Chapter Twelve, Science Bros.

"So, what is it that was so important for you to call me twice in one afternoon and even make me come here? The company you wanted me to create from scratch was already starting to give me a headache and I had given that to do to an assistant. Why am I here?"

"We created a metallic alloy that can reduce energy consumption of any electronic device ten times, and is slightly faster in transmitting information than optic cables."

"..."

"We were originally going to publish a pa-" I say, before getting interrupted.

"THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?! You want to die so badly? Is that it?! Putting an entire industry out of job wasn't enough for you that you decided to kill off every other one at the same time!?"

"That's why we called you." Sue says, a smirk on her face as she looks at me. Fine, you win that round, woman. "We thought better than doubling down on our last miscalculation."

"And you escaped hell just for thinking that. Who decided to call me? Because that person deserved to be made leader of your little band and given due respect from now on." Everyone looks at Sue from the side. "Well, well, well. Looks like someone's got the beauty and the smarts to go with it. I'm glad at least one of you has any sort of common sense."

"We thought- Sue thought it would be better to have someone to support us when we make that discovery public."

"And she's right, you're too small at the moment to drop such a nuclear bombshell on the world. You need allies, a chaperon. You've got any ideas yet, or you just wanted me to do the thinking for you?" The shark-... the lawyer asks.

"I thought of calling at the very least Stark Industries, Tesla and Toyota. For the rest I thought you would know better, you've been in the business of, well businesses far longer than us."

"Why does it have to be Stark? You've got dirt on him or something?" We look the other way. "Wait, you do? What is it?"

"It's not dirt, per se. He… Sort of owe us a favor." I say.

"Alright. Anyway, that's a start. Stark Industries has its fingers in quite the large pie, so it should be a huge help to you. Tesla's just starting up though… But it sure would help them quite a lot. And for now not a lot of competition is doing electric cars yet, but if they did, you could have called them as well. Oh, wait a second, they aren't yet, but some car manufacturers are definitely looking into it. Your stuff might help them tremendously, and it might just give them enough edge to become competitive in the energy aspect. That's a huge market that's waiting for you there, You just gotta find the right umbrella. Toyota is certainly wider than Tesla. What else? You were talking about energy. What do you think of Roxxon, Exxon, Chevron, Total etc.?" we all shake our heads at that comment. "No? Well what about MidAmerican, NextEra, Vestas, Dong?" None of us know those names. So we voice our lack of knowledge. "Seriously? You mean to tell me that you wanted to stop pollution without knowing who could help you with that? I've been looking for partners for a while now. Anyway. We'll contact those four then. They aren't at the heel of any of the first four, but all of them might just make a bit of shade for you to hide under. I'll also look up the largest copper wire manufacturers, see which of them can help you. Alright, the next was communication/information. One the one side you've got telecommunication, all Verizon, At&T etc, on the other you've got all the computer manufacturer, especially those doing advance calculation stuff. I don't know enough about that, but I'm sure an assistant of mine can compile me a list." At that point, she looks at us again. Seeing our lost faces and empty looks, she sighs. "In short, I've got a lot of research to do. You can go and contact Stark. He'll tell you when to call Toyota and Tesla. I'll work on other possible allies on my side. Do tell him to keep in touch with me on this, we might need to work together to avoid bad blood between some of your future allies," we nod. "You did good calling me, it could have gone bad on an interstellar scale in a matter of seconds after your paper went out the door." she says as she rises from the table. "Dammit I won't be getting my beauty sleep anytime soon with all of this sh*t," she mutters, leaving the room."

"..."

"Well that was quite an earful. What do we do?" Johnny asks, trying to get his bearings after this extremely quick monologue. While it might have seemed long, she was speaking way faster than usual, making even Sue dizzy from the speed of her speech and volume of information she released.

"We do what she said. We call Tony." I say.

"We should probably give him a room or something at this point. And don't worry, I'll call him this time. He might still be a bit bitter from the last time."

"Thank you, Sue. I appreciate it. I'll make it up to him by giving him a roll of alfium when he comes by, to apologize." About two hours later, Alfred told me that Tony would be coming by in the week, since he was a bit busy at the moment. Which makes sense, with all of the attention on him after his coming out. So after working out a few kinks of the production of alfium, we decided to line all of our current equipment with it, and plug the original machine again so that it can finish turning the cable in Alfred' servers to it. Once this is done —under heavy supervision of course— we'll unplug the machine and disassemble it to see what made it do that in the first place.

While working on it during that week, Tony showed up. He was over the moon with the attention he was receiving, and full of ideas to upgrade his suit. He couldn't stop talking about it with Ben and Johnny, who came by the entrance to welcome him. Once he saw me, he quieted down a bit, scrunched his nose and raised his head. Before he could say anything, I engaged the conversation.

