Notice: Due to an awards ceremony that I have to organise, foot questions over and chair in September, I'm going to be taking the week starting Monday 12th – Sunday 18th September off. I'll be back Monday 19th.
Cover Art: Kirire
Chapter 18
Waterson's publishers and printing house was a modest looking building of square construction, with two floors and a flat roof. It looked like the kind of building a child would draw, with perfectly square windows spaced out equidistant from one another across both floors, and a double door of glass slap bang in the middle. The sign that hung above it was aged, with the letters A and E dangling off, and the R missing entirely.
There was a small car park outside that Jaune drew them into, parking among the empty bays and turning the ignition off. Seventeen was the minimum age for driving, which they both qualified for, but the way Jaune drove suggested he'd been doing it for longer. He leaned forward over the dash to look up through the windscreen at the building. The roads outside and around the premises had been sealed off – allegedly for sudden and important roadworks. Sure enough, construction workers were employing heavy machinery to tear up the asphalt and create such noise that no one could hear what went on within.
"They're not answering calls and no one has been seen arriving or leaving for two days." said Jaune.
"Why wasn't the alarm called before now?"
"No idea. Maybe it was and the police handled it poorly." He unstrapped his seatbelt and pushed his door open. Blake did the same, stepping out and closing her door while Jaune kept talking over the top of it. "Or it could be the people inside are complicit and made excuses. It's our job to find out. All shipments in and out are being blocked."
"Are they still tyring?"
"Oh yes." Jaune moved to the boot of the car and popped it open. Blake swallowed at what lay inside: numerous weapons, some classifying as small arms but others large assault rifles and, to her dismay, explosives. Jaune thankfully avoided those and took a simple handgun, holstering it at his side. "They tried to send out a shipment of books at eight this morning. The police intercepted it and are holding it without looking inside. The excuse they have is that the printing house is making counterfeit money."
"There's an excuse for the regular people and an excuse for the police. Why not use the same one?"
"This level of force is disproportionate to toxic fumes." explained Jaune. "And to be honest with you, they're more likely to believe it if they think they're being trusted with top secret information. It makes them feel special and privileged to know the truth, and that'll have them much less likely to share it. And if someone does piece together that all this was too much for toxic fumes then the truth they'll find is the next lie about counterfeit money."
Lies upon lies upon lies; they were going to bury the story under so many layers that the conspiracy theorists would stop when they cracked the first one, think themselves geniuses and not dig any deeper. It was clever, if a little daunting to realise she was one of the very few trusted with the actual story. It was so much worse than toxic ink or counterfeit money.
They approached the doors and tested them, pushing the glass open and stepping inside when no alarm went off. The main reception area was well-lit but empty, with the seats bare and the two doors leading off left and right closed. There was a rhythmic hum and clunking sound of machinery deeper within the building, likely the printing press, but there were no sounds of people.
"We're not splitting up," said Blake.
"Last time we agreed to that we ended up locked in a flooding basement."
"Doesn't mean it was the wrong call."
"Alright." Jaune chuckled to himself and edged toward the left door. Blake followed. "There's too much risk of being ambushed if we go alone anyway. This anomaly – or the people using it – are clearly capable of planning if they distributed the books so far. They also waited for exam periods to target younger people."
Sickening. Blake shook her head. "Why?"
"We'll find out." He touched the door and pushed it open, entering slowly with his gun drawn. The lights were on again, so no need for flashlights, but the corridor beyond was empty. It was a long hallway with wooden doors on left and right. "Check every door. We don't want to leave a potential enemy behind us. I'll take left. You take right."
"What did I just say about splitting up?"
"We won't. Just open and look. Don't go in."
He was entirely too relaxed about all this. Or confident – or even just resigned; it was so hard to tell with Jaune. Blake grumbled and moved to the right of the hallway, pushing open the first door and peeking inside. Storage room. Full, but not one living. She waited for Jaune to check his, say "clear", and move onto the next before she did the same.
