RWBY Retold (A VagueZ/Kei Collaboration)

[Kei]

The wind lashes against your face as you soar through the air at somewhere around a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, altitude five hundred meters by the time gravity takes hold and you begin your oblique downward arc towards the ground.

You're not terribly concerned. Gazetteer Academy - the preparatory combat school you were enrolled in prior to your acceptance at Beacon Academy - had long prepared you for a "landing strategy". And even if you make a stupid mistake, the landing conditions are ideal, or at least as ideal as things are going to get: It's broad daylight, you're falling towards a woodland area where the foliage will slow and cushion your fall, and your Huntsmen instructors with medical training are on hand to deal with any unfortunate accidents. Which - if you really botch your landing - may include funeral services.

Still, you did not expect your initiation at Beacon Academy to begin by being thrown skywards by a catapult. Valeans are insane.

You scan the skies around you, squinting as air resistance assaults your eyes, assessing your surroundings for danger. It isn't flying Grimm that you're looking for, specifically; you already scanned the sky just before the creaking museum piece sent you on your way. Rather, it's for "navigational hazards", as you've heard sailors call them. The initiates were launched in rapid succession but ultimately one at a time, reducing the likelihood of a chain reaction of midair collisions. However, the eighty-or-so other dots in the air - initiates, each and every one and of them - are now attempting to speed up or slow their descent, and the sky is now being increasingly crowded.

You suppose you're lucky, though. Yours is not the only initiation; Beacon Academy is holding three separate "entrance exams" at once. You're jealous of the eighty initiates who got a lucky draw and are currently undergoing their initiation on the Azure Shore, but at least you aren't the unfortunate eighty currently suffering at the foot of Mount Glenn.

One out of twenty people on the planet pursues a career in a defense-related field, whether that's soldiering, law enforcement duty, or defense logistics. Of those, one out of twenty trains to become a Huntsman. Every year, two to three hundred young adults enroll at Beacon Academy, even though not all of them end up being Huntsmen. Remnant is a deeply militarized planet.

It's not as if you have a choice. The People must contend with the creatures of Grimm, the monsters from the dark, the demons without souls, the abominations of the Rotten Wings. They prey upon our inner light, running over our towns, besieging our cities. We have lived under their shadow for as long as history has been told. Our homes are surrounded by high walls with heavy gun emplacements. Our trains are heavily armored. Our ships host cannons.

Sometimes, they disappear without warning, only for the wreckage and corpses to be found years later.

It's for this reason you have come to Vale. It's for this reason that you have decided to become a Huntsman. It's for this reason you are at five hundred meters and falling.

You prepare yourself for your own landing strategy. At two hundred meters above ground level, you feel comfortable tucking yourself into your preferred position for a low-altitude, low-deceleration maneuver that would see you landing safely on both feet.

It's a shame, then, that you don't see a red-and-gold spear flying towards you in time, with a gunshot its self-propulsion and its guidance system the most uncannily accurate of throws.

*****​

Seventeen years ago, there was a war: The Great War.

The world had changed. The supremacy of the Kingdoms of Mistral and Vale no longer went unchallenged. The Kingdom of Mantle - a small, second-rate country in the freezing wastes that became the heart of the Industrial Revolution - had shifted the balance of power, and the Kingdom of Vacuo was all too eager to exploit this upset. Remnant had become a mess of contradictions: The rise of competing nationalisms, the demand for rights by communities of faunus with irreconcilable visions for the future, the conflict between progressive and conservative forces. The world became a powder keg, and the Great War was its spark.

Battles would no longer be fought with only sword and Dust. Firearms became commonplace. Airships took to the skies. Cannons tore down city walls.

But the Grimm reminded us that we were but children railing at the heavens. From the skies came Graula: its great black wings, its ivory-bone talons, its terrible violet flame. The dragon - the giant creature of Grimm that laid low the Four Kingdoms - reminded us of the cost of our hubris.

Yet even in the darkness, there is always a single flickering light: The Huntsmen, sworn protectors of light, defenders against the Grimm. For years, they had warned the world that the Great War was but child's play before the might of the Grimm. For years, they had been ignored. Yet it was at the end of the Great War that they brought the Four Kingdoms together in the Armistice of Vytal, slaying Graula in the skies over the Emerald Forest.

