Here we are, fellas! Back at it again with another idea for you all!
Let me tell you, this idea has been a long time coming, but I've never got around to putting it down to words. But thanks to some recent inspiration from Clone Wars (the CGI show, not the one directed by Genndy Tartakovsky), I was finally able to get the inspiration I needed to make this, so I hope that you all enjoy.
But with that done, let's get right into the meat of this.
Loops
(Inspired by Higurashi: When They Cry)
The story takes place within Beacon Academy, at the start of the school year just after the Initiation, and continues on to the Vytal Festival. We follow the perspective of Ruby Rose, as she leads Team RWBY through their school life, filled with mischief, learning, death-defying stunts, and all sorts of adventures.
Oh, and homework. Lots of homework. An obscene amount of homework, in all honesty.
However, as the story progresses, something more begins to grow in the background. Ruby begins to grow more and more suspicious of the people around her as she attempts to keep up with her studies and training. Her teammates begin to act oddly - staring off into the distance, eyes growing duller for a few moments, saying strange things without much reason, things like that - and no one around her seems to notice these strange patterns of behaviour.
On top of this, the stress of being a team leader, on top of all the extra work and added stress of their escapades into Vale, begin to wear at her more rapidly than anyone could've presumed, and by the time of the Vytal Festival, Ruby is much snappier and temperamental than in canon, and is continuously suspicious of her teammates' strange collective behaviour, with how they exclude her from activities, have talks without her, say strange things to her, and so on.
Her growing paranoia is not helped at all when she finds a razorblade in one of her meals.
With the collective stress and pressure of her academic life, and the now ingrained patterns of behaviour that her teammates are showing, Ruby is now convinced that the three of them are planning something against her, and her temperamental attitude and suspicions only continues to grow.
But then, her three teammates corner her in their room, and they hold her down, with a dull-eyed Yang trying to push a razor blade into her skin and cut her open...
And Ruby grabs the nearest blunt object and beat then all to death with it.
By the time she leaves her room, the corpses on the ground barely resemble the people that they once were, and the walls and Ruby's own body are covered in blood.
But soon, as she walks the hallways of Beacon Academy trailing blood behind her, something in her brain begins to pulsate rapidly before exploding, and Ruby's own heart ceases to beat.
She drops to the floor, dead.
And then, the story begins again once more... from another perspective, all the way back at the beginning of the school year.
This is the basic formula for this story, hence why it is called 'Loops'. Like the franchise that this is based off, Higurashi, the story takes place over several loops of events, all of them almost identical, but with deviating perspectives, actions, and outcomes to each of them, therefore making it harder to predict what is going to happen next.
These loops would be divided into two different kinds of arcs, also much like the original show: these would be 'Question arcs', which would serve to establish the basic mysteries that would form the backbone of this story, and 'Answer arcs', which would serve to answer questions and give clues to the larger mysteries that plague the narrative.
The next loop would focus around Weiss Schnee, and would be a question arc much like the previous. This arc would serve to establish common elements that go into the loops, identify patterns, and so on.
Weiss Schnee would be made part of Team RWBY, and though she would be angered by this, she would force herself to strive through it and continue on to achieve her desired image of perfection, something that she has long wanted to be: the perfect self that she longed to be.
And she would see this image through Pyrrha Nikos, the one whom she considered the epitome of perfection. It was Pyrrha whom Weiss considered the star student, and it was Pyrrha who Weiss would spend much of her arc trying to be like.
However, over the course of time, she would begin to see people looking down on her, mocking her for her weaknesses and imperfections, and Weiss' desire to be flawless would slowly begin to evolve into an obsession. She would begin to take charge of her team and mould them into her own images of flawless perfection, slowly beginning to break them apart mentally and manipulate them using methods of both psychologically warfare and glyph manipulation on them.
Soon, she would begin to physically reshape herself into Pyrrha's image as something inside her began to drive her madder by the day, eventually mutilating herself into resembling her idol, who she now treated as something akin to a god, and beating her teammates into submission when they did not comply with her level of perfection.
As for why her teammates did not fight back... well, once many nights ago, when they were all sleeping, something in Weiss woke up and wormed its way into all of them.
Soon, something within Weiss would cause her to snap, and in a flash of demented violence, she would corner all of Pyrrha's teammates, being Jaune, Ren, and Nora... and murder all of them.
