faderift | closed.

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.

closed.

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https://youtu.be/l5xxcN8d2qA

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