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When Danny awakes, he’s falling through the sky.
He’d thought he’d broken the habit of screaming while falling long ago, in the early days of his ghost powers, but one tears itself from him now before his mind remembers what his body forgot.
“Going ghost!” he announces, calling to the power he knows is inside of him. Nothing answers. “Uh—crap! ‘Going ghost!’ Go ghost, go ghost!”
Danny remembers a joke Dash had made once (in very poor taste) after some suicidal kid took a fall off the roof of the school. “Falling never hurt anybody!” Dash had said, loud enough for the whole cafeteria to hear. “It’s hitting the ground that’s the hard part!” Well, turns out falling can hurt. The air is freezing and it whips Danny like it’s trying to tear his skin off. He’s filling and emptying his lungs as fast as he can but can’t get enough oxygen. His vision is going fuzzy like a TV with poor signal; he can’t feel his fingers; his brain threatens to shut down. The clouds are below him, an experience which became banal to him some time ago but is suddenly terrifying again.
He searches inside for the piece of himself that he’s always known how to find, the door his power waits behind, ready at any moment to fill him and work for him. He fumbles for it, finds it, grasps it; it resists him. He throws himself at it; it’s jammed. It flexes under his strength but doesn’t budge. Then there’s a sense of slippage—a familiar tingle at his fingertips—and he’s through. The power jolts into him, startling from him something between a yelp and a laugh.
He draws on it immediately, greedily, and cries out in pain. What happens is not the slick transformation he’s used to. Instead, there’s an eruption in his right hand that sets all his nerves on fire. When he brings it to his face, it’s blackened and twisted; the veins stand out with a troublingly bright red; the nails are elongated and hooked, ending in cruel points.
The landscape beyond his hand is unfamiliar, without a city in sight; only the rapidly approaching ruins of a small, antiquated town directly below him. Panic sets in.
“Oh god, oh god, oh fuck—come on! Go ghost!” He reaches for his power again. If he thought the struggle was over, he was wrong; it flows for him now, but not freely. It’s less like turning on a faucet and more like pushing a boulder uphill. He throws himself against it with animal desperation.
The nerves of his arm ignite, but he keeps pushing, and the transformation encroaches further up his arm, over his shoulder. It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it in time, not at this rate. This transformation is far more physical than the one he’s used to—it’s slow, and he feels like his bones are snapping and refusing. The pain brings him dangerously close to blacking out, but the rapidly approaching ground gives him all the motivation he needs to keep pushing.
His time is up, and the transformation has only covered half his body. He extends his right leg to meet the ground.
Shockingly, it isn’t his leg that gives way under the tremendous force, but the ground. The paved stone spiderwebs with wide cracks for meters in every direction, cratering around him; dirt and stone-dust explode into the air. The sound is tremendous. Breathing heavily, he straightens his black, digitigrade right leg and plants his shaky left leg beside it.
He wants an hour to catch his breath, to sit down and wait for the shaking to stop. But he’s used to danger; his instincts don’t allow him to assume it’s passed. He lifts his head and scans his surroundings. It’s an effort to focus his eyes on the unfamiliar world around him. What he sees, he doesn’t understand.
His eyes see two worlds at once, two images layered over each other. He closes one eye and through the other sees everything in shadow, insubstantial, colorless the way night is colorless. Everything, that is, except for the figure quickly approaching him. Dwarfing the figure itself is a bloom of color, a deep red blossom of light which follows her and envelopes her. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. The person, whoever it is, is a shadow by comparison, a blemish on a stained glass window.
He closes that eye and opens the other, and the world appears ordinary again. Not that Danny would describe the short girl in front of him as “ordinary.” She’s stopped a cautious distance away, stance wide, her weapon between them. She wears a long red cloak which hangs in the air behind her for a moment, an echo of her dash from moments ago, and of the red fire that Danny had seen in that other version of the world. She’d been moving fast—clearly the scythe didn’t slow her down, though it must be twice as long as her, and it looks like solid steel.
