"I just had a meeting with my boss," you blurt out.
"Shit, say no more kid." Torchwick swaps cane-hands and offers his right. You clasp it firmly and he hauls you back to your feet with a soft grunt of effort, standing you upright and dusting off your shoulders. "Good news is, Uncle Torchwick has just the thing. One of my jobs is helping teach ya how humans act, and y'know what humans do when they just got off the horn with their shitty boss?"
I want to keep Roman around. For all that he's a brutal mob boss who has no trouble feeding people to horrifying creatures who seek to bring about the end of human civilisation, he's incredibly charming.
You nod enthusiastically and swing yourself around again, staggering over to the aforementioned deceased feline. Certainly no real objection presents itself - it's downright nostalgic to be eating carrion at this point. Not that you really know what a 'nostalgic' is but the nice thing about being drunk is not having to think about questions like that. You simply scoop it up and... devour it whole. Your jaw unhinges, your face splits in two, and down the gullet it goes. Torchwick whoops excitedly, clapping all the while. You hold up one finger to silence him and wait for it to digest.
Ah, drunk people. They make
weird choices. Even if they eat souls/stories.
"... his name was Paul-"
"I FUCKING KNEW IT!" Torchwick howls at the top of his lungs, snapping his fingers and pointing straight at your nose. Then he whips his cane out and smashes the last display just because it seemed lonely being the only unbroken one. "Hey, hey, hey help me find some paint. Gonna scrawl 'I KNOW' all over everything tennnnn-foot high then roll in and jack up the protection fee. Hah, man, you are just... just the best, y'know kid?"
Obviously this is meant to be comedic, and it is. But, taking this another way - I assume that whoever provided this meat, whether the shop or who the shop brought it from, didn't kill someone to make meat. Maybe they just picked up a homeless guy who died of - something. Probably not exposure, Vale's a heavily urbanised valley. Anyway, this underlines that things are super shitty. If you're pikcing dead people up to sell them as meat, when cannibalism is such a massive taboo,
especially in this world:
Catherine only barely made it back of course, her team ran into some trouble in the mountains near the Vale-Atlas border. Dust miners trapped by a cave-in forced to eat their own dead and possessed by Grimm for their trouble - hardly pleasant dinner conversation by Jaune's standards but apparently he's the only one that thinks so. Blanche only got the King's Brand last summer and she still won't stop showing it off to everyone.
So, uh. Eating people can literally get you possessed by Grimm. I think that underscores how bad things really are.
You double-take, blinking blearily. There's a woman standing next to you, perhaps a hair shorter than you - and she has it to spare. A thick, curly, lustrous mane of hair that isn't simply blonde like Jaune's, but so golden that it genuinely seems to be spun from the metal itself. The ridged, coal-black horns that curl from her forehead and corkscrew back into the golden mass are almost completely swallowed up - if she bothered to style it even slightly you never would've noticed them. Her canted lilac eyes meet yours, and she flashes you a smile.
Faunus Yang? Good shit. Also, good - experience with hangovers. She'll also be a good teacher as to social graces.
Your heart seized in the icy grip of primal panic, you turn and sprint into the ship to escape the spitting image of the Snow Queen.
"Hey, Jaune, why do you always act all flustered around Weiss? Does someone's kokoro go doki-doki?"
"No, actually. She reminds me of the horrific monstrosity who I serve, who plots eternally to overthrow the works of man and crush humanity under her icy heel."
"Hey, I don't judge. You do you."
This does not make you 'nervous'. This does not make you feel fear. This is what you were born for.
That's a lie. Jaune has so little chill that it's definitely influencing you. Thankfully,all Hunters are weirdos, so your complete lack of chill and social savvy will go unremarked.
[ ] The strong golden-haired woman with horns and the smaller girl in red and black. The former seems to... 'like' you well enough already.
It kind of makes sense to go for them in-character. We already have an "in", it's the path of least resistance.
[ ] The other animal-person on the ship and the well-built young man she appears to be having a staring contest with. Her ears twitch every now and then in vague annoyance, and the man with slicked-back hair is rolling his jaw as he clearly searches for something to actually say.
So, the ex-
terrorist Faunus rights activist and Cardin. I want to see this trainwreck in action.
[ ] The long-haired man with a pink streak in his hair sitting with his ginger friend. He's reading a book, and she appears to have been talking about
somethingever since you left the dock, without once having stopped for breath.
Nora and Ren are just going to be fun to read.
[ ] The woman with flame-red hair standing off by herself. Well, there is a young man with ratty clothes and a half-shaved head standing off to the side and clearly agonising over whether to approach her or not, but she seems to acknowledge him only with vague annoyance.
Pyrrha! And Rando. I want to see Zerban write Pyrrha, personality and fighting. She's an Achilles-expy for chrissakes!
[X] The woman with flame-red hair standing off by herself. Well, there is a young man with ratty clothes and a half-shaved head standing off to the side and clearly agonising over whether to approach her or not, but she seems to acknowledge him only with vague annoyance.
"No, I don't sign autographs." "I literally don't know who you are." "Oh, thank fuck."
