Shiller was sitting in the office of Arkham Sanitarium, scrolling through short videos on his phone when, with a bang, the door was pushed open and Peter rushed in.
"Doctor! Doctor! Quick, take a look at this!" Peter thrust his phone in front of Shiller's face and said, "What do you think about this giant balloon? It'd be super cool to have at the wedding!"
Shiller glanced at it and saw that it was one of those viral wedding videos on the short video app, featuring a huge balloon that could lift people off the ground with "Fly, My Love" written on it, and then the bride and groom slowly floated toward each other.
"I'm only sure that if you put this thing at your wedding, your Uncle Stark would kill you," Shiller said.
"Ah!" Peter let out an anguished scream, collapsing onto the nearby couch like a heap of mush.
"With all this time on your hands, you might as well go double-check the guest list again. Although you don't have many guests coming from your side, it would still be a hassle if you got it wrong," Shiller reminded, not knowing how many times he had already done so.
"I wish I hadn't joined in the excitement!" Peter slumped on the couch and said, "Gwen and I are both so nervous."
Shiller sighed. The whole situation had started with Stark's wedding.
Originally Stark's wedding invitations had been sent out, the date was set, and the ceremony was about to take place when Carter, Steve's girlfriend, got pregnant.
Normally, this wouldn't be a huge issue, except that Steve is quite traditional, and so are Carter's parents. They couldn't accept having a child out of wedlock, so Steve hurriedly began to prepare his own wedding with Carter.
Seeing this, Stark thought, since we're already having a wedding, why not join ours? After all, no matter what Steve did, he couldn't possibly outdo Stark's grandeur. Stark was confident that the wedding proceedings he had planned would create unforgettable memories for the bride.
After discussing with Carter, Steve felt that having a collective wedding wasn't a bad idea. On one hand, Stark had pretty much sorted out every aspect of the wedding, so they didn't need to worry about it. On the other hand, Steve didn't have many relatives, so it would look rather sad if too few people attended just their wedding; it seemed better to have a lively event with everyone together.
Steve agreed, which made Stark overjoyed because it was a validation of his wedding planning and romantic taste.
Stark was a mercurial man who thought two couples weren't enough. Noticing that Peter and Gwen were also getting married, he offhandedly suggested that they should hurry up and get married with them.
Peter was actually reluctant to join in, but Gwen did some calculations for him, and after seeing the long string of zeros associated with the cost of an independent wedding, he felt a joint wedding was a brilliant idea.
It's not that Peter and Gwen were without money; they were raking it in from their various patent royalties – but in New York, there's always someone richer. Their assets barely qualified them as middle-class compared to the magnates a few streets over.
Even though they weren't planning on having kids right now, if one day they wanted to provide their children with elite education, their current savings would fall short. Splurging on an expensive wedding would only make their finances tighter.
Neither of them were flashy; they managed their daily lives frugally and would prefer a simple wedding at a church followed by a small gathering with just a few close friends.
However, given their social status now, having no wedding at all wouldn't work. Their patented technologies needed investors, and even for the sake of attracting investment to their lab, the more lavish the event, the better. It was an important social occasion that couldn't be skimped on.
So, a collective wedding had many advantages: they wouldn't have to spend too much themselves, they could talk about their technology patents with the social elites attending the wedding, and promote their lab without hindering the gathering of family and friends.
More importantly, for Stark, face was everything. Not spending his money would be seen as an insult. And as someone led by emotion, he was thrilled by his good friends entrusting him with the task of arranging their lifetime event, which meant he had to make it even more spectacular than before.
The result was the wedding decoration needed readjustment, the date postponed, and the original invitations voided. Only after rearranging everything would they reissue the invites.
Even though it meant many adjustments, the main structure was already in place, and Stark figured a conservative estimate to postpone would be about a month, though Peter, assessing it realistically, thought it would take at least two months.
The original plan was for the wedding to be held on the West Coast, but Los Angeles was no longer sufficient for Stark's ambitions. He bought an island off the West Coast and transferred all the decorations there.
Only because he had countless Mechas and various mechanical equipment was such a move not too troublesome. If any ordinary person tried such a feat, it would take at least half a year.
While Stark was responsible for the main theme of the wedding, Peter and Steve also needed to finalize some details. The part that was driving Peter crazy was decorating the entrance walkway for the new couples.
To start with, Peter Parker was a science guy with a very minimal romantic side to his brain, or else, with his good looks and academic achievements, he would not have ended up bullied as a nerd at school.
Secondly, Gwen was also a science person; she might be slightly better than Peter, but only marginally, and since graduation, they had both been dealing with machines in the lab. Their daily conversations revolved around theories, experiments, and they had never experienced birthday flowers, candlelit dinners, or honeymoon trips.
