You Always Knew
Ashley Lilly wasn't sure what she had envisioned Rosemary Ashmore's home to be, but when they found it, she actually had to admit this seemed right, given everything that happened to her after publishing The Record. The condo was a ragged, cheap looking place that looked like it had never been fixed after being bombed by the Terrans. The place was so run down and eerie that Ashley genuinely wasn't surprised she saw a crow flying about. Ashley pointed out the omen of death, and found herself debating with Schwarz about whether or not Neo, out of her loyalty to Aldric, had sent them on a wild Grimm chase. Sylvie silently listened to the two while she frowned at the bird and Dusty, perhaps emboldened by his proximity to home or by his desire to 'get his groove back' after being stared down by the 'scary mute lady', just walked right up to the door and started pounding.
"Hey yeah, hi, is this the reporter lady's house the one who messed up the story of a lifetime can you come out please I want to hear about how you stared down Mister friggin' Evil hisself and stole his stuff and I gotta admit I've wanted to meet you ever since I read the Record when I was a kid but now that I know it's real I really really wanna say hi so I can see what kind of woman tried to pull this off and ma'am if you think you can ignore me I promise you I can sit here bangin' on this door all day I need something to hit after having an assassin flirt with me or maybe she was propositioning me I dunno and I actually don't wanna know because I don't think she'd let me say no and I'm also really worried about how I'mma tell my momma and my girlfriend about this seeing as how for the former I don't wanna lie and I'd have to tell her I lost my innocence to a crazy woman and the latter well I'm ashamed to admit but I kind of thought about it and that feels like a betrayal but I'm also a little worried she's the type to be into those kinds of things and I dunno if I can satisfy two people at once even if I had ten times the experience I have now especially given that ten times zero is -"
There was a gunshot so loud it shattered a few of the windows on the house. Dusty's aura flashed as he was sent flying backwards with a loud yell. He landed with an 'oof!' as smoke wafted out from the enormous hole in the door.
"GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!" Came a shrill voice from inside the house.
SSAD scrambled for cover while Dusty shot right back with: "Ma'am, I think you've gone and solved that one already!" He rubbed at his smoldering chest, sucking wind through his teeth.
Ashley turned to her right, about to check if the stoic siren was alright after a blast that loud, but was stopped when she saw the woman trying to pop her inner ears, wearing an expression of annoyance.
"Wait - are you alive?! This is an anti-mech rifle!"
"Ma'am, I've seen cows I'd put money on before any ol' mech!" Dusty shot right back, "and I gotta tell you, you must'a been scammed if you were told that thing was an AMR. Or you bought bad bullets - did you shop from the guy on twenty third? Dude ripped off my uncle, like, three times, claiming the rounds were factory pressed when he'd actually reloaded them him-"
"We're here because you know about Nebo Aldric!" Ashley cut in, feeling the situation spiraling out of control and hoping the name would cut through the tension and set things back to zero.
Unfortunately, she'd forgotten that this was the woman who'd started those conspiracies, and that Neo had said enough of those kinds of people had gone to her in person that she'd moved three times. Ashmore's response was another building-shaking gunshot, and though it missed SSAD by a mile, it sailed through the air so far and so fast that Ashley saw it slam into the farming fields in the distance. She flashed Dusty an impressed look when the fields in question exploded as though they'd been hit by a bomb, but her concern shifted towards Sylvie, who had graduated from her normal emotional range to something Ashley suddenly realized she'd never seen before since the day they'd met. As Sylvie pulled her hands away from her ears and saw the blood in her palms, her expression changed from the mild annoyance at being assaulted by a loud noise, to outright anger.
Dusty didn't seem to notice the look, but Schwarz had, and though the former geared up to yell back at the woman, Schwarz tried to pour water on the powder keg by calling out in an audible, but much quieter and even tone:
"Miss… Uh… Reporter lady… I've never met the man in person, but by reputation I know he's stupid strong. Do you really think that cannon would do anything but ruin your ears?"
Ashley blinked in surprise, and gave Schwarz a look, her face settling into a frown. He'd been right, she just lit off a cannon indoors, how wasn't she screaming in pain? Ashley and the others at least had the benefit of aura to blunt the expected side effects of something like that, but Ashmore? She was supposed to be plain-old Human, something like this should have left her deaf.
There was a silence that stretched on long enough that Dusty looked to Schwarz. "Wait, that was for him? And she thought it would work?!" He leaned back up, "lady you thought that scam gun and cheap bullets'd work?!" He hollered, loud enough his voice echoed all around.
That seemed to do it, as the entire team's attention was stolen by the 'bang' not of a cannon throwing ordinance, but an irate woman slamming a fist against a car door. "This woman published his journal to the CCT with no preamble, no context, no reputation to lend her legitimacy, nothing, and she fired a gods-damned cannon indoors. She is not very intelligent." Sylvie growled through gritted teeth. "Observe." Without further word, she got to her feet and brazenly approached the condo.
"Sylvie!"
"Hey - hey! One more step and I'll blast you in two!"
Sylvie just continued walking, sticking to the side and staying just out of view of the front door.
"I'm serious!"
Sylvie flicked the switch on the sonic weapon around her throat, and whispered: "No you won't. Be quiet!" Each syllable was like throwing a tornado at the house. Because of the damage already caused by the gun, the door and even parts of the wall blasted apart into splinters, revealing the inside of the house, a gun longer than a car, and a woman who was desperately scrambling to her feet after having been blown on her ass. She barely even sat up straight before Sylvie made a soft noise through pursed lips, and blasted the woman into the wall. The siren flicked the switch again, and added: "An AMR is bigger than most people. It has to be or there wouldn't be enough magnetic coils to accelerate the projectile. So even if you had another very expensive round on your nonexistent salary, you couldn't have moved it to cover me."
"Oh shit, she's right." Schwarz murmured, leaning his head back against his cover, while Ashley just looked on in awe. "How the hell did you survive that?" He turned to Dusty, who was already on his feet.
"You ever seen a Mistrali steer before, buddy?" Was all Dusty sent back in response, as he marched up the stairs. "Ma'am, I think we need to have a word before our word! You pissed off our - oh, wait, uh, hi, I'm Dusty! - now, you pissed off our little Tiger in five minutes. Ma'am, I've been trying that for half a year and I still haven't managed it, so you'd do well to be quiet because I'm genuinely concerned she might kill ya if you go for that gun again. Lighting off cannons in suburbia - what if it hadn't been someone like me on that porch?" He demanded, slowly uncurling his whip with one hand, while the other landed on his hip. "Would you have shot the mailman? The Huntress scouts? The - wait, that's a mag cannon?" The hand on his hip went limp and he gave Sylvie a look when his brain caught up with his mouth, he then looked back at the gun, patting his chest with a wince that did nothing to cover his shocked expression.
As Ashley got to her feet, she saw Ashmore's response: Whipping out a pistol almost as long as her forearm. Ashley was honestly surprised the woman thought it would work, and the look of utter shock on her face as Dusty casually snagged it with his whip and tore it out of her hand was alone almost worth the trip out here. Now having established the woman as perhaps not threatening, but willing to try and hurt them, Ashley looked around the somewhat trashed house. It looked as well-kept on the inside as the outside, with little care or time spent on making things look presentable. This was to the point where wallpapers were peeling off and everything had a gray appearance to it, from the furniture, to the empty box of ammunition a few feet away from her, to the two coffee cups on the table in the living room.
Ashley frowned for something about this feeling significant, but she turned her attention back to the matter at hand. The former reporter turned attempted whistleblower turned reclusive hermit was on her back, surrounded by people half her age and several times as lethal. Her plain, brown hair was matted to her head, and just as Ashley had thought, despite the sheer volume of the gunshot, there was no blood or anything coming out of her ears. Woman was built like a tank, Ashley was impressed.
"We're going to skip asking why you have a cannon, because we know why. We're also going to skip the whole song and dance about if he's real or not because all know better, I'm already tired of your antics, and I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty angry you went from zero to sixty and tried to kill my friend."
"Aw, I love you too girl!"
"Instead we're just going to ask you how to find Nebo Aldric."
"Are you serious?!" The woman demanded.
"Dusty how close can you get with that whip?"
"Wings off a fly!" There was a light crack of the whip in question, inches from his ear.
Ashley gave Ashmore a 'your turn' look, and as Ashmore stared right back, Ashley took the woman in. She looked like hell; Ashley had found a couple pictures of the woman back when she'd initially published the record, and to compare the two was like comparing before and after photos of a drug addiction. She had lost a lot of weight, her hair had grayed, and her eyes had a wide, manic look to them. It only took Ashley a few moments to realize that this hadn't been drugs, but rather stress - this woman had lived every single day terrified that her actions would come back to roost, and Aldric would come to exact some kind of revenge.
But something about her looked strange. There was something off, in a way that her intuition was practically screaming at her as familiar. Ashley tried to figure out what it could be, but drew a blank. She was vaguely aware of the fact that she'd technically ran into Ashmore exactly once, and wondered if that was what was being dragged out of her mind, but that felt wrong. It felt like she was staring at a puzzle whose corners and sides had already been found and assembled, but why this was evaded her.
That was when the shoe dropped. Quite literally - Sylvie's display had thrown pretty much everything around, including a pair of shoes that had plastered themselves against the wall. One of them finally succumbed to gravity and slid out from its indentation and fell to the ground. Ashley's semblance had already taken the thing in - a plain, cheap leather boot. The thought of the boot's cost led her brain to make a new connection - that everything in this house, except for the gun, was also cheap. The house itself, the furniture, the dishes, the only thing that looked like it cost more than a handful of lien was the gun that Schwarz was in the middle of appraising.
This led Ashley to a new train of thought: That gun was expensive. One couldn't just buy a magnetic rifle willy-nilly, especially on a civilian salary. Yes, this was Vale, and people here loved their guns, but this was the kind of thing that required a hell of an investment, even the bullets had a ridiculous cost per shot. Ashley would have applauded the woman's willingness to throw money at the chance that Aldric may come back and kill her, if that thought didn't make her realize that Ashmore's name was mud. She'd basically outed herself as a conspiracy theorist - who the hell would hire her? Sure, there may be some odd jobs that would look the other way, but that would only give her… Well, enough to live in a place this awful, actually.
