You have no idea how close this story came to never being published.
Welcome to the epilogue. I like to use my epilogues to discuss craft-of-writing topics, like where the story came from, how I wrote it, things that pleased me, and things I had trouble with. That last category is important here, because I came pretty close to dropping this story altogether 40k words in. (It wouldn't be the first time.)
This story wasn't supposed to be mine in the first place! Marc122 had the original notion of bankrupt Schnees trying to start over. His version had the Schnees dropping into the gutter, to the point of actual destitution, and had some other key differences.
When he started canvassing the Qrow's Nest Discord for opinions on plot points and key moments, I helped with the brainstorming session, and came up with some payoffs for a story like that. My favorite invention was a hostile takeover scene, with the workers going to sell their stock and then hitting Fall Dust with a Reverse card. (Initially I thought Ilia might play the key role in that scene for maximum drama, which was the first notion of her being involved.)
After a time, marc122 found other fics to write, and I was in the midst of "Event Horizon" eating my writing time and spitting me out. The concept stayed in the back of my mind, though, and new things to do with it kept percolating. Eventually I hit a critical mass of interesting ideas, I asked to adopt the fic, got permission, and got working.
And then came to a screeching halt.
Six chapters in I hit a wall. Partly I was having trouble stitching things together. Partly I had a sense that I was taking too long developing the story, even though every time I looked at what I might cut everything seemed necessary.
Part of it, as I whined on Discord, was that it felt like 90% of the story was the Schneesters arguing or finding the next place to have an argument. (Even though, when you cut to the heart of things, the Schneesters learning how to love better is what the story's actually about.)
For several weeks, almost a month, I made minimal progress on the story. I got to the point where I openly contemplated giving it up.
For the next month I averaged almost ten thousand words a week.
That is a frankly insane amount of writing, well above anything I can sustain, but it just flowed and flowed in the moment. I'd hit some scenes that I'd already planned in my head, and they went very quickly. Things started to make more sense as they tied into/paid off the earlier groundwork.
I also put together a setup to allow me to write by dictation while driving, important for a dad who commutes a lot and has kid-schlepping duties. That added a ton of writing time back to my schedule. More importantly, it created times when I didn't have anything better to do than write, which is an adequate substitute for motivation.
These breakthroughs made a huge difference both for the fic and for how I felt about the fic. After a month, I had enough of a buffer (and enough confidence that I'd finish) that I started posting, and the rest is history.
Omake 1
Winter: [bares her throat in submission]
Ilia: I hope this doesn't awaken something in me.
Winter: I hope it does.
The first things I think about for a story are the payoff scenes: the scenes that are the reward for writing (and I suppose reading) to that point, moments of high emotion or comedy. As I mentioned above, the hostile takeover scene was the first big draw, the first thing I wanted to write. Others that came early: Winter and Ilia in the mine, "They're all hot!", Ilia on the train, the final showdown with Ironwood.
Many of those scenes transitioned from idea to written word very easily; "They're all hot!" required barely any editing, even. It was awesome the first time.
In contrast, "Ilia-Winter in the mine" required several stabs at it to get right. I had to rework it in my head two or three times to get it how I wanted it, though I'm pleased with how it ended up. The Ironwood fight was even rougher. The final, two-front battle against Fall Dust got more elaborate every time I thought about it and took weeks to work out.
Several of the payoff scenes didn't develop until later in the writing process. "I have my own version" was not in my initial plans. It didn't suggest itself until after I'd brought RVBY into the story. The canon version of that scene is my favorite scene in all of RWBY, though, I love it to pieces, and with this inversion I hoped to both honor it and tap some of its power.
But back to the planning process. Along with the payoff scenes comes the premise, the environmentals. The Dust company idea was a given; the communal ownership of the company became both theme and the solution to multiple narrative problems, such as, "What could the Schnees do differently from other companies that would let them survive in such a rough business?" (That is, in fact, the very first question Marc122 posed to us.)
