Lolory
RWBY Tuesdays
CLASSIFICATION: Inhuman | Cursed-Misfortune | Homonculus
Winrey Deacon was born to a very doting family of just two people, his mother and his father. Due to the circumstances of the world, they lived in secrecy away from the rest of society which was now overrun with monsters, demons, and creatures of all kinds. Humans as a whole had become a rarity, and it was unheard of to see one anywhere unless you spent years searching the vast forests and caves for any settlements. His family lived in one of those secret human settlements hidden away in a bayou.They ran a church that was small and had a congregation of only 12 other humans, but it was still a manageable community, and showing up every sunday to preach or to help his father with the upkeep of the priory kept him busy. He was still very young when he gave his first sermon, and seeing as there just wasn’t a lot of people around, his father thought it wouldn’t hurt to let him lead on Sundays at such a young age.
Winrey enjoyed every moment he spent in that small swampy settlement, talking idly with his neighbors, and everyone treated him as if he were there own son seeing as he was one of the only children around.
Of course, things like this don’t last when you live in a world ruled by monsters. The settlement had been found and subsequently set ablaze overnight. That night, no one survived, including Winrey himself. His body, however, was found by the worst this new society had to offer.
Her name was Elise Oakwell. Many called her “Madame Oakwell”, as she ran a very famous orphanage for “little abominations” that had been abandoned. Oakwell saw Winrey’s charred body still being clasped by his parents embrace, and took it away to her orphanage. A woman who runs an orphanage for monsters has to be quite the monster herself, for she used his body in cruel experiments.
Ever since humans had become a rarity, it had been a race to see if there was a way to replicate or make more artificially. However, the task seemed impossible, so a breakthrough in creating human life had not shown itself. Madame Oakwell wanted to be one of the first monsters to try and create a human using alchemy, and so she had built herself a small lab in the basement of her orphanage.
She had tried many times with different bodies, and they had all been failures. She had learned that in order to get as close to creating life as possible that she’d have to cross some of the human DNA with other non-monster creatures. So she found a generic brown rabbit, and used it in her experimentation with Winrey. However, unknown to her, that rabbit had become cursed the moment she laid hands on it. She would find that her experiment was a success, but at a hefty price.
Winrey was born again, this time in a basement to a woman he didn’t recognize. The memories he had from his old life were murky and like a dream, he could barely recall them. His body was newly transformed, he wasn’t a normal looking little boy anymore. His legs had been replaced with that of a brown rabbit’s. There were some things he knew about the world when he was born in that basement, and it was that monsters ruled the world.
Seeing his strange appearance, he naturally assumed he was one of those monsters. His life with Madame Oakwell was hell. She had no love for her creation at all. In fact, there were times it seemed she was disgusted to even look at Winrey, which was something he couldn’t understand. He didn’t get why she treated him so cruelly, and just took it as another fact of the world. “I don’t want to see you during the day. Stay down here, and clean for all I care.” She would say, before shoving a broom in his hand to keep him occupied.
During the day, he would keep her laboratory clean and make sure her tools weren’t out of place. And during the night, she would order him to tidy up while the monsters he never saw or played with slept away. As time passed, his body started to change in a way he wasn’t quite expecting. Instead of getting “bigger” like Madame Oakwell had explained (Though she used far crueler words and called him stupid to boot for asking) he began to rot. It started with his left foot. He started noticing whenever he would take a bath, that chunks of fur and skin would slough off if he scrubbed too hard.
What was even more odd was that there was no pain attached to that leg. The nerves in it had completely died, and Winrey had just never been alarmed by it because he thought he was just going through the process of “growing” like Madame Oakwell had described. When the bone started to peek through, he thought it necessary to finally tell her about his leg.
At first she was mortified, she’d thrown a large tantrum about the whole thing, destroying lots of equipment in her lab. “You’re just a bundle of wasted potential! I can’t believe I went through the trouble of even making you…” She said with a derisive sneer. “I should’ve left your useless body back in that bayou with the other humans.”
Winrey was afraid of the rot that was slowly creeping upward along the side of his body. He wasn’t afraid of death, but rather of not being useful anymore. The small joys in his life like cleaning the lab and the orphanage were all he had. It was the only thing Madame Oakwell ordered him to do, and if he couldn’t do that anymore…He felt not having a purpose was worse than death.
