#SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. )

[etruatcaelum]

On Semblances.

As this post mentions, neither Salem nor Ozma have ‘true’ ancient magic anymore: her immense power derives from the pools of light and darkness, and when Ozma created the maidens, they sacrificed their divine gifts but awakened their aura. Both now wield powers functionally identical to the aura and dust-based magic of modern humans; the sole difference between them and ordinary humans is vastly greater experience and, in Salem’s case, the interaction between her infinite aura and her grimmness.

(That is the subject for another post, but in essence grimm flesh and atrum ‘burn’ aura and this reaction can be controlled and channeled just like dust; Salem, who is grimm, uses this to her advantage to mimic ‘true’ magic.)

And, because their ‘magic’ is really just aura trained to a level beyond what any mortal could achieve in a single lifetime, both of them do have semblances.

Salem’s semblance is less an outward projection of her self than an inward one. It developed through the slow reconstruction of her mind and soul after a long period during which she had no sense of identity and was just kind of mindlessly dreaming all the time; her semblance sparked from the need to become whole and to know herself again. What it does, in essence, is immanentize her thinking.

Think method of loci, but crystallized from the imaginary construct into a real, tangible place—in a sense, the interior of her soul, her semblance, is a realm. Not one anything like as vast or complicated as Remnant or the Ever After, but quite a bit larger and more intricate than the vaults, and accessible only through doors she chooses to open.

It’s how she keeps herself sane and also why her sense of identity and conviction are so unshakable in the present: Salem knows herself extremely well and nearly everything that defines who and what she is, she made a deliberate choice to include as a fundamental part of herself. She is capable of change—and in fact capable of changing herself very rapidly and easily, once she decides to do so—but she cannot be forced or coerced or compelled or worn down or manipulated into it. Because the only way she can change is for her to literally disassemble and reassemble parts of herself and her semblance will not let her do that if she doesn’t truly want it to.

Ozma doesn’t know that they even have a semblance, because their semblance fluctuates from one life to the next; they believe the permutations of their own semblance have all been semblances taken from the lives they steal. What’s actually going on is that their very fragile sense of self gave them a semblance that lacks clear definition because it has yet to be fully-realized. It warps and bends and molds itself into the hollowed-out masks of every host, then loses that shape once those masks crumble again to expose Ozma.

There are, however, some constants:

The base essence of their semblance is remembrance and accretion of time. It’s the grasping for another chance and the tearing pain of almost and the venom of what if and maybe then and it wasn’t supposed to happen this way all rolled into one. It’s the aching possibility on the trailing edge of a mistake. Often, it takes the form of small-scale temporal manipulation: with Ozpin, it became an ability to ‘skip’ a second or two here and an idle moment there and ‘save up’ that time to spend all at once, squeezing several minutes worth of action into a single fraction of a second. (<- Ozma still has this ability and Oscar can tap into it for a while, but after the events of V8 it fades as their self-identification as Ozpin disintegrates.)

As themself—once freed from their curse and restored to live as their own person—their semblance is effectively only half-formed: not quite latent, but not truly manifested either. They will need to find themself and know themself before they’re able to fully bring it out. In its true, unalloyed form, Ozma’s semblance is unbinding: the breaking of chains, the opening of doors, the snipped thread of fate to unleash boundless possibility.

In less poetic terms, they will be able to reach back and bring forward the moments when what is now became inescapable. Nothing can be undone, nothing erased: the past cannot be unwritten, but what they can do is create a second chance to rewrite the future, whether by literally making a new possibility that didn’t exist before or by cutting through whatever beliefs or rationalizations a person clings to to pretend that they have no other choice.

Their fully-realized semblance will turn inward and confront them whether they like it or not; toward other people it is entirely under their control. (<- It is also quite likely the one thing capable of reaching into Salem’s head and shaking the foundations of her self, by drawing out her line of reasoning for committing to those choices and asking her to walk those paths anew, decide again.)

Oscar does not have a semblance and will not have a semblance until he’s separated from Ozma. If the integration were completed he would eventually produce a new permutation of Ozma’s, but it wouldn’t in any meaningful sense belong to Oscar, because Oscar as an individual would, for all intents and purposes, be dead.

But once he’s separated from Ozma, and once he sorts out who he is and who he wants to be outside of the looming existential dread of becoming Ozma, he’ll be able to discover his semblance.

(<- Also his aura, when not subsumed by Ozma’s, will turn out to actually be orange. Like a pumpkin. Because his Ozian allusion isn’t Tip OR Dorothy, it’s Jack Pumpkinhead)

Oscar’s semblance is… essentially, a hyper-specialized form of empathy: he can take the words people say and unfold them to reveal the things they mean, the feelings they’re trying to express but can’t communicate clearly, and then find the words to articulate those things back. He’s an interpreter, not of language but of emotions. He’s able to very quickly talk through to the heart of a problem, and he’s preternaturally good at listening in a way that makes people feel seen and heard. It also has the side effect of making him almost impossible to lie to.

Even with Ozma in his head, there are traces of this latent ability eking through to the surface—his determination to connect with Ironwood throughout V7, his intuitive sense for what to say to Hazel and Emerald to earn their trust, and even earlier, his realization that Ozpin is lying and his ability to break through long enough to spill Jinn’s name: these are all inklings of what could be, if not smothered by Ozma’s curse.

That sort of rising-to-the-surface is very rare among Ozma’s hosts. With Oscar, it’s happening partly because he’s fighting so hard to hold on for as long as he can, partly because his upbringing gave him a pretty strong sense of identity to begin with, and partly because the nature of his semblance itself resists falsehood and obfuscation. Latent though it is, it still gives him a firm place to stand when he pushes back and asserts himself against Ozma’s resignation. This struggle also has the effect of deepening the potential of his semblance—in effect, training it before it even properly manifests—so that once he’s free and it emerges fully he gets in tune with it fast.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #[ mumbles. #resilience + liberation + compassion. ] #[ also i am so serious about #the pumpkinhead thing #like. point blank #rwby is a retelling #of marvelous land of oz #this is why i say that salem is glinda! #her role in the story is wrathful justice and truth #set against the deceit and manipulation of the true villain— #the god of light / mombi #ozma’s curse is broken through glinda’s relentless pursuit of the truth #rapunzel’s tears unblind her prince. #the uniting thread of salem’s allusions #is the breaking of curses and restoration of truth. #also summer rose is general jinjur #searching for the crown in the ruins of the emerald city. #please read marvelous land of oz. #it’s the man behind rwby’s curtain. ]

[etruatcaelum]

8 and 9 to all, 13 to Summer

8. which scar was caused by the worst wound?

