Fox in the Henhouse [RWBY]

[Amacita]

Fox in the Henhouse
A RWBY Fanfic by Amacita

Foreword

Jackie, the main character of Fox in the Henhouse, has seen a lot of changes since I first created her in late 2017. She started as a roleplay character on a subreddit which shall not be named. When that subreddit began to implode under the weight of a toxic community and their corrupt, bullying moderators, I transferred Jackie to a superior roleplay sub, WormRP2, or as it is sometimes known, KracRP.
 
Set in the futuristic utopia of Earth Krac, KracRP is the invention of my good friend TCGM, who is providing worldbuilding support for this story so that I can keep it consistent with the roleplay.
 
Because she is a character with years of history, she has a peculiar way of thinking, one which usually works out well for her despite how bizarre it seems at first glance. She also has a broad and somewhat eclectic set of powers which will be revealed as the story goes on.
 
By Remnant standards, Jackie is extraordinarily powerful. Not nearly as powerful as the Brothers, but more than strong enough that she isn’t worried about anything Salem, Beacon, or the Atlas military could throw at her.
 
The main point of this story is to have fun and try to make Remnant a better place without getting caught up in any life or death struggles. For Jackie, the primary limitation is not what she is able to do, but rather what she chooses to do. And that is a responsibility that she takes quite seriously, even as she tries to solve all problems with cuddles.
 
If that sounds like your kind of story, read on.

[Amacita]

Part 1

Chapter 1

In which I hug some Grimm only to be “saved” by an idiot.
 
Grimm. Creatures of darkness and despair, they love nothing more than tearing people limb from limb. To some, they are the stuff of nightmares. Me? I call them cute. Big, adorable, huggable pets. Or at least that’s what they will be once I’m done teaching them the meaning of hugs and training them not to attack people.
 
Currently, it was not going so well. I’d managed to bait a pack of wolf-like Grimm, which my phone helpfully informed me were called beowolves, into hugging distance, and, well… they were trying to eat me. Each one individually must have weighed at least a couple hundred pounds, and right now there were six of them. Six red-eyed, slathering beasts with my tails in their mouths, nomming away like a dog on a bone. Every one in a while, they’d viciously shake their heads, tossing me around in an effort to break my spine or pull me apart.
 
It tickled. Like, seriously, I couldn’t stop giggling. My face was all red, and I was shrieking and batting at them ineffectually with my puny little arms. At this rate, I was more likely to die from lack of oxygen than any damage they might do to me.
 
They couldn’t hurt me. My whole body was more or less as tough as titanium, and even if they did somehow manage to injure me, I would just regenerate, so there was absolutely zero danger to me. But still, I was supposed to be teaching them about hugs, not getting tickle attacked into submission.
 
That was when someone very brave and very stupid stepped into save me. He must have heard my “screaming” from the road.
 
“Get away from her!” The voice was masculine, but wavering, uncertain. Scared as hell and trying not to show it.
 
The beowolves, as one, turned to face the interloper. They also stopped nomming my tails long enough for me to blink the tears from my eyes and get a good look at him. He was tall and blond, wearing a metal chest plate like a knight in shining armour. He stood in front of the pack, legs planted in a wide stance, sword and shield held before him.
 
He was going to die. I could see it, not just in his terrified eyes, but with one of my powers. Visible only to me, ugly threads of black coiled with red and spotted with purple pustules connected him to each of the beowolves. My power translated the threads instantly, telling me exactly what he thought of beasts now stalking towards him: “oh shit, I’m going to die.”
 
A flicker of will, and my thread sight inverted, revealing red lines of pure aggression flowing from them to him and only him. Seriously. The Grimm that had taken me an hour to get the attention of were already fixated on him like I didn’t even exist. So unfair.
 
They were drawn to fear. That had to be it. He was scared of them. I wasn’t.
 
Shit. With another thought, the spectral threads vanished from my sight, and I watched with clear eyes as the first of the pack tested itself against his shield. He blocked the lunge clumsily and backed up, but already three of the pack were circling to flank him.
 
I stood up. My heart pounded in my ears. I didn’t want to watch someone die my first day on Remnant! Why did he have to try to save me if he knew he couldn’t win?
 
“Hey!” I shouted at the Grimm, trying to get their attention back. I charged at the closest one, leaping onto its back and hugging it violently with all nine tails. My biosuit, picking up on my intent, immediately began dissolving the Grimm, chewing through bone and muscle, and whatever strange black flesh they have instead of organs. In a matter of seconds, the Grimm dropped to the ground, lifeless.
 
Five left. Three flanking him, two in front, and instead of focusing on them, he stares at me wide-eyed over top of his shield. I must have looked pretty badass standing atop the dissolving Grimm, nine black tails flowing behind me, utterly unscathed when just about anyone else would have been dead.
 
