The tree was scheduled to be delivered in two days. That left the Avengers, collectively, with enough time to sort through the virtual mountain of ornaments, tinsel, lights, garland, and ribbons that had been left behind by previous years' decorating efforts. Steve had approved the purchase of new hangers for the ornaments that had lost theirs (or replacing them with paperclips or string).
There was enough variety to satisfy everyone—traditional wooden ornaments, glass ones, fabric ones, beaded ones, red ones, blue-and-silver ones, clear ones, red-and-gold ones (Tony might have swiped those early on). Coulson had leaned over to murmur something in Barton's ear at the start of the process, and now Barton had accumulated a suspiciously red-white-and-blue pile of ornaments. It was perhaps a Christmas miracle that no one came to blows over which decorations would be used in the common rooms.
The one constant, the one point of agreement, was that everyone insisted that there should be lights on the tree and around the rooms.
The problem was that the old lights didn't work.
Tony had dragged out the old strings of lights, and they were a mess. Lights out, lights missing, cords frayed, tangled in knots. As the other Avengers sorted through decorations, he plugged each lump of lights in for testing. More than half of them didn't light at all. Some of them did, here and there. Half a string might light, then its other half would flicker, then the whole thing might go dead.
"This is ridiculous, and a total waste of time," he muttered. "JARVIS, order us up about twenty of these and have them delivered." He turned to dispose of the old lights and caught Steve's horrified look.
"You can't just throw those away!" he protested.
"Uh, can and will," Tony responded, opening the trash bin.
"No!" Steve grabbed the lights. "You can't just get rid of things when they take a bit of effort. We can make them work."
"Oh, no," Tony moaned, clutching at the lights and attempting to pull them back from Steve. "Is this some sort of cultural moment? It's one of those frugality things, isn't it? 'Use it up, wear it out'? It isn't worth it, Cap."
He pulled, but Steve refused to release the lights, and now they were drawing the others' attention. "Steve, seriously, they don't make things the way you're used to. There's this whole 'planned obsolescence' thing going on. These were never made to last, maybe not even made to be reused."
"Are you telling me you can't make them work, Tony?" Steve challenged.
And there it was. The moment where the 46-plus hour timeline converted in Tony's mind to the huge digital countdown clock on the wall of a missile silo. He could practically see each red LED changing over. 46:37:23... 46:37:22... 46:37:21
"I cannot even start to list the possible points of failure, here. In order to even test a single string, each socket must be filled with a working bulb. Which means each bulb must be tested separately. The sockets themselves can go bad. Then there's the fuse—easy enough to test, but the cord itself..." He shook his head. "JARVIS would cry if he saw the weak-sauce wiring they use on these things. There could be a break anywhere, and who's to say there's only one?"
Tony pulled out the big guns. "You could be breaking them right now just from your grip," he said, and Steve, sucker to the end, released the lights like they were burning him.
Tony took a deep breath. "Now if we could get all those ducks in a row, and make a strand work, it still has to be unknotted without damaging any bulbs, sockets, wiring, or sheathing. Honest, Captain Planet. Not. Worth. It."
He turned back to the trash bin and ran directly into Coulson's disapproving eyebrow. Which is how the Avengers ended up spending a "team bonding" evening trying to unknot strands of Christmas lights in the confident belief that Tony Stark would figure out a way to make the lights work.
Tony watched Steve try to detangle several of the strands. He had the patience, but even his dexterous artist's hands were not precise enough for the work. Additionally, working with the light strands was a process that seemed to take at least four hands at any given time: two to support the knotted cords so they didn't re-tighten, one to trace the path, and at least one more to feed the cord back through the knots. When Steve called Pepper in for an assist, it became clear that even four weren't enough and that a fifth or sixth hand would have been a definite plus.
After watching the assassin twins work on their strand together, with the occasional assistance of their former handler, Tony concluded that a shared brain might be advantageous, too. Really, this was not the sort of activity that was suited for humans. It would be much better to have someone with arms that didn't get tired, who had enough hands or fingers to complete the job, and who didn't interrupt the process with inconveniently timed bathroom breaks.
Tony mused on this the next day as he tested the various strings of lights in his lab. The others had promised that if (when!) he got the strings working, they would get them linear. All bets were off in the event of Doombot attack, of course.
This meant Tony somehow needed to get access to each of the lights in the strand, which meant more than a little time pulling his hair in frustration. Despite nearly thirty hours awake and a throat dried by too much coffee, he was still able to work himself into an extremely vocal tirade.
