Hey guys, Rosesaiyan2 here again! We are now at the start of Volume 2 of the Ruby cannon story. This chapter will start abit differently since we will be delving into the animosity between Elves and Humans in this story. And.. just in case you're wondering, no, Odyn and Ruby won't just all of a sudden be together like that. I'm taking a little more time to build their relationship. Right now, it's more of a close friendship/ growing one sided attraction at the moment.
Trying to do a better job of fleshing things out for the pairings... the earliest Odyn x Ruby might come to fruition is... most likely Volume 3... or just before. We'll see as it depends on the situation within the story. Here are the pairings I have so far:
Odyn x Ruby (main pairing)
Roy x Yang
Baron x Flare
Daikon x Weiss
Khanna x Mercury (that one may take abot longer to develop lol 😆)
Jaune x Pyrrha/Spoiler
Blake x Spoiler
Sybryh x Tarro
If you haven't noticed, I've decided to give Blake a pairing too. This one will take place a little later in the story, so her and Sun will just remain as really good friends. Since this is more of a crossover with the dbz universe in mind, the dark elves origin is.. a little different than if it was strictly an xover with black Clover. There are just elements from Black Clover in this story, unfortunately no Black Clover characters appear in this story. I wasn't able to figure out a way for that to happen unfortunately... plus I'd rather not mess up the personality of said characters.
Lastly, Elves use a combination of magic from Black Clover and Ki attacks from the dbz universe, so the Dark Elves will be unique in that regard. As for if they have super forms like super saiyan and all that... you'll just have to see later down the line. I'll get creative in that regard since I have to fuse elements of Black Clover and Dbz/Dragon Ball Super into this story. Anywho, onto the story!
Ps.- Rosesaiyan2 (Novaflame6_Badal/Novablade67) doesn't own Dbz/ Dragon ball super, Black Clover, or Rwby and their characters. Those belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation, Yuki Tabata/Studio Pierot and Rooster Teeth/ Monty Oum respectively. He only owns the OC's with permission to use the characters of Daikon and Tarro via ComparedDreadx.
Opening- Rising Hope [Lisa] Irregular at Magic Highschool
Visuals: just replace the characters with the characters of this story, same with the world.
Chapter Eight: Best Day Ever and Burdened History
Two weeks is not, in the accounting of most lives, a significant unit of time.
It is enough time to adjust to a new schedule. Enough time to learn the particular rhythm of a building — which stairs creak, which hallways echo, which windows catch the morning light at angles that make the walk to class feel like something worth doing. Enough time to stop being a stranger to the people you eat lunch with and start being, instead, simply the people you eat lunch with.
It is also, apparently, enough time to discover that several of your friends are members of a race that had been absent from the world's memory for longer than anyone currently alive had been living.
This had not gone as badly as it could have.
The members of Teams RWBY, JNPR, and most of KDBNB had received the information in the various ways that people receive information that reorganizes something fundamental — with questions, with a period of silence, with the specific quality of re-examining memory for the things that had been present all along and now made a different kind of sense. Jaune had asked about the ears. Nora had asked whether this explained the running speed. Ren had asked nothing, which was Ren's way of expressing that he had already arrived at several conclusions and was continuing to update them.
Pyrrha had said, quietly and with the particular steadiness that characterized most of what she said: "I suspected something of the kind. Thank you for telling us."
Nobody had treated it badly. This was not, Odyn knew, the experience his people had generally had with disclosure. He was aware that it was partly their own doing — the weeks spent building something first, the relationships established before the revelation was made — and partly luck, and partly the specific quality of character that some people simply had and others didn't.
He was grateful for it. He didn't say so, because he had not yet found a way to say it that was equal to what he felt.
What he felt was something close to: this is what it could have been, all along, if the world had been different.
He filed this carefully, in the place where he kept things that were too large for immediate processing, and went to lunch.
Ruby Rose was sitting at the table with her chin in her hand and her gaze in the middle distance, which was how she sat when she was thinking about something she hadn't told anyone about yet.
Odyn sat across from her. He did not ask what she was thinking about. He watched her think about it and waited, because Ruby's thoughts arrived at their destination in their own time and asking tended to redirect rather than accelerate them.
She had been doing this more lately — the thinking-about-something expression — and he had observed, with the careful attention he brought to her as a matter of course, that it tended to appear when she was watching him from a distance she believed sufficient for the watching not to be noticed. This was information. He was not yet certain what to do with it, and so he did with it what he generally did with things he wasn't certain about: he filed it, and continued being present in the ordinary way, and trusted that clarity would arrive when it arrived.
