ᴊᴜʟɪᴀ ᴡɪᴄᴋᴇʀ (juliawicker) wrote in noexits, @ 2021-01-14 19:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread/narrative, the magicians: julia wicker, ₴ inactive: tony stark, → week 005 (rest) |
log: julia wicker & tony stark, day one.
Tony arrives in a new world. Julia finds out she has a roommate. They both kinda try to ditch the other before deciding maybe they could work together. They get coffee. Lucky for them that Tony brought doughnuts.WARNINGS Language!
Instead, she found herself at the start of the new week back in her tiny, shitty dorm room. The extra bed was back, despite Julia shoving it in the hallway to make more space, and she looked unhappy to see it. This was week five now. She’d learned that small changes stayed, but some things would always reset.
“Fuck!” she barked. Julia paused. Closing her eyes, she took a couple of steadying breaths. Anger got shit done, but too much and she was prone to making bad choices. She sat up and reviewed the notes she made in confiscated notebooks from one of the other buildings, rereading everything she had surmised about the campus, which wasn’t much.
It was called Derleth University, which as far as she knew, did not exist on her world.
There were ten structures if you counted the greenhouse, two dorms, one dining hall. The clinic was not yet important to note, but like the dining hall, everything seemed to be more or less provisioned.
Magically speaking, nothing worked for her as far as an escape went. And as far as she knew, everyone else that had arrived were just as stuck.
She looked outside her window and saw the return of the void. Which meant… her record in the void so far was mixed, but at least if something inside the campus fucked with them again she could be reasonably certain by the start of the next week everything would be back to how it was.
She just had to decide what her next action would be.
Julia had not counted on the door to her room opening.
Maybe seeing a man in bright red and gold armor, Ray-Bans, and a box of doughnuts shouldn’t have been the surprise that it was. It took Julia about a second to hop up onto her feet and do her best to keep him from entering. Not that she could have really stopped him.
“Oh no, we are not doing this. You can get your own room. Goddamned enchanted keys are not saddling me with a roommate in a fucking closet.”
At this point, it was hard for Julia to remember how she would have responded before. This couldn’t have been that far off? Would the old her really have just said hello? Offered her name? Welcomed him in without trying to figure out an obviously much better solution?
She slipped past the man and knocked loudly on the room next to hers. Seeing no one in there before, Julia assumed it was empty. He could stay there. She pounded one more time and was satisfied when there was no answer, her right hand made a practiced gesture near the handle.
Nothing happened.
Julia tried the door to find it still locked.
She muttered under her breath and tried the small spell again. And again. She couldn’t get it open.
The first words she really spoke to him, when she really noticed him, were, “Give me your key.” She held out her hand. It was then she noticed he was hungover and there were strange lines on his neck. “I’m trying to get you your own room, so unless you want to share…” Her hand gestured expectantly.
Tony Stark was in no mood to deal with crazy chicks.
A few minutes earlier, he had been pushing his way out of Randy’s Donuts in the wee hours of the morning after literally crashing his fortieth birthday party, when he found himself standing in the courtyard of some gothic revival building with a box of donuts and one new voicemail. Instead of being from his red-headed assistant—new or former—with some choice words for his behavior the night before, it was the voice of a stranger with even stranger news. From within his Iron Man helmet, Tony closed his eyes and shook his head. Hallucinations. This was new. He tossed the unopened box of donuts on an empty bench, lowered his helmet, and took off.
He got exactly nowhere.
No matter how high he flew, the building and the college campus that housed it remained a hundred feet below him. And completely surrounded by a vast white nothingness.
What the fuck?
After several failed attempts to leave, Tony returned to his donuts and the key that had randomly turned up on top of it. Hungover, hungry, and mentally unequipped to work out what the hell was going on at that precise moment, he snatched the key, his breakfast, and headed inside for a private place to regroup.
Or not.
Tony’s sunglasses slipped down on his nose as he looked down at the short and pushy occupant of what he thought was supposed to be his room. He wasn’t in the mood. Instead of his key, Tony grabbed a donut from his box, placed it in Julia’s expectant hand, then shut the door in her face.
