Chapter Text
"Hey, Ruby!"
No answer. Weiss walks into the room and sees her young friend still lying on her bed, her arms and legs spread wide around her and even drooling a bit.
"RUBY ROSE!!!!!!!!" The girl murmurs silently in her sleep, but still does not wake up. Annoyed, Weiss kicks the redhead's bed, causing her to slide off with a thud. Ruby's eyes spring open and with a warlike yelp she jumps up, her hands already searching for her Scythe.
When she notices the clearly annoyed Weiss Snee standing before her, she quickly and embarrassed falls back into a more relaxed stand. “Hey Weiss, what’s up?” she asks, in her eternal innocence.
Weiss places her hand on her face and breaths in and out slowly for a couple of times to calm her temper a little. Nevertheless, when she turns her angry glare at Ruby, the other girl shrinks back from her friends fiery eyes.
"Ruby, do you have any idea what time it is? We should have left five minutes ago!”
“What! How! Oh no!” is all Ruby yelps as she runs into the bathroom, still in her pyjama’s. She slams the door shut and Weiss angrily glares at the clock above the door. Exactly two minutes later, Ruby races out of the room again, now fully dressed and breathing labouredly. Weiss just sniffs and says “Couldn’t you’ve been any faster?”, after which she walks out the apartment. Ruby hastily follows her, trying to catch her breath, and silence returns to the room. Not for long however, as Ruby storm back into the apartment, grabs her weapon, the technological highly advanced scythe/rifle Crescent Rose, standing next to the door, and sprints back out of the apartment again.
The two girls meet up with Yang Xiao Long, Ruby’s older sister, and Blake Belladonna, their Faunus friend. Yang smiles happily at Weiss, who is glaring at Ruby, and Ruby, who is yawning openly. “Hard time waking up, Ruby?” she asks, smiling sweetly at her little sister. Ruby just grumbles and leans on her Crescent Scythe. After her brute awakening, the adrenaline had left her body and it had realised that five in the morning was too early, and it had returned to sleep-mode. Weiss gives her a bit too hard pet on the head, waking her up enough to groan a soft “ai”, and looks annoyed at the tall blonde standing before her. “She was slow, as always. You both ready to go? We better head out as soon as possible: it’s not often that we receive such an opportunity to study old artefacts.” Yang nods at her clearly irritated friend and her grin widens. “Yep, ready to go! You too Blake?” she says, turning to their friend. The black haired girl nods, a tiny smile on her face. “Yes, let us go.” They head out the heavy gate, Weiss pulling a half-asleep Ruby with her, towards their objective of the day.
*****
They arrive only minutes after the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. A huge cliff looms over them, surrounding them on all sides, except for the narrow crevice they had to walk through to get to this small valley. Ruby has awoken a little, and is her own joyful self, speaking animatedly with Weiss, who is clearly extremely annoyed by her happiness on such a serious mission. Neither Yang nor Blake try to support her or take some of Ruby’s joy away from the white-haired girl who is nearing an emotional explosion, mostly because they secretly enjoy the amusement that the conversing girls bring them.
They arrive at their destination. A huge thirty metre high boulder lies before them against the wall of stone. They all halt in front of the massive rock and take in its sheer size. Yang whistles softly. This would be a hard nut to crack. She lifts her Dual Ranged Shot Gauntlets, the Ember Cecilia, and looks at her friends. Blake shrugs, Weiss just nods, and Ruby still stares at the huge obstacle before them, her mouth slack, but her eyes awake, calculating, seizing up every inch of mineral.
Yang returns her gaze towards the rock, and raises her arms. With practiced ease, she opens fire with her gloves. Her shots slam into the stone. She empties her entire magazines, and except for a little blackened spot on the rock, there is no real damage done to it. She looks annoyed at the rock and spits at it. Weiss and Blake both step forward, holding out their weaponry. Weiss wields a Multi Action Dust Rapier named Myrtenaster, and Blake holds her Variant Ballistic Chain Scythe expertly in her right hand. Both of them smash into the boulder, their weapons a whirl of deadly metal, but neither of them leaves even a scratch on its surface. Weiss even throws some Dust into play, arming her weapon in fiery flames and frosty ice, but again no harm is done to the stone. They both step back, panting a little, and Blake returns her weapon to its holster.
“It’s too strong. Some kind of Dust must have gone over it, to make it this impregnable. Someone, some time, did not want anyone to enter this place.”
Weiss nods, agreeing with the Faunus. “It resists all other forms of Dust. There’s no way we’re getting in.”
Suddenly, someone yells at them. Ruby, having walked around the massive boulder as the girls had been going at it with their weapons, waves at them from besides the rock. “Hey guys, I found an entrance!”
Weiss swears under her breath. “You got to be…”
*****
But Ruby wasn’t kidding. The boulder might have been Dust-protected, the surrounding cliff wasn’t. In time, the rock had eroded away on this side, leaving a thin gap between the cliff and the obstacle. It was hard to see, even when you knew it to be there, and without Ruby’s sharp eyes, they wouldn’t have found it at all.
They enter through the crevice and find a long empty hallway, which is lightened by Dust markings on its walls, which enfold the entire area in a dark blue hue. Blake immediately begins studying the signs, trying to translate them, and Yang joins her efforts, but not before asking Ruby and Weiss to continue into the ancient cavern. They all agree they must handle the investigation as quickly as possible, before it gets too dark outside to head back home: none of them wants to spend the night lying on a cold, stone floor.
