Three members of Team RWBY sat in the mess hall the next morning. Yang chatted with her partner, Blake Belladonna, while Ruby worked on her cereal.

"No Weiss today?" asked Yang, taking a break from her conversation. Ruby shook her head.

"She said she's getting something ready for lunch. Wants to make sure I don't bomb this test," she replied with a glum tone.

Blake glanced across the table at her, eyebrow arched.

"Are you really doing that badly, Ruby?" she asked.

"I guess," replied the younger girl with a half-hearted shrug. "I just keep falling asleep in Port's classes, so I guess I missed a bunch of stuff that's on the test today. I can't help it, though! He's so boring."

Yang grinned. "I think his stories are awesome. I wanna be able to wrestle a mother boarbatusk into submission, too."

Ruby stirred the spoon around in her bowl. She was still worried about the night before. Weiss hadn't seemed angry with her, but Ruby felt responsible for the wasted evening. When she'd woken up this morning, her partner had already left. The expression on Ruby's face didn't escape her older sister.

"Hey, cheer up Rube. You'll be alright," said Yang, giving Ruby a light pat on the back. "Weiss is a smart cookie, she won't let you down."

Ruby appreciated the sentiment, but it wasn't Weiss letting her down that she was worried about. There was a nagging feeling at the back of her mind that she was going to be directly responsible for making Weiss the first member of the Schnee family to have to retake a year of education.

The morning quickly passed, and Team RWBY's lunch period soon began. The moment her class ended, Ruby gathered her books and sprinted back to the RWBY dorm room. This was one appointment she was not going to miss.

She opened the door and started a greeting, but stopped when she noticed the room was suspiciously empty. The mess left from the night before had been completely cleaned up, and her partner was nowhere to be found.

It only took a few seconds for Ruby to notice an unusual detail: A cookie sat on the desk she shared with Weiss, next to a neatly folded piece of paper. She snatched the paper and read the words scribbled on it.

Ruby: Meet me at the edge of the Emerald Forest as soon as you see this. Skip lunch and just eat this on the way. -Weiss

The cookie was, of course, gone by the time she finished reading the note. Ruby was already sprinting out the door as she swallowed the last morsel.

The white heiress was easy to spot against the earthy colors of the forest. She stood next to a sturdy old oak, against which rested a large leather satchel. Ruby jogged to a stop next to her, catching her breath.

"Good, you saw the note."

"Weiss, you could've just sent me a message on my scroll."

"I certainly would've if you didn't show up in another minute or two. Are you ready?"

Ruby drew herself up to her full height.

"Yes! Where should we start today, Weiss?"

Weiss looked at her as if to say something, but then turned back to the tree and withdrew a rolled-up piece of paper from her bag. She snapped her fingers as two small glyphs appeared at either end of the scroll. Following her hand motions, the glyphs guided the scroll to the tree, unrolled it and held it firmly against the trunk.

Staring down at Ruby was a life-sized picture of a beowolf, poised to attack. She gave it a confused look before glancing back to Weiss.

"Uh, I know what a beowolf is, Weiss. And we already tried flash cards last night," asked Ruby. "What are you gonna teach me?"

Weiss allowed herself a little smirk before reaching behind the trunk and grabbing the instrument of her victory. She immediately spun on her heel and threw it toward her red-hooded charge.

The younger huntress brought her reflexes to bear and caught Crescent Rose in one hand.

"I'm not going to teach you anything," said Weiss. "She is."

Ruby looked from her partner, to her weapon and back again. Weiss stepped to the side and pointed at the beowolf.

"Kill it."

"But it's not-"

"Ruby, we don't have all day."

Ruby deployed her weapon in its rifle mode, and took aim. The sharp crack of gunfire echoed across the quiet afternoon landscape.

Weiss approached the target and inspected Ruby's marksmanship. The girl had put the bullet exactly where she'd need to in order to immediately halt all brain function. Weiss grinned; this was going to be easier than she thought.

The Schnee heiress stepped back from the tree, facing Ruby again.

"Good. But, what if you wanted to keep it alive? Capture it for study?"

Another shot sounded off. Weiss looked at the target again and saw exactly what she wanted to see. The bullet had pierced the beowolf's skull, about an inch below its left eye.

"Why did you shoot there?" asked Weiss.

"Because they pass out when you shoot 'em there."

"What would happen if you shot a little higher?"

"Well, I guess I'd just hit the brain and it'd probably die pretty fast."

Weiss felt like a guided missile homing in on her target.

"So what are you hitting if you aim below the brain, right under the eye like you did?" she asked.

"The perinimal gland," replied Ruby without hesitation.

She clapped a hand over her mouth in pleasant surprise.

