A/N: Having the flu sucks. On the bright side, during one of my 2 a.m. coughing fits, I was struck with this idea. I've only done a minor search to see if anyone else has already done a take on the whole body-swap thing, and only found one fic by knives4cash (who does some pretty funny stuff. Check it out.) so hopefully I'm not rehashing something some other author has totally nailed.

Anyway, prologue time.

The sun hung low and orange over the horizon despite the hour, a testament to the growing hold spring had over the land of Vale. The honey-coated light slid through the gap in the thick red curtains, painting a stripe across the tile floor of the quite dorm room.

The scene was as familiar as a cup of coffee: bookshelves stacked with textbooks and a scattering of novels, a neat pile of silver-white luggage containing quantities of Dust in the corner, and four beds, precariously bunked by means of an assortment of ropes and hardbound books. Posters and paintings adorned the walls, and not a few half-finished homework assignments lay awaiting completion spread across the tops of the desks against either wall.

All in all, it was a quiet scene. Quiet and peaceful right up till the moment when the door slammed open, admitting the bedraggled quartet of girls that comprised Beacon's shinning stars: Team RWBY.

"See you in the morning," the first to drag her feet across the threshold was Yang Xiao Long. She collapsed in a blonde tangle on the lower bunk belonging to her partner, Blake Belladonna, who was quite frankly too worn out to do much more than growl about the intrusion of space and tumble in beside her, still fully dressed.

Following at their heels came the youngest of the team, who was coincidentally the team leader, Ruby Rose. The girl scrubbed at her eyes with her fist and almost tripped over the crimson cape that drooped from her shoulders.

"Don't block the door, you dunce," Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, lacked the energy to add any bite to her scolding tonight. She shoved her way past, shedding her icicle hair decoration and the tie fixing her snowy hair into its trademark asymmetrical ponytail so it spilled loose around her shoulders.

"Ruby, brush your teeth," came a sleepy directive from Blake and Yang's bunk.

"Sis, come on. I'm so tired," Ruby whined, fumbling with the clasp of her cape. It didn't seem to want to come undone. She flicked some of her short, dark hair out of her eyes. Screw it. She could change without taking her cape off and still shoot back at her sister an accusing, "You didn't brush yours."

A mess of unintelligible grumbling was all the response she got. Sanction enough to skip on hygiene for the night. It had been a long day, after all. A loooooong day.

First, they'd overslept and missed breakfast. In retrospect, staying up till four in the morning playing trivial pursuit with Team JNPR hadn't been the brightest idea. (But they had won.) After that, a steady downward spiral of class disasters and combat practice mishaps all culminated in a lengthy visit to Professor Goodwitch's office to explain the Dust explosion in Ozpin's lab lecture that both teams may or may not have played an integral part in.

"I think I still have Dust in my ears," Ruby mumbled, tapping herself on the side of her head with her palm to see if any fell out. Weiss, already changed into her pale gray nightgown, scoffed at her.

"Well, if you'd just listened when I told you not to mix Dust types if you weren't one hundred and fifty percent sure of what they were…"

"How can you be a hundred and fifty percent sure? That's…" Ruby's brow scrunched together with the effort of the thought, as she pulled on her pink rose-covered pajama pants. "…more than a hundred percent."

"Precisely."

On the other side of the room, Blake and Yang were already lost to the world. Blake was still wearing the black ribbon she used to disguise her faunus heritage. Her cat ears were a little unruly at times—easily irritated, and all that. The bow twitched in her sleep as her partner snored.

Ruby shut the curtains and climbed into her bunk, too tired to muster a comeback in her argument with Weiss. The heiress was exhausting sometimes. And it hadn't been her fault that the bottles of Dust had been mislabeled. Or not labeled. She couldn't remember. Oh well. The bed swung a bit on its ropes.

Below her, Weiss was just cross enough to continue scolding, but just tired enough to let it end. "The tournament's coming up. We'll need a lot of sleep to make up for how ridiculously tiresome dealing with today's mess was."

"I'll get right on it," the response was somewhat muffled through her pillow. It was sufficient.

Weiss gave a satisfied hmph and pulled the comforter up to her shoulders, sinking into the sweet oblivion of warmth and fatigue.

Little did she—little did any of them—suspect the twist fate had in store for them come morning. For now, they slept, oblivious to the change working in them as they slept.

The room was quiet again as outside the sun continued to sink below the horizon.

Across the hall, Team JNPR, all of whose members had been caught up in the explosion in the dust lab, thought that they had come clear of the episode with singed eyebrows and nothing more.

Juane Arc, leader of the team, sprawled with his blonde hair in disarray. Pyrrha Nikos slept on her left side, protecting her heart. Lie Ren could sleep through an earthquake; Nora Valkyrie could cause one, but at the moment lay curled around her pillow, smiling contentedly in her dreams.

They'd survived another relatively normal school day at Beacon, and now the four team members slumbered in peace without the slightest inkling that the following day would be anything out of the ordinary.

Oh, how very, very wrong they all were.

A/N: Bleah, it's short and completely leaves you hanging, but there it is. I tried to clean it up a bit, but as it's been mostly a means of distracting myself from hacking up junk and drowning myself in tea, I may have missed a few things. The next chapter should be up before too long.

In the meantime, leave a review!