Seed 1.5
I woke up the next morning on an uncovered mattress in my new, very spartan bedroom. Grey walls, gray desk, gray bedframe, gray shelves. Nothing you'd ever see on Remnant.
Ah well. I could deal with it long enough to get out of here.
I'd been left here last night with toiletries and a few changes of clothes, and been told that someone would come get me in the morning. For the time being though, they probably wouldn't be happy with me just wandering around the base, so I'd be staying in here. I showered and changed, and looking like I just robbed a gift shop I had to figure out what to do next.
Crescent Rose was still gone, so I couldn't run her maintenance yet. An investigation of the desk drawers revealed nothing but typical office supplies and a calendar, which raised even more questions. Why would the names of the months be the same, but the days of the week be different? They were close enough to be recognizable, but the changes threw me off kilter. Taiday became Tuesday, Figday became Friday; it made for yet another reminder of just where I wasn't.
I got saved from trying to redirect that train of thought by a knock on the door. I put on the hood, then opened it up to find Challenger, somehow giving off an impression of cheerfulness despite his featureless silver mask.
"Hey there, everything been going alright?"
Gotta be careful with questions like this. Let's see… yeah, he knows everything. "I've been better, still getting used to all this. I think all of… this is starting to hit me."
He hummed. "All us Protectorate members get looked at by a psychologist every so often to make sure we're staying, y'know, sane? The Director could probably set you up with a session ahead of schedule if you asked."
...Huh. That wouldn't be my first time with a psychologist - Jaune spent a lot of time convincing me to visit one during our stay in Haven - but it wasn't something I'd considered here. I hummed, then grinned, shaking off the negativity. "Anyway, enough of all that, what've I got for today?"
He looked at me for a second. I got the impression he was about to say something, but changed his mind at the last moment. He spoke for real a moment later; "First thing on your schedule is power testing. You probably know what your limits are, but the PRT likes to have hard numbers for things."
We started walking again, turning right and heading back for the elevators. He continued; "This won't be in-depth though, it's just a preliminary. There'll be a more complex one in the future."
We kept walking, discussing the specifics of what would be involved. Challenger's own initial testing was different from what mine would be because of the differences in our powers, but he was able to give me a general idea.
We traveled down an elevator, and left it to find an open cube, twenty or thirty yards to a side. The floor was taken up by gym equipment, a boxing ring, and a shooting range - if it hadn't been for the upper floors, it would have looked like a normal gym. Above all of that though, things were different. Multiple levels of catwalks rose up to the ceiling, plus a bunch of metal hoops welded to the wall and a ropes course up near the top.
Armsmaster was waiting for us as we entered, wearing an odd combination of his helmet and visor above typical gym attire, his halberd somehow balanced on one end as he leaned against it. Behind him, I saw a group of people in lab coats in a room mounted halfway up the back wall.
Armsmaster spoke: "Thank you for meeting me here. The technicians aren't cleared on your identity, so we'll be calling you Scythe until your name gets decided. Does that work for you?"
I nodded. "Yep! So… what should I do first?"
A new voice suddenly filled the room. "First thing would be to tell us what exactly you can do. We've got to know what we're testing for before we test you on it. In detail, please." It took me a moment to realize that the speaker was one of the people in the upper room.
"Okay. Uh, well, the most important thing would be my Aura. It's sort of like a forcefield that sits a couple inches away from my skin, but I can stretch it away from me if I need to. I can also tell when something's about to hit it if I need to dodge or block the hit."
"Does that work if you don't know the attacker is there?" That was Armsmaster.
"Yeah? If anything's about to damage my Aura, I just sort of know where it's going to hit and sort of how much damage it would do. So if somebody's about to shoot me, I can move my scythe so it's in the path of the bullet, or I can use my other power on the part of me that's about to get hit so the bullet just goes through me."
"Combat precog, plus a forcefield. That'd be pretty powerful on its own, but you have other powers on top of that?" Back to the lab coats.
"Yeah. This one might be easier to just show you though."
Armsmaster nodded and stepped back. I heard Challenger do the same behind me. Once they'd stepped back, I scattered, then shot upward, reforming in a three-point-stance on one of the catwalks before launching forward again. I canceled out my momentum and launched in a different direction, making a sharp right angle in an instant, phasing around a railing in the process and crossing the gap to the next platform over.
From there, I scattered again and fell through the floor, dropping to the middle of an intersection on the lower level. I spread my Aura, shooting off a cloud of petals in each direction. Each of the decoys stopped a few yards away from the center, as my Aura stretched to its limit. If this had been an actual fight, I wouldn't have risked spreading my defenses so thinly, but it worked for stuff like this.
