Peter Parker, spider problems

Elseware

Pepper Potts was a professional woman. She worked as the Co-CEO of one of the most successful companies in the States, and quite possibly the world. She also put up with some of the most infuriating people in the world- something she found she'd become very good at.

Being the very professional woman she is, she did not have time for people like this. She, believe it or not, had better things to be doing, and better people to be talking to.

The people she was talking to referring to the amateur engineers sitting across her desk from her. The ones sweating bullets and playing dumb.

They looked young, were probably fresh-out-of college interns- easy to intimidate, though she couldn't be sure. Pepper sighed internally, knowing she shouldn't be complaining because really this was all her fault.

See, It had all started when one of the head statisticians told his boss who told their boss who mentioned to some random person who by chance happened to comment on it to her, that some intern delivering coffee had solved a problem that had scientists throughout the building feeling like they had dyscalculia.

Well, helped solve it anyway. Turns out it wasn't the people solving it that was the issue, but the problem itself. Technically, this kid was wrong but after he pointed out something strange they'd figured out that the problem they'd had on the board wasn't actually for what they were solving, and didn't actually apply to reality.

Or at least that's the brief summary she'd gotten from some scientist when she'd been mildly intrigued by the gossip and looked further into it. After that of course she'd looked for the intern.

I mean, yeah, obviously, some brand new intern comes and solves something like that and you're fucking supposed to fucking look into it. When she's first looked into it she'd thought, y'know, probably some kind of unrealized child prodigy, this could be good for the company! But, unfortunately, things didn't seem to... well, really line up after that.

She'd found out the kids' name and age, all of his school records- the usual. He seemed like a good kid, smart, academic decathlon and whatnot, but nothing to really put him out into the ordinary, just your average high achiever.

She'd even grown a little disappointed after keeping tabs on him for a while, he just didn't seem to be keeping up too well with the work. He'd stay late, didn't take breaks, she even thought the whole couple of floor's productivity might drop with how long it seemed he'd take with things. It was kind of odd, actually.

All the kid had to do was plug the stuff on the paper he was given into the computer- your average high schooler could do that! Well, after they learned how anyway. You didn't even have to know what you were looking at!

Even though all she'd heard from people on those floors around him was good- (well, aside from a couple of people telling her that the Winter Soldier came and talked to him on occasion, she hadn't heard something so ridiculous in a long time! She'd blatantly laughed the first time she heard it. Plus Barnes hated kids, only making even stranger of a joke.) The lengths of time he had to spend to get things done made her think the whole solving the equation thing had been a fluke, pure accident.

She had still kept tabs on him for a while, she pondered the possibility of him maybe having something like ADHD that made him take longer- she was open to the possibility.

She'd almost forgotten about it, almost completely just given up on the idea of him being special, when something crossed her desk that was truly confusing. She was sitting in her main office when it happened, sifting through stacks of paperwork. When she pulled out a paper she wasn't familiar with off the top of a stack next to her.