Chapter 23: Cold Welcome
In which an evil wizard welcomes his guests.
Mordo's little hidey-hole wasn't that far away, but speed was still paramount. And since his suit could break the sound barrier with ease, Tony had offered to carry his current teammate to their destination.
"This is so cool…" Carnage had whispered with quiet glee, and then they were off.
Tony tried to keep his flight steady without any sharp turns for fear of dislodging his passenger, but even when he forgot himself for a brief moment, Carnage held on without any issue.
…Well, without any serious issue, because their claws were sharp enough to scratch even the gold-titanium alloy and their tendrils kept trying to seep into the joints of his armor.
"Hey, knock it off," Tony complained, pulling at one of the tendrils that started to creep between the armor plates on his neck. "Do you want us to crash?"
"Don't make barrel-rolls then!" they hissed back, but the semi-liquid substance pulled away nonetheless, no longer threatening to lock the joints.
"Sorry, I don't usually fly with passengers," Tony replied without feeling particularly apologetic.
Still, he had to admit, this casual display of shapeshifting was fascinating to see. He had been trying to implement something similar into his armor, simply because having one shapeshifting suit would make his job far easier than having an entire garage of specialized armors.
…Would it be rude to ask for a sample? Tony had never worn organic armor before, but he was willing to try. Then again, he wasn't a xenobiologist and genetic engineering was a can of worms he'd rather not open. Nanotech would probably be easier to implement anyway.
Tony kept idly musing over the issue until they finally reached their destination: a plot of land on the outskirts of New York City that was taken up by a generic warehouse with an equally generic suburban house standing close by. Both buildings looked completely normal and not at all like they were owned by an evil wizard, but Tony could see an underground tunnel connecting them on his scans.
There was something located even deeper beneath the warehouse, but the structure was shielded from his sensors.
Ugh. Magic again.
"And here we are," Tony announced, hovering above the rooftop. "Let's knock."
Then he pointed one hand down and blasted a hole through the roof. No alarms greeted him, and there didn't seem to be any defenses inside that he could detect, so Tony descended into the warehouse.
Inside, it looked just as mediocre as outside, with dusty crates and containers piled haphazardly everywhere. Tony wasn't surprised: all the good stuff had to be hidden underneath.
When he landed on the floor, Carnage peeled themselves off his armor, wobbling slightly on their feet. "Phew… That was fast. And less loud than we feared."
"That's Stark tech for you: we only make the best of the best," Tony preened. (So sue him, he liked his accomplishments being acknowledged.)
"Any chance we could get a suit like this too?" Carnage asked semi-seriously.
Tony snorted. "Sure thing. Got any experience as a pilot?"
"Uh. What?"
"What do you think? This suit has more controls than a fighter jet, except instead of buttons on a dashboard, they're all touch sensors and eye-tracking. Think you can handle something like that?"
Rhodey had complained to him more than once that flying War Machine armor was more complicated than any jet he had ever piloted in the Air Force. Using it required a very specific skillset and hell of a lot of training.
"…On the second thought, we're fine the way we are."
"Heh. Thought so." Tony activated his scanners again, searching for the hidden entrance that had to be somewhere around there. "Alright, this way."
He flew towards the large elevator located in the far corner. Carnage followed after him, bouncing between containers like a rabid squirrel.
Tony raised his hand and blasted the doors with a repulsor. To his surprise, they bent but still held.
Huh. Alright then.
He gathered the energy around the arc reactor in his chest. If a repulsor blast dented the doors, a unibeam would cut them right through.
"Wait, let us try!" Carnage called out.
Tony shrugged inwardly and redirected the energy back into the rest of his systems. "Okay, be my guest."
Carnage clasped their hands together and shifted them into a jagged arrangement that resembled something between a scythe and a pickaxe. Then they slammed the new weapon into the already dented metal, piercing it through, and dragged the blade down to cut the doors open.
Where blunt force failed, it took Carnage less than a minute to carve out an opening large enough for them to squeeze through. They dropped down into the elevator shaft, digging their claws into the walls to slow down their fall. Tony followed, keeping his repulsors at a low enough power to reach the bottom floor quickly.
