"And you were worried we wouldn't find any caves," Jaune said, plopping down next to Ruby where she sat on the grass.

Ruby glanced up from her scroll. He'd probably meant it as a joke, but she didn't think it was very funny.

Their guess about the settlement had been spot on. They'd followed the river up toward the edge of the mountains, and they'd barely broken the treeline before encountering hints of it.

Ruby looked around, her eyes tracing over the barest remains of a fieldstone wall, past the mysterious rectangular slab embedded in the river's side - maybe there had been a water wheel, once? - all the way up to the edge of the mountain range. The orange light of the nearly-setting sun soaked the base of the mountain, casting dramatic shadows into the mouths of the hundreds of caves dotting its side far into the distance.

Apparently there was a lot of limestone in the area.

Jaune clapped a hand on her shoulder, and Ruby turned back to look at him.

"We don't have much daylight left," he said. "We need to start thinking about where to spend the night."

Ruby didn't want to stop. They were so close.

She looked back at her scroll, flipping through the pictures she'd taken of the cave entrances. Most were boring, but some had crude markings chiseled outside the entrance. A few of the markings were easily interpretable, stick figures with sharp lines in their hands surrounding crude approximations of Grimm. Others were more abstract, or faded to almost nothing by the passage of time.

She stared hard at the pictures, trying to squeeze understanding from them by sheer force of will. There had to be a clue in there. Some pattern, some non-obvious interpretation, some clever angle where she'd squint just right and everything would resolve into a clear picture of who these people had been, how they'd lived, and where they would have put their gosh-darned temple...

"Ruby?" Jaune asked gently, squeezing her shoulder briefly and pulling her out of her thoughts.

She looked down and saw that her free hand was clutching the hem of her skirt, knuckles white, working the cloth back and forth, back and forth, repetitively.

She took a slow, deep breath, forcing her hand to relax. Her throat was tight, too, now that she was paying attention, and she had a kink in her back from sitting badly for too long.

Yang had made her promise, when she was younger, that she wouldn't try so hard to be perfect that she'd wrap around into being an idiot. Uncle Qrow had made her promise almost the same thing, years later. Her dad had never really said anything to her, but at some point he'd started telling a very particular type of cautionary story once a month or so, when she just so happened to be in earshot.

She sighed, turning off the screen of her scroll, trying to wrench her brain onto a new track. She patted Jaune's hand, and he let go with one last friendly squeeze, leaving her free to stand and stretch.

"We should probably sleep in the caves," she said, turning to look them over. "We don't know what's in these woods, but if the caves worked for normal humans armed with spears, we should be safe too."

Jaune nodded, standing up. "Pyrrha and I thought the same thing. Maybe that one with the deathstalker carved on the front?"

Ruby considered. Now that she wasn't tunnel-visioning on the temple, there was a lot to consider. What was she even trying to accomplish?

Keep the four of them safe. Sleep well, replenish their aura. Meet up with Yang. Find the temple in the morning. Delve into the temple, retreive the relic, get back to the cliffs.

"Let's try to find one high up on the southwest face of the mountain range," she said, "If we keep a fire going, it should be visible from dozens, maybe hundreds of miles away. Yang might find us in the morning. We have at least an hour of light left, that should be more than enough time to gather firewood. We can cut some green wood, too, and smoke some fish so we have emergency provisions."

Ruby almost kicked herself. Smoke signals! It was so obvious. As soon as she knew the temple wasn't going to be trivial to find, she should've taken ten minutes to reassess, started a smoky fire going on the mountainside, and then continued looking.

They could set off some burn dust, too, in case anyone was in hearing distance. They probably had enough to spare. How could she have missed that? An ursa had managed to figure out that loud bangs would attract Weiss. There was really no excuse.

Ruby shook her head, doing her best to discard the negative thoughts. That line of thinking wasn't productive, and might attract Grimm. She'd go over the initiation and think through her mistakes in detail once everyone was safely back in Beacon.

"Right," Jaune said with conviction. "Good thinking. Why don't you go get a start on the fish? I'll go find Weiss and Pyrrha."

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby was standing on the riverbank, flipping through the notes on her scroll in exasperation, when a white glyph appeared. Moments later, Weiss arrived in a blur, slamming to a stop beside her.

"Weiss!" Ruby said, relieved. "Quick. Say something interesting."

Weiss paused, mouth slightly open. She looked like she'd been about to say something, but hadn't managed to get it out in time.

