#krwbyverse

[kinaesthetiqueer]

Team MYNT

Team MYNT is the only first year combat team comprised exclusively of Faunus students!

Marine "Mar" Axatilus

Faunus: Fish - Fins and scales on ears, forearms, and calves

Semblance: Hydrokinesis - controls water

Partner: Yasmin

Personality: Cool, calm, and no nonsense, Mar is the obvious choice for leader! Mar is inclined to keep to herself for a variety of reasons, which bleeds over into her team's tendency to be somewhat insular. She's sharp and very observant, as well as unapologetic for her needs and accomodations. She doesn't care much to retaliate against bullies, but she doesn't mind when Yas has fun in her stead.

Fun Facts: Originally from Menagerie; very thick prescription glasses; going to Beacon was her first time leaving Menagerie; despite having a faunus trait better suited to an aquatic environment, Mar decided to train as a huntress anyway with the intention of protecting aquatic faunus settlements; totally oblivious to Yas' flirting... maybe? they've been doing this dance on and off for so long

Yasmin Tigris

Faunus: Tiger - Tail

Semblance: Shadowstripe- As long as there is a combination/balance of light and shadow (think a sun dappled forest), Yas can fade into the background and remain visibly undetectable

Partner: Mar

Personality: Yas is incredibly willfull and opinionated, never afraid to stand up to bullies or anyone who tries to get in her way. A self-described mean lesbian, she takes zero shit from anyone but especially human boys. She'd eat Cardin for breakfast if she hadn't already scared CRDL off early on.

Fun Facts: aro as hell and loving it; tiger stripe tattoos; Sienna Khan's biggest fan; parents sents her to huntsmen's academy as an attempt to distract her from her dreams of joining the white fang (it's only strengthening her resolve); grew up on Menagerie

Navina Rana

Faunus: Bullfrog - Spots (typically mistaken for moles)

Semblance: Bellow - can make herself heard over incredible distances; can also use her voice as a short-range attack

Partner: Tia

Personality: Navina is sweet and a little shy, but very sure of her desires, even when she's a little unsure about pursuing them. She's easy to tease and easy to please. She often acts as her team's peacekeeper. She's the first to back down or try to avoid attracting attention. Similar to Ilia, she grew up on the mainland, typically obscuring her faunus heritage. To avoid closer scrutiny, she learned to be agreeable and quiet.

Fun Facts: Born on Menagerie, lived there until she was about eight; knew Yas as a kid, who called her Navi; also knew Tia way younger, though she did not recognize her at first; Navina's family is pretty big and she's the youngest of the middle children and the second to attend a huntsmen academy; her eldest brother attended Beacon academy several years prior on the support track; pretty used to being overlooked

Tia "T/Tea" Lampyre

Faunus: Firefly - skin glows when excited, brightest where her vitiligo is most prominent

Semblance: Flashbang - intentionally flashes brightly and dazes her target(s), both mentally and visually

Partner: Navina

Personality: Tia is often mistaken for a loudmouthed idiot, but she really is a firecracker and quick to set off her fuse. She's more than happy to defend herself and others, damn the consequences. She'll loudly and brightly do what's right, even when it makes her unpopular and misunderstood.

Fun Facts: orphaned by a mine accident and shipped off to relatives in Vacuo, Tia was the kind of kid who learned to hide sadness from a young age; nearly Flashbang'd half the forest in her excitement when she locked eyes with her old childhood friend; always dresses to show off her vitiligo

Read the MYNT side story here!

(Also, the entire team is sapphic as hell.)

[kinaesthetiqueer]

Scrolls and Aura Monitoring

Scrolls are such a neat, all-encompassing multitool in RWBY. I like how we've seen them be everything from communication to accessibility assistants (Fox & ADA) to tech interface (Watts, Cinder, Ironwood) and more.

I've already talked about my technical expansion Find My Team and how the app allows team leaders to locate their team members, within certain parameters.

What I didn't talk about was how proximity to one's scroll affects its ability to sense and monitor its owner aura.

