RWBY Through Worlds

88: Help Us Survive

"Tell us what you know about Kanap," Winter said to Watts, firmly. 

"Be specific," Robyn reminded her, grabbing his hand like he was a slug.

Winter thought.

"All right, why does she want Raven?" she began.

Watts didn't seem that adverse to answering this question.

"In a nutshell, she wants a person who contains some magic inside them in order to run her tests," he said. "Now she has no knowledge that I know of that Raven Branwen is a Maiden, as I did not tell her. I wanted to have a back up card in case my plan didn't go smoothly. I like to have an ace up my sleeve--"

"Just stick to the facts," Winter interrupted.

"So far that was true," Robyn said. "I'm surprised you volunteered that."

"You'd have asked me about it anyway, I'm trying not to waste time," Watts said, in a bored voice. "And I care little about Raven Branwen's secrets."

"We know she wants her for that," Winter said. "But why her, why not Qrow?"

"That I can't answer, but perhaps she thought you'd all be less likely to go after someone who is a confirmed traitor, I was not privy to this plan," Watts said, sounding offended at it.

* * *

"We settled on Raven because she's dirty," Vara was sipping some water now. "I don't like traitors. Personally, I don't care much if she lives or dies. But I thought capturing her would be quite the trick. Theo suggested using bait and I said I didn't want to. He clearly has ignored me. Vic wouldn't be above it if it got her what she wanted. She's wanted her hands on a magical being for years. But for a long time she tested me. Now...Victoria is...crazy, but she's not totally without principles. She'd prefer a willing subject, so while I was willing, it was fine with her to use me. And I guess you could say that wasn't wrong, but I always felt like if I stopped, she wouldn't. I don't like the look in her eye when we think we're getting close...and she says she's already learned a lot about magic. She can make it activate, she can dampen it, she said she learned a lot from taking blood samples from me, other samples too. Magic apparently affects the DNA of whoever uses it, in some way...but so far, she's never cloned it. She said that the amount she could get from DNA never multiplies with magic, if she multiplied the DNA. The magic level stays stagnant. It's a lot of stuff I don't understand very well, but basically it's like growing a mold sample in you biology class, right? The mold will grow, but you can't grow a mushroom on top of it...and I guess the magic mushroom in this analogy, is sterile."

"Huh?" Mercury said.

* * *

Yang thought she was done listening to Victoria after she had Raven taken away, but she instead moved Yang--easily enough after draining her aura again--to a different room where she said she'd be more comfortable.

Well, she was sitting down this time--in a glass tank. Sure it had a sofa in it and a glass of water, but it wasn't that much better.

Ir was also a different level of the werid lab...which made Yang wonder how much of it Neo had actually seen when she was here.

"I want to put you quite at ease about your mother," Victoria said. "I really thought you looked a little horrified earlier. I've been studying magic for years, you see. I've learned a lot about it, I can do almost anything with it except make more of it. No matter what I try I can't...but the problem is, I can never get any sample that lives longer than a few days, even frozen. Magic seems to somehow have to have transfer through aura alone, at least so far. But if it can move between auras, it has to have it's own variable. I call it the M variable. My theory is that the DNA of people with magic has been altered slightly. If ordinary people are XY or XX, people with magic are XXM or XYM, in Ozpin's case--he's the only other male magic wielder alive...and you see, I've never gotten a sample from him."