Tales of Haven Academy

[Quellian-dyrae]

NEVERMIND CHANGE OF PLANS USE THE NEW MW GAME!

OOC Thread

Episode 18 (Volume 4) - A New Year

It had been a long winter.

The attack on Vale at the Vytal Tournament had been like a meteor falling into the sea. The direct impact was violent and destructive and world-shaking, of course. But the true damage was only felt later, when the ripple effects started crashing ashore.

Vale's CCTS tower had been destroyed by Chapi Incident dragonfire. Global communications required all four towers to function, meaning each kingdom was cut off from reliable communication with the others. Messages could still be delivered by mail, but that had never been super-reliable, and the infrastructure wasn't really in place to support the newly-increased demand. This would have been troublesome enough on its own, but among the last scenes to be played out on international broadcasts showed Atlesian military robots, up to and including their state-of-the-art Paladin-class battlemechs, contributing to the attack, while their battlecruisers hung silent in the air, hovering uselessly over the destruction while an Elder Wyvern dominated the skies. It's not that nobody knew, or even tried to say, that the Atlesian systems had been compromised and there had been no hostility on their part. But it was hard for that note of clarity to cut through the noise of fear or anger.

It certainly wasn't helping Atlas's international reputation that the kingdom had to all accounts gone completely on lockdown. Even the SDC had been forbidden from shipping any product across the nation's borders. This didn't entirely cripple the premier Dust company - their local resources in each other kingdom were still producing. But the arctic wilderness of Atlas was home to some of the richest Dust mines on the planet - particularly but far from exclusively when it came to Ice and Lightning Dust. That alone would have been a substantial loss, but as a result of losing Atlas's supply, Vacuo - home to Groen Corp, the SDC's biggest competitor, as well as to vast fields of Dust (primarily Fire and Light) farmed throughout the inhospitable desert - had increased demand on its local companies. Groen Corp was the SDC's biggest competitor, but they weren't the SDC, and the increased demand made it nearly impossible to economically ship much more than a trickle to other kingdoms.

All in all, Dust supplies in Mistral and Vale, less blessed with local resources and equally efficient distributors, were down by something like forty percent, with much of the loss in some of the energetic, high-output forms that formed much of the basis of modern technological infrastructure.

It had been a cold winter, too.

The reduced supply of Dust was coupled with increased demand, because Grimm attacks were at a high not seen since before the Great War, the monsters drawn by the fear and anger choking cities and towns throughout the world.

And hate, of course. The Farm and the White Fang had both been involved in the attack. If you thought that that fact would make people realize that there was a greater enemy at play using both groups as pawns, a great foe of civilization that all the People of Remnant must unite against, then I'm sorry to say that many people are simply not that reasonable. Those whose prejudices or politics aligned them - even if they didn't ally them - with one or the other of the extremist groups were all too quick to shout blame and invective at the other side and anyone who supported them - or even just did not denounce them sufficiently loudly.

It could have been worse, to be fair. With Mac off the board and its forces depleted, the Farm itself was in ruins - there were some rumors that what remained of the organization was coalescing under new leadership, but there was little evidence to support such claims, and certainly no Farm attacks. And the White Fang seemed to be having internal struggles of their own - they were no longer the type of organization to make media appearances and seek to sway public opinion through discourse, but the general word among those in the know was that the top leadership was stridently against the faction that had taken part in the attack, but it was anybody's guess which side held more sway among the rank-and-file. Had either or both organizations been in proper fighting form, the blood might have run thick. As it was, it mostly just ratcheted up existing tensions and provided greater opportunity for hatred to flourish, with ordinary faunus, as usual, somehow ending up the ones bearing the brunt of it.

It had been a hard winter, too.

The Mission Boards sometimes seemed to be moving more like a popular internet chat room, so often were new threats popping up. The Huntsmen and Huntresses of Mistral had been stretched thin throughout the winter responding to all the demand. Although let it never be said that Professor Wulf would ever fail to exploit any opening offered - deciding that a greater breadth of combat experience than just solo-fighting the same elite veteran Huntress every day probably would in fact be useful to your development, Wulf had scaled back her brutal beatdowns to only two or three classes a week. Those matches, she explained, would be where you learned how to fix what didn't work.

But to build upon and further refine what did work, she allowed the class to select missions of their own from the Mission Boards. Why do all of these exciting adventures and valuable experiences get glossed over in a timeskip rather than rating full episodes of their own, you ask? Because while she let the class choose the missions, she chose who actually went out to complete them, and she did not once send out a group that failed to qualify as "utterly overwhelming force". Anything that would have presented the eight of you with anything even vaguely resembling a level-appropriate encounter she stacked classmates into until it no longer qualified. This is not to say your class was able to single-handedly (score-or-so-handedly, whatever) substantially ease the burden on the kingdom's Huntsmen and Huntresses - there was simply too much need, too few of you, and that kind of concentration of power could not be deployed broadly. But where you did deploy, it was like playing whack-a-mole. With a sledgehammer.

But none of this was to say the situation was hopeless, or even necessarily dire. There was struggle, and there were losses. People had been hurt who didn't need to be, and people had caused harms they hadn't needed to. But the center held. The kingdom stood. Over long snowy months and dark cloudy nights, no army came for Mistral, Grimm or otherwise. No villains made plays for either of the Maidens. Apex did occasionally manifest an image before one or another of you (Lapis aside), typically with some melodramatic pronouncement that was no doubt intended to be foreboding. ...And occasionally just to ask how your classes were going, for reasons that presumably made sense to him. But he didn't actually do anything particularly, you know, villainous at you or in your general direction. Sightings of Devil Grimm happened on occasion, but they were rare. The world kept spinning, the sun kept rising, and in time, Spring came anew, bringing with it the promise of a new year.