There's a wish-fulfillment aspect to this, as well. There usually is in fanfiction, though it's not always obvious what wish that is. For me, I've been struck by the problem of rehabilitating felons. Felons (in my country at least) face limits on their employment opportunities that go beyond what we usually mean by "debt to society". It probably contributes to recidivism. If felons can't find honest work, we can't be surprised if they return to crime.
What if, I thought to myself, there were companies that sought to employ felons? They would have a potential comparative advantage, and the felons would get a road back to the mainstream workforce. It's an intriguing idea with one big problem: me.
I have no Schnee audacity. I am inherently risk-averse; this vice has only increased with fatherhood. I fear not having the drive or acumen to make my idea work…
…except in fanfiction.
This story, then, filled a certain psychological need for me, beyond just being a fun narrative and an interesting spin on familiar characters/settings.
When the concept of the story was first pitched, I wasn't crazy about Cinder Fall or Fall Dust being involved. I didn't think it was necessary. Wasn't the environment/Dust market obstacle enough, source of conflict enough?
Obviously that perspective changed. PvP is more compelling than PvE, after all.
Omake 2
Winter: So, do you expect me to sell out?
Cinder: No, Miss Schnee, I expect you to die.
Cinder: [pets cat like a boss]
Cat: [bites Cinder]
With the payoff scenes in mind, I started constructing the narrative.
The pace is slow at first, slow enough that it concerned me. Every time I looked through it, though, there seemed so little I could cut. The Schnees needed a loan, and I needed Huber. The Schnees needed workers, and I needed Cristata. Most of the scenes were pulling double duty and had to stay.
Could I have cut down some of the survey scenes? I actually did cut it down from the first draft, and maybe could have trimmed a little more, but only by about 500 words. I needed to keep the sisterly friction going (it's near the heart of the story), I needed the Centinel sequence to establish Weiss' baseline combat abilities, I needed to drive the sisters to Skjulte Perle, and I had to justify there being a lucrative mine no other company had snapped up yet.
I refused to cut the Song of Atlas section, I loved it far too much for that.
I felt like I had to walk through most of the things the Schnees needed, step-by-step, deliberately. Did that turn some people off on the story? Probably, but I don't know how else I could have written it.
Similarly, I got some blowback about the importance of the White Fang and the Faunus aspect of the story. I'm going to level with you: if you're writing about the Schnees and Dust and you don't have race relations as a big part of it, I think you're doing a disservice to your story and the source material both. I understand more than most that this seems prescriptivist and the whole point of fanfiction is doing what you want. I get it. But canon ties the Schnees, the Faunus, the White Fang, and Dust together explicitly from the very beginning—from Blake's very first lines of dialogue. You can't separate these things without also unraveling them.
All of that is the long way of saying that I was afraid it was going too slow, but couldn't find anything expendable to cut that would speed it up.
There's a little bit of filler in the teens, I'll acknowledge; those chapters are also a little shorter, with some around 4K words when the story standard is 5K (until the chonker closing chapters). It was necessary for pacing reasons: I couldn't have Ilia's character arc move from "stab the Schnee" to "kiss the Schnee" too quickly, and even then some people commented they thought it was rushed. (Then again, some people were like "finally", so on net I don't know how to take it.)
Omake 3
Blake [Indiana Jones voice]: Trains. Why did it have to be trains?
I don't do shipping all that often; it's more of a side thing for me, typically, or something I problematize. It was more important here, for three reasons: to support the plot, to be an emotional current through the story's middle, and because I found this pairing interesting for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.
The last is unusual for me. Previously I shipped Snowbird (though I never worked it into a fic), and I can explain that easily: "fighting is how we flirt" is an ingrained taste for me. When V7 and V8 happened and there was zero material supporting Snowbird, it pretty much sunk, and I replaced it with my headcanon that Qrow and Winter are exes.
That made for a lot of fun in the climactic chapters!
I can't explain the Ilia-Winter thing as well. I can't put to words why it appeals to me, only that it does. I will say it desperately needs a new ship name. "Atlas Drop-outs" is what the shipping chart says, which is, um, insensitive in a post-V8 world. Now accepting proposals!