She looked up and found him watching her.
Something in her expression shifted — not quite embarrassment, but the rapid, involuntary quality of someone who has been caught in a private moment and needs a fraction of a second to reintegrate.
"Thinking?" he said.
"Always," she said.
"About anything in particular?"
She looked at him for a moment. There was something in the look that he recognized — the specific quality of a person deciding whether to say the thing they're actually thinking or a plausible substitute.
"Just—" She stopped. Started again. "Just about the last few months. How much has happened." She paused. "Good things, mostly."
"Mostly," he agreed.
The corner of her mouth moved.
Yang, across the table, was catching grapes with her mouth and watching her sister with the mild, satisfied expression of someone who has information and is choosing, for now, not to deploy it.
It was Ruby who slammed the binder on the table.
She slammed it with considerable feeling, which was Ruby's standard delivery method for announcements she was excited about, and the sound it made was sufficient to interrupt seventeen separate conversations.
"Sisters," she said, with the gravity of someone opening a parliamentary address, "friends—"
"— and Weiss," Weiss said, from behind her.
"— Weiss. Four score and seven minutes ago, I had a dream."
Yang tossed a grape at Nora. Nora caught it with the expression of someone being offered something insufficient. Odyn looked at the binder. The binder had Weiss's name on it in neat, official lettering, which had then been crossed out in red marker and replaced with BEST DAY EVER ACTIVITIES in writing that bore the specific quality of Ruby having had the marker for three seconds before committing.
"Did you steal my binder?" Weiss asked.
"I am not a crook," Ruby said, with her fingers crossed behind her back.
Odyn looked at the crossed fingers. He looked at Ruby. "You're very convincing," he said.
"Odyn."
"I'm just saying—"
"Odyn, whose side are you on?"
"Yours," he said. "Most of the time."
She pointed at him. This was, he had come to understand, her expression of mild outrage that did not actually contain any outrage — the theatrical version of it, deployed when she wanted to express something without expressing it directly.
He maintained eye contact and waited.
She put her hand down. "You're the worst."
"I've been told."
Khanna, two seats away, was watching this exchange with the expression of someone reviewing evidence.
Blake saved him. "What are you talking about, Ruby?"
"I'm talking," Ruby said, turning back to her audience with the renewed momentum of someone who has been temporarily sidetracked but has not lost the thread, "about kicking off the new semester with a bang. Classes start tomorrow. Which means today is the last day. Which means today should be—"
"Wonderful," Weiss said, with the particular intonation of someone who has heard Ruby plans before and has developed a vocabulary for the specific category of feeling they produce.
"I don't know whether to be proud or scared," Weiss added.
"Both is reasonable," Odyn said.
"Both is reasonable," Weiss agreed.
They looked at each other. Both appeared mildly surprised by the agreement.
The exact sequence of events that led from Ruby's planned activities to a food fight was, if you traced it carefully, comprehensible. It involved Nora, a pie, a target that was technically Weiss and practically a catastrophic miscalculation, and the particular chain reaction that follows when one person throws food in a room full of people who have been training for combat since adolescence and therefore have very good reflexes and perhaps insufficient judgment about when to apply them.
Odyn, who had been sitting at the table when the pie connected with Weiss's face, observed the moment of silence that followed.
He observed Nora's expression of cheerful non-regret.
He observed Pyrrha's hand over her mouth and Jaune's frozen, wide-eyed stillness and Ren's palm pressed flat against his own forehead.
He observed the particular quality of the atmosphere in the room — the specific charged potential of a space containing a great many trained fighters, an abundance of projectile-capable food, and the unspoken collective realization that the social contract was, at this precise moment, very thin.
He reached out through the mental link he maintained with his team, which was a narrow channel used for tactical communication and, more recently, for the specific variety of exasperation that didn't want to be expressed aloud.
No magic, he said.
Obviously, Khanna said.
Also no Ki, he added, for Roy's benefit.
I hadn't considered it, Roy said, in the tone of someone who had absolutely considered it.
Roy.
I'm not going to use it.
I know. I'm establishing it anyway.
A beat.
This is going to be embarrassing, Hailfire said.
For someone, Odyn agreed. Probably several someones.
It will be good for morale, Hailfire said.
