revivalproject | (no subject)

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WHO: Tony and some glownies, and any witnesses to this experiment
WHERE: Sansa and Tyrion's house, the livestock nursery, anywhere in between
WHAT: Tony sees an obvious solution to a transportation problem.
WHEN: There's a few options in here, this is an extended period of time while Tony works out the problems and gets your input. Theadjacking imperative, talk amongst yourselves.
WARNINGS: Potential animal harassment and/or consumption. That one's on Tommy.
ALSO: I've got an OOC post if you want to hash something out with me/each other, or there's something known about these animals/places that I've messed up.

Suburban Cowboy
The effort of cleaning out the forge and getting the heat on had caused a deep-muscle kind of exhaustion that encouraged Tony to recuperate for a whole, like, ten minutes with his feet kicked up on a worktop he found he liked the feel of, thankful for the soldering iron that had come back from Risa with him so he could mostly work in stillness as he knitted some found fragments together with his tongue between his teeth and cheap sunglasses precariously on the end of his nose. His work wasn't manifesting the mechanism of the data points quickly, though, and he was going to have to reprogram his tablet if he was going to Frankenstein a working computer that in any way satisfied his level of patience before he could start making sense of any software. If the workforce in any way seemed to exist on this planet, Tony would have found a way to pay for this menial labour days ago. It was taking way too much time to actually get to work.

Trying to sleep at this point didn't help his focus; laying in his nest of what he identified as largely blackout curtains repurposed from around the forge and neighbouring factory, close enough to his workbench that he could fall into it at any moment, Tony just stared wide-eyed at the dark, vaulted ceiling listening to the profound lack of humanity around him. There was no familiar rush of traffic, or even constant hum of power. There wasn't even a satellite he could reach out to to listen in on the murmur of connection around the planet. There was just the tiny, little network of a handful of people, mostly silent on a good day. All he could hear was the alien fauna, so clear without the familiar noise pollution, like being isolated up in a mountain cabin: a rustle of leaves as something small darted through the underbrush outside, a repeating call that back home Tony would have identified as a toad but here was probably some kind of scavenger canid. And his muscles still ached, but not nearly enough to knock him out yet, not like the last few times he'd been able to convince himself to sleep.

He hadn't gone West from the area around the forge yet, finding himself straying into the centre of town where most of the activity and food was to be found when he could make the journey, but it wasn't a particularly long run in that direction before he found himself jogging around what felt like a common block of a subdivision. This could have been an admittedly still pretty alien, but cottagey area of Long Island; he felt like he could pass a yoga mom out on her early morning jog before the school rush at any moment. The surrealism was enough without a flicker of faint light that kept on catching his eye as he rounded the block. It wasn't bright enough for Tony to pinpoint immediately, but without any other lights on his whole run, it was hard to miss, and eventually he slowed enough to wander toward it, through a yard to a fenced off area.

Were those llamas glowing?

Glow-Ranching
The agricultural sector of this community, or any community, really, hadn't been of much interest to Tony so far. It seemed to be functional and producing edible products, and the details could be left to the kind of freaks who enjoyed that kind of information, like biologists and plant-mom millenials. What he hadn't considered until now was the potential for an untapped labour force. Every agricultural society in history had very quickly figured out that domesticating animals, whether it was dogs or cattle, to get their stuff from one place to another, was much more civilized than walking around like cavemen. This New Temba Colony was so far behind on their development. Most of them might have been advanced enough in their technological development back home to be well beyond this kind of system, into spaceflight or beyond, but the resources for that kind of thing were many and complex. These resources were right here, fueled by weeds and, by all accounts, pretty placid.

The livestock nursery was a surprisingly quiet place, and Tony's first scan didn't reveal any obvious foot traffic. It was the middle of the long day, though-- when the sun was at its peak for that long, it was difficult not to buy into the siesta lifestyle. Everyone could have been in the huge greenhouse, that did seem to be the centre of plenty of activity whenever Tony was in the area, so Tony took a moment to squint up at it across the street, hand shielding his eyes, hoping he might see someone through the glass to catch their attention.

