Before Ruby could open her eyes, the high-pitched ringing in her ears told her she was awake. It was the kind of sound that she heard when Yang fired a shell from her Ember Celica two inches from Ruby's face. If that little event was anything to go by, her hearing would be a bit off for a while.

Slowly her eyes started to work, and the first thing Ruby noticed was that she was very definitely not in a forest. Her hands and knees were planted on metal, and the room was far too dark to to be lit by the sun.

Ruby noticed that her hearing was starting to return. Oh good, she could hear Yang's voice, so at least they were still together.

"I s..d b..k .ff!" blah blah, talk talk. Ruby wasn't sure who she was talking to, but she sounded... angry? Hmm. Well, she could probably handle it for another minute while Ruby continued to get her bearings. It wasn't long before she was able to hear other voices talking back to Yang. She wasn't really processing what they were saying, but she noticed that they sounded rather cross, and they enjoyed using the word "fuck" a lot. Ruby thought that was a rather rude way to talk to a young lady.

"Hands where I can fucking see them!"

"Stand the fuck down!"

"Don't move! Don't fucking move!"

"Where the fuck are those goddamn psi operatives?"

"Drop your fucking weapons!"

These, and about ten other commands/questions were shouted in the span of roughly four seconds. Ruby noticed that, while they sounded very hostile, there was also a definite hint of fear in their voices. Odd, considering they were all shouting at a pair of young girls. What was all the fuss about? After a few more seconds, Ruby had enough strength to sit up and further assess the situation.

There were a lot of people in the room. To her left was Yang, who had assumed a fighting position and was shouting back at the angry people. Directly in front of her and fanned out into a semi-circle was the mob that had been (and still was) shouting obscenities. They were pointing a lot of guns at Ruby and Yang. By her count, there were about three shotguns, six pistols, eight rifles, two light machine guns... and was one guy pointing a rocket launcher at her? That was a bit excessive.

The facility they were in had some sort of intercom, as Ruby began to hear a voice talking from nowhere.

"Strike One, are there hostile aliens at your position?"

The person at the front front of the angry mob toggled a mic on his collar to respond to the new person asking questions. "Negative, Central. Hostiles are not x-rays."

"EXALT?"

"Uhhh, unless they've resorted to recruiting under-aged women, negative. Dress code doesn't match, either."

"Then what are we dealing with, Strike One?"

"Unknown. One target is standing and definitely hostile-"

"You've got twenty guns pointed at me! You're damn right I'm being hostile!"

"... and the other appears to have been stunned upon entry."

"Strike One, try to contain the situation diplomatically. If hostiles engage, you are free to respond with force. Psi Ops are on their way to counter any psychic abilities they may have."

"Understood, Central." The guy who was apparently called Strike One flipped off his mic and returned his attention to Yang and Ruby, who was standing by this point.

"So..." his gaze bounced from one stranger to the other, "Either of you care to explain how or why you decided to pay us a visit? Or who you work for? I'm not going to lie to you, I've three squads worth of soldiers here who have been walking a razor's edge for months now, and the only thing keeping your brain pan unperforated is a highly-disciplined trigger finger."

Ruby almost instantly regretted raising her hand to politely ask if she could speak. As soon as she did so, she found all twenty weapons trained on her. The best she could do at this point was to press on and ask her question. She was embarrassed when her voice came out as something closer to a squeak. "What's a brain pan?"

Absolute silence followed, save for Yang's heavy sigh. "The nice gentleman over there was explaining how all those other nice people really want to shoot us in the face."

"Oh... well, I would prefer if that didn't happen, so... what do we do?"

Before either Yang or Strike One could answer, three more soldiers pushed their way through the semi-circle and focused their attention on the two intruders. Ruby noticed that they didn't have any guns, though, they were just holding two fingers to their temple and looking intently at Yang, and then Ruby. They looked rather silly, to be honest, but their attitude and posture showed that they were anything but. After a moment, they seemed to relax, and one spoke into her mic.

"Central, this is Annette. Hostiles are not psychically sensitive."

Yang started laughing. "What? Seriously? You want me to believe that you have psychic powers? Are you going to tell me what number I'm thinking of?"

Annette glared at the cocky intruder. "You want to try me? Give me the chance, and I swear I can be your worst nightmare."

Ruby saw that this conversation was not going in a good direction, so she decided to act quickly and draw attention back to herself. "Look, we haven't done anything! In fact, we're probably just as confused as you are! Why are you still treating us like we're hostile? We're not!"

