Tony/Jarvis quote a day keeps boredom away! #04

Continued from: tonyjarvis.deviantart.com/blog… (the first part of this post.) The post turned out to be quite long, so I decided to split it in two parts.

The quotes below are posted under the "fair use" rule of the copyright law. The sum of all the quotes does not exceed the limit of 10% of the book. The quotes are posted for the purpose of commenting on the particular aspects of the book and encouraging discussion and the creation of fan works.



Back to the action: Tony saves the pilot from the damaged F-22 and is convinced that this show of good will will get the second F-22 off his tail. And, actually, the second pilot and most of the soldiers in the Ballroom want to discontinue the chase, but General Allen firmlu orders the pilot to eliminate the bogey (much to Rhodey's panic, as he knows by now that Tony is Iron Man, but he can't do anything to stop General Allen).

Tony takes a heavy hit and drops off the radar, Rhodey nearly has a heart attack. Tony somehow makes it to the Dubai residence; he's so badly hurt that he can't even take off his Iron Man suit on his own. He tries to block the pain with alcohol when Pepper finds him and drags him home. Tony's very badly injured, but he refuses to be hospitalized and insists that he will treat himself. Doped on painkillers and hooked up to IV drip he has a talk with Rhodey. We also learn that Pepper is helluva pissed at Rhodey for letting that happen to Tony, which makes little sense to me as there was really nothing he could do. Rhodey had even considered telling Allen that Tony Stark is inside the suit they are chasing, but he realized that there was no way Allen would believe him anyway.

As soon as Tony can haul himself to a vertical position, he leaves for the workshop and continues working on his armour. Pepper finds him there and is angry. Tony asks her to go hack into the Stark Industries mainframe using the device we see in the movie. It is explained why he can't do it from his home - he wrote the security systems himself and made them so intrusion-proof that it would take him three weeks with no sleep to break through them. And he can't go himself because he sort of can't walk very well yet.
A nice addition is that when Tony yells "there's nothing but this!" he ends up pointing at Jarvis: "“There's nothing except this.”He pointed across the room and Pepper saw that Jarvis was machine-shopping replacement parts, or possibly a newly created armoured suit."

Pepper leaves for Tony's office, discovers Obadiah's video file, gets caught by Obie but manages to get away thanks to Agent Coulson. Obie makes a beeline for Tony's arc reactor.

---

Tony Stark, hard at work in his workshop, blinked in surprise when the power started to diminish unexpectedly.
"What gives, Jarvis?”
“You have a visitor, sir. Obadiah Stane is here.”
Tony moaned. This simply wasn’t something that he needed to deal with. And he wouldn't have had to if he’d bothered to update Jarvis as to the current situation with Obadiah Stane - namely that he was a lying scumbag that Tony didn’t want to have anything to do with. Then Jarvis could have taken steps to make certain Stane didn’t get into the house.
"Fine," said Tony after a few moments of mentally kicking himself. He tossed aside his tools and headed out, not even glancing at the digital readout on the phone indicating that Pepper had tried to get through. Stane was waiting in the living room for him and, shock of shocks, he had pizza with him.
“Peace offering? Or . .. . pizza offering, as the case may he.”
Tony simply stood there with arms folded, There was nothing that Stane could say to him that could possibly he of interest to him. Perhaps sensing that the time for conversation had long passed, Stane put down the pizza, walked across the room to Tony, and produced a letter sized envelope from his jacket pocket.
"I’d like you to proofread something for me.”
"Would you like me to spell check it, sir?” said Jarvis.  
Stane’s expression was pained. In a low voice, he said, "Can you turn him off? All the way?”
“Spin down, Jarvis," said Tony, who had already removed the letter from the envelope. He scanned it and the further he went, the higher his eyebrows arched. He looked up, surprised.
"Your resignation? “
Stane nodded and said, as if making a confession, "You were right. It’s not my company. Not my name on the building. We were a great team, but I guess this is where our paths diverge.”

---

Turning Jarvis off - never a good idea. I was really happy this scene was included in the novel, because its equivalent in the movie really bothered me. So Jarvis could intervene when Christine wanted to touch the control panel, but he couldn't even go "You are not authorized to remove Mr.Stark's heart" when Obie made his move? Of course, even in the movie the scene can be explained somehow (i.e. by Tony trusting Obie and giving him the ability to turn the monitoring off or something), but it's always better to have the plot hole closed in the canon. A bit earlier, when Tony was injured after Gulmira, Pepper is seen considering "ordering Jarvis to put the house into lockdown. He could do that; he had the capability. Every wing, every room could be sectioned off and made impervious to intruders. One word from her and Jarvis would see to it that a phalanx of Sherman tanks wouldn't get anywhere near Tony Stark."

And again, this is a mistake that Tony will learn from. In the next novel only two people (aside from Tony) will know about Jarvis: Rhodey and Pepper. To all the other people - even Nick Fury, who is Tony's ally - Jarvis. by Tony's request, acts like he was just an ordinary computer system. This way he can monitor Tony without people actually being aware that a sentient AI is listening to their every word, And if they are not aware, they obviously can't ask Tony to turn Jarvis off. Can I once again say just how much I love the characters that evolve and learn from their mistakes?
(Eventually Natasha, I think, learns something more about Jarvis, but she does so without Tony's knowledge and luckily she's on Tony's side, so it doesn't bite him in the backside. But I think that Tony might grow to be a bit more paranoid after IM2...)

