Man, I love this health app watch thing. It's so funny to have a numerical readout of how stressed I am all the time. It's 10:30am at the time of writing this note, and I've been at work just 90 minutes, and yet already the app is telling me I'm too stressed and have drained HALF my "body battery" and should take a break or find a way to relax.
Worse yet, it tracks my heart rate. I was at 60-70 pretty much all over the weekend aside from when exercising, and yet my average at work has been between 80-100bpm. In a sedentary job!
0.o
That doesn't look good!
It sounds all bad (and is) but being aware of it is making me take a break to have a walk, a drink and do some breathing exercises and my heart rate dropped back down to 71 for a while. I guess being aware of it and not just bullishly pushing on is good for me.
Cover Art: Mystery White Flame
Chapter 13
Roman toyed with the idea of ignoring the call and letting it go to voicemail. It was amusing to consider Cinder – because really, who else could it be? – frothing at the mouth as his catty voicemail message invited her to share her thoughts. However, he knew was toeing the line as it was with regards to sabotaging her, and if he made it too obvious that it was all intentional as opposed to, say, a hilarious coincidence on his part, then she might just murder him for real.
That'd be bad because Roman rather intended to live forever, if not in the literal sense then in the minds of people and the history books. And with the Vytal Festival itself now on the list of things he'd stolen, there was a damn good chance he would. But he also intended to live long enough to see and gloat over those books – which wouldn't happen if Cinder cooked him from the inside out.
"Good moooorning," he said cheerfully down the scroll, dragging out the o's. "And what a glorious morning it is. How may this world famous thief help you today, Cinder?"
"ROMAN!"
"That is who I am. How are you doing?"
"You will put the Amity Colosseum back where you found it right now!"
Ooh, straight to the point. Cinder normally liked to dicker around making it sound like what he'd done was just stupid and not an actual obstacle to her plans. This was the first time she'd actually come out and admitted he'd foiled her.
"Hmmmm? What do you mean?" Roman played dumb.
"I need Amity!" she hissed. "The Vytal Festival is INTEGRAL to my plans!"
"Is it? Oh damn, oh crap, oh shit." Roman snapped his fingers. "Oh, my bad Cinder. I didn't know that." He was laying it on too thick but she was too agitated to notice. "You never mentioned it was important so I assumed it wasn't. I mean, with you using the White Fang to blow a hole in the middle of the city, I kind of assumed your plans were down on the ground."
"Well, they're not, Roman. They were up on Amity."
"Oh. Damn. Ah man, I am such an idiot." He mimed slapping his face with the palm of his hand. "Wow, I just feel bad now. You should have told me and I'd have stolen something else. And here I was trying to create a distraction to help you out! I just asked myself what the biggest distraction I could possibly cause would be. Oh, Cinder, I am so sorry."
Butter wouldn't have melted in his mouth.
"Damn it, Roman. Just put Amity back – give it back or let it be found or lose it to them somehow. I don't care for the details, I just want it back under Vale's control."
"Yeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..."
"Roman..."
"About that..."
"ROMAN!"
"Well, it turns out that it's really, really expensive in terms of dust to keep a thing like that up in the air, and obviously Atlas was providing a lot of said dust. I mean, I'm sure there was a lot on Amity, but I was piloting the thing and it'd normally be run by a crew of people."
Roman rolled onto his back on the couch, kicking his feet up over the armrest and miming the act of twirling a phone cord around his finger. Cinder could only see his face and he made sure to keep that looking contrite.
"And well, I ran down to the engine room to try and load it with dust, but that meant leaving the pilot's seat and – wouldn't you know it – you're meant to keep your eyes on the road even when you're several thousand feet up in the air. Crazy, huh?"
"WHERE. IS. AMITY!?"
"You got a television over there? I think they're doing a report on it now."
He knew they were, of course, because he'd gone and leaked the location of it to Lisa Lavender who had leapt on the story and gotten an entire team out to the site. He hadn't been entirely lying to Cinder; he was just one man and couldn't both pilot and keep Amity fuelled, but he could have flown and landed it on the fuel it had in its engines.
