Hey guys, I'm back with a new chapter! Hopefully you all enjoyed the separate chapter for Yang and Roy, besides... I kinda had to tie up a loose end with them lol. The chapter will start a bit different before it refocuses back to the events of episodes 4 and 5 of Volume 2. This one cover parts of 3 episodes, now that I think of it lol. Which would leave next chapter to cover the Beacon dance.
I'm thinking Blake will be with an oc this time around, but.. it won't come to fruition until certain events play out later in the story.... i.e- Volume 3 and beyond.
Now, I have this planned out but just wanted to see which scenario you guys think would be better following the climax of Volume 3.
After the fall of Beacon:
1. The Elves declare war against the humans and the White Fang
II. Jaune leaves with *spoiler* to become stronger and better equipped to protect what he cares about
III. The Elves come out from hiding and publicly confront both Atlas (Atlus) and the Shcnee family regarding their inhuman treatment over the years
IV. The Devils come forth, intent to capture Odyn and Ruby in an attempt to revive Mordred.
V. Other write in scenario
VI. Stick with the cannon rwby events up until the author kills off Cinder.
Let me know by PM which option is best and why. Now, onto the story!
Disclaimer: I don't own DBS/ DBXV/ Black Clover/ or RWBY. The aforementioned series belong to Akira Toriyama/ Toei Animation/ Yuki Tabata/ Studio Pierot/ Rooster Teeth/ Monty Oum respectively. I only own the oc's.

A/N: new opening: Naruto Op 8- Re:member
Visuals: Characters of this story with those from Remnant
Chapter Eleven: A Minor Hiccup — Ruby's Strange Rescuer
The morning of the investigation arrived with the particular energy of a plan that has been agreed upon by too many people, which is to say: it arrived with slightly too much enthusiasm and slightly too little clarity about which parts of the plan were fixed and which parts were still negotiable.
Port's classroom — earlier that morning
The story had been going on for forty minutes.
Port was at the stage of it where the protagonist — himself, seventeen years younger and considerably more flexible — had cornered the Grimm against a cliff face, and the narrative had the quality of something that was going to get to the point eventually but had decided, for now, that ambiance was also important.
Jaune Arc was not listening to the ambiance.
He was watching Weiss Schnee in the seat adjacent to his with the concentrated attention of someone who has committed to a plan and is in the process of executing it despite mounting evidence that the plan is not working.
"Weiss," he said, quietly enough that only she could hear and approximately loud enough that five people around them could also hear. "After class — would you want to grab something to eat? There's this place near the festival grounds that—"
Weiss did not look up from the clock on her desk.
"Also," Jaune said, changing approach, "I have these two tickets to the new Spruce Willis—"
The clock ticked to four o'clock. Weiss dismissed the alarm and turned her attention forward.
"And maybe after that, we could study together? Because you're smart and I'm — you know—"
Port reached his dramatic pose. The bell rang. Port missed the climax of his own story, cleared his throat, and addressed the class with the dignified disappointment of someone who had been building to something.
As students gathered their things, Jaune waited.
Weiss packed her scroll. She stood. She walked.
"Weiss — did you hear me?" Jaune asked.
"No," she said, moving. "No." Another step. "No." The door. "Yes."
The door closed.
Jaune performed a slow, deliberate descent of his forehead onto his desk.
Daikon, two seats away, watched this with the expression he wore when something was entertaining and he had decided, for once, not to say so.
Khanna came around the desk and put a hand briefly on Jaune's shoulder. "One day," she said. Which was not encouragement exactly, but it was the honest kind of thing that sounded like encouragement from the right angle.
Yang appeared on his other side and ruffled his hair with the particular sisterly energy she extended to people she had decided needed it. "She'll come around," she said. "Give it time."
"How much time?" Jaune asked, from the surface of the desk.
"More than you've given it," Yang said. "Less than you think."
Jaune sat up. He looked at the door. He appeared to conclude that this was, on balance, acceptable.
Team RWBY's dormitory — one hour later
The preparation sequence had the quality of the beginning of something that was going to be considerably more complicated than planned, which was, in retrospect, how most things the group attempted began.