SALEM.

The only scars she has are the ones she had before she became immortal—most of them are on her forearms, up near her elbows, little flecks of remembered scar tissue and faint lines of discoloration, self-inflicted from clawing at herself and then picking the wounds open over and over in the tower.

But she also has some gnarly ones from where the God of Light bit her. They didn’t heal, exactly; Darkness glued her back together before he and his brother drowned her in the fountain of life. So they don’t quite look like scars: they’re necrotic-black and scabrous. The biggest runs from where her left shoulder joins her neck, down to her mid-back on the right side. She’s got a discontiguous slash of punctures and gouges following the same line down her front, neck to waist. (In her V7-8 fit those would have been visible.)

OZMA.

They don’t exactly get to keep their scars—of which they’ve had quite a lot over the years—but there is an injury that was bad enough to persist across lifetimes, and that’s what Salem did to their leg the night Lux Aeterna fell. When the fortress came down on their heads, Ozma shielded themself and Salem… didn’t, so she got smushed like a bug right in front of them and that kind of snapped Oz out of the battle haze for a minute.

So they pulled her out of the rubble, panicking, and as she started to knit herself back together she grabbed their thigh and like, railgunned her own broken bones through their leg. And then they incinerated her because what the FUCK, and then she reconstituted and burnt them alive, and every single one of Ozma’s hosts since then has developed a psychosomatic limp because it still hurts.

SUMMER.

This. It’s faded, but Summer’s hands and forearms to this day have splotches of noticeable discoloration, darker and ashier than her natural skin color. She wears long sleeves to cover it up, doesn’t like when people stare. The injury also did some permanent damage to her nerve endings; she has fluctuating but constant pins and needles, and her gloves have a reinforced aura-reactive lining to help her grip. Gloves off, she can’t hold anything much heavier than a half-gallon of milk without either cradling it in her arms or bracing it on a hip—her fingers just aren’t very strong anymore.

OSCAR.

Besides the type of scars you’d expect a kid who grew up on a farm to have, Oscar didn’t have any truly serious ones before Atlas. He does have one on his right forearm that looks nasty—but it’s from getting kicked by a rabbit, not exactly dire.

Nowadays, though? His worst injury and worst scar are both courtesy of Salem. When she blasted him after he lied about the lamp being out of questions, she caught him with his aura down. That burn eventually heals into a huge, reddish starburst of a scar.

9. do they have any funny story related to one or more of their scars?

SALEM.

On the extremely rare occasion that someone both sees the scars and dares to actually ask, she tells the truth, which is “god tried to kill me.” Nobody ever quite believes her.

She thinks it’s funny.

OZMA.

Generally, Ozma does not like to talk about whatever scars they acquire, irrespective of how they got them.

SUMMER.

With most of her scars being from her huntressing days, the true stories are mostly variations on “so there was this grimm—” Whether the story is funny or not depends; Summer used to frame them as funny stories as a matter of course, often with a self-deprecating tone, but she doesn’t do that anymore.

OSCAR.

The Rabbit Incident. He gets a kick out of it because he can instantly tell how country a person is based on where they fall on the “yeah that tracks, rabbits amiright?” to “what do you mean a little bunny did THAT” sliding scale.

13. did they ever come up with some absurd story about their scars?

When she doesn’t feel like getting into it—with nosy strangers mainly—she does like to make up stupid, outlandish stories about how she got them. For her hands, her go to is “lost a fight with the sun,” and she’ll riff hard on ‘The Man Who Stared at the Sun’ if challenged on that.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. )

[etruatcaelum]

reflect — is your muse able to self-reflect? do they use this reflection to improve or not?

Salem.

Her semblance has entire rooms dedicated to self-reflection and she has spent thousands of years deliberately whittling away her capacity for self-deception to the point that nowadays she really can’t lie to herself. Being able to see herself clearly, without distortion, is very important to her. And in the event that she sees something in herself that she wants or needs to change, her semblance allows her to do so fairly rapidly and cleanly—it’s a literal matter of renovation of her internal landscape.

Her one big blindspot is that a central pillar of her self-conception is that she is fundamentally selfish and fundamentally unlovable because of that selfishness. She’s internalized the belief that she is a dangerous monster to such a degree that it’s become invisible to her, as much an integral part of herself as her own name. Ripping that out and replacing it with a new pillar once she identifies it as a distortion is going to be… arduous. In the meantime it’s the foremost driver of her extremism: she takes it as absolute fact that she cannot ask for help and that the only people capable or interested in seeing her as a person are those who have been thoroughly broken and cast out themselves.

Ozma.

Only when they’re dead.

The nature of their reincarnation—the dissolution of each host into a hollow reflection of Ozma’s own worst self—the whole point is to prohibit change and prevent them from breaking free. The closest they’ve ever gotten to doing so was in the life they spent with Salem, but the horrifically traumatizing ending of that relationship locked in all the wrong lessons: that listening to their heart only brings pain, that telling the truth is dangerous, and that the God of Light spoke true when he condemned Salem.

When they’re dead and just themself in the white void between life and death, they’re able to see themself more clearly—but it’s almost impossible for them to hold on to whatever insights they realize whilst dead once the next cycle begins, because it’s painful and incredibly disorienting to be drawn into a new body and they get flooded with bits and pieces of the host’s self right away.

However, once the curse is broken and they’re freed? They do have about four thousand years’ worth of revelations and epiphanies that they’ve had while dead—often multiple times—repressed deep down in their subconscious that will rise pretty fast and which Ozma will finally be able to actually act upon.

Summer.

She does not spend a lot of time thinking about herself or looking back on the past; Summer prefers to live in the moment and look to the future. But—after she commits to staying with Salem—she does do a fair amount of introspection through the mirror of Salem: the two of them are… pretty similar in a lot of ways, and understanding Salem better also led Summer to a better understanding of herself.

Which is both good and bad, really: seeing Salem as a person helped Summer to also see herself as a person, something she desperately needed, but that intense identification with Salem also caused her to fall into the same trap of desperation.

