[RWBY] RWBY Shorts

[AndrewJTalon]

Synopsis: The Tragicall Historie of Camelot or King Arthur

Written by the great playwright Billius Schakkenspell, this is a romantic historical tragicomedy in five acts, set in the past of Albion, whose eternal capital remains the gleaming castle of Camelot — a bastion of chivalry and ancient magic perched upon misty cliffs and surrounded by enchanted forests filled with Grimm and other dangers.

Principal Characters (with their Shakespearean correspondences)

• King Arthur Pendragon — The noble but grieving monarch of Albion (Cymbeline)
• Queen Morgause — Arthur's ambitious and treacherous second wife, a sorceress of subtle poisons (the Queen)
• Prince Mordred — Morgause's arrogant and brutish son by her former marriage, covetous of power (Cloten)
• Princess Guinevere — Arthur's virtuous and courageous daughter by his first queen, named for her (Imogen/Innogen)
• Sir Lancelot du Lac — A valiant knight of humble origins, raised at court and secretly wed to Guinevere (Posthumus Leonatus)
• Sir Agravain — A cunning continental knight from Gallia, sly and boastful (Iachimo)
• Sir Bedivere — Lancelot's loyal companion and servant (Pisanio)
• Sir Belinus — A banished lord, living as a hermit in the wilds of Albion (Belarius)
• Sir Gawain and Sir Gaheris — Belinus's adopted "sons," brave young warriors unaware of their true birth (Guiderius and Arviragus — in truth, Arthur's long-lost sons, kidnapped in infancy)
• Merlin — The enigmatic prophet and advisor, appearing in visions (Jupiter/the Soothsayer)

Act I: Courtly Intrigue at Camelot
In the grand hall of Camelot, King Arthur mourns the disappearance twenty years prior of his two infant sons, taken in the night. Influenced by his cunning second wife, Queen Morgause, he seeks to secure his line by wedding his beloved daughter Guinevere to her son, the vainglorious Prince Mordred.

Yet Guinevere has secretly married Sir Lancelot du Lac, a peerless knight of mysterious low birth raised at Arthur's court. Furious at this defiance, Arthur banishes Lancelot to the continent. Before departing, the lovers exchange tokens: Guinevere gives Lancelot a sacred bracelet woven with her hair, and he bestows upon her a ring bearing the Pendragon crest.

Queen Morgause, plotting to elevate Mordred, feigns support for the lovers while secretly brewing poisons and schemes.

Act II: The Wager and Deception
Exiled in Gallia, Lancelot boasts of Guinevere's unmatched fidelity among the knights there. Sir Agravain, a smooth-tongued Gallian, wagers a fortune against Lancelot's ring that he can seduce the princess. Lancelot accepts, staking his honor.

Agravain travels to Camelot bearing gifts and flattery. Failing to woo Guinevere openly, he hides in a great chest delivered to her chamber (under pretense of safeguarding treasures). By night, he emerges, memorizes the secrets of her room — including a mark upon her breast — and steals the bracelet from her arm as she sleeps.

Returning to Gallia, Agravain presents the "proofs" to Lancelot, convincing him of Guinevere's betrayal. Maddened with jealousy, Lancelot orders his servant Bedivere to slay her upon her arrival in the wilds.

Act III: Flight and the Wilds
Guinevere, warned by Bedivere of the order, disguises herself as a young page named Fidelio and flees Camelot to seek Lancelot. Prince Mordred, enraged at her rejection, pursues her clad in Lancelot's armor.

Lost in Albion's ancient forests, Guinevere encounters a cave dwelling where the exiled lord Belinus lives with his two valiant "sons," Gawain and Gaheris. Touched by their noble bearing, she joins them as Fidelio. Unbeknownst to all, Gawain and Gaheris are Arthur's kidnapped heirs, raised in rustic honor.

Mordred confronts the brothers; in the ensuing duel, Gawain beheads the prince. Guinevere, taking a potion from Morgause's physician (believing it a restorative), falls into a death-like sleep.

Act IV: War and Vision
Gallia's King Josef Arc in Lutetia demands renewed tribute from Albion, refused by the King's nationalist fervor. Gallian legions, led by Caius Lucius, invade. Lancelot, repentant yet despairing, returns disguised to fight for Albion but is imprisoned, as he is seen as a spy.

In prison, Lancelot dreams a vision: the ghosts of his ancestors beseech Merlin, the then deceased wizard and advisor to Arthur, who descends in thunderous glory, promising that the lion's whelps shall reunite with the Pendragon and bring peace.

