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

fully entangled in cobwebs as i type this

[grindset]

It is very early, or very late, and Viktor is the kind of awake that persists without any sense of beginning or end. He has grudgingly taken rest on a little cot in the former Felandaris office (closeable doors being a valuable commodity in such times), but the last time he surrendered his iron grip on consciousness for long enough to count as sleep was over forty-eight hours ago now.

The so-called sun glasses, a pair of glass spheres enchanted to radiate the equivalent of daylight, have been in continuous use since the project began. Each being set in a heavily customized lantern case with adjustable apertures, one glass is acting as a lamp in the workroom here, while the other is similarly set up in the basement, where the Magrallen proper dwells in a state of active refurbishment. While it is more practical to assemble the machine in its entirety where it lies, the scientists at work can at least see to certain of its components up here, this space being much better suited to long hours of fiddly work—and without suffering through flickering firelight or the cold fluorescence of a glowstone. Miraculous as they are, however, the glasses are powerless against the dry and bleary strain of fatigue.

While Wysteria now abstains from furniture, Viktor stubbornly continues to occupy the stool at his workstation. He could be sitting in one of the armchairs someone dragged in here from elsewhere, but he's in as much pain sitting there as he is here, and here he feels more productive, so here he is. While Wysteria fusses with the crank, he is trying to thread a copper filament through a tiny hole. Wysteria clicks, and unclicks, clicks and unclicks and clicks and unclicks and clicks and unclicks and the wire bends against the casing for the third time and Viktor clenches his fist as hard as he can and sets his incisors edge to edge and then puts everything down very gently.

"Maybe," he says, "you should try something else."

[heirring]

"Nonsense. It will come loose," is so automatic a response that she has given it no thought whatsoever, her attention being faithfully applied to the arm's mechanism.

Click, UNCLICK. Click, UNCLICK; the back of her neck growing redder and more flush with each catch.

There is oil in the workroom. Fine tools for taking apart delicate parts of things. There is also, very near to hand, a ball peen hammer for striking the chisel she has been working with some minutes earlier.

Obviously her hand finds it way to this last implement first. She gives the crank a few encouraging taps—click, unclick—and a few more—CLICK. UNCLICK—and then with a decisive strike and a crunch of careful pieces, the whole mechanism is smashed in with a fit of furious impatience.

[grindset]

There are many such tools in this room. Viktor has a set right here, in fact, at rest in the fine leather case that was gifted to him last winter; Wysteria could ask to borrow any one of them at any time and most likely be obliged. Nonsense, she says instead, and resumes her infernal clicking with renewed vigour. The look he turns on her then is a profoundly shitty one—but he's turned just as she pulls the hammer in for her little taps, which seems enough like she's following his barely restrained advice to be a mollifying sight.

This is short-lived.

The sudden detonation of Wysteria's temper stuns him, bodily, cognitively. He can only stare. Something very small rattles, somewhere, then stops: the herald of a dreadful silence.

[heirring]

Later, she will regret it. Or maybe she regrets it now. Or maybe it is only fury and impatience, and the embarrassment of having both observed that has been the knot in her stomach and the thrumming of blood in her ear. But for a moment, she is quiet outside. Then at the behest of hating the absence of sound, Wysteria turns the hammer over, winds the line of fine cabling around the narrow head, and makes to rip the cable from between the now inoperable clamping end of her prosthetic.

The clamp is very tight. It is meant to be.

"Turn around," she snaps at him without actually looking in Viktor's direction, abandoning her grip. The twist of cable untwists. The hammer flops free of it with a clatter and Wysteria's hand goes promptly moves to yanking loose the ties on her sleeve and bodice's shoulder.

[grindset]

"You—"

They start speaking nearly at the same instant; Wysteria's snarl wins out. Viktor finishes with a glower, and turns his shoulder to her obligingly, but not before glimpsing the first brusque snatch of fingers, and not without picking up his answer approximately where it was cut off:

"That was completely unnecessary. I'm right here." She doesn't see him flinging his hand, but it's in his voice.

This has not been a fruitful day for him. At one time he might have cut his losses for the night (or morning), or at least gone through the motions of it, but there's no getting away from this project. Empty rooms, interrupted habits, silent crystals—it's in everything. He's working on this tiny fragment of a fragment because he's been bashing his brain against the runic system for days with fuck all to show for it, desperately needs to accomplish something, and his hands are so unsteady he can't even feed a wire through a hole—

No, defeatist thoughts won't help. Off the momentum of his own exasperated gesture, Viktor snatches up the wire and some snips and clips off the last cursed inch of it.

[heirring]

"Because you have been so free with your help," is snipped briskly back.

Lacings come unlaced. The untethered sleeve is thrust down the length of the prosthetic arm, across its smashed crank and onto the line tangled in the mechanism's hook like a bit of laundry hung to dry on a line. Wysteria undoes the shoulder ties of her bodice as well, squirming to extract her whole arm from its half of her overdress.

(It isn't so late. She might take the ferry across to Kirkwall, and run up to Hightown and so fetch the finer prosthetic kept in its box to replace this more economical model with. If she hurries, she might catch the ferry yet. She needs only to shrug free of this tangle first. That is the only reason for urgency; not simply because the whole arrangement is somehow unbearable.)

[grindset]

"You could ask."

It comes out in prickly disapproval, as though he himself has never stubbornly steered away from anyone's assistance. It should be immediately relatable to him, how difficult it is to swallow one's pride when the thing in question is something that ought to be very easy to achieve, such as threading a copper filament through a tiny hole.

Instead, while straightening this renewed length of wire, he mutters,

"Not that you would."