Black Dust Background

by Time Traveler 7

If you are interested in a little bit of background involving my RWBY. This is a short write-up I wrote when I was first creating my RWBY OC. I believe it to be...one of my worst pieces of trash. There are little to no edits. It is written in first person and is super cheesy. I prefer to believe it is not a proper reflection of my work, but perhaps I am in denial.

2. Chapter 2

From the perspective of the author.

When I first started to write Black Dust I intended for it to be a story with multiple villains. Tene Breuxe was supposed to take center stage. The villain was a man named Nymm Breuxe, a distant relative of Tene's with the same semblance. His semblance was slightly different, though, in that he was essentially an aural vampire and he could copy semblances, but essentially their semblances worked by the same function: control over quantum fields. It was just that Tene had learned to control his one way and Nymm the other. Then I learned that semblances cannot be copied and aura cannot be manipulated. This threw a wrench into my plan.

I underwent a half year long revision process where I decided on a new back story for each of the characters. I even wrote a new reason for how Tene got his power. I will include it in the next chapter of this Background. But understand that part of this will become canon in the main story. Grimm have featured prominently in Tene's life. I always intended for them to destroy his home, his family and eventually a part of him. One of the reasons RWBY so thoroughly enthralled my mind was because of the Grimm. They are an entire kingdom of life (are they alive?) that exists solely to attack humans and keep them at bay. And they seem to be extraordinarily efficient at it, seeing as civilization can only really rise where natural defenses allowed people to thrive. I like to think this is what enthralled Monty Oum for the ten years he slowly developed RWBY (if my memory serves me correctly).

Since this is what enthralls me with the show my stories focus partly on the people who suffer outside the walls of civilizing environs. This is why none of PSTL grew up inside Vale. Tene grew up in a farming village outside Atlas. Saun and Lune were a part of, what I can only describe, as Roma who decided to settle down in a place of isolation from Grimm. And Pan hails from a wealthy governing family in Mistral. And in successive chapters I want to focus on the cultures of each character, particularly Lune and Saun because they are from outside the Four Kingdoms whereas Tene and Pan are still from inside them.

This focus is also why I wrote about the cave art and the visions of Lune about them in the first chapter. I wondered how ancient humans avoided Grimm. And the only answer I have is if they eased their minds, settled in areas where Grimm have trouble reaching and where they could easily kill Grimm. That's why the inhabitants who drew those committed human sacrifice, to ease their minds, why they were close to a source of Dust, making it easier to kill Grimm, and they settled in a place where Grimm have difficulty repopulating: Vale.

I did not intended for these people to be the ancestors of the people of Vale. In fact, I have the opposite in mind. These people were massacred by the tribes who became the ancestors of the people of Vale. Naturally, there was an influx of Grimm from the panic, but the tribes easily defended the Vale. Not only this, but I think the tribes there stayed in Vale because of the Dust. Perhaps this was why they killed the original inhabitants.

The story behind these inhabitants is important in my mind because it is how the kingdoms came to be. The stock of people who entered these places are the ones who made it what it was in the future. Their beliefs, their habits, their technology and their motivation to protect each advanced them further and further until they were even more advanced than us.

On a slightly separate note. The tribes and peoples of pre-Kingdoms Remnant each spoke separate languages. This is why language features prominently in my stories. Old Ninulen is one such language. Another language is Old Mantelese, which Tene speaks a dialect of. Pan speaks a few as yet unnamed languages, but as Old Ninulen is inspired by French, Latin, Urdu and Finnish, and Mantelese is inspired by German and Old English, Pan's will be inspired by Asiatic languages. I will probably write the basics of phonology and grammar on each language in future posts.

The language aspect of Remnant is what leads me to believe that the Kingdoms speak an ancient Lingua Franca, and not English. I have no idea what this Lingua Franca might be, perhaps it is an Auxilary Language, perhaps it is Atlesian, or Vitalese, since that seems to be where their peace treaty was made. But when I watch RWBY I like to imagine they are actually speaking in a language that survived the millennia of Grimm attacks, since in such a world where villages and tribes disappear overnight, entire language families and isolates disappear in moments, and the languages that are left over have survived these attacks, and the speakers of these languages are left to cultivate their languages as they see fit. It's beautiful.