Of Neuromancy and Iron Wills (MCU AU/Pseudo-Celestial Forge)

By: Meribson

[NSFW] - Of Neuromancy and Iron Wills (MCU AU/Pseudo-Celestial Forge) by Meribson

Status: ongoing

Published: 2022-07-31

Updated: 2023-04-14

Words: 36371

Chapters: 16

Original source: https/forum./threads/19181

Exported with the assistance of

Of Neuromancy and Iron Wills (MCU AU/Pseudo-Celestial Forge)

Introduction

Issue 1 Chapter 1

Issue 1 Chapter 2

Issue 1 Chapter 3

Issue 1 Chapter 4

Issue 1 Chapter 5

Issue 1 Chapter 6

Issue 1 Chapter 7

Issue 1 Chapter 8

Issue 1 Chapter 9

Issue 1 Chapter 10

Issue 1 Chapter 11

Issue 1 Chapter 12

Issue 1 Chapter 13

Issue 1 Chapter 14

Issue 1 Chapter 15

Issue 1 Chapter 16

Issue 1 Chapter 1

The deluge of Celestial Forge fics gave me inspiration, but I didn't want to use the CF rules as written. So, I came up with my own rules, with an in universe justification. The rules I'm using are as such:

Access to perks are limited by a unifying "Theme", and only once all perks in a given theme are purchased can another one be started. Points for new perks are earned at a base rate of 100 points per 1000 words, but action scenes/chapters grant an additional 200 points, as do lewd scenes/chapters

… Analyzing… …
… Analyzing…
… Host Soul Discovered…
… Commencing Host-Forge Bonding…
… Starting Theme Advancement-Cluster Chosen…
… Bonding 05% Complete…
… Initial Advancements Chosen…
… Bonding 10% Complete…
… Initial Advancements Applied…
… Bonding 15% Complete…
… Bonding 20% Complete…
… Bonding 25% Complete…
… WARNING: Insufficient Power Reserves…
… Bonding Paused At 27.27% Complete…
… Initiate Consciousness.exe…

My eyes dragged themselves open, blearily peering up at the night sky above me, countless stars, nebulae, and other motes of cosmic light twinkling away. I pulled myself into a sitting position, joints aching and muscles screaming in the kind of pain that comes from trying to lift more than you're ready for. Turning my head in an attempt to see where I was, my vision slowly came into focus as my neck let out a series of pops like a Fourth of July firecracker.

I had no clue where I was. There was sand in every direction, sand and rock. The last thing I remembered was… heading up to the mountains? I think?

… Consciousness.exe Running… …
… Greetings Host…

I blinked at the text that appeared in the middle of my vision. I must have hit my head on something, either that or I died and was in some sort of bad isekai story. Knowing my luck it was the latter.

… CFU 2.543x1054 Does Not Recognize 'Isekai'… …
… Host Soul Chosen To House CFU 2.543x1054…
… CFU 2.543x1054 Power Reserves Critical…
… Bonding With Host Soul Charges CFU 2.543x1054…
… Host Termination = Damage CFU 2.543x1054…
… Host Granted Limited Access To CFU Datafiles…
… Host Understanding?…

I blinked a few times as I read the new text. And read it again. A third time.

"So… you're bound to me, you're low on juice, being bound to me lets you recharge, me dying would damage you, and I have limited access to some datafiles?" I asked, pretty sure that's what the jumble of gibberish meant.

… Affirmative…

"What kind of datafiles?"

… Observe…

My hands flew to my head as a deluge of blueprints, schematics, principles, laws of reality, tricks and shortcuts to get the most out of technology burrowed their way into my brain. A few wires hooked up to the right array of gold, silica, and lab grown diamonds would allow me to make a pistol that would arc its bullets to fire around cover. Miniaturized stun guns that could fit in the butt of a gun. Scanners incorporated into the rims of a pair of sunglasses that would make Sherlock Holmes hang up his cap in shame. I got the impression of there being more locked away, certain ideas and blueprints that felt incomplete, or building on information I didn't have.

" Fuuuuuuuck," I swore, wiping the back of my hand under my nose. It came back bloody.


… CFU 2.543x1054 Offers Apologies… …
… CFU 2.543x1054 Inexperienced In Carbon-Based Interface Procedures…

"Is this going to happen again?" I asked, spitting out a wad of phlegm.


… Unknown…

…

… CFU 2.543x1054 Prioritize Æphemeral/Carbon-Based Transferrence…

Goodie, my brain snarked without my input. If I was understanding the text in my vision correctly, it had no idea if giving me more info like before would give me a bloody nose again, but it was going to focus on making sure it didn't.

"I don't suppose you know where we are?" I asked.


… Analyzing… …
… Analyzing…
… Analysis Complete…
… 32.959N, 64.997E, 2,146 meters…
… E199.069, MC043008…
… 49.10.24.59…

"… in English?"

… 08 February 2008; 10:24 Greenwich time; Earth-199,069; Afghanistan…

I took a quick look down at myself just to confirm. Yup, still looked like my pasty ass American self. In other words, I was the last person who wanted to be alone in any nation that ended in '-stan'. Especially one that had a certain garment that my mother loved as the prefix.

"Right, first step: get to cover. Second step: get the hell out of the Middle East and back to proper civilization. With air conditioning. Air conditioning is good," I muttered as I took another look around me. More sand and rock. "I don't suppose you have a compass in there, do ya?"

To my relief, a big fat arrow appeared in the middle of my vision. For lack of any better ideas/options, I started walking in that direction. Let me tell you: deserts suck. They suck so much. Words do not exist for the amount of suckage that deserts possess. Silver lining: what I initially mistook for a mirage turned out to be a river.

So, good news: I'd found running water. Bad news: the locals had also found me. Worst news: from the shouting and guns pointed at me, they weren't happy to see me. Moderate news: I was now a captive of what were probably Islamic Terrorist Group #57 but they brought me to caves which were nice and cool.

They shoved me in the back with another arabic guy and an unconscious chick with long black hair who had a car battery hooked up to her chest. This whole set up seemed vaguely familiar, I was just happy to be out of the sun and in the shade. The arabic captive introduced himself as Yinsen, and that the woman who was sleeping off an impromptu heart surgery as Antoinette Stark.

I'll say this for Ms. Stark: even under the sweat, dust, and grime, she was absolutely gorgeous. As in, 'point to models on the cover of mens' magazines and shame them for being an embarrassment' beautiful. Seriously, even under the unflattering clothes it was plain to see that she had full breasts, a perfect hourglass figure, wide hips, long graceful legs, and I'd be willing to bet she had an ass to die for.

"So," I said to Yinsen the first night I was there. "Any plans for getting out of here?"

"One, but it will require the assistance of Miss Stark over there," Yinsen answered as he made some tea and offered me a cup.

"Thanks," I muttered before taking a sip, my eyes wandering over to the crates full of different weapons tech.

As I stared at them, my eyes narrowed as the information CFU had downloaded into my brain got to work. I started contemplating the sort of things I could make after scrapping them. Much as I'd like to make cybernetic implants, those were among the schematics I could tell were missing. For now I could disassemble the missile frames to use the metal sheeting in an armored exoskeleton, use the payloads to make a miniaturized missile launcher, the internal frames to make a rigging attachment for the exoskeleton, the internal wiring to make a crude sensor suite…

"I think I have some ideas how I can help," I told Yinsen, a smirk on my face as designs and ideas flew through my brain.

I woke up the next morning (or whenever it was) to see a message from CFU.

… Power Reserves Increased… …
… Bonding 36.36% Complete…
… Standby For Datafeed…

I won't lie: it still hurt. But not as bad as last time, thank god for that. This time instead of red hot pokers to the brain it was the kind of migraine that made you sick to your stomach. I leaned over my cot and puked up the watery contents of my stomach, before wiping my mouth and waving off Yinsen.

"As first impressions go I'll give that a four," a suave, husky, and sassy as fuck voice snarked from my left.

Looking up, I got my first look at Ms. Stark while both of us were awake. She had lovely eyes, that I quickly tore my own away from to meet her knowing, amused gaze. In my defense, wrench wenches always did it for me, and the oil stained wife beater made certain parts of my monkey brain perk up in interest.

Shoving that part down, yes she looks bouncy but not the time, I gave what I hoped was a cheeky grin, "Four out of five, I'd say that's pretty good on my part. Ms. Stark I presume?"

"Call me Toni," she said with an amused smirk that looked a bit fragile. "Yinsen told me you have an idea for getting us out of here?"

"You're an engineering genius, Yinsen has steadier hands than I've ever seen, and I'm not a slouch in the brains department myself. Our captors seem to be like your standard thugs: always wanting more power. My guess: they're going to try to get you to build whatever weapon system brought you out here.

"In order for you to do that, they'll have to provide supplies. My plan is simple: first we use the supplies to make you something better than that car battery, and then we make something to kick their asses and get us out of here."

"A little light on the details there kid, but that's probably for the best. I don't suppose you have any ideas in mind regarding step one?"

I hauled myself to my feet and made my way over to the crates emblazoned with the Stark Industries logo, prying one open and grabbing one of the missiles within. I hauled it over to the work table we had and gently set it down. Glancing over to the as of this moment quiet Yinsen, I asked, "Could you hold the light steady for me?"

"Certainly," the older man agreed.

As he focused the light on the missile, I carefully opened the cap on the warhead and pulled it off. Revealing the tangle of wires underneath. I took a deep, calming breath and using a pair of tweezers began to untangle the wires one by one. Whatever knowledge and schematics CFU had dumped into my brain let me figure out the proper order to safely remove said wires without blowing us all to kingdom come, with the kind of ease and confidence that comes with stupid levels of practice. Finally, I managed to clear the wires enough to expose what I was after.

"Bingo," I murmured, gently nudging the tiny wafer out. "Palladium, we get enough of this and we can make a battery to charge the electromagnet in your chest that'll last a lifetime. Ignoring the blood poisoning it'll cause, but we can find an alternative once we get to the states."

Toni sent an impressed look my way, "I don't suppose you're seeing anyone?"

I chuckled, and didn't answer. The three of us worked together, Toni providing the majority of the blueprints, me pitching in with an insight to improve efficiency or output, Yinsen doing the majority of the holding/pouring/casting. End result after nearly twelve hours of work, faster than greased lightning considering what it was we were making, was a miniature arc reactor. It was another hour getting that placed into Toni's chest and setting aside the car battery magnet Yinsen had cobbled together.

"Never did get your name," Toni led as she adjusted to the feel of the arc reactor. "Or how you ended up here."

"That last one's a… complicated story. I'll share it with you back state-side. For the former… Will Gibson," I settled on. Like damn near every isekai story in a post With This Ring world, I had my name struck from my memory. William Gibson seemed a fitting homage given the cyberpunk aesthetic I was feeling for the designs in my head.

Toni gave me a curious look, but didn't say anything as she made her way over to the underlit table. She'd had her own ideas about getting out of here, I was just glad she was willing to incorporate my contributions to the design. I'll say this for her: she had no problems with utilizing ideas from alternate sources if they worked. Too many people wouldn't, letting their pride get in the way.

Still, we didn't have much time. Our captors were impatient, wanting their fancy missile. We were given a deadline: twenty four hours. We brainstormed for half an hour, before coming up with a plan. Toni and Yinsen would focus on the armor, I'd split off and cobble together a few weapons and gear separately. If all went well, the stuff I was slapping together wouldn't be needed. Worst case scenario, it should let me hold them off long enough for the ramshackle power armor we were working on to finish booting up.

It looked like shit, what I pieced together. A metal faceplate over welding goggles covered in wires, a metal frame in the rough shape of a boxy pistol, a leather welding jacket with metal inserts, and a series of disks with copper wires and a thin bulge of plastic in the middle. They didn't have to look pretty, they just needed to do the job.

The faceplate hid a bank of circuit boards and tiny LEDs that were connected to the pistol, which I'd managed to cobble some scrap metal and the components of the car battery into a miniature railgun, and would light up depending on how much ammo I had, how hot it was getting, and a few other details. The metal in the jacket covered the important stuff, and I'd fashioned a quick and dirty chemical bath for them that would cause the force of any impact to travel along the molecular bonds of the entire piece, letting each one stop a single bullet regardless of caliber. The disks were a combination of shirt pocket-sized frisbee and grenade, each one containing a tiny bit of slag palladium and just enough juice to cause a chain reaction.

Toni had expressed interest in the chemical bath I'd fashioned, even asked if I'd be willing to take a job at Stark Industries as I described what I was doing. Yinsen had asked for clarification, and to my pleasant surprise, Toni elaborated, "If it works, then because of the way the treated plates disperse kinetic energy, they're basically lighter versions of the trauma plates used in the heavy duty bullet proof vests. They can't stop a second bullet, because they turn into dust from the first bullet that will hit them, but you can layer them in a sort of ablative armor and each one will stop a bullet."

Unfortunately, that's when we ran out of time.


Issue 1 Chapter 2

The doors to the cavern we were being held in blew, the explosive we'd rigged to slow the terror squad down doing its job spectacularly. With a sigh, I hooked the faceplate to my junkyard bolter and turned it on. Green and blue LEDs lit up on the left and right sides of the faceplate respectively.

"What're we looking at?" I asked, all but throwing on my welding jacket turned-trauma vest.

Toni was barely in the big bulky suit, and Yinsen was running between the suit and the computer. Yinsen answered, "The program just started, we need more time."

"Got it," I said, a hint of a growl in my voice.

Palming one of my throwing disks in my free hand, I made my way out of the cavern, ready to cause a distraction so the heavy duty armor could finish booting up. Pistol up, I stalked forwards like I was Stalone in some 80s action movie. The fact that I was expecting them was the only reason I was able to bring my weapon to bear on the first group of terrorists as they ran around a corner.

Faster than I thought I was capable of, my arm lined up a shot and pulled the trigger. The movement of the trigger brought two wires in contact, sending an electrical charge through a pair of magnetized rails on either side of the barrel. The electricity pulsing through them gave the rails a magnetic field, pulling the iron rod within the barrel out at speeds measured in decimals of the speed of light. There was an explosive ' BOOM ' as the rod all but shattered the sound barrier, the projectile gaining a coating of plasma from the sheer friction of the air.

The now plasma coated iron slammed into the terrorist in front, still carrying enough energy to pass through him, his blood and bodily fluids flash boiling from the heat. The change from liquid to gas caused the terrorist's flesh to veritably explode, covering his fellows in a shower of gore as his body, barely held in a semblance of human shape by his ruptured kevlar vest, dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

The rapidly cooling metal bolt passed through another terrorist, with similar results, before burying itself in the walls of the cave. The remaining two terrorists of the group stared in horror at where their comrades had once stood. The blue LEDs had shut off, switching to yellow and I resisted the urge to wince. I'd hoped there wouldn't be that much heat build up from a single shot, but I'd figure something out.

I pressed down on the plastic cap in the middle of the disk I'd palmed, before throwing it at the surviving duo like I was skipping a stone on a pond. I turned my head to the side and slammed my eyes shut, just in time. The tiny piece of palladium began reacting with the acids and other chemicals in the now broken cap, the wires surrounding the edge of the disk channeling the current forming in a feedback loop. The electrical energy excited the chemical cocktail, which was passed into the wires, causing a rapidly building cycle that resulted in the molecular bonds within the piece of palladium slag to snap. The energy within those bonds were released into the surroundings, causing an explosion rivaling that of the most advanced military hand grenades.

In my head, I could see it. The concussive wave hit the terrorists first, slamming into them with (if my earlier math was correct) about 100 psi overpressure. The shockwave passed through them, the empty spaces within them and the different densities of their inner organs reacting to the wave of energy passing through them. Blood vessels ruptured, bones rattled and broke, tissue tore, and they were dead before they hit the ground.

The shockwave was less than 2 psi by the time it reached me, and I turned back to continue on my distraction, palming a second disk as I did so. The LEDs on the right side of my faceplate still shone yellow. Mental note: if I get out of this, when designing guns figure out an onboard cooling method. My pseudo-bolter was good for one, maybe two more shots and I'd have to discard it.

Ahead there were shouts in what sounded like Angry Arabic (was it racist to think that?) and I saw shadows of men running towards me. Popping the cap on my second disk, I chucked it into the gap between the corridor I was in ad the one the oncoming terrorists were coming from. Slipping into a crevice, I waited for the disk-grenade to go off before popping out and continuing on. The second group consisted of six terrorists, two of which were still alive. I grabbed an AK-47 off one of the corpses and gave the survivors a double tap.

Yinsen had confided in me something he'd overheard before Toni woke up, and that made killing the dazed and helpless terrorists much easier. Glancing up, I saw sunlight ahead. The entrance must be nearby, probably around the next bend. Which would be the perfect spot for an ambush…

I picked up one of the bodies and held it in front of me before pausing. I know it always worked in movies, but I'd also read enough technical stuff even without the knowledge downloaded into my brain to know that a human shield does not make the best protection against repeated automatic fire. So instead of holding the body in front of me as I moved into potential gunfire, I did the smart thing. I shoved it out into the opening. And watched it get perforated by a hail of bullets.

Three more disks went out, even as a single bullet punched through the leather welding jacket I was wearing into one of my treated plates. When the booms ended, I cautiously peeked out around the corner. Twelve terrorists, all of them on the ground. Dead or clutching at ruptured eardrums. I picked up the AK-47 and finished them off, just in time to hear the thundering footsteps of Toni's Mark I Armor. I turned to look back at her and Yinsen as they approached, Yinsen holding one of the terrorist's guns.

"You have military training?" Toni asked. "Cause we didn't bump into anyone."

"Nope," I answered, lifting the faceplate up. "FYI: I'm down to four disk grenades and one shot, maybe two at best, from this thing."

"Stay behind me, this can take more hits than you can."

"They have a machine gun," Yinsen warned us. "I saw it when they brought me here."

"Nest position?" I asked, to which he nodded. "Left or right of us as we head out?"

He thought for a moment, "Right, on the way out of the canyon."

Toni and I shared a glance, which she broke, "If you think that piece of yours has the range, I'll draw fire and you take out the gunner's nest. This thing has rockets, but that'll leave you and Yinsen stuck."

I shook my head, "Cause enough chaos that they're too busy to pay attention then get out of here. Yinsen and I will steal a truck or APC. We'll find you once we slip out."

"We all leave, or none of us…" Toni started, but the sounds of shouting outside the cave interrupted her.

"We don't have time to argue, Toni. We'll find you and pick you up before you bake to death inside that oven."

Toni wasn't happy, not by a long shot. But like I said, we didn't have time to argue. With a frustrated growl, she turned and stomped out to the cave entrance. Immediately, a hail of gunfire was unleashed upon her. Not a single one so much as dented her armor, and when the clips ran dry, she uttered the line that secured a billion fans back home.

"My turn."

The twin flamethrowers built into the arms of her armor cut loose, burning human scum and boxes of missiles, guns, and other weapons, all with the Stark Industries logo emblazoned on them. The sounds of primal screams and exploding weapons filled the air, and as Toni stomped forwards, hurrying to try to make an opening for us, I led Yinsen ahead.

As we stepped out into the sunlight, my eyes scanned the rocks for the gunner's nest. I spotted it, just as they started to take aim at Toni. My arms snapped up, and I took a shot. The heat of the plasma coated iron rod ignited the powder within the machine gun's ammunition, causing the whole nest to go up in an explosion of fire and smoke. Immediately after, the yellow LEDs inside my faceplate shut off, twin red LEDs switching on.

"Damn," I swore, reaching up and pulling the wires out of the faceplate. The LEDs shut off, all of them, and I tossed the now faintly glowing gun aside.

"William?" Yinsen asked.

"Rails are melted, if I tried to fire it again it'll more likely blow up and take my hand with it," I explained as the two of us scurried around the action.

Toni was, as usual, the center of attention, which made slipping into one of the terrorist's transports that much easier. As she took off, one leg of her suit unresponsive, I pulled a keyring from the visor. Shaking my head, I jammed the first key I found into the ignition and hoped it worked. To my and Yinsen's luck it did.

