“Uhh… Hey, Neptune, Sage, Scarlet…” The young man said, his hands cuffed, being dragged out of the, rather comfortable-looking to be honest, prison cell at the police officer. Neptune just looked on in disappointment.
“This is the sixth time we’ve had to bail you out of prison, have you no decency, Sun,” Sage commented.
“Hey, it ain’t my fault I got caught!”
“It is your fault that you left without us…” Neptune commented.
“I was just sick and tired of all the packing, I wanted to see what Vale was like, plus, ships are fun…”
“Come on, get him uncuffed already…” Scarlet said to the police officer, who obliged, and undid the monkey-faunus’ hands. “Now, let’s go get something to eat, I’m absolutely famished.”
“Ditto,” Neptune and Sun said in unison.
As they left the prison, one of the guards watched them, eyes green behind his sunglasses.
“A dance?”
“A school dance to celebrate the beginning of the Vytal Festival, it’s only two weeks away…”
“That still seems a bit early for a celebration, don’t you think?”
Sweetie and Weiss were sitting in the ballroom, going over the plans for the dance, it was always set up a few days in advanced, team CFVY was supposed to be setting it up, but they had just been called away for a mission. “You want us to help set it up?” Sweetie asked.
“Precisely, you’re semblance would be wonderfully useful for helping set everything up…”
Sweetie looked a little confused, “Pinkie said I wasn’t allowed to help with parties since that one time I tried baking a cake…”
“It’s just a dance, and the rest of your team would surely be of help…”
Sweetie thought about it for a second, then stood up and walked off to her dorm, saying “I’ll go talk to Diamond about it.”
As Sweetie left, Weiss drew out her sheaf of papers and studied them… Telekinesis was the paper she opened upon, showing a very simple series of lines and circles with a line of text circling the matrix. With some help from Sweetie, what she originally went to see the girl about before talk of the dance had come up, she had a basic understanding of what the words meant… “Convert energy:chemical=subject:caster>targeted object=kenetic, force=gravity-2, hold location=0,0,0,” She muttered, cementing the letters in her mind… It reminded the girl of computer programing, and she wondered if semblances were simply that, lines of programming in a person… But, she let go of that train of thought as she reached out, feeling the chemical energy from her own body being drawn out and latching on to the object she wanted to lift, pulling it upward against the pull of gravity and holding it still in a location…
Those numbers, at the end of the code, Sweetie had explained, represented where you wanted to move the object, it was hard at first, but everyone where she lived quickly got used to changing those numbers almost as fast as they could think… Weiss changed one of the zeros into a one, and the coffee cup, in a whitish-blue field, jutted upward a centimetre.
“Why hasn’t Atlas figured this out yet… How did this elusive village of faunus figure out how to use semblance in such a way…” Weiss thought to herself, muttering quietly under her breath…
The mass of magically infused crystal lenses, the arrays of scrying spells, the shell of steel… The immense construction was built into the mountain with a full view of the sky above. Pegasi weather teams had been moved in to clear the sky of any clouds, vapours, or dust particulate, and unicorns cast spells into the air that kept it clear… The megascope, as some had come to call it, was only one of a dozen or so of these monstrous constructions, but it was still amazing to be the one to operate such a device.
The megascope was a kind of powerful telescope, even if that was an astonishing oversimplification of the arcane function. If it could be aimed at the horizon, it would be able to see in clear and sharp detail an individual virus on the tip of a fine needle, hundreds of kilometres away. Aimed into the sky, it was perfect for mapping distant planets and celestial bodies, even things at the other end of the galaxy were only reduced to fuzzyish pictures, rather than completely unidentifiable… The machine was the work of decades of intricate spellcasting to get those crystal mirrors and the scrying magic within them perfect.
It was a point of pride that someone so young, only recently graduated from the academy of physics in Canterlot, was assisting the lead scientist in this investigation, and in such an amazing work of science and arcana. Star Tracker sat on his rump, quill in his teeth, writing down whatever his master, the pony operating the megascope, said to.
