WHO: Tony Stark, Joselyn Smythe, Richard Dickerson, Wysteria Poppell, Vanadi de Vadarta WHAT: A group of nerds and one cool elf investigate some strange reports coming out of a Free Marches village. WHEN: Second week of August. WHERE: Free Marches NOTES: TBA.
Tony had slowed and come to a stop, discarding some line about going for some unagi later as he eyeballs Vanadi, and then looks at the stream, and the odd quality it has with a school of eels wending through beneath the ripples. 'Don't like that', he says, and then moves on forwards.
Eels with people eyes isn't his area. His area is sometimes taking out a little obscure device he's explained minimally and taking down the numbers it reads out from its dials, or, more accurately, expecting Wysteria to take down the numbers he reads out from the dials. But he is given to moments of recklessly leading the way, and so.
He takes a very thought out jump onto the nearest rock to get closer to where they're all schooling. The floor is lava. Or eels.
From where she is arranging a place for the jar of potentially toxic fungi in the little folding traveling case, Wysteria pauses to follow the arc of Tony's hop out onto the flat slab of rock in the stream. Vanadi had seemed more than deft about navigating the space, but she has seen enough of Mr. Stark in the field to consider the possibility of him slipping on a wet rock and into a school of poisonous blood sucking eels.
(Or maybe she's just seen enough of Mr. Stark in generalv that the possibility occurs to her at all and registers as some small measure of concern regardless of how graceful he is or isn't. Who can say.)
"What does an eel's eye usually look like?" is asked generally, or to Richard who is evidently a regional-zoologist-slash-chef as she packs the jar away and snaps shut the case.
“Almost comically false-looking, usually, like doll eyes,” Joselyn contributes, because she's been here this whole time just go with it, “white or clear around and a very strong black pupil. How hard do you think you'd have to hit an eel to knock it out?”
That is the sound of someone with a staff who is thinking about how she could get an eel's humanoid eye in a jar.
As curious a man as Richard is, there is a reserve to his interest that catches on Vanadi looking warily back at him. He was absolutely going to ask. Now, with both hands wrapped idle around his journal and his brows at an uneven slant, he proceeds to calculate against Vanadi’s calculation -- if he does ask, can he do so in such a way --
Tony jumps.
In the earliest stages of opening his mouth, Richard closes it again, waiting to see if anyone else seems alarmed. They don’t. The Research and Scouting divisions have very different energies.
“They’re fish,” he agrees, late. “They should have eyes like a fish.
“With gloves it might be easier to flip one out of the water.” He’s tucking his journal away into his pack as he says so, precluding accusations of spectating over offering his assistance. "Stabbing it in the brain would be ensure its cooperation."
Oh, great, they're all interested, just as he'd hoped they wouldn't be. Some things really are better left to their strange devices. Not one to discourage, though, Vanadi only stays well back from the water's edge to watch Tony at it.
"Should," he agrees. "I wonder if they've humanoid teeth. I can't decide if that would be more or less painful than their usual assortment."
Tony has by now taken a knee on damp rock, and is tugging a glove onto his left hand. His other hand is differently dressed, with a bracer-type piece buckled to his wrist, extending its support to the back of his hand which wraps around and tethers some configuration of fine metal against his palm through which his anchor shard glows.
As they speak, he takes out from a pocket a glittering disc of something crystal -- in fact, he takes a couple of them out, inspects one, puts the other back -- and twists it into place over his palm. All the while, he mainly has his eyes on swimming black tubes. If their eyes are strange, it's hard to tell without a closer look.
"I mean we could just ask it nicely," Tony says, on the back of brain stabbing as soliciting inspection. "Not everything needs to be solved with violence."
Which is when he extends his hand, palm flat and fingers splayed, and fires a wall of rippling green light directly into the river. At first, it seems more dramatic than it is, as a fine mist of water immediately erupts from the surface, an impact splash rippling out in a wide circle, but the shock of Fade energy isn't so powerful as to blow eels out of the water. Instead, while many eels writhe away, another many go still in the water, twitching.