“Shit,” he sighed, leaning against the closed door and taking a deep breath. His throbbing head bounced a little off door.
Julia stared at the doughnut in her hand, flinching perceptibly at the shut door. There were notebooks on her desk, filled with pages of things to try, her observations. After a month, she was onto notebook number two. Since the room had been hers alone for over a month, she hadn’t thought to put them away or keep them out of sight or even tidy.
Sometimes, Julia tried to remember how she was supposed to feel. She was still angry, waking up here, but doughnut in hand, she realized she maybe had been harsh. Harsh enough to feel bad about it? She tried, and was unable to. Would she have before?
Quentin would have given her a look, probably. Julia put the doughnut in her mouth and held it between her teeth, fishing her own key out of her pocket. Fine, she could relocate herself, and get her stuff from her former room later.
She tried a spell, and nothing happened.
She tried another. Still nothing.
Even a cosmetic spell, to make the key look like it was meant for another room failed to work. That struck her as especially bizarre and overblown. It was, as far as she could tell, enchantment proof. She paused to take a bite from the offered doughnut and chewed thoughtfully.
I should try to make amends, she thought. Old Julia would have apologized. Shadeless Julia took another bite of doughnut. Her back against the hallway, she slid downward and sat cross-legged on the floor. The Quentin of her mind’s eye gave her another look, but Julia was able to banish him. She could make amends later.
She held the partially eaten doughnut in her mouth again, it was pretty good actually, in order to free up her hands. Like in bad 90s heist movies where a bit of spy dust was sprinkled over a secured hall, Julia’s spell lit up the spellwork of the wards revealing faintly glowing lines of spellwork.
The doughnut nearly fell out of her mouth and into her lap. Julia caught it in her hands at the last moment.
“Fuck,” she said.
The wards that were visible, she suspected there was even more to the spellwork than what she could see, were more intense than the security wards used at Brakebills. There was no way she could undo this on her own. She wasn’t even sure where to begin.
It was kind of a shame The Beast wasn’t around.
Julia sat in the hall, staring at the magical code that had lit up the hallway, eating her doughnut and trying to make sense of it.
Whatever this place was, they were so fucked.
When the small, crazy woman did not force her way back in, Tony opened his eyes for a quick scan of the room. There was an empty bed, and he tossed his helmet there while setting the donuts down on the desk in front of it. Donut in hand, he snooped around at the work on the other desk. Clearly his roomie had been here for a while. Munching on a maple iced donut, he thumbed through one of her notebooks. The observations were of mild interest and gave him a better picture of this place, but what really caught his eye were what looked a bit like mathematics. At first, it looked like the jottings of a lunatic, but Tony quickly saw a logic to it. But its purpose?
He opened the door to the room as if he expected to find Julia sitting on the floor in the hallway. He tossed the notebook down onto the floor in front of her, opened to one of the pages filled with equations. Every move he made was accompanied by a pleasant sort of whirring sound as the joints operated. “What the hell is this?” For someone who had just unceremoniously evicted her from her own room, Tony’s vibe was suddenly strangely friendly. His curiosity had been piqued, which for the moment, pushed his hangover and potential existential crisis onto the backburner.
If Julia was upset about being booted, she didn’t look it. She had, after all, tried to give him the boot. Asking about the notebook was a bigger sore spot. The back of her head knocked gently against the wall behind her as she looked at the ceiling.
“Failed attempts to get out of here.” She sighed. “It’s not a simulation or a psychic prison. As far as we can tell everyone here is real and not a hallucination, but also from parallel realities. One week the campus is locked here in a pocket dimension, the next the whole campus travels or teleports to some other world.”
Julia’s gaze shifted to make sure her lack of bedside manner hadn’t lost him yet. “Last week we were in Regency England. Probably not my Regency England but also probably easier to escape from than this place, so I put an ocean and most the American continent between here and me and still woke up here today.”
Julia paused. “What’s the deal with the armor?”
As the asshole whose name tag at events usually read, “You know who I am,” her question caught Tony off guard. “Costume party,” he replied dismissively. “You didn’t answer my question.” He blew past the quantum-mechanical implications of her recap and nudged the notebook with an armored foot as he took a bite of his maple glazed. “The math.”