Ruby laced her shoes with the focus she brought to gear checks. Weiss drew Myrtenaster and confirmed the glyph revolver's alignment. Yang ran the chamber of Ember Celica. Blake tightened the ribbons around her arms with the practiced efficiency of someone whose weapon is partly herself. Across the room, Odyn tightened his bracers, Roy tied the headband below his hairline and sheathed his blade, Hailfire confirmed the shield mechanism on her gauntlet, and Flare checked the folded configuration of her gauntlets twice because she always checked them twice.
Khanna and Baron adjusted their weapons with the comfortable, pre-mission efficiency of people who have done this long enough that the motion is less preparation and more ritual.
Daikon had been added to the plan, which Weiss had objected to on the grounds of general principle before conceding on the grounds of practical necessity, and which Daikon had accepted with the mild satisfaction of someone who had not been surprised.
"Does everyone understand their role?" Ruby asked.
The roles were understood.
Weiss, Ruby, Odyn, and Daikon would go to the CCT — the Cross Continental Transmit Tower — and access the Schnee company records for evidence of other Dust robberies.
Blake, Sun, Baron, and Flare would attempt to get into a White Fang meeting.
Yang, Roy, and Neptune would find a contact of Yang's in the less officially sanctioned part of Vale.
Khanna and Hailfire would circulate through the city asking questions in the specific, patient way of people who know how to be unremarkable in a crowd.
At this point, the window opened and Sun Wukong hung from the ledge by his tail and said yeah!
There was a brief pause.
"How long were you there?" Ruby asked.
"A while," Sun said.
"The whole time?"
"Most of it."
Another pause.
"Oh," Weiss said. "What is wrong with—"
"Should I come in?" Sun asked.
"Please," Neptune said, from the thin ledge outside the window, where he was distributing his weight with the careful, contained terror of someone who had not anticipated being this high above the ground.
Khanna looked at the window. She looked at the ledge. She looked at Neptune's expression, which was the expression of someone performing composure and not quite succeeding.
"Let him in," she said.
"Thank you," Neptune said, coming through the window with the relief of someone stepping off a very small boat onto solid ground. He straightened up. "Seriously. That was awful." He looked at the assembled room. "Also, aren't libraries for reading? This is a dormitory. What are you all doing?"
"Sup," Sun said, landing in the room with the ease of someone for whom height is simply another dimension of movement.
"We could ask you the same thing," Khanna said.
"Fair point." Sun looked at the group. "So are we finally going after Torchwick?"
"We are going," Blake said, "to investigate. As a team."
Sun looked at her. Then at the various elves and saiyans distributed around the room. Then back at Blake.
"Team seems like it's gotten pretty big since I last saw it," he said.
"That's besides the point," Blake said.
"Kinda got a point there, though," Roy said.
"He does," Khanna agreed.
Blake sighed.
The plan was redistributed to accommodate the additions, which mostly involved Neptune being placed with Yang and Roy on the grounds that he was available and there was no other obvious configuration.
Weiss, during the redistribution, attempted to arrange herself into Neptune's group by suggesting Ruby go with Yang.
"Why don't you go with Yang?" she said, with the specific quality of someone delivering something casual. "She's your sister, after all."
Daikon, who had been standing to the side with the particular expression he wore when he had identified something but had decided to wait and see, said nothing.
Ruby, already moving, steered Neptune firmly to Yang's side. Neptune rocked slightly.
"But, Weiss — if I went with Yang, who would go with you?" Ruby asked, with the specific innocence of someone who is either entirely genuine or has learned exactly how to perform genuineness, and Ruby was always genuine.
"Well," Weiss said, with elaborate casualness, "Neptune could—"
"Nah," Ruby said, already laughing.
Daikon crossed to Weiss and took her arm before the situation could develop further. "Come on, Princess," he said, already moving toward the door. "You can admire the view some other time."
"Wait—"
She was out the door before she finished the word.
Odyn turned to Ruby and offered his arm with the formality of someone who is performing formality slightly ironically and slightly not.
"Shall we?" he said.
Ruby giggled — the real laugh, the one that came before she could decide about it. "Odyn, you're so silly," she said, and took his arm.
He rubbed the back of his head. The expression on his face was one that Roy, had he been in the room, would have recognized and filed.
"Only for you," Odyn said, and they walked out together.
The CCT — Cross Continental Transmit Tower
The tower was the kind of structure that impresses you differently depending on how you arrive at it. From a distance, it was monumental — the specific scale of something built to last regardless of what happened around it. Up close, it was deliberate: the quality of architecture that knows exactly what it is and does not perform otherwise.
"The Cross Continental Transmit System," Weiss said, looking up at it with the particular pride of someone explaining something they feel proprietary about, "was developed by Atlas to allow the four kingdoms to communicate freely. It was their contribution to the world following the Great War."
"Very thorough," Daikon said.
"Thank you."
"I was being sarcastic."
Weiss turned. "I know you were being—"
"You're just going to repeat everything they taught you in school and expect me to be impressed," he said.
"I am not—"
"You like knowing things," Daikon said. "And you like people knowing that you like knowing things. Which is fine, by the way. Just don't pretend it's purely informational."
Weiss stared at him.
"What?" he said.
"You're infuriating," she said.
"You keep saying that," he said. "And yet you keep talking to me."
The electricity that formed between their expressions was, as usual, not entirely hostile.
"The elevator is this way," Weiss said, and walked toward it with the authority of someone who has decided to end a conversation by simply not continuing it.
Daikon followed.
Inside the elevator, he stood to her left and slightly behind her and said nothing. This was, Weiss had noticed, his other mode — the one that existed when he was not specifically engaging, which was the mode of someone who was observing, cataloguing, arriving at conclusions he intended to keep to himself.
She did not entirely understand Daikon Koizumi.
She understood that he was perceptive and deliberate and that his teasing had a quality to it that other people's didn't — it landed differently, as though it had come from somewhere specific rather than from general mischief. She understood that he disliked pretension with the focused dislike of someone who has had reason to, and that he expressed this dislike by deflating it wherever he found it, including in her, which was often.
She understood that when he said princess he did not mean it the way Jaune said snow angel — Jaune said it with the slightly distracted charm of someone who had decided the phrase worked and deployed it mechanically. Daikon said it the way someone names a thing that is essentially true even when it's annoying.
She did not find this comfortable.
She found it, despite herself, more honest than most things people said to her.
The elevator arrived.
The CCT's communications floor had the particular quality of important rooms that do not need to be impressive — the technology was present in its function rather than its appearance, and the effect was a room that knew what it was for and had organized itself accordingly.
Weiss gave her name, inserted her scroll, was verified, and settled at Terminal 3 with the contained composure of someone who has done this before and knows exactly what the conversation ahead is going to feel like.
Daikon stood slightly to her left. He had positioned himself, she noticed, in the specific way that someone stands when they are providing presence rather than surveillance — close enough to be there, far enough to be clearly not intruding.
The operator appeared on screen. There was warmth, surprise, the offer to connect her to her father.
Weiss declined.
There was a list of documents. Some of them were sensitive. Weiss indicated that she would treat them carefully. The data transferred. The call ended.
The screen went dark.
In its reflection, Weiss's composure, which had held through the call with the practiced certainty of something that has been performing this exact function for a very long time, showed its edges.
A hand came to rest on her shoulder.
She looked up.
Daikon's expression was not the expression he wore when he was being Daikon. It was the expression he wore when he had decided, for a specific moment, to set that aside.
"Whatever it is between you and your father," he said, "I'm not going to ask about it. But you've been carrying it since we walked in here, and that expression—" He paused. "It doesn't suit you."
She looked at him.
"You're better than that look," he said, and the directness of it was, as usual, uncomfortable, and also — she found, to her own mild irritation — the thing she needed to hear.
She let out a breath.
"Thank you," she said, and the words came out quieter than she'd intended, and with more genuine feeling than she'd planned.
"Don't thank me," he said. "It's just the truth."
Princess, he added, a beat later, and it landed differently than it usually did — not as a diminishment but as something closer to a name.
She looked at her scroll and at the data on it, and at the work that was waiting, and she found that she was, without having decided to be, slightly more prepared to do it than she'd been five minutes ago.
Meanwhile — Vale city center
Ruby's scroll launched itself from her hands at a trajectory that suggested she had been expressing enthusiasm physically rather than simply feeling it.
It skipped twice across the pavement and came to rest at the feet of a girl with copper-red hair and wide, bright eyes.
"Oh!" the girl said. "Here—"
"Penny!"
The reunion had the quality of something that had been building since the docks — the specific relief of you're here and you're alright arriving with rather more force than Ruby had anticipated.
