#ventureseek

“Hi, I’m Tony Stark is about as simple as I can make it.  Anything else...”  He waved a hand.  Where did he even start?  That this wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever seen that year?  That week?  That in the grand scheme of weird shit, dimension hopping hovered around a four?  Unplanned, yes, but there was always a way back.  Had to be, or he was utterly screwed, and he didn’t want to be stuck here, not long term.  Stark Unlimited was hitting its stride, having finally found a happy medium between research and the Iron Man, and things...Well.  Things back home could be worse.

And would be before too long, he would put money on it.

A lot of money.

“Okay.”  He held out both hands, palms together.  “The universe works like this.  This is your reality.”  He wiggled the thumb of his left hand.  “This is mine.”  The thumb of his right hand took a turn with the wiggle.  “And there are a lot more, stacked together like the world’s tallest plate of pancakes.  I’m guessing I look enough like Here Me that you’re at least buying some of this, so I’ve got that going for me.  Which is nice.  But in some realities it’s all crazy...LIke.”

Like he was a woman.  Or...Something else equally completely different.

“Well, let’s just say some realities don’t have it as lucky as we do.  Ultron destroyed the world or Galactus ate it or Fin Fang Foom stomped everyone to death.  Idiocracy really happens or everyone ends up a zombie.  The Melter becomes a halfway decent villain.  Whatever.  It gets weird.  It gets messy.  And sometimes-”  He crossed the index fingers of both hands.  “The streams get a little crossed.  No one ever, ever takes that advice from the Ghostbusters, it’s really distressing.”

His face says all it needs to, but that’s not actually going to stop him from adding salt to that wound, is it?  Of course not.

“Yeah...I think sitting in jail in Windhelm is the exact opposite of dignity, actually.”  It’s freezing in here and the guards haven’t exactly been inclined to be friendly.  Not with him and his pointy ears and...It’s true, he probably shouldn’t have swung first and that’s on him and he knows it but-

Well, they’re stuck here for now.

“Got a lockpick?”

♣: Any headcanons about your muse?

x. tnathas is more amoral than his canon counterpart.  part of this is because the dwemer themselves are more amoral and his view of what is right and wrong has been shaped by that societal conditioning (i mean there’s rumors the dwemer were buddies with the dragons so you know…).  part of it is because the world of tamriel is a lot more shades of grey than black or white, and people who see things in strictly good or bad terms just don’t last very long.  it’s a method of survival, especially when you’re the last of your kind.

x. so companion tony.  the replacement eye’s not the only thing he’s tinkered on when it comes to his own physiology.  taking notes from 616, he’s done all kinds of fun things to himself to make himself more tuned to surviving the wasteland and high amounts of background radiation, outside of the explanation of SCIENCE! and such.  he’s got a few other implants/enhancements, mostly the in-another-post-mentioned keeping of the undersheath of his suit literally as a part of the hollows of his bones.  that’s one enhancement i think even the mcu is pushing toward (or would, rather, if i thought rdj was gonna be around as iron man much longer).  the synth eye replacement he eventually pops in has all kinds of goodies, too, like tactical targeting, heat vision, night vision, and it glows in the dark in a way that pleases him (i’m…mostly joking about that part. mostly.).  tl;dr:  he’s followed the 616 example of using himself as a guinea pig, because he won’t test on anyone else, and he’s had a long time to sit and think about the pros and cons of doing it, and decided any downsides are outweighed by better surviving the new york bombed out hellscape and the much more pleasant commonwealth to do some good in the world.

x. ai tony really has some issues with dissociation.  as much as an ai program can.  the human mind is really not good for transferring over to that state, and tony knew that when he did it, but again, pros outweighed the cons and considering he then went into a coma…well.  having to use gauntlets for simple physical tasks that limit his dexterity (or would be dexterity - his “physical” form is only a hologram) is frustrating.  he doesn’t like communicating through pure code, which is why he’s nearly always a hologram even while alone.  and for the record tony wanted him to be an exact replica - he could have cleaned him up, made him bright eyed and bushy tailed, and instead what he offered in his place was a visual representation of the actual physical tony:  tired with bags under his eyes from lack of sleep and exhaustion written over every inch of him.  and tony considered that the nicer alternative, than giving those he knew would be around “him” and knew tony himself too well to buy one that looked a little too put together.

