faderift | closed.

There is a ledge that overlooks the docks of the Gallows with a view that shows up the blue peaks of the Vinmark Mountains as shadows behind low cloud cover. It's high enough that the general activity and bustle of the surrounding area is dimmed into a background mutter, but not so high as to get cold. At this angle, the worst of cold winds are deflected off the fortress itself, and so one can enjoy some clean air without getting buffeted or interrupted.

And also pot smoke in that clean air, if you are these two people.

Tony has cashed in on his Satinalia gift from one elf woman some time into Firstfall, currently touching anachronistic match to blunt and shield it from what wind does manage to scoot around the corner. The dampness in the air feels like the biggest hindrance, but he manages in the end, then offers the still burning match to Athessa, stamping down the instinct to wastefully flick it away.

Things cost money! Who knew. "It's illegal," he's saying, as he does so. "Technically. Not really, unless you're-- uh. At a certain socio-economic disadvantage," sounds like an easier thing to explain than getting into earth race and class relations with a Dalish elf. "But that's probably why we have about nine-hundred very dumb words for getting high. What do you guys call it anyway? Substance and effect, I mean."

He's bundled into a coat, scarf, gloves, and is wearing his sunglasses for no particular reason given the weather save for habit. Slowly accumulating a wardrobe in the grudging concession he is not going home any time soon. Plus, it's getting colder.

"The substance is elfroot, or herb," she's saying as she lights up her own freshly rolled blunt. Turns out, rolling blunts on this ledge, in the wind and cold, is not easy! "There's a couple other substances you can smoke to varying effect, but if someone's smoking herb, it's elfroot. And no, we" meaning elves "don't just call it root."

Athessa pauses in her answer to take a drag, thinking. "Effects: getting high, of course, that's a shared one I guess? Sometimes it's called taking medicine, since elfroot has healing properties. Getting Faded. I'm sure there are plenty of religious ones too, like uh...pledging to the Maker or some dumb shit. Oh! Riding the dragon."

She gets another short puff of smoke just to blow it out through her nostrils by way of demonstrating why dragons are relevant. And just as Tony is bundled, braced against the cold, Athessa is layered up with leggings beneath her harem pants, two undershirts and a large knit sweater. The perfect combination of warm and shapeless.

"So it's only illegal for regular folk? You're allowed if you're wealthy or—?"

Edited (nit picking ) 2019-11-12 03:49 (UTC)

There is a genuine if brief laugh out of Tony at this first part, abbreviated and a surprise to him as he settles into his slouch. Thick wool is enough to dim the chill out of discomfort and so it's a nice break from the stagnant air of the workshops, or the dusty, too-dry air of the library. The constant smell of woodfire and oil. It's a wonder there aren't more respiratory problems going around, honestly.

There's an approving noise at 'getting Faded'. Not bad.

"Not officially?" he says, on the back of his first inhale, held there, then released in a sigh. Also not bad. He's not exactly a connoisseur but it's different enough to give a value judgment. "It's harder getting in trouble for the little things after a certain tax bracket. Probably a universal truth, right."

He clicks his fingers, as if to give a sound effect to synapse firing. "Chasing the dragon, but that's for a different thing. But there's puff the magic dragon, which is-- wordplay based on a children's song. A sad one. Inappropriately so."

When someone mentions tax brackets and you're a wayward elf who doesn't know jack shit about taxes or brackets, what do you do? You nod slowly and press your lips together and make some sort of ah yes noise in the back of your throat.

It's definitely true that rich folk can buy their way out of problems, though.

"Do the children get eaten by the dragon?"

"No. I said sad, not hilarious."

Tony glances sidelong, to communicate he is kidding and it's fine and hopefully her childhood friends weren't all eaten by a dragon.

And moving along, besides; "The dragon outlives his human kid friend who forgets about him and he recluses himself in a cave, or something. See, we can have adorable sympathetic dragons because they don't exist in my world. Remember to follow my social media for more super useful information about my entire dimension."

To be fair, he did give a brief physics lesson at 3 fucking AM or whatever it was.