“It’s magic,” she said, sounding equally dismissive.
“Bullshit.” From Tony’s perspective, her response meant she was blowing him off, and that wasn’t how things worked. “It looks like a derivative of the Richards Conjecture.”
“It’s magic,” Julia repeated, only this time her hand did a gesture and held a near perfect sphere of fire. Huh. That was a good one even by her standards. She dissipated the fireball by shaking at her hand and stood up, gathering her notebook. “Also I can’t hack the wards in this place, so in the meantime you’re stuck with me.”
Julia was small enough to slip past him in the hall back into their shared room where she opened the drawer to her desk and shoved the notebooks in there, as if that would be enough to keep Tony from going through her things if he felt like it.
“Neat trick,” Tony scoffed, unconvinced. “You gonna pull a rabbit out of a hat next?” He didn’t try to stop her from entering the room. He watched her judgmentally as she hid her notebooks away. “You don’t wanna talk about your work, fine. I get it.” His armored shoulder shrugged awkwardly. “Who wants to resolve the EPR paradox anyway, right?” He shoved the rest of his donut into his mouth.
“Only if it’ll get us out of here. I’m not really into resolving paradoxes so much as using them.” She sat on her bed, which also worked as a makeshift couch. “Some of those ideas weren’t mine, anyway. A friend came up with quite a bit of it, I just thought there might be something useful in her work.” Julia almost frowned at the memory of Kira. More recent, she had a clearer memory of the parapalegic woman whose life work Julia helped her to complete.
Julia was trying to put together a picture of who the hell the stranger was in front of her. Armor. Scientist. Doughnut connoisseur. Didn’t believe in magic.
“I’m Julia,” she tried. Not that his name would mean much to her, but it seemed like maybe they should have started with that. Oops.
“Tony,” he replied flatly. The headache was back on his radar. “There any coffee in this place?” He shifted uncomfortably in his armor. It fit like a glove, but he’d been in it for hours, and the means to remove it were, what, a parallel world away? Not completely out of the realm of possibility, but not exactly something he had been prepared to deal with today.
Julia stood and went to the window. Thankfully their room faced the green turf and other buildings, rather than the void on the other side. “Dining services,” she said, pointing to Dexter Hall with her finger pressed against the window. “There’s a few industrial coffee makers in the kitchen. It’s mostly a help yourself situation for the moment.”
Julia stepped back and looked him over. “You gunna keep rocking the ComicCon look?”
Tony followed her gesture with his eyes, but made no move to head off in that direction just yet. “Does it look like this thing has a zipper?”
Julia pressed her lips tightly together and when that wasn’t enough to hide her highly amused smile, she clamped a hand over her mouth. There wasn’t a way to hide the pure look of joy in her eyes though.
She carefully composed herself before she dropped her hand and opened her mouth to speak, “Please tell me you’re wearing something under the armor.” Because otherwise helping him was going to get awkward.
“My birthday suit,” Tony confirmed, waiting a couple of beats before adding, “It’s pinstriped.” He looked down at her over the top of his sunglasses. “Why? You have an industrial robotic arm in that other drawer?” He motioned toward the desk where her notebooks had disappeared to.
“Happy birthday,” Julia said. Holding up her hands, her brows furrowed as focused on the armor, more specifically the desire to free one of his arms. Her hands and fingers moved delicately, the first part of the spell to get a sense of the mechanisms that kept the suit of metal together.
When she didn’t get a clear sense of it— too many moving parts, perhaps the type of metal affecting the spell, the lack of moon, sun or stars in the sky— she closed her eyes to concentrate and started again. And when she finally had what she thought, her hands turned and her fingers completed a new series of gestures which… popped off a single piece of the armor at his shoulder.
He was still completely covered, even as the piece clanged to the floor, there were still mechanical workings underneath.
“Jesus, Tony,” Julia frowned. “How many pieces is this?”
"Not particularly," Tony replied, as if her happy birthday had been a question instead of a declaration.
