Emergence

When three half-drunk college students in Vancouver, Canada are approached on the street by a girl apparently cosplaying as Ruby Rose from RWBY, they are quick to dismiss her pleas for help finding her way back to Vale -- until a shower of petals and a very real Crescent Rose unfolding before them force them to consider the impossible: that this lost teen is in fact the genuine article, inexplicably transported from Remnant to Earth. They have no idea that by bringing her back home with them that they are beginning an adventure that will send them around the world to find and rescue the other members of Team RWBY.

And once the girls are back together, the adventure is far from over. How did they get to Earth? Why can't they remember how they got here? What are they going to do with themselves? What happens when they run out of Dust? And how are their poor student benefactors going to pay for feeding and housing four voracious super-humans, even with the occasional donation of cash from Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth? Some of these questions are answered when they learn that several governments have been helping them almost from the start, and have established a joint taskforce called "Gemstone" to watch over the girls and help them settle in to Earth -- and to learn as much as they can about Remnant, Remnans, Dust and Dust-based technology. Because the governments behind Gemstone realize that when four friendly girls can arrive from Remnant so can far less friendly things, and they need to know what to expect -- and what to do about possibly hostile visitors.

Confounding the more paranoid of their college student friends, Gemstone is as open as it can be about what they're worried about and what they'd like to learn from the girls. The girls agree to help -- and in return, Gemstone sets them up with a home, an income, and identities as high school students. And after some research, Gemstone also creates cartridges for their weapons made from Terran firearms technology. The girls settle in, go to school, and start to adapt. Occasionally they fly out to a government facility somewhere to talk to scientists or military personnel. In between, they learn what Christmas is, start dating some of their classmates, and even go to the prom...

And not long after the school year ends, Team JNPR appears in Washington DC... and the world will never be the same again.

Emergence is a RWBY fanfic series by an author who goes by "XVCG" on Spacebattles.com and "Chris7221" on Fanfiction.net. Its central storyline is, as of May 2016, composed of three large multi-act stories, the third of which is complete except for an epilogue as of the beginning of July 2016:


 * Emergence (complete) - One by one, the girls of Team RWBY arrive on earth, scattered across the globe.
 * Aliens Among Us (complete) - Four new girls start at a Vancouver High School, four girls who seem impossibly familiar to a few of the students there.
 * Convergence (ongoing) - Everyone from the girls to the governments knew that Team RWBY's masquerade was never going to last. But when their cover is blown defending a hotel full of earth folk from Cinder Fall, Roman Torchwick, and the others, what will happen next?

The author has two further installments planned after the conclusion of Convergence, tentatively entitled Emergence Second Interquel, which will take place during 2015 to 2018, and Resurgence, to be set circa 2035.

Additionally there are several side stories. They're optional but reading them will make certain developments in the main storyline more understandable:
 * Those You Leave Behind (complete) - When Team RWBY disappears between the end of Volume 1 and the beginning of Volume 2, Jaune and Team JNPR vow to take up their challenges and missions -- and in the process work their way through a version of Volume 2 that is both familiar and quite different.
 * Tabula Rasa (effectively complete) - Her name is Rosalind Drake, and today she's a New York City cop. But ten years ago she was found an amnesiac wandering the streets of the city, and her origins still haunt her.  Even more, she is haunted by the faces on the photo she had with her when she was found, faces for which she has names but no other memories:  Ruby.  Yang.  And Taiyang.
 * Emergence: Asides (ongoing) - Short pieces ranging from vignettes to full ministories, showing odd, amusing and interesting moments across the entire series. Some of these got rolled into the main story, but they're all worth reading -- especially the installments where Team RWBY watch RWBY and react to it.  Note that some of these are canon to the rest of the series, but some aren't.
 * A Christmas Emerging (complete) - Team RWBY struggles with the True Meaning of Christmas.

There are also a few other pieces, including at least two works originally released as April Fools gags.


 * Accidental Murder: Both Weiss and Yang accidentally kill hostile soldiers shortly after their arrivals because they're unaware of just how fragile Terrans are compared to Remnans.