Combat boots, tights, a thigh-length skirt, a lace-up corset, and white puffy sleeves. Her entire outfit is color-coded black and red, down to the dyed-red tips of her hair. She ought to look like she’s playing dressup, but instead… she looks soldierlike. It’s easy to believe that scythe is a real weapon for real fighting, but at the same time Danny can easily imagine her at school, sitting in one of his classes, eating in the cafeteria.
Her sharp gaze flickers up and down, lingering on his face but not his eyes. He can see how focused she is, ready the way a loaded gun is ready. There’s an air of strength to her, tempered by… what is that? What is he sensing? She readjusts her grip on the scythe. Are her palms sweaty? Yes, he can smell it. Leaning forward, he can almost… he can taste it: her fear. It’s on his tongue, but frustratingly, tantalizingly, it’s tamped down, kept in check by a kind of professionalism that seems at odds with her youthful appearance. His tongue hovers in his mouth to catch the scent, at the threshold of his parted lips; not enough. There’s a part of her, the greater part, that’s in control. A growl rises to his throat from somewhere deep and dark; his right hand clenches—Hey! Woah! Where’d that come from? This isn’t like him.
He raises his hands innocently as he straightens—she definitely recognized the hostility that he’d felt a moment ago, like a foreign presence in his own body, and she is less uncertain now, more hostile. She’s placed him firmly in the “threat” category.
“It’s okay!” he says clearly, and only then does it occur to him to wonder if she even speaks his language. “I don’t want to fight you!” Hopefully so. He chances a cautious smile. Her brows knit together. She's about to say something, but suddenly her eyes raise to something beyond him.
“Behind you!” she cries, darting forward. Danny begins to turn but is cut short by a sudden vice-like grip that squeezes the breath from his lungs and swings him through the air at an incredible speed. He turns incorporeal, and not an instant too soon. The claw that had gripped him—now clenched around nothing—slams into the wall of some long-abandoned tower hard enough to leave it slanting slightly. Danny shudders at his narrowly avoided fate. He hadn’t even realized he could access his usual powers! He slams on his invisibility. The strange girl sees him do it but barely has time to look startled before she has to dodge a lazy swing from a second monstrous arm. If Danny’s been able to fly this whole time, he’s going to feel very stupid.
He can see the creature that had attacked him now. Dread lances into Danny’s guts. It’s a parody of a horse, its pale skull and ribs exposed to the air, with lesions of glowing red marks decorating the former. Its body seems smoke in places and flesh in others but is everywhere black, as black as a hole in the world. Growing from the horse’s back where a rider should be is the torso of something almost human in shape, impossibly skinny, its freakishly long arms back at its sides and dragging on the stone beneath it, limp. Long, but they were certainly longer a moment ago, when they were flying through the air like whips. It makes Danny think of that Junji Ito story, which he read when he was far too young—The Enigma of Amigara Fault. He shudders. Even knowing what he knows about the ghost world, this kind of thing isn’t supposed to be real. It belongs in fiction, and in nightmares. The rider’s white skull is also visible, covered in marks like tattoos which glow a quiet red, crowned by bull’s horns which twist motionlessly into the cold air. Futile spears and sword blades jut outward from the rider’s back, their shapes vague in the poor light. Both skulls have embers burning in the sockets of their eyes, hateful and alive. The monster stands as tall as the houses to either side.
The girl is backing up, firing shots from her scythe—which is a thing it can do, apparently—at the monster, joined now by a blonde boy with a sword and shield, the two exchanging urgent words. Neither of them look half as scared as Danny feels. The new boy has a glow around him too, in Danny’s right eye: a beautiful golden color, brighter than the girl’s.
Danny holds up his right arm for comparison to the monster—he can still see himself when he’s invisible—and his suspicions are confirmed. His transformation has made him look like that thing. One half of him, anyway. As wild as this situation is, it’s also oddly familiar. He’s pretty sure he knows what to do.
