deernet | video; un: harbinger

[The scruffy, middle-aged man that appears on the screen looks a bit uncomfortable. Videochat is certainly not his preferred mode of communication on these devices, but he does figure it would be helpful to see his face for what he's posting on the network to say, so.]

Uh...hey. I'm Qrow. If you don't know me from Deerington, I'm a Huntsman. Which--mostly means I've fought a lot of monsters and sh--[hm. children.]...crap like that.

So anyway, it's halfway through October, and the streets aren't overflowing with blood and corpses, and far as I know nobody's gotten eaten by monsters or lost their mind and gone on a murdering rampage. But that probably just means the town's waiting for us to let our guard down.

[Or maybe that's just paranoia. But Qrow would rather err on the side of paranoia rather than complacence, considering his last October.]

Point is, now seems like as good a time as any to learn to defend yourself if you don't already know how to fight. I uh, I used to teach teenagers in a combat school, a few years ago? So I've got some experience.

...Don't expect a lot, I quit for a reason--[that reason being, honestly, Ruby getting admitted to Beacon a full two years early, but shhh]--but you can get the basics down.

So yeah. Let me know.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[a long story that she doesn't know if she has the mental capacity for. she's not gonna play peacemaker for any more families. not after what she did to the geteilts.]

Apparently it's pretty different.
Place called Recolle, in, like, what I was pretty sure was the only real world out there.
There's a few other people from Earth here, but nobody else knows Recolle.
This is my first time going this far out of my comfort zone.
But not my first time with weird reality-bending shit. Recolle loved weird reality-bending shit. (Ask me how I lost my eye sometime.)

well for what it's worth
i didn't think there was anything out there beyond remnant either before i got sucked into some kid's nightmare in deerington

[A beat.]

i'm probably gonna regret this but how did you lose your eye?

Evil brain made of memories stole it inside a soul energy research lab underneath reality.

[ . . . . . . . . . . ]

that might be the most deerington sentence i've ever heard and it didn't even happen in deerington

[in other words: what the fuck]

Yeah, that's why I haven't been super fazed by anything here so far.
Recolle liked messing with the way you look at reality. At yourself.
Less blood and gore, more "you woke up and your body is someone else's, but also yours, and now it's your problem".

huh
the squid thing sounds less complicated than that
you shared a body with someone? like a same-soul situation, or?

Hey, got it in one.
Except it's definitely present tense.
Souls colliding and intertwining ain't something you just wake up from.
Which someone we both know probably already told you.

[...Hm. Interesting.]

yeah, makes sense
oz or oscar?

[Which one did you meet, he means.]

Oscar.
Oscar with a little bit extra inside him, but still just Oscar.
Pretty sure that's the way he'd want me to talk about it.
Same with me. Just Anna, with a little extra combat android inside.

huh
neat way to think about it

[He wonders if whoever "Ozpin" originally was felt the same way, back when he was still distinct from the wizard part of him.]

kind of wild someone out there shares oscar's circumstances, honestly
pretty bizarrely specific kind of thing to happen across two different universes

so...this combat android, they part of a war or something too?

Like you wouldn't goddamn believe.
I've heard a little about Remnant's super cool forever war. A2's got one of her own going on, too. Not thrilled about how many forever wars there are out there in the universe, honestly.
I only have a bunch of memories from her, but I already know how bad it messed A2 up.

And yeah, like. Me and Oscar having anything in common really tripped me out. But it's not bad.
Didn't think I'd run into anyone else quite like me ever again, you know?

man
even if it's just our two that's two too many if you ask me
forever's just way too long to be at war
at least we can get away from it here, though

but uh
when you say again
do you mean there were other people like the both of you where you came from?

Oh yeah, dude. A ton of the people in the city I came from.
We all had some lost soul that we were meant to be the vessel for.
For me, it was A2. For other people, it was superheroes, or other androids, or hosts for alien flowers.

Oscar's whole deal is my normal, to be honest.

[...

what the heckie.]

...don't suppose your city had some kind of apocalyptic nonsense going on too?

[This is so perplexing to him. Like. Oscar and Oz's deal exists specifically to forestall the literal end of the world. He can't quite imagine it happening across an entire city just because.]

Eh, sort of.
More like... a collection of apocalypses all sent their souls to my city.
And it was a kiln to rebuild all of the worlds within.
Well, at least until this guy Vanderweele showed up and tried to turn it into an "only the strongest souls deserve to survive" thing.

I took care of him.
I don't have an emoji for casually spinning my sword, but pretend I'm doing that.

and here i thought i'd heard all the wildest shit there was to hear after a year in deerington

glad that guy's out of the picture, though
he sounds like he was a pain in the ass

{Qrow is Sir Not Thinking About How His Sister Could've Been That Guy in this thread, okay. Nope. Not today, Satan.]

Oh, like you wouldn't believe, dude.
He discovered time travel just so he could throw himself into a stable time loop and make it harder for any of us to deal with him.
It's always the clever ones that turn out to be eugenicist assholes.

Man. None of this seemed too weird at the time, but now I feel like I could just keep pulling things out of a bag and one-upping myself.
I really got my frog boiled.

[He takes it back. This guy is much crazier than his sister. What the fuck.]

not gonna lie, that sounds like the plot of some really bad b horror flick
really didn't think anything could outdo crawling through a flesh sinkhole in a dream to wake up a squid in another dimension but man
the time loops are some stiff competition

Hey, just a different kind of weird.
Like I said, Recolle liked messing with reality and identity. More of the thinking man's horror.
There was a part in the middle where a lot of people were convinced we were all just computer programs.
Didn't help that they were rewriting people's entire lives so completely that they didn't even know anything was wrong.

I'm just used to that kind of stuff now.
Same way you're used to squids and blood and guts.
Still fucked up that we had to deal with it at all.

funny you should say that actually
the blood and guts is actually kind of new-ish?
grimm just turn into ash when you kill them
deerington was the first time i had to deal with monster corpses
getting your clothes clean after a fight is a bitch and a half now

[But he can't get clothes like the ones from home anymore so submitting to terrible laundry bullshit is a conceit he will to make to Vanity;;]

but hey, at least you don't have to deal with anymore matrix bullshit around here, right

Oh, huh. Interesting. Yeah, guess this would be a little bit messier.
Just a smidge.

Don't talk about being finished with Matrix bullshit quite yet.
Before you know it they'll revive it here and we'll all be saying bleep bloop I love this fuckin' steak.

video; un: harbinger

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