Chapter Text
A young woman lays spread eagle on the floor of her schools’ library. It just so happens that today, November 16th, is the final day of her very first semester at the most prestigious school for heroes in the world. A school of which she was admitted to early. Though it was only sixteen years ago she was given life, it is only today that her name will be given meaning.
What is the name of this young woman?
>Enter Name
Summer Rose
>That Story Is Already Over Smartass
Little Red
>And that one was never really yours
Ruby Rose
>Tell Us About Yourself
Your name is RUBY, and you come from a short lived line of ROSES. As previously mentioned, it is your last day of SCHOOL, otherwise known as BEACON ACADEMY. They are celebrating this momentous occasion with THE GLADIATORIAL COMBAT OF UNDERAGE HEROES. Combat from which you and the team you lead have been prematurely disqualified from, due to the MISPLACED AGGRESSION of your sister. At least, if the papers are to believed. Your team is a bit split on the matter.
>Tell Us About You, Not Your Sister.
Ah, right, you’re a tad SOCIALLY AWKWARD and tend to deflect conversations away from yourself when you can. Well, aside from being named Ruby, you have a VARIETY OF INTERESTS. Or well, you have two or three interests that all stem from one grander interest, which is of course TRAINING TO BE A HUNTRESS. You enjoy the rigor and respective sweat of EXERCISE, though due to your sisters ADANAS BODY and the CONSTANT COMPARISON between you and her, people underestimate greatly just how strong you are. You have a passion for COMBAT TACTICS and the pursuit of self-education into the vast topic of FIGHTING STYLES. Most importantly of all, you have a borderline sexual OBSESSION WITH WEAPONS, though you deny both adjectives. There is nothing borderline about your weapon fever, and your love is too pure for it to be only sexual, you swear.
>Is there something you enjoy doing besides huntressing it up?
Ugh, you guess you also like to play SCROLL games sometimes. Don’t be such a downer with these questions. Also don’t be so formal with them! Keep it light, keep it legendary… keep it feeling like a fairytail, please?
>Very well then, Examine The Library.
Not much to say on this matter, it’s your school’s library. You tend to do most of your studying either with your partner in your team’s dorm room, or alone in the forest just outside of school bounds when you need a break. The only reason you’re here is because your sister, who’s currently under house arrest, found some game to play online. You’d much rather be watching the GLADIATORIAL TOURNAMENT, but you love your sister and she’s had a bad week. You don’t know much about this game. Your sister, YANG BY THE WAY, has been weirdly cagey abut it, but she insisted that the game is best played one at a time, and when you’re not in the same room as your fellow players. So, here you are, in the library, half rendered as it is in your memory. You can no better describe it than you can describe the rush job background art in the underfunded cartoons of your youth. Which, you suppose is just another way of describing it. Go you.
Despite your sister’s current WILD UNPOPULARITY, she managed to wrangle all of your team, your sister team, team JNPR, and somehow even a few exchange students into playing with you. None of that matters right now though, as you’re the only one who’s going to be playing at first due to the pre-mentioned isolationist nature of the game’s ideal pre-requisites. Not that you mind none, you’ve always been better off on your lonesome, and this game is a great way to get out of your dorm room. The vibes there are awful right now.
>Shut up. What will you do?
Huh?
What Will You Do?
>Search the library for a borrowable pair of arms
You’re all good on arms right now actually.
>Prove it
Prove what?
>Think real hard about your arms Numbnuts. Details please.
Your arms are thin yet toned, extending from broad shoulders that don an old rose red cloak that has held up admirably over the years, no doubt due to your ABOVE AVERAGE care for the article.
The skin of your arms is pale, pale like your mother. Pale like the snow. Pale like the snow your mother’s buried under. You’ve long accepted that all that your dream of becoming a huntress is, is a dream of lying next to her. You’ve read the stories, you’re familiar with how each and every one of them end. The path you and your friends walk is a doomed one, of this you are certain. It’s like you told Blake though, someone has to. Cementing your fate with such certainty is the only way this world will ever become better. One day.
You aren’t quite certain that the people you love understand this, though you wish they would. They walk the same path as you, and it feels duplicitous to not tell them of such things, but it feels condescending to remind them if they have somehow managed to forget, or worse, not notice.
>Enough with the arms. Pat yourself down. Watcha got on you.
