When paths enTRINE

July 16, 2016:

Tony offers Jim a dream hobby to keep his 'mind' occupied at Pepper's request. TRINE has other ideas.

Stark Industries, New York City

Rising high into the skyline with the name of it's Lord and Master for all
to see, the Stark Industries Tower is the most visible component of the
Stark Industries complex centered in Midtown Manhattan. Manufacturing,
office space, power generation and even some inventory is housed in the
tower and its associated subelevels. It also contains guest housing and, at
the top, the penthouse suite that is the domain of the Main Man himself, at
least, when he's not at his Malibu home.

Characters

NPCs: TRINE JARVIS Friday

Mentions:

Plot:

Mood Music: [* None.]


Fade In…

"I do actually have a perfect high volume job that could use your eyes, though not having errors littering our QA seems positive to -me-."

The finer details of office morale and people pleasing are among the reasons Pepper Potts basically runs SI, now.

"But, get this. How would the two of you like to help me hunt down a murderous AI from the future."

It's Hollywood, baby.

Screenplay material.

Stark seems keenly aware of this fact.

"I've distributed a countermeasure trojan of my own built off his own code structure. So far it's blending in with TRINE and reporting back back suspicious activity while spreading through 'net-connected computers faster than I'd hoped." Which was already fast; Tony designed and programmed the thing, and he's rather good.

"We need to figure out a pattern in TRINE's movements so we can pin down all instances at once." Lest he adapt and escape like OTHER AI survivors. "And carefully monitor possible sources of these parts…" the holographic room display scans through a list of components, mostly related to advanced transmission and encryption. There's also a list of code names, as yet mostly unmatched with meaningful figures.

***

K-thoom.

That's an odd sound. Not quite an explosion but close. Sonic boom, actually, for those who know what that sounds like. Most of the people present should.

"Sir, there is something rapidly approaching the building. It's size and bulk suggest a large power-suit or man shaped drone of some kind. There is-"

BANG Something just impacted the building.

"Sir, something has just struck the southwest corner of the building's structure. The integrity of the building remains sou-"

Knock knock. That's the window. There's an eight foot tall, almost 'ape' like power suit/drone hovering there. It looks armed. Very armed.

***

That sounded almost as bad as when a 30-foot dragon flew into the building like an absent-minded pigeon. Pepper startles, looks around, then gasps when she sees the ape-like automaton. She's seen one like that before. Her words are seemingly calm, but her eyes are as wide as saucers. "Tony, go get your armor. Right now."

***

The bird-like fellow ducks a bit as Pepper talks, wings flaring up to protect him before falling back down once more. Subdued he quietly adds with a humble tone… "I was just trying to help them out and make things a bit more productive?" Of course, given Tony she's *probably* heard THAT a hundred if not thousand times before, too, though perhaps not with the contrition.

"We don't get along because we have some faith issues. I believe that some seriously weird stuff can happen. He's a bit more rational about things, very cut and dried and for all his talk of Enlightenment I get this feeling it's his way or the highway. I'm a bit more stubborn than that. Whether that's because I'm human or my background or what, who knows?"

He pauses for a moment then listens. "There'd be a neat bit of synergy, y'know, AI from the past taking down the AI of the future and all that, even? And… that sounds like a seriously huge number-crunching project. Like… something that could actually keep my brain…"

"I'm no genius, but, that looks like an interesting couple of data-poi—"

He starts looking around warily and then leaps in front of Pepper.

"GO! I'll hold it off. HURRY." is shouted towards Tony.

Jim drops his wings down in front of him as 'shields' as he advances slightly towards the window.

"Look, Buddy, you're in the wrong space at the wrong time, leave or there will be consequences!"

***

"Jarvis, go get my armor. Right now." It might not be the right time to snarkily echo Pepper with entirely not enough apparent alarm for the situation, or it might be the perfect time. Tony's own initial action is to take off one set of wristbands, the left's extended, articulated glove-frame retracting into it, and slips them into Pepper's pocket.

"If I were you I'd be locking myself in the inner lab right now, but I'm not, I'm Iron Man, so I'm going to go see what the kill-bot wants. Figure out how to put those on as quick as you can, you'll need 'em if this goes sideways." If Pepper lets him, Tony will be walking her straight to that door, and ideally hitting the button to seal her off from the outer room entirely behind reinforced plexiglass… with a secondary emergency vault door if it becomes necessary.

