Tony wasn't precisely a prince, and the truck wasn't precisely a chariot, but he was certainly at his ease, up there in the passenger seat with a distinct air of ownership over the seat conveyed by his body language -- a loose posture, indolent and perhaps a tad insolent. Out in this part of Rassvet, he was down to a long-sleeved shirt, no collar, and a pair of jeans and workboots, looking mostly like a boondocker and a hinterlander, someone here to dig the post holes at the direction of bigger brains.

He kept one ear on the radio, but most of his focus was on a couple of small devices in a tray on his lap that he was messing with -- mostly by furrowing his brow and concentrating. Occasionally, a huff of breath out of frustration or a grunt of satisfaction came out of him, but it was worth noting that Tony had little to say to the gallery in the back. 

Ever since the accident, about four years ago, Tony would slip into these moods as a defensive mechanism from boredom, a hyperfocus that allowed him to come out of that affair with less control or ability in Mist, but also a change in mentality and a certain degree of learned indifference to the things that other people puckered themselves over. Moody, sometimes remote and not necessarily communicative about what actually grinds him, Tony adopted a certain solitude even in a crowd, though if talked to about serious things like that, he'd inevitably fob it off with a joke. The concentration was evident, but practiced. Tony's Mist-use was unremarkable in a system that looked at raw power, but it was developing the sort of fine tuned control that allowed for a whole new system of options to occur.

But in a way, it was an improvement over the old Tony, who would bounce around in a situation like this, loudly and obviously unwilling to sit around when he could be doing pullups or something. This Tony was practicing with the Mist, doing 'reps' with the power to admittedly small parts and bits of wire, without an explanation as to his goal here. 

So it might have been a surprise when he piped up on the Princess, [color=fff79a]"Might be worth offing her, but there might be things that make it more trouble than its worth, seeing as she's youngest. Killing one ups the security around the others. If she's being positioned to take the throne and she's smarter than the other chinless, jug-eared inbred sociopaths in charge, and knocking her off allows an idiot to inherit, it might be worth it or it might really backfire because stupidity in power is dynamic and volatile."[/color] he added, in a very bored sort of tone. It was typical Tony -- a skeptic's eye and a somewhat nonchalant delivery, but that goblin's brain of his churned around the concept and spat out the analysis. Mostly, Tony just liked committing lèse-majesté against the Vangar royal family. Funny enough, the Vangars invented that term.

He took the moment of situational awareness to look along the unrelieved vista of wadis and segarro scrub and other semi-arid flora, fauna and land features, matching it up against a map on the dash and checking time. It was so far away from the rest of the world that it almost felt like a moment of respite, of sand and wind and sunshine, of open terrain, the dun splashed with the vibrant sage green, all flashing past the truck as it barreled through the desert road. It let one pretend that this was all there was to it, at least for a time.

[color=fff79a]"It's nice to imagine a world without the fuckers, to be honest,"[/color] Tony added, without specifying which fuckers, but it was probably aristocrats and the system alike. Tony harbored a casual disregard, but there was something deadly serious beneath the casualness. He was known for not particularly liking aristocracy, even if he, paradoxically, knew a few personally and somewhat liked them. But he was strange, off-putting and intense, and it was safe to say he didn't exactly have a pick of friends anyway. But Barghest, at least, at the very end now, was something similar to that. The strange thing about Tony was his bloody-minded fatalism and skepticism. He took a dark, bleak look at the world and seemed to draw an incongruous strength from its ambiguities, a carefully honed sense of grievance. Some got institutionalized and were already missing the Citadel, but Tony was breathing free air for the first and last time in ten years  and he managed to make it while not turning into one of their little disciplined toy soldiers.