Alternative title: How to overthrow corrupt capitalist corporations for the good of society and simple sanity
Decades after the Faunus Rights Revolution, saying that you're a Faunus on Remnant is still an admission to being a second-class citizen. Blake Belladonna would like to change that even if the White Fang's recent pivot toward violence may yet make it far more difficult than it needs to be. Those in power are not in her favor, the general public doesn't yet care enough to exert effort toward supporting Faunus rights, and overall, it sometimes seems like the whole world is working against her.
AN: For those who have a strong preference, there is a separate poll for which viewpoint (first-person, second-person, third-person, or the narrative vs. vote contrast seen in this OP) will be used for the quest. I'll retroactively edit the OP to match the winner after a few days. EDIT: Annnd looks like the hybrid won.
Knowledge of the potential planes in this quest (RWBY, MGLN, Fairy Tail) is not required, and all three settings will be AU to some degree to aid in that lack of requirement.
"Move up to the next car. I'll set the charges."
"What about the crew members?"
"What about them?"
Such a short exchange, yet every repeat within Blake's mind struck another blow to her hopes and dreams. It distracted her in a critical moment—let her fall to a body slam of all things, and forced Adam to save her from literally being crushed underfoot. Even when they were both blasted outside, Blake's head was half a continent away from the fight. She couldn't so much as focus on striking weaknesses instead of armor plating.
"What about them?"
She should've expected this when Adam didn't bother to review the crew manifests with her. Blake suspected she knew what he was thinking: as far as he was concerned, the crew members were acceptable targets. Every one of them were humans on the exploitative Schnee Dust Company's payroll.
"What about them?"
But killing the crew would harm the White Fang's fight for Faunus rights, not help it. SDC-controlled media demonized the White Fang no matter what they did, yet the White Fang was known to minimize collateral damage even on their controversial assassination missions. Anyone who drifted away from the SDC infosphere and their affiliates could easily realize how exaggerated the SDC's claims were; most of the White Fang's more recent recruits had been acquired that way.
"What about them?"
Changing that equation would dramatically reduce their potential recruiting pool and would slowly turn public opinion against Faunus rights. Quite frankly, the freight train's crew members literally weren't important enough to kill. It would let the SDC reframe the war as one of innocent everyman humans against fanatical Faunus rather than a workers' war against corporate exploitation.
"What about them?"
She couldn't let Adam undo what progress they'd made. The White Fang was growing, and at an increasing rate. Every new recruit was one who could potentially recruit one or two of their friends. She couldn't let Adam turn that positive trend into a negative one; the remains of their romantic relationship had more than demonstrated his ability to—don't think about it.
"What about them?"
Blake barely noticed when Adam's Semblance-enhanced strike disintegrated the SDC Spider Droid; she'd already hopped across cars and was steeling herself to do what she knew had to be done. It was difficult to force out so much as a single word from her throat.
"What about them?"
"Bye."
"What about them?"
She'd hoped to simply cut herself out of Adam's life and assumed that he would respect that choice. Cutting the train link with an Aura-infused blow could have been the work of an instant if she hadn't turned the strike into a slow, ponderous thing. She'd meant to communicate her regret through eye contact, wished for Adam to realize that she didn't want to have to leave him.
"What about them?"
She'd never know if Adam would have respected her choice, because that was when an explosive round caught her in the upper back and launched her beneath the train.
Blake awoke screaming. Finding out that she still had a throat to scream with was surprising enough to make her choke it off and fearfully scan her surroundings. Her multicolored, shifting, alien surroundings taken directly from the mind of a madman. Unless the gods truly were insane, she had the distinct impression that this couldn't be any sort of afterlife. The budding burning in her chest was concerning, but it didn't really hurt; instead, she had the feeling that it was the only thing keeping her alive in the space between worlds and what.
She glanced to her right and blinked at the alien world before her. The world she was now outside of. She chanced a look around herself and found yet another plane with wildly different geography and distributions of colored mana. Mana that she could use for magic, because that was also something she apparently knew about now and could use.
...Well, at least I know why I'm not dead.
She felt a hysterical laugh escape her throat. She'd known for a long time that her Semblance was that of a coward, of someone who would run away and let an expendable clone take a hit for her. She hadn't realized that it could stretch so far as letting her run to entirely different worlds.
No, no, she couldn't afford to dwell on such thoughts; she could already feel this place eating away at what little remained of her Aura like a Beowolf gnawing on a limb. She should focus on picking a world before this place went from chewing Aura to chewing her.
OOC Vote: What is the primary color of mana produced by your soul? Your soul will still produce other colors, but in lesser quantities; it won't be your primary focus. (Use standard X voting)
[] RedOnce upon a time, this might have been the easiest color for you. Now, though, the flames and destruction of Red remind you of the ugly direction that the White Fang appears to have pivoted toward. You'd prefer to specialize in something that you can lead rather than be led by.
...Also, we already have a quest for that.
[] Black
The SDC and other exploitative companies are only interested in their bottom lines, and they're used to having militaries to back them up. However, there's always a bigger monster—and that monster could be you. Metaphorically. You're trying to not become the sort of person who could be the villain in a fairy tale.
Black mana would let you inflict curses to hamper your enemies and all that they work for. Short-term curses could weaken your enemies for long enough for you to win the battle; long-term ones could harm the health and luck of increasingly large groups, including potentially the entire SDC when you're powerful enough. It also seems to have a heavy association with raw magical might: you could have a much easier time in full-fledged fights and in fighting off assassination attempts. That could be accomplished via blasts that force weakness or withering upon your enemies, draining the life from foes and taking it for yourself, harming yourself to do far worse to the enemy, or even reanimating the fallen. Really, you're starting to suspect that some fairy tale witches might have been based off wielders of Black mana…
[] Blue
Relatively low-casualty methods clearly aren't producing fast enough results for the poor and disenfranchised to stick with them, and a frontal assault would do even worse without significantly more power than the Faunus populace is willing to muster at this time. Blue mana would let you slip behind the metaphorical walls and begin introducing cracks in enemy defenses.
Forceful mind control would be beyond you for quite a while, but you might never need it. Illusions, shapeshifting, artificially induced twinges of emotion, forced Semblance usage or temporary Semblance copying, magical item creation, concealment, memory deletion or editing, computer control… if you want to topple a criminal empire without anyone ever learning your name, then Blue seems like the color to do it with. When facing off against mana-based mages, Blue mana should also let you learn how to negate or redirect enemy spells—at least, provided that you understand those spells almost well enough to use them yourself or you otherwise know an exploitable weakness.
Both colors could potentially let you control and hamper the Grimm, although you rather think that might be an absolutely terrible idea on your homeworld. Sufficiently large swarms or especially old Grimm are known to display dangerous levels of intelligence. Controlling them seems like an easy way to get that malevolent intelligence to focus solely on slaughtering you, to say nothing of what it would do to public opinion.
IC Vote: Once again, use standard X voting. All settings are AU to help ensure that prior setting knowledge will not be required.
[] RWBY Your homeworld, Remnant.
You don't think it wise to return just yet—which is good, because you don't think you can right now. Remnant doesn't seem to be one of the two worlds within easy view; you'll need to search for it again. You won't push the point right now. As long as he thinks you're dead, Adam is ludicrously unlikely to tell others of the "betrayal" you'd almost committed on the SDC freight train. Return before he has the chance to martyr you, and you'll be viewed as a traitor instead. Return later and your bridges in the White Fang may yet remain unburned.
You are a bit worried about the possibility of the 'Fang spreading something like, "Blake wanted to spare the crew that ultimately killed her!" Still, you're pretty sure they'll do that regardless of whether or not they think you're alive. Just replace a perceived success with "tried to kill her" and the message remains largely the same. It's not like you can do anything about it; you get the feeling that you'll need to spend a significant amount of time searching for Remnant before you can return.
[] Fairy Tail In the absence of an outside threat, it seems that people are even more willing to fight among themselves.
A world less advanced than your own, and with wielders of colored mana and magic rather than Aura and Dust. Oh, many of them use some Aura unconsciously to soften and strengthen physical blows, but they don't have full access like you do. The Wizards of this world also don't seem to have heard of "crippling overspecialization" and often only specialize in one or two types of magic. You can't really blame them, though; it seems as though they're manipulating mana through rote and practice, not by seeing and sensing it. You'll probably be able to learn how to wield magic in single-digit percentages of the time it takes them.
Their world also doesn't have Grimm, either, so you'll reluctantly admit that they might've come out on top. Half their villages don't even have walls! Oh, there are some magically infused monsters around, but none a tenth as bad as the Grimm. Any monsters dumb enough to attack a human settlement would soon find a large bounty posted on their head and dozens of Wizards from various guilds willing to take it down. Really, most of the military strength of the world seems to literally be mercenary. Mercenaries that are unusually attached to other members of their guild, mind, but it's still weird to see pseudo-Huntsmen and Huntresses motivated primarily by money instead of protecting people. Many job postings for Wizards aren't even related to combat at all.
Syndicates of criminal Wizards are common enough for them to have their own names—Dark Guilds—and you'll definitely want to avoid them. Slavery is thoroughly outlawed everywhere you look, but that doesn't stop illegal human(oid) trafficking and you're a prime target. At least you're pretty sure that traffickers are no longer a threat that can do more than temporarily inconvenience you. After all, you're now the greatest expert alive when it comes to running from your problems.
Theoretically, you could find and obtain some rather valuable items and magics lost to the world, but... well, that would involve delving into fortified ruins of varying stability and safety. Obscurity would be the best-case scenario for finding treasures. The worst would be automated defenses. You think the ruins would have both less risk and reward when compared to the other new plane you've discovered.
[] Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A plane of ruins—and ruin.
Well, now you know what the Grimm winning would look like. This plane has a staggering number of occupied worlds, the astonishing ability to travel between them in mere days or weeks, and an absolutely horrifying number of dead planets. Self-replicating autonomous war machines, explosives that render atmospheres outright unbreathable, devices that accidentally alter the orbit of the planet they're activated on, energy generators so powerful that they turned their world into a molten husk… it seems like the inhabitants of this plane have found a thousand and one ways to kill themselves and others. Modern governments try to avoid activating Lost Logia, the ancient machinery responsible for such destruction, and have laws in place to prevent the creation of similarly destructive objects. There's no denying that they are quite powerful, though; ruin-delving could be an exceptionally lucrative, if proportionally dangerous, career.
