Fanfic / Linked in Life and Love

Linked in Life and Love (AO3 link) is a RWBY fanfic written by | OmegaInfinity |, who also authored the Storm Hawks fic The Strength in Weakness.

In an AU where Faunus go into heat once a month, which they usually control via pharmaceuticals, Blake finds herself without her medication and the school on lockdown. Trapped with her teammates she is determined to ride it out through sheer willpower, but finds to her surprise that her teammates are willing to help her in her hour of need, even if it is awkward as all hell. In the aftermath, they find that maybe their feelings for each other are more than they ever suspected.

A Pollination fic without Enabler, Linked in Life and Love focuses mainly on the relationship between all four girls of team RWBY and them getting used to each other's extended family, all the while moving towards an earlier than canon conflict with Adam Taurus who's not too happy about his ex-girlfriend sleeping with the enemy.

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Linked in Life and Love contains examples of:

A-G

• Abled in the Adaptation: Yang still has two arms even after fighting Adam
• Accidental Proposal: Turns out, during a Faunus's heat, if they bump foreheads with you and you push back, that's an indication that you agree for them to give you a Mate's mark.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Ruby, when trying to work out Summoning with Weiss' Semblance, accidentally does the exact opposite of what she was supposed to do, only for it to not only work, but have unexpected benefits compare to the normal Summoning method.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Despite Yang's animosity towards her mother Raven, she can't help but break down in giggles at the news that Ruby accidentally collided with her in bird form during her initiation trial, as well as at Ruby's dismay.
  • Ilia ends up giggling helplessly at Blake's story about how she ended up mated to three humans, calling it straight out of a trashy romance novel.
  • When Ruby says that she managed to summon a Nevermore with The Power of Love, Weiss gets a much-needed laugh out of it.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Raven is depicted as a significantly more heroic character here compared to the canonical series, between leaving her own daughters Yang and Ruby for the much less selfish reason of wanting to protect them and her wife Summer from harm and adopting the actual Spring Madien into her tribe rather than murder her for her power. There's still awkwardness between Yang and Ruby with Raven due to years of silence, but there's significantly more hope for a reconciliation in this fic compared to canon.
  • The Branwen Tribe as a whole. After Raven returned to lead them, she managed to convert them from a mere bandit tribe into a private security company that sends five fighters in the place of one Huntsman. It's become quite lucrative, too, as Lionheart routinely hires them on for missions instead of his official Huntsmen.
  • Also happens to Roman Torchwick and Neo, the former is a former Huntsmen who became a crime lord to track down his missing sister, Summer, and returns to duty during the story he also has much for positive relations with Team RWBY has he's Yang and Ruby's uncle. Neo maintains her loyalty to Roman and even joins Beacon Academy as part of Penny's new team.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Adam Taurus's Semblance Moonslice is given a slight adaptation in this fic; it also has the capability of nullifying Aura, keeping the wounds he inflicts from healing fast and even disrupting some Semblances.
• Adaptational Wimp: Raven is not the Spring Maiden in this story
• Alliterative Name: Roman's real full name, Roman Rose.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Summer always wanted a family of her own with her lover Raven coming around to the idea. Raven had Yang using Tai as Yang's sperm donor. Ruby came later via a Dust IVF.
• Animal Jingoism: Downplayed. When Blake freaks out upon finding Ruby and Yang's dog Zwei in her bed, Yang asks her if it's a "cat thing". Blake exasperatedly replies no, it's not a 'cat thing', she was just surprised at a random dog in her bed, and she's not really fond of dogs.
• Animal Motifs: In a dream that Yang has in chapter 67, Ruby seems to be represented by a wolf, while Weiss is a white fox. They are being attacked by a horned beast, probably a bull to represent Adam, and Yang's own animal is not clear, but has claws and roars, hinting at a bear or lion.
  • Chapter 71 confirms it is a lion, on account of Adam Taurus naming those exact animals from the dream when they confront him.
• Anti-Magic:
  • In this story, Adam's Semblance nullifies Aura, meaning that any wounds he deals with it have to heal the natural way, and he even manages to cut through one of Raven's portals before it can send him away, somehow injuring Raven in the process.
  • Cinder splitting the power of the Fall Maiden weakened it enough that Ozpin was able to keep her from using it to escape. She does get one blast out, but that's all.
• Anti-Villain: Roman and Neo are heading this way with the reveal that Ruby and Yang are Roman's nieces and that he used to be close to all of Team STRQ. Especially since Roman is planning to get rid of Taurus to protect Team RWBY and thus derail all of Cinder's plans.
  • There's another layer of this regarding Roman, since it's revealed that he became a criminal mastermind via his dealings with the criminal underworld, all to find his missing sister Summer.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • After he finds out about Penny, Ozpin has one to his friend James Ironwood regarding her and the whole reason she was built (to be a host for Amber's Maiden Powers):
    Ozpin: What of Penny herself? Does she get a say in this? Can she say 'no' if she wants?
  • When Ilia talks to Blake about her leaving the Fang as she did, once she learns how spur-of-the-moment it was (Blake didn't even have a change of clothes), she asks if Blake would have tried to get her to come with if her flight hadn't been so rushed. Blake admits that she doesn't know before asking if Ilia would have come if she had, forcing her to admit that she doesn't know either.
• Artificial Stupidity: Lampshaded In-Universe by Winter in a flashback; she views robotic drone soldiers as less versatile than a living soldier in every way – they're useful for filling the ranks, but she wouldn't trust them with her life, since they can't react or improvise like a human could, follow every order to a fault, and are easy to trip up with a Logic Bomb that a human could shrug off easily. For example, when Jacques has an injured Weiss kidnapped by robots, he has the fact that he ordered them to do so classified, however Weiss is able to figure it out within minutes of waking up, because the person who ordered the mission had to be an administrator, and Weiss is able to get one of the robots to list off who they all are. She's also able to trick one into getting close enough for her to headbutt, allowing her to use Yang's Semblance to break free of her restraints.
• Ascended Extra: Penny's partner for the Vytal Festival, Ciel Soleil, is greatly expanded upon, especially after she and Penny are put on a Huntress team with Ilia and Neo, named Team PINC. She is given a personality, Hunter weapon, Semblance, and backstory, all of which she lacked in canon.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: After Roman spills the beans on Cinder's entire plan, General Ironwood asks him if this is accurate.
  Roman: "No, General, I made it all up just to make you piss yourselves."
• Attack Backfire: When Roman uses the EMP he had installed in the Paladin, although he takes Penny out of the fight, much to his surprise since he's unaware of her robotic nature, forcing Sun and Neptune to get her help, overall he does more damage to the mech than to his foes. There was a reason Neo advised against using it, after all.
• Awful Truth:
  • Ruby and Yang get the fully unvarnished truth of the origins of their mother Summer Rose from their uncle Roman Torchwick, and they come to tears multiple times when they hear that their mum had lost her parents to the Grimm at a young age, had become a Street Urchin, and had to lie, cheat, and steal just for her and her little brother to survive.
  • Roman laying out all of Cinder's plans to elicit enough fear to cause a Grimm invasion to Ozpin has several of these reactions, especially the part where Pyrrha would be illusioned and tricked into tearing Penny apart with her Magnetism Manipulation Semblance.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: The newly formed team of Penny, Ilia, Neo, and Ciel do this when they're surrounded by Grimm during their first mission test.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: With a dash of Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! - when she encounters two Atlassian soldiers who are looking for Penny, Weiss uses her (completely bogus) rights as a Schnee to not only get Penny out of trouble for running away, but allow her to spend the rest of the day with her and Ruby. Especially when she bluffs calling Winter to clarify things and the soldiers decide it's not worth the trouble.
• Bedmate Reveal: Blake gets a three-for-one in the very first chapter, when she wakes up to find all her teammates in the same bed with her. And her nose confirms for her exactly what they did last night.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Cinder Fall is one. While it is her plan to bring down Beacon, she is completly reliant on Roman and Adam to do most of the hard work while she is under cover at the school. Due to this her plans fall apart when both Roman and Adam betray her for their own reasons, before she is blindsided by Ozpin and captured.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Ruby, Weiss, and Yang do this when Blake finds herself being harassed by a Faunus over her choice to mate a Schnee.
  • Penny pulls off a pretty nice save when she shows up at the bot fight just in time to prevent Yang from being punted off the freeway.
• Big "NO!": Taurus's reaction to finding out Blake is Mated again.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family:
  • Roman says as much when talking about Team STRQ and the weird dynamic their daughters were born into.
  Roman: Between Silver Eyes mom, Bandit Queen mom, bad luck uncle, and conman uncle, not to mention Taiyang 'wouldn't-hurt-a-fly-but-can-crush-a-freaking-mountain-with-his-pinky-anyway' Xiao-Long... Even if everything had gone all sunshine and rainbows for us, those kids were doomed to weirdness from day one.
  • To say nothing of the relationship said daughters are in now: two half-sisters are sharing girlfriends, one of whom is the heiress to a mega-corporation, and the other is a Faunus and the daughter of the man protesting against said corporation.
  • Blake and Weiss get in on this as well with their canon family issues. Blake's are sorted out pretty quickly, once she actually talks to her parents, whereas Weiss' are only compounded by her new relationship. She has a (thankfully uncalled for) Freak Out when Winter finds out and is shown at multiple points to be absolutely terrified at the prospect of her father even seeing her express affection for any of her girlfriends.