I was very amused when there was a conversation in one of my Discords about how relationships need to be explored more completely, that too many stop at the "get together" point and don't think much further past that. I had to stifle laughing, because I was getting ready to write Ilia and Winter's big fight which I thought spoke to the point of the discussion, but I didn't want to spoil it.
I probably thought too much about avoiding spoilers.
This is one reason I have so much difficulty with the tagging system. Like, telling people what to expect has value and helps bring in the clicks, but how are you supposed to surprise people if what's coming is in the tags? I struggle with these things.
RVBY's appearance was like the previous two problems combined into a mega-problem: they don't appear for 60% of the story, and when they do, all of them present relationship questions.
I know people wanted them to show up, I'm certain I lost readers who gave up waiting, but the internal logic of the story didn't permit it. They had to show up when they did, how they did. I was able to tease them a little with the Vytal references, at least.
Omake 4
Winter: Thank you, Miss Schnee.
Weiss: No, thank you, Miss Schnee.
Winter: No, thank you, Miss Schnee!
Weiss: No! Thank you! Miss Schnee!
Ruby: What are they doing?
Blake: Trying to establish dominance… I think.
I suppose my issues with spoilers and tags fall into the category of "things I care about more than any reasonable person does". There are others in this story. The amputation scene, for example, was the subject of extensive consultation with my nurse wife, trying to get mechanisms and terminology just right. A lot of work for a scene I honestly could have cut without it being missed!
Even more niche were naming issues. The Ursai we see in Solitas in V7 are clearly different from the Ursai we see in V1-3 in Sanus. Reusing the same name didn't seem right to me. To differentiate the Solitas species, I came up with "Ursai Boreai"… only to realize, to my horror, that "ursa" is from Greek, but "boreal" is from Latin. Mixing the two wouldn't be right! Yuck!
Unfortunately, when I tried to workshop replacements, my Discord groups consistently countered with "literally only you care about this". So "Ursai Boreai" stayed, not least because it sounds very impressive.
I drew the line with the God of Animals. Naming attempt number one was "Panfauna"… except, again, that would have mixed Greek and Latin word origins, but this time in the same word. Couldn't do it. Happily, "Panzoa" sounds very similar and flows almost the same, and has all Greek components. Much better.
Nerd. Nerrrrrrrd.
More fun with names! Not every name in the story has a deep inspiration or secret meaning. Some do. Skjulte Perle, for example, translates to "hidden jewel", which the town's founders used for marketing purposes. It's similar to the Vikings calling a glacier-covered island with a miserable, barely-inhabitable coastline and a four-month growing season "Greenland".
I was so pleased with myself when I came up with that name that I completely underestimated a) how many times I'd have to type it, and b) how annoying it was to type. Whoops. The dictation software never had a clue what to do with it, either, though it took some amusing swings.
That's probably half the reason the other towns had names like "Junction" for the train junction town and "Port Solitas" for the port town. In my defense, literal/functional names like that are a common convention on Earth. (Portsmouth, Portland, Anchorage, etc.)
"Cristata" is part of the scientific name for the star-nosed mole; "Aster" sounds good next to it and means star, emphasizing the point. By the way, has anyone else tried to implement Faunus traits that are outright disadvantages? I haven't seen much of that, and so felt the need to fill that void myself. There doesn't seem to be any rule or organizing principle for what animal traits are on or off the table, and plenty of animals do things worse in some capacity than humans. It follows that there ought to be Faunus that are handicapped by their traits. I realize that's uncool in a Rule of Cool-run show, but still.
Holly and hemlock are both poisonous plants, because of course they are.
I workshopped several team names for R_BY plus Neptune, including RBYN (either robin or ribbon) and others. RVBY just felt right, though. I could, and did, blame it on Ozpin. You seldom go wrong blaming Ozpin.
