open and closed.

[propulsion]

WHO: Tony Stark and some well coordinated back up dancers.
WHAT: Some open prompts about scientific pursuit under the cut, and some pre-planned starters below.
WHEN: Throughout Harvestmere. What is time?
WHERE: The workshops in the Gallows; the wilds of the Free Marches; and others.
NOTES: Feel free to use action spam tags if you prefer, and contact me if you'd like to do something different/specific! The field work has two prompts, feel free to pick either one and threadjack if your preferred already exists.

WORKSHOPS; LATE AT NIGHT.

Golden lamp light creeps out from beneath the door of one workshop, and for most evenings, well into the pre-dawn hours, that's really all the output that anyone need worry about. Maybe the occasional mutter, mostly muffled by thick wood and thick stone.

Tonight, however, disturbance and noise ekes through the barriers. It mostly starts as an intermittent sound of shattering glass, the strange thunder-strike sound of an anchor-shard firing, should you have the familiarity to make that connection, along with the spill of green light peeking from beneath the door into the hallway, flashing like lightning.

Glass scraped aside, some thumps of moving furniture, footsteps.

And then ("three, two--") another shattering, louder, that crack of sonic energy detonating, and then--

Yelling. "Damnit-- ow, ow, crap--" And if the lamp light coming out from beneath the door looks a little brighter, flickering, hotter-- well, there's probably a reason.

FIELD WORK; VARIOUS.

There is a rift taking up space in a paddock, hovering something like ten feet in the air. Nearby, a sheep corpse is decaying in the late afternoon haze, eyes staring and stupider than when it was alive, oily grey wool burned black where errant energy struck it dead where it stood. Its companions had the sense to get out of the way, but not the better sense to do so more than something like forty, fifty feet.

Tidy piles of sheep shit are dispersed intermittently among the dewy grass.

"Look alive," Tony says, to those he dragged out here today. "We're losing the light. Hand me that?"

Without too much in the way of explanation, he starts moving in a circle around the rift with a bundle of what look like bronze pokers in his hand, well-made, tapering into a spiral at the end, the other sharp so as best to be staked into the ground, which he does. Mages of specific studious inclination may recognise these as measuring tools to capture outputs of spells, as with the device in his hand -- also bronze, finely made, a little scratched and dull in spots.

The rift pulses with warning, green lightning bolt-type activity licking the grass beneath it, and the dense clouds above rumble with coming lashings of rain.

A later day, Riftwatch locates a rift over a river -- more like a stream, but wide, almost a hundred feet across of water rushing around and occasionally burbling over water-smooth rocks, some enough to stand and step on, others enough to catch a foot and turn an ankle. The latest distribution of demons have been dispatched, disintegrating into the glistening water with oozing demonic ichor under a late day sun, in a rare clear sky.

Tony comes to a stop near the rift, absently shaking his anchor-shard having hand as it pulses and glows brightly from both recent combat use as well as the rift nearby. In his other hand, which has his attention, is the thaumoscope, its dials and innerworks clicking. "Okay, are you listening?" he calls over towards whomever he saddled scribe duties with today. He is 80% soaked through with river water, and ignores the flow of it high around his ankles. "Passive reading is--"

And he starts listing off the various numerical indicators that we're just gonna handwave.

"Reset," he says, mostly for himself, twisting some dial on the scope. "I wanna get a reading of when it's activated, and then we'll-- give some considerable thought towards closing it, how's that sound."

Comments

[murderbaby]

Mhavos spreads his hands. "It's a sign of respect among my people." He says it flatly and calmly.

He looks to Athessa, turning his face away from Tony, and winks.

[sulahnan]

--Which is met first with a blank stare, but soon dissolves into her signature dorky laugh. Absurd. The giggle fit dies down a bit, with her shaking her head at the ground, but as soon as she looks back to Mhavos, she's off again, waving her hands like she's trying to get him to stop whatever he's doing that's got her in stitches.

"You're so weird," she manages, composing herself and walking forward. She claps Mhavos on the shoulder once and then looks at the gently smoldering Tony.

"The fuck is that?" Casual, nigh on monotonous. She points to the contraption he just rid himself of.

[propulsion]

"Yeah, well, tell Santa to amend the naughty list while you're at it."

And other jokes only Tony can appreciate, half-distracted still with loosing himself of his own contraption. Once he does, he inspects his palm, the back of his wrist, having gotten away with some singed arm hair and nothing worse. In the dim light of a room lit just by the low hearth, the green beacon in his hand burns brightly, and he sets about removing the more ordinary glove on his other hand.