  • In Chapter 59, Summer and Raven were the Official Couple of their team. Yang came about from Taiyang volunteering to be a sperm donor for them. The big kicker is Ruby: her biological parents are Summer and Raven, thanks to advances in Homosexual Reproduction.
• Big Sister Instinct:
  • Yang learned to control her Semblance in part by reminding herself that she couldn't protect Ruby if she lost the fight she was in.
  • As soon as Winter sees Roman Torchwick near her sister, her first action is to jab her rapier in his face.
• Big Sister Worship : This turns out to be the missing piece to Weiss successfully Summoning the Arma Gigas. Because Summoning requires recalling every piece of the memory, emotions and all, the missing piece is her remembering Whitley, observing along with Jacques, and watching in awe as his older sister did something really cool.
• Big "WHAT?!": Yang and Ruby's reaction to finding out Roman Torchwick is Summer Rose's brother, and therefore their uncle.
  • Adam has a similar reaction when Roman reveals this to Adam as justification for betraying the fanatical Faunus.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Ozpin does this to both Torchwick and Ironwood when they meet one another in chapter 65. He claims that the former was a deep undercover agent, helping keep tabs on criminal gangs, while the latter gets pulled into line with a simple remark about making decisions behind his back... such as Penny's creation. Both subjects are not amused.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Turns out Ruby's Super-Speed Semblance isn't as fun as first thought, when it's revealed she focuses her aura into her heart to accelerate it and her body, and trying to get the body to work in a way it's not supposed to gives off a lot of unnerving and unnatural sensations. Luckily, Ruby has had many years of using her Semblance for her body to get used to it; her teammates, not so much.
  • Yang's has a similar downside, she has a maximum amount of energy she can hold at one time, but her Semblance still tries to multiply the power when she hits her limits. If she lets it out, the worst she gets is microfractures that her Aura heals easily – if she doesn't, the energy tries to get out on its own, first by cracking her bones, then "boom", as she and Ruby put it. She broke her arms several times before figuring all of this out.
• Boring, but Practical: Many of Roman Torchwick's plans are this such as simply tranquilising Cinder and her followers rather than fight them
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Geist-possessed Paladin turns out to be this. Despite not looking like much, and the Paladin being Roman's already-wrecked one, the fact that it doesn't need to keep itself safe like one with a normal pilot would, among other factors, means that the fight goes on for far longer than Yang expected.
• Both Sides Have a Point: When Ozpin calls Ironwood out for creating Penny behind his back to be a host for the Fall Maiden's power, he argues about whether or not Penny even has a choice in the matter, while Ironwood counters with the point that Ozpin's candidate(s) might refuse to take up the power, leaving it stuck in the comatose Amber.
• Break the Cutie: A downplayed example with Ruby. In the space of one day, she meets Raven Branwen, finds out that Raven and Summer are her mothers and that she never was Taiyang's biological daughter, that she had been lied to all these years, learns a bit more of why Raven abandoned them, (re)meets her uncle Roman, finds out that Summer was a Street Urchin as a kid, that one of her new girlfriends' exes is gunning for her head, and that a plan was brewing to kill her new robot friend and drown the city in Grimm. It's no wonder she really wants to sleep after having her entire world yanked out from under her.
• Call-Back:
  • When Taiyang reunites with Raven in Chapter 58, he gives her a back-breaking hug that squeezes all the air out of her, just like Yang did to Ruby in the first episode of the show. Which becomes a lot more significant in the next chapter...
  • In Chapter 17, Ruby accidentally causes a massive explosion by combining Earth and Lightning Dust, which destroys her desk. Come Chapter 93, Weiss uses the same Dust combo, combined with Blake's clones to attack a Geist-possessed Paladin.
    • From the same chapter, when Yang follows Blake to a Faunus pharmacy to refill her prescription, she checks out some hair shampoo intended for dog Faunus with thick hair. In Chapter 95, Blake finds Yang in their dorm bathroom trying to fix her hair after falling into the Vale harbour during a Grimm fight. One of the bottles is the dog Faunus shampoo.
• Calling Your Attacks: Chapter 94 has Yang yelling out her attack name to finish off a Geist-possessed Paladin.
  Yang: BLAZING... METEOR!
• Cannot Spit It Out: The surviving members of Team STRQ seem to have some hang-up about telling Ruby and Yang the truth of their parents, especially Raven. Roman takes some serious offense to that.
• Cast Full of Gay: Besides Team RWBY, several secondary characters are also attracted to individuals of the same gender.
• Chekhov's Gun: In a random lecture about Dust usage (where Ruby was playing around and gets detention as a result), Weiss hears about some applications for Lightning Dust, one of which is enabling same-sex in-vitro fertilisation. Come The Reveal in Chapter 59, and we find out how Ruby was conceived from both Summer and Raven.
• Chosen Conception Partner: Taiyang turns out to be this for Raven, who was in a relationship with Summer Rose. Yang was the result. He is also godfather to both Yang and Ruby.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Major one in Chapter 71, in which the confrontation with Adam Taurus and the White Fang reveals that Adam had a Plan B.
  • And it continues in Chapter 72: Adam Taurus is defeated, but not before impaling Weiss.
  • Chapters 79 and 80 have the same cliffhanger heard by two different groups: someone (Jacques) abducting a convalescing Weiss.
  • Chapter 91 ends with the emergence of a Geist in Vale's harbor, possessing the wreck of Roman's modified Paladin.
• Closet Key: While Blake and Ruby may have played a part in it, Yang is the main reason that Weiss realised she is a lesbian. Both times she questions her sexuality it's Yang that interacts and helps Weiss with her preferences.
• Coming-Out Story: A secondary plot in the later half of Act I and the transition into Act II: Blake has to confront whether she wants to continue hiding her identity as a Faunus, which includes her new Mates, or show them off and be proud of all parts of being a Faunus, Mate's Marks, ears, and all.
• Composite Character: An odd and comedic example. Raven was actually the bird that Ruby collided with at the start of initiation.
• Crazy-Prepared: Roman rigged all the guns that he gave Adam with a fifty-thousand-volt taser in the stocks, rigged to go off when exposed to a specific radio signal, as insurance. Ilia sabotaged the rest prior to the trap.
• Crisis Makes Perfect: The first time Ruby summoned a Nevermore via the Schnee family Semblance, it went berserk due to her unfocused thoughts. A while later, when she hears that Weiss had been kidnapped and is being taken away, with Winter's advice, she manages to summon a more stable Nevermore empowered with her Super-Speed that she can use to catch up.
  • Similarly, Weiss perfects her summoning of the Arma Gigas while she, her team and Winter are fighting against a Geist.
• Cry into Chest:
  • Ilia ends up sobbing into Kali's chest when they finally confront each other, and Ilia reveals just how much she was hurt by Blake's departure from the White Fang.
  • Blake does this to her parents after seeing them in person for the first time in years.
• Damsel in Distress: Jacques kidnaps Weiss while she's recovering in the hospital.
• Dare to Be Badass: In Chapter 96, Professor Goodwitch gives a speech to this effect when Cardin Winchester tries to complain about Team RWBY using multiple Semblances in the Vytal Tournament, claiming that fighting against those odds is impossible. Goodwitch says that they still have two weeks to prepare for the tournament, that fighting against impossible odds is a Hunter's entire duty, and that if Cardin can't handle impossible odds, he should quit. While Cardin declares that he's not a quitter and doesn't complain after that, the speech also buoys all the other Hunter trainees to not back down in the upcoming tournament, especially against Team RWBY - something that Yang finds herself excited by.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Weiss openly admits that her polygamous lesbian relationship that involves a Faunus is something her homophobic, racist, and traditionalist Father would hate with a passion.
• Defiant Captive: Even after Weiss finds herself kidnapped and restrained, she does not give in. She converses with her captors to find out who's in charge, and then proceeds to bust out with Yang's Semblance.
• Defiant to the End: Having managed to impale Weiss in the final battle, Adam just will not stop grinning, even while Blake is beating him to a bloody pulp, and being confronted by Chief Ghira in the aftermath.
  Adam: So... who do you think won, Chief?
  Ghira: Not you. [punches him out]
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Just like her younger sister, Winter can't help but start to thaw slightly when she starts chatting with Ruby. Several chapters revolve around her getting used to her sister's mates and the Big, Screwed-Up Family she has now found herself a part of.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Team JNPR has almost no plot importance, with only a brief scene where Jaune talks about his Faunus half-sisters. However after they get let back into the loop in chapter 87 they return to the forefront of the plot.
  • Cinder, Mercury and Emerald hardly show up, and when they do, it's to have them react to what Adam and Roman are doing. The only time they are plot-relevant is when Ozpin captures them using information he got from Roman and Neo's Heel–Face Turn.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Roman never expected Ozpin to not know about Cinder and Taurus's plan, as expecting Ozpin to bust up the whole operation while he slipped away with the profits was the whole reason he joined with Cinder in the first place.
  • When Adam was trying to get revenge on Blake and her new Mates, he focused entirely on Blake (daughter of the King of Menagerie) and Weiss (heiress of the Schnee Dust Corporation). He didn't spare any attention for Ruby or Yang, meaning he was blindsided by Roman Torchwick turning out to be their uncle, and their mother turning out to be a famous bandit queen who even Cinder fears.
