#and the villain’s plan hinges on him realizing that nobody can tell him apart from the deputy if he just puts on his fucking sash

[idkaguyorsomething]

the writers for classic who went “hmmm, how can we ensure that susan has something to do in this arc we’re writing 🤔” and their solution was to make a planet of psychic aliens that get easily overstimulated and have face blindness that the main characters need to negotiate with.

[imjustthemechanic]

Our Own Demons

Part 1/? - A Bolt from the Blue Part 2/? - A Different World Part 3/? - Stark At Home Part 4/? - Pot Roast Night Part 5/? - Space-Pie Continuum

What if Tony Stark really were the villain of the Marvel universe?  How would that work?  Tony himself is about to find out, as he battles his inner demons (and some outer ones, too) across a multiverse of infinite possibilities.

At the other’s command, the windows rearranged themselves on the phone screen, bringing to the fore one that was showing black and white video with the date in the upper left corner and the words Special Projects Workshop in the lower.  Tony found himself wanting to reach out and increase the image size the way he could with one of his holographic displays, but of course that wouldn’t work, so all he could do was drag his chair around the little table so he could see right-side up, and squint.

The view showed a suit of armor assembled in the middle of the workshop, while Tony’s counterpart worked on something in the left room.  The frame rate was low and the resolution was not great, but Tony still noticed that this suit had definitely been built for a woman.  It was smaller and slimmer than any of his, and the shapes on the front were clearly meant to suggest a sweetheart neckline, though the armor didn’t actually mold to the breasts.  If Tony had been going to build armor for Pepper, he thought, that was exactly what he would have made it look like.

The other Tony turned away from the suit to look at something on a nearby bench, and then the screen went white.  For half a second there was no picture at all, then a buzz of static, and finally the image returned, slowly, block by block, to reveal the suit in bits on the floor and Tony struggling to his feet while his counterpart grabbed the pipe wrench.

“That’s pretty much what I saw,” said Tony.  “Everything went white, and the audio squealed… that’s an EMP,” he realized – a sudden burst of electromagnetic radiation.  It must have been incredibly intense to knock out an Iron Man suit.  He’d specifically designed them to be resistant to pulse weapons. “Something on the order of the magnetic field of Jupiter.”

“Exactly what I was going to say,” the other agreed, flipping through windows.  “The video overloaded, but we monitor other frequencies, too.  JANIS, can you give us a plot of the radio and the infra-red, please?”

Tony observed that this guy was awfully polite to his computer, but before he could decide how best to tease him about it, the graph appeared.  At first it looked like random bursts, but of course, those were just the frequencies JANIS was programmed to monitor.  If Tony were to join them up… he reached over and ran a finger across the screen, connecting the dots.

“Extrapolate a blackbody spectrum,” he ordered.

What’s the magic word? asked JANIS, but she did it anyway: a curve appeared, showing a peak much further up the spectrum.  There’s a margin for error, of course, the computer noted apologetically.

“That’s okay.”  Tony scratched his beard as he studied the result.  “Turn around,” he told his counterpart.  “I need to see the back of your neck.”

His double obeyed, and Tony touched the skin with the back of his hand.  It was about as pale as a man with Mediterranean ancestors could get, and warm to the touch but not overly so.

“That can’t be right,” Tony said.  “That peak is in the ultraviolet.  You should have a sunburn.”

“A sunburn, hell.”  The other frowned at the display on his phone.  “That spectrum would require a temperature of about ten thousand Kelvin.  The surface of the sun isn’t that hot.  It should have burned the building down.”

“Not to mention vaporized me,” Tony agreed.  “Or at least turned me into the Hulk or something.  So we’ve got… some kind of phantom radiation?”

The other chewed on his lower lip.  “It’s got to be a side effect of something else,” he decided. “If you’re from another universe, the only way to get to this one would be by tearing a hole in space, and as far as we know no amount of radiation can do that.  The only force that can is gravity.  If you want to rip open the space-time continuum, you need one of two things: a black hole, or…” he paused, frowning.

“Pie?” asked a voice.

Tony and his counterpart both yelped in surprise. They’d been so focused on their conversation that they hadn’t realized Audrey the waitress was back.  She held up her hands, apologetic.

“Didn’t mean to scare you!” she said.  “I just wanted to say, our dessert today is homestyle apple pie.”

Tony breathed a sigh of relief, trying to make his heart start pounding.  “How about this,” he said.  “We’ll take the whole pie, a pot of coffee, and the cheque, okay?”  Hopefully that would head off any future interruptions.

“All right,” said Audrey.  “I’ll… uh… I’ll be right back.”

The two men kept quiet until she returned with the pie and coffee, and a tub of vanilla ice cream for them.  Tony tossed some money on the table, to pay for their meal and to make up for the tips Audrey would not be getting while they continued to occupy the table.  The alternative was heading back to his double’s apartment and he didn’t want to do that.  They helped themselves to dessert, and tried to pick up the thread of their conversation again.

“Where were we?” asked Tony.

For a moment the other couldn’t remember, then he glanced down at his pie.  “Pie,” he said.  “Pie doesn’t break space, but black holes do.”

“Or other things,” said Tony, picking up his train of thought.  “I’m thinking specifically of a blue, cubey thing that’s good for blowing shit up. Contains an enormous amount of energy, and yet energy that doesn’t seem to hurt people unless they come into direct contact with it.  Hence no sunburn.”

“Please tell me your reality doesn’t actually call it the Blue Cubey Thing,” said the other.

Nobody was listening to them and the waitress was at another table, but Tony still lowered his voice to reply.  “Tesseract,” he said.