Mr. Strike One gestured at Yang with his pistol. "Tell that to your friend over there. She's been standing like that before you even started to sit up."

Ruby looked over at Yang who, much to Ruby's dismay, was still assuming a combat-ready stance. "Yang! Are you trying to get us killed?"

Her big sister shrugged. "If you can get them to stop pointing all those guns at us, I'll stop being ready to bust some heads."

Strike One gave a dry chuckle. "Not gonna happen, kiddo. You come into our house? You're not the one that gets to make demands. Stand down."

"Yang, please..."

Yang rolled her eyes, lowered her hands, and flicked her wrists to deactivate Ember Celica. With a click, the gauntlets shifted to their inert form. Yang then folded her arms across her chest and raised an eyebrow at Strike One, as if she were silently asking "happy now?"

"No" was the apparent answer, as the soldier gave her an unamused look. "Right, we'll need you to take them off so that one of my operatives can deliver them, along with…" he waved in the general direction of Crescent Rose, "whatever that is… to our chief engineer so he-"

When he mentioned taking off the gauntlets, Yang's eyes grew wide before narrowing into a glare. "No. Nope. No way. My gauntlets. I made them myself, I've had them for years, and they only time they come off is when I'm sleeping."

Strike One matched Yang's glare with one of his own. Ruby had to admit, his was pretty intimidating. "Well, Miss... Yang, was it? Here's a new time for them to come off: immediately after you waltz unannounced into an XCOM base. A base, mind you, where everyone is jumpy at the slightest anomaly in their day-to-day due to the nature of what's happening worldwide. Do you know what constitutes an anomaly in this situation? A young girl walking around with heavy gauntlets that appear to be loaded with shotgun shells."

Ruby was starting to really get nervous. While it was comforting to hear Mr. Central tell these guys to diplomatically solve the situation, she could tell that Mr. Strike One was getting fed up with having his patience tested. Ruby herself was frequently frustrated by Yang's antics, and they were sisters. Here was a guy who apparently had an extremely heavy burden of base security sitting squarely on his shoulders, a guy who looked sleep-deprived, cranky, and scared all at once, and he was commanding a squad with firearms trained on two huntresses. Ruby didn't care how good she was at fighting, the odds were not stacked in her favor, and she had no idea how much longer Strike One was willing to humor her hot-head of a sister.

"Yang... can you just do what he says and give him Ember Celica for now? Just so we don't get killed in a misunderstanding? Please?"

Yang looked at Ruby, sighed again, and slowly began to take off her gauntlets. "If your so-called chief engineer breaks these, I'm going to break his legs."

Strike One's glare turned into a withering look. "Okay, first: threatening to injure a man who's vital to this operation's continued survival? Not the greatest start to a diplomatic truce. Second: Dr. Shen has studied, handled, and built mechanical, electrical, and chemical devices far more complicated than your little fancy gloves. There's not a single goddamn piece of tech that he and Vahlen can't crack when they put their minds to it. Annette? Could you relieve Miss Yang of her hardware and take them down to Dr. Shen?"

The "psi op" from earlier nodded and stepped forward carefully towards Yang. Ruby was relieved to see that her sister was done being difficult. When Annette held out her hand for Ember Celica, she gave up the gauntlets without a fuss. Even so, Ruby could see from her face how hard it was for her sister. She decided she would later try and use diplomacy (which seemed to have worked well for her so far) to convince whoever was in charge to let them go see Dr. Shen.

"Great. Fantastic! You have successfully disarmed a teenaged girl, and the hostile situation has been diffused! I'm so proud of you all." A woman spouting sarcasm was pushing her way forward through the ring of soldiers. She was smaller than them, not dressed in the same manner as the rest, and unarmed. Indeed, the only thing she was carrying was a clipboard. "So now can I PLEASE analyze the subjects?"

"Dr. Vahlen, I don't think-"

And that was when the portal, which everyone seemed to have forgotten about, spit out Weiss and Blake before closing up and vanishing entirely.

"New contacts at the Hyperwave Relay!"

"Don't fucking move!"

Ruby sighed. It was going to be a long day.

After the arrival of team RWBY's other half was sorted out, and Dr. Vahlen was promised a chance to "analyze" them later (a chance Ruby wasn't looking forward to… that woman gave her the creeps, and she'd only been there for two minutes), the four girls found themselves escorted to some kind of conference room where they were told to wait for further instructions. While being bossed around by strangers was not something any of them particularly enjoyed, it did give them a chance to talk privately for the first time since getting here. So naturally, Weiss capitalized on the moment to berate Yang.

