RWBY: Beacon
Day One
This Headmaster Ozpin clearly knew something. I was pretty sure he wasn’t a Planeswalker himself. When I looked at myself with the Aether Detection spell, I looked like a lamp shining from within and draped with sparks all along my skin that slowly faded the longer it had been since I’d visited the space between worlds. I couldn’t be completely certain, but I was pretty sure that what I was seeing was my Spark, or at least the echo of its presence within me.
Ozpin had nothing like that. Instead, he looked more like Zatanna, except where Zatanna was formed from Mana and Aether, Ozpin looked like he had a similar mix buried inside him. Once more, I was just hypothesizing wildly, but I suspected that the man in front of me had some form of spell put on him by a Planeswalker. I really needed to go see what it looked like when I cast a spell empowered by Mana, particularly the odd Blueprint I’d gained after creating the wardstone with Zatanna. I had a feeling I’d find something very similar to what I was looking at now, but I simply couldn’t say for certain.
I was sorely tempted to leave. There were no anti-apparition wards over Beacon so I could just apparate away, back to Forever Fall and that fascinating ruin. If I wanted to be really safe, I could just Planeswalk here and now. I couldn’t be completely certain, but I doubted that Ozpin or Glynda could track me if I just left the Plane entirely, nor could they follow me even if they wanted to.
However, that would be foolish. If I fled the world every time I ran into the first sign of danger, I’d never get anywhere. That wasn’t to say that I’d be reckless or stupid, but sometimes you had to take risks to get ahead. That was the Slytherin way. We did not charge in headless of the risks, but nor did we hem and haw until long after the opportunity had passed.
The magic of this plane sounded both interesting and useful, the Grimm represented a vast number of potentially valuable Blueprints, and who knew what other treasures I could find if I looked in the right places? This was the very first time I’d seen magic done with Colored Mana that I hadn’t cast myself and potentially studying the work of another Planeswalker sounded like it could advance my understanding of my abilities by leaps and bounds. If I Planeswalked away now, without having bonded a land here, it was unlikely that I’d ever find my way back.
There was a chance that whatever other Planeswalker that Ozpin was familiar with could do something of the sort, but from his aborted words to his colleague, I had a feeling that the two parties were not on particularly good terms at the moment. Or at least Ozpin didn’t have an easy way to contact them and hadn’t heard anything about them recently. As far as I could tell, he’d noticed that Zatanna was a product of my magic and had thought she was someone else’s summon. It had taken him several moments to connect the dots and realize that I was the Planeswalker that had made her.
And so I smiled and followed Ozpin into the elevator, Zatanna a comforting presence at my side and my wand buzzing against my fingertips. Professor Goodwitch joined us after a moment, moving to stand with her headmaster, all four of us silently studying each other as the doors closed behind us and the elevator began to move.
No one spoke as the elevator slowly trundled up the tower, not stopping until we reached the highest floor of Beacon’s highest tower. We filed out one by one into a small antechamber and then Ozpin once more led the way into his actual office.
The room was rather large and circular, with a round window in the back wall that I quickly realized also served as the face of the large clock on the school’s tallest tower. The whole chamber was done in gray-green tones and there were intricate clockwork mechanisms everywhere.
Ozpin walked around his desk, a quarter-moon with the two points of the crescent facing the window, and took a seat, Glynda quickly taking up a place slightly behind him and off to one side with her hands folded behind her back.
I exchanged glances with Zatanna and she nodded slightly. A flick of my wand summoned one of the half-dozen chairs arrayed around the outside edge of the room and I languidly took a seat facing the Headmaster, Zatanna mirroring Glynda’s position behind me. Had the real Zatanna been with me, I probably would have summoned a chair for her as well, but this felt…appropriate.
Ozpin leaned forward. He was doing a good job hiding it, but I could tell that he was flustered. His mask of composure was excellent, but it was a mask nonetheless. There was a tightness in the corners of his eyes, a certain stiffness to his posture that told of iron willed control holding back what would have appeared as shock in a lesser man. This was a man that was used to holding all the cards and it was clear that my presence had him unsettled.
Glynda could see it too. Her back was ramrod straight and her muscles just slightly tensed, ready to spring into motion at a moment’s notice. She had even less of an idea of what was going on than the rest of us and I was pretty sure that only my presence and her respect for her boss was keeping her from asking a whole bevy of questions. She kept shooting Ozpin tiny glances, her pupils flicking between the two of us and her riding crop swishing back and forth behind her back, the sound barely audible even with my magic.
“You are…like them,” he began. It wasn’t a question.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’ll have to elaborate.”
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Ozpin took a deep breath and pushed his spectacles up his nose with a single finger before fixing me with a firm stare. “Like them. Like the Brothers.”