"Full deployment estimated in another ten seconds, sir." It's one nice thing of working from home— or at least, this home. Certain comfort items are always close at hand. "Please hold still, Mister Stark."

Tony turns, arms to his sides, and does just that. Several rotating panels align in the floor by his feet, a variety of mechanical whirrs sounding from beneath the metal. For a potentially vital few moments, Stark takes the distraction offered by Corvinus' approach, leaving the protest to Reha and the monotone protestations about airspace and safety code violations from the building's external speakers.

"Jarvis, tell me if that thing answers our hails. … or maybe transmits DOD identification." But Stark's not counting on being lucky, which makes him glad for the red-and-gold suit that mechanical arms start assembling around his body.

***

"I am not reading any transmissions at all. I theorize it is on a tight beam laser satellite system. This is the only known way to interact with a data structure in a more or less-"

The suit/drone/thing reaches behind it and pulls an oversized something off it's shoulder. It looks like a light vehicular cannon but much more advanced. Possibly energy based. Running can be heard in the hallways as security officers start to move people out of offices and away from the walls. One of them leans into the office. "Miss Potts, we need to-"

The cannon fires. It obliterates the window in front of it. The pane simply shimmers out of existence. The sudden inflow of air knocks everyone ever so slightly back and that's the only thing that makes it miss Pepper's head. Instead it strikes the guard who simply shimmers out of existence.

Literally. When people check later, there will be no records of him and all memories of him will slowly fade. Even JARVIS will have no record of the man.

"Temporal variance still causing calculatory issues. Adjusting. Don't worry, Miss Potts. Mister Stark. I'll make this painless."

***

Pepper Potts blinks at Tony, still too surprised by the ape-thing's arrival and Jim actually trying to confront it to protest his putting bracelets in her pocket. The getting shoved through a door, though, that she protests. "But, Tony…" And then the window is vaporized and she stumbles and … "Oh god." She scrambles the rest of the way to the doors Tony steered her toward. She really hates leaving Tony in the line of fire, but she is also smart enough to realize keeping herself there will just put him at risk as he tries to protect her instead of stopping that automaton as quickly as possible.

***

It's like he doesn't even SEE me. Sonuvabitch. YOU CAN'T SEE ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!

Jim ducks down behind a bank of equipment and pulls up the monitor he was using a few moments before, severing his WiFi connection to it. Hefting it a bit he flings it like an electronic Frisbee with full strength towards the weapon that it will hopefully be knocked out of the thing's hands for a little bit.

"What kind of wuss brings a gun to a knife fight? C'mon and get some." Strange circuitry flares into appearance all over the avianoid as it glows an angry yellow, claws popping out of his hands.

***

Well. It looks like worrying about Jim's ability to go toe to toe with the modified suit wasn't relevant after all. Security, on the other hand? Well, Pepper's escort, what was his name? He was a good guy, and it's decidedly -not- the kind of treatment Stark endorses for his employees. Especially when they're trying to murder Pepper, to boot. Stark stumbles when the blast comes, but quickly corrects his stance, getting right back into position. By the time the unconvincing apology is finished, the helmet of the modular Iron Man suit is locking in around his head, its visor closing down over his face and powering up as Stark stalks forward, metallic footfalls sounding fiercely against the resilient floor.

Without activating the external speakers, his first instructions are for JARVIS. "Jarvis, run a sweep from all our sats in the quadrant, all possible frequencies, I want to know whose satellite is running this thing." Then, Iron Man's synthesized voice crackles to life with snark, "You're not filling me with faith in your accurate math, Trinidad."

It's offered as he throws himself out the window, repulsors supporting his weight as the suit's own sophisticated scanner suite works overtime on the floating arsenal. One he didn't build, which makes it profoundly wrong and against nature. "Jarvis, plug this thing's energy signature and silhouette into the whole network." Tracking TRINE's activity through use of the DOD suits is one more way to pin the homicidal intelligence down.

***

"At once, Sir." JARVIS responds. "I'm detecting a signal source but there is no satellite in the detected locations. Refining my search to account for the possibility of a micro scale orbital communications platform."