That moment cost him, because just then one of the Grimm bowled into him from the side. His sword slid away in the grass. He held on to his shield, barely, only bringing it up just in time to stop the next beowolf from biting his face off. Teeth and claws scraped loudly against metal, and the knight grunted as the beast’s weight crushed him into the dirt.
 
I leapt off the back of the dead beowolf and came in with a spin attack that had nine tails slamming into the one on top of the blond knight. The monster’s head snapped back from the force of the impact, and the beast flew off of him, tumbling into one of its friends before crashing into the side of a tree.
 
My tails weigh more than I do. Imagine getting hit with 120 pounds of solid titanium, and that’s what it was like. That Grimm wouldn’t be getting up.
 
Four left. At this point, the only thing that mattered was keeping my would-be saviour safe, and the best way to do that was to hug him. So I did. I threw myself on top of him, pressing myself up against his shield and all but cocooning the both of us in a dome of floof. The remaining beowolves threw themselves against it, only to find themselves drowning in hundreds of thousands of hairs, each one coated with a very protective and very corrosive (when it wants to be) piece of biotech.
 
I called him Jerry. Jerry the biosuit.
 
Needless to say, they didn’t last long, and I could feel Jerry’s smugness radiating off of him, suffusing every inch of my body with a warm sense of satisfaction.
 
Good job, Jerry.
 
Now with that taken care of, I could turn my focus to the guy I was currently on top of. I pulled my tails into something a little more tidy, allowing the early morning sun to reach us again. The boy—and I could see he was a boy now, no older than me—squinted against the light. He also stopped screaming, which was nice.
 
“Hey,” I said by way of greeting. I peered down at him over the top of his shield, our noses nearly touching. My breasts were also pressing into his shield, which wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I wasn’t complaining. I mean, if I’m going to be splayed out on top of a guy, I’d prefer it to be with at least a few inches of solid metal between us. His shield wasn’t that thick, but it was, I deemed, acceptable for now.
 
“They’re gone now, right?” he asked, his pupils still little pinpricks of black in a sea of blue.
 
“Yup.”
 
“Completely?”
 
I grinned, despite the fact that my heart was still pounding from how this idiot had almost gotten himself killed. “One hundred percent deado, bucko.”
 
Only now did he relax his shoulders, letting out a tense breath. The shield shifted as he tried to get up, but I wasn’t budging. With a grunt, he pushes harder, but without any leverage he couldn’t budge me.
 
“You’re heavier than you look,” said the guy with a death wish.
 
I shrugged it off, still just happy that I was getting to hug someone. I’d been on Remnant for maybe three hours now, and already my tails were starting to lose their fluffiness. I needed hugs to recharge them, dammit!
 
“It’s the tails,” I explained.
 
He grunted again, this time trying to tilt his shield and slide me off, all the while holding in face in a some awkward rictus of a grin. Just refusing to acknowledge the fact that I’m on top of him and hoping that he can dislodge me drawing attention to it. It was kind of cute the way he got more awkward and more desperate the longer it went on. His face kept getting redder until finally it was like the dam burst, and all at once he said in a squeaky voice, “Do you mind? I’m just trying to get up, and you’re kind of on top of me, so—”
 
I got up, dealing with my own awkward feelings purely through the power of pretending they didn’t exist. “Thanks for the hugs. I need them to live.”
 
“Alright. Yeah.” When he made his way to his feet and collected his equipment, I could see that he stood a full head taller than me. Maybe more than that. Then, remembering what it was he came here for, he asked, “Are you okay? I heard you screaming, and when I got here the Grimm were all…”
 
I waved off his concern with a flick of the tail. “I was just teaching them how to hug.” I cast a disappointed look at the six beowolf corpses, now disintegrating into motes of black dust. “Huh,” I muttered, pointing at them. “They do that?”
 
“What?” he gave me a strange look, though whether it was for the hug comment or my lack of Grimm knowledge wasn’t clear. “I mean, obviously,” he said after a pause, though the way he said it made me think he didn’t know either.
 
Changing the subject, he then thrust out his hand and flashed me what he thought to be a winning smile. “The name’s Jaune. Jaune Arc. Short, sweet, rolls off the tongue—ladies love it.”
 
“Jackie Lee.” I met with his eyes with utter seriousness. “Unofficial Ambassador from the world of Earth Krac. Here to save Remnant through the power of hug magic.”

[Amacita]

Chapter 2

In which I drug Jaune and run from the cops.
 
Jaune didn’t believe me. Not about the magic. Not about being from another world. Certainly not about my plan for world domination via cute cuddly Grimm. Which was a shame because I actually like it when people take me seriously. I may be eccentric, but I’m not dumb, and when I say something is true I usually have good reason.
 
I could have proved it to him any number of ways, but at the moment, I had bigger problems to worry about. Problems like what to do with Jaune.
 