I didn't have to come up with a name for the leader of Cinder's disposable mooks, because Arrowfell exists. Admission: I had put off playing Arrowfell, because I am a bad fan and habitually late to things. I finally convinced myself to buckle down by telling myself it was research for this story. It was less helpful than I'd hoped. There are some new areas in that game, but we never get an idea what any of those areas do or are about. At least I got a few decent names out of it.
(As a game, it's fine. It's short and has zero replay value, but it's fun enough and has a few moments.)
Team BRIR came this close to being more bad guys, but it just wasn't right.
Minor characters catch a little more disdain, like the talking heads for Atlas Eye Evening News: the host, Talca Pan, is white bread—boring, lowest-common-denominator, inoffensive. The sportscaster is Carne Crania: "meathead".
My favorite name from the AEEN crew was Teak Travers. I kept accidentally using it for other people in the crew, and had to keep going through to reassign it.
Malplaquet is not a person from Earth; it's a battle. Specifically, it was a blemish on the otherwise sterling martial reputation of the Earl of Marlborough, and the beginning of the end of the anti-Louis XIV coalition, and yes, it was an English victory judged more costly than a defeat. The obvious allusion to make would have been to Pyrrhus and his battles, but RWBY already has Pyrrha, and that would have confused the issue.
McCarthy was a notorious congressman who gained political power by telling wild stories of Communist spies and using accusations of such to silence his political enemies. Using his name was almost too easy.
Omake 5
Weiss: What a miserable time to be alive. Everyone in town is fighting with each other, depressed, or both.
Penny: I am a living ray of sunshine. Bask in my radiance.
The feedback I've gotten for this story has been a delight.
It has been fascinating to track different people's thoughts as the story progressed. Some picked up on Ilia-Winter early, others were almost blindsided. Some people anticipated that there would be a Weiss-Winter breach. But no one guessed Neptune as the fourth member of RVBY, and that amuses me.
Why Neptune? The primary reason, honestly, was to heighten Weiss' bisexual panic by adding in a character she canonically crushed on. He's a pretty face, and sometimes that's all you need.
He turned out to have a lot more utility than that. He's different from the other characters in RVBY—different background, different ways of thinking, different preferences and skills and flaws—and those differences are useful and fun. Contrast makes for better group dynamics.
Which, canonically, is true for Weiss. Weiss is so different from the other members of RWBY it illuminates both her and them. Neptune ends up playing a similar role in being a foil, though he obviously goes about it differently than she does.
I didn't invent anything about my characterization of Neptune. Sun says he has a history of spilling anything Sun says to him to Scarlet in V2E1. Water Attraction is his canon semblance. It's implied that he stomped RW_Y in their "Remnant: The Board Game" match in V2E2, meaning he's nerdier than appearances suggest. Chibi has him taking video games way too seriously, and while I know Chibi isn't canon, I like to selectively treat it as canon when it makes sense. In short, Neptune's whole "I'm so cool" posing is at least partially a front to conceal how nerdy he is under there. Tri-Hard being a weapon built more around tech and nuance than force is a low-key reflection of this, to me.
Yes, I know it's supposedly Sun that came up with the name Tri-Hard (as a way of making fun of Neptune without him realizing it), and that if Neptune isn't on Team SSSN that doesn't happen. It's too funny to change, so here's my justification for keeping it: any joke Sun can make, Yang can probably make too, and as she's someone who (like Sun) actually possesses the confidence Neptune pretends to have, she'd likely come up with that just as easily.
There's exactly one character trait in this story that I'll admit as invention: Ilia's piety.
There's very little actual religion in canon. We see occasional bits of iconography that could be seen as religious, like Qrow's tilted cross or the Albains being at what looks like a shrine, but nothing explicit. Even characters occasionally swearing "By the gods!" doesn't move the needle for me, because cusses tend to take on lives of their own quite divorced from their literal meanings. (The endless utility of the F-word is a good example.)
But an absence of religion doesn't track with the (for lack of a better term) human experience, and it especially wouldn't track with the Faunus' circumstances. Religion has long served on Earth as the balm of the oppressed and the wretched. Even Marx acknowledged this, while framing it as negatively as he could.
