Meditation was a comfortably familiar thing by now for me.

Aside from being a useful tool to help hone my Aura I was also downright certain it was the key to getting my eyes to function. Function without having to watch anyone I care about die, that is, if I had things my way I would be able to skip that step with some hard work. Spontaneous powerups or a hidden heritage coming to the fore because of emotional trauma, while a staple of anime, was something I preferred not to lean on when my life and the lives of people I loved were on the line.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about meditating with Aura was the level of hypersensitivity that naturally came about when I focused inwards. I could hear every creak in the house like a series of firecrackers, but I didn't really take it in; I just let the sounds wash over me. I felt every twitch and flex of my muscles, but it all seemed distant as I focused on keeping my composure. The pressure of Zwei resting on my lap felt like a soft blanket, almost lulling me to sleep, but I pushed through the drowsiness, letting it blend into the background of sensations. The worst part, though, was the slick, bitter taste of my own saliva, which I tried to ignore, letting it become just another part of the sensory noise.

It was altogether an incredibly distracting experience, but one that over the scant few years I've been practicing have grown more and more accustomed to. What I was currently doing was an old Aura meditation technique that Dad taught me after some begging and pleading, the mere fact that I had to beg for it left me irked and rubbed raw.

Of course, the man couldn't be bothered at the time to actually teach me anything, just rummaged around his old huntsman stuff until he found me this old book that taught me the technique. To my initial dismay, the book had read like some old Xianxia scroll, full of waxing poetry about the nature of 'self' and strange philosophy that was hard to wrap my head around; it was clear that it was written by some Mistralian martial artist at some point.

Thankfully with time I had managed to make progress toward mastery of the technique. One of the primary and instinctual uses of Aura was to heighten one's senses, following this logic, I was supposed to help build a firmer control over my own Aura by gaining a better understanding of my own body. This had drawbacks, of course, a human was not supposed to feel everything so thoroughly about themselves and I almost gave up after my first session when Ruby had found me knocked out from keeping the technique up far longer than I rightfully should have. She had been exceedingly worried at the idea that I was presumably pushing myself too far and it had taken hours to convince her otherwise. I still decided to continue, but I ensured that next time I took things much slower and wasn't accidentally hurting myself somehow.

But despite that little hiccup, to the author's credit, the technique wasn't a waste of my time and my own finite control over Aura had started to gradually increase at a pace that outmatched my two sisters. I was nowhere near an expert on the subject, nor could I claim to be a mere novice. Strengthening the foundations of one's own soul was a daunting task that took years upon years of effort and training.

There was a reason why veteran Huntsmen such as my uncle could easily wipe the floor with any fresh graduate from Beacon. The amount of time invested into his own growth in comparison was absolutely insane; his typical routine in the morning blows Olympic athletics back on earth out of the water. We're talking about a man who takes a five-mile run around the forest that our home was in for a warm-up before starting work on an aura technique or some other thing he wants to focus on.

The gulf between someone with proper training and experience compared to some fresh student, who just got their soul awakened, was vast. That was a lesson imparted to me and my sisters in our early youth, not that we realized the importance at the time. I wasn't exactly a fresh face child with a newly awakened Aura, but it was the principle of the lesson that truly mattered in this case. But I think I was getting a better appreciation of that fact the longer I honed my own body and my own Aura.

Yet training my Aura wasn't what was on the schedule for today, instead I was attempting to refine that super sensitivity down to see if I couldn't use it to find anything of note about my eyes. After so long spent spreading my sense across the entirety of my body it was somehow paradoxically difficult to restrain it back down to just one area.

In my current state of internalization, I failed to hear the soft opening of the door into my room that was accompanied by a set of equally gentle footsteps, nor did I notice the sudden absence of the warm ball of fur on my lap.

The constant rumble of the world born from my state of hypersensitivity felt quiet, peaceful even. A haunting paradox that I can't adequately describe.