"Excuse me?" she asked instead.

"I can't get my semblance to activate! I'm almost in the right mental state, and it's even urgent since the sun's setting, but fishing gets boring after a while, and I'm honestly kind of burnt out mentally, it's been a long day, and I need a little push, so say something interesting."

Ruby just managed to get the whole sentence out without taking a breath. She didn't have time to be bored.

"O...kay?" Weiss said. "The crack of a whip is actually a very tiny sonic boom."

Ruby thought about it. That made sense. It was kind of interesting...

"Not like that. Something more stimulating."

Weiss rolled her eyes. "Like what?"

"Something stimulating."

"You already said that."

"Well, what do you want?"

"An example of something you'd find stimulating."

"That's what I want from you."

Weiss pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Look. What was the last stimulating topic you thought about?"

Ruby thought back. The real answer was the conversation with Weiss about the Schnee semblance, but Ruby didn't want to come across as prying.

"My sister and I talked about the end of Ozpin's speech, when he said that a hunter is someone who is allowed to be unhappy."

Weiss grimaced at that. "Ah, yes. My father warned me about that tendency of his."

"Tendency?"

"Hinting at things he really shouldn't be hinting at in public. I mean, he wasn't exactly shouting it from the rooftops, but technically most of the people in that room shouldn't be privy to restricted information until they've fully enrolled."

Ooooooooh. That was interesting. Ruby could feel the dam in the back of her head start to give a little.

"What specifically do you think he was hinting at, though? Just, you know, in case...there were...multiple meanings..."

Weiss was giving her a look. Ruby tried to keep her face innocent.

"I'll tell you after initiation," Weiss said coolly.

"Weeeiiis..."

"I'm serious, Ruby. The information restrictions aren't a joke."

"But Weiss, c'mon. It's not like anyone would know."

Weiss covered her face with a hand, sighing.

"Ruby...even ignoring how incredibly naive that is in general, it's quite likely that in this specific instance professor Ozpin is literally watching us talk right now."

Ruby took a second to parse that.

"Er...what?"

"After you and Pyrrha fell into the forest, professor Ozpin was watching you on his tablet scroll to make sure you were alright. He held up the whole launch for it."

Ruby felt confused for a moment as she adjusted to the new information, followed by a wave of relief. Professor Ozpin had been watching, making sure she and Pyrrha had things under control. She didn't know his semblance, but if there had never been a casualty during initiation, it was entirely possible he'd had some way of intervening.

They were probably being watched right now. Yang was probably being watched right now. She'd had a nagging worry in the back of her mind, ever since things had started going wrong this morning, that maybe professor Ozpin wasn't the sort of man she'd thought he was. If he was willing to throw children into mortal danger with barely a thought...but no, she hadn't been giving him enough credit.

Right on the heels of the relief came a wave of implications.

There was no way the forest was blanketed with enough cameras for one to be located right where she'd landed. That meant the cameras were in the sky. The tree cover wasn't very thick; they'd be able to see quite a bit.

Ruby knew Atlas had surveillance drones that could observe the ground from miles overhead. And classified tech was probably at least a decade ahead of what she'd read about.

The details didn't matter, though. Or, rather, they mattered immensely, but she could work with what she had.

There were probably multiple cameras in the sky. Professor Ozpin would want to watch many areas at once, and if the angle was too sharp the trees would block line of sight. Everyone Ozpin wanted to watch probably had a camera roughly overhead.

That meant Yang probably had a camera roughly overhead.

Ruby's semblance tipped, finally, the world around her slowing almost to a standstill. She barely noticed the sensation as her thoughts continued to race.

These cameras were transmitting information to Ozpin somehow. Maybe they were using directional transmitters, but probably not. Her scroll was jammed everywhere she'd been in the forest, but they could easily be on a different frequency. If she could build a receiver, it probably wouldn't be that hard to triangulate their locations from the signal strength. It might get tricky if there were several close together.

She had a bunch of wires for hooking Crescent Rose up to her scroll; those would work fine as an antenna.

She racked her brain for what little she remembered about antenna design. She vaguely recalled that long wire antennas were supposed to work kind of OK for a lot of frequencies, but she didn't have nearly enough material. If the cameras were transmitting over long distances, probably the frequency was pretty low. Maybe a loop antenna would be a good first effort? How in the world were you supposed to decide what shape to use without looking it up?

Ruby went to dig the wires out of her skirt, to see what she was working with, and her hand moved sloooowly through the thick air.

