Sandman: A RWBY Fanfiction

Chapter 7

Warning: The following Chapter contains major spoilers from RWBY Volumes 3 and 5.

Shade Academy, Vacuo, Five Weeks Ago

Time, and our perception of it, can work in brilliant ways the more you think about it. Within one moment, it can feel drawn out and sluggish, and within another, the hands of the ticking clock can seemingly fly by before you can even tell it to stop. It's no doubt that we have all considered why this is the case and why it dismantles our expectations so frequently. Ultimately, the answer comes down to our individual activities and how they alter our sense of time and direction. Evidently, the moments we enjoy become the moments that fly by faster just as the moments we dislike become the moments that can be excruciatingly long to endure. Such is why being in school or work can feel like torture if you don't enjoy and invest in the opportunities provided to you. This is also why a weekend or a summer vacation can end up being in its last few hours, as we spend our free time investing ourselves in the things that we enjoy and, in turn, relax us.

Now, it is important to note that there is a major factor in life that blends these two rules of time perception together into one. That very factor is infamously titled "disaster," a title that has been attached to countless events and definitions since its initial creation. As such, one must ask what is the true intention and definition of disaster? Does it exist to torment us with the pain of loss or the joy of unity through the pain? Generally, the answer is provided by one's perception of disaster, whether through optimism or pessimism. One could say that disaster is necessary to teach humanity of the woes of survival just as someone else can say that the destruction it brings is more of a burden than a lesson. Such is why disaster has so many different examples and instances, to begin with, as nobody can come up with an answer that is agreeable enough from both standpoints. Indefinitely, disaster can bring life and joy as much as it can bring death and destruction, there is no one side or the other. Because, ultimately, a lightning bolt has the ample opportunity of both killing a tree and providing an electrical power source. So, in conclusion, there is nothing definitively good or bad about a disaster, as there will always be a "calm after the storm."

For Remnant, that storm has undoubtedly become the extraneous disaster that has altered the past year to feel like an eternity. Survival has been on the mind of every individual possible, both young or old. Whoever was behind the Vytal Festival Incident last year had succeeded in their devious attempt at global terrorism. Millions of people, ranging from mere citizens to top-performing officers, now lived in constant fear of both the Grimm and each other as the possibility of another war loomed. Life, as everyone knew it, would likely never be the same after this horrible year. Each kingdom had its own reason for believing such a thought, however, there was one whose reasoning bested all the others.

Beacon Academy and the capital city of Vale had sorrowfully fallen due to the Vytal Festival Incident, an occurrence that many people hoped would not come true but ultimately expected. As the center of all the chaos, Beacon and Vale were bound to walk out of the Vytal Festival Incident with more than just a few cuts and scrapes. Such is immensely evident by both the death of Headmaster Ozpin and the catastrophic loss of Vale's Cross Continental Transmit (CCT) system with the destruction of Beacon Tower. As the name suggests, the CCT is a major component when it comes to ensuring global communications between the kingdoms of Remnant. With Beacon Tower and its CCT system destroyed alongside it, comms between the four kingdoms have gone completely silent, as Beacon Tower served as the hub for all CCT communications in Remnant. Only local means of transporting information from place to place is viable, although the high increase in Grimm populations worldwide has prevented such transportation to safely occur. All of this, alongside the horrible loss of the capital city and even Beacon Academy, has undoubtedly marked the damage caused in Vale as the worst out of all the four kingdoms.