open.

[propulsion]

WHO: Tony Stark, Loxley, Marcus Rowntree, and your fine selves.
WHAT: Tony works a forge, Marcus trains, and Loxley invents sunbathing.
WHEN: Covers off Solace.
WHERE: Around and about.
NOTES: Probably just a couple replies per prompt would make my life easier. Select the man of your choosing. Feel free to convert to action spam style tagging, I don't mind nor care. If there is something specific you want to do, let's wait a week, big AC-related wink, or hit me up in inboxes!

tony stark;

Clang. Clang. Clang.

These are the familiar sounds coming from the smithy, where it is almost unbearably hot. The air tastes of smoke and metal, thick with the occasional cloud of steam. The forge is burning with colours of bright white and yellow rather than gold at what Tony approximates to be probably 2800 F, maybe hotter. It's at his back with his attention paid forwards at the anvil, on which he rests a glowing-hot length of metal held secure in tongs in one gloved hand. The other hand wields a hammer, bringing it down onto soft metal with almost trance-like consistency. Embers spark and catch on his wrists, his arms, but only occasionally.

He almost looks the part. A coarse leather apron drapes down from his waist, and he's wearing a sleeveless jerkin of similar material, keeping arms exposed to the warm, fire-flecked air. The stand out difference would be the goggles he has fashioned himself at some point -- round, tinted lenses, secured with a strap. He flips whatever he's making around as the heat begins to leech from the iron, and Tony Stark resumes his meditative assault of hammer falling upon metal. He's been doing this for a while, now, arms soot-streaked and slick with exertion, muscles tense even where he grips firm the tongs, from wrist to shoulder.

As the iron turns from bright white to fading orange, he turns to shove the potential sword back into the furnace, and, pulling off his goggles, brings his forearm up to wipe his brow. Not necessarily in slow motion.

marcus rowntree;

It's getting late into the morning, the sun creeping towards one of its rare clear sky zeniths. Marcus Rowntree has the space mostly to himself, so it would seem, and who can blame anyone. It is hot as shite. But he has used this excuse all week not to do much of anything, and so he has summoned himself out into the training courtyard to roll through the motions of combat. Exercises, mainly, a collection of stances through which he moves his heavy, bladed staff through the air in swoops that are both powerful but controlled. Restraining the easy urge to let gravity and momentum wrest precision from him.

It's nothing they taught in the Circles. In his Circle, anyway. He came to all of this quite late.

Anyway he is also shirtless.

And when he is done, blade hitting the ground in front of him with a flicker of fire scorching the earth, he is breathing harder than he had been before, and drops the staff into the dirt beside him, runic incisions on the metal flashing hellfire orange for a moment before dimming. He is already walking directly to the barrel of water left out for this purpose, and at first, hovers his hands over it. A glimmer of blue light dances off the murky surface, cooling the water within just a little. Marcus picks up a bucket, matter of factly submerges it into the water, and brings it back up, full, to tip over his head, flicking wet hair out of his face as he does so.

loxley;

But all of that sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?

Loxley is opting for leisure, when he can find it, and with a natural resistance to fire, has never feared the potentially damaging effects of prolonged exposure to the sun. Back in Tassia, when his hue was a bronzed-gold, he tended to darken up quite handsomely, and he's noticed, now, the qunari grey actually has some pleasing undertones of silver when it's in a certain light. So he is reaping the benefits on a lovely afternoon, having found an area of the island coast unbothered by deckhands and ferries and the like, and, after laying out a woolen cloak he has brought along for this sole purpose, lies upon it like a lizard beneath the open sky to sun himself. Quite a few pieces of clothes have been set aside, his weaponry resting atop of it, down to just a light pair of shorts and some dark-lensed glasses that the Research academics had been developing some months ago.

He is on his belly for a while, and you'd be forgiven to think that he might just be fully asleep, until he rolls his lazy way to lie on his back, positioning an arm under his head.

Comments

[ipseite]

Oh—of course—

( a little gingerly, in taking it, but it's hardly the first time she's handled a weapon for one reason or another. (rarely the intended purpose thereof.) she gets a better grip, then, so that she's holding it steady by the time marcus lets go—

they are so unique, each mage's staff. she studies it, now that it's in her hands. )

I used to enchant swords, ( she says, her fingers light over the runes. ) To burst into flame when wielded a particular way.

[luaithre]

[ The runes do not activate under her touch, although perhaps she has talent enough that she could, and bring about the unearthly red glow she's seen them take. Even minimal study will indicate they are there for augmentation, with an additional minor enchantment to warm up the immediate vicinity with a thought. Nothing they would be good for, right this moment.

Marcus steps back, and now sets about tugging his shirt on, pulling the collar down around his neck. ]

That's a talent I wouldn't mind learning, [ he says. ] But I was a poor student, when I was one. This, [ and he nods to the weapon, slow to take it back from here as he refastens his sleeves ] was gifted to me.

Is that a skill you've carried into Thedas?

[ipseite]

Mm, in part. ( as a gift, the staff is yet more interesting; gifted in its entirety, enchantments and all? and from who? ) I boasted more permanence than I have yet achieved here, though my research has indicated that if I pursue the working of refined lyrium I may have more success.

At the beginning they were all temporary, of course.

( but in popular memory, they were all one; l'duc and his flaming sword, not swords. alight in imagination.

there are lessons to take from that, more than just the object lessons of her husband. )

[luaithre]

I believe glyph-work is close to enchantment. I've only a little practice in that area, myself. I'm sure there're good books about it.

[ Ones that probably Julius has read, if not Petrana herself. Marcus then reaches out for the staff back, as oddly amusing, or pleasing?, as it was to behold her holding steady a thing made of heavy oak, sharp steel. ]

What business in Hightown?

[ipseite]

The more pressing kind that leaves my enchantment work somewhat more in the vein of hobbyist, ( is wry, and presumably a lead-in rather than the whole of the answer.

for him, at any rate. there are probably people she might enlist to assist her and not, necessarily, feel obliged to explain herself further. that there is work in need of doing often seems to her like it ought to be enough, when they are all ostensibly working to the same ends.

ostensibly. nothing is ever so simple, even the business of saving the world. it has always begged the question of what manner of world. )

I mean to tease out some information—I am owed a favor or two that might be resolved thus, and with any luck shall be worth spending.

[luaithre]

[ He is listening for a task, which she may glean only once she's finished in her short explanation and a task is not readily apparent, but no matter; they have occupied each others time for less, although Vysvolod would disagree.

He nods to her. ]

I'll make myself presentable.

[ And not half-soaking wet, and half covered in training yard dust. ]

[ipseite]

( vysvolod is, in fact, substantially more. if one were to ask vysvolod. but in his absence, )

I shall meet you at the dock, then—

( the brief press of her hand to his is perfectly polite. )

Thank you. I dislike visiting Hightown unaccompanied; I find it leads to assumptions.

( like 'what can be got away with', namely. )