an: thanksgiving is a good a day as any for posting a fic.
disclaimer: didn't you say you wanted to post this in july?
an: and i posted the last chapter in august, so that was certainly impossible, wasn't it?
disclaimer: and it's also the shortest chapter yet.
an: the other fanfic site is all about short chapters! besides, this is a prologue, the chapters don't have to be long. and this was as good a point to break the chapter as any.
disclaimer: eh, i guess. RWBY is owned by Rooster Teeth, and Persona is owned by Atlus. the author of this fanfic owns neither.
Everyone is entitled to their own sorrow, for the heart has no metrics or forms of measure. And all of it... irreplaceable.
Schnee Manor
20 July P.B.
7:57 PM
Weiss Schnee was not having a good day.
What an ironic situation. She had gotten what she wanted. Father was letting her go to Beacon instead of Atlas Academy, no strings attached. None besides his usual ones, anyway. She merely had to keep in contact with him, and even that was just one phone call, once a month. A whole month! Had she decided to cave in and go to Atlas it would've been once a week, and that was discounting his regular visits to campus, whether to (attempt to) schmooze it with General Ironwood, the Council, or just help with the senior year business classes. Which he technically did teach, if on most days through an SDC aide hired for the job.
And yet...
"Three minutes until curtain."
"I know," she sighed. She had showered for an hour, and her hyper-luxury extended wheelbase sedan had the air conditioning on full blast as even Atlas can get hot in July, yet she still felt sweaty and dirty after the fight she'd had that afternoon that allowed her to go to Beacon. She'd only recently managed to awaken her real Persona, not just an SDC Mass Produced Persona like so many other would-be students of the Huntsmen Academies.
She had awakened it during the fight that afternoon. She'd even used Evocation Dust to do it, so she was just as surprised as everyone else. Even more surprising was that she was no longer able to summon the MPP at all, which meant either one of two things.
One, she no longer fit its criteria for summoning. But that was impossible. Anyone with even the slightest interest in and ability for becoming a Huntsman could summon it, and she would have given up on her dream long before if that was the case. Not to mention the Gigas would have no doubt killed her.
Two, she did not have access to the Wild Card, an ability so closely linked to the Schnee family Semblance it may as well have been part of it. It would go a long way to explaining why she had so much difficulty using Summoning Glyphs.
But, she thought, lots of Huntresses don't have the Wild Card, and they can summon an MPP even after unlocking a Persona of their own, right?
She shook the idle thought from her head.
Enough of that. She took one last, longing look at Myrtenaster. Father had insisted she perform one last time as a singer and not a Huntress before leaving for Beacon.
One minute to curtain.
Six hours earlier…
Blood dripped down Weiss's face onto her eye-
Blood?
Her hand reached up to wipe something warm and wet from her brow, swiping it out of the path of her eye before bringing her fingers to her face. It was sticky and red. Blood alright, and with her fighting a Grimm alone, there's only one person whose blood it could possibly be.
She stifled a grunt. With her Aura this far into the red, the scar was likely to be permanent. No matter - Atlesian Specialists were trained on how to fight without their Aura, even against Grimm as dangerous as Centinels without it, and this was an Arma Gigas used for training, one like the ones her sister had fought plenty of times before. For show! If Winter could handle it in front of a crowd of Atlas staff, she could handle it in a closed room with no one but herself to worry about getting injured.
Are you all right, Miss Schnee?
Weiss nodded, triggering Myrtenaster's magazine and letting it spin until it stopped on the Evocation Dust. The rapier's blade turned an electric ghostly blue as the Dust converted it from matter to pure soul energy.
Your Aura is quite depleted. Perhaps you're at your limit…
"I've been through worse," she snarled out of strained lungs. She forced her Aura to momentarily recede from right above her heart. In time, practice would make doing so nearly instantaneous, and she would need to learn as Evocation Dust couldn't penetrate Aura. One must trick their soul into thinking that summoning a Persona is the only way to prevent being severed from this mortal coil. According to her tutors, anyone who accepted the risks associated with becoming a Huntress in their mind could use Evocation Dust to summon a Persona in this manner. As a result it was the most common, most understood, and simplest means of doing so.
It didn't make it pleasant.
Weiss Schnee's wrist twisted, her arm bent against itself, and she buried Myrtenaster all the way to the hilt through a point just below her sternum, all the while mentally wishing she had listened to Winter and just bought an Evoker.
Blue flame exploded outward from her back, taking form as she pulled her rapier away and into a less concerning defensive pose. To her surprise, the flames behind her did not form into the eyeless, long-headed android that is the standard form of the Mass Produced Persona, but something entirely new and unique.
Its skin was bone-white, and its face was almost featureless - just a pair of glowing blue eyes and a nose-like ridge in the middle of its masklike face, with two elf ears on either side, each more like daggers than functional hearing organs. From top to bottom it had a witch's hat whose tip pointed flatly and sharply backwards with a pair of silver eagle's wings held up and away, a white over-the-shoulder garment halfway between a cloak and a duster, and a simple white dress held to its body with a leather belt that was slightly askance. In its right hand was an enormous lever-action rifle, long enough to be used as a staff, and a bayonet's needle-like blade at the top, sides, and bottom of the octagonal barrel.