That's one way to describe it.
Nora, on the other side of the room: "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!"
The link closed.
The food fight had the architecture of a minor military engagement conducted entirely in condiments and carbohydrates.
Nora and most of JNPR occupied the high ground — a tower of cafeteria tables that had been assembled with the structural logic of someone who has built things under pressure before. Daikon, Note, and Beat had allied with them, which was a strategic arrangement that made some sense in that all of them were very fast and had excellent aim.
Baron had found a position near the wall and was watching everything with the expression of someone who has made an executive decision to be an observer.
Team RWBY had committed.
Ruby crushed a milk carton, which was more dramatic than it needed to be and also more accurate — the milk arc was impressive.
"Justice will be swift!" she said. "It will be painful! Justice will be—"
"Delicious," Yang finished, which was the word Ruby had been reaching for.
"Delicious," Ruby confirmed.
Odyn had a breadstick. He was not entirely sure how he had ended up with a breadstick, but he was committed to it now.
Yang had turkeys.
She had put her fists through two of them, and she held them up with the calm satisfaction of someone for whom this was a reasonable solution.
"Ready?" she said.
"Yang," he said, "I want you to know that this is the most undignified I have been in several years."
"Ready?"
"...Ready," he said.
The watermelons came.
They came from Note, specifically, who had identified a large stock of them near the back of the cafeteria and had, in the thirty seconds of preparation time available, arranged a launching mechanism from a folded table. This was, objectively, impressive. The watermelons came fast and at varying angles, and Yang blocked three of them with the turkeys — which was also impressive — and Odyn caught one with his free hand and redirected it without quite stopping his forward momentum.
He made a mental note that fruit at sufficient velocity had about the same impact profile as a thrown training weight. This was not useful information but it was precise.
Across the room, Hailfire and Pyrrha had found each other.
This was, he thought — watching from the corner of his attention while he dealt with the ongoing watermelon situation — probably inevitable. They had similar training instincts: the pattern recognition of serious fighters, the economy of movement, the specific quality of attention that goes toward assessing an opponent's technique rather than simply reacting to it. They were fighting with breadsticks, which should have been ridiculous, and was instead somehow elegant.
"You're not bad," Hailfire said.
"Neither are you," Pyrrha said.
"Hail. My friends call me Hail."
Pyrrha smiled and pressed a feint, which Hailfire read and stepped around, and the exchange continued.
Roy and Ren were fighting with celery sticks and appeared to be enjoying it in the specific way that two technically skilled people enjoy a contest in which neither party is trying particularly hard, which is to say: with calm, mutual appreciation and the occasional expression of genuine surprise at the other person's capabilities.
Khanna and Blake were fighting with a chain of turkey sausage, which was a sentence Odyn hoped he would never have cause to repeat, and the fight had the quality of two people discovering that they had more in common technically than they had expected.
It ended when Khanna yanked the chain and Blake went airborne, which was Blake's fault for not accounting for the leverage differential, and then Blake became a projectile that collected Roy on her way through, and the two of them became a combined projectile that collected Flare and Nora, and the resulting dispersal pattern sent several participants to opposite ends of the room in a sequence that Odyn would later be unable to fully reconstruct.
He found himself facing Khanna.
They looked at each other.
"Somehow," she said, "I knew this is how it would end."
"It was always going to be us," he agreed.
The breadstick fight that followed was brief and precise and concluded with a particular satisfaction that he filed alongside the morning training sessions and the sparring yards of their childhood — the specific pleasure of competing against someone who knows exactly what you're going to do and forces you to be better than what you planned.
Khanna's stick went out of her hand on the third exchange.
She raised both palms. "Your win," she said.
"Next time somewhere other than a cafeteria," he said.
"Agreed."
Ruby came through at speed on a food tray, which she was using as a skateboard in a manner that was technically brilliant and practically insane, and the food twister that Pyrrha had assembled reversed itself against the far wall with a sound like a brief, enthusiastic percussion section.
When the dust — and the food — settled, the far wall had outlines of several people pressed into the condiment layer that had accumulated on it, which was either art or evidence, depending on who was doing the assessment.
"Victory for Team RWBY," Ruby announced, holding up two fingers.
"And OHRF," she added, looking at Odyn.
"I'll accept a partial victory," he said.
She grinned at him with the particular grin she had when she was happy in the uncomplicated, immediate way — not performed, not managed, just there. He looked at it for a moment.
