Quinoa gets a robot suit
“Your concept is flawed,” rasps Barnes, which is about as many words as Tony has ever heard him string together at once.
Tony lets his measuring tape zip back inside its shell. “Hey, don’t get down on me, buddy. She goes where you go, and you go some pretty dangerous places, if we’re both perfectly honest.”
“No,” says Barnes.
“No… you don’t go dangerous places, or no on llama armor?”
“She’s my service animal.”
“Ah, so you’re going to fall back on teleology.”
Barnes frowns. “I know what it means,” he snaps, before Tony can even get going again.
Quinoa, sporting an awful lot of tinsel this morning, sniffs at Dummy, who’s quite abashed at all the attention.
Tony holds up his hands. “Okay. Okay, you’re skeptical. I get that. But listen, I’ve borne the brunt of Quinoa’s fury, and I think she could be a real, well.”
“Asset?”
Barnes is just glaring now, but it might be an “I’m in on the joke” glare. Tony hopes. It could also be an “I’ve already memorized the HVAC system from the inside and will kill you in your sleep” glare.
“You… are going to go into the field with us, right?” Tony ventures. He’d sort of been counting on it, if only to shut Rogers up for like, twenty minutes about it.
Barnes just shakes his head, and tugs on Quinoa’s reins. Quinoa grunts, and Dummy likewise wilts at being so cruelly abandoned.
“Wait! Wait wait wait! JARVIS?” Tony waves his hands. “Prototype, please.”
It’s just a hologram suit, sure, but it’s one hell of a suit. Barnes stares. Quinoa yawns, totally nonplussed, as usual, by her finery.
“I, uh.” Tony scratches the back of his head. “Worked in some details you might like.”
Simulated LED lights dance and scroll over the surface of the armor, like deep-sea creatures that have just discovered Lisa Frank.
Barnes is still frowning. It’s not a frown that Tony can remotely interpret. “What do you think?” he finally has to ask.
“It doesn’t have to be functional, does it?” Barnes hugs his elbows. “I mean… we could just… build that because we should build that. Right?”
“You’re going to make all my calculations for llama-appropriate repulsors go to waste?”
Barnes makes a suitably Bucky-esque face, one that really might have come from the 1940s. “You’re breaking my heart, pal.”
Quinoa strains at her reins, back toward Dummy. Tony starts. “Where did you get that? Dummy, no. You can’t buy your way into a lady’s heart like that.”
Dummy whirrs and twirls the carrot clamped hopefully aloft.