Yo! Second chapter of mirror, mirror! Wanted to release something a bit earlier in the week for a change. So here's that!
Start Chapter 2
Weiss did her best to run Jaune – he insisted that she call him the Dread King, but frankly, she refused – through the last… well, thousand or so years of history, given that records any farther back were rather hard to come by.
It turned out that she knew a lot less about the minute-to-minute intricacies of history than she'd once thought she had when she'd been younger. She'd been tutored by the best of the best in Atlas, and if they could see her now, they'd likely groan, cry, and throw themselves out a window, in that order.
"So, there was a war." She began.
"Ah, wars. I love wars. Who was fighting, and for what reasons?"
"Well, there was… the old government of Atlas? And for the sake of individuality."
"I see. And Atlas, tis the place we currently reside within?"
"Indeed."
"I see. And you say the old government? Who led this government? And assumedly, judging by your saying of the 'old' government, they were overthrown in this war?"
"They were… I think?"
"You think?"
"It's… there's… history is complicated."
"…"
"Don't just stare at me judgmentally!"
"I was simply waiting for thee to elaborate on the meaning of 'complicated'."
Weiss couldn't fault the man – or, well, annoying magical mirror, which she still didn't buy, by the way, this was probably just a semblance of some kind – on that front. She was, undeniably, being a lot less helpful than she had assumed she'd be.
"Alright. And these… faunus you speak of… they art human beings with animal parts on them that grant them specialized abilities, including, but not limited to: flight, the ability to breathe underwater, night vision, etcetera?"
"Yes."
"I see. And I assume they are treated as superior citizens, due to their natural genetic advantages to humans?"
"Er… no. They're actually racially discriminated against the world over."
"Hm. That sounds incredibly stupid. Why haven't they risen up and declared war on the world?"
"Oh, they did. They won."
"Ah, so they enslaved all of humanity, then?"
"No. Humanity gave them an island that they could have all to themselves."
"Ah. Where they would be waited upon and treated as nobility?"
"Uh… No. Almost nothing changed. If anything, the racism just got worse."
The Dread King was silent for quite a while.
"The people of thy time are rather dull."
"Yes," Weiss sighed out. "On that, we are in agreement."
"Why haven't the faunus just gone to war again?"
"Because…" Weiss floundered. "…I don't know."
"…"
"…"
"Thou are rather dull as well, it seems."
"I will stuff you in a storage closet, so help me–"
"Aha, I meant droll, droll! Like… like amusing!"
"Sure." Weiss gritted her teeth. "I completely believe you."
"Wow, truly?"
"No."
"Oh."
There was a knock on Weiss' door, then, and instantly, she felt a wave of… not quite liberation, but at the very least relief. She could let someone else see this whole… Dread King nonsense, and pass him off to somewhere he wouldn't cause Weiss an endless number of headaches.
Because she was already starting to feel a rather potent one, and she'd been dealing with him for, maybe, thirty minutes.
Besides, this was assuredly just someone trying to trick her with their semblance. Weiss wasn't daft enough to believe that the man within that mirror was really some ancient king from days long-gone.
She straightened out her outfit, looked down at the mirror – which showed Jaune D'Arc raising an eyebrow at her – and then turned towards the door.
As she opened it up, she saw just the man she'd been hoping to.
"Ah, Ms. Weiss," Klein greeted her with a bow. "I heard about what happened at the charity gala. I wished to come and make sure that you were alright."
"I'm fine, Klein, but thank you for worrying." Honestly, if he'd come in half an hour ago, she'd probably not have been fine, but she'd been so distracted by the fact that her mirror had started talking to her that she'd forgotten all about the entire debacle of the evening. "If you don't mind me asking, there's actually something I'd like to show you, would you come in?"
"Ah, of course, young lady."
Klein stepped into her room just as she'd asked, and immediately, Weiss steered him towards her dresser, upon which the mirror containing the 'Dread King' was located. Then, she made a grand gesture towards it.