"So Yang, how did blindly dashing through a mysterious portal to find mommy work out for you?"

"Weiss..."

"Did you find her? Because I feel like if she was here, we wouldn't have a full complement of weapons aimed at our faces and expletives shouted at us simply because we decided to pop in and say hello."

"Weiss!"

"Do you even know where we are? That guy mentioned we're at 'XCOM', but I've never heard of such a thing. Did you ever hear your mom talk about XCOM?"

"Weiss, I'm serious! Lay off her!"

"So now here we are, in a strange base, with a lot of strange people, and none of us have our weapons. Worse yet, they're undoubtedly being poked at by some old codger who's probably breaking Myrtenaster as we speak!"

"WEISS-"

"Actually, Miss Schnee, if you get the opportunity to see some of the tech Dr. Shen has developed here at XCOM, you'll probably have a much better opinion of him and his engineering expertise."

All four heads snapped up to look at whoever it was just walked through the door. Ruby recognized the voice as "Central" from the intercom. He was smartly dressed, wearing a simple pair of beige slacks, a green sweater with a white undershirt and tie, and a lightweight earpiece. Ruby thought the tie was a nice touch. On his sweater there was a small insignia patch sewn over the left side of his chest, and Ruby was able to make out the words "Vigilo Confido." Though she had no idea what that meant, she recalled seeing the same insignia on most of the other soldiers back at the Hyperwave Relay. Central's professional posture, combined with his short and well-kept hair, spoke volumes to Ruby that this was the kind of fellow who was very good at getting things done. She smiled and waved at him.

"Hello Mr. Central! Were we waiting here for you?"

Mr. Central chuckled and nodded. "Yes, I've come down to do a proper debriefing, as many people are… concerned that Dr. Vahlen would simply ask questions relevant to her interest, and not to those of XCOM as a whole." Ruby groaned inwardly, not wanted to think about that particular odd duck. "And my name isn't Central, Miss Rose. It's Bradford. Central Officer is my title."

"Oh." This knowledge started spinning some wheels in Ruby's head. "So Mr. Strike One..."

Bradford nodded. "... was Major Vance."

While Ruby seemed to completely miss the fact that Bradford knew both her last name and Weiss's, her partner was more perceptive.

"How did you know my last name? I never told you. I never told any of you."

Bradford smiled and tapped his forehead with his finger, as if that would help clarify things. "My role as Central Officer is to know things, Miss Schnee. Where Major Vance uses a rifle as his weapon, I use information."

For the first time since arriving, Blake spoke. "That still doesn't explain how you knew her last name. Information doesn't come out of thin air."

The central officer shrugged. "The answer is something I'm not going to tell you. While it is true that you don't appear to be hostile, you are still an unknown. At times like these, security is one of my top concerns. Suffice to say that information is my job, and I have ways of acquiring it. In the end, that's not why I'm here. I'm here because we need to figure out who you are, where you came from, and why you came at all."

"Oh! You want to know why we came?"

"Weiss..."

Bradford held up his hand to cut off the hotblooded huntress before she launched into another rant. "I heard your… conversation the first time from down the hall, you don't need to repeat it." He turned his focus to Yang, who had her arms folded and her boots kicked up onto the table. "Since it seems you were the... I suppose 'instigator' is the right word... the instigator of this whole chain of events, why don't we start with you?"

Yang shrugged. "Not much to say. I've been looking for someone in my past for years now. I thought I had a brief glimpse of her about three days ago as she was stepping through a portal. This morning, we were out killing some Grimm, when a similar portal pops up. Naturally, I wasn't planning on wasting a golden opportunity to continue my search." She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. "Trust me, the last thing I was expecting was to be greeted by obscenity-slinging, hyper-aggressive soldiers who looked like they were operating on caffeine and zero sleep."

Ruby was pretty sure everyone else missed Yang muttering under her breath, "Though it wouldn't be the first time that's happened to me."

Bradford nervously cast his glance sideways when Yang mentioned the soldiers. "Yes... we try our best to let our operatives maintain a healthy rest cycle, but...we're in the middle of a long war. One that isn't going as well as it could be." Bradford got up to shut the door to the room before sitting down and looking at the four girls before him once more. "So I think we both have things we need to share with the other party. Would you like to go first, or shall I?"

