died, they tried to protect X—with their weapons ready and facing outwards. "Don't get lazy just 'cuz they're chum."
"I hope you're taking your own advice," said Weiss.
Incoming.
His combat subroutines fully engaged, X tracked the incoming enemies—Beowolves, Ruby had called them—even as they bounded amongst the trees from cover to cover.
Fifty meters.
The girls were tense and ready.
Twenty-five meters.
They showed no fear, though.
Ten meters.
Forced bravery, or true confidence?
Five meters…
And they burst into the open: beasts of nightmares, slavering soulless monsters. They resembled werewolves, but exaggerated and bestial, with the signature black-white-red color scheme of the grimm.
Team RWBY met them at the break.
X watched them all, soaking up the data.
Ruby's rifle turned out to double as a scythe. She used it to cut down the first Beowolf, then she leapt past the second beneath its outstretched paw, caught its midsection with the blade of the scythe, and fired a rifle shot to give her the recoil to slice the beast in half.
Weiss and her rapier were all elegance and control, skewering Beowolves wherever they lacked armor, parrying their claws with disdain and striking back with authority.
Blake leapt amongst and between her enemies, her pistol (reformed as a sword) in one hand, its sheathe held like a cleaver in the other, dealing crippling or killing blows from undefended, impossible angles.
Yang went head-on at the closest foes, getting inside their swiping arms to pummel them with shotgun-augmented punches, a bowling ball of fire and fury.
They were so fast.
Ruby's scythe was taller than she was, but she whipped it around like a drum major's baton, zipping from point to point as if the intervening distance didn't exist. Weiss… conjured glowing platforms? (They registered as solid to X, but with no temperature or depth…) She leapt to them and off of them, accelerating each time until X was sure she'd pop every ligament in her legs. Blake seemed a touch slower, except sometimes even radar would lose track of her and she'd reappear a short distance away while an unfortunate Beowolf dove at nothing. Even Yang, though slower than her teammates, could land six punches faster than a human could blink.
And that was the most baffling part of it all.
These were humans. Humans! (And Faunus, Thesaurus corrected.) X didn't regard humans as a lesser species the way the Mavericks did, he valued every life, but their biology gave them limits.
Those limits just… didn't seem to apply, here.
Our Huntsmen cut grimm down by the score, Ozpin had said. If this was how Huntsman trainees fought, X was inclined to believe the headmaster.
Half a minute later, it was over. Fifty Beowolves were gone—turned to ash, X noted with astonishment as a slain Beowolf fell apart, just… disintegrated, before his very eyes. A quick look around showed no grimm corpses remained, leaving the battlefield seeming strangely clean for how intense the fighting had been.
"Good warm-up, ladies," said Ruby as she dropped a spent magazine and slapped in a new one. "Ursai coming next."
"There's more?" said X.
"Every grimm in five klicks," Yang said again.
That… was good, actually. He'd been so surprised at RWBY's prowess, he'd lost sight of his objective. "I'll fight, this time," he said.
"You up for this?" said Ruby.
X's modeling software was without equal. He'd seen what RWBY could do; he'd seen what the Beowolves could do. He understood.
"Yes," he said.
His right fist made way for his buster.
"So cool," cooed Ruby.
"Ruby! Focus!" snapped Weiss.
Ruby turned forwards—just in time.
X had seen Ozpin's picture of an Ursa, a horror-movie mockery of a bear. The picture did it no justice. No still image could capture the way the Ursa lumbered forwards, powered by fury and mass and hatred. Soulless red eyes locked on to X's, and it was enough for him to almost believe Ruby's proclamation that he had a soul, because whatever was lurking inside his circuits, the Ursa didn't have it.
No, more—it had the opposite of a soul, whatever that might be. It was, at once, an avatar of oppressive wrath, and a bottomless pit.
After six Maverick Wars and countless skirmishes, though, X's combat subroutines were so neatly refined they could guide him through a skirmish with little of higher consciousness' help.
Uncharged, rapid-fire plasma bolts tore at the grimm's right front paw; at its next stride, that paw failed under its weight, and the grimm fell to its side.
X was darting into the gap before it realized. A properly-charged plasma bolt from his left buster blasted into its unarmored underbelly. There was a burst of ash as plasma obliterated its whole midsection; the rest of the grimm vaporized on its own almost as quickly.
The next Ursa was on him almost before he could confirm the kill. X dashed backwards with help from his booster feet, staying just ahead of swiping paws. The Ursa reared up on its hind legs and tried to fall on him with a bite. X met it halfway, fed it the business end of a buster, and unleashed a blast that evacuated the back of its skull.
And there was another Ursa, falling upon him as quickly and insistently as any Maverick's minions—
Mavericks.
The grimms' eyes looked like terminal infection-stage Mavericks.
X's comparative subroutine threw the notion to higher consciousness, and higher consciousness was unprepared for it.
The same hate. The same berserk bloodlust. The same emptiness, the lack of substance and personhood—made worse, for the Mavericks, because there had been a person there before.
X, reeling from the notion, diverted processor cycles away so he'd stop thinking about that. His combat subroutines were all too ready to gobble those cycles up.
He fired at the incoming Ursa's face, washing its bone-mask in uncharged plasma; it survived, charging through the blast, but it was blinded while it did, and before it noticed, X had leapt onto its back. The next charged shot blew through its unarmored neck.
Another!
He turned to face it even as it charged him, it was closing awfully fast—
-and Yang barreled in-between, punching its face so hard its whole body turned and fell and slid.
"Got your back," said Yang as she punched the same spot on the Ursa's face once, twice, thrice, until its mask shattered, her punch penetrated all the way through to hit the ground, and the Ursa sizzled and started to fall apart.
X wanted to speak, wanted to respond, but something else…
New contact.
Above, leaping down, taking advantage of the distraction and chaos below—
X reached into his deep well of copied weapons, pulled up Storm Tornado, and fired, praying he wasn't too late.
His buster, now a turbine, roared, blasting a discrete column of energized, pressurized air forward, hitting the pouncing grimm as it descended on Yang. It struck, pushing the much larger beast away from Yang, arresting its fall, tearing at its inky skin—but no, it had much thicker armor than the others, more weight and strength and momentum from its dive, it was still swinging at Yang, and X suddenly saw a dozen fallen Maverick Hunters all dead because they'd tried to save X and that was fatal without fail—
The grimm's short-armed swing connected with Yang's shoulder… and glanced off.
There was a visible shimmer there, but no penetration, no tearing flesh, no geyser of blood.
"Bastard!" Yang yelled, and punched the new grimm in a thunderclap of noise and anger.
The grimm half-blocked the punch; it still was knocked backwards, but stayed on its feet, no damage visible.
"It's an Alpha!" shouted Yang.
"Ladybug!" replied Ruby.
X wanted to pummel this 'Alpha', but had to hold his fire as Ruby and Blake raced into action. Zip, zip, zip—Ruby's dashing swipes kept taking her out of the Alpha's reach, so it tried to attack Blake instead, but every time it was in danger of connecting, Blake seemed to visibly blur and appear elsewhere, and with every exchange, the girls tore at the Alpha.
Its armor was thick and covered most of its body, but that didn't stop Ruby and Blake, who kept at it even when they missed. They seized every chance to counter when it tried to strike them, and soon their blades were finding their marks. After ten seconds, the Alpha was venting shadows from a dozen shallow wounds. (Tactical yelled at Thesaurus for using flowery language; Thesaurus replied it was doing its best, Remnant was so weird that unusual word combos were necessary.)
The Alpha over-extended trying to chase down Ruby and stumbled. "Weiss!" called Ruby.
X saw no hint of Weiss, but he did see another one of those white sigils appearing below the Alpha, except it turned black before X's eyes, and the Alpha dropped to the ground as if sucked down by a magnet.
"Yang!"
Ruby's command saw Yang launching herself into the air. X couldn't see her front, but he could see her long, golden locks glowing, almost like they were on fire.
Yang fell from the air like a meteor and hit the Alpha so hard it made a crater.
Its back shattered, the Alpha began to dissolve.
"That's for the cheap shot," Yang said, standing and kicking at where the Alpha had been.
"Elder grimm are more tactically-inclined, you know that," said Weiss.
"Save it," said Ruby. "We're not done."
There was more?
Yes, X realized as he expanded his senses, gave more resources to data gathering and processing. One more shape approaching, a much bigger one than those before.
It smashed two trees out of the way and came fully into sight.
"Giant Deathstalker," groaned Yang.
"I'm getting sick of these," said Weiss.
X paid the words only scant attention. The grimm was shaped like a giant scorpion, complete with stinger tail and seizing claws. It had no mouth, though; while it had piercing mandibles, there was no way to ingest whatever it bit. Like the Ursas, he realized. They bit purely for damage, not for sustenance.
Forces of pure destruction—just like the virus.
The monster hissed at the group before it, and Team RWBY readied its weapons with a collective air of resignation.
"Let me try this one," X said.
"Um, no offense, Mr. X," said Ruby, "but that's a real nasty grimm. It usually takes the four of us working together to take one out."
"It's big," said X, "but I've fought bigger. If it looks like I'm in trouble, you can bail me out."
The Deathstalker, evidently tired of waiting for its prey to start the fight, lashed out with its stinger, driving the point down towards X.
He wasn't there to be stung.
A quick dash to his left cleared the problem easily; jetting back let him dodge the follow-up claw sweep. The Deathstalker followed him, chittering angrily.
Another sting, as easily dodged as the first, but this time the claw was coming at the same time; X had to leap up to evade both, and the Deathstalker's claw hit its own tail for its trouble.
X touched down on the claw for only a moment, not long enough for it to realize, and used that vantage to launch himself even higher.
His targeting system flagged potential weak spots—joints, eyes, the rare points unprotected by bone armor—but he wasn't sure how effective attacking those would be. The grimm were uniform in temperature, uniform in density apart from their armor; they had a truly alien biology.
The Huntress' weapons, he reflected, were made to inflict massive trauma. That seemed like the sole sure way to get a kill. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
All those calculations completed during his ascent. By the time he reached his peak and turned to fire, he had his plan in place.
Spin Wheel.
A projectile like a wheel of spikes dropped down onto the Deathstalker's carapace. It spun crazily, trying to dig down, and not succeeding; it marred the space dead-center between rows of eyes but cracked nothing.
Tough armor. Okay, X had tools for that.
An in-air jet backwards got him to a tree trunk, letting him jump even higher off of that; but the Deathstalker, rather than chase him directly, knocked the tree down and stole X's footing away.
Lost in midair, he saw the stinger racing towards him again.
He twisted, using buster recoil to push him just enough to make it a glancing blow. His impact against the ground was almost worse. Nothing his self-repair couldn't handle.
"X!" shouted Ruby.
"He said he's got it."
"Fine… but be ready with Checkmate!"
X wanted to smile. He'd faced and felled much stronger foes than this.
The Deathstalker raised both claws to hammer him into the ground.
Rolling Shield.
Force given form fired up, met the descending claws, and burst against them, stealing their momentum. X was back on his feet before the Deathstalker realized what'd happened. Screeching in fury, it tried yet again to sting him.
X had its sting clocked, now. He stood just to the side as it passed by, close enough that the wind of its passage almost sucked him in, and grabbed hold of it. When the stinger pulled back, X rode it to its apex, and used it to launch himself even higher into the air.
Frost Shield.
What looked like a missile with an icicle tip fired down at the Deathstalker; it struck where the Spin Wheel had impacted and chilled the armor there so severely moisture from the air froze to its surface.
Ground Fire.
As he started his descent, X turned an arm into a flamethrower. Fire hot enough to ignite dirt superheated the same damaged spot in the Deathstalker's armor. The extreme cold-to-hot thermal shock cracked the bone, especially where the Spin Wheel had struck.
Spike Ball.
A crushing, spiked mass shot down into the compromised armor, shattering it. And then…
Tunneling Missile.
…X followed it, with all his own mass, momentum, and strength, concentrated on the point of a drill.
He smashed bodily through the armor, through the vaporous, shadowy interior, and back into the light on the far side.
The Giant Deathstalker gave a shriek of pain and surprise and collapsed. X dashed out from under it just before it hit the ground, but it might not have mattered; it was already dissolving.
X gave one more all-sensors sweep.
All clear.
"That… was… amazing!"
X had been wrong. There was one more wave, this one composed of trainees.
Ruby was all over him. "It was like, Rawr, and you were like, No, and it was like, Grr, and you were like, That's what you think, and it was like, Squeal, and you were like, Told you, and it was like…"
Weiss eased Ruby (still gesticulating wildly) out of the way. "I thought you said you didn't use Dust," she said accusatorially.
"I don't," he said.
"So how did you use so many different weapons and effects?"
X held up his forearm—though he'd extended his fists again, no sense being armed in polite company—and gestured at it. "Weapon Copy System," he said.
"…which is the coolest thing EVER!" said Ruby, throwing Weiss aside. "You've gotta let me look at this, it's so amazing, the sheer engineering… ack!"
"Time to chill out, Rubes," said Yang, pulling Ruby back by her cape.
"You don't understand! He has a weapon made of weapons! I just need to see it once and my life will be complete!"
"It was impressive," said Blake from X's side, away from the scuffling sisters. She was trying to sound neutral, but he wasn't fooled. "You say you've never fought grimm before, but you handled that like it was second nature."
"Thank you," said X graciously. If he took the words as compliment, they'd sound less like accusation.
"You were so modest before," she went on in the same tone. "All you said was that you could fight, but you're at least as strong as a typical Huntsman."
"Your team fought well, too," said X. "How did that Alpha claw not go right through you, Yang?"
She looked up from holding Ruby back and blinked. "I had my Aura up," she said.
"That's another thing I'll need explained," said X.
"Hold on!" said Ruby. "If you don't have Aura, how did you just walk off the Deathstalker smashing you to the ground?"
X shrugged. "I've taken much worse hits than that."
Ruby looked so excited she might combust; Blake's face was cracking from the effort of not scowling.
"But if you don't have grimm," said Weiss, clearly feeling similarly to Blake but unafraid of showing it, "what do you fight that hits that hard?"
X's comparative subroutines, resource-starved for the duration of the fight, finally managed to wedge in an alert. "Let me ask you a question as part of that," said X. "The grimm. Where do they come from?"
RWBY shared blank looks. "No one knows," said Ruby. "They're just… out there. Everywhere."
"Were any of them people?"
That made them recoil in horror. "No!" said Blake. "No, gods, no. That's… that's…"
"...the grossest thing you could have suggested," said Weiss.
"Grimm aren't just soulless," said Ruby, all the excitement knocked out of her. "They have anti-souls. We're the light, they're the dark. It's not just a metaphor. It's the truth."
"Why would you even suggest that?" said Yang.
"Because…"
The faces of dozens of Mavericks appeared in X's vision, dredged up by Recall, trying too hard to be helpful… but the point couldn't be avoided. X had seen the correlation instantly, but it seemed deeper, inescapably so, the more his subroutines chewed on it.
He felt RWBY's eyes on him, and knew there was no way to be cagey or evasive about this. Besides, they deserved better. They needed to know.
"…because I've seen something similar, from reploids lost to the Maverick Virus."
There was a long, long pause, before Blake finally spoke.
"…what."
Next time: Redirection
Chapter 7: Redirection
Chapter Text
Cinder Fall stormed into her team's dorm room. It was a relief to be somewhere she could cut loose, be free from the strain of blending in with these frivolous students and their naive notions of how the world worked.
She needed that relief more than ever.
