Intermission
Yes, folks, it's a good ol' Mahina Fable Intermission update. For those of you who aren't familiar with my other works, I like to put intermissions in my stories, in places where I feel it appropriate. These intermissions consist of deleted scenes, goofy omake entries, and the occasional essay where I talk shop with you, my lovely audience.
So, first up: this intermission is poised right before the final arc of Reign of Steel. But wait! Don't start typing the comments yet! There are more that I have planned for this AU, which I will be writing in a sequel story. I haven't got a title picked out for that sequel just yet, but let's just put it under the production title of Reign of Steel 2. I just feel that the end of this upcoming arc will make for a good, natural stopping point for the first entry.
Right. With that announcement made, let's get with the intermission proper.
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Omake: By Any Other Name…
A resounding clap echoed throughout Beacon's hangar as the palm of Jaune's hand met his forehead.
"Ruby," he huffed, exasperation evident in his tone. "That's not how lasers work."
His female counterpart puffed her cheeks at him in her pique. "If it's not a laser, then why is it called a laser rifle, huh?"
"Because someone clearly made a mistake!"
Ruby waved her small fists around in wild gesticulations. "Oh, you've only been here for, like, a week, and you know better than the teams of highly-specialized Armored Core weapons engineers?"
"Evi-fucking-dently!" Jaune howled. "Lasers are light! They travel at the speed of light! Whatever it is that that thing is spitting out -" here, Jaune gestured towards the computer display, which showed an image of Pyrrha's Karasawa rifle - "But whatever it is, it's not a laser! Laser beams don't look like comets! You! Are! Wrong!"
"Well, why don't you come over here and kiss me about it?" blurted Ruby.
Jaune blinked. "What?"
"What?" Ruby's huge silver eyes were entirely too innocent as she gazed calmly back at him.
"Did you just -"
"Nope."
Jaune squinted at her suspiciously. "I'm watching you, Ruby Rose."
Ruby's answering smile was all teeth. "I'm counting on it, Jaune Arc."
A/N: This was just a silly, non-canon to the story little scene where I'm poking fun at some of the nomenclature in the Armored Core series. In many of the older games, the Karasawa laser rifle, and several different models of back-mounted laser cannon, fire what are obviously bolts of plasma. They look like shooting stars, which is just utterly inconsistent with the very notion of a "laser."
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Powerscaling the White Glint
How strong is White Glint relative to other Armored Cores?
Well.
In the game from which this model of White Glint is pulled, Armored Core: For Answer, the player character pilots a 4th generation Armored Core, known as a "NEXT." During the tutorial mission of the game, your character, a rookie pilot at the controls of a slightly-outdated NEXT proceeds to tear through previous-generation Armored Cores - called "Normals" in that game - as disposable mook enemies.
Now, with that in mind - that a rookie pilot in a gently-used NEXT can kill normal ACs en masse - consider the following. None of the other NEXT pilots, even the top-ranked, veteran professionals kitted out with the bleeding edge of Armored Core technology, were willing to take on White Glint unless the odds were 2-on-1 or better.
Yep.
Jaune's version of the White Glint isn't quite that powerful. The biggest reason for that is because both the game's White Glint's best defense and most powerful weapon were fueled by "Kojima Particles." Kojima Particles might as well be called "Fairy Dust," for all the scientific sense that they make, but the main things that they did for an Armored Core were to power it, and to provide an energy barrier around the machine, one that could be overloaded to erupt in a reality-warping explosion centered on the unit.
They also killed the world. Killed it dead. It's a FromSoft game, y'all know how they are. The White Glint was the sole remaining beacon of hope and freedom in a world being strangled to death by corporate corruption, so of course, your job is to go out and kill it. There are multiple branching story paths in the game, all of which have you enacting a genocide of some description. The choices boil down to exterminating most everyone so that some can survive, uphold the status quo so that everyone dies, or killing most everyone while trapping the survivors on the surface of the contaminated Earth so that you can kill them by hand yourself.
It's a FromSoft game. They aren't happy unless their writing gives everyone a bout of depression.
Anyways, Jaune's White Glint doesn't have Fairy Dust Murder Particles, but it is straight-up magitek. It'll be a while before mass production of fusion generators can begin, and make the 4th generation of Armored Cores, but even with them, just like how Karasawa rifles were just better than other plasma rifles, for reasons engineers couldn't piece together, White Glint will continue to be the high water mark for AC development for a good goddamn long time.