He flies behind a building to finish transforming—more out of habit than any real need. Then he steels himself, counts down from three, and subjects himself to the pain once again. It’s her life on the line now, and that boy’s, and he’ll be ashamed if he’s any slower now than when it was just his life he feared for. To his ears, his screams don’t sound human.
When it’s over, he feels new, his skin raw and tingling. No time to waste—he leaps to the top of the nearest house to take in the situation. That’s certainly not something he’s ever done before, leaping onto houses, but it comes so naturally he doesn’t realize he’s done it until he’s squatting on the roof, claws dug into the tiles for traction.
His first impression is of five lights. Stars, he thinks. Stars blazing in the darkness. Two twin stars, pink and magenta, side-by-side, the first fiery and the second ice-cold, have joined the golden and red from before. They push and fall back together, unified against the monster. Past them, another red star, this one weak and fitfully flickering. They seem… precious to him, and his claws curl covetously. He focuses on what’s happening. They need him! The red one from before—the scythe-user—just took a nasty blow. The monster has both arms around the magenta one, but with what must be superhuman strength, they’re staying rooted in place.
“Guys!” shouts the golden one, a noise which sounds strange to Danny at first, which doesn’t register as a word. Danny launches himself straight at the monster. “Keep moving! Go in a cir—”
He cuts off as Danny’s fist slams into the creature. The creature almost falls, and Danny slams into the ground on the other side of it, tumbling over several times, not noticing the pain. It regards him with a tilted head, and he screams at it—this seems natural somehow—and launches himself straight toward it again. This time, he’s knocked aside by a swing of one of its long arms. He’s sent flying before a second arm darts out and slams him back into the ground, pinning him there. He thrashes, scratching ineffectually, shrieking. Then the red girl is there, hooking her scythe around the arm. She fires a blast from the head of the scythe to kick it into sudden motion, and it slices clean through.
The creature wails, thrashing what’s left of its arm like a whip, and the hand that had encircled Danny dissolves into dust. The four fighters—the dim red soul isn’t with them—cover their ears as though its wail hurts them somehow. Then, shafts of bone erupt from the spine of the creature, each one longer than Danny’s arms, and its presence seems greater suddenly, though for no reason Danny can name.
The magenta soul fires at the creature, the bullets possessing a faint green light that can’t compare to the light of the four fighters. The little lights are swallowed by the dark of the beast. Its head turns so fast it seems its neck ought to snap, and it launches its undamaged arm at an unbelievable speed, pinning the human against a wall.
Its focus fixed on the magenta soul, Danny turns invisible again and launches at it. Impossibly, it turns toward him almost immediately, lashing out with its amputated arm. He narrowly avoids being struck and, falling back beside Red, turns visible again. It’s like it can sense his presence. Of course it can, he realizes. He can sense the monster's presence, and he and it are somehow the same.
It turns its attention back to the struggling magenta soul. While Danny’s wondering how to proceed, Pink calls “Ruby!” Red nods, and then uses the kickback from her scythe to launch Pink toward the monster’s arm at a startling speed. Danny only now notices the giant hammer that Pink wields—the part of his brain that puts names to things has grown quiet, and he’s been paying more attention to the blossoms of light around each fighter than to the fighters themselves.
Pink raises their hammer in what should be a devastating blow, but even with how quickly they fly, the monster nails them with a too-loud thwack! They hit the ground hard and bounce, then—something in the light surrounding them gives. It makes Danny think of cooked crab legs being snapped in two, the hard shell cracking open, the soft white flesh sliding out. It’s only when he hears the growl rising in his throat that he realizes he’s moving toward them and slams on the breaks. It’s easier to smell them now, like the seal on their power has been broken and the better part of it is leaking uselessly into the air, filling his nostrils and throat and making him salivate. It’s an effort to look away from them, to push their vulnerable form to the back of his mind, to focus on his true enemy.
…Don’t think I like this transformation very much.
