TRP is a post-Great War AU RWBY RP set in Mistral City and Haven Academy with no canons, no rank claims, no maidens, and no god interference. We offer a progression system and site-wide events that change the setting based on player actions.
The change in the man's tone was jarring. And she couldn't stand the look in his eyes, like he had the gall to pity her. Actually, no, it wasn't pity. It was something else, something sad. Like he saw something in her that she didn't recognize and that annoyed her.
"So that's it? You're gonna walk away? You're all just full of hot air." Her hands dropped to her sides. "I can't believe I got so stressed out for this."
"Waste of a seat? I guess I'm not worthy enough to be here, huh?" she yells down the hallway. "Guess what, pal? My being here isn't fuckin preventing another trainee from enrolling. The enrollment wait list isn't exactly full, especially not since the last fucking attack if you have forgotten."
"Whatever hypothetical trainee you are talking about, they can talk to the fucking headmaster for all I care," she rolls her eyes. "Oh yeah, maybe it says something about Haven's low standards if some punk like me is here. But the fact is that hunters are in demand and I'm good enough for the job."
Honor? Heroics? Where on Remnant did he get the time to bring out those old toys. Someone could trip on such things. Ruqa stopped believing in those ideas long before she attended Haven. In the real world there was no infallible hunter that always did the right thing 100% of the time, no golden hero to save you when you needed them. All you could do was rely on yourself and do what you thought was right. Try as hard as you could to be good but sometimes you were going to make mistakes. This whole situation was a mistake and it wasn't one she was capable of fixing. That alone didn't make her a bad person but she wasn't to let herself be used as the example for comparison for these goons to put themselves on pedestals.
She turns around to take a good look at Arrats. For a second he had his semblance activated, she knew he did. The fucker was going to blast her when her back was turned. She stares back at him.
"Hey. Hey. Don't take that as a sign that you did a good job. You did nothing." she says, exasperated. "But I get it. I smacked dogbreath over there when he wasn't looking. Fair enough that you shoot your semblance at me. It's only fair for some payback."
She laughs, a disturbed sound. "But you didn't~. So don't think too much on it."
She returns her attention to Solomon while pointing at Arrats. "THAT is not a hero. That is an idiot. Fact is we are all idiots. Idiots with semblances even. Useful idiots perhaps."
"But at least I'm not the idiot pretending to be someone he's not," she tells them. "I know what I am. I guess I am a monster like you say."
They were all probably disappointed in her already now. Her parents. Her brother. Her old friends. They were so supportive of her yet she turned out like this. Maybe they didn't pay enough attention pr they weren't strict enough. But she had no one to blame for becoming the person she was. But why not go all the way? Why let the ideas of other people stop her from doing what she wanted.
Because she still cared, if only a little bit.
It still stung and that remark caught her off guard. She wanted to say something back, something to hurt Solomon for bringing up those unwanted emotions.
"And you? You know what you are?? You are a fake, insecure, edgy moron who thinks that becoming a hunter will be your chance at redemption."
She starts out strong, wanting to keep that anger going but her heart was no longer in it.
"But no matter what you do, at the end of the day. you are just a dumb dog, choking at the end of it's leash. It's pointless."
She lets Solomon walk away. It wasn't worth it. She could snap his neck and it wasn't going to make a damn difference. Damn what he thought, damn his beliefs, she wasn't the person he said she was.
She glances back at Arrats. Her look alone told him to scram and get out of her sight before he regretted it.
Post by Solomon Moon on Mar 8, 2020 1:15:39 GMT -5
Solomon
Sol didn't move with any great sense of urgency. As far as he was concerned, this woman was a wild animal prone to bite at any perceived weakness, and appearing to be trying to flee would only invite her. It was a dimwitted animal impulse, the ritual of dominance, with which Sol himself was keenly familiar. He'd been on the other side of this display to know exactly what was going on in the cripple's head, perhaps even better than she did. Now she had a choice, pursue him, and escalate this conflict to the next level, or keep talking and try to spin this exchange so that she could convince her fragile ego that somehow she was victorious.
Ruqa opted for the latter. Sol wondered idly to himself as he shifted his burden, whether he had ever been this tediously, pathetically predictable. Probably. No, almost certainly. That lead into the question of why he'd been allowed to get away with it. The answer was obvious, or at least one was. It wasn't worth the effort to resist. Sol could suddenly see the mental arithmetic and risk/reward calculation that people must have regarded him with, because he was making those calculations himself. He was weighing the effort of turning around and setting this idiot straight against the physical risk she posed and the likelihood of collateral damage to the school and its occupants, and the rewards he'd get for doing so. As far as the latter went, making him even less popular with the establishment than he already was, living up to his reputation as a petty, violent psychotic, a fleeting sense of superiority at sinking down to he level. It was no wonder people had tolerated his pettiness. It hadn't been any more worth it then to set him straight than it was now for Sol to teach this fool a lesson.