Oscar.

He spends a lot of time ruminating or dreaming, more than self-reflecting—that was true long before Ozma happened to him. In part because of who raised him, Oscar finds it a lot easier to introspect out loud, in conversation with another person; he can describe himself for someone else more accurately than he can see himself alone, in a way.

This… becomes something of a double-edged sword with Ozma, because he can have conversations in his head about himself, but those conversations are with somebody who is insistent that Oscar eventually has to become them. Not great for honest self-reflection or personal betterment! He does, however, try his best to keep growing in a direction that he can be proud of.

Cinder.

She would rather die.

The primary reason she struggles so much with the grimm arm early on is her fragile sense of self and her reluctance to honestly interrogate herself. She circumvents to a degree by getting used to it and beginning to think of it as hers, but the shallowness of her self-knowledge is what makes her vulnerable to Salem’s partial control over the arm.

Watts.

He holds himself to a rigorous standard of self-honesty regarding his skills and motivations: if he says he can do something, he can. His high regard for Salem stems partly from his admiration for her willingness to be flexible, admit error, and correct course—traits that were notably in short supply in the command chain of the Atlesian Military. And if he discovers a fault or shortcoming in his abilities, he’s very quick to rectify it.

Where Arthur falters is with interpersonal relationships and emotional honesty. He has no problem expressing anger or disdain; but he’s not in tune with his other feelings and his ability to express genuine care is, to say the least, very atrophied. So when it comes to reflecting on interpersonal conflicts… he will almost always find a reason to blame it all on the other party. Salem could pry an admission of wrongdoing out of him if she put her mind to it, but it would be a heavy lift, and anybody else? Good luck.

Henrietta.

She is allergic to sitting around thinking about herself, but she’s also not at all inclined to bury or ignore things: Henrietta just kind of tackles things as they come. (In a way, she has a lot in common with the Afterans; she knows exactly what she is, she’s happy that way, and she’ll change if and how she feels the need to. Although if she made it to the Ever After she’d probably be a bit scornful of the idea of needing some magical tree to fix her up, she can do that herself thanksverymuch.)

She, like Oscar, and to a much greater degree than him, needs to talk through things out loud in order to process them. This can make her come across as self-absorbed, but she isn’t really—she just does her thinking out loud.

Elah.

The bulk of his thinking and pondering is about the deep questions of the universe moreso than himself. When Elah does reflect on himself, it tends to be in the context of his cosmic insignificance and the liberation he feels in that insignificance—he’s very much the “nothing matters! :D” type of nihilist. (Although, unlike Tyrian, he is not about annihilation: he’s a hedonistic philosopher driven by an obsessive need to describe meaning.)

That’s the sort of self-reflection that flings him headlong into occult obsessions and makes things like “eat atrum to learn more of the grimm” sound like good ideas. If it ever leads to personal growth and improvement, it’s probably by accident.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE CROWNED KNOT OF FIRE ( sc: cinder. ) #THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE ( sc: watts. ) #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. ) #EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ( sc: elah. ) #[ all of them because. hrjfhfgk. ]

[etruatcaelum]

📂

send 📂 for random useless extravagantly worldbuildy headcanons

Salem:

Remnant’s atmosphere is conventionally divided into two major strata, the zotikosphere and the upper psilosphere. These are separated by an atmospheric layer known to modern science as the koniolytic stratum, which is composed primarily of ozone and aura-saturated oxygen ions. Extreme heat and auric energy in this stratum interfere explosively with dust, and above it all normal aura- and dust-based reactions will spontaneously fail.

This model was formulated by human scientists when the koniolytic stratum was discovered several years before to the Great War; Salem has known of it for millennia thanks to a large, birdlike morph of grimm called mallemucks.

Rarely encountered by humans or faunus, mallemucks spend most of their lives on the wing near the equator, skimming just under the koniolytic stratum to feed on the aura-rich gas it contains and landing only once or twice a year. They were first observed by humans during the Great War, when the advent of high-altitude aircraft brought Mantelian spy planes close enough to provoke territorial aggression. Only a handful of sightings have been credibly reported since then.

Grimm describe the koniolytic stratum in patterns that Salem translates as ‘skin of the sky,’ a phrase that any well-read student of the occult would recognize as a key cosmological concept in the centuries-old esoteric tradition of northwest Sanus. Salem is quietly pleased that the scientists are finally catching up.

Ozma:

These days, Long Memory is officially registered as having a grav-dust-infused collapsible frame encased in a ballistics-grade polymer composite casing: fairly unremarkable, as huntsman weapons go. In actuality, the haft was forged with ateric steel—that is, a steel alloy made with grimm ash—which gives it properties similar to dust.

Unlike dust, which exhibits very high auric reactivity and tends to disintegrate when agitated by all but the most skilled practitioners, ateric alloys are quite durable and can, if tempered correctly, hold charges of auric energy. In the modern day, they are used most commonly for computing and cybernetic engineering.

Ozma relies on Long Memory to compensate for their lost magic, and habitually carries a charge powerful enough to level half a dozen city blocks if released all at once. The cane is, in effect, a magical battery.

The gears set into the pommel serve no actual function other than to lend a gloss of credence to their explanation that Long Memory stores up kinetic energy. The haptic feedback they get from the gears does, however, help them keep precise track of time while wielding it—helpful in lives when their half-realized semblance morphs into some form of temporal manipulation.

Oscar:

While a plurality of Mistral’s urban population subscribe to some form of Draconism—worship of the Dragon Brothers—the dominant religion in Anima is Kairoism.

A polytheistic tradition dating back thousands of years, Kairoism is one of the oldest living religions on Remnant. Its pantheon comprises eight powerful kairoi and the lesser but abundant aurai, and in practice it is principally concerned with cycles, particularly that of the harvest. Time itself, in Kairoist thought, is a circle: everything that has happened will happen again and everything that will happen must happen because it has already happened.

(The mantra Pyrrha recites when she unlocks Jaune’s aura is an abridged form of a Kairoist coming-of-age ritual.)

Oscar is a practicing Kairoist and, despite Ozma’s searing mortification about this, continues to be such even after witnessing Jinn’s revelation that the Dragon Brothers are both real and the creators of humankind.