They kept equal pace on the doors, advancing down the corridor in tandem one room by one, pushing a door open, poking in and taking a quick look around. Many of them were small single-room offices, either used for employees or maybe for one-on-one meetings with people. Some were larger, either staffrooms or meeting rooms, but they were all self-contained rooms that didn't cross over to any other. The sound of machinery grew louder as they went, and Blake began to wonder if the machine itself wasn't what was anomalous. The idea was dismissed just as quickly; if it were the anomaly then it would have been active long before now, as this printing house had presumably been making textbooks for years without issue. Blake took it as a sign of how deep she'd gotten into ARC Corp that she could think like that.
"Clear." said Jaune at the last door. Blake echoed him and he nodded. "Next corridor then." He pushed up against it and readied his weapon. "This should take us to the left-front corner of the building. That should be the employee kitchen and one of the two staircases to the second floor."
He was right. The kitchen was simple enough with units around the outer edge, two tall refrigerators side by side, a sink and a washing machine. There was a microwave nearby with uneaten food inside that had long since gone cold. Flies buzzed around it menacingly. There was a stack of dirty mugs by the sink, proof of the day's washing that had never been cleaned.
At the back corner was a staircase, one of those back and forth ones that went up, turned one-eighty and then went back and up again the other way. He climbed it steadily with Blake behind, her ears perked up for any sound. It was because of their heightened tension that they heard the sound of muttering ahead. Voices. Jaune signalled to her to ask if she'd heard, and she nodded back. He motioned with a finger to his lips for silence and they crept up the rest of the way. The hall at the top was empty, but the double doors to the left were wedged open by a fire extinguisher propped up by the door, and inside were a whole host of people.
Men, a few women, all of them adults and most of them down on their knees or laid our flat on their stomachs. They didn't wear any singular uniform, but a few of them wore safety equipment you might have seen on the factory floor, and others were dressed in fine suits and smart workwear. Each and every one of them had a book either in hand or on the floor, and they were poring over them with rapt attention. More victims.
"Don't look into any of the books." said Jaune, needlessly. Blake already had her eyes averted up toward the ceiling. Jaune moved in and she followed, careful not to so much as glance at the open pages. "It looks like the people working here didn't want to cooperate."
"Do we help them?"
"We find and deal with the anomaly first."
"We could drag them out."
Jaune shook his head. "More people risk being affected if we don't deal with this, and we'll be sitting ducks if we have to protect them and ourselves at the same time. They've survived this long." Some of them, he didn't have to say, as two were neither moving nor breathing. "They need the kind of help we can't provide. Academic help." He snorted briefly, amused more by the concept than the words. "This is a mess and no mistake. I just hope they don't wake up knowing about whatever, or whoever, caused this. It's always hard to keep witnesses silent."
"Without killing them. I hope."
"Obviously. It'd be easy to keep them silent if we could do that." He jerked his head forward. "Come on. Let's find the one, or the thing, responsible for this. The sooner we deal with it, the sooner these people will be safe."
It didn't feel right just leaving them, but she followed Jaune through the next set of doors all the same. It wasn't like with Adam, she told herself. Adam had been prepared to let everyone on that train die for his own ends; Jaune just wanted to focus on disarming the metaphorical bomb instead of evacuating the passengers. The next room was an office with a glass pane window that looked out over the printing area itself. The machinery inside was so tall that it took up both floors, hollowing out the centre of the building and turning it into a factory floor where conveyor belts brought reams of paper, all connected in one long strip, under a press that pressed down with a hydraulic hiss. It would then lift, and the belt would drag the next stretch of paper across for it to do the same.
On another machine, the connected roll of paper was being cut by another, automatically measured, set and cut in a way that would leave the pages uniform in shape and size. These were then flickered into another machine which, by some clever programming, sorted the pages in such a way as to split them up and funnel them to where they could be stacked into full books. The press itself was large enough that it looked to be printing some twenty pages at once on a single ream. Fortunately, they were too high up to have any chance of making out specific words.
"Do you think that's it?" asked Blake. "I'm not convinced the machine would be the anomaly."