Act V: Reconciliation and Revelation
In a fierce battle near Camelot's walls, Arthur is captured — but rescued by Belinus, Gawain, Gaheris, and the disguised Lancelot who escaped from his prison to save his King. Albion triumphs.

Captured Gallians are brought before Arthur. In a cascade of revelations: Guinevere awakens and is reunited with Lancelot; Agravain confesses his deceit; Queen Morgause's poisons and plots are exposed (she commits suicide, unrepentant); Belinus reveals the true identity of Gawain and Gaheris as Arthur's sons.

Mordred's headless body confirms his fate. Merlin interprets the prophecy fulfilled. Arthur pardons all, restores tribute to Lutetia in a gesture of wise peace, and blesses the unions of Guinevere and Lancelot, welcoming his lost sons home.

The play ends in Camelot's great hall with feasting, forgiveness, and the promise of a renewed golden age — though shadows of future strife linger unspoken.

Notes:

This play, one of Billius Schakkenspell's later works, is difficult to categorize. It is technically a history but alters the events so dramatically from what was commonly believed at the time to have been the true events of Arthur I's reign as the first true King of Albion it hardly qualifies, even compared to liberties taken with plays such as Lūteus Imperator. It has comedic elements but these are also accompanied by significant drama and tragedy. It's slightly rushed third act is also a rarity for the great playwright, though as it was a commission from Lord Ozymandias of Furth-on-River who insisted on being present at every step of the play, it is understandable. It was one of Schakkenspell's most ambitious undertakings, though this would pale next to his later play (also commissioned by Lord Ozymandias) entitled The Witch and the Knight, based upon a play by an ancient Quitalan playwright known only as "The Pale Scribe".

OOC Notes:

Well you gotta have a Shakespeare equivalent if you have a British Empire equivalent, right? So here's a take on Shakespeare's Cymbeline, featuring many of Arturia (and subsequently Jaune's) ancestors. And yes, the names were so legendary people still kept getting named them and ending up in somewhat similar positions, though they often had much happier endings.

 

[dogbertcarroll]

An naruto crossover but its just naruto and Sauke from at the valley of End in part 1when the got transport . So for this when they havent had the 3 year time slip.now they are forced to cork together to survive as the grimm would be attracted to them especially with how they are at this point

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Attract? Sasuke's entire personality is trauma and Naruto carries an endless engine of rage in his stomach. Grimm would kill each other to reach the pair.

 

[Sliverhero]

Attract? Sasuke's entire personality is trauma and Naruto carries an endless engine of rage in his stomach. Grimm would kill each other to reach the pair.

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Thats the point its to forced the two to work together in thos crazy world.

 

[Gur40]

If Adam Meet A Human Girl That Wants To Burn The SDC To The Ground

Spoiler: Meme

Never Ask A Racist His Wife Race

---

Which Couple Is This

Spoiler: Snarky To Lovers

Or Duel Confession

---

Christmas Colors

Spoiler: Getting The Star

Sorry For The Quality found it like this

 

[The Brotherhood of Steel]

-Someone spikes the eggnog at the Aslanmas party at Beacon. Hoooo boy.

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That night Jaune finds out how assertive Velvet can get with liquid courage.

Spoiler: Pic related

 

[Sliverhero]

Time for some forbidden history.

An Extract from the Annals of Unclean Faiths and Calamities Upon Remnant

Collected and transcribed in the later Age of Kingdoms, from fractured testimonies, censored monastic records, and the words of those who did not long survive the telling.


On the Sect Known Only as the Drowned Star

Let it be stated plainly, before ink is committed too deeply: much of what follows is uncertain, contradictory, and drawn from accounts twice or thrice removed from the event itself. No scholar has claimed direct observation and lived. Those who insist otherwise were found raving, or were not found at all.

The sect is referred to in scattered records as the Drowned Star, the Congregation Below, or most commonly in warning edicts simply as the Forbidden Cult. Its true name, if such a thing exists, is not written here. Where it has been written elsewhere, the parchment has rotted black, or the eyes of the reader have failed soon after.


Of Their Nature and Practices

Unlike the common heresies that plague frontier villages, this cult did not seek power, wealth, or even dominion. All surviving testimony agrees on one point: they sought remembrance by something vast and ancient, a presence not native to Remnant, yet aware of it long before humanity learned to fear the Grimm.

Witnesses describe their rites as slow, patient, and performed in places where the land itself seemed old and wounded, coastal chasms, drowned cities, caverns beneath stagnant seas, and ruins that predated recorded history. They wore no consistent symbols, only scars, brands, and masks that suggested not beasts, but depth. It is said they did not pray in words, but in waiting.


