Royce's Random Thoughts

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"Thanos' fleet has just entered Earth orbit," Shuri reported to her king and Captain Rogers, looking up from the console in her lab. She glanced over at Vision, who was laying back on the couch as the scan of the Mind Stone embedded in his forehead continued, his friend Wanda watching over him. "I'm not going to be able to remove that from his head before Thanos' forces land."

Rogers nodded reluctantly. "Then we'll have to go to Plan B then."

T'challa turned away from lab's windows, where he'd been staring out over the grassy plain that circled Wakanda's capitol. "I do not care for this plan, Captain Rogers. To send a single, ordinary man, to confront this mad Titan, is to send him to his death."

"He volunteered, and if it doesn't work, we can still put up a fight," Rogers said. "You put faith in your society's elders, don't you?"

T'challa nodded reluctantly. "In some things, yes."

"Then trust this one. If anyone can pull it off, he can."

( But will one man be able to stop him? )

Note: Set pre-Civil War, obviously.

“I need you on your best behavior, Rogers,” Tony said, tapping his fingers nervously on the steering wheel of his Audi R8, as they weaved their way through the mix of suburbs and light industrial buildings outside of Pittsburg. Unusually, for Tony, he was actually sticking to the speed limits and not revving his engine impatiently at the stoplights.

“On my best behavior, are you serious?” Steve asked.

“Yeah,” Tony replied. “Try not to be so smarmily superior, like you usually are. I want you to make a good impression.” Though it was hard to tell with Tony sometimes, Steve was pretty sure that statement, mocking as it was, was meant in deadly earnest.

“Wait, you are actually serious,” he said. “Who are we meeting, and why are they so important?”

( One of the few men Tony respects. )

Okay, the new MCU series Agent Carter confirms what was largely fanon before, the idea that Tony's JARVIS AI was based off his memories of the very human Jarvis the butler employed by Howard Stark. While there are other computers capable of understanding colloquial speech (most notably Fury's SUV in Winter Soldier), none of them seem capable of the snark, concern and capability of independent action that JARVIS possesses.

We also know thanks to Winter Soldier that by the 70's, SHIELD possessed the capability to digital scan a human brain and upload it to a computer mainframe farm (and presumably fit a on thumb drive with 21st century StarkTech). By that time the 30 or 40 year old flesh and blood Jarvis would be in his 60's or 70's and getting quite old by mid-20th century standards. And at that time Tony was entering his teens and being painfully ignored by Howard.

Combine teenage angst with perhaps an elderly man's desperation not to die, and Tony's ability to create a sentient AI in the first Iron Man film doesn't become so far-fetched.

In the same continuity where Steve Rogers was fighting a desperate battle with a revived HYDRA and trying to find a way to save the friend who was hell bent on killing him...

...half a galaxy away a cybernetically enhanced, gun toting RACCOON and his friend a walking, talking TREE were about to save the universe and just miss meeting SPOILER the SPOILER in the Collector's lab.

Marvel: "What's this "realism" you keep talking about?"