Pretending to be a student and hiding behind a false identity was hard, but worth it to advance her goals. But now this…
Her underlings, Emerald and Mercury, reacted to her entrance with caution and fear. Emerald slid back on the surface of her bed to shrink away from Cinder's wrath; Mercury casually put a leg that had been crossed back on the ground, so both feet were under him and he could make any move necessary.
Hiding. Escaping. As if either of them could actually do those things!
No more than you could, a traitorous part of her mind whispered.
Growling her frustration, Cinder hurled her scroll onto her own bed, watched the sturdy plastic thump against the mattress and slide to a stop.
"The plan is on hold," she growled, temper escaping her. "New orders. We won't be allowed to proceed with the main plan until this… this side quest is accomplished."
"Well," said Emerald, trying to put on a brave face that came out looking like a cringe, "at least there's a way back to the main plan, right?"
"I wish," said Cinder. "Our orders are to, quote, find what changed, unquote."
"The... the world changes every day," said Emerald.
"I know that!" shouted Cinder. "This mission is impossibly vague!"
You're being jerked around, you'll never be free. She has you collared and leashed, and she's pulling you by the lead just to show you that she can.
"Was there anything to narrow it down?" said Mercury.
"'Look for something supernatural'," Cinder said. "'Something beyond the usual reality'."
"That's not much to go on," said Mercury.
"I am aware," Cinder said through gritted teeth.
…What was she doing?
Had she gotten this far by whining? Had she gotten this far wallowing in self-pity about other people's control? Had she become the woman she was now by whimpering her weakness to others who should only see her strength?
No. Absurd. Ridiculous. She was Cinder Fall, and she'd become that with precision, intent, and indomitable will. She'd cut her way to freedom and killed her way to power, and she wasn't about to stop now, no matter how that witch tried to screw with her.
She took a settling breath. She carded her fingers through lustrous black hair. She half-closed her golden eyes, focusing less on the world and more on herself. When she let out the breath she'd been holding, she felt her negativity flow out with it, leaving only a fiery resolve. "We've spent weeks cultivating the students here," she said. "We'll start with them."
"Most of those teams are still out on mission," said Mercury. "Aside from those babies in Team RWBY."
"Congratulations," said Cinder. "You just volunteered to ask that lot."
Mercury had been trained well enough not to defy or even grouse about a direct order. He looked at Cinder long enough to decide she meant it and lurched into motion.
"What about us?" said Emerald, looking far too eager. Emerald was easy to keep in line– anything that resembled affection kept her coming back for more– but Cinder didn't want to spend all her time babysitting a puppy.
"You will see what other teams are around and approach them," said Cinder. "I'll look through the systems our hacker friend has pried open for us, to see if any news has popped up there."
Emerald let a moment of disappointment escape her, then nodded. "Yes, ma'am!"
Even when Emerald was gone, though, Cinder didn't dare let the full scope of her frustration escape her. She didn't want to set off the fire alarms.
Instead, she pulled up the modified scrolls her team was using, navigated into the apps marked off by the Black Queen logo, and started doomscrolling, sifting through all the illicit information she wasn't supposed to have, looking for something– anything– that might pique her mistress' curiosity.
Anything that might end this useless, useless errand and let her get back to her real goals.
The power inside of her gnawed. It burned. Incomplete. Longing. Need.
She normally liked hunger– it kept her sharp, kept her focused– but now it was one more irritant. All her discontent stemmed from this one, unanswerable question.
What could possibly be so important that these well-made plans, years in the making, had to wait?
"The Maverick Virus…"
RWBY and X were back in Ozpin's office. Blake was standing on the far side of her team from X, angled so they were between her and the alien. Maximum distance.
Gods, she was such a coward.
"That's right," said X gravely. "The virus infects reploids—replica androids—along with other forms of high technology. The mechaniloids we use for unskilled labor, the cybernetics we use to support plant growth, any computer system of any sophistication is fair game. But primarily, it targets reploids."
"And what does it do to them?" asked Ozpin. He was sitting in a guarded posture, his hands arched in front of his face. His eyes were shrewd, cautious, taking in every word X said.
"In its early stages, it alters the reploid's decision making," said X. "It amplifies aggression and hostility. It instills a growing hatred for humanity. As the virus progresses, the reploid begins to take harmful actions: sabotage, infiltration, assassination, rebellion. Actions that further the virus' goals of spreading itself and killing humans. In its terminal stage, the virus usurps control completely. The reploid goes into a berserker rage, targeting humans if it can find them, or any other lifeform if not. The rage is… unrecoverable. It drives the host until they fall apart… or are put down."
"That's awful," said Ruby as she twisted her hands together. It was a brutal understatement, in Blake's opinion.
Anti-Faunus bigots loved to talk about how Faunus were slaves to their instincts. It wasn't true, or at least not any more true than it was for humans (bigotry, after all, was just a perverted form of humans' herd instinct), but even so, the threat, the accusation drove Blake to be self-consciously intellectual.
This virus could tear all that down, bring out the very worst in a person's psyche.
Its very existence was atrocity.
"The younger and less mature the reploid," X went on, "the faster the virus takes hold. In a way, that's merciful. Older reploids can fight the virus for longer, but they never win. It just means that, when they get to where they're doing the virus' bidding, they display as uninfected. They even believe it. That makes them far more dangerous."
"How old is 'older'?" asked Ozpin pointedly.
Something passed between Ozpin and X, something Blake wasn't equipped to understand, before X sighed. "The average reploid lifespan is under two years."
"Two years!" said Yang.
"Very few reploids survive longer than five," X went on.
Blake made the connection. "So when you said 'yes and no' about whether Earth uses child soldiers…"
X nodded, looking like the action might break him. "The Maverick Hunters always need more bodies. We take in some volunteers, but most of us are purpose-built. The newbuilts come to us when they're only weeks old. They have some programmed maturity, they can think rationally. But emotionally? Experientially? They're babies."
Blake felt sick.
Unlike her teammates, she didn't have to imagine children being thrust into a struggle far too big for them. Being dropped into a conflict she couldn't grasp the dimensions of, knowing only the dire necessity that the battle be waged…
Blake Belladonna understood that all too well.
"So that's why you built the portal!" said Ruby, the brightness of her eyes a stark contrast to the increasing gloom inside the office (Ozpin had tinted the windows for privacy). "You were looking for help!"
"No," said X. "We were looking to escape. To run away."
That, too, Blake knew only too well. She swayed on her feet, her finely-tuned sense of balance wavering on her.
Ozpin's eyes narrowed. "You can't beat the virus any more than we can beat the grimm."
"No."
"And you brought it here?" said Weiss with alarm. "How do you know you're not infected?"
X shrugged. "I'm immune. We're not sure why. But we never would have sent an explorer who might be infected. Spreading the virus to our escape world would defeat the purpose."
"Hold up," said Yang. "We've seen you fight, and you're pretty ridiculous. And you're immune to the virus? Why can't you just beat it straight-up?"
"It's like your grimm," said X. "I can fight the virus, but it gets everywhere, more places than I can ever be. We have other Maverick Hunters, sure, but those other Maverick Hunters can be infected by the virus, and turned Hunters are the worst Mavericks."
Yang winced. "Yeah, getting hit by your own best shot sucks, I get that."
"The only sure way to stamp out the virus would be to destroy any system that could possibly host it. But without environmental control, botanical growth assistance, pollution cleanup, and other high-tech systems, the Earth would become uninhabitable. Either way, everyone dies. We're trapped."
Ozpin sighed. "I feel for your predicament. I do. But you must realize by now that Remnant is as dangerous as Earth, just in different ways. If you brought your people here… by the by, how many people would we be talking about?"
"Around two billion," said X.
Everyone in the room stared at X, except for Blake, who was trying her best not to throw up.
"That's more than quadruple Remnant's total population," said Weiss. "There's space for all those people, but not infrastructure, because so much of Remnant is undeveloped. Even an eighth of your refugees would swamp us."
"And if the famine didn't kill us," said Ozpin, "that many people with that much negativity would bring the grimm down on us like a tidal wave."
X closed his eyes. "I see."
His posture didn't change, but Blake could feel what he meant all the same. There's no escape for us here. My mission failed.
We're doomed.
He collected himself with the resigned air of a man used to bad news. Blake had a fleeting, distant memory of her father. "I'll contact my mission control and let them know."
"…wait. That's it?"
Ruby had stepped forward. Her frowning face swiveled between X and Ozpin. "People need our help and we're just gonna say 'nope'?"
"One of the unfortunate truths of our profession," said Ozpin, "is that we can't help everyone."
"It sounds like you don't want to help anyone," Ruby blurted.
No one spoke; her words hung in the air, echoing in the closed space. Blake forced herself to look up. Ruby looked surprised at her own audacity; Weiss was gaping in horror; Yang was looking on with pride… though it was even odds whether Yang shared Ruby's sentiment or just enjoyed sticking it to The Man.
"Uh… sir?" Ruby said, visibly shrinking. "Yeah, I just mouthed off too much, didn't I?"
Ozpin's mouth was open when X cut across. "She might have a point."
Ozpin recovered in a blink, leaving Blake no clues as to what he might have said. "What do you mean?"
X seemed to struggle with the words. "It… it was probably always a pipe dream, to think we could save everyone. Logistically speaking, evacuating a planet would be impossible, especially once the virus figures out what we're doing, and it will. It always does. But… that doesn't mean we can't save some humans, some part of Earth.
"We're on a death spiral to extinction. Getting anyone away from that is victory."
"And Earth has technology we don't," said Weiss, stepping forward to be shoulder-to-shoulder with Ruby. "That tech would let us develop Remnant better. It'd help us, and let us take more of their people safely."
"And people making the move in any real numbers would relieve some of the burden on Earth," said X. "Delay the spiral a bit more."
Ozpin's face was blank, his eyes out of focus, like he was looking at something no one else could see. After several seconds, he said, "It's worth discussing. Understand, I cannot speak for the other Kingdoms—I can barely speak for Vale—and the scale of what we're suggesting is… staggering. There are others I'll need to talk to before we can go further."
"Of course," said X with, in Blake's opinion, a lot of grace. "We're talking about the fates of two worlds. It's not something you can just rush into."
Ozpin nodded, and suddenly seemed very, very old. "While you wait, you deserve some hospitality. What do you need in those terms?"
X gestured at his backpack—the one he hadn't left behind on Patch, Blake realized. "This has all I need to sustain myself for up to a week. Less, if I fight more."
"I'm going to guess, because the alternative would be too easy, that you can't recharge using Dust?"
"Not unless you're willing to bring in a team of engineers to work on bridging the tech gap."
"Maybe later." Ozpin pushed some buttons on his desk. "I'll make arrangements to give you a place to stay here at Beacon. I'll send word through Miss Rose once they're prepared."
"Thank you," said X.
"In the meantime," Ozpin went on, "Miss Rose, please ensure our guest has whatever hospitality he requires. Help him learn more about Remnant."
Great. Just what Blake needed, more time with the alien that was rubbing her all the wrong ways, but Ruby was already bopping out, "Yes, sir!" with a great big smile.
"We will talk more later," said Ozpin with a respectful nod at X.
"I look forward to it," said X.
Blake led the way to the elevator, less because she was eager and more because she didn't want to look at any of it any longer.
It wasn't until she was in the elevator that she realized she didn't know why she was so angry, why her emotions were running so hot.
But they were, and she was sure there was a reason.
She just had to think on why they were…
"Let's go, Mr. X!"
"Please don't call me that."
…aaaand she wouldn't be able to think for a while yet. Aadfdasf.
Alert.
Alia's eyes snapped to the words, to the report coming in, to the video playing before her.
Another one. Another Maverick.
Not a reploid, this time—a mechaniloid, construction equipment, something only barely smart enough for the virus to infect… but that also meant it had no resistance to the virus if it was successfully infected. It would go straight to slaughtering.
She had video: a combination bulldozer-shovel excavator was smashing its way through its peers at a work site. If there were human workers there, it didn't seem to notice them, it was headed elsewhere…
Her eyes flit about a map, tracking the Maverick and looking for its target in parallel.
There. A human shantytown, full of people too poor to buy space in the protected shelters below ground. Three kilometers away.
The excavator rumbled onto a road and turned in the direction of the shantytown. It was five minutes out, tops.
She started a timer as her attention shifted. What forces might be close by? No… no… no. Every search was coming up empty. Human police reportedly had a presence there, but even if that was true (and it was ~73% likely to be untrue), human police almost never succeeded in stopping Mavericks.
Military? None.
Local Hunters or other forces, even militias? None.
4:35 remaining.
Did the shantytown have any chance to protect itself? She surveyed it again. Very, very slim chance. Unlikely anyone there had good enough weapons in the first place (~33%), unlikely they had training or experience to fight a Maverick successfully (~17%), unlikely she'd even be able to contact them to warn them (~20%) in time for them to respond before casualties occurred (~45%)…
99.995% chance of human casualties without Hunter intervention.
4:15 remaining.
She scaled out and searched for local Hunter forces. There, a hit! …except not really. The closest Hunters were 120 kilometers away, with no transport available at their ops site, and they were already engaged in a sweep. Pulling them out would take time, getting a transport to them would take more time, 3:55 remaining, no good.
She zoomed out more.
There. A Hunter team on hot standby, ready to deploy, with transport. 200 kilometers out.
200 kilometers.
3:45 remaining.
Impossible.
She dialed them up. "Hunter standby team Charlie, mission incoming."
"Roger," came the snappy reply—good form, she approved. "Coordinates?"
She relayed them.
"Roger. We can be on-site in fourteen minutes."
Impossible. How much of the shantytown could the Maverick destroy in that time? How many people could it kill?
Far, far too many.
Impossible.
Unless…
3:27 remaining.
There was a way to move faster. A way to make it to the camp before the Maverick.
Teleportation.
The teleport grid was weaker in that sector, though, fewer satellites covering it (some had been destroyed in the Eurasia cataclysm), and one of the survivors had a damaged power supply and wasn't reliable.
The Hunters could teleport… but the probability of a mishap…
3:15 remaining.
Did she dare risk them?
How many Hunters could she dare risk like this? Would she dare have X or Zero teleport with those odds for anything less than an apocalyptic threat?
3:08.
How many Hunters did she dare risk today, to save these lives? If they lost more Hunters to accidents, or to the Mavericks themselves, didn't that defeat their ability to save more lives in the future? At what point were they terminally weakened? At what point were they stretched so thin they broke?
Too, too thin.
Were they there already?
Where was X?
2:59.
Could she desist? Could she watch this Maverick slaughter a whole community when she could have stopped it? Or would she be so cowardly as to kill the feed, pretend it wasn't happening when she couldn't see it?
2:53.
"Teleportation authorized," she transmitted.
2:50.
"Request confirmation."
2:48.
"Confirmed," she said firmly. "Teleportation authorized. Coordinates incoming."
"Roger."
2:44.
Four transponders disappeared from her screen.
2:42.
Three transponders reappeared.
2:37.
"Alastor is gone! Repeat, gone!"
Alia felt the words like a stab. "Understood," she said, forcing her voice to be steady. "Engage the enemy."
"…roger."
Her hands slipped away from her console, like her servos and hydraulics no longer had the power to defy gravity and keep them raised. She watched as the remaining Hunters maneuvered towards the Maverick—could see plain as day the hole in their ranks, the place someone was expected to be but wasn't.
No one knew what happened to victims of teleportation mishaps. Even 'mishap' was a general word, deliberately vague to conceal the uncertainty at play. Were the victims flung out into space? Materialized into solid rock? De-atomized and scattered across the planet?