Summer:

Depending upon who you ask uninhabited continent is called Alukah, Malus, or the Bleakland; its legal designation as per the Vytal Accords is Terra Ignota, and habitation there is banned by international law except for military and industrial purpose. (The name Salem favors is Alukah.)

Although the extraordinarily high numbers of grimm on the continent make for a powerful deterrent against settlement, the land is also incredibly rich in dust, and modern history is littered with sad tales of mining outfits lost to the grimm. One of the most notorious of these tragedies was Visage: an SDC company town situated near the southern extremity of the continent, only an hour’s flight away from the northern coast of Vacuo.

Visage is well-known because it was successful: the settlement was Nicholas Schnee’s crowning achievement and catapulted the Schnee Dust Company to international prominence. For twelve years, the mines of Visage supplied the global market with premium dust.

Then the young Jacques Schnee began to gather influence over the company, and over the next four years the wheels came violently off, as cost-cutting measures, several rounds of layoffs, and increasing pressure from corporate to dispense with ‘unnecessary’ safety measures weakened Visage from within. Sixteen years after its founding, the settlement was overwhelmed by grimm and wiped off the map. Out of almost two hundred residents, only thirteen survived: one of them an eight-year-old girl with silver eyes.

As a grown up, Summer does not talk about her childhood beyond that she grew up in an orphanage in Vacuo; and her staunch refusal to even touch dust branded by the SDC or its subsidiaries is easily explained away by the fact of her Vacuan citizenship.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #[ one each because my notes are uhm. #extensive. hrghrd #and i am indecisive. ]

[etruatcaelum]

tags.

#WRAPPED UP IN A LIE ( ooc. ) #LEGENDS AND FAIRYTALES ( ic. ) #MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #AND TIME DOES THIS TO US ( fic. ) #THE MOON ALSO IS MERCILESS ( ic: salem. ) #AS IF TO OUTFLAME A PHOENIX ( ic: ozma. ) #THE ATROCITY OF SUNSETS ( ic: oscar. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #IS IT FOR SUCH I AGITATE MY HEART? ( v: postwar. ) #A DUET OF SHADE AND LIGHT ( v: beacon. ) #THE MOON HAS NOTHING TO BE SAD ABOUT ( v: fall. )

[etruatcaelum]

[ @the-gray-maiden asked: ]

20. how does your muse feel about public displays of affection? would they engage in them?

SALEM.

No. Just being in public—being looked at—makes her feel viscerally uncomfortable and unsafe. She's spent millions of years with no one but herself for company, and her experience with other people has been overwhelmingly defined by violence. Even something as small as holding hands where someone else might see would be deeply upsetting for her.

OZMA.

Their comfort with public affection fluctuates from one life to the next, although they tend to be more reserved than not. Right after they're separated from Oscar, they have a brief period of wanting to just hide in complete silence somewhere nobody can find them—and as that feeling settles, it turns into Ozma being intense about their privacy.

SUMMER.

She doesn't go out of her way to engage in PDA, but she's also not shy about it.

OSCAR.

He would be so embarrassed to be caught kissing somebody, but he's fine with things like holding hands or hugging in public.

CINDER.

In the event she had a partner, Cinder would absolutely not feel comfortable with open displays of affection—but she would also unflinchingly go for it anyway if she felt like she had something to prove.

WATTS.

He doesn't pay any attention to it. Half the time, unless the participants are being truly over-the-top about it, he won't even notice.

ELAH.

His guiding philosophy is "you only live once." That this is, in his case, demonstrably not true will in no way stop him. If he likes you he is going to do his best impression of a lapdog and you will scritch the teeth behind his ears. That is a threat.

HENRIETTA.

She is the type to commentate when she sees it. Loudly.

BLAKE.

It depends a lot on her comfort with her partner and the time and place. Around friends, with Yang, she's pretty okay with PDA in moderation.

ADAM.

He is… weird about it. Emotionally, he never actually feels okay with making romantic gestures of any kind in front of people—but with Blake, he also felt like a certain amount of grand gestures and very public displays of (chivalrous) affection were just part of being in love, so he crushed down any discomfort he felt and ignored hers.

SIENNA.

She isn't stridently opposed to it, but she does feel that open affection is better kept private. In her own relationship, she would be okay with very small gestures only.

ILIA.

On the one hand, she finds it obnoxious and unnecessary and even a little gross when a couple really gets into it. But on the other, when she imagines being so in love with someone herself that kissing made the rest of the world fall away, it sounds unbearably romantic. She's aware of, and vaguely embarrassed about, this hypocrisy. She would absolutely make out with her girlfriend at a bus stop, zero hesitation.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE CROWNED KNOT OF FIRE ( sc: cinder. ) #THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE ( sc: watts. ) #EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ( sc: elah. ) #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. ) #AS THE TOOTHED MOON RISES ( sc: blake. ) #A STAR WHERE DRAGONS BREED ( sc: adam. ) #THE OLD MOON IS TARNISHED WITH SMOKE ( sc: sienna. ) #THE MOON SEES NOTHING OF THIS ( sc: ilia. )

[etruatcaelum]

[ @the-gray-maiden asked: ]

12. does your muse get flustered easily? how would they typically react to compliments from someone they are interested in/dating?

SALEM.

She does. Forget compliments, forget someone she has a romantic interest in, being treated with basic decency by anyone is enough to flummox her. It runs contrary to all her social expectations and she has no idea how to react; so she just… doesn't. At most you might get a faintly incredulous look.

OZMA.

It… depends. Being complimented is likelier to make them feel guilty than flustered, but coming from a romantic partner, verbal affection matters to them a lot. They're far more comfortable giving compliments than receiving them—and this is compounded by Salem's difficulties with speech and her lack of confidence in her own ability to communicate verbally. Even when they were married, she very rarely told them how she felt in words, which meant the rare occasions she did scrambled Ozma's head like an egg.

SUMMER.

As a huntress—and sometimes even now—she tended to hear compliments as implicit expectations. They didn't get her flustered, but they did fuel her unspoken anxieties and the pressure she felt to be a heroic paragon. In the present, she's much more relaxed.

OSCAR.

He is fifteen. Small talk with someone he's crushing on flusters him.

CINDER.

She leapfrogs over "flustered" to land on "anyone who says something nice about me is fishing for something, and this is a game that I am playing to win."

