faderift | war table: one giant leap.

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS;

There's a lot of time dedicated, on Tony's end, to only moderately inexplicable things. It could be worse.

He'd started with setting up the brass tuning rods, delicate tripods of bright metal engraved in runes it's not possible for him to have placed there himself, placed in a wide semi-circle around the rift. "Hey," at some point, to someone across the way who happens to be standing nearby one, pointing. "Can you move that guy there, like, two inches left? No, my left."

And then for prolonged periods of time taking down readings from a handheld device that he instead has placed on the temple floor in front of him, while he sits criss-cross apple sauce and bent over loose pieces of parchment, writing some figures down.

He says, "Huh," and then takes a few of these pieces of paper and raises them above his head, blindly, while looking at something else. "I need, uh, a peer. For review." He wiggles the pages, as if to tempt anyone into taking them, although hopefully it is a scientist who does.

NUMBERS OF CRUNCHES;

It's late into this exercise that Tony wanders towards the Gate after having disappeared into the ruins a ways with a pocketful of beef jerky. He still has a shred of it in his hand, gnawing on a mouthful as he stops and simply looks at the big floating corrupted gash in the air. He's done a lot of measuring, conjecturing, analysing, but he hasn't really taken a second to just

look at the thing, at least not since they first landed. Now he does, squinting into that slice of churning void, and then he walks a few paces back. Squints closed one eye. Tips his head. Asks whoever,

"Does it look bigger now, to you?"

And then every hair on the back of his neck raises at the sound of a near-whispered, Tevene voice drifting too close to his ear, causing him to spin around fast.

Whoever turns out to be Ellis, who latches a hand onto Tony's elbow as he whirls. It's all instinct, though Ellis doesn't see anything in their immediate vicinity, he registers Tony's alarm and the hissing murmur, and both inspire an urge to do—

Something.

The sort of something that hasn't proven very useful thus far.

"Yes," is an answer to the earlier question, perfunctory, before, "You hear that?"

Because Ellis is hearing far too much to trust his own assessments.

Tony's arm automatically lifts at the shoulder like the next move is to haul away from the grip at his elbow, but stops before he does. Looks at Ellis, then to the side, quasi-spooked but more intent on finding out what the hell rather than flinching away from it. "Yep," he says. Voice automatically quieter. "Right behind me."

Or at least, it was. He inspects that spot, where there is nothing. "Different to the normal bullshit," he says, and then is immediately unsure if that's true. Crossroads bullshit is varied and numerous.

A similar thought seems to have occurred to Ellis in the exact same moment Tony speaks.

But Ellis has walked through the Crossroads before, and it has never hissed at them quite this way. (And it has never drummed the Calling up, pounding behind his eyes.) These whispers feel less incidental, more deliberate. Pointed.

His fingers maintain their hold, even though there is not...

"There's nothing there," Ellis says, flat and apprehensive. "There usually is."

Eventually, at least.

Just getting to the island where the Gate is waiting for them is studious, nervy work that entails a great deal of watching one's feet to make sure neither wanders off narrow crumbling bridges or dizzying stairwells. And it's hardly as if there's any shortage of things to poke and prod and look at once more or less secure among the crumbling ruins. One might be forgiven for overlooking certain discrepancies until this point; maybe she's spent much of the expedition standing beside the Wardens. Wysteria herself certainly hasn't noticed the drab, unaltered quality of her person compared to the other Rifters of their party gleaming away in the crossroads.

One handed, she hefts the brass tripod up and over to the left. —And then, no, to the other left.

"Once this is all arranged, I'm going to take one of the Wardens into the ruins with me. I would like to map them and see if there's any pattern to how they've been altered by the Gate. Here?"

She flicks a little bead of rubble out of the way and reorients the tuning rod by a half degree to avoid some slant in the floor.

Tony raises the thaumoscope, making the by now familiar motions of resetting it as the runic engravings emanate faint light. Wholly consumed in distraction for the moment while he makes sure everything calibrates like its meant to. He says, "Good call," on her intentions, and squints over at the placement of the rod.

And then at her, and the thaumoscope tick-tick-ticks in his hand, ignored. He'd been wearing a pair of wholly unenchanted sunglasses to combat the headache inducing Crossroads light, and now he tips them down further on his nose to evaluate her.

"We have this thing," he says, after a beat, "on my home planet called movies. Think of, like, thousands of individual images that capture the motion of a—we've gone over this, you know, like a zoetrope. Anyway, there was this one called The Wizard of Oz," and by now he does occupy himself back with his task, moving aside to adjust one of the rods, holding up the thaumoscope towards the churning, corrupted rift, "mega popular, and it's kind of this fairytale about this girl, Dorothy, who's from Kansas, and winds up in the magical land of Oz, and spends the whole time trying to get home again. To emphasise its, you know, magicality, the scenes in Kansas are shot in black and white and grey, and the scenes in Oz are in bright colours."

He gestures at her with the thaumoscope as he says, "So now you have the full context when I say—no place like home, Dorothy?"

The task of anchoring the carefully balanced tripod consumes a great deal of this explanation. She extends and locks into place the stabilizing feet from the foot of each leg with a soft serious of clicks and clacks, head cocked halfway toward Tony as he prattles on about Oz and fairytale princess and so on. It's only during this last bit that Wysteria has fully straightened from the task so she might squint at him and the sunglasses perched at the very tip of his nose without interruption.

She bats some measure of invisible or non-existent Crossroads dust from her skirts.

"Pardon?"

war table: one giant leap.

tony. ota.

crunches

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crunching

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