It didn’t take me long to get the story out of him. He ran away from him to become a Huntsman, which were like professional Grimm slayers.
 
I made a quick mental note of that, that these people were perhaps my natural enemy when it came to cute-ifying all the Grimm across Remnant. No more Grimm threat meant no more Huntsmen. No more Huntsman schools. No more Huntsman supply shops. Possibly a lot of people out of work. Which meant my quest may take me up against an established industry with strong lobbying powers if I wanted to change anything on a large scale.
 
But that was a problem for Future Jackie. Present Jackie just had to keep Jaune from getting killed.
 
“Look,” I explained to him, once we’d made our way back to the main road—or more of a loosely defined path, really. From the little scouting I’d done, it seemed like Remnant wasn’t big on the whole “roads” concept. “Vale is how far away? A week?”
 
Jaune was not liking where this talk of ours was going. I could tell mostly because of how he was walking away from me and refusing to look in my direction. “I made it this far on my own.”
 
“You did, yes.” And to be fair, if I hadn’t spent an hour actively looking for Grimm so I could cuddle them, there wouldn’t have been any near the road. He might have made it to Vale without encountering a single one. Still could. Maybe. If he was lucky.
 
“If you run into any more Grimm, you’ll die. Maybe they’ll train you to handle yourself once you get to—”
 
“Beacon,” he supplied, his eyes still fixed on the path ahead.
 
“Right, well—”
 
Now he did look at me, and when he did, his eyes held a bitter spark. “See, this is why I didn’t tell anyone.” He rolled his eyes, and his voice took on a mocking lilt. “Oh Jaune, you’re so helpless, you can’t do anything on your own. You can’t become a Huntsman.” He turned his head like he was going to spit, then thought better of it and huffed instead. Back in his normal voice, he went on. “No one would train me. No one believed in me. And now you.” He glared at me, challenging me to defy him. “You’re not going to talk me out of it.”
 
I sighed, backing off. It seemed I’d hit a nerve. Part of me wanted to just leave him to his own devices, but a bigger part knew that would be reckless. And where I come from, we’re pretty big on responsibility when it comes to not leaving people to uncertain death.
 
The easiest thing to do would be to return him to his parents. I could even call them first to ask about a—I wouldn’t call it a ransom, more like a finder’s fee. A bounty, if you will. All it would take is crushing the dreams of a guy whose only crime was risking his life to “save” me.
 
A subtle glance showed that Jaune was back to ignoring me, only his defiant scowl had been replaced by a more subdued pout. It was almost kind of cute. Would be cute on a girl.
 
I sighed heavily. If I did what was probably the right thing here and flew him home, I’d feel like shit, wouldn’t I?
 
The silence between us drew on, an awkwardness only broken up by the rustle of leaves and the sound of our footsteps on packed dirt.
 
“Alright,” I said at length. “I’m not going to stop you. I still think it’s a dumb idea, but… “ I trailed off, trying to think of a polite way to say, Once you reach Beacon, you’re no longer my problem.
 
It seemed that Jaune got the gist of it, because when he spoke, his voice was dripping in sarcasm. “Gee, thanks.” To be fair, he probably didn’t how how easily I could follow through on stopping him, and I did just tell him that his hopes and dreams were stupid and unrealistic.
 
And yes, I knew how hypocritical that sounded coming from the girl who wanted to save the world through hugs. But believe it or not, my plan was actually grounded in reality.
 
No doubt Jaune saw the irony as well, which was why his opinion of me was about as low as my opinion of him. But we were stuck together until I could get rid of him. Fortunately, I had a way to do that. Unfortunately, it was going to suck.
 
“Hey Jaune, “ I said, turning to him with a resigned sigh. “Are you afraid of heights?”
 

***

 
Once upon a time, back when I was newly arrived on Earth Krac, I earned a boon from an ancient dragon and the spirit of Magic itself. Well, it was less “earned” and more “gained their attention and they liked me,” but that was par for the course. Really, I don’t know what it is about me that makes me like catnip for unspeakably powerful beings, but so far it’s been working out in my favour. The pair of massive, magical dragon wings that I could sprout at will was just one example of that.
 
Since then, I’ve come to learn two things. One: flying is very, very convenient. And two: I… kind of hate it.
 
Please, nobody tell the dragons. I don’t want to hurt their feelings.
 
At any rate, the flight to Vale took a little less than an hour. It was still early in the morning when we arrived, and I started circling the city, looking for a place to land with an urgency not unlike someone who really, really needs to use the washroom. There were a few cars on the streets, and the morning sun was still casting long, sharp shadows.
 
Anyone looking up would have easily noticed a dark shape against a backdrop of sun-lit clouds. When I said my wings came from dragons, I wasn’t kidding, and that meant they were appropriately dragon sized. My super awkward wingspan, fully extended, was about the size of a house. Not a small house either, so I probably freaked a few people out. Yet another reason to land quickly.
 
