As if something had just occurred to him, Coulson tossed Stark a USB drive. "It's a toxin suppressant Daisy developed. She says as soon as you're off the palladium, the formula will gradually flush the poison from your system."
Stark turned the drive in his fingers, skeptical. "She has a pharmacology background now too? Which brilliant scientist did she rip this one off from?"
Coulson just smiled and said nothing.
The butterfly's wings had kicked up a hurricane. The hammer that was supposed to have touched down in New Mexico around this time never showed up. Coulson stayed on babysitting duty with Stark, and in his downtime the two of them talked about customized motorcycles. All things considered, this was turning into a pretty pleasant stretch for Coulson.
Daisy, meanwhile, was splitting her time between the helicarrier retrofit and the drone soldier project. With Hammer Industries under her thumb, her "fund transfers" were going through dramatically faster. Plenty of books could now be balanced on Hammer's own ledgers.
Profit on the current helicarrier was almost used up, but if the next retrofit came back to her as well, she could bring in Hammer Industries as the supplier, keep production and sales inside her own orbit, run the whole vertical. The margins would be incredible...
One week later: the Stark Expo.
The Expo was in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens—host to two prior World's Fairs, sprawled across 1,255 acres. That worked out to roughly five square kilometers. Three square kilometers larger than the entire nation of Monaco, where a certain someone had recently killed Ivan Vanko. A single park was more than double the size of an actual country...
Stark Industries had built the whole venue. Geometric forms were used heavily as decoration—lines and planes, metallic structures at every turn.
There was nothing ornate about it, no flashy artistic pretension. It sat there with a quiet, direct confidence that said: we have money, and we prefer manufactured things to natural ones.
Where Eastern design prized authenticity and evoked "landscapes of the heart," the Stark Expo had no trace of nature's untouched magic. But inside its meticulous precision, you could read the designer's ethos clearly: the spirit of man conquering nature.
Night had fallen. The lighting was dazzling, the crowd enormous. Huge numbers of ordinary New Yorkers had turned out to see the spectacle. Every kid got a free Iron Man toy at the gate—and very few people turn down free stuff. Without anyone having to say it out loud, the idea that Iron Man was a superhero was quietly taking root in countless minds.
This, obviously, was Pepper's idea. Stark had been through plenty of ups and downs, but help always seemed to find him. The reason was Pepper—she handled the little things, bit by bit, building him an ever-growing base of supporters.
Around ninety percent of attendees were civilians. The other ten percent were investors flown in from around the world, eyes sharp, scanning the products for something worth backing.
Tony Stark could be wildly idealistic. Run the numbers on this Expo as a business venture and it wasn't profitable at all. Between the venue costs, the build-out, the hundreds of thousands of free toys—Stark was going to lose real money on this.
But Stark's brute-force cash burn did its job. His personal popularity soared. Combined with a certain someone quietly buying up his stock on the side, Stark Industries' share price caught a powerful updraft. Whether you called it dumb luck or a long-planned maneuver, Stark Industries was officially out of the danger zone.
The Expo was set to run for a year. Backed by deep pockets and a marquee setting, it drew businesses and entrepreneurs from around the world, all hungry for a chance to showcase and pitch their products.
Investors wandered the booths, hunting for promising ventures to fund. Even ordinary attendees got in on the action—short on capital, but full of enthusiasm for investing.
In its first six months open, the Expo had already brokered tens of thousands of deals of every size. Stark Industries' in-house evaluators flagged nine hundred of them as genuinely high-value projects expected to deliver triple-or-better returns. Stark Industries, that staggering giant, was now slowly climbing back to its feet under Pepper's leadership—poised to walk a brand-new road.
Tonight, though, the Expo had just one star: Hammer Industries. Only a man with a death wish would throw his own product launch inside a competitor's turf. Justin Hammer was exactly that man.
Lucky for him, Tony Stark was a principled hero. Put a villain in that spot, and Justin would already be dead.
Everyone has their own ideas, and those ideas change with experience.
Cyclops' partial dark turn was a good illustration—even a psychic master like Professor Charles couldn't see fully into a human heart. Not even the bald old man himself could. And Daisy, with her half-assed psychic ability, certainly couldn't. Mental powers were best used as guidance. Outright mind control never worked cleanly.
She hadn't turned down Justin's pitch to host at the Expo. As she saw it, Ivan Vanko was already seven days in the grave. Stark, by all reports, was still at his mansion working on a new reactor. Tonight's exhibition should go off without a hitch.
She left Justin Hammer—the guy she'd forcibly drafted—to handle the public-facing crowd. In a back-office control room, Daisy received a delegation from the Pentagon.
Her outfit was especially formal today.
A beige floor-length gown by Yves Saint Laurent, with a subtly cut-out back panel that exposed just a hint of skin. Everywhere else was fully covered.
The legendary designer had passed away just in June. His pieces had spiked in value overnight. Daisy couldn't tell you how much vision or fashion theory was packed into this dress. She could tell you it had cost her thirty-five thousand dollars.
The New York salesclerks had laid it on thick—handcrafted by the master, his final swan song—and she'd been too rushed for the show to push back. She'd put it on a card.
Shoes, bag, jewelry—more money down the drain. Even for her, it was a significant dent. For a standard female S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, purchases like this would have been crushing.
She now understood exactly why Black Widow was determined to stick it out at Stark Industries for another month. She understood why Hill had walked out of S.H.I.E.L.D. and straight into Stark Industries HR. Agent pay really was on the low side. Stark Industries pay really was absurd.
Clothes were a major expense. Cosmetics were another black hole. High-end makeup was priced out of this world.
The generals didn't care what she was wearing. Honestly, neither did she. But the Maid lived by the doctrine of never leaving the house without makeup. Daisy had initially pushed back—hard—but recently, for reasons she couldn't quite name, her position had started softening. She now agreed that important occasions called for makeup.
"Gentlemen. Secretary Robert, General Haig, Lieutenant General Green—welcome." Daisy kicked it off. "This is the Counter-Terrorism Type-1 Drone Soldier Hammer Industries is delivering to the Department of Defense. It comes in four variants—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—designed to maintain regional stability, assist service personnel in humanitarian operations, and advance global peace and development..."