Then the doors opened and Glynda Goodwitch entered the cafeteria.
The silence was immediate and total.
"Children," Glynda said, in the tone of someone who has arrived past the point of surprise and has landed in a register of pure, exhausted authority, "please. Do not play with your food."
Nora burped.
The assembled students held their composure for approximately three seconds.
They did not hold it for four.
Yang descended from the hole in the ceiling she had been sent through — Nora's watermelon hammer had been, on reflection, an extremely disproportionate response to a turkey — with the controlled velocity of someone who has decided to commit to the landing even though the landing was going to hurt.
Roy was directly below her.
This was not planned by either party.
Roy had time to register what was happening and not quite enough time to get fully out of the way, so he did the next best thing, which was to turn and brace, and Yang landed across him in a tangle of limbs and what he later described to Odyn as "a very significant impact to my dignity."
She looked down at him.
"Hey there, handsome," she said.
"My back," he said.
The room, which had been managing its composure, stopped managing it.
Roy accepted Yang's offered hand with the expression of someone who has decided that this is simply the kind of thing that was going to happen to him, and possibly that it was not the worst kind of thing that was going to happen to him, and stood up.
"We're all very sorry," Odyn told him.
"Sure you are," Roy said.
Yang was already taking his arm. "I'll make it up to you, good-looking."
"That is not the—"
"Roy."
He stopped.
He looked at Yang, who was looking at him with the direct, bright quality that she had — the specific quality of someone who has decided they like something and is not embarrassed about having decided — and something in his expression, which had been managing the same careful equilibrium it generally maintained around her, shifted.
"Fine," he said.
Yang's smile was comprehensive.
Odyn watched this from across the room and said nothing.
Khanna came to stand beside him. "He's going to be completely useless for the next hour," she said.
"He'll recover," Odyn said.
"I know he will." She watched Yang leading Roy toward the less-damaged section of the cafeteria. "I'm just noting it."
Ozpin and Glynda stood at the cafeteria entrance.
Glynda had the expression she wore when she was deciding between several responses and all of them were variations of I do not believe what I am seeing. She was choosing between them with the thoroughness of someone for whom precision matters.
Ozpin sipped his coffee.
"They are supposed to be the protectors of this world," Glynda said.
"They will be," he said. "But they aren't yet. They're still—" He paused, looking at the room — at the laughing students, the food on the walls, the general evidence of an afternoon spent in the particular way of people who are not yet burdened with the full weight of what they are becoming. "—children. Enjoying the time they have before they aren't."
Glynda followed his gaze. Something in her expression did a small, involuntary softening that she appeared to notice and then choose not to correct.
"It won't last," she said.
"No," he agreed. "It won't."
He watched for another moment — watched Ruby show Odyn something on her scroll that made him look at it and then look at her with the calm, attentive expression that he wore when she had said something that required him to update something — and then turned toward the door.
"Let it last as long as it can," he said.
Sybyrh, who had been standing at the wall with the particular, controlled stillness of someone who was both a combat instructor and a person with considerable affection for the people she was watching, reached over and briefly touched Glynda's shoulder.
"They're good kids," she said.
"They are," Glynda admitted. Then, because she was Glynda: "That doesn't mean I want food in my cafeteria ceiling."
"No," Sybyrh agreed. "Of course not."
The corner of Glynda's mouth moved in a direction that was not a smile, precisely, and then corrected itself, and she walked away with the posture of someone who has maintained their standards in the face of considerable provocation.
Across town, on the same afternoon —
The man running the dust shop on the corner of Portsmith and Vale Commercial had been doing so for thirty-seven years, which was long enough to know the ladder. He knew the ladder well. He had been using this specific ladder for eleven of those thirty-seven years and had, in that time, never fallen.
This was, apparently, no longer statistically guaranteed.
He reached for the sign with his right hand, shifted his weight, and the ladder's feet made a decision about the pavement.
He was caught before he processed the fall.
He looked behind him.
Two young women. Dark skin, the particular quality of it that was warm and deep. The first had hair the color of mint — vivid, unusual, with the specific quality of something that had been that color for its entire existence rather than something changed. Red eyes, direct and alert. She moved with the economy of someone trained to move efficiently.
