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[ Tony's arms go back down.

And he enters the room, uh huh uh huh'ing along with what she's saying as he flips through his notes in his hand, nodding, sure, yep, and then finds what he is looking for. When he finds it, he flips it around, laying the backside on his chest.

She will have to squint, but she will be able to see the sketch lines of what appears to be a dirigible schematic. He probably didn't draw it this morning. ]

[She does indeed squint.]

Mister Stark, [is shades of faux indignance. A page on one of the earlier piles is turned over; it features a complex series of arcane diagrams, meticulously constructed and starkly alien in comparison to the runic enchantment work which so often litters her work otherwise.] Have you been keeping secrets from me?

Looks like we both got our hobbies.

[ He makes his way over, offers the book with that page turned out for perusal—and turns his wrist to twirl it out of her reach when she goes to take it. ]

What kinda grievances? Just the big one?

[Her hand, having closed around air, is promptly tucked back against her side.]

Well, [is something like a scoff, an embarrassed exhalation as she pivots her attention briefly to shuffling nearest to hand.] More or less. The Ambassador and Mister Dickerson mostly. And Mister Fitz as well, I suppose.

[Her gaze flicks back.]

Unless there is something you would prefer we add.

Huh.

[ The book is twitched back in position for her to take. If she does not, it is dropped in range. Tony snags a chair and drags it over, reaching for the diagrams of arcane scribbles she'd revealed. ]

What did Dickerson do.

[Please. The book is promptly snatched and her nose buried in it. Her hand, and the pen in it, resumes its work across the ready page—notes on the sketches rapidly taking form.]

Informed the Ambassador of our whereabouts in the dream, evidently. But you should know as we discuss this, Mister Stark, that it is my opinion that one shouldn't put too much stock on this things. Mister Dickerson is a clever and resourceful person and I would see him kept as a friend. The same should be said for Mister Fitz. To Byerly Rutyer I can extent no such praise, of course, but given the logic of the dream I suppose that I understand even his basic impulses.

[ The airship sketches boast a few different designs, external structure and mechanisms both. Enchantment and powercores with lyrium reactors are factored in but more broadly, blank spaces where repulsion motors and heat generation and locomotive power would go.

Tony sits back in his chair, leg crossing the other. He glances at her over the top of the pages he's picked up, a whiskery twitch at his mouth at the mention of giving Mister Fitz a pass. ]

You don't have 'snitches get stitches' in your world? I thought that was universal.

[Without looking up:]

I hardly think that applies in this case. Have you never done something out of character or preposterous or unfairly cruel in a dream?

Okay—

[ Tony tosses the pages back on the desk so he can rub his face, then his fingers through his hair, which stands up straight as a result. ]

I'ma call a moratorium on naming what happened a 'dream' for a minute. I know we like throwing just literally whatever convenient word around in Thedas for weird crap we don't understand, and that dreaming is in itself more of that, but it's not the same thing as what we just went through.

Like, no one's jogging naked down route 61 and highfiving President Eisenhower. It's not raining eels in Paris, it's not hooking up with Miss July who turns out to be the au pair you had when you were like eight, so that's weird, it was—

—a shared simulation. And we won't know anything about the conditions or parameters involved in choosing who goes where, and what they do next. You were pretty damn in character from where I was standing.

Edited 2021-02-14 00:13 (UTC)

[That last bit makes her look up, bristling. The point of the pen's nib presses down hard enough to leave a wet black mark in the midst of a half written sentence before good sense (or instinct) takes over and her hand tips it up off the page.]

I most certainly was not.

[ This pivot in tone forces a pause, studying her across the workspace. ]

Okay.

[ Like walking casually down a street and then someone making you aware that actually there are hidden landmines everywhere, Tony stays conversationally still for a beat. ]

Just so.

[With hackles still up, she reverts her attention to the page and begins a new line. It takes a few resolute pen strokes before the bristling parts smooth themselves down again.

So. Yes. Fine. Continuing then.]

Relations with certain individuals aside, if we are to take the thing so literally then you and I might soon find ourselves in an equally uncomfortable position given all the aid we lend to the Venatori. And I hardly see the point in that.

[ He does think to himself: put a pin in that. But then— ]

Nuh uh, [ he says, pointing. ] No we didn't. We did not.

We were told we lent aid to the Venatori. We woke up one day in a jail cell and we were given memories about how we got there. But I sure as hell don't remember getting nabbed by them. I don't remember agreeing to anything. I don't remember building or innovating. I remember remembering it. Those were the conditions.

But I remember us working out how to get free, and doing that. And everything else that happened in, what, a few weeks of simulation? The choices that were made? That's on them.

