Jaune couldn’t make heads or tails of any of this.

Second Thoughts was his semblance. The physical manifestation of his soul.

Ever since Second had been fully unlocked back in that meeting with Oobleck, he had been a constant in Jaune’s life. Chastising him from inside his head, getting him in trouble with people by revealing knowledge he shouldn’t have, occasionally being helpful, possibly being a friend…

Even if he’d known the whole time that on some level that Second was his own person with his own thoughts and feelings, he hadn’t thought it was so… literal.

And he didn’t see how it was possible.

Granted, he was probably the least informed on the subject in the group. He had gone into initiation not knowing what aura was, after all. But he’d been paying attention in his classes! Mostly… he definitely paid attention to all the extra lessons that Pyrrha had been giving him, at least.

But, with his limited understanding, this just wasn’t computing. How does someone go from a… a completely normal person? to a semblance of all things? That’s not how this stuff worked!

Was it?

Did all semblances used to be people? Was his the only one that could talk? Maybe he was just the first person to have his manifest in a way that the semblance could communicate the fact that they were a person. Not that Second had explained it. Or, well, this was his explanation, wasn’t it?

So caught up in his scattered thoughts, he was barely paying attention to the ever changing display around him. He’d already seen most of this in his not-dreams, anyway.

Until the smoke erased the home office, and instead placed them in Beacon.

“While the minds of humanity are capable of much, they cannot draw from nothing,” Jinn’s narration continued.

Jaune watched as… Jaune? walked out onto a rooftop with Pyrrha.

It was strange, looking at himself like this. Except, it wasn’t him? The version of him he was watching was less… detailed, his movements more stilted.

“Pyrrha, I know I’m going through a hard time right now, but I’m not that depressed.” The other-him looked over the edge of the roof. “I can always be a farmer or something.”

“No!” The not-Pyrrha dragged his counterpart away from the ledge. “That’s not why I brought you up here!”

As Jaune watched the scene play out, he only grew more and more confused.

This was him, but not. It was Pyrrha, sort of. This scenario… it hadn’t happened at all.

Not like this, at least.

The not-Jaune admitted to having cheated his way into Beacon, but instead of it being an opportunity for him to grow closer to his partner, he pushed other-Pyrrha away, insisting that he had to handle things on his own.

Was this…

Was this what would have happened if Second Thoughts hadn’t been guiding him?

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The scene faded away with another batch of blue smoke.

“Instead, you pull from elsewhere. Other times. Other worlds.”

Glynda watched as the Vale docks formed before her, Roman and his misfit crew of White Fang touching down to steal the dust containers.

She was struggling to wrap her head around all of this. Other worlds? Fantasies being other realities? What did that mean, exactly? Was the smut that Ms. Belladonna hid so poorly real somewhere out there? None of it seemed real to her.

And yet Ozpin, the centuries old wizard and her boss, had acted like this Jinn was serious business. Like she should accept what was being shown to her.

It was hard to do that when what she was seeing was close to what she knew, and yet so different.

The warning they had received from Second Thoughts about Ms. Belladonna’s fanaticism regarding the White Fang seemed to be a fair one, if this truly was some version of reality.

She watched as the foolish girl confronted Roman Torchwick on her own. “Brothers of the White Fang, why are you aiding this scum?”

Glynda clenched her hand around The Disciplinarian harder with every passing moment as the girl was assisted by not just Mr. Wukong, who had apparently joined her in this venture, but Ms. Rose and James’... and Penny as well.

Staking out the docks for two nights had been torturous, especially since she had the displeasure of having to do it with Peter and Qrow present, but she would do it again if it meant avoiding a disaster like this.

Is this how things would have played out without Second’s warning? Or was it simply some other, random reality? Jinn’s explanation of her abilities had included a “no future knowledge” clause, but how did that come into play with things like this?

There would need to be some explanations when all of this was over.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

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Given what she had just been shown, Winter did not like the fact that the scene changed to a Valean warehouse that was familiar to her.

Belladonna and Wukong jumping out of the window, followed by the Paladin, which she had safely recovered, bursting through the wall, only cemented that feeling.

“Though these events are not as you remember them, though they are not this reality as it exists, they occurred all the same.”

The Paladin chased after the students, and Winter found that though the action was moving, she was not. How inconsiderate of this Jinn to play things out like this.

But with the Schnee Glyphs, it was all too easy to keep up, following along… and seeing the path of destruction left in their wake.

The foolish faunus duo decided to escape by leading Torchwick to the freeway, leaping from car to car. Roman showed even less care for the innocents around him than they did, plowing through vehicles and sending them flying.

She kept on following, unable to bring herself to look back at their fate, focusing on what was in front of her instead. This had not happened. She had prevented it. Those people had not died.

She watched as Vasilias and the remaining members of team RWBY joined in the fight. As they damaged the road, causing untold amounts of damage. As they failed to capture Torchwick, due to the interference of Neo.

She forced herself to watch it all.

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When Roman had been forced to get involved in this whole mess, he hadn’t expected something like this. Not even when the kid and his semblance had sucked some sort of freaky magic shit out of a girl in a box and shoved it into Neo.

“For as long as he has been able to communicate in his new form, Second Thoughts has used his knowledge of these other realities to influence events, guiding those he could reach to make decisions that would lead to, in his eyes, an ideal future.”

Roman watched as Beacon fell. As Vale barely scraped by. As thousands of people died in what he could only assume was Cinder’s original plan coming to fruition.

Atop one of Ironwood’s giant battleships, it was a rather dashing version of him alongside Neo, fighting off Red. A swarm of Nevermore were flying all around them, but with so much tasty fear in the air, the trio went largely ignored by all the grimm.

“But why?! What do you get out of it?!” The fake Red called out.

Despite that he had not lived this, that he likely never would, Roman was able to mouth along the words as his other-self spoke them. “You’re asking the wrong questions, Red. It’s not what I have to gain, it’s that I can’t afford to lose.”

A flurry of blows were exchanged, and Red was left dangling from her stupid scythe off the side of the ship.

“I may be a gambling man, but even I know there are some bets you just don’t take.”

Neo approached, ready to finish the job.

“Like it or not, the people that hired me are going to change the world. You can’t stop ‘em, I can’t stop ‘em, and you know the old saying. If you can’t beat ‘em-”

Rose hit the switch on Hush, and the whipping winds from so high in the air quickly pulled Neo off the ship as she tried to keep a grip on her parasol.

Was this really what he had been planning on doing?

While the other him and fake Red duked it out, he turned to look down on the chaos. It was like Mountain Glenn all over again, wasn’t it? So many people dying, and for what? What had Cinder even been after? Just the power that Neo had now? Roman was a lot of things, but… was Cinder really willing to sign off on the deaths of so many people just for a bit of power? She was already strong enough, for fuck’s sake…

“...for me? I’ll do what I do best.” Roman tuned back in to what he was sure was a beautiful monologue from the handsome fellow with the cane. “Lie, steal, cheat, and survive!”

Roman paused as he saw what happened next.

There was no way. After all of that bullshit… after dealing with Cinder for so long, ensuring her plans went through…

He seriously died because a Griffon swallowed him?

That semblance… what had he said at the end of that meeting? Something about joining the moron he was stuck with or dying?

In the so-called “reality” before him, he stayed with Cinder and died a pathetic death.

Had the little punk been serious?

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“But there has been so much that he felt the need to change. Fates that he was determined to avoid. He struggled to keep close to a path that he thought he knew, because he felt it was the only certain way to avoid deaths that he knew were coming.”

That wasn’t the sort of line that Pyrrha wanted to hear as the scenery changed to her and Cinder alone in some ruins. There were giant metal gears all around, which, while strange, one would think put things in her favor.

But if she were the one to win, if Cinder were the one to die in this battle… well, she doubted that would be a “fate” that Second would deem worth changing.

Not keen on watching her own death, Pyrrha turned away, looking out into… oh. This must be a continuation of the last scene. She doubted that Beacon would be in such a state more than once, after all.

She tried to block it all out. To focus on something else.

Like how Second’s “story” analogy when Mr. Arc first arrived seemed to be much more literal than any of them had thought.

It was a strange thing to think about.

She was real. She was certain of that much. Her life had been too… too full, too detailed, too… too much to be anything but real. The ups and downs and small everyday things were reality.

She didn’t really get what all of this Relic and Knowledge and Jinn business was about. But all of the “in the know” people seemed to think it was a big deal, so…

Was it truly possible that somewhere out there… that she was just a character in a story? Were the characters in the stories that she read real? Not here, but… somewhere out there…

And what did all of this mean for Jaune? Granted, it was probably a much bigger deal for Second Thoughts, and she did want the semblance… the… she wanted Second to…

She cared more about Jaune. Perhaps that was selfish of her. But Jaune… he meant a lot to her. He was the leader of team JNPR. He was her partner. He was her… he was…

She really hoped that these… visions weren’t going to be how Jaune found out how she felt about him.

If there was going to be awkwardness in the team, she wanted to at least get a kiss out of it first.

But would he be okay after all of this? She was struggling to accept… well, if she was being honest with herself, she hadn’t really accepted any of this. She was quietly pushing it all to the back of her mind to freak out about later. But if it was that bad for her, then she didn’t even know how to imagine…

She took a deep breath as the fighting behind her grew quiet. As Ruby rushed up the side of the tower, stopping beside her. As she heard herself gasping for air. As Ruby screamed, and everything returned to the blank white that Jinn had initially cast them into.

She would just have to be there for Jaune. Try to help him, wherever she could, just like she had been so far.

“But attempting to follow a path is difficult. Especially when you’ve seen so many branches.”

The blue smoke returned once more, and the scene changed before her.