AN:
Guys, there's fanart, now.
Lemme say that again - there's fanart!
Someone took time out of their day to illustrate (and make a few comic panels) my half-baked fanfiction, and it's fuckin' cool.
Check this dude out: many9919{dot}deviantart{dot}com
And now, this:
Chapter 38
Aldric had compared his healing abilities to Old Man Logan on multiple occasions before, in that as long as he survived the fight and got a good night's sleep, he'd make it through whatever he came across. That hadn't changed with the terran invasion, but holy hell did he feel he had to emphasize the 'Old Man' part, because when he was released the next day and given his medications, he made the mistake of not taking the pain meds before the ones he'd been given intravenously had worn off. He felt like a walking, talking bruise - even breathing released a soreness in his muscles, and it felt like forever before the pills kicked in and brought the pain and stiffness down to manageable levels.
Fortunately for Aldric, he wasn't released first thing in the morning, but rather late that night, so his 'care package' delivery from Pyrrha came and went without him needing to explain to her why he wouldn't be returning immediately to Beacon when he got out. The care package itself was mostly harmless items, consisting of some proper clothes - Pyrrha lamented having found his coat, but it being in such a terrible state, that she didn't want to give it to him all shredded as it was - his scroll - the CCT was still out, so it was only local signals and broadcasts - and a little surprise.
"What the hell did you people do to my arm?!" Aldric guffawed, after he unwrapped his arm.
Pyrrha stifled a laugh, "Ecru heard it had been damaged by your fighting, and when Ruby heard she was going to try to fix it herself, we all kind of started putting our own touches on it."
Aldric kept laughing, "I'll say!" It looked less like Venom Snake's arm than it did a black and red easel, covered in so much graffiti that it looked as though he had a sleeve of tattoos.
Whatever damage had apparently been done, Aldric couldn't see it, but he did see 'Fear and Dead Men!', sprayed on with electric blue paint and signed by Yang, Ruby's rose symbol with her name orbiting it, 'GEMS' on each of his knuckles, the word 'GROOVY!' painted across the split in the plates that housed his chainsaw, no doubt thought up by Ecru, 'A Blade In the Hand' on the elbow of all places, and signed by Weiss, 'Light fingered!' on the back of his hand and signed by Myrtle, 'My sword is cooler than yours!' on his underarm and signed by Srebro, 'Never an enemy of ours.' signed by Blake, and the phrase 'I bite!', signed by Pyrrha. Overall, Aldric got the same feeling he had when he'd broken his arm once, back home, and everyone signed the cast.
Aldric shook his head. "Is this permanent paint, Pyrrha?" He asked, "I shower with this thing, you know."
She grinned, as he twisted it into place. "No. Ruby's rose and Yang's contribution may be a bit harder to wash off than everything else - they each used spray paint before Weiss could stop them - but everything else should come off in time." She shrugged, "we wanted to do something special for you."
Aldric let out a long breath of air, "well consider me feeling special." He flexed his robotic fingers, "you check in with Jaune?"
Pyrrha nodded, "Ren and Nora are with him now. I was going to go there next, is there anything you need?" She asked.
Aldric shook his head, "nah, I'm armed now, so I'm good."
Unfortunately, his immature attempt at humor flew over Pyrrha's head, and with another nod and a warm smile, she vacated his room, and Aldric sensed her head down the hall to Jaune's. When the night came around, the Doctor returned to swap out Aldric's bandages and give him another check over, and when he declared Aldric fit enough to leave, he gave him a bag of pill bottles, instructed him on when and how to use them all, and sent him on their way, bringing Aldric to the here and now.
He wasn't going back to Beacon, but rather the Garden. He was using his White Cane, his lightsaber hilt missing from its end, as less of a visual replacement and more of a walking stick. He entered the Garden, which was astonishingly close to the Green Line, he realized, and checked in with the concierge, using her and his radar to locate Cinder and Mercury. Descending the levels, he made a brief pit stop with the prosthetist to place the order for Jaune's arm, telling him to make it the same as Aldric's, minus the chainsaw. Then he made it to the hotel rooms and navigated his way to Cinder's.
He knocked thrice, and on the third knock, she had the door open, a knife hidden behind her back, which vanished in a shower of embers when she realized it was him.
"Aldric." She breathed, "it is good to see you are alive." She stepped back and opened the door.
"Oh, if you were one of my nurses, you'd be saying something different."
She frowned, "why?"
Aldric grinned, tapping at a swollen portion of his mouth, "I was bored and fooling around..." He said, walking into the room. "Might have... Done something stupid." He still tasted the iron taste of blood in the corner of his mouth, but he shook his head. "Doesn't matter that much."
She shook her head, "fear and dead men?"
Aldric snorted, "holy shit that one's not going away, is it?" He shook his own head, "I've got something for you." He said, splitting open the plates on his arm, and fishing for one of the smaller spare Power Glove canisters he kept inside.
"Oh?"