 * Alien Invasion: It's all but stated outright that the government of Atlas (or a faction within it, at least) is behind a project to deliberately open gates between Remnant and Earth, with the intent to invade the "peaceful, primitive" world on the other side which legend says lacks both Dust and the Grimm.  In one of the most recent chapters as of this writing, a gate between a Canadian park and Forever Fall has opened (for no apparent reason), measuring dozens of meters wide and tall enough to accidentally catch an airplane in flight.    In the following chapter, Ironwood more or less admits that he had intended on invading Earth; discovering that the inhabitants were at least advanced enough to have radio definitely put a kink in his plans to steamroll over the "primitives".
 * And on receiving word of the start of peaceful contact between Vale and Earth, the deposed/figurehead Queen of Atlas decides to activate her own plans for opening a portal and invading what she and her advisers still believe are peaceful primitives with no ability to retaliate, despite reports to the contrary.


 * Aliens Speaking English: Everyone who comes through from Remnant speaks modern English, but they don't call it that.  See Call a Rabbit a Smeerp, below.


 * Alpha Bitch: Weiss finds herself at social odds with one and her Girl Posse when she ends up in high school in Canada.  Eventually their relationship thaws, and they find that they're Not So Different, underneath their respective masks.


 * Alternate Character Interpretation: In-universe:  After watching Volume 2 of RWBY, Weiss is less than impressed by Neptune and can't understand why her animated counterpart finds him attractive.


 * April Fools: The author has written side stories which he has posted on the first of April for the last couple of years; they should not be taken very seriously.


 * Artistic License Gun Safety: Not unlike the Vale cops near the end of V1, Ruby casually points a loaded rifle at Sam and Joe with her finger on the trigger.  She gets thoroughly scolded for it.


 * Big Eaters: Remnans, compared to Terrans.  Apparently a quirk of their physiology, but they don't derive nearly as much from a "normal-sized" meal made from Terran food as they would from an equivalent meal made from Remnan ingredients, so they end up eating far more than their size and activity levels would indicate.


 * Bloodless Carnage: Utterly averted in so many ways.
 * When Remnans fight Terrans in any kind of close combat, the fight usually ends in a horrifying display of real-life Ludicrous Gibs.
 * The cleanly-rendered battles of V2 -- especially the Grimm incursion at the end of the volume -- are actually littered with the bloody and broken bodies of Innocent Bystanders when we see the "real" thing in Those You Leave Behind.


 * Book Dumb: All of the girls at one point or another during Aliens Among Us, but most prominently Yang and Blake in math class.  Yang basically ignored her math classes when she was younger, and Blake never actually had a formal education and thus doesn't have any grounding in math at all.


 * Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: Language variation:  The series RWBY is not engaging in Translation Convention -- they really are speaking in English.  Except they call it "Valic".  And Pyrrha identifies Classical Greek as "Ancient Mistralian".


 * Cassandra Truth: Aaron, in Aliens Among Us.  Almost from the moment they step into school he identifies the girls as Team RWBY, but his brother and his friends think he's nuts.


 * Character Development: All the girls undergo growth and change during their time on Earth, Weiss and Yang the most.


 * CIA Evil, FBI Good: Averted, for the most part.  In fact, the author's work does not fall victim to any variety of "government is evil" generalization/cliche.  (Some of the characters, however, buy into it completely.)  Every agent, employee and official of a Terran government who appears is a person doing their job, sometimes with fewer resources or less information than they'd like, but doing the best they can for the right reasons.  (At least for Western governments.  It's implied that the Russian government may not have had Weiss's best interests at heart, but it's unclear how much was the one squad that found her, and how much really was orders from above.  And even assuming ISIS counts as a legitimate government, no one connected to them comes across as anything but Complete Monsters.)


 * Complete Monster: ISIS and its individual members, from Yang's point of view.  And arguably everyone else's.


 * Cool Gate: Apparently the goal of projects run by the Atlesian government (and maybe others) as well as Cinder's faction, with the intent of reaching the half-remembered world of Earth, which may be the origin of Remnan humanity.


 * Cosplay: Blake arrives in Akihibara and follows several Japanese girls in Catgirl cosplay, thinking that they are fellow faunus and will lead her somewhere she can get help.


 * Curb Stomp Battle: Weiss's first fight in the Ukraine, Yang's fights in Syria.
 * What Ironwood anticipated his planned invasion of Earth would be, until they received radio transmissions from the other side of the gate in Forever Fall.