Soon I spotted a large, open park near the harbour, where I made my landing. I released Jaune from the cocoon of fluff I’d been carrying him in, and he spilled out on the grass like a quivering, crying sack of sadness and vomit. I was right there next to him, shaking and miserable. Partly because flying is freaky, but also because there’s just something deeply unpleasant about holding onto someone for an hour as they’re crying and miserable and wanting you to stop.
 
I felt like shit. That was another aspect of my powers. Just like the thread sight lets me see empathically what someone thinks or feels about what’s around them, I also have the ability to physically feel a version of that. And that’s a part of my power that I can’t turn off. So the whole way here, it felt like skinny dipping in liquified dumpster waste, all wet and cold and chunky.
 
Let me reiterate: flying sucks. Carrying a guy who gets violently airsick double sucks.
 
Once we both finished spewing chunks, we sort of just looked at each other and made an unspoken vow to never speak of this again. Then, like a good civic citizen, I carefully swept my foot over the mess to let Jerry clean it up.
 
Jerry was a good boy. Jerry didn’t complain. I still made a mental promise to make it up to him with chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.
 
Then, because my wings stretched from one side of the park to the other and Jaune was staring, I retracted them. It felt kind of like pulling a measuring tape back into the dispenser, except my shoulder blades were the dispenser. They even made a shick sound as they disappeared back into the magical subspace from when they came.
 
Jaune said nothing. He just stared at my wings disappearing then threw up his hands, like he was too emotionally exhausted to deal with me right now.
 
“Not much of a morning person, are you?” I asked, because sounding bitchy while trying to show concern is my special talent. There’s a reason I do my best communicating through hugs.
 
Jaune’s only response was a grunt while looking around, trying to get his bearings. Pretty sure he was still mad at me. Not that I blamed him. I’d be pretty pissed if someone dragged me on an hour-long, vomit-inducing flight against my will.
 
“Look,” I tried, “at least let me make it up to you.”
 
Now he turned to look at me. “By leaving me alone?”
 
Ouch. “No. Well, yes. But first, how about some hot chocolate to wash away the taste of…” I trailed off, not wanting to mention the thing that we’d agreed not to mention.
 
“Fine. Is there, like, a cafe around here?”
 
“Even better!” I took out my phone—a device which in and of itself carried unspeakable power and was so heavily classified that it was probably illegal even to think of it. “Phone, two Hightower Hot Chocolates, please! Make them plus six.”
 
My phone beeped in confirmation and started more or less 3D printing a pair of steaming hot mugs of heavenly magical goodness into my hands. When they finished, I passed one to Jaune, who took it with more than a little suspicion.
 
I took a sip, and then it hit me. The greatest antidepressants known to Magical Science. It felt like liquid orgasms rolling over my tongue before settling down into my core, where it sat there, sending pulses of warm, gooey pleasure through every nerve in my body. My fur bristled. My tails and ears quivered. My legs became so weak that I had to lean against a picnic bench to stay upright. My eyes rolled up, and I let out a long, moaning shudder that had Jaune giving me a very strange look.
 
After what must have been a couple of minutes, I came to my senses and realized Jaune was asking me a question.
 
“What?” I asked.
 
“I said are you okay? You just started twitching and fell down.”
 
“Yeah.” I got up from where I was sprawled on the picnic table. I had to steady myself with several tails because my head was still pulsing with the opposite of a migraine, just wave after wave of dopamine, serotonin, and all that good stuff. That hour long flight from hell? Not worth thinking about anymore. I could barely even remember what it felt like anymore.
 
“Are you sure?” he asked.
 
“Of course!” I was grinning from ear to ear now, unable to contain my happiness. I bounced to my feet, full of a sudden rush of energy. “Never been better!”
 
“Your face is all red,” he pointed out.
 
“Okay.” My eyes flicked over to his mug, still untouched. “Drink up!”
 
Jaune seemed to consider for a moment. He almost thought better of it, but peer pressure was a powerful thing. Plus, the heavenly scent had been wafting into his nose for the last few minutes, and it’s pretty hard to resist. Finally he shrugged. “Bottoms up,” he said, and took a drink.
 
The effect took hold immediately. Jaune’s pupils dilated to an alarming degree, further than I thought possible. His hand started to shake, and then, seemingly as if on automatic, he brought the mug up to his lips and downed the rest. After which he started making some very inappropriate sounds and fell to the grass in a boneless, twitching heap.
 
“Shit,” I swore eloquently.
 
That was when I heard the wail of police sirens closing in on my position. And I knew they were coming for me because even through the several blocks of buildings in the way, I could see a very angry and very worried thread connecting them to me.
 