"Weiss!"

The older girl crossed her arms with a look of satisfaction. She didn't want to celebrate yet, though. They'd only just begun.

"And why does that gland affect the beowolf that way?"

Ruby paused, but their study exercise began to jog her memory. She recalled the weight of Crescent Rose in her hands, absorbing the recoil into her shoulder as she once executed this very attack on a beowolf. She remembered an odd yellow goo leaving the entry wound, just below the left eye. The memories began to fit themselves neatly into a vague recollection of one of Professor Port's lessons, like pieces of a puzzle.

She snapped her fingers in revelation.

"It secretes something that numbs pain so the beowolf can keep fighting even if it's really badly hurt. If you bust the gland open it releases too much and just knocks them out cold."

Weiss could almost feel her blood pressure start to drop. She allowed herself a sigh of relief before giving Ruby a faint smile.

"Very good, Ruby," she said. "But don't put the gun away. We've got a lot more to cover and only what's left of this lunch period to cover it." She ignored a cheeky remark about her partner's speed as she retrieved more lesson materials from her bag.

For the next half hour, the sky was full of gunshots punctuated by the odd whoop of delight as the two continued their work.

The lecture hall was full of the sounds of pencils scribbling. A portly professor slowly strolled around the room, periodically glancing at students' work. Weiss saw him stop at Ruby's desk, but his expression was unreadable. She never could decipher anything through his substantial facial hair.

Instead, she snuck a glance at Ruby. The red tips of her dark hair swung lazily as she worked. Weiss had to give her credit; she was definitely trying. Their unconventional study session had gone much better than the night before, but Weiss still worried that Ruby wouldn't be so sharp without the weapon in her hand.

No sense fretting about it now, she thought. The only thing for her to do now was to score as high as she could on her own paper. She hunkered down over her test and continued her work.

The day continued uneventfully. As classes drew to a close, Team RWBY went about their usual evening business. Yang spirited Ruby away on whatever errand she'd wanted to run the previous day, leaving a relatively quiet dorm room for the other two teammates. Weiss and Blake didn't have a particularly warm friendship, but they maintained a mutual respect and never really got on each other's nerves.

Weiss sat at her desk doing homework while her faunus teammate laid in bed with a book, occasionally exchanging some idle chatter.

"You really spent all night trying to teach her?" asked Blake.

Weiss nodded without looking up from her paper. She flipped her pencil around to erase something.

"Yes. It was pretty impressive. You wouldn't believe the lengths I went to trying to get through to her; I spent almost as long researching private tutors as I did trying to apply their methods in our study session."

"Did you try the alligator method?"

"Mm-hmm."

Blake looked up from her book, with a questioning look on her face.

"I can't believe she was willing to sacrifice the whole day just to study."

Weiss completed the paragraph she was writing and put the pencil down for a moment, giving Blake a sideways glance.

"I may have led her to believe that I'd fail the class if she didn't pick up her grades."

Blake gave an uncharacteristic snort.

"Maybe if you were already a borderline academic failure. We both know your grades are so high that she could fail every test for the rest of the year and you'd still pass with flying colors."

"I know," replied Weiss, starting on the next homework problem. After a few seconds, she could feel an uncomfortable stare and turned to see the black-haired girl wearing a very Yang-like grin on her face.

"...What?" asked Weiss suspiciously.

"Why are you that concerned that she doesn't fail?" asked Blake.

Weiss gave a second's hesitation as she realized that she wasn't entirely sure. She reached back to her highborn upbringing for an answer.

"Because I'm a Schnee and no partner of mine is going to be a failure," she said with a hint of annoyance, returning to her homework.

Blake was savvy enough to know the end of a conversation when she heard one, but she did make an I-don't-quite-believe-you hum before picking up where she left off in her book.

Professor Port was handing back the tests. Ruby fidgeted as he slowly made his way around the lecture hall, stopping at each student to thumb through the pile of papers in his hand. She'd answered all the questions, hadn't she? Usually she couldn't even attempt the tougher ones.

He stopped at her desk. She gave him a nervous smile. His moustache glanced at her briefly before finding her test.

A paper landed on the desk in front of her. She looked at it. The test looked back. Ruby's mouth moved silently as she struggled to say something but couldn't find any words.

"Very impressive work, Miss Rose. I hope you make a similar effort on your future tests."

He moved on to Weiss while Ruby just continued to stare at the big '100%' scrawled in red marker at the top of her test.

After a few seconds, she remembered how to be alive again and looked at her partner sitting next to her. Weiss appeared to be in equal shock, looking over at Ruby's mark. Her own paper sat in front of her with a '96%' written at the top.

"You aced it!?"