That took a moment. Tony let himself consider, studying Jarvis' face, not too intently, in the changing light. Yes and no, assent and dissent, those were easy enough - but complex concepts were more difficult to express with the limited tools they had at their disposal, brows and facial tics and hand gestures all curbed even more than they might otherwise have been by caution and timidity and fear, by unfamiliarity.
Twenty questions might have been a better way to get at the truth, but Tony was more at home with trial and error. He smiled, he latched onto an idea - and if it was wrong, he'd recalibrate. "Yeah," he agreed, reaching for a potato. "It does drive people totally batty. Something about spending your whole year gearing up for one event, I guess. You have to be some kind of obsessive weirdo to like that job." Not that there weren't attractive parts. The public admiration was nice - but, again, that was reserved largely for the senior figures, the ranks of which one couldn't hope to join for decades. And Tony had enough of a public profile to satisfy even him, if he'd only been allowed to use it. A victor and a Stark - he didn't need another platform to stand on. The job offered him nothing. But then, neither did his current job, aside from the ability to lose himself in something that wasn't liquor and television for most of the day, and all right, he was coming to enjoy it, to find ways to use it to amuse himself, but in the end, wasn't it just serving another old man (and a particularly hateful one, at that), handing over all of his ideas for nothing more than -
Well, that really wasn't a spiral he'd been intending to go down tonight. There was clearly more than one way to become an obsessive weirdo.
Now he could pace and putter around in less than total isolation, at least. "If' I'm going to go nuts, it's sure as hell not going to be because of my job."