But then Cinder would have demanded he give it up like she had here, and Atlas could have reclaimed it in time for the festival. That wouldn't do. And, obviously, there weren't many fences or avid collectors on the market who could accept and hide a flipping flying colosseum. Amity wasn't something he could have shifted other than if he broke it down and sold it all as component parts.
On the screen, Lisa Lavender was on a boat with her crew.
"Reporting live from the northern coastline of Vale where Amity Colosseum was last tracked before vanishing from radar. Dredging teams have already been deployed and we have just received confirmation that Amity Colosseum has been located! Sir, can we get a comment."
The lead diver looked wet and too tired for this shit but put on as best a face as he could in a wetsuit with a mask over his forehead and a mouthpiece dangling under his chin. "Yes, we've found Amity not too far underwater. While I wouldn't say it crashed into the shallows, Amity was big enough to create its own shallows. You can actually free dive down to the stadium by holding your breath."
"Amity is intact, then?"
"For a certain definition of the word. There's obviously a lot of water damage."
"And can it be reclaimed?"
"We think so. Obviously, it'll need to be fully dredged and brought to the surface, then machinery will need to be replaced – but Amity will be able to take off and fly under its own power at that point. That's a lot easier than us having to drag it out the water first, which would frankly be impossible."
"That's excellent news," said Lisa. "And how long would this take with the Vytal Festival itching to begin?"
The diver looked a little surprised. "Uh. A while. I mean, two or three..."
"Days?"
"Years. Two or three years. And that's optimistic."
Lisa swallowed. "W—Well, that almost certainly means some... um... adjustments will need to be made to this year's festival. The Council of Vale have declared that the festival will continue despite the efforts of one man to derail them, but we have no information yet as to how that will happen. Now, onto the weather!"
Roman clicked the TV off, basking in his success.
And in the dial tone of Cinder having hung up on him in absolute rage.
/-/
Ozpin had been around for many thousands of years and yet in all that time he'd never quite been so unamused to be present at a meeting. The mayor of Vale, Coppersmith, was as red in the face as his namesake, and spouting enough steam to fit for a forge as well.
"What do you have to say for yourself, Ozpin!?"
"Hmmmm?" Ozpin looked up, nursing his coffee. "I apologise, but I fail to see how this is either my fault or my business." Stunned silence greeted him. "My duties are to Beacon and its student body, and to protecting Vale against the Grimm. And last I checked, this was no Grimm incursion. I rather think this is a matter for Atlas."
James tensed. "And I rather think this is a matter for Vale," he shot back. "Though I agree not for Beacon or Headmaster Ozpin. Roman Torchwick is a criminal. Should not we be asking the good minister of policing his opinion?"
The minister for law and order flinched. "I... um... our department is clearly underfunded. As I told you before, but someone opted to use much of the budget on boosting the economy in preparation for the Vytal Festival." He turned on the Chancellor. "I do believe I protested the cuts of 1,000 police officers forced upon me last year."
All eyed turned to the Chancellor. The woman was sweating. "Those cuts were part of a cost-cutting campaign ordered by Mayor Coppersmith," she said, passing the hot potato on. "I was told to cut by a certain amount and was given no support in that. I only crunch the numbers, gentlemen, I can't be held responsible for what criminals do."
Ozpin watched the game play around the table with the faintest of amusement. Someone had to pay the price for this debacle and he and James had roundly excluded themselves, leaving the politicians to decide who would be sacrificed to the people's anger. It was, after all, always easier to blame a single person for the state of an economy or a disaster than it was to fault the system. And, as was often the case, it wasn't going to be the ones at the top who paid the price for it. Some junior minister would take the brunt of this.
But none of the upper ministers wanted it to be their juniors, because as much as they were all terrible people, they liked their sycophants and didn't want to lose them. And whichever junior minister was at fault for this, their boss would receive some blame for not having "caught" their mistake in time.
Politics. Ozpin despised it. For a long time, he'd felt the world better off under his direct control as king – not that absolute power was good, but that it was good when the one wielding it did so with the betterment of everyone in mind. He'd only brought an end to it after one of his sons inherited several centuries back and decided to use his power to favour himself.
