"Stark, we need you to come in."
"What do you want Coulson, I'm a little busy at the moment."
"There's a little situation and we need you to come check it out."
"Details pal, details."
"I can't tell you much over the phone, but we found something that may be related to Stark Industries."
"Fine, where?"
"I'm sending you the itinerary right now."
Great… I hate that guy. He insults me all the time and yet he always asks me to do stuff for him. I have half a mind to just tell him to screw off, seeing as he has tried multiple times to monopolize my weapons manufacturing company. He doesn't seem to understand that my millions of dollars will kick his 4 foot ass any day.
"Pepper!" I call as I throw my phone onto the sofa. "Butterfingers, get me a drink, STAT."
Sir, I'm receiving the information for your flight now. Would you like me to review it for you?
"Yes Jarvis. Where is Ms. Potts?"
She boarded an 8am flight to Washington this morning, sir.
"Damn how could I forget that?" I grumbled, plopping myself into my desk chair. "Let's call her shall we. Wouldn't want her to have a heart attack when she gets back and I'm not here."
Ms. Potts has already been informed of your departure.
"Seriously? She knew all about this and didn't tell me? I didn't even have the chance to defend myself. Man I really hate that guy! Call her anyway, I need to vent. And where is my drink!?"
Calling Ms. Potts now.
I hear a whine near the bar area from Butterfingers, my robotic assistant. A few clanks and clatters later, it brings me a tumbler containing my favorite Scotch.
"This is Ms. Pepper Potts speaking, how may I be of assistance?" my secretary answered after a few rings.
"Pepper I'm extremely disappointed. Are you conspiring against me now?" I remarked, rubbing my temples gently."
"I don't know what you're talking about, Tony."
"Please, spare me the cover up. You knew Coulson was going to call me today so you abandoned ship as soon as you could. Why would you do this to me? I thought we were on the same team."
"Tony, seriously, what are y-"
"You know I hate that man! You know that I don't want anything to do with this 'project' they're starting, and you know I have work to do that can't really wait. So remind me again why? That's all I want to know."
Pepper sighs and from the sounds of scraping from the other line she switched the phone to her other ear. "This isn't as big of a deal as you're making it out to be. SHIELD found something and they just want you to identify if it belongs to you or the company or not. Just be a good boy for once and do as they say."
Well, there's no arguing with that…
"Well Jarvis I guess we're going. Let's just get over and done with and hopefully they will never bother me again."
Yes sir. Stark Industries flight 217 is scheduled to leave in 2 hours. Shall I arrange a car for you?
"Nah it's cool, I have 5 of my own. Damn I don't even have Ms. Potts here to pack my bag."
It's already been done sir.
"Oh fantastic. Uhhh I'm guessing I'll be gone for a couple of days, so forward all calls to my out of office voice mail. It's going to take all my concentration not to hit Coulson while I'm there, let alone not trash my phone as well." I mumbled as I rounded the corner into my bedroom.
Yes sir. New mobile phones are not in this month's budget.
"I know what's in the budget, and that's also something I don't want to worry about right now. Two hours huh… another drink is in order." I grabbed the bag that was nicely packed on my bed and downed the last gulp of Scotch in my tumbler.
I really do have a cool assistant, maybe I should tell her that more often and she won't conspire against me like this again. I know she likes flowers, maybe I should send her some.
"Jarvis, leave some flowers for Pepper when she gets back in to New York. Just leave them anonymous though, and say thanks."
Of course sir, but wouldn't you like to make the sentiment personal to you?
"No, wouldn't want her to start believing I've gone soft. She'll know it's me anyway."
The sun was at prime height to light up the entire living room without too much glare from the floor to ceiling glass doors. I poured myself another drink then parked it on the sofa. Looking over at my phone, I realized I had missed a text message from Pepper.
"'Sorry.'" I read out loud. "Well crap, now I feel kinda bad. In all fairness though, she did keep a secret from me. Jarvis don't tell me you knew as well."
No sir, I was not informed.
"Fine. I wasn't even left anything to go over? No 'debriefing' as he calls it? No photographs?"
It will all be ready for you in your jet.
Yep, I'm just dragging things out as much as I can. A pessimist is definitely on the list of names I've been called. Maybe I should change that. Wow, this Scotch is amazing.
"There better be Scotch there too."
Two hours later I'm on the jet going to… uh where am I going? Oh right, Manhattan. Apparently SHIELD field workers up north found a huge wreck in the ice, yet I fail to understand how this pertains to me, seeing as I didn't send much of my weapons up north. Are the eskimos trying to replicate my Jericho Missile? I haven't even released that yet… Whatever Tony, quit stressing about it and find out when you get there.
Thank god it was a short flight to Manhattan, where I was informed that I would in fact not be going any further than that. Just the site of the SHIELD logo made my spine crawl with a mash up of feelings I couldn't describe. Of course, Coulson would the one who greeted me as soon as I got off the jet, all bright and smiles and military seriousness.
