player plot: when my time comes around, pt. 2.5.

[propulsion]

WHO: Stephen Strange, Tony Stark, Viktor, Wysteria de Foncé, feat. James Flint, Yseult, and sundry!
WHAT: A sleepless month.
WHEN: First week of August
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Partially open! Within are some closed threads for time travel solutions and geniusing, but feel free to use this post as a catch all if you wish to RP about time travel and sciencing or talking to people about time travel and sciencing.

Something is happening!

And at first, who could possibly say what, with the research workrooms kept closed? But the sounds of other voices muffled on the other side can be picked up at just about any hour. Eventually, this becomes more erratic, but only because there is the sound of metal grinding, clanking, and quiet conversation drifting and pattering up through the lyrium-glowing stone passageways that funnel down into the basement of the Gallows.

Eventually, an announcement is made, and the cause for at least four of the Research division being utterly consumed by work becomes apparent. Do feel free to stop by, whether to register your disapproval, make sure they are eating, or to lavish upon them your tearful gratitude, but don't expect to stay too long regardless.

Comments

[grindset]

It's that same flicker, or the inveterate pursuit of it, that has drawn Viktor out among the others. Since the news dropped he's become increasingly reclusive, emerging only for biological necessity, those telltale taps few and far between. His workstation remains in stasis even now, hammer and rag lying just where he left them.

It is no exaggeration at all to say that hope has kept him moving his whole life. He's carried it, fed it, done his best to nurture it in others. But this, this void they're in, has proven so inhospitable to hope that for him its spark has simply failed to catch. His pilot light is as low as it's ever been—but the thinnest shell of flame is still a flame, so here he is, sitting in, like he said he would. In minimal concession to the meeting, he's on a stool near the door, still grimly leafing through whatever papers Stark would put in his hand when he arrived, which he did latest of all present. Between this and his silence, it may seem he hasn't really been paying attention. (And even by a metric adjusted to account for his frail health, it may be noted, he looks truly terrible.)

Strange isn't wrong; even in its diminished state, this is a strong team. The notes aren't exactly exhaustive, but he's worked with less, and the idea itself carries a Fuck It, We Ball calibre of ambition which appeals to him on a personal level.

Moreover, this concept isn't so far removed from the realm-warping operation he helped to pioneer—a comparable mechanism would have to be activated from the point of origin, which seems to have been the case previously—if only they had that amulet—

[heirring]

That Wysteria de Foncé would be to hand in this moment seems obvious. Nevermind her association with Tony, or the particulars of which members of Riftwatch had been laid in careful state in the infirmary and her relations to them, or her black mourning clothes (the dark clothes look very strange on her). The young lady has something of a nose for transgressive magiscience, and this promises to fit the bill. Presumably even without an invitation, she might have somehow sniffed them out.

Stood there at the edge of one of the workroom's tables, her station having exploded with papers and various bits and pieces seemingly in defiance to the absence of work being accomplished elsewhere in the room, Wysteria sets down her pencil. She has been taking notes on a folded sheaf of paper, having abandoned the pretense of keeping things in booklets.

"Perhaps," is not strictly tentative nor skeptical. From the slight frown she's adopted and the wrinkle pinching there between her eyebrows, she is thinking about something very hard indeed. "—Well," is a pivot. She's decided on something. "It's not entirely dissimilar from what occurred in the Crossroads last winter either, is it? Not in the sense that the places we went were entirely real, so to speak, but we've seen that there's a way for Rifters to influence how places adapt to, er, let us destabilizing forces. So we might have some natural advantage which could be levered. Hypothetically. In the right circumstances."

[propulsion]

Tony can be found sitting crosslegged on a section of table only partially cleared. Some pages are being rumpled under his left cheek.

There is an immediate and fierce gratitude for Strange picking up what he's putting down without as much question as he'd have a right to ask; Viktor's presence in the room is a positive enough sign that he doesn't feel the urge to needle the other man into responding; and so his focus angles off towards Wysteria in her black silks and ruffles.

A flip of his hand in her direction communicates: exactly.

"My gauntlet's a product of trying to work out how to get home," he adds. "I mean. Obviously that didn't work, because that's not how we work," you live and you learn and sometimes that learning is that you might be a Fade-construct of a person you remember being, no big deal, "but I've got some practice in harnessing Fadeiation into doing all different kinds of useful nonsense."

Temporal-shielding, gravitational manipulation, matter attentuation—why not time travel?