No father should have to topple his son in a peasant rebellion, but then a man had to own up to his mistakes and Ozpin had clearly failed his child back then to let him become such a ruthless ruler. Since then, Vale had decided democracy was better, and it absolutely would have been if the values those early people espoused had been stuck to, as opposed to democracy being overtaken by these self-serving idiots.
Maybe systems weren't the problem. Maybe humans were the issue.
"Well, something has to be decided about the tournament," said Coppersmith, shouting over the noise. "I've already promised it'll continue, so it has to. Can we hold it at Beacon?"
"Beacon lacks the means to keep so many people safe," Ozpin swiftly interjected. "We'd have to transport tens of thousands of people through the Emerald Forest. The Grimm would see it as an all you can eat buffet."
"Does Atlas have a spare...?" the mayor asked hopefully.
James raised an eyebrow. "A spare flying colosseum...?"
"Can you... make another...?"
Ironwood's dark expression said it all. Atlas could, of course, begin construction on another Amity but the idea that it could be completed in a couple of days was comical, to say nothing of the billions it would cost. James knew Vale wasn't offering to front that bill despite having ostensibly lost the original.
Though Vale would argue – rightly so in some ways – that Atlas had been in charge of protecting Amity in the first place. It was a diplomatic issue at this point. Atlas blamed Vale for not dealing with Torchwick, and Vale blamed Atlas for not stopping Torchwick, and neither side wanted to escalate because the Atlas-Vale alliance was worth a lot both militarily and economically. What that led to was a lot of talk of "strong ties and forgiveness" in public and a lot of beady-eyed utterings of "incompetence and reparations" in private.
And, of course, the issue of the Vytal Festival – because if they cancelled it then all the people who had come to visit would demand refunds, and the hotels would be put out of business and the city would fall into a recession, and so on and so on. The economy had been bolstered by the festival, but it could just as easily be destroyed by the removal of it.
Worse yet, the coffee was decaff. Ozpin yawned and propped his elbow on the desk.
"—cancel the golden statue we ordered of Torchwick. Yes, we started to have it made. A statue compares well financially versus an entire colosseum, but the deal is off now he's crashed it. Look, we're just going to have to hold the festival here in the city. We'll clear out a car park or something. I'm sure we can make up some temporary bleachers."
"But it'll disappoint people."
"That's going to happen anyway! Unless you want to equip everyone in scuba dear and have the festival take place underwater, this is all we have! General Ironwood, can we re-enact the other plans for the festival?"
James' eyebrows rose higher still. "You mean our plans for a roulette system to determine arena type?"
"Yes."
"Not unless you want us to turn a stretch of your city into a desert, another into ice, another into a ruined city and so on." He spoke with the slow kind of tone an IT professional might use to explain a computer problem to a pensioner. "I don't think that's going to be possible. Or a good idea."
"Can't we import some snow and throw it on the ground...? Same with sand for the desert one?"
James looked like he wanted to strangle the man who asked that. Ozpin would have laughed if the situation weren't such a mess. He already had Lisa Lavender asking for an interview, as if he had any involvement whatsoever. Ozpin had been quite merrily asleep while Amity was being stolen, and he'd have liked to continue that sleep but for James breaking his door down screaming at the top of his voice.
"The Council may do as it feels is fit," James eventually said, divesting himself of all responsibility. "If we may, I believe Ozpin and I need to inform our students of the changes and make sure everything there is in order."
"Yes!" Ozpin said, throwing his weight behind James' bullshit if it meant escaping this meeting. "We need to do that to avoid any panic among the students. We have the utmost faith in the council to do what needs to be done."
Which was a lie, of course, but they all knew that.
Once they were out and the doors were closed, James covered his face with two hands. "This is going to be a travesty," he said. "They want to recreate state-of-the-art arena changing systems on a budget. They're going to have people shovelling on buckets of sand imported from Vacuo onto tarmac, then shovelling it off again once the fight is over. This is going to go down in history as the most comically stupid festival."
"It could be worse."
"How!?"
"It could be happening in Atlas."
James considered that. "Okay, you have me there. I think I'd fire myself into the sun rather than explain this to my own kingdom. Vale is going to be a laughingstock. Are you fine with that?"