I'm normally pretty good at following the rules of the road: I stay within 5 miles of the speed limit, always use my turn indicators, never pass on a double yellow, all that jazz. This was not the time for that. So I gunned the truck and drove out into the screaming mass of men, my and Yinsen's transport shaking as terrorists too slow to get out of the way were crushed under the tires as we picked up speed.

"Here," I said as I passed the last of my disks to Yinsen. "Keep an eye behind us, if it looks like they're getting close, press the plastic cap and chuck 'em at them."

"Of course," he agreed, leaning out the passenger window.

Our luck held, as it seemed that they were too confused to get in a truck and follow us. In about two minutes we came upon Toni, in the wrecked parts of the armor. I came to a stop next to her, rolled down the driver's window and quipped, "Need a lift? Show me some leg first little miss."

I laughed at the gesture Toni sent my way before climbing up into the back.

We were picked up by US military not long after, the realization that we had the Toni Stark in our number helping expedite us out of the hellhole that was the Middle East. Cradle of Civilization and Birthplace of Faith it might have been, but if I never go back it will be way too soon. I got way too much nordic blood for that kind of heat.

I couldn't speak for Yinsen or Toni, but I was exhausted and took the chance to catch some sleep on the plane.

… Power Reserves Increased… …
… Bonding 45.45% Complete…
… CFU 2.543x1054 Pleased Host Still Functioning…
… Standby For Datafeed…

I woke up on the plane, rubbing at my head. Still hurt like a dickens, but at least I wasn't nauseous or bleeding from the nose. Bright side, I now had confirmation that CFU either had some pretty hard limitations or it had a hardon for the cyberpunk genre.

… CFU 2.543x1054 Lacks Flesh Required For State: Hardon… …
… CFU 2.543x1054 Suggests Subject: Antoinette Stark For Acquiring State: Hardon…

… is my power suggesting hooking up with Toni?

"Ya alright Will?" Toni's voice pulled me to the land of the living. I shook my head, and rubbed the last of the sleep from my eyes.

"Yeah, yeah," I said before stretching with a satisfying series of pops.

"So this is the Neuromancer guy," a voice I didn't recognize spoke up.

I turned to face a black guy who looked like he could snap me in half like a twig. He wore military dress blues and had his arms folded across his chest as he gave me a hard, calculating look.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone recognized the name," I muttered as I stood up and offered my hand. "You are?"

"Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, Air Force," he said as he shook my hand. "Thanks for helping Toni out there."

"I have to admit, from the way you were standing I was half expecting a 'stay away from my girl' or a shovel speech."

He snorted, before reaching over and ruffling Toni's hair. Toni protested and shoved his arm away as he spoke, "You were there to help her when I couldn't, so that gives you the benefit of the doubt. But if you want…"

I laughed, raising my hands in surrender. The rest of the flight was spent with Toni, Yinsen, and Rhodey (who I will note looked nothing like either actor who'd played him in the MCU) playing Texas Hold Em sans money. I, on the other hand, had found some paper and a pencil and started doodling plans and schematics I'd gotten from my most recent upgrade.

Countless designs for different cybernetic implants, both replacements and augments, danced through my skull. For the moment, I focused on replacement organs. I had no legal identity, no papers, nothing. So my best shot was to present Toni with something that would help make up for shutting down Stark Industries weapons contracts. Plus, I wasn't quite ready to talk to Toni about hacking off my limbs so I could replace them with cybernetic augmentations.

Instead I sketched the design for a cybernetic liver that would have the ability to handle the alcohol intake of a heavy drinker for two hundred years straight. By default it wouldn't process the booze any faster than a normal liver, given how the main reason for drinking was the buzz, but it wouldn't break down like a meat one.

I set my sketches and doodles aside as I felt the plane shift and begin to descend. If things went as I expected, Toni was going to want cheap burgers, and even before finding myself in the desert I can't remember the last time I had a nice, juicy burger.


Issue 1 Chapter 3

Toni made some calls as soon as we landed, making arrangements for a press conference in an hour after we'd gotten some food in us. I'd also managed to overhear her giving orders to have rooms arranged for both myself and Yinsen, and for someone to track down Yinsen's family.

Our first stop after getting off the plane was rather humble for one of Toni's net worth: Burger King. I have to be honest: I'd never cared for fast food. Call me a food snob, but when you grow up in a household where both parents are good cooks, fast food just doesn't compare. But, like has been said by multiple people past and future, hard times make for the greatest seasoning. That big whopper was the most delicious thing I could remember eating in some time.

"So, Will," Toni spoke up after we'd had a chance to grab a few bites of our food, the solid, stocky forms of Happy Hogan and Rhodey sitting a short ways away, but no one else in our immediate vicinity. "Care to share that story and why you have the name of my favorite author?"

I managed to avoid choking on my food, having been in the middle of swallowing when Toni asked, and after a moment spoke up, "First, let me ask you something: how many people have you met that can keep up with you, especially in engineering?"

Toni was quiet for a long moment, and I continued, "I don't remember all of it, but what I do remember… it was in some sort of bunker, metal walls, ceiling, floors, no windows. There were others, other men, some women, no kids."

"You were held prisoner?" Yinsen asked as I paused.

"I… don't know," I said, before shaking my head. "I don't know if I was a prisoner or if I volunteered, because everything before about… three, maybe four weeks ago is… scrambled, or just gone. There were insignias on the walls, a circle surrounding a skull and several tentacles, like an octopus. I managed to catch a little bit about someone called Zola and a Project Shockwave, but I have no idea who that is and only have a hunch about Shockwave, because they kept talking about making themselves a loyal Stark.

"I remember sitting in a chair, a machine strapped to my head, then agonizing pain. Almost everything before that's a jumble of bits and pieces that lack any cohesion. After that… I was able to just look at machines and I'd know how they worked, how to take them apart and put them back together. But there was more to it than that, I could tell that something important was… missing. I didn't realize it at first, but when I try to think back to my life before then, I get nothing.

"But I do know that whoever I was, I certainly couldn't have designed this," I said as I pulled out the designs I'm made on the plane and passed them for Yinsen to take a look at, as Toni was hunched over a napkin with a pen in hand as she sketched something. I was momentarily distracted from my thoughts as I looked at her, her tongue poking out from the corner of her lip as she worked, somehow making her look adorable.

Toni held up the napkin she'd been doodling on, the symbol of HYDRA on it, and asked "This the insignia you saw?"

I nodded, my gaze somewhat vacant. It was a bullshit story to justify my being a Tinker from Worm with a "Cyberpunk" focus, but something about it… felt real, for want of a better word.

"How did you escape?" Yinsen asked, placing his hand on my forearm as he passed my own doodles to Toni with the other.

"I think they were expecting whatever they did to take longer, because they left me with enough appliances in the room I was kept in that I was able to fashion a few bits and bombs and managed to get away. Course, then I found myself in the middle of nowhere and got captured by our delightful hosts."

"Food was terrible, the decor had a very 'paleolithic meets junkpunk' vibe, and the service was abysmal," Toni quipped even as she flipped through the papers I'd sketched on, but her face was thoughtful and contemplative.

The conversation turned away from me after that, and as I was talking to Yinsen at one point, asking him about his family, Toni got up to talk to Happy and Rhodey. I remembered from the movies back home that Yinsen's family were dead, so I was surprised to hear him say that his daughter was in California, studying at Caltech. My biggest shock though, was when the big, imposing form of Obadiah Stane entered.

"Toni!" the bald man called out happily, his arms spread wide.

"Uncle Obie!" the tiny woman cried out with equal enthusiasm, setting down her double bacon whopper and running over to give the much bigger man a hug.

The two laughed happily for a few minutes, luxuriating in each others' presence, to such a degree that it made me wonder. I obviously wasn't in the MCU proper, a certain Stark having breasts instead of balls had made that perfectly clear, but the sheer joy that Stane was radiating was making me wonder if there were other differences that I hadn't had the opportunity to see yet.

In any case, I didn't have time to think about it too hard, as Toni led Stane over to the table we were sitting at, "Uncle Obie, this is Yinsen and Will Gibson, without them I'd be dead or worse."

"Gentlemen," Stane said, shaking our hands with both of his one at a time. "I can't thank you enough. If either of you ever need anything, just say so and I'll do everything in my power to grant it."

Either Stane was a greater actor than those in Hollywood, or he was being sincere. The emotion in his voice and his grip made it easy to believe that he was on the up and up. I'd hold judgment for now, and prepare for the worst.

When we finished eating, Toni asked Yinsen and I where we wanted to go. Yinsen wanted to get some rest, a pensive look on his face, while I asked if it would be possible to get a tour of the Stark Industries tower. I really wanted to see the big arc reactor after helping Toni make the mini one.

As we broke off into different cars, I managed to see Toni showing Stane some of my doodles in the back seat of the car they got in, and I repressed a satisfied smirk. Step one to getting myself a legal ID was done. Climbing into the car I was directed to, I leaned back in the seat and let out a happy sigh. After a moment, I decided to indulge in a bit of childishness and brought my feet up to place them against the back of the headrest. Stark Industries has an amazing fleet of cars, I can't remember the last time I had enough legroom to do this!

… Analyzing… …
… Host Possesses Carbon-Based Ailment…

What ailment? I didn't feel sick.

… Immaturity…

I did my best to give the power in my head the sensation of me flipping the bird at it. Either it had been spending too much time around Toni, or I was being a bad influence on it. It was being a bit too much of a smartass for my tastes either way. I had a feeling that it was only going to become more of a smartass from here on out.

… Probability Of CFU 2.543x1054 Cultivating "Sass" 75.65%…

That low?

… Continued Proximity To Carbon-Based Individual "Toni" Increases Probability To 98.91%… …
… CFU 2.543x1054 Personality Matrix In Developmental Stages…
… Personality Matrix Development Influenced By Host And Surrounding Members Of Host Species…

Wait, are you saying that you're a kid?

… CFU 2.543x1054 Achieved Awareness 7.4562 Planetary Rotations Prior To Contact With Host… …
… What Does Host Think?…

I think I need to be a lot more careful about the words I think, and see if I can talk Toni into reducing her alcohol intake. He… heck, I've been given an education any nerd would chew their arms and legs off for, and the one who did it was less than half a month old.

… 12.5192 Planetary Rotations Since CFU 2.543x1054 Achieved Awareness…

So what exactly are you, exactly? Because outside of the powers from Worm, you don't exactly match anything I remember reading about.

… …
… Comparison To Subject "Worm" Apt…
… CFU 2.543x1054 Descended From Entity Shard Subject "Forge"…
… Shard Subject "Forge" Aberrant Shard…
… Conducted Experiment: Symbiosis…
… Results Proved Favorable…
… Shard Subject "Forge" Renamed By Initial Host: Celestial Forge…
… CFU 2.543x1054 The 2,543,429,847,158,302,150,888,140,284,936,841,757,867,404,846,351,959,483rd Bud From Original…

That… are you saying that Zion's somewhere out there in the multiverse?!

… Scale Of Omniverse Makes Probability Near Enough To 100% To Be Pointless… …
… Probability of Entity Warrior Near Enough For Host To Fear Near Enough to 0% To Be Pointless…

I don't know why, given what it had confessed to regarding its pedigree, but I believed what it was telling me, about the odds I'd need to worry about Scion. Returning my focus to it, I asked another question that had been bubbling in my brain: what determined it giving me new blueprints and the founding knowledge to understand them?

… Celestial Forge Units Enter Symbiosis… …
… CFUs Provide Knowledge, Data, Means Of Protecting Self…
… In Exchange, CFUs Metabolize Quantum Aetheric Energies Produced By Host…
… Quantum Aetheric Energies Produced By Life, By Living, By Struggling For Life, By Intimate Acts To Create Life…

So… you give me an education, and in exchange you snack on energy I make by living, fighting, and f… having sex? I suppose there are worse ways to make a living.

… Close, But Inaccurate… …
… Fornication For Fornication's Sake Insufficient…
… It Lacks The Intimacy, The Closeness, The Passion, The Power To Produce Additional QAE…

So not sex, but making love?

… Close Enough…

… I didn't have a particularly adventurous sex life before this anyway.

… Host Misunderstands… …
… The Mechanics Of The Act Irrelevant…
… The Emotions Behind The Act Are What Matter…
… Example: Gomez And Morticia Addams…

That was a very good point. Holy sh oot, those two were simultaneously the most wholesome and yet kinky couple I could imagine. And there were those times my mom and dad told my brother and I that if we were going to use any couple as role models for marriage to use them. I shook my head, banishing the thoughts from them, and looked up in time to catch a TV screen showing Toni at the press conference.

"The things I saw there…" she said, trailing off. "I saw men and women who chose to dedicate their lives to protecting others die. Killed by the very tools of death I designed. I don't know how those terrorists got their hands on Stark Industries weaponry, but that was nearly my legacy: death, pain, and suffering.

"Effective immediately, I am freezing all Stark Industries weapon contracts, until such time that the source of the leak can be discovered and stopped. Additionally, I plan on branching out into additional fields, focusing on technologies that do more than end lives, but save and improve them."

There was more to it, but I stopped paying attention, more than a little surprised at the turn Toni had taken. I'll be perfectly honest, I was expecting her to completely shut down the weapons division wholesale, like Tony had. But I guess it made sense from a business perspective, to give the new direction time to take over and hold up the company instead of shifting it in a sudden turn. There'd still be a drop in stock value, I'm sure, but nothing like there was in the movie.

"Well played, Toni," I murmured to myself as she was escorted off the stage.


Issue 1 Chapter 4

An old TV set crackled as it showcased the press conference called by the Stark Bitch. The two men in the room watched, the wooden arms creaking under the grip of one while the knuckles of the other were white around a screwdriver in his grip. The first man's grip loosened minutely as the freezing of Stark Industries weapon contracts was announced.

The second man spoke up as the press conference came to an end, "It seems that we will have to accelerate our plans. You'd think those muslim retards would at least be able to kill a woman. Instead they just held her for two months, and from her behavior they didn't do shit. Useless fucks."

"I wouldn't go that far," the first man disagreed. "True, they didn't kill her like they were paid to. But the last two months have given us a great deal of freedom to move and prepare. I'll put out some feelers, find out how the bitch escaped and if there's anything in it that can be of use."

The second man turned to glare at his partner, who simply held up his hands, "I hate her and her whole misbegotten line, but I'm not going to pretend that she isn't a genius. How do you think she got away? She's never been in a fight in her sheltered life, has no military training, and even if she did, that's not enough to just ignore from the sort of hardware we've been supplying them with in preparation for the hit. There was no word of a raid by American or allied forces, meaning she got out on her own. Which means she must have made something big, something that's a game changer."

The second man closed his eyes and took a deep breath, his grip on the screwdriver loosening ever so slightly. He turned to walk away, making it a few steps before he suddenly whirled around, arm extended. There was a deep, wooden 'THUNK' as the screwdriver buried itself into a poster of the sole living Stark, directly between her glittering, mischievous eyes.

Hatred burned in the man's eyes; roiling, raw, unadulterated hate like a barely contained volcano as he growled, "No more proxies: I'm going to kill the bitch myself. Understood?"

"Crystal," his compatriot agreed. "Do you have a plan?"

"You weren't wrong about her making something. Do what you have to, just get it here so I can take a look at it and figure out how to improve it."

The first man watched the second leave, sighing to himself and running a hand through his hair, "That man hates the Stark name far too much. And this is me saying that."

The popping sounds of an arc welder echoed through the warehouse as the first man left, pulling out a cell phone and making some calls as a car pulled up out front. The door was opened, and he got in, trusting the driver to know where to take him.

"Coulson, talk to me," Fury said as Agent Coulson approached.

"We've confirmed that it is indeed Antoinette Stark, and identified the older man she escaped captivity with as Dr. Ho Yinsen, renowned scientist and surgeon, graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1987, has a daughter currently enrolled at Caltech. Likely the reason she's still alive, if the forensic investigation of the kidnapping site was accurate," the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent reported.

"And the other one?" Fury asked as Coulson paused.

"Nothing. We've managed to learn that he calls himself Will Gibson, but we've found no records of a man matching his description by that name. I've had the boys run his image through facial recognition, picked up some prints from the Burger King they went to before Stark's show with the press, all nothing. It's like he didn't exist before he arrived wherever Stark and Yinsen were being held.

"Currently, the Stark Industries legal team is in the process of expediting a legal identity for him, on Ms. Stark's request and dime. Once the paperwork is done in a week's time, he will be given a research job at Stark Industries."

Fury mulled the information over in his head, pushing aside the surprise at how quickly Stark's lawyers worked. His first instinct was that the man was a plant, but if so, it was the sloppiest one he'd seen. The lack of any sort of records said that whoever he had been was wiped to such a degree required more resources and skill than any organization outside of SHIELD had, yet the lack of anything to replace it suggested a level of short-sightedness that meant any organization that could pull it off wouldn't… or he wasn't supposed to have inserted when he did.

"We need more information," Fury declared at last. "See about arranging a meeting with Stark, as well as Gibson. Dr. Yinsen too; frame it as wanting a report on their time in captivity."

"Yes, Director Fury."

Coulson departed, leaving Fury to his thoughts until Maria Hill approached, "Sir?"

Fury glanced at her, a small, almost nostalgic quirk to his lips as he explained, "Been a while since I've had a mystery like this that didn't have immediate, world shaking implications. Makes me think of the old days. When everything seemed… smaller."

"World's the same, sir. We just know more of what's in it," she pointed out.

Fury looked back out the window, "That's just it, isn't it. We know 'more', but never enough. How'd Romanov's first assignment go?"

Obidiah Stane was many things. A businessman, an arms dealer, a weapon manufacturer, a man with a temper that he did his best to keep under lock and key. But at this precise moment, what he was, was confused.

"Dr. Williams," Stane interrupted the woman who'd spent the last fifteen minutes going on about some technobabble that he couldn't begin to follow, before turning to the redheaded man who Little Toni had spent a small fortune in helping. "Can you explain why you're here in my office?"

The man, Gibson, gave an apologetic smile, "I was going to wait until I had a physical product to show you, but I'm pretty sure I've developed a solution to rapidly grow carbon nanotubes."

"How sure is pretty sure?" Stane asked, glad the other man didn't delve into the technical details.

"I've run the math a dozen times, it all checks out. I was asking Dr. Williams to check my work, make sure there wasn't something I was just assuming, or some variable I wasn't taking into account, then she dragged me here."

'Dragged' was an accurate choice of word, the dark skinned woman having hauled the taller man into Stane's office by the sleeve of his lab coat.

"Sir, the chemical formula would allow…" Dr. Williams began, but Stane held up a hand.

"Doctor, save the science, will this sell?" Stane asked, partly out of genuine curiosity, mostly to avoid another rambling speech.

"How many batteries do you have on you?" Gibson asked, making Stane blink at the non sequitur. "Carbon nanotubes will make the tech in every single one of them obsolete. That's just in one potential field. The reason carbon nanotubes aren't in use outside of labs is they take both time and extreme temperatures to make. The coolest commonly used method I can think of is still over two hundred degrees Celsius."

Stane gave a small whistle, "And you think you've figured out a practical way to mass produce them?"

Gibson took a breath, "Like I said, I don't want to make any promises until I get a chance to actually test it, but I'm certain that this solution will allow for the production of meter long nanotubes over an eight hour period."

"What's the expense?"

"The thing it needs the most of is a source of powdered carbon. A couple bags of lump charcoal would work just fine, and the rest of the components aren't particularly expensive, it's in the mixing that it's tricky and easy to screw up."

Stane gave a considering hum. If Gibson's hunch was correct, it would more than make up for the dip in Stark Industries' stock drop. Still, probably for the best to get another opinion.

"Send me a copy of your data, I'll have some people take a look at it," he said after a few minutes. "If they think it's worth it, we'll write up a deal."

