Post by HoM on May 12, 2019 8:08:48 GMT -5
Tony Stark has gone through a lot in his life, but the one thing he's always tried to do, is better himself. Well, after a life changing accident, billions of dollars, and a few years cooped away in his workshop, that's not changed. Tony Stark is about to return to the world, and he doesn't intend to return alone...
Invincible Iron Man
Issue One: "Human Plus; Part One: Mr Self Destruct"
Written by Charles HoM with thanks to DrDread
Cover by Craig Cermak
Edited by Brian Burchette
Thin fingers played across circuit boards, wiring, fiddling and changing configurations slowly, and with much thought. He was surrounded by machinery, soldering irons and strange machinery constructed by hand, from the base up. Everything in the workshop was made by him. He didn’t trust anyone else. His fingers slipped, catching a wire and pulling it out of place, and he cursed and spat and he kicked the worktop he was working at. He climbed out of his seat, and stumbled across the room, back to another worktop, with another similarly ruined piece of machinery sitting there waiting to be continued. He climbed back into his seat, grabbed a soldering iron, and continued to work on it. He mumbled things to himself: equations, poems, songs, little snippets of conversations he had once heard and couldn’t help but remember, but he concentrated on these pieces of metal before him, his thin fingers playing across circuit boards and wiring. Tony Stark murmured to himself, lost in thought.
Despite his name sake, ‘Happy’ Hogan was not a cheerful man right now. He had been in charge of Stark Industries for a couple of years now, and he had been able to keep them afloat, but without Tony there by his side, every day had become a chore. The board had begrudgingly accepted his position as acting-CEO, as Stark had complete trust in him, but they couldn’t help but think that they were following the directions of an idiot; given Hogan’s past career as a pugilist.
“You’re doing well, Hap,” reassured Pepper Potts, his long-time fiancée. She had been there with him every step of the way, and that reassured him some what. They were in a limo heading back to their apartment situated near Columbus Circle. Traffic was bad, as usual, and Happy, as usual, doubted himself.
“Oh come on Pep, we both know the only reason I’m sitting at the head of the company desk is because Tone implanted an intelligence chip in my head with all his savvy. Stark Industries ain’t nothing without him in charge. We’re stagnating, especially since Tone explicitly said he don’t want us accepting any more weapons contracts. That was our biggest area of revenue, and now we’re settling for what? The scraps. I swear we’re losing billions from nothing, but losing billions from billions when you’re stagnating… Accounting says everything is on the up and up, but jus’ look at our--”
Pepper kissed him softly on the lips, withdrew slowly, and then smiled. “We’ll head to the coast this weekend and check up on him, ok? We’ll see if we can’t coax him back. I know I wouldn’t mind having my fiancée all to myself for longer than the few hours between meetings.” She winked, and then took out her PDA. “You and the board have a meeting with Justin Hammer’s people to discuss the joint venture our companies will be undertaking tonight, and then tomorrow is now--” She pressed a button on her PDA, “Clear for us to head to the coast. I’ll order Quinjet Zero to be fuelled up and ready at JFK tomorrow, alright?”
“Thanks Pep,” smiled Happy sheepishly, scratching the back of his head. “Thanks a lot.”
“My pleasure, honey,” smiled Pepper.
Tony Stark jerked up in the darkness, clambered out of bed, and stumbled across the room. He barely made two steps across the cold wooden floor before he keeled over and hit the deck hard. He clutched his chest, and writhed around, eventually ending up on his back, the pain shooting through his limbs and down his nerves. “Aahh! Oh God, oh, God, my… Oh, Jesus Christ, what’s… happened…?” His hands dabbed his chest, and they found a dirty bandage that covered his chest. It was wet with blood.
“Mr Stark, you currently have a shard of your own munitions grinding its way through bone and muscle and into your heart. That is my prognosis.”
Tony looked up, his eyes frantically searching for whoever just spoke. It was an elderly man; his voice was solemn and calm. “Who, who the… Argh, Jesus…”
“I am Doctor Ho Yinsen. We have met before. You are dying. We are in enemy territory; held captive by terrorists. But this is not then. This is a dream. Wake up.”
“Whaaa--” The room contorted and twisted, and then suddenly he blinked, and he was back in the workshop. “--tt?” Waking fever dream. Not good. The machines must be eating into memory tissue, the hippocampus spewing memories like a nightmare through his mind’s eye. He looked over to a computer that was situated across the room. He left his second workbench and headed over to it. He began typing manically. “Reprogram. Divert… Away. For now…” He watched as a syringe filled with blue liquid beside the computer, and then took it from its receptacle, and looked at his arm, track marks up and around his forearm. He stabbed the needle deep into his flesh, and plunged the liquid into his veins, and he let out a quite yelp as the contents of the vial went to work.
“Stark,” barked the man, as he walked toward the dishevelled inventor, working away at his work bench. Tony couldn’t remember how he ended back at his stool, but his soldering iron was hot, and he working again. That was something. The man behind him removed the cigar from his mouth, and then continued, same barking tone, same anger at the edges of his voice. “You listening to me, Stark?”
“Go away, busy, working, leave,” mumbled the man, his fingers red and raw from working. His long black hair was dirty and greasy, his beard long and unkempt, flecks of white hair present around his temples and chin. He wore goggles with red lenses, and his white tank top was covered in holes made from rogue sparks. “Work.”
“Damn, Stark,” grunted the man, as he placed a hand on the busy worker’s shoulder, “you’re gone.”
“Work!” shouted the man, as he flinched back. He looked around, and there was no one there. “Work. Finish this-- HUIRRHHK--” He clutched his chest suddenly, awkwardly, a grey metal cylinder visible through his tank top and seemingly melded with part of his chest. Flesh and metal intertwined. He clutches it, cries out for a moment, blue lights flashing in sequence around the edge of the cylinder, and then stares at the work in front of him. “God… Damn…” He looked over to the massive black doors that were on the far side of the workshop, and grit his teeth. “Come on, you son of a bitch, come on.”
I can’t do this Pep, cancel the meeting with Hammer’s goons, we’re going up now. We can get to the coast in a couple of hours in the Quinjet.” Hogan removed his tie and jacket, and threw them onto his sofa. He looked at Pepper, who had a look of shock on her face. “I know this is a bad business decision, but the chip in my head doesn’t make me a floozy for this company, it makes me know what’s best, and right now, I don’t need a chip to say go see Tony. We’re going to see Tony.”