Magenta is thrashing in the monster’s grip, tearing crazily at the black arm with the curved steel blades that extend from each of their two handguns. They shout something at Pink, a noise which means nothing to Danny. With each passing second, the light around Magenta gets weaker—the monster is squeezing the life out of them. Danny can sense the threshold approaching, the breaking point at which the magenta fighter’s power will fail them, the way it failed the pink, and the anticipation makes it impossible to look away. I need to help them, Danny thinks. But at just that moment, a screech makes Danny turn his head. The golden one has cut a back ankle of the beast and its leg has slipped out from under it. Some animal part of Danny recognizes the window of opportunity and his legs begin moving before he can think.
No! Danny pivots and leaps at the arm, swiping at it with a savage claw. His talons travel almost halfway through the flesh, and the sensation of it, the resistance and the give, sends a shiver of something like ecstasy through Danny’s body. The injured arm retracts, flailing, and nearly strikes Danny in its return trip.
Almost as soon as he’s hit the ground, Magenta is dashing past him, straight toward the monster. It screams at them, and Magenta screams right back. But their light is almost broken, Danny thinks incredulously. The injured arm lashes out again, and Magenta takes the blow right to the chest, but is on their feet again seconds later, firing their handguns as they run.
I need to stop them. But, with their light that weak, hovering on the edge of breaking, will Danny be able to resist? Once he’s grabbed the magenta fighter, all it will take is a squeeze of his claws and that light will shatter, and their life will be Danny’s for the taking. It’s an awful thought. I don’t want that! I’m Danny Fenton! I have no reason to want that! I’m the hero! He screws his eyes shut and stands there, trembling, not trusting himself to move. Even with his eyes closed, he can see the magenta glow clearly, can see it straight through his eyelids.
He sees it burst apart like a drop of ink hitting water.
He opens his eyes as the fighter’s body sails just a foot over his head. The world seems to slow down, like he’s watching slow motion footage. Danny sees “Magenta” clearly for the first time. A boy of maybe 17, with gentle features and long black hair. Wisps of magenta light cling to him, but the rest is in black-and-white; a charcoal drawing. Danny reaches his hand up toward the boy, but seeing his serrated claws snaps him out of his trance. He grabs one arm with the other, leaping away from the vulnerable body in a panic. The boy hits the ground, bounces, and rolls. Danny can smell the pain, and the hate, and the fear, and the blood.
If I don’t get him out of here now, he’s dead. I can do that. Danny trembles with adrenaline, fear, and sickening desire. I can do it. I’m Danny Fenton. I save people. He takes a step forward, but then the pink one—though there’s very little pink light left now—grabs the boy and pulls him under one of the houses. Danny shudders in relief. That leaves the monster. He knows how to deal with monsters.
And I need to make sure no one else gets hurt. Remember who you are. He clenches his fists. “I’m Danny Phantom,” he tries to say, but what comes out is unintelligible. The remaining two fighters are darting around the monster, dashing in and out, wearing it down. Danny launches himself into the fray.
Time disappears as Danny loses himself in the ebb and flow of violence. His compatriots operate together like a machine, but he’s always alone, unable to hold them in his mind. All his world is filled by the monster, and he jumps at every opening, forgetting his wounds as soon as they appear. Twice, he’s only spared a grievous wound when one of the shining stars around him sees and reacts to the peril for him, but he never saves either of them, never really sees them at all. They’re light itself, but he’s not. He can tell; he’s one of a kind with the monster trying to kill them. He dodges a flashing black arm and then grabs it, sinking his teeth deep into it. It thrashes and he barely keeps his feet on the ground, digging his talons between the flagstones.
In front of him, the golden one stabs his sword through the arm, pinning it to the ground. Danny forgets the arm and leaps straight at the monster. Its horse-half snaps its teeth at him but is too slow. He plants himself on its back, digging in his claws for purchase, and sets to slicing apart the creature’s humanoid upper-half.
