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(OOC Note: I'm providing three different starters here because I've got a lot of ideas about what Tony is doing and I'd rather write a variety of circumstances and moods, etc. Just pick any one of them to reply to. Like an ordinary open post, any scenes that happen on this post, no matter which starter they start from, will proceed in parallel.)

#1

"We are not soldiers," Tony had shouted at Steve Rogers after Coulson (supposedly) died. Tony still stood by that heated statement. For one thing, Tony Stark would make a terrible soldier. He'd have been drummed out in five minutes flat for insubordination. For another, if he was a soldier, the idea of going on a mission probably wouldn't be so foreign to him. Tony had been in his share of tight situations, but the one thing Tony had never done was risked his life on a tight schedule.

There's a problem? Do something about it. There's an enemy? Do something about it. Now. He'd been imprisoned, on the run, almost dead, and he'd gotten though it all and come out on top. That was the Iron Man way. It wasn't always easy, but it happened when it happened.

This was different.

The culmination of weeks worth of demands and counter-demands between Tony and Nick Fury had come yesterday:

"I have consulted with my superiors, and we must refuse your request. SHIELD will not return Stark Technology donated to Project [redacted]. If you want it, you will have to penetrate our top secret facility and steal it, which I'm sure you will agree is impossible. I do not expect to hear from you again on this subject."

Which was basically an invitation, wasn't it? Especially considering what Tony had found out about HYDRA inside SHIELD -- the reason he'd started making demands in the first place -- and what he knew Fury knew, and what he knew Fury knew Tony knew and so on ad nauseam.

But the important thing was that HYDRA didn't know what they knew -- so far as Tony knew. And Fury wanted to keep it that way, which limited his range of actions.

The second part of the invitation had arrived shortly after, when Tony was hacking SHIELD and suddenly a file had shown up with schedules and maps for a certain top secret facility where Stark Technology was being used, completely with encoded hints about when the best time to raid the facility might be.

Sneak in, destroy the helicarrier-level repulsors, destroy all plans or attempts to reverse-engineer the technology, send Project Insight -- oops, Project Redacted -- back to the drawing board.

Tony Stark, who answered to no one, could occasionally be useful to Nicholas Fury, who answered to everyone.

All very simple, planned down to the second -- for half past one tonight. Which left Tony with eight hours to get though until then. That's how he'd ended up on the lawn of the hotel throwing coffee mugs for Dummy and U to take turns catching. (U, it should be noted, had a new paint job -- red, with "Stark" prominently displayed, along with a new fancy weather vane labeled "Nearest coffee" that constantly turned to point to the nearest known coffee in liquid form. In small print along the side was some discreet writing, in a hard to read cursive font -- "Don't you wish you had a robot to read the small print for you? Property of Tony Stark. Danger, do not attempt to dismember, dismantle, or in any way disassemble dis robot.")

"And I'm marching to Fury's fife after all," Tony said to Dummy. "Good catch! But here's a question, should I write a letter to Pepper, just in case?" Tony did his best thinking out loud; it was a habit so ingrained he didn't even think about it, he just said whatever popped into his mind. "You know, if you read this, I'm dead, I want you to know I...I mean, that sort of thing? Is that tacky? Unnecessary? Worse than not writing her a letter? It's not that she doesn't know anything I could tell her, so I don't know why I'm even thinking about this. I blame all this planning. No, I blame Fury. If there ever was a man who existed to be blamed--"

#2

Once upon a post-bellum period, back in those halcyon days after the second world war when SHIELD was still an uncorrupted dream in the minds of a small group of people, Howard Stark started collecting of strange and dangerous artifacts. He got a lot of them from Germany -- from HYDRA -- but he didn't stop there. The USSR, Japan -- with his money and connections and interest, and things just dropped into his hands.

