One side of Tony's mouth quirked up when she told him there were no snipers. He wasn't the sort to resort to hire someone else to do his dirty work. But it wasn't about him or the fact he was still wary, even after that sort of disclosure. He realized she had scouted out the area out of force of habit. It was good situational awareness, a throwback to her military training. Useful.
As for his reasoning, it was a little blurry around the edges. Tony considered it a potentially dangerous test. There was a split second of tension when someone passed by and motioned like they wanted to snap a picture from the sidewalk. Tony flipped his sunglasses up over his forehead for a full view of his face, forcing a megawatt smile while waving a hand at them. Picture taken, they blew him a kiss as he made a show like he caught it. He waited until they were gone before slowly wiping that hand down the front of his coat, as if he'd caught an imaginary snot ball.
The sunglasses were flipped back down onto his nose, and his squinty focus was honed back on Ellen again. Ellen, who was alive after getting charbroiled by live power lines. Yep, that was a thing. BBQ'd Extremis soldiers. Speaking of charbroiled stuff, where was his burger?
As though on cue, Roy returned with their food and drinks. Apparently when Tony Stark was around, you got your food pronto before anyone else. Not that he specifically asked for a rush on it or anything, it just happened. Tony peeked up over his glasses and offered a much kinder, "Thanks, Roy. You better get inside before your face freezes off. Oh! Can I get some boiling hot coffee? Can you leave it over there, on that table by the doors? I know it's weird. Promise I don't bite and I've had all my shots. And we'll give you a holler if we need anything else, 'kay?"
"Okay, Mr. Stark." Roy looked a bit more relaxed as he made a retreat back inside.
Tony was giving their retreating waiter a thumbs up. The least amount of time their server was around them, the better. Baseline bystanders were a liability. Naturally, no further thought was wasted on his own baseline status.
"I saw part of what happened to that second test group," Tony was saying, while giving the ketchup bottle a jerky hand-job to get some ketchup next to his fries. The ketchup wasn't coming out, so he kept going while talking. "Up to the tick tick boom. You're lucky yours was stabilized. So I'm guessing Maya tweaked things around again, trying to stabilize it even further. And you're not wrong, either. A lot of it was how it slotted into individual genetic sequences. Do you hear anything about what the maintenance injections were for other test subjects? Or what that the initial failure rate was? I wanna make sure any blanks are filled in."
After getting a meager sploot for all that effort, Tony gave up on ketchup and set the bottle aside. He took a big bite out of the burger like it was his last meal. Which it might be. And possibly because he'd been snacking on sunflower seeds and dried blueberries for the past...had it been a day? Sure. It could be a day. That seemed reasonable.