Chapter 39


The party was extravagant beyond measure.

The entertainment space consisted of several rooms lined up in succession and junctioned by wide, marble doorways who's doors slid back nearly to the wall, and did little to separate the individual suites.

The line of rooms curved, imperceptibly, so that - when standing on the border between rooms - one could hardly see beyond the limit of the next.

Bold color schemes and arabesque figures painted the walls and guided the tapestries - giving each room a distinct character of living light that seemed, in the absence of any substantial doorways, to differentiate the indifferentiable rooms, and to give to them an individual character separate from that of the others.

Mr. Schnee was one of the later arrivals and he wore a white mask, composed of bleached ferns, that covered the upper half of his face, forming a bold fortress around his eyes. This hardly concealed his identity, but it did help him to blend in to the rest of the masked crowd.

At this time of year, the normal social moores were loosened, and many exciting avenues for self expression opened themselves up to the normally more reserved classes of upper Atlas. And, wow, did some people take full advantage, because some of the costumes were what Mr. Schnee would have called... revealing.

"Whooo!" a maid in a lower cut version of her work uniform passed by Mr. S, walking backwards with her arms raised in the air; a giggling posse of similarly dressed mairds followed behind her - one of them was wearing a set of replica Infantry armor made out of cardboard.

Mr. Schnee had entered into the east room, a light blue affair with giant, turquoise windows that lined the walls either side of it.

Beyond the windows, a set of blank hallways followed the curving rooms, filling the space with a subtle glow of filtered blue light.

The next room was similarly modeled, except it was bright white and with translucent windows, it's various decorations hinted at the color of snow.

In each room, the only thing that could be counted upon to break the color scheme were the haphazardly costumed guests, and the gleaming silver robots which traversed the floorspace, carrying refreshments and a thousand other things.

Mr. Schnee climbed up onto a raised dais, which was topped with a small circle of chairs, and enclosed by a round fence of velvet lines. On this occasion, he was alone with Schwarz, keeping up an easy conversation with her, as she sat on the chair next to him. And, truth be told, he'd been deliberate, when setting things up, to allow no other guests. Speaking with Schwarz was one of the few joys left to him, and he dreaded to spoil the occasion by allowing the self important to impose themselves upon him. So engrossed was he, that he hardly noticed the hour flying by, only noticing the time when the time announced itself.

The midnight chime was doubly long, and remarkably loud - so much so, that the orchestra stopped playing, making way for it; and every voice fell to a hush, waiting politely for its speech to end.

Twelve seconds were a long time to spend in attentive silence. And it was long enough that everyone suddenly noticed Thetis, who had all this time managed to avoid attracting anyone's attention.

Thetis was covered in makeup, and hidden beneath the great folds of her latest outfit. Still, no one had any trouble recognizing her; for no one other than Thetis would have dared to wear such a thing.

False blood stained red the white canvas of her tattered robes. Her clothes were pale and bleached otherwise: a costume of poverty, made of the finest silks and dyed with the most expensive inks.

This alone would have drawn little attention, were it not for the torn sections at the back of her costume… reminiscent of the marks that might be left by a whip. Also notable were the faunus ears that decorated her head, and the made-up tattoo that read "SDC" and which seemed to brand itself - in bright letters of burnt flesh - across the side of her paling neck.

Thetis flaunted the look, and paced around the suddenly empty space that formed around her. By the look of her, she might have been on the catwalk. She proudly gestured to highlight the faunus ears she'd stuck on her head, as well as the fake brand which she seemed especially fond off.

"Thetis," Mr. Schnee's words were carried with perfect calm.

Thetis turned, hunching comically over in a servile bow when she saw him. "Is it appropriate, for one such as I, to behold your glory?" Thetis answered, quoting the standard phrase that the leaders of the former Mantle empire had used to greet their king.

Crack, Crack, Crack.

A noise came from the side.

The cold was almost physical with its presence, pressing like cool steel wherever Thetis' tattered robes failed to cover her adequately.

Thetis saw icy ferns crawling slowly into existence on the windows, glowing a ghostly blue against the backlit hallway. Below her, a slight crunch accompanied the shift of her numbing feet. A layer of white condensation that had collected on the floors, and the walls, and the hallways.

And at the epicenter of this temperature change, Mr. Schnee sat stiffly, looking down at her as silent winds howled about him.

The crowd was gone, huddled in the white room; the bravest of them pressed up against the doorway to look upon the developing scene.

Mr. Schnee looked down upon her, his face a mask of the deepest calm, showing nothing except a contentment that seemed to have no end.

Thetis decided, since she was apparently in so much trouble already, to see if she could push that.

Smiling, she tugged at one of her faunus ears, making a gesture with her fingers that - in some parts of the world - was actually considered friendly.

Suddenly the temperature crashed; several of the windows cracked with and various pieces of glassware followed suit. The serving robots stopped working… dead immediately, their glowing eyes turning dark as if a switch had flipped inside them.

Thetis, despite her aura, found herself in a painful cold, and her breath turned solid in the open air, littering the front of her shirt with glittering icicles.

The crowd recoiled in unison from the burning cold, leaving Thetis alone suddenly, in the ice covered blue room.

Mr. Schnee, hardly turning to face Schwarz, spoke calmly: "Escort her out of here."

Schwarz complied, and Thetis was taken to her room.

Very soon afterwards, it was discovered that Thetis had sabotaged some of the cameras around her assigned room.

This was no surprise. After all, it was an open secret that Thetis had a habit of messing with electronics, and hardly anyone begrudged her the use of her semblance. Besides, Thetis herself was older than many of the social delicacies that had formed around international business procedure, and so was given some leeway in this regard.

This particular night, however, her tampering with the cameras was submitted to the T.R.E.G as a violation. And, after some rather hefty string pulling, it had been decided that her actions, as a result of the knowledge she'd gain by interacting with the camera systems, constituted intellectual property theft - a civil crime in most proceedings.

After which, on an expedited ticket, the violation was transferred from the T.R.E.G to Atlas police who - after some virtuoso string performances by Mr. Schnee - concluded that Thetis's intellectual property theft, because it related to the security system of the Schnee Manor, actually represented a case of spying - a capital crime, in most jurisdictions.

And this criminal case, after some string pulling which required the legal equivalent of tugboat, was again expedited to the Atlas Council, where General Ironwood, in review of the evidence, was forced to agree that, yes, Thetis's spying was a threat to national security, and that the best course of action would be to exile her from Atlas immediately.

Granted, it was a temporary exile, but it was still impressive to get even that much done in twenty minutes.

And Thetis was impressed as well, when she was woken up thirty minutes after the fact, and informed of her new status.

She never liked Atlas anyways.

Still, she knew it wouldn't pay to fight the judgement, went without complaint to her private bullhead, and from there to Mistral.

What Thetis apparently did not know, however, was that Mr. Schnee was - at the moment of her exile - lying in his room, dying of the poison that had been administered to him.


Mr. S paused the scene, watching the footage which had long ago burned itself into his retinas.

He sat in a dark room, staring with strained eyes at the dim projection.

This was the week of the winter solstice and Mr. S had managed, somehow, to convince the staff to host another party week.

Just outside the private meeting room Mr. S had commandeered for his purpose, the din of conversation and opera music could be heard as the servants milled about the colorful party suites.

Mr. S had insisted on another week long celebration - a strange request considering the last celebration was barely a week old.

But Mr. S persevered so that there would be another week of catering. Get food, that was the plan.

Though, perhaps his plan had worked too well, Mr. S thought. He stared sickly at the half eaten apple in his hand, full of food and drowning in boredom.

Despite his boredom, however, Mr. S wasn't relaxed. No, he was anything but.

You see, this entire situation, with the partying and the food and the poison. It reminded him of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Namely, it reminded him that the winter solstice would pass, and the living spring would come, and Mr. S would be left short on excuses to host more parties.

Really, though, the entire situation only brought into focus his main problem: that there were assassins in the household in the first place.

Schwarz had left him early in the morning in order to interrogate Pyrrha, and this abandonment left Mr. S feeling a lot more nervous than he would have liked. The party season, though he'd asked for it, left him in the company of very large crowds. Without Schwarz, it became very difficult for him to walk anywhere without being hounded by that paranoid feeling that had arisen ever since the attack.

And so he picked up several random plates full of food, secluded himself in one of the private meeting rooms, and there accessed the castle security system.

Once there, he subjected himself to a marathon of the camera archives, trying to find out who had poisoned Mr. Schnee.

Really, this wasn't the first time he'd thought to do such a thing, but several things waylaid him until now. For one, he was a busy man these days, and, despite his continual promises that he'd take a day off to get things sorted, something always seemed to come up: whether it be an assassination attempt or another, more dangerous, assassination attempt.

The second issue was more subtle.

You see, as far as Mr. S could register, most of the world currently thought him crazy, for various reasons. And he didn't much feel like adding to it by throwing out crazy accusations of paranoid suspicion.

So, in order to avoid this, Mr. S resolved to do the preliminary investigation himself. Once he'd gone though the camera footage, he'd find the suspect, and report them to Schwarz. It was all so simple.

There was just one complication that hindered it.

Mr. S searched again through the archived footage. He crossed a look at the wall clock: this was the fifth hour he'd spent studying that thirty minute span of time so critical to him.

He rewinded and paused and replayed that particular scene a hundred times, from a dozen different camera angles.

And, after all his hours of study, he'd come to one conclusion.

His food had been poisoned in transit, in a hallway that was just in between the kitchen and the main suite.

There was one problem, however.

You see, just before his food was due to arrive, and just After Thetis had made her quiet entrance, the critical cameras shut off, for just long enough to allow the trolly - and it's tamperers - to pass by undetected.

Now, who could have done that, Mr. S wondered.