The second was older, or seemed older — not in appearance, which was the thing that took a moment to resolve, because she did not appear older in any conventional sense and yet carried the specific weight of someone who had been accumulating years for longer than her face suggested. Lavender hair, braided back. Eyes the color of a fire seen from a distance — the amber-gold that the first girl's companion didn't have, the true flame color that was specific to a particular kind of person. Pointed ears, visible for a moment as she turned to set the shop owner back on his feet.
The mint-haired girl had caught him first, but the older woman's hands had come up almost simultaneously — reflexive, the muscle memory of someone for whom this kind of intervention is simply automatic.
They had said the same thing at the same time, which was careful there, and the synchronization of it was the kind that happens between people who have been in proximity long enough to share certain instincts.
"I apologize," the older woman said, to the shop owner, which was unnecessary and was said anyway. "Are you alright?"
"Fine, fine," he said, with the relieved gratitude of someone who has been surprised into needing help and is not sure how to process this gracefully. "Thank you."
The older woman smiled. It was the kind of smile that had been shaped by a great deal of experience with people — warm, specific, the smile of someone who actually means it.
She turned to leave, and the mint-haired girl stood slightly to her left.
"Wait," the girl said. Something had caught her attention — the ears, visible at this angle, or the eyes, or the specific combination of both, or the feeling that registered at the edge of her awareness when she was near something she couldn't categorize.
The older woman turned back.
"I've never seen anyone with your eyes before," the male voice said, from behind the mint-haired girl. She turned. Her companion — silver-haired, grey-eyed, the particular calibrated ease of someone who has been in dangerous situations often enough to have developed a resting state that is adjacent to readiness — stood with his hands in his pockets, head tilted slightly. "Are you from Vale?"
"Mercury," the mint-haired girl said.
"It's just a question."
The older woman looked at them both with the attentive, assessing quality that had nothing aggressive in it — the assessment of someone deciding how much to say, not whether to engage.
"I am from quite far away," she said. "I have come to see someone dear to me." She paused. "My name is Hyatan Albanar. Take care, both of you."
She turned again.
The man beside her — visible now around the corner of the shop, where he had been waiting with the patience of someone accustomed to waiting — had cerulean hair and a beard that carried the same deliberate quality as the rest of him. He looked at the two teenagers with a brief, direct attention that was neither hostile nor warm, exactly, but complete — the assessment of someone who has formed a very thorough impression in a very short time.
He nodded, once, and then the two of them were gone, walking down the street with the ease of people who know where they are going.
Mercury watched them go.
Something in his expression had the quality of a mechanism encountering a tooth it cannot quite clear — not jamming, exactly, but running against something and finding the running strange. He put two fingers to the side of his head without deciding to.
"You okay?" Emerald said.
"Yeah." He lowered his hand. "Yeah, I'm fine." He looked at the street where they had been. "That woman. I don't — I've never seen her before."
"But?"
"But—" He stopped. "It felt like I should know something about her. Not her specifically. Something about—" He made a gesture that expressed the insufficiency of what he was trying to say. "I don't know. I don't know what it is."
Emerald looked at him with the specific expression she had when she was thinking something that she was not yet prepared to say. She had a theory, the shape of which was that people sometimes carried things in their memory that they didn't know they were carrying, and that certain encounters could brush against those things without resolving them.
She decided not to say this.
"We need to get moving," she said instead.
Mercury was looking at the street for another moment. Then he turned forward and walked.
She fell into step beside him and filed the moment in the place where she kept things that seemed like they were going to matter later, and did not know yet that she was right.
The warehouse, evening —
Roman Torchwick had, in his professional assessment, been having a difficult several weeks.
He delivered this assessment to Cinder in the particular way he delivered things he found uncomfortable — with excessive verve, with the theatrical confidence of someone using performance to occupy the space where honesty would otherwise have to go.
Cinder received it the way she received most things: with the patience of someone who has the information they want and is waiting for the person speaking to catch up.
"Have a little faith," she said, when he'd finished. She turned away. "We're done with the Dust."
Roman blinked. "Then what—"
"Phase two," she said. "Move the White Fang. Clear this building. I'll send coordinates."
She was already at the door.
"One more thing," Emerald said.
Cinder stopped.
"On the way today — we saw someone. A woman we didn't recognize. Lavender hair. Dark skin." Emerald paused. "Pointed ears. And eyes like—" She found the description. "Like fire. The color of actual fire."
The change in Cinder's posture was minimal. Someone who didn't know what to look for would have missed it. Emerald knew what to look for, because she had been studying Cinder for long enough to have catalogued the specific, minor recalibrations that her employer made when something registered as significant.
