Of Starkium & Wakanda
Tony gave a little sigh of relief once the elevator doors closed, direction SI R&D labs.
Little chance of Fury getting to him in there, since security is usually a thing with weapons manufacturers.
Of course, it was much too early for the one eyed pirate to show up. Tony had little doubts that Fury knew about the palladium core, the subsequent poisoning, and true to form, was biding his time.
But...
But Tony had severely curtailed SHIELD's access to him, this time. Agent had not had the opportunity to get in touch with Pepper... And Romanoff had been bored silly in a menial secretarial job, one she got out of in a hurry when the FBI had gotten around to audit her office.
Which, okay, she got out... But leaving your desk with all your shit and not coming back is a sure way to raise federal agents interests, go figure.
Tony had had his own suspicions about Natashalie's abilities outside of honeypotting and subsequently killing men with her ankles for some time now, but really, that was shitty spying. SI had fended more competent attempts from Hammer, for God's sake!
Anyway, there was one very excited FBI agent who was on the trail and digging for all he was worth. JARVIS had played the little victory dance the agent had done when he'd found the bug in the archives server room. Cute.
Not that it mattered, really. JARVIS had been aware and filtered information: If someone tried to build anything following THOSE plans, they were in for a big surprise. Just ask Justin Hammer.
Anyway, back to Fury: Since Tony had done his best to curtail access, there was no guarantee the one-eyed pirate wouldn't try to get to him earlier... And Tony didn't want to face him before he had a number of ducks in a row.
Oh, he would meet with Fury at some point... if only to meet the furry (Tony wanted himself some flerken time!). But he was not in a hurry.
Other priorities, ya know?
He did find the minions all gathered around the Stark Expo model that had been relocated in the break room... It was the perfect place, and also the perfect moment, to have his "new element" epiphany.
Right there in front of everybody. (And OF COURSE Jarv was fully integrated in every room at R&D! Don't be ridiculous.)
After a few moments of stunned silence, most of the room exploded in cheers, while the most science oriented of the bunch outright raced each other to the newly minted Hadron collider, to get it started.
It took most of the day of intense sciencing, but in the end, Tony had an arc reactor that wasn't poisoning him... And SI added a new element to the periodic table.
The party was EPIC.
No, truly. Nobody parties like a bunch of nerds letting loose. Quite a bit of them MADE their own alcohol right there on the spot, and those potatoes died for a good cause, lemme tell ya! On top of that, with SI inegration policy, R&D had a really high female/male ratio, for a high tech company. Nothing to talk all that much about usually, but in this case... Well, if any of his minions found themselves in the family way, Tony was gunning for Godfather.
But for him, the fun really started when it was time to find the new kid on the block it's place in the periodic table... Just cozily nested between Adamantium and... Yep, Vibranium!
Tony had Happy get the remains of Cap's shield from his own lab safe and sent to him.
(No, he hadn't come with. There's genius, and there's suspiciously prepared.)
But it was so much fun, to see how similar Vibranium and the future named Starkium were.( Yes, Tony still thought Badassium was a superior name, but it didn't merge with his newfound mature personality. On top of that, discovery was published under the name of BOTH Starks, and Howard had never had much in the way of humor, as far as Tony knew.)
Still needed to do the work and research, of course, but Tony had had an inkling of what Wakandan Tech looked like and was able to do.
A lot.
And Starkium was basically synthetic Vibranium... Oh the possibilities!
Time for the lawyers to come in.
Tony chose not to clamp ownership and copyright on Starkium. First, because he truly believed that nobody should *own* an element. Second, because there was plenty to go around and even SI was too small to explore all the possibilities.
So Tony and his lawyers crafted an open-source agreement on the element creation process, just asking first dibs on partnership for any outside invention... It was not totally out of the goodness of his heart.
Tony never had much interaction with T'chaka, but his son was not amongst his preferred people... And there was something fishy about that country. Nobody can have a whole population with above average income... It's just NOT mathematically possible.
And, yes, Vibranium, rarest metal on Earth, yadda yadda.
Except Wakanda NEVER sold vibranium, apparently for religious reasons. Something you can't sell has no value by definition, so what Tony had seen of Wakanda material wealth made no sense whatsoever.
Same deal with Wakandan tech which apparently relied quite heavily on vibranium. It was very advanced, some good scientists in Wakanda obviously...But... It was also unsalable. For quite the same reasons. And once the labs around the world were going to grab Starkium and start playing with it, someone in Wakanda, at some point, would realize what was going on.
That the rest of the world was going to close the gap.
Tony wondered if T'Challa's father decision to open his country to the world was linked to Starkium discovery, the first time. No way to know, but smart. Especially since Tony had ben too harried to really study what he had.
But he recalled Wakandans tended to be very thin skinned regarding vibranium and related tech, which was the second reason he'd gone for the open-source thing. One billionaire, the infamous "Merchant of Death" hoarding a new element to himself and his company? Fair game.
Trying to wring a new toy out of the hands of scientists the world over? Good luck Wakanda.
Tony didn't wish ill to Wakanda. Quite the contrary. You could say that Tony, in fact, was very invested in T'Chaka continued good health. T'Challa, from the get go, had been a disaster of a king: Going on killing rampages, harboring terrorists... Giving away the conduct of his Army to Cap and his beard of Sorrow?! Which, WTF?(If Tony had been that Okoye lady, he would have been seriously pissed... And from what he'd seen in the movie marathon from Hell, she was not the kind of gal you want to piss.)
Tony was hoping that, if only by age and experience, T'Chaka would be more level headed and know that International Diplomacy is NOT supposed to be a dick measuring constest.
Hopefully.
But if Wakanda got pissy about Starkium, well, Tony wasn't going to go out of his way to interfere in what would likely happen: The world wondering why this small nation was kicking a fuss, more likely finding about the reality of Wakanda... And Wakanda not making friends the world over, starting with their neighbours.
But that was not his responsibility.
And Tony was going to be busy: He'd decided to stay close to the original timeline and go on with the Stark Expo, hopefully with much less Vanko... With less Monte Carlo races, too. It had been sort of fun for two minutes, but Tony could admit privately it had been stupid.
Heavy metal poisoning was a bitch.
Besides, why drive cars when he could go Mach 3 in the suit?
On another front, he had to devise a strategy to deal with SHIELD... and it's HYDRA addon.
His first instincts would have been to cut all and every possible ties with that bunch of leeches... But it had been such a big part of the original timeline that he would lose all hindsight if he did that.
And was it even possible?
Tony had to hand it to the one eyed menace (Fury, not Odin... even if that was another disaster in the making). He'd timed it masterfully, getting into his head when he wasn't thinking straight, and once he was there, manipulating him to his own end.
THAT had been Natashalie main job: Gaslighting and pushing on all his insecurities to make him a nice puppet.Which she was very good at... Much like Obie and using the same tactics.
Showed two things: One, that he had to watch for that, because genius or not, he was a sucker for that kind of thing. Two, that SHIELD needed him more than he needed them... so...
"Let them come."