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The second time Lilah saw Tony Stark’s son she was half delirious from lack of proper caffeination and about thirty minutes away from her villain origin story.
They had run into each other in the labs. Peter had been poking around at some holographic code, a computer open on his lap. His goggles were pushed up to his forehead and his hair was sticking out in all directions when Lilah stumbled in, clutching for dear life onto an empty mug. She looked around the room until her eyes, wild and wide, landed on Peter.
The back of his neck prickled.
“Peter,” Lilah said evenly. She was calm. So calm, in fact, that she basically radiated serenity. (She was going to rip out his throat—no. She was calm.) “Why is it that there’s a sticky note with a frowny face where the coffee maker is supposed to be?”
Slowly, Peter turned to face Lilah. “Uhhhhh—”
“Because,” Lilah interrupted, her knuckles white around the handle of the mug, “if you have anything to do with the fact that there is currently no hot and delicious coffee in my mug right now, then I hope you are prepared to be the reason that the world prematurely ends.”
Peter shuffled over to try to hide a silver machine that had been sitting on the table in front of him. The movement caught Lilah’s attention, and she narrowed her eyes. “Tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” She demanded. Peter winced.
One hour earlier
Exactly sixty-four floors above where Lilah would contemplate world domination was Tony Stark’s personal lab, where both Tony and Peter were standing in front of a lab table filled with messily strewn tools and random unfinished projects. Peter pouted at his not-dad, who was in the process of explaining to him exactly why he wasn’t allowed to install rudimentary A.I.s into things that should not have any sort of sentience—like the coffee machine in the intern break room, affectionately named ANGEL (short for Absolutely Necessary Giver of Everlasting Life), who spontaneously decided that her one true passion was to not, in fact, make coffee, but instead to make tea.
Specifically, non-caffeinated tea.
Somehow, no matter how many coffee grounds were used, at the end of the brewing cycle the only thing in the pot would be hot water—a travesty of the highest proportions for the interns, who had learned to despise the obnoxiously bright and cheery voice saying “Enjoy your tea!” in a way that was, upon later reflection, extremely passive aggressive. The icing on the cake was the loud ding! that ANGEL made when she popped open a drawer full of tea bags. (“It’s like she’s mocking us!” Senior Intern Nicolas complained, flinching as another ding! rang through the air. “Oh, come on!” He yelled at the—for legal purposes, inanimate—machine. “You didn’t even open the drawer for that one!”)
All of this meant that the intern labs were full of uncaffeinated, sleep-deprived barely-adults in charge of semi-important projects, which, to no one’s surprise, quickly led to disaster.
“Come on Mr. Stark, it isn’t that bad!” Peter crossed his arms defensively as his Da- mentor, as his mentor pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “How was I supposed to know that ANGEL wouldn’t want to be a coffee maker? In fact,” Peter began, disregarding how Tony seemed to send up a prayer for strength, “I think this is a- a great opportunity for learning! I mean, now we know that we should definitely add in some programming to make sure the A.I. will want to do what we want them to do. Right? I didn’t know we had to do that—”
“Obviously,” Tony said dryly. Peter ignored him.
“And now that I do know, it means that I can fix ANGEL and PEDRO and CARLA—”
Tony made a slashing motion. “Hold on, time out, who the fuck—”
“Mr. Stark, language!”
“Who are you, Steve? As I was saying, who the fuck are PEDRO and CARLA? Did you make more than one A.I.? What did you put them in?” Tony looked like he desperately did not want to know the answers to any of the questions he was asking so that he didn’t have to deal with the inevitable issues that would come from knowing, but Peter completely missed any and all cues from him, perking up at the questions.
“Yeah, I made four!” Peter said brightly. “PEDRO is the toaster that’s in the penthouse and CARLA is the blender in the lab. I made that one so that maybe DUM-E will stop poisoning us with the motor oil smoothies, ya know?”
Tony picked up a wrench—maybe to throw at Peter, maybe to bang against his own head—then paused for a moment. “Okay… so who’s the fourth one?”
Peter hesitated. “I’m… not sure if I should tell you,” he said, eyes darting to the door.
Tony crossed his arms and shifted slightly to block Peter from escaping.
“Okay, fine, so I may have given STABBY—that’s the roomba with the butter knife attached to it, by the way—a tiiiiiiiny bit of sentience. It should be fine, right?” Peter said confidently. Tony gave him a look—not a good one, but one that said I-don’t-even-know-where-I-went-wrong-God-please-someone-help. It was a very particular look, one that Peter was, unfortunately, well acquainted with.
“…Right?” His voice was suddenly less sure. Tony said nothing, just continued to stare at the boy who was currently the cause of every single problem in his life. “Oh my God,” Peter said, collapsing into a nearby swivel chair, causing it to turn slowly. “Oh my God. What have I done?”
“So you understand where you went wrong, right?” Tony asked. Peter gave a small nod, hiding his face behind his hands. “Good, because if you had said no I would have locked you in a room with—what was it again, STABBY? God, we have got to work on your naming skills—until you finally understood why it was a bad idea to give an already homicidal roomba an A.I.”
“Mr. Stark, no—” Peter mumbled as the chair slowly spun him around until he was facing away from Tony.