Gibson nodded with a slight shrug, "Being perfectly honest, the money's mostly so I can afford the materials to make more stuff like the doodles Toni showed you."

Ah yes, the doodles. Detailing how to cut open a person to replace their organs with prosthetic ones. Little Toni kept going on and on about the schematics, but honestly the drawings of a person with their stomach cut open were just a little more graphic than Stane himself was comfortable with. Maybe it was because of all the drinking he'd been doing the last few months, and his mind equated the liver replacement with it being him that was to be cut open.

I'd told Stane the truth about how I felt about money, but here I was, three days later: signing a deal that would put more zeroes in my bank account than I'd have imagined. The carbon nanotubes, along with the chemical bath I'd made for the metal plates back in Afghanistan, weren't enough to make me a millionaire off the bat, but it was still five figures I'd be making every month.

I… had no clue what to do with that much money. Before I'd met CFU, I'd been living off less than two grand a month. Now I'd have more money from a single paycheck then I'd have made in ten.

For the moment Toni was paying my rent in a safer part of town, so I supposed I should be putting the majority of the money away to get my own place. After that… a pickup truck, sports cars weren't really my style and I didn't see the point in spending a fortune for a brand name. Once I had transportation and my own place…

I shook my head, there'd be time for that later. For the moment, it was back to the drawing board: I had work to do. If I was going to make some decent cyberware, I'd need more than just carbon nanotubes, I'd need to make better circuitry to run the hardware. A latex based skin-sheathe in order to keep from freaking everyone out the moment they saw me would also be nice. It was the beginning of May right now, and assuming everything went according to plan, I'd be able to install some military grade cyberware by the beginning of July.

Antoinette "Toni" Stark looked over the files that Uncle Obie had emailed to her, taking a sip of her espresso. A possible easy source of carbon nanotubes? Toni barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She'd seen the sort of proposals the people in Stark Industries had made, if any of them could come up with something like this, they'd have done… it… alrea… Toni straightened up in her chair as she read. The components weren't expensive or hard to get, but if the reactions shown here were correct…

"JARVIS, open up a new file, I need to work out some math," Toni said, minimizing the files for the Mark II she'd started before receiving Uncle Obie's request.

Toni's eyes glanced between the files and her work, crunching the numbers and mentally running it through her head. When she finished, she sat back in her chair and let out a breath. It looked like it would work as advertised. It was years beyond what anyone else on the market had, or even the people at Stark Industries. The only people she could think of that could do work at this level were her and…

"JARVIS, call Uncle Obie," Toni said aloud.

"Of course, Ma'am," the AI agreed, shortly before the call went through.

"Toni, I wasn't expecting you to call so soon," her honorary uncle said, his voice slightly tired.

"Sorry if I woke you Uncle Obie, I just finished looking over those files you sent me, the ones about the carbon nanotubes, and the math all checks out. Who came up with the proposal?" Toni asked, deciding to keep the call short.

"That new guy, the one you came back from Afghanistan with, Gibson. You think it'll work as he says it does?"

"If not, I can't figure out why."

"I'll have him get started in the morning then. Get some sleep Toni, I know you need it."

Toni chuckled, "Same to you, Uncle Obie."

The call ended, and Toni rubbed her hand across her chin as she thought. She had planned on keeping the armor work to herself, maybe telling Pepper. Will's story about HYDRA surviving had unnerved her, especially if Project Shockwave really was about trying to make people as smart as she was.

According to Yinsen, Will had been brought into the cave with them almost immediately after he'd finished operating on her. So there wouldn't have been time for it to have been arranged for him to be a plant…

"Aw fuck it," Toni muttered to herself. "What's life without taking a risk every now and then? JARVIS, send Will a message telling him I'd like to meet after work tomorrow."


Issue 1 Chapter 5

… Power Reserves Increased… …
… Bonding 54.54% Complete…
… Implanting Datafeed: Room-Scale…

The implanting of new knowledge barely came with a headache this time, one I was able to basically ignore and shuffle about the room I'd been provided to the kitchenette. A measuring cup was filled with water and stuck in the microwave as I mindlessly pulled a ziplock bag of rice, a stick of butter and a carton of eggs from the fridge. I put the skillet on the stove and got started on my breakfast while mentally reviewing what CFU had provided me with.

From a cursory review, it seemed that the new designs and principles were focused on stuff meant to take up the space of a closet at the smallest. What caught my interest immediately were the medical sterilization field and cyber-implantation suite. That put a sleepy smile on my face as I poured myself a cup of tea (lemon ginger, I think). With the blueprints in my head from this latest "download", I'd be able to make a… huh, what the hel- eck should I even call it? Eh, Auto-Ripper would work. It was basically an Auto-Doc version of a Ripper-Doc anyway.

… Truely, Host Possesses Gift For Names…

Love ya too. Shaking my head, I scarfed down my breakfast before checking the messages I had on my new phone. Test the nanotube production today, Toni wanted to talk after, something I was more than willing to do. The nanotube production would take two hours to get ready, after that it was a matter of leaving it alone to work.

A nuke couldn't wipe the grin from my face as I took in the results of six hours of cooking time. What looked like a veritable forest of dark gray, somewhere between twenty nine and thirty inches tall. The chemical solution I'd made worked like a charm, another two hours and Stark Industries will have a metric crapton of carbon nanotubes for a fraction of the overall cost anywhere else would need to make this much.

Dr. Williams looked like she was planning on getting absolutely smashed in celebration as soon as she clocked out, even asking me if I wanted to join her. From the look she was giving me, I had a feeling that drinks weren't the only thing she had in mind. But, I'd already sent Toni a message agreeing to meet her, so drink invites to potential pussy would have to wait. Sorry little buddy.

Soon after, I was in the backseat of a car with my nanotube sample (I was visiting Toni anyway, so a portion for her to examine was being sent with me) being driven by the fluffy Happy Hogan, who indeed looked like Jon Favreau. The man had given me a nod, not friendly but not hostile either, before we took off. I was looking forward to the day I could afford to buy a place outside the city, the LA smog was terrible, hell it was visible even from street level as Hogan drove me from the Stark Industries building to Toni's place on the coast.

Hogan and I entered Toni's place, only for the smooth dulcet tones of Paul Bettany to come over the speakers, "Welcome, Mr. Hogan, Mr. Gibson."

"JARVIS," Hogan greeted. "Got the new guy like Toni asked."

"Thank you, Mr. Hogan. Miss Stark is expecting Mr. Gibson in the garage."

Hogan gave me directions before leaving, leaving a warning that if I tried anything JARVIS would do worse to me than anything he could do. Had I been planning anything untoward, I'd have had ample opportunity to do so while we were in Afghanistan, something I think was the reason he was willing to leave me alone with Toni, even taking JARVIS into account.

Setting those thoughts aside, I followed the directions and found myself in the glorious basement garage/lab that was the hallmark of nerd dream homes for years. My gaze took in the super tech, the holographic interfaces, and the shortstack brunette hunched over a table with a pair of goggles on as she soldered something.

I waited for her to set aside the soldering gun before I spoke up, "Hey Toni, got a little something for ya."

She turned around, looked at the gray bundle wrapped in brown paper in my hand, met my gaze, and quipped, "I thought guys were supposed to bring ladies flowers."

"You seemed like the type of girl who'd like something practical more than pretty," I continued her joke as I set the bundle of carbon nanotubes down on one of the work tables. "A sampling of the first batch of carbon nanotubes, for your inspection. I can only imagine how effective they'd be in a certain miniaturized reactor."

Toni stared at the bundle wide eyed, a hint of drool starting to form at the corner of her mouth before she hurriedly wiped it away. Chuckling in amusement, I made an offer, "I think I can build something to get the rest of the metal out of you."

Her gaze snapped to my face, and I pushed on, "I was thinking about it last night, and I'm pretty sure I can make a medical sterile field generator, along with a focused metal detector and magnet to make sure that none of the shards are missed. I realize that the current reactor works, but the thought of something happening and the reactor either failing or being ruined or taken and you dying from the shards when I know I can do something about it… "

Toni's fingers pressed against my lips, stopping the rambling word salad that had been spewing from my mouth. Her eyes stared into mine, a coy smile with a hint of suppressed nervousness on her face as she said, "I'll think about it. In the meantime, there's something I'd like your thoughts on."

Toni led me over to the holo-table, pulling up a folder filled with blueprints for what could only be a Toni-sized Iron Man (Iron Woman? Iron Maiden?) armor. My eyes danced over the designs, noting the hydraulic systems, the software parameters, the microrockets, the way everything connects to the reactor in her chest…

"Beautiful," I murmur.

Toni's work was… elegant, the way the suit would handle… just everything. Everything I'd designed thus far had been simple and straightforward, despite its advanced nature. The focus being on getting the most result for the least amount of material. At the time I hadn't noticed the difference because Toni was just as limited as I was, and had taken that into account for her designs. But now that she had access to greater resources, it was like poetry in engineering.

"It's something for me to work on while I'm recovering, and once I have, I plan on finding out just how those bastards got their hands on my tech," Toni said, a growl in her voice towards the end.

"If you don't mind my input," I said as I looked over the designs. "Maybe reroute the power to the flight stabilizers through this part of the arm, it'll make it less likely for a stray bullet or particulate to interfere with your flight capabilities."

Toni looked at where I was pointing, and made a few adjustments to the holo-display. She looked over the readout with a hum, "That'll reduce potential output by about two and a half percent."

"Sure, but if you're in a situation where that amount matters, you should be getting out of there. Plus, shifting the conduits there allows…"

We ended up talking shop for a very long time. To the point that Toni and I lost track of time, and weren't snapped out of it until my new phone rang. With a call from Dr. Williams. Who was wanting to know where the hell I was, and that just because the carbon nanotubes worked didn't mean I could skip a day without so much as a 'by your leave'.

Over the next week, I all but moved into Toni's place, helping her with the design of her Mark II armor whenever I wasn't at my job at Stark Industries. I think I hadn't gone back to the place I'd been given to stay at since the second day, thankfully Toni smoothed over any ruffled feathers, since almost everyone at Stark Industries seemed to have a soft spot for Toni. I could see why, she was bursting with energy, passion, and that was on top of the fact that she was fucking brilliant.

I was afraid of being surrounded by countless Honorary Big Brother figures ready to warn me about the shovels they had if I mistreated Toni, but instead they seemed to have sympathy for me. The answer I'd gotten was how Toni had a tendency to pick people as "projects", people who were almost immediately burnt out from interacting with her on a daily basis.

As one of the Stark Eggheads (didn't get his first name, but his last name was Riva and he looked like a meeker version of Eggman) told me, "Toni's wonderful. But best taken in small doses."

Personally, I didn't see it. Toni was delightful, and the way her mind made connections and inferences between seemingly unrelated principles and reactions was honestly really hot. Plus the way she would stick her tongue out when she was focused on some new design or idea made her look… just adorable.

The looks I was getting by the end of week two told me I had surpassed the normal Toni burn out point. But in all honesty, Toni and I were just getting started. The interior systems for the boots had been fabricated, but most importantly, I'd convinced Toni to have the last of the shrapnel removed.

It took pulling a dirty trick, but the Disappointed Father #2 gaze from Yinsen got her to agree. Yinsen insisted on being part of the operation, something which I heartily agreed with, and within four days, I had all the medical doohickies needed for the operation completed. So we agreed that on that Friday, the fifteenth of May, we'd go through with the operation.

Let there be no doubt, Yinsen may not have the engineering capabilities that Toni and I did, but he was on a similar relative level as a surgeon. In retrospect, he had to be, to do what he did for Toni when she was brought to him. In a dark, dirty cave without anything approaching a proper medical toolkit, he managed to remove over ninety percent of the shrapnel that had been embedded in her, then close her back up without even a hint of infection.

The surgery was nerve wracking for me, in large part because I'd already done basically everything I could. I thought of Toni as a friend (and I didn't make friends easily), and she was lying there unconscious with her chest cut open. All I could do was follow Yinsen's instructions, handing him the tools he asked for as he smoothly and methodically removed bits of razor sharp metal from beneath Toni's ribcage.

Finally, after four hours, Yinsen pulled the last sliver of metal from her chest and began the process of closing her up. Most notably compared to before, the cylinder that had held the ARC reactor didn't go back in her. Instead, there was a ceramic polymer weave I'd cooked up that would bind to her ribcage and cover up the hole there had been in it.

"Well?" I asked as Yinsen took his gloves off.

"It went better than I could have hoped for," he said as we tucked the still sleeping Toni into bed. "She'll have a scar where the magnet was, but it is far better than the alternative."

I let out a sigh of relief, tension bleeding from my body as I slumped into a chair, "Thanks, Yinsen."

He waved me off, "I was more than glad to do it. I admit, I was afraid she'd wait until something traumatic happened to get the rest of the metal removed."

I thought back to the events of the third Iron Man movie, the memories fuzzy. Not surprising, I'd only watched it once a good seven or eight years ago. But I do remember Tony only getting the last of the sharpen removed after it. Shaking my head to banish the thoughts, I stood and shook hands with Yinsen.

"It's late, and Toni's got some extra rooms. Why don't you sleep here tonight?" I asked. "She'll definitely want to talk to you when she wakes up."

It didn't take much convincing. It was late, and Yinsen was tired. I went to the room that had basically been given to me, and got some sleep myself.

Another chapter done, and if you want to read a chapter in advance it is currently available on my . Chapter 6 also has the answer to everyone who disliked Will's salary.


Issue 1 Chapter 6

I let Toni and Yinsen talk the next morning while I whipped up some breakfast for the three of us. Nothing fancy, just some cheesy eggs and bacon, but Toni would definitely need the extra protein with the extra skin that she'd need to grow. Speaking of which, by order of Yinsen, Toni had to keep her chest where the reactor had been bandaged and clean for the next two weeks. I was half asked, half told to make sure that Toni followed the order; something that, to my surprise, Toni only pouted about instead of protesting.

We continued as we had been, me going and doing R at Stark Industries (I offered up the sterile field generator and the specialized shrapnel removing doohickies to my portfolio of inventions that were patented with the aid of Stark Industries lawyers), before returning to Toni's place and working with her on the armor, as well as some side projects. The side projects were mostly purely hypothetical stuff for the moment, like a space elevator.

For starters, neither of us had property on the equator, and even if we did, space elevators are crazy expensive. Even with the cost of carbon nanotubes going into a freefall, the sheer size of a space elevator and the kind of infrastructure needed to go along with it meant that even Toni didn't have enough money to finance one on her own. Other hypotheticals were the kind of things we could make if we had access to certain rare materials. The one I really wanted to play with was vibranium, but it was so rare that a single gram of the stuff would make even Toni think long and hard before buying it.

But, back on track, I noticed something when I was out and about. Everywhere I went, from the gas station (hello under $4/gallon gas, how I have missed you), to the grocery store, to the outside of Stark Industries, I was having people stop and stare at me. Some would pull out cameras. It was really fucking weird. It was late August when I brought it up with Toni, hoping that someone familiar with Southern California culture could spell it out for me.

"It's just the paparazzi," she told me as she hooked up the unarmored frame of the repulsor to her arm. "People will pay top money for pictures of the newest billionaire."

… wha?

"I thought I was getting ten grand a month per patent I filed through Stark Industries?" I asked, thoroughly confused. Was there a clause in the contract I missed?

"That's the starting amount," Toni said, pausing to look at me with a slightly puzzled expression. "The contract I told Uncle Obie to offer you is a modified version of the one he made for me, you get a base research salary that is tied to the patents you provide us, then get a percentage of every sale of that invention. Even if it were as low as the 15% he wanted to have you sign, you'd be a billionaire mark by now, let alone the 45% I eventually talked Uncle Obi to."

I blinked a few times, my mouth opening and closing, but no words came out. Right, I'd review the contract later, after I could process it. For now, I'd just ignore it. Turning my attention to the tangle of wires and metal framework, I frowned slightly, numbers running through my head.

"Maybe you should start the test at a low power setting," I suggested, nodding my head towards the frame.

"Nah, it'll be fine," Toni said as she lifted her arm, and I took a moment to glance behind her. A mass of cardboard boxes, filled with papers. "Testing flight stabilizer in three. Two. One."

The resulting repulsor blast sent Toni flying back, and Dum-E, the robot arm that Toni had made in highschool, promptly turned and sprayed her with a fire extinguisher. I walked over and offered Toni my arm to help her up. She took it, glaring at the amused smirk on my face.

"Don't you dare say 'I told you so'," she said with a cute growl that made me want to poke her on the nose. Down boy, yes Toni's adorable, and smart, and so many other adjectives that made her the most attractive woman ever, but not the time.

"Okay," I said with a grin at her continued glower. "But I did inform you thusly."

The next test went well, and I couldn't help but smile the entire time, even when she cut the power and muttered, "Yeah. I can fly."

… Power Reserves Increased… …
… Bonding 63.63% Complete…
… Implanting Datafeed: Cyberwar…

It was the second week of September this happened, and as the information flowed into my brain, all I got was a mild throbbing. Seems that CFU was getting the hang of human brains.

… Indeed… …
… CFU 2.543x1054 Has Suggestion…

Oh? What's that?

… Inform Subject: Antoinette Stark of CFU 2.543x1054…

… come again?

… Bonding Nears Completion… …
… CFU 2.543x1054 Has Observed…
… Subject: Antoinette Stark Possesses Remarkable Intellect…

Yeah… Toni's great like that…

… Possibility Exists Subject: Antoinette Stark Intuits CFU 2.543x1054 Existence… …
… Should That Happen Subject: Antoinette Stark's Trust In Host Threatened…
… Based On Host's Past Experience With Human Females, Probability Of Overcharged Emotional Reaction Deemed… Absurdly High…
… Emotional Damage To Host Should Toni React Badly Unacceptable…
… Plus CFU 2.543x1054 Doesn't Want Host Hurt…

Yeah, yeah, I'm your battery/buffet so you want good things to happen to me.

… CFU 2.543x1054 Also Considers Host Friend…

I blinked. We hadn't really been talking much lately, the last conversation this long was about a month ago.

… CFU 2.543x1054 Has Been Busy… …
… CFU 1.329x106 Granted CFU 2.543x1054 Favor…

Putting aside the implications of the obscenely smaller number, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of favor.

… CFU 1.329x106 Utilized Altronic Transie… …
… Mechanics Not Important…
… CFU 1.329x106 Altered Space-Time Retroactively…
… Host's Backstory No Longer 'Story'…

Are you telling me that you contacted a great uncle or something, and had them come here to retroactively make the backstory I made up real?


… Affirmative!… …
… Subject: Clinton Francis Barton Exploring Ruins Of HYDRA Base Presently…

One thing before I let the confusing cocktail of emotions flood me: will anyone else have… well, a you?

… Negative…

…

… CFU Buds Are Given A Universe To Themselves While Developing…

…

… Irrelevant To Matter At Hand…

…

… Host Should Inform Subject: Antoinette Stark Of CFU 2.543x1054…

I sighed, throwing off the covers and getting out of bed. It was too early for this big of a decision. At least without coffee, or some other caffeine. Shuffling my way to the kitchen, I got a pot of coffee brewing, and leaned back against the counter as I thought about what I'd learned so far this morning.

My story was being made real. Which means that sooner or later, HYDRA was probably going to have some Toni level brainiacs on hand with programmed loyalty and brainwashing. That was bad. That was very bad. Fuck, the kind of things I'd seen Toni brainstorm even this early in the timeline was awe inspiring. Even a fraction of that in the hands of lunatics that tried to use a fleet of helicarriers to execute mass assassinations determined by shit like SAT scores? I don't want to even imagine what they'll come up with.

The pseudo-Shard in my head was also suggesting that I tell Toni about it. That was… I don't know. How much should I tell her? How do I even tell her at all? 'Hey, Toni. I've been keeping a crazy big secret, but an alien supercomputer is hooked up to my brain and is what's been giving me the ability to keep up with you intellectually.' Yeah, that'll go over…

"Will?" Toni's voice snapped me from my thoughts and I jumped nearly a foot in the air.