“Double shit,” I told Jaune’s twitching body. “Someone must have called the cops.” I blamed the stupidly huge dragon wings and their stupid lack of subtlety.
 
And yes, it did look an awful lot like I just drugged Jaune. But just let me be clear: that wasn’t what happened. I didn’t drug him. I just helped him self-medicate after a traumatic experience with a completely safe and completely non-addictive magical antidepressant. Which is completely different from drugging him unconscious.
 
Though now that I thought about it, starting him off with a +4 was probably a mistake. The only reason I could handle extra-extra-extra-strength Hightower Hot Chocolate was because I had an absurdly huge mana pool and a body with top of the line regen.
 
Jaune, on the other hand…
 
He was frothing at the mouth and convulsing like he was having a seizure, except one of the good kinds that involve mind-blowing amounts of happy fun times. He’d be fine. Probably.
 
Just in case, I had my phone extract a Healing Blanket from my soulbound inventory. A stream of golden motes floated out of my tails and coalesced into a blanket, which I threw on top of him.
 
“There,” I said, patting him on the shoulder with a tail. “Good as new. Mostly.”
 
I wasn’t sure if he heard me, but he whimpered something that sounded like “Murgle!” in response, which I took to mean, “Thanks, Jackie, you’re great! I’ll be fine from here.” A quick check with my thread sight provided that he wasn’t even mad at me anymore, though that could have been because he was in a state where it was literally impossible to experience negative emotions.
 
“Another job well done,” I declared before dusting off my hands and running like hell, because even though I’m perfectly innocent, I didn’t want the cops to catch me standing over an unconscious, overly self-medicated teenage runaway.

[Amacita]

Chapter 3

In which a warehouse blows up and it totally isn’t my fault.
 Just because I was running from the police like a lawless criminal didn’t mean I was a lawless criminal. In fact, I was too lawful, and that was the problem.
 
If I were only moderately lawful, I would have just waited back in the park with Jaune and explained everything. And because I was white and not technically guilty of anything, it would have worked. Eventually. Probably. Provided the cops here weren’t a bunch of corrupt, bullying dickwads like the ones in my old world before Earth Krac.
 
The problem was that I couldn’t take that risk because there was this little inconvenient thing called interreality politics.
 
Put simply, I was a citizen of the Alliance. And as an Alliance citizen, I was subject to Alliance law. Not Remnant law. Even though I was merely an unofficial ambassador, I still had diplomatic immunity. So long as I didn’t commit a crime by Alliance law, no foreign government could hold me or prosecute me without inviting a full interreality invasion. Which meant that if the cops here tried to arrest me and charge me with anything, my life (and theirs) would get really complicated really fast.
 
All of which is to say that—as I tore down an alleyway with two cops in hot pursuit—I was heroically stopping them from causing a diplomatic incident.
 
“Stop right there, faunus scum!” one of them shouted.
 
Now, I didn’t know what “faunus” meant, but I was pretty good at picking things up from context, and in this context “faunus” sounded a lot like “criminal.” I learned a new word today!
 
I also learned that cops on Remnant were no joke, because the two of them were very quickly gaining on me. Soon, I was cornered in an alley, a dumpster to one side, a brick wall to the other, and a chain-link fence to my back.
 
“Nowhere to run,” said the one on the left. He was the fitter of the two, his partner coming in several seconds behind and panting for breath. That one looked pissed that I was making her run. They both drew batons and advanced menacingly.
 
“Can’t we just talk about this?” I tried with a hopeful smile. The chain-link fence rattled as I backed into it.
 
“Talk to the stick,” the first cop said, swinging his baton at my head.
 
Before it could connect, Jerry melted the chain-link fence, and I went tumbling back. My tails cushioned my fall, and I ended up in a ball of tails, rolling backwards into the street in a blind somersault. Cars honked and swerved. The officers swore. Then it turned out that the street was on something of a hill sloping down towards the waterfront.
 
I continued to tumble. I also began to scream because tails or no, somersaulting down concrete in the middle of downtown isn’t exactly the nicest feeling in the world.
 
Sure, I could have unballed myself and stopped, but weirdly enough, this was working. My short little legs couldn’t match the pace of Tall Cops One and Two, but in ball form I had the advantage.
 
At least until I barreled through a railing, splashed into the harbour, and quickly began to sink.
 

***

 
Warm, salty water enveloped me. The deeper I sank, the darker it got, but I didn’t panic. While I might have a problem or two with flying, swimming held no such terrors.
 
Jerry was, technically speaking, a spacesuit. He was developed as a piece of biotech for space exploration, hence the way he covered every inch of my body, inside and out. It was to protect me from the vacuum of space. His ability to disintegrate matter was to prevent an astronaut from becoming trapped by debris.
 
