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Iron Man Lore

Stark Tower Shuffle

There are times, Tony Stark reflected, when a man just wants to be left alone to do his work.

The problem before him was tricky. Doctor Doom had unraveled the boundaries between different timestreams, causing them to overlap and tangle — and bring him directly into conflict with a second Doctor Doom from an alternate future.

This Timestream Entanglement had destabilized countless worlds and destroyed who knew how many dimensions that could not survive being overlaid onto another reality.

Tony had the glimmer of an idea of how to build a machine that would reintegrate the timelines and hopefully restore his own personal reality to the way it had been before. A future version of T'Challa and Shuri, along with the egghead Reed Richards himself were his main collaborators, though Peter Parker and some other locals gave some insight also. If they couldn't figure out how to get Trudy running, nobody could.

That machine has been a doozy. They were going to need massive amounts of this new element, Chronovium, to pull the construction off. The group had begun referring to it as the Timestream Reintegration Device, and because that was clumsy, they'd shortened it to TRD — which Tony affectionately referred to as Trudy.

He was in love with the idea of Trudy, but she was a fickle mistress, her solutions sometimes nearer and sometimes farther away as they learned more about the mechanisms of space-time and Chronovium.

It didn't help that Present Doom had locked down control of most satellite communications, and was constantly trying to sabotage their efforts in other ways. Or that Doom 2099 was also unleashing armies of Doombots.

Or that New York, in the midst of its own time crisis, was under the thrall of Dracula and an army of vampires, which made a casual stroll from Avengers Tower to the Baxter Building a life-or-death risk. Or that the vampires were always on the lookout for ways to infiltrate Avengers Tower.

Currently, he was being interrupted by an alert from one of the lower elevator shafts in Avengers Tower, as a camera picked up what looked like a vampire. Contrary to popular folklore, they did show up on cameras. Maybe Dracula himself didn't, but his creations did.

"Friday," he said. "Get me some better imaging."

"The creature isn't moving, boss," she answered. "So there's no other angle."

Below the vampire, the elevator came up into view from a lower floor. Tony understood, just a moment too late.

As the elevator approached, the vampire leaped onto it and tore open the emergency exit. The elevator car passed out of camera view.

"Next camera!" Tony snapped. He hated party crashers.

"On it, boss." Friday shifted the view. The car appeared, still going up.

"What floor is it headed for?"

"Looks like this floor."

"That'll be a negative," Tony said. "Stop it where it is."

The elevator chunked to a stop. "It's between floors thirty-six and thirty-seven," Friday said.

Tony activated his armor. The nanotech-enabled suit built itself in seconds and came online before he could count to three. "One more thing, Friday," he said. "Who was on that elevator?"

She named four techs from one of the labs studying superconducting materials on a lower floor.

So now he was possibly looking at five vampires, depending on how long it took to turn once the people in the elevator had been bitten. That seemed to vary quite a bit from person to person.

Either way, no vampires were getting off that elevator.

Iron Man walked to the elevator door. "Friday, open up."

She did, and Tony stepped into the shaft.

He dropped forty floors in free fall, then hit the brakes with his jet boots so he didn't snap the elevator's cable when he landed. The sound of his boots hitting the elevator car roof rang all the way back up the shaft, but it didn't drown out the screams from inside.

"Seeing five heat sources, boss," Friday said. "One quite a bit cooler than the others."

Maybe he was in luck, Tony thought. He dropped through the open hatch and took in the scene in a split second. The vampire stood casually in one corner of the car. The four techs cowered in the other corner. Tony, by sheer luck, had landed between them.

"Mister Stark!" one of the techs cried out, in a sob of pure relief. "You're here!"

"Anybody bitten?" he asked.

None of the techs said anything. The vampire smiled. "All of them," it said slowly, drawing out the words.

Tony lit it up with repulsors, but it was quicker than he would have expected. It anticipated his aim, even in the closer quarters of the elevator car, and ducked away.

Then it barreled through the victims, who screamed and fell over each other trying to escape the monster's clutches. Tony spun, repulsors hot, waiting for a shot that wouldn't take out one of the techs. Not all vampires turned their bite victims. He didn't know how it worked, but it was possible all of the techs would live if he could figure out how to get rid of the vampire.