And she burned that second shot on intimidation… She was there, she was right there, on the cusp of something, she could feel it.
That was when Ashmore finally gathered her courage to speak: "Oh my gods, it's you!" She slowly pushed herself to her feet, her shoes sliding against the dust-covered floor. "It's you!"
The rest of the room heard the shock in the voice, the realization that the shoe had dropped for Ashmore as well, and she realized who she was talking to. Ashley heard a bit more: The longing. There was a desperate desire in Ashmore's words, like someone who had gone for years without seeing a loved one and was now face to face with them.
That final stray thought led the pieces to the puzzle to all fall in place.
The expensive gun with its expensive bullets, so casually used despite an austere lifestyle.
The lack of any repercussions from using a cannon indoors, despite a lack of hearing protection.
The multiple coffee cups.
The shoes falling off the wall.
The shoes on the woman's feet.
The off-ness she radiated.
The longing in her voice.
The way her eyes flicked towards the hole in the house.
The tension in her muscles.
The way her body didn't actually seem to line up with the gauntness of her face.
The seam running around her throat.
"Dusty -" Ashley breathed, in such a hollow voice that all eyes shifted towards her. "Grab her!"
The person, the PI, hesitated. They didn't realize until Ashley spoke that they'd been made. Dusty, with a swiftness and fluidity born from the intense trust and instinct forged through almost a year of non-stop team training, did not.
It was still close - with a crack of the whip, Dusty moved first. The PI still moved so fast that the cracking whip failed to ensnare their body as he'd intended, but not fast enough that the telekinetic rookie wasn't able to adapt, and catch their arm. They were stopped, but not before they'd moved so far that the leather of the whip strained and groaned under the pressure, and Dusty had to brace himself against the PI's strength. Even with his bracing himself, the PI was strong enough that they dragged him across the ground anyways. Dusty responded to this by adding his semblance to his physical strength, but even when pulling against the equivalent of two of him, the PI continued forward.
They grabbed the doorframe with their free hand, trying to physically pull themselves out of the house, but this lasted only long enough for the rest of SSAD to spring into action: Ashley ripped the Lovely Lady off of her back and smashed the bat into the back of the PI's head, and when combined with another sonic blast from Sylvie, the PI was stunned long enough to have their feet taken out from under them by two shots from Schwarz's gun.
Dusty took advantage of the PI's loss of balance to haul them back inside with a loud yell. Snapped back into the house like a rubber band, the PI slid across the ground, back to where they had been laying moments ago. This time, they were met with guns, the feeling of Dusty's boot slamming down on their leg, and the 'click' of Sylvie's amplifiers.
Distantly, Ashley noticed how the person still didn't show much sign of injury, but this thought was wiped away when, cradling her shotgun in one hand, she reached forward with the other and grabbed at the PI's throat. She was done with this game, but to the PI's credit, they were professional enough to try and resist - right up until a barely audible "Don't" from Sylvie slammed into her with such force it bounced her head off of the wall. Said wall was promptly shattered entirely by a warning shot from Schwarz. Ashley couldn't help but feel like this resistance was half-hearted at best, and learned why just a moment later, when she unmasked the PI.
Ashley fell back a step, holding a strange, sack-like mask, Ashmore's face immediately faded away with a light whine, revealing a gray material. Ashley looked down at the PI, and felt her lip quiver as, despite the world-shaking nature of the person in front of her, she found she wasn't surprised by it.
Smooth raven hair fell from its previous confines, cut just above the neck, likely because it was easier to keep it short rather than bundle everything up under the mask every time they went out in public. Bright orange eyes stared up at Ashley, shaking from the intensity of the emotions welling up within them. A narrow face was trying its best to keep from cracking, but Ashley's semblance told her that the woman before her was utterly failing to win the fight against her own emotions. She looked older - twenty years older than any of the pictures of her that had circulated the CCT, made their way into documentaries, or had been approximated by actors. She hadn't aged quite as gracefully as Neo seemed to have, with more than a few frown lines having permanently etched themselves onto her face.
In a way, she should have seen this coming - or at least been aware of the possibility, ever since Neo had outed that this woman was at play, but it simply had not occurred to her this could happen. Ironically, the one person Ashley had not thought she would see, had effectively written off, and had not intended to seek out, was now before her.
Her flesh and blood mother.
Cinder Fall.
Any remaining doubts - what few, desperate dregs still clung to her mind - that this all might very well just be some enormous misunderstanding were utterly and finally annihilated by looking into Cinder's eyes. There was no mistaking the love in them, and the sorrow and pain that radiated out could only come from a parent who had intentionally separated themselves from their child.
But Ashley suspected Cinder hadn't separated herself quite as fully as her other half had: "You never left." The PI - that damned PI - it was her. Backtracking this meant that every time Ashley had noticed and suspected their presence, it was always the same person. Where Aldric had gone and isolated himself in the middle of nowhere, Cinder had found she simply couldn't leave her child alone, and had, in secret, stayed near her, always watching. Whether these had been brief dalliances or it had been a constant affair, only made noticeable when Cinder made mistakes, Ashley couldn't know for certain, and yet she nevertheless knew that it had been constant. Cinder had always been there.
A fact confirmed by the woman's guilty nod.
Ashley wanted to ask if her father knew at all, but felt there was a slightly more pressing question: "What did you do with Ashmore?"
Cinder regarded Ashley for a few long moments, before finally speaking in her own voice. "She's upstairs."
Schwarz gave Sylvie a look, and the woman nodded, stepping around Cinder and climbing upstairs. Ashley regarded Cinder a moment longer, before lowering her gun, and giving Dusty's big arm a pat. He let the tension out of the whip with a flick of his wrist, and stepped off of Cinder's leg, leaving behind a large bruise and an equally large bootprint on her pants.
"Wasn't the point to stay away?" Ashley asked, as Cinder slowly sat up.
A single tear fell down Cinder's cheek as she nodded, and it told Ashley everything she needed. A part of her - the angry, emotional part that just wanted to lash out - wanted to ask anyways, just to rub salt in the wound, but she just couldn't bring herself to do it. The woman before her, while not broken, was not the towering villain twenty years of movies and TV had helped build her up to be. This wasn't the woman that nearly destroyed Vale, ripped apart Mistral, and smashed Atlas and Vacuo. Before Ashley was nothing more than a mother, who simply couldn't leave her daughter's safety to the whims of fate.
"That's why you were here." Ashley said, letting the Lovely Lady dip low enough that its barrel touched the ground. "You were trying to convince her not to talk to us." And much like Neo, they'd just managed to show up quicker than expected.
An hour in either direction, and they may very well have missed her.
Ashley continued to regard the woman for a few moments, a pit beginning to open in her chest as she found a conflict begin to roil within her. On one side, there was the realization that she was standing in front of her mother, a woman she had thought dead for ten years, a woman so long departed from her life that any memories she had - ignoring whether or not they were genuine - had long since faded away to simple feelings of love and comfort. On the other hand was the realization that, in finding this woman, she felt nothing. No overwhelming loss, no return of familial love, nothing like what she felt whenever she went home to her aunts, nothing like the stories Dusty told about his siblings and his parents. Ignoring Cinder Fall's history, the woman before her may very well just be any other person for all Ashley seemed to care. These two things clashed inside her, bringing forth a building sensation of guilt - after all, shouldn't she feel something? This was her mother, shouldn't she be feeling something blossom in her chest? Shouldn't she be dropping to her knees and embracing her? Shouldn't there be tears flowing? Was she wrong for not feeling anything at all?
Worse was that there was something growing in there, something reflective of one of the only considerations she'd spared her mother in the overwhelming amount of thought she'd put to her father. She'd thought - accurately, it seemed - that unlike Aldric, Cinder had kept some amount of personal freedom after Adam Taurus' defeat. The entire reason she was pursuing Aldric and not Cinder was that where the former had gone into exile, the latter, ostensibly, had not. Now, first through Neo and now through personal interaction, Ashley had proven this intuition to be true. Where Aldric had stuck to the plan, had stayed away, had isolated himself, Cinder hadn't - much the opposite, she'd stayed right next to Ashley for the entire second half of her life.
From this perspective, Cinder had kind of placed Ashley in the very danger they had tried to protect her from, but Ashley cut this line of thought before she could pursue it too long. It just brought more intense guilt, as she reminded herself she didn't really know what this woman or her husband had gone through - all she had were stories told about her by a number of people whom all shared a general distaste for her, and after that, legions of media who knew even less, and were perfectly fine with having a villain to hate.
Ashley's judgement was based on the bias she'd been unwittingly inheriting this entire time. She'd never really thought to examine this bias because, before - Cinder Fall was a dead historical figure. Now, she was alive and her mother, but the odds of running into her had been deemed low since nobody knew what she'd done after Ashley had been left with Ecru.
But this was her chance to fix that.
"Can I have the room, guys?" She asked, holding her hand out to the woman, who looked up to her, seemingly aghast by the action.
Dusty and Schwarz exchanged glances, but anything they may have said was interrupted by Sylvie descending the stairs alone, explaining with her usual taciturnity that Ashmore was scared for her life, and wasn't coming down. She was taken outside by Dusty and Schwarz, while Cinder finally took Ashley's hand and pulled herself to her feet. The two regarded each other for several long moments, Ashley's iron eyes meeting Cinder's orange orbs.
Cinder was the one to break the silence, "you're even more beautiful than I remember." She lifted her hand, initially intending to caress Ashley's cheek, but seemed to think better and stopped before she went too far. "I'm so sorry." She added hollowly, with a shake of her head.
The two commandeered Ashmore's couch. Ashley felt a little bad about using the woman's house like this - and trashing it on top of that - but decided there was a little too much going on to really dwell on it. Ashley found she had so many questions to ask, but also didn't know at all which ones to ask to begin with.
So she decided to jump headfirst into things with the one thing she'd had the most difficulty parsing: "Time travel?"
Cinder let out a soft, breathy laugh, and nodded. "Before you were born, I tried discussing that with your father. It made as much sense to me as I suspect it makes for you. He spent hours trying to explain it, but eventually he gave up and if I ever brought it up, he would just say 'God and a Wizard did it'."
