Apparently we just don't get short titles this Volume. Also, did you know that "Time To Say Goodbye" is a really common song name?
Weiss is clock-watching in Professor Port's lecture theatre, which is understandable given that Port is storytelling. She redoubles her focus when Jaune tries to ask her out.
Finally, class is over. As Weiss leaves, she reveals that she was apparently paying enough attention to agree with the part where Jaune trailed off into saying that she was much smarter than him. Yang, walking past him slightly later with the rest of her team, delivers an
en passant headpat and remark of "One day.", which really isn't responsible or helpful of her.
Rare side-on shot of the "bunk beds" as Ruby proclaims the beginning of Team RWBY's investigation into the White Fang and Torchwick and everything. Weiss has to dodge fast as Ruby leaps off her bunk in her excitement.
Everyone knows their roles: Ruby and Weiss will abuse the latter's family connections, Blake will abuse her heritage, and Yang will abuse her underworld connections (by which she probably means Junior). The Unspoken Plan Guarantee™'s inverse means that it won't work out that way.
I wasn't expecting it to go off the rails before they even left the room, but here's Sun anyway.
Also he brought Neptune. This is getting out of hand, now there are two of them. He's not quite as comfortable with heights as Sun.
Sun and Neptune are paired with Blake and Yang respectively. Weiss protests - Weiss is acting distinctly un-Weiss-like with regard to Neptune - but Ruby drags her out the door.
I have just noticed that Team RWBY are all wearing new outfits. Look, costume animation budget!
It is now time for
michaelb958's Tangentially Related Storytime.
In the grim darkness of history, there was mostly war. This was not for no reason. We live in a time of unprecedented technological advancement: Most of history was pretty technologically boring across the span of a human lifetime. There were rarely any great advancements in productivity, and when there were, deploying them was beyond the means of many states. Furthermore, nigh-all production came from agriculture, which is basically proportional to land. If a state wanted more stuff, the most efficient option by far was to take more land from other states.
In the 1800s, industrialisation had a twofold game-changing effect. Firstly, building machines and factories and stuff could dramatically increase the productivity of the land a state already had. Secondly, this also increased the ruin of war, so taking land from a peer power (which, eventually, most of them were) would destroy the machines etc. already deployed there, rendering the land a bit useless relative to the new normal.
Suddenly, trade was more productive than war, and war was more destructive than ever. The First World War ended up being what was always going to happen when states, constructs designed to support wars to take land, tried to war under this new paradigm: 'horrifyingly inefficient in money and lives' is the most charitable interpretation possible. And so, when the dust settled, the surviving states of Europe looked at each other across the oceans of rubble and said "Let's not do this again. H*cking dismantle the worst aggressor as an abject lesson to anyone else who wants to try."
As you know, that didn't work so well: About twenty years later we got the Second World War, which was even more lethal, destructive, and generally wasteful of lives and assets, not to mention it took half again as long to resolve. And afterwards, the surviving states of Europe looked at each other across the even bigger oceans of rubble, and one of them was the first to say "
We can't go on like this." The new plan: entangle all of themselves in so very much international trade that none would dare start a destructive, wasteful war because even the obvious immediate costs would be too much to bear. The instrument of that plan was the European Coal and Steel Community, which became the ancestor of the European Union and the eurozone and all those other nice things. There wasn't another war in Europe for more than seventy-five years, and they all got fabulously rich.
(
Most of that was basically just me reading off the notes of an actual historian. Check them out.)
So while one's first reaction to Weiss saying 'the Kingdom of Atlas graciously gifted everybody the Cross-Continental Transmit System after the Great War' is probably 'in what utopia', on sober second thought it makes a great deal of sense as a forward-thinking mechanism to support economic entanglement and thereby discourage future wars. Better communication links can only help the eternal defense against the Grimm, and encouraging trade also helps with the cost-benefit analysis for such a megaproject. Truly, Remnant is fortunate to only have needed one Great War to realise they should be making trade not war. (I wouldn't swap, though - they have Grimm.)
Ruby, being Ruby, insisted they visit the gargantuan CCTS Tower (it deserves the capital letters) itself to check out the cool technology. When she tries to take a picture, she butterfingers her Scroll all the way over there to Penny's feet. When Ruby asks where she's been, Penny just accuses her of being confused and flees. Well, she's definitely confused now.
Ruby pursues. Penny doesn't want to say anything, but under a two-pronged attack of 'the people from the docks are up to something and we're investigating' and "as your friend!", eventually admits "It's not safe to talk here."