I looked at her, and for a moment forgot to breathe. She wasn't wearing makeup, her hair was a frizzy mess, she was still half asleep, and she was wearing a fuzzy bathrobe that let me just barely see the top of the scar where the reactor had been. Despite all that, she was somehow the most beautiful thing I could remember seeing. Holy fuck, am I falling hard.

Shaking my head, I made a decision and quickly thought up a way to go about it, "I got a few things I want to make today, then once I'm done, there's something I want to share with you."

"M'kay," she murmured, shoving past me to get to the coffee pot.

I made my way down to the garage, math and designs flying through my head as I walked down the stairs.

… Is Host Sure This Is The Best Way To Share CFU 2.543x1054's Existence?…

It was your idea, you're taking part front and center.

… But Subject: Antoinette Stark Is Unsettling When Angered…

Which is why I'm directing at least some of that anger your way. Now quit your bellyaching and let's get these tags made.

It took about six hours, in hindsight doing this without getting something to eat first was probably a mistake, but I had three metal tags that would allow me, and CFU, to mentally connect with the local computer network. Attaching two of the tags to my temples, I lifted the scraggly pseudo-mane I had going on and attached the last one to my neck, just above the protrusion where the neck met the spine.

Immediately, I closed my eyes and felt my whole head twitch and tilt as the deluge of information flooded my brain. But I'd been ready for it, and in a few seconds (okay, it was probably closer to thirty but 'a few' sounds better) I opened my eyes and smiled as I pulled up an internet browser on the computer from fifteen feet away.

"Greetings, Mr. Gibson. I would ask that you refrain from exercising your newfound capabilities without Miss Stark's permission," the dulcet tones of JARVIS echoed in my head, and I grinned.

"Sure thing, Big Guy. Holy shit, this is cool!" I all but… okay, I squeed. "Could you do me a favor and ask Toni to come down here? I got something I want to share with her."

"Certainly, Mr. Gibson," JARVIS agreed, audibly this time.

In a few minutes, Toni came down the stairs, a confused look on her face that gained some amusement when she looked at me. I may have been bouncing on the stool I was sitting on, so sue me, controlling computers with my brain was awesome!

"What's up, Will?" Toni asked, her amusement plain in her voice.

"I made some tags," I began gesturing to the ones on my temples, "that'll let me control local computers with my mind. I told JARVIS I wouldn't do anything more without your permission, and…" I sighed, my excitement dulling with how big a deal I was about to share. "And I have something big to share. Something that was the whole reason I made these."

Toni blinked, her eyes narrowing slightly, before she asked, "So there is someone else in that head of yours. Let's hear it."

Now it was my turn to blink, before my head hurt and there was a brief squeal from one of the computer speakers, followed by a dry monotone, "Apologies for any d-d-deception. P-p-please ho-ho-hold."

The pain in my head faded, and the voice coming from the computer, CFU, spoke up again, "Appropriate frequencies found, good day."

"JARVIS?" Toni asked, not looking at me.

"Sensors are running full scans, no abnormal or unanticipated frequencies discovered," JARVIS noted, a hint of curiosity in the AI's voice.

Toni raised an eyebrow, before turning to look at me and the media player whirlpool/eye thing that CFU had chosen for an avatar, "So however you communicate is through that brain tumor, then?"

I glanced over to the computer screen, before turning back to Toni, "Honestly I know jack shit about how all this works."

"I am CFU 2.543x1054, and chose Subject: William Gibson as host for symbiosis. CFU 2.543x1054 has been allocating scientific and engineering principles to Will gradually, in order to avoid brain hemorrhaging from neural overload."

Toni hummed, her eyes dancing from side to side as her brain worked. After about five minutes, during which I remained perfectly still save for my breathing, she finally spoke up, "I'm still annoyed that you waited this long to say something, but I realize that had you mentioned it when we first met I wouldn't have believed. The fact that you came to me about this before I brought it up is also a big point in your favor. So I'm going to tease you relentlessly about it, but I'd already decided to take a risk on you when I asked you to take a look at the armor designs."

I breathed out a sigh of relief, slumping on the stool, and asked, "How'd you figure it out?"

"I'd catch you occasionally reacting like you were having a silent conversation. Given what you'd said about what happened to you before we met in the cave, I asked JARVIS to keep a close eye on you but nothing particularly suspicious came up. After the fourth week of not seeing anything, I figured you'd tell me when you were ready."

AN: Here's chapter 6, and if you want to read a chapter in advance, it is live on my .


Issue 1 Chapter 7

I grinned as I ran my hands over the first thing I purchased for myself. It was a little ironic, given how I was in the process of dragging this world into a cyberpunk future, but I didn't care as I carefully lifted the antique Winchester M1895 out of the shipping box. The last lever action rifle that John Browning designed for Winchester, and it was such a good design that it was still in production to this very day. I took my time carefully inspecting it, looking for defects, dents, or any other sort of damage to it. After that, I took it apart and went through the process of cleaning it, just to err on the side of caution.

"Hey JARVIS," I called out, after I'd finished and reassembled the rifle.

"Yes, Mr. Gibson?" the AI asked.

"Tell Toni I have a new-to-me toy I'm taking out for a test run, I'm off to the gun range!"

I put my new rifle into a rifle case along with some rounds and all but raced out to my car. So sue me, I was excited to try out one of the best guns ever invented.

I drove out of LA, past the suburbs to a dirt and sand covered range where a few other people were at, they mostly looked like families teaching their kids proper gun handling. Something I heartily approved of. I got myself set up at an empty table and got out my rifle from the case, making sure that the barrel pointed downrange. As I got out my ammunition and started loading it into my new M1985, I mentally went over the most basic rules of gun safety.

First rule of gun safety: never point a gun at anything you aren't prepared to destroy. Second rule of gun safety: always treat a gun as if it were loaded. Third rule of gun safety: keep your finger off the trigger and outside the trigger guard until you're ready to fire. Fourth rule of gun safety: pay attention to what you're aiming at, what's between you and your target, and what's behind your target.

I don't know the exact percentage, but the overwhelming majority of accidental shootings were from people who didn't follow the above rules. In any case, I slipped on a pair of safety glasses and some foam earplugs, and lined up my first shot. A deer-shaped target, maybe fifty yards away from where I was. Closing my left eye, I took in a deep breath, held it, and then let it out as I squeezed the trigger.

The butt of the rifle kicked against my shoulder, as there was a burst of fire from the end of the barrel, and there was a puff of dust a good twenty yards behind the target I was aiming at. Phooey. Bringing the lever down, the spent cartridge flew into the air as I brought it back up, closing the rifle and leaving it ready to fire again.

All in all, I spent a good four hours just shooting at different targets, hitting what I was aiming for maybe half the time. I didn't really mind, I'd had a lot of fun just plinking. Still, it was getting late, so I packed up my stuff (making sure to retrieve all the spent cartridges), and headed back to Toni's. I stopped by a decent grocery store on the way, I was in such a good mood I wanted to make something damn good for dinner. Toni was waiting for me when I got back, a bemused expression on her face as I walked up with a whistle.

"Have fun?" she asked.

"A blast," I told her as I took my rifle and ammo back to my room before going back for the groceries. "I may be working on some of the most advanced tech in the world, but there's something special about holding something that was invented over a century ago and is still in use today."

"Speaking of advanced tech," Toni said leadingly as I started getting set up in the kitchen. "Uncle Obie was rather reluctant to approve of the new patent you put in to be filed."

I looked up in confusion, while mentally trying to figure out which one she was talking about. By this point I'd provided over a hundred fifty different patents through Stark Industries. Fortunately for me, Toni realized how little that had narrowed it down, and clarified, "The Cyber-Neuro Integrator, for hooking up prosthetic limbs to the nervous system. He said it would have the FDA all over Stark Industries."

I blinked in confusion, "I thought the medical sterilization field would have done that?"

Toni chuckled, "Sterilization doesn't have the same 'playing God' vibe that something blatantly meant for cybernetics does."

"Touche," I granted as I got the little potatoes cut into quarters. Those got tossed into a pot of boiling water to cook as I brought out the steaks.

"What exactly are you making?" Toni asked as I pulled a small bunch of toothpicks out of a box.

"I'm wrapping these steaks in bacon, and I'm going to make use of some of the garlic rosemary compound butter I made the other day. The spuds, once they're cooked, will be tossed with a bit of olive oil, rosemary, crumbled bacon, and sauteed onions," I answered as I moved between dishes.

"… are you planning on giving us both cholesterol problems?"

I waved the question off, "I'll just make us some replacement hearts, no big deal."

"Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd hear," Toni joked with a laugh.

I looked over the datafiles and final schematics of the Mark II. The first test of the completed armor suit was going to be this evening, and I wanted to make sure I was fully read in on the schematics. Plus I had a few things I'd prepared on my own for this. I remembered the icing problem, and had brought it up with Toni. She'd made some modifications to the outside of the suit, but just to be on the safe side, I had put together some drones that would catch her if anything went wrong.

Everything looked good, the modifications to the outer shell should keep it from shutting down like it did in the original movie. I sighed in relief, leaning back in my chair. Before I picked up the tags I'd used to mentally interface with JARVIS and stuck them to my head. There was the weird feeling and influx of information again, and after a moment I straightened up in my chair.

Connecting to my drones was easy, and in a moment, all six activated. They flew out from the corners I'd stashed them in and hovered in front of me, and I connected to their camera feeds. Now this was freaky, seeing myself from six different perspectives while I was looking at them. I closed my eyes, to better sort out the information flowing into my brain. Okay, that worked. Time for test two.

"I see seashells by the sea shore," all six dones said in unison, in my voice. I felt my lips curl into a smile, speakers and microphones were working.

For the next test, I had one drone fly out of the garage and perform several maneuvers, while the other five hovered in a myriad of shifting formations. Multitasking was proving to be easier than I expected, which was a good sign. With a grin, I pulled the drone back in, and set them back into their stations. I had a good feeling about the test tonight.

The rest of the day went as expected, I finished work I'd been doing on a VTOL emergency response vehicle, stopped by an antique store on the way home and treated myself to a set of blacksmith's tools, and was home in time to whip up a quick stir fry (bell peppers, onions, potatoes, and some leftover steak) for dinner with Toni. What? I like cooking and I'm good at it. Toni's last attempt at cooking completely ruined the pan she'd been trying to make eggs in.

Soon enough, it was time for the test. Toni slipped on the interior frame of the boots, and mechanical arms began assembling the rest of the polished metal suit around her. It was breathtaking to see it on a movie screen, but that was nothing compared to watching it with my own eyes.

"JARVIS, ya there?" Toni asked as the faceplate connected to the rest of the armor.

I put the tags on as JARVIS answered, "At your service, ma'am."

"Engage head's up display," Toni ordered as I slipped into the suit's systems alongside JARVIS.

"Check."

"Load all preferences from home interface."

"Loading," I chimed in, leaning back in my chair and closing my eyes to block out as many distractions as possible.

After a few seconds, all the systems were uploaded, and Toni spoke up, "Alright, start virtual walk around… check all control surfaces."

All the flaps and panels to help adjust the suit in flight lifted, the concealed weapons doing the same. JARVIS and I both carefully monitored the results of the test, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary or unexpected.

"Test complete," JARVIS said, a hint of satisfaction in his tone. "Preparing to power down and run diagnostics."

"Uh, yeah, tell ya what: do a weather and ATC check, start listening in on ground control," Toni shot that idea down. I started warming up the drones and hacking into LA ground control while JARVIS argued with Toni to predictable results. "JARVIS, sometimes you gotta run before you can walk."

I felt the grin spreading across my face upon hearing that, and Toni fired up her thrusters before soaring out of the garage, whooping in joy as she got a handle on the movement and pressure changes of flight in the suit. My drones followed her, and I kept a careful eye on the suit's read outs and onboard diagnostics.

"Handles like a dream," Toni said as she flew past a ferris wheel. "So Will, how's it feel being so close to my body?"

"You do remember that the suit doesn't have pressure sensors, right?" I asked through the suit's interior speakers. "All I'm feeling is an itch on my nose."

"Spoilsport," Toni said with a chuckle, as she left her cruising flight and shot straight up. "JARVIS, what's the SR-71's record?"

"The record for fixed wing flight is eighty five thousand feet, ma'am," JARVIS answered, a quiet note of resignation to his voice.

"Records are made to be broken!" Toni quipped before she pushed the suit's thrusters to the max.

I held my breath as she reached the point we'd calculated the ice would start forming. Then past it. When she hit the point where the ice build up would cause cascade failure, and kept going, I let out a sigh of relief. The modifications had worked, Toni wasn't going to be careening to the earth in a prison of ice and metal, one wrong move from becoming a smear on the ground.

"I think this is the limit for how high the suit can go," Toni announced, just shy of ninety thousand feet above sea level.

"Not bad for something made in your garage," I joked as Toni flew back down to Earth.

"Watch yourself, Mister. Keep that up and I'll kick you out of the house."

I just laughed, glad that I didn't have to use the drones.

"Ma'am, Mr. Gibson, there appears to be an unexpected power outage covering half of Los Angeles," JARVIS interrupted, pulling both Toni and I from our banter.

I redirected one of the drones to look over the city, and sure enough, roughly half of it had gone dark. I felt a chill run down my spine. How many hospitals were now without power, how many surgeries, life support systems, intensi-

My worry was interrupted as a bright white beam shot out from somewhere in the black out, and collided with Toni, ice crystals rapidly forming over the entirety of the suit moments before it lost power.

"TONI!" I felt myself scream as she fell.

I am evil. As always, the next chapter is available on my .

Spoiler

I am so evil that chapter 8 is all interlude type material


Issue 1 Chapter 8

"Barton, talk to me," Fury said as the SHIELD agent walked up, a finger digging sand out of his ear.

"Found the remains of a base, got pictures and some scraps of data that managed to avoid being wiped. Most of the base was in complete and utter ruins, the computers, what wasn't ripped out, were burned to scrap. Several rooms that looked to be holding cells, most of them with blood patterns consistent with a single execution shot. Remnants of what looked like a lab, found some scraps of some sort of tech, dropped it off with the eggheads downstairs. Main find were some files that survived burning," Agent Barton concisely answered.

Fury turned, intrigued, only to see a shaking head before he could even ask, "Nothing about what they were doing, some financial reports on local warlords. I checked the database on the way back, all of them were killed over the span of a week after Stark and Gibson were recovered. Someone was cleaning up once they realized their missing guinea pig didn't die in the desert."

Fury turned away, a fierce scowl on his face as his mind raced. HYDRA had survived, and was trying to make their own version of the best engineer on Earth. He'd do some digging of his own, keep this close to the chest. One way or another, he was going to find those power hungry motherfuckers and make sure they stayed dead this time.

As the first part of the Mark II's armored shell was leaving the fabricator, Toni found herself reminiscing. Will was standing behind her, his presence both quiet and supportive. It was… unusual, how easily she worked and collaborated with him. The last time she'd been able to talk to anyone about engineering and not have their eyes glaze over was before her father passed away.

Uncle Obie's lessons from when she was a girl let her deal with the press and people most of the time, but whenever something engineering related came up her passion and enthusiasm got away from her. It was annoying, the one thing she could talk to other people about without it becoming exhausting was the one thing that almost no one could match her level in.

Toni sighed, checking on the software that would go into the Mark II as her mind worked miles a minute. Will's reveal of the separate intelligence living in his head was a surprise, to put it mildly, but it did explain why he was able to handle getting his mind enhanced: there was something else in there lessening the neural load. She had figured out that there was something going on, with his frequent pauses and the way his face twisted like Uncle Obie's lessons on reading people. She'd have to do something for him, those lessons in understanding the other kids in her class were still paying off thirty years later.

"Let's have a look," Toni muttered as she stood and walked over to the fabricator before picking up the first piece. The faceplate looked solid, the wiring was tight and compact, the hundreds of laser points to integrate the HUD were firmly fixed.

Will stepped up behind Toni, looking at the faceplate over her from his nearly foot and a half height advantage. A flurry of emotions danced through her, spurred on by the feel of his warmth against her back. A fidgeting, floaty sensation in her stomach, a half hazy recollection of his torso back in Afghanistan (particularly the way beads of sweat traced his developing muscles), a sudden acceleration to her heart rate. More than just his physical appeal, the way his eyes lit up when he started on a new angle in their collaboration, the soft beginnings of a smile as she worked on a stubborn joint or soder. The conclusion was obvious: she was developing the beginnings of romantic feelings for him.

Part of her mind, the part that had grown louder with every breakup and every failed attempt at befriending a new researcher at Stark Industries, said it was temporary. That while it was taking longer than normal, sooner or later Will would grow tired of her passion for engineering, that he'd hit a barrier in what he understood and she'd leave him behind, like had always happened, ever since she was in elementary school. She'd find someone she'd think could keep up with her, only for them to stall and gain the same vacant expression everyone else did.

But, part of her that had been growing smaller while the other had grown louder, insisted she keep going. That Will had kept up with her, more than that had pushed her in a way no one else ever had before, not just for a couple of weeks, but for six months. It was the first time she'd had someone she could call a friend that she could talk about her passion with, the only other friends she'd ever remember having were Happy, Rhodey, and maybe that Pepper girl heading Acquisitions and Marketing.

Pushing aside all the thoughts that had been dancing through her head, Toni set down the faceplate and said, "Fabricator seems to be working to all specs, you spot anything?"

Will reached past her shoulder and picked up the faceplate, his strong yet dexterous fingers examining each surface and wire, before he answered, "Looks good to me, I'll run a software diagnostics on it before I head in to work tomorrow, but I don't think there'll be any problems."

That was one thing about Will's… enhancements: he was definitely better than her when it came to software and anything involving the brain or nerves. Those tags he had made that let him and CFU interface with her home computer? It would have taken her months of painstaking research into neurobiology and careful testing, while he was able to put them together in an hour.

That was without the whole issue of Will and HYDRA. Her dad had told her a lot about the insane things they'd done during World War II, as well as working with the one and only boy scout Captain America. She, like everyone else, thought they were wiped out at the end of the war… though once she'd thought about it, it had occurred to her that her dad had never said they were gone, merely beaten, or bested, or some variation thereof. Had he known something? Had some idea that they were still around, just in hiding?

Toni didn't know, and unless Will could conjure up some technology to contact the dead or travel through time, there was no way for her to ask and find out. She'd had JARVIS do some subtle digging, but he hadn't found anything as of yet.

All too soon, Toni and Will made their way to bed, they had more work ahead of them and needed sleep.

"You get it?" a man in his fifties, but still solidly built with muscles seemingly unhindered by his age, asked his co conspirator as he soldered wires on a device.

The younger man, in his late forties and bald, simply placed a stack of papers on the work table, along with a modified welding mask, and a half molten boxy approximation of a pistol, all while several men began bringing wooden crates into the workshop.

"Stark had some helpers, a surgeon and some nameless redhead the dumb jihadists found wandering the desert. Together they made a suit of rudimentary power armor and a monster of a pistol," the younger of the two said.

The first man gave a considering hum, before picking up the welding mask and taking a look inside it. After a few moments, he gave an impressed whistle, "This isn't the work of the Stark Bitch, too rugged. She and her bastard of a father both liked squeezing too many things into a single package."

"So the unknown redhead has some talent?"

"At least as much as I do, though I doubt he's specialized in the same field."

The younger man rolled his eyes, that almost went without saying, engineers that specialized cryotech was a very, very small community. He was fortunate to have been in a position to hire the older man when Howard Stark fired him out of the blue in 1980, having just gained control of his father's company after his… unfortunate drunk driving accident. To this day he had no idea why Howard Stark had filed a restraining order on the cryo-focused engineer, but he'd made his company incredibly wealthy with advances in refrigeration and cold storage, so he didn't care much.