Ashley nodded to the side, idly deciding 'shut up and don't think about it' was perfectly valid when the answer really was magic and divine intervention. She looked at her mother again, seeing a conflict within her similar to that which was boiling in Ashley. Cinder wanted nothing more than to be right here, talking to Ashley, but also seemed well aware that she was violating someone's trust to do so, and was putting her in grave danger.
Neither of them seemed willing to point it out.
"Why did you change sides in the end?" All things considered, Ashley felt this was the important one. Aldric's Record mostly brushed this off, just rolling with 'it happened', and everyone's conclusion came from that information and what little was known about her.
Cinder looked away for a few moments, gathering her thoughts. "I… Have two answers to that. There's what I actually thought, back then… And then there's me, having twenty years to really think about it." She turned back to Ashley, who just waited for her to continue.
"Back then, I just cared about power." Cinder continued, "I just wanted to be stronger than everyone else. I wanted the freedom I thought that would bring. I wanted to be in control of my life. I didn't care what I had to do to get there, I just wanted it. I found something that started me on the path towards eventually finding Salem, who promised me I could have all that and more." She said this with an edge to her voice, and a small frown on her face, indicating to Ashley that the regret she heard was genuine - the woman really did think she'd done the wrong thing. "The things she gave me, the places she took me, the power I received simply from being with her… It was exhilarating. I didn't care about right or wrong, or anyone caught in my way, at least not until I met your father.
"Although I later learned it was equal parts a survival tactic and an effort to place himself where he needed to be to plunge the knife into my back, it doesn't change the fact that he befriended me. He was, in the early days, literally everything I wanted in a subordinate - competent, powerful, but obedient, and loyal. He became my friend, and as the others alongside us failed to measure up and died, he became the person I grew to rely on. I trusted him, so when I learned that he, and every single one of the others like him, all intended to betray Salem and myself, I had a moment of clarity. A moment of introspection, one that led me to realize that I was on the wrong side. That I was evil." Her gaze grew distant as she spoke, as the memories played out before her eyes.
"In more recent years, I realized it was a bit more complicated than what he called an 'Are we the baddies' moment." Ashley noticed a twitch to the corner of Cinder's mouth, the ghost of an old laugh at an older joke. "I told him once that I got started on my dark path because of a bandit raid on my childhood village. I don't think he believed me, but I actually had been telling the truth. The story was a bit longer, and I didn't go right from there to finding Salem, but it did lead me to desire the strength to make my own fate, which eventually led me to Salem, which led me to Aldric, to the Maidens, and on and on. I recognize now what I didn't have eyes for then: I was just angry. I was angry, and scared, and I was lashing out. I had an idea of what I thought I wanted, what I thought I needed, and Salem provided me with those things, and all I had to do was listen to her and not ask questions.
"But a person can't run on rage forever, and being betrayed by my closest ally, my one friend, finally snapped me out of it. It made me finally start to actually think any further at all than instant gratification. It finally made me realize that I was doing the wrong thing. That I'd been killing and ruining lives for no reason. I was still just a little girl, scared and trying to put a wall up between her and the rest of the world. I still, to this day, feel guilty about the things I did, and why. There are people today who felt the same pain and agony that I felt, because I was too blind and too weak to see any solution other than lashing out at those around me. I knew I couldn't change the things I had done, and I knew I likely couldn't make up for them either, but I could at least try. I decided that if standing against Salem was such an obvious act that four aliens did so without hesitation, then it must be the right decision."
"And then you time traveled, and…" Again, like with Neo, Ashley felt struck by a lack of knowing how to properly refer to Aldric. "He… Took you in?"
Cinder gave Ashley a look halfway between pity and sorrow. "No." She shook her head, "to this day, Ashley, he doesn't trust me. In some respects, I have only ever proven that to him." She indicated Ashley as her evidence.
Ashley felt that the fact that Cinder was admitting it was significant, but so too was the fact that despite knowing this about herself, Cinder had never done anything to correct it.
But… She told herself. She is a mother… That's a pretty quick way through anyone's walls. Ashley looked away, coming face to face again with the fact that, for all she wanted to ask, they were really just questions she already had the answers to. Even the obvious 'why didn't you go away' and 'why have you been watching me' both were easy to answer: She was her daughter, and she didn't want to just leave her. Whether that made her stronger or weaker than her husband, Ashley couldn't judge.
But she didn't want to move on just yet, and she came up with a question she felt she couldn't fully answer on her own. "Why put me in Patch?" Yes, because of her aunts, but more than that: "I think you can literally see the island from the top of the tower. Why have me so close?"
Cinder's smile became a little nostalgic at this. "Aldric's single greatest trick was how he hid his secrets - because despite almost everyone figuring out how he did it, nobody is really able to adapt to it. The way he explained it is it's very similar to why Aldric Black was such an effective opponent - everyone, on Earth and on Remnant, is prepared for the fight. Nobody is prepared for simple, direct death. Even murder and assassination is a struggle, but using telekinesis to stop a heart? Even if you know the trick, you can't prepare for it. The same goes for how he hides his secrets: He outright tells you everything you need to know, and you're so caught up in looking for hidden meanings that you don't realize…" She paused a moment, and then shrugged. "That he's suggesting he tells the enemy he's a spy because he's already done it, and wants you to think he's doing it for you. The best way to hide a secret is to shove it under someone's nose and wait."
Ashley looked a little incredulous, "but the moment the jig is up, it all falls apart."
"That's where the backup plans come in. Before, it was planning a hundred different escape routes to flee to the other side in case Salem or I figured out his game. Now… It's giving your aunts a box of toys and instructions on who to go to to disappear."
If Ashley didn't have a lifetime of evidence as to the efficacy of Aldric's philosophy, she'd be damn incredulous. If she were being honest with herself, she still was, but she got the feeling she'd just been told in almost black and white how Aldric had gone from 'barely surviving against a Beowulf' to 'planning for the failure of a backup plan that itself was contingent on two other plans failing.' Everything before and after was improv.
That actually inspired perhaps the first question she really had no answer for: "When you killed Aldric Black, the Record said you and he were… Wherever you were, for a while." Cinder nodded, "then you were out keeping things together while he kept progressing towards Salem. But Xiao Long's mother… That was all you. How did you convince her to allow herself to die?" She couldn't even pretend to be an expert with bandit tribes, but she was still willing to bet that the chieftain of one - with magic powers to boot - was pretty unwilling to just lay down and die.
Cinder was silent for a few moments, weighing her words. She eventually lifted her hand, and Ashley leaned back in shock as twin portals appeared on her palm, and some kind of grimm insect crawled out of her.
"I… Showed Branwen what would happen if she didn't contribute." The insect crawled back into the portals, which faded away. "What she would be facing alone."
Ashley was pretty sure she knew what that was, especially given how instinctively her revulsion towards it felt. Cinder confirmed it was the method through which she stole four people's very souls, and it - like the 'Micro Wyverns' she and Aldric still possessed - was among the last artifacts of Salem's influence on Remnant. This led Ashley to realize that Cinder had an area of expertise over Aldric - namely, in experience with the Grimm Queen herself, so she asked her about it.
Cinder lowered her hand, rubbing at it as though it made her feel filthy. "It takes a certain kind of person to attempt to orchestrate the death of gods. It takes something even more than that to try again after having failed the first time and witnessed extinction as a result. She was everything that implies.
"I have stood in the same rooms as Nebo Aldric, Roman Torchwick, and Professor Ozma. Every single one of them at some point tried, failed, and succeeded in manipulating me. Not a single one of them were as good as she was." Her eyes glazed over a bit, the memories swimming right before her. "She was… Intoxicating. She could explain to you in graphic detail that you would steal the souls from living beings, and make you want to. She made you want to please her, and made you fear anything but her satisfaction.
"And she knew how to hurt you. To exert dominance and will, to cut and gouge away at you with maximum effect in as few words as possible. She knew just what to say, how to say it, when. Aldric wasn't immune to this - he told me how much she scared him in every single interaction they had. How he thought she could see through him even before he realized she actually had." The ghost of a smile returned to her face. "And the first thing he did when he met her was make fun of her fashion sense."
Ashley had to laugh at that. Soon, Cinder joined her, and before they knew it, they were laughing with each other. Ashley didn't know how long it lasted, but it simultaneously felt like forever, and not nearly long enough when they finally calmed down. In the silence that ensued, Ashley still felt she didn't want to move on, but knew this couldn't last forever.
She nodded back to the stairs. "You'd already split up when she happened. Did you know?"
"That she tracked him down?" Cinder asked, before shaking her head. "I actually didn't know until you were fifteen. I was concerned, especially given how she had even gotten him to talk, but given it had been five years and nothing had happened, I concluded she wasn't a threat."
"My aunts are worried he might be dead."
At this, Cinder scoffed, fondly. "You don't know what he eats up there. He's fine."
She had so little idea what to do with that that she just let it drop without consideration. "I… I have some memories of my Mom and Dad. But I was told my memory had been altered to remove you two. Are they real?"
Cinder's lip quivered, "I don't know, Ashley." She again reached for her, and again hesitated. "We never saw magic the same way."
Ashley let out a long sigh, and decided it was best to get on. "Were you here to try and keep me from finding him?" Cinder nodded. "Why? By this point, I'd say the show's over, no? And, I would add, if he's such a planner, how do we know he didn't intend for me to go find him eventually?"
"I doubt he intended for this to happen, Ashley."
"Not this, but in general."
Cinder sucked wind between her teeth, seeming caught between 'I agree' and 'there's no way'. "We argued for a long time about this choice, Ashley. So much that you nearly woke up. He said the only way it would work was no-contact -"
"And, again, it seems like the show is over." Ashley interjected, "so why keep it going?"
"Ashley, your father bet everything on Ozma believing you would be a Maiden. You've already made contact with him, if you left now, with what Ruby is doing, what do you think his reaction will be?"
Ashley stared at her mother a moment, feeling herself grow a little pale. As if on auto-pilot, she responded: "Notice one of my teammates comes back to campus, send every single teacher he can to ask about me…" Oh no. "Follow him afterwards, and freak out when I go to the reporter chick's house." Ashley covered her face in her hands, groaning as she determined, indeed, Neopolitan was right:
She was not good at this.
