Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25555436-20150130030020/@comment-25857155-20150130055651

Oh, wait, I do have a partial headcanon running about team RWBY, but only a vague timeline of a specific arc.

During their third year at Beacon, something very big happens (attack by WF or ancient Grimm, perhaps, not sure). Team RWBY is in the middle of the wilds when it starts, and they get caught up in a huge fight. The enemy is tougher than they imagined, knocking out Yang and Blake, leaving Ruby and Weiss to hold out until their air-extraction arrives. At the last moment, the airship is almost overrun as they are extracted. An enemy of some kind wraps a whip or tentacle around Ruby's leg and pulls her out, and Weiss tries to hold onto Ruby's already tattered cloak, which tears off in her hands as Ruby gets yanked back into the mass of Grimm.

The next several months, team RWBY is led to believe Ruby is dead. Yang falls into rage and acute depression accompanied by alcoholism, Blake is depressed and striving to hold the remains of the team together (now led by her), and Weiss is devastated by the loss of her partner and closest friend. Blake decides to give team WBY a new purpose, suggesting that they hunt down the ones responsible. They each take on some sort of token of their lost teammate - Yang wears a red neckerchief, for example - and Weiss starts wearing a red cloak like Ruby's.

While the three are trying to hunt down Ruby's supposed killers, Ruby is barely managing to survive in the wilderness, slowed down by a grievous wound on her leg that becomes infected, along with several other injuries. She ends up finding a surprisingly well-established wilds settlement far away from other kingdoms, in the ruins of a collapsed kingdom. They save her from the infection, and she in turn gets dragged into a conspiracy to destroy their settlement. She will make new allies there, of course, and eventually will leave and eventually make her way back toward Vale.

On the night before WBY's planned assault on the enemies remaining (it is supposed to be a suicide mission, because nobody else is willing or able to help), Weiss, the only one still inside, finds her cloak missing. She turns toward the open window to find Ruby standing there in her cloak, all dramatic like, and Weiss freaks out, prompting the other two to run back inside for the reunion. With Ruby's tactics and help from her new friends, they manage to take down the mysterious (undetermined) enemy and save the kingdom of Vale from the unrealized threat.

During all of this, something is causing the Grimm to attack the walls of the kingdoms in organized fashion, keeping the other forces busy, hence the apparent lack of outside help for team RWBY.

Grimm, in this AU, are very similar to Heartless. (Nodding to a fic titled "Children of Summer" here, which I do not recall the author of on FF net. Stupid workplace internet blockers.)  They were originally humans or Faunus that were corrupted into Primal Grimm, which mated and produced the common Grimm of today's Remnant.

Whatcha think? =P