At any rate, it looks like this plane could teach you how to do more with your Aura than merely enhance yourself and your weaponry. They've found ways to turn Aura into far more efficient passive or active shielding, as well as what seems like a million and one ways to attack, restrain, and disable your foes with it. They can even fly—which seems like a great way to get shot down by opposing forces, honestly, but it might be a useful option. Their advanced technologies might also show you new methods of upgrading Gambol Shroud, your weapon—or, better yet, of remaking Gambol Shroud as an Intelligent Device.
Intelligent Devices are exactly what they sound like, and seem to be a major hallmark of this plane. They can assist their user with Aura-based magic, personal scheduling, minor self-care, and basically anything that a hypothetical sapient Scroll might be capable of. Most of them seem to be a bit dumb, though; they're sentient, but only just. At least they're relatively easy to acquire if you have the money.
Unison Devices are an even greater prize with their own Aura, the ability to independently cast spells, full intelligence, and a sort of devastatingly effective collaborative bodily control mode known as Unison. Unfortunately, UDs are rare, expensive on the black market, and with a demand far exceeding what little supply is generated by archeologists and ruin-raiders. There doesn't even seem to be any guarantee that you'd be able to perform Unison with one, which is an effective requirement for them being willing to be your partner; individuals capable of doing so are rare enough to be called Lords. Admittedly, that's an issue you can likely get around via mana-based magic, but doing so would require first finding a Unison Device in the first place. Both IDs and UDs should be able to link to your Aura in order to survive the space between worlds.
Also, child protective services might end up as your mortal enemies. This plane takes unaccompanied unknowns very seriously.
Author's Note: I would like to remind the audience that Blake is, like everyone else alive, an unreliable narrator.
Current age: 16
The White Fang was once a peaceful activist organization working for equal Faunus Rights, and was considered by many to be the chosen representative for Faunus Rights Revolutionaries after the war. Blake's parents, the former leaders of Menagerie before Blake's birth and the White Fang's founders, threw their still-significant political power behind the group. The distinction between former and current ruler took Blake years to understand; as former rulers and current advisors, it seemed like their wishes continued to become Menagerie law despite their relative lack of official power. How was that different from personally ruling?
(Shouting from the throne room was answer enough. They only held power so long as the chieftain still listened to them.)
Regardless, Blake was demanding to lift a sign and participate in White Fang protests by the time she was five years of age. Briefly. SDC-allied media played up the "child exploitation" angle and indirectly convinced her parents to bar her from attending further protests. She still helped by hand-delivering messages, distributing flyers, gleefully exploiting her best pitiful expressions, and whatever else she could convince others to let her help with. It wasn't until she was ten that her parents finally caved and let her start attending full-fledged protests again.
(She suspects it might never have happened if she'd told them about all the times humans tried to hurt her during her other activities. Their asinine resistance just encouraged her, though.)
She was twelve when the old leader of the White Fang stepped down and was replaced by someone who was reportedly far more aggressive. Confirming their stance took time; the White Fang reorganized into a cell structure soon after the new leader rose to power, and the White Fang's leadership stopped being a tenth as transparent as it once was. Her parents didn't even wait to see what the 'Fang would do in the future and publicly withdrew their support for the White Fang during its reorganization.
This… did not go over well. As far as Blake was concerned, it seemed like Blake's parents were retreating based on what people could do rather than what they'd done, and wasn't that the same argument used by horrible humans to insist that Faunus should be treated as thieves? Of course the White Fang's leaders should be kept secret; SDC-bribed cops kept arresting them! Were her parents really going to lounge around on Menagerie while other Faunus fought exploitation, biased laws, unfair and unbalanced courts, and worse? Because Blake had absolutely no intention of following them into complacency!
It took years of increasingly violent acts for Blake to even consider the idea that her parents might've been right to harbor misgivings. Members of the White Fang had made it quite clear that Blake chose their organization over her own parents, and that wasn't a choice Blake felt her parents would forgive. Not after all the horrible things she'd said to them during her departure, or her choice to run away rather than leave the White Fang. She'd be lucky if they'd be willing to even look at her.
Aura:
The staple of all Huntsmen and Huntresses, Aura is known as "The light of the soul." Aura can be compared to a video game HP or shield bar: as long as it persists, all incoming damage to the user will be dramatically reduced. Once an individual runs out of Aura, however, their fragile body will begin to take damage normally. Aura levels can be monitored by medical equipment or personal smart devices such as Scrolls, although trained users will generally know their approximate level even without that aid.
Aura can also be used to enhance personal physical capabilities or attacks from held equipment, protect items in contact with the user, and interact with Dust or Semblances in a large variety of ways. Despite her hatred of the SDC's masters, Blake does have to admit the Schnee Semblance is a good example of the possible variety: Dust and Aura can allow an experienced Schnee to do everything from launch fireballs, to summon obedient copies of fallen foes, to manipulate time.
Blake is not at that level. The White Fang's access to Dust has been in too sporadic for her to do any significant training with Dust/Aura/Semblance mixtures.
Semblance:
Remnant's Aura-users are capable of unlocking a single Semblance, or a unique ability that supposedly reflects who they are. Blake's Semblance is Shadow. Shadow allows her to create a short-lived clone of herself that overlays her current position at the time of activation. Blake is then propelled in a direction of her choice while the clone retains the position Blake was in at the time of activation. Clones seldom last for even half a second — approximately a fifth of a second is more common — before they blur into nothingness. Clones have no autonomy of their own; they may be moved by gravity, attacks, or other physical phenomenon, but they will not move of their own accord. Some White Fang members nicknamed her Semblance "Afterimage" due to this lack of autonomy and the short lifespan of clones.
Blake generally uses Shadow to avoid attacks, rapidly reposition, change direction even mid-air, "multi-jump," and disorient foes. Despite their unlock requirements, Semblance usage generally pulls from physical and mental stamina instead of Aura. An individual's usage of their Semblance may change or even grant additional abilities with practice, frequent usage, and/or increases in proficiency. Blake fully expects that the lifespan of her clones will increase over time; she's hoping that she might also be able to make them move small amounts in order to effectively echo her attacks and further disorient foes.
White Fang Combat Training:
Blake is comparable to an entry-level student at an upper-level academy for future Huntsmen and Huntresses. As such, she is capable of maneuvering and attacking in three dimensions and at velocities better comparable to highway vehicles than to anyone without unlocked Aura. She is adept at maintaining a continuous stream of high-speed attacks from various angles, but consistently has trouble doing any appreciable damage against highly armored opponents. That was Adam's job.
Unlike most students entering upper-level academies, Blake has significant experience in life-or-death battles without an instructor present to help ensure her safety after an Aura break. She is also very, very good at disengaging in Remnant's urban environments.
High-grade, highly-armored autonomous units have proven to be one of Blake's major weaknesses. Lesser units often treat her clones as yet more combatants in the moment before those clones vanish, and people are often disoriented by her Semblance without experience fighting her. High-grade units can instead correctly flag her clones as decoys and seamlessly continue their attacks.
Blake is experienced with firearm and explosive safety, knows how to utilize both, and feels she's gotten fairly good at gauging minimum safe distance from an explosive act of sabotage—or from SDC Dust containers used as improvised explosives.
Mechashift Weapon Proficiency:
Blake's weapon of choice is Gambol Shroud, a Variant Ballistic Chain Scythe. As with many attempts to quantify and categorize the weapons of Huntsmen and Huntresses, this name is not particularly helpful for describing its capabilities.
Gambol Shroud's sheath can act as a large, square blade not dissimilar to a cleaver. Gambol Shroud's pistol-katana component can be separated from this sheath to allow for assymetrical dual wielding, and the katana's orientation can be changed on-the-fly so that the katana's blade is either:
Parallel to the hilt and perpendicular to the pistol barrel (katana form),
Or perpendicular to the hilt and parallel to the pistol barrel (sickle form).
A long (reinforced) ribbon attached to the katana's hilt lets her utilize Gambol Shroud as a kusarigama — or phrased more simply, as a sickle attached to a ribbon of varying length. This is the source of the "Ballistic Chain Scythe" portion of Gambol Shroud's name despite the inaccuracy therein.
Like many Huntsmen and Huntresses, Blake frequently takes advantage of recoil from the gun portion of her weapon. Hitting an enemy with pistol rounds is generally a consolation prize; a more frequent goal is simply to add more force to her attacks or to extract her katana's blade from an enemy.
Non-traditional education:
Despite not attending a formal school within the last several years, Blake has kept up with her peers academically (mostly via book-studying and sporadic tutoring), personally designed and assembled Gambol Shroud, and knows how to maintain her equipment and clothing using pre-fabricated components with consistent construction. Blake has experience hunting her own food, purifying water, and generally surviving in Remnant's wilderness — temporarily. She does not know what to do with any of the non-edible parts of an animal, such as their fur, and she's pretty sure that knowledge of furs would be essential for long-term wilderness survival.
Blake knows what infrastructure is essential in a modern urban environment and what recurring trends can be exploited to evade pursuit. She can generally navigate the social aspects of criminal enterprises without issue, and knows how to disguise herself in Atlas as a lower-class Faunus or middle-class human. These disguises may not hold up to experienced scrutiny; Blake is honestly amazed that hiding her ears beneath a head-bow has proved so effective thus far.
Thriller, drama, and mystery novels aren't exactly the traditional mechanisms for learning about trends in public opinion, but they seem to be working out pretty well for her thus far. Unfortunately, these aren't exactly viewed as respectable qualifications no matter how many times she accurately predicts the civilian response to a White Fang mission.
Dust Novice:
Dust is the primary (and almost exclusive) fuel source for the entirety of Remnant. It is used for effectively everything requiring energy input to function—vehicles, firearms, explosives, household heating, power plants, Grimm hunting, everything. Due to its volatility, extracting Dust from naturally occurring deposits is dangerous and has a high rate of injury. One poorly-placed spark can set off a chain reaction that destroys an entire mine.
