A/N: With RWBY Vol. IV premiering today, I figure it's time for an announcement. During Vol. IV, every time the fine folks at RT post a new chapter (not WoRs; when they get a day off, so do I), I'll be posting a new chapter. So basically, Belladonna Lilies will be going weekly for the next few months. As you probably guessed, we're getting near to the end...though I think I'll still have a chapter or two left even after the volume finishes... Enjoy the now more-tolerable cliffhangers!

~X X X~

There were no thunderous gasps, no furious denials or shouts of protest following Weiss's statement. Margarethe simply gave her grand-niece a sad, exhausted smile and said, "When did you realize?"

"Not until after we escaped the Pavilion tonight and I had a chance to think things over while we were hiding. I understood how the creatures of Grimm knew we'd be here; they presumably work for Hyde and so likely kept tabs on Garnet. When they saw Strauss and the others preparing to trap us, they followed and laid their own traps with much more lethal intent. This also explains why the destruction wasn't more complete, because they were adapting to circumstances as they found them instead of having the time to fully plan in advance.

"What I didn't understand, though, was how Garnet knew to send Strauss and his men after me."

She turned to Strauss.

"You knew I would be here, meeting with Aunt Margarethe. This wasn't a precautionary observation in case I arrived, but a trap based on actual knowledge."

"It didn't make sense that he could have figured it out from the messages in the Star's agony column," Blake said, taking up the thread of the explanation. "He didn't know the references we'd be using or even that we would be communicating in that way or in that paper. He had to be told, either by Miss Schnee or by Dr. Verhart."

"And if it had been Dr. Verhart, he wouldn't have given me back Myrtenaster, certainly not after improving it so I'd be better prepared to escape by force. No, it had to be you, Aunt Margarethe. The entire meeting with you was your idea, to draw me out where Garnet could get me out of the way, packed back to the manor and no longer making trouble."

Once again, Margarethe made no attempt to deny it.

"Having allied yourself with Miss Belladonna, you had become an active obstacle to Pandora's operations, particularly after you were witnessed at the former Jekyll house. That frightened me as well, since you yourself had put yourself at serious risk twice at that point. Many of Pandora's guards had been drawn from the criminal classes, and you cannot expect such men to hold back if they believe themselves in danger, no matter how many orders they might be given to leave you unharmed."

Weiss nodded.

"I know. You asked me to give up hunting Hyde, and you couldn't conceal how shocked you were when I told you about the first two attempts the creatures of Grimm had made on my life. It was a great relief to know you had nothing to do with that even before I realized that you were involved with Pandora."

"To say nothing of the fact that you were as much risk from the bombings as Weiss, if not more," Blake said. "But that doesn't excuse you for what you did do, for allowing Moreau and Hyde to carry out their monstrous experiments. To create things that were neither human nor beast but some blending of the two. Can you imagine what it was like for us, being—"

"Blake!"

The cat-eared girl inhaled sharply.

"I…I know. This isn't the time or the place. But there will be that time and place, Miss Schnee."

"You have to believe that I knew nothing of what you were saying. I had no idea that they were in any way using innocent people as test subjects."

"You arranged their funding. You provided them with facilities, equipment, staff, everything they needed to do their work, and you kept yourself in ignorance as to what was actually happening. You had a responsibility, not even just to us, their victims, but to yourself and the rest of your family and the Dust Company, to Weiss and to people like Mr. Ashton and even Mr. Strauss, here!"

"She's right, Aunt Margarethe. Please, I want to understand what happened."

The old woman nodded.

"I wish that you could have known Dr. Moreau. I don't think that you can entirely understand without having talked with him, heard him and the passion he brought to his work.

"He was a genius, of course. Educated at Paris originally and took his medical degree by the age of twenty, then went on to pursue advanced studies at Ingolstadt, near Geneva, where he was viewed as the second coming of the great Waldman by all his professors. That was where we, the Schnee Dust Company, had him brought to our attention."

"We maintain regular contact with most of the major educational institutions in Europe, and many abroad," Ashton explained.

"I know," Blake said. "The Dust Company was, after all, founded upon the control of the newest, most dramatic technological and scientific breakthroughs of the century…regardless of how they made them."

"Some scientists," Margarethe continued her story, "dislike the idea of working for a company. They fear the interference of businessmen with their research, either in terms of the demands placed upon them or the loss of control over their work. Dr. Moreau was not in this group. Rather, he had no pride of ownership in his discoveries; his concern was with the importance of the work itself, and eagerly joined the Dust Company because it provided the resources by which he could push the boundaries of human understanding.

