RWBY Through Worlds

22: Listen Loud and Clear

The party erupted into chaos seemingly out of nowhere while the kids were still hanging around downstairs, and Wally's disc track was still playing over the speakers--

--when reports that Mantle's heating system had been turned off started flooding people's scrolls.

There was some argument going on upstairs, according to Weiss, concerning what to do now.

Oscar rushed up there to help sort things out.

People were being sent home, and Wally had to round up the other kids to make sure they were all still in touch.

Most of them were not allowed to join the discussion, but they went up to the hall to listen at the door.

"So what happened is Weiss's father was making a deal with this man named Watts," Pyrrha was giving Ren and Nora a run down. "He works for Salem. He helped to design the security system of Atlas, but they thought he died in a fire. He must have been the one who hacked the robots at Beacon. Now he's turned off the heat, and he also rigged the election."

"Does that make Robyn the rightful winner?" Nora asked.

"No, they'd have to hold a re-election," Shine answered for them. "They have no way of knowing how many votes he tampered with. No doubt, if nothing else goes wrong and they get things up and running, they'll hold another one. For now, she's still not an official."

"That sucks," Yang said.

"Does it?" Shine said.

"Yeah," Yang said.

"Fine," Shine said. "From the sound of it, they're telling James to finally let the Council in on Salem...and Robyn too... This ought to be good..."

It was.

The Council came out of the room and just paced around for a while. They were sure he wasn't lying, because why would he with Robyn right there to check his story?

"But how...?" Camilla said.

"Is it so hard to believe?" Shine wondered aloud, where they could hear her. "The Grimm attacked in such order at Beacon and have in many other places... Why couldn't they have a master? How else do such creatures pose such a threat to humans? If they can't think."

Camilla shot her a strange look. "But this? A person?"

Shine shrugged.

"Amateurs," she said to the kids in a lower voice. "In our faith, we believe that there's been a master of the evil ones since the dawn of sin. In fact, that he was the first."

"So you have a male one," Pyrrha said. "Ah, yes, I remember reading that now."

"It's no matter--you have a male one too," Shine said. "The god of darkness is male. Salem's powers come from him. She is the perfect blend of the god of light's strength and his. And we see through her that it's as our Bible says: 'What fellowship can light have with darkness? What do righteousness and wickedness have in common?' In another place, it says 'a little leaven (that's yeast) leavens the whole lump', meaning that a little evil will spread and putrify everything around it. Evil and good are both contagious, but evil is certainly more so to us weak beings. So Salem, rather than being half good and half bad, is all evil. Even if you divide it up logically, that doesn't make sense. There is no equivalent exchange for evil."

[And thus the show's own lore proves that the gods' dualist approach cannot work. Otherwise, Salem would not be pure evil just because of the Grimm pond. The life pond didn't make her purely benevolent... No consistent internal logic is more like it. But it also serves to prove that you can't rationally make the case for it. She can't be both good and bad at the same time and still be the antagonist of this show.]