  • Despite all their planning, none of the alliance's inroads into Taurus's plans expected his plan B - crash a train full of stolen Paladin mechs into the ambush. Roman knew about their existence, but he didn't anticipate Adam going so nuts as to use them when Cinder had existing plans for them.
  • No one saw Jacques kidnapping Weiss coming.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": The overly-formal Ciel Soleil has to be told by Weiss and Blake not to call them "Miss Schnee" or "Princess", both because they don't like the formality, and the latter, despite her parents ruling Menagerie, are merely a chieftain's family, not a royal one.
• Don't Split Us Up: Summer Rose and her brother Roman Torchwick were orphaned at a young age, and the moment the former heard an inkling that she and her brother could be split up in the system, she decided that becoming street kids was better than that fate.
• Don't Think, Feel: Ruby's Achievements in Ignorance regarding her summoning Speedymore involves focusing on the emotions she felt when slaying the Grimm and sending them through the link, instead of trying to restrain and control said feelings like the normal Schnee method.
• Dramatic Irony: Enraged at finding out his ex Blake is re-Mated, and to a Schnee, Adam Taurus enlisted both Roman and Ilia's help to deal with Team RWBY once and for all. Little does he know, thanks to Roman finding out that his team contains his two nieces, and Ilia's meeting with Chief Ghira, those two people are the last people to want the girls dead.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Weiss is hit by an aura nullifying attack that pierces her lung. She is in critical condition right after the attack. Despite having nanite healing tech Weiss still has a long recovery process and has to take it easy after she is released from the hospital.
• Easily Forgiven: Roman and Neo are given full pardons for their crimes and embraced by their family after they defect to Ozpin's Faction.
• Elemental Hair Composition: Just like what happens when Yang uses it, the other members of Team RWBY have their hair affected by the use of Yang's Semblance. Ruby gets a full red-haired, static-charged dye job, Weiss's gets more white and frosty, and Blake's goes violet and takes on a vapor-like appearance.
• Even Evil Has Standards: What could cause Roman, conman and criminal mastermind, to grow a conscience? Finding out that two of the girls in the line of fire of him and his associates are his nieces.
• Evil Knockoff: According to Raven when Adam asks her if her mask was to disguise herself as a White Fang member, she was wearing it long before they started, and if anything they're ripping her off.
• Exact Words: When Raven asks Roman if Neo is trustworthy, Roman promises her that Neo "won't say a word".
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: After Ruby's Nevermore summon goes flying off, and Blake is explaining the situation to Winter, Winter explains that berserk summons will tend to latch onto the summoner's last thoughts and use them as "orders". Blake then realizes that Ruby's last thought was showing Weiss what she'd done, and that means that it should have headed towards her in the infirmary. But since it went over the forest instead, that tips them off to her kidnapping by Jacques.
• Explosive Results: Ruby has had a few.
  • Once again, while doing a Dust project with Weiss, her using the wrong Dust types has this result.
  • Her first attempt at using a Schnee summoning glyph while still learning the basics blows up in her face.
• Eye Color Change: When using Yang's Semblance, the other members of the team also have their eyes turn red like Yang's do.
• Failed a Spot Check: Roman is rather flabbergasted that no-one on Ozpin's side noticed any of the activity at Mt. Glenn, despite them running freight trains down in the old subway tunnels.
• Fallen Hero: Roman Torchwick once tried his hand to be a Hunter, but had his license revoked after dealing too much with the criminal underworld while trying to find his missing sister.
• Fantastic Racism: Plenty of it. Blake is repeatedly shown to be afraid to reveal her more animalistic traits out of fear of rejection. The pharmacy Blake goes to has a sign that says Faunus Welcome, which Yang notes shouldn't be necessary and implies that Faunus are not welcome in many others. There is also Kojak's hatred of the Schnee and specifically Blake's relationship with one due to the mistreatment his family suffered, as well as his disgust at her hiding her race.
• Flashback Echo: Ozpin has one when he catches Cinder whom he just tranquilized for trying to escape, the scene causing him to remember something from his past lives - likely the original incarnation of the Fall Maiden that was the daughter of his first life.
• Flat "What": This is Weiss's and Blake's reaction, in contrast to the sisters' Big "WHAT?!" above, to the news that Roman Torchwick is their uncle.
• Flipping the Bird: Yang does this to Adam during their confrontation.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Ruby calls her terrifying super-speedy Nevermore summon Speedymore.
• Foil: Chapter 96 has several contrasting reactions to the thought of going up against Team RWBY in the Vytal Tournament, on account of them being able to use each others' Semblances, and summon powerful Grimm via the Schnee Semblance, who themselves can use Semblances. Jaune just resigns himself to a humiliating loss, Nora and Pyrrha are eager at the thought of a good fight and a real challenge, and Cardin tries to ask Professor Goodwitch to implement an Obvious Rule Patch to keep things fair and gets told off for his trouble.
• Foreshadowing:
  • After Roman confronts Raven about Team STRQ just losing a teammate when they lost Summer, Raven quietly admits that she "lost more than that". Then comes The Reveal in Chapter 59, and we find out that Raven and Summer were the Official Couple of STRQ.
  • When Roman comments on the family dynamics of Team STRQ (quoted under Big, Screwed-Up Family above), although the words "mom" and "uncle" are thrown around a lot, the word "dad" is not used at all, not even when describing Taiyang. It's later revealed that while Taiyang is Yang's biological father, it was Summer and Raven that were the girls' mothers, with Tai just being their godfather.
  • Upon realising that she has a piece of Blake's aura, Weiss thinks about things that could compromise aura, including certain Semblances. Later, Adam Taurus' Semblance prevents Weiss' aura from healing her after he cuts her lung.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • When Adam learns that Ghira is in Vale, he adjusts his plans to pull an I Have Your Wife with Blake.
  • Weiss has been rescued from her father's attempt to kidnap her... and then the Wyvern Grimm wakes up... and vanishes completely.
• The Gadfly:
  • When Ruby starts getting worked up about Qrow's sword-scythe Harbinger, Yang decides to goad her little sister by commenting that it's "just a sword", setting Ruby off into a full-on espousing tirade.
  • Roman just loves pushing people's buttons and does this to everyone and anyone he can.
• Gambit Pileup: As the story progresses, Cinder's faction of herself, Adam Taurus, and Roman Torchwick practically devolves into an Enemy Civil War, with Cinder wanting to remain focused on her and Salem's plans to overthrow Ozpin, Adam wanting to throw all their resources away to deal with Team RWBY and his ex-Mate Blake (and is willing to go behind Cinder's back to do so), and Roman and Neo doing their best to coordinate with Roman's sister's old team to keep the girls safe, on account of finding out that he is an uncle to two of them.
• Girlfriend in Canada: Familial variant; Vernal assumed that this was the case about Raven's stories of her daughters Yang and Ruby, though she thought Raven had just lost them to a Grimm attack rather than having made them up entirely.
• Give Me Back My Wallet: Professor Ozpin did this to the Street Urchin Summer Rose and her brother Roman when she tried to pickpocket him. First, when they found out they only stole his empty wallet, he showed up carrying the stack of lien. Then, when she slugged him and they made a break for it, they found out that he had Hunter backup waiting.
• The Glomp:
  • Blake does this to her parents when they make a surprise visit to Beacon.
  • Ruby does this to Neo after she finds out that via her long-lost uncle Roman, she is her cousin.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: During their fight, Ruby asks Adam how, if he could Feel Blake for a week, the same way that she could Feel him, how he could just not care about how much he hurt and scared her, her determination slipping for a moment to reveal how lost she felt thinking about it.
• Gone Horribly Right: Ruby starts practicing summoning in order to help Weiss with her own block on using that aspect of her Semblance, and with some advice from Blake she manages to summon the Nevermore that she decapitated in the Emerald Forest. However, she can't control it, and it somehow manages to use her Semblance to fly off in the direction of the Forest.
• Ground Punch: Yang often does this to bleed off her excess stored energy while sparring.
• Guns Akimbo: Roman dual-wielding both Melodic Cudgel and his old Hunter weapon Black Valentine during the confrontation with the White Fang.

H-P

• Heel–Face Turn: Roman and Neo go through this over the span of numerous chapters, and it gets cemented in chapter 65 when the former blows Cinder's cover and reveals her plans to Ozpin's faction, Ilia, Penny, and team RWBY and their families.
• Heroic BSoD: Ruby's first reaction upon learning that she is the daughter of Summer and Raven is a whole lot of confusion before she runs out of the room.
• Heroic RRoD:
  • Ruby's Semblance involves channeling her Aura through her heart, and feels so free and joyful it's addictive. Luckily she's gotten used to it, but the other members of her team...
  • Yang repeatedly broke her arms from Pent-Up Power Peril while learning how to use her Semblance, which can still happen if she doesn't release that stored power.
• Hidden Depths: Jaune is a lot more well-versed on Faunus and Mating than Teams RWBY and JNPR first thought: two of his sisters are wolf Faunus; actually his half-sisters from his father's first wife.
• Honorary Princess: Much to Blake's embarrassment, a few people start calling her a princess when they learn just who her parents are.
