Tony Stark (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aggravating) wrote2012-05-14 10:49 pm
aggravating) wrote2012-05-14 10:49 pm
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User Name/Nick: Kels
User DW:cafune
AIM/IM: tmesisly
E-mail: reyndown@gmail.com
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Tony Stark
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe/Iron Man/Avengers
Age: 42ish
From When?: Post Iron Man 3
Inmate/Warden: Warden- hey, he's been through the Inmate stuff. He's learned his lessons, gotten better at a lot of things. He's a true and proper hero, a slightly better person, and a lot less prone to make stupid mistakes. And, well. Believe it or not, he's actually a pretty nice guy. He's accepting in the weirdest ways, helps people out while seeming like he isn't, and usually whenever he puts his mind to something, when he actually takes the time and interest to try and help someone, they come out infinitely better. And not just because he's buying them whatever the hell they want.
He also, due to his canon point, has some pretty personal experience with panic disorders and PTSD. Admitted experience, too. Unlike when he was here before.
Item: A Stark brand phone. Now with extended holographic capabilities. And a built in mobile JARVIS.
Abilities/Powers: Tony has the abilities and powers of a human male of his age in top physical shape. He isn’t a muscle builder, and his frame is a bit on the skinny side, but he is still fit in all senses. He also has genius level IQ, but that isn’t quite a superpower. It hasn’t been accelerated in any way, he’s just very, very smart. However, just because he isn’t a superhero in the sense of powers or genetic manipulation doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some sort of ‘power’. See, he’s a genius. And he’s an inventor. And he’s Iron Man. As such, he kind of sort of has a certain suit that enhances his strength, durability, is heat and cold resistant, has a few weapons built in and allows him to fly.
Personality: Tony Stark is the textbook definition of extremely difficult. In his own words he defines himself as a “genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist” where-in an outside personality assessment he was simply labeled as “volatile, self-obsessed, and doesn’t play well with others”. At first glance this is exactly what he seems to be. An extremely intelligent man who has more money than he knows what to do with and an ego the size of Russia and most of Asia. He’s the very definition of a showman in every aspect of his life, building up press and always making headlines with his girl of the week, latest drunken escapade, and groundbreaking announcement. But see, this is all just the surface of Tony Stark, and when you scratch just a little bit deeper, you get to see exactly how complex of a man he truly is. And how so much of how he acts in public is really a matter of misinterpretation and the combination of his various true personality points.
Now, it’s important to note that the flippant attitude that Tony adopts in public is the first thing people are introduced to, yes, but it’s just that. Something he adopts. It’s a mask he puts on in order to get to certain heights, to work under a public name and be able to worm his way into certain circles. He’s flippant, first and foremost, dismissing just about everything that’s thrown at him and shrugging it off as if it’s simply someone calling him silly and throwing water balloons at his face. He acts as if nothing really matters, in the long run, even if it’s something as important as a senate hearing, the board completely blocking him out of his own company, he tends to react in an incredibly subdued manner, as if, in the long run, no decision that’s made about him is anything that will keep him down for long. He prides himself on his adaptability in such situations, in being able to look ahead of whatever is in front of him and calculate the various outcomes, to plan through a simple hearing or a meeting and accept whatever losses that brings him since the overall long-term profits outweigh anything. As such, he doesn’t really think too much about his immediate reactions to things, and does things that most people would consider utterly insane. Such as, for example’s sake, hacking into the senate’s projectors and commandeering their screens in order to make a point. Something that, if it had been anyone else, would have landed him in jail. But more than that, Tony’s just prideful. In the public’s eyes he does things for the sheer sake of having his name everywhere, whether that be in good news or bad news. He crashes parties, is infamous for getting drunk and doing stupid things, and more recently he makes split-second decisions such as entering himself in races at the last second as well as trashing his house after getting drunk in his Iron Man suit. If anyone can expect anything from Tony it’s that he’ll always be loud, boisterous, and any event with him in attendance? It’s going to make headlines for at least a week, and it’s going to be something people remember.
But as said before, this is just the persona he adopts for the public’s eye. A persona that makes people take him a little less than seriously. It allows him to be regarded as a name with a few bucks behind it, a legacy of brilliance, but nothing more than that. It’s the thing that’s had companies and people disregarding him, writing him off as a loose-canon and a liability, someone to not take seriously when, really, they should. Because at the heart of it all, Tony Stark is an absolute genius. He can think miles beyond a situation, can practically see the end results of a situation the moment he walks into it, and if there’s one thing he knows how to do well, it’s work under the table. It’s this combination of things – his own genius and the name he’s made for himself – that has always been his greatest assets. He’s able to be taken lightly, to not be as cunning as he is because people expect him to always be showing his true colors, to be bragging about his plans and flaunting his designs to whoever will listen, even if they’re just some random person he passes in the street. It’s this name he’s carefully built and this representation of himself that allows him to work in secret. It allowed him the freedom to work and build the suit that allowed him to escape the cave in Afghanistan as well as the suit that would become a more ‘finished’ model. Simply because everyone expected something that amazing to be front and center, to be flaunted and told to everyone he knew, and maybe even hinted to the press. Never once did they think that there was more to Tony than what he outwardly showed. Never once did they think there was a cunning to him that, hand in hand with a few other key attributes, eventually turned him into a true superhero.
See, despite everything that Tony Stark seems to be, he’s not actually that mean of a person. He comes across as sarcastic and insufferable, sure, but that’s mainly because he doesn’t quite get social situations as well as the normal person. His mind simply operates at a level that’s too fast for simple conversations. He’s everything a genius is, and that includes being a bit too… fast for people to keep up with. In a normal conversation, something can be said that’s harmless and justified, and Tony’s mind simply jumps beyond the reasonable and the appropriate, begins picking apart every word that’s been uttered and formulates responses that, at first glance, seem to be insults and, while some times they are meant as such, in other ways they’re just his way of saying he disagrees, that he’s trying to logically point out flaws in an argument and presenting his own solutions, but with the normal rapier of his wit and his genuine jackassery in regards to media and social events, everything he tells people is usually taken with a grain of salt. After all, that’s what Tony is. A jerk. A billionare. And a self-obsessed egomaniac. But, given the chance, he’s really not any of that. His mind simply works on a level that leaves him too busy to really think through the true consequences of his actions and what he says, and half of the time he doesn’t even realize what’s actually coming out of his mouth. Even when it seems like he’s doing nothing, he’s usually thinking about whatever plans he has for his suit, for the latest stock merger for his company, a solution to whatever villainous scheme he’s up against this time. His genius is on such levels that he needs to be constantly thinking and multitasking, and in the long run that doesn’t really leave much time for properly thinking about what’s appropriate in social situations. Which is where the wit and automated responses he normally gives people in interviews and during what press speeches he still attends comes in. He just doesn’t fully realize that he’s doing anything wrong. Because his mind simply doesn’t fully recognize it. However, when he pulls himself out of his projects, when he focuses and gets his mind out of a computer and turns off the blue tooth he normally keeps buzzing in his ear, it becomes clear that he’s… really not that bad of a person at the heart of it all. He gets distracted, he forgets things, he gets so wrapped up in his lab that he forgets birthdays, meetings, and everything like that, but he does hold onto what’s important. He just… gets things a little mixed up sometimes. For example, when he was trying to apologize to Pepper in Iron Man 2, he brought her strawberries, because even in his overactive mind, where projects run supreme, he managed to remember Pepper telling him a little tidbit about strawberries. Sure, he didn’t remember that she was allergic to them, but he still remembered it in part. Which, to Tony’s normally chaotic mind, is kind of a miracle.
Which brings us to another point. The fact that Tony Stark isn’t just some hunkered down genius in a laboratory. That’s he’s an honest to goodness superhero who risks his neck for the lives of everyone around him. Everything that Tony is, now, is because of one man. A simple doctor who saved his life in a cave in Afghanistan, even if it meant giving up his won life in return. Tony, at that time, didn’t feel he deserved it. He was a self-centered brat who didn’t look past himself and see the world, he couldn’t see what his work was doing, that he was being attacked with his own weapons. But as soon as he escaped that cave and the months of torture within it, he became a new man. Even if the rest of the world never really got to see it. He became obsessed with the mission, and still is, to a point. The true mission beneath the outward appearance of fame and fortune. The mission to retract his presence from the military world, to destroy his weapons when they get into the wrong hand, to personally put his life on the line for once and become a symbol for peace, even if his name still meant war. Even the Iron Man suit, at its heart, isn’t a weapon. The blasters in his hands are meant to be flight stabilizers, and nothing Tony does is in an attack, it’s all defensive. He refuses to be a part of the military, to give his plans to the government. He refuses all of that because he can’t risk the world falling to ruin because of Stark weaponry, not again. And the thing is, as much as Tony loves himself, as much as he seems to be wrapped up in everything he is and doesn’t care about anything else, the suffering of others truly bothers him. It makes him angry, makes him demand answers, forces his hand into actually going and doing something himself, instead of waiting around for the government to get off its ass and ‘help out’. He also had no qualms with putting his own life on the line to do so, but that’s… well. That’s a whole other can of worms.