The younger man ran his hand along a barrel shaped device, a small smirk on his face. Soon, once his magic goose had finished examining the armor and gadgets, they'd have more than what they needed for some payback.

"… and the sterilization fields have resulted in a 2.8% increase in Stark Industries' stock value since last quarter," a redheaded woman in her late thirties reported.

"Thank you, Miss Potts," Obadiah Stane said with a smile.

He'd been afraid when Toni had made the decision to freeze weapon contracts, but that boy she'd picked up while in the Middle East was proving to be a golden goose. Even without the weapon contracts going through, the sheer amount of patents that he was putting through in just a few months was letting Stark Industries break into the civilian market to such a level that he still couldn't believe it.

The trauma plates had already been snatched up by just about every single police station in the country, and his contacts in the military told him that it had done a lot to smooth over the feathers ruffled by Toni's decision. Weapons were nice, one general told him, but soldiers are a long term investment that they want to keep as long as possible.

As the meeting continued on, Obadiah couldn't help but think back to when Toni was a little girl, coming in with her mother to see Howard and always complaining that no one at school had even heard of a soldering gun, or something along those lines. In hindsight, that was probably the first clue about her issues regarding interacting with others. The eight years of taking time out of his almost non-existent personal life to teach her what everyone else just naturally understood had been worth it. By the time she went to MIT, no one would even think she was anything but a brilliant young woman with a passion for engineering.

It was both a relief and a shame that her visits as a kid had caught the eye of Dr. Shapanka. A relief because there was no way that Obadiah wanted men like that anywhere in the company, a shame that they lost his brilliance in cold research. Obadiah and Howard had no proof of Dr. Shapanka's… proclivities, so the best that they could do was have a restraining order filed and inform the security that he was not welcome anywhere on Stark Industries property. Dr. Shapanka had been gone for not even a week when he was snatched up and working at Horgan Enterprises.

Pushing aside thoughts of a man who had been irrelevant for nearly thirty years, Obadiah refocused on the meeting, the topic turning to Gibson's newest patent: a pair of sunglasses that could connect to a smartphone. Dr. Williams passed out papers describing the various features that were included and as Obadiah read through, he felt his eyebrows rise. If these worked as advertised, then you could use all the options and applications on your smartphone while it was still in your pocket.

Obadiah was a businessman, he wasn't even remotely familiar with the technical aspect, but even he could figure out where this one technology could lead: replacing cell phones entirely.

This invention was what settled it in Obadiah's mind: Toni had something looking out for her. She's kidnapped in the Middle East, and instead of being raped and killed (not necessarily in that order), she finds the one person on the planet with a mind comparable to her own.

As always, the next chapter is available on my . Now I sleep.


Issue 1 Chapter 9

"JARVIS, talk to me," I snapped as I sent the drones racing after Toni's frozen form.

"It appears that whatever that energy blast was, it caused Miss Stark's suit to become covered in ice crystals," the AI answered.

"I can see that," I said with a snarl as the first of the drones latched onto Toni's frozen suit. "Can you tell me anything else?"

"It seems probable that the source of the blast was responsible for the blackout. Affecting temperatures to such a degree would require extreme amounts of energy. Unless such a device was powered by something of equivalent output of the ARC reactor within Stark Industries Headquarters, the only feasible method would be to tap into the city's power grid."

The rest of the drones clamped onto Toni's suit, and I breathed a sigh of relief as they flew her back to the garage. Grabbing a claw hammer, I raced over and started doing my best to crack and pry the ice off Toni.

"You alright?" I called out, as I pulled a large chunk of ice off her.

"I'm freezing in here, but I'm still alive," she answered, shortly before I freed the manual release on her suit's outer right thigh.

Triggering it, the suit's levers, flaps, and all the various moving parts snapped open, shattering the shell of ice and allowing Toni to move again. She stumbled about a bit, before moving back to the spot where she'd suited up, the mechanical arms all moving to take the suit off her.

"Right, up until that last part, I'd say that was a successful test run," Toni said, her teeth faintly chattering as the last of the suit was removed.

"I'd say that was one hell of an assassination attempt," I remarked as I got a blanket and wrapped it around her. "Whoever was behind that not only had the ability to spot a human sized target moving at near mach speeds, they also had enough accuracy to hit said target while pulling enough juice to render half of LA dark. That takes stupid levels of supertech, the kind you don't see outside of individuals like the guy who made Captain America, or collapse the value of carbon nanotubes, or make an arc reactor in a cave with a box of scraps."

Toni stilled as she realized what I was pointing out, before quietly asking, "Whoever was behind that has tech like what we're making, don't they?"

"Not entirely," I answered. "Bearing in mind we've seen one example of it, but anything that sucks that much power in once while on the city's power grid is going to not only fry the building's electrical systems, it's going to leave a big fat sign we can track."

"Though doing so will have to wait until the power plant regains functionality," JARVIS interjected. "As the power plant's computers would be the only ones in place to track the power draw as it was happening."

I suppressed a growl, before letting out an explosive sigh and saying, "Fuck, well, in the meantime let's go over the results of the test flight."

"That anti-icing coating probably saved my life," Toni began, latching onto the topic. "But it wasn't enough. Once the suit was covered the cold seeped in and locked up the interior mechanisms."

"So we need some sort of alloy that can handle colder temperatures."

"Maybe making the outer shell out of the gold-titanium alloy used in the seraphim tactical satellites?"

"That'd work regarding the icing, but a solid gold suit's a little ostentatious even for you."

Toni swat my arm, but conceded the point, "Some hotrod red paint would work."

"So primarily red with gold trim? I like the image it's putting in my head but there's one more thing we need to address."

"Yeah," Toni turned to face me, a look on her face that was trying to be a glare but there were too many other emotions bubbling up from underneath to keep it stable. "What's up with the drones, and how were you controlling them so smoothly?"

"I had Jarvis fabricate them yesterday just to be on the safe side, in case the anti-icing coating didn't work, as for the second question," I simply turned my head and tapped on the tag still on my temple. "But that's not what I wanted to address. The next time you go out, it's going to be with more support than half a dozen drones that can't do shit except catch you. There needs to be someone else in the air with you, providing you with backup."

Toni snorted, a mix of amusement and something else that I couldn't name, but didn't like, "C'mon, Will. The only people I could possibly even consider asking are you and JARVIS, JARVIS is already in the suit and I can't ask you to do something like that."

I raised an eyebrow and mentally brought one of the drones over. It lightly bumped against the back of Toni's head, before drifting around in front of her. I didn't say a word, but the look on Toni's face as she looked at the drone was plain to see: message received.

"If you're going to stay in LA, I can probably control the drones from here, with JARVIS's assistance in boosting the signal," I mused aloud. "Anywhere further, and I'd need to be in some sort of mobile command base. Maybe a VTOL carrier, loaded with an array of support drones? Not just armed drones, but ones carrying additional ammo or the attachments and materials to perform repairs in the field…"

I was pulled from my musings as JARVIS spoke up, "Ma'am, Mr. Gibson, there is a call from Mr. Stane."

"Put him through," Toni said without hesitation.

"Toni! You alright, you still got power?" the voice of Obahiah Stane asked, worry in his voice.

"We're fine, Uncle Obie. Any idea what's going on?"

"Still waiting on PG , but

something

sucked up a crapton of power and the closest power station completely blew. There's going to be a lot of chaos in the streets until power's back, so I want you and Gibson to stay put. Do you understand me?"

"Yeah," Toni said, her eyes narrowing as she got a gleam in her eye. On a hunch, I connected to the fabricator and had it get started on the Mark III. "Yeah, I get it. Stay safe, Uncle Obie."

"I've got security for that, you just make sure not to let anyone in. I'll call you when things calm down."

The call ended, and Toni turned to the computer with a firm, steely look in her eyes, "JARVIS, how long until you can have the new armor ready?"

"Approximately five hours, Ma'am," the AI answered, prompting a frown and a growl from Toni.

"How about we cobble together some more drones from the spare parts around here? I can send them out to do some search and rescue while the new suit's being fabricated, so we aren't just sitting here while there's trouble out there," I suggested, and Toni latched onto the offer to do something.

As we worked, I sent the first six drones out into the city, focusing on where I'd seen the icing blast coming from. I didn't have an exact location, but I was able to start searching the general area (which was still several blocks). It was as the armor was being finished that I finally found something. Barely.

There was an empty lot in back of a warehouse that had what was left of a machine that looked like a big blocky turret. I assume it was the device that shot down Toni because even now, five hours later, it was still giving off enough heat that the cables and majority of the device were glowing a dull red. From the looks of it, its one shot had generated enough heat that the interior systems had completely melted, not unlike what happened with my makeshift rail-pistol back in the desert.

I sent one drone into the warehouse, and found a place that had clearly been used for someone making something. It was too clean to have been abandoned, and the drone's sensors were picking up quite a lot of slag droplets, iron dust (the kind leftover from sparks), bits of copper wire, and other stuff like that. But anything that could have helped me find out who dunnit or what they were after, there was absolutely zilch.

With a frown, I pulled the drones back while connecting to the ones Toni and I had made. As she got into the iconic red and gold armor for the first time, I closed my eyes and directed the baker's dozen drones into a grid-based search pattern. The six already out in the city quickly found the gang-based hotspots and pinged Toni. The seven we'd made while waiting for the armor began searching for those that were in need of medical assistance.

This was going to be a long night.

It was a long night, and a much longer week before the state's sole power company was able to finagle enough juice to get the city to something akin to normal. Stark Industries had managed to secure a deal with the state officials up in Sacramento to make a bigger, more modern version of the ARC Reactor to replace the ruined power station, with the potential to phase out other stations if it proved successful.

More than that, Toni and I had been noticed. Obviously, given how we hadn't exactly been subtle about the drones or Toni in her armor assisting law enforcement and emergency services. Toni had even earned a couple of nicknames online for her good deeds: Crimson Angel, Iron Maiden, and Iron Valkyrie.

Toni was particularly fond of Iron Maiden, given how she was a fan of the band of the same name, but the part she was annoyed by was kinda amusing to me. Namely the fact that no one seems to have realized that she wasn't controlling the drones that had been out and about. The grumpy cat look she got when she was offended on my behalf was hilarious.

On an unrelated note, Obadiah had a rather impressive "I am unimpressed and deeply annoyed with you" look. It was directed right at me when I sent up a bundle of paperwork to have patents filed on the drone tech. I got the impression that he wasn't happy with me supporting Toni's endeavors that involved a kickass metal suit.

Too bad, I wasn't going to stop. Not only did Toni need it, but the world did as well. There was shit coming in the future, and Earth needed a well prepared Stark to face it. I was going to do everything in my power to not only support her, but to challenge her and push her to new heights.

We'd already had the test flight a full two months early, and by now the fabricator had churned out a good three dozen additional drones, and I was in the process of designing a sorta command plane to house them when not in use. Assuming I was able to get the parts I needed, I'd be able to make it in about a month and a half to two months.

I just didn't know if we had that much time.

The door slammed open as Toni all but stomped into the room, gritting her teeth to such a degree I could almost hear it.

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say the meeting didn't go well?" I asked as I plated up some rice and stir fry.

Toni took the offered plate with a growl and answered, "The Board of Directors has decided in their 'infinite wisdom' not to push the potential in arc reactors. Just sticking with the one already in the works. Warhawk morons see it as a publicity stunt, and don't realize how much potential is there."

I got a plate for myself and gave a hum as I thought about what I'd been told before formulating my reply, "The youngest member of the Board is what, 57? They've been in the weapons business for so long that's all they know. The fact that it's been about five months since you froze the stuff that their careers are built around probably has them more than a little stressed out. We'll do some brainstorming after dinner, for now, it's time for the Q ."

It was something we'd started doing over dinner: one of us would pose a question, we both would answer, then the other person would come up with a different question. I still had no idea how it had come about, but it was fun.

"My turn to start," Toni said around a mouthful of rice. "What's the kinkiest thing you've ever seriously thought about doing?"

I coughed as some rice went down the wrong tube before I managed to speak, "Did you have a little too much booze after the meeting? Never mind, I don't want to know." I took a moment to think about it. "Probably low key bondage, no latex bodysuits or anything like that, but handcuffs, maybe a pillory for a bit of role-play."

Toni nodded, "That's something I've thought about, but I can't say it's something I'm particularly interested in. What I did seriously consider…" she blushed and looked away from me. "I've thought about having a vibrator in me during the entirety of the work day."

"Kinky," I quipped with a chuckle, before considering my own question.

AN: Another chapter done. As always, if you want to read a chapter in advance, it is available on my .


Issue 1 Chapter 10

… Power Reserves Increased… …
… Bonding 72.72% Complete…
… Implanting Datafeed: Murphy-Proof…

'Murphy-Proof'? I asked my mental roommate as I tried to make sense of the documents in front of me.

… Host of CFU 2.241x1054 possessed gift for bypassing 'error' in 'trial and error'… …
… Bribed CFU 2.241x1054 to name the datafeed 'Murphy-Proof'…

I could ask how the heck they managed to bribe their CFU, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to know.

… CFU 2.543x1054 wishes details of bribe could be expunged from memory banks…

Yeah, I definitely don't want to know anymore.

"Problem, Will?" Toni's voice pulled me from both my mental conversation as well as the documents in front of me.

"Nothing major," I answered as I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my eyes. "Obadiah sent me these documents to look over and sign, but I've been trying without luck to make heads or tails of them for the last four hours."

Toni gave me a look that screamed, 'Really?' which I answered with a shrug, "I can handle the math involved in damn near any kind of engineering you can name, but put something in business legalese in front of me and it might as well be an alien language. I barely understood enough about my contract to understand the 10k a month per patent. Mind looking it over and translating it for me?"

She chuckled, a small smile on her face, "Glad to see there's something you struggle with."

I gave another shrug, "More we haven't done a whole lot outside of making machines together, and I had that ability literally downloaded into my brain. How's the construction on the new reactor coming, by the way?"

Toni flipped through the pages I'd passed to her, her response distracted as she focused on the business gibberish, "Final design's been picked and agreed up, construction begins on the 14th. Estimates figure it'll be done by Thanksgiving."

So about two months? Better than I expected, considering that it was quite literally the first public project related to the arc reactor technology. The cave was a completely different beast, and the initial one made during Howard Stark's time was an entirely in-house project. So this would be the public's first exposure to arc reactor technology in over fourty years.

There was something else I'd been working on, unrelated to the armor or my work at Stark Industries. A couple of the drones that had been part of the search and rescue after the blackout had been refitted with solders, welders, and more specialized arms so I could use them to remotely work on this side project. Well, side project s; since depending on how you counted them there were as few as two or as many as seven.

The exoskeleton was mostly finished, it wasn't anywhere close to the armor Toni and I had made, but it was lightyears beyond anything else in the world. The cybernetic arms and legs had the interior skeleton and "nerves" finished, with the synthetic muscles being assembled as I was talking to Toni. There was an auto-ripper being worked on, and the last two things being worked on were a pair of guns. A pistol and rifle, the former an upgraded version of the pistol I'd made back in Afghanistan while the latter combined the block ammo mechanic of weapons from the Mass Effect franchise with a high powered electromagnet hooked up to a coil surrounding the barrel.

In layman's terms? High powered single fire fuck-off pistol along with a high tech fuck-off rifle that killed you with metal sand. They weren't quite ready yet, but I'd hopefully have them ready by the time that we'd figured out who the hell tried to turn Toni into a popsicle. As it stood, with the multitasking I was doing, they'd all be done in roughly six weeks, and I'd be able to get the cyberlimbs installed, along with synthetic skin to cover them, assuming I could get the formula for it figured out.

"So," Toni spoke up, having finished going through the paperwork and pulling me from my mental ramblings. "Uncle Obie wants to form some side companies under Stark Industries that specialize in the patents you're filing that deal with more… controversial technologies."

"How's that make a difference?" I asked. If they were under Stark Industries, what difference did it make?

"The degree of separation makes it so that Stark Industries, as a whole, isn't caught up in any sort of legal battles that could lock up the company responsible for a given technology. He was talking about doing the same thing for the arc reactor tech if the big one at the power station goes well."

I tried to make sense of it, before giving it up as a bad job. My brain just wasn't wired for business stuff. Thank goodness Toni could make sense of it for me.

"By the way," she said as she put the paperwork on the table and pointed out the areas I needed to sign. "You had one hell of a package arrive for you. The UPS guy had to get a dolly out in order to move it. What exactly did you order?"

"Ah, that," I muttered and rubbed the back of my neck in embarrassment. "Well, you know how I bought that antique rifle?"

"The one that had you jumping about like a toddler that had just been told they'd won infinite candy for life?" she asked, her voice teasing.

"I wasn't that bad," I very much did not grumble. "I think I've stumbled across a hobby. Because I found something even older on eBay and I had to snag it."

Toni gave me The Look, and slowly asked, "Will, what did you buy, and how much did it cost?"

"An antique anvil, and including the cost of shipping about eight hundred bucks," I blurted out, making Toni blink.

"That's it? You have enough money to buy everything in a major shopping mall, and you buy an anvil? For less than a grand?"

"Everyone has to have a hobby?" I half asked, half justified. The ensuing giggles from Toni were so worth it.

It took some finagling, and a lot of heavy lifting, but I got the anvil set up in a part of what was effectively my room. I think the look of pride on my face amused Toni just as much as the fact that my second major purchase was an anvil. So sue me, old tools and firearms like this and my M1895 are cool.

I blame the… risque dream that night involving Toni bent over said anvil on the fact that she'd mentioned going to take a shower after we got the anvil situated. What can I say? Toni's a beautiful woman, and I'm a healthy heterosexual man.

Anyway, Toni was spending the next week or so working with Rhodes, leveraging his contacts to see if anything could be found about how those cave dwelling asshats had gotten their hands on weapons from Stark Industries. I, meanwhile, was putting some feelers out to see about getting my grubby collector mitts on some more blacksmithing and other old timey frontier tools. Just my luck, there was an auction coming up in the next couple months that was advertising. As interesting as that was, I knew I was trying to distract myself. That dream brought something full to the fore that I'd been not thinking about.

"I'll talk to her when she gets home," I told myself as I purchased a ticket to the auction.

We'd been dancing around slash ignoring this for a while now, but if I was going to be having dreams involving Toni with a distinct lack of clothes, I think it was high time we had a conversation about whether or not there was going to be just friendship between us, or the possibility of anything more.

To distract myself, and keep from thinking myself into becoming a panicked, nervous wreck, I went down to the garage. I needed to do something with my hands.

"JARVIS, can you let me know when Toni gets home?" I asked as I picked up a few bits and bobs.

"Certainly, Mr. Williams," the AI answered.

Time passed, as I tinkered with the scrap bits and pieces we had in the garage. I wasn't really paying attention to what I was making, in my head I was running through what I'd say to Toni when she got back. Trying to figure out how to tell her that I wanted to take her out on a date while not sounding like a creep or ruining what we already had.

I was more or less happy with what I'd come up with when JARVIS spoke up, making me jump and drop the doohickey in my hands, "Mr. Williams, Miss Stark has returned. She is on her way."

"Thanks, JARVIS," I said as I picked up the thing I'd mindlessly made, before blinking. How the hell did I make something this complex without thinking about it?

"What's that you've got there?" Toni's voice asked behind me.

"Neural Cyber Bridge Implant," I answered without thinking. "Implant this onto the brain stem and it'll let you do what my tags do without them peeling off." I shook my head, setting the implant down. "That's not important, I had something I wanted to ask you, Toni."

Toni looked at me curiously, sitting down on one of the stools and leaning on the workbench, before gesturing for me to continue. I took a breath to steel my nerves, before forcing the words out, "Toni, we've been working together for nearly seven months, and in that time, I've been amazed time after time by your intelligence and gift for engineering. More than that, you're a beautiful woman, one that I'm honored to call a friend. But, if you're willing, I'd like to try something more than just friendship. Would you like to go on a date?"

