Obadiah was a pure businessman—no science background, no engineering instinct—but he knew people. He could see that Daisy was interested in the Arc Reactor. That was enough.
"If Miss Johnson can help us scale the reactor down to commercial size, I can personally authorize the first supercomputer installation fee to be waived—written off as new product development." The old man laid out his terms without preamble.
Daisy did the math in her head. The first installment wasn't a small number—easily over a hundred million dollars. Saving it was obviously the better outcome. Besides, she'd had her eye on the Arc Reactor for a while. With it powering her systems, she could slash her electricity costs significantly. Just thinking about running a supercomputer that consumed at least 100 million kWh per year made her chest tighten.
The upside: saving money, saving money, and more saving money. The downside? There really wasn't one. All she had to do was build Obadiah a reactor. What harm could that do?
Without outside help, Obadiah would just go and steal the one already sitting in Tony Stark's chest. One wrong move—one butterfly effect too many—and Stark could wind up dead. But if Obadiah had a reactor of his own, Stark would face Iron Monger at full power with no reason for any of that.
From that angle, helping Obadiah build his own reactor was actually doing a good deed.
Daisy let herself feel reassured by this reasoning. Basically, she was doing a good deed.
She didn't agree on the spot. The fee waiver depended on a working product, and she genuinely wasn't sure she could reverse-engineer one. Starting from an existing unit and working backward to the original design wasn't any easier than starting from scratch, and she had no guarantees.
"No design schematics? Then what about basic data? How much have you actually gathered—can I see it?"
No commitment, but the meaning was clear: show her the specs first.
Without a word, Obadiah called in a small, balding man in round glasses. He made no effort to hide his dissatisfaction with the man. A brief introduction: "Dr. William—walk Miss Johnson through your current research progress."
Dr. William glanced twice at Daisy's outfit—an off-shoulder dress that revealed sculpted collarbones and ivory-smooth shoulders, a slender neck carrying what looked like an expensive ruby necklace. With minimal accessories, she looked clean and refined. Her long legs and heels made her look like she was pushing 5'11" (180 cm). Her eyes were bright and alive, almost arresting in motion.
The doctor was socially awkward. He didn't stare. He simply went quiet for a moment. Was this science, or had he wandered into a photoshoot?
Daisy had guessed what he was thinking. She'd dressed for a business meeting, not a lab session—her outfit was decidedly out of place next to his white coat.
She handled it the way she always did: by pulling out her mentor's name as a shield.
"A great teacher produces great students" held true in any setting. The moment Dr. Hank Pym's name dropped, the little doctor's whole bearing shifted. He ran through a few cycles of rapid mental recalibration before finally connecting the face in front of him to the name he'd seen in academic journals.
"You're Daisy Johnson? I always pictured an older physicist..." he trailed off.
He looked at Daisy, then at himself, and said nothing more. Probably a fifty-fifty split between embarrassment and envy.
Once it was established that Daisy actually knew her field, the two got down to business.
Stark Industries had little historical context on the Arc Reactor's origins, but Daisy knew the backstory. Howard Stark had originally drawn inspiration from the Tesseract. The Allies had captured a number of Red Skull and Zola's weapons—laser tanks, energy rifles, all of it—and Howard had spent twenty years studying that perpetual energy source, determined to break free from its limitations and develop a clean energy source that belonged to Earth alone.
Science doesn't happen overnight. Even with Anton Vanko's help, material limitations had left them with little more than a prototype.
It took two generations—father and son—for the Arc Reactor to reach completion and enter the clean-energy market. That was still a few years off.
The reactor sitting in Tony Stark's chest right now was, in terms of concept, no different from the massive installation in front of her. Both were scaled-down versions of the original design.
Daisy circled the reactor while Dr. William followed alongside, answering what questions he could. He knew some things, but more often than not he admitted he couldn't follow the more detailed parts.
Daisy looked down at him with barely concealed exasperation. This was supposedly Stark Industries' best engineer? His thinking was far too rigid.
"Go take some readings for me." She'd walked two full laps around the five-meter-wide (about 16 feet) installation, then stood staring at the blue electric arc for half an hour, before finally giving the instruction.
"Me? I'll—" The doctor froze. He was the chief engineer.
Daisy didn't even look at him, just gave a nod. Obviously, she was in a fitted dress and heels—she wasn't climbing up there to take readings herself.
The doctor looked to Obadiah, who stood stone-faced and silent. With no other option, the doctor climbed up, muttering under his breath.
A long stream of numbers poured out—none of which Obadiah understood. Daisy rubbed her temples and bent her head to calculate. Midway through, she linked in to PERIL to help crunch the data.
Obadiah started out standing, then crossed his arms, and finally dragged a chair over and sat down to wait.
Dr. William had the worst of it—run ragged by Daisy's instructions all afternoon, sweat streaking his face, not daring to stop and wipe it.
After a full day of work, Daisy arrived at a rough conclusion.
The Arc Reactor's underlying principle wasn't complicated in theory: coils were wound inside a circular vacuum chamber and energized to generate a spiral magnetic field, which heated the palladium at the center to trigger cold nuclear fusion. No pollution, no high temperatures. Clean and efficient.
The difficulty lay in the sheer volume of precise data required. Every single number had to be exact to produce a stable spiral magnetic field inside such a confined space.
In the current world, those exact values were known only to Tony Stark and Anton Vanko—who was barely clinging to life. Daisy could reverse-engineer a portion through calculation, but the rest remained out of reach.
What she could do, however, was use her power to compress it into shape. This was exactly why Professor Xavier's technology was decades ahead of anything conventional science had produced—when theory ran out, ability filled the gap. You didn't even need to understand the principle.
Science demanded exact values. Her power, by contrast, let her fine-tune within a workable range. Fifteen didn't work? Try sixteen. Still off? Try seventeen.
That was exactly where Daisy stood now. She couldn't calculate the precise answer—but with partial data and her ability as the safety net, she was confident she could build it anyway.