""Funny, I don't remember everyone else being a black silhouette," Weiss remarked cynically."
 * Deadpan Snarker: Weiss becomes even more of this than she was to start with after arriving on Earth.  For instance, upon watching the first couple episodes of RWBY, she comments:


 * Defrosting Ice Queen: Weiss defrosts so much by the end of Aliens Among Us that she's practically a puddle.  Imagine, if you will, Weiss Schnee in yoga pants and T-shirt, sprawled on the floor playing Call of Duty and screaming obscenities at the other players over her voice connection because they think she's Kara Eberle trolling them.


 * Does Not Know His Own Strength: It takes the girls a little while to get used to just how much more powerful they are than Terrans.
 * Ruby almost injures a boy in her gym class just by throwing him a basketball.
 * Inverted late in Aliens Among Us when Yang overestimates how much weight she can lift and is almost injured by a barbell because she's gotten a little out of shape. The amount of weight on the barbell -- and the fact that Blake casually picked it up off of her -- still boggles a couple of boys who witness the scene.


 * Doppelganger Crossover/Celebrity Paradox: Some of the girls from Team RWBY meet their voice actresses during an excursion to RTX in Austin, TX.  Sadly, the only part of this we actually see is the moment where Yang and Barbara Dunkelman greet each other.  (We certainly don't get to see the impassioned make-out session Dunkelman has claimed would ensue in such a situation.)


 * Faking the Dead: Summer Rose, as far as those in Remnant are concerned.


 * The Federation: The four city-states of Remnant all appear to be some variety of The Federation, albeit ones which are very pragmatic and morally neutral at best.  From what little we hear about their governments, they are probably oligarchies with little to nothing in the way of a democratic system.


 * First Contact: Earth and Remnant entered into a first contact situation in the third act of Convergence.


 * Fish Out of Water: All the girls, at first.  However, they all eventually adapt to one degree or another, sometimes maybe a bit too much -- see Defrosting Ice Queen, above.


 * For Halloween, I Am Going as My Fairy Tale Inspiration: What the girls did for their first Halloween.


 * Gamer Chick: Weiss, after a year on Earth.  To the point that she decides she'd rather be a video game designer than go back and run the Schnee Dust Company.


 * General Ripper: General Ironwood is showing symptoms of this, especially with his off-handed comments to Ozpin about hoping to simply roll over all opposition on Earth and how now having to actually face a potentially equal force there is an annoying roadblock in his plans.


 * Gosh Dang It to Heck: Subverted.  The girls, who almost never say anything one could consider off-color in V1, slowly pick up Earth's "colorful metaphors" to different degrees.


 * Government Agency of Fiction: Gemstone, an international task force initially assembled to watch over and help Team RWBY, and later learn everything they can about Remnant.  For about half of the core arc stories, Gemstone manages the Government Conspiracy which allows Team RWBY to have a normal life.


 * I Was Beaten by a Girl: At the Halloween party, Yang beats a boy in arm-wrestling with insulting ease thanks to her Super Strength. He doesn't take it well and attacks her; fortunately between being drunk and the intervention of friends, Yang manages not to kill him in the ensuing fight.


 * Immune to Bullets: Any Remnan with unlocked Aura can shrug off Terran gunfire; bullets are almost below Weiss and Yang's notice, and Ruby says they sting.
 * At one point, a Gemstone operative is told that if Team RWBY were to suddenly become hostile he should skip firearms entirely and go directly to anti-tank weapons.


 * In-Series Nickname: Because of how the yellow parts of her outfit stand out on low-res videos of her attacks on ISIS that make it to the West, Yang is nicknamed "The Bride" by the media in reference to Uma Thurman's role in the Kill Bill movies.


 * In Vino Veritas: Both Yang and Weiss at the Halloween party in Aliens Among Us.  Yang admits her identity, although no one but Aaron gives it any credence.  And in a moment of drunken catharsis, Weiss admits that she hates her father.


 * Innocent Bystander:
 * The Grimm incursion into Vale is seen to be much bloodier and deadlier in Those You Leave Behind than it appears in V2; there are dozens if not hundreds of casualties.
 * RTX is filled with these, and several are killed during Cinder's attack.