• Hope Spot:
  • When Yang asks Raven why she hasn't tried to create a portal to Summer, Raven says she did and creates a portal that fizzles out and burns her. Raven just says it's because Summer is in an unreachable location, but then Yang asks her if anyone she's had a portal connection to had ever died before, and when Raven answers no, Yang posits that it could just be what naturally happens with her Semblance when someone does die. Then, she blows up at Raven for giving her hope that Summer could be alive only to yank it away with an "I don't know".
  • Percy Spring is shocked when Yang mistakenly calls her Penny, given how much she looks like Penny Polendina, but this is because she thinks someone might know her late/missing older sister, Penelope (who was also called Penny). Yang has to let her down and admit that the android Penny is too young to have anything to do with Penelope, but there is a lot of uncertainty.
• How Do I Shot Web?: The members of team RWBY have this issue with the new Semblances they now have access to, averting Instant Expert. Ruby and Yang have a bit less trouble, due to being sisters and knowing how their Semblances work from years of training and living together, but there's still a learning curve.
• I Am Spartacus: In STRQ's backstory: After Summer used the power of the Silver Eyes to wipe out a horde of Grimm, a Cult of Salem lynch mob came looking for the user of the Silver Eyes who had just erased their entire Grimm army. With Summer unconscious, Raven proclaimed herself the Silver-Eyed user, drew the cult away and managed to give them the slip... for that instance at least.
• I Am What I Am: At the start of Act II, Blake's fear and desire to hide her identity as a Faunus clashes hard with her desire to proudly show off her new Faunus Mate's Mark, but eventually she decides to stop wearing her bow and publicly embrace her Faunus identity, with her teammates in full support.
• I Am Not a Gun: When Ozpin finds out about James Ironwood and his plans for Penny with regards to the Fall Maiden's powers, he asks if Penny has had her own opinion taken into account, even though it's the whole reason she was built. Penny isn't sure.
• I Can Still Fight!: The aftermath of the White Fang sting operation has Raven stubbornly running on fumes, but still trying to put up a strong front. That lasts until her twin brother Qrow and brother-in-law Roman trip her into a chair behind her and the latter says that if she was fine, there wouldn't be any way they could do that.
• Idea Bulb: Whenever Ruby gets an idea on how to solve a problem, there is a DING! to signify this trope happening.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • When Adam learns that Ghira is in Vale, he modifies his plan so that he'll be able to use Blake as bait for her father.
  • A variation: Raven tells Ozpin that her bandit/mercenary group had rescued and taken in a girl who turned out to be the Spring Maiden, and if Ozpin won't tell Raven what happened to her wife Summer Rose, he'll never get his hands on her.
• Identical Stranger: Penny Polendina and Percy Spring (the current Spring Maiden) look very similar to the point that when Yang first sees Percy she mistakes her for the former. When Percy shows Yang a picture of her late sister Penelope, she is a dead ringer for the android Penny.
• Inadequate Inheritor: According to Ghira Belladona's recounting, Nicholas Schnee, Weiss's grandfather, thought this about his bigoted and ruthless son-in-law Jacques. Right before he stepped down as the SDC CEO, he announced to the public that Jacques would become temporary CEO until someone of Schnee blood could take over. From Jacques' expression at that time, that was the first he heard of it too.
  • From what Weiss tells Blake about her brother Whitley, she believes he is just as unworthy as their father of running the SDC, which is why she has to be worthy of inheriting the CEO position over him.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Penny's "cat out of the bag" comment when her robotic nature is accidentally revealed leaves some people groaning. Yang cackles.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • An understated example in chapter 41 when Winter downs her wineglass after hearing Weiss' explanation of how the Mates situation happened.
  • Roman name drops this trope upon realizing that he has effectively taken his sister Summer's role as the Only Sane Man on Team STRQ.
• Instant Expert:
  • Averted with the additional Semblances that Team RWBY gets access to via their Mate bonds, going through How Do I Shot Web? instead.
  • Downplayed, but Ruby manages to summon the Nevermore she decapacitated in the Entrance Exam after only a week of trying once Blake and Yang help her through a block. Since it took Winter eight months to do it successfully, she's rather shocked when Blake tells her. And even then Ruby doesn't know how to control her summon.
• Instant Sedation: Justified, the darts used to disable Cinder, Mercury, and Emerald contain not just a tranquilizer, but also some lightning dust, which paralyzes them long enough for the drug to finish knocking them out.
• Interspecies Romance: Human-Faunus relationships are of course present in this story, but they're a little more complicated than at first blush, since humans can't give a Faunus a Mate's Mark, meaning that the Mindlink Mates relationship would be completely one-sided. Luckily, Weiss is smart and resourceful enough to find another solution for all four of them.
• Interrupted Intimacy: Pyrrha walks in on Weiss and Yang kissing.
• Intimate Hair Brushing: Chapter 95 has Blake helping to rescue Yang's ocean-drenched hair in the middle of the night, while also talking through Yang's lingering resentment for her mother, who had just asked how they were doing.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Happens to Weiss in the final battle, not by Cinder, but by Adam Taurus.
• Irony:
  • Roman collapses into Mirthless Laughter when he finds out that Ruby stopping his robbery was the reason she was admitted early into Beacon Academy and why she and her team has been a constant thorn in his side.
  • Cinder believed that Adam would see reason and stick to her plan while Roman only needed money to keep him loyal. She was wrong on both accounts; Adam went Revenge Before Reason on Blake and took resources for the invasion to get back at her, while Roman spilled the beans to Ozpin for free to protect his family.
• It Began with a Twist of Fate:
  • With Blake on the run for almost a week during Season 1's finale, she forgot to refill her anti-heat prescription. Neo raided Beacon's student database looking for info on the students from the Season 1 finale battle. This causes the school to go into lockdown and triggers the whole plot.
  • This culminates in the Fall of Beacon being averted entirely due to Roman and Neo switching sides and spilling the beans to Ozpin and co. in order to protect his newly-found nieces and their girlfriends. Adam is captured and the White Fang's presence in Vale is made nonexistent, and Cinder and her minions are exposed and face a similar fate.
• It's All My Fault: Ruby blames herself for Weiss being stabbed by Adam because they didn't use Instinct Sharing in the fight like they did against Roman. To make up for it, she tries to practice summoning in order to help Weiss figure out why she is having trouble with summoning and allow her to get past her block on it.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Blake's justification when Ilia finds out that the former had tried to hide being a Faunus while at Beacon.
• Jaw Drop:
  • Winter has one when she sees Ruby, Blake and Yang using the Schnee family glyph Semblance.
  • Neo has one when she hears Roman and Raven argue about Roman's late sister Summer.
    • And then she has another one after her and Roman's Heel–Face Turn, and Ozpin reveals his plans to put her on a Hunter team with Penny, Ciel, and Ilia.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Kojak, a bear Faunus that has grown up on the rough side of Faunus Fantastic Racism, may be a jerk in how he condemned Blake for mating with a Schnee and tried to out her when they disagreed, especially since he doesn't know her past, but his points about how Blake is insulting their whole race by hiding her Faunus features and how she could've been a symbol instead, hit more close to home than she'd like to admit.
• Just Shoot Him: Roman's plan for dealing with Adam.
• Late to the Punchline: It's only after they're in bed resting after crashing from using Ruby's Super-Speed that Blake and Weiss realize what Yang meant about giving them a "crash course".
• Life Isn't Fair: When Cardin inquires to Professor Goodwitch what kind of restrictions overly powerful competitors such as a Huntress team with multiple shared Semblances would be under in the Vytal Tournament, Professor Goodwitch just asks why they would restrict any competitor from showing off their full potential. And when Cardin answers that going up against those odds would be impossible and unfair, Goodwitch responds that one could view their entire profession as Hunters as an unfair, impossible task fighting against the endless, unyielding, uncompromising legions of the Grimm... and yet, here they all are, training to fight the impossible.
  Goodwitch: You claim that fighting someone with multiple Semblances is impossible, Mr Winchester? My response to that is thus: if you are unwilling to face the impossible… you should find a different career.
• Lightning Bruiser: What happens when the team uses Ruby and Yang's Semblances simultaneously.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • Chapter 86 has a discussion about this trope, with a slant towards defying it. Winter has reservations about letting Team RWBY in on the secret of the Maidens and how it could potentially lead to the fate of Summer Rose; given all that they've been through the past week, it might be best to wait until after the festival. Ozpin and Ironwood, however, rebut that idea for several reasons: they're already involved and leaving them out of discussions would only lead to them taking action themselves, and Ozpin is currently suffering the consequences of keeping important people out of the loop ( a broken nose from Raven). They will let them enjoy the dance next Saturday, then bring them into the loop.
  • Throughout the entirely of the Battle with Torchwick, the reveal of Team STRQ, the raid on the White Fang and Weiss's kidnapping, Team JNPR was completely unaware of it all, and Sun and Neptune only were aware of the first. Jaune points out that they would've jumped to help their friends if they were told, and although the excuse that there was No Time to Explain doesn't work (they had a week to prepare for one of the events), the fact that most of it was highly confidential does.
• Logical Weakness:
  • It's mentioned that Adam's Semblance is powerful, but has the major weakness of needing to hit it's target to work.
  • Penny, being a robot, is magnetic. This allows Pyrrha to accidentally pin her to the ceiling when trying to disarm her.
