@Gamma_Attorney@seeminglysmall "Good point, Jen. I'll meet you two soon."
Boot jets engaged, repulsor power surged through his armor, and the Invincible Iron Man took flight.
He diverted flight paths to split off temporarily to secure the cables, blasting off and away at supersonic speed.
@Gamma_Attorney@seeminglysmall "We'll have to see what happens, we're running out of time to plan. And I need to go get that cable from Stark Industries."
Iron Man began walking, preparing to leave and take off.
"...but man, don't you just wish Thor would've answered his stupid phone today?"
@Gamma_Attorney@seeminglysmall "That..."
There was a long pause as Iron Man evidently began thinking about it.
"...Actually might work. Stark Industries was prototyping a new aircraft cable intended for use with the Helicarrier after its last crash. The tensile strength might be high enough to do the job."
@Gamma_Attorney@seeminglysmall "What you see is unfortunately what you get. I've got about eighty percent of my systems online, but I'm not about to give up because of it. I'll fly circles around the big lug as long as I can and keep him off-balance until we get a better plan... or I get crushed. Either-or."
@Gamma_Attorney@seeminglysmall "It's not going to be that simple. Terminus is huge, and mobile. Keeping him in one spot isn't going to work for long. Sure, I can distract him while you two evacuate everyone, but eventually he's going to want to move. And I'm out of spare suits to use for extra backup or help."
"That's what the records say. My fault, too. It..."
Tony huffed, and his voice trailed off. There was a long beat of silence before he followed up with, "It... it wasn't worth it. The Act, the Initiative. It tore the Avengers apart... and because of it, the Skrulls nearly won."
"I eventually came to in the middle of Osborn's invasion on Asgard missing almost a year of my life. And as soon as the fight was over, I got to reading. And I couldn't believe what all had happened. And, in some cases... what I'd done."
"Yeah, it's... well, that's kind of the thing. I guess I knew Osborn would go right for the SHRA database. So I wiped it clean. But as I had Extremis at the time, my brain was an organic supercomputer. If he got me, Osborn could pull that database out of me like a hard drive..."
โI didnโt think you had amnesiaโฆ
Is that a story for another time?
Well, suppose that doesnโt matter.
I heard the Superhuman Registration Act became defunct.โ
"So I wiped my mind clean. I had a contingency, of course. A backup of my mind made up to work with the remnants of Extremis in my body. But the problem was I hadn't updated it since before the Superhuman Civil War."
"It's... a long story. The Skrull Invasion really messed things up, Jan. And the worst part is... I don't even remember it. At all. I mean, I know it happened, but...
Well, that's also a fairly long story."
"Not by choice, I'm afraid. But once he had his oily mitts dug deep into S.H.I.E.L.D. and Stark Industries, busting the armory open wasn't too hard. Course, the best part? I took his systems down in an armor so old that it still had analog repulsor switches and transistor power."
"Not just one armor. ALL of them. And despite this, the moron chose to cobble his own together from spare parts. Subpar software, subpar security and subpar quality.
Blasting past his firewall and shutting it down was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done."