Chapter 5: Chapter 5 Turning up the heat
Night has fallen over New York City, and I'm bent over one of my tool tables with my dissembled armour lying on front of me, a scowl on my face, one of my canines gleaming in the light provided by stolen Stark Expo lamps.
"I didn't think this through."
While my new body was absolutely amazing, and I still marvelled at the sheer strength now at my disposal every time I flexed one of my numerous bulging muscles, there were some unforeseen drawbacks.
Or rather, there were some drawbacks that I should have foreseen.
The biggest one was that stealth was now significantly harder than it used to be.
While I might still be able to sneak around under the cover of night, ploys such as the one I used to infiltrate the Stark Expo were now completely out of the question, which was a bummer because that operation had been the most fruitful endeavour of my admittedly short career of a super thief/scavenger.
Another drawback was that I now no longer fitted in my armour.
The armour for which I had braved discovery by S.H.I.E.L.D., the armour for which I had stolen, lied and cheated my way around, adrenaline rampaging through my veins for months on end in order to get the parts I needed, the armour which I had made during countless sleepless nights, pouring over Stane's blueprints until my head hurt, trying to make sense of the advanced technology of this different universe.
And I no longer fitted inside.
Of course, it wasn't as if the possibility hadn't crossed my mind, but I had always brushed it off, simply thinking I'd pull my armour apart and build it bigger.
But I had forgotten to take into account the new size of my primary manipulators, otherwise known as hands. The Iron Man armour was filled to the brim with cutting-edge electronics and robotics, and all of it was smoothly hidden underneath the interlocking plates of the armour.
Where my hands now had difficulty reaching.
There were two minor lights in the crushing, all-consuming void of my despair (slight over exaggeration there): one, I had a hyper intelligent scientist on hand, though getting him away from his own projects in order to help me with rebuilding my armour was a herculean task of its own (I'm a geneticist, not an engineer! I have a degree!) and two, I found that I could ditch some of the electronics.
The Iron Man armour was so powerful, much of its inner workings were designed solely to keep its wearer safe from itself (the torso of the armour could technically rotate 180°, which the average human body could not). Much of this was focused around the servos, making sure they didn't rip a limb off whenever you lifted your arm, or in order to take its own weight so that the wearer wouldn't be crushed like in those 'Object vs. Steel press' that were becoming popular on YouTube these days.
This wasn't as much of a problem for me however (though I kept the function that would keep my torso from suddenly turning the wrong way as that seemed like a nasty way to go), which allowed me to strip much of the inner shells from the armour.
Ironically this ended up making the armour a lot lighter, which in return allowed me to strip even more as I could easily handle the weight of the armour, even after I enlarged the plating to fit over my body (as I was now about the same size as the Hammer drones this was made surprisingly easier than making my original armour had been, as I didn't have to resize the plating this time).
Tony's armour was as much cutting-edge technology as it was a piece of art. Stane's armour had a military, rough look to it. Vanko's original armour, the one in Monaco, had a prison-made appearance (in as much as you could call it "armour").
Mine somehow looked even uglier.
Thick plating across the torso and limbs, with a robust frame (one more reminiscent of the one used by Matt Damon in Elysium than anything Marvel-like), my armour looked like it was made from stolen materials and put together in a shed.
Which is exactly what it was.
However, it did have one major advantage over the other armours, as it had something that none of them had.
Me.
July had already turned into August by the time I finished rebuilding my armour, but when I put it on I couldn't quite contain my glee at the sight that greeted me from the cracked full-length mirror I had stolen during one of my nightly scavenger runs around the city (and I do mean runs: I didn't know my exact top speed, but I had managed to keep up with New York traffic easily, and cleared the spaces between buildings with a single bound. Parkour had become my bitch in the month since my transformation).
The armour, with its thick plating and rough framework, had a no-nonsense, utilitarian vibe to it on its own, but when strapped to my hulking, 7 feet tall frame, it became downright menacing, aided by the new helmet I wore, modelled after the one Crossbones wears during his brief fight with Cap in the Civil War-movie.
This armour, unlike the one I had worn when I had picked up Stein and Banner's blood, was filled to the brim with all the weapons I could fit on it, which included the Infantry tank gun and the Navy missiles from the Hammer drones.
In short?
I looked Bad. Ass.
But while it was extremely satisfying to see my finished armour after the months of blood, sweat and tears I had poured into rebuilding it, I was still stuck with one of the unforeseen drawbacks after my transformation, which brings us back to my brooding form as I sit at one of the worktables.
I had my transformation on the 12th of June 2011, only recovering on the 14th. The next Step would involve Loki's attack on Midgard. The problem however, was that that would only occur on May the 4th, 2012.
So what now?
I briefly contemplated killing Ulysses Klaue and taking his stash of Vibranium which he has squirreled away for some time now, but he's hiding somewhere in South-Africa, and is probably being watched.
Besides the logistics of actually getting my butt to South-Africa undetected, there's still the fact that even if I had Vibranium, I wouldn't know what to do with it.
