revivalproject | Succession

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Succession

WHO: Anyone on the first train out of Temba!
WHERE: Not-Temba, the Not-Transport Station
WHAT: First look at the new city! Tony has some specific things in here he's doing, but you can make it your own first impression experience.
WHEN: As soon as possible after receiving Ga Re's message, time to Ex Floor.
WARNINGS: I'll let you know if this gets weird.

a. Arrival! [OTA! This is a mingle option, so display your preferences accordingly]
The last time they got an urgent message from the Agrii about travel plans, they were headed to space to fight a war. So when Ga Re said far, Tony was not expecting to be standing at the train tracks, staring at the vehicle with some bewilderment. It hadn't been that long since the last time Tony had come this way, and it hadn't looked to him like this station was going to be in service for a good, long time at that point. Even now, as he looked down the tracks to where they disappeared into the woods, he wouldn't confidently say they looked serviceable. Even if the train itself had the juice, it very much looked like a rusty bolt and warped metal was its first and last destination.

That was a problem to solve when they got to it. Tony wasn't the only one ready to find out what was going to happen, and he glanced around the platform to the few people who had dropped what they were doing to come see Ga Re's train with a faint, wry smile, before turning back toward the city to watch for Jon with a flurry of encouraging text messages to spur him on. They had plenty of time already to hang around Temba, it was time to go forward.

The train itself was a sleek tube, like a subway car, lined with seats on the inside that weren't particularly comfortable or inviting. It wasn't giving a long-distance impression, without much room for luggage or travel comforts that a long-haul vehicle might. It didn't even appear to have any kind of control system that Tony could find after some frustrated investigation; just walls and windows and a button to open and close the door, that swished enough times to be irritating before Tony fully gave up on it. He was about ready to apologize for not solving the go puzzle when the car gave a rattle and lurched forward of its own volition, starting its slow roll toward the woods. From there, while Tony bounded for the window to watch Temba disappear behind the foliage, the train rapidly picked up speed, until the leaves were whipping by and then they were suddenly plunged into darkness.

An hour, when you don't know when its going to end or where you are even going, is an incredibly long time.

Abruptly, somewhere deep in that dark tunnel, Tony could feel a snap at the back of his neck, a tingle that numbed the base of his skull enough to touch it gingerly as he realized with a pitch of dread that he couldn't reach out to the network anymore. He reached for Jon's hand first, waiting for a steady breath as he stared distantly out at that endless darkness before he stood to get the rest of the car's attention. With his communication device in hand, he announced, "We've been bricked."

It was possible that Tony should have better prepared for this. It was possible that he should have been ready for the rapidly mounting anxiety as the train burst back out into the sunlight, lashed from all sides once again by the dense, untamed growth of the abandoned planet. And he should have been thoroughly anticipating stepping down from the train as it sighed into the strangely familiar station, and looking back over his shoulder with the realization that they had no control interface, and no way to contact anyone back in Temba.

Were they stuck here now?

b. Transport Station [For Bucky, but you're welcome to join!]
If they were meant to be here for the foreseeable future, the immediate experience wasn't what Tony would call hospitable. He never experienced Temba as it was when the He Rows first arrived, only coming to know it well after some progress had been made and there was clean, running water, and he hadn't realized how thankful he was for that small mercy until he disembarked the train in this new abandoned city. If he didn't have the map to orient himself and assure him that this place was a strange mirror of Temba, he wasn't sure how quickly he would have recognized the shape of the transport station obscured as it was under the tangle of vines and enthusiastic bushes. It took Tony some work to pick his way out of the snarl of it, thorns managing to catch in the seams of his heavy, metal boots and snagging where they met the nanoweb on his thighs, to turn and take in the structure as a whole, looking for a place to start. Where Temba could be shockingly quiet, here Tony could hear a whole cacophony of life calling and chattering high up in the branches of the expansive trees. The air itself smelled sweet with the overripe rot of lush fruit that hung heavily everywhere Tony looked, and littered the ground where more plants yet would grow. Tony wrinkled his nose and planted his hands on his hips. The train wasn't broken, that much was clear. There had to have been a way to make it run.

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He breathed an amused huff through his nose, wiping his fingers free of any lingering blood or spines once Tony pulled away.

"You're not going to lick anything down there, are you?"

Tony gave his own snort with some disbelief at the question as he scrubbed at the tickle of blood down his neck, brow furrowed inquisitively before he said, "I appreciate the set up, but you're going to have to start giving me some back if you want to play." Ideally, Tony wouldn't have to lick anything else, anyway, and there would at least be an obvious power source to find underneath the tracks. He went searching along the platform, toeing plants aside or cautiously using his gauntlet-covered hand to search through brambles to try to locate the entrance to the underground he thought must have been mirrored here.

"Genuine question," Bucky assured, hand to his heart like he had no idea what Tony was getting at.

"What should I be looking for?" he asked, not having spent enough time in Temba yet to have done a through exploration of the train station on that end end.

"A--manhole, basically. But the Agrii are big," Tony replied, searching a few feet further before suddenly stopping and spinning around on his heel. Something wasn't right, that was clear in the furrow of his brow, but he continued nonetheless, "I would say it's like an emergency access point, but I never could get a good sense of that whole space, too much water damage."

With a dramatic point toward the train like this would explain his thought process entirely, Tony went stomping off back through the tangle of brambles to get a sense of the building itself again, trying to look through the plants to see the less familiar. He was teetering back on his heels just a few paces away from the strange, smooth wall and craning his neck when he called back, "The proportions are all wrong." His math was precise, after all.

Right. Bucky nodded, and started to aid Stark with his sweep, frowning at whatever it was that abruptly seemed to upset him.

He let him work through it, seeming to know better than to question until Stark came out with it himself.

"Wrong how?" he called back, gesturing at the space to indicate the answer wasn't obvious to him.

"Look at the train. The doors and the seats," Tony suggested as he came strolling back through the overgrowth, hands up to slowly draw apart from each other. Big. "Everything in Temba is like that. The stairs are too tall, the halls are massive like everything is a big shopping mall, because the Agrii are big." When he reached Bucky again, Tony could turn to gesture toward the doorway of the station itself, anything blocking it long since decimated by the ambitious weeds and gaping, but the stone held its shape. It was distinctly not Agrii-sized the way Tony had become accustomed to. It was downright homey.

"...You think someone more human sized lived here?" Bucky looked around the rundown station, brow furrowed as he kicked a few loose stones aside. Segregated cities?

Now that he was looking for it it was a little more obvious, mind trying to piece together this place as it had once been, a crowded, bustling place. That might have been a bench once...it only came to Bucky's knees.

"...I thought they started bringing us here after the storms drove them away? This place looks just as old as Temba..."

It was difficult to tell just how old anything was, or how long it had been left wasting, with the amount of foliage and the humidity that would cause more rapid deterioration than the levels Tony was used to in Temba, so Tony frowned up at the walls and had to accept Bucky's estimation for now. With his eyes narrowed, and without a confident answer for Bucky's questions, Tony instead responded with another question, "Did you think the way Ga Re talked about this place was kind of weird?" It was possible that Bucky did not know how to address the Agrii that spoke to them, so Tony's focus returned to ground level for him to mime the communication device in hand, receiving the Agrii message. "'We find city'," he reminded Bucky, with a skeptical purse of his lips. "I know their English isn't great, but is that how you would say it? You live in New York all your life, and you talk about Hoboken like you haven't been acutely aware its been way too close this whole time?"

Bucky gave a curious hum and nodded, before his head tilted. "Do we know how long it's been since they were living down here?" he asked, "If it's a whole new generation up there, maybe it's not so much not knowing Hoboken, but not knowing the neighboring city from the country your parents immigrated from?"

That was a good point, both because the timelines had been deliberately obscured and time was clearly ambiguous, and because Tony realized he didn't know how long an Agrii lived in the first place. It could have been fifty years on Agra-10, only 20 for the Agrii on their ship, and ten generations of their natural lifecycle.

"Christ, we don't know anything," Tony admitted with his head tilted back to look up at the ceiling, like he could see the Agrii ship in orbit above them. With a sharp sigh of frustration, he dropped his chin to glance around the platform again, searching the weeds at their feet. "Let's find that hole," he grumbled, because it would be nice to know how a single train worked.

Bucky offered a faint sympathetic look, knowing how not knowing could weigh on a Stark.

"Least we know we don't know anything." Better than being fully confident in the answer and wholly wrong without any idea.

He nodded, and tried to work his way out in a grid, pausing and crouching after some searching. The weeds very nearly obscured it, and it was camouflaged with some of that same strange rock. He used his left arm to pry the hatch open, calling for Stark.

"Think I found something."

The growl of the shifting rock would have been announcement enough, bringing Tony trotting cautiously toward Bucky from where he had started to walk along the tracks themselves to spot some irregularity. Thrilled to have something happen, even if it was just looking down into a dark pit, Tony grinned as he bent over Bucky and gave his shoulder an appreciative pat to congratulate, "Excellent work, sweetheart." Hopefully, it had more to give them than the impenetrable shadow that quickly diffused the light of Tony's repulsor as he aimed down to try to get a sense of the depth.

It couldn't be that deep. Tony didn't hesitate any further to crouch down with Bucky, then vault himself over the edge, clinging to the stone to dangle freely into the transport station underground. Kicking his feet only had his toes swinging through the air, not finding anything to get purchase on, but the faint glow of his boots might be more effective at this depth. Tony tried to crane his neck to peer over his shoulder, searching for the ground.

"Wha-" Bucky moved to grab him, holding off as Tony dangled and creasing his brow at him. He was worse than Steve. Just jumping in without a clue what was down there. Or how deep.

"Yeah- how about you let the super soldier take the perilous jump into the unknown?" he offered with a frown, trying to squint down past Tony, offering a hand to pull him back up.

Instead of responding to this very reasonable concern, Tony continued to hang into the void and asked with some delight, "You are?" Being a super soldier was the best explanation for...everything going on with him, and obviously the Bucky who had been his dimension's Captain America must have had the serum, but no one had confirmed that for Tony yet. Only then did Tony haul himself up to brace his chest against the edge of the opening, arms folded tightly but with his metal hand pressed firmly into the stone. "Seems pretty deep, try climbing," he offered with a tip of his head to indicate down his back.

"More or less," he agreed, surprised by Tony's starry eyed delight for a moment. Zola's serum wasn't exactly the same as Steve's, but it was close.

He gave Tony an incredulous look. "I'm not exactly light," he warned, but if Stark was sure...

He started to climb down, limbs stretching but still not reaching the bottom. Without giving it too much thought, Bucky let down, dropping to the ground with a grunt, and only then did he squint back up at the top with a thoughtful frown.

"...Did you bring rope?"

Bucky wasn't kidding about the weight, making Tony grimace and very quickly regret the offer, but he could dig his armored elbow into the stone for some leverage until Bucky released him and left him feeling...not much better, honestly, exhausted and squirming slightly to keep himself aloft. With Bucky's voice as a reference point, though, he didn't have to for long, only signalling his intent in the way he dropped to hang from his fingertips again, toes pointed and kicking like this time they might reach further to the ground. When he did fall, it was with much less grace than Bucky, weighted as he was by his boots and, as noted, not exactly a super soldier.

It was only when he hit the ground that he responded, "Of course not."

Hey, he did warn you. He stepped back to give Stark room, wincing at little at the landing.

"You good?"

Bucky would be thrilled to know he has maintained a reputation of being anything like graceful here, and that no one will ever see his plummet from that plane.

He trust Stark to have some plan for getting them out again if it came to it, or that could be a problem for future them to solve, he wasn't overly concerned, stepping curiously into the dark space that seemed to run parallel to the tracks above.

He kicked some rat like creature from underfoot with a frown. "How about a light?"

While Tony continued to stumble to find his footing, he insisted, "Always." He'd get his feet under him eventually, and everyone's bones needed a good rattling now and then, for the humility. Especially someone who dropped into a pit assuming they'd figure out an extraction plan when it was necessary. Tony stood in the circle of dim light, staring up at the hole above and the swirling dust motes, calculating just how far it was. For when it was necessary.

"Please, I'm a gentleman," he answered like he hadn't just come up short on the rope thing. He could probably use a little power up and still have enough in the tank for a good emergency blast. The faint glow from Tony's metal-clad palm was easy to track in the dark as he raised to toward Bucky, and the distinct whine of it spinning up echoed eerily in the underground as the light intensified. The yellow light threw Bucky's shadow against the wall beyond him, diffused across a snarl of ambitious roots.

He started to smile, but that whine as Tony's pointed his palm at him triggered a sudden and vivid sensory memory. It happened in just a fraction of a second, but in that moment Bucky's gaze hardened, clearly somewhere else, and his hand moved reflexively for a weapon that wasn't there.

Then a beat passed and he blinked, refocusing and swallowing uncomfortably as he tried to shake it off. His lips twitched into a brief, forced smile to try and reassure Stark, turning away from him and trying to distance them from having to acknowledge whatever that was.

"...I'm gonna see how far this goes."

The reaction wasn't easy for Tony to read, too brief and too far away, only tensing in response in familiarity with that steely glint and unmistakable reach for a holster. Bucky's demeanour changed before Tony's could, and he was turning away by the time Tony ratcheted down enough to lower the repulsor by a fraction and cast an inquisitive frown over his fingers.