I stayed there for a second, then snapped to the location of one of the decoys. The other three disappeared behind me as I zipped off again. I finished it off by flying a bunch of quick circles in the empty air, slowly floating down as I stretched my aura again, reappearing on the ground instead of visibly moving down. I rematerialized in the three-point pose that you saw in just about every comic book ever.
It struck me that being on a team with Weiss for so many years had apparently made it way easier to show off.
I looked up to find Challenger clapping, the technicians buzzing around in their room... and Armsmaster simply staring, body language unreadable.
A new voice came through the speakers; "Preemptive ratings are going to be mid-brute, mid-thinker, mid-breaker, mid-mover, low-stranger. Armsmaster, anything to add from down there?"
"We should test the exact strength of your… Aura," he responded, "but the other ratings should be adequate for the moment. Before we do that, are there any weaknesses we should know about? I'd rather not accidentally hurt you." He grabbed his halberd and spun it as it reconfigured into a sphere, snapping out on the end of a piston.
I gulped.
"Ooooowww," I complained, recovering from another hit. my Scroll wasn't working without access to the CCT, so apparently, the only way they could test the strength of my field was by having Armsmaster hit me over and over again and see how much damage I took. At least I'd been able to dodge when they were testing my reaction time.
"Where are you at now?" His voice had been getting more and more exasperated since we started. He'd started out light, and been gradually increasing in power with each hit. At first, they hadn't been much worse than a good punch, but that one was pretty close in force to a particularly large bullet.
"That one did some damage. Feels like I'm down around a quarter of my total?" Luckily, I was able to get a rough sense of how much I had left.
Armsmaster addressed the techs; "Down from a third. That should be all we need, then. Mark Scythe down as a Brute four, Thinker four, and we should be done for now."
Finally! Aura made sure I wasn't being seriously hurt by any of that, but it didn't exactly make it fun, either.
"So we're done here, then?" I asked the room.
Armsmaster turned to face me. "For now. We'll be going more in-depth in the future, but right now I believe you have a call waiting." He tilted his halberd in the direction of Challenger, who was walking up to us.
"Yep, Dragon's waiting upstairs. You ready to go?"
"Hello Ruby," came a voice from the terminal. A woman's face appeared a moment later. You could tell it was fake, but it still moved like it was real.
"Hello. You're Dragon, I guess?"
The face on the terminal smiled. "Yes, that would be me. I'm the Tinker that has access to Professor Haywire's technology."
Ah! That would explain it. "So you can get me back home?"
Her smile changed. It seemed a little more forced now. "It's… a little more complicated than that, I'm afraid. Unlike most Tinkers, I can understand how Haywire's technology worked, but that doesn't help us on the legal side of things."
"Legal side? What does that mean?"
Dragon responded, "You've heard about our contact with Earth Aleph, right?" I nodded, and she continued. "Well, when Haywire first punched the hole, both sides were worried about a war. The temptation of an entire planet full of resources might have eventually spilled over for one side or the other, and no matter which side ended up winning it wouldn't be pretty. They ended up stuffing the hole full of concrete from both sides, to try and keep anyone from ever crossing over again."
"Okay, I get why that could be a problem, but what does that have to do with me? Can't you just do the same thing with a portal back to Remnant?"
"We could…" Her face fell, "if we were allowed to open one in the first place. Since the hole got filled, it became illegal to travel, contact, or otherwise interfere with parallel worlds."
What? That doesn't… Couldn't she just?
Dragon must've seen my rising panic, and she spoke up before I could come up with a response. "No Ruby, it's alright! It's not hopeless yet. It's possible that we could get the law changed, but even if we manage it…" She trailed off.
"It's going to take a while."
"Exactly. I'm sorry, Ruby, but that's just the best I can do."
Okay. I was gonna need to decorate my room at some point. That probably shouldn't have been my first thought, but it was easier to focus on that than anything else. Still, it wasn't as bad as it could have been! I was still getting home, I'd just have to stick around for…
"How long do you think that's going to take?"
"...I truly am sorry Ruby, but I'm going to be honest with you. I can't say for sure. It could be months, it could be years, or it might not work at all."
Right. Okay, this will be fine. I can deal with this. I'm still gonna be helping people, that's what's really important, right?
When I didn't respond, Dragon continued. "I'll keep you apprised of my progress if you'd like."
I nodded. "Yeah, that'd be good. Thanks, Dragon." I paused for a moment. "Did you need anything else?"
Her expression settled back to a small smile. "No, that's all for now. I'll probably contact you again in the future to discuss your weapon - I have some questions about those 'Dust rounds' - but I'll let you get settled in your position before we get into that."
We said our goodbyes, and I turned to reopen the door. Challenger was waiting outside once again.
"How'd it go?" he asked.
Not great. "Well, I might be staying here for longer than I thought. Turns out it's against the law to go to parallel worlds, so I'm stuck here until it's not."
