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Entry tags:
Crossover Fic: Lecture Series, Marvel Movieverse/St. Trinian's, PG
Disclaimer: not mine
Rating: PG? Mostly G.
Length: 2000+
Fandoms: Marvel Movieverse, St. Trinian's.
Characters: Pepper Potts, Kelly Jones, Miss Fritton, various others
Notes: idek. I blame![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
havocthecat
Summary: Pepper Potts gives lectures, almost no one gets hurt.
Lecture Series
by ALC Punk!
Pepper takes the job lecturing for schoolgirls because she needs a break from the corporate world. Not a long break, she tells herself as she packs clothing for the trip, just a short sabbatical dealing with nothing more challenging than bright young women looking to enter the world she already owns. Then she'll be more than ready to return to the world of cut-throat competition and salaries through the roof.
It's something that will good on end-of-the-year taxes, as well as putting her face out there as an inspiration to young executives everywhere. The publicity is certainly better than the last time Tony hit the news, at least.
-=-
They send her to England for the last two weeks of the tour, and she speaks at three schools without trouble. The girls are well-mannered, some of the boys in the audience are boorish but ignorable, and the fees are excellent.
Her agent has trouble finding the fourth school, and the car gets a flat halfway up the drive. Pepper doesn't mind walking, but he does, especially when he ends up dangling from a tree by his ankles.
Leaving him there and taking a carefully defensive stance, Pepper makes it to the school without any mishaps of her own.
-=-
The girls are sharks. Pepper's used to sharks, but not when they're quite this young--still, she takes it in stride, leaning against the podium (covered in graffiti and apparently last used during the Nixon administration, if the political stickers right next to the non-working microphone are to be believed) and delivering her lecture without bothering to look at her notes.
It's a well-practiced lecture, geared to providing hope and guidance to young girls looking to enter the corporate world and take it by storm.
"Any questions?" Pepper asks, finishing up and looking over the gathered audience expectantly.
The last several schools had some routine questions she could answer in her sleep. She can feel her expectations shifting, though, as the girls seem to size her up. They're dressed in various versions of their school uniform, some flashing more leg than is advisable, some with neatly-tied bow-ties. Hair is a mess in at least half the cases, and smoothly dealt with in others. Two girls snapped gum loudly through-out her entire speech, and she's fairly certain that the group at the back never actually paid attention, more intent on the computers and tablets they were using than her.
"You do know that whole thing was rubbish?" This from a sneering sixteen-year-old. Her dark eyes are unimpressed, and her arms are crossed. "Corporate espionage, now--"
"Shut it, Taylor." The more smoothly-dressed Kelly Jones (introduced by the headmistress as the Head Girl, Pepper had heard the capitals) tipped her head as she looked up at Pepper. "How difficult is breaking the glass ceiling, Ms. Potts?"
"That's what heels are for." Pepper suspects she shouldn't be saying such a thing. "Steel-cored high heels are the best for the job."
"Like those?"
Pepper tips up one foot and studies the low heel she'd picked out to wear that morning. "No. They need to be closer to three inches--part of it's expectation, you understand."
"Can't you just blow it up?" One of the younger girls pipes up, looking disgruntled about the concept of high heels.
The twin sitting next to her nods emphatically, "Just a few applications of gelignite would do it--at strategic points."
"It's not that simple--" Pepper doesn't for a moment think the two little girls could possibly blow anything up. Then again, her initial assessment of St. Trinian's wasn't that they'd be docile. "The glass ceiling is more metaphorical than something you can smash."
"You can sleep your way to the top, of course," suggests one of the more dolled-up members of the audience. "Or is that not done anymore?"
Pepper shakes her head, "It never was--sleeping your way to the top is a male ego myth to tear us down and keep us happy at middle-management."
Several shouts from the audience at the idea that the male ego is useful erupt, and there's chaos for a minute or two before Kelly stands up and yells at them all. Then she turns back to Pepper. "How did you do it?"
"A great deal of hard work."
"And corporate espionage." This from one of the geeky-looking girls at the back, her gaze unassuming as she looks at Pepper over the rest of the audience. "Or what would be considered such if the SEC ever read deleted emails."
"Corporate espionage is hard work, Polly," objects one of the other girls near her. She pushes her glasses up and frowns. "And those deleted emails could be entirely innocent."
It wasn't the first time she'd been accused of corporate espionage. Pepper doubted it would be the last, given the environment she worked in. She raised her eyebrows, "Hard work, ladies. Corporate espionage only gets you so far." Not that she had actual experience with it, even if there had been times when she'd been tempted.
But she wasn't a secretary and personal assistant anymore, and there was no point in getting into that.
Kelly smiles up at her, and settles back in her chair, "Why don't you explain more of the corporate infrastructure to us, Ms. Potts. The day-to-day details that no one ever asks about."
"Most of that isn't very interesting," Pepper hedges, wondering why these girls would want to know something like that.
"Oh, I'm sure we'll find it fascinating."
Pepper wants to doubt the sincerity in Kelly's voice, but there's something avid in the faces of the girls around her. She wonders where her initial impression that these girls were sharks went, and then shrugs internally. "Where should I start?"
"At the beginning."
It's not a lecture, more a question and answer session, with each girl pushing Pepper for more and more boring details about corporate life. At some point, Pepper takes her shoes off and sits down on the edge of the stage, hands sketching the work-flow from Research & Development and into Promotion & Advertising.
By the time she's done, she feels wrung out--about the only thing she hasn't told this crowd of strangely curious girls is when bathroom breaks occur, and they could easily infer that from her answers to the breaks and lunches question.
"Have you ever had to blow someone up?" Tania and her twin are too adorable to be asking questions like that.
"I've thought about it." An admission no one ever has gotten from her, and Pepper considers slapping a hand over her mouth to stop more. "But no, I haven't. Killing people is rather frowned upon in the corporate world."
The two twins sigh in unison, looking as though they'd hoped for a different answer.
Before Pepper could collect herself and begin to worry, Kelly leans back in her chair and gives her a beautiful smile, "Thank you, Ms. Potts. I think you've covered most of our questions. Hasn't she, girls?"
A chorus of affirmatives and one or two wild cat-calls is the answer.
More used to being applauded, Pepper wonders if this is her cue to go and stands again. "You're welcome. I hope I've given you information you can use to structure your own goals in the future, girls."
Corporate double-talk, that, but Pepper's gotten used to it. And she's being fully sincere, she convinces herself as she surreptitiously checks them for traps before she steps back into her shoes. Her agent is still hanging from a tree by his ankles, after all. And if these girls are sharks, she'll put nothing past them.
Miss Fritton stops her with a hand on her arm before she can quite leave the room, "You'll stay to tea, surely, Ms. Potts?"
"Well, I should--"
"I won't hear a refusal," the strange woman says, over-riding Pepper's beginning protest more effectively than many a boardroom shark has.
Pepper revises her opinion a little: the girls aren't the only predators in the room. She pastes a polite smile on her face, "Well, all right. But could someone perhaps release my agent first? I'm sure he can't be comfortable out there."
"We'll send some First Years," says Kelly Jones, smiling at her before moving off to order her troops into action.
And before she quite realizes it, Pepper is sipping something that is very suspiciously not tea, and possibly not even recognized by most alcohol connoisseurs. And eating rather tasty scones slathered in what might be fresh-cream butter.
Better not to ask, she decides, as the alcohol begins to take effect.
"Ms. Potts?" asks a soft-voiced younger girl. Her voice has an adorable bit of a lisp, and Pepper thinks of how she's never really wanted children before.
"Yes, dear?" It's not condescension, she convinces herself, even if she feels a silly smile on her face.
"Have you ever staged a corporate takeover?"
The question sounds like something she shouldn't answer, and Pepper opens her mouth to deflect but finds that she can't. For some reason--perhaps the alcohol she hadn't meant to drink--she finds herself explaining the best way to under-cut another company and bring it to its knees.
After that question come more, dealing in cut-throat ideals and tax evasion.
Pepper blames the alcohol entirely, even if she doesn't remember much about the answers she gives.
-=-
Her agent is oddly subdued for the last two stops of the lecture tour, and Pepper doesn't ask him how he fared hanging from his tree nor why he seems to have lost all his hair. It doesn't seem the sort of question one asks, after all.
In her office again, attired in her normal high heels (the steel cores might metaphorically break glass ceilings, but they also cause everyone to under-estimate her, a useful tool even now), Pepper settles back at her desk. With a practiced ease, she begins reading through emails and memos, getting back into the swing of things.
"Ms. Potts?"
Distractedly, she waves her PA to a seat, "What is it, Jordan?"
The younger woman sets another stack of opened and sorted mail on her desk, and then coughs a little, "While you were gone, I'm afraid there was a little... mishap with the company stock."
Pepper's head comes up, her eyes focusing. She hadn't hired Jordan to put her ahead of the game, but because the other woman was very good at her job. If there was something she couldn't deal with... "What sort of mishap?"
While traveling, she had been forbidden to check into the company's day-to-day business, only being contacted for an emergency. Since no one had contacted her, this obviously wasn't an emergency. But it still didn't sound like a simple stock transaction.
"Several small corporations and individuals began buying up stock, and now their parent company--I had to do some back-tracing to find it--owns nearly forty percent of Stark Industries." Handing over the data pad she's been using, Jordan points to the relevant links.
Fritton LTD. through its many subsidiaries now owns over a third of Stark Industries. Pepper frowns, trying to place the name. When she does, her eyes widen and her mouth drops open slightly. "Oh my," she whispers, remembering a very long walk down a dusty drive with a limping agent, and cheering schoolgirls running around them, whooping.
"Will this be a problem, do you think?" Jordan was obviously prepared for the worst.
Pepper wasn't sure if the worst was warranted here, and yet she wasn't entirely sure about the probable outcomes. "Well, perhaps they'll simply keep us on our toes."
Looking unconvinced, Jordan accepts the pad back. "They, ma'am?"
"Nothing." Pepper waves a hand, not wanting to get into explanations about schoolgirls with booby-trapped drives.
Apparently that's more than enough for Jordan, as she lets the matter drop and asks, "Instructions, Ms. Potts?"
"I need to finish getting up-dated here. But pass me any more information you can find on these corporations." Pepper makes a mental note to look up some details on her own and then turns back to the work that's piled up on her desk since she left.
The six weeks off was a great vacation, but now she's ready for the worst the world can throw at her. Even if St. Trinian's is involved.
-f-
Rating: PG? Mostly G.
Length: 2000+
Fandoms: Marvel Movieverse, St. Trinian's.
Characters: Pepper Potts, Kelly Jones, Miss Fritton, various others
Notes: idek. I blame
havocthecatSummary: Pepper Potts gives lectures, almost no one gets hurt.
Lecture Series
by ALC Punk!
Pepper takes the job lecturing for schoolgirls because she needs a break from the corporate world. Not a long break, she tells herself as she packs clothing for the trip, just a short sabbatical dealing with nothing more challenging than bright young women looking to enter the world she already owns. Then she'll be more than ready to return to the world of cut-throat competition and salaries through the roof.
It's something that will good on end-of-the-year taxes, as well as putting her face out there as an inspiration to young executives everywhere. The publicity is certainly better than the last time Tony hit the news, at least.
-=-
They send her to England for the last two weeks of the tour, and she speaks at three schools without trouble. The girls are well-mannered, some of the boys in the audience are boorish but ignorable, and the fees are excellent.
Her agent has trouble finding the fourth school, and the car gets a flat halfway up the drive. Pepper doesn't mind walking, but he does, especially when he ends up dangling from a tree by his ankles.
Leaving him there and taking a carefully defensive stance, Pepper makes it to the school without any mishaps of her own.
-=-
The girls are sharks. Pepper's used to sharks, but not when they're quite this young--still, she takes it in stride, leaning against the podium (covered in graffiti and apparently last used during the Nixon administration, if the political stickers right next to the non-working microphone are to be believed) and delivering her lecture without bothering to look at her notes.
It's a well-practiced lecture, geared to providing hope and guidance to young girls looking to enter the corporate world and take it by storm.
"Any questions?" Pepper asks, finishing up and looking over the gathered audience expectantly.
The last several schools had some routine questions she could answer in her sleep. She can feel her expectations shifting, though, as the girls seem to size her up. They're dressed in various versions of their school uniform, some flashing more leg than is advisable, some with neatly-tied bow-ties. Hair is a mess in at least half the cases, and smoothly dealt with in others. Two girls snapped gum loudly through-out her entire speech, and she's fairly certain that the group at the back never actually paid attention, more intent on the computers and tablets they were using than her.
