Disclaimer: I don't own Iron Man or Jarvis. Marvel does. I'm just playing with them.
Tony Stark closed his eyes and leaned against the table for a moment, catching his breath. He had been working on a new project for the last twenty-two hours, and he was taking a breath and recovering his thoughts as he prepared to work for the next several hours as well. He knew Pepper would kill him if she realized how little he had slept, but he didn't care…that much.
Ever since he had had the shrapnel removed from his chest, he had wondered what to do with himself. It was just so… different… not having to depend on the reactor in his chest to keep him alive. It was freeing, but also strangely terrifying. And it would be strange, building new suits with reactors of their own, instead of constructing them to use his reactor. Not difficult, but strange. So he had decided that instead of working on yet another new suit, he would try something different. Something more difficult.
He had been inspired after he saw the tesseract in action. Before, he wasn't sure if it was possible to make a portal/teleport device. But now…? The possibilities were endless. He had had Jarvis run some diagnostics after the whole affair with the Mandarin, when he had wanted to start doing something else, rather than obsessively building suit after suit. Finally, he had some measurements that he could use.
He wasn't going to start big, with world-jumping or anything like that. Nah, he would start with small trips and work up to world-jumping gradually. So far, he had only built a small prototype. The next thing left to do was to test it.
Tony slowly stood up, clutching a cup of coffee, and made his way over to the device. Taking a sip out of his mug, he set it down on a shelf, picking up a small metal box. The box had a tracking device inside, and he was going to send it through the portal/teleport and see where it went. And if it survived. That was always important.
"Hey, Jarvis, get the machine ready, ok?" he stated rather impatiently. "I wanna get this thing tested."
"Very well, sir," the AI responded. "However, I would not recommend testing it yet, as it does not appear to be stable."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Look, I don't care, I didn't work on this all night just for it to not be ready in the morning. Just turn it on, ok?"
If Jarvis had been a human, he would have sighed. But since he was merely a robot, he simply acceded to the request. "Very well, sir."
The machine turned on, making a whirring noise and glowing yellow, to Tony's delight. Soon a hoop of yellow had appeared above the machine.
Tony grinned. "Well, what do you know? It's working!" He reached forward to send the box through the apparent portal.
"Sir, use caution," Jarvis warned. "It appears to be 4.53 times stronger than we estimated."
Disregarding the advice, Tony stepped closer to the portal and pushed the box through. It hung in the middle of the hoop for a second, then disappeared in a flurry of yellow sparks. Tony swung around, his back to the machine. "Jarvis, find out where it went!" He inadvertently took a step backwards.
"Sir, you are too close to the portal for safety," Jarvis warned, but it was too late. Tony was sucked into the hoop, hovered there for a second, and then dissolved into a flurry of sparks.
The portal blinked, and collapsed in on itself with a snap as sparks burst from the machine.