Chapter 2
A/N: Thank you to everyone who's read this story I have been amazed by the response. A big thank you to The conmanw, CCSakuraforever, and humo146 for your reviews they really help with the motivation to keep writing.
To answer your review victorsan12345, I'm disappointed to hear you're not a fan of my story nor of Stark, I've always thought of him as a complex character with a huge guilt complex who tries to do the right thing as he sees it.
This chapter introduces a new character who's responsible for helping to steer Tony's guilt complex in the right direction not to mention helping bring Sci-fi tech to earth.
The next day dawned bright and early, which for Tony Stark meant 2am with the ping of a coffee percolator, as soon as he was conscious he began decoding his mother's language. Fortunately, his mother had made it a mission to make sure he could communicate with everyone at social functions in their own language and amongst them she'd added her own. By the time it reached a reasonable hour he'd managed to add the necessary coding into FRIDAY's matrix to allow her to recognise the information and translate galactic basic which even better shared many compositional similarities to English.
In his searching he'd found a source for the elements he needed to recreate his mother's technology but without her ship he wouldn't be able to get to the asteroid belt and begin mining. In the mean time he was filling in the time by trying to get a head start on the inertial dampeners which he needed to cope with the inevitable G-forces he would experience when he took to the air.
Unfortunately the dampeners were presenting a bigger problem than anticipated.
"Boss, the inertial dampeners require a breadth of knowledge which you do not possess specifically that of biomedical engineering. Might I recommend you incorporate the Stark Research and Development team."
"I've already told you this, the less that know the better, at least till Clan Stark is ready."
"With your current rate of production you will not finish this project within your month time limit, this will push your study of the ship back two weeks and result in your overall time scale being altered by almost a year."
"Argh fine, who did you have in mind," even if he wasn't one to work with others he could accept it when he had no choice.
"Miss Jessica Drew, former SHIELD agent, current biochemical specialist in the New York R & D department." FRIDAY accompanied the report with a profile of the person in question. She had dark brown almost black hair and brown eyes, familiar brown eyes.
"It's her," shouted Tony, "the ungrateful one."
"Boss she had reason to be preoccupied during your rescue, her child was nearly captured during the fall of SHIELD."
"Yeah but it'd have been nice to get a thank you I did help her with the hole zappy thing even though it's not my field as you so kindly pointed out," whined Tony.
"You did receive a thank you and an invitation to dinner but during the ULTRON incident it was reclassified and lost till now."
"Oh." Running his hand through his hair, "fine then give her a call. Anymore bombshells to drop on me?"
"General Ross has been demanding to know the identity of Spider-Man."
"Ah how is the kid?"
"He is doing well, but Ross has notified the police that he is to be treated as an accomplice to any damages done by the criminals."
"Ah damn, he's starting to become a nuisance," Tony groaned as he ran a hand through his hair. "What have we got on him?"
"His treatment of the Rogue Avengers was covered by the accords."
"Yeah that damn imprisonment without a trial clause, what did we agree the likelihood was of that being overturned with the Rogues escape?"
"Approximately 40% owing to the publics willingness to ignore what doesn't affect them."
"Yeah that was it, so we need to make it affect them, see if we can't increase the amount of 'heroes' somehow and force the issue to change." Tony picked up one of the tablets he'd been working on with a flick of his wrist an image appeared of his mother's clan, twenty something people dressed in armour with helmets under their arms. "What'd you think of Mandalorians?"
"Models suggest that could work," said FRIDAY slowly, "but..."
"Yeah I know, if we start from the ground up and make the heroes approachable. We could try humanising the heroes see if that'd work. Alternatively we could try digging up all the dirt we can find on Ross. Either way if SWORD's to work we're going to have to open a channel with the UN military, not to mention finding more heroes."
"And what of Spider-man?"
"I'll send him a bit of help here and there, if you can run interference with the police, give the kid a bit of room to make his own mistakes."
