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

[heirring]

A less effective research assistant might at this point glance up from either the thaumoscope or the page upon which she was transcribing the readings, but while Wysteria Poppell may be a sixth rate magician she is nothing if not a first rate assistant. Her attention remains stubbornly fixed on the machine as it jitters out a series of reading - that was a rather impressive spike - and her hand moves in rapid shorthand. She had not spent nearly a year in the service of a petulant, demanding, self-centered academic of note only to end up incompetent at note taking over a lot of men shouting in her general vicinity.

"Do you want me to stop? I could help with closing the rift if you need it!" Wysteria shouts back, which is not an answer for either of them really. Obviously she got it. Obviously she knows there must be wisps and all sorts of other nasty things spilling out of the activated rift. She isn't dim.

[propulsion]

"Woah!" Tony shouts. Objection. That's his emotional support Grey Warden.

Too bad this anchor-shard doesn't have a quick fire mode, but Tony is at least a little versed in weapons that take a second to charge up. A darting wisps fires off shimmering ray of green light that catches Ellis in the shoulder, sinking a brief moment of weakness into his muscles. Out the corner of his eye, he sees Tony rounding on it, firing off his own shimmering ray of green light of a stronger kind of oomph.

The ghost scatters into particles. The next shot fired is at the thrashing terror demon, hitting it square enough that it falls backwards in its attempt to reclaim balance for a second attack on Ellis.

"Okay okay okay. HOUSTON!" Tony barks back to the river edge. "Get your happy ass over here."

In the time it'll take her to do so, he's pretty sure someone will finish off the thrashing bloodied mess wallowing in the river. And if it's not Ellis for some ding dang reason, well-- he can think of a few more tests they can run. For now, he picks off wists. He hums something as the next one explodes, but no one is here to recognise and appreciate a good Ghostbusters reference.

[heorte]

Even cursing, slightly blood and shaking off the effect at about the time Tony knocks the terror demon on it's ass, Ellis recognizes his cue. (He would like to hold off to demand Wysteria wait with Tony's contraption on the bank, but Ellis is aware enough to recognize what is and isn't a good use of his time at this point.)

So Ellis does exactly as Tony assumed he'd do: he obligingly bludgeons the terror demon into bubbling ooze while Wysteria makes her way over to them.

"That was well done," Ellis tells him, nodding towards where the wisps had been darting back and forth. He can feel blood dripping from his chin, but it's likely just a knick. He can leave it for the moment. He spins his mace, stepping back out of Wysteria's way. Ellis doesn't have a shard. He can't be useful here.

"Perhaps we can practice with it next time we come out here."

Very easy to be generous when he senses that Tony and Wysteria's experiment is winding down.

[heirring]

With the promptness of a young lady who has already thought this part through, Wysteria casts down her notes, gathers up the ends of her skirts and stuffs them up into her wide belt to keep them from the water. Considering the volume of fabric and the finnickiness of that broad brimmed hat, the extremely sensible boots she's wearing are a surprise as is the speed with with she manages to traipse her way through the shallows to join them. The exploding filaments of the last wisp have yet to fully dissipate before she's there, left hand crackling with energy.

"Ellis, you look ghastly," Wysteria crisply informs him. "And this water is freezing."

Sweeping her sleeve out of the way, she raises her hand toward the pulsing wound of the rift.

[propulsion]

"Take it to the complaint box," says Tony, irreverent, watching her first as she lifts her hand, the way Fade-lightning immediately leaps and attaches to the shard of magic embedded in her hand, the way it lashes fitfully between these two points. He shakes out his own hand and does the same thing, nose wrankling as energy hits his raised palm.

It takes some several seconds, and there's that sound of energy overloading, charging, accumulating, and then the thunder crack of the Veil snapping closed, leaving behind nothing but a faint, dwindling green glow, and the demonic remains still bubbling away and dissolving into the river.

The energy immediately leaves Tony's body, but he has enough left not to sit down in the rush of icy water -- he leans hands on knees and bends over, regaining his breath.

"Thanks," he says, on delay, to Ellis. "You could probably be quicker on the recoil there."

You know, if we're giving notes.

[heorte]

Oh, the water's freezing, is it? Ellis' eyebrows shoot up, but declines to point out that he's been sloshing around in it for the better part of the afternoon. He lifts a hand to his chin, gingerly mapping out the source of the blood as Tony catches his breath.

"I'll keep that in mind," he answers, wincing and drawing his fingers back. He bends to rinse the blood off in the water, then nods towards shore in the same movement. "We should pack up your contraption before something else opens up overhead."

And because Ellis somehow hasn't yet learned his lesson, he looks directly at Wysteria expectantly for support. Surely she'll agree with him this time.

[heirring]

At last, gratification: "Ellis is right, Mister Rhodes-Potts. I rather doubt we're at risk of another rift opening up, but it's getting dark and I for one don't play nursemaid very well should anyone catch a cold." Wysteria says, dusting her hand (shaking the ache out of her fingers; ouch, that smarts). To Ellis: "That said, I have a salve for cuts with my things and will lend the pot to you if you promise to wash your hands first. Now, Mister Rhodes-Potts, we shall have to review the numbers. I think you'll find that the burst in tandem with activating the rift was slightly more powerful than the last and I would be curious as to whether the effect would be cumulative over time. Say, does the rift's output always multiply in intensity? And if so, at what rate? And how does that affect the capacity of our shards to--"

And so on and so forth as she slogs along in the heavy boots back toward the riverbank.