The House Is Alive
Living with Toni took a lot of getting used to. She had several strange habits and it wasn't uncommon to find bits of random circuitry lying around that she had been working on while walking. There was also the fact that the entire tower was a bit of a labyrinth due to just how many floors it had and how many of the rooms looked similar.
However, the part that took the most getting used to was the fact that practically everything in the house seemed to literally have a mind of its own. Toni had made basically everything in her house into an AI and was completely unapologetic for how shocked the new residents of Stark Tower were to find out about this.
~#Natasha, Peggy & Nova#~
Of course Natasha's first encounter with an AI hadn't been at Stark Tower, so, by the time she moved in, she was more prepared for Toni's antics than the rest. That, however, didn't mean she hadn't gotten a shock when she had been unprepared the first time she had worked for Toni in the Malibu Mansion. She had been briefed about JARVIS, Dummy, You and Butterfingers when she took the case, as the entire world knew they existed and SHIELD had done a little digging into what they could do.
The problem came when, as part of her job as Toni's PA, she had to fetch her friend coffee while Toni was working on something that she said was important. Natasha could make neither head nor tails of it, but that had become normal even if, because of her profession, it was something that she didn't like at all. Mind you, she had gotten the information she came for. Toni was perfect for the Avengers Initiative despite Fury's fears, as her primary project was protecting everyone that she could. The only problem with that plan was that Toni was dying. Sure, the genius hadn't told Natasha that – she hadn't told anyone in fact – but the redhead had easily been able to figure it out. All of her questions and actions lately screamed that she was setting her affairs in order and preparing to say goodbye. She hadn't figured out the exact cause of it, yet, but the spy guessed it had something to do with the arc reactor that was in her chest.
She got so caught up in her thoughts, that she didn't register that she was grabbing the coffee that Toni had explicitly told her was for guests only. While it was perfectly nice to most people, Toni found it disgusting compared to her regular ridiculously expensive brews. Natasha was about to spoon it into the coffee maker, when it piped up a series of beeps and words scrolled across a screen near the rim telling her to, 'put the coffee down. It's the wrong kind!'
She did put the coffee down; rather dramatically though, as, despite her spy training, Natasha jumped about three feet in the air and dropped the container full of coffee on the kitchen floor. The vacuum cleaner then suddenly zoomed out of its position by the door to clean it up, which didn't help Natasha calm down at all. Both the coffee machine and vacuum cleaner kept beeping at her and she didn't understand what they wanted, so she was very relieved when Toni came running out of the elevator asking, "Nova and Peggy told me something was wrong. What happened?"
"I think I nearly put the wrong coffee in the coffee maker, but I didn't exactly expect it to come to life and… shout at me," Natasha explained, pausing a little at the end as she wasn't sure how to describe the coffee maker's reaction.
"It's okay," Toni assured her, clearly relieved by hearing that that was all that had happened. "Peggy gets a bit defensive if she's made to brew the rubbish stuff more often than normal and JARVIS must have told her that the coffee was for me. Nova was just cleaning up after you, I see."
"You turned your coffee maker and your vacuum cleaner into AI's?" Natasha asked incredulously.
"When I get drunk and see something that's not working as well as it could, it tends to become an AI," Toni told her. "I only work on them when drunk nowadays; their faults give them personality."
Deciding that she didn't really want to continue this conversation, Natasha dismissed her friend with a quick, "you should get back to whatever you were doing. I'll make you the right coffee, which I'm sure… Peggy will appreciate."
~#Phil & Viva#~
Phil Coulson prided himself on being well informed and very difficult to surprise. He would say that the amount of times he had been surprised by something were perfectly easy to count on a single hand. Of course, one of them had already been due to Toni, so he should have expected her to pull it off again.
He was sitting in one of her many living rooms while said billionaire worked down in the basement to save her own life. Phil still felt a little guilty about what they had done to her, as he knew how she hated being locked up after what had happened in Afghanistan. However, while he originally had been vehemently opposed to Fury's plan, he had accepted the necessity of it after hearing that Toni wasn't even trying to save herself. Not only was she an important part of protecting the planet, but she was also his friend and he didn't want to lose her like he had lost so many others to his profession.
Phil switched on the TV and, as it was showing some sort of documentary on Stark Industries, he decided to change the channel using Toni's extensively edited remote. The TV, however, didn't seem to be having any of that. It kept switching back to the documentary after showing a brief flash of the programmes he wanted to watch.
He kept trying to change the channel for about two minutes before a face flashed across the screen looking angry as it told him, "Stop interrupting my show."
Phil was rather ashamed to admit that he fell off the sofa due to the shock, which was probably the most undignified he had looked since his teenage years. He was very thankful that Toni was stuck in the basement and couldn't see it. Suddenly, the phone nearest to him rang and, when Toni didn't pick it up in the basement, he decided to answer it for her. As it turned out, it was Toni on the other end of the line.
