ioduanlogs | what's that mysterious ticking noise?

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what's that mysterious ticking noise? | April Catch-All

Characters: Tony Stark and YOU
Date: Throughout April
Location: Around Tony's apartment and workshop; the Opara Core
Situation: Minor annoyances and major annoyances. Tony dealing with that absolutely appalling magical foghorn noise.
Warnings/Rating: none yet

1. how much money do you have? sixty nine cents | a farmer's market | early April

After finishing a major project for a client and pocketing a nice chunk of cash, Tony decides to take the rest of the day off and reward himself with lunch from a nearby farmer's market.

But when he puts in his order at the noodle stand and reaches for his money... he comes up with what appears to be slightly crumbled dog biscuits instead.

Tony stares at the handful of Definitely Not Money for a few seconds, processing. Apparently, the Dreaming has a sense of humor.

"I really, really hate magic," he declares, and dejectedly cancels his noodle order.

2. look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! | outside Tony & Gene's apartment | early April

According to one of Tony's neighbors, one of their other neighbors had been illegally breeding... ferocious attack bibirus. Which explains the Sentry activity the other day, and the sudden disappearance of said neighbor.

It also probably explains the stray bibiru that's been running around the block all day, persistently eluding capture by peeping angrily and nipping at the ankles of anyone who gets too close. That hadn't bothered Tony: he's not much of an animal person, and he'd figured it would eventually calm down enough to be nabbed, or run off and make a new life for itself in some local park.

It seems, however, that the bibiru is much more interested in making a new life for itself in Tony's apartment. It's taken a liking to him (who knows why), and has followed him all the way to his doorstep, trying to affectionately nibble his pant cuffs. He crouches down to shoo it away, and the damn thing chirps and hops right into his lap.

"What? No, scram!" Tony says, flapping his hands at the bunny-thing. The bibiru fluffs its wings and blinks at him.

Tony grimaces, picks the creature up, and stands. "Look, buddy, I don't really do pets. Why don't you go find someone else to bother?" The bibiru chirps again.

He holds the bibiru out at arms' length and looks around helplessly. Surely there's a pet-crazy kid or animal lover around here somewhere, right? "Hey, anybody want a weird little bird rabbit?"

3. Let It Grow, Let It Grow | Tony's workshop | early April

Tony feeds a mysterious power crystal to his mysterious metal tree. What will happen? Who knows! Details TBA

4. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc | near Tony's workshop | April 10

Tony has been having an annoying couple days, and the last thing he needs is an unhinged wacko giving him grief over some imaginary theological offense. But, no, according to Acolyte Causation Not Correlation, here, Tony is personally responsible for setting off a new round of that horrible droning noise. By sneezing.

"Come on, cut it out!" Tony snaps, trying to cover his ears and shoo away the irate Ban Om devotee at the same time. No matter how fast he walks, the castian man scuttles after him, spitting religious rebukes. "Everybody's sneezing, it's just the pollen, you're— hey!" Is this guy seriously flicking holy water at him? "Stop it! You asshole," Tony seethes.

5. Peace And Quiet | Tony's workshop or the Opara Core | April 13

The noise from the ships is really getting to Tony. It hurts his Extremis-enhanced hearing, and seems to be interacting badly with the nanites, leaving him with lingering migraines and a feeling of general malaise. At least it's predictable – every twelve hours, like clockwork, increasing according to the Fibonacci sequence – but the fact that it is increasing is troubling. If the current pattern continues, the sound will be constant by the 16th.

Anyone looking for Tony in the second week of April is most likely to find him holed up in his lab looking vaguely miserable.

By the weekend, though, a couple of Opara techs who he's gotten friendly with take pity on him, and invite him to a nook in a little-used lab that seems to be shielded from the awful sound. They've even scavenged some plush chairs and turned it into an ad-hoc lounge space. Anyone else who has an in with an Opara employee might be able to get an invite to the secret lounge too... Where they'll find Tony, scribbling on scrap paper and chatting animatedly with the techs about structural insulation and shielding and resonance.

6. Sneeze Disease | Tony & Gene's apartment | during The Honkening | closed to Gene

Tony is getting migraines from the fucking Mystical Honk Fleet. Gene has horrible allergies thanks to the pollen. Both of them are low-key miserable and more inclined than usual to bitch at each other over petty bullshit.

And Tony "forgot" it was his turn to do the dishes. Again.

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Nita happens to be in the same farmer's market when Tony pulls out those biscuits - and, both to see if she can pay for his order and just in case something like that has happened to her, hurriedly checks her own pocket.

Unfortunately, it's the latter, and she steps forward holding out her own biscuit.

"Wasn't expecting us to match," she says, embarrassed.

Tony turns away from the noodle stand to see someone else rifling around in their pockets – and coming up similarly empty-handed. Or mystery-biscuit-handed, as the case may be.

Well, at least that pretty definitively proves that it's the Dreaming, rather than an unusually skilled and cheeky pickpocket. Tony smiles wryly.

"Okay, this may be mean, but I feel a little better that it's not just me."

"No, no, I get it," Nita replied, smiling in turn.

"I was hoping I'd be able to help - guess I still am, in a way? Though," she added, looking again at the biscuit.

"It'd help if these were at least normal biscuits. Because I just know some pet's going to give me puppy-dog-eyes on the way home, and I won't have anything else!"

Edited 2019-04-09 16:46 (UTC)

"Maybe if we keep them long enough they'll turn back into money," Tony suggests, squinting hopefully at one of his biscuits. He sighs. "I can't believe that was all my money from that order..."

He's not running in the red anymore, so it's not a catastrophe like it would have been a couple months ago, but it sure is a downer. It means a couple weeks of eating a lot of cheap food that can be bought in bulk, and no date nights with Gene or outings with Pepper.

"Sometimes I really miss being a billionaire," Tony concludes, tucking the biscuit back in his pocket.

"Not impossible," Nita concludes. Neither the potential reversal, nor the meal being that costly.

The billionaire comment, though, brings her momentarily up short.

"... Seriously? Sorry," she immediately amends.

"It's just not the first thing that came to mind when I saw you."

Embarrassment mode, activate!

"Probably wouldn't have been the first thing that came to mind if you saw me back then, either. Apparently I have terrible fashion sense," Tony jokes. ~~Yeah, goofy knee patches don't exactly scream 'billionaire tech prodigy,' do they?~~

"Anyway, it turns out the inter-universe exchange rate for Earth dollars is pretty crappy, so now I actually work for a living. Or sometimes for dog biscuits, I guess."

~~They do scream 'self-made', though!~~

"Might mean something different if we were working for dogs- sorry," Nita adds quickly after a very sharp glance from a native who happened to be listening in.

"Not referring to anyone's ancestry, I swear."

With that peace made, Nita returns to looking at Tony.

"It's not the craziest thing I've seen exchanged for money, though - and we should probably move away from the line..."

Since that wasn't the only glace she'd spotted.

~~Pretty sure they just scream 'enormous dork.'~~

Tony chuckles as they shuffle away from the flow of traffic. "I mean, if you want to talk crazy, I've seen someone spend fifty million dollars on a painting of a red square, so..." After all, isn't exchanging money for completely crazy things arguably the basis of the entire social structure of the wealthy elite?

Once they're out of the way, Tony offers, "You want to come back to my workshop? I don't think I have much cash lying around, but I do have snacks." Since they're both stuck in the same boat, it seems only polite to share. "And maybe I'll get lucky and someone will walk in with a nice big downpayment in their wallet wanting a rush order on run of custom camshafts. Or something." And then they can both come back for noodles! Assuming that money doesn't turn into dog biscuits too.

~~Also that.~~

Nita bemusedly rolls her eyes.

"The real crazy part is that it makes people think anything could be worth millions. Even stuff that shouldn't be!"

Like, water, for instance. Water is priceless, and essential.

Nita raises her brows - but after thinking on it a moment, nods.

"Sure. Something's better than nothing, where food's concerned."

"Yeah, why waste all that money on an ugly painting? There are lots of things you can buy that are actually worth millions of dollars," Tony agrees. "Cyclotrons. Stealth jets. Houses. Big chunks of vibranium," he lists off cheerfully. "Definitely not bad modern art." How much does some paint and a big canvas cost, huh? Like a hundred bucks? Take a hike, Rothko!

He starts to lead them back to the workshop; fortunately, it's only about three blocks away. "I'm Tony, by the way." He pauses, like he's considering adding more to that introduction. All he ends up saying, though, is: "I'm mostly a mechanic these days. I opened up my shop a few months ago."

Nita only blinks at that last one.

"Vibranium?" Other worlds, Neets. It's probably just real somewhere else, is all.

Three blocks is no trouble for this native New Yorker.

"Nita," she responds in kind.

"Haven't picked a field of employment officially yet," unless wizard counted, and even that didn't pay the bills, "but I've been doing odd jobs, helping with reconstruction. Sounds like people here could use mechanics, though."

"It was a little easier to get work when the local tech was five hundred years less advanced and an alternate version of myself had already set up a business with my name on it, but I guess I still get by," Tony replies, grinning. "So you got here pretty recently, huh? What's your 'thing' back home?"

Nita snorts.

"Okay, yeah, that would make things easier."

She makes a wry face.

"Officially? Still a high school student. But, uh, unofficially - wizard. And not the 'parlor tricks' kind, more 'fighting entropy'" she hurries to add.

"Been doing a lot of stuff with water, lately. Interspecies communication, troubleshooting wizardry shorthands... the works."

Explaining whalesarks wasn't quite something Nita was up to explaining, at least without an easy way to demonstrate them on hand.

"High school is totally lame," Tony sagely opines. "Wizard? Way better. I mean, I was gonna give you a little bit of a hard time about the wizard thing, but 'entropy wizard' is pretty badass, so I'll let you off the hook."

In reality, he's long past the days of mocking the concept of magic, but he can't resist poking a little fun at the magic-users every now and then, in the spirit of friendly rivalry.

"What kinds of interspecies communication? Like, aliens?"

Nita relaxes again; gentle teasing is better than the harassment she'd been worried about, but she would still rather pass on that.

"Well, those too, but there are a lot more intelligent species on Earth than you'd expect."

She snickers at an unexpected thought, then adds, "Including humans on that one. But mostly, when it comes to the ocean, I work with whales and dolphins. I've met with sharks, too."

"Wait." Tony comes to a stop and dramatically turns on Nita, putting a hand on her shoulder.

"Whales can talk? You mean Star Trek IV was right?"

"Ye-es? Whales have language, like lots of species do."

Nita hurriedly stops as well, anchored by the hand on her shoulder.

"Aaand now I'm wishing I remembered how that movie went. I really hope it's not one of those that Dair made a show of stashing the case where no one could grab it..."

Sometimes her sister and Spot were too good at hiding things for their own good.

You want a synopsis, Nita? Well, Tony will happily oblige.

"A mysterious probe shows up in Earth orbit and starts emitting an untranslateable signal that's strong enough to knock out Earth's power grid and cause planetary storms. Spock figures out that it's whale song, but humpback whales are extinct in the 23rd century. So the crew has to go back in time and find some whales to bring to the future and answer the probe," Tony explains. "Pretty risky plan if you ask me – how do you know the whales aren't going to tell their alien buddies, 'wow, we're totally extinct in the future and these human guys are assholes, you should kick their asses'? Still the best Star Trek movie, though," he cheerfully adds.

Nita has to fight through several 'first thoughts' before settling on a reply - Wait, haven't probes been plot points there before?

Whales can't go extinct that soon!

Was the probe made BY whales?

She gives a wry grin.

"Can't beat whales, that's for sure."

"Sorry, salroka," comes a voice from the street. There stands a tattooed dwarf in a leather jacket, a cigarette in one hand and the end of a leash in the other. At the end of said leash is--you guessed it--a brown-spotted bibiru, this one sporting a slightly bum wing. "I've met my pet quota."