Penny backed up a step.
"I — I think you might have me confused—"
"Penny," Odyn said, from beside Ruby, in the quieter register that he used when he was being very specific about something, "it's us."
She looked at him. Something in her expression did the specific thing it did when she was deciding whether to trust something — not the calculation, exactly, but the moment before the calculation, where the answer already exists and is waiting to be acknowledged.
"Ruby has been worried about you," Odyn said. "So have I. Not because anything you did was wrong — because you disappeared and we didn't know if you were alright."
Penny looked at Ruby.
Ruby's expression was simply itself — the open, genuine, undefended quality that was her most consistent feature and also, Odyn had observed, her most disarming one.
"We can't talk here," Penny said, finally. "It isn't safe."
Odyn nodded. "Too many people."
Penny blinked. "How did you—"
"I pick up on things quickly," he said. "Let's find somewhere better."
They found a quieter street two blocks from the main plaza, and Odyn positioned himself with his back to a wall from long habit, and Ruby sat on a low step beside Penny with the natural ease of someone who has been sitting beside people and making them feel less alone since she was old enough to do it deliberately.
"My father asked me not to wander," Penny said. "But it wasn't only my father."
"General Ironwood," Odyn said.
Penny's eyes widened. "How—"
"The military presence here isn't general caution," Odyn said. "It's specific. And the soldiers who were watching you at the docks weren't watching a bystander — they were watching someone they had instructions about. The only person with that kind of reach in Vale right now who wouldn't want you talking to us is Ironwood." He paused. "I may be wrong."
"You're not wrong," Penny said softly.
Ruby had been watching this with the expression she carried when she was doing several things at once — listening, feeling, filing, arriving at conclusions through a completely different route than logic but arriving at the same place. She put her hand over Penny's.
"Whatever's going on," she said, "we're your friends. You don't have to carry it by yourself."
"We promise," Odyn added. And it was the kind of promise he made: simple, without conditions, meaning exactly the words it contained.
Penny looked at her hands.
She lifted them, very slowly.
The skin of her palm had torn in the place where she had stopped the truck — not bloodlessly, not cleanly, but revealing beneath it the specific, unmistakable quality of metal. Gray, precise, the unmistakable material of something built.
"I'm not," Penny said, "a real girl."
The words arrived with the quiet weight of something said for the first time to people whose response matters.
Ruby looked at Penny's hands.
Then she looked at Penny's face.
Then she said: "You stopped a truck for me."
Penny blinked.
"With your hands," Ruby continued. "You caught me from falling. You have been kind and strange and wonderful and you are my friend." She tightened her hand over Penny's revealed palm. "What you are made of is interesting. But it's not what matters to me."
Something happened in Penny's expression that was the specific expression of someone receiving something they had not expected and did not know what to do with, and it was the most human expression she had made since they met her.
Odyn said, quietly: "Whatever you are, Penny — you chose to help Ruby. You put yourself in harm's way for a stranger because you thought it was right." He looked at her steadily. "That doesn't happen automatically. That's a decision."
Penny was quiet.
"This changes things," Odyn said, "in that I have more questions about what Ironwood is doing and why. But it doesn't change that you're our friend."
Penny looked between the two of them.
"I— yes," she said, and the word carried more weight than its single syllable suggested.
"Good," Ruby said.
They sat for a moment in the quiet of a side street in Vale, with the sound of the festival preparations in the distance and the ordinary sounds of the city around them, and the particular quality of a moment that has been significant and has decided not to announce itself as such.
Twenty minutes earlier — the plaza demonstration
The Atlesian demonstration had been timed for the middle of the morning, which meant it coincided with the exact window when Odyn and Ruby, following Penny through the side streets of the plaza district, arrived at the edge of a gathered crowd.
The hologram of James Ironwood addressed the audience with the carefully calibrated confidence of someone who has given this speech or a version of it many times. The AK-130s stepped forward. The AK-200s replaced them. The crowd applauded with the mild enthusiasm of people who are impressed without being particularly moved.
Ruby had been tracking Penny.
She had stopped tracking Penny.
She was now tracking the hologram of the Atlesian Paladin — the towering battle suit with its hinged legs and its rectangular head and its general quality of being a piece of machinery so large and well-designed that it had entered the specific territory where Ruby Rose's attention became difficult to retrieve.