Birds of a feather flock together; it was only by finding each other that this Sleeping Dragon and Rising Phoenix didn't drive anyone else insane.
Tasking such people with wedding decoration was undoubtedly the worst idea Stark had come up with in ten years.
These past few days, Shiller had seen one ridiculous proposal after another that Peter had found online. If any of these absurd ideas showed up at Stark's meticulously arranged wedding, Iron Man would punch Peter so hard he'd bury him underground with no way to dig him out.
But Peter really lacked imagination in this area, and he didn't have a clue about what kind of atmosphere should be set when the bride and groom made their entrance.
Shiller had put in a lot of effort, like guiding him to imagine the scene when he first met Gwen, imagining the moment he first revealed his true identity to Gwen, recalling their trip to Hollywood together.
The memories were all wonderful, but when it came down to reality, the scene was akin to an industrial exhibition.
Peter wriggled on the couch, humming and hawing until Shiller was so annoyed that he thought for a moment and said, "You can't solve this problem with me, you really need to find a professional."
"A professional? Is there anyone more professional than you?"
"I'm talking about wedding planners, or at least someone with a design background…" Shiller thought for a moment and said, "Didn't Eddie follow a whole season of wedding documentaries? He must know Tony's thoughts on wedding design, why don't you go ask him?"
Peter had an epiphany and sprang up from the couch, calling Eddie on his phone as he ran for the door.
"He still acts like a child." A familiar voice sounded in Shiller's ear, and he turned to see a wisp of gray mist.
"You're back now? Hungry again?"
"No." The gray mist churned and said, "I've got to come back for Tony Stark's wedding, you know. The chocolate he ordered is really tasty."
"That's true, if Venom is going, you have to go as well, or else all that expensive custom chocolate will just benefit him."
"Heh, that guy is a tasteless glutton, just shoves anything into his mouth," the gray mist said with a bit of disdain. Then he looked at Shiller's computer screen and said, "Are you looking at job postings? Is the sanatorium short on doctors?"
"You don't recruit doctors on this website." Shiller shook his head, put down his phone, looked back at his computer, and said, "Didn't I buy a farm? It needs staff, and though I'm not planning to live off farming, it still needs people for maintenance and the like."
The gray mist nodded sagely, then floated over to another side and said, "The phone's about to ring."
Shiller picked up the phone, and sure enough, it rang shortly afterward, with the cheerful voice of the Scarlet Witch Wanda on the other end.
"Doctor, have you heard? Tony Stark has invited me and Jarvis to have a wedding together!"
"You're doing it together?!" Shiller said in surprise, then he shook his head and added, "Tony's gotten a little too excited. A wedding for four couples means much more complex preparations. Is he ready to accommodate mutants?"
"That's exactly what I was about to talk about, Doctor. I don't really want to call Erik; could you ask him which mutants could come?"
"Alright, I'll give him a call later, but don't get your hopes up too high. Things aren't peaceful in the Andromeda Galaxy, so he'll probably need to leave a lot of people behind."
"Okay, I understand, thank you, Doctor."
After hanging up, Shiller sighed again. A wedding with three couples was manageable, but now with the addition of the Scarlet Witch and Jarvis, it would be a disservice to Stark's lavishness if nothing happened at the venue.
But as it turned out, Stark was more excited than he had imagined because before long, Matt's call also came in.
"You must have received Tony's call, right? Doctor, he insists on having me and Erica get married alongside everyone else; we've each already had a wedding…"
"There's no helping it, he's too excited right now and no one can talk him out of it." Shiller said, "Just hope you don't see Kingpin at the wedding."
"Of course, you can hear the headache in Matt's voice," he said. "That's why we didn't want to make a big fuss. Erica and I have no shortage of enemies; they are likely to cause trouble at the wedding."
"Is there anything I can help with?"
"It's not the adults I'm worried about, but there will be kids at the wedding. Security is paramount. If possible, could we meet at S.H.I.E.L.D. tomorrow to discuss it?"
"No problem, just give me a time."
Shiller and Matt agreed to meet at S.H.I.E.L.D. the following afternoon to discuss wedding security with Nick. It might seem a bit excessive to use S.H.I.E.L.D. as an escort for a wedding, but maybe Nick was just looking for an excuse for expense reimbursement.
And surely enough, a little later, Shiller received a call from Nick, who said decisively on the phone,
"S.H.I.E.L.D. must nab this big project, Doctor Schiller. The next two years' funding depends on it, do you have confidence?!"
"I'm very confident that you'll be on the receiving end of a punch from Tony!"