Disclaimer - I don't, and have never claimed to, own Marvel or its Intellectual Property. This is all just so that I can take my maladaptive daydreaming and turn it into something so that it does not ruin the rest of my day.
DoorMan #55
LA[February 11, 2008]
–Colin Baxter–
Something was wrong, he thought to himself as he paced in his room. It had been two days since that incident and there has not been a single peep from Stark Industries about the situation. They were just sent home from the Reactor building and then an email was dropped to each and every one of them that their internship obligations were suspended until notice, and that they were free to enjoy the perks that came with the internship without doing any work.
Something was seriously wrong about the whole situation. Why would they keep all of them away from the company? Were they infected?
Well, Arc Reactor tech most certainly did not give off any harmful radiation and by the time they left the building, the containment unit was still holding strong. There was no news later on about the incident and the data he had been able to scrape through satellites showed no noticeable change in radiation.
Even so, they were now on their 3rd day of vacation since the day it happened, they were back in their accommodations by noon itself. He was starting to feel a little cooped up in this place, despite the list of amenities. All the other interns, taking the opportunity, were working on their own stuff or were off relaxing and roaming around the city, exploring.
He had no such interests, he had no pending work for the moment because he knew these six months were going to be action packed for him so he had told all his clients that he was going to take a year long hiatus.
It was not like he needed to work anyway and taking a small break to figure out how to create a much bigger brand was worth it, or at least he thought it would be worth it but he was quickly realising that he was never going to learn how to create a big company by becoming an employee. No, he needed something more than that and he was going to find that soon enough but for now, his focus was someplace else.
Pinging Jin'Ya through their mental link, he asked, "Hey, any update on Tony?"
Wordless, Jin'Ya complied and actually supplied him with a video feed, showing Tony working on some papers, drawing what looked like schematic diagrams on top of other diagrams. He smiled, knowing that this was the birth of what would become Iron Man and after instructing Jin'Ya to keep a close eye on Tony, he cut off the connection.
With that out of the way, he hopped onto his desk and opened his personal laptop. With a twitch of his finger, the enchantments on the laptop came to life and connected him to his personal server in Kamar Taj. Honestly, doing that one thing has improved the lives of many.
It was a massive server with caches of the majority of the streaming services, along with a large storage system to make sure that everyone at Kamar Taj could use that as cloud storage, and more importantly, it gave him a computer server in a place that was literally untraceable.
After all, it was in a completely different dimension.
He opened up the SHIELD database that he had taken from their heavily encrypted archives, this one held everything about the Arc Reactor. Not Howard Stark's notes, no, those were kept strictly off the internet and in old floppy formats but these notes were what SHIELD's analysts have in their database after analysing the original Arc Reactor every year or so.
Yup, SHIELD does periodic inspection of something that might one day become the future of humanity and clean energy. Surprising.
They were surprisingly heavily encrypted and the server usage had shot through the roof because, his stupid ass, found a cache of refurbished 4K TVs through a vendor in China and took it off his hands because he knew one place that could use 30 4K displays for over a hundred people.
Kamar Taj.
Yup, so, hindsight's a bitch by the way, he went ahead, took the 30 displays, consulted with some of the Masters, and installed them in Kamar Taj, hard wired internet and everything. So, now, his server, whose main purpose was for his use, now had most of its resources sapped by the simultaneous 4k streams that now happen in Kamar Taj.
Which is why it took days to decode this thing instead of the hours it would have taken otherwise.
Even now, the ETA was about 4 minutes. Sighing, he leaned back in the chair and decided to just wait it out. No point looking for something else which would take longer than 4 minutes and his number one curiosity at this point was the Arc Reactor because it had somehow messed with his powers, creating a Door that he hadn't even used until now, which was also eating him alive.
He really needed to get out of this place for a long period of time without it looking suspicious and there were very few ways he could do that. Honestly, he was contemplating just dropping out of the process completely, such was his burning curiosity when it came to the most fascinating and important thing of his life.
His powers. The Doors.
They were a thing of beauty and the fact that he could already do so much, become one of the most powerful beings on the planet, with a mere 7 Doors was more than telling. Who knows how powerful he would become as he aged and more Doors were unlocked for him.
The fact that his understanding of his powers' mechanisms was upended by the Arc Event was somewhat unsettling because if he didn't need to wait a year to get another Door, what else could he do to gain more Doors and gain ULTIMATE POWAAAAH!
Which is why he needed to get to the bottom of–
PING
His eyes zoomed in on the message he received, from Shuri or rather, from Panther Princess. After it went through the mandatory scanning processes, he opened it and read the single text message in it.
"Agreed. State the place and time. I will be there. This is important, your cooperation is of utmost importance to Wakanda."
Okay, that was odd. His brows furrowed as he thought of the language of the text. Why would she even need his cooperation and importance to Wakanda?
Shaking his head, he began typing, "Mount Everest Base Camp, a week from now, 5 AM local time."
He was actually looking forward to that now. A week would be sufficient time for him to generate some sort of reason to get out of this internship because doing a 9-5 or even having a regular day to day agenda itself did not seem appealing to him.
Life of crime fighting and world saving sounded way better to him.
With that out of the way, he sent the message, and then turned to the decoded files. There were dozens of reports, from multiple analysts from various divisions, having visited the Arc Reactor under multiple guises.
Homeland Security.
Pentagon.
Department of Energy and many more agencies were used to hide the SHIELD analysts that took deep scans of the thing every single year, as part of the government's agreement with Stark Industries for allowing them to have what was essentially a nuclear reactor on private property with private oversight under the condition that it would never be used to power anything useful, which is why Stark Industries HQ was still powered off the grid instead of the actual reactor technology they had sitting on their campus.
As he read through the reports, it was clear that the current rendition of Arc that they had was not viable, in any sense of the word. Not viable financially, strategically, or even as a PR stunt because that thing could barely generate more power than it needs to function. Some sort of fatal flaw in starting the muons in the Arc housing which led to subpar performance.
He was sure that Tony could solve this thing by taking a long look at it and spending a couple of nights on caffeine, it's just that he had no incentive to, until now.
Year after year, analyst after analyst, told the same thing. The thing was safe, with no risk of any explosion or radiation even in an explosion. Ulteriorly, they also noted that in its current condition, it was nowhere near a threat to Big Oil and Big Coal, only serving to function as an exaggerated science fair project.
All of that was fine but that was not what he was looking for. He finally reached the last report, the earliest one, made by SHIELD when Howard was still alive, right after the inauguration it would seem.
His eyes narrowed as he saw part of that report was redacted. Many words were blackened but he could make out something from the rest of the report.
Some sort of energy canister, used to start the Arc Reactor, reported missing from SHIELD's inventory, Category-3 object, non weaponized.
He leaned back and looked straight up, as those particular phrases began revolving in his mind. Then, it clicked for him.
"Huh." He stilled for a moment as he mechanically looked at the report once again.
Energy canister? The same ones that HYDRA made in WW2? Category 3 object? Yup, that level of energy density would classify it as category 3, and non weaponized means it was used for a reactor instead of for an energy weapon that disintegrated people.
"Holy fuck!" It was the Infinity Stone or its energy. The original Arc Reactor was jump started using the leftover energy cubes from HYDRA, extracted from the Tesseract.
That was the reason his powers acted up?
Now he really needed to go to an empty place and unleash the power of his eighth Door.
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