He didn't respond at first. We kept walking, and as we reached the elevator he finally spoke up; "This is kind've outside my area of expertise, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry"
"Eh, it's not your fault, I'm fine. Got other stuff to think about right now, anyway. It's time for me to meet everybody that I haven't yet, right?"
He looked at me again, tilting his head to one side. "Yeah, that's right. You've got a few hours until your clearance comes through and we can start briefing you on everything, so until then you'll be meeting the teams."
"Perfect!" He was still giving me that odd look. Couldn't he see I was fine? "Is there anybody I should watch out for?"
"No, wait, go back. How'd he get away with calling himself Clockblocker?" We were both laughing by now.
"He - whew - he managed to trick the PR gang. They decided on the name Stopwatch, then he convinced them to let him give the name to the media during his introduction."
Hah! Yang is gonna love hearing about this kid. "He's gonna be someone to watch out for, isn't he?"
"It wouldn't surprise me. Last time a Ward joined, he acted like he was going to shake their hand, then froze them mid-shake., She's hated him ever since."
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened a minute later. Assault was waiting on the other side, along with a handful of others. Two were women, one in a bodysuit covered in softly glowing lines and the other in military camouflage with a colorful scarf and sash. The remaining two were men, one costumed in skintight red with racing stripes and the other wearing stylized plate armor with brightly glowing boots. I gave that last one a double-take; his armor looked Mistrali, almost like the pictures you'd see in museums of one of their footsoldiers in the Great War, but older, fancier, less practical. It wasn't the best of connotations.
The flashbang-bright glowing boots and the cartoonishly tiny shield kind of broke the effect though.
The camouflaged woman stepped forward. She was the only one here that was obviously armed, at a glance. "Welcome to Protectorate HQ, ah…"
Challenger spoke up behind me. "Scythe, until we finalize an actual name. Are the Wards not coming?"
Mistral-guy answered, "Still in school right now, they'll be out in time for the inauguration." He moved a step away from the group. "From what I heard, you're not going to know who we are just by sight, so…" His posture shifted into what I'm sure was meant to be an impressive defensive stance. It got a little cooler when the forcefield bubble snapped into place around him, crackling and sparking where it met the floor.
"You can call me Dauntless." His voice had gotten deeper too. The whole performance would have seemed impressive when I was younger, but now it just felt condescending.
They weren't all that way, though. The military woman gave a more subtle demonstration of her power, the pistol at her hip dematerializing into a glowy green-black cloud, and reformed as a knife on the other side as she shot a quick glare at Dauntless. "I'm Miss Militia, these are Velocity, Battery, and you already know Assault," she said, gesturing first at the man in the racing stripes, then the woman with the glowing lines. Velocity waved and Battery nodded.
Assault glanced in their direction, then shot me a finger-gun.
"And I'm… I guess Scythe, for now." This codename stuff was going to get on my nerves. "That should change pretty soon, I guess." Nobody talked for a second. Dang it Ruby, you let the conversation trail off again!
"Why Scythe?" That was Battery, breaking the awkward silence from over in the corner. I liked her already.
"Well, I didn't exactly choose it. I actually don't know who started it, but it's because of my weapon. I… guess Armsmaster still has it. I haven't had a chance to get it back since he looked it over." I'd better get her back in one piece, or we were gonna have a problem.
"That's not surprising." Miss Militia again. "Piggot has everyone burning the candle at both ends to get you inducted ASAP - something about publicly announcing you before any of the higher-ups can do anything about it. I can't say I know what this is all about, but it's caused some confusion either way. Worst case scenario, you get it back once everything has calmed down. I am surprised that a name hasn't been finalized yet though - do you have one in mind?"
Shane had asked that question too, and it was a hard one. Names were really important, so even before I knew I'd be stuck here I'd known that this would take some thought. However, after sleeping on it and exercising my Semblance during testing it came to me. I'd always used the word 'scatter' in relation to my power. I never really thought about why; maybe I was somehow linking my Semblance to my mother's, connecting it to the text on her gravestone; but whatever the case, it simply felt right to call it that. The name needed to reference that, and to be honest, the word didn't need to change that much to work.
"I'm thinking… Scatter."
Alright guys, I've gotta apologize here. I realize it's only a day late, but it really annoys me that, even with another slightly shorter chapter than normal, I messed this up. School's started back, and the last week or so has been busier than I expected, so I didn't plan well enough. On the other hand, I can hopefully channel that frustration into writing more in the future, so we'll see how that goes.
In more positive news, we're through the standard chapters for Arc 1! I've got interludes lined up for the next two chapters, so you should be seeing things from Piggot's perspective next time. Speaking of which, I'm going to plan out my writing better this time now that I have some idea of what I'm doing, so you should see that chapter on October 12th.
I'll hopefully see you then!