Impressive. You actually formed a Persona of your own, in such condition?
Weiss settled into a guard, leg straight, free arm up and to the side, and the point aimed squarely at Arma Gigas's head. Myrtenaster's cylinder rotated onto a canister of Ice Dust, and her muscles tightened in preparation for the imminent violence of movement.
The slightest twitch of her wrist, and the cylinder spun again, this time onto a cartridge of Lightning Dust.
Surprising as it may seem to you, Miss Schnee, the president does love you very much, the man resumed over the speakers, either ignorant or uncaring of the middle Schnee's focus. He once even mentioned that he enjoyed your singing.
With a flick of her wrist, a black Time Dilation glyph formed beneath herself and her Persona. With another, a cluster of three Icemine glyphs formed in a sloppy triangle. The Gigas let out an inhuman shriek, and Skadi let out a shriek of her own. She lifted her rifle and fired twice, letting loose a pair of blue bolts of energy - Bufu spells, no doubt.
But your father bears heavy obligations as the head of the Schnee Family.
The first hit the monster squarely in the chest, sending it staggering backwards. The second was aimed at its head, but as the Gigas struggled to regain its balance its head tilted backwards and the shot went high, coating a car-sized section of ceiling in a layer of ice thick enough to skate on.
The Gigas continued backwards, finally regaining its balance right as it seemed about to step on an icemine. Then the head turned towards Weiss, and in a moment of that strange almost-self-awareness that older Grimm could sometimes possess, deliberately moved its leg to step clear over and around it, then kicked a still-melting chunk of ice from earlier across the ground, triggering the mine. It proceeded to kick the chunk of ice that spawned from that at Weiss as well, and she launched herself sideways to avoid them. Too late - the second chunk clipped her, but she quickly recovered. At least it wasn't her sword arm this time.
In addition to his responsibilities to his employees, he also faces the increasing threat from the White Fang's terrorist activities.
The two fighters, human and Grimm, took stock of each other. As much as she felt the growing bruise, the Gigas clearly felt that last Bufu. It took a moment longer than Weiss to get ready, swinging its blade in a high overhead arc. It's fast, but not near as fast as it was at the start of the fight, and Skadi caught the blade with the wooden stock of its rifle. Weiss's Persona roared and twisted the rifle around, slamming the butt into the Grimm's wrist and knocking the blade free, before kicking it in the breastplate hard enough to send it in a far less controlled backwards stagger. This time the Gigas can't recover, and lands back-first onto an icemine.
No matter how it may seem to you, he needs you to be there for him.
The Grimm was smart, but it was hurting. So was Weiss, though, and the usefulness of time dilation glyphs was easily matched by their cost - a cost she could ill afford this late in the battle. The Gigas had danced around like a King's Souls boss for most of that fight, which had forced her to use a lot of glyphs just to keep up.
She took a deep breath, and readied for a gamble. She charged with a wordless roar at one of the legs, slashing at it with Myrtenaster while it was charged up with Ice Dust as she flew by, having been too close to the Gigas for it to stop her. Ice spread like an infection from the cut in the armor, and Weiss couldn't suppress a smirk. Her sword's cylinder rotated to a canister of Nuclear Dust, and she swung again, only to hit nothing as the leg moved out of the way as the giant knight dodged Skadi's rifle butt. It isn't fast enough to stay away from the rifle's barrel, though, and takes another Bufu to the other leg, freezing it in place.
Now that your older sister, Winter, is away, we have high hopes for-
"If keeping me trapped here is my father's way of showing affection," she snarled, "then I don't want it."
That shut the toady up.
The Arma Gigas swung again, from the same angle, determined as it was to cut the rifle in half. The air rang with the sound of metal hitting metal, but while the Gigas focused on the Persona, Weiss saw the opportunity to finish it off for good.
Charging her Myrtenaster again with nuclear energy, she slammed it into the frozen leg and jumped back. The Gigas stared dumbly at its impaled limb right as it exploded into shards of ice-encrusted metal. The Grimm howled in agonized rage, but its protesting was cut short when Skadi swung its rifle like a bat. There was a sound like a thousand soda cans being crushed at once as mask and helmet were crushed, and the rest of the Gigas's armor dropped noisily in a heap.
The crony lowered his arm from shielding his face and let out a noise of surprise when there was at last silence, and Weiss was still standing. She walked over to the pile of armor, pulled Myrtenaster out of the mess, slipped it into her belt, and marched off towards the exit.
Thirty seconds to curtain.
"I was surprised when you decided to appear at a charity event today, after all that," he said, his first words since acknowledging that your father had allowed you to go to Beacon. "If your father had the time, I'm sure he-"
"If he really likes my singing," Weiss cut him off again, "he'll be listening somewhere."
She stepped up to the microphone. A buzzer sounded, and state-of-the-art machinery pulled on very much not state-of-the-art pulleys and sandbags, tugging on the ropes that would haul up the curtain.
"And you know, when I commit to something, I give it my all."
"I am well aware," he said as he left the floor to her.
And she did.