That was twelve years ago. Remnant is once again at peace, guarded by its protectors.

But it could never last forever.

*****

VagueZ and Kei Present
RWBY Retold

*****​

The Kingdom of Vale is not your home. You came here a few days ago from the Kingdom of Atlas, formerly known as the Kingdom of Mantle a mere twelve years ago before a military coup changed things. You are a child of the eternal snow. You are a scion of the Industrial Revolution.

You are a faunus.

The faunus - a humanoid species with animalistic traits - have experienced centuries of discrimination at the hands of humanity. They were the unclean, the undesirables, the slaves. They were proof of the superiority of humans, that knowledge would always triumph over savagery.

Never mind that the faunus are no less sentient than humans. Never mind that the faunus have been denied the same education opportunities as humans. Never mind that the faunus have often been afforded little more than manual labor. For centuries, maybe even more, they were the underclass, the foundation upon which civilization was built, but never to be at its core.

But times are changing, as they do. The Great Compromise of Saint Tabitha's Square started swaying hearts and minds. Yes, the Unrest and the Decade of Barricades that followed spelled some of the worst turmoil prior to the Great War. Intercommunal violence defined the early tenth century. Rival militias roamed the streets and murdered each other. Armies maintained their dubious status as peacekeepers. Walls were erected between communities as a desperate attempt at peace.

Yet that spark, that one dream of a more equal, more diverse society, started taking hold in Remnant. Thirty years ago, the last few unemancipated faunus slaves still served uncompensated human masters. Today, the faunus are increasingly folded into the nationalist identities of the Four Kingdoms.

The situation is not perfect. But it will get better. You must believe it will get better.

You are...

[ ] Write-In
First name only. Name must abide by Color Naming Rule.

[ ] Male
[ ] Female
[ ] Non-Binary

Specifically, you are a faunus with the traits of a...

[ ] Write-In
Choose an animal.

...with the ability of...

[ ] Write-In
Choose one trait commonly associated with selected animal.

Votes will be tallied as a single set. While we will do our best to respect the popular vote within the limits of reason, the open-ended nature of the vote means we retain final veto power over which vote is chosen.

*****​

Kei: For my longtime readers: Hold on, wait, please don't kill me, I can explain.

RWBY is a franchise that I have a level of weird fondness for, despite my recognition of its subpar writing (and disagreements with other people about where it is worst). Part of it is that I was familiar with its late creator Monty Oum's previous amateur YouTube work (ridiculous but awesome fight scenes with no actual real plot), and so I came into RWBY with a slightly different set of expectations than most people. Part of it was that it was a throwback to some of the stuff I loved most about anime as a child: Fantasy combat school settings, a world of danger and adventure, a cute cast. I think even most people cynical of RWBY concede that - regardless of whether or not it was thrown in because "it seemed cool" - the show had a promising combination of ingredients with squandered potential.

Doing a fan rewrite of RWBY - that is, taking its core ingredients and doing something that I hoped would utilize them better - has always tickled the back of my head, although for obvious reasons, I had never gone through with them: I had transitioned into original writing, I have my commitments to On the Road to Elspar and Intercessor, I could barely take on another project I don't feel super serious about. But I've hit a pretty hard writing slump lately, and @VagueZ - a very old friend - offered to help with that slump by doing the heavy lifting (AKA "most of the writing") for something that's hopefully a bit different and lighthearted to get my creative juices flowing again.

It remains questionable as to whether or not I can do "lighthearted", but.

Rewriting RWBY as what we feel could be not only a better work but also a fun quest means that, frankly, we need to work in a lot of changes. By and large, we want to abide by the spirit of RWBY, in the sense that a "rewrite" isn't just an attempt to tell our own story with a RWBY skinner pack. Realistically, though, not overhauling the plot and the setting is quite difficult. There are simply too many core conceits that weren't simply ill-handled but also ill-conceived. What to do with Remnant's tacked-on creation myth or its deities? What to do with Ozpin and Salem's shallow motivations? What to do with Qrow and Raven's misgivings about being given the ability to transform into birds?

Obviously, having to address these core conceits means fundamentally changing Remnant as a setting and RWBY as a story in many far-reaching ways, especially since we want to take worldbuilding at least a little more seriously than the franchise. On a more practical matter, running this as a quest gives us the added incentive of writing up new content with which we can keep our questers excited and on their toes when it comes to your participation. We don't want you to go through a one-for-one retreading of canonic content you're already familiar with anyways. We're still abiding by some of the broad strokes, but the devil is in the details, and we think it would be best if you approached this quest as something akin to a new story, with a completely fresh take on characters, plot threads, and setting conceits. The most obvious change revealed thus far, for example, is that rather than being something that took place eighty years ago, the Great Backstory War Great War was something that ended only twelve years ago, fresh within living memory, something that almost everyone in the cast lived through in one way or another, and which plays an immediate effect on the setting. We will certainly be writing the quest as if this were a new setting that we need to ease you into.

We hope you will enjoy our own interpretation of RWBY.

P.S. I blame the Number None Discord server.

*****​

VagueZ: As Kei has said, blame me for the fact that we started kicking around several ideas and ended up harmonizing enough of them that we think there's something neat to explore here, now. I love writing overblown, over-the-top action scenes, and this is an excuse to do so. For me, as well, there's a point where I love to create, but sometimes some projects end up stalled, mainly due to the fact that I hit bits where things need to percolate as I plan things out.

Thus, I hit on wanting to do something new for me, and this is a piece of media that Kei and I share not only the fact that we consume it, but similar approaches to what we think is wrong with it and what can be done to improve it.

Kei has already hit on several of the other points I'd want to say, so the only additional note I have for you right now is my own wish that it be something to help spark creative impulses in you, whatever format that takes.

 

[VagueZ]

[ ] Plan Stay Gold, Foxy Lady
-[ ] Latón
-[ ] Female
-[ ] Write-In: Fox
-[ ] Magnetic Field Targeting

There is a spear coming at me is one of those realizations that sharpens the mind wonderfully. There's just a certain focus and reaction it inspires, regardless of how one may have become aware of it.

"Paracognitive extrasensory perception"; or, as everyone who isn't a stuffy academic locked up in their ivory tower calls it, "the sixth sense". One of the foundations of the interaction between living beings and their aura. An instinct that nibbles away at the back of your head. The expression of the soul that warns you of danger when sight and sound and smell and touch remain dormant.

Fun fact about "the expression of the soul", though: It tends to work better when it comes to noticing living beings with souls, or their intent once you've noticed their existence, or the wrongness of those without. They tend not to work well at detecting, say, a meter and a half of vanacarbite polearm traveling at more than two hundred kilometers an hour.

The good news is that you're a vulpine faunus. Among those People who have animal characteristics, one trait associated with their associated animal typically stands out. The most common trait among many faunus are enhanced senses; for vulpine faunus, this is typically hearing and smell. Your foxlike heritage, however, has expressed itself in a more unique way: A peculiar sensitivity to magnetism.

You usually use this sensitivity in fairly mundane ways: Having a pretty good idea of precisely where people behind cover or concealment are (at least once you know they're there); being able to judge distances with an accuracy comparable to modern rangefinders; having an uncanny sense of always knowing the direction of true north. Nothing super fancy, very niche applications, mostly mundanely convenient rather than supremely useful.

Funny thing, though: You feel the spear coming in at you without ever seeing it because it is practically radiating magnetic force in an abandoned woodland area far from power plants, power lines, and other such sources of magnetism that could throw your sensitivity off. In this case, the magnetism is acting as a guidance system: Making very minor course corrections to an otherwise stunningly accurate throw, stymieing attempts on your part to twist away from its trajectory at the last moment.

It rockets past within centimeters of you, continuing its flashing passage. Then a bestial screech: The projectile spears a nearby black mass. A stray Lancer, one of the flying creatures of Grimm reminiscent of a giant wasp. It had been eyeing the Huntsman initiates as you entered their territory. You had noticed it, but it simply hadn't been urgent yet. It had been pacing you as you continued your aerial tumble, but was less urgent than the upcoming ground.

Then, there's no more flight. There's just the forest, and trees, and branches are suddenly no longer a beautiful carpet beneath you, but instead a series of obstacles. You let your aura protect you as you crash through two branches, catch yourself briefly on a third to shed velocity, bounce off, tear through a leafy canopy, and finally land on the forest floor in a three-point landing, both legs and one hand touching down almost simultaneously.