Just as Jerry could recycle the air in my lungs pretty much indefinitely so that I could breathe in space, he did the same thing here. Hence, drowning wasn’t a concern. Nor was I worried about water filling my ears and causing an infection. My tails wouldn’t even get wet unless I wanted them to.
 
Not even my clothes got waterlogged, because I wasn’t wearing clothes. I was wearing Jerry who was engineered with the ability to look and feel like clothes provided said clothes were reasonably tight fitting.
 
All of which is to say that while the two cops kept a lookout, assuming that I would have to surface eventually, I was casually swimming away like I had all the time in the world. If this had been in the winter when the water was cold, I would have been in more of a hurry, but the summer water was nice, even early in the morning.
 
I used my tails to propel myself in lazy, languid strokes. First I would scrunch my tails up close to me, and then I would straighten them all at once, more or less propelling myself like a squid. My tails could displace a lot of water, so it was very easy going.
 
Once I’d gained enough distance down the waterfront that the cops wouldn’t find me, I took out my phone and opened the maps app. And yes, my phone worked underwater; it had more energy than the entire solar system combined, and I was pretty sure it could survive the destruction of the universe itself. Water was not an issue.
 
Typing in some instructions, I asked for directions to a place I could hide from the cops and lie low for a while.
 

***

 
A nondescript warehouse by the docks. The perfect place for shady activity. Also the perfect place for a perfectly innocent foxgirl to hide from the cops. Well, cops and—if my thread sight was to be believed over this distance—a few specialists who definitely weren’t cops but were still intensely searching for me.
 
These people really took their dragon sighting seriously. Weird. I hoped they weren’t racist against dragons.
 
In other news, it seemed like Jaune had been taken away somewhere out of my range. Someone must have come by after the two cops left him there, visibly overdosing on magical hot chocolate to chase after a “faunus scum.”
 
Focusing now on my present surroundings, I cut off my thread sight to look for a way in. And, well, there was a door. I tried the door. It opened.
 
Sometimes the easiest solutions were the best ones. I stepped in, and—
 
Someone put a gun to my head.
 
“Were you followed?” came a gruff, masculine voice from my right.
 
I froze. Not that a bullet to the head was any threat to me, but it’s just instinct. A scary guy with a scary voice puts a gun to your head, you freeze.
 
I licked my lips nervously. “No,” I told him, defaulting to honesty as the best policy. And thanks to my powers, I could answer that question better than anyone else in the world.
 
Almost inaudibly, the man breathed a sigh of relief. One that my sensitive fox ears could barely pick up. He must have been trying not to appear worried. “Good,” he said, and I felt him remove the gun.
 
Now I turned to look up at him. He wore faded jeans, a denim jacket, and a spiked dog collar. I couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a mask, one that bore the design of a snarling wolf. But I could see that he had blue eyes, and before I could say anything, he shoved a similar mask into my hands.
 
“Uh, thanks?”
 
He grunted and pointed inside, where I could make out several more masked individuals loading what looked like shipping crates into the back of a truck.
 
“Boss wants this place empty by noon.”
 
“Okay,” I said, “but, um—”
 
“You’ll get paid when the rest of us do, now move it.”
 

***

If there was one thing I hated, it was a bully. And in this warehouse that bully was the Hag. She had grey hair, prune-like skin, and her breath reeked of cigarettes. She was also the one in charge. And if you spoke out of turn—

Whap!

She hit me over the head with a rolled up newspaper. My subsequent pout only earned me a second bap on the head. Seriously, I had met terrifying, city-wrecking demons that were more susceptible to my cuteness than this woman. I loathed her with every fiber of my being, and if I had laser eyes, she would be dead by now.

“We don’t pay you to ask questions,” she informed me, before pointing her newspaper imperiously towards one of the pallets still full of boxes.

“There’s a forklift right over there,” I pointed out. “Why don’t we just—”

“Less talking, more moving,” the slave driver ordered.

As I sighed and retrieved what had to be my thirtieth box so far, by hand, I knew that whatever they were paying us for this, it wasn’t enough. Probably the only reason I hadn’t walked out or given the Hag a piece of my mind was because I was still riding on magical antidepressants. That, and I didn’t want to escalate things with a group that had already proven willing to point a loaded gun at me.

Someone could get hurt. Not me, but someone.

Eventually we finished loading up the truck. Some of the taller people (which is to say, everyone) had to help me stack the last few crates, but we managed. Then the truck started moving out, and the Hag announced a five minute break before the next one arrived.

I sat down on a pile of crates next to the defunct forklift. What was with that thing, anyway? It would make the whole loading and unloading so much easier.

“We don’t have the key,” came a man’s voice, and I felt the crates shift as he sat down beside me. His full face mask was askew, and he was wolfing down an absurdly overstuffed sandwich.

