Chapter 12: Primordial
The quiet hum of the heater seemed to be what disturbed Weiss, before the creeping realization that her team was nowhere to be found. She felt awake and laying on a bed, yet couldn't trust the sensation. The room was bright, all white and blue. She looked to the sides, scanning the… her room at the schnee Manor.
"Weiss…" Doctor Sabrina said, in a warning tone.
She did not know any Doctor by that name. The woman at the side of the bed looked at Weiss from behind her clipboard as she made some notes.
Weiss struggled for a moment, her head felt painfully dazed, as if she'd sparred with Yang without Aura shields, "Who are you?"
Sabrina only looked at her, confused. She wasn't a figure Weiss could recognize, the pale blonde hair, the near albino skin… Even in solitas, where pale skin was more common than in the rest of the world, there was an ashy undertone to hers. Her clothes were impossible to notice, as every time Weiss observed her, it was as if her vision would blur anything but her face.
Something in the back of Weiss' mind sounded alarms, she felt a creeping, tightening sensation on her stomach every moment she stood by the doctor's side.
"Ah, I see," Doctor Sabrina finally answered. "This must be another episode-"
As Weiss instinctively tried to reach for Myrtenaster at her belt, a chain went taut as the leather handcuff trapped her on the bed. She tested the other limbs, only to find them in the same affliction.
"Are the straps bothering you? We could loosen them a bit."
Weiss looked up, only to see she was no longer in her room, but rather a medical bay, the only door in the room flanked by a couple of guards in white. She looked down, only to see that her clothes had been replaced with a pale blue lapover gown, her weapon nowhere to be seen.
Weiss looked up at the doctor, "What did you do to me?"
The doctor merely offered a false, forced smile, "The same as every day, we've medicated you for your condition, but-"
As soon as Weiss shifted her attention to the room, the doctor stopped. Where was her team? Unless they had been captured, there was no reason why they would leave her with regular doctors.
Sabrina cleared her throat, "I'm afraid I need your complete attention so we can make some progress."
Progress on what? The only progress to be made was against Atlas, what was this doctor trying? Perhaps Weiss could reason with her.
"Look. I collapsed on the snow once, that's it. Whatever happened I trust my team more than a strange doctor, so release me."
Again the doctor smiled that disgustingly patronizing smirk, "Do you see? This is why we must continue our treatment."
A point of confusion mixed with curiosity took over Weiss, unprompted, "What? What treatment? Look, may I see my team?"
Sabrina shook her head, "I'm afraid that would be a step backwards, especially when you've made so much progress."
Was she in an Atlesian medical bay perhaps? "I can give you my Beacon student number, if that would help."
"You can," Sabrina said. "I'm sure you can. But will it return to me the ID of Mello this time? Or Catalina? Don't you see how me continuing to humor this is unhealthy for you?"
Weiss listened to the words cautiously, she had no memories of such events... Yet doubt still seeped into her mind, she couldn't place the feeling anywhere else other than her own perception. She could vividly remember only a few moments before waking. The realization that Atlas simply looked to destroy, there was for sure no political gain, nothing but a war against the living humans in the continent and that it necessitated a larger than human being behind it.
That they were being attacked on a mental level.
Was it all a delusion? The doctor at her side, she'd never seen her before, yet the restraints on her limbs felt real. The room, the air with a hint of fire Dust that seeped through the heater's filters, fine orange specks that filled the room.
A dark red droplet oozed from her nose, Weiss only realized it was her blood a moment later.
Sabrina produced a kerchief from her labcoat's pocket, Weiss only just realizing she wore such. She leaned in closer, to wipe the blood, and the feeling of dread increased tenfold, out of instinct Weiss struggled against the cuffs, she couldn't let the doctor come any closer!
The seemingly ever present smile left Sabrina's face, "Don't struggle. You-"
Bang!
The doctor's head was flung backwards, a spray of black blood painted the wall behind her as she fell to the floor. Shocked, Weiss looked backwards, seeing a white-haired man holding a smoking gun. One of the guards, a fool, ran towards him, only to be shot in the chest, and the other ran outside, to an unseen corridor.
The man, Weiss noticed at glance, felt familiar, although only vaguely so. There were so many white-haired people, she herself was one of them. The most notable thing about his was the fairly old-fashioned clothes.
He rushed to her bed, to undo one of the cuffs, "You'll need to come with me." Despite the fact he'd seemingly murdered two people, the man was fairly stoic.
As soon as the cuff was undone, Weiss took to undoing the others, "Where to? I don't even know you."
