Disclaimer - I don't, and have never claimed to, own Marvel or its Intellectual Property. This is all just so that I can take my maladaptive daydreaming and turn it into something so that it does not ruin the rest of my day.
DoorMan #38
LA [January 23, 2008]
–Colin Baxter–
His eyes fluttered open as he rose from the bed, very slowly and smoothly. It was something that he had noticed happening, ever since he permanently opened the CHI gate in his very soul. His body was constantly flooded by relatively tiny amounts of CHI that not just strengthen it but do a lot more than that. His sleep schedule, for example, was getting changed bit by bit.
He slept less and less as months went by and even the sleep he did need was of such low quality that he woke up even due to the noise of the curtains hitting the glass due to the wind from the AC or something, such was his light sleep.
It was not really a problem but he had some doubts about long term sustainability about being essentially devoid of sleep at all times. It had gotten to the point that he had already consulted the Ancient One about it and she had recommended following normal sleep patterns unless it comes to the point of him not needing to sleep for weeks on end.
Then, he might have to construct a fully soundless chamber somewhere in the Red hearth, just to get a good night's sleep.
Getting off the very comfortable bed, he walked onto the balcony and looked at the rising sun, with people and cars already honking below on the road. He was on the seventh story of the hotel the people at Stark Industries had put him in. He had arrived late last night and had done nothing except eat, look at a new web series he'd found, and went to sleep.
In the meantime, Jin'Ya, knowing that Tony Stark was about to get the awakening of a lifetime, had made his nest in Kamar Taj, a space reserved for the grumpy dragon, designed to house him for longer periods of time. The dragon was responsible for keeping an eye on the genius playboy billionaire philanthropist, and informing him if something untoward happened to one of the smartest humans on the planet.
He hoped that nothing drastic would happen in this timeline but who knows? He couldn't really predict anything because the one place where he found an anomaly, Wakanda, was the one place that was shielded from Jin'Ya's gaze, both because of Bast's protection and also because of the planetary supernatural treaty that the Ancient One made Jin'Ya sign.
It was a Wednesday, the middle of the week, and he had nothing to do for the day, a transitional period, his handler said. He had to report to Stark Industries, or more accurately, someone from Stark Industries would come pick him up tomorrow to give him his orientation.
He had read testimonies from previous interns that the Dean handed to him once his internship offer was confirmed, and according to them, the gig was kind of awesome. They did not give any important work to any intern, which was obvious, but the work given was also not expected to be completed on time.
Essentially, each and every one of the 29 interns that came from his University to Stark Industries to intern told the Dean the same thing. It was a very nice and rewarding experience. The corporate atmosphere was one of the best and it was the gold standard for work life balance, according to the Dean who told him explicitly that he could even continue his freelance work and continue doing open source projects even if they conflicted with some of Stark Industries' projects, as long as he himself was not working directly on them, which was very reasonable.
He stretched, and after checking the time, grinned and jumped into the bathroom for a quick shower, because his body simply did not generate the same amount of sweat and grime as normal people so his body did not need regular cleansing, not that he did not still regularly bathe.
Some people might be into that but he was a clean freak by a wide margin, a problem exacerbated by his enhanced senses that allow him to see much better than normal people.
Whistling, he changed into a T-shirt and shorts, since today was his day to roam the city and not meet people in stuffy business formal attire, and went down to the ground floor.
He had a free breakfast buffet to demolish, to eat all the calories he might need for the rest of the day.
____xx____
–Shuri Udaku–
She sat in a cafe in a better part of the town, one of the American places where everything was very overpriced but it was only because you paid not just for the food but for the time spent in a very well maintained and expensive place. In her case, she was sitting in a booth with enough privacy for her to work on her laptop without any peeping toms nearby.
"Thank you," She smiled at the waitress and went back to reading the reports on her laptop. They were SHIELD reports, on the so-called Orange Menace, and what reports they were.
Enhanced strength, durability, and speed. Ability to turn invisible. Flight, Strange Door manifestation, that were bulletproof and could be manipulated remotely.
Multiple projections of the same Door could be used, just like he used to create that makeshift ship that he flew around, at speeds rivaling the fastest jet she had made for the Royal Air Force, back in Wakanda.
Sipping her coffee, she swiped her hands on the trackpad and saw the UI change completely, now resembling the systems she had back in her personal lab, showing a single red dot, along with a real time feed showing Colin Baxter, stuffing food in his mouth as if it was his last meal on the planet, in the breakfast buffet of the hotel he was staying at.
She had followed Colin to LA last night, mainly because she was very much interested in him and also because she had no friends back in Seattle and her only acquaintance was, strangely, the guy who was hiding from the rest of the world by throwing a smoke screen in the form of an up and coming genius programmer.
She really did not know how to approach this whole situation. On one hand, she did not know the kind of person Colin really was and haphazardly approaching someone who had the potential to seriously hurt her, even after her enhancements was not wise. She could not just approach him and tell him that "Hey! I know your secret. I would also like to be your friend."
Ewww. Cringe.
She finished the last of her coffee as she swiped the UI as it went back to the general state of work happening back in Wakanda on projects she marked as priority before she left, chief among them being a way to efficiently and safely disseminate viable cures to the rest of the world in a phased manner.
She had a lot of work and if by some misfortune, the past record of her country was ever revealed to someone like Colin? Then she could only pray to Bast because she had gone through the SHIELD reports on the conservative estimates on both the Hulks' as well as Colin's powers and they did not paint a pretty picture in her opinion.
An alert on the screen brought her attention back to reality as she pressed a button on the table that would alert the server to come to her table. She was in the mood for some classic American fries and cheeseburger. Now that she had essentially an always on calorie consumption machine in her body, she could eat anything and everything she could ever eat and never have to worry about her figure because her body needed so much more energy to sustain itself now that she had injected herself with the extracted and refined juices from 11 Heart Shaped Herbs, something that was supposed to be a suicide according to Bast but somehow she survived as if the universe itself made an exception for her.
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