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Peter was bored.
Peter. Was. bored.
For the past *checks watch* However long he’s been up, Peter has been unable to occupy his mind in any way that would stick. He tried scrolling through the internet or watching movies but neither of those felt fulfilling. He tried to hang out with his dad but he was currently out of the city with aunt Pepper for one reason or another. Not even Loki was free to hang out with him because they were on Vanaheim visiting their aunt. He also tried going to the lab, someplace that had never failed to cheer him up in the past; but he’s been feeling a striking loneliness lately, and the silence of the lab just compounded it. He tried to play music, movies, and even podcasts to chase away the silence, but the artificial liveliness just made it worse.
He’s currently staring out his window from the hammock perch in his nest contemplating the general purpose of life, as one does when they’re bored out of their skull, when he suddenly gets an idea.
“Hey Friday?” he called out.
“Yes Peter?”
“Are there any meetings going on right now that I could crash?” His dad has taken to dragging him to R&D meetings (both because he doesn't want to go alone and to start training for if/when Peter takes over) and while normally he wouldn't feel comfortable just crashing a meeting, today is special circumstance.
“Certainly,” Friday said, a little too much mischief in her voice “there are three meetings currently going on that wouldn’t mind your assistance. The first is examining potential new materials for padding on a transtibial prosthesis.* The second is discussing the hypothetical creation of cryogenic pods for deep space flight, and the third is reviewing the most effective advertising models for the StarkPhone.”
*an artificial leg below the knee
Peter didn’t even need to hear the last one before he was jumping from his nest and pulling on his shoes.
A few minutes later found him walking into conference room J. The food smell he had thought was coming from the cafeteria the next floor up, was apparently coming from the here. The main table had been pushed to the wall and lined with home-cooked dishes of all varieties. The people in the meeting were all standing around, most of them holding stereotypical red solo-cups.
“Oh, you guys brought food? Awesome!” Peter was glad he wasn’t interrupting a formal meeting “I’m so pumped for this, and I think the possibility of deep space flight is a lot closer than people think. So what was the plan for today?” everyone turned towards him, startled (which, fair. It’s not every day your meeting gets crashed by a fifteen-year-old)
Luckily one of them snapped out of the shock before it got awkward. “Help yourself, we were just planning on throwing ideas around.” Peter nodded his thanks. Then noticed the rolling whiteboards by the back wall and, after setting down his tablet, grabbed one* dragging it to the front of the room.
*read: stuck his hand on it and let it roll behind him
“So first, I always think it’s best to lay out any major limitations before trying to make anything.” He uncapped the blue marker and started writing ‘Problems’ and a few bullet points beneath it. “So I think the first major limitation is fairly obvious, how do you freeze a person without killing them? Because theoretically you could just,” he gestured vaguely with the marker “I-I don't know, dunk someone in liquid helium and they’d technically be frozen,” he started doodling a little picture of a frozen-thawed animal cell, “but when you freeze something living, while it might preserve the cells, It's also incredibly difficult to unfreeze something without killing it. So problem one: finding a method of preservation that is harmlessly reversible.” he paused his writing “And y’know they don't necessarily have to be cryogenic chambers right?” he glanced back at his audience, some of which have rolled over and sat in the discarded office chairs, others have just sat on the floor. “I mean, ‘deep space flight’ is kinda vague so technically these could be coma chambers instead, no freezing needed. But then again I guess that isn’t what we’re here for.” he turned back to the board. “Problem two: finding a way to make the pods self-sustaining,” he made sub-bullet points for each possible outcome. “In case the ship’s hull gets pierced by asteroids or debris they need to be airtight, the refuelling of solutions and chemicals if necessary, and an isolated power source in case of a ship-wide blackout.” Peter paused at that one, that gave him a fantastic idea. He went and grabbed his StarkPad from where he left it on the corner of the table (next to a plate of rice pockets that he struggled very hard to ignore*) and opened the sketching application.
*Due to the spider mutation he now has a complicated relationship with vinegar. (an ingredient often found in sushi rice) so while mild vinegars like rice wine vinegar is tolerable (behaving like a medium-level hot sauce) white wine vinegar would give him mild chemical burns. So as a general rule of thumb, if he doesn't know what's in it, he steers clear.
“What if each pod was powered by a perpetual motion machine?” Peter began frantically drawing up rudimentary blueprints and hypothetical materials, subconsciously latching on to the idea and abandoning the initial prompt of cryogenic chambers.
At some point he switched back to writing on the whiteboards, leaving his tablet on the floor next to him, he vaguely noticed one of the other people in the room pick up the device and look through his notes* but quickly became consumed with the topic at hand. (he had finished the perpetual motion machine on his tablet and was now working on the pods again.)
*Karen was uploaded on his StarkPad and would make sure to keep any unauthorized personnel away from anything classified so he wasn’t worried.
Peter didn’t know how much time had passed when Friday interrupted his chain of thought: “Mini-Boss,” he looked up, a little disoriented “sergeant Barnes would like to announce that he’s made double chocolate chunk cookies and he can only hide them from the team for so long.'' The sheer pavlovian response to hearing ‘Bucky’ and ‘cookies’ in the same sentence was something that should be studied as he quickly dropped all other trains of thought, grabbed his tablet from where it had been replaced by his feet, and took pictures of his handwritten notes.
“Thanks for having me everyone, I can't wait to see where this goes, bye!” he said over his shoulder as he rushed out of the room and to the stairway. Not the elevator. Peter had timed it a while back and he was 3.52 seconds faster than the elevator, those three and a half extra seconds were all he needed to ensure that Uncle Clint didn’t get any of his cookies.
Peter imagined that had an outsider seen what was, at this point, a bi-weekly occurrence, they would have been confused at the least and traumatized at the worst.
Peter, on the ceiling, crawled on all fours (he had abandoned his shoes in the stairwell) through the rooms in between him and the kitchen with an almost inhuman speed. Hearing Uncle Clint bargaining with Uncle Bucky he sped up. Seeing the end in sight: the cookies were on the counter, Bucky guarding the cookies, Clint trying (and failing) to get past him.
Peter flung himself off the ceiling, landing on Clint's shoulders just long enough to launch himself over Bucky with just enough finesse to land on the countertop. He folded his shirt over and loaded it up with almost an entire tray (there were three more next to it) then crawled on top of the kitchen cabinets and into the vents where he emerged moments later within his nest of webs.
As Peter settled into his nest revelling in the spoils of his hunt he thought back to the meeting and realized dimly that no one at the meeting had really participated, no one jumped in, no one really took notes, and that could mean one of two things. Either a) Peter had just been so engrossed with his train of thought that he didn’t notice anyone else butting in or b) it wasn’t even a meeting in the first place.* Peter didn’t know which was worse, being a rude intruder on a meeting, or being a rude intruder at what was probably a birthday party or something.
Whichever the case, Peter was thoroughly mortified and made the executive decision to drown away his cringe with cookies and Star Trek. He quickly webbed his laptop from off his bed and pulled up a random episode of next gen. Well, he thought, at least I have some cool blueprints to show dad when he gets back.