Quietly, Adana clarifies, "I can tolerate being near you, I'm - working on my apparent racism. It's really not very fair of me to judge you by that other - ... person. I will go with person. So if it's just turning your wings to fluff I don't mind."

"...Okay, now I'm distracted, a hacksaw? Is there some way that is less gross than it sounds?"

"I was volunteering because I imagine sawing off your own wings is painful. I would just turn them into fluff and you wouldn't feel a thing. I'm not going to make you suffer because I am mildly uncomfortable due to unfortunate circumstances."

"Okay, my question about grossness is answered," says Tony. "Ew. No but going back to the computers, are you seriously going to backchain the whole hundred and fifty years of different standards talking to each other? Because like, speaking of deep revulsion, wow. And what if it doesn't hook up on this end because our worlds are a tiny bit different? Like, the reason I'm offering is because I think it would be fun and I've done something like it once already. If you desperately want to drape a century and a half of technology across my basement floor, I guess I won't stop you, but man. It just sounds so ugly."

"Well, when one is a hundred and seventy-two one gets used to thoughtful upgrades, I think I could do it in five or six steps, and it also doesn't require me to unencrypt anything but the last input step for not sure about giving you lots of futuristic tech reasons - although the fact that you have AI and we don't may mean I shouldn't worry about that in the software department specifically..."

"I am already ahead of most of my world in both software and hardware by, like, a lot," he says. "Like a lot. I don't want your futuristic tech for weird nefarious reasons I can't even actually think of right now, I want it because I bet it'll be fun to take apart and if it's ahead of me anywhere I can make even cooler stuff once I figure out how it all works."

"Well, what sorts of things do you do with the cool stuff you have? Aside from the AI, that one's obvious."

"I don't really do things with it. Most of my stuff right now isn't even technically my stuff, anyway, it's the company's stuff," he gestures with his fluffball, "Stark Industries, weapons manufacturing. But that's just the family business, it's not what I personally aspire to do with my life, I don't know what I personally aspire to do with my life, I'm seventeen. I wanna get an engineering degree at MIT and then spend the rest of my life making cool shit into cooler shit, I wanna get cold fusion off the ground as a viable energy source, I wanna take all my dad's old plans for flying cars and God knows what and build all the shit he never got to finish."

"Well, I am definitely supportive of cold fusion and new sources for viable energy. It's just I can see why he is concerned about handing over huge technological advances. They are potential world-changers and need to be used carefully." Pause. "Also, do you want a hug?"

"...Maybe yes?" he says. He puts down the fluffball and the still-untouched coffee.

"All right." Adana is missing her wings to make this a proper hug, but that's okay. She reaches hugging distance, then holds out her arms for an offered hug.

Hug.

Hug.

"I'm not going to help your weapons manufacturing any, but maybe other stuff. But why are you so far ahead, you personally, why aren't you propagating all your cool advances in this and that?"

"It's complicated," Tony mumbles, somewhat muffled by Hug. Hug is Important. "Like I'm not gonna hand out anything that went into Jarvis, because it'd kill me if something happened to him, and I don't have that much else that'd do anybody any good, like when the company's doing nice helpful stuff on the side I'm right there but I don't run the place. Yet."

Pat, pat. Adana is perfectly fine with continuing to hug. Tony seems to need it right now, getting daeva in his basement at three in the morning seems to be emotionally upsetting.

Cam rocks back on his heels, waiting for more emotional equilibrium in the surrounding atmosphere before he produces a futuristic computer.

"If you'd rather go back to bed, you can, but I've decided to go ahead and make a computer to wire or radio or whatever to what you have. I can wait till a saner hour if you rather."

"Well, I mean, that depends. If all you want is a wireless password or an ethernet cable, Jarvis can handle that, but if you're actually gonna take me up on that data conversion offer, I'll totally take the coffee and get to it."

"I'm pretty sure someone with AI in the basement cannot overmuch misuse consumer-grade computing hardware from 2159 that includes no such wonders, so yes, for the sake of being able to view the internet on a familiar and well-behaved device," he produces this device - heavily partitioned with his own files behind enough layers of security to choke an elephant - "let's do it."

"Awesome," says Tony, becoming rapidly more animated even as he reaches for the coffee.

Adana snickers. "May I also have a computer? There are things that I'd like to look up, too. If you're going to be up anyway, we might as well connect me to the internet, too. And I'm more familiar with 2159 technology."