There's a long moment (still only a moment, though) in which Athessa stares at Tony. It's just long enough, with enough of a furrow drawn between her brows and enough of this and enough of that that it very well might seem like she's about to drop the fact that her friends were indeed eaten by a dragon.

But then she laughs. Because it's absurd. "I just realized that it's probably just as weird for you to hear us talk about normal stuff as it is for us to hear you talk about... social media? Normal stuff from your home."

Darkly shaded glasses conceal the slow squint she gets for playing at making this more unfortunate than he'd intended, but she laughs, and the corner of his mouth hooks up.

Attention shifts back forwards

"Yeah. Like," a brief pause to take a hit of smoke, the end of the blunt flaring bright, "books, what's that about?" He tips his chin up enough to loose a floating ring of white smoke into the air, and a second after it. For his troubles, the smoke snags high in his lungs and the rest if released with a scratchy cough.

Blergh. "Vegetables. Stairs. Foreign and alien."

Another laugh--more of a snort, really, followed by a very poor attempt at blowing smoke rings of her own. Puff, puff, puff, cloud cloud cloud, no rings.

"Sandwiches, unheard of. And...roads? What the fuck are those?" Athessa leans back, rolling the blunt over her knuckles and watching it flip end over end over end over end...

"Can you teach me to do that?"

"Mmno. I think it's, like, genetic," Tony says, very immediately but very casually, on the back of a sigh of fresh smoke. "Innate capability. Some things can't be taught."

But he looks sideways at her again, then says, "Show me what we're working with."

And then will proceed to try to explain the vaguely ineffable talent of smoke ring exhales, given to just repeating himself if asked for further clarity. By then, his manner has relaxed, his characteristic fidgety tension unravelling like yarn. If anyone needed to get high, he's a top contender.

"It's like," he's saying, "not breathing, but it is. You're doing great."

Edited 2019-11-18 06:13 (UTC)

Welcome to the reason Athessa is so high so often, Tony! And, naturally, the reason that by the time he's relaxed, she's gone full horizontal, laying back on the ledge with one knee bent and the other gently swaying as it drapes over the edge. The ledge-edge. Edge of the ledge.

But she's not immediately good at this thing she's never tried, which is frustrating. She's got blowing the smoke out down, no problem there. A solid execution of the classic puff of smoke, and blowing the smoke out her nose which always makes her nostrils feel funny, but rings? Not happening.

"It's gotta be like...a tongue thing, right?" She asks, making gestures with both hands that surely make sense to her but wouldn't be decipherable to a sober mind. And then, she points at him. "What's that tongue doing?"

"What do you want it to be doing?" is delivered with the innuendo laid on and at a half-mumble as he watches the boats do boat things in the bay, and immediately followed by a crisper, "Scratch that. Ignore it. Inappropriate," despite the crooked smile evident in his voice. "Unless you got an answer in Dalish, anyway. Then it's a teaching moment."

Another deep breath of smoke followed by a few wobbling, flimsy rings pushed into the air to figure out the important question of what is that tongue doing. The scratchy feeling of lingering smoke induces another quick burst of dry coughs, and he impatiently waves his hand.

"Not a lot. You're breathing it out too hard probably because you want it too much."

That innuendo is met with raised brow and a look that says oh you wanna play that game, huh? But then he backpedals and the look turns to a side-eye.

"Dirthara-ma. It means may you learn, but it's also a way of calling someone gutless." How's that for a learning experience, Tony?

She takes another drag, and this time when she breathes out the smoke she does it slowly. It's still just puffs. She rolls her tongue and tries again, and there's a bit more structure to the shapes, but they're still far from rings.

Gutless sounds like an answer to another question and also rude, maybe, which Tony contemplates with a middle-distance squint as he knocks ash off smoldered paper and leaf. That she might be calling him cowardly for retracting a pass only half hovers at the edge of his mind, and that's fine. It's probably true, inasmuch as fear seems like it isn't the culprit.

Something. He exists to amuse himself, anyway.

As for her rings: "I'd give that a C-. Nothing to put up on the refrigerator. But conditions aren't ideal, and neither is this stuff. You'd probably nail it with a hookah. Do you have hookahs? It's a water-based, uh, thing."

"We have hookas," she answers, nodding. "I dunno what a sea-minus is, or a...refridgerator? But I've got Benedict's fancy expensive hookah stashed away until he gets out of the dungeon in around 500 years."

Tap, tap, ash falls into the wind and is swept away like it was never even there. Looking up through the smoke as she breathes, a wry expression twists her lips.

"Dalish isn't that good for learning moments, really. It's mostly been lost because the people who know it keep getting killed off, and a lot of our shit isn't written down anywhere, so it just goes--" Poof, like smoke. "Not a lot of use for it if you're not dealing with clans. Not a lot of fun things to say, either, 'cos it all depends on how you say it. Like garas melar." There's that side-eye again, this time looking to see if he's going to repeat the words.

There is a glance of surprise at this first thing, but then again, why not hookahs? Trying to figure out the overlap of cultural touchstones between Earth and what feels like a much smaller Thedas is enough to be headache inducing, and he came out here to relax.

So he glances, and doesn't question it.

More to the air to Athessa, he asks instead, musing, "We have a dungeon?"

That's weird. Anyway.

He breathes out smoke in twin, draconic streams from his nose, feeling the nervous system tingle of its effects in a way he's not sure he's gonna love if he keeps going, but by now his joint has burned down to a stub. He listens as Athessa talks elf history, some of which he's done the readings about, and there's a moment of pause as if he's expecting the translation to come next, equally flattering probably as the last.

But it doesn't, and he can feel the weight of the prompt. "Garas melar," he repeats, pronunciation coming easy when you have a decent handle on a few languages already. A look, to see how'd he do.

She can't suppress her grin, so she doesn't try. He took the bait!

"Oh, well if you insist," her play-acting delivery of that line might be believable if it weren't for the aforementioned grin, teeming with mischief. She sits up and closes the distance between them, not touching him just yet but definitely leaning into his personal space once she settles next to him, propped up by the heel of one hand.

At least she turns the wattage down on that grin to just a cheeky smile, and she bats her eyelashes at him.

"Wanna guess what that means?"

Ever sensitive to things like boundaries, personal space, conversational distance, Tony pauses when he almost feels more than sees Athessa lean in once she sits up, looking first out the corner of her eye enough to catch big grin before it dims, keyed into the way her voice -- anyone's voice -- sounds subtly different when within a certain proximity.

He turns his head to look at her, eyeline directed over the top of sunglasses, frank and confronting and definitely amused.

"Uh," he says, first of all, "'what's your tongue doing'?"

Athessa shakes her head.

"It means come here."

Ok, those sunglasses are distracting. She tips her head to one side slightly and takes the dark spectacles off of his face and, in one smooth motion, flips them around to put on her own face--upside down. It does nothing to keep her from looking self-satisfied.

It's late, which is a relativistic term that applies to people who keep normal schedules. For people who work whenever they want, it's simply the evening, which arguably makes for ideal conditions with which to work, unless you have a girlfriend who judges you about it. Which neither of the men in this room have, in this reality, so that's fine. There's a burning hearth that provides a good quantity of heat and light to the workspace, helped by some burning sconces and several candles and their slow moving waterfalls of wax.

On the table between them are sheets of parchment, on which are diagrams and notes drawn in Tony's precise hand. The central one is an exploded depiction of a device, lots of circular patterns, drawn to scale in metric measurements, and then more alien additions -- some runic symbols copied down, referenced, translated.

Howard by now knows the principle of what the glowing thing in Tony's chest is meant to be -- an electromagnet powered by a small and powerful energy generator, the implications of which perhaps Tony has downplayed to some extent and allowed the context of being from the future to fill in some blanks. What it has become is now sketched out between them in detail, Tony having pointed to some of the key items. The core of refined lyrium, the outer ring of some previously unknown mineral he's now narrowed down to a few possibilities that will need to be tested, the runic inscriptions.

