revivalproject

Entry tags:

Flood

WHO: Lerith and Tony, and whoever else might be taking refuge in the library
WHERE: The library
WHAT: We haven't quite figured out how to handle the screaming moon
WHEN: Mid-event nyoom under the wire
WARNINGS: Depends on your Tony-tolerance.

There didn't yet seem to be a universal way of dealing with the whole moon. A heavenly body acted on them, not the other way around, and so far it appeared as though they had to adapt to this development like they did the tides. The mothcats were relatively instructive. As the sun went down, when they typically became more active and the scourge of the local spider population, they had begun to slink closer to the floors, then huddle as deep in the belly of the library as they could get, infiltrating the human-occupied basement more confidently than they usually would. It insulated them some from the sound, and Tony suspected some other effect that they had no way of articulating, just had them restlessly grooming to try to smooth their ruffled feathers.

He was trying not to stray too far from the library anymore, either, despite the limits. Even if it wasn't so disruptive to cajole Jon along with him back and forth to the forge, that was probably the last place Jon should have been when he had to reminded what they were talking about mid-sentence. Tony hurt himself most of the time he was in there, and he knew what everything did. Instead, he had to work slowly, his workshop at the library largely compromised with the network inactive. For some things, this wasn't a terrible imposition; he could furnish most of Jon's office without the processing power that he had installed. For others, like the stray pieces of the Iron Man that he was slowly collecting, it wasn't so straightforward; they had to be hunted down, then disengaged from Extremis so they didn't go once again hurtling into the walls, or someone's fleshy body, the next time the moon peered down at them with its wicked grin. He lounged now with one of them that he had found, sprawled on the couch on his back with his legs kicking over the arm, meticulously dismantling the errant shinguard with his fine tools and tongue between his teeth. So engrossed, he didn't take much notice of the mothcats slipping away, already sticking to the shadows and moving silently as they did. Only one remained close, tucked against the back of the couch and against the warmth of Tony's stomach, and purring intently in a way that Tony only knew the interpret as contentment. Cats purred when they were happy, right? It was a soothingly consistent sound, anyway, and the animal was very still where it had wedged itself, watching Tony through anxiously slitted eyes. It knew what was coming, even if Tony wasn't prepared for the scream that shattered the air.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He thought it was a one time deal, the moon screaming. It hasn't even been an entire year since the last time. He hates it, and each time he's outside, it's planned poorly and he's caught with it screaming down at him. It sends him in a panic, and his magic flaring up from his hands.

He was heading to the library anyways, intending to see if there were any books he could find about potions. After talking to Noctis about them, surely there had to be one or two, right? Hopefully they'd be in an language he could read as well. If not, maybe he could get Jon to translate them for him.

The door is opened and he leans against it once he shuts it, hands too hot over his ears as he crouches down against it. Like the elf is scared that the moon is going to follow him inside. There's a sort of yelp now, those hands coming away as fire sparks from the palms and he tries to shake it off.

There was that awful scream, and nails digging into his stomach, then the slam of the door all in quick succession for Tony to deal with. He grimaced, fumbling the armor piece in his hands and almost dropping it onto his face, if not for it flaring on in a faint yellow glow of the repulsors to go jetting off into the library stacks. He could hear it battering the shelves, pinging between them as it tried to follow the burst of nonsense commands from Extremis, but first he had to get this mothcat out of him, and find out what else had let itself into the library. The best he could do with the animal was ease it off enough so that it was only clinging to his clothes, and cradled awkwardly in one low-slung arm against his stomach while Tony rolled to his feet in a clatter of his scattering tools.

When he approached the door, it was with the moonlight from the windows behind him, and the faint flicker of the low fire that warmed the library entrance glinting off of the golden nanoweb that slithered erratically across his skin like oil dancing across water. He narrowed his eyes, trying to recognized the person curled in on themself, and came to a startled stop with his free hand starting to come up defensively when they gave there sudden, sparky jump. "Hey, okay, listen, this is happening pretty fast for me, usually we've at least made eye contact before the sparks start flying," he tried.