"You do know that whole thing was rubbish?" This from a sneering sixteen-year-old. Her dark eyes are unimpressed, and her arms are crossed. "Corporate espionage, now--"
"Shut it, Taylor." The more smoothly-dressed Kelly Jones (introduced by the headmistress as the Head Girl, Pepper had heard the capitals) tipped her head as she looked up at Pepper. "How difficult is breaking the glass ceiling, Ms. Potts?"
"That's what heels are for." Pepper suspects she shouldn't be saying such a thing. "Steel-cored high heels are the best for the job."
"Like those?"
Pepper tips up one foot and studies the low heel she'd picked out to wear that morning. "No. They need to be closer to three inches--part of it's expectation, you understand."
"Can't you just blow it up?" One of the younger girls pipes up, looking disgruntled about the concept of high heels.
The twin sitting next to her nods emphatically, "Just a few applications of gelignite would do it--at strategic points."
"It's not that simple--" Pepper doesn't for a moment think the two little girls could possibly blow anything up. Then again, her initial assessment of St. Trinian's wasn't that they'd be docile. "The glass ceiling is more metaphorical than something you can smash."
"You can sleep your way to the top, of course," suggests one of the more dolled-up members of the audience. "Or is that not done anymore?"
Pepper shakes her head, "It never was--sleeping your way to the top is a male ego myth to tear us down and keep us happy at middle-management."
Several shouts from the audience at the idea that the male ego is useful erupt, and there's chaos for a minute or two before Kelly stands up and yells at them all. Then she turns back to Pepper. "How did you do it?"
"A great deal of hard work."
"And corporate espionage." This from one of the geeky-looking girls at the back, her gaze unassuming as she looks at Pepper over the rest of the audience. "Or what would be considered such if the SEC ever read deleted emails."
"Corporate espionage is hard work, Polly," objects one of the other girls near her. She pushes her glasses up and frowns. "And those deleted emails could be entirely innocent."
It wasn't the first time she'd been accused of corporate espionage. Pepper doubted it would be the last, given the environment she worked in. She raised her eyebrows, "Hard work, ladies. Corporate espionage only gets you so far." Not that she had actual experience with it, even if there had been times when she'd been tempted.
But she wasn't a secretary and personal assistant anymore, and there was no point in getting into that.
Kelly smiles up at her, and settles back in her chair, "Why don't you explain more of the corporate infrastructure to us, Ms. Potts. The day-to-day details that no one ever asks about."
"Most of that isn't very interesting," Pepper hedges, wondering why these girls would want to know something like that.
"Oh, I'm sure we'll find it fascinating."
Pepper wants to doubt the sincerity in Kelly's voice, but there's something avid in the faces of the girls around her. She wonders where her initial impression that these girls were sharks went, and then shrugs internally. "Where should I start?"
"At the beginning."
It's not a lecture, more a question and answer session, with each girl pushing Pepper for more and more boring details about corporate life. At some point, Pepper takes her shoes off and sits down on the edge of the stage, hands sketching the work-flow from Research & Development and into Promotion & Advertising.
By the time she's done, she feels wrung out--about the only thing she hasn't told this crowd of strangely curious girls is when bathroom breaks occur, and they could easily infer that from her answers to the breaks and lunches question.
"Have you ever had to blow someone up?" Tania and her twin are too adorable to be asking questions like that.
"I've thought about it." An admission no one ever has gotten from her, and Pepper considers slapping a hand over her mouth to stop more. "But no, I haven't. Killing people is rather frowned upon in the corporate world."
The two twins sigh in unison, looking as though they'd hoped for a different answer.
Before Pepper could collect herself and begin to worry, Kelly leans back in her chair and gives her a beautiful smile, "Thank you, Ms. Potts. I think you've covered most of our questions. Hasn't she, girls?"
A chorus of affirmatives and one or two wild cat-calls is the answer.
More used to being applauded, Pepper wonders if this is her cue to go and stands again. "You're welcome. I hope I've given you information you can use to structure your own goals in the future, girls."
