Chapter Text
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Tidings
Ruby Rose walked down the street, being pulled practically by Zwei. Her loyal...she hesitated to call him dog because at this point he was almost anything but, but he was still a dog at his heart. So yeah, her dog.
It had been one week since the Vytal Incursion, as the news had started to call it. One week since the largest Grimm invasion ever recorded, bigger even than the one that took down Mt. Glenn, attempted to attack Beacon itself.
Drawn there by the machinations of one Cinder Fall.
Zwei paused as he got to the door, giving a soft whine as he started to paw on it. "Wait just a second Zwei, I need to get my keys out," Ruby answered his growing pawing. "You can go to the bathroom once I unlock the door..." she murmured.
Her shop wasn't entirely locked with her scroll. It was, at least nowadays, a mechanical and electronic lock, if only because Blake Belladonna had told her of how easy they were to hack. At least for Blake. Most of her compatriots in the White Fang had also seen it relatively easy to hack, and it was how Ruby had found herself face to face with Roman Torchwick...the second time.
Her door unlocked with a simple green light, and immediately Zwei rushed in. Ruby wisely chose to let go of the leash as he poured on the speed, heading straight for the back room. "You know, you could go outside like every other dog," Ruby called out, getting a small howl from the bathroom door as it shut.
She gave a happy sigh as she looked around her shop. She was one of Vale's few weaponsmiths. A specialist in the forging of custom weapons for the Huntsman and Huntresses of Beacon, the small school Flare, Pharos, and Signal. Her shop had been untouched in the thirty minutes that she'd been walking Zwei, exactly as she'd left it. A few aisles of seemingly custom weapons stood on the side, each one located with a small placard that said what its main types were, and what types of ammunition that it used.
Last year, she'd started to make a kind of special unique ammunition, that she'd ended up getting into a bit of business boom because Nora Valkyrie thought that blowing up a dust-infused mountain at only the highest spectacle event in years was a good idea.
Apparently, according to Qrow and Ozpin, Professor Port still ended up having it on repeat on his scroll, and watching that during his off-hours.
There were no weapons in her shop that used it yet, mostly because she wasn't one hundred percent certain of it's exact characteristics yet. She knew enough to make it relatively safe if the person she was giving it to was an explosives expert, which according to Ren, Nora was. And based on how she handled them, that was true.
But what that all did mean was that now she was getting more and more questions regarding how it was made.
In the front of the shop, close to the center, was a large high tech white arena built into the floor. With only a scroll push, Ruby could train for hours in there if she wanted, using either training dummies or if she just wanted to put up walls, she could. In the case of sparring.
She had yet to see if it would work against magic though, and she was hesitant to try it considering that her warranty for the parts was about up. And with Qrow's existence, she'd needed the longest warranty possible.
And it wasn't as if she hadn't used it. Either the arena or the warranties. The arena had seen more than its fair share of use, especially during the Breach, when the White Fang, being chased by Ghira and Kali Belladonna, decided to act early, and blow up the central park area, summoning a bunch of Grimm.
Right in the middle of Vale.
She had locked her two employees and all of their current visitors into the arena before she went out and started doing what Huntresses did best; kill Grimm.
She sat down on the small chair behind the glass counter showing off the small dust crystals and what purity they were. Below each larger one, she'd handwritten the expiration dates because she hadn't yet found the time to create new placards.
If she had to be honest, she hadn't yet had time to even try to remake Crescent Rose, or the Sundered Rose Copy.
The last week had been almost too busy. Insurance forms, especially, took far too long. And when it wasn't insurance, it was Ozpin who was begging her to reconsider joining Beacon a year early, despite the fact it was blatantly against the law.
And she was still considered a gun runner for the White Fang, considered they ordered nearly thirty five of the semi-automatic rifles. And it was only thanks to Qrow's extremely powerful and yet extremely unlucky Semblance that it wasn't worse than it was. So naturally, she wanted to play everything else safe. No more breaking the rules.
Nope, she'd do everything she needed to, by the book. She'd keep her hands clean!
Almost as if to answer her thoughts, Zwei then came out of the bathroom door, and Ruby didn't hear the flush. She stared at him for a moment, before he tilted his head cutely. "Did you wash your hands?" she asked, unconvinced of his innocence. He gave another head tilt, and a small pant, before he shook his head and wandered back in. Where she promptly heard a flush and the sink going.
"Good," she answered as he walked out the door, this time his head held high as he wandered up the stairs to the conjoined apartment. It was intended to originally be the storage room, but with her dad's help, they'd managed to convert it, legally, to an actual living unit. There were a whole lot of extra laws in there that she had no knowledge about, a lot of permits and some other changes and conversions that made her head swirl. She knew weapons, not legalities.
She sat down on the chair, letting in spin idly. "Think today's gonna be a busy day?" she asked Zwei, only to remember that he'd gone upstairs. "Fine, Zwei, don't answer me," she answered to herself instead. "Today's gonna be a good day!" she nodded.
The last of the insurance forms had been filed for the stuff that Cinder had broken for her, which was all bad metal anyways but no one was ever going to hear her saying that, and for everything else that might have or not have been taken from the shop.
It had been the Vytal Tournament Festival. Incredibly, the rest of the Festival had actually continued, and would be finishing up soon. It extended past Beacon finals, which was odd, but Ruby didn't now why. Maybe it was so that way the students could actually enjoy the Festival a bit?
But the Tournament had been the big draw. Everyone from Atlas to Vacuo, from Mistral and Vale, competed against each other in raging fierce one on one combat. Or two on two. Or four on four, if they were in the middle of the team matches.
It was this, Ruby knew, that Cinder Fall had launched her devious, diabolical, and completely nefarious plans. Although, she had to guess what exactly those plans...were.
Ozpin had figured most of it out, but Ruby was still exactly unsure why Cinder had decided to throw everything away in a last ditch attempt to make it work. There was supposedly some amount of effort to turn the CCT against Vale, but Ruby had accidentally damaged that during the Vytal Festival dance. And so her words, intended to be dark and weary and extremely uncomfortable, were instead broadcasted solely to Beacon and to Amity Arena.
And Atlas had showed up in surprising force. They had to keep a big battleship away from the fighting because they'd captured the White Fang, and with their mechs and drones acting as meatshields, or metalshields if Ruby had to be honest, for the actual Huntsman and Huntresses to fight the incoming Grimm.
But the most diabolical, the most nefarious thing that Cinder Fall had done? She had went and murdered Crescent Rose.
Her beloved scythe. The bestest of all the best weapons she'd ever made. A scythe almost too big for her to carry and wield safely, and yet she knew she was quite skilled with it. She'd even managed to beat her Uncle Qrow!...she wished. She'd knocked him down to forty percent aura, which was...not too bad. But she'd been fresh. Then again, Qrow was really skilled.
And Cinder had went and murdered it. The murdering murderer who murdered weapons. But that was only after it had been defiled by Emerald Sustrai, who thought that trading weapons was a good idea. Emerald had taken it, attempting to use her baby, her masterpiece, against James Ironwood himself.
She'd lost, obviously. That wasn't hard to figure out. Ruby had never fought Ironwood, and truth be told she really didn't want to. The man was way too serious for her liking.
But Ruby had fought Mercury Black. A man who seemed kinda nice actually, with these awesome prosthetic legs that doubled as shotguns if he wanted to. It had taken everything that she had, plus Winter Schnee, to help take him down.
They had been captured, as far as Ruby knew. Except Cinder. Cinder had been...well, there was no way she wasn't dead. Pierced through the heart from Pyrrha Nikos, a three or four time Mistralian champion who was probably the best fighter currently in Beacon, punched by Ruby's sister Yang Xiao Long, and even Blake had added to the fight against Cinder.
They were one of the most successful teams in Beacon, actually. They were second years now, as they'd officially gotten their final tests back.
Jaune, the last member of the team, had not been looking forward to seeing his grades for combat class, but even he had passed. And he was the first one to get a custom weapon for Ruby, so she had held Mors in particularly high regard.
It's full name was Crocea Mors, and it had been an ancestral weapon of the Arcs. Or the ancestral weapon, Jaune hadn't actually been clear on that to her. But he'd wanted the same thing, but better. With a ranged option. In other words, to turn the fully melee weapon into a mechashift.
It had been a complicated design. One of the most complicated that she'd had at the time, exception being Crescent Rose itself. Even Yang's Ember Celica, while complex, hadn't actually been that complicated because she'd been able to use new metal when needed.
Mors? Jaune had wanted the actual metal. And as any metalsmith knew, using old or already forged metal was a recipe for disaster. But Ruby had done it, exactly to her and Jaune's specification.
And, well, he may have gotten training from Pyrrha to help him up to the ranks. He was no amazing fighter, but he was no slouch anymore. Not the bottom of the class, as she'd been told last time that Ruby threatened to spar with him in the shop.
Her scroll buzzed, snapping her out of her reverie. She still had a few minutes before opening time, and everything had already been cleaned. Zwei had been fed...Lilac and Jasper shouldn't be calling in because they were already scheduled off...
She glanced at it, before she gave a sigh and rolled her eyes. Yet another message from Ozpin, begging her to join Beacon early. "Ozpin..." she sighed, throwing her head back, "I don't want to go to Beacon yet, I'm trying to keep my head down!" she called out to the air.