"Neither am I." admitted Jaune. "But it's a possibility one part of it is. That thing is a whole bunch of different machines, and they might have installed one recently that was anomalous." He moved to the window and placed his hand against the glass. "It doesn't matter either way. The best thing we can do is shut that thing down. If it isn't anomalous then the books are, and the less that are being made the better."
"Back to the ground floor then?"
"Yes, we'll-" Jaune went silent. He hissed suddenly. "Blake, look!"
Down on the ground floor, by the machine, she saw the person. The man – it was a man, she assumed, by his suit, and he was looking over the pages as they whizzed by at high speed. He nodded, turned and moved further down in no hurry, and seemingly not captured by the words on the pages at all. That would have given him away if the fact he was the only person still active in this place hadn't. Jaune was already moving away from the window and back toward the door, and the staircase beyond it.
They took the stairs down quickly, circled around and followed the building plan until they reached the sealed doors leading to the factory floor. Jaune tested them as quietly as he could. It wasn't locked. "What's the plan?" asked Blake quietly. "Shoot first? Talk?"
"Talk," said Jaune. "We don't know if he is the anomaly or if he's using it, and we need to know which it is. It'd also be good to have him able to tell us where he got it from."
"You think it's the Schnee again?"
"I have no idea, but I think I'd like to know for certain." He took a deep breath and said, "I'll go in first. Follow, but keep your eyes to the sky. Don't read anything. Get out if the worst happens. Get help and come back."
Blake wanted to say it wouldn't happen, that he was being silly, but she knew it was better to have a plan and not need it than go in blind; she nodded her head. The door creaked open and they crept inside, the sounds of the printing press slamming down and hissing now the loudest thing by far. There was a certain rhythmic nature to it all. A whirr as the reams were moved, a ker-chunk as the press came down, a hiss as it rose, then a whirr again as the pages moved along. It repeated on and on. Jaune moved slowly, handgun held pointed down. The man was up ahead and didn't look to be armed, neither with conventional weaponry nor with a mind-controlling book.
"Freeze!" Jaune brought the gun up to point at the man's back. "You're under arrest." The man did, indeed, go still, as men tended to when faced with armed strangers. "Turn," said Jaune. "Slowly. Turn to face me."
The man – for it was a man – looked remarkably normal. He wore a tweed jacket with brown and grey stitching, an untucked green shirt beneath and black trousers. His face was aged, around fifty, and he had a pair of round tortoiseshell glasses perched on his nose. His greying hair was cut short, but his beard had started to grow out, likely from being trapped in here for two or more days. There was a lanyard around his neck with a nametag that Blake couldn't read and wouldn't have for safety's sake even if she was close enough.
"O-Oh my." He had a rich, gentle voice that reminded Blake of her elementary school teacher back home. "I'm afraid this is a restricted area. The machinery is quite dangerous if you're not careful."
"You're under arrest." Jaune moved a little closer, though he kept outside of range of the man's arms. In truth, the man looked too weak to pose much of a threat, but then the anomalous routinely broke the laws of physics so his caution made sense. "You're under arrest for the deaths of numerous people relating to these books you're printing."
"Educational textbooks." said the man, indignant. "They are not mere books, but tools of broadening the mind and fixing the problems that plague our society."
"Down on your knees!" said Jaune.
"What problems?" asked Blake at the same time.
"The problem of the next generation and human intelligence." The man shook his head sadly. "There are too many children playing games, watching videos online, skipping class and wasting their education on transient pleasures. Did you know the average IQ has dropped in recent years?"
"Knees!" said Jaune, jerking the gun downward. "Get on your knees."
The man took to one and then the other, and Jaune breathed out, relieved. That didn't stop the man talking. "It's a terrible state the world is in. Less budgets for schools, more cuts as the privileged few looks to save money; parents delegating the upbringings of their children to scrolls and the television. The old values of teaching your children are dying out, and we are sleepwalking into disaster because of it."
"That's nice," said Jaune. "Blake, cut the machines off."