At some point, some of Howard's artifacts were transferred to SHIELD for safekeeping, but not all of them. Specifically, there was some equipment from a lab in Germany that probably played a big role in one of Abraham Erskine's early trials of what was to become the Super Soldier Serum. This equipment had been sitting in a secure Stark storage facility since 1952, waiting for Howard Stark to bring it out and make something out of it. Howard Stark never had, much to the disappointment of various interested parties -- including HYDRA.

At least, that was the story Tony had put together from Nick Fury's cryptic hints, and the important part of the story was that the modern HYDRA still made the occasional sweep of SHIELD records, trying to find this equipment, in the hopes of using it for recreating Super Soldier Serum or something like it.

The party to draw out HYDRA had been Tony's idea. "I'll have a party, donate some old junk I've got laying around to a museum, and have a one time only display of some other old junk from my father's collection. I'll just happen to include some old German junk that I clearly don't understand the value of. If you can't use something like that to figure out who's interested and who's HYDRA, you're not trying hard enough," he'd suggested.

It had worked out a bit too well -- some of that old German junk had disappeared half way through the party and Tony wasn't entirely sure the old German junk they'd recovered was the same old German junk. Something about the calm look on Fury's face when the whole thing was over made him wonder if SHIELD had wanted that equipment too -- and just who might have gotten it, scanned it, or in some other way pulled something off during the party. It made Tony's head hurt -- and it totally ruined the rest of the party.

But the night was still young over in The Nexus Hotel! Tony checked in with Pepper first, but she was still handling the aftermath with unflappable aplomb. There wasn't much Tony could contribute at this point, so he snatched up some bits of old German mystery equipment in various shades of early twentieth century chrome -- no doubt specially designed to perform certain unthinkable experiments -- loaded his robots down with leftovers from the party, and led them in search of a simpler world.

He set up in the lobby -- drinks, food, music, old German equipment on display like it was artwork -- and whenever anyone entered the lobby he raised his glass and greeted them. "Welcome to the Stark Impromptu Lobby Party! We're celebrating the headaches our fathers left us. Have a drink!" He couldn't say it was the most successful party ever, but at least it was an uncomplicated party.

#3

Of course it was stupid to carry around mice loaded up with Extremis in his pockets, but these mice were important to Pepper's cure -- first mammals Tony had given a dose of Extremis to -- and Tony didn't want to let them out of his sight. So he'd just reinforced and fireproofed two pockets on the front of his shirt, and took the two mice with him everywhere he went. They'd quickly gotten used to it, and it let him keep an eye on them, poke them occasionally just to make sure they weren't about to explode, and inject them with various substances if he thought they might explode. The worst they'd done was smoke a bit, which was annoying but not fatal. He was making progress -- but not quickly enough.

Tony was worried about Pepper. He'd been working on this Extremis stuff for too long -- and all this time, she'd been living with it, and there was only so much that Tony could do for her without a complete cure. He didn't know how long that was going to take.

It had gotten so that Tony had a hard time looking Pepper in the eye whenever the subject came up, and he'd been spending more and more time in his lab and then, occasionally, at the Nexus Hotel, where Pepper was less likely to walk in and see something blowing up. He didn't think that was good for her peace of mind.

For his own peace of mind, Tony had started working on a suit. He wasn't entirely sure what kind of suit it was going to be, but he kept it in his Nexus lab, next to the cages where the mice lived when they weren't in his pocket.

Tinkering with the suit kept him busy when there was nothing he could do with the Extremis stuff. Babysitting mice kept him busy when the suit refused to cooperate. And when both of them hit a dead-end? He loaded the mice in his pockets and put the troublesome gauntlet on his left hand so he could keeping fiddling with it, and went down to the cafeteria to get a hefty meal.

The idea was that if he ate, and poked the mice, and fiddled with the gauntlet for long enough, some idea would break lose.

The idea was not to let mice loose in the cafeteria, but that was what happened. "Everyone please stand still," Tony commanded the cafeteria at large. Luckily it wasn't too crowded. "And tell me if you see--" He stopped himself before he said 'smoke', thinking that might start a panic. "Anything moving," he finished. The mice did have trackers, so they couldn't actually get lost, but if he didn't get them back quickly, his experiments would be ruined. And then there was the slight possibility of them exploding...

