"Guess this explains why Professor Ozpin asked US to check this out..." Yang muttered as she shook the remains of the monster off of her gauntlet. "There's no way these things are Grimm..."

Team RWBY were all taking a much-needed moment to catch their breath after fighting their way through a small army of giant centipede-like monsters. What was left of them refused to dissolve away to ash like the Grimm's bodies, meaning that they were surrounded by stinking, splattered corpses.

"Yeah, but that doesn't answer the question of what they ARE!" Weiss complained, holding up her scroll both to take photographs and to provide some light to the underground cavern. "We can't just go back with that information alone."

Blake used her cleaver-like sheath to slice the head from one of the twitching bodies with an air of professional detachment. "She's right. Just because they aren't Grimm doesn't mean they're from another dimension. It just means they're something new."

Weiss finished her work with a flourish. "Well, I sent the pictures off to to Isis. Hopefully she'll have an answer for us soon. For now, should we head deeper?" All eyes turned to their leader. Ruby pondered the question carefully, glancing back at the tunnel to the surface before shaking her head.

"We need more to go off of before we meet up with Professor Oobleck and Team JNPR, and we've still got an hour before the rendezvous. Let's keep moving."

Everyone seemed to agree, following Ruby deeper into the tunnel. Things were barely lit by the lantern they had brought with them, almost like the dark itself was pushing back against their encroachment.

"Sure would be nice to have someone with a glow-in-the-dark weapon..." Blake muttered. The complaint went unanswered as no one else wanted to prod that particular subject, but they all missed their fifth teammate.

"Yeah, she's still a multiverse superhero or something, right?" Yang asked, stretching her neck from side to side. "Maybe we should give her a call after this and ask how that's going for her!"

The idea seemed to raise everyone's spirits as they walked further and further into the dark. It was growing harder and harder to ignore the fact that it was becoming unnaturally cold, and soon they could see their breath puffing out into small clouds in front of their faces. For once, Yang was starting to regret her tendency towards short sleeves and a bare midriff, and a short glance to her partner made it clear that Blake wasn't pleased with the sinking temperatures, either. Weiss, of course, didn't seem to so much as shudder, and Ruby had just pulled her red cloak a little tighter against her body.

"This kind of cold isn't natural..." Weiss muttered as she examined a spot of frost on the cave wall. "But what could be causing a heat sink on this scale? If I didn't know better, I'd say that this place feels like an ice dust mine..." As she continued looking closely, her fingertip brushed against a congealed chunk of ice in a small recess in the wall.

The response was immediate and violent. The ice seemed to disassemble and shatter itself into hundreds of shards. The cloud of ice particles moved like a single organism, sliding and shifting over one another and grabbing onto her hand. Weiss cried out and violently shook her hand, but the ice held fast, the sharp edges quickly grinding through her aura and digging into her skin.

"WEISS! Hold on!" Ruby cried, running up and trying to brush away the possessed crystals with her hands. They had already completely encased her arm up to the elbow and were rapidly moving towards her shoulder. The thing seemed to react to Ruby like a magnet, beginning to expand and move towards the girl in red.

"G-Get back!" Weiss shouted, giving her a hard shove and sending Ruby crashing towards the ground. In her other hand, the revolver in her sword's dust chamber clicked into place, and red light flared up the edge of her rapier. A wave of blistering heat radiated outward from her as the fire dust inside ignited, and after a moment to make certain the blaze was under control she carefully passed it over her frozen arm. The ice swiftly melted away, reduced to steam by Weiss's timely efforts. She flexed her fingers in and out with a grimace as speckles of blood began to rise up from numerous puncture wounds in her skin, but after taking a moment to confirm that her arm was still functional, she returned Myrtenaster to its sheath.

"Are you okay?" Ruby approached her injured teammate with a hint of hesitation before an affirmative nod gave her the go-ahead to begin inspecting Weiss's arm.

"It didn't get deep, just pinpricks... a lot of them," Weiss muttered. "As for what, I have no idea... It was like the ice was ALIVE!"

"And it sure wasn't vegetarian..." Yang muttered, "You were almost a Weiss-sicle!" Her joke didn't do much to lift the mood, and everyone stared into the dark tunnel ahead with equal trepidation.

"That... or it could have been some kind of trap, or a guard." Blake's eyes narrowed as she stepped up to the front of the group. Her golden eyes gleamed in the low light, reminding everyone that she had the best night vision. "I think I can see a bigger chamber up ahead. We might be getting close to some answers."

"Then let's go..." Weiss grumbled, rolling up her sleeve on her injured arm. "I've got plenty of dust left, and I don't want to leave this place empty-handed."

"Okay, but everyone watch your step, and try not to touch anything!" Ruby tightened her grip on her scythe with a touch of worry in her voice. "We still have to make it back out, too!"

The four of them continued on in step with one another, never allowing the others out of arm's reach. Sure enough, Blake had been right: the tunnel soon opened up into a massive cavern, one that the light of their lantern had no chance of reaching the edges of. The ground dropped away into a deep crater, and Yang had to cover her mouth to stop herself from gagging at the sight of what laid below:

It was a lake of ice, the same kind of ice that had nearly taken over Weiss's arm. It looked to all be in the same kind of shards at first, but she could see floes of solid chunks floating around inside, each with a suspiciously human-shaped silhouette inside. She could make out the chitinous reflection of the centipede carapaces around them as they crawled into and out of tunnels bored into the walls, but for some reason they didn't seem to be interested in dealing with their intruders. The air felt thin, and she could feel a hollowness to it beyond the cold sucking the heat out of her body. She tried to rub her hands together for warmth, but it was like rubbing two ice cubes together: each one kept the other equally cold.

Every member of the team drew closer to one another and stepped away from the edge of the ice lake, but Blake's eyes weren't on the dangers around them: they were glued to the roof. Yang tried to follow her gaze, but she couldn't seem to make out the same thing her keen-eyed teammate could.

In her pocket, Yang felt her scroll begin to violently hum and vibrate, and she could tell by the startled jumps and movements of her teammates that they had all received the same message at once. She quickly reached down and opened up the device. The screen was dark, aside from two words in Isis's signature blocky pink text:

EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!

Yang glanced at the rest of her teammates. Weiss and Ruby both had the same worried look that made it clear they'd received the same frightening message. As they began to carefully retreat back to the tunnel they'd entered through, Yang could see that they were one girl short: Blake. She seemed to still be transfixed by whatever was above them, locked into place with her jaw beginning to hang slack. Yang reached out, grabbing her hand and giving it a firm yank to pull her back into the tunnel. The sudden motion finally broke whatever spell had been cast over her, snapping her back to the present as she was pulled into the relative safety of the tunnel.

"What was THAT for?" she hissed. Yang clapped her hand over the faunus girl's mouth and held up her scroll with Isis's message. After a moment, she pushed away Yang's hand. "Fine, sorry..."

With that, the four of them began to slink back along the path that they had entered by. Ruby held her scroll up to her mouth, whispering as quietly as possible into the device. "What IS this, Isis?"

The pink text didn't change, making it clear that their robotic friend wasn't interested in answering questions, which was a first.

Things must be BAD if Isis doesn't want to dump a bunch of information on us... Yang felt a chill run up her spine at the implications of Isis's silence. As they walked on and on, there was a sinking feeling that they were getting colder. The four of them were all beginning to shiver, and more and more ice was appearing on the walls for them to try to avoid. Was it this far to get DOWN here?

Their party came to a complete stop when they encountered an obstacle that definitely hadn't been present on their way in: a seal on the tunnel. It looked like more ice, but at least a foot thick, something that never could have formed in the time they'd been down here. They all looked warily at it, no one seeming to want to draw to close. Yang loaded a shotgun cartridge into her gauntlet, only to be stopped by a hand on her shoulder as Weiss strode past. She pressed the tip of her blade against the center of the seal and ignited another charge of fire dust. It was like a wave of relief to everyone when the temperature began to rise, and a small hole began to form in the ice, swiftly expanding by the second.

The seal exploded, sending chunks of ice everywhere as a torrent of the gigantic insects from earlier poured in with them. The ice chunks all split immediately into a flurry of razor-sharp shards, but Yang couldn't tell what was living ice and what was the biting and pinching of sharp pincers and legs. The lantern was thrown from Ruby's hand with a squeak, knocked back down the tunnel and leaving them all at the semi-lit edges of its range. Yang opened fire, blowing the head off of a centipede just as its mandibles were about to close down on her throat. The body was still twitching as she threw it aside and jumped back to her feet. She stomped on two more, one with each boot, before taking a second to examine the situation. Blake and Ruby both seemed to have had enough time to react to the army of bugs thanks to their semblances, but they each were quickly losing a limb to the living ice, with one of Blake's arms immobilized and Ruby's left leg grounded to the floor. Weiss seemed to be their primary target, barely holding off a platoon of the monsters with wide arcs of fire.

Yang dug deep, grabbing hold of the power buried in her gut as she triggered her semblance. Her golden hair began to crackle with yellow flames as her hands pulled into tight fists and her rage began to spill over. With a roar, she threw herself into the mass of monsters, ripping and tearing them to shreds with a flurry of punches and shotgun blasts.

"HIDING BEHIND THE ICE? THAT. IS. SO. CHEAP!" was the only thought she could articulate between the blows. For a while, the world turned into a blender of black blood, shattered exoskeletons, and viscera as she tore through the oncoming bugs like a one-woman army, but she was running out of power fast. She could feel herself winding back down after only a short time as if felt like all of the strength was sapped out of her body and into the air, but she knew that she could outlast the monsters: she had to, so she would. Even when her semblance ran out, Yang kept up her attack, relying on her shotgun blasts to rip apart her foes. One shot could reduce both her target and at least three more behind it to a fine mist.

There weren't many left when she heard the sound she hated most: Click! An empty chamber.

From behind her, silver light flooded the tunnel as Ruby's hidden talent made itself known. The monsters caught in the light of her sister's attack were reduced to ashes with a sizzle, finishing off the last of their opponents without issue.

"Think you could OPEN with that next time, sis?" With a sigh of relief, Yang stepped back and away from the already-stinking pile of corpses.

"So much for getting out quietly..." Blake's words were bitter, but her smile betrayed her gratitude for Yang's work as her formerly-frozen arm hung at her side.

"They set up an ambush for us, these things are smarter than they look." Ruby shook her head as Weiss's blade melted away the last of the ice from her leg. "They're not just dumb monsters."

"How? I thought we killed them all on our way in!" Blake shook her head with confusion.

"All the more reason for us to get out of here quickly..." Weiss replied. "Can you walk?"

Ruby took a moment to flex her leg with a grimace before hopping up and down on it and nodding. "Like you said, not deep pricks, just a lot of them... Ugh, it's like getting a hundred shots all at once!"

Weiss rolled her eyes. "Well, once we get back, I'll get you a lollipop for being such a good girl. Does that sound good, leader?"

"Hey, I'm not a kid!" Ruby fired back, only to reconsider her stance a moment later. "But yeah, a lollipop does sound nice..."

As Ruby limped back to pick up the lantern, a glimmer of motion caught Yang's eye on the ground: one of the centipedes was moving. At first, she dismissed it as post-mortem spasms, but as Ruby returned with the lantern, she spotted something that made her blood run colder: the blood from the thing seemed to be un-splattering itself, drawing together and pouring back into the open wounds.

"Girls... I think I figured out how they got behind us..." she whispered, taking a step back as it began to twitch more and more violently. Finally, with an unnatural snap, the pieces of its head reassembled themselves, and the monster stood intact again. "They're the same ones we fought on the way IN!"

"Come on, we've gotta move!" Ruby shouted, grabbing Blake and Weiss each by a hand and beginning to sprint back towards the entrance. Yang stayed right behind them, using the moment to discharge her spent casings and reach down to her belt for fresh clips. She could hear the creatures all hissing and shrieking as they reassembled themselves and took off in pursuit.

"We're almost there!" Weiss shouted, pointing to the dim light of the entrance to the tunnel.

Blake's eyes were on the opposite direction, looking back where they had come from. "They're catching up!"

Yang could hear the panic growing in her teammates voices. She'd already burned through all of her stored-up energy in her semblance, but right now she was the one on the back line, and she had fresh ammo, fire dust charges.

