closed.

[propulsion]

WHO: Tony Stark and VIPs only.
WHAT: A diverse array of socialising.
WHEN: Throughout Firstfall.
WHERE: Many places!
NOTES: This is a catch-all of pre-planned-ish threads. Happy to create starters if you want to do a thing, and feel free to turn any of these into action spam if your brain prefers it. Warnings for casual drug use, I guess!

Comments

a haunting in high town; misadventure science trio

[heirring]

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?"

[propulsion]

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?"

[heorte]

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.

plink

[heirring]

"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."