Tony then reaches in with his gloved hand to grab one by the tail and flip it out onto the shore. He goes, 'yaaaagh' when he does it, as the eel seems to immediately begin squirming again. Pap. The dense-bodied fish lands roughly at Richard and Joselyn's feet.
A second one follows with a wild fling, hitting the dirt, almost bouncing in its thrashing.
They both have beautiful eyes. One, a clear blue. The other, hazel-brown.
At the sight of what Tony can produce with his anchor-shard, Joselyn looks thoughtfully at her own,
and then sets that aside. Probably pursuing anchor-shard magic would be just as complicated for her religious convictions as any other sort of magic, and ergo is not to be pursued in front of anyone else. (Or at all. Or just, with witnesses to her interest.) But the eels are more immediately pressing, and she looks briefly to Richard with a sort of well, that worked expression before casting her eye back down, thoughtfully,
“There's only one way to find out about the teeth. I think it's better to keep the entire head, though, else it's going to look like we visited a village in need of help and nicked some of their eyeballs.”
She is still not going to ask the eel nicely. The blue-eyed eel gets the butt of her staff, hard, where its head connects to the rest of its body because she isn't testing the teeth thing before she's done that.
No, sorry, that's not the sound of Joselyn's staff crunching through an eel's neck (that's really more of a wet thunk); it's Wysteria snapping a few extraneous twigs from the dry stick she's fetched up on out the grass. She passes the pared down thumb wide fork of it to Richard she moment she's within range to do so, which is very quickly.
"Here you are, Mr. Dickerson. As you are the expert, you must hold the other one," which is flopping around, oil black body becoming crusted with dirt as it squirms uselessly on the creek bank. "So we can get a better look at it. —Mr. de Vadarta, here. Would you like to see it up close?"
Tony fires a wall of fade green light into the river, and Richard flinches ramrod straight away from his pack, transfixed after the fashion of a dog whose owner has just vanished behind a dropped blanket: tiny mind blown, no existing frame of reference to explain -- thump, an eel lands at his feet. Thunk. Crack. He looks to Wysteria at the sound of her footsteps, his eyes bright, energized at the prospect of incoming explanation --
She pushes a stick into his hands.
He holds it.
It takes him a beat to process that it is for a task. Once he has, he steps over to press his boot over the conscious eel’s flapping tail, and pins the head down with the fork of his stick, just behind the gill plate. It continues to struggle, slime clotted with dirt in the trench of its suffering. Richard ignores it.
“Was that magic or some other type of ability?”
He asks quietly, because they are supposed to be studying eel peepers, and not each other.
She answers in the dramatic sense of sotto voce, which is to say the sort of whispering fit to be heard clear to the back of a large auditorium.
"It's a variation on how the anchor typically interacts with the Veil. So in some sense, yes. I suppose that it is magic of a kind." —and may or may not refer to a certain long standing argument with respect to the technical jargon they are or are not choosing to use in order to reference power drawn from or in relation to the Fade.
(Fade-iation is a stupid name and she stands by it.)
Well, and Tony can do that. That's good to know. Vanadi watches all of this from the dubious safety of several feet back, tense and wary. Maybe there's no need to be. Maybe they're just eels with strange eyes. But Vanadi isn't fond of taking chances ... until Wysteria very kindly reminds him that it's his job on this outing to do just that.
He nears with a deep sigh, like a man off to the gallows; at least he's got poor Mr. Dickerson between himself and the creature.
"And it's safe to assume, I hope, this isn't simply an unsettling trait of the eels in this world?"
Having come prepared with numerous specimen jars, each individually held within leather bags for safe-keeping and to keep them from jostling and jangling as she moves, Joselyn is kneeling down at the struggling eel and its possibly-more-fortunate-actually kin to purpose. The staff that she has, to date, never once used for any magical purpose is serving now as a leaning post while she rifles in her satchel for the largest of the jars,
which would by no means contain the entirety of either eel, so this is probably about to get worse. Or better, for people who really don't want the eels to be alive so close to them. In a way, actually, Joselyn is really helpful.
