[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya wakes up early Thursday and gets the day started with a nice cold shower. as enjoyable as hot showers are to others Niraya just loves the cold feeling on her skin. probably due to some resistance she built up because of her semblance but all the same she enjoyed it. after the shower, she grabs some spare clothes since she was working with metal today it would be bad if her good clothes got ruined by hot metal sparks. Once that was sorted she grabs her usual equipment. Crimson Heart and a few pieces of armor she had. She has trained well at swift strikes and her katana Crimson Heart was something she was proud of. She made this weapon herself and was her weapon of choice when she joined Haven.

She heads out of the dorms and into town heading for the Wind District. As she walks around she could tell the townspeople were on edge. a town being destroyed and Haven Academy being attacked at the same time. Niraya sighs to herself and continues on her way. Soon enough she arrived at the Broken Steel Forge. It was a rather large building slightly sunken into the ground. Niraya walks in and is greeted by Jack. "Niraya glad to see you. we got a large order for nails for Haven. Think you can help out?" Niraya nods. "For you Jack I will even mine the mountain to help you." Jack chuckles. "No need to go that far." Niraya chuckles and heads into the back. she walks down a short set of stairs to the sunken area of the building where 3 large forges were sitting and several machines to help construct whatever what needed.

Upon entering Tim waves at Niraya and taps Roy to get his attention. "What is it, Roy?" Tim points to Niraya and Roy speaks up. "Well if it isn't the ice fox herself. You here to work or just wanting to chat." Niraya chuckles. "I am here to work. think you can keep up with me?" Roy chuckles. "You're on. Tim keep count!" Tim shakes his head. though he couldn't speak it was obvious he was annoyed with Roy's ego. Niraya heads into the employee room and puts away the unneeded equipment she brought with her and dawns some protective gear so she can get to work at the forge.

She grabs some steel rods and begins working them into nails. they had an order for about a thousand of them so Niraya was going to do her share. She works quickly striking the metal with precision and shaping it into the shape of a nail before cutting off that one from the rest of the rod and beings the next one. Every now and then Jack walks into the back and writes something down on the chalkboard usually orders that come in. Tim would handle those till the massive order was finished.

WC: 489
TWC: 489

↺ + HK

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

The air was still chilly. Sol enjoyed winter. He'd spent a solid portion of his life in the high valleys of Mantle, a land of near eternal snow and cold. Even years later, and even after the horrors he'd been through in that snowy waste, he still loved the peace and purity of winter and its snows. Snow filed all the harsh edges off of everything as it fell like a fluffy blanket across the landscape, familiar things like buildings and trees were transformed into new and ethereal forms. Then there were the magical moments in the early morning when the cold air sucked all the moisture out of the surface hoar and produced a fine layer of microscopic crystalline formations that glittered like scattered diamond dust that danced and shimmered with changes in perspective as they caught the light. It was such a morning today, and the entire world from horizon to horizon seemed to be coated in a fine layer of starlight that twinkled as Sol walked by.

Were it not for the destruction that radiated out from the academy, insinuating itself into the countryside like a cancer made of burned out rice paper architecture, and vast piles of rubble, and the haunted expressions of certain passersby, the illusion would have almost been enough to make Sol feel peaceful. As it was however, that beauty and splendor draped over such ruin like a mortuary veil of white silk, it seemed like an extra layer of decay laid across the wreckage, like an indifferent and harsh world returning to claim the works of man.

He was in a maudlin mood. What else was new? Perhaps people in the street could sense it, because they were conspicuously steering clear of him. Perhaps it was just something about the look of him.

Solomon Moon would have been a handsome man, once upon a time, but somewhere along the line the cruelty and injustice of the world had settled in this flesh. His once proud features, a commanding jawline, high cheek bones, and a noble brow, had grown harsh and severe, giving his countenance the impression of being honed from unfinished stone. His long black hair was tied back save for a fringe that fell across the right side of his face like a widow's veil. Lastly, in place of his right eye which had once been the same molten gold of its neighbor, was a plain black patch and a puckered pink slash that tan from hairline to the corner of his jaw. His habitual expression, in a face that had once been uniquely expressive, was a perpetual half scowl that made him see ten years older than he truly was.

Just walking, he radiated menace like a furnace gave off heat. The commoners and laborers moving about their days were treating the tall dark cyclops with caution, and giving him a wide berth. Sol for his part wasn't especially exploiting their attitude. He was used to sticking out like a sore thumb, and he kept mostly to himself. If the civilians interpreted his straight back, and flowing self-assured strides that resonated with many hundreds of hours spent marching, as threatening, then that was their problem, not his. If they saw the crest that filled the back of his waistcoat, and whispered fearfully about a one eyed man with a black reputation, that was none of his business.

It wasn't like he was making any great effort to draw their attention. Though the richness of the fabrics that made up his attire, sable and royal shades of blue, were certainly eye-catching. His shirt, long sleeves covering both arms closely enough to suggest at the lean muscle within, a deep blue like the ocean at midnight, his swallow-tailed waistcoat, featuring a stylized emblem of Remnant's broken moon between the shoulders, his black parade trousers, were all pressed completely free of wrinkles, and the creases were lined up as if with a protractor. Every item was custom-fitted, and hugged the powerful frame of his broad shoulders and chest as if he'd been stitched right into them. Not a single stain or blemish was in evidence, not even upon the snow-white parade gloves that covered each hand. The black leather of his jack-boots, into which each pant leg was tucked with studious care, rose midway up his shins and shone like polished obsidian.

Some, those that didn't know any better, would have perhaps thought he was some nobleman, or perhaps a diplomat, on his way to some ball, or political audience.

The truth was, this was just how he dressed. Drill sergeants, tutors, and his father had always placed appearances in high regard, and had demanded impossibly high standards of presentation. A man was no better than the state of his uniform, and though what he wore was his equivalent of casual dress, Sol viewed all his clothes as a kind of uniform and treated them with the appropriate gravity.

The truth was, he wasn't on his way to some fancy party, or meeting of the rich and powerful. He was on his way to a smithy for some custom work.

"Broken Steel" a sign which was just several chunks of metal, hammered and riveted to a board, declared the identity of the shop over which it hung as the one eyed soldier of fortune approached. Sol studied the sign for a moment, trying to determine whether the crude craftsmanship of the sign in question was a genuine indication of the low quality of talent that the establishment could furnish, or if it was an affectation meant to make the shop seem rustic and more approachable. His deliberation proved inconclusive, so he looked past the storefront and studied the quality of the shop itself.

Like many of the buildings in Mistral, it was a design of mainly wood frame architecture, with walls made from either rice-paper or a more modern material fashioned to resemble the traditional style. The building was squat, a sing story tall and accented with the swooping pagoda design typical of much of the city. The actual work floor of the shop took up half of the building proper, and was completely open on one side, with a waist high wooden pony wall extending the workshop out towards the street. Sol could see forges, kilns, anvils, racks of tools, and others of what one might expect to see in a smithy, as well as other machines of more specific purposes near the back under cover of the roof. He could see three workers, milling through the grounds, moving materials and working the metals on anvils or in forges. One of them, a man with a chalkboard, seemed to be in charge, and Sol approached him.

The young man, garbed in a dirty leather apron, came up short, his expression shifting from first curiosity to something resembling concern as he saw the well dressed and horrifically scarred man who had entered the smithy. He licked his lips uncertainly, cocking a brow at the cyclops and tapping on his chalkboard, perhaps slightly nervous at the sight of the warrior's severe and almost menacing expression, and was about to say something when Sol cut him off short.