"Ruby," Odyn said.
She said nothing.
"Ruby."
Still nothing.
He reached over and lightly — very lightly — administered a single precise knock to the top of her head.
"Ow—" She looked at him. "Hey."
"Penny," he said. "Down the street."
She refocused with the specific efficiency of someone who is very good at moving between total absorption and immediate attention, which was a quality she had that he found consistently useful.
"Right," she said. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize," he said. "Just keep moving."
She kept moving. He kept pace beside her.
"Little Rose," he said, mostly to himself.
She glanced at him.
"Nothing," he said.
The soldiers found Penny at the edge of the demonstration crowd.
What followed happened quickly enough that reconstruction was difficult afterward.
The soldiers identified Penny and began moving. Ruby and Odyn identified the soldiers identifying Penny and also began moving. Odyn peeled away to the left with the particular decisiveness of someone who has already done the geometry.
"Afternoon," he said, stepping into the soldiers' path with the ease of someone who has been blocking paths since he was old enough to understand the value of the skill. "Busy day?"
The soldiers attempted to go around him.
He moved with them.
"You look like you're in a hurry," he said. "I understand — very busy time of year. The festival and so on."
"Get out of the way," one of them said.
"In a moment," Odyn said. "I just had a question about the AK-200 demonstration—"
Penny and Ruby disappeared around the corner.
Odyn considered his options. The soldiers were past the point of being redirected by conversation. He did the specific calculation of someone who has been trained to apply the minimum force required and not exceed it, and applied accordingly — two precise strikes to the specific points at the back of each neck that produce temporary unconsciousness without lasting damage, the kind of technique that looks, from the outside, like someone who knows exactly where the off switch is located.
The soldiers went down.
"Nighty night," he said, without particular satisfaction. Then, louder, to the soldiers coming around from the other direction: "Hey. Over here."
Three more soldiers changed direction.
He led them for two blocks, turned a corner, waited with the patience of someone who has done this before, and addressed each of them in turn.
When he arrived at the alley where Penny and Ruby had stopped, he was slightly out of breath — not because the soldiers had been difficult, but because he had covered two blocks at a sprint in the interval.
"You're okay," he said, assessing Ruby first and then Penny.
"I'm fine," Ruby said. "You're okay?"
"Fine," he said. "Six soldiers successfully redirected, none permanently harmed, one light magic memory adjustment for the bystanders." He paused. "The last part stays between us."
She nodded. "Memory adjustment?"
"A very precise version," he said. "Five minutes, no collateral. They're fine."
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had when she was reassessing something. "You really are—"
"Don't," he said.
"I was going to say impressive."
"—impressive," he completed. "Yes. I know."
She laughed. He did not quite hide the fact that this was the correct outcome.
The truck came from the direction that neither of them was watching.
Odyn heard it before he saw it — the specific sound of something large moving at speed in a space where neither Ruby nor he were attending to it — and he moved, but Penny had already moved faster and the sequence of events had already decided how it was going to happen.
The truck stopped.
Penny's hands were against the hood, her palms flat, the ground beneath her cracked from the transmitted force.
Ruby was not under the truck.
Ruby was in someone's arms.
She processed this in the order that dazed processing works — the cessation of danger, then the question of present circumstance, then the identity of the person who had arrived in the gap. She looked up.
Blue hair. Flame-colored eyes. Dark skin. A beard, which was the specific detail that her brain caught and could not immediately categorize, because the only person she knew with blue hair and flame-colored eyes and dark skin did not have a beard and was seventeen years old.
The man was looking at her with the expression of someone who is both relieved and quietly amused.
"Thanks for saving me, Od—" She stopped. "Hang on—"
"There are worse people to be mistaken for than one's own son," the man said. He set her on her feet with the easy strength of someone for whom this was not a significant effort. "I take it you know him?"
"He's my—" She caught herself. "He's my friend." She paused. "A very dear friend."
The man's expression did something specific.
Odyn arrived.
"Ruby, are you—" He stopped.
"Odyn!" Ruby said. "You're here, good, because I need you to explain—"
"Dad," Odyn said.
The specific quality of shock that moved through Ruby at this single word was comprehensive. She looked at Odyn. She looked at the man. She looked at Odyn again.
