(Chapter 30)(Some) Honesty is the Best Policy

I looked at Victor for a second and then focused on looking and seeming normal. I had to think fast on this one - What did he know, what might he know, and how could I tell enough truth to get him on side.

Alright, he had concluded I was a time traveler. That made sense, I had handed him the keys to time travel and said, "work it out." What was he supposed to think? But that also meant he must have deduced I didn't know how to time travel. He knew what day we had come back to, but not necessarily why. He might remember Obadiah Stane's death, so I might as well fess to that one right here.

What did I know about the future that it would be good to tell him? I decided to tell him as close to everything as possible. I didn't know what he knew, so it was better to look as forthright as possible in case he had cracked anything else.

"Well, for starters, almost all of the things in Tail Risks happen in the next ten years. Some of them happen multiple times. The great plague is a bit of an approximation of a different, much worse catastrophe, but there you are."

Victor stared at me, his eyes wide with horror. "Damn. And you came back to stop them?"

"Better to say I messed up." I said. "I didn't intend to come back in time at all." I hadn't asked to come to this mad, mad world anyway. "I got thrown back into my younger body after an accident. The rules of time travel are public knowledge in my future and I knew they'd used Pym Particles to achieve it."

"Pym Particles?"

"The Micron Particles, sorry. Hank Pym designed them originally."

"Are you planning on going back?"

"No" I said. "Did you get those measurements I asked for before you stowed the suits? I'll explain why."

"I got them after," he said, popping open the laptop and putting it on a crate in the storage unit.

I looked at it for a few minutes and pointed, "There we go." I tapped a sequence of numbers, "I can't get back to my home timeline because I don't have that. A sequence of numbers that identifies where we are in the quantum fields. I know it's more complicated than that," I said, before we had to have an advanced physics conversation about this. "But you get the idea."

"Right, so you're stuck in our timeline and you decide to help."

"Well, the timeline was already altered by my presence, so yeah. I still have no idea how powerful the butterfly effect is. Some things have been pretty successful," I said. "I handled the Gibborim long before your kids outed you and you got arrested. Some things I did worked but the consequences aren't right - In my timeline, Tony Stark saved and damned the world enough for three messiahs as the Iron Man. So I thought I was doing him a favor when I got rid of Stane. Now apparently that's mothballed and I still don't know why."

"How does Chase turn out?"

"He's an impressive engineer, he designs these gloves that fire force that are amazing when he's about seventeen - But he never really takes to schooling. He's a better man than you or I."

"That's not the highest of bars in my case," Victor said with a sigh. "But I'll take it. Tell me as much as you can about the future."

"Alright, but the first thing that you need to understand is that whatever happens, you'll be asking yourself, 'shouldn't the government have done something about it?' And unless I tell you otherwise, just assume it didn't."

"The government did nothing?"

"Well, for awhile there, there was an organization that addressed these sort of things but then we just gave up on it because of some internal corruption. Of course, immediately after that, a rare genetic mutation empowered hundreds with super powers."

"Okay, so we dissolved the let's call it extra-normal response organization immediately before the mass mutation event?" There was raw fury in his voice by this point. I mean, who could blame him? If you describe what actually happens in the Marvel movies, it's the ultimate embarrassment.

"That's, yeah, that's essentially what happened." I couldn't remember the Agent of SHIELD timeline, but I thought that was right.

"And the government didn't do anything during this?"

"Well, I think they tried to patch the SHIELD structure back together eventually. Lost track at some point."

"Why'd they dissolve?"

"Internal corruption."

"So we disarmed ourselves in the face of a hostile universe because… what, because of bribery?"

"More like some members worked for a terrorist organization,"

"Still doesn't make any sense. You fixed the terror cell yet?"

"It's ongoing. Andromeda's a member of SHIELD, so that helps."

I broke down the plots of each movie I could remember - Iron Man 1, 2, and 3.

"Good job with Vanko. You can't remember who the guy who developed the fireball regeneration recipe was?"

"It was restricted access information, so it was really more of a curiosity."

"They can regrow limbs and they just… let it go?"

I shrugged helplessly and left the Thor movies out - I hadn't watched Thor 2 and Ragnarok took place completely off. I included Captain America: Civil War but not Winter Soldier - The fights between Tony and Steve, the assassination of the king of Wakanda, Black Panther, the framing of Bucky. I was a bit fuzzy on the connective tissue and I told him so.

"So you're saying Wakanda is some kind of weird mix of throwback monarchism and hyper-tech Afrofuturist country?"

"I know how ridiculous that sounds but you have to believe me."

"Alright, so two dudes gather up their closest friends and just start beating the tar out of literally Earth's only line of defense over what amounts to a jurisdictional dispute?"

"Yeah."

"With heroes like these, who needs villains?"

I explained that it was actually Pym who I had feared breaking into my facility. Scott Lang still hadn't been arrested here and I didn't want to involve myself too much in his life just yet. There wasn't any point in including Peter - And whatever happened with the Sorcerer Supreme, she had said that she had lived many, many times and always came back to that balcony, so I figured that Strange would make his way to her eventually. Also the degree to which I did not want Strange to catch up with me was very high.

I went over what I knew of Kilgrave, Kingpin, and Cottonmouth as well as the Hand. "And then PRIDE of course, got caught out by your own kids, so good on them."

Finally I ticked through Avengers one and two.

"Okay, so Thor's brother, Loki, who is a god, comes back at this Thanos guys' behest? And then, the World Security Council tries to nuke New York? But, lucky New York, Iron Man, who no longer exists, saves them?"

"Right, you got it. Working on a replacement plan."

"And Thanos' is trying to get these Infinity Stones but he sends one with him?"

"Thanos' M.O. is really aggressive plays but carried out by his subordinates. He trains child soldiers, I'm not sure it's about what's the most sensible."

"Alright and then the Infinity Stone in this staff, the mind stone right, Tony Stark designs a robot with it that almost destroys the world. And then, for some inexplicable reason, his solution to this is to design a new robot with the same stone to save the world?"

"Listen. Tony was a hero but he was a mad scientist. Also, to his credit, it worked."

"Then Thanos came to collect the Stones to kill half of everyone?"

"Yeah, he did it too. The only country that put up a fight was Wakanda."

"And they fixed it only after five years?"

"Won't be nearly that long now that we've cracked time travel."

"So why, of every time we could have come to, did we come back to this time?"

"It's very early in my new timeline. Beyond that, two reasons," I said, leaving aside my guilt about Nicole and everything I had done. "One, I'm making powerful enemies in the home timeline and if it all goes south, I want to be able to bolt somewhere hospitable. I left some advice for avoiding those enemies here. Two, in case Thanos succeeds again, I'm certain this timeline would help us bail our timeline out." My secret fear, that we would need to sacrifice someone we truly loved for the Soul Stone, also meant that I wanted to optimize the number of times we (as in every timeline) had to do that to as low of a number as possible.

"Alright." He tapped his foot for a moment. "I'm in. We have to stop this stuff. Let's go home."

I counted that as a win for now.