Then, something within the rest of Weiss' teammates snapped as well, and they go on a rampage as well. The demented Weiss walks through a field of blood as the halls filled with violence and madness...
Until her three teammates were stopped and killed by a vengeful Pyrrha Nikos.
A crazed Weiss, driven insane by her own need for perfection, and something else inside her as well, declares her undying admiration for Pyrrha... only to get a shield bash to the face, and an angry champion lunged at her.
The fight between them is long and bloody, but Pyrrha is ultimately the victor, impaling Weiss with her spear and leaving her twitching and bleeding out on the ground.
Weiss dies with a smile on her face, blubbering out her admiration for the perfect Pyrrha as the light left her body... and something inside her shrivelled and died.
This arc is focused on creating patterns and identifying common elements that will be carried through each arc, but in it we establish several different facts:
1. the students of Beacon are suddenly suffering from bouts of paranoia, schizophrenia, and having their negative aspects exaggerated and amplified.
2. there is a theory proposed by theologists and scientists, called the Ether Conversion, that aura manipulates brain activity at a young age in order to create warriors naturally opposed to the Grimm, stimulating certain impulses and emotions such as aggression and anger, and leaving their warriors as killing machines from early development.
3. there is an old legend known as the Wishing Well Curse, in which a man, angry at the world, wished death upon the world itself, and an old witch that lived in a wishing well answered, and cursed all that opposed his desires, even in death, to a grisly and violent fate, less they sate his bloody wish by committing violence themselves.
4. there was once an incident known as the Red Velvet Massacre, and it turns out that Nora had something to do with it...
Once more we start again in another loop, this time from the perspective of Ren, who himself is a believer in the Wishing Well Curse, and does his best to ignore his fears over it and the needs in which to fulfil the curse, which he takes out on the Grimm themselves. However, once more the symptoms of schizophrenia, irrationality, and paranoia begin to take hold, and he begins to focus himself more and more on the curse and how he can appease the mythical figures found in it.
However, surprisingly, he can temper the symptoms via his semblance, which turns him invisible to Grimm.
Here, we find ourselves in both an answer arc and a question arc. Here, we find answers in the Wishing Well Curse, and see that it is an old tale made told to scare children, but does have some roots in history and fact, even if they are exaggerated. We also see that the legend is founded in blood and gore, and that many religious practitioners have cast out those who believed in the Wishing Well Curse, due to the practitioners being considered heretics for their bloody practices, involving the slaughter of many in appeasement to the old gods of their choosing.
However, we also find more questions to be raised, as we find that Nora seems to know more about the Curse than she lets on, and, not helping Ren's paranoia, the echoes of the dead begin to follow them, whispering into his ear about this and that, and demanding peace from him.
Ren, believing them to be the whispers of his gods, responds by finally losing a grip on his semblance, going mad, and killing Nora. Then he killed Jaune, then Pyrrha, and finally himself.
Their bodies wouldn't be discovered until hours later, when Glynda Goodwitch, wanting an explanation as to why Team JNPR had missed their classes, find their bloody corpses in their room.
And Ozpin would look on, with an expression of disappointment across him.
The next arc is an answer arc, focusing in Yang Xiao Long. However, instead of focusing on her insanity, we instead shift back all the way into the first arc, and see Ruby's fall to insanity through Yang's perspective.
Here, we find that many, if not all, of the strange behaviours and looks, and even the dull eyes, that Ruby's teammates were sporting were all hallucinations. Yang and the others were actually acting normally, and it was all in Ruby's distorted imagination. Worse yet, we discover that the strange talks that Ruby's teammates had had with her were all muddled and confused in her mind to mean something else: her teammates had been trying to identify what was wrong with her and help her.
They had tried to ask for Ozpin's help in figuring out what was wrong with Ruby, but he just put it down to dealing with a new environment and the responsibilities that came with it.
Despite this logical reasoning, this is not a good enough explanation for them.
So, the rest of Team RWBY try to help Ruby, eventually trying to get her to join them on activities, and even, at the end, trying to play a joke on her in order to get her to cheer up...
And she beats them all to death for it.
Yang's arc ends, and another begins as the voices of angels and demons flow over her...
Now, we begin once more through the eyes of Jaune Arc, in one of the most important answer arcs to date. Here, instead of beginning from the school year, we begin just after Ruby and Yang's arcs. Here, we discover that he had actually been observing Ruby's strange behaviour over the course of their time in Beacon, documenting her strange activities and trying to figure out what was going on himself. Upon discovering the legend of the Wishing Well Curse for himself, as well as a few scant details of the Red Velvet Massacre, he begins to piece together what is going on for himself.
