tushanshu_logs | What could possibly go wrong amirite

Characters: Hiro Hamada, Stork, & Tony Stark
Date: May the 4th ~~be with you~~
Location: Starting out in Central at the Hotel; moving to Metal Sector after that
Situation: Black Market shopping; situations of dubious legality; nerds getting in trouble, probably
Warnings/Rating: None at the present, will edit if needed.

Hiro loves his brother, really. And is concerned for him. He just doesn't know what to do with him right now. He feels guilty for lying, he misses his aunt even though he won't say it out loud, and it's all a lot of pressure and it's weird right now and he needs to get away and not deal with it for a little while.

So he's gonna go bother Stork instead.

He pokes his head in the Hotel's garage and, true to form, the Merb (but what is a Merb) is there hunched over some project or the other, apparently not having noticed him yet. Hiro really doesn't think about this; he skips into the garage unannounced, just about tripping over himself in the process, and pops up next to Stork's workbench with a grin on his face.

"Hey, hey, check this out."

Why is Hiro wearing gloves?

He claps his hands together, eliciting a sharp buzz, a shower of sparks and five points of bright blue light at the interior of the knuckles where they meet.

That's why.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Stork seems surprised by the impatience, stopping what he was doing and lowering his pliers. "I said I'd go with you," he answered. The lure of materials not easily found anywhere else in the city was too much for a mechanic like the merb to ignore, plus the last part that Hiro had said. He wasn't about to let the kid go by himself; Hiro wasn't that much older than the Sky Scouts were.

"You didn't say it was now."

"Oh." Heh. Hiro carefully switches off the other glove before tucking his hands behind his back, grinning sheepishly. "Well...consider this me telling you, maybe?"

There's a pause, for a couple of seconds, before he adds hastily. "I ran out of some stuff I needed and I can't get it anywhere else and Callaghan's busy right now."

Hiro, don't make that face. Adults can't resist that face. ~~that's totally the plan~~

"Okay, okay. Let me get my bag..." One Stork has his messenger bag, he nods. "Lead the way... I guess."

Hiro perks up immediately, like maybe he was only half-expecting that to get him anywhere and is pleasantly surprised to find Stork agreeing to accompany him so readily. "Really?" He asks at first, and then, "Oh, sweet. C'mon, we can try to take a shortcut through the main doors - I know they're bugged right now, but they only wig out every so often. I think we can risk it."

He finds a spot to set down the frequency scanner Stork loaned him and then sort of hop-skips out of the garage with the Merb in tow, babbling on about their destination. "So, when we get there, you gotta act casual - if you don't they'll try to rip you off for all you're worth. Give 'em the cool, level-headed act, like you're not that interested in anything they're selling. Be above it all. You get better deals that way -"

Tony is headed to the garage to see if he can scrounge up a couple odds and ends he doesn't have in his own stash of engineering miscellanea. He's absorbed in his notes, chewing a pencil and staring down at his schematics as he walks - which is why he walks straight into a certain excitable young teen heading the other way.

"Whoa!" Tony fumbles for his notebook, just managing to snag it and the pencil before they both go tumbling to the floor. "Sorry, totally didn't see you. Hey, Stork. Where are you guys headed?"

The question is automatic, purely conversational in a and-where-are-you-off-to-in-such-a-hurry kind of way, but now that he's said it, he is actually curious where the two other engineers are going.

"Uh," Stork says, doing an impressively awkward freeze on the spot, while he shoots Hiro a look.

"That's... we're... um."

"Secret mission," Hiro covers, fast on the uptake for somebody who's still trying to recover his balance after nearly getting knocked on the floor. "But actually, we're just going to the market. So it's more like a secret shopping trip."

No mention of which market, or where it's located, at least not to current strangers, though as he dips slightly to one side and tilts his head to glance at the notebook, he has his suspicions; mainly because he only knows of two engineers staying in the hotel right now, one of which is conspicuously green, and the other is the elusive but much-talked-about Tony Stark.

Also, he'd like to divert attention from where they're going. "Whatcha workin' on?"

"Wow, and I though I was a bad liar," Tony jokes. Hiro's attempted coverup might have convinced him, but Stork's deer-in-headlights freeze couldn't have looked more guilty if he'd been wearing a burglar costume and had pantyhose pulled over his head. "I'm working on some modifications to the suit's sonic disruptors. What are you really up to?"

He's not going to be distracted that easily, Hiro.

Ironically, Stork actually can lie with the best of them, but he's terrible on the spot with people he's less familiar with.

"We're going to the market," he echoed Hiro with an emphatic nod, before looking interested and safely getting off topic. "Wait, sonic disruptors?"

"The market. The...slightly illegal market..." He's half-mumbling as he says it and skims past pretty quickly, shooting Stork a look, because oh my god he totally knows now, dude. Also, he's totally going to keep trying to change the subject, smiling brightly and folding his hands behind his back. "...Anyway what's a sonic disruptor do? Because it sounds like it does something awesome."

"It's one of the weapons on my suit. It's, you know - sonic. It causes disorientation without hurting people." And has other niche uses, such as shattering laser-focusing crystals so he doesn't get sliced into iron spaghetti. "I'm recalibrating them so I can generate a wider range of frequencies and intensities." He rushes through the explanation, because he's a lot more interested in what Hiro just mumbled under his breath.

"The— hold on, are you going to the black market?"

Tony had been deeply suspicious of Keeliai's black market at first: at home, there'd been a brisk black market trade in stolen Stark tech, which had not exactly endeared him to the institution. But he'd eventually come to terms with the fact that Keeliai's black market was a necessary evil, and often a useful one. Especially because it was the best place to find foreigner stuff. If something got stolen from a foreigner, or something randomly appeared from another universe and was found by a kedan, the black market was where it was likely to end up.

Which is why, instead of trying to talk them out of it, Tony just asks "...Can I come?"

Stork immediately suspects that, if they were to refuse, Tony would do the same thing Hiro would do: go and try to find this place on his own. Safety in numbers, and all that.

Well, mostly safety in a well-placed booby trap, but he'd settled for numbers in lieu of those.

"I... guess so?" he hedged, glancing at Hiro.

Oh shit, nail on the head and all that. Hiro winces. So much for subtlety. He glances at Stork, brain already hacking away at a solution on the spot. He finds it pretty quickly, edging closer to Tony and dropping his voice lower.

"Okay, fine. But you gotta be cool, and not tell anybody, and—" A beat. "And I wanna see one of those sonic disruptors, later. Deal?"

Hiro that was not supposed to be part of the deal but too late, already threw that in there. He's milking this one for what it's worth.

Much in the way that a plan never survives first contact with the enemy, subtlety rarely survives first contact with Tony.

Tony grins. "Cool." And, to Hiro specifically: "I'll show you the whole suit, if you want."

Hiro's other conditions are also acceptable: Tony has no reason to blab about the illicit field trip. (Though, if Cass corners him unexpectedly, all bets are off.)

What could possibly go wrong amirite

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

omg I lost this

no subject

no subject