A can we really should delve into. See, Tony Stark, for all his swaggering about, really doesn’t have that great of an opinion of himself. A lot of it is shown in his obsessive need to be loved in the public’s eye, to have eyes on him at all times, to be flashy in everything he does – hell, even his suit is painted bright colors, his landings all done in poses, his computers taking control of PA systems in order to blare music, rockets creating fireworks. He has a grade A attention problem, built up slowly but surely all the way from his childhood. See, even with the videos he’d recently seen of his dad giving him a quick pep talk, growing up Tony had known nothing but his mind and his schooling. And he’d sure as hell had no signs of affection from his dad. He swore Howard Stark’s best moment had been when Tony got shipped off to boarding school. That sort of lack of attention from a role model, from his father is definitely the base cause of Tony’s lack of true self-esteem now, the very reason why he tries so hard at running his company, at bettering his machines and inventions. And it’s the reason why he craves attention from everyone he meets, be that good attention or bad attention. It’s why he runs his mouth, why he’s always so flashy, why he goads and goads and never lets things lie. Because he needs all eyes to be on him, he wants any attention he can get to make up for everything else. Every bit that he hides. In the first Iron Man? It was because he thought he shouldn’t be alive. Because he should have died in a cave, because the only thing keeping him alive, allowing him to live, was the death of a perfectly innocent man and a magnet wrapped around his heart. In the second? Well. He spent the entire movie with his death looming in front of him, and it didn’t take him long to figure that this was it. He was finally dying, as he should have all those months ago, in the middle of a desert. He fights for people so well because he has little regard for himself. He rushes into danger because he doesn’t really care about the outcome. But also because he knows that he’s too good. He’s too good at what he does, at inventing and designing that he just won’t die. He can take those risks because he knows he’s living on borrowed time, on time he shouldn’t have, and he survives them because he knows he’s too smart, too efficient. His suit is too good. And thus the cycle never ends.
The last thing to note about Tony is that he seems to have a bit of OCD, at the end of the day. He has an issue being touched, getting visibly flustered and uncomfortable and trying his best to worm away or simply avoid the contact in the first place. In addition, he also has a bit of a problem being handed things, which seems to go a step beyond his ego and his reluctance to get bad news. After all, so far only Pepper can hand him anything without him going through extreme discomfort.
Now, while Tony has been on the barge before to work through a majority of his worst issues, that doesn't mean that he's suddenly an angel. That he's learned his lesson and has turned into a kind, soft-spoken person. Oh no. He still has an ego, he still gets frustrated, he still stays up way too long and gets way too lost in his projects. He still doesn't know when to cut himself off, still snaps and says things without thinking, still can't be handed things, still has those little ticks and eccentricities. He's still a jerk, still doesn't really care that he is. In other words, he's still Tony Stark.
What his time on the barge has given him, has shown him, is that he's a hero. It's not the suit so much as it's him. He's learned that, and he's had it shoved down his throat that despite everything he is, despite what he tries to do to the people who get close to him, people actually give a shit about the man underneath the metal. He's figured out how to peel back the outer layers. The metal suit, the conceited businessman underneath. He's alright with letting people know he's not as conceited as he looks. As sappy as it sounds, he's a lot more comfortable being genuine with people.
But the biggest things are probably the fact that he's no longer self-sabotaging and... he doesn't drink. Not a drop of alcohol passes his lips anymore. He's over that crutch. He's dealing with things himself, with a lovely lady and PA by his side.
UPDATE
im3 goes here
Barge Reactions: Considering that this time Tony is actually aware that he's going to go on a little trip to the hell barge, he's going to be a lot more calm with what's happening. After all, this time he chose to be here. As much as he hates that. So yeah, he'll still get pissed at everything that's going on, he'll still hate the floods and the breaches, and he'll still insult people he really has no business insulting because hey. Graduated or not, he's still Tony Stark. And being infuriating is just one of his endless charms.
He'll gripe and rant and rave, he'll get freaked out about as much as anyone else, but he's also aware of what the ship does, how it works. And this time, at least, he'll have a little extra control. That little foothold and anchor that being a Warden gives him. So at least now he won't try to systematically tear things down. He'll just... have a little bit of annoyed panic when things go wrong.
History: Anthony Stark was born to Howard and Maria some thirty-six years ago. He was born into an empire of sorts, a rich family with a lot of pressure and legacy riding on their last name. Howard was a name during the wars of the past, but more than that he was an inventor who was leading the charge into the future. And Tony, as his son, was expected to take the company when the time was right and lead it even further into the future. But see, Tony Stark would surpass anyone’s wildest dreams. He was a genius from the start, getting through his schooling in record time, attending MIT as a teenager and graduating when he was just seventeen. But see, from there… his life would just go to hell. Because barely a year later, when Tony Stark was just eighteen, his mother and father died in a plane crash, leaving him with a company to run and no parental figures for the rest of his adolescence. Sure, there was Obadiah Stane, his father’s friend and the man helping him run the company, now, but he was just grooming him for leadership, really, investing in his mind and his inventions more than him as a person.
And so, the climb to power began. Tony took his father’s company beyond Obadiah’s wildest dreams. He designed weapons for everyone and their mother, pushing the American military into a new age. But while he was doing that, Tony sort of… went on a downhill slide. He started drinking, gambling, sleeping around. He became a name of infamy in the media, and the American public quickly turned him into their party boy cover story. People were wondering what crazy thing he would do next more than how he would push their society forward. But in the end, Tony would be forced to grow up pretty quickly, seeing as once his pride and glory – the Jericho missile – was finally put into production, things sort of… went to hell for Tony. After all, on the way back from his weapon’s presentation, the military escort he was provided with was bombed, most of the soldiers killed. And while Tony himself took a pretty serious hit to the chest, in the end he was kidnapped, taken away, his heart hooked up to a magnet to keep him alive long enough for the insurgents to get him to build them a Jericho missile.
Tony, however, had other ideas. With the help of a fellow prisoner named Yinsen, Tony managed to stay alive, miniaturizing an arc reactor to keep himself alive and to power a suit he was making in secret, to help them escape. In the end, he managed to do it. To break on out and get rescued, but the cost was high. A bit too high for his liking. After all, Yinsen… gave his life for Tony to escape. Something that had never set well with him. But, in the end, he did make it out of the cave, and after wandering the desert for a little while, a rescue team found him, and Tony was swept back to civilization. However, that wasn’t going to be the end of it. Not by a long shot. After all, Tony had seen how many of his weapons these men had gotten their hands on. And while he managed to destroy a lot of what was at that base, he just knew that wasn’t all of it. That there was a leak in his company, and he had to find it… as well as make a few changes.
So, as soon as he got back to the States, he set up a conference, telling people he was back safe and sound and, as of that moment, Stark Industries would no longer be manufacturing weapons. Sure, that meant he eventually got shut out of the company and their stock dropped a few dozen percentage points, but hey. He was going to stick to his guns, now. And he was determined, after everything he’d seen and lived through, to change the way his company went about things. Even if that meant getting kicked off of the board, his involvement with his own company reduced to simply holding majority shares. And so, he began to work on a suit. To finish and refine the designs he’d started in that cave in Afghanistan. To finish a suit that would, eventually, be known as Iron Man. And, given the state of the world, it wasn’t long until Tony became aware of a group of terrorists gaining his weapons, attacking innocent civilians in a town called Golmira. Moved by their plight and his company’s apparent involvement in the shipment that got taken, Tony donned his suit for the first time, and in a quick flash? He was in Golmira, saving every civilian he could and destroying a vast majority of the weapons they’d pilfered from him.
However, on the way back, he had an unfortunate run-in with a few US fighter jets, even managing to crash one of them – although both pilots survived. However, he was now officially on the radar, and Rhodey, best friend and army nut extraordinaire, had a good idea about what he was up to. However, the worst was still to come. After all, with the suit now public knowledge, Obadiah Stane could now make his move, acquiring the prototype suit Tony had used to escape and remaking it, improving it. All with the intention of making the ultimate weapon… and wiping Tony out. After all, he was the one who had ordered Tony to be killed on that convoy.
Something that Tony would find out soon, it seemed. Because as soon as he sent Pepper into the company to figure out what, exactly, they were up to, she found evidence that Obadiah had ordered the hit, as well as plans for a suit to rival Tony’s. But before she could contact Tony about any of that, Obadiah broke into Tony’s house, using a paralytic device in order to pull the arc reactor right out of Tony’s chest, just so he could power his own suit. Desperately, once the paralysis wore off, he stumbled down to his workroom, struggling against cardiac arrest with every passing second. In the end, the prototype chest piece was the only thing that saved him. Taken out and made into a trophy, as proof that he even had a heart – very clever, Pepper – so while Obadiah had meant for him to die, the genius pulled through. And even though the prototype wasn’t meant to power something as big as the Iron Man suit… well. What else could he do but charge forward and try and save Pepper and his company from Obadiah’s meddlesome hands?
The ensuing fight tore up a lot of streets and buildings, and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but in the end Pepper helped Tony overload Stark Industry’s arc reactor and, in the end, Obadiah got fried by energy, passed out, and eventually exploded in an end fitting his villainous, traitorous character. And while SHIELD helped Tony prepare a statement covering up everything that had happened that night, in the end… well. Tony’s ego got the better of him. So after a pause heard ‘round the world, he came up with the wonderful words… “I am Iron Man”.
And six months later, those very words came back to bite him in the ass.
See, there was a little problem with his arc reactor. And that’s the fact that… it was slowly killing him. Spreading poison through his bloodstream the more he used the suit, and even then the spread was slow and steady, the chemicals within the reactor poisoning him the longer it was in his body. And it wasn’t like he could just take it out and be done with it. Oh no. The device that was keeping him alive was killing him. That was how much his life had begun to suck. So, he started to go a little off the wall. Instead of telling anyone, making them worry and make them make him stop using the suit, he kept on being Tony Stark, kept on being Iron Man. Until it became time for him to start crossing items off his bucket list, to begin to say goodbye to the world. And that was when Tony Stark really went insane. First, he signed his company over to Pepper, then he went wild in Italy, entering a car race that ended up nearly killing him as an apparently long-time enemy crawled out of the woodworks. Anton Vanko, son of a man who had worked with Howard Stark on the initial arc reactor design before going insane. Seemed insanity ran in the family, though, since Anton didn’t waste any time going crazy and trying to kill Tony, forcing him to don a suit and pretty much beat Anton’s ass into a jail cell.
From there, things kept going downhill. Unbeknownst to him, a competitor – Justin Hammer – broke Vanko out of jail in order to have him perfect a suit to rival Tony’s, which just gave Vanko the opportunity to try and create a small army to try and kill Tony. Stark, meanwhile, was having a few issues of his own. As his blood toxicity kept climbing, he decided it was time to give away a suit without really giving it away. So, he ruined his own party, got drunk as hell while in the Iron Man suit, and forced his best friend’s hand, getting him into a suit to stop Tony’s drunken idiocy. The night ended with Rhodey taking the suit away, through with Tony’s childish antics, and even Pepper seemed to have just completely given up on him. To Tony? This was easier than telling them he was dying. Than giving the suit away as a sort of “final gift”.
However, SHIELD wasn’t having it. In a rare show of form, Director Fury himself tracked Tony down at a little diner, talking him down and revealing the new-ish secretary Pepper had hired was actually an agent of his, and also telling Tony that he hadn’t tried everything as far as saving himself went. So, the Director gave Tony some of his father’s old research, confining him to house arrest until he figured it out. Of course, it’s kind of hard to keep Tony Stark put, so before long he broke out to visit Pepper, and ended up seeing something that gave him a new idea. After all, his father had said in a video clip that he’d done all of this for him… so maybe the answer to the new element he needed to power the core was in the table he’d used to lay out all of the Expo. After scanning the table and really taking a look at what was there? Well. Tony found out that Howard had given him everything he needed. Every little thing to help power the suit was there in front of him. All he needed to do was crash some particles and make an element.
In the end? It did the trick. With a newly powered up suit and a rejuvenated body, Tony crashed his own Expo, trying to talk sense into Rhodey, to tell him that Hammer was using everyone, and that even Hammer was being used, in the end. By Vanko. However, not as soon as he said that but the drones Vanko had built for Hammer began to act up, to target Tony and ready their weapons. After all, Vanko had full control over them. And as soon as Iron Man had shown up? Well. The war had started. And while Natasha – the beautiful secretary to Pepper – managed to hack into Rhodey’s suit and get him back on Tony’s side, the fight with all the drones still wrecked most of the Expo, and put hundreds of people’s lives at stake. And that was before Vanko himself made an appearance. Piloting a reinforced suit of his own and waving those energy whips about.
That... was when Tony Stark died and landed in the barge. A mystical, magical, hellish place where he found himself forced to "better himself" with the help of some crazy psychic guy in a wheelchair. But better yet, he was meeting people from other universes, from his future, from the past. Aliens and angels and even robots and guys who looked just like him except tended to turn into a dog when overexcited. He got his arc reactor ripped out and damaged by a guy who could wiggle the shrapnel around in his chest with a simple thought. He got turned into a gangster with a younger twin brother. He shot himself in the head in order to let that twin escape with his life.
But more than that, he battled his own inner demons. He drank too much, lost control. He scraped the bottom of the barrel and got to his lowest possible point, unable to even comprehend climbing back up. He made mistakes, said things he shouldn't have, and even got a good portion of a boy's experiences in Auschwitz shoved into his mind. Graphic memories, dreams as if he were actually there.
But during all of that, fate seemed to want to play a little trick on him. And while he was on the barge, dealing with things one day, the next? He was back at the expo, electricity surging through him and Rhodey shouting to get his attention. He was fighting Vanko, in pain but alive. Well... at least for the moment
It was a close one, but Rhodey and Tony managed to work together and blast Vanko into submission. But in pure supervillain fashion he rigged every single droid to self-destruct, leaving Rhodey to hightail it out of there and Tony to swoop Pepper up just before the drone near her exploded. In the end, Tony somehow managed to get the girl - how, he still doesn't know - as well as stop the bad guy and just basically be awesome.
That is, until he was turned down for the Avengers Initiative.
Something that would be a moot point in just a few years, really, especially since Tony did keep on with being a consultant for SHIELD during the two year break between the Expo and the finalization of the tower in New York. During those years, his company pushed forward, he and Pepper stayed in a relationship, Tony formed a kind of friendship with Coulson and basically life was good. He developed a new model of the suit, started making a name for himself in the energy race... yeah. Life was really good in Tony Stark land.
Until, you know, Coulson decided to be a party pooper and tell him that an evil Norse God brainwashed a SHIELD agent and stole a magic cube. And apparently he was now supposed to team up with Captain American't, the Jolly Green Giant, Natalie "Thunder Thighs" Widow, and who the hell knew who else. Well, granted, Jolly he was looking forward to meeting, because when his 'roids weren't acting up he was almost on his level of genius. Which was rare and completely awesome. So when he finished up on his homework and heard that the boys were playing around in Germany? Of course he had to go and save their asses. And capture Rudolf the Parental Issues Reindeer.
Things just... pretty much went downhill from there. They got Rudolph into the plane, ran into a thunder storm which was actually a pissy Norse Barbie Doll, Tony played whack a mole with the guy with the giant hammer and suit charging powers (seriously not the brightest idea there, Point Break) but in the end the good Popsicle came and got them all working together, kind of, and moving back to the helicarrier. Which was when, finally, Tony met someone who wasn't completely brain damaged that he could work with. Bruce Banner was a savior at that point, because honestly? All Tony wanted to do was jump on the science and poke at that glowing can opener Loki was so attached to.
Which they then skipped off merrily to do. And, in the end, that was... pretty much a bad call. For the glowstick of destiny was also kind of a rage rod of some kind, just amping up tensions and hostilities to their boiling point. Of course, it meant that every one of the Avengers was in one room arguing at one point (which, retrospect, could have been a hot moment and Tony definitely needed to get pictures of that) about Thor breaking a town, Tony being a dick, Natasha just being Natasha, Bruce being suicidal, apparently, and Fury making nuclear weapons which was just not cool with anyone. Of course, Loki was practically rolling around in his little glass cage cackling with glee at that point because everything was literally about to go to shit no matter what, because if Clint didn't blow up an engine (that'd be Hawkeye, by the way, Mr. Brainwashed not even two minutes into his role which is probably a record of some kind) then Bruce was going to Hulk out and literally rip the ship apart anyway. So really definitely a good thing that the engine thing happened instead.
