The Wonderful Life of Mister Schnee
What would you do with all the riches in the world? Party...
What would you do with all the riches in the world? Party...
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[RWBY] The Wonderful Life of Mister Schnee
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Chapter 1: Hard Astarboard
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
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The Wonderful Life of Mister Schnee
What would you do with all the riches in the world? Party? Relax? Good works? Well, a man from Earth is about to find his answer to a similar question when he wakes up as one Mr. Schnee. He'd better find an answer quick, though; his daughter just kissed a Faunus on live television!
Chapter 1: Hard Astarboard!
I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
The first eleven chapters have been posted on Spacebattles and Fanfiction, so check them out there if you like.
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Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
His eyes snapped open, as if having forgotten the patterned lethargy which overcame them every morning.
Instinctively, his hand reached for where he knew there was nothing and tapped the scroll that lie there, abruptly silencing the annoyingly pleasant ring of the alarm.
Before his still groggy mind could process the incongruity, his body acted, pushing his arms back and sitting him up. From his new vantage point, he could make out the soft bumps his legs formed under the fluffy, white cover that blanketed his gargantuan bed. Around him was a clean and well designed, if sparsely decorated, bedroom; covering the floor, if he'd taken the effort to lean himself over the distant edge of his mattress, he would have been able to see the warm, red carpet which decorated the floor and was itself decorated with a large compass.
He wasn't paying attention to that, however. He was too busy tumbling out of bed and hopping about on each foot, screaming.
"Ahh, Ahh, Ahh," he yelled quietly as he took strange strides with unfamiliar legs. His teeth didn't fit, his fingers were in the wrong place, his mouth tasted weird, nothing was right.
It didn't hurt, or even feel bad; it was just disorienting, like looking at those moving-illusion pictures, except the moving illusion was his entire body, bones and all.
It was the little things that set off this reaction, the minute twitches and strangely calibrated movements his body underwent, along with a quickly fading vertigo that overtook his senses. This reaction was why he was half walking, half running towards the large personal mirror that stood opposite his bed. And soon, he was leaning over the cabinet that supported the mirror, staring into the deep, blue eyes and hardened face of Mr. Schnee, the wealthiest individual on Remnant. Those were his eyes, however. That was his face in the mirror.
Moving his hand to gingerly touch at his face, he watched, entranced, as the reflection moved to do the same.
This couldn't be a dream, he accepted: Dreams consisted of things you knew, and he'd never known the impossible feeling of being in another person's body. Curiously, he took in his new body, his gaze shifting across the reflection before a flash of blue and white caught his interest. Slowly, his new, and somewhat sensitive, eyes were drawn upwards to gaze at the words which hung above him.
"eenhcS?" he read in confusion, turning swiftly afterwards to look at the space above his bed. "Schnee" the embroidered and snowflake-themed crest read. 'Am I in Germany?' the man thought, 'In the future?' his thought pattern continued, observing the paper-thin slice of glass that glowed softly on the mattress.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Three light, chipper, knocks resounded across the heavy oak of his bedroom door, startling him as they echoed through the cavernous room around him to become an ominous rumble.
'Geeze, who sleeps in a place like this? Dracula?' he cringed slightly as the sound slammed against his eardrums.
His thoughts cut short as a feminine voice called, "Mr. Schnee? Are you ok?"
The muffling effect of the heavy door did nothing to conceal the urgency and worry lilting the voice.
"I'm ok," he rushed to respond, feeling strange as unfamiliar lips mouthed the words.
"Are you sure? I heard some bangs, and some yelling," the woman continued.
"I'm perfectly ok," he said, more forcefully.
'Perfectly ok? since when do I say that?' he thought with a confused expression.
"I just, uh, knocked something over," he continued, searching for something to distract the woman with.
"Oh! Do you want me to call-"
"By the way," he interrupted, "how is my schedule for today?"
'Yeah, schedules. This Mister Schnee fellow looks like a man with schedules. Schedules for days, even.' he smiled at his quick thinking.
"Well, you're relatively clear for today, sir! You just have to host the Grand Opening Gala for the Messerschmitts. The staff finished preparing the ballroom this morning and the first guests should arrive at eight," The woman answered in a chipper tone, seemingly having forgotten her previous state of anxiety. "Oh," she continued, as if remembering something, "You've also got five voicemails, none of them seem critical, however."
"Understood, leave me while I prepare. I'll meet with you in about an hour or so," he said, absentmindedly accepting her adieus while entranced with the new, strange manner of speech that seemed to have overtaken him.
He decided to start by cleaning himself up, hopping in and out of the shower as quickly as he could and brushing down his hair and mustache shortly before donning the neatly folded suit that lay on his bed-side desk. Following this, he took a rest and sat down, staring at the intimidating selection of colognes that lined one of his drawers as he thought over the situation. He looked down through the paper-thin scroll he spun around in between his palms. In any other scenario, he knew he would have been overjoyed to study such a technical marvel. But he couldn't be bothered to do much more than coldly analyze the touch screen and look over the basic functionalities of the...phone...computer...device of sorts, the feeling of general anxiety that overtook him with the knowledge that he was in another person's body was pervasive and wearing. From what he'd gathered, he was in the body of a "Mister Schnee" in future…well, Montana or Alaska going by the accents and the arctic conditions outside his bedroom window. He worked in a company and might be rich. Actually, he was probably loaded considering he had servants and was "hosting" parties.
Of course, the right thing to do would be to reveal himself before he inadvertently got this guy fired...buuuut there was nothing wrong with testing the waters before taking such drastic action. Who knows, maybe "body snatchers" like him were common in the future and immediately put to death once discovered. The fact that today was "party day" gave him more reason to keep up the act because he had, as of right now, at least one day where he could relax and learn more about this future. This gave him a chance to act on his own terms, at least to some extent, in any case. As a bonus, he didn't have to worry about messing up anything important. Sure, these fancy parties or galas or whatever had a lot of rules and procedure, but he was sure his servants would take care of that. Besides, a gaff at a party makes the Saturday news if it's big enough; a mistake on the job could cost lives and livelihoods... He shuddered at the thought, a lingering sense of dread developing in his gut as old news reports of exploding chemical plants ran through his memory. Seriously, unless this guy's job had something to do with Chemical or Aerospace engineering, he was gonna get fired on day one.
He absentmindedly grabbed a purple cologne in a clear glass, applying the concoction before placing it back into the drawer and heading to the west wall of the room. The "west wall", as he called it, was actually a large bookcase, packed to the brim with a blue wall of velvet-bound books. He whistled in appreciation as he craned his head to see the top shelf of the collection, noticing a switch at the side which would presumably conveyor-belt the books to his level. The book he was looking for, however, was within arms reach, worn with the touch of many readings.
He frowned as he pulled the book out and looked at the full title.
"History…" It read, "...of Remnant."
He opened to the first page of the book.
"Man, born from dust, yadda, yadda, yadda, darkness, blah, blah, blah, Creatures of Grimm?" He frowned at the book, flipping to a random page decorated with an anatomically accurate drawing of a, "Nevermore, how original," he rolled his eyes at the name, looking at the massive raven which graced the page alongside a scale drawing of a human.
He placed the book back into its place. He was here to read about the history of the world not to learn about the long winded backstory to a long winded fantasy novel.
He skimmed through the titles on the bookshelf, reading...
"Technology...of Remnant," He mumbled, placed the book back into its place with a bit more force.
"Countries...of Remnant" He was starting to get mad.
"An analysis of Dust Vein decomposition patterns...In FUCKING REMNANT!"
Seriously, he thought it was annoying in his time when every franchise jus HAD to release twelve "world building" books of bullshit. The trend only seems to have gotten worse since then, however. No matter, he would just find an actual history book, even if he had to go to the library instead of scrounging through someone's fantasy book collection. It was just as the thought of looking things up on his new phone hit him that he heard three, echoing knocks from his door once more.
"Sir, the first guests are arriving," the woman politely reported from the other side of the door.
'Already?' he thought, turning to look at the morning sun shining through the window. 'Wait, did she mean Eight AM? How long is this party gonna last?' he pocketed his scroll as he headed towards the door.
He was approaching the door when a terrifying thought hit him. He didn't know the woman's name. If he was right about her being his secretary, than getting her name would be the key to getting everyone else's. But he'd have to call her something in the meantime! '
What am going to I call her?' He thought, frantically cycling through the options.
'"Sweetie?"...No,' he shook his head 'too personal.'
'Or maybe "Hun?"...Nope.'
He closed in on the door with sweaty palms as he desperately searched for an appropriate nickname. Cringing in anticipation, he slowly opened the door before looking through and immediately thinking,
'Oh, thank the greatest good of goodnesses, she has a name tag!' He rejoiced.
The light blue tag hung over her right breast reading, "Schwarz."
'Schwarz, huh? Strange name, but it's the future or whatever.' he dismissed the peculiarity and lifted his gaze from the tag. A pale face stared back up at him with gleaming dark eyes and softly curving strands of coal-dark hair running down on either side.
"Good morning, Schwarz," he tested, hoping that there wasn't a secret handshake he'd just forgotten to do.
"And a Good Morning to you too, mister Schnee!" she replied with a chipper tone, rising up on her toes in a short hop at the greeting, her fur-trimmed skirt twirling heavily at her knees as she did so. The richly textured, black of the hem almost gleaming against the almost uniform darkness of the rest of her outfit, the rest dark fabric only being broken up by the sable, fur hem running along every edge of her velvet jacket and the white cloth that covered her chest, just underneath the light-yellow, short collar that rose up above the neck of her jacket. All of this tied together with a grey belt with and two white, rectangular attachments that hung down on either side of the belt like earrings, reaching down to her knees with their length..
His heart lightened at her expression, and at the confirmation that he'd apparently greeted her correctly. A wave of confidence filled him as he closed the door behind him and walked down the hall, Schwarz following behind with clicking heels.
'Yeah, I've got this. It's just a party. I'd have to be, like, an advanced level idiot to mess this up.' our new Mr. Schnee thought with a smirk.
"Oh, and, it seems there is another matter for you to attend to." Schwarz tentatively probed.
"Yes?" he replied.
"Your daughter, Weiss, has sent a message. She says she'd like to accept your invitation to appear at the Gala today after all, but on the condition that she be allowed to bring along guests," Schwarz said in an even and calming tone. "Mr. Schnee", for his part, didn't pay much mind to her hesitation, it sounded, to him, more like a formality from the sound of things if his own daughter had to "accept an invitation" to a party.
"Of course," he said, "invite her. How many guests is she bringing anyways?"
"Really?" Schwarz exclaimed, wide eyed. "I mean, of course, sir. She's bringing three guests, though you should know that one of them is coming as a date, a girl by the name of," she looked down at her tablet, "Blake Belladonna."
"You say that like I'd mind," he said absentmindedly, nodding at his surroundings. 'Yeah, I'm definitely lost.'
"It's not that sir. It's just that some aspects of Ms. Belladonna's guest sheet seem to have been left blank," Schwarz said, clearly uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation.
"Look, Schwarz," he said, looking around at his surroundings and trying not to seem as lost as he was, "If she's human, than let her through," he chuckled at his own joke.
"That's just the thing, sir," Schwarz said with the gravest tone imaginable. "Her guest sheet," she paused, "It doesn't SAY whether she's a human."
He paused for a moment, processing the statement. Then his face brightened, "HAHAHAHA," he laughed immediately as the statement clicked. 'Holy crap, who knew Schwarz was so funny! She even had me going with that whole serious business persona!'
He interrupted Schwarz's uncomfortable chuckle as he wiped a tear from his eye. "Look,Schwarz, remind me to give you a raise sometime," he said, patting her shoulder and causing her eyes to glow once more as she looked up at him.
"Just invite them over and focus on the rest of your duties," he finished.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz replied, expertly hiding her worries. Mr. Schnee could take care of such things, after all. He'd been navigating the swirling politics of the Atlas corporate head for longer than she'd been alive. She was sure she was just being paranoid if he thought nothing untoward could happen.
'Yeah, things are going great,' he smiled, 'looks like nothing would come to foil his party day after all, considering how dedicated a crew I have.'
"By the way," he asked, looking back at Schwarz as she followed him.
"Yes, sir?" Schwarz answered.
"Where are we going?"
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Weiss read and reread the message which pinged onto her scroll. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. She'd only "accepted" the invitation as a joke. She'd never imagined he'd actually accept, considering he knew well enough how she thought of him.
Well, no matter. His loss was her gain.
Of course, she couldn't lie on the guest sheets, that would be a felony after her father and his friends in politics got through with her. But, she could omit that Blake was a Faunus, and when the time came at the Gala Dinner, she'd reveal the truth to a shocked audience.
'The daughter of "Mister Schnee", dating a Faunus.' Weiss smiled at the potential headlines as well as the look on his face when he found out at a party of all his colleagues.
It wouldn't ruin him by any means. She wasn't willing to damage the company so many good people relied upon for work and dust, even if was being led by a morally questionable head. It would simply mean he would have to disassociate from her completely, like she'd wished for all along. Furthermore, the press, heckling and rumors would ensure that this year was the most tiring, work filled experience of his entire life! But, most importantly of all. It would shatter that facade of a "happy family" he hid behind. That self aggrandizing lie of a healthy home he worked to ensure the world saw when they looked at the Schnees. All of this while never showing his own family a fraction of the attention and care he devoted to his own image!
She took a shuddering breath as she calmed herself. No need to ruin her day thinking of such things.
She forced a smile, that was supposed to make you even a little happier by itself, wasn't it? She continued to scheme as she called for Blake, saying "Get the girls, and put on your dress Bow on!...Yes, the one that comes off easily!"
This was going to be the worst party ever, and Weiss was going to love it!
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"I'm honored, thank you," he smiled, adding some half thought out declaration to each new face that greeted him with a smile.
"Mr Schnee" greeted guest after guest after guest until his hand ached. There was literally a line of people waiting at the entrance to shake his hand, and he sighed as he saw the twenty or so more people left standing before him. The "guests", it turned out, were VIP's who'd be treated to a tour of his palace, and yes, it was a palace, until the party began as ,apparently, the party proper wouldn't actually start until eight o'clock at night. It was nine o'clock in the morning as he finished greeting the last of the guests, so he would have about eleven hours to himself before the start of the party proper.
Schwarz stood waiting when he entered back into the palace, the last of the guests being corralled together by a cheerful tour guide behind him.
"Long line?" she asked with a familiar smirk.
"Of course," he said, with a tired stance.
"Well, we've got to go oversee the processing systems floor next," she said looking down at her tablet as she swiped through some files and time tables.
"I thought you said I had an empty day?" he asked.
"Hahaha," Schwarz laughed a light laugh, "we both know an empty day for you means you only have to carry your regular mountain-load of work," she finished with a smile. "But don't worry," she continued, "I've actually made some adjustments to your regular schedule. If you don't have any special obligations, you could finish by seven o'clock if you get to your office by eight!" she said with a sincere smile as she presented a multicolored time chart like it was a school painting she was especially proud of.
"Mr Schnee" internally screamed as he pondered the idea of eleven hour work days.
"Of course," he swallowed, "but put a pin on that time table for now and walk me to the floor. I'd like to talk with you."
"What about, sir?" Schwarz looked up at him.
"Huhhh," he breathed a deep and dramatic sigh he'd been planning for hours. "Tell me, Schwarz," he continued with a heavy tone, "What did I hire you to do?"
"Uhm, to schedule your affairs, filter your communications and head your security, sir," she replied mechanically, as if reading from a list.
'Wow, she does all that?' He thought.
"And how long have you been working in this position," he asked as if they both already knew the answer.
"Two years, six months, sir" she replied in that same tone.
"Yes, of course," he drifted off with a thoughtful tone, having run out of questions to ask.
"Is… is there any particular reason you wanted to talk about this?" Schwarz asked, failing to hide the deep worry that colored her voice.
"Oh, it's nothing to worry about," he assured. "I've just been thinking about something," he lied cryptically. "Would you mind sending me a file with the essentials of my work. I want to look over my things. Include the family history too, actually. With pictures."
"Uh, yes sir," Schwarz didn't ask any of the myriad questions which came to mind.
The rest of the time passed quickly for "Mister Schnee", consisting mostly of an adrenaline flooded series of decisions about company essentials, everything from what regions new sites should be placed at to which markets they should target most heavily in the next quarter. It was during this time of the day, when he sat at the head of a table surrounded by an assortment of fancy suits, that it fully sunk in just how big of a deal he was now, as well as how big of a deal his mistakes would become. He sighed at the momentous realization as he finished the work day off just before he was due to arrive at the party. Still, today's decisions were mostly multiple choice and any mistakes were, probably, easily fixable. He would just attend this party, have Schwarz clear his week, cram about history all night and make a decision by next Monday: even if that decision won him a nice, new straight Jacket.
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"Weiss would have to sit to his right, definitely," she muttered. "But then, I'd have to move the Messerschmitts eldest down to sit by…ugh, no, she just got married to..."
Schwarz almost frowned as she wracked her brain, looking at the seating chart layed out in front of her while occasionally glancing towards the mess of papers scattered to the side. The papers showed tabled information on all the guests, along with lines of relationships literally drawn between the names. She wouldn't dream of getting mad at Mr. Schnee, but it was hard not to feel frustrated after his last minute change to the guest list. Beyond the fact that his daughter was unpredictable at times and that her guests were unknowns, Schwarz would only have several hours to rearrange the seating chart!
Schwarz bit into her sandwich as she played with the names projected on her tablet, sliding them around the scale model of the main dining table. There were many tables at this party, but this table was key. This table would hold the most influential and powerful families in Atlas, who could, and often would, forge the greatest dynasties at simple "parties" such as this one.
And these families, like many other powerful families with long histories, were quite thin skinned.
A single misplaced seat, putting together marrying age children of the wrong couple, unbalancing the hierarchy of seating orders, putting this person or that too far from the edge without proper reason… would bring fire and fury upon the "lowly secretary" who was playing like a god with the place and movement of these old and powerful names; and, in that pattern of movement, all of them orbited the name of Mister Schnee, the most rich and the most powerful among the rich and powerful of Remnant.
Schwarz sighed as she rushed to complete the seating chart before her lunch break was up. Mister schnee had entrusted her to complete this, and she wouldn't disappoint!
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He stared up in amazement at the seemingly endless height of the room, his spirits lifting with the expanding space as he left behind a tense workday and stepped into the comforting warmth of the ball room. The arched ceiling seeming to hang weightlessly over the room despite its size, supporting a gargantuan chandelier in is center that radiated a warm, yellow-white light that seemed to color the atmosphere as it glittered against the tiling. He knew he was rich, but he'd never appreciated that fact until he stepped into this twelve story tall art piece, with intricate stonework etched away in every corner and richly colored tapestries draping the walls and support structures.
The architectural inspiration, along with many other curiosities of the future, worked to convince him that Germany got at least a partial victory out of World War III.
A gloriously blue banner hung down from the ceiling, reaching from one end of the room to the other as bold letters spelled out "SCHNEE" across the banner.
He tried not to seem too amazed at the technological wonders which surrounded him, though it was hard not to get excited at seeing an actual, real life, robot.
He soon focused his attention back onto the rest of the party and moved away from the massive doorway that enframed him. Stepping down the wide, marble staircase, he soon arrived down at the main floor, mingling into the crowd as he released Schwarz to enjoy the party, practically having to force her away from her duties of following him around and working. He noticed she never seemed to stray too far away from him, though, casually talking to other party goers as she discreetly glanced at him once and again, as if asking "are you SURE you don't need anything?". It was the best he could hope for, he guessed, shrugging.
"Hello there, Jacquez," a confident voice came from his side, interrupting his reverie and revealing a beautiful woman with flowing blonde hair and the reddest lipstick he'd ever seen.
"Hello," he greeted calmly, "who are you, again?" he asked in a casual fashion, too late to stop himself from saying something revealing.
"Oh, straight to the insults, Jacquez?" she sneered in that still calm tone as she glared up and down at him. "Usually, we wait until after the backhanded compliments for those."
He wasn't sure who she was or who exactly she thought she was, but the way she said "Jacquez", with an annoying stressing of the syllables, irked him greatly.
"Is there any reason I should know you?" he responded, less concerned with insulting her now than he had been prior.
"I feel like your time at the top has softened you if you can't remember even my little old name," she said with poison on her tongue.
"You weren't on the VIP list, you see. I don't recognize shaking your hand this morning," he said, trying to maintain civility even as her mannerisms drove him further and further from that goal.
She paused with a cold silence, looking at him with a dangerous glare as if he'd just kicked her dead mother.
"Huhhh," she took a calming breath, her wine glass shaking as if she were working to keep the liquid from splashing onto his face.
'I...probably shouldn't have said that,' he thought just before she spoke again.
"Perhaps I was wrong about your softness," she said, chuckling. "It seems you've gone fully senile if you think you can get away with comparing me to those heel-licking, title purchasing, wannabe robber barons that you hand out those little vip stickers of yours to."
"Uh-"
"Know this, Schnee," she barreled on. "You can hide if from your pet secretary over there," she looked over his shoulder to Schwarz, "and you can even hide it from the press and your friends on the up, but don't think for a second you've managed to hide it from me. I, and many of the people here, know you're crumbling, and I'll be the first do dance on the ashes of whatever burnt out relic of a legacy you manage to leave behind" she finished, smiling meanly. She whirled about dramatically, her red dress swirling, and walked away with clicking heels as soon as she finished her tirade.
With the slight exception of a weird coffee addict in a green suit, rest of the party went relatively normally; he spent most of it going about between various groups, asking how the party was going, exchanging pleasantries, and moving on to other guests to ask after them. He got similar reactions of delight and surprise whenever he dropped in, except for when visiting one person, a person who left enough of an impression on him that he'd remember his name after the night was over...Jon Braun.
Jon initially caught our new Mister Schnee's attention, who we will call "Mr. S" from now on, by the extreme shock he showed at his presence. Mr. S was used to the surprise he got from people at this point, but this was no ordinary surprise. This was an eyes wide open, "can I believe my eyes?" kind of experience. Of course, they soon hit it off...
...
"So you work on rockets for the military?" Mr. S asked.
"Yes," Jon answered. "Well, I used to anyway. The team's being disbanded, I'm getting moved over to engine design." Jon replied with a regretful tone.
"They're disbanding the entire rocket team?" Mr. S was incredulous. He'd worked on rockets in the past and unless something incredible happened, he wasn't imagining their obsolescence. "Surely the military isn't so short sighted. They'd at least want to keep the experts for missile design, wouldn't they?" Mr. S asked.
"Oh, of course," Jon replied, "I'm apologize for having mislead you," he quickly amended, "you see, I was actually talking about...well...rockets to get into space," he cringed internally as he waited for the raucous laughter he'd gotten used to hearing after that statement.
"Well, of course," Mr S. replied. "It's long past due for serious investment in the exploitation of space."
"R-really?" If it were possible, Jon looked even more surprised than previously, as if he'd just seen a unicorn and that unicorn was also richest-man-on-remnant Mr. Schnee.
"Yes, what exactly were you working on?" Mr. S leaned in with intense interest as he'd been dying to hear how rocket technology evolved into the future.
"Well, I can't really go into the details of it, just the stuff the public already knows about," Jon said apologetically, though still with that look of incredulous surprise that bordered on fear.
"Tell me anyways," Mr. S insisted.
"Well, we were trying to develop rocket systems," he said. Adding after a short pause, "trying to bypass the dust barrier."
Of course, having worked as Mr. Schnee himself for one day, he'd doubtless been exposed to "dust." Nobody went over the basics of it with him, but apparently it had a crazy-high energy density and came in different varieties which were named after the elements for some reason, probably a marketing gimmick.
"Any troubles with the engines?"
"Oh, no, the engines were basically modified Atlas thrusters, we didn't have any trouble with the design..." Jon replied, putting emphasis on "design."
Mr. S was surprised to see the Atlas family of rockets still holding out this far into the future, but he was curious nonetheless.
"What problems did you experience, then?" Mr. S asked.
"Well, I don't have to tell this to you of all people, of course, but dust doesn't work in the upper atmospheres. We weren't able to get around that." Jon said simply.
"You couldn't get enough speed in the lower atmospheres? What inclinations did you try?"
"Unrealistic inclinations," Jon replied dryly, his eyes opening in surprise, now fully wondering if this man actually was Mr. Schnee. Was he on one of those hidden camera shows? Was this some hazing ritual they pulled on the new guys? Was he dreaming?
"Did you try carrying your own air as propellant?" Mr. S asked, feeling silly as soon as he'd asked.
"We tried. We think it might be the altitude itself which affects the dust rather than the air density," he whispered intensely as he spoke excitedly to Mr Schnee. He'd never thought being chosen to represent the Atlas Military at a ball would lead to such engrossing conversations. Even the hint that Mr. Schnee had heard of rockets would have been enough to tickle that hopeful part of him. but this...
Mr. Schnee was about to ask why they didn't just use a chemical rocket for the second stage when Jon asked, "I don't mean to be rude, but you seem very knowledgeable about the subject."
"I've been researching-" Mr. S replied just as a heavy bell rung through the ball room, quieting the guests and signaling the start of the dinner.
"I am extremely sorry," Schwarz said with intense worry as she took Mr. S and lead him to his seat at the other end of the dining hall, staying stone silent as she led him the rest of the way.
'Stupid, Stupid, Stupid' she chastised herself in her thoughts. 'Of course he only allowed Weiss and her friends to attend so that the Messerschmitts would be moved down four seats. This would move the Frau's down as well due to the recent marriage to their rivals, and that would've opened a seat for the Atlas military advisory to sit next to Mr. Schnee without there being a scene! It was all so obvious!'
Schwarz resisted the urge to facepalm in polite company.
'Thanks to my slowness, Mr. Schnee had to spend half the night talking to some no-name military advisor when he should have been talking to the heads! And His daughter is still here! No wonder he didn't want me around!" she gripped onto her napkin nervously as they approached the head of the dining table.
'Ok, calm yourself, Schwarz.' Schwarz took a deep breath 'He still managed to spare some time for everyone, even if he was a bit curt. He'll handle the rest at dinner and you can apologize later.' Finally, she escorted Mr. Schnee to the head of the table, with his daughter and her friends lined up on his right and another family sitting to his left.
She passed by Weiss and company on her way down the table to her own seat. She noted the bright, though relatively respectable clothing they wore. 'At least she bothered not to make a scene out of them,' she thought, knowing exactly how hunters and huntresses in training could get at parties. 'Perhaps this party could end simply," she thought, her heart pounding more than it usually did during these events.
…..
"Ladies and gentlemen," his voice boomed across the silent ballroom as he stood at his seat, "it is with the greatest honor that I host this party during such a significant date in our.."
Mr S. started reading off the teleprompter and giving a small toast about a new business opening or something; he wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. No, he was more focused on the camera's dotting the room. Not security cameras, mind you. Full blown, HD news cameras. Some of them clung to the walls and columns, hidden from the casual gaze as if they were a part of the architecture. Others were attached to drones, circling high above like vultures and almost touching the ceiling in their lazy flight.
'Oh, so this is one of those parties,' he noted, taking a breath. Nothing to be worried about, he'd finish the toast and they'd probably edit the rest of the night out considering it would consist of people eating and chattering to each other for an hour, he assured himself.
Mr. S sat down to light applause after finishing his speech and dug in. The party had quite a nice spread, he noted, sinking his teeth into some steak soup with a fancy, some might call pretentious, side of Risotto. He kept a sly eye on his table companions, making sure he mimicked their actions and didn't use the wrong fork or something. Thankfully, the people at this table just dug in; it seemed the complicated myriad of rules he expected didn't apply during dinner. Seriously, some guy in the corner was practically inhaling alcohol.