Tony's quip has the machine canting its recessed head off to one side as if considering him. But then Jim's out and making a target of himself. A quartet of mini rocket launchers slide out of the suit. "You know what. I lied about making it painless. Let's just go with quick and emphatic."

"Sir those are incendiary thermobaric-"

JARVIS never gets a chance to finish. A dozen mini rockets swarm into the room on erratic paths. One would have been enough to fill the room with a fireball that would have left anyone unprotected inside a pile of ash. Twelve is… overkill. Four lock on each to points around Pepper, Jim and the now armored Tony himself.

***

Pepper Potts gets to the door and through it, thanks to JARVIS. But does the door close in time after her? With the explosions, it might be difficult to determine immediately.

***

The math is pretty quick for the avianoid, even using the limited software that is Jim's brain. Rather than let the missiles *get to him* he leaps upwards towards the suit and flares his wings wide, rapidly closing the distance, faster than they can get to their targeted locations as they impact against his feathers, knocking off several here and there before they can detonate. Every impact does elicit a grunt and or a gasp from the fellow.

"Not on my watch, jackhole!"

He coughs out a gout of blood, now closer to the suit but not QUITE within reach of the claws.

Gonna need a five course when this is done. Gluh.

***

The inner lab where Pepper retreats is much like the outer one, but closer to the heart of the building, reinforced against hazards and, perhaps most importantly just now, walled off by both a hermetic seal and a reinforced blast door. Even without JARVIS to pre-emptively seal these measures behind Pepper, the latter mechanism has several built-in redundancies— Tony works with some scary energy in these rooms, and swallowing New York in a singularity is really not a possibility. Hence, the walls are thick, the alloys resilient, and the blast door, well— it's the kind you want in an apocalypse, put it that way.

The problem with reinforced points in a building is the impossibility of reinforcing -all- of it— but these upper levels of Stark Tower are close, is what we're getting at, here. As the first of the missiles directed inside seeks to penetrate the breach, an energy shield pulses into existence at the perfect moment, an erupting fireball rocking the Tower, but diverted from the lab. Several more ostensibly shatterproof windows crack or break on floors both above and below the impact, and it's only compounded when the second adds its firestorm to the mix.

Pepper would likely have time to watch this happen as the transparent door seals, and perhaps time enough to see the next pair rip into the lab unhindered as the heavy blast door drops. High-tech cryogenic countermeasures are firing even as the detonation occurs, and as they're destroyed, their remaining flame-retardant payload detonates, spattering the room in firefighting compound.

"Ms. Potts, I can do little more to protect you if you do not put on the bracelets provided by Mr. Stark." JARVIS advises Pepper, though it's a crackling voice that's hard to make out, transitioning between three different speakers as they fail and short out. The building around her seems to lurch subtly, a creaking sound of strain coming from the stressed frame as the sound of detonations moves outside.

The missiles that lock onto Iron Man have a substantially harder time: Stark executes a high-velocity ascending corkscrew, the gauntlets of his suit launching a crackling pulse of luminescent energy that sparks and erupts on contact with the first missile, timed with uncanny— one might say /mathematical/ precision to consume the pursuing projectiles in a mass of their own flame. It's a cloud of fire that Iron Man dares long enough to cover his own attack, blasting down into the firestorm and then out of it, right back in at the hijacked suit, firing just one rocket from a shoulder-launcher of his own.

One rocket that erupts into five micro-missiles in its second stage partway there, and then five homing blasts that actually detonate some distance from their target, designed so that countermeasures similar to Stark's own only marginally diminish payload delivery. That payload? Goop. Greyish, thick, sticky goop, like molten plastic on a dashboard. The firing vector is such that the suit's space will suddenly be filled with the stuff— and anywhere it sticks, the hungry compound starts draining energy into itself, like the world's most invasive recharging battery. Of course, it's also a battery without containment— and the electrical discharge as it becomes increasingly unstable is bad for wiring.

***

Pepper Potts stares wide-eyed at the destruction happening in the lab until JARVIS speaks up and blinks. Setting her tablet aside on whatever surface is handy, she hastily and a little clumsily pulls the bracelets from her pocket and … they're too loose for her wrists. So she pushes them up until they're snug around her forearms a couple of inches below her elbows. "JARVIS? Now what?"