I'm no metalworker and neither is Stein, so trying to make a new armour out of the miracle meteorite-metal is out of the question. I briefly entertained the notion of lining my bones with Vibranium, but I don't think my healing factor is strong enough to keep me alive through the operation (I can heal small cuts within a few hours, while a broken bone takes about a day, which I discovered by accidentally dropping the mostly intact Navy drone on my foot. Wolverine survived getting shot in the chest with a cannon during the Civil War and he almost didn't make it through the bonding-process).
I could use the Kree-blood that S.H.I.E.L.D. has hidden away, as Hydra has proven that it can bestow humans with a sweet regeneration factor, but given that it is inside a secret base I don't even know where I should begin to go look for it.
Extremis on the other hand… Killian already has the formula, the only problem is that it has a chance of blowing up the recipient. I, however, am an already enhanced human with a (slight) healing factor, so I might survive the virus (which isn't a virus at all, but that's neither here nor there).
Then again, the two serums might also decide to not play nice with each other and blow me up, but thankfully, I have one of the foremost experts in human engineering right here in my storage unit.
Getting out of my funk, I straighten up and turn around on my chair, grinning as I call out to Stein who's hovering over a microscope, engrossed in his own experiments of trying to use whatever happened to his brain as the basis for a cure for Alzheimer's (if he suggests experimenting on monkeys I'll pull the plug. No Planet of the Apes for me, thankyouverymuch).
"Stein!" I rumble, my voice a deep bass that would probably be able to rattle windows should I yell at the top of my lungs (which I did when I dropped that Navy-drone, but as the storage unit didn't have any windows I couldn't tell. Scared the crap out of Stein though).
The aforementioned scientist looked up at me with a sigh, clearly annoyed at being once more pulled away from his own research, fixing me with an impatient glare.
"What is it Mr. McCole? I've introduced a reagent to the chemicals saturating my bloodstream and I should be able to see a reaction at any time now." Stein says hurriedly, as I stand up and with a few great strides cross the distance between our desks, placing my massive fists on either side of his microscope as I loom over the mutated scientist.
"How would you like to run tests on a serum which unlocks the hidden potential within the human genome?"
The answering grin is all the response I need.
Finding Killian is surprisingly easy: I just looked him up on LinkedIn.
Since AIM has yet to reveal that they're an evil organization, they are still very much in the open, with advertisements, contact info and they even have their own website (it's pretty sleek, to be honest). All of it is available to the public.
Except for where they are located.
A quick search gives me nothing, no home address for Killian, no locations of any headquarters, not even a shipping address. All contact is done through the internet, and when you manage to set up a meet, then one of them will come to you, not the other way around.
This complicates things somewhat.
I know that in November, one of Killian's test subjects (given that most of them are disabled veterans they might even be victims of Blonsky's rampage) will explode, and the media will label it as a suicide bombing, which Killian will enforce by "creating" the Mandarin in January of 2012 (still the dumbest reveal in MCU-history to date, really dropped the ball there Shawn Black, though I love your Lethal Weapon movie).
This gives me something of a window to try and track down Killian, but that is also more complicated than I'd like for it to be because of one very big problem.
We're running low on funds.
Much of the material for my armour I had managed to steal during my time working at the Expo and even afterwards, getting my hands on tools and the like had been rather straightforward.
Nothing about Stein's equipment could be called straightforward.
When I took him and the Hulk-blood, all that he had been able to put in the duffel bag was most of his research and the blood itself, and almost none of the equipment, as it was either too delicate or too massive to take with us.
During the few days of chaos after the fight between the Hulk and Abomination I had managed to sneak into the College a few times and take some of the smaller machines (thank whatever deity is willing to listen that I hadn't gotten rid of my janitor-disguise yet) but after clean-up had mostly been organized we had to find an alternative.
Like I said, Stein's massive intelligence managed to find some ways around our less than stellar equipment but he still needed something to work from, and despite the fact that both of us had withdrawn our lifesavings (in his case just in the nick of time, as his assets were frozen a few hours later) the equipment I had to buy for him was a massive drain on our monetary funds.
There was also the fact that due to our mutations (the brain is the most energy intensive organ in the human body and Stein's had just doubled in size, while I had almost doubled in size in general) we ate a lot.
Like, seriously a lot.
So, as it stood, I neither had the time nor the resources to sink into a wild goose chase for AIM and their exploding goodies.
After giving it a lot of thought (which included many sleepless nights simply staring at the ceiling above my bed while my legs from the calves down hung over the edge) I had a tentative course of action.
Step 5: Find a source of income that at the very least will keep me and Stein fed, and hopefully pay for the equipment we need.
Step 6: Track down AIM, or track down the subject which will explode in November, depending on which I find first.
Step 6a: In the case of finding AIM first, burst in, kill everyone that is trying to stop me, steal their research and serum and unleash the intellect of Stein on it, then inject myself with a version of Extremis that won't end with me as a new coat of paint on the walls, floor and ceiling.
Step 6b: In the case of finding the "suicide bomber" first, find a way to either subdue him, or get a piece of him to bring back to Stein, let him try and reverse-engineer it and then inject myself with a version of Extremis that won't end with me as a new coat of paint on the walls, floor and ceiling.
I was really hung up on that last bit, finding it crucial to my plans.
Stein was less concerned about it.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone