Of Neuromancy and Iron Wills 3 (NEW, CANON)

Mostly the same, added in a scene with Will giving Yinsen and Toni his "backstory" while removing the scene with Fury. End result is a bit shorter, but incorporates the ideas from QQ.

Added a second modification due to continued QQ ideas. At this rate I'll have to stop writing these chapters in advance!

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 2.543x10^54 Cultivating “Sass” 75.65%…

That low?

…Continued Proximity To Carbon-Based Individual “Toni” Increases Probability To 98.91%…

…

…CFU 2.543x10^54 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 2.543x10^54 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 2.543x10^54 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 2.543x10^54 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 2.543x10^54 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 shoot, 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.