"Are you Niraya?" He growled, his voice a harsh and rough sound, like metal being raked through coals, as if he had only just finished smoking a pack of cigarettes and screaming himself hoarse, "We spoke on the Haven short-wave telegram."

The one eyed man thrust out his hand towards the increasingly concerned man, with such a suddenness that it caused the smith to flinch slightly. Sol was extending his hand to shake the blacksmith's own in greeting, though oddly it was his left hand, and more superstitious Mistralan's might have taken offense at that peculiar detail. The man with the clipboard glanced at the hand, tapping his chalk-board a few more times as realization dawned in his expression, and then called over his shoulder at a surprisingly pretty blonde pounding iron stock on an anvil nearby.

"Niraya! You got a visitor!" He said, as he strode right past Sol, who was frozen in surprise with hand still outstretched, and returned to whatever task he'd been momentarily distracted from.

The tall soldier followed the chalkboard man's call and gazed with some confusion at the girl, who was apparently who he'd come to meet. It was a stupid mistake, but an honest one, that Sol hadn't realized as he spoke to the girl over the Haven Instant-Messenger System that she was female. She'd said nothing to indicate her gender in their brief exchange, and Sol had expected a smithy to primarily employ men. To say that as the girl looked up from her work with radiant blue eyes, she wasn't what Sol had expected would be an understatement.

For one, she was pretty. Very pretty. Her painfully blonde hair, even tied back while she worked was glossy and smooth, and her fringe framed her electrically blue eyes like a halo of liquid gold. Her figure was striking even in work-clothes which could not hide the well defined feminine curves of her bust and hips. He could see bands of graceful muscle at where her neck met her shoulders, and where her trouser hugged her thighs. Her face was shaped like an inverted teardrop, and seemed both youthful and friendly, welcoming. And her eyes. Only once before had Sol seen eyes so blue.

Too bad it was all spoiled by one detail. Sol could accept a woman in a profession as archtypically masculine as smithing, especially a pretty woman, but he had a lot more difficulty accepting the other part. Atop her head were a pair of triangular ears, the same color as her sunflower yellow hair, like that of a fox or a cat.

It hit Sol in the gut like a cannon ball, and it made his skin feel cold and clammy all over. A wave of impulses crowded to be the first to crash through his mind. He wanted powerfully to turn around and leave right at that instant, at the same time that he wanted to leap across the shop and cut the faunus down where she stood, at the same time that he wanted very badly to weep openly. Memories, none of which were things he wanted to be remembering at that moment, swarmed through his head like a cloud of biting and stinging insects. He felt sick. He felt strangely scared. He felt cold.

Somewhere, out of the past rose sounds and sensations buried by his own hands in the sands of time. A pair of blue eyes. A voice, speaking in a language that Sol couldn't understand. The sounds of a gunshot, of whispering steel sliding out of a scabbard and then through soft flesh. The smell of blood. A pair of ears, pointed, like a fox or a cat's.

He'd gone very, deathly pale, his golden eye wide, and the lines on his face cut deep as he fought to control his expression. He knew he should leave. He knew he should get far, far away from here. But there was no way to leave now that he'd announced himself, that he'd been seen. They would think he was mad. Appearances were important. So he just stood there, trying to calm the sudden panic that gripped him as he waited for the faunus to come closer, to talk to him.

@tag

1909 words

notes

Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya was happily forging away on the nails. she was working quite quickly making a single nail every twenty or so seconds. She was humming a song that had a tempo similar to how quickly she was striking metal. her tail swayed back and forth almost keeping the rhythm like a metronome. Niraya could hear customers coming and going. Niraya had gotten about a hundred nails finished at this point still plenty more to get done. Roy who was helping was keeping pace to him this was a race one he was going to win. Tim just worked on the other orders so they didn't fall too far behind on the other orders.

Niraya hears her name and spots Jack walking into the lower area with another man. Niraya looks at this new person who was rather intimidating. his one golden eye seemed to be staring at Niraya. Niraya puts down the metal she was working with as well as her hammer and approaches the man. "Greetings. Welcome to the Broken Steel Forge." Niraya offers her hand for him to shake. "so what is an intimidating man like yourself needing from a humble blacksmith." Niraya had tilted her head slightly curious about what he was here for.

The man would get a better look at Niraya's features now that she was a lot closer. He would be able to make out a sheath attached to her side with the blade still in it. Niraya was trying to be nice but her tail had wrapped around her waist showing that she was a little intimidated by this newcomer. Tim watches them from the side as he waits for the metal to heat up. Roy just hammers away using this distraction to get ahead of Niraya. Jack goes back upstairs. "Do be careful while down there. a forge is a dangerous place."

WC: 358
TWC: 847

↺ + HK

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Sol could feel the sweat as it started to bead on his palm, and could almost trace the chill is it spread throughout his body. He knew on an intellectual level that this physiological reaction existed distinctly from his emotional response, and that he should control his feelings instead of allowing the impulses of his body to dictate his mood, but unfortunately he also knew that it rarely worked that way. He'd been through this song and dance enough times to know every note and step by heart. It was tragically routine.

All it took was a sound, a smell, a sensation, and it felt like the past rushed up from behind and swallowed him whole. Sometimes the trigger was so subtle that he didn't even notice it until the episode was beginning, and sometimes it was so obscure that he couldn't even connect it to the visions it called up.

Sol didn't have to guess this time though. He knew exactly what had done it. He'd seen those blue eyes and those triangular ears enough times in his recurring nightmares that he would probably be years in the grave before he forgot a solitary detail of it. They weren't the same blue eyes. They weren't the same ears. But the resemblance was uncannily similar. In a single crushing blow he was back in a bombed out battlefield in some neglected corner of Mantle, five years younger, and without any of the awful experience he had in the present.

He was huddled over the body of a dying man, a boy, not much older than he was, a child really. The boy had blue eyes like a pair of brilliant sapphires twinkling in the golden radiance of the sun. He had golden blonde hair, cropped close to his head under a slightly skew berret. Out of that hair sprouted a delicate pair of ears, pointed like that of a cat or fox, pinned back in terror and pain. His flesh was pale. His lips were turning blue, and as he tried to speak in words that Sol could not understand, blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. His stomach was slashed open from one side to the other, and his guts were in Sol's hands. Blood everywhere. The smell of it was so thick that Sol thought he'd never be able to smell anything else. Sol had done this to him. He hadn't expected the boy to have no aura, and had all but cut him in half with a single stroke. Sol was trying to push his guts back in, but whenever he managed to shove a handful of the slimy purple ropes back into the gaping wound, more fell out of the other side. Sol wasn't sure when the boy had stopped breathing. He only knew that he looked up once to find that those sapphire eyes had changed somehow. They were the same color, they were identical in every individual aspect of their production, but something was different. They had grown empty, dark, as if a light inside had gone out. It was the first time Sol saw someone die. It was the first time he killed someone.

Sol trembled. He looked down, and he could see a long slimy length of intestine hanging from his fingers. Why wasn't anyone screaming? The blacksmiths continued with their work as if it were perfectly normal for a one-eyed madman to be standing in their shop with half a dozen feet of bowel in his hands.

"It's not real you idiot..." He thought to himself, willing for the vision to end, to release him, as if that ever worked in the path. By the dead, he could even smell the blood, he could even smell the shit where his sword had penetrated the intestine. It wasn't real. He knew it wasn't, but that didn't make it go away.