"Yup." He removed the canister and fell into a seat, and with a thought, a lightsaber appeared in his hands, however it was different from his - far darker, looking almost scorched, and with two vents sticking out from each side of the top, just below the opening for the blade. "If you saw that, then I assume you saw the sword I was using?"
Cinder nodded, sitting down on the edge of her bed, hands folded in her lap.
"Well... I'm keeping that one. You say 'lightsaber' to someone from my world, odds are that's the first one that comes to mind." He said, clicking the button on this one, and holding it out, as a bright red blade shot out from the top, and then the vents flared to life, two more blades slowly extending, finishing the cross-guard look; but instead of the loud 'zhoom!', it was the sound of a plasma torch sparking to life and burning the air. The blade also flared and wavered, sparking in the air, giving the weapon a serrated look, halfway between a proper lightsaber and a proper plasma torch. "You can have this one, though." He said, as the blade stabilized and quieted down.
Cinder's eyes lit up, both from the bright red reflection of the blade's light, and from her clear desire to possess it, but then she frowned. "How did you make it?"
Aldric grinned, and flicked the blade again, deactivating it, and resting it in his lap. "When I first made my shields with the Power Glove, whenever someone would hit them it would sound like they were punching glass. But around the time I fought Yang, which was when I added color to it, it started sounding like it was made of metal. I didn't miss that change, but it never really registered as something I should've paid attention to. Until I had a criminal amount of time to kill a few weeks ago, and on a whim I took it to a metallurgist. Want to know what I learned?" He asked, "it wasn't made out of light, but metal... A metal that didn't exist on the periodic table."
Cinder blinked, "how is that possible?"
Aldric's grin widened. "He asked the same thing... And I joked and told him 'magic'." Cinder's frown dropped to a shocked, neutral expression, the implication dawning on her. "Yeah - I only realized afterwards that I'd unintentionally been correct. See, I think what happened was I used my powers unconsciously, funneled them through the Power Glove and used them as the fuel and it as a focus to create things from my memories. My proof came when I went back the next day with those claws I like to make, and they too were made of metal, but a different kind." A beat, "I told him I'd looted a meteor and it was in Mistral, to keep him from asking too many questions."
She nodded, "okay." She said, brushing her hair out of her face, "so the swords?"
"Another thing from fiction. I wanted to see if this was a one-off or something I could do intentionally... And if I could create complex machines or only simple instruments. So - " He brandished the crossguard lightsaber. "I did."
A beat, before she sneered. "And 'fear and dead men'." She said, "that came from where you got those swords?"
Aldric clapped his hands, leaned back in his chair and pointed at Cinder. "You know me so well, Hot Stuff." He grinned. "Yeah. The long and short of that is Ozpin was looking desperate for a plan, I dropped him one, and he needed me to buy the navy time to do it."
"You are on speaking terms with Ozpin?" Cinder intoned, cautiously.
"Hell the fuck no!" Aldric laughed, "well, yeah." He shrugged, "kind of. You make the reputation I do... Second in the class, he tends to take notice... And I'd just finished turning Pyrrha Nikos into a living Rail Gun to take out some of the jets. That kind of stuff doesn't escape notice, even in a warzone. He asked what I thought, and I told him."
"Do you think you are at risk?" Cinder asked.
Aldric shook his head, "might be in a better spot now than I've ever been. If you got 'fear and dead men' down here, imagine how fast it's spreading through Beacon. Might be able to use that." He shrugged, "but back to the sword. See, I intend to give it to you - shit, you can have it now." He plucked it out of his lap and tossed it to Cinder, who caught it deftly. "But I am hoping for a little something in return. Call it back to our talk after the Maiden, about trust." He nodded, locking his new eyes with Cinder's.
"You want to know what happened." Cinder surmised, crossing her legs and examining the hilt. "The button, here?" She at least didn't do like Luke Skywalker did and look right down the lethal end of the device.
"Mhm." Aldric grunted, "just uh... Be careful. That's plasma, ionized fucking plasma. Same shit that makes up the sun. So it'll cut through anything, aura or not, I'm pretty sure." He said, "a knob down on the bottom, flip it to the left and it'll be on safe mode, but less lethal. To the right, and it's lethal like nobody's business." He leaned back in his chair, "and, yes. I know my people have some wicked advanced tech in comparison to yours, at least when it comes to leaving their planet... But we aren't anywhere fucking near leaving our solar system, or going to another goddamn universe entirely. So I've been thinking a lot as to how it could have happened... And then I remembered something." He frowned, though his tone was still civil.
"Oh?"
"I marked up the flight manifest during that week before you guys came for me. Burned the bodies and marked off every one I found. There were five names left, including mine, that coincided with bodies I never found." He explained, "so four other Masters potentially out there. And since I'm pretty sure we haven't found the other Maidens... That means the only people who could have opened up inter-universal wormholes would have been those Masters... And from what I've seen, Ozpin and his ilk aren't the kind to go cracking into other universes and wrecking shit...
