chapter 11

So...to clarify. You're mad at me because I don't like faunus." He said, slowly waving his arm to gesture at the wall team RWBY lined up against.

"Yes," the droning chorus came from the sisters of the team as Weiss and Blake elected to stay silent and stare at opposite walls.

"And everyone else is mad at me because Weiss kissed Blake and I was ok with it." Mr. S continued at a slower pace, turning his chair to face Winter and the Hologram of General Ironwood.

"Most everyone of relevance to the issue, yes," Winter answered back with a curt nod, ignoring the glares and pleading looks that Blake and Weiss sent her way. Ironwood leaned over his desk, rubbing his temples as the hologram looked straight down at the mahogany table top.

"So, therefore-"

"Yes! Yes! The answer is yes!" Weiss interrupted with a yell. "Now can you please just call my relationship a disgrace on live television so we can all get out of here?" she said with a strained voice.

Mr. S, despite the evening he was having, was still awestruck by the surreal nature of that statement as he got kicked back to stage two of grief. Was any of this real? Was this one of those science experiments where they test to see if you'd kill someone because some guy in a lab coat told you to? Still riding the trailing edge of his indignation, Mr. S closed his eyes with a sigh as he tilted his neck down and shook his head.

"I can't believe this," he said with an amazed tone. Really? He gets launched across the very fabric of space and time into a futuristic, alien planet just so he could say racist things on tv? Of all the alternate realities to end up in, he gets sent to the Starfleet Confederacy?

Opening his eyes, he glared out into the room as he made a decision.

"No," he said with a tone of conviction.

"What do you mean 'no'" Weiss said with a strained voice.

"No," Mr. S responded evenly once more, drawing all the strength that he could from all those D.A.R.E ads embedded into his memory.

"Just call the news and tell them you don't approve!" Weiss said, growing desperate.

"No." Mr. S repeated.

"Really? You hate me that much?" Weiss seethed, "you'd be willing to risk all of this just to keep me trapped here?" she said, raising her arms up to gesture at the general surroundings, "just to keep me tied to the bame you've worked so hard to ruin?"

"And what would I be risking, exactly?" Mr. S responded in a tone that he hoped came off as sarcastic.

"Actually, father. If I may interject," Winter interrupted, "you should consider the severely negative impact this could have on the company," she said keeping her voice even.

'Ahh, shit. I've still gotta stay in character,' Mr. S thought as he remembered that he still had a part to play, even if he didn't know what that part was supposed to be…

"Well, obviously, I won't be risking much," Mr. S replied, fully committed to listening to his elementary school self's wisdom.

"What do you mean?" Weiss asked, hunched over with a sneer.

"Huhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Mr S sighed a deep and solemn sigh, making very clear the depths of his disappointment at being surrounded by feeble-minded plebs who couldn't see the obvious. Drawing his sigh out for as long as he could, he frantically thought of reasons why he was right.

'Come on, come on, brain give me something...Fuck, fuck, fuck, what was I thinking! I don't know shit! I'm such an idiot, acting like I knew what I was talking about. Fuck, how am I supposed to come up with anything when the only thing I know is that this place sells dust. And I don't even know what that i- actually, wait a minute…' he thought, almost smiling giddily as a desperate gamble appeared before him.

"What?" Weiss asked impatiently.

"Schwarz, how are stocks?" He asked with an overconfident tone, not bothering to face his secretary as he spoke.

Schwarz turned to look out the glass wall, glancing at the giant screen on the factory wall, taking in the green line as it snaked its way along a graph, before looking back at Mr. S. "Uhh...they're stable, sir."

"See?" He said as if that proved everything. "We sell dust people," he continued as if he knew exactly what that entailed besides a vague Saudi Arabia corollary he'd made in his mind. "We could start funding terrorist groups and even then I'm sure people would hesitate to go green," he said, accidentally referencing the Schnee corp. competitor, Green co., a dust distributing company that Mr. Schnee had been instrumental in counter programming to near oblivion.