Carnage ripped open the elevator cabin they had landed on, jumped in, and made quick work of the doors below.
And then a hail of bullets slammed into their body.
As soon as they noticed the automated turret pointing at them, Carrie bristled with blades. The flat, dagger-like shapes overlapped like scales, too small to serve as weapons, but tough enough to block the gunfire.
Except the small elevator cabin made the cacophony of ricocheting bullets outright deafening. And it hurt, far worse than the bullets themselves.
The makeshift shield wavered, starting to crack, and Cameron threw their body to the side, plastering to the wall in an attempt to hide behind what remained of the elevator doors.
Then Iron Man dropped into the cabin with them, briefly blocking the gunfire with his own armor, and blasted the turret into pieces.
Carrie quivered, allowing themself to relax a fraction, and Cameron sighed in relief. Finally, blessed silence…
"You okay, kid?" Iron Man asked.
Cameron ran his claws over the flat sharp-edged "scales" roughly the size of his hand that cascaded down his body like porcupine quills. They stuck out at odd angles and felt uncomfortable to move in (and probably dangerous to use with anyone squishier than armor-plated Iron Man close by), but provided a nice boost to their defenses.
"Good thinking, Carrie."
"We can do better," they disagreed, letting the scales melt back into their mass.
"For a spur-of-the-moment thing, you did great," Cameron insisted. "We can refine it later, when we're not being shot at."
"Don't worry, we're bulletproof," Cameron said out loud.
"If you say so…" Iron Man drawled dubiously, "…but I think I'll take point from now on. My scans show more weapons outside."
Cameron pressed himself back to the wall, Carrie shuddering at the thought of dealing with sounds again. "Yeah, okay. They're all yours."
Iron Man strode out of the ruined elevator and the gunfire started again, before several quick repulsor blasts silenced it. "All clear!"
Cameron bounded towards him on all fours (aside from making him stronger and faster, Carrie had also made his joints far more flexible, so the animalistic gait actually felt comfortable), quickly reaching the end of the narrow corridor. It wasn't particularly long, but there were several now-destroyed turrets on the walls and nowhere to hide from them.
"I guess Mordo doesn't like visitors, huh?" Cameron thought.
"It's not that bad," Carrie replied. "Bullets are easier to deal with than fire."
"Let's just hope that it won't get worse."
At the end of the corridor, there was a heavy metal door with a coded lock. Iron Man shifted the armor plates on his wrist and pulled out a long wire, before attaching it to the lock. Soon enough, the lock deactivated and the door slid open.
"Wow, this is worse garbage than HammerTech," Iron Man snorted. "Or did he set his password to 1234?"
He walked through the open door – and immediately started to back away, nearly causing Cameron to slam into him.
"What the–"
With a heavy thud, the door slammed shut behind them.
"Great, another trap," Iron Man muttered. He backed away as far as he could, keeping himself in front of them like a shield.
Carrie immediately shaped themself back into defensive scales, and Cameron frantically looked around, searching for danger.
They were in a large round room, empty, except for the stone statues lining the walls. They were ugly, demonic-looking things that brought to mind gothic gargoyles, only large enough that the tips of their curved horns almost scratched the ceiling.
Across the room, there was another door, although it wasn't metal like the one they had entered through. Instead, it was made of wood and wouldn't have looked out of place in a medieval castle, if not for the fact that it was glowing with ominous green light.
A quick look behind showed the entrance lighting up with the same eerie glow. Carrie whipped out a tendril tipped with a jagged spike and slammed it into the glowing door, but it bounced off without leaving a scratch.
"Magic seal," Iron Man said and pointed at the floor where a complex geometric design was glowing the same green color.
It was slowly getting brighter, casting flickering shadows across the room, and Cameron felt the back of his neck itch with a feeling like static electricity.
Then the glow intensified, sudden and sharp, and spread out, staining the statues like mold.
And then the statues began to move.
"Those things are alive?!" Cameron yelped as the gargoyles flexed their claws and spread their vestigial wings in eerie silence, the slight creaking of stone the only sounds they produced.
"Animated," Iron Man corrected. "They're just puppets this spell is stringing around. How smart they are depends only on how well Mordo programmed them."