I slowly, yet still fully conscious, fell deeper and deeper into the soothing wake. And I-

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-Snapped my eyes open.

My vision is subjected to a symphony of otherworldly colors bleeding into one another, mixing and swirling like molten glass, forming a kaleidoscope of ethereal hues that swarm together to form a canvas that defies human meaning. Shadows with hidden depths that roiled within themselves beneath their surface dance in my periphery, tempting me with secrets that only the subconscious would dare decipher.

The very landscape around me feels surreal, sensations seem to take on a life of their own. Seconds blended into minutes before blurring incomprehensibly and impossibly into hours. Time itself soon lost all meaning, melting into a seemingly infinite expense where the past, present, and future converge; a mishmash of places I had been before iterated and reiterated upon themselves, ebbing between totally unrecognizable to eerie recollection.

And then, an outwardly delicate balance was achieved. A metaphysical tightrope walk between the realms of reality and fantasy, a place where the mind keeps cohesion while the fabric of existence becomes malleable to an open mind.

And the very first thing I witness with my newly unobstructed sight is quite possibly the oddest-looking chair in existence. Standing tall and proud with four outward mechanical-looking legs, it held four broken cogs attached to the back of the metal monstrosity, outwardly giving it the appearance of having two pairs of metallic, clock-like wings.

"You done giving my chair a lookover, Jack?" An eerily familiar voice asked from behind me.

I whirled around to witness a near-perfect copy of myself make his way around me to sit down in the abomination of a chair, swirling his red cloak as he did so. How on Remnant he found it remotely comfortable, I'd never know. "That thing is a modern artist's wet dream, Lee, and I am ashamed to see it rendered to life."

Then I frowned, dusting off some imaginary lint from my own burgundy cloak and giving the crime against upholstery a second glance, finding that it tickled my memory somehow, "You know that seems more familiar than something like that should be."

"You and Hans haven't been that active outside of writing fanfiction and reading fanfiction, recently. I've had the time to burn, plus I knew it was going to annoy the two of you."

"It's not my fault our late mother decided to write religious scripture into fanfiction…" I mumble aloud before shaking my head, and raising a hand pointing two fingers toward my eyes, "Besides, I'm doing more than just reading fanfiction."

I look around the patchwork clearing we seem to be in, ignoring how the sparring area from Signal seamlessly merged with the awkward amalgamation of my room and the attic. "Where is Hansen anyway?"

I see my near double give me a blasé shrug as he starts tinkering with the atrocity he created, "Last I heard from him, he was ranting about having another supposedly genius idea after getting over a nasty brain freeze, before running off."

How did one even get a brain freeze when we were just a mental figment? Who knows.

"I AM A LIVING GOD" I heard suddenly, the interrupting shout sending ripples through the dream imagery.

I exhaled in exasperation, staring at the landscape shifting around us, rippling apart like a splitting watercolor painting, "I regret falling asleep while meditating already."

I turned back to Lee and his smug red cloak-clad self as he sat upon his big, dumb chair, "Send me back out there before Zwei pees on us. I'm trying to get something done, you know?"

"Yeah I know, just make sure you're a bit more careful, and don't let Uncle Qrow catch you in the attic, again." That statement only caused his smug smirk to extend wider, "At least you didn't have a near meltdown like Hans did when our dear Uncle stole his transcript."

"A perfectly valid response to a potential information threat!" A disembodied crazed voice suddenly interrupted from seemingly nowhere, only to go woefully ignored by the two others.

My lips pursed while I pinched the bridge of my nose, not a day went by that I didn't wish that we weren't all stuffed into one meat suit to puppeteer, "Please, I don't need a reminder about how terrible we are at this covert shtick. We're lucky that we're his nephew and he thinks we have some kind of mental illness on top of wanting to learn more about our late mother."