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Chiana raised her eyebrows at the greeting, shifting most of her weight from foot to foot as she made her decision. Not a very tough one to make; there was food and drinks. "Is that another human tradition?" she asked as she wandered closer to the bottles, trying to figure out which she would try just by looking at their shapes, colours and labels.

Tony didn't hesitate, not at the alien appearance of the woman asking the question, nor at the question itself. "You better believe it," he said. "Sometimes it's mothers," he admitted. "But we all start off as impressionable little squirts who don't know enough to refuse the headaches until it's too late. That one's good," he interjected, about the bottle Chiana was looking at.

"Different for you?" he asked, genially curious. "Because if -- for example -- you don't have fathers, then I think I'm envious. If you don't have headaches, I know I'm envious." He paused to consider that a moment more than it deserved, then added, "Even if I was speaking metaphorically, and metaphorically everyone's got headaches. Hey, can you pour me another?"

Chiana opened the bottle he'd recommended and took a sniff. ...yeah, that smelled alright. She poured herself a very healthy dose and held her hand out for his glass when he requested one of his own. "I meant celebrating the headaches," she replied, as she poured him just as generous a glass. "We have sires. And headaches." She handed him his glass back, dark lips curved into a sharp smile. "I can think of better things to celebrate."

"Like what?" Tony asked, making it a challenge. Best things to celebrate: and... go! Reclaiming his glass, he took a small but appreciative sip from the generous portion in the glass. Unlike some memorable parties (the kind that were always remembered with a wince, even for him), this was going to be the kind of party where he went home to Pepper at the end without having drunk too much, done anything too stupid, or gotten into a state that would make her too mad. It was a blurry line at times, at least from his perspective, but he thought he was still on the right side of it.

"What do you think?" he asked Chiana about the drink, because if you've got an alien drinking your booze, you might as well find out what she likes. "But really, any excuse for a celebration," he added, back on the previous topic. "Work with what you've got. Besides, he would have done the same, more or less. More drinking, less fun."

Chiana was silent for a couple of seconds after taking a first sip, then she smiled, sharp, as she tilted her head to the side. "I like it," she answered, and claimed an armchair as her own, swinging one leg over its arm and very much sprawling there. Not making a show of it, just being her regular old self.

But the man's other question... she thought a few more seconds, head lolling from side to side in consideration. "Personal favourite - having made it another day. But good alcohol is also worth celebrating, always," she added, and took another drink, to that notion. Sure, there was always some around in the hotel, if you knew who to smile at, but she had been stuck with bad alcohol - or worse, no alcohol at all - before. "But if you wanna stay on the sire theme, I'm drinking to never seein' 'em again."

"Good stuff," Tony agreed, taking another sip as he watched Chiana sprawl with an approving smile.

"I can see the difference between you and me already," Tony said. "I expect to survive to the ripe old age of one hundred thousand, after cracking the secrets of the human genetic code and eliminating aging. In that perspective, another day?" He waved his free hand.

"I'll drink to that," he said immediately after Chiana proposed the toast, suiting actions to words. "I like that word sire, by the way," he added. "It's got a very hands-off vibe to it."

Chiana grinned again, sharply, and pointed out at the man with the gloved hand holding her glass. "Exactly right." Hands-off was definitely the way she preferred them. And so, yes, she drank to that.

"I'm Chiana," she added, because she usually knew the names of the people she discussed her sires with.

Tony liked being agreed with, so he just grinned at Chiana. "I usually am," he said.

"Tony Stark," he added.

"You some hotshot scientist, Tony?" Chiana asked curiously - on account of his comment about eliminating aging.

Not that that would stop anyone from dying of anything but old age, which was what she so enjoyed celebrating. In many, various ways.