[portalling]

“Useful nonsense should be our tagline.” Then, more seriously: “Sometimes you have to break the rules for the greater good. And life has taught me that the rules of time and space are more malleable than not.”

And a lot of people would blanch at that prospect, but these four voices in this closed workroom… well, they’re exactly the sort of people to push the envelope, perhaps recklessly, perhaps too far, but that’s the energy they’re gonna need for an endeavour like this. Tony’s rattled off his Fadeiation credentials, and it’s already starting to ping some rusted muscle: brainstorming, pinging ideas off each other, the sense of a rolling boulder gathering speed.

All cards on the table. Strange spreads his hands flat against his desk. “As for me, I am, as Tony’s put it before, a literal time wizard. I don’t have the magical artifact I used to control the flow of time anymore, but I still taught myself how to use it in a record-short amount of time. With help to adapt the theory to the local equivalent, I’m sure we could put together something similar. I have first-hand experience in magically rewinding time, creating loops, looking into potential futures.”

Fourteen million of them, but who’s counting?

“So. That’s my resumé. What else do we have?”

He’s looking at Viktor and Wysteria both, now.

[grindset]

Viktor has since hooked a heel on the crossbar of the stool. He's done this to raise his knee, because he's also taken a writing tool from the adjacent desk and begun to apply it to the page open on his lap. As this impromptu CV exchange winds up to what sounds like an expectant pause, he glances up—barely—to confirm and then waves it off with a gesture, the pencil light between his fingers. Ignore him, it says, he isn't here.

Time loops—stabilizing the unstable—

[portalling]

Okay, hermit crab's not lured out of his shell just yet. That's alright; they'll keep talking around him, letting it percolate, dropping little kernels of mad science until it eventually draws him out in some shape or form.

Pivot. Strange's steady blue gaze shifts to Wysteria instead.

[heirring]

Who hems and haws a little under it, drumming her fingers absently on her packet.

"Oh, well," is a little uncharacteristically demurring when she does answer. "I've studied runic enchantments and the use of lyrium, and obviously have helped Provost Stark with his work on the Rifts and the Gates and so on.

"And—" A very brief hesitation, a number of years spent dodging around the topic among most of the company having become something of a well versed habit. But no time like the present (or the past, as it were). So: "And I do have some Talent, speaking in the arcane sense. I might be able to help you with your adaptation issues, Doctor. Come now, Viktor, you don't really mean to sit there in silence, do you?"

[propulsion]

"He's fine."

Fine is maybe not the word, but it's the one that comes out of his mouth. Too restless for quirky table-sitting, Tony levers himself off, landed two-boots down. "The problem," as if this is the only problem and not the whole damn rest of it, such as tampering with the timestream at all, so he amends this with, "the first problem, is generating the kind of power necessary to supercharge a rift into doing the job.

"But we've got a thing. The thing's a Magrallen, because—I don't know, ancient Tevinter was bad at naming stuff, but it'll give us the juice once we hammer it back into shape. We construct something capable of harnessing that power, containing and tampering with the rift. Like a door. Window. Some kind of gate, maybe."

Maybe Viktor can sense the very vivid experience of Tony Stark's full focus bearing down on him from where Tony has paused his wander about the room.

"Like a magitechnical gate of some kind."

[grindset]

He can sense it. And he is fine, sitting here in the silence of his figurative shell, thank you very much. He doesn't raise his head at first, because he's in the middle of something, and also because if he doesn't commit everyone looking at him to observable reality then that means it isn't happening. But he does answer,

"That would be the way to go about it." He's quiet. After a pause to clear his throat, so as to sound less like he's emerging from a crypt, he goes on.

"Every stage of this plan will be arduous, but the greatest challenge lies in directing the resultant tear in the Veil to a precise purpose. That and acquiring the fuel to achieve it," he grants, dry, with a tip of his head. Fortifying momentum achieved; now he does raise his eyes. "But, that fuel requirement can be mitigated. Triggering a destabilizing feedback cycle to amplify the Magrallen's power would be relatively easy."

''''easy''''

"With a stabilizing cycle to oppose it, the system should reach a controllable equilibrium. The trick will be creating a mechanism robust enough to withstand the massive energy output."

As an afterthought, off his own glance down, Viktor lifts the page he's been writing on (was this one important? oh well), briefly turns it around to show a glimpse of scrawled notation, including the roughest of circular diagrams—not the full solution, but a solid start to the hours upon hours of work unfurling before them.

Behold: his résumé.