Field Test
Tony was very close to the camera, but he wasn't quite looking at it, clearly attempting to balance it carefully so he could back away slowly, hands up and waiting for it the tablet to fall. Perfect, stable, it wasn't about to pitch off of the fence. In one hand seemed to be loops of rope, while he used the other to point at the camera now expectantly. "Okay, rolling. This is field test one, starting mark..." He spun around, searching, and found that his subject was about ten feet from where he had left her and called, "Hey. We're trying to do something here. Places, people." None of the glownies had learned Tony's language yet, including this one. He turned back to the camera, and tried a new tactic, "This is Llamrei, she's a champ, has lots of ideas to contribute to the project. Today we are going to see if we can ride her."

In the time it took Tony to jog over to the animal, there was a distinct shiver to the camera as someone disturbed the fence, and it wobbled just as Tony started to murmur sweet encouragement to his project and try to slide his makeshift reins into place. The tablet hit the dirt at the same time as Tony went, "Woah, sorry!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A wolf could have been among this flock and Tony wasn't sure he would have spotted it, staring so intently at one of them to try to figure out if he was looking at bioluminescence or radiation and none of them had properly considered the fallout possibility of a power system failing. Not that Tony knew what to do about that at this point; the goal very much was and still would be to get the hell away from here. He didn't quite jump at the sound of Sansa's voice, but looked sharply her way, holding his breath and wholly not expecting to encounter anyone, let alone be spoken to. The breath came out of him in a brief burst of relief, his heart still thudding in his chest from the run and in no way a historically reliable mechanism, if this voice had been more of a threat.

"Sansa Stark," he returned with a breathless grin, and let himself lean forward on the fence, trying to give it his tension. If Tony was in any way prepared to see anyone out here at the edge of town, it definitely wasn't her. "I was just in the neighbourhood, you know." Her strange animal pen could clearly wait, it had been waiting for Tony to discover it, after all, and Tony had a more pressing concern; "Are you out here alone?" If she popped out here, and Tony thought that looked like it could be any minute, he didn't know how long it would be before the next person came by. This didn't seem like where the parties had been happening.

"I am alone, yes," Sansa says. She presses a hand to her low back as if to explain precisely why she's out of bed and draws a little closer so she can actually see Tony's face while they talk. It's dark still, yes, but Sansa doesn't feel unsafe her. She's had plenty of experience with unsafe in her life and Agra 10 isn't unsafe.

"I can't sleep very well anymore," she admits. "And I'm probably going to crush Tyrion in bed at some point because I'm bigger 'round than a melon from the Summer Isles but he is too kind to say anything. I suspect one doesn't say such things to their pregnant wife."

She tips her head a bit. "Now, what about my glownies? Are they not behaving?"

He really should have clarified what he meant by 'out here' because for a second Tony panicked and was already rationalizing putting his work at the forge on pause so he could move his precious few creature comforts into Sansa's animal pen until the baby was at least 18 and ready to go to college. Even in the eerie glow-light of the animals, Sansa didn't look nearly as concerned about this as Tony felt, which made it worse. It was only when she mentioned she shared a bed that Tony found himself releasing another held breath, really not sure his heart could take this if he didn't relax. He gave a soft chuckle at himself and shifted his attention back to the glownies, letting his eyes go unfocused as he used the fence to balance and pulled and ankle up behind himself in the other hand to stretch. They could have looked like jellyfish wandering around a tank, if he was far enough away. There was definitely a serenity here that he was out of sync with so far.

His voice dropped lower now that he knew there was someone else in the house and likely asleep at this hour, and Tony replied, "I don't know, are they supposed to be doing something else? I've never seen anything like it. I saw them from..." He was so distracted by their alluring glow that Tony hadn't been measuring the distance he came from the road, and could only gesture vaguely out into the street as he dropped his foot. "We've got, like, fish and algae that'll do that, but not...mammals." Definitely nothing of this scale, he was positive.

"We don't have animals such as these in Westeros either. What is even more strange is that the fur, when carded and spun into thread? It retains some of the glow but only in the dark. It doesn't if I dye it," Sansa clarifies. "But if it is undyed, it will retain the glow."