As I wrestled with what it meant to be a Faunus on Remnant, I grew more interested in the idea of the cult of Panzoa being a thing, especially among those more concerned with their Faunus identity. The God of Animals is a character from Remnant's mythology, and Ozpin notes "The Shallow Sea" as being especially important to the Faunus, who have their own version of the story. It all made sense. Having it be especially important to Ilia added dimension to her character, but as a natural outgrowth of what we already knew about her.
While the God of Animals doesn't have a name in "Fairy Tales of Remnant", try writing "the God of Animals" fifty times and working it into sentences and idioms and prayers and swears. Yeah, no. 'Panzoa' was partly for narrative purposes, and partly for my writerly convenience.
Omake 6
Winter: To summon successfully, think of times when you had to exceed yourself and grow. Think of enemies you defeated by becoming more than you were.
Weiss: *summons Ice-Winter*
Ice-Winter: You can be better than this, Miss Schnee!
Winter: ...I might have deserved that.
I knew, going in, that this story would rely on OCs far more than my norm. Typically, I use OCs to fill certain roles, plug specific holes. They don't get the spotlight, nor do they deserve it. I write fanfiction because I like the canon characters, so the canon characters should and do carry the story.
This story, however, required me to have more, and more important, OCs than most any other. That's because it's so far away from the canon characters for so long.
If this was more of an AU—that is, some sort of alternate reality or a world with different history—then I could move canon characters around to fill different roles. Maybe Blake takes the place of Cristata, for example. But that wasn't the idea. This falls into the "Canon, except…" sub-genre. In this case, "Canon, except that Salem takes a break from targeting the Maidens to attack the world's dependence on Dust".
This means that other characters have to stay where canon puts them unless this change provides a reason otherwise (e.g. Neptune taking Weiss' vacant foreign-born-student spot at Beacon.)
Hence, the rest of RWBY can't show up until much later, when the story gives me a reason to make it happen. The Schnee sisters have to carry a lot of it until then—which is appropriate, it's their story, but they can't do everything. I needed some OCs to play off of them, and which I could bring back in later for various purposes.
So in went Cristata, Cam, Huber, and Lief. You can tell I knew I'd need them because I bothered to describe them! I don't always; that's a vice of mine. (Tyrone raises a nondescript hand.) Even McCarthy gets extremely short shrift because she's less a character than Atlesian prejudice made flesh. And Cinder's various underlings don't even get names. (A decision which is half authorial inclination, half deliberate characterization of Cinder.)
I probably should spend more time describing characters on the whole, but this story was already out of control without me stopping to do so. It's a hard balance to strike. I try to keep descriptions down to what is necessary, so as to keep the focus on what I think really matters. That means I sometimes cut too close to the bone with some characters. It's a process.
(I also am super not a visual thinker and my vocabulary for clothing is extremely limited. Detailed visual descriptions do not come naturally to me; I have to force them.)
Out of those characters, I'm happiest with Huber, who's just so gross. He's the epitome of Steve Irwin's comment about preferring crocodiles to people, because crocodiles are very clear about wanting to bite you, whereas people pretend to be friends first. He was the cleanest concept, I got max utility out of him, and his being outside Huntsman culture let me dish out some headcanon. He was fun to write.
Cristata got to go hard near the end. It wasn't wholly the plan. My first ideas about the hostile takeover scene had Ilia as the star. As I developed the story concept, and especially as I decided to ship Winter/Ilia, I realized that wouldn't work. Someone else would have to do it. That meant I needed to build a character with enough oomph to pick up that burden, someone who could speak for/represent the Crater Faunus as a group.
It would have been very difficult to try and bring in different Faunus to present a wider view of different people's experiences and takes on Being a Faunus, and it would have greatly complicated scenes like the hostile takeover. Even if it's reductive, having one person represent a group lends itself to storytelling. Cristata ended up having to bear a lot of that weight. He's the Faunus' proxy in the meta-story as much as he is in-story.
