Easier [on hiatus]

too close

"FRIDAY pull up yesterday's model." (Y/N) put her feet up on the work table, and chewed absentmindedly on the twizzler in her hands. "Please." She added, quickly though she knew the AI wouldn't know the difference.

"Yes Ms. Stark, one minute." The AI responded, slowly piecing together the model of the machine (Y/N) had been working on since the day after her father's funeral. Once it was fully together, she stood up, and played around with it for a couple of minutes. She grew and compressed edges, poked at the hologram and moved it around in circles. She wasn't doing it for any type of research, or actually contributing to the design at all. The truth was that she was stuck.

After the couple minutes of playing with it were over, (Y/N) sat down again in the chair and let out a long frustrated sigh, as quietly as she could so no one in the house could hear her. "This has to work." She said, biting down on the candy so hard she bit her tongue, "I don't have any other options." She thought for another minute and almost screamed out of frustration, "This has to work." She threw her hands in the air, dramatically and one of the wrenches from the nearby workspace flew into her palm without warning.

She dropped it as soon as she could, and shook her hand witch glowed purple for a second before flickering out. "Ouch." She rubbed her hand before looking back at the model. "Keep it together Stark, your going to figure this out. You have to figure it out."

"FRIDAY tell me about the theory of the multiverse."

(Y/N) tapped her fingers on the edge of the table as she listened. "According to MIT physicist Max Tegmark, 'Our entire universe may be just one element — one atom, as it were — in an infinite ensemble; a cosmic archipelago.' Which means that we could exist on one plane, next to a variety of different universes where dinosaurs still exist, or the Earth never formed at all."

"But it can be smaller changes to right? Like for example Thanos never came to Earth, never found it in the first place?"

"Yes."

"Pull up the model labeled time machine please?"

"Yes, Ms. Stark."

(Y/N) stood up again and looked over the model her father had made months ago, right before the time heist as he had called it. He thought it was a time machine, but through her research, she'd found that he was wrong, they were all wrong. "Friday pull up the Banner audio file, the one I stared, and my research pages all side by side with the model."

She'd done this multiple times the past few days, since she'd hit a wall on what to do with all the information she'd gathered. It had all started two days after her father's funeral, when Uncle Steve had gathered all the stones, and got ready to return them all back to their respective timelines. She'd been watching from afar, mostly because she knew that one of them was going to give her the pity face if they knew she was there. But bruce had said something about the "ancient one" telling him that if they didn't return the stones then that reality would be in trouble and branch off.

(Y/N) had been in the woods that day to steal the stones. Looking back she knew the plan had been concocted only in grief and that in practice it wouldn't have worked at all. Sure, she could've easily gotten the stones by pulling the briefcase out of caps hand with her powers and then making a run for it. But, she didn't have a gauntlet to put them on, and there were heros lingering everywhere and it would only be a matter of time before someone caught her. Good thing she learned something else that day that would help her more than a few infinity stones ever could.

"So in theory-" She mused, "I could use this device to create a portal, and use the secondary device to find a universe that has what I need, and poof, we have liftoff." She smiled but it quickly faded once she realized that it wasn't going to be that simple. "Yeah, and y'know build said machine, and use it without anyone finding out. And who knows what kind of hell is going to break loose once I do it." She paused, "FRIDAY has anyone else tried to build tried to build a similar machine to the model?"