Full Summary:
Ryan Tillman is your average engineering student in New York with an unpleasant past. That is, until she gets a project that includes working with Tony Stark and they build her a metal suit. Ryan fights against Loki alongside the Avengers as the Iron Maiden, but when she reveals herself, albeit reluctantly, she gets threatened and her past comes out. Two days after the battle, her ex-best-friend shows up ready to kill. To complicate things further, Loki is sent back down for Earthly justice and starts falling for Ryan, who by then is getting pretty sick of psychotic attentions fixing themselves on her, and just wants to get Steve to notice her as something other than a teammate... Ah, the life of a reluctant superhero.
**Edit 5/24: I changed some details of the story, so I would advise any old readers to read all the way through to get a fresh grip on the story.**
"Shut up, phone!" I snapped at my phone without even missing a beat. I logged on to my email, something I hadn't done in a week, and found my inbox flooding with emails, mainly Facebook messages.
After about five minutes of sifting through and deleting emails, I found what I was looking for. The year project info for my engineering class.
Miss Tillman,
This year's engineering project is as follows:
Students are to interview an assigned prominent engineer and present a report on the person's work. The report must be twenty pages long. This project is worth ten thousand points.
There is also a bonus opportunity, which is as follows:
The student may, for up to five thousand bonus points, create something under the instruction or with the assistance of their assigned engineer.
The engineer you have been assigned is Tony Stark.
Good Luck,
Professor Jackson
Once I finished reading the email, I fired up Google and typed in "Stark Tower address New York City", and what I found surprised me. It turned out that Stark Tower was just next door to my apartment building, and I had plenty of time to get dressed and walk over to set up an interview.
I arrived at the Tower twenty minutes later, finding someone standing at the door already, almost as if waiting for me to show up. They opened the door, letting me inside just as it started to rain.
"Thank you. I'm looking for Mr. Stark..." I said, and the woman who had let me in gave me a suspicious look.
"Why might that be?" she asked, still looking suspicious.
"I'm an engineering student at NYU, and my big project for the year requires me to interview an assigned engineer about their work, and I was assigned Tony Stark." I explained, and the woman looked down at a tablet computer she held, scrolling down the page and nodding.
"Are you busy later today?" she asked, pulling out an iPhone, the model of which I couldn't identify, and looking at something on it.
"No, I'm completely free. I'm taking a more independent-study type of course, since I took most of the engineering courses, and quite a few others, out of boredom over the past few summers, but I never got the chance to do the hands-on bits. So I'm actually free pretty much all the time!" I replied, and she smiled, leading me over to one of the many elevators in the lobby-type room.
"Well, how far away do you live, Miss Tillman?" she asked, and I raised an eyebrow in confusion, before realizing that the security around the Tower was extremely tight, so they probably got a background check on me the moment I moved in to the building next door. I shrugged it off, before noticing the woman's look of confusion.
"I live in the apartment building next door." I answered, and she smiled again. The elevator arrived then, and we stepped in.
"By the way, I'm Virginia Potts, Mr. Stark's personal assistant. Everyone calls me Pepper, though." Pepper introduced herself, pressing the button for the basement.
The ride to the basement was silent, and fast, and when the elevator doors opened, we were greeted by a rather amusing scene. Stark was sleeping, head on his arms on a table, beside a half-finished robot, while another robot moved around by his feet cleaning up spilled coffee.
"He's had a long night. How about we leave him here to sleep and go get something to eat upstairs?" Pepper suggested, and I turned to her, smiling widely.
"That sounds great, I didn't eat breakfast this morning and I'm actually really hungry. But then again, I almost never eat breakfast and it's past ten, which is when I usually start feeling the consequences." I replied, and Pepper laughed as we stepped back into the elevator.