"Weiss," he said, turning to his daughter. Well, "daughter." At the same time, she turned back to look at him with a decidedly neutral expression.
"Yes, father?" she replied.
"How have you enjoyed the ball?" He continued evenly, deciding to overlook the fact that she spoke like she was raised in the forties.
"It was an adequate gathering," she replied, looking straight ahead and making it clear that she didn't want to talk.
Mr. S Shrugged, he'd figure out what teenage drama or petty squabble was causing this later.
"Well, how are your friends enjoying the party?" he looked to the three girls sitting beside her, who together formed a spectrum of emotion which he swore had to be planned.
"It was good. I mean, great! Mr. Schnee." a soft spoken and nervously chuckling girl said, adding a quick, "sir," after a short pause. He smiled at the girl as she tried turning her grey eyes away from his. The grey eyed girl was sitting furthest from Weiss, and next to her sat a busty blonde in a yellow dress who didn't bother hiding the glare she directed at him. Moving on quickly, he looked at the next person in line, who he guessed this was "Blake" considering her black dress and that she sat directly next to Weiss.
Blake's look was some combination of "Ahh!" and "I will rip your heart out and eat it!", all of this mixed with resting bitch face. Now, he wasn't one to meddle in a strangers dating life, but he wondered if Weiss had chosen the best people to call friends.
"And why are you asking?" Weiss said forcefully.
"I just wanted to know how your friends were doing?" he replied with probably the most honest thing he'd said since he woke up this morning.
Alas, Weiss, despite all her riches, was not buying it.
"Really? You want to know more about my friends, now?"
Weiss's voice echoed across the ballroom. Mr. S noticed the sudden quiet and turned to see the nervously smiling faces of the guests as most everyone seemed to be occupied with sipping their empty cups while discreetly staring at the scene. Weiss herself noticed the now silent room, the buzzing drone of the cameras now audible as she worked up the courage to take the next step.
"Well fine," she said standing up. "I'll tell you about them!"
"Ruby!" she pointed at the grey eyed girl with black hair, "is the most talented huntress I've ever met, without whose leadership Beacon would surely have fallen." Weiss proclaimed with a not-too-subtle jab at the Atlas nobility's unpopular decision to hold back dust sales to a besieged Beacon when the white fang attacked. They reversed this decision of course, but it was still a sore point for many heads at the table.
"Ruby," as he now knew her to be called, waved at him with a nervous smile as Weiss lauded her achievements.
Mr. S wanted to give Ruby his congratulations on helping to win their D&D campaign, but Weiss was not done.
"Yang!" she pointed now to the scowling blonde.
'Oh, she's doing all of them,' Mr. S thought, as he looked at the scene with a neutral expression.
"Who is the most KIND HEARTED and BRAVE person I know!" Weiss said, putting particular emphasis on "KIND HEARTED" and "BRAVE" as another kick in the gut to the Atlas nobles who wanted to stay out of the fight for beacon. The same atlas Nobles who nearly let the white fang destroy one of the CCT towers.
Many guests in the ballroom were heavily gulping down wine from their flasks, Schwarz was considering downing a bottle.
'The yellow haired one looks like she'd main an orc,' Mr. S, thought. Now understanding why Weiss had to be invited to this party. 'No matter, she can't make anymore of a scene,' Mr. S thought, wondering what kind words Weiss would have for Blake.
"And Blake!," Weiss's voice rang out like a crystal through the now stone silent Ball room. Her eyes glancing lovingly down towards Blake for a split second before she braced herself and let Blake grip her hand.
"My girlfriend!" she announced, helping Blake up from her chair with a tug of her arm, removing her bow with a flick of the wrist and bending Blake backwards as she kissed her deeply in front of the watching crowd.
Yang smiled deliciously, barely managing to keep her promise not to make any more of a scene.
Ruby clapped lightly in the corner with a nervous smirk, "yay! they're girlfriends!" she whispered.
If possible, the silence in the room got colder, followed by a loud, unanimous, gasp which spread out in a wave before falling silent; the acts of yelling, crying ladies, and loud phone calls only held back by the common courtesy everyone showed in allowing Mr. Schnee to be the first among them to do those things.
All eyes were on him, as some brows sweated and some, like the lady in red, smiled with a devilish smirk at the shitshow that would surely follow.
Now, if you, dear reader, expected Mr. S to be so completely ignorant of Faunus kind that he would make the wrong move at this turn, you'd be wrong. No, for Mr. S had learned about Faunus just prior to his party.
Well...he hadn't LEARNED about them...or read anything about them...or even heard the word "faunus" before in his life...Ok, he'd seen a picture of some people with animal ears on the cover of a magazine in one of the waiting rooms: A crime-watch magazine. But! He had managed to deduce much from a simple picture.
For example, it was obvious that gene therapy had advanced to the point where people could selectively add animal characteristics to their biology.
From this, he gathered three more pieces of information.
First. Obviously, only rich people would have access to this technology at first, a hypothesis somewhat confirmed by his daughter dating someone with said augmentations. So make sure to treat people with animal characteristics accordingly.
Second. People in specialized industries would probably get them if their work could be improved by it, which is why those prison guards on the magazine cover had extra ears, to help keep a lookout.
And third, and most importantly. Don't freak out if you see people with animal ears, you'll make a fool of yourself.
So of course, Mr. S was now extremely glad that he'd seen that magazine. Otherwise, he might have freaked out at the sight of Blake's ears and made a fool of himself. PHEW! Of course, it was apparently a big deal that his daughter had made a scene and kissed someone, so he'd better say something to ease the tension. All of this flashed through his adrenaline addled mind in a quick second.
Looking smoothly over to the anticipating rows of diners in front, and his daughter and her friends to the side, he cleared his throat.
"You know, Weiss," he said. "I didn't know much about Blake when you'd first introduced her, but I can see now why you chose to date her."
Weiss rolled her eyes, 'Of course he's going to mention he didn't "know about" Blake. Trying to distance himself from this "Travesty"' she thought hotly.
Weiss didn't bother to hide her disgust at the coming speech about her "rebelliousness," the "bad influences at Beacon" and her "traumatized little soul after surviving through the attack by the White Fang."
Despite all of this, however. Weiss responded.
"And why do you think I chose to date her, father?" Weiss said, with a tone as sweet as ever.
"Why, because she's obviously an excellent listener!" he said loudly, making sure everyone in the room heard the clever joke he'd just come up with.
'Yeah, I'm awesome,' he thought as he chuckled at his own joke.
'It works on so many levels,' he thought to himself, glad that he was able to come up with something under pressure like that as he stuffed down a hearty spoonful of the, quite delicious, Risotto, still chuckling. Yeah, he deserved this. Slowly, he got less and less glad as his own chuckles echoed back towards him.
No one else was laughing. Like, not even a little. Not even those fake laughs people give when rich people tell bad jokes, or even those half hearted pity-laughs people give when poor people tell bad jokes! He looked over from Weiss to the horrified faces that stood out on every person he saw, except for the red-lipstick lady, who's smile stood out like Christmas was coming early.
'Yeahhh, I've fucked up," he thought, looking back towards Weiss, who looked like her eyes were going to fall out of her head as her expression switched between wrathful, shocked and exasperation.
Thankfully, he didn't have to think of anything else to say. The rest of the ball did that for him.
"What the fuc-" a man near the middle of the table yelled, standing up. The rest of that sentence wasn't heard, drowned out in the wave of shouts that arose from every table and corner of the room.
While the panic spread, the cameras still circled slowly above, capturing the scene in all its HD glory.
To be continued...
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Review if you've got something to say about the story.
What would you do with all the riches in the world? Party? Relax? Good works? Well, a man from Earth is about to find his answer to a similar question when he wakes up as one Mr. Schnee. He'd better find an answer quick, though; his daughter just kissed a Faunus on live television!
Chapter 1: Hard Astarboard!
I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
The first eleven chapters have been posted on Spacebattles and Fanfiction, so check them out there if you like.
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Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
His eyes snapped open, as if having forgotten the patterned lethargy which overcame them every morning.
Instinctively, his hand reached for where he knew there was nothing and tapped the scroll that lie there, abruptly silencing the annoyingly pleasant ring of the alarm.
Before his still groggy mind could process the incongruity, his body acted, pushing his arms back and sitting him up. From his new vantage point, he could make out the soft bumps his legs formed under the fluffy, white cover that blanketed his gargantuan bed. Around him was a clean and well designed, if sparsely decorated, bedroom; covering the floor, if he'd taken the effort to lean himself over the distant edge of his mattress, he would have been able to see the warm, red carpet which decorated the floor and was itself decorated with a large compass.
He wasn't paying attention to that, however. He was too busy tumbling out of bed and hopping about on each foot, screaming.
"Ahh, Ahh, Ahh," he yelled quietly as he took strange strides with unfamiliar legs. His teeth didn't fit, his fingers were in the wrong place, his mouth tasted weird, nothing was right.
It didn't hurt, or even feel bad; it was just disorienting, like looking at those moving-illusion pictures, except the moving illusion was his entire body, bones and all.
It was the little things that set off this reaction, the minute twitches and strangely calibrated movements his body underwent, along with a quickly fading vertigo that overtook his senses. This reaction was why he was half walking, half running towards the large personal mirror that stood opposite his bed. And soon, he was leaning over the cabinet that supported the mirror, staring into the deep, blue eyes and hardened face of Mr. Schnee, the wealthiest individual on Remnant. Those were his eyes, however. That was his face in the mirror.
Moving his hand to gingerly touch at his face, he watched, entranced, as the reflection moved to do the same.
This couldn't be a dream, he accepted: Dreams consisted of things you knew, and he'd never known the impossible feeling of being in another person's body. Curiously, he took in his new body, his gaze shifting across the reflection before a flash of blue and white caught his interest. Slowly, his new, and somewhat sensitive, eyes were drawn upwards to gaze at the words which hung above him.
"eenhcS?" he read in confusion, turning swiftly afterwards to look at the space above his bed. "Schnee" the embroidered and snowflake-themed crest read. 'Am I in Germany?' the man thought, 'In the future?' his thought pattern continued, observing the paper-thin slice of glass that glowed softly on the mattress.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Three light, chipper, knocks resounded across the heavy oak of his bedroom door, startling him as they echoed through the cavernous room around him to become an ominous rumble.
'Geeze, who sleeps in a place like this? Dracula?' he cringed slightly as the sound slammed against his eardrums.
His thoughts cut short as a feminine voice called, "Mr. Schnee? Are you ok?"
The muffling effect of the heavy door did nothing to conceal the urgency and worry lilting the voice.
"I'm ok," he rushed to respond, feeling strange as unfamiliar lips mouthed the words.
"Are you sure? I heard some bangs, and some yelling," the woman continued.
"I'm perfectly ok," he said, more forcefully.
'Perfectly ok? since when do I say that?' he thought with a confused expression.
"I just, uh, knocked something over," he continued, searching for something to distract the woman with.
"Oh! Do you want me to call-"
"By the way," he interrupted, "how is my schedule for today?"
'Yeah, schedules. This Mister Schnee fellow looks like a man with schedules. Schedules for days, even.' he smiled at his quick thinking.
"Well, you're relatively clear for today, sir! You just have to host the Grand Opening Gala for the Messerschmitts. The staff finished preparing the ballroom this morning and the first guests should arrive at eight," The woman answered in a chipper tone, seemingly having forgotten her previous state of anxiety. "Oh," she continued, as if remembering something, "You've also got five voicemails, none of them seem critical, however."
"Understood, leave me while I prepare. I'll meet with you in about an hour or so," he said, absentmindedly accepting her adieus while entranced with the new, strange manner of speech that seemed to have overtaken him.
He decided to start by cleaning himself up, hopping in and out of the shower as quickly as he could and brushing down his hair and mustache shortly before donning the neatly folded suit that lay on his bed-side desk. Following this, he took a rest and sat down, staring at the intimidating selection of colognes that lined one of his drawers as he thought over the situation. He looked down through the paper-thin scroll he spun around in between his palms. In any other scenario, he knew he would have been overjoyed to study such a technical marvel. But he couldn't be bothered to do much more than coldly analyze the touch screen and look over the basic functionalities of the...phone...computer...device of sorts, the feeling of general anxiety that overtook him with the knowledge that he was in another person's body was pervasive and wearing. From what he'd gathered, he was in the body of a "Mister Schnee" in future…well, Montana or Alaska going by the accents and the arctic conditions outside his bedroom window. He worked in a company and might be rich. Actually, he was probably loaded considering he had servants and was "hosting" parties.
Of course, the right thing to do would be to reveal himself before he inadvertently got this guy fired...buuuut there was nothing wrong with testing the waters before taking such drastic action. Who knows, maybe "body snatchers" like him were common in the future and immediately put to death once discovered. The fact that today was "party day" gave him more reason to keep up the act because he had, as of right now, at least one day where he could relax and learn more about this future. This gave him a chance to act on his own terms, at least to some extent, in any case. As a bonus, he didn't have to worry about messing up anything important. Sure, these fancy parties or galas or whatever had a lot of rules and procedure, but he was sure his servants would take care of that. Besides, a gaff at a party makes the Saturday news if it's big enough; a mistake on the job could cost lives and livelihoods... He shuddered at the thought, a lingering sense of dread developing in his gut as old news reports of exploding chemical plants ran through his memory. Seriously, unless this guy's job had something to do with Chemical or Aerospace engineering, he was gonna get fired on day one.
He absentmindedly grabbed a purple cologne in a clear glass, applying the concoction before placing it back into the drawer and heading to the west wall of the room. The "west wall", as he called it, was actually a large bookcase, packed to the brim with a blue wall of velvet-bound books. He whistled in appreciation as he craned his head to see the top shelf of the collection, noticing a switch at the side which would presumably conveyor-belt the books to his level. The book he was looking for, however, was within arms reach, worn with the touch of many readings.
He frowned as he pulled the book out and looked at the full title.
"History…" It read, "...of Remnant."
He opened to the first page of the book.
"Man, born from dust, yadda, yadda, yadda, darkness, blah, blah, blah, Creatures of Grimm?" He frowned at the book, flipping to a random page decorated with an anatomically accurate drawing of a, "Nevermore, how original," he rolled his eyes at the name, looking at the massive raven which graced the page alongside a scale drawing of a human.
He placed the book back into its place. He was here to read about the history of the world not to learn about the long winded backstory to a long winded fantasy novel.
He skimmed through the titles on the bookshelf, reading...
"Technology...of Remnant," He mumbled, placed the book back into its place with a bit more force.
"Countries...of Remnant" He was starting to get mad.
"An analysis of Dust Vein decomposition patterns...In FUCKING REMNANT!"
Seriously, he thought it was annoying in his time when every franchise jus HAD to release twelve "world building" books of bullshit. The trend only seems to have gotten worse since then, however. No matter, he would just find an actual history book, even if he had to go to the library instead of scrounging through someone's fantasy book collection. It was just as the thought of looking things up on his new phone hit him that he heard three, echoing knocks from his door once more.
"Sir, the first guests are arriving," the woman politely reported from the other side of the door.
'Already?' he thought, turning to look at the morning sun shining through the window. 'Wait, did she mean Eight AM? How long is this party gonna last?' he pocketed his scroll as he headed towards the door.
He was approaching the door when a terrifying thought hit him. He didn't know the woman's name. If he was right about her being his secretary, than getting her name would be the key to getting everyone else's. But he'd have to call her something in the meantime! '
What am going to I call her?' He thought, frantically cycling through the options.
'"Sweetie?"...No,' he shook his head 'too personal.'
'Or maybe "Hun?"...Nope.'
He closed in on the door with sweaty palms as he desperately searched for an appropriate nickname. Cringing in anticipation, he slowly opened the door before looking through and immediately thinking,
'Oh, thank the greatest good of goodnesses, she has a name tag!' He rejoiced.
The light blue tag hung over her right breast reading, "Schwarz."
'Schwarz, huh? Strange name, but it's the future or whatever.' he dismissed the peculiarity and lifted his gaze from the tag. A pale face stared back up at him with gleaming dark eyes and softly curving strands of coal-dark hair running down on either side.
"Good morning, Schwarz," he tested, hoping that there wasn't a secret handshake he'd just forgotten to do.
"And a Good Morning to you too, mister Schnee!" she replied with a chipper tone, rising up on her toes in a short hop at the greeting, her fur-trimmed skirt twirling heavily at her knees as she did so. The richly textured, black of the hem almost gleaming against the almost uniform darkness of the rest of her outfit, the rest dark fabric only being broken up by the sable, fur hem running along every edge of her velvet jacket and the white cloth that covered her chest, just underneath the light-yellow, short collar that rose up above the neck of her jacket. All of this tied together with a grey belt with and two white, rectangular attachments that hung down on either side of the belt like earrings, reaching down to her knees with their length..
His heart lightened at her expression, and at the confirmation that he'd apparently greeted her correctly. A wave of confidence filled him as he closed the door behind him and walked down the hall, Schwarz following behind with clicking heels.
'Yeah, I've got this. It's just a party. I'd have to be, like, an advanced level idiot to mess this up.' our new Mr. Schnee thought with a smirk.
"Oh, and, it seems there is another matter for you to attend to." Schwarz tentatively probed.
"Yes?" he replied.
"Your daughter, Weiss, has sent a message. She says she'd like to accept your invitation to appear at the Gala today after all, but on the condition that she be allowed to bring along guests," Schwarz said in an even and calming tone. "Mr. Schnee", for his part, didn't pay much mind to her hesitation, it sounded, to him, more like a formality from the sound of things if his own daughter had to "accept an invitation" to a party.
"Of course," he said, "invite her. How many guests is she bringing anyways?"
"Really?" Schwarz exclaimed, wide eyed. "I mean, of course, sir. She's bringing three guests, though you should know that one of them is coming as a date, a girl by the name of," she looked down at her tablet, "Blake Belladonna."
"You say that like I'd mind," he said absentmindedly, nodding at his surroundings. 'Yeah, I'm definitely lost.'
"It's not that sir. It's just that some aspects of Ms. Belladonna's guest sheet seem to have been left blank," Schwarz said, clearly uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation.
"Look, Schwarz," he said, looking around at his surroundings and trying not to seem as lost as he was, "If she's human, than let her through," he chuckled at his own joke.
"That's just the thing, sir," Schwarz said with the gravest tone imaginable. "Her guest sheet," she paused, "It doesn't SAY whether she's a human."
He paused for a moment, processing the statement. Then his face brightened, "HAHAHAHA," he laughed immediately as the statement clicked. 'Holy crap, who knew Schwarz was so funny! She even had me going with that whole serious business persona!'
He interrupted Schwarz's uncomfortable chuckle as he wiped a tear from his eye. "Look,Schwarz, remind me to give you a raise sometime," he said, patting her shoulder and causing her eyes to glow once more as she looked up at him.
"Just invite them over and focus on the rest of your duties," he finished.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz replied, expertly hiding her worries. Mr. Schnee could take care of such things, after all. He'd been navigating the swirling politics of the Atlas corporate head for longer than she'd been alive. She was sure she was just being paranoid if he thought nothing untoward could happen.
'Yeah, things are going great,' he smiled, 'looks like nothing would come to foil his party day after all, considering how dedicated a crew I have.'
"By the way," he asked, looking back at Schwarz as she followed him.
"Yes, sir?" Schwarz answered.
"Where are we going?"
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Weiss read and reread the message which pinged onto her scroll. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. She'd only "accepted" the invitation as a joke. She'd never imagined he'd actually accept, considering he knew well enough how she thought of him.
Well, no matter. His loss was her gain.
Of course, she couldn't lie on the guest sheets, that would be a felony after her father and his friends in politics got through with her. But, she could omit that Blake was a Faunus, and when the time came at the Gala Dinner, she'd reveal the truth to a shocked audience.
'The daughter of "Mister Schnee", dating a Faunus.' Weiss smiled at the potential headlines as well as the look on his face when he found out at a party of all his colleagues.
It wouldn't ruin him by any means. She wasn't willing to damage the company so many good people relied upon for work and dust, even if was being led by a morally questionable head. It would simply mean he would have to disassociate from her completely, like she'd wished for all along. Furthermore, the press, heckling and rumors would ensure that this year was the most tiring, work filled experience of his entire life! But, most importantly of all. It would shatter that facade of a "happy family" he hid behind. That self aggrandizing lie of a healthy home he worked to ensure the world saw when they looked at the Schnees. All of this while never showing his own family a fraction of the attention and care he devoted to his own image!
She took a shuddering breath as she calmed herself. No need to ruin her day thinking of such things.
She forced a smile, that was supposed to make you even a little happier by itself, wasn't it? She continued to scheme as she called for Blake, saying "Get the girls, and put on your dress Bow on!...Yes, the one that comes off easily!"
This was going to be the worst party ever, and Weiss was going to love it!
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"I'm honored, thank you," he smiled, adding some half thought out declaration to each new face that greeted him with a smile.
"Mr Schnee" greeted guest after guest after guest until his hand ached. There was literally a line of people waiting at the entrance to shake his hand, and he sighed as he saw the twenty or so more people left standing before him. The "guests", it turned out, were VIP's who'd be treated to a tour of his palace, and yes, it was a palace, until the party began as ,apparently, the party proper wouldn't actually start until eight o'clock at night. It was nine o'clock in the morning as he finished greeting the last of the guests, so he would have about eleven hours to himself before the start of the party proper.
Schwarz stood waiting when he entered back into the palace, the last of the guests being corralled together by a cheerful tour guide behind him.
"Long line?" she asked with a familiar smirk.
"Of course," he said, with a tired stance.
"Well, we've got to go oversee the processing systems floor next," she said looking down at her tablet as she swiped through some files and time tables.
"I thought you said I had an empty day?" he asked.
"Hahaha," Schwarz laughed a light laugh, "we both know an empty day for you means you only have to carry your regular mountain-load of work," she finished with a smile. "But don't worry," she continued, "I've actually made some adjustments to your regular schedule. If you don't have any special obligations, you could finish by seven o'clock if you get to your office by eight!" she said with a sincere smile as she presented a multicolored time chart like it was a school painting she was especially proud of.
"Mr Schnee" internally screamed as he pondered the idea of eleven hour work days.
"Of course," he swallowed, "but put a pin on that time table for now and walk me to the floor. I'd like to talk with you."
"What about, sir?" Schwarz looked up at him.
"Huhhh," he breathed a deep and dramatic sigh he'd been planning for hours. "Tell me, Schwarz," he continued with a heavy tone, "What did I hire you to do?"
"Uhm, to schedule your affairs, filter your communications and head your security, sir," she replied mechanically, as if reading from a list.
'Wow, she does all that?' He thought.
"And how long have you been working in this position," he asked as if they both already knew the answer.
"Two years, six months, sir" she replied in that same tone.
"Yes, of course," he drifted off with a thoughtful tone, having run out of questions to ask.
"Is… is there any particular reason you wanted to talk about this?" Schwarz asked, failing to hide the deep worry that colored her voice.
"Oh, it's nothing to worry about," he assured. "I've just been thinking about something," he lied cryptically. "Would you mind sending me a file with the essentials of my work. I want to look over my things. Include the family history too, actually. With pictures."
"Uh, yes sir," Schwarz didn't ask any of the myriad questions which came to mind.
The rest of the time passed quickly for "Mister Schnee", consisting mostly of an adrenaline flooded series of decisions about company essentials, everything from what regions new sites should be placed at to which markets they should target most heavily in the next quarter. It was during this time of the day, when he sat at the head of a table surrounded by an assortment of fancy suits, that it fully sunk in just how big of a deal he was now, as well as how big of a deal his mistakes would become. He sighed at the momentous realization as he finished the work day off just before he was due to arrive at the party. Still, today's decisions were mostly multiple choice and any mistakes were, probably, easily fixable. He would just attend this party, have Schwarz clear his week, cram about history all night and make a decision by next Monday: even if that decision won him a nice, new straight Jacket.
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"Weiss would have to sit to his right, definitely," she muttered. "But then, I'd have to move the Messerschmitts eldest down to sit by…ugh, no, she just got married to..."
Schwarz almost frowned as she wracked her brain, looking at the seating chart layed out in front of her while occasionally glancing towards the mess of papers scattered to the side. The papers showed tabled information on all the guests, along with lines of relationships literally drawn between the names. She wouldn't dream of getting mad at Mr. Schnee, but it was hard not to feel frustrated after his last minute change to the guest list. Beyond the fact that his daughter was unpredictable at times and that her guests were unknowns, Schwarz would only have several hours to rearrange the seating chart!
Schwarz bit into her sandwich as she played with the names projected on her tablet, sliding them around the scale model of the main dining table. There were many tables at this party, but this table was key. This table would hold the most influential and powerful families in Atlas, who could, and often would, forge the greatest dynasties at simple "parties" such as this one.
And these families, like many other powerful families with long histories, were quite thin skinned.
A single misplaced seat, putting together marrying age children of the wrong couple, unbalancing the hierarchy of seating orders, putting this person or that too far from the edge without proper reason… would bring fire and fury upon the "lowly secretary" who was playing like a god with the place and movement of these old and powerful names; and, in that pattern of movement, all of them orbited the name of Mister Schnee, the most rich and the most powerful among the rich and powerful of Remnant.
Schwarz sighed as she rushed to complete the seating chart before her lunch break was up. Mister schnee had entrusted her to complete this, and she wouldn't disappoint!
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He stared up in amazement at the seemingly endless height of the room, his spirits lifting with the expanding space as he left behind a tense workday and stepped into the comforting warmth of the ball room. The arched ceiling seeming to hang weightlessly over the room despite its size, supporting a gargantuan chandelier in is center that radiated a warm, yellow-white light that seemed to color the atmosphere as it glittered against the tiling. He knew he was rich, but he'd never appreciated that fact until he stepped into this twelve story tall art piece, with intricate stonework etched away in every corner and richly colored tapestries draping the walls and support structures.
The architectural inspiration, along with many other curiosities of the future, worked to convince him that Germany got at least a partial victory out of World War III.
A gloriously blue banner hung down from the ceiling, reaching from one end of the room to the other as bold letters spelled out "SCHNEE" across the banner.
He tried not to seem too amazed at the technological wonders which surrounded him, though it was hard not to get excited at seeing an actual, real life, robot.
He soon focused his attention back onto the rest of the party and moved away from the massive doorway that enframed him. Stepping down the wide, marble staircase, he soon arrived down at the main floor, mingling into the crowd as he released Schwarz to enjoy the party, practically having to force her away from her duties of following him around and working. He noticed she never seemed to stray too far away from him, though, casually talking to other party goers as she discreetly glanced at him once and again, as if asking "are you SURE you don't need anything?". It was the best he could hope for, he guessed, shrugging.
"Hello there, Jacquez," a confident voice came from his side, interrupting his reverie and revealing a beautiful woman with flowing blonde hair and the reddest lipstick he'd ever seen.
"Hello," he greeted calmly, "who are you, again?" he asked in a casual fashion, too late to stop himself from saying something revealing.
"Oh, straight to the insults, Jacquez?" she sneered in that still calm tone as she glared up and down at him. "Usually, we wait until after the backhanded compliments for those."
He wasn't sure who she was or who exactly she thought she was, but the way she said "Jacquez", with an annoying stressing of the syllables, irked him greatly.
"Is there any reason I should know you?" he responded, less concerned with insulting her now than he had been prior.
"I feel like your time at the top has softened you if you can't remember even my little old name," she said with poison on her tongue.
"You weren't on the VIP list, you see. I don't recognize shaking your hand this morning," he said, trying to maintain civility even as her mannerisms drove him further and further from that goal.