Pepper looked at him, and her expression changed from shock to relief. “Took you long enough. The jet is fuelled; I was just waiting for you to get all the postulating out of your system. The limo did a lap of the block and is waiting outside. Let’s go.”
“I love you, Pepper Potts,” Harry ‘Happy’ Hogan grinned, as he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“And I love you, Happy,” she kissed him back, and then giggled. “Get your coat; we’ll be there in a few hours if you don’t get distracted.”
Happy chuckled. “With you here, I can’t help myself.”
“The boss says he has technology delivered here that makes no sense. And that, to the boss, means that Tony Stark is making weapons. And that his whole little complex is one big weapons lab waiting for some opportunistic so-and-so’s to come in and make a little mess and bring out some of the good stuff.”
The man took a large, deadly looking device from his back, and flicked a switch on the side of it. There were four of them, wearing identical purple and black armour, though the one talking had a large black panel across his own chest, as if to signify his authority over the rest of his team. Their faces were obscured, though their lower jaws were uncovered, though just visible under the seam of the edges visible was a clear plastic mask, ready to cover the users face in case of gas attack. They were standing near the coast side of Tony Stark’s coastal hide away, and ready for business. He aimed the weapon at the wall, and grinned.
“Alright, this little bad boy is going to take the molecules of the wall out of synch with each other, and we can walk right on through. Easy enough. Just walk in a straight line, and keep your eye on the prize. You don’t know what he’s got roaming the halls, alright?”
“Yes, sir!”
The man grinned. “Green light. Go.” He activated his weapon, and the wall began to shimmer. They ran through, weapons at the ready.
The monitors revealed all that was transpiring outside of his workshop. He hadn’t slept in days. He’d been so busy, so frantic to get his work done, that the only time he slept was for twenty three minutes, and then he was back on the caffeine, working away, his mind awash with ideas and activity. He couldn’t trust his eyes. He wasn’t sure anything was real but the tools he held in his hands, and the things he worked on. His computer whistled under the pressure, and scans verified the fact that there were people making their way toward his sanctuary.
“Progress,” he hissed at his computer, as it began to work over time. He took a pair of scissors from a work bench, and began to cut at his beard, the long hair flittering to the ground as he did so. He then pulled the rest of his hair in a ponytail, and cut that off too. He didn’t look good, but he was getting there.
The computer buzzed alive, giving him the much needed answers he wanted. <<Nano-composite complete>>
“The coolant?”
<<Cooling process complete>>
“Ok, ok, good, let’s get moving with the final stage.” He pulled off his tank top, revealing the machine built directly into his chest to keep him alive. “Power cells have been failing for too long, need an outside source to get it kick started again, begin release.” He looked at his arms, and then began to peel off a layer of fake epidermis. Beneath this layer of skin was another layer of flesh, and gold plugs that lead directly into his body. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing he had done to himself, but it was a necessary pain. “Come on, let’s get going with this.”
He walked toward the black doors at the end of his workshop, and they opened without a touch or a word. He shuddered, a cold wind sweeping past him as they creaked open on automatic, and then stepped inside. He didn’t say a word, and then removed his trousers, and opened his arms wide. Wires began to run down from the ceiling, and he plugged them into the holes in his arms. “God. Damn.”
<<Nano-sheath process ready: Continue?>>
Tony tensed his muscles, his insides were already churning; readying himself from the eventual pain of what would come next. “God damn, son of a bitch, DO IT!”
The machine began to work. Tony Stark began to scream.
“What the hell was that?!” One of the team members gasped, the noise of Tony Stark’s screams sounding foreign and alien as they travelled through the air vents and were distributed above the interlopers heads.
“What?” inquired the leader of the squad, his weapon ready. The group was twitchy. “What do you mean?”
The other man was frantic. “You hear that, that noise?!”
“Keep your head in the game, man; keep your head in the game.”
The man didn’t shut up. He kept rambling, in a panic. “It’s like he’s torturing someone, somewhere in the complex! Jesus H--”
The team leader’s weapon discharged silently. The panicking man fell down hard; his head no longer anywhere near his shoulders. “We keep moving. To the workshop.”
Justin Hammer paced the room. He was angry. Brimming with anger; overflowing with anger. “That retarded little son of a bitch!” He slammed his fist into his desk. “He dares cancel on me? He’s lucky I don’t have him killed.”
His secretary entered the office, and saw her boss in his current state. She back tracked, and then knocked on the door tentatively. “Sir?”
“What?”
“You ordered the satellites to track Mr Hogan? He boarded the Stark Enterprises private yet and is headed to Tony Stark’s last known location, his coastal retreat?”
“The coastal retreat?” Hammer’s eyes open wide. “Ah. That could be interesting.” He smiled and then nodded at the woman who brought him this information. “Thank you, Laura.”
“I’m Claire,” corrected the secretary without thinking. She bit her lip as her name left her mouth.
Justin Hammer smiled and nodded again, just as before, comfortingly, understandingly, and then spat: “I really don’t give a damn, leave.”
The entry to his office closed, and a man stepped out from a secret door near the window. The door opened, and a shimmering blue wall, like a vertical sea of water, was visible. A man stepped through this weird division, and shook his head. “Sir.” He wore a blue exo-skeleton, his face was horrifically scarred, and his teeth cracked messes. As he spoke, he spat, and he walked toward Hammer with intent. “Don’t you think it best to call off the Shimmer Men?”
“Professor Sandhurst,” started Hammer, as he returned to his desk, “If Hogan is caught in our agents corporate raid of Stark’s property, caught, as in killed dead, then that is just an awful shame.” His lips formed a thin smile, his skin thin and wrinkled. “Yes, I would have preferred to bring him under our control with those nifty little devices you have created, but if he dies, well, it’ll be easier to take control of the board of directors and buy Stark Enterprises out from underneath them.”
Sandhurst grinned. His crooked teeth made it look more like a snarl than a smile, but Hammer understood. “I look forward to using my slave-discs on them.”
“Me too,” nodded Hammer. “Yes, it’s a shame we couldn’t get Hogan today, and if the Shimmer Men fail, we’ll try again some other time.” He looked around. “I have a meeting with Roxxon now, you know what that means. Head back to the lab through the tesseract veil, and we’ll talk later.”
“Here.” Sandhurst paused for a minute, and then pressed a button on his gauntlet, and a small circular device rose out of his armour. He took this between his fingers, and placed it softly on Hammer’s desk. He then turned around, his costume roaring as his exo-skeleton powered back up, and he vanished through the door in the wall, the blue wall enveloping as he passed through it. Hammer looked at it, and then grinned.
Claire knocked on the door of his office, and Hammer cleared his throat. “Yes?”
She entered, and smiled. “Sir, Hugh Jones is here to see you.”
“Lead him in, Claire, lead him in.” Hammer smiled his thin lips, and palmed the device. “I’ll see you soon, Hogan,” he whispered to himself.
“The screams came from in there... the ambient audio scanners tell us that much,” noted one of the three armoured men working their way toward Tony Stark’s inner sanctum. “But the broad spectrum sensors can’t penetrate the walls--”
The team leader pointed to the long stick thin device on one of his men’s backs. “Can we use the molecular destabilser on them?”
“Too dense,” stated the other squad member. “That’s got to be some kind of adamantium weave, I don’t know, we’re not getting through that with this thing.”
“Alright, then get to work with the explosives around the blast door. We’ll see if we can’t talk this out.” He cleared his throat, and found the vent that lead into the workshop. “Stark, we know you’re in there! We want your technology, it’s as clichéd as that! You come on out, hands out and open, and we won’t cripple you.” His fingers were crossed.
There was no reply. Stark was busy. His body was smoking. Thin wisps of smoke rising out of his pores as his body somehow overheated and cooled at the same time. A thin gold sheath of protective layering was forming as this smoke dissipated. He knew that the friction of metal on his bare flesh would eventually skin him alive, and he had through that through. The sheath became his skin. He looked over to his work table, and then smiled. It was all coming together. His sheath had contact points all over it. The armour wound plug into his nervous system. He concentrated, and another chamber of his workshop popped open. There it was. He smiled. He actually smiled. No stray thoughts, no crazy things popping into his head. He was happy. The armour hissed as it came out of the coolant lock. He opened his arms, his body covered in the golden under sheath, and then the armour… Stepped forward. The front panelling opened up, and Tony turned, and stepped up on the tips of his toes as the armour stepped into him, and then with another hiss, and the whining of newly born joints and connections, it sealed up, him inside.
“No reply, sir, do we trigger the explosives?”
The leader nodded. “Do it.”
The armour roared alive as the men triggered the explosives around the blast door that lead inside. Liquid semtex had been poured into the lock, the hinges, and caused the door to simply fall forward. The three men stormed inside, their weapons raised.
“Holy mother of God.”
“Servos working.” Tony was speaking to no one but himself, making notes on his armour out loud for himself (and internal recorders) to hear. He had yet to open up the speaker so those outside could her him. Iron Man threw one of the men across the room before he could blink. Tony Stark smiled within the armour. It was like a second skin. Like he could manipulate the armour’s movement as if he were wearing a shirt.
“Fire your bastard weapons!” Energy rifles discharged and struck Iron Man on the chest. He stumbled back, more out of surprise than anything.
“Energy absorbers working too. Great. Rerouting extra charge to magnetic projectors.” He opened up his hand, servos whirring, and a ball of blue energy flew out of his palm and struck one of the men on his chest, and he suddenly flew across the room, and collided with the wall. He didn’t move off it. The squad leader turned, and looked at his two teammates, beaten already. “Anti-magnetic plating was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Iron Man.” Tony grinned. Then he realised no one else could hear him. He turned on the speakers with a thought. Everything ran on a whole new, near telepathic level.
<I’m Mister Starks’ bodyguard. You can call me ‘Iron Man’; when you wake up.>
“Sonofa--” The man swung round the molecular destabilser and Iron Man was already two steps ahead of him.
He grabbed the long metal pole and spun it around, aiming it squarely at the squad leader’s head. He had his finger tight on the trigger, ready to fire. He stared at his reflection in Iron Man’s golden mask. <Pull that trigger and you may very well turn your skull into nothing but a cloud of molecules and your blood and muscle and brain will simply fall past your jaw line and rest comfortably in your neck. That will result in a very painful death. I promise you. I’m not threatening you, I’m not saying that will happen, but you’ve broken into this workshop, you’ve been the one who threatened my boss, and let me tell you, he doesn’t take very kindly to things like that. So if you’re feeling lucky, pull that trigger. You might catch my faceplate in the blast. But what’s that going to do?>
“You… You…”
<I’ll tell you what, mister. Nothing.> “This only works on inorganic material and non Stark origin metals, idiot. I should know because I…” Iron Man used the hesitation to his advantage. He crushed the rod, snapping it in two, separating the trigger from the barrel. Iron Man analysed the schematics of the technology with a glance, x-ray lasers making 3-d diagrams in his minds eye and being stored in the extra memory space he had been building in his brain. “My God.” He then proceeded to pick up the man. <Where’d you get this technology?>
“S-screw you man!”
Iron Man looked at him for a moment. <This is Stark Industries technology.> “I built this. I built this and put it in cold storage before I left. This is R&D trash… What the hell is going on here?” <Tony Stark designed this himself. Where’d you get this?>
The man spat at Iron Man’s face plate. Tony mumbled something to himself. He then raised his palm to the man’s face. <Goodnight.> “Low frequency.”
A repulsor beam shot out, and fired the man across the room and into the wall. He landed unconscious next to his team mate who was stuck to the wall, and near the knocked out third member.
Tony nodded slowly, and looked at his hands. His armour shone, even in the dim light of the workshop. “I need to get back.”
“Tony?” Pepper Potts and Harry Hogan wandered through the residential floors of the coastal retreat. The waves crashed on the cliffs outside, and they could hear the water fall back upon itself, and smell the salt in the air. “Tony, you there?” there was a certain twang of fear in Pepper’s voice. There was so much dust on everything. No one had lived here. No one could. “Happy, I think you should call--”
“What the hell?” Happy opened a door, and found three men, tied, gagged, and in their underwear, on the ground, unconscious. On the other side of the room sat three suits of armour, one cracked in the chest plate, one with a dented mask, and another that looked relatively unharmed. “What the hell is going on?”
“I wouldn’t bother with the police, Pepper. They’re already on their way, and they take their sweet time coming to the coast.” Tony Stark smiled, as he walked toward them, wearing a pair of black jeans and an open white dress shirt. Beneath that was a vest, and Hogan and Potts saw the familiar sight of the device that kept him alive buzzing away on his chest. “It’s been a long time.”
Happy grinned, then took his friends hand and shook it vigorously. “What’s happened, Tone? What’s up with those guys?”
“Let’s take this out of here. Give those burglars some privacy.” Tony winked and closed the door behind Pepper and Happy as they left the room. “I need to show you something.”
“What is it Pepper? Are you ok? You’re sweating? And your hair… Your beard…”
Tony waved his hand at her, dismissing her concerns. “I’ll shave later. Something big happened today. A major break-through.”
“With what?”
“Remember the stories I told you about my time in Iraq?”
“How you built a suit of armour based on all your dreams to escape, I remember them, yeah,” nodded Harry. “We’ve got the suit sitting in Stark Enterprises reception area. What of it?”
“Happy, I have spent my life building machines. I could build a computer in a week, from the circuit boards up, in a god damn week, and you know what I’ve spent the last few years doing? Building more armour. I started big, like the big, bastard machine that got me out of that terrorist camp and failed to save Yinsen. Great big suits of armour, big enough to protect me from the world; because you know what? I’m scared. I’m scared of getting hurt, I’m scared of dying, and in Iraq, in the Gulf, and I nearly died. Had a piece of metal get jammed in my chest so tight that if it comes out I will die in seconds… seconds. So I built a machine directly into my chest to make sure nothing nudges it in the wrong direction. Blood and wire all mixing together in my sternum, made with whatever rusting tools we… Ho Yinsen and I… could get our damned hands on. When I got back to America I refined it, I fixed it, made it better, but you know what, having a clean machine built into your heart by hand, under mild anaesthetic, is a teeny-tiny step up from having a dirty machine built into your heart by shaking hands, under no anaesthetic at all. But then… I started thinking smaller. On a smaller scale. If a big suit of armour could save me, what about a small one? And for a year I spent building tiny machines that would go beneath my skin and protect me from the inside out.” He took a breath, and looked around, a wild grin on his face. “Sorry, I forgot to breathe for a minute there.” He was leading down to the lower levels of his coastal retreat; to the workshop.
Pepper Potts moved toward her former employer, a hand reaching out to him, another touching her mouth, fear running through her. “Tony, are you ok?” She had never seen him like this before. Even during after the accident when he himself was so scared, so afraid to step out his apartment…
“The machines, I’ve been updating them every few weeks, they’ve been rewiring my thought processes and I go a bit schizophrenic every now and then, but the latest batch, it’s erased all the bad nannites, and replaced them, reprogrammed their computer cores and sent the final intelligence package into the reboot stage. My mind is now a computer, a machine built right into my brain to make the armour work by thought, a cortical interface, locked into the algorithms of the armour, Converting raw dreams and wishes into complex binary code--!”
Happy stopped walking, and Pepper and Tony turned to him. “More armour? You actually built more armour?”
Tony didn’t say anything for a minute. He stepped over the fallen blast door; the walls still singed, and held Pepper’s hand as she joined him. Happy followed shortly, and the duo was amazed at the site. The workshop was a mess of tools, metals, weird machines and other strange contraptions. Pieces of paper littered the walls, designs for armour variations, weapons, machines, everything. In the corner was a small cot, and Pepper yelped as she nearly slipped on a pile of hair.
“Ignore that. The nannites protect my brain. The armour my body. And the chest plate is the battery. You put them together and you’ve got an Iron Man (I love that song, and it seems fitting). When I was in that terrorist camp with Doctor Ho Yinsen, we had little over a week to build something that could keep me alive.” He touches his chest, where the cylinder of metal was whirring alive, “And that machine was shoddy and nearly fell apart after I got to safety. Brief charge. But it kept me alive, and got me home, and that’s more than enough.”
Happy took another look around the room, and then turned back to Tony. “Boss, you look… Ill.”
“It’s the rush. God, it’s like I can hear everything at once. I’ve been regrowing body tissue after all that self-enforced malnutrition I put myself through over the past few years. It’s all a test! Human plus. The first Iron Man. God,” he shook his head, and then turned back to Happy. “Remember those ideas I bounced off you before I left? I’ve refined them. Remade them. Repulsor beams. Anti-grav panelling. Micro-munitions. Tiny, smart bombs. Contact lenses built to channel satellite footage! It’s all here! In me!”
“That was all hypothetical though Tone, you, you said we didn’t have the time or the funding to do all that work, and…” happy paused. “You’ve been siphoning funds off Stark Enterprises haven’t you? That’s how you afforded all this.”
“It’s all legal and above board, and I’ve been supplementing the withdrawals with cool, calculated, computer-like investments in whatever machinery that would bring in funds back in. I think you’ll find Happy, my dear friend, Stark Enterprises is about to be more productive than ever.”
“What do you mean? How do you… What have…? How?”
“Non-lethal munitions, producing early versions of everything I’ve refined in my Iron Man armour. Repulsor rifles, anti-gravity hull plating. Let’s just say I have an old family friend up in the sky who will be very interested in some of the leaps we’re making with science.” Happy fell silent. Tony just looked at him.
“And what about those guys upstairs?” Pepper motioned above her head.
“Shimmer Men. I downloaded their armour specs into my brain as soon as I saw them. Industrial terrorists. Hired, I assume, to steal whatever it was I’ve been working on for the past few years whilst I’ve been here. They didn’t know I was working on myself. I’m a living weapon. But somehow, my friends, they got their hands on old R&D technology we put into cold storage before I left. The military applications. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know Tony, I’ll have to--”
Tony interrupted. “We’ll have to check it back. I’m coming back. I’m coming back to Stark Enterprises. I’m coming back to New York.”
Pepper smiled, “are you sure?”
“I have to. I have to sort this out. I have to find out who’s been raiding our warehouses undetected, and I have to take Stark back to the top.”
Happy nodded. “It’d be good to have you back Boss. But just… Just one thing…”
“What’s that, Hap?”
“Aren’t you going to show us the armour?”
Tony Stark grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“I’m the technologist, I work with machines, I build things. Banner was the biologist, not wildly different schools, but different enough. When we had to opportunity to work together, to work on building a better human, to put it mildly, our theories were different. I wanted to use machines. It’s what I’m best at. He, on the other hand, wanted to use radiation. He said he had the raw materials available in the human body, and all he would have to do is change them. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t scoff, because I was going to build armour and unfortunately, I was sounding like the crazier of our little mad scientist duo. Sadly he got called away to work on some government project in New Mexico, but I filed away all our ideas in my head, all my armour designs and schematics, and I hoped that one day we’d be able to work together on something like that. Then there was the accident, my kidnapping, and I got back to America and I heard he’d died in a gamma radiation accident….”
Invincible Iron Man
Issue One: "Human Plus; Part One: Mr Self Destruct"
Written by Charles HoM with thanks to DrDread
Cover by Craig Cermak
Edited by Brian Burchette
Thin fingers played across circuit boards, wiring, fiddling and changing configurations slowly, and with much thought. He was surrounded by machinery, soldering irons and strange machinery constructed by hand, from the base up. Everything in the workshop was made by him. He didn’t trust anyone else. His fingers slipped, catching a wire and pulling it out of place, and he cursed and spat and he kicked the worktop he was working at. He climbed out of his seat, and stumbled across the room, back to another worktop, with another similarly ruined piece of machinery sitting there waiting to be continued. He climbed back into his seat, grabbed a soldering iron, and continued to work on it. He mumbled things to himself: equations, poems, songs, little snippets of conversations he had once heard and couldn’t help but remember, but he concentrated on these pieces of metal before him, his thin fingers playing across circuit boards and wiring. Tony Stark murmured to himself, lost in thought.
***
Despite his name sake, ‘Happy’ Hogan was not a cheerful man right now. He had been in charge of Stark Industries for a couple of years now, and he had been able to keep them afloat, but without Tony there by his side, every day had become a chore. The board had begrudgingly accepted his position as acting-CEO, as Stark had complete trust in him, but they couldn’t help but think that they were following the directions of an idiot; given Hogan’s past career as a pugilist.
“You’re doing well, Hap,” reassured Pepper Potts, his long-time fiancée. She had been there with him every step of the way, and that reassured him some what. They were in a limo heading back to their apartment situated near Columbus Circle. Traffic was bad, as usual, and Happy, as usual, doubted himself.
“Oh come on Pep, we both know the only reason I’m sitting at the head of the company desk is because Tone implanted an intelligence chip in my head with all his savvy. Stark Industries ain’t nothing without him in charge. We’re stagnating, especially since Tone explicitly said he don’t want us accepting any more weapons contracts. That was our biggest area of revenue, and now we’re settling for what? The scraps. I swear we’re losing billions from nothing, but losing billions from billions when you’re stagnating… Accounting says everything is on the up and up, but jus’ look at our--”
Pepper kissed him softly on the lips, withdrew slowly, and then smiled. “We’ll head to the coast this weekend and check up on him, ok? We’ll see if we can’t coax him back. I know I wouldn’t mind having my fiancée all to myself for longer than the few hours between meetings.” She winked, and then took out her PDA. “You and the board have a meeting with Justin Hammer’s people to discuss the joint venture our companies will be undertaking tonight, and then tomorrow is now--” She pressed a button on her PDA, “Clear for us to head to the coast. I’ll order Quinjet Zero to be fuelled up and ready at JFK tomorrow, alright?”
“Thanks Pep,” smiled Happy sheepishly, scratching the back of his head. “Thanks a lot.”
“My pleasure, honey,” smiled Pepper.
***
Tony Stark jerked up in the darkness, clambered out of bed, and stumbled across the room. He barely made two steps across the cold wooden floor before he keeled over and hit the deck hard. He clutched his chest, and writhed around, eventually ending up on his back, the pain shooting through his limbs and down his nerves. “Aahh! Oh God, oh, God, my… Oh, Jesus Christ, what’s… happened…?” His hands dabbed his chest, and they found a dirty bandage that covered his chest. It was wet with blood.
“Mr Stark, you currently have a shard of your own munitions grinding its way through bone and muscle and into your heart. That is my prognosis.”
Tony looked up, his eyes frantically searching for whoever just spoke. It was an elderly man; his voice was solemn and calm. “Who, who the… Argh, Jesus…”
“I am Doctor Ho Yinsen. We have met before. You are dying. We are in enemy territory; held captive by terrorists. But this is not then. This is a dream. Wake up.”
“Whaaa--” The room contorted and twisted, and then suddenly he blinked, and he was back in the workshop. “--tt?” Waking fever dream. Not good. The machines must be eating into memory tissue, the hippocampus spewing memories like a nightmare through his mind’s eye. He looked over to a computer that was situated across the room. He left his second workbench and headed over to it. He began typing manically. “Reprogram. Divert… Away. For now…” He watched as a syringe filled with blue liquid beside the computer, and then took it from its receptacle, and looked at his arm, track marks up and around his forearm. He stabbed the needle deep into his flesh, and plunged the liquid into his veins, and he let out a quite yelp as the contents of the vial went to work.
“Stark,” barked the man, as he walked toward the dishevelled inventor, working away at his work bench. Tony couldn’t remember how he ended back at his stool, but his soldering iron was hot, and he working again. That was something. The man behind him removed the cigar from his mouth, and then continued, same barking tone, same anger at the edges of his voice. “You listening to me, Stark?”
“Go away, busy, working, leave,” mumbled the man, his fingers red and raw from working. His long black hair was dirty and greasy, his beard long and unkempt, flecks of white hair present around his temples and chin. He wore goggles with red lenses, and his white tank top was covered in holes made from rogue sparks. “Work.”
“Damn, Stark,” grunted the man, as he placed a hand on the busy worker’s shoulder, “you’re gone.”
“Work!” shouted the man, as he flinched back. He looked around, and there was no one there. “Work. Finish this-- HUIRRHHK--” He clutched his chest suddenly, awkwardly, a grey metal cylinder visible through his tank top and seemingly melded with part of his chest. Flesh and metal intertwined. He clutches it, cries out for a moment, blue lights flashing in sequence around the edge of the cylinder, and then stares at the work in front of him. “God… Damn…” He looked over to the massive black doors that were on the far side of the workshop, and grit his teeth. “Come on, you son of a bitch, come on.”
***
I can’t do this Pep, cancel the meeting with Hammer’s goons, we’re going up now. We can get to the coast in a couple of hours in the Quinjet.” Hogan removed his tie and jacket, and threw them onto his sofa. He looked at Pepper, who had a look of shock on her face. “I know this is a bad business decision, but the chip in my head doesn’t make me a floozy for this company, it makes me know what’s best, and right now, I don’t need a chip to say go see Tony. We’re going to see Tony.”
Pepper looked at him, and her expression changed from shock to relief. “Took you long enough. The jet is fuelled; I was just waiting for you to get all the postulating out of your system. The limo did a lap of the block and is waiting outside. Let’s go.”
