Disclaimer: I do not own Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Iron Man, or Black Sabbath.
CHAPTER ONE
Summer vacation dawned with clear skies and a mild breeze. In hindsight, Toni Stark would be rather miffed that the world couldn't be bothered to at least drizzle a bit on the worst day of her life to date.
At the moment our story begins, Toni wasn't too concerned with the world outside the car. She was more concerned with how her fingers were starting to go numb from the ice-cold glass of water she was holding. She took one last gulp and put the glass in a cup holder. Problem solved. Yay. God, I'm bored. She turned her head to look back forlornly at the trunk. She really shouldn't have let… uh… whatever the driver's name was put her carry-on bag back there. That bag had just about everything that made her life worth living. Her laptop, phone, 3DS, notebooks… at this point, she'd be happy to have that book she'd brought along just so she could be reading it when she saw Jarvis again and shove in his face that, yes, she was reading, what was all that about how all those electronics must be giving her cancer at this point? Hell, she'd even take her Vita, which had been so neglected that all the dust blowing off it when she packed it back in her bag gave her roommate an asthma attack.
Boredom wasn't a good state for a genius like her to be in. She hadn't even been in the car for half an hour, and she'd come up with probably a hundred new ideas for weapons or computer programs or how to smuggle booze into school. She was starting to get a headache from the enormous backlog of world-changing ideas demanding to be brought into the world, even if it would only be as a few lines of a sketch before it became clear how stupid it was and was promptly crumpled up and thrown in the trash.
Toni decided to try staring at the driver in the hopes that he'd notice and start a conversation, even if it started with 'You're really creeping me out, stop it'. Any attempts she'd made at starting one had been summarily shut down. The gruff attitude combined with the muscles stretching the seams of his suit made her think he was a bodyguard doubling as a chauffeur. Her dad was in one of his paranoid moods, it seemed. Not that Toni could really blame him. When your job involved enabling mass murder, it paid to be on the safe side. At least he cared enough to make a token attempt at preventing her horrible untimely death.
By this point Toni had grown bored of the whole staring plan and decided to change tactics. "Hey, would you mind turning on the radio?" The driver turned his head ever so slightly toward her, face impassive as ever. After what Toni could only guess was a Sherlock Holmes style evaluation of the situation, he reached over and hit the power button. "Thanks."
"- has refused to make a statement regarding the matter," came the staticy voice of some reporter that sounded kind of familiar but not enough that Toni could name her. "This morning in Afghanistan, Howard Stark, founder of weapons manufacturer Stark Industries, demonstrated his latest weapon - the Jericho."
"I was thinking something a bit more musical," said Toni, glaring at the radio. The driver/bodyguard obediently switched to FM. "Thanks." Toni's frown turned upside down as a familiar electric guitar riff came from the speakers. "Oh, sweet, this is my jam! Mind if I sing along? I'm gonna sing along." Driver-bodyguard-guy didn't have time to reply before the vocals kicked in.
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Driver-bodyguard-guy's head was almost imperceptibly bobbing up and down to the beat. Toni opened her mouth to needle him about it, but then the worst day of her life kicked into gear.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, Toni would never know where the car came from. In the moment, she wasn't even entirely sure what had happened for a few seconds. Then the confusion faded and she noticed the screaming and twisted metal around her and pain permeating most of her body. Three guesses, right? Uh, car crash, that's… number one possibility. Pretty much one hundred percent probability. What other possibilities are there? Aliens, that's always a good one. And, um… freak meteor crash? Okay, that's three. And this whole line of thought probably means I've got a concussion or I'm going into shock or something horrible. Yay.
A man who was certainly not Driver-bodyguard-guy was suddenly standing over her. Is Driver-bodyguard-guy dead? I hope not, he likes Black Sabbath. People who like Black Sabbath shouldn't die. The look in the man's eye set off all kinds of warning bells in Toni's head. She opened her mouth to scream for help, but she'd been so busy thinking about aliens and meteors she hadn't done an inventory on what was going on with her body and found that something was restricting her chest and making it impossible to take the necessary breath. The man pulled a cloth from somewhere and put it over her mouth. Toni's thought process devolved into panicked swearing as her consciousness seeped away.
A/N: Hey guys, I know you all want the next chapter of Alfred Jones (and Others), but I recently did a marathon of both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and this unholy fusion brought the question of 'What if the Avengers were Magical Girls instead of superheroes?' to my mind. Because people totally want to see the middle-aged man who became a hero with nothing but his own brains and resourcefulness be turned into a teenage girl who got magical powers from a mascot character. Since the MCU started with Iron Man, I am too, even if he doesn't have his own category on this website and I have to file him along with all his friends (Really, website? You gave ANT-MAN his own category, but not Iron Man? Ant-Man's awesome, but... really?). And also because I apparently have a thing for writing characters with out-there thought processes. I'd like to say that I'm definitely going to do adaptations for all the movies, but I said something similar for AJ(aO) and look how that's turning out. I'll try, but it'll take a while. I hope you'll enjoy however much I manage to complete. Now, it's late, and I should really be going to bed. Sorry if this was too rambly.
