DUMPSHOCK - ACCESS DENIAL

A week dragged painfully by without any word from the elusive Sister Cyanide. It had been almost unbearable for Tony to just sit back and wait for some update from the Creole on Kitten's whereabouts, but he had no other choice. All he could do was lay low and keep quiet, hoping that the phone would ring and that tragically cliched accent would croon to him a meeting place and time.

Yet, the long time served as a bit of a blessing as well. It served to sober Tony, despite the copious amounts of alcohol he continued to pour into himself on a daily basis. One of Tony's college friends had commented during their studies that Tony was a "functioning alcoholic with a flexible definition of functioning." The joke had stuck with him, even after all those years. The man drank to total excess, to the point of pure oblivion, working through the drunken blurs until he passed out for a few hours of sleep.

Tony needed the research, needed a plan. Tony loved having a plan, multiple ones, in fact. So long as he had something up his sleeve, the inventor could do anything, as proven with the original inception of his exosuits. Whenever his mind started to drift from the task at hand, Stark closed his eyes and pictured Rhodes, broken and ruined, on his own floor, until bile splashed at the back of his throat. Once or twice, when he'd helped himself to too much liquor, Tony had gone too far, to the point where he couldn't force back down his own vomit. The inventor mentally wrote it off as alcohol induced, his body naturally rejecting the poisons he continued to drink down in massive gulps and hammered shots.

After he'd gotten back from the chance encounter with Sister Cyanide, Tony had crawled onto the couch in the basement and closed his eyes. Tony had been hoping that the Flaming Kalashnikov was the calling card for Kitten herself, granted her pyrotechnic displays, instead of the Amazon he'd accidentally introduced himself to. Yet, this was a grand opportunity. Tony didn't have much of a plan when he waltzed into that bar, but Sister Cyanide's delay had offered him the time to formulate one. It brought him enough small comfort to sleep soundly through the night for the first time in days.

The next morning, still hungover and aching in his side, Tony took his pain medications and settled in to research. First thing was first; Kitten. Or Amatista Labropoulos. Or whoever she was. He started with the last records of her, as a Georgia Tech student. She'd skipped ahead a grade in high school and gone to college a bit early, not unlike Tony Stark at M.I.T. Tony phoned a friend of his who was still on the physics faculty. His friend recalled the student and put Tony in touch with another teacher, a Professor LeMarc, who chaired a class in theoretical physics. Tony laid a careful story of just discovering that Amatista Labropoulos may have been related to him and finding out of her untimely demise, both factors driving him to find out anything he could about dearly departed cousin Amatista.

"Why, of course I remember Amatista!" LeMarc sounded excited for a moment before lamenting, "Such a shame. Such a waste." His voice retrained a compassion after that, and a nostalgia. "Amatista was an odd kid, but she was a good student and a sweet girl. Funny, smart, and always lending a hand in labs. Good kid. She had some absolutely wild ideas that would have really done a number to the scientific community if she'd lived long enough to get published."

"Yeah?"

"Oh, yeah. I first met her after she started sitting in on Tech classes when she was just a high school freshman. By the end of the year, she was doing better than some of my regular students," LeMarc asserted. "I ended up helping her con her high school into letting her take physic classes as Tech for credit at her school."

The inventor scratched his chin, thinking about his own unusual college experiences, having graduated when he was just seventeen. "She was that promising of a student?"

"Just in physics and philosophy. Everything else, didn't interest her. Math. English. History. Statistics. It was like it all bored her clean out of her mind. But physics, theoretical physics." The professor stopped. "She was good."

"Theoretical only?"

"Yeah. Newtonian physics had no interest for her," the professor replied quickly. "If it couldn't be attached to philosophy or parapsychology, she didn't care. I told you she was an odd kid."

Tony nodded to himself on his end of the phone; if only LeMarc knew just how odd Amatista had grown up to be now. "What sort of things?"

"Well, before string theory got all muddled up, Amatista was all over that."

The inventor smirked to himself. String theory. Definitely not mathematics taught in your average high school. No wonder Amatista had gone out of her way to study the few classes she held credit for at Georgia Tech. String theory suggested that the tiniest building blocks of atoms were comprised of tiny loops oscillating at super high frequencies. An offshoot of string theory contested that because of this, everything in the world had its own, natural frequency underlying all else. Philosophical physicists went on to say that the frequency of an individual interacting with surrounding frequencies is what caused people to instinctively like or dislike something. It explained vibes and empathy as quite simply an attuning to the background "noise." Tony felt it was hardly science and scoffed at the idea quite openly after it had been kicked around in his own classes.

