Loading Up A Partner

As images of the exotic Emerald flitted across your mind, you found yourself thinking—why stop there? One of the best things about RWBY, besides its quantity and quality of ridiculously awesome fight scenes, was that you couldn’t throw a scythe without hitting a character that was interesting, fun, and, let’s be honest, generally smoking hot. So it was in this spirit that you decided that you would expand your options as to who you would eventually make your partner, though it was that very same variety that was beginning to make your head—among other organs—start to ache.

Pushing that aside for the moment, you netted your fingers, stretched them out in front of you, and then grabbed your pencil, prepared to make a few small changes to get your Remnant vacation destination on the path to success. After all, just because the setting was pretty good already, didn’t mean that you couldn’t make some tweaks…

You put your pencil to paper, and began to write.

‘All of the changes on this page will pertain to a version of RWBY’s Remnant known from now on as “Haverty’s Remnant”, with no changes passing on to the canon version.’

‘On Haverty’s Remnant, the entrance requirements for academies that train students to fight monsters are much closer to Earth colleges than to Earth high schools like they are in the show. As a result, the ages of all students and faculty at any of these academies is uniformly eighteen and up, with no exceptions.’

‘On Haverty’s Remnant, all of the cast of RWBY who would normally be present at Beacon Academy will still be there, whether or not they are a hero or a villain. However, nothing like the show’s plot will be allowed to take place while I am there, with all of the involved characters doing something of a holding pattern for one reason or another. The only exceptions to this are if I, Haverty, personally start the plot back into motion, or if I write another command into the notebook that either partially or fully cancels out this command.’

‘The students and faculty of Beacon Academy, and to a lesser extent the surrounding citizens of Remnant, will know me as Michael Haverty, the librarian’s assistant for Beacon Academy. All of the people I meet will have a vague but overall positive impression of knowing me, and will generally find me easy to talk to and even to share secrets with. While this impression can be reversed given the normal factors that would naturally do so, in general it will be much easier for me to make friends in Haverty’s Remnant than enemies.’

You pause, tapping the pencil idly against your lips, trying to think of any other small thing or factor that might improve your stay in the wide and wonderful world of RWBY. While a few safety precautions come to mind, you find yourself brimming with too much anticipation and impatience to properly articulate them; besides, if anything really bad happens, you’ll just end up back safe in your own home anyway, right?

Closing the notebook, you hold it out in front of you, nod once, and close your eyes. “Move me there. I’m sure, I’m sure—”

You’re not completely sure that anything has actually happened at first, until you feel a light breeze across your cheek and you instinctively open your eyes. Your jaw drops.

A thousand jokes about hardware and budget and the rates of frames pop up in your head, before being instantly squashed; all of the money in the world couldn’t have brought Beacon Academy to life the way it was before you right now, towering above you in all of its splendor as one part medieval castle and another part futuristic fortress. You have to rub your eyes for a moment just to make sure that what you’re seeing is real, and while you’re at it you notice that your hand has clutched so hard onto the notebook’s spine that your knuckles are turning white.

“Wow.” You breathe out, loosening your grip with some effort, before holding the notebook out before you with a new sense of appreciation. What you had seen it do before was impressive, but this ground under your feet, the new air filling your lungs, the foreign lands stretching away into the distance—this was nothing short of a miracle.

Though it would be kind of nice if this miracle had more people in it.

As you look around the space of the small plaza somewhere within the school’s interior that you’ve found yourself in, you find that you were subconsciously expecting to see a gaggle of the show’s infamous background silhouettes rushing from one spot to the next. Instead, you realize a tad sheepishly that you never specified to the notebook that you actually wanted to show up between classes, when everyone would be out and about and there would be a chance that you might spot someone that you actually knew.

“No worries, easy fix.” You murmur to yourself, holding the notebook up once more, even as an idea suddenly strikes you as to how you’ll fix your partner indecision crisis at the same time in one big swoop. After all, wasn’t planning an abrupt strategy for landing kind of a Beacon Academy tradition at this point?

‘In the next few minutes, a member of the RWBY cast that I like will wander into this area for one reason or another, at which point we will lock eyes.’

There, that takes all of the hard work of picking a future partner out of your hands. And if it doesn’t work out? Well, unlike these poor saps, you don’t have to be stuck with the person for the next three years unless you want to.

Still, you can’t help but feel that something’s… missing. Like there’s some key element of the RWBY experience that you’re missing out on, other than the building and the ambiance and the characters. Something that niggles at the bottom of your brain, that you’ve always known you wanted but never really thought about, something that excited your imagination just as soon as you heard about it. Something like—

Ah. That was it.

‘My notebook is also a gun.’

“Perfect.” You say out loud, before you start to write more.

‘In the same way that a normal student’s weapon can shift to a gun and back, I am instinctively able to transform my notebook to its gun form and back, possessing an intrinsic knowledge of its workings and mechanisms. I am able to load the gun by thinking of a command that I want the notebook to carry out, follow by the thought “load it up”, at which point the bullet will form in the gun’s chamber. No one will be able to notice me using the gun for anything, and the bullets will never be able to cause physical harm to their target. Instead, the bullet will merely carry out the changes that I thought of while creating the bullet on whoever the bullet hits, affecting them either retroactively or not depending on my wishes.’

That seemed pretty comprehensive, and allowed you to live out the greatest fantasy that you didn’t really know you had until that exact moment. Eager and anxious in equal measure to see the result in action, you take the notebook in one hand, hesitate for just one moment, then flick your wrist.

The changes begin almost immediately, the inner pages folding in on themselves like origami figures while the outside cover splits apart into distinct sections, which promptly began folding over one another and arranging themselves in different patterns. You watch in open-mouthed awe as the folding pieces of paper form a grip in your hand, the upper section turning, twisting, sliding, and slotting into place, a page marker snaking easily around your index finger to form a trigger while the former spine of the notebook rests fully in place to become the weapon’s barrel.

The whole contraption finishes settling in place with all of the pieces fitting together, the seams vanishing easily as though they had never existed in the first place. You turn the weapon over in your hand with no shortage of awe, and it is only seconds later that you’re experimentally pointing it at what is most definitely the plaza’s most threatening shrubbery, while unable to contain the look of glee on your face.

You instantly start to strike a couple of different poses, telling yourself that you’re trying to get a good feel for the weapon, when in reality you’re pretty much just getting giddy over how cool it is. With every swing, sway, and shift of the barrel, and every imagined monster on the other side of it, you start to really get sense for feeling what it's like to be a brave warrior venturing in to unknown territory, ready to face whatever comes your—

“Hi!”

“AAH!” You yell, before turning abruptly around, already having forgotten about the little rendezvous that you’d set up just moments before. Your gun swings with you, pointing directly at the torso of your new guest, and you feel your finger start to instinctively pull the trigger…