• Long-Lost Relative: Roman to Ruby and Yang, by virtue of being their uncle. Legally speaking, this also makes Neo their cousin.
• The Lost Lenore: Raven is willing to use the Spring Maiden as leverage to force Ozpin to devote every resource he has to finding out what happened to her wife Summer Rose.
• Luke, I Am Your Father:
  • Turns out that though Summer is Ruby's mother, Taiyang isn't her father... Raven is. Ruby doesn't take the news well at first.
  • Roman tells Neo that during one heist where he had to forge adoption papers for her to get her out of jail, he found it faster to do the whole process legitimately instead, making Neo legally Roman's adoptive daughter.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Besides the general anti-Faunus racism some humans have, and the reactionary feelings of the Faunus as a result, it's noted more than once that Weiss's father is not going to be happy if/when he finds out about Weiss being Blake's mate, and possibly won't even acknowledge it, let alone accept it.
• Mama Bear: Kali Belladonna has this reaction after talking to Blake. What's interesting is that Blake had just finished telling her about her new mate Weiss Schnee, and how Weiss herself is scared of her father Jacques.
• Mate or Die: Downplayed with regards to Blake's situation when she can't get medication to suppress her heat — there's no suggestion that she would actually die if it's not dealt with, but Blake is already sweating and trembling after one hour of trying to go cold turkey with nine more to go until morning. Blake knows going solo doesn't work, and the other RWBY members find out via online research that her symptoms will progress to a high fever and phantom pains.
  Yang: (to herself) She won't make it til morning. It'd be hell.
• Mating Season Mayhem: The story kicks off when Blake goes into her monthly heat without having refilled her suppressant prescription.
• Meaningful Echo: When Yang describes her Semblance to her Mates, she describes it as pressure building up that she has to release eventually, or else "Boom". Blake later echoes that description back to Yang while describing her resentful feelings towards her mother Raven, who has by now joined their side and wants to reconnect, and that she can choose to release the "boom" now while she's in control, or let it explode later when the pressure gets too much.
• Milholland Relationship Moment:
  • After Kali Belladonna hears about everything that has happened with Blake since she ran away with Adam, what they had turned the White Fang into and Blake's eventual defection, she makes it very clear to her daughter that she does not blame her at all for it.
  • A downplayed example when it's revealed that Taiyang is only the girls' godfather, Yang's biological dad, and unrelated to Ruby by blood. When they finally get a chance to talk about it, Ruby gives him a hug anyway.
• Million to One Chance: The odds of a Faunus Mated pair developing an Affinity (which is effectively a second Semblance) is 1 in 20, and most of them are pretty passive like sight sharing. So of course the Mated team of RWBY would develop one, and have it be an extremely potent one: copying the Semblances of any of the others.
• Mindlink Mates: Generally the focus of the fic. These links are a normal part of Faunus mating and are formed by essentially implanting a piece of one's aura in another. They allow emotion sharing as well as a general feeling of the location of a Faunus' partner(s). They also allow something referred to as "instinct sharing" where one partner can send an action or series of actions to another. In rare cases the mixing of auras creates what is known as an Affinity, which is a kind of "second Semblance." In Team RWBY's case, this ends up being Semblance sharing, essentially allowing all four girls to use each others' Semblances.
• Mistaken for Racist: As a Schnee, Weiss is subject to a lot of this, much to her dismay. On an occasion when Weiss bumps into Velvet and Coco (literally in the former's case), Coco takes offense to what she sees as a Schnee mistreating a Faunus friend. Weiss does a good job in defusing it though.
• The Mole:
  • Ozpin claims that Roman had been in deep cover in the criminal underworld for him the entire time, to get him out of hot water from Ironwood.
  • This is what Ilia claims to be within Ozpin's faction for the White Fang, when Adam calls her for a status update. She said that Ghira ate up her sob story to defect, which leads to Adam deriding his predecessor as soft-hearted. Little does he know...
• Mommy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: A main reason why Raven couldn't stick around to raise the girls is that she was the target of a very persistent lynch mob, specifically the Cult of Salem who were looking for the user of the Silver Eyes. With Summer in no shape to do any fighting at the time, Raven said that she was the Silver-Eyed maiden and became the target of the cult. After they escalated to assassinations and literal bomb deliveries, Raven decided the risk was too great for her family and chose to stay away.
  • Although Roman takes offense at the fact that Raven hadn't told Yang or Ruby anything about it for all of the girls' lives.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Right after Roman has finished telling his solemn origin story to Yang and Ruby and how their mother Summer really was, he steps out of the room to find Winter Schnee sticking her rapier in his face.
  • In Chapter 87, the heavy atmosphere after Team RWBY, Penny, Ilia and Neo are finished telling Team JNPR, Sun, Neptune and Ciel about all their endeavours the past few weeks jumps to comical when the RWBYs realize that in all the excitement, they'd forgotten to go dress shopping for the dance. And then it jumps to cheery again when Nora drags everyone off on a shopping spree.
• Morality Chain Beyond the Grave: Well, the "grave" part is in active debate, but when Roman sticks his gun in Ozpin's face for holding out on information that could've helped him find his sister Summer, while he went around for 13 years becoming a criminal to find her, Taiyang points out to him that killing Ozpin won't bring those years back, and that he'd know what Summer would say. Roman backs down.
• Mythology Gag: Penny's identity as a robot is exposed by Pyrrha's Semblance, but in a much less lethal circumstance - she was trying to defuse a fight by sticking everyone's weapons to the ceiling, and as such stuck Penny to the ceiling as well.
• Named by the Adaptation: The girl who is currently the Spring Maiden, whom Raven adopted into the Branwen clan instead of killing her for her powers, is named Persephone "Percy" Spring.
• The Nicknamer: Roman has this habit, because he's a bit terrible with names. He calls Adam Taurus "Bully Boy", Cinder Fall "Matchstick", Team RWBY "Little Red", "Ice Queen", "Kitty-Cat" and "Sunshine" respectively, and Summer, Raven, Qrow and Taiyang "Sis", "Brainy Bird", "Birdbrain" and "Musclehead" respectively. His nieces also get "Rosebuds", due to being Summer's daughters.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: After Weiss is impaled by Adam's broken sword, an enraged Blake slams him against the wall and proceeds to beat his face into a bloody pulp.
• The Nose Knows: Blake is capable of telling humans from Faunus by scent and it is implied that other faunus can do this as well; moreover, they can tell when a person is mated to a Faunus.
• Not Helping Your Case: During a training exercise, Jaune has to face a challenge entirely on his own, and is his usual pessimistic self about it. Ren attempts to motivate him with the quote, "If you think you'll lose, you've already lost." It doesn't help.
• Nothing Is Scarier: When the Wyvern Grimm disappears after waking up after Weiss is rescued, the fact that no one knows where the Hell it went is cause for major concern.
• Not Hyperbole: When Neptune says that he doesn't want Yang to toss him out a window for interrupting Team RWBY's beauty sleep, Sun winces because he knows that Neptune isn't being hyperbolic.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Raven Branwen and Roman Torchwick join Ozpin's faction only to protect their family. Stopping Salem aligns with that goal.
• Not So Above It All: Who's the one to give Weiss's new Arma Gigas summon her name? Winter, providing the name Cryoknight.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When Weiss sees the SDC brand over Adam's eye, she says that she's surprised to see that they have something in common. When Adam sees Weiss's scar and realizes what she means, he just gets madder.
• Not So Omniscient After All:
  • Roman is flabbergasted when he finds out that Ozpin, the man who virtually everyone trusts to know everything and keep Vale safe, had no idea of Cinder's plans, what she was doing in Mt. Glenn (despite freight train shipments regularly going in and out), or that she was masquerading as a student right under his nose. Heck, believing that Ozpin was The Omniscient was the only reason Roman went along with her insane plans in the first place, as he was expecting Ozpin and his allies to blow the whole crazy plan sky high at the best moment while he escaped.
  • Ozpin genuinely does not know what happened to Summer Rose, but Raven refuses to believe that, and is willing to use the threat of never seeing the Spring Maiden her tribe has in order to get him to devote every available resource to finding out where she is.
• Not So Stoic:
  • When Weiss finds out that Winter gave Professor Ozpin a black eye, her sister's composure collapses. Especially when Weiss starts laughing at her.
  • Winter has her turn to lose composure when Yang asks her when Weiss's birthday is so that they don't miss it, the sheer earnestness of Yang's question making her tear up with both mirth and joy.
• Not What It Looks Like: Sun and Neptune are gobsmacked when they see Neo, whom they'd last saw assisting a criminal mastermind, trying to pick the lock on Team RWBY's door. She was trying to wake up her new cousins for a spar, and when they wouldn't wake up, decided to enter her way.
• Obsessively Organized: Ciel Soleil does not do very well without the presence of rules, restrictions or order. The idea of no curfew or etiquette in the Beacon Academy dorms leaves her completely flummoxed, and without a dress code to go off of, picking a dress for the dance is painful for her.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Weiss is flooded with panic when she sees Ruby, her new Mate, walking around the corner talking amiably with her sister Winter.
  • Ilia, who is being sent to Vale by Adam to deal with Blake, has this reaction when she realizes she is stuck on the same cruise as Blake's parents.
  • Roman has this reaction when it turns out that Adam did have a Plan B for their final encounter - involving a runaway train full of stolen Paladin mechs crashing into the abandoned station.