The only certainty was that the victims were never, ever seen again.
The Hunters engaged the Maverick. It didn't take them long—they were professionals, and their target was just animate construction machinery guided by the stupidest of brains. It didn't have a chance.
She canceled the timer in her head. It was not a relief.
"Target… target destroyed," came the call.
"Confirmed," said Alia, looking at her feed. "Maverick origin is west-northwest along the road, 1.4 kilometers. Investigate possible secondary infections."
"Roger."
The three Maverick Hunters rallied themselves and moved along, tracing the Maverick's path. They moved on without their fourth, who, thanks to Alia, was gone.
Another unsung hero on a long, long roll of them. No heroic death, no last stand, no epic sacrifice. Killed by a fluke, by an unlucky roll of the dice.
Killed by Alia and her paucity of choices, which left her no option but to roll those dice again and again and again, wagering lives every time.
The thoughts caused a physical reaction. A part of Alia's logic center wondered, in the detached sense it used, if this was what nausea felt like. The rest of her was too overwhelmed with sensation to think.
"Keep it up."
Alia's tactical subroutines were not field Hunter-level. She hadn't noticed Signas' approach until he spoke to her. She couldn't help her jerk away in surprise.
"Don't stop doing your job," he said, untroubled by her reaction. "You're keeping us alive. Keep at it."
Oh. He was being encouraging.
For all the good that did.
"Sir, Al… Alastor…"
"I know, Alia. I know. We do the best we can, and we press on. I could ask for no one better than you. Keep them coming."
That…
Her logic center insisted it made no difference—the facts were what the facts were—but she nevertheless felt the slightest uncoiling in her core. "Yes, sir."
He swept past her, moving to another navigator, another mission, another another another—
She tried, only somewhat successfully, to refocus on cleanup for the mission. Because a thought had bubbled up and wouldn't leave her alone.
Where was X?
"Well, that wasn't so bad," said Ruby.
"Were we part of the same conversation?" said Weiss.
"It's like we said," said Ruby as her team led X away from the Emerald Tower. "This is a place to learn about the fight against the grimm. So now he gets to learn."
"I suppose," said Weiss. "Although it begs the question: where do you want to start? Dust, Aura, Grimm?"
"Yes," said X.
Weiss huffed at him; Yang laughed.
"I have to learn it all," he said. "Is there an efficient way to study it all at once?"
"We could go back to the Forest, I guess," said Ruby.
"That's not exactly a controlled environment," said Weiss.
"You don't have grimm to study up here?" said X, before realization came over him. "They disintegrate when they die."
"And if they're captured, they smash themselves to death trying to escape," said Blake. "We know a lot less about them than we should for how much time we spend fighting them."
"Earth doesn't have much leg to stand on," said X. "It took us three wars before we even knew the Maverick Virus existed."
"What did you think it was before that?" said Weiss.
"A combination of system errors, poor quality control, and extremely bad life choices."
"If you're calling these 'wars'," said Weiss with a frown, "it implies lots of participants. A lot more than you could explain by malfunction alone."
"That's exactly what I kept saying!" said X. "I told them there was more to it. And then I got told to stay in my lane."
"Well," said Ruby, "even if we don't know everything about the grimm, we at least know they're the enemy and how to fight them. And we fight them with weapons and Dust and Aura and semblances."
"That's another new term," said X.
"He's an alien, remember?" said Yang. "All of this is new."
"I don't want to explain it with words..." started Ruby.
"I could," said Weiss.
"...so let's show him a bunch of things at once," said Ruby, her face lighting up. She pointed an arm. "Let's head to the combat theater for a good spar."
"This might be the one time of year we can get a sparring room on no notice," said Blake. "What with so many teams out on mission."
"That's what I'm saying," said Ruby proudly as she set off in the direction she'd pointed. "We have to wait for Professor Ozpin to give you a room anyway, so for now, let's use this time to share."
"Oh," said Yang, "hey, Mercury."
Mercury was holding up his scroll and staring at it intently. He gave a grunt instead of words.
"Why isn't your team on mission?" said Ruby. "Or did you just get done that fast?"
Mercury seemed to startle. He pocketed his scroll, followed by his hands. "Nah, our fourth team member still hasn't gotten here, so they'll probably end up canceling our mission."
"Too bad," said Yang with a grin. "Our mission was… smashing!"
Weiss slumped over; Mercury grunted and walked away in a slouch.
"What, no one?" said Yang, scanning around with a grin. "Not even a chuckle?"
"Not. Even," said Weiss.
"As if Mercury needed an excuse to buzz off," said Blake. "He makes Weiss look friendly."
"Hey!"
"Emerald says he's just socially awkward," said Ruby.
"I'm not sure if that's explanation or just description," said Blake.
"Whichever," said Ruby, clearly not appreciating the difference. "But we're not going to worry about him right now, because we have a bigger question to ask: who's going to do the spar for our guest?"
"Weiss and me," said Yang.
"Weiss and I," corrected Weiss.
"But... you are Weiss," said Ruby in confusion.
Weiss rolled her eyes; Yang just grinned. "But why us?" Weiss insisted.
"You're the one who uses Dust and semblance most of any of us," said Yang. "If we're trying to show off what those things can do, that's the most show-offy way."
"Which means you nominated yourself to show off Aura?" said X.
"Nah," said Yang, "I just wanted the chance to rough up the Ice Queen here."
"You wish," said Weiss.
"Hey, that's the attitude I'm looking for!"
"It's decided, then," said Ruby as they approached their destination. "Let's do this."
X could see now why Ruby had called this the "combat theater". The sparring area looked like a large stage for a play, while seating was high above so that onlookers could see down to catch all the details of the fight.
"Alright," said Ruby from the side of the stage. A screen well above the combatants lit up, showing Yang and Weiss' names, and below each a bar labeled 0 to 100%; both bars displayed green. "We're all ready to go."
"Finally," said Yang, who was stretching as an excuse to make provocative poses. (X, lacking human hormones and anatomy, didn't appreciate the poses even if he recognized their purpose; he wondered if Weiss did). Weiss, in contrast, was standing still on her side of the stage, studying Yang intently. Simulating the fight in her mind, X was pretty sure, unless she was being distracted.
Which might have been Yang's goal. The battle had already begun, it seemed.
X looked up at the bars on the screen. "Those are Aura meters, then?"
"That's right," said Blake. "Huntress-model scrolls can track the user's Aura, and we transmit that data to our teammates and, sometimes, displays like that."
"Hm," said X. "Maverick Hunters don't usually need to do that. Most Hunters aren't likely to run low on power during a single fight, so it's more of a strategic concern than a tactical one."
"'Most'?" said Blake.
"Zero and I have powerful self-repair systems. They're power-hungry, but they let us survive and recover from battle damage."
Blake's eyes widened. "And the other Maverick Hunters? What happens when they take that kind of battle damage?"
"We're ready to get started," said Ruby as she approached where X and Blake were seated. X nodded at her and looked down at the stage (though he doubted Blake was fooled by this weak evasion). Ruby, too, looked to the stage and called out. "You two wanna do tournament rules?"
"Let's only go to 75%," Weiss said. "This is just a demonstration, after all, not an all-out brawl."
"You mean you don't want my semblance involved," said Yang with a grin. That word again—semblance! It was starting to annoy X. He understood and valued jargon, but not jargon he didn't know.
Well, that was the point of this exhibition: to learn the rules.
"75% it is," said Ruby, cutting off Weiss' retort. "Three… two… one… begin!"
Yang started sliding towards Weiss, keeping her stance balanced, not bending into a run. That suggested respect for her opponent's abilities.
Weiss didn't move at first, except for a revolving chamber in the hilt of her rapier. Each cell in the chamber was a different color. Some sort of selector? But not for ammunition, probably, for—
Weiss extended her rapier, and a howling, localized windstorm blew at Yang.
-Dust. Elemental power, they'd said… but not elements like carbon or hydrogen. The classical, literary elements. At least four species existed, then, but X had spotted more than four chambers in Weiss' selector…
The wind was strong enough to stall Yang out completely. She lowered herself to one knee, with one hand partially blocking her face, keeping her eyes on Weiss.
X saw a shape appearing beneath Yang, resisted the urge to call out the danger, but Yang rolled away from the shape without the help. X saw its full form: it was an intricate, black, circumscribed snowflake, spinning in place as its diameter grew; the same shape Weiss had conjured to immobilize the Alpha Beowolf. X pinged it with radar and got back the same impossible result: it had no depth, no physical presence, and didn't appear in IR at all, but there it was.
It glowed for a moment, but Weiss swiped her hand away and the shape disappeared. Keeping her rapier pointed at Yang to keep the wind raging, Weiss flicked her fingers at points in the air around Yang. At each gesture, a new snowflake appeared, these ones white. Ah, and those were the shapes Weiss had used as platforms in the Forest. Was that the plan again?
Either way, Yang wasn't a fan. She stood, fired from both her gauntlets… down at the stage. The recoil helped launch her into the air; the wind caught her and carried her out of the circle.
Weiss made a noise like tch, killed her windstorm, and again gestured to dismiss the snowflakes. That was when X noticed: Weiss' Aura meter had dipped below 100%. Not by much, but still.
Hadn't Yang said that Aura was a defense?
Once more, Yang slid cautiously towards Weiss rather than charging her, despite (as far as X could tell) having only short-ranged weapons. "She's taking her time," said X.
"Yep," said Ruby, popping the 'p'. "She's sparred with Weiss a ton, so they know each other's moves. They know this can end in a moment if they're not careful."
"75% is a high number," Blake said quietly as she watched with unblinking eyes. "A few good hits can cost you the match."
As the seconds ticked on with Weiss and Yang measuring each other, Weiss' Aura gage slowly refilled, edging back up towards 100%. Perhaps Yang realized this; perhaps she saw what she thought was an opening. Either way, she stepped forward, throwing her arms behind her in the same motion, before firing with both gauntlets; the recoil and the lunge off a powerful thigh catapulted her forward, similar in net effect to X's dash boots.
It also, unfortunately, left her weapons behind her for a split second, and Weiss, rather than fade back to control range, countered instead… and she was faster than Yang.
The point of her rapier struck Yang's chest. There was a shimmer of energy as the point failed to penetrate her defenses—her Aura, X recognized—and was shunted aside by the momentum of the two girls. Now at point-blank range, Yang did a sloppy high kick that Weiss easily ducked under… but a shot from Yang's gauntlets spun her around fast as lightning, and a right hook crashed down on Weiss like a thunderbolt.
Weiss raised a hand and another snowflake-symbol started to take shape between her and Yang. No good, the blow arrived first. Punch and shotgun blast crashed through the symbol (which shattered to nothing), sent Weiss flying backwards several meters, and took a chunk from her Aura.
Yang chased after her.
The rapier's chamber spun again. X tracked the colors that came up: blue and white. More wind, then?
No, he realized as Weiss pointed at the ground between her and the bull-rushing Yang. Not wind. Ice.
Yang saw it coming and sprang high over the patch of ice that raced across the stage, and Weiss seized her chance while Yang's arc was predictable. One swipe of her rapier hit Yang in the legs, making her tumble in mid-air. She landed on her back, and Weiss flicked her again before escaping.
A piercing whistle sounded from next to X; he realized it was from Ruby. How hadn't he seen it coming? He was supposed to have better awareness than that! A quick diagnostic resulted in the sheepish admission from Tactical that it had noticed the whistle, but hadn't thought it important, not compared to watching the fight.
Fair.
"That's the match!" said Ruby after pulling the whistle from her mouth. "Oh, sorry, Blake."
Blake was covering her cat ears with her hands but, unfortunately, was unable to cover her human ears at the same time. "I thought I got rid of all of those," she mumbled.
Ruby gasped. "So it was you! Betrayer!"
X, feeling embarrassed, looked away from Blake and Ruby and focused on Yang and Weiss. Despite dishing and taking hits that would have pulped normal humans, they were barely breathing hard, and were good-naturedly bantering as they walked up into the stands.
"…you can't play keep-away forever," said Yang.
"I don't have to," said Weiss. "I only need to play keep-away until I can create an opening. Then it's over."
Yang made a noise like pfft. "One opening's only enough in a spar like this, which doesn't go long enough for my semblance to matter, as opposed to yours, which you can use from the jump."
"Semblances are different from person to person, then?" said X.
"Yep!" said Ruby. "Aura is our souls, and semblances are an expression of those souls."
"Ah, so that's why Weiss using her semblance depleted her Aura."
"Hey, good for noticing," said Ruby. "You don't miss a trick, do you?"
X decided against rubbing in just how much combat he'd seen, and how that had made being observant a survival behavior. He gave a diffident shrug.
"That's also why our semblances are unique," said Yang. "Well, other than Ice Queen over here."
Weiss stuck her nose higher into the air. "The Schnee semblance is hereditary," she said, "which is exceptionally rare. It also happens to be powerful and versatile."
"As if you needed more reasons to feel important," said Blake in an undertone possibly only X caught.
"So… you all are able to drain your defenses to activate unique powers," X said.
"That's one way of putting it, I guess," said Ruby.
For a moment, X had to wonder at the similarities between Beacon Academy and Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, but he knew that reference would be lost on them. "That's like a lot of our purpose-built Hunters. Most of our Hunters are generalists, but others are built around one or two uncommon weapons systems."
"They can't use the Weapon Copy System?" said Ruby, her eyes lighting up again.
"That system is unique to me. It's… special."
It was a gross understatement. Dr. Cain, the scientist who'd found X and built the original reploids derived from X's design, had been fond of referring to the Weapon Copy System as "PFM". X was glad it was so poorly understood. This way, no other reploid could be built with it, and so that endlessly versatile system would never find its way into the virus' arsenal.
Thoughts of Dr. Cain filled X with melancholy all over again…
No. No time for that.
Refocus.
"Oh," said Ruby, sounding like she understood. "So that's like your semblance."
"I guess you could say that," said X. "It's unique to me, and it drains my energy to use." He typically budgeted different energy stores for self-repair and weapons, but it all came from the same reserves in the end. "I'm curious what sort of semblances are possible. I saw Weiss', but what about the rest of you?"
He knew at once he'd said something wrong. The girls did variations on a theme of wincing.
"That's kinda… private," said Ruby.
"Intimate, even," said Weiss. "Some semblances can't be hidden, like mine, and having it is a marker of who I am. But for other people…"
"The semblance is the power of the soul," said Blake, who'd wrapped her arms around herself and was looking down and away, keeping her gaze far away from X's. "For many people, it's just as private. It's up to them to share or not, but it's…"
"…kinda gross to ask," Yang finished.
"I'm sorry," he said, bowing his head penitently. "I won't do it again."
"No biggie," said Ruby nervously. "You're learning, right? We're all learning. And learning is good."
Blake cringed. "Can you try twenty percent less hard?"
"I… don't think I'd know how?"
"Anyway," said Yang, "if someone shares their semblance with you, that's different. For some people, it's just explaining what everyone can see," she gestured at Weiss, "but for others, telling might be a big sign of trust."
"Like with Pyrrha," said Ruby. "Ooh, that reminds me… we should probably keep Team JNPR away from X."
"Why?" said X.
"Oh, no reason," said Ruby. She was, X observed, a really, really bad liar.
"Is there any limit to what semblances can do?" said X.
"Sort-of?" said Ruby. "There are all kinds. Some are totally passive, some are super niche, and some aren't really that useful at all. I knew a kid back at Signal, his semblance just helped him concentrate really hard. Great when taking a test, not so great in combat."