The question now was if her life was just going to veer even more into 'comic book' territory than it already was, and have Ozma show up right now, or if he was going to wait and see how things played out. The parts of her - quite possibly, she now mused, influenced by those buried or erased memories of her parents - that feared him, were convinced of the former. The parts of her that understood those fears were themselves based in people who all admitted they just didn't know whether or not he was a good person, gave her the smallest hope that the latter may be the case.
Running her hands up her face and through her hair, she saw her mother looking at her with wide orange eyes, filled with no small amount of fear. "Please don't tell me he knows, Ashley." She whispered, so low that a breeze passing through the hole in the house almost drowned her out.
Ashley grimaced, held up a hand, and then pointed outside.
A moment passed.
Then another.
Ashley risked opening her eyes, and actually felt that small hope swell inside of her.
"I…" She dropped her hand. "I didn't know when he brought me into his office, but I think he put it together from what I did know. Namely, I told him my family name was Guilliman."
Ashley could see every muscle in Cinder's body tense, her eyes growing sharp. She was torn halfway between jumping to her feet, and staying put.
The decision was made for her when a loud farmer's drawl called out: "Uh, Ash - Ashley! Missus Ashley's Mom! We - uh -"
"Problem!" Came the much quicker bark from the taciturn siren.
Ashley wanted to scream, she wanted to rage, because she knew who was out there, and damn it, how did he know? Had she been right on the money? Had he sent someone to follow Schwarz?
Or maybe… She thought, ignoring her mother when the woman leapt to her feet with a hurried and hushed 'stay here', It's just that this lady damn near blew the whistle on them all. They've probably kept an eye on her ever since, and we blew up her house.
She got to her feet and turned around, just in time to see Cinder reach the destroyed front entrance and freeze at what she saw. She didn't know the woman much, but she didn't need to, to recognize the anger, hatred, and 'take one step closer to me or my kid and you'll die' that was etching itself onto her face. Deciding to face the music, Ashley too went to the broken part of the house, and though Cinder didn't seem to question - much - her decision, she threw up an arm and steadfastly refused to let Ashley step in front of her.
Outside, Ashley saw the exact person they'd been invoking the past few minutes. He stood clad in armor as opposed to his normal headmaster's attire, a cane held in front of him, both hands resting upon it. His golden eyes had been locked onto Cinder's orange orbs, but immediately snapped to Ashley's the moment she came into view. In front of him, though vastly outclassed, the rest of her team all had their weapons drawn and ready.
There was a silence so complete that Ashley actually heard the floorboards upstairs creek - Ashmore, likely looking out a window and realizing two gods and a bunch of kids were staring each other down on her front lawn.
As always, Dusty was the first to speak:
"Uh… Sir… I know you'd kick our ass if we actually fought, but that's not why I'm saying we really don't wanna fight. I - I - uh, I read the alien wizard guy's journal, the - uh, the stuff he said about you, I don't agree, I think you're pretty cool. We're just worried seeing as how you showed up in armor and not a suit, and we're pretty sure you know who all's in there. She's just tryin' to find her Pa, could you just maybe… Uh, give us a few days off school? Call it a family emergency? Please?"
For once, Ashley actually wished he wouldn't stop talking, but Dusty petered off when Ozma's heavy gaze drifted down to him, the effect being like watching heavy moving equipment shift from one position to the next. The headmaster's eyes softened a bit at the sight of his student, and he let out a long sigh.
"Stick it under their nose." He said, turning his gaze back to the mother and daughter. "Miss Fall, Miss Lilly." He nodded to them in turn, before gazing at Cinder. "You look well, Miss Fall." She didn't give him a response but to bare her teeth, and he just accepted it with his disturbing grace. "May I ask why you are here?" His face, as ever, was uncanny for all of its expressiveness.
"To protect -"
"A grown and growing woman in a Huntsmen Academy." Ozma interjected, with a disappointed shake of the head. "The child of two of the strongest people to ever walk our world. Quite possibly the two strongest who will ever walk." He turned his gaze to Ashley, "Miss Lilly. Are you at all aware of the strength inside of you? Do you wonder how it may have manifested itself? I would never -"
"Stop." Cinder pulled Ashley closer in behind her, but Ashley put her hand on the woman's shoulder.
She was terrified, but she pushed past it to speak up: "Why don't you want me to find him?"
Ozma smiled in that unnerving way. "I was just going to say, Miss Lilly. I would never prevent you from doing so. Much the opposite - I would beg you as I once begged Miss Nikos to find him. To help him, to bring him back to us and prove to him that he has a place in the world he saved." He shook his head, "but not now. You are strong, Miss Lilly, but you must be cultivated before you could seek him out. You can fight, yes, but you cannot defend yourself against the world you are stepping into. I can train you - I want to teach you! I want to turn you into the woman I guarantee he and your mother have both dreamed of."
"He never trusted you." Ashley pointed out, "why should I?" She noticed a smile play Cinder's features as her gaze went from her daughter to her enemy.
"He was the sufferer of my greatest mistake, Ashley. He was a boy when he came to our world, forced to play a man's game so difficult and so harrowing that it broke his ability to trust. I dare say if the very heroes he modeled your namesake after were to stand before him, he may not have trusted them." Ozma responded, although through the uncanniness, Ashley just couldn't tell if the earnestness in his voice was real, or fake. "I am not a good man, Miss Lilly. I cannot claim to be, and I will not, but I am as well not the man he thinks me to be. Or do you think, in his bout of omnipotence, he would have allowed me to live?" His voice was soft, but firm enough to reach her.
She had to admit, he had a point. Aldric had been a god for a few minutes, ostensibly knowing absolutely everything, past present and future. If Ozma had been the awful man Aldric thought he was, would Aldric have let him live?
"More even than Aldric." Cinder called out, as she slid a device from the small of her back. A quick glance at it brought a frown to Ashley's face, as it just looked like a scorched tube in the vague shape of a sword hilt. "You were the one who hid behind words. More even than him, if you were given the chance to speak, you can take control of anything." She tilted her head in Ashley's direction, though her bright eyes never left Ozma's. "In my world, he tried to get me to kill myself. To give him my soul so he could retrieve the power he -"
"I would note, as she brings this up." Ozma cut her off in turn. "That the timeline she describes was one of utter desperation. Salem had won, had unleashed a Human Grimm upon the lands and had ostensibly pushed us so far that we were enacting Aldric's contingencies to evacuate the planet." Though he was speaking defensively, his expression was one of guilt - Ashley had the fuzziest feeling that he understood his alternate self's reasons, but loathed the fact they had been necessary.
Ashley heard the sound of metal creaking, and cast her eyes down, seeing Cinder white-knuckle the hilt. An idea struck her, and she stepped in front of the woman. Cinder started at this, and Ozma's eyes shone with anticipation, but they both stopped when she came to a halt at the edge of Ashmore's porch.
She pointed to Ozma, "you want to train me, to turn me into a… New Maiden. You want me to save him, but you don't want me to leave to do it, yet. If I tried to leave, you would stop me." She then pointed to Cinder. "And she would stop you. You would fight, he would come, and we wouldn't be glad to see him." Back to Ozma, "you follow me, she stops you, you fight, he comes." Back to Cinder, "you don't want me to leave, but you can't leave him alone. If you come with me, he follows, he learns where…" She pushed herself through it, "where Aldric is. He doesn't trust any of you, thinks it's some kind of attack, you all fight." She looked between them, as she noticed her team, starting with Schwarz, begin to relax. "You're pinning him here. And you're pinning her here. Neither of you can leave for fear of what the other will do with me, and what he'll do in response."
Ashley stood up straighter, and hoped she looked as tough as tough as she was trying to sound. "So I'm going, because neither of you can do anything about it." She looked to Cinder, "you're going to tell me how to find him. Because all you'll do by refusing is costing me time - time he -" She pointed to Ozma, "- doesn't want to waste, given what Ruby… And, evidently, Neo and her husband, are doing." She noticed Cinder blink at the last bit, but pushed on before she could be interrupted, and before she could dwell on the sudden thought that she might be able to add 'and their son' to the end of that sentence. "If that time gets wasted, he gets anxious, tries to move things along, you two fight, bad things happen." Ashley crossed her arms in front of her chest, and looked between the two of them again.
Was this what it felt like to be him during his mission? Did he feel the gut-clenching desperation of acting on the first idea to occur because it was the only thing that might work? Or had his plans accounted for these things? Did he experience the crushing weight of 'fuck I hope this works!' settling on his soul? Or had his utter belief in his mission given him a level of bravery and confidence she didn't feel in herself? Did he feel as scared as she did right now, watching two trains on a collision course? Or did the fact that he'd set them on that course give him the clarity to orchestrate a near miss?
She looked to her mother, trying to imagine what it must have felt like to stare her down as an enemy, when she had utterly lacked any compunction against irresponsibly using her powers. She looked to Ozma, and tried to imagine the crushing weight of immortality, how it had changed the very way he thought, and others thought of him. Her mother had never experienced doubt until she had learned Aldric's secret, and even then, it had only been a flash - to be immediately enveloped by the knowledge that what she did after must be right. Ozma had born the weight of a war against Salem for so long that entire libraries could be filled with his life story alone, and had seemingly been trusted and distrusted by the majority of the people he'd called allies in that time.
Both of them were so utterly used to existing on their own level, that she could already see how paralyzed they were by her father's checks and balances. Despite this deterrent, however, she could also see their determination, and knew that it would take just one false move to cause this house of cards to fall.
"So?" She prodded, trying to keep the momentum and forcing things to go her way before they could realize either the flaws in her argument, or simply become desperate enough to try something.
There was a long enough stretch of silence that Ashley began to worry she'd lost the moment, but then Ozma let out a long sigh from behind an uncanny grin. "As quick with your wit as your father, as sharp with your tongue as your mother." He shook his head, "I do not know how I failed to recognize you sooner." He took in a deep breath, and let it out in one huff, his entire body straightening up as he shifted his gaze towards Cinder. "Did you, as I, forget this feeling? So often wondering if we are playing to his design or if he is instead merely staying upright through sheer momentum?"