Edited 2021-02-14 01:24 (UTC)

[As he's talking, her hand continues on its merry way. Scratch, scratch, scratch says the nib of her pen as it loops its way through delicate loops and lines. It's clearly the same hand--and indeed perhaps the same pen, for she rarely uses any other--which painstakingly drew out those elaborate otherworldly runes and diagrams on the page she'd traded. Diamonds nested within circles within broken lines, like mathematic graphs on a system with different values, or diagrams of clockwork in a place without time, or the alphabet of some language whose fundamentals have gone untranslated.

Her brow furrows as she listens, a wrinkle pinching there. It's followed by another pause (pen up from the paper this time), and Wysteria opening her mouth to object--

And then closing her mouth to squint at the point where the wall and ceiling of the room join together, considering the logic--]

That hardly seems fair, Mister Stark. It is all well and good to say, but the truth of the matter is that some of us were lucky enough to be given memories which were honorable and just and some of us were not. It is far more natural to act in accordance with what one believes to be their practice than otherwise.

So the game's rigged. I'm not saying we should take 'em out the back or anything—

[ He hasn't forgotten her doodles. Or he did, briefly, honing in on making his point, but now that he's made it and she's scribbling away over there, he tips a look back at it. ]

But, you know, I have a very selective Christmas card list, and they've lost out, that's for dang sure.

Your anti-magic shield was dope, by the way, let's make that happen too.

[From the sound she makes—swallowing a protest so abruptly that it seems like she might choke on it—, this last part is an unexpected turn in the trajectory of the conversation. And surprise enough that for a moment it briefly undercuts her intent for further hen pecking.]

Oh that. It isn't possible. There might be some way of adapting the theory of course—something to do with the Templars and what they do, perhaps? But the form it took in the dream? No.

How do you imagine these to work? It can't be a mage producing the lift; they would be exhausted before it could travel anywhere useful. You need—Ah. [Another note is scratched down in the margins of her page.]

Yeah, [ Tony says, at her ah, filling in the blank. ] Fun part will be figuring out how to power a sustained heat-based glyph with that much oomph and not catch the whole thing on fire. Oh, the humanity, et cetera.

[ He picks up her notes, watching her write. He has something he wans to ask. More critical than the subject of Venatori treachery, of his slow death she carried herself away from getting too close to, of the substance of the reality they shared together, a month like, five years long.

Nonchalantly; ]

What'd you think about the robot?

Oh.

[She hums, drawing an excitable series of runes in the margins of her notes. A box is drawn about them, presumably to emphasize their importance when she is later reviewing her own handwriting.]

Very cool.

Edited 2021-02-16 17:12 (UTC)

[ His smile is immediate and genuine if a little compressed, like in resistance to it, keeping his eyes fixed on the pages he's stolen as it happens. That day, Tony Stark's heart grew three sizes.

Papers rustle, and he now lays her notes flat against his chest and turned out so she can see her own rows of runic scribble. ]

So I've been reading this for three minutes and I have no idea what this is.

No, I don't suppose you would. It's a Kalvadan spell diagram. A very basic one, mind. Though I've been refining it for some time.

[Dashing off a last note, Wysteria at last sets her pen aside entirely and raises her attention from the page and the airship sketches. She looks at him.]

Would you like to see how it works?

[ There is a beat in which the amount of that Tony wants to see how it works cannot be properly quantified and is written plain in his look across at her. Probably the fact he is also exhausted means he can pull off the nonchalant— ]

Sure.

[The line of her mouth pulls sideways and her eyebrows flirt in the direction of her hairline, but she does hin the courtesy of not explicitly calling his bluff. That would be rude.

Instead, Wysteria takes a random blank page from the middle of her stack. She folds it in half once and then lays it open with the fold's crease exposed on the table.]

Lend me something from your pockets, if you please. Something with bulk if you have it.

Okay David Blaine.

[ Tony pushes both hands into his jacket pockets, coming up with his comms crystal—which goes back in—and a pair of winter gloves. This latter thing he offers with a querying twitch, a glance down at the paper. ]

I'm watching both hands. Nothing gets by me.

I don't know who that is, [is an automatic reminder as she takes the gloves.

There is no showmanship about it. Wysteria simply sets the gloves on one side of the paper, and then closes the other half over them.

Completely.

All the way over them.

The two sides of the folded paper meet flush and smooth, as if nothing at all lived between them that might reasonably make closing the fold—not difficult. Impossible.

Wysteria folds the paper a few more times, making a neat little self secured origami envelope out of the thing. She slides it back across the table to him.]

There.

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