Cristata and Ilia represent different reactions to Being a Faunus in Atlas. One dedicated herself to the violent overthrow of the system; the other, deciding he didn't have that kind of power, resolved to keep his head down and try to avoid the notice of the system, while never ever trusting it. (Marrow represents a third approach, but bringing in Atlesian specialists for some reason would have complicated the story even more.)
I was somewhat less satisfied by Cam and Lief. They're… fine? They're fine. I needed them and they did what I asked of them, though with less payoff or gratification than the others.
Omake 7
Ruby: So we beat the bad guys, broke our usual number of laws, and exceeded our usual quota of property damage—all in all, that's a good mission.
Yang: You know what's the one thing we haven't done? Beach trip!
Weiss: *profuse nosebleeds*
Ruby: I don't think it's beach season.
Blake: I don't think Solitas has a beach season.
Neptune: For me it's never beach season.
Yang: Wimps! *activates Aura and jumps in water*
Yang: *Aura instantly breaks*
Blake: Told you.
Some parts of the story are intrusions from our world.
Ironwood's preference for a monopoly Dust provider is canonical (he did nothing to move against the SDC, instead enabling it). It also has the ring of Earth truth to it.
Government is supposed to buy services on the open market when it can, the idea being that a competitive market can provide certain services more efficiently than government. Unfortunately, the same laws that say "make companies compete for government work" also lay down onerous, time-consuming, and exhausting rules on how those competitions have to go. The rules have a purpose: you want to keep corruption out of the process, make sure the competition is fair, etc. But competitions are so demanding they make individual programs want to avoid doing them.
There are, after all, specific circumstances where government can decide in advance which supplier it wants and go straight to that supplier. Because of how hard competitions are, program managers tend to look for any excuse to say their "circumstances" let them go sole-source and skip the competition, which is the opposite of the laws' intent.
Ironwood exhibits this trend (alongside his usual preferences for unitary command and personal control). "All these companies rising and falling, each of them offering similar products, with no clean or obvious way to decide which of them the military should buy from… you know, wouldn't it be easier if there was just one Dust company? That'd be easier."
Having someone personally loyal to him in that position, and beholden to him if he ever needs that, would just be the cherry on top.
The saga of Watts and the virus is ripped from yesterday's headlines. It's modeled heavily on the Stuxnet virus, which unknown actors used to damage the centrifuges Iran was using to enrich uranium in the late Aughts. The only major difference is that Stuxnet moved around via thumb drives, which aren't a thing on Remnant, so I fused it to modern phishing techniques.
There's a similar thing going on with some of the trafficking bits. Trafficking is a blight on our modern times, and I used those modern traffickers as the base for many of the techniques the traffickers in this story use. (Aside from the powered trolleys.)
Omake 8
Cristata (singing): The internet is for porn!
Weiss: I get it.
Penny: The internet is for porn!
Weiss: Not you, too!
Cristata: Why do you think the 'net was born?
Penny + Cristata: Porn, porn, porn!
Weiss: You know what? I hope the virus crashes everything.
For all that's in this story, there are still things that are not.
The biggest casualty was Klein. I had originally planned for Klein to make a touching return later on. The idea was, when the Schnees were at or near rock bottom, for him to come back saying things along the lines of "I tried to take care of other people, but I really cared about taking care of you," and taking the job for free on the strength of his own prior financial planning. It would have been sweet, and touching, but it would not have been additive on net. The last thing the story needed at that point was an additional complication and yet another heart-to-heart.
It was a bit of a waste. His line in chapter one, "This isn't the end," was intended to foreshadow his triumphant return. In the event, there wasn't space for it, and thematically, having the Schnees end up with a butler at the end of it all wouldn't have felt right.
It would have made for nice symmetry for Weiss to have long, meaningful conversations with Blake and Neptune to go along with the ones she has with Yang and Ruby, but that, too, would have bloated the story to little gain. They got some nice moments during the big fight, and I'll have to be happy with that.