"Was she alone?" Cinder asked.
"There was a man with her. Dark blue hair. Same eyes."
Cinder turned. Not fully — half a turn, the kind that means I need to think about this in the direction I'm already facing.
"The Dark Elves," she said, and the words had the quality of something being placed on a table with care — not a surprise, but a development. The difference between a theory and a confirmed fact.
"You know what they are?" Emerald said.
"By reputation." Cinder looked at the middle distance. "More than reputation, in some respects." She was quiet for a moment. "Don't antagonize them. Don't make contact. If you encounter any of them again, observe and report."
"What are they capable of?" Mercury asked.
Cinder looked at him. Something in her expression had the quality of a person deciding how much of what they know to give away, which was a calculation she made frequently and rarely resolved in favor of giving more than necessary.
"More than you'd expect from a race that has kept itself absent from the world for a generation," she said. "Which is why you'll observe. Not engage."
She turned to the door again.
"When it's time to account for them," she said, "we will do so carefully. Until then—" She did not finish the sentence. The incompleteness of it was its own instruction.
The door closed.
Emerald stood in the warehouse for a moment, among the White Fang soldiers moving crates, and thought about lavender hair and flame-colored eyes, and about the way Mercury had gone still for a moment on the street, and about the accumulation of things she was filing that she did not yet have a framework for.
Mercury, beside her, was not thinking about any of this.
He was thinking about a woman's face, which he had never seen before, and the inexplicable and entirely frustrating sensation that he had been told something about it once and had forgotten what the telling was.
Cafeteria, meanwhile — the aftermath
The tables had been restored. The food had been cleared. The wall outlines remained, which Glynda had apparently decided were a problem for tomorrow.
Sun and Neptune sat at the edge of the room, Neptune's hair still carrying evidence of the soda incident that had occurred during the food fight in a way that he had declined to explain and no one had felt strongly enough about to press.
"So those are the Elves?" Neptune said.
Sun followed his line of sight to where Odyn and Ruby were sitting, Ruby showing him something on her scroll that was making her gesticulate with the specific enthusiasm she reserved for things she cared about, and Odyn listening with the particular quality of attention he gave to things she said.
"Yeah," Sun said. "Well — some of them. I don't think you want to meet Khanna when she's in the mood she was in earlier."
"What mood was that?"
"The one where she won a food fight."
Neptune considered this. "I feel like that's not actually the most important information about any of them."
"It kind of is, though," Sun said. "You learn a lot about people from how they act when they're not being serious."
Neptune looked at him.
"I learned that from someone," Sun added.
"Which one?"
Sun looked at the table with the particular expression of someone who has said more than they intended to and is navigating back from it. "Roy. The redhead. He said something like that, a couple weeks back." He cleared his throat. "Anyway. The point is — they're good people. I wanted you to meet them before you formed opinions."
"What kind of opinions would I form?"
"The ones people form when they hear mythical warrior race and skip past the people part."
Neptune looked at him. This was, he acknowledged internally, a more considered observation than he had expected from Sun at this hour of the afternoon.
"Okay," he said. "I'll meet them."
"Cool." Sun stood up. "Also don't mention the ears in the first thirty seconds. Just general advice."
"Was that ever a risk?"
"I'm establishing the baseline, Neptune."
Ruby was showing Odyn her notes for a semblance application she had been thinking about — a way of using her petal-burst in a shorter, controlled burst for close-quarters rather than the full sprint — and he was listening with the expression she'd come to recognize as the one that meant he was actually thinking about what she was saying and not just waiting for her to finish.
"The issue," she said, "is that the shorter burst generates less momentum, so I'd be trading speed for maneuverability, and I'm not sure the trade is worth it unless I can figure out how to—"
"Redirect the excess," he said.
She looked at him. "Yeah. Exactly."
"Could you use the rotation? If you're in a smaller burst, you have more control over the directional component. If you bank at the apex of the burst rather than carrying straight through—"
"Then the momentum isn't lost, it's—" She sat up straighter. "It goes lateral."
"Instead of forward."
"That's — yeah, that could actually—" She grabbed her scroll and wrote something down, which she did with the focused urgency of someone capturing a thought before it moved. "I'd need to practice the timing. The rotation has to be set before the burst or it won't redirect, it'll just spin me."
"Training ground after class tomorrow?"