Blake nodded and moved over to the nearest machine. There wasn't much of an indication on how to stop it, but she could follow the cables to the walls and a large fuse box. Opening it up, she tore out a few fuses until the machinery began to rumble to a halt. Some of the paper bunched up and spilled off the wheels, spooling down onto the floor, but the printing press ground to a halt.
"Don't tell me you stand against a proper education as well," said the man.
"Education is for schools." Jaune moved forward cautiously and stepped behind the man, picked his arms up and dragged them to his back. "It's not for us to decide, and not for us to unleash a plague that is killing people at this very moment."
"It isn't killing people."
"We just came form a home where a young girl died," snapped Blake. "Explain that."
The man looked up at her and smiled. "Starvation killed her, or dehydration, or to be more specific, the girl died from an acute case of stupidity. If she had only studied harder, paid more attention in class, then it would not have happened."
Blake's hands shook. "You bastard."
"Not a bastard, my dear. I am a teacher. An educator. A tome of knowledge." The man's smile stretched a little too wide for his face, wide enough that it reached and extended beyond his cheeks. It grew so wide that it split his entire face in two, and the upper half of his head dropped back as if it had been severed, now hanging from a single flap of flesh. No, from a binder. His entire head had opened up into a book, and pages flicked as his voice echoed. "And I think it time for a lesson."
Jaune shot twice into the man – the anomaly's – back. He was knocked forward onto hands and knees but pushed himself up leaking black blood. Ink. He stood even as Jaune unloaded his full magazine into the man's chest.
"You cannot kill that which is written down."
Blake surged forward, drew Gambol Shroud and sliced across his back without warning. Her blade cut through his flesh with a dry sound like tearing paper; even if he was a book, a knife would do the trick. His back was cut open from left to right, but he simply fell forward, bending double, and then opened up again by the new cut she'd made. He folded in on himself and reformed, the new gaping wound becoming his head as pages flickered and whooshed by.
"It is ever the remit of the uneducated and the unintelligent to lash out at that which they do not understand." The voice remained human but echoed with a sound like a finger flipping through a book. "I will teach the world. The studious will survive, the indolent will perish, and from the ashes will rise a world where everyone is learned and wise." He raised his hands. "Behold!"
Pages flooded out from the man's sleeves and whooshed through the air as if caught in a hurricane. They plastered against the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the windows and even them. They plastered against the printing press too, and it groaned slowly to life even though she'd broken the fuses. The press was moving now not by electric power but because the pages were pulling, pushing and controlling it like the muscles of a human body.
"Don't read them!" shouted Jaune. "Don't read the pages!"
Blake clenched her eyes shut just as a page slapped into her face. She wrenched it off and squinted her eyes, ready to close them if another came close, and holding her arms out to block them. The tornado of pages continued on, and she couldn't see the anomaly or Jaune either, lost in a storm of white and black. "It's time for a test! Let's see how good your knowledge of history is!"
"Vacuo. King Malek. Two hundred and twenty two thousand dead. The reunification." It was Jaune who was speaking, and Blake's eyes widened in horror as she realised what he was doing. Answering questions.
"No. Jaune! Jaune, don't read them!"
"-the treaty of Atlas, founded in-"
It was too late. The pages began to think and Blake cried out wordlessly at the sight of Jaune, on his knees, with a page splatted flat against his face. His hands were gripping his gun, which rose and then fell as his strength left him. He'd been caught by the anomaly. Worse, it was right there and could keep adding new questions no matter how quickly Jaune answered them.
"Still free, my dear?" said the anomaly. It regarded her without eyes, but with flicking pages. "Still ignorant? I can fix that."
Blake ran.
She ran and she ran, like she had from the White Fang, like she had from Adam, like she had from her parents, from her responsibilities and from the cause she'd promised to dedicate her life to. Blake ran from the printing room, down the corridor and out the front door, bursting into the warm afternoon sun with a strangled cry drowned by the heavy construction and roadworks being used to cover that very sound. Her knees struck the concrete, her hands soon after, and she trembled with fury. Run and get help, he had told her. Run. Blake picked herself up from the ground and kept running.