It seized one of the techs and unhinged its mouth, poised to sink its fangs deep into the woman's neck flesh. She screamed and struggled, but it was much too strong for her. The vampire looked right at Tony, and in its eyes he saw that it planned to do as much damage as it could. It would drain his tech dry in front of him if he didn't do something about it.

So he took a chance. He waited until the vampire's focus wavered, just for the slightest moment, as it salivated for the tech's blood. That moment of wavering focus gave him the time he needed to snap up one gauntlet and blast the vampire off her neck with a repulsor.

It hit the wall and the tech slumped to the floor. One of the other techs grabbed her and dragged her across the car as Tony stood over the stunned vampire and blasted it with both repulsors until he was sure he wouldn't have to do it again.

The techs' panicked breathing filled the elevator shaft, hearts pounding, counting their last moments as humans. "Friday," Tony said without giving them a second look, "start the elevator again. Floor sixty-seven."

The sixty-seventh floor of Stark Tower was a medical research lab. All four of the bitten techs were met by medical crews in full protective gear, and taken to separate isolation units.

The main bio researcher, Curt Connors, met Tony at the elevator. "Doc," Tony said, "time to try out the serum."

Connors had a look on his face Tony knew all too well. "Connors," Tony said. "You look like you disagree with me, but don't want to tell me that because I'm your boss. Does that sound right?"

"Yes," Connors said reluctantly. "The serum isn't ready. It's not adequately tested."

"Those four people will probably die without it. I'd say they're willing test subjects."

Connors was struggling, and Tony gave him credit for that. Ethically, it was a tricky proposal to give a poorly tested experimental formula to desperate people.

"Ask them yourself if they're okay with it first, if it'll make you feel better," Tony added. Guess the doctor had some previous anxieties over his own history with serums.

This appeared to mollify Doctor Connors somewhat. "Okay. Okay, I will."

"And Doc?" Tony called as Connors headed deeper into the lab.

"Yes, Mister Stark?"

"Keep me updated on how they recover, will you?"

He was alone in the elevator on his way back up to his lab, so everything was quiet until Friday broke the silence. "Reed Richards called while you were...engaged in the elevator."

Doom controlled satellite communications, but Tony and Reed had figured out a way to get very short calls through using old land lines and local area networks. They didn't use it often because they didn't want anyone to find out. Plus, it was a little embarrassing to be some of the smartest men on Planet Earth communicating via a glorified can and string.

"Oh, you should have put him through. I could have talked to him at the same time."

"Multi-tasking has always been your strong suit, sir."

"That's right!" Tony snorted. "Never forget when I fixed your bugs while buying out Hammer Industries. Call Reed back."

Reed Richards' face appeared on Tony's heads-up, reminding him that he was still in his armor. He made the armor disappear and Reed's face appeared as a thumbnail on the inside of Tony's glasses.

"Tony," Reed said. "I thought you were sending the newest iteration of the Chronovium compounding formulas today."

"I did," Tony said. The elevator reached his floor and he got off.

"It never got here," Reed said.

"It's probably burying nuts somewhere, Reed," Tony said. "It'll get there."

"We really can't afford to have our couriers detouring to bury nuts, Tony—"

Reed said more but Tony didn't hear it because that was when the Doombots blew a bunch of holes in the wall and invaded his lab.

Tony came to expect carnage constantly nowadays. Energy blasts, explosions, the usual chaos. He was armored up and powered up before all of the Doombots had landed in the lab. There were eight of them. Seven stood near the shattered windows, their cloaks waving in the wind.

The eighth held up a cage containing a squirrel.

"Stand down, everyone! Stand down!" Tony held up his hands and dematerialized his suit's helmet. He had to know whether the Chronovium formulas were still in the little chip that squirrel carried around its neck. With the garlic.

If Doom had those formulas, he would know more about how Tony and Reed were trying to build Trudy. Which would make it easier for Doom to sabotage Trudy, and force Tony and Reed to change some of their plans.

"Oh, you found our lost squirrel," he said. "Appreciate you bringing it, I mean, him back. But just so we're clear, I'm still going to oppose you taking over the world."

"Squirrels," the Doombot said, in Doom's unmistakable tone of scorn. "Your methods remain as absurd and moronic as ever, Stark. I am returning this animal to you because to harm it would be beneath me."