Cinder didn't respond, instead turning to her daughter, expression softening. "Ashley…" Her grip was still tight around her cold weapon, but the tension was starting to flow out of her body. Ashley could see in her eyes equal parts overflowing love and intense conflict. "He didn't want this for you." Whether it was her own wont, or a learned behavior from her husband, Cinder gave off the air that she had to try this last time.
Ashley's own expression fell into melancholy, as she looked into her mother's eyes. It took her a few moments to find the right words, but they came when she sent another look down Ozma's way, and then at her team. It was then that she realized, through the determination, through her own desire to 'save' her father from his exile, through everything she'd welled up inside of her to convince her to move on this, that there might very well be a foundation beneath it all that she'd never been aware of. It was revealed to her, first through Cinder's declaration, and then, retroactively, through Ozma's musings.
Ashley turned back to her mother and asked: "Are you sure?"
She had never seen someone's world fall apart before, but she was pretty sure the look in Cinder's eyes was that exactly. She watched as Cinder digested her words, her shoulders slumping as Ashley's implication dawned and settled upon her like a great weight. Cinder let out a short, almost disbelieving breath, her bright orange eyes locked onto Ashley's gray orbs, and then took in another, only to let it all out in a long sigh of surrender.
Out from Cinder's pocket came a slip of paper, heavily worn and wrinkled with age. Cinder clenched it tightly, closing her eyes, before loosening her grip and giving it to her daughter. When Ashley took it, Cinder then wrapped her up in her arms and held her tightly.
"I'm sorry." Was whispered into Ashley's ear, Cinder's voice beginning to shake.
Ashley didn't respond, instead returning the hug, and allowing herself to hold, and be held by, her mother for the first time since she was a child. Ironically, despite stepping so eagerly into this strange and dangerous world of gods, masters, maidens, secret societies and honest-to-gods aliens, she'd never felt more safe than right now, in her mother's arms.
She didn't know how long it lasted, but eventually Ashley was released by her mother. Ozma, gracefully accepting defeat, invited her up to Beacon. "Perhaps your first peaceful visit, Miss Fall?"
Cinder glared at him, but accepted the invitation, and casually revealed to Ashley that shapeshifting existed, as she demanded his shapeshifting agent accompany them, or else they wouldn't move at all. Sure enough, a crow dipped out of the sky and before SSAD's eyes, turned into a man, who gave Ashley a shrug and a wince, as though to say 'sorry, but that's the game.' When SSAD departed, so did Ozma, his agent, and Cinder.
Once they were out of earshot, Dusty literally started screaming, and didn't stop until there was no air left in his lungs. He didn't get much further than: "DID WE REALLY JUST -" Before Schwarz kicked him in the back of the knee, and put him in a headlock, refusing to let go until they redefined the term 'inside voice'.
Sylvie spared the boys a brief glance, before looking up to Ashley. "Are you ready?"
Ashley looked down at the paper Cinder had given her, the coordinates scrawled upon it promising something she'd technically wanted since she had been a child, but had never thought would be possible.
Ashley scoffed, and spoke the truth: "No. But I want this anyways. Does that make sense?" She looked down at Sylvie.
The taciturn woman regarded Ashley for a moment, nodded, and proceeded to split the boys apart before they continued on their way back to the Garden. As they walked, Ashley called her aunts to give them the update. Ashley had expected fury when they learned Cinder had gone against the plan, and while they were definitely angry in their own way, they seemed more understanding than anything else. There was a brief discussion when Ashley asked if they wanted to join her, and while both Ecru and Srebro seemed fond of the idea of one last ride, they both agreed that this had to be Ashley's.
At length, SSAD returned to the Garden, where they found Neo who gave them the keys to and location of a fully stocked airship. She made a passing reference towards wanting to find the ship her parents had used during their crusade, but simply hadn't been able to find it. After another pass at Dusty, which was shut down when Sylvie flagged a guard and asked if sexual assault counted as 'business', SSAD was back above ground and on their way to the shipyard.
Their new ship - the 'Deep Sea Astronomer' - wasn't very handsome, but at least looked like it could take a beating, and take them from one end of Remnant to the other and back. It came with four rooms, a small kitchen, and a communal bathroom. A true house on wings, the novelty of finally seeing one left Ashley with a smile that lasted right up until SSAD had to put their heads together to read the instruction manual and figure out how to program the automatic pilot. Fortunately, it was designed to be straight forward and idiot proof, as these kinds of airships, while not ubiquitous, were common enough that the average family could get themselves a small one for inter-kingdom trips.
The ship took off, and Ashley was soon left alone with Schwarz in the helm, as Sylvie was put on 'Dusty Duty' the second he started turning green.
"First time leaving Vale?" Schwarz asked, as the ground shrank beneath them, and the computer notified them they had been cleared for takeoff.
Ashley was about to say 'yes', but caught herself with a smirk. "Technically… No?"
Schwarz gave a sidewards nod at that, "fair enough. I was always more of a train guy, myself. Flying's fun, but there's something more… Classically romantic about a train."
"More dangerous, too."
"That's why I always sat under the auto-cannon mounts." Schwarz chuckled, looking over his shoulder as Dusty proved he could be just as loud retching as he could at anything else, his sounds echoing all the way through the ship from the bathroom. "So… I gotta ask, Ashley. How far ahead have you thought?"
Ashley quirked an eyebrow, and gave Schwarz a curious glance.
"What do you expect to happen when you meet him? Even ignoring that isolation does weird things to people, even ignoring all the things he'd done… What you're doing is basically no different from an adopted child going out to meet their biological parents."
"Do you speak from experience, old man?"
Schwarz rolled his eyes, "not personal experience, no. Buddy of mine was adopted - I shit you not, it was one of those 'married couple wants an exotic faunus kid' situations you see on TV. So kind of like you, he knew from day one that Mom and Dad weren't the people who made him. Unlike you, he always had a dream of going to find his parents one day. I met him when we were ten, and I watched him grow up with stars in his eyes, wondering how it would go."
"How did it go?"
"It was the most mundane thing you could imagine. His mother didn't want kids but also didn't want to… Well, take the other option, and his father wasn't ready for fatherhood. They put him up for adoption when he was born, and they didn't last together much long after that." He responded, with a wistful sigh. "In case you're not following along, the point is I'm seeing in you the same thing I saw in my buddy. Dude spent years building up this idea of how things were going to go, only for it to just get plopped down on his plate like a bad school lunch. As of a few days ago he hasn't so much as mentioned the two."
"You're telling me not to get my hopes up."
"I'm telling you to temper your expectations." Schwarz gave Sylvie a look halfway between morose acceptance and soft concern. "I know that look in your eye, Ashley. You're going to do exactly what you said - you're going to go out and try to save the man that saved all of us. But I'm just saying to really ask yourself what you expect to happen, because this is the same guy that voluntarily went into exile twice. Guy whose willpower was so much that he was literally a god, and gave it up. He'll definitely take you into his home, but I really wonder if he'll do anything past that."
Ashley wanted to discard that, to not believe it, but she had to admit there was some sense to be made there. This was a guy who not only wanted to be left alone, and who not only believed he needed this as a form of penance, but also believed the security of an entire world may very well depend on him staying away from everything. Yes, Ruby and the Neopolitan family wrecking Roman Torchwick's holdings wasn't good, especially given it was kind of being done in his name, but that wasn't his concern. He may very well refuse anything Ashley gives him.
Schwarz wanted her to ask herself what she would do in this case, but the only question in her mind was what she would do to succeed anyways.
She wondered who that question came from: Her mother, or her father.
It was this one train of thought that occupied her mind as their ship took them across the planet. Halfway through, she swapped out with Sylvie to keep an eye on Dusty, who was lamenting the fact that he couldn't ride anything metal without losing his guts. The entire trip took almost a complete day, and Ashley was woken up early the next morning by the dinging of an intercom.
"Oh holy crap this thing works check it out I can hear myself like I'm the friggin' Brothers - uh, wait, no, I guess they're dead? Anyways - wake up folks! We're here!"
Ashley lumbered out of bed, throwing on some clothes packed by the Garden - and decidedly ignoring how the hell they knew everyone's measurements. She was joined by the stoic siren, who didn't look at all like she'd just been awoken far too early by the farm boy, and their stalwart leader, who broke off quickly to make a pot of coffee. Sylvie and Ashley reached the cockpit, only to stop dead at what they saw outside.
It was not the ranch.
It wasn't anything but snow - a blizzard so thick that the ship's exterior lights just made things look like a giant white wall spinning around them.
"Yeah I'm confused too, but the ship just landed here a bit ago - that's why I'm awake, you see, and why I'm not -"
"Schwarz, did you enter the numbers correctly?" Ashley called out, turning back to see Schwarz approaching. She felt a brief smile twitch at her lips when she saw he had forwent a mug and had elected to just drink straight from the pot, and already seemed to be a quarter of the way through it.
"Pretty sure." Said the man, as he wiped a line of caffeine from his mouth, and stepped up to the consoles that lined the cockpit. He retrieved the paper Cinder had given them, holding it up to the screen and comparing the two. "Lady wanted us to come here."
"Did none of us check the GPS before we plugged it in?" Ashley groaned, rubbing her face.
"We knew where we were going." Said Sylvie, "we had reason enough." She had her scroll in hand, but was frowning at the screen - which showed a complete lack of signal, they were so far away from the CCT network.
"Do we even have cold weather gear?" Schwarz asked, taking another chug from the pot.
"Yes." Sylvie said, cutting off Dusty just as he opened his mouth.
"Well, let's go outside and -"
Suddenly, with a loud groan, the entire ship began to shake as its nose dipped downward. Everyone grabbed on to whatever was closest as the ship slid and shuddered forward, burying itself in the snow. Dusty cried out in glee, throwing his hands up like he were riding a roller coaster as the entire ship continued forward, until it came to a violent halt.
"Do it again!"
"Dusty."
"Do it again!"
"I'm not above pouring this coffee on you."
"Did we just get buried in snow?" How the hell would this get worse?
"Nah!" Dusty happily declared, "just our nose in a cave!" He thrust his hand forward, and with a telekinetic shove, the snow covering the windshield shot away, revealing a pitch black cave. "Ten to one this cave is where your Ma told us to go, and the ship landed right on -"
"The ship is dumb and we can't fly. It did what we told it to. Fly here and land."