“No, this is unusual for an eel.” Prising its jaws open to get a better look at the mouth— “Who's got the biggest knife?”
Hers might not quite do it. Still, she's game to try.
"I prefer 'Fade energy'," Tony is saying. He lines up his jump, swings his arms, and hyup, lands with two feet hitting the river bank at the same time in a neat hop. He roams nearer to the group, not paying an incredible amount of attention to the catch of the day just yet. "To magic. 'Fade-iation'? Is something we're throwing around. And this little accessory can attenuate or focus the output for attack blasts. Hey, I'll hook you up if you get hand lasers too."
The back of his hand bounces a friendly swat off Richard's shoulder as he says so, an easy transition into salesmen while some dorks look at fish. And Vanadi is a here too.
As Joselyn pries into the dead eel's mouth, the jaws give a little resistance from seized muscles, but it's relatively easy to overpower. There, a row of little needle-like teeth as she would expect to find in such a creature gleam back at her. As the jaw cracks open a little wider, she glimpses something else. Inside the mouth itself, and protruding from roof of it inside, is a neat semi-circle of bony protrusions. A second set of teeth, blunt, recognisably humanoid, grow out from within. On the lower, there is a strange fatty, musly swelling between its lower sets of teeth. She would be forgiven for imagining it to be an emerging human tongue, if not all the way grown freed.
The still alive eel continues to thrash. The human eyes in its head roll around.
The stream continues to flow, but perhaps Vanadi has the better vantage point to see some disruption beginning to occur. Almost as if it were following Tony's muddy tracks, an eel suddenly slithers out onto the bank, snapping at the air. And a second. And a third.
He misses the teeth; he'd never dream of getting close enough to confirm an idle speculation. He misses the teeth, he misses what might one day have been a tongue, but he doesn't miss that flutter of motion near the river. His paranoia would never allow it.
He's stepping forward quickly, drawing his rapier with a rasp of metal. They're just eels and this is ridiculous, what is he going to do, make a fresh fish meal of them? -- and yet here he is.
"Tony," comes his word of tight warning, eyes on the slithering bodies. "All of you, keep back from the water."
Richard’s shoulder jolts with the swat; he’s been bumped by social adepts before, but still hoods his brow, looking again to Wysteria for a vibe check. She is busy with the teeth and eyes eel. So is Joselyn.
“Is it common for rifters to develop ‘laser hands?’”
He has a dagger at his hip, but reaches back to draw a larger one from the small of his back, beneath the tail of his coat. It’s long and mean enough to stake a man diaphragm to heart, unadorned save for the smooth-worn trace of a serpent stamped into the leather wrap of the grip. The edge is sharp.
He offers it down to Joselyn as the first of the eels lunges ashore, expression unchanged from his initial assessment of Tony Stark’s offer.
"Oh quite common. Well, relatively common. Not just for Rifters, of course. I believe it to be a mutation significant to the anchor itself rather than to the body it's attached to, so anyone with—"
She is quite capable of chattering along while hovering over Joselyn in an attempt to squint down an eel gullet. And to be fair, it's hardly as if she stops as Vanadi draws his sword in reply to the wet slap of the eels making their evolutionary jump from fully aquatic creatures. She simply changes subject.
Some urgent multitasking happens very quickly, and while it's actually sort of impressive that Joselyn doesn't accidentally fling Richard's knife into the river out of surprise she'd also sort of rather him not notice that, since it was closer than she'd like and he might want his knife back. (He'll get it back, it's fine, but she's doing things right now—)
Mostly, what she's doing is trying to gather up the two eels that they'd done in already in a sort of skewer formation like the worst snack they're definitely not going to eat while scrambling backwards from the oncoming,
“Then we can probably give these a new venery term,” she says, using her staff to push herself back to her feet, eels wiggling from Richard's knife, “I propose we're looking at a fuck off from this river of eels.”
Tony swivels around and backs up as soon as Vanadi calls out, and on reflex raises his shard-embedded hand up for just in casesies, but his expression skews more interested than disturbed.