"It's doing magic," in conclusion. Tony, by now, relaxing back into his chair with the front feet of it lifted off the ground, hands clasped around a cup of room temperature wine. "Hooked into a miniaturised-- Barrier, spell," said haltingly, reluctantly, "enchantment, whatever. And I can probably make more of 'em."

That’s the first statement in at least two minutes to get Howard to lift his attention from the diagrams, which he’s been leaning over, forearms planted flat on the table, following along as best he can. And as best he can is pretty good, even though some of the science behind the explanation is (don’t make him say it) more advanced than he’s familiar with, and all of the enchantment is, well—

“Do you think you can make them stop calling it magic, while you’re at it? Unless you’re planning to generate rabbits out of hats.”

Petty. He can deal with it, really.

He stands all the way up. For a very brief moment he narrows his eyes at Mr Tony St. Rhodes-Potts, before chalking up a flash of familiarity to odd shadows from the firelight and craning his neck to force an impolite man-among-men joint pop.

The house is, emphatically, haunted.

Never mind the faint air of decrepitude or the thin layer of dusk married with the distinct odor of An Old Man Lived Here And It Didn't Go Well. In the first time minutes of them standing in the drawing room, a decorative plate edged in gold and painted with a series of dusty cherubic faces had thrown itself off the expansive mantle at directly Ellis' head. Wysteria, in the process of picking up the pieces from where they'd exploded against the wall behind him, had promptly assured them both that, "Kostos Averesch - he is one of the Nevarran death mages - assures me that it doesn't mean any real harm. Ignore it and the spirit will grow bored and go on its merry way clomping around on the third floor and rearranging all the cutlery. Though I really must congratulate you on your reflexes, Ellis. Now, if the both of you would follow me--"

What followed was a whirlwind tour through a series of cramped rooms slightly too full of the detritus of a life lived by the sort of doddering old gentleman with no heirs of note whose ramshackle estate might somehow fall, by a series of coincidences, into the hands of a young lady who didn't belong anywhere at all in Thedas. There are books and dreadful old paintings and rooms furnished for guests who almost certainly had not been present for decades, and bedroom stacked high with old clothes and papers featuring a a four poster bed whose mattress yet bore the macabre indentation of its former master.

At last, they've ended up in a large storeroom off the house's narrow kitchen. A single high window in the storeroom's wall looks out into a shriveled and weed-rotten slip of garden surrounded by an ominous stone wall which rises high enough to block nearly every scrap of sunlight from this side of the house. In the slate floor sits a trapdoor, through which lies a stairwell so upright it borders on a ladder leading down into a truly wretched root cellar.

The storeroom itself has already undergone a minor transformation. The kitchen table has been dredged into it and taken on a quality of workbench, overflowing with rulers and compasses and open books and half organized piles and piles of paper. Wysteria stands now near the center of the room, her hands on her hips and her sleeves folded back to the elbow.

"You can see why I thought this space might work as the primary workshop. I would like to open up the wall there and put in a proper set of double doors. There is a gate in the side garden and anything that needs transporting could pass through it from here and out in the alley beyond instead of being ferried through the front door and so on. And there are rooms upstairs that could be cleared away and made into secondary places of study, of course, but I suspect it will be easiest to do this one space at a time. What is your opinion of the place, Mister Rhodes-Potts?"

Tony has kept a germophobic distance, hands to himself, from most surfaces within the house as he trailed after Wysteria at a wandery pace and reliability. His face hadn't done anything too cynical at 'Nevarran death mage', let alone the ghost problem, and the sunglasses he is wearing do something to attenuate moments of distaste as readily as they do the meagre sunlight.

This last stop is reassuring. So there's that.

He'd come to a stop with his arms folded, gauging the size of the room, the altered dimensions were they to knock a wall out, the height of the ceiling. "I mean.

"It's not exactly OSHA compliant." He wanders towards the trap door, hands hovered out as if second guessing himself, but then hefting it open. A stale, wet smell immediately rises, but he opens it fully anyway. "But get a clean-out crew, an exterminator, and four guys in matching jumpsuits with a catchy jingle to do a sweep and I think it'll be swell." He doesn't repeat his 'how did you get this place again?' that has resurfaced at least a couple of times.

