Chapter 44: Tony's in trouble. Again.
With the weight off his mind, Tony made his way back to his oceanside villa after the brief rest.
His schedule was not generous.
Beyond tracking down the mole inside his own company, he had other work waiting.
The Mark II, for one.
The cave had clarified something for him that he had not really thought of before: the human body was fragile in a way that became very obvious when people were actively trying to destroy it. When things went wrong, he had no way to protect himself. Not really.
The only thing that had ever made him feel genuinely secure was the cold weight of the suit around him.
That, and the enormous creature that had taken his helmet off with one hand in the dark. If something like that were looking out for him at all times, he probably wouldn't lose much sleep. But Matthew hadn't given him so much as a Tyrant, let alone Nemesis, and showed no immediate signs of changing that position.
Which left the conclusion that standing on someone else's capability was not the same as having your own. Better to be the strong one than to borrow strength from a stronger one.
So.
Iron Man. Beginning now.
In the workshop, Tony spoke quietly. "JARVIS. You there?"
"At your service, sir."
"I want to open a new project file. Label it Mark II."
"Of course, sir." A brief pause. "Shall I store the files in the Stark Industries central database?"
Tony hesitated for a moment. "No. I don't know who I can trust right now. Keep everything on my private servers for the time being."
"Understood."
"One more thing." He was already moving toward the workbench, the thought arriving late. "Open a second folder, separate from the Mark II files."
"Of course. What would you like to call it?"
"...The name." He considered it. "Call it Stanavistin."
Tony stood at the workbench, working through the Mark II's redesign in one part of his mind while another part replayed a conversation from the tree-lined path that afternoon.
Matthew's voice, unhurried: "Tony. What happens if you've built an indestructible suit but the enemy doesn't give you time to put it on?"
"Real fights don't come with a transformation sequence. Nobody's going to stand there patiently while you suit up."
That had landed harder than Tony had let on at the time.
Back in the workshop, he had been turning it over ever since.
As he saw it, there were two solutions. One: find a way to always have the suit on or near him. Two: find a way to be dangerous without it. At minimum, stop being a soft target.
That was what Stanavistin was for.
Time moved.
Tony was deep in the armor upgrades. Matthew, on his end, formally submitted the applications to the relevant city departments and began accepting children into the Nursery. Homeless children, children with nowhere to go, children whose situations were the kind that didn't improve without intervention. Within half a month, every available space was filled.
Under a sustained culture of gratitude that Matthew had been deliberate about building, System points began flowing in at a steady rate. Sitting in his office one afternoon, he did the arithmetic. The Nursery, running normally, was generating between eighty and a hundred points per day.
The occasional dip was probably the teachers taking it easy on certain afternoons. A reasonable human tendency.
On the thinking-building side, Matthew had done everything available to him. To ensure the children developed a clear and lasting impression of who had made this place possible, he had commissioned a statue of himself for the entrance and hung a selection of instructive sayings along the corridor walls. Several of them were specifically designed to build gratitude and a sense of obligation to the values the Nursery was built on.
Eighty to a hundred points a day was not a large number in isolation. As a reliable daily income, it added up quickly. Combined with his continued street-level welfare runs, the System balance that had been sitting close to empty was building back up at a rate he found satisfactory.
The office had been quieter lately.
Both Eleanor and Ada had been deployed.
Eleanor's assignment was straightforward. Go to the Daily Bugle. Have a conversation with its editor-in-chief, J. Jonah Jameson. Arrange for Peter Parker's part-time position there to be terminated. Then, at an appropriate moment, extend an offer of part-time work in Umbrella's public relations department.
There was a condition attached to joining Umbrella, as there was for all staff: a comprehensive medical examination upon onboarding, including bloodwork and a full panel of tests.
This was not primarily a recruitment exercise.
What Matthew actually wanted was access to Peter Parker's biology. A Spider-Man's blood was a research opportunity that didn't come around often. If Birkin could work with what the samples produced, the result might be something capable of developing the kind of physical enhancement that Parker's genetics had arrived at through other means.
And even if the blood produced nothing useful, Matthew would still have recruited a field-capable operative with instincts that no amount of training reliably produced. Either outcome was worth the effort.
Ada's assignment was the more dangerous one.
Matthew had sent her to Spain, looking for something the files described as Amber. Las Plagas, the parasite from the village. The same organism that made Resident Evil 4 what it was.
He was clear-eyed about the risks and had made no hard demands. If she could retrieve a sample, excellent. If the target proved genuinely unacquirable, she was authorized to withdraw and simply report the specific location back to him. Finding it mattered more than retrieving it on the first pass. Once the location was confirmed, everything that came after it became considerably more manageable.
In practice, Ada's role on this trip was closer to that of an advance scout than an extraction operative.
That night, Matthew sat at his desk with nothing urgent on his plate and browsed through the news with the mild attention of someone doing a routine sweep.
[Spider-Man breaks up drug operation linked to organized crime...]
[Daredevil rescues victims from child trafficking ring...]
[Stark Industries stock falls 56 points as uncertainty over weapons division future continues...]
Fifty-six points.
Matthew looked at that last one for a moment.
He picked up his phone and sent Eleanor a message about acquiring some Stark Industries shares while the price was depressed.
Her reply came within a few minutes.
[Eleanor: Understood, sir. I've already learned that one of the current shareholders is looking to sell. I'll move on it.]
[Matthew: Go ahead.]
He put the phone face down and returned to the news.
A few minutes later, a second notification came through.
Different tone from the first one. Less a message, more an alert.
He picked up the phone.
On the screen: a set of coordinates. Latitude, longitude, altitude. Nothing else.
He looked at the position data carefully.
When he understood what he was looking at, he shook his head slowly.
Matthew had told him directly: investigate the board. Warned him specifically to watch for the mole. Stane had apparently moved against him anyway.
Clever man, occasionally oblivious about the things happening directly around him.
That said, Tony was the investment. Which made the answer to whether to help him fairly simple.
***
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