Even if, once again, it was all a moot point. Because Bruce hulked out anyway and ripped basically everything apart. Staring to sense a theme with moot points, actually. Anyway, once again it was all up to Tony Stark to save the day (if he wasn't such a philanthropist he'd have been charging by that point) and keep everyone and their mothers from crashing into the ocean/land that was below them. Of course that meant nearly getting shredded to death in the engine he was kickstarting because seriously Steve? You had to be hanging off the side of the ship waving hello to death at that very moment? Eh, whatever, it worked out. Ruined his suit and gave Loki enough time to get them separated - what with Thor dropped down to Earth in a glass box and the Hulk just kind of rocketed off in some random direction and oh yeah.
Loki killed Coulson.
And that didn't sit well with any of them.
So it was time for some hardcore Avenging at that point. Time for Hawkeye to get brain bashed back to their side, for Tony to fix up his armor enough to fly on ahead as Steve, Nat, and Clint hijacked a plane. See, Loki is kind of a Grade A dick and decided to be awesome (spoiler: that's sarcasm) and set up shop at the top of Tony's tower for the final phase of his little plan. Which, of course, was both genius and a really bad mistake because sure, Loki could take advantage of the arc reactor Tony had there in order to power up his portal making machine, and sure he could throw Tony off of a really high building, but he also gave Tony access to his even newer suit. Which kind of made it easier for everyone when it came to dealing with the hordes of alien beasts suddenly pouring out of the sky.
That sucked. Like. Kind of majorly.
Anyway, Thor showed back up to punch Loki in the face and slam him into the ground, Bruce putted back in on a motorbike and went all green and giant to get in on things and let Hulk have fun smashing aliens but in the end? They were getting tired, beaten down, and there was no sign of the invasion stopping... or even slowing. So Natasha climbed the tower to try and find a way to deactivate the device... while the ever helpful government decided to fire a nuke right into the heart of New York City. And, since Tony was the only one who could fly? Yeah. Guess who got the fun job of being a missle escort!
So, to prove just about everyone wrong about him just being a selfish asshole, Tony flew the nuke into space, aiming it at the mothership on the other side of the portal, watching everything blow up in front of him as oxygen deprivation and suit failure ultimately claimed him, cutting off his final, desperate call to Pepper and sending him plummeting down towards the portal as Natasha jammed Loki's hipster pimp cane into the middle of it in a sort of ironic DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS moment. And Tony totally would have commented on that in real time if he hadn't, you know, been totally out cold and pretty much dead and freefalling from above the height of the empire state building. He was going to get really familiar with the ground if someone didn't-
Well. Alright, hello again Barge, how you doing? At least this time Tony had some sort of idea of what he was going into. Even if now he was met with new faces, people he'd met in his world as well as others still trickling in. He resumed his work with Charles, still turning to alcohol to make dealing with the emotional problems they kept having to rip into a little easier. It took a while, took a long while and took Tony stealing from an asthmatic kid version of Captain America just to get drunk, took him running into a young Natasha soon after that, somehow triggering the kid that would grow up to actually be a pretty good friend into stabbing him in the leg, forcing another good friend to lose his temper at a psychotic toddler for him to realize that, well. Maybe he was kind of messed up.
From there, it was work. It was realization and admitting that he had a problem. It was asking the people he trusted to keep him away from alcohol, to help and make sure he didn't sneak things back to his room, to get him through that initial withdrawal stage. To keep him on his feet until he could stand on his own. Until he could walk and run and deal with the other things he needed to. Deal with the self-destructive tendencies he had. Until he could find people to rely on, could find it in himself to actually ask for help.
In the end, Tony graduated, but he graduated a coward. Because as much as Tony Stark had progressed, he still just... couldn't bring himself to say some long-winded sappy goodbye.
Besides, he planned on coming back.
But yeah, where were we? Oh, right. Falling through the sky completely unconscious, about to become real familiar with the ground-
Oh, hey Hulk buddy. Thanks for the catch. Knew there was a reason we kept you around.
With Tony successfully saved from going splat on the sidewalk and the Hulk then roaring to give his heart the jumpstart it needed, the Avengers made their way up to where big mean and green had been using him as a stress reliever and chained him up, stopping off for some shawarma at a local joint before prettying themselves up and saying adios to their god-like friends in the middle of Central Park. Tony dropped Bruce off at the bus stop (although seriously, he still had the entire R&D department for him, if he wanted) and went back to the Tower, looking over the damage from the battle and setting up a new floor plan with Pepper. One floor for each of the Avengers. Just. They didn't have to know that yet. Or ever, actually.
---im3 goes here---
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera is facing the wall. An interesting thing, seeing as there must be some sort of reason someone would purposefully start broadcasting a picture of the wall. Perhaps it was going to change? Perhaps there was a pattern hidden there, something just slightly off-white patterned there. Some hidden message, some hidden meaning. Perhaps all the answers to life were in that one little piece of a room, that one, focused image of a wall being sent around the barge. Perhaps-]
back in black [Oh.] I hit the sack [Is that-] I've been too long [Oh no.] I'm glad to be back!
[And just like that, AD/DC at full force in the background, the camera is picked up, held up and at an angle pure myspace style, revealing one Tony Stark in all his business suited glory.] Honey, I'm home! [Aaaand down goes the communicator on the table.] And, so we're all on the same page here, I fully endorse a battle royale to figure out who honey is. Although I warn you now, I'm a picky soul, and my heart belongs to one thing and one thing only.
[Wait for it, pause for dramatic effect, drum roll please!
... Yeah he's just stepping aside to show the Mark VII in all it's powered down glory.]
It's the red and gold that got me. I still say I go with the red suit and you wear the gold lace, babe.
I believe the lace would flatter your figure better, sir.
Alright, alright. [Yup. That's one smart-talking computer program that's followed Tony to the barge. Again. JARVIS is practically a part of him at this point. But at the very least Tony seems to be calming down, finally sitting at the desk the communicator's on and tilting it up a little to eye the camera a little better.] Quick debrief. I'm back of my own free will. Lacking the invisible shackles this time around, and this? [Have a quick wiggle of his phone] I got promoted to camp counselor. So someone get the blogs out and give me updates.
Sample RP:
To Tony, his armor had become a part of him. His arc reactor the same. It was him as much as he was it. The super hero and the person. He put it on, and he became one with it. It moved with a fluidity no one on Earth could match, it bent to his will, performed every action imaginable, and more than that? It allowed him to do everything he had ever wanted, everything he had never known he wanted. From the moment he ended up in that cave, trapped and afraid and more than a little freaked out, it had been like his eyes had been opened. Opened to the horrors in the world, the bitter truth of everything he’d done over the past few decades, ever since he’d stepped up and taken control of the company, a young man who’d known nothing more than money and laboratories since the moment he was born. He’d never experienced war, he’d never experienced strife. He’d heard about it, watched movies, but nothing compared with the bitter fact that you were holding onto a man’s hand, watching life drain from his eyes, and knowing he had given himself up for your worthless ass to survive.
Which was what he heard, every time he donned the armor, every time that gold-titanium alloy slipped over his skin, hugged his body like a layer of clothes, thick and protective, shimmering and flexible, sliding with his joints and bending in every way his body could, supporting him where muscles couldn’t, he could hear Yinsen’s words, could see his face and hear the distant firing of bullets, the same bullets that ended his life. With every crash of metal against metal, every time his fist surged forward and slammed into Venko’s armor, with every push of his rockets, every whirr and charge of his chest piece, feeling the energy ripple from his center to every part of the suit he heard him. Heard Yinsen telling him the cold, bitter truth. That this was his legacy. That war and murder was everything he had helped create. That even the mess he was currently faced with was, in the end, a Stark problem. Vanko wouldn’t have been here if not for him, he wouldn’t have corrupted and fallen so far if his father had given him a little credit, tried to help instead of just lock Vanko’s father out. But the past was the past. All Tony could do now was grit his teeth and ignore the smooth warning of JARVIS in his ears. All he could do was square his feet, shift his shoulders and give the muttered cue to JARVIS to put power in the rear thrusters.
His fingers tightened over the crackling energy whips, already numbed from the electricity thrumming through them, the cue from his nervous system the only thing really causing them to move. What metal could do when the flesh simply couldn’t, it would never cease to give Tony a thrill, to send his mind whirring with possibilities. Just as the smooth, British voice of his AI never ceased to do either. Send a jolt of giddy glee through his body as the almost immediate response echoed back through his helmet, almost before the words finished leaving his own mouth. I already have, sir. And just like that, with every crackle and every creaking of his armor, every clanking ricochet of Rhodey’s causing Yinsen’s words to reverberate through him, the reminder that he had caused this, so he should fix it, he tightened his grip, felt the armor on the back of his legs shift and open, rockets powering up, and he got ready to surge forward, even as JARVIS’ voice distorted in his ear, as the targeting system in his helmet began to fizzle, the picture of what was in front of him less clear. He would do this. He had to do this. Because this was his mistake, this was his Expo. And he. Was. Iron Man.