Living the minimalist life you do, you only carry the bare necessities of the huntress on your person. Your PERSONAL SCROLL that you use for communication and GAMING. A decorative EMBLEM your DECEASED MOTHER left you, symbolizing your FAMILY NAME and pinning your CLOAK to the school uniform you’re already finding too small after a recent growth spurt. Finally, and most importantly, THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE AND RECEPTACLE FOR YOUR MANY PASSIONS Crescent Rose, the war scythe you wield on your hunts that you built yourself. Your oldest and most loyal companion.
>Captchalog all that bullshit.
You have no idea what that means, but suddenly everything you just listed disappears. Like a dumb and stupid deer your bright silver eyes blink at where they were, your lips pursed but your tongue unmoving.
>Equip your Scythe and Emblem.
Equip? All of that stuff was already ‘equipped’, it was literally all on your body and grabbable. If anything, this is a re-equip scenario.
Semantics aside, you get the feeling you won’t be doing ‘equipping’ anytime soon. You aren’t quite sure what a captchalog is, and the sudden disappearance of your TREASURED POSSESSIONS of GREAT SENTIMENTAL FEELINGS have been one of the most confusing and stressful times of your life. You’re so dang confused about what’s happening, you don’t even remember to have a panic attack over the sudden loss of CRESCENT ROSE. Congrats!
You calm yourself down with the sudden understanding that your CAPTCHALOG is operating under the logic of the FATED MOMENT DATA STRUCTURE, whatever that might mean. And while your TREASURED POSSESSIONS aren’t accessible by the whims of you or anyone else, they will be there when you actually need them. Unless it’s important for them not to be.
>So… you just have an infinite storage space for your items now, and you don’t have to do anything to access them other than need them?
Well, yes? That would seem to be the case.
>Alright then.
You reach for your scroll, suddenly desperate to talk to your team about what you have to assume is magic, but your scroll will not produce itself. How quickly the cruel restrictions of a far-off future becomes the cruel restrictions of today.
>Read your favorite library book.
On shaky legs, you jolt up from your chair. Like a doe in snowfall, if you will tolerate a second comparison to game. Your breathing is shallow and quick, and your eyes glisten with the beholding of nonsense that is now fact. Or perhaps you’ve just gone mad?
You hear a thought, trickling into your brain like a dry river that you should go back to your room. Ask your big sister what’s going on, what she has found, or perhaps, to pretend this all never happened. To wake from this dream and find objects that you pick up capable of being held and wielded on any given whim. Seems a bit unfair though, that you would be able to decide such things? Who should have so much power?
The thought you hear, is not the thought you listen to however, as you meander over to the shelves upon shelves of books. Stacked to the ceiling with alleyways of tombs that extend and twist far enough to give the illusion of a room without end. You stroke leather spines that as far as you’re concerned, haven’t been opened since this school was founded off the back of a war. A promise that this world will never stop needing children to learn how to take up arms, but just maybe, the world will stop forcing them to turn them on their fellow man.
You were never much for studying with paper books. The tactile experience gave you too much to do with your hands, made you antsy, put you in the mood for something more physical. You could empathize with the pleasure you know Weiss and Blake got from the library, but if you actually needed to focus, you always worked best with a scroll screen set far enough away that you couldn’t endlessly scroll, but close enough that you could read.
The stigma around such studying created some tension between you and Weiss during the beginning of the semester. Young girl that refused to study in the library, getting poor marks on everything but her practicals and her engineering. It’s not your fault you skipped two years though, moved from an underfunded school far in the country to literally the best university in the world. The fact you were passing at all was testament to your intelligence, and even if others didn’t realize it, you put in more work than anyone else on your team. You have the slowly improving grades to prove it.
>This isn’t reading
Sorry, you tend to ramble when you’re nervous. Your baby and your emblem blipped out of existence, so it’s understandable you need some time. Ground yourself real quick, really caress each book as you move further and further into the stacks. Take a moment to let your mind buzz out as you walk, there’s only one book you’ve ever really loved, no need to think about where your feet are carrying you.
Your mind drifts to it, the many times you have heard it read to you, the many times you have read it with your own eyes. The voices she once spoke it in, the names that change with every edition. The places, the feelings, the tone, the art, the horrors, the challenges, the love. All of those change, all of those are made immortal by you’re favorite ever story, but even as you have read through countless translations and countless retellings and countless editions and countless critiques. Some things, the important things, stay the same. Like water in soup, like fertilizer in fields, like blood in bodies. These little terribly important things that stay consistent within things that have variations that surpass the thousands.
You wander deeper into the library. Down it’s winding paths, deeper into its darkest unknowns. As the lights change from plastic, to glass, to metal, to wood. As electricity turns to clockwork. As nonsense, turns into written word. You’re feet carry you away from the place you thought to retreat to. Far, far, far, away.