"Look!"
In Klein's defense, he did exactly as Weiss had asked him to. He stepped towards the dresser, upon which the mirror rested, looked down into it, and…
"I see my own reflection, Ms. Weiss. Am… I supposed to see something else?"
Weiss' brow furrowed, and she shook her head. "What do you mean, there should be–"
And yet, when Weiss, too, stepped forward, she was greeted…
Well, she was greeted with a perfectly normal looking mirror.
Which…
"That's not possible!" She shouted far louder than she really meant to. "That… there's…"
She felt anger boiling up inside her at that inane fool that resided within it, using his semblance – or perhaps even some advanced technology – to disguise this mirror as some ordinary object.
"Jaune D'Arc!" She shouted, leaning forward and shoving her finger against the glass. "Show yourself this instant!"
The man did no such thing. In fact, the mirror seemed to grow somehow more normal as the seconds ticked on, and Klein stayed deadly silent, almost as if he was afraid a stray word might land him in a sizable bit of hot water.
…
He thought she was crazy, didn't he?
"K-Klein," She turned towards her attendant, who had been by her side for nearly her entire life. "I… you must believe me. There was a figure within the mirror, just moments ago! He was speaking to me, trying to convince me that he was some… some king from before the sundering of Remnant, that he…"
She was sounding even crazier the more she talked, wasn't she?
"Ms. Schnee," Klein smiled at her kindly, like he had been asked to handle a particularly fragile flower within her mother's garden. "I would advise that you go to sleep early this evening. I'm sure you're just tired, and that your father's actions have left you feeling emotionally drained. I cannot blame you that. I'll not tell your father at all about this, alright?"
Weiss felt more humiliated than she had about anything in her entire life, then. Her face was a bright red as she nodded her head towards Klein, and the man made his way out, bowing as he closed the door shut behind him.
And then, again, Weiss was left alone in her room.
"Well, thanks for making me look like some kind of loon!" She shouted as she turned back towards the mirror.
There was no response. In fact, Jaune D'Arc had disappeared from the mirror entirely.
Her brow furrowed.
"Would you just get out here already!? Haven't you caused enough trouble!?"
Again, nothing.
Weiss' eye twitched.
"…I'm not going crazy." She told herself, shaking her head and letting out a rattling breath. "I am perfectly sane. I did not just imagine some… some idiot in my mirror! That happened! I know that happened!"
And yet, when she thought about it, she couldn't exactly summon up evidence that it had happened, could she?
Had she…
Had she really imagined it?
NO! Weiss shouted inside her own mind loud enough that she now had a headache, which felt impossible. No, I'm not crazy. That happened. He's just… hiding at the moment. Likely from my wrath.
…But perhaps Klein's idea of getting some sleep wasn't a terrible one.
And so, Weiss moved over towards her ensuite bathroom, brushed her teeth, flossed, used those annoying teeth whiteners – because gods forbid a Schnee's teeth have any normal yellow coloration – and then retired to her bed.
As she did, she checked the mirror one final time, but…
She found nothing.
She growled out under her breath, even as she laid down, threw the covers up over herself, and laid down to rest.
She was asleep not long after.
/
The next morning, Weiss awoke having genuinely thought she'd imagined the whole thing.
That lasted all of thirty seconds before she looked over and saw the rather obvious dent in her wall that the indestructible mirror her father had gifted her had created.
Yes. That had all happened.
The jury was still out on whether or not the crazy talking lunatic in the mirror had been real, however.
Which was a thought that didn't at all make her feel better.
Ugh.
Weiss got herself out of bed, and realized with no small annoyance that her father had told her rather explicitly that she was not to leave the mansion, as, according to the report he'd fed the media about her little 'outburst' the previous night, she was experiencing an episode right now, and thusly was too unstable to be seen by anyone.
AKA, he didn't want her blabbing about him being a terrible father, and considered her a flight risk.
Double ugh.
Still, when Weiss thought about it, she came to a rather startling realization.
Her title as heiress had been taken away. All of her assets under the Schnee name had been frozen for the time being – and would likely remain frozen unless her father had a miraculous change of heart into a decent human being – and the media already thought she was losing her mind from the trauma of what happened in Beacon.
What, actually, could he take from her at this point?
…
So, it turned out, Weiss didn't much give a shit about the fact that she'd been told explicitly not to leave the mansion.
She in fact took some sick pleasure in doing exactly that.
Being a Schnee, it was actually frighteningly easy to sneak out. She opened her window, conjured a few glyphs, and was gone before anyone knew anything had happened, hopping along them a good few stories in the air without a care in the world.
Oh, the guards outside the manse would see her, of course, but that was fine by her. They'd tell her father she'd left, he'd get mad, and probably curse her name.
Hah.
She had a destination in mind that day as she landed near Atlas HQ. It was not to enter into the massive building that loomed over the rest of Atlas like a silent reminder of the militaries overwhelming authority, nor the very nice dog park about a block down the road – no matter how much she wanted to go one of these days.
No.
Her destination was the library.
She was going in disguise, to be fair. She had her long white hair pulled up and hidden underneath a beret and a dark pair of shades – which made her look like Coco with about three times less effort put in – alongside a black dress that she'd had to wear to a board member's funeral some three or so years ago, which was nice enough to be appropriate at the time, but also not quite nice enough to be seen as overdressing to a library.
Her father had, evidently, not cared all that much about that particular board member.
It was tight, and had rather clearly been fitted to the exact size she'd been back then, but she could manage sitting still and reading out of books with it on.
Atlas Public Library was a wonderful place; even Weiss, not at all a reader, could appreciate that. It was five stories tall, with each story dedicated to its own section.
The first floor was mostly nonfiction; science books, documentaries, and other such collections. There were a few students lurking about that area, sitting down at some of the many tables available.
The second floor consisted of fictional stories. Classics, romances, tragedies, comedies, and all sorts of stories from all different time periods. She thought Blake might have liked to peruse the collections here.
The third floor was for poems, and other such literature styles. Haikus, sonnets, and psalms also took their places here, alongside the occasional set of sheet music from classical orchestral pieces. It also featured things like fairytales, and children's stories.
The fourth floor was filled, wall to wall, with comics, graphic novels, and even more obscure things like adult coloring books – all of which had certainly been colored in by now, Weiss was sure.
And the fifth and final floor was what Weiss was there for.
Books about Remnant's history; about the cultures of Vacuo, Vale, Atlas, Mistral, Menagerie, and so many other former lands that had all but faded into the collective unconscious.
Far more relevant to her interests, however, was that there was also a section dedicated to the few discoveries that scholars and scientists all over Remnant had made about their world prior to the event referred to as the Great Sundering.
There were some fossil records that dated humans to being present on Remnant even so far back as a hundred thousand years ago. But then, for a long while after that, human bones grew much, much scarcer. It was considered a major accomplishment to find anything of human or faunus origin from the period that stretched from around 90 to 20 thousand years ago.
Which lead to the idea that some sort of mass extinction event had happened on Remnant, and nearly wiped humanity and the faunus out entirely.
It had taken them seventy-thousand years to recover – and perhaps for them to relearn such things as society and language – give or take. After that, the populations had seemed to recuperate, and mankind, again, flourished. But they never seemed to be able to do so to the same degree that they had been able to before.
In the past, it seemed that humans covered all sections of the globe, but nowadays, they were much more clumped together, due in large part to external threats that prevented them from spreading out safely; the Grimm, put plainly.
Some scholars suggested that the Grimm themselves, who sought only to hunt humans, had not been present before the Sundering. That their appearance on Remnant had been a result of the Sundering itself, and that their newfound predation on humans had impeded their populations from ever truly recovering.
She almost wished that blasted mirror was here now. She would want to ask him about such.
…Not that she believed him, of course! It was preposterous – completely insane (just totally stupid) – to believe that a man(?) could both be sealed inside a mirror for a hundred thousand years, and then just…
Well, wake up like nothing had happened, apparently thinking that he'd been asleep for a few months, tops.
She shook her head, even as she took the elevator to the top floor. She was both delighted and slightly annoyed at how well her disguise was working when a man brushed past her without even apologizing, but she stepped out to see…
Well, a good fifty-thousand books.
And no sign that explicitly stated, with an arrow containing giant bolded letters, 'HERE IS THE INFORMATION YOU NEED!'.
That felt like an oversight that the library should work to remedy.
Still, there was nothing much else for Weiss to do but to… well…
Start looking.
She decided that she would cast a wide net at the start, and shrink her focus as ideas began to take on a more palpable shape. She had no real idea what she was looking for. Perhaps collections of fairytales, like the Maiden's had been? No… no, Jaune D'Arc's name, or perhaps a story about an evil king, would have at least been known to her.
She'd been read fairytales as a child, of course. Not by her parents, obviously, but by Winter, and some of the other servants. She'd heard of the Maidens when she'd been just eight.
Jaune's story had caught her entirely off guard. It had all been entirely new information.
So, instead, she decided to start at the concrete, and work her way up from there.
Weiss picked up a book about their moon, and many theories as to its origins, and its odd form.
The prevailing theory about their moon was that something, at some point, had shattered it, something with immense, almost magical power. That was a popular theorem because, by all conventional logic, the moon simply could not retain the shape it did. Gravity itself dictated that the many disparate pieces would either begin to orbit the central ball – which itself would gradually form back into a sphere – as a ring, or set of rings, or be subsumed back into the moon, eventually forming a spheroid that was essentially the same size as the moon had been before the impact.
Neither thing had happened. Instead, the shards of the moon were held in perpetual stillness, always the same distance away from the main body, which itself never collapsed on itself.
It was, in some fashion, being held there by force.
Such a thought disturbed something inside of Weiss. It was the same primal fear as that of the dark, or of the Grimm themselves. Something within her told her that such questions should not be asked, that such truths should not be sought.
Wisely, she decided to put that particular book away for the time being.
She ended up staying in the library for another three hours, but she never found anything that seemed relevant to her current problems. If she was out too long, her father was certain to send someone to retrieve her, and she'd really rather he didn't make a scene that would prevent her from coming back the next day.
So, she packed up, and she returned back home.
She went in the window yet again.
The rest of the day passed by slowly. Weiss maybe shouldn't have been shocked, cooped up in the Schnee manor, but… the thing that struck her, truly, was the amount of time she had to just…
Do nothing.
Of course, a good portion of that was the fact that her father was actively pretending like she didn't exist, and the servants obeyed his whims – because he paid them, which was a fair reason, Weiss felt.
But…
When she thought further on the matter, she realized the reason she felt she had so much time didn't have to do with her father, or the fact that she was stuck in the Schnee manor…
It was because she didn't have Team RWBY around her.
It felt odd to admit to such; that she'd grown so used to her teammates' presence over the course of the last year or so, but being without them felt incorrect.
She almost laughed, because she had a feeling that if they were around, she'd not be singing the same tune. After all, Ruby could be hyperactive and aggravating at the best of times. Blake was a menace, plain and simple, even if Weiss could understand the reasons behind such actions. And Yang was, frankly, insufferable on occasion.
…She missed them. She missed them more than she'd ever missed anything in her life.
She'd have taken them all at their most egregious if she could have them there beside her. Let her have Ruby hyped up on sugar and caffeine, bouncing off the walls and spreading rose petals everywhere. Let her have Blake high on yet another White Fang conspiracy within Atlas, constantly trying to go out alone and get herself killed. Let her have Yang with all of her crappy, crappy puns and stupid jokes and needling comments and hogging the bathroom in the mornings for an hour at a time.
Weiss sighed, and the hours ticked by.
She thought of her team, and where they were. She thought of Beacon Academy, and the other friends she'd made. She thought of Yang, and her now singular arm. She thought of Blake, having disappeared before she'd even been taken away.
She thought of whatever strange event had taken place with Ruby, her partner, atop the main spire of Beacon.
The frozen wyvern that still stood at the peak.
It was that thought that stuck with her, as she shut her eyes later that night, and allowed herself to rest.
/
Weiss had been going to the library for two or three days, and evidently, her father had decided that trying to contain her was a lost cause. He possessed, after all, quite literally nothing to threaten her with to stop her, and seemingly realized that getting one of the security squadrons to bring her back would cause quite the media stir, one he very much wished to avoid.
She might've been worried he'd fire Klein if she thought he had any chance of finding someone remotely up to the task of handling all of his responsibilities.
Besides, she'd been going to the library incognito, and the media hadn't made a peep about her being sighted. He must've figured that was fine, then.
Let her go off and play her silly little games. At least she wasn't bothering him.
Weiss rolled her eyes, but did her best to focus back in on the book she was perusing.
She was not reading it, because if she had truly tried to read any of the many books she had skimmed that day, then she'd have made it through a single tome instead of dozens. No, she'd long since accepted that she might miss something small, insignificant, but overall increase her efficiency by skimming over the books that sounded interesting quickly. Sticking mostly to the glossaries, and only digging deeper if anything jumped out to her.
Her method had, thus far, produced no real successes, but then, the first few books she'd picked up had been on rather lengthy and confounding topics. She'd have been lost attempting to read them anyhow.
She'd been tutored by some of the very best, but a mind for parsing scientific reports she did not have.
So, she instead parsed through far more readable books on the origins of mankind and the faunus.
…Okay, they weren't that much more readable, but they'd at least been written with the intent of nonscientific people being able to digest them at all, so that was a plus in Weiss' eyes.
In the end, however, Weiss made no real progress. She was beginning to grow rather annoyed, given that she'd been in the library off and on for half a day out of the last four or so.
So, she decided she'd try something new.
She went down to the third floor, where the poems, haikus, and fairytales were set up, and she grabbed as many as she could of the latter.
She'd dismissed the fairytales initially on the basis that she'd heard many of them when she'd been a kid, and none had been related to anything she'd heard from Jaune. But the moment her eyes connected with one particular book, and she cracked it open, she felt somewhat foolhardy.
Because of course, Winter wouldn't have been able to read her faunus fairytales, would she have?
The faunus were, in their own way, a separate race from humanity. Of course, they shared characteristics, and their cultures had largely become one in the modern era – whether or not racists decried such as being the 'fall of civilization', whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
But it seemed certain things never quite made it over into the public consciousness of humanity. The book on faunus myths had quite a bit of juicy information for her.
One particular passage, at the very least, provided her more information than she'd received anywhere else so far.
'According to legends passed down through generations, there was once a pair of twin Gods. These gods were vengeful, wicked beasts, and they hated the denizens of Remnant for being imperfect creations. So, they cleaved apart the world, shattered the moon, and sundered the land. Then, from the ashes, they gave life to two beings.
They were called the two immortals.
They were powerful, and wise, but still, ultimately, human in their nature. They could not escape the petty squabbling that characterized our races, both human and faunus. So it was that, after the Gods themselves departed, the twin immortals were only able to rule in peace for a short time before warring against one another, leading both to eventually vanish from Remnant without a trace.'
Two gods, and two immortals…
Weiss had never heard of that specific story before. She supposed that that made sense. These were faunus tales, and their cultures had different myths, different fairytales and bedtime stories.
It was all fascinating in a distant way for Weiss, even if she had more immediate concerns.
Namely, trying to confirm if any of what that crazed mirror had said was real.
And so far, well…
She'd found nothing at all.