"Now I trusted you when you said you didn't know anything at the time." Aldric said, "but it's been a week since then, and I know you've got ways of talking to Big Boss that don't need scrolls and the CCT... So have you learned anything since then?" He asked, earnestly. "Anything at all about why I had to cut through at least thirty terran soldiers? Why there were navy ships and jets hammering the shit out of Vale?"
To his surprise, Cinder nodded, but her answer made his blood run cold. "Not Vale."
Aldric blinked, "well where are we then, Vacuo?" He snorted.
"Not just Vale." She explained, straightening her back. "Vacuo... Atlas... Mistral, too. From what I've been told, Vale and Atlas are the only ones who didn't get pushed back to their academies in the first day."
He hated being right.
"I'd be tempted to say that's a war on four fronts..." Aldric said, slowly. "But I get the strangest feeling it isn't just one country slugging it out against Remnant, here."
Cinder shook her head, "I haven't been told everything, but this is part of the plan." She said, "your world's governmental conglomerate... The United Nations? Now that they've a stable and reliable access to this world, they have declared war on Remnant in its entirety. Everyone there is contributing."
"Well... You don't know about the North Koreans, lady. So most everyone." He said, running his hands through his hair. "How?!" He asked, "why?!"
"A part of the plan, Aldric." Cinder repeated, coolly. "As powerful as we will become, the more Maidens we capture and the more power we take from them... They are a means to an end." She said, "and reaching that end will take time." She placed the lightsaber to her right, folded her hands, and leaned forward. "Have you read of the Deity Brothers?" And when Aldric nodded, she continued. "They left behind four relics, and beyond the Maidens, those relics are our true goal. They are hidden in the four Academies, and initially." She said, "our intent had been to raise our own army to attack them and find the Relics."
"But?"
"But I learned after speaking with our leader that, while that still is our goal... When we were able to pull your airship to our world, that planned changed. Was adapted. Updated." She explained, "at the time I wasn't aware of how immensely compartmentalized it was. I thought that because I had been told to watch the ship itself, that that had been the length and breadth of the plan."
"But?"
"But others in our group had been instructed to search for survivors in the outlying areas, and if they did, to recruit and train them separately from you, or the other survivors." Aldric wasn't sure, but from the way she was frowning, he wondered if she wasn't sore about this, as if she was mad Salem hadn't trusted her with this part of the plan. "Three of the four names you mentioned."
"There are three other Masters?" Aldric repeated, "what are their names?"
But Cinder shook her head, "she didn't tell me." She said, "she wishes to keep things as compartmentalized as possible, as I said. I do not even know if they still yet live in the face of terran counterattacks, but she told me she intends to use the other Masters, and the terran militaries, to simultaneously attack all four academies. Something we would not have been able to do had we not successfully opened a connection to your world."
Once again, Aldric felt that his being right was becoming less and less of a good thing. "You think we can do that?" He asked. "I thought we wanted to wait until the Vytal Festival."
"And wait we will." She said, with a nod. "We control the flow of the war between Earth and Remnant, Aldric. Earth's greatest strength is in its mountainously higher industrial capacity, but that access is tenuous at best, they do not understand where it comes from or how it remains open. That is why they all cluster so tightly around the wormholes leading to Earth, and stage their entire war efforts from the coasts, from which they can easily retreat back to their ships and through the wormholes again, before they close."
"Are you trying to say if you kill the wormholes they won't just slam shut?"
She nodded, "three incursions we've launched on Earth, and each wormhole required an hour to close once we cut power to them. The stabilized, self-sustaining ones we have opened near the four kingdoms, they will take longer."
"Uh... Incursions?" Aldric tilted his head.
She nodded, "to spark this war, first we opened one connection and dropped Grimm into one of their cities. Then another, with more Grimm... And then a third, we used one of the Masters to construct an Atlesian warship and a robotic force capable of piloting it, and sent that through, with data to suggest that they were responsible for your flight's disappearance, the two Grimm attacks, and that this technology they were using had been leaked to an unknown party."
Aldric gaped at her, "how did you get an entire planet to buy that?" He asked, "I don't buy that!"
"You're privy to the truth, Aldric." Cinder countered, "and your world has nothing else to believe but that. Put yourself in their position, where one day, out of nowhere, an alien force begins attacking you, and then an organized military force arrives later to keep up the pressure." She reasoned, "with no precedent or source of information but what they can obtain, they can only act upon what they have."
Aldric shook his head, "lady, my people are adept at games political and war. They wouldn't dedicate to this attack without something big, and I guarantee you the point would have been brought up -"
"I don't know, Aldric!" She snapped.
Well that shut him up. "Come again?"
"This entire chain of events has surprised me just as much as they have you, and our leader... I am not a part of the decision making process when it comes to the Earth. If this information confuses you, you can imagine how out of my element I am."
