……so my first thought was “but this would have given the decoy game away to cinder, surely?” and then i spent like. …a normal amount of time thinking about kindred link and,,
well basically the problem to solve here is that if raven wants to use the maiden powers in a way that will make it obvious, in the immediate aftermath, that maiden powers happened—like blasting ruby across the room with a fireball—she’s got to do make sure it looks to cinder like vernal did it, which means vernal needs to fake the motion and raven needs to conjure and launch the fireball from vernal’s hand, and their coordination needs to be perfect because cinder is like. right there.
which… sounds impossible but is it tho?? with kindred link being… the way it is???
conceptually KL is explained as “raven can create portals that take her straight to people she’s bonded with,” but there’s also this… psychic/extrasensory element to it where raven has at least some degree of always-on, possibly conditional? awareness of people she’s bonded with: the only way she could have known that yang needed saving on the train in V2 is if her semblance alerted her. maybe she just feels it when a bond is in danger, or…
the thing about kindred link is that “open a portal straight to them” isn’t wholly accurate—or at least, doesn’t give the whole picture of what raven can do. her portals don’t have to go right to the person she’s bonded with, just their general vicinity, at what seems to be pretty decent range? sooo, taking that into consideration with the V2 data point—and in context with KL probably manifesting in the first place out of fear of losing her “cursed” outcast brother—it seems to me more like, once raven bonds with someone she can always know where they are, if they’re safe, and how to get to them (with the portals actually maybe coming later? as an “i need to get to them NOW” evolution). so while yang seems to think of the portals as a kind of “find my person” ability it’s the other way around, with the portals allowing raven to move to the known location of one of her bonds, within a certain radius.
(this also squares with the likely emotional purpose of her semblance, of this need to be able to rescue people she loves: if one of her bonds is in danger, she needs to know what the situation is before rushing in to help, and she needs to be able to put herself in an advantageous position. a portal that just located her bond and dropped her right there accomplishes neither. and also conceptually i like the maiden of knowledge having a semblance whose core function is informative.)
where i’m going with this is: if this sensory/spatial awareness element is fairly detailed, or at least something raven can consciously tap into to get a clearer/fuller picture of her bonds and their surroundings, then as long as she and vernal touched base beforehand on the “once the portal opens, pretend to throw a fireball through it” piece, making it look believable would have been fairly easy, because raven would be able to “see” vernal’s movements and position/time the fireball to match them.
which. would still be a weird amount of effort to put in for the sake of taking one petty potshot EXCEPT. the talk qrow and raven have in V4 implies pretty heavily that the tribe’s raids are so devastating because they’ve got the spring maiden with them, and there’s no point having a maiden decoy if you’re not consistent, which necessarily means that raven participates in raids while keeping up the “vernal is the spring maiden” act and… yeah. if they’re coordinating magical blasts in the chaos of a bandit raid, vernal pretending to throw a single fireball on a clear signal while they’re both in stationary positions probably feels easy by by comparison! (especially if this specific “blast through the portal” move is a regular trick in the banditry arsenal which, given how useful it would be to initiate an ambush this way, seems really plausible now that i’m thinking about it.)
FINAL THOUGHT in 5.6 when qrow hears the portal opening behind them he whips around and throws up an arm to shield his head, and while obviously raven wouldn’t advertise having spring to ozpin’s circle by fireballing her brother—what are the odds that she like. announces her imminent arrival by chucking something at him. frequently enough that qrow has a finely-honed “my sister’s about to portal a shoe into the back of my head” reflex.
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