"I'm not exactly thrilled, but I'll survive. Or I won't and Glynda will take over Beacon until I die and inhabit a new body." Ozpin could afford to be relaxed about it all when he'd retain control of Beacon no matter what happened. "How are your men taking it...?"
"Poorly. They're suspended on pay while an investigation is undertaken. I'm doing my best to make sure they're not scapegoated. Roman was able to get both our military details and my voice – and there have been no leaks on our end. The Council aren't allowing us to look into whether the leak came from them – which is as good an admission of guilt as anything."
"Hmmm." Ozpin wouldn't normally encourage James' paranoia but it wasn't paranoid to say the Council was a leaky mess. That was just being realistic. "Honestly, as embarrassing as this all is, it's not the worst thing in the world. This is actually taking a lot of attention away from the recent breach and the deaths caused there."
Which was horrible, but good in a cynical sense that it meant the White Fang hadn't been able to get the coverage and attention they so desperately wanted. The online spaces were awash with memes, with Torchwick being immortalised in meme form atop Amity Colosseum. The cockroach must have been enjoying it.
But, realistically speaking, it was better for Vale to be memed into oblivion than it was for the White Fang to get explosives up onto Amity. This could have been so much worse, with Torchwick sneaking on board to plant bombs that might have brought the colosseum down and killed everyone on it.
Ozpin wouldn't shake the man's hand just yet, however.
Not when the asshole still had his cane!
/-/
Ruby wasn't sure what to make of everything being said. Weiss was quick to share her opinions, and for once Blake agreed with her, but they were both biased against the White Fang and Torchwick and hadn't really been in the same situation she had.
People called her dumb, and Ruby would admit she wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but she knew she would be dead without Torchwick's intervention in Mountain Glenn. The White Fang had genuinely been about to kill her for some recorded execution footage before he swaggered in, saved her, berated her, then quite obviously let her escape.
And sure, maybe he'd just done it to avoid charges – that was what Oobleck said. He'd told them Roman was a criminal but cowardly at heart, and that he tried not to cause deaths or harm so that his inevitable captures didn't result in the worst punishments. And he had been caught and arrested a few times, and never for much more than robbery.
But didn't that just make it even more obvious that something was going on here?
Torchwick had as good as told her there was someone pulling his strings.
But, of course, her team wouldn't believe that.
Weiss called him a fiend and a braggart, Blake said he'd led the White Fang astray, and Yang just wanted to punch his face in for tying her little sister to a chair. Ruby, meanwhile, just wanted him to stop calling her "Red" and maybe to prove she totally could be a proper nemesis. It was just her last few run-ins with him hadn't been at the best of times.
She was fifteen, okay? Mistakes happened. That didn't mean she was a cruddy nemesis...
"It's crazy how badly some people are taking this," said Jaune, sharing the table with them. "I mean, it's not great but it's not the end of the world either. I think we're all annoyed but some people are freaking out!"
His team were some of the most chill about it all. Pyrrha even looked pleased, but then this wasn't anything special to her. There were a lot of other people who had come from abroad to compete in what might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Ruby felt especially bad for Mercury and Emerald's team leader, who had apparently been rushed to the infirmary today because of a nervous breakdown. Some people really were too high-strung for their own good. Maybe Ruby should be a good host in Beacon and find her a self-help or meditative book in the library, something she could read to calm down when the stress got too high for her.
"Weiss and Blake are just annoyed because they feel like this wouldn't have happened if we'd caught Torchwick," she explained to Team JNPR. When her team were going feral, Team JNPR was always a safe haven of peace and tranquillity. Even when Pyrrha so obviously had a crush on Jaune, she welcomed Ruby into their dorm.
She must have sensed Ruby didn't have any designs on him, or maybe Pyrrha just wasn't as immune to the puppy-dog eyes as she liked to pretend. Ruby couldn't help it if Jaune had big brother energy. It helped that he could even pass as Yang when she squinted and ignored the lack of hair and other assets.
"And Yang?" asked Ren.
"Just wants to punch him for capturing me, even though he didn't kill me."