WATTS.

The closest this man has ever gotten to feeling flustered was the time he delivered himself to Salem's front door, fully expecting to have to spend hours making the case for his employment like his life depended upon it, only for Salem to hear the words "wrote Atlas' security code" and ask him which of her spare rooms he wanted to set up shop in.

ELAH.

He is unflappable. He is also more or less indifferent to being complimented, although he is fairly liberal with praise when he feels it's deserved.

HENRIETTA.

She takes compliments as basic facts of the universe and may preen about it if she's feeling especially pleased with herself.

BLAKE.

While she doesn't quite get flustered, Blake does have a difficult time accepting compliments. It's something she's working on.

ADAM.

Superficially, compliments feed his ego and are an unspoken expectation of his—but that arises from his insecurities and extreme lack of self-worth, fueling a vicious cycle of Adam seeking, and sometimes demanding, external validation to keep frail sense of self afloat.

SIENNA.

She is very comfortable in herself, and too outspoken to let anything anyone else thinks of her break her stride. In the event she did have a romantic interest in someone, though, she would be very flattered to receive compliments from that person.

ILIA.

She would not know how to handle being sweet-talked at all, and just dissolve into an incoherent and vividly pink mess.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE CROWNED KNOT OF FIRE ( sc: cinder. ) #THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE ( sc: watts. ) #EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ( sc: elah. ) #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. ) #AS THE TOOTHED MOON RISES ( sc: blake. ) #A STAR WHERE DRAGONS BREED ( sc: adam. ) #THE OLD MOON IS TARNISHED WITH SMOKE ( sc: sienna. ) #THE MOON SEES NOTHING OF THIS ( sc: ilia. )

[etruatcaelum]

[ @the-gray-maiden asked: ]

3. has your muse been mainly attracted to men, women, non-binary people, another identity not specified, or an even split?

SALEM.

She is at least two hundred million years old and immortal and the original sin and her creators annihilated the last world and shattered the moon to spite her. Her gender no longer exists in any meaningful sense because the Ruakhian conception of "grimm" as a gender category has been erased from the historical record. Ozma is the only lover she's ever had because she is inescapably aware of being older than dirt and one step shy of unknowably eldritch.

OZMA.

Ozma is a hopeless romantic who exists in a perpetual state of being spiritually drawn and quartered by a divine curse and they're coping with not being with Salem by being with Salem but in a "fated enemies" way. They inherited every other romantic partnership they've ever had from their hosts, and also see their ex-wife every time they look at a grimm. They don't know what a gender is and at this point they're too afraid to ask.

SUMMER.

She does not know how to be friends with someone without also being a little in love with them. Summer would tell you that she's never been in love with anyone, and then say the most blindingly romantic shit you've ever heard about her friends. She's confused aromantic bisexual noises all the way down.

OSCAR.

He is fifteen and never felt much in the way of romantic attraction to anybody prior to leaving home, which makes Ruby his first crush—not that he's actually identified that feeling as such yet.

CINDER.

She associates upper-class femininity with power and very much has her wires crossed in regard to envy and attraction, in that she cannot differentiate between the feeling of sexual attraction or romantic interest and the feeling of coveting power, whether real or perceived. Under her myriad layers of toxic femininity and gender anxiety and gender dysphoria, she's attracted to gender-nonconforming women.

WATTS.

His one true love is being left alone to write code in peace.

ELAH.

He prefers women but he isn't especially particular; like Salem, his relationship to gender harkens back to a very different culture—as a human-passing faunus born in Mantle decades before the Great War, Elah was influenced quite strongly by the faunus-separatist movements of the time and regards "human woman" and "faunus woman" as discrete genders. His romantic and sexual interest does not extend to humans.

HENRIETTA.

She is utterly indifferent.

BLAKE.

Gender does not figure into her attraction to people whatsoever; she's attracted to people whose character she admires—to virtue, honesty, and a strong sense of justice.

ADAM.

Blake was his first love and—in part because what drew them together in the first place was a shared love of romantic stories, and in part because his sense of self depended on being perceived as a heroic archetype—he came to believe that she was his only true love. That belief decayed into obsessive hatred after she left him and it became clear that she wouldn't come back.

SIENNA.

She likes men, although romance has always been a distant consideration of hers—not that Sienna is uninterested in the possibility of romantic partnership, but she's comfortable being alone and it isn't something she feels inclined to go out and look for.

ILIA.

Blake was her first serious crush, although she had plenty of fleeting crushes on other girls in her school before the collapse killed her parents. She's never had any interest in boys.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE CROWNED KNOT OF FIRE ( sc: cinder. ) #THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE ( sc: watts. ) #EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ( sc: elah. ) #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. ) #AS THE TOOTHED MOON RISES ( sc: blake. ) #A STAR WHERE DRAGONS BREED ( sc: adam. ) #THE OLD MOON IS TARNISHED WITH SMOKE ( sc: sienna. ) #THE MOON SEES NOTHING OF THIS ( sc: ilia. )

[etruatcaelum]

Scars and Routine!

scars:  how many scars does my muse have? where are they located on my muse’s body? how did they get them? what do they look like?

see also: scars.

SALEM.

Lot of little marks on her legs and under her elbows, all quite faint; these are self-harm scars left over from her imprisonment in the tower.

She also has scars where the God of Light bit her, a thick one running down her back from her left shoulder to the right side of her waist and a trail of gouges following the same line down her front. They’re pitch black and have the rough oily texture of grimm hide. Salem can’t get rid of them—she’s tried—and when she’s newly reconstituted or emerging from a period of prolonged stillness, the scars are very delicate and prone to rupture. Unlike the rest of her, the scars bleed pure atrum rather than her blood-saturated atrum.

As a point of interest, the red veins lacing her skin are not scars but rather ordinary horde venation, which is an important channel for grimm cognition.

OZMA.

Their hosts have acquired countless scars throughout their lifetimes, both from grimm and human or faunus adversaries. Ozma had fewer scars than might be expected given their knighthood; magically-reinforced armor and the divine aegis bestowed by their vows protected them from harm. They had pox scars from a childhood illness and a handful of scars left by training injuries, and that was it.

Once they’re separated from Oscar and restored to their own body, they end up with a random hodgepodge of scars they remember from different lifetimes.

SUMMER.