"Tony, I'm sorry for the last time. The radiation was affecting my emotions, but I should never have acted like that. I apologize. I have a gift for you, which is also why we called you."

"Oh. Okay. I was going to say that you were wrong and should apologize, but I'm glad we're on the same page. Now, I heard gift, where is it?"

"It's upstairs, come on in." said Sue, by my side. She looks at me. "Alfred called Jeri, she should be here in about an hour or so."

"So, the radiation thing you talked about during the press release was true? Why didn't you say you had powers?" Tony asks. "And did you solve the problem? Are you going to lash out at me because I didn't put on slippers when going in your lab? What was so important that you had to call for me despite knowing I was so busy? Why can't I stop asking questions? Can someone help me by answering at least one? I can't-" I interrupt him.

"Yes, the radiation thing was true. We got affected by the radiation when we got our powers. It's become like an organ now. If we don't use our powers, we get withdrawal symptoms affecting our emotions and thought processes." Sue follows up.

"We didn't talk about our powers because the world is not ready, and we aren't either. We didn't solve the problem as much as mitigated it, like we did with the Lithium for you." she says. And I can't help but see one of his eyebrow twitch at the mention of this. It seems he noticed what we were about to talk about later could call on that favor. Johnny speaks up.

"Slippers I don't know, but you've got to put on protective covers for your shoes if you don't want to remove them. He calls them booties. I think you couldn't stop asking questions because you're full of adrenaline every day because you can fly in a suit of armor and shoot at things with blasters in your arms and do you mind if I try it because I can fly on my own but I'm sure it's not the same thing and-" Ben cuts him off.

"Hey Matchstick, quit it."

"Thank you Ben," I say, pausing for a bit to let everyone breathe. "As for why you're here, it's in there. And no, I don't have protective covers or booties in my lab, that would be a Marvin move and I'm not a Marvin." We step in it, and I direct him to my desk, on which a roll of Alfium is sitting. "There it is. This is my present to say sorry. And why we called you here." He looks at it from afar, with an eyebrow raised, clearly underwhelmed.

"That's… What is it?"

"It's called Alfium. It's a new metallic alloy. Copper and unstable molecules. A tiny bit faster than optic cable, and reduces energy consumption by ten times. Packet loss minimal, in information and power. You're welcome." During my very quick presentation, his face morphed from disbelief to awe to inquisitive and back to awe before settling on a neutral appearance.

"So. Why Alfium? Is it because you found it in Alfred's servers?" Johnny laughs out loud. I sigh.

"At the start yes, but not anymore." I explain the new origin for the name, while he looks at it under different angles, testing it with different materials and electronics and observing it under a microscope.

"Okay, that can work. So you called me because you can't reveal this otherwise you'll be killed and your stuff will be stolen is that it? You need a chaperon, someone to say he's with me don't touch him to the other guys in the prison because you're too small to be taken seriously yet, right?"

"Basically, yes."

"Alright, I can work with that. I want 60%."

"Of the profits?"

"Why would I take that? No, I want 60% of all the cables you'll be producing to go to Stark Industry and to me."

"I believe we'll be discussing that between lawyers, Mr. Stark. For now you should be talking among yourselves about what you can do with this stuff." Jeri intervenes, coming down the elevator. "You do realize that Stark Industry isn't enough to protect that invention. We need Stark, that's for sure, but not just you. We'll be calling a lot of people, Mr. Tin Man."

"It's Iron Man, trademarked and registered. And you're right, Lawyer Woman, we'll talk about that later. What's the biggest thing you tried it on to check the power drop?"

"We lined a prototype that was supposed to draw on 1.3 Gigajoules, and it got it down to 130 Megajoules. So it doesn't seem to be affected by the size of the object or the energy demanded from it." I answer.

"What kind of stuff are you making that would need that much power? Are you guys making a new portal?"

"No, but it's confidential. You might get a sneak peek before the rest of the world, but you won't know what it is until we make sure it's ready." Johnny says with a smirk. "I can give you a hint if you let me test out that sweet armor you got."

"Johnny!" Sue says, trying to prevent that from happening.

"So you can make metal with that machine, and the first one you made is already overpowered. Have you tried making other metal and alloys, yet? What about new metals, things never seen before. What if you separate the copper from the stuff you make the Alfium with?"

"We tried that last thing, and it's just a different kind of quartz, but flimsier, more prone to cracks, and overall much less useful than normal quartz. We haven't tried other alloys, but Alfred is running simulations in the background. Do you have any specifics in mind? It might help to focus on a particular one."