She looked up from her scroll. He was looking at her with the mild, unperformative expression he had when he had said something practical and meant it practically.
"You'd help me practice it?" she said.
"The timing part is about repetition. Having someone track the arc helps." He paused. "Also, if you spin rather than redirect, someone should be standing far enough back to not be involved."
She stared at him. "That's — you're being practical about this."
"Yes."
"Not just — you're not saying yes to be nice."
"I'm not generally nice in that particular way," he said. "It's an interesting problem. I'd like to see if the solution works."
She looked at him for a moment — at the specific, calm interest in his expression that was not about her, exactly, but was not separate from her either, the attention that went toward the things she cared about because she cared about them.
She made herself look back at her scroll.
"Okay," she said. "Tomorrow, after class."
"After class," he agreed.
Yang, across the table, caught Khanna's eye.
Khanna raised a single eyebrow.
Yang raised one back.
They did not say anything. They didn't need to.
Later, in the dormitory —
Ruby was lying on her bed in the ceiling tent, looking up at the underside of the fabric, with the expression she had when she was thinking about something she had been thinking about all day and was finally in a position to think about it without any interruption.
She was thinking about what Yang would say if she said it aloud.
She was also thinking that Yang would say the same thing whether Ruby said it aloud or not, because Yang was Yang and had very good pattern recognition.
She was thinking about the semblance conversation, and about the timing part is about repetition, having someone track the arc helps, which was a practical thing to say and had been said practically, and which she was not going to assign more weight to than it contained.
She was thinking about all the times over the past year that she had been upset or uncertain or spinning in place, and about the specific consistency of a hand on her shoulder, a voice that said here is what I actually think, not what you want to hear, a presence that arrived reliably and left her steadier than before.
She was thinking: this is what friendship is.
She was also thinking, with the honesty that the ceiling tent permitted: I think this might be more than friendship, and I don't know what to do with that.
She pressed both hands against her face.
The ceiling tent was quiet around her.
Below, she could hear Yang's soft breathing, and Blake turning a page, and Weiss writing something with the pen she used when she was reviewing notes before bed. Ordinary sounds. The sounds of her team, in their room, at the end of a day that had been better than most.
She thought: eventually, I'll figure out what to do about it.
She thought: he said eventually was a reasonable timeline.
She thought: he was talking about something else entirely.
She thought: I know.
She let her hands fall and looked at the ceiling of her tent and decided that eventually was still a reasonable timeline, and that for now, tomorrow, after class, training ground was sufficient, and that she was going to go to sleep.
She went to sleep.
End of Chapter Eight
To be continued in Chapter Nine: Welcome to Beacon — Reunion
Every story has a chapter like this one — not the chapter where things happen, but the chapter where the things that are going to happen gather themselves quietly in the background, arranging themselves into the sequence they'll eventually take. The food was thrown. The laughter happened. Two women with lavender hair and cerulean hair walked through a city and were observed by people who did not yet know why it would matter. A girl in a ceiling tent pressed her hands against her face and thought about someone, and decided that eventually was still a reasonable timeline.
Somewhere in the dark, something old and patient opened its records and added a name.
Tomorrow, classes resumed.
It was, as Ruby had said, going to be a good semester.

Shonen Onmyouji ED 1 (don't know the name of the song lol) this song just with cast of this story.
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Hey guys, hopefully you enjoyed this chapter. As you can tell, Cinder has now discovered the dark elves being in Vale. I'll try and touch on why Cinder knows about them as the story progresses. She has a pretty major role in the backstories of three of the Dark Elven lords who are attending Beacon (Odyn, Roy, Khanna).
As for Mercury, Next few chapters will explain why he's so familiar with the Elves. It will also start his change from villain to a hero in this story. I'm not sure what to do with Emerald though... Maybe you guys can decide?
Should Emerald stay Evil?
A: Yes, keep her as a villain.
B: No, go in a different direction with her.
I know I also mentioned Blake having a pairing for this story and I fully intend to deliver on that promise. Which male character should I put her with down the line?
I. Sun
II. Beat
III. An Oc
IV. Don't, leave her single.
Anyways, hopefully I did okay with the food fight, wanted to make sure it was different- ish. I'll end with one last poll.
Who will go on a date first?
Roy and Yang
Odyn and Ruby
Daikon and Weiss
Baron and Flare
Or
Jaune and Pyrrha
That's all for now, see you guys in the next update!