The Stark Expo was pretty huge.

It sort of had to be though, every inch of the small town that Tony had taken over was needed in order to sell Tony's plans to reorient Stark Industries so entirely.

The town was actually on the grounds of the old Stark Expo, a small company town that Howard had originally constructed for weapons testing, but one that the company slowly started to use less and less as it moved away from small arms.

Now it hosted far more than weapons.

Stark Industries was in the process of producing a wide range of technologies, retooling their factories for more civilian endeavours.

But the big showpiece was what was powering this expo. Tony's Arc reactor technology was leaps and bounds beyond his father's after the advancements he made from compacting it in Afghanistan and the rediscovery of starkanium had only improved things

One of the buildings had thus been converted into a powerplant with a full-size arc reactor at its core.

Just as I planned to sell the electricity produced by my fusion plants, Stark was working to build his own arc reactor plants once he managed to get production of Starkanium scaled up.

The reactor was currently powering the entire Expo, before it would be placed under the nearly-completed Stark tower, with New York acting as it's testbed, but even still, with the amount of power draw all the prototypes on display were running, this would still give Stark plenty of data to tweak it with.

That said, we weren't here for that.

Both Gwen and I were in full costume as we wandered from exhibit to exhibit. In addition to Stark Industries and it's subsidiaries, hundreds of companies, large and small, had rented out space to show off their products and services.

Tony's genius was well known, in part thanks to his father's association with Project Rebirth, but that only gave him the opportunity. Any company that managed a favourable showing against the new Stark Industries line of products would have advertising gold, what with their products comparing favourably with things that Tony Stark had worked on.

So there was quite a lot going around. and plenty of it was the sort of stuff that we were interested in too.

We stopped every now and again, travelling between exhibits to see what was on offer and occasionally stopping to meet with fans.

A surprising number of fans.

While Gwen received a lion's share of the attention, I had a surprising amount of fans myself.

But in between signing autographs and posing for pictures, we saw all sorts of new things, in competition with stark and not.

We saw a new line of high-performance laptops, designed in order to compete with the tablets that Tony was putting out as a part of his new 'Innovate' line of products.

Apparently the tablets were supposed to be like, a modular dockable compute unit? The could stack on top of each other in order to network and share computing power, so you could just share power as you needed for various tasks.

I'm not sure how well they will sell, but he's apparently based the technology on something he developed for military supercomputing a few years back, so at the very least, we shouldn't see any scaling issues.

That said, the demos are pretty cool, there's even some sort of internet-based networking functionality that applies for some tasks.

That said he's running a Linux fork on his systems, so he might see some push-back from the enthusiast market. Might see some acceptance from the Linux community though, I don't think that there has been a dedicated consumer Linux machine for a while.

Still, each tablet was a pretty beefy machine and between the productivity suite and the surface-style keyboard case, I could see it doing pretty well.

"Ohh! Ripple, check this out!" Gwen squealed excitedly. I turned to see what exactly it was that had caught her attention.

Excusing myself and taking a moment to float over the crowd, I touched down next to a display showing a new line of cars that Tony had designed.

I think I'm sensing a theme here.

"It looks so cool!" She enthused, staring at the convertible model.

I chuckled, "Want one?"

She sighed, "I can't really justify it. I can't really chase criminals in a car after all."

"I've got the privacy barrier up. Want one in your civilian persona?" I asked.

She shook her head, "I can't really justify that. This looks pretty high end, and I don't know if Gwen could afford that."

I rolled my eyes, "'Gwen' is graduating this year and I could offer you a position in my enterprises here. I'm looking for someone to help me diversify my interests in this world, and I can trust you to take care of that for me."

She looks at the car longingly for a moment, "Well… we'll see when I graduate. I was going to go into aerospace, but you literally travel to alien planets on a regular basis."

"You can travel with me is you want, you know? It's not like it's dangerous or anything." I shrugged.

She shrugged, "I guess so. Still, I need to finish up my classes first. Maybe after class lets out."

I shrug, but let the barrier fall.

The two of us continued to wander between different exhibits, stopping for fans and to try and experience as many things as we could get our hands on during the expo.

We saw everything, from home automation gadgets to an interesting line-up of games developed by the in-house games development team. The creative leads had chosen not to advertise their names, but unless I missed something I think I know who JES, DMS and UES were.

We were in line for the demo when we finally ran into the man himself.

"Tony, nice to see you!" Gwen cheered, "Your stuff looks pretty cool."

He nodded, "Yeah, I'm actually having quite a bit of fun spreading my wings like this."

I chuckled, "Yeah, it looks like you just took a look at all the things you like in life and saw if you could make them. Though, if this is telling me anything I get the feeling that your… assistants have joined the party."

He looked at me and sighed, "Yeah, they were the ones who put these games together. Pretty much all on their own too, I'm pretty proud of them."

"The demos we've checked out are pretty long. How long did these take to make?" asked.

He shrugged, "I don't know. They approached me with the finished games, and they were pretty fun. A bit buggy, but I'm saying that they are in beta at the moment and we should have any issues stomped pretty quickly. According to Jarvis, we've already got a couple of thousand downloads from the link already and they've got the first patch mostly done already."

I nod, "So, how has the Expo been going?"

"Pretty well, actually. We've seen interest in plenty of different branches, so we have plenty of avenues to explore for the civilian market, even if the primary focus is going to be on selling energy and maybe doing research." Tony responds.

I nod, "Well, I'm glad you are having fun at least I saw some cool stuff back there. Is that new AR headset going to be compatible with the new tablets?"

"Yeah, T-MAT is fully compatible with that, plus, the Stark HUD has a decent range on it. About… twenty-ish meters in open-air?"

Gwen grins, "That's going to be awsome for offices and schools!"

"Yeah, once we get the training sessions for my personal CAD system spread a little more, we're planning to switch R&D over to T-MAT clusters." Tony nodded, "And since I'm making these things in house they're pretty cheap. Pepper's planning on making a donation of a few hundred of them to the New York public schools."

Gwen freeze, before a smile shows through her mask. "How's Pepper doing by the way, have you confessed to her yet?"

Stark blushes, "Really, you're still on about that?"

"Even JARVIS can tell that you like her," I drawl, "You've stopped sleeping around ever since you fought Obie - and it wasn't Afghanistan, you went on a tear for like a month after you got out of the hospital, just ask her out. You've known each other long enough to give it a chance."

He sighed, "Are you sure?"

I shrug, but Gwen gives him a thumbs up, "Yep, I checked!"

"AH, so that's why you borrowed my divination texts. Practising the Spider-Sense?" I ask.

She nods, "I can usually tell if something big is about to happen, and I can tell roughly how likely the outcome of a specific event is, assuming that it doesn't happen too far in the future."

Tony stares, "Really?"

"Just don't be super cocky about it. She knew you before all of this, so she's not going to believe you at first, but she's probably willing to accept a date, and give things a shot after that." Gwen confirmed.

Tony nodded, deep in thought, before I spoke up, "By the way, Hammer's presentation is about to start, why don't we head over to take a look?"