Oh. Right. Her semblance.

She looked down at her pocket, then over at Weiss, then at the river.

Then back at her pocket.

She couldn't possibly be expected to stop thinking about this and go fishing. That just wasn't reasonable.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby sat in the mouth of the cave they'd chosen, headphones on, coding. The sun had set almost two hours ago, and the glare of her scroll's screen left her night-blind, immersed in her own little world.

She'd been really into programming as a kid, but her semblance had nudged her into more physical forms of engineering. Every time she got too excited, the world around her would slow, including the interface on her scroll. It was impossible to get into a flow state when she had to stop typing for a few minutes at exactly the wrong times.

(She'd tried pushing before, and had even managed to make her scroll hiccup a few scrunched petals out of its audio jack on one occasion, but she'd never managed to speed up its computation even a tiny bit.)

Ruby was discovering that programming without a CCT signal was almost a different activity entirely. She knew how to read from an analog cable, same as if she was taking diagnostics. Fine. She hooked up a cable, wrapped it into a loop a half-dozen times, and started collecting data.

Now how in the hell did you go from that time series data to the amplitude of a particular frequency? Somebody knew, obviously. She even knew exactly how to phrase the question to search for it, but there was no way to find out. It felt like losing a sense she hadn't even realized she'd been relying on her whole life, or like a big chunk of her memory had simply vanished.

She had the source code for her scroll's CCT module, but it was totally inscrutable.

A hand entered her field of vision, in front of her scroll, waving back and forth. She felt a flash of irritation, barely fighting it down.

"Ruby?" a voice asked. She almost couldn't hear it over her song.

With a sigh, she looked up from her scroll, reaching up to drop her headphones down around her neck.

Jaune was in front of her, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Hi," she said, voice a little curt.

"Hi," he said. "It's, um, getting late. We need to figure out what we're doing tonight."

"What do we need to figure out?"

"Watch rotation, mostly."

"I can take the first watch. I'm not tired yet."

Ruby turned back to her scroll.

"Ah..." Jaune said, before she was even able to find her place in the code again.

Ruby closed her eyes, inhaling deeply through her nostrils.

She wasn't irritated at Jaune, she reminded herself.

She couldn't focus on this conversation and keep the CCT module's code in her head at the same time. She could already feel it starting to slip.

"Give me five minutes." she said, putting her headphones back on. She opened up a new file and starting jotting down everything she'd already figured out before she lost it. It was annoying, but honestly it was good to do anyway.

"...OK."

Jaune stood around awkwardly for the first minute or two, then went back into the cave.

It took her a little more than five minutes. Finally, though, she finished, pausing her music and removing her headphones again.

She took a moment to herself, just to calm her mind. She closed her eyes, more gently this time, and listened to the world around her.

The forest rustled in the wind. The signal fire they'd built crackled, surprisingly loud even though it was more than twenty feet from the cave mouth. Her clothing scraped against the rock as she shifted.

No insects, oddly enough.

She heard something else, though, emanating from inside the cave, far past the first bend. Low voices, carried farther than they should have been by the cave's acoustic properties.

"She isn't normal," said a high-pitched voice, too distorted by the echoes to be recognizable. "She's either off in her own little world, totally oblivious to everything around her, or she's chattering like an overexcited child about the stupidest things. Tonight it's antenna design, for some reason! 'Weiss, do you know anything about antennas? Weiss, do Atlassian surveillance drones use directional transmitters? Weiss, what does the top of the CCT tower look like in Atlas?' We're deep in the wilderness, surrounded by Grimm, no idea where we're going, and she just will not take any sort of hint that nobody else cares about whatever she's..."

A creeping dread began to work its way through Ruby's stomach as she listened. The sense of calm she'd been cultivating disappeared in a instant. She scooted a little further into the cave, trying to hear.

"There's no need to get upset," another voice came bubbling up out of the cave.

"I'm not upset," said the first voice. "But I am trying to convey to you how unacceptable this state of affairs is. She dragged me around all day looking for Jaune, never even asking what my priorities were, and now that we finally found you two, suddenly her sister is the most important thing in the world. And what do you know, now everyone's gathering firewood and camping in this godforsaken cave just on the off chance her sister happens by, and oh by the way, instead of joining us in here and planning what to do next, she's off on her own working on some cockamamie scheme with professor Ozpin's surveillance network. Or at least I assume it's a cockamamie scheme, she never actually explained what she's doing."