On the low table, Star Tracker continued to look through the photos sent from Canterlot, from the surface of some distant planet, it showed views of the night sky on the alien world, and of the alien world’s moon, cracked and drifting in pieces, it disturbed the young astrophysicist. But, at least it was a noticeable landmark, and certainly the kind of thing easily seen through the megascope.
From behind him, the lead scientist, a mare called Oculus, a unicorn, said, directly into Star Tracker’s mind through the use of some telepathic spell, “No, no, mark off Solar-77, I can’t find anything around that star, none of the planets match the profile…” Star Tracker unconsciously nodded and flicked over to another piece of paper, making off another name on the list of stars with known planetoids around them… It wasn’t the most thrilling work, but at least he wasn’t one of those ponies going over the records to see if there had been any mention of a planet with a broken moon in one of the megascope’s previous observations of the sky… Going through all those books must be such a chore.
He flicked his eyes back to the photos, making a small “Hmm…” His eyes were drawn to one slightly brighter than average star in the sky of that distant planet, it was green… There were very few green stars in the galaxy, but there were a hoof-full, glowing green due to some unknown magical phenomenon, one that simple observation hadn’t shed any light on… But, that green star was right next to two others, a red and orange star that seemed to be touching, a binary star… Red and orange binary, relatively near a green star… It stuck some familiarity with the colt, and he went over to some of the star charts he had…
“Red and orange binary, if the general location is where I think it is, it must be… That’s Blastlight’s Star, in the northern hemisphere, but the green, there isn’t a green star next to Blastlight’s Star, unless… No, it must be Blastlight, there aren’t any other red-orange binaries in close proximity to a green star, but, Ather-12 isn’t that close to Blastlight, it’s eighty degrees to the north-west…”
He pondered this for a moment, his train of thought temporarily disrupted by Oculus calling into his mind again, saying “Mark off Ather-91,” But then, a few moments later, he face-hoofed.
“Of course an alien planet wouldn’t have the same line of sight of the stars that we have… It must be facing those two stars in such a way to make them look like they’re next to each other… And, it clearly orbits the same kind of star as Celestia’s Sun…” He paused, pulling out a calculator and doing some quick triangulation, then stood and trotted over to Oculus, “I think I have something!”
The room was a bit small, but Cozy found it, well, cozy… She was sitting on the edge of the bed watching her new companions, Neo, the colourful human, was quiet, and simply sitting on her bed, sharpening a large steel needle… Cinder, a tall human with a dark mane and bright yellowish-orange eyes was glaring at her… They had just settled in from their trot over from the White Fang’s hideout, this Beacon place was interesting, there was an odd magical pressure, and a feeling of unease that the filly quickly got used to.
“I’m curious,” Cinder began, staring at the foal, her eyes drilling into the filly’s soul, she returned the stare, and Cinder flinched, just a tiny thing, but one that Cozy could notice… “What do you want, why did you join the White Fang…” Cinder said, intrigued by the girl, those little pale pink eyes held dark anger and pressure behind them that made Cinder uncomfortable.
“Why are you asking…” Cozy began, “Want to know if you can trust me? Want to know how much of an asset I will be to your little quest, whatever that is…”
Cinder paused, as much as this little girl looked like an innocent child, every word, every movement, screamed to the woman’s heightened senses that she was in the presence of a predatory beast. “Yes,” Cinder answered truthfully, knowing that trying to dodge the question or lie wouldn’t go over well with this monstrous child.
“Well, I want to know what exactly this plan of yours is… And how it will benefit me…”
Cinder was silent for a second, Neo was looking at them both, and Cinder sighed, “I… I am working for a powerful being, and she wants four, powerful, items hidden in the schools, Beacon is our first target… These items, these Relics, are locked behind doors that can only be opened by a kind of special power… I have some of that power, but not all of it, and that's what I’m working to get… The being I am working for is very, very powerful, and I’m sure that no matter what you want she can grant you it, if you do well and please her.”
Cozy smirked, “My family hated me, I didn’t have power, I didn’t have strength, and that’s what they prized above all… So, I’ve come to get my power, to get the strength that was stolen from me at birth… Can this person grant me that?”