"Well, I think you can try titanium, nickel and maybe even nitinol. Don't limit yourself to alloying one metal, try alloying other alloys."

"We'll do that. Just so you know, I won't be making you any armor. You've got enough as is." Well… I won't make him any, but at some point, I will give him direct access to the machine. Forn now every single one of the machines is linked to Alfred for security and monitoring purposes.

"At least I tried…" he mumbles. "Alright." He looks around the lab. "Have you already-"

"We were in the middle of it."

"Cool. And have you also-"

"Yup, it's almost finished and Alfred is monitoring everything. Once all of the servers' cables are turned to alfium, we'll look at the machine to see what made it act as it did."

"What if you weave the alfium in your suits?"

"Well, we thought about doing that but Alfred said that the only way it could be used is to upgrade the connectivity of the suit, not much else."

"Okay. Well, I'm going to call Pepper and ask her to bring lawyers so they can get started on the legal side of things while we work on that. Do you have a server or two for me to install Jarvis real quick? Two AIs will be better than one. I'll use your gift to upgrade him at my place."

"You shouldn't do that now." I say, thinking about the events of Iron Man 3. Speaking of, I should do something with Maya Hansen, her death is pretty sad considering her work on Extremis… "I think you should put it in a suit or something. Can you imagine the power you could end up saving when blasting your repulsors?"

"I thought you wouldn't make a suit for me?"

"I won't. I gave you a gift, and you do whatever you want with it but my recommendation is putting it in a suit and maybe in your arc reactor. I don't know what you used to make it."

"You don't?"

"I mean I could probably find out if I gave it some thought and get myself my own version in a few weeks, but I don't want to be on your bad side. Speaking of, why didn't you patent it?"

"Stane was pushing for it hard, and I just didn't want arms dealers to get their hands on my tech anymore. And I didn't think anyone would be able to do it, or have the balls to come out into the world with it. If you did, I would have sued you to hell and back, all the while taking you away from your hands using my suit."

"You know, you're not the only person in the world able to do what you do, right? There are smart people everywhere. You may be in the top five, but you're certainly not number 1."

"Is it because you are?"

"No, I'm not sure if I'm more or less smart than you are, but I'm definitely not the smartest person on earth. This position is held by a 10 year old African princess. And no, I'm not joking. She's one of the people I want to work with in our science pals group."

"Why haven't I heard of her if she's so smart? And a princess?"

"Because her country is hidden. I only know of it because of the dream I had. She'll appear in a while. I'll try to get into contact with her before then. Anyway. Do you want me to have a Stark reactor, or make my own, and will you sue me if I do either one?"

"Just… Don't sell it to anyone please. And don't give it to anyone either. In fact, keep it a secret, and that'll make me happy. If you manage to upgrade it, tell me about it, I don't think it's perfect yet."

"I'll make sure to do so. Will you stay for dinner?"

"Nah, once my lawyers and yours are done I'll get back to Malibu, I have a lot of stuff to do. Keepme posted. I'll leave a copy of Jarvis here if you need. I promise he won't spy on you again. I learned my lesson. Circé, was it, she's quite the AI. Good thinking, having her devour antivirals databases for breakfast and viruses for lunch. Did you program an AI to create viruses for her to fight during its infancy?"

"Just like in real life, nothing is more effective against a virus than a vaccine with a small strand of it for good measure."

"Fire is more effective though. Fire burns all viruses. If you think about it, I'm like the perfect vaccine, with me around, no virus will touch you before being burnt." Johnny cuts in, jealous that his hero spends his time talking to me...

"That's true. I wonder if we can make some sort of fire vaccine, for extreme viruses." I say, trying to appease his jealousy while hinting at something for Stark.

"Hey, that reminds me of some girl I met at a conference some time ago, I wonder what she's up to these days." Oh, just helping create the number one terrorist threat in America in a few years... "What am I saying, I can't even remember what I had for breakfast, much less someone I met however years ago while drunk… Anyway, nice to see you guys, we'll talk later." he says, before heading to the meeting room where our and his lawyers barricaded themselves for quite a while now.

"You know, you might have something there, with the vaccine idea…" Sue says, interested.

"Oh, yeah, I know. It exists, but it's not stable yet. And used by terrorists. It was created by Dr. Maya Hansen a few years ago, with some help from Tony Stark. As he said, he was drunk so he doesn't remember, but he will in a couple of years. I'll try to recruit her by then, she might make a good addition to our science pals group, and you might have a new friend to talk shop with."

"I'd like that. Wait, terrorists?"

"She's in it for the science. And a tiny bit against her will. For now, let's just meet up with Jeri to see what advantages or disadvantages she managed to get for us…"