If Shiller had known Stark was all three‑minute enthusiasm plus a short fuse, he still wouldn't have expected him to be this impatient. They'd only talked about shooting a personal biopic a few days ago, and by today the whole project was already pieced together.
"Take a look at the script." Stark tossed two folders down in front of Shiller, then pulled out another two for himself. Flipping through them, he said, "Out of my generosity and mercy, I've decided to give you two a bit more screen time. See what you think."
Shiller's hand paused; he instinctively had a bad feeling, but he still picked up the script. After just a few glances, surprisingly, it was actually pretty good—put together like a real movie.
Then again, it made sense. Stark was willing to throw money around, so he'd obviously hired a famous producer, and producers had a lot of clout. They'd naturally look for the most suitable screenwriter and director. Turning out a decent‑looking script wasn't exactly shocking.
"How'd this get done so fast?" Shiller asked with some confusion. "No matter how you slice it, you can't crank out this much script in just a few days, right?"
"There's this thing in the world called the Time Management Bureau." Stark said smugly.
"Good Lord." Shiller sighed. "That's Nick's turf. How much did you pay him?"
"Not that much, maybe a third of one quarter's budget." Stark didn't care at all. "Oh, right, did I mention? Stark Group's business has already expanded into interstellar space. We've made a lot of Universal Coin, so tossing Nick a cut is no big deal."
Shiller raised a brow. He had heard about this, actually—Little Morgan had gone on and on about it. The main product was mining mecha: cheap, convenient, and solid in quality, and sales were pretty good.
But the real reason the market opened up was that the Three Great Empires had all been knocked flat. Their exports had tightened up, and the market was flooded with junk—either expensive, or useless, or both expensive and useless. Right at that moment, Stark Group rolled out something decent, so of course it became popular.
You could easily imagine Stark being among the first to get rich again. But this had little to do with Stark Group on Earth. Toss him into an interstellar junkyard and he'd still manage to cobble something together—it was simply the power of Wisdom.
After reading for a while, Shiller frowned. "Why is there so much about the youth period? Shouldn't the focus be on the final battle?"
"This film project is a trilogy." Stark explained. "The first one is mainly about my youth, the second is Stark Group, and the third is the final battle."
"That pacing is way too slow." Shiller said. "You're not making a TV series. If the first movie doesn't hook people, no one's going to bother with the rest."
"But I don't want to shoot that kind of fast‑paced popcorn flick." Stark said. "The kind that crams everything in just to grab eyeballs—like shoving dinosaurs going extinct and then resurrected in modern times all into one movie. That's just not it."
Shiller paused; he'd fallen into a bit of a mental rut again. Because what his friends were making now actually weren't Superhero movies, they didn't necessarily need plots about disaster, growth, and then a final showdown. They were making personal biopics.
Like Captain America—once it came out, it wasn't really a Superhero film at all; it was more like a war movie. So if Stark wanted to make a coming‑of‑age youth film, that wasn't out of the question.
"You've gotta have a romance subplot in this kind of movie." Shiller said. "How are you planning to handle that?"
"I can't." Stark said. "Honestly, I only became a Playboy after taking over Stark Group. When I was younger, I genuinely thought my Soul mate was the lab bench and the lathe."
"That's actually not bad." Shiller nodded. "A genius teenage scientist totally immersed in his experiments meets a like‑minded friend one day, and they begin a dangerous friendship."
Stark raised One Hand to stop him. "Let's set aside 'genius teenage scientist' and 'like‑minded' for a second—what do you mean 'dangerous'?"
"You don't think meeting us in college would've been a dangerous experience?" Shiller asked.
"Uh… what was dangerous about it?" Stark genuinely didn't know. "Oh, I get it. You guys weren't planning to drag me into skipping classes, were you? That's fine, I didn't like those classes anyway. The Professor never understood me…"
"Forget it. It's just a movie, write whatever you want." Shiller shook his head with a smile and set the script down.
Stark was itching with curiosity. "So what did actually happen in college? What were you guys doing?"
"Nothing much." Shiller said. "I think the script's pretty good, but you'd better run it by Steven. I think you wrote his temper as way too bad."
"No way. I even had the screenwriter tone it down. It was worse before." Stark said. "And all I did was give the screenwriter an honest Explanation of his temper."
"He wasn't that arrogant when he was young." Shiller sighed. "Did you forget? He came from a small town, and in medical school you don't get to do surgery right off the bat. Early on he was just a totally invisible nobody, and only after studying for a while did he start to stand out."
"There's actually that chapter too?" Stark's eyes started darting around—clearly up to no good. But that was exactly what Shiller wanted. Stark would definitely go crazy investigating Strange, and then he wouldn't be pestering Shiller with the script every day.
Strange was still busy with matters at the Magic Academy, he had no time to care what Stark was up to. And while he was in the dark about it, Stark had already dug up everything on him, especially his situation back in college.