Meanwhile, Weiss walks into the megastructure. You'd think she would have noticed it visually before kinetically. That's only three-quarters a terrible joke: She's inside, walking directly towards the camera, and directly behind her is a solid pillar between the two sets of main doors - the visual implication is she phased through the pillar.
The immediate lobby of the CCTS Tower is very old-style fancy, but it rapidly transitions to a more cyber-fancy style.
When Weiss presents her Scroll to the cyber-fancy lift as an access card, it thanks her by name. I've never had a lift address me by name and I don't want to. I'm also a bit irked by having a voice operator when a button would do, and curious as to what destinations a random walk-in might want that aren't "the communications room" (as if this megastructure only has
one).
The communications room's receptionist is a hologram. Telepresence, or AI?
The SDC receptionist confirms that Weiss has a living father and sister. Blake, the only possible-orphan of Team RWBY, is now the only possible-only-child as well.
"I've compiled a short list," says Weiss, transmitting from her Scroll what the sound effects imply is an unshort list.
Weiss is evidently not very attached to her father. But oh, how refreshing, nepotism leveraged for a good cause. I read some piece of media criticism once that asked, essentially, why is it that only the bad guys ever benefit from corruption? Why don't the protagonists occasionally get to come out ahead by bribing the right guy? It stuck with me.
That conversation would probably have gone worse if Ruby was there, wouldn't it.
Meanwhile, Penny is standing in front of a cafe that looks like the same one patronised by Blake and Sun, if possibly a little less colourful. Right on cue, here's Ruby, hoping it's safe to talk here. It sort of is - the conversation waits until they're walking along some random footpath.
Ruby and Penny commiserate over their fathers being a little overly-protective of them. Ruby then makes progress on who asked Penny not to even say anything to her (or the rest of her team), but they walk around a corner into a press-conference-slash-live-demonstration of the latest in Atlas military hardware. Not only do they have new and improved human-scale robot mechs, they also have giant human-piloted mechs! Ruby is naturally captivated, but Penny is extremely uneasy, and then flees as two soldiers break off from the demonstration and run in their direction. Free tip: Police running at you are scary, and soldiers doubly so, but fleeing is a pretty suspicious-looking reaction. (I'm not
quite saying this from my ivory tower. Ask me about the time I got pulled over by an undercover cop car for Walking While Hoodied.)
Ruby pursues. In turn, the soldiers pursue her. All four of them fail to look both ways before crossing a minor road. Most are lucky, but one of the soldiers is collected by a car that can't quite stop in time. The other soldier ditches their partner to continue the pursuit. There are so many things wrong with that decision.
The next alleyway they all run down has a somewhat rickety-looking wooden structure with a bunch of crates on top of it. A slash from Crescent Rose brings it down behind Ruby, delaying the soldier. Ruby then parkours her way to catching up with Penny and carries her off down a connecting alley in a burst of rose petals. I question why she didn't go to petals a lot sooner - superspeed is pretty handy if you want to catch up to someone. Maybe she's worried it would make her too identifiable if the soldiers saw?
Anyway, Ruby stacks the landing (maybe that's why), leaving Penny flat on her face at the alley mouth as she (Ruby) bounces and rolls into the middle of a road. I don't like where this is going.
Suddenly, truck! I knew I didn't like where this was going.
Suddenly, Penny! She shoves Ruby out of the way and braces herself to be hit palms-first. Against all reasonable expectations, Penny is not isekaied; instead, the road she's standing on is.
It's the
same shopkeeper driving the truck. Sometimes I just can't even.
Penny, still visibly distressed, considers her hands for a few moments before resuming her panicked flight. Ruby pursues again. The soldiers finally catch up, but are kept busy policing what is now the scene of a weird traffic accident. I wonder how the first soldier, who got collected by a car, got here in the same amount of time as their partner who left them behind (again, so many things wrong with that). Perhaps they went back after being blocked by the cratefall.
Ruby catches up with Penny and just wants to know
what the h*ck is going on. Penny, fists firmly clenched, gets an attack of the hiccups in between deflections that are more like outright conversational blocks. (Is that what the episode title is about?)
Sufficient silver-eyed pleading, and assurances of friendship, finally gets Penny to open up, somewhat literally as well as figuratively, revealing a deep metaphysical inferiority complex in addition to the metal beneath the damaged skin of her palms. "Oh," says Ruby, as the writers leave us on a cliff.
Today's credits fanart is of Penny, and today's credits music is actually going to make me cry if it goes on a second longer.
Next time: Car Crash TV.
