Who: Tony and Pepper and JARVIS and 'bots and Sochi puppies When: April 11 (backdate) Where: Avengers Tower, lab What: So there was this thing. And now there's coping. Poorly. Rating: High, probably Usually, this kind of fabrication and research was not Tony's domain; Reed's, sometimes, and Bruce Squared got into this. As Tony played with the petri dish and tried not to swish liquid onto the lab tables, eying the swirling helixes and chemical formulas dancing through the holograms - with Rocky bouncing up to try and catch the molecular structure at odd moments - he tried to imagine how Reed or Bruce B or Bruce W would have handled this.
Well. That wasn't quite a fair comparison, since Reed had handled this, and Bruce W had also undoubtedly handled this and why wasn't he calling Bruce and getting whatever test he'd devised for this? Because that was a straight up DNA test, Tony remembered as he poured the liquids of two test tubes into a beaker and swished it like a scotch. This was a little different. Bruce B might know. But he was also nearly positive that Bruce (B) hadn't done this, and wouldn't be of much help with the whole...issues surrounding this. Not on the practical side.
They didn't know, he told himself as he transferred the contents of the beaker into the guts of one of his old blood testers, and tinkered a bit with the electronics so that it would say something more useful than "paladium levels at X%" under these new circumstances. They didn't know this would actually work either and wouldn't just spit out garbage pixels and black smoke and ooze, but he had JARVIS's explanation of what the compound was testing, and JARVIS'd had a terabyte server before they became cool, and the size of his database had only grown from there.
When told that he would have to let the mixture sit and congeal, Tony put down his tools, and felt as though he'd come up to the surface. His head was still racing around...everything, but his hands were steadier. This was a step. This was a thing that he could do. Now he just had to worry about doing it with someone with very small hands, or...
"What if they're not," he blurted out to Pepper, and Rocky wandered over to flop down on his feet, panting after giving up on the molecules. "Yeah, I coulda told you that would end like that," he had to tell the puppy who was technically no longer a puppy, except when he tried to bite holograms. "Why don't you get your real ball or go play with Dummy? What if they're not like me," he continued, jumping back to the topic at hand. "What if they can't look at that-" he pointed at the molecule still spiraling through the lab, "and see how it fits into that one, much less play 'find the periodic table' with it?" This was an honest concern, but the least of his worries; if his children were anything like Pepper, they would be smart enough to keep up with him even if they couldn't point at each part of the molecule and give its atomic weight.