"Yeah, okay..." he breathed, not feeling in the least like the tension was gone, but he wasn't going to be given much opportunity to balance it. A screeching protest of metal rang out from above them, making Tony drop his hand even further as he tilted his head back in surprise. They weren't given much time to ponder its source before a shudder knocked a rain of dust loose from the ceiling above them, and a slow, distinct ker-thunk of gears shifting and twisted tracks being forced into alignment under rolling weight echoed down the length of the tracks.

"The train," Tony breathed for them, head turning like he could trace the length of the tracks and see the mouth of the tunnel from where they stood. By the time it got up to speed and hit that tunnel, their chances were going to be slim if they wanted to be in control of that train. "Barnes--now!" Tony demanded with a scoop of his arm as the only actual instruction outside of the familiar whine filling the cavern again.

He made it a few steps before that sudden shudder had him looking up with a frown.

Shit.

There wasn't time to think, just curse mentally as he turned and sprinted back to Stark.

Apparently the controls weren't down here.

"Get me up there and I can catch it," he huffed.

That demand was enough of a signal of trust to get this job done for Tony to promptly grab Bucky around the middle with his unarmored arm, and give an impatient kick at his toes with the unforgiving metal boots to get him to step up. The other hand dropped down to Tony's side to give as much thrust as he could manage for an incomplete set of armor that hadn't been designed to achieve flight.

The concussive blast of the repulsors from his boots and gauntlet was enough to crater the floor of the tunnel they stood in, leaving a strangely round impression directly under the hole while Tony squeezed around Bucky and they jumped straight up toward the light. That was it, that was the emergency blast, and it got them as far as Tony flailing out for the edge of the uncovered opening before they could sink right back down into it, already regretting the impulse with a heartstopping panic at the very immediate threat of Bucky's now uncomfortably familiar weight. Tony could calculate at exactly what angle that drop at this velocity would jerk his shoulder out of place.

His flights with Sam had never been especially smooth or planned either, so Bucky didn't find the experience too different, though it was definitely not his preferred method of getting around.

And thankfully Bucky had the reaction time to take the brunt of the weight for them, mirroring that grip round Tony's waist with his flesh and blood arm and catching the edge with the vibranium one. Judging by the gritted teeth and pained grunt it didn't feel too great to him either, but it held a hell of a lot better than Tony's joint would've.

Hoisting them up, Bucky stalled only long enough to make sure Stark could pull himself up the rest of the way before racing after the train to try and catch it before it disappeared from sight.

It was a long chase before he caught up, into the tunnel, just shy of hopping onto the outside when he slammed face first into an unseen forcefield. It fully laid him out for a moment, and he was grateful not for the first time that Sam wasn't there with Redwing to see him in moments like this.

His face was a mess when he walked back out, and he flashed Stark an uncomfortable, stiff smile. "...Yeah, there's barrier in there," he informed, as though that wasn't obvious.

The help up was a profound relief that the whole trust thing was still working smoothly, and for the sake of Tony's joints, and left twin furrows in the accumulated dirt and weeds that had overtaken the station platform where their metal fingers dragged across the stone for purchase. Before Tony could say anything about it, or was entirely out of the hole, Bucky was off and running, leaving Tony to stare without much optimism at the retreating tail of the train before he had dragged himself up enough to collapse on his back, feet still swinging down over the edge of the opening. The gauntlet was fried for now, enough that Tony had to use the other arm to help lift it up before his eyes with a frown of disappointment before manually disengaging it and letting the myriad pieces of the armor drop and scatter across the platform.

By then, it was uncomfortably quiet. The rumble of the train was a distant noise that Tony had to strain to pick up, and in that moment of stillness Tony fully accepted that Bucky had caught the train and was on his way back to Temba. With a sigh of defeat, he dragged his heavy legs out of the cavern to start disassembling the darkened boots as well. He was down to one boot and the undersuit when the movement from the foliage caught his eye, and he glanced up only to give a start at not necessarily the return of Bucky, but the blood on his face only looking more gruesome from the...was he trying to smile? Tony scrambled up to go limping stiffly with his heavy foot dragging, as quickly as he could to meet Bucky as he approached, one hand already up to hover gingerly over his shoulder, then his hair as Tony asked, "Did you try to catch it with your teeth? Did you break something? Here, put your head down..." The other hand came up to cup under Bucky's face like Tony meant to catch any more of the bleeding, which was a very normal way to determine if his face was bleeding too much.

"S'fine," Bucky tried to dismiss. It hurt like a son of bitch, but it would heal up faster than his bruised pride.

The blood was all ready congealing, none dripping down to dirty Tony's hands, and he shook his head, more or less sure nothing was broken. Well-

"Maybe the nose, but it'll be fine-" He touched his fingers gingerly to the swollen bridge of his nose. Not his finest moment.

Succession

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