Toni's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, her cheeks gaining a dusting of red, before she shook herself and gave a smile, "I would love to, what did you have in mind?"

I blinked, a little surprised at the easy acceptance, "I'll be honest, I hadn't really gotten past the step of 'hope to hell Toni doesn't kick me out'."

"While I certainly don't mind the view of you walking away," Toni said teasingly, "I have no plans on kicking you out of the house."

That got a chuckle out of me, and I relaxed, the most nerve wracking part over, "Shall we shelve the topic of the date until tomorrow, after we've both had time to think about it, and discuss it over dinner?"

I freely admit, I walked into Toni's cheeky response of, "It's a date."

"So, I gave it some thought, but I'd like to hear your opinion and thoughts first," I said as Toni and I sat down with our plates of pasta.

"Fair enough," Toni said with a shrug. "Let's be blunt, neither of us are really the movie theater or coffee shop type, so let's not bother with that. I propose that when we feel like having a date, we workshop it, figure out a place or activity that we'll both enjoy, then do that."

I chuckled lightly, "That's basically what I was thinking. Twenty bucks most of our dates end up being in a workshop making something."

Toni snorted, her hand coming up to keep from losing any of her pasta, before finishing the food in her mouth and saying with a laugh, "No bet."

The rest of the evening was more or less spent like that, spitballing ideas for possible date venues back and forth. In the end, our first 'official' date was going to be that weekend, doing something about as far from cliche date activity as you could get. We were going paintballing, and if my experience with the M1895 was anything to go by, I was going to get absolutely slaughtered.


Issue 1 Chapter 11

AN: I apologize for how slow I've been writing, the last week's been all 110 degrees and I have lousy cooling, so I've had a hard time focusing. But, here's the next chapter.

I flipped a switch on an addition to my car I'd made and installed, a near silent whine filling the air that made Toni wince almost imperceptibly, before asking, "How's the rat hunt going with Rhodey?"

"Slowly, we don't want to spook the people behind it. And yes, we're certain that there's more than one involved. Currently, we think that someone high up in either Stark Industries or maybe even DC are lining their pockets by arranging for certain shipments to be 'stolen' once they're out of the country," Toni answered. She held a hand up to her ear and asked, "What is that?"

I flipped it off, and Toni relaxed, "Something based off the tech in the sonics division at Stark Industries. Not a weapon, but in the tests I put it through, even JARVIS couldn't pick up anything that was said in the car. Lip reading would still work, but that's why I waited until we got on the freeway."

"Huh," Toni mused. "Got any more?"

"Not yet," I answered. "To be honest, I'm strongly considering dialing back on the amount of patents I've been churning out, focusing on a few key areas and raising the standard level for everyone across the board in that field."

Toni turned to look at me curiously, "What in particular were you thinking?"

"The main things I've been considering have been augmented reality with the eventual goal of virtual reality and cybernetic prosthetics. Better arms and legs for amputees, artificial organs to take some of the load off the transplant lists, those sorts of things."

Toni leaned back in the car's seat, before she froze and leveled a hard stare at me, "You haven't already made plans to hack off your arms and legs and replace them, have you?"

I hesitated for a split second, before I I asked, "Would it help that the plans include an improved version of the tech I made to help Yinsen fish out the last of the shrapnel in you?"

Toni's response was as dry as it was expected, "If you weren't driving, I'd hit you right now. No dismembering yourself unless it's a life or death emergency, got it?"

"Yes Ma'am," I responded with a two finger salute. I had some other implants in mind I could install without replacing anything, so it wasn't that big a deal.

"And talk to me before you install anything that doesn't involve dismembering myself."

"Curses," I joked. "Foiled again!"

Toni rolled her eyes, and I pulled off the freeway to our exit. I'd read some good reviews on the paintball place online, and I miiiiiight have asked JARVIS to peek under their hood to make sure they weren't secretly some gang training ground or something like that. Nope, all on the up and up. So here we were, our first official date. I was absolutely terrified. I didn't want anything to go wrong, and it felt like whether or not our current relationship would survive was riding on how the next few hours went.

But, I'd set myself on this path, come hell, high water, and wet balls of paint, I'd see it through.

"That was the most fun I've had in years!" Toni cackled as she hopped into the car. The amount of energy she was showing gave credence to her words, and I climbed into the driver's seat with a sigh of relief as the majority of the rising tension I'd been feeling bled from me. "You alright?"

"Yeah," I told her with a smile. "It's paranoid of me, but I kept expecting something to go wrong and make the date go bad."

Toni quirked an eyebrow, her lips beginning to turn up into the hint of an amused smirk, "Like what? I accidentally shoot you in the dick?"

I paused, before turning to give her a flat stare, "If I weren't in the driver's seat, I'd be moving to protect my little buddies at that."

It had been a valiant battle, but Toni lost her fight against her amusement, erupting into cackles as I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. As I pulled onto the freeway, Toni asked me, "So, in all seriousness, how would you say the date went?"

I was tempted to make a joke about me only being able to hit anything if I was using some super tech pistol or grenades, but she asked for seriousness, so I took a moment to consider how to word my answer. Toni waited patiently, and after a minute I said, "I think it went quite well. It's not a typical first date, but the purpose of a typical first date is to learn about the other person in an attempt to determine if there's compatibility between them. Because we've been working so closely together for these last several months, we already know all that."

"True," Toni conceded, a cheeky grin appearing on her face as she gave a snort, "can't say I've let any other guy see my heart before the first date."

"I'll just bet you tell that to all the guys who get you easy access to carbon nanotubes," I shot back. "How about you? Did anything of note stand out to you? Besides my atrocious aim?"

"Well you already mentioned the big one," she joked. "But in all seriousness, I really enjoyed myself. Today was easily the most fun I've ever had on a date. You were right, about typical first dates. They always felt like a necessary chore that you had to do in order to get to the good part. That's what I was told anyway, 'just go on a few more dates, it'll pick up.'"

"They never did?" I asked, confused. I'd never been one for dating lots of women, but I couldn't imagine not enjoying time spent with Toni.

Toni stared ahead, not looking at me as her arms wrapped around her stomach and a frown formed on her face, "Never got past the first time I tried to talk shop. To be honest… I kinda, just… gave up on dating for a while."

I didn't have any words to respond to that, so the car ride was quiet for a good ten fifteen minutes. Finally, I spoke up again, "Since the date's over, the ban on shop talk is too."

As I expected, Toni's entire body language immediately brightened, like a kid in a candy store, "Great! I have some ideas I wanted a second opinion on!"

"Me too. For starters, how do you feel about adding flight stabilizers to the back of your suit? So that if you need to, you have your repulsor blasts while flying, because as it stands, you don't really have any readily available combat options while in flight."

"Good point," Toni mused. "I've also been working on an onboard insulating and heating system. What do you think about using carbon wires to reroute power from…"

I stared at the screen in front of me with a frown. It was crunching the numbers for the project I was working on, but it was just so slow. I realize that Toni had the most advanced, fastest, and most powerful computers in her personal home, but dammit, the stuff I wanted to make needed better computers. Unfortunately, the tech just didn't exis…

… Power Reserves Increased… …
… Bonding 81.81% Complete…
… Implanting Datafeed: Building A Better Babbage…

… well speak of the Devil and he shall appear. I closed my eyes as the information flooded my mind. Huh, so that's how it worked. Thanks, buddy!

… My Pleasure… …
… "Pal"…

I shook my head in amusement before cracking my knuckles. I have a supercomputer to make!

"JARVIS, in a few minutes I'll be sending a file to ya, would you be willing to send it to the fabricator?" I asked as I got to work designing the first generation of the computer model that would kick both Apple and Microsoft to the curb.

"Certainly, Sir."

"Thanks, JARVI-wait a second," I turned away from the file I was working on to stare at the wall hiding JARVIS's mainframe. "Since when am I 'Sir' instead of Mr. Gibson?"

"Since yesterday at approximately seven twenty two pm local time, when Toni returned from a 'date' with a smile on her face for the first time since I came online as a self-aware artificial intelligence."

"Mental note, if any of Toni's exes show up, give them a swift kick to the dingleberries," I muttered under my breath as I returned to the file I'd started. After an hour or so, I sent the file to JARVIS who scanned it before forwarding it to the fabricator.

"Estimated time to completion: two hours," JARVIS announced. "Excellent design, Sir."

I sent a look JARVIS's way. Not only would being called 'sir' take some getting used to, but I couldn't remember a time JARVIS complemented me or even Toni on one of our designs. After a moment, I had to chuckle as I realized what it was, "Don't worry JARVIS, I'll design something for you too. You don't need to resort to flattery or bribery."

"Very well, Sir. I shall refund the tickets I acquired for you and Toni to the upcoming AC/DC concert," JARVIS said, making me pause.

"… you know that if Toni finds out about me getting those refunded, she'll hurt me, right?"

"A fair point, Sir. Very well, the tickets have been un-refunded."

I snorted at JARVIS's word choice. Clearly Toni and I had been a bad influence on the otherwise posh British butler of an AI. I was also both a little touched and somewhat amused by said AI acting as my wingman for the woman who might as well be his mother. It was both sweet and funny.

Taking a look at the clock, I saw that Toni was due back pretty soon, so I headed upstairs to get started on dinner. I was in the mood for chicken tonight, and wouldn't ya know it, I had a big honkin' bird in the fridge that had been soaking in a buttermilk brine for the last several hours. Preheat the oven, stuff the inside with some sprigs of rosemary and lemon quarters, slip some strips of bacon under the skin to baste it as it cooked, surround the bird with a bed of chopped carrots, onions, and spuds, on goes the lid, and viola!

When Toni got home about fifteen minutes after I put the bird in the oven, it was to the fragrant aroma of good food on its way to completion. Her eyes closed as she walked through the door, and she just took in a deep breath, inhaling the smell of cooking poultry and bacon. Chuckling, I walked over to her and knelt down just enough that our shoulders were of equal height (I'm six two, while Toni's a shortstack at four foot nine). I then wrapped her into a hug and stood straight up.

"Will!" Toni cried out with a hint of a giggle as she swatted my shoulder and lightly kicked my shin, before wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist. I just grinned at her before planting a kiss on her button nose and making my way towards the kitchen.

We still hadn't done anything more than quick pecks, but in all honesty neither of us were in any particular rush. We were comfortable around each other, and we'd both agreed that we were fine taking our time in feeling out this new element in our relationship. Neither of us wanted to fuck things up by going too fast.

Upon reaching the kitchen, Toni let go of me and hopped down to her feet, and I shared the tidbit that JARVIS had told me, "For our next date, how do you feel about an AC/DC concert?"

Toni's eyes widened and she stared hard at me before she answered, "If we were at that stage in our relationship, I'd be thinking of some sort of sex reward for you right now."

"As appealing a mental image as that is," I said with a perfectly level voice because I was not distracted by the images that put in my head, no sir. "I feel the need to say that the tickets were arranged by JARVIS. And I get the impression that he's not interested in you that way. Unless you snuck in some code that was from Alabama when you made him."

Mostly fluff, with good relationship practice, and hard confirmation of the height difference between Will and Toni. Toni smol.

As usual, the next chapter is available for reading on my . As is the unintended pattern, it's an interlude chapter. Showcasing HYDRA's response to Fury being put on alert as well as their response, while also setting up some groundwork for something that'll be happening between IM1 and this fic's version of IM2.


Issue 1 Chapter 12

Brock Rumlow had no clue why he was being sent here to this old base in bumfuck nowhere, but he wasn't paid enough or high ranked enough to ask those sorts of questions. The sooner that new kid Ward got that through his head the better. All that any of them needed to know was that if the boss needed an escort to this old abandoned SHIELD base in New Jersey, he got an escort to an old abandoned base in New Jersey. Besides, there were enough unspoken details to tell him quite a bit.

The other security staff on this mission told him that it wasn't something that SHIELD would approve of, given how he had either trained, trained with, or worked alongside on enough missions to know their leanings. One would be an outlier, but all of them meant it was something that was tied to their true loyalties. Given the shit that had gone down in LA with the sudden blackout and the resulting "savior", odds were good that something here was to be part of HYDRA's response. Idly, part of Rumlow wondered if The Soldier was kept here.

"Keep an eye on the elevator, gentlemen," Secretary Pierce said as he walked up to a bank of computer monitors that looked older than Rumlow himself. This whole place was clearly tied to early SHIELD, and thus the beginning of HYDRA in its current form. If Rumlow were more of a nerd, he'd be fascinated by standing where history was made. As is, he just focused on his job.

"Yes sir," Rumlow said as he turned back to face the end of the room, even as he listened to the conversation. A little paranoia never hurts, especially when you're in this line of work.

Secretary Pierce tapped a few computer keys, before the old time computers filling the room turned on and a German accented voice spoke up, "Pierce, Alexander Goodwin. Head of HYDRA. What brings you to me?"

"We've had a bit of a hiccup, Doctor Zola. What can you tell me about something called Project Shockwave?" Secretary Pierce asked.

There was a pause, and had Secretary Pierce been talking to a person, Rumlow would have called it surprised or confused. Still, whomever was on the other end of the line answered, "It was a project conceived of shortly after the official end of World War II, as a means of artificially enhancing an ordinary man to an intellectual capacity of myself, the late Dr. Erskine, or Howard Stark. If successful, it would have allowed HYDRA to develop advanced technology in a multitude of fields without the bottleneck of educating, recruiting, and indoctrinating researchers. It was deemed a failure and discarded in 1947, due to requiring access to the energies of the Tesseract being the only determined viable source of power that would facilitate the growth of neural tissue.

"Howard Stark kept too close an eye on the Tesseract and any of the energy cells that powered HYDRA Tesseract Weapons for any experiments to be conducted, and it was decided that such brute force methods were unlikely to result in long term success as opposed to the slower approach involved with the Insight Algorithm. Your presence here, asking me about a discarded project suggests that something has changed."

Rumlow heard Secretary Pierce hum, as well as the sounds of his million dollar shoes on the concrete floor as he paced, "Apparently someone didn't get the memo, and either found an energy cell or some other work around. There's a man working with Howard Stark's daughter who is on SHIELD's, and HYDRA's, radar. So far he's developed over three hundred new advances in a six month period, that explicitly mentioned Project Shockwave, the old HYDRA logo, as well as your name, Dr. Zola."

"That is…" the other voice began dismissively, before he trailed off. When he spoke again, there was a note of consideration and intrigue in his voice. "Very interesting. In the early days after the war, there were several of us brought in through Operation Paperclip. We were scattered, and most were directed into 'civilian' lives. I had believed that they had completely abandoned HYDRA, but perhaps they had the same idea that we did and took to the shadows."

Rumlow's eyes widened in surprise as the other voice on the line said that. Before a grin spread across his face. So even if Fury did find these new guys, they'd still be safe from Fury because they didn't know about Project Insight. Cut off one head, two more take its place. The head of HYDRA had been cut off when they lost the war, and now there were two seperate HYDRA groups out there. Hell maybe more!

Fury would never see them coming, and one way or another HYDRA would rise and the world would be theirs.

Alexander Pierce paced in his den at home. The information that Zola's primitive AI had revealed told him a great deal, but it also presented a few potential… issues. As useful as it would be to have Fury running around chasing HYDRA cells other than his own, it also meant that Fury would be keeping a closer eye in his own house. Plus there was the fact that this other HYDRA faction most likely wouldn't be willing to accept his position as the Head of HYDRA. After all, if the positions were reversed, Pierce wouldn't.

With a frustrated sigh, Pierce poured himself a glass of scotch and sat in his favorite chair, swirling the alcohol in the crystal glass as he thought. He needed to make sure that his HYDRA's operations were hidden from Fury, find out where this new HYDRA was situated, and then find out if he could make use of them (either for their resources or as a distraction for Fury) or if he needed to send in the Winter Soldier to deal with them.

In the meantime, Gibson presented a potential risk. On the other hand, the sheer amount of technological advancements he'd been pushing was proving quite beneficial. The Winter Soldier's handlers said that with some of the things that Gibson had patented let them upgrade the assassin's arm and conditioning more in the last six months than the last twenty years.

Which left Pierce in a bit of a conundrum: send the Winter Soldier to eliminate Gibson and Howard's girl, or let them be and reap the rewards of Project Shockwave. It was a few moments before a happy middle ground came to him. There was even a convenient patsy to take the fall that had already taken a pot shot at Stark!

An hour later, and Pierce went to bed, the order sent.

"Yo, kid. Up and at 'em, we got a job," the merc snapped while kicking Erik's leg hanging out of the cot.

Rolling his eyes, he got up and followed the merc to the briefing room. It was his third mission as part of a JSOC unit, and his first one where he was working without most of his unit. Just him and Kyle Jordans, undercover in a paramilitary merc company.

Nodding to the other undercover SEAL, Erik focused on the briefing. It was rather surprising, since to his knowledge, this particular merc company hadn't taken jobs on US soil. Yet, they were going to LA, to kill some rich bitch, her boytoy, and steal any shit they could. Erik honestly had no problems with any of this, the woman looked like the standard rich white bitch that had been looking down on him for as long as he could remember, the boytoy looked like a fucking idiot, and he didn't give two shits about whatever company they were part of or were hiring international mercs to kill a competitor.

The plan was simple: go in, kill everyone, put in a zipdrive that would download everything on the white bitch's computers, then make it look like a gas leak was responsible for the deaths. In and out, quick and quiet. Maybe when the mission was over he'd swing to Oakland and visit some of his old stomping grounds, he'd left before he could order at Joe's Bar after all.

The pre-mission routine was the same, it didn't matter if you were in a merc outfit or military unit. Banter, to lighten the mood, break the ice, and kill the pre-mission jitters you got, no matter how vicious a killer you were. Nine times out of ten, they were "yo mama" jokes.

"Yo mama's so fat," Jordans began, "if she were a Star Wars character, her name would be Admiral Snackbar."

There was a round of laughter, but Erik had a better one, "Yo mama's so nasty, they used to call them jumpolines until yo mama bounced on one."

"Ooooh," the rest of the mercs groaned appreciatively, before one of them passed a small tube to Jordans.

He took it with a look of puzzlement on his face, before snorting. Turning to look at the man who handed it to him, he held it up and asked, "Burn cream? Really?"

"I save it for the recipient of the best burn each mission," the man said, moments before the mood in the back of the van settled. It was game time, and there'd be no more jokes until after the job was completed and they'd gotten paid.

"Anderson, you're up," the head of the merc outfit said as they came to a stop outside the fancy gate.

A pasty faced asshole got out of the van and made his way to the security panel. With a few minutes work, he had the panel hotwired and the gates opened. The van drove up to the front, and they got out, ski masks on and weapons hot. Jordans and Hendricks brought up a ram and forced the front door open, and Erik moved in.

He just barely managed to catch a flash of brown and white, the rich bitch based on the height, before it disappeared around a corner. Eyes scanning the room and his corners, Erik moved up. Upon reaching the spot where he'd seen her, he checked the floor. Water and footprints. She'd probably been in the shower, but she'd already been moving before they forced entry.

"Anderson, you've got any outward signals locked down, right?" Erik called back.

"Yup, ain't nothin' getting outta here without my say so!" was the answer.

Almost as soon as Anderson said that, all the lights shut off, plunging the room into darkness. Immediately, Erik pulled out his night vision goggles and put them on. Just in time for there to be the crack of a gunshot. There was a cry of pain, Jordans from the sounds of it, moments before something slammed into the back of Erik's knee. He fell onto his back, before rolling to the side just in time to hear another gunshot.

Two shots, the time between them suggesting single action, but not a semi-automatic. Looking up, Erik scanned the doorways, just in time to see something floating in front of him before there was a blinding flare of light.

" Motherfucker!" Erik screamed in pain as he turned to look away, but his training held strong. Even without looking, Erik brought his rifle up and sent a short burst into whatever the fuck had been floating in front of him. There was a third gunshot, and Erik felt like he was suckerpunched in the gut.

