Schiller was currently atop Mountain Range No. 1 on Asgard's polar planet. He was using the Gray Mist to spit out supplies. Once he had finished unloading everything, he began wandering through the hollow carved out inside the mountain.
He had never gotten the chance to see the faster-than-light engine built in the Himalayan Mountains on Earth. This time, he could finally get a good look at it. Although the components had basically been manufactured and packaged on Earth before being shipped over, watching the installation process was still worthwhile.
Honestly, it was not nearly as flashy as Schiller had imagined. It looked like a giant furnace, and all those special metals had been painted a dull gray, utterly lacking in glamour. If no one had told him it was a faster-than-light engine, he would have thought it was a bathhouse boiler.
But Schiller knew very well that this was exactly how such equipment ought to look. All those fancy light strips were far too prone to malfunctioning, and maintaining them was a nightmare.
He had heard Stark complain countless times about the breathing lights on his Arc Reactor malfunctioning. Either they would not blink at all, or they would blink erratically. They needed repairs practically every week. Yet for the sake of appearance, Stark stubbornly refused to change them, even though the thing was embedded in his chest. Even when he accidentally burned his own flesh while repairing it and grimaced in pain, he still insisted on installing them. Iron Man was truly Iron Man.
After taking a full tour, looking over the familiar lettering and serial numbers, the red-and-blue waterproof tarps that reminded him of his childhood, and the super machines beneath them that completely clashed with the plain style, Schiller was contentedly preparing to return to the