Italics indicate thinking
Bold is for attacks
Leona's POV
We all moved in as a team, the room was rather tight with five girls although I didn't mind I was used to community living like this in the barracks back at the village. Speaking of tight I was not a fan of these "Uniforms", I was much more comfortable in my fur outfit and I hated that they made us all look the same.
Though I did enjoy the first class, it was all about hunting stories, I couldn't understand why the other girls weren't fascinated by these mighty tales of the hunt.
"Hey Leona." Ruby whispered.
"Hmm?" I looked over and saw she had drawn a silly picture.
"Hehehe." She snickered.
"Hmph." I chuckled a bit.
"Grr…" Weiss growled at us.
"And Then I returned to the village celebrated as a hero." The teacher, a man, said.
"Bravo! Another! Another!" I clapped.
"It seems we have at least one interested student." He acknowledged "But remember students who among you considers yourself to have the three traits of a huntsman, they must be strategic, well-educated and wise! So who among you believes themselves to be the embodiment of these traits?"
"Isn't a huntress just supposed to kill stuff?" I asked Ruby.
"I don't know." She shrugged a bit.
"I do Sir!" Weiss suddenly yelled.
"Well then let's find out." The teacher gestured to a large cage in the classroom.
"Do cages in this world always growl?" I asked Ruby.
"No."
Weiss changed into her battle outfit and faced off with a Boar type Grimm.
"Go Weiss!" Yang cheered.
"Wahoo, spill it's guts like a true warrior!" I yelled.
"Fight hard." Blake clapped.
"Yeah you represent Team RLWBY…The L is silent!"
"I am trying to focus!" she snapped at us.
"Is giving words of encouragement before a hunt not something you do here?" I asked.
"Well…it's Weiss." Ruby sighed "Uhh but I'm sorry."
Weiss started fighting the creature, she didn't seem to be making progress but she certainly wasn't losing.
"Hang in there Weiss!" Ruby yelled.
"Watch the tusks." I yelled.
Weiss rapier was soon pinned between the two tusks and shot across the room although she did quickly retrieve it.
"Weiss go for it's belly, there's no armor there!" Ruby cheered.
"Stop telling me what to do!" she snapped back before stabbing the boar.
After that the bell rang, and class was dismissed.
"Weiss!" Ruby ran out into the hall.
"Weiss can fight." I remarked to Yang "But her attitude makes for a poor hunting companion."
"I guess."
Later
"Hmm." I sat up in the bed.
I found these beds far more uncomfortable than the cots back home, strange since the others liked them so much. Weiss had yet to return and despite Blake and Yang going to bed Ruby was still up. I didn't say anything when I got up and went outside to sit near the trees in the school courtyard.
"Much better."
"Could you not sleep?" Ruby asked walking up to me.
"I suppose." I looked at her "I find this place strange, for all its metal and lights…the stars still look stunning."
"Weird people normally say it's harder to see the stars in the city then out in the country." She laughed sitting on the grass next to me.
"Well it's impossible to see the stars with a whole jungle canopy in the way." I smiled "I thought you said you were studying."
"I need a break." She sighed "It's hard, I don't know how people take school so seriously, and I saw you leave so I figured I'd take the chance to get some fresh air, that and we can talk."
"Talk? About what?" I asked.
"Stuff I guess, I'd like to know more about you." She smiled "Your tribe too."
"Leona Lionheart, I grew up in the Amazon Tribe, but you knew all that already." I laughed.
"What's your tribe like?" she asked.
"We're all women, we live like one big family." I told her "You live for the village, everything you do is for the sake of the village."
"Sounds tough." She said.
"Not really, when you grow up like that it's just…normal." I shrugged "Frankly you all wanting to do things alone is very foreign to me."
"I guess that makes sense, it must be hard to live out there with all the Grimm." Ruby said.
"We manage, we hunt what gets close the rest tend to stay away as a result." I shrugged "Or so the Matriarchs say."
"Matriarchs?"
"Our Elders, the oldest women in the village, they make choices about what to do in crisis, how to deal with problems, what and where to hunt." I explained "We all listen to them."
"What about these." She poked my right arm "I like them."
"My Tattoos?" I asked.
"I think they look cool." She laughed.
