Marvel: Merchant Days

It had gone even better than she had hoped and the results were exhilaratingly intoxicating. She held up the skull to her face with a delighted smile and slowly brought her glass of wine to her lips and took a slow appreciating sip.

"You truly were amusing to the end, Shaw." She cooed softly as she caressed the jaw of the skull with her thumb. The only thing that remained of Shaw after she had her way with him.

Most, like Jessica Jones, would assume that she schemed and backstabbed Sebastian Shaw and they would be delightfully wrong. She didn't scheme against Shaw during the whole situation with Jones: why would she when she had already been scheming against him for decades now?

If anything, she just nudged a few cards and simply accepted the natural outcome it presented to her.

Her relationship with Shaw was that of an ally of convenience on the basis of mutual profit. Never for once had either of them thought of the other as a peer, instead both of them had been looking forward to the day they completely crushed the other under their heel.

The Hellfire Club was a ring of vultures and as the leaders of the Club, it stood to reason that they were the most ravenous of their circle of carrions.

"Ironic that it was your invitation that brought me into the Hellfire Club."

Selene Gallio, though, had to give Shaw his due. In as much as she looked down on him, he would have known instantly if she was actively scheming against him; which was why it came as a delightful surprise when the young lady triumphed over him.

She stood up from her throne of darkwood and sculpted skulls and walked towards the open balcony. She took another sip of her wine and licked her lips as she gazed down on her kingdom.

There was a shadow of a hungry glint in her eyes, one that shone similarly to ambition. Something roused slowly, like from a great slumber, behind her bosom; why wouldn't it?

She held out her glass and a servant silently walked up from behind to refill it and promptly withdrew their presence with a bow.

She looked at the crimson brew that twirled elegantly around the glass and once again indulged herself in its delight.

The token for the twinkling spark behind Selene's eyes was entirely owed to one thing in particular: the glass in her hand, as if burning away a mirage, turned into a blackened skull with a wash of green flames.

The Skull of the Sorcerer Who Would Not Die.

It had been a willful purchase and it had turned out to be a great boon. She had devoured and sublimated the consciousness and memories of the dark sorcerer within it and from the trove of knowledge that came from the memories of a grandmaster of necromancy, she had found something extremely profitable.

Normally, whenever she drained somebody of their life-force, she did it by absorbing their vitality from every single pore of their body, even down to their cells, turning her victims to fleeting dust upon a full drain. Draining her victims of vitality also gave her their memories – that had been the case from the beginning.

Selene, however, from the sorcerer's memories, had gained knowledge of a sinisterly warped necromancy spell, a dark magic of the highest degree, that worked on the same life draining principles; instead of simply siphoning their life force, the spell drained out everything down to the dregs of their soul – memories, imprints, talent, bloodline, heritage, and as she had pleasantly hoped, even their mutations. The Sorcerer also theorized that the magic, if correctly worked into a ritual, might also allow one to drain a person of their karma and fate.

"How ruinously tempting." She mused out loud with an amused curve to her lips.

While there was nothing to prove his suspicions, the fact that it could be used to siphon her victims of their blessed talents and abilities already made it a spell she held in the highest degree.

Shaw's surprising and incredibly welcomed downfall gave her the perfect opportunity to test it. It gave her the most exhilarating sensation she had ever felt when draining someone's life force.

Gaining Shaw's memories, his fine business acumen along with other traces of his identity, as well as his most prized ability to absorb kinetic energy, was Selene's immense fortune.

However, like magic was wont to do, the spell wasn't without its shortcomings. She couldn't be interrupted during the process as it could result in a backlash that will reap away at her vitality. It was a delicate ritual, and while it could be fatally dangerous, it was something manageable.

Aside from that, she had realized upon draining Shaw that there was a capacity to what she could drain. Everyone had a conceptual weight to their existence, some more so than others, which meant that there was a limit to what she could assimilate without risking her ego warring against, and potentially being consumed, by the other siphoned egos.

Selene could handle Shaw's as easily as she could breathe, but she figured it wouldn't be the case if she were to drain beings like the Hulk or Thor because of their conceptual weight. Since she was no longer just absorbing their vitality as life force fuel, draining a being like Thor for example, would make her not only as strong, but also ascend her to a Goddess of Thunder as she would have usurped his domain and divinity.

Since the magic and her abilities worked independently, she could still make room for her soul's capacity by burning away the template of those she assimilated back into vitality, permanently losing everything she had gained from it, even the memories, as it is once more converted into life force. An irreversible action – a desperate dying gamble nonetheless.

It was such an insidious spell that only someone with an understanding of the darkest crevices of magic could create. And now it was hers.

Ambition and desire roared inside Selene and she did nothing to stave them. It was only right.

She chuckled softly. "Even in death, you still can't help but attend to my desires."

All of Sebastian Shaw's contingency plans against her and Emma, as well as those regarding the Merchant, now only served as appetite for her inspiration.

"It seems I'll be putting your talent for business and profits to use very soon." She dangled a small smile as she thought of all of Shaw's secrets, leverage and the bulk of his wealth.

All of Shaw's possessions were now simply a means to acquire all that she could from her delightful Merchant.

