I. Penny, A Minor Hiccup/Painting the Town

You see Ruby Rose in the intersection and you see the truck coming her way. You take in the panicked expression on the driver's face, he knows he can't stop the vehicle in time. Your positronic brain makes a calculation in mere nanoseconds; there's nothing your friend can do to escape her fate. But there is something you can do.

You leap into the street and, bracing yourself to take the sudden impact, catch the delivery truck with your bare hands. The asphalt, unable to withstand the forces, cracks beneath you. There's the high-pitched squeal of metal bending as the hood crumples and the horrified shrieks of the bystanders, but you tune all of that out. The only sound you care about is the gasp of the girl sprawled on the street behind you: "Penny..?" You can hear it in her voice, she's terrified, confused, uncertain.

You don't turn to face her.

To the driver of the truck, you ask "Are you okay?" As he stammers out some sort of affirmative reply you realize that the cause of all this, your Atlesian Army minders chasing you, is still a pressing problem.

With the immediate danger over, you rapidly return to the flight mode of your fight-or-flight impulses. Your father always says that it's better to avoid confrontation when possible. You retreat to an adjacent alleyway where you won't be spotted out as easily.

"Penny!" shouts your friend, "Come back!" She follows you, having the gift of speed and none of the burden of your metal frame.

"Penny! Please! What is going on?" begs Ruby, "How did you do that?!"

You can't explain, you're simply not allowed to. You need to get out of here, but Ruby's got you trapped. Besides, you don't want to just run away- you like your friend. You like having a friend. It's great and new and different!

"I-I can't!" You try to explain how you can't explain. "Everything's fine." The hiccups your father's programmed into you start up. Luckily, you don't think Ruby knows what they mean. "I-I don't want to talk about it."

A gamut of expressions run across Ruby's face. You're able to interpret their net effect as corresponding to about eighty percent concern, fifteen percent confusion, and five percent interest. That's an odd reading, you realize. You don't know that you understand that one.

You make a note to follow up on it with your father or the general when you see them later. It wouldn't do to decrease your combat efficiency because you failed to understand something... although really, this knowledge should have been made accessible to you from the start, Regardless, this sort of blatant oversight needs correcting.

Consistent with your estimation of her emotional state, Ruby continues to ask you questions about the status of your being. "Penny, if you can just tell me what's wrong, I can help you!"

The genuine desire for you to be okay is almost too much for your emotional circuits to handle right now. "No," you reply, "No, no, no! You wouldn't understand."

"Let me try!" comes her swift rebuttal, "You can trust me."

You think you really can trust her. That's what friends do for each other, right? You meet her eyes, asking the critical question. "You're my friend, right? You promise you're my friend?"

Ruby looks you straight in the eyes and softly says, "I promise."

That'll have to be enough. "Ruby," you confess, "I'm not a real girl."

You hold up your hands, revealing the damage they took when you stopped the truck. The skin on your palm's been ripped away, revealing your dull metal chassis.

"Oh," says Ruby. She looks like she wants to say more, but you keep talking. It's best to get this all out now, before the general's men come for you.

"Most girls are born, but I was made. I'm the world's first synthet-"

Ruby cuts you off. "I'm so glad!" She beams at you. "I thought I was the only one!"

Now it's your turn to be confused. The doubt you have in her statement is significant enough to trigger a lie detection subroutine, which reviews and analysis the last few seconds of footage. Her pupils are wide, her hands are still, her breathing has steadied out; the involuntary contraction of the muscles near the corners of her eyes reveal that her smile is genuine; a rough estimate of her heartbeat, factoring in her recent physical exertion, has actually dropped from "agitated" to more normal ranges. Conclusion: Ruby Rose is telling what she believes to be the truth.

But that doesn't compute at all.

All physical cues point in favor of your friend being between eighty-three and one hundred percent human, You can refine that number by acquiring additional data, so you take the only sensible option before you. Stepping forward, you press the tip of your index finger onto the girl's forehead. Cross-referencing the readings against your sensory input databases, you determine that Ruby's forehead falls completely within typical human parameters. "Hmmm," you say out loud as you sample her jaw in a similar manner, then her chest. She blushes, further supporting your hypothesis that she is in fact human- only the Atlesian laboratories that produced you should have access to that kind of technology. "Are you certain, Ruby? My most recent estimates place you at ninety-six percent human, with a statistical uncertainty of four percent."

"Well," starts Ruby. In a total reversal of roles, she's the nervous one now. "It's possible to be completely human and still have been… made."

You're not sure you follow. When you express this, your friend attempts to clarify. "I don't know why I'm telling you or really how to tell you, I've never came out to anyone, but I guess maybe you're the only person that might really understand but now I'm rambling and oh my god okay, I'll just say it."

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and confesses. "Penny, I'm a clone."

…

Notes:

So I was browsing /r/RWBY and someone had posted a comic involving Summer. "Wow," I said to myself, "She's basically just a clone of Ruby." And then I thought long and hard for a quick and easy second and realized exactly how stupid that thought was. Even the simplest chronological argument necessitates that Ruby be the clone of Summer.

And that's the story of how this happened.

I've got one more scene of this in me for sure where we discuss why Ruby and Penny were created, who knows what'll happen after that.