Mit Livs Eventyr [RWBY]

The teachers. It's the only option that makes sense - your fellow students are an easy target, but they're almost as ignorant as you. A candid look at the professors, insight into how they really feel, well... honestly the very idea makes Jaune practically jump up and down inside the well of shadows like a hyperactive bunny. You had no idea that being a 'fly on the wall' was such a deeply-held wish among humans.

You move like a whispered secret in the night and this, this is what you've been missing. Flowing up and out of the window like smoke, keeping low to the grass outside, slithering between individual blades like a thousand indistinct black serpents. It's familiar. It's safe. It's comforting. You aren't 'happy', of course. Such things are reserved only for humans, but you are content and filled with a certain zealous eagerness to see this through.

You no longer have a physical nose but you catch Gotthard's scent all the same. It's strange - human of course, but carrying a faint and familiar scent. Grimm but old, baked-in like carrion too aged to even reek right. You catch a few scant glimpses of the greater castle as you follow the scent, flitting and flickering between the deeper shadows in the alcoves. Several more outbuildings, a towering central keep with entry hall, and the grand clock tower crowning it all that must certainly be Ozpin's abode. Several more floors and so many rooms to explore, but you follow the scent to its source. Swarming across time-worn stone floors, pressing practically flat against rough and rocky walls like a shifting oil-black mural. Flow through the cracks in one door and into some sort of antechamber.

Voices. This is it. You compress down, down, a flat puddle of shadow and ash. Seeping beneath the door like water and darting into the first patch of true shadow you can find.

Hold still. Were you discovered? Wait and listen. You have no heart to beat faster, no breath to hold, but you wait all the same. No shouts of alarm. No weapons being drawn. You're safe. You can observe.

It looks a lot like Jaune's memories of the family living room. Hunting lodge? It stands out from what you've seen of the castle merely by its state of repair. It's a comfortable place, warm and relatively cheery, the roaring orange fire of the fireplace casting the flickering black shadows in which you hide. A brass-framed, silver-backed mirror sits above - you make sure to keep beyond its sight. You're hiding behind and beneath one of the half-dozen or so armchairs arranged artfully around the space, seated atop a broad carpet. There's a table against the far end of the room with food and coffee, the latter of which is clearly in high demand. The room practically reeks of the stuff but there's a fresh pot brewing already.

"He can be insufferable sometimes, I swear." Gotthard finally catches the twig tangled up in her hair and plucks it out with an incensed grumble. "He could stand to at least be less cavalier about school property."

"Hell with school property, that airship was supposed to be our ride here!" another woman interjects. She's blonde and young, probably the youngest in the room, dressed for travel and nursing what looks like the latest of many cups. "Poor Urdr couldn't take the strain on her tired old bones, we had to carry her up those horrible steps."

"You had to carry her up the steps. I had to carry all the luggage," interjects another woman. She's older, but nonetheless the spitting image of the first. She's dressed in a simpler gown, and leans over the back of a large plush armchair in which an ancient old woman sleeps like the dead. Steel-grey hair, wrinkled skin, a simple dark grey shift draped over her wizened frame like a blanket. Clearly the 'Urdr' being referred to.

"Let's just try to keep this in perspective." What you mistook for a barrel draped in a false beard turns out to be another teacher, squeezed into a vast chair that still seems far too small wrapped around him. There's really no doubt in your mind that he's the aforementioned forgemaster - he looks like he could smelt ingots by grinding raw ore between his palms. "Is this really worse than the time he set Grimm on the train three kilometres out from Vale?"

"Hah! That's right, it nearly derailed," laughs another, younger man. Dark-skinned, smooth-faced and kind-eyed, a pair of equine ears emerge from his tousled hair like a pair of furred quotation marks. "Had to do his fair share of fast-talking, didn't he?"

"I did ninety percent of it," Gotthard grumbles.

"The year he dropped all pretence and just set the students on a bracing cross-country hike for Beacon, now that was a test," the final teacher reminisces. He'd be the oldest in the room were it not for the unconscious crone. His hair and voluminous moustache are completely silver, and his frame is wrestler-broad with a stomach that's long-since become a single rounded slab of intermingled flab and brawn. "Nothing but grit, determination, and survivalism."