"I...well, I admit that we do seem to have somewhat lost sight of our actual goal."

"Have you tried talking about it with her?" a deeper voice broke in. That must be Jaune. "I thought it was really helpful when the three of us talked things out. I think she'd take it well."

A sound echoed up, maybe a sigh, but it was hard to tell.

"I know. I should do that. The perfect version of me probably already would have. But am I going to carefully negotiate what sort of conversation we're having ten times a day? I don't think she even notices there's a problem. It's like she doesn't realize other people are there half the time. And I'm worried about setting her off."

"Setting her off?"

"We had an...altercation, before we met up with you. She's on a short fuse. And like I said, she isn't normal. I watched her dig around in a Grimm's severed neck for half an hour, like a toddler digging in a sandbox."

"Wait, what?"

"It's-"

"Look," the deeper voice broke in. "I understand where you're coming from. But please, just talk to her about it. I can be there too if you're worried about something. I'm pretty sure it will go well, though."

"You're pretty sure? You've known her for less than two days."

"I'm pretty sure," the deep voice said confidently. "I've only known her for two days, but I recognize a lot if things. My youngest sister is...well, Ruby reminds me a lot of her. She can be difficult at times, and you need a little bit of patience, but-"

Ruby stood up, suddenly, pushing her way out of the cave.

She emerged into the night, the fire flaring impossibly bright in her vision now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark of the cave.

She turned away from it, walking with quick steps down the path that wound up the mountain to their cave. Twenty feet from the entrance, the path had turned far enough that she felt alone, the fire well out of sight.

Her throat was tight.

She didn't want to feel like this.

She stared into the darkness, her eyes slowly adjusting. She could just make out the shapes of the trees, dark forms swaying in the wind. She caught a flash of glowing red from deeper in the forest, gone too quickly to really be sure it had been there at all. Grimm.

Her heart sped up at the thought.

Her mind went back to the ursa she'd killed with Weiss, to the peaceful satisfaction she'd felt as it died, the sense that something was right in the world. Everything had felt so natural, when she and Weiss had been fighting together. It was only afterward that things started to go wrong. She wanted that again.

She took another step down the path, but hesitated. A tiny voice in the back of her head urged her on, but another, louder voice told her she was being an idiot.

She hunted Grimm for a reason. To protect people, or to train so she could protect them in the future. If she went into that forest now, who would she be protecting? She wouldn't be here if someone needed her. She wouldn't be here if Yang arrived.

And what would happen after? When she returned exhausted, hours later, aura and ammo depleted, and had to explain why she'd run into the forest alone after dark? She could almost hear the distorted echo of Weiss' voice, adding it to the list of things that made her bizarre. Or worse, that made her scary.

Ruby dropped to a squat, clutching her head and squeezing her eyes shut. She couldn't go forward, she couldn't, but she couldn't stand to go back, either, to face everyone-

She felt her fingers tense, nails working into her scalp. The sense of dread in her gut was worsening. Feelings roiled through her with no release, fear and hurt and shame and disappointment, swirling around with nowhere to go, bottled up by the overwhelming sense of being trapped, unable to move in any direction, unable to fix things-

The wind picked up, suddenly, traveling through the trees of the Emerald Forest with a whoosh and a rustle of disturbed branches. It died and then picked up again, stronger, the trees creaking under its force, and Ruby fell backward, grabbing onto the rocks.

Ruby looked up at the sky, some instinctual part of her mind searching for storm clouds, but seeing only the shattered moon in a sea of stars.

A second later, the wind picked up again, and the moon was gone. It took Ruby a second to realize that it had been covered, obscured by a dark shape.

Her eyes stung, and she tried to blink away tears that weren't there.

A different pair of eyes opened far, far above her: two terrible red orbs, impossibly large and impossibly bright in the darkness. She stared into them, and they stared back, filling her vision and washing out everything around them.

Her eyes burned now, whether from the light or something else she couldn't say, and her thoughts tripped over each other, a raw scream in the back of her mind tumbling together with an overwhelming fear and a surreal sense that she must be dreaming.

Something that large - how could it exist, let alone fly-

The creature above her pumped its wings one last time, the resulting gale almost pressing her to the ground, and then it dove, growing and growing in her vision until it was too large to comprehend, rushing toward her like a tidal wave.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Author's Notes:

* Thanks to Appliciousness for beta.

* The next update will be on Sunday.