Chapter 9

After letting Salem rant her heart out, Pepper took the younger girl and allowed her to get one of the things she always wanted.

Salem got a tongue piercing and a black septum piercing, knowing full well that her father didn't want her to get either until she was sixteen but that was months away and she was pissed at him.

Pepper allowed it because she knew Salem needed a way to have control over her life, in some sort of way. To have a sense of control might help her keep her anger and emotions in control too, stopping the outbursts of Magic or whatever Salem had.

Starks and their control issues.

Both piercings healed within a couple of minutes, Salem wanting to be healed sooner rather than later and so her body accommodated her.

She dressed up when Pepper asked her to attend a couple of company meetings since it would be good PR for the company to see that a Stark was very interested in what was happening.

As a Stark, Salem had the attitude to match so the questions posed to her were answered with a slightly snarky tone.

Salem spent a couple of days with Pepper, getting the hang of being in a Fortune 500 company as an assistant to a CEO. But it was short-lived as Pepper had mentioned that she would have to face her father at some point.

There was something about having to face a person who almost hit you with a glass that frightened Salem, even though she knew he didn't mean to. She had seen the fear on his face at one point, the same fear she saw whenever he used to have nightmares after he came back from the Ten Rings with the machinery in his chest.

Lagos happened and that changed a couple of things around the compound.

)()()(

While Salem wasn't an Avenger, she had powers she couldn't yet control and so she was allowed to stay at the compound. Her room was mostly bare since she didn't spend a lot of time there. Besides the bed, a TV, a laptop and a tablet, there wasn't much in her room. Her clothes were packed away neatly and it didn't even look lived in at some points.

Salem started to work with Wanda because they were the most similar with their powers having an unknown limit. It was more of them trying to manipulate things by lifting them with their powers. Salem could do the Chaos Magic that Wand could do but Salem's was purple instead of red.

Salem spent more time in the gym than she did in her own room and she doubted the other Avengers approved of that. They kept saying she needed to be in education but Tony brushed it off and told them to leave her alone about it. She had just found out that her old school was compromised and they didn't know how they found out still.

After a night where she couldn't sleep well, Salem found herself in the training room to try and get her energy out.

She kept her ring on along with her nanobot bracelet and watch. She had two fabric chokers on, one a stretchy lace that hung around the base of her neck while the other was a thin velvet which sat a little higher.

Nothing was taken off unless absolutely needed.

She had on a black pair of sports leggings with running trainers and a sports bra, long hair up in a ponytail to keep it out of her way. Tucking her ring into a pocket of her sports leggings, she wrapped her hands with wrapping tape used for sparring or punching bags.

Warming up on the treadmill to get her heart pumping and loosening up her muscles, Salem took out her wireless headphones and connected them to her phone.

The first song to turn up was the Can Can. Of all songs, this one was what got her sprinting on the treadmill. After a couple of seconds of completely sprinting, she closed her eyes and continued for the whole song.

Her music for working out could differ between her moods, and right now it was energetic classical music or folk dance music.

She turned her music louder, jumping off the treadmill and going to the punching bag. Salem didn't need any distractions as she began to hurl punches at the bag.

Salem had pent up anger from the last two weeks.

The Avengers were out on a mission, but Tony stayed back to work on something in one of the workshops.

Salem kept away from him as he kept away from her.

Muscles in her arms beginning to ache, she swapped to kicks. Planting her feet firmly, she swung into roundhouse kicks as they were her best ones. She always got back onto two feet before she went for another kick, alternating every five or so kicks so each side would get equal practice. One of the kicks was badly placed, her ankle twisted too much before impacting the bag.

She felt every single millimetre of her talus bone-shattering, almost breaking through the skin and not letting her put any more pressure on her foot. She dropped to the floor, clutching her leg closer as she watched her right ankle completely swell up with pain and turn blue-black.

She bit into the inside of her bottom lip, not letting a single sound of anguish come out as tears welled up.

"Fucker," was the only word she could get out, and then, "Motherfucker!" also came out.

LILITH almost signed. "I have informed the medic wing. They'll be here in a couple of minutes."

"I'm not fucking healing!" Salem said, a hunger in her throat suddenly making itself present. She was suddenly starving but she had eaten not long ago. "What the fuck? Why am I not healing? Stupid goddam powers…"

)()()(

"What happened?" Tony sighed, coming into the medic bay as Cho and Doctor Strange stood next to Salem's bed.

Salem lifted her leg, kicking it into the air as a large white bandage was around her right ankle. It had a thin metal cage around it to keep it in place as the bone between the foot and leg had completely shattered.

"Fucked my ankle up and it won't heal," Salem frowned. "I was in the gym, kicking the bag a little too hard and the talus shattered and didn't heal."

"There isn't much I can tell right now about why she isn't healing," Doctor Strange said, turning his gaze to Salem. "I don't understand why you can do what you can do. Your hormone levels are uneven. This might be a personal question, but have you been having your menstrual cycle recently?"

"I had them when I was younger, and then I had an implant birth control," Salem lifted her left arm, showing the tiny bulge in her bicep where it was. "Stops periods completely for me."