The eels leading the charge, as it were, muscle and slither their way towards where Joselyn is skewering their friends, snapping, too-human eyes rolling. (At least one of them that catches attention seems to have two tails, split at the centre, which doesn't seem to benefit its ability to slither whatsoever, thrashing a little pointlessly.) More and more follow, swelling from the edges of the river. They move in concert, twisting around each other like tangling snakes, coming together into a while.
It even lifts up in the air by about a foot, like a big tentacle of writhing eel bodies, straining forward.
Tony is not calling a retreat so much as trusting everyone to mind their business, stepping around a little as he says, "Watch yourself, Smythe," as he squints at what is happening, hand still poised.
Mind her own business she does. With certain specimens skewered and everyone looking at the prospect of a tactical withdrawal from the riverbank, Wysteria fetches up her skirts in one fist, chirping "Mr. de Vadarta, if you please," in reference to the gentleman's ready sword, and then dives into the gap between their little coalition and the encroaching, roiling mass of eels.
She has a traveling kit to rescue, and makes about doing that with as much confidence as one might muster when one is acclimated to being rescued or otherwise miraculous preserved in otherwise threatening situations. Maybe Vanadi has to chop a few eels; maybe she just snags the kit by the handle and, squawking at a too-close snap of eel jaws, manages to skitter back to safety. Regardless: things saved, time to go.
This ranks pretty high into extremely gross things Vanadi has had to witness, and now seems like a really great time for some kind of hands-off blast of magic at the whole writing mass of them -- particularly when one snaps a little too closely to Wysteria. His sword's not quite close enough to do the job, so it's a quick bolt of black, crackling energy from his palm that sends the thing flying away instead. The next few get chopped, which is, as predicted, very gross.
But the bag and both persons are safely extracted, Vanadi lingering just enough to make sure any other snapping jaws might pick his retreating ankles over Wysteria's.
"No one else has left anything they're very attached to, have they? I'm entirely in favor of moving on."
With the eels successfully skewered, if any of them turn around to retreat in earnest, it will be to see Richard Dickerson standing and looking back at them from some 60 feet up the bank, well away from the river’s edge already. There are a few loose pebbles still rolling down through dirt and rock, marking the path he scarpered up and away.
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faderift2020-08-04 09:35 pm
no subject
Tony had slowed and come to a stop, discarding some line about going for some unagi later as he eyeballs Vanadi, and then looks at the stream, and the odd quality it has with a school of eels wending through beneath the ripples. 'Don't like that', he says, and then moves on forwards.
Eels with people eyes isn't his area. His area is sometimes taking out a little obscure device he's explained minimally and taking down the numbers it reads out from its dials, or, more accurately, expecting Wysteria to take down the numbers he reads out from the dials. But he is given to moments of recklessly leading the way, and so.
He takes a very thought out jump onto the nearest rock to get closer to where they're all schooling. The floor is lava. Or eels.
no subject
(Or maybe she's just seen enough of Mr. Stark in generalv that the possibility occurs to her at all and registers as some small measure of concern regardless of how graceful he is or isn't. Who can say.)
"What does an eel's eye usually look like?" is asked generally, or to Richard who is evidently a regional-zoologist-slash-chef as she packs the jar away and snaps shut the case.
no subject
That is the sound of someone with a staff who is thinking about how she could get an eel's humanoid eye in a jar.
no subject
Tony jumps.
In the earliest stages of opening his mouth, Richard closes it again, waiting to see if anyone else seems alarmed. They don’t. The Research and Scouting divisions have very different energies.
“They’re fish,” he agrees, late. “They should have eyes like a fish.
“With gloves it might be easier to flip one out of the water.” He’s tucking his journal away into his pack as he says so, precluding accusations of spectating over offering his assistance. "Stabbing it in the brain would be ensure its cooperation."
no subject
"Should," he agrees. "I wonder if they've humanoid teeth. I can't decide if that would be more or less painful than their usual assortment."
no subject
As they speak, he takes out from a pocket a glittering disc of something crystal -- in fact, he takes a couple of them out, inspects one, puts the other back -- and twists it into place over his palm. All the while, he mainly has his eyes on swimming black tubes. If their eyes are strange, it's hard to tell without a closer look.