[portalling]

While Tony paces the room, Strange has been squinting at Wysteria with an expression landing somewhere between aggrieved and just plain baffled — a memory ringing in his ears of her laughing, saying I’m neither, I’m merely an enthusiast,, and he wonders why in the world a rifter would bother to hide their arcane capabilities when they’re surrounded by other mages — but then Viktor emerges from his trance of concentration.

He’s too far off to the side. The sorcerer rises from his desk, moves closer to see the diagrams being flourished at them. This part’s all Greek to him, but it sounds— promising. Yes. Good.

“All three of you will be better at the Magrallen and the engineering part of it, I suspect,” he says. “But directing the tear in the Veil— I’m sure I could learn to do that. I’ve done something like that.” A glance over at Tony; he’ll remember. Doctor Strange’s jerking spasms, limned in eldritch light, flicking through timelines like the world’s fastest tickertape.

“If you all can generate and stabilise that energy, I can try to direct it and find the specific, precise timeline we need to reach.”

All of this is theoretical so far, but everything has to start as a theory, so —

[heirring]

Having gracefully ignored certain looks of bafflement laser focused in her direction, she drifts now in the direction of Viktor and his impromptu diagramming—

"The matter of generating power would seem to be an important question as well. Even with the anchors and lyrium work and, forgive me, whatever it is precisely that Doctor Strange might work out—I believe the Magrallen is powered by blood, isn't it? We can hardly afford to go sacrificing more members of Riftwatch to it"—sounds, alarmingly, more like a logistical quandary than an ethical one when she says it.

"Something will need to act as a substitute, yes? To activate the device once it's been modified. Or we'll need to alter it sufficiently to the point that it doesn't require that component."

[propulsion]

"I mean worse comes to worse, we'll be rebooting the universe," Tony says, with a crack of a smile that is more gallows humour than anything else, now resuming his wander upon Viktor speaking up, "but I figure mass sacrifice is a hard sell no matter how temporary the timestream."

A gesture. "Dragon's blood is more than a substitute and according to what I've read, we wouldn't even need a lot of it, not if we're talking about just activation. We destabilise, amplify," a nod to Viktor and his helpful diagrams, "and build something to channel and loop the overflow. We have a decent stock of material I don't mind completely burning through.

"It'll be fun," is just true, discounting the high stakes, the absence of reliable Grey Wardens to bring him coffee during the wee hours, and so on.

[grindset]

Viktor's impromptu diagramming, having been done with a blunt pencil, in a hurry, using his leg as a table, is nigh illegible—but then, most of the words are in Runeterran squiggles, so even under ideal conditions they might be less than ideal for this audience. On the other hand, the mathematical notation translates almost 1:1. Funny how that works.

First come first served: he offers up the page to Strange, for perusal or passing off. Meanwhile, being no longer in the middle of a thought, he now takes advantage of this tiny notes queue to have his turn at giving Wysteria a belated Look of his own. This one happens to favour aggrievement.

"The fuel collection team should still be encouraged to collect more than is needed," he says. "Best to assume this will take multiple attempts to succeed." And then, with barely any inflection, he confirms, "It will be fun."

[portalling]

Strange takes the papers as offered, meanders away to press them to the table and lean over and start trying to decipher that train of thought, that initial seed of an idea. He and Viktor have discussed their runic magic before and tried to conduct a sort of comparative etymology; enough that he recognises a few of the glyphs, where they’d tried to find the commonalities between their systems, a way to mesh them together.

Fun is an alien word these days, but he can still feel it: that kick of brutal satisfaction, building momentum, firing up the engine without guard-rails and without any of them looking at each other and asking are you insane. If anyone can do the impossible, surely it’s the four people in this room.

“That means we need to rope in Forces and Scouting and others,” he says. “People with muscles to go fight a dragon for us.”

Then again, other members of Riftwatch might be looking for somewhere to pour all their energy. Maybe they’re angry and grieving enough to go fight a dragon about it.

[heirring]

Don't you look aggrieved at her, Viktor. Some members of this division have refrained from disappearing behind their locked doors and have been stuck minding certain excesses of paperwork on account of it.

But there are more pressing things to squint at other than directly back at him, and so her attention reverts back to Tony. "We should also test to see whether lyrium has effect on the power generated by the anchor. Take it as a mage might," Ser Orlov had recommended. "We can open a Rift or two in the dungeons and close them right away as soon as we've takes measurements. That way if something were to begin to— fray, I suppose, when it comes to overtaxing the machine. We could be certain then of how far it might be pushed while retaining some stability of the Veil about it."