Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-10390252-20130728185452/@comment-10390252-20130826184914

Here's one I just came up with: a little moral message story.

Ruby is by her own admission, a bit of a dork around weapons. She's also something of a conceptual and mechanical genius when it comes to them. The fact is, she's really one of those engineering types who can't look at something and not think of the dozens of ways it can be improved.

The story starts after a test when she catches Ren complaining to Nora that, yet again, Jade Dragons' relatively low armour-piercing capability is leaving him vulnerable when facing tougher foes.

Worried that his guns' relative lack of killing power could get Ren hurt or killed, Ruby does something rather stupid. She sneaks down to the lockers that night and steals Jade Dragons from his locker. She spends the night rechambering them to a much higher calibre and more powerful propellent grain. She also has to upgrade some of the mechanical components to deal with the greater recoil and angled muzzle breaks to reduce the upward force from the mechanism. When Ren takes Jade Dragons down to the range the next day, he's in for a shock. Once he's recovered from the jump from 9mm Parabellum to .357 Magnum, he has to admit that the guns are more effective. Whoever did this has his thanks (although he would have preferred they'd asked first).

Feeling vindicated, Ruby loses her sense of proportion and spends the next night 'improving' everyone's weapons. Next morning, there are lots of unhappy people. There's no doubt that Ruby has improved them. They're more capable, more deadly, more accurate and more reliable. The problem is that an experienced fighter has gotten used to his his or her weapons's quirks. Their fighting style can even be built around it. Removing those quirks and modifying the weapons make them suddenly virtually foreign to their users.

Ruby is terrified of the consequences of exposure but, after Yang nearly nails herself into the ceiling during one practice because of Ember Celica's increased recoil, she confesses. She gets a dressing-down from everyone and a massive deduction of credits from the staff. She then has to return the weapons to the way they were before her well-intentioned sabotage. It will be a while before she has regained her friends trust and she's learnt an important lesson about teamwork (and the difference between 'upgrade' and 'improvement').

She's sitting in the cafeteria alone (again), with Weiss on the next table very loudly discussing about how they're not talking to Ruby at the moment when Ren comes over. In his usual quiet way, he starts discussing some other improvements that he had in mind for his weapons; he lacks the raw engineering talent to make them work but it seems she might have the know-how. She looks up in shock. "Asking permission is never better than seeking forgiveness," Ren explains.