A silence settled upon them for a few moments, as everyone digested this. Mostly fueled by a 'fuck it! Let's roll!' from Dusty, who was too excited even to pretend to be hurt by Sylvie, they decided that if these exact coordinates were where they were supposed to go, then they might as well go outside and explore the cave. They threw on some cold weather gear, pried open one of the doors, and poured outside. Four beams of light carved through the darkness, joined by the ship's own much more powerful headlights.
The exploration wasn't as exciting as Ashley had expected. This was supposed to be Aldric's stronghold, a place only he and Cinder knew about. She was expecting magic space turrets, killer robots, illusions that Schwarz couldn't cut through, tests of honor - anything!
Instead, they got a cave that really only went one direction, a welcome mat, a big red button that said 'That was easy!', and an extremely happy Dusty hitting said button over and over again. Schwarz stayed behind to examine the button, while Ashley and Sylvie descended further into the cave, until their flashlights hit the wall at its end.
"I must admit I'm surprised." Sylvie muttered, swinging her flashlight back in the boys' direction. "I expected more."
Ashley remained silent, trying to divine how the easy button would lead them to Aldric. They returned to the boys, whose only theory was to shove it in Ashley's face and suggest maybe, since she had the magic blood, it would do something for her?
Click: "That was easy!" It didn't.
Dusty was the one to reveal the 'no cheating' message under the welcome mat, but that didn't help them at all. They spent the next several hours scouring every inch of the walls of the cave, scanning over them with their flashlights, looking for anything that looked out of place, but they were just in a hollow in a mountain, nothing to differentiate it but for the welcome mat and the red button.
They returned to the warmth of the ship and decided to do something productive. Sylvie and Dusty worked together, using their semblances and the ship's engines to dislodge it from the mountain and slowly work it back outside, while Schwarz kept an eye on the instruments, and Ashley warmed herself up with coffee. When the ship settled down outside, the others returned and they had their pow-wow. They spent the rest of the day pouring over Aldric's Record, looking for anything they could use to tell them what they had missed, or where they were supposed to go next, but little was of any real use.
Ashley wanted to go back to the caves, but the others refused to allow it - the temperature was already low enough to be felt through the cold weather gear, and with the sun going down, it would only get worse. They would try again in the morning.
Ashley had to admit that what they said was correct. It was the smart option. Going out in this temperature - with the promise of it dropping further - was a terrible decision, she was too invested, they knew this, and were trying to be the voice of reason.
This was why she felt bad when she went out after everyone went to sleep anyways.
And they were right! It was so cold she felt the water of her breath frost on her cheeks in the few meters between the ship and the cave. But, so too was it cold that it woke her right up! It was a shock to the system violent enough that the day's activity was pushed back, and she felt just like she did when they landed.
Knowing this was probably not a good thing, she told herself she'd only be here for an hour - two tops.
Three hours later, utterly exhausted, Ashley was literally running the button over the walls, when she hit the end of the cave, and the wall vanished, revealing a great metal blast door.
She stared at it for several long moments, so cold and so tired that she couldn't even work up the energy to be frustrated.
It took her a few moments just to even process what she was looking at. The change - and the promises it made - put some pep back in her step, but she was running on fumes. Ashley silently vowed to come up with some kind of detective-book, techno-babble explanation for how she found this, anything smarter than 'I got so deliriously tired I rubbed the button on the walls until something happened'. Due in part to wanting to see what was inside, hoping it was warmer, and hoping that said warmth might wake her up a bit, she slotted the button into the circular depression on the blast door, and pressed it.
The door suddenly shot open with a loud 'bang!', and the button dropped to the ground before it could even say: "That was easy!"
Insult added to injury, Ashley dully stared at the smug button, and decided she officially had daddy issues. The guy had indeed done something 'exciting' with his fortress - he'd used some kind of hologram generator so damn good that it beat out three people whose semblances should have countered it.
Or at least, that's what she hoped he'd done. It would be terribly embarrassing if they'd just missed this.
Under your nose… She thought, teeth gritted.
Her frustrations were forgotten in a wave of warm air, and she let out a long, loud groan as she walked into the brightly lit bunker. She briefly considered going back out and waking everyone up and drinking a gallon of coffee, but couldn't resist the urge to just take a look. The warm air had combined with the thrill of discovery to give her just a bit of an extra push. There was a tiny voice in her head that was telling her to go back to the ship and just sleep, that she shouldn't be playing in a magical doomsday bunker this tired, but an even louder voice was reminding her that this was a magical doomsday bunker and she needed to see what was inside!
It, like the cave, wasn't really what she expected. It was huge inside, brightly lit, but she was expecting something more than just dull grey and white metal walls, bright blue LED lights, and the occasional door. She got more when she walked further inside and saw, as the ground sloped downward, a wall of computers and screens at the end of the bunker. Were she any more lucid, she might have noticed and come up with an elaborate joke about how she'd clued together why she'd noticed it first, but she was so tired that all she'd needed at all was just the change in color from white walls to black computer screens.
Alongside a lone figure, standing there, waiting.
Ashley blinked, her heart stopping cold in her chest, and adrenaline beginning to flood her system, pushing back the fog of exhaustion almost immediately.
She stared down at the distant figure, who stared unflinchingly back at her.
Holy shit, it's him. She breathed, feeling her heart start back up and begin hammering in her chest.
She did her best to stay calm and composed as she started approaching him. All the ways this could go played through her head as she grew closer, and he waited. As she grew closer, she got a better look at him. He didn't look like he'd aged at all, more than that, the burns and scars he'd gotten seemed -
"Wait a minute." Ashley stopped, anxious expression dropping just as the hologram in front of her raised its hand.
"Now before you freak out! I'mma say this here and now, and you may hear it a lot, so get used to it." The holographic recording cleared his throat, and it didn't take an eyesight semblance to tell he'd done so to fight back a grin. "I'm sorry. My responses are limited. You must ask the right questions." He gulped, trying to keep the grin from stretching too far, one corner of his mouth twitching from the effort.
Ashley listened as the hologram introduced itself and the bunker. She came back to earth, her earlier excitement - and the adrenaline in her system - evaporating as she began to realize in turn that he wasn't here, and Cinder had sent her here instead of directly to him.
When the hologram was finished with its introduction and grew unnaturally still, she decided to ask it in a tired, grumbly voice:
"Cinder told me to come here. I'm looking for you."
The hologram twitched, and his head tilted.
"I don't know that voice." He tilted his head. "How interesting. I sincerely hope you're not at the tail end of a thousand year old prophecy, because while I might be giving you everything you want, I bet you'll be disappointed anyways." Another twitch, "anyways… To answer your question." Another twitch, as Ashley realized what was happening was the hologram was loading different answers.
"I'm sorry, my responses are limited. You must ask the right question."
Ashley was getting sick of the roller coaster of emotions. Excitement at finally getting inside led to disappointment that the place was so bland, led to excitement at meeting her father, led to disappointment that it was a hologram, led to excitement she might at least get something out of this, led to the disappointment of her seemingly besting his ability to plan things out. She frowned at the unmoving hologram, a thought occurring to her: He had made this thing when he was so young that his crusade hadn't been finished. The programming, therefore, came from a time in which he simply could not conceive of Cinder having turned to his side.
So, maybe the answer was, indeed, to ask the right question:
"Where is your ranch?"
"I'm sorry, my responses are limited. You must ask the right question."
Ashley twitched her jaw, not her best idea, but she was tired. "Fair enough… When was the last time this facility was accessed?" Maybe she could back-track from whenever Cinder or Aldric had been here last.
"I'm sorry, my responses are limited. You must ask the right question."
A little frustrated, Ashley blurted out: "What is the right question!?"
The hologram just laughed, and Ashley began adding to the list of daddy issues.
She let out a long sigh, shifting on her feet as she looked around, trying to come up with something that would dislodge this thing. She idly wondered if it had been updated at all since Aldric's quest, and if that was why she was running into a brick wall: She was asking questions Aldric had never considered relevant, because none of them led to 'how do I kill Salem?'.
Out of a lack of anything else, she asked exactly that, to which it responded: "Even I don't fucking know... But Earth might. My best efforts were Ruby Rose and Jaune Arc. The former may be able to neutralize her, and the latter has a weapon I created as something of a hail mary, if it turns out Salem's the same kind of immortal as Ozpin and the Maidens."
"What, you don't have any weapons in here?"
"Every single weapon save a few can be found in the Infinity. Tell the computer to lead you to Contingency Sephiroth."
Ashley looked up at the wall of computers before her, tilting her head, before shaking it. She doubted she'd be able to find a file on the thing that said 'this is where I am!', so she turned back to grill the hologram.
"How did you come up with the questions and answers?"
"Do you know me?"
"No, Dad, that's half the point." She groaned, wondering if her mounting frustration was due to her not making progress, or just her being tired.
Thinking it might mostly be her lethargy, she turned around and vowed to get some sleep, update her team, and then put three more heads on this. Someone - maybe even her, fully rested! - would come up with something to ask this.
Probably Syl-
"Dad." The voice changed, suddenly sounding older, and a bit more gravelly.
Ashley whipped around, and saw that the hologram had changed. Aldric now appeared older, closer to the pictures in his box. Half of his face was covered in scars and burns, and he looked exhausted. "What is your name?"
"That was the magic word?" Ashley asked, incredulous.
"Oh." The hologram took in and let out a deep sigh, "sorry. You said a word, it tripped something I added in later." Ashley blinked, and realized where she'd screwed up just as the hologram flickered again, and his younger self returned before giving her the usual line.
Ashley swept her hand over her face, sighing. "You've got to be kidding."
The hologram groaned, "come on, man. You couldn't have said 'surely'?"
Ashley let that one slide, raising her head back up. "Dad."
The hologram flickered, and the older version returned. "Oh I'm back. Gonna give me a name I recognize this time?"