You rise lithely, telling your stubbornly poofed tail to behave. It's never a subtle thing to begin with, but when all the fur on it stands on end, it's utterly impossible to miss. And it says you're rattled, a tell you can't suppress.

Oh, well.

"I'm sorry!"

The feminine voice jolts you into taking in your surroundings again. It's distant, echoing across the woodlands, but you place the point of origin as being closer than the javelin's flying arc would've otherwise led you to believe. You don't place a name or face to the voice, but that's not a surprise. You'd only just gotten to Beacon Academy yesterday, and hadn't had a chance to really get to know anyone in the last couple hours before sleep and then immediately getting thrown off a cliff.

It takes a few minutes of waiting around against your better judgment, but someone does eventually emerge from the trees. Definitely an initiate, not an instructor, someone your age. "You're okay, right?" she asks as she hurries past you, retrieving her spear from the corpse of the Grimm she just speared. "That Lancer was getting awful close."

Once she has prized it free, you see its mechanisms working, slipping from one shape to another. It's apparently not just a javelin: You can see at least a gun barrel in there, too, and it settles down into a double-edged short sword in her hand, a match for the brilliant shield she carries in her left. There's a general red-bronze color scheme to everything from her hair to her fashionable corset-like armor.

You don't have time for anything more. The Lancer wasn't the only creature of Grimm in the forest. Two more of the monochromatic, soulless beasts are on the scene with a roar. Beowolves, both of them: One of the most common and thankfully weakest types, found almost everywhere across Remnant. Landbound, quadruped but capable of bipedal movements, reminiscent of a deformed wolf with elongated limbs. They are much larger than any person, two meters of heavy muscles and bones when standing upright. Most of their body is covered in black fur, but their somewhat canine-shaped snouts have a heavy white bone plate protecting it, as do some of their claws and joints.

Despite their imposing appearance, your attacker or savior or whatever she counts herself as doesn't flinch, throwing herself into the fray against the two of them. She darts in, thrusts against Grimm flesh that doesn't have Aura to protect it, scoring deep in the chest. Howling in pain and fury, it tries to attack her with its right arm, but her shield is in the way, angled to make its claws glance off. The shield isn't a perfect circle; it has two divots in its outer edge. One of these suddenly sprouts a sword blade as she strikes back, removing the limb near the elbow.

She takes a half-step back, then circles, which you recognize almost immediately is to keep this one between her and the uninjured one. With a complex but instant gesture, the shield is on her back, and the sword has switched into its gun mode. The battle rifle kicks, peppering both Beowolves with bullets, until she suddenly springs forward again. The gun is back to a javelin, and she pierces the first one's bone helmet as a lever to bounce over. It's dead before it sees the motion, and the other doesn't see the wicked edge on her shield, which she smashes forward for a quick hit.

It's all over from there. It's almost unfair how swift and accurate her moves are, each one flowing from the previous like a chess master playing out a game or an acrobat practicing a familiar routine. The second has no more chance to touch her than the first before it, too, falls.

It took only a few seconds for the entire fight to play out.

You managed to fire off a couple of shots to support her while she was doing that. You're normally much more helpful, but right now you're still pulling yourself back together mentally.

Like a slim majority of your fellow intitiates, you have already designed your own weapon, meaning that at least you're not out here with some unfamiliar weapon as you hunt for a pick-up team, seek a prize, and try to pass the exam. The ninth century Industrial Revolution established the trend of weapons that had melee and firearm applications. It's proven its worth, so it's no surprise that you have followed this tradition.

You turn your attention back to the weapon itself. You flip it back and forth a couple of times, assuring yourself that the mechanisms are still in good working order after the rather startling combination of being catapulted off a cliff, nearly getting skewered by a spear, and then crashing through a forest canopy. Thankfully, it is still operating flawlessly.