There's someone else in here. The panic doesn't ebb, even as the screaming is muffled slightly from the other side of the door. He hears the clang of metal, both from further away and from up on the shelves. He finally gets his focus on Tony moving towards him. Finally manages to snuff out the flames by shoving his hands under his arms.

Lerith didn't want to hurt anyone with his magic. He thought he had control of it!

Yellow eyes look to Tony's dark ones, not moving from his huddled position. It takes a long moment, but once the elf is certain that he could trust his magic to behave long enough, the communicator is fished out. Typetypetype, and then Jon's voice comes from it.

'I don't understand why the moon is screaming again. It's terrifying. And when it does that, I can't keep control of my magic.' He lets Jon speak and pulls the hood up over his head to throw his face in shade, though his eyes glinted like a cat's like this.

More typing. 'Sorry if I startled you. I was closer to here than the hotel.'

The long pause was uncomfortable enough that Tony glanced back the way he had come, then down to the mothcat hiding its face against his shirt, like he might find some help there. As usual, he would have to fill the space himself, starting to talk before they had to be alone with their thoughts for too long, "You're Lerith, right? Am I saying that right?," with a swipe of his free hand around his neck to indicate the scarf the man had told him he would be wearing, and drawing out the name with a heavier lean on a New York accent that wasn't always so obvious when he spoke, Law-rit, to try to force a reaction. It was only when Jon's voice came back at him that it occurred to Tony, "Oh," and his already very active hand took on more structured gesturing in a mostly-remembered pidgin ASL to ask as he spoke, "Can you hear me?" That would explain why he wasn't listening. He was looking to teach people sign language, wasn't he?

The long pause that was really just his silence was something that Tony might have to get accustomed to. He takes some breaths, like Dustin taught him on the other world. He wasn't as close to a panic attack this time, but why risk it? The library didn't need to be engulfed in flame just because the elf didn't have a handle on his magic.

'I am, but it's pronounced more Orlesian. Le'rith,' with the 'rith' sounding more like the start of the word 'rift'. Which also probably answered Tony's question of being able to hear him or not.

'I can. I am just a mute. I cannot speak because of magic. Who are you?' Though he does allow himself a moment of distraction as he notes the glint of eyes looking towards him. Was that... a cat? But not really. Close enough?

While Tony gave a nod as though he was being very attentive, it was 'Orlesian' that he repeated soundlessly to himself, testing the shape of that one as though it could tell him any more about what it meant. The cultural exchange would have to wait. "Tony," he replied, hand back to its more erratic flitting to land lightly on his chest, then extend in offer that he immediately seemed to regret, pulling back slightly as he eyed Lerith's sparky hands cautiously. Maybe that was rude. "I've heard a lot about you," he said, with a private smirk, and tried to play off the handshake offer with a wave of his hand to finally dismiss, "Don't apologize, handsome fella inviting himself in and getting things hot is some people's thing, I won't hold that against you. Sorry about the moon thing. It's--I'm working on it. Kind of an issue of scale right now."

It had taken a little bit to get the not-Jon on the communicator to say the word 'Orlesian' correctly, and then 'Orlais' as well. Thedas names were not normal names here apparently.

Those yellow eyes watch Tony's erratically animated hand moving about. It's enough of a distraction from his fear that the sparks are starting to die off. Oh. This was Tony Stark. He frowns, trying to remember where he had interacted with this guy before. Had it been the network? Maybe... maybe the day the network got messed up and he was trying to reach Iron Bull? That sounded about right. He doesn't seem to notice the way Tony covers his abandoned handshake with the the wave.

Lerith stands, curling over in a manner to make himself smaller. It doesn't work as well as he keep thinking it does. 'You've heard of me? I am not handsome and I am sorry about the magic. Going outside and the moon screaming makes it...erratic.' Which was terrifying, which made the situation worse of course. But that last bit, he scowls.