She paused with a cold silence, looking at him with a dangerous glare as if he'd just kicked her dead mother.
"Huhhh," she took a calming breath, her wine glass shaking as if she were working to keep the liquid from splashing onto his face.
'I...probably shouldn't have said that,' he thought just before she spoke again.
"Perhaps I was wrong about your softness," she said, chuckling. "It seems you've gone fully senile if you think you can get away with comparing me to those heel-licking, title purchasing, wannabe robber barons that you hand out those little vip stickers of yours to."
"Uh-"
"Know this, Schnee," she barreled on. "You can hide if from your pet secretary over there," she looked over his shoulder to Schwarz, "and you can even hide it from the press and your friends on the up, but don't think for a second you've managed to hide it from me. I, and many of the people here, know you're crumbling, and I'll be the first do dance on the ashes of whatever burnt out relic of a legacy you manage to leave behind" she finished, smiling meanly. She whirled about dramatically, her red dress swirling, and walked away with clicking heels as soon as she finished her tirade.
With the slight exception of a weird coffee addict in a green suit, rest of the party went relatively normally; he spent most of it going about between various groups, asking how the party was going, exchanging pleasantries, and moving on to other guests to ask after them. He got similar reactions of delight and surprise whenever he dropped in, except for when visiting one person, a person who left enough of an impression on him that he'd remember his name after the night was over...Jon Braun.
Jon initially caught our new Mister Schnee's attention, who we will call "Mr. S" from now on, by the extreme shock he showed at his presence. Mr. S was used to the surprise he got from people at this point, but this was no ordinary surprise. This was an eyes wide open, "can I believe my eyes?" kind of experience. Of course, they soon hit it off...
...
"So you work on rockets for the military?" Mr. S asked.
"Yes," Jon answered. "Well, I used to anyway. The team's being disbanded, I'm getting moved over to engine design." Jon replied with a regretful tone.
"They're disbanding the entire rocket team?" Mr. S was incredulous. He'd worked on rockets in the past and unless something incredible happened, he wasn't imagining their obsolescence. "Surely the military isn't so short sighted. They'd at least want to keep the experts for missile design, wouldn't they?" Mr. S asked.
"Oh, of course," Jon replied, "I'm apologize for having mislead you," he quickly amended, "you see, I was actually talking about...well...rockets to get into space," he cringed internally as he waited for the raucous laughter he'd gotten used to hearing after that statement.
"Well, of course," Mr S. replied. "It's long past due for serious investment in the exploitation of space."
"R-really?" If it were possible, Jon looked even more surprised than previously, as if he'd just seen a unicorn and that unicorn was also richest-man-on-remnant Mr. Schnee.
"Yes, what exactly were you working on?" Mr. S leaned in with intense interest as he'd been dying to hear how rocket technology evolved into the future.
"Well, I can't really go into the details of it, just the stuff the public already knows about," Jon said apologetically, though still with that look of incredulous surprise that bordered on fear.
"Tell me anyways," Mr. S insisted.
"Well, we were trying to develop rocket systems," he said. Adding after a short pause, "trying to bypass the dust barrier."
Of course, having worked as Mr. Schnee himself for one day, he'd doubtless been exposed to "dust." Nobody went over the basics of it with him, but apparently it had a crazy-high energy density and came in different varieties which were named after the elements for some reason, probably a marketing gimmick.
"Any troubles with the engines?"
"Oh, no, the engines were basically modified Atlas thrusters, we didn't have any trouble with the design..." Jon replied, putting emphasis on "design."
Mr. S was surprised to see the Atlas family of rockets still holding out this far into the future, but he was curious nonetheless.
"What problems did you experience, then?" Mr. S asked.
"Well, I don't have to tell this to you of all people, of course, but dust doesn't work in the upper atmospheres. We weren't able to get around that." Jon said simply.
"You couldn't get enough speed in the lower atmospheres? What inclinations did you try?"
"Unrealistic inclinations," Jon replied dryly, his eyes opening in surprise, now fully wondering if this man actually was Mr. Schnee. Was he on one of those hidden camera shows? Was this some hazing ritual they pulled on the new guys? Was he dreaming?
"Did you try carrying your own air as propellant?" Mr. S asked, feeling silly as soon as he'd asked.
"We tried. We think it might be the altitude itself which affects the dust rather than the air density," he whispered intensely as he spoke excitedly to Mr Schnee. He'd never thought being chosen to represent the Atlas Military at a ball would lead to such engrossing conversations. Even the hint that Mr. Schnee had heard of rockets would have been enough to tickle that hopeful part of him. but this...
Mr. Schnee was about to ask why they didn't just use a chemical rocket for the second stage when Jon asked, "I don't mean to be rude, but you seem very knowledgeable about the subject."
"I've been researching-" Mr. S replied just as a heavy bell rung through the ball room, quieting the guests and signaling the start of the dinner.
"I am extremely sorry," Schwarz said with intense worry as she took Mr. S and lead him to his seat at the other end of the dining hall, staying stone silent as she led him the rest of the way.
'Stupid, Stupid, Stupid' she chastised herself in her thoughts. 'Of course he only allowed Weiss and her friends to attend so that the Messerschmitts would be moved down four seats. This would move the Frau's down as well due to the recent marriage to their rivals, and that would've opened a seat for the Atlas military advisory to sit next to Mr. Schnee without there being a scene! It was all so obvious!'
Schwarz resisted the urge to facepalm in polite company.
'Thanks to my slowness, Mr. Schnee had to spend half the night talking to some no-name military advisor when he should have been talking to the heads! And His daughter is still here! No wonder he didn't want me around!" she gripped onto her napkin nervously as they approached the head of the dining table.
'Ok, calm yourself, Schwarz.' Schwarz took a deep breath 'He still managed to spare some time for everyone, even if he was a bit curt. He'll handle the rest at dinner and you can apologize later.' Finally, she escorted Mr. Schnee to the head of the table, with his daughter and her friends lined up on his right and another family sitting to his left.
She passed by Weiss and company on her way down the table to her own seat. She noted the bright, though relatively respectable clothing they wore. 'At least she bothered not to make a scene out of them,' she thought, knowing exactly how hunters and huntresses in training could get at parties. 'Perhaps this party could end simply," she thought, her heart pounding more than it usually did during these events.
…..
"Ladies and gentlemen," his voice boomed across the silent ballroom as he stood at his seat, "it is with the greatest honor that I host this party during such a significant date in our.."
Mr S. started reading off the teleprompter and giving a small toast about a new business opening or something; he wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. No, he was more focused on the camera's dotting the room. Not security cameras, mind you. Full blown, HD news cameras. Some of them clung to the walls and columns, hidden from the casual gaze as if they were a part of the architecture. Others were attached to drones, circling high above like vultures and almost touching the ceiling in their lazy flight.
'Oh, so this is one of those parties,' he noted, taking a breath. Nothing to be worried about, he'd finish the toast and they'd probably edit the rest of the night out considering it would consist of people eating and chattering to each other for an hour, he assured himself.
Mr. S sat down to light applause after finishing his speech and dug in. The party had quite a nice spread, he noted, sinking his teeth into some steak soup with a fancy, some might call pretentious, side of Risotto. He kept a sly eye on his table companions, making sure he mimicked their actions and didn't use the wrong fork or something. Thankfully, the people at this table just dug in; it seemed the complicated myriad of rules he expected didn't apply during dinner. Seriously, some guy in the corner was practically inhaling alcohol.
"Weiss," he said, turning to his daughter. Well, "daughter." At the same time, she turned back to look at him with a decidedly neutral expression.
"Yes, father?" she replied.
"How have you enjoyed the ball?" He continued evenly, deciding to overlook the fact that she spoke like she was raised in the forties.
"It was an adequate gathering," she replied, looking straight ahead and making it clear that she didn't want to talk.
Mr. S Shrugged, he'd figure out what teenage drama or petty squabble was causing this later.
"Well, how are your friends enjoying the party?" he looked to the three girls sitting beside her, who together formed a spectrum of emotion which he swore had to be planned.
"It was good. I mean, great! Mr. Schnee." a soft spoken and nervously chuckling girl said, adding a quick, "sir," after a short pause. He smiled at the girl as she tried turning her grey eyes away from his. The grey eyed girl was sitting furthest from Weiss, and next to her sat a busty blonde in a yellow dress who didn't bother hiding the glare she directed at him. Moving on quickly, he looked at the next person in line, who he guessed this was "Blake" considering her black dress and that she sat directly next to Weiss.
Blake's look was some combination of "Ahh!" and "I will rip your heart out and eat it!", all of this mixed with resting bitch face. Now, he wasn't one to meddle in a strangers dating life, but he wondered if Weiss had chosen the best people to call friends.
"And why are you asking?" Weiss said forcefully.
"I just wanted to know how your friends were doing?" he replied with probably the most honest thing he'd said since he woke up this morning.
Alas, Weiss, despite all her riches, was not buying it.
"Really? You want to know more about my friends, now?"
Weiss's voice echoed across the ballroom. Mr. S noticed the sudden quiet and turned to see the nervously smiling faces of the guests as most everyone seemed to be occupied with sipping their empty cups while discreetly staring at the scene. Weiss herself noticed the now silent room, the buzzing drone of the cameras now audible as she worked up the courage to take the next step.
"Well fine," she said standing up. "I'll tell you about them!"
"Ruby!" she pointed at the grey eyed girl with black hair, "is the most talented huntress I've ever met, without whose leadership Beacon would surely have fallen." Weiss proclaimed with a not-too-subtle jab at the Atlas nobility's unpopular decision to hold back dust sales to a besieged Beacon when the white fang attacked. They reversed this decision of course, but it was still a sore point for many heads at the table.
"Ruby," as he now knew her to be called, waved at him with a nervous smile as Weiss lauded her achievements.
Mr. S wanted to give Ruby his congratulations on helping to win their D&D campaign, but Weiss was not done.
"Yang!" she pointed now to the scowling blonde.
'Oh, she's doing all of them,' Mr. S thought, as he looked at the scene with a neutral expression.
"Who is the most KIND HEARTED and BRAVE person I know!" Weiss said, putting particular emphasis on "KIND HEARTED" and "BRAVE" as another kick in the gut to the Atlas nobles who wanted to stay out of the fight for beacon. The same atlas Nobles who nearly let the white fang destroy one of the CCT towers.
Many guests in the ballroom were heavily gulping down wine from their flasks, Schwarz was considering downing a bottle.
'The yellow haired one looks like she'd main an orc,' Mr. S, thought. Now understanding why Weiss had to be invited to this party. 'No matter, she can't make anymore of a scene,' Mr. S thought, wondering what kind words Weiss would have for Blake.
"And Blake!," Weiss's voice rang out like a crystal through the now stone silent Ball room. Her eyes glancing lovingly down towards Blake for a split second before she braced herself and let Blake grip her hand.
"My girlfriend!" she announced, helping Blake up from her chair with a tug of her arm, removing her bow with a flick of the wrist and bending Blake backwards as she kissed her deeply in front of the watching crowd.
Yang smiled deliciously, barely managing to keep her promise not to make any more of a scene.
Ruby clapped lightly in the corner with a nervous smirk, "yay! they're girlfriends!" she whispered.
If possible, the silence in the room got colder, followed by a loud, unanimous, gasp which spread out in a wave before falling silent; the acts of yelling, crying ladies, and loud phone calls only held back by the common courtesy everyone showed in allowing Mr. Schnee to be the first among them to do those things.
All eyes were on him, as some brows sweated and some, like the lady in red, smiled with a devilish smirk at the shitshow that would surely follow.
Now, if you, dear reader, expected Mr. S to be so completely ignorant of Faunus kind that he would make the wrong move at this turn, you'd be wrong. No, for Mr. S had learned about Faunus just prior to his party.
Well...he hadn't LEARNED about them...or read anything about them...or even heard the word "faunus" before in his life...Ok, he'd seen a picture of some people with animal ears on the cover of a magazine in one of the waiting rooms: A crime-watch magazine. But! He had managed to deduce much from a simple picture.
For example, it was obvious that gene therapy had advanced to the point where people could selectively add animal characteristics to their biology.
From this, he gathered three more pieces of information.
First. Obviously, only rich people would have access to this technology at first, a hypothesis somewhat confirmed by his daughter dating someone with said augmentations. So make sure to treat people with animal characteristics accordingly.
Second. People in specialized industries would probably get them if their work could be improved by it, which is why those prison guards on the magazine cover had extra ears, to help keep a lookout.
And third, and most importantly. Don't freak out if you see people with animal ears, you'll make a fool of yourself.
So of course, Mr. S was now extremely glad that he'd seen that magazine. Otherwise, he might have freaked out at the sight of Blake's ears and made a fool of himself. PHEW! Of course, it was apparently a big deal that his daughter had made a scene and kissed someone, so he'd better say something to ease the tension. All of this flashed through his adrenaline addled mind in a quick second.
Looking smoothly over to the anticipating rows of diners in front, and his daughter and her friends to the side, he cleared his throat.
"You know, Weiss," he said. "I didn't know much about Blake when you'd first introduced her, but I can see now why you chose to date her."
Weiss rolled her eyes, 'Of course he's going to mention he didn't "know about" Blake. Trying to distance himself from this "Travesty"' she thought hotly.
Weiss didn't bother to hide her disgust at the coming speech about her "rebelliousness," the "bad influences at Beacon" and her "traumatized little soul after surviving through the attack by the White Fang."
Despite all of this, however. Weiss responded.
"And why do you think I chose to date her, father?" Weiss said, with a tone as sweet as ever.
"Why, because she's obviously an excellent listener!" he said loudly, making sure everyone in the room heard the clever joke he'd just come up with.
'Yeah, I'm awesome,' he thought as he chuckled at his own joke.
'It works on so many levels,' he thought to himself, glad that he was able to come up with something under pressure like that as he stuffed down a hearty spoonful of the, quite delicious, Risotto, still chuckling. Yeah, he deserved this. Slowly, he got less and less glad as his own chuckles echoed back towards him.
No one else was laughing. Like, not even a little. Not even those fake laughs people give when rich people tell bad jokes, or even those half hearted pity-laughs people give when poor people tell bad jokes! He looked over from Weiss to the horrified faces that stood out on every person he saw, except for the red-lipstick lady, who's smile stood out like Christmas was coming early.
'Yeahhh, I've fucked up," he thought, looking back towards Weiss, who looked like her eyes were going to fall out of her head as her expression switched between wrathful, shocked and exasperation.
Thankfully, he didn't have to think of anything else to say. The rest of the ball did that for him.
"What the fuc-" a man near the middle of the table yelled, standing up. The rest of that sentence wasn't heard, drowned out in the wave of shouts that arose from every table and corner of the room.
While the panic spread, the cameras still circled slowly above, capturing the scene in all its HD glory.
To be continued...
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Chapter 2
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
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Chapter 2
I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me. Check out my Reddit Fantastic-Tales for updates on other stories that I'm writing.
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"Sir," Schwarz whispered, lightly placing her hand atop Mr. S's arm, "we should go," she said, hooking her arm through his and pulling him away from his seat as raucous chattering filled the ball room. Excited onlookers cried out in the frenzied excitement of the moment as a sort of spontaneous dialogue seemed to have formed in every corner of the room as every guest strongly agreed that this was not good, each person tripping over themselves to denounce the situation more sternly than the last. Some of the ladies lightly dabbed at the mascara ridden tears that streamed down their cheeks as many of the people stood precariously on their chairs to videotape the scene with their scroll cameras.
Interestingly, nobody bothered to directly address, or even interact with, "Mr. Schnee" during all of this, allowing Schwarz a relatively quiet moment to guide him to the nearest exit: a secret door, hidden behind one of the tapestries that hung against the North Wall. Weiss, having recovered before the rest of team RWBY and quickly locating the pair, managed to yell out an impassioned, "Wait!" just as the heavy marble door shut neatly behind the retreating pair, resting flush against the wall once more as the tapestry swung smoothly back to cover it.
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Schwarz's dress heels clicked sharply across the marble floor, resonating within the small tunnel they traveled through as Mr. S wondered if he should say something to break the silence before quickly deciding against it. He shivered with aftershocks at the memory of what was literally his first informal conversation of the night as, eventually, they came upon a small, circular room with four mechanical doors lining the walls; a fifth door shutting cleanly behind them as they entered the circle. And, for just a moment, as they both stood in the quiet and otherwise empty room, well...honestly, he thought she was here to kill him. His blood pressure spiked as Schwarz turned suddenly.
"Where should we go, sir?" she asked with a straight voice while staring intensely down at the scale-model hologram of a building that floated above her tablet. A fiery red web of secret pathways snaked their way throughout the projected building's interior while a blue, flashing light indicated their position in those very tunnels.
"Take me to my office," he replied monotonously, managing to force a semblance of alertness and strength in his voice. And, at his word, the rightmost door whirred with a mechanical hum as the metal moved to reveal another small tunnel.
They once again headed into the maze of pathways, occasionally coming across forks in the path and winding around strongly curved and inclining walkways. During all of this, Mr. S felt keenly the unsaid questions hanging uncomfortably in the air as Schwarz worked her hardest to pretend the answers to those questions didn't matter: questions that Mr. S couldn't identify.
'Alright, this is too much,' Mr. S decided, eagerly pulling his scroll from his pocket and searching for "History of The World." It wasn't much to go on, but it was all he could think to search for at the moment. His eyes desperately scanned over the first link, reading in a flurry...
Remnant is a rocky planet with one natural satellite. Home to two races, Humanity and the Faunus, the history of Remnant is...
'Motherfucker!' he worked to keep himself from yelling as he scrolled down, only to see more links for this "Remnant" world building crap. 'Seriously, how much was this guy into this fantasy book if it affected his recommendations this much!'
Frantically, he started typing away for a more specific query when a news story popped up, partially blocking the screen.
Former Schnee heiress makes surprise speech at ball! the headline read, continuing on to say, "You won't believe what happened next!"
A grainy picture of the dining table he'd just been sitting at appeared below the title, showing standing at her seat and looking down at Mr. S while multiple red arrows decorated the photo, pointing to a spot on Ms. Messerschmitt's cleavage, which itself was highlighted by a red circle. He scowled at the image, clicking it away as he worked to type in a new search once more.
"Sir, we're here," Schwarz interrupted.
Mr. S looked up to see Schwarz standing patiently by a heavy, metal door. He followed her light glance towards the small fixture embedded into the wall beside the door.
'Oh, she wants me to unlock it,' Mr. S realized as he strode confidently towards the fixture.
'Ok,' he thought on his way to the door, 'If "PASSWORD" doesn't unlock the door I'm going to pretend to pass out until I can figure out what-OH THANK GOODNESS IT'S A FINGERPRINT SCANNER!'
Mr. S exhaled in relief as he approached the door. A loud and deep CLICK resounded from inside the metal door almost immediately after he pressed his thumb onto the thumb pad. The door clicked a second time, more softly this time, before parting in the middle into two parts, each half swinging smoothly inwards to reveal his office.
If he'd been in the mood, he would have quickly run in and jumped into the swivel chair before spinning about to take in the aesthetic beauty of the room while softly saying "whoaaaa…" with each revolution. The floor of the room was covered completely in custom fitting, snow white, tiles that lined the room from wall to wall. The walls themselves were amazingly designed. The front wall was a solid block of metal, the same type as the doors'. The two side walls were covered in a lightly toned, hard carpet of some sort that brought a lot of balance to the stark contrast created by the white floor and dark, mahogany desk which sat near the back edge of the room. And finally, behind the desk itself, there was the main attraction: a wall made entirely of glass. He experienced a bit of vertigo as he looked through that wall and saw the skeleton crew working, their colored uniforms contrasting nicely with the white factory floor below. On the opposite wall of the warehouse was what could have been the largest television he'd ever seen. The screen itself was larger than his entire office, and on it was displayed the stock information for Schnee Corp, or rather, SCHN. A bright, green line ran along the surface of the screen, fluctuating up and down on a black graph as other companies and numbers flashed onto the lower bar of the screen, feeding real time stock price information straight through the glass wall. The green glow of the graph was just powerful enough to stretch into his office, coloring the snow white tiles a decorative teal.
He wasn't paying attention to any of this as he walked in, however. He was intrigued more by the crowd of people who mulled about on the inside, apparently ready to greet him. Schwarz followed hesitantly behind him as she looked more obviously at the two groups which stood on either side of the room, forming a path for Mr. S to reach his desk as they all stared at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to incredulity to rage.
He looked straight ahead as he walked forward, keeping his eyes on the desk as indistinct features passed by on either side of his periphery. Each step he took seemed to echo in the crowded room, his every movement risking a casual brush against either of the two lines they had formed against the carpeted walls. He released a soft breath he'd been hiding as he curved around to stand in the clear space behind his desk. Reaching forward, he pulled back the chair behind his desk and lowered himself into it, trying his hardest to look regal as he did so.
As he sat in his chair, his desk surprised him by humming on and powering up all the electronics and computers that sat upon the mahogany.
"Good. Morning. Mr. Schnee," a staccato, computerized voice sounded from the telephone which sat on the nearest corner of the desk. "You. Have. Nine...Thousand. Four. Hundred. And. One. Messages," the computer finished just before a loud, cacophonous ringing overtook the machine.
The ringing stopped after several seconds. "You. Have. Nine. Thousand. Five. Hundre-"
CLICK. The sound resounded throughout the room as Schwarz's hand pressed harshly into the largest button on the machine, though Mr. S noted that a small light still flashed on the grey surface of the device, indicating that the stream of calls continued. He looked up, seeing the contained grimace Schwarz directed at the machine, before focusing his attention to the people in front of him. Careful not to ask suspicious questions like, "who are you people?" he elected to take a more subtle route. The first thing would be to find out whether "he" was supposed to know these people. His only guess was that he knew at least some of them quite well, and must be quite friendly with at least one of them if they had the key to his office, so a more casual approach might be appropriate for the situation, he gathered. He felt a cold shill fall over him as he thought of what to say, unable to come up with any excuses or apologies about whatever it was he did.
"Professor Ozpin, what are you doing here?" Schwarz asked with a mixture of relief and worry as she directed a familiar smile towards the man with the cane. Mr. S thanked his lucky stars at this and elected to stay silent for as long as he could manage.
"I was just dropping by to say hello," the man he now knew to be Ozpin replied with a genial smile, breaking the silence as he took a sip of, he guessed coffee, from a mug he'd been holding up ever since Mr. S walked in. "We didn't get to talk much during the party," Ozpin continued, directing the statement at Mr. S.
"I don't think you're the only one who wants a talk with our dear Mr. Schnee," a slightly tipsy man with raven hair chuckled. The man gestured with his flask hand to a television embedded into one of the side walls.
"Why, because she's obviously an excellent listener!" the statement blared from the tv's speakers as an aerial shot of the ball showed Mr. S, a small figure in a white tuxedo sitting at the far edge of the largest table. Despite his small presence on the screen, however, his words tore through the surrounding silence of the ball room and seemed to pass through the tv and into his office to haunt him once more.
"Now, as you can see quite clearly, his voice is clear and unstrained, and there is no hint of discomfiture from Mr. Schnee as he speaks, nor is there any indication that he meant to be deceptive. In fact, if you will pay attention to his chuckle there at the end, I can see no intent to follow up his joke with anything substantive," a man wearing a brown suit explained while the news station replayed the statement, along with the following chuckle, in slow motion on the left half of the television screen.
"So would you say that Mr. Schnee seemed tolerable of, even friendly with, the faunus that kissed his daughter?" the reporter sitting next to the man asked as she hooked her hands together and leaned forward on her stool.
"Yes, uh, I would characterize his behavior as friendly," the man answered with a curt nod.
"Well thank you, doctor Braun," the reporter said with a respectful nod before turning back to face the camera with a serious expression. "We will now talk LIVE with our body language analyst on the scene who-"
A light blue, circular light appeared on the lower corner of the tv as the sound muted. Turning his head, Mr. S looked up to see Schwarz standing beside him with her arm outstretched towards the screen, a remote grasped firmly in her hand. Mr. S wondered if he ought to give her a raise sometime.
"Now why'd you have to," the raven haired man took a long swig, "go on and do that. We were just getting to the fun part," he finished with a devilish smirk.
"Actually," a cold voice interrupted Schwarz's heated reply. Weiss stepped forward from the line she and her friends formed against the left wall, "I actually...agree with Qrow," she said as if swallowing something distasteful. "You have a lot of questions to answer," Weiss continued, her voice losing its initially wavering nature to take on a braver tone.
As she said this, the rest of the group trained their gazes on Mr. S, who sat still in his chair, thinking over the situation.
So he was sitting in a room with seven people. His daughter and her friends, along with Ozpin, were the people he "knew" apparently. That left two people unaccounted for.
Standing next to Ozpin, against the right wall, wearing a white and purple dress, was a displeased librarian with a riding crop. No. Really. She just carried that thing around and no one batted an eye, not even when she was wandering around the party...Moving on, Mr. S. decided to ignore her attire as he went to analyze the other unknown. Next to her, leaning on the wall in a roguish manner, was a man who apparently just did not give a fuck about dress code. He was wearing a cape for god's sake! And even while wearing that outfit he managed to make it look like he was too drunk to dress himself. Now, Mr. S wasn't usually one to pay too much attention to appearances in the first place, but the man seemed to have a talent for annoying people. His look, his hair, they way he talked, and his nonchalant attitude in the face of this disaster…whatever it was.
Man, he thought he was just soooo cool. Well he wasn't.
Mr. S exhaled lightly as he looked at his "daughter", who now stood defiantly in front of his desk.
"Now what could I possibly have to answer for?" he asked with an ironical smirk that implied he knew what the hell was going on.
"Buh, ghhh," Weiss floundered at Mr. S's playing dumb act. "Everything!" she finally settled at with a breathless, exasperated shout, "you have everything to answer for! What kind of act ar-"
"Excuse me," Schwarz interrupted strongly. "While Mr. Schnee appreciates your...excitement...to meet with him, you are still trespassing." she noted to a now surprised Mr. S. "Please leave and we'll be sure to schedule appointments for all of you," she finished in a tone that made clear that they wouldn't be getting any appointments. While she said this, her hand hovered dangerously over the visible emergency button.
"You're excused," Weiss responded, calmly fixing her dress, "and we're not leaving."
"Actually," Schwarz said in the closest thing to a sneer Mr.S had heard from her, "you wi-"
"Schwarz," Mr. S interrupted, drawing Schwarz's attention to him while he looked out to the group ahead, "why don't you get our guests some chairs."
"What?" Weiss asked indignantly.
"Of course, sir," Schwarz looked down at him, smiling while her hand hovered over the hidden emergency call button.
"No..I mean, actually get them some chairs," he clarified, drawing a confused look from Schwarz as she fought an internal battle between her trust in him and her duty
"What?" Schwarz summarized her feelings, immediately recoiling at the apparent impudence in her voice.
"Of course," Weiss chimed in, crossing her arms haughtily.
Schwarz turned her head to face Weiss with a glare, "I don't know what on Remnant-"
Mr, S didn't hear the rest of Schwarz's admonitions; for just as he heard the word "Remnant" leave her lips, he'd leaned back in his chair just enough to see the REAL centerpiece of the room. Above his head, expertly painted onto the ceiling of his office, was a giant map of…
"REMNANT".
Dark, bold letters spelled out the name of the world in stylized lettering, with each of the continents "Atlas," "Minstral, "Vacuo," and "Vale" being similarly labeled.
A series of epiphanies slammed into his mind as he gazed up at the world in a contemplative silence.
'They're basically just modified Atlas thrusters.' Jon's words rung clearly in his head.
'oh' Mr. S thought
'Remnant is a rocky planet with one natural satellite,' the words from the web entry flashed in his mind.
'Oh' he continued.
'...home to two races, Humanity and the Faunus…'
'OH' his mind began to burn with implications.
'...seemed friendly with the Faunus that kissed his daughter?'
'OH!'
'Because she's obviously such a great listener!' his own actions flashed painfully in his memory for no particular reason.
'D'OH!'
Quickly recovering, however, the final piece of the puzzle slid into place.
...Analysis of Dust Vein Decomposition Patterns In Fucking Remnant…
'OH SH-'
"Mr. Schnee," Schwarz interrupted his inner monologue, bringing his focus down from the ceiling. "Are you sure you'd like to speak with these people now?" Schwarz continued, putting emphasis on "now".
"Yes," he replied. No matter what was going on in the news, he NEEDED to find out what was going on. Now. Because he was far from being Montana or Alaska, and he definitely wasn't in Kansas.
"Ha!" Weiss said, snubbing her nose at Schwarz while the dark haired woman begrudgingly called for the chairs with raised hackles and a nervous posture.
"Just be-"
"While you're at it," Mr. S interrupted the dangerously toned statement that Schwarz directed towards Weiss, "would you mind going through my voicemails?"
Schwarz was a gem, and he appreciated her at the moment more than he'd appreciated anything in his life, but he could tell a frazzled person when he saw one. She was best off doing something other than talking to the people present.
"You want me to look through all the voicemails?" Schwarz asked incredulously.
"Of course not," Mr. S replied. "Just randomize the order and look through a few to get a feel for the environment."
"Randomising. Voicemails." The phone chimed, seemingly deciding Schwarz's next course of action.
Schwarz seemed to get the subtext of the statement and lowered her shoulders as she picked up the phone handle, pressed some buttons and pushed the phone to her ear as she read off of a transcript. Though, Mr. S noted, the task seemed to have a calming effect on the secretary, as a hint of a smile formed on her countenance at the first contact with the hard plastic of the phone.
Now, he needed to get some very key questions about this world answered...and he couldn't ask any of them. In fact, instead of asking questions, he would have to give detailed answers about the politics and behavior of Mr. Schnee while providing an adequate explanation for the apparent difference between his behavior and what Mr. Schnee's behavior would have been.
He was sure that was possible though…somehow.
Maybe if he answered in question form?
He wasn't a pessimist, but he was sure this would be the hardest game of Jeopardy ever.
Mr S. blinked as he looked over the expectant crowd. Everyone was silent, looks of confusion, anger and intense curiosity flooded the room as everyone trained an idle gaze on Mr. S. Even Qrow, looking unusually serious as he leaned back against a side wall, managed to show some reverence towards the situation, as if the mystery of the century was about to be solved in this very office. Mr. S looked back at them with a blank gaze, slowly regretting his rash decision to keep them here as they all waited for him to bust out a completely rational and sensical explanation for what was going on. Well, that wasn't happening. His mind was still burned out after accepting that the future reality was actually some alien world and he wasn't really in the best state to come up with anything convincing. Really, the only explanation he could think of was the truth, and it was just stupid.
Breathing in lightly, he prepared to grind out some half thought declaration when sweet respite came with Weiss as she cut through the awkward silence.
"Can we get on with this, father?" Weiss leaned forward to glare down at him.
The question buzzed past him as he barely acknowledged the meaning of the statement before it slipped from his mind. Really, he was thankful that someone else had taken the burden of starting the conversation, but Mr. S was still a bit distracted by the fact that this crazy body snatching adventure was actually on another fucking planet! As such, at the moment, he was more concerned with the Fermi paradox and the logistics of interstellar travel then he was with the conversation before him.
"Get on with what?" he managed to reply with a straight voice and gentle smile, concealing his lack of fucks expertly.
"You!" Weiss pointed a finger at Mr. S while she slowly intoned each word, "answering our questions!" Weiss finished as she felt her pointing finger shake with a growing rage at having asked the same, impossibly interesting, question of her father.
"Well, what questions could you possibly want answered?" Mr. S replied, trying to put on an interested smile that came off as more smug than intended. 'Yeah, this probably isn't Proxima, what with the whole tidal locking. Maybe Alpha Centauri?'
Weiss shivered with a contained wrath at his apparent nonchalance. "Well," she began with an overly calm attitude as she felt herself being undone. Her expressions and movements become looser and more exaggerated as an impassioned fury expressed itself through her. "You could start by explaining your behavior back at the ball, old man!" At this point, Weiss was a raging ball of hot fury, barely holding herself back from yelling as she let it all out. Everything. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she noted that she'd never gotten this far before, having always been shut down, or slapped or threatened before she'd reached this point, but she was free now. She'd already been disowned and had nothing else to lose, nothing else he could take from her. Best of all her father was stupid enough to let everyone stay, to let himself be cornered in public like this! Finally, after all these years, like a dream come true, she would be leaving this poisonous relationship, and she would be leaving with her head held high, her friends by her side, and most importantly...getting some answers!
So why was she so angry?
Weiss leaned intently forward as Mr. S moved to speak, hating that she was so captivated by his words and beginning to listen to that muted voice in the back of her head that told her to calm down as she felt Blake move to stand beside her, allowing her to relax just a bit.
"Well, whatever would I have to explain myself for?" Mr. S replied as if this conversation was the last thing on his mind.
"Why did you say that back at the ball!?" Weiss exploded once more, on the brink of shouting as Mr. S Idly thought about paying more attention and care to his responses before resolving to muscle through this, he was bound to mess up, best not to overthink it.
"Because it was funny," Mr. S replied simply with a forlorn smile.
"You. You. You. You." Weiss stuttered, rapidly blinking as she struggled to come up with more words that could express her fury.
"Well what was I supposed to say?" he replied defensively as he felt his mind begin to wake once more and notice the rest of the people in the room who watched, as Yang in particular looked ready for a fist fight and Ruby weakly hooked her arm through Yang's in a worried attempt to hold her back.
"You were supposed to say that you didn't approve of our relationship!" Weiss replied with the obvious answer, almost begging for the world to make sense again.
"Well, why wouldn't I approve of your relationship?" Mr. S asked.
"BECAUSE SHE'S A FAUNUS!" Weiss exploded, stretching her arms up as she stood on her tiptoes to point vigorously at Blake's cat-ears.
Blake blushed as she flattened her ears and looked bashfully at the floor. Blake wondered if she should be offended at her girlfriends words.
'No," Blake thought, 'she's not like that.'
Mr. S, meanwhile was taken aback, visibly reacting to Weiss's words for the first time in the conversation as his eyes widened a hair and he moved to lean back against his office chair. There was a noticeable lull in the conversation as everyone seemed intrigued by "Mr. Schnee's" reaction, hooked onto his lips as they all eagerly awaited his next words. Weiss had said it straight, there was nowhere for him to deflect the conversation to. Mr. S himself was shaken from his reverie as it all hit him like a train, bringing him fully back into the conversation, the here and now, as "Remnant" left his musings and yet another stream of epiphanies streamed into place. Despite this being the third time that night that he was having such an experience, the power of the moment was enough to overwhelm him once more, to wipe away his thoughts as a singular conclusion formed in his mind, and, like a deer staring into the headlights of truth, there was nothing he did other than look back with wide eyes and reflect what shone onto him.
Mr. S paused for just an instant to consider his words, the whole room going still as even Qrow moved from his relaxed position against the wall to look fully upon the unfolding scene.
"You know," Mr. S paused with a slightly shocked tone, "Weiss," he brought his hands together, touching them to his lips as he looked down at his desk top in concern, "that's kind of racist."
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I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me. Check out my Reddit Fantastic-Tales for updates on other stories that I'm writing.
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"Sir," Schwarz whispered, lightly placing her hand atop Mr. S's arm, "we should go," she said, hooking her arm through his and pulling him away from his seat as raucous chattering filled the ball room. Excited onlookers cried out in the frenzied excitement of the moment as a sort of spontaneous dialogue seemed to have formed in every corner of the room as every guest strongly agreed that this was not good, each person tripping over themselves to denounce the situation more sternly than the last. Some of the ladies lightly dabbed at the mascara ridden tears that streamed down their cheeks as many of the people stood precariously on their chairs to videotape the scene with their scroll cameras.
Interestingly, nobody bothered to directly address, or even interact with, "Mr. Schnee" during all of this, allowing Schwarz a relatively quiet moment to guide him to the nearest exit: a secret door, hidden behind one of the tapestries that hung against the North Wall. Weiss, having recovered before the rest of team RWBY and quickly locating the pair, managed to yell out an impassioned, "Wait!" just as the heavy marble door shut neatly behind the retreating pair, resting flush against the wall once more as the tapestry swung smoothly back to cover it.
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Schwarz's dress heels clicked sharply across the marble floor, resonating within the small tunnel they traveled through as Mr. S wondered if he should say something to break the silence before quickly deciding against it. He shivered with aftershocks at the memory of what was literally his first informal conversation of the night as, eventually, they came upon a small, circular room with four mechanical doors lining the walls; a fifth door shutting cleanly behind them as they entered the circle. And, for just a moment, as they both stood in the quiet and otherwise empty room, well...honestly, he thought she was here to kill him. His blood pressure spiked as Schwarz turned suddenly.
"Where should we go, sir?" she asked with a straight voice while staring intensely down at the scale-model hologram of a building that floated above her tablet. A fiery red web of secret pathways snaked their way throughout the projected building's interior while a blue, flashing light indicated their position in those very tunnels.
"Take me to my office," he replied monotonously, managing to force a semblance of alertness and strength in his voice. And, at his word, the rightmost door whirred with a mechanical hum as the metal moved to reveal another small tunnel.
They once again headed into the maze of pathways, occasionally coming across forks in the path and winding around strongly curved and inclining walkways. During all of this, Mr. S felt keenly the unsaid questions hanging uncomfortably in the air as Schwarz worked her hardest to pretend the answers to those questions didn't matter: questions that Mr. S couldn't identify.
'Alright, this is too much,' Mr. S decided, eagerly pulling his scroll from his pocket and searching for "History of The World." It wasn't much to go on, but it was all he could think to search for at the moment. His eyes desperately scanned over the first link, reading in a flurry...
Remnant is a rocky planet with one natural satellite. Home to two races, Humanity and the Faunus, the history of Remnant is...
'Motherfucker!' he worked to keep himself from yelling as he scrolled down, only to see more links for this "Remnant" world building crap. 'Seriously, how much was this guy into this fantasy book if it affected his recommendations this much!'
Frantically, he started typing away for a more specific query when a news story popped up, partially blocking the screen.
Former Schnee heiress makes surprise speech at ball! the headline read, continuing on to say, "You won't believe what happened next!"
A grainy picture of the dining table he'd just been sitting at appeared below the title, showing standing at her seat and looking down at Mr. S while multiple red arrows decorated the photo, pointing to a spot on Ms. Messerschmitt's cleavage, which itself was highlighted by a red circle. He scowled at the image, clicking it away as he worked to type in a new search once more.
"Sir, we're here," Schwarz interrupted.
Mr. S looked up to see Schwarz standing patiently by a heavy, metal door. He followed her light glance towards the small fixture embedded into the wall beside the door.
'Oh, she wants me to unlock it,' Mr. S realized as he strode confidently towards the fixture.
'Ok,' he thought on his way to the door, 'If "PASSWORD" doesn't unlock the door I'm going to pretend to pass out until I can figure out what-OH THANK GOODNESS IT'S A FINGERPRINT SCANNER!'
Mr. S exhaled in relief as he approached the door. A loud and deep CLICK resounded from inside the metal door almost immediately after he pressed his thumb onto the thumb pad. The door clicked a second time, more softly this time, before parting in the middle into two parts, each half swinging smoothly inwards to reveal his office.
If he'd been in the mood, he would have quickly run in and jumped into the swivel chair before spinning about to take in the aesthetic beauty of the room while softly saying "whoaaaa…" with each revolution. The floor of the room was covered completely in custom fitting, snow white, tiles that lined the room from wall to wall. The walls themselves were amazingly designed. The front wall was a solid block of metal, the same type as the doors'. The two side walls were covered in a lightly toned, hard carpet of some sort that brought a lot of balance to the stark contrast created by the white floor and dark, mahogany desk which sat near the back edge of the room. And finally, behind the desk itself, there was the main attraction: a wall made entirely of glass. He experienced a bit of vertigo as he looked through that wall and saw the skeleton crew working, their colored uniforms contrasting nicely with the white factory floor below. On the opposite wall of the warehouse was what could have been the largest television he'd ever seen. The screen itself was larger than his entire office, and on it was displayed the stock information for Schnee Corp, or rather, SCHN. A bright, green line ran along the surface of the screen, fluctuating up and down on a black graph as other companies and numbers flashed onto the lower bar of the screen, feeding real time stock price information straight through the glass wall. The green glow of the graph was just powerful enough to stretch into his office, coloring the snow white tiles a decorative teal.
He wasn't paying attention to any of this as he walked in, however. He was intrigued more by the crowd of people who mulled about on the inside, apparently ready to greet him. Schwarz followed hesitantly behind him as she looked more obviously at the two groups which stood on either side of the room, forming a path for Mr. S to reach his desk as they all stared at him with expressions ranging from curiosity to incredulity to rage.
He looked straight ahead as he walked forward, keeping his eyes on the desk as indistinct features passed by on either side of his periphery. Each step he took seemed to echo in the crowded room, his every movement risking a casual brush against either of the two lines they had formed against the carpeted walls. He released a soft breath he'd been hiding as he curved around to stand in the clear space behind his desk. Reaching forward, he pulled back the chair behind his desk and lowered himself into it, trying his hardest to look regal as he did so.
As he sat in his chair, his desk surprised him by humming on and powering up all the electronics and computers that sat upon the mahogany.
"Good. Morning. Mr. Schnee," a staccato, computerized voice sounded from the telephone which sat on the nearest corner of the desk. "You. Have. Nine...Thousand. Four. Hundred. And. One. Messages," the computer finished just before a loud, cacophonous ringing overtook the machine.
The ringing stopped after several seconds. "You. Have. Nine. Thousand. Five. Hundre-"
CLICK. The sound resounded throughout the room as Schwarz's hand pressed harshly into the largest button on the machine, though Mr. S noted that a small light still flashed on the grey surface of the device, indicating that the stream of calls continued. He looked up, seeing the contained grimace Schwarz directed at the machine, before focusing his attention to the people in front of him. Careful not to ask suspicious questions like, "who are you people?" he elected to take a more subtle route. The first thing would be to find out whether "he" was supposed to know these people. His only guess was that he knew at least some of them quite well, and must be quite friendly with at least one of them if they had the key to his office, so a more casual approach might be appropriate for the situation, he gathered. He felt a cold shill fall over him as he thought of what to say, unable to come up with any excuses or apologies about whatever it was he did.
"Professor Ozpin, what are you doing here?" Schwarz asked with a mixture of relief and worry as she directed a familiar smile towards the man with the cane. Mr. S thanked his lucky stars at this and elected to stay silent for as long as he could manage.
"I was just dropping by to say hello," the man he now knew to be Ozpin replied with a genial smile, breaking the silence as he took a sip of, he guessed coffee, from a mug he'd been holding up ever since Mr. S walked in. "We didn't get to talk much during the party," Ozpin continued, directing the statement at Mr. S.
"I don't think you're the only one who wants a talk with our dear Mr. Schnee," a slightly tipsy man with raven hair chuckled. The man gestured with his flask hand to a television embedded into one of the side walls.
"Why, because she's obviously an excellent listener!" the statement blared from the tv's speakers as an aerial shot of the ball showed Mr. S, a small figure in a white tuxedo sitting at the far edge of the largest table. Despite his small presence on the screen, however, his words tore through the surrounding silence of the ball room and seemed to pass through the tv and into his office to haunt him once more.
"Now, as you can see quite clearly, his voice is clear and unstrained, and there is no hint of discomfiture from Mr. Schnee as he speaks, nor is there any indication that he meant to be deceptive. In fact, if you will pay attention to his chuckle there at the end, I can see no intent to follow up his joke with anything substantive," a man wearing a brown suit explained while the news station replayed the statement, along with the following chuckle, in slow motion on the left half of the television screen.
"So would you say that Mr. Schnee seemed tolerable of, even friendly with, the faunus that kissed his daughter?" the reporter sitting next to the man asked as she hooked her hands together and leaned forward on her stool.
"Yes, uh, I would characterize his behavior as friendly," the man answered with a curt nod.
"Well thank you, doctor Braun," the reporter said with a respectful nod before turning back to face the camera with a serious expression. "We will now talk LIVE with our body language analyst on the scene who-"
A light blue, circular light appeared on the lower corner of the tv as the sound muted. Turning his head, Mr. S looked up to see Schwarz standing beside him with her arm outstretched towards the screen, a remote grasped firmly in her hand. Mr. S wondered if he ought to give her a raise sometime.
"Now why'd you have to," the raven haired man took a long swig, "go on and do that. We were just getting to the fun part," he finished with a devilish smirk.
"Actually," a cold voice interrupted Schwarz's heated reply. Weiss stepped forward from the line she and her friends formed against the left wall, "I actually...agree with Qrow," she said as if swallowing something distasteful. "You have a lot of questions to answer," Weiss continued, her voice losing its initially wavering nature to take on a braver tone.
As she said this, the rest of the group trained their gazes on Mr. S, who sat still in his chair, thinking over the situation.
So he was sitting in a room with seven people. His daughter and her friends, along with Ozpin, were the people he "knew" apparently. That left two people unaccounted for.
Standing next to Ozpin, against the right wall, wearing a white and purple dress, was a displeased librarian with a riding crop. No. Really. She just carried that thing around and no one batted an eye, not even when she was wandering around the party...Moving on, Mr. S. decided to ignore her attire as he went to analyze the other unknown. Next to her, leaning on the wall in a roguish manner, was a man who apparently just did not give a fuck about dress code. He was wearing a cape for god's sake! And even while wearing that outfit he managed to make it look like he was too drunk to dress himself. Now, Mr. S wasn't usually one to pay too much attention to appearances in the first place, but the man seemed to have a talent for annoying people. His look, his hair, they way he talked, and his nonchalant attitude in the face of this disaster…whatever it was.
Man, he thought he was just soooo cool. Well he wasn't.
Mr. S exhaled lightly as he looked at his "daughter", who now stood defiantly in front of his desk.
"Now what could I possibly have to answer for?" he asked with an ironical smirk that implied he knew what the hell was going on.
"Buh, ghhh," Weiss floundered at Mr. S's playing dumb act. "Everything!" she finally settled at with a breathless, exasperated shout, "you have everything to answer for! What kind of act ar-"
"Excuse me," Schwarz interrupted strongly. "While Mr. Schnee appreciates your...excitement...to meet with him, you are still trespassing." she noted to a now surprised Mr. S. "Please leave and we'll be sure to schedule appointments for all of you," she finished in a tone that made clear that they wouldn't be getting any appointments. While she said this, her hand hovered dangerously over the visible emergency button.
"You're excused," Weiss responded, calmly fixing her dress, "and we're not leaving."
"Actually," Schwarz said in the closest thing to a sneer Mr.S had heard from her, "you wi-"
"Schwarz," Mr. S interrupted, drawing Schwarz's attention to him while he looked out to the group ahead, "why don't you get our guests some chairs."
"What?" Weiss asked indignantly.
"Of course, sir," Schwarz looked down at him, smiling while her hand hovered over the hidden emergency call button.
"No..I mean, actually get them some chairs," he clarified, drawing a confused look from Schwarz as she fought an internal battle between her trust in him and her duty
"What?" Schwarz summarized her feelings, immediately recoiling at the apparent impudence in her voice.
"Of course," Weiss chimed in, crossing her arms haughtily.
Schwarz turned her head to face Weiss with a glare, "I don't know what on Remnant-"
Mr, S didn't hear the rest of Schwarz's admonitions; for just as he heard the word "Remnant" leave her lips, he'd leaned back in his chair just enough to see the REAL centerpiece of the room. Above his head, expertly painted onto the ceiling of his office, was a giant map of…
"REMNANT".
Dark, bold letters spelled out the name of the world in stylized lettering, with each of the continents "Atlas," "Minstral, "Vacuo," and "Vale" being similarly labeled.
A series of epiphanies slammed into his mind as he gazed up at the world in a contemplative silence.
'They're basically just modified Atlas thrusters.' Jon's words rung clearly in his head.
'oh' Mr. S thought
'Remnant is a rocky planet with one natural satellite,' the words from the web entry flashed in his mind.
'Oh' he continued.
'...home to two races, Humanity and the Faunus…'
'OH' his mind began to burn with implications.
'...seemed friendly with the Faunus that kissed his daughter?'
'OH!'
'Because she's obviously such a great listener!' his own actions flashed painfully in his memory for no particular reason.
'D'OH!'
Quickly recovering, however, the final piece of the puzzle slid into place.
...Analysis of Dust Vein Decomposition Patterns In Fucking Remnant…
'OH SH-'
"Mr. Schnee," Schwarz interrupted his inner monologue, bringing his focus down from the ceiling. "Are you sure you'd like to speak with these people now?" Schwarz continued, putting emphasis on "now".
"Yes," he replied. No matter what was going on in the news, he NEEDED to find out what was going on. Now. Because he was far from being Montana or Alaska, and he definitely wasn't in Kansas.
"Ha!" Weiss said, snubbing her nose at Schwarz while the dark haired woman begrudgingly called for the chairs with raised hackles and a nervous posture.
"Just be-"
"While you're at it," Mr. S interrupted the dangerously toned statement that Schwarz directed towards Weiss, "would you mind going through my voicemails?"
Schwarz was a gem, and he appreciated her at the moment more than he'd appreciated anything in his life, but he could tell a frazzled person when he saw one. She was best off doing something other than talking to the people present.
"You want me to look through all the voicemails?" Schwarz asked incredulously.
"Of course not," Mr. S replied. "Just randomize the order and look through a few to get a feel for the environment."
"Randomising. Voicemails." The phone chimed, seemingly deciding Schwarz's next course of action.
Schwarz seemed to get the subtext of the statement and lowered her shoulders as she picked up the phone handle, pressed some buttons and pushed the phone to her ear as she read off of a transcript. Though, Mr. S noted, the task seemed to have a calming effect on the secretary, as a hint of a smile formed on her countenance at the first contact with the hard plastic of the phone.
Now, he needed to get some very key questions about this world answered...and he couldn't ask any of them. In fact, instead of asking questions, he would have to give detailed answers about the politics and behavior of Mr. Schnee while providing an adequate explanation for the apparent difference between his behavior and what Mr. Schnee's behavior would have been.
He was sure that was possible though…somehow.
Maybe if he answered in question form?
He wasn't a pessimist, but he was sure this would be the hardest game of Jeopardy ever.
Mr S. blinked as he looked over the expectant crowd. Everyone was silent, looks of confusion, anger and intense curiosity flooded the room as everyone trained an idle gaze on Mr. S. Even Qrow, looking unusually serious as he leaned back against a side wall, managed to show some reverence towards the situation, as if the mystery of the century was about to be solved in this very office. Mr. S looked back at them with a blank gaze, slowly regretting his rash decision to keep them here as they all waited for him to bust out a completely rational and sensical explanation for what was going on. Well, that wasn't happening. His mind was still burned out after accepting that the future reality was actually some alien world and he wasn't really in the best state to come up with anything convincing. Really, the only explanation he could think of was the truth, and it was just stupid.
Breathing in lightly, he prepared to grind out some half thought declaration when sweet respite came with Weiss as she cut through the awkward silence.
"Can we get on with this, father?" Weiss leaned forward to glare down at him.
The question buzzed past him as he barely acknowledged the meaning of the statement before it slipped from his mind. Really, he was thankful that someone else had taken the burden of starting the conversation, but Mr. S was still a bit distracted by the fact that this crazy body snatching adventure was actually on another fucking planet! As such, at the moment, he was more concerned with the Fermi paradox and the logistics of interstellar travel then he was with the conversation before him.
"Get on with what?" he managed to reply with a straight voice and gentle smile, concealing his lack of fucks expertly.
"You!" Weiss pointed a finger at Mr. S while she slowly intoned each word, "answering our questions!" Weiss finished as she felt her pointing finger shake with a growing rage at having asked the same, impossibly interesting, question of her father.
"Well, what questions could you possibly want answered?" Mr. S replied, trying to put on an interested smile that came off as more smug than intended. 'Yeah, this probably isn't Proxima, what with the whole tidal locking. Maybe Alpha Centauri?'
Weiss shivered with a contained wrath at his apparent nonchalance. "Well," she began with an overly calm attitude as she felt herself being undone. Her expressions and movements become looser and more exaggerated as an impassioned fury expressed itself through her. "You could start by explaining your behavior back at the ball, old man!" At this point, Weiss was a raging ball of hot fury, barely holding herself back from yelling as she let it all out. Everything. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she noted that she'd never gotten this far before, having always been shut down, or slapped or threatened before she'd reached this point, but she was free now. She'd already been disowned and had nothing else to lose, nothing else he could take from her. Best of all her father was stupid enough to let everyone stay, to let himself be cornered in public like this! Finally, after all these years, like a dream come true, she would be leaving this poisonous relationship, and she would be leaving with her head held high, her friends by her side, and most importantly...getting some answers!
So why was she so angry?
Weiss leaned intently forward as Mr. S moved to speak, hating that she was so captivated by his words and beginning to listen to that muted voice in the back of her head that told her to calm down as she felt Blake move to stand beside her, allowing her to relax just a bit.
"Well, whatever would I have to explain myself for?" Mr. S replied as if this conversation was the last thing on his mind.
"Why did you say that back at the ball!?" Weiss exploded once more, on the brink of shouting as Mr. S Idly thought about paying more attention and care to his responses before resolving to muscle through this, he was bound to mess up, best not to overthink it.
"Because it was funny," Mr. S replied simply with a forlorn smile.
"You. You. You. You." Weiss stuttered, rapidly blinking as she struggled to come up with more words that could express her fury.
"Well what was I supposed to say?" he replied defensively as he felt his mind begin to wake once more and notice the rest of the people in the room who watched, as Yang in particular looked ready for a fist fight and Ruby weakly hooked her arm through Yang's in a worried attempt to hold her back.
"You were supposed to say that you didn't approve of our relationship!" Weiss replied with the obvious answer, almost begging for the world to make sense again.
"Well, why wouldn't I approve of your relationship?" Mr. S asked.
"BECAUSE SHE'S A FAUNUS!" Weiss exploded, stretching her arms up as she stood on her tiptoes to point vigorously at Blake's cat-ears.
Blake blushed as she flattened her ears and looked bashfully at the floor. Blake wondered if she should be offended at her girlfriends words.
'No," Blake thought, 'she's not like that.'
Mr. S, meanwhile was taken aback, visibly reacting to Weiss's words for the first time in the conversation as his eyes widened a hair and he moved to lean back against his office chair. There was a noticeable lull in the conversation as everyone seemed intrigued by "Mr. Schnee's" reaction, hooked onto his lips as they all eagerly awaited his next words. Weiss had said it straight, there was nowhere for him to deflect the conversation to. Mr. S himself was shaken from his reverie as it all hit him like a train, bringing him fully back into the conversation, the here and now, as "Remnant" left his musings and yet another stream of epiphanies streamed into place. Despite this being the third time that night that he was having such an experience, the power of the moment was enough to overwhelm him once more, to wipe away his thoughts as a singular conclusion formed in his mind, and, like a deer staring into the headlights of truth, there was nothing he did other than look back with wide eyes and reflect what shone onto him.
Mr. S paused for just an instant to consider his words, the whole room going still as even Qrow moved from his relaxed position against the wall to look fully upon the unfolding scene.
"You know," Mr. S paused with a slightly shocked tone, "Weiss," he brought his hands together, touching them to his lips as he looked down at his desk top in concern, "that's kind of racist."
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NTTN
Chapter 3
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
- Messages
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Chapter 3
I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
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In a completely unexpected turn of events, Weiss freaked out.
"Mother fu-!" Weiss's yell was cut short as a monochrome blur fell over her form, the rest of the room relaxing as Weiss was held back from making a popular mistake.
Meanwhile, the first verse of the "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" theme song started playing in Mr. S's head.
Mr. S pressed back against his chair as Blake dragged away a struggling Weiss in a full nelson hold. Really, he didn't know what to be more surprised at, the reaction itself or that the heiress had the kung-fu moves to accompany it. Really, she had the foot work down and everything. The sudden and awkward silence that now weighed down on the room gave him some time to breath, though.
"Let go of me, Blake!" Weiss shouted for the third time as she struggled against the silent, though worried looking, faunus that held her.
Well, it was quiet if you ignored the violently angry heiress in the middle of the room, which everyone seemed to do in favor of giving Mr. S a dumbfounded look of...unbelief? Confusion? Drunkenness?
"Whasstha-" Qrow managed to slur out as he leaned against a near wall for support, looking suspiciously into his flask as he confirmed that last hypothesis.
As for the rest of the group, Mr. S was sure that this was the first time those facial expressions had been expressed anywhere, ever. Even Yang paused, ignoring the fact that Ruby was no longer holding her back as they both looked at the surreal scene unfolding before them.
"Wha-What do you mean 'That's racist'!?" Weiss said, managing to make the air quotes on either side of her scowling face despite her Blake-encumbered form.
"Well, it just seemed like denying your dating someone on the basis of their race-" Mr. S began to explain as if he'd just been caught without his homework.
"Will you just stop with this crazy talk!?" Weiss interrupted, exploding once more and feeling Blake tighten her arms around her as she gesticulated forward at Mr. S.
"Well, it might be hard to face your own shortcomings, but acknowledging that you have such a mindset is the first step to fixing it, Weiss." Mr. S said with a genuinely worried tone, partially at the views Weiss seemed to hold and partially at the hope that he said her name right.
"Wh-Wha-Whaahat?" Weiss chuckled out, a mad smile forming on her countenance as she leaned forward in the grip that still held her, slack as she felt all strength leave her at the declaration. "You're calling me racist?" Weiss said, weakly pointing towards herself as she struggled not to laugh.
"I'm not trying to shame you with the label," Mr. S said with an understanding tone, forgetting that he was talking to what was supposed to be his daughter. "But acknowledging the fact is the best way for us to move forward," he finished, crossing his arms over his lap as he locked gazes with Weiss.
"What are you talking about?" Weiss said with a befuddled expression, feeling more and more like she was the one who had no idea what was going on. How was he able to say such things with such confidence!? "I'm not the racist! You're the racist!" Weiss said simply, as if she had to work to keep the facts from changing.
"Am I, though?" Mr. S said in a curiously skeptical fashion.
"Yes!" Weiss yelled back, managing to pull away from Blake's grip and stumble forward several steps as Schwarz once again pulled away from the voice mails to watch Weiss carefully. "What could possibly have caused you to think any differently!?" Weiss asked, "I'm the one dating her!" she continued, gesturing back to a nervous looking Blake. "You're the one who was supposed to freak out here!" She finished, pointing back at Mr. S, using simple and concrete language as if anything else would cause the reality around her to be even more nonsensical than it was.
"So...you're only dating her to get back at me?" Mr. S, asked with a disappointed look in his eyes.
"What? No!" Weiss said defensively, quickly switching back to an unbalanced anger as she tried to take back control of the conversation. "Don't flatter yourself," she continued, calmer as as straightened out her skirt and stepped back into an artificially stiff posture, "I'm dating her because I like her. I just revealed that fact so you'd finally get off my back."
"So, you're only dating her to get me to leave you alone?" Mr. S asked with genuine curiosity, desperately trying to find out what was going on.
"No!" Weiss floundered, stretching her arms down either side of her body as her hands bent out at the wrist and balled themselves into fists.
"You shouldn't use your relationship as a means to an end, Weiss," Mr. S, said, feeling the need to keep talking and attempting to draw out some sage-like advice from his cluelessness.
"What are you doing?" Weiss almost fell to her knees. Her well trained sense of propriety recoiling at such a drastic loss of form. Her instincts for such things always seemed to fail when it came to talking with her father, never to this extent however.
"I'm just concerned about this unhealthy mindset you're carrying," Mr. S replied in as honest a statement as he could muster at the moment.
"You're the racist!" Weiss replied simply, looking slightly hopeless at the occasion.
"You know, it doesn't seem that way," Mr. S denied calmly, leaning back in his chair and trying to retain his cool as the heavy accusations and public argument wore away at him.
"Actually, you are," a new voice interrupted, drawing his attention to Blake as she stepped forward with a large posture and a cool glare; her ears were prominent for the first time, held fully high in the air. "I don't know what it is that you're trying to accomplish," Blake said with a husky, almost bored, tone that didn't fail to show her youth, "but Weiss is the most kindhearted and caring person I've ever met," she continued past the confused, and almost hurt, looks that Ruby sent her way, "and I won't stand here and let you accuse her of anything. If you want to find something to be concerned about, look at the hiring practices you've instituted that force even the most qualified faunus to struggle for respectable jobs. If you want something to fix, look at the faunus children that your foremen target, putting them to work in the harshest mines for the slightest scraps of food," Blake continued, her fists balling up in a cold rage. "If you really want to signal your moral worries, maybe you should start by giving all of your workers access to clean drinking water?" Blake said, her voice shaking as her eyes shifted into vertical slits that focused on Mr. S's impassive expression, "just don't think that playing these games with us is doing anything worthwhile."
Schwarz moved forward in a defensive posture, hating how she couldn't call for security now until Mr. S ordered it. 'How long are we going to indulge this girl?' she thought.
'Oh,' Mr. S thought, fully appreciating now just how mind burning a crash course in a completely new world's history could be as the full implications of Blake's speech hit him. 'So, basically, I'm Hitler, and my son just kissed a gay jew...on live television.'
He sat back in his chair, absorbing the information as he glared out impassively at the silent crowd of people in his office, not bothering to come up with something to say. What could he say? 'Oh, wait. Now that I think about it, I don't approve of your relationship after all?' He mentally shook his head at his situation, pausing a long moment as he kept an inexpressive face, trying to center himself as Blake's declarations cascaded their way throughout his mind and his gut fell out from under him; the girl's speech affecting him more than he knew it logically should have as the suddenly personal nature of the evils he'd ignored on Earth buried themselves into his heart, hurting as if someone had spritzed acid into his blood.
"Blake, for her part, was valiantly trying not to break down. She didn't regret what she'd said, but the severe silence that now centered around her didn't do much to comfort the normally shy and bookish girl as she stood unsteadily, tunnel vision focused on the vicious glare Mr. Schnee sent her way, the world drowned out in the oppressively claustrophobic sounds of her heartbeat thundering in her ears. Would she be thrown out? A sinister voice sounded in her ever darkening thoughts. Jailed? Executed? She was in Atlas after all. Ever more horrifying scenarios fell upon her like an avalanche, paranoid thoughts running rampant as she tensed, her old survival instinct rising back up as her head twitched towards the door, she had to run, she couldn't let them know she was thinking of running. She-.
She breathed out in silent relief as Weiss's small, cold hand intertwined with her own, drawing her out of her thoughts as the world seemed to open back up and her heart slowed. 'No. Ozpin is here and Weiss herself said everything would be fine. We'll be fine,' she thought, hoping desperately that she wasn't fooling herself as Mr. Schnee moved to speak and another shard of fear tore through her heart. She gripped Weiss's hand painfully, as if anchoring herself still, and held her breath, awaiting her fate.
"Okay, fair enough. I'm the bad guy," Mr. S admitted lightly, gesturing to himself with a tone somewhere in between seriousness and casual acceptance.
Weiss's patterned response fell dead before it left her lips, instead just giving a disappointed look with a touch of hopeless despair thrown in. Schwarz didn't look any better, looking down at Mr. S as if he'd just kicked a puppy.
A cold second passed, and then another, and another and another and another and another.
Looking around the room, It seemed as if everyone was just getting tired with Mr. S and his surprises at this point. The librarian lady was scowling, as always. The drunkard seemed to be in a transcendent state between passing out, making annoying quips and hangover. Team RWBY froze in a collective state of shock, Schwarz not doing much better and, through it all, Ozpin stood nonchalantly in his corner of the room, sipping from his mug and looking at Mr. S as if this were some big joke that they were all in on.
"Will you still be needing those chairs?" Mr. S asked, wondering if this meant they would all leave now as he attempted to break "awkward silence number thirteen" of the day.
"What is wrong with you?" Weiss asked.
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I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
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In a completely unexpected turn of events, Weiss freaked out.
"Mother fu-!" Weiss's yell was cut short as a monochrome blur fell over her form, the rest of the room relaxing as Weiss was held back from making a popular mistake.
Meanwhile, the first verse of the "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" theme song started playing in Mr. S's head.
Mr. S pressed back against his chair as Blake dragged away a struggling Weiss in a full nelson hold. Really, he didn't know what to be more surprised at, the reaction itself or that the heiress had the kung-fu moves to accompany it. Really, she had the foot work down and everything. The sudden and awkward silence that now weighed down on the room gave him some time to breath, though.
"Let go of me, Blake!" Weiss shouted for the third time as she struggled against the silent, though worried looking, faunus that held her.
Well, it was quiet if you ignored the violently angry heiress in the middle of the room, which everyone seemed to do in favor of giving Mr. S a dumbfounded look of...unbelief? Confusion? Drunkenness?
"Whasstha-" Qrow managed to slur out as he leaned against a near wall for support, looking suspiciously into his flask as he confirmed that last hypothesis.
As for the rest of the group, Mr. S was sure that this was the first time those facial expressions had been expressed anywhere, ever. Even Yang paused, ignoring the fact that Ruby was no longer holding her back as they both looked at the surreal scene unfolding before them.
"Wha-What do you mean 'That's racist'!?" Weiss said, managing to make the air quotes on either side of her scowling face despite her Blake-encumbered form.
"Well, it just seemed like denying your dating someone on the basis of their race-" Mr. S began to explain as if he'd just been caught without his homework.
"Will you just stop with this crazy talk!?" Weiss interrupted, exploding once more and feeling Blake tighten her arms around her as she gesticulated forward at Mr. S.
"Well, it might be hard to face your own shortcomings, but acknowledging that you have such a mindset is the first step to fixing it, Weiss." Mr. S said with a genuinely worried tone, partially at the views Weiss seemed to hold and partially at the hope that he said her name right.
"Wh-Wha-Whaahat?" Weiss chuckled out, a mad smile forming on her countenance as she leaned forward in the grip that still held her, slack as she felt all strength leave her at the declaration. "You're calling me racist?" Weiss said, weakly pointing towards herself as she struggled not to laugh.
"I'm not trying to shame you with the label," Mr. S said with an understanding tone, forgetting that he was talking to what was supposed to be his daughter. "But acknowledging the fact is the best way for us to move forward," he finished, crossing his arms over his lap as he locked gazes with Weiss.
"What are you talking about?" Weiss said with a befuddled expression, feeling more and more like she was the one who had no idea what was going on. How was he able to say such things with such confidence!? "I'm not the racist! You're the racist!" Weiss said simply, as if she had to work to keep the facts from changing.
"Am I, though?" Mr. S said in a curiously skeptical fashion.
"Yes!" Weiss yelled back, managing to pull away from Blake's grip and stumble forward several steps as Schwarz once again pulled away from the voice mails to watch Weiss carefully. "What could possibly have caused you to think any differently!?" Weiss asked, "I'm the one dating her!" she continued, gesturing back to a nervous looking Blake. "You're the one who was supposed to freak out here!" She finished, pointing back at Mr. S, using simple and concrete language as if anything else would cause the reality around her to be even more nonsensical than it was.
"So...you're only dating her to get back at me?" Mr. S, asked with a disappointed look in his eyes.
"What? No!" Weiss said defensively, quickly switching back to an unbalanced anger as she tried to take back control of the conversation. "Don't flatter yourself," she continued, calmer as as straightened out her skirt and stepped back into an artificially stiff posture, "I'm dating her because I like her. I just revealed that fact so you'd finally get off my back."
"So, you're only dating her to get me to leave you alone?" Mr. S asked with genuine curiosity, desperately trying to find out what was going on.
"No!" Weiss floundered, stretching her arms down either side of her body as her hands bent out at the wrist and balled themselves into fists.
"You shouldn't use your relationship as a means to an end, Weiss," Mr. S, said, feeling the need to keep talking and attempting to draw out some sage-like advice from his cluelessness.
"What are you doing?" Weiss almost fell to her knees. Her well trained sense of propriety recoiling at such a drastic loss of form. Her instincts for such things always seemed to fail when it came to talking with her father, never to this extent however.
"I'm just concerned about this unhealthy mindset you're carrying," Mr. S replied in as honest a statement as he could muster at the moment.
"You're the racist!" Weiss replied simply, looking slightly hopeless at the occasion.
"You know, it doesn't seem that way," Mr. S denied calmly, leaning back in his chair and trying to retain his cool as the heavy accusations and public argument wore away at him.
"Actually, you are," a new voice interrupted, drawing his attention to Blake as she stepped forward with a large posture and a cool glare; her ears were prominent for the first time, held fully high in the air. "I don't know what it is that you're trying to accomplish," Blake said with a husky, almost bored, tone that didn't fail to show her youth, "but Weiss is the most kindhearted and caring person I've ever met," she continued past the confused, and almost hurt, looks that Ruby sent her way, "and I won't stand here and let you accuse her of anything. If you want to find something to be concerned about, look at the hiring practices you've instituted that force even the most qualified faunus to struggle for respectable jobs. If you want something to fix, look at the faunus children that your foremen target, putting them to work in the harshest mines for the slightest scraps of food," Blake continued, her fists balling up in a cold rage. "If you really want to signal your moral worries, maybe you should start by giving all of your workers access to clean drinking water?" Blake said, her voice shaking as her eyes shifted into vertical slits that focused on Mr. S's impassive expression, "just don't think that playing these games with us is doing anything worthwhile."
Schwarz moved forward in a defensive posture, hating how she couldn't call for security now until Mr. S ordered it. 'How long are we going to indulge this girl?' she thought.
'Oh,' Mr. S thought, fully appreciating now just how mind burning a crash course in a completely new world's history could be as the full implications of Blake's speech hit him. 'So, basically, I'm Hitler, and my son just kissed a gay jew...on live television.'
He sat back in his chair, absorbing the information as he glared out impassively at the silent crowd of people in his office, not bothering to come up with something to say. What could he say? 'Oh, wait. Now that I think about it, I don't approve of your relationship after all?' He mentally shook his head at his situation, pausing a long moment as he kept an inexpressive face, trying to center himself as Blake's declarations cascaded their way throughout his mind and his gut fell out from under him; the girl's speech affecting him more than he knew it logically should have as the suddenly personal nature of the evils he'd ignored on Earth buried themselves into his heart, hurting as if someone had spritzed acid into his blood.
"Blake, for her part, was valiantly trying not to break down. She didn't regret what she'd said, but the severe silence that now centered around her didn't do much to comfort the normally shy and bookish girl as she stood unsteadily, tunnel vision focused on the vicious glare Mr. Schnee sent her way, the world drowned out in the oppressively claustrophobic sounds of her heartbeat thundering in her ears. Would she be thrown out? A sinister voice sounded in her ever darkening thoughts. Jailed? Executed? She was in Atlas after all. Ever more horrifying scenarios fell upon her like an avalanche, paranoid thoughts running rampant as she tensed, her old survival instinct rising back up as her head twitched towards the door, she had to run, she couldn't let them know she was thinking of running. She-.
She breathed out in silent relief as Weiss's small, cold hand intertwined with her own, drawing her out of her thoughts as the world seemed to open back up and her heart slowed. 'No. Ozpin is here and Weiss herself said everything would be fine. We'll be fine,' she thought, hoping desperately that she wasn't fooling herself as Mr. Schnee moved to speak and another shard of fear tore through her heart. She gripped Weiss's hand painfully, as if anchoring herself still, and held her breath, awaiting her fate.
"Okay, fair enough. I'm the bad guy," Mr. S admitted lightly, gesturing to himself with a tone somewhere in between seriousness and casual acceptance.
Weiss's patterned response fell dead before it left her lips, instead just giving a disappointed look with a touch of hopeless despair thrown in. Schwarz didn't look any better, looking down at Mr. S as if he'd just kicked a puppy.
A cold second passed, and then another, and another and another and another and another.
Looking around the room, It seemed as if everyone was just getting tired with Mr. S and his surprises at this point. The librarian lady was scowling, as always. The drunkard seemed to be in a transcendent state between passing out, making annoying quips and hangover. Team RWBY froze in a collective state of shock, Schwarz not doing much better and, through it all, Ozpin stood nonchalantly in his corner of the room, sipping from his mug and looking at Mr. S as if this were some big joke that they were all in on.
"Will you still be needing those chairs?" Mr. S asked, wondering if this meant they would all leave now as he attempted to break "awkward silence number thirteen" of the day.
"What is wrong with you?" Weiss asked.
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NTTN
Chapter 4
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
- Messages
- 9
- Likes received
- 236
Chapter 4
I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
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"What is wrong with you?" Weiss asked.
Mr. S leaned back, sighing as he did so.
In times of great stress, Mr. S often found it helpful to revert back to his younger, more naive, though fundamentally wiser, self for guidance. Mentally, he traveled back in time to when summer was good, love was easy, and the world made sense; searching in those nostalgic, rose-colored times for a solution. Meditating on his youth for a moment, the answer quickly became clear to Mr. S, shocking him with it's simplicity: It was time to stop this farce, there would be no more half-truth's, no more sliding past the issue, no more glancing questions away; from now on, there would just be simple, straight up, lies. His game plan now was to see the world for what it was and proclaim it to be something else.
It was thus that Mr. S answered, "What are you talking about? I'm as alright as ever."
"I don't care about you, I just want to know what you're trying to do!" Weiss yelled, supporting herself on the desk with her arms as she glared down at Mr. Schnee.
"I'm not sure what you mean…" Mr. S said with a cocked eyebrow as he circled one hand before him in a leading gesture, deciding it was best for the moment to say as little as he could get away with.
Weiss blinked rapidly, slowly leaning back away with stiff, robotic movements as she looked on in disbelief. The faux-enlightened act she could buy, even as just an act, but her father was nothing other than brutally direct. He HAD to give it up now that they'd all caught on...right? Eventually?
"What is wrong with you?" Weiss repeated, deciding that no other statement would ever fit the situation better than that one.
"I'm not sure what you mean," Mr. S responded a tad more aggressively, his stoic mask giving way under the pressure as he grit his teeth and leaned forward in his chair for the first time. Really, if the universe was going to glitch out his metaphorical save file, plop him into future, space Hitler's body without so much as a 24 hour notice and then expect him to play along, then it had another thing coming. Fuck the rules, he was breaking decorum like he was Dolph Lundgren. "Really," he continued with a slight scowl and a more controlled tone, "I think you'd find my behavior more to your liking if a group of people hadn't burst into my office uninvited."
"Nobody's bursting into your office!" Weiss shouted back just as the office doors burst inward, slamming against the walls with a heavy clang.
"Father, I heard the news," Winter strode into the office, easily navigating the crowded room despite her stiff posture and long strides, eventually coming to a stand before the desk while giving a curious, sideways glance at the harried looking Weiss.
"And it would also be great if people stopped interrup-"
"Nobody's interrupting you, either!" Weiss continued, fully in verbal combat mode.
"See. That jus-" Mr. S started.
"TSHHHH!" a blue hologram appeared before him, the static fading to reveal the hardened face of a tired looking man with a nice suit and a five o-clock shadow. "Mr. Schnee," the man greeted with a slight nod as he looked out with what seemed to be a permanent glare attached to his face.
Mr. S. barely kept himself from jumping back at the sight. Of course, he'd seen holograms numerous times since he arrived here, but all of them had been banners and signs and such, things you saw at a distance; somehow, that made it easier to cope with, if they were at a distance, you didn't really have a visceral reaction to their existence; thus, he might be forgiven for looking surprised when holograms jumped into his face like he was their only hope.
Taking a moment to compose himself, he replied.
"Ah, General Ironwood, Winter," Mr. S said with a jovial tone, giving a polite nod to the respective figures, thanking god for name tags, and barely keeping himself from saying "Ms. Schnee," to what was apparently his daughter. "Any reason you're both visiting me?" Mr. S asked, taking note of their matching uniforms as he worked to keep his nerves from acting up as the room seemed to be filling up with imposing figures. He had to admit, though, their interruption was just what he needed, a nice respite of calm waters in a chaotic ocean of yelling teenage girls.
"I have to ask what you were thinking-! Really? This is unlike you-! The council has been hounding me for the past-! The board's extremely worried at the momen-!" They both sprung into their respective diatribes without warning, blasting Mr. S with enough bad news to fill a New York back alley.
Their overlapping complaints were silenced quickly as Mr. S raised a hand, leaning back in his chair as if absorbing the information. Really, though, it just felt nice to quiet people with a gesture. "Ok, one at a time," he said, taking a breath, "what is going on?" he asked, directing the question to anyone and everyone as he worked to keep the defeated tone from his voice.
"Uh, sir?" Schwarz interjected, pulling the phone away from her head and placing it down. "I think I've looked at enough voicemails: people seem to be upset with you." She said.
"That's an understatement," Qrow's gravelly voice added from the sidelines.
Ok, the puzzle pieces were in place now, all the information needed to find out what the hell was going on. Sure, the pieces were vague, small and oftentimes incomplete, but he could sense that understanding was just a hair's breadth away.
Of course, he was still in a "fuck you, universe!" mood at the moment, and putting effort into anything at the moment sounded about as fun as doing a million piece puzzle after flunking his SAT. So, as it turned out, he didn't do the puzzle work, instead cutting to the heart of the matter with a simple question.
"So...why is everyone so upset, exactly?" he asked, leaning an arm across his desk and tapping his fingers onto the wooden surface.
"Well...uh...What?" Winter asked, leaning forward slightly as she stumbled over her words.
"Get used to it." Weiss deadpanned.
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"So...to clarify. You're mad at me because I don't like faunus." He said, slowly waving his arm to gesture at the wall team RWBY lined up against.
"Yes," the droning chorus came from the sisters of the team as Weiss and Blake elected to stay silent and stare at opposite walls.
"And everyone else is mad at me because Weiss kissed Blake and I was ok with it." Mr. S continued at a slower pace, turning his chair to face Winter and the Hologram of General Ironwood.
"Most everyone of relevance to the issue, yes," Winter answered back with a curt nod, ignoring the glares and pleading looks that Blake and Weiss sent her way. Ironwood leaned over his desk, rubbing his temples as the hologram looked straight down at the mahogany table top.
"So, therefore-"
"Yes! Yes! The answer is yes!" Weiss interrupted with a yell. "Now can you please just call my relationship a disgrace on live television so we can all get out of here?" she said with a strained voice.
Mr. S, despite the evening he was having, was still awestruck by the surreal nature of that statement as he got kicked back to stage two of grief. Was any of this real? Was this one of those science experiments where they test to see if you'd kill someone because some guy in a lab coat told you to? Still riding the trailing edge of his indignation, Mr. S closed his eyes with a sigh as he tilted his neck down and shook his head.
"I can't believe this," he said with an amazed tone. Really? He gets launched across the very fabric of space and time into a futuristic, alien planet just so he could say racist things on tv? Of all the alternate realities to end up in, he gets sent to the Starfleet Confederacy?
Well, if watching Black Mirror had taught him anything, it was to say no to this metaphorical pig.
Opening his eyes, he glared out into the room as he made a decision.
"No," he said with a tone of conviction.
"What do you mean 'no'" Weiss said with a strained voice.
"No," Mr. S responded evenly once more, drawing all the strength that he could from all those D.A.R.E ads embedded into his memory.
"Just call the news and tell them you don't approve!" Weiss said, growing desperate.
"No." Mr. S repeated.
"Really? You hate me that much?" Weiss seethed, "you'd be willing to risk all of this just to keep me trapped here?" she said, raising her arms up to gesture at the general surroundings, "just to keep me tied to the bame you've worked so hard to ruin?"
"And what would I be risking, exactly?" Mr. S responded in a tone that he hoped came off as sarcastic.
"Actually, father. If I may interject," Winter interrupted, "you should consider the severely negative impact this could have on the company," she said keeping her voice even.
'Ahh, shit. I've still gotta stay in character,' Mr. S thought as he remembered that he still had a part to play, even if he didn't know what that part was supposed to be…
"Well, obviously, I won't be risking much," Mr. S replied, fully committed to listening to his elementary school self's wisdom.
"What do you mean?" Weiss asked, hunched over with a sneer.
"Huhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Mr S sighed a deep and solemn sigh, making very clear the depths of his disappointment at being surrounded by feeble-minded plebs who couldn't see the obvious. Drawing his sigh out for as long as he could, he frantically thought of reasons why he was right.
'Come on, come on, brain give me something...Fuck, fuck, fuck, what was I thinking! I don't know shit! I'm such an idiot, acting like I knew what I was talking about. Fuck, how am I supposed to come up with anything when the only thing I know is that this place sells dust. And I don't even know what that i- actually, wait a minute…' he thought, almost smiling giddily as a desperate gamble appeared before him.
"What?" Weiss asked impatiently.
"Schwarz, how are stocks?" He asked with an overconfident tone, not bothering to face his secretary as he spoke.
Schwarz turned to look out the glass wall, glancing at the giant screen on the factory wall, taking in the green line as it snaked its way along a graph, before looking back at Mr. S. "Uhh...they're stable, sir."
"See?" He said as if that proved everything. "We sell dust people," he continued as if he knew exactly what that entailed besides a vague Saudi Arabia corollary he'd made in his mind. "We could start funding terrorist groups and even then I'm sure people would hesitate to go green," he said, accidentally referencing the Schnee corp. competitor, Green co., a dust distributing company that Mr. Schnee had been instrumental in counter programming to near oblivion.
"So stop being monday night-" Mr. S paused.
'Wait,' Mr. S thought. 'I can't say "Monday night quarterback," they might not play football here!' he thought as he felt his plan slip out from underneath him.
"Uh…" Mr. S snapped his fingers in consternation. "Uh, Schwarz, what's that saying with the sports and the hindsight," he asked, hoping to seem confused enough that nobody here would ask what "Monday" was.
"Being a Monday night team captain, sir," Schwarz answered nonchalantly.
"Yeah, that," Mr. S answered, wondering if they had Garfield comic strips too.
Thankfully for Mr. S, this was one of those moments where being an alien visitor could be confused for being an out of touch rich person, as noted by the several face palms that went through the room.
"Wait, you don't understand," Ironwood said, rising from his chair as the hologram rose up to look Mr. S in the face.
"What?" Mr. S asked, his heart beating into his esophagus as he hoped he didn't fuck up his reasoning too badly.
For those of you that are getting hopeful thoughts, let us all acknowledge that Mr. S's characterization of the situation, as him being Hitler and his son kissing a gay jew, is a bit off. It would be more appropriate to describe the situation as him being Hitler, and his son kissing a gay jew who happened to be Trotsky.
"Blake is-" Ironwood began.