Lee winced slightly in response, before quickly schooling his expression and nodding back, "Yeah, let's try to avoid another situation like that occurring again. Twice is more than enough for me, and I don't want to see if the third time's the charm."

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"Speaking of avoiding things, when will it be my turn again? I've been dying to dig into that Aura basics manual Uncle got us." The mysterious voice said with the opening of a hatch that wasn't there before. Upon his back rested a crimson cape that covered a body that held the same face.

Lee and I shared a quick glance before I turned back to look at the third of us, "You'll get another turn when you stop trying to convince us to split our soul and stuff a fragment into a weapon."

I know, it may be crowded right now, but I very much liked my soul remaining intact as it turned out. This nut job wanted to perform a pseudo-Penny soul transplant into weaponry. I wonder if he forgot that we only had one of them and it was already mashed together pretty good between the three of us.

The crimson-cloaked doppelganger rolled his eyes, "Okay, first of all, that was just a concept that I suggested with minimal knowledge of Aura. The likelihood of us being capable of such a thing without whatever highly advanced technology that whats-his-name used to create Penny is minimal. Besides, my attention has already drifted towards other possibilities, but those possibilities will remain possibilities if none of us read the stupid book!"

He scoffed, "Honestly, I don't get why neither of you is more interested in this, it's magic superpowers."

"I am working on trying to activate one of those superpowers." I emphasized, "What kind of god makes specific emotions felt at a high enough intensity the key to activate anti-Grimm eye lasers… What is this, the Force? At least we get lightning with Jedi Powers."

"That's Sith, not Jedi," Hans interjected suddenly, his form hunching down into the bowels of the hatch as if he were looking for something.

"Whatever." I rolled my eyes. Regardless we were stuck with two useless silver peepers until we figured it out.

"Clearly, the God of Light has a sense of humor," Lee unhelpfully cuts into the budding argument before leaning his body over the arm of his chair and above the pit Hans somehow made for himself, "And please Hans, for the love of the two Brothers, please get over your pacifistic stint. I've been trying to make up for you, but at this rate, we're going to be left behind. Especially now that Ruby got herself a scythe."

"And speaking of Ruby," Lee continues with an expression of exhausted concern clouding his eyes, "Would it kill you two to check up on her more often? I've had to cheer her up twice in the past few weeks and I think our wallet is going to revolt soon. I know I'm essentially the social driver, but this is just getting concerning."

I slowly nodded my head with a frown.

There was some level of truth to his words, and I hated to admit it, I was obsessing over Summer's written works that she left behind. I felt like I was missing something and it was infuriating. Maybe I needed to look into the worship of the Brother Gods throughout the written history we could access on our scroll to figure out how to get past this wall I was hitting, but that could wait for later. I mentally resolved to give it a tiny break for now once I got back out there.

Hans finally looked up from his little hatch on the floor, "How about we all accept we are making mistakes and communally agree to help each other correct them? A team is as only good as its ability to work together after all."

"Oh and by the way, Lee, about my so-called "pacifist stint." I'm not a pacifist, I just don't like to fight. Is it now a crime to not like getting hurt?" Hans continued, going back to rummaging in the hole. And honestly, I don't really want to know what he's looking for down there.

I can clearly see Lee's face fall into a look of deadpan neutrality as he rested his head into a closed fist in my periphery, "Yes, yes it is Hans. Especially with what's going to happen in a couple of years. We need all the practice we can get and magic superpowers aren't going to save us if we get killed before we can even activate them."

Hans grimaces, "I guess I'm not against practicing more, if that will appease y'all, but you have to understand how asking me to not instinctively feel bad for trying to hurt people is more than a little hard right?"

Lee sags slightly in his metallic monstrosity, looking tired even in this dreamlike state, "Yeah, I guess that's fair. I just don't want to fall behind, because let's face it, we're not a prodigy like Ruby and Yang."

"Not according to Old Man Burnside and our other instructors. We're the best thing since sliced bread." I offered my own input, my fingers tapping nervously on my arm as I crossed them.