"Anything else you can tell me about my cousin?" Tony had to catch himself from hissing the word through his teeth.

"Actually, if you want, I saved her last paper. I could send a copy to you. It kind of struck a chord," LeMarc admitted while shuffling through something over the phone. "I couldn't just throw it away like so many other papers. It was too different, too out there. And with her being dead, an' all, it just didn't feel right." The professor chortled to himself. "Y'know, it's funny. These kids put so much effort and work into something they know I'm just going to recycle at the end of the semester. Kind of makes you feel bad about it."

Tony couldn't bring himself to a philosophical conversation yet, even about something as trivial. Nor did the inventor feel like making his own commentary on his own college term paper experiences- most of which had ended in Tony slinging a string of profanities at his professors. He just agreed and waiting patiently for the man to find the paper.

"Ah, gotcha!" LeMarc triumphantly announced. "A Brief History of Unrecognized Universal Forces." The professor must have heard Tony's disbelief. "I gave the freshman an open-ended essay assignment for midterm. Anything they wanted to write on. She picked magic."

"Sounds like a cop-out," Tony mused bitterly.

LeMarc conceded, "That's what I thought when I first heard her proposal, but she made a highly compelling argument. Amatista was a bit headstrong. Never did listen to anything but her own head."

"Sounds like the Kitten I know," the inventor thought solemnly.

LeMarc must had read Tony's silence as feeling insulted by his comment. "Anywho, Amatista was obsessed with three base forces to the universe that hadn't been cited. She called them Magic. Essence. And Resonance." Tony almost started at the last one, but LeMarc went on. "Magic was fairly self-explanatory. Essence, she claimed as the measure of a living being's lifeforce or soul. She claimed it powered Magic and was directly influenced by technology, particularly the unnatural alteration of the body with implants, prosthetics, and other devices. The lower the Essence, the less effective a force applied through Magic could be."

Tony contemplated that for a moment, his hands drifting up to the arc reactor in his chest. His fingers tapped the round disc. She hadn't know why he'd survived that night on the road, and neither had he. Perhaps this was the reason? The arc reactor had lowered his Essence and rendered some small portion of her magic useless? No. Magic didn't exist. The logical, rational part of his mind, the scientist in him overrode the part of him that wanted to give the theory a chance based off of his own observations of the girl. There was a trick to what Kitten did, a magician's sleight of hand or misdirection, allowing her to impress the illusion of magic on her audience and victims. It was her act that gave Kitten power over people purely by intimidation. Nothing more and most assuredly nothing less.

"And Resonance?" Tony pressed, intrigued by the connection back to SETEC.

The professor gave a huff. "She never got to that part. Amatista was murdered before she could finish her paper. I've only got a rough draft, and she only mentioned Resonance as an additional force in a note she wrote on the margin like an after thought."

The inventor shrugged, "Sketchy." He paused, wondering if he'd given away too much information to his words. "And downright ridiculous."

"Yeah, but she liked to point out the checks and balances of the four fundamental forces that hold subatomic particles together and repel them to keep atoms from collapsing in on themselves all at the same time." LeMarc flipped the page. "She rebuked accusations that these three forces were made up in her own paper. Ah, here's a good one. 'Up until the twentieth century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the charged electromagnetic spectrum, humans learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one millionth of reality.'"

"An old quote."

LeMarc sounded mildly pleased. "But a good one. While I couldn't give Amatista's rough draft any credit for validity, her audacity to point out that we only decided that a force called Magic doesn't exist when the possibility lingered out there was commendable. She went so far out of her way as to cite out the 'magical number.'"

"What, like the sign of the beast stuff?" Tony hung his head, nursing a slowly building headache at the prospects.

"No, no. The magical number seven, plus or minus two, is a theoretical limit to working memory." the professor explained.

"Hence the reason why important numbers are broken down into smaller groupings to encourage memory." Tony ruefully recalled his long forgotten phone numbers and the social security number that, truthfully, it was likely only Pepper Potts and the government accurately knew. "Like telephone and account numbers?"

"Correct. Amatista based her argument on the fact that, if humans were just too stupid to recall anything larger than maybe 9 digits, as well as so dumb to think that there wasn't anything else to reality beyond what we could physically interact with, who knew what was out there? I mean, she even pointed out the original criticism of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system as an argument to her defense." The professor paused, gathering his thoughts and reining himself in.

LeMarc sounded impressed and proud of his own student, and Tony did have to admit that there was a mad sort of logic to it. Humans were, fundamentally, stupid creatures. They were easily broken and trained to perform on command. They fought their natural instincts and ignored what was right in front of their faces all the time. And, above all, the human body had evolved into a joke. Claws that were thin and brittle. Teeth that couldn't rip or tear at all. No fur, scales, or feathers to protect from the cold. Slow. Pathetic. Weak. Fragile. Prey. Tony Stark, in some of his more morose drinking moments, often considered the human species to be a cruel genetic joke.

"Take it you were going to give her an A?" Stark teased flatly.

"Like hell!" LeMarc blasted before calming once more. "Like I said, I couldn't give her any credit for the validity that these three forces just so happen to exist without any proof of their existence or scientific evidence, but I had to give her credit for having the brass balls to formulate her hypothesis around the fact that humans are basically stupid creatures. She didn't take it well when I told her 'proof of possibility was not proof of actual existence.'"

"What'd she do?"

The professor sighed deeply. "Amatista was adamant about her topic. She wouldn't give it up. I told her if she could provide proof of existence to these theoretical forces of hers, then, she could continue with her paper." The professor laughed again. "I figured she would have given up on it, since there's no real way for her to prove this theoretical Magic or Essence of hers."

"Aw, wouldn't let her produce a rabbit from a hat as proof?" Tony quipped.

LeMarc chuckled a bit. "Nah. Turns out, she took it as a challenge and said she had an experiment devised to prove it. I told her to go ahead, that she had a week to prove me wrong or else she had to write a new project proposal. She spent that week holed up in the open labs working on her experiment."

The inventor smiled slightly to himself. His high school teachers had all fought tooth and nail to keep Tony's inventing streak and experimenting to a minimum and keep the fledgling inventor on the same course as their curriculum dictated. Each of those attempts met a similar failure as the boy soldiered on, blazing his own path. His college professors all learnt quite quickly that Tony Stark had a mind of his own that could not be tamed nor controlled by any threats of expulsion or dismal grades. He had spent many nights of his own in the labs at M.I.T. working to prove many a teacher wrong in their own theories and hypothesis. After quite a few members of the faculty had to endure the embarrassment of a direct slap to the face from a boy no older than seventeen, the professors steered rather clear of Tony. Amistata Labropoulos didn't sound all that different according to LeMarc's testimonial.

Tony mentally chastised himself. Amatista Labropoulos may have been a creature of his own heart, but that was well over four years ago. Now, she was Kitten, a dark and deadly thing of the night that killed for a living. They were nothing alike, and they would never be anything alike. She had become a murderer, using her skills and knowledge to destroy lives and do billions of dollars worth of damage, whereas Tony had turned to try to help people. That was until Rhodey...

The man refused to complete the thought, distracting himself by asking a further question of the professor. "So, what was her experiment?"

"No clue."

The inventor frowned in disappointment and frustration. "What were the results?"

"No idea," LeMarc answered uneasily. "She was murdered before she could bring her data and experimental design to me. Her laptop and her notes were confiscated by the police as evidence before I got to see her work."

The conversation wound down after that, leaving Tony with more questions than answers as LeMarc promised to mail a photocopy of the draft later in the week. Something had happened to Amatista Labropoulos before she could finish her essay topic. Tony knew it wasn't the "murder" that everyone else thought it was, but he couldn't place his finger on what had happened back then. What was it? There was no telling. But, whatever it was, it had turned Amatista Labropoulos from a normal, healthy, sane girl that the college professors had apparently enjoyed having as a student, into a hardened criminal, a mercenary and corporate assassin for hire. It had to have been something awful, and it had happened within the span of a short week.

After that, any and all leads on Kitten died.

That left Jonas. All Tony had was a basic description of the boy and a first name. Tony tried scoping out the web and any APBs from the police, CIA, and FBI, coming up dry. Jonas seemed a ghost, almost as much of a ghost as Kitten was. At least Kitten had a history. Jonas had nothing. Not one scrap of information. And, after all his searching, Tony felt just as uncertain and confused as he had been before, lost and without a bearing.

Tony pressed further into the idea of Resonance, Essence, and Magic, coming up short once more. Amatista Labropoulos either had one hell of a ghost writer inspiring her to those theories, or she was a philosophical genius, a bullshit artist worthy of Tony Stark's respect. Tony would have bet the house on the bullshit artist hypothesis.

XXXX

Author's Notes: Mmmm... again with the thickening plot. Hope you guys like your plot as thick as molasses on a cold winter day.