"GO! I'll buy us time!" She spun in place and pounded her fists together, daring the creatures to come at her. She didn't wait for them to arrive, throwing the fiery bullets out in rapid succession. The first few landed dead in the center of their ranks, sending shockwaves through the surging masses of legs and pincers. After a moment, however, another thought occurred to her, and she changed her target to the roof. With a series of explosions, the rock and dirt gave way, coming crashing down and cutting off their enemies completely. She could feel the burning aura of Weiss melting their escape way behind her, and she leaned forward to put her hands on her knees. Something about this place... It makes me so tired...

"Thanks..." Yang watched a trickle of water run past her boot as the light of the world above grew brighter.

The sound of more rocks clattering and shifting caught both Yang and Blake's ears, instantly drawing them back to the cave-in. As the light grew clearer and clearer, Yang could scarcely believe her eyes.

"Guuuuys, HURRY!" Blake called, levelling her gun at the barrier. One by one at first, then en masse, the stones began to lift off of the ground and back into the air. As the stone fused back into a single solid mass, flashes of light seeped out and coalesced. Flames burned in reverse, concentrating to single points. It was all that Yang could do to tackle Blake to the ground as her own bullets were fired back at them. The entire world erupted into fire and pain, and Yang felt herself lifted up and blasted away by the hail of explosions.

When the smoke and haze cleared, Yang was looking at the sky. Everything hurt, and she could tell just from how much pain she was in that her aura was completely spent, but it looked like they'd managed to get back out of the hellish tunnel, one way or the other.

They all stayed like that for a moment before something jolted Yang out of her reverie: a tug on her boot. She felt the world shift under her as the tug came again, and she put all of her effort into raising her head enough to look down her body. She felt a surge of panic as she watched one of the giant centipedes closing its mandibles on her ankle to drag her back towards the opening in the ground. She tried to kick at it, but her body was sluggish and too slow to respond, making her attack easy to dodge.

As she looked around for help, she could hear more indignant squeaks and shrieks from the rest of her team. They were in the same situation.

Come on... get up! she chided her body as she made another attempt to kick off the creature before it could drag her back underground. GET UP!

"HEY! Why don't you freaks pick on somebody your OWN size?" an unfamiliar voice called out.

There was a crackle of lightning and a gust of wind, and then the pressure on Yang's ankle was gone. A chorus of sounds that Yang could only categorize as "giant bug zappers" echoed and crackled through the air, and she could feel every hair on her body stand on end with static electricity. Moments later, an unfamiliar figure was standing over her, offering her a hand.

Yang groaned and gritted her teeth as the stranger pulled her up into a sitting position, trying not to cry out with the pain of moving.

Yang wanted to object in the strongest possible terms to being called "kid," but she didn't want to antagonize the woman who had just saved them. Instead, she forced out the first worry on her mind.

Yang took a moment, trying to examine the stranger more closely. She was lithe and muscular, definitely a runner's build rather than a fighter's. She wore what looked like iridescent white leather at first, but squinting revealed a much more scaly pattern to the material. It made up a light jacket and pair of leggings, while she wore a lightly magenta-tinged shirt underneath with an icon of a cloud and striking thunderbolt embroidered over her heart. The small splash of color complimented her eyes, which were a much more saturated version of the same shade. Her hair was long and white to match her clothes, wild and barely held together in a ponytail. The static electricity crackling among the strands kept it constantly shifting, as if it had a life of its own.

"You did a good job. Not just anybody could find a Baalchion Gate and make it out alive."

As the stranger turned back to her with a terse frown, something slipped out of the front of her shirt that Yang hadn't noticed: a necklace with a circular geode hanging around her neck. Her eyes widened as the gem swung freely, and she knew where she'd seen one just like it... but this one was blue, not red.

"I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but this confirms it... Your world is being invaded."

A chill ran through the air as a new figure began to emerge from the tunnel, and Yang's breath caught in her chest. Not only was it human, but it was a human she RECOGNIZED. The last time that Yang had seen her, she'd had a hole burned through the center of her chest. Before that, she'd been a hazy figure wreathed in flames, stealing away Sunset's best friend while they all helplessly watched.

Now, Cinder Fall was emerging from the ground as easily as one would climb a set of stairs. The hole in her chest was filled by a writhing black mass, her eyes were bleeding the same ichor as the other monsters, and both of her hands were being orbited by wide disks of ice crystals. She looked over the assorted huntresses with a hungry gleam in her eye and began to rise off of the ground. Below her feet, tendrils of frost began to stretch out towards them. In her gut, Yang could tell that THIS was where that "hungry ice" had come from.