"It's a conspiracy, JARVIS. Planned obsolescence. Everyone says that no matter how well they're put away the year before, they always manage to get tangled almost beyond salvaging. And what's the source of this? Gremlins? Focused entropy? Spontaneous chaos generation? Hm? It's impossible. No engineer worth their slide rule would design something like that. Therefore there must be darker forces at work."
"I see, sir. When you explain it in those terms, it does make perfect sense." JARVIS paused momentarily. "A reminder, sir, that you have thirty minutes until the board meeting. Would sir prefer to use his tin foil hat to accessorize the grey or the blue suit this afternoon?"
While he ignored the board members in the meeting, Tony directed more thought to the debacle that was the Christmas lights in the tower. Really, even if he got them all working, there was no guarantee that the rest of the team would be able to straighten them out, and almost certainly not by deadline. It called for a more elegant solution; certainly a less organic one.
It would require... Something like Dummy, but with more arms and a lot more finesse. He would need a chassis. Not too mobile, because you wouldn't want it to roll all over the lights. No, movement would have to be very deliberate. And multiple optical sensors, because the bot would need to see the entire problem, all sides of it at once. And then hands... or maybe highly-articulated appendages instead?
The board meeting closed without his conscious notice, and he wandered back to the workshop, half-lost in thought. "Okay, JARVIS, " he announced as he strode through the door, "here's what we're going to need..."
A mere ten hours later, Tony fed the first mound of lights to his newly-minted light-detangling bot. A moment later the bot's appendage lost its grip on the cord and slid about four feet, crushing each bulb in its path. As he shook the multicolored glass shards out of his hair, Tony took a moment to be thankful that he had, for once, given in to JARVIS' nagging and worn his lab glasses.
"Okay, so good thing we used one of the ones with dead wiring, then, right JARVIS?"
After a few more tries, he produced a bot that could pull on the decorative strings lightly enough to unwind them from each other and not break the wiring within the strands.
He didn't hear Pepper keying in her code to the lab. He did, however, hear the immediate volume drop of Godsmack. "Pepper, my light! What brings you to the lab this afternoon?"
"It's morning, Tony," she responded in amused resignation. "You've been all-night engineering again."
"Really?" How had the Countdown Clock Of Doom gotten away from him? Yep, there it was. He could see the little red LEDs ticking over: 04:52:14... 04:51:13... "Pepper, how could you? You dare to call just after six A.M. morning? And with a straight face, too!"
"Tony." She leaned over to give him a kiss and paused, trying to find a grease-free spot. She settled on a point just in front of his ear and gave him a quick buss. "We missed you last night."
"Yeah, well, engineering to do..." he mumbled vaguely.
"What are you up to, anyway?" she asked.
"Ligh—" he broke off in a yawn. "Light-detangling bot. Save thousands of person-hours untangling light strings each year."
"Seriously?" She laughed. "Tony, how many of those strings of lights have you broken in testing?"
"Um, several? But they were perfect for testing! They were more tangled up than Cap's conscience."
"You may have chosen the wrong man for your metaphor, Tony. I'd imagine Steve's conscience is smooth as a pane of glass," Pepper said smilingly. "How many hours have you spent on this? No, don't answer that." She shook her head. "Have you ever heard of 'throwing good money after bad'?" She paused, reassessed, and then tried again. "Okay, do you have any idea what that phrase means to normal people?"
"Sir has indeed heard the phrase, Ms. Potts," JARVIS inserted, "but I fear that Mr. Stark still believes that budgets are things that happen to other people."
"Tony," she said firmly, "get a few hours' sleep, and then come upstairs for lunch and decorating. Bring the lights." She searched for another clean spot for a kiss. "Shower," she amended her instruction. "Then sleep."
"Sure," he agreed absently. "Almost done here." He bent to examine the bot's fine motor controls again and missed Pepper's fond headshake as she left.
An hour later, JARVIS interrupted him. "Sir, may I remind you that Ms. Potts requested your attendance at an Avengers gathering?"
"Just this last one, here, JARVIS, I think I've almost got it..." The bot took the snarl of light cords and began gently pushing the strands around, feeding them back through knots and pulling ends delicately through gaps it created. "Yes! Ha! And they said it couldn't be done!"
"You neglected to add 'Mwah-hah-hah', but I take your point, sir," JARVIS intoned. "It is an excellent device."
Lights dimmed at the work table and the projection screens, and Dummy and You scurried back to their charging stations. Tony sighed. "Cutting me off, JARVIS?" The only illumination that remained was the brightly-lit hallway leading to the attached bathroom. "Fine, fine, I'll go," he said, ending his words in a yawn. He patted the new bot gently. "Good boy. Stay."