The Behavior of the Grimm

Here the accounts grow most troubling.

Multiple military logs, village records, and Huntsman testimonies, later sealed by Kingdom decree, describe Grimm behaving in ways that defy all known instinct. Rather than attack nearby settlements, caravans, or even manifest Maidens, the Grimm would divert, converge, and hunt the cultists themselves.

One account from the Vale frontier states:

"The Beowolves did not howl. They did not rage. They moved as if drawn by a current, ignoring us entirely. A Nevermore passed overhead without striking. It followed the chanting."



Another record, attributed to an Atlesian observer centuries later, notes that Grimm would circle cult sites but not cross certain boundaries, as though fearful of what the cult sought rather than the cult itself.

This alone caused early Huntsman orders to classify the sect as Extinction-Level Heresy.


The Account of the Storm-Woman

A single ancient chronicle, heavily damaged by water and salt, tells of an event now considered apocryphal but repeated too often to dismiss.

It speaks of a woman of great power, unnamed, who stood upon a coastal rise as the sky tore itself apart. Thunder bent to her will. The seas rose and fell at her command. Many later scholars believe this to have been an early Maiden or something akin to one.

Yet when the cult emerged from the black surf below, chanting in rhythms that "hurt the wind," the Grimm did not turn upon her.

Instead, they turned away.

The storm broke around her, but the Grimm surged past, heedless of lightning and wrath, to descend upon the robed figures below. The chronicle ends with the line:

"She was mighty. They were expected."



Of Giles and the Warped Flame

In later centuries, fragments of the cult surfaced within human history itself, most notably through the infamous Giles, remembered in common texts as a murderer and war criminal, but named in suppressed archives as the Drowned Flame.

Giles was not alone.

He served a master whose name has been struck from nearly every surviving document, though marginal notes describe him as learned, charismatic, and unafraid of the deep places. This master is believed to have introduced coastal rites, star-aligned calendars, and the practice of "answering dreams."

Giles, it is said, did not understand the full scope of the cult's purpose. He merely believed he was preparing the world for a cleansing fire. His master knew better, and vanished before judgment could be passed.




Final Warnings and Suppression

All records agree on the cult's ultimate goal only in the vaguest terms. They did not seek to control the Grimm, nor to destroy the Kingdoms directly. They sought to call something awake.
Something that even the Grimm: creatures born of endless hatred, refused to stand near.

The final sealed edict of the old Vale Council ends with a warning never meant for public eyes:

"Whatever name they whisper into the abyss, it is not a god that answers.
The Grimm fear it.
And the Grimm are not known for fear."


Thus ends this extract. May it remain forgotten.

 

[ExFelineServer3]

Okay, very Lovecraftian!

 

[Sliverhero]

Okay, very Lovecraftian!

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That's the idea as if there is the brother Gods exists who know what else exists.

 

[AndrewJTalon]

Bubble Towns in Remnant

Definition and Origins

Bubble Towns (sometimes derisively called "Grimm Bubbles," "Wall Blisters," or simply "Outskirts") are formal and semi-formal satellite settlements that form adjacent to the primary defensive walls of Remnant's major cities and fortified towns. They are constructed in many ways, from scavenged materials—leftover Dust-mining slag, ruined stone from abandoned outposts, broken airship hulls, corrugated metal, or local rock quarried from nearby terrain. These communities "bubble" outward from the main city's perimeter, often connected by narrow gates, elevated walkways, or long walled corridors reminiscent of ancient historical designs (e.g., the Long Walls of Athens, which linked the city to its port).

The phenomenon has existed throughout Remnant's post-Moonshatter history, but emerged most prominently in the post-Great War era, as populations swelled due to migration, refugees, industrial booms, and better Grimm control technologies. With main city walls already at capacity and expansion costly (requiring massive expenditures of labor and resources), authorities often turned a blind eye to squatters building just outside. Over time, some Bubble Towns have been retroactively incorporated during city expansions, becoming new districts (e.g., the lower terraces of Mistral's capital or suburbs and industrial fringes of Vale).

Types of Bubble Towns

1. Organic/Squatter Bubble Towns: Informal settlements inhabited by the poor, immigrants, refugees, outcasts, and day laborers. Walls are patchwork and hastily built, offering minimal protection.
2. Corridor-Linked Towns: Purpose-built extensions connected by long, fortified roads or walls to the main city, allowing safe transit for workers or trade to smaller communities near the major cities.
3. Planned Industrial/Expansion Zones: Government- or corporate-sponsored bubbles for factories, mines, or housing booms, often starting as temporary worker camps.
4. Penal Bubble Towns: Deliberately isolated prison communities, designed as "Grimm traps" (detailed below).