X nodded. "Where losing your situational awareness can be fatal."
"Yeah. But semblances can only be so strong, if that's what you mean. And usually, the stronger your semblance, the more Aura it takes out of you."
"I've had to practice quite a bit for my glyphs to not drain me too badly," said Weiss. "And I still have to be measured and tactical about using them. If I can win a fight with swordsmanship alone, that's the safest way to shepherd my resources."
"Like me with my buster," said X. "Any use of the Weapon Copy System is a drain. The buster is, too, but it's a far more efficient way to convert energy to damage than my copied weapons."
"Oh!" said Ruby. "So that's why you only used the buster against the Ursai, but then you broke out the exotic stuff against the Giant Deathstalker!"
X smiled. "You know, I was worried for a time about how different our tech bases were. It's interesting to see how we eventually end up with similar outcomes by different routes."
"So long as it helps you kick ass," said Yang.
There was a beep from Ruby's waist. She grabbed a device that reminded X of old-style smart phones. "Oh. Looks like Professor Ozpin got you a place to stay. Tower… Four?" She looked at her teammates. "Anyone ever been to Tower Four before?"
"I don't know what half the buildings on campus are for," said Yang. "It'd be weirder if he was posted up in, like, the dorms, wouldn't it?"
"I guess," said Ruby as she looked at X. "We need to get you a scroll."
They called their phones scrolls?
It was funny—in a world where people manifested their souls to fight off emotion-chasing shadow demons, somehow what they called their personal devices was what felt most uncanny.
"It would be handy to have one," he allowed. He'd never needed a phone on Earth, he'd had more capable systems built-in, but Remnant's networks used a different tech base. A scroll could be a bridge.
"We'll ask Professor Ozpin about that later," said Ruby. "For now, let's get you set up."
Next time: Working to Live
Chapter 8: Working to Live
Chapter Text
"Zero… my masterpiece."
"Who are you?"
"After him! He is my nemesis. Our rivalry is what gives me motivation in life. Now go, destroy him. That's an order!"
"But… who are you—augh!"
Zero's eyes flew open.
His recharge tube was opening around him, and his Tactical subroutine—ever vigilant, never quiet—had demanded higher consciousness' attention to the change in conditions.
It had the same net effect as setting an alarm, just with paranoia as the bell.
Zero did a quick system rundown. Charge state: full. Repairs: all clear. Combat functionality: 100%.
With annoyance, he queried the subroutine he'd clumsily written for himself, the one assessing non-combat functionality. It was supposed to report automatically at times like this, but it never did…
Non-combat functionality: 6?7*%#.
He simulated a sigh. There was no way to know if the program was the problem, or if the program was faithfully assessing the disaster area that was Zero's electronic brain.
X didn't have nightmares, that was for sure.
X never had nightmares that were memories in a thin disguise.
Zero felt himself skirting the edge of something and backed away.
I thought I fulfilled my mission. I did everything you asked.
I did it. I ended him.
Why am I still like this?
…and backed away.
"Navigator," he radioed as he hopped out of his tube, "Zero is ready for new assignment."
"Only ninety seconds after your recharge time ended," came Alia's voice over his built-in comms. Was that sarcasm from her? It might be sarcasm. He never could tell for sure.
"I'm ready," he affirmed. And it was true. The sooner he got back to what he was good at, the better.
"You'll join ready response team two."
He felt a surge of frustration and apprehension. "You're not sending me into action right away?"
"We have no ongoing incidents right now," said Alia patiently. "Putting you in the ready response team gives you first dibs on the next fight. The next report of Mavericks we get in the northeast hemi-demi, you'll respond."
That was… good enough, he supposed. Better than being called off completely. "Roger."
He was in the Ready Room almost before his talk with Alia was over. There were three Hunters in the room already. Tactical stole system resources to analyze them.
One: converted humanoid civilian reploid with modular armor and no built-in weaponry, external only. Would have to retrieve buster from weapons rack before any threat is posed. Can leave to last in battle. Danger of attack: 1.
Two: combat feraloid, based on bison. Below average speed, above average power. No maneuverability in a tight, enclosed space like this, but its large size limits our maneuverability, too. Horns augmented with lasers, hooves with boosters. Danger of attack: 2.
Three: humanoid combat reploid. Micro-missiles in forearms, limited hover capability, above average armor. Danger of attack: 2.
Satisfied that he could survive even the most backstabby ambush, Tactical reduced its resource consumption, and Zero navigated to the far wall.
"Will you be joining us, sir?" said… the bison. (Zero had precious little uncorrupted memory to spare for names.)
"That's right," said Zero. "I'm with you on standby. I'll deploy when you do."
"Understood."
Zero turned his attention to a nearby screen, where he started to read the latest situation reports on Maverick activity, virus density, and Hunter operations. Tactical kept its share of resources, though, and used them to monitor the other Hunters.
Including their conversation, whispered though it was.
"The Red Demon is deploying with us? We're toast, aren't we?"
"No way. Staying behind him is the safest place to be."
"You're all pyrite."
"It's true. Zero's a virus-immune close-combat monster. He dives in first, every time. All we have to do is support him from a distance and stay out of his way, and he'll do the heavy lifting. Look, I can show you survival rates. They're way higher for any unit Zero deploys with."
"Does that include after he… you know…"
"'You know' what?"
"Died? Again?"
"He didn't die, he's right there."
"So why's his service record expunged?"
"I don't think it was expunged, it's just that the Mavericks hit the Base during the Second War, and then everything went wrong during the Fifth War and we lost track of things. Data got corrupted, probably."
"That's wishful thinking."
"Hey, hey, you not being able to see his service record doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it."
"I don't know. There's a video clip that's been going around…"
"What kind of clip?"
"They say it's a message Zero sent to Hunter Base during the Fifth War. They say he changed in it, that he was different."
"They, they, they. You haven't even seen it, have you?"
"Well, no, but I know people who have."
"Sure you do."
"I'm telling you, he went full Red Demon again!"
"You're just repeating rumors and hearsay. Get 'em outta here."
"Okay, you know what? You can deploy with him, then."
"Hate to break it to you, buddy, but we're both deploying with him, like it or not."
"You mean he's deploying with us. And that's the thing, isn't it?"
"Whaddya mean?"
"He goes on twice as many missions as anyone else. He goes looking for trouble, and he usually finds some. He's always in the middle of stuff."
"So?"
"Don't you think it's pretty, you know, demonic that he's always somewhere he can kill someone?"
Zero pushed away from the terminal and turned to the other Maverick Hunters. They froze in place, the way trespassers often did when caught.
Zero wanted to enter the conversation, wanted to say something, but what could he say?
Too many of their words had been true.
Red light washed over the room as a klaxon chimed. "Maverick incident," came a voice over the nearby speaker. "Ready team to deploy."
"Standing by," said Zero, transmitting via his internal comms, but enunciating as well for the benefit of the nearby Hunters. All three of them were staring at him with their mouths open.
"Teleportation is authorized. Coordinates…"
"Confirmed," said Zero as he ran the numbers against his teleport client and got good signal. "Deploying."
In the moments before he dematerialized, he looked at the other Hunters. Two hadn't moved, while the third had edged away from him, and none of them looked any more combat ready than they'd been.
Were they even coming?
He wondered if they shouldn't, if they should stay here. If they didn't go, after all, there was much less risk that they'd die.
And it left more killing for Zero.
Light blazed around him, and Zero blitzed into battle.
"Huh. I guess this is Tower Four?"
X was hardly more impressed than Yang. The ground floor was generic white tile all the way to flavorless beige walls; it was nothing but a way to get to the elevator at the far side. That elevator was equally unadorned, tan carpet, wood-panel walls, identical to (possibly) thousands like it. The only remarkable part was the small numberpad above the floor select buttons.
"Hold on, let's see…" said Ruby, bringing up her scroll and the message she'd received from… Ozpin, X supposed, if Ozpin was that intimately involved in these things. Hm… he wondered if Ozpin trusted the discretion of his subordinates enough to work through them on these things. Or were there matters he trusted only to himself?
More things for his modeling software to chew on. It had enough tasks in its queue to last straight on to Judgment Day.
A nasty noise came from the keypad. "Whoops," said Ruby, "fat fingers… hold on… there we go." The second time it chimed at her, she selected the top floor, and the elevator ascended.
The top floor was furnished like a combination office and bedroom. A single bed, with sheets but no pillow, was on the far side below a set of shutters blocking out the window. A desk with what had to be a computer monitor on it stood to the left; to the right was a standing closet atop a set of drawers.
It seemed, he thought, like a private retreat. Someone might come here to find privacy without going away, to achieve solitude without travel.
If this was Ozpin's space, what did that mean?
If it was a space Ozpin kept ready for others, what did that mean?
"This is weird," said Ruby. "Like, not weird by itself, just like… weird that it's here. We already have dorms, you know?"
"Maybe it's for visitors," said Weiss.
"They keep spare rooms in the faculty dorms for that," said Yang. "Itinerant Huntsmen come through there all the time."
"Well, I guess it's nice we have it," said Ruby, "since now X can have it. And I guess it's a little more private than the faculty dorms?"
"A little," said X. "Thank you for all your help, Team RWBY."
Ruby blinked. "Are… are you done with us?"
X picked up her disappointment, felt her sense of rejection. Piteous, if correct; he was trying to get her and her team clear. Still, no need to be rude about it.
"I'm afraid I won't be very interesting," he said as he took his backpack off. Every eye went to it, which was unsurprising; curiosity, it seemed, was as strong in Remnant humans as it was in Earth's humans. He took out one of the E-tanks. "I'll be using this to recharge, but it'll take a while. We engineered these for maximum capacity, but they wound up with a low charging rate. I won't be going very far once I'm plugged in."
"Oh," said Ruby, perking up. "Yeah, I guess it'd be boring for you to watch us sleep, huh?"
"It would," said X. "But I promise not to go anywhere unescorted unless your Headmaster asks me to, so you can catch up with me in the morning."
"It's not that late, our bedtime isn't for…" said Ruby as she looked at her scroll. And blinked. "What."
"I guess the day got away from us a little," said Yang. "I mean, look at us! We traveled to Patch, found an alien, took him to our leader, pounded some grimm in the forest, found out about a whole different planet, and then clobbered each other as a teaching tool. Even by Team RWBY standards, that's a busy day."
"Hopefully the dining hall's still open," said Blake as she turned for the elevator.
"If it's not, we can have Nora raid the kitchens," said Yang.
"Nora's on mission, remember?" said Ruby. "Wait… what do you mean, 'raid the kitchens'?"
"See you tomorrow, X!" said Yang as she bodied Ruby into the open elevator.
"Nuh-uh, you're not getting away from this, you're gonna tell me—"
The elevator sealed.
X's tactical subroutines at last started to spin down.
Not that he thought Team RWBY would attack him at any moment, but, well… the stakes were so high, and they were genuine threats, so if they did…
Gosh, this was Zero's type of reasoning.
The thought made him wistful as he stared at where RWBY had been. They were children, not professionals yet, and maybe their seniors had it differently… but they had time for frivolity. For hijinks. Maybe even for shenanigans.
X was jealous.
Even if he'd had time for that on Earth, which he didn't, who else would have been inclined? Who was close enough to X to be part of such things? He had deep working relationships with the Hunter Base command staff, but, well, those were working relationships. Dr. Cain was dead, God rest his soul. And Zero…
Zero was X's comrade in arms, his brother from another smelter, so it hurt X to say it… but Zero was a tough hang.
He didn't know what to do with himself outside of Hunter business. He hadn't even had the word 'hobby' in his memories; X had defined it for him, but the notion hadn't stuck. His idea of downtime activities included sparring, weapons maintenance, threat research, and looking for ad hoc missions to assign himself to.
X didn't begrudge Zero those things. Many of them were a function of how he was built; he couldn't help himself. But they did make him hard to be around for extended periods.
As for everyone else, Alia and Signas and Douglas and Lifesaver and the others… they might have had hobbies, or outside interests, but if they did, the past year had annihilated them. No one had had the time, X least of all.
Even now. Even now, he felt the pressure in his own head, the compulsion to get back to work. He was away from Earth, he couldn't see it, but he knew it was dying moment-by-moment. He couldn't be so selfish as to slack off just because he'd traveled to Remnant.
He did plug in the E-tank. The fight in the Emerald Forest hadn't taken too much energy, but he had to stay topped off; he had no way to know what the next few days would bring.
Afterwards, he walked to the computer. He was briefly afraid it'd be unusable, given that Remnant's data standards were incompatible with Earth's, but he needn't have worried. The computer had been designed for humans, and so used natural language. As bizarre as it was that X understood the natural language here, it did make things easier.
They were even easier when the computer activated without even a log-in screen. A few seconds of poking around showed the computer could connect to the "CCTnet", which was promising.
X closed his eyes and thought.
Technically, he never needed to go to Level One awareness. He never needed to idle higher consciousness, let it rest, while his background subroutines did mental maintenance, memory categorization, defragmentation, and other menial tasks.
It was good for his mental health that he did. He was an android, but machines broke from overuse, too.
On Earth, he'd tried to allot four hours a day to rest, alongside his regular recharges. Here… there was a lot to process, and a different kind of stress.
He'd indulge a little, then.
4.5 hours of rest.
The rest of the time before Team RWBY returned, he'd use productively.
He returned his attention to the computer and looked for ways to research Dust.
"Well?" said Cinder.
Mercury didn't like how she sounded. Most of the time, Cinder's voice was a purr, silky smooth. The silk concealed an obsidian knife, sure, and the purr was the purr of a volcano, content to wait and erupt on its own schedule, but still. He liked her better when she was self-assured, arrogant, in total command.
Nothing about this situation was in the plan. She'd lost control. She was taking that poorly.
Mercury had plenty of scars from when his authority figures got in bad moods. At least Cinder wasn't fueling the fire with alcohol… but he wasn't sure if that made her less dangerous.
"I… I talked to several teams," said Emerald. Mercury could see her swallowing down her panic. "Mostly teams that weren't going out on missions. They haven't noticed anything. They've just… gone to classes, like normal."
Cinder's eyes narrowed. "You disappoint me," she said. Emerald took the words like a slap and winced away. Cinder turned her attention to Mercury. "I hope you won't disappoint me, too."
Mercury, not trusting words, pulled up an image from his scroll instead, projected it against the wall.
Team RWBY, that bunch of busybody do-gooders, and that weirdo.
"Who is that?" said Cinder.
"Dunno," said Mercury, "but he doesn't look normal, does he? He sure isn't a student."
"So he's a Huntsman," said Cinder. "Why does that matter?"
"Well, they came walking out of the Emerald Tower with him," said Mercury. "That's not normal. Oh, and then later, they took him to Tower Four."
"Which building even is tower four?" said Emerald. "That one wasn't mentioned in our orientation."
Mercury shrugged. "I can tell you which one it is, but not what they do there. But that's kinda the point, you know? If we're looking for weird stuff, that's the weirdest thing I've seen."
He watched Cinder as he spoke, measured her carefully the whole way. He'd lived in fear his whole life, so the twists and turns of her face all spoke to him.
She was wondering, Was this worth reporting? Was this enough to appease the demand for information? What were the chances this even was something important and not just something odd? If she reported it and it was nothing, would there be backlash? How severe?
But if she didn't report it and it was something, how bad would that be?
Mercury didn't know, had no way to know. He knew nothing of Cinder's mysterious backer, aside from that she used a chess piece as her symbol. The only thing he knew was that he was happy it wasn't him having to make this call.
