Jumping at ROB's Behest: RWBY 1 (Patreon)

I’d been subjected to falling at terminal velocity more than once in the six months I was an Animorph, so I quickly adapted and managed to orient myself so that I was facing the ground and caught sight of the bright green forest spread out below me. Step one: don’t go splat.

Concentrating, I focused on my favorite bird morph: a sharp-shinned hawk. Immediately, I began to shrink, as my face pushed out, my lips hardened into a beak, feathers erupted from my skin, my fingers merged together as my hands and arms flattened, my eyesight sharpened. I pushed the morph to go as fast as it could, and managed to complete it in roughly twelve seconds, my wings flaring to break the dive.

It hurt. A lot. Sharp-shins weren’t major divers like bald eagles or peregrine falcons, they were nimble, thick-forest hunters. But I’d done this kind of stunt before, and knew how to bleed the momentum off the right way. Shifting my wings and tail, I dipped past the treeline, looping around the first tree I saw to bleed off extra momentum before coming to a landing on one of the branches.

Moments after I landed, a dark bundle flew through the air, dropping through the canopy to the forest floor. Looking down, I mentally frowned upon seeing the note on top of the bundle. Even from where I was, I could make out ‘For Dorian’ in big, cutsey letters. Bitch. Still, I kinda needed the stuff that was going to be inside it. So I flew down to it and demorphed. Picking up the letter, I immediately opened it and started reading.

Beloved,

Welcome to your new playground. I mentioned tasks, I have a few things I want you to accomplish before I grow bored with this world. I even organized them into categories for your simple human mind, you may thank me upon completion.

Easy:

1 Acquire 10 new morphs.

2 Cover a copse of trees in spider webs.

3 Humiliate the school bully.

4 Trounce Jaune Arc in combat class.

5 “Comfort” a grieving widow.

6 Convince Blake Belladonna to wear a pet collar.

7 Kill 25 Beowolves.

8 Kill 25 Ursa.

9 Kill 20 Boarbatusks.

10 Kill 10 Death Stalkers.

11 Kill 10 Nevermores.

Medium:

1 Survive the first five weeks in this world without leaving the confines of the forest.

2 Maintain a 3.5 GPA for your entire time at Beacon.

3 Prevent Roman Torchwick’s death.

Hard:

1 Replace the stick in Goodwitch’s ass.

To better aid you in these tasks, I’ve provided you with the dominant magic of the world, called Aura. There are abilities unique to each individual called Semblances, but you’ll have to discover that for yourself. But since one of your first tasks involves wilderness survival, I decided to be a gem and left you a field survival kit with this note. Again, you can thank me later.

I’ll stop here, and let you figure out the rest of what I got you on your own. It’s so much more fun that way. Besides, the first of your targets should be drawn to you soon after you finish reading. I’d morph something strong and tough right now.

Your Darling,

Jump-Chan

‘Double-bitch,’ I thought to myself, a little worried by the fact that something with ‘Death’ in its name was listed under Easy. Still, entities with her kind of power weren’t something to brush off or ignore, so I took a moment to take in my surroundings. Forest floor, thick canopy, sometime around midday, I’d guess. I spotted a spider building a web, and while I did have a spider morph already, jumping spiders weren’t exactly known for making webs. So, with a ‘gift’ that let me cheat one of the basic rules of morphing, I stared hard at the spider for a few seconds, before I felt the tingling that told me I’d acquired it. One required new morph down, nine to go.

From the distance, off to my left, I heard the sound of movement. Given what the note said about an approaching target, I considered my morphs before picking one. Immediately, my already tall body stretched out, becoming longer and thinner, my skin turning into scales, my arms and legs melting into my body, and in a quarter of a minute I’d taken the form of the largest snake ever to live on Earth: titanoboa.

What came bursting out of the brush wasn’t anything like I expected. It looked like a bear, if the fur was vantablack and it was covered in white plates. Regardless, I let the morph’s instincts take over. Hurling myself forwards, my jaws opened wide moments before I bit down on its unarmored forearm. In an explosive surge, my body wrapped around it once, twice, three, four times, more, until it was all but cocooned in my rapidly tightening coils, muscles contracting and squeezing.