The woman in white pounded her fist into her palm with a crackle of electricity as she rose back to her feet.

"There's the gate's guardian. Must be the poor soul they used for the portal catalyst..." She tilted her head from side to side, stretching her neck with a series of pops. "I'll put her out of her misery."

"C-careful!" Yang eked out the word before the woman could throw herself into the fight. "She's dangerous..."

That caused the corner of the woman's mouth to tug upwards into a smile. She lowered herself into a starting position, and her hair all flared out behind her as the electricity began to build higher and higher. It spread across her clothes, then across her skin and finally collected around her geode, where the white bolts seemed to tint just a hint blue before sinking into her body for the last time.

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Sunset drove her knee as hard as she dared into the small of Penn's back, keeping him pinned to the ground. "I'm TRYING to help you!"

Penn flailed weakly underneath her, failing to throw her off by a long shot. "What a to-do to die today, at a minute or two to two!" He flexed up and down again, but Sunset drove him back to the ground before he could break away again while being careful to avoid the roiling black gashes in his back. "T'was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe!"

She cast a desperate glance at Missy for clarity, but the little angel could only respond with a worried shrug before returning to flipping through the most recent binder of cards at top speed. It looked as if they were both equally clueless about whether or not he was trying to send them some kind of message.

"CRIKEY, I'VE LOST MY MOJO!" Penn screamed before thrusting his face into the dirt and roaring at the top of his lungs.

"High Humes, what does THAT mean?" Sunset asked. It hurt her to see Penn like this, unable to do anything to help except stop him from hurting himself. When he'd first woken up, he'd bolted for the nearest tree and begun slamming his head against it as if he were trying to concuss himself. Isis's taser had been useless, and it had taken one of Sunset's more advanced martial arts throws to bring him down so he would stop trying to bash his skull in.

"So, what, the ink is more REAL than Penn?" Missy asked, pressing her hand to her temple as she examined another card more closely.

"Rule number 40, if it seems like someone is out to get you- GAAAH!" Penn writhed again, this time in pain. Sunset could only watch as the gashes in his back seemed to widen and dig in deeper pf their own accord.

Penn was panting rapidly, gasping desperately for air as Sunset felt shivers traveling through his body and he began to break out into a cold sweat.

"In fearful day, in raging night, in fearful day, in raging night, in fearful day, in raging night..." He seemed to have been reduced to repeating those six words, now, as his body went limp underneath her. Sunset eased up on the pressure on her knee as fear began to creep higher and higher from her gut into her throat.

"What can we do to help you?" she whispered, praying that he'd find some way to get a message through to them.

"UGH, THIS IS NO HELP!" Missy shrieked, slamming the binder of cards shut before throwing it back into the back seat of the car. "Why isn't there anything USEFUL in there?"

Sunset glanced back to Penn, seeing the black satchel at his waist. She closed her eyes and swallowed before reaching down and unzipping the top. She slipped her hand inside, feeling the plastic of the card covers. She didn't try to remove them to look at what they were, she just whispered a plea.

Move. Sunset heard the voice more in her mind than in the air, but she knew who it belonged to. She leaned back and away, releasing him from her pin.

Missy's question was cut off as a card slipped out of the satchel: a trap card Sunset recognized from his duel with Joshua, Fiendish Chain. The art of the card burst open, sending pitch-black chains matching the illustration into the night air before they crashed down around Penn's body. The unnatural bindings snaked around his body over and over, wrapping him from the neck down in a prison of cold black metal. Anchoring themselves in the ground, the chains pulled him up into a standing position, and his head sagged limply as he fell completely unconscious.

"Negating the ink demon's effects!" Missy shouted, finishing Isis's sentence. "Of COURSE! Why didn't I think of that?"

"Still, that gives us a little more time to think..." Sunset sunk to the ground as relief overwhelmed her to have even just a moment's peace. Big Sis, if you can hear me, THANK YOU...

"What kind of doctor would we go to for THIS?" Missy gestured to the entire situation.

Off in the trees beyond the campfire's reach, Sunset spotted a flash of blue light. She blinked, unsure what could have caused it, but something about it held her attention. Penn said that "force" could give precognition, right? Maybe it's not just for warning about danger...