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Deleted Scene: A Thought for a Penny
It was dark. Penny hadn't gone without the benefit of, at the very least, sensors solved to her main processors, since her…
Huh. Would one call the start of a synthetic being's full sapience a birth? An…ignition? Perhaps the phrase "advent?"
A contemplation for her, as she floated, disconnected from the material world, with only her own thoughts to occupy her.
Penny decided that, since she was the first, and currently only extant synthetic intelligence alive in the world, she had the best claim to choose the terminology surrounding her people. She decided to go with "advent." The advent of her sapience. That would be the term used for when a synthetic being achieves full sapience, and if the engineers in Atlas disagreed, then she'd arrange for some pranks to be sent their way.
An amusing little diversion. A whole four seconds, that took her. It was dark. And lonely.
Her only consolation - beyond her continued existence - was that she had protected a lot of meat people from the blast that Adam Taurus was aiming at Beacon. That was what she was created to do, after all. A bit of repair work, and she'd be fine. With a transfer into a new Armored Core unit, she'd be back on the field as if nothing happened. It was something that no meat person could hope to match, and if this little incident had occured back in Atlas, she probably would've been combat ready again in a matter of hours.
It was what she was created to do. But…was that what Penny wanted to do?
Before Director Ozpin had asked it of her, it had never occurred to Penny, nor to anyone else, that she even had the option to refuse to fight. She didn't want to hurt anyone, really. Penny would much rather everyone be her friend, and be friends with each other, so they could hang out together and watch fishies.
It struck Penny, for the very first time, that she was taking a risk that she hadn't fully understood. She had been operating under the preconception that there were only two outcomes to her loss in combat: either she would be recovered and set back to rights in swift order, or else she would face oblivion. Her current situation gave her a third option; that she would be left, alone, unable to detect or interact with the world around her, until the heavy-duty backup batteries that kept her processor powered finally lost charge.
That was…less than optimal an outcome. A blast of plasma followed by utter nothingness was one thing, but to be trapped in a state of pure consciousness, to await a slow and inevitable end…
For the first time, Penny was afraid.
Weiss had been taking shots at Taurus from a distance, and Miss Winter had been moving into position when Penny's Armored Core had been destroyed. While Atlas had the best programmers and software engineers in the world, Beacon wasn't so bad itself, and so Penny had no reason to believe that Taurus wouldn't be defeated and herself restored within a reasonable amount of time.
But she could be wrong.
And not just in this particular instance, but if she continued on this path, she would face repeated elevated risks of having her hardware irretrievably lost. Suppose she was escorting a ship, one like the one one which she'd traveled from Atlas, and her hardware was knocked into the sea? Or if it were to be lost in a fissure? Or if some calamity hit one of the Kingdoms, and her hardware was left behind as the meat-people fled for their lives?
Having entered real combat for the first time, Penny had a much better understanding of what she was truly risking. And for the first time, Penny was afraid.
But in the end, she decided that, even the worst case scenario for her was not so unbearable that she would stand aside and let other people get hurt or killed, if she could possibly stop it.
So. a full six seconds after deciding that the proper nomenclature for the beginning of a synthetic being's life was its "advent," Penny became a hero.
Now what?
Penny gave the digital equivalent of a sigh. She really needed to get Weiss to upload some games for her.
A/N: Penny is too pure for this world. There's a great deal of fear and anxiety around artificial intelligence, usually pertaining to worries that our machine offspring will turn around and wipe us out. I, on the other hand, see a great deal of promise and hope in the pursuit of synthetic intelligence. So many stories, all worried about what could go wrong. What about how they could go right?
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On The Gil Arc Plotline
If you can listen closely, you might very well hear the sound of me thumping my head on my desk.
I wasn't planning on writing more on this in the intermission. The gods know I bitch enough on Discord to drive my peeps mad with my frustrations on the pushback to this particular plotline. I figured that I'd said all that I needed to say on the matter, and rolled my eyes at the number of guest reviewers loudly announcing that they were going to stop reading because the Gil Arc plotline had so unnerved them that they felt that they had no recourse but to drop the story.
Then I read a review, left on August 14, 2022, by user randomthoughts96. While I give this user credit for posing a review from an actual account, it was the end of said review that had me so baffled, so absolutely gobsmacked, that I decided to address the Gil Arc plotline one last time, here in this intermission.
The review is found in its entirety on the review page, but I will quote the particularly baffling segment here, with grammar errors left as-is:
"maybe it's just me but I kinda hoped that nikos mom was the bad one and gil would've accepted her and taught her along with jaune. make it about the next generation rather then killing the good the past did"
So, why does this bother me so much?