"Let’s do this."
Special Notes: naaaaada
User DW:
cafuneAIM/IM: tmesisly
E-mail: reyndown@gmail.com
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Tony Stark
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe/Iron Man/Avengers
Age: 42ish
From When?: Post Iron Man 3
Inmate/Warden: Warden- hey, he's been through the Inmate stuff. He's learned his lessons, gotten better at a lot of things. He's a true and proper hero, a slightly better person, and a lot less prone to make stupid mistakes. And, well. Believe it or not, he's actually a pretty nice guy. He's accepting in the weirdest ways, helps people out while seeming like he isn't, and usually whenever he puts his mind to something, when he actually takes the time and interest to try and help someone, they come out infinitely better. And not just because he's buying them whatever the hell they want.
He also, due to his canon point, has some pretty personal experience with panic disorders and PTSD. Admitted experience, too. Unlike when he was here before.
Item: A Stark brand phone. Now with extended holographic capabilities. And a built in mobile JARVIS.
Abilities/Powers: Tony has the abilities and powers of a human male of his age in top physical shape. He isn’t a muscle builder, and his frame is a bit on the skinny side, but he is still fit in all senses. He also has genius level IQ, but that isn’t quite a superpower. It hasn’t been accelerated in any way, he’s just very, very smart. However, just because he isn’t a superhero in the sense of powers or genetic manipulation doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some sort of ‘power’. See, he’s a genius. And he’s an inventor. And he’s Iron Man. As such, he kind of sort of has a certain suit that enhances his strength, durability, is heat and cold resistant, has a few weapons built in and allows him to fly.
Personality: Tony Stark is the textbook definition of extremely difficult. In his own words he defines himself as a “genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist” where-in an outside personality assessment he was simply labeled as “volatile, self-obsessed, and doesn’t play well with others”. At first glance this is exactly what he seems to be. An extremely intelligent man who has more money than he knows what to do with and an ego the size of Russia and most of Asia. He’s the very definition of a showman in every aspect of his life, building up press and always making headlines with his girl of the week, latest drunken escapade, and groundbreaking announcement. But see, this is all just the surface of Tony Stark, and when you scratch just a little bit deeper, you get to see exactly how complex of a man he truly is. And how so much of how he acts in public is really a matter of misinterpretation and the combination of his various true personality points.
Now, it’s important to note that the flippant attitude that Tony adopts in public is the first thing people are introduced to, yes, but it’s just that. Something he adopts. It’s a mask he puts on in order to get to certain heights, to work under a public name and be able to worm his way into certain circles. He’s flippant, first and foremost, dismissing just about everything that’s thrown at him and shrugging it off as if it’s simply someone calling him silly and throwing water balloons at his face. He acts as if nothing really matters, in the long run, even if it’s something as important as a senate hearing, the board completely blocking him out of his own company, he tends to react in an incredibly subdued manner, as if, in the long run, no decision that’s made about him is anything that will keep him down for long. He prides himself on his adaptability in such situations, in being able to look ahead of whatever is in front of him and calculate the various outcomes, to plan through a simple hearing or a meeting and accept whatever losses that brings him since the overall long-term profits outweigh anything. As such, he doesn’t really think too much about his immediate reactions to things, and does things that most people would consider utterly insane. Such as, for example’s sake, hacking into the senate’s projectors and commandeering their screens in order to make a point. Something that, if it had been anyone else, would have landed him in jail. But more than that, Tony’s just prideful. In the public’s eyes he does things for the sheer sake of having his name everywhere, whether that be in good news or bad news. He crashes parties, is infamous for getting drunk and doing stupid things, and more recently he makes split-second decisions such as entering himself in races at the last second as well as trashing his house after getting drunk in his Iron Man suit. If anyone can expect anything from Tony it’s that he’ll always be loud, boisterous, and any event with him in attendance? It’s going to make headlines for at least a week, and it’s going to be something people remember.
But as said before, this is just the persona he adopts for the public’s eye. A persona that makes people take him a little less than seriously. It allows him to be regarded as a name with a few bucks behind it, a legacy of brilliance, but nothing more than that. It’s the thing that’s had companies and people disregarding him, writing him off as a loose-canon and a liability, someone to not take seriously when, really, they should. Because at the heart of it all, Tony Stark is an absolute genius. He can think miles beyond a situation, can practically see the end results of a situation the moment he walks into it, and if there’s one thing he knows how to do well, it’s work under the table. It’s this combination of things – his own genius and the name he’s made for himself – that has always been his greatest assets. He’s able to be taken lightly, to not be as cunning as he is because people expect him to always be showing his true colors, to be bragging about his plans and flaunting his designs to whoever will listen, even if they’re just some random person he passes in the street. It’s this name he’s carefully built and this representation of himself that allows him to work in secret. It allowed him the freedom to work and build the suit that allowed him to escape the cave in Afghanistan as well as the suit that would become a more ‘finished’ model. Simply because everyone expected something that amazing to be front and center, to be flaunted and told to everyone he knew, and maybe even hinted to the press. Never once did they think that there was more to Tony than what he outwardly showed. Never once did they think there was a cunning to him that, hand in hand with a few other key attributes, eventually turned him into a true superhero.
See, despite everything that Tony Stark seems to be, he’s not actually that mean of a person. He comes across as sarcastic and insufferable, sure, but that’s mainly because he doesn’t quite get social situations as well as the normal person. His mind simply operates at a level that’s too fast for simple conversations. He’s everything a genius is, and that includes being a bit too… fast for people to keep up with. In a normal conversation, something can be said that’s harmless and justified, and Tony’s mind simply jumps beyond the reasonable and the appropriate, begins picking apart every word that’s been uttered and formulates responses that, at first glance, seem to be insults and, while some times they are meant as such, in other ways they’re just his way of saying he disagrees, that he’s trying to logically point out flaws in an argument and presenting his own solutions, but with the normal rapier of his wit and his genuine jackassery in regards to media and social events, everything he tells people is usually taken with a grain of salt. After all, that’s what Tony is. A jerk. A billionare. And a self-obsessed egomaniac. But, given the chance, he’s really not any of that. His mind simply works on a level that leaves him too busy to really think through the true consequences of his actions and what he says, and half of the time he doesn’t even realize what’s actually coming out of his mouth. Even when it seems like he’s doing nothing, he’s usually thinking about whatever plans he has for his suit, for the latest stock merger for his company, a solution to whatever villainous scheme he’s up against this time. His genius is on such levels that he needs to be constantly thinking and multitasking, and in the long run that doesn’t really leave much time for properly thinking about what’s appropriate in social situations. Which is where the wit and automated responses he normally gives people in interviews and during what press speeches he still attends comes in. He just doesn’t fully realize that he’s doing anything wrong. Because his mind simply doesn’t fully recognize it. However, when he pulls himself out of his projects, when he focuses and gets his mind out of a computer and turns off the blue tooth he normally keeps buzzing in his ear, it becomes clear that he’s… really not that bad of a person at the heart of it all. He gets distracted, he forgets things, he gets so wrapped up in his lab that he forgets birthdays, meetings, and everything like that, but he does hold onto what’s important. He just… gets things a little mixed up sometimes. For example, when he was trying to apologize to Pepper in Iron Man 2, he brought her strawberries, because even in his overactive mind, where projects run supreme, he managed to remember Pepper telling him a little tidbit about strawberries. Sure, he didn’t remember that she was allergic to them, but he still remembered it in part. Which, to Tony’s normally chaotic mind, is kind of a miracle.
Which brings us to another point. The fact that Tony Stark isn’t just some hunkered down genius in a laboratory. That’s he’s an honest to goodness superhero who risks his neck for the lives of everyone around him. Everything that Tony is, now, is because of one man. A simple doctor who saved his life in a cave in Afghanistan, even if it meant giving up his won life in return. Tony, at that time, didn’t feel he deserved it. He was a self-centered brat who didn’t look past himself and see the world, he couldn’t see what his work was doing, that he was being attacked with his own weapons. But as soon as he escaped that cave and the months of torture within it, he became a new man. Even if the rest of the world never really got to see it. He became obsessed with the mission, and still is, to a point. The true mission beneath the outward appearance of fame and fortune. The mission to retract his presence from the military world, to destroy his weapons when they get into the wrong hand, to personally put his life on the line for once and become a symbol for peace, even if his name still meant war. Even the Iron Man suit, at its heart, isn’t a weapon. The blasters in his hands are meant to be flight stabilizers, and nothing Tony does is in an attack, it’s all defensive. He refuses to be a part of the military, to give his plans to the government. He refuses all of that because he can’t risk the world falling to ruin because of Stark weaponry, not again. And the thing is, as much as Tony loves himself, as much as he seems to be wrapped up in everything he is and doesn’t care about anything else, the suffering of others truly bothers him. It makes him angry, makes him demand answers, forces his hand into actually going and doing something himself, instead of waiting around for the government to get off its ass and ‘help out’. He also had no qualms with putting his own life on the line to do so, but that’s… well. That’s a whole other can of worms.
