RWBY: Remnant's Blond Bard

Chapter 7

He may have underestimated the power of the internet.

That was the only conclusion Jaune could come to as he looked at his bank account and realised it had exploded from a couple of hundred lien to shy of 40,000 in the space of a couple of days. It turned out that going viral was good for your ad revenue.

Less so for his self-esteem.

A magazine in the grocery had a picture of his alter-ego on the cover with the words "WHO IS GUITAR CUTIE?" above it. That stupid name had stuck, too. It was Guit-Arc. It was a clever play on words.

That was a hill he was prepared to die on.

Technically speaking, RemTube and his bank knew exactly who he was on account of the fact they paid money to his account, but they weren't going to tell when it'd mean breaking confidentiality rules and causing a huge scandal. Maybe they didn't even know for sure. The site probably only let its employees see "necessary information", and the bank knew he got money from RemTube, but didn't know if he wasn't some other new creator making it big.

Apparently, he'd caused a bit of a stir. It was hard to tell just how much because Ansel was far removed from the major cities and a lot of their news came late. Maybe the fuss was all over by now and no one cared. Maybe he was already yesterday's news.

Through performing for an audience, you have gained +1 Charisma.

Ugh.

Or maybe not.

Tearing his eyes away from the cute girl on the magazine cover, he paid for the groceries and bagged them up to take back home for mom. The cashier tried to make conversation with him but the long line behind wasn't appreciative and the girl flushed and went to serve them while he slipped out.

Ansel didn't have a supermarket. Few villages were big enough for it. Instead, it had a franchise that ran a grocery store-slash-newsagent and got most of its goods as cast-offs from the supermarket it was franchised from. Even the magazines on the shelves were a couple of days out of date.

It had been a week since Mistral and while he'd kept in touch with Nora and Ren, he'd neglected his RemTube channel. Mostly out of fear. The barrage of notifications of gaining a level in Charisma had slowed, thankfully. It was impossible to know if that was because it was getting harder to gain Charisma as his stat grew, or if it was the natural slowing down of traffic to the video. It might have been both. Either way, he was lucky if he got one point in it a day now. It was honestly a relief.

Turns out using my Bardic Music absolutely does transmit over digital media, he thought.

He wasn't sure why it did but trying to apply logic to a Semblance seemed like a bad idea anyway. After reading up on them, he'd found some examples of family ones like the famous Schnee Semblance, and that was pretty illogical as well.

Glyphs that could appear in the air and bend gravity? Summoning defeated foes as spectral versions of themselves? They might as well be called magic. How else could you describe something that broke the fundamental law of physics? They were witches and wizards, and he was among them – except he'd rolled bard without realising it.

Go figure.

Idly, he checked this stats.

-/-

Jaune Arc

Lvl 5.

Title: Bard

HP: 140/140

MP: 65/65

Str: 6

Con: 5