U know something when you introduced runesmithing it says weapons and armor

Gee, I would never have guessed that you dislike deserts :-P

Worth noting, rationing water is a very bad idea; in my home desert of southern Arizona they'll occasionally find dead or nearly-dead people who still have water in their canteens, dehydrated because they feel like rationing water will do them some good somehow. I don't know if that's something you will have had reason to hear about, but I suppose that's not terribly relevant, because our narrator Jaune would probably never have heard of such a thing.

Having lived in the Anza Borrego desert I guess how you see deserts and how I do are quite different. Though I have never experienced anything like the Sahara so I may be speaking from ignorance. Not all deserts are remotely equal after all.

I just think of them as quiet places where the stars stretch horizon to horizon. No cars or cities. No clouds floating by. No trees in the way. Just you and whatever the sky means to you. Maybe it is still home and I want to defend it a bit. There was a bluff, cut through by a fault line, very near where I lived containing the last 8 million years Earth's geographical history. That same fault created a wash that literally split a fair sized hill into two near equal pieces. So few people and so much freedom. Eh, I'm probably not very convincing. Not like I've ever lived in a city like London (I don't think you live there but you seemed to have done so once). Los Angeles is large but sprawling. San Francisco dense, but confined. And neither of them likely compare very aptly.

Just wanted to say a few words about deserts. Like the chapter, can't wait for more Captain Dragon, but Jaune doing Jaune type stuff is good fun. This one has the added benefit of him being more mature and confident, and that has to be a bit of a pleasure for you to write now. Thanks again.

I swear to everyone the desert is it's own version of hell. It's no reason for it to be so damn hot and the sand plus the heat. HAHAHA. I am now, Sandman.

poor jaune. Nobody told him about the plot armor of a main protagonist.

A great chapter, I eagerly await more.

Nitpicks:
in a valet between [valley. Probably an autocorrect error.]
had buried up [burrowed]

They apparently don't teach desert survival at Beacon.

They did not prepare for the weather in either Atlas or Vacuo.

I see you brought the spider Grimm from HoS. Nice touch.

- Nice setup. Glad to see things are really picking up fast for this book. Insect/Arachnid Grimm are creepy and add a lot to the theme and sense of “other” in Vacuo. Hoping for some possible snake, bird of prey, or other various desert animals Grimm to add to the tone, maybe some alligators or other “river valley” Grimm in the middle of the decidedly un-River valley desert to add to Ren’s lovely scene-setting myth.

- Love the sense of continuity on Jaune’s underlying quest to study the logic of castes in different situations and cultures. His observations on Vale’s difference, Mistral’s deification and adoration for the “extra special” ones, Atlas’ stratification of different types of heroes, and now Vacuo’s (seeming for now) realative relaxation of caste hierarchy all seem interesting and are great sources of non-exposition world building. The continuing observations of the lack of NPC’s in these hierarchies is a good way to tie the story back into the premise that, hero in deed or not, he still is an outsider, and a (most likely tragic) reveal of that is coming up sooner or later. Suspense is killing me.

God damn spiders! Just reading about them made me shiver.

My one problem in this chapter was that they didn’t prepare properly. I mean it’s Vacuo, the worlds anus of a location. They could’ve asked the teachers for advice or read up about it particularly Weiss and Ren since there their go to source for information.

Though the story is pretty good, I feel like you could have written it as an original fiction story and the concepts still would have worked. This story is like an AU fanfic (regular high school for example) where the majority of the original source used can be hand waved away?

Cafe with a Smile works because it uses original and canon to develop its story. We already know some of the character motivations, which makes the interactions and AU elements more enjoyable

But here, it feels like you used RWBY just for the sake of it in what could have been a original RPG adventure story. Characters/names are references to RWBY for us readers, but they don’t go through the same events/development as canon, so they’re your own characters you developed that have inspiration from RWBY. Semblance are abilities that are part of the Class System. So there’s a whole original system for special abilities present.

So in summary, I feel that this story is an original idea, and the RWBY content feels forced.

I wonder if there is any way to kill Neo? With her by Roman's side he will be quite hard to capture.

hey something you might want to include into this to better the understanding of magic or perhaps as some kind of ex machina latter down the line is to include the idea of let lines into the magic portion of the world