She might once have thought it a strange magic but she's learned such things here are called science, not magic. The glownies aren't dangerous, though, and generally good-natured so she isn't worried about tending them even while heavy with child. Lady helps, too, and as if summoned by thought, the direwolf pads up beside her. Sansa rubs between her ears.

"They're fairly calm creatures, though, even if I'm in no condition to tend livestock. It's just that Tyrion is in a far worse position to tend them so it's best that I do."

There was the wolf in the flock-- if that was a wolf, it was huge, which wasn't as strange as glowing but still made Tony uneasy. Sansa had a real menagerie going on here that Tony really didn't know how to anticipate. Was she keeping eight-winged chickens, too? She really had gone native. Someone from a time and place that didn't already have advanced comforts like processed cheese and polyester had to have been better suited to this environment by default, and Tony felt like he was lagging behind by virtue of trying to make something he was more familiar with. It hadn't even occurred to him that it was perfectly normal for someone to weave their own fabric, but it sounded completely natural coming from Sansa-- of course she was spinning thread, she already said she sewed, what else was she sewing? She was an absolute alchemist.

"Is he okay?" She made it sound like Tyrion was ill, and that could have been anything but Tony couldn't help but shoot another look at the glownies with a very intrusive 'radiation poisoning' thought. All of the animal tending, cloth weaving skill in the world didn't make Tony any more comfortable with two people who needed extra care out here alone in the suburbs. Or maybe he was just out having affairs that Sansa was being docilely supportive of, Tony didn't know. He wasn't about to push that one and admit who was manipulating the network.

"Tyrion? Oh, he's in good health. He just so happens to be a dwarf, is all, and seeing as I must be at least three times bigger than he is right now, it's a genuine concern if I do roll over him. He seems to find it amusing, though, so he's clearly not as worried about it as I am."

Tyrion had taken a true liking to this place the same way he had the Fleet and Sansa couldn't be more grateful. Being in this place meant they could actually be together and weren't separated by a continent and two whole kingdoms. He'd wanted the life they'd built together, even if the pregnancy had been a complete surprise to them both.

"I didn't expect to get pregnant since I never have. I suppose I got lucky this time."

Tony didn't respond right away, not sure what being a dwarf had to do with being able to handle animals because the ones he had met had been far more sturdy than a Midgardian pregnant lady on her best day, maybe he was the kind that couldn't go out in the sun? Tony didn't know enough about them, that was very much not his realm, literally. It took him far too long to settle on the much more grounded possibility, that she could have just meant Tyrion was a person with dwarfism, not an actual dwarf, and when he did, Tony went, "Oh!" with too much enthusiasm to be completely normal. Now he had to explain himself, that seemed rude. "I thought you meant he was a dwarf," which was only further nonsense, Tony realized. "Like, not an elf, a dwarf--" this wasn't helping, "you know what, forget it." At least Tyrion himself wasn't here for Tony to be saying things like his stature must have meant he was from a different plane of existence, but Tony still blushed in frustration. Thor would know how to explain what a dwarf was, Tony wasn't about to make himself suffer through more Tolkien to get a better grasp on it.

"Stress can play a big part," he continued quickly, happy to distract both of them from being embarrassed for him if he could. "You're happy, you're relaxed, your body is more ready to take on more processes. The luck is just more ideal conditions."

"Yes, Tyrion has dwarfism," Sansa says, unsure of what Tony is talking about. "Does dwarf mean something other than that to you? There are less kind things to call my husband but I'm not using them. He's the only husband who has ever shown me kindness in the bed and out of it. I respect him."

When he moves on to talk about her pregnancy, Sansa thinks about it. She'd not lain with Tyrion the first time they'd been forced to marry because he wouldn't without her consent. Ramsay tortured her mercilessly day and night with his body and his knives. She's only just come out of a long winter and a harrowing war. Here's a place that has no stress or worry. Perhaps it's why she could conceive now.

"I suppose so. They don't have medicine in my time, not like you have it here. I'd just thought myself barren, honestly, and that it was a blessing considering...the marriage I was in."

