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]

"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.