Essientially, I'm about to answer one question that 20/21 raised: What is the functional distance someone can be away from their scroll before it stops being useful as a monitoring device?

Short answer: approximately one mile/1.6km of unobstructed distance

Long answer—

Long Answer: Scrolls have an effective range of exactly 0.97 miles or 1.56km. This range includes their ability to sense both other scrolls and the person to whom they're keyed.

How'd I come up with this? Gods, I'm so glad you asked because the only person who would be interested enough to question me is the one who was present while I was doing the math. 💛

We never see any implants or bracelets mentioned or shown in any media that suggest a more scifi way of monitoring. So I figured that scrolls must be tapped into their owner's aura signature directly for the more fantasy type option. I'm going with the idea that scrolls have a set-up sync option that helps new owners key their scroll to their aura. It is, however, optional. (Which helps explains Jaune. Pyrrha helped him set it up during intiation though.)

For krwbyverse, I'm sticking with the idea that each scroll senses its own owner and can transmit that information as needed to other scrolls. Atlas pioneered aura transfer, which means that they had to build that on tech that can sense aura, right? Right.

Students can form groups as needed, outside of their teams, so they can adjust monitoring groups as long as they have the permission of the other person. Something along the lines of enabling WPS or AirDrop basically.

So, for example, RWBY might be a permanent school-based group but should RW need to team up with SN, they could form a new monitoring group for ease of keeping an eye on each other's auras. Such a group would be temporary, either on a time limit or set to dissolve upon half of the group dropping out. Doesn't have to be four but old habits, y'know!

(The permanance of school team groups has implications for JNPR that I have already briefly addressed in On the Run from Tomorrow. :') )

Okay, so math.

I used the scene from V6C1 with the Argus Limited fight. Ruby and Nora watch their scrolls, waiting for the them to leave each other's range. I took note of the time it took between Blake cutting the train tie and Ren activating his semblance– 35 seconds. Given a suggestion from a Wiki commenter, the Argus Limited is likely based on the Milwaukee Hiawatha train. After research into it, I'm inclined to believe it. Those trains were built to go 100mph/160kmh on average. Using the time and that speed, I calculated that the AL traveled about a mile in that time.

(I am electing to acknowledge but ultimately ignore some physics here, mainly an object being detached from its source of power and therefore beginning to slow down due to force acting against it (friction, wind resistance), just because with all the anti grav and ice and everything, im choosing to just. not make my brain hurt. I could though. you'd have to pay me though.)

Why care!?

Because that's as close as I can get to a canon peer-to-peer transmission distance, especially because the CCT is down! I think it makes sense that aura info wouldn't necessarily be tied to CCT uptime, right? Can you imagine being on a mission way out somewhere and not being able to see how your partner's doing?! Anyways.

Where was I going with this.

Oh yes! RUBY! Poor Ruby. Aside from not having access to FMT and everything else that her scroll can do, she doesn't really have another way to find her scroll. They're so critical to student life that to be without one is to be incredibly disadvantaged.

Because of On the Run from Tomorrow specifically, krwbyverse Beacon dorms don't use scrolls for room access, like canon implies. I needed them to be able to get into the dorm without electricity being a factor. Hence why they have Laundry/Backdoor keys and Room keys. Hence Weiss' key fob.

BUT BACK TO SCROLLS

A scroll can sense its owner for up to a mile. So even though Ruby didn't have her scroll, it was still useful as a monitoring device as long as it didn't get too far away from her. Beacon is a pretty big campus. But unless it gets out of that range, it's not going to show as offline or out of range. Once a scroll gets out of range, it grays out the aura level with an offline overlay, showing the last known aura percentage.

(Which sucks for JNPR. Because a broken aura and a dead aura are indistinguishable by the tech. There was always that little sliver of hope.)

This was way more rambly than I intended but fucking tumblr posted my draft instead of saving it so here I am!