Panic was gripping him, the exact same panic as had gripped him in that bunker. The blue eyed smith was coming closer. He had to do something, anything to make the vision end before she reached him. He did as he practiced, as he'd learned from countless previous private battles within his own mind, and he focused intently on what he knew to be real. From his environment, from the concrete reality that surrounded him somewhere beyond the scars on his mind, Sol made an anchor, made something heavy and fully realized enough to drag him out of the past and back into the present.

His sense of touch, of smell, of sight were useless for the task, as all three had been colonized by the flashback. So he focused on what he could hear. The rhythmic clanking of steel surrounded him. Metal struck metal, coals hissed, bellows groaned, casters squeaked and chains rattled. He squeezed his eye shut, drinking in the sounds of the real world around him like a man dying of thirst casting himself into a massive body of cool refreshing water. He focused on the sound of his own breathing, and counted each breath in time with the rhythmic striking of metal. It felt like he was breathing steam at first, but with each breath it got easier. Slowly the panic receded. The cold remained.

As he opened his golden eye, a slightly feverish light playing somewhere behind the lens, he beheld that the girl had come close enough that she filled nearly all his distinctly limited field of view. She held out her right hand, seemingly to shake his. Regret filled him, and Sol's expression, which had been pale up to this point, became even more so, and his features twisted in an expression of disdain or disgust. Needless to say, he didn't return the gesture. His right hand did not shift as much as a micron from where it dangled at his side.

Up close there were differences he hadn't seen from further away. The resemblance to the boy in his vision was slight, and even more so on close inspection, but that was often how it was. He could tell that her eyes weren't the exact same shade of blue, nor her hair that same blonde, but it was too late for these details to make much of difference. The damage was done, but Sol focused on these minor details, grasping for any element of the present that would prevent his mind from sliding back into the past. Most notably, as his gaze slowly slid from her head down her body, were the obvious characteristics that she did not share with the ghosts of his past. The faunus girl was blessed with a breathtaking figure. A generous swell of chest flowed gracefully into elegant hips, and then into long agile legs. Sol looked away quickly before he could accused of staring and settled his gaze on another notable detail, the sword on her hip.

The weapon's brightly colored lacquer seemed to be a custom work, as one might expect of a smith, though Sol would have expected a hammer. The only other blacksmith, now bartender, that Sol knew, could practically have claimed his hammer as a personality trait. Even in it's sheath, Sol could see it was similar in design to his own sword, a long hilt for use in two hands, a conservative tsuba style guard, a slightly curved blade profile, likely single edged, specialized for delivering cuts. The only embellishment on the sword's design, other than the bright red coloring, was a stylized dragon's head on the pommel. Overall it was the kind of weapon that Sol approved of.

As he concluded his study of the sword, Sol spotted the girl's belt, or at least what he'd taken for a belt at first. A brief moment revealed that it was in fact the girl's tail, wrapped securely around her waist. Sol didn't have many faunus friends, on account of a reputation that was damning in the eyes of the animal folk, but he was familiar with the mannerisms of the more common types, such as feline and canine breeds. Faunus instinctually protected their tails when they were alarmed or afraid, and while most would place the appendage between their legs just like their quadrupedal counterparts, enough chose to instead encircle their waists that Sol recognized the posture.

The message was obvious. Sol was frightening, and the faunus was afraid of him. He couldn't blame her. He was afraid of himself most days. That didn't stop the realization from causing what was left of his stomach after the unexpected flashback, to fall out of his guts and leave him feeling empty with his guilt. A moment later she even admitted as much by calling him intimidating directly. Sol's urge to leave grabbed the word and hit him in the back of the head with it for good measure.

Sol nodded at her question, doing his best to be polite, but his tongue felt like it was a mile wide and weight a ton, and he didn't trust himself to speak with the shadow of his flashback still hanging over him. Instead he reached up and over his own shoulder, and grasped the scabbard of his own weapon, which was slung across his back, out of the way and where he carried it when he was not intent on needing to draw it quickly. He'd even gone to the effort to wrap it carefully in fabric so that passersby wouldn't realize he was armed, and might just take the bundle for something harmless.

Gripping the bundle with the unyielding grasp of his right hand, garbed in a white glove that went all the way up into the cuff of his jacket's sleeve, Sol unwrapped the fabric with his left, slowly exposing his own weapon to the blacksmith. The hilt of the weapon was the first to reveal itself, about two and a half hand spans long, it was clearly intended for use in two hands. Curiously, only the later two thirds of the hilt were wrapped in the traditional style with braided blue ribbon, while the third nearest the blocky and functional tsuba was clearly custom shaped to fit the exact shape of his right hand, with small depressions to fit his fingers, and protrusions to fill the gaps between. Even more curiously, where would have been the center of the palm in the hand impression of the grip was a type of port that resembled the combination between a fuel-port on a military vehicle, and a mag-lock. It was a strange thing for it's placement, because the jutting out port would be uncomfortable, or even painful to anyone trying to wield the sword, as it would jab mercilessly into their palm. The second detail that stood out as more of the fabric peeled away was the trigger mechanism and dust magazine set into the scabbard, back about half a hand span from the mouth of the sheath.

It was an infamous Atlesian design, known colloquially as a "Kreig-Messer", sometimes translated as "Cannon-sword", and less often "Gun-Blade", though it was an inaccurate name because the firing mechanism was part of the sheath not the sword, so a more literal name may have been "Kreig-Mantel", or "Gun-Scabbard". The design was infamous for being notoriously difficult to wield effectively. It relied upon triggering a dust charge inside the sheath, as the wielder delivered a draw cut, exploiting the explosive forces within the sheath to eject the blade at ballistic velocities. As one might expect, when swordsmen were trying to draw swords at speeds comparable to that of a bullet exiting the muzzle of a rifle, injury was as likely to be done to the wielder as any potential foes. It was a design that required a unique combination of skill, inhuman physical strength, and unbelievable recklessness to wield effectively. An entire field of martial art was developed especially for the weapon, which itself was a glorious union of Atlesian and Mistralan traditions, and as such it was only typical for noblemen, or especially valuable bannermen to receive the required education to competently utilize.

The one-eyed swordsman regarded his tool with a mixed and impossible to define expression. It was not the expression of fondness that most hunters bestowed upon their personalized arms. It looked, if anything, a little bit sad.

"What do you know about Kriegmessers?" He asked finally. The golden eyed cyclops had a voice to match his rugged and calloused exterior. His voice was deep and resonant, and strangely hoarse, as if he were a pack a day smoker for fifty years, that brushed his teeth with barbed wire and gargled battery acid. It was vaguely unpleasant to listen to, and it seemed as if he nearly needed to force the sound out, as if some damage to his vocal chords had rendered the usual method of speech painful.

@tag

2145/4054 words

notes

Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya's nervousness didn't stop when she was close. being at such a close range she could see he was having an inner conflict. did he have a grudge against Faunus? was he a Faunus hater? either way, Niraya wasn't going to push this fact. She had her own goals in mind and driving a gap between her and this potential customer was not something she was planning on doing. They stand there in silence each second dragging on to the next. when the man clearly showed he wasn't going to shake her hand she pulls it back. this man was thinking unsure what it was but his facial features made it clear it was something painful.