The Penal Bubble Town Strategy: "Bait Districts"
One of the most controversial applications is in penal policy. Certain Kingdoms (notably Atlas, Vacuo, and some Vale and Mistral sub-provinces) construct prisons as isolated Bubble Towns far from core populations but linked by guarded corridors. The rationale is coldly pragmatic: concentrated negative emotions—despair, anger, regret—from prisoners act as a powerful Grimm attractant. This draws hordes to the site's walls, where automated turrets, Huntsman patrols, or military/paramilitary forces can cull them efficiently.

• Mechanism: Grimm are lured in predictable waves, preventing scattered attacks on civilian areas. Prisoners are told this "serves the greater good" by thinning Grimm numbers.
• Examples: The infamous "ICE-17" outside old Mantle (now destroyed) was a walled compound where inmates mined Dust under guard; Grimm sieges provided "live-fire training" for Atlas cadets. In Mistral, remote island-like bubble towns off the coast or in grasslands serve similar roles. Some high security prisons in Vale and many normal prisons in Vacuo are kept outside the main walls of major cities and act in this capacity,
• Ethical Debate: Officially framed as utilitarian defense, critics call it state-sanctioned cruelty, exploiting prisoners as bait.

Societal Implications
Bubble Towns can be a sign of class divides across Remnant, while simultaneously enabling survival in a Grimm-dominated world.

• Economic Role: They house the labor force for undesirable or dangerous jobs outside the city walls (mining, waste processing, menial services). Incorporation brings taxes and infrastructure; neglect breeds black markets.
• Demographic Concentration: Many have high Faunus populations due to discrimination pushing them outward in some provinces of the Kingdoms. Many White Fang recruits emerge from these areas. Most however are a reflection of the demographics of their cities and reflective of their roles.
• Grimm Dynamics: Proximity to walls offers some safety, but overcrowding and poverty generate constant low-level negativity, attracting smaller Grimm packs. This creates a feedback loop: more attacks → more fear → more Grimm.
• Political Tension: Councils debate "cleansing" vs. integration depending on the type of bubble town. Radical voices (e.g., hardline White Fang) view them as proof of systemic oppression; more pragmatic voices see them as necessary to allow the population to expand, vital resources to be exploited, or defense in depth against Grimm incursions.

 

[Villuviel]

A mission goes wrong when JNPR goes to a large settlement to conduct a routine check up.

Nora accidentally triggers her hammer too close to Jaune. He starts crying and yelling desperately to run away. They don't get it, there were only 7 people in their group, why is he crying about missing people?

Wait, why are there 12 sleeping bags in their campsite?

Please, roll initiative

Grimm Idea: False Hydra - Calliope

 

[Sliverhero]

@AndrewJTalon just wondering if you forgot to add my snip to be bookmarked.

Time for some forbidden history.

An Extract from the Annals of Unclean Faiths and Calamities Upon Remnant
.

Click to shrink...

 

[zMADLAXz]

Duel Confession

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My first instinct was to correct "Duel" to "Dual" but upon further introspection, Duel is correct in this case.

 

[Blackicefox]

A mission goes wrong when JNPR goes to a large settlement to conduct a routine check up.

Nora accidentally triggers her hammer too close to Jaune. He starts crying and yelling desperately to run away. They don't get it, there were only 7 people in their group, why is he crying about missing people?

Wait, why are there 12 sleeping bags in their campsite?

Please, roll initiative

Grimm Idea: False Hydra - Calliope

Click to shrink...

You are EVIL

 

[Sliverhero]

Time for even more Forbidden history this time with Giles master.

A Composite Extract from the Annals of Unclean Faiths and Calamities Upon Remnant

Black Archive Concordance — Cross-Era Suppression

Recovered from multiple sealed repositories beneath Vale, Mantle, and old Mistral.
Compiled by unknown hands across millennia.
Annotations attributed to at least nine separate authors—some contradicting, some continuing one another mid-thought.
All copies ordered destroyed. None fully were.


On the One Called François Prelati

Where Giles burned, another watched.

This is the enduring failure of common history: that Giles was the architect of the Drowned Flame, that his madness was singular, and that with his death the heresy ended. Suppressed records disagree. They insist quietly, insistently, that Giles was never more than a vessel.
Willing. Devout. Replaceable.

