player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 3

[cozen]

WHO: Anyone who's not dead!
WHAT: Various & sundry steps on the path toward time travel, including a dragon hunt and other fetch quests.
WHEN: August 9:49
WHERE: Miscellaneous
NOTES: This is part of this player plot. We have two (2) plot logs still coming up—one for time travel, one for reunions—but this is the last log the dead characters are banned from. Time travel will go up soon!

Following Tony Stark's announcement and its glimmer of slightly insane-sounding hope, there's work to be done. The magic/science, of course; anyone with the ability to help construct a dragon-blood-powered time machine may be enlisted into that effort.

For everyone else, there are fetch quests: everyone collect three Stormheart and five Volcanic Aurum. Swiftly negotiating for raw materials or for jewelry or weapons that can be melted down—or stealing them, because whatever, there will only be consequences if this doesn't work—requires venturing out of Kirkwall to track down miners, merchants, and collectors. And then there's the dragon blood.

In the meantime, keeping things afloat and planning contingencies remains necessary. For now, this remains only something that might work. If it doesn't, this is still the world and the war they're stuck with, so keeping it from getting worse in any avoidable way would be ideal.

Comments

[propulsion]

A very specific set of mannerisms are liable to draw the eye even if you are not a person who has made a career out of noticing these things. Tony wanders through the door, stops there, looks around without much in the way of subtlety—

And flows off towards where the bar is being managed, sliding some coins across it and a gesture that indicates the table he is intending to occupy.

Of course it's Bastien's. There's plenty of time, in all of this, for him to scuttle sideways out the back, but maybe the food left in his bowl or the last few pages of his current chapter are compelling enough factors to hold him fast while Tony meanders to the table. Whatever the cause, Tony reaches out a hand to the chair back opposite him, a waggle of his fingers following,

"Mind if I join you?"

So there's another chance. Maybe. Tony's hand is already setting down where it's hovered.

[cozen]

The stew and the book are compelling. So is preserving his dignity. And so is satisfying the dull little ember of curiosity that's been reignited by time and fresh air and hours with only the dog and the horse and the emotional equivalent, out in Kaiten, of sticking his hand into a lightning glyph. There is no scuttling. He glances up from Lady Ashelineau a few times during Tony's journey through the room, to keep track of his progress, then raises his eyes and keeps them up when he arrives.

"No," has a drawl and rising inflection, fine with the joining but wary of what might come after it.

Not unfriendly, though. He retains some manners. He dog-ears his book and closes it to give Tony his attention. It would be too much attention, really, to openly give a friend in situations further removed from tragedy. But under these circumstances his quiet inspection of the details of Tony's face, like he might be ill, is maybe less unsettling? Or maybe not.

[propulsion]

The chair comes out, and he sits.

Tony on not a lot of sleep is very similar to a Tony who has gotten his full eight hours, at least in the first minute or so. Not so much because he is good at hiding it as he is good at being a weirdo all the time. Maybe Bastien can split the difference, maybe not, but there is something decidedly unsomber about the rap of fingers against the table.

"We have food at home, you know," he says, with a gesture to the bowl of stew as he sits back in his chair. "How're you doing?"

[cozen]

Bastien's eyes go from Tony's face (just short of completely inscrutable) to his fingers, then back up for raised eyebrows and an asymmetrical smile. "Really shitty," he says. The same tone and cadence he'd use for pretty good.

He stirs his stew, then drops the spoon without taking another bite after all.

"Same as everyone else, I'm sure," he adds. He's not special. He knows that. Everyone lost someone, more than one someone, and Tony—

Bastien really did read his biography. He knows what a Snap is and everything.

The smile drains away. "How are you?"

[propulsion]

Maybe if Tony had some other agenda on his mind, he'd say something like: it's okay, you can be King Sad if you want, I won't tell. He'd do it in such a delivery that it would be funnier than it is dickish, perfectly sincere and primed for commiseration. Maybe he wouldn't even be annoyed at Bastien for abandoning ship. Who wouldn't be tempted to do that, if they had a choice?

Instead, he says, "Pretty good," to get it out of the way, and then, "Holding up. We have a plan. You wanna hear it?"

A crack of a smile, as if anticipating the non and prepared to bulldoze over it in three, two—

[cozen]

The non comes silently, in the form of a further dulling of the eyes—the look of someone who has, say, had a very long day, and has just realized that the person who's paused to be kind to them about it is about to invite them to come to their church or sign up for their MLM.