Niraya watches him as he lifts his right hand above his shoulder her left hand tightening on her sheath. the man pulls out a thing wrapped in cloth. as he slowly removes the cloth she notices its a sword. it was similar in appearance to her katana blade but this one was different. the hilt was much larger than normal hilts, in fact, it even had a trigger mechanism, fuel port, and dust magazine. a gunblade of some kind. she had worked on a few but this one was different. it looked like it wasn't meant for range attacks the slight reinforcement to it made it seemed like it was meant for something else.

then the man spoke his voice that of a thousand rakes scraping across a blackboard. he referred to the weapon as a Kriegmessers. Niraya unconsciously tilted her head as if confused by this. "No, I can't say I have. but that won't stop me from trying to help you. what is wrong with your Kriegmissers? Kregmesser...That is a difficult word. Kriegmessers?" she had gotten it right at the end but probably accidentally insulted the man. Niraya would lean in for a closer look at the weapon if something was wrong Niraya would be the best one to fix it here but this construction was new to her. if she was allowed to fix it she would need to slowly take it apart to understand the inner workings and to find what went wrong exactly because sometimes one problem hides the true crime. "I can help you by fixing this if you are willing to hand it over for a bit. I swear on my blacksmith honor that I will do the best I can to fix your rather unique weapon."

WC: 410
TWC: 1257

↺ + HK

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Sol's expression frosted over as the girl studied his weapon. He could tell that she had not the faintest clue what she was looking at, well before she started stumbling over the name itself like it was made of slippery squirming eels. She was doing no favors to the faunus stereotype of simplicity, and Sol actually started to look around, searching the faces of the other workers for signs of amusement, certain that they had sent some impostor, or just a simpleton as some sort of joke. How could she need so many tries to say the name correctly, when he'd said it himself out loud, within hearing distance of the faunus not a moment prior. But no one was laughing, no one seemed to be paying any attention at all.

Whisper, the name of his weapon that Sol rarely used, might have, if not for one other remarkable competitor for the position, been his single most precious possession. Though perhaps precious was the wrong word. Sol did not share the fondness that most huntsman bestowed upon their custom made armaments. In fact, all the evil he'd committed with the assistance of that sword had permanently stained it in his eye, and he would never be able to look upon it without a thick undercurrent of regret. In any case it was nevertheless an extremely valuable item, and could he really trust to leave it in the care of someone who needed several tries just to get the name right? He couldn't even be certain she understood the most basic principles of its design or function. She didn't even seem to know how it worked.

That, and she was a faunus. Sol had known the animal folk to be especially devious and cunning in a low and feral sort of way, but had yet to meet one he would classify as a titan of intellect. Perhaps Professor Shadecloak was passably intelligent, but she seemed to have sacrificed all of her "humanity", if such a word could apply to the mongrel cunt, at the alter of that intellect and remained astonishingly ignorant in areas like interpersonal interaction and basic decency as a result. Sol half suspected that the smith was playing dumb, for some nefarious purpose inscrutable to a human mind, because that was honestly easier for him to believe than her simple ignorance.

Sol's father had always quoted the Valanese philosopher Hanlon's famous saying, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." oft immediately before adding, "Unless the party in question is Faunus.".

What was this blue eyed runt playing at? She couldn't believably be that incompetent. It was that question more than anything that made Sol play along, rather than simple thanking the half-breed for her time, when really it was looking a lot like she was wasting his, and walking away. Sol wanted to discover what this girl's angle was. The possibility of his own prejudice and Niraya being exactly what she seemed to never came within sight of occurring to him.

Sol nodded, his stony features betraying nothing of his thoughts, except for a slight and skeptical pursing of his lips that could easily have passed for exasperation, and began to unwrap the rest of the weapon. Folds of cloth fell away, revealing interlocked ceramic plates treated with red dust to fortify them against heat, surrounding a core of blue infused vaguely transparent metal that would quickly sink heat away from the primary structure. It was a fantastically elaborate weapon, even by huntsman standards, and likely worth more than the combined tuition of the academy's entire freshman year. It was sturdy and elegant, and seemed solid enough to be a lethal weapon without need to even draw the blade.

Gripping the scabbard near the mouth with his left hand, finger resting on the trigger guard that would activate the dust magazine set beneath it, Sol held out the weapon for Niraya to get a good look at, but did not give any indication of intending to hand it over. Until she demonstrated something nearing competence, Sol was going to hold onto his weapon.

"Perhaps a demonstration first? For a smithy of this size, you have some sort of proving ground, I'd guess." He said, trying to sound patient but unable to keep his irritation entirely out of his voice.

As soon as he was given the barest direction with which to find what he sought, the golden eyed lordling strode right past the smith, taking invitation as granted by virtue of his station and his patronage, and proceeded directly towards the practice range without bothering to wait for her to catch up. She could rush to keep up, or not, he didn't particularly care which.

Sol moved with a gliding animal grace, radiating power and command with every individual position of his frame and musculature. He marched as if in formation with an invisible parade, without even needing to dedicate any conscious thought to it. In spite of his dominating physical size, he was fast and sure. It was like watching a giant reptile sidle up to a watering hole, not in a hurry but alarmingly quick on its feet, and every movement conservative and automatonically precise, as if he were intrinsically aware of every inch of his body at any given moment, as if the movements themselves were coded onto him at a genetic level. The fluid predatory flow of motion was indicative of extensive martial training, and he contained a suggestion of a cocked and loaded weapon with the safety on, as if it were jsut a switch he needed to flip to go from perfectly at ease to ready to kill. Even if Niraya didn't notice, the other workers did, and several turned to watch for a moment, and those nearest quickly chose different routes that would carry them out of the path of the armed warrior.

Sol arrived at the practice range, which took up the rear lot of the shop, in an open space on a crumbling concrete and cobble pad. Makeshift targets were placed randomly about. Old rusted water barrels, pockmarked and pierced indiscriminately by a variety of calibers and projectiles, steel plates that hung down from racks of various heights, similarly dented and scuffed by shot impacts. Wooden frames in the approximate shape of armed adversaries were scattered around between the other targets, along with bundles of tatami mats on metals stands, each to serve as targets for melee weapons. For the first time since arriving, the one-eyed noble seemed to approve of something, and pursed his lips as his gilded eye scanned the positioned targets without moving his head.

He'd come to a stop in a pose, sword grasped sheathed in his left hand, right thumb hooked into his belt, shoulders squared and back, chin up and hair falling loose across one side of his face, that unconsciously, or perhaps deliberately mimicked the noble figures struck by statues of famous generals and huntsman throughout the Cloud District streets. He stood like that a moment, once more suggesting at a youth and vigor, of a handsome and capable young man that had once been before he'd gone off to war, and then like a the sun vanishing behind a cloud after a moment of radiance on an overcast day, it passed and he stalked towards one of the wooden frames that stood in for armed humanoid targets.

With a flick of his wrist, he caused an articulated metal arm that had been folded up parralel to Whisper's sheath to flip out from the scabbard, and then with another well practiced jerk of his forearm he caused the free end of that arm to catch upon the metal bracer he wore upon his left wrist. The arm secured itself with a ratcheting clack, and Sol let go of the scabbard with his hand, and allowed the bracer to hold the sheath in that position relative to his arm. Fingers now free, scabbard following the movements of his left arm like a mantis's claw, the one eyed man used his left hand to carefully peel the glove off of his right hand. The flesh beneath that glove was wrong.

