(Hey. Sorry for my absence. I'll eventually get to continuing my Pepperony story, but for now.. Have this. Seeing as I am inspired for this currently. ^^ Enjoy.)


Finally back at the tower, after that incident with the God of Mischief, Tony was starting to think that the world needed him and the petty group of heroes more and more often. Honestly, it was kind of annoying being constantly on call for some stupid kid blowing shit up a few blocks down. Walking down the almost car-wash like mechanism as his Iron Man suit was taken off, he rolled his shoulders and sighed, his suit was a bit battered more so than normal. No doubt due to the fact that this time it had been a slightly bigger deal, it had been a short scuffle in Manhattan, but not without quite a bit of repercussion and prize. Firstly a good portion of Downtown had been blown to smithereens, secondly…. The cause of it all had been a few stupid kids on the street who found a mysterious stone and decided to try it out, and when it decided to blow everything up in the vicinity, well… The Avengers and SHIELD were a little bit less than just pleased.

After the battle had ended, Tony found this stone. It had a certain allure to it, and after a quick "meeting" with Nick Fury back at the base, he decided to hand the stone over to Tony for studying and for safe keeping. Steve, had disagreed with Fury, thinking Tony to be too irresponsible or something along those lines, but in the end Iron Man got the stone regardless, it was not as if Steve Rogers' opinion actually mattered in this particular case. Regardless, Tony wandered back into his tower, ears ringing still with the sounds of battle and the loud pangs of destruction, and then there were the sirens of the police cars arriving at the scene of broken down Manhattan, they had everything under control it seemed for now. Which meant, to Tony's absolute fortune he got to rest, he was going to be able to sit down and just have a drink and inspect the stone in a quiet environment. Something he had been desperately wishing for now for the past hour ever since he got his hands on the beautiful gem.

It was purple, not particularly a common color for a regular looking rock, which made Stark think that perhaps it had fallen from space at such a high velocity that it somehow broke through any atmospheric barriers that the Earth had. Which was reasonable, after all a meteorite had succeeded in that before, why not a smaller rock? Something smaller could travel at a higher speed after all. Regardless, he pulled up a chair next to the desk, and set the stone in front of him, with a single swipe of his hands holograms and screens showed up, he placed the stone into one of his customized scanners, which went through the artifact with red lines, before beeping in denial and confusion. It did not recognize the material, so it was not anything from Earth… Alright, a different setting and Tony calibrated quickly before setting the stone back up for scanning, only to receive the same exact reply as before. There were residual pieces of the dust from the atmosphere on it; however there was no telling where this stone was from. Whether it was from a planet, or something entirely different, Tony was going to go with something entirely different for now as he scribbled down a few notes.

Hours passed, and Tony even after humming to himself and even talking to himself like some crazed scientist could not figure out what in the world this stone was made out of, he rubbed his face in frustration looking around, he stood up. A break, yes a break that is what he needed and so without much hesitation he turned from his desk and chair, and went to the bar just a few paces away. Picking out liquor, he poured some into a glass and sipped. Stark was quite up to his neck with all of these mysterious happenings as of recent, he was quite ready to go back to his normal life where he had to fight some guy hell-bent on taking over his company, or some foreign dude from another country. Yeah, he'd take that over aliens with spaceships any day. Though he had a feeling in the back of his head that things would not be settling down any time soon, and when his gut feeling told him something, Tony tended to follow no matter how absolutely stupid it might have initially seemed.

But, no - another sip – he couldn't worry about such petty things currently, Loki was gone up in his own world being punished, imprisoned. Things wouldn't be heating up any time soon, Loki had been the biggest threat they faced as a group (minus the short falling out) and Tony doubted that there was any enemy out there who was as big of a threat, and if they could take out Loki they could take out anyone else. Plus, what exactly were the odds of there being anymore aliens out there? Tony hoped slim, though again his gut feeling told him he was just fooling himself, which he might have been, and so he sighed and took another drink of his beverage eyes closing for a brief second to rest them.

When he did open his eyes, he had to look outside, the large windows he had always gave the most beautiful scenery of the evening time New York; it was mesmerizing and relaxing all at the same time and Tony smiled very briefly at what he saw before moving over in a quiet shuffle to the desk once more, plopping down he set his drink off to the side and looked back to the stone.

"What am I going to do with you?" He inquired a soft shake of the head before he picked it up and looked it over once more, alright so maybe he wasn't completely dumbfounded by this thing, he just needed to break it open and see what was inside that was causing this power. So without further ado, he reached down into the box of tools just under the desk, hand blindly searching for the hammer. This was probably a bad idea, but nothing could deter Tony Stark from his duty, and therefore he gripped the hammer tightly in his hand once he found it, smiling with a bit of glee.

Did someone say volatile?