“I love you, Pepper Potts,” Harry ‘Happy’ Hogan grinned, as he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“And I love you, Happy,” she kissed him back, and then giggled. “Get your coat; we’ll be there in a few hours if you don’t get distracted.”
Happy chuckled. “With you here, I can’t help myself.”
***
“The boss says he has technology delivered here that makes no sense. And that, to the boss, means that Tony Stark is making weapons. And that his whole little complex is one big weapons lab waiting for some opportunistic so-and-so’s to come in and make a little mess and bring out some of the good stuff.”
The man took a large, deadly looking device from his back, and flicked a switch on the side of it. There were four of them, wearing identical purple and black armour, though the one talking had a large black panel across his own chest, as if to signify his authority over the rest of his team. Their faces were obscured, though their lower jaws were uncovered, though just visible under the seam of the edges visible was a clear plastic mask, ready to cover the users face in case of gas attack. They were standing near the coast side of Tony Stark’s coastal hide away, and ready for business. He aimed the weapon at the wall, and grinned.
“Alright, this little bad boy is going to take the molecules of the wall out of synch with each other, and we can walk right on through. Easy enough. Just walk in a straight line, and keep your eye on the prize. You don’t know what he’s got roaming the halls, alright?”
“Yes, sir!”
The man grinned. “Green light. Go.” He activated his weapon, and the wall began to shimmer. They ran through, weapons at the ready.
***
The monitors revealed all that was transpiring outside of his workshop. He hadn’t slept in days. He’d been so busy, so frantic to get his work done, that the only time he slept was for twenty three minutes, and then he was back on the caffeine, working away, his mind awash with ideas and activity. He couldn’t trust his eyes. He wasn’t sure anything was real but the tools he held in his hands, and the things he worked on. His computer whistled under the pressure, and scans verified the fact that there were people making their way toward his sanctuary.
“Progress,” he hissed at his computer, as it began to work over time. He took a pair of scissors from a work bench, and began to cut at his beard, the long hair flittering to the ground as he did so. He then pulled the rest of his hair in a ponytail, and cut that off too. He didn’t look good, but he was getting there.
The computer buzzed alive, giving him the much needed answers he wanted. <<Nano-composite complete>>
“The coolant?”
<<Cooling process complete>>
“Ok, ok, good, let’s get moving with the final stage.” He pulled off his tank top, revealing the machine built directly into his chest to keep him alive. “Power cells have been failing for too long, need an outside source to get it kick started again, begin release.” He looked at his arms, and then began to peel off a layer of fake epidermis. Beneath this layer of skin was another layer of flesh, and gold plugs that lead directly into his body. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing he had done to himself, but it was a necessary pain. “Come on, let’s get going with this.”
He walked toward the black doors at the end of his workshop, and they opened without a touch or a word. He shuddered, a cold wind sweeping past him as they creaked open on automatic, and then stepped inside. He didn’t say a word, and then removed his trousers, and opened his arms wide. Wires began to run down from the ceiling, and he plugged them into the holes in his arms. “God. Damn.”
<<Nano-sheath process ready: Continue?>>
Tony tensed his muscles, his insides were already churning; readying himself from the eventual pain of what would come next. “God damn, son of a bitch, DO IT!”
The machine began to work. Tony Stark began to scream.
***
“What the hell was that?!” One of the team members gasped, the noise of Tony Stark’s screams sounding foreign and alien as they travelled through the air vents and were distributed above the interlopers heads.
“What?” inquired the leader of the squad, his weapon ready. The group was twitchy. “What do you mean?”
The other man was frantic. “You hear that, that noise?!”
“Keep your head in the game, man; keep your head in the game.”
The man didn’t shut up. He kept rambling, in a panic. “It’s like he’s torturing someone, somewhere in the complex! Jesus H--”
The team leader’s weapon discharged silently. The panicking man fell down hard; his head no longer anywhere near his shoulders. “We keep moving. To the workshop.”
***
Justin Hammer paced the room. He was angry. Brimming with anger; overflowing with anger. “That retarded little son of a bitch!” He slammed his fist into his desk. “He dares cancel on me? He’s lucky I don’t have him killed.”
His secretary entered the office, and saw her boss in his current state. She back tracked, and then knocked on the door tentatively. “Sir?”
“What?”
“You ordered the satellites to track Mr Hogan? He boarded the Stark Enterprises private yet and is headed to Tony Stark’s last known location, his coastal retreat?”
“The coastal retreat?” Hammer’s eyes open wide. “Ah. That could be interesting.” He smiled and then nodded at the woman who brought him this information. “Thank you, Laura.”
“I’m Claire,” corrected the secretary without thinking. She bit her lip as her name left her mouth.
Justin Hammer smiled and nodded again, just as before, comfortingly, understandingly, and then spat: “I really don’t give a damn, leave.”
The entry to his office closed, and a man stepped out from a secret door near the window. The door opened, and a shimmering blue wall, like a vertical sea of water, was visible. A man stepped through this weird division, and shook his head. “Sir.” He wore a blue exo-skeleton, his face was horrifically scarred, and his teeth cracked messes. As he spoke, he spat, and he walked toward Hammer with intent. “Don’t you think it best to call off the Shimmer Men?”
“Professor Sandhurst,” started Hammer, as he returned to his desk, “If Hogan is caught in our agents corporate raid of Stark’s property, caught, as in killed dead, then that is just an awful shame.” His lips formed a thin smile, his skin thin and wrinkled. “Yes, I would have preferred to bring him under our control with those nifty little devices you have created, but if he dies, well, it’ll be easier to take control of the board of directors and buy Stark Enterprises out from underneath them.”
Sandhurst grinned. His crooked teeth made it look more like a snarl than a smile, but Hammer understood. “I look forward to using my slave-discs on them.”
“Me too,” nodded Hammer. “Yes, it’s a shame we couldn’t get Hogan today, and if the Shimmer Men fail, we’ll try again some other time.” He looked around. “I have a meeting with Roxxon now, you know what that means. Head back to the lab through the tesseract veil, and we’ll talk later.”
“Here.” Sandhurst paused for a minute, and then pressed a button on his gauntlet, and a small circular device rose out of his armour. He took this between his fingers, and placed it softly on Hammer’s desk. He then turned around, his costume roaring as his exo-skeleton powered back up, and he vanished through the door in the wall, the blue wall enveloping as he passed through it. Hammer looked at it, and then grinned.
Claire knocked on the door of his office, and Hammer cleared his throat. “Yes?”
She entered, and smiled. “Sir, Hugh Jones is here to see you.”
“Lead him in, Claire, lead him in.” Hammer smiled his thin lips, and palmed the device. “I’ll see you soon, Hogan,” he whispered to himself.
***
“The screams came from in there... the ambient audio scanners tell us that much,” noted one of the three armoured men working their way toward Tony Stark’s inner sanctum. “But the broad spectrum sensors can’t penetrate the walls--”
The team leader pointed to the long stick thin device on one of his men’s backs. “Can we use the molecular destabilser on them?”
“Too dense,” stated the other squad member. “That’s got to be some kind of adamantium weave, I don’t know, we’re not getting through that with this thing.”
“Alright, then get to work with the explosives around the blast door. We’ll see if we can’t talk this out.” He cleared his throat, and found the vent that lead into the workshop. “Stark, we know you’re in there! We want your technology, it’s as clichéd as that! You come on out, hands out and open, and we won’t cripple you.” His fingers were crossed.
There was no reply. Stark was busy. His body was smoking. Thin wisps of smoke rising out of his pores as his body somehow overheated and cooled at the same time. A thin gold sheath of protective layering was forming as this smoke dissipated. He knew that the friction of metal on his bare flesh would eventually skin him alive, and he had through that through. The sheath became his skin. He looked over to his work table, and then smiled. It was all coming together. His sheath had contact points all over it. The armour wound plug into his nervous system. He concentrated, and another chamber of his workshop popped open. There it was. He smiled. He actually smiled. No stray thoughts, no crazy things popping into his head. He was happy. The armour hissed as it came out of the coolant lock. He opened his arms, his body covered in the golden under sheath, and then the armour… Stepped forward. The front panelling opened up, and Tony turned, and stepped up on the tips of his toes as the armour stepped into him, and then with another hiss, and the whining of newly born joints and connections, it sealed up, him inside.
“No reply, sir, do we trigger the explosives?”
The leader nodded. “Do it.”
The armour roared alive as the men triggered the explosives around the blast door that lead inside. Liquid semtex had been poured into the lock, the hinges, and caused the door to simply fall forward. The three men stormed inside, their weapons raised.
“Holy mother of God.”
“Servos working.” Tony was speaking to no one but himself, making notes on his armour out loud for himself (and internal recorders) to hear. He had yet to open up the speaker so those outside could her him. Iron Man threw one of the men across the room before he could blink. Tony Stark smiled within the armour. It was like a second skin. Like he could manipulate the armour’s movement as if he were wearing a shirt.
“Fire your bastard weapons!” Energy rifles discharged and struck Iron Man on the chest. He stumbled back, more out of surprise than anything.
“Energy absorbers working too. Great. Rerouting extra charge to magnetic projectors.” He opened up his hand, servos whirring, and a ball of blue energy flew out of his palm and struck one of the men on his chest, and he suddenly flew across the room, and collided with the wall. He didn’t move off it. The squad leader turned, and looked at his two teammates, beaten already. “Anti-magnetic plating was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Iron Man.” Tony grinned. Then he realised no one else could hear him. He turned on the speakers with a thought. Everything ran on a whole new, near telepathic level.
<I’m Mister Starks’ bodyguard. You can call me ‘Iron Man’; when you wake up.>
“Sonofa--” The man swung round the molecular destabilser and Iron Man was already two steps ahead of him.
He grabbed the long metal pole and spun it around, aiming it squarely at the squad leader’s head. He had his finger tight on the trigger, ready to fire. He stared at his reflection in Iron Man’s golden mask. <Pull that trigger and you may very well turn your skull into nothing but a cloud of molecules and your blood and muscle and brain will simply fall past your jaw line and rest comfortably in your neck. That will result in a very painful death. I promise you. I’m not threatening you, I’m not saying that will happen, but you’ve broken into this workshop, you’ve been the one who threatened my boss, and let me tell you, he doesn’t take very kindly to things like that. So if you’re feeling lucky, pull that trigger. You might catch my faceplate in the blast. But what’s that going to do?>
“You… You…”
<I’ll tell you what, mister. Nothing.> “This only works on inorganic material and non Stark origin metals, idiot. I should know because I…” Iron Man used the hesitation to his advantage. He crushed the rod, snapping it in two, separating the trigger from the barrel. Iron Man analysed the schematics of the technology with a glance, x-ray lasers making 3-d diagrams in his minds eye and being stored in the extra memory space he had been building in his brain. “My God.” He then proceeded to pick up the man. <Where’d you get this technology?>
“S-screw you man!”
Iron Man looked at him for a moment. <This is Stark Industries technology.> “I built this. I built this and put it in cold storage before I left. This is R&D trash… What the hell is going on here?” <Tony Stark designed this himself. Where’d you get this?>
The man spat at Iron Man’s face plate. Tony mumbled something to himself. He then raised his palm to the man’s face. <Goodnight.> “Low frequency.”
A repulsor beam shot out, and fired the man across the room and into the wall. He landed unconscious next to his team mate who was stuck to the wall, and near the knocked out third member.
Tony nodded slowly, and looked at his hands. His armour shone, even in the dim light of the workshop. “I need to get back.”
***
“Tony?” Pepper Potts and Harry Hogan wandered through the residential floors of the coastal retreat. The waves crashed on the cliffs outside, and they could hear the water fall back upon itself, and smell the salt in the air. “Tony, you there?” there was a certain twang of fear in Pepper’s voice. There was so much dust on everything. No one had lived here. No one could. “Happy, I think you should call--”
“What the hell?” Happy opened a door, and found three men, tied, gagged, and in their underwear, on the ground, unconscious. On the other side of the room sat three suits of armour, one cracked in the chest plate, one with a dented mask, and another that looked relatively unharmed. “What the hell is going on?”
“I wouldn’t bother with the police, Pepper. They’re already on their way, and they take their sweet time coming to the coast.” Tony Stark smiled, as he walked toward them, wearing a pair of black jeans and an open white dress shirt. Beneath that was a vest, and Hogan and Potts saw the familiar sight of the device that kept him alive buzzing away on his chest. “It’s been a long time.”
Happy grinned, then took his friends hand and shook it vigorously. “What’s happened, Tone? What’s up with those guys?”
“Let’s take this out of here. Give those burglars some privacy.” Tony winked and closed the door behind Pepper and Happy as they left the room. “I need to show you something.”
“What is it Pepper? Are you ok? You’re sweating? And your hair… Your beard…”
Tony waved his hand at her, dismissing her concerns. “I’ll shave later. Something big happened today. A major break-through.”
“With what?”
“Remember the stories I told you about my time in Iraq?”
“How you built a suit of armour based on all your dreams to escape, I remember them, yeah,” nodded Harry. “We’ve got the suit sitting in Stark Enterprises reception area. What of it?”
“Happy, I have spent my life building machines. I could build a computer in a week, from the circuit boards up, in a god damn week, and you know what I’ve spent the last few years doing? Building more armour. I started big, like the big, bastard machine that got me out of that terrorist camp and failed to save Yinsen. Great big suits of armour, big enough to protect me from the world; because you know what? I’m scared. I’m scared of getting hurt, I’m scared of dying, and in Iraq, in the Gulf, and I nearly died. Had a piece of metal get jammed in my chest so tight that if it comes out I will die in seconds… seconds. So I built a machine directly into my chest to make sure nothing nudges it in the wrong direction. Blood and wire all mixing together in my sternum, made with whatever rusting tools we… Ho Yinsen and I… could get our damned hands on. When I got back to America I refined it, I fixed it, made it better, but you know what, having a clean machine built into your heart by hand, under mild anaesthetic, is a teeny-tiny step up from having a dirty machine built into your heart by shaking hands, under no anaesthetic at all. But then… I started thinking smaller. On a smaller scale. If a big suit of armour could save me, what about a small one? And for a year I spent building tiny machines that would go beneath my skin and protect me from the inside out.” He took a breath, and looked around, a wild grin on his face. “Sorry, I forgot to breathe for a minute there.” He was leading down to the lower levels of his coastal retreat; to the workshop.
Pepper Potts moved toward her former employer, a hand reaching out to him, another touching her mouth, fear running through her. “Tony, are you ok?” She had never seen him like this before. Even during after the accident when he himself was so scared, so afraid to step out his apartment…
“The machines, I’ve been updating them every few weeks, they’ve been rewiring my thought processes and I go a bit schizophrenic every now and then, but the latest batch, it’s erased all the bad nannites, and replaced them, reprogrammed their computer cores and sent the final intelligence package into the reboot stage. My mind is now a computer, a machine built right into my brain to make the armour work by thought, a cortical interface, locked into the algorithms of the armour, Converting raw dreams and wishes into complex binary code--!”
Happy stopped walking, and Pepper and Tony turned to him. “More armour? You actually built more armour?”
Tony didn’t say anything for a minute. He stepped over the fallen blast door; the walls still singed, and held Pepper’s hand as she joined him. Happy followed shortly, and the duo was amazed at the site. The workshop was a mess of tools, metals, weird machines and other strange contraptions. Pieces of paper littered the walls, designs for armour variations, weapons, machines, everything. In the corner was a small cot, and Pepper yelped as she nearly slipped on a pile of hair.
“Ignore that. The nannites protect my brain. The armour my body. And the chest plate is the battery. You put them together and you’ve got an Iron Man (I love that song, and it seems fitting). When I was in that terrorist camp with Doctor Ho Yinsen, we had little over a week to build something that could keep me alive.” He touches his chest, where the cylinder of metal was whirring alive, “And that machine was shoddy and nearly fell apart after I got to safety. Brief charge. But it kept me alive, and got me home, and that’s more than enough.”
Happy took another look around the room, and then turned back to Tony. “Boss, you look… Ill.”
“It’s the rush. God, it’s like I can hear everything at once. I’ve been regrowing body tissue after all that self-enforced malnutrition I put myself through over the past few years. It’s all a test! Human plus. The first Iron Man. God,” he shook his head, and then turned back to Happy. “Remember those ideas I bounced off you before I left? I’ve refined them. Remade them. Repulsor beams. Anti-grav panelling. Micro-munitions. Tiny, smart bombs. Contact lenses built to channel satellite footage! It’s all here! In me!”
“That was all hypothetical though Tone, you, you said we didn’t have the time or the funding to do all that work, and…” happy paused. “You’ve been siphoning funds off Stark Enterprises haven’t you? That’s how you afforded all this.”
“It’s all legal and above board, and I’ve been supplementing the withdrawals with cool, calculated, computer-like investments in whatever machinery that would bring in funds back in. I think you’ll find Happy, my dear friend, Stark Enterprises is about to be more productive than ever.”
“What do you mean? How do you… What have…? How?”
“Non-lethal munitions, producing early versions of everything I’ve refined in my Iron Man armour. Repulsor rifles, anti-gravity hull plating. Let’s just say I have an old family friend up in the sky who will be very interested in some of the leaps we’re making with science.” Happy fell silent. Tony just looked at him.
“And what about those guys upstairs?” Pepper motioned above her head.
“Shimmer Men. I downloaded their armour specs into my brain as soon as I saw them. Industrial terrorists. Hired, I assume, to steal whatever it was I’ve been working on for the past few years whilst I’ve been here. They didn’t know I was working on myself. I’m a living weapon. But somehow, my friends, they got their hands on old R&D technology we put into cold storage before I left. The military applications. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know Tony, I’ll have to--”
Tony interrupted. “We’ll have to check it back. I’m coming back. I’m coming back to Stark Enterprises. I’m coming back to New York.”
Pepper smiled, “are you sure?”
“I have to. I have to sort this out. I have to find out who’s been raiding our warehouses undetected, and I have to take Stark back to the top.”
Happy nodded. “It’d be good to have you back Boss. But just… Just one thing…”
“What’s that, Hap?”
“Aren’t you going to show us the armour?”
Tony Stark grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
TO BE CONTINUED
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COMING SOON IN INVINCIBLE IRON MAN--!
“I’m the technologist, I work with machines, I build things. Banner was the biologist, not wildly different schools, but different enough. When we had to opportunity to work together, to work on building a better human, to put it mildly, our theories were different. I wanted to use machines. It’s what I’m best at. He, on the other hand, wanted to use radiation. He said he had the raw materials available in the human body, and all he would have to do is change them. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t scoff, because I was going to build armour and unfortunately, I was sounding like the crazier of our little mad scientist duo. Sadly he got called away to work on some government project in New Mexico, but I filed away all our ideas in my head, all my armour designs and schematics, and I hoped that one day we’d be able to work together on something like that. Then there was the accident, my kidnapping, and I got back to America and I heard he’d died in a gamma radiation accident….”