"He's a crook," said Nora. "I think stealing you from your team is on brand but killing you wouldn't have been."
"It would have been for the White Fang if he wasn't there," Ruby mumbled. "But of course Blake thinks he's the one leading them astray."
Jaune smiled awkwardly. "That'd almost be a good thing, wouldn't it? Hardened terrorists turning to lives of petty crime sounds like a positive to me."
It sounded good to her as well, though not quite as good as them deciding to be productive members of society or fight the Grimm, but then Ruby would also admit she didn't know much about what faunus had been through. Life on Patch had been good, even with the loss of their mother.
"Attention all students." Glynda Goodwitch had stepped into the cafeteria. Lessons had been cancelled today due to the teachers all being busy trying to figure out what the hell was going to happen with the festival. "I am pleased to tell you that the tournament will continue." Miss Goodwitch did not look pleased. "And that you will have the opportunity to represent your teams and your schools in a new setting. The tournament will be taking place in Vale's largest sports arena, the ValeO Arena."
Ruby knew of it in the sense that she'd heard that music concerts and sports games were held there, but she'd never been. It didn't sound too bad, though. Not as cool as a floating colosseum but there'd be stands for the audience and a space in the middle for them to fight on. Not too different from how it was planned to be before.
"But due to the lack of adequate equipment for combat between huntsmen, we are asking students to..." Glynda sighed. "Take it easy on the terrain."
And there it was, the kicker that had everyone groaning. Amity was more than just a set of stands and an arena; it was a specially created stadium capable of protecting spectators from the consequences of a whole lot of dangerous weaponry and Semblances. The arena was made to retract and come back up specifically because the average fight would leave great holes in said arena. Throw in someone like Nora and her grenade launcher and the problem only got worse.
This sports stadium would have none of that, and now a whole host of teams were being unfairly penalised because their method of fighting was too destructive. A chorus of boos rose up from the crowd of students, soon reaching cacophonic levels.
"Enough!" Glynda barked. "If you wish to complain, you're welcome to don your swimsuits and try to drag Amity back up onto the shore! Any takers? No. I thought not! It's not our fault an entire floating stadium got stolen by a fop in a trench coat." Glynda's nostrils flared. Judging by her lack of patience, the morning had not been kind to her, and anyone who got in her way was going to suffer. "Now, if you don't have any constructive ideas then I shall leave you to your meal. Good day to you all."
No one dared speak until long after she'd gone.
"Someone's in a bad mood," Yang quipped, though even then she spoke in a whisper.
"We should go find and stop Torchwick," Blake decided.
"How, and in what way, will that improve the current situation? It's not going to un-sink Amity."
"But what if he steals the ValeO Arena next?"
"That thing is literally built into the ground. He'd have to steal a whole chunk of Vale with it, so I don't think that's possible."
Blake crossed her arms. "They said the same about Amity, I'm sure, and yet here we are."
"Look," said Ruby. "I get that you hate Roman more than anyone here, but the teachers are going to kill us if we go get into trouble right now. Please don't pull your usual—"
Ruby was interrupted by a high-pitched scream. "ROOOOOMAAAAANNNNN!"
Everyone in the cafeteria watched as Cinder Fall screamed, then fainted a second time today. Her teammates picked her up between them and, with apologetic looks toward the others, carried her away. Two of them did, anyway. The black-haired one just watched with a cheerful grin and a milkshake.
"Correction," said Ruby. "I think Blake has been usurped as the one who hates him the most."
"Yeah..." Even Blake was surprised. "I mean, I hate him, but that's two nervous breakdowns in one day. She must have really been looking forward to the festival."
Turns out deep breathing exercises work as I was able to consciously lower my stress levels from a steady 75-100 down to 25-50, and my heart rate down to 65-75 for the remainder of work solely through them and being more aware of my stress and pausing when it gets too high.
I'm guessing this means my stress is self-inflicted, probably due to anxiety or me having bad working habits, rather than any physical issue. Go figure the guy who's written fanfiction on top of a normal job for ten years with hardly any breaks has bad work-rest balance.
Who could have possibly foreseen this!? Derp.
Next Chapter: 21st May
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