[for Pepper and Peter] Reaching for the stars.

[notawastedlife]

His father, in his video and by extension his notes, had stated his desire for Tony to finish his work, to take the work that had already been done and bring it to another level. He didn't have a problem with this concept; all innovation built on that which already existed. Any scientist not standing on the shoulders of his predecessors was

Comments

[daretodo]

"Hi," I say, frowning as I take in Tony's latest project. He mentioned once, in passing, something about cold fusion, but even so, it's not quite what I'm expecting when I step into the workshop today. Despite having caught only the tail end of Jarvis' suggestion, I already know I agree wholeheartedly.

"Run the simulation."

[wildlyconflictd]

Pepper reached the bottom of the stairs just long enough after Peter to have missed most of what had been said. Two fresh cups of coffee in hand, she paused and peered first from the dubious look on Peter's face and to the determined one on Tony's. Did it honestly matter what they were discussing?

"Listen to Peter," she advised, and continued into the room, heels clicking on tile. One of the cups she handed off to the younger man before she carried the other over to Tony. "Please," she emphasized, brows arching as she passed him his coffee.

[notawastedlife]

"Are you my boss?" Tony asked Peter, leaning around slightly to look past him at Pepper, as she entered. "Is he my boss?"

Then she had to go and agree with him. They were ganging up on him. He should have seen that coming. He sighed, did a complete revolution in his chair before taking the cup of coffee in one hand and reaching over to hit a pair of keys with two fingers of the other hand.

He pushed the screen around to face Peter. On it, superimposed over a diagram of the reactor -- small, cylindrical, designed to fit in the space in his chest -- was a graph, now rising exponentially. Then it turned into two graphs, with slightly different lines. Then three. The third one was turning red.

"Jarvis doesn't like it, because he can't reliably simulate it mute," he said, cutting off Jarvis' protest as it began. "Heisenberg."

The mute also had the advantage of preventing Jarvis from mentioning that he'd only needed one key press to run that simulation, and the other had prepped the reactor for the initial stage.

[daretodo]

"As in the principle?" I ask, setting the coffee down on the desk as I step in for a closer look at the screen. There's absolutely nothing about those graphs that's so much as remotely reassuring, but then, I've always had an aversion to unstable nuclear reactions -- call me a scaredy spider, I can take it.

"You designed Jarvis. If Jarvis can't reliably simulate it, doesn't that technically mean you can't?"