The name that surfaces beneath scorched margins, ritual erasures, and sigils of interdiction is always the same:

François Prelati.
No birthplace is agreed upon.
No kingdom claims him.
No era contains him.

He appears suddenly in records that should not intersect: a scholar of forbidden astronomy in pre-unification Vale; an itinerant mystic along Mistral's drowned coastlines; a court thaumaturge dismissed from Mantle long before Atlas named itself, cited for "unsafe inquiries into Aura persistence beyond mortal continuity."

Each time, the descriptions align.
Soft-spoken. Educated. Unhurried.
Eyes that did not rest on people, but on what stood behind them.

On the One Who Preceded the Kingdom of Steel

Long before Atlas rose, before Mantle armored itself in iron and certainty, proto-Mantle engineering logs speak of a figure known only as the Consultant.

He advised against deep bore drills near the northern coasts. He warned that certain pressures, once relieved, could not be resealed.
He spoke of Aura theory with a fluency that would not be formalized for centuries.

The logs note no accent.
No origin.
No aging across decades of appearances.

When Mantle's council demanded lineage and credentials, the Consultant simply ceased attending meetings. Construction continued.

Test sites were later abandoned, not due to revolt or collapse, but because Grimm descended directly into the excavation shafts, ignoring surface settlements entirely, as though responding to something beneath the worksite.

Only much later were these logs cross-referenced with cult annotations and a single recurring name scratched into the margins:
François Prelati.

His Teachings

Prelati did not preach worship. He discouraged it. What he taught instead was attunement.
Fragments of his instruction describe the world as layered: stone upon memory, memory upon thought, thought upon something older still.

He taught that the Grimm were not Remnant's greatest calamity, but its immune response, violent, blind, and terrified. "They do not hate us," one fragment attributes to him.
"They hate what notices us."

It was Prelati who formalized the cult's calendars, aligning rites not to moons or seasons, but to stellar occlusions, tidal irregularities, and periods of collective dreaming. It was he who taught the discipline known as answering dreams: the controlled surrender of Aura during sleep, allowing something vast to brush the soul without fully entering.

Most who attempted this went mad. Some did not wake. Those who succeeded were never the same.

On the Matter of Continuance

Here the annals hesitate. Ink thins. Margins fill with warnings. There are repeated, heavily disputed rumors, never confirmed, never fully erased, that François Prelati did not fear death. Not as zealots claim to transcend it, but with the familiarity of one who had already crossed it and returned… sideways.

Contradictions persist:

A man burned at the stake in Mistral, Prelati confirmed dead, followed decades later by his appearance in Vale, unchanged. A drowned corpse recovered from northern waters, face matching contemporary sketches, while records place Prelati alive elsewhere at the same time.

A Huntsman report declaring a successful kill, followed weeks later by an addendum:
"Correction. The body was his. The voice afterward was not."

One marginal note, written in a steadier hand than most, reads: "He does not move from body to body. He teaches bodies how to let go."


Whether this implies possession, succession, or something more profane is unresolved. The annotator vanished soon after. His chambers were found empty, smelling faintly of salt and ozone.

On the Multiplicity of Claimants

Across centuries, at least five individuals, three women and two men were executed, imprisoned, or erased under the charge of being François Prelati.

Each claimed the name without hesitation.
Each demonstrated identical knowledge of forbidden stellar cycles, Grimm avoidance thresholds, and the rites of the Drowned Star.

Descriptions conflict: A silver-haired woman in Vacuo who laughed during immolation.
A Mantle archivist who corrected his interrogators' dates. A Mistrali priestess who stated under truth-binding Semblance:
"I am not him. I am where he was needed."



Autopsies, where permitted, show no shared physiology. Grimm behavior, however, was identical.

The Pattern of Grimm Response

Initial sightings of a Prelati claimant do not provoke attack. Grimm avoid the region. Lesser Grimm fail to approach. Mid-tier entities circle but do not engage. Only with prolonged presence do heavier manifestations appear.

Ancient Nevermore variants.
Leviathan-class entities.
Forms without modern classification.

Not to destroy the claimant. To contain the location. Multiple military analysts, separated by centuries and unaware of one another, reach the same conclusion: "The Grimm behave as if awaiting authorization."



If the claimant is eliminated early, escalation ceases. If the cult's activity deepens, if rites near completion, then Grimm no longer hunt the person. They hunt the ground.

Of the Hunters

It is often said that great men have hunted François Prelati across history. This is accurate, and incomplete. Kings ordered his death.
Huntsmen swore oaths. Scholars turned executioners. All failed.

