RWBY Through Worlds

85: Family Torn

Yang was convinced she was right about her mother.

However...the way Victoria started to act after an hour or so had gone by made her almost wish she'd been wrong.

She kept pacing around and looking at Yang appraisingly, like she was a piece of fresh meat.

Then she'd say, "I really thought it would only take 10 minutes at most."

Kip sat in a corner, looking nervous.

"Mother, are you going to treat her arm?" he asked.

"My arm?" Yang looked at her arm.

"A worthy idea, Kip." Victoria looked at it, eyes glittering. "But it's such a fine piece of machinery, really. Almost superior to a real arm. I'm not sure I could improve on it much, maybe a few modifications."

"You could make it part of her body," Kip said.

Yang experienced a wave of nausea.

"Thanks, but I like it to be detachable. It's really uncomfortable to sleep on," she managed.

"Mother can fix that," Kip said. "With the nerve endings."

That remark did not make Yang feel better.

"You'll have to forgive Kip--he's a bit overly enthusiastic about the transplants," Victoria said.

"Yeah, I noticed he has a few himself," Yang said warily. "What did you do, make your own robot son?"

"I'm human!" Kip said, annoyed.

"Don't let her get to you, son," Victoria said. "She's just bitter."

She picked up some kind of device that looked like a scanner and held it out like she was inspecting Yang with it. Making Yang feel kind of exposed.

"Kip has a very rare genetic disease," Victoria said, by way of explanation, sounding a little bit more normal again, "causing organ and muscle failure. His father had it also. Unfortunately he died of it when Kip was just 2 years old. We thought he was the only one, but then I had finally developed technology that was able to detect it much more precisely than anything we had before, and I found the same thing present in him. But we caught it early enough to stop it. He's still human, but he needed a lot of...prosthetics. You understand how it goes."

"I was really sick," Kip said, looking upset. "It was horrible, but Mother cured it. She's a genius."

"Ah, thank you," Victoria said modestly. "But I'd like to think any mother would have done the same for her child."

"Not any one," Yang muttered darkly. "So you're some kind of doctor?"

"I never got my license," Victoria said. "I'd like to think of myself as an honorary doctor though. I know more than those coots at Atlas did. But I veered a little too far off the beaten path, as you can see. I consider myself more of an alchemist/biologist."

"An alchemist? The heck is that?" Yang said.

"Well, traditionally they were people who tried to convert other metals and materials into gold," Victoria said. "Alchemy is essentially the idea that you can make one thing into something else if you combine it with enough other elements. A fascinating study...works better with biology than it does with metals, however."

Yang didn't even know that much about biology... It was the study of bacteria or something, right?

[Biology is the study of living organisms, humans to bacteria to amoeba.]

"Speaking of which, girl, you have one of the brightest Auras I've ever seen," Victoria said. "I'm guessing you can take a lot of hits and still not run out."