He's being a bit of a teasing shit, but the scene's hard not to laugh at. Smirking, he juts his chin out at the bibiru. "Why don't you want the little guy anyway? Seems like he's taken a shine to you."

Someone does take notice of Tony's plight – unfortunately, only so that they can tease him. Tony's lips turn down into a very small frown (which is not at all petulant, that is lies and slander).

"The closest thing I ever had to a pet growing up was a robot that I built for myself. I'm more of a 'keep machines running' guy, not a 'keep living things living' guy. Anyway, my boyfriend already has a cat... thing." He says, as if he isn't a total softie for the catbat. Look, she's an exception to the rule. "She would probably eat this guy." The bibiru peeps defiantly. Tony raises an eyebrow. "Even if it is a 'fighting bibiru.'" You can tell he takes that designation so seriously.

Flekk has hopped to the very end of his leash with both ears swiveled forward, curiously sniffing at the air in the other bibiru's direction. Kit also looks down at Tony's critter companion, though he looks similarly dubious over this designation.

He looks from the bibiru to Tony, then back again.

"...seriously?"

"Yeah, I guess the sentry is investigating some kind of bibiru fighting ring. They arrested my neighbor for running an unlicensed breeding operation. Very serious stuff. We're a hotbed of criminal activity," Tony somehow manages to say with a straight face.

The bibiru wiggles its nose as the other animal hops forward. Scenting a rival, it chirrs warningly and puffs up its fur. This succeeds in making it look about half again as big, but about twice as fluffy and adorable. Tony rolls his eyes. "Ferocious."

"Tony."

Gene turns around from the sink. He's been sniffling and sneezing all day, his nose is redder than Rudolph's, and his eyes have been streaming from the damn pollen. He's had to take some days off from the dojo, which he hates doing, so even without the pollen he'd have been grumpy. But this? This is the one little thing that ticks him over into being really, really annoyed.

"Why are there dishes in the sink."

"Huh?" Tony mumbles, from underneath the icepack he has draped over his face. He nudges it up enough to squint at Gene. "What's today? I thought it was your turn?"

It would probably be more accurate to say that he couldn't remember whose turn it was to do dishes and chose to assume it was Gene's turn so he wouldn't have to worry about it, but potato potahto, right?

"It's Monday. Mondays are your turn to do dishes. You haven't done the dishes in three weeks."

Now, normally Gene wouldn't be crabby - aside from some good-natured exasperation - but the entire population of the Wiosen Botanical Gardens has decided to be fruitful and multiply in his sinuses, which has him a weensy bit ticked.

"Okay, okay, jeez," Tony grumbles. "It's only—" he heaves his arm upwards with a probably excessive show of effort, and looks at his watch— "three o'clock. I'll get to them before dinner."

"No," Gene says, gritting his teeth. "Do it now." Any potential impact that forcefulness may have is undercut by an attack of sneezing so severe that he doubles over and sinks to the ground.

"Aaaargh!"

"Chill out," Tony replies, becoming more obviously irritated. "I said I'd do them, okay? I still have a headache from those stupid honk boats, and—" and then Gene starts sneezing so violently that it actually brings him to his knees.

Given what a bad mood Gene's in, it's probably not a good idea, but Tony can't help himself: he laughs.

"You're not--" Sneeze. "The only one--" Sneeze. "The 'stupid h--" Sneeze. "--honk boats'" Sneeze sneeze sneeze. Whatever Gene's about to say is lost in an absolute fit of sneezing, which only makes him madder when Tony starts laughing.

"You think this is funny, do you?" he says, getting to his feet and sniffling.

"It is pretty funny," Tony confesses.

Intellectually he knows that Gene is as miserable as he is, if not more. But Tony has never had allergies and it's been years since he's had anything as mundane as a case of the sniffles, so his sneeze empathy is a little rusty, and it's hard not to focus on the physical comedy of Gene's plight.

