Chapter 15
2008
0 days, 0 weeks, 1 month, 0 years
It was strange for Pepper, to be sitting in a room that seemed to be entirely quiet and empty but to know that there was someone else there. She had gone back and forth between choosing to bring some of her paperwork up to the penthouse but eventually decided against it.
If she was honest, she hadn’t even thought about how she and Peter were supposed to communicate without Tony being there to translate until she was already there and Tony had herded his other friends off to god only knows where. She couldn’t see him or hear him and nor could JARVIS so he wouldn’t be of use for that either.
Peter didn’t seem to be bothered at first.
He worked determinedly on his half of his new High School Musical puzzle while Pepper worked on her half. She watched as, in turn, each piece disappeared and then reappeared, carefully slotted into it’s place in the picture.
It wasn’t until the puzzle was finished and they were halfway through watching The Sound of Music that Pepper was struck with an idea.
“You stay here, Peter,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
With that, she stood up off of the couch and began to make her way across the room towards the stairs down to Tony’s workshop. Her steps were unusually quiet without the rhythmic clicking of the heels she normally wore.
Today, she’d opted for something a little more comfortable. She was wearing a wide, oversized, kitted cream jumper with soft black leggings. Instead of her usual high heels, she was wearing her red trainers. Before he had left, Tony had told her Peter was clearly ecstatic that she was wearing them if the beam across his cheeks was anything to go by.
It took her a few minutes of rummaging to find what she had been looking for. In a large container that could only be described as somewhere between a box, a basket and a crate, piled underneath scraps of failed projects and other random bits and pieces that had mostly never been finished, she found it.
It was a sound board with sixteen physical buttons that would actually register Peter pressing on them, unlike the touch screens of a phone or Stark pad.
Tony had made it a couple of years before for Dum-E so that they could communicate easier. However, Dum-E had very quickly decided that he hated it and had refused to use it. At one point, he had even gone as far as to try and drop it out of the window to get rid of it – needless to say he hadn’t been successful in this attempt, especially considering the window in question didn’t even open to begin with, but Tony had decided not to bother pushing the use of it any further.
“This is a sound board,” Pepper explained once she was back in the living room and had paused the film. “You press the buttons and it makes noises.”
She pressed the green square in one of the corners and the devise chirped out ‘time for a break’.
“See. You can use it to communicate with people who can’t see or hear you, like me and Rhodey.”
Peter reached out and pressed a button, a yellow one that said ‘yes’ followed by another right next to it, a red one that said ‘no’.
The two of them fiddled with it for a little while. They played around with finding out what all the different buttons said, laughing about the funny or slightly strange ones, and Pepper explained to Peter that Tony and him would be able to reprogram the buttons to say whatever Peter wanted them to say.
“Shall we continue watching the film?” she asked.
Peter pressed the yellow square, ‘yes’, and Pepper pressed play on the movie.