"You're out on the field, and Big Boss isn't giving you everything to work with?" Aldric deadpanned, "holy crap, who is running this army?" He shook his head, "how are we supposed to execute a plan with Vytal if the entire goddamn planet is fighting a war against another entire goddamn planet? For fuck's sake, they keep up like they are, Vytal won't even happen!" A beat, "and why even wait until Vytal if Earth is kicking Remnant's ass right now?!" He added, finding himself unable to resist the urge to play devil's advocate.
"I don't know, Aldric." She stressed again, teeth gritted. "Earth as a whole is being handled by another associate and another Master." She gritted her teeth, "I have only been told to go according to plan and react accordingly."
Aldric let out a long, exasperated sigh. "This makes no fucking sense, Cinder. Let's say... For sake of argument... We slug it out with the terrans for the next... Oh... Three months." He said, waving his hand about. "Let's say that because I'm here, I fuck up their operations in Vale beyond all recognition, and it actually takes them that long. Then let's say that because Atlas is basically Remnant United States - god that's a fight I want to see, by the way." He honestly was willing to bet a few of those glass coins that that was how everything was working out: A few UN Security Council nations to every kingdom, and Earth's military superpower to Remnant's superpower. "- we can assume they're powerful enough to fend off their invasion too and get the terrans to leave. That still leaves two kingdoms out there that may or may not be fully fucking conquered, depending on how many countries donated hardware to this invasion.
"You -" He pointed at Cinder, "are suggesting that at this point we'll cut the portals, and the terrans will cut their losses and fucking run, or risk being stuck in another universe, surrounded by enemies, with no resources or fuel flowing in, for an indeterminate - potentially permanent - amount of time... And I'm having a lot of trouble believing that all of Remnant will just go..." He leaned back and lightened his tone, "... 'Huh... That was weird'..." He shrugged, "... 'let's party!', and then throw a big enormous Vytal Festival. I mean it's possible... But..." He shrugged, "do you see what I mean? Entire planet was just at war, a shit load of people are dead, entire countries would have been thrashed... Sure I guess they'd want the festival to take everyone's mind off of it but... Really."
"I understand and share your concerns, Aldric." Cinder responded, "but the fact of the matter is that neither you nor I have experience in large-scale war... And the two who do are the ones leading the Atlas campaign, and the efforts of Earth and Remnant."
"Cinder..." Aldric leaned forward, "Big Boss' plan seems to be to artificially keep this war going until Remnant is trashed and Earth's dedicated almost all of its defenses here, so she can destroy them both while they're weak. But you all don't know what they're capable of. If we push Earth too far... If we make them think they've been thrown into a corner..." He shook his head. "You may not like what rabbits they'll pull out of the hat." Aldric was almost one hundred percent sure there were already nuclear submarines spread throughout Remnant, that would not leave even if the surface fleets fled through the collapsing wormholes, and he feared for what Earth's contingency plans were if they thought this war would spill back their way.
Worse was that Aldric knew if there was a loyal Master out there, in charge of rattling the terrans and pissing them off, he was certain that this Master had told his handler about nuclear weapons, which meant Aldric had to reveal that card or risk losing trust with Cinder.
So when she tried to head it off with, "I know, Al -"
He interrupted with, "no, Cinder... You don't." He said, "imagine a bomb... More powerful than any you've ever seen. The kind of sheer, unbridled power we've only ever seen in the Maiden before - and greater than hers, even." He said, "imagine this bomb can wipe out an entire city and kill tens of thousands with just one blast." A beat, "and then realize that this bomb I'm describing is one of the weakest we've ever created, that the bombs we have now..." He shook his head, "Cinder, terrifying Earth was a bad move, because this planet? Over here? It's just a place to them, they don't care about it. And if you make them think even for a second that this war could spill back onto Earth, all four kingdoms, all the Maidens... I'd even wager the relics we're looking for - they'll all be wiped out in their entirety, and they won't regret it.
"Because we've shown them that there's life out there - and that it wants their blood." He explained, "we haven't just put the fear of god into them, Hot Stuff - we've put an existential dread in them. They think their way of life and their very existence as a species is going to be threatened by the four kingdoms or the Grimm, respectively. They will not hesitate to use nuclear force if a conventional war doesn't go their way." He raised his hand, "and to head that off at the pass, the reason I never said anything about this bomb is because I don't know how to make one, with or without magic, and I never thought it would be relevant."
She nodded, her orange eyes lowering to the ground as she leaned back on her hands, frowning in thought. "As I said, Aldric... I understand and share your concerns... But the fact of the matter is, we will not know the full extent of her plan until it is concluded, and we can meet with her personally."
He sighed, leaning over and rubbing at his eyes. "Alright... Alright." He nodded, "oh - uh..." He straightened back up, "have a few names. Was going to wait to drop them but with what's going on now... They may want a Maiden sooner, rather than later."
"Who do you have?"
