Episode 02)

Other Side of the World

Part 2

A/N: Welcome back! Let's pick up where we left off, and see how Violet is doing…

Another flash of red-orange light appeared amidst the trees, and Violet watched as the second blast of fire hurtled directly towards her.

Kicking out to the side with her leg, Violet sent herself rolling haphazardly across the forest floor. The chill of the grass beneath her clashed starkly with the heat of the flames above her, but she had not been hit yet. Her attacker, whoever they were, didn't seem to be that good a shot.

But there were relentless, and a third blast was already being sent her way before she even had time to process where exactly it was coming from. They were hidden in the treeline, that much was obvious. But where?

The egg in her arms jostled as she rolled about, knocking against something hard on the ground. A stone, most likely. Not good. If the ground was more rugged than she had first assumed, then rolling about like this was going to be more dangerous than simply getting up.

But if there's stone here, then I have something to work with. I just need to see where to aim…

The telltale, unmistakable sound of a circle being drawn caught her attention once more. Acting quickly, Violet blindly grabbed a handful of stuff from the ground and threw it upwards, just as she rolled once again to get out of the way.

Her hidden attacker fell for the distraction. The sudden movement of leaves and grass and dirt drew the fire, and the blast tore through Violet's thrown handful of foliage, reducing it to ashes in the wind.

I see you!

The blast had indeed come from behind the treeline as she had thought. And this time, she had seen exactly which direction it had been sent from. The shadows concealed whoever they were from sight, but the clear gap between two tree trunks was as plain as day.

Unobstructed, too.

Perfect.

Violet's hand moved, the circle was drawn, and the spell was cast. The stones littering the ground, pebbles really, were enveloped by her magic and began to move by her command. In seconds, a small but compact mass of rock had been pulled together, forming a rugged sphere that floated above the ground… before being catapulted towards the gap in the trees, flying as if it were a thrown Grudgeby ball.

Violet felt herself smile in grim satisfaction as she heard the sound of her impromptu cannonball solidly striking someone, the sound of the impact accompanied by the loud grunt of pain they let out.

Violet was on her feet, leaping up and already preparing a second spell. She cradled Azure's cousin in her other arm while she drew the circle required, her eyes staring directly into the shadowed recesses of the treeline.

The soil rippled and warbled, twisting about as Violet cast her next move. The very ground around her turned almost fluid, bending to her will and rising up, up, up and forming a spinning ring of earth that orbited her body. It spun faster, spread out wider, its edge thinning out and flattening from the force of the rotation.

With a thought, and an accompanying snap of her fingers, the ring spun out all around her, expanding and cleaving clean through the trees around the edge of the little clearing. A magical, earthen buzzsaw that felled her surroundings in an instant. The trees toppled, sending up flurries of leaves and dust as they landed on the forest floor, and the shadows receded now that the light of the setting sun could break through the gaps.

"Are you crazy!? You almost cut me in half!"

Violet's jaw clenched upon seeing him. The one who had grabbed her and pulled her away from her brother, he was now sans both mask and hood, as well as some hair to boot. Evidently, he had not quite managed to duck in time.

Violet drew another circle, her hand moving counter to how she had drawn her previous one. In response, the man across from her raised his own hand and drew a new circle of his own. Fire flared into life in the palm of his hand as he prepared to clash his magic directly against hers.

Too bad for him that Violet was not attacking him from the front this time.

The dirt disc she had sent out in all directions was recalled, rising back up from the ground where it had dropped and spinning back inwards, and the man only had time to widen his eyes in shock before he was caught up in the swirl.

With yet another circle, all the dirt and stone and detritus came together, encasing the man from the neck down in an earthen cocoon, immobilising him. A final circle sent her magic directly into the mass, and Violet grimaced as she watched it all turn grey. The soil was now stone, and her attacker was trapped.

"Ha!" he laughed at her. "You think something like this will stop me? Just you wait, you little brat! When I get… out of… here… I'm… I…"

His head had been bobbing about, but now he was motionless. His struggling stopped, his words trailed off, and his expression went from haughty to confused, to shocked, to some combination of embarrassment and worry.

"You were saying?" Violet snarled, breathing heavily as she tried to reign in her fury now that the battle was over. Her heart was hammering in her ears, and she could taste blood in her mouth. She must have bit her cheek at some point in her scramble across the ground, or perhaps she had knocked a tooth loose.

It didn't hurt, though. Not at that moment. All of Violet's attention was aimed squarely at her now captive attacker.

The man's demeanour changed at once, going from combative to contrite. He smiled at her, chuckling nervously.

"Heh… well, I guess you, uh… you know your stuff, kid."

Violet took a few steps back and set down the egg against one of the felled tree trunks, taking care to do so gently. All the while her eyes never left her prisoner. Then she stood up straight, and purposefully pointed a single finger straight at the trapped man.

"OK look, I think we can both agree that we got off on the wrong foot back there," the man said quickly, face paling slightly. "I mean, I threw some fire at you, you through some rocks at me, we both got a little angry, but we're a pair of level-headed witches at heart. So what do you say, kiddo? Why don't you let me out of here, and we can talk this out properly? Help each other out, and stuff. Sound good?"

Violet narrowed her eyes, keeping her finger trained on him.

Leave him here to rot, said one side of her mind.

Tempting, but she had other, more important things to think about. Getting payback could wait.

"Answer my questions," Violet said in a low, slow voice. "And I'll consider it."

The man grinned at her. "Ask away, kiddo! Whatever you want!"

Violet had to fight back the urge to walk up and punch him then and there.

"First thing's first. Where are my friends?"

"No idea," the man replied, almost nonchalant. "Seems we all got dumped all over the place on arrival, so your guess is as good as mine."

Violet scowled. That was not what she wanted to hear at all.

"OK, next question. Where are we?"

"Again, no idea."

Violet stepped forwards, closing the gap between them, her anger no longer under control. She was almost seeing red. "It was your spell that brought us here!" she snapped. "Tell me where you took us!"

"I really don't know!" the man replied quickly. "Blame Kevin! It was his stupid ritual that we used to teleport all of us to the Isles! It was supposed to return us to our island at The Edge when we were done, but I guess he screwed it up again!"

Violet lowered her hand with a huff. "So you don't know where we are, or where my friends are, and I'm assuming you probably don't know how to get back either. Does that sound right?"

The man paled further, turning almost ghost-white. "Look, I know I'm not giving you much here, but think about this for a moment. If you let me out, we can help each other out. I can help you find your friends, and you can help me find my allies. That way, everyone gets what they want!"

"You attacked me," Violet spat back. "You attacked all of us. In what reality would I ever be able to trust you?"

"Look, I wasn't aiming at you specifically," the man stressed. "I was aiming at the Titan egg you were holding."

Violet stared at him, utterly incredulous at his sheer, blatant audacity.

Does he not even care who could have gotten hurt? Do any of them care?

The man audibly gulped. "I'm… not helping my case here, am I?"

Violet knelt down and scooped the egg back into her arms.

"Come on, kid," she whispered to it. "Let's go." Turning her back on the cocooned man, she started to leave.

"W-wait a minute!" the man yelled after her retreating form. "Y-you can't just leave me here! You have no idea what might be out there! Come on, don't do this!"

Violet stopped walking. She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

He's not worth it…

…

She turned back around and walked back towards the man. She saw him sigh in relief as she closed the distance, and he began to say something to her.

Violet, however, ignored whatever words he had for her. Instead, she punched him in the face as hard as she could.

The sound of something breaking made her feel a little better… but not much.

"You tried to hurt my family. You tried to hurt my friends," Violet seethed as she stared down the man before her. Her anger was almost boiling over entirely, and she wanted so badly to keep on hitting him, to wail on his face until he had no teeth left and his nose never set right again…

"But lucky for you, I don't have time to waste."