 * It's Not You, It's Me: The excuse Aaron gives to Blake for breaking up with her:  that despite all experience to the contrary he's still caught up (involuntarily) in the idea that Ruby, Anna, Bella and Linda are really Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang, and when he looks at his girlfriend, he still sees the animated character he thought she really was instead of the girl who's actually there -- and that it's not fair to her.  The irony of this is not lost on Blake.


 * Know When to Fold'Em: Upon seeing the few scattered bits of Cinder, Emerald and Mercury left after they're taken down by the US forces, Roman Torchwick and Neo immediately surrender.


 * Laser-Guided Amnesia/Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Team RWBY suffers from a minor anterograde amnesia which prevents them from remembering anything between the confrontation on the docks at the end of V1 and their arrivals on Earth.
 * Rosalind Drake cannot recall almost anything about her life before she was discovered wandering the streets of Manhattan circa 2004.


 * Ludicrous Gibs: The usual result of a Remnan fighting a Terran in close combat, even before Dust-powered weapons are factored in.


 * Made of Iron: Remnans compared to Terrans, because of Aura.


 * Made of Plasticine: Terrans compared to Remnans.


 * Masquerade: The girls essentially hide in plain sight as high school students in Canada, and despite a few careless moments on their parts and a couple of their classmates who are convinced that their resemblance to certain animated characters is too incredibly uncanny to be easily dismissed, they manage to maintain their covers.  However, they and the Gemstone team know it's only a matter of time before the Masquerade breaks, and indeed, it does, in the third act of Convergence.


 * Mistaken for Cheating: In the second chapter of Emergence, Jen initially thinks Ben has shown up with a new girlfriend when he brings Ruby back to their apartment to crash for the night.  Unlike the usual Sit Com implementation of this trope, though, matters are quickly explained.


 * Mistaken for Subculture: In the third act of Emergence, Blake arrives in Japan and mistakes several girls in cat ears for Faunus (and vice versa).
 * Later, in Convergence, both Team JNPR and Cinder's group are mistaken for cosplayers as well, the latter with tragic results.


 * More Dakka:   This is, in fact, official policy for dealing with hostile Remnans -- see There Is No Kill Like Overkill below.


 * Mugging the Monster: Both Weiss and Yang when they were attacked forces in the war-torn areas in which they first appeared.


 * Muggles Do It Better: Terran military technology overall appears to be more robust than and possibly more destructive than its Remnan counterparts; certainly a lot more of it can be brought to bear more quickly than Remnan forces can muster.  Also, Remnan armor seems to rely quite a bit on its users' own invulnerability; after getting some experience with Terran armaments, the girls estimate an Atlesian Paladin could be taken out by a single mine or RPG round.


 * Mysterious Waif: Ruby, at the start of Emergence, to Sam and the others.


 * Never Bareheaded: Blake is never seen outside of the girls' home without a hat to cover her cat ears, and when asked, will only say "I don't want to talk about it."


 * Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Pretty much anyone from Remnant on Earth.  Team RWBY and Team JNPR are all promising new students but far from the best at what they do -- and on Earth they are unstoppable juggernauts that are nigh-invulnerable to anything short of anti-tank weapons.  Cinder and her people are at least an order of magnitude more dangerous than them.  Even Cinder's Faunus mooks -- one gets hit by several fifty-caliber rounds and can still keep going.


 * Nosy Neighbor: Aaron plays this role in Aliens Among Us, even while dating Blake.


 * Nothing Is the Same Anymore/The Unmasqued World: The President of the United States reveals the existence of alternate worlds and visitors therefrom in the aftermath of.


 * Pop Cultural Osmosis Failure: Realistically implemented -- despite its popularity RWBY isn't exactly a mainstream property and more than a few characters, like Joe, have never heard of it.


 * Puny Earthlings: Terrans are not only Made of Plasticine compared to Remnans, they also have no Aura to unlock -- the girls tried.


 * Real Life Writes the Plot: Given the prominent if (mostly) off-screen role the staff of Rooster Teeth play in the events of Emergence, and how close to "in real-time" the story was written, the inclusion of Monty Oum's death and its effect on the girls (and even some of the Gemstone agents) was inevitable.


 * Real World Episode: The entire series is very much one, which has increasingly major consequences.


 * Reality Ensues: Just as "this is real life" can be considered Arc Words for this story, this trope is clearly a primary theme -- everything, every action, has very realistic effects and consequences, and nothing is as easy as it normally is in a Self Insert or Trapped in Another World fic, to the point of Deconstruction.