Dust naturally manifests in a variety of elemental categories, including (but not limited to) Combustion, Lightning, Ice, Fire, Water, Plant, Rock, and Gravity Dust. Synthetic Dust subtypes can also be made by combining other types of Dust in various proportions, but the volatile nature of Dust makes this an expensive and destructive practice.
The White Fang did not have large enough stores of Dust for you to regularly practice with it; you have enough Dust to operate Gambol Shroud as a firearm, but not enough to utilize any sort of elemental attack. It's probably just as well. Elemental Dust tends to be significantly rougher on weaponry, and high-grade weapon components aren't cheap.
Dust comes in crystal and powder form.
Planeswalk [Rank 1]: You aren't sure if it's a supercharged use of your Semblance or something completely different, but you can step outside the world and travel to a new one. You're leaning heavily toward it being another application of your Semblance; what else could it be? Still, doing so is exhausting, attempting multiple planeswalks in close succession could be lethal, and there's apparently nothing stopping you from entering a plane in mid-air. You hope it won't be as problematic with practice.
Unfortunately, you're no longer certain that you'll be able to Planeswalk at will. You don't have any evidence saying that you can't, but your sample size is comprised solely of your original planeswalk. There might be extra circumstances needed to activate it, you might need to marshal your will toward punching a hole between worlds, or something else entirely. You simply don't know yet and aren't willing to test until you're either forced to or you have a way to return to your current area.
Mana Sense [Rank 5]: You can see mana in moderate to high concentrations and sense it otherwise. You're still learning how to distinguish between the colors when it's particularly diffuse, but you've gotten much better at identifying the distance and direction of a specific mana signature with respect to yourself; this lets you potentially track those who are approaching from nearby, albeit with some dedicated focus to make it anything approaching reliable. Apparently, this ability also seems to grant you weird impressions of what a given magical effect actually does, with the impression strengthening the more you know about it.
Personal Mana Generation [???]: You don't have enough experience sensing or using mana to guess how much your soul produces. Your soul's mana feels mostly Black, though.
Black Resistance [Moderate?]: Contact with Black mana doesn't seem to be nearly as harmful for you as it is for everything else, although you do still take some damage. Wither, for example, leaves you feeling cold and weak in the affected areas.
Artifice [Rank 0]: You have a very vague idea of the very basics of constructing magical items, and a few examples to work from if you dedicate enough time toward thinking about recurring trends. You'll need far more practice and knowledge before you can actually build anything.
Black Mana Control [Rank 6]: "Control" is a bit of an overstatement at this level, but you can coax Black from your own soul to generally meander in desired directions. You can also tether increasingly large bundles of Black mana to yourself by continually releasing threads of Black, and have improved your ability to release increasingly small amounts of Black mana from your soul. Perhaps most importantly, you can infuse Black mana with your intentions and wishes to make it move itself slightly in accordance with your goals; this doesn't seem to work for anywhere near everything, but it's a technique that has made your life significantly easier.
Wither [Rank 3]: The rather harmful result of infusing a leaf with raw Black. Your experimental leaf rapidly dried up and crumbled. You also know that you can hit more than one target at a time—provided that they're close enough to each other—and could potentially hit someone in passing via a tethered bundle of Black. Withering a target animal seems to afflict them with both temporary phantom(?) chills and temporary weakness—or at least, that's what it does to you. You're now capable of Wither'ing at a touch and at no risk to yourself (at least, no risk from the spell).
Drain Life [Rank 4]: You can pull life from living beings in order to enhance yourself or your spells. Life from plants seems to only be good for enhancing your own health and defense, whereas life from animals is almost as versatile as raw Black mana. What actually constitutes "life" is still beyond your knowledge. Plants wilt and dry up, while the one animal you tested it on wound up looking like it had been starving prior to its death. Currently, this ability requires touch contact.
Dark Vigor [Rank 4]: You can repurpose Black mana to grant temporary strength instead of weakness. That strength comes at a price, however: if you don't force Black to only consume itself or drained life in the course of strengthening you, then it will use your own Aura as supplementary fuel. You're guessing that it will eat your body's energy if Aura has already been completely exhausted. Perhaps more importantly, you can redirect power away from granting actual strength in order to instead infuse your blows with Wither or Drain Life. This ability occupies a strange space between Constructs and Black mana control, and you suspect that both skills will be helpful in improving it. You aren't yet sure which would be more useful.
Dark Pulse [Rank 3]: You can release a pulse of Withering Black mana to affect everything in a small bubble around yourself. Prematurely halting, linking, and repurposing mana so released is currently the only way you can currently make a Black Cloak.
Menace [Rank 5]: The practice of using intent-infused Black to frighten a specific target with minimal splash or cost. Magical ability and/or Aura might convey additional resistance to this, but you've still been able to use it to terrify multiple incredibly unpleasant customers. (...It's totally killing intent.)
Black Mana Constructs [Rank 2]: The practice of building enclosed systems of Black mana specifically designed to last longer than standard spells. You're still garbage at it—all you can do right now is create a Black blob that happens to last a bit longer in the atmosphere than raw Black mana would, or a you-shaped cloak with the help of Dark Pulse. You're hoping to make spell-carrying cats with some practice, however.
Black Cloak [Rank 1]: With the aid of Dark Pulse, you can make a you-shaped (and incredibly expensive) cloak of Black mana around yourself that would wither anything that touches it. Since it moves as you do, it never actually comes into contact with you.
Curse [Rank 0]: You can't do it yet, but you're hoping to transfer your bad luck to people who deserve it. It would be easier if you had an example to work from; as it currently stands, it might take a couple days of trial and error before you manage to make any sort of curse at all, let alone one affecting something as nebulous as luck.
Blue Mana Control [Rank 1]: You can wrestle Blue mana into a general location and shape it with some significant trouble. It doesn't move on its own, but that doesn't mean it automatically goes where you want it to; it takes time, effort, and a relatively concrete mental image to direct it into something usable.
Cryokinesis [Rank 2]: You can pull water from the air and freeze it into fist-sized chunks, or simply freeze a preexisting body of water. You can't direct the freezing process just yet—it will continue to freeze water until the provided Blue is exhausted.
Hydrokinesis [Rank 1]: You can set up uncertain, wobbly paths of Blue to determine the rough direction that water will follow. This seems to be significantly harder without ready access to water.
Screech [Rank 0]: You now know that it's possible to produce sound via Blue mana, and have an example available for examination. Imitation would require additional examination of your Resonance Lacrima.
Charm [Rank 0]: An effect that seems to cling to the target and temporarily prompt uncharacteristic trust with the caster. You could probably imitate it with a few days of effort and a willing test subject, or significantly less time if you manage to get more examples to work from.
Worn:
White and black clothing: Your Aura has been protecting your outfit from tearing so far, but it can't entirely stop dirt and sweat from sticking. You're fortunate that it was designed not to stink without much more time spent in the field. Fairly unusual by local standards, but likely well within the range of what Wizards or upper-class individuals might wear.
The black bow that usually hides your ears is in your pocket at present.
Gambol Shroud, Lower Back: Your weapon of choice, a Variant Ballistic Chain Scythe. Currently armed with a clip that's likely nearly empty.
3 extra ammunition/Dust clips. With your usual fighting style, that number would likely last you an equal number of major fights. You could try to be more conservative with your ammunition usage, but your fighting ability may be severely hampered until you adapt to the change and moderately impaired afterward.
Messenger's satchel: Earned from your very first job on a new plane. May have been made from mildly magical materials.
Miscellaneous:
Lyrian Currency: 9 silver spits, 6 silver pieces [78 silver piece equivalent]: Mostly tied in a small rag to help prevent audible jostling.
Weapon Maintenance Kit: The oils, cloths, blade sharpener, and minimal replacement parts required to keep Gambol Shroud in working condition. You'll almost certainly run out of ammunition long before this runs dry.
Dry Rations [6 days]
Two perishable meals: Provided as a bonus parting gift from Elda.
2 Waterskins [2 days of water]
Wooden Dishware [Spoon, knife, fork, bowl]
Brown cloth travel bag: Equipped with strings that both hold it shut and let you wear it as a mildly uncomfortable backpack.
Wallet and pre-paid Lien cards: Enough money to provide two or three months worth of middle-class food, rent, and basic (civilian) necessities on Remnant. Completely and utterly useless on other worlds.
Bedroll: Earned from your very first job on a new plane. May have been made from mildly magical materials.
To be clear, Blake is never going to go full edgelord or eviiiilllll - that's no fun for me, either. I don't want this to be a quest where people feel like their non-preferred chargen option winning would be the end of the world. She'll likely still dabble in Black or Blue even if the other option wins, too.
EDIT: To be clearer, this is not a quest where Black is interpreted as an inherently evil color. Ambition and self-improvement are both interpreted as Black.
EVERY colour is bad without balnce Black is just more obvious about that bad White without other colours or philosophys leads to totalitarian tyranny as white is Order just as it can be a force of justice to those without it can also be an iron fist of tyranny and orwellian shit(Although that also requires the bad side of blue that is obsessive needs to control and plan) Green is growth but its also the element of savagery and brutalism(Whats more natural than survival of the fittest) Red is passion and Drive but it is also the colour of anger and if not controlled will lead to manic short sightedness and poor impulse contro(and with it massive collateral damage) Black is linked to death and decay but it also represents good parts the ambition to keep going forward for a goal the ability to give anything be it other or Yourself(that IS a part of black) and the ability to turn even the most decayed and atrophied apsects of the worldinto usable resources
Blue is thoughtful and plans forward but it can lead to nothing but thought and no action or such a reliance on plans that when they fall apart are left helpless. It can also lead to obsessive knowledge gathering even when that knowledge is something out of cthulu simply because those too far into it cant comprehend such a thing as better left unknown
You, uh - you might want to invest in some punctuation. You use one period in 240 words and have a number of spellcheck-caught typos besides. The legibility issues make it much less likely that people will bother to read your points, and harder to read when they do decide to take that time. (Pseudo-edit: And your next post isn't really any better. Have you considered using bullet-point lists?)