But had it really?
Sol hadn't grown better because people had capitulated to his violent outbursts. If anything, he'd grown worse, bolder and more brutal in his expressions of dominance. It had gone from verbally berating subordinates, to physically assaulting dissenters, to inflicting his will by force, to... By the dead... He couldn't even bare the thought of where it had landed him. People allowing him to get away with shitty behavior hadn't just damned him, it had damned everyone around him, and everyone he came into contact with. Of course there had been challenges to his superiority, but Sol had always managed to prevail, driven by his own cruelty and arrogance, and triumphing, often through no virtue of his own, or fault of his opponent. Challenges had come from within his own ranks for the most part, and when they did, Sol could count on the loyalty of those whose livelihoods depended on his favor, and when challenges came from without that circle the deck was stacked even more firmly in his favor.
But he couldn't help but wonder what might have happened, if just once, someone had stood up to him and had the bones to come out on top? Would that have been enough to break the chain of decay that he was forging around his own neck? How much suffering would that have spared the world?
Sol didn't have to wonder for long. He'd known for a good long while that his continued existence had largely been bought with the blood of better men, and this only deepened the regret he felt for that inescapable truth. It made the guilt he felt strike all the more keenly. Like a hundred close calls he'd had, where the difference between being alive and being mud could be measured in the few meters between a shell landing at his feet and in the formation of his allies, to a few degrees between his path and a bullet, to a few inches between something vital and a blade that snuck past his guard, this was just another example of the injustice of the world; Just another example of how close he'd been to being just another corpse in a mass grave instead of The One-Eyed Dragon.
"You are a fake, insecure, edgy moron who thinks that becoming a hunter will be your chance at redemption."
His heavy reinforced combat boots emitted a sharp squeak as he came to a literally screeching halt. A series of nerveless twitches fluttered up the ruined side of his face. The injury that had take the eye on that side had also ruined most of the nerves that innervated the right side of his face, and Sol wouldn't have noticed the twitching, were it not for how it made the corner of his mouth draw back in a crooked sneer, and were it not for the icy cold that was filling him. Sol knew what he must look like. Once he'd caught sight of his reflection when those spasms overtook his visage and ever since had done everything he could to remove every surface capable of casting a reflection from his quarters. That twitching, that icy sensation, like his blood itself was starting to run cold, was a warning, a warning that he'd failed to heed more than once, a warning that heralded pain and suffering.
"Redemption belongs to the dead." He responded to her, voice as cold and flat as the face of a sword, "One moment you try to ambush me, and the next you speak as if you know me, as if you know anything but your own hatred and bitterness? Do you know what the difference between me and a dog is?"
He half spun to face her, but not with the left side of his face which was still whole. He turned to her the ruined half, the part of him that was his reward for a life of evil, the half that was contorted in crazed sickening spasm, mouth drawn wide, teeth bared, fluid leaking from the corner of his mouth and from beneath his eye-patch.
"When you beat a dog, it doesn't deserve it." It was uncanny, it was terrible to hear such a voice come out of such a face. One was flat, hollow as a tomb, as bereft of inflection or passion as winter itself, and the other seemed to be a canvas of disparate emotions warring with themselves, crawling like flies upon a slab of rotten meat.
"You think that your cruelty makes you hard, makes you strong. You think you are a monster?" He delivered that last, not as a statement, but as bald disbelief, incredulity, the first sign of emotion in his voice since he stopped walking, "But you are not. You are a scared, crippled little girl, hiding behind your strength to justify the weakness of your character. You're a coward using the injustice of the world as an excuse to be unjust. You're a pathetic child using your misfortune as an excuse to inflict your pain on those around you."
He spat, as if the words he was speaking were staining his tongue with sourness.
"If you think things like, honor, heroism, selflessness, and compassion, and all the virtues that make humanity worth preserving in the first place are so worthless, if virtue is so pointless, if we are so flawed, then why did you stop at just your arms?" He asked, voice returning to that icy reptile drone, "You think you are hard? You think you are strong? Look to those parodies of flesh jutting from your shoulders, which so embody those virtues and ask yourself what being hard and strong alone is worth. Ask yourself if all you want to be good for is doing harm."
He started walking again.
"Because if that is all you want, then you may as well finish the job that you started with your arms and go join the bastards who burned down our school and killed our friends."