I tilted my head a fraction of an inch, just barely enough to be noticeable. “I don’t have any brothers, but I do have some cousins. I’ve been told that I look a lot like Regulus did at my age,” I said glibly. That wasn’t true––Regulus and I looked as different as cousins could––but even months removed, the wounds of Arcturus’ betrayal were still too raw to bring him up.
Ozpin’s lips pulled into a tight line. He turned to his right, “Glynda, I hate to trouble you so, but could you perchance fetch our guests and I something to drink?”
She frowned, “Ozpin…” she began softly, her voice trailing off as their eyes met. Ozpin held her gaze for several long seconds before she looked away. “Of course, sir.” She didn’t sound pleased by the order––it was a rather blatant excuse to send her away––but she clearly trusted him a great deal. Still, it was clear this was a conversation that she did not consider to be over.
“Thank you, Glynda. Hot cocoa for me, please and…”
“Tea, if you have it. Otherwise, whatever he’s having.”
“Very well.” She swept out of the room, the door slamming open in front of her and then crashing shut behind her. Ozpin watched her go with an inscrutable look in his eyes, then turned back towards me.
He took another deep breath, leaned forward, his elbows resting on the desk in front of him, and began to speak, his voice soft and almost wistful. “Once upon a time, there were two brothers. They were powerful, powerful beyond measure, and with their magic they created this world. They filled it with life and wonder and then, with their powers combined they gave birth to the first seeds of humanity. In that time, we called them Gods, though that was not a title they gave themselves. They said their power was not that of divinity, but something else. Something more.”
He paused for several long moments, gathering his thoughts. I didn’t interrupt him, no matter how outlandish his words sounded. “Time passed. Centuries. Millennia. And then she came. She had been blessed, or perhaps cursed, by the gods, by both brothers. She united all the peoples of the world behind her and she chose to make war upon our makers.”
He smiled ruefully. “Of course she did not succeed. Instead, the God of Darkness chose to wipe the slate clean, using their own magic against them to wipe away all that had been built, leaving only her standing amidst the rubble. They told her how disappointed they were by their failed experiment. And then they left, leaving behind a broken world.”
“That is quite a story,” I said softly, “but,” I gestured around us, “the world seems perfectly near as I can see it.”
“That it does. That it does. And it took…oh so long to bring us even this far. A mere shadow of what once was.”
“You say it as though you were there.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “And in a sense I was. Before and after. Time, and time, and time again.”
Well, that certainly didn’t sound ominous at all. I shifted my grip on my wand, ready to cast a defensive spell at a moment’s notice. The implications of Ozpin’s words were not lost on me. “And this concerns me, how?” I asked curiously.
Ozpin sighed. “You’re like them, I can feel it. Or, well,” he amended, “your companion is like their creations were. Like their magic was. It has been years beyond count since I have seen its like outside of myself and…another.”
“The woman?” I asked.
“The woman,” he confirmed.
My mind spun as I considered what he had told me. It was an…interesting, if rather unbelievable story. And an inspiring one. To create a whole world…how much mana must it take to achieve a feat like that?
Well, in for a knut, in for a galleon. “Well, I can’t say that I myself have created any worlds recently, but I do suspect you may be right. I may very well be like your Brothers in a way. It sounds like we both came to this Plane from a great distance, though it sounds like our goals were quite different. I assure you I have no plans for world domination or destruction.”
Half way through my speech, Ozpin sat up, his back straight as a board. “Planeswalker,” he whispered softly.
I nodded once. “In the flesh.”
“Then…do you know of them? Have you seen them? Can you find them?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think so. It sounds like this all happened a long, long time ago, and I’m afraid I’ve only been doing this for a considerably shorter time. But…perhaps I could. In time. It doesn’t like that is something you seem to be lacking.”
Ozpin leaned back, clearly lost in thought as he gazed off into the middle distance. “Then why are you here,” he asked after several long moments of silence. “I thought at first that you must be a messenger, but that does not seem to be the case. I…We must all seem so small in the grand scheme of things. Everything I have ever known or seen…they called it a little experiment. They said that they’d get it right eventually.”
“It's about what I told Glynda. I’m a traveler from a very distant land, just looking around for interesting things to find and new magic to learn. I’ve already found some interesting creatures and I’d love to know how you could feel the magic in Zatanna here.”
Ozpin’s eyes lit up slightly. “And…for such knowledge…would you be willing to assist with some…minor tasks?”
I smiled. Now he was speaking my language. “If they are within my means and the payment is worth it…” I trailed off, but I could see the excitement that had quickly replaced the worry behind his mask.
Ozpin leaned forward once again, his spectacles slipping down slightly. “If it is knowledge and magic you seek, then you’ve come to the right place. There is no one else on this Remnant more knowledgeable of such things as I.”
“Then I’m certain we can come to an arrangement,” I told him with a practiced smile.
“Indeed.”
And suddenly things were starting to look up!