RWBY: The Session is a Japanese light novel written by Kyosuke Izuki and published by Gagaga Bunko on July 19th, 2017. It tells an original story of Team RWBY and JNPR's midterm vacation, set in-between RWBY's first and second volumes, and was never officially translated to English, making it one of the most obscure works in the RWBY canon.
Taking a break from their ongoing fight against Roman Torchwick and the White Fang, Team RWBY and JNPR spend their vacation on the Sapang Island's luxurious beach resort, which is owned by Starhead Industrial Company and run by its animal drones, but quickly find out that things aren't as they seem.
RWBY: The Session provides examples of:
- Affably Evil: Fort Lee is a genuinely kind person who shares Ruby's interest in weapons, gives her leadership advice after learning she had difficulties leading her team in the previous volume, and makes it clear that he would rather have Team RWBY join him than kill them. All of this gets thrown out the window when you add a faunus to the mix.
- Animal Mecha: Iona uses one of her father's elephant drones as one to fight Team RWBY.
- Arm Cannon: Fort Lee has an exceptionally powerful one as his main weapon.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Fort Lee's cybernetic eye constantly feeds him with data on his opponents' fighting style while he is fighting them, allowing him to adjust his own style to avoid and counter it.
- Beach Episode: Despite taking place on a beach resort and featuring the main characters in swimsuits on the cover, the novel is anything but a relaxing beach vacation.
- Call-Forward:
- Roman Torchwick's intervention in the final battle showcases his (or rather, Watts', on Cinder's behalf) ability to hack and override mechanical systems for the first chronological time in the series.
- The SIC records on the main island imply that the SIC was affiliated with Merlot Industries before Fort Lee's takeover as CEO.
- Casting a Shadow: Fort Lee's semblance allows him to turn his own shadow into a sticky goo that restrains and weakens his enemies.
- Child Prodigy: Fort Lee's daughter, Iona Rockshow, is almost as smart as him, good enough at piloting an Animal Mecha to get Team RWBY on the ropes, and helps them navigate and escape Sapang Island's mining area as it is in the process of self-destructing. She's only around 5 years old.
- Disability Superpower: Fort Lee is missing an eye and possibly an armnote . He had the former replaced with a cybernetic interface that can read through any opponent's fighting style and abilities and control his entire base's security systems and drones and the latter with a massive Plasma Cannon that can take down someone as strong as Pyrrha Nikos in one shot.
- Fantastic Racism: Fort Lee is probably the most extreme example in the franchise. He's not only openly hateful towards Faunus, but wants all of them enslaved or exterminated and is currently in the process of doing the former.
- Foreshadowing: The records Team JNPR finds foreshadow the existence of Doctor Merlot and imply that the SIC had ties to him and his experiments on Grimm long before Fort Lee was CEO.
- Heel–Face Turn: Iona turns on her father and agrees to help Team RWBY and JNPR when they reveal to her that he's been using his resort island as a trap to capture and enslave faunus, despite having previously distrusted faunus herself for what she assumed was the same reason.
- Large Ham: Fort Lee introduces himself with a song and dance number courtesy of his drones and has them follow him around and provide background music for most of the story.
- Let's You and Him Fight: After discovering the SIC's past ties to Torchwick (and by extension, the White Fang), Blake is able to inform them of Fort Lee's capturing and enslaving of numerous faunus in order to have them attack Sapang Island and force the SIC to have to deal with them and her own team simultaneously.
- Logical Weakness: After witnessing Pyrrha's semblance in action, Fort Lee arms his elite guards with non-metal weapons that wouldn't be affected by it. Downplayed, since it wouldn't be that big of a deal under normal circumstances, but in this instance Pyrrha is injured and doesn't have her own weapons, and the elite soldiers have enough skill to challenge her in a group... Until her teammates arrive with her weapons and turn the fight into a massacre.
- Lone Wolf Boss: Downplayed. Fort Lee is currently independent, but his company used to have ties to Torchwick (and possibly Merlot) before he became its CEO, which allowed him to use their funds for his own projects. This connection is hijacked when Torchwick betrays him at the end of the novel and sets his HQ to self-destruct.
- Mechanical Animals: The SIC specializes in the manufacturing of advanced, talking animal drones, which are used for everything from managing the beach resort to fighting Grimm to being used as a makeshift staircase for Fort Lee. It is implied that the latter chose to model them after animals because he sees faunus, which he refers to as animals, as inferior beings only worthy of being owned by humans as property.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The epilogue implies that many of the faunus captured by the SIC went on to join the White Fang and ultimately contribute to the destruction of Beacon in later volumes, and for a good reason.
- Pile Bunker: Fort Lee has one inside his cannon's muzzle. He can use its powerful plasma shot as a jet thruster to increase its speed and power.
- Plasma Cannon: Fort Lee's weapon is an Arm Cannon that fires a massive beam of plasma. According to Torchwick, this plasma has similar properties to both fire and lightning.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Averted. While the main characters are rightfully appalled by Fort Lee's enslavement of Faunus, the White Fang - who arrived specifically to free those slaves - Are still treated as just as, if not more evil than him and their intervention is simply a case of Let's You and Him Fight.
- Talking Animal: The SIC's advanced animal drones are able to speak and run most of the beach resort without any physical help from humans.
- Taking You with Me: Fort Lee sacrifices his chance to escape the mining area after Torchwick sets it to self-destruct in order to finish Blake off. Suffice it to say that he fails.
- Tragic Bigot: Iona believes her father's hatred for faunus (and her own) was sparked by the White Fang murdering her older brother in front of them. Subverted in the epilogue, where Ozpin claims Fort Lee hated faunus long before that.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The epilogue never explains what happened to Iona after she escaped the mines with Team RWBY.
- Wicked Stepmother: Gender-Inverted. Ozpin reveals at the epilogue that Fort Lee's stepfather was the one who tore out his left eye.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Roman Torchwick decides to blow up Fort Lee's mine because he now has a new, better partner (implied to be Cinder) and therefore no longer needs his or the SIC's help.