With that, Violet spun on her heel and walked away once more.

"The spell holding you won't last forever," she called back to him without turning around. "Give it a few hours and you'll be free, but you'd best hope we don't run into each other again."

If he said anything in response to her clear threat, Violet did not hear it. She walked out of the clearing, stepping over the felled trees as she entered the forest proper, Azure's cousin safely cradled in her arms.

Sunny reached the bottom of the hill with a grunt, managing to avoid stumbling again, and paused for a moment to catch her breath.

OK. Made it down, and I didn't completely fall over. That's a start.

Now that she was at the base of the hill, and the strange trees were right in front of her, she could see them a bit more clearly in the light of the setting sun.

All told, the trees of the Demon Realm weren't really too different from the ones back on Earth, aside from the fact that their leaves always seemed to be in fall colours. They were still made of wood, still grew like any other, and for the most part they were as harmless as a tree usually tended to be… aside from the occasional carnivorous one, but Birch had made sure she could identify those by sight.

These ones, though? Even by the standards of the Boiling Isles, these ones looked downright bizarre.

Leaves all different colours was one thing, but their trunks were also odd. Up close, they looked like they had all been deliberately and intricately carved into. Every single tree bore a pattern of swirling lines all up and down their trunks. And like the leaves and the grass, these patterns were also different colours. Silver, gold, bronze… lines like metal stencilled directly into the bark.

With a shaking, hesitant hand, Sunny reached out and brushed her fingertips up against one of the trees.

Immediately, she withdrew her hand sharply with a hiss.

Cold!

The grass had been cold, but touching the tree had felt like she had tried to touch a glacier. It sapped the warmth from her skin, and even that brief contact had left her shivering even harder than before.

Sunny rubbed her hands together to dispel the chill, then wrapped her arms around herself again and tried to warm herself up.

Cold grass, ice trees… what is this place?

…

Azure would know.

Azure seemed to never run out of things to tell Sunny about the Boiling Isles and the Demon Realm. If ever Sunny had a question, Azure had an answer. And if she didn't, she would go off and find it. Even if Sunny didn't ask, Azure would tell her things unprompted, share with her little details here and there.

But Azure wasn't here. Nor was Violet. Nor anyone else. Even if she had the energy to be curious, there was no-one to answer her.

The wind blew again, and Sunny shivered more. The temperature was dropping fast. Even if she couldn't get to the coast, she needed to find somewhere to shelter, fast.

She pressed onward, crossing the edge of the treeline and beginning to make her way through. Up ahead was the coast she had seen from up high. Up ahead was where that light had landed.

Up ahead…

A hand on her shoulder, grabbing her from behind. She doesn't know who it is. She doesn't know where she is. She's at a party, or she's at her old house. She can't tell anymore, but she can feel the hand on her shoulder, grabbing her, pulling her along. The sound of something sharp-

"Stop it!"

Sunny felt her nails digging into her arms as her grip on herself tightened. She stared straight ahead, eyes unblinking, focussing only on the spiral pattern on the tree directly in front of her. She stared, jaw clenched and hands hurting from how tightly she was gripping herself, but she focussed only on the spiral pattern and nothing else.

With her eyes she traced one of the lines, following it as it flowed along the bark. She let that single line take up all of her focus, and allowed it to block out all of the images… all of the memories…

…

Sunny relaxed her grip on her arms, but she still held onto herself, still curled inwards as she came down slowly.

"Keep going," she said aloud. "Just keep on going."

She walked onwards, slower now, but she walked on nonetheless.

She didn't think about what or who might be waiting for her at the end of her journey.

Nor did she think about what had happened before.

She refused to.

The sun was getting lower. The air was growing colder. The trees were getting denser, closer together as she moved through them.

"Keep going."