Another voice rang out in the lab. Tony looked. Uh oh, he thought.

"You," Squirrel Girl said as she walked in to the lab, tail stiff and face grim. "You kidnapped Cyril!"

Tony had to cool the situation out until he knew whether Doom had taken the information the squirrel carried. "Hey, Doreen, everything's fine, the Doombot brought Cyril back. No need to —"

"Tony, you know I really admire the heck out of you, but this is not the time to be talking down to me," Squirrel Girl said. She advanced across the lab and snatched the cage from the Doombot's hand. "Doom, I know you're in there," she said, standing close to the Doombot's face. "If you did anything to Cyril, he'll tell me about it, and then I'm going to come after you and you'll wish you'd never been born!"

"Doreen," Tony said. "Why don't you just take the squirrel — "

"His name is Cyril!"

"Why don't you just take Cyril and make sure he's okay?" Tony caught Doreen's eye and saw that she understood what he meant. Cyril would tell her if Doctor Doom or any of the Doombots had examined his information payload.

She backed away, glaring at the Doombot and then cocking her head to one side, presumably because Cyril was telling her something interesting.

"What's he saying?" Tony asked.

"He says the Doombots fed him and he wants to go finish his mission now." Doreen's eyes shone with pride. "Isn't he just a little trooper?"

"He sure is," Tony said. Would Doreen have told him in front of the Doombots if Doom had messed around with Cyril's payload? He thought so. But it was hard to be sure, and there was so much at stake...

"I know what you are doing, Stark," the Doombot said, its tone now mocking. "You and Reed, and your Wakandan partners. You will be fine challengers, but in the end you and your machine will not be able to stop me. Victor von Doom will control space-time, for all pasts and all futures! You dabble in the mysteries of Chronovium, but I created it! And I will master it, and I will bring time itself to heel. You have been warned."

The Doombots backed toward the shattered windows and rocketed away into the night.

"Reed, did you get all that?" Tony asked. The call had been open the whole time.

"I did," Reed's voice remained unwavering.

"Think it's time we reconsidered some of our research pathways, if Doom knows about the compounding formulas."

"Sounds like it," Reed says. "But didn't the squirrel say nothing happened?"

Tony sighed at the fact of living in a world where that sentence made sense. "Yeah," he breathed. "It did. But I'm not totally inclined to let our entire project depend on acorn eaters, you know? No offense, kid. There were any number of ways Doom might have accessed the data without the squirrel ever knowing."

"I concur," Reed said. "I'll start retooling things over here."

"Okay, I'm gonna do a little math and get back to you in the morning. Ha ha, there's no morning here, but I'll get back to you after I get some sleep."

"Try not to lose any more squirrels." And with that, Reed broke the connection.

"Nobody lost a squirrel," Doreen retorted. Her tone was pretty heated. She'd been ready for a fight, and now she hadn't had one, so all that aggression had nowhere to go.

"Nope. We didn't. Cyril's all good?" She nodded. "Then how about you let him go back to the park, and we'll think about how we communicate with Reed going forward."

"I'll do anything to help, Tony," Doreen leapt up. She had that starry-eyed look she sometimes got around him. It drove Tony a little crazy, but he also found it charming, and it also made him feel good, because if he had the admiration of someone as good and pure as Doreen Green, he couldn't be such a bad person after all.

"Well, Doreen, we have two Victor von Dooms, with two competing visions of how to tyrannize the future we all have to live in, and while we try to stop one or both of them, we also have to fight a vampire army." Tony walked her to the elevators. "So, there's plenty for everyone to do. And this sounds really weird in my head even before I say it...but we might not be able to do it without you and your squirrels."

"I know," she said. "And when you get your machine built, you better remember that."

With a flick of her bushy tail, she was gone into the elevator. Tony had a grin on his face as he surveyed the damage to his lab. Nothing that couldn't be repaired. And if Squirrel Girl was going to make good on her threat to make Victor von Doom wish he'd never been born...well, that was a future worth fighting for all by itself.",

"HeroUIAssetBPTable_10340010_HeroSpciality": "Armed with superior intellect and a nanotech battlesuit of his own design, Tony Stark stands alongside gods as the Invincible Iron Man. His state of the art armor turns any battlefield into his personal playground, allowing him to steal the spotlight he so desperately desires.