Weiss and Ruby walk on, and after a short distance arrive at a massive cavern, sprawling out before them, and so high neither of them can see the roof.
They head further into the cave, hearing their footsteps echoing around them. There seems to be no end to it. Suddenly, Ruby yelps, and brandishes her Scythe. Weiss jumps, and turns around quickly. “What?!?”
Ruby stares into the opposite direction, her eyes wide, and her finger never leaving the trigger of Crescent Rose. “There is someone there…”
Weiss frowns, narrows her eyes, and peers into the darker parts of the cavern. Surely, two figures stand there before them, but as Weiss takes two more steps forward, she relaxes, if only a little.
“No danger, Crater Face. It is just us. It’s just a mirror.”
Both girls head forward a little more, and surely Ruby now realizes the two figures she had seen before were another Weiss and another Ruby, just a reflection on the massive mirroring wall.
"Intriguing..." Weiss murmurs, as she walks closer to stand next to Ruby at the gigantic mirror. Ruby, however, has no eye for sheer vastness of the glass no longer, and stares at their own reflections in the mirror.
"What is it now?" asks Weiss slightly annoyed to her younger partner.
Ruby doesn't speak for a long moment. Then she says: "Something is off..."
Weiss sighs. "Obviously, Ruby, this is a huge fucking mirror standing in an empty cavern. Name one thing that isn't off about this thing?"
Weiss makes to turn away, but Ruby halts her with an upturned hand. "No, seriously Weiss. The mirror..."
Weiss turns back around and looks good into her own eyes. She notices that a lock of her hair is out of position, and makes to groom it back into place. As soon as she raises her hand, Ruby finishes her meaning: "... we're not mirrored."
The white-haired girl blinks, and looks closer at herself in the mirror. She gasps. Her hand, having risen to fasten her rogue hair once more, is not the same hand as she should be holding up in the mirror. Her reflection is not mirrored! Both she and her reflection gulp. Yang and Blake choose exactly that moment to arrive. They enter the massive cave through its main entrance, just as Weiss and Ruby had done before them, and notice the girls standing close to the mirror, seemingly frozen in their spots.
"Hey girls, are you alright over there," Yang yells over the distance separating both groups, as she and her partner start to make their way over to the mirror.
Ruby answered, a little anxious: "Nothing serious... just that something that isn't right with this giant mirror here."
As they come closer to the two nervous girls, Blake is the first to notice the oddity. "Ah," she whispers, matter-of-factly, "no mirroring." They halt next to their friends, and all stare at their own reflection. Ruby proceeds to make a step forward, and gazes closer into the weird mirror, which actually isn’t a mirror at all.. Her own white-skinned, black-and-red dressed self returns her gaze with the same questioning look.
"Ruby, don't go any closer!" Weiss murmurs, "We don't know what this thing is."
But Ruby, never the cautious one, does not listen. She only has eyes for her own body, her own face. She feels strangely attracted to it. Childlike wonder spreads across her face and that of her reflection as they both make another step forward, now standing not an arm’s length away from each other and only separated by the reflective wall. She suddenly sees how cute she actually looks in her fighting gear, her dress showing off her still forming female characteristics very nicely. She and her doppelganger both brush through their own soft, short hair, and suddenly Ruby starts to imagine what it must feel like to do that lovingly to another, identical, her. She blushes and bites her lip. Something down between her legs starts getting wet...
As Ruby was staring so captured at her own image, Yang suddenly felt an identical feeling, that pulls her eyes towards her own reflection in the wall of glass. Her attention is completely taken over by what she sees: herself. Tall, strong and busty, with a wave of curling golden hair falling down her shoulders, she looks like an angel. She makes to stand at the same distance as her sister from the mirror, staring into her own lilac bright eyes, imaging what they would look like in the dark, looking up at her as she pounded on that delicious body of hers. A tiny smile spreads across her lips.
Blake notices the strange expression her two friends suddenly wore, but before she could say or do anything, she too is captured by her own image. Never before had she seen herself as attractive. Not until now. Her cat ears do indeed make her look cuter than she ever would have imagined, and her amber eyes have some sort of magical characteristic, that leaves her unable to look away. She blushes heavily like Ruby when thoughts about sexual interaction with herself hit her, and her breathing rate increases.
Weiss is the last one standing, but has been so busy with a small silver scanner she had produced from one of her pockets that she has not noticed her friends sudden interest in the mirror. "Girls, there is an extraordinary amount of Dust in this cave. Far too much. We should head out of here while we still can, before we set off a trap or..."
Her voice trails off as she notices her friends standing before the mirror, looking mesmerized into their own eyes. "Hey, what are..." she begins, just before she is caught by her own ‘reflection’.
White hair in a playful ponytail, held together by her loved hairpins. Shining light-blue eyes. Perfect face. Gorgeous dress. Weiss tries to keep these new and strange thoughts out of her mind, but the influence on her mind is too strong. Step by step, she nears the mirror, the scanner falling from her grip, landing on the cold stone floor, forgotten. She wants to touch that perfect skin, feel her meticulously styled hair, kiss those beautiful lips.
All four girls continue to gaze at themselves in the mirror, hypnotized by themselves.
Slowly, all four raise both their hands. Their fingers move forward slowly, towards the outstretched hand of their doubles. Where the glass should have been, is nothing. All ten fingers of all four girls brush together. A flash of light. Followed by darkness.