Sweat sticks to your face, paler, hazy. You have yet to calm down. The world moves around you, your body moves forward, as your mind lags behind in daydream. You ponder upon what you love of your favorite story. Not the thousand complexities, not the many ways in which it can be different. But on the ways it always ends the same.
>Tell us a story
What story?
>The one that is in your hands.
Oh, of course, how foolish of you. You hardly noticed such a thick old tomb slipping from the high stacks of an area in the library that’s been locked away. You hardly noticed the lock nor the key. You hardly notice the click shut of the Library’s door. You hardly notice, the way your fingers flick through delicate yellowed paper to an exact page.
You lean back against the cruxtrader that has popped into existence. Settled right next to your alchemizer and totem lathe. Now no matter where you go in this library. This sprawling sprawling place, you will have this dark wooden place to return to, to surround you in comforting metal.
>Try to summon Crescent Rose
No such luck, this is what you have for now. Unless you plan to read what is to come far away. Learn to use it, learn to love it. Learn to… well, maybe don’t treat these things like you do Crescent Rose. Someone is watching after all.
>Who is watching? What are these things? What is happening?
We don’t need to waste time on questions like that. You know, Seer.
>You do
You beg no one, you plead. To let you out of here, to let you help them. Your breathing is coming fast, you don’t want to be stuck here.
But someone must be, and you’re the only one who knows what being stuck really is. Through your brilliant eyes you see the careening death of ten thousand things. Of air and water and earth and sky, of Grimm and Grimm and Grimm, and of people. Fools call this change, but you are studied, and so you call it death. Death scratches and tears at the throats of those you love, and you couldn’t be more proud. The corpse of the Weiss you first knew is decayed, and Blake and Yang are on their way. You think it’s beautiful, you think you are doing the world a service by ushering it where you can. Reap my girl, reap. Reap and know that you want it. You are the death that looms, and death never changes, never dies. First one in, last one out.
You hate it, you hate it, you want to be new. You want to die. If only so you stop being Summer Rose, stop being the prodigy, stop being a leader. Who could you be, if you didn’t have to fight. Who could you be, if it wasn’t denied to you?
>Say please once more, quietly but earnestly. You have to be there for them.
If you really meant that, why does your hand still stroke the page.
>You don’t know
Like you didn’t know where to find the book? How to unlock the door? What page to turn to? What the tools the second player in the link has so kindly made for you are? Like you don’t know what it all means?
>Please, stop
My my my, what big silver eyes you have. All the better to read for us with.
>Once upon a time-
No, not that one :(
>I thought I couldn’t help what page I was on?
No, that would be ludicrously boring. Once you accept you can’t choose your place in all this, you can for the first time in your life, make choices for yourself.
>Hmmm… It feels wrong still.
But you enjoy this? No?
>No, they need me. I have to help them.
And this is how. Hey, introduce yourself will you?
>I already did
The game is afoot now. You can no longer hide behind falsehoods, your self is set in truth.
>…
Your name is RUBY ROSE. And until a few seconds ago, that name meant a lot LESS THAN BEING A SILVER EYED WARRIOR, LEADER OF TEAM RWBY, AND THE BEST HUNTRESS THERE FUCKING IS. Now, it only means LESS THAN BEING A SEER OF DOOM. You are DEALING WITH SOME EMOTIONAL TURMOIL RIGHT NOW, such as how you know you should be PANICKING, at the VAST DOCUMENTATION OF TRUTH SUDDENLY LAID OUT BEFORE YOU, and how DIFFERENT IT IS THAN WHAT LIFE WAS MERE MOMENTS AGO. But you understand change better than anyone. You accepted Death, and being its witness long ago. As always, your only goal now is to make the best of a bad situation.
You would be panicking, but you feel genuinely giddy knowing your place in all of this.
You have a LOT of genuine interests. Including, but not limited to, TELLING LOTS OF FIBS, MESSING WITH WEISS, LOVING YOUR SISTER, JERKING OFF WITH YOUR WEAPON CRESCENT ROSE, WEAPONS THEMSELVES, AND MUCH MUCH MORE. But, all of the above have just been ripped from you, until the moment is once again right. That doesn’t dampen your mood at all though, you’ve always wished you could change how people saw you. It’s the only way to change the self after all, and now’s your chance to figure out what comes next for you. The best part about getting everything you love, locked away from you, is that it has knocked you back to having nothing but your FIRST AND MOST PASSIONATE INTEREST.
FAIRYTALES.
Tell us a story, Seer.
>Once upon a time, a young girl was all alone.