I went to some lengths to demonstrate Neptune's place on and value to RVBY, part of my continuing opinion on how an AU story needs to do something with the changes it makes. I never did figure out a Neptune and Yang combo, but I was able to imply that one exists by creating the other combos, much like canon does. Canon doesn't show a Yang and Ruby combo, but because all the other combos are shown, that last is implied to exist.
Ideas for other scenes flitted in and out of my head, such as McCarthy's second-in-command kinda-sorta apologizing for their behavior after her death, but such a scene would have done very little work. Frankly, the Military Police subplot as a whole is on the expendable side. I'm not saying it did no work, because it helped a lot in keeping pressure on the Schnees and fueling part of the fight between Weiss and Winter, but it was probably the least essential. (McCarthy's abrupt and unceremonious end is symptomatic.)
A funny thing about this story is how, despite me not adding all this stuff I could've, it still ballooned way, way past my expectations. I had not expected this to be my second-longest story when complete. It wound up almost twice as long as initially planned, with most of that growth occurring in Act Three. Act Three is as long as One and Two together, in large part because by then we have the full cast and more stuff happening, so there's more ground to cover and more stories to tell.
More, as I said, than I had planned. I would write some, say, "I think I'm that about 20,000 words from done," do another 10,000 words, say, "I'm about 20,000 words from done," and on and on until it became this monstrosity. Even this epilogue is a thousand words longer than my norm. I felt like a band director saying after every run-through, "Last time…", until there've been five runs that were all the "last time".
Lightning round!
"Who would Salem recruit next?"
I alluded to her trying the Branwen tribe next, and Lil' Miss Malachite and her Spiders could be patsies much like Roman was in Vale, potentially. Of course, Raven being Raven, Salem's attempt to recruit the Branwens may not go to her liking.
"How much of a disaster is Weiss going to be when she's actively trying to flirt with someone?"
Did you ever see that "Calvin and Hobbes" comic where a derailed train and crashing plane are both headed for a collision at a place where a gas leak is in progress at the meeting point of tectonic plates? Something like that.
"Can't the Schnees just do what they did with SDR and improve the Dust mining industry for all?"
On top of the reasons the Schnees give for rejecting Ironwood, reforming an institution is often harder than building one. SDR's greatest asset was its buy-in, that it was something its workers and the Schnees were all invested in and wanted to build collectively. No other Dust company was like that, and trying to transform another company into that would likely wreck it.
"Do you have any ideas or plans for what would happen after this?"
In the world of SDR, no, not really. There are no plans to come back to this.
In a larger sense, yes! I have a posting plan that takes me out to February, an almost unthinkable luxury. Over the rest of December I'll finish my STRQ-fic, "Burnout", and then in January is a novella-length crossover fic, "Rose's Rowdies", where RWBY stomps around in giant robots. By February, I should have enough of my next longfic written to start posting it. We're at... 35K words so far...
Oh, no, this one's becoming a kaiju, too...
Thank you to everyone who stuck with this self-indulgence to the end. I'm glad I was able to write and finish this story. I hope you enjoyed it.
Oh, yes. One last thing. There was one more scene I wanted dearly to include. I couldn't find a place for it and it would seem like nonsense trying to stand alone, so I might as well drop it here. Here's one more Winter-Ilia scene, as a treat. Thank you, and good night.
"Now what?" said Winter.
"Now sit," said Ilia. "Put your legs like so, and then rest your hands together in your lap."
Winter mirrored Ilia's posture with more awkwardness than discomfort. This was not the sort of thing she'd ever done before, but a promise was a promise: she wanted to understand her lover, and that meant understanding all the bits and pieces of her.
Including whatever this religiosity was.
Her initial instinct, upon learning of Ilia's devotion to the cult of the God of Animals, had been that it was time-wasting nonsense. Religion was for those seeking escape from a material world in which they didn't measure up, not for the strong and capable like the Schnees.
After some reflection, she realized it was her father's voice she could hear saying those things, and that made her want to give worship a try. She would never go wrong by doing the opposite of what Jacques wanted.