Not so helpless, it turns out—it butts him with its horned head, gashing his arms and chest and threatening to knock him loose. It snaps at his throat, and he grabs it by the horns and pulls until they snap. Behind him, someone shouts something. He slashes again and again at the monster as it wails, but suddenly something has grabbed him from behind and is pulling him off. He hisses and, twisting, slashes at it.
That beautiful red glow is rent apart under his claws, and the girl beneath it, eyes wide, falls backward with a cry of pain.
Danny freezes, horrified, afraid. But he doesn’t have long—teeth sink into his shoulder and he screams, thrashing to get away, swiping at the monster’s grotesque bare skull. It lets go with a shriek and he grabs it by the neck, squeezing. Another shout from behind, and this time he can tell what it’s saying. “STOP! IT’S MINE!”
He stops. Damn it, Danny! Are you human or aren’t you? He leaps down to the ground where the others are, and they back away from him. All but the long-haired boy, the one with a magenta soul. Now that Danny’s separated himself from the violence, his head is clearer, and he wastes no time in finding the red-souled fighter. Her light is weaker than before, but there’s no other sign she was attacked—no physical wound. Even her clothes look untouched. The light protects them. He’d already known that somehow, he just hadn’t put words to the knowledge. Or thought to wonder where it came from. Thank goodness she’s alright. “I’m okay now,” he wanted to say to her. “I won’t hurt you again. I’m not dangerous. I promise I’m not.” But if he tried, he’d only manage another animalistic noise, would only frighten her. The fear stench is strong on all of them.
All but one, Danny realizes.
The magenta soul is weighing Danny with his eyes. Danny stands still, anxious and uncomfortable. He tries to put his hands in his pockets and remembers they’re not there—his clothes won’t come back til he’s human again. He wonders what he looks like.
Then the stranger bows to him. “Thank you,” he says in a low, even voice. He turns to face the monster. His guns are stashed away; he holds a small, black knife. Danny smells no fear on him at all.
The head of the horse-half is gone, but the rest of the horse-half keeps struggling to stand and falling back to the ground, over and over. Both its back legs have been cut. I guess they were attacking it while I was keeping the human-half busy. How long was I at it? The monster doesn’t let up screaming for a second, its eyes rolling madly and its human-half twisting and thrashing, pulling at its pinned arm. The black-haired boy approaches and stands in front of it, armorless, gray as the world around him.
The monster snaps at him, but he’s just out of reach. It shrieks in his face, but he doesn’t step back, doesn’t cover his ears. For all the world, he could be a statue. Then, with sudden violence, he ducks in and slices off its remaining arm, then dances back out of reach. It wails and cries and crawls toward him on its remaining legs. It lunges at him, jaws wide, but his feet don’t shift. He slashes across its face, taking out both of its eyes. It recoils and thrashes harder than ever, its wail rising to a painful keening. It’s truly desperate now. Danny smells fear on it. Remarkable that it didn’t know to be afraid before this moment. Like it forgets everything when it can see its prey. Like Danny did.
“For myself,” the boy says suddenly, clearly, and with a sure and brutal stroke, slices through the monster’s neck. Its head falls to the ground, instantly silent. In the wake of that scream, the silence is deafening.
Danny realizes he knows this part of the story. All eyes are on the monster. The fight is over. Pink tackles Magenta in a hug. Danny starts to slip away, out of sight, where he can transform. Great plumes of smoke rise from the body of the monster, blacker by far than the night around them, and all eyes turn up to follow it. Except the red soul, who turns and finds him. Danny freezes, and they regard each other for a moment. She steps toward him. “Who—”
He vanishes.
She stares into the night after him and doesn’t turn away as he flies, silent and invisible, far away. Far enough that they won’t hear the screams.
The bite on his shoulder is gone. It disappeared along with his other wounds when he transformed, and he worries they’ll come back when he takes his other form again. He has to hurry. He saw airships approaching the ruined town and is jogging to get back—it’s too far for sprinting. If they take off without him he’ll have to transform again and fly after them, and probably camp out invisibly on the ship until they reach where they’re headed. Not ideal.