Once the four girls agreed he should start, Central Officer Bradford launched into a description of what was going around the world outside of the XCOM base. The alien invasion of Earth that started six months ago, with all its abductions, terror strikes, and UFOs, was explained to the members of RWBY. Additionally, Bradford explained the headache that was EXALT, the pro-alien (or possibly just anti-XCOM, they weren't entirely sure) terrorist faction that had cropped up to cause even more problems for Bradford and his crew. The XCOM Project was an international initiative that has become the planet's last line of defense against these foes. If XCOM was defeated, Earth would certainly be lost. As such, failure was not an option. He explained how it was a rare occurrence for more than three days to go by without an incident, and the fatigue was taking its toll on his soldiers.

"Sure, we recruit more soldiers into XCOM to bolster our numbers, but that doesn't solve everything. We always need a few veterans to accompany the rookies on their missions to ensure things don't go wrong, and even then... things often go wrong. This leaves us with fatigued or dead soldiers, a fluctuating number of veterans who have real combat experience, and few options when it comes to fielding a fully-rested squad. Mechanized SHIV units are handy in a pinch, but they're expensive and difficult to fix when they take too much damage."

Bradford let out a heavy breath and tiredly rubbed his eyes. "Dr. Vahlen and Dr. Shen have been amazing assets to this operation, but they're no miracle workers. Every time we advance our tech, our enemies advance along with us. It seems impossible to pull ahead in the arms race, leaving us stuck in our current, deadly predicament." He got up and walked over to a window, gazing out at the central command room. He continued his monologue as he watched a big, blue, holographic globe (he had called it the "geoscape" earlier) slowly rotate on its axis.

"Still, though, the situation isn't entirely hopeless. For every setback thrown our way by the aliens or EXALT, we make progress. We've downed over twenty UFOs, and successfully killed off the crew of fifteen of them. Abductions are frequently disrupted by our operatives all across the globe. EXALT is still active, but we're close to finding their base of operations and eliminating them completely. It's just that the costs of these achievements are higher than we'd like, and payment is made in blood."

Bradford returned to the table and looked at the each of the four girls in turn. Ruby was at full attention, leaning forward and intently listening to every word Bradford was saying. Yang was still sitting with her boots on the table and her eyes were wandering the room, but the central officer could tell he still had her interest. Blake was sitting impassively in her seat, watching Bradford as he spoke, but giving no sign as to what she was thinking.

Weiss, it seemed, had absolutely no interest in the successes and failures of the XCOM Project. She politely remained quiet, but it was obvious to Bradford that her attention was on other things. Her nails, her hair, her daydreams, pretty much anything that wasn't him.

"So that's the general rundown of our current situation. Are there any questions?"

To his surprise, Weiss spoke up. "Why are you telling us any of this? We don't belong here, Yang told you that this whole thing was a mistake. Why should we care about a war that we have absolutely no stake in?"

"Because we're stuck here."

All eyes turned to Blake, surprised that she had decided to speak. With four sets of eyes on her, the faunus pressed further. "It's true, isn't it? If you knew how to send us back through your... relay device, you would have told us so. More than that, you would have done it as soon as possible so you could get back to concerning yourself with your invasion. What's the point of telling us all this about your war if in a few minutes you'll say 'thanks for dropping by, now leave'?"

Bradford made a mental note to be mindful of Blake's razor-sharp perception during future interactions. "Miss Belladona is, unfortunately, correct. While Dr. Vahlen has told me that the Hyperwave Relay event has given her 'lots of fantastic data', the truth is we have no idea why the portal spawned, or how to replicate it. It was supposed to enhance our ability to track communication between the alien forces, not rip four girls from who-knows-where and drop them into our base. Given time, she may be able to come up with something, but I have a feeling that you may be our guests for a while."

The room grew quiet as Bradford's words sunk in with the members of team RWBY. The silence was broken by Yang, who finally sat up and looked curiously at Bradford. "Alright, so we're stuck here. Might as well come to terms with that. You said there were aliens out there trying to take over the world?"

Bradford hesitantly nodded, unsure of where Yang was going with this. "That... is correct, as far as we know. Even if their ultimate motive isn't quite clear, they're certainly wreaking havoc across the planet."

"... And you guys have the job of killing these aliens."

Was she even listening during the debriefing? "That is the purpose of the XCOM Project, yes."

Yang kicked her feet back up on the table, relaxed with her hands behind her head, and smirked. "So do I have to be all unlady-like and ask, or are you going to be a gentleman and offer us the chance to have some fun and kill the little dirtbags?"