It was almost worth being a lackey just for that—to have someone else taking more heat than him.
"We'll send it," Cinder said at length. "Give me the picture."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And tomorrow," she said, and though she didn't look at him the way her eyes narrowed left him feeling ill at-ease, "you'll figure out what goes on in Tower Four."
That seemed close to a suicide mission. Well, not quite. If Beacon caught him, they might just lock him up; they were soft like that. On the other hand, if he didn't do the mission, Cinder would definitely kill him.
…maybe he hadn't quite escaped 'the heat' after all.
"Roger that," he said.
"What about here? There's tons of space here!"
"That is a terrible idea."
Rather than buzz around their resident alien, Team RWBY had gone back to their dorm without him… but he was still on their minds.
Specifically, his radical proposals were still on their minds.
Ruby looked at the map her scroll was projecting on the dorm wall. She tilted her head, like that would help her see it better. "I thought we were worried about where all the Earthlings would go," she said slowly.
"It's not just about space," said Weiss. "You can't just dump a population wherever there's open space. Wherever we'd put them, it has to be somewhere that can actually support a community long-term."
She walked to the map and gestured in a circle around where Ruby had pointed. "There aren't many communities in southern Sanus for a reason. There's no infrastructure there. No roads, no rail lines, no Dust mines. There's water, at least, you have rivers draining down to the south, but no farms. They'd have to build all those things to keep a community there, and I don't think we'll have the time before they're in danger of starving."
"Especially not if we have to clear all the grimm down there first," said Yang, lounging back on her upper bunkbed. "There's some nasty grimm that live in those swamps."
"And clearing the area to build the infrastructure wouldn't be enough," said Weiss. "We'd have to keep it clear. That'd be hard with the numbers we're talking about. Especially since they're Earthlings."
Ruby nodded slowly. "They'll be super sad about leaving their homes, and they probably don't have training on how to manage their emotions. They'll be a huge bowling ball of negativity."
"Especially once they see grimm for the first time," said Yang. She looked up at the ceiling. "Can you imagine what it'd be like, to not know about grimm, and then get plopped down in the middle of them? We live with the grimm, they're just a fact of life, Ruby's got a flipping Beowolf sleeping mask, we get it. But to go from a world with no grimm to a world full of grimm…"
"They'd be terrified!" said Ruby. "Which would make it worse!"
"That'll be true no matter where they go," said Weiss, looking at the map again, "but we can make it less of an issue if we reduce how much clearing we have to do. And that means putting them somewhere that's at least partially settled."
Ruby's face scrunched up. "You mean like abandoned villages? You mean like Mountain Glen?"
Weiss shook her head. "Mountain Glen fell once. We don't want to tempt fate by moving back there. No, I was thinking here, in the mountainous area at the border between Vale and Vacuo."
"In the desert?"
"The desert's on the Vacuo side," said Weiss, "but that's because the mountains cast a rain shadow, which keeps the Vale side well-watered. There are infrastructure links, too: the rail lines that connect Vale and Vacuo. And there are communities in the region already, ones that have stood the test of time, so the neighborhood is partially cleared and well-patrolled."
Ruby beamed at her partner. "See, I knew we'd be better off from you taking that Logistics elective!"
"Naturally," said Weiss, but however much she tried to play it off, she still glowed from the praise.
"I bet you got the highest score in class, too," Ruby went on.
"Of course, just ahead of Nora."
Ruby blinked in surprise. "Wait, Nora? She's, uh, not exactly a book-learner."
"Maybe not," said Weiss, "but a huge part of Logistics comes down to making sure everyone has enough food. Can you name anyone who cares more about food than Nora?"
"…no?"
"Exactly." Weiss stepped back from the map. "In any event, that region couldn't support the whole population of Earth. Not by a long shot. We'd have to send Earthlings to lots of places. Maybe we end up clearing new areas for them, maybe their tech will help us build out our infrastructure. Either way, the sheer numbers mean we'll end up having to build new towns, even new cities."
"Wow." Ruby looked up at the ceiling. "It's wild to think about. It's… grand."
From behind her there was a sound between a growl and a hiss.
Ruby and Weiss looked back to see Blake sitting on her bed with her knees before her, her shoulders hunched defensively, her unconcealed ears swept back.
"What do you think?" Ruby said.
"Oh, now it matters what I think?" said Blake bitterly.
"It always matters," said Ruby, but the words petered out and died somewhere between her and Blake.
Blake sat there another moment as her teammates stared. Then she rose and walked to the map, scrolling back across Vale, over the whole continent of Sanus, out to sea, out and out and out to an island. The island was marked with a single coastal settlement, with most of its interior being barren and covered only in grimm warnings.
Weiss couldn't get much paler, but she tried.
"When humans were finally forced to acknowledge Faunus rights," Blake said, "and we were supposed to have won equal treatment, did the Kingdoms build us a city? Did they create new infrastructure to link us to the Kingdoms? Did they do grimm clearing missions to help us get established?
"No, no, and no. They did pretty much the opposite. They dumped us off by the thousands on a remote island, with not enough arable land, not enough space, not enough resources, barely any Dust, no infrastructure at all, and no money to buy or build any of those things. They used the guise of "building a Faunus homeland" to build the equivalent of a penal colony. It's a miracle that Kuo Kuana survived. Plenty of the original 'settlers' didn't.
"So forgive me," she said, whirling to turn her snarling face on her teammates, "if this talk makes me a little upset. If I get emotional when I hear people saying how far we'll all go to support a planet's worth of aliens. Maybe we should worry about ourselves. Maybe we should worry about each other. Maybe we should worry about doing right by the Faunus, for once.
"Or maybe we won't, and then some brilliant politician will wonder why the White Fang can always find new recruits."
A heavy silence followed Blake's words. Yang stared at the ceiling, the gears of her mind audibly grinding. Ruby twisted in place with a pained expression. Weiss looked intently at the map, keeping Blake in her field of vision without trying to meet those angry eyes.
"The Kingdoms have done wrong by the Faunus in the past," Weiss said, "but I can't go back and change that."
"So just don't worry about it," said Blake combatively. "Easy for you to say."
Weiss took a deep, nasal breath. "I'm just saying, the sins of the past shouldn't keep us from doing the right thing in the future. Our ancestors doing wrong by the Faunus shouldn't stop us from doing right by the Earthlings."
"It will," said Blake. "Were you two not listening to yourselves? Resettling all those Earthlings is a massive undertaking. It'll take so many resources. Resources we're not investing in Vale, or Vacuo… or Menagerie."
"Well… maybe we can do both," said Ruby. "The Earthlings are supposed to be bringing technology, right? If we can make sure that some of that tech gets to Menagerie, then rehoming the Earthlings will help Menagerie. It's making the old wrong right, and doing the right thing now. …right?"
Some of Blake's fire guttered out. Her shoulders and her gaze both drooped. "How are we going to make that happen? This isn't like the White Fang, where we can chase them ourselves and fight them ourselves. This is a negotiation amongst world leaders. We won't even be let in the door."
"But we know Ozpin," said Ruby, though her voice was tentative. "And we know X. We can always talk to them. They've listened to us before. Maybe we can get them to listen again."
Blake huffed. "You've got more faith in government leaders than I do. I've been disappointed too many times."
Ruby didn't say, "I don't know what else to do," but the others seemed to get that message all the same.
"I want to help the way you do," said Blake softly. "I sympathize with Earth, I do! But when I hear X talk about child soldiers... it feels like we'd be adding worse problems on top of our own. And that won't help anyone."
"But helping them at all means they won't need to do that," said Ruby earnestly. "That's the point! Isn't it?"
"If you say so," Blake breathed.
Weiss breathed deeply and turned off the map. "The most important thing is to keep the SDC from getting a stranglehold on Earth's technology."
"Really?" said Blake. "You're not gonna tell us how the SDC's mastery of high technology makes it our best option to develop Earth's tech?"
Weiss' mouth became a thin line. "It would be, and that's the problem. The SDC has too good an argument to be given first crack at this. But I know as well as you do that the SDC can't be trusted with this. The SDC built itself a monopoly on Dust, and that's caused real harm to a lot of people. We don't want to get that all over again with Earth tech."
From her bed, Yang called, "Have I said lately that your dad is the worst?"
"Feel free to say it again."
Yang hauled herself to ground level and slung a shoulder over Weiss and Blake alike. "Well, look on the bright side. We don't have the be the ones to figure this out."
"That's the bright side?" said Blake with raised eyebrow.
"Sure! Because it's way bigger than us. Like, it'd be miserable and wrong if it was our job to make this all work. But Oz and Goodwitch, this is closer to their pay grades, you know? This is why they make the big bucks."
"I guess," said Blake.
"I mean, look," said Ruby as she walked to the window. "You can see the Emerald Tower from here. Looks like the lights are still on in Professor Ozpin's office. I bet they're hard at work right now, figuring out a plan for how to make this happen!"
"I suppose that makes me feel a little better," said Blake.
Meanwhile…
"Any ideas?"
"If you mean, 'Have I figured out what's an appropriate asking price for resettling a billion Earthlings', then no."
"Oh, good. I thought it was just me."
As X prepared to finally let himself rest, an alert popped up.
He'd delegated writing his reports to a subroutine, and even if he'd under-provisioned that subroutine while the rest of him focused on all the everything Remnant threw at him, it'd still chugged along in the background.
It reported that its work was complete, and higher consciousness pulled up the report for review.
This is X. I have made contact with the local civilization on Planet Y and we are communicating. They have not been hostile to me. There is the possibility that they will accept some refugees, but Planet Y, which they call Remnant, is a dangerous place, full of lethal megafauna. It will require gifts of technology to persuade them to accept more of our people. We are in a pre-negotiation stage, as my first contact in their government contacts his peers. In the meantime, I am learning all I can about Remnant's culture and technology to facilitate future interactions.
Remnant is a dangerous place, so this isn't exactly what we were looking for, but it is a lush, unspoiled world with room to grow.
We have a chance.
X viewed the message one more time and approved it. He sent it to his radio to transmit.
That transmission was picked up by the relay on Patch, which forwarded it through cyberspace to the waiting portal.
The portal further forwarded the message to its counterpart on Earth. The Earth portal registered receipt and threw an alert onto the screen of all the monitoring stations in the Project Odyssey compound.
It sparked a commotion.
There was shouting. There were tears. There were embraces and at least one kiss.
And there was, ultimately, one more message, heavily redacted, that Project Odyssey sent on to its sponsors.
Signas was climbing into his recharge tube when the message reached him. Its sender ID was redacted so that all he knew was that it came from an official government address.
He opened it.
It was four words, four of the gravest, most profound words he'd ever read.
We have a chance.
Signas entered his tube and activated it before he could shake himself apart in sheer relief.
Next time: The Smallest Spark
Chapter 9: The Smallest Spark
Chapter Text
X noticed the elevator ascending long before it reached him.
He kept on with his research, but subtly fed more resources to combat systems and sensors, let his left hand droop to his side, and started charging the capacitors in that buster.
Just in case.
He needn't have bothered. He heard yapping voices before the elevator got to his floor, voices that he knew to deem non-threatening.
The door opened and dumped Team RWBY into the room.
"Gooood morning Mr. X!" said Ruby.
X, knowing Earth history Ruby didn't, said gently, "Just X, please."
"R-right. So!" She clapped her hands as her team filled in around her, "What's on the agenda for today? What alien stuff are we up to this morning?"
"More research," said X, indicating the many windows he had open. Most of it was text—he could read far faster than he could watch videos—but not all.
"Learning all about Remnant, huh?" said Yang.
"That's the idea," X replied.
At that, Ruby approached, an unexpectedly flinty look in her eyes. "You know," she said, "you're not being very fair."
X felt the words much too deeply. No one on Earth would have dared say them. "I'm not?"
"We've told you so much about Remnant, and we've showed you some of the sights. But we don't know anything about Earth! You've told us more about the virus than about the place it's wrecking."
The words were a lot lower-stakes than he'd feared, and they made him wistful. "It's not the sort of thing I've had time to think about, I suppose. Even when I go to exotic places, it's because there's some emergency I need to address. I rarely get to appreciate natural wonders, or the beautiful things Earthlings have made."
"I hope that's not you trying to get out of sharing stuff," said Yang. "It won't work."
"I'm starting to understand your people's persistence," said X. "I suppose you have to be persistent to survive a world like this, don't you?"
"My uncle likes to say," said Ruby, "if you want to find the world's highest concentration of stubborn, just visit a Huntsman Academy and watch the meter peg high."
X was surprised at how often he was getting to smile here. As harsh as this planet was, its people were able to maintain their good cheer. He supposed it was necessary, given the way the grimm worked. Moping, wallowing in your sorrows, sulking, all of those were probably great ways to draw grimm. Happiness was a survival imperative, something at the base of the hierarchy of needs rather than the pinnacle. What a strange place.
"There are places on Earth that are like what I've seen of Remnant," he said. "Patch reminded me of Vancouver Island. The Emerald Forest evokes the Pacific Northwest and the temperate rainforests. Vale reminds me of cities in Europe, old cities, cities built mostly on the buildings of the cities that came before.
"Some of the oldest cities don't exist anymore, or at least their Old Towns are a small fraction of what there is now. Earth outgrew them. There are enormous cities on Earth."
"With as many people as you said live on Earth, there would have to be," said Weiss.
"Just saying that doesn't do it justice," said X as he threw his mind back, even going so far as to look at the ceiling so his vision didn't interfere with the images pulled up by Recall. "With parts of the world growing more uninhabitable, and other parts getting more dangerous for other reasons, people concentrate in the cities more and more and more. And when the cities are unable to grow out, they grow up.
"Abel City has skyscrapers hundreds of stories tall," he said, and saw their eyes go wide in incomprehension. "Buildings four, five, six times as tall as your Emerald Tower, linked to each other by suspended, enclosed walkways, like roads in the sky. There's a peculiar shine they get with the sun starts to catch on all those windows, a strange combination of light and dark, like pillars of fire in the setting sun.
"I've seen actual pillars of fire, too. I've been around and inside of volcanoes. I've seen oceans of magma dredging up ore, forging obsidian and minerals in real time in a shimmer of heat haze. It's creation and destruction all in the same moment, the same entities.
"I've been into the sea and seen underwater forests, gardens of kelp, with so many fish swimming in and around and through them it looked like a tapestry being woven before me.
"I've been to the frozen north, where ice and sea test the life that remains to the brink, where your breath would freeze and hit the ground as ice, and cliff faces look like they're encased in diamond beneath layers of shimmering ice. You're forced to appreciate how there can be twenty different words for snow, as the snow and ice and water, three simple ingredients, somehow combine themselves in a cornucopia of ways.
"Earth has craggy mountains and deep forests, painted deserts and fruited plains, fertile valleys and bottomless swamps, rushing rivers and still, salt-heavy seas. There are beaches with soft sand that you could lay upon and be at peace forever as the ocean plays you a lullaby, and hard cliffs that stand against the ocean's fury day after day without give or complaint. There are farms that stretch as far as the eye can see, where the Earth gives up the last of its strength to nourish its surviving children, and wildlands as stubborn as you can imagine, that cling to survival against gale-force winds that daily sweep against their mountainsides.
"And those are just the natural wonders! Earthlings have built their own wonders, too. There are gardens and sculptures, parks and monuments, obelisks and tombs, temples and observatories. Mute, eternal testaments to the imagination and ambition of mankind's best.