Tony stretched to grab a handful of expensive nibblies from a passing robot with a tray. As he did, his gaze caught on the chrome equipment he'd put on display. He'd played around with it a little a few days ago, enough to know that it didn't do much that was all that special. Any hints it might contain about the world's greatest biological mystery, Super Soldier Serum, were in understanding how it had been used, not in the any unusual capabilities of this equipment.

Erskine had been a scientist; his equipment was mostly tools for understanding. Which was totally fine if you liked that sort of thing, and Tony was all for understanding, but only if he could see where it led.

He ought to try to find Steve Rogers, the Super Soldier himself, to complete his display. Tony chuckled at the thought, and turned back to Chiana with his answer.

"Only if I have to be. Mostly, I'm a hotshot engineer," he said. "I make things. And then I make them better."

"You've definitely got room to make a lot of things better," Chiana remarked, because human technology seemed very basic to her. She didn't understand how it worked; she wasn't an engineer. But it was obvious all the same, compared to everything she'd seen.

"You could not be any more right," Tony said. Usually he felt like it was just him, looking at the world and seeing what could change, what he could make that would change everything. But maybe it was him and...this alien woman?

"What's it like where you come from?" he asked.

"No fun at all," Chiana replied honestly, because talking about her sires has her take that 'where you come from' as her home planet, rather than where she was before coming here. "But with better tech." Including the sort she wished didn't exist, like the Establishment's frelling mind-cleansing tech.

Something about Chiana's tone caught Tony's attention, though the words would have been enough on their own.

"Don't you like better tech?" he asked, totally baffled, then added, as if taking it as a challenge, "How much better?"

"Way better," Chiana replied, as if that was a proper answer to that question. "I still haven't met an Earthan who's actually traveled." She'd met humans who weren't from Earth, though; this 'multiple worlds' thing was a bit of a mind-frel at times.

Tony opened his mouth, then paused, considered that he actually wanted to know more about alien technology -- far more than he wanted to say the clever and sarcastic thing that popped into his mind in response to Chiana's totally inadequate answer. He said, mildly, "Do you have any of this tech with you? What's it do that makes it so good?"

Travel didn't interest him nearly so much as tech. He shook his head at Chiana's assertion. "Come on. You're sitting here in a hotel that's built on a nexus of instantaneous travel and complaining about the untraveled Earthans?"

He paused. That word felt funny in his mouth. "I prefer Earthian, by the way," he said. "Or human, though that one's a bit loaded. But really, does it only count if it's difficult and boring?"

"You want me to believe you guys are responsible for this place?" Chiana asked with a snort. Yeah, no, thank you. They might have built the hotel for all she knew, since it seemed very Earthan, or Earthian, or whatever, but she'd never believe they were responsible for the nexus part, or the doors.

"I still haven't met any of you that wasn't stuck on Earth," she added with a shrug. "Not counting this place. Any advanced civilisation can travel around." She looked at him curiously. "You ever gone exploring?"

Maybe he would be her first!

"My point was that everyone you meet here has traveled," Tony said. "Why not count this place? It's the easiest way I know to travel. Sometimes I come here because the cafe here is closer than the cafe down the street at home. Plus, no elevators."

His expression darkened as he considered Chiana's question. "Not counting this place, I went through a portal once, but I was a little too busy to look around much, so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you probably wouldn't count that either."

He sighed and tossed back the remainder of his drink. "Not one of my best memories," he admitted. "Come on, tell me about your technology. What do you do with it? Travel?"

"Among other things," Chiana confirmed, without giving much detail, because there was this other thing he'd brought up first. "And I don't count this place because it isn't human technology. It's just the universe frelling with you, like it's frelling with me. I wouldn't count it as Nebari technology either."

"This place is the biggest mystery I've ever personally dropped in on," Tony agreed. "I'll drink to that."

He tilted his head and raised his chin, considering Chiana. "You really don't count it as travel unless it's done -- " Tony decided to come at this from another direction. "With what? How do you prefer to travel, when you're at home?"