'You're making the moon scream? Why?!' Not-Jon sounds as appalled as Lerith looks.

"Great, first you break into my house and now you're arguing with me," Tony rolled his eyes, already talking over the communicator before it got to Lerith's apology, so he must not have been listening to the explanation as he continued to tease, "Are you trying to get a date?" He had met enough girlfriends that way that maybe this was more of a threat. What the moon could and couldn't do was generally pretty clear to Tony now, and what finer details there were to learn about anybody's magic were not particularly interesting to him, if they could be avoided.

The impish glint in his eye and peek of his smirk was quickly gone in the face of Lerith's very reasonable shock, making Tony grit his teeth around another apology with his hand up again, this time in surrender. "I don't actually--I didn't mean to. I didn't know it would do this," was his only real defence. Some genius. "I thought I was joking, you know, sometimes you just say things, and the next thing you know, you have a lot of apologies to make."

Lerith frowned. Others at least listened to the communicator when he was trying to speak. It felt rude. But then Tony's asking if he's here to get a date and his ears go red. He frowns more, trying to type quickly to answer. Only he stops as soon as the glint in the human's eyes are gone and that hand comes up.

'I don't understand how you made the moon scream. Moons don't do that in Thedas and I thought it happened before because of the ones who keep us here. I am not here because I want a date or because I was trying to break in. I am here because I am scared and the moon is screaming and making my fire uncontrollable when I am outside!

Tony looked as though he was going to interrupt again, lips already parted to argue before he realized he was going to be treated to a whole list of very obvious things that Lerith was under the impression Tony did not know. With his mouth still open, the quirk of Tony's smirk made the expression predaciously toothy, his keen focus on Lerith entirely invasive as he searched for any other vulnerability in his system.

"Don't be," might not have been terribly convincing then, but it at least reminded Tony to dial back the smirk again, gesturing another apology for it. "Moon's not coming down here," he continued, and had to give his hand a twirl to grudgingly admit, "Yet."

Lerith hopes that Tony isn't going to interrupt again. Otherwise he'll give up the communicator entirely and either sign furiously or just leave. This human was almost as frustrating as he had been on the Network that day, but at least this way Tony could see the elf's emotions.

He takes a calming breath. No sense getting frustrated at someone... well, was Tony doing something to help? Whatever, it didn't matter in the here and now. Or so Lerith was going to try and convince himself.

'Do you know what you did to the moon to make it... act like that?' The elf lets the device speak and looks a little less scared, a little less frustrated. Talking angrily to people didn't really give out answers as much as talking calmly usually did.

This question had Tony looking guilty again, glancing away back up toward the stacks from where he had come, and hoisting the clinging animal he carried a little higher against his chest where his fingers could reach just enough to tap restlessly against his heart. The answer was not going to gain him any favour in this conversation, as he had already displayed his poor behavioural control, and he had to admit, "I told someone it did. So it does now." He tried to shrug like this was a perfectly reasonable thing to expect, what can you do?, and not like he was pressing his nails into his shirt. "Come on, you're not on fire now, right? I know I was messing with you, but honestly, sweetheart, if you burn this place down, that wouldn't be great, I've got some stuff here, it's a whole thing, we're going to have to set some boundaries. These guys, though, when they get freaked out, the moon is doing its thing, they go downstairs, it seems to chill them out, you know..." He gave a vague indication with his free hand around the whole animal, like he wasn't entirely sure how to best indicate it.

The guilty look doesn't escape him, even with as quickly as Tony looks away. He's seen it on other faces, though those faces had been hollowed by years of slavery. He had seen the guilt when they stole sweets or something to hide under their beds down in their quarters. Fleeting bouts of happiness for the luxuries the magister hadn't noticed gone missing.

Lerith calms himself. Tony wasn't meaning any harm, was just teasing or something. Being... Tony, maybe. 'I am sorry. I get scared very easily. And the magic is... it is a work in progress. Reeve was helping me with it.' He does tilt his head at the motion around the mothcat.

'I promise not to intentionally burn anything down,' and held his hands open to show they were empty. Not burning. He takes a careful step forward, ready to jolt back if the human didn't like him getting closer. 'Is this your companion? Or, pet? This is a mothcat?' He looks very interested at least, yellow eyes looking over the creature.

How easily he did or did not get scared was not something that Tony would voluntary provide to just about anyone, and he started to make a gesture to suggest Lerith also maybe not say that too loud in case the wrong person was close enough to overhear it. That wrong person probably wasn't Reeve, at least, and Tony muttered, "Was he? He's probably a great teacher, very patient, never seen him set anything on fire so he must have a lot of control, sure."

As much as Tony rambled to try to fill the space, he didn't look as though he was going to recoil from Lerith, and shifted the animal again when he realized Lerith's focus was on it to try to draw it out of its anxious coil and reveal its face. "Not a pet, no," he was quick to deny. "They just hang around here, I don't know where this one came from. He just doesn't like the noise. It's probably worse for them, you know, the ears..." He gave a flick of his free hand up toward his own, mediocre human ears, only to quickly drop it because Lerith was probably having an experience with the sound slightly closer to the mothcat's and maybe he didn't need Tony bringing it up. "It's usually pretty quiet in here," he decided was a reasonable conclusion. "Library."

'Reeve has magic rocks that help. He had a special name for them.' Of course, he can't fucking remember the name when he needs to. That was a little frustrating. No, don't think about that, that's how hands get set on fire.

He glances from the creature to Tony, and straightens up. 'It is very loud outside. With the screaming.' There's a small tilt of his head. 'You either talk a lot, or you are nervous and ramble?' There was another slave he knew of that did that, down in the servants' quarters. They'd keep the nervous energy in all day and then just let out a torrent of one sided conversation when away from the magister.

A very careful and gentle hand comes into contact with the mothcat, then smooths down in a petting fashion three times before drawing back. 'Libraries are quiet. The one in Haven is as well, though it's smaller than this one. And... has more books.'

Which was strange to think of for a library to be quite frank.

"If you're really nice, maybe he'll have a special name for you, too," Tony suggested with a wry smile, only to immediately regret it under this accusation about his very normal amount of conversation. It wasn't exactly helping any argument against either possibility. "It only sounds like I do," he tried to argue anyway, "because you're so quiet. Skewed perception. I don't get nervous. Look at me." Most of the time he did manage to look incredibly cool, so that might have worked, sometimes. Carrying around a feathery cat, without his sunglasses and his hair sticking up from being sprawled on the couch was probably incredibly uncool, and he only had his disarming grin to rely on. Maybe if he talked more, Lerith wouldn't notice.

"Yeah, the book thing, that's an ongoing problem. Rare commodity, turns out," he said as the mothcat seemed to asses whether or not he liked being pet like that, tipping its head too far back to stare at Lerith narrowly. "Not for lack of trying. You should have seen this place when we first got here. Garbage, everywhere. What they did have were more of those datapoints, like the one by the fountain, only they were all broken. Destroyed, definitely deliberate, if you trust my math. And you should. I've been trying to get one to work--to figure out how it works, then maybe we could get some of them back on these shelves."

Radley was in the library too, still weirded out by everything and trying to figure out how to handle it. He loved kitties, so he was happy to see so many mothcats hanging around. He spoke to them softly, hoping to coax some to hang out with him. A couple seemed receptive.

The moon screaming set his teeth on edge. Was there any place where it couldn't be heard?

"It's like Halloween every night," he muttered, petting a restless mothcat.