"Thank you for coming Mr. Stark," he said.
"Yeah yeah. This better be good." I adjusted my tie, not looking him in the eye before I led the way to somewhere I had no idea where I was going.
"We wouldn't have brought you here if we didn't think this was of utter importance to you. Did you read everything in the debriefing folder we left for you?"
"Yes, but you left out one crucial piece of information. You didn't tell me WHAT they found, so I could immediately tell you whether or not it belonged to me so I could be on my merry way, or maybe not even come at all!" I rambled.
"That's exactly why we didn't tell you. We feared you wouldn't believe us too, but we need your hands on, up front expertise… in person."
I rolled my eyes and walked a little faster. The one thing I hated most about this man was that some freaking how, he was able to shut down my witty, sarcastic logic with his mediocre rhetoric. I wanted nothing more than to stomp on him with my words one day.
"Fine. Show me."
Coulson and his gang of cronies sped past me and detoured from the double doors ahead to a set of stairs to my right. I felt an immediate drop in the temperature as we got closer to the heavy iron door at the bottom.
"Are you locking me away in a torture chamber or something?" I mumbled, staring down the ominous door.
"Just stay with us."
Coulson passed his badge over the electronic door lock and after a series of blinks and beeps, it swung open to reveal a wide concrete passage.
Wow. What the hell could they have found that needs to be kept in a subzero concrete dungeon? Then again, this is SHIELD… they tend to overreact about the little things, and not pay enough attention to the things that actually are a big deal.
After what seemed like hours of walking with my toes growing numb from the coldness, Coulson stopped outside another pair of double doors, turned back to me, and pushed them open. Inside looked like a hospital room from something really big. There were two vertical pods at the far end of the room, both rigged to the nines with cables and tubes. The other corner housed a massive computer system with at least 10 different monitors, and a lengthy control panel. I tried to glimpse what each monitor was showing, but Coulson deterred me over to the pod farthest on my left.
"What is all this…?" I asked, finally setting eyes on a monitor that was displaying a gigantic wreckage in the remote tundra of the north. It looked like an aircraft had emergency landed in the middle of nowhere and no one was able to find it for a long time.
"I would suggest you sit down Tony," Coulson warned, pointing to a table beside the control panel.
I looked at him skeptically before slowly moving towards the chair. "There better be Scotch here."
He ignored my comment as he sat down at the table across from me. "So as you're aware," he started, "our crew has found a significant piece of evidence in the far north, and as I'm sure you've also noticed, it was an aircraft. SHIELD has no records of this aircraft, and neither does the American military. The technology and equipment the excavators are finding inside are nothing we've ever seen before, yet it seems very primitive, therefore we have reason to believe this aircraft came from a different time. 1945 to be exact. Now, the reason we asked you to come check this is out is because of something else we found inside. We found a man and woman frozen in the ice."
"That's a little creepy, why would I want to check them out?"
"We have no idea how, but these two people are still alive. The w-"
"That's even creepier."
Coulson glared at me and continued to ignore my comments. "The woman was carrying something that represented Stark Industries, likely something belonging to your father."
"If it belonged to my father, I don't want it. Were you not aware that I make MODERN weapons now, and I don't tend to linger in the past?"
"Of course I'm aware of it. Tony, we went through every bit of research we could collect from your father, and nothing we found came anywhere close to matching what this woman was carrying. It's the blue prints for a weapon that used a power source from a technology that didn't exist in his time."
"What did you do with that blue print?" I demanded, stressing the urgency. That blueprint can't get any further into SHIELD's hands… it needs to be burned and destroyed and never seen again.
"We made copies of it, and the original is still with the unidentified woman." Coulson replied calmly.
"You need to get rid of it right now. All the copies, the original… destroy them all. It belongs to me, therefore I command it."
"Oh don't worry," he interrupted with that "I'm a step ahead of you" grin on his little face, "Someone else has already surpassed this design, and created it. We believe that the faction that constructed this weapon stole the design from your father, which is why we can't find any other documents pertaining to this. We're hoping the other two artifacts we found can give us some answers once we've restored them."
I have to get into their data bases and destroy any and all copies of those blue prints, and once this woman wakes up if she ever does, I have to find out where it came from. Stark Industries does not need this riding over its head and destroying all the hard work I've put into making what it is today.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the pods in the corner behind me, wondering who it was inside of them, how the hell they were still alive, and where they came from. I stood up abruptly from the chair and hurried over to them. I read the information cards next each pod, but nothing was any use to me.
These people obviously knew my father, and maybe they were close with him, in order to have an important, possibly stolen blueprint. Is the technology that apparently didn't exist in his time the arc reactor? Son of a bitch if it is, that certainly doesn't need to be in the ingredients list of weapons…
"Show it to me," I said.
"I can't op-"
"I don't want to hear excuses. Just show me the damned blueprint.
Coulson glared at me then reached for his communicator. "Get someone from tech down here to open the pods."
I kept my eyes fixed on him, to make sure he knew I wasn't messing around.