"There was one team," the young blonde woman says to herself in a low voice, clicking her fingers to jog her memory. "Wandered off-course- oh that's right. They just bartered for train tickets and got here that way, right? I forget, did Ozpin even fail them?"

"You know, I honestly couldn't say," Gotthard replies. She glances down at the pot. "I have refills, if anyone's biting? Skuld? Helmutt?"

"Oh bless you Glynda, you're a lifesaver," the blonde woman - Skuld, you presume - breathes as she hurries over for her refill.

"Do slow down," Glynda teases. "You'll age yourself with all this caffeine."

Skuld and her older doppelganger - her mother? - share a laugh at what must be an inside joke. The horse-eared man makes to get up for his refill, but something occurs to him halfway through, and he slowly sinks back down in his chair. He cradles his empty mug thoughtfully, drumming black nails on the ceramic.

"You've had a good look at her," he says at last, looking up at Gotthard. "Is it true? It's really her daughter?"

Gotthard grows more sombre at the question. She rests one hand on the table and nods slightly. "Without a doubt. No mistaking eyes like that. And to have so much control over her Semblance at such a young age..."

"That's why Ozpin let her in, isn't it?" the horse-eared man says with a certain grimness in his voice. "Killing some Bösenwulf all by herself was just a pretext."

"In fairness I feel Ozpin is more like a dog and just does things arbitrarily," Skuld comments.

"So you don't think he had any ulterior motives in giving Aurora Rose's only daughter a scholarship?"

Skuld has no answer to that beyond the patently obvious, so she falls silent. The mustachioed man fills the gap readily.

"Not that we should downplay her own achievements too severely. To enter an elder Bösenwulf's lair alone and emerge victorious, in part due to a weapon of her own design, is no small feat at such a young age. We must only keep in mind that she is still a child, and her Semblance has her thinking that she can simply run from any consequence of her actions."

"Helmutt's right," Gotthard says. "Rose needs to be handled carefully, but don't mistake my meaning. We mustn't judge her unfairly but nor can we afford to coddle her. She succeeds, or fails, on nothing but her own merits. We owe her mother no less for her service."

The mood grows sombre. All present take on melancholy casts, staring into space or into their own coffee mugs. The horse-eared one is the first to recover, a slight smile crossing his lips.

"We have quite a few faunus in this batch, don't we?" he says. "That's something. Russell and Yang are natural-born Vale citizens, right? Yang seems to have done fine for herself sofar, but poor Russell. To think of all that potential being wasted if we hadn't picked him up."

He trails off, frowning. "Although to speak of wasted potential..."

"Belladonna?" the mustachio'd man prompts him. The horse-eared young professor nods.

"Her I don't understand. How can she be so dismissive about this? It's the kind of opportunity so many could only dream of and she's already acting like it's some sort of... I don't know, imposition." He lets his empty mug dangle freely by the handle on two fingers. "I'm just glad Ozpin didn't throw all three faunus on the same team for one of his arcane 'plans'. The three of them couldn't be more different."

"Or heaven fucking forbid with that Weiss girl," Gotthard adds. Pausing to badly suppress a grimace. "Just two of them."

The horse-earned one just leans forward and kneads his eyes with the heels of his palms, groaning like he's about to be sick. A heavy sigh travels around the room, carried by the voices of a faculty coming to terms with what they'll have to handle for the year. The mustachioed one tops up his mug with his hip flask.

"If you ask me, she's the real mystery," he says, taking a generous sip. He gestures with his free hand. "Now Winchester, Bronzewing, Arc, they're easy. Family business, get half a dozen applicants like them every year. Ren, Valkyrie, Yang, Nikos, they just want to kill Grimm, get them every year too - even if Nikos had to cross half the world to come here as well. Schnee?" He shrugs. "I can't think of one good reason why she would become a Huntress, let alone of Vale. If you ask me she doesn't have the temperament for it at all. In Ozpin's place I would've failed her in an instant."

"Yes, well... a lot of us would do things differently in Ozpin's place. Yet the school still stands." Gotthard sighs and shakes her head. "Even if he makes it very difficult to trust his judgement sometimes. He put her on a team with two faunus for Maiden's sake! For all we know Belladonna's parents are both working themselves to death in a Schnee-run colonial debtor's prison. This isn't just interpersonal friction, this is homicide waiting to happen."

"Let's try to look on the bright side!" the horse faunus interjects with a tone of somewhat-strained optimism, raking his nails down his cheeks and throwing on a smile. "Maybe this will be good for her? Faunus teammates, mandatory Arcadian studies courses, some distance from her family - maybe we can turn her around?"

Gotthard purses her lips and stares at nothing, deep in thought. She takes a long sip from her mug. "I hope so. I just think we should temper our expectations a little."

The old crone lurches awake and upright, creaking like a rusty door hinge. "NIKOS KNOWS HER DOOM BUT NOT THE- oh, hello dears. I must have dozed off."

"(Oh did you now, I hadn't noticed)," Skuld mutters under her breath.

"WHAT?" the old woman shouts.

"And on that note I think it's best we all retire," Gotthard says, setting down her mug. "The students won't be the only ones run ragged this year. Lovely to chat with you all, regardless."

You sink down into the shadows, lying as still as still can be as the professors exchange a few more platitudes and goodbyes on the way out. The three women take the longest, burdened by their elder, who appears to have fallen straight into a sleep as deep as death once more. There are a few muttered curses from the youngest. But soon enough you hear the door click, and you're alone in the teacher's lounge at last.

You rise to your full 'height', a shifting assortment of shadow and smoke in a vaguely humanoid form, and ponder what you heard. You've been given a great deal to think about, and yet you've still come away with more questions than answers. Vexing, but a matter for another night. You've done what you came to do and it's best you not stay out of bed longer than absolutely necessary. You slither and flow over to the door, stretching out your form to slip through the lock once more.

The door opens at your touch instead, swinging inward. You know for a fact it opened the other way.

What lies beyond is not the hallway, but a room. A room just like the one you were leaving - you glance back to confirm that it's still there, just the way you left it - different in only a few subtle ways. The mirror above the fire is gone, the coffee-maker replaced by a liquor cabinet filled to the brim with exquisite labels in crystal vessels. Only one chair beside the roaring fire, backlit by the silver moon shining through the tall windows.

"Snooping around after dark, I see. Dangerous. Very dangerous indeed."

The Groom sits in the armchair, leafing through a leather-bound book with practiced idleness. He 'glances' up at you with the hollow pits behind his glasses, still mechanically turning pages.

"The Snow Queen gave you a gift and sent you packing before I could so much as properly greet you. I'm hurt, Shadow. Truly, deeply hurt."

You just look at him. In your true form you don't have the capacity for much else. He barely even seems to notice. He closes his book around his thumb and adjusts himself in his chair, crossing one leg over the other. Taking a long, deep breath of comfort and satisfaction. The very picture of opulence and elegance.

"Make no mistake, you won't survive this without my help. You need charm. You need charisma. You need, in other words-" a mirthless smile that exposes too many teeth stretches across his masked face "-to woo a fine woman. And I can provide what you need. Help me help you, Shadow."

He uncrosses his leg and leans forward, the upholstery creaking and squeaking gently as his weight shifts. "Tell me; which fine lady draws your eye the most? I'm positively dying to know."

You get the sense that he's making this out to be something it isn't, but you don't care to argue with an elder Grimm when it's offering to help you. If he has answers or advice, you'll gladly take them.

[ ] Ruby Rose. She was the first thing on the professors' minds, a mystery and a prodigy, all centred around this 'Aurora Rose' you just heard so little and yet so much about.
[ ] Xiaolong Yang. A fighter and a killer, a true Huntress, yet strangely close to Ruby. What history do they share?
[ ] Blake Belladonna. A faunus accepted to a prestigious Hunter academy, yet surly and disdainful. Even the teachers are struggling with her attitude.
[ ] Weiss Schnee. The spitting image of the Snow Queen. Some sort of princess from a faraway land, her motives for coming here at all a mystery twice over. Lonely and yet violently opposed to comfort and company.
[ ] Pyrrha Nikos. You've made a little headway with her already, but you can tell you've still got a long road ahead. And then there was the old woman's strange outburst, coupled with what you already know about how strange it is to come to Beacon from abroad.
[ ] Nora Valkyrie. You know vanishingly little about her, but she's going to be on your team so you might as well start somewhere. As an added bonus, an 'in' with her is an 'in' with Ren.