Part of it is the niggling idea in my mind that there is something, some way, that I could communicate the themes of power, choice, and consequence, and in a way that everyone can understand. And then I read a statement like that, and I realize that what I'm trying to communicate is absolutely alien to some of my readership, as utterly incomprehensible to them as it would have been had I filled half of the story with repetitions of "Blah, blah, blahbitty-blah-blah," over and over.
How else am I to take a reading of my work that has the reader hoping that that dastardly…dead woman who was impregnated by her commanding officer, a man many years her senior, would get her comeuppance?
By the time randomthoughts96 made his observation, the characterizations were well-established throughout the story. Gil Arc was an international hero, and had a long career as both a pilot and an instructor to two generations of Armored Core pilots. To absolve the senior Arc of his culpability for abusing his position, influence, and authority, I would need to go back and re-write Pyrrha's backstory, explain how and why she came to Beacon, her relationships with the Xiao-Long family members, find some equivalent position for Pyrrha's mother that is on parity with Gil Arc but also accounts for an orphan coming to join Beacon in Vale. A complete overhaul, for the express purpose of clearing Gil Arc of anything more than infidelity.
Incidentally, would that count as "forcing," or does that term only apply when one wants to involve themes and plots that tend to effect women, people of color, and gender and sexual minorities?
More and more, I'm convinced that "forced" is shorthand for "discusses ideas that make me, personally, uncomfortable."
So, I'm going to be painfully blunt here.
I'm trying to get my readers to contemplate several ideas. I'm trying to get them to conceptualize that one can be an exemplary citizen in public - a war hero, a citizen of prominence, a celebrity, whatever - while being downright bastardous behind closed doors. I'm trying to get the readers to consider that public dignity and private behavior can well be two very different things. I'm trying to get them to consider the possibility that someone who behaves one way with some people may behave very differently when it comes to people in other categories, especially those who may have a hard time protecting themselves or retaliating due to social dynamics.
I'm trying to get my readers to consider the revelatory nature of power. Why? Because while we may not be placed in charge of giant, atomic-powered war robots, there are times in our lives when we will have some degree of power over someone else. What will you do with that power? What does that say about you? Your character? Character isn't something that just happens, it's something that one cultivates, over time, through introspection and conscientious effort.
Jaune begins with a very simple moral framework - what would Dad do? When that grounding is kicked out from under him, he begins contemplating what he is going to do based off of his character. His family life could've been a lot simpler if he'd joined with his father to sideline and silence Pyrrha, but he decided that that wasn't a course of action that he could condone.
So, there we have it, in as simple terms as I can make it: I'm using fiction as a vehicle to model the process of growing from a child's simple virtue ethics to a more adult and encompassing, complete moral framework. There are many other plotlines and points of characterization that connect to that model, but that is the main point of the Gil Arc plotline and Jaune's growth into a hero.
That's it. I literally cannot explain it any further from this point. If you've read this essay and you still find the plotline so utterly incomprehensible to you that you simply must stop reading, then go. Literally leave, and don't bother making a big dramatic post announcing your departure - it's the equivalent of loudly slamming a door as you flounce your way out of the room.
That's my final word on the matter. Don't flame randomthoughts96, since at least he had the decency to post on an actual account. Be nice, ya bastards.
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Deleted Scene: The Spectre Strikes Again!
Ren would be lying if he didn't admit, at least to himself, that he was low-key having a blast revisiting his days as a costumed vigilante.
He'd taken Junior Xiong's nightclub by storm, hunted down Roman Torchwick's outfit and effectively scared six different colors of shit out of the man himself. Now, he just had to make a visit to the home of rising organized crime figure Jimmy Vanille, and his evening's work would be done.
The Vanille estate was decorated with the ostentatious garishness typical of a nouveau riche social climber. Seriously, who puts chrome tips on a wrought-iron fence? Ren resolved to pistol whip the son-of-a-bitch at least once, on general principle.
Twenty minutes later, and the combination of Jimmy Vanille's smarmy personality and godawful taste in decor had convinced Ren to pistol whip the would-be mob boss repeatedly about the face and head until the man had lost consciousness.
Seriously. The man's office had walls painted purple and gold curtains. The savage beating was more than justified.
Ren had finished cleaning Vanille's blood off of his heavy pistol when the office door opened. He scrambled to heft Jimmy's sorry carcass off the floor, holding the man in front of him with his gun held to the unconscious man's temple. Standing in the doorway was a rather pretty young woman, probably in her late teens or early twenties, wearing a white dress that clung to surprisingly heavy curves packed on her short frame. She had long brown hair falling over her bare shoulders, and striking heterochromatic eyes, one brown and one pink.