Names are redacted, erased, or lost. Deeds survive without authors. Yet one fragment recurs across eras: a record of a lone hunter, appearing again and again at the edges of Prelati's movements.

The name is never fully written. Only two letters persist.

OZ

In the oldest strata, he is described as "the first Huntsman, though the title did not yet exist."
In later accounts, he appears as a counselor, a general, a headmaster, a man who arrives too late yet somehow always knows where to look.

Marginal notes suggest he has pursued Prelati longer than any Kingdom has existed. One damaged entry reads: "He has killed Prelati before. It did not end."

Another, written centuries later in a different hand: "OZ hunts not to win. He hunts to delay."


Of Nearing Completion

Several records agree on one final terror: the most dangerous phase is not Prelati's rise, but the moment when he or they, is no longer required. In regions where cult activity ceased without suppression, Grimm numbers dropped to zero. The land did not recover.

Aura destabilized. Dreams synchronized.
Navigation failed. Children spoke words they had not learned.

A pre-Atlas tablet recovered from a collapsed coastal vault bears a final carving: "When the door remembers itself, the key may sleep."


Closing Censure

Let this be written only once more.
If Giles was the flame, then François Prelati was the oxygen, patient, unseen, and essential.

He does not seek thrones.
He does not command the Grimm.
He does not fear death.

He prepares.

And when it finally stirs..

The Grimm will already be waiting.
And so will OZ.

Thus ends this concordance.
May its authors remain unknown.
May its subject never be found.

 

[Gur40]

From Tumblr BY notmaplemable - May 28, 2024

Jaune: *Steps over baby gate*

Weiss: *Still on the other side* ...

Jaune: ...I can take it down.

Weiss: No... Uppies, please.

 

[LordofBones]

Everyone finds out that Whitley built a hugging machine. Nobody knows what to think when Ruby and Jaune make liberal use of it too.

Ren: "...Out of curiosity, what else did you build?"
Whitley: "A machine to tuck me in at night and make hot cocoa, a machine to tell me 'good job, bro', a mother-bot that asks me how my day has been and says 'I love you', a robo-butler that's also a master assassin-"

 

[Ardrianian]

a robo-butler that's also a master assassin-"

Click to shrink...

HK-47 has entered the chat.

 

[AndrewJTalon]

Der Vampyr von Albion

A grand romantic opera in three acts. Music by Himmel Marchener. Libretto adapted from ancient Albion chronicles and the mythic tales of the Joestar bloodline. Premiered in Kölln's Royal Theatre, circa the 1900s of Remnant's calendar in Arminius.

Principal Characters

• Sir Jonathan Joestar – noble young lord of the ancient Joestar house, baritone (Ruthven/Johann von Wohlbrunn analogue)
• Lord George Joestar – Jonathan's honorable father, bass
• Erina Pendleton – Jonathan's pure-hearted beloved, soprano
• Dio Brando – ambitious orphan taken in by the Joestars, powerful tenor (the Vampire Lord)
• Sir William Zeppeli – eccentric Quitalian master of mystic Aura arts, tenor
• Robert E. O. Speedwagon – loyal street-born ally from the rough districts of Camelot, baritone
• Lady Malham – high priestess of a secret midnight coven, mezzo-soprano
• Chorus of Albion nobles, villagers, coven members, and spectral undead

Setting
The misty isles of Albion, in the grand estate of Joestar Manor outside eternal Camelot. An age when Dust technology was new, and Aura is commonplace but many ancient arts of that great power are now but whispered of in legend. And ancient stone masks of forbidden power lie buried in forgotten crypts before the Moonshatter.

Act I: The Oath and the Mask
In the great hall of Joestar Manor, Lord George Joestar welcomes the orphaned Dio Brando into his home to repay an old life-debt. Dio, burning with ambition and resentment, bows outwardly while inwardly scorning the noble family. Jonathan, honorable and trusting, offers friendship, but Dio humiliates him in a public duel, stealing a kiss from the gentle Erina Pendleton to wound Jonathan's pride. Jonathan fights back, and Dio is humbled... For now.

Years later, Dio and Jonathan are practically brothers. Jonathan is close with Erina. Dio is outwardly planning on becoming a lawyer and going into politics. All the while, he plots to steal the Joestar fortune. During a storm, Dio unearths a sinister stone mask in the family crypt. When blood from a minor wound touches it, the mask awakens, driving bone spikes into his skull. He rises transformed — a vampire lord, immortal, thirsting for blood and dominion.