I couldn’t take my eyes off his meat. I mean, seriously, there had to be a least five different kinds of cold cuts on that sandwich, and somehow it still found room for lettuce and tomatoes. Just looking at it made my mouth water and my tails wag.

To distract myself from how I hadn’t eaten all day and had no money for food in this world, I nodded back towards the forklift. “Why not?” I asked.

Sandwich Man shrugged. “We’re not paid to ask questions.”

That again. I got the feeling that my next question, what’s in the boxes, would be met with the same response, so instead I went with introductions. “I’m Jackie.”

The man looked at me strangely, tilting his head, and only now did I notice a pair of brown dog ears on his head. Actually, now that I looked around, everyone here had some sort of animal trait. The guard by the door had a raccoon tail. One of the girls had mottled skin on her arm, like snake scales. And the Hag had a forked tongue. How that woman managed to speak normally was beyond me, but my guess was pure, venomous spite.

By way of reply, the man just tapped his mask. When I asked what that meant, he just tapped the mask again. His mouth was full of sandwich though, so maybe he was just being polite.

“Elon Mask?” I guessed. “The Masked Shipper? Masky McMaskface?”

He snorted and wiped some crumbs from his lips. Sandwich finished already, he shifted his mask back. “We’re supposed to be incognito mode. No names.”

“Oh. Right.” I winked at him. “Secret identities. Because we’re superheroes.”

That earned a bark of laughter from him. “I like you, Jackie.” He gave me a good-natured slap on the back. “Had my doubts about you at first. Didn’t look like you could keep up, but you did.” Then he looked me up and down, and I read concern in his azure eyes. “Going to be a hard shift if you skip lunch. Sorry I didn’t notice earlier, or I would have offered you some of mine. Faunus like us got to stick together.”

Faunus. He called me a faunus. I stiffened, my eyes darting left and right. “Ehehe. Faunus? What makes you say that?”

“Uhh, Jackie.” He flicked one of my tails. “It’s kind of obvious.”

“Wh-what do you mean?” I hugged my tails protectively, pouting at him over top of a bundle of fluff. “Is there something wrong with my tails?”

“No, no, no, they’re nice,” he explained patiently, and now he was giving me a pitying look. “They just make it hard to hide what you are.”

A faunus. A criminal. Were tails illegal here on Remnant?

I stood up suddenly. My heart was beating so hard that I couldn’t hear myself think. “I’ve—I’ve got to go.” Then I power-walked away from him, not even looking where I was going, until I smacked face first into the side of the forklift.

Right. The forklift. If I could get it working again, I could get out of here sooner. I didn’t have any specific spells to hotwire a vehicle, but fortunately I was a hug mage, and hug magic (technically Imbuement) was just about the most general purpose magic there was.

So I hugged it. I hugged the forklift. My nine tails and two arms wrapped almost all the way around the thing, practically enveloping it in my warm, fluffy, loving embrace. Then I started to pour magic into it. Lots of magic. More magic than any ten Novices could manage in an entire day.

“Help me, Obi-wan Forkobi, you’re my only hope!”

The forklift’s engine rumbled to life. Its headlights blinked open, illuminating the dimly lit warehouse with warm, golden light. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Quickly, before the Hag could come by and ruin this, I explained to the newly sentient forklift its purpose in life. “You have to help me,” I explained in a rushed whisper. “There’s these boxes. And we need them loaded up on the truck.”

Its engine purred, and the lifter part went up and down an inch, which I took as a mildly sarcastic, “Okay, Mom.”

Not perfect, but I’d take what I could get. “Good boy,” I praised it, patting the forklift on the seat before hopping on top of it.

***

Obi-wan Forkobi, or Obi for short, was met by amazed cheers when I brought it around. Actually it brought itself around, but I had to pretend like I was operating the thing so no one freaked out.

The forklift was only as smart as a dog, which would have been a problem, except that it seemed to have some pretty powerful forklifting instincts built in. One by one, it shifted the pallets into the truck, making short work of the next load of boxes. The rest of the team just had to shift the pallets towards the back of the moving van, which only took a fraction of the effort.

I really, truly felt like a hero, the sense of accomplishment warming me up like a miniature sun in my chest. I was beaming ear to ear.

It was too good to last.

“Off. Now,” the Hag ordered, bapping me on the thigh with her newspaper.

“What?” I asked, visibly confused.

“No questions,” she snapped. “Off.”

With a resigned sigh, I got off, and the self-important cow climbed on. Because of course she couldn’t let someone else keep the high chair. She couldn’t let someone else earn praise and admiration. She couldn’t let me have fun.

I reached a hand out plaintively towards Obi-wan Forkobi, who raised his lifter to press against my palm. The machine let out a rumbling whine that tore at my heart.

“Goodbye, Obi-wan Forkobi,” I whispered. “I’ll always remember how you lifted my spirits in my time of need.”