It was really a minefield of dark history with Sansa. With a glance at the giant wolf, trying to asses how it would take this, Tony took a chance and pulled himself up to sit on the fence, swinging his feet into the pen. This still felt detached, but less closed off than being on the other side while she was being so open. "There's a whole realm where the people there are called dwarves. Don't worry about it. Not even related," he tried once more, because that was still a better explanation than swapping the derogatory terms their cultures might have for people like her husband and comparing notes. They were probably pretty similar, they didn't have to get into it.

To Sansa's allusion to her worries with her less courteous husband, Tony suggested, "Maybe he was," with a shrug of one shoulder and a hint of a sardonic smile. One big failure of manhood like making your own wife hate her life, had to suggest a few more failures in the works. The ideal conditions thing was a much more pleasant answer, though, and Tony continued, "Tyrion must be great for you. The getting pregnant's the easy part, are you kidding me? That's the fun part. Getting this far takes a good support system. How do you know he's a boy? Do we have a maternity ward I wasn't aware of?"

"Wanda told me," Sansa says, cheeks flushed with excitement. "We have no way of knowing in our world until the child is born, of course, but Wanda could tell he was a boy as soon as she knew I was with child. She has a connection with him that I can never have but that's all right. I think of her as one of my sisters."

When Tony talks about getting pregnant, however, that flush turns to proper embarrassment. A queen she might be but these weren't subjects spoken about openly in her world. She's more comfortable with them now than she used to be, yes, but it was hard to suppress her natural feelings.

"I suppose it is quite fun," she says, a bit clipped. "Though I've never discussed it...like this. I did - I do enjoy it with Tyrion. He says we're both supposed to enjoy it, anyway. Not just him."

Wanda's exact powers were varied and mysterious to all of them, but that one in particular was new to Tony and he wasn't sure what to make of it. There was either a kind of telepathy at work, or some kind of ultrasound vision, both of which were disturbing in totally unique ways. He had seen her do a kind of precognition, that could be it, but Tony didn't that quite fit the bill of 'a connection'. The spectre of Wanda had been looming over his whole experience here now, and the longer he went without actually encountering her, the stranger it got. "Does she come around?" he asked, a little too loud while trying not to look completely desperate, but completely ignoring a woman telling him she enjoyed herself in the bedroom wasn't in his nature so that was going to be an obvious tell. "Not while you're making babies, of course." Smooth recovery. "Unless, you know--no judgement here, doesn't hurt to get some extra hands on a project."

"Not that way! I've never thought about her that way!" Sansa says, unsure if she's appalled or simply embarrassed. "Tyrion might have liked whores before he married me but he isn't like that any longer and I certainly don't look at Wanda that way! She and James were my closest friends and she's the only one I've got left now. The other James isn't the same."

Sansa exhales softly, trying to regain her composure. "The one that Steve is with isn't the same as mine. He's different. He hasn't been haunted the way mine was. It's how we bonded, James and I and Wanda and I. We've all gone through terrible things and have been forged into steel by them instead of falling away. I don't know Bucky even if he is the man James used to be and so I cling to Wanda. I don't want to lose her. I absolutely do not share my bed with her, though, or anyone who isn't my lord husband."

Tony's hands were already up to apologize, suddenly hyperaware with that reaction that he was still talking to a queen, like with a castle and the religious stuff and probably all kinds of social rules, and he should have been more respectful in his approach and careful with his jokes no matter how comfortable she seemed to be with sharing with him. He had already learned about the boundaries he had to watch back on Risa, he didn't have to immediately forget about that just because the natural rules of the luminescence of animals were being tested here.

He didn't get to his apology, though, because Sansa had a lot of information for him, starting with a bit about whores that, on reflection, Tony wasn't supposed to laugh at and still forced him to chuckle uncomfortably for lack of a better reaction. That probably wasn't something she was supposed to share about Tyrion. Tying her James to Bucky was whiplash after that, that made Tony murmur a long note of understanding as the whole blueprint revealed itself-- Steve and Bucky had mentioned a whole other Bucky, too. It was a strange image that Sansa was presenting, the tight clique of her, Bucky and Wanda, but there was a lot of history there that Tony was not privy to and wasn't about to test. Okay, he shouldn't joke about sleeping with Wanda because they were friends, like she and Bucky were friends, and that definitely was not his baby. Clear.