Tempting though it is, because seriously. "Any chance your Nevarran death mage can talk the ghosts into not smashing our stuff?"

On the extreme other end of the spectrum, the house puts Ellis on edge even before it started throwing things at his head. It smells of a sad, drawn out type of death that makes him want to open all the windows. He hasn't drawn his mace, but there's a wary set to his expression as he watches Tony and Wysteria appraising the room.

"I can do something about your garden in the spring," Ellis offers. "But I'm not sure what I can do about the ghost other than provide a moving target."

But he has some thoughts about windows, about ways to make this place more inviting than it already is. He'd half expected something to leap out of the root cellar, but mercifully it's only wet and damp. Ellis leaves off his examination of the garden to circle the room, coming to a stop beside Tony at the trap door.

They're going to detonate something in that root cellar. Ellis just knows it.

"Oh, nevermind the ghost," she says with a wave of the hand, dismissive as if they are discussing a particularly persnickety cat. "The aforementioned Nevarran death mage has assured me the spirit means no harm. So long as we don't go poking it with any sticks - metaphorically speaking, I mean -, it's unlikely to cause much trouble outside the occasional smashed glass. I find it is slightly fussy about strangers, but given the time to acclimate it really is quite even tempered. I suppose. I can't say that I've met many spirits."

She at least has the good sense to give Ellis a sidelong, very nearly apologetic look. Really, it's perfectly fine.

"Anyway. Let us not linger on the pretense of the phantasmagorical, shall we? There are more important matters at hand, such as how we"--funny, how that word keeps coming up--"Might go about convincing Riftwatch to assist with the whole... four matching jumpsuits effort."

Oh, of course. I was just doing a little research.

[ In the middle of the night while waiting on a gentleman caller, apparently but-- moving on. He spares a proper glance over the other man, awake equally late. Perhaps equally restless. Tony isn't who he was expecting, but that needn't be a bad thing. ]

It's-- well, it might be of interest to you. Would you like to come in? How do you feel about spiders?

[ Not the order those questions ought to go in, perhaps.

All the same, he swings open the door in offer. Inside, the smell of incense and oil, a work bench, a table. Upon the latter: a board dotted with pinned moths and a glass jar the size of his head, dark and full of skittering. ]

[ Tony enters the workspace-- not eagerly, but certainly with some degree of intent, inclined towards the centre of most given rooms to assess his surroundings from there. His attention immediately zooms in on the table and the sign of subtle movement. ]

We have an understanding, [ is his answer. ] Mostly around proximity, boundaries, that kind of thing. How do you feel about spiders?

I am more partial to beetles, but they have a certain charm.

[ Or the people who love them do, at least. He shuts the door after and sweeps back toward the table, rolling up his sleeves. ]

And certain uses. Giant spiders, you see, are one of few creatures who can reliably sense the thinning of the Veil.

Well that's fun. Do they make webs that say 'some demon!' over the top of rifts?

[ He makes a gesture, a sweeping hand gesture to project the visual image, which turns quickly into a dismissive wave. ]

Kid's book, not local, don't ask. You were saying about your spiders?

[ Squinting, ] If they could spell, this would be much simpler.

But even before a rift appears, they like to nest in the thin spots. It's why there are so many cobwebs in the Gallows -- or part of the reason, at any rate. [ Also it's, u kno, old and understaffed and full of spiders.

Delicately, he plucks a dead moth from its pinboard, enfolding it in caged hand. ]

So they feel that potential far earlier than we do. I thought if I could inspire them to react a bit more obviously... [ Well. A shimmer of light between fingers, and wings like dry leaves flutter to life. Ilias releases it to beat against the glass wall of the jar--

Where the spiders don't do much of anything, to be honest. Perhaps a handful scurry a little faster.

It's a work in progress. ]

closed.

the gallows; athessa.

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https://youtu.be/l5xxcN8d2qA

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workshops; howard.

thank you for your patience

a haunting in high town; misadventure science trio

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plink

invites myself in here

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