At first it appeared that the fingers of Sol's right hand were pitch black, but on closer inspection it became apparent that they were actually vaguely translucent, flesh tinged blue, and coal dark skeleton visible within. The back of his hand was scaled with the same red ceramic plates as on Whisper's scabbard, so finely assembled that they moved like the reticulated hide of a serpent. In his palm was a winking metal aperture, the once silvery fins long since stained a diseased confusion of color as if from intense heat. It moved uncannily, the fins that made up a ring in his palm articulating themselves individually like the beak of a squid, as a ring inside dilated and contracted like the pupil in the eye of a devil. He took a moment to move each finger, one at a time, as if checking for their range of motion, as if distrustful of his own hand, though by this point it was clear that the hand was in truth as much a part of his body as the sword was, and was merely a cunningly crafted prosthesis replacing the original. A heat haze started to rise out of his palm, as a light flared out of the aperture in set there, and eventually resolved into a short spike of flame as fuel pumped out the arm and ignited in his hand as a short blade of blue radiance. He clenched his fingers and snuffed out the collected flame, choking off the quiet whistling it had produced.

Then he began to limber up slightly, rolling his shoulders, and his neck, and twisting his back one way and then the other as he fell into a fighter's stance with his right shoulder towards the practice dummy, legs spread, knees bent, torso twisted towards the side to present a more narrow target. He swung his left arm up and then down in a wide arch, causing the scabbard to swing out on it's armature and snap out straight, tip pointed straight up at the peak of the arch, before snapping back parallel to his forearm as he arrested the motion sharply at it's conclusion.

He wrapped the fingers of his artificial hand around the hilt of the sword, as the fingers of his left hand grasped the scabbard, forefinger tickling the trigger set there. A series of loud clicks rang out as the artificial hand insinuated itself into the hilt of the sword, two becoming one as the fuel port on the sword's grip interfaced seamlessly with the aperture in the palm of Sol's prosthetic. Sol's expression twitched slightly, as the artificial nerves in the arm reported the successful coupling and began to transmit sensory data from the sword and scabbard as well.

Sol took a deep breath as he aligned the sheath with his target and took aim over his right shoulder at the center of the dummy's mass. Then he expelled the the breath as a booming shout, "HAAAAAA", and as if responding to his voice, his false arm and hand began to emit a shrill scream of churning turbines, filling the entire proving ground with an ear-splitting machine wail that had passersby on the street out from looking up to the sky to try and catch sight of the airship that must surely be swooping low overhead, only to find the sky completely clear. Stabilizing thrusters sprung jets of ignited fuel out of the backs of the fingers on Sol's hand, causing his hand to smoke like the surface of a forge.

What happened next was too fast and too much to take in all at once, it began with Sol pulling the trigger on Whisper's scabbard, and ended with the target dummy tumbling across the yard in smoking chunks, all in less time than it took for a nerve impulse to travel from the tip of a human finger to the brain, less than a fraction of the time it took to blink. What happened in that fraction of a fractal instant, was a work of engineering magnificence, accomplished by the unification of a thousand of disciplines from metallurgy, to martial arts, to mechanics, representing the very peak of human ingenuity and dedication to the art of violence. If a monument could be constructed to honor the sordid history of man from when one cave man first killed another with a rock, to the engineering excellence of the Atlesian Palidan Weapons Platform, it would have been that moment, frozen between trigger pull and blow struck.

The pulled trigger ignited a dust charge housed inside the sheath, as simultaneously Sol's false hand pumped liquid fuel through the hilt and into the blade, and then out through vents in the blade's spine, filling the interior of the sheath with a volatile mixture of fire and wind dust of Sol's own design. The fuel ignited immediately, and generated an earth shattering explosion that ejected the sword from the sheath at the speed of a medium-velocity firearm round. The air immediately ahead of Sol, where he'd been aiming, vanished behind a cloud of swirling orange and red flame in a blast of pyroclastic fury that alone would have reduced the victim to splinters, were it not beaten to the punch by a blade travelling faster than the speed of sound, which impacted so hard that the material that made up the dummy literally exploded beneath the blow and rained down in a conical shower of smoking wreckage. It was like one instant the dummy was there, and the next it was nothing but smoking rubble.

Sol's booming war-cry came to an end. It wasn't just for show, he had deliberately created positive end pressure in his lung and kept his mouth open so that the pressure wave, which it bears repeating that he created by simply drawing his sword, didn't inflict barotraumatic injuries upon the soft tissues of his inner ear and respiratory tract. Any regular man should have had his arm torn off at the shoulder, should have been knocked out cold by the pressure exchange and set alight by the cloud of burning fuel, but as Sol stood there, arm frozen at the conclusion of his swing, the only indication that anything remarkable had taken place was the fire that continued to lick from the blade of his sword, and the cloud of pulverized wood hanging in the air around him. He maintained the pose for a moment, then glanced towards Niraya.

Sol shifted back to an easeful position, rising to his full height and sweeping his sword in a broad arch to snap out the flames still clinging to Whisper's face. Chest thrust out, he slipped the blade back into it's sheath without needing to look, and sealed it in position with an audible click, followed by the buzzing of his false hand as it detached from the grip. He waited for her reaction as he pulled a glove back onto his false hand, and rolled out the joints at fingers wrist and elbow, as if the display had left them stiff.

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Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya examined the blade as more and more of the cloth fell off. it was quite an interesting design. from what she could tell the blade had vents and heatsinks built into them a clear sign of a blade meant to dish out high heat. but something wasn't adding up a flame blade doesn't need such a precise design the vents were more like thrust ports. the burn marks show the heat was directed at high speeds. As she thought about the design she hears Solomon speak up. "oh we have a testing spot in the back. but you have to go out the front of the shop and walk down the alley beside it." no sooner than she said that than Sol than he started to move.

Niraya panics a bit. "Hey wait for a moment!" She follows him as he swiftly moves to the testing ground behind the shop. the shop had a dirt mount between it and the testing ground to protect it from stay shots. the test targets were spaced out for practice but not actual combat training so they were just haphazardly placed. Sol takes his place as Niraya stands some distance back. As she watched him move she started to see the inhuman features he had. were his limbs replaced with cybernetic replacements? why did they look like they were so heavily abused? well, she soon got her answer.

As he got into position Niraya noticed the air begin to change around her fearing something dangerous would happen she activates her semblance ice forming around her body protecting her. She brings her arms up in front of her to help protect her body. the air begins to distort more and more as a high-pitched sound begins to emit from the man. in a flash of light or was it less than that Sol's sword launches out of his sheath and the target goes flying. the explosive force that came from the attack could be felt by Niraya even though she was a safe distance away. Sol seems to take a normal stance afterward.

Niraya breathes a sigh of relief and lets go of her semblance. her ice armor begins to crack and fall away. "so this Kriegmessers is a ballistic cannon blade. the speed from it is quite intimidating. What exactly are you needing from a blacksmith for such a unique weapon?" Niraya was clearly a little intimidated by the display but was eager to take the challenge of repairing the weapon.

WC: 420
TWC: 1677

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Sol drew a long breath through his nose, and the let it out between his lips. His blood seemed to be buzzing inside him with the adrenaline rush of unleashing Whisper and Roar upon a physical target. The act alone, complete with the deafening blast, the full body slap of a pressure wave striking every inch of him at once, and the spectacular destruction of the target, would have been enough to bring anyone to full sensory arousal, as a cocktail of stress hormones and neurotransmitters flooded his system in response to the avalanche of stimuli. Sol however had an additional layer of sensitivity to the display.