"So they are just magic robots?" Cameron clarified.
"Pretty much," Iron Man agreed and shot the closest statue from both hands. The blast threw it into another gargoyle and the impact shattered them both into a pile of broken limbs and dusty rubble.
The green glow around the broken fragments grew brighter. Then they floated up and reassembled, fusing piece by piece back into the two statues.
"…This might be a problem," Iron Man commented mildly.
"You think?!" Cameron flailed as the statues crept closer, slow but steady.
He shifted one arm into a long whip tipped with a jagged blade and cleaved it through the neck of another gargoyle, taking off its head. A few seconds later, the green light repaired it, leaving no trace of damage behind.
"I told you, they're just puppets," Iron Man said tensely. "They'll keep reanimating until we dismantle the spell itself."
Carrie created more tendrils on their back and shoulders and aimed them in the general direction of the spell. "So we just have to destroy it?"
"No!" Iron Man shouted, grabbing their tendrils before they could hit anything. "Do you want the damn thing to blow up in your face?!"
"Then what do we do?!" Cameron yelled with rising panic.
Iron Man rose into the air as high as the ceiling allowed and blasted back several gargoyles that had gotten too close. "Dismantling spells is like defusing a bomb: you have to do it the right way or you'll just make it worse. Luckily, I've done it before and I can do it now. Would've been easier if these clowns stopped bothering me, but I just need a couple of minutes to figure out the pattern."
The utter confidence Cameron could hear in his voice was just what he needed to settle his fraying nerves. He could feel Carrie calming down as well, and now that they had a goal, it was easy for their minds to draw closer, synchronizing into something that was at once both and neither of them.
"You need time? We'll buy you time," Carnage promised.
The tendrils on their back grew thicker, spikes lengthening into massive blades. Their jaws unhinged, sharp fangs ready to bite and tear, and their claws extended into jagged talons the length of their forearms.
And then with a loud screech they threw themselves into battle, tearing savagely into the gargoyles. After all, these statues weren't alive, so Carnage had no reason whatsoever to hold themselves back.
Verbal incantations could only be broken by appropriate counter-spells (or by punching out the enemy wizard, which was Tony's preferred method of dealing with it). Otherwise you just had to grit your teeth and tough it out.
Written spells were far easier to dismantle: all you needed to do was figure out which components they were made of and then cut the right wires – or rather, destroy the right sigils.
Easy-peasy. Tony knew how this crap worked.
He quickly looked over the pattern, searching for the energy source that powered the spell. Mordo worked for Dormammu, which meant… Yes! There!
Tony grinned at the cluster of sigils that represented Dormammu's name. Cutting it off should depower the spell, but he knew better than to destroy it outright: the backlash could be nasty. Instead, Tony focused on the conduits that led to the other parts of the spell: angled lines that spread out from the power source like rays of the sun.
Each conduit had a small sigil attached to it in the middle. Tony couldn't quite recognize the symbol itself, but he knew what this position meant: it was a tripwire that would activate and blast whoever severed the conduit with something unpleasant. So these had to go first.
He pointed one hand at the closest tripwire and the other at the conduit it was attached to. Then he blasted them away one by one: tripwire, conduit, tripwire, conduit, tripwire–
"Oh, what the hell?!" Tony yelped when instead of the entire spell powering down, the destroyed conduits repaired themselves and reactivated. "How did– Oh, dammit…"
There was another energy source there. The spell didn't just draw power from Dormammu, it was keyed into the ley lines, the natural sources of magic energy, as well. If one power-source was cut off, the other one activated.
Damn, he knew this place was built on a convergence of ley lines, but he didn't think Mordo was smart enough to use them to put back-ups into his spells. Or make those spells self-repairing.
Okay, think-think-think! There had to be a weak point somewhere. Everything had a weak point, he just had to find it, before the damn statues overran them.
Tony looked up to check how Carnage was faring on that front–
And promptly froze, because wow.
He honestly hadn't been expecting much help from the kid, but it looked like Carnage was more than capable of living up to their overdramatic name.
