faderift | closed.

There can be no mistaking Wysteria as unchanged from the chancy, feverish days she'd spent in the Gallows infirmary. Nevermind the significant shortening of her left arm, which is admittedly difficult to overlook given how it features in their present work. Consider instead the evidently prodigious volume of her yellow hair which has been cinched into a simple braid by one of the Gallows laundresses rather than in its typical upright twist! Or her very plain dress with its tragically diminished number of buttons! Or even the fact that she is wearing soft soled slippers rather than her (very sensible) floral stamped nug-hide boots with the ribbon lacings. These are all the truly dire alterations.

That's what she's decided in any case. The rest is clearly perfectly manageable. She is hardly the first young lady to have lost a limb, but there is nothing so dreadful as being poorly turned out. Which is why—

"I'm willing to risk it. The hook is the most important element of this in any case. I will truly die if I can't do up buttons."

Patience however has not been her forte. She is eager to don the array of straps and buckles, shrugging the whole spiderweb a little clumsily into place. Neither is Wysteria shy about offering Tony a few of the buckles to do. Fitting the cap over the blunted end of her arm is done herself, however. There is something incongruously dismissive verging on the impersonal about its management.

"Sure, that'll be what does it," Tony agrees. Between multiple kidnap attempts, any number of ill-advised experiments that have ended in toxic gas expulsions and/or flames, and a shard that ate her hand off, definitely plain buttonless fashions will mark the end of Wysteria Poppell.

He's moving to help, anyway, standing at a casual post by her side as he loops a leather strip up over her shoulder, tugs it secure but not tight, pulling at a few more buckles to check the fit. A glance slides down the length of her arm to peep the fit of the cap where she places it, then at her profile, then at his hands.

"I figure some kind of multi-tool extension should be doable, but not until you've had a minute to test what comes after the hook and clamp. We can prioritise the blast cannon if you prefer. Or the wasp gun. I'm saying we got options."

"There will have to be a knife," is agreement, a carrying forward of the proposal. "Otherwise Mister Ellis will never let me hear the end of it. He is always going on about how I should carry one in the field and is never satisfied by it being in my pack. I quite like the little umbrella you gave me for Satinalia last year. Maybe something like that where it could be built into and unfolded from the forearm. That would be very clever, and wouldn't require the constant winding or unwinding of the winch. —Not that I dislike the principle behind the idea."

With the limb more or less set in place, Wysteria leaves the various adjustment of the bulk of the straps to Tony so that she might instead snap the hooking mechanism open and closed a few times. Presently, she is pleased by the arrangement of metal and coils and the ratcheting and un-ratcheting conducted by the winch's little crank handle. Distantly, she is—

Well, it hardly matters. It has been shoved to the margins for a reason.

When his part's done, buckles buckled, loosened and tightened so that they won't need to be redone when she takes it off and on, Tony scoots a step aside to watch her handle the attachment, waiting to help with any sign of awkwardness or clumsiness that never actually comes. He scrubs the back of his head as she tests the winch, and that part he's pretty confident in, so he moves aside to go lean at the chair he was in to watch her figure out her way around it.

He should say something.

It's been actual weeks and he doesn't know if that means that something's gonna give and he might be moved to express some kind of sentiment, some unburdening thing, or if that means he's gotten into the pattern of just not.

Here, Tony opens his mouth and says, "How's the weight on that?" instead of anything else, but he does want to know, you know, the answer to that question.

Her hand doesn't pause. She has wound the winch all the way closed and is now after only a momentary pause unwinding it in the opposite direction toward opening it fully.

"It's fine," which means that it must be heavy or awkward or at least a little strange. But anything would be, wouldn't it? After weeks spent laid up in that silly little clinic sick bed, being poked and prodded by Riftwatch healers and de Foncé's Orlesian doctor.

"I will likely has to wear it for a little to be sure. It must be a little like breaking in new shoes. —Were you surprised?" She asks suddenly, attention rising from the making some minor adjustment. "About Brother Gideon. I suppose everyone must have been. But I must say, he seemed perfectly capable during the hours which I was in his charge."

The rise and fall of her eyebrows at him says, Ooo spooky.

His attention is where hers is, at first, gauging whether the length is problematically off, how easily it turns, and also, I mean, the aesthetic. The aesthetic's important. It could use work, and when can't it, as subject to alteration and update as any other component, but for a first try, it's not so bad, leather padded out not to bite over time, although there's gonna be some points of pressure, some chafing, just like new shoes—

Tony looks up to eyebrows, corner of his mouth ticking up. "Guess he must have done all his evil scheming off the clock," he says. "Nice of the universe to stack all the fun and games into the one month Mr. Ellis is on the other side of the continent. Bet he'll be thrilled."

He reaches across the table to pick up a sort of fine soldering tool, sets it down in front of her, a hand gesture that indicates go ahead, while he talks.

"Big swing, big miss. You know he tried to take us out, upstairs? Kinda nostalgic."

The soldering tool is accepted with only a very mild flicker of hesitation, her hand hovering briefly over it before fetching it up off the table. She has traditionally done very little of her own work, but— But she can see already a few little things which would benefit from adjustment now that the arm has been strapped to her and the crank tested, and so she sets to poking and prodding.

"No! Did he? How outrageous! Imagine if they hadn't caught up to him and he'd escaped off the island." Poor Mister Dickerson's face. "But I suppose all of this happening while Mister Ellis is away may be a point in both our favors, you know. He may be forced to admit how very self reliant we've become. Not that I suppose it was ever really in any doubt. And certainly not in your case.

"Was your golem able to help you escape?"

Tony emotes with his eyebrows, sort of a yeah, maybe, a flicker of doubt at Mr. Ellis arriving at that conclusion in particular. He watches her poke and prod, remembers the sensor-based prosthetic handle he'd made, what, a month before he went to sleep at the wrong time and woke up here? A piece of technology that could control a whole suit through the flexes of his palm. And that had been a fix until he could get the subdermal implants online.

"He's a robot," Tony says, "first of all, is Fred. And no, I got lucky, or he got sloppy, one of those. But probably Ambassador Rutyer woulda died if not for that one sweaty guy, so I guess Georgetown knew what he was doing."

And then, in a fair imitation of her own accent, "Terribly exciting."

"Oh, ha ha." Yes, Mister Stark, you're very funny. She continues to fiddle with various bits of bobs of the arm, pausing intermittently to test the weight of the crank. "You should consider calling Messere Edgard by his name, you know. Seeing as he saved you and Mister Rutyer from certain death."

This is clearly the most important part of this conversation.

"Messere Edgard," Tony echoes, emphasis his. "Sure. I guess if you weren't going full native before,"

and then the rest of the sentence happens, or rather, fails to. He kind of just shrugs, a blank where the subject of her non-existence shard lives now, and he dips his focus down to fidgety hands. A series of whims has seen him acquire a ring with a veined stone set in it, leading to him putting it on today, and he turns it around on his knuckle.

"Sounds like his most holy was just a solo lunatic, but who knows. I'd wanna believe the Chantry would do a better job."

She is not consumed with either the fiddling with the arm's (her arm, a very logical part of her supposes from what seems like a considerable distance of remove, so remote that in her mind the voice of it is rather small indeed) various mechanical parts or with this particular vein of gossip to a suitable degree that she would miss that strange lingering shape where other words might have been.

Wysteria Poppell, ladies and gentleman: built with ears tailor-made to detect pauses in conversation. How would she elbow her way into filling them otherwise?

Yes. Well.

"I'm sure they had no idea what his intentions were," she agrees. With a last modest adjustment, she offers the little soldering tool back to him. "Other people in the Gallows might suspect otherwise, but I would attribute that to unjust suspicion. For one, I can't imagine what the Chantry would even gain from having sent Brother Gideon with the intention to—well, whatever it was he intended to do. I don't suppose we discovered a manifesto or letters among his personal belongings."

(Did anyone rifle his pockets for a lore related loot drop?)

Edited (copy paste comedy of errors) 2022-01-16 01:23 (UTC)

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