Cinder smirked, “That’s exactly what I want, and yes, yes she can…”
Cozy’s smirk turned into a sickly sweet smile that would both melt the heart, melt it until it burned a hole through the person and left them a smoking corpse, “Golly, I better work hard then…” She opened her eyes which somehow drilled into Cinder’s soul, “So, what do we do first…”
Cinder turned and pulled out her scroll, “Well, first Neo here needs to get into the CCTS Tower during the prom, meanwhile, you and I need to work on setting up a grimm attack on the city, more fear means it will be all the easier to set up attacks in the future, and the more attacks, the less guards there will be to the power, and the Relic…” She paused as she saw something on her scroll pop up, “Hm… Seems like Mountain Glenn is a bust, none of the scouts I’ve sent in have come back, I didn’t know it was that dangerous… Guess we’ll need to find another vulnerability, another place to hit the city from…”
The shifting green and purple clouds below had become a common sight after the first month, now Diamond settled herself by trying to map the strange dream… She had discovered that anything she had on her body when she slept, she had with her inside the dream, so, she had brought a scrap of paper and was starting to map the shifting corridors and labyrinthine maze of the dreamscape, soon, she also brought a marker, and scribbled on the walls to help orient herself in the dream, putting a large pink dot on the ground where she began… Her first few maps needed to be scrapped after she discovered that she didn’t appear in the same place every time she slept. “What’s causing all this, why is the dream realm so, stable, here…” She thought, but those were questions better left to a unicorn, and Sweetie certainly didn’t have any useful answers.
The corridors twisted and turned and she had made quite the map, but there was more, always more, the maze seemed to go on forever… Then, she spotted a door, a large gilded door set into the obsidian walls… “That’s new…” She quickly marked it on the map, and continued to trot around until she came to wakefulness, examining the newly marked map sitting in her hands when the rays of morning came into her room.
Looks like Remnant's been spotted. Not bad work, good thing the scientist remembered to adjust for altered perspective before they missed it, hehe.
Oho, Chrysalis has thrown off an entire arc already, how interesting.
ah, Cinder getting her first glimpse at the inner workings of the demon child.... delightful
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Ozpin bashing? Can't read, then.
He's the reason why people still exist on Remnant, and has saved the world multiple times. He's thousands of years old. If anyone knows what the greater good is on their world, it's him. No one understands the situation better than the one man who's lived through it all. No teen-twenty-thirty-something is going to know better, realistically, regardless of how highly they rate themselves (but since the show is ABOUT the girls, I'm sure somehow they will, because that's how stories go - instead of them learning a lesson about what they've done to the poor man who's given them everything).
If you'd bash the hero and savior of the world over the person trying to corrupt and destroy it just because he's got to manipulate things from behind the screen (He is literally the Wizard of Oz, this is how his character is meant to be) in order to keep up morale and not let people fall into the despair of knowing things they don't need to worry about, then that seems very, very wrong in my eyes.
Any leader, no matter how nefarious or how glorious and pure - no matter how small or large, will have to make use of manipulation at some point, because not everyone can handle knowing everything. The vast majority of people who demand that nothing be held back from them in life couldn't stomach what they found out. Thus I can't understand why people exist who are offended that someone who is helping them isn't giving them infodumps they don't need - they don't get to make decisions that change the outcome of things, anyway. It'd just weigh down on them.
And in the world of Remnant, morale is EXTREMELY linked to survival. If everyone knew about Salem and her being unkillable and the source of the Grimm - trying to kill them all, all they'd do is attract/create more Grimm due to their negativity. Depression, panic, sadness, fear, all of that makes the problem much, much worse. Ozpin was completely in the right to be secretive. We have confirmation and evidence of entire populations being wiped out due to a spread of negativity. Ozpin is not only responsible for continued life on Remnant from the start, but works to keep it going in a big way at all times. How can you bash someone like that?