"He worked for three years in the Dust Company's medical research division, where his efforts were sterling—he was directly responsible, for example, for the breakthrough in the use of ivory Dust in enhancing the properties of anti-septic treatments for use during and after surgery that have nearly doubled patient survival rates when in effect. But all of that was work done on our projects, not on his own, which he still dreamed of completing."

Blake shifted in her seat, but managed to hold her tongue.

"I first met Dr. Moreau at a party celebrating the dedication of our new medical research facility in Cornwall, in 1882. My presence was more or less a matter of public relations, a Schnee attending the dedication as if I was christening a battleship at its launch, but Dr. Moreau saw an opportunity. He sought me out—quite openly; there was no trace of deception in him—and asked if I would hear him out. Now, perhaps, I wonder if it would have been better if I never had."

"I don't think there's any meaning to those kind of regrets," Weiss said.

"Perhaps not, but…"

"The mistakes came later, not in first causes."

"That depends," Blake cut in, "on what it was that Moreau proposed. What was his idea?"

Margarethe inhaled, slowly and deeply. Given her age, the lateness of the hour, and the violent events of the evening, it seemed plain that she was holding herself off from complete collapse solely by force of will.

"We retired to a private parlor, and there Dr. Moreau spoke to me of his dream. He saw, he said, inspiration in the way how Dust enabled us to control the fundamental energies of the universe, and through its application make electrical and mechanical functions work differently than otherwise believed possible. He'd been inspired by Darwin's work on evolution, and how natural selection will allow species best adapted to their environments to thrive and survive, and how those species will change over time as positive traits are spread through the population, even up to and including human beings."

"I take it that Moreau did not believe that humans were created in God's own image," Blake said dryly.

"It is a question that I asked him myself, not out of any expectation that he would say yes, you understand, but because I wanted to hear his answer."

"Which was?"

"He correctly said that I obviously knew that already and was just testing him—because 'obviously an intelligent woman like yourself could not seriously entertain such arrant nonsense and so could have only been trying to measure my reaction,' if I recall his exact words."

"Typical," Ashton stated, drawing all three women to look at him.

"How so?" Weiss asked.

"I've supervised more scientists, researchers, engineers, and automatists than I can conveniently count in my time with the Dust Company. I have found that it is perfectly possible for a man or woman to be both a skilled, dedicated scientist and a person of religious faith. And I have found that one can be a professed atheist and still be a deeply moral person to put their more devout fellows to shame. But that one particular kind of scientific hubris—whether the actual substance of it is genius or nonsense—is only found where a man believes he is the only God. Call it the atheist's equivalent of a witch-burner, if you will, where one reads Nietzsche and sees only self-aggrandizement."

"If you want to call Moreau a deluded fanatic, you won't find any argument from me," Blake said.

Margarethe nodded, though whether she was acknowledging the conclusion or merely that Blake would feel that way wasn't obvious.

"At the time, all I saw was his passion and drive. He continued by pointing to the different races of mankind and how each had developed various physical characteristics that allowed them to thrive in their native environments. These, though, were all slow and random developments. Mutations had to occur based upon pure chance, and then chance again had to give them the opportunity to emerge and thrive. But what, he said, if it wasn't random? If we could alter the nature of the human race by choice, to select positive traits—better senses, superior intellect, greater strength and endurance, resistance to disease, whatever you may—and infuse them directly into people at our will, how might it chance human history, the very nature of the world? The technological gains of the Second Industrial Revolution would be nothing compared to the transformative nature of this."

All four of them stared at her at this pronouncement. Strauss, one suspected, was probably considering the whole thing crazy, better suited to a bad melodrama than an actual business decision. Blake gave no outward signs of surprise or shock even though she'd just been given the reason for her very existence, implying that she'd already had the thought and had expected something very much like what she'd heard. Ashton nodded once, slowly, as if acknowledging that significant breakthroughs often came from reaching for the seemingly impossible.

It was Weiss who cracked.

"For that," she whispered, barely audible. "It was all for that? Hideous experiments carried out with reckless abandon? The captivity and torture of Blake's people? The deaths of Dust Company workers and soldiers in the Ellespoint Island disaster? The suffering of the Faunus trying to survive? Further deaths at Saulbridge and the Jekyll house? And now this…abomination tonight? All for something so stupid as that?"