"Breaking news!" a blaring television interrupted, turning all heads to the first wall television as Qrow stood fiddling with its controls, himself staring up at the menacing portrait of Blake that appeared on the tv screen. "We are just getting this," the reported announced, almost falling off of her desk with giddy excitement as she pressed a finger tightly against her earpiece. "BLAKE BELLADONNA had been CONFIRMED to be a former, and possibly current, member of the WHITE FANG TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," she said, almost pounding the desk as her sweat glistened in the camera lights. "So far, Mr. Schnee has declined to respond to any queries about the matter-" she continued as Schwarz took on a guilty look and an areal shot of Schnee manor appeared in the corner of the screen.
"Follow channel 2 faction news-" the reporter began to say before her voice, along with the approaching noise of helicopter rotors, was quickly downed out by a beating cacophony that came from every side of the office. The dancing jig of panic, heard even through the ceiling, filled the room as Mr. S sat frozen in his chair, trying not to be the first one to move in a room filled with shocked faces.
Faintly, just faintly, the chaotic, disjointed song of "SELL! SELL! SELL!" could be heard through the office walls, just in time for the green-tinted, snow-white tiles of the room to turn a magenta red as Mr. S guessed what that entailed for the TV Screen behind him.
Turning his chair around just as everyone recovered enough of their senses to follow his gaze, Mr. S. looked on as the large screen presented a precipitously falling red line on an expanding graph, quickly showing the company's stocks dipping below the bottom of the screen as Mr. S felt himself pressed back into his chair by the action, never fully appreciating before how solid stocks could feel when they sucker punched you in the gut.
The room fell maddeningly silent as the tv fell into the background and the panicking investors in the surrounding rooms added pressure and confusion with their overlapping voices. The night crew in factory room below didn't seem to be doing much better, crowding around the tv screen as they stared up at the numbers in horror.
"Now, that might be a problem," Mr. S admitted, fully smacked out of his "angry at the universe" phase by the Scrooge McDuck levels of money that was apparently going down the drain.
"MIGHT!?" Weiss responded with a shrill, growling voice.
"MIGHT!?" she said again, moving to stand before the glass wall before gesturing at the falling stock prices. "How could this be anything other than a complete nightmare?" Weiss asked, her form tinted a hellish red by the light, fitting well with the "avatar of rage" look she seemed to be rocking.
"Well, I would like to note that all is not as it seems with that graph," Mr. S answered while a sensible part of him, buried deep inside his psyche, screamed at him to shut up.
"What could possibly be misleading about this!? The Line. Is Going. Down." Weiss enunciated.
"Well...the y axis doesn't start at zero, for one," Mr. S answered softly.
It was an instant after this utterance that Mr. S realized. Elementary-schoolers are idiots.
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I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can help improve the quality of the story and want to decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
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"What is wrong with you?" Weiss asked.
Mr. S leaned back, sighing as he did so.
In times of great stress, Mr. S often found it helpful to revert back to his younger, more naive, though fundamentally wiser, self for guidance. Mentally, he traveled back in time to when summer was good, love was easy, and the world made sense; searching in those nostalgic, rose-colored times for a solution. Meditating on his youth for a moment, the answer quickly became clear to Mr. S, shocking him with it's simplicity: It was time to stop this farce, there would be no more half-truth's, no more sliding past the issue, no more glancing questions away; from now on, there would just be simple, straight up, lies. His game plan now was to see the world for what it was and proclaim it to be something else.
It was thus that Mr. S answered, "What are you talking about? I'm as alright as ever."
"I don't care about you, I just want to know what you're trying to do!" Weiss yelled, supporting herself on the desk with her arms as she glared down at Mr. Schnee.
"I'm not sure what you mean…" Mr. S said with a cocked eyebrow as he circled one hand before him in a leading gesture, deciding it was best for the moment to say as little as he could get away with.
Weiss blinked rapidly, slowly leaning back away with stiff, robotic movements as she looked on in disbelief. The faux-enlightened act she could buy, even as just an act, but her father was nothing other than brutally direct. He HAD to give it up now that they'd all caught on...right? Eventually?
"What is wrong with you?" Weiss repeated, deciding that no other statement would ever fit the situation better than that one.
"I'm not sure what you mean," Mr. S responded a tad more aggressively, his stoic mask giving way under the pressure as he grit his teeth and leaned forward in his chair for the first time. Really, if the universe was going to glitch out his metaphorical save file, plop him into future, space Hitler's body without so much as a 24 hour notice and then expect him to play along, then it had another thing coming. Fuck the rules, he was breaking decorum like he was Dolph Lundgren. "Really," he continued with a slight scowl and a more controlled tone, "I think you'd find my behavior more to your liking if a group of people hadn't burst into my office uninvited."
"Nobody's bursting into your office!" Weiss shouted back just as the office doors burst inward, slamming against the walls with a heavy clang.
"Father, I heard the news," Winter strode into the office, easily navigating the crowded room despite her stiff posture and long strides, eventually coming to a stand before the desk while giving a curious, sideways glance at the harried looking Weiss.
"And it would also be great if people stopped interrup-"
"Nobody's interrupting you, either!" Weiss continued, fully in verbal combat mode.
"See. That jus-" Mr. S started.
"TSHHHH!" a blue hologram appeared before him, the static fading to reveal the hardened face of a tired looking man with a nice suit and a five o-clock shadow. "Mr. Schnee," the man greeted with a slight nod as he looked out with what seemed to be a permanent glare attached to his face.
Mr. S. barely kept himself from jumping back at the sight. Of course, he'd seen holograms numerous times since he arrived here, but all of them had been banners and signs and such, things you saw at a distance; somehow, that made it easier to cope with, if they were at a distance, you didn't really have a visceral reaction to their existence; thus, he might be forgiven for looking surprised when holograms jumped into his face like he was their only hope.
Taking a moment to compose himself, he replied.
"Ah, General Ironwood, Winter," Mr. S said with a jovial tone, giving a polite nod to the respective figures, thanking god for name tags, and barely keeping himself from saying "Ms. Schnee," to what was apparently his daughter. "Any reason you're both visiting me?" Mr. S asked, taking note of their matching uniforms as he worked to keep his nerves from acting up as the room seemed to be filling up with imposing figures. He had to admit, though, their interruption was just what he needed, a nice respite of calm waters in a chaotic ocean of yelling teenage girls.
"I have to ask what you were thinking-! Really? This is unlike you-! The council has been hounding me for the past-! The board's extremely worried at the momen-!" They both sprung into their respective diatribes without warning, blasting Mr. S with enough bad news to fill a New York back alley.
Their overlapping complaints were silenced quickly as Mr. S raised a hand, leaning back in his chair as if absorbing the information. Really, though, it just felt nice to quiet people with a gesture. "Ok, one at a time," he said, taking a breath, "what is going on?" he asked, directing the question to anyone and everyone as he worked to keep the defeated tone from his voice.
"Uh, sir?" Schwarz interjected, pulling the phone away from her head and placing it down. "I think I've looked at enough voicemails: people seem to be upset with you." She said.
"That's an understatement," Qrow's gravelly voice added from the sidelines.
Ok, the puzzle pieces were in place now, all the information needed to find out what the hell was going on. Sure, the pieces were vague, small and oftentimes incomplete, but he could sense that understanding was just a hair's breadth away.
Of course, he was still in a "fuck you, universe!" mood at the moment, and putting effort into anything at the moment sounded about as fun as doing a million piece puzzle after flunking his SAT. So, as it turned out, he didn't do the puzzle work, instead cutting to the heart of the matter with a simple question.
"So...why is everyone so upset, exactly?" he asked, leaning an arm across his desk and tapping his fingers onto the wooden surface.
"Well...uh...What?" Winter asked, leaning forward slightly as she stumbled over her words.
"Get used to it." Weiss deadpanned.
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"So...to clarify. You're mad at me because I don't like faunus." He said, slowly waving his arm to gesture at the wall team RWBY lined up against.
"Yes," the droning chorus came from the sisters of the team as Weiss and Blake elected to stay silent and stare at opposite walls.
"And everyone else is mad at me because Weiss kissed Blake and I was ok with it." Mr. S continued at a slower pace, turning his chair to face Winter and the Hologram of General Ironwood.
"Most everyone of relevance to the issue, yes," Winter answered back with a curt nod, ignoring the glares and pleading looks that Blake and Weiss sent her way. Ironwood leaned over his desk, rubbing his temples as the hologram looked straight down at the mahogany table top.
"So, therefore-"
"Yes! Yes! The answer is yes!" Weiss interrupted with a yell. "Now can you please just call my relationship a disgrace on live television so we can all get out of here?" she said with a strained voice.
Mr. S, despite the evening he was having, was still awestruck by the surreal nature of that statement as he got kicked back to stage two of grief. Was any of this real? Was this one of those science experiments where they test to see if you'd kill someone because some guy in a lab coat told you to? Still riding the trailing edge of his indignation, Mr. S closed his eyes with a sigh as he tilted his neck down and shook his head.
"I can't believe this," he said with an amazed tone. Really? He gets launched across the very fabric of space and time into a futuristic, alien planet just so he could say racist things on tv? Of all the alternate realities to end up in, he gets sent to the Starfleet Confederacy?
Well, if watching Black Mirror had taught him anything, it was to say no to this metaphorical pig.
Opening his eyes, he glared out into the room as he made a decision.
"No," he said with a tone of conviction.
"What do you mean 'no'" Weiss said with a strained voice.
"No," Mr. S responded evenly once more, drawing all the strength that he could from all those D.A.R.E ads embedded into his memory.
"Just call the news and tell them you don't approve!" Weiss said, growing desperate.
"No." Mr. S repeated.
"Really? You hate me that much?" Weiss seethed, "you'd be willing to risk all of this just to keep me trapped here?" she said, raising her arms up to gesture at the general surroundings, "just to keep me tied to the bame you've worked so hard to ruin?"
"And what would I be risking, exactly?" Mr. S responded in a tone that he hoped came off as sarcastic.
"Actually, father. If I may interject," Winter interrupted, "you should consider the severely negative impact this could have on the company," she said keeping her voice even.
'Ahh, shit. I've still gotta stay in character,' Mr. S thought as he remembered that he still had a part to play, even if he didn't know what that part was supposed to be…
"Well, obviously, I won't be risking much," Mr. S replied, fully committed to listening to his elementary school self's wisdom.
"What do you mean?" Weiss asked, hunched over with a sneer.
"Huhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Mr S sighed a deep and solemn sigh, making very clear the depths of his disappointment at being surrounded by feeble-minded plebs who couldn't see the obvious. Drawing his sigh out for as long as he could, he frantically thought of reasons why he was right.
'Come on, come on, brain give me something...Fuck, fuck, fuck, what was I thinking! I don't know shit! I'm such an idiot, acting like I knew what I was talking about. Fuck, how am I supposed to come up with anything when the only thing I know is that this place sells dust. And I don't even know what that i- actually, wait a minute…' he thought, almost smiling giddily as a desperate gamble appeared before him.
"What?" Weiss asked impatiently.
"Schwarz, how are stocks?" He asked with an overconfident tone, not bothering to face his secretary as he spoke.
Schwarz turned to look out the glass wall, glancing at the giant screen on the factory wall, taking in the green line as it snaked its way along a graph, before looking back at Mr. S. "Uhh...they're stable, sir."
"See?" He said as if that proved everything. "We sell dust people," he continued as if he knew exactly what that entailed besides a vague Saudi Arabia corollary he'd made in his mind. "We could start funding terrorist groups and even then I'm sure people would hesitate to go green," he said, accidentally referencing the Schnee corp. competitor, Green co., a dust distributing company that Mr. Schnee had been instrumental in counter programming to near oblivion.
"So stop being monday night-" Mr. S paused.
'Wait,' Mr. S thought. 'I can't say "Monday night quarterback," they might not play football here!' he thought as he felt his plan slip out from underneath him.
"Uh…" Mr. S snapped his fingers in consternation. "Uh, Schwarz, what's that saying with the sports and the hindsight," he asked, hoping to seem confused enough that nobody here would ask what "Monday" was.
"Being a Monday night team captain, sir," Schwarz answered nonchalantly.
"Yeah, that," Mr. S answered, wondering if they had Garfield comic strips too.
Thankfully for Mr. S, this was one of those moments where being an alien visitor could be confused for being an out of touch rich person, as noted by the several face palms that went through the room.
"Wait, you don't understand," Ironwood said, rising from his chair as the hologram rose up to look Mr. S in the face.
"What?" Mr. S asked, his heart beating into his esophagus as he hoped he didn't fuck up his reasoning too badly.
For those of you that are getting hopeful thoughts, let us all acknowledge that Mr. S's characterization of the situation, as him being Hitler and his son kissing a gay jew, is a bit off. It would be more appropriate to describe the situation as him being Hitler, and his son kissing a gay jew who happened to be Trotsky.
"Blake is-" Ironwood began.
"Breaking news!" a blaring television interrupted, turning all heads to the first wall television as Qrow stood fiddling with its controls, himself staring up at the menacing portrait of Blake that appeared on the tv screen. "We are just getting this," the reported announced, almost falling off of her desk with giddy excitement as she pressed a finger tightly against her earpiece. "BLAKE BELLADONNA had been CONFIRMED to be a former, and possibly current, member of the WHITE FANG TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," she said, almost pounding the desk as her sweat glistened in the camera lights. "So far, Mr. Schnee has declined to respond to any queries about the matter-" she continued as Schwarz took on a guilty look and an areal shot of Schnee manor appeared in the corner of the screen.
"Follow channel 2 faction news-" the reporter began to say before her voice, along with the approaching noise of helicopter rotors, was quickly downed out by a beating cacophony that came from every side of the office. The dancing jig of panic, heard even through the ceiling, filled the room as Mr. S sat frozen in his chair, trying not to be the first one to move in a room filled with shocked faces.
Faintly, just faintly, the chaotic, disjointed song of "SELL! SELL! SELL!" could be heard through the office walls, just in time for the green-tinted, snow-white tiles of the room to turn a magenta red as Mr. S guessed what that entailed for the TV Screen behind him.
Turning his chair around just as everyone recovered enough of their senses to follow his gaze, Mr. S. looked on as the large screen presented a precipitously falling red line on an expanding graph, quickly showing the company's stocks dipping below the bottom of the screen as Mr. S felt himself pressed back into his chair by the action, never fully appreciating before how solid stocks could feel when they sucker punched you in the gut.
The room fell maddeningly silent as the tv fell into the background and the panicking investors in the surrounding rooms added pressure and confusion with their overlapping voices. The night crew in factory room below didn't seem to be doing much better, crowding around the tv screen as they stared up at the numbers in horror.
"Now, that might be a problem," Mr. S admitted, fully smacked out of his "angry at the universe" phase by the Scrooge McDuck levels of money that was apparently going down the drain.
"MIGHT!?" Weiss responded with a shrill, growling voice.
"MIGHT!?" she said again, moving to stand before the glass wall before gesturing at the falling stock prices. "How could this be anything other than a complete nightmare?" Weiss asked, her form tinted a hellish red by the light, fitting well with the "avatar of rage" look she seemed to be rocking.
"Well, I would like to note that all is not as it seems with that graph," Mr. S answered while a sensible part of him, buried deep inside his psyche, screamed at him to shut up.
"What could possibly be misleading about this!? The Line. Is Going. Down." Weiss enunciated.
"Well...the y axis doesn't start at zero, for one," Mr. S answered softly.
It was an instant after this utterance that Mr. S realized. Elementary-schoolers are idiots.
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NTTN
Chapter 5
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
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Chapter 5
I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can improve the quality of the writing and decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
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BRBEEP! BEERP! BEEPEREP! A muffled cacophony of phone calls rang through the hologram as the figure of Ironwood turned off to the side to observe source of the sound in a resigned fashion, soon moving back to face Mr. S with a look of...almost annoyance…
"Huh," he sighed, "I've got to go; the heads are looking for someone to blame," he said, focusing a serious look on Mr. S. "Take care of things on your end, I'll talk with you at our next meeting," he finished with a short nod before the hologram cut out and a blast of wind rushed past Mr. S.
Mr. S's eyes widened in surprise, the tips of his mustache drifting lightly in the current as Schwarz appeared suddenly before his desk. Shifting his head up from where he'd been looking at the holo-projector, he caught Schwarz taking a defensive stance before him. Blake, who, for the most part, looked as if all the blood had been drained out of her, hardly mustered any reaction to the secretary as Yang and Ruby quickly moved to flank either side of the catatonic faunus, forming a defensive barrier between her and Schwarz.
Weiss watched on worriedly before rushing forward and skidding to a stop inches from the right side of the desk.
"Well?" Weiss asked, almost breathless with anticipation and a well hidden sense of anxiety as she tried to occupy Mr. Schnee with the falling stock prices, hoping for the first time that he'd keep his sudden turn of opinion and not call security, or worse.
"Sir, I highly recommend we call security," Schwarz suggested with a steady, though strained, tone as she stood steadfastly, glaring at Blake. Weiss, meanwhile, mentally applied some choice words to the secretary.
"Eh, yeah, just calm down there for a second, Schwarz," Mr. S replied in a casual, half distracted, manner as he nervously eyed the falling stock numbers, putting forward as much concern as he could muster about the Blake situation. Noticing the panicked expression that Schwarz directed towards him, he quickly threw back a look of 'geez, calm down, my company's dying here!' as he made a mental note to talk to Schwarz about her priorities. I mean, terrorist or no, they were dealing with a teenage girl here, she wasn't hurting him period, especially when considering that they were in a room filled with eight other people, at least one of whom didn't want him dead.
Dismissing her concerns, Mr. S quickly turned his attention back to the stock screen, watching the red line continue to fall as he experienced his stomach turning with every dip and rise of the graph, once again pressing back into his chair as if the graph were a crashing plane that he'd been strapped to. He stared, entranced, as every sudden, upward jerk of the numbers shot a beacon of hope into his heart that the trend might start reversi- Beep Beep Beep!
He was drawn back into the present as he found himself in a loud room filled with quiet people, the clamor of the "investors next door" playing through the walls like they were surround-sound speakers as another phone went off.
Beep Beep Beep! There was that noise again.
The sound rung out once more as Mr. S looked about in confusion before whipping his head toward Schwarz.
"I thought you turned the phone off?" He asked.
"I think that's you, sir," Schwarz responded without looking away from her target, prompting Mr. S to quickly pull the glowing scroll from his pocket.
Looking confusedly at the opaque screen for a moment, he swiped his thumb over the fingerprint scanner, clearing away the frosted glass effect and revealing the mystery caller.
'Huh, so I do know her…' he thought, tilting his head at the confidently smirking, cherry red lips of the alluring woman on the screen. Strangely enough, no name showed up anywhere with the profile photo of the blonde.
Shifting the phone in his hand, Mr. S pressed what looked like the "pick up call" button but was actually the "speaker" button.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" the voice on the other side rang out, one lightening-and-thunder sound effect away from impersonating Maleficent. "I didn't think I'd be seeing the fall of 'the great Mr. Schnee' so soon, fool," the harsh voice announced through the now relatively quiet room. "And oh, what a wondrous fall it was," she continued in a giddy tone of voice. "You have no idea-"
'I think she's been saving this up," Mr. S thought with a curious expression before a sudden change of tone brought his attention back to the monologue.
"-AHAHAHA, you should just retire now! And I hope you won't be brave enough to show up at this months STOCK meeting...because you're a laughing STOCK! HAHAHAHAHA! And I'll be sure to be laughing with the rest of them!" she said, pausing a moment to catch her breath and savor the moment. "But really, truly," she said, putting a brief stall to her tone, "I hope you see now how little respect you had without your wife's name, Jaquez." she finished with a sneer, taking back control of her frenzied sentence.
"I'm sorry? Who is this?" Mr. S asked.
"AGHHH!" she sneered out before the line cut off abruptly.
"Hehehe!" Mr. S chuckled lightly, shaking his head in amusement at the now blank phone screen.
"What are you laughing at!" Weiss interrupted, slamming her palms down on the edge of his desk. "The company's dying!" she announced with a panicked look; Winter looked on from behind with a curious expression.
"Since when do you care, anyway?" Mr. S asked defensively, "You're the one that caused this in the first place!"
"I don't hate the company, I just hate you!" Weiss responded yet more aggressively, and Mr. S felt like he'd just stuck his face behind a jet engine.
'Ouch.' Mr. S, thought.
"Ok, so we're all being very candid today," Mr. S responded calmly, raising his palms up in a calming gesture. "So, candidly, let me ask, of all the faunus in the world," he circled his hands, "you couldn't have chosen one that wasn't, and, I repeat, wasn't a terrorist?"
'Ooooh, burn!'
"She's not a terrorist!" a chorus of voices responded from all non-Blake members of team RWBY.
"Right, right, she's a 'freedom fighter'," Mr. S replied, making air quotes.
"No, the news is lying!" Weiss responded. "She's actually not a terrorist," she clarified further, folding one arm across her chest as a hand rose to rub at her temples, hoping that he'd forget about the dressing down Blake had given him just moments before becoming very arrest-able.
"Wait, really?" Mr. S asked, swiveling his chair around to face Weiss at that declaration.
"Wait," Weiss drew back, folding her arms in on herself as she looked blankly down at Mr. S along with the rest of the room. "Wait, what?" Weiss asked, making sure that she was hearing that hopeful tone in his voice right.
"I'm asking if you're really not affiliated with the White Fang," Mr. S said, swiveling once more to address Blake through the crowd of people standing between the two of them. "I'd really like to clear this up with the press."
"Uh...well," Blake struggled, desperately wanting to say "yes" but somehow unable to spit out what would be a technically false answer."It's...complicated?" she finally said.
"Sir, I'm calling security," Schwarz said, grabbing the phone.
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I'm looking for editors by the way, so if you think you can improve the quality of the writing and decrease the time between updates, feel free to message me.
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BRBEEP! BEERP! BEEPEREP! A muffled cacophony of phone calls rang through the hologram as the figure of Ironwood turned off to the side to observe source of the sound in a resigned fashion, soon moving back to face Mr. S with a look of...almost annoyance…
"Huh," he sighed, "I've got to go; the heads are looking for someone to blame," he said, focusing a serious look on Mr. S. "Take care of things on your end, I'll talk with you at our next meeting," he finished with a short nod before the hologram cut out and a blast of wind rushed past Mr. S.
Mr. S's eyes widened in surprise, the tips of his mustache drifting lightly in the current as Schwarz appeared suddenly before his desk. Shifting his head up from where he'd been looking at the holo-projector, he caught Schwarz taking a defensive stance before him. Blake, who, for the most part, looked as if all the blood had been drained out of her, hardly mustered any reaction to the secretary as Yang and Ruby quickly moved to flank either side of the catatonic faunus, forming a defensive barrier between her and Schwarz.
Weiss watched on worriedly before rushing forward and skidding to a stop inches from the right side of the desk.
"Well?" Weiss asked, almost breathless with anticipation and a well hidden sense of anxiety as she tried to occupy Mr. Schnee with the falling stock prices, hoping for the first time that he'd keep his sudden turn of opinion and not call security, or worse.
"Sir, I highly recommend we call security," Schwarz suggested with a steady, though strained, tone as she stood steadfastly, glaring at Blake. Weiss, meanwhile, mentally applied some choice words to the secretary.
"Eh, yeah, just calm down there for a second, Schwarz," Mr. S replied in a casual, half distracted, manner as he nervously eyed the falling stock numbers, putting forward as much concern as he could muster about the Blake situation. Noticing the panicked expression that Schwarz directed towards him, he quickly threw back a look of 'geez, calm down, my company's dying here!' as he made a mental note to talk to Schwarz about her priorities. I mean, terrorist or no, they were dealing with a teenage girl here, she wasn't hurting him period, especially when considering that they were in a room filled with eight other people, at least one of whom didn't want him dead.
Dismissing her concerns, Mr. S quickly turned his attention back to the stock screen, watching the red line continue to fall as he experienced his stomach turning with every dip and rise of the graph, once again pressing back into his chair as if the graph were a crashing plane that he'd been strapped to. He stared, entranced, as every sudden, upward jerk of the numbers shot a beacon of hope into his heart that the trend might start reversi- Beep Beep Beep!
He was drawn back into the present as he found himself in a loud room filled with quiet people, the clamor of the "investors next door" playing through the walls like they were surround-sound speakers as another phone went off.
Beep Beep Beep! There was that noise again.
The sound rung out once more as Mr. S looked about in confusion before whipping his head toward Schwarz.
"I thought you turned the phone off?" He asked.
"I think that's you, sir," Schwarz responded without looking away from her target, prompting Mr. S to quickly pull the glowing scroll from his pocket.
Looking confusedly at the opaque screen for a moment, he swiped his thumb over the fingerprint scanner, clearing away the frosted glass effect and revealing the mystery caller.
'Huh, so I do know her…' he thought, tilting his head at the confidently smirking, cherry red lips of the alluring woman on the screen. Strangely enough, no name showed up anywhere with the profile photo of the blonde.
Shifting the phone in his hand, Mr. S pressed what looked like the "pick up call" button but was actually the "speaker" button.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" the voice on the other side rang out, one lightening-and-thunder sound effect away from impersonating Maleficent. "I didn't think I'd be seeing the fall of 'the great Mr. Schnee' so soon, fool," the harsh voice announced through the now relatively quiet room. "And oh, what a wondrous fall it was," she continued in a giddy tone of voice. "You have no idea-"
'I think she's been saving this up," Mr. S thought with a curious expression before a sudden change of tone brought his attention back to the monologue.
"-AHAHAHA, you should just retire now! And I hope you won't be brave enough to show up at this months STOCK meeting...because you're a laughing STOCK! HAHAHAHAHA! And I'll be sure to be laughing with the rest of them!" she said, pausing a moment to catch her breath and savor the moment. "But really, truly," she said, putting a brief stall to her tone, "I hope you see now how little respect you had without your wife's name, Jaquez." she finished with a sneer, taking back control of her frenzied sentence.
"I'm sorry? Who is this?" Mr. S asked.
"AGHHH!" she sneered out before the line cut off abruptly.
"Hehehe!" Mr. S chuckled lightly, shaking his head in amusement at the now blank phone screen.
"What are you laughing at!" Weiss interrupted, slamming her palms down on the edge of his desk. "The company's dying!" she announced with a panicked look; Winter looked on from behind with a curious expression.
"Since when do you care, anyway?" Mr. S asked defensively, "You're the one that caused this in the first place!"
"I don't hate the company, I just hate you!" Weiss responded yet more aggressively, and Mr. S felt like he'd just stuck his face behind a jet engine.
'Ouch.' Mr. S, thought.
"Ok, so we're all being very candid today," Mr. S responded calmly, raising his palms up in a calming gesture. "So, candidly, let me ask, of all the faunus in the world," he circled his hands, "you couldn't have chosen one that wasn't, and, I repeat, wasn't a terrorist?"
'Ooooh, burn!'
"She's not a terrorist!" a chorus of voices responded from all non-Blake members of team RWBY.
"Right, right, she's a 'freedom fighter'," Mr. S replied, making air quotes.
"No, the news is lying!" Weiss responded. "She's actually not a terrorist," she clarified further, folding one arm across her chest as a hand rose to rub at her temples, hoping that he'd forget about the dressing down Blake had given him just moments before becoming very arrest-able.
"Wait, really?" Mr. S asked, swiveling his chair around to face Weiss at that declaration.
"Wait," Weiss drew back, folding her arms in on herself as she looked blankly down at Mr. S along with the rest of the room. "Wait, what?" Weiss asked, making sure that she was hearing that hopeful tone in his voice right.
"I'm asking if you're really not affiliated with the White Fang," Mr. S said, swiveling once more to address Blake through the crowd of people standing between the two of them. "I'd really like to clear this up with the press."