So here she was, sitting on the floor of Ilia's room, clad in a simple robe. She was thankful to have that much. Ilia had informed her that worship of Panzoa was seen, amongst Faunus, as a clothes-optional affair. Panzoa was not in any way ashamed of his children, and modesty served no purpose around him. Mercifully, she also explained that nakedness was not a requirement, either. Clothes were acceptable as long as they were kept as simple as possible, as plain as possible, to show that no one present was trying to escape or obscure their animal natures.
Winter was grateful for this stipulation. She was pretty sure that the only thoughts she'd be able to manage next to a naked Ilia would be quite sacrilegious.
"Now let your body go slack," said Ilia, "and try to let go of your mind. Let it wander. It doesn't matter where it goes, only that you stop trying to steer it."
It was an instruction nearly antithetical to Winter's existence, to how she operated as a person. Ironically, she couldn't get her mind off of that.
Ilia couldn't tell, which was a small blessing. Ilia's eyes had shut, and Winter recognized how much her breathing had slowed. Ilia gave her something to focus on, though now that she thought about it, focusing on anything, even Ilia, was not the point of the exercise.
So she tried to force herself to idle.
It made her brain hurt.
"Now," said Ilia unexpectedly, "say a prayer of thanks. Thank Panzoa for your form and the blessings that he gave you."
"But I'm..." Winter started to say.
Ilia's brow tensed.
Winter realized that saying she wasn't a Faunus might not be the most tactful or pious thing to say. "I don't know any prayers," she said instead.
"I'll teach you some later," said Ilia. "For now, just make up your own, or you can listen to me and concentrate on what I say."
Schnees said 'thank you' almost as infrequently as they said 'sorry'. Winter decided to go with the second option.
Ilia intoned, "Oh Panzoa, we thank you for your blessings. We thank you for our forms, and the purposes they may fulfill, seen or unseen, known or unknown. Guide us in our service to others as you have served us, and help us to do your will for each other. Let us be the God of Animals to all your great family."
Winter kept expecting more, but seconds ticked past and Ilia didn't speak again. Winter couldn't stand it for long.
"What now?" she whispered, for the silence seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and was full of meaning she felt compelled to respect.
"Now," Ilia whispered back, "you listen."
"For what?"
"For the voice of Panzoa," said Ilia. "For his whispers to you, giving you encouragement or advice."
She fell silent, but Winter was more confused than ever. How could a single entity whisper to different people in different places, whisper to them to where only they could hear, but no one else? She didn't understand it, didn't understand how anyone could believe it.
And yet a glance at Ilia showed how deeply some people did.
So Winter tried. This at least was something she could do: focus all of her attention on making herself as still and silent as physically possible. It would give her the most chance to hear whatever it was she was supposed to hear.
It unfortunately also made her aware of the passage of time, and the increasing length the two of them were spending doing nothing... and "doing nothing" had always been anathema to Winter Schnee.
Profane or not, she couldn't help herself. "How long are we supposed to wait?" she asked.
"For what?"
"To hear these whispers," Winter said, feeling her own frown. "To hear this 'advice and encouragement'. How long do you have to pray before you hear an answer?"
"Weeks," said Ilia serenely. "Months. Years, even. Some people go their whole lives and never hear them."
Winter was aghast. "You mean people do this their whole lives and don't get anything out of it?"
"That's not what I said. I said some people never hear the whispers. That doesn't mean they got nothing from trying. After all," she said with a keen look at Winter, "you said yourself that even those who fail are worth respecting if they gave their all, right?"
Winter, her ability to speak failing her, nodded.
"This is like that," said Ilia simply, and once more she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing.
Winter had little hope that she would ever hear what Ilia sought to hear. She doubted Panzoa would pay an apostate human much mind. It would almost be more concerning if she did get his attention when so many others needed it more than her.
But, as her eyes inescapably slid to take in Ilia once more, she realized that didn't mean it wasn't worth the attempt.
She closed her eyes.
