motherofnemesis | ic contact

[ He's just working, quietly, and not all that chatty, tbh, so he would have done better with the texting, but w/e. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters - that's the mantra right now. None of this matters. He'll go back home and he won't remember any of this time here and he'll be where he wants to be and with whom and if he hopes that Pepper gets stuck here too, with him, well, that just confirms a third of the things about himself that make him a horrible person. ]

You wanted to get the conversation over with?

[ texting removes the possibility of using her most valuable tool in a conversation that's going to be, she strongly suspects, unpleasant. even now she's tentatively feeling the waters, just seeing if there's any way she can dampen the reaction she's sure he's going to have. ]

I removed their anger and substituted boredom and apathy.

[ he's listening vaguely, also working on something else, and then it hits him after she's been finished talking for a little bit. He looks up at her completely, a little wary, and squints, trying to figure out if that meant what it really kind of sounds like it meant.

so, after a few moments of that, somewhat slowly: ]

You... emotionally manipulated them. Like, telepathically, not the kind that people use on each other to get others to donate to needy African children. You just... Told them not to feel something anymore.

[ a long pause, her shoulders perfectly square and back straight. She's not watching him entirely, her gaze just missing his face most of the time, sliding back to it and then glancing away again. She's got enough other senses to feel him realize what she said, anyways. ]

Yes. [ Short, concise, and then she is looking at him directly, tired. ] I'm an empath. Knock off telepathy via emotions. Not actually as fun as it sounds.

[ It's not so much that he ~suddenly feels uncomfortable in her presence or anything in as much as it is a vague 'oh shit' lack of hiding that seems to exist without prior warning. ]

Doesn't sound fun at all. Especially here. [ Maybe that means here for Exsilium or here for the workspace. but he continues. ] So you can change how people feel. To do that you'd have to feel what they're feeling in the first place.

[ It's about one standard deviation up the desirable side of the 'reactions to being told she's an empath' scale from the normal reaction, at least. Could definitely be worse. ]

Emma did fix my shields, though, so. [ A shrug, as careless as she can make it, and she looks away. ] It's easier now.

[ Ah yes that. ] That's the other side of it, yeah. I sense emotions and I manipulate them. Voila. Empath.

[ masking all the everything, even though mentally he has no idea how to shield. all he's doing mentally is tell JARVIS to rotate the schematic and then run it with a different set of parameters, staring at the screen as he watches JARVIS execute the command in front of him. It leaves a decently sized portion of his thoughts left over despite that for considering this development. ]

Only when you have to though, right?

[ she can feel the attempt, but immediately after that she's retreating, staying well away from any of his thoughts or feelings, pulling back tightly within herself. she'd really rather not do anything to jeopardize anything here. ]

I try to avoid it. Most problems have other solutions.

[ It's mostly physical reactions he's masking, because that's all he knows to do. He's got no idea how to hide his emotional ones beyond just not letting them show on his face, mentally shoving them elsewhere. And there's a lot of feelings right now that need masking, very few about this current situation. ]

Yeah, most do. [ He works again for a little while. Then stops. ] That was it? That was what you didn't want to tell me?

[ note to herself: teach Tony how to shield. actually, note to self, bring that up as soon as possible. it might help this whole thing, and then she won't need to worry about whether or not she's accidentally reading his emotions, because right now that seems like a Very Bad Idea. ]

Most people take it worse. [ a shrug. ] Most people take it much worse.

[ He knows how to shield from machines, so far, which... may or may not be completely different.

Yeah he'd take far less kindly to that than he would the general idea of this as a whole. ]

Yeah, I can see that. If you want, I can suddenly get really unhappy about it. Make things a little more authentic.

[ It's probably enough on the same principle to be a solid starting place, at least.

All good as long as it never happens. ]

No, that's - fine. Really. [ Joking is not a skill she's able to juggle on her repertoire right now. ] I can teach you how to shield yourself. If you wanted.

[ That gets a quick look. It very much says 'do I need to?' before he cools it back a little. ]

What would that entail.

[ Thaaat was not the reaction she was going for, but she's still not willing to try to use his head to navigate her way through the conversation, so hit and miss is to be expected. ]

It's not that hard. A lot of practice on your own once you know the basics is all. Not that it will help against someone high level, but anything basic.

[ sry. habit by this point - he's inherently the most suspicious of the people he's closer to. ]

Okay. Sure. How does it go down?

[ That's at once smart and sad. ]

It's imagery, mostly. A matter of will and being able to frame your head as something someone else can't read. My - a technopath I knew used the idea of his mind as unhackable code. [ Mostly unhackable. ] I just use the classic house with locked doors approach.

[ the fact that she knew another technopath always gets his attention ]

So you make shields by mostly just thinking about making shields and then hoping really hard.

[ she can even sort of talk about him. success! ]

That's one way of putting it. It takes a great deal of concentration to keep your mind organized like that though. At least at first.

You do realize how much bullshit that actually sounds like, right?

[ But he's trying it regardless. He's been having to structure at least the perimeter of his mind - or what he perceives as such - anyway, to work on the electronic communication, so there's some basic groundwork here between his own trial-and-error efforts and the baselines that Emma showed/gave him. It's still a very rocky process though, and in the meantime the effort drops some of what was there. ]

You got any special tricks for it? [ Because he's coming up with and discarding metaphors as he goes along. ]

Yeah, that's what most people say at first.

[ A little more at ease, sympathy in her faint smile. She hops up onto a clear section of her bench, still watching him, and settles in a little bit. ]

The more personal it is, the harder it is for someone who doesn't know you to get past them.

[ Aaaaand that's another sort of pause, because that feels like some sort of trap, to think about the things that are the most personal to him in particular and either share or inadvertently share them. He's not sure how he feels about that, but he's even more not sure how he feels about the areas that come to mind. He doesn't want to think of his own mind as a cave, but it was pretty damn impregnable. The workshop back home isn't bad, but structurally he's not sure how well it'll work. His childhood room (the main one, anyway), similarly using code and firewalls, walls built out of JARVIS and the arc reactor itself - he's not sure what to choose. ]

What if they still do? That seems like it would shake the safety in that memory.

[ There's a reason that years and years ago when she was young and had to teach herself shields she just used the generic image of a house, the one the book suggested. There's also a reason she doesn't recommend it. Her shields don't actually resemble that house anymore so much as they look like a prison, less like rooms than cells locked down. ]

It's a balance. You don't want something sensitive enough that it would compromise you if people got through it, because these aren't a fix-all. Emma? Anyone on her level can rip through shields like this as soon as they put some real effort into it. These are for blocking low-level telepathy types.

[ Hmm. Okay. He'll pick his office at SI. That's reasonably personal but not too important. That'll work. ]

So, after you pick something, you just imagine it being fortified and your mind being inside it?

More or less. Find hiding places and picture putting away anything you don't want seen in there. Cupboards, safes, cells, subdirectories, whatever works.

[ It doesn't take that much to imagine all those shelves with doors on them, creating little cubbies to hide away whatever he feels is important, and then he gets to stashing. The most important things go on a ghost drive accessed by the computer in the office, because if anyone's going to mix their literal mental metaphors, it'll be Tony Stark. ]

How can you tell when you've constructed it well enough?

ic contact

aw yeah

highfives

\o/

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