"How'd you come to be full of shrapnel? Is that from when your version of Snow tried to kill you?"

"How'd you guess," he says dryly.

"Well, it was either that or an awful lot of people have been trying to kill you," says Shell Bell.

"Okay," he admits, "very logical."

"I actually managed to take over my entire world without anybody trying to kill me and without having to personally kill anyone, which was way better than our initial projections. Although one of my alts came for a visit and killed someone for me. And I burned down a couple of buildings, but I chased everybody out of them, I didn't catch them on fire."

"...Definitely better than the alternative."

"Yeah. So what do you do? I bet some kind of engineering, but I mean specifically." She glances around the house for clues. "I'm pretty clueless about what my Tony gets up to in the basement with the gadgets, and I know less about what it'd take to write a Jarvis, which mine didn't do." Pause. "Hm, the only Tony with no Jarvis is the one who had a Sherlock all along, I wonder why, maybe the writing Jarvis and the cloning are both about being lonely or something."

"...I do pretty much every kind of engineering," says Tony. "And some superheroing on the side."

"Ooh, superheroing. Need any help, as long as my friend holding the door isn't impatient yet?"

"Nah," he says, "I'm good, thanks."

"Okay." [Hey, Darcy, I've just been referring to you as "my friend who's holding the door" so far, do you care if you come up in conversation enough for identifying you to make sense?]

[...Nah, not really,] she says. [Wait, are you actually talking to him? He didn't just blow you off?]

"Asgard," says Bell. "...Is Asgard public knowledge? I think it may be another planet. I went home with her so I could fix their bridge."

"I met a person called Sif there and another one called Heimdall who appeared to have been supervising a previous conversation without having been present? Is that informative?"

"I don't tend to get mythological references and so on, I have a spotty and culturally impoverished education. I've been going to Milliways since I was six and staying until I ran out of seashells to trade for food, so in some ways I'm very cosmopolitan albeit without much information about what things are and are not common across worlds, but I spent the rest of my childhood in a beach town pretending to be slightly crazy, attending an underfunded school designed to turn out docile fisherfolk, working on a clam boat, and generally existing in a context that has lost all its previous ties to Earth history that isn't a fictionalized version of the Roman Empire."

Tony blinks. "Okay, that's impressive."

"...Which part?" Bell asks, tilting her head.

"Being an empress, on a resume like that?" he says.

"Oh, I could stay in Milliways for a long, long time if I brought enough seashells and didn't eat much," says Bell. "I talked to everyone and read a lot and watched a lot of video and learned everything I could. And after your alt and Sherlock put me on their tab instead - they're rich, you got a lot of money for winning on the TV show, everyone else outside the Capitol was dirt poor - then I stayed for months instead of weeks until I faked my death and stowed away on their train to move in with them. It's possible I'm actually twenty now by subjective time, but I've never added it up."