Before people get too far into the color debate, I'd like to note that the colors of MTG will not perfectly line up with the colors in this quest. Specifically because I don't want to let the thread get consumed by arguments over what trait belongs to what color, among other reasons.
For those who didn't read Ignition, please also be aware that looking for specific cards and the costs of those cards will not help you. This actually works in your favor most of the time - many effects won't even cost a full mote of mana. (EDIT: And she doesn't have "cards" or a deck.)
Looking at the general summary for a given setting might help, but I try to ensure that even that won't be required; setting knowledge is not required to participate in this quest, and metaknowledge is overrated. (All the settings are AU. ALL OF THEM.)
Given Blake seems to fit both Blue and black fairly well (to the point I'd peg her as multicolour), is there a chance that we'll be able to shift her main focus later? It seems like it would be interesting to have something like a colour choice each time she travels to a plane, which somewhat indicates the general dispositions or approach which she is taking while there.
Still, it's fine if this is is a set thing. I'm interested in this quest regardless.
This vote will dictate the primary color of mana produced by Blake's soul, as well as what type of mana control she has the highest starting level of skill in (which is to say, "can control poorly" instead of "no control without significant practice.") Neither mana generation nor skill is something to be changed across planes.
You can dip into colors other than the one dictated by this vote. However, the focus will have enough of a head start in terms of both time and available mana to effectively ensure that it stays the main focus.
Color-dipping is actually almost guaranteed, honestly. While the abilities listed are all things you can do with that color, that doesn't mean they're all skills Blake will develop (or the only ones that she can). There will likely be more possibilities that she doesn't pursue than ones that she will. It's perfectly possible to play a Black-primary mage without necromancy and life drain, or a Blue-primary mage without emotional and mental modification.
EDIT: She will have a tougher time learning how to use some colors and effects compared to others, though.
Yeah, Black has a lot of effects that are directly harmful and not as much utility. Blue just plain has far more utility abilities under its belt - that's more-or-less the whole color - even after removing basically everything related to mind control.
That being said, people are far from the only foes you'll need to overcome. Atlas and the SDC are particularly known for fielding autonomous mechanized units, and dangerous Black spells turned against machinery could bring that machinery to a cracking halt (while Blue might be used to steal control before a fight could occur). Fairy Tail has a pile of monsters that won't stop trying to eat people until they're dead, which Blue wouldn't be nearly as good for, and a number of criminals, whom Blake admittedly wouldn't want to turn many Black effects on and might get more use from Blue. Blue might help with suppressing or stabilizing the MGLN Lost Logia that could be stabilized, but Black would aid in destroying all of them.
In general: don't panic. It really isn't the end of the world if your non-preferred color wins.
Author's Note: I encourage readers to stick with this even if they dislike a particular plane's franchise. You're working with the worlds, not their plotlines; my quests are sandboxes and frequently occur in different points in the plane's history anyway. The character sheet has also been updated with information that may be useful. (And no, Black is not evil in this.)
[X] Black
[X] Fairy Tail
Blake wouldn't have stepped out into open air if she'd had any choice in the matter. It was just a hunch, but she suspected that she might be a bit bad at this whole planeswalking thing. A sudden surge of exhaustion only reinforced the sentiment: it seemed as though planeswalking was not an activity that she could perform multiple times in quick succession. She might risk it in an emergency or if she found some way to aim for a safehouse, but it took too much of her stamina to be viable outside those circumstances. Succumbing to exhaustion in the place between worlds may very well kill her.
(Ability Discovered: Planeswalk [Rank 1])
Precious seconds were spent trying to regain her bearings and partially recover from her journey across worlds. Still, she'd be a disgrace to feline Faunus everywhere if she couldn't survive a little fall. She held tight to Gambol Shroud's ribbon and flung its kusarigama toward and around one of the numerous nearby trees. That alone wasn't enough to arrest her momentum, but a few loops around the tree slowed her enough to retrieve her weapon and land safely amid the leafy green undergrowth.
She knew it might be foolish to guess environmental trends on an alien world with unfamiliar plant life. She tried anyway. Despite the plant-infested ground level, her surroundings didn't feel humid or hot enough for a true jungle. Insects flocked to her like Grimm to fear, although none were strong enough to appreciably deplete her Aura. Blake still hated the feeling of having them climb all over her and they were crawling under her bow why–
Blake took a deep breath and tried to ignore the literal crawling on her skin. She could take a nice, long walk through fire to get them off when she reached whatever passed for civilization. Or a bath. A bath would probably be easier in a world without Fire Dust. Unfortunately, she'd need to do it in a stream or similar water source prior to reaching civilization; she couldn't help but instinctively flick her ears to try and force the insects off. A furiously twitching bow wouldn't be even remotely subtle. At least it would help distract her from the subjects she honestly didn't want to dwell on, right? Recollection could wait until after she'd acquired food, water, shelter, and insecticide.
A whole new world and I still need to hide.
She shook her head and jumped back into the trees. Fleeing from her problems only worked if she didn't let them catch up.
It was hard to break habits born from multiple years of training. The forest had no Grimm, yet Blake still found herself constantly scanning her surroundings for threats. It might yet prove to be useful against other predators, true, but that didn't stop the cumulative mental exhaustion from maintaining her vigilance. Needing to jump from branch to branch didn't help any; with all the undergrowth, it wasn't like she could just travel at ground level. Some of those leaves were just as big as her. She couldn't stop herself from reflexively slapping at the more intrusive insects, either. Bugs that weren't repelled by Aura were utterly awful and Blake didn't care what role they played in their local ecosystems, she would still wipe them out at the first available opportunity. No wonder she hadn't seen any Faunus on other worlds if this was what they had to deal with.
At least she'd managed to find a small river she could follow. She should be able to find civilization if she traveled downstream for long enough, right?
Companionship had spoiled her. Traveling on her own and without anyone to talk to proved to be absurdly boring and not something she'd like to repeat if at all possible. All she had to occupy her was what seemed like an endless forest, several painful subjects that she really didn't want to dwell on in an unsafe area, and nearly-baseless speculation about the world she'd traveled to.
She didn't recall seeing any Wizards who weren't part of Guilds, legal or not; she doubted there would be much work available for freelance Wizards. Why trust an unknown when organized groups were so much more reliable? No, Blake would need to join a Guild at some point if she wanted any kind of steady work. At least the job posting system would make it easy to find and fulfill requests, and the tight-knit nature of Guilds might make it easier to find magical tutors.
Blake wasn't too thrilled with the most common method of Guild identification, though: magical skin-markings that might as well be tattoos. Although they were designed to be removed relatively easily by the subject or a Guildmaster, doing so was culturally equivalent to quitting that particular Wizards' Guild. This trend could prove problematic on other planes. Trying to explain a magical membership marker, a glorified gang symbol, was not Blake's idea of a good time. Hopefully, she'd be able to find a Guild that understood her need to periodically remove and refresh the marker.
A conspicuous oddity did make itself known as a result of her review, too: how could Wizards endure so many attacks if they only had minimal control over their Aura? There had to be another element to their vitality that she was overlooking. Magical infusions, perhaps; if their bodies used mana as an extra energy source, it seemed reasonable that mana-users might naturally wind up more durable than the average person.
Daylight was retreating by the time Blake spotted the diffuse pillars of smoke indicative of intelligent life. If she wasn't a Faunus and thus blessed with improved low-light vision, she might not have noticed the contrast between the sun's fading embers and what she hoped was smoke from firewood. Treetop reconnaissance confirmed that impression: trees had been lashed together in a primitive wall around the source of the fires, and she could hear an occasional shout from the site. Although she couldn't confirm the legibility of those shouts, they did sound an awful lot like actual words. Hopefully, that meant she could understand alien languages and other people could understand her. Needing to learn a pile of new languages for each new plane would be remarkably inconvenient.
Skeletal wooden watchtowers and an artificially cleared area around the camp dissuaded Blake from traveling closer and stealthily gathering more information; doing so could easily be misconstrued as a hostile act. A pounded dirt path did seem to lead to the encampment from downstream, but that was the only path. This place was a dead end, not a waypoint. Was it a military camp? A place for logging, furs, and herbs? A group of scholars conducting research on the surrounding area? She had no idea. Not that it really mattered very much; she'd welcome even a hostile Dark Guild if it meant ridding herself of the insects eternally harassing her.
Throughout the day, she'd had the instinctual urge to produce a life-draining cloak of Black mana atop her person. Self-preservation warned her against that very course of action: she had no guarantee that such a spell wouldn't harm her, too. It would be best for her to either find examples to work from, or somewhere that temporary weakness or sickness wouldn't kill her. Or both.
Still, she teased a few strands of Black mana from her soul simply to verify that she could and that it wasn't all in her head. She was gratified to find that it wasn't. Less thrilling was how a green tree-leaf reacted to the infusion of Black mana: by changing from green, to yellow, to brown, and then crumbling altogether.
(Ability Discovered: Black Mana Control [Rank 1])
(Ability Discovered: Wither [Rank 1])
(Ability Discovered: Black Cloak [Rank 0])
Although she could tell there was mana around her, the overwhelming Green from the surrounding forest-jungle-thing wasn't very good for helping her distinguish between its different colors. Perhaps that might have changed if she were to spend significant amounts of time teasing other colors from her soul; unfortunately, she wasn't confident enough in her wilderness survival skills to make it viable. Not on an unfamiliar alien world.
(Ability Discovered: Mana Sense [Rank 1])
Still, those failures left Blake with a fairly significant problem: the bow covering her cat-Faunus ears was borderline useless for disguise when those ears kept trying to flick away the insects crawling across them. Water from the river was traveling too quickly to safely collect some for self-cleaning, and standing in smoke would require her to painstakingly clear a space for fire. Anything less would have insects resuming their harassment within minutes.
She could wander into the camp without her bow, but she was pretty sure that this world didn't have any Faunus—or at least, they weren't common enough for her cursory inspection to uncover them. There was probably some form of magic that let the caster acquire traits similar to Faunus, but Blake had no idea how rare that was. She didn't want to draw more attention than necessary.