And also some new students, including one Roxana Miller - the Clydesdale faunus now openly using her last name - who joined the Spring Class of 1203 as the leader of Team RGRK.

Team RACL

You know what was kinda weird? It had been over four months since the attack on Vale, and you guys hadn't really had all that much opportunity to operate as a team.

Like, I'm not saying you hadn't hand a chance to work together. You had certainly had that, what with Wulf's newfound fondness for (sure let's call them) training missions. But like, in the past a lot of your training missions had been either your team, or your team and FLNS. But between Wulf playing the hardest action economy game this side of Celerity spells and the whole thing with Pyrrha and occasionally Sorena rotating teams, when you were working together the missions had been kinda more crowded.

And that wasn't even all the time, any more. As second-year students, you were occasionally sent on missions to shadow and support professional Hunter teams (Lapis, of course, was an old hand at this). And your professors, Wulf in particular, had seemed to develop something of a taste for mixing teams up on missions lately - partly to give you more experience fighting alongside different allies with different powers and capabilities, but mostly just to make sure it wasn't too obvious that Pyrrha (and Sorena) were rotating teams. The villains behind the attack on Vale may have known who the Maidens were, but there was still some value to minimizing the chance of others learning about them.

And even outside of missions, your class had been together for a year now, and while I can't speak for you guys your NPC classmates (notwithstanding Pyrrha and to a lesser degree Tabby, who were still pretty new - Tabby was a social butterfly, granted, but Pyrrha tended to be a bit distant still with most of the class, though less so with Rhys, Sorena, and fellow forced-transfer-student Anya) were largely all more comfortable and generally sociable with you now. Not to mentioned that as a class, you'd all seen and been through some stuff, and many of your classmates largely saw the protection of the Maiden powers as a shared responsibility (though out of respect for Sorena and Pyrrha both as Huntresses in their own right and as people who didn't want their friends taking risks to protect them, the class tended to make a strong distinction between protecting the Maiden powers, and protecting the Maidens themselves). Long story short, the boundaries between teams weren't quite as sharply defined as they had been previously.

All of which was to say that here, now, as you were walking back up the mountain towards Haven, two levels down, maybe half an hour after sunset, the mission you had just finished - taking out a small Ursa pack that had been harassing a small farming village about half a day outside of the city, it had been a slaughter, heads had been booted, doggos had been launched at scientifically interesting velocities - had actually been the first mission you had undertaken as Team RACL and only Team RACL since you had gotten back from Vale, odd though that may seem.

Team FLNS

It's morning, and you're all in your dorm. It's a pretty normal day. Weekend, no classes, although Nicoale has to report to a security shift at work in a little under an hour. Honestly nothing that exciting or significant happening. Terrible opening scene for the opening post of a new adventure slash forum transfer. Hopefully something interesting will happen, I dunno.

Spoiler: Fen

Show

So huh that side scene kinda petered out - figure that Doctor Brown ended up finding you after an undoubtedly hilarious encounter with the well-armed Frog faunus and got you and the Epoch back to the End of Time and from there you, Sorena, and Pyrrha were able to take the Gate home. I had a joke about Pyrrha and Sorena getting Magic Tabs from Spekkio but it's not important.

Anyway, Brown had found the item he was looking for, which as far as you could tell was a kinda weird egg-looking device that kinda resembled one of Solstice's egg grenades, except maybe a little smaller and less colorful. As of yesterday, he told you it had been charged and if you still wanted to do this, he was ready when you were.

Here's the thing. Your brothers had been (presumably, technically, but for our purposes this is a very important technicality) killed by a flock of Nevermores. The flock had attacked before your fateful scream. You had seen at least some of your brothers going into battle again. That part of your personal history was not something you were allowed to change. For this to work, you couldn't just prevent your brothers from joining the doomed battle in the first place. You would have to go in after your last experience seeing them, but before they actually died.

All of which was to say, you had a very specific window of time to conduct your mission - during your brothers' battle against the Nevermores. That means you have to rescue them from an entire flock of Nevermores.

Even for you, that's too much. Even for you and Doctor Brown, that's too much. Your brothers were capable fighters, but not so capable that they can even those odds.
What you need is the sort of fighting power that can take on a flock of giant avian Grimm and carry the day.

But even if you were willing to involve as many people as you could get to help you, it's not quite that easy. You also need to win surgically enough that your past self experiences nothing that you did not, yourself, experience on that day. Not insurmountable by any means - you were not nearly so alert back then, and you had, after all, just rendered yourself deaf. No explosion or screams, not even Jason Ardors calling his attacks as loudly as possible, will change your past self's experience. Even so, the more people you bring, the more chances there are for someone to do something that changes things.

You don't just need a Nevermore flock's worth of fighting power, you need it in as small and as surgical a package as possible. You need it in the form of people you can count on, at least as much as you can ever count on anybody. And you need it from people who will be willing to risk their lives fighting for your family.

But where could you possibly get something like that...?

Spoiler

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Nicoale, I don't expect the pending deadline from your job to have too much of an impact on your here, because Reasons, but it's still a time pressure that you have to be cognizant of, so take a point of Limit for your Working for Schnee Complication.