Lord George discovers Dio's dark experiments. In fury, Dio strikes him down, draining his life before the horrified household. Chaos erupts; Jonathan swears vengeance. Dio flees into the night, abducting Erina as leverage and prize.

Act II: The Midnight Coven
Jonathan, driven by grief and love, pursues clues through Albion's shadowed moors. In a ruined abbey, he interrupts a midnight rite led by Lady Malham, high priestess of a secret vampiric cult. Dio has joined her coven, promising them eternal night in exchange for loyalty.

Jonathan is captured and brought before Dio, who gloats over his newfound power. Erina, imprisoned yet defiant, refuses Dio's seductive offers of immortality. As Dio prepares to turn her, Jonathan is rescued by the mysterious Sir William Zeppeli, a wandering Quitalian master who teaches the ancient Aura art of Ripple breathing (Hamon) — channeling the soul's life-energy through the body to combat creatures of darkness.

Together with the rough but loyal Speedwagon, who has witnessed Dio's horrors in Camelot's underbelly, Jonathan trains in secret. Zeppeli warns that the battle will claim a sacrifice.

Act III: Dawn Over the Manor
The final confrontation returns to Joestar Manor at dawn. Dio, now commanding an army of ghoulish thralls, prepares his coronation as eternal ruler of Albion. Lady Malham and the coven chant infernal hymns.

Jonathan, Zeppeli, and Speedwagon storm the manor. In a series of blazing duels lit by Aura energy:

• Speedwagon holds off the undead horde.
• Zeppeli faces Dio directly, transferring the full mastery of the Hamon School to Jonathan at the cost of his own life.

Jonathan and Dio clash in the great hall. Dio's vampiric strength and regeneration seem invincible, but Jonathan's Ripple — pure as sunlight — burns through the darkness. In the climax, Jonathan drives a Ripple-charged sword through Dio's heart as the first rays of dawn pierce the windows.

Dio's body disintegrates in golden flames. Erina is freed; the coven scatters. Jonathan, gravely wounded, collapses in her arms as Speedwagon kneels in respect.

The opera closes with a solemn chorus at sunrise: though evil is vanquished this day, the ancient mask endures, and the Joestar bloodline must forever stand vigilant against the night.

NOTES:

Naturally this one is based on JoJo Part 1, and Der Vampyr by Heinrich Marschner. Arturia was a fan of it in her youth.

 

[Sliverhero]

A Redacted Addendum to the Common Histories of the Great War
Filed under: Irregular Influences, Suppressed Causes
Circulation Prohibited Beyond the Academies


Most citizens of Remnant know the Great War as it is taught: a clash of ideologies, of crowns and councils, of color and culture. Textbooks speak of Mantle's rigidity, Mistral's excess, Vale's reluctance, Vacuo's abandonment. Dates align. Banners fall. Treaties are signed.

This version is true. It is also incomplete.

What follows is not taught because it cannot be neatly diagrammed. It does not fit into speeches or memorials. And those who first attempted to record it often did not finish.

Of the Hands Beneath the Table

Before the first mobilizations, before the embargoes and conscriptions, there were smaller movements...quiet ones.

Fraternal orders that were not fraternal. Study circles that met at odd hours. "Philosophical societies" embedded within officer corps, trade ministries, and cultural councils across every Kingdom. They did not fly a single banner. They did not agree on symbols. They agreed only on direction. These cults, if the word applies, did not command armies. They advised them.

A recommendation here: escalate rather than withdraw. A suggestion there: suppress negotiations, for weakness invites annihilation.
A forged report. A delayed message. A general reassigned at precisely the wrong moment.

None of these acts alone caused the Great War.
Together, they ensured it could not end quickly.

Of Influence and Atrocity

Later analysts would note peculiar consistencies across all fronts: Orders that resulted in mutually assured devastation, issued without clear strategic value.

Entire battalions deployed into terrain already marked, quietly as compromised. Cities evacuated after supply lines were cut, rather than before. Witness testimonies from veterans describe moments where commanders spoke words that did not sound rehearsed, nor wholly their own. Moments of unnatural certainty. Of decisions carried out with reverence rather than reason.

There are sealed medical reports of soldiers who survived battles only to later insist they had agreed to die, but forgotten why. These records are fragmentary. Many were burned. Others simply stop.

Of Mantle, Before Its Breaking

Before Mantle fell, before its allies fractured under the strain, there was a final convergence.
The cult networks had grown bold. Their rites, once scattered, began to synchronize. Observatories reported anomalies dismissed as equipment failure. Aura researchers recorded fluctuations attributed to battlefield stress.