  • Cinder and her team get this when Ozpin strolls into their room, reveals that their cover is blown, and that everything they've been working towards is about to crash and burn. Especially when he reveals that Roman was the one who betrayed them.
    • Mercury has a particularly big one when he looks out their window to see an Atlassian airship ready to forestall any funny business.
  • Ruby, Blake, and Yang's reaction when the former's Nevermore summon shoots out over the Forest with Ruby's Semblance.
  • Everyone's reaction when a crashing airship awakens a Wyvern Grimm.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Roman gets absolutely livid when he hears from Raven that Ruby and Yang still don't know the truth of what happened between Team STRQ, completely ruining his plan of getting them out of danger.
  • How can Qrow convince Yang that Raven will actually show up when they ask to meet? He gives her his weapon Harbinger and tells her that if Raven doesn't show, it's hers to do whatever she likes to it, including smashing it. Ruby is horrified.
  • Ironwood and Glynda are surprised when they find out that Ozpin had been researching something all through last night, leaving his normally-immaculate office a paper-strewn, research-covered mess, Ozpin is completely disheveled, and that, for the first time since Ironwood has known him, he's not wearing his glasses.
  • When Ozpin spills the beans to Winter, she was so mad at what she learned that she punched him in the face.
• Only Sane Man: Roman finds himself in this position when trying to convince Raven and Qrow that they need to speak to Ruby and Yang, and though it will be difficult, they can handle it all like adults. Then he realizes he's turning into his sister Summer and immediately heads for the alcohol.
  Roman: Good Gods, I'm turning into Summer! What nightmare am I in where I'm somehow the most responsible one in the room? Gah, I need a drink.
  Qrow: How bad did we screw up that Roman is making sense?
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot:
  • When Sun and Neptune first catch up to the newly Mated Team RWBY, Neptune, not knowing a thing about Faunus Mating, tries to hit on Weiss. Needless to say, Yang and Blake take offense.
  • When Roman is reacquainted with Ruby and Yang as their long-lost uncle, his first words are to ask about Ruby's leg (which he broke). Cue Yang slugging him.
  • When Vernal finally lays eyes on Raven's daughters Yang and Ruby, her first stunned reaction is "...holy shit, you're real." Her boss is not amused.
• Orwellian Retcon: Several chapters containing Blake's backstory were written before season four and stated that she was an orphan who never knew her parents and was raised by the White Fang. These were rewritten to be more in line with her canonical history.
• Out-Gambitted: What Roman's insider information allows Ozpin to do to all of Cinder's plans, including cut off all their escape routes when he goes to confront them.
• Outside-Context Problem: Team RWBY is this due to their Affinity. Multi-Semblanced opponents are not a thing that happens in Remnant so fighting an opponent with four is unthinkable.
• Papa Wolf:
  • The chapter where Ghira Belladonna finds out about Adam's actions and what he did to both his organization and especially to his daughter is titled "Papa Panther". The only other detail needed is that it involves Ghira Flipping the Table.
  • When Taiyang finally confronts Roman about the Mini-Mecha he sicced on his daughters, Roman quickly grabs Neo and scrams.
  • Roman is this of all people to Neo as her legal adoptive father. The man is willing to fight Ozpin and lose his pardon to prevent her from going to jail.
• Parent-Child Team: Roman and Neo are this due to Neo being Roman's adoptive daughter
• Parental Substitute: Roman acting like a father to Neo, especially after it's revealed that legally she's his adopted daughter due to Roman filling out the paperwork and having a lawyer make it look like that had been the case for a while to get her out of jail (he meant to have it forged, but it turned out to be easier to do it legitimately). Neo's not sure how she feels about that information.
• Pent-Up Power Peril: This is part of Yang's kinetic Energy Absorption Semblance. When she takes a hit, her Semblance amplifies the energy absorbed, but her body can only safely hold on to so much of it at once, and once that limit is surpassed by too much energy absorbed and/or amplified, Yang has to release it or risk it shattering her bones. Yang repeatedly broke her arms because didn't understand the limits of her Semblance and didn't discharge her stored energy fast enough, not to mention the fact that her father's similar Semblance doesn't have this drawback.
• Percussive Therapy: Yang gets the opportunity to talk out, work out and fight out her feelings with her mother Raven when they have a spar in Vale's old sports arena. It goes... a bit far.
• Porn Stash: Ruby finds out how two girls can have sex after she discovered Yang's pile under the latter's bed under an old jacket.
• Power Copying: Team RWBY's Affinity is to have each member able to use the Semblances of any or all of the others.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: This is the case when Team RWBY use Yang's Semblance; just like Yang's, their hair lights up bright, and even gains extra effects. Ruby gets a full red-haired, static-charged dye job, Weiss's gets more white and frosty, and Blake's goes violet and takes on a vapoury appearance.
• Power Misidentification: Hinted at when Penny suggests that Ruby's Semblance isn't just Super-Speed, but she's interrupted before she can elaborate. She gives the full explanation in Chapter 96, that Ruby's Semblance is actually her transformation into a cloud of rose petals with Super-Speed and Teleportation as side effects. Although Ruby is excited, she is disappointed that she no longer shares a Semblance with her mother Summer.
• Power High:
  • Weiss and Blake find out that using Ruby's Super-Speed is incredibly addictive. But just like any high, when a high comes down, it can crash hard, especially if you're going so fast that you forget to breathe.
  • They have a similar reaction to using Yang's Semblance, but Taiyang warns them that that's what led to Yang hitting her Pent-Up Power Peril limits and breaking her own bones.
• Power Tattoo: Stage Two Mate's Marks are intricate designs that reflect the characteristics of both mates. They glow on a person whenever his/her mate is sharing their emotions with them. In RWBY's case, they also glow when one member is using another member's Semblance.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Roman only went along with Cinder's plan because he never thought she'd actually manage to succeed, having overestimated how much Ozpin and Ironwood had managed to notice, anticipating that he'd cut and run with their cash when Cinder and Adam got busted. As he points out to Winter, his whole operation boils down to stealing stuff so he can get money in order to prepare and steal more expensive stuff, thus allowing him to get even more money. Thus, what's the point of helping Adam and Cinder if there's no one left to steal from and nowhere to spend the money?
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: When Weiss finds herself kidnapped by robotic Atlassian Knights under her father's control, she has this dialogue with one of them before the action starts.
  Knight: External temperature dropping to dangerous levels. Please cease aura fluctuation before you freeze.
  Weiss: Freeze? When I'm like this, I don't freeze. (activates Yang's Semblance) I burn.
• Pre-Climax Climax: Team RWBY decides to spend the last night before the operation to take out Adam Taurus being intimate.
• Precocious Crush: Blake's crush on old family friend Adam was originally this, as he was ten or so years older than her. Blake's mother Kali wasn't particularly concerned and figured it would go away on its own, but Blake's father Ghira took Adam aside and told him in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to encourage Blake's attraction. Adam promised he wouldn't do anything. Kali is therefore pissed when she finds out that Adam tried to Mate with her daughter, and that's before she finds out that Blake ran away from the White Fang because of what she saw in Adam's soul.
• Pride Before a Fall: Team STRQ experienced this right out of graduation. Hailed as Beacon Academy's best, and high on the cockiness of youth, they accepted a mission that had them facing an entire horde of Grimm that would've been a challenge for five teams, and decided to take it all on by themselves instead of calling for backup. It was a literal miracle they all made it out alive.
• Promoted to Parent: After their parents died in a Grimm attack, Summer Rose ended up becoming this to her little brother Roman.
• Properly Paranoid: Roman has every right to be wary when two kids with remarkable resemblance to his missing sister Summer and her bandit wife Raven show up; it wasn't the first time he had a lead to his sister's whereabouts only for it to lead to one of his rivals with a grudge. Thus when he does see them, he decides to challenge them with a Paladin warmech to see if they're the real deal.
• Punched Across the Room:
  • After The Reveal of her and Ruby's actual parentage, Yang's temper boils over and she ends up slugging Raven across the rooftop. In Yang's defense, Raven was asking for it.
  • Then she does it again to her Uncle Roman, though it's downplayed as she merely slugs him into the door behind him. For his part, he gets up and mentions that her father hits harder.

Q-Z

• Quality over Quantity: During one of Ms. Goodwitch's training exercises where a team's leader fights a three-on-one with the members of another team, Ruby ends up facing Team CDRL (minus Cardin). Thanks in part to her new Mate bonds watching her back, she is able to come out on top. And she's the only leader who actually wins her fight.
• Rage Against the Mentor: Raven has delivered these to Ozpin multiple times, including one time where he put her team at risk, and especially over Summer Rose's disappearance, and Ozpin has reiterated he does not know what happened to her.
• Rags to Riches: The basis of Summer Rose's origin. She was a Street Urchin who ended up pickpocketing Professor Ozpin, and the man was so impressed (and possibly noticed her Silver Eyes) that he offered her a scholarship at Beacon Academy.
• Recoiled Across the Room: Implied to have happened to Winter after she picks up Crescent Rose to provide long-range support to a Grimm fight. When Yang mentions the sniper-scythe's incredible kick, Winter embarrassedly admits that there's a reason she was firing it lying down, and an accompanying piece of fan-art shows her firing Crescent Rose while sitting up against a wall, with visible cracks in the wall behind her.