***

The explosion of the micro-missiles that do detonate heat things up a lot. Fortunately that explosion is contained. Unfortunately that's not all the suit has. It boosts back and away. Pepper will have a real good look at it. It sprays laser fire and micro-cannon fire and more of that exotic energy. Everything that tears through just vanishes as though it never was. Tony and Jim might want to be careful.

As might Pepper given that a huge chunk of the wall just vanished.

***

Jim's on the floor in the lab when the munitions he *didn't* get start going off, and the blast wave is enough to blow him up off his feet and out the window. Past the armored suit, past Iron Man, and a good eighth of a mile outwards before he begins to slow down… and plummet. Not from a lack of aerodynamics, not from a lack of flight ability though right now that could start to become an issue, but simply from being disoriented from such a rapid movement in an unexpected direction.

Of course, that just ADDS to the fiasco that may be forming around this.

Slowly one eye forces itself open… then the other… and then the panicked flailing as wings attempt to beat frantically to stop the descent and perhaps rise once more.

On one of the Stark Industries frequencies Jim sends a response to Tony and hopefully JARVIS…

"I'm okay, take it down…. be back in a bit."

***

It was bad enough to be trapped at the top of Stark Tower as fires tore out its guts, really. Being trapped up there with the wall to the outside erased from existance, well. "I suggest you stay near the back wall, Ms. Potts." JARVIS advises, still in that half-broken stereo, "And hold your arms out to the side. I am adjusting calculations to your… creative wardrobe choice." The instruments would have adjusted to her wrists— but JARVIS isn't going to hold that against Pepper.

For his part, Stark does a sweep of the Tower as he deftly evades the majority of the fire— and most particularly that horrific energy. Using the (topical!) neural interface in his suit to shunt power from his secondary weapon systems, Iron Man shifts tact from the shutdown to the military shutdown, dedicating almost all of the suit's immediate power-flow to a precisely timed pulse of the chest-mounted unibeam: in this case, frequency modulated into a crackling, super-hot fusion beam meant to split the hijacked drone apart at the waist.

***

Pepper Potts minces skittishly away from the suddenly no longer there wall, and when JARVIS mentions calculations and 'attire' she blinks twice before stepping out of her heels and tossing them under one of the worktables farthest from the external walls. What? They're some of her favorite Louboutins.

***

Jim starts to slowly climb from below. He's not nearly as agile nor as fast as the zippy Iron Man armor nor the armored assault unit. Without a complex series of sensory arrays, he can't even see the exotic rads pouring off the thing.

What he can see, though, is the traces of fire that are heading in all directions. He runs a quick series of calculations of points he can reach based on his climb rate, the 'dancing' rate of Iron Man, and the speed of the strange TRINE unit.

Going to get one shot at this, so make it good.

Having fallen mostly out of the dogfight that's going on, his goal is to ascend above where the fur-ball is happening and cut off the escape route should the attacker try to make a run for it.

"Going high, keep at it."

***

"So much for shock and awe. Run a detailed analysis of those emissions and try to find me a frequency that can overwhelm those converters." The Iron Man armor has something similar— but against output of that magnitude, Stark would probably be in serious trouble. It should give him pause with regard to this engagement, but it really doesn't seem to. Speaking of his own countermeasures, the laser fire is diffused by the armor's refractive coating, refueling Tony's energy reserves more quickly than the arc reactor alone and giving his repulsors that much more oomph as he dances that deadly aerial ballet amidst the rain of gauss blasts and micro-missiles.

The last of those slips past Stark's defenses and consumes man and machine in a brilliant, pressurized fireball. "..zxxxshhhming in on the other side." Only part of Stark's transmission makes it through to Jim, as he bolts downwards out of the impact, scorched armor still eminently flight-worthy, and circles around opposite Jim's angle of approach: the energy countermeasures are impressive, but as established, he's more agile. This sudden shift in position is used both for attack and distraction, the suit's speakers blasting Black Sabbath as Tony rockets in with both gauntlets leading, using himself as a projectile as he seeks both to create an opportunity for Jim to exploit, and exploit another shift in tactics himself.