She kept repeating it. Over and over. Urging herself to keep moving forwards.

Azure stopped. She was at the top of the hill. The ground around her now all sloped downwards. This was a high as she was going to be able to get.

But with all the trees still all around her, her uphill climb in search of a vantage point was in vain. Her surroundings looked the same as before.

Midnight…

Again, nothing. Her Palisman was nowhere near her still.

Oh, how easy this would be of she could just fly.

It made a lot of things easier, being able to fly. Getting around and seeing from up high, of course. But it also made other things better, too. All the problems in the world get small when up in the sky. All her worries felt so far away when she and Midnight soared among the clouds together, only each other for company.

Azure looked up, eyes scanning the trees. One in particular seemed to rise above the rest, poking above the canopy.

"Better than nothing," she mumbled, making her way over to its base and reaching up for one of the thicker branches.

As her hand closed around the branch, she winced at how strange it felt. She had noticed it before, but now that she was more aware of herself, she could truly feel the strange chill that the wood gave off on contact.

Wood shouldn't feel like this…

Deciding to leave pondering that fact for later, Azure began to climb.

Being lifelong friends with Violet meant that Azure was a pretty good climber. Not as good as Violet, of course, but still good enough. Even if she preferred to fly…

She shook her head and continued to pull herself up, hand over foot, clambering through the leaves and up past the lower end of the canopy. A sharp twig nicked at her arm, but she paid that no mind as she continued on upwards,

The light was filtering through the top of the tree, golden and rose from the sunset. As Azure's head poked up into the open, she winced a little, shielding her eyes with one hand and looking all around as her eyes adjusted to-

Azure's eyes went wide, her jaw dropped, and she gasped at the sight before her.

A sea of multicoloured trees, and poking out amid it all, stark white spires of bone. Ribs, like she had seen so many times when flying above her home… but not these ones. These ones were not smooth and curved, but jagged like white bolts of lightning. Several were broken, snapped off at different lengths, and Azure could see that one of the broken pieces was poking up above the trees where it lay.

An elbow was clearly visible some distance from her position, devoid of any plant life other than the grass. On another side, a knee was bent, its top scoured clean of everything, revealing the bone beneath, cracked and decaying.

And further away still, but clearly visible as the sun began to sink behind it and cast shadows along the land, was the skull. A skull that looked different from the one she knew. Four horns instead of two, and one entire side of the structure collapsed. No crown adorned its head, and an enormous dead-looking tree was rising from the top, its skeletal branches like a hundred claws reaching out in all directions.

A Titan.

Not the Titan she called home.

Not even one of the Titans she had read about that were known to exist elsewhere in the world.

This was a Titan that no-one had even seen before.

Azure remained up in the canopy for some time, staring out across the land, her mind so overloaded with questions and thoughts that she had frozen.

By the time her mind had finished rebooting itself, and by the time the magnitude of what she was seeing fully hit her, Azure could only say one thing.

"Holy sh-"

Hello all! Not Scot here, and this has been the second half of Episode Two! Our main cast are indeed on an entirely new, previously undiscovered Titan! One that has a lot of secrets to be found.

Apologies for the delay in getting this to you all, by the way. My internet has been out of commission for the last few days, so I wasn't able to get this uploaded in time. But the issue has been resolved, and the next Episode will be up this Sunday barring any more technical issues on my end. Speaking of which:

Our trio find themselves in an alien land, but what is happening back home in the wake of their vanishing? How will everyone respond to this turn of events? Tune in next time for Episode Three of 'Violet, Azure and Sunny': 'Missing You'!

The next chapter of 'RWBY Re:Mixed' needs uploading after this, so I'd better go do that before I turn in for the night. So for now, I shall take my leave.

Until next time,

Not Scot.

P.S: There is a reason why the trees are so wacky, but you'll have to wait a bit for that reveal.

P.P.S: Azure right now: "Wait, I'm all alone… I can swear for real!"