"I was just wondering if she was likely to come by the house..." Tony replied weakly with a grimace at causing this problem.

Sansa colors a bit, utterly embarrassed that she'd taken it to a place that it hadn't meant to go. She is glad for the dark, at least, and when Tony asks if Wanda comes around to the house, Sansa nods. She and Wanda like to see one another a few times a week at minimum so there's no reason to think that will change any time soon.

"Oh! Wanda comes around a good bit, yes. At least every other day, if not daily. A lot of people have been a little worried about me because I'm the first pregnancy that any of us have had since coming from the Fleet. We'd spent years there, in the case of some, and no children had been born the entire time. I didn't conceive there before. I conceived very soon after I got here."

So if Tony did stick around long enough, Wanda might happen to walk through the door, too. He couldn't go pursuing her-- this Wanda was a totally different person, he had no right to do that, and even if she was anything like the one Tony had left back in his own dimension, she had disappeared for a reason. No Avenger was on her trail because that wasn't what was best for any of them.

Only now he had made it weird, completely offended Sansa's sensibilities with a threesome joke and put that awkward tone in her voice, he couldn't just ask if that invitation for breakfast was still on. Tony cleared his throat, nodding like he was definitely paying attention to what Sansa was saying. Something about the baby, right-- "Is that why you're not sleeping? He's still doing this? Come on, kid, we talked about this," Tony complained, as though she would have had any better reason to be restless at this point.

Sansa sighs a little and rubs a hand over the swell of her pregnancy. Her child seems active all the time now and she knows it must be soon - but not right now. It's difficult to time it, really, since she hadn't been tracking things until about two or three moons in. Her lips curve in a small smile.

"He never sleeps, Tony. There's not enough room in there and he keeps trying to make more by shoving my insides out of his way. Do you have any ideas? Walking helped last time on Risa so I thought I might try it again this morning - even if morning is the middle of the night."

Sansa had made it clear that Tony should maybe keep some of his ideas to himself, but that didn't stop him from making a show of holding his tongue, pressed under a devious canine tooth, and letting his narrowed gaze wander thoughtfully to the sky. Just what could bring relief in the middle of the night? He laughed off the expression before Sansa could take him too seriously again, giving a wave that said he would definitely hold himself accountable for this continued disrespect, then shifted where he sat to make room for her between his knees and tapped the fence there where she could put her back. "I had a friend, a lifetime ago," he said, and that could have meant anything in this place, "and we were in a similar position, cut off, basically on our own planet, doing our own kind of survival and she was due..." Basically immediately, Tony had found out, but the delivery story was another one entirely. "About where you're at now," he said. "We didn't have a lot of options, is what I'm saying, and this seemed to work for her."

Sansa arches an eyebrow at him but shrugs and comes to rest against the fence so that her back had a little relief. It's not much, really, but nothing took the pain away entirely these days. She'll eventually give birth and then the pain part would be over, at least.

"I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point. My husband seems to think that if we...the child will come faster. I told him that was a story that men have been telling their wives for centuries and had no proof to back it up whatsoever."

This was going to do something, Tony was confident of that, so he took that skeptical look brightly and smiled at her approach. He at least had something else for her to think about. With his hands on her shoulders first to welcome her and accustom her to this position, he started to laugh at Sansa's careful dance around being too crass now and offered in Tyrion's defense, "I've heard that one, too." Carefully pushing her hair over her shoulder had him wondering briefly at the texture of it, and sure he could have mistaken her for Pepper at this angle. There was too much to keep his mind busy here, he didn't have time to be homesick.