"Uh...well," Blake struggled, desperately wanting to say "yes" but somehow unable to spit out what would be a technically false answer."It's...complicated?" she finally said.
"Sir, I'm calling security," Schwarz said, grabbing the phone.
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NTTN
Chapter 6
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
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- 236
Chapter 6
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"Now hold on, Schwarz. Let's hear her out," Mr. S proclaimed, speaking in a gentle, understanding, and genuinely hopeful tone of voice that everyone elected to ignore for the sake of their sanity.
"Sir, as the head of your security, I can't allow you to sit here with an admitted terrorist!" Schwarz explained, turning slightly to face Mr. S while making sure to keep Blake in her periphery.
"Don't get too excited now, Schwarz," Mr. S beckoned. "At worst, she's a former member; besides, I doubt Weiss is the kind to knowingly date a murderer," he said, guessing.
"I highly doubt the risk is worth whatever information she can offer," Schwarz retorted, managing to keep her tone professional.
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing," he said, lying.
"Even so, can this discussion not be held off until proper security measures are in place?" Schwarz said with a pleading tone.
"That's not feasible given the current situation," Mr. S said, gesturing to the red screen behind him and slipping comfortably into that alien vernacular which seemed to take effort to avoid. "Besides," he continued, "I doubt it's even necessary," he turned to look at Blake, asking, "What were you doing in the White Fang? Carrying letters? Spying?"
"Front line combat," Blake answered mechanically.
"Sir!" Schwarz said nervously, gripping the phone in her hand.
"We still don't have the full story here, she could be a victim of circumstance." Mr. S pointed out. Again, everyone elected to pretend he didn't say that.
"And she could also have joined willingly," Schwarz retorted.
"Well, there's only one way to find out isn't there?" He said, looking over to Blake and asking, "If you could elaborate, that would be nice."
Blake, for her part, was still working to dig herself out of the catatonic state she'd been worked into; mortified into stillness by the sudden reveal of her deepest secrets on live television, the completely off the wall happenings of the past couple of hours, as well as the obligations that kept her from running. It was all for the best, though, she would gather later on: that office was probably the safest place in all of Atlas for her at the time, considering its inhabitants.
"Blake, wake up!" she heard Yang whisper as Ruby worked to gently shake her awake.
"Anytime today, if you could," Mr. S said, just as Blake's brain rebooted and her eyes blinked open, her irises relaxing into gentler circles.
"Uh, well," Blake stumbled awake, "my father was a-"
"Keep it short, we don't have much time," Mr. S said, hiding his impatient tone while he nervously glanced back at the stock screen behind him. "Around twenty words would be ideal," he added, looking back at her.
"Well, I was born into the white fang when it was good...I guess I stuck around too long after the fact," Blake said easily, surprising herself with her own words.
Not for the first time, Mr. S was struck back: this time for a completely different reason than fear or surprise or self preservation. He found himself easily slipping on a mask of calm analysis as his heart rung out in response to the sorrow in Blake's voice: the sorrow of lost ties and crushed hopes. With that, he found himself taken fully away from the strangeness of his situation and drawn into the fact that he was surrounded by people: people just like him and everyone he'd ever known, living all over this world and deeply under his power. He wouldn't know how to express this moment until later, but that sorrowful moment would be the healing light that burned away the acid in his heart, and gave him a purpose for being there.
Of course, without the clarity of hindsight all that the sobering moment had managed was to tear him from his idle world of apathetic observation into the harsh reality of the room. 'People' the word seemed to echo in his mind as the distressed voices of investors rung against his ears and the desperate murmurs of worry coming from the factory floor tickled against his ears, and a casual glance toward the girls before him revealed anguish, heart wrenched despair and a stubborn defensiveness as they all seemed to huddle together for protection. He held back a cringe as he felt the endless dread this inspired in his soul. People were getting hurt, in ways that could ruin lives and he-
"Father, you have to save the company!" Weiss's voice called out as she leaned tiredly onto his desk, fear and trepidation leaking through into her words as the extended silence harried her, making more desperate attempts to draw Blake away from his attention.
Mr. S once again, was pulled from his thoughts. That one word, "father" lighting up in his mind, seeming alien the way it left Weiss's lips. 'She wants something,' He thought instinctively, deducing that from her tone, the formality and nice blandness of her words, as well as the fact that her sentence had contained a request.
'Save the company.' The phrase shone in his mind as he clung to it and centered himself.
"Give me a moment, I'm thinking," he turned to Weiss with an earnest tone and false confidence. He quickly turned back to his desk and looked intently into the surface, his heart slowing and that stagnant pool of dread in his stomach lightening as if it had been set aflame, energizing him until excited shivers ran up his shoulders and the world came into crystal clarity. Incidents were gut wrenching and horrible, often requiring that you answer for something, but this...this was a problem, something he could face and look for an answer in.
'I've spent my entire career solving problems, no need to stop now,' he thought confidently as an excited jitter went up hs body and he quickly slipped back into that comfortable suit of engineer. His mind ran faster than he could hardly process, running quickly over thoughts and concepts on levels that couldn't be described with words, as he planned, thought and planned his thinking. In a flash, he came to the first goal, his mind turning and his gut whizzing as he dredged up every last bit of knowledge aboout companies and economics that he could muster, every incident, news article, example, case study and definition he'd ever learned rushing forth to present itself in his minds eye.
A company is a large entity that exchanges goods and/or services in order to make a profit.
...
That was it. Mr. S realized in a panic, once again cursing that charismatic physics professor who'd swindled him into taking Quantum Mechanics as an elective when he was considering a business class!
He quickly dropped that train of thought, however as anxiety began to rise...people were depending on him and he was just sitting here! People were going to-
'Oh,' the thought came.
It was people that he needed to fix this problem for, people that were the cause of those red numbers behind him and, fundamentally, people, panicking people but people nonetheless, that made up Schnee Crop; what those people needed at this moment was a leader, and he would need to become that leader he accepted; a strange calm falling over him as everything fell into perspective.
'Ok, I need to be a leader,' he thought, thinking through the issue in as simple terms as he could muster. 'That's not too bad. I've lead more engineering projects than I can count over the years and this is just like that,' he continued, building confidence. 'Yeah! I'm basically just leading an engineering group after the world's started suspecting us of affiliating with terrorists,' he thought with a hopeful tone shortly before getting serious.
'First order of business, damage control,' he decided, turning to Schwarz with a serious look.
"Schwarz," he said, breaking the increasingly antsy secretary from her focused reverie before continuing on with his plan. "Set up a press meeting for," he paused, taking a moment to confer with his watch, "...twenty minutes from now, and contact the best speech writers you can get a hold of, they have fifteen minutes to write the best speech ever. Offer them whatever we can afford," he ordered, strategically sidestepping any currency names.
"What do you want the speech to say?" Schwarz asked, the purpose driven task doing a great deal to calm her harried nerves shortly before a mad screaming emanated from the tv, drawing all eyes onto the news station once more.
"The White Fang are controlling the Schnee Corporation, man!" a twenty something fellow with bare feet, torn pants and an over sized, green ski hat proclaimed directly into the news camera, completely ignoring the reporter next to him in his frenzied theorizing. "How else do you thing those faunus get all that dust?" he proclaimed with wide open, red eyes as he stepped forward to stare deeply into the camera, "they've been controlling it this entire time! Right under our noses! And now they're ready to reveal themselves! I tell ya that Beacon attack was just the beginning-" the footage suddenly cut off, revealing the very excited news anchor as she struggled to maintain a neutral face for the camera.
"You heard it there from our on-the-ground-reporter Heinz Dasler," the anchor said, leaning forward across her desk. "Though extreme, people are starting to worry as to what possible connection the Schnee family has to the White Fang, and events transpiring are-" a blue light appeared once more as the tv muted.
"Thank you, Schwarz," Mr. S said without having to look over at the secretary. "And as to what I want the speech to say…" Mr. S hesitated, circling a hand in thought and leaning back in his chair, "how about, 'I'm not a terrorist and neither is she'," he said, gesturing towards Blake through the wall of people between them.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz said, tapping furiously onto her tablet, making sure to keep Blake in sight.
"Now, Blake," Mr. S said, standing up from his chair as he did so and pacing around to the front of his desk, "what exactly wa-"
"Wait, you're not planning on going in front of the camera like that, are you?" Weiss interrupted with a genuinely frightened tone.
"Like what?" Mr. S asked, looking down at himself as Winter, Schwarz, Glynda and Ozpin all honed their eyes onto the lower left section of Mr. Schnee's suit jacket.
"Like that!" Weiss said, stepping forward and pointing at a spot on the lower left portion of his suit: and there, just in front of Weiss's finger, was a spot of cloth which, in just the right light, on just the right day, seen by just the right eagle, could possibly have been made out to be a stain.
"So what?" Mr. S responded without thinking.
"What do you mean 'so what'?" Weiss responded angrily, "the company's failing, you can't go out in front of the cameras like you're already a washed up drunk!" as she finished, Ruby self-consciously looked at the macaroni stains decorating her dress.
"I have to agree, sir," Schwarz said.
"It would be bad form," Winter added as Ruby frantically started folding her dress to hide the stains.
"Ok, so do you want me to chang-"
"What is wrong with you!" Weiss interrupted once more, now transitioning to a more personal anger at the man who wouldn't let her eat supper until her clothes were "prim, proper and perfect." "All changing your clothes will do is let everyone know you stained them! And theories about the size of said stain are going to be headlining the news for weeks. Or, wait, they would be headlining the news if you hadn't tanked the company!" Weiss yelled, clicking her heels together and pointing once more to the stock screen.
"Very well," he conceded, eager to move the topic of conversation, "Schwarz, have someone send down another white sui-"
"We no longer carry identical items in your wardrobe sir, not since the duplicate tie incident," Schwarz said with a weary sigh and bad memories.
"Huh," Mr. S sighed, putting his face into his palm. This was going to be a long event.
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Still looking for an editor, but feel free to just post some sick reviews.
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"Now hold on, Schwarz. Let's hear her out," Mr. S proclaimed, speaking in a gentle, understanding, and genuinely hopeful tone of voice that everyone elected to ignore for the sake of their sanity.
"Sir, as the head of your security, I can't allow you to sit here with an admitted terrorist!" Schwarz explained, turning slightly to face Mr. S while making sure to keep Blake in her periphery.
"Don't get too excited now, Schwarz," Mr. S beckoned. "At worst, she's a former member; besides, I doubt Weiss is the kind to knowingly date a murderer," he said, guessing.
"I highly doubt the risk is worth whatever information she can offer," Schwarz retorted, managing to keep her tone professional.
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing," he said, lying.
"Even so, can this discussion not be held off until proper security measures are in place?" Schwarz said with a pleading tone.
"That's not feasible given the current situation," Mr. S said, gesturing to the red screen behind him and slipping comfortably into that alien vernacular which seemed to take effort to avoid. "Besides," he continued, "I doubt it's even necessary," he turned to look at Blake, asking, "What were you doing in the White Fang? Carrying letters? Spying?"
"Front line combat," Blake answered mechanically.
"Sir!" Schwarz said nervously, gripping the phone in her hand.
"We still don't have the full story here, she could be a victim of circumstance." Mr. S pointed out. Again, everyone elected to pretend he didn't say that.
"And she could also have joined willingly," Schwarz retorted.
"Well, there's only one way to find out isn't there?" He said, looking over to Blake and asking, "If you could elaborate, that would be nice."
Blake, for her part, was still working to dig herself out of the catatonic state she'd been worked into; mortified into stillness by the sudden reveal of her deepest secrets on live television, the completely off the wall happenings of the past couple of hours, as well as the obligations that kept her from running. It was all for the best, though, she would gather later on: that office was probably the safest place in all of Atlas for her at the time, considering its inhabitants.
"Blake, wake up!" she heard Yang whisper as Ruby worked to gently shake her awake.
"Anytime today, if you could," Mr. S said, just as Blake's brain rebooted and her eyes blinked open, her irises relaxing into gentler circles.
"Uh, well," Blake stumbled awake, "my father was a-"
"Keep it short, we don't have much time," Mr. S said, hiding his impatient tone while he nervously glanced back at the stock screen behind him. "Around twenty words would be ideal," he added, looking back at her.
"Well, I was born into the white fang when it was good...I guess I stuck around too long after the fact," Blake said easily, surprising herself with her own words.
Not for the first time, Mr. S was struck back: this time for a completely different reason than fear or surprise or self preservation. He found himself easily slipping on a mask of calm analysis as his heart rung out in response to the sorrow in Blake's voice: the sorrow of lost ties and crushed hopes. With that, he found himself taken fully away from the strangeness of his situation and drawn into the fact that he was surrounded by people: people just like him and everyone he'd ever known, living all over this world and deeply under his power. He wouldn't know how to express this moment until later, but that sorrowful moment would be the healing light that burned away the acid in his heart, and gave him a purpose for being there.
Of course, without the clarity of hindsight all that the sobering moment had managed was to tear him from his idle world of apathetic observation into the harsh reality of the room. 'People' the word seemed to echo in his mind as the distressed voices of investors rung against his ears and the desperate murmurs of worry coming from the factory floor tickled against his ears, and a casual glance toward the girls before him revealed anguish, heart wrenched despair and a stubborn defensiveness as they all seemed to huddle together for protection. He held back a cringe as he felt the endless dread this inspired in his soul. People were getting hurt, in ways that could ruin lives and he-
"Father, you have to save the company!" Weiss's voice called out as she leaned tiredly onto his desk, fear and trepidation leaking through into her words as the extended silence harried her, making more desperate attempts to draw Blake away from his attention.
Mr. S once again, was pulled from his thoughts. That one word, "father" lighting up in his mind, seeming alien the way it left Weiss's lips. 'She wants something,' He thought instinctively, deducing that from her tone, the formality and nice blandness of her words, as well as the fact that her sentence had contained a request.
'Save the company.' The phrase shone in his mind as he clung to it and centered himself.
"Give me a moment, I'm thinking," he turned to Weiss with an earnest tone and false confidence. He quickly turned back to his desk and looked intently into the surface, his heart slowing and that stagnant pool of dread in his stomach lightening as if it had been set aflame, energizing him until excited shivers ran up his shoulders and the world came into crystal clarity. Incidents were gut wrenching and horrible, often requiring that you answer for something, but this...this was a problem, something he could face and look for an answer in.
'I've spent my entire career solving problems, no need to stop now,' he thought confidently as an excited jitter went up hs body and he quickly slipped back into that comfortable suit of engineer. His mind ran faster than he could hardly process, running quickly over thoughts and concepts on levels that couldn't be described with words, as he planned, thought and planned his thinking. In a flash, he came to the first goal, his mind turning and his gut whizzing as he dredged up every last bit of knowledge aboout companies and economics that he could muster, every incident, news article, example, case study and definition he'd ever learned rushing forth to present itself in his minds eye.
A company is a large entity that exchanges goods and/or services in order to make a profit.
...
That was it. Mr. S realized in a panic, once again cursing that charismatic physics professor who'd swindled him into taking Quantum Mechanics as an elective when he was considering a business class!
He quickly dropped that train of thought, however as anxiety began to rise...people were depending on him and he was just sitting here! People were going to-
'Oh,' the thought came.
It was people that he needed to fix this problem for, people that were the cause of those red numbers behind him and, fundamentally, people, panicking people but people nonetheless, that made up Schnee Crop; what those people needed at this moment was a leader, and he would need to become that leader he accepted; a strange calm falling over him as everything fell into perspective.
'Ok, I need to be a leader,' he thought, thinking through the issue in as simple terms as he could muster. 'That's not too bad. I've lead more engineering projects than I can count over the years and this is just like that,' he continued, building confidence. 'Yeah! I'm basically just leading an engineering group after the world's started suspecting us of affiliating with terrorists,' he thought with a hopeful tone shortly before getting serious.
'First order of business, damage control,' he decided, turning to Schwarz with a serious look.
"Schwarz," he said, breaking the increasingly antsy secretary from her focused reverie before continuing on with his plan. "Set up a press meeting for," he paused, taking a moment to confer with his watch, "...twenty minutes from now, and contact the best speech writers you can get a hold of, they have fifteen minutes to write the best speech ever. Offer them whatever we can afford," he ordered, strategically sidestepping any currency names.
"What do you want the speech to say?" Schwarz asked, the purpose driven task doing a great deal to calm her harried nerves shortly before a mad screaming emanated from the tv, drawing all eyes onto the news station once more.
"The White Fang are controlling the Schnee Corporation, man!" a twenty something fellow with bare feet, torn pants and an over sized, green ski hat proclaimed directly into the news camera, completely ignoring the reporter next to him in his frenzied theorizing. "How else do you thing those faunus get all that dust?" he proclaimed with wide open, red eyes as he stepped forward to stare deeply into the camera, "they've been controlling it this entire time! Right under our noses! And now they're ready to reveal themselves! I tell ya that Beacon attack was just the beginning-" the footage suddenly cut off, revealing the very excited news anchor as she struggled to maintain a neutral face for the camera.
"You heard it there from our on-the-ground-reporter Heinz Dasler," the anchor said, leaning forward across her desk. "Though extreme, people are starting to worry as to what possible connection the Schnee family has to the White Fang, and events transpiring are-" a blue light appeared once more as the tv muted.
"Thank you, Schwarz," Mr. S said without having to look over at the secretary. "And as to what I want the speech to say…" Mr. S hesitated, circling a hand in thought and leaning back in his chair, "how about, 'I'm not a terrorist and neither is she'," he said, gesturing towards Blake through the wall of people between them.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz said, tapping furiously onto her tablet, making sure to keep Blake in sight.
"Now, Blake," Mr. S said, standing up from his chair as he did so and pacing around to the front of his desk, "what exactly wa-"
"Wait, you're not planning on going in front of the camera like that, are you?" Weiss interrupted with a genuinely frightened tone.
"Like what?" Mr. S asked, looking down at himself as Winter, Schwarz, Glynda and Ozpin all honed their eyes onto the lower left section of Mr. Schnee's suit jacket.
"Like that!" Weiss said, stepping forward and pointing at a spot on the lower left portion of his suit: and there, just in front of Weiss's finger, was a spot of cloth which, in just the right light, on just the right day, seen by just the right eagle, could possibly have been made out to be a stain.
"So what?" Mr. S responded without thinking.
"What do you mean 'so what'?" Weiss responded angrily, "the company's failing, you can't go out in front of the cameras like you're already a washed up drunk!" as she finished, Ruby self-consciously looked at the macaroni stains decorating her dress.
"I have to agree, sir," Schwarz said.
"It would be bad form," Winter added as Ruby frantically started folding her dress to hide the stains.
"Ok, so do you want me to chang-"
"What is wrong with you!" Weiss interrupted once more, now transitioning to a more personal anger at the man who wouldn't let her eat supper until her clothes were "prim, proper and perfect." "All changing your clothes will do is let everyone know you stained them! And theories about the size of said stain are going to be headlining the news for weeks. Or, wait, they would be headlining the news if you hadn't tanked the company!" Weiss yelled, clicking her heels together and pointing once more to the stock screen.
"Very well," he conceded, eager to move the topic of conversation, "Schwarz, have someone send down another white sui-"
"We no longer carry identical items in your wardrobe sir, not since the duplicate tie incident," Schwarz said with a weary sigh and bad memories.
"Huh," Mr. S sighed, putting his face into his palm. This was going to be a long event.
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Still looking for an editor, but feel free to just post some sick reviews.
Chapter 7
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
- Messages
- 9
- Likes received
- 236
Chapter 7
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Mr. S sighed into his palm, feeling more and more hopeless by the moment.
"But," Schwarz said, shooting happiness directly into Mr. S's veins more effectively than any drug, "we can have it washed in the laundry room."
"Excellent," Mr. S replied, moving off the desk he'd been leaning against to face the left wall. "You, you, come with me," he gestured towards Ruby and Blake in a commanding fashion before heading towards the door.
Schwarz spoke out, "Wait, you can't go alone with-"
"Schwarz," Mr. S interrupted softly, turning his head aside to look at Schwarz, "do you trust my judgement?"
"Eh..ugh...yes," Schwarz admitted, looking all the while as if she were swallowing mud.
"Good, now-" Mr. S began.
"But...how am I supposed to do all of this by myself! I'd need your help and authorizatio-"
"Delegate!" Mr. S said, walking backwards towards the exit and tossing to her the master access card he'd grown so used to using over the course of the work day.
"Wait…" Schwarz, broken out of her argument, fell into a reverie and caught the card, reverently holding it in two palms, "you're giving me...permission to lead?"
"Yes, do whatever you have to do. I trust you to succeed!" Mr. S shouted back as he walked out the door.
"Wait a minute!" Weiss shouted, rushing out behind him, causing the rest of team RWBY to follow after her, Ruby and Yang herding the still dazed Blake along with them and leaving the room significantly quieter.
Schwarz stood disbelievingly, staring, wide eyed, at the card in her hands as the rest of the visitors sat awkwardly alongside her in the encompassing silence.
Of course, something had to come along and break the peace.
"Schwarz!" the distant voice of Mr. Schnee yelled.
"Yes, sir!" Schwarz yelled back.
"Where is the laundry room!" she heard, shouted back.
"It's on the third level of the basement, sir."
"How many levels are there in the basement, again?" Mr. S asked, as if he were trying to remember the answer which he totally knew all along.
"Ten, sir." Schwarz replied, already swiping the card over her tablet as she sent out the necessary orders.
"So, is it on level negative three or level negative seven?"
"Level negative seven, sir," Schwarz replied.
Once again, there was a quiet as Schwarz tapped away at the tablet she cradled in her forearm.
"...Schwarz, where's the elevator?"
"On your left, sir," Schwarz answered, not looking up from her screen.
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Weiss and company followed suspiciously behind Mr. S as they came upon the elevator.
"What are you up to?" Weiss asked, heels clicking furiously as a now partially awake Blake trailed behind her while sending worried looks in her direction.
"I'm going to wash my shirt, Weiss," Mr. S answered, annoying her with the misuse of proper dress terminology.
"You could wash it on your own, you know," Weiss pointed out aggressively, "why try to drag Blake and Ruby along with you?"
"Oh, I thought I could use the company," Mr. S replied with a casual tone. "Also, I thought it might be important to know more about the "not-a-terrorist" that's managed to draw so much attention recently."
"Then why did you want Ruby," Weiss said with complete disbelief before pausing a moment to send an apologetic expression back to the pouting, and slightly annoyed, girl behind her.
Mr. S paused a second, thinking of a way he could formulate his answer without using the phrases, "Napoleon Complex","Anger Issues","Axe Murderer", or "Uni Bomber-Kitty" to any significant degree.
"Well, to be honest, she seemed to be the least insane person in your group," Mr. S settled, stopping at the first of a wall of elevator doors and pressing the summon button, really wishing he still had his master access card, which would have given him priority.
"And why should we follow you?" Weiss questioned with a heated tone and crossed arms. Here, the gentle ring of the elevator bell chimed, accompanied by a soft hum as the elevator doors parted.
"Because you already are," Mr. S responded in a matter of fact tone, casually stepping into the empty compartment before him and turning aside to face the featureless screen which stood in place of elevator buttons.
"Just answer the question," Weiss retorted sharply as she stepped in behind him and the rest of team RWBY followed in behind her. Despite her stoked fury, Weiss was curious to know the answer; she couldn't return to the office as it was, in any case.
"Because you don't want the company to fail any more than I do," Mr. S responded evenly, "and I'll need your help to give it the best chance of survival," he finished, looking over at team RWBY and at Blake in particular.
Blake shared a sideways glance with Weiss before turning to look at an empty corner of the elevator.
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Mr. S stood silently in the flourecent wash of light that filled the stainless interior of the elevator car, staring back at the judging expression reflected in the elevator doors and cursing himself; he tensed as the compartment bell chimed in arrival, holding back regret at not having asked Schwarz what room number the laundry was in...until the elevator doors opened, that is.
Ding! The bell sounded and the sound of laundry flooded through the parting doors. Stepping out of the elevator, Mr. S felt more as if he were entering a museum than any laundry room. In fact, calling it a "laundry room" would be an injustice; It was more akin to a laundry level, with whirring machines embedded across every wall as far as could be seen, covering every surface up to the high ceiling as complicated machines trawled along the walls, carrying baskets to and fro.
The floor of the room was a clean, white tiled, endeavor decorated with tall shelves of machines that lined the space and between which maids patrolled, carting hampers and staring, wide eyed, at the newest arrivals.
Ding! The next elevator door opened revealing several, heavily armed, security bots which soon exited, leaving behind a worried group of executives as they stepped onto the floor and turned mechanically towards Mr. Schnee.
"Oh, great, who sent these things over?" Weiss asked with a tone of contempt.
That response, coupled with the lack of screaming and running from anyone on the floor, hinted to Mr. S that these killer robots were of the "come with me if you vvant to live" variety, prompting him to ignore the following robots along with the staring maids as he hurriedly picked out the fanciest looking machine within reach and strode towards its location, followed closely by team RWBY and again by team Robot.
Stopping just before the rainbow colored, sleek, and ivory chromed washing machine, Mr. S...stared at it in confusion, too afraid to ask where the buttons were.
"Uhm...sir?" Ruby asked, leaning over to look past Yang's shoulder, "do you...not know how to use that washing machine?" she asked with a soft tone.
"Apparently not," Mr. S replied with a resigned voice, still leaning down to stare into the glass globe protruding from the center face of the machine.
"Would you like me to help?" Ruby asked just as softly.
"It would be appreciated," Mr. S replied as Ruby slinked past Yang's worried grasp and stalked slowly over to the machine in question.
'Oh my gods, oh my gods, oh my gods, oh my gods!' Ruby rapidly chanted in her head, 'I can't believe I get to touch a RAZR BACH 9000! '"It's more expensive than the Razr Bach 6000, but it's filled to the brim with all sorts of fun features!"' she quoted, mentally reciting the slogan that had been drilled into her head from childhood. 'I can almost smell the chrome-titanium heating units,' her hands twitched, hovering tensely over the machine as if afraid to touch it.
Mr. S decided to ignore the giddly jumping girl as she smiled maniacally and expertly pulled apart the configurable units of the machine, instead looking over at Blake, who leaned against the wall of washers with her arms crossed as she tried to huddle herself in the barrier the rest of the team had formed around her.
"Blake, was it?" He inquired, drawing the sulking girl's attention as he removed his suit coat and gently folded it up in his hands.
"Yes," she replied coldly, not seeming to understand his words as her distant eyes quickly turned back to examine the flooring ahead.
"Huhhh," Mr. S sighed at the attitude. He knew that look from all the little kids he'd seen sulking at the youth center, and he knew he wouldn't be getting any help until her issues were dealt with. "You know, you've been unusually quiet lately," he ventured, attempting conversation and earning the defensive glares of Weiss and Yang as they closed in closer around Blake.
Blake didn't respond, merely gazing in between the statuesque security bots, watching their sentinel like forms in her periphery as she became lost in the view of the laundry room before her.
"Look," Mr. S started easily, "I realize that you're not having the best of times right now, being accused of being a terrorist and such," he continued, earning another glare from Yang as Weiss continued her last one, "but if we want to salvage the company and your reputation, I'm going to need your cooperation," Mr. S proposed, holding the long silence after he finished his speech.
Blake held her own silence, staring at the reflection in the tiled floor for over a minute as she lethargically moved herself to answer, fighting against the defeated spirit inside of her that was frozen worrying over how this would affect her life at beacon and really just wanted a cat-nap for the next twenty four hours. "What do you need?" she asked, sounding more like a prisoner than she'd intended.
