Holy crap.


Ozpin engages Cinder and sends Pyrrha and Jaune to get help...but his fight is a short one and Cinder makes for the tower. Pyrrha kisses Jaune good-bye and after making sure he cannot follow her into the fight runs off to buy time for the others to gather and stop Cinder.

Pyrrha, who has been an awesome character and , in many ways, a Mary Sue done right, puts up a tremendous fight against Cinder, but the villainess is, by now, something of an eldritch horror. Pyrrha does everything right and genuinely annoys Cinder, but it was to no avail, An arrow she actually  disintegrated in flight reforms and imbeds itself in her heel, and, thus paralyzed, the proud heroine suffers the ignominy of being on her knees when the death blow is delivered and is reduced to whimpers as Cinder consumed her soul and her powers.



The screen cap can't do the scene justice...THAT was hard to watch. The quivering and the gasping, and the visage of this awesome person paralyzed in a position of utter supplication was the stuff of nightmares and made for one of the more disturbing death scenes in recent years.

Meanwhile, Jaune  (who Pyrrha had kissed, stuffed in a locker and propelled to the other side of town) suffers the cumulation of his worst nightmares. He could do NOTHING except beg Ruby and Weiss to try and save Pyrrha...he has to confront the fact that he is AGAIN the fifth wheel, the failure, the man who cannot rise to the occasion. That he has punched far above his weight and exceeded all expectations can be of no consolation to him as his inability to offer so much as a distraction has resulted in the woman he loved, the only person who ever showed him a kindness not founded in pity, dyeing the most horrible death imaginable. The only mercy shown him is that he did not witness her death.

That wretched visage is reserved for Ruby, who unlike Jaune is able to arrive just in time to be too late. She goes a little nuts and.....























The last 20 minutes are a brief montage of the characters dealing with the ramifications of the battle. It seems that Ruby has a rather spectacular hidden power that is activated by watching awesome characters die. It also results in her being in a coma for some days, and it does not actually thwart the villains plan so much as alter it slightly. The tremendous Lovecraftian abomination that was oozing out monsters was put to sleep by Ruby's manifestation of her powers, however, while not adding to the local monster population it , in its slumber serves as a beacon drawing in all the creatures of darkness to the university section of the city, which has been largely abandoned except for the various monster hunters trying to retake it. The global internet and communications array is down and the planet's various kingdoms and smaller outposts of humanity are now isolated. 

Blake is missing, Weiss has been recalled to her nation by her father and Yang, now missing her right arm, is sinking deep into a bitter depression. Before leaving, Ruby's uncle Qrow confides in her two pieces of information.  Ruby's late mother had a similar power and while it is known, it is so rare that is literally the stuff of legends.Also, with Ozpin gone (presumably eaten by Cinder) Qrow is taking over his organization and heading off to the Kingdom of Haven to carry on the fight in the shadows.

Fall turns to winter and Ruby quietly slips away to trek off to Haven, in the hopes that she can help to avenge her friends and save the world from the encroaching darkness.

She is joined by three highly motivated companions...



So, whether it's titled RWBY,  JNRR, AVRR, RAVL, RRAV, NJRL, LAVR, RALV, RLAV ,NARR, VAR,L NRAR, JNR,L ARVR, VARR, NRLJ, NRJL, ARLN, ARLV, JRRV or perhaps LRVA there is a good chance that we'll be seeing more of this story, which is good as the many worrisome implications of that stinger really need to be elaborated upon.

On the other hand the prospect of seeing Jaune burned at the stake is a bit off-putting.  

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Supreme Court Justice Antonine Scalia was just found dead.

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...that you, gentle reader, have (for some reason) any interest in happenings that do not involve the presidential primary, here are a couple of things that seem to be getting short shrift.

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...are permitted a moment of well deserved satisfaction when they are achieving a moment of trancendental magnificence...

That was a thoroughly satisfying battle. After the defeat of the Fire Dragon, which could not have happened without Leili's moment of awseome, our heroes decamp to rendezvous with Rory, only to find her broken, bloodied and her scythe shattered. A quick assessment of the situation followed by polite inquiries reveal 3 things to our protagonists:

1: This is Giselle, she is the Avatar of Hardy, the god of the underworld much like Emloy, god of war has Rory. Note her pets. She woke up the fire dragon 50 years early so she could train two of its young to help her defeat Rory, because of something to do with the politics of this worlds pernicious pantheon.



2: It turns out that when Rory bit Itami two episodes ago, she gave him 3d6 damage reduction with the effect that the damage is transferred to her.

3: All those close calls and minor scrapes Itami got during the fight with the dragon...weren't. He was getting hit just as hard as all the people around him who died. Rory was absorbing all this colossal dragon inflicted damage at exactly the moment Giselle and her pets sucker punched her.

Although it was a team effort, given Giselles fondness for the dragon, none of the girls seem to think it wise to take credit for its slaying.

He did it.

Given that their mage and their demigod are currently unable to walk, all their ammunition is gone and they are faced with a very ornery demigod who has two baby dragons at her command it is decided that the most productive course of action is to 



RUN AWAY!!!



Fortunately there are few problems not of the heart that can't be solved with 155mm artillery and Sidewinder missiles.

I did like the fact that the cavalry, in the form of air support and an artillery battery arrive too late for the main fight, but still are absolutely necessary to save our heroes hides.

With that pesky dragon out of the way, I'm curious as to how the story is going to portray the 'United Fruit' school of economic development...but that does not look like it's going to be addressed next week...which looks like its starting a completely new arc.

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When our protagonist got the call from Ruru (Lulu?) I immediately asked myself how the hell the 12 inch tall genie got a cellphone, and if it's magical how does she connect to...oh...

Things do not go as anticipated  I must say, I did NOT see this coming...

  The little girl's teddy bear is a kaiju and saves their collective ass.

It may not actually be, strictly speaking, "nice" either.

Interestingly, while I mentioned this was a character episode, it is NOT about the little girl, rather it focuses on the background of  Minase, the aloof red-head who through no fault of her own gets in over her head. Despite the ignominy of having their bacon saved by a Teddy bear, Mai and Haruhiko actually do ultimately save the day with a solid, unambiguous win...which is refreshing.

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Business Insider is reporting that the claim by the North Koreans that they conducted an H-Bomb test may indeed be something more than a crate of commie kimchee. For one thing, recent analysis of the seismological data indicates that the detonation was actually much deeper than was initially supposed (more than twice the depth of the previous tests). There seem to be other indicators as well, that this was a test related to specific components used in an H-bomb, though officials are a tad coy about specifics, about how they have come to this conclusion or what components they might be. One interesting fact is that air samples aren't detecting any radioactives, which could mean that the DPRK is getting better at preventing any venting. (I suppose it is also possible that they popped of between 7 and 10 thousand tons of TNT; that's not without precedence but there doesn't seem to be any reason to do that as they clearly do have atomic weapons). There is more on this test here and here. American tests that tested H-bomb components prior to the first official H-bomb (Ivy-Mike) included Greenhouse-George. That test (and not Ivy-Mike) was was actually the first thermonuclear burn, though its fusion yield was far less that its fission yield. It was a proof of concept test and could well be what is being implied for the North Korean test. Something along those lines would make North Korean claims about the test substantively true. 

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