"So stop being monday night-" Mr. S paused.

'Wait,' Mr. S thought. 'I can't say "Monday night quarterback," they might not play football here!' he thought as he felt his plan slip out from underneath him.

"Uh…" Mr. S snapped his fingers in consternation. "Uh, Schwarz, what's that saying with the sports and the hindsight," he asked, hoping to seem confused enough that nobody here would ask what "Monday" was.

"Being a Monday night team captain, sir," Schwarz answered nonchalantly.

"Yeah, that," Mr. S answered, wondering if they had Garfield comic strips too.

Thankfully for Mr. S, this was one of those moments where being an alien visitor could be confused for being an out of touch rich person, as noted by the several face palms that went through the room.

"Wait, you don't understand," Ironwood said, rising from his chair as the hologram rose up to look Mr. S in the face.

"What?" Mr. S asked, his heart beating into his esophagus as he hoped he didn't fuck up his reasoning too badly.

For those of you that are getting hopeful thoughts, let us all acknowledge that Mr. S's characterization of the situation, as him being Hitler and his son kissing a gay jew, is a bit off. It would be more appropriate to describe the situation as him being Hitler, and his son kissing a gay jew who happened to be Trotsky.

"Blake is-" Ironwood began.

"Breaking news!" a blaring television interrupted, turning all heads to the first wall television as Qrow stood fiddling with its controls, himself staring up at the menacing portrait of Blake that appeared on the tv screen. "We are just getting this," the reported announced, almost falling off of her desk with giddy excitement as she pressed a finger tightly against her earpiece. "BLAKE BELLADONNA had been CONFIRMED to be a former, and possibly current, member of the WHITE FANG TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," she said, almost pounding the desk as her sweat glistened in the camera lights. "So far, Mr. Schnee has declined to respond to any queries about the matter-" she continued as Schwarz took on a guilty look and an areal shot of Schnee manor appeared in the corner of the screen.

"Follow channel 2 faction news-" the reporter began to say before her voice, along with the approaching noise of helicopter rotors, was quickly downed out by a beating cacophony that came from every side of the office. The dancing jig of panic, heard even through the ceiling, filled the room as Mr. S sat frozen in his chair, trying not to be the first one to move in a room filled with shocked faces.

Faintly, just faintly, the chaotic, disjointed song of "SELL! SELL! SELL!" could be heard through the office walls, just in time for the green-tinted, snow-white tiles of the room to turn a magenta red as Mr. S guessed what that entailed for the TV Screen behind him.

Turning his chair around just as everyone recovered enough of their senses to follow his gaze, Mr. S. looked on as the large screen presented a precipitously falling red line on an expanding graph, quickly showing the company's stocks plummeting through the floor in time with an irresistible force that Mr. S felt himself pressing him back into his chair, never having fully appreciated before how solid stocks could feel when they sucker punched you in the gut.

The room fell maddeningly silent as the tv fell into the background and the panicking investors in the surrounding rooms added pressure and confusion with their overlapping voices. The night crew in factory room below didn't seem to be doing much better, crowding around the tv screen as they stared up at the numbers in horror.

"Now, that might be a problem," Mr. S admitted, fully smacked out of his "angry at the universe" phase by the Scrooge McDuck levels of money that was apparently going down the drain.

"MIGHT!?" Weiss responded with a shrill, growling voice.

"MIGHT!?" she said again, moving to stand before the glass wall before gesturing at the falling stock prices. "How could this be anything other than a complete nightmare?" Weiss asked, her form tinted a hellish red by the light, fitting well with the "avatar of rage" look she seemed to be rocking.

"Well, I would like to note that all is not as it seems with that graph," Mr. S answered while a sensible part of him, buried deep inside his psyche, screamed at him to shut up.

"What could possibly be misleading about this!? The Line. Is Going. Down." Weiss enunciated.

"Well...the y axis doesn't start at zero, for one," Mr. S answered softly.

It was an instant after this utterance that Mr. S realized. Elementary-schoolers are idiots.