"I mean we could just ask it nicely," Tony says, on the back of brain stabbing as soliciting inspection. "Not everything needs to be solved with violence."
Which is when he extends his hand, palm flat and fingers splayed, and fires a wall of rippling green light directly into the river. At first, it seems more dramatic than it is, as a fine mist of water immediately erupts from the surface, an impact splash rippling out in a wide circle, but the shock of Fade energy isn't so powerful as to blow eels out of the water. Instead, while many eels writhe away, another many go still in the water, twitching.
Tony then reaches in with his gloved hand to grab one by the tail and flip it out onto the shore. He goes, 'yaaaagh' when he does it, as the eel seems to immediately begin squirming again. Pap. The dense-bodied fish lands roughly at Richard and Joselyn's feet.
A second one follows with a wild fling, hitting the dirt, almost bouncing in its thrashing.
They both have beautiful eyes. One, a clear blue. The other, hazel-brown.
no subject
and then sets that aside. Probably pursuing anchor-shard magic would be just as complicated for her religious convictions as any other sort of magic, and ergo is not to be pursued in front of anyone else. (Or at all. Or just, with witnesses to her interest.) But the eels are more immediately pressing, and she looks briefly to Richard with a sort of well, that worked expression before casting her eye back down, thoughtfully,
“There's only one way to find out about the teeth. I think it's better to keep the entire head, though, else it's going to look like we visited a village in need of help and nicked some of their eyeballs.”
She is still not going to ask the eel nicely. The blue-eyed eel gets the butt of her staff, hard, where its head connects to the rest of its body because she isn't testing the teeth thing before she's done that.
no subject
No, sorry, that's not the sound of Joselyn's staff crunching through an eel's neck (that's really more of a wet thunk); it's Wysteria snapping a few extraneous twigs from the dry stick she's fetched up on out the grass. She passes the pared down thumb wide fork of it to Richard she moment she's within range to do so, which is very quickly.
"Here you are, Mr. Dickerson. As you are the expert, you must hold the other one," which is flopping around, oil black body becoming crusted with dirt as it squirms uselessly on the creek bank. "So we can get a better look at it. —Mr. de Vadarta, here. Would you like to see it up close?"
no subject
She pushes a stick into his hands.
He holds it.
It takes him a beat to process that it is for a task. Once he has, he steps over to press his boot over the conscious eel’s flapping tail, and pins the head down with the fork of his stick, just behind the gill plate. It continues to struggle, slime clotted with dirt in the trench of its suffering. Richard ignores it.
“Was that magic or some other type of ability?”
He asks quietly, because they are supposed to be studying eel peepers, and not each other.
no subject
"It's a variation on how the anchor typically interacts with the Veil. So in some sense, yes. I suppose that it is magic of a kind." —and may or may not refer to a certain long standing argument with respect to the technical jargon they are or are not choosing to use in order to reference power drawn from or in relation to the Fade.
(Fade-iation is a stupid name and she stands by it.)
"Oh, they are very human looking, aren't they?"
no subject
He nears with a deep sigh, like a man off to the gallows; at least he's got poor Mr. Dickerson between himself and the creature.
"And it's safe to assume, I hope, this isn't simply an unsettling trait of the eels in this world?"
no subject
which would by no means contain the entirety of either eel, so this is probably about to get worse. Or better, for people who really don't want the eels to be alive so close to them. In a way, actually, Joselyn is really helpful.
“No, this is unusual for an eel.” Prising its jaws open to get a better look at the mouth— “Who's got the biggest knife?”
Hers might not quite do it. Still, she's game to try.
no subject
The back of his hand bounces a friendly swat off Richard's shoulder as he says so, an easy transition into salesmen while some dorks look at fish. And Vanadi is a here too.