The man pointed behind him with his thumb, there was a wooden door on the wall to his back, bright sunlight piercing through the door frame. It had appeared there as Weiss wasn't looking? "I'll explain when we get there. Hurry!"
Sabrina's body sat up.
"Ozma," She said, antipathy dripping from the word. The black blood cascaded from the hole in her forehead, down the nose and chin.
Weiss undid the final cuff at her leg, leaped off the bed in time to see it split in two by a force either too fast or too subtle to be noticed. The man — Ozma, she thought — fired thrice as he walked backwards, she wasted no time running to the wooden door…
Just as she opened it, Ozma was flung in her direction, his body striking her back dead center. The world spun around her, shots fired from the medical bay, she hit sand, then silence.
And the unmistakable scent of seawater followed, along with the sounds of waves crashing against the sand.
Weiss took a moment to breathe, she felt deprived of her Aura shield for the first time in many years, and though it wasn't a difficult adjustment, it required some effort. She'd fallen face-first, and the momentum had dragged her through the sand a few meters. Lifting her head, she could see the afternoon sun, were they somewhere in Vale? Behind them, the door had disappeared, nowhere to be seen.
She rolled to her back, seeing Ozma prone on the sand, near her feet.
"Are you alive?" She asked.
The man chuckled, "Yes." He stretched his arms to his sides with a groan before sitting up, "I'm afraid this is a little beyond life and death at the moment."
Weiss scanned her surroundings again. Where could they be that the beach was completely deserted? Even in Vacuo it was still a place of leisure for most. "I'm not sure I follow," she said.
Ozma seemed as if he was about to get up, before he decided against it, "I suppose that makes sense. You're not here by your own volition."
Weiss nodded, "I'm not even sure where I am. Ah, I'm sorry, I'm Weiss Schnee, Huntress of Team Ruby."
"You may call me Ozma," he said, "And I'm well aware. I'm the man who created Beacon in the first place, you know as ex-Headmaster Ozpin," he chuckled.
The words were said so casually that Weiss almost took them at face value, "What?" she asked.
Ozma smiled, "I'm sorry, I'm afraid there'll be a lot of confusion but bear with me."
"Why should I believe you?"
"Because I just saved you from who knows wow many years of mental torture?"
"It could be a trick, for all I know. You could be the one who put me there in the first place, trying to get me to lower my guard."
Ozma paused for a moment, "That is… sound reasoning, I must admit. Then don't."
"What do you mean?"
"Don't lower your guard, keep an eye out, stay vigilant. I won't ask anything of you. How does that sound?"
Weiss eyed him, suspicious of the man, "Then tell me, where are we?"
"Simply put? Nowhere. This is a temporary construct, something akin to an illusion."
"An illusion? One that feels this real? Weiss grabbed a handful of sand, let the grains run through her fingers.
Ozma tapped a finger to his head, "Your mind decides what is real. Although there are differences between Aura-enhanced and normal people, one aspect remains the same and it's that the human brain always performs many functions at the same time. Even within dreams, you can still feel the same sensations you do while awake."
Weiss remained silent as Ozma continued, "Of those functions there are two that always work tirelessly, one that believes, and one that proves beliefs. What the thinker thinks, the prover proves. If a power can take control of one of them-"
"Like a Semblance of some sort?" Weiss interrupted, to her own surprise.
Ozma nodded once , "Something like it. In truth it's magic, an old and insidious kind."
Weiss raised an eyebrow, "What's the difference?"
"Not much of one," Ozma sighed, "But Semblances generally only perform one task, magic… Well there are fewer limits to what it can do."
"Is that so? Then why is it that nobody has any magical talent in all of Remnant?"
"I'm afraid that's a secret I've kept from you. From everyone in Remnant, for the good of mankind."
"I don't believe you."
"You don't?"
"No. What good can come of keeping any of this a secret?" Weiss said. Realizing the irony in an atlesian saying such. There were many lies in Atlas, many omissions, and she was well aware of the power that lay in always having a secret weapon, in denying your enemy crucial information.
It didn't mean she believed Ozma's words, but she could see the point being made.
Perhaps the silence had betrayed something, as Ozma smirked before continuing, "Ah, so you see, don't you? I can't say I wouldn't prefer open honesty, but this was the least harmful path. That woman you saw earlier is our collective enemy."
"And I still can't tell if that's true. I don't even know if she's real, or if any of this is real and not a trap."
"Fair. I'll leave it to your judgment then, but you already know it. You know there's someone, not something, behind the Grimm. They act intelligently, sometimes almost with human intelligence."
