Weiss was quite unsure of herself right now. In the past, she had always thought of herself as a person who had a grip on her emotions and the situations around her, but that didn't seem to be true anymore. Weiss had spent quite a bit of her life looking out for herself and nobody else, but now she was supposed to run a country she didn't know at all. This whole thing was Ruby's fault! How could she just rush in like that and assume leadership without asking Weiss? However despite that, Weiss found herself confused about how to act towards Ruby. Many wouldn't believe it, but Weiss wasn't the ice queen that everyone assumed she was. While she couldn't forget the first few weeks of class and initiation, Weiss had long put that past her and was now helping Ruby as much as she could. Her methods of help may have been a bit unorthodox, as was evident by many arguments between herself and Yang over how hard Weiss was working Ruby. The truth was that Ruby didn't need to be coddled, she needed to be pushed farther if she ever wanted to reach her dreams. While this was in part due to the fact that Weiss didn't want anyone slacking on her team, she did care for Ruby and therein was the central problem. Since arriving here, Weiss had been noticing Ruby more and more for reasons she couldn't understand. Maybe it was because they were far from the social norms she was expected to follow, but Weiss had felt some sort of spark that she was unfamiliar with. While she knew the meaning of it, she was unsure of how to proceed with her feelings. It wasn't an issue of right or wrong for her, the Schnee family was actually very supportive, contrary to popular belief. Weiss and her father argued mildly frequently, but she was a teenage girl growing up under an aristocracy, so who could blame her? She would have to figure something something out soon otherwise-

"Weiss, get up! We have to leave right now!" Ruby bursting into the room shocked Weiss out of her thoughts.

"What's going on?" Weiss asked.

"The guild just got a call, a village in Lastation is under heavy assault." Ruby said as they raced down the hallways.

"How are we supposed to get there?" Weiss had found a basic map of Gamindustri earlier and Lastation was fairly far away.

"Good question, let's ask Histoire."

Speaking of the tiny floating devil, Histoire, Vert, and Blanc almost ran into them. Evidently they had just gotten the news.

"I assume you girls heard about Lastation?" Histoire inquired.

"Yep, how do we get there fastest?" Ruby was practically bouncing on her heels.

"Since this is an emergency, you should fly there. Here is a map that includes the area under attack. I will contact you if I sense anything going wrong but you two must hold out until the guild can send backup. Blanc and Vert, you two should head to your respective nations and be prepared for any other type of attack. Nepgear, IF, and Compa will stay here to keep watch over Planeptune. Good luck you two."

After a fairly long flight to the village, Weiss and Ruby could see large pillars of smoke rising from several places. Hordes of monsters marched towards the town square where the two could see intermittent flashes of light. The CPUs exchanged a glance before diving towards the action. Ruby landed directly in the front lines and started eviscerating monsters with her quadra-scythe. Weiss opted to offer assistance to whoever was fighting before them. Landing and clearing the monsters around her, Weiss got a look at the lone girl. She was petite, with vivid green eyes and white drill shaped hair and she wore a black skinsuit similar to their own. Her weapon was a comically oversized gun that was easily three times her size.

"Who are you two?" The girl asked incredulously.

"No time for that, let's get these monsters cleared out."

Weiss opted to hang back with the unknown girl and leave the front line work to Ruby. After quite a lot of mindless attacks from the cannon fodder, the monsters divided and left an open path. The girls exchanged glances but turned their attention to a loud whining sound. They all scattered for and form of cover as a blast of light barreled past the spot they had just stood upon. A large multi legged contraption marched towards them. It was low slung with a almost beetle-esque design but had a pair of cannons mounted on a humanoid torso.

"Now what?" Weiss looked towards Ruby.

"Just move quick and coordinate attacks. We've done this before."

Weiss prepped a speed glyph under the trio and they launched into an all out barrage. Weiss and Ruby alternated slashing at the target, Weiss constantly adding new elemental edges to her blade and using a variety of glyph based attacks, Ruby twirling her scythe and blasting energy balls from her arm. The other girl opted to offer aerial support by raining down energy beams and bullets. The machine evidently couldn't keep up and started spinning erratically until they severed the torso from the legged base, deactivating it. The other monsters had formed a circle around the fight but started to disperse after the machine had been destroyed.

"Alright I need some answers now." The other girl said.

"Right. My name is Weiss, I'm the acting CPU of Lastation. That's Ruby, acting CPU of Planeptune."

"Wait that doesn't make any sense, where's Noire?" She looked quite worried.

"Our best guess right now is that Noire and Neptune were transported to our world." Weiss sighed. "It's a long story."

"Oh no, Noire." She had visibly deflated.

"Do you know Noire very well?" Ruby asked, eager to try to help.

"Of course I do. She's my sister." She straightened herself out a bit. "I'm Uni, the CPU Candidate of Lastation."

Weiss didn't know what to say here, she couldn't imagine what Uni must be going through. She was trying to look strong and resilient but Weiss could see right through it, she was all too familiar with that look.

"Are you going to be okay?" Weiss asked as she walked up to Uni.