He wasn't sure what he was expecting Julia to do. Certainly not make a series of unexplained, peculiar hand gestures. He watched her skeptically. When the armor detached at his shoulder, however, he whipped his sunglasses off and stared at Julia through squinted eyes. Ok, so maybe she hadn't been blowing him off with the line about magic. “Does it matter?” His eyes were still narrowed. “Do that again.”
Julia gave Tony a look. As if it was silly not to believe in magic. Maybe she’d been in her own personal magical silo for too long, or with the loss of her shade went away some of her ability to empathize. The other shoulder would be easier now that she had an idea of how that particular piece attached to the rest of the mechanized armor, but she was still focused on getting his arm free.
Julia took his arm and positioned it parallel to the ground to make it easier.
The first series of gestures to find the mechanism that released his armored glove, the second to actually release it. This time she was able to pull the glove off carefully and reveal his hand underneath. She set it on his bed, next to the helm. “I don’t actually know what I’m doing so if there’s an order this is supposed to go, or you want it to go…”
Julia visually looked over the rest of the arm, not sure how many pieces were left to remove, but once more it took multiple gestures to discern and to unlock the armor. “Is this normal on your world?” This time the rest of the arm released like a clam shell, freeing his limb.
Tony was barely paying attention to her words. His eyes were fixed on her hands, as if he could decipher the meaning and function of the gestures for himself. “The government would like it to be. Not gonna happen.” Or maybe it would. He had left Iron Man in the hands of Rhodey. It would be his decision now.
Tony tapped the armor surrounding his torso. “Chest piece next. Steer clear of the glowy bit unless you want to share your room with a corpse.”
“Glowy bit. Is that the technical term?” Julia arched one of her eyebrows not sure if she was amused or annoyed. Figuring out how to open the suit wasn’t easy. It required a lot of staring at him, giving her more time to study him. “The lines on your neck? You’re connected to all of this?”
A few more gestures and she had the chest piece open.
“Highly technical.” Tony didn’t feel the need to elaborate on its purpose. “More like it’s connected to me.” This point was made clearer when the chest piece fell away with a hefty thunk, revealing a suit jacket, unfastened tie, and an unbuttoned dress shirt framing the arc reactor in his chest. Clearly the decision to wear the armor had been made in haste.
He began to button up his shirt. Not out of any sense of modesty, but in order to cover up the web of black veins that spiraled out from the arc reactor and had begun inching up his neck. It was something he had chosen to keep hidden from everyone. A personal penance for past wrongs, the conclusion to what started a year ago in that Aghan desert. He had been on borrowed time, but long enough to get his affairs in order, leave things better than they would have been had he never made it out of that cave.
“That looks painful.” Julia stated it as fact, rather than concern. Now that the chest was done she went to work quietly on the other arm. Not out of respect so much as she needed to concentrate on what she was doing. Casting was initially tricky in the void, but with each spell she adjusted her technique to what would be a new normal for the foreseeable future.
“Legs next?” she asked.
"I had a good surgeon." In truth, it was painful. Nothing sharp or intense, but a dull ache that was always there, but one that Tony could push to the back of his mind when it was preoccupied with other things.
He heaved the chest piece up into the bed, with no mind to the fact that he would likely need to sleep there later. He still had not conceded to the belief he was stuck in this place. "Legs next." He continued to watch her work with an expression that could have been interest or disbelief. "Is this normal on your world?" he finally asked, throwing her question back at her.
“Magic?” Julia asked. “Before I knew it it existed, I would have said no. Kind of hard to tell now, if I’m being honest. Not when you’re in the thick of it.”
Each leg took a series of locks and mechanisms to undo before Julia moved onto the rest of the torso, beyond the chest piece, and finally had him out. She had no idea what the armor was capable of, the technology and care that went into its design. The history, its fame, his fame. She’d dismantled it with all the pomp of a tired locksmith. “Ta da,” she said, followed by, “Coffee?”
“Interesting.” While Julia removed the remainder of the armor, Tony started to fasten his tie before thinking better of it, and tugged it loose from his collar. He kept the jacket, and even with his hangover, unkempt hair, and the hint of a shiner he was sporting under his left eye, he looked annoyingly put together. Once he’d been freed from the last bit of the armor, he retrieved his sunglasses and retreated behind them once again. A nod. “I’m thinking Grande. No, Venti. Maybe just an IV caffeine drip. Or a beer bong. A place like this, there’s gotta be a beer bong around here we could use to just pour it down the hatch.”