"I've heard spicy food can do the trick, too, if that's more your thing, but I'd have to side with your husband there. I don't know if that's the sort of thing you should be forcing or anything, but if you've got an excuse to do completely indecent things to each other, there's not even a question, you take it every time." At least, that was what Tony thought the benefits of marriage were. His fingers settled alongside her neck, propped gently on her shoulders where he could press his thumbs to the base of her skull, seeking upward for tension that she would be carrying all the way down her spine.

The feel of his hands is very, very nice and Sansa thinks that this might be the most relaxed she's been in weeks and he's barely started it. Clearly she should have asked someone to rub her neck before now because it seems to be helping - at least with all the worry she carries about having the baby.

"It was a lot easier to be indecent before there was so much of me," Sansa says with a laugh. "As it is, not much left to do. There's something to be said for trying though, I suppose."

She lets out a soft noise and exhales, trying to let some of the tension out. "And you are very good at this. You may have a business on your hands if you advertise."

Tony's hands were his primary resource; the day someone could accuse them of not being talented, he was going to be out of commission, but it was more often less yielding metal that he had to work with. If he could build half the empire out of a good neck massage, he might be willing to give it a try. "That's what this place is missing. Pictures of my face, on every street corner," he agreed. Egotistical posturing was much safer territory than wading into whether or not Sansa should be letting her pregnancy get in the way of feeling frisky. That was a minefield of delicate self-image and someone else's bedroom, Tony could already sense the tears. "Back home, you couldn't escape my brand if you ran to the other side of the Earth. In fact, our numbers are better over there. It's actually kind of a relief, can you believe that?" Tony didn't have a short version of why that would be a relief, so he noted, "You usually have very good posture," directing his pressure to her notably trained spine between her shoulders, "but you're overcorrecting, here." He pushed there gently with his thumbs again, lifting her chin with his fingers spread along her jaw, so she wasn't sitting so much into the weight of that baby.

"I do think you might be right," Sansa says. It feels much better when Tony pushes between her shoulders and lifts her chin. She has to wonder how he knows how to do this, though, and files that in back to puzzle at later. She'll pick the easier thing for now.

"You are excessively fond of yourself," Sansa agrees. "But alone you...I don't know. I think you're hiding a little. What you're doing for me gets you no personal gain. It's just a nice thing for a friend. Someone that obsessed with his own self wouldn't be selfless. Perhaps it's good no one knows who you are other than your friends from home. And, well, me of course. I know everyone named Stark. It's a rule."

'Excessively fond' was not one Tony had heard before, and it tickled him enough to make him chuckle, hands going loose and abstract in the work until she got a little too observant. At least she bookended it with another one that Tony could snort at, giving him time to mount his defense and seek out a pressure point under her ear to put her balance to the test.

"I don't know who told you that my intentions were selfless, but you shouldn't trust them, they're setting you up for disappointment. You don't know, I could be a vampire," he pointed out and tipped her head into one hand to expose the weakness of her throat to a hovering predator. Selfless wasn't the worst thing she could accuse him of, Tony found, and he was happy to entertain the concept as long as they didn't stray any further back to what he had to hide. "And are you boasting, is that supposed to be a boast? There's two of us, that's a very narrow field of study, that's a thesis your advisor won't even bother to read. Scratch that, I have a cousin that's still kickin', a whole third specimen for your research."

"And I have a sister, a brother and a half-brother left," Sansa agrees. "But there's still only a few Starks lying about. Just enough that I care about, anyway. When winter comes, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives. Winter lasts years where I'm from," she explains.

"So it's no small thing to concern yourself with it. Hence, I don't think you'll do anything foolish. I wouldn't have trusted you otherwise. I know better now than I used to. I can just tell."

Imposing himself on the pack sounded like more of a good argument for Tony's more selfish intentions than hypothetical vampirism; they weren't very different concepts. But kindness without altruism didn't necessarily make the action any less kind, not in the moment, so Sansa wasn't wrong. The way she spoke made 'naive' seem like the wrong assessment, too. "Don't say that one too quick, I am capable of a myriad of foolish things that can and will surprise both of us," he dismissed first, but had to ask, "How old are you? You've lived a life, I get that, but sometimes you talk like you've been dealing with bullshit for about 80 years. And if that's true, listen, you look amazing, any tips?"