The scream of the moon made lights burst at the edges of Tony's vision, and the armor piece in his hands flare up to jet off. With his eyes squeezed shut, which didn't help at all, he did his best to keep a grip on the armor so it didn't break another window, the sudden jerk and tension making the mothcat on him yowl, scratch, and leap away to go scampering into some security in the dark. Hanging onto the armor was the wrong move anyway; it just took Tony with it, dragging him up off of the couch into the air to tear off down the hall as he gave a yell of surprise and his tools fell away to the floor, then finally relented as his fingers slipped and the armor piece tried to flip. He crashed to the floor, sliding along the cold concrete as the armor hurtled away, pinging off of the far wall then going ruinously deeper into the building where Tony could only lift his head to look after its glowing repulsors disappearing down the halls with a groan.

There was a man there when he turned his head intending to gather himself from the floor, making him freeze in his awkward heap, grimace still in place and forgotten and eyebrows raised in surprise. "Hi," he greeted, doing his best to sound very casual and cool.

Radley watched the wild ride in utter shock. He jumped when the armor flew away, but quickly turned back to Tony. "Are you okay?!"

Immediately, like an automatic response, Tony said, "Of course, always," and got enough of a sense of all of his limbs to push himself up onto one hand, where he remained like that was where he meant to be this whole time. "Not the worst thing that has happened this week. I'm sorry, do I know you?" It all came out rapidly, skipping quickly past how okay he was or wasn't so he could point inquisitively at this person he happened to fall into. He wasn't sure just how territorial he really could be about the library, but it did spook him somewhat that there might be people in it that he wasn't aware of.

"Uh, no, we haven't met. I'm Radley," he said.

Tony's eyebrows slowly crept up expectantly, waiting for any further explanation that clearly wasn't coming fast enough for Tony's limited patience, so they dropped to repeat, "Radley," as Tony nodded like this was all he needed to know. After a beat, it occurred to him to offer in kind, "Tony," with a hand to his chest, that he then waved in a way he meant them both to understand that they should pretend this was very dignified and they exchanged handshakes and he wasn't still recovering from being thrown on the ground.

"... So, do you ... uh ... want some help chasing down that thing you were holding?" Radley asked. He didn't figure he needed an explanation for being in the library, but he would provide one if outright asked.

Looking bewildered and craning back around to squint the way the armor piece had thrown itself, Tony started to open his mouth only to snap it shut again with an irritated click. Right, being on the floor for this meeting was only half of the mess that he was. In an attempt to cobble together a more respectable image, he finally rolled himself up, patting fussily at his clothes, then his hair. "It can't have gone far. Unless it broke out. We'd probably hear that," he did eventually reply, the final statement almost a question as he raised an eyebrow at Radley with some weak hope.

"... Break out? Like through the wall?" Radley stared. "I'm pretty sure I didn't hear anything like that."

"Tony Stark, I come to speak to you."

It had taken Lauri multiple days to find the forge. It had taken her another few to find the library to discover Tony here. The Kree woman, when she entered, stood tall as always, but even she looked tired and ruffled in the face of it all. And, of course, she strode in without her hammer.

With how poorly the technology here was behaving from the storm, she did not dare risk it around others. So instead she had braved the storm on her own, looking for someone in particular. This someone.

"I wish to make war against the moon. You will assist me."

Hearing Lauri-Ell say his name was almost as much of a shock to the system as the moon's wordless scream, with just a little less scrambling of Extremis. It set Tony's teeth on edge, and he was reluctant to even look her way, sure he was going to find murderous intent in her face for some new crime he didn't realize he had committed. When he did risk a sidelong glance her way, though, it was clear she didn't have her hammer with her, so that must have been a good sign, no official judgment to bring down on him. A pettier crime then, a personal slight, that was better corrected with her fists.

He did his best to play off all of this anxiety by merely wrinkling his nose in acknowledgement as he continued to work, primly twisting at a screw in the plating and giving a small nod as if to imperiously consider listening, and maybe he would respond if it seemed more important than his armor. Only, he wasn't actually the one being judged. He was being recruited.

Slowly, he finally turned his head, tongue still between his teeth but hands finally stopping their restless work, brow furrowed to ask if he had heard Lauri correctly. Fighting the moon didn't seem feasible. It wasn't like anything else was working, though. "What's the plan?" he eventually asked lightly.

