After failing at writing anything resembling an SI time after time (Emergence doesn't count), I'm trying again. Unlike all the other weird ones, this one is a straight and serious SI. Well, as close as I can get, which is probably going to be not very.

Perspective – a RWBY SI

Prologue: Last Days

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
-proverb, origin disputed

"If anyone can hear me, please respond, over."

This was it. We'd failed, the bad guys won, if I made a difference it was the wrong one. The world was going to hell around me and even if it wasn't exactly my fault, I sure as hell didn't help things.

"We're under attack from the monsters and they've turned our own machines against us. I don't know who's left. They're attacking the city and civilians are dying."

In retrospect, I probably should have done a lot of things differently. I should have stayed out of it, shouldn't have tried to fix everything. I knew everything was going to go downhill and I figured I could stop that from happening. Like so many wannabe heroes, hubris was my down fall.

"Please, if anyone can hear this, send help."

But I didn't, and now I'm here, crawling through the Emerald Forest, desperately calling for help from someone who would probably never respond with the world going to hell around me. How did I get here?

That's a really long story.

July 23, 2016.

Britain was leaving the European Union. Trump had just been chosen as the Republican nominee. Erdogan's purges were in full swing. Pokemon Go was sweeping the nation. I was still waiting for Windows 10 Redstone and the Zenfone 3.

It was my last day on Earth.

I sure as hell didn't wake up thinking that. I woke up a bit nervous about travelling, because I don't travel well and travelling on a plane doubly so. That was counterbalanced by a fair bit of excitement about seeing my friend Simon again for the first time since high school. He'd gone one way, I went another, everyone else had gone a third, and the rest is history.

Was it already three years? I feel old. I mean, I know I'm not, but it's all relative, isn't it? I'm technically an adult now. Which is a bit scary, but that's another topic entirely.

At least it wasn't an early flight. I cannot handle mornings, period, full stop. Give me a can of Pepsi Max or an Awake bar and I'll get moving a little better, but I'm still somewhere between "totally incoherent" and "man bitch" any time earlier than ten in the morning. This flight left at one in the afternoon, which meant I was actually halfway awake when I went through the pain in the ass that was post-9/11 airport security. Between my general demeanour and my overgrown beard, I was expecting it to be more trouble than it actually was. Nope, just pull my Frell XPS out of my bag, toss it in the tray with my shitty old S2, step through the scanner, and pick up my crap again.

I would be flying on a Q400 for the first time, and that was something I was excited about. It was a neat little plan, a ridiculously overpowered turboprop in the age of commuter jets. I mean, it was probably just as shitty to fly on- probably worse with the gigantic props- but it was neat and I'd only seen one up close at an airshow before. The half hour long wait at the gate had a nice panoramic view of Q400, though I'd pretty much given up and started writing awful fanfiction five minutes in.

The rest was standard airplane fare. They announce boarding beginning at five to one, I wait my turn, hand my ticket, and trudge down the boarding bridge. I take my seat near the front of the plane on the exit row. I paid extra for that seat for a few reasons. First, I have annoyingly long legs and a nineteen inch seat pitch is a recipe for instant cramps. Second, it's close to the bathroom, although even I probably won't use that on the hour and a half long flight. Third, it's right next to the exit so I can get out of here in a hurry if the universe decides my flight would make a good episode of Mayday.

A middle aged gentleman sat down beside me just after I finished stowing my backpack and adjusting my seat belt. Right away, he shoves his laptop bag under the seat, gives me a little nod, then clips his seatbelt in, leans back, and closes his eyes.

As we began rolling down the runway, the lone flight attendant gave us the usual advertisement and takeoff spiel. She didn't show me how to open the exit door. For shame. While we taxi down the runway, I grab the card and read it through. Wonderful reading to counter pre-takeoff jitters, but it's not like I have anything better to do.

Almost immediately after takeoff, the guy beside me fell asleep. In the middle of the day. Okay, sure, I guess some people are like that. I'm the opposite. Like Jack Ryan, I never sleep on a plane. Unlike Jack Ryan, it's because it's uncomfortable, not because I'm afraid it's going to fall out of the sky.

Maybe Jack Ryan had a point.

Remember how I said it was my last day on Earth? If you were guessing the flight had something to do with that, you'd be right. It was a routine flight until about halfway in. I was playing Pokemon on my phone when It happened. What was It, you ask? A bright flash of light, a bang, flickering lights, two turboprops spooling back and the beginning of the most terrifying thing that had ever happened in my life until that point.

I managed to corral my phone back into my pocket before the little turboprop did an honest to god barrel roll (no barrel rolls, Tex!) and threw everything not tied down halfway across the cabin.

The rest I remember only as incoherent snippets.

The flight attendant urging calm and shouting at us to brace for impact. The look of abject terror on the gentleman's face as he woke up from his nap into a nightmare. The cry of a baby audible above the screams. The blaring of alarms and colourful language from the cockpit.

That terror, though, that was the one thing crystal clear to this day. We knew we were going to die. We didn't think, didn't guess, we knew that the rest of our lives were measured in seconds. Even as the roll slowed and the plane levelled out and the ground came up to meet us.

I should have been thinking about my parents or my friends or God and Jesus or Vishnu or something in my final moments, but all I could think of was the mistakes I'd made in the past few years of my life. I had not made the transition to adulthood gracefully, that's for sure. One year wasted, two years of education and not much else, no girlfriend, no job, a lot of potential as a NEET and not much else.

I put my head between my legs and screamed.