Right before his eyes, they struck one of their bladed tentacles straight through a gargoyle's chest. Even though it was taller than them – and much heavier, being made of rock and all – Carnage swung it around with ease and smashed it into another statue, breaking both into rubble.
Then they jumped and somersaulted in the air to land on the ceiling, escaping the retaliation attacks from the other statues. The gargoyles reached out for them, too tall to be avoided, and Carnage sawed off their arms with vicious strikes from their serrated blades.
"You… uh… need any help there, kid?" Tony called out unsurely.
Carnage responded with a screech more fit for a bird of prey than anything human and bit off a gargoyle's head, crushing it to dust between their jaws. Then they jumped down and cleaved their claws through the chest and stomach of another gargoyle, splitting its torso open.
Yeesh… Tony cringed inwardly. If that statue hadn't been made of solid stone, its organs would've been spilling out on the floor. He could just imagine what that kind of attack would do to a human body…
He mentally kicked himself. No, bad Tony. No judging people for their abilities instead of their actions. That way lay madness and assholery the likes of General Ross.
Carnage was tearing into the statues like this because they were just mindless dummies. Tony had no reason whatsoever to suspect that they would ever do the same to actual people.
"Okay! Carry on!" Tony gave them a thumbs up and turned back to the spell.
Alright, if he was supposed to somehow break it… Or was he? Maybe he didn't actually need to dismantle it fully, just enough to open the doors –
Wait, duh! The doors!
Keeping the doors sealed and animating the statues were two completely different spells! And rooting them into the same pattern was like soldering titanium without pre-plating it first: the solder wouldn't stick properly and one good hit in the right spot would break it apart.
Tony quickly analyzed the sigils, trying to find the metaphorical "weld line" between the two parts of the spell. There was only so much space in the pattern, there had to be a place where they interfered with each other.
He didn't recognize every sigil – there were too many different schools of magic in the world for even a genius like him to learn every single one of them – but he knew enough to make an educated guess.
Detect, move, repair – that had to be the animation spell. Block, barrier, reinforce – that was the seal. Conduits traveled between the two parts like tangled power cords…
And then briefly converged in one spot, too close even for the tripwires to fit. Bingo!
Tony blasted at the knot of conduits, severing all of them at once. The spell flickered… and its sigils finally went dark. The barrier around the doors disappeared, and the statues froze in place once the magic keeping them animated was finally gone.
Tony quietly sighed in relief, glad that he got it right. Honestly, he'd rather fight a tank barehanded than deal with this crap. Magic was not his strongest suit.
"Alright! Glad that's over with." He turned towards his teammate and frowned. "…Uh, Carnage? You okay?"
Standing hunched amidst the rubble, Carnage looked more than a little dazed. The tentacles bristling on their back swayed around them in a halo of deadly blades, as if seeking another target to strike.
Before Tony could get properly worried about their mental state, they shook themselves like a dog and all the additional limbs melted back into their body. "…Sorry, you were saying something?"
"Are you good to go? Or do you need a minute to clear your head?"
Carnage shook themselves once more, the surface of their skin rippling slightly. "We're fine, just got a little…" they uncertainly waved a clawed hand, "…zoned out."
"Oh yeah, I know what it's like," Tony sympathized.
It happened to him too, often enough. One moment he could be making regular upgrades to his suit, then it would suddenly be 3 AM and he'd have a brand new armor half-assembled in front of him. He did his best work during inventing binges like this, but the crash afterwards absolutely sucked.
"Just try not to make it a habit. In our line of work, hyperfocusing like this can be dangerous. You need to always be aware of your surroundings, especially if you're in the middle of a fight."
Yes, Tony knew he was being a total hypocrite here, but if he couldn't teach by example, he could at least try to give some advice to the newbie.
"Right… Note to self: don't rely on instincts too much," Carnage muttered in response.
"You'll get a hang of it, kid, I'm sure. Now come on! We have a wizard to find and a demon to punch in the face!"
A/N: Before anyone gets worried, there is nothing nefarious happening to Carnage. It's just Cameron getting hyperfixated on the task at hand like the ADHD disaster he is, and Carrie leaning on their instincts a little too much to compensate for their lack of combat experience.