"Salem started to become anaemic when she bled so we thought it would be best that she doesn't have periods at all," Tony said. "Of course, I didn't force her into having it but we thought the pros outweigh the cons."

"I was on pills when I turned about twelve and had the implant since I was thirteen," Salem said simply. "Cho had it put in for me. I'm really hungry, when can I have food?"

"Let me take a sample of blood first and then you can eat something," He said. "Doctor Cho, can you do that while I look at her previous results? I hadn't had time to look at them yet."

"Cheeseburger?" Tony asked, hand on his phone. "Extra cheese, extra pickles, extra onions?"

"Nothing less than that."

"I'll get a quarter pounder then," Tony ordered the burgers. "They should be here soon enough. Happy is bringing them."

"Hey, Doc," Salem said.

"Doctor Strange," He emphasised. "Yes, Miss Andris-Stark?"

She grimaced at that. "Stark will do, or just my name. Anyway, after I hurt my ankle, I suddenly became really hungry. But it wasn't really for food or anything. What does that mean then?"

"You say you became hungry but not for food, what do you mean by that?" He asked.

"I… started to crave something but I don't know what that something is. I know I just need it and my body is… almost aching for it. The closest thing is hunger or thirst, but not for food." She thought for a second. "When I was working out, I didn't feel it. I felt almost better when I was moving, but as soon as I stopped and dropped to the ground after I hurt my ankle, the craving was there and tenfold."

Doctor Strange nodded and made a mental note about it.

"We don't know the source of your powers," He admitted. "But it seems when this craving for something we haven't identified yet comes, it stops your powers."

"I think it just limits them," Salem said, snapping her fingers and creating a tiny flame between her thumb and pointer finger. She frowned and stopped, rubbing her sternum gently. "But it makes the craving even more pronounced."

"Whatever you're craving might be the fuel for your powers…" Tony muttered. "Like a machine needs fuel, you might too. We just need to find out what the fuel is. Can you describe what you're craving?"

"No, it's hunger like but more feeling like when you're dying of thirst and you know that water will help…" Salem trailed off as Steve came into the bay with a grimace on his face. She could almost feel the anger and fear coming off of him though he hid it well under the mask of being Captain America.

"Tony, we need you in the conference room," He said. "It's important."

"Okay," Tony said. "I'm coming."

They both left quickly, Tony letting one final glance go to his daughter before he walked out.

"Are you tired?" Doctor Cho asked as she did the blood draw on her left arm. "Your sleep hasn't been the best recently. LILITH gave me access to the files."

"I've not been the tired you'd get from not enough sleep, though I've been exhausted for a while and it's just getting worse with each time I use my powers," She admitted. "Eating helps but I need to eat so much to even feel a tiny bit better."

Salem tried to sit up, slowly moving her left foot so it allowed her to sit up straighter. She swiped a hand over her glass watch screen, putting up a holographic screen in the air in front of her.

She wrote a couple of things down.

Fuel?

Food - Need a lot of it to feel better.

Going into sunlight helps, sun?

"What do you mean that sunlight helps?" Doctor Strange asked.

"I used my powers after almost having a sensory breakdown," She said. "I felt the slight craving then, but never enough to think it was anything besides my need to eat food. I went into the sun, Malibu is really sunny, and I suddenly felt better."

"Sunlight is used to create solar power but…" He trailed off, putting his hands in front of him and started to sign something. A small golden circle appeared and it struck her with electricity in the arm.

"OW!" Salem flinched, touching her arm where the static feeling wouldn't go away.

The craving in her chest seemed to lessen slightly.

"How do you feel?" He asked.

"Annoyed."

He gave her a look.

"Fine. It's lessened. So, what's your theory?"

"I think you're craving energy in all forms," He said. "You receive chemical energy from the food, solar from the sun, kinetic energy when you move, and electric energy helps too. To confirm, I'd like to test a few more but for now, you need to eat and heal up."

She rubbed the area where the electricity had hit, feeling herself heal it. Her ankle hurt a lot less right now, but it didn't feel completely fine right now.

"How about we test another theory right now?" Salem said as soon as Doctor Cho and Strange were a couple of metres away. She grabbed the defibrillator from next to the bed, turning it on and pressing it into her chest.

It shocked her but she felt so much better!

Dropping the two handles, Salem watched as the doctors scrambled back to her. She leaned forward to updo the metal cage around her foot before undoing the wrappings. They watched as her ankle started to change colour, going from blue-black to purple to brown to yellows before fading away.

Doctor Cho tried to stop her but Salem got out of the bed quickly, putting weight onto her ankle.

"Healed!" Salem grinned like a madwoman. "That didn't even hurt. I feel good now, great even."

Doctor Strange sighed. "You're more impulsive than your father. Next time, don't. You don't know how it could have gone and could have hurt yourself."

"I'm in a state of the art facility that knows how to deal with Super Soldiers, I'm not in any danger," She said.

He just turned away at that. "We'll do a couple of experiments tomorrow to test what fuel you need to use your powers. In the meantime, don't get yourself killed or hurt again, Miss Stark. I don't want to explain to your father how you put yourself in danger."

"Fine," She grinned and left with a skip in her step.

)()()(

By Pepper's advice and wise words of "You've got too much time on your hands, Salem. Why don't you enrol in college or university to give you something to do? Perhaps an undergraduate degree?" Salem started an undergraduate degree in Electronic engineering with distance learning.

It was less that Pepper said she should and more that Salem was so bored all the time. She didn't have a lot to do at the compound and she wasn't going to be going on missions even if she was allowed, and she needed to do something that didn't involve taking apart the toaster again when it burnt her last piece of toast to ashes.

Over the course of the next month, as the fallout of Lagos, Nigeria was happening to the Avengers, Salem started a Bachelor of Engineering degree. It wasn't from any certain university, Salem knew she couldn't get the grades needed to get in for all of them but she knew what she needed.

She could not pass any tests that wanted her to answer questions. She was a practical person, needing to do and prove rather than theorise all of the time to truly show off how much she knew, but the degree was helping her understand why theories were needed.

She was loving it, spending countless nights in her room as she continued to study various units in the degree. She had recently finished the Electromagnetics unit, consisting of Elements of vector calculus: divergence and curl; Gauss' and Stokes' theorems, Maxwell's equations: differential and integral forms. Wave equation, Poynting vector. Plane waves: propagation through various media; reflection and refraction; phase and group velocity; skin depth…

There was a lot to learn but most of it she could understand without having already studied it.

Her favourite topic so far was Electronic devices and circuits. It was so easy because she already understood the mass majority of it, but she just needed to know the little bits of detailed items she hadn't focused on.

She was a Stark, creating was in their DNA.

Finishing a year's worth of topics in just under a month, in precisely twenty-nine days, Salem continued onto the next year's education topics.

You would be surprised with how much of it Salem had to shift through and learn to finally get to a part that she was actually interested in, AI.

Most of it was just basic Electronic Engineering stuff, stuff she already knew from experience. But she had to make sure she knew how to get the top grades before she could move on to one of her favourite topics.

She looked at the MIT page for Course 6-2, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, took a glance at the courses and almost dropped her head onto the table. It all sounded so complicated when written down like how it was, and to get the AI topic, she had to go through so much.

Unluckily, she couldn't go to MIT and attend lectures or lessons as she wished, so she asked MIT to send recordings of previous lessons so she could get ahead.

MIT was so courteous when they heard the Stark name.

)()()(

Salem was dressed up smartly as she stood with her dad backstage at MIT as Tony had a seminar or whatever to show the students and parents at the school. She had on a white tank top tucked into a pair of freshly pressed dress trousers that had nice and deep pockets. She had on her signature pair of boots and jacket.

Tony was lucky she had even put on something that looked remotely smart, she was having a bad sensory day which meant she couldn't deal with textures today. That included food, clothing and anything she touched.

Duke was wrapping himself around her torso, letting the familiar presence of him calm her down as she picked at her cuticles.

"Pepper's not going to come," Salem calmly said as her father was finishing things up before he could go on.

He paused. "What do you mean she's not coming?"

"She cancelled," She gave him a look. "If you checked your texts from her, you would know. I changed the teleprompter for you."

"Fine," He said promptly. "Go do some work or something, I'm on in a couple of minutes."

Salem made a face at the way he said it, going over to an area in the back. Her dad went onto the stage and started his presentation of BARF.

The way Howard was treating Tony in the flashback was similar to how Tony had started to treat her recently, the irony of it all.

She sat down on the floor, swiped the holographic screen up a keyboard which was attached to her fingertips and could predict what she was going to type. It was almost like she was typing on an actual keyboard.

Going through her emails, she realised one of her teachers hadn't given feedback on one of her recent research papers, it was a small thing about circuits and trying to see if another material could be used as a conductor to transfer electrical impulses across circuits inside of having to completely connect them.

Salem waited for a natural pause in the teleprompter, knowing exactly what her father was going to say.

She strode over with a bright smile and stopped right next to Tony.

"Everyone, this is my daughter, Salem Stark. She is actually studying a course at MIT even at her young age. Takes after her father, eh? Please excuse me for a second." He turned to her. "What's up?"

"One of my teachers hasn't gotten back to me about one of my essays and I know he's in the crowd right now," Salem said. "Can you remind him to check his goddam emails because I've sent him like half a dozen asking him to send feedback back to me? He's Professor Wellerman."

"Greatest school my ass," He muttered before smiling as he turned back to the crowd. "Is there a Professor Wellerman in the crowd?"

A spotlight went onto a man near the front of the crowd. Tony gave her a nod.

"Hi, I'm in your electrical engineering course, 6-2, and I need you to send me my feedback on my essay that I sent in two weeks ago," She said, a slightly passive-aggressive tone in her voice but she hid it well with a smile. "The one about possibilities of using different materials to bounce electrical signals across instead of through distances. I need it within the next two days if you want me to be able to get through the next unit. Thanks."

The man flushed a little but Salem just walked off stage and allowed her father to finish his showcase.

)()()(