A can we really should delve into. See, Tony Stark, for all his swaggering about, really doesn’t have that great of an opinion of himself. A lot of it is shown in his obsessive need to be loved in the public’s eye, to have eyes on him at all times, to be flashy in everything he does – hell, even his suit is painted bright colors, his landings all done in poses, his computers taking control of PA systems in order to blare music, rockets creating fireworks. He has a grade A attention problem, built up slowly but surely all the way from his childhood. See, even with the videos he’d recently seen of his dad giving him a quick pep talk, growing up Tony had known nothing but his mind and his schooling. And he’d sure as hell had no signs of affection from his dad. He swore Howard Stark’s best moment had been when Tony got shipped off to boarding school. That sort of lack of attention from a role model, from his father is definitely the base cause of Tony’s lack of true self-esteem now, the very reason why he tries so hard at running his company, at bettering his machines and inventions. And it’s the reason why he craves attention from everyone he meets, be that good attention or bad attention. It’s why he runs his mouth, why he’s always so flashy, why he goads and goads and never lets things lie. Because he needs all eyes to be on him, he wants any attention he can get to make up for everything else. Every bit that he hides. In the first Iron Man? It was because he thought he shouldn’t be alive. Because he should have died in a cave, because the only thing keeping him alive, allowing him to live, was the death of a perfectly innocent man and a magnet wrapped around his heart. In the second? Well. He spent the entire movie with his death looming in front of him, and it didn’t take him long to figure that this was it. He was finally dying, as he should have all those months ago, in the middle of a desert. He fights for people so well because he has little regard for himself. He rushes into danger because he doesn’t really care about the outcome. But also because he knows that he’s too good. He’s too good at what he does, at inventing and designing that he just won’t die. He can take those risks because he knows he’s living on borrowed time, on time he shouldn’t have, and he survives them because he knows he’s too smart, too efficient. His suit is too good. And thus the cycle never ends.
The last thing to note about Tony is that he seems to have a bit of OCD, at the end of the day. He has an issue being touched, getting visibly flustered and uncomfortable and trying his best to worm away or simply avoid the contact in the first place. In addition, he also has a bit of a problem being handed things, which seems to go a step beyond his ego and his reluctance to get bad news. After all, so far only Pepper can hand him anything without him going through extreme discomfort.
Now, while Tony has been on the barge before to work through a majority of his worst issues, that doesn't mean that he's suddenly an angel. That he's learned his lesson and has turned into a kind, soft-spoken person. Oh no. He still has an ego, he still gets frustrated, he still stays up way too long and gets way too lost in his projects. He still doesn't know when to cut himself off, still snaps and says things without thinking, still can't be handed things, still has those little ticks and eccentricities. He's still a jerk, still doesn't really care that he is. In other words, he's still Tony Stark.
What his time on the barge has given him, has shown him, is that he's a hero. It's not the suit so much as it's him. He's learned that, and he's had it shoved down his throat that despite everything he is, despite what he tries to do to the people who get close to him, people actually give a shit about the man underneath the metal. He's figured out how to peel back the outer layers. The metal suit, the conceited businessman underneath. He's alright with letting people know he's not as conceited as he looks. As sappy as it sounds, he's a lot more comfortable being genuine with people.
But the biggest things are probably the fact that he's no longer self-sabotaging and... he doesn't drink. Not a drop of alcohol passes his lips anymore. He's over that crutch. He's dealing with things himself, with a lovely lady and PA by his side.
UPDATE
im3 goes here
Barge Reactions: Considering that this time Tony is actually aware that he's going to go on a little trip to the hell barge, he's going to be a lot more calm with what's happening. After all, this time he chose to be here. As much as he hates that. So yeah, he'll still get pissed at everything that's going on, he'll still hate the floods and the breaches, and he'll still insult people he really has no business insulting because hey. Graduated or not, he's still Tony Stark. And being infuriating is just one of his endless charms.
He'll gripe and rant and rave, he'll get freaked out about as much as anyone else, but he's also aware of what the ship does, how it works. And this time, at least, he'll have a little extra control. That little foothold and anchor that being a Warden gives him. So at least now he won't try to systematically tear things down. He'll just... have a little bit of annoyed panic when things go wrong.
History: Anthony Stark was born to Howard and Maria some thirty-six years ago. He was born into an empire of sorts, a rich family with a lot of pressure and legacy riding on their last name. Howard was a name during the wars of the past, but more than that he was an inventor who was leading the charge into the future. And Tony, as his son, was expected to take the company when the time was right and lead it even further into the future. But see, Tony Stark would surpass anyone’s wildest dreams. He was a genius from the start, getting through his schooling in record time, attending MIT as a teenager and graduating when he was just seventeen. But see, from there… his life would just go to hell. Because barely a year later, when Tony Stark was just eighteen, his mother and father died in a plane crash, leaving him with a company to run and no parental figures for the rest of his adolescence. Sure, there was Obadiah Stane, his father’s friend and the man helping him run the company, now, but he was just grooming him for leadership, really, investing in his mind and his inventions more than him as a person.
And so, the climb to power began. Tony took his father’s company beyond Obadiah’s wildest dreams. He designed weapons for everyone and their mother, pushing the American military into a new age. But while he was doing that, Tony sort of… went on a downhill slide. He started drinking, gambling, sleeping around. He became a name of infamy in the media, and the American public quickly turned him into their party boy cover story. People were wondering what crazy thing he would do next more than how he would push their society forward. But in the end, Tony would be forced to grow up pretty quickly, seeing as once his pride and glory – the Jericho missile – was finally put into production, things sort of… went to hell for Tony. After all, on the way back from his weapon’s presentation, the military escort he was provided with was bombed, most of the soldiers killed. And while Tony himself took a pretty serious hit to the chest, in the end he was kidnapped, taken away, his heart hooked up to a magnet to keep him alive long enough for the insurgents to get him to build them a Jericho missile.
Tony, however, had other ideas. With the help of a fellow prisoner named Yinsen, Tony managed to stay alive, miniaturizing an arc reactor to keep himself alive and to power a suit he was making in secret, to help them escape. In the end, he managed to do it. To break on out and get rescued, but the cost was high. A bit too high for his liking. After all, Yinsen… gave his life for Tony to escape. Something that had never set well with him. But, in the end, he did make it out of the cave, and after wandering the desert for a little while, a rescue team found him, and Tony was swept back to civilization. However, that wasn’t going to be the end of it. Not by a long shot. After all, Tony had seen how many of his weapons these men had gotten their hands on. And while he managed to destroy a lot of what was at that base, he just knew that wasn’t all of it. That there was a leak in his company, and he had to find it… as well as make a few changes.
So, as soon as he got back to the States, he set up a conference, telling people he was back safe and sound and, as of that moment, Stark Industries would no longer be manufacturing weapons. Sure, that meant he eventually got shut out of the company and their stock dropped a few dozen percentage points, but hey. He was going to stick to his guns, now. And he was determined, after everything he’d seen and lived through, to change the way his company went about things. Even if that meant getting kicked off of the board, his involvement with his own company reduced to simply holding majority shares. And so, he began to work on a suit. To finish and refine the designs he’d started in that cave in Afghanistan. To finish a suit that would, eventually, be known as Iron Man. And, given the state of the world, it wasn’t long until Tony became aware of a group of terrorists gaining his weapons, attacking innocent civilians in a town called Golmira. Moved by their plight and his company’s apparent involvement in the shipment that got taken, Tony donned his suit for the first time, and in a quick flash? He was in Golmira, saving every civilian he could and destroying a vast majority of the weapons they’d pilfered from him.
However, on the way back, he had an unfortunate run-in with a few US fighter jets, even managing to crash one of them – although both pilots survived. However, he was now officially on the radar, and Rhodey, best friend and army nut extraordinaire, had a good idea about what he was up to. However, the worst was still to come. After all, with the suit now public knowledge, Obadiah Stane could now make his move, acquiring the prototype suit Tony had used to escape and remaking it, improving it. All with the intention of making the ultimate weapon… and wiping Tony out. After all, he was the one who had ordered Tony to be killed on that convoy.