"Just a moment, Ms. Potts." JARVIS assures Pepper, even as the open-air vault she's in shifts, tilts against the failing framework around it, threatening to drop through the floor below. "Mr. Stark is holding out against the attacker, and this contingency plan is unreliant on his quick success." Thankfully, she's the only civilian they've detected on those threatened upper levels, just now— at least aside from that poor security guard, but he was never really there anyway.

***

Pepper Potts says, "Okay, JARVIS." Pepper's words would normally be calm enough, but the floor is starting to tilt so her voice goes a bit higher in pitch as she backs against the wall farthest from the open air, then tries to find something to hold onto that's bolted to the wall or something. She does NOT want to fall out of the building. That would be REALLY inconvenient.

Inconvenient? Seriously? Yeah, Pepper's starting to freak out just a little bit if she's mentally commenting on her own inner dialogue.

***

So long as there's only a couple attackers this TRINE drone seems quite content to try to keep shooting at Tony and the others. The blast from Tony sends it tumbling through the air before it rights itself. He is doing damage to the armor, just much slower than he should be. By JARVIS calculations the back and left armor is down to about 60 percent.

It's got bad stabilizers that's for sure. But great weapons coverage. Little nodules on the armor seem to house some kind of variable frequency energy emitter that keeps tracking Tony and Jim wherever they go. That… cannon though. It can't seem to bring it to bear on them.

So it turns to try and bring it to bear on where Pepper should be about now. Of course it's also leaving itself fairly open. Again.

***

Okay, buy me just a few more… ow, that… oh, good. Invert, angle left. Thank you, Mister Stark!

Jim ponderously moves into position and just about the point he'd be directly overhead the suit he folds his wings tight and angles himself downwards, claws fully extended, one wing flipping out then back, then the other as he makes slight adjustments in his gravity-assisted death from above and behind.

If he can connect, he'll start tearing into the back of the thing and any joints around the 'disappearing gun' that might have been exposed in the on-going battle. Failing that as an assault, he'll focus on destroying the aperture and barrel of the cannon. No matter how good the thing is designed, it can't withstand too much force or it'll go out of calibration, can it?

"You're terminated!"

Okay, so it's a witty throwback to the '80's that probably only the most obscure movie goers would catch onto…

If it looks like he's made any sort of progress, he'll then kick off the thing with both feet and curl up into a ball to drop away from it. No sense in getting caught in a blast radius, after all…

***

About the time the chamber Pepper's no longer sealed within starts to give way again, a suit of armor that's not the one deployed with Tony, but a red-and-white alternate operated by Jarvis, appears hovering over the rather sharp drop-off down to NYC, peering at Pepper. Using telemetry from the robotic bracers she wears, the suit veritably disassembles and reassembles itself in short order, flinging itself abruptly at her piece by piece and securing her within the form-fitting inner skin despite the obvious differences in frame between Pepper and Tony. No guarantees it isn't chafing or pinching in some very inconvenient spots, though. Fat lot of good any of that will do her if Iron Man and Corvinus aren't successful in disabling the assailant, either way.

"Well Jarvis. If this doesn't work, we're going to need something a lot bigger. How far away is Betty?" The answer isn't really relevant to Tony— it's too far to deploy /now/. "Five more seconds Jimbo. I'm gonna light this up." The music crescendos, shoulder panels on his armor open, and nearly a half-dozen micro-missiles are ejected, their repulsor-tech propulsion igniting with a flare as they shoot off inexorably towards the suit in rapid succession, each targeting one of the different weapon systems JARVIS has tagged.

Tony ascends, putting distance between himself and the rogue armor, an emitter in his gauntlet charging with an audible, high frequency whine as electromagnetic energy builds up. Several frequencies read out across his suit HUD as likely to overwhelm the absorption system that dissipated the uni-beam; Stark picks one at random, then fires the bolt of ionized plasma. It crackles with energy, building up charge from the static in the air, the ambient electromagnetic waves everywhere in the city, detonating in a maelstrom of ball lightning at point of impact.

***

Pepper Potts leans back and tries to resist the further-tilting floor as long as she can, and then there's another armor there staring at her and … "Holy…" She doesn't get a chance to finish that particular little curse as the suit engulfs her. She blinks in disorientation at suddenly being closed in by the helmet, and can only thank stupid luck that today she chose to wear her hair in a tidy french twist and not loose all over the place. "JARVIS?" Her voice is practically a squeak by this point. And really, there's just too much other stuff around to freak out about to really let a bit of pinching and chafing completely draw her attention.