It is now believed the primary locus lay far north, beyond sanctioned borders, at a site whose coordinates are still classified and whose name has been scratched out of every surviving map.
And toward that place went a single figure.

Of the One from the Arc Line

The records do not agree on how the unknown hero arrived. Some say he walked alone through blizzards that should have killed him.
Others claim he was escorted by Huntsmen who later could not recall his face.
One account insists he was already wounded when he departed, and never slowed.

What is consistent is what followed.
That day, the sky was said to bleed, not rain, but color, staining clouds as if the world itself had been cut. Across Mantle and its allied territories, people reported hearing voices that were not carried by air. Some wept. Some screamed. Some laughed until their throats failed them.

A percentage of the population, no two sources agree how many, simply broke. They raved of doors opening the wrong way. Of stars pressing too close. Of something vast rising, unfolding, reaching...

Several witnesses swear they saw a silhouette climbing into the heavens, so large it might have brushed the shattered moon itself.

And then...

Nothing.

The pressure ceased. The voices ended. The thing was gone.



The Final Report

A later communiqué, released only in part, states that the young man from the Arc family sacrificed everything to disrupt the cult's designs. Not merely his life, though that too, but his name, his place, his memory's anchor in the world.

The report's author admits something unusual:

"I cannot remember his face.
I cannot recall whether I loved him, followed him, or was born of the same blood.
I know he mattered to me.
I know that I knew him."



Every attempt to reconstruct his identity collapses into uncertainty.Son or daughter.
Brother or sister. Lover. Friend.

The only artifact that remains verified across multiple independent recoveries, iis a shield, battered beyond recognition save for one mark:
The Arc symbol.

No initials.
No inscription.
Just the crest.

Of What Followed

Within weeks, cult communications across Remnant fell silent. Several high-ranking officials resigned without explanation. Others vanished. Grimm activity along certain fronts dropped sharply, unnaturally so.

The Great War continued.
But historians note that from that point on, escalation slowed. Plans unraveled. Catastrophes that had seemed inevitable… did not occur. The war still claimed millions.

It simply did not claim everything.

Closing Annotation

Public history teaches that the Great War ended because the Kingdoms learned to listen to one another. The suppressed records suggest something else intervened first. Someone stood where the world was thinning. Someone paid a price no ledger could record. And in doing so, ensured that when Remnant remembers the Great War, it remembers survival, not extinction.
The shield remains in storage.

No one who studies it too long can quite remember why they started.

 

[AndrewJTalon]

Anyway, a slightly less serious idea: Glynda has decided that if Jaune wants to stay at Beacon, he's gonna prove it. She sets him up against all seven of his friends (and Blake) in Combat Class with the intent of making him so frustrated he quits voluntarily when he can't get even a single win. Not that they are aware of this.



Jaune however isn't giving up. CRWBY said they wanted Jaune to be their Sokka. Let's let him be Sokka. He pulls out all the stops, comes up with every trick and tactic he can to even the odds as his only advantages are his mind and his huge Aura. And he aims to win.



This lets you explore all the RWBY main cast via combat. Gives you avenues for exciting action, drama and character work.



Naturally, by the end of it Glynda is impressed enough with his progress, even if he loses most of his bouts, to encourage him further. And to consider him a proper student.

 

[TheFabulousCustodes]

Anyway, a slightly less serious idea: Glynda has decided that if Jaune wants to stay at Beacon, he's gonna prove it. She sets him up against all seven of his friends (and Blake) in Combat Class with the intent of making him so frustrated he quits voluntarily when he can't get even a single win. Not that they are aware of this.

Click to shrink...

Jaune wins the match against Blake by using Zwei, who because of his aura being unlocked, technically counts as Huntsmen equipment.

How else does Jaune win by using his wits?

 

[dragon_cloud16]

Jaune wins the match against Blake by using Zwei, who because of his aura being unlocked, technically counts as Huntsmen equipment.

How else does Jaune win by using his wits?

Click to shrink...

When he fights Ruby, he throws a sack full of cookies into the air. Leading to her to pause long enough for him to get a ring out.

 

[Frakir's brother]

I've got a idea for adoption too. Jaune, instead of being Random Idiot A, has the basics of sword and board along with his Aura unlocked. This comes from a former teacher of his, Gila Blueberry who also was in a illegal relationship with him, how does this change things? Beacon is an elite school and so more than the basics are needed, but it means people aren't all that suspicious that the born Tank got in.