"I know that you are all tired, concerned, and confused about what happened last night." You say as the last of your less important employees file into the ground floor of the tower. "Well, I went to investigate early this morning and it is much worse than we all hoped, but not as bad as you might have feared. Vale still stands... but only just. What remains is buried beneath quite a bit of rubble."
Like clockwork, the crowd of faunus and the occasional human all burst into excited chatter. disbelief, fear, indifference, anger. The shouting goes on for several minutes before you silence them all with a Lightning Bolt against the ceiling.
"I heard some of you ask 'how' or 'why', well the short answer is that the dreadfully loud thunder-peel last night was in fact an explosion of unbelievable magnitude. After speaking with General Ironwood, neither of us are any closer to knowing just what Ozpin was doing, but Beacon is no more thanks to his negligence." You explain to them all, since it isn't as if something has to be true to be 'the truth'.
From them, the idea that everything was Ozpin's fault would spread through the rest of the populace. Using Ironwood's name would only help make it more 'official', rumors being a rather virulent thing that clung to any bit of substantiation and grew with each telling. After all, the hearts of men are easily swayed. There would be no denying who caused this disaster, not even Ironwood could say for sure that Ozpin hadn't been involved and he certainly wouldn't be the one to give up any secrets that he might have known to lie beneath the academy. Most importantly though, was that nobody would associate the destruction of Vale with your apprentice and therefore yourself.
"Now I know this must come as a shock, but we cannot let the actions of one irresponsible man stop us from moving forward. All of you are secure in food, shelter, and health while under my employ, but there are thousands of people in what is left of Vale who have neither. Human or faunus, nobody should be left to die of dehydration beneath the rubble of their homes and I expect you all agree."
Clearly not all of them do, but the majority seem to and the rest... well, they don't look as if they're going to argue against helping. It was still work and they were technically getting paid for it, which is good enough for your purposes. A hand rose from the crowd and you motion for silence before pointing to them.
A brief shuffle of the crowd reveals the somewhat bedraggled form of Sarah... Pale-ham? Pellum? Whatever her surname, the displaced parasite host had slipped your mind of late, but now there is a certain eagerness to her as she asks, "What can we do to help? I assume there's still search and rescue to be done and we should help there too, but has anyone come up with a plan for clearing roads? Fresh water distribution? It's getting colder, but we should probably also have some teams for removing bodies before they start to rot or attract pests."
Having forgotten all about her and most of the others from Brockton Bay, you didn't expect her input. Glory Girl and Amy had actually been the ones you intended to act as 'heroic' inspiration for the rest. She does sound enthusiastic, as well as experienced, so it isn't as if you're going to ignore her.
"Road clearing was part of the plan, since that would make everything else easier, but I had other things in mind. If you want to help organize for anything you think might help in the city itself, it would be most appreciated." You tell her, more than happy to offload the brunt of the work onto the woman. "For the rest of you, General Ironwood has promised a shipment of supplies in the next few days that are to be used for making health and disease cure potions. I would ask that anyone less physically capable or squeamish stay behind to help with preparations for that."
-------------------------------------
Young teenagers, elderly relatives that had been slipped through the portal during evacuation, and the crippled; not the best available, but definitely the least useful elsewhere. Instructing them all in the set-up, use, and maintenance of a basic alchemy set had taken several hours and it would be a daily occurrence before you trusted any of the fetchers with actual potion brewing when the ingredients arrive.
Now that that is done though, you can move on to another student in much more dire need of instruction, namely Cattleya.
If her idiotic escapades in Menagerie hadn't tipped out off to how ill-equipped she is to handle any sort of self-governance, the fact that she couldn't identify where she'd gone wrong definitely did. How pathetic of the supposedly unbending Karin to let her child grow so incapable just because of infirmity. In your own clan, someone as frail as Cattleya had been would have at least been taught how to handle themselves outside the safety of home and trained in less strenuous arts like alchemy or mysticism. Assuming the clan-mothers were so incompetent that they couldn't create a cure by the time she reached adulthood, she would have still been more than capable of caring for herself.
That isn't to say that she is mentally incapable, she isn't, but she dearly lacks for life experience or any sort of knowledge on how to keep herself alive beyond the academic. Were she not possessed of Beast magic, she would have no doubt died a dozen times over on that trip. Her reasoning that it was the source of that same Beast magic that sent her there was irrelevant and untrue. Hircine didn't make her commune with Hermaus Mora and he didn't tell her to run off into the desert unprepared and ignorant of what lay in wait.
It was a foul miracle that she even managed to get that far considering how Paty and Asena said she acted among the citizenry of the island nation.
So it is that you stand in the forest with a thoroughly chastised pinkette, her displeased grumblings earning no pity from you.
Status: Healthy
Magicka: (650/650)
Choose:
[] She's too reliant on her transformation-
-[] Teach her the most powerful of basic spells; Sparks. Just hope she doesn't fry herself and force you to heal her like her sister.
-[] work with her on improving what combat spells she has.
[] Teach more Reach magic-
-[] Nature magics may be slow to start, but they allow for unrivaled control of an area when properly cast.
-[] Focus on improving her Beast magic, partial transformations are fully possible if she just works at it.
[] Summon daedra as needed to force her to plan rather than just use brute force. Winged Twilights to avoid her swipes via flight, Frost Atronachs for their extreme durability and strength, Spider Daedra for their cruel cunning, etc.
[] Write in.