"Dad," she said, which was not a question and not a statement but a sound made by someone who has just processed something and needs a moment to organize it into a sentence.
Berethon laughed. It was a large laugh — not performed, not contained, the laugh of someone who finds something genuinely delightful and is completely comfortable being the person who finds it delightful.
"You're the famous Ruby Rose," he said, and he said famous with the specific quality of someone who has been reading letters about a person and is now meeting the person and finding them to be precisely what the letters described. "My son has written about you rather extensively."
Ruby went several shades of red in sequence.
"He has?" she said.
"Odyn," she said, turning to him.
"He has," Berethon confirmed, still smiling. "Every few weeks, there's a letter, and there's always something in it about Ruby Rose."
"Dad," Odyn said.
"I'm simply being truthful," Berethon said.
"I'm aware of what you're doing."
"Good." He looked at Ruby. "It's a pleasure to meet you, young lady. You can call me Berethon — I've heard that Mister Albanar makes me sound ancient, and I prefer to believe otherwise."
"Mr. Berethon," Ruby said, which was the compromise she arrived at, and it made Berethon laugh again.
The sound of more soldiers came around the corner.
Berethon straightened and turned. The laugh was gone. What replaced it was not frightening exactly — it was simply the quality of a man who has been doing something for a very long time and has stopped needing to perform it.
"I'll handle this," he said. "The two of you go. And Odyn—"
"I'll give you a full explanation later," Odyn said.
"Yes," Berethon said. "You will." He turned toward the sound of approaching footsteps. Then, back over his shoulder: "Ruby?"
She looked at him.
"My wife has been very eager to meet you," he said. "Based on the letters." He smiled. "Come with Odyn later. She'd appreciate it."
Ruby opened her mouth, closed it, and then said: "I'd be honored."
Berethon nodded and walked toward the corner, and his voice reached them a moment later with the affable, encompassing energy of someone who has decided to be very personable to a group of military personnel who are about to learn what it is to encounter a Dark Elven king who does not need to identify himself for his authority to be present.
Odyn watched his father go.
Then he turned and looked at Ruby, who was still processing, and found that he did not know what she was about to say and that this was, unusual for him.
"He knew who I was," she said.
"Yes."
"From letters."
"...Yes."
"Your letters."
"The word dad was a formality at that point, I think, but yes—"
"Odyn."
"You're in my letters," he said, and he said it with the particular directness of someone who has decided the only available path is the honest one. "We have things that happen and I write about them. You're in a significant number of the things that happen."
Ruby looked at him.
He looked back at her with the steady, clear quality that he brought to things he had decided not to retreat from.
"Oh," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"That's—" She was doing the expression she did when she was managing something. "That's very—"
"I know," he said.
A beat.
"Come on," he said. "Penny needs us."
She turned forward.
He followed.
And from around the corner, they could hear Berethon addressing the soldiers with the warm, comprehensive authority of someone who has been a king for thirty years and has found that this is generally sufficient, and neither of them mentioned the letters again for the rest of the afternoon, though both of them were thinking about them in the specific way of something placed carefully in a pocket to be examined later, when there was space for it.
The alley, now quiet —
Penny looked at her hands.
Then she looked at Ruby.
Then at Odyn.
"You said you're both my friends," she said.
"Yes," Ruby said.
"Even though I'm—"
"Yes," Odyn said.
She looked at her palms — the metal visible, the skin torn, the evidence of what she was made of displayed without artifice.
"I don't want to be a secret," she said, and the words had the quality of something that had been waiting.
"You don't have to be," Ruby said. "Not with us."
"Penny," Odyn said, and he said her name the way he said names when he was being precise about something, "whatever General Ironwood believes about what you are — whatever he's told you about what that means — I want you to know that the two of us are not going to change how we think about you based on what we're seeing right now."
Penny looked at him.
"You stopped a truck," he said. "Because Ruby was in danger. Whatever you were made from, and however you were made — that decision was yours."
Penny was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said: "I'm glad you're my friends."
"We're glad too," Ruby said.
The city moved around them, busy with its festival preparations, entirely indifferent to the three of them in the alley — a girl made of something extraordinary, a girl who moved like rose petals and meant everything she said, and a dark elf who was in his letters about one of them more than he had probably intended to be.