She slammed both palms onto the table, thrusting herself up out of the chair.

"How could you? Even if—if—there's some validity in the underlying ideals, it demands to be treated properly! You just gave those men money and resources to do whatever they wanted, and then when it all went catastrophically wrong you did it again. You deliberately arranged things within the Dust Company structure so that Pandora would have as little oversight as possible. You gave madmen carte blanche to do whatever they wanted! How can you possibly justify that?"

"Because…The only excuse I can offer is that I believed in Dr. Moreau."

"Believed in him? In that lunatic?"

"You can't imagine how it was if you'd never met him. He had such fire, such energy. He had a way of bringing his dream to life for you, right there as you spoke to him. He made you believe in the new world he imagined, a world where humanity could be everything that it was meant to, freed from the shackles of our current shape. We could redefine life, even society itself, and with our own hands instead of waiting for what might take centuries or millennia. For the first time ever, science would allow us to define what it means to be human instead of having limitations thrust upon is."

"Playing God, more like," Strauss said, a look of open disgust on his face.

"Nothing more than an excuse, he said. Until now, we never had the knowledge or the ability to make those changes, so we pretended to ourselves that we weren't supposed to and made up lies about it."

"'Ah, well, the grapes were probably sour anyway,'" Blake said, quoting Aesop.

"And you believed that?" Weiss challenged her aunt directly. "Reducing the human experience to something to tinker with, like a set of child's blocks or spare parts in Dr. Verhart's lab?"

She raised her head, looking directly at the younger woman.

"Weiss, I dearly hope that some day you yourself will have lived long enough to understand. I have been alive for over seventy years. My body is failing me, slipping bit by bit with every passing year. I tire more quickly. My legs go weak and require the help of the stick for support. The strength and vigor of youth are long vanished. No, Dr. Moreau made no mention of being able to reverse any of that; there were no such airy promises or childish dreams. But the idea of mastering the human body, when life has conspired to tear that mastery from you, the appeal is self-evident."

Weiss shook her head and dropped back into her seat.

"Even if that were true, there should have been standards, limits—"

"Yes, there should. And in truth, that was exactly why I arranged Moreau's project in the way that I did. He knew as well as I that ground-breaking, paradigm-changing research such as his would always be hedged 'round with restrictions and limitations on how far he could go. Committees, paperwork, approvals to fight through for every step not to verify that he was right, but because people would be afraid. It was why he had chosen to work in the industrial field and not carry out his research at a university, because he felt that we were interested in building the future instead of being held back by the past. But even the Schnee Dust Company has its limits, its controls.

"So I made those controls disappear. As a Schnee I knew how that was to be done, where to apply my authority and more simply where the gaps in the company's structure could be found. Dr. Moreau was given the Ellespoint Island facility, where his research could be carried out away from the public eye. Security was assured by our military assets."

"Where does this Hyde, or Jekyll, come in? You've only talked about Moreau thus far," asked Ashton.

"Dr. Jekyll was a researcher doing cutting-edge work in the area of the human brain, in its physical development and the effect of chemicals in its function. Dr. Moreau believed that Dr. Jekyll's work would be necessary in realizing his vision, since the separation between human and animal clearly lay in the brain more than in any other way. At the time, Jekyll appeared to be little more than a paid associate—he was given the opportunity to work, respect for his theories, and a considerable salary and benefits.

"After the disaster that brought about the end of the initial project, though, that changed. Dr. Jekyll talked to me from his hospital bed even as his injuries were still healing, about how he had become inspired to finish Dr. Moreau's work, to see things through. He told me of amazing breakthroughs they had made in transplanting the tissue of animals, of surgically and chemically adapting it to work with the bodies of the hosts—I had no idea that he meant human experimentation!" she added, turning to Blake with a desperate plea in her voice and expression alike.

The Faunus just folded her arms across her chest.

Weiss let out a long sigh.

"That was the problem, Aunt Margarethe. You did, indeed, have no idea. You put your trust in men who hadn't earned it, and you left yourself no way to verify if they kept faith. You gave power to madmen without any way to take it back."

"When I arranged for Pandora's creation, I insisted upon Mitchell Garnet being in charge of security. He would have—"

"He would have done nothing," Blake cut her off, "just like he did do nothing. He wasn't there to parse the science; it wasn't his job, and he didn't have the education. If the Dust Company had signed off on it, well, it wasn't his place to disagree. We all are aware that the Schnees' position on industrial espionage doesn't draw the line at killing. You don't have to be a historian too see how people in power can use and abuse those below them. It was less than a century ago that this country still practiced the slave trade, and you don't have to be a reformer to cite the abuses going on in the colonies today, or the labor practices right here in England."