Nearly all of her scars came from grimm. Bite marks, claw marks, caustic burns, the whole gamut. She was… pretty reckless during her huntressing days, and it shows.

The burn scars are splattered over both hands and up her forearms; the skin is discolored, a bit darker than her natural skin tone and sort of grayish. She also has nerve damage in both hands—without her gloves, which have an aura-reactive exoskeleton-like reinforced lining, her grip is very weak and she has constant, varying levels of pain, numbness, or pins-and-needles sensations.

OSCAR.

He has a lot of what you might call farm scars. A checkmark-shaped jot on his chin from falling face-first off a horse. Old burns on his palms from a wood stove incident when he was small—these get irritated easily, which is why he keeps his gloves on whenever possible. Huge, nasty-looking gash on his right forearm from getting kicked by a rabbit.

In Vacuo, the burn Salem inflicted on him heals into a big reddish knot in the pit of his chest; it’s painful and limits his range of motion quite a bit.

CINDER.

Thin burn scar encircling her neck, courtesy of the shock collar she wore for almost ten years. A scar across her stomach where one of the flanges of Rhodes’ mace sliced through her aura the night she killed him. The burns on her face and left arm from Ruby’s glare are dark red and waxy to the touch. After the events of V8, she has small striations of grimm flesh spiderwebbing her chest and stomach because taking the full blast of Penny’s laser cannon nearly killed her and would have killed her if not for Salem’s intervention.

WATTS.

A purplish incision scar on his right arm from an ORIF surgery to repair a fracture that had healed (badly) without medical treatment. The hardware, combined with infection-related nerve damage from the original injury, left him with chronic pain.

Besides that, he has a multitude of weird little scars on his hands—a common feature in his profession, as it’s nigh-impossible to work with dust-based electronic components without receiving frequent shocks or small burns.

ELAH.

…Hundred year old embalmed corpse who died and came back a ghoul.

HENRIETTA.

Like Oscar, she has a bevy of farming-related scars, most of them small and not particularly noteworthy. She has an old burn scar on the underside of her left wrist from being careless with a kettle years ago, and some very gnarly gouges on both calves—bites from a pack of ratlike grimm called colocolo.

routine: does my muse have a consistent routine in their lives? do they find it difficult to stick to a routine? 

SALEM.

If you asked, she would insist that she does even though she quite clearly does not. If you pressed, you might eventually piece together that what Salem means when she says she keeps a strict routine is just scrupulous adherence to her religious praxis and that she rotates between her sundry dwelling places around Alukah in a consistent order.

She makes… a vague effort to sleep and eat on a regular basis, with negligible success; her perception of time is wildly irregular and she generally doesn’t register discomfort until it rises to the level of acute distress. Day-to-day maintenance is extremely difficult for her.

OZMA.

Tea first thing every morning. That’s their one and only constant.

SUMMER.

She takes her meals, goes to bed, and gets up at roughly the same time every day; beyond that, any daily repetition or regularity makes her want to eat her own hands.

OSCAR.

Before Ozma… happened to him, the only real variance in Oscar’s day-to-day life was driven by the turning of the seasons; plantings in spring and summer, harvests in summer and autumn, surviving the winters. Much as it bored him then, he misses the comfort of the familiar cycle now. The uncertainty and intermittent chaos of war wears him down.

CINDER.

Even the suggestion of a regular schedule gets her hackles up.

WATTS.

He can be flexible when the need arises, but he doesn’t like it; his ideal lifestyle would be a groundhog day loop where everything happens exactly the same and the only thing that changes is his work on whatever project he has in front of him. Because reality does not work this way, he compromises by being a tyrant about his workspace and keeping the most strictly regimented schedule he can feasibly get away with.

ELAH.

While very much a creature of habit, Elah is also quite relaxed—blasé really—about most things. He’s a hedonist. If he feels like taking a fifteen hour long nap, he will. If he wants to stay awake for three days to play online chess with strangers he’ll do that too. There is exactly one person in the world who can get him to do things he doesn’t want to do, and she’s worse at routines than he is and not interested in dictating his schedule besides.

HENRIETTA.

She gets up at dawn, breakfast, does chores, takes off to the guardhouse to train (and terrorize) the village militia, lunch, takes point on the afternoon patrol, does the daily inspection, goes home for dinner, spins until she feels tired, bed. The only exceptions are planting and harvest days—which she spends on the farm—and in the event of bandits or grimm attacking one of the settlements in the region, in which case she marshals the Radicarian militia to the defense.

#THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE CROWNED KNOT OF FIRE ( sc: cinder. ) #THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE ( sc: watts. ) #EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ( sc: elah. ) #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. )

[etruatcaelum]

hc + 🧡 for a friendship-themed headcanon

For Oscar

While he had a lot of children near his age with whom he was friendly, Oscar never properly had friends before he left home. He was the kind of child who was moderately well-liked by his peers but not close to any of them; his big dreams of adventure beyond the village and his quiet, bookish demeanor kept him on the sidelines (and out of trouble, sometimes). Growing up he was always much more comfortable around adults and older teens—partly because his youngest cousin is twelve years older than him.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. )

[etruatcaelum]

MOUTH : Does your muse have a preference over sweet or savoury treats? 

Salem.

Even when she’s eating consistently, her outlook on food is still very much one of starvation; she was malnourished in the tower and spend millions of years starving but unable to die because there was nothing to eat except her own flesh. And then for a long time everything was poison or indigestible. She will eat anything, and her idea of a treat is a meal.

(Giving someone food or making food for them is also really her only uncomplicated way of demonstrating care. Food and love are inextricable from each other in her mind.)

Ozma.

They like sweet flavors but they don’t like sweets very much. Ozma’s more the type to go for fruit or herbal teas—hibiscus is their weakness, in every life.

Summer.

Her preference is for sour things. She will eat whole underripe lemons as a snack. In her huntressing days she kept a huge stash of sour candies of the ‘feels like the inner lining of your mouth is peeling’ variety.

Oscar.