Honestly, the insect problem wasn't anywhere on the list of hardships she'd expected from an alien world. Remnant insects generally knew to leave Aura users alone after initial attempts at parasitism failed to penetrate the Aura protecting users from harm. Alien bugs? Not so much.
How will Blake handle her cat-ears?
[] Cloak yourself in Black mana. You suspect this could significantly weaken you. You don't intend to perform such experiments without ready access to food, water, and shelter.
[] (Reveal) Remove your bow and walk to the walled area. You might already be drawing significant attention as a stranger wandering in from the wilderness; what's a little more?
[] (Hide) Retreat a fair distance, clear space for a short-lived fire, and dissuade further insect harassment by rubbing ashes over your ears and bow. The sun will have long since set by the time the process is finished, but at least it'll reinforce your disguise. Only once that process is complete will you approach the encampment.
[] Write-in
…And what kind of approach do you take for the camp?
[] Gambol Shroud's sheath is blocky enough to look like some kind of package, and your clothing is blatantly unsuitable for the environment that you're emerging from. Pretend to be a lost civilian unless this stance endangers you.
-[] Try to imply that the family you were separated from is particularly well-off. Hopefully, that will encourage them to help you more than they otherwise would've. If you can't follow through with the implied reward... well, you have extensive experience in evading pursuit.
[] You're quick, you're armed, and you aren't likely to stand by if someone is in trouble. Present yourself as a wandering Wizard searching for the nearest hub of civilization.
[] Write-in
Voting will be locked for 2 hours after this goes up.
QM's Note: Explaining why you're voting a certain way is heavily encouraged in general. You're more likely to convince others, and it makes QM-created compromises easier if I know what player intentions are.
For this quest, I'm going to be experimenting with "Bandwagon Prevention" — which is to say, sometimes incorporating or using write-ins that arrive later in the voting cycle, have a compelling argument in their favor, etc. Emphasis on the sometimes. I don't want to encourage shenanigans like "don't bother to debate, just spam all possible plans" or "I can participate in a bandwagon and then not check the thread because Alivaril will take care of it."
Author's Note: Constructive feedback is appreciated! I mean it. If you aren't comfortable publicly saying something you think is harsh, then PMs are fine as long as you aren't using this encouragement as an excuse to flame or something.
Pragmatism ultimately triumphed over caution. Any disguise might not last in a bug-infested environment, and she honestly had no guarantee that smoke and soot would serve as an adequate repellant for alien bugs. Even making the attempt would take time and effort; clearing a proper firepit could take over an hour, and subsequently appearing after nightfall would warrant caution from even more trusting individuals.
Adam would be thrilled. He'd never understood her reasons for hiding her ears.
Blake untied and pocketed her ribbon, hesitated, and indulged in a little clawing at her ears. Most of the insects stubbornly clung to her fur despite her attempts at dislodging them. After a minute of futility, she sighed and jogged out from the treeline.
"Hail the fort!" Blake hollered.
Was that weird? That wasn't too strange, was it? It didn't seem as though her new instincts came with an etiquette guide.
"Uh, hello?" a deep male voice cautiously called from the nearest watchtower. "I, uh—did you just get back from an expedition or something? I don't remember you."
The watchman didn't even wait for an answer before turning and calling to someone inside. At least Blake now had confirmation that they could understand her and vise-versa.
"Did any Take Over Wizards pass through recently?"
"No?"
Blake's mouth quirked. That short exchange might rule out any sort of disciplined military camp: they hadn't bothered to wait for her to answer, and they obliviously divulged tactical information to an eavesdropping unknown.
"So, yeah," the watchman continued, turning back to her. "Did you get lost or something?"
"Extremely!" Blake confirmed. "I'm not even sure what country I'm in!"
There was an awkward pause.
"Oh. Uh, I don't suppose that form helps with climbing? We already lowered the gate for tonight and it's a pain in the ass to lift again. You're welcome to share our fire if you can get in."
And no permission sought or required. It looked as though the walls were meant to deter wildlife after all.
In place of an answer, Blake enhanced her legs with Aura and began sprinting in preparation for a running jump. She could clear the barricade in one bound, but it was common for similar White Fang camps to have wooden spike traps behind such a defense. Blake couldn't count the number of beowolves they'd managed to kill with that particular trick.
"Crap, shit—mind the ground spikes!"
Called it.
Blake put enough power into her jump to land just shy of the wall's sharpened top. Once the wall concealed her actions from the watchtower, a single use of her Semblance served to propel her upward and to an adequate perching point. Anyone watching from the other side would likely assume she'd struck the wall and simply pulled her way up.
The bonfires within made it difficult for her eyes to adapt properly. She didn't need details, though; the general layout seemed to be enough. Some twenty or thirty people in drab brown clothing sat and socialized around a ring of firepits near the center of the fort, surrounded by boxy log dwellings. Trails of broken dirt led to a pile of irregularly sized logs surrounded by sawdust, with a neat pile of rectangular boards nearby. Multiple boxy carts and donkey-like beasts of burden hinted toward the future transport of those boards.
A stake-filled dry moat sat behind the walls and would likely impale anything trying to hop their barrier without sufficient horizontal velocity. Blake wouldn't have any problems with that. She pushed herself off the wall, let her Aura soak up most of the damage from hitting the ground, and rolled forward to shed the remainder. Three pairs of eyes turned toward her from the nearest fire and none of their owners seemed inclined to stand up.
One of the men did seem inclined to take one look at her and start laughing, though. Blake felt her ears flatten back as she glared at the responsible party. It was better than hostility, she supposed, but that still hurt a little.
"The fuck is wrong with you?" a woman hissed at him. "Are you trying to offend?"
"She—clothes—house cat—" the asshole gasped out.
The third figure at the fire sighed and beckoned Blake toward him. She cautiously obliged, prepared to jump back if it became necessary. Watching their lips proved to be strange simply because it wasn't. As far as she could tell, the movements of their mouths matched the language and accent that Blake could best understand. Was her own perception being adjusted, or did they start to speak her language without them noticing the change?
"Just ignore Terzo; you're welcome to share our fire. Nero got a screecher yesterday, so we've got more than enough stew to share if you can stand the taste. Do you have your own bowl?"
Blake mutely shook her head.
"You can borrow one of mine if you're willing to wash it afterward," the man decided, filling a carved wooden bowl with the aforementioned stew and offering it to her. "Did you lose all your supplies, or are your other group members just running late?"
Blake cautiously accepted the rat-sized bowl and sat opposite the asshole who was still laughing. Adam would probably have stabbed Terzo by now.
"I'm alone," Blake admitted. "Thank you for the food, mister…?"
"Teo," the man answered easily. "Just Teo; we don't really bother with formalities. Are you quick enough to get back to town tomorrow if we let you stay overnight?"
Blake blinked. That was far more generous than she'd expected.
"I'm not sure," she admitted. "I'm a bit lost and was hoping to ask about nearby travel hazards. Plus, I haven't had anything to drink since this morning; I'm willing to exchange chores for essentials if you're willing."
Teo shook his head quickly. Blake took the opportunity to start eating while he answered. The meat honestly wasn't half as bad as she'd been expecting; a little tough and clearly overcooked, but it tasted more like potato and squirrel stew than anything else. She'd eaten far worse.
Or maybe she was just feeling more generous with the departure of most of the insects that had been plaguing her.
"There are too few Wizards around these days to waste your time with what we can do ourselves. Just remember us if you're ever offered a job in this area, yeah?"
Blake nodded, kept eating, and continued watching Terzo. A Wizards' Guild mark, a green bat wing, wrapped around most of his shoulder. She couldn't sense any of the increased mana output she would expect from an experienced Wizard, though. Perhaps her standards had been a bit skewed by viewing the plane's more powerful Wizards from outside the plane.
At least Teo was empathic enough to leave her alone while she ate. Terzo wasn't. Blake had only eaten half her stew when he tried to talk to her, still sporadically snickering.
"Did you really Take Over a house cat? Who does that? Tigers, sure, but taking traits from a measly mouser?"
Teo's hand met his forehead with an audible slap. Blake felt her ears flatten once again as she glared at the rude Wizard. At least she'd learned a little from his lack of manners: he seemed to assume that she'd somehow taken an animal's traits via magic rather than because she was a different species entirely. That was an excuse she could use.
"I didn't," Blake replied frostily, "and it's also none of your business."
Terzo opened his mouth to further harass her. A shove from the muscled woman beside him turned his words into an undignified squawk.
"Just ignore him, please," she grumbled. "Gods know I want to."
"Better yet, why don't I bring you over to Nero?" Teo offered. "I'm sure he'd love to have a receptive audience for once."
"He'd love to talk her ear off, you mean," grumbled Terzo.
Blake gestured for Teo to lead the way. The sooner she could learn what she needed, the sooner that she could finally fall over.
Blake barely earned a passing glance from the various laborers before they turned to their own conversations. She did notice a recurring trend, however: all of them were humans with the same skin color, none were older than middle-aged, and the vast majority were male. Blake could count the places with so little diversity on the fingers of one hand.
Only two people sat at the campfire Teo brought her to. Both were human males, and both possessed the green Guild marks she'd seen earlier. That was where the similarities ended. One was smaller than Blake, while the other would tower over almost anyone she'd ever met. The shorter of the two had lime green hair with his counterpart possessing crimson. The eyes of both seemed to match their hair color, too.
Perhaps most importantly, the shorter one felt like crackling static while the larger smelled strongly of tree sap.
"This is, uh…" Teo blinked and glanced over to her.
"Blake," she provided. "I don't know what country I'm in and was wondering about local travel hazards."
The giant sighed and cradled his head between both hands while the smaller of the two perked up. She was guessing that made him–
"Nero!" The green-haired man cheerfully introduced himself. "Big and grumpy next to me is Catello. Are you a Take Over Wizard? We get a lot of hopefuls coming for the swipers."
"Something like that," Blake deflected.
She caught a split-second frown flit across Nero's face before the cheerful countenance returned. It seemed she'd found the limits of her warm welcome.
"Well, I suppose it isn't important," he lied. "Welcome to the lush land of Lyria, where–"
"Dork," Catello muttered.