The afternoon continued.
Elsewhere in Vale, as evening approached —
The groups filtered back toward the rendezvous point in ones and twos, each carrying their portion of the day's information and, between them, several other things that had not been on the original agenda.
Weiss had data from the Schnee company files and the specific quality of someone who has just been told that their emotional landscape is visible and is processing this.
Yang had intelligence from her contact and the specific quality of someone who has spent a day with Roy and had told him several true things by the end of it.
Blake had confirmed certain patterns in the White Fang's movements and had, in addition, found an unexpected complication.
Khanna and Hailfire had assembled a picture of the city's situation that was somewhat more alarming than any single piece of it suggested alone.
And Ruby had Penny's secret, and a conversation with Berethon that she was going to need to think about, and the knowledge that she was in Odyn's letters.
This last item was not relevant to the investigation.
She was thinking about it anyway.
Odyn met Valvedern and Zero on his way back through the city, which had the quality of running into people you didn't know were there but whom, in retrospect, made complete sense.
Valvedern was in his crimson armor, which was the specific armor of someone who wants to be identifiable as a threat before any conversation begins. Zero was in the Vanguard configuration — less aggressive, more present, the armor of someone who is there to ensure that other people have to go through him to reach whoever he is protecting.
"You look like you've been busy," Valvedern said.
"I've been handling things," Odyn said.
"Six soldiers," Zero said, "a memory adjustment spell, and you're walking through Vale without your team and apparently running errands for a group of human students."
"They're my friends," Odyn said.
"We know," Valvedern said. "We've seen the letters."
Odyn looked at him.
"Your mother reads them to us sometimes," Zero said, with the specific expression of someone who knows this will produce a reaction and is looking forward to it.
"She reads them—"
"Aloud," Valvedern confirmed. "There's a part about a girl with silver eyes that she particularly likes. She reads that part twice."
"I'm going to have a conversation with my mother about correspondence privacy," Odyn said.
"You could," Zero said. "Or you could introduce us."
"Later," Odyn said.
"We'll hold you to that," Valvedern said.
Odyn walked past them. They fell into step behind him, because this was what they did, and because they had been doing it since they were all children and the habit was older than the armor.
"Good to see you," Odyn said, to the street ahead.
"Good to see you," Zero said, to his back.
The city settled into its early evening configuration around them, and the lights of the festival grounds came on in the distance, and somewhere ahead of them Ruby Rose was thinking about letters and a Dark Elven king who had known her name before they met, and things were proceeding in the direction that things always proceed when enough of them have been moving for long enough.
End of Chapter Eleven
To be continued in Chapter Twelve: Painting the Town — Sovereign of the Dark Elves
There is a particular kind of letter — not the formal kind, not the kind written out of obligation — that reveals more about the writer than the writer intended when they sat down to write it. You can recognize this kind of letter by the way the subject keeps appearing in it: unprompted, unremarkable, simply there because they are always there, in the background of the events being described, the way certain people become part of the furniture of your daily life before you have quite decided to let them.
Berethon Albanar had, over several months, read this kind of letter.
He recognized it.
His wife had also recognized it, and had said nothing, and had read the relevant sections twice.
These were not coincidences. These were simply the way it goes, when it is going somewhere.

Insert: Black Clover ending 6
Visuals: Characters- main cast of this story so far (the Elves, Rwby, JNPR, and Khanna's team)
And... done! Whew! As you guys saw, Odyn's dad saved Ruby instead of it just being Penny, thought that twist would be a little different. Sorry for the lack of description on Berethon but I'll make up for it in the coming chapters where he plays a much more important role in the story.
I thought some development with Daikon and Weiss couldn't hurt, same with just deepening the foundation of Ruby and Odyn's relationship. Things could become interesting when Odyn's mom gets involved as far as Ruby's interactions with her son.
That I'm planning for Hyatan to be.. sort of a mentor for Ruby, same with Yang. Anyways.... I think I know who I'll have with Blake in this story for her pairing. Hailfire is up in the air though, maybe you guys can decide?
Who should Hailfire be with based on her personality?
1. Giblet
2. Shallot
3. Sun Wukong
4. Oscar Pine
5. Yatsuhashi Daichi
6. Other male write in
That's really it for now. Next.chapter will be part 2 (episode 4 of Volume 2)