[kinaesthetiqueer]

the thing about loving nora so damn much is that i legally have to Make Her Go Through It. sometimes though, it feels so so so mean. however. i have to make my headcanons make sense from top to bottom.

so. per my headcanons on how her semblance works... once she was struck by lightning and her semblance unlocked, her passive ability unlocked too. rather than dissapating the tiny bits of electricity that her body naturally produces, like everyone else does, her body stores them. it's up to nora as to how she can deal with it.

before she gets a handle on it, she's a walking static producer. ever walked around in socks on carpet in the winter? she's like that, all the time. discharging whenever she touches anything that can conduct electricity. some of the less helpful instructors at tocsin (the vale combat school that my ren and nora attended from ages 13-17) force nora to wear rubber gloves when she's in class.

this, of course, doesn't actually help. she's still storing it up. nora copes by energizing herself with the excess electricity and just. Being Hyper. she always has been excitable but now she just bounces off the walls, because she doesn't know how else to spend the energy outside of combat.

ren doesn't know how to help her either. his semblance is strictly defensive/supportive. he has always been under intense stress to make sure he keeps it under control. they aren't on the streets anymore but nora feels compelled to make sure, should they ever end up there again, that she can pull more weight when it comes to keeping them safe.

if nora is worked up or stressed, she starts sparking. arcs of electricity come off her skin and they can hurt whoever gets close. it's a easy way to help her discharge, if you can get a grounded lightning rod close enough.

other lesser signs that she's not quite keeping it under wraps are, in order of increased severity: increased fidgeting/stimming (hilarious as a marker, as she's audhd af), static field as observed by her hair strands lifting up as if rubbed by a balloon, indigestion & nausea (too much energy messing with peristalsis); uncontrollable hiccups (excess electricity causing her diaphragm to spasm), and finally, the sparking.

these first two markers goes pretty much unnoticed by nora herself, though the rest of jnpr is pretty good at noticing when her hair starts going flyaway. ren can tell the difference between normal nora fidgets and too much energy! nora fidgets at a glance. when nora gets so bad that these side effects show, she tends to skip indigestion and nausea and go straight to hiccuping. rarely, like if she's in an argument with someone who doesn't know her well enough to point out her hair, she might reach the indigestion stage (for example, cordovin). however, hiccups come on fast when she's having a breakdown. they are her major sign that she needs to find some way to calm down and rein in her semblance.

she has two choices for doing so: sequestering it for later (a choice she makes when she's likely to be in combat soon) or discharging.

sequestering (storing) it requires her to rein in the electricity and sink it into her muscles. typically this means her thigh and butt muscles, as they are the largest. she creates a circuit of circulating electricity deep in her muscles and they slowly store the energy for later. (don't ask me about the biology here unless you want to be here all night; that is a promise, not a threat). she can also then use it to jump and leap. this is also why she skips so much!

storing/sequestering is what nora refers to as "sinking". it's not a term she really explains to anyone. in fact, she loathes explaining her semblance to people. firstly, no one expects her to understand how her semblance works, because she's hyper and bubbly and girly. secondly, people tend to get weirded out and wary of her when she explains, at least they did at tocsin. ren loves that she knows how both hers and his works.

she gets a lot of confidence and joy from it as jnpr works in private to train for the vytal festival, because jaune and pyrrha think her semblance is super cool. by the time vytal comes around, she's just stoked to be able to show off for the first time, since jaune decided they should keep it a secret until then.

on the other hand, discharging it is exactly what it seems. it's what she does when she doesn't need the extra energy or wants to be sure she's safe to touch others. she can discharge into the air (which causes a thunderclap of varying decibels, depending on how much electricity she discharges) or into the ground or to any grounded source. she can also do this offensively by throwing a bolt or striking something with precision.

after spending most of her time at tocsin wearing gloves, she keeps them in her beacon outfit, though fingerless, because she likes to comfort and the compression, but also she likes to know she's capable of safely touching people.

the mean thing that i was thinking of, which prompted this post, was nora being threatened with, and perhaps once subjected to, tocsin's cruelest 'therapy' which is to forcibly break a student's aura so that their semblance won't hurt anyone until they get it under control. which. may or may not have happened to her when she took a shower while charged, knocking out tocsin's campus water plant and electrocuting anyone who was also taking a shower at the same time. 🙃

anyways. i want to write a series of oneshots and drabbles that contains all my headcanons for the main kids' semblances and how they work and how they've adapted to them over time. im just a big sucker for logistics and after blake's semblance driving me batshit for months, i think it's what i deserve.

