tony stark. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
propulsion) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
faderift2019-10-14 09:36 pm
propulsion) wrote in faderift2019-10-14 09:36 pm
open and closed.
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.
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."
same
Clik-clik-clik.
Clockwork spins faster in tandem with that pulse of energy, and Tony glances backwards towards the strange destabilisations in the earth that tend to signal the next wave.
Clik.
"I got--"
Even Romain can feel the next pulse of energy in a sort of ambiant concussive sense, but Gwenaëlle and Tony feel it somewhat worse as their connection to the rift is severed for them, a strange and unsettling yank as the rift, in that moment, expands with a heart beat throb.
The thaumoscope drops, out of sight and out of mind, Tony on hands and knees the next time his brain registers what's happening. Wide eyes turn upwards to the floating, shimmering tear in reality as bright green lightning slams into the ground.
Wisps resolve out of thin air, the vague human-shapes flickering like candles flames.
And directly in front of Tony, where Romain is squaring to ambush, the ground bubbles and ripples with black ichor and green light, the terror demon having vanished two seconds ago now hurtling up and into the air. It brings a long arm down in time for Tony to fire off a glimmering wall of Fade energy directly in front of him, demon claws raking across it.
There's a strange whine happening in his ears, blocking out all sound, as he graclessly scrambles backwards.
...same
she thinks, we're all going to die.
It takes at least two anchor-shards to close a rift. There is no softening it up. No one has closed a rift by themselves since Evelyn Trevelyan took an entire mountain to the face, and there is no reason to expect that this is somehow going to be the exception. She has come out with two elderly men and a lunatic and he is panicking and they are all going to fucking die. A large part of her wants to do exactly what Tony's doing and just drop her hand and raise her shield (he can do that now, that's interesting, what a shame they're going to die and no one else is going to know) (and that they're going to die before she can kick the shit out of him for getting them all killed)—
it's the stubborn part of her that doesn't. The part that has said, for the past year: she is probably going to die, but she isn't going to do it sitting on her hands waiting for fuck ups to save her.
Gwenaëlle squares her shoulders, thinks well, it isn't as if the Duke or Guilfoyle were going to die in their beds, anyway, and raises her hand. She is dimly, distantly aware that it feels different this time.
no subject
What he can do is reach for the training that was pounded into him as an officer, decades ago. Guilfoyle is holding his own, but their rifter...
"Stark," he barks, the edge of military training unmissable even with the culture (world) difference in play. "Get up." He's not sure if it will work, but he's had men who occasionally needed the verbal equivalent of a slap in the face. It's worth a try, and it's not as if he's worried about offending the man in this moment. He doesn't even have long enough to see if his order does anything, moving as quickly as he can to avoid the terror demon's strike and to try to draw it away from the rift.
no subject
He'd managed to chuck it into a containment box before detonation. Had Jarvis make a note of it, something like 'self-destruct mode', question mark.
Anyway, in short: this is what Tony feels like his whole brain is doing.
Thedas, rifts, demons, whatever -- mentally, he is back in New York a year ago, and he is falling, and he sees the incredible terrors that lie just beyond their gate. His heart is in his throat and he can't breathe. Someone is yelling his name, and he flinches.
"Sorry," he says, breathless. No one is listening. No one can hear him. His heart is trying to escape his ribcage, but least the terror demon has whirled around to confront the man with the sword. Green light crackles from and around Tony's palm, but he doesn't notice this as he clumsily tries to put distance between himself and whatever is happening right now.
The rift shivers with its own unstable force beneath the assault of Gwenaëlle's anchor, and all at once, she can feel it. That little pull, that sense of finding the threads that are keeping the Veil held open. All she has to do is yank.
no subject
It quite literally comes apart in her hand, the terror demon weakened by the rift's instability and falling beneath her grandfather's sword, the sound of pressure and release something that she feels in her chest, sick green light washing over them and fading to nothing, to remnants in the grass. And quiet, except for the sound of swords being sheathed and Tony's harsh breathing.
For a moment, she cannot comprehend that they aren't dead.
Immediately after that, she stalks after Tony—her hand aglow, a knife not in it only because she couldn't have been holding one and doing that—and makes herself stop rather than just continuing to walk forward until she could kick him in the ribs. The breath she takes is necessary. She stares up at the sky, devoid of demons, and makes sure she's steady before she drops down to her knees and says, clearly, “I'm going to take your hand. I'm not going to hurt you.”
Does she still want to hurt him. Yes, a bit.
no subject
Is anyone about to be? the unspoken addition.
no subject
Is what Tony says to Gwenaëlle, or it's what he tries to say. Breath still caught up shallow in his lungs, and the edge in his voice sounds both skeptical as well as, well.
Like he's having an out of body experience and he's not sure what's supposed to help him. When she takes his hand, it feels colder than it ought to feel, and there is a delay before he responds to it by relaxing his fingers. Sitting stupid in the dirt, the tinnitus whine in his ears having taken the place of demon screeches that are no more.
There is a minor full bodied jerk as Romain's voice appears close than he'd expected, but Tony lifts his other hand -- anchor still glittering and pulsing -- to indicate he definitely not hurt seriously. He hasn't lifted his head since he dropped it. If he manages to make it out of this without crying that sure would be swell.
What is wrong with him.
Okay don't answer that.
no subject
it is not immediately obvious whether or not anyone is going to be hurt seriously, but Gwenaëlle takes Tony's hand and presses it to her ribs, laying her own free hand flat over his chest (beside the glowing lyrium problem, not atop it) and breathing slowly and deliberately. The kind of deep, patient breaths that move her ribcage but not her shoulders, that keep her back straight and her eyes focused just upon Tony's hands and his shoulders and not his face because she doesn't need to know the things his face might tell her and the things she does need to know she can find elsewhere.
“Match me,” she says, her voice low and brisk and not unkind. Not kind, either, but patient the way eroding rock is patient. “Breathe in when I breathe in. Breathe out when I breathe out. Do it until you can't tell which of us is leading.”
And then? She doesn't give him an and then.
no subject
Romain was in a war, once; he's seen men in battle shock, both during and after that time. But it's going to take him a moment to translate that experience to this one, without the context for Tony as any kind of warrior. That said, deep breaths generally don't hurt, so her approach seems a reasonable one. And the quiet gives him a moment to visually check his granddaughter for any injuries she felt weren't worth mentioning before.