A combination of our academic credentials from before this whole soul blender thing made us easily able to score top marks on the less rigorous and more scholastic learning. Essentially, where we would spend a huge portion of time studying the material like mathematics and linguistics that was instead spent on combat training.

The only black mark on our record was our 'mental illness'. I honestly didn't have a clue how to fix that, other than appear normal now that we more or less had our shit in order.

"Anyway, our biggest advantage is that we focus on this stuff far more than your average huntsman trainee does and there's three of us to split the mental workload so to speak."

"I suppose that's true, Jack," Lee mumbles out from behind his hand, before slowly standing up and leisurely walking to the center of the patchwork clearing. The abomination of a chair sank into the odd mixture of wood and concrete behind him. "Anyways, let's get you out of here. There's still plenty of daylight left and you still have to finish your turn."

"Don't forget to give Ruby extra hugs when you wake up!" Hans shouts suddenly as the symphony of unearthly colors threatens to consume my vision once again.

"As if, she's probably hugging us right—

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'-now'

My eyes opened and true to my words from but a second ago Ruby was quietly snuggled up next to me playing Village Fighter Eight. Something I also quickly noticed was how she wrapped the both of us up in our extra large and fluffy blanket that we typically use during winters. My heart warmed a little at the situation, the overly comfy embrace of the blanket and Ruby's adorable presence set my heart truly at ease.

Swiftly moving before she could decide to block my attempts, I wrapped her up in a big hug.

"Wha- Hey! Get your big meaty arms out of the way I'm on like that last level!" She shouted indigently, to which I replied by loosening my arms enough so that she could play unobstructed. I just wanted a hug after all, and Brothers knows how much I hated it when people interrupted me when I was gaming.

"Hey…" Ruby says suddenly, "Do you want to play something cool I found?"

My tired and recently awoken mind sluggishly tried to interpret her words, yet it took me a whole minute of silent blank staring before I actually realized what she was saying. And once I did, I nearly declined her offer to give meditation another shot, preferably without the interruption of the two menaces stuck in my head. But then Lee's words of admonishment echoed through my mind as a thread of guilt flashed through me, and not to mention, I really could do with playing a mindless video game right about now.

"Wha.." My words paused as I briefly released Ruby to stretch and yawn, "What about the level you're on?"

The redhead shrugged, "Eh, for the last level it's been a huge disappointment anyway. The bots don't even get any better, they just scale the health!"

I snort and move to grab my scroll from my nightstand.

"Alright, I could use a break from meditation anyway."

"Awesome cookies!" Ruby replied excitedly, "I've been playing this new game recently called Grimm Runners, it's really cool but it requires co-op for 'the full experience' so I was really hoping you'd say yes!"

Interesting. I've heard of this game before from some of my classmates, but I didn't think Ruby would have gone ahead and bought it without mentioning it to me. Well, I certainly held no qualms in joining her in her newest obsession.

"Sure, I've heard some pretty good things about it."

Ruby began finagling with the old TV we had dragged into our room a long time ago, hooking the old thing up to our scrolls. It was always a wonder to me how Scrolls were capable of playing games that I was almost certain would have required beefy PCs back home.

"Okay just… like this!" Ruby said, distracting me from my thoughts. A smile broke out on my face as I picked up my scroll that would act kind of like a controller while I was playing. Hopefully, Ruby doesn't break her scroll by overusing her Semblance while trying to button-mash her way to victory, again.

The game started, the two of us being presented with the grandiose and ominous-sounding music of the main menu. Ruby didn't sit on the menu for long, quickly navigating to start a new co-op campaign and I quickly grew concerned when she selected the difficulty to be challenging instead of a more reasonable easy, or normal.