Whatever monster I was constricting let out a baleful roar, only making my job of killing it easier as air rushed out from its lungs. Or at least, that’s what would normally happen, but I also would have felt the creak of bones by now, but nothing. Judging from the wheeze it let out, it was still feeling the effects of my constriction, but I was starting to wonder if this thing had any internal structure to it at all.

Either way I was more than strong enough to crush the life from it, my body constricting, flexing, and squeezing down on the struggling beast. If I had the proper mouth structure, I’d be grinning as it went limp in my coils. Letting go of its arm, my head rose up above the limp form in my coils. It had been hours since I’d eaten, and bear was looking very tasty.

It was only as the thing’s hind paws were sliding down my gullet that I realized I’d let the titanoboa’s instincts take over. WIth some mental curses, I forced myself to demorph. I was hoping that whatever that thing was would go where the rest of the mass that wasn’t part of me went. It had to go somewhere, when Visser Three ate… anyway, Visser Three didn’t burst from that, so I shouldn’t burst from this.

Grabbing the bag that R.O. Bitch had left, I hauled it up and quickly started leafing through it. Survival food, fire starter, bowie knife, towel, water purification kit, all the sort of things you’d expect from a survival kit. About the only thing not standard was the fact that on the outside of the bag was what I assumed was my name in this world: Dorian Slate.

That aside, I still had to find the essentials: shelter, water, and actual food. Plus dealing with the assorted monsters that apparently resided in this world, hopefully there were more than just bugs as far as real animals are concerned. Not just for food, more morphs was always a good thing.

I eventually set up shop, so to speak, in a copse of trees not too far away from a stream of spring water. Definitely not drinking straight from it, I don’t know how many animals have done their business in it. I also soon learned that eating the local monsters was a bad idea, even demorphed I was burping and farting out black smoke for five days!

One of the tasks was to completely web up a copse of trees, so I did that in the canopy above where I made camp. I was attacked multiple times, but morphing was enough to deal with the various monsters like the initial demon-bear-thing. It also let me figure out some of the basics of this Aura shit. It acted like a combination regen factor, force field, and strength booster. Most importantly, I could still use it while I was in morph.

Aura was simple enough to get used to, and by the end of day five I had gotten the hang of it to the point that it was always up. What took more getting used to was the fact that R.O. Bitch changed my body when she dumped me in this world (again). I was still mostly human, which is why I didn’t notice when I was reading the note, but in addition to having patches of scales on my upper arms, pecs, and spine, I now had a big ass tail (I’d say a bit over four feet long from eyeballing it) and, eh… I was now packing a double decker, so to speak.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Rachel, if she was still in the extradimensional house or if she’d been dropped into this world like I had.

[hr][/hr]

My name is Rachel. In my first life, my full name was Rachel Catherine Berenson. Here, on the world of Remnant, my full name was Rachel Daff Arc. In my first life, I was the oldest of three. Here, I was the youngest of nine. Seven older sisters, and a twin brother older by half an hour. Oh, and I’m despised by the entire family except for said brother.

Honestly, I think the reason Jaune doesn’t hate me is because he’s a bit of an idiot. But in the way that makes it so that you can’t quite hate him. The reason the rest of the family hates me isn’t anything that I did, it’s the fact that I’m a reminder. Nine months before Jaune and I were born, the entire family was on a camping trip when bandits showed up. One of them, a big bear faunus, killed Stefon Arc, and raped Calli Arc. One pregnancy later, I was born; the one faunus in a family of humans.

Farm life was harder than I’d thought it was in my first life, I was a city girl despite how my blood raced in a fight. But it was that rush from a good fight that secured my future here. Calli (after overhearing her muttering how I should never have been born into a bottle one night, I couldn’t call her ‘Mom’) saw me get into a scuffle with one of the town boys and enrolled me into Sanctum Academy.

I wasn’t stupid, I knew the reason why she enrolled me and not Jaune, despite how much he begged and pleaded. One of the first things we were told was the death rate amongst Huntsmen and Huntresses. Regardless, I positively thrived at Sanctum. I was easily the best in my combat class, and in Weapons Class I made my first mechashift weapon.

I named it Bear Breaker, and while many went with having two weapons, I didn’t. I was a faunus, which means I couldn’t get away with walking around openly armed like most of my classmates could. So in addition to its combat form of a giant dane ax heavier than me, it would mechashift into a shoulder slung purse that I could carry around anywhere.

