Summer sat on the floor of her new living room, surrounded by piles of books and contemplating her netbook with deep concentration. Ordinarily, sorting books wouldn’t require so much effort, but the previous week had been exhausting.
First, there had been the whole-day ordeal of moving four cats eight blocks, one at a time. That had left her so wrung out even Loki noticed, and insisted on coddling her for the rest of the evening. Which was nice, no mistake, but unusual. She’d woken up sometime in the night in his bed with him wrapped around her, gently but inexorably.
The rest of her gear had taken a further three days to move — not because she actually had that much stuff (even though she did [/books/!]), but because she paid a moving company to pack it all up as well as move it. And there was only so much they could load into even the cargo elevator in the Tower at once, which took up even more time. She’d shoved some of it into storage (mostly furniture), which, again, made things take longer.
But now all her things were at the Tower, in the suite she’d claimed, and there was nothing left to do but unpack and find out how things would be different actually /living/ here. She’d spent most of the morning wrestling extra bookcases from the other suites for her library and shoving the furniture around to suit her.
“Jarvis, I want to ask you something. Does it bother you to be asked to carry messages, basically, between people around here? It seems a little … demeaning, somehow.” Summer’s tone was genuinely concerned, if also a little absent, and she turned over the paperback in her hands a couple times before setting it down on one of the stacks.
Jarvis had watched the moving in process with interest, though he had commented little, beyond the usual wondering if he could offer any assistance (it had disturbed the movers the first time and things were nearly dropped, and Jarvis had apologized for startling any of them, but his true contriteness had been mild at best).
The cats had all been added to the database, so as to make sure he didn’t refer to them by incorrect names in conversation, and he had made a note not to open the elevator onto the guest floor if Boris was the only one in it. The footage of Loki and Summer—the guest suites were under just as much surveillance as the penthouse—had been offered to Mr. Stark, who had tried to wave it off as no big deal, but Jarvis was familiar enough with Mr. Stark to know when his expression could be called ‘soppy.’
He had contemplated reminding Summer that there were enough interns that one or two could be spared to help move the book cases and furniture, before he decided that it was mildly amusing and he probably shouldn’t pull the interns away from their work without Mr. Stark’s permission.
And now he continued watching and listening, as he always did.
-If I were human and being forced to keep a phone to my ear or run about the tower, then it would, perhaps, be demeaning, or at least demanding. But given that I exist in every room simultaneously, it is more of a convenience.-
“Well, but is that convenience for you, or for them? Us? I guess I tend to think of you as people, and I wouldn’t ask someone to do that for me; I’d text or shout or get up and walk or something. It just seems rude.” Summer moved a few piles carefully to one side and another in no apparent order and started sorting a new box, scanning each bar code and comparing the result to the list on the screen.