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The thing is Ozpin is putting little faith into people. Here's a truth you may not be aware of it seems, but we're all going to die. Instead of random beast that're attracted to negative emotions, you'll have beast that're made/controlled by a mane-iac that people need to work together with to destroy, well cage. My point is national pride is a powerful positive emotion that can be used for good or bad, and if there's a crazy lady making monsters to kill people, you better believe lots people will join the military to deal with it, and also if you have schools teach kids to be tough and have fun while doing it, it would at least reduce the impact. IDK, what-eves.
To be frank, I'm not a big fan of the information dump lamp, or the information dump guy, that RUBY has. They're basically telling the watchers what has to happen for a win. Only a few things can happen, she eventually gets caged or they talk/fight sense into her, and they talk sense into her after she's caged, or they pull something stupid and bring back the gods before she changes her attitude. Sure you may want to find out how all that ultimately unfolds, but you more/less know the end game and that's boring.
With that said I'm enjoying this written series, it's much more unpredictable.
I love that Cozy scares Cinder.
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None of that is how people work, and some of what you said didn't even make sense in or out of context. Especially considering the constant decay of their world and the many blows to hope that already exist, that is not applicable to the people of Remnant.
"Unkillable evil god-like creature has an infinite army of horrors that have haunted your every waking moment since you were born. Let's join the military to kill the unkillable creature!" Meanwhile, we see Remnant's only known organized military hunkering down and hiding because she's literally just that scary.
Meanwhile the cast goes brat mode and blast the ONE guy in the world who is trying to solve the issue at its source. Does he have a plan currently? No. They got mad that he didn't tell them the details of his life and that he didn't already have a plan to stop Salem, to the point they drove away the man they owe everything to. Then they got mad that he left when they were the ones to drive him away - yes, he didn't have a plan, but he was still forging ahead trying to find one. The man spent thousands of years trying to solve this issue and until that moment apparently hadn't stopped trying, and wasn't going to stop.
The cast vastly disappointed me in turning on their sole benefactor who was doing his best to find a way to stop this.
So tell me, why would he have faith in people? Why does he need to? He's trying to give humanity a future, trying to save the world, and all these people disappear in next to an eyeblink and contributed very little in his quest overall other than helping him gather information or fighting off her ploys - otherwise there'd be more headway. Seems to me he's been burned before, too, but our girls and dear Qrow really took the cake this time. The people he did put some amount of trust in turned on him for not giving them information that would hurt the cause if they knew before they were ready - which was proven not long after that they were NOT ready. Now they're just doing what they would have been doing under his direction ANYWAY, only they're scrabbling around blindly in the dark instead of benefiting from his wisdom and allowing him to use his familiarity with the subject to figure out more than they currently are.
It was a betrayal, short and simple. None of them were qualified to judge him or try to tell him he was wrong. If they know that he's wrong, I'm sure not hearing the right way to do it. Without that, there can be no accusation. But of course, because of how writing tropes go, they'll youthful-bravado their way through to the answer and generally invalidate thousands of years of his suffering and hard work even though it'll be damned contrived. RWBY does tend to operate on shounen-anime logic. Elder mentors exist to be ignored/surpassed/die to protect the young upstart who somehow finds their way through things that should have stopped them cold for the rest of their lives.
But I always run into this kind of pushback. For some reason there's an inordinate amount of you who seem to find the concept of a good immortal who works tirelessly for the betterment of everyone and isn't some sort of servant to mortals to be offensive. Gods know I've had similar points to make over the years in regards to how many people hate Celestia for the same reasons, whether they acknowledge those reasons or not.
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I do not have a problem with an immortal guardian of the people, that is one of the reasons why I like Celestia, what I do have a problem with is Ozpin training up students, practically children, and throwing them at an enemy that cannot be stopped, sending people to their deaths, prolonging the cycle of violence, rather than stepping up and facing Salem himself... I'll point this out later in the fic itself when Celestia and Ozpin meet one another, but you might say "Celestia was doing the same thing to Twilight to train her in becoming an alicorn and taking the throne" but to that I say, Celestia knew that the dangers Twilight and her friends faced were things they could handle, and if they couldn't, then I fully believe that Celestia would step in and protect Twi, rather than leave her to die and grab the next unicorn filly off the street to do the same thing.