"Front runner is Pyrrha Nikos. Top of her class, good sense of good and evil, strong moral compass, whole nine yards, she'd made a good enough candidate." He said, "I'd say runner up would be one of Goud's teammates, probably Ecru, due to her fighting ability."
"None from the silver-eyed huntress' team?"
"Those chicks have issues, Hot Stuff." Aldric grinned, "you'd get along fine."
Cinder rolled her eyes, "I'm more than willing to test this on you, Aldric." She said, picking up the lightsaber again. "You say this can cut through anything?"
"You've never used a plasma torch, haven't you?" He asked, "fucking things can cut through solid steel like they're not there, and that's just with a tiny jet like we've got on Earth. What you're holding there, that's..." He snorted, "oh man... Way stronger. Generates heat like the sun, you see, so it can feasibly cut through anything, yes... But if you're holding a material with an enormous melting point, or something incredibly dense, then you may be able to defend against it for a little while."
"How about your shield?" Cinder asked, sparking the blade again and briefly filling the air with the sound of burning plasma, "if I am to understand your implication... You drew it from somewhere in your fiction, and from what I've seen of it... Very durable indeed." She held a hand over the hissing red blade, slowly lowering it until it was almost touching it.
Aldric eyed her hand over the blade, "ain't that a question people want answered?" He chuckled, looking back up, as Cinder removed her hand from the blade and deactivated it, "you're about to ask why it isn't hot." And she nodded, "it's been a damn long time since I've read up on my Star Wars lore... But way I understand it, it's... Perpetual." He said, "blade comes up, goes down, and the energy required to sustain it is fed back into the mechanism, meaning it only ever has a physical presence and a net energy expenditure when the field is broken and something touches it." He shrugged, "so... I guess that's how the heat is contained, and we're not being blinded every time it activates. It radiates no energy unless something breaks the magnetic field containing it."
"That, makes no sense, Aldric."
"Oh, you want no fucking sense?!" Aldric barked, "let me say again that that thing's a stick of superheated, ionized, plasma! You and I should be blind right now - double blind, for me!" He leaned back and laughed, shaking his head. "I pulled it from a sci-fi movie, Hot Stuff. From the seventies."
"Touche." She ran her finger over the ports on the side, "and why these? I did not see anything like this on the blade you used from the footage."
Aldric shook his head, "couldn't tell you. It looks cool?" He shrugged. "I would've given you a carbon copy of mine but..." He shook his head, "I dunno. Tried to make it with the Power Glove, but it never stuck unless I got rid of the original one. Trying to figure out why that is." He shrugged, "So how do you want me to keep playing this game at Beacon, with Earth being an issue now?"
She sighed, and shrugged her shoulders. "Do as I was told: Continue, business as usual."
Aldric chuckled, "alright then. I had an absolutely stupid fucking idea I wanted to run by you." He said, resting his hands behind his head and grinning. "If it works... It may let me locate the Maiden imminently, and may buy us an information source in Ozpin's inner circle." He paused, "aaaaand if it doesn't... Ho boy, I'll have to get the eff out of dodge."
Cinder frowned, and leaned forward, "what idea do you have?"
"I want to tell Ozpin who I am and what I'm doing."
"So you want me to kill you with this." Cinder brandished her new lightsaber in his direction, "is what I just heard." Though there was a light grin turning up one corner of her mouth, as she placed it on the bed next to her.
"Might be a quicker death, I'll admit." He snorted, "but my thought process... At least before Earth got involved... Was that if I did this, and we had Torchwick set up a bunch of false bases around Vale, make it look like he operated out of them and drop information to other false bases, I could act as an informant, gain his trust." He said, "then... What I was thinking, was I'd tip him off about that shit we've got going on in Mountain Glenn. We make sure Torchwick isn't there, yeah, but Ozpin sends a team of Huntsmen in and stops a potential Grimm invasion, and then he'll trust me completely. Especially now with Earth knocking on their door - a Grimm invasion would fuck everything up. Stopping it would be high on Ozzy's priority list.
"I think this works even better now because of what I could represent as someone with more knowledge on Earth than anyone else on Remnant... Especially anyone else on his side." He explained, "and since now we've got the terrans coming in and wrecking shit, generating fear and empowering the Grimm... We could stand to lose Mountain Glenn, and focus more resources on fucking up the Vytal festival." A beat, "hell, we could double down on that Atlas thing and drop the same intel we gave the terrans. Implicate them in the entire reason another planet is blowing us up, but that's an aside." He said, shaking his head. "The endgoal would be to gain his trust and eventually get him to show me where the Maiden is... And whenever we do what it is we're going to do with Torchwick, the White Fang, the terrans, we'll know exactly where to gun for."
To his immense surprise, Cinder was actually considering this. "And what would you do if he instead deigns to take you prisoner?" She asked, giving him a firm glare.
"I've got a few party tricks up my sleeve to disguise me stabbing the shit out of him as a terran missile attack." Not the least of which being him using his powers to actually make enough explosives to level a city. "I haven't tested it out, for obvious reasons, but I'm willing to bet on that thing being strong enough to cleave through aura, easily enough." He added, nodding to the blade next to her.