He hadn't known before, but once he checked, it scared him. The younger Stephen Strange was a loner, an unpopular nerd who had almost no friends and wasn't valued by the Professors. Plus, in order to cover his living expenses in New York, he bounced around doing part-time jobs and had worked all kinds of gigs.
Stark and Strange are the same age, it's just that Strange is a few months older. However, Strange went to medical school, and in America you can't enter medical school directly—you need to first attend a regular college and then apply to medical school. By the time Strange got into medical school, he wasn't exactly young anymore.
Stark, on the other hand, is a rich man plus a super genius. He got a degree from a top university in his teens, and by the time he was in his twenties, he had already taken over the Stark Group and become a famous Playboy.
In other words, when Stark was on a yacht enjoying Dionysium and the company of supermodels, Strange was probably just finishing his homework and rushing to some fast-food place to work a shift; when he was dominating in front of the board of directors, Strange was standing behind all the other students, squeezing forward with all his might just to catch a glimpse of the Professor's operation.
This didn't make Stark feel any kind of pride; on the contrary, he was a bit panicked. Because he realized that this Supreme Magician who was always arguing with him about whether science or Magic was superior had started from a much, much lower baseline than he did. Even their backgrounds were already that far apart, not to mention that Strange had switched careers halfway through.
In other words, the time he'd had to study and delve into Magic might only be one-third of Stark's, yet he had already become a Supreme Magician who stood on equal footing with him. Did this mean that Strange's talent was better than his?
Once he started thinking about this kind of question, Stark's anxiety would inevitably flare up. It's not that he couldn't tolerate someone being more gifted than him, it's just that he couldn't help thinking: if Strange had gone to Kamar-Taj from the very beginning, and enjoyed all the resources of the Magic realm the way he did, wouldn't he now be way stronger than him? He would never be able to prove that science was superior to Magic, and then everyone on Earth would develop Magic instead. He might get expelled from Earth, or be arrested as a Heresy…
It sounds totally irrational, but that's how it is when anxiety hits—you just keep sliding down that slope. See one ant, and you feel like the entire house has been hollowed out; see a puddle on the ground, and you're convinced the whole city is about to be flooded.
So when Shiller finally freed up some time to go look for Stark, sure enough, he ran into him in the middle of an episode again. After giving Stark a round of Healing, Shiller was left utterly helpless.
"Tell me, is this really my fault, Tony? Is it my fault I always catch you at your most embarrassing moments? I was gone for what, a little over 30 hours, and you managed to anxiety yourself into being unable to leave your chair. What on earth happened?"
Stark's face was the color of boiled greens, and Shiller let out a long, deep sigh. "It has something to do with Steven, doesn't it?"
Stark still wanted to tough it out, but Shiller had already taken out his phone, ready to make a call. Stark slapped a hand over it. "No. Don't call him. I don't want him seeing me make a fool of myself."
"We're friends," Shiller said. "I mean the three of us. Don't drag those confrontations you cooked up in your fantasies into reality. Steven has never hurt you, Tony."
"How could he not have?" Stark said. "The candied fruit he brought me was sour as hell."
Shiller froze for a second, then said, "I thought you were going to bring up his father."
"Oh, God, that too." Stark immediately clutched his head in anguish again, and Shiller couldn't help but laugh in exasperation. Tony Stark was like something God created after getting drunk, running into a Ghost on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Ignoring his protest, Shiller still made the call. Strange hurried over, glanced at the two of them, and said, "What's going on? What happened?"
"Here's the thing, Tony wants to shoot a movie." Shiller still didn't tell the whole truth; he just said, "Originally he only needed the two of us for cameos, but then they kept adding scenes and now we might end up as supporting roles. Do you have time?"
"A movie?" Strange looked a bit surprised.
"Yeah, because the promo video the Stark Group shot before didn't do well, while 'Captain America' was a huge hit, so he wants to try making a solo film too, about his younger years."
"All right," Strange nodded. "Wait, no, what do his younger years have to do with the two of us? I didn't know him when I was young, did I?"
"Of course there's been some adaptation," Shiller said. "In short, he'll meet us during his youth, when we're still in college…"
Shiller handed the script to Strange. Strange skimmed through it, then thought for a moment and said, "I do have time, but you're not going to make me turn back into my younger self to act, are you?"
"Why not?" Shiller shrugged. "The audience must be dying to know what the Supreme Magician was like when he was young. They'll be stunned."
Strange's expression turned a little awkward. "The main issue is that we'll have to deal with the younger Tony Stark—a terrifying Playboy."
Shiller narrowed his eyes. "Sounds like you're not very fond of young Tony?"
"I never said that. Just let me know when shooting starts." Strange was obviously avoiding the topic; he tossed out that one line and then hurried off.