Daisy couldn't care less about the palladium poisoning. She had her own agenda. "I've got a question. I need to lift an enormous steel structure into the sky, but the fan surface area relative to the fuselage is way too small—not enough lift..."
She launched into a rapid-fire barrage of technical details. Pepper listened patiently for a while before realizing she hadn't understood a word.
Stark had no idea why this woman was suddenly quizzing him. Since when were they that close? But the more he listened, the more intrigued he became.
Women and mechanical engineering were his two great loves. If forced to choose between them, he'd pick engineering.
Daisy's question had real depth. Blood was still trickling down his forehead—he hadn't even wiped it—and the two of them launched into an impromptu technical session right there on the street.
"What are the airflow disturbance parameters?"
"You're building some kind of aerial weapon platform, aren't you? Have you accounted for the suction force at that scale?" He went from casual disinterest to full focus in about thirty seconds.
"Lower the RPM. At the same time, angle the turbine blades a few degrees off the conventional pitch—that requires dedicated computation..."
They debated for half an hour under Pepper's bewildered stare as she watched two people speak in tongues. Midway through, Ivan Vanko regained consciousness twice, and both times Daisy put him back down hard.
The bear-sized Russian was craftier than he looked—he tried playing dead, planning to spring an ambush. Unfortunately for him, he'd never trained with the Hand to suppress his heartbeat. Daisy heard it loud and clear.
After the fourth forced nap, even his constitution gave out. Vanko's eyes rolled back and he went limp for good.
The discussion didn't stop. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s scientists weren't amateurs, but the problems they couldn't crack gave Stark a hard time too. Still, the man was a genuine freak of nature. He rattled off solutions to thirty or forty percent of the issues off the top of his head, then engaged his brain on the remainder and chipped away at another twenty-odd percent.
Daisy walked away with a haul. Science worked like that sometimes—one key insight and everything downstream clicked into place. Stark didn't know they were trying to make an aircraft carrier fly, so many of his suggestions lacked specifics.
For instance, he assumed no one would be standing on the deck during flight. Obviously. Who in their right mind would stand outside while four massive fans were blasting at full power? That would be insane.
She'd gained plenty of new ideas, but Monaco's police had arrived. With all those eyes on her, performing a teleportation trick was out of the question. She waved Stark toward the car, and they headed back to the hotel.
"My car!" Stark's eyes went wide when he saw the Rolls-Royce Phantom's obliterated front end.
While inspecting the wreckage, he finally noticed the reactor on Vanko's chest. His hand moved fast. A flicker of wariness crossed his face as he turned to Daisy. "Did you make this for him?"
"Of course not."
"I'll cover you—grab it. Quick!" He immediately pivoted and strode toward the Monaco police with exaggerated charm, buying her a window.
Daisy seized the moment. She reached over and wrenched the reactor from Vanko's chest.
The police took Vanko away. Daisy's group returned to the Hôtel de Paris.
"You're not leaving yet. I strongly suspect this guy's reactor is connected to S.H.I.E.L.D." As one of only two people alive who could build an arc reactor, Stark's suspicion of Daisy was perfectly natural.
To prove her innocence, she agreed to go see Vanko with him.
Monaco was a postage stamp of a country—barely two square kilometers. The population hovered around thirty thousand. Between the tiny territory and their love affair with death-defying motorsport, the place had a peculiar charm.
Daisy and Stark walked into the local hospital, Monaco Central Hospital. It served as both the main facility and the only facility. With so few residents, little financial stress, and a generally healthy outlook on life, hardly anyone showed up sick.
Inside the lobby, they spotted a grand piano sitting right in the middle of the foyer.
The packed, shoulder-to-shoulder hospital chaos Daisy remembered from her previous life was simply unimaginable here.
Today was different, though. Several racers had died in the track incident, and two more were injured. Counting Vanko, three patients had been rushed in by ambulance.
Tony Stark's influence counted for nothing in this little European nation. Daisy reached into her bag and produced her FBI badge. The staff hesitated, debated, and finally let them through.
"Is that badge real?" Using the FBI's name like this—Stark had never done anything quite like it before. There was a little thrill to it.
He still had his doubts, though.
"Real as gold. Realer, even..."
Stark wanted to ask if she could get him one to play with, but one look at his universally recognizable face and he thought better of it.
They found Vanko shortly after, though there was no conversation to be had. Someone had brutalized the man—multiple fractures across his body. He'd been resuscitated but remained in a coma, transferred to the ICU.
Stark had a mountain of questions, but with the man unconscious, there was nothing he could do. He pulled up a chair next to the bed and started examining the reactor they'd taken from Vanko.
"You're sure you didn't make this?"
"Last time I'm saying it. No."
The result genuinely puzzled Stark. Daisy had reverse-engineered a working reactor from his finished product—impressive enough to make his head spin. If he put himself in her shoes, minus his father's original blueprints, he figured he could do the same given enough time. But he'd top out at Daisy's level. He couldn't have miniaturized it to the size of a palm.
So how had this guy built one? Surely he hadn't just watched it on TV and modeled it after the reactor in Stark's own chest. That defied all logic.
Stark's gaze bounced between Daisy and the unconscious Vanko. There was a truth here that he didn't yet know.
"His RPM is set a bit low, don't you think?" Stark asked casually.
"His materials are subpar across the board. That limits him to a relatively low rotation speed. Besides, he only needed to power two electric whips—he didn't need high output." Daisy couldn't help herself. She started critiquing Vanko's arc reactor like a reviewer at a science fair.
"If he'd commercialized this technology, he could've amassed a fortune in no time," Stark mused, talking to himself as much as to her.
Daisy looked at him with amusement. "This guy was clearly trying to kill you. You were the target. What fortune? Killing you was his entire life's mission."
They discussed Vanko as though he were already a corpse, talking over each other with increasing fervor. By the time they left the room, Vanko still hadn't woken up. Nobody told Stark the parable about God and the shark.
Stark's expression was dark. His palladium poisoning was getting worse. He needed to drink his neutralizing solution at shorter and shorter intervals.
The arc reactor had saved his life and pushed him toward the abyss in equal measure. His body was in terrible shape—his vision was starting to blur. He reined in the conversation quickly. Daisy needed to get back to her turbine engine research anyway. They parted ways like two colleagues forgetting they'd left Ivan Vanko behind, each heading home.