Something that Tony would find out soon, it seemed. Because as soon as he sent Pepper into the company to figure out what, exactly, they were up to, she found evidence that Obadiah had ordered the hit, as well as plans for a suit to rival Tony’s. But before she could contact Tony about any of that, Obadiah broke into Tony’s house, using a paralytic device in order to pull the arc reactor right out of Tony’s chest, just so he could power his own suit. Desperately, once the paralysis wore off, he stumbled down to his workroom, struggling against cardiac arrest with every passing second. In the end, the prototype chest piece was the only thing that saved him. Taken out and made into a trophy, as proof that he even had a heart – very clever, Pepper – so while Obadiah had meant for him to die, the genius pulled through. And even though the prototype wasn’t meant to power something as big as the Iron Man suit… well. What else could he do but charge forward and try and save Pepper and his company from Obadiah’s meddlesome hands?
The ensuing fight tore up a lot of streets and buildings, and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but in the end Pepper helped Tony overload Stark Industry’s arc reactor and, in the end, Obadiah got fried by energy, passed out, and eventually exploded in an end fitting his villainous, traitorous character. And while SHIELD helped Tony prepare a statement covering up everything that had happened that night, in the end… well. Tony’s ego got the better of him. So after a pause heard ‘round the world, he came up with the wonderful words… “I am Iron Man”.
And six months later, those very words came back to bite him in the ass.
See, there was a little problem with his arc reactor. And that’s the fact that… it was slowly killing him. Spreading poison through his bloodstream the more he used the suit, and even then the spread was slow and steady, the chemicals within the reactor poisoning him the longer it was in his body. And it wasn’t like he could just take it out and be done with it. Oh no. The device that was keeping him alive was killing him. That was how much his life had begun to suck. So, he started to go a little off the wall. Instead of telling anyone, making them worry and make them make him stop using the suit, he kept on being Tony Stark, kept on being Iron Man. Until it became time for him to start crossing items off his bucket list, to begin to say goodbye to the world. And that was when Tony Stark really went insane. First, he signed his company over to Pepper, then he went wild in Italy, entering a car race that ended up nearly killing him as an apparently long-time enemy crawled out of the woodworks. Anton Vanko, son of a man who had worked with Howard Stark on the initial arc reactor design before going insane. Seemed insanity ran in the family, though, since Anton didn’t waste any time going crazy and trying to kill Tony, forcing him to don a suit and pretty much beat Anton’s ass into a jail cell.
From there, things kept going downhill. Unbeknownst to him, a competitor – Justin Hammer – broke Vanko out of jail in order to have him perfect a suit to rival Tony’s, which just gave Vanko the opportunity to try and create a small army to try and kill Tony. Stark, meanwhile, was having a few issues of his own. As his blood toxicity kept climbing, he decided it was time to give away a suit without really giving it away. So, he ruined his own party, got drunk as hell while in the Iron Man suit, and forced his best friend’s hand, getting him into a suit to stop Tony’s drunken idiocy. The night ended with Rhodey taking the suit away, through with Tony’s childish antics, and even Pepper seemed to have just completely given up on him. To Tony? This was easier than telling them he was dying. Than giving the suit away as a sort of “final gift”.
However, SHIELD wasn’t having it. In a rare show of form, Director Fury himself tracked Tony down at a little diner, talking him down and revealing the new-ish secretary Pepper had hired was actually an agent of his, and also telling Tony that he hadn’t tried everything as far as saving himself went. So, the Director gave Tony some of his father’s old research, confining him to house arrest until he figured it out. Of course, it’s kind of hard to keep Tony Stark put, so before long he broke out to visit Pepper, and ended up seeing something that gave him a new idea. After all, his father had said in a video clip that he’d done all of this for him… so maybe the answer to the new element he needed to power the core was in the table he’d used to lay out all of the Expo. After scanning the table and really taking a look at what was there? Well. Tony found out that Howard had given him everything he needed. Every little thing to help power the suit was there in front of him. All he needed to do was crash some particles and make an element.
In the end? It did the trick. With a newly powered up suit and a rejuvenated body, Tony crashed his own Expo, trying to talk sense into Rhodey, to tell him that Hammer was using everyone, and that even Hammer was being used, in the end. By Vanko. However, not as soon as he said that but the drones Vanko had built for Hammer began to act up, to target Tony and ready their weapons. After all, Vanko had full control over them. And as soon as Iron Man had shown up? Well. The war had started. And while Natasha – the beautiful secretary to Pepper – managed to hack into Rhodey’s suit and get him back on Tony’s side, the fight with all the drones still wrecked most of the Expo, and put hundreds of people’s lives at stake. And that was before Vanko himself made an appearance. Piloting a reinforced suit of his own and waving those energy whips about.
That... was when Tony Stark died and landed in the barge. A mystical, magical, hellish place where he found himself forced to "better himself" with the help of some crazy psychic guy in a wheelchair. But better yet, he was meeting people from other universes, from his future, from the past. Aliens and angels and even robots and guys who looked just like him except tended to turn into a dog when overexcited. He got his arc reactor ripped out and damaged by a guy who could wiggle the shrapnel around in his chest with a simple thought. He got turned into a gangster with a younger twin brother. He shot himself in the head in order to let that twin escape with his life.
But more than that, he battled his own inner demons. He drank too much, lost control. He scraped the bottom of the barrel and got to his lowest possible point, unable to even comprehend climbing back up. He made mistakes, said things he shouldn't have, and even got a good portion of a boy's experiences in Auschwitz shoved into his mind. Graphic memories, dreams as if he were actually there.
But during all of that, fate seemed to want to play a little trick on him. And while he was on the barge, dealing with things one day, the next? He was back at the expo, electricity surging through him and Rhodey shouting to get his attention. He was fighting Vanko, in pain but alive. Well... at least for the moment
It was a close one, but Rhodey and Tony managed to work together and blast Vanko into submission. But in pure supervillain fashion he rigged every single droid to self-destruct, leaving Rhodey to hightail it out of there and Tony to swoop Pepper up just before the drone near her exploded. In the end, Tony somehow managed to get the girl - how, he still doesn't know - as well as stop the bad guy and just basically be awesome.
That is, until he was turned down for the Avengers Initiative.
Something that would be a moot point in just a few years, really, especially since Tony did keep on with being a consultant for SHIELD during the two year break between the Expo and the finalization of the tower in New York. During those years, his company pushed forward, he and Pepper stayed in a relationship, Tony formed a kind of friendship with Coulson and basically life was good. He developed a new model of the suit, started making a name for himself in the energy race... yeah. Life was really good in Tony Stark land.
Until, you know, Coulson decided to be a party pooper and tell him that an evil Norse God brainwashed a SHIELD agent and stole a magic cube. And apparently he was now supposed to team up with Captain American't, the Jolly Green Giant, Natalie "Thunder Thighs" Widow, and who the hell knew who else. Well, granted, Jolly he was looking forward to meeting, because when his 'roids weren't acting up he was almost on his level of genius. Which was rare and completely awesome. So when he finished up on his homework and heard that the boys were playing around in Germany? Of course he had to go and save their asses. And capture Rudolf the Parental Issues Reindeer.
Things just... pretty much went downhill from there. They got Rudolph into the plane, ran into a thunder storm which was actually a pissy Norse Barbie Doll, Tony played whack a mole with the guy with the giant hammer and suit charging powers (seriously not the brightest idea there, Point Break) but in the end the good Popsicle came and got them all working together, kind of, and moving back to the helicarrier. Which was when, finally, Tony met someone who wasn't completely brain damaged that he could work with. Bruce Banner was a savior at that point, because honestly? All Tony wanted to do was jump on the science and poke at that glowing can opener Loki was so attached to.
Which they then skipped off merrily to do. And, in the end, that was... pretty much a bad call. For the glowstick of destiny was also kind of a rage rod of some kind, just amping up tensions and hostilities to their boiling point. Of course, it meant that every one of the Avengers was in one room arguing at one point (which, retrospect, could have been a hot moment and Tony definitely needed to get pictures of that) about Thor breaking a town, Tony being a dick, Natasha just being Natasha, Bruce being suicidal, apparently, and Fury making nuclear weapons which was just not cool with anyone. Of course, Loki was practically rolling around in his little glass cage cackling with glee at that point because everything was literally about to go to shit no matter what, because if Clint didn't blow up an engine (that'd be Hawkeye, by the way, Mr. Brainwashed not even two minutes into his role which is probably a record of some kind) then Bruce was going to Hulk out and literally rip the ship apart anyway. So really definitely a good thing that the engine thing happened instead.
Even if, once again, it was all a moot point. Because Bruce hulked out anyway and ripped basically everything apart. Staring to sense a theme with moot points, actually. Anyway, once again it was all up to Tony Stark to save the day (if he wasn't such a philanthropist he'd have been charging by that point) and keep everyone and their mothers from crashing into the ocean/land that was below them. Of course that meant nearly getting shredded to death in the engine he was kickstarting because seriously Steve? You had to be hanging off the side of the ship waving hello to death at that very moment? Eh, whatever, it worked out. Ruined his suit and gave Loki enough time to get them separated - what with Thor dropped down to Earth in a glass box and the Hulk just kind of rocketed off in some random direction and oh yeah.
Loki killed Coulson.
And that didn't sit well with any of them.
So it was time for some hardcore Avenging at that point. Time for Hawkeye to get brain bashed back to their side, for Tony to fix up his armor enough to fly on ahead as Steve, Nat, and Clint hijacked a plane. See, Loki is kind of a Grade A dick and decided to be awesome (spoiler: that's sarcasm) and set up shop at the top of Tony's tower for the final phase of his little plan. Which, of course, was both genius and a really bad mistake because sure, Loki could take advantage of the arc reactor Tony had there in order to power up his portal making machine, and sure he could throw Tony off of a really high building, but he also gave Tony access to his even newer suit. Which kind of made it easier for everyone when it came to dealing with the hordes of alien beasts suddenly pouring out of the sky.
That sucked. Like. Kind of majorly.
Anyway, Thor showed back up to punch Loki in the face and slam him into the ground, Bruce putted back in on a motorbike and went all green and giant to get in on things and let Hulk have fun smashing aliens but in the end? They were getting tired, beaten down, and there was no sign of the invasion stopping... or even slowing. So Natasha climbed the tower to try and find a way to deactivate the device... while the ever helpful government decided to fire a nuke right into the heart of New York City. And, since Tony was the only one who could fly? Yeah. Guess who got the fun job of being a missle escort!
So, to prove just about everyone wrong about him just being a selfish asshole, Tony flew the nuke into space, aiming it at the mothership on the other side of the portal, watching everything blow up in front of him as oxygen deprivation and suit failure ultimately claimed him, cutting off his final, desperate call to Pepper and sending him plummeting down towards the portal as Natasha jammed Loki's hipster pimp cane into the middle of it in a sort of ironic DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS moment. And Tony totally would have commented on that in real time if he hadn't, you know, been totally out cold and pretty much dead and freefalling from above the height of the empire state building. He was going to get really familiar with the ground if someone didn't-
Well. Alright, hello again Barge, how you doing? At least this time Tony had some sort of idea of what he was going into. Even if now he was met with new faces, people he'd met in his world as well as others still trickling in. He resumed his work with Charles, still turning to alcohol to make dealing with the emotional problems they kept having to rip into a little easier. It took a while, took a long while and took Tony stealing from an asthmatic kid version of Captain America just to get drunk, took him running into a young Natasha soon after that, somehow triggering the kid that would grow up to actually be a pretty good friend into stabbing him in the leg, forcing another good friend to lose his temper at a psychotic toddler for him to realize that, well. Maybe he was kind of messed up.
From there, it was work. It was realization and admitting that he had a problem. It was asking the people he trusted to keep him away from alcohol, to help and make sure he didn't sneak things back to his room, to get him through that initial withdrawal stage. To keep him on his feet until he could stand on his own. Until he could walk and run and deal with the other things he needed to. Deal with the self-destructive tendencies he had. Until he could find people to rely on, could find it in himself to actually ask for help.
In the end, Tony graduated, but he graduated a coward. Because as much as Tony Stark had progressed, he still just... couldn't bring himself to say some long-winded sappy goodbye.
Besides, he planned on coming back.
But yeah, where were we? Oh, right. Falling through the sky completely unconscious, about to become real familiar with the ground-
Oh, hey Hulk buddy. Thanks for the catch. Knew there was a reason we kept you around.
With Tony successfully saved from going splat on the sidewalk and the Hulk then roaring to give his heart the jumpstart it needed, the Avengers made their way up to where big mean and green had been using him as a stress reliever and chained him up, stopping off for some shawarma at a local joint before prettying themselves up and saying adios to their god-like friends in the middle of Central Park. Tony dropped Bruce off at the bus stop (although seriously, he still had the entire R&D department for him, if he wanted) and went back to the Tower, looking over the damage from the battle and setting up a new floor plan with Pepper. One floor for each of the Avengers. Just. They didn't have to know that yet. Or ever, actually.
---im3 goes here---
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera is facing the wall. An interesting thing, seeing as there must be some sort of reason someone would purposefully start broadcasting a picture of the wall. Perhaps it was going to change? Perhaps there was a pattern hidden there, something just slightly off-white patterned there. Some hidden message, some hidden meaning. Perhaps all the answers to life were in that one little piece of a room, that one, focused image of a wall being sent around the barge. Perhaps-]
back in black [Oh.] I hit the sack [Is that-] I've been too long [Oh no.] I'm glad to be back!
[And just like that, AD/DC at full force in the background, the camera is picked up, held up and at an angle pure myspace style, revealing one Tony Stark in all his business suited glory.] Honey, I'm home! [Aaaand down goes the communicator on the table.] And, so we're all on the same page here, I fully endorse a battle royale to figure out who honey is. Although I warn you now, I'm a picky soul, and my heart belongs to one thing and one thing only.
[Wait for it, pause for dramatic effect, drum roll please!
... Yeah he's just stepping aside to show the Mark VII in all it's powered down glory.]
It's the red and gold that got me. I still say I go with the red suit and you wear the gold lace, babe.
I believe the lace would flatter your figure better, sir.
Alright, alright. [Yup. That's one smart-talking computer program that's followed Tony to the barge. Again. JARVIS is practically a part of him at this point. But at the very least Tony seems to be calming down, finally sitting at the desk the communicator's on and tilting it up a little to eye the camera a little better.] Quick debrief. I'm back of my own free will. Lacking the invisible shackles this time around, and this? [Have a quick wiggle of his phone] I got promoted to camp counselor. So someone get the blogs out and give me updates.
Sample RP:
To Tony, his armor had become a part of him. His arc reactor the same. It was him as much as he was it. The super hero and the person. He put it on, and he became one with it. It moved with a fluidity no one on Earth could match, it bent to his will, performed every action imaginable, and more than that? It allowed him to do everything he had ever wanted, everything he had never known he wanted. From the moment he ended up in that cave, trapped and afraid and more than a little freaked out, it had been like his eyes had been opened. Opened to the horrors in the world, the bitter truth of everything he’d done over the past few decades, ever since he’d stepped up and taken control of the company, a young man who’d known nothing more than money and laboratories since the moment he was born. He’d never experienced war, he’d never experienced strife. He’d heard about it, watched movies, but nothing compared with the bitter fact that you were holding onto a man’s hand, watching life drain from his eyes, and knowing he had given himself up for your worthless ass to survive.
Which was what he heard, every time he donned the armor, every time that gold-titanium alloy slipped over his skin, hugged his body like a layer of clothes, thick and protective, shimmering and flexible, sliding with his joints and bending in every way his body could, supporting him where muscles couldn’t, he could hear Yinsen’s words, could see his face and hear the distant firing of bullets, the same bullets that ended his life. With every crash of metal against metal, every time his fist surged forward and slammed into Venko’s armor, with every push of his rockets, every whirr and charge of his chest piece, feeling the energy ripple from his center to every part of the suit he heard him. Heard Yinsen telling him the cold, bitter truth. That this was his legacy. That war and murder was everything he had helped create. That even the mess he was currently faced with was, in the end, a Stark problem. Vanko wouldn’t have been here if not for him, he wouldn’t have corrupted and fallen so far if his father had given him a little credit, tried to help instead of just lock Vanko’s father out. But the past was the past. All Tony could do now was grit his teeth and ignore the smooth warning of JARVIS in his ears. All he could do was square his feet, shift his shoulders and give the muttered cue to JARVIS to put power in the rear thrusters.
His fingers tightened over the crackling energy whips, already numbed from the electricity thrumming through them, the cue from his nervous system the only thing really causing them to move. What metal could do when the flesh simply couldn’t, it would never cease to give Tony a thrill, to send his mind whirring with possibilities. Just as the smooth, British voice of his AI never ceased to do either. Send a jolt of giddy glee through his body as the almost immediate response echoed back through his helmet, almost before the words finished leaving his own mouth. I already have, sir. And just like that, with every crackle and every creaking of his armor, every clanking ricochet of Rhodey’s causing Yinsen’s words to reverberate through him, the reminder that he had caused this, so he should fix it, he tightened his grip, felt the armor on the back of his legs shift and open, rockets powering up, and he got ready to surge forward, even as JARVIS’ voice distorted in his ear, as the targeting system in his helmet began to fizzle, the picture of what was in front of him less clear. He would do this. He had to do this. Because this was his mistake, this was his Expo. And he. Was. Iron Man.
"Let’s do this."
Special Notes: naaaaada