/-/
"Pick up. Pick up. Pick up." Blake's shiny black shoes clicked as she stalked about the Containments Office with the scroll to her ear. Her chest rose and fell as she gasped for air after her long run back, and her white shirt was almost see-through from sweat. Timothy bumped against her legs, and for once she ignored him, brushing past and sitting on the corner of Jaune's desk. "Pick up the damn scroll, you piece of-"
"Fist Office. Saphron speaking."
"Finally! It's Blake – from the Containments Office. Jaune's assistant. We need help."
Saphron sensed the seriousness in her voice and kept it short. "What's happened?"
"There was an anomaly. It's a book – the anomaly is – and it makes books that mind control people into completing the questions within, but they get harder and people are dying. A lot of people. It's threatening to go Reality Class." There was a hiss down the line. "Jaune and I stormed the printing press an hour ago and shut it down, and we confronted the anomaly. It was a person, or it looked like one, but they transformed and…" She was rambling. Blake bit her knuckles to calm herself and said, "It's got Jaune."
"He's dead?"
"No. He's been captured by the book. It's a student's textbook filled with questions. He can't move or defend himself, or try and escape, until he's answered every question, and the anomaly is right there to keep giving him more. It's got him held hostage."
"Fuck." Saphron summed it up in one word. "Terra and I are on our way. ETA will be six hours"
Six-? Blake wanted to tell them to be quicker, but she knew they'd be coming as fast as they could with how dangerous this was. "Okay. What should I do until then? Jaune told me to run and get help if one of us got caught. I left him there."
"You did the right thing. Having you both caught is a waste. Listen to me and listen carefully. You need to contact the Vale Council and instruct them to release a news story about broken gas pipes and the risk of a detonation. They need to make a show of evacuating homes near to wherever this place is. Understood?"
"I… Yeah, I guess. Is that for the cover story?"
"Yes, but also for their own safety."
"Okay. Fine. I'll do that." Blake pushed on. "But what about Jaune? How are we getting him out?"
There was a silence on the line. A tense silence. Eventually, Saphron said, "If my brother has been captured and controlled by an anomaly then it's ARC Corp standard regulations that are to be followed. You know them?"
"No, I-"
"Of course you don't. Typical of Jaune to ignore your training. In the event that a director is compromised or captured by an anomaly, the first and foremost actions are to eliminate the anomaly and prevent escalation to Reality Class. After, the Office will fall to the next-in-line among the Arc family, who will take over."
Blake's words caught in her throat. "Grk…?"
"That would be Amber, our youngest sister. You will have a chance to meet her when she takes-"
"No!" The word burst from Blake's lips. "No, what? What the fuck!? I – I meant that we can save Jaune. That's why I'm calling you. To get help to save Jaune."
"We will be saving him. He will be saved from a life as a thrall to an anomaly."
"By killing him!"
"It will be instantaneous. Terra will use her Slaved Anomaly to detonate the building, the area and the anomaly in one go. Jaune will not feel a thing." She couldn't believe what she was hearing – except that, in a way, she could. This was ARC Corp. Duty before family, obligation before love; Blake trembled as Saphron wrapped up the call. "We will be there in six hours. Wrap up the preparations and make sure the anomaly doesn't go Reality Class in the meanwhile. The Fist Office will sort this mess of yours out."
"Wait-"
The call ended with a click.
/-/
"-the anomaly wants to release the books over all of Vale by the sounds of it, or across all Remnant." said Blake. "His, or its, attitude is that the intelligent should live and the stupid should die, and if it's not stopped then it's going to present a clear threat to all life."
Headmaster Ozpin of Beacon Academy listened from behind his desk, having acquiesced to dismissing his deputy, Glynda Goodwitch, before the meeting. The woman had been indignant at having Blake come running out the Emerald Forest to demand one in the first place, and even worse when she refused to make an appointment and wait for a response. Blake had threatened to fight her way up to the office if needs be, and only by Ozpin's own intervention had she been allowed up.
"Jaune and I went in to stop it, but he pulled off some transformation and caught Jaune in one of the books. Now he's trapped answering questions and can't defend himself. We need help." Blake took a deep breath and met the headmaster's eyes. "We need huntsmen support, either a team of them or just one – even just you or your teachers. Or Qrow Branwen. Someone who can fight and help me take on the anomaly and rescue Jaune."
"Have you tried ARC Corp?"
"They're on their way, but they plan to blow the whole place up and kill Jaune at the same time!" spat Blake. "They don't even care about him!"
Ozpin closed his eyes and chuckled bitterly. "That sounds like ARC Corp alright. There is a reason they have so many children, you know, and it is not because they are a loving family. The responsibility they hold would crush them otherwise."
"That's why I need help to fix this."
"I can see that."
"Then you'll help?"
Ozpin's fingers and thumbs met, his hands forming a triangle before his face. "No."
Blake's body refused to work for a long moment. Her brain ran empty, her mouth ran dry, her lips cracked, first into a smile, and then into a manic expression she couldn't place. She had to have heard that wrong, right? Or he meant something else. No, he wouldn't help, but yes he would provide a team. "Do you mean-?"
"I mean that you will receive no help from Beacon or myself." explained Ozpin.
Her hope came crashing down. Blake slammed her hands on the table and rose. "WHAT!?"
"ARC Corp and I are not friends," said the man. The anomaly. "You know this, Miss Belladonna, and yet you come here asking for me to place my allies at risk to save one of your own. One who is a direct family member of those who locked me away in the past."
"Hundreds of years ago!"
"To me, those hundreds of years are still fresh in my mind."
"T-That may be, but Jaune wasn't even alive then! You can't blame him for what his ancestors did."
"They all look the same to me, Miss Belladonna. One Arc is not so different from the next, the last, or those who passed centuries ago. They share the same ideals, the same goals and the same disdain for what I am." He leaned forward. "For what you are. Did he ever tell you the story of Flora and Fauna?"
Blake shook her head. "I don't care."
"Flora was a plant-like human entity, and fauna an animal-like entity. They were peaceful, loving and quite harmless."
"This isn't-"
"When the security breaches happened, ARC Corp scrambled not to contain but to eradicate any anomaly they could. They thought that the best way to stem the bleeding would be to kill each and every one. A party was sent after Flora and Fauna, who split up to lead them astray. Fauna escaped, but Flora was captured. A harmless, helpless creature with flowers for hair." Ozpin smiled, sadly, and closed his eyes. "They set her alight. Fell upon her with flamethrowers and burnt her screaming to ash. Fauna, meanwhile, escaped, and over the centuries-"
"Gave birth to the faunus. I get it!" interrupted Blake, shouting over him. "I. Don't. Care. It makes no freaking difference if I'm an anomaly or if every faunus are Reality Class anomalies. That doesn't excuse this one trying to kill people, nor you leaving Jaune to die because of your own pettiness. If I can get over what they did, and if Jaune can treat me as a normal person despite what I may be, then I don't see why you can't."
"Because I am a bitter old man who was tortured and abused to power coffee machines and computers for humans." said Ozpin. "Because I suffered for hundreds of years, along many of my mind, simply so that they could have cheaper energy bills."
"You'll let an innocent man die for that…?"
"Jaune Arc is anything but innocent." He sat back and closed his eyes. "But I don't expect you to believe that, or anything I might say about it."
"We saved your school from an anomaly!"
"You did your jobs. Nothing more and nothing less." He touched a button on his desk, the intercom, summoning Miss Goodwitch, and said, "Our meeting is over. Please come pick up Miss Belladonna." He released the button and said to her, "I believe you have a cover story to concoct. I wish you well on the future running of your office, Miss Belladonna. I will be calling Qrow Branwen and will ask him to take Miss Rose out the city. There's no need for you to drag an aspiring and promising young huntress into this."
Blake stood, shaking, trembling with a fury she hadn't felt since Adam told her he wanted to kill everyone on that train. The elevator door opened and Goodwitch entered, and it was that alone that saved Ozpin from her lunging across the desk to strike him. "I'll remember this," she said instead, locking her eyes to his. "I'll remember this in the future when you need us, and I'll do what ARC Corp hasn't been capable of."
"You are welcome to try, Miss Belladonna. Better and more numerous have. Glynda." He smiled politely for his deputy. "Please escort Miss Belladonna to the Bullhead docks and see her on a flight back to the city."
"Yes sir. Miss Belladonna…?"
Blake stared at the headmaster one last time before she spun on her heel and stormed away.
/-/
Four and a half hours.
Four and a half hours until the Fist Office arrived, dealt with the situation and killed Jaune. Blake stood in the Containments Office with her hands on the desk and her face all scrunched up. She was afraid to open her eyes for the bitter, angry tears. How was it that no one was wiling to help them? Were they that hated?
The Council had been worried, afraid, but the man she spoke to had almost sounded relieved to hear the Fist Office would come and blow it all up. He agreed to the gas leak story and it was already being sent out. They didn't even bother to ask about Jaune. Blake had hung up by smashing her scroll down, and it had shattered on impact, fragments of glass biting into the palm of her hand. There was only Roman left, and she didn't have a way of reaching out to him, nor any hope he'd risk his life for them. Not like this. There was no one else.
"Damn it, Jaune," she hissed. "I ran and I tried to find help, but no one wants to help us."
It was so much like being a faunus before, the hatred and the prejudice, the double standards and the casual way those in power ignored their plight. It was inconvenient, they said. They couldn't help. There was nothing that could be done. Bullshit. Utter bullshit. That was why Adam, she, Sienna and the others had taken matters into their own hands. If no one would help, they'd have to help themselves.
"It's no different here," said Blake, to herself, to Timothy, to anyone out there. "No difference at all. I… I have to go back." It would very likely mean her end, but if she ran… if she ran now, then when would she stop? Would she ever? There was only so far she could run to escape this. "Fuck you, Jaune, you knew this would happen. You knew no one would come help, and yet you were still willing to go in there and do what's right."
It felt too much like a eulogy. Blake sucked in a sharp breath, stormed out the office and crossed to her apartment. It was still a messy, bags of shopping still not tidied away, and yet it was to her bed she went, underneath to where she'd stashed her meagre belongings from before Jaune gave her the advance and helped get her apartment. He'd accepted, well, more been forced, but he'd put up with a strange faunus with no prospects and helped her find her feet. It was time to repay the favour. Going in alone would just get her caught the same way Jaune had, however. What she needed was a way to obscure her vision, not to blind her, but to make everything just a little fuzzier and pages impossible to read.
The red and white porcelain mask she'd sworn she would never again wear would do. Its eye sockets were small and narrowed to match the snarling visage it gave off. Blake set it upon her nose, shocked by how easily and snugly it still fit. In the nearby mirror, Blake Belladonna, White Fang terrorist, stared back at her.
It was a start – but it wasn't enough.
"Timothy!" Blake called his name and forced herself not to shudder as he came clicking and wobbling out the corridor toward her. He, it, was cautious, recognising her voice and knowing she was not its biggest fan. Even so, Ruby had ingrained some words with recognition in its limited intelligence. "Walkies, Timothy. We're going for walkies."
"Skreeeeeeeee!"
You know shit is serious when Blake is encouraging Timothy – goodest boi that he is.
And yeah, Ozpin is a bit of an asshole in this one, but then ARC Corp were assholes to him. ARC Corp aren't like SCP Foundation in terms of Secure, Contain and Protect. ARC Corp's was a lot more focused on Secure, Imprison and Exploit.
They were quite literally using them for any purposes they could, and Ozpin, because of his magic, would have made for a rather convenient source of free energy. Just keep provoking and harming him until he expends it, then channel it into cheap, renewable electricity. Does it hurt Ozpin? Almost certainly, and he would have spent his existence alternating between pain and exhaustion, likely for hundreds of years, but anomalies don't have rights, so, eh? Keep going. That's the old ARC Corp of course.
The survivors that formed the ARC family were stated earlier not to be from leadership or anyone in charge, but from the remnants of the security divisions. They would have been people doing their jobs as guards and containment officers.
Next Chapter: 22nd August
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