[kinaesthetiqueer]

I'll make a digital version eventually but... isn't this the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?

(ignore the days of the week; it's a daily schedule)

teacher close ups:

sticky notes:

using the class schedule from After the Fall (green sticky note), I extrapolated a canon-to-my-fics teacher schedule for the 6 named professors. i had to standardize the classes into blocks (90m) and half-blocks (45m) before i could make it fit. combat is 105m to account for changing clothes and priming weapons as well as the sparring period of class. this covers all 1st year classes, the canon 2nd year classes, and a few 3rd/4th years classes, leaving room for another set of teachers whose primary focus is beacon juniors and seniors.

fun little features and notes below the cut

all teachers have at least one period of prep/plan time

15 minutes between classes allows for ample travel time

breakfast opens at 6:30am

glynda only teaches 1st and 2nd year combat. her mornings are dedicated to administrative tasks

mulberry is the weapons masters for 1st/2nd years. he has open workshop for weapon repair during their combat hours.

oobleck does 3rd/4th year combat in the mornings; there's another unnamed teacher that runs open workshop for those students

greene is one of the school counselors and focused on interpersonal relationships- however her semblance is camoflauge related so she teaches 2nd yr stealth and security as a pet project/change of pace

she, along with the other counselours, also has drop in hours every day for students to come in and talk about what's on their minds

between greene, oobleck, and glynda, their classes work well for combat outings. oobleck and glynda do outings on the same days- she takes his 1st year settling remnant history class (and mulberry's 1st year weapon craft/upkeep class) for an extended combat outing and he takes the 2nd years from greens stealth and security class on an extended outing (that he may or may not choose to run into his plan period). green then extends her open office hours to include 4th period

port teaches combat overflow/drop in, mainly for 1st year students who want an occasional change of pace. however students of all years can drop in with permission.

peach is a botanist and field ecologist determined to make sure no beacon graduate eats the wrong plant on the road or doesn't know what bark can sooth a headache or starves outside of the kingdoms

block 4 is a mandatory elective and teams have to take whatever they choose together. each year gets two choices.

jaune and ruby get special permission to take the 2nd year weapons class because i backed myself into a corner and realized they couldn't take the 1st year elective because both their teams wanted settling remnant and as team leaders they conceded to their team and set aside their own preferences.

weiss takes history of crime because she thinks it will help her run SDC better if she knows more objective info about crime groups that could pose a threat

ren and blake correctly realize they're going to often be the level headed one in the group. they're also big fans of professor greene's legendary tea stash, which she shares both during class and open office time

nora loves knowing more about plants bc of some heavy headcanons I won't elaborate on here but basically she's always been one to eat anything and everything and has long since kept up with her foraging knowledge. it's her easy-a class!

pyrrha wanted something that wasn't too heavy and/or combat related. she also thought it would be nice to have someone else she knew in class who didn't just know the famous pyrrha nikos. nora is happy to be the buffer for her.

yang thought it would be good for them all to take different classes so she picked what was left over. but she does find it's a good fit for her and she grows to really like it. and of course it comes in handy sooner than she expects.

qrow is surprised by yang's choice in class but he starts sending her pictures of plants on the road for her to identify. makes for good practice. yang and nora battle it out for top marks, much to peach's bemusement

peach does all of her postunch classes outside. 4th block (outdoor cookery) meets outside and 5th block (field pharmacology) knows to meet her there as well. she usually goes on foraging excursions in the forests around campus during her plan. her junior and senior students get permission to come with her, a hotly contested honor that's bestowed on a rotating basis

port's research class is for more academic/science minded students to help him with his research into noncombat ways to defeat/detract/evade grimm.

port has an admin block because he assists with the planning and supervision of 2nd year outings (i.e. cvfy in lower cairn)

[kinaesthetiqueer]

nora "so we failed as a team but we succeed as a team too!" valkyrie has been trying so damn hard for so damn long i hope she gets some focus in v10

> pyrrha running off by herself to accept the maiden power while nora and ren look on helpless >> "where is she going?"