"I presume there's a point to that other than a general indictment of humanity and the Schnee Dust Company in specific?" Ashton said.

"My point is that there will always be someone who's willing to do what shouldn't be done when ordered to. We can say that they shouldn't, that they should take a stand, one man or one woman at a time, but that's hardly realistic. Whether they're afraid of the consequences of disobedience, or society has taught them that it's an acceptable sort of wrong to commit, or because they genuinely just don't care, there'll always be those who obey orders that ought to seem monstrous. That's not how the world should be, but it's how it is—and it means that it's the responsibility of those who do have power to make certain that orders of that sort are never given."

"That's a fairy tale," Strauss grumped, inadvertently revealing what he expected from his employers.

"No, it's not," Weiss said. "Blake is right. It's too much to expect that everyone in the world will suddenly become a model of virtue, honor, and charity, especially when it puts them at risk to try. But I ought to be able to expect the three people at this table who can set policy for the Dust Company to do so responsibly, with standards." Her count made it clear she was including herself among those with a duty.

"What do you want from me, Weiss?" Margarethe asked. "I've admitted my mistakes. And it's been made all too clear what kind of a madman Hyde is. That he would sanction something like this—indeed, that he would willfully order the murder of a Schnee at all—is proof positive of how far he has fallen. But it should be equally obvious to you that I have no control over him. Whatever direction he has taken Dr. Moreau's work, it is obviously more important to him than human life."

"I can't argue with that," Weiss said. "If Hyde is to be stopped at this point it will have to be by force." She turned to Ashton. "Now that you know what's happening, will you work with us on stopping it?"

"Of course. Even if basic decency didn't require it, then the good name of the Dust Company does. If Hyde's activities ever became public knowledge, the cost would be immeasurable. Tonight's debacle alone could run over a million pounds sterling when you consider all collateral and incidental costs. Besides which, it is, technically, what your father asked of me."

"Then between the two of you, it ought to be possible to throttle Hyde's access to resources. I'm sure that he's established hidden slush funds, but a pure research group requires steady infusions of money until its products can go into production. I assume that you can cut those off, Aunt?"

"Yes, of course."

"And while Hyde might not follow your orders, I'm sure that Garnet will. He was still trying to capture me, after all, and work within the bounds of what you might call 'normal' operations."

"For a certain definition of normal," Blake said. "There's something you can do, too, Mr. Ashton."

"And what is that?"

"We have to do something about the creatures of Grimm. I don't know how big they are as a group, but they've sent six men and women after Weiss so far, and it's obvious they'll stop at nothing in trying to kill her. I'm sure that the more…clandestine…parts of Dust Company security has as good or better an awareness of the underworld as Scotland Yard, and the resources to remind those madmen of how reckless it is to go to war with the most powerful entity in Europe."

Weiss looked over at her in surprise.

"Blake, did you just suggest that Ashton have the Grimm hunted down and—"

"Yes. I don't care if it makes me a hypocrite. You'll never be safe while those things are still out there,' she growled.

"Frankly, Miss Belladonna, I had already intended something of the sort," Ashton said. "Given the extremely public nature of tonight's events, Special Branch will be aggressively seeking these creatures of Grimm to prevent any further atrocities. It is one thing for the Schnee Dust Company to be the victim of such people, but quite another if Inspector Branwen and his fellows were to discover that they had been hired by the president of one of our subsidiaries."

"Then that just leaves Hyde himself. How do we go after him?"

"Aunt Margarethe can help with that, I think, by answering the question she never had a chance to before the interruptions began. Though knowing what we do now, I think it's unlikely that she ever intended to get down to specifics."

"No, I did not," she said. "I had hoped that I could convince you to abandon this affair of your own will, and if not to occupy your attention long enough for Mr. Strauss and his associates to spring their trap. Now, of course, I shall hold back nothing."

Blake Belladonna chose that moment to demonstrate that Weiss wasn't the only Schnee woman whose dramatic revelations she could preempt.

"That's all right; you as good as told her with what you did say. When you put together the source of what Pandora's capitalization with Hyde's obsession and the need for a private facility where he could carry out monstrous research without risking the public finding out, one possibility seems obvious. Pandora has refurbished Moreau's old facility on Ellespoint Island, hasn't it?"