However, soon he begins to feel more paranoid and stressed about the people around it, and that's when he realises that whatever was affecting Ruby and Yang is now affecting him as well.
With this keen awareness of what is going to happen to him, as well as a fear of harming those around him, Jaune recognises the need for him to hurry, especially with the ticking clock around him, and recruits Penny Polendina into helping him figure out what is wrong with him, and if it could affect anyone else.
And so the two of them begin their investigation, and upon performing an autopsy on Ruby's corpse, they discover a strange, out of place piece of meat in Ruby's brain that should not be there, yet looked rotted and filled with holes.
Suddenly, Ozpin discovers what they are up to and orders them to be arrested. Now on the run, Penny and Jaune disguise themselves as Atlesian soldiers in order to continue their investigation, and come to the conclusion that the strange tumour in Ruby's head was a strange parasite, which self-destructed when Ruby's life came to an end, though it seemed half complete and filled with missing spaces.
Realising that the same parasite is wriggling around in his head, Jaune undergoes the risky procedure of having it removed from his brain - helped along by Penny, who has a million medical procedures preprogramed into her mind - and with the strange paranoia and alien anger removed from his head, he and Penny discover that the parasite is actually an organic control chip mixed with Grimm matter.
White Grimm matter.
Determining that this chip is the cause of Ruby's breakdown and Jaune's downward spiral, the two determine that the chip runs on the Ether Conversion theory by manipulating aura and brain activity in order to increase aggression and violent tendencies. What's more, they discover that the chip spreads itself like a parasite into other hosts, via taking control of their bodies during times of sleep, and forcing themselves onto their sleeping neighbours and injecting clones of the Grimm/organic hybrid chip into them via oral contact.
Coming to the conclusion that the chips must've been inserted into them via the Emerald Forest, and realising that everyone in Beacon Academy is at risk, Jaune and Penny move to try and get the word out about the threat now lurking at their doors...
But they are stopped by Atlesian soldiers, and killed. Their research is destroyed, and all the evidence that they had accumulated is burnt up.
And thus, we begin again, now looking through the eyes of Blake Belladonna once more in her own question arc.
Here, we see Blake's already existing paranoia, even at the start of the school year, begins to amplify and grow thanks to the parasitic chip lodged in her head, and she begins to frantically search for foes and forces hiding in the shadows, eventually leading her to draw conclusions and make connections between all sorts of disparate and separated groups, from the White Fang to Roman Torchwick to even her own teammates.
However, as her paranoia worsens, she begins to hear voices in her head. That of angels and demons, and of those already passed away, coiling around her and whispering things that she could not hear but knew were there. The intrusive whispers only began to drive her madder still.
But then came the flashes. Images and glimpses of times that did not happen, of events that have not come to pass...
Prophesies of her own demise.
This only serves to push her over the limit, and in a mixture of coiled fear and paranoia of the world and people around her, she begins to claw at her own head, digging at the parasite within her while the voices only continue to grow louder and louder, and as her insanity continues to grow, her teammates panic, and try to work out what is wrong with her.
And in a flash of deluded self-preservation, she snaps and kills all three of them.
Blake is captured and sent off to a mental institution. There, she is poisoned in her sleep, and dies.
Another arc comes to pass, and we look through Pyrrha's perspective in her own question/answer arc, in which she begins to suffer from her own flashes of things that had not come to pass, and alternative events, as well as the voices of those who had passed on as well, now growing stronger and stronger with each loop.
However, instead of seeing her death, Pyrrha sees something else.
She sees the death of her teammates, of Nora, Ren, and Jaune.
Slowly, Pyrrha begins to grow more and more protective of her teammates, secluding them to her own company and keeping them to herself. Eventually, as the voices continued to grow louder and the flashes continue to grow stronger and more persistent, Pyrrha's protectiveness shifts into obsessiveness, and she becomes more and more controlling of her teammates, to the point of locking them away and threatening to break every bone on their bodies if they ever thought of leaving her.
Yeah, Pyrrha turns into a yandere.
In the end, the voices of the angels and demons begin to overwhelm her, as do the flashes of past lives and deaths in her mind, and the mind control hybrid parasite within her threatens to worm out and infect the others.