Lifts his attention back to the pair of elves who have Apparated into his life and probably aren't even gonna fix his stuff while he's sleeping. Tony moves his arm in implication he's gonna underhand pass to her, before he tosses the device over the few feet necessary for her to catch. It's still smoking in places, but you know.

She'll live. "Focusing device for the anchor," he says. "Or-- supposed to be. But believe it or not, this is progress. Mind the, uh. Hot metal and broken crystal shards." He turns his back on them, moving towards where a bottle of wine is sitting on a table, next to a cup.

"What're you kids doing up anyway."

[murderbaby]

Mhavos watches the smoking thing whiz past, and doesn't flinch. The room smells of smoke and corroding metal, but now there's an... herbal scent. Athessa?

He'll worry about it later. For now, he just watches tony, unmoving.

"How are you doing that without magic?" It could be a challenge, but it's not. Mhavos belatedly thinks to add-- "as your research assistant, I am assisting your research."

He takes a step closer to the hearth, genuinely curious, but not knowledge enough about any of the objects before him to make his own guesses.

[sulahnan]

Yes, she's the source of that herbal scent you're picking up, Mhavos. More specifically, the joint in her hand is the source, and as she catches the device in her free hand, she puts the joint between her lips and lets it chill there without taking a drag.

"Neat," she says, turning the thing over and avoiding the hot metal, as warned, and carefully catching the broken crystal shards in her palm. She holds the thing up and looks through where the lens would be, or was, and hmms softly. "Like a magnifying glass? Or more like a prism?"

[propulsion]

Glug glug glug. Tony pours a fair helping of some kind of fragrant wine into his cup, a crooked smile to himself at Mhavos's question following--

"Uh, with flair?" is some bullshit thrown over his shoulder, but more of a holding position for real explanation. "With-- I dunno, pizzazz."

He turns, amusement more visible from this angle via a look traded from Mhavos to Athessa as she looks the contraption over. There is something like approval in the cant of his head. "Sorta," he says. "Right idea, magnification through realignment. This particular variation's supposed to capture and focus energy output for a harder hit with a longer range of impact, but there's a weird interaction. Partial heat conversion, but.

"Not magic. Much cooler. Are you toking in my office right now?"

[murderbaby]

Mhavos wishes he had something to take notes with; all of this sounds fascinating. Instead, he'll peer at everything that doesn't look likely to explode, committing it to memory.

"This is your office?" Skepticism.

[sulahnan]

"Am I what?" Toking? That's a word she's never heard before.

But, no matter. She carries the glove-thing over to hand back to Tony, brushing the crystal shards from her palm onto some empty tray along the way. She would have tossed it back, but then again, he did tell her once not to throw his stuff.

"So how do you fix it? Get something that doesn't get too hot to handle?"

[propulsion]

It's fairly sparse, as far as a workspace goes. There's some trash swept into the corner -- more crystal shards, leather scrapes, bits and pieces for later disposal. Many lanterns light the room or hang and sit idle and dark. One table is littered with hardware -- pliers and scissors and hammers and drill bits -- along with materials, beaten steel and leather, and a few non-shattered crystal lenses of various thicknesses and qualities and colours. Sheaths of parchment lie in stacks, with precise looking sketches of parts compiled, shorthand notes, measurements, equations.

Tony doesn't miss Mhavos scouting the place, even with the skepticism. "Workshop," is correction for both himself and the other man. "It'll do for the minute. Worked in worse."

He's already looked back to Athessa as he says so, bringing his cup up to drink from, pausing it a few inches from his mouth as he considers the query. "Toking. Blazing. Smizzle the bizzle. Puff the magic dragon. Smoke a big fat one. I-- really need to write these down, god." It's a lot of pressure, being the only cool earthling in town. "And yeah -- tweak the design, source some insulators. I'll need someone to write some convincing letters to Dwarftown if I want more than what we've got in storage, though.

"Trade you," and Tony is offering the cup still charged with wine, undrunken from.

[murderbaby]

Mhavos is genuinely surprised Tony isn't complaining about the conditions he's in, and maybe a little impressed. That's the great thing about extremely low expectations.

Watching the friendly exchange from a distance, he considers the question in the abstract. "You are trying to amplify its power?" He considers, "or focus it more intensely... I assume for offensive purposes. I wonder if either would make much difference in the closing of rifts."

[sulahnan]

Every weird word or phrase he says, which she gleans are ways to refer to smoking herb, elicits a laugh. She hopes she can remember them all later. Maybe Tony should write them down. In the enchanted book. So she can learn them later.

"Technically I was toking outside your office, then," she says, taking the glass despite shaking her head no thanks to the offer, and handing over the glove in return. Why is everyone trying to get her to drink this stuff? She turns to give it instead to Mhavos, more than content to stick with her pre-established form of intoxication.

[propulsion]

That's not

exactly

the trade he was fixing to make, frowning as his wine is taken and he winds up with his hands full of prototype. Oh well. Probably picking up new vices in the wee hours of the morning is a bad idea? Question mark? And Tony is quickly distracted anyway as he heads on over to the worktable, picking up a set of pliers and going about removing the focus from the brace.

"Maybe," he says. "I've been crunching the numbers--"

Numbers pre-crunched by the likes of Salvio and Wysteria and Mhavos himself, that is. Twang goes metal as Tony wrenches, twists, snaps it. Tosses the bracer down, picks up the focus to inspect the damage. Pliers are traded out for-- smaller pliers, and he starts cleaning the frame of broken crystal. All of his movements are efficient and practiced and only a little manic if you consider what time it is.

"--and the amount of energy being accumulated by the anchor when it hits a rift is, uh. Significant. But worth a shot, right."

[murderbaby]

Mhavos stares blearily at the wine, and sets it aside. He does drink, but he's not much interested at the moment.

"So you'd like to accumulate more power, or redirect it? Or just see what happens."

[sulahnan]

"Val says that doing stuff just to see what happens is a necessary part of science," she says, as if offering banal justification for an answer Tony hasn't given.

And she starts to wander, peering curiously at this and that and the other thing, not sure what most of it is, with vague guesses about some of it, and nearly fumbling her joint when the metal twangs. She catches it, and hops back away from whatever it is she's looking at, palms out as if saying I didn't touch anything.

Oh. Yeah, that's true, she didn't. Back to wandering.

[propulsion]

At least he gets his wine back, when he's done, but Tony has preoccupied himself now, sitting up on the edge of the table as he continues to salvage what he can of the device. "Val's a smart guy," he says. "Or gal."

He glances up to note Athessa's antics, a brief squint to convey mock-suspicion, before eyes back down on his task.

"But I'd like to develop something that can accumulate and store the energy that the anchor attracts from a rift and then, sure, redirect it, focus it, either for demon punching or getting rifts closed quicker, or not needing a whole team to do it. It'll need to be made of sterner stuff than this guy," and he waves the device he's working on, "'cause this guy can barely handle what we do on our own."

[murderbaby]

"Valentine de Foncé," which just muddies the water, because that spelling can be applied to any gender, "is educated and clever." It could sound like a compliment. From Mhavos, it's... look, he's hesitant to call the man smart; that requires a certain something the Orlesian nobility has yet to breed.

"You're talking about trapping energy," Mhavos says, and searches his too-sharp sleep-deprived mind for what little knowledge he has of theoretical magic. "That- energy doesn't like to be trapped."

He cringes at his own words. He doesn't like to speak so basely.

[sulahnan]

"What about something like a lightning rod?" Athessa offers. She doesn't know how they work, has only seen them from a distance while traveling, but they seem to take in a lot of energy.

This time she does take a drag on her spliff, holding it for a bit and then speaking around a cloud: "What makes rift stuff different from lighting, except that it's green?"

[propulsion]

Tony kind of lifts his head to look at Mhavos in a slightly more deliberate way than tossed glances or monitoring what people are doing and/or touching. He also lifts the pliers, pointing at him, which then switches to Athessa.

"Hold that thought," he says, then back to Mhavos. "Serah Davat, you have the stage. What do you mean, doesn't like to be trapped."

[murderbaby]

"I'm no alchemist," Mhavos says, surprised and unsure in the face of this sudden attention, "but I was under the impression that is why explosions... explode. Unless you are planning to render the energy into a more... passive form, to be reactivated later."

He's read some books on what Tony would call chemistry, but he only remembers the basic framework, not the smaller, more intricate details.

[sulahnan]

She's half paying attention, one-fourth holding that thought, and the remaining quarter is trying to make smoke rings.

[propulsion]

"Yep."

Tony drops his hand. "Chemical energy. In my world we got something called a battery that converts, uh, different forms of energy into chemical and then into electrical, electrical energy being--"

Back to Summer Of Love, over here, Tony looking towards Athessa to redirect attention. "Lightning. Funny you should say so, because rift stuff-- or, magic, or let's go with 'Fade energy', can be quantified and measured the same way we quantify and measure the basic forms of energy, in terms of force and speed. As for what makes it different from something like lightning--"

He spreads his hands. "That's kind of what I've been doing for the past-- uh, way too many weeks. They have similar properties and different behaviours. Lightning is attracted to metal, but I can't say the same for Fade energy. Hey, can I have my wine back, if we're all done with, uh--"

Passing it around and putting it out of reach, apparently.