Apparently this heartfelt goodbye was against the rules, because the Hab smacked my ears for it. “No talking,” she admonished. “Go.” Even though there was nothing to do until the next truck arrived, she made a shooing gesture towards more of the boxes.

Ears drooping, I turned my back on the Hag and the machine that was far, far too good for her.

I didn’t make it more than three steps before I heard the newspaper smacking against the side of the forklift. “Move, you stupid thing!” the Hag snarled.

The forklift made a snorting sound like an irritated horse. One that’s seriously contemplating dumping its rider into the mud.

“Why.” Smack. “Won’t.” Smack. “You.” Smack. “Move?!”

I looked just in time to see her stamp down on the accelerator. The forklift jerked forwards, towards me, and it continued accelerating even after the Hag lifted her foot. Purely on instinct, I jumped out of the way, and that turned out to be the biggest mistake of the day.

Maybe if I had hugged it, I could have calmed the forklift down. Prevented the disaster that was to come.

Instead, there was nothing to stop Obi-wan Forkobi from barreling straight into the stack of remaining crates.

The Hag screamed. Sandwich Man screamed. The guard by the door screamed. I screamed because everyone else was screaming.

The forklift shuddered to a stop as it reached the crates. Its giant fork slotted neatly underneath one of the pallets, and for a moment, it looked as though it was over.

Then the forklift started raising the pallet, along with the twenty or so boxes on top of it. One of those boxes tilted precariously, sliding slowly towards the edge, seconds away from falling to the ground.

That was when everyone noped out of there. The Hag jumped off the forklift like it was on fire and booked it out of the warehouse. She was faster than she looked. Sandwich Man, the guards, the other masked superheroes, they all ran as well.

I was just starting to think that maybe they knew something I didn’t when the box fell, and everything went to hell.

[Amacita]

In the team's dorm room, Weiss tries to get Jackie to turn off her phone and study.

Jackie: "Can't."

Weiss: "Can't or won't?"

Jackie pauses; that's actually a hard question. "I don't know."

Weiss rolls her eyes. "You stayed up all night on your phone. We all know you're addicted to Fox Jumper. But you need to focus."

"I wasn't—" Jackie shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. I already know what's on the test. I don't need to study. What I need is—"

Weiss makes a grab for the phone. Jackie pulls it to her chest, curls her tails around it protectively, and bares her teeth. The cheerful chiptune melody of Fox Jumper continues to play, muffled only slightly by Jackie's floof.

Jackie shakes her head vigorously. "I need to keep playing. If I stop, I'll start to think, and that would be bad."

Weiss: "We're in a school. The whole point is to think."

Yang: "Don't you mean 'learning to fight Grimm'?"

Weiss: "How do you do that without thinking?"

Yang: "With your fists."

Ruby interrupts with a very pensive expression. "Girls, can we go back a minute?"

Weiss looks confused. Ruby and Yang lock eyes, and some unseen understanding passes between them.

Yang: "Oh no."

"She was up all night on her phone," Ruby says, then turns to Jackie.

Jackie shifts guiltily before burying her face in her phone and tails to keep gaming. Yang pinches her ear, and she bolts upright, rubbing it and shooting Yang a glare.

Yang (sternly): "What did you do?"

Jackie mumbles something unintelligible.

Ruby (slowly): "Jackie, why can't you turn your phone off?"

Jackie swallows nervously. "Terrifying metaphysical implications."

Weiss buries her face in her pillow and lets out a very muffled noise that sounds suspiciously like "Fuuuuuuuuuck."

Now that she's started, Jackie can't help but elaborate. After all, she'd been up all night thinking about it. In fact, she'd been so desperate to keep gaming to avoid thinking about it. Now that she could finally let it out, it was almost a relief.

"I had my phone simulate the universe to see what was on the test," she confesses. "Except simulated Jackie probably did the same thing, and I don't know how deep the recursion goes."

On the other side of the dorm, Weiss can be heard punching her pillow in a very unladylike manner.

"There's probably a near infinite number of simulations. Most of them are probably pretty normal." Jackie gestures around to their dorm room, with its fox posters and antigravity bunk beds. "Relatively speaking."

"You mean they're similar," Ruby clarifies. "Because you were trying to simulate our reality."

"For the test," Yang finishes, a look of growing apprehension on her face. "I don't like where this is going."

Jackie confirms her fears. "The more I think about it—we're probably somewhere in the middle. There's probably some Jackie one level up having this exact conversation with her team. And we're a simulation running on her phone. Which means..."

Jackie looks down at the phone in her hands, her thumb running idly over the power button.

"If you turn it off..." Ruby says.

Jackie: "She'll do the same."

On the other side of the room, Weiss' muffled screaming turns into horrified sobs.

"Right. So." Yang claps her hands. "New rule. No more phone before bed."