Also silently, but less subtle, is the shrug. He reaches for what little is left of the watery ale he's been drinking with his stew and drains most of it with a swig.

"Sure," is weary, because he is not expecting what Tony is about to say. He's expecting something like: We're regrouping. We're getting revenge. We're going underground. We're taking the war to Corypheus. "But you are competing with the ghost of Lady Ashelineau's horrible vengeance on her mother-in-law," he adds, with a tap on his closed book for clarity, "so don't be boring."

[propulsion]

It's immediately annoying. Irritation is so quick and so strong that Tony is fast to abandon the set up, at least for now—

"What's your deal?" is not as irreverent sounding as it might have been, a flash of that irritation in the sharp pivot. The rest is, likewise, not as harsh in delivery as the words might imply. "We lose sixteen people and you decide what's one more? We need all the help we can get right about now."

[cozen]

If Benedict had tried that line a week ago, Bastien would have done the flippant thing and offered to have his replacement here by the end of the month—someone younger, faster, better connected. He could afford to supplement a Riftwatch salary to make it enough for at least a second-rate bard.

But he’s had some time. So he’s a touch abashed, more than dismissive, when he says, “I know,” before circling back to the first question with, “I don’t know.”

Extrospection is more his thing. But he makes an ineffectual stab at it.

“He was the only person who ever had any patience for me when I didn’t have my shit together. Which sounds pointed, right now, probably,” with Tony annoyed across the table, “but I don’t mean—we’re not that kind of friend. You’re exempt.” Although, “I tried to go see my parents,” borders on a that-kind-of-friend thing to tell a fellow, at least in the broader context of generally pretending to have sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Val Royeaux. “And I don’t know why. I don’t know what I thought would—“

Ineffectual, as promised. So he stops there, mid-predictable sentence, and gathers his shit back into a pile. As a gesture of goodwill he scoots the book a few inches further away.

“D’accord. Desolé. I will not be an asshole about your plan.”

[propulsion]

'Exempt' gets a brief tug of a smile, listing back into his chair as he listens to the rest. Tony is more given to analysis than visible sympathy, but these things aren't exclusive from one another so much as the arrangement of his face is better at showing the former.

It lowers some hackles enough for plan imparting, maybe, with the sigh-like exhale that follows, which is delayed when a server comes by with the bottle of ale he'd ordered, the cup that goes with it. Drums his fingers on the table edge before picking up the bottle by the neck, and pouring his helping.

"Holding you to that," he says. "Because it's gonna sound nuts."

Beer poured, bottle set aside, he takes up the cup. "We're gonna alter the timeline so that it never happened. Granitefell, everyone that died, all of it. With me?"

[cozen]

Bastien has promised not to be an asshole about the plan, and Bastien has more or less perfect control over his face when he wants it. So there is no outward evidence of the instinctive recoil from this offer of impossible hope, or the several hops of reasoning before it coalesces into a possible hope instead, except the fact that his face remains so carefully placid.

Where his hand rests on the table, a few inches from the book he has pushed out of reach, his fingernail taps the table twice.

"In theory," he says, finally, and counterbalances the wariness with wan smile. "And it is not boring, so that is."

The extent of his capacity to make a joke of it.

"How sure are you? One to ten. I will take a one," he clarifies, "if I can help. But for the sake of moderating expectations."

[propulsion]

"Like a,"

and there's a moment of processing his own answer, trying to confine the abstract into a mathematical measure of certainty, Tony's gaze flicking up over Bastien's head as the bottom lids of his eyes raise a little in thoughtful squint, and it's not purely a bit so much as a reflective way of being, and Bastien should at least understand that much,

"solid nine point six."

Which likely doesn't sound very moderate when a one is permissible, but also maybe that's still a huge margin of error. Maybe it should be ten or nothing when you're asking people to believe in something insane. Tony takes a sip from his cup, clarifies, "We're pending a few more proofs of concept," before setting the cup back down. "And stuff goes wrong, sure, that's life, maybe it won't work. But looking at the variables under our control, I'm sure.

"And it won't even matter if you were here or on whatever boat you were looking to catch out of town, but I think you should be a part of it. Plus, some of the margin is devoted to whether or not we can build a good enough team to get us the stuff we need."