> pyrrha running off to fight cinder, pushing jaune away

> jaune taking cinder solo on in a highly emotional state despite absolutely not needing to, not heeding nora's attempts to becalm him >> "...jaune-?!"

> ren shutting jaune and nora out when he sees his feelings as a liability. >> "why won't you just talk to me?" (technically said prior to the shutting out, i know)

she's on team self-sacrifice. what the fuck else would she do when she has no one to restrain. holding them back holds her back!

she watches her team not listen to her time and time again, not because they mean to hurt her, but because they're so wrapped up in their own feelings

thus, nora, away from her team for the first time since beacon: you know what? fuck it. be strong and hit stuff. *does some stupid self-destructive shit within 24 hours*

i fully believe that nora's self destructive impulses are only curbed by having to curb the rest of her teams' SDIs. be strong and hit stuff feels like two things to me. be strong? she's been [emotionally] strong this whole damn time. we never quite get to see her grieve on screen; she spends so much time comforting others. this isn't a dig at the narrative, it's a compliment to it. i don't think it's a coincidence that she did the most self destructive thing possible the second she was away from them. grief and self loathing and confusion, all of it coming to a head.

anyways i love her a normal amount.

[kinaesthetiqueer]

oops, i've made pyrrha autistic.

......i have zero regrets about this.

[kinaesthetiqueer]

heres some fun facts about the nurse twins, because i found this in my drafts!

felicity and callie coral are allusions to nurse joy (pokemon)

initially only felicity existed

however in ch 15, the one where weiss gets sent back to bed, i realized as i was writing it that i was having waaaaay too much fun with felicity and i realized she was completely off base. and then i thought "what the fuck is a nurse joy allusion doing without at least one twin"

thus callie was born because i was gonna be damned if i gave up the fun i had writing her

they're fraternal twins. callie is cis and felicity is trans

they had matching birth names and have traditionally had a very tight, do everything together, relationship

felicity was worried about changing her name because she didn't like anything that matched callie's birth name. callie told her to fuck it and pick something she liked and she would follow her lead.

callie picked calamity bc of the suffix and also "one of us should pick something cool"

they're inseparable... except when they're working. one of them works in the satellite infirmary that services the combat wing. the other works in the campus hospital. on any given day. they like to switch up who's where. sometimes they'll both get scheduled in the combat wing.

it's very hard to tell them apart by sight (or scent).

they also have quasi-allusions. with felicity's being mercy and callie's being moira (overwatch)

(don't @ me it's quasi for a reason. callie's not evil; she's just chaotic sometimes)

callie's semblance is tactile empathy. she can get a read on someone's most prominent feelings by touching them. it works through 1-2 layers of clothes. were it to evolve further, it would allow her to pass her own emotions to whoever she touches

felicity's semblance is tactile anaesthesia wherein she can put someone into a relatively deep sleep with a single touch. hers does not work through fabric. however, she can keep hold on multiple people. however, the more people she has under control, the more her hold slips on her first victims to the point where they may wake up on their own. it doesn't work on grimm (as it requires an aura to work, she doesn't know this)

I miss them! we won't see them for a few more chapters though!

[kinaesthetiqueer]

Chapter 27 of her pulse in my throat introduced my first kRWBYverse Grimm– the Aurox!

This is an alpha Aurox, much, much, muuuuuch bigger than a standard one. According to Ren, they're usually found roaming the desert outskirts. So, what is this one doing in the Emerald Forest, sniffing out three-quarters of team JNPR?

I based this Grimm on a combination of a draft cow (ox), wild yak, auroch, and paul bunyan's blue cow... though that last one was more of a subconscious thing. I don't plan to introduce new Grimm very often, but I did this for a very specific mental image and that was Nora riding this fucker like a rodeo bull, however briefly.