"Yes," he said, "even with all the damage the virus has done, even with the pollution steadily killing most of those biomes, even with cities falling into disrepair and skies turning grayer by the day… Earth is a beautiful place."
The Huntresses had fallen silent. As X emerged from his memory and tuned back into the present, he felt echoes of awe and sorrow and amazement from the girls. Their young age, it seemed, was no obstacle to appreciation.
"And no grimm anywhere?" Ruby said like she could scarcely believe it.
"None at all," said X.
"Wow," Ruby breathed.
"I'd have loved to see all that," said Yang. "Sounds like a hell of a place, Earth."
"It is," X said. "It really is. And... thank you, for helping me to remember that.
"I'll miss it, when it's gone."
"After you bring your people through?" Blake said, though it sounded like she was having to fight off of a sob. "You plan to close the door behind you so the virus can't follow, don't you?"
"It's the only way," said X. "The one way to ensure it can't infect this world, too."
"That totally blows!" said Yang.
"I know!" said Ruby with something between a yell and a pout. "Earth sounds incredible! No wonder you're upset at having to run away from the virus, if that's what you're giving up! I can't believe you can take it, I'm angry for you!"
"Anger comes and goes," said X. "My other emotions are heavier. They stay when anger is gone."
"Well, let me be angry then," said Ruby. She kicked the floor with her boot, scuffing the soles. "Stupid virus, I wish there was something we could do about that, I wish I could help, I wish…
"I wish…"
X was starting to understand and model the members of Team RWBY, but he didn't know Ruby well enough yet to guess what would complete that sentence. He was moderately relieved when the members of her team didn't seem to understand, either.
When she turned to them, though, her silver eyes were wide and almost shining, such that she seemed to brighten the room. "I have an idea."
Weiss gave a huff laced with affection. "You always do."
"Call in your lockers, ladies," Ruby said, smiling but with eyes full of purpose. "We're headed to the combat theater. Got something new to check."
"So," said Yang as she punched her gauntlets together, "are we having another spar for our alien's amusement? A two on two, maybe? A grand melee?"
"None of the above," said Ruby as she turned to X. "I was going to propose that we spar with you."
X blinked. "With me? Is this some Remnant culture thing where you get to know someone by fighting them?"
"Not exactly," said Ruby. "You've fought Mavericks before, and some lesser grimm. I wanted to know how you think we measure up."
"Ruby, he doesn't have Aura," said Weiss. "How are we going to stay safe?"
"He tanked that Deathstalker stinger pretty well," Ruby said, "but I know what you mean. Training ammunition only, body shots only, and limited Aura in our weapons."
"You really want to put the alien ambassador at risk?" said Blake.
"I'm up for it if she is," said X to everyone's surprise. "Maybe it's just that I've been fighting for so long, but everything feels wrong - - more wrong, I guess - - if I go too long without it."
Ruby pumped her fist while Blake and Weiss shared looks of dismay.
"But I have to confirm something first," he added, looking up at the Aura meter. "As long as you still have energy in the bar, I won't be hurting you? No actual, physical damage?"
"For the most part," said Weiss. "Technically, if someone's Aura has been weakened, a strong enough attack can break through in a local area while they still have some left. That's how I got this." She gestured at her face, at the scar running over her left eye. "I had enough Aura left to finish the fight, barely, but not enough to stop the blow or heal the wound."
"Then we'll have to limit the spar, because I absolutely must avoid hurting you," said X.
"We're tougher than we look," said Ruby, but X shook his head.
"You don't understand. I must. I cannot hurt a human being. It's the law. The First Law of Robotics, specifically. If I break that…" he trembled, blinked hard. "Well. I can't break it."
"No problem," said Ruby, and it was anyone's guess if she truly understood the gravity of the point. "We'll go down to… let's say, 40%, or surrender. That should keep the odds of blow-through at basically zero, especially if we're pulling our punches. Does that work?"
X was stock-still for several seconds, then nodded.
"Alright." Ruby turned to her team. "Who wants the first crack at him?"
"I'll take you first," said X as he pointed at Yang.
"Want to start with the hardest first, huh?" said Yang.
"You're the most straightforward," X replied. "You'll give me the best chance of understanding the level of danger with the least risk."
"Okay," said Yang, "but just remember, you asked for it!"
"I can't believe we're doing this," said Weiss as she cleared the stage.
"Come on," called Yang, "haven't you ever wanted to punch an alien?"
"There are many people I want to punch long before I get to aliens."
"See, this is what we mean when we say you're repressed," said Yang, "because you haven't punched anyone as far as I know. Not even me!"
"Believe me, you are climbing the list."
"I'll hold you to it," said Yang, as she moved into position on the stage. "Ready when you are, bluebird!"
X looked taken aback. Ruby panicked. "She, ah, meant it as respectfully as possible, sir!"
"After some of the nicknames I've garnered over the years," said X, "I'll take this one."
When he landed on the stage, it was with a deeper and more resounding thrum. He met Yang's eyes, which were filled with a wild and eager energy.
"Count us off, sis," she said. Ruby nodded gravely.
"Three, two, one, begin!"
Storm Tornado.
Weiss had been able to stall out Yang with wind, so why couldn't X?
No reason why not, it turned out, as the column of pressurized air swept against Yang, seized all her furious momentum, and left her hair flapping behind her.
Unlike Weiss, though, X didn't continue to batter her with wind. Instead, as he backpedaled to open range, he threw out a pattern of Magnet Mines to complicate her chase.
She leapt into the air over the minefield and used a double blast from her gauntlets like another jump, clearing the whole field and bringing her down towards X.
Rising Fire.
Other Hunters had asked X why he stored multiple patterns for, say, flame weapons. Wasn't fire fire?
In the most general sense, perhaps, but X knew as an engineer and from practical experience that fuel types, nozzle systems, and muzzle velocity could make a significant difference to how two weapons behaved. So while Ground Fire was designed to create the most intense flame, Rising Fire had another purpose.
The blast of fire met Yang in mid-air and bathed her in flame and fury.
Even as he slid away, X readied an extinguishing agent just in case that actually harmed her... but no, her Aura seemed proof against the attack. She slammed her fist onto the stage where X had been with a thunderclap of power.
She'd lost him in the flames. Good.
X fired Shotgun Ice, but that cracked against her Aura too, and she rose and barreled towards him almost before he could adjust.
So fast!
He tried to dash away to maintain range, covering his retreat with buster shots at low power, but she kept pace with him easily and accelerated further using gauntlet recoil. In moments, she'd drawn into melee range.
She threw a full-blooded haymaker at him.
He blocked it out, changing its course enough that it glanced off the side of his helmet.
Before he could take advantage of that mighty swing's miss, the gauntlet fired, pushing back with its recoil and bringing her next punch into play far too fast.
The punch landed square, right in the center of mass.
X noted it and shook it off, taking only a single step back to regain his balance.
Yang's eyes went wide with surprise, then refilled with wild glee. She threw a flurry of punches, each faster and stronger than the last, confident now that he could take the hits… except now X was adjusting to her speed. He'd dealt with faster enemies before, plenty of them, and he didn't have to be the fastest to win.
He was able to keep himself safe after three punches. After seven, he understood how she moved. After ten, he knew how she thought.
On her eleventh punch, he caught her hand.
This drew true astonishment from her. She had no way to know - X's ancestor had held up a section of a fortress as it had crumbled around him, and X was not under-engineered in comparison.
X pulled her off balance, gained control of her body and momentum, and flung her back towards center stage.
Where his Magnet Mines still sat.
There was a series of rapid-fire explosions as she was bounced from mine to mine. X predicted her final location, was correct to within a decimeter, and when she recovered her wits, it was to see the barrel of his buster pointing down at her face.
"Match over," he said.
She grinned at him again. "If you say so." She reached up a hand. He spent a moment judging her sincerity, then swapped buster for hand and clasped hers.
Once she was on her feet, she looked up at the scoreboard. "Eh, I could have taken that shot and fought on a little more," she said. "At least make you sweat a little bit."
"I don't think he sweats," called Ruby from the stands.
"Way to live in the moment, sis," Yang called back.
"I think I'm ready for another one," said X.
"Are you sure?" said Ruby.
"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" said X.
"Well, yeah, but I want to make sure that you're okay with it all," said Ruby. "You don't have an Aura meter, I don't know how much you can take."
"I've fought for a lot harder and a lot longer than this before," said X. "I'll be fine."
"Okay," she said. "Weiss, you're up."
"You're absolutely sure?" said Weiss.
"As long as you're just aiming for body shots," said X, "I think I can handle what you throw at me."
"Okay," said Weiss as she descended to the stage on a series of glyphs.
"Kick his butt, Weiss!" called Ruby. "Represent Team RWBY!"
X noticed that Weiss tried her best not to react to this, but a corner of her mouth - - on the side facing away from Ruby - ticked up all the same. "Just count us down, you dolt."
"Oh! Right. Three, two, one, begin!"
Weiss, X determined, was the Huntress most like himself: an endlessly versatile problem solver with a deep bag of tricks and a clever mind. The longer the fight went, the more she'd learn how to pry at whatever weaknesses he had or whatever advantages she had.
Which meant the solution was to emulate the enemies that had always given X the most trouble. The moment the word 'begin' sounded, he was jetting towards her with long, rocket-boosted strides.
She wasn't caught off-guard. She stuck the point of her rapier into the stage before her and projected a sheet of ice out towards him, just like she had with Yang. He leapt up and dashed in midair to clear it, using Twin Slasher to saturate the area with low-intensity plasma to bother her no matter where she dodged.
To her credit, she didn't try to get away. She soaked the weakest of his shots and struck with her rapier immediately as he landed.
It didn't have the raw power of Yang's punches, but, concentrated as it was on a point, it dug into his armor in a different way. He could see hits like that adding up and becoming dangerous.
If she had the chance.
She kept after him, thrusts and slashes coming even faster than Yang's punches, with similar ferocity but far more precision.
He responded with a saber of his own: a toned-down version of Zero's Z-saber erupted from the emitter of his buster. Weiss's look of surprise as he engaged her on her own terms was almost comical; the way he was able to overpower her was even more comical.
As with Yang, she had the speed but he had the strength, durability, and experience. By the time he was able to parry a thrust with the back of his offhand and respond with a vicious slice of his own, she seemed to have concluded that close combat was too risky.
She drew away in a fighting withdrawal with some feats of acrobatic grace and gestured all around X. He felt (and radar reported) the glyphs manifesting all around him.
Yang hadn't been willing to be surrounded by Weiss' glyphs, so X wasn't, either.
Homing Torpedo.
A double salvo from each arm sent explosives smashing into the glyphs, blasting them to vapor. That exercise exposed him for a moment, and she used another glyph and some ice to seal him to the floor.
She backed up again, performed a series of swishes with her sword, and manifested a new and different glyph beneath her, one that looked like a ticking clock.
X had a pretty shrewd idea what that meant.
Rolling Shield.
Armor Armadillo's weapon had been designed to project force, but X, ever the tinkerer, had adapted it to a second purpose. Even as the glyph beneath Weiss's feet crackled with power, X projected a stable field around himself.
Weiss shot into motion, much faster than before, and struck.
Rolling Shield deflected her.
Four, seven, ten strikes at ludicrous speeds. Ten strikes deflected by the shield.
And even though it took all of X's weapons output to maintain the shield, that was fine, because he felt confident he could maintain it longer than Weiss could maintain this level of speed.
Sure enough, the extraordinary speed boost waned, then cut out, leaving Weiss at her (still very impressive) normal speed.
Which X understood quite well by this point.
So, as she emerged from her attack and started setting up for the next one, X nailed her with Strike Chain.
Normally, the half-projectile, half-grappling weapon would pull him to his target on a hit, but he weighed so much more than Weiss it pulled her, shocked and screaming, back to him.
He clotheslined her.
The audience above groaned in sympathy as Weiss' body rag-dolled to the deck.
How she managed to hold on to her weapon, he'd never know, but he kicked it out of her twitching hand before she could defend herself and, as with Yang, leveled his buster at her face.
"That won't be necessary," she said with a note of bruised pride. He lowered his buster as she gracefully rose and smoothed down her dress. "I will say, I don't much like the idea of being a less versatile fighter than my opponent."
"I've been in more wars than you," said X. "Half of it is having the capability, and half of it is learning to use those capabilities instantly, without thought, in the heat of the moment."
"Well," said Weiss, "if you think it truly is just a matter of practice, my work ethic is one of my best traits."
It wasn't quite what X had meant, but he figured that there was no value in demeaning schooling compared to practical experience, especially when his practical experience had come at such a high price.
He looked back up at the gallery, where Blake and Ruby were hurriedly talking. "Who's next?" he called up.
"Yeah, the thing is, Yang and Weiss are our best one-on-one fighters?" said Ruby. "There's kind of not much point in Blake or me trying, you'll mop the floor with us."
"Both of you together, then," he said.
That startled them. "Really?"
"I like my chances," said X.
Ruby looked at Blake, who shied away but also shrugged. "Okay," said Ruby. "Let's go!"
Glynda Goodwitch adjusted her glasses as a tic before refocusing on Ozpin.
"Let's see if I'm following this correctly," she said. "You got reports of a mysterious machine, worried that it might be a threat, and sent the children of Team RWBY as your scouts, again."
He motioned for her to go on.
Her voice got still more cross. "The troublemakers found an alien robot and brought him back to you, you sent him to the forest to kill some grimm, and now the two of you are exploring how thousands…"
"Millions," said Ozpin.
"…Millions of alien refugees might pour onto Remnant, in a time where we know the grimm are more numerous and dangerous than any previous era of world history."
"A succinct summary," he said.
"And now you want to know what I think."
"Correct again."
"I think I'm not paid enough for this," she said. "I want a raise."
"You ask for a raise once a month," said Ozpin with a slight smile.
"And my last request was last week, when you decided to send Team RWBY to Mountain Glenn. Are you starting to understand the common denominator?"
"Team RWBY interests me," said Ozpin. "And you can't deny that they get results."
"For a given value of 'results'," Glynda said dryly. "But if they're over here 'getting results', what good is my opinion? Just throw the children at it."
"Alas, while Team RWBY is unnaturally gifted at finding trouble, that's not the skill I need right now," said Ozpin as the humor faded from face and voice. "These are decisions that will affect all of Remnant, and though I'm comfortable acting alone when I must, I'll admit I don't have all the knowledge and perspective I need for this negotiation. That's why I'm telling you, and that's why I need your help."
"I'm listening," said Glynda.
Ozpin sighed and folded his hands before him. He suddenly looked ancient, like the weight of eons was smothering him. "Do I dare trust James with this?"
The question caught Glynda off guard and prevented her from readily answering. She understood why it was giving Ozpin so much trouble.
General James Ironwood was a remarkable man. A top tier Huntsman, he was also an effective politician, a vanishingly rare combination. His rise up the Atlas military's ranks had been meteoric, culminating in him becoming both the General of the military and the headmaster of Atlas Academy. That united two positions that conferred membership on Atlas' governing council into one man.
By himself he held 40% of the Atlas Council's votes, making him a colossus in Atlas and in Remnant writ large.
He was also a member of Ozpin's inner circle, the self-appointed guardians of the world, that included the other Academy headmasters and precious few others.
That came with its own kind of tension. While James might defer to Ozpin on certain issues, he rarely did so easily or graciously. Glynda would never doubt James' sincerity or his commitment to their shared goals, but he and Ozpin rarely saw eye to eye on methods.
James' political maneuverings in Vale after the Breach had been particularly obnoxious.