The action continues, with the scene with Rhodey finding Tony in the lab being hilarious (buy the novel to read it!). One quote that I must include, though, is Rhodey's description of what truly made Iron Man Iron Man:
"In all his years in the army, of all the weapons he'd witnessed in action, Rhodey had never seen anything quite as terrifying as the sight before him now. And that wasn't even because of the powerful-looking armor that Tony was wearing. It was because of the fierce determination on Tony's face."

This Tony, this stubborn, fierce, determined Tony who just would not give up, no matter how much battering his body has taken, no matter how many times he's betrayed is the Tony I love and I missed him horribly in the second movie (I'm just happy that the second novel kept him in character).

But let us move on to the good stuff!

---

Tony hurtles through the air; wishing to hell that he had somehow managed to invent a matter transporter device so that he could just magically appear where he was needed.
Despite the speed with which he is moving, it’s like every passing second is a nail being hammered into Pepper’s coffin. Worse, he feels as if the armor is actually beginning to slow. He checks the HUD and discovers that he’s not imagining it; he’s lost about jive knots off his airspeed. He knows he’s not responsible for it.
“Jarvis, what the hell!  is no time to shift me into low gear! "
“‘Time’ is actually the consideration, sir. It is not something that you have in abundance, not with your earlier model generator in place. I am merely endeavoring to conserve energy. "
"All the conservation of energy isn’t going to mean a thing if I get there too late to help Pepper! "
"If you arrive deceased, you’ll hardly be in a position to help anyone.”
"Give me the velocity I need, Jarvis. Once I get there, I'll make it short and sweet and won’t come anywhere close to the generator's limits."
"That sounds akin to wishful thinking, sir,” Jarvis says, but the speed picks up nonetheless.
He hopes it is fast enough.

And this in one of my favourite scenes in the novel. Here we can see Jarvis acting out of his own initiative, without asking Tony for permission or informing him at all (Jarvis is probably very much aware that the moment Tony becomes aware of him limiting the speed, he will as Jarvis to pick up the speed again). I love Jarvis's verbosity thorough the scene - not only it fits his increasingly snarky personality, but also gives an air of "I'll speak as slowly and deliberately as it suits me, and the longer I speak the more I postpone the moment of acceleration."
I utterly love Jarvis's black humour-ish manner of warning Tony. And it only gets better.

Tony arrives at the scene and gets into a scuffle with Iron Monger. During the fight the huge arc generator is damaged and there is a risk that it will explode. This is actually the reason why Tony asks Pepper to cause a controlled explosion in the novel.

As Iron Man and Iron Monger fight, Tony's power levels begin to drop:

---

"Emergency power!"
"Sir," Jarvis's voice cautions. "You'll drain the -"
"Now!"
The Iron Monger is about to heave the car at him when the Repulsor rays surge from Tony's gauntlets and slam into Stane. (...)
The good news is that he cushions the impact with his body, so that no one in the car is hurt. The bad news is that he is pinned under the car.
The HUD informs him "Power Critical: Recharging."
Jarvis's voice sounds in his helmet. "How is the short and sweet strategy proceeding, sir?"
"Not now, Jarvis."
"At current power levels you may not have a later, sir."

---

OUCH.
Upon the first reading, this passage actually made me burst out in shocked laughter. Actually, scratch that, it still has that effect on me. This is such a total sucker punch line. It makes me totally adore Jarvis, because while he can be helpful, considerate, polite and sweet, if Tony gets himself into trouble all on his own, Jarvis will totally make sure that Tony is aware of the fact in the most imaginative way possible. Ironically, Jarvis is one of the few people (Nick Fury could be seen as another example, though in his case it comes fore from his age and experience, and his familiarity with Howard Stark) who just won't take shit from Tony. Tony's closest friends - Pepper, Rhodey and Happy - are often irritated by Tony's recklessness, carelessness and flippant attitude, but they do not confront him about it in a serious manner until it's too late. In result, Tony does not even realize how crooked his relationships with people are, not until all the amassed hurt and misunderstandings explode in the second novel.
Jarvis has no qualms reacting to Tony's occasional fits of stupidity - be it recklessness or trying to poke fun at Jarvis. The nice thing is, Jarvis never reacts in an aggressive manner, never says anything that would cause a rift between him and Tony. And Tony takes Jarvis's snarky commentary surprisingly well (for someone as egocentric and convinced of his own superiority as Tony). In the second novel he relies on Jarvis a lot, and often seeks out his help or opinion. One of the things that upset me somewhat in the second movie was the scene where Tony ignored Jarvis's warnings and put in the new RT without having it tested. In the novel he and Jarvis tested the new chestpiece many times before Tony actually had it installed (which showed that Tony managed to grow up a little and learn that recklessness often does not pay off).


Back to the action - things go along more or less the same way as in the movie, except, as I mentioned in the previous post, there's no "freezing problem" and Obie is knocked out by Rhodey in Tony's own car. One notable thing is that when Obie rips Tony's helmet off, Tony notes that "he has lost his HUD and Jarvis's advising him (...).

The final scene of Tony's and Obie's fight is extended, and ends in this lovely exchange:
"I guess this is a draw," says Stane. "The genie is out of the bottle. We've done our part. We've brought a great gift to the world and now it's time to go. That is the law of nature, Tony."
Then the roof gives way completely and Stane tumbles down, down into the bubbling purple miasma that is the Arc Reactor. He disappears into it.
There is no scream.
Tony, still paralyzed, watches him go. He waits to feel something - disgust, triumph, anger... anything.
Instead he feels nothing, even as the reactor that will save his heart reboots and comes back online.
"And that is the law of gravity," he says.



And that's it for the quote love fest from the first novel. Don't worry, this is not the end. There's still the second novel to squee over!