“So, what do you want to know?” Second asked as he took up a spot leaning against the wall of Oobleck’s office.
Qrow raised a brow. “Well, everything? This is sort of a big deal, and I’d like to know anything I can before I go and mess with something like a relic.”
“We’ve deemed Qrow’s semblance too much of a risk to interact with the relic directly, but he will be in the area when it is being retrieved,” Oobleck informed them. “Given the covert nature of this operation, obviously we’re limited in regards to who can be involved to various degrees.”
“I’m sorry, but is it really like that every time you turn into a bird?” Jaune asked, still looking a little green.
Qrow rolled his eyes. “What sort of huntsman in training is that put off by a small amount of body horror?”
“I’ve not done any sort of rigorous research, but my assumption is that it would include most of them, you buffoon.” Oobleck sighed. “Though while I can sympathize with your reaction, I must insist that we table that discussion for now, Mr. Arc. The clock is ever ticking against us, after all.”
“Uh, right, sorry…” Jaune agreed, but still couldn’t take his eyes off Yang and Ruby’s uncle.
“You’ll have to be a bit more specific, anyways,” Second brought them back on topic. “Just saying tell me everything doesn’t actually help me. Do you want me to just aimlessly ramble about the thing?”
Oobleck pulled out a notebook that was filled to the brim with ink. “I suppose the first question should be a confirmation of its location. We’ve surmised that the most likely housing for it somehow involves the statue in the headmaster’s office entrance, but beyond that we’ve little to go off of.”
Second thought for a moment. “Well, the statue holds up a platform that descends into a basement way below the school. Though maybe calling it a basement is generous, since it’s really more of an open cave once you hit the bottom. You have to take that platform down to reach the vault. But as for how to activate it…”
Qrow groaned. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how to activate it either! What’s the point of knowing all this stuff if you can’t even get into the vault?!”
“I didn’t say I don’t know how to open it!” Second hastily defended. “I just… well… such a small thing sort of slipped my mind a bit…”
Oobleck looked up from his notes incredulously. “Are you suggesting that you simply forgot?”
“Suddenly you being my semblance makes a lot more sense…” Jaune bemoaned.
“Hey! Calm down, it’s not that bad! It was… I remember that Lionheart was the one who opened it… a key of some sort? No, that can’t be right, it wouldn’t just be a key… he definitely used something to do it though…”
“Qrow, you were present for Lionheart’s arrest,” Oobleck turned toward the drunkard. “Did he have anything unusual on him? I imagine that an item of such importance would be something he kept on his person at all times. In the case of something obvious, to hide it from potential agents of Salem, and in the case of something deceptive, to prevent it simply being lost.”
Qrow thought back to the arrest, but shook his head. “Nothing is coming to mind, but I wasn’t exactly the one searching him. But since it was an Atlas operation… Jimmy should still have it, whatever it is. We could always bring all of it along, see if anything works…”
“Is Clover working as a specialist yet?” Second Thoughts chimed in once more.
“The name seems vaguely familiar…” Qrow answered as he took a swig from his flask.
“His semblance is the opposite of yours. If you lay out Lionheart’s stuff, he might be able to just pick it at random.”
Qrow looked dumbfounded. “You mean the bastard has a good luck semblance?! Is that how Jimmy’s men found the secret room? This is total bullshit!”
“You can whine about the cruelties of the world later, Qrow. We have no assurance that such a semblance will assist us in that endeavor, but it’s all we have to work on for now. I suppose we should move on to what to expect after descending to the basement, should things proceed as planned.” He looked at Second expectantly, a pen at the ready.
“Right…” Second thought it over as Jaune stood awkwardly next to him, not really knowing what to do with himself. “Like I said, it’s more of a massive cave. There’s a platform suspended in the air that leads to a tree, and I would suggest that you don’t fall off of it like… well, I guess that probably won’t happen in this timeline…”
The other three in the room shared a concerned look at the casual mention of what sounded like someone falling to their death. Just how big could this cave possibly be?
“In front of the tree there’ll be a… well, a weird door thing. Once Raven touches the door it will open up into a desert that holds the relic. I’m not sure if the relic is actually in some sort of crazy pocket dimension desert type thing, or if it’s just an illusion, or… well, anyway, at that point it’s just a matter of grabbing the thing.”
Jaune looked at him oddly. “It’s… in a desert?”
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“Yeah.”
“...why? Is there something special about deserts?”
Second shrugged. “How should I know? You’d have to ask Ozpin, he made the damn things. Or, I assume he made them? I’m not sure if the relics were in the vaults when they were created or if Ozpin made them, actually…”
Qrow, much more used to bullshit magic than the rest of them, moved on from the puzzling detail the fastest. “Tell me about the relic itself, then. Is it safe to touch? I’m not gonna waste a question on accident, am I?”
Second turned to Oobleck, holding out a hand. “Mind if I borrow that for a second?”
Oobleck looked confused by the request, but handed over the pen and notebook anyway. The three humans watched as the semblance flipped to one of the few blank pages and began to draw. It appeared to be a… well…
“What is that supposed to be?” Jaune asked.
The drawing wasn’t bad by any means, if anything his semblance seemed to be much more artistically inclined than any of them would have assumed. It was just that the subject matter was… interesting.
“Well, supposedly it’s supposed to be a lamp, and the thing glows so I suppose it could technically serve that purpose, even if it’s a bit odd looking.”
“A lamp? With that shape?” Oobleck asked in disbelief. “That would be totally impractical! If it’s round and has ornate decorations on every side, there would be no way to set it down without it falling over, not to mention that the roundness would see it rolling until the… handles? Stopped it from moving further. I presume that the ring at the top is intended to hold it, letting it hang from a pole or some other such-”
“Cool it with the nerd stuff, Bart.” Qrow shushed him. “The weirdness of the shape isn’t exactly our top concern. How does it activate if not by touch?”
“It activates when you say her name,” Second answered as he put the finishing touches on his drawing.
There was a pause in the conversation.
“What exactly do you mean by her name, Second? I thought we were talking about the relic?” Jaune asked.
Second blinked at them. “Oh. Has nobody brought that part up yet? I sort of assumed, since you guys know about it so early, that Oz would have included… hmm… I guess that was silly of me, given what he did in that timeline. If not for…” Second shook his head. “The long and short of it is that the Relic of Knowledge houses Jinn, a… I’m not quite sure what she is, but she’s the one who you ask the questions to. Did Oz at least tell you the rules of the questions?”
Oobleck nodded. “Indeed, in so far as we can trust his word. He informed us that it could answer any question, so long as it did not pertain to knowledge of the future. There are three questions available every one hundred years.”
Second nodded. “Well, that much is true, yeah.”
“Guess that just leaves which three questions we’re gonna ask. Jimmy and Winter came up with a shit ton of them, and Bart and I have been sorting through them, but there isn’t much sense in asking this… Jinn a question that you could answer for us. Let’s go through the ones we’ve narrowed down and call it a day.”
Jaune nodded along, happy that this meeting hadn’t gone on for too long, but Second had paused as he went to hand the pen and notebook back to Oobleck.
“Hold on a moment, did you say three questions?”
Oobleck looked at him with confusion clear on his face. “Of course. You just agreed that there are three questions every one hundred years yourself, did you not?”
“Well, yeah, that’s how it works, but…”
Second looked between the two older men with concern. “Did he not tell you that there are only two questions left in this era?”
----------------------------------------
Something was wrong. He could feel it in his bones, and though these particular bones had been with him for less than a century, he had come to trust them all the same.
What was it though?
He had just seen to placing the little terror known as Neo Politan back in her room, even if it was apparent that the gesture was all but meaningless at this point. While the fact that she currently held part of the Fall Maiden’s power rightfully kept him on edge, he didn’t think that was his current source of anxiety.
Jaune Arc and his infuriating semblance were in the process of seeing the Arc family off, last he checked the security feed. He should give Glynda a raise for coming up with that punishment, if only he had the means to do so. He supposed he would just have to pay her with the video he had saved of Second Thoughts getting his ass handed to him in the training arena over and over again. He knew that he was finding great enjoyment in it.
Glynda hadn’t bothered him about paperwork today, the other students had only caused minor amounts of serious property damage this week, the Mistral Council had stopped incessantly hounding him…
Something related to Salem, perhaps? Her current minions were still at large, perhaps they were up to something that he was picking up on subconsciously. He doubted it, though. Those who were suffering from something serious enough to land them in her employ were rarely ever subtle. Cinder and her lackeys slipping into the student body had really been their own faults. He should have known better than to blindly trust Leonardo’s word. Or rather, Glynda should have known better. It wasn’t like he was going to do all that paperwork!
But what did that leave? What else could his millennia of experience be nudging him to notice?
Could it be… some of his closer allies? Qrow, Glynda, Ironwood… they’d all had their disagreements over the years, but he’d thought them trustworthy. Though he had thought the same of Leonardo, and plenty others in the past, hadn’t he?
No. Casting every single relationship he holds into doubt wasn’t healthy. He’d gone down the path of extreme paranoia several times in the past, and each and every one of those times he had regretted it later on. Distrust led to isolation, and before he knew it those he cared about had died without him getting a chance to say goodbye.
Perhaps he just needed to take a break from things. It’d been one thing after another since Jaune had unlocked Second Thoughts, after all. The adrenaline had been running through his system for too long.
Yes, a break sounded nice. A nice cup of coffee, perhaps a nap…
Hopefully allowing his mind to relax would put this unsettling feeling to rest.
He didn’t want to imagine any alternatives.