Sandbox / RvBvRWBY: Incursion

The Battle of Beacon has passed and the Defenders have left Remnant. But life for Team RWBY continues on. They're assigned to a shipment of experimental Dust going to Atlas when the transport is attacked by a strange new creature of Grimm and the material activates, opening a rift that sends Team RWBY to another world, with two armies of inept armored soldiers at war, and in the future. RWBY must protect the experimental Dust, find a way home, and keep these loveable colorful idiots alive.

— Official summary

RvBvRWBY: Incursion is a sequel fanfic to The Defenders of Remnant. Ever since the Battle of Beacon concluded one month prior, Team RWBY have largely been living on their own waiting for school to start back up again. However, before Beacon is repaired, they're selected by General Ironwood for an important mission: transporting a new form of experimental Dust that allows them to travel between dimensions. Mid-flight, the routine mission is interrupted by the Hound and several crystals go off and send their ship free falling through dimensions; when they wake up, they're greeted by red and blue soldiers who all suck at their job.

Now, Team RWBY is in the reverse position from before; they're tasked with navigating the new world and their seeming allies as best as they can, all while they and Remnant's forces try to bring them back to their own universe. Meanwhile, Salem's forces continue to recover from the setbacks they previously faced.

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RvBvRWBY: Incursion contains examples of the following:

• Achilles' Heel: Though the Hound craves the Cosmic Dust and consuming it raises his intelligence, it's also his biggest weakness. When he takes an explosion of the Dust straight to the face, unlike his other injuries, it never heals.
• Actor Allusion: Ruby and Yang note that Church sounds a lot like their father, which actually starts to get under Ruby's skin whenever Church starts yelling. When they meet inside Ruby and Yang's fantasy world, they both mention that they both sound familiar.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Even Blake can't help but laugh at Tucker's confusion when Doc manages to get Sister naked within moments of meeting her due to the need for a physical examination. She also records when Caboose "asks out" Weiss while practicing for the plan to distract Sheila.
• Adaptational Intelligence:
  • Simmons gets to use his status as Red Team's science officer far more than he did during The Blood Gulch Chronicles, with him and Weiss working to create a device that could harness the Cosmic Dust and get them back to Remnant.
  • Tucker actually remembers the story of Church's time traveling, specifically the fact that he left behind a lot of clones every time he went back, and uses it to his advantage to destroy all of the Wyoming clones at once later on.
• Adaptational Villainy: Slightly. In canon, Weiss's reaction to Jacques slapping her implies that this isn't a regular occurrence. Here, Weiss specifically says that she and the other children were struck when they were growing up.
• Chekhov's Gun: In chapter 20, Team RWBY put the Cosmic Dust into their weapons to allow the Dust within to work. In the next chapter, that Dust becomes the only Cosmic Dust still left in Blood Gulch when Grimmaster escapes, which means they still have a way home.
• Continuity Nod: While trying to reassure Taiyang that his daughters are going to be fine even if they're missing, Ben mentions the time he stayed in Weiss and Blake's dorm for several weeks straight.
• Death by Adaptation: Unlike in canon, where it's implied that the Green Alien managed to genuinely revive Flowers from the dead, here it's just O'Malley puppeteering the corpse. This means that when he leaves Flowers' body, he simply keels over dead.
• Dies Different In Adaptation:
  • A lot of the Red and Blue grunts that Tex killed in the original show are killed by the various Grimm the Hound drops before she arrives at the scene.
  • Wyoming isn't just stabbed by Tucker's sword, he's outright disintegrated by the Cosmic Dust. The Dust also destroys all of the Wyoming clones before the Red Team can get involved.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • One of the reasons Ironwood has faith in Ruby is because she killed Cinder Fall; the audience knows that she actually survived their encounter in the previous fic.
  • Winter tells Team JNPR that the reason Ironwood is so paranoid about the multiverse is because he can't help but wonder how events like the Breach and the Battle of Beacon would have gone if Cinder and her crew didn't have Earth villains like Taskmaster helping them. The audience knows that in the original show, the battle actually went even worse for everyone, and Taskmaster did nothing to make the battle better for Cinder.
• Dumbass No More: After absorbing some of the Cosmic Dust, the Hound becomes capable of speaking full sentences without pausing. After eating an entire bag of it, Taskmaster (or Grimmaster as he prefers to be called) regains complete sapience.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Grimmaster is still in love with Cinder and refuses to accept that she may have died (of course, unknown to everyone else, he's right). A large part of his plan involves him getting back to Remnant so he can be with her again.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Tucker originally acts like his typical Casanova Wannabe self towards all of Team RWBY, but he stops doing it with Ruby when he learns she's only fifteen.
  • Yang happily goes along with Sarge's fake funeral, but she draws the line at actually burying him alive and knocks him out before they go through with it.
  • Tucker doesn't like Doc any more than anyone else does, but even he thinks Weiss goes too far in her hatred of him when she accuses him of still having O'Malley in his head and calls him a ticking time bomb.
  • Weiss hates everyone in the canyon and just wants to go home, but she draws the line at letting Omega enslave an entire race and does everything she can to stop Tex from letting him do it.
    Tex: Since when do you care so much? I recall you hating everyone here and just wanting to go home!
    Weiss: Doesn't mean I'm going to ignore something so blatantly evil!
• The Friend Nobody Likes: As in canon, Andy gets on everyone's nerves from the moment he's created, with even his friendship with Caboose being downplayed. The only reason they deal with him is because the Alien needs a translator.
• Godzilla Threshold: Grimmaster forcing a possessed Yang to attack her friends makes Weiss so mad that she instantly becomes capable of summoning the Arma Gigas.
• Gone Horribly Right: Weiss and Simmons' first attempts to use the Cosmic Dust to get Team RWBY back to Remnant fail, but their attempt to do so using the teleporter ends up working, creating a portal between the two dimensions. Unfortunately, doing so causes Grimm to pour through the portal en masse, which summons the Hound to attack the Dust, and Ruby is forced to destroy the portal before they can use it.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: As Weiss gets more and more frustrated by her time in Blood Gulch, she starts going on furious tirades at even the smallest inconveniences or annoyances. It gets to the point that Ruby has to take her aside and remind her that they're not dealing with actual soldiers.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: A recurring issue that Team RWBY faces is that the Hound clearly has an actual mission it's trying to complete, but they have no idea what that mission is or why it's doing it. More alarmingly, Salem doesn't know either, as the Hound isn't under her control. Even Wyoming, his supposed partner, doesn't know what the Hound is actually trying to do besides take out Team RWBY, and he prepares to betray him the second he can so he's not caught in the crossfire.
• Hidden Depths: Yang is the first one to get a look under Grif's hood and see underneath his lazy exterior, revealing a surprisingly wise man who cares for his little sister deeply and knows what to say to comfort Yang when she doesn't know what to do being separated from Ruby.
• Hypocrite: When Church pawns Sister off on Caboose to act as a "tour guide", Blake criticizes Church's terrible leadership skills. When he retorts that she can be the tour guide then, she immediately backpedals and agrees to let Caboose do it.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • The siege on O'Malley's compound goes basically the same, meaning the bomb still gets planted, Tucker still gets the sword, the whole group almost blows up, and Church arrives to deactivate the bomb at the last second.
  • York still dies during the assault on Wyoming's compound.
• Internal Reveal: Thanks to Grimmaster saying her name, Ironwood is forced to tell Team RWBY about who Salem is.
• Irony: Ruby is considered an "honorary Red" immediately because of her color scheme, but she ends up spending all of her time with the Blues, especially Caboose. It's not until she and Sarge fall into the caves under Blood Gulch that she spends any time with the Reds.
• It Can Think: The Hound catches all of Team RWBY off guard when it proves capable of not just understanding what they're saying and countering their tactics, but calls Blake and Ruby by their full names. After it absorbs some of the Cosmic Dust, it becomes capable of full sentences without pauses.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Tex holding Team RWBY at gunpoint and demanding to know what they're hiding is called out as extreme, but Ruby does admit that she has a right to demand information from them after the Hound almost killed them all, so she tells them everything about their pasts after that.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Team RWBY quickly catch on that while all of the Reds and Blues are jackasses in their own way (except for Caboose and Donut), they all generally mean well underneath it. This is captured well in their first scene, where they rip into each other constantly and all generally act like dicks, but agree to help Ruby, Yang, and Blake find their missing friend without any issues.