"In my village these are very significant, each spiral and line shows something important, we have markings for everything from hunting milestones to childbirth." I explained showing the branch like pattern on my arms that went all the way down my hands where it changed into a more skeletal shape and curved around my fingers "Some tattoos are hereditary, so you'll often find that daughters have some pattern in common with their mother to show linkage. We even have tattoos that show our mates."
"Mates?" Ruby looked focused "I thought you said your tribe doesn't have any men?"
"Ah I see there's a little confusion." I nodded "We use men for breeding yes, but that does not mean that we are unfamiliar with the concept of romance and love as I've seen in your world. So in my village if you see the same mark on the breast of two woman it means that they have completed the ceremony of unity and bound themselves to each other. Though I suppose it must be strange to you, women loving other women, though to us it is considered normal maybe someday, maybe even here, I may find someone to share a marking with?"
"We have stuff like that here, although it's a lot more complicated." I sighed "It's certainly not look at as positively as your people seem to, though I don't care who does what, I think it's cool to have someone special, no matter who they are."
"You see most girls in our village will grow up with two mothers, although biologically speaking only one is genetically so." I said "Or so says the scientists who came to study my people. Though I can't say I know it personally."
"Did you only have one Mom?" Ruby asked.
"I never had a mother at all." I told her showing her my palms where there were dark beads tattooed on them "Do you see these markings?"
"They look like raindrops." She said.
"No…they are drops of blood." I said "I got these at my initiation, they are the symbol of my mother, though I never knew her."
"Did she die?" Ruby asked.
"You could say that…she was killed." I looked off "Or more specifically she was…executed."
"Ha!" Ruby gasped "I'm sorry I shouldn't have asked."
"There's no reason to be shocked, she got what she deserved, or so the Elders told me." I explained "My Mother was a vile woman who killed her fellow tribeswomen for fun, unfortunately she was pregnant with me at the time, the tribe needs all the girls it can get, so she was allowed to give birth to me…and executed the next day."
"I see…I didn't really get to know my Mom well either." She frowned.
"Then that makes us kindred spirits I suppose." I smiled.
"What about your other tattoos what do those mean?" she asked.
"I don't have very many unique tattoos yet, I had only completed my initiation recently, at 16 we go though a rite of passage to officially be recognized as an adult woman in the eyes of the tribe."
"What do you have to do?" she asked.
"You must collect the poison of a Deathstalker." I said "You return to the village with it."
"That sounds hard…especially for a girl our age."
"That's actually the easy part." I chuckled "The poison is distilled and mixed with herbs and tribal concoctions and worked into a fine paste…to put it simply you could say-"
I held the back of my hands up.
"We use it to make the ink for our tattoos." I smiled "That is the most painful part, getting your first tattoos, feeling the burning and stinging as your body grows used to the poison is something not all candidates can bare, but those who do are Amazon's down to the very fiber of our being."
"So your people inject themselves with the venom of a Grimm?" Ruby asked "Is that safe?"
"To my knowledge, it is." I shrugged "But perhaps there is something that allows Amazons to handle it, I can't quite say for sure, but subsequent tattoos aren't nearly as painful."
I stood up "Thank you Ruby I enjoyed this chat."
"Yeah me too, I think I learned a lot." She smiled "Your Tattoos sound weird…but cool, I don't know if they'd suit me though."
"Your pale skin with black ink would certainly make you stand out." I smiled "Although I don't think the Matriarchs would let you join the tribe, seeing as you're an outsider. Though if you truly are interested who knows, your strong enough to be an Amazon, if you can handle the initiation that is. Thank you Ruby, you've made me feel so welcome here, but we should head back inside."
"Yeah it's late, but I kinda wanted to study more." She sighed as we headed back inside "I wanna be a good leader that you guys can depend on."
"You've done more than enough." I smiled.
AN
Thank you for reading. Feedback is appreciated. Feel free to message me any questions or concerns.
Hope you enjoyed this exposition chapter for Leona's backstory. We'll get more into the story of her Mom and more about her tribe later, this was just meant to establish some worldbuilding stuff about the Amazons.
Debating whether I wanna do shipping in this? I've never done an OC Yuri ship, could be fun to experiment with that?
Till Next Time!