This is not a drill.
Tony hated having to stay at SHIELD headquarters while the mansion was being repaired, again. He had the best contractors in New York working around the clock and it would still be at least a week before the Avengers Tower could be remotely habitable. Tony wanted to just buy a hotel and have everyone stay there until the repairs were finished but Pepper said she didn't feel real estate was a good investment right now. And when Agent Coulson (Tony still couldn't call him Phil with a straight face) suggested the team stay at headquarters, Pepper agreed so quickly that Tony knew there was some sort of plot going on. Still, sometimes the best offence was biding ones time and seeing what the enemy had planned before attacking, so he agreed. He just didn't know about all the alarms that would be involved.
The day they moved in was the first. Some junior SHIELD agents had been assigned to help the Avengers find their quarters and move their things. Unfortunately, no one told Bruce the plan and when a SHIELD lackey had picked up what the soldier thought was a box of CD's, Bruce hulked out.
Alarms went off through out the building. "Hulk alert. This is not a drill. Hulk alert. This is not a drill." Lights flashed and sirens blared. The Avengers quickly went to the lobby and found Bruce as Hulk surrounded by Shield agents with all sorts of weaponry. They were afraid to fire however, so when Captain America entered and said "Stand Down!" they actually listened. Cap slowly approached the Hulk, and gave him back the box of Gamma Research material, the Hulk went away and poor Bruce had to live with being naked in front of all of SHIELD, again. Tony escorted him off to their temporary lab and made them both tea. (Being Tony, he did take time to add a shot of Bourbon to his own cup.)
The next day it was the paperclips. Someone in HR had just brought a new box of paperclips up from the supply closet when the paperclips came to life. They were hopping all over the office, trying to mate but generally just getting stuck in long chains and knotted balls.
"Animate inanimate object alert. This is not a drill. Animate inanimate object alert. This is not a drill." Tony was getting into the suit when Jarvis said, "Director Fury is calling sir, and he does not sound pleased."
"Put him through Jarvis."
"Stark…"Fury started.
"The paperclips ARE NOT MINE! I don't even use paper!" Tony said. "Jarvis, end call."
After an afternoon of the greatest superheroes in the world (actually, with Thor, two worlds) chasing bouncing paperclips throughout SHIELD offices, it came down to Tony finally noticing that these clips were of the extra large variety and there was an incredibly small micro chip imbedded in each one. Tony ended up glad that Coulson wouldn't let him just shoot the damn things, those microchips were amazing. (Phil didn't want to have to duplicate all the paperwork that would have been destroyed if Tony had blown up the offices.) Tony went down to R&D and looked for the person trying not to grin.
"Son, do you have something to say?" Tony asked a lab assistant.
"They wouldn't listen to me sir. All because I never finished my dissertation."
"Why paperclips?"
"Have you seen the amount of paperwork they make us do? And the real scientists WITH their PhD's make me do all of theirs. And I thought thumbtacks might hurt someone." Maria Hill was entering the lab looking like she was about to go all ninja on someone, so
Tony quickly and quietly slipped the young man his business card and said, "Shut them down. And when you're tired of working for idiots, come and see me."
Two days later its Giant bat from hell day. Clint had brought home what he thought was a run of the mill Alpine Long-eared Bat back from Russia as a pet. (No, it wasn't an Avenger Op and no, Phil didn't know about the bat until it was too late.) Clint had found it in his snipers perch and thinking it was an orphan, decided to bring it home. Clint didn't know his target had been a geneticist working on giantism. (Fury used Phil and Hawkeye as a tool, does your hammer have to know what the nail was doing before you just hit it?) Over night the bat had grown to the size of a Volkswagen and decided to make Fury's penthouse quarters its cave. (Fury did like to keep it dark in there and it was rather damp for some reason)
"This is not a drill. Giant Mammal alert. This is not a drill. Giant mammal alert." Why did the sirens seem to get louder? It seemed to make the bat angrier. He was swooping around the office knocking all of Fury's Captain America memorabilia off the walls and shelves.