"I've heard it before. Hive theories, the idea that there's some central connection. It's outlandish, a conspiracy theory."
"No, people think it's a pipe dream. Consider the facts: Grimm don't communicate in any perceivable way. There's no body language, no spoken language, nothing at all, and yet we can see that they clearly coordinate between one another. You've surely seen it at least once."
"That doesn't mean anything. We know they can follow negativity because we've observed it, we've never seen any form of hierarchy between Grimm."
"True, but you have seen that Grimm can be controlled. And that they can control androids. This is why the Crisis happened in the first place, it was no accident."
Weiss considered it, It was true that she had seen it with her own eyes, her sister had been a victim! But it was almost impossible to believe the implication, "How can one person be behind all this? It would take too many resources, all the money, connections, we'd intercept it at some point."
"We did. Multiple times. The problem is that our foe is immortal."
"Immortal?" Weiss asked, incredulous, "Don't mean unaging? Nobody is truly immortal."
"No, I mean completely and utterly immortal. You could destroy every molecule of her body and she would simply reform, unharmed, every memory intact."
"That's…"
"Hard to believe? Trust me, it was for me too, but she's the reason you're even here. Don't you want to know? It is fairly messy, and the longer we sit here questioning me, the longer it'll take."
Weiss considered it, Ozma, so far, hadn't tried anything, and his answers were honest, she'd seen no sign of lies in his mannerisms or demeanor. It was true that he could be armoing a trap, trying to get her to consider him a friend before revealing to be foe, but curiosity had the better of her, she knew he could also be speaking the truth. That chance, that possibility alone made the risk worth it.
"Go ahead then, why did I even end up here?"
"To put it simply, you somehow broke through a spell's barrier. Invisible, maybe even completely abstract, but even as we speak, that spell affects all of Solitas, no exception. It was a mental barrier, and this is but a fallback. A backup plan, a second layer of defense."
"So we were compromised!"
"Indeed. There are more advanced thinking techniques that would've revealed our enemy and her plan fairly early into your expedition, and I believe she knew this. Thus, a spell, one that causes any eyes prying too close to the truth to fall into circular thinking, it makes your thoughts avoid the obvious entirely. To keep you in a perpetual fight against the Grimm as a distraction, while she ends humanity unscathed."
"But why not simply kill us?"
"I suspect she avoided it because it would be too overt. I trained Huntsmen and Huntresses to fight against such after all. Direct, large scale attacks against all of Remnant would've just increased the rate you adapt at. It would've failed"
There was a sincere hint of pride as Ozma smiled, one of the few times he wasn't stoic in the face of the horrifying news delivered. Could that man truly be Ozpin? They seemed so… Different in many aspects, but similar in others.
Weiss leaned back on her arms, her fingers digging through the sand, "So she attacked us in a way we couldn't see, with a weapon that attacks our minds, and one we can't fight using weapons."
"Exactly. Mind you, this conversation? This is not happening within your mind, at this moment you are prone in the snow, half dead, and I am sitting in a bunker room, in the exact same state. This illusion is as real to me as it is to you, I will leave this place and remember everything, same as you."
"Will she remember this too? Can she hear what we're saying?"
"I can't say. I'm not the one who made this little haven."
"But how did you even interfere, how could you know we were caught in this spell?"
"Although I have no magic within me anymore, I had help, someone called Amber, I don't believe you've ever met before. She was the one who felt the disturbance you caused, I suspect other… Magically-gifted people did too. I must say it is quite a feat, thinking yourself out of a spell hard enough to cause a worldwide backlash."
It was a way of putting it, minutes ago she wasn't even aware there was such a thing like magic, and deep inside she still doubted it when everything she experienced so far could be perfectly explained through the use of a Semblance. There was no real palpable difference when it came to mind-altering powers. How could she believe this man? Believe that there was an immortal enemy looking to destroy all of humanity?
Weiss straightened herself, "That woman, Sabrina-"
"Ah, that's not her real name, she's Salem."
"Fine. Salem. Why does she even want humanity dead? If she wanted to kill us so badly, there were multiple ways she could've done it already. If she had her Grimm attack our farms, kill every food source, we'd be close to extinction already. There are only so many Huntsmen."
"True, true. As everything when comes to her, I believe even the threat she poses to us is merely subterfuge to a deeper goal. What it is, however, I do not know. The conflict, the endless back and forth between humanity and Grimm, it could all very well just be entertainment for her, this could simply be the whims of ennui."