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Growing up you only know what people teach you, if people teach you it's perfectly okay and acceptable, heck even preferred and you get to go to heaven afterwards, then you're going to be happy with blowing yourself up to kill a bunch of infidels at a street market, while they sing your praises after your untimely end. This happens/happened in real life.
If people can be happy doing that then people would be more than happy to fight an actual threat that actually exists. The Faunus are an example of how propaganda and nationalism could truly be used for morale to fight what clearly is a world threat. Racism means people can be spurred into a cause either just or unjust. Kind of like how climate change is being used to push a world government in the real world, except in this made up world of Remnant the global threat is much more real and urgent. Do you really believe we had truly accurate climate records of the past 100 years around the world? At most we have major events for locations that were previous uninhabited even 50 years ago, which are now inhabited b/c we're now all over the place, sorry for the rant on global warming but those people are crazy. I agree with keeping environments free of chemicals/what-have-you that actively kill things and hurt its food chain, or sets rivers on fire. Otherwise, regulating air that plants use to breath is going too far.
Ozpin's problem was that he's been trying it alone and apparently he's not very creative, being immortal does not make you smart. It does not make you all knowing. He still has a mortal brain. Heck, he didn't even trust his host, the person who's body he's now sharing. Quite frankly he betrayed them by sending them on a suicide run without all the information needed. Lets say they kill her, and then she pops right back into existence and they were unprepared, or they thought she was dead but revives and takes one out with they thought it should be safe and eventually they have to run. My point is it's very important information to have, and sure he may have the best of intentions and be very good, that just does not make someone smart. The path to hell was paved with good intentions, is a saying for a reason.
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One man made climate change is real and needs to be combatted now since the science shows it. As for Ozpin, he’s been betrayed too many times which has caused him to get a habit of keeping secrets even when he shouldn’t. Ozpin is why humanity still survives and what Oscar is learning that some secrets should be kept but others should not unlike Ozpin.
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Can you people please keep these long arguments out of my comments section... Go message each other if this discussion means so much to you.
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Just as Qrow said, some secrets require proof to be worthy of such trust. Ozpin didn't share everything because the matter of Salem is an inherently dangerous matter. Once you know about her, everything you know about the world changes. It's not only a matter of trust but also a matter of capability. Trust must be earned. Ozpin knows that RWBY and the others are good and capable people, but he has still known them for less than a year. He trusted Raven and Lionheart for decades... and look at how they repaid all those years of trust. Stealing the power of the Spring Maiden, and sending Mistral's huntsmen to die and handing the Relic of Knowledge over to the enemy. I find it very hard to blame Ozpin for keeping some cards close to his chest after that. Just as he said right before the big reveal, Leo was not the first to betray him to Salem.
I can only imagine the burden that Ozma is forced to live through. It's no wonder that he plays things close to his chest. It's human nature. More than just the monumental task he is set with, how many friends has he lost over so many generations, vanished before his eyes? Whether at Salem's claws or from old age, he always loses his friends. That's why it's so hard for him to open up to others. He's lived through that pain too many times, which is why he encourages others to savor the joys of youth and friendship that he no longer can. It's also why he feels such immense guilt, that he will always live while others do not, which is why he was especially affected by Qrow's words in Volume 6. Not only does he share this in common with Celestia and Luna, I know that a certain 'Doctor Whooves' in Equestria goes through the same thing. Always living on while carrying unspeakable burdens and secrets that cannot be shared so easily.
There is no greater calling than fighting to save lives. Because honestly, what else does this change from when we first signed up for Beacon? Our mission still remains the same: to protect the innocent. Even if you can't permanently destroy Salem, you can still step up when you see evil! And now Ruby and the others have a very special chance to help more than anybody else! You don't have to save the world, you just have to make a difference with the opportunities you are given! That is why we fight with Ozpin: To foil the plans of evil and to protect those who can't protect themselves.
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"There art times I must be a hero, and there are times I must be a king."
- King Arthur,
Le Morte D'Arthur, c.1470
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Well said. I won't add on to that and further support it with my own ruminations and understandings, the author has asked me not to continue. But I completely agree.