"Yes I'll be okay, Noire's been gone for long times before. My real concern is who are you two?"

"It's... a long story." Ruby replied sheepishly.

"We can talk about it in a bit but the important thing is the town. Where is everyone?" Weiss asked.

"Everyone is hiding out in the emergency bunker. They're a fairly common thing to have in settlements this remote. I was buying them all time to get to safety." Uni said.

"Well that's good then, we can-" Ruby stopped mid sentence and looked off towards the forest that the monsters had retreated into. "Weiss come here."

Weiss obliged and stood next to Ruby. "What do you see?"

Ruby pointed at the edge of the forest. "Right there, I think I see someone."

Squinting, Weiss looked where Ruby was pointing. As she saw a shape come into focus, her head suddenly exploded in pain. She cried out and clutched her forehead. The pain was immense but it was gone as quickly as it came.

"Weiss?! What's wrong?" Ruby immediately went to offer help but it wasn't needed.

"It's fine Ruby, just a headache. It's gone now."

"Are you two alright?" Uni asked, walking over to them.

"Yeah, Weiss just had a headache for a minute." Ruby answered.

Uni was enveloped by light for a minute as she transformed back to her normal self. She was a girl roughly the same height as Ruby with red eyes and long black hair that was tied into two sections on the left and right. Her outfit was a similar combat skirt to both Weiss and Ruby and she had a rifle slung over her shoulder. "Well come on then, we have go debrief all the villagers. But more importantly, I need to hear your story."

Blanc was currently occupied with a new fantasy novel to cope with the long ride back to Lowee. Normally she would just fly back but she wasn't in a huge hurry and this book had been vexing her for a few days, so she decided to take a terraportation ship. Planeptune, as usual, had the best technology and the ships were no exception. So with all that image, Blanc thought it was unusual that the lights were flickering and the smell of ozone was in the air. Despite the "terra" in the name, the ships were everything but. They were either sea based; mainly those between Leanbox, Planeptune, and Lastation; or airborne, like the ones that traveled between all nations. Blanc happened to be on an airborne ship and, despite the fact that the ship wasn't very high above the ground, she had no intention of it crashing. However it looked like life had other plans today as the ship went into a steep dive towards the ground. 'Well shit, this day just keeps getting better.' Blanc thought. She activated HDD and smashed out part of the ceiling and flew out mere seconds before the ship crashed into the capital city's plaza. Thankfully, as per the advanced technology, there was no combustible items on board so there was a lack of an earth shattering explosion. She pulled out her phone and activated the executive emergency broadcast, calling all available guild members and medical staff in the vicinity. Until then, she started slashing away at the crumbled remains of the ship in order to reach the surviving passengers. After a few axe swings, she realized that ripping the ship apart wouldn't help. Floating back down to the ground, she was swarmed by emergency responders who battered her with questions.

"Lady White Heart, what happened here?"

"Is anyone still alive in there?"

"What do you want us to do?"

Taking a breath, Blanc assessed the situation. "The priority is looking for survivors and treating them. Look for any type of emergency exit and open it, if we need to, I can cut part of it open but that's a last resort. We don't want to cause and more damage and have this thing fall apart with people in it."

"You can count on us, Lady White Heart!" Came a unanimous response.

Blanc stepped away to make a call on her phone. The recipients picked up almost immediately.

"Rom, Ram, are you two alright? Yes I'm at the crash site, I'm fine, don't worry. What do you mean you're almost there?"

Before she could process it, she saw pair of lights spiraling towards the downed ship. After pausing for a moment, they made a beeline towards her and slammed into the ground. Blanc was greeted by the sight of her twin sisters in their HDD forms, both looking concerned.

"What the hell are you two doing here?" Blanc was annoyed, but mostly she was worried.

"We wanna help!" Ram said exuberantly.

"Yeah... help." Came Rom's meek agreement.

"This is a emergency situation you know, it's no place for kids." Blanc said pinching the bridge of her nose.

"But you gotta rescue the people inside right?" Rom asked. "We could help with that."

"Yeah, we can just use magic to take the ship apart and save the people!" Ram agreed.

Blanc was about to argue but she realized that her sisters had a point. They could dismantle the ship piece by piece without worrying about anything falling apart.

"Alright fine, make yourselves useful."

Blanc spent the next few hours debriefing all the passengers. After everyone was rounded up, it was made clear that, miraculously, there were no casualties. Blanc chalked this up to another over-engineered piece of Planeptune tech with a thousand safety features. Most of the passengers were citizens of Lowee that were merely returning from a vacation but there were a few people from other nations as well. However as of now, there was no culprit or explanation behind the sudden crash. Now that the passengers were all out, investigators could analyze the ship to see if it was a mechanical failure or sabotage. But that would take plenty of time so Blanc made for the nearest bookstore, determined to replace the novel she lost in the crash.

Author's Note

I'm back again. Sorry the upload schedule is so inconsistent, I'm back in school and don't have a ton of free time to write. Rest assured, I have no intention of abandoning this story any time soon. This first story arc is probably going to last for quite some time, so stay tuned until the end.