"Don't come any closer," Ren growled, concealing his normal speaking voice with an exaggerated gravelly tone.
The girl canted her head curiously, like a dog. Then she smiled brightly, with lovely straight, white teeth, skipping merrily into the room.
Ren blinked in surprise, tightening his grip on his hostage. "Don't -"
The girl reared back and gave the unconscious Jimmy Vanille a sharp, swift kick between the legs. Her bright, innocent smile turned downright predatory, and she kicked the man again.
"Hey, hey!" Ren let Vanille drop to the ground, the unconscious gangster flopping like a limp noodle on the ground. He trained his weapon on the girl, but she ignored him entirely, proceeding to kick the unconscious man's face and ribs. Finally, Ren was obliged to pull her away from him lest she actually kill the man.
She beamed up at him, and Ren struggled to keep up his guard in face of the short girl's full, heavy bust pushed up high on her chest and pressing into him as she hugged him.
"Who are you? Jimmy's wife? Girlfriend?"
The girl made a disgusted face, pantomiming yakking.
"A daughter?"
She nodded.
"Right. So, not a fan of your father, I take it?"
She stuck her tongue out at him. Then, after the girl looked over to take in the bleeding, rumpled form of her heavily-bludgeoned father, her expression turned sly and mischievous.
Ren knew that look.
The girl bit her lower lip, fluttering her lashes.
"Really?" he asked, slowly shaking his head.
Her white dress hit the floor.
A few hours later, Ren finally left the Vanille estate. He'd given the daughter - one Trivia Vanille - his hat, though he'd kept the mask on during his…assignation. That girl was insane. And a contortionist. He was rather grateful for the Flow - his "Aura," as Ozpin called it - as he was pretty sure that, without it, Trivia Vanille would have eaten him alive.
He pinned a note on Jimmy Vanille for him to read when he came to.
Jimmy Vanille,
Don't forget. Funnel the WF towards Emeraude. Do it, and you never see me again. Try to fuck me over on this, and tonight will look like a relaxing day at the spa.
The Spectre
P.S. - I plowed your daughter. A lot. You lot are in dire need of family counseling.
Ren gave it six months to a year, tops, before Trivia overthrew her father. Probably less than that. Well, that was a big batch of Not His Problem.
Sleeping with a deranged girl was nothing new for The Spectre, but for some reason, he felt that mentioning his one-night stand to Mountain Flower would be a bad idea. Oh well.
A/N: The sort of shenanigans that Ren got up to as The Spectre. I thought it was a little too much for the tone of the chapter, and decided to axe the segment. Without Aura, Dust, and a Semblance, Neo - Trivia - hadn't quite got around to slaughtering her parents yet, but yeah, she's still a little psycho.
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Omake: Mother Knows Best
Ruby could only sigh in defeat as she saw that her mother had not only prepared the room, but had done so with an actual blackboard on a stand. All she could do was sit in resignation as Summer went about using a piece of chalk to make a rough sketch of Jaune in profile.
Then the older Rose wrote across the top of the board, the title of her lecture. "BUTT-TOUCHING FOR BEGINNERS."
"Really, Mom?"
"I saw that kiss you laid on him in the workshop," teased Summer. "It's best to get this sort of education out of the way before things get to that level."
"Did you give this lecture to Yang?"
"Your sister is more of a boob kinda gal. Your father gave her advice."
"Makes sense."
"Indeed."
Ruby sighed once more, with the infinite exasperation that came naturally to teenage girls. "Dad already told me that Jaune promised not to touch me until I'm seventeen." Ruby hadn't meant to disclose just how disgruntled she was by that edict, but she couldn't help herself. Didn't her dad understand that there was a butt what needed touching?
"Now Ruby, your father is just being responsible."
"Bleh."
Summer gave her daughter a wily smile. "Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't touch Jaune. Or specifically, his butt."
Ruby blinked. Two pairs of silver eyes met, and then the girl took out a pad to take notes from her mother.
"Right." Summer turned back to the blackboard. "Now, let's discuss the best ways to ask to touch the butt…"
A/N: I reserve the right to be ridiculous.
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Well, I hope that you enjoyed these entries. I'll be gearing up to the final third - roughly guesstimated - of Reign of Steel. I've been turning this confrontation over in my head for over a year, contemplating how to choreograph an almighty brawl.
I am embarrassing amounts of excited to show you all the absolute chaos that's been churning around in there.
Thank you all for reading, and I hope that you'll enjoy the rest of this story.
Love,
Mahina Fable