"—where Catello cannot find any woman willing to share his bed," Nero smoothly sniped. "Lyria got a thousand problems and Her Majesty is too soft for peace to be one of them. We make pretty good money off these woods, but we already have enough monster hunters available to deal with angry wildlife; we don't need any more. Sorry."
Blake couldn't help but notice the vagueness of his summary. Despite Nero's cheerful countenance, it seemed he wasn't quite as trusting as he implied. The casual disrespect for their monarch seemed unusual as well; was he really so confident that there wouldn't be any backlash? That fit his description of her as soft, certainly, but she'd still expect more caution. Similarly, the vagueness of describing 'Monster Hunters' seemed a bit pointless when the Guild tag on his right shoulder hinted toward him being one of them.
"Following the only damned path outta these woods would take you a good two days of travel by cart before you reach the main road. Take a right, keep going for about another day, and you'll reach the town of Pava."
Nero scratched his head and shrugged.
"Frankly, I don't really know much more surrounding geography than that. You asked about travel hazards, though, and I'll be happy to provide. We'll start off with the Burning Briars Dark Guild: they are, pardon my crocean, a bunch of fucking dumbasses. The 'Dark' status is new—they forgot to save enough of their money for taxes, and lashed out at Lord Battalia when he tried to collect. Everyone who would normally handle internal enforcement is busy with the war. You might see some recruiting posters offering absurdly huge sums for joining the army, but it's a really bad idea. That's more of a clash of titans and little people shouldn't get involved. One of the demons can supposedly kill those nearby just by screaming.
"Even though the Briars are no longer a legal guild and everyone knows it, they're still largely acting like one—accepting innocuous jobs, frequenting bars, all that good stuff. Nobody has any idea how long it'll last; some of the members have already started to flout their power around town, I heard a disgruntled parent tried to burn down their headquarters, and crime is becoming more common in general.
"Lord Battalia's daughter wound up getting herself kidnapped a week ago; no idea if they've resolved that since then. My money's on no. Burning Briars isn't likely to take the job given their grudge—"
"And it would be political suicide for Lord Battalia to employ a Dark Guild," Catello interjected.
"I mean, if you think politics still matter, sure. The nearest legal Guild is some ten days away from his estate, so they've probably only just received the job offer by now."
"Bet the payment will be too stingy for them to bother. Lady Amedea's an infamous tomboy."
Blake wished she had a pen and something to write with. Separating fact from rumor and remembering the sources of each would be much harder without a concrete record available to her. She supposed that was yet another item to obtain when she reached civilization.
"Nah, he's not that heartless," Nero dismissed. "Anyway, I think those are all the big ones."
Catello shook his head in apparent disagreement.
"Fewer guard patrols lead to their own hazards, Whitewing populations in the northern plains are getting out of hand, going off the roads can get you bitten by snakes, and you should rush to somewhere with a competent herbalist if you meet anyone with blotchy purple skin," Catello summarized. "Vacancies in the leadership of Maroca—that's a port city about a week past Pava—have led to some smugglers blatantly running amok with everything that entails. Further to the east, an awful lot of refugees from Croce have been getting desperate and thus stupid. In general, assume it's not getting done if a Wizard would normally take care of it. There's money to be had there if you're strong enough to ensure your own safety."
"Oh, but you'll want to join a Guild first," Nero added. "A lot of people are lowering their standards, but they won't pay as well and it's harder to punish them if they short you. So try turning around and following the road once you get some essentials at Pava; that'll bring you to Belonde after a few days. They're not big enough to have a Guild of their own, although you can always find some teenage Guild enthusiasts who'd love to give you a rundown of ones nearby. Some of them are in the phase where they think Dark Guilds are cool, sure, but they'll still know all the local specialties. Now have I covered everything?"
Catello shrugged noncommittally. After a moment of hesitation, Blake shook her head in disagreement. It was a risk to ask about, but it wasn't as though she was going to stick around for very long. Temporary hospitality aside, Nero had been quite clear that her presence was neither necessary nor desired.
"You mentioned a war?"
"Shit, uh—" Nero stared at her for the better part of two seconds before shaking his head. "Yeah. The High Priest of Ankhseram, God of Death? He wasn't too happy about the safety charges to Croce's annual tournament. No contest deaths at all last year. He, uh…" Nero shifted uncomfortably. "Well, he killed everyone there — including Croce's King, Simone—and used their lives to summon an archdemon. The port town of Paola fell soon after and it's all gone downhill from there. They say the sky in Croce isn't even the same color anymore: night or day, it remains a starless red sky."
Blake's brow furrowed. If the priest killed everyone at the tournament, then how did news of his motives get out? He sounded like the sort of monster who'd prefer to kill anyone close enough to talk to. Did this plane have some form of remote viewing and communication, did he announce his reasons after the slaughter, or was it hyperbole to say that everyone at the tournament had died?
"It went downhill from there," Catello corrected. "The army is either in a stalemate or gaining ground depending on who you ask."
"Caution is good for the soul. You're right, though, and… wow. We've made this region sound like a hellhole. It's really not all that bad. Lord Battalia still has enough guardsmen around to keep the roads clear, and the demons aren't anywhere near Lyria's borders."
"Her Majesty is relaxing the laws on demonology and death magic, though," Catello added sourly. "'Weaken the enemy by understanding their weapons,' she says. Because we really needed more Warlocks wandering around, right?"
...Well, I guess I'm not practicing with Black mana before bed.
Do you have any other questions before bed (or other actions you'd like to perform)?
[] Any recommendations for odd jobs? You'll need more money for essentials before anything else.
-[] You're probably adequate when it comes to fighting.
-[] You're fairly good at reconnaissance and searching.
[] Why didn't they list their own Guild as one to join? You're not insulted, just curious.
[] Do they have any recommendations for finding non-combat magic guides? Your skillset is a bit narrower and more violent than you'd prefer.
[] Write-in
Voting will be locked for 60 minutes after this goes up.
Beta-read by @Nixeu, and beta-combed fairly thoroughly by @Nachtigall. Thanks a bunch!
Author's Note: I've made another side poll for whether readers would rather have the winning vote appear at relevant bits or just listed at the start. It also seems that some people didn't realize that the "tourist guide" glimpse at planes in the first post was IC—in other words, that Blake knows about the listed content.
[X] Ask more about the kidnapped noble
-[x] Since the alternatives are a dark guild or distant legal one, might the local lord be willing to hire an unaffiliated wizard to secure his daughter's rescue?
[x] Any recommendations for odd jobs? You'll need more money for essentials before anything else.
-[x] You're fairly good at reconnaissance and searching.
[x] Is there anything unusual about this forest? The insects were horrible.
-[x] They mentioned swipers earlier?
-[X] Ask about the purple skin - is it a disease? A curse? How close do you have to be to catch it and what are the other effects past bad tattoos?
[x] Why didn't they list their own Guild as one to join? You're not insulted, just curious.
"I don't really know enough about Warlocks to have an opinion on that," Blake admitted. "Still, I appreciate the warning. Do you mind if I ask more questions?"
Catello snorted and ignored the resulting elbow-jab of retribution from Nero.
"This guy dreams of showing off what he knows," Catello confided dryly. "I'm sure the rest of the camp would thank you for giving him his fix."
"Hey now," Nero protested halfheartedly. "I like teaching. It's not as if I just enjoy the sound of my own voice."
"And yet…"
"Oh, shut up."
Blake rolled her eyes as the two men engaged in increasingly forceful shoving. She should probably cut that short before one of them accidentally pushed the other into the fire.
"About the kidnapped noble," Blake interrupted. "Since the alternatives are either Dark or simply far away, do you think Lord Battalia would be willing to hire…"
Nero was shaking his head before Blake could even finish.
"Frankly, an unaffiliated Wizard is only a small step up from a confirmed Dark Guild member; plenty of Dark Guilds don't identify their members with the usual marks. Sorry. You could try rescuing Lady Amedea and then returning her, but I'm sure that'll force you to search without useful evidence. You'd be reliant on Lord Battalia's honor and goodwill, and any other Wizards that took the job might be unhappy about missing out. You'd more than likely be paid a pittance just so he can pay the others something."
"Might be a good way to get a letter of recommendation, though," Catello contributed. "Plus a boost to your rep. Both would be useful for joining one of the better Guilds."
Nero wrinkled his nose. "Reputation is more of a long-term thing, though. It sounds like she needs a quick solution just to get back on her feet."
"I do," Blake confirmed. "I am fairly good at reconnaissance and searching, though, so it might be worth a try. Do you have any other recommendations for odd jobs? Riches aren't the first thing on my mind right now; I just need the essentials—and bug repellant."
Nero and Catello established eye contact with each other. Catello's expression seemed resigned, but also expectant. Nero quickly huffed and broke eye contact.
"There are always people who have lost something important to them," Nero began slowly. "Lost mail, lost heirlooms, lost pets, you name it. The pay is usually poor, but you can do a lot of those little jobs in a day."
"That's usually Guild work, though," Catello added. "They might take offense if word gets around. A normal Guild would just shrug it off, but since they're already going to be losing many of their usual job offers…"
"Tell you what," said Nero, pointedly ignoring Catello's knowing grin. "I'll give you one of our oldest Resonance Lacrima as an insect repellant, a filled waterskin, and a week of dry rations if you tell me what that black case is. I'm not demanding you reveal your magics or anything; it's just really been eating at me this entire conversation."
Blake blinked. She hadn't really wanted to reveal that she was armed, yet it was hard to believe that any of these people would want to hurt her. Terzo had been the worst of the lot and that seemed to be born from a misunderstanding. Revealing that she had a weapon could be rather telling, but if Gambol Shroud's designation was useless for someone who actually possessed a basis for mechashift weaponry… no, no, she didn't need to give them that much information. The blade alone should fulfill their requirements without tripping any flags.
Still, it was a pity offer and she knew it. Nero and Catello seemed aware that she knew, too, and taking charity from humans always rankled. It felt like they'd rather throw some of their money at the problem rather than actually doing anything to fix the source. Admittedly, it wasn't as though they could fix the source in this case. She might as well just accept.
"A sword," she summarized shortly. "Can I unsheathe it without frightening everyone in camp?"
"Ye—" Nero began.