He decided to take matters into his own hands, and secretly explored the orphanage and Madame Oakwell’s personal library for anything to help abate the rot. Along with his leg, came another unknown problem that Winrey had not taken notice of. He wasn’t around Madame Oakwell enough to see the causes of it, but misfortune clung to him like a cursed object. And it had a habit of rubbing off on anyone who was nearby, which included the Madame.
It started with small things. She’d trip and break something, or maybe she’d drop an important experiment while working in the lab. But the random acts of misfortune continued to grow in danger. What became a dropped beaker became a dropped knife to a chandelier who’s nails conspicuously failed just as she passed by.
Winrey had been reading and studying during the night, and he soon learned the truth of his creation. Madame Oakwell was remiss to keep that a secret from him, and he’d never been allowed to know the truth of why or how she made him. But in that darkened library, freshly swept and dusted by his own hand, he learned what he was. A Homunculus. A creature made from human flesh and other living creatures DNA to create life.
His leg, which wasn’t any better at this point, had been held together with bandages and medical gauze though it did nothing to abate the rot. He’d tried everything in all of the medical journals that Madame Oakwell had, and nothing seemed to truly work. Until, he came across one book that was very familiar to him. Though his past life was still a distant memory that he couldn’t recall fully, this book in particular called to him.
“Curses & Blights” was the title. He flipped through the pages, and found that rather than a book that would teach about curses or blights, it was one meant to help heal and hold such things back. Holy water, prayer beads, wax candles…They were all needed to hold back all manner of cursed power. He decided to give it a try, and found the act of prayer and holding a vigil came to him naturally, even if he had no memory of ever doing it before.
Madame Oakwell soon learned about what was truly causing the rot, and confronted Winrey about it. “I’d kill you, but curses are nasty things…they’ll haunt you to the end of time if you get rid of them improperly. So I’ll have to find…another way to be rid of you.” She had explained that she was essentially selling him off to some other “poor fool” who’d probably kill him because he was just that useless. Winrey couldn’t imagine a world outside of the orphanage, he had read in books at some points about what the world was like, but each story was so unique and different that it still seemed like an impossibility.
Madame Oakwell kept her distance from him after that conversation, but she allowed Winrey to care for his leg finally, and the rot was soon abating. Before, the entirety of his left side had almost been eaten away at, but over time the skin regrew. He just had to keep applying holy water and wax seals to it occasionally.
A woman arrived at the orphanage one day, and Winrey was allowed to see another person for the first time in his second life. She introduced herself as Elvyra Highwater, and explained to Winrey’s amazement that she was his Aunt. They were blood related. The two of them couldn’t look any less alike, though. Elvyra was tall, and broad shouldered with dark skin and a mean gaze, but there were some similarities. They had the same long flowing hair, and piercing red eyes.
“Family don’t all look the same, kid.” Elvyra had explained with a chuckle. “But that’s besides the point…I hear you’re an excellent cleaner?”
Elvyra was a far kinder caretaker than Winrey had been expectingShe was a cruel loan shark and boss to anyone beneath her, but a very doting Aunt to Winrey. She did have a job for him to do, however. At first, he afraid it’d be something truly difficult like murder or interrogation (things he’d seen the other lackey’s around Elvyra do for her) but instead her request was simple:
“Clean up any bodies we leave behind. Oakwell told me you loved doing it so…I thought this would be the best way to keep you busy!” Elvyra explained.
And it truly did keep him busy. He loved his newfound job. There were different things to learn this time aside from scrubbing floors and dusting bookshelves! Before he knew it, he had spent years, perhaps hundreds if he bothered to keep count, beside his Aunt Elvyra being her cleaner. What was better was that he realized his cursed rot which grew from his left leg did not effect Elvyra in the same way it effected Madame Oakwell.
“I’m already dead, Winrey. Or well…undead more like. So that weak curse won’t touch me at all, don’t worry about it.” She patted his head as she told him this. It made sense, he had seen her drink nothing but blood from other monsters, and there was only really food for him and some of the other cronies who followed behind. In his spare time, he continued to read and learn more about the origin of his creation. He became enamored with the idea of making a homunculus just like himself.
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