ahollowman | (no subject)

The new project was pretty insane. Tony's team had figured out how to build a solar cell with nearly a forty percent efficiency rate. It didn't sound that impressive in the media reports, because forty percent wasn't normally a huge percent. But anyone who had worked on the project knew better.

Commercial solar cells rarely reached more than twenty, and with silicon, more than thirty was unheard of.

Tony's team had created a perovskite crystal matrix cell that had nearly no crystal imperfections; on its own, a great advancement.

But they'd also figured out how to make the film self-healing.

And to make it cheap.

Which was potentially revolutionary; for Darrow, maybe. For Tony, if he could remember it when he got back home. And for everyone on the team, to take back with them.

Today, for Tony, it was a lot of hot stinkin' work out in a field next to a nunnery. Did they still call them nunneries? Nuns lived in it, and they'd been Tony's first contract. He was doing it not-for-profit. Which meant trying to save on as many costs as possible.

Which was why Tony was knocking on Peter Parker's apartment door.

"I know you're in there."

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Peter is napping when he hears the knocking on his door, incessant, insistent. He takes a lot of naps these days. Between finishing up with school for the year and, you know, the Spider-Man thing, the alternate universe thing, and trying to convince his landlord he's actually an upstanding citizen, he gets sort of tired.

That's definitely Mr. Stark's voice, though, and it makes him sit up - reluctantly, slowly, rubbing at his eyes before he shuffles over to the door.

"Hey, Mr. Stark..." he hardly even looks at Mr. Stark, though, eyes half shut as he shuffles back and opens the door more to let him in, eyes half shut. "Sorry, I was..."

"I want your help with something. You get to play with cool parts and sodder some crap together in positions your Aunt May would be very upset with me about, you get free lunch and liquid refreshments, and I get some reduced-cost labor."

Tony oozed into the apartment like he owned the building. Tony usually did.

"Come on. Get moving. You're younger than me, where's your boundless, optimistic youth? Come on."

Tony moved Peter in the direction of his wardrobe, before starting to go through his kitchen cupboards, searching for boxed cereal.

"Why would May be upset about how I solder things?" He isn't even expecting an answer, though, so he isn't sure why he says it. By this point, he's used to Mr. Stark making himself at home at his place, so he just watches him wander around while he stands in the middle of it all, only moving when he's prompted.

He wanders off to his bedroom and changes into clothes that he's okay with getting motor oil and whatever other random mechanical detritus on and grabs his backpack. Sure, he's excited to do work for Mr. Stark, he always is, but he wishes, from time to time, that he was more than an extra set of hands. "What's, what's the thing we're working on?" He calls from his room.

""Be ... cause you might be upside down, crammed into spaces smaller than an adult man. You're a small person. You realize that, right?"

Tony had found the cereal. He put the entire box into Peter's hands as he came back out of his room and into the kitchen area.

"Solar panels. To begin with. New material, newish process. But after that, I want your help with something else."

Tony levied on Peter a look of suggestive nonchalance. Something Else involved Spider-Man, tangentially.