He does not have a preference, and he’s also not too fussed about food in general. Not that he avoids it—Oscar’s got a pretty big appetite—but he’s the type to sit down for meals and clear his plate regardless of what it is. If he snacks at all it’ll be because he’s feeling really hungry in between meals and he tends to go for things like nuts or a boiled egg—small but filling. Taste isn’t ever something he pays much attention to. He’s not keen on really sugary stuff, though.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. )

[etruatcaelum]

double-edge — does your muse have any personality traits that are a double-edged sword? (For Oscar and Salem)

Salem is phenomenally resilient. Inhumanly so. She can—and has—endured things that would utterly and completely break anyone, including herself, and every time she did shatter, she found ways to remake herself into something that could bear it. There is nothing so awful that she cannot pick herself up from it and keep going—and nowadays, experiences bad enough to even shake her are few and far between.

The dark side of her resilience is that smaller, ordinary discomforts—like hunger or tiredness, or the emotional pain of loneliness—barely register with her anymore, and consequently she tends to neglect them until they reach a dire enough tipping point for her to even notice that she feels bad. She gives the impression that she no longer has physical or emotional needs, that she’s unfeeling or nearly so—but what’s lost in reality is the capacity for regular, basic self-care.

Anything she can do without, she’ll do without, or at best indifferently take what’s given to her, until it hits critical mass. This is really bad for her and frankly dangerous for anyone close to her who doesn’t figure out how to read the very subtle signals when she’s nearing a boiling point.

Oscar’s capacity for unconditional empathy is both his greatest strength and deepest vulnerability. He’s really good at seeing and understanding where people are coming from—so good that it can be difficult for him to stop trying to make connections and bridge division between other people who aren’t interested in good faith conversation or compromise.

At his best, he’s a good mediator, a good negotiator, and skilled at making people feel heard. But at his worst, he can end up more invested in getting people to agree than making sure that an agreement is truly fair for everyone, and his own boundaries tend to be the first thing he puts on the chopping block.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. )

[etruatcaelum]

CURIOSITY– How thoroughly do they explore new places, things, or ideas? Do they go out of their way to learn new things?

SALEM.

She is voracious. The imprisonment she suffered as a child left her with an intense, lifelong desire to discover the world, to explore. And on top of that she’s grimm: these are creatures quite literally brought to life by the drive to learn and to know.

Very nearly everything Salem knows, she learned by trial and error or through experimentation. For obvious reasons, going to school is not… really an option for her, although in an ideal world she would like to. Her deepest areas of expertise are, naturally, grimm, aura, dust, and esoteric matters generally; the Evernight horde also keeps a rich trove of historical data that would if translated into a readable format make any historian want to cry.

But she knows quite a lot about a lot of things. Having infinite time, insatiable curiosity, and no reason not to do physically dangerous things in pursuit of knowledge will do that to a person.

OZMA.

They are inquisitive and open to trying new things until it’s something that seems like it might make their very fragile psyche implode if they allow themself to think about it, in which case they will pull out all the mental stops to not acknowledge its existence in any way. The practical outcome of this is they spend most of their lives in a dissociative fog and distort the world through the fairytale lens.

This behavior is driven by their curse: the combination of their soul with their host’s does destroy the host in the end, but a hollowed-out facsimile of that conscious lingers and amplifies all of their doubts and anxieties.

Ozma is never alone: that is not a good thing. Their thoughts, their feelings, are subject to constant and ruthless scrutiny by a mirror-image of their deepest fears. Their outward surface rearranges from life to life, but at a deeper level their curse makes it impossible for them to truly change.

Once they’re free of that curse, and once they’ve had a while to just sit with all of this and decide what they want to be, one of the first steps toward healing will be to let themself be curious again. It’s just… something that will take time, because the scars run very deep.

SUMMER.

While not exactly incurious, Summer’s interest in things tends to be fleeting and unfocused. She’s the type of person who loves to learn (and whose mind a steel trap for) interesting facts, but doesn’t feel much of an urge to dig down and thoroughly research the unfamiliar.

In school, she excelled in practical settings and just sort of skated by in everything else. Research-based assignments she often just… didn’t do. Her academic record is actually quite poor as a result; if Ozpin hadn’t pulled some strings on her behalf she probably would have washed out of Beacon for reasons of rarely turning in major assignments.

But if someone Summer cares about wants to teach her something? She’s all ears. She really does like listening to her people about their interests, and she is plenty smart enough to get her arms around it for the most part.

OSCAR.

He’s starting to inherit Ozma’s fears, which does put a damper on his natural curiosity, but Oscar’s baseline in this regard is quite a bit closer to where Salem is at. His aunt raised him to ask questions—if nothing else, Henrietta cannot resist an invitation to talk, and that meant that Oscar could ask her literally anything and expect to get a thorough and honest answer.

The culture of the Palash region is also rather different from the kingdoms as it pertains to grimm, in that grimm are basically seen as a nuisance: the serious dangers faced by these communities are bandits and crop failures, with grimm being viewed as mere scavengers. One side effect of that is the people are quite a bit more relaxed about openly expressing negative emotion or talking about bad things. Oscar did not grow up with a lot of taboos limiting what he was allowed to wonder about.

Before Ozma… happened to him, when Oscar fantasized about leaving the farm to pursue greater things, he didn’t imagine being some hero or huntsman: he imagined becoming an adventurer, of the sort who did things like explore ancient ruins or discover new kinds of animals and so forth.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. )

[etruatcaelum]

♡ family

SALEM.

Her father, Lord Ithai, was the third-born scion of a noble house of no special renown before he rescued the princess Salome from a group of dissidents who had kidnapped her. In reward, he was granted Salome’s hand in marriage and the two fell deeply in love.

Their firstborn was a boy called Kalev, whom both parents agreed was the most perfect child in all the world. Salem followed him a little more than two years later—but her birth was protracted and painful, and ended in tragedy. Salome died as her daughter came into the world, and when Ithai laid eyes on the newborn child, all he could see was a murderer.

He named her Salem after her mother and decreed that she would never leave the tower room in which she had been born. While her brother was reared as the crown prince of the realm, Salem was raised by an irregular parade of nursemaids and servants—many of whom were quite cold to her, all terrified of incurring the prince-regent’s wrath by treating his beloved’s ‘killer’ with too much mercy, and several of whom were downright cruel.

Ithai came to see her only very infrequently; Kalev was a more frequent visitor, and although the boy was vicious to her when they were young, he began to realize as he grew older that their father’s treatment of her was wrong, and they struck up a sort of alliance against his abuse.