• Kick the Dog:
  • While Ironwood is trying to justify the doomed mission he sent Team RWBY on to Taiyang, he tells Tai not to make this into another Summer situation. Tai is so furious that he threatens to track Ironwood down and attack him if he ever says her name again.
  • After the Reds blow up Tex's ship, Church goes on a furious tirade blaming Ruby for everything that went wrong ever since they showed up in their universe. Ruby is reduced to tears by the end of it, and it takes Grimmaster reminding him that they didn't actually really interfere in the situation before Church realizes it wasn't their fault.
  • In retaliation for blaming them for his maiming, Grimmaster intends to force Team RWBY to kill the Reds and Blues, then use the Cosmic Dust to get home while stranding them in a different universe with the corpses of their friends.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: The Hound gives Wyoming a dose of the Grimm liquid, meaning that the Grimm ignore him.
• Loophole Abuse: When Omega starts bodysurfing in the canyon, Weiss turns on her radio alongside everyone else, reasoning that even if Omega can't outright infect her, she can still clog up the frequency and make it harder for him to find Tex.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Grimmaster uses the Cosmic Dust to trap Team RWBY inside their own minds, leaving all of them in a fantasy world of their dreams. Church possesses Grimmaster to jump between all of them to convince them to leave it behind.
• Missed Him by That Much: Team JNPR, Winter, and Frank examine the portal Team RWBY create in Blood Gulch, but before they can do anything they're attacked by a Grimm horde, and then Ruby has to destroy it to ensure the Hound doesn't go through it. They come within inches of discovering the portal between worlds, but in the end neither group learn it was a portal.
• Mythology Gag: When Gamma takes over Sheila's tank body to back up Wyoming, Church asks why something dramatic seems to happen every five minutes, a reference to the length of the show's original episodes.
• Not Me This Time: When Watts asks Salem why she sent the Hound after the bullhead, she tells him that not only does she have no interest in the multiverse (and thus she had no reason to attack the ship), but the Hound still won't be finished for several months, so it couldn't have been her. She thus tasks Watts with discovering who sent the Hound after the team.
• Odd Friendship: The low-energy Lazy Bum Grif and the high-energy Blood Knight Yang end up getting along very well, even spray-painting the Motorcycle together. It largely forms from their disrespect for military authority, especially Sarge.
• Pet the Dog: Ruby does everything she can to treat Caboose well, such as taking the time to explain things in a way he understands, propping him up when he collapses from feeding Junior, and defending him against Church's constant tirades. They end up so close that when Church enters Caboose's mind again, his representation of her is actually close to accurate.
• Point of Divergence: Team RWBY arrives in the Red vs. Blue universe right at the same time that the Reds and Blues "time travel" halfway through season 3.
• Posthumous Character: Even though Moon Knight is dead and his friends have left Remnant, his influence lasts over the world through Raven, who reveals to Tai that he convinced her to change their tribe's ways towards heroism.
• The Reveal:
  • The reason why Dust works inconsistently in the other universe is because the Dust only works whenever the Cosmic Dust is nearby, as the Cosmic Dust is the only Dust to not lose its properties when it leaves Remnant's atmosphere.
  • The Hound isn't just a person underneath the Grimm skin, it's Taskmaster, having survived his apparent death in Mountain Glenn because the Grimm essence kept him alive even as he was torn apart, seeking revenge against Team RWBY for their role in his maiming.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Because she's carrying the Cosmic Dust at the time, Ruby becomes immune to Wyoming's time loops just like Tucker is. During one of the loops, they manage to communicate this to each other, resulting in them working together to shoot Wyoming with a bullet of Cosmic Dust to destroy him and his clones at the same time.
• Sequel Hook: As with the last fic, this fic ends with several hints of what will come next. Both Team RWBY and Caboose still have Cosmic Dust and make it clear they intend to use it to find their friends again, Oscar Pine tracks down Qrow with Ozpin in his head just like canon, and Cinder, Anthony, Emerald, and Mercury flee Salem's service into the multiverse, prompting Salem to finally take interest in the multiverse and the Cosmic Dust.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Sheila decides to spend her time being emotional and angry with Church while he's begging her to open the canopy so he and Simmons can take shelter from a horde of Grimm. It takes Yang outright threatening to destroy her power source before she agrees to open it.
  • When Team RWBY try to investigate the last of the Cosmic Dust exploding, the Reds and Blues waste all their time arguing in the middle of the canyon about who's at fault for everything. It's not until Grimmaster outright interrupts the conversation that they realize how wrong things have gone.
• Stations of the Canon: The fic very closely follows the events of The Blood Gulch Chronicles seasons 3-5 (as well as Out of Mind, which takes place in the middle), with the only major changes being that the Hound interrupts the events every once in a while and Weiss and Simmons spend some time working on building a machine that can get Team RWBY home. Grimmaster even indirectly discusses the idea later on, pointing out that even if you take Team RWBY out of the situation entirely leading up to Andy detonating, nothing actually changes.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Weiss and Blake get tired of the Blood Gulch Crew's antics very quickly, especially Sarge and Tucker. Lopez is downright delighted to see someone else with even a modicum of common sense once he meets Blake.
• Tempting Fate: Ironwood assigns Team RWBY to protect the bullhead largely because he thinks nothing bad could happen and he repeats this to RWBY, Taiyang, and Glynda repeatedly. Naturally, it goes wrong and ends with Team RWBY in another universe.
• That Man Is Dead: Anthony decides to forgo his previous title of Taskmaster and replaces it with Grimmaster when he regains his sapience.
• Villain Team-Up: The Hound infects and teams up with Wyoming so they can fight Team RWBY and the Blood Gulch Crew together.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 15: Weiss and Simmons' latest attempt to harness the Cosmic Dust briefly works before it explodes, leading to a burst of energy being detected just outside of Argus. Ironwood sends Winter to recruit Team JNPR and investigate it.
  • Chapter 20: The Reds blow up Tex's ship to stop her from escaping with Omega, but before they can recover, the Hound reveals himself as Taskmaster and uses the last shard of Cosmic Dust to send Ruby to a fantasy world where Summer is still alive.
• Wild Card: The Hound spends the entire story acting on its own whims with no consideration for any of "sides" involved in the conflict. It's later revealed that this because he blames every Remnant faction for his maiming at the hands of the Grimm, and he was only involved in the Red vs. Blue conflict because that's where the Cosmic Dust was.

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