Who: Messrs Stark & Jarvis, your hosts; Ms Peggy Carter, Ms Natasha Romanoff, Mr Bucky Barnes, Mr Clint Barton, Mr Scott Lang, & Mr Steve Rogers. We regret that guests cannot be accommodated. What: A dinner party. Where: Tony's penthouse. When: Around eight o'clock in the evening. Try not to be fashionably late, svp. Note:Because an eight-man strategy session is likely to get unruly, the way we'll be conducting this is as follows: during dinner, everyone at the table will get a couple of uninterrupted minutes to make their case. Tony starts things off here. From there, if you want to get in on the sharing sesh, the randomly-generated posting order is: Clint, Scott, Peggy, Natasha, Bucky, Steve, Jarvis. Everyone gets one IC tag in this thread. Because the format of the actual dinner discussion is truncated for logistical reasons, if you want to hash out any additional reactions, discussions, or other strategizing funtimes OOC-wise, take it to this thread and go back and forth amongst yourself to your heart's content. After dinner, everyone's been invited to stay as long as they'd like, so mill around the fireplace, find yourself a guest room, chat on the balcony, have a smoke in the library - whatever's most conducive to your plotting needs. (Just don't go into the west wing Tony's workshop.) Post any non-dinner IC threads as you would to any group scene; just reply to the main post.
Entertaining came naturally to Tony; he did it easily and with pleasure, in large part because it was one of about three things he knew he could always pull off without a hitch. From making an entrance to easing himself into the last intimate group of stragglers, it was his game. He had - rightly - an excellent reputation for it (eased along a little, of course, by the man who set the menus, made the food, arranged for the decor, and put out all the fires, along with other such incidental functions of being a good host). So when he found himself anxious, dreading eight o'clock, and doing very little with himself beyond sitting around waiting for his guests to arrive and feeling his appetite spiral into just about nothing, it was - well. It wasn't a good sign.
Still, he'd done what he could to make it a tolerable evening. The food would, of course, be flawless; as usual, everything was spotlessly turned out; there was room and to spare if anyone should decide they wanted to stay, to linger after dessert and coffee and strangle one another into the wee hours of the morning. His home lacked for nothing in the way of amenities for private conversations. Sure, the ostentatiously overlong table at the end of the broad, open, high-ceilinged space that was living and dining room, set just beside the floor-to-ceiling windows, was set for eight (hopefully Jarvis' surprise addition to the guest list wouldn't unnerve anyone; he was banking on it being read as a good-faith gesture) and left no room to hide - but after they got through the bush-whacking, blood-letting business of the evening, it wouldn't be at all difficult for people to lose themselves in twos and threes around his home. It ... happened a lot.
No - no one would be able to accuse him of being a bad host. Plenty of other things, perhaps, but - why not try going into this with a little optimism?
After all, the fact that these people were willing to get together in a room and talk overtly about trying to thwart the highest institutions in the land was big. It was huge, it was unthinkable, and he wondered, really, if part of the reason he was able to go through the motions of it so blithely was that some part of him still thought of all of this as a game. Any rational man would have bought out of this by now, would have sold his fellow conspirators right out to the men in charge and retired comfortably on the credit. But instead ... instead, they were all at least thinking about doing this. And if they wanted to have an actual shot, rather than just blowing all their capital on on a rigged contest for nothing but the thrill of play, they needed to start thinking together. Pulling in vaguely the same direction. Holding, at the very least, the same rope. And Tony knew they could get that far. He was pretty sure. He thought they could. There was a non-zero chance it could happen.