• Recruited from the Gutter: Summer Rose counts, since she and her brother were Street Urchins before Ozpin found them and offered them scholarships to Beacon Academy (possibly since he noticed her Silver Eyes). After that, Ozpin had her loyalty for life, which her friends think maybe contributed to her accepting the mission that led to her disappearance without telling anyone, not her lover, not her brother, not her friends, and not her children.
• Refuge in Audacity: In Chapter 65, right as Roman is about to be arrested by Winter and General Ironwood for his crimes, Ozpin steps up and explains that Roman had been in deep cover for him this entire time, much to everyone's surprise (including Roman himself). And when Ironwood objects, Ozpin reminds him of the secret that Ironwood had been hiding from him (Penny), upon which Ironwood decides to call them even.
  Roman: ...did... did I just get pardoned?
• Related in the Adaptation: Summer Rose and Roman Torchwick are siblings.
• Relationship Upgrade: Embodied as a literal phenomenon with Faunus Mate Marks, which come in stages. Stage One is a simple, temporary mark where the Mates share bits of their aura with each other, allowing them to feel each other more closely. Stage Two is the Mates accepting the others' aura and merging it with their own, forming a more intricate mark and a deeper connection (and possibly an Affinity), and will remain unless both parties agree to break their bond. Stage Three is like Stage Two, but permanent and irreversible.
  • One chapter involves Blake helping Coco and Velvet become Mates.
  • Also turns out to be the case for Summer and Raven, back in the day. They were the Official Couple of Team STRQ; Taiyang was never romantically involved with either of them (though he is godfather to Ruby and Yang and biological father of the latter).
• Restrained Revenge: After finally meeting Raven again after four long years, Taiyang gets his own back on her by giving her a back-breaking Bear Hug.
• Required Secondary Powers: Winter reveals that to use her family's glyphs, they must know exactly how the effect they're trying to replicate works. So, if one tries to use a gravity-cancelling glyph, they have to know exactly how gravity works. Ruby and Yang aren't that excited at the prospect of so much book-learning to learn glyph usage.
• Retro Upgrade: After retrieving his old Hunter weapon Black Valentine, Roman comments that he hasn't used it in years and that it's a decade out of date. His co-brother-in-law Qrow, who had been keeping it all these years, tells him that he's maintained it and even modified it to use the newer dust rounds.
• Revenge Before Reason: When he learns about his ex Blake finding new mates, Adam Taurus is so incensed that he's willing to throw away all his available resources and jeopardize his and his allies' plans to deal with her, and neither Cinder nor Roman is happy with that - though for very different reasons.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Averted. Both Roman and Ilia are enlisted by Adam Taurus to deal with Team RWBY, with neither knowing the other has a vested interest in keeping the girls alive. Luckily, scroll messages arrive in time to reveal that they both are on the same side.
• Right Through the Wall: Weiss is subjected to this when the rest of her team is helping Blake who is in heat.
  • Ruby mentions that she was subjected to this in the past with Yang and some of her old girlfriends.
• Scars Are Forever: After Adam's attack on Weiss, which could have easily killed her if he had hit just a little ways off in any direction, she's left with a large scar on her chest.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Team RWBY and their allies know that Jacques attempted to kidnap Weiss while she was recovering, but they can't do anything to him without evidence. The man is the richest person in Remnant and holds a monopoly on Dust, so angering him would cause too many problems.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Roman makes a hasty exit when Taiyang Xiao Long confronts him with the knowledge of what he did to his daughters.
  • Everyone has no hesitation in running when they see the dragon Grimm.
• See You in Hell: Right before Adam is about to order his goons to gun down Blake and the rest of Team RWBY, Blake tells him to go to hell. Adam says that he's sure he'll see her there.
• Shipper on Deck: Nora is ecstatic when Ruby informs her that she spotted Jaune and Pyrrha coming down from the roof together some time ago.
• Sibling Incest: Defied; Ruby and Yang make a Siblings' Pact to avoid the issue. However, those that are learning about Faunus Mating and Team RWBY's situation for the first time don't always know about that, leading to repeated instances of shouted denials and disgusted or embarrassed reactions until it's cleared up.
• So Bad, It's Good: In-Universe, the first chapter had Team RWBY watching a movie about a team of Hunters...that seems to be a pastiche of your standard action movies, and nothing like an actual Hunter's life at all. Yang outright name drops this trope when talking about it.
• Somebody Set Us Up The Bomb: The Cult of Salem, targeting Raven as who they thought to be the Silver-Eyed Maiden, eventually escalated to gifting her a child's toy top which she then gave to her 4-year-old daughter Yang - which turned out to be a bomb.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Ozpin's whole plan involving the Maidens gets a hard swerve when Raven tells him that she has the Spring Maiden as a member of her group, but she won't hand her over to him unless he tells her what happened to Summer Rose.
  • Team RWBY's decision to mate ultimately serves as this to Cinder and Salem's plans. The moment Adam finds out, he diverts all the resources Roman and Cinder amassed for him to get revenge on Blake. Meanwhile, Roman and Neo have secretly turned on the alliance due to Ruby and Yang being the former's nieces, and spill the beans to Ozpin. This leaves Cinder completely blindsided and desperate to cobble back together what's left of the situation for fear of failing Salem, only to be defeated and captured by Ozpin.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Due to being a much better person than in canon, Raven did not murder the Spring Maiden for power. Instead, she adopted her into the tribe and gave her a job as a cook, which she enjoys.
  • Adam Taurus is arrested and captured by the heroes instead of being killed.
• Speed Blitz: What Adam Taurus is subjected to in their final battle by Team RWBY mainlining Ruby's Super-Speed.
• Spotting the Thread: As Roman points out, given that Penny can fire laser beams, literally pull swords out of her back, and was disabled by an EMP, it wasn't hard for him to figure out that she was a robot, even without Cinder's intel.
• Springtime for Hitler: This applies to Roman Torchwick's decision to help Cinder and her faction with her insane plan. Being pragmatic and not omnicidal, he fully expected to go along with it until Ozpin The Omniscient and his friends busted in and arrested Cinder while Roman slipped away with his profits and merchandise. He never expected Ozpin to not know a darn thing about the scheme or for it to get as far as it did without anyone putting things together.
• Squee: Kali Belladona dissolves into happy tears when her daughter asks her to help her find a dress for the upcoming dance.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Of sorts: Weiss Schnee, daughter and heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, is now mated to Blake Belladonna, daughter of Ghira Belladonna, leader of Menagerie and founder of the White Fang, the organization that protests against the SDC.
• Stating the Simple Solution:
  • When Ruby is having trouble figuring out Summoning, and talking with Blake and Yang about it, she reveals that the point where she gets stuck is recalling the moment when she defeated it, which for her is the moment that she cut off the head of the Nevermore they fought. Blake then suggests that the problem is that she's not recalling the entire fight. Sure enough...
  • Later when Weiss is kidnapped by Jacques, Roman calls Raven to ask her to make a portal for the rescue team at Weiss's location. Unfortunately, despite her daughters being Weiss's mates, Raven hasn't bonded with Weiss and can't make the portal.
• Straight Man: Atlas is known for being militaristic, humorless and professional, so two of its residents, Winter Schnee and Ciel Soleil, are frequently used as comic foils for the story's antics. The former finds herself trying to understand her sister's new relationship and all the new superpowers that up-end her world view that come with it, while the latter finds herself a Fish out of Water for the chaos of Beacon Academy as a whole, especially when she is put on a Huntress team alongside a combat android and two ex-criminals.
• Street Urchin: The origin of siblings Summer Rose and Roman Torchwick. Their parents were killed in a Grimm attack, and they were put into an orphanage until it came up that they could be separated, whereupon they took to the streets doing whatever it was needed to stay alive.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Roman finds the sudden appearance of Ruby and Yang very unnerving, considering how much they look like their mothers. He ends up resorting to attacking them with a Paladin warmech just to confirm his suspicions and to find if they're the real deal, and the silver-eyed and red-eyed angry glares he gets do the trick.
  • Then later, when Ruby tries to defend him from Winter with a whole lot of Motor Mouthing, Roman mutters that she inherited Summer's gibberish.
  • And then, when Ruby and her Uncle Roman start exaggeratedly pouting at each other, Weiss and Blake find the resemblance downright Uncanny.
    Weiss: ...oh, gods, I can see it. Blake, how do I unsee it?
    Blake: When I find out, I'll let you know.
• Stunned Silence:
  • Kali Belladonna has this reaction when she finds out that her daughter is Mated to Weiss Schnee.
  • Winter Schnee gets this, complete with Jaw Drop, when she witnesses all three of her sister's Mates creating glyphs, their family's own Semblance.
  • Almost all the Faunus in Beacon Academy go silent when Chief Ghira shows up.
  • This is everyone's reaction when Ozpin declares Roman is his deep cover agent to protect him from Winter and Ironwood.
  • Then Ozpin himself gets this reaction when Raven tells him that she has the Spring Maiden in her possession, and until he tells her what happened to Summer, she'll stay forever out of his reach.
• Suddenly Shouting: In Chapter 87, after a long Let Me Get This Straight... moment summarizing the events of the past few weeks, Jaune only has one thing to say to Team RWBY.