"I... think I saw something." She pushed herself to her feet and started walking in the direction she'd seen the light. "I'll be right back, stay with him."

"But- But what about- But-" Missy stammered, clearly frustrated beyond words when she folded her arms over her chest and sunk back to the ground and cracked open the third binder of cards.

Sunset couldn't help but feel guilty as she left the campsite behind and wandered through the trees. It felt selfish to walk away from the situation chasing a hunch, like she was just leaving the problem to Missy and Isis to solve while she got some space. As she wandered farther and farther into the trees, she wondered if her mind had just invented the light she'd seen, but just as she was ready to turn back around, she finally caught sight of another flash just ahead.

It was a small blue box with a slowly revolving light on top. It was hardly much bigger than a phone booth, with white windows and blue wood paneling. Across the top were glowing letters that read "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX." As she came closer, she could see a white sign with blue lettering posted on the outside.

Police Telephone
Free
for use of
PUBLIC

Advice & Assistance
Obtainable Immediately
Officers & Cars
Respond to all calls

PULL TO OPEN

Is this... some kind of hotline? Sunset glanced around for any signs of civilization that would make putting a helpline out here make sense. A helpline for... middle-of-nowhere emergencies?

She reached out to the door and gave the handle a hard tug, but it refused to budge. She pulled again, but it still didn't so much as crack, seeming to be sealed tight.

And just like that, Sunset felt a horrible gravity come crashing down on her hopes. The sheer weight of it pulled her against the box and down to the ground, where she pulled her knees up against her chest. She couldn't bear the thought of going back to Penn and Missy and Isis now, not empty-handed. It would be worse than leaving.

"Can't we catch a break? I don't want to be rescued, I just want help..." she whispered as her tears began to fall.

Just beside her ear, Sunset heard the sound of squeaking hinges, and her head snapped up just in time to see the door opening inward. Inside was a tall, older-looking man with short gray hair and wearing a black suit, staring down at her with a look of surprise.

Sunset blinked, trying to remember if she'd ever met the man before for a second before deciding that it didn't matter. She pointed back in the direction of the campsite.

"My friend, he's sick... He needs help and I don't know what to do, and I saw the sign and-."

"Wha- Again? What did he do THIS time?" The man rolled his eyes for a second before the door slammed shut. A second later, he re-emerged with a stethoscope in one hand and a pair of black sunglasses in the other. "You know, one of these days I'm going to start charging you two!" he declared while pointing at her before disappearing into the trees in the direction of the camp. Sunset started to scramble to her feet, only to find herself being helped by another pair of hands. This time, it was a young woman who came out of the box, with shoulder-length dark hair and a warm smile.

"Hello again, Sunset. It's been a while!" She gave Sunset's back a brief dusting as she helped her to her feet. "How have you been?"

Sunset blinked, greeted once again with the conundrum of someone she didn't know recognizing her.

"I don't... I'm sorry, but... have we met?" she gestured to her head. "I- I'm kind of a mess right now, I'm sorry if my memory is bad..."

The girl stopped, peering at her closely for a moment. Sunset wasn't sure what she was looking for, but she seemed to find it after a few seconds, her eyes widening with surprise. "This is early, isn't it? Really early!" She glanced around the nearby area. "Who have you found, so far? Is there anyone else with you, like Rainbow Dash?"

"Don't worry, I'll explain everything. For now, though..." she nodded in the direction that the strange man had run off in. "Let's go find our know-it-all friends before their collective troublemaking gets us all in over our heads, huh?" With a squeeze of her hand, Sunset felt a wave of reassurance. Something about this girl, even if she didn't know her... it felt familiar. Safe. Deep in her heart, Sunset knew she was among friends. "Don't worry, everything's gonna be just fine."

The woman gave her a smile and held out her other hand for a handshake. "I'm Clara, by the way. Clara Oswald." She pointed ahead of them. "And that fellow you just met for what seems to be the first time is the Doctor."

"Sunset Shimmer... though I guess you already know that..." Sunset did the only thing she could think of and accepted the handshake.

"Yeah, like I said, it's a little bit complicated..." Clara sighed, "but don't worry, we'll catch you up!"

The Multiverse in a Nutshell

by Pennington Inkwell

Beginning of the End