"You're probably fine as long as it doesn't summon anything," interrupted Catello. "And don't try to show off, please."
Blake tamped down her irritation. If she was going to show off her skills, she would've mentioned it when she was asking about jobs.
"Wasn't planning on it," Blake said shortly, unsheathing Gambol Shroud's blade and unceremoniously laying it on her lap.
Nero scooted closer to her and leaned over the katana. Catello wasn't as blatant about his search, but she could tell that he was still examining her weapon.
"May I?" Nero asked, gesturing to the blade.
"I'd prefer if you didn't," she refused, shaking her head. "I realize I'm an unknown stranger in your camp, but I'm alone in a camp full of strangers. Also, I expect we would have a giant mess on our hands if you hurt yourself with it."
Nero frowned even as Catello nodded approvingly.
"Don't push, Nero," the larger man instructed. "Imagine her unconditionally trusting everyone she meets and how well that would go over."
Nero's frown didn't entirely vanish, but it did ease up. He leaned back without further protest. They weren't wrong: she was well aware that subterfuge and ambush were probably some of the easiest ways to hurt her.
"I guess I shouldn't complain about a healthy dose of caution," Nero admitted. "Which reminds me: don't trust free food and drink, yeah? Especially if you head over to Maroca or another city with an awful lot of traffic. It's suspicious when prices are cheap across the board, too: they need to make that money back somehow. It could just be poor quality food, or… Well. You're attractive, you're a young woman, you're impoverished, and you're traveling alone; that's four risks too many. A sword won't be worth a damn if kidnappers just drug your food."
Blake huffed. She supposed she should've expected uncontrolled criminals to be smuggling people; she already knew that human trafficking was a problem. And now that she was thinking about it, the possibility of abduction raised another problem: she could effectively teleport herself out of danger, but she couldn't bring her belongings with her if she was separated from them.
Catello contributed, "You seem like a bit of a loner. Try to get over that and aim for some of the more populated inns. The more people present, the safer you'll be. Two or three people don't mean a damn; they could just as easily be accomplices."
Blake nodded thoughtfully. That was an issue she hadn't considered. Too many Hunters and Huntresses preferred peace and quiet, and they weren't the sort to overlook suddenly sleepy patrons. Populated inns were actually worse for lone individuals: tipsy workers were a dime a dozen, and it was hard for employees to remember who arrived together when you had fifty other patrons to worry about. Cheap food and drink had a similar stigma: the default assumption was that the owners would be informants and information brokers, not kidnappers.
"I already knew to be wary of strangers and anything 'free,' although I hadn't considered the isolation or economic aspects. Thank you both for the warnings. Anything else you want to tell me about? I have more questions if you're done."
Nero rubbed his chin with one fist.
"Yeaaah, it's kinda hard to know what warnings to not deliver. Traveling alone is dangerous enough. It's far worse when you really are alone. Even membership in a careless Guild would act as a deterrent—and I'm done with the sword, you can put it back."
Blake was honestly surprised not to receive any questions about Gambol Shroud's materials or hilt; for someone allegedly fulfilling their own curiosity, he hadn't seemed all that curious about it after all. Catello took over after Blake obligingly sheathed the blade.
"Consider lying to anyone asking if you're traveling alone. Say you're meeting with friends soon, that your employer expects you back, anything that implies people will look for you if you vanish."
"Eh…" Nero shook his head. "Maybe the employer bit, but saying you're part of a group might scare off people genuinely willing to watch your back. Refuse to answer? You seem like you'd be pretty good at that. Just ask your questions and I'll try to think of anything else that might help."
"You've already been much more helpful than I was expecting. Still, is there anything unusual enough about these woods to attract expeditions? You mentioned swipers, but those sound more like targets for lone Wizards and the insects have been just awful."
Nero once again established eye contact with Catello. The larger man just waved one hand as if to say, "Go ahead."
"The whole area is saturated with more magic than is normal, and old writings mention an ancient militant compound that nobody has been able to find yet. We get treasure hunter expeditions through every few months, and they all return empty-handed—or not at all. And yes, the magical saturation is almost certainly related. I expect the ancients offed themselves in the usual manner for Lost Magic: raw power finally exceeded their ability to control it, and the whole area went up.
"We're just here for herbs, pelts, and wood; all of them have properties that make them valuable to the right buyers. And yeah, we sell the occasional Resonance Lacrima to any explorer who neglects to bring their own. You're far from the first to get mauled by bugs—uh, remind me to fetch your payment if I forget."
"And the swipers?" Blake prompted.
"Eh, they're really just giant cats with tails that hurt like hell. Some Take Over mages like 'em on account of being one of the strongest and deadliest felines around."
"Before fatally underestimating those beasts half the time," Catello grumbled.
"And that," Nero acknowledged. "They'd really just be better off training what they've got rather than looking for easy shortcuts. Hard work gives better power-ups than any spell."
Catello didn't disagree, and Blake filed the sentiment away for future cross-referencing. It held up to casual inspection: weapons and Semblances were useless if you couldn't wield them worth a damn, and magic seemed like a similar tool. It might be better to utilize a few multi-use effects very well rather than skimming a number of single-use spells.
"About those purple blotches you mentioned—are they something you can catch from local wildlife, some sort of curse, or…?" Blake trailed off.
"A very contagious disease," Nero confirmed. "I've never heard of an animal with it, and believe me, people would've noticed. The afflicted become far more sensitive to light, and even a little jostling can make you bruise—that's where the purple comes from. Barely anyone dies if you get to someone who knows what they're doing, but it's extremely important that you rush to do so. Go into debt if you have to, because if you're sick and aren't treated, the sensitivity will spread from the skin inward. All the way inward."
"You could just admit that you forgot the word 'organs,'" Catello said dryly.
"Fffak off," Nero shot back, narrowly self-censoring for Blake's benefit. She really did wonder how that worked with her new translation effect; could it still operate off something like intent if his intentions changed in the middle? Or did it operate under an entirely different mechanic? She'd heard of stranger Semblances, true, but this was definitely on the list.
"Threaten to go to the local lord if the apothecary tries to charge you more than what a few weeks would cost at a workers' inn," continued Catello, ignoring his bristling compatriot. "They don't appreciate extortion when it comes to the treatment of an infectious disease. Ah, but stay about two dozen paces away and you should be fine. The issue is that their sun sensitivity encourages the afflicted to cover up, and if you're close enough to see the bruising even after that…"
Blake bit off a snide comment about human eyesight. Despite what some Faunus claimed, the only major difference between humans and Faunus laid in low-light and night vision. She shouldn't humor the White Fang's more recent sentiments of Faunus supremacy.
"And the name?" Blake prompted.
The displaced Faunus finally got to see what cluelessness looked like on the two grown men before her.
"Uh. Purple…" Nero began, helplessly glancing at his companion as though hoping for a rescue. Catello could only shake his head.
"Not purple fever," Nero tried aloud. "You might be nauseous and bedridden for a few days after taking the medicine, but there's still no fever. Uh. Look, healers don't really like it when people self-diagnose anyway, alright? The name doesn't really matter."
Blake raised an eyebrow and graciously changed the subject.
"Well, you've both been very helpful. However, I was wondering why you didn't mention your own Guild as a possibility. I'm not at all insulted; I'm just curious."
Nero gratefully grabbed the chance to save face.
"To invite someone to a Guild is to say that you vouch for them. We haven't known each other anywhere near long enough for that, and the Green Gliders are invitation-only. Plus, you'd be the youngest person in the whole Guild by a fair margin. They're good people and all–"
"Mostly," interjected Catello.
"–Mostly," Nero acknowledged. "But we're slated for protection and combat first and foremost. Even if you proved that you could keep up, you seem like the sort of person who'd find teasing about your age increasingly irritating as time went by. Find a generalist Guild with mentors, other young Wizards, or both. Don't be the only kid in a Guild of adults."
Blake closed her eyes to avoid rolling them. The White Fang had people who commented about her age, too, but she'd proven herself multiple times over. She ran with Adam, one of the most promising—don't think about it. Nero was right: it would be wonderful if she could just avoid receiving backhanded compliments every time she proved herself.
She did still want to help people, though. Even if Wizard work gave her the resources to help the Faunus back on Remnant, she wasn't sure that she could tolerate a purely mercenary lifestyle. She would much prefer to help people and gather resources at the same time.
"Are human trafficking and smuggling lucrative enough for them to have Wizards on payroll? I don't like leaving problems and assuming someone else will solve them."
"Don't–" "Ye–" Nero and Catello started, stopped simultaneously, and wordlessly let Nero go first. "Absolutely yes. Do not humor any thoughts of hunting them down. Finding Lady Amedea's kidnappers is one thing; nobody sensible would try to kidnap a noble's kid, if only because that noble will hunt them down for the insult. People who make a career out of abduction? They'll have Wizards on payroll specifically for hero wannabes. Wait until you're older and have comrades before you start trying to fight people like that. Don't just deliver yourself to them! You'd become just another helpless victim if they can disable you long enough for magic-draining restraints to suck you dry."
Blake tried not to bristle at the well-intended advice. Going in without a partner might not be as safe, but she couldn't exactly retreat into the place between planes if she'd leave a friend behind. Nero and Catello couldn't know about that, though, and she had zero intention of telling anyone at any point. It was too effective of a backup to reveal.
Nero jerked his head to Catello and let the larger man take over.
"I'm betting that those ears and eyes will make you more vulnerable to sound and sight-based magics, including the hypnotic and sleep-inducing magics popular among competent kidnappers. I don't care how good you are at using magic; you can't fight an entire group all on your own."
Spoken like someone who's never seen a Huntress cull a Beowolf pack.
She was surprised anyone had noticed her eyes and called her out; they were barely outside the human norm. She supposed their slight slant could be a bit more obvious when her ears were bare. Honestly, nothing the Wizards said made her feel better about leaving her ears uncovered. Even in the absence of anti-Faunus bigotry, it might be best to hide them until she had a Guild to back her up.
"I was asking because I wanted to know how risky it might be," Blake grumbled. "You don't need to act like I'm demanding the locations of criminal hideouts."