"I'm sorry about Viva," she told him, "she gets a bit territorial when she wants to watch something and you try to change the channel. For some reason, she watches anything she can about me and the company, which is a little strange."
"You turned your television into an AI," Phil deadpanned, knowing that that was extreme, even for Toni. "Were you drunk?"
"Yes," Toni honestly said, "but, she's perfectly nice. If you want to watch the channels that you want though, judging on the channels you were trying to access, you should go and talk to Milan in the 8th spare bedroom. She loves reality TV." He could also have gone to Jazz who was much closer, but Toni was about to attempt to sneak out, so she wasn't going to tell him that.
"Thank you," Phil thanked her as he stood up, asking JARVIS for directions to the bedroom Toni had indicated while trying not to think about his encounter with the temperamental TV.
~#Bruce & Aqua#~
From his very first look at the labs, Bruce knew that he shouldn't be surprised by anything he found in there. So, when Toni had introduced him to the AI's that ran everything she didn't have time to do herself and didn't delegate to people like Pepper, he took it in stride. His first few encounters with AI's outside of the lab went well too, as they were all things that he expected Toni would have tinkered with.
He came up short when he was faced with one of the showers in the suite Toni had built for him decided that it didn't like the doctor very much. Bruce had been a bit cross after he had heard Toni fighting with the US military once again about how he wasn't a monster (something he was now starting to believe) and accidentally dented the pipe a little bit. The next thing he knew, every time he went in there, the shower seemed to know exactly what he wanted and gave him the opposite. When Bruce wanted something cold, the water would constantly be scalding. When he wanted a nice long hot shower to relax, he would be hit with a freezing blast and then the thing would shut off completely.
At first Bruce, didn't know what to think about it, as he didn't think the slight damage he had done to the pipe would have been enough to cause that. Besides, he had immediately told Toni, who had fixed it straight away. He didn't tell her about this problem purely because, every time he tried, she was busy or they ended up chatting about another project they wanted to work on.
This was a problem, as the problem only seemed to be getting worse; the shower regularly managed to give him minor burns. He started reaching in and hitting the button before quickly withdrawing his arm in the hopes that maybe it would just stop after a while, but it never seemed to. In the end, he knew that it was either wash in the sink or finally get Toni to look at the issue.
Of course the minute he told her what was happening, she knew exactly what had gone wrong, "Aqua must be mad at you because you accidentally injured her. I'm sorry that I didn't think to mention this to you earlier, but she's not usually a temperamental AI. You can borrow Lilah in my suite for now while I have a word with Aqua about the accident."
"You put AI's in your showers as well," Bruce asked in amazement. "The sheer amount of waterproofing you must have had to do with every individual wire is incredible. It must have taken hours even for you, as you wouldn't let the bots handle such delicate work."
"Well," Toni started with a shrug, "I just felt like they should be treated the same as I treat every appliance I own; as one of the family. And it would be weird, even for me, if I didn't turn them into AI's before doing that."
Bruce cracked a smile at that as Toni led him to the lift, stating her passcode so that he could gain access to her suite. He had a relaxing shower for the first time in weeks while the shower beeped pleasantly at him and, by the time he went back to his suite, Toni had finished her conversation with Aqua. She translated the beeps the AI gave him when he came back in, telling Bruce that it was an apology for messing with him for so long.
Although it was very odd for the doctor, he told Aqua that it didn't matter because he was in the wrong too. Ever since then, he never had any troubles having a shower in his own suite ever again.
~#Clint & JARVIS#~
Clint was an acrobat and a spy at heart after spending as much time as he did in the circus and with SHIELD. This meant that pretty soon, after Toni had left him alone in his guest suite to get acquainted with it, he jumped into the nearest vent and began to crawl around the ducts, trying to see what he could find in Toni's extensive house. What he didn't realise was that Toni: a) had an AI that saw everything, including the inside of the vents, and b) also had thoroughly booby trapped all of the vents just in case someone tried to use them as a way to infiltrate the tower.
He triggered one of these traps and weapons immediately sprung to attention in the walls. Clint leapt back immediately, right into a net that had appeared behind him.
"I apologise for the inconvenience Agent Barton," a disembodied voice told him, making the archer stop struggling momentarily in shock, "but maybe you should ask Miss Stark before you explore an area that she hasn't introduced to you herself."
"What the…? Where the hell is that coming from?" Clint asked confused, recognising the slight reprimand in the voice's tone and not being very pleased at him being treated like a child by someone who wouldn't even show their face.
"My name is JARVIS and I am the AI in charge of the Stark Household and the Iron Man suit," JARVIS informed him. "And I would appreciate it if you didn't enter any vents that Miss Stark hasn't explicitly told gave you have permission to be in future. Replacing all those traps will inconvenience me unnecessarily for at least five minutes and I do not want to work overtime to stop you from being seriously injured by the traps when I might have to deal with real threats."