 * Rebellious Heiress: What Weiss becomes, even more so than she was in V1 -- by the end of Aliens Among Us she's decided she wants to be a videogame designer on Earth rather than go back home to run the Schnee Dust Company.


 * Refuge in Audacity: In Aliens Among Us Blake tells Aaron that the girls are deliberately mimicking the title characters of RWBY for their own personal reasons, and that's why they ping on his fanboy radar so strongly.


 * Refugee From TV Land: Everyone from Remnant, obviously, which includes Team RWBY, Team JNPR, Cinder's group... and.


 * Rouge Angles of Satin: Isaac suffers from this in spades -- to the point that his written communications can be incomprehensible, as in the case of a Christmas card he sends to the girls.
 * One of the April Fools side stories to the series is actually an In-Universe Fanfic written by Isaac, and is as garbled as one might expect from his various written efforts in the main story.


 * Self Insert: The author describes the story as an inversion of the self-insertion trope.


 * Shell-Shocked Veteran: Yang after getting rescued from Syria.


 * Shipper on Deck: After watching V2, Weiss becomes an "Arkos" shipper -- and not just to get Jaune off her back.


 * Spared by the Adaptation: Although the plot of RWBY and the "real" events in Remnant remain reasonably close through to the end of V2, it's obvious that things will play out differently for what would have been V3:
 * Roman and Neo are on Earth in US government custody and will not be part of the attack on Vale and Beacon, and thus will not suffer their animated counterparts' fates.
 * Inverted for Cinder, Emerald and Mercury, who are killed by the U.S. military before the events of V3 even begin.
 * Consequently, Pyrrha will not be killed by Cinder. And for the same reason, Penny -- who has yet to appear in Emergence -- is almost certainly spared her canon fate as well.
 * On a different, semi-meta level, the in-universe version of Rooster Teeth puts production of RWBY on hold until they can decide how to deal with the spooky resonance between the show and the real Remnant. Given what V3 would have held in store for Pyrrha, Penny and Yang (at the very least), they are reluctant to inflict such things, fictional as they may be, on people they now know are real.


 * Superhero: How practically everyone in the know describes Remnans -- and specifically the girls -- in comparison to Terrans.


 * Take That: Several to other works, including Twilight and The Expendables.


 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Official military policy when engaging hostile Remnans, developed after studying Team RWBY in action.  First employed in the field when Cinder and her group attack RTX in Austin -- she, Emerald and Mercury are hit with a couple dozen Hellfire missiles, after which what's left is bathed in minigun and rocket fire.
 * Informally, this is advice given to a member of Gemstone much earlier in the story -- if Team RWBY ever went rogue, forget about firearms and go right to anti-tank weapons.


 * They Would Cut You Up: An explicit fear that the college students have, which they manage to transmit to Team RWBY before Gemstone makes itself known.


 * This Is Reality: Almost the Arc Words for Emergence -- someone says some variation on this at least a half dozen times throughout the main arcs of the story.  And with good reason -- one of the underlying themes of the work is the collision of realities, one far more idealistic and black-and-white than the other.


 * Time Travel Tense Trouble:  During and after watching V2, the girls have trouble deciding just how to refer to the events therein, partly because of this trope.


 * Tragic Keepsake: Rosalind's photo of Ruby, Yang and Taiyang.


 * Trapped in Another World: The girls of Team RWBY on Earth.


 * True Meaning of Christmas: A Christmas Emerging explores Team RWBY's attempts to understand what Christmas is about.


 * Washington DC: Team JNPR wake up on the Mall after smashing an ominous machine in a Supervillain Lair.


 * Who Would Want to Watch Us?: The initial response all of the girls have upon learning about the existence of RWBY.  They also dip into fan websites, with predictable results.
 * Late in Convergence, Nora bucks the trend by deciding it's all awesome. Of course.


 * World of Badass: Explicitly averted by Word of God -- Aura is not evenly distributed among Remnans, and Hunters/Huntresses are all on one end of the bell curve.  After all, if everyone were capable of that level of ability, they wouldn't need a special caste of fighters to defend society.


 * Your Head Asplode: To Yang's horror, what happens when she punches Terrans.