As Joselyn pries into the dead eel's mouth, the jaws give a little resistance from seized muscles, but it's relatively easy to overpower. There, a row of little needle-like teeth as she would expect to find in such a creature gleam back at her. As the jaw cracks open a little wider, she glimpses something else. Inside the mouth itself, and protruding from roof of it inside, is a neat semi-circle of bony protrusions. A second set of teeth, blunt, recognisably humanoid, grow out from within. On the lower, there is a strange fatty, musly swelling between its lower sets of teeth. She would be forgiven for imagining it to be an emerging human tongue, if not all the way grown freed.
The still alive eel continues to thrash. The human eyes in its head roll around.
The stream continues to flow, but perhaps Vanadi has the better vantage point to see some disruption beginning to occur. Almost as if it were following Tony's muddy tracks, an eel suddenly slithers out onto the bank, snapping at the air. And a second. And a third.
no subject
He's stepping forward quickly, drawing his rapier with a rasp of metal. They're just eels and this is ridiculous, what is he going to do, make a fresh fish meal of them? -- and yet here he is.
"Tony," comes his word of tight warning, eyes on the slithering bodies. "All of you, keep back from the water."
no subject
“Is it common for rifters to develop ‘laser hands?’”
He has a dagger at his hip, but reaches back to draw a larger one from the small of his back, beneath the tail of his coat. It’s long and mean enough to stake a man diaphragm to heart, unadorned save for the smooth-worn trace of a serpent stamped into the leather wrap of the grip. The edge is sharp.
He offers it down to Joselyn as the first of the eels lunges ashore, expression unchanged from his initial assessment of Tony Stark’s offer.
“Hm.” HM.
no subject
She is quite capable of chattering along while hovering over Joselyn in an attempt to squint down an eel gullet. And to be fair, it's hardly as if she stops as Vanadi draws his sword in reply to the wet slap of the eels making their evolutionary jump from fully aquatic creatures. She simply changes subject.
"Is this unusual for eels as well?"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER_RvM5WkAAGF3x.jpg
no subject
Mostly, what she's doing is trying to gather up the two eels that they'd done in already in a sort of skewer formation like the worst snack they're definitely not going to eat while scrambling backwards from the oncoming,
“Then we can probably give these a new venery term,” she says, using her staff to push herself back to her feet, eels wiggling from Richard's knife, “I propose we're looking at a fuck off from this river of eels.”
no subject
The eels leading the charge, as it were, muscle and slither their way towards where Joselyn is skewering their friends, snapping, too-human eyes rolling. (At least one of them that catches attention seems to have two tails, split at the centre, which doesn't seem to benefit its ability to slither whatsoever, thrashing a little pointlessly.) More and more follow, swelling from the edges of the river. They move in concert, twisting around each other like tangling snakes, coming together into a while.
It even lifts up in the air by about a foot, like a big tentacle of writhing eel bodies, straining forward.
Tony is not calling a retreat so much as trusting everyone to mind their business, stepping around a little as he says, "Watch yourself, Smythe," as he squints at what is happening, hand still poised.
softly punches my notifs
Mind her own business she does. With certain specimens skewered and everyone looking at the prospect of a tactical withdrawal from the riverbank, Wysteria fetches up her skirts in one fist, chirping "Mr. de Vadarta, if you please," in reference to the gentleman's ready sword, and then dives into the gap between their little coalition and the encroaching, roiling mass of eels.
She has a traveling kit to rescue, and makes about doing that with as much confidence as one might muster when one is acclimated to being rescued or otherwise miraculous preserved in otherwise threatening situations. Maybe Vanadi has to chop a few eels; maybe she just snags the kit by the handle and, squawking at a too-close snap of eel jaws, manages to skitter back to safety. Regardless: things saved, time to go.
no subject
But the bag and both persons are safely extracted, Vanadi lingering just enough to make sure any other snapping jaws might pick his retreating ankles over Wysteria's.
"No one else has left anything they're very attached to, have they? I'm entirely in favor of moving on."
no subject
At least he’s stopped to wait for them.