What is its melee mode?
-[ ] [melee] Tessen
A pair of war fans is an elegant, but useful, tool. When folded, they don't even look much like weapons, but have the heft to make effective clubs. When unfolded, their metal span makes an effective parrying shield, and the edges are blades. Also a classy accessory.
-[ ] [melee] Arming Sword and Heater Shield
A classic pairing that lets you combine good defensive prowess with a balanced blade, plus plenty of surprises are available to startle an opponent who doesn't realize a shield is also a weapon.
-[ ] [melee] A Long-Hafted Halberd
An axe-head on a pole gives you reach, power, and all the leverage you could want. It's a two-handed weapon, and you treat the entire thing as a whole weapon, not just the head.
-[ ] [melee] A Pair of Khatars
These punch-daggers are swift, light piercing weapons. You can rain straight blows with alacrity, though their shorter length and lack of stopping power means that what tears up smaller opponents won't make a large Grimm blink.
-[ ] [melee] Whip
Your weapon is a flexible length of advanced materials that you can use to strike with the speed of a darting cobra. It lacks in power, but can manage plenty of tricky enmeshings: Tripping people, latching onto grapple points, or snatching small objects.
-[ ] [melee] Write-In
What are the upsides and downsides of your weapon? What does it mean to you, that you decided to pick this?

What is its firearm mode?
-[ ] [gun] A Pair of Revolvers
Six shots... more than enough to kill (almost) any Grimm that moves. Relatively slow-firing, but powerful and your senses let you aim in two different directions at once.
-[ ] [gun] Duckfoot Pistols
Multiple barrels on slightly diverging angles with separate triggers mean that with a little cleverness you can either shoot a 'fan' of fire to harass a whole crowd or aim quick follow-up shots at a single spot by slightly twisting your wrist as you go.
-[ ] [gun] Assault Rifle
Your rifle is a balanced thing, the result of decades of military experience. It is generally above-average, able to be used in a wide variety of situations, though it lacks a specific focus it excels in.
-[ ] [gun]Sniper Rifle
A mechanical rangefinder supplements your innate talents. Your accuracy over long ranges is already high. Slow-firing but effective, and a good match to your innate kinship to a patient ambush predator.
-[ ] [gun] Mortar
It takes a moment to set up, and you can't very well move while it's deployed, but your senses let you drop damaging bombs with precision, and the high arcing shots can sometimes evade notice or bypass cover.
-[ ] [gun] Dust Wand
Not a gun at all. You use up an expensive supply of Dust to perform surprising, seemingly-magical tricks and elemental attacks. Very versatile with a wide variety of applications, but not good for attrition.
-[ ] [gun] Write-In
What are the upsides and downsides of your weapon? What does it mean to you, that you decided to pick this?

You look back up as the other girl approaches. This, you suppose, is your partner. Part of the directions you were given just before you were hurled here float back through your mind: "You will be given teammates today. Your teammates will be with you for the rest of your time here at Beacon. The first person you make eye contact with will be your partner for the next four years."

This would seem to count. You could probably do worse, you suppose. Supposedly, after the exercise is over, pairs will get paired up again to make a quartet (and, you suspect, any partnerships that absolutely do not work will get a special exception from the teachers). Still...if it's policy, it's probably not usually changed.

"Are you okay?" asks the redhead now that the danger has passed. She gives you a nice enough smile, but closed-lips. "I wanted to make sure you weren't hurt, before." She's looking over you with a bit of a fussy eye. "I'm Pyrrha, by the way."

It does seem like you're going to be with her for the moment. You're going to have to get to know each other and learn to work together.

You do have your upsides as a person, but it's not all good, of course...

You are...
-[ ] Agreeable
-[ ] Dependable
-[ ] Intelligent
-[ ] Confident
-[ ] Fun
-[ ] Cheerful
-[ ] Write-In

...but on the other hand you are...
-[ ] Timid
-[ ] Unsociable
-[ ] Conniving
-[ ] Arrogant
-[ ] Irreverent
-[ ] Ditzy
-[ ] Write-In

Votes will be tallied as a single set. Please be reasonable about weapon and personality combinations.

*****​

RWBY is a show that ties in and communicates its characters' personality through their combat and their combat style is shaped by their personality. For this reason, these votes are all together, as a plan vote, so it should look something like the following example:

[ ] Plan name
-[ ] [melee]
-[ ] [gun]
-[ ] personality
-[ ] personality

(but don't forget to mark with an [x] instead of a blank space so that the tally program can count it)