So, she resolves to kill anyone who threatens to take her teammates away from her, and almost succeeds, until she is confronted by her own team, and finally brought down...
Until they themselves are killed by Ozpin, who is revealed to be the one responsible for the mind control parasites and White Grimm hybrids.
We begin a new loop, that being an answer arc set not in a new present, but in the past of Summer Rose, where it is revealed that she too is a believer of the Wishing Well Curse, and has secretly been practicing the religion's twisted belief via murdering the criminals and thugs that she came across during her days as a Huntress, though she would, of course, do this all in secret.
However, everything changes when the voices of the angels and demons begin to haunt her, and in trying to banish them, she unleashes her silver eyes on a Grimm... and purifies it, turning it into a White Grimm.
This grants both Ozpin and Summer a few ideas, as Summer begins to experiment with creating more White Grimm, and Ozpin, desperate for ideas on how to unite all of the world together against the Grimm and Salem, allows for her to continue, as she begins to experiment with the old corpses of those that she had killed for the Wishing Well Curse.
As the voices of angels and demons continue to haunt her, Summer begins to experiment with hybridising the White Grimm with human tissue, and begins by implanting the resulting chip in the mind of a random human - the head of a gang - intent on controlling his movements through her connection to the White Grimm in the chip.
Little did she know, however, that the gang leader was actually protecting an old orphanage, who's primary ward he unwillingly infected with the parasitic chip.
An orphanage known as the Red Velvet Orphan's Home.
Another answer arc begins, taking place within the Red Velvet Orphan's Home, and through a brand new perspective.
That of a young Nora Valkyrie, before she had ever met Ren.
One night, Nora is woken up by the voices of angels and demons, and she receives a flash of another time, another place... as well as that of her own grizzly death at the hands of her fellow orphans.
Unlike the others, Nora is somehow able to hear the voices of the angels and demons, and they warn her of the people around her, and who she can and cannot trust. Soon enough, her fellow orphans begin to act strangely, suddenly becoming more paranoid and violent, much like the wards looking over them.
Soon, on the recommendation of the angels and demons, Nora moves to escape one night, but finds that not just the orphanage, but the entire town has been cordoned off by Atlesian forces, but soon, thanks to the angels and demons, she is able to find a friendly Atlesian soldier who allows her the chance to slip out of the town, and so she goes back to the orphanage to collect her things.
However, soon the entire town begins to succum to violence, and the orphans of the Red Velvet Orphan's Home begin to murder each other in their rooms in a frenzy of murder, along with the wards and adults. The entire town begins to massacre each other, and Nora is barely able to escape.
However, as soon as she comes across the friendly Atlesian soldier, he is killed by Ozpin and Summer, and the two attempt to force her back in the town before settling on just killing her.
But then, Nora is saved by the voices of the angels and demons, who invade Ozpin and Summer's minds and thoughts and overwhelm them, allowing Nora the chance to escape with her life.
Now, the truth behind what is happening to the students of Beacon Academy is revealed: soon after the Red Velvet Massacre, Ozpin had Summer imprisoned. Though he had survived the angels and demons attacking him, the mental assault had left Summer Rose braindead, so Ozpin simply repurposed her. now unable to do anything but continuously create new White Grimm for him to create into the parasitic control chips. Now desperate for a way to unite all of mankind together against Salem, Ozpin would allow the parasites to spread through the Beacon student population, so that when the Vytal Festival came to pass, the parasites would spread themselves through the academies, and then through the kingdoms, allowing him to control them all through the Ether Conversion theory via manipulating their aura, bringing them all under one banner, and finally uniting the whole world against Salem after thousands of years of trying on his own.
The random brutal killings and cases of insanity? They had simply been random trial runs throughout the loops. By the time the Vytal Festival would come around, Ozpin would have a completed and stable version of the chip ready to be administered to the students and tourists visiting Beacon Academy in the thousands.
But what of the angels and demons? What of the Wishing Well Curse?
As we find out in Nora's second arc, that being a return to the present day, the angels and demons are a product of the Wishing Well Curse: they are the spirits of the dead who were killed by those who practiced the twisted religion.
Long ago, there was a woman who wished in a well for herself and her loved ones to have a good life, and gave an old Witch a loaf of bread and much coin for her to make a new life for herself in the wake of an unfortunate tragedy. Humbled by the woman's generosity, the Old Witch granted the woman's wish, and she and her loved ones spent the rest of their lives in good fortune.