My main “rival” for the top spot at Sanctum was a redhead named Pyrrha. I say rival in quotation marks because it was plain to see that I was just as good as her in fighting, if not better, yet somehow her grades were always just a bit higher than mine, or an assignment of mine would go missing, or some other bullshit like that. If it weren’t for the fact that Pyrrha was the closest thing I had to a friend, I’d suspect she was trading favors for making sure she scored above me.

Instead, she was even more vocal than I was about how the teachers were clearly not grading me fairly. I didn’t participate in the regional tournaments, on top of needing parental permission that Calli would never give, I didn’t like the thought of broadcasting to potential enemies what I was capable of.

It was in my last year at Sanctum that I discovered my Semblance. Pyrrha’s let her manipulate metal, mine made my already present anger issues worse. I named it Rage Unending; it makes me stronger, faster, tougher, makes me heal and recover faster, an all around physical boost that scales to how angry I am at a given moment. My peak so far let me kick the metal target dummy so hard it was ripped from the floor and blew through the wall of the training hall. The dummy was folded in half and I’d hit it with such force and speed that the two halves had been practically welded together.

Given how potent my Semblance was, Sanctum tol Calli about it. Calli’s response was to treat me like I was about to snap and kill everyone in the house. Which made my already frayed temper at home even worse, which in turn made Rage Unending boost me up even more, which resulted in Calli doubling down on her suspicion. The whole mess looped around again and again until I’d go off into the woods to vent and create a new clearing in the process.

I’d stay at Sanctum year round to avoid all the bullshit with Calli and the rest of the bitches if it weren’t for one thing: Jaune. Jaune wanted to be a hero, a Huntsman, like his grandfather, great grandfather, great great grandfather, and so on had been. So in that puppy-like earnestness and enthusiasm, he begged me to pass on what I was learning from Sanctum.

First thing to do was unlock his Aura. Of which he had a lot. I’m not joking, he had more Aura than any two of my class at Sanctum combined, myself included. For his weapon, he “borrowed” the family sword and shield, Crocea Mors.

Teaching Jaune was an exercise in frustration at times. Not because he was inattentive, but because he’d spend too much time listening to our older siblings who didn’t know squat about fighting or the dangers Huntsmen and Huntresses faced. Seriously, damn near every weekend when I came back from Sanctum, it felt like the first day was spent beating out whatever nonsense he’d been told that week.

It wasn’t just combat or combat adjacent stuff, but also other dumbass things he’d been told. Hell, he’d told me one weekend that our sister Lemon had told him to introduce himself to cute girls with the line, “I’m Jaune Arc. Short, sweet, rolls off the tongue, ladies love it.”

I beat him over the back of the head with Bear Breaker (in purse form) for thinking that’d do anything but get him labeled as a creep. Much as I love my idiot twin, he’s such a hassle to manage.

During my final year at Sanctum, I started to notice something… uncomfortable in the atmosphere whenever I returned “home”. I couldn’t say for sure what it was, only that something about the way that Calli was looking at me seemed different. My next clue was when I noticed that the way Calli was looking at Jaune. Again, I couldn’t put what about it made the hairs on my neck stand on end, but I decided to do some digging.

Over the next month, whenever I was at the farm I’d keep an eye on Calli and do some subtle digging around when I managed to slip away. None of my half-sisters wanted anything to do with me, so I wouldn’t get any help there, and Jaune was more naive and trusting than a dodo. That made me more than a little skeptical about him being able to keep anything a secret if I told him about my suspicions. A month an a half before I was due to graduate, I hit pay dirt. Calli kept a journal hidden behind a false wall in the closet, and upon reading it… well, let’s just say that the contents of it more than justified my response.

There was only one person I could trust with what I was going to do. So I called Pyrrha and did something I never did, in either of my lives. I begged. I begged for her help in getting me and Jaune out of that house until we could get into a Huntsman Academy. Pyrrha agreed, and arranged for a Bullhead to pick us up in a few hours. All those tournament sponsorships came in handy.

I admit, there were less combative ways I could have approached what I did next. I probably should have done something a bit more subtle than packing a pair of bags (one for myself and one for Jaune), marching up to the full dinner table, slamming Calli’s journal onto it, opened to the page where she spells out what she’d been doing to Jaune, and declaring that Jaune and I were leaving. Forever.

Getting Jaune to go along with it while our sisters read what was in the book was as simple as telling him, “Grab your shit, we’re going to Beacon.”