The older Salem got, the more she resembled her mother, and the crueler and more possessive of her Ithai became. Ozma found their way to her through Kalev, who willingly snuck Ozma into the royal household as a trusted member of his retinue, and looked the other way while his vassal and his sister murdered his father and vanished into the night. He did not hear from either of them again until half a century later, when Salem—long since immortal by then, and barely touched by the passage of years—turned up on his doorstep to plead for his alliance in her rebellion against the Brothers.

All of which is to say, this guy ->

…is her brother, and Salem was seventy-three when her rebellion began.

OZMA.

In their first life, at the age of six, Ozma was given by their parents into the care of a knightly religious order. From that point forth they were trained as a paladin sworn to service of the God of Light. These years were characterized by strict rules enforced by dispassionate taskmasters; the order produced warriors in the sternly, coldly benevolent mold of its god.

Ozma, sensitive and caring by nature but also desperate to be good, grew up to become an exceptional warrior beset by an aching, ever-present sense of desolation and emptiness. They flung themself into one just cause after another, caring little whether they lived or died—until the day they helped Salem escape her tower, and felt some long-dead part of their soul rekindle from the ashes.

The illness that claimed their life, the first time, struck as a consequence of breaking their vows to rescue Salem.

SUMMER.

Even though Summer was eight years old when she lost her parents, she has only vague memories of them. She and the twelve other people who escaped the onslaught of grimm that wiped Visage off the map survived only because Summer’s eyes erupted with a blinding flash of white light that momentarily scattered the grimm—and alerted a band of huntsman patrolling on the Vacuan side of the strait to the calamity.

By the time rescue arrived, Summer had collapsed into a catatonic state, overwhelmed by the explosive awakening of her own light. For a month, she passed feverishly in and out of sleep, never quite emerging from waking dreams; and once she did fully regain consciousness, her memory of everything before the onslaught had become jumbled and fragmented. It never came back, although she was able to piece together some information about her family based on the accounts of another survivor, Claire Espinosa, who was sixteen at the time and had often watched younger children—Summer among them—while their parents worked in the mines.

Because of her eyes, Summer grew up feeling the unquestionable expectation that of course she wanted to become a huntress someday. She didn’t even need to apply to Oscuro Academy: when she turned twelve, she was invited to enroll. The combat school’s stealth and infiltration instructor, a feline faunus called Silvester Kellas, became her closest mentor and something of a parental figure; her admiration for him played a significant role in her semblance manifesting in the way that it did.

Sil is the only person Summer trusted enough to contact after she chose to stay with Salem. He does not know all the details, but he knows that she is alive and involved with some sort of revolutionary movement targeting the Huntsman Academies… and when he learned about the sheer pressure Summer had been put under as one of Ozpin’s top agents, he was inclined to agree that something had to change. Soon after she got in touch with him, Sil applied for and received a transfer to Shade Academy, where he has been teaching stealth and infiltration for close to nine years now—feeding information to Salem, through Summer, the whole time.

OSCAR.

His adoptive aunt gets a rundown here. She found Oscar curled up asleep in a dry culvert one summer, when he was around two or three years old. No one in the area had any toddlers unaccounted for and nobody she asked recognized the child, so Henrietta kept him and raised him more or less as her own. For all intents and purposes, she’s his mother—but he calls her his aunt because she doesn’t like being referred to except by her name, and ‘Aunt Henrietta’ was the compromise they came to.

A couple weeks after Team RWBY and Jaune make it home from the Ever After, Henrietta turns up in Vacuo in hopes of finding Oscar; she is spitting mad about the situation with Ozma, and her presence (and sheer force of personality) helps to shore up the boundaries between Oscar and Ozma—not just delaying, but incrementally reversing the progression of Ozma’s curse.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. ) #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. ) #[ <- realizing she needs one too. for vacuo. ]

[etruatcaelum]

📂 i crave moar, these are too good c;

send 📂 for a random useless extravagantly worldbuildy headcanon

Oscar’s adoptive aunt, Henrietta Pine, is a leporine faunus—her primary trait is her rabbit-like dentition—born and raised in the Palash region of southern Anima. The region is not a part of Mistral, although its western margins do spill into the hinterlands of Kuchinashi and the exact location of the border is a matter of ongoing dispute.

Despite being some of the most fertile country in Anima, the Palash region has not been annexed by any larger neighboring state since late antiquity; the danger posed by Mount Atrox, one of the largest and most active volcanoes in the world, and the grimm-infested jungles surrounding it, imposes serious operational and logistical problems that make large-scale administration of the region prohibitively difficult.

Most of the region’s population lives in a constellation of interdependent free towns and villages, although a significant minority of mainly faunus are pastoral nomads. Henrietta was born into one such nomadic group, orphaned by grimm at the age of ten, and taken in by then-childless farmers afterwards. She now lives in a village called Radicar, near the contested border with Mistral, on the farm she inherited from her adoptive parents.

Henrietta is, by the standards of the region, fairly wealthy—which is to say, she owns a horse: a cobby bay mare named Feray. She runs the farm together with her younger brother, Emre Solsen, his partner Glencoe, and their children, Alon, Lina, and Talha, the youngest of whom is twelve years Oscar’s senior. Although she of course takes to the fields during all-hands-on-deck times of year—plantings and harvest—Henrietta herself is an indifferent farmer and spends most of her days at the Radicarian guardhouse, where she organizes the village’s branch of the regional militia.

She is not a huntress—but she does know how to fight grimm, a necessity for people who live outside the kingdoms.

(Oscar’s assertion that he never had combat training before means something different than it would mean to someone who grew up in one of the kingdoms: the regional militia comprises volunteers between the ages of nineteen and sixty, and Oscar—being fourteen—had never drilled with them before, but he was raised knowing how to fight and defend himself as a matter of course.)

The militia is organized around a system of watchtowers, signal lamps, and horse-drawn trolleys which run on tracks running between every settlement in the region. If one town or village is attacked—whether by grimm or bandits—the combined forces of the entire region can be swiftly mobilized to its defense. Palashian nomads do not directly participate in this system, but most groups have a few riders acting as message-runners and scouts on behalf of the farmers full-time, in exchange for the promise of shelter, supply, and protection should the nomads suffer any calamity.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. ) #[ yells incoherently in small farmers. #anyway oscar isn’t mistrali hrgfhd ] #THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. )