A/N: Sorry, the site ate this chapter. The previous update is the chapter after this. Enjoy.
Weiss tolerates the meetings. She's set to inherit the Schnee Company, and until recently that was her greatest dream. Now, nobody answers the real questions. She's asked about the robots in storage, and has gotten flat denials that they exist. Weiss hasn't dared take photo evidence to them; she knows it'll just lose her what little power she has.
The last thing Weiss wants is to be out there, fighting on the front lines of a losing battle against the White Fang. Or so she tells herself, at least. The truth is that she can't stand being here, stuck in the Atlesian bureaucracy when she wants nothing more than to fight. Weiss has a responsibility to fix the damages of the Schnee Company and its forays into military technology, and she can do nothing from the Schnee manor house, except wait and watch. Her power builds up from lack of use, freezing her when she isn't careful but mostly remaining carefully repressed.
She finds herself going to the storeroom more often now, sneaking in at night or by day when she simply needs an hour or so to think. The robots don't bother her any more; they're harmless. Weiss even lazily tinkers with their broken pieces once or twice, trying to work out how each wire connects to produce something disturbingly human.
She finds the computer banks there one night, and spends hours searching through them. Most have had the hard drives either wiped with magnets or simply crushed manually, but one or two remain functional. She scrolls through endless budgeting spreadsheets and half-functional diagrams of circuits, searching for something more.
Weiss finds it in a long email chain; it has been carefully wiped from the internet, but the Schnee Company keeps backup files. The P3N, the Atlesian military's finest unit, an android with perfect human-mimicking capabilities and enough hidden weaponry to level cities. Helpful for everything from crowd control to espionage to discreet assassinations, one email states, as if it's nothing more than an advertisement for the latest electronic gadget. Which, in a way, it is.
Neither the military nor the corporation even consider the ethics of military machines indistinguishable from humans. There's a mention of a prototype, the P3N-3, that after being sent on a mission developed consciousness and began to insist on its human nature. A factory reset of its programming, to remove any learned behavior that could be the cause of its rebellion, is mentioned as if it were nothing more than the erasing of data, rather than the killing of a living being.
Weiss can't breathe, and spends several moments trying to inhale the dusty air before her muscles relax and allow her to breathe once more. She turns back to the screen, not wanting to know what happened to the project, but needing to find out why it's been abandoned to rust in a storeroom.
The robots couldn't function without machine learning programs to allow them to adapt, but the faster they adapted the faster they turned against their captors. No way was found around that fact. With the fall of Vale, the project was scrapped in favor of larger, flashier military machines, to reassure the public that the Atlesian government was doing its best to keep its people safe.
Weiss scans the intricate lists of parts until she finds what she's looking for. The drive containing a copy of the P3N-3's programming for future study, stored in crate 40. Weiss finds crate 40 and removes the lid, tugging out stray wires until she finds the drive. A deceptively small 50-terabyte drive with a universal adapter plug, containing within it one consciousness. One human life. Weiss wonders if her own mind could be kept in another drive, moved and stored and modified.
Weiss pushes the drive into her pocket and shuts the crate. She's done enough prying open of boxes that now look far too much like graves.
She takes the device out of her pocket and stares at it multiple times over the next two days. She doesn't plug it into a computer, doesn't try to figure out its mechanics or electronics. Her first thought is evidence tampering, her second that she isn't sure if she wants to interact with something robotic and yet so horrifyingly human.
She's staring at it again, as if she can understand it simply by running her fingers over the smooth surface, when the alert comes up. Another villain, outside Atlas but still close to Weiss. Weiss turns on the live coverage of the event, hoping for a glimpse of the heroes. Pathetic, that mere weeks ago she would have been out there fighting and now she's reduced to waiting and praying.
"Shut up," Weiss tells herself, a thin coat of ice spreading across the drive. She drops it instinctively, then picks it up again when it seems largely unharmed. Electronics work better in the cold, and that reassures her, that there's something, someone, she won't harm if she loses control.
No heroes are arriving. Weiss waits for them, squinting at the mediocre camera footage for glimpses of the villain, a scorpion Faunus tearing through the steel walls of a factory as if they're paper, laughing. The news anchors grow increasingly nervous as they wait, suggest that Atlas send a squad out to deal with the threat at its border, and Weiss realizes.
The heroes are spread too thin, fighting across Vale and Mistral just to keep them from collapsing. They won't swoop in at the last second to save the day. The heroes won't save them now.
Weiss stands up, barely noticing the windowpanes that shatter in her wake as an icy wind blows in. It opens the door of her wardrobe before she reaches it, scattering coats aside to reveal her sword. Weiss picks it up, wrapping her fingers around the hilt, and it feels like coming home.
"I've missed you," she tells it, before using it to hack away most of her skirt, leaving a dress short enough that it won't get in her way. It doesn't have the same protection as her old uniform, but it's good enough and Weiss doesn't have the time for something better.
Weiss toys with the drive in her hand, contemplating bringing it with her or leaving it behind with the rest of Atlas and its falling decadence. It's an ally, although not a helpful one.
Weiss stops at the window, then rushes in the opposite direction. She has an ally, and she has the technology, even if none of it is perfect and it's been abandoned. Even if she doesn't know how the AI will react to being placed into a new body, even if she may just create another villain to fight.
Weiss shoves the lid off of one of the crates, the one that contains an almost-intact skeleton. The wires are visible, including a port at the back of its head that Weiss shoves the drive into. The boot-up process is agonizingly slow, and Weiss begins to wonder if she's done something wrong, but at last the half-finished eyes flicker to green. The robot tests each limb, then stands.
"We have a villain to fight," Weiss tells it, because there's no time to waste on pleasantries. It nods.
The roof blows away, letting in a freezing blizzard, and although it's colder than she's ever been Weiss feels at home. She's caught up on the winds along with the robot, and they soar. Weiss is back in her element, and woe betide any villain in her way.