This will not be tolerated!!! Gene will not tolerate this!!!

Gene sniffles as he walks over to Tony, leans over him, and then lets loose with the most dad-tier level sneeze he has in him. Like, just absolutely horrifying for someone with a migraine to hear. Just awful.

Tony lets out a shout of disgust and fails on the couch, pulling a pillow over his face in a vain attempt to block some of the sneeze fallout.

"What the hell!" He pulls the pillow away and glares. "Gross, Gene!"

"Do the dishes or I'll--" Sniff. "--keep sneezing on you."

Biological warfare? Damn, Gene, even for you, that's low. He's smirking, because he thinks he has the upper hand. Maybe he does. Either way, this is taking a lot more time than either of them doing the dishes.

"Ugh!" Tony heaves himself off the couch. "Okay, fine, I'm going, I'm going. You don't have to be an asshole about it."

"I'm the asshole?" Gene says indignantly, somehow managing not to undercut himself with a sneeze. (Gene, you have never not been the asshole in your life.) "Asking you to do a few chores now and then isn't a lot."

"And I said I was gonna do it," Tony snipes, "in a minute." He flouces to the kitchen and starts passive-aggressively scrubbing. "You're not gonna die if the dishes don't get done for another hour."

He knows how petty and whiny he sounds, but he's too grumpy to care.

"I might," Gene says, and punctuates his own whining with a sneeze. "You don't know that for sure." He knows that he sounds petty, whiny, and like a bit of a jerk, too, but the big ol' honks coming from the harbor and the constant tree sex happening outside and making him feel as physically useless as he's ever felt makes him really not care. And if there's one thing Gene hates, it's feeling useless. And helpless. The Mandarin would probably just sneeze his enemies into submission right now.

Tony rolls his eyes. "Wow, hilarious. I didn't know you could die from terminal nagging."

A part of him knows that he's just needling Gene to get a rise out of him – it has less to do with Gene, and more to do with Tony taking out his misery on whoever happens to be convenient. He's just spoiling for a fight, and it might as well be with Gene.

Unfortunately for whatever comeback Gene had been cooking up, another dad-tier sneeze bursts its way out of him and he falls back on the recently-vacated couch. "Aggh! I hate this!"

He reaches for a nearby box of tissues and makes some honking noises as well, but not nearly on the level that the ships have been doing. "I can't wait for this miserable season to be over!"

Tony gives Gene a skeptical and unsympathetic look over his shoulder. "Can't you use the rings to summon magical benadryl or something?" Because, speaking of things getting on Tony's nerves, the constant sneezing is not improving his mood.

"I've tried, I can't focus long enough to--" Sneeze. "It's intolerable!"

Gene closes his eyes and shakes his head to try and clear it. They're both miserable, and seem to be stuck in a feedback loop. "Maybe I'll just go back to bed..."

Tony pauses his resentful dishwashing to turn fully back to Gene and stare at him. "You can lose your ultimate cosmic powers from allergies?"

There's a beat of incredulous silence, and then Tony starts to laugh again. "Too bad you're not allergic to llamas."

Sneeze. "Screw you, Mr. Honking-Boats-Make-My-Suit-Not-Work." Great comeback, Gene. "You try and focus on doing anything when you're about to forcibly expel your brain through your sinuses!"

"My suit works fine," Tony declares. (The fact that using Extremis during The Honk Cycles exacerbates his migraines tenfold and has so far mostly not been worth the trouble is neither here nor there.)

"If you do sneeze your brains out, can you not do it over the carpet? That would be a pain to clean, and I don't want to do any more chores today."

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what's that mysterious ticking noise? | April Catch-All

1!

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Tony has the cultural consciousness of a potato

XDD Some people are probably grateful.

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yes, Tony, that's the important takeaway here

XDD One of many. Also: headcanon'd Callahan shenanigans!

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2!

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6

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jkjdflsklfj HONK BOATS that's it as a mod i decree it they just make airhorn noises

T H E H O N K E N I N G

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