Hell, the mirror hadn't even spoken to her since that night! It had been entirely silent, even when Weiss had threatened to store it away in her closet, and then had done that for a full day! He'd not said a thing.
Weiss… was really starting to feel like she was losing it.
By the time she'd hit her daily allotted hours in the library, she'd yet to find anything else of note. She hissed out under her breath, even as she stood, went downstairs to the main desk, and checked out the book on faunus mythology.
At the very least, she could do a bit more reading in the silence of her own room.
She arrived to find everything the same as she'd left it, albeit one of the maids had come in to change her sheets, and make her bed.
Weiss sighed as she sat down on the side of it, and realized that over the last four days, she'd made no real progress at all.
…
She looked over towards the mirror, which sat on her dresser where she'd left it. It had been silent for many days, without a single peep of anything magic – semblance! It was a semblance, not magic! – going on.
Weiss was starting to run out of ideas of how to gather more information.
She would've honestly taken just… asking the mirror man about it all.
That was difficult, however, on account of the fact that he seemed to once more be trapped as he'd been before.
…Wait.
'You, girl, the power of your song has restored me to consciousness!'
…It couldn't be that simple, could it?
She walked over to the mirror, held it up in front of her, and then, somewhat embarrassed, sung the chorus of 'Mirror, Mirror', just as she had before.
And lo and behold…
"Aha!" The face of one Jaune D'Arc appeared within the mirror, and he gave a dramatic pose. "I have been reawakened! Freed once more from my–" He turned to see her. "Oh. Tis thou. I had begun to worry that I slept for another hundred thousand years."
Weiss sighed. "It's been four days."
"Ah, very good."
"What happened, exactly?" She asked him, suspicion likely evident in her gaze. "You just, what, happened to get pulled back into the curse, or something?"
Jaune D'Arc seemed rather embarrassed. "Well… er… there were extenuating factors–"
"Just tell me!"
"Alright, alright." The man whistled. "Frosty, much?"
Weiss was starting to wonder why she'd wanted to see this man again at all.
"I must first confess something to thee; I intentionally hid myself away so that your slave would not notice me–"
Weiss was reeling for a moment before she was able to make sense of what the Dread King had just said. "Klein is our family's butler!"
The man hummed dismissively. "Same thing."
"It is not at all the same thing! He's paid quite well!"
"Well, of course. Slaves are always paid." He stared at her. "Do thine people not pay their slaves? My gods, and they called me tyrannical."
"We do not have slaves!"
"Oh. Well, that seems dreadfully inefficient."
"I think I hate you."
"Thy feelings are both noted and entirely ignored. Now, where was I?"
"You hid yourself away?" Weiss deadpanned out, and Jaune made an 'Ah!' noise.
"Yes, so, I hid myself away, for if anyone were to figure out about my wondrous self whilst I was still trapped within this mirror… well, er… that would bode poorly for me, so to speak. Thusly, I intended to simply duck away until his departure. Only… it seems…"
"The curse that originally confined you to the mirror took hold of you again the moment you tried to hide away?"
"…Well, your version makes me sound awfully stupid."
"Jeez," Weiss rolled her eyes. "I wonder whose fault that is."
"I don't think I like your tone! I'll have you know I was a great and magnanimous king! I was beloved and beloathed the world over! The Dread King, chief amongst the Lords of Light! I am–"
Weiss turned the mirror upside down.
"Ah! Darkness! Girl! I cannot see a thing! Assist me!"
Weiss took a deep, steadying breath as the reality of the situation struck her.
She was too curious about this idiot to throw him away like she constantly threatened to. She wanted to learn more about this magical – Semblanceical! Or… it was just a semblance, alright! – 'ancient' king.
Which meant…
Which meant she was stuck with him, wasn't she?
…Great.
Juuuuust great.
End Chapter 2
Alright, that was Chapter 2!
Not a ton to say in all honesty, other than that I'm really liking this story! It's a lot of fun to write something humorous while writing a bunch of serious stories.
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