Sol was sensitive to the act, in a way that perhaps no observer could be, because he alone among current company had used that weapon upon foes other than inanimate bundles of wood. Sol had used that weapon on living, breathing, thinking people, and when the smoke cleared it had not been a cloud of splinters that filled the air, and not the tang of charcoal clinging to his flesh. The air had been full of blood, and the smell on him had been the stench of scorched meat.

Human beings, though in many cases it had been faunus, didn't shatter neatly the way the dummy had. They didn't divide evenly at shoulder and waist and scatter in fragments not much larger than toothpicks. Their pieces didn't skip across the floor and bounce about. They couldn't be cleaned up with a few minutes and a broom. People were nothing but animate bags of meat. They split like overripe fruit, and splattered in irregular patterns. Their pieces stuck to the floor and the walls, and ceiling and splashed the area around where they landed with gore. Living creatures killed by a kriegmesser, because a direct hit was rarely anything short of instantaneously fatal, often left not enough behind to be recognizable, and Sol had frequently returned from battles soaked head to foot in viscera, and had pulled small pieces like gristle and even teeth out of his belongings, and even his hair, as much as days later.

It was a monstrous, shocking, awful way to kill one's enemies.

How many times had he done that to a real person? It made Sol feel cold inside that he couldn't even answer that question honestly anymore. He honestly didn't know. He wasn't sure which were memories and which were nightmares. He wasn't even sure he remembered all of them.

His body remembered though, and that was why the flesh of the one-eyed soldier felt electrified, why his stomach felt like a bottomless icy pit in the center of him. That was why he drew in deep breaths, smelling, tasting, gagging on the smoke, because if he didn't do that, his body might forget where it was, his mind might find it's way back to those distant horrors buried inside his past. The smell of smoke was an anchor in the present.

A flutter of spasmodic twitches crawled up the right side of his face, causing the pale flesh to squirm unsettlingly around the black patch that covered the absence of the swordsman's right eye. Sol swallowed down something that seemed to be trying to rise out of him, something cold, something that lurked just below the surface, and turned his golden eye upon Niraya as she dared to shed her protective shell of ice.

The uncertainty was clear on her features now, whereas she'd been attempting to conceal it before, but the one-eyed man still doubted that the significance of the display had truly landed.

Perhaps because she was faunus, perhaps because she was younger than him, and perhaps because she did not seem to have been subject to the life of horror that he had, but whatever the case, Sol had a sense of something lost in translation between them. It was like talking to someone who one knew not to speak one's native tongue as a first language, and the ever present suspicion of misunderstanding, of incomplete comprehension that came as a result of it. It was a matter of trust, or lack thereof in the young smith's ability to understand. Sol had the inescapable sense that something was being lost, and no matter how much detail and how explicitly he worded his dialogue with her, there would be minor details, subtle differences, tiny matters that she would miss, overlook, or simply not notice, and over the course of their interaction these tiny discrepancies would added up to an impassable gulf between them. Truth be told, Sol felt something similar when dealing with any other person, to some degree or another, but it was always most keen when it came to dealing with faunus.

"It is exactly because it is a unique weapon that I need a blacksmith," He answered her, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, his tone somewhat incredulous, though making a strong effort at being tolerant of her, by this point, characteristic ignorance, "Kriegmessers are an Atlesian design, and Mistral does not have a surplus of Atlesian weapon-smiths, and I cannot afford to return to Mantle whenever a part wears out, or fails. What I need is a blacksmith who meets three specific criteria. One, is native to Haven. Two, has the necessary facilities and materials to craft parts. And lastly, and most importantly, is competent enough to master the intricacies of a foreign design, and has the necessary skill to produce quality replacements."

The twitching of his right cheek finally stilled as he strode near to the girl, his height slowing him to literally look down on her as he came close. He swept the surrounding facility with circuit of his golden eye, before bringing it back around to leer coldly down at the vulpine faunus.

"From what I have seen, you meet the first two. Your shop is within short walk of the academy, and you seem to have the machinery and materials to make what I need." Sol concluded, his unpleasant grind of a voice seeming to be even more coarse up close, "As for the last requirement. Considering you didn't even know how to pronounce the style of my weapon, lets say that I am not yet convinced. My life will very likely rely upon the capabilities of this sword and the quality of it's construction, and I am not about to trust its maintenance to a craftsman that I do not have complete faith in."

It was not something he said with cruelty, or even intention to offend. It was simply a professional laying out of their relationship and his expectations as a patron of her as a craftsman.

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Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya froze up a bit as Sol approached her. he laid out his thoughts plain as day. completing the shop's location and access to resources, but he was still questioning her. Niraya pulls off the ice mask and takes a deep breath. "Your weapon is Atlesian? I'm not going to let some tech-head who thinks they can manipulate people get the glory of repairing such a unique weapon. I promise that I will do everything in my power to help you out. I will need to dismantle your weapon. But I know you will not be in favor of such a venture. I am willing to take any test to show you I'm up for the task." Niraya stands strong her attitude shifted more to one of determination. her ears perked up and her tail stood proud.

WC: 137
TWC: 1814

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Though it was difficult to be sure given the brief window of exposure, Sol was all but certain that he'd never met a more artless, guileless individual, ever, in his entire life. A cunning merchant who truly desired his custom would have at least feigned familiarity with his weapon's design, and certainly would not have witlessly blurted out the fact with impunity. It was just bizarrely inept enough to make Sol suspect that it must be an act, because surely no creature trusted with as hazardous a workplace as a forge could truly be so utterly clueless, but Niraya was more than happy to thoughtlessly characterize Atlesians as manipulative tech-heads not more than an instant later, and Sol had to admit, maybe she really was just that stupid.

Her tail and ears, twin orange beacons, broadcast the girl's honest ignorance with such utter sincerity that even a man who flirted so close to the line of bigotry as Solomon Moon had to admit it was pretty convincing. It was so convincing in fact that he half wanted to humor her blithe idiocy just to see if he could uncover some trick behind it. She was a fox, well a vixen technically, after all, weren't foxes supposed to be cunning and mischievous?

All right then. Play along. What's the worst that could happen?

"Pay attention." Sol said with a twinkle somewhere between amusement and irritation shining in his golden eye, as he held out his sword, which ran parallel to his forearm upon a metal limb that clipped into the bracer he wore on his left wrist.

Then with his whole body springing into finely tuned action, Sol produced a twisting motion of his wrist and jerked the hand towards himself. The clip unto which the sheath's arm fitted gave out a ringing clank sound as it detached from the bracer and popped the sheath into the air as the arm retracted into scabbard's housing.

"In basic..." He began, hands moving completely independently as he spoke with something in his expression that might have been pride, utilizing the jargon that most grunts used to refer to "basic training".

With his right hand, Sol snatched the sword out of the sheath. The liberated blade hissed and rang in the air for several seconds, until he spun the weapon around in his fingers and stabbed it vibrating into a beam of wood supporting a nearby workbench. While the sword still shivered in the timber he swept his hand back through the air, and scooped the dust magazine out of the still airborne scabbard, using a motion of his forefinger and thumb to depress the clip release and eject the loaded mag into his palm.

