closed.

[propulsion]

WHO: Tony Stark and Joselyn Smythe
WHAT: Two nerds in a boat.
WHEN: Sometime in Haring.
WHERE: Kirkwall docks.
NOTES: n/a

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful..."

What should be a relatively popular time for the ferry at the Kirkwall docks is countered by the weather. The precipitation doesn't seem to know what it wants to be and comes down in sprays of icy water that form up into something that could flurry, but this doesn't deter Tony's choice of carol, muttered under his breath as he climbs aboard the boat.

It's an earworm and a classic, and he utters the next part as he unsteadily finds a place to sit; "But the fire is so delightful-- hey, how're you doing, 'scuse me-- and since we got no place to go, lllet it snow, let it snow, let it snow--"

Therein lies the problem when it comes to no-longer-so-ubiquitous catchy tunes: the absolute blankness of his memory where the next fifty verses would be, and an absence of google to help him out. Reduced to humming, he sits, one gloved hand gripping the edge of the boat as he pulls his coat tighter around him to best huddle beneath it. Above, the sky is grey marble and so turns the water around them into cement grey. Fog wraps around the shape of the Gallows in the distance, and muddies out the finer details of the buildings around them. It could be dawn, it could be sunfall, it could be noon. Who knows.

But it's cold and wet and gross, and Tony is impatient even before he's begun to wait -- never mind when the oarsman starts to load up the ferry with what appears to be an infinite flow of heavy luggage.

"You kidding me with this?" Tony asks. "Hey, hello, remind whoever we're flying coach? One bag, one personal item, no liquids, no animals."

Comments

[obdurata]

“My—”

There's a pause. Joselyn exhales through her nose, which is a sound mostly lost in the nightsounds, the water, the wind. The dull thuds of his fingers. After a moment, she turns her attention to the oarsman instead of watching Tony hold her box, because Branne's intense air of not giving a shit about either of them is somehow more immediately comforting.

If nothing else, it's more familiar.

“I don't do anything exciting with it,” she informs him, primly. “For religious reasons.”

[propulsion]

The boat rocks as it takes its first lurch out from the docks, smacks into rippled waves coming off a more distant, busier ocean and its currents, but it's mostly smooth going. For religious reasons, she says, and Tony doesn't

quite switch off, or anything, but the corner of his mouth twists up a little. Thedas has a whole other energy when it comes to the Bible thumpers, and there's probably a thesis waiting, there, for Rifters who write those. Something something the presence of magic and alternate planes of existence as a modifier against a society that hasn't gone through its moody Enlightenment phase just yet, or maybe the Maker is real, even.

But anyway. He's still in the habit of feeling a little cynical about that whole everything.

"Church-approved boring stuff only," he supplies. "Rabbits out of hats?"

[obdurata]

Leaving aside, for a moment, the logistical nightmare that is the prospect of bringing a rabbit out of a hat—is that blood magic? it feels like that should be blood magic, or at very least, possibly extremely bloody magic—Joselyn levels a look at him that she's forced to deliver directly by the limitations of her furred hood. He wouldn't see a sidelong look, no matter how intensely given.

“I could hit you with it,” she says, eventually, when she judges the weight of her silence sufficient. “There's a knife on the end that has done a respectable amount of damage mostly sparring.”

It had been more practical to use the knives she carries on her belt in those more pressing circumstances unavoidable to all mages who didn't run to ground during the war.