"Just tell me about your time in the White Fang and your affiliation with them. Feel free to go into more detail, we need a story to give to the press," Mr. S quickly answered, eager to move the conversation along.
Blake took a moment to formulate her words while Mr. S waited to the side with a patient mask. "I never killed anyone," she responded coldly.
"We're all well aware," Mr. S interrupted with a calming tone, "we wouldn't be having this conversation if you did."
Another silence.
"Is there anything else of importance to the case you'd like to reveal?" Mr. S asked.
Blake stayed silent while Mr. S continued to wait with an expectant look, even past the point where he knew he wouldn't be getting any more answers.
"Umm, sir," Ruby said in a strained voice, drawing Mr. S's gaze to her struggling form as she forcibly held together a flashing module in her arms, pulling it away from the washing machine it was attached to with a rip chord as she braced a foot against the body of the machine and rested the module on her raised knee. "If you could hand over your coat," she continued breathlessly, "... hurry!"
Quickly, Mr. S tossed the coat towards Ruby, causing the girl to lurch forward with great effort and catch the article of clothing in the modular basket she'd forced open in her hands.
SNAP!
The box snapped shut around the coat and the rip-chord reeled the object into the larger machine, where Mr. S was sure several tornadoes subsequently apparated as the noise level of the machine rose incredibly, though somehow still sounding oddly refined.
Within seconds the box popped out and snapped open, revealing a clean, dry and freshly pressed suit that was warm to the touch and felt like heaven. Mr. S tried not to show any signs of being impressed as he took the coat and put it on, leaving the machine to snap shut and reel back on itself once more as he stepped away from it.
"Huh," Mr. S closed his eyes as the comforting weight of the suit rested once more upon his shoulders, making him feel just slightly more evil in the process. This had not been a productive trip. Although, he had to admit, the suit just looked better without the stain, really rather put together as a whole.
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Mr. S sighed into his palm, feeling more and more hopeless by the moment.
"But," Schwarz said, shooting happiness directly into Mr. S's veins more effectively than any drug, "we can have it washed in the laundry room."
"Excellent," Mr. S replied, moving off the desk he'd been leaning against to face the left wall. "You, you, come with me," he gestured towards Ruby and Blake in a commanding fashion before heading towards the door.
Schwarz spoke out, "Wait, you can't go alone with-"
"Schwarz," Mr. S interrupted softly, turning his head aside to look at Schwarz, "do you trust my judgement?"
"Eh..ugh...yes," Schwarz admitted, looking all the while as if she were swallowing mud.
"Good, now-" Mr. S began.
"But...how am I supposed to do all of this by myself! I'd need your help and authorizatio-"
"Delegate!" Mr. S said, walking backwards towards the exit and tossing to her the master access card he'd grown so used to using over the course of the work day.
"Wait…" Schwarz, broken out of her argument, fell into a reverie and caught the card, reverently holding it in two palms, "you're giving me...permission to lead?"
"Yes, do whatever you have to do. I trust you to succeed!" Mr. S shouted back as he walked out the door.
"Wait a minute!" Weiss shouted, rushing out behind him, causing the rest of team RWBY to follow after her, Ruby and Yang herding the still dazed Blake along with them and leaving the room significantly quieter.
Schwarz stood disbelievingly, staring, wide eyed, at the card in her hands as the rest of the visitors sat awkwardly alongside her in the encompassing silence.
Of course, something had to come along and break the peace.
"Schwarz!" the distant voice of Mr. Schnee yelled.
"Yes, sir!" Schwarz yelled back.
"Where is the laundry room!" she heard, shouted back.
"It's on the third level of the basement, sir."
"How many levels are there in the basement, again?" Mr. S asked, as if he were trying to remember the answer which he totally knew all along.
"Ten, sir." Schwarz replied, already swiping the card over her tablet as she sent out the necessary orders.
"So, is it on level negative three or level negative seven?"
"Level negative seven, sir," Schwarz replied.
Once again, there was a quiet as Schwarz tapped away at the tablet she cradled in her forearm.
"...Schwarz, where's the elevator?"
"On your left, sir," Schwarz answered, not looking up from her screen.
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Weiss and company followed suspiciously behind Mr. S as they came upon the elevator.
"What are you up to?" Weiss asked, heels clicking furiously as a now partially awake Blake trailed behind her while sending worried looks in her direction.
"I'm going to wash my shirt, Weiss," Mr. S answered, annoying her with the misuse of proper dress terminology.
"You could wash it on your own, you know," Weiss pointed out aggressively, "why try to drag Blake and Ruby along with you?"
"Oh, I thought I could use the company," Mr. S replied with a casual tone. "Also, I thought it might be important to know more about the "not-a-terrorist" that's managed to draw so much attention recently."
"Then why did you want Ruby," Weiss said with complete disbelief before pausing a moment to send an apologetic expression back to the pouting, and slightly annoyed, girl behind her.
Mr. S paused a second, thinking of a way he could formulate his answer without using the phrases, "Napoleon Complex","Anger Issues","Axe Murderer", or "Uni Bomber-Kitty" to any significant degree.
"Well, to be honest, she seemed to be the least insane person in your group," Mr. S settled, stopping at the first of a wall of elevator doors and pressing the summon button, really wishing he still had his master access card, which would have given him priority.
"And why should we follow you?" Weiss questioned with a heated tone and crossed arms. Here, the gentle ring of the elevator bell chimed, accompanied by a soft hum as the elevator doors parted.
"Because you already are," Mr. S responded in a matter of fact tone, casually stepping into the empty compartment before him and turning aside to face the featureless screen which stood in place of elevator buttons.
"Just answer the question," Weiss retorted sharply as she stepped in behind him and the rest of team RWBY followed in behind her. Despite her stoked fury, Weiss was curious to know the answer; she couldn't return to the office as it was, in any case.
"Because you don't want the company to fail any more than I do," Mr. S responded evenly, "and I'll need your help to give it the best chance of survival," he finished, looking over at team RWBY and at Blake in particular.
Blake shared a sideways glance with Weiss before turning to look at an empty corner of the elevator.
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Mr. S stood silently in the flourecent wash of light that filled the stainless interior of the elevator car, staring back at the judging expression reflected in the elevator doors and cursing himself; he tensed as the compartment bell chimed in arrival, holding back regret at not having asked Schwarz what room number the laundry was in...until the elevator doors opened, that is.
Ding! The bell sounded and the sound of laundry flooded through the parting doors. Stepping out of the elevator, Mr. S felt more as if he were entering a museum than any laundry room. In fact, calling it a "laundry room" would be an injustice; It was more akin to a laundry level, with whirring machines embedded across every wall as far as could be seen, covering every surface up to the high ceiling as complicated machines trawled along the walls, carrying baskets to and fro.
The floor of the room was a clean, white tiled, endeavor decorated with tall shelves of machines that lined the space and between which maids patrolled, carting hampers and staring, wide eyed, at the newest arrivals.
Ding! The next elevator door opened revealing several, heavily armed, security bots which soon exited, leaving behind a worried group of executives as they stepped onto the floor and turned mechanically towards Mr. Schnee.
"Oh, great, who sent these things over?" Weiss asked with a tone of contempt.
That response, coupled with the lack of screaming and running from anyone on the floor, hinted to Mr. S that these killer robots were of the "come with me if you vvant to live" variety, prompting him to ignore the following robots along with the staring maids as he hurriedly picked out the fanciest looking machine within reach and strode towards its location, followed closely by team RWBY and again by team Robot.
Stopping just before the rainbow colored, sleek, and ivory chromed washing machine, Mr. S...stared at it in confusion, too afraid to ask where the buttons were.
"Uhm...sir?" Ruby asked, leaning over to look past Yang's shoulder, "do you...not know how to use that washing machine?" she asked with a soft tone.
"Apparently not," Mr. S replied with a resigned voice, still leaning down to stare into the glass globe protruding from the center face of the machine.
"Would you like me to help?" Ruby asked just as softly.
"It would be appreciated," Mr. S replied as Ruby slinked past Yang's worried grasp and stalked slowly over to the machine in question.
'Oh my gods, oh my gods, oh my gods, oh my gods!' Ruby rapidly chanted in her head, 'I can't believe I get to touch a RAZR BACH 9000! '"It's more expensive than the Razr Bach 6000, but it's filled to the brim with all sorts of fun features!"' she quoted, mentally reciting the slogan that had been drilled into her head from childhood. 'I can almost smell the chrome-titanium heating units,' her hands twitched, hovering tensely over the machine as if afraid to touch it.
Mr. S decided to ignore the giddly jumping girl as she smiled maniacally and expertly pulled apart the configurable units of the machine, instead looking over at Blake, who leaned against the wall of washers with her arms crossed as she tried to huddle herself in the barrier the rest of the team had formed around her.
"Blake, was it?" He inquired, drawing the sulking girl's attention as he removed his suit coat and gently folded it up in his hands.
"Yes," she replied coldly, not seeming to understand his words as her distant eyes quickly turned back to examine the flooring ahead.
"Huhhh," Mr. S sighed at the attitude. He knew that look from all the little kids he'd seen sulking at the youth center, and he knew he wouldn't be getting any help until her issues were dealt with. "You know, you've been unusually quiet lately," he ventured, attempting conversation and earning the defensive glares of Weiss and Yang as they closed in closer around Blake.
Blake didn't respond, merely gazing in between the statuesque security bots, watching their sentinel like forms in her periphery as she became lost in the view of the laundry room before her.
"Look," Mr. S started easily, "I realize that you're not having the best of times right now, being accused of being a terrorist and such," he continued, earning another glare from Yang as Weiss continued her last one, "but if we want to salvage the company and your reputation, I'm going to need your cooperation," Mr. S proposed, holding the long silence after he finished his speech.
Blake held her own silence, staring at the reflection in the tiled floor for over a minute as she lethargically moved herself to answer, fighting against the defeated spirit inside of her that was frozen worrying over how this would affect her life at beacon and really just wanted a cat-nap for the next twenty four hours. "What do you need?" she asked, sounding more like a prisoner than she'd intended.
"Just tell me about your time in the White Fang and your affiliation with them. Feel free to go into more detail, we need a story to give to the press," Mr. S quickly answered, eager to move the conversation along.
Blake took a moment to formulate her words while Mr. S waited to the side with a patient mask. "I never killed anyone," she responded coldly.
"We're all well aware," Mr. S interrupted with a calming tone, "we wouldn't be having this conversation if you did."
Another silence.
"Is there anything else of importance to the case you'd like to reveal?" Mr. S asked.
Blake stayed silent while Mr. S continued to wait with an expectant look, even past the point where he knew he wouldn't be getting any more answers.
"Umm, sir," Ruby said in a strained voice, drawing Mr. S's gaze to her struggling form as she forcibly held together a flashing module in her arms, pulling it away from the washing machine it was attached to with a rip chord as she braced a foot against the body of the machine and rested the module on her raised knee. "If you could hand over your coat," she continued breathlessly, "... hurry!"
Quickly, Mr. S tossed the coat towards Ruby, causing the girl to lurch forward with great effort and catch the article of clothing in the modular basket she'd forced open in her hands.
SNAP!
The box snapped shut around the coat and the rip-chord reeled the object into the larger machine, where Mr. S was sure several tornadoes subsequently apparated as the noise level of the machine rose incredibly, though somehow still sounding oddly refined.
Within seconds the box popped out and snapped open, revealing a clean, dry and freshly pressed suit that was warm to the touch and felt like heaven. Mr. S tried not to show any signs of being impressed as he took the coat and put it on, leaving the machine to snap shut and reel back on itself once more as he stepped away from it.
"Huh," Mr. S closed his eyes as the comforting weight of the suit rested once more upon his shoulders, making him feel just slightly more evil in the process. This had not been a productive trip. Although, he had to admit, the suit just looked better without the stain, really rather put together as a whole.
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NTTN
Chapter 8
Fantastic Tales
Getting some practice in, huh?
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
- Messages
- 9
- Likes received
- 236
Chapter 8
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"Sir! You're back! I see the security I sent for arrived on time," Schwarz said with a smile as they entered back into the office, the whir of robotics limbs filling the air as two sentinels followed the group in and Weiss returned a look of contempt for the secretary.
"How is everything coming along?" Mr. S responded, not bothering to think of any pleasantries at the moment.
"Everything is proceeding expediently," Schwarz replied, returning to her tablet. "I've sent an invitation to the press for a conference in the main courtyard, and Adolph's just sent in the speech you requested," Schwarz continued, swiping at her tablet and bringing up the speech on one of the office TVs.
"Already?" Mr. S asked, deciding to ignore the fact that they apparently had an in-house speech writer that he should have known on a first name basis. Looking over the speech displayed across the nearby TV screen, Mr. S nodded in approval. He had to admit, it was quite a masterful speech for such a short amount of time; it hit all the right beats, allowed for deviation from the script and, most importantly, was easy to present. Although, Mr. S had to say, the speech might have been a tad too...impassioned.
Looking over the speech several more times, he was soon interrupted as Schwarz appeared by his side and pushed a print out of the speech into his hands. "The Press is gathered sir, they'll be expecting you."
"A moment," Mr. S responded as he pulled out his scroll.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz replied quietly so as to not disturb Mr. Schnee's important preparations. There was no doubt in her mind that he was shifting around millions in stock merely in preparation for his speech. Not wasting the moment, she turned to her own duties, tapping away at her tablet.
Hurriedly, Mr. S typed out "What is White Fang?", readying to define the dozen or so terms he saw on the document and didn't understand. "And while you're at it, run a background check on our speech writer," Mr. S added, not looking away from his scroll.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz added, her eyes flickering over her crowded tablet screen as Mr. S spent the next several minutes looking intently between paper and screen, all while trying to hide the transparent back of his phone from any prying eyes.
Soon enough, he was finished.
Mr. S nervously dallied about on his phone, searching for more excuses to stay behind. Such it was, he leapt in before he could change his mind and proclaimed, "Schwarz, let's go."
"Of course, sir," Schwarz responded, powering down the tablet and placing it onto the desk, wringing her sprained wrist afterwards and receiving a deep look of understanding from the librarian lady.
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Soon, he found himself following Schwarz down a barren hallway with Weiss and the rest of team RWBY walking along behind him. He took a deep breath when the glass doors came into view, a marble stair way and the lush garden beyond it visible through the glass, illuminated by the thousand artificial lights of several dozen news vehicles and camera setups as a crowd of people packed around the podium, stone silent with expectation. Squaring his shoulders, he pushed back all the nervous thoughts bombarding his mind, telling him that he should have set this for an hour later, a day later, that he wasn't prepared, that it wasn't too late to reschedule if he fainted and faked a health crisis.
Shaking away those thoughts, Mr. S looked forward, deciding to use what little time he had on something more productive than being nervous. And, despite his bravado, he had to admit that he was unprepared in at least one respect. Looking down at the speech showed no mention of Blake and, considering the circumstances, he'd have to say something about her on that podium.
"Blake," Mr. S said solemnly, drawing the attention of everyone around him, "I realize you're not in the right mood to want to...act strategically," he said, strategically. "But, for both our sakes, just tell me this…' he paused a moment, formulating the phrase. "Did you stay with the White Fang after they began terrorist activities?"
"Yes," Blake responded, surprising herself with how easy it was to admit that to the man. She knew it was because of how low she must've stood in the man's eyes already, so she didn't really feel shy about confirming his beliefs about her, but, strangely enough, it felt more...freeing than that, like she was talking to a fatherly therapist than "Mr. Schnee". She wasn't sure how to describe it, even to herself.
"But she didn'-", "She never-" Ruby and Weiss both began before they were interrupted by the intensely stern voice of Mr. Schnee.
"How long?" He asked.
"Five years," Blake answered, again without any hesitation despite the fear that crept into her heart at his change of tone. Maybe she was just too tired to hide anymore, the world already thought worse of her.
"But really," Weiss said, chuckling nervously, "she never hurt anybody," she continued as she elbowed Blake in the gut with a whispered "shut up!"
Mr. S breathed thoughtfully through his nose as he brought a hand up to grab his chin. "Is there any evidence that could link you to the white fang after their turn?" he asked with an inquisitive expression.
"Uhhh...Maybe?" Blake answered.
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"...and I remember first learning how she so bravely left the white fang, her only home, immediately, and. I. Say. Immediately. after their ideals turned to ones she could no longer support," Mr. S said, almost pounding on the podium with conviction.
Meanwhile, Schwarz stood off to the side behind him as her face showed a perfectly calm mask of concealed emotional turmoil. Team RWBY lined up besides Schwarz in WBYR formation, left to right, showing an alternating pattern of "barely contained rage" and "horrified anxiety".
"THIS is why, I am naming Blake the new head of our Faunus Outreach Committee," Mr. S continued, "which will be dedicated to forming closer ties with the former leaders of the White Fang, the leaders of Menagerie, and all faunus alike, as well as supporting the the kind of Faunus activism which we hope will bring positive change to BOTH Humanity and Faunus kind." Mr. S finished his speech with a smile as Weiss sputtered in the background, breaking composure along with rest of her team as Yang scowled, Ruby hiccuped and a slow look of hopeless despair drew itself across Blake's features for the fourth time that hour. Schwarz herself took it all in stride, striding forward to hook her arm through Blake's and leading her toward the podium ahead before the rest of team RWBY caught on.
Mr. S noticed the approaching pair as they entered into the spotlight and turned slightly to pose for the camera, moving his arm to hug around the terrified-looking faunus' shoulders as a roar of questions and camera Flashes washed over their forms.
Blake, for her part, was still wondering what Mr. S meant by "Faunus outreach committee" and "Blake will be the new head" and "of." Thankfully enough, this distraction left her still enough for the cameras to get some clear shots of her shocked, cat's eyes, expression as Mr. S smiled genially next to her.
Soon after the reveal, Mr. S stepped away from the podium, letting Schwarz take the mic as he walked off with Blake. Schwarz's droning voice was barely heard over the crow of questioning reporters as she informed them that "Mr. Schnee will not be taking any questions at the moment" and the reporters pretended that they couldn't hear her and kept shouting questions. Mr. S walked away from the podium as Blake and the security bots followed along robotically behind him. He was only five yards away from the doors when he tilted his head the slightest bit upward and was greeted with yet another world shattering reveal just as a particularly enthusiastic reporter managed to capture his attention at that critical moment, quieting all the the clamor around her.
Mr. S turned back to the questioning reporter, breaking every protocol about public relations as he did so. One must forgive him for the lapse, however, for any memories about press release etiquette were, at the moment, drowned out by the singular thought of. 'Holy crap! Somebody broke the moon!'
"Mr. Schnee!" the faunus reporter said, adjusting her reporter's hat as her tail wagged behind her. "Eva Landa from the FRA, Atlas Branch" she introduced herself.
"Yes?" Mr. S asked, with a slightly annoyed expression, realizing from the sudden quiet that it was too late to turn back, all the while occupying himself with the new thoughts of 'Was that there this entire time?' and 'How!? How did I miss that!?', partially to keep himself distracted from the pit weighing on his stomach as he awaited the reporter's question, his heartbeat accelerating and his head clearing as he focused, readying himself for the most horrible, difficult questions imaginable; all the while, his mind rushed to come up with the best, most meaningless response to every contingency.
"What do you say to the allegations that you have had dealings with the White Fang?" She asked, tugging at the inside edge of her blazer with one hand to keep it from flapping in the wind as she reached out her other hand to record his response with her scroll.
Mr. S was, at first, puzzled to hear this question on account of having already answered it by virtue of the entire speech he'd just given. Instinctively, however, he caught on to the intent of the query: that was, to trip him up and have him say something stupid and newsworthy. Nervously rushing, Mr. S blinked as he scoured his mind for something, anything, that could act as an answer without causing the apocalypse.
'Uhh,'
"Fake News," He threw out, with all the confidence of the universe behind him.
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"Sir! You're back! I see the security I sent for arrived on time," Schwarz said with a smile as they entered back into the office, the whir of robotics limbs filling the air as two sentinels followed the group in and Weiss returned a look of contempt for the secretary.
"How is everything coming along?" Mr. S responded, not bothering to think of any pleasantries at the moment.
"Everything is proceeding expediently," Schwarz replied, returning to her tablet. "I've sent an invitation to the press for a conference in the main courtyard, and Adolph's just sent in the speech you requested," Schwarz continued, swiping at her tablet and bringing up the speech on one of the office TVs.
"Already?" Mr. S asked, deciding to ignore the fact that they apparently had an in-house speech writer that he should have known on a first name basis. Looking over the speech displayed across the nearby TV screen, Mr. S nodded in approval. He had to admit, it was quite a masterful speech for such a short amount of time; it hit all the right beats, allowed for deviation from the script and, most importantly, was easy to present. Although, Mr. S had to say, the speech might have been a tad too...impassioned.
Looking over the speech several more times, he was soon interrupted as Schwarz appeared by his side and pushed a print out of the speech into his hands. "The Press is gathered sir, they'll be expecting you."
"A moment," Mr. S responded as he pulled out his scroll.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz replied quietly so as to not disturb Mr. Schnee's important preparations. There was no doubt in her mind that he was shifting around millions in stock merely in preparation for his speech. Not wasting the moment, she turned to her own duties, tapping away at her tablet.
Hurriedly, Mr. S typed out "What is White Fang?", readying to define the dozen or so terms he saw on the document and didn't understand. "And while you're at it, run a background check on our speech writer," Mr. S added, not looking away from his scroll.
"Yes, sir," Schwarz added, her eyes flickering over her crowded tablet screen as Mr. S spent the next several minutes looking intently between paper and screen, all while trying to hide the transparent back of his phone from any prying eyes.
Soon enough, he was finished.
Mr. S nervously dallied about on his phone, searching for more excuses to stay behind. Such it was, he leapt in before he could change his mind and proclaimed, "Schwarz, let's go."
"Of course, sir," Schwarz responded, powering down the tablet and placing it onto the desk, wringing her sprained wrist afterwards and receiving a deep look of understanding from the librarian lady.
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Soon, he found himself following Schwarz down a barren hallway with Weiss and the rest of team RWBY walking along behind him. He took a deep breath when the glass doors came into view, a marble stair way and the lush garden beyond it visible through the glass, illuminated by the thousand artificial lights of several dozen news vehicles and camera setups as a crowd of people packed around the podium, stone silent with expectation. Squaring his shoulders, he pushed back all the nervous thoughts bombarding his mind, telling him that he should have set this for an hour later, a day later, that he wasn't prepared, that it wasn't too late to reschedule if he fainted and faked a health crisis.
Shaking away those thoughts, Mr. S looked forward, deciding to use what little time he had on something more productive than being nervous. And, despite his bravado, he had to admit that he was unprepared in at least one respect. Looking down at the speech showed no mention of Blake and, considering the circumstances, he'd have to say something about her on that podium.
"Blake," Mr. S said solemnly, drawing the attention of everyone around him, "I realize you're not in the right mood to want to...act strategically," he said, strategically. "But, for both our sakes, just tell me this…' he paused a moment, formulating the phrase. "Did you stay with the White Fang after they began terrorist activities?"
"Yes," Blake responded, surprising herself with how easy it was to admit that to the man. She knew it was because of how low she must've stood in the man's eyes already, so she didn't really feel shy about confirming his beliefs about her, but, strangely enough, it felt more...freeing than that, like she was talking to a fatherly therapist than "Mr. Schnee". She wasn't sure how to describe it, even to herself.
"But she didn'-", "She never-" Ruby and Weiss both began before they were interrupted by the intensely stern voice of Mr. Schnee.
"How long?" He asked.
"Five years," Blake answered, again without any hesitation despite the fear that crept into her heart at his change of tone. Maybe she was just too tired to hide anymore, the world already thought worse of her.
"But really," Weiss said, chuckling nervously, "she never hurt anybody," she continued as she elbowed Blake in the gut with a whispered "shut up!"
Mr. S breathed thoughtfully through his nose as he brought a hand up to grab his chin. "Is there any evidence that could link you to the white fang after their turn?" he asked with an inquisitive expression.
"Uhhh...Maybe?" Blake answered.
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"...and I remember first learning how she so bravely left the white fang, her only home, immediately, and. I. Say. Immediately. after their ideals turned to ones she could no longer support," Mr. S said, almost pounding on the podium with conviction.
Meanwhile, Schwarz stood off to the side behind him as her face showed a perfectly calm mask of concealed emotional turmoil. Team RWBY lined up besides Schwarz in WBYR formation, left to right, showing an alternating pattern of "barely contained rage" and "horrified anxiety".
"THIS is why, I am naming Blake the new head of our Faunus Outreach Committee," Mr. S continued, "which will be dedicated to forming closer ties with the former leaders of the White Fang, the leaders of Menagerie, and all faunus alike, as well as supporting the the kind of Faunus activism which we hope will bring positive change to BOTH Humanity and Faunus kind." Mr. S finished his speech with a smile as Weiss sputtered in the background, breaking composure along with rest of her team as Yang scowled, Ruby hiccuped and a slow look of hopeless despair drew itself across Blake's features for the fourth time that hour. Schwarz herself took it all in stride, striding forward to hook her arm through Blake's and leading her toward the podium ahead before the rest of team RWBY caught on.
Mr. S noticed the approaching pair as they entered into the spotlight and turned slightly to pose for the camera, moving his arm to hug around the terrified-looking faunus' shoulders as a roar of questions and camera Flashes washed over their forms.
Blake, for her part, was still wondering what Mr. S meant by "Faunus outreach committee" and "Blake will be the new head" and "of." Thankfully enough, this distraction left her still enough for the cameras to get some clear shots of her shocked, cat's eyes, expression as Mr. S smiled genially next to her.
Soon after the reveal, Mr. S stepped away from the podium, letting Schwarz take the mic as he walked off with Blake. Schwarz's droning voice was barely heard over the crow of questioning reporters as she informed them that "Mr. Schnee will not be taking any questions at the moment" and the reporters pretended that they couldn't hear her and kept shouting questions. Mr. S walked away from the podium as Blake and the security bots followed along robotically behind him. He was only five yards away from the doors when he tilted his head the slightest bit upward and was greeted with yet another world shattering reveal just as a particularly enthusiastic reporter managed to capture his attention at that critical moment, quieting all the the clamor around her.
Mr. S turned back to the questioning reporter, breaking every protocol about public relations as he did so. One must forgive him for the lapse, however, for any memories about press release etiquette were, at the moment, drowned out by the singular thought of. 'Holy crap! Somebody broke the moon!'
"Mr. Schnee!" the faunus reporter said, adjusting her reporter's hat as her tail wagged behind her. "Eva Landa from the FRA, Atlas Branch" she introduced herself.
"Yes?" Mr. S asked, with a slightly annoyed expression, realizing from the sudden quiet that it was too late to turn back, all the while occupying himself with the new thoughts of 'Was that there this entire time?' and 'How!? How did I miss that!?', partially to keep himself distracted from the pit weighing on his stomach as he awaited the reporter's question, his heartbeat accelerating and his head clearing as he focused, readying himself for the most horrible, difficult questions imaginable; all the while, his mind rushed to come up with the best, most meaningless response to every contingency.
"What do you say to the allegations that you have had dealings with the White Fang?" She asked, tugging at the inside edge of her blazer with one hand to keep it from flapping in the wind as she reached out her other hand to record his response with her scroll.
Mr. S was, at first, puzzled to hear this question on account of having already answered it by virtue of the entire speech he'd just given. Instinctively, however, he caught on to the intent of the query: that was, to trip him up and have him say something stupid and newsworthy. Nervously rushing, Mr. S blinked as he scoured his mind for something, anything, that could act as an answer without causing the apocalypse.
'Uhh,'
"Fake News," He threw out, with all the confidence of the universe behind him.
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