“So, Delphine.”  He’d been trying to keep his opinions to himself.  He really had.  He knew that in the scheme of things, he was still missing such huge swaths of history when it came to Tamriel as a whole that he:

1.  Did not have a horse in any of these races.  Dragons?  Yeah, he’d been there and done that, remembered the dragon cults of a bygone era.  Civil Wars?  Not really his problem but he knew he was probably going to get dragged into that mess against his own will, if only so the bigger problems at hand could be focused on.

2.  Had very little idea what was even going on to begin with.  There were the Tongues, of course, he knew about those, but he hadn’t figured on them becoming something of a running gag through history.  There was just so much he only had the murkiest of details on and while he’d spent some time at the College (and they’d tried to induct him as an initiate - the amount of disrespect had been unbelievable) sifting through their collection, so much had apparently been lost he had little recourse other than to shrug and hope to stumble on something by luck.

But all of that brought him back to the point at hand, as he looked up at the Alduin’s Wall in Skyhaven Temple.  There was Numidium - a stupider idea he couldn’t imagine - and plenty of Akaviri symbolism and allegory and...Really, those guys had always had a real problem with just spelling things out.  It had always annoyed him.

why i can’t have nice things → we talked about thiswhy i can’t have nice things → i told you not to why i can’t have nice things → i get lost and turned around at that damn tree every timewhy i can’t have nice things → and now you want me to come find you

“Attraction kind of gets hampered when they let you know exactly what they think about Mer in general, and me in specifics, believe it or not.”  And here he hadn’t done anything at all, he thought, to warrant that kind of reaction.  What it certainly had down, however, was remind him that Nords, on the whole, were a bunch of assholes.

And coming from someone like him, that was saying something.

“Nice to know Windhelm hasn’t changed a bit.  These guys were just as nasty before, too.  Only more violent and not fighting each other, considering we were trying to push them back out of Resdayn.”  He paused there.  They weren’t calling it that anymore, were they?  Well, he wasn’t going to correct himself.

One day, he figured, the Chimer’s leftovers would figure out a name they liked and stick to it, but it was nice to know that some things actually remained exactly the same.

“The next one that’s got something to say about me and Dunmer is going to be swallowing teeth.”  He wasn’t, when it came right down to it, the sort to just jump into something like that (a lie: he was very much the sort to do exactly that - and everyone had always let him know exactly how such irrational action and reaction was unbecoming of the deemed).  But he’d run into enough of these Stormcloak supporters since leaving the confines of his lab that he was literally done with it.  He didn’t look anything like a Dunmer or a Chimer, and he figured that was fairly obvious.  But then, using the powers of perception had never been big in this part of Tamriel.

x. He honestly doesn’t know if she can be trusted.  It’s been too long, too much has happened in the interim, and too many brothers and sisters have died at the hands of the Thalmor purges or simply disappeared to be presumed dead that he can’t really be sure who to trust anymore, aside from Cicero.  Cicero is the only one he’s had full-time contact and eyes on in the entirety of the time from the destruction of sanctuaries starting until now.  And also the matter of their new little family, which he’s made no secret out of being displeased about.  And yet despite that lack of trust (which, honestly, is this surprising from Hector in any verse?) he’d much rather lay his cards on her than anyone else (always excepting Cicero).  She’s actually probably the only one in the family other than Cicero that knows where his actual residence is (Pinewatch - bandits taking up somewhere is really just free real estate billed as a fixer-upper, amirite?), and that in an of itself says a lot about where he holds her in his esteem.

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