Ashley had to bite back a retort, instead finding herself a little impressed as she realized she was not only playing its game the right way now, but was actively seeing how thoroughly he'd planned things out. She suspected what he'd done was program it with her name, and if it heard anything but her name, it would switch back to 'apocalypse mode' and treat whatever she'd said as a question. She felt the urge to play with it, but fought it off, not wanting to learn that, in her growing exhaustion that she'd tripped some kind of planet-killing self destruct switch.
"My name is Ashley Lily."
The hologram regarded her for a moment, the look on his face giving her the feeling as though he was considering what to ask next, and how to ask it.
"Who were your aunts?"
"Ecru and Srebro."
"Your mother?"
"Cinder Fall."
"Father?"
"You."
"What was your name?"
"Guilliman." Ashley wanted to feel frustrated at how many hoops she was jumping through for whatever this was, but on some level, she got it - one of his defining characteristics was paranoia. He needed to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt she was who she claimed she was, and not just someone who knew the answers.
"What is your earliest memory of me?"
"I don't have one?"
"Why don't you remember?"
"You wiped my memories."
"Who sent you here?"
"My mother."
Flicker. "Of course she did." The hologram shook its head, flickered, and then asked. "Am I alive?"
"Uh… Yes?" Ashley technically didn't know for sure, but she was confident enough to tell it so.
Another flicker, and the hologram sighed with relief. "I guess I won the toss." He looked down at the ground, a smile played his features, so faint that it made Sylvie look as expressive as Dusty. "Kiddo… If you're here, and -" Flicker. "- I'm alive, then I'll save the words for when we meet up. Until then -" He nodded to the wall of computers, which all began to come to life. "Keep yourself entertained. You'd be surprised how fun it is to just read about how this sci-fi tech works." His grin became more pronounced, before he vanished, leaving Ashley alone in the bunker.
Ashley wasn't even able to do the 'wait what' routine before she was alone. Cautiously, she approached the computers, finding the desktops on the main screen cluttered with dozens of folders. She saw 'Techno Babble' next to 'Arcano Babble', 'Homework [No Seriously For Real]', 'Tactical Analysis', 'Final Fantasy Plot Summary', 'I Unleashed An AI On Remnant And All I Got Was This Stupid Folder', and on and on it went. What drew her attention, however, was the presence of an executable file right dead center in the screen, as though Aldric were specifically drawing attention to it:
The joke flew right over her head, she was too tired to think anything past 'why is this center frame?'. Clicking on it, it wiped the screen, and the desktop was now spread across all the screens on the wall. She had to back up a few steps to take it all in - it looked like a man, with a strangely bulbous head, entirely made up out of stars. She shuddered, skin crawling as the feeling like she was being watched washed over her. Ashley then examined the folders scattered about the main screen. The executable had changed the entire desktop, removing the old folders and replacing them with ones that read less like funny jokes to make him smile, and more like actual titles.
What caught her attention immediately were the three folders dead center on the screen. 'I'll Do It Myself' was under the other two, 'Doomsday Clock' and 'HBO'. Intuiting that, much like the file that had brought her here, these were meant to catch attention, she clicked on one at random, and 'I'll Do It Myself' won the toss.
Inside was a series of subfolders, ranging from 'The Record' to 'Stolen Video', alongside another executable file entitled 'The Short Version'. With nothing to lose, she clicked on the short version, and lost herself to confusion, as new entries to Aldric's Record appeared alongside video and images depicting Ruby Rose, of all people, going back in time, altering Aldric's fate, and then the file began depicting two possibilities: One in which Ruby held Aldric's secrets, and eventually led to his death at the hands of the Brother Gods, and one in which she told him everything, but led to his being stuck as a pawn in the war for his entire life.
Ashley frowned at the screen, tilting her head as she tried to divine the meaning from this. It took her a few moments to push through the cobwebs and fog of exhaustion in her mind, but she recalled from Ashmore's interview with him that he'd spent a good amount of time planning out a 'perfect run', was this supposed to be all of the results? All of the ways he'd gamed out the ways his crusade could have gone? If so, then Ashley found herself impressed. The central screen was filled with folders, and sure enough, some digging eventually found the exact scenario he'd described to Ashmore, hidden in a folder creatively called 'The Speedrun'.
Further exploration of the folders only cemented her conclusions. Everything from 'Galactus' in which he gamed out what would have happened had he spared the Brother Gods and they'd chosen him to be their champion because, apparently, wiping everyone out on their own was too boring, to 'Douchebag Aldric', which she abandoned pretty quickly, finding the image of her father falling to darkness hitting much, much harder than she would have thought. The biggest question she had as she took everything in was where the footage come from? And the Record entries? These weren't A-Z outlines, or mockups, these Records were fully written out, and the footage that accompanied them looked like it had been ripped straight out of a video camera.
Each time she returned to the desktop, her eyes landed on the central three folders. Obviously the reason was they were dead center, begging to be noticed, but it took her a while to realize why they kept catching her eye: Save 'I'll Do It Myself', they were executable files.
Her interest captured, and partially fueled by a 'screw it' that itself was likely the child of her lethargy, she clicked on the 'HBO' executable.
The computer chugged a bit, loading the file, but then she was presented with herself.
A live video feed from a webcam she located a few moments after realizing she was staring at herself, at this instant. She frowned, tilting her head - her actions mirrored by the video of her on the screen. Was this a video caller? Had she called herself?
Wait… She blinked, feeling her heart slow down. No… No way. If this was a video caller, and 'HBO' called the bunker, then that must mean 'Doomsday Clock' must call him.
It made sense, in a weird way. If one thought like Aldric, and lined up with his belief that he was some kind of sealed up evil, then calling him could start the countdown to doomsday. This must have been why the hologram had told her to entertain herself - eventually she would have found this, and this would be the alert Aldric would need to take her those final few steps.
Ashley felt her heart begin to pound in her chest, as she closed 'HBO' and brought the cursor to 'Doomsday Clock'. Her finger hovered over the mouse button, and she had to swallow through a dry throat twice, had to calm herself down and control her breathing, she had to psych herself up just to hit a button.
"Oh, hey dad!" She murmured, staring at the executable. "Oh, yeah. Mom got into a fight with Ozma and told me where your secret base was! What's that? How - uh, how do…" She trailed off, wide eyes locked onto the two words that promised her an end to this journey.
She remembered what Schwarz had said - what did she really expect to happen? The answer came from the rest of her team. Whatever did happen, she could - like Sylvie - only control so much, so why worry about the rest? Whatever Aldric's reaction would be, there was no sense in worrying about it, so like Schwarz, the best idea would just be to let it wash over her. And of course, whatever Aldric may have planned, she got her stubborn streak from him, her mother, and - most importantly - her aunt, all of which was just fed more by the boisterous farm boy, so like it or not: She was going to bring him back to everyone else.
Really, all she was doing, worrying and agonizing over it, was just stalling.
Granted, there probably was some wisdom in taking a step back and getting some sleep before meeting the man - even in this way. She was so tired she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. One side of her wanted to operate on the whole 'like father like daughter' deal because she wasn't one much for the most intelligent course of action. The overwhelming majority of her, however, instead lodged its vote for going the hell to sleep, and figuring this all out in the morning.
So, as much as she desperately didn't want to leave, she decided discretion would be the better part of valor, rubbed her eyes, and returned to the Deep Sea Astronomer. She didn't even remember making it there, before all of a sudden she was woken up by Dusty pounding the foot of her bed like a gorilla.
"Girl, girl, girl - wake up! There was a door at the end of the cave and it went and opened itself!"
Ashley didn't move for anything less than a pot of Schwarz's coffee. The entire pot, just like he'd done, and while she did her best to fuel herself up, she told them about her ill-advised late night adventure. Schwarz was unhappy, but also seemed to be of the mind that none of them would have ever come up with the idea of smacking the button on the walls unless they'd been of that ill mind. At length, when they all were awake and prepared, they went into the bunker to explore it.
Only to find almost all of it was locked off. The various doors leading to various wings, all labeled by Earth and Remnant writing, refused to open. Sylvie was the one to shed light on this, as she hadn't taken a single step past the wall of computers, and had spent the entire time diving through them and interrogating the hologram. She learned that almost all of this bunker was designed for the purpose of facilitating Aldric's wartime contingencies - specifically those that could function independently of his death, and without any human interaction. The bunker was, therefore, completely locked down because none of those contingencies had been enacted.
There was a brief debate over whether or not they should figure out how to poke around, but then Sylvie threw a few questions at the hologram which revealed that there wasn't just one, not just two, but several different ways to literally end all life on Remnant hidden away in this bunker. They all decided it was probably a good idea to leave well enough alone, and instead focused on what they could find in the computer, whereupon Sylvie promptly pulled up a folder labeled 'This is where I am!'.
An hour later, they were back in the Astonomer, flying towards the 'Null Zone', and Ashley had added another item to her list of Daddy Issues. Schwarz got Dusty Duty this time, while Ashley, after taking a nap, hung out with Sylvie in the cockpit. They didn't really do much talking, but that was good enough for Ashley, she wanted quiet, but didn't want to be alone. As excited as she was to be hitting the end of this journey, she found her nervousness over it growing in equal measure. The roller coaster of ups and downs since yesterday had left their mark, and she now just had no idea how things were going to go when they got there.
She just whittled her time away, watching the readouts on the airship, and the 'time to destination' click ever lower.
Until: "How are we being called?"
Ashley blinked, head turning to Sylvie, who was frowning at the instrument cluster. Ashley followed her gaze, and saw a notification on the display: An incoming call.
Several thousand miles outside of the CCT Network.
"That… Means…" She shook her head, and when she opened her eyes, the notification was still there, blinking an insistent green. "Doesn't that mean that's local?" Extremely local at that, if she understood things well at all.
Sylvie nodded, and promptly accepted the call. "Deep Sea Astronomer."
"TURN. AROUND!"
For a half second, Ashley thought Aldric had cottoned on to them and was pulling a 'get off my lawn', before she realized that the voice coming from the speakers was decidedly female.
"Excuse me?" Ashley asked, as Sylvie leaned forward to start tapping at screens.
"You're running out of time! If you don't turn around now you'll lose power and you'll crash!"
Then there was a faint, "who even are they? What are they doing this far north? Do they know?" From a male voice, just barely picked up by the woman's scroll.
