Tony had to take a seat, overwhelmed by the enormity of his findings and a sense of disbelief and astonishment. For a split second, his mind seemed to freeze, the blue screen of death replacing the usual fury of thoughts that raced through his brain every second. He had done it! He had achieved the seemingly impossible. Tony Stark had invented time travel technology.
If his calculations were correct, and they were always right thank you very much, a lot of opportunities were opening in front of him. He was like a pioneer standing on the threshold of unexplored territory. Tony burst out laughing. His life was even crazier than ever before.
The sheer magnitude of possibilities was mind-boggling, far too vast for Tony to fully grasp. It was as if the universe had opened its arms to him, offering a chance to rewrite the fabric of reality itself. Thanks to this new machine, he would have the opportunity to change his world, to protect the people, especially his small family.
Peter's return occupied a central place in his thoughts, and Tony would make sure that the kid, his son in everything but blood, would never disappear from his sight ever again. If he could have things his way, Pepper, Morgan, Peter, Thodey and Happy would remain by his side for as long as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, time travel, like any mathematical principle, had rules and limitations.
Tony would need to be precise and meticulous. He would have to be mindful of the exact sport he would be travelling to. His house was by no means a new building. It had a history, and it had been inhabited by other families in the past. Carelessly appearing in the middle of an innocent family's Sunday dinner was hardly the discrete approach he would need to achieve his goals.
He would need to be practical as well. He would need currency of the time he would go, clothing and other essentials to navigate the era he was visiting. These insignificant but critical features would be crucial in his ability to blend into the time period smoothly and achieve his objectives with minimal interference.
The need to deal with Thanos in the past was undeniable. Rhodey was not wrong when he said they should go back when the titan was a baby, vulnerable and defenceless. Tony had always been a pragmatist. He wasn't the monster some people believed him to be. He couldn't bring himself to kill an infant, even one to become the Mad Titan. Tony would wait until Thanos was an adult, at least by Earth standards, before disposing of him. Long before obtaining his first infinity stone, the Mad Titan had been travelling from planet to planet, killing half of their inhabitants in his quest of balance.
Space travel was an essential component of Tony's newly forming plan. It presented a huge obstacle, one that most people might have been unable to overcome if it weren't for his time machine. The Milano was a fine ship and Tony had learned a lot during that horrible flight back from Titan. He could recreate the technology. Tony knew intimately that the journey would be too long that way. He was in half the mind to buy a DeLorean and fit the device inside, but that would be taking things a little too far, even for him.
In any case, time travel has never meant merely going back in time. If it wasn't for his new mission, it would be out of sheer curiosity. He was, after all, a futurist. He wondered what kind of advanced technology and innovations existed in the far-off future. Tony wasn't doubting he would find a means of quick transportation then, something he would be able to either take back in time or back engineer. Or both.
With the power of a time machine at his disposal, Tony would also be able to correct a few small but annoying mistakes, literal thorns in his side, along the way. They would have to be dealt with one by one, and he would have to return to his present time to ensure that nothing too important had been altered. These alterations should not create more problems than they solved. Tony understood the concept of trial and error like any good scientist. As long as he had the knowledge around the time machine, he could always experiment and potentially fail.