Momentarily struck and practically speechless by the reprimand, Clint just muttered a quick, "okay," and then shut up. He figured it was for his own good, as every evil AI in every movie he had ever watched was flashing through his mind and it was a little terrifying even for someone as trained as he was.
"Just as a reminder," JARVIS said coldly and then unleashed a flurry of fire extinguisher foam that clung to Clint's uniform, which was generally not a pleasant experience. "Have a good day, Agent Barton."
Ten minutes later Clint tumbled out of a vent at Natasha's feet. All she had to say was, "you should know better Barton."
~#Steve & Dummy#~
Steve had never been into Toni's labs before as he hadn't been given a reason to. Now, however, Toni had called him into one of the research labs, telling him that she had designed a new system for him that should make his shield return to him more consistently. The Captain was looking forward to it in one way, but he wasn't too keen on entering a place that was even more technologically advanced than the rest of the house. If he was overwhelmed by that at times, then he was certain he would be the biggest fish out of water in the history of the universe when he entered the lab.
It was almost as bad as he thought it would be, although a lot of the things that were immediately visible were things that Toni had explained to him sufficiently enough that he had at least a basic grasp of what they did. "Oh Steve there you are," Toni called as he entered. "I was wondering when you would get here. Dummy has the shield. Dummy would you bring it over for me please."
A little robotic arm that Steve hadn't noticed trundled over, beeping happily while carrying a shield that looked identical to how his had been before, except for the fact that it had a strip of metal across the back that it didn't have before. As Dummy was trying to hand it over to Toni, he nearly dropped it and Steve had to lunge down and catch it before it hit the floor. He could have sworn that the robot's beeps following this sounded almost sad.
"It's okay Dummy," Toni told the robotic arm, much to Steve's bemusement. "No harm done, and I've always known that your claw is not quite secure enough to lift something that big and carry it a long distance."
"Is this one of the EI things that you were talking about?" Steve asked, remembering a conversation he had with Toni a while back about JARVIS and what he did.
"It's AI Steve," Toni corrected with a smile. "And don't call them things again, unless you want them to get upset with you. But, yes! They have their own personalities and skills, which basically make them people."
Steve decided just to accept this as one of the many strange things about Toni's home and moved on with the conversation, "So, how is this advanced retrieval gig going to work, Toni?"
"Well," Toni started, before launching into her explanation of how she had designed a wristband to call back the shield using the strip of metal she had installed onto the new design.
~#Thor & Addy#~
Thor was perhaps the person who had the most traumatic first encounter with an AI. Both for himself and for the AI, which was hardly surprising, considering the fact that, unlike the others, he had no knowledge whatsoever of any kind of Earth technology. Even though Steve's was also limited, the Captain had a gentler mind-set and just decided to tread carefully around any appliances.
The problem started in the kitchen (as was often the case with Thor) as the God of Thunder took out a packet of pop tarts to eat, having discovered that they were what he considered the best food on Midgard. After he had eaten them raw the first time, Toni had told him that he was actually supposed to toast them and pointed out the toaster. She had been planning on explaining it to him more thoroughly, but then Clint (who still hadn't learned) had emerged from an air vent covered in foam again and she had to go and attempt to talk some sense into his head.
So, Thor has no idea how the toaster actually worked, thus, he just shoved the entire packet of pop tarts in every which way, ignoring the indignant squeaks that came from the toaster. He thought they couldn't possibly be coming from the device and so passed it off as being something else.
It wasn't until shortly after he started the toaster that he realised something was wrong as it began to squeal in pain and scorch marks began to appear. Thankfully, Toni ran in at just that moment, having been told Addy was in distress by JARVIS. She picked her up and clawed the pop tarts out before rounding on Thor in a fit of pure anger.
The tirade lasted for about half an hour and, by the end of it, Toni was crying and trying to comfort Addy whilst still shouting at Thor. The prince of Asgard was looking thoroughly abashed and upset that he'd injured one of Toni's friends, while the other Avengers watched on, terrified of Toni's temper. Bruce was infinitely grateful that the damage to Aqua had merely been superficial, or he might have ended up on the receiving end of the genius' temper.
Once she was done, Toni stormed out, taking a thoroughly traumatised Addy with her while Thor got the genius idea to get Natasha to take him out to get flowers for Toni as an apology. The redhead wasn't sure this was the best idea, but didn't want to stand in between a demigod and something he wanted to do.
Addy came out of the incident with a few new parts and an extreme fear of Thor, whom she refused to let touch her to make pop tarts ever again. He had to get someone to make them for him or he went without. Thor was quite satisfied with the end result as, other than that, at least Lady Toni had seemed happy with his gift of a floral arrangement for her room. At least she had laughed for quite a long time, which he assumed was good.