"Hm, we can see them." Ashley heard Sylvie intone, and turned to see she'd pulled up one of the external cameras and aimed it at the ground.
Sure enough, though they were practically ants, Ashley could see a pair of figures on the ground, each looking up to their ship, each waving them down even as they spoke over local frequencies. One of them had some kind of multicolored disc in their hand, waving back and forth, no doubt something big and flashy they'd hoped would catch attention.
"Who are they?" Ashley asked, before remembering they were still on call, and repeating the question.
She was interrupted before she could finish, "stop talking and turn your ship around!"
"We're on auto-"
"Ashley." She heard Sylvie gasp, just as there was a commotion on the other end of the line.
The man had snatched the scroll from the woman, "there are more Grimm in that direction than you've ever seen in your lives, and if you don't turn around NOW you will go down right in the middle of them! Just grab the stick and pull!"
But Ashley only barely heard him, as over the horizon, the saw in short order: A small, quaint farm, a ranch just ahead of that farm, and Grimm.
Grimm as far as the eye could see, all surrounding the farm and the ranch. Ashley and Sylvie were both stunned silent at the sight. They were all just standing there, facing the ranch, unmoving. They were stacked right next to each other, so densely packed that the area around the ranch looked like a sea of jet black and exo-skeletal white.
Ashley took in a hollow breath, feeling her skin go cold as she tried and failed to process what her eyes showed her. "What the fu -"
"TURN AROUND! TURN AROUND NOW YOU'RE ALMOST IN THE -"
Silence.
Everything suddenly went utterly quiet, as though the Brothers themselves had hit the 'mute' button. What was stranger was that suddenly everything looked wrong - colors were duller, Ashley's skin felt colder and stiff, and when she looked to Sylvie, she just looked wrong. Ashley blinked once, twice, shaking her head, only to then notice that the deafening silence stretched much further than she had initially realized. The scroll call was dead, disconnected, the engines in the airship stopped cold, the air conditioning spun down, and the electronics went dark.
The airship had died.
They were a missile, coasting through the air.
"What just happened?" Ashley gasped, her voice sounding strange to her ears.
Then, the airship began to tilt, nose-down.
Sylvie acted first, twisting around in her seat and screaming: "BU -" She stopped halfway through the first word, blinking, her brow furrowed, her expression somehow both shocked but uncannily stiff as she pressed her fingers to her throat. She then shook her head and called out again, "BUCKLE UP WE'RE GOING DOWN!"
"Oh SHIT!" Ashley faintly heard, as she and Sylvie began desperately securing belts and buckles, and the ship tilted further and further down, picking up more speed with every passing second.
Ashley's heart hammered in her chest as they continued hurtling for the ground. The terror of the trip made it feel so much longer than it actually was. The sight of them clearing the ranch, only to be diving right for the sea of writhing Grimm made her cry out in confusion and fear. The last thing she remembered with any clarity was that brief second right before they hit the horde of Grimm, when the electronics sprang back to life, and color came back to the world, only for it all to suddenly start screaming 'danger!'.
Ashley blacked out when they hit the ground. She wasn't conscious for the ship to hit the Grimm nose-first and lance straight through them. She didn't hear the sound of glass shattering, metal groaning and tearing, she didn't see the Grimm smoke fill the air from the dozens they killed instantly on impact.
She didn't even remember what had happened when she finally did wake up to the sound of whip cracks and gunshots. She dumbly wondered why Dusty and Schwarz were sparring in an airship, and then wondered why her head hurt, and why she was hanging from the ceiling. Blurrily, she looked around, and thought it was strange that Sylvie was throwing her hands up like she was about to hit the dive on a roller coaster, although not as odd as the ketchup running down her throat.
As she looked around, and felt the pressure build in her head, alongside something wet dripping out of her ears, she figured she must be having some kind of nightmare.
Or, no, maybe a dream? Because she highly doubted seeing Pyrrha Nikos, charging straight through a horde of Grimm counted as a nightmare. Her shield was raised, and her spear was a blur, stabbing several Grimm each second as she and - oh wow, was that… What was his name? Her head hurt.
She distantly heard someone call out her name, and turned to her left again. Sylvie was awake now, but why did it sound like she was all the way in Patch? Sylvie said something while she struggled with her belt buckles. Ashley tried to tell her not to do that while they were still on the ride - she'd seen too many horror movies to think that was a good idea - but her throat felt dry, and her tongue felt thick. She didn't know what she actually said, but it didn't sound right.
Sylvie released herself and dropped to the ground. Then she actually did sound right next to Ashley, as she whirled around and screamed so loud a shockwave shot out from her lips. Ashley's vision started to blur some more, and Sylvie moved to pull her out of the restraints too. Ashley struggled against it until she realized she didn't know what the things were called that you actually rode in, on roller coasters. Carts? Coaster carts? Cars? Wagons? Sylvie would know, she should ask -
Wham!
Ashley was on the ground, blood flowing from the nose that had hit the glass first. The sharp, sudden pain, plus the release of pressure in her head, flooded her with enough adrenaline that she finally began to push away the shock and wake up for real. Sylvie tried to get Ashley to her feet, but Ashley made the mistake of trying to shake her head clear of the cobwebs - only to immediately fall back to her knees as a wave of nausea hit her hard enough it made her vomit.
She was then pushed to the side by Sylvie, who let loose another sonic shriek. After Ashley regained some semblance of her wits, she looked up to see there were Grimm in the ship. In the back of the ship, barely a few meters between them and yet practically on the other side of the planet for all the good it did them, Dusty and Schwarz were fighting, the former using his whip and his semblance to keep Grimm away while the latter blasted away at them with his gun. Worse was that that was where Sylvie's sonic booster and Ashley's Lovely Lady were stowed - they were weaponless, with more and more Grimm realizing that fact with each second.
The ship shuddered violently, and then Ashley heard the sound of claws scraping against metal, just in time for a hole to get ripped in the hull just a few inches above her head, revealing a snarling beowolf. Ashley had regained enough wherewithal to scramble to her feet just as Sylvie grabbed the collar of her shirt and hauled her up. Just as the Grimm lunged inside, it was speared through the throat by a longsword, and then with the sound of metal rending flesh, it was cleaved in two and burst into smoke.
Sylvie let out another sonic shriek, and then another, but they did no good - and suddenly the two were slammed into by Grimm. Ashley's world went dark again when the back of her head slammed into the airship's windshield, but then she was immediately brought back to consciousness when the Grimm slashed at her torso, leaving several deep gashes all immediately awash with blood. She punched it, for all the good that it did her, but the crash hadn't just knocked her senseless - it had shattered her aura, and she wasn't terribly strong to begin with. She was now face to face with an angry Grimm, and she screamed in fright as it reared up to slash her again.
It was then cleaved in two by an enormous slab of iron, swung so wide and so powerfully that it cut through the ship around it as easily as the Grimm. Beyond blonde hair and a thick beard, she didn't have time to take in any of the warrior's features, as he immediately front-kicked the Grimm ripping at Sylvie, launching it out of the ship like a cannon. He turned to them to ask if they were okay, but Sylvie only knew he'd asked that because she read his lips.
That probably wasn't good.
Just as the fact that she suddenly felt like she was freezing probably wasn't good.
And the fact that bright red joined the deep scarlett spraying out of her chest was definitely not good. She fell to her knees, but didn't hit the ground - the warrior grabbed her, and she suddenly felt warmth returning to her body. It only lasted for a few moments, and if anything, it just made all the pain infinitely worse, but whatever he'd done, she couldn't see anything spraying out of her chest anymore.
That wasn't a bad omen, right?
"Where the hell is he?!"
Ashley blinked, and then all of a sudden she was outside on the ground. She was partially hidden underneath the wrecked airship alongside Sylvie and Schwarz, the former of whom was a pale, ghostly white, and the latter of whom was conscious, but screaming as he held one of his arms. It appeared to be literally hanging off of his body by threads, although if those were cloth or flesh, Ashley couldn't tell. Her torso was tightly bound in improvised bandages, and there were sounds of fighting all around her. Dirt and grass pressed into her back, the air was filled with deep, oily black Grimm smoke, through which thin tendrils of sunlight streamed through. It felt like she'd been dropped, and when her head lolled to the side, she saw Dusty's boots shifting about, as though he were standing up. They twisted and heaved about, each movement accompanied by the loud crack of a whip.
Ashley tried to get up, but found that her arms weighed a million pounds, and her chest and head weighed even more than that. She focused as best she could, but all that did was bring the world into slightly better focus, and allow her to hear the desperate battle raging mere inches away from her on all sides.
"Gods damn it, Aldric!" She heard the first voice shout, cracking he was yelling so loud. "Get out here!"
Oh right, that's -
Ashley blinked again, all she knew was that time has passed, and that it was very, very difficult to open her eyes, but open them she did, because of a literal change in the air. The tendrils of sunlight that snaked through the smoke had changed into literal, physical columns of red-orange light that lanced through the sky and slammed into the ground with earth-shaking force. The loud bang and thrum of these beams were so great that they had drawn Ashley out of her head. She saw a few pairs of legs in front of her, all of them having shifted to face away from the beams, as though shielding their eyes.
It was probably a good idea to do the same, but Ashley's arms were too heavy. She could only watch in awe, and in pain, as one column of light was joined by another, and another, and another. The air previously filled with Grimm smoke was now completely choked by it, only to be cleared each time a beam faded away and the air rushed in to fill the void. Each time a beam hit the ground, it didn't just obliterate Grimm, it carved through the smoke around it, somehow managing to make everything seem just as bright as it was dark.
Then, just like that, it was over.
Things were quiet again.
"Uh - Miss… Miss ma'am? Mister Sir?" Ashley heard Dusty intone, distantly. "Is this normal? Or should I be on my knees praying now?"
He received no answer, as the three still standing turned towards what was now the only sound apart from them. Through the clearing smoke was the sound of footsteps, Ashley's vision was so blurry and so obscured by the smoke that, as the figure became visible, all she could really see was just that it was a person. She did, however, notice one of the three people defending the injured relax at the figure's approach.
The last thing Ashley heard before she fell out for good was a distant: "At the risk of missing the perfect chance for a 'get off my lawn' joke, what the fuck did I miss?"