He sees the airships land well before he’s in town, and after that he really does sprint, and the minutes seem agonizingly long. Once he’s among the houses he hears propellers starting up, deafeningly loud. “Wait!” he calls, uselessly. Now would be a good time for a second wind. The propellers get louder and louder, and then the forms of the airships are rising above the rooftops, long wing-like paddles churning the air. The ships look more like they’re built for the sea than the sky. He reaches a hand out toward them desperately.
Guess I’ll have to fly, he admits to himself begrudgingly, letting go of the possibility of catching up on foot. And then he feels something familiar. Surely not? Sitting there within himself, where it always is when he’s in ghost form, is the power to fly. He reaches for it, and his feet lift off the ground. He does a double take, checking himself up and down. He looks perfectly human. What on Earth? Well, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe not the best metaphor after what he just went through, but dawn is breaking and, in the daylight, the struggle of a half hour ago seems like a dream.
He flies up toward the ship, enjoying the wind on his face. I suppose I didn’t have to transform at all then, when I was falling through the sky. Oh, and I just spent twenty minutes jogging back into town! I could have just flown?! Unfair! But it’s hard to be upset.
Red will know who I am. She saw me when I was only half transformed—she knows what my face looks like. Or, one side of it.
Well, that might just be that. Secret’s out. But maybe not.
One of the airships must spot him, because it comes to a stop in the air. They’re able to do that? It’s moving its wings like it’s treading water. He catches up and sees the fighters in a chamber open to the air on the underside of the ship. Strange design. They all watch him with obvious interest as he flies the remaining distance and touches down on the chamber floor. There’s a man with a visored helmet and brown tracksuit there to greet him—clearly a crewmember.
“Welcome,” the man says gruffly, extending a gloved hand. “Another traveler?”
“Hi,” Danny says, shaking his hand. “Um. Yeah.”
“You with them?”
“…No. I’ve never seen them before,” he says, with a meaningful glance at Red. She has her hand on the chest of an unconscious man on a stretcher—the other red soul, Danny realizes. The one whose light was almost out. He can’t see any of their lights now. The world’s looked normal since he became human again. He wonders if those two are father and daughter.
“Flight,” says the magenta-souled boy. He’s holding the pink one’s hand. “That’s a good semblance.”
“Right,” says Danny. “Yeah. Thanks.” Semblance.
“I’m Ruby Rose,” says Red, standing and walking around the unconscious man. She shakes Danny’s hand.
“Danny,” he says, giving her a smile. She returns it, but weakly, and glances back at the man on the stretcher. “Is he okay?”
“He will be,” she says. “If we get to Mistral in time.” She doesn’t sound confident.
“It’ll be okay, Ruby,” says the golden one, the one who’d fought with a sword and shield. “I know it will.” Ruby stands pensively, turned inward on herself, worrying at her sleeve.
“I’m Nora Valkyrie!” says the pink one suddenly, her voice at odds with the mood in the airship. “This is Lie Ren.” She cheerily jostles the black-haired boy’s shoulder rather harder than necessary, which he tolerates without comment. “Where were you heading?”
“Uhh… Mistral.”
“Lucky you!” She gives him a wide smile. “What brings you this way?”
“Just, y’know…. Sightseeing.”
“Sightseeing,” Ren says flatly. “Grimm are at record numbers, the CCT just went down, and you, a… fifteen-year-old at most, are traveling alone… without any travel pack… to sightsee.”
“Not, well, um, not alone. That is, I got separated. From my parents and sister.” That’s true enough. “There was a monster.” He gambles. “A Grimm.”
