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

the gallows; athessa.

[propulsion]

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.

workshops; howard.

[propulsion]

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."

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?"

invites myself in here

[libratus]

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. ]