Ruby paced back and forth as Weiss worked on her engraving. The morning had passed too slowly for her as she watched the snow-haired girl work. The designs were beautiful, but the work was time-consuming, and only served to agitate Ruby's worry.

"Ruby, come sit down. You're making me nervous, and I need steady hands for this." She said it almost absentmindedly, with only a hint of annoyance. She was bent over the arm and peering through a magnifying lens as she tapped on a fine chisel with a tiny mallet.

Ruby came to sit beside her thoroughly engrossed partner and fidgeted with her bandages again. "Sorry, Weiss, I guess I'm just restless." Weiss gave the chisel another gentle tap and adjusted her aim and for another. The highly stylized flames were beautiful; certainly they were beyond Ruby's ability to create.

"There isn't anything you can do, Ruby. Trying to wear a furrow in the deck isn't going to accomplish anything." Weiss pushed the lens out of the way to get a wider view of her work. She set her tools down and stretched her fingers, rolling her wrists back and forth. "I'm sure everything will be fine with your eye. Atlas technology is the best anyone could ever hope for. I'm almost jealous."

"Almost? Why?" Ruby queried.

Weiss gave her a long-suffering look, the kind she usually gave Ruby when she was about to call her a dolt. "You do realize how expensive something like that is, don't you?" When Ruby shook her head, Weiss rolled her eyes. "I could save my allowance for ten years and still not be able to afford that thing. You're really lucky that they needed a test subject for their prototype."

Ruby's jaw dropped open and her fingers brushed her bandages. "Oh, wow!" She had a vague idea of how much money her partner was talking about. Then she had a worrisome thought. "They won't want me to… pay for it, will they?"

Weiss gave her a withering look. "Of course not, you dunce. People who get prototypes aren't expected to. The engineers will need your input to refine the design and they'll make certain that it functions as well as the final product. After that, any upgrades or replacements will cost."

"Oh," Ruby said. "Polly did mention something about regular reports, I guess. I thought she meant like checkups and stuff, but you make it sound like I have to do paperwork."

Weiss shook her head and took up her tools again. "Nothing so boring, fortunately. The engineers do tend to be happier with extensive feedback, or so I hear." She repositioned the magnifier and began tapping the chisel again. After a few minutes of clinking tools and steady beeps from Yang's monitor, Weiss began to hum a quiet song in time to her measured mallet strokes. Ruby smiled and closed her eye; her partner had a lovely voice. Ruby thought it was a shame she didn't do it more often and remained silent. The singing drew up happy childhood memories of her own mother putting her to bed. Any mention of it usually caused Weiss to stop, and right now Ruby just wanted to enjoy the peaceful atmosphere. She drifted off to sleep without realizing it, and was nudged awake a short time later.

Polly had taken a seat where Weiss had been – the girl was nowhere in sight. "Oh hi P-" Ruby started, only to be interrupted by a wide yawn. "Hi Polly. Where did Weiss go?" She looked about, but it was just the two of them and her sister.

Polly patted her knee and gave her a pearly smile. "The doctor wanted to see her for a follow-up. With any luck the cast can come off later today." She turned to look at their efforts, brushing her fingers over the etchings Weiss had been working on. "This is lovely craftsmanship, Ruby. I hope Yang will be able to appreciate it." She faced Ruby again. "Are you ready to have the bandages off, or would you rather change first?" She pointed to the bed where Ruby's outfit lay, neatly folded.

Ruby stood and reached for her tights. "I think I'll dress first, if that's alright." The gown was drafty, and made her look silly.

"Of course," Polly said. She turned her chair to give Ruby some privacy, pretending to look at the finer details of Weiss' decoration. Ruby shucked off her socks and pulled on the tights before pulling off the gown and getting the rest of her clothes on. Once she had cinched the corset and tied the strings, she sat down. Polly spun again and reached into her jacket pockets, pulling out a tablet in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. The tablet was put aside and Ruby eagerly leaned forward so the nurse could cut away the dressing. "You might want to remove the tape yourself. Just be careful, though – it helps to work it from both sides. You'll lose fewer eyelashes that way."

"Ugh, I hate this part." Polly smiled in sympathy as Ruby peeled away the surprisingly sticky tape. She grumbled as the tape came free. "There! Can I open it?"

Polly grabbed the tablet and gave her a nod. "It won't work until I initialize it, but we should probably give it a quick look first. We wouldn't want to turn it on upside-down." Ruby's look of horror must have been plain to see, because Polly laughed. "I'm sorry, that was a terrible joke, wasn't it?" Ruby sighed, but laughed a little as she opened her new eye. She blinked a few times, but honestly couldn't tell much difference. Certainly it was better than the void that had been there for the last several days.

The nurse picked up the tablet and drew her fingers across it a couple of times before looking up at Ruby. "Are you ready?" She gave an affirmative and grabbed the edges of her seat. Polly pressed the activation sequence, and Ruby yelped as the final connection seated itself. The Faunus jumped and nearly dropped the tablet as she reached out to Ruby. "I'm sorry, Ruby, are you alright?"