"You think you can kill Professor Ozpin." Cinder shook her head, "Aldric, you have grown these last few months... But you are not yet that powerful."
"If I had a nickel for every time someone said I couldn't do something because I wasn't strong enough..." Aldric shook his head, "lady, I took on the entire terran military. They're stronger than me. Guess what the difference is." He nodded, "I know how to use what little I have to the greatest effect. Take... For instance... The fact that you haven't noticed I picked up your lightsaber." And he poked her in the back with it, causing her head to snap down to the bed, seeing the lightsaber missing, and then turn around, to find it hovering behind her, just a button-push away from impaling her.
"Is that what it's called?" She asked, plucking it out of the air. "Appropriate." She turned back to face him, "offer one hand and arm the other."
Aldric blinked, staring at her with a dumbfounded expression. "I said it earlier, hot stuff. Losing your memory?"
"No, I've just learned to tune you out."
Aldric rolled his eyes, "well it's not my only idea, either. There's this other movie I loved. Long and short of it was this government organization that dealt with and kept secret the presence of aliens on Earth, and they did so with these things that let 'em wipe peoples' memories... I'd love to mess around with that one day, but I'm not sure if I'd have the chance to use it on Ozpin, with how much danger I'd be in." He shook his head, "Point being: You don't get as far as I have now through raw, overwhelming power. You need skill in order to use it effectively." He nodded at her, "you could probably kick my ass six ways from sunday even as I am now."
"Are you intimating you think you are stronger than I?" Cinder gave him a coy grin.
But Aldric stood his ground, "in raw power, sure." He said, "since we're assuming I've got the same power as the wizard who gave his powers to the Maidens, it's not too much of a stretch to assume I have that kind of raw power inside of me, whereas you have a quarter of it." He said, "buuuuuut... I've already made my stance on power versus skill clear. You actually know how to consciously use yours, whereas the best I've gotten is... A handful of seconds in non-combat conditions."
Cinder blinked, "you've accessed your powers? Without the glove?"
Aldric grinned, "I told you I had some party tricks up my sleeve, Hot Stuff." He said, "but back to point, you outweigh me completely in skill. You've fought far longer than I have, and know how to use your powers better. So while I should be stronger than you on paper, in reality?" He shook his head, "you'll kick my ass - ah, don't you fucking deny it."
She nodded her head to the side, at that. "This is what I shall do. I will contact our leader again, tonight, and inform her of your plan." She explained, "after which I shall contact you with instructions, and if we move forward with it, we shall coordinate with what information we shall give, when, and how."
Aldric's return to Beacon granted him the first look at the school he'd had since the battle, days ago. He'd had to take the long way up, riding an elevator as opposed to flying, because he wasn't quite ready to start trusting his aura after all the damage he'd taken during the fight. All of the main buildings had had pieces blasted out of them, and were in varying states of repair and disrepair. The grounds had chunks torn out of them and there were still piles of debris everywhere, though considering the size of some of them, Aldric suspected that they had all sprung up in the wake of the cleaning and repair efforts. Beacon Tower still stood tall and clearly had been given the most attention out of all of them, which Aldric understood: Fixing the CCT tower to connect with the rest of the world took priority. The dorms looked like they had been hit almost as hard as the tower, and as Aldric looked at them, he realized how well his night vision was with these new eyes: He could still see with perfect clarity.
Standing on the landing platforms, Aldric looked from the main tower, to the dorms, the physical manifestations of his duty versus his desire. He could either go to the dorms and get some sorely needed sleep, or ascend the tower and speak with Ozpin. He let out a long, exhausted sigh, and started towards the tower. Only to be stopped hardly even halfway there
by something he hadn't predicted.
"Goud!" He heard Yang call out, just a second before she entered his radar range.
Aldric turned to face her, "Yang, what the fu -" And he stuttered when, upon fully entering radar, he saw what she had hanging from her shoulder: A cinch-bag, inside of which were items intimately familiar and less so. First was a tablet he spent hours each night writing in, and on top of it was his cell phone and the RWBY SD strong box, and then there were three patches, which looked like they'd been torn from uniforms, one of a British flag, one of Russia, and one of China, as well as a few glass Garden coins. In her back pocket was a smart phone, separated from the rest. "- uh... Hell are you doing up so late?" And where the fuck did she get a collection of his stuff and some terran war trophies?
Worse was that, on closer inspection, he realized she was armed, too: Ember Celica, while collapsed, were both secured to her arms, merely waiting for her to clench her fists. "I was going to come down and see you..." Yang called out, as she approached. "Had some questions for you."
Aldric gulped, but kept his posture neutral, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Like?"
"Well, what are you doing up? And out of the hospital, even?"
"I got discharged and I got cabin fever. Not a good combination." Aldric blinked, "wait, did you call me 'Goud'?!" Oh yeah, he knew where this was going.
