Stark Industries, Monday

[imafuturist]

Tony had spent most of last week back in New York being: repeatedly punched in the arm and hugged (Jan), given disappointed looks and lectures about trusting his team to back him up (Steve), ruthlessly mocked for being a beautiful technological butterfly (Clint), and prodded and tested for science (Reed

Comments

[craftyladyparts]

Jessica decided to stop in to check in on Tony now that he was back. It was the start of the week. He was bound to be back, right? That's how weeks worked around here.

"Hey, Tony. Still holding up? No terrifying side effects?" Jessica checked as she walked in. "No sudden bursts of evil cackling?" Small talk could wait.

[craftyladyparts]

"Just a woman who has a track record in the field of befriending Tony Starks," Jessica said. "If it helps, I'm perfectly happy with you creating a traffic jam of other Tonys."

[imafuturist]

"You're forgiven for that," Tony replied. "And thank you. Since I didn't say it before."

And Pepper had sent him multiple emails on the subject.

[craftyladyparts]

"Any time," Jessica said. "Just, man, get a slightly lower powered brand of bad guy. You guys are making it tough for me to consider myself a supersoldier, even with my training."

[imafuturist]

"Blame FuturePharm," Tony replied. "Which I am now in the process of dismantling and integrating the employees who haven't committed any crimes or broken any basic ethic codes into my R&D department."

[craftyladyparts]

"I'm actually working with a person who DOESN'T want to work with brilliant, morally corrupt people," Jessica noted. "That's really weird to me. I'm not used to it."

[imafuturist]

"...your world continues to make me sad."

[craftyladyparts]

"If it helps, Cap was my President for a while, so it wasn't all bad," Jessica said. "He won as a write-in candidate on the basis of punching enough things and people."

[imafuturist]

"...a little," Tony admitted. "Mine was replaced by shapeshifting alien invaders who made people not trust him anymore."

And then Spider-Man learned a valuable lesson from him about it.

[craftyladyparts]

"We had aliens like that. I think the Hulk ate a lot of them," Jessica noted.

[imafuturist]

"And I'm right back at being disturbed by your universe."

[craftyladyparts]

"Honestly, it's an appropriate feeling to have," Jessica said. "There's a reason I made it through school here so easily. My world was way, way more messed up than anything Fandom has thrown my way."

[imafuturist]

"An alien queen once tried to make me her bride and I still feel like my world is more normal than yours," Tony replied. "I never thought it was possible."

[craftyladyparts]

"Was the alien evil or just not your type?" Jessica checked.

[imafuturist]

"Evil and a little bad touchy." Which was his type, but only when the world wasn't in peril. And they weren't threatening his team.

[craftyladyparts]

"Yeah, that's pretty bad," Jessica said. "Really, we got pretty lucky with aliens. We only had a handful of confirmed alien incidents after World War II. And Galactus might have devoured New Jersey, but we drove him off before even more lives were lost."

Because Earth lost lives to Galactus in the Ultimate Universe. And he only tried eating it once!