The two Wizards relaxed almost imperceptibly. Neither looked like they entirely believed her, but all she wanted was for them to stop pressing.
"Good," Nero said gruffly. "There are those who are already working on catching the smugglers; it's not solved yet, but it's only a matter of time."
The authorities aren't exactly doing a good job if the crime wave has become common knowledge for people over a week away. And even if the authorities finally managed to catch the suppliers, Blake sincerely doubted they'd be able to find and rescue everyone who'd already been sold.
"I think," Catello began slowly, "that we're all getting tired and needlessly emotional. Why don't we leave it at that and part amiably instead of in anger?"
Nero took a deep breath and nodded. Blake followed suit. Catello was right about the time; she hadn't even been planning to ask her last question until they reminded her of the White Fang. Adding more impulsive questions to the list might raise questions and concerns she'd prefer not to deal with.
"I'll leave your supplies inside the door," Nero promised. "You ever used a Resonance Lacrima before?"
Blake shook her head. Nero didn't seem particularly surprised, so Blake doubted they could be too commonplace.
"Just pull on the panel until insects leave you alone, lock it at that setting, and hang it around your neck. It should be good for some four or five days if you run it constantly."
Catello shot an amused look at his ally. Blake was guessing that the lifespan was a bit too long for the nearly-depleted Lacrima that she'd been promised. She had zero intention of complaining.
"Thank you."
Nero grunted. "Think nothing of it. Send us a letter when you're safe and settled, would you? It'd be reassuring to know that things worked out for you."
Blake wordlessly nodded. It wasn't as though a letter would be a hardship. Dust, she might even bring word personally if she became good enough at sensing mana to grant an advantage in finding whatever ruins might once have been in the area.
Blake was rather surprised to get a small cabin room all to herself. Oh, it was barely large enough to fit the cot, but it was private and safe. Less impressive (but not particularly surprising) was their lack of indoor plumbing; the outdoor privy was honestly disgusting and she hoped more permanent dwellings would have better amenities.
True to his word, it seemed that Nero had left her the promised supplies within a two-string brown cloth bag. It chafed both literally and metaphorically, but she would acknowledge its usefulness; even if the brown fabric was uncomfortable and clashed with the rest of her outfit, it would still be far better than trying to carry the supplies loose.
Especially since Nero seemed to have given her just a bit more than she'd bartered for. Not a lot, but certainly enough to be deliberate.
Items Acquired: (Dry Rations [7 days])
(2 Waterskins [1 day each])
(Wooden Dishware [Spoon, knife, fork, bowl])
(Resonance Lacrima [~6.5 days?])
(Brown cloth travel bag)
She wanted to look over the Lacrima and try to understand the underlying effect. Exhaustion proved the stronger fighter. She could examine it while she was traveling on the road; for now, it was enough for her to tug and lock the hourglass-like reservoir halfway open, ignore the ringing at the edge of her hearing, and go to sleep.
Blake ultimately slept through breakfast and only barely managed to rouse herself in time for lunch. Nobody seemed to begrudge her the extra sleep, although sheens of sweat on their bodies made it clear that they'd all started work hours ago. Blake tried not to stare.
The Faunus hovered uncertainly for the better part of a minute before one of the workers beckoned her to a kettle. A chorus of halfhearted "Hey"s met her when she approached, and really, she'd wasted enough time already. Blake filled her bowl and glanced around for any of the people she actually knew by name.
"They're out patrolling," came the unsolicited answer from the heavyset woman who beckoned Blake over. "They don't like goodbyes anyway, so don't worry about it."
Blake frowned and nodded.
"Pass on my thanks to them, then? And to the rest of you. I would've collapsed within another few hours if I'd been turned away."
"Mmm," the woman acknowledged. "Just return the favor to anyone needing to share your fire, would you? The world would be a much nicer place if people weren't so damn selfish."
One example instantly came to mind: the Schnee and their hoarding of more wealth than the whole wretched family could use in a hundred lifetimes. It wasn't just the Wizards' world that had too much selfishness.
"I will; it really would be an improvement," Blake agreed with forced calm, and turned to walk while she ate. She'd wasted enough of the day already.
She waited until she'd cleaned her bowl and was well away from the camp before breaking into a light run. There may have been the occasional plant encroaching on the path, but at least she had a path to follow. It would be a fraction as tiring as jumping between trees had been, and she wouldn't need to dedicate much of her attention to the path ahead. Which was good, because it was boring. The path was rough, yet she'd traversed far worse.
She started off by holding up her new Lacrima and looking it over. It was obviously Blue, but the lesser impressions she received took some wrangling to make sense of. It was almost like she was trying to hear through her sense of touch, and only simple stubbornness let her make sense of the separate functions.
(RATION. BUZZ/ECHO)
Ration felt fairly obvious; that portion would be the slide modulating the output. Buzz and Echo were separate from Ration, yet linked together. Buzz took the available resources and converted them to a specific frequency of sound, whereas Echo forced Buzz to continue as long as there was mana available to work with.
…Assuming she wasn't just convincing herself of utter nonsense via confirmation bias. She'd need to find a book on the subject at some point.
(Ability Discovered: Screech [Rank 0])
(Skill Discovered: Artifice [Rank 0])
Practicing with Black while moving proved to be a fair bit more difficult. It didn't want to stay centered on her of its own accord; if she drew mana out of herself, then the strand would fall behind the moment it finished separating from her soul. She'd accidentally hit herself with a minimal amount of Black before she caught on. Blake didn't feel any worse, but that might have been because of the minuscule dosage rather than any sort of personal resistance.
She could tether it, though. Black seemed to want to stick to itself as a cohesive mass—for that matter, she wouldn't be surprised if it was drawn to itself altogether. She could create a floating bundle of Black mana and have it roughly keep pace with her as long as she continued drawing out even the smallest amounts to act as a tether. Actually reaching the point where she could withdraw mana at such a glacial pace occupied her all the way to the main road, and she still wasn't done. She'd improved, certainly, but she was nowhere near finished. Precise mana emissions would need to be a long-term project.
She'd also Withered a dozen plants in passing after she lost control of half as many Black bundles, but the plants would've just been cleared from the path later. Nobody would notice a little more dust in the wind. Besides, now she knew how to Wither something without stopping!
(Ability Improved: Black Mana Control [Rank 1 → 4])
(Ability Improved: Wither [Rank 1 → 2])
(Current Daily Black Mana Capacity: 25%–50%?)
Blake squinted at the wooden road sign beside the entrance to the path. The blocky lettering didn't look at all familiar. She bit down a curse and shook her head. She supposed she was lucky that she could at least understand other people, but her apparent lack of literacy would be incredibly inconvenient. She would need to start learning as soon as she could.
She glanced up at the sky and tried to gauge the time of day. Mid-afternoon, perhaps? The time estimates she'd been given seemed off. At her current pace, she should be able to reach town before sundown. There were other people on the main road, though, which would definitely impede her ability to safely practice Black while running. The last thing she wanted was to carelessly shove a ball of Black into someone.
She could continue practicing if she slowed to a more mundane pace, but that would be slower and she hadn't been given any sort of bedroll. Once she reached the main road, Nero had estimated a full day of travel at a normal person's pace; Blake couldn't go much faster than a midday arrival the following day without drawing attention. She would need to spend a night outside at that rate. However, such a pace would let her keep practicing as she traveled, and would avoid revealing her as a fleet-footed Wizard.
She supposed she should consider covering her ears either way. On Remnant, every Faunus was a target. In this new world, she might be targeted as the only Faunus. Then again, Nero and Catello had talked about how she'd be a target even without the ears; why bother hiding if she'd be targeted either way?
The default assumption is that Blake will leave the bow off and her cat-ears bare. Because of what Nero and Catello said about her risk factors, you may vote to override this.
[] Hide your ears once more. "Permanent cat ears" still seems more problematic here than "lone female, etc."
[] Slow to a more sedate pace and keep practicing. The senses of most people on this plane are supposed to be awful when it comes to mana; you should still be inconspicuous.
[] Maintain your pace and put off mana practice until later. Your reserves are already more than halfway empty, and it'll let you arrive before sundown.
[] Write-in
…And what do you do after you arrive?
[] Focus on avoiding trouble while searching for job opportunities.
-[] If there are any relatively easy errands, complete them as you go along.
--[] Try not to pick anything that would require obvious demonstrations of abnormal physical prowess.
[] Walk around town and try to gauge the general mood of the whole area, not just the main path and market. You don't even know if they have slums yet.
-[] Try to guess what colors of mana are associated with which areas. You won't have the focus to learn as much from eavesdropping, but you could use the sensing practice.
[] Aim to learn what you can about Lady Amadea's kidnappers. This area seems too overgrown for them to travel off the paths without disturbing the undergrowth.
[] Write-in
Voting will be locked for 120 minutes after this goes up.
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Misc QM Answers I (Meta-knowledge, Character Sheet Unreliability, Moratoriums)
That is literally the meta-knowledge I'm referring to. Anything that comes up in the story is just normal knowledge. I won't ban attempts to exploit knowledge of canon settings (attempts that would be out of character for Blake are what the character veto is for!), but trying is just as likely to lead you astray as it is to actually help. Such attempts are like being aware that you should walk at crosswalks without knowing about the associated lights, or trying to shop for shoes at the soup store.
Question: Jade's character sheet was subject to the "unreliable narrator" warning and she regularly underestimated her skills. Will Blake's sheet be similarly affected? Though we'd have to expect the opposite direction since Blake has shown several signs of overestimating herself.
Blake's skills will also be subject to unreliable narration, but any overestimation would generally be on account of application rather than ability - which Jade also did. For example, Blake might know that she could hit something with a spell and theoretically have it accomplish X dffect, but might not be aware of the effects of magic resistance or how well the enemy can dodge. EDIT: Skill/ability numerical ranks are largely arbitrary estimates by a character and the most likely to be inaccurate.
To be clear, there's a moratorium on voting. Discussion is encouraged, and indeed, that's why the moratorium is there at all. If you want to propose a write-in vote during that time or refer to an existing vote with attached discussion, then I encourage using empty brackets [] instead of a filled X so that it doesn't seem like you're ignoring the moratorium.