"...the new recruits aren't allowed to even fire their weapon until they can take it apart and reassemble it,.." He continued, watching the faunus, and not his hands as he slapped the charged cache of fire dust rounds on the bench into which the sword was jammed, while at the same time with his left hand he caught the tumbling scabbard, now empty, just below the trigger guard and thumbed a latch at the same time that he pinched a pin near the manifold between middle finger and thumb. Like how some chefs could crack an egg by striking it against a surface and applying careful pressure at the fracture points, Sol caused the entire trigger assembly, manifold, and slide, to split neatly apart in his grasp. Catching the still falling scabbard with his right hand as he laid out the dissembled parts with his left, Sol spun the sheath about and then sharply tugged against the momentum of the rotation, causing the sheath, no longer held together by the structure of the trigger assembly and slide, to split into it's component pieces of armored housing and reinforced dust treated core. He caught the core of the scabbard in his left hand and slapped both fragments down on the wood.

"...While blindfolded." He concluded with emphasis, as his hands fell back to his side.

The entire demonstration took only a few moments to complete, but it produced an organized row of parts laid out neatly as soldiers in formation on the bench in front of the one eyed warrior. It was clearly a trick of dissembling his weapon that he'd practiced to the point of complete mastery, that not only neatly prepared every part of the weapon system for cleaning, but also reflected a keen instinctual understanding of it's design and assembly.

He waved at the arranged parts.

"I don't see why I should trust you to make me new parts if you can't do the same. You have fifteen seconds to put Whisper back together. I hope you were paying attention, I will be timing you."

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Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya stands strong as Solomon gives her a serious look. Solomon plants his blade into the bench next to them and begins to skillfully dismantle his weapon. The parts for the device were laid out with precision. Niraya could spot a few pieces that could do with a replacement but before she could say anything she was challenged to reassemble the device in 15 seconds. "I can't do that. a device such as this can't be assembled in under 15 seconds without knowing how it's built. should I even try to I could get something misaligned and the next use could result in catastrophic failure."

She looks down at the parts and begins arranging them into a pattern akin more to how a blueprint would show the parts. she was unsure if she played out the parts correctly because he disassembled it so quickly but she did her best. "There are a few parts that could do with replacement as they show signs of metal fatigue, not a good thing when you're unleashing so much power from such a contained spot. I can forge anything you ask to replace these. I only need to know its specs and material."


WC: 199
TWC: 2015

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

The one eyed mercenary was visibly disappointed at the faunus' reaction. His hardened features became rigid and his lips pressed into a thin line that readily betrayed dissatisfaction.

He wasn't sure whether he was more disappointed by Niraya confessing her incredulity of the test, or her flat refusal to even try. On the one hand, his demonstration had been brief, but definitive, and he'd even gone so far as prefacing it by instructing her to pay attention, which should have given her enough of an insight into the weapon's composition to at least make the attempt. On the other, the time limit was ridiculous, especially for a first attempt, but Sol himself had never allowed the perceived incredibility of a task dissuade him from giving his best effort.

From an early age, and more specifically from day one of basic, Sol had been given one impossible task after another. He'd been forced to spar with seasoned warrior with many years more experience than he had. He'd been instructed to clear obstacle courses in a time that was a challenge for graduates. He'd been expected to perform to the exact same level of combat effectiveness as battle hardened killers. And he had failed, time and again. Success had never been the point, the point had been to try in spite of how unfair it was, because war wasn't fair. The point wasn't to succeed on the first attempt, even the best recruits couldn't meet the Sarge's insane standards, it was to get better on the second attempt, and to keep getting better. The point wasn't who triumphed and who was defeated, the point was, more than anything, those who responded to adversity with grit and conviction, and those that simply gave up. The point was, who was wired to fight, and who was wired to retreat. The point was to separate the fighters from the cowards.

It went without saying what refusing his test made Niraya in that solitary golden eye.

He hadn't set her up to fail. Because he hadn't been testing her for her knowledge of an unfamiliar weapon design. Sol had instructed Niraya to pay attention, and then given her a demonstration, if a somewhat brief one, and proposed a task based on what he'd just shown her. He'd given her the tools needed to make an attempt, and had given a consequence to motivate her, and it was worth mentioning that he never directly said that failure to stay within the time limit would result in failure, merely implied it.

However, Niraya had in turn, refused, and why? Despite what she said about the risk of a misfire if the weapon was reassembled incorrectly the one eyed man remained unconvinced. It was a weak excuse in Sol's mind, because of course he would be checking her work before he deigned to engage the mechanism in question. He'd have to be an idiot to trust her to get it right on the first try. No, the way he saw it, the real reason she refused was because she thought it was too hard, it was unfair, impossible.

Sol shrugged, and no sooner had Niraya started adjusting the arranged parts, he began putting the weapon back together, flawlessly and thoughtlessly reassembling Whisper's scabbard while paying as much mind to it as one might when shuffling a deck of cards. He gave the girl an unintelligible grunt and turned back towards the shop, before making to leave, in no great hurry, without any further comment but the rasp and click of his sword sliding back into it's sheath.

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Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya was sure she was being tested but before she could muster the courage to assemble the weapon Solomon did it in front of her. Niraya doesn't stop him she failed the test she had no right to argue. but the test was to build the weapon and she didn't do it fearing she would break it. Solomon didn't say anything but her gaze said it all. he looked down on faunus and now he was looking down on her. Niraya kept professional and stayed silent. She follows Solomon back to the store she was sure he was going to leave and never return. Jack would probably scold her for it later.

Niraya shakes her head she couldn't let this one incident slide. She marches in front of Sol and stops him. "Look I promised I could help you the best I could. rebuilding a weapon from scratch in a few seconds from one demonstration is impossible! You said it yourself those who learn this weapon are taught to assemble this weapon over and over again until they can do it blindfolded. well, you came here not for me to assemble your weapon but rather get replacement parts. I can forge new parts hell I can forge stronger parts if that is what is needed! I have worked at this forge for years! so I know a lot when it comes to making stuff. so how about you hop off your high horse and we can negotiate on my terms!"

WC: 260
TWC: 2375

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[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Sol was brought up short as a voice spoke out behind him. Being that Niraya had, in so far as the one eyed soldier was concerned, failed to meet his "reasonable" expectations, and thus their business was naturally concluded, he was perfectly ready and in the process of never again giving a second thought to her existence, the same way that one would immediately forget the face of an unremarkable barista who worked at a coffee shop one had decided never to visit ever again. For this reason, and a few others not worth detailing, Sol was surprised to be challenged, all the more so for it being this diminutive half-blood doing the challenging.

He came to a sharp halt with a crunching of his shin high jack-boots on concrete that wouldn't have looked out of place in a parade formation, standing bolt straight and motionless for a moment as he listened to the words, which rang slightly petulant to his ears, without as much as turning to face their origin. Other than the sudden arrest of his stride, for a long interval, the golden eyed swordsman, gave no indication of actually having heard the words, until just as she finished, he cocked his head slightly to the side, as if a hound becoming aware of a shrill and unexpected tone beyond the range of normal audibility.

The expression surrounding that luminous golden orb set in a dark sunken socket narrowed slightly, pulling flesh away from his mouth and producing a liquid acid sneer as he pivoted at the hips to face the faunus who dared to address him thusly. A cool sensation flowed out of his chest and into his hand and legs, as a thrill of anticipation and a violent desire to answer the challenge with borne steel loped languidly across the landscape of his mind. As real as if he had done it already, a vision materialized within his shaded mind, of springing off from his half turned posture, drawing Whisper from her scabbard and slashing towards the girl's neck, exposed by her defiantly raised chin. Perhaps he would stop just before drawing blood, perhaps he would cut right through and spray her sanguine life across the entire proving ground. Perhaps their eyes would meet across the bridge of his bared steel, or perhaps she would end her life gasping on the concrete, clutching at her gaping throat, spraying blood in great fountains with each gasping, desperate, terrified breath.