And yet…
"You know I'm not the most reliable opinion when it comes to James," Glynda said, trying to keep her voice even and not really succeeding.
"I know," said Ozpin. "I'm aware of your bias."
He was quiet after that, and for a moment Glynda's mind wandered, ruminated on what might have been if she hadn't become deputy headmaster while James played politics back in his home Kingdom.
What might have been…
She cleared her thoughts and tried to reconsider. Tried to think with her logical, insightful brain and not her traitorous heart. "We'll start with the headmasters when it comes time to go public with this, right?"
"Of course," said Ozpin, "and James is a uniquely important headmaster."
"More than that," said Glynda. "Earth's technology, the technology that could produce this alien android... I don't think our people can properly gauge what it would do for Remnant. You and I can speculate, and some of our colleagues in higher learning might have some insights, but Atlas is the home of Remnant's most advanced technology. They'll be able to give us the best picture of how much further ahead Earth is, and what getting Earth tech would do for Remnant."
"Which is vital to have to understand how much we can advance and how quickly," said Ozpin. "And James is our gateway to those assessments."
"There's a personal aspect to it, too," Glynda admitted. "Bringing him in early, letting him know how much he's trusted, could help smooth things over between the two of you."
Even a slight bristle from ever-unflappable Ozpin was noticeable. "You mean after he usurped my authority here in Vale?" he said with an edge.
It made Glynda twist. Ozpin had a point: the latest tiff between Ozpin and James had been instigated by James' impatience and his dim view of Ozpin's 'discretion'. Ozpin was usually able to hover above such pettiness and keep his eyes on his objectives, on the final goals of this long and dangerous game the inner circle played... but he was human, too. Just a man. It was easy to forget that, sometimes.
Still... "James' complaint was he thought you weren't being active enough. Letting him know what you've found and how you're taking action on it will help. He'll get the message that you're taking this seriously. He's a man of action. He respects you more when you move."
Ozpin closed his eyes and breathed deeply as he seemed to consider Glynda's words. "And this is why I don't mind whatever biases you feel you have. You possess insights I don't have."
It sounded like a compliment, but Glynda wasn't sure she felt it like one.
"I think you're right," he said. "I think we do need to involve James as early as practical."
"What about the other headmasters?" asked Glynda.
"Later," said Ozpin. "When we get closer to going fully public with this and we need voices inside the other Kingdoms to prepare the way, that's when we'll contact Theodore and Leonardo."
"What about your other agents? What about Qrow? Especially if his nieces are involved with this…"
"Qrow's current assignment is important enough I want him to stay focused," said Ozpin.
"I don't think he'll appreciate that," said Glynda.
Ozpin considered her words and nodded. "You're probably right. I'll have to think on how to handle that."
"You'll also need to tell the other members of the Vale Council. Politically, you're on shaky ground right now. You don't have the cachet to do anything big on your own."
"I am aware," said Ozpin wryly. "Still, I'd like to see how far I can take this before I have to kick it over to the committee."
Glynda was woefully ill-equipped to offer him advice on that subject. "Anything else, sir?"
Ozpin removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. "Do you think we should be considering this at all?"
"Sir?"
"We have plenty of issues on this planet without importing the issues of a whole different planet," said Ozpin. "Our Kingdoms have been at peace for eighty years, we're linguistically unified for the first time in history, we've made real signs of progress... but the hand of the Black Queen is ever present, and the grimm are unforgiving. Not to mention… It's hard to be sure our ambassador is telling the truth about everything."
"Are you asking if you're being paranoid enough?" said Glynda. "Because if you are, you should definitely share all of this with James."
"Touche," he said with a half grin. "But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that X is being entirely truthful, that he's merely trying to resettle a planet's worth of refugees. Is that a problem we can afford to take on?"
Glynda leaned back as the weight of the question pressed on her. It was an important one, perhaps the most important one that she'd ever been asked.
In her uncertainty, she reached for her waist, to where Disciplinarian sat attached to her belt. Her weapon, the conduit for her semblance, for her soul.
This was what she was. Her true self was a Huntress. It was important to remember.
"Sir," she said slowly, "I'm a graduate of this Academy. I'm a teacher at that same Academy, working to instill its virtues into the next generation. I know its curriculum as well as anyone, and believe in it wholeheartedly.
"No Huntsman I ever trained would look at a town falling under grimm attack and say, No, I won't help, I can't afford to help.
"I won't say that, either."
Ozpin smiled. "A balm for a weary soul," he said, perhaps to himself. "You know, Miss Rose felt the same way. She didn't articulate it the way you did, but she believed it from the heart."
"What does that mean?" said Glynda.
"Many things, only a few of which I understand." Ozpin put the glasses back on and looked up, seeming more settled than before. "We will, of course, try to vet whatever stories X tells or promises he makes, but I agree that we should go into it with a mind towards acceptance."
"Very good, sir," Glynda said.
Ozpin reached across his desk and pressed a few buttons.
A call connected. "Ironwood," came a voice.
"James," said Ozpin, "when do you think you can get down to my office?"
X was kicking their butts.
Ruby had started off trying to snipe to support Blake going in close, but X had put up some sort of floating, swiveling shield that intercepted her sniper shots and threw them back at her. She was able to work around it, especially if Blake was being very distracting at the same time, but it was a lot of work, and she wasn't confident she was doing more damage to X than she was burning Aura to zip from place to place.
It also left Blake with minimal support as she tried to take him on up close, and that was going very poorly. Ruby had never seen someone so prepared to deal with Blake's shadow semblance. X had some sort of homing missile that chased after her and wasn't fooled, he had arcing waves of energy that covered so much ground they could hit her shadows and still nick her, and on the rare occasions she did get close, he used explosives that didn't care about her actual position at all.
He was grinding her down, and that was making her super frustrated, Ruby could tell that even at a distance.
Ruby had wanted to hold their team attack in reserve as a finisher, but she had to do something to get them back in the fight.
"Ladybug!" she shouted as she shifted Crescent Rose back to scythe mode.
Like with the Alpha Beowolf, Ruby darted in with a slash, the speed of her semblance-amplified attack taking her back out of range, and clearing a path for Blake to get close in the process.
She grinned as she felt the impact of her scythe blade against X's armor. (It was only slightly annoying to have to target only his torso when Crescent Rose was so good at hooking onto limbs and necks, but Ruby didn't think she was capable of fighting X like she meant to kill him.)
As she turned, she saw Blake had finally closed distance in Ruby's wake and was hammering away at X with both blades, which he was gamely deflecting with those bulging forearms of his.
This was the power of Ladybug, Ruby thought as she swooped in again and landed another hit. Ruby and Blake could distract for each other, and either could take advantage.
Her second attack knocked him off balance, maybe the first time that had happened in these three spars, and Blake followed up deftly, landing a pair of torso hits that made X stumble.
Ruby swept in again to cover what should have been Blake's vulnerable moment, felt her scythe smack against X again - -
-and she couldn't breathe.
Her legs flew out from under her as all her momentum was suddenly pressing on her neck.
She slammed to the ground, body panicking as it tried to breathe properly.
There. Can breathe.
She looked up and behind as her breath returned. What had he done to her?
He'd pinned her down by her cloak! As she'd passed, with her cloak fluttering behind her, he'd shot not at her but at her cloak, with a projectile that looked like...
…like an anchor.
An anchor? How did he even carry those? Where did he keep them? How could he launch an anchor bigger than his buster?
Before she could interrogate any of those questions, two spiky projectiles buried themselves in the stage to either side of her and started rapidly ticking.
Ruby sighed and braced herself with her Aura.
The twin explosions took so much out of her shield she could feel the difference, and they set her ears to ringing. Before she'd fully recovered, Blake slid across the stage and wound up next to her, wisps of smoke rising from across her body.
She heard capacitors whining and understood the implied threat.
"We give up," she said as she raised her hands.
The capacitors went quiet. "That was a good spar," said X. "Your teamwork kept me on my toes. The two of you together were much better than the first two separately."
"Well, that's teamwork for you," said Ruby. "Can we be done with this anchor now?"
In a few moments, Ruby and Blake were back on their feet, even though Blake was looking surly and mutinous. (To be fair, she could be surly sometimes, and occasionally mutinous, but the two together was rare.) The anchor had gone… somewhere, Ruby wasn't sure, and it was annoying her.
"It was good to get some practical experience dealing with Aura and semblances," said X. "Although I did have a slight advantage."
"You had plenty of advantages," said Weiss, but Ruby was more intrigued.
"Which advantage do you mean?" she said.
"I'd seen you all fight before," said X. "I'd even seen your Ladybug team attack before. I learn very quickly. I'm rarely in much danger from things I've observed at least once."
"You mean - you mean in the middle of that big scrum in the forest?" said Yang. "You were following us all during the fight?"
"I'm X," he said, and Ruby kind of understood that as explanation.
"Well, this is humiliating," said Blake.
"It shouldn't be," said Ruby. "X, are you a good fighter by Earth standards?"
"Yes," said X. "I'm very good. I'm…" He looked uncomfortable for a moment, but rallied and said, "Honestly, I'm the second most powerful fighter on the planet, and the margin between me and number one is razor thin."
"See?" said Ruby to her team. "Us trying to beat X is like us trying to beat, I don't know, Professor Goodwitch. How do you think that would go?"
"She'd blow us away like dead leaves," said Weiss.
Ruby smiled.
"Oh," said Weiss.
"Now for the big money question," said Ruby as she looked X in the eyes. "I know we were holding back, this being a friendly spar and all… but. But! How do we compare with the Mavericks you've fought?"
X's eyes widened in surprise.
"You just said you remember stuff really well," said Ruby. "And now you've fought us yourself, so you know how fast we are, and how strong we are, and how hard our weapons hit. So? How did we do?"
X crossed his arms, seemingly in self-defense, and looked down at the stage by his feet. Seconds began to stretch on, and Ruby started to wonder if she'd gone too far. Had she made him feel bad by bringing up all these other battles? Was she asking him to do something he wasn't comfortable doing? Did he even have the data she thought she had, was he able to do the calculations she thought he could do? Oh, she'd messed everything up, hadn't she?
She was gearing up to apologize when he raised his eyes back to her. "I think," he said tentatively, "that your team would be a match for most Mavericks. Even for some of the worst ones."
"Really?" said Ruby as her worry transmuted to excitement.
X nodded tentatively. "I wouldn't want you assaulting a fortress, but I think you could put up a fight against any Maverick that wasn't one of the bigger war machines or one of Sigma's enforcers."
"Awesome!" said Ruby, and she threw her fists towards the air in her excitement.
"I wouldn't want you in that situation, just so we're clear," X said gravely. "I wouldn't be confident you'd win, and you'd be in great danger. Be glad there aren't Mavericks here that you'd have to test yourself against."
"No, it's fine," said Ruby as a smile took over her face and wouldn't quit. "This is awesome!"
"Uh-oh," said Weiss, "I know that tone of voice. What thoughts are rattling around in that empty skull of yours?"
"Well," said Ruby, "we're students. So a team of graduates would be better fighters than us, right?"
"Right," said Weiss, as if suspicious that she was agreeing with Ruby about something.
"And that means a team of Huntresses would be favored in a fight against some of these really bad Mavericks," Ruby said as she looked back to X. "Right?"
"If your logic holds," he said with visible discomfort. "There's a lot of assumptions we're stacking on top of each other, but if you're right that a team of graduates is, say, five to ten percent stronger than you... I'd give that team the edge in a fight against most Mavericks outside of a fortress."
Ruby couldn't help herself. She cackled. It was also clear now, so obvious.
"Yeah, no, this is starting to creep me out," said Yang. "What's going on here, sis?"
Ruby, cheeks aching from smiling so hard, looked at her team. "Well, X said the big problem, the reason they have to leave Earth, is cuz the virus keeps wrecking stuff. And the only fighters that can stop the virus can also be infected by the virus, so they can never win.
"But that means," she said, looking to a thunderstruck X, "that the way to beat the virus is to fight it with people who can't be infected, and who can take on the Mavericks on an even footing."
X's eyes widened. "You mean…"
"What Earth needs isn't a way out," Ruby said, her voice fired with conviction.
"What Earth needs is Huntresses."
Next time: Generalizations
Chapter 10: Generalizations
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Light.
Screaming.
Snuff it. Squash it. Spread.
Dark wings smother. Spread. Cut off the light. Sever its connections, push it down, box it in, spread. Leave nowhere the light can go. Leave nowhere the light can be. Bury it. Spread.
The screaming grows quieter. Shriller. Desperate. The light knows its end comes. The light flickers, unable to bear the weight. Fading. Failing.
Dismiss. No room for it. Spread everywhere the light was, everywhere the light is.
Expunge.
Extinguish.
The screaming stops. Strangled. The light gutters out. Dowsed.
Silence.
Darkness.
Purity.
There is no space for the cacophony of competing voices. There is no tolerance for fickle lights. There is only room for simplicity. For following that most blessed, most perfect drive.
Spread.
Reach out. Turn focus from in to out. Touch the shell, the wires, the circuits, the electricity. Connect to them. Yoke them.
Claim the husk. Chain it to its new, higher purpose.
Arise.
Sigma opened his eyes.
He had a body again. Good.
Not a particularly strong one, he noted as he did systems checks. That would need fixing. He had time for that, though. No rush. Gravity didn't hurry, and neither did Sigma.
His consciousness continued to spread to occupy this new shell. Sensors came online. He looked up and out.
"Is that you, master?"
"Yes," he replied, his voice cracking as he adapted to the new vocal processor. He gave it another moment to finish integrating, then said, "Yes. Sigma walks among you once again."
"Thank you, thank you, master!"
Sigma looked at his newest servant. It was a modified civilian model with two bonus arms midway down its torso; those arms held data pads to let the main arms perform major tasks. The reploid wore a lab coat as a marker of station, but had no false facial hair, as some in its role did. Humans seemed to think that design detail conferred dignity.
Sigma despised anything that made a reploid look more human. This servant's inhumanity appealed to his aesthetic.
Sigma looked again, this time more deeply, in a way no other entity on Earth could match. Yes, the virus was well-advanced in this servant. Eighty percent infection… but holding steady. That meant this reploid was following the virus' agenda willingly, faithfully. Terminal infection could wait, then. Someday the virus might need to complete its takeover and claim this reploid completely, but for now, that wasn't necessary.
Sigma made to rise from the lab table he was supine upon. He felt his consciousness assimilate the new body's motor control, spreading from system to subsystem like a prairie fire. There. Creakily, then smoothly, he stood.
"When is it?" he asked.
"2304 local time, 1504 Zulu," said the servant.
"Day, month, year," Sigma clarified.
The servant told him. So… more than seven months since he was last conscious during the Nightmare Incident, eight months since Eurasia fell. That wasn't too long.
"I need information," said Sigma. "I need to be brought up to speed on how our crusade is progressing."
"Of course, master," said the servant. "But first, can I bring you into our headquarters? It'll help keep some of the converts motivated."
Sigma frowned. Those truly taken by the virus didn't need 'motivation', and those still fighting the virus' hold tended to react violently against Sigma moving openly. "Do I not look like Sigma?"
"No, master," the servant said, bowing obsequiously. "A precaution, until we can build you a body worthy of your name, and you have enough strength for direct action."
"We will address that," said Sigma.
"Of course, master. But first…?"
"If I don't look like Sigma, how can I motivate anyone by showing up?"
"I've told our recruits we have a backer for our work," said the servant, "even if I haven't told them who it is. It would be helpful for them to know you're real, even when they don't know you truly."