Zwei gave a helpful little yip from the top of the stairs. She looked over at her calendar, making sure that the 'Zwei fed' box had been checked. It was, although the mark was faint. Meaning that he had, once again, figured out how to try to get more food out of her. "No, Zwei, you're fine," Ruby answered. "You'll be fed later tonight." He gave a quiet whine.
She ignored Ozpin's scroll call, or scroll message. She'd listen or read it later, if she was bored. He knew her reasons for not wanting to join Beacon yet.
But that wasn't to say she didn't want to go. She absolutely did. And now it wasn't a question of if she was going to go, but simply when. She'd already basically accepted it, and she was, as Yang had put it once, a walking weapon of mass destruction. Although that wasn't to say she was actually all that good with it.
She shut her eyes, willing the power to come forth. It was a lot like calling her Semblance, Petal Storm, to the surface, but unlike her Semblance, it was more of an entire body power. She simply knew when it was on now.
Originally, when it had been at half strength, she couldn't tell. Now she could, at least. She could feel her emotions gauging the power, wondering which one to use at her behest. Satisfaction and frustration, for the wind? Aggression for lightning? Sadness and happiness for rain and water? And anger for fire?
The wind came bubbling up from nowhere, sending her cloak into the air. She used it lazily right now, trying to measure the room with it, giving an alarmed chuckle as it went by the dust. If it activated the dust crystals... ooh boy so maybe she shouldn't do this in the shop yet.
She turned it off, yet again glad that she could. When it had been at half power, she couldn't tell if it was on or off, let alone how to turn it off. As Ms. Goodwitch had once said to her, 'Ozpin gave her the power without bothering to tell her how to turn it off'.
Although that wasn't quite true. She had been the last ditch effort to keep the power of the Fall Maiden within Vale.
More than a year ago, Amber, the previous Fall Maiden, had been attacked by Cinder and her two cronies. Half the power of the Maiden had been stolen at the time, and Amber had been rushed to Beacon to try to keep her safe and alive.
Ozpin had done his best to keep her alive, but eventually someone with half a soul, half their aura, could only do so much. Even with the aura keep-Amber-alive machine, she'd only lasted about a year. And Ozpin had been left with no choices left, but to offer Ruby the position. Actually, he'd had a lot of choices, but all of them had been turned down for one reason or another.
Pyrrha Nikos had been his preferable choice. So he'd tested her, seeing how she'd do if put in a position of power over others, how she would act and react. And he also gave her Yang, the biggest troublemaker this side of the Roses and Xiao Longs.
Seriously, apparently Team PABY, or Team Peabody, was on course for beating out team STRQ's record for most amount of detention and trouble in Beacon history. And Ruby was still absolutely not certain that Peabody was a color, but every time she asked about it, Ozpin and Goodwitch had simply pointed to Oobleck and left it up to that.
Pyrrha...hadn't been able to keep Yang from causing trouble. Admittedly, half the trouble that Team PABY had caused was because of the other half of the partnership, Jaune Arc and Blake Belladonna.
But because she hadn't been able to keep them out of trouble, and in fact had her hands full with the team, Ozpin had decided to not have Pyrrha receive the power, or even to offer it.
The others on the table were maybes, but had been turned down for one reason or another. But Ruby, seeing as how she'd managed to turn Adam Taurus from extremism, which Ruby highly doubted she actually managed to do, he'd given her the offer.
And she'd accepted.
She still had a few scars from the fight with Cinder. They'd had a climactic duel in the rain, created by the Maiden power, fighting each other with wind and fire. Fire so hot that it could soften metal, or in places even melt it entirely.
Cinder had killed a lot of weapons that day, but in the end they had, like the phoenix, come back from the ashes.
Even if she'd had to boil the metal for a few hours and carefully manage to get the impurities such as dirt out of it before she could use it again. And she was lucky she'd even had the time to manage that, what with the insurance forms.
She looked at the door, wondering if maybe her two employees would come in through the door anyways. She only had them for a few months more at the latest of having them before they'd have to go back to their normal lives.
Actually, she looked towards the calendar. How long did she have them for? She'd miss them if it was already over, she'd barely had time to say goodbye, really.
Two more weeks, actually. Had it just been for the Vytal Festival? She remembered saying that to the both of them, and they'd both agreed without a problem. Jasper might have given her a side glance before telling her that it was already his plan.
He was the snarky kind of person to do that. Lilac was much more customer friendly, and she had a mind for numbers that exceeded even Ruby's. Although she wasn't all that good with weapons. Truthfully neither of them were, and neither of them had even thought of becoming Hunters.
Her scroll alarm blared, and with a satisfied sigh she quickly grabbed it up and unlocked the door. Opening hours. She was, the weaponsmith of Summer's Weapons Shop, was open for business once more.
