RWBY: Volume 1

P1: Red Like Roses

For all the snow that had fallen the last couple of weeks, hardly any of it had found its way onto the gravestone near the cliff's edge. The little girl in the little red riding hood stood before the gravestone, looking at the rose bud carved into the face of it. It wasn't truly a grave; that would require a body to have been buried beneath the stone. This was, in truth, just a placemarker.

On most days, the girl spoke some words to her deceased mother. It helped her to cope. But not today, on the anniversary of Summer Rose's demise. Today, Mother was no less silent than Daughter.

Her head sulking, the girl, finally starting to get cold, turned and retreated into the woods that hugged this cliffside. The walk home was a touch lengthy, and this winter cold was settling into the girl's bones. She needed to curl up next to her dad's dog by the fireplace; maybe be joined by her sister. If they wanted to make it a full-family bonding experience, Dad would be welcome to join, too. Just so long as there was warmth.

She walked for some fifteen minutes between the spaced-out, black and white trees, and had come to a meadow she and her sister had so often played in over the years when some snarling lightened her mood. She couldn't help but smile passed her dismal mood. This was exactly what she needed right now to cheer her up.

In front of her, a whole pack of beowulves was migrating by. Grimm; foul creatures that held half-lives. Precisely where they came from was unknown, but this little girl knew all too well where to send them back on their way... and how to send them there.

Three omegas caught her scent; one howled, and the whole pack went on alert. It was a rather large pack, as far as beowulves go. This would almost be a challenge. Almost.

The three that had smelled her found her with their eyes and charged simultaneously. She stood there as they came; they all three pounced at the same time, one jumping a little higher than the other two who tumbled over each other, and they got her in their claws, in their jaws. Red blood seemed to explode in all directions, but it didn't seem to soak into the snow as it fell to the ground. The beowulves, incapable of true cognitive thought like all Grimm, could not fathom just what had happened, but if they could, they would have realized that there was no blood, only rose petals. They looked around in confusion, following the trail of raining petals up into the sky until they looked directly up at the silhouetted figure that eclipsed the pale winter sun, her cloak flowing and her hand coming to something behind her back. She wore cute, laced shoes with long black socks; a ruffled knee-length skirt was belted to her waist, a black, long-sleeved shirt with a short turtleneck tucked into it. A silver necklace bearing the same rose carved into the gravestone hung from her neck, currently hanging in the air as the girl seemed momentarily suspended from gravity.

The hood came back from her head, revealing facial features fitting a child in her mid-teens. She had light skin, a small nose, and well-tended eyebrows. Her reddish-brown hair was almost black at the roots, but gently, subtly blended to a dull red at the tips of its short length.

A person watching this might have been mesmerized; however, the beowulves reaction was delayed not by shock and awe, but by their confusion as the girl procured from behind her back a bright red metal box sized like a briefcase, which expanded in her grip to the size of an average (albeit boxy) shotgun, and with one trigger pull, a single .45 caliber round careened with effortless aim into the dome of one of the three Grimm's skulls, the monster's head exploding on impact. The recoil of the shot was enough to make the girl flip higher into the air, and she somersaulted backward to land lightly on her feet.

A second beowulf charged at her; she hopped over it, diving forward as it pounced at her, and emptied another round into its head while she was inverted, using the recoil to bounce her toward the next one, which she shot in the hip, nearly blowing the beast away in two pieces—a fatal wound, nevertheless. She rolled, coming to her feet as another one jumped on her, and she shot that one in the chest, sending it flying back on nearly the same trajectory it had come from. When the recoil of that shot rolled her backward, she sprang back up to standing again, and waved her sniper rifle around gracefully, as the weapon unfolded into its true form: a long scythe, with the rifle built into the handle of it, with the muzzle at the base of the blade.