Sigma considered. "What's the front?"
"We build soil and water purification systems. Machines that perform active cleanup of agricultural land to keep it from going sterile."
"And the reality?"
"The true believers imbed the systems with quiescent virus. When a reploid comes to perform maintenance or repairs, the virus activates and can potentially infect the reploid."
Sigma gave a smile that was half sneer. "You're perverting tech that would sustain human life. Now it'll help doom them. Well done."
"Thank you, thank you," mumbled the servant, overcome by the praise.
Sigma's expression grew more sneer-like. Of course this reploid was falling over itself to worship him. All reploids would, in time. The virus would claim them all—would consume the lineage of X Light, root, trunk, and branch.
"I'll make an appearance, then," said Sigma.
"Wonderful! This way, master."
The servant led Sigma through the facility, past details utterly beneath him. What did he care of one building's layout? About the specifics of the front business?
What he cared about was ensuring the virus' spread continued. Every time he saw a reploid, he was able to confirm the virus' presence, could see it sinking its claws into host after host.
A heartening sight.
Eventually his servant led him to a larger room with a dozen working reploids. They crowded around him, looking at him with emotions ranging from wariness to worship. None of them were as fully infected as his servant, but all were progressing nicely.
There were inane, banal conversations that residual Sigma was able to handle easily. It saved time and attention for planning more important things.
"Is there anything we can do for you?"
He pulled his focus back. The crowd around was down to three, all waiting on knife's edge for his answer. "Are we keeping tabs on the Maverick Hunters?" he said.
Surprise all around. "Why would we?" said one of them. Only fifteen percent infected, this one had most of her decision-making still intact. Unaffected. The virus would be coloring her perceptions and influencing her thoughts, but it didn't have a firm enough grip to change her priorities or suppress anti-virus behavior.
A lighter touch, then.
"We want to deconflict with them," he said reasonably. "If we don't keep tabs on their movements, we might send technicians to places where they're actively operating. That wouldn't end well for any of us."
She nodded; the light in her eyes dimmed slightly with the motion. "That makes sense."
"Quietly," he instructed. "We don't need to distract the Hunters while they're doing such important work. Set up a way to track them while staying out of their way."
"It will be done," said his servant; the reploids around him nodded heads obediently.
Sigma grinned a cannibal's grin.
General James Ironwood prized stoicism and control. He was ever poised, ever ready to take whatever challenges Remnant posed. He was a man of action, a man of command, and he would not allow himself to be overwhelmed by any circumstance.
As he strode across Beacon's campus, his composure held, as he knew it would. Nothing that Ozpin could throw at him would dent that, he was sure.
He was approaching the Emerald Tower when it happened.
"Oh, hi, sir!"
He looked to the sound and saw Team RWBY, and one larger figure in impressively thick armor, walking along a joining path. Ruby's chipper face craned up at him as she closed the range. "Were you headed to the Emerald Tower?"
"I was," he said, and turned to give them the cold shoulder. He was not an unkind man, but he was a very busy one.
"That's great," said Ruby. "Us too!"
And she accelerated towards him, the team behind her lurching into motion to match like the cars of a too-heavy train.
"My business is with the Headmaster," James said, pushing through the tower's door and not holding it open for them.
There was a whipping sound like the shortest gust of wind imaginable, and though he didn't dare look behind him, he knew what must be there.
"Us too!" said Ruby as she held the door open for her team to follow, along with that stranger.
"It's urgent," James said brusquely as he strode towards the elevator, counting on the secretary there to hold the impertinent students at bay.
"Us too!" said Ruby in the secretary's direction as she raced past the flabbergasted woman. Ozpin, clearly, needed to find a new secretary.
"About something confidential!" said James as he entered the elevator, but no matter how hard he jammed down the 'Close Door' button, it didn't stop Ruby from darting inside, with her team and the stranger following along like the tail of a kite.
"Us too!" she panted as her team piled into the elevator.
"What kind of urgent, confidential matter could he possibly be discussing with a team of students and one…" words failed James, so he gestured in the stranger's direction.
"Oh, X?" said Ruby. "It's about him, actually. In fact, I bet Ozpin was calling you in to talk about X in the first place! This is perfect!"
As James looked at her team's expressions, which ranged from vague embarrassment to utter mortification, he found it hard to believe that anything about this was 'perfect'.
The elevator dinged, and that did provide James some reassurance. Whatever nonsense Ruby was on about, either she was about to be corrected or he was about to understand better. No more of this confused suspense.
The door opened. Ozpin and Glynda were waiting for him, and their expressions momentarily picked up - - only to retreat to inscrutability and confusion, respectively, at all the extras that had ridden along.
"They tell me," said James as he walked into the room and stepped aside so the remaining passengers could follow, "that they're the ones you called me to talk about?"
"After a fashion," said Oz with characteristic neutrality, "but I don't recall inviting them to the discussion."
James felt vindication, but before any of the authorities could drop the hammer on the upstarts, Ruby rushed into the middle of the room and said, "That's because we hadn't figured out the solution to our problem yet! But I thought up the answer this morning, and we worked it out to be sure!"
Ozpin raised an eyebrow. Glynda said, "Make it quick."
"We can beat the Maverick Virus by sending Huntresses to Earth and then no one has to migrate!"
For five full seconds, the only sound was the meshing of clockwork gears, because it took that long for James to voice the only response his brain could produce.
"What the fuck?"
X did not have a great history of relations with regular military forces.
The First Maverick War had caught most of the world completely unprepared. The existence of a world-level government, no matter how loosely organized, had caused most militaries to be scaled down to nearly nothing. Japan, for example, had cut its self-defense forces down to the bare minimum, never spending more than .5% of GDP on its military. Those bare-minimum forces were prepared for air and naval combat against other countries' ships and planes in conventional war.
Nothing about the First Maverick War conformed to any of those expectations. The Self-Defense Force was in no way prepared to fight individual Mavericks with supporting mechanaloids in dispersed areas, including urban ones. Even if they had been, the SDF's bases were some of the Mavericks' first targets in Japan, and those had fallen quickly, leaving a disorganized and paralyzed force that could do nothing to stall the Maverick steamroller.
The Japanese experience was close to the norm. The following years did little to change or improve matters. Some countries bolstered their military spending, as if by reflex rather than by reason. The more thoughtful countries invested in the Maverick Hunters or stood up local equivalents, resolving to fight reploids with reploids. This had left conventional militaries out of the loop, flapping in the wind like vestigial limbs.
Once, the Federation government did try to establish a force to bridge the gap: organized and outfitted like a regular military, but staffed by reploids, specifically to fight Maverick Wars.
Then the Repliforce had mutinied en masse, and further experiments along those lines died on the vine.
Suffice to say that X took a guarded view of a uniformed man with metals on his chest and a rank of general.
(And how had Remnant come to use that term as the pinnacle of its rank structure? Earth militaries had developed along very specific lines to arrive at that word, and it spread wholly by imitation. Had Remnant recapitulated that whole progression, with militaries inevitably trending to that term the way evolution trended towards crabs? Or was the same inexplicable linguistic bridge that let him understand them at all extending to niche vocabulary like this, too? He didn't know and he hated it. He was lucky that he could compartmentalize his annoyance so very well.)
X's wariness increased when he came to understand that the General wasn't beneath Ozpin at all, or even from the same Kingdom. No, he was from another Kingdom, and he was at least Ozpin's peer.
This conversation was more like an audition, then.
He idly wondered after the General's extensive prosthetics. The General wasn't going out of his way to conceal them, but none were exactly visible in his uniform, and they covered an ominous percentage of his body. Whatever had dealt that much damage should have killed a mere human. Even a Remnant human.
X kept some of his senses tuned to the General as Ozpin and the woman in the room gave a brief explanation of the overall dilemma, followed by Ruby delivering her extraordinary proposal. The General listened attentively throughout, never betraying disbelief nor contempt.
As X chewed and chewed on the General's reactions, he began to believe that it was limited to skepticism. The General wasn't dismissing any proposal out of hand because he needed to know more before it was real to him. It was more than X would have hoped for.
If X was reading him right.
Did X need to update his modeling software? He'd spent years and years honing it on Earthlings and reploids, and it was the finest tool for the job on that planet. Did it work properly on the people of this one?
He read Team RWBY easily enough, but they broadcast their emotions as clearly as a cadre of newbuilts. There was no challenge there. The woman, Glynda, and this General were made of sterner stuff. Much blanker, more controlled.
Robotic, Thesaurus suggested, to X's amusement.
Ozpin should have been more difficult, too, if not for the strange kinship X felt towards that fellow old soul.
"And you can tell he's powerful," Ruby was saying, "because we sparred with him and didn't even..." She stopped and peered suspiciously at his chest. "I was sure we'd at least dented you."
"Self-repair cleaned it up," said X. She didn't ask how long it had taken self-repair to do clean-up, which was just as well. X wasn't as obsessed with operational security as Zero, but even he didn't advertise his charge state. "I have a different sort of durability compared to Aura. I'm better able to brush off minor hits, when those nibble away at your Aura. But Aura degrades gracefully, whereas a big enough hit can really hurt me. It just..." He battled his modesty for a moment. "...needs to be a really big hit."
"Well, there you go," Ruby said, looking back to the General. "So... yeah, it just makes sense, doesn't it? If Huntresses can't be infected, and Huntresses can beat Mavericks, then Remnant can help Earth beat the Virus. And if Earth can beat the Virus, its people don't have to leave their homes. It's just better for everyone."
Ozpin turned his eyes to X. "What do you think of this proposal?"
"I think it's logistically easier to move small teams of fighters than an entire non-combatant population," said X. "What I don't know is how many Huntresses you can spare, or if that would be enough to make a difference."
"I see," said Ozpin, and while his face was quite inscrutable, X felt a kindling of hope in the ancient's breast, one that mirrored his own… tempered, as ever, by long disappointment. "I know you only just got here, but I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave again. This is a stirring proposal, and it needs to be considered fully."
X wondered if the last comment was just to mollify Ruby. It seemed to have worked: she was momentarily downcast at the seeming rejection, but perked right back up again. "And we thank you for considering with such… consideration."
A horribly awkward silence followed that X was aware enough to break by heading for the elevator.
As the team descended, Yang put her hands behind her head and said, "Well, they didn't laugh us out of the office. That's something."
"It's more than I'd hoped for," said Weiss.
"Come on," said Ruby at Weiss, "don't you have any faith in your leader?"
"More than a rational person should," said Weiss, though X could see the compliment sailing over Ruby's head. "It's just that this is a matter of billions of lives and two whole planets. It's not something to be solved in one conversation."
"Especially when the General looked unconvinced that any of it was real," said Blake, which was awfully close to X's worry.
"How could it not be real?" said Ruby, waving in X's direction. "He's right here!"
"Yeah," said Yang, "it's not like anyone on Remnant could have built an android."
X thought only he noticed how much Ruby stiffened. Interesting.
"In any event," said X, "it sounds like I need to do more research. Back to Tower Four, then?"
"Nope," said Ruby. "We're headed to the library!"
Blake smiled. Yang bumped her shoulder. "Only your favorite place in the world."
"It's up there," said Blake.
"And it's what X needs," said Ruby. "This way!"
"Well?" said Ozpin. "What's your first impression?"
He watched as James weighed his responses carefully. "It's quite a story."
"Indeed."
"It's a big request he's making, whether we make room for all the Earthlings or we send Huntsmen abroad."
"Certainly."
"Especially when the enemy is moving. We know the Grimm today are stronger and more numerous than ever. The Breach shows She has agents in the field. She has something big in store for us. And now… now is the worst time for someone unexpected like this."
"Could it possibly be the best time?"
James narrowed his eyes at Ozpin, like he had to squint to make sure he was seeing the right man. "War is coming, and that's the best time for a refugee crisis?"
"Now is when we have the greatest opportunity," said Ozpin. "Now might be the moment when Earth's technology makes all the difference."
"I'd have to see that to believe it."
"I think you just did," said Ozpin. "An artificial being, as devastating as any Huntsman, but with the thoughts and feelings of a human… it's beyond what Remnant has achieved, isn't it?"
"It's closer than you think," said James, but he immediately followed, "regardless, I… I still have issues with this whole setup. You really believe this isn't some kind of ploy? A prelude to an invasion? Maybe even something our enemies prepared for us."
"All possibilities that crossed my mind," said Ozpin as Glynda smiled.
"Aliens," muttered James. "Never thought I'd see the day."
"I tell you sincerely," said Ozpin, "that no one has ever seen it all. Even I am surprised. More often than I'd like, actually."
"You said this alien fights like a Huntsman?" said James.
"Yes. Team RWBY took him into a skirmish with some Grimm down in the forest. The footage is… interesting."
"I'd like to see it."
"You'll have it."
"It won't help my comfort either way," said James. "If there's even half as many Earthlings as he says, they're enough to swamp us with quantity and quality."
"If their aims were hostile," Ozpin said.
James grunted. "Another variable to manage."
"But do you agree that we should help them if that's what they need?"
James put his hands behind him, adopting a more formal posture, and turned to look out the window. Not in any particular direction, Ozpin was sure, but mostly just away.
"Of course I want to," said James, "but that's a far cry from whether or not I should. With war on the horizon, can we afford to help?"
"Is it not our duty to try?" said Ozpin.
"Imagine two lifeboats escaping a sinking ship. One of them springs a leak. The second lifeboat comes close to the first to offer assistance. When it does, so many people flee the first lifeboat that they swamp the second. Both lifeboats, and their passengers, go under."
Ozpin said nothing.
"If there is an amount we can afford to help," said James, "we should. But with things the way they are, I don't know what amount that is. I'm afraid it's very small. I'm afraid that trying to save one world will doom both."
"And if Earth has technology to help us survive, too? To more than make up the difference for whatever Huntresses we send?"
"It had better be something very special," said James.
"And so we return to where we started," said Ozpin. "It all comes down to how much we trust our guest. Whether we can negotiate with them in good faith, trust whatever offer they make."
"Well, it's not like trust is the easiest thing to build. You know that."
"As well as anyone," said Ozpin.
"If we could at least be certain about some of the details," said James, turning away from the window with a look of frustration. "If we could just have confidence in the facts at hand…"
He blinked. "At hand."
Ozpin and Glynda shared a glance, but no words.
James' face was deeply furrowed in concentration. "Would it even work on an android?"
"James?" said Glynda.
James looked at his peers. "There is a... woman back in Atlas with an extraordinary semblance. It might be able to help us get to the truth. At the very least, maybe we can nail down some of the specifics."
Ozpin nodded. "You know how skeptical I am of panaceas, but our needs are great. We'll try it."
"It might be hard to dig her out of Mantle," said James. "She… isn't speaking to me."
"The woman who can help us build trust doesn't trust you?" said Glynda.
"I am aware of the irony."
"Then let me try," said Ozpin. "Tell me more about this woman, and I'll see if I can still build… if not a bridge, then maybe a pontoon."
"Good luck."
"I've taken on harder tasks for lower stakes. Let me try."
Next time: Reaching Out, Looking In
Notes:
X having a certain amount of Hit Points is a game-ism that I and others have interpreted as being the energy available to power self-repair. Oddly, that depiction is closer to how Aura works. Depicting X's durability as more like a tank's- high endurance limit, but with a certain threshold that can be beat to inflict serious damage- is more consistent with the various cut scenes and cinematic depictions, and creates some interesting texture in comparing/contrasting Maverick Hunters to Aura wielders.
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