“Campus is dry,” Julia reported with a frown. “If I’d known I’d be stuck back here, I would have stocked up on absinthe. They were also really into medicinal cocaine. Not sure I would have gone that far but lesson learned. Next world that has alcohol, stock up.”
There was something about his nervous talking that reminded her just ever so slightly of Q. So she nudged him gently with his elbow and smiled. Universal sign for chill. “Besides, we got this. I’ll bring the magic and you bring the armor that’s really inconvenient to get in and out of. ...And hopefully tomorrow we don’t age almost a decade again.”
Julia gave a half shrug and led him toward Dexter Hall.
“Of course it is,” Tony mumbled flatly, but raised an eyebrow at the rest of her comment. “How long did you say you’d been stuck here?” He wasn’t sure she actually had.
“If I’d known my donut run was going to turn into a Gilligan-style three hour tour, I would have worn the one that packs into a briefcase.” Actually, that one had been partially destroyed by a dick with daddy issues that rivaled his own, but whatever.
“Going on week five,”Julia said. When she looked at Tony, there might have been a split-second once over, now that she could see him and he was no longer in his suit. “Why wouldn’t you normally use armor you can pack into a briefcase? Seems a little more practical.”
Their room was already small for two people who weren’t eager college freshmen. The armor itself took up quite a bit of real estate, especially dismantled. She opened the door to the dining hall and walked past empty dining tables and chairs into the kitchens behind them. Another time and it might have been a nice place. Empty, there was an eeriness to the way their steps were just a little too loud beneath them.
“Practical: yes. Powerful: not so much. At least not yet. The suit’s a work in progress.” Tony exhaled loudly. “Five weeks, huh? And no one’s made any headway with the how and the why of this place?” Not that it would necessarily be a mystery he would be able to solve. His days were numbered. There could be more of them, if he stayed out of the armor. Maybe he could still be useful before the end.
He looked around at the empty dining hall. It reminded him of the overpriced boarding school his dad had shipped him off to as soon as he was old enough. Not necessarily a time he wanted to be reminded of. Tony let Julia lead him to the coffee.
“Honestly, I was much more interested in just finding a way out,” Julia sighed. “Maybe if I didn’t have important shit to do, this place would seem more interesting. Now I’m not sure if I really have a choice.”
Julia got the coffee, which wasn’t completely terrible thanks to the high tuition rates, and thanks to Barton, she knew how to work the machine easily enough. “I know someone who can literally teleport between worlds. I just have to get out a message and point him in the right direction before he dies.” Her jaw clenched slightly, her hands were a little rougher with the machine. To be so close to a solution, and yet so close to losing any hope, pissed her off. But there was more than that.
Her hand went to the medallion she wore that hid her from Reynard. If she took it off, there was a chance he might show up, but she wasn’t prepared to kill him here.
Tony had already finished his "important shit" for the most part before he was dragged here, wherever here was. Maybe that made him the lucky one out of the castaways. Still, that didn't mean he wanted to spend the rest of his days in some ghost town of an Ivy League school. "So you've tried your whole witch angle. Anyone looked at the problem with a scientific eye?"
Tony didn't intervene when she began to get rough with the machine. If he had been the one making the coffee, he doubted he would be any gentler. "Teleportation. How does that work?" He paused. "And don't try to beat me over the head with your it's magic explanation. Because I've seen your magic now, and I know it's more complicated than that." He still wasn't sure he could believe in the concept of magic as some all-powerful fairy tale plot device. But if he subscribed to the belief that mathematics was the language of the universe, there was room for whatever he'd seen Julia do, especially if what was scribbled in her notebooks was what she called magic.
It took a little more searching for the mugs. Julia slid one to Tony over the counter. “Rick. He’s … different. Apparently he’s been in simulations before and thought some alien race might be responsible and said alien race hates nudity so guess how I met him.”
