Lea walked quietly for a while with him.

"So, that was a prototype armor you were working on earlier?"

"Not really a full armor," Tony replied. "More like an emergency one-shot kind of deal. Hell, I've been caught without a suit once or twice. Having a one-shot repulsor around wouldn't be a bad idea. And Pepper thinks it could be marketed as some kind of self-defense thing, which I really doubt, because my tech is mine and nobody else's and repulsors are part of my tech, but still."

"But you don't have to make it a repulsor," Lea pointed out. "If you wanted to market it as a self-defense thing, you'd actually be better off making it not repulsors. Make it either a watered down version of repulsors, or something closer to a Taser. A full-blown repulsor is fine for you, but not for the general populace." She paused for a moment. "And you might be able to get two or three shots out of your design."

"That's not the point," Tony said. "Marketing those would be like handing the suit over to the military, which isn't going to happen. And when did we start talking about this?"

"When I asked. You brought up what Miss Potts wants, I didn't ask about that." Lea shrugged. "So what is R&D coming up with for green energy? I haven't had a chance to take a look at those projects yet, but I know that's one of their priorities at the moment."

"Large-scale Arc reactor technology," Tony replied. "Not like my little miniatures, the real deal. Working out how to get them to run longer."

"I'd like to take a look at what they're working on when we get back, if I'm allowed." Lea raised her eyebrows at him.

"We'll see," Tony replied. Hey, it wasn't an outright yes. But it wasn't a no, either.

Lea knew better than to push and so simply nodded and moved on.

"Got any projects you need looked at? No, not your projects, projects for the company. I'm getting bored at SI, I don't have anymore projects to work on."

"I'm sure I can find you something," Tony replied, waving a hand.

"Unless you really want me fiddling with projects of my own." Lea grinned, looking over at him.

"Depends, will they explode? Because, really, I'm the only one allowed to make things explode, and even then Peps set limits on it, as if you could limit something like that, but still, me, only one allowed explosions." Tony grinned a bit.

Lea laughed a bit. "No explosions," she agreed. "Well, not unless I come up with some brilliant idea, but even then I'll try not to explode anything."

"Then knock yourself out," Tony said, shrugging. "Far be it from me to discourage science-y shit."

Lea snorted. "You mean since you and Bruce do science all the time?"

"Pretty much," Tony replied, grinning a bit. "Nothing wrong with science."

"I might need to borrow some textbooks. I haven't had a chance to study science much. Or, y'know, anything, really." Including programming and coding, but Lea didn't want to tell him that outright.

Tony blinked.

"You don't know science?" he asked. "How the hell did you ever pass school as a kid?"

"Oh I know all the basic stuff, just enough to get my high school diploma." Lea shrugged. "Between the four or five high schools we went to, anyway."

"Impressive number," Tony said. "I take it you didn't stay in one place much."

"No, not at all. Our mom made us move a lot. AIM wasn't as wide-spread then as it is now, so we still had to move about once a year. Not as frequently as recently, but frequently enough to make everything a big pain." Lea shrugged.

"Fun stuff," Tony said. He drank some more of his coffee.

"Oh yeah. Oodles of fun." Lea shook her head. "But she was a fantastic woman. You would have liked her, I think. She took no shit from anyone."

Tony grinned.

"Sounds like Pepper," he said.

"From what I've seen and heard of Miss Potts, yeah." Lea grinned briefly. "I'd really like to meet her sometime."