That is the truth of the Wishing Well Curse. Unfortunately, the legend has been distorted over its thousands of years of existence, and now has been misidentified and mistaken for a legend of evil, and a religion of malice.
And it is those who have been killed by the worshippers of this religion that would suffer the most, as thanks to the Old Witch's powers (whether they be magic or a semblance is unknown), the spirits of those who have been murdered by the Wishing Well Curse's believers still linger, connected to the myth and becoming the curse itself, unable to move on to the afterlife and find peace, thus becoming the angels and demons who still haunt the world.
It is also a curse that transcends universes, as those who have been tied down by the curse have been given the ability to travel between realities, only to watch and grow in pain and suffering as more people are killed by the believers of the Wishing Well Curse.
But now, they finally have a chance to break free and transcend into the afterlife. Thanks to some unknown factor, the parasitic control chip in Nora's brain malfunctioned, allowing her to retain her free will and communicate with the spirits of the dead - the angels and demons - through the White Grimm itself.
Now armed with new knowledge and companions, Nora now seeks to bring down Ozpin and his gathering of Wishing Well Curse believers and foil their plans.
And to do that, she would have her army of spirits - her angels and demons - show her friends in RWBY and JNPR the alternate realities that they have lived through, thanks to the spirits ability to share memories and experiences through psychic connections, and share with them the threats they now face, and the horrible experiences that they have been through.
At first, they are afraid. Broken. Tormented by all that they have done. But soon, as they see the reality behind their true enemy, and the voices of the angels and demons that remain trapped in the world thanks to the Wishing Well Curse, they all unite together against their common foe in Ozpin and Summer Rose.
And the first way that they fight back is destroying the White Grimm hybrid parasites within the students around them and in themselves. Thanks to both their remembered experiences and the shared knowledge of the spirits guiding them, the eight Hunters are able to create an antivirus for the chips and inject it into the meals and drinks in the cafeteria, giving the students a collective immunity and killing the chips already in the heads of the students while they were still in development.
Then, they go after Ozpin and his crew as well, planning on giving them a taste of their own medicine.
They feed him and his followers their own parasites, and expose their crimes to the world itself.
Though Ozpin's allies in the kingdoms, as well as the Atlesians in Vale, try to cover up the experiments and Ozpin's actions, thanks to the voices of the angels and demons, as well as the flashes of alternate realities where they had suffered and died, Beacon Academy's populace. as well as visiting students, rally around the eight friends, and with the spirits of the dead backing them up, they go to war with Ozpin and the Wishing Well Curse religion...
And win.
With the churchgoers of the Wishing Well Curse going to war with each other in a haze of bloodthirst, and Ozpin loosing control of himself, the angels and demons lead the students downstairs into the basement, where the aura transfer machine lingers. Throwing him into it, the students drain the aura from the man and deposit it into an empty casket, sealing him away forever in a waking nightmare.
With Ozpin defeated and his plans foiled, the students expose his plots to the world, and implicate what's left of his allies - those who were aware of the conspiracy, and those who supported it. Summer Rose is taken away for prison and mental rehabilitation, and many of the spirits who were tied down by the Wishing Well Curse begin to fade away...
But not all of them do. Many still linger, and they hang around Nora in the droves...
And Nora makes it her mission to hunt down and destroy the last of those who believe in the Wishing Well Curse, purify its origins, restore the original magics of the story, and put those whom have been murdered by those same believers to rest.
So says Nora Valkyrie, the descendant of the Old Witch.
I've been feeling hard pressed for motivation recently. I've been struggling with writing Ascendancy, so much so that I had to take a week off writing just to try and regain my motivation, and then I had to delete seven thousand words worth of a chapter because I had written it before my break when I was still in my motiveless haze and just didn't like it.
Part of me blames the heat. It's been so freaking hot recently that all I've felt was tired. It's been exhausting. Plus trying to find a part time job, applying for university, trying to look up universal credit, travelling around, and all that jazz takes a lot out of you.
So anyways, here's this whopper of an idea for you all. I know it's probably not the most original - that of it being so closely inspired by Higurashi and all that - but I've been starved for good ideas recently as well. They usually tend to come naturally, but still...
Again, I blame the heat.
But with all that said and done, please leave a review, and if you want to use this idea then send me a quick PM and be on your way! But with that said and done, stay safe, stay hydrated, and I'll see you all next time!
Titanmaster 117 out!