  Jaune: (shouting into Ruby's face) WHY THE HELL DIDN'T YOU TELL US ANY OF THIS?!
• Superpowerful Genetics:
  • The Schnee family glyph Semblance is this. So Winter has an interesting time training three outsiders who can use it as well on its use.
  • Yang's Semblance is apparently similar to her father Taiyang's: both can absorb kinetic energy and enhance their strength with it, but while Yang can amplify the energy she takes in, she cannot store it for very long before it has to be released, whereas her father can only return as much energy as he absorbs, but can stockpile and store as much as he wants for effectively forever. This is Played for Drama, since Taiyang had tried to teach Yang to use her Semblance exactly like his (holding it in for as long as possible), causing a lot of pain, frustration, and shattered bones before they finally realized the problem.
• Superpower Lottery: The Affinity of Team RWBY to use each other's Semblances due to being Mates is a very potent skill, especially when using the Semblances together, like combining Yang's strength boost with Ruby's Super-Speed. Especially considering that most Affinities between Faunus Mates are rather passive. And if that's not enough, Summoned Grimm via the Schnee Semblance can also use their Semblances too.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Roman finds himself having to do this when Ozpin declares him his deep-cover agent in the criminal underworld to get him off the hook from General Ironwood.
  Roman: Huntsman Roman Rose reporting, sir. Mission... accomplished, I guess.
• Synchronization: A downside of Ruby's method of summoning via the Schnee Semblance. While embracing her emotions during the summoning process gives the resulting summon a degree of sentience and independence, the stronger link between her and her summon means that Ruby feels all the pain dealt to it, including some painful feedback if it is destroyed. During the Geist fight, her summon Speedymore is buried under some rubble, wracking her in pain for a large majority of the fight.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Ghira tries to talk down the White Fang Mooks he faces during the raid, and for a second it looks like it'll work, but it ultimately fails.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: Defied; with the Vytal Tournament coming up, Cardin asks Professor Goodwitch what kind of restrictions competitors will be on, such as using only their weapon and "their" Semblance. It's clear to everyone that he's trying to invoke an Obvious Rule Patch to make things "fair", but Goodwitch shoots him down by saying that the tournament is for future Hunters to show off their full strength, and that in a profession like theirs, "fairness" was never part of the equation.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Raven has a big chip on her shoulder with regards to Ozpin, since she's sure he knows what happened to Summer despite him constantly denying it, but she's willing to work with him to keep her daughters safe from Adam Taurus.
• Third Eye: Ciel Soleil's Semblance turns her sun forehead tattoo into one of these, allowing her to see farther and clearer.
• Time for Plan B: What Adam Taurus says after his ambush is ambushed.
• Touché: Roman is indignant when after his Heel–Face Turn, Ozpin reinstates his Hunter credentials and puts him on light duty due to "mental strain", saying everyone will think he's crazy, but Ozpin points to the novel-length document containing all his crimes. Roman concedes the point.
• Uncanny Valley: In-Universe, Pyrrha finds herself having this reaction when Penny asks her if she seems real. While Penny looks normal at first glance, Pyrrha finds herself noticing the unnatural parts of her appearance (lack of breathing, blemish-free skin, glossy eyes) and has to repress the thoughts that it all seems wrong.
• Underestimating Badassery: As far as Adam is concerned, the only people worth his attention on Blake's Huntress team are his traitorous ex-girlfriend and the damned Schnee heiress that is the target of all his wrath, completely dismissing the other two as worth any attention. As Roman points out to Adam, even if they weren't badass Huntresses-in-training in their own right, they might have loved ones who might take offense to him putting them in danger - like say, the very criminal who's arming him and his goons in the first place.
  • Yang assumes that defeating the Geist-possessed Paladin will be easy, since she'd beaten it before. Unfortunately, the Geist's ability to make minor repairs to the mecha and the fact that it doesn't need to worry about keeping itself safe in the same way that a human pilot would makes it a lot tougher than you'd expect from an already busted piece of machinery.
• Undisclosed Funds: Vernal is none too happy about Ozpin's request for her to throw together a security force (which includes their currently absent boss) in under an hour, until Ozpin names her an amount that, as she tells Raven later, would leave their group flush for the entire year. Added bonus is that Vernal just gets through saying that there's no amount of cash that could make her agree, and the instant Ozpin says the value, she changes her tune.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Ilia is this to Blake. Which makes for some issues when Adam orders her back to Vale to deal with her defected friend.
  • It only gets worse when she sees with her own eyes that Blake and Weiss are Mates.
• Use Your Head: Weiss is able to trick one of the robots transporting her into getting close enough to let her headbutt it. It doesn't hurt the robot at all, but the impact allows her to charge up Yang's semblance and break her bonds.
• Villainous Breakdown: Roman can only hear it, but he can tell that Adam Taurus does not take the news that his ex Blake is not only interfering in their plans, but that she's Mated to someone else very well. Especially when he goes all Revenge Before Reason.
• Villainous Valour: Neo takes offense to Roman insinuating that she'd jump ship as soon as he can't pay her, especially since he's attempting the admittedly suicidal mission of taking out Adam Taurus and going against the White Fang and their entire coalition, and throws an envelope of money back in his face to tell him that she doesn't care about the money, she's still sticking by him.
• Warts and All: Roman makes it clear to Ruby and Yang that while their mother Summer started off as a law-breaking Street Urchin doing what she could to keep her and her little brother alive, she still grew up to be the supermom they both know her to be, who kept them safe her whole life.
• Weapon-Based Characterization:
  • Black Valentine, Roman Torchwick's weapon in his pre-criminal Hunter days, and as befitting a kid who grew up on old mobster movies, switches between compact, short sword, and drum-magazine Tommy gun modes. Designed and up-kept by his co-brother-in-law Qrow.
    Roman: Wanna see a massacre?
  • As an Atlassian combat prodigy and a no-nonsense Consummate Professional, Ciel Soleil's Huntress weapons are a knife and Dust-round pistol combo. They can also combine into a pike that allows her to pole vault-Rocket Jump to new heights.
• Weaponized Teleportation: One of Tai and Raven's techniques if for Raven to use one of her Semblance portals to teleport a foe to Tai, who takes them out while they try and figure out what happened.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 59, where a big part of the truth of Team STRQ and the lineage of Ruby and Yang is finally revealed.
• Wham Line:
  • In Chapter 46, Roman gives a major one during a shouting match with Raven over why he's so angry over how Team STRQ has handled Ruby and Yang.
    Because you all just lost a teammate. I lost my sister!
  • In Chapter 71, right as Adam is held dead to rights:
    Ádam: I suppose it is rather hard for a bull to skin a cat. Especially when she's cowering behind a fox... a wolf... and a lion. Isn't it? ^note Those motifs appear in a recurring dream to Team RWBY, which Taurus should not have been able to know about.
  • In Chapter 86, Cinder Fall lets something slip during her interrogation, while she's being asked about Salem:
    Cinder: I will not! What part of 'I will not betray her' do you moronic imbeciles not get! I will not tell you anything about Mother, not now, not ever!
• What Did I Do Last Night?: Downplayed; the morning after, Blake remembers the events leading up to Team RWBY's first night together, but the details of the act itself got lost in the heat.
• With Friends Like These...: Roman has this very bickering relationship with Raven and pretty much the rest of her old team. Understandable since his sister used to lead it.
• Wrecked Weapon: The final battle has Blake and Gambol Shroud shattering Adam's sword Wilt.
• Would Hurt a Child: The cult hunting the Silver-Eyed Maiden (whom they believed to be Raven) eventually escalated to assassination attempts, and even once used a little boy to gift an explosive disguised as a toy top to her, which went off while a four-year-old Yang was playing with it. She was lucky to have survived. That incident was what finally convinced Raven to leave.
• You Are Not Alone:
  • When Team JNPR first see Blake in public with her ears on full display, they waste no time telling her that they have no problems with her being a Faunus whatsoever.
    • When Cardin and his team first see Blake with her ears exposed and move to start hassling her, they get a Death Glare from not only the rest of her team, but most of team JNPR as well. Nora is the only one smiling, but that's because she's letting Magnhild's appearance on her lap do the glaring for her.
  • Villainous (or Anti Villainous) example: Neo refuses to abandon Roman even when he can't pay her and is planning on turning on Adam Taurus, and by extension, Cinder.
  • Ghira and Kali make clear to their daughter's new mate Weiss that if her father rejects her relationship, their house in Menagerie would always be open to her. And that goes for her sister Winter as well. Both Schnee siblings are incredibly touched.
  • In Chapter 88, the Schnee sisters have this exchange after Jacques cuts Weiss off from the Schnee fortune, just like he did to Winter, and Winter relays Qrow and Roman's words of support.
    Winter: You have garnered a rather extensive support system. Use it.
    Weiss: We.
    Winter: Pardon?
    Weiss: We. We have an extensive support system.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
  • Roman has this reaction when Taiyang and Qrow throws him into a room with Raven, Ruby, and Yang, the latter two of which have just found out he's related to them.
  • General Ironwood asks if Ozpin is joking when he hears that Raven has the Spring Maiden in her possession and will only give her up for information that she believes Ozpin to have, but doesn't.
  • Glynda says as much after she, Ozpin, Ironwood, and Roman are almost flattened by a Nevermore summoned by Ruby that is capable of using her rose-speed Semblance.

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