The suggestion made Weiss' blood boil under her skin, "Entertainment? We've been fighting against a horde of monsters that exist to kill humans… And she's causing it just to get out of boredom?"
"It's possible. It could be spite, it could be any number of reasons. Consider her current situation-"
"You want me to sympathize with a mass-murdering immortal?"
Ozma opened his mouth, hesitated for a moment, "Not necessarily. Consider the facts. She's immortal and has lived through many millenia, past a certain point where centuries are but a fraction of her lifespan, where individual lives end before this very fraction. There is no dilation of time, she experiences it at the same rate you or I do. Decades don't pass at the blink of an eye, they take decades just the same. Can you imagine what this would cause to a human?"
She couldn't say she did, but that woman, was she really human?
Ozma continued, "The death, the endless cycle, generations of people, although one loss is tragic, it loses its impact when one has seen it thousands of times. Perhaps at some point they'd want some variety, some creativity behind the struggle. It's all I can devise at least, at the end of the day, it's still not possible to kill her, so we seek a way to reduce the harm she causes."
The logic was sound, but curiosity still poked Weiss's mind uncomfortably, "There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?"
Ozma raised an eyebrow, and Weiss continued, "You know a lot about her. About her immortality, but you didn't tell me how this all happened, or how you even know about it."
"Ah, I'm afraid that's something I must not tell you."
"Why not?" Weiss exclaimed, frustrated, "This secret, this person we could've done something if everyone knew about her-"
"No you couldn't!" Ozma interrupted her, pointing his finger and raising his voice for the first time. "None of you could've done anything ten thousand years ago, and none of you can do anything now!"
Ozma stopped, realizing he'd lost his composure, then forced his eyes shut as he pinched the bridge of his nose. He continued, his tone measured, "I have tried countless plans in the past. I don't like this, I don't like- The current events. But you must trust me when I say that her presence in the open will be catastrophic. She'll have no reason to hide, no reason to pull her punches. If you think the isolation-the slow death of every village in Solitas looks bad, then trust me, large scale war against her is worse."
Weiss pictured the scene, evey defense, every Huntsman, Huntress and even the cities themselves were not made to fight Grimm in worldwide scale, not with Remnant divided. They had quality, any one Huntress could kill hundreds of Grimm on her own, but numbers had a quality of their own. In this kind of future, if she tried to project a chance of victory… It was not high.
"Still," Weiss said, "We need to stop what is happening in Solitas."
Ozma nodded again, "Yes. We should not sacrifice even the city of Atlas to save the continent. I believe it can be done."
"How?"
"Ozma's eyes darted from side to side, as the man calculated something, it was impossible to tell what, "Once you wake up, you would've tried to warn your team, would you?"
"Yes. And I refuse not to," Weiss said, already guarding herself against any suggestions of deceit. She would not lie to her team.
Ozma, she noticed, acted much like Ruby in the moment he had to recalculate something, as he winced and in the brief moment of frustration mouthed one of the many calculations made silently, "Then do so, but you must not let the information reach the Mirage. Your teammates are under the same spell, and freeing them will be difficult. It adds more steps to the path."
"But it increases our chances?"
"If I told you, it'd change the chance."
"For better or for worse?"
"I cannot say."
Weiss groaned, frustrated once more, "And then what? I don't even know what to do now, all of this, it's way too big for me, or even just Team Ruby."
"Survive the next night. Then you'll need to find a way inside Atlas undetected."
"What? Survive the next night?" Weiss asked.
Ozma shook his head, "I cannot tell you-"
"Of-f course." Weiss let herself fall backwards, laying back on the sand. This Ozma who she did not know, who claimed to be Ozpin and told her of an unseen, powerful immortal, then offered a possible path to survival of the human race. Should she take it, would he simply use her and her team as a pawn to greater schemes?
"Then at least tell me, is there anyone who can prove all of this? Someone else I can trust, who won't be talking to me only in an illusion?
"Yes. Her name is Cinder Fall."
"Wait, the girl from-"
Weiss opened her eyes as she gasped for air, her lungs suddenly burning. She was still face-down in the snow, a blood-red patch had formed from the blood that dripped from her nose, and her teammates called her name. How long had she been out, mere moments? She checked her body, Myrtenaster was at her hip, she no longer wore the hospital gown.
The conversation she had mere moments ago almost felt distant, like a dream, yet she remembered it. She remembered it all, but a pit formed on her stomach.
How would she show all of this to her teammates and not appear completely and utterly insane?