Like I said before, I love my brother, but he’s too damn naive. He didn’t question anything about the display, even as Saphron started shouting at Calli as we left. She was always the sister I had the fewest issues with, even if there was a gulf between us. The fact that every time she saw me her eyes immediately flicked to the bear ears poking out of my hair made sure of that.

The Bullhead arrived when Pyrrha said it would, and I spent most of the trip to Argus pacing the hold in an attempt to calm down. I had… limited success. I wasn’t going to do anything that’d wreck our transportation or draw any more grimm than my and Jaune’s awakened Aura already would. But I still needed to spend some time in a training ground wrecking shit. What helped the most was the fact that this would be a positive for Jaune in more ways than getting him away from Calli. He’d be able to take the test in option for Beacon now instead of some brain dead idea about faking some transcripts.

Pyrrha arranged for us to stay at a hotel in Argus until it was time to head to Beacon. Jaune told me after the first few days that the part about it that was the most surreal was the fact that he didn’t have to wait half a day to use the bathroom because the rest of us had already secured its use.

The intervening time between getting out from under Calli’s thumb and going to Beacon was mostly spent running Jaune into the ground in an attempt to get him up to snuff. Because while he wasn’t untrained, thanks to the efforts I’d put in on the weekends, he still was nowhere near ready for a Huntsmen Academy.

Jaune, as I was honestly expecting, developed a crush on Pyrrha. But, after having heard me talk about Jaune for years, Pyrrha confided in me that he felt like an eager little brother. Or an eager to please puppy. I understood exactly where she was coming from. Still, now that he was away from the influences of our sisters, he started progressing rapidly. I wouldn’t say he absorbed what he was being taught like a sponge, but I no longer had to waste time beating newly learned bad habits out of him before I could get around to actually teaching him. That made a huge difference in his retention rate.

The end result: by the time we were getting on the ship that was taking us to Beacon I felt pretty confident in his ability to fight against the entirety of my and Pyrrha’s graduating class. He wouldn’t win against all of them, and if you added in a second opponent he’d definitely lose, but he’d no longer be an embarrassment to watch.

The ride to Beacon lasted overnight, and I thank any gods that exist that I got rid of Jaune’s onesies before we got on the plane. I’d have to kill myself if I hadn’t. Thankfully Pyrrha was willing to foot the bill for a small shopping run to get my brother a decent wardrobe.

All in all, I had a good feeling about Beacon.

[hr][/hr]

I’d been stuck in this stupid forest for five weeks, spent a week with purple skin because of some berries, been attacked by god knows how many black skinned monsters, one of which had shredded my throat to the point that even with using morphing to heal I couldn’t talk, and to top it all off my one change of clothes until I could get back to my Warehouse had long since bit the dust. But, the mandatory five weeks were up so I could start making my way out of these godforsaken woods.

Ironically, almost as soon as I thought that, I heard strange noises. Not like the monsters that I’d been dealing with, no these sounded like… explosions? Explosions meant people! Yes! SOCIAL ACTIVITY!!!

I raced through the woods to the sound of explosions, pushing myself to morph into something faster. I wasn’t thinking about what, I just wanted to get there as fast as possible. The trees shrank, my body elongated as my tail grew, I fell forwards to walk on all fours as my front grew too heavy, the world exploded as countless scents grew in intensity. After a few moments, I came to a clearing with two girls in it, both with fists raised. They stared at me in confusion for a moment, giving me enough time to lean with my snout and start rubbing up against them.

“Umm… what the fuck is this thing?” the girl with bushy hair asked the other.

“I don’t know, it’s not a creature of grimm, but I’ve never heard of an animal that looks even remotely like this,” the girl that smelled like a cat answered.

My joy at finding other people was cut off, as the smell of the monsters that lived here drifted on the air. Right, socialize later. Deal with monsters now. Lowering my torso to the ground, I jerked my head back, trying to get the girls to climb up onto my back. After a few moments, they did so, settling in on the spot where my neck met my body, just in front of my sail. Standing up, I gave a throaty rumble, deep in my chest, as nearly a dozen of the werewolf-like monsters burst into the clearing. Time to go a stompin’. The shrieks, cackles, and hoots of enjoyment coming from atop my back as I stomped the monsters into smoke was just the icing on the cake.