Backstory

: Kane has her mother’s eyes but looks like her father. Before she unlocked her semblance, Kane was actually a pretty outgoing, happy kid. But then, when a bandit tried to mug her and her parents in a dark alley, she unlocked her semblance, read his body language and told her parents he was lying. Unfortunately, she still couldn’t stop the guy from killing them. She tried to find the guy, but everyone, including the cops, was lying to her, covering something up. Her parents were well-known hunters and had a lot of enemies. She grew up with her grandfather, who tried to help her with her semblance. Ironwood recruited her after seeing her, still a scrawny kid, able to hold her own against his men. She had wanted to talk to him when she learned he was visiting Vacuo. He had publicly criticized the corruption in Vacuo, so she thought maybe he would know something. To gain her trust, he played a game with her: two truths and a lie. He said: 1) He didn’t know her parents. 2) He didn’t know who killed them. 3) He liked coffee with cream and sugar. His assistant then entered his office with a cup. Kane took it from them before Ironwood could reach for it, and tasted it. Black. Ironwood smiled at her grimace and asked Kane to come to Atlas. Kane agreed and thrived there, eventually graduating with plans to become a specialist for Ironwood. Instead, he suggested that she work as a huntress. It would allow her more freedom to do missions for him. And, given that it’s Atlas and pre-volume one of RWBY, faunuses weren’t allowed to be specialists. If she had joined the military, they would have hindered her career because she was a faunus. This was when she was finally forced to face that fact that faunuses would never be seen as “good enough” in the eyes of Atlas society. Not that she hadn’t faced zero discrimination. To this day, she refuses to use dust due to a certain company’s treatment of faunuses. She also still smiles at the memory of Jacques Schnee’s face crumpling in fury when he found out she had graduated top of her class.