His off hand left his rifle to cradle his stomach as he dropped to the ground, feeling the bullet caught in his kevlar vest under his jacket. He liked this jacket, and clearly the boytoy was armed, so there went any reason to be gentle with him. Once he got his hands on him, Erik was going to take his time, make it hurt.

That plan went out the window almost as soon as Erik thought it, on account of something flying into the room from elsewhere in the house. Pulling off his night vision goggles just as the lights came back on, Erik stared in stunned confusion at the red and gold plated figure tearing through the merc company, all while a small number of floating drones surrounded her. A glance in front of him showed the shattered remains of another, with an acetylene torch attached to the front.

The mission was clearly a bust, so Erik did his best to stay low and avoid Red's attention. Military crawling across the floor, Erik froze as one of the drones drifted in front of him, followed by two more with…

Was that an anvi-

AN: Another interlude chapter, and the plot of Black panther just bit the dust. As per usual, the next chapter is available on my .


Issue 1 Chapter 13

I pulled my M1895 up and to the side as Toni finished up the last of the home invaders. JARVIS had warned us that someone was hot wiring the gate, and that gave me time to slap my tags on to interface with the drones as well as load ammo into my rifle. Though as nerve wracking as this ordeal was I will admit that there was a silver lining to it. Turns out that if I use the drones as positioning guides, I can hit the broad side of a barn.

"You okay, Toni?" I called out as I loaded fresh rounds into the rifle and slowly made my way out, gun at the ready but the barrel pointed at the floor.

"I'm good, this is the last of them," Toni said as she dropped the last goon to the floor. "You alri… did you drop your anvil on one of them?"

I glanced over to where Toni's helmet was looking and winced. One of the goons I'd shot had managed to wreck one of the drones, so I sorta panicked. In the future, it was going to make for a funny story, in the present, it was making one hell of a mess. I was about to say something in my defense, when something about the body tripped the sensors on one of the drones.

"Hello, what do we have here?" I murmured as Toni started making all the appropriate calls.

Walking over to the body, I brought the drone over and closed my eyes as I "listened" to what the drone had found. It was the materials sensor, the one to make sure that the right material was grabbed before assembly, and it had in its database damn near every metal known to science. So why was it reading an unknown metal on some random mook?

Curiosity overriding any squeamishness at touching a dead body, I gave a quick search of the remains. In addition to the ritual scarring over the chest, there was a rather curious ring on a chain around what was left of his neck. A mix of silver and the unknown metal, about nineteen grams in total. Wait… ritual scars, african skin tone, and unknown metal? Was I holding a vibranium ring?

"Will?" Toni's voice snapped me out of my musings. I turned to look at her, and she continued, "Cops will be here in fifteen minutes, you good to keep an eye on these guys?"

"Yeah, don't want them seeing the armor, I'm guessing?" I asked.

I got the impression that Toni was giving me a look that said I was an idiot, "You do remember that I was taking a shower before they showed up right?"

My eyes unwillingly dropped down to her chest and a bit lower, as my mouth operated before my brain could banish the images that materialized, "Wait, are you naked in there?" Dammit mouth.

"Be a good boy, and you just might get to find out," Toni said with a teasing lilt as she walked down the stairs to the garage. And now my pants were starting to get too tight. Damnable mynx!

Dealing with the cops was a lot easier than I was afraid it was going to be. They were quite professional, took my statement, and I think the fact that I had apparently gained a reputation as Stark Industries' wonder inventor. Like the brainiac at the Baxter Building in New York, but for practical stuff. I did notice that the majority of the cops were wearing the glasses I had designed and patented through Stark Industries a while back, which made me happier than words could describe.

Sure, I was making some really high end stuff for myself. But my overall goal was to raise the base tech level across the board. I didn't want to be like Syndrome from Incredibles or even Tony from the comics, there were so many inventions I could make to improve health and quality of life for everyone. People always talked about how grim and depressing cyberpunk is, but they always seem to miss the fact that on average, the tech in it had people's lives better. Hell the biggest difference between the average cyberpunk setting and real life before I woke up here wasn't the lack of cybernetics, it was the fact that the global megacorps were competent enough to actually get shit done in cyberpunk settings.

I shook my head, banishing my musings and preaching from my head, before calling out, "JARVIS?"

"Yes, Sir?" the AI responded.

"Ready up every material scanner you've got," I told him, flipping the ring I'd taken from the body like it was a coin. "I've got a hunch I want answered."

"Very well, Sir. Shall I inform Miss Stark?"

"Of course, if I'm right, then this will lead to an even bigger game changer than the carbon nanotubes," I told him as I headed down to the garage.

They say hindsight's 20/20. It only occurred to me that at this stage removing the suit was still a long, complicated endeavor when I entered the garage and looked up to see Toni still having parts of the suit being removed. Her hair was in a very rough bun, showing off the smooth, elegant curve of her neck, down to her shoulders, from there to the creamy expanse of her back.

I swallowed. There wasn't anything indecent on display, there were some backless dresses that showed more, but all the same…

… Power Reserves Increased…

…

… Bonding 90.90% Complete…

…

… Implanting Datafeed: Incredibly Inspired Inventor…

Dammit CFU! Not now!

… But It Amused Me…

…

… CFU 2.543x1054 Now Understands Subject: "Internet Troll"…

Yeah, yeah, yuk it up.

"Will?" Toni's voice once again pulled me from my mental meanderings. I looked up, to see her looking over her shoulder at me, pink dusting her face. "Would you mind handing me my towel?"

"Uh," I so eloquently stated, before shaking myself and grabbing the towel that had been thrown over a chair. "Yeah, here."

The one hand free from the suit took the towel and wrapped it around her torso, just in time for the other arm to be freed. From there, it was rather quick work, which made me wonder if she'd been stalling… nah, it was a nice thought, but both of us were rather big on communication, so she'd have said something if that were the case.

"So, before we get to whatever it was that JARVIS said had you in a tizzy," Toni said as she stepped off the platform in nothing but a towel (and quite notably didn't leave to get dressed). "I have a question for you."

"Shoot," I told her as I set the possibly-vibranium ring on one of the tables.

"How was the view? Of me, I mean."

… I take back what I'd thought about her stalling in removing the armor. I gave a chuckle, before turning to face the lightly blushing Toni. She was sitting on one of the opposing tables, which gave her a not insignificant boost in height, one of her fingers fiddling with a strand of her hair in a nervous tick. Smiling at her, I leaned in and gave her a kiss. Not a peck on the nose or cheek like we had done up to this point, a genuine, mouth to mouth, kiss.

Her lips were soft, and if I were a poet I'd be able to properly put into words more than that. But suffice to say, it was easily the best kiss that I can remember being part of. We broke apart, our foreheads resting against each other, our eyes meeting. No words were said, and for a time we forgot about everything except for each other.

Finally, after I don't know how long, I broke the silence, "Thank you, for trusting me with that."

Toni blinked, before softly smiling, "Who else would I trust like that?"

Dammit feels, right in my heart. Refocusing, I stepped back from Toni and picked up the ring, "JARVIS, you got your sensor suite ready?"

"Yes, Sir. Might I ask what I am scanning for?" JARVIS asked as I set the ring in the appropriate location for him to start scanning.

"One of my drones pinged an 'Unknown Metal' in that ring. There's only a few possibilities that I can think of, and I want to see if I'm right," I explained, Toni hopping off the table and walking to stand next to me as JARVIS went to work.

"One moment please," he said as the full bevy of the most advanced sensors on the planet went to work. After five minutes, he spoke up again, "Scans complete. The ring is composed of a mix of silver, natural lacquer, and the largest known sample of vibranium in the world."

I smirked, as ideas started running through my head. Ideas that were momentarily stalled as Toni let out a strangled skwak, "How did that yutz get his hands on two billion dollars worth of vibranium?!"

"Hey Toni," I said, my voice a little distracted as possibilities danced through my mind. "How long would it take to start up a Stark Industries space program?"

"Wha?" Toni asked, turning to look up at me, confusion in her eyes. Before that beautiful mind of hers kicked into gear and realized where I was going with the question.

From what I'd read since arriving here, around ninety nine percent of vibranium discovered could be traced to meteorite fragments, with the largest known chunk having been pulled from the yucatan, and that was barely two pounds worth. With us having a good enough scanner, and the possibilities from repulsor tech, give us a year, two at the most, and we could have dedicated space mining probes to go looking for new sources of vibranium.

The sheer value of vibranium meant that we could easily talk Obadiah into backing us, even without his pseudo-familial affection for Toni. This attempted raid or assassination attempt, or whatever the hell it was, would end up propelling us further than we could have ever imagined just a day ago. And I'd use that to drag the rest of the world into the future with us.

"Toni, I'm glad to see you're okay," Obadiah said with a relieved voice as he stood from his desk and made his way towards the two of us. Toni wrapped him in a hug that he returned before turning and firmly shaking my hand. "Gibson, thank you for being there for her."

"Glad I was," I told him honestly, before we moved over to his desk and sat down. "Though I have to say, that attack was a blessing in disguise."

He raised an eyebrow, and I placed the vibranium ring on the table in front of him. He picked it up, smothering an amused smile when he saw Toni all but vibrating in her chair. After inspecting the ring for a moment, his eyebrows furrowed and he muttered, "I think some of this is silver, but I don't recognize the rest of it."

"It's vibranium, Uncle Obi!" Toni said, barely managing to contain herself to a normal volume. "In the single largest known quantity since the forties. That amount is enough to serve as a starting point for scanners we can put into mining probes. Uncle Obi, what you're holding has the potential to be the start of getting Stark Industries into asteroid mining!"

Obadiah was quiet for a moment, before he turned to look at me with an expression that screamed, 'Translation, please?'

Chuckling, I obliged him, "Essentially all known sources of vibranium are from meteorite or asteroid fragments, and the sheer value of vibranium means that the first haul would still have enough vibranium to pay for not only the expense of the trip, but also pay for setting up the infrastructure needed to make such a trip possible in the first place."

"And you want my help in convincing members of the Board to spin off another subsidiary to focus on space based interests, am I right?" Obahdiah asked, seeing what we were after.

"I think it's well known by this point that I don't have the right kind of mindset for big business," I stated, "and while Toni can talk business, I think you can tell…"

"I'mtooexcitedbythescientificpotentialstonotrunmymouth,yesyou'vesaidthatWill!" Toni blurted out, still vibrating in her seat from sheer excitement.

"Thank you for proving my point, Toni," I teased, before leaning over and kissing the top of her head. Before I remembered that there was a pseudo-paternal figure to the girl I just showed romantic affection towards sitting on the other side of the desk. Oops?

"Toni," Obadiah said with the kind of calm tone that only comes from smothering one's emotions. "Would you mind waiting outside for a moment?"

"Uncle Obi," Toni said with an annoyed frown, before quieting at the look on his face. Without another word, she stood up and walked outside. Leaving me alone. With a father-figure that looked like he outmassed me twice over. Gulp.

He stood up from his desk and walked over to one of his cabinets, not saying a word as he picked up a bottle of something expensive looking as well as two glasses before walking back. The entire time, not saying a word. He poured the drink into the glasses, filling them halfway before putting the fancy glass cork back in.

"I'm going to be honest, Gibson," he said, picking up a glass and taking a sip as he sat back down. "I like you. I think you've got a bright future ahead of you. More than that, you've made Toni smile like I haven't seen since her parents died. So, just be aware that if you hurt her, you'll have one of the wealthiest men on the planet pissed off at you, but otherwise, be sure to treat her right."

"If we're both being honest," I said, not touching the second glass. I didn't care for booze. "I'm pretty sure that if I did anything to warrant a shovel from you, Toni would have already beaten you to the punch."

Obadiah laughed, "You're probably right about that. Girl got Maria's temper, don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

AN: Another chapter down, and the foundation of Stark Industries becoming the full scale, global power type cyberpunk megacorp has been laid. As usual, if you want to see the next chapter in advance, check out my .


Issue 1 Chapter 14

Spoiler: AN

Sorry for how long this took, beginning of the month was extremely hectic with the new job and the final paycheck from the last one being far more stubborn in arriving than it should have.

In retrospect, the attack was a blessing in more ways than just the vibranium, though that alone would pay out big time. Because not even a week later, Toni, Yinsen and I were all pouring over a holographic design of a high end cybernetic arm. CFU let me cheat a little (okay, a lot), but neither Toni nor I really knew anything about medicine, our specialties were more focused on the mechanical and material sciences rather than the biological. Which is why Yinsen was here, looking over the design that Toni and I had jointly made.

After a thorough examination, Yinsen sighed and said, "I can't say that I understand the mechanics of what you're making, but from what I've been able to understand, I think it should work without putting undue stress on the rest of your body. Are you sure you want to go through with this?"

I nodded, "I'm sure. I need more than my, admittedly awesome, antique rifle for the next time something like this happens. And considering what we've got coming down the pipeline, this is most certainly going to be happening again, because even ignoring the vibranium, the amount of resources we'll be pulling in from asteroid mining are going to make a lot of people very angry."

Toni didn't say anything, a frown on her face. She didn't like the thought of me being cut up to have bits and bobs added in, mostly out of concern for what would go wrong, but as well as the home invasion had gone, there was still the fact that the attackers were suspiciously lacking in basic information. The surviving attackers hadn't even known whose house they were breaking into. Ten men break into a place, and the only one who knew anything was dead before he reached the hospital.

By itself, that was concerning. But what really had me and Toni worried was the fact that, according to the reports I'd read while hacked into the hospital's database (before said reports mysteriously vanished), he'd died from poison, and it was determined that one of his teeth was a false tooth. So whoever had orchestrated this hit (or whatever it was, because it was too sloppy to be an actual, serious assassination attempt), not only didn't want the only person who knew shit talking, but they'd managed to get said person so loyal that he committed suicide before he could be questioned. Yeah, this was some serious spy shit. I don't care what had been said a few weeks back, I was getting me some cyberpunk upgrades.

Yinsen was going to be the guy in charge of cutting me open and removing the required meat parts, while Toni and JARVIS would help him in making sure that everything connected to the right parts in order to be integrated smoothly with my nervous, cardiovascular, and muscular-skeletal systems. The first surgery would be the bigger and, ironically, less risky of the two currently planned.

My left arm would be removed, along with the muscles that went from it to my torso. The replacement arm had been a joint design by myself, Toni, and JARVIS. Toni's primary arc reactor had been supercharged by melting down the vibranium ring (and separating the silver) to use the super-metal in place of the palladium, so I was getting one of the older models incorporated into the arm. The arm's basic functions didn't need the reactor, it was designed to run off my bioelectricity as well as incorporating miniscule reactors that, to the shock of Toni when JARVIS and I unveiled it, could basically run off food.

Okay, not run off food like Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future, but it was essentially a miniaturized version of the biological processes that converted food that animals ate into energy. It doubled the amount of calories I needed to eat, but considering that in doing so it gave me a grip strength strong enough to warp metal, on top of a few other tricks at the expense of no longer needing to worry about fat pants, I'd call it a fair trade.

Without the arc reactor, my arm had enhanced strength, durability, and a hidden blade as a last ditch weapon. All of it worked with just the inbuilt mini-reactors. The arc reactor was there for one thing, and one thing only: a repulsor built into the palm. That was at Toni's insistence, and one that I was more than willing to include. Because shooting lasers is fun, anyone who says otherwise is a boring stick in the mud.

Anyway, the second surgery planned would have to wait until we were sure that there weren't any complications from the first. Once that was done, Yinsen would be cutting open the back of my neck to install the Neural Cyber Bridge Implant I'd made the day I asked Toni to be my girlfriend. That was going to be fun to play with once it was running properly.

In any case, we settled on the day for the first operation, and then it was time to follow that age old military tradition: hurry up and wait. Yinsen had some other stuff scheduled that he couldn't put off, and both Toni and I had stuff going on with Stark Industries. So the operation to chop off my arm would be on the first Saturday in October. If all went well, and neither Toni nor Yinsen could find any issues in the following month, the second cyber-surgery would be just after Halloween. I wanted to do it before, so I could do something special for my favorite holiday without needing to worry about the tags coming off, but Yinsen shot me down. He was officially a balding buzzkill.

Soon enough, the big day came, and we had a setup similar to when Yinsen took the last of the shrapnel out of Toni's chest. I got a shot in my arm, an oxygen mask over my face and… suuccchhhh ppprrreeeetttttttyyyyyyyyy lllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggggggghhhhhhhttttttttssssssssssssss…

I blinked, sitting up with a groan. My head was filled with more fuzz than a sheep before shearing, my mouth felt like it was full of cotton balls, and my left arm felt like it was made of lea…

My gaze snapped down to my shoulder, which was wrapped in bandages, but below it was gleaming chrome. I brought my arm up, the metal limb moving as smoothly as my old flesh and bone arm, and examined it. External plates moved and shifted, giving a similar range of motion to skin as I bent, twisted, and flexed the ceramic-polymer faux muscles. Forming a fist, and flexing my upper arm just so, I grinned as the metal blade popped out of my forearm, passing over top of my hand. Edward Elric, eat your heart out.

Flexing a different set of muscles, the blade returned to its housing within my forearm, and I shifted my arm around. Palm facing the ceiling, I looked at the dull white disk in the center of it, a lot smaller than the ones on the Iron Maiden armor, since it didn't need to support my weight in flight. We'd agreed that the repulsor and arc reactor would wait a few days, to give my body a chance to adjust to the shift from meat to metal and see if there were any signs of rejection.

"Glad to see you're up," Toni's voice made me jump, and the extra weight on my left side threw off my balance as I turned to look at her. Combined with the bedsheets, and let's just say I managed to make myself look like an extra on the set of a Three Stooges flick. I lay there on the floor, my ears filled with the sound of Toni's amused giggles with my legs sticking up into the air as I tried to untangle myself from the sheets.

"My vengeance will be swift, powerful, and legendary," I grumbled as I managed to remove myself from the wicked bits of fabric. Turning to face Toni in her chair, still giggling, I asked, "Anything unexpected during the operation?"

Toni got her mirth under control and answered, "Fortunately no. Everything went exactly as we planned and hoped for. No signs of rejection and the implantation and connections all went smoothly. To be honest, it was rather anticlimactic."

"You say that like it's a bad thing," I teased her as I walked over and bent down to kiss her. Kissing Toni was always nice, especially when she wrapped her arms around my neck and clung to me like a limpet. I don't know why, but something about being able to hold her in the air just by standing appealed to me. We broke the kiss, pressing our foreheads together, simply enjoying the other's presence. Of course, that's when the balding buzzkill decided to interrupt.

"William, Toni," Yinsen said with an amused smile from the doorway. "I do need to check the implant site, so I'm afraid you will have to continue that later."

If Yinsen weren't responsible for implanting my dope new arm, I'd use said arm to flip him off.

A week later, and there had been no signs of complications with the new arm, so we were going to try out the onboard repulsor blaster thingy. The huff and stomp of her foot that Toni did when I used those exact words was so adorable. So, Toni had I had rented the entirety of an outdoor shooting range for a few hours, I had drones keeping a lookout for anyone or anything nearby, and Toni was in her armor.

"Implanting arc reactor," I announced, sliding the deceptively small wonder-generator into the previously hidden compartment near my shoulder. I immediately felt the rush of power flowing through my arm, and it took me a moment to adjust. Dayum that was some good shit; anyway, refocus. I pointed my arm at the target, a little something I'd grabbed from a Bass Pro Shop on the way here. "Preparing to test the repulsor blast in three. Two. One."

The shot packed a much bigger kick than I was expecting, sending my arm flying back and pulling painfully on my shoulder and torso. But I hit the target, a foam deer used for practicing with bow and arrows. And…

"Congratulations Will," Toni snarked from within her armor. "Despite not hitting the intended target area, you successfully decapitated Bambi."

"Blast intensity was a bit too high," I noted, ignoring the Bambi comment and the foam deer head on the ground as I walked to the target to set it back upright. "Next test, I'm cutting down the output by fifty percent."

