Author's Note: There's kind of an Easter Egg in this chapter. You don't win anything if you find it, but you might get a laugh.
The first thing Tony thought of when he heard the words 'bad news' was, "where's Pepper?"
"Pepper?" asked Agent Salzmann.
"Miss Potts," Jarvis explained.
"I sent her up to Big Bear Lake," said Tony. "Did she get out?"
"Oh!" Agent Salzmann said. "She was still at her apartment when we got in touch with her. We've sent somebody to pick her up. She's going to meet us at the helipad."
For half a second Tony was angry: he'd told Pepper to leave right away and that had been four hours ago! He knew she could get ready in a hurry when she needed to, so why was she still in town? The feeling didn't linger, though. He could talk to her about it when this emergency was over, and in the mean time she'd be perfectly safe in Las Vegas, four hundred miles from the coast. Staying near the coast was going to be Tony's job.
A few yards away, Agent Wheeler was explaining the situation to Steve and the Windhams. She only got as far as the word 'helicopter' before Steve interrupted her.
"We can't leave," he protested. "If something's going to happen, we'll be needed here."
"Took the words right out of my mouth," Tony agreed. "This is no time for us of all people to be running away and hiding!" Behind him, Clint and Natasha both voiced their agreement.
Wheeler didn't look impressed. "Captain America can stay," she decided, "along with Hawkeye and the Black Widow." Her use of the code names was pointed and deliberate, making it very clear that they were to be present in their capacity as superheroes. "But Mr. Stark, Dr. Jarvis, and the Windhams have to come with us. Until Huang or one of his followers cracks, everything we know about their plans comes through you four. We need you."
"That's just too damn bad," said Tony. He'd done more than enough screwing up and shirking his responsibilities for one week – it was going to stop. He wasn't sure yet what he could really do without the Iron Man suit, but there had to be something. "Jarvis and the Windhams can tell you anything you need to know. I'm staying."
He should have known better. "I won't be leaving either," said Jarvis. He addressed Tony: "I was told to be where you are, and that's where I belong in any event. Besides which, Miss Potts would never forgive me if I allowed you to come to any harm..." he hesitated a moment in indecision, and then finished, "Tony."
Tony had to grin. The name still sounded weird coming from Jarvis, but he thought he could get used to it. "Good to know somebody's got his priorities straight around here," he said.
"We'll stay, too," Dido said.
Tony's grin evaporated. "You?"
"Yes," she said firmly. "If you guys are going to be working on this here, you'll need us. Dad and I are the other half of the puzzle. Huang's been stealing technology from us, too. You need a complete picture of what he's got at his disposal. I've seen recent footage, and Dad probably has a list somewhere of everything he thinks Huang took." She looked at her father. "Right, Dad?"
"Fuck that," Balthazar replied. "Where's the helicopter?"
Tony decided to ignore Balthazar, but conceded that Dido might be helpful somehow. If nothing else, he vaguely remembered that she knew how to fly a plane: if worst came to worst, they might be glad for that. "New plan," he told Wheeler. "You can set up your HQ at Stark Industries. We'll have everything you need there, and anything that's missing, I'm sure Pepper can figure out how to get. We'll work this." If anyone could figure out how to stop a tidal wave in its tracks, two thirds of the Avengers were probably a good stark.
Wheeler, however, remained unmoved. "If you won't come with me, Mr. Stark, I will be forced to arrest all four of you."
"That sounds like fun," said Clint. "Let's let her try."
At some point during this conversation, Natasha had returned to the motel room – now she re-emerged, holding out her phone. "Agent Wheeler," she said, "Director Fury of SHIELD wants to speak with you."
This was clearly not something Wheeler had expected to hear. She reached to take the phone, and held it to her ear cautiously, as if it might burn her if she got it too close. "Hello?" she asked.
There was a short pause.
"Yes, Sir," said Wheeler.
Another pause. Tony looked at Natasha and said, "footie pajamas? Really? What happened to all those silk negligees?" Where, he wondered, did one even buy a flannel onesie big enough for a grown woman?
"Sir?" Wheeler asked the phone.
Pause. Natasha rolled her eyes. "Those were for your benefit, Stark, not mine," she said. "When it's up to me, I prefer to be warm."
Wheeler was starting to look really and truly scared. "But Sir," she said to the phone, "my instructions were..."
Tony could just barely hear the distant buzz of Fury's voice on the line, as SHIELD's director delivered his own instructions for dealing with the situation. It sounded as if he were living up to his name.
"Yes, Sir," said Wheeler, defeated. "Immediately." She gave the phone back to Natasha and scowled. "Very well, then, Mr. Stark. Let's go get set up in your building."
"I knew you'd see reason," said Tony with a nod. "Give us five minutes to get dressed." Everybody was in pajamas, underwear, or motel bathrobes, and none of that was exactly attire to save the world in.
"Hey!" Windham protested, as everybody started to head back into the rooms. "What about us? We still want to leave!"
"You still want to leave," corrected Dido. "I'm staying."
"You will do nothing of the sort, young lady," said Balthazar, shaking a finger in her face. "I'm not leaving you here to get washed away!"
Dido grabbed the finger and bared her teeth at him. "Thirty-five, Dad! I'm thirty-five! What are you going to do, ground me?"
So much for all those heartfelt apologies, Tony thought.
Jarvis stepped between the arguing pair. "Mr. Windham," he said, "Tony and his colleagues will look after your daughter. She'll hardly be in any danger in the company of four superheroes."
Maybe in a bid to regain her deflated authority, Wheeler put her own two cents in. "You can go or you can stay," she said, "but make up your mind, because we don't have time for this and I'm still authorized to arrest you."
Windham threw up his hands. "Oh, fine! Have it your own way!" he snapped, then spun around and poked Tony in the arc reactor. "You let anything happen to her, Stark, and I'll sue you for every penny and your fancy armour besides!"
"I'll put you on the waiting list," Tony told him.
Windham stormed back into the motel room to get dressed. Dido followed, but only after taking a moment to smile at Jarvis and say, "thanks, Neddy." Steve, Clint, and Natasha were already in the process of changing, and Tony figured he and Jarvis had better try to catch up.
"You're really just gonna let her call you 'Neddy'?" he asked Jarvis as they headed indoors.
"She seems to derive some sort of comfort from it," Jarvis replied. He picked up his vest and tie, which he'd dropped next to the bed, and caught his shirt when Natasha tossed it to him from the bathroom. "Thank you, Agent Romanoff," he said, then added, to Tony, "I think Dido is honestly sorry for getting me involved, and is trying to make herself feel better about it by behaving as if we are friends."
Tony grabbed his jeans and stepped into them. "If you say so," he said. "Neddy."
"I'd like to remind you that I know all your fraternity nicknames, Tony," Jarvis said.
"Dirty pool, Jarvis," said Tony, grinning.
It turned out that Clint and Natasha had come prepared: both of them reappeared in their costumes rather than the street clothes they'd been wearing earlier, and they'd also brought Steve his costume and shield. Tony felt rather out-of-place sitting in an FBI van in civvies alongside three obvious superheroes. He took what comfort he could in the presence of Dido – back in her red power suit – and Jarvis – in his wrinkled shirt and trousers, with his tie un-tied and his vest un-buttoned. Tony wondered where that coffee ring on his left sleeve had come from, and made a note to find him another pair of shoes.
Wheeler called the people who were meeting Pepper to let them know about the change of plans, then began briefing the group on what had happened in China.
"Unsurprisingly," she said, "the Chinese government is disavowing all knowledge – and since it seems Huang had connections not just to the Tian Ming but to multiple terror and anti-communist groups throughout East Asia, they might well be telling the truth. Whatever the case," she sighed, "nobody wanted an international incident, so the Ministry of State Security put together a rain on the Ao Guang mining complex."
"I'm guessing that didn't go too well," said Steve.
Wheeler's expression was really the only answer anybody needed. "Huang's second-in-command, a Miss Peng... well, nobody's ever going to know for sure what she was thinking because she was shot dead during the raid," Wheeler said. "But as far as we can figure, she believed she had to use the weapon or lose it, so she used it. Seismographs detected the trigger blasts at three thirty-nine this morning. There were a series of fourteen, evenly spaced. They set it off early. We've got some people working on a computer model to tell us exactly when the wave is likely to reach the California coast, but it'll probably be there before noon."
"Then we need ideas now," said Tony. He wished Bruce were here. They needed all the big brains they could get for this one.
"Well, you have to evacuate the city, don't you?" asked Dido. "I mean, these guys may be superheroes, but they're not King Cnut."
This reference was lost on Tony, and he was a little relieved to see that Wheeler, Steve, and Clint all looked like they hadn't gotten it, either. Clint was the one who asked, "who's King Cnut?"
"He was a Danish ruler who conquered England in 1015," said Jarvis. "Legend has it he once stood on a beach and ordered the tide not to come in."
Steve raised his head. "Actually," he said. "Why not?"
"What do you mean, why not?" asked Wheeler, looking almost offended.
Tony had already caught on. "Thor!" he exclaimed. "If he can't do it personally, he's probably got some godly friend or other who can just stand on the beach and proclaim Calmeth Thy Tits, O Ocean! Problem solved!"
"The Norse gods of the sea were Njord and his wife Skadi," Jarvis put in.
Dido pointed at Jarvis. "Remind me never, ever to play Trivial Pursuit with him."
"Thor. I'm on it," said Clint. He was already dialling his phone.
Agent Wheeler was staring at them as if they'd all just turned green in front of her. "You're just going to call up a god of the sea on your cell phone?"
"Asgard has excellent reception," Tony assured her. The reasons why had never made any sense to him, but the fact was undeniable.
"It's ringing," Clint confirmed. They waited while the tone sounded three times, then seven, and finally nine before going to voicemail. Clint left a short message, then shook his head and hung up, and everybody sagged in disappointment. Tony reflected that if Thor had been partying it up god-style for his parents' anniversary, he'd probably be in no shape to help them much right now anyway – nor would any friends he might have with ocean-related powers.
Thor would be apologetic later that he'd missed an opportunity to help, but that didn't do them any good right now. "Okay," said Steve, "so much for that. Does anybody have any other ideas?"
"We're in the wrong universe. We need Aquaman," said Tony. "There's gotta be a way to do this. How do you stop a wave?"
"By setting up an opposing wave form," Jarvis said.
For a moment Tony thought this was just a bit of sass – if the situation had been a problem on a physics test, that would have been the obvious solution. Then he said up straight and said, "son of a bitch."
Jarvis was startled. "I'm sorry... Tony," he said, still speaking the name with a certain amount of hesitation.
"No, no, no!" said Tony quickly. "Don't apologize, Jarvis, you're a genius! I could kiss you! I won't, because that would be weird," he added, "but yes, of course, that's exactly what we'll do. We'll set up an opposing wave form and cancel it out!"
"What does that mean?" asked Wheeler.
"Didn't you ever take physics?" Tony asked her. Who exactly was the FBI hiring these days? "When two waves overlap, they add together. If their peaks and troughs line up, like this," he traced out a pair of imaginary waves in the air, "they become one really big wave. That's what Huang's people were doing with their fourteen trigger blasts. But if the peaks of one are at the troughs of the other, they both vanish." His mind raced, putting together what they'd need to know in order to do this. "We can use the seismograph data to calculate where and when to set off our own opposing wave form. You think you can do that, Jarvis?"
Jarvis nodded. "I may need some... electronic assistance," he said, "but the computers available at Stark Industries ought to be more than adequate."
Steve took over. "All right," he said, "we have a plan, then. Tony and Jarvis can work out how to do that, while the rest of us will help to evacuate as many people from the waterfront communities as possible. We don't want to take chances."
"Wheeler," said Tony, "call the Air Force. Get in touch with Colonel James Rhodes – he's stationed at Edwards Air Force Base outside Lancaster. Tell him Tony needs a few favours."
"What if he asks what kind of favours?" Wheeler wanted to know.
"Tell him the kind that blow up real good," Tony replied. He cracked his knuckles: this wasn't a problem for superheroes after all. This was a problem for science.
He got a bit of a shock when the van pulled up in the Stark Industries parking lot – Pepper was there waiting for them beside her car, fully dressed and looking as if she had no plans to go anywhere, let alone Las Vegas. Tony hurried up to her. "Pep," he said, "why are you still here?"
"Because you are," she replied. "Tony, what's going on? Nobody will tell me."
"You're supposed to be on your way to Las Vegas!" he objected.
"So are you," Pepper said. "Agent Wheeler told me on the phone that you were staying and setting up a headquarters here, so I said I wanted to help."
Tony turned to look back at Wheeler, who was getting out of the van. "Don't look at me," the FBI agent sighed. "Nobody else is listening to me this morning, so why should I expect her to?"
"Now for the last time,' said Pepper, "what's happening?"
"I'll explain on the way upstairs," Tony decided. Pepper would be able to help. "We're gonna need our seismic data, all the computing power we can get, strong coffee, and I wouldn't mind seeing a change of clothes if somebody can arrange it. Also, Jarvis left his shoes somewhere."
Pepper nodded, and Tony saw her eyes flick past him to Jarvis, being helped out of the van by Natasha. He'd figured out sitting down, but was still awkward getting in and out of vehicles. "Dr. Strange picked an awful time to leave you with no computer," Pepper sighed.
Tony put his hands on her shoulders. "Dr. Strange picked a great time to give me a guy who can think on his feet," he said. If Jarvis hadn't been here, Tony probably would have eventually come up with the idea on his own, but... no, wait. He wouldn't have. Because if Jarvis hadn't been here, Tony would never have known this was happening. Dido and her father would still be locked up in that basement while a tidal wave headed for Los Angeles and nobody suspected anything but a mining accident.
Had Dr. Strange known all this was going to happen? And if he had... wouldn't it have been easier just to say something about it?
As they took the elevator up to her office, Tony gave Pepper a quick rundown of recent events. She was aghast at the threat of the tidal wave, but being Pepper, she immediately started doing what she could to handle it. She began making phone calls, rousing people early from bed with the promise of overtime pay, and with her usual efficiency she quickly arranged for everything Tony had asked for. He wanted to grab her and give her the classic Hollywood dip-and-kiss, but decided to wait until the emergency was over. Pepper had once told him that she doubted he could have tied his shoes without her – Tony reflected that he probably wouldn't have been able to find the shoes in the first place.
"You must be exhausted," he said, when she put down the phone and sat down at her desk. "Do you want to find someplace to sleep while we work on this?"
"Oh, no," said Pepper, shaking her head emphatically. "I won't be able to sleep until this is over. Although when it is... is that old offer of a week in Venice still good?"
"I'd prefer somewhere with less ocean," said Tony. "How about Lake Louise? When this is over, I'll take everybody to Lake Louise, my treat. We'll sit in the hot tub, we'll make s'mores in the fireplace, we'll teach Steve to ski, and you and I can sneak off and find places to be alone, okay?"
"Sounds good," said Pepper. "Thanks for warning me that you're bringing Steve this time."
They got to work. Agent Wheeler coordinated security for the building while Tony and Jarvis set up two big folding tables in the middle of the office. Pepper loaded up the relevant seismic data, and from somewhere or other she also dug out a wall-sized topographical map of the Pacific Ocean Floor. They spread this out on the tables, weighing down the corners with stacks of books to keep it from rolling up. Then Dido pulled the lid off a red sharpie, and drew a rough circle somewhere southwest of Kiribati.
"Huang was never too specific when he was telling me about it," she said, "but the Ao Guang mining complex is somewhere in here. When the guy arrives with me laptop, I'll show you the sales pitch he gave me. Maybe you'll see something in there that'll help you narrow it down."
"We'll take a look," Tony agreed. "In case that doesn't work out – Jarvis, do you think you can find the location from the seismic data?"
"I'll need the exact coordinates of the seismographs in order to triangulate," said Jarvis. He had seating himself at Pepper's laptop and logged onto the company server. Tony wondered whose password he'd used, and then wondered if he'd even needed one. His typing was improving by leaps and bounds as he got more practice.
Agent Wheeler had been on the phone. Now she disconnected and rejoined the others at the table. "I've contacted Colonel Rhodes," she said. "He's on his way."
"Awesome," said Tony. "I'll get the coordinates of those seismographs."
It was amazing how a little unnatural disaster could bring everybody together, Tony thought wryly as he marked their map with little x's to represent the seismographs. In the past few days he'd fought with all of these people: Pepper had been mad at him over repeatedly failing to show for the Disney thing, Dido hated him on principle, he and Jarvis had their argument, and Agent Wheeler had recently threatened to arrest him – but here they all were, working together like a well-oiled tsunami-stopping machine. They'd probably all be angry at each other again twelve hours from now.
Dido's laptop arrived and they gathered around to look at Huang's presentation. It was long on graphs and bullet lists, but short on useful information. There were a few photographs of facilities and some footage of people working underwater – Tony was going to have a word with his legal department about the 'Deepsuits' they were wearing – but these had been carefully chosen so as not to give away specific locations. Nobody would have noticed while watching it as a business presentation. Tony had to admit once again that whatever Huang was trying to accomplish, he'd certainly put some thought into it.
"Sorry, Dido," he said. "It looks like Jarvis is gonna have to figure it out."
"I think I already have," said Jarvis. "I just wanted to see if Dido's presentation contained any additional information. He looked at the map. "May I have some pins and a length of string, please?"
Pepper found them for him. He pushed the pins into the location of each seismograph, then used the string and a pen to draw arcs representing the blasts' distance from each. Theses all intersected, at a point right on the edge of the circle Dido had drawn in red.
"Good work," said Tony, clapping Jarvis on the shoulder. He couldn't remember if he'd said 'good job' or even 'thank you' when Jarvis had fixed the server yesterday, but suspected he hadn't. When he thought about it, Tony really didn't praise Jarvis very often. He would say 'good job' to Dummy and Butterfingers, which were technically extensions of JARVIS, but such sentiments had rarely come into his conversations with the AI itself. Tony tended to treat the robots as if they were separate entities with doglike personalities of their own. Maybe he'd done a lot more anthropomorphizing of his machines than he'd ever admitted... although apparently still not quite enough.