ladyshadowdrake (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladyshadowdrake) wrote2018-06-01 01:56 am
ladyshadowdrake) wrote2018-06-01 01:56 am
If you are still taking suggestions, I would love some more incubus steve!
via https://ift.tt/2J2IquL
A New Beginning 6/? (Well, not the whole of 6, maybe really more like 5.5, or 5.1283)
It was entirely accidental that Tony found the tiny leak in his giant ship. Or, rather, he found all the signs that there was a leak. He’d been looking for a prototype generator that he’d put in storage when he’d gotten bored and moved onto another project. When the staff at the facility couldn’t find the generator, he’d gone on a hunt through the records for where it had been moved to, and why. It looked like a clerical error, just the wrong stick slapped on the box, and there was his generator in somewhere inconvenient like China instead of upstate.
It wasn’t until he’d followed the errant bit of machinery from Manhattan to Malibu, to Barstow, to Houston, to Taiwan, and then to Japan that he started noticing patterns of other items going along similar, circuitous routes. The generator fell off the proverbial truck in Singapore, but by then he’d lost interest in the project, and was following nine different trails of bits of seemingly inconsequential machinery and parts being shipped all over the globe before abruptly disappearing.
Individually, the pieces of machinery and bits of material were harmless, but his brain was already putting the list together and rearranging the pieces. When he was a kid, he used to play a mental exercise game of inventorying everything in eyesight, and then twisting them all around in his head to create something new. He’d once mentally melted the glue out of the spines of his dad’s showy library, and then torn the cloth off the couch, disassembled six floor lamps, unwound the big tassels tying the curtains back, and emerged with a functional hang glider.
Putting the parts together out of his own inventory did not lead to anything as ridiculous as a hang glider. Without even taking into account everything else that must surely missing, Tony could have built enough weapons to take over a small country.
He tried to tell himself that he was being paranoid. He was doing that thing he did where he put together a bunch of disparate facts and came up with an alien invasion. Correlation did not equal causation. Except that sometimes it did.
“Jarvis, go to work on this,” Tony said when he’d tracked the last of them all to the manufacturing facility in Singapore, where they appeared to just dissolve into so many drops of water falling into the ocean. “I need to know where these things are going, and why.”
“At once, Sir,” Jarvis answered amiably. Despite his neutral, polite tone, Tony could sense the excitement in him. Whether he would ever admit it or not, Jarvis had always had a pair of wandering feet, and that hadn’t changed when he’d lost his feet all together. He was always excited about infiltration projects, particularly when there was no risk of him getting his shirt dirty in the process.
Tony sat back to watch the screen for a few minutes, but even he couldn’t keep up with Jarvis’ processing speeds, and the information flew by so quickly that it might as well have been one of those ubiquitous Matrix screensavers circa 1999.
He abandoned his chair, debated working on something useful, and decided to call Steve instead. Maybe he could fast talk Steve into a late afternoon lunch, and just conveniently neglect to mention that by lunch he meant letting Tony blow him in a semi-public location before taking to him to that trendy Seducer Spa with the glacier water pools.
(Your picture was not posted)
A New Beginning 6/? (Well, not the whole of 6, maybe really more like 5.5, or 5.1283)
It was entirely accidental that Tony found the tiny leak in his giant ship. Or, rather, he found all the signs that there was a leak. He’d been looking for a prototype generator that he’d put in storage when he’d gotten bored and moved onto another project. When the staff at the facility couldn’t find the generator, he’d gone on a hunt through the records for where it had been moved to, and why. It looked like a clerical error, just the wrong stick slapped on the box, and there was his generator in somewhere inconvenient like China instead of upstate.
It wasn’t until he’d followed the errant bit of machinery from Manhattan to Malibu, to Barstow, to Houston, to Taiwan, and then to Japan that he started noticing patterns of other items going along similar, circuitous routes. The generator fell off the proverbial truck in Singapore, but by then he’d lost interest in the project, and was following nine different trails of bits of seemingly inconsequential machinery and parts being shipped all over the globe before abruptly disappearing.
Individually, the pieces of machinery and bits of material were harmless, but his brain was already putting the list together and rearranging the pieces. When he was a kid, he used to play a mental exercise game of inventorying everything in eyesight, and then twisting them all around in his head to create something new. He’d once mentally melted the glue out of the spines of his dad’s showy library, and then torn the cloth off the couch, disassembled six floor lamps, unwound the big tassels tying the curtains back, and emerged with a functional hang glider.
Putting the parts together out of his own inventory did not lead to anything as ridiculous as a hang glider. Without even taking into account everything else that must surely missing, Tony could have built enough weapons to take over a small country.
He tried to tell himself that he was being paranoid. He was doing that thing he did where he put together a bunch of disparate facts and came up with an alien invasion. Correlation did not equal causation. Except that sometimes it did.
“Jarvis, go to work on this,” Tony said when he’d tracked the last of them all to the manufacturing facility in Singapore, where they appeared to just dissolve into so many drops of water falling into the ocean. “I need to know where these things are going, and why.”
“At once, Sir,” Jarvis answered amiably. Despite his neutral, polite tone, Tony could sense the excitement in him. Whether he would ever admit it or not, Jarvis had always had a pair of wandering feet, and that hadn’t changed when he’d lost his feet all together. He was always excited about infiltration projects, particularly when there was no risk of him getting his shirt dirty in the process.
Tony sat back to watch the screen for a few minutes, but even he couldn’t keep up with Jarvis’ processing speeds, and the information flew by so quickly that it might as well have been one of those ubiquitous Matrix screensavers circa 1999.
He abandoned his chair, debated working on something useful, and decided to call Steve instead. Maybe he could fast talk Steve into a late afternoon lunch, and just conveniently neglect to mention that by lunch he meant letting Tony blow him in a semi-public location before taking to him to that trendy Seducer Spa with the glacier water pools.
(Your picture was not posted)