"Yes Boss."
The following day found Tony laying out all his work on inertial dampeners ready for the arrival of his lab partner.
"When's our co-conspirator getting here?"
"Ms Drew is at the vehicle entrance asking permission to park in the car park."
"Sure thing let's get this party started."
Tony heard a car coming down the ramp/runway, he couldn't help groaning as a beat up ten year old ford came sputtering towards him. Stepping from her car was the dark brown haired woman from FRIDAY's briefing, she was dressed in sturdy boots with skinny jeans and a livid red jacket with black sleeves.
Jessica said, "hello Dr Stark it's good to see you."
Tony couldn't help grinning at the title, up yours 'Captain' America he earned his title. "You too Dr Drew, I'm pretty impressed you made it in that thing to be honest."
"Well she's not the most impressive to look at but she'll get you there," defended Jessica.
"Yeah, if there is the morgue," smirked Tony, "now come along we've got work to do."
"What exactly are we doing?" Said Jessica pulling off her jacket to throw it into her car before coming over to Tony's workstation.
"Well Jessy,"
"Jess, if you must," she interrupted.
"Anyway Sparky we're working on inertial dampeners, to compensate for G-forces in flight."
"Ok that much I understood from your AI, so you need my biomedical experience I assume."
"Yep, I've got about halfway but FRIDAY insisted that it would take too long to learn what I needed to finish it in time, so here you are."
"Ok and what are you going to be doing while I work on this?"
"I'm gonna create a force-field."
While Jessica worked on the dampeners she couldn't help sighing at the confusion that was her interactions with Tony Stark.
As with the majority of SHIELD she heard of him when she joined, he was the main contributor to the organisation, their weapons were all sourced from him through various front companies. She heard very little after that till a few years later whilst on assignment in MI6 she heard of his kidnapping. After that it was one shock after another as he was outed as Iron Man then years later the expo and the Avengers Initiative. She was quite content to let his heroics go on over her head until the AIM incident, then it became her problem. With her biomedical background she was reassigned to look into EXTREMIS, try and stabilise it into a working super soldier serum. Then bloody Steve Rogers went and outed her location to the world with his leak of all the SHIELD files. She spent less than a week on the run before HYDRA caught up with her, apparently, they weren't as dead as Rogers thought. What happened next was never spoken of except to her psychiatrist bless her soul, suffice to say it was a difficult few months. Once they realised their patience would run out before her resolve they turned from questioning her to using her in their experiments. She honestly didn't remember much of the following few days till she woke on a medical bed in Stark Tower.
Apparently Stark had come to her aid, destroying the bunker she'd been in. Following the debacle, she set to finding her son, fairly easy and a new apartment, more difficult especially one she could afford, then Stark Industries offered her a job. She was even more surprised to see many more of her fellow SHIELD agents on the Stark Industries payroll. Never let it be said she wasn't grateful, she'd even gone so far as to offer dinner to Stark which he'd never replied to. She was very aware her pay in any other company shouldn't cover the apartment and the nursery that had been foisted upon her by someone from Human Resources, apparently it was one of the safest in the world. For all his many faults it appeared Tony Stark was trying to turn a new leaf.
Sat at his desk Tony busily pulled apart his mother's vambraces with the utmost reverence. He was aiming to reverse engineer the force-field shield, more than that though he was aiming to convert it to run of the ARC reactor.
He was pleasantly surprised to find the fuel source responded similarly to the ARC reactor and so it wouldn't require too much adjusting. The wiring was simple to change, the emitter was another story, he'd spent four hours on it and was finally beginning to get somewhere when a hand tapped him on the shoulder.
"Dr Stark, I'm going to have to go, my son's leaving pre-school at 4."
"Ok sure thing, see you tomorrow."
With nothing else said between the pair Jessica headed out and Tony continued working on the shield making good headway in coupling the circuits with the new micro arc reactor built specifically for the job.