If she expected someone to walk through the door immediately, she was hit with a realization that her shop wasn't all that. It was good, it was one of the only weaponshops in Vale that did custom weapons. Better than whatever that other shop was that had opened to try and get her out of business.
He'd had awesome weapons, sure, but he couldn't do customs. And apparently they were overpriced.
"Right. Shop time," she said, spinning the small comic section that Jasper had installed during the Vytal Tournament. It was just one of those spinny-racks with stands built into them, filled to the brim with comics. She glanced over at the door, as if halfway expecting someone to open it right away, despite that almost no one ever had at opening time. "I did unlock it, right?" she asked the air, before she used her Semblance, jumping over the counter.
She gave the door a quick jiggle, making sure that it was unlocked. The fact that the door moved showed that it was, in fact, open. And she had actually done it right. It would be easy to think that after almost a year, she'd be used to this, but she really wasn't. She doubted that she'd ever be.
She darted back into the chair, spinning it lightly. Door was open, so now it was just...back to the usual grind. She could look over at the commissions, and most of them had been saved from when the shop on Beacon grounds had burned.
There was a thick pile of papers in the folder behind the counter, of all the various commissions that she'd gotten. A few of them she glanced over for a second, before tossing into the 'talk to the owner about' later. Most of them were about things that were flat out not possible. One wanted a sword that shot sword beams, like that one game. That was what he wanted for his ranged option.
Actually...now that she thought about it, it was probably possible. She'd have to create a hardlight shield around the blade itself, and use hardlight dust to create a projection of the sword, using the user's swing to actively project it.
It'd be easier to just use aura waves, but according to Qrow that was a waste of aura. But...yeah, she could do that instead. She put that into the 'look into' pile, scribbling a few notes on it to make sure she remembered her thoughts on it.
And this one wanted an exploding axe head. Easy enough, but then they wanted it to be able to be reconstituted. Red dust, followed with attracted gravity dust? Maybe if she used a gauntlet, she could create a magnet in the gauntlet, allowing them to freely throw the axe, letting it explode on contact, before the pieces come back together in their hand?
With dust alone, it was basically magic. She blinked; that's what dust actively was, wasn't it? The power of the elements, in their hand.
She was knocked out of her reverie, and her internal dialogue about how these weapons would work as the door opened, the brilliant yellow hair and build of her dad walking in.
Taiyang was a tall man, thickly built and extremely strong. He'd been the one to help her get this place up and running, giving her enough money to survive the first three months of rent, the security deposit, and convince Qrow to give up some of his weapons for her stock. She'd been able to either remake the ones that she'd sold or just give them back in the case that she hadn't sold them. After all, a crow liked their shinies.
"Hey Rubes," her dad said as he walked in. "Just by yourself today?" he asked.
Ruby nodded. "Yeah, I figured that so close to the end of the Vytal Festival that both Lilac and Jasper deserved a break, and this was the first day I didn't have to deal with insurance forms," she answered, hanging her head at the barest mention of the darn things.
What was worse is that it wasn't her first claim, either. She'd been robbed by Torchwick in the first three, four months of the shop's existence. And then his protege, Neo, had done the same thing six months later.
She'd stolen the Sundered Rose Copy that she'd made, a copy of her mother's weapon from memory. Cinder had since finished it off, melting it down to slag.
Cinder had a lot to pay for, but having her plans sabotaged by a sixteen year old girl was probably going to be one of the best outcomes she'd have gotten.
"That's nice of you. It's looking like a nice day out here for basically the last day. You want to come out and spend it with Yang and me?" her dad asked.
"I'd like to," Ruby answered honestly, "but I don't trust Zwei to watch the shop by himself. Much. Mostly because I think he'd probably go and fill up his food bowl by himself again and again."
Dad laughed. "Yeah, that sounds like him. Well, maybe I'll get Yang in here around lunch then, and we can spend it together then."
"Sounds like a plan to me!" Ruby grinned. "It's good to see that you've both let that dinner last year drop out of your minds."
Dad froze for a moment. "Right," he said quietly. "That dinner. Yeah that's...totally behind us," he answered a bit too quickly to be honest. "Yep, completely behind us. Not thinking about it at all."
Ruby stared at him in disbelief. "You forgot about it, didn't you?" she asked with a hidden smirk.
He nodded. "Yep. Completely forgot about it. Think Yang forgot too?"
Ruby's scroll went off with another message, this time from Yang. It read 'Think Dad forgot about that dinner yet?'
Ruby showed it to him with a grin. "Nope but yeah, I think she did," Ruby answered.
As her dad left, she gave another quick look at the scroll for other messages. There was the one from Ozpin, short and fairly simple. 'Bullhead caught leaving Darklands. Careful Ruby, I fear Salem is on the move.'
Oh. Yeah, that was a good message then, Ozpin. She'd be careful.