Crimes Against Food

March 03, 2019:

Late night at the mansion, three Avengers met to chat briefly about current events. Tony crazy food tastes are unveiled.

Avenger Mansion

The Avenger Mansion is a three-story townhouse at 890 Fifth Avenue,
between the 70th and the 71st street. The building was built by Howard Stark
and was the Starks residence until his death.

The mansion grounds are surrounded by a wall topped by a metal fence that
altogether is twelve feet tall. Appearing like rough stone and aged bronze,
it is actually made of advanced, extremely resilient concrete and steel. The
mansion itself is surrounded by a lawn on three sides. The main entrance is
on Fifth Avenue, and the back entrance leads to a parking space for land
vehicles.

The ground floor is dedicated to common area living space for the resident
Avengers. There is a sizable kitchen, a dining room, a large library, a
living room and a large space converted for public conferences, much akin to
a slightly smaller version of the West Wing press office.

Characters

NPCs: None.

Mentions: MODOK

Mood Music: None.


Fade In…

Night time is the right time to find a batling. Spoiler rolls in and sets her bike to charge before making her way upstairs. She moves with calm focus, not in a rush but not meandering aimlessly. There are some updates to do on the Avengers' Computer, but that's about it.


Despite the time of the night Nathaniel is at the main computer room, apparently doing one of his ‘watch everything’ sessions. Comfortably sprawled on a large computer chair, at least a score holoscreens arranged around him, he seems to be watching and hearing newscasts on different languages. His armor is nowhere in sight, but his helmet sits on a desk nearby, likely doing the projections.


The time is of little concern to Tony either since he quite literally never sleeps. Maybe he was out for a run, he certainly has the out for a run look about him as he enters the Mansion. Sucking down water from a bottle as he makes his way through the Foyer in a body sheath like hot suit designed to modulate his core temperature while exercising. "Hello? Anybody here?"

JARVIS IS HERE; "I am here."

"Good, do me a favor and get me some toaster stroodles cooking huh?"


Spoiler turns to look at the 'commotion' of Tony making his way into the room.

"Hello, Tony," she says, digital voice modulator active, as it so often is. "You know you can put them into toast yourself, right?" she quips faintly, head tipping an inch to one side as she regards him.


"Computer room, Mr. Stark," replies Nathaniel's voice over JARVIS'. He leaves to Spoiler to announce her own presence, although he offers a quick smile and a brief gesture with a hand to the blonde when he spots her.

But since it seems they are meeting upstairs, he freezes all the screens and heads up. "Are you finally giving JARVIS control over the mansion, retiring HOMER?"


Tony spins in the foyer towards the mudulated voice and lifts a hand at Spoiler in greeting, "I could… I could do a lot of things myself. Like clean my room or fold my clothes.." He's grinning of course, headed in the direction of the kitchen while sucking on the water bottle dangling from his hand. "I don't though. Does that make me lazy? I don't know.. but I know it makes me energy conservative and I think we can all agree that life is finite and wasting any of it cooking your own breakfast pastries is a gross waste of system resources."

JARVIS is doing his bidding, stroodles prepped for microwavation.

To one of the intercoms, "Okay here's the thing.. Last week I was working on a new suit variant that integrated with my neural net. I can't be ''positive'' it's affected some of my memories, but if I do something, literally anything, that seems different than I would have done longer than, like, two days ago? It's probably better if we just run with it." That's meta. It's so terribly meta. "Besides, HOMER was kind of downer. I don't have time for that kind of negativity in my life. JARVIS is better."

"Thank you sir."


Tony is like a magnet. Sometimes repulsive, other times attractive. Either way, he is almost certainly polarizing. But whatever one may think of the playboy billionaire philanthropist, he's words and antics at least have the purple and black clad batling smirking ever so slightly… while being pulled along in his magnetic field. She drifted into the kitchen, a place she hasn't ever really visited here, and settles to a counter, leaning a hip against it as Nathaniel makes his way in. The other avenger's wordless greeting receives a gentle now of her head.

"You acting odd is something I think we've all learned to just roll with," is Spoiler comment of Tony acting differently.


"It was dry," admits Nathaniel, standing by the doorframe and watching vaguely amused at Tony's antics. "JARVIS has more personality." The kitchen is spotless, as it sees very little use now most Avengers are living at their own places around the city. It was something Nathaniel tried to avoid, as it makes them less efficient, but people would be people.

Eventually he also got a penthouse at the other side of Central Park. He needed the space for non-Avenger experiments. On a positive notes nothing has exploded in the labs under the mansion for months.