“Thank you.”  The other pulled out his phone again and opened another window.  “JANIS, please get me the stuff we pulled out of SHIELD’s database on the tesseract.”

“What happened to it in your reality?” Tony asked, while the data loaded.  “We sent it back to Asgard, where the aging republicans who run the world can’t get their mitts on it.”

“Yeah, the Odinson took it back with him when he took Loki home,” the other said.  “I definitely didn’t have it in my workshop.”

“It wasn’t in my back pocket on the way to California, either,” said Tony.  “So if I came here through a tesseract wormhole, it didn’t start out in my reality or in yours…”

“Which means there’s a third universe involved here, where it was accessible to a third one of us,” the other agreed.  He looked at the tablet, which was showing a rotating image of the tesseract with text scrolling beside it, then sighed and took another bite of pie and ice cream.  “Man, when I got up this morning I thought the biggest challenge I was going to face today was phoning the damn credit card company.”

“What’s so hard about that?” asked Tony, who had never done it.

“They’ve got one of those voice-activated menus that doesn’t work, so you’ve got to talk your way through half an hour of bullshit before you can even be put on hold,” the other said.  “Honestly, this makes sorting out my overcharges look like a fun afternoon.”

“We have to take a proper look at that suit,” Tony decided. “If that was the tesseract, it’ll leave an ionic residue.  Banner did some work on that… can you find his paper?”

“Who?” the other asked.

“Bruce,” Tony clarified, but that didn’t seem to improve matters.  “Dr. Robert Bruce Banner.  You’ve never heard of him?”  This was a world where Tony was broke, Pepper was a superhero, and there was no Hulk… what other surprises might it have for him?

“Can’t say that I have.  Dr. Ross might have something for us,” the other mused, “but she’s not easy to get in touch with.”

“Never mind.  We’ll figure it out,” said Tony.  “Two heads are better than one, and here we’ve got two of the best.”

“Are you sure this counts as two heads?” the other asked suspiciously.

“Close enough,” Tony decided, his mouth full of pie.

The two of them had not actually talked about it, but somehow Tony had his counterpart had come to the agreement that they should not let Miss Potts find out about this.  When they returned to the building in the morning, they did so not through the lobby but via an old emergency exit from the train station, where they were less likely to be observed.

“How did you find this?” asked Tony, as the descended a very narrow flight of metal stairs.  He was trying to remember if there were anything similar in his Tower – he didn’t think there was.  If there ever had been, it must have been pulled out during construction of the new building.

Thinking about that was far preferable to the other thing that was on his mind, which was that he was wearing clothes that belonged to his counterpart.  The jeans, striped t-shirt, and green jacket weren’t the problem – it was the underwear that was bothering him.  Sure, it was clean, and yes, Tony had shared pretty much his entire wardrobe with Rhodey when they’d been room-mates at MIT… but this was still weird.

“We explored down here pretty thoroughly while we were looking for somewhere I could work on the suits,” the other explained.  “There’s a service elevator that goes all the way up to the penthouse, which is handy, and this entrance means I can get in and out when the building’s closed at night.”  He reached the top of the steps, where there was an old metal door with the paint peeling from it.  A keypad opened the lock.  Tony expected the hinges to squeal, but they were apparently the one part that was in good repair.  The door swung silently.

Unfortunately, there was a flaw in their plan.  When Pepper had told her employee to take the rest of the week off, she must have meant it.  Tony’s double tried to use his key card to open the workshop, but the only result was a buzz and a red light.  JANIS wouldn’t let them in.

Miss Potts wanted you to stay home and rest, she reminded him.  She’s told me to keep you out until Monday at least.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” the other asked, exasperated.

You didn’t ask, said JANIS, as if that were entirely reasonable.

“You let your machines talk to you like that?” Tony wanted to know.  JARVIS’ wit was as dry as a good martini, but he was never passive-aggressive.

“Technically, she’s Miss Potts’ machine,” said the other. “And she’s very polite to her.  All right, JANIS.  You know what this means.”

If you can reset it without security noticing, I’m all yours, said JANIS sweetly.

The security office was on the ground floor.  Tony and his counterpart walked with a purpose as they headed up – apparently the other knew, as Tony did, that if you looked like you knew what you were doing people were unlikely to question you.  They marched into the office, and there found an obstacle in their path.  A short, muscular, red-headed obstacle, who was very much startled to see them.

“Oh,” said Tony’s double, in a voice that sounded less like he was greeting his girlfriend and more like he was at his high school reunion saying hello to the guy who used to stuff him in lockers.  “Good morning, Beth.”

It took Beth a moment to recover from her surprise, but then she widened her stance and folded her arms across her chest.  “I thought you were supposed to be at home, recovering from a sudden case of crazy.  And maybe amnesia,” she added, with narrowed eyes.

“I’m sorry, Beth,” said the other.  “I swear I remembered, but my cousin got into town, and…”

Beth interrupted him.  “Seriously?” she asked.

“Seriously,” Tony spoke up, stepping out from behind his double.

It was actually very gratifying the way Beth’s jaw dropped.  “I… oh,” she said, her arms moving from guardedly in front of her to awkwardly behind her back. “Who are you?”

“I told you,” said Tony.  “I’m his cousin.  From Italy,” he added, figuring that was safely far away enough that she would buy never having heard of this guy before.

The other put his arm around Tony’s shoulders.  “We’re like Patty Duke, except there really are two of us,” he said.

Tony nodded.  “Have we got a Betsy?  I forget.”

“I hope not.  We don’t look good in a pretty floral bonnet!”

“Speak for yourself,” Tony snorted.  “Anyway, Ms. Cabe – we need a small favour.”