Heroes of New York

NINETEEN - SEARCH

Chapter Nineteen - Search

~Tony Stark~

I paced the common room floor, feeling more and more anxious as the minutes ticked by.

Bruce watched from the couch, his hands wrapped around a mug of some sort of herbal tea. Peter, in typical teenage fashion, was scrolling through his phone - although in what was likely not typical teenage fashion, he was doing so while lying across the ceiling.

Natasha was giving a mission report at some hidden SHIELD base, and Barton had gone to inform her of the meeting. Captain Spangles said he was on his way, but had probably stopped to help some old lady across the street or something, like the boy scout he is.

I wished we could contact Thor - a god would probably be a better expert in magic than some random teenager we just met - but he was offworld and apparently cell phones just didn't have that sort of range (could I make phones that could do that? Probably).

I paused. Actually... How did Percy know about magic? Most people would probably see what Percy and I saw and come to a conclusion closer to advanced holograms, or hallucinogens, but magic? I glanced at the couch the kid was stretched out on.

"J, call up everything we know about Sleeping Beauty here."

The vents shuddered in some sort of protest.

"Are you sure, sir? That seems like an inadvisable breach of trust and privacy."

He really got JARVIS to like him that much? I waved my hand in dismissal of the concern. If he had nothing to hide, then what was there to worry about?

A hologram screen appeared in the centre of the living room and webpages started popping up, overlapping one another in chronological order.

There was... a lot actually.

"Peter, kid," I looked over at him to see that Peter had put his phone away and was now staring at me, wide-eyed. "How well, exactly, do you know this guy?"

"Uhh..." He dropped down from the ceiling, landing with a muffled thump on the carpet. "I mean, I met him at school at the beginning of the year. Mainly its 'cause we have a couple classes together and also our lockers are next to each other, but also he's actually, like, the nicest guy ever, even if he's kind of weird and also gets into fights a lot. He doesn't like to talk about himself much but I think maybe that's because he has, um, trouble at, uh, at home. What, exactly are you looking for, anyway, Mr. Stark, sir?" Peter shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

I hummed in lieu of response, shuffling through the information JARVIS had brought up for me. Articles with missing persons cases for this kid, starting when he was twelve. He kept vanishing and popping back up over the years, apparently fine. Some of the articles had links to others, claiming there would be more information to be found, but clicking on them only led to error pages.

"JARVIS, take the research up a notch." I could tell he was unhappy about it, as the screens froze momentarily and the vents groaned, but the AI still brought up police files and school report cards, pushing the articles to a different screen.

Okay, woah. And I'd thought the regular web searches had brought up weird stuff.

Peter stared at the screens alongside me, seemingly unable to mesh the information he was seeing with his classmate who was napping on our couch. From the school files we could tell Percy was a troublemaker. Detention, suspension, probation, expulsion - for everything from poor grades to dropping his classmates into a shark tank to firing a war cannon at a school bus to "being a general menace on academy grounds".