She couldn't help but salivate greedily at the thought of all the kinds of ancient magic the resources she now commanded could get her. What would Isaac accept for a fair exchange? How much would she be willing to exchange for purchase of her desires?

While she couldn't speak for Isaac, she knew boldly the answer to the second question: Everything.

.

…......

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[Avengers Tower]

Just like Tony expected, figuring out antigravity suspension was easy. With a working prototype and a holo-scan of its internal mechanics in front of him, it had simply boiled down to crunching the numbers until one pulled through – and he was the number one genius when it came to crunching numbers.

Sixteen hours, breaks included – as well as a two-hour FaceTime with Pepper – and the silly thing stopped playing hard to get. Compared to creating a new element, it was light work, pun intended.

What had him stuck however was the Kerenzikov Implant. He had JARVIS run the diagnosis over and over again and he wasn't any close to cracking it.

He could replicate it no problem. He even knew the extensive parameters and the scale of augmentation the device played at. He could whip up another one in his sleep, hell, he had even logged some improvements into the folder; all that did was give him the clarity that without a work doll, he would have gotten nowhere close to cracking it, for the simple fact that Biology wasn't his field of expertise.

Reengineering a more efficient model of the Kerenzikov Implant was easy enough. As for understanding how the device read, supplemented and enhanced the subject's perception without frying the Cerebral Cortex, all he drew was blanks.

This was more Banner's field than his. It was more of Helen Cho's playground than either of theirs.

[Is everything alright, sir?]

"I know I wrote your code to be more precise than that, JARVIS." He spun on his chair and dragged his eyes through the dozens of biological pages opened up in the air around him.

[You did, sir. Should I take my conclusions from the state of your vitals instead?]

Tony looked pleasantly surprised. "Huh. For a second there I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or being serious. Looks like you are learning after all, buddy."

[That, I recall, you explicitly wrote into my code.]

"Continue mouthing off and your next update will come with a word count." He threatened lazily as his chair stopped spinning and had him staring at the Kerenzikov.

He took a measured breath.

"Analysis, JARVIS: Building things has always been something I enjoyed. At some point it became less of a challenge I tackled for fun and turned into crossword puzzles. The truth sounds like bragging, and it might be, but I doubt you could name two people better than me in mechanics on the planet."

He looked at the spinal implant and was once again faced with the same question that came to him when he hit his first roadblock. He was a second away from calling Bruce to his lab and only refrained due to his stubbornness. It was a silly pettiness in the spur of the moment, but it stayed.

Simply put, he liked being the best.

"Sure, there are technological heights I haven't reached, but until such a time arrives, I want to know why I never bothered to know more than I know. Vibranium, Extremis, nanotech, clean energy, Artificial Intelligence, creating a new element – I've cracked them all. Why did I never bother to achieve the same in other fields?"

An ugly thought crept into his head and laid there as the last sentence left him. It was the beginning of an understanding, an uncomfortable one.

When it came to technology, there were only two names he would put above on the same level as him in the privacy of his mind, and they were Victor von Doom and Reed Richards.

He couldn't do the same in any other field because outside of technology, they had him mercilessly beat. He could admit that much.

"So why?" He asked again, this time more to himself than JARVIS. He was the only one out of the three of them with a linear-focused mastery, and still they had him caught up, at most a step behind.

His intellectual pride was what hurt the most at the silent admission. Sure, he could pick any random field for a weekend study and best most of the world's experts in that field but that meant little to him. Those 'geniuses' did not matter to him. It was a whole different bar.

[I… I don't know, sir.]

"I know you don't." Tony's response was instant and easy, almost flippant with the casualness with which he said it. "I made you, remember?"

JARVIS, however, had more to say. Even that didn't surprise him.

[If I may, sir,]

"Shoot."

[At the risk of offending you, as well as making a wholly wrong assessment…]

Now that surprised him. He did not build JARVIS with a provisional directive to acknowledge his feelings or emotions when giving a response. He leaned forward, openly interested in what his chat box had to say.

[…. Could it be, sir, that you were afraid of not measuring up to par as you would with mechanics? That you feared you'd find something you had no answer to, or worse, the disappointment from those around you, so instead you focused on the only thing you knew so you'd never have to confront it?]

The room fell silent. Tony did not give an answer, neither did JARVIS pry for one. For ten minutes, the quiet was the only thing that surrounded a man and his inventions.

Finally, he sighed as he stood up. He stretched his limbs with a wide yawn and then looked around his workshop, especially at all the pages JARVIS had pulled up.

"Clear this, will you?" A soft ding and the Holodeck turned off.

[Should I relocate them to the bin?]

"Huh?" Tony looked confused. "What am I going to read when I come back? In fact, create a parent folder: 'Flesh sculpting with Tony'. For anything biology-related."

[A rather grim name of choice, sir. Or is that your humor at work?]

He snorted. JARVIS, for all his smartass comments, did as he instructed. He stopped at the door and gave his assistant another reminder.

"And create a syllabus for me while you're at it."

[What level, sir? The standard syllabus of a Masters degree or a Doctora—]

He interrupted as the door slid open. "My level, JARVIS."

[Affirmative.]

"See you later, buddy. I need some shut eye."

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A/N: *mumble mumble* Tony partakes in heresy. The Warp is inevitable *mumble mumble* *nod nod*...