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Tony peeked out from behind a massive sheet of wood he was hauling by hand to a pile of processed pine lumber. The trees he'd harvested were cut to a variety of sizes, but still needed shaping and treatment.

"MSST get rid of woodworking yet?" Tony cracked a grin.

"No, we still have shop class," he says. "I was in it last semester."

Or at least the last semester he was at MSST, which was already two semesters of school in the past.

Peter shrugs off his backpack and sets it down to the ground, out of the way of their work. "What do you need me to do?"

Tony winked. Attaboy. "I tell you what I'm thinking, and then you tell me what you're thinking." Tony turned with the sheet, leaning it against the pile of lumber. "We construct a chassis out of the pine lumber and then cold-mold the body with plywood. It'll be lightweight, aerodynamic, thrifty, and most importantly, sexy."

"I've never cold-molded anything before, but I did watch something on YouTube awhile back about a bunch of guys who used it to make a boat, so..."

Making a car doesn't seem that completely un-doable.

Peter looks over at Tony. "You ever make something like this before?"

"Not a car." Why bother? He was never at a loss for metal. He'd had his flings with woodworking, but cold-molding was a first--he'd only ever watched friends at MIT construct with it. "Easy concept. Labor heavy. For applying resin to the veneer, ask your friends if they want in on it."

"The resin or the driving?" Peter asks.

Edited 2019-01-24 04:22 (UTC)

"Gotten your permit?" Tony sat back onto a log jutting out at waist height, crossing one ankle over the other.

"No," Peter admits, scratching the back of his leg with the foot of his other. "You did show me how to pilot an alien spaceship, though."

A beat.

"Sorta, we weren't really good at it."

They did crash into Titan, after all.

Tony's throat lurched, and he played it off as a cough. "No promises we get to do that again. Ahem. Anyway." He nodded for Peter to approach.

Peter approaches and sits down next to Tony. "It was fun," he says, smiling lightly. "Scary, but fun."

If Peter had the will to smile about something from the future, life couldn’t be all bad. He raised a hand, dropping it on Peters’s shoulder to give it a hearty squeeze. “I chose the structure. You choose the colors. Deal?”

"Deal," Peter says. "I already know what color I want, though."

Red, obviously.

"When it's done, are you gonna show me how to drive it?"

"When we're done, it's gonna be yours." Tony patted Peter's back, pushing up off the logs. "So, yes."

Peter's head swivels to face Tony and looks at him, unblinking.

"Really?"

Tony paused, realizing his mouth had gotten ahead of him. After a moment he simply shrugged, carrying on. “Yeah. Pretend to be surprised later.”

Embarrassed, Peter tries to suppress the smile that's quickly growing on his face, but instead he finds himself smiling harder. He looks down, rubs the side of his nose, and looks down, hoping his delight isn't too obvious.

"Well, we should probably get started."

In a few moments, armor was encasing Tony’s chest and arms and he was tossing a chunk of lumber the size of the Hulk’s forearm Peter’s way. “What types of wood you worked?”

"Plywood, cedar, and cypress," he says. "Basically whatever we had in shop class. I kinda spent a lot of time doing non-shop activities in shop classes, though."

Mostly stuff like trying to figure out what was going on with the glowy thingie. And building his web-shooters.

"We're spoiled for pine here." Tony nodded at the piece he tossed Peter--the reddish-brown heartwood of a Ponderosa Pine, bearing swirling grain. "Decent softwood. Doesn't split like hardwood, workable. Can easily fashion into more veneer."

It all did raise some interesting questions--did the natural resources replenish like the inn's resources? Those questions would get answered soon enough. Hitting some kind of ore vein somewhere would be priceless. 'Literally. Neverending mining would destabilize more than a few economies. Thank god for pocket dimensions.' "Hey, random thought but wanna do a geochemical analysis of the soil with me sometime, Pete?"

This idea was too precious not to follow up on.

Peter looks up from the piece of pine in his hands.

"Yeah," Peter says, nodding. "Sure, I'd love to." Sure, the nature of their relationship had changed a lot since Tony's arrival, but there was still a part of Peter who still was as eager to be around Tony as he was after his first mission with him in Berlin.

"The faster we strike a vein, the fast we explode this place with the full throttle of our collective genius." Tony's dark eyes were alight with possibility, his shoulder mounts popping up to carve the pine into thin sheets via laserwork. California wasn't starved for natural resources, and even just enough bauxite ore could open up a world of possibilities for building. All of Tony's manufacturing had come from scavenging, but he was only content with that for so long (which was not at all.)

Peter feels like he's two steps behind Tony, but it doesn't bother him as much as it might have when he felt a constant urge to impress him; as their relationship settled into something more comfortable, it seemed less important to him that he convince Tony that he was somehow worthy.

Besides, he's pretty sure now that most people feel like they're two steps behind Tony.

"What do you mean?"

"Catapulting this joint into the Industrial Age." Though he hadn't consciously willed it, his armor was now coating his hands once more, his fingers twitching anxiously as they caught strips of veneer. "The only part we can't manufacture out of wood is the engine. And the tires." Tony waved off any concerns with making either before Peter could even think it.

"California's a leader in mining. Gold, gypsum, iron, aluminum, oil--you know it's the sole producer of boron, to boot. You know what that means? Fuel, pyrex, neutron detecting." Tony was beginning to ramble, and quickly, out of pure excitement. He almost added nuclear reactor regulating, but he was getting far ahead of himself. That lab was close enough to taste.

"Yeah," Peter agrees. He assumed that they'd find those things the next time a portal opened... provided a portal did open and there were useful things there. It'd been over a half-year since the last time it opened. May? Or was it June?

"Have you ever mined before?" That wasn't exactly something they taught at Midtown.

"Sure haven't." Tony processed another few kilos of lumber, a third arm emerging from his back to catch and gather veneer as his hands laid it out on the table he'd dragged out.