Ruby puckered her lips and blew out her cheeks, fluttering a hand in front of her face. "Yeah, it stung for a second, but 's fine now." The doctor's warning hadn't helped at all, but as promised, it passed quick enough. All thought of that fled her mind as she realized that she could see. She clapped her left hand over her good eye and waggled the fingers of her other in front of her eye. The image looked like she was seeing through a holo-set, but the detail was sharper than that. "Wow! This thing really works!" she exclaimed. She held both hands out in front of her and alternated closing one eye and the other for comparison. "It's a little weird, but it almost seems better than my real one."

Polly grinned and made notes before coming to stand in front of her. "That's good news. Let's have a look then." She pulled a penlight from a breast pocket and tipped Ruby's head back. She shone the light into the implant as she peered carefully into it, consulting the pad as she waved the beam back and forth. "Light levels appear to be adjusting properly. Follow my finger without moving?" She clicked off the pen and held up her index finger, moving it up and down, in and out, which was a little disorienting to Ruby. Instead of the fluid movement she was used to, the prosthetic would snap to the new positions when she tried to track the wandering digit. She shook her head a few times in an effort to make it stop. When it didn't, she growled and rubbed at her uncooperative eyelids. "It's okay if it seems frustrating, Ruby. The engineer said that the shell casing will take some time to get used to. The casing transmits the impulses from your muscles to the eye itself. You'll have to work at it, but they assure me it's perfectly normal to overcorrect. We can try to fine tune the interface if it gets to be too much, but it won't be a lot."

Ruby looked at Polly in a mix of consternation and happiness. "I'll do my best, Polly. The important thing is that it works, right?" She was so relieved in spite of the speed bump; after spending most of the day nervous and worried, she was just as grateful that it hadn't been for nothing.

Polly shook her head up and down with enthusiasm. "Absolutely! Are you ready to test the other functions? We've got quite a bit to get through."

Ruby was eager to move on. "Sure – where do you think we should start?" There were a surprising number of things this eye could do besides help her see like normal again. The doctor had given her a brief list, but hadn't been able to provide her with a technical manual.

Polly held up her tablet and tapped a finger against her lips. "Hmmm. How about the night vision? I hear that you'll be able to see in the dark as well as I can." Ruby hopped up and dashed over to the light switch by the door and flipped it. Polly walked to the viewport and closed the shade, then dimmed the holo-projector on Yang's monitor until the room was almost pitch black.

Nothing happened at first. "Okay, so am I supposed to do something?" Ruby asked into the darkness.

"It should just work. Let me see… Ah, there's a note here that you might have to goose it with your aura, whatever that means. It shouldn't take much." Ruby squinted her eyes in concentration as she focused a tiny amount of her energy into the eye, which only felt slightly strange. She was instantly rewarded with a view of the room cast in a green-hued light. "Go on and point at me when you get it working." Ruby had lifted her arm and aimed a finger at the nurse before she'd even finished the sentence. "Excellent!" she said.

Ruby held up her hands and frowned. "How come everything is green? It works, but it's a little weird."

Polly shrugged and consulted her scroll. "I'm sorry, it doesn't say. I'm sure one of the engineers could explain it. Shall we try another?" Ruby grinned and turned the light back on, and then rejoined Polly at the work-station.

She sat down and fished out her own scroll. "The doctor mentioned that I could pair a scroll with it – can we do that?" Polly pulled up the instructions and they spent the next several minutes trying to get the two devices to talk to each other. When they finally did manage to get it working, they could only get whatever was on the screen to appear in her vision. To complicate matters further, the mirrored screen encompassed her entire field of view. Ruby was able to mitigate the inconvenience by changing the scroll's opacity to a lower setting. It wasn't perfect, and if she wanted to do anything, it had to be done with the scroll itself.

Polly scratched her head as she read more about that function. "It looks like they haven't finished an interface for visual cues yet. Oh." Polly frowned and darkly muttered something about common sense. "You might want to stick with just the scroll for now. Apparently that uses a lot of power." Ruby grimaced and closed her scroll, reminding herself that this was brand new. There were bound to be bugs that needed working out. The screen faded from view as she tucked the scroll back into her belt pouch. "Honestly, you'd think they would put that at the beginning instead of letting us wander around for half an hour."

Ruby chuckled and shrugged her shoulders. "How does it get power? Does it need to go on a charger, or is it wireless like the scrolls or something?" Polly looked up from her tablet and started to say something, but could only look past Ruby in open-mouthed shock. Ruby turned, thinking the nurse had seen something out the window, and nearly fell out of her chair at the sight of her sister sitting up.

"Yang?"

A/N - Welcome back! Apologies for the shorter chapter! For those of you hoping for a Penny segment this time, I'm sad to say that while I chose not to include it, have no fear! Penny will get a chapter of her very own in the next installment. In the meantime, plans to release the first chapter of Artificial Outlaw have been postponed for another week or two. The reason for that is partially because if I'm going to try getting into subscription-based writing, the quality needs to be better. Double and triple-checking things like grammar, character development, and balancing the exposition all need to be just as good as you would find in any book on the shelf. The other half of the equation is one of time management, or lack thereof on my part. There has been a scramble to get ready for a new job and organize things here at home in preparation for other fun things I plan to do alongside my writing. As always, thank you for reading!