The next thing I knew, we were on the ground. I'm not sure if I blacked out or blocked out the memories or something. One moment I had my head between my legs and we were going in. The next, I was sitting up and we were sitting still on the ground. I heard some moaning around me, but I didn't feel any pain myself. If I had been thinking rationally, I might have attributed it to adrenaline, but I wasn't thinking rationally at the time.

Are we okay?

Nope. I smell smoke, I hear burning, I feel heat, I see flames. There's one thought on my mind and it's to get the fuck out of here before we fry.

This is where some extraordinary people rise to the occasion, becoming heroes out of the blue and saving the lives of their fellow passengers. I would open the door, yell at everyone to get out, drag a few out and be the last one off the plane.

I'm not a hero. I turned the handle, pushed the door out, grabbed my backpack, and jumped out of the wrecked plane.

Yes, I know one of those things is not on the List Of Things To Do When Evacuating a Burning Airplane. First, that laptop was $1500 of someone else's money, and second, I'd just been slammed into the ground at a hundred kilometres an hour and was jumping out of a burning plane and I'm not exactly thinking straight god damn it.

The drop wasn't exactly pleasant. Not because the plane was high up off the ground. No, because it wasn't. I was expecting a drop of at least a few feet, but the exit was almost level with the dirt around it. It was painful like when you're used to stepping out of an SUV and encounter a sedan for the first time in months.

I cursed and bolted away from the plane. We had landed in what looked like a fairly average forest, but fortunately for me it wasn't very dense. I don't know how far I made it, but I couldn't feel the heat of the plane anymore when I stopped running.

There were many things someone better than me would do at this point. Assess the situation rationally, plan a survival strategy. Go back and try to help the other survivors. At least try to call 911 on my phone or something.

Nope. I sat down against a tree and cried like a bitch.

I don't know how long I actually sat there leaning against the tree. I do remember that nobody else from the plane showed up to join me. Maybe they were all dead, maybe they just went the other direction. I wish I could say I was pondering some serious meaning of life stuff, but mostly my brain was stuck in a loop of "holy fuck I was just in a plane crash"-"what the fuck am I going to to now", occasionally interrupted by an errant thought about Pokemon.

At some point, I got restless. Not desperate, more like bored. It's a hard feeling to describe. Like I thought I should be doing something but had no idea what that something was. I took a drink from my five dollar airport water. I pulled out a granola bar, stared at it for a minute, and put it away because I really didn't feel like eating. I stood up, kicked the tree and got into a one-sided shouting match with it. I pulled out my phone, tried to place a 911 call, and found there was no service out here.

I carried on aimlessly fucking around for a good amount of time before an unholy abomination from Hell stumbled out of the woods. Yes, unholy abomination from Hell. That's no exaggeration. This thing is the kind of thing that shambles out of your nightmares.

It was, without a doubt, the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life up to that point. Considering I'd just walked away from a plane crash, that was saying something. It was kind of like a bear, cranked up to eleven and high on anabolic steroids. Massive clams the length of my goddamn hand extended from its paws. Its face was covered in a bone mask with glowing red eyes in it. It's eyes were also glowing red. Oh, and it was fucking huge.

This was definitely not natural and yet it was oddly familiar.

I'll admit, I screamed like a little girl at that point. Leaving my backpack by the tree, I scrambled for the treeline opposite the superbear, fat lot of good that would do me.

"Kyyyaaaah!" A red streak appeared out of the trees, slamming into the side of the monster. It stumbled with the hit, before smacking the red shape out of the air. It went flying into the trees, and a different object went flying the other way, landing a pace away from me.

Well, shit.

Through conscious effort or sheer luck, I'm not sure, but I didn't make two counts of being useless into a triple streak. That thing was going to go after me next, and I wanted it fucking dead before it made me into dinner.

I guess survival instinct is a hell of a thing.

I didn't have a weapon on me for obvious reasons, but I recognized the object beside me as a rifle. Maybe more Mass Effect than Cabela's, but I was pretty sure it was a rifle. There were a lot of questions that I didn't think about at the time. All I cared about was where the trigger was and which end the bullets came out of.

I picked up the red rifle, lined up the telescopic sight, and pulled the trigger. I couldn't actually figure out how to shoulder it, so I was lying on the ground with the back of the weapon sort of braced against the ground. Even still, the recoil felt like it was going to break my wrist. I didn't care. That monster was going down. I reached around the side of the weapon for what I hoped was the bolt handle and yanked it back before pulling the trigger again. The monster stumbled, but it refused to die. Rack, bang. Rack, bang. Rack, click. Tap, rack, click.

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

Before I could formulate a plan or non-plan, another vaguely-defined shape zipped out of the trees. I wasn't sure, but I thought this one swiped with some kind of something rather than just slamming into the monster. Whatever it was cleaved the monster clean in two, seemingly with zero effort at all.

The grey shape which I now recognized as a grizzled man in a tattered cloak with a fuckoff huge sword made a motion toward me which I didn't understand before heading into the woods again. He emerged with a red-clothed girl who was probably the first blur I'd seen earlier.

At that moment, everything clicked. The beast was a Creature of Grimm. The people standing before me were Ruby Rose and Qrow Branwen. This was Remnant.

Now, I'm not a fainter. I've never fainted in my life. I've felt like fainting here and there, but I've never actually passed out on the floor. Or, at least, I hadn't, until then.

"All the nope."

Thump.

A few errant notes: I'm probably going to keep going with this for a while. I probably won't go too far off the rails, but I'm hoping to put a unique spin on the concept. It's going to be very hard to strike a balance between an overpowered SI and a useless SI. The world of Remnant here is similar to that of Emergence but differs in several key ways and is not the same as either Fateful Flight or Emergence. Expect some Deus Ex Machina, things will get complicated, and this is set just before Volume 1. And I'm mostly winging this.