faderift | open | put my faith in the hard of heart

Howard wastes no time.

No. He wastes some time. But after, between, and during the drinking and existential crisis, he finds a charming little workshop—where charming means small, underequipped, cluttered—and moves in. Underquipped and cluttered can be fixed. Small can probably be fixed if they let him at the walls. Wysteria Poppell (charming name, charming hair, where charming means—) doesn’t seem immediately aware that she’s his assistant now, probably because she was there first, but time will probably take care of that, too.

Miss Poppell’s section of the room looks like the aftermath of a tornado. His (slowly expanding) section is literally alphabetized, with the handful of curiosities and gadgets he’s managed to acquire so far evenly spaced on a shelf and a single book open on the desk.

“I changed my mind,” he says, without looking up from that book. “It’s not that people are stupid. It’s that they’re bad thieves. All this innovation exists, but no one is stealing it.”

Edited 2019-09-09 19:16 (UTC)

“I could do better,” Howard says.

The story of his life. It works on multiple levels.

But specifically, right now, he’s referring to two broad-winged contraptions he’s hauled to the top of the fortress walls during a spot of clear, calm weather. They’re made partly of bedsheets and melted-down swords that previously belonged to dead people. Still, for things that he made alone, from memory, using literally medieval equipment, and primarily to prove a point, they’re pretty good.

“It’s astonishing how much things cost when you don’t have any money,” he goes on, plucking experimentally at the rigging on one of the gliders. “But they’ll work. At least once.” He considers the water—not that bad—and a pair of griffons swooping over the harbor. “I assume you can swim.”

You. Whoever is up here with him. He made two—surely someone isn’t a coward.

First thing on his list is: do not tell m'lady that he did this.

Second thing on his list: do not tell m'lady if he ends up breaking anything. Or come up with a reason as to why he's in the infirmary. Family dinner you know how it is. Rope in Thranduil if necessary.

But Yngvi is game for a laugh most days, recovering from whatever nightmare story he was told of rationing as this guy - did he get a name, probably not that's generally not been important to Yngvi in the grand scheme of 'why I did the thing I am doing' - rambles away, Yngvi trying to take notes. More for writing to his brother if he survives.

"I'm a dwarf. I float. Like a cork." Arms out to the side he shimmies a little to give the suggestion of how this all sort of works. "You need to go cultivating the right friends though," he adds belatedly because well he knows how Kirkwall works.

(Jimothy take care of his animals should the worst come to pass.)

“That so?”

A response to either statement. To both at once. He eyes the fellow—dwarves, sure, that was one of the things that required the least mental adjustment to accept. But the others he’s seen have been solidly built. This one seems to be mostly hair and clothes. Like a fluffy dog that’s going to look like a rat once it’s rained on.

Not necessarily a dealbreaker. But.

He doesn’t expect the kid to know how much he weighs, unless it’s less than a hog, more than a dog.

“We’ll have to talk about that. Mind if I lift you for a second?”

If his fathers - actually more if Hulda who is and isn't family, she's never fitted into that whole tangled root system, or Einar - could see him now. Gunnar footing the debts still to be paid. Unless those go to Riftwatch.

Has that been figured out yet? Yngvi's not privy to it, maybe he should've suggested that just out of spite: Riftwatch foots all his bills if he dies on their watch even if it's something he volunteered for.

Especially if it's rifters who might just be some sort of Fade noodle wearing clothes, no one has ever confirmed what they are and it's not like Yngvi would like to go looking under their clothes. (Why do most of them wear weird clothes? Like, across the board there are some choices that are made. Mage hat choices. And mages probably didn't get a choice in the hats, he will give the mages that much.)

But at least, for one rare moment in his life, Yngvi is being asked. And he has to stop. Stare. Just to parse that yes his opinion matters and okay Yngvi be cool about it, this is how this is for everyone that's not a dwarf--. "Sure. Mind your fingers near my pockets."

There are sharp things maybe sticking out. Don't mind that. It does not concern anyone but Yngvi and anyone on the receiving end.

There's exactly zero chance that Teren is going to listen to some idiot stranger who says he's got a bright idea and wants volunteers, but that doesn't mean she won't absolutely watch this shitshow unfold. Having noticed the man dragging his contraptions up to the top, she's standing below with her arms folded, wondering how big of a stain he'll make on the cobblestones.