"Uh… Ruby?" I tried to ask but was quickly shushed as an intro cinematic began to play. It was, to be quite frank, mildly interesting at best in terms of a story hook. The story was your typical super ancient evil lurking below the earth slowly awakening and threatening all of human civilization, something quite common back on earth. At the very least here on Remnant, it could claim to be a somewhat original idea, still, I felt like they definitely could have tried a bit harder to come up with a more unique and profound story.

Ruby didn't seem to mind at all, and I couldn't help but smile at the overly excited grin she had on her face as the intro played out. It was only when said intro was finally finished, that was I granted permission to ask my question about the difficulty she had chosen.

"Sink or swim Russ, sink or swim…" She had just replied with what she probably thought was a wise and thoughtful facial expression.

In the end, I just shrugged and accepted my perhaps inevitable fate of dying over and over in this game, fully aware that my inherent skill in video games gathered across three separate lifetimes was perhaps a little rusty.

Five minutes into the game later I was proven more than right, "Brothers above, not again…"

"Heh, don't worry Russ, I know the game is difficult but if you put in the time to practice to be as great as me!" Ruby said smugly, and I gave her a stink eye in return.

"Says the girl using her Semblance to button mash harder than the enemy AI can react." I snarked back.

Ruby giggled, "Semblance usage is a perfectly valid method of attack, I'm sorry your useless Semblance can only help you make pretty lights!"

I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at that, and then with casual grace I manifested a single mote of those 'pretty lights' and proceeded to hover it in front of Ruby's face.

"Wha- Hey! Cheaty cheater!" Ruby exclaimed, valiantly trying to move her face around the petal that glowed a faint burgundy.

"Semblance usage is a perfectly valid method of attacking, Ruby." I mocked genially, a small smile on my face as my character rushed forward to score more kills than Ruby.

Really the two of us were on the same team, but we had made a game within the game by seeing who could score the most kills without dying. It wasn't very easy, mostly because of the difficulty Ruby had set the game on, but it spiced things up for me at the very least. The gameplay loop itself was relatively mundane all things said and done, in that way, it really was a game that got its full benefits only when it was played cooperatively with a friend, as most of the fun came not really from the story or the mechanics but from the interaction built into the levels.

Time passed as we delved deep into ancient ruins crowded by even more ancient Grimm, scavenging powerful artifacts left over by First Humanity to reinforce and modify our virtual mechashift weapons. Ruby had been less than satisfied by that portion of the game, the only available options being a sword, axe, or spear. I had to agree that it wildly underestimated the sheer scope and variety of Huntsman weapons, but Ruby in particular was froth about the lack of scythe representation.

Then of course the game was almost immediately abandoned when I off-handily mentioned an idea about using my Semblance to create three-dimensional models of potential weapon designs.

"YOU CAN DO, WHAT?!" She screamed, loudly.

"Hey! Keep it down up there you two!" Dad suddenly shouted, making Ruby and me wince. Though judging from the redhead's sparkling silver eyes, the chastisement hadn't dampened her excitement in the least.

"Show me." She said firmly, eyes boring into my own with a quiet intensity.

"Ruby, I don't even know if I actually can, it was just an id-" I tried to reply but was interrupted.

"Show me." She said, even more firmly, grabbing me by the shoulders and beginning to shake me violently like a ragdoll.

"Okay, okay I'll try to do something so stop shaking me!" I cried, begging for mercy.

To my surprise, the three-dimensional trick was a lot easier than I thought it would be, though I wasn't entirely sure why I was surprised in the first place. Everything else with complicated shapes was easier for me than Hans and Lee, so I wasn't sure why I thought this would be any different. It just sort of felt like this should have been something difficult to accomplish or some kind of skill that needed to be worked on, yet it came naturally in a way that I knew the others wouldn't be able to mimic.

I put those thoughts out of my mind, however, instead focusing on Ruby and trying to map her onslaught of ideas onto the virtual weapon that was taking shape in the middle of our room. A glowing burgundy scythe and axe pair that I knew would be iconic once finished.