It would have been simple for Hulk to smash the bat from hell, but Clint had become attached to the creature, so Tony set up a high frequency amplifier that seemed to gently annoy the bat right out of Fury's office and Clint used moths from SHIELD's own genetics lab as a food trail down to the detention level. Seeing that the Hulk no longer was a threat (one hoped anyway) they used a Hulk cage to keep the bat in. Clint had named it Fury Junior. Phil almost smiled at that. Tony was looking into changing the sirens to rock music, maybe Black Sabbath. Then he got distracted.
The next alarm, Tony had to reluctantly admit, was his fault. He needed at least three hands to rebuild his leg armor the way he wanted and he needed an AI that could actually be helpful in his work for a change. (Not counting Jarvis, Jarvis worked just fine.) Maybe it wasn't the best idea to give Butterfingers a drill, a drill that Tony had fitted with its own AI. An independent AI that decided to get back at Tony for perfectly innocent remarks.
This is not a drill. Independent AI alert. This is not a drill. Independent AI alert.
"Do you hear that Drill? They don't know that this time, it actually IS a drill. Kind of funny, right? Tony was talking to the drill, hiding behind an overturned workbench. 'There had to be a way to disconnect those damn flashing lights, at least in the lab', He thought.
When the rest of the team entered they found Tony using a discarded arm from an old version of the Iron Man suit as a saber, what was left of the top of the workbench as a shield, blocking the drills attack and saying "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have accused you of not being straight. And I'm sure you're right, I DID say ¾ inch bit, not ¼ like I meant. It was totally my fault. You deserve a name, even Dummy got a name. How about Pokey, would that be OK? Pokey the drill."
While the rest of the team just sat back and laughed at the sight, Thor finally took pity on him used Mjölnir, and smashed the drill to pieces.
"Hey, Clint got to keep the bat from hell, and my pets just get clobbered?" Tony complained.
"Clint's pet didn't try and kill him." Coulson said dryly.
"Come on Tony, I'll help you get cleaned up and then I'll be your third hand." Steve offered.
"Oh, you innocent thing, you have no idea how many naughty things I could do with that statement, are you flirting with me Captain America?"
"After we clean up, I'll let you know."
They were finishing sweeping the lab when the next alarm went off.
"Can't a building full of secret agents handle anything with out literal bells and whistles and god damned strobe lights?" Tony complained.
"Noxious substance detected. This is not a drill. Noxious substance detected. This is not a drill." Tony and Steve didn't need Coulson's sitrep to know which way to head. The horrible sweet smell seemed to be coming from Black Widow's quarters. Bursting through the door they discovered Natasha in only a fluffy white towel coming out of her bathroom.
"It looked like the same bottle of bath salts I always use. This has to be Clint. I'll kill him without even breaking a sweat." She mumbled as she stormed out of the door.
"Nat, don't you want to get dressed first?" Steve asked.
"Where's the fun in that?" Tony laughed. By then, Bruce had arrived with the super odor absorbing foam he had developed when he was looking for a deodorant for the Hulk. Dumping it in the bath, the smell dissipated immediately.
Watching through CCTV in Fury's office, Phil checked something off a list on his clipboard, Pepper read over his shoulder and Fury sat with his feet on his desk and almost smiled. "I'd say this week of drills went rather well."
"I still say our own agents could have handled some of this without the Avengers help." Phil said.
"But that wasn't the point of these exercises. Most of these things could have been handled by SHIELD agents eventually. We needed the Avengers to CAUSE the emergencies." Fury explained.
"And the paperclips?" Pepper asked.
"Happy coincidence. Oh, and you should probably prepare some employment contracts for that lab assistant. Doubt he'll want to stay after Maria's punishment." Fury said to Pepper.
"What was it this time sir?" Coulson wondered.
"He had to do paperclip inventory. And if anyone knows how much paper work is involved in running a place like SHIELD headquarters, it's you Phil."
Yes, Fury was capable of smiling, no matter what rookie agents thought.
Pepper shivered and called the local Hilton. "Yes, I need to some rooms for the rest of the month please… How many?...All of them." Better safe than sorry she thought. At least the alarms would probably be quieter. If it was the place was completely destroyed, THEN Tony could buy it and rebuild.