She could try to prevent this, but it's none of her business if a fool's already made up his mind.

If he were aware of the audience—the audience’s skepticism, especially—he would be sure to wave cheerfully as he passed. As it is, he glides overhead without paying her much attention, focused on tightening a strap mid-air, and disappears over the wall.

"Well,"

....

"shit."

She goes about her day, a little disappointed.

A little hasty guesswork alongside his developing spacial awareness of the layout of this weird island prison sees Tony amble his way to the edge of the waters rather than stick around to watch the immediate take off. Of course, anything could happen -- a fault, bad construction, sudden gusts of wind, one of those flying animals could take them out, but what can he say. Tony is an optimist, and he optimistically expects the little science project going on right now to land in the sea.

He is right.

There is so much to be curious about. So much that he absolutely isn't. Anchors, barely. What's happened to his arc-reactor, sure. But everything else has abstracted itself into a grey haze of incomprehensible bullshit that he is only just deigning to roll with, and he wonders if he'd be better about that before handsome aliens brought their drama to his world. Maybe, maybe not, doesn't matter -- to wit, Tony has not been easily distracted owing to all of it is distracting.

This, though, gets his attention, and he finds himself actually wanting to meet the entrepreneurial spirit(s) who did it, whether they're from olden times or something like from where he's from.

So he stands at the nearest path leading back up from coast to fort, arms folded, watching. He has dressed in some local cast-offs -- there's a lot of brown leather, apparently. Some boots that fit him okay. A grey cotton shirt chosen to diffuse the glow of blue at his chest while the relative humid heat of the area denies him the ability to layer up comfortably, inconspicuously. His stance doesn't suggest that he is ready to help or do much of anything else but observe, but he is watching carefully for sign that he ought to.

Edited 2019-09-09 23:20 (UTC)

No, no, no need. Despite the griffons' best efforts Howard is unharmed—can't say the same for the glider, which is about as harmed as an inanimate object can get without being incinerated, but it wasn't built to last anyway—and he hoists himself out of the sea and onto a rock with a positive attitude and only a little struggle.

On his hands and knees and thoroughly dripping, he notes his observer, who is no one in particular, to him. Then he turns to sit, facing the water, and crosses one leg over his knee to be able to reach his ankle, which is still attached to a bit of wood and sheet's worth of soggy cloth by a stubborn strap.

"George Cayley didn't have to put up with this," he says, lobbing the words over his shoulder without fully looking back, like crumpled paper into a rubbish bin, because that's about how much he expects his commentary on Sir George to be worth here. "Birds the size of elephants—" (Not quite.) "—would have set aviation back decades. They would have had to learn how to account for mounted harpoons before they could go anywhere." The strap comes free. He spools the wreckage in. "There's something on your chest, by the way."

Tony approaches. It's a meandering kind of amble, nudging aside rock broken up against the shore, finding safe passage along the craggy terrain until he can come up alongside. Distance, still. That the stranger cites Cayley makes enough sense that it doesn't come as a surprise.

Though Tony might indulge in a little relief. Just a smidge.

The accent's familiar, too, in a generic kind of way. No one talks like and yet, twangs nostalgic. Taps into some other murky memory too, but not strongly enough to gain his notice -- not yet, anyway. "Give this place another five, four centuries," he says. He turns a squint upwards towards the circling griffins. "Maybe less, 'cause magic. Ten bucks says their planes will flap."

Something on his chest just has him reach up, wind a finger around the string that laces up the front to his collar, and tug it tighter. "Thanks," like the other man had said 'there's something in your teeth'. "What're you working with, here? Are those bed sheets?"

Edited 2019-09-13 11:30 (UTC)

"Good eye."

Planes, he said, and there's more than a smidge of relief on Howard's end. Maybe Cayley did have to put up with everyone thinking he was talking nonsense, but on top of all of the things he didn't have to put up with, including griffons and glowing hands and alternate worlds, it's too much.

"That was a bedsheet. This—" A narrow metal band, held up and wiggled in view over his shoulder. "—was a broken sword. I had to make a mold out of sand, like some sort of animal."

He deposits the debris on the rock beside him, once it's wound up, and pivots to stand. In middle age his build will pad out to medium. Now, in his twenties, with his linen clothes sticking to his limbs, he's bordering on coltish.