“Oh, no!” Nora says. “That’s awful!” And suddenly she’s scooped him up in a hug, rocking and petting his hair. “You poor thing! No one deserves that.” She takes him by his shoulders and looks him in the eye, suddenly serious and intense. “We will get them back for you if it is at all possible. We’re huntsmen and huntresses. Qrow is, anyway—the rest of us are students from Beacon. Don’t give up on that, okay, Danny? Don’t you go thinking it’s over, or that there’s no chance of seeing them again, okay? Just promise me you aren’t giving up, no matter what happens next. Promise.”
“I—I promise,” Danny says. “I won’t give up.”
She pulls him back into a tight hug. “Good. Don’t. Things can always get better. I promise.” She sniffs, then stands straight, seeming to recollect herself. “Right,” she says. “Come have a seat. I guess you don’t have any money on you?” He shakes his head. “You can stay with us in Mistral. I’ll take you out for ice cream, okay?” She leads him by the hand to where Ren is and he takes a seat with them.
“Ice cream is good.” He smiles gratefully. He feels a bit more like his feet are on the ground, now. Knowing he has somewhere to stay helps soothe the panic he’s been feeling since coming to this world. He’s not so sure these people can do anything to help him get back to his parents, though. But he does hope. Danny Fenton doesn’t give up easy.
“Do your parents know you’ll head to Mistral if you can?”
He should keep up this story until he has more information, and more time to think. Plus, hiding things is kind of Danny’s modus operandi. If he’d really been separated from his parents while traveling, he would have headed wherever they were already going. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m hoping they’ll arrive there soon after me.”
“Maybe they’ll be there waiting for you,” she says reassuringly. “Were you traveling with a huntsman or huntress?”
“No. That is, um… my mom and dad are a huntsman and huntress.” Hunstmen and huntresses must fight these Grimm, the monsters of this world, and Danny’s parents fight the monsters of his world—in their own way. But the real reason he said it was so that Pink—Nora—wouldn’t be so worried for him. He knows it was the right thing to say when a wave of relief so obviously washes over her. He hadn’t realized just how concerned for him she really was.
“Oh, good.” She gives his shoulder a squeeze. “They’ll be just fine, don’t you worry. A huntsman-huntress couple! That’s sooo romantic! Don’t you think so, Ren?”
“Uh, yeah,” Ren says gruffly.
Ruby is sitting again, staring at the man on the stretcher, face tense. She’s close to Danny’s age, the youngest of everyone here besides him. “Ten minutes!” calls a pilot from the cockpit. Ruby seems unable to relax, biting at her lip, her brows drawn together. Danny wishes he knew some way to distract her, to help her relax, but he doesn’t know what to say.
“I’m Jaune,” says the golden one. “Jaune Arc.”
“Really?” Danny says, turning, startled out of his thoughts.
“Wh—? Yeah, really.” Jaune looks confused and uncomfortable. “Wh-what do you mean? You’ve heard of me?”
“Oh, um, no. It’s nothing,” Danny says, just as awkwardly. A historical figure. Only, this Jaune Arc is a teen boy. And we’re all speaking English—it didn’t occur to me to find that as strange before now. This seems like another world, but if it is, then coming out and asking, “Is this Earth?” will give the game away. Maybe Jaune was named after the historical Jaune Arc? But he seemed confused, so… maybe he’s this world’s version of Jaune Arc. Destined to follow a similar path. If so, that’s some pretty valuable knowledge I have. Danny studies the golden haired boy. Should I tell him he might get burned at the stake? Or whatever exactly happened to her? “Nice to meet you,” he says instead.
“Nice to meet you too,” Jaune says, smiling.
“Look,” Jaune says, and Ruby looks up from Qrow to what can only be the city of Mistral. Verdant twin mountains shoot up into the sky, covered with gorgeous white buildings, and at their peaks, unbelievably, a massive building, a palace maybe, that bridges the gap between them, supported by a great arch, and with many slanted red roofs and bright white spires. The distance from the small, squalid houses down at the mountain base to the soaring peaks of the palace could fit five skyscrapers end to end. Danny can’t look away.
“There it is,” Nora says, and she sounds as awed and Danny feels. “We’ve arrived in Mistral.”