Corporate double-talk, that, but Pepper's gotten used to it. And she's being fully sincere, she convinces herself as she surreptitiously checks them for traps before she steps back into her shoes. Her agent is still hanging from a tree by his ankles, after all. And if these girls are sharks, she'll put nothing past them.
Miss Fritton stops her with a hand on her arm before she can quite leave the room, "You'll stay to tea, surely, Ms. Potts?"
"Well, I should--"
"I won't hear a refusal," the strange woman says, over-riding Pepper's beginning protest more effectively than many a boardroom shark has.
Pepper revises her opinion a little: the girls aren't the only predators in the room. She pastes a polite smile on her face, "Well, all right. But could someone perhaps release my agent first? I'm sure he can't be comfortable out there."
"We'll send some First Years," says Kelly Jones, smiling at her before moving off to order her troops into action.
And before she quite realizes it, Pepper is sipping something that is very suspiciously not tea, and possibly not even recognized by most alcohol connoisseurs. And eating rather tasty scones slathered in what might be fresh-cream butter.
Better not to ask, she decides, as the alcohol begins to take effect.
"Ms. Potts?" asks a soft-voiced younger girl. Her voice has an adorable bit of a lisp, and Pepper thinks of how she's never really wanted children before.
"Yes, dear?" It's not condescension, she convinces herself, even if she feels a silly smile on her face.
"Have you ever staged a corporate takeover?"
The question sounds like something she shouldn't answer, and Pepper opens her mouth to deflect but finds that she can't. For some reason--perhaps the alcohol she hadn't meant to drink--she finds herself explaining the best way to under-cut another company and bring it to its knees.
After that question come more, dealing in cut-throat ideals and tax evasion.
Pepper blames the alcohol entirely, even if she doesn't remember much about the answers she gives.
-=-
Her agent is oddly subdued for the last two stops of the lecture tour, and Pepper doesn't ask him how he fared hanging from his tree nor why he seems to have lost all his hair. It doesn't seem the sort of question one asks, after all.
In her office again, attired in her normal high heels (the steel cores might metaphorically break glass ceilings, but they also cause everyone to under-estimate her, a useful tool even now), Pepper settles back at her desk. With a practiced ease, she begins reading through emails and memos, getting back into the swing of things.
"Ms. Potts?"
Distractedly, she waves her PA to a seat, "What is it, Jordan?"
The younger woman sets another stack of opened and sorted mail on her desk, and then coughs a little, "While you were gone, I'm afraid there was a little... mishap with the company stock."
Pepper's head comes up, her eyes focusing. She hadn't hired Jordan to put her ahead of the game, but because the other woman was very good at her job. If there was something she couldn't deal with... "What sort of mishap?"
While traveling, she had been forbidden to check into the company's day-to-day business, only being contacted for an emergency. Since no one had contacted her, this obviously wasn't an emergency. But it still didn't sound like a simple stock transaction.
"Several small corporations and individuals began buying up stock, and now their parent company--I had to do some back-tracing to find it--owns nearly forty percent of Stark Industries." Handing over the data pad she's been using, Jordan points to the relevant links.
Fritton LTD. through its many subsidiaries now owns over a third of Stark Industries. Pepper frowns, trying to place the name. When she does, her eyes widen and her mouth drops open slightly. "Oh my," she whispers, remembering a very long walk down a dusty drive with a limping agent, and cheering schoolgirls running around them, whooping.
"Will this be a problem, do you think?" Jordan was obviously prepared for the worst.
Pepper wasn't sure if the worst was warranted here, and yet she wasn't entirely sure about the probable outcomes. "Well, perhaps they'll simply keep us on our toes."
Looking unconvinced, Jordan accepts the pad back. "They, ma'am?"
"Nothing." Pepper waves a hand, not wanting to get into explanations about schoolgirls with booby-trapped drives.
Apparently that's more than enough for Jordan, as she lets the matter drop and asks, "Instructions, Ms. Potts?"
"I need to finish getting up-dated here. But pass me any more information you can find on these corporations." Pepper makes a mental note to look up some details on her own and then turns back to the work that's piled up on her desk since she left.
The six weeks off was a great vacation, but now she's ready for the worst the world can throw at her. Even if St. Trinian's is involved.
-f-
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