"We were talking about how advanced your tech is," Chiana reminded him easily, and moved to go help herself to more of that very good liquor. "Meaning, not very much. Just because this place drew you in doesn't make you any more advanced." They really, really weren't. But she could still answer his question with a simple, "Ships," and a grin, taking a sip of her new drink. "But," because she could say some nice things about Earth, "I really like some of your alcohol."

Tony shrugged, tiring of the discussion that didn't seem to be going anywhere. "I'm advanced, but I'm living ahead of my time," he suggested airily. "Have as much as you want, there's more where that came from."

But that reminded him of the party he'd come here from. He'd meant to have a more exciting party here, not less. He surveyed the room, looking for ideas.

"What this party needs is fireworks," he decided abruptly. "Hey, want to help me blow up my dad's old junk, see what kind of display it makes?"

He had a distant feeling that might be the kind of idea that would turn out later to have been a bad idea, but he ignored it. He'd been paying too much attention to that kind of thing lately -- when did he get to have fun?

Besides, it was just old German junk. Howard Stark's problematic old German junk, and who needed that? And what better place for fireworks than the edge of this little island in a sea of stars? It would be stunning.

"In here?" Chiana asked, sounding amused more than concerned at the idea. Honestly, the hotel could use something like it. Give the lobby a remodel.

Tony paused, arrested by that idea. Indoor fireworks... But really, it was far too dangerous this time, he decided. Flying fragments of glass and metal -- too easy to hurt someone who was just walking through. Maybe some other time, when he'd had a chance to think about it, and put together a non-lethal version.

"Out by the edge of the island," he countered. "Throw it off, watch it blow."

Ah, fine. Chiana pushed up and out of the armchair, and grinned at him. "You're on."

Watching things blow was fun.

Tony smiled like he'd never doubted for a second that she would be.

"Okay, Dummy, U--" He gave orders to leave the food, gather some of the drink and the rest of the junk, and sent one of the robots back to his world for explosives. The other robots started out the door in a slow line, oddly like a formal procession.

Tony watched, quirked a brow as he realized it looked like a funeral or a parade or something, and then offered his arm to Chiana, as polite and formal as he was capable of, but with an ironic air -- playing a part. "Usually I'd just tell them to hurry up, but I don't want Dummy to break any of those bottles," he explained.

A second later he wondered if she'd recognize either the procession or the offer or the irony, but he guessed he'd find out.

The offer was readily accepted, without a second's thought; Chiana was too tactile a creature not to go for it, hand very informally going to the crook of his elbow as she watched the robots. As for the irony, she was vaguely aware it was there without being sure what it was about, since she didn't in fact recognise the procession - and she didn't much care what she was missing out on, too focused on the little mechanical helpers. They were pretty amazing, for human tech, and she had a fondness for small, personable creatures, whether they were natural or technological. "Is he the only one with a name?" she asked curiously.

"Dummy?" Tony said, striding forward with a stately air for a few paces, but since Chiana wasn't quite playing along, that dissolved rather quickly into as easy an informality as was possible when escorting a lady alien.

"Or U?" He grinned. "There's also Butterfingers, but I've gotta admit, Dummy's almost always been my favorite. He's my first robot."

Erik didn't quite know where to look first. He'd been intending on a slow stroll through the art gallery before meeting Jordan for dinner, but the lobby had been transformed from a quiet cavernous space into the site of a cocktail hour. The music, waitstaff with trays of drinks wandering here and there,

The headaches our fathers left us... The words grabbed his attention, and he wandered to where the man with the odd goatee stood behind a table full of metal objects. Instinctively he felt them out with his power, his eyebrows drawing together as he mapped their texture, their age, the words stamped proudly on their surfaces. Krupp, Röchling, Messerschmitt— powerful names in the world in which he'd grown up. Less so after the war— after names like Stark had risen up to take the industrial world by force.

"Quite a collection," said Erik, looking up as he realized he hadn't so much as acknowledged the man's existence since approaching the table. "All of it yours?"

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