To a member of a race who regularly did serious terraforming of worlds, and made great wars, destroying or even just altering a moon was just something to consider. As she did now. Though, in truth, she had no plan.

"I... assumed you would be able to create one. You are a wise man, or so Carol believed."

That was a lot of confidence that Lauri-Ell had walked in with just to vent off immediately at the first question, making Tony purse his lips with a new frown of irritation before he was rolling himself upright to plant his feet on the floor, much to the similar irritation of the animal that was lounging with him. It crawled up the back of the couch as he moved, and tools rolled freely into the new empty spaces left around them. She had presented him a problem, it was his job to invent a solution.

"We can't just destroy it," he had to outline first, because they had to come to some agreement of what 'make war' meant. "For one thing, I think it is this planet's actual moon, and blowing it up would be too destructive for how everything down here worked. Worse than the storms, negative outcome. Besides, it's got a face and appears to have some kind of sentience, I think that might actually be murder." He went uncharacteristically still for a moment then, staring blankly as he processed just how much like a murder that would be, and how likely just killing the moon and leaving the body hanging in the sky would actually solve their problem vs. the morality of that murder. Couldn't scream if it was dead. Could he even put that onto the table? "So, what else--capture it? Prisoner of war?" he pressed on instead.

"Why can we not destroy it? The Kree have never had issues with the careful destruction of such things before," she said. Yes, tides really aren't a thing she knows about. "And I do not believe it has sentience. It is just angry."

How would one even capture a moon though?

"If one cannot capture Galactus, surely you cannot 'capture' a moon in this manner."

The Kree hadn't been particularly cautious about what civilizations were wiped out through their imperialism, which didn't seem like a correction that would win Tony any favour in this tenuous neutrality. Maybe later, after the moon issue. Instead, he narrowed his eyes, trying to asses if Lauri-Ell actually believed blowing up satellites didn't hurt anybody, only to have to confront the idea that she might have believed that because she had a skewed perception of basic sentience. Maybe it only hurt angry people.

"What does that mean--how can it be angry if it's not sentient?" he had to confront that one, baffled with a hand open with some desperation.

Of course they were not. That was history, though.

"I have fought the Cotati to protect your planet. They made use of other plants, who were not the Cotati. They were not sentient. But they were angry because of the will exerted upon them."

It took a moment for Tony to come around to this theory, frozen in his inquisitive position with his eyes narrowing to try to decide which part he liked the least, only to land on a realization that felt really obvious as he said it out loud. "The moon is not angry, because it is just a program. Program is just expressing what the programmer put there," he rephrased. "The moon isn't doing anything, it's being controlled." Just like everything else around here, so it shouldn't have taken him so long to get to this conclusion. "So, it's not the moon we have to 'make war' with."

"So you believe it is a ship then? Or a giant machine?"

Those are the easiest conclusions for her to come to from what he was saying. But she was still following his logic more or less.

"You believe this more Atroma cursing of us?"

Those weren't exactly the conclusions that Tony was heading toward, making him hesitate as he tried to consider them in case Lauri-Ell had said something surprisingly inspired twice in a row. Probably not. "Were the other plants machines?" he tried to reorient them, because it seemed like a different problem entirely that the whole moon had been replaced, only to wave the question away himself because he realized it didn't actually matter now that he had said it out loud. "It's definitely somebody messing with us, because it always is. Going to the source of the problem, then, about as achievable as reaching the moon right now." With a frustrated frown at this revelation not amounting to anything much useful, he tried a different angle, "Moon's big, though. Got to be hard to influence. Got to be pretty complicated to hide that."

"No, they weren't," she said, but then he's going on again, and Lauri-Ell once more felt left behind.

Is this what it's always like around intelligent people?

"I believe I see your point. I still wish to find a way to stop it. Is it perhaps possible for us to create, and launch, a probe to study the moon the next time the ships carry us from the planet?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Flood

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject