deercountry | o4 . january catchall

[If by "challenging" Ozpin means "constantly ricocheting between wanting to stay because of a borderline unhealthy commitment to helping Ange and wanting to go because Ozpin himself is so insufferable and resembles Kinzo to an uncomfortable degree" then he's correct! Sayo is still standing near the doorway, hand extended outward halfway to the bookshelf, frozen just before she would've returned the book.]

My world was... decidedly less, er.

Monster-y? And tentacle-y? Than this place, so... it has been odd, yes.

Ah, I'm given to understand that most worlds are. [ The kettle clinks as he drops the little Lunar Orb into it. ] Remnant, my own world of origin, was remarkably similar in many ways. And after a full year in the dream of Deerington, I've become accustomed to... shall we say, a heightened level of strangeness.

[ He disregards the frozen awkwardness, eyes on his tea set. ]

I'm afraid I've not yet heard much of your world from Miss Ushiromiya.

I... gathered as much from what I've read.

[What she's read about Remnant felt more like The Simarillion than an actual historical record. It sounded- well, not nice considering how dangerous it was, but it was more interesting than Earth.

(Sayo may have drawn a Huntersona for herself, unconcerned with the thorny issue of interworld cultural appropriation.)]

Earth is nowhere as exciting as Remnant, really... there wasn't anything exciting about it, especially the part that I lived in.

Well. Um.

...one... exciting... thing happened, I guess. But it wasn't really an Earth thing.

[She still isn't making any moves toward the tea set.]

Oh?

[ With the kettle set to heat, he moves back to the two chairs by the windows, and once again sweeps a hand for her to join him. The free chair stands open, looking out over what in Deerington had been manicured lawns, and what is now a winding cobblestone drive. ]

What sort of exciting thing, if I may ask? I do love to collect stories.

[Sayo stares at Ozpin like she's a deer in the headlights. Mostly out of incredulity. He's lived with Ange for how long and he didn't manage to pick up on the implications there? She officially adds "stupid" to his long list of crimes as she looks at the chair, looks at Ozpin, looks at the chair again, and sits down like a marionette being awkwardly maneuvered into a sitting position.]

Um... well... I- I don't really know all the details since, um, I was... murdered... pretty early on...

[Without knowing what kind of evidence was left after Eva had her way with the island, Sayo needs to stick to her story of "Shannon died in the first twilight" as much as possible.]

[ She goes like a girl to her execution, but she goes, which he considers excellent progress. They won't get far with her hovering uncomfortably; better that they sit across from each other properly, and he will give her a reprieve from the attention when the kettle whistles.

In the meantime, though, his eyebrows jump in genuine surprise. ]

Oh, dear. [ He actually says oh dear low and grave like this is tragic news about the passing of a relative, or some such; for all that he's lived it a hundred times, there really is no good way to discuss someone's own death. ] Very exciting indeed, I suppose, but not in the way that makes good teatime conversation.

[ The smile he quirks is a shade more apologetic, now, and his interest only more acute. (Perhaps it explains some of her clear anxiety; no wonder her protector had been so readily riled.) ]

I do apologize for bringing up unpleasant memories.

Er... yes. [Sayo's shoulders curl inward, and despite knowing that Ozpin's staring problem has (hopefully) been rectified by now, she fixes her gaze on the surface of her drink rather than look him in the eye.

This is also to hide the schadenfreude in her eyes as she watches him flinch. Now look who's uncomfortable!]

It's no issue. You couldn't have- well, I suppose I expected you to know, considering that you've apparently known Ange-san for so long.

[ He keeps his gaze politely off her, despite the pressing awareness of her blood. Even with his back turned, he feels acutely aware of her position in the room, as though knowing where the sun hits his back; she is a central point of gravity that smells of wine and blackberries.

But he's not been challenged to stop wanting it, only to stop showing it. ]

I'm afraid she's never been particularly eager to share the details of her experiences back home, nor have I been particularly eager to pry.

[ He pours their cups and lets the clink of china fill the awkward silence for a beat. ]

I find that residents of Trench have left behind rather unpleasant situations, more often than not. Perhaps the silver lining is that many have grand adventures to share, as well— or, to my particular benefit, a knowledge of tales and folklore unique to their homes. It does make for fascinating conversation, though I suppose the stories aren't always happy ones.

...

I'm afraid that I'm nothing like a hero, Ozpin-san.

[It takes all of her willpower to not erupt into desperate, mirthless cackling at the implication that she has a tale worth sharing from her home. If you cut away all the fantasy, all that was left was a sad, lonely girl who thought it'd be better to burn down the world than for her and the people she cared about to keep suffering, never mind whatever hope the future might have brought.]

From what I've read, Remnant sounds fascinating. I imagine the stories there are just as fantastic.

[Time to change the subject before she really does snap.]

[ He gives a gentle hm of thought, but does not argue the point. Still: he wonders at her protector and its relationship with heroism.

His new houseguest may not be strictly safe to interact with, but she is certainly interesting. ]

Oh, yes. We have some wonderful tales to tell.

[ Ozpin spoons sugar into his tea unhurriedly— quite a bit of sugar, as it happens; he has a weakness— and then takes up his cup to regard her over it. ]

I've always been something of a scholar of fairy tales. I'd be happy to share a few of my favorites, particularly if you have anything to share in turn. It always fascinates me, the sorts of stories we learn as children.

Well... I don't know about fairy tales, but Rokkenjima has a few ghost stories. You might, um, find them entertaining.

[If nothing else, Sayo is an old hand at telling scary stories about Beatrice by now.

After so many tea parties with Maria that called for an excess of sugar in the brew, Sayo is more inclined toward bitter tea whenever she's drinking it on her own. She loves that girl, but her sweet tooth was overwhelming.]

Oh! Color me curious. Hm, can you tell me any stories about...

A witch?

[ He goes very still. There is a moment in which his hand hangs over the sugar bowl, frozen in a beat of hesitation.

He smooths back out, exhales a breath that is nearly a chuckle, but there's no real warmth in it. ]

We have many stories of a witch. She is a recurring figure throughout the lore of Remnant, a common villain.

[ There's a tight slant to his mouth, now, something faraway to his eyes. ]

It would take a long conversation indeed to share her whole tale. Perhaps I can give you simply a chapter from what we think to be her story.

[Sayo notes that reaction and files it away under buttons to push when she needs to catch Oz off guard, inside her overfilled mental filing cabinet and right next to the multitudinous pranks she has prepared as a more petty sort of revenge than "gun barrel thrust into his mouth at the asscrack of dawn."

His reaction is... interesting, though, speaking more to a deep wound that's too busy bleeding to properly become a scar than a simple annoyance or distaste.]

Oh dear... she sounds like quite the character. [Sayo loves her already.] Please, I'd love to hear.

Quite.

[ He is silent for too long a beat, lifting his too-hot tea to sip. When he sets the teacup down with a little clink, he begins. ]

She plays many roles throughout our folklore, perhaps most notably as The Witch in the Woods: a story with many tellings, and a strong influence upon later tales warning children against straying too far from safety.

[ And so he starts to tell it. He does not say whose version this one is. It's about a boy, a traveler, who comes upon a village terrified of the surrounding woods. That dark forest is the domain of a witch, they say: a tall white spectre with inky black eyes. Monsters follow where she walks.

The boy has a shielding Semblance— a special power, Ozpin explains, like a small act of magic— and the village elder is excited by this. You can defend us, she says, so we can hunt in the woods without fear of the monsters. We can work together to make this village a better place to live.

But that is not enough for the boy. He says, I don't fear the witch. I can face any threat in these woods.

The village elder asks him not to go, but still he takes up a sword. The woods are teeming with monsters— Grimm— the sort that can smell when you're afraid, and the boy is very determined not to be afraid. He fights his way through them and comes upon a little shack.

As he steps up those creaking stairs to the door, a voice comes from within and says Leave this place. Your people are not welcome here. But the boy has slain many monsters and feels as though nothing can hurt him. He wants to see the witch. He ignores the warning and steps forward.

The door creaks open. And there in the darkened shack is the White Witch, pale as bone and moonlight, with eyes blacker than any Grimm.

(Ozpin pauses, here, for a long beat. When he resumes, it has the easy cadence of a story once again.)

The witch raises a hand, and Grimm surge from the woods to attack. The boy has to fight them off, and that is when he hears screaming from the direction of the village. He looks to the witch, and then back to the village. He has to choose which he really values: the glory of trying to kill the witch, or the real heroism of defending those who need it.

He rushes back to the village, and finds it overrun by monsters. The village elder is trying desperately to hold them off, but she is about to be cut down by a giant Grimm. So the boy calls upon his Semblance: he shields the elder, and then each of her men. Together, they fight off the horde of Grimm.

Once the battle has died away, the elder asks him, Did you find the witch in the woods?

He says, I should have listened to your warning. I'm sorry for putting the village in danger. And she says, You know, we still need a hero to help keep us safe. ]

In this life, we all have some measure of power, [ he concludes, tea long forgotten and gaze gone distant. ] The question is how we choose to use it. Which doors we choose to open.

As for the witch...

[ He does recall his tea, finally, which has started going cold. He sips it all the same. ]

In stories of this era, she only harmed those who would not leave her in peace.

[Sayo thoughtfully sips her tea as Ozpin relates his story, her discomfort around him fading to the background as she's drawn into the tale. She comes away from it with two important conclusions:

One, the witch sounded cool as hell, two, she did nothing wrong and if Sayo suddenly started getting bothered by some braggart while she was minding her own business in her spooky woods cabin she'd have a similar response.

But on the other hand...

Sayo is quiet for a few moments more, staring into her tea... then she giggles.]

S- Sorry, Ozpin-san, it's just... funny. The witch of Rokkenjima would do anything to be noticed and pursued like that, so it's odd hearing about a different witch who was so desperate to remain alone.

[ Ozpin blinks, openly startled; then his expression shutters again to something distant and sad. ]

The witch of our story lived a long and difficult life. Sometimes, under those circumstances, loneliness becomes... a familiar pain. It can be more painful to step out from the darkness knowing you may have to return to it again.

[ By the gravity in his voice, he's not even attempting to claim this as a story. ]

I can understand why someone would come to feel that way. [Viscerally and personally. The condescending pity (that's likely not actually there, but Sayo is looking for more reasons to be mad at Ozpin to justify her irrational hatred of him thanks to his passing resemblance to Kinzo) in his voice is added to the pile of petty grievances.] Sometimes, you grow comfortable in a familiar pain, and so the idea of joy is terrifying...

[Said the chair to the kettle.]

Would you like a story from Rokkenjima in return?

[ He nods, and busies himself finishing the last of his lukewarm tea. When he sets the cup down again, it is with more of his usual mild good cheer, though there's still a far-off note to his eyes. ]

I would be very glad to hear one.

[Sayo sips from her tea lets the silence extend into the exact second before it stops being dramatic and starts being awkward. Let her have this luxury, Oz, she hasn't gotten to flex her storytelling talents in Trench.]

The names of things are quite important. I know, I know. That seems self-evident, doesn't it? [She giggles, but her cadence is settling into that of a storyteller rather than a maid.] But it's true! Before Rokkenjima Island was Rokkenjima, it was Akujikishima, or "Evil Hunger Island."

Fog gathered around it at all times of day and night. Boats vanished into the mists, never to return. True, while you could justify the island's reputation with "unique atmospheric conditions" or something similar... that doesn't explain how houses that respected the spiders dwelling in the corners of their home, spiders famed to ward off evil spirits, always had better harvests and were raided by mysterious shapes in the fog far less often.

So the island of evil spirits was left uninhabited, cursed as a locus of misfortune. That is, until a traveling shugenja heard of the shadow that loomed over the island, and arrived to cleanse it. He built a shrine housing a sacred mirror of unfathomable power atop a reef next to Akujikishima, quieting the storm of darkness that roared at the heart of the island.

Magic is magic, though, Eastern or Western, and the ripples of such a powerful spell anchored in place could be felt all across the world. [Sayo is excellent at improvisation, unlike Kumasawa.] A certain ill-natured witch, who had not yet earned the title of Beatrice but was still aspiring to that golden name, had her curiosity piqued by the powerful binding that transformed Akujikishima to Rokkenjima, or "Six House Island." To take the final step to claim the name of Beatrice from her mentor, she traveled around the world—and made quite the ruckus, according to Kumasawa-san, but if I related all of those incidents we'd exhaust the household's supply of tea—to Japan with a singular goal: to dispel the warding around Rokkenjima and claim it as her own demense, to transform it from what was once the island of evil spirits to an island of witches.

However, the not-yet-Beatrice was too quick-tempered for her own good, for she neglected to do her research and discover that Eastern and Western magic is fundamentally incompatible. The systems are like parallel lines: they may reach similar places, but never the exact same, and they never cross. For a full year she tried to break the warding, to meet with failure each time.

On the first anniversary of her miserable trip to Japan, while she was sulking on the shore of the island closest to Rokkenjima, the same shugenja who had purified the island found her and asked what was wrong.

The witch who would become Beatrice ranted and raved and did absolutely nothing to explain her situation, and the language barrier also failed to help matters. Still sympathetic to whatever her plight was, the shugenja took her into his home, and gave her a place to rest aside from on a cold rock next to the shrine that was the source of her frustrations. Slowly, they grew closer, cobbling together a mutual understanding that didn't include any of their misunderstandings about the other.

Perhaps they even loved one another. Who knows.

But whatever they had shattered when the shugenja saw Beatrice performing her own rituals, in what would be a successful attempt to finally break the ward over the island... with what she'd learned from watching the shugenja cleanse those in town of minor curses. Yet still, she couldn't conceive of her friend as the loathsome, faceless nemesis she'd hated for more than a year for barring her path to true witch-hood.

They clashed, magic against magic, but neither of them gave an inch. Spells bounced against one another. Paper seals did nothing to affect red magic circles, and all the War Towers couldn't pierce a simple prayer.

In the end, it came down to violence. Knuckle against skin. Blade through muscle. And the witch who was now Beatrice, who had claimed the village as her own witch's domain after the traveling shugenja who settled there out of love for the people was slain by her own hand, stood victorious.

She left, afterward. To formalize her heritance of the title Beatrice, and to master the Endless Magic.

Yet every decade, she returned to the Izu Archipelago, to wander the one place on Earth that was not her domain under the mighty power of the Endless Magic. And as the power of magic dwindled, as humans found comfort in science and refused to believe... it became something like home to her. A place where she found the one human desperate enough to accept her contract when humanity had forsaken magic, a human who invited her in...

...and a human who trapped her there once she grew tired of his affections. She was chained in a circle, and when she escaped the circle she was chained by a vessel, and when she escaped the vessel she was chained by the very ward she had sought to destroy but could never find the wherewithal to shatter. For Eastern magic and Western magic are incompatible, and when she became a being of pure magic... it was a barrier she could not escape.

Kumasawa-san told me that's when Beatrice's affection turned sour. She lashed out however she could, causing mischief and accidents, desperately plying the servants for contracts and belief, scrabbling to find any way she could escape the last memory of her friend.

And one day... she found a lucky fool who was stupid enough to take her up on her offer. [Sayo's gaze is momentarily haunted, so drawn into her story that for a few precious, hopeful seconds, she forgets the true cause of the shrine's destruction and remembers a deal the clumsy Shannon made with Beatrice for the sake of her own love.

Then she remembers, and she casts her eyes down, staring into her tea.

She is silent.]

[ He listens. It is a good story, a passionate story, exactly the sort he goes looking for: old folklore, the sort of tale with mythic highs and lows and some lesson to be learned. It feels like the origin of something real and rawly powerful. It feels familiar.

It does not feel like anything he might have expected from a timid maid.

The girl gazes somberly down into her tea, and Ozpin watches her through several beats of silence. He wonders, now, at the thing which came to him in the night. He does not quite see how the pieces interact, but he is coming to understand their places on the board.

He inclines his head in a slow nod, and when he speaks again, his tone is low and warm. ]

I had no idea your home carried such a mythic history... however dark the tale may be. Thank you, Shannon, for sharing it with me.

[ He reaches for his tea, but it is has well and truly gone cold. Ozpin simply gazes down at the space between them, instead. ]

What became of her, in the end? Your witch who found her freedom.

[Sayo had intended to tell a spooky story about Akujikishima, to get under Ozpin's skin with a tale of the witch. The way he reacted to her request to hear a witch story made it obvious it was a sore spot for him. But Sayo was too much of a storyteller, got too wrapped up in the fairy tale she was making up on the spot, and now she's tipped her hand.

...although... she could use this to her advantage. Ozpin has to be wondering who stuffed a gun barrel into his mouth a few mornings ago. Perhaps she can redirect his suspicions to an illusion.

Shannon fidgets at the question, glancing nervously away from Ozpin.]

W- Well... like I said, she found someone dumb enough to make a contract with her. To free her by shattering the mirror. She still wasn't strong enough to manifest on the material plane without help, though, so...

[ It works: Ozpin's interest shifts from assessing to a quieter, more inward-looking consideration. There are depths here he does not yet comprehend, and he cannot quite guess at the direction of them. ]

So she is a sort of ghost, of a sort? A possessing spirit?

I- I suppose she is, yes...

[Sayo deliberately fidgets, making an act of being very uncomfortable with this line of questioning, but her internal Beatrice is cackling. Hook, line, and sinker.]

[ It is a tidy explanation, and so he accepts it without further pressing. The greater point of this conversation, after all, was to decrease his presence as a threat in her eyes.

The smile he gives her is small and pitying, and still faintly faraway with thought. ]

Formidable indeed. I will bear her story in mind.

[ He rallies to a smoother smile, a tip of the head that is both acknowledgment and the beginnings of a polite dismissal. She has given him all he wanted and more; he'll not hold her here in discomfort any longer. ]

And should you want any more stories, Shannon, do know you're always welcome to come and read with me in here.

[Sayo fantasizes about leaving mysterious bloody handprints on his door when she notices the pitying quality in that smile. Almost imperceptibly, her grip on her tea tightens, but her smile is as Shannon as ever.]

Of course, Ozpin-san. Ah- But I have work to do helping Oscar-san in the garden, so I'm afraid I must be off...

[She is actively preventing herself from committing mental murder as she scooches out of her chair.]

o4 . january catchall

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