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

[propulsion]

"Okay."

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.

[elegiaque]

Or at least not right now. Gwenaëlle may have to do a serious study of Tony before she can answer that question in the kind of satisfactory detail that she might wish. For now—

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.

[toujoursdroit]

Romain is aware that he is not the most calming presence in the world (possibly with the exception of Gwenaëlle, who has often seemed to relax a hair in the face of his predictability). So he lets her take the lead, waiting to see if Tony can manage to follow her instructions as he wipes and sheathes his blade. At least they are no longer imminently going to be ripped apart, which is more than he'd expected a few moments earlier.

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.