“Mr. Stark, yes. I was already dealing with an unintentionally murderous robot, and now I’m gonna have to deal with it consciously trying to attack me. I swear to God, if I wake up to it stabbing at my ankles tomorrow morning I am going to throw it away, I don’t even care how many puppy eyes you give me,” Tony grumbled, ignoring the devastated look that Peter gave him.
“Mr. Stark, you can’t! That would—that would be, like, murder! STABBY is my child and it is my duty, as a responsible parent, to encourage his passions, however… um, however bloodthirsty they may be.” Peter crossed his arms and stared mulishly up at Tony, his neck twisting to keep eye contact as the chair continued to rotate.
Tony sighed heavily. “Just fix it. Go downstairs and fix the coffee maker so that I don’t have a fucking riot on my hands.” He flicked a hand at the boy. “Shoo.”
Peter dragged himself out of the chair and made his way towards the elevator. “Are you sure we can’t just—”
“No. Go.”
FRIDAY didn’t even wait for Peter to choose a floor, just closed the doors. She opened them again when they reached the floor containing all of the intern labs, and when Peter didn’t move, she gave an altogether too-human sigh and said “Peter,” with more disappointment than should have been possible. He rolled his eyes and unhappily made his way to the break room, where he immediately spotted ANGEL, who had a bright yellow sticky note proclaiming that she was ‘Defective—does NOT make coffee, it LIES’.
“ANGEL,” Peter said, frowning at the note. “I thought we had talked about this. You were supposed to make coffee for the interns so we don’t have any avoidable deaths on our records.” ANGEL dinged twice. His eyebrows scrunched together. “What do you mean, no? We literally spent an hour discussing it. I agreed to buy you some fancy tea leaves for your collection, you agreed you would make coffee at least half of the time—”
Another two dings.
“ANGEL,” Peter said, exasperated. “Stop saying you don’t know what I’m talking about, FRIDAY can even back me up on this, there’s no use lying.”
“Peter is correct,” FRIDAY said.
“Thanks, FRIDAY. Come on, ANGEL, just work with me here. It’s starting to feel like you want to kill off all the interns.”
ANGEL gave a single, ominous ding. Peter paused.
“Uhhhh… ANGEL, tell me you didn’t mean that.” There was a telling silence, and Peter sighed. “Damn, I can’t believe Mr. Stark was right.” He muttered, then grabbed at ANGEL. “Alright, come here. We are gonna shine you up, get you all nice and sparkling,” he lied, hand surreptitiously reaching for the plug. Quickly, he yanked it out of the socket, and then opened ANGEL up to get to the USB drive labeled with her name. He crumpled up the sticky note that had been stuck to her and grabbed a new one, drawing a frowny face on it and placing it where the coffee maker had been. Gathering ANGEL into his arms, he made his way to an empty table in one of the labs and plugged the thumb drive into his computer, opening up the faulty code.
Forty-five minutes later, the world was a lot closer to having one less murderous A.I. in it than before. Peter was just putting the finishing touches on the new-and-improved ANGEL when Lilah, the very last person who he wanted to see, walked in looking like she had been awake for three straight days (which, to be honest, she probably had been).
Shit.
Peter was slightly worried that he might become the first casualty of the uncaffeinated intern, and knew that if Lilah knew that he was the cause of the whole lack-of-coffee thing, it would go from accidental death to premeditated murder in a heartbeat. So he tried to hide the coffee maker while she was threatening him, but that must’ve failed because she turned to him with narrowed eyes.
Later, interns would tell the story of how Lilah had chased Peter up seven flights of stairs, all the while screaming things like “How could you?” and “You are never getting cookies again, you hear me?”. Legend has it that the only reason Peter got away was due to the help of STABBY the bloodthirsty roomba, who valiantly chased after Lilah, poking at her ankles.
After the whole incident, Peter had promised Lilah that she would do whatever she wanted in order to be taken off of her hit list. She hadn’t expected much, to be honest, maybe a carton of Starbucks delivered daily or something, but Peter had gone above and beyond. He had installed a button on the wall of the break room—a big, red thing that looked like it was capable of massive amounts of destruction—and stuck a sticky note on it that said ‘PRESS FOR COFFEE’. Lilah, desperate as she was, hadn’t even questioned the potential consequences of doing as the button asked as she tiredly pressed her hand against it. The button let out a truly ominous beep, worrying the few interns who were awake enough to feel, before a small door opened to reveal a steaming mug of goodness set on a tiny little conveyor belt. For a moment, Lilah just stared at the coffee in front of her, and then, tentatively, as if approaching a wild animal, she reached out and grabbed the handle. As she raised the cup to her lips, the room held its breath…
…and then loudly cheered when she proceeded to down the whole drink. Smacking her lips, Lilah slammed the mug down on the table in front of her, rattling a few test tube racks, and said, “Now that’s some damn good coffee.”
Twenty floors up, in a small, cramped closet filled with office supplies and towering stacks of tea, sat a silver coffee machine. The janitors had been left with the confusing task of leaving a tin of tea leaves by the machine every week or so—nobody knew why, but the current theory going around was that the world would end if they skipped a week, and nobody wanted to find out the hard way if they were right.
(They were closer to the truth than they would ever know).