Julia’s brows made a sort of shrugging expression. “There’s a few people from pretty far in the future. Space military. Not sure how much help any of them will be. One of them is really into mushrooms?”
Julia waited for the coffee to brew. Whether it was a limitation or just patience, she did not use magic to speed the process along. “I can calculate portals. But my way of teleporting only works on the same material plane. What Penny does is different. He basically just thinks it. There is more to it than that, he’s psychic for one, he has to know where he’s going, for two. There’s a magician here with a spell that looks a lot more like Penny’s kind of teleportation, but he had never heard of there being other worlds before, let alone been to one, and his spell wasn’t able to get him back home, so…” Julia shrugged and took a sip from her cooled down coffee.
“Real motley crew,” Tony sighed. Not that he was the type to collaborate. Still, no use repeating other people’s failures. He had no problem starting from scratch. Clothed or unclothed.
Tony accepted the coffee while he listened to Julia’s spiel about magical means of travel. He swirled it around in his hand and stared down into the cup. “So it’s extremely likely your not-dead-yet friend would have the same problem.” He looked around the room as if it might provide answers. “Some kind of defensive programming. Like this whole place is stuck in some kind of fail-safe mode.” He was talking to himself more than her. It was something he was used to doing. Oftentimes, his A.I. would chime in. It had become his process.
“We don’t know that,” Julia said. Mostly because the idea made her unhappy, not because it wasn’t a possibility or even likely. The more she thought about it, the more it pissed her off. The few emotions Julia did have left were, at times, overwhelming when the rest of her personality had been replaced by a metaphysical crater.
“Fuck,” she cursed, thinking it over. “I need a cigarette.” Julia revealed her pack and shook it, about half full. Half an offer, half an explanation. And because she wasn’t a monster (most of the time) she took her coffee mug with her to step outside the building to smoke. Not that she cared about rules that prohibited smoking indoors. Mostly she just thought it would be a dick move if inside the building smelled like cigarettes, especially where people ate.
“Seems to me you don’t know much of anything.” It was a plural you, but could have sounded accusatorial. It wasn’t that Tony didn’t enjoy a good problem to solve. Ordinarily, this sort of think would have been right up his alley. But he hadn’t slept, his body was filled almost to the brim with toxins, and he was just coming off of a staged epic meltdown, the run-up to which he enjoyed more than he should have. He needed sleep and he needed one of his chlorophyll shakes. Instead, he took a long swig of his coffee.
When Julia offered him a cigarette, he looked a little too long and hard at the carton before shaking his head. He followed her anyway. Despite his need to crash or his desire to be alone, that was looking like it wasn’t going to be possible any time soon. As his only contact in this place—and apparently his roommate for the time being—it behooved him to make nice. “So what’s your next move?” he asked, leaning up against the building while Julia did her thing.
Julia lit the cigarette with a quick, one handed gesture that felt mundane to her now. It was easier than pulling out a lighter. “You mean besides wondering if we’re all just completely screwed?” Julia took a drag and exhaled. “I don’t know, what’s yours?”
Julia, recovering Type A personality, had not had the benefit of a game plan since she discovered magic was real. Usually she fell headfirst into magical emergencies, largely of her own making, and tried not to get herself killed. That probably wasn’t going to work here.
Tony shot her a look that clearly said, ”Show off,” and took another drink of his coffee. It would be a while before he got used to the idea of magic being a thing, but right now, it was the least of his worries. Maybe if it hadn’t accompanied a multiversal abduction, he might have been freaked out a little more. For a man who liked to be in control, the idea of there being forces that he couldn’t was troubling. He shrugged one shoulder. “How about you show me what you’ve tried, and that will give me an idea where to start.” And what he’d need to piece together. Hopefully the campus wasn’t dry on technical supplies too.
Julia nodded in agreement. She was tired. Tired of hitting walls and tired of trying to be the one to come up with new ideas. She drank her coffee quietly and when she finished it, tossed it. The sound of the ceramic breaking did not give her nearly as much satisfaction as she hoped.
Once they were back in their shared room, Julia turned her notebooks over to Tony to look over, and went over week by week, her various failed attempts to escape Derleth.