"I wouldn't say ''odd''." Tony corrects, spreading peanut butter on a freshly toasted stroodle and taking a huge bite, "Just different. You remember when I theorized that there were billions of different realities living in conjunction with one another along an infinite loop?" Glancing between them, "Have I shared that yet?" He waves a hand and takes another bite, "I'm sure it's not a new concept, I'm just saying that it's possible that some timey wimey stuff is going on… or parallelly welly? You get the point."

HOMER was dry.

"Yeah, I can't remember why I made him that way. I guess I needed a straight man? Who knows." He points at the stroodle, "Anybody? There's another one."


"Different… Odd… it's all about the same," retorts the blonde. The smirk leveling off into a flat lipped expression to mask the 'OMG what have you DONE to that wonderfully delicious toaster stroodle, YOU MONSTER' reaction she wanted to give at seeing Tony slather PEANUT BUTTER on it instead of… or on top of… the sguary goodness of the frosting it comes with.

"Probably," she acknowledges of the parallel universe. it's something she's already too familiar with, and so refrains from commneting on the Dr. Who reference. She knows it from memes and not because she's got time to be a whovian. The offer of a stroodle is declinedby her turning to look at Nathalie.


"Timey 'wimey' are my field," points out Nathaniel with a glance back to Spoiler. They had one together of those a couple years ago. Most of the pieces have been picked up and mended. "But actually I have detected some temporal anomalies recently, psionic in nature. Closest one was in Mutant Town just after those cyborgs attacked. If you are interested I will send JARVIS the data. I estimate someone is projecting from the distant future, but I am not sure. It doesn't seem to be fraying reality on a noticeable level."

No stroodle for him. It is late. Actually, he should be sleeping.


"More for me." Tony indicates with another bite of his stroodle, one down. His hands are brushed together to drop crumbs down onto the plate and he bobs his head to Nathaniel, "Yeah, send it along. I'd like to get some residual readings as well. I've got an idea that maybe we can start predicting these things on… well maybe not absolute certainty.. at least a semi regular basis." He sucks down more water and glances at the second stroodle, running his tongue across the back of his teeth. Seeing as nobody else wants it, he grabs for it and adds some peanut butter.

"If only to gauge the relative bleed effect into our own stream. I'll leave the particulars of the calculations to you once we've gotten the scans, that's not really my field, but come back the Tower sometime and look at some of my designs." Another bite. MMmm.. "This is heaven."


It's moments like these that Stephanie Brown tries WAY too hard NOT to be the dumb blonde inthe room. She manages this by just staying still and staying quiet and not reacting to any of what's being said…. or eaten. Because peanut butter on stroodle just looks gross… in her book. She'll file away that Tony likes it… as information for later. Just in case.

Blackmail Tony if he ever tries to befriend Gordon Ramsey.

Exactly.


"Done," says Nathaniel quietly, giving contacting with his armor through the neural interface and sending the data to the mansion servers. A fluttering of psychic chonokinetic connections. North Dakota, the Colorado Rockies, a couple contacts in the northern Appalachian, a half a dozen in New York. All in the last few weeks. Same power signature. He tries to ignore Tony's crimes against food. There are some battles no one can win. He is sure JARVIS did try.


At least Tony isn't rubbing his food options in anyone's face! Only his own open gullet. Once more brushing off his fingers onto the plate so he doesn't get crumbs on his Starkphone. The screen flips out and he goes through the information transferred to the servers with a swipe of his finger, "That's a lot in New York.." He murmurs with a raised brow, "Alright so if we triangulate these twelve access points a pattern should immerge." He's licking peanut butter from the top of her mouth. "At least tell us what all these locations have in common? A concentration of some kind of energy would be my thoughts, but as I said, not my area of expertise."

Spoiler isn't left out. "Think you could hit up some of these locations in New York and lay down a scanning spike for us? I could fly out there, but it might be easier to do it a little more subtly if someone else is keeping tabs."


Subtly. That's exactly why she was recruited in the first place wasn't it? Spoiler gives Tony a nod, arms unfolding from over her chest as she straightens out of her lean.

"Just give me the equipment," she says, all business as always. For all that the voice behind the digital modulation seems like is is too youthful to be doing this sort of thing, Spoiler's gone so very serious in the past year or so.


"Nothing at plain sight," comments Nathaniel in response to Tony's question. He has glanced over the contacts and then proceeded to ignore them, since they are not Kang-related. But a detective might find common points, certainly.

But Nathaniel has been busy with the Rift's fallout and his personal projects. Also, looking for MODOK, who escaped Ryker's Super-Max wing recently. Keeping tabs on AIM is one of his main pastimes.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License