Yang didn't respond to that, instead saying, "I know you took a few hits to the head, but the student dorms are that way." She nodded over her shoulder, coming to a stop six feet away from him, one hand on her hip, one holding onto the cinch-bag's strap.
"Wanted to talk to Ozpin." Aldric responded, "figured I'd face the music sooner rather than later for my stunt, last week."
"Wouldn't he be in the staff dorms?" Yang asked, looking over Aldric's shoulder. "It's pretty late..."
Oh, I know what you're implying, lady. She was leading him, she was going to accuse him of working with the terrans, and was going to somehow help them target Beacon Tower for another attack. "Well... I have taken a few hits to the head, lady." He chuckled, "what's this about? You're a lot... Quieter, than usual."
Yang's expression didn't change. "You know Ozpin told the students with dorms on the outer edge of the building to move deeper inside?" She asked, "and your room specifically got hit with a rocket. My sister, team, and I spent today helping yours move. I found something under the floorboards. Hidden." She slid the bag off of her shoulder, and then hurled it at Aldric, who caught it deftly, his expression slowly dropping to a frown. "I'm not normally the one to suspect people, Ash... To be honest, it didn't even cross my mind when I saw it at first. But then I was cleaning out my own room, and I found some of the things I'd picked up from the city the other day - things I'd forgotten to give to the VAF garrison so they could study them.
"I turned one of the invader's scrolls on..." She pulled the phone out from her back pocket, "And..." She turned on the screen, and Aldric's heart sank as he was greeted with a picture of Captain America, shield held proudly in front of him.
Yup. Aldric sighed. Fuck. "In my defense, I am from-"
"A small village, right?" Yang interrupted, "I thought this guy must have been from the same one... But you told me your village got ruined by Grimm. That there hadn't been many survivors... And I realized you never really talked about what happened afterwards. You were just... There at Chancel. Then you were at the bar where we met... Then you got your arm cut off... And with barely any time to recover, then you came here." She sounded morose as she spoke, almost as if she didn't want to believe the conclusions she was leading them to. "And then add the two scrolls I found in your bag..." A beat, "you know - it still didn't occur to me. Not until Blake saw me looking up the symbols on those coins in your bag and panicked, thinking I was involved with the 'Garden'." She broke eye contact a moment, looking out to Vale, out to the coast, "I didn't know what to do and lied to her, Ash. Told her I'd seen it during the fighting and it just came back to me, and I was wondering what it meant." She turned back to him. "But after that a lot of pieces started falling into place... Enemy technology... Enemy weapons... Weiss herself said your sword doesn't exist anywhere else, not even in Atlas... Enemy symbols... And coins from an underground assassin ring?"
Beat.
"Tell me I'm wrong and I'll believe you, Beebee. Look me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong." She pleaded, Aldric noticing a moisture building up in her eyes, as her expression melted into a frown of equal parts fury, pain, and sorrow.
Aldric sighed, and turned to Vale, looking off to the horizon. "His name was the, uh... Strangest thing I've ever heard." He said, "said it was Steve. Steve Rogers. I still sometimes try to find the color in it." He'd have to improvise better than the cast of Who's Line if he'd want this to work. "The - shield was his. Scrolls too." He said, jostling the bag. "He was rolling through our village round about when the Grimm attacked. I was chatting him up, 'cause I'd seen him spar with some of our guards and I was trying to figure out how he'd bounced it off of three different guys and caught it again like it was no big deal.
"Now, to condense several long and terrifying hours, by the end of the day, the village had been destroyed, I was hiding outside of it, and covered in a shit load of blood, with most of it his." He said, "he fought the entire day, but the Grimm never stopped coming. He took one hell of a cut to his gut, and that inspired him to take the first person he could see and run." He shrugged, "guess who won that lottery?" Yang's expression was softening, and the previously tense grip on the smartphone slackening. "I tried as best I could with the stuff he had on hand to bandage him up... Bought him... A day... Ish." He said, with a shrug. "Long enough for him to give me his shield, said the 'old girl' would keep me safe. He told me to take his stuff, and go to this place in Mistral proper, called 'The Garden'. Give them his name and one of the coins, and they'd take care of me. Said if I ever ran out, the shield would fetch a lot of coins, and the scroll would too... But I kind of lucked out.
"Ember saw this... Scrawny, half-starved kid, with a shield strapped to his back, so big that it looked like a red, white, and blue turtle shell. So short that he couldn't reach up to the desk to give the bemused concierge the shiny coin in his hand. She bought my way in and gave me food. She knew Steve, and said that if I promised to do some work for her when I grew up, she'd take care of me."
Yang blinked, "Ember - your sugar - the woman at the bar?"
