The (Mis)Adventures of Team J.P.T.R.

Magma-Flavored Machinery

I beg, have mercy on my soul.

Apologies for the long wait, everyone. Back in April, I started my final quarter to earn my Associate's Degree and wanted to lock in for the end. After that was done, I was big chilling, ready to enjoy my first Summer vacation in two years...

And then my company shut down. Yeah, not just the store I worked at, no no, the whole damn retail chain I worked for declared bankruptcy and is currently in the process of shutting down all their stores, so I've been looking for a job while also trying to speed-run my Bachelor's degree. Life has been pretty busy this past year. But hey, I kept my promise. Never more than a year without updates. I'm right on time.

It... does not feel like it's been a year since the last chapter. On that subject, it doesn't feel like this story is already over a year old. I feel like I just kicked things off a few months ago. Time's moving too fast for this story. Here I thought I'd be done in two or three years, but at this rate, it'll take way longer. I might not even still be in America by the time it's finished.

Oh well. Not important, I guess. Let's hope my writing ability didn't wear down after all this time. I'm kinda praying my final course helped me keep some of that rust from building up. The professor of my final English course let us write our final essays on whatever we wanted, so I chose actual children's cartoons.

If anybody asks, I can honestly say I earned my Associate's Degree because of Amphibia, The Owl House, and The Ghost and Molly McGee.

I'm very proud of that. Beautiful A on that paper, you best believe. I'm just sad there was a 12-page limit, or I would have thrown in way more cartoons.

I don't own RWBY, Spider-Man, any version of Ben 10, or Generator Rex

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"How did this day turn out like this?"

Slumped over in an uncomfortable plastic chair, Jaune was very tempted to start crying, regardless of where he was at the moment. It wasn't too long ago that he was sitting in class, fervently praying he wouldn't be selected for the day's combat sessions. At least those prayers were answered, if nothing else.

If... absolutely... nothing else.

He was having trouble deciding if his current situation was any better. No matter how many times he crunched the numbers, he couldn't decide. If he was chosen to fight, he definitely would be on life support at this very moment, to say nothing of the fact that he would be outed immediately among his peers, effectively ruining everything he'd worked for in the past week. All those sleepless nights and lifespan-shortening study sessions, wasted!

But, the alternative outcome and his current predicament was sitting in the Headmaster's office, sweating buckets alongside his team, plus Kevin and Weiss. The spacious room was almost entirely empty aside from a large desk situated near the back wall and a handful of bookshelves filled with trinkets right beside it. Rather than walls, the room was almost entirely lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave its occupants a clear view of the cloud-covered sky. The abnormal amount of unused space coupled with the lack of proper boundaries made the already large office feel oppressively huge. It was an exceptionally uncomfortable feeling, to say the least.

"..."

It would be so much less painful if it weren't so quiet. Weiss had done nothing but stare at her lap and clench her fists since they had arrived, Peter was politely waiting in stone-faced silence for somebody to address him, and Ben and Kevin were doing their damnedest to hold back their snickering before it erupted into full-blown laughter.