"But it could have been worse. Nobody is dead."

"Yeah. Should get a hold of some sailcloth for mark 2. There's a war? Apparently. So someone'll fund creative ways to get living bodies into, uh..."

Which is when Tony turns his attention up from the tangled mess of fabric and molded metal bands, arms folded and stance only a little precarious on the rocks, and towards the man getting to his feet.

Different. Tony has some very fixed impressions of Howard Stark. White hair, for a lot of the time he remembers most vividly, and pressed suits, and a certain kind of expression reserved only for him. Everything else behind that was just scaffolding. So he thinks of old photographs, the kind he'd pondered with some uneasy curiousity, reluctant interest come too late.

"Uh," he says, again. Uhhh. "Peril."

Good thing this stranger has no frame of reference. Maybe Tony always looks this bewildered.

Howard, wringing water out of one sleeve and oblivious to a long, long list of facts, says, "Good thought."

He says it like he'd already thought of it. Like sharing the same thought as him is what makes it good. A tone learned from walking among Ph.D.s like he owned the place, well before he did actually, literally own the place.

"I thought a proof of concept might get me a budget," he goes on, moving to the other sleeve. "I mean, you can't blame them for thinking I'm insane. If one of them showed up on Earth talking about Blights and. Ah."

He tilts his head to shake water out of one ear.

"Talking about anything they talk about here, I can't say they wouldn't be shot." And they don't know who he is. But maybe Mr. At Least Slightly More Clever Than He Looks With That Expression does, so Howard sticks out a damp hand. "Howard Stark."

"Uh huh."

Tony unsticks from freezeframe to shake hands. "I know. I mean."

Genius strikes, like genius always strikes: unexpected, and a little wild, barely managing to avoid stumbling his words as he adds a cavalier; "Who doesn't. Besides our frolicking friends of fairy forest." It's a bumpy landing, from pure ??? to something resembling any manner of dealing with what's happening

(is this tinnitus that's happening to him right now, or did a corner of his brain fritz out, hard to say)

but he's gotten some practice in, to say the least.

That said, this handshake is going on for a while. "Uhhh Tony. I'm Tony. Rhodes. Potts." That's weird, he regrets it already. "It's a pleasure."

“Sure is,” Howard says, with a slanted smile and slight squint that add up closer to amused appreciation than judgment. Eccentric old men are better, in his very educated and valuable opinion as an eccentric young man, than most of the alternatives.

But he’s still taking his hand back now.

“Rhodes-Potts, huh? Of the Hoboken Rhodes-Potts?” There are no Hoboken Rhodes-Potts, obviously, and the joke is for his own personal benefit, so he speeds ahead and leaves it discarded behind him. “What did you do? Or what did you do, before the—“ He rolls a recollecting hand. “—fairy forest.”

Tony actually does something like an apologetic jazzhands when the handshake is terminated on the late side, and there's an awkwardly overlapped half-laugh at joke that is already left to the wayside. The bumpy landing continues, apparently.

"I, uh." Car salesman. Math teacher. Body double. No one, this isn't happening, it's a dream. "I tinker. Robotics, engines, A.I. Took up a contract or two with Stark Industries, actually."

A smile, more at the eyes. "It's a small multiverse after all."

“Yeah,” Howard says; “yeah.”

A delay.

He hates to say he doesn’t know what someone is talking about—in this specific situation, anyway. When they’re talking about something that matters. He needs a few seconds to be able to stomach it. This, on top of being soaked and attacked by griffons.

But then he waves one finger, spooling an invisible line back in.

“No. Back up. A.I.?”

That wasn't on purpose, somehow. Like maybe the idea of Howard Stark feels as present and live as he does in sepia tinted film reels. That twitch of a smile from before kind of settles, private amusement in spite of himself. In spite of how complicated this is all gonna get because he can't keep his damn! trap! shut! for any real length of time.

"Artificial intelligence," Tony supplies, parting with knowledge easy. "As in, machine intelligence with learning capability, human competencies and computational-- actually, did you ever meet Turing?" A gesture, indicating Howard, lax at the wrist. "He had some neat ideas."

Somewhere in the sky, a griffon screeches.

"We could take this-- I mean, you look like you could use a towel and a drink."

open | put my faith in the hard of heart

settling in. (open)

falling with style. (open)

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down below

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landing with flair. (closed to me.)

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