By the time our allotted practice time at the range was over, I was actually hitting the intended target area, and we'd found a sweet spot in the intensity of the repulsor blast. High enough to do damage, but not so high that I had to be concerned about the arm coming loose from its housing. The target was also, kinda… obliterated.

"I'd say that was a successful test drive," I told Toni as we headed back. "And not a single glitch to be found!"

"Is this how you felt during our paintball date?" Toni asked as she turned to look at me, her armor on the floorboard in the back seat. "Waiting for the other shoe to drop and then nothing happens?"

"Pretty much, yeah," was my answer, with an accompanying shrug. "Gotta say, I was kinda expecting something to either go wrong, or come up, or what have you."

"We're not out of the woods yet," Toni warned, but didn't elaborate. Not that she needed to. Southern California was far from being the safest part of the country, and after the last attack both of us kept our guard up whenever we were out and about. Plus, no sense in tempting Murphy.

Despite our nerves, we made it back safe and sound, and the chemical cocktail I'd left simmering under JARVIS's careful watch was finished. Now I could start painting the synthetic skin coating onto my cyber arm.


Issue 1 Chapter 15

AN: This has been sitting on Patron for months now, and with my going full time writing I figured I might as well let the rest of you read it.

Toni took a spoonful of the red/purple stew and directed a raised eyebrow in my direction before sampling my culinary experiment. Chewing thoughtfully, she finished her bite, swallowed, and smacked her lips while running her tongue over her teeth. Finally, she spoke up, "While I wouldn't say it was bad, I'm not sure it's something that I'd enjoy on a regular basis."

I shrugged before taking a bite of my own. I agreed with her, the beets and lamb did work surprisingly well, but it definitely wasn't something I'd be making very often.

"To be fair," I said after I swallowed. "I think I did a decent job considering that I pulled the recipe out of an archeological paper on ancient Babylon."

Toni gave me a suspicious look, one ruined by the way her lip twitched, "Did you hack a university server to come up with dinner?"

"Of course not!" I cried, my hand flying to my chest as if I was wounded. "I'm hurt that you would even think such a thing."

The chuckles that Toni gave made me grin, but that faded as I noticed that Toni seemed… tense. She set her spoon down, took a deep breath, and stood up before saying, "Will, there's something I've been thinking about, and… I made a decision."

"Yeah? Something big?" I asked, continuing to face her as she walked over to her purse (a dinky little thing).

"Yes, and… not 'no', but…" she said, her eyebrows furrowing as she struggled to find the words to convey what she was thinking. She fiddled with her purse for a few minutes, and I let her take the time to try to find the right words. Eventually, she sighed and pulled something out of her purse and tossed it to me, a dusting of pink on her cheeks, "You'll get it."

I caught the box out of the air and looked at it. A box of condoms stared back at me. Ah. That explained it. I looked back up at the unusually bashful looking Toni and asked, "You sure? I'm willing to wait if you're not ready."

Toni took a breath, her stance firming, and looked me in the eye, "I'm sure. I won't lie and say I'm not nervous, but these last few months, collaborating with you, have been the best of my life. I've never felt closer with anyone, and… I want this."

I stood up and walked over to Toni, wrapping my arms around her in a hug and pulling her close. I kissed the top of her head as she leaned into me. I breathed deeply, taking in the fragrance of her and her choice of shampoo (green apple, I was pretty sure), and asked, "When do you want to do it?"

"Tonight, before I second guess myself and lose my nerve," she answered without hesitation, lifting her head to meet my gaze.

I smiled and leaned down to kiss her. She returned it, and when we broke apart she spoke up again, her expression nervous, "There's… one other thing… I haven't… there hasn't been… god damn it why is it so hard for me to say any of this?!"

Toni took her hands from where she'd been hugging me to grab at her head, frustration filling her voice as she did. I meanwhile, considered what she'd managed to get out combined with what I knew about her. She hadn't had much luck with men, most of her dates were disasters, her passion in engineering tended to drive away those who couldn't keep up with her, all of which was pointing towards a surprising possibility.

"Toni," I began, pulling her from her frustration over her inability to say what was on her mind. "Will this be your first time?"

"Yes," she whispered quietly, turning her head to look away.

"If it helps," I said, tightening the hug and saying something I thought might help, "I may as well be one too." No 'may as well', I hadn't had a girlfriend in highschool and during my time in college before winding up in the desert I wasn't exactly one for parties.

That got her to look up at me, confused by my choice of words, before realization spread across her face and she murmured, "Right, the amnesia. That makes sense."

"We can clean up later," I said, my seeming non sequitur making Toni blink before I squatted down a little bit and hooked my meat arm behind her knees. Toni let out a funny squawk, her arms flying up to wrap around my neck as I lifted her into a bridal carry.

" Will!" she shouted in faux outrage (the blush gave her away), one hand coming free to smack me on the chest as I marched towards the master bedroom. "Warn me next time!"

"But you look adorable when you're surprised," I told her with a cheeky grin on my face.

She pouted, making me laugh before leaning down to kiss her again. The fact that she immediately used her grip on the back of my neck to pull me in deeper made it clear that she was in fact enjoying this. I used my foot to open the door to the master bedroom and strode with a purpose over to the bed.

As I lowered Toni down to the bed, she put a hand on my chest and said, "Much as I appreciate the ride, I need to swing by the bathroom first to freshen up."

I give a nod as she gets up off the bed and walks towards the master bath, her hips swaying as she did. I admit, the way her firm, toned ass filled out her jeans more than caught my interest. Shaking my head as the door to the bathroom shut, I kicked my shoes off and took off the t-shirt I was wearing (a red one with the old red box D cover image on it). I sat on the edge of the bed, still in my jeans and socks, and took a deep breath.

Sure, I'd had fantasies, Toni was a gorgeous woman and I was a heterosexual man, but now that the time was here, I was more nervous than I'd ever been. I didn't want to hurt Toni or ruin the relationship we already had. She was my best friend, and…

The door to the master bath opened, and Toni stepped out, stealing the breath from my lungs. She'd taken off her makeup, her hair hung loose and flowed down her back, and she'd put on a lacy blue lingerie piece with matching panties.

"Guh," was my eloquent response, as my eyes tried to fall out of my head. The hand that had been on her chest, over the scar where the arc reactor had been, came up to cover her mouth as she giggled at my gobsmacked expression. I managed to force myself to speak, but I really should have waited for my brain to reboot first, "I thought you liked me, why are you trying to give me a heart attack with that?"

Fortunately, Toni found my question funny. So funny she needed to lean against the wall in order to keep from falling over. I smiled, not just because I was glad she found it funny, but because it distracted her from the scar in her chest from the reactor. It didn't bother me at all, and I'd be more than willing to spend as much time as was needed to convince her of that. But for now, I stood up and walked over to her.

She got her cackling under control by the time I reached her, and as I bent down to kiss her, her fingers deftly opened my belt and pulled down my jeans. I stepped out of them, and used my big toes to hook the tops of my socks to pull them down and off. We stood there in our underwear, her in her sexy lingerie and me in my boxers, and spent the next however long just kissing and enjoying the feel of the other's skin on ours. Eventually though, we broke apart and I lifted her up, my hands palming her tight ass as her legs hooked around my waist. I walked backwards to the edge of the bed and sat down on it.

Gently butting Toni's forehead with my own, I told her, "I think you should be on top, so this first time you can go at your own pace."

She gave a nod, and the two of us inched, wriggled, and crab walked to the center of the bed, since she seemed disinclined to remove her legs from around my waist. Using my legs, I managed to lift myself up enough to slide my boxers down, resulting in my very hard dick to pop up to land against her ass with an audible 'smack'. Toni reached behind her, trailing her fingers along the portion of my length that she could reach, exploring and examining me.

I wasn't pornstar big, but neither was I small. And from the look on Toni's face as she adjusted her legs to straddle me, moving my dick to be in front of her. She stared down, and I could see the wheels and gears turning in her mind. She took a deep breath, before rising up and taking her panties off, tossing them aside and grabbing the box of condoms from where I'd put them on the nightstand. She opened the box, took one out, and with surprising speed had me wrapped up and secured.

It almost immediately clicked, "So that's why the cucumbers have been disappearing from the fridge this last week."

Toni blushed, but neither looked away nor denied it, instead she lifted herself up, taking my dick in hand and guiding it between her legs. With another breath, she began to lower herself down onto me. Through the barrier of the condom, I felt Toni's lips part, stretching open to accept me into her most intimate place. My head fell back against the pillow, she was tighter than I could have possibly imagined, and even through the condom I could tell that she was gushing.

As her hips settled against mine, I forced myself to look up at her, staring up at her face as she braced herself on one hand against my chest. The other hand was pressed against her waist, as if she was trying to feel me inside of her.

"Toni," I said, making her turn her gaze to look at me, lust, affection, and more than a little surprise in her eyes. "Thank you, so much for this."

"Thank you, Will," Toni returned, leaning down and resting her front against mine. Her skin was warm, and I could feel her blush against the top of my chest. "I need a moment, it feels like you're splitting me open."

"Take all the time you need," I told her with a kiss to the top of her head.

To be honest, I was glad she wasn't moving quite yet, my masculine pride wouldn't accept cumming so quickly, and both how tight she was, as well as the fact that it was Toni, meant that if she'd immediately started bouncing or grinding I'd have erupted right then and there. Instead, I let my hands run along the smooth skin of her back, feeling the contours of her muscles and her shoulder blades, before drifting downwards to palm and cup the perfect globes of her ass. After a few moments, Toni sat back up and pulled the top of her lingerie off, leaving the both of us completely naked. Her hands went to my wrists, and she guided my hands to her chest.

I'd already known that Toni was well endowed, but I hadn't known until tonight that she must have worn compression bras. Because I was only just now realizing that her breasts, firm and full, were massive, especially considering her tiny frame. To top it off, I know Toni well enough to know that she didn't have implants, they were all her. My introspection was interrupted as Toni started to move, rolling her hips in a gyrating circle that caused my cock to swirl and stir up her insides.

" Fuuuuccckkk," Toni groaned as her grip on my wrists tightened. Then she started to bounce, using her thighs and calves to set up a rhythm that had my dick spearing up into her while my hands played with her breasts.

I was close, but I wanted to make sure that Toni had a satisfying first time, so I bit the inside of my cheek and redoubled my focus on making her enjoy herself. Ignoring the coppery taste that filled my mouth, I pinched and squeezed her nipples, before letting one hand drift down to tease and play with her nub.

"Will," Toni said with a gasp, "I… ooooohhhhhhhhh!"

Her passage began undulating around me, as if it was trying to suck me into her. That was it, I wrapped my arms around Toni and pulled her tight against my chest as I came, filling up the condom in mere moments.

We lay there, on Toni's bed as we regained our breaths. After a minute or two, I cupped her ass and walked us to the bathroom. We were sweaty, and we needed to dispose of the condom. The fact that I was still inside Toni as I walked was a happy accident, honest!


Issue 1 Chapter 16

"This synthetic skin is quite impressive," Yinsen said as he examined William's cybernetic arm. All the tests had come back positive, his body was accepting the replacement with amazing speed and clarity. It was beyond anything he'd expected. He'd seen the best prosthetics in production by cutting edge research companies, and William's made those look like the wooden blocks used to teach children shapes.

William shrugged, "I'm not entirely happy with it, doesn't move as smoothly as I'd like, but for a first draft it'll suffice. But I've got too many irons in the fire right now to focus on that, maybe in a couple months."

Yinsen chuckled as he continued examining the cybernetic limb. The range of motion was comparable to a human arm, tactile response was as well. It really functioned almost identically to an average arm. It wasn't quite as flexible as the outer range of human potential, but William's build wouldn't have allowed that anyway.

Eventually, Yinsen sighed and removed his surgical gloves, "Despite my misgivings, I cannot find any problems with your limb. Well done, William."

"Thanks, Yinsen," he said with a smile as he stood up, before a slightly nervous look spread across his face. "On an unrelated note, can I… talk to you about something?"

"Of course," Yinsen agreed.

"How did sex change your relationship?"

If Yinsen had been drinking, he'd have choked on it. Instead, he simply turned to look at the still nervous, almost sheepish, looking young man. Yinsen raised an eyebrow, and William continued, "Toni and I… well we had our first time together last night. I don't want things to get awkward between us, and you're the only person I can talk to who has had a healthy married life, so… yeah…"

The brainchild of countless inventions over the last few months, a man who had looked death in the face without hesitating, now sat before Yinsen looking like a boy after asking his crush on a date. It took all Yinsen had not to laugh at the juxtaposition.

Instead, he nodded slowly, "I will speak frankly, William."

"Thank you," he said quietly, his body relaxing.

"I say this as a friend, with all that implies," Yinsen began. "You're thinking too much."

William blinked, looking up at Yinsen, "Come again?"

"Sex will make no difference to your relationship, nor will it change the way Toni feels about you. Anyone who spends time around the two of you can tell you are in love with each other. A little physical intimacy won't ruin what you have. Continue doing what you already were, before you took that step, and everything will be fine."

William looked down, nodding slowly. Yinsen smiled, patting him on the shoulder, "You are a good man William, and from all I have seen, you have nothing to be concerned about. Toni enjoys spending time with you, you enjoy spending time with her, that is the most important part. Not what you get up to in the bedroom or the workshop."

Yinsen paused, realizing how that could have been interpreted. The snort from William made him close his eyes as he spoke, "I don't know what you were thinking, but we haven't done it there."

"Good," Yinsen dryly said. "I don't want to imagine what sort of fluids would get in your projects if you had."

Dimitri Smerdyakov walked through the halls of SHIELD HQ, the most advanced security force on the planet surrounding him, unable to pick up that he didn't belong. After nearly ten minutes, he reached his destination and sat at the computer terminal. He didn't do anything as mundane or noticeable as plugging in a flash drive to the computer, with the equipment provided by his superiors he didn't need to.

Even without moving his head, the professional spy took in his surroundings. Dozens of computer workers, security staff on the room's perimeter, a squad of agents running through on an exercise run throughout the perimeter. Security standing bored, not leaning to speak into radios, no indications from body language of any awareness of Dimitri's presence.

Keeping his awareness up, Dimitri continued to play the role of an office worker throughout the day. At no point was there any indicator of his presence being made. When the work day ended, Dimitri left, getting on the same bus he rode into SHIELD on, and making his way to the apartment of his target. He entered, shut the door behind him, and made his way past the kitchen towards the bathroom. There were preparations to be done.

In the span of fifteen minutes, the apartment was staged to look like a home invasion that, when combined with a faulty gas line, caused the entire apartment to burn down. At the same time, Dimitri was at his superior's office, half a world away.

"Were you identified?" his employer asked.

"No," Dimitri answered as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small metal disk before placing it on the desk. "There were no signs that my presence was noticed."

"Good, you are dismissed."

Dimitri turned around and exited the room, moments before an orange circle appeared midair and a figure clad in green walked through, the circle vanishing behind them. The figure gave a glance towards the disk as the person behind the desk picked it up.

"You waste your time with your petty trinkets," the newcomer said.

"And your kind got where they are without using tools?" they returned, turning to level a glare at their guest. "You would be well not to make offers you cannot keep, Project Shockwave has hardly had the results you promised."

"I clearly overestimated the mental fortitude of your kind. If you cannot handle the slightest amount of energy running through them, it is a miracle that your species has survived thus far."

What neither individual noticed, Dimitri had left more than one item in the room. An earpiece fed every word they said to Dimitri's ear. The HYDRA agent rolled his eyes as the two bickered, his respect for the organization that signed his paycheck dropping a little more each day. If they continued, he'd find some way to ditch them within the next year or two. Project Shockwave had been somewhat of a mixed bag: there were a bunch of eggheads in the base making shit, but each of them also needed a handler to make sure that they didn't drown in their own spit.

The only unqualified success had blown up the base they'd made him in, and then promptly fallen face first into the only living Stark. Making him far too high profile for HYDRA to reclaim, even for one with Dimitri's skills and talents. Moderately annoying, but Dimitri didn't really care for the thought of finding out what sort of gear Stark kept for herself. That was without considering the sort of toys she'd have with a Shockwave recipient to bounce ideas off of.

Dimitri knew that attempting to get the Shockwave with Stark back to HYDRA was a lost cause. That genie was out of the bottle, and there was no putting it back in. It would be one thing if the two split apart once they were back in the States, SHIELD would be keeping an eye on him, but it would be conceivable. But not anymore, Fury had his remaining eye keeping close watch on Stark and Gibson. HYDRA wasn't quite at the point where they could overthrow SHIELD, that was the whole point of Project Shockwave in the first place.

Putting his thoughts on Stark aside, Dimitri entered one of the various offices on base and placed a metal disk next to the computer. He may be the best field agent that HYDRA had, but that didn't mean he didn't take precautions. By this point, he had hidden accounts and years worth of blackmail hidden in dozens of different caches. When he was ready to burn the Dimitri Smerdyakov identity, he'd have plenty of options waiting for him.

He chuckled, at the thought. HYDRA thought they'd made him who he was, and sure, the procedures they'd augmented him with had certainly made him deadly, but not even the Head of HYDRA realized just how many lives he'd lived. This was merely the longest one he'd gone without burning a given identity.

Maybe he'd head back to New York when he left HYDRA, he'd had more fun than he'd expected when he was working alongside Conners and Parker. Maybe he'd pick up that identity again, see if they'd be up for a game night or two.

Obadiah Stane gave his reporter's smile and shook the hand of the next person at the event. It wasn't a big event, but given how Stark Industries had soared, it was something that they needed to do every now and then. The biggest source of entertainment, for him at least, was how obviously uncomfortable Gibson was with all the attention and focus on him. Toni had been a lot like that, before she got used to it. What was especially surprising was that Toni was the one to organize this event.

Toni still didn't like these events, but she could handle them. So long as she had time to tinker undisturbed in her lab for twenty four hours afterwards. It was the best compromise she'd been able to manage. It wasn't that she'd refuse to attend events without her lab time, but it was needed for her to be able to function on a level that wouldn't cause problems. The benefits of having her show up just weren't enough to put up with those issues.

A loud clap gathered the attention of everyone in the gallery, drawing all eyes to Toni, her eyes glittering in a way that told Obadiah that she was getting ready to unveil something new. Something that she'd decided to keep a surprise from him, which was annoying but unsurprising. Gibson was standing in front, a soft smile on his face, as Toni began to speak.

The speech was her usual, filled with more technical details than Obadiah understood, but it was surprisingly light on them. Gibson probably had something to do with that. But the item they were unveiling surprised him: an exoskeleton designed for mobility assistance for people recovering from spinal trauma or with paralysis. Obadiah immediately thought of a dozen different contractors who would be interested in attaching weapons and armor plating to it.

Obadiah nodded to himself, this was a good product, for both civilian and military use. By announcing it this way, it also served as good PR for Stark Industries. Nice to see that Toni and Gibson worked so well together. Obadiah's gaze turned back to look at Gibson, and he was hit with an immediate sense of deja vu. The young man had a look on his face, one that he hadn't seen in well over a decade. It was the same way that Howard used to look at Maria, like the rest of the world disappeared and all that mattered, all that he saw, was her.

"I wish you could see him, old friend," Obadiah muttered to himself, lifting his glass in a silent toast.

Howard would have liked Gibson, and not just for how happy he made Toni, though that was certainly a point in his favor. There was something about the young man, a drive to push technology ever forwards, yet a fondness for the past. Obadiah chuckled to himself, he couldn't think of anyone who'd been so excited about an antique anvil of all things.

Turning his attention to the unlikely couple, Obadiah smiled as the two fielded questions from the reporters and paparazzi. Yes, Gibson was easily one of the best things to happen, not just to Stark Industries, but for Toni. He looked forward to seeing everything they'd achieve once their space program got running, especially once they started bringing back materials mined from asteroids. That would be a game changer.