That thought jarred him, like a trunk of a massive tree laid across the line and completely derailing his train of thought as it came into contact. The visceral, graphic detail of the fantasy was as sharp as it was sudden, not in the least because it felt like a thought that belonged to a different man than who he was now. For a distinct moment, Sol's mind had divided into two distinct partitions, and for an instant he seemed to be seeing the world and thinking, having thoughts, as two different men inhabiting the same flesh simultaneously. Then, no sooner had the moment occurred did it pass, and Sol's split consciousness snapped back together and left him psychically reeling from the dissonance.

It seemed alien, frightening that he'd had such a thought, due in great part to his knowing exactly where it had come from. It had been in fact the thought of a different man, a man Sol had not been in earnest for nearly two years by now. The horror came not from the fantasy itself, because even if he had acted on it, there were a million outcomes that would have diverted it from the outcomes he'd so clearly seen in his mind. Niraya was aura trained, after all, and likely would react in some way before he could cut her throat, and Sol might miss or fumble the strike and deliver a blow that was not lethal, or perhaps mean to try and stall the blade, but misjudge the swing and inflict injury anyway. No, that wasn't what bothered him. What bothered the one eyed man was that he'd thought it, that for that moment he'd wanted it, that for that moment he'd had, unbidden by any decision he'd made prior to, an impulse to inflict harm or terror upon this girl, and for what? Standing up to him? Speaking out of turn?

It wasn't the fantasy of a rational mind. It wasn't his thought. It was the thought of a dead man, who had died in the swamps of Mistral twenty months prior.

That was The One-Eyed Dragon's thought. It was the kind of thing he would have done, not very long ago, and no matter the outcome he'd likely not have given the act, much less the thought itself so much as a second glance. The mud of Solitas and the bogs of Mistral were full of victims, killed on a whim, for amusement or for a slight. The dead knew, that while Sol hadn't done it today, hadn't acted on that insidious urge, The One-Eyed Dragon had frequently entertained such thoughts, inspiring fear in foe and follower alike, and had never shied from exacting the ultimate price from those that displeased him.

Sol had spent the last two years heaping soil onto that monster, killing him by small degrees, and yet, even now, like a desiccated hand clawing up from grave-soil, it reared it's malignant influence.

Sol swallowed, recovering from the slippage of the mask, lips suddenly very dry as he tried to puzzle out the reason behind the hideous impulse, and came back with nothing. It was terrible not because he feared what he'd nearly done, because outwardly there was no indication of the battle of identities that had just taken place. It was not an invasion where another intelligence had tried to control his flesh, but rather a more insidious influence that had momentarily hijacked his mind, and that was infinitely more terrifying.

He could tell that by the look on her face that Niraya had not the faintest clue how close she'd been to having a much different encounter, and the thought of what a difference that slight instant could have decided made Sol's blood run cold. He rushed to answer her, fleeing in his mind from that awful question of identity or dark inscrutable desires by devising some sort of verbal engagement of her insolence.

"You've worked at this forge for years? And yet you couldn't even pronounce "Krieg-Messer" much less give the faintest clue of it's function. It is not an uncommon design, and I find such ignorance to be disturbing to say the least." He answered her coldly, his face as implacable as the cold stone of a fortress wall, voice like the rattle of chains as the gates slammed shut, "So I suggest a test, not of your skill, but of your character, and you refuse to even try. Ignorance I can forgive, but hesitance, reluctance? I do not know about "smiths"," he put an accent of this word as if he doubted whether it really applied to Niraya, "but in my line of work, these are unforgivable sins."

Sol gave her a moment to digest that last address as he turned to fully face her, and adopted his full striking figure, tall where she was short, hard and grizzled where she was young and naive, garbed in the finest fabrics tailored to match his body perfectly where she wore a baggy smock stained with soot, powerful and threatening where she was slight and meek, as if to wordlessly justify the loftiness of his steed.

"Even a failure, if committed in earnest with conviction and determination can be impressive." He concluded, lifting his dark brow, as if addressing a being of inferior intellect as well as social standing, "Who can blame me, if in lacking that one last opportunity, coupled with your ignorance and" he gestured generally at her, "whatever else you want to call this unfortunate situation, I find myself unimpressed? Haven is a large city, full of craftsmen. Why shouldn't I go seek out a more competent technician? What makes this shop, what makes you," he seemed to sneer that word as he referred to her, ", so special? Other than finding a spine only after my custom has slipped through your fingers? Tell me, I really want to know what makes you think I should "negotiate" with you and not simply take my business elsewhere."

@tag

1414/10535 words

notes

Velvet of WW

[Niraya Platinum]

Niraya Platinum
When snow falls, Nature listens.

[attr="class","rainbow"]

Niraya stood tall as Solomon stopped to listen to her. He didn't acknowledge her until she was finished with what she had to say. he didn't fully turn towards her more glaring at her from the side. at that moment Niraya could feel the raging bloodlust she had felt before growing up. to just end her life and be done with it. Her stance didn't change but she was ready to react, but nothing came from this sensation. Sol just stood there staring as if judging her still.

Sol finally spoke and it was like he saw her as nothing more than the trash people say Faunus were. Niraya stands firm listening to the man as he laid into her. "what makes me special? the years I spent on the street should have made me a bitter hateful Faunus but here her we stand and you are the only person acting mighter. I was born to the Huntsmith family we lived in a home not too far from here. But when I was very young my family was forced from the town. I got separated from them, and to this day I still do not know there fate. I survived on the streets doing everything I could to live in a world that saw me as nothing more than garbage."

Niraya takes a deep breath and looks to the sky. "Zerul was an old man who had lost his granddaughter to the grimm. He saw me and knew he had a second chance of passing on what he knew and to be the grandfather he wanted to be. He taught me about robotics and complex mechanical parts. But then the day arrived he died of a heart attack. Atlas swooped in and took everything of Zerul and kicked me out. I was left with nothing for a second time. But I didn't harbor any hatred. In fact, I saw what goal I should strive for. I want to make this world a better place for all. Human and Faunus. The two species can live in harmony but this war of mine is a struggle for there are those who see the other and only find bitterness and hatred."

Niraya tilts her head looking at the wall of the shop as if she could see something behind its walls. "After a few years, I met Jack. he didn't exactly give me everything on a silver platter. No, he made me work for it. That is when I started working at the forge. Jack also talked to someone a hunter by the name Grimm Eclypse. He owns a dojo not too far from here. its thanks to him I have the skills necessary to be a Huntress in training at the school. But I still worked here on my days off. I have forged many things from simple nails to complex transforming gun hammers."

Niraya turns her attention back to Sol. "Your weapon is by far the most unique thing I have seen come to this shop. It shares properties with other weapons but uses them in a very unique way. a way that I could tell had its ups and downs. The positive side it strikes swiftly using the expanding dust to launch the blade like a bullet from a gun. the excess dust then condenses in the air and begins to react creating a large explosion where the blade was. the downside is that your body would need to be trained on how to handle a dangerously close range explosion and its side effects, as well as garnering the physical strength required to not get your arm ripped off by the initial phase of the weapon's attack." Niraya bows to Sol. "It was an honor to just get a glimpse at its inner workings and the display of the weapon's fearsome results."

WC: 642
TWC: 3017

↺ + HK

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