Aldric nodded, "see... I haven't been lying to you guys, just haven't been giving you the full truth. It was a summer job... But also a fall, winter, and spring job, too. Whenever I wasn't in Chancel, I was watching her back. I'd graduated that year, and she brought me here to Vale. Saw you wrecking shit, and thought you'd be a good benchmark for if I should go to an academy or if I was good enough as-is." A grinned, "turns out, the answer was yes to both... The latter 'cause I won, the former 'cause I also won, just not that fight, and not nearly as spectacularly." He turned to her, and then indicated his myriad of injuries, noting that the suspicion and hurt from earlier were being crushed by relief and concern, as she closed the gap between the two.
Is there no fucking end to the things I can lie my way out of? Aldric wondered, as his gunmetal gray, cybernetic orbs locked onto the violet eyes reflecting the moonlight.
"And to answer your unspoken question... I'm going to speak to Ozpin, not to try and spearhead some kind of attack, but because I think, because of Steve, I might know something about our enemy." Aldric continued, "you ever heard of a place called America?" Yang shook her head, "well... Steve and Ember said it was hidden away. I asked where, but they only ever said 'to the west'. A land clear of Grimm, but also without any Dust, whatsoever - my sword is based off of the ideas this American, they said his name was Lucas, had a few decades ago. They were never able to make it, since they didn't have the Dust to power it, but I could, since I had access to it. So when the invaders came -" Aldric turned to, and pointed out towards the horizon, with Yang following his gaze. "- and I recognized some of their iconography, I knew we were in for some trouble. That I may not have much on them, but anything is better than nothing.
"I promise, Yang. You were over reacting. I'm not working with those people. I'm not some spy, and I'm not trying to... Destroy Vale." He said, with a shrug of his shoulder. "I'm just the right guy in the wrong -" Crack!
Aldric felt and heard the bullet whiz by, and in the time it took him to blink, Yang fell to the ground, gasping for breath as she pressed both of her hands to her freely bleeding hip. The second Aldric registered the blood pouring out from between her fingers, he felt white hot pain lance through his sternum, and he stumbled back, coughing, as his gaze shot up -
And he saw five men in dark clothing, crouched down low and surging forward, one of the sound suppressors on their rifles smoking.
Once again, Aldric found himself becoming increasingly aware of how often his being right was a bad thing. Case in point: During the fighting for Vale, he'd been worried out of his mind that it had actually begun days or even weeks earlier, with special forces scouting out the city and painting targets for drone, jet, and missile strikes, and that even if they pushed the terrans back, their special forces would still be there, likely paving the way for an even more devastating counterattack.
And would you look at that: He and Yang both had holes in them, and if the patches she'd recovered were any indication, Aldric was either staring down a squad of Terran special forces.
"You..." Aldric coughed, feeling some blood trail back up his throat, "fucking..." He grunted, as he rushed towards and stood over Yang, raising his arms in a defensive posture. "Assholes!"
"Put your hands on your head!" He heard one of the commandos call out, in an English accent, as the five of them, Aldric, and Yang, were all lit aglow by the bright moonlight, which was slowly finding itself choked by the gathering clouds above.
"You guys... Fuckin' know... How this went last time." Aldric said, with a clench of his fist, as Yang squirmed beneath him, trying to crawl behind him and out of the way, but paralyzed by the foreign feeling of an injury literally bleeding through her aura shields.
Unfortunately, his attempt at intimidation was interrupted by a cough, that sent a dollop of blood flying out of his mouth. He and the five commandos each looked down at the speck of blood that landed on the ground, before going back to eying eachother. Aldric tried to reach out for their explosives as he had done at the docks, but the combination of the medicine, his previous injuries, and now his new one, meant he didn't have access to most of his tricks, and he could do nothing but posture defensively, as one soldier took a threatening step forward.
"We have time." Said the soldier, from behind his rifle. "You and your friend there don't." He indicated Aldric, whose shirt was sticking to his chest from the blood, and Yang, whose hands were now red with her own blood, which streaked underneath her on the ground. "Come with us. We'll getcha medical attention. Treat you according to our rules of war and yours."
Aldric gritted his teeth, glaring at them as he tried to think of a way out of this, but unarmed, outnumbered, outgunned, and healthy as he was - or wasn't, as the case may be - meant he had few options, and even fewer feasible ones.
The commando seemed to know what he was doing, "most of the staff here are down there." He nodded to the west, "watchin' the front. No one's comin', and we're willin' to wait."
Think... Think... But even as Aldric tried, he knew that most solutions would require something creative, and he was in no state to be creative, at the moment.
So instead, he picked his battles, slowly straightening up. "Let me help her first."
"Negative, kid. We know about the nanites."
"Sure you do." Aldric sighed, looking down at Yang, who was glaring up at him, her expression having regained the distrust he'd worked to lie away, but now being mixed with something new: Fear. He saw the fear of a wound she wasn't sure of the mortality of, fear of the man standing above her, of the men standing in front of them, and of what the outcome of this would be. "Welp... I know you don't... But I need you to trust me." He breathed, as he collapsed to his knees, the blood loss and pain finally getting to him.