***

The beam from the cannon is jerked off to the side by Jim's assault but it still misses Pepper by inches. Well, a now armored Pepper. Jim himself takes… well Corvinus' systems will show a sudden flood in exotic particles. Anti-Chronitons? Some mumbo jumbo like that. The distraction is more than enough for TRINE to be distracted enough to get hit by Tony. Over. And over. And over as that storm builds and lashes out. The cannon seems to 'phase out' and TRINE ignites it's boosters. It's going straight up. Well not quite straight up. Right at Tony. It means to go through him. It's a bit slow getting off the gate though. All that mass, you know.

***

The circuit traceries that were glowing yellow before? Well, they just went an ANGRY red and smoke comes off the avianoid in places as he's doused in whatever strange energy the thing is using. Jim attempts to throw the wings wide as it gets clear of the boosters. "Ton….. don' let it hit you! HOT."

A few feathers flake off the bird-person's wings, disintegrating into ash before they're even inches away.

Need to find somewhere…. to… land… so… tired….

He spirals downwards until he finds a nice roof of a nearby skyscraper and tumbles to a landing, watching skywards hopefully as a few more feathers molt off.

***

"Och. Hang tight, lass. I'll take ye ta' Corvinus." Friday is good to her word, piloting the suit on Pepper's behalf and providing her some brief, exhilarating, terrifying, breathtaking moments rocketing across the New York skyline in a bleeding edge piece of super-heroing equipment. It's the kind of thing a girl could get used to, the kind of thing she'll never forget, the kind of thing a person never wants to do again, but can't get out of their head. Or maybe he's projecting his own personal experiences.

Iron Man's gauntlet-mounted rocket launcher cycles in another round and deploys the tube with a mechanized whirr. It's not hard to target with that thing careening straight at him, and it doesn't seem built to change direction abruptly, either. Not when it's trying to attain ramming speed, anyway. Stark takes a moment to level his shot, and fires it off. There's no explosion for the thing to bust through, not at first. The warhead is adamantium-tipped, propelled by a secondary repulsor thruster, designed to deliver a comprehensive sensor package to the heart of a mechanized target. It's just that intriguing powered heart that Tony targets, taking a deeper look at the transmogrifying machine and its rather unique systems.

"Jarvis, is the spotlight still online?" "Estimate safe charge up to 85 of maximum, sir." "Plenty. Feeding you precise targeting." A laser that's not visible to the naked eye is projected from the Iron Man suit as Tony goes evasive, centered in on one of those powerful thrusters. One of the tallest superstructures on the tower suddenly angles and adjusts a complex series of lenses, and secondary arc reactors power up one after another; with the last, a brilliant beam of white-cored coherent light is fired from the Tower, looking to disable the armor with one overwhelming stroke.

"/Thaht's/ a lasah." Stark murmurs in an Australian accent.

"What's that, sir?"

"Nothing, JARVIS."

***

Pepper Potts can really only just close her eyes as the armored suit conveys her over to where Corvinus/Jim just sort of crash landed. ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Never again. Ever. … unless Tony does something about the—ow. okay, uncomfortable for sure. And GOD the repair expenses. She just really hopes that no one was in the upper levels of the tower.

***

TRINE breaks. Well that blast shears something off. An arm and shoulder it looks. His trajectory up wobbles and then stabilizes. The chassis is getting away, into suborbital trajectory territory. Of course.. Tony just got a bunch of things to look at. Maybe he can figure out what TRINE did to those drones. It ought to be enlightening if nothing else.

"I am re-tasking our satellites to track the outbound suit." JARVIS informs both Tony and Pepper. "Will project landing coordinates in case he goes dark."

***

The arrival of the red and white armor, relatively intact, that was in the same spot Pepper was at roughly was at when she got shot at… Jim's finally able to put that piece together.

"Hey, boss, am I still on the clock? Don't want to cheat the company, after all, righ'?"

He wobbles a bit as a few more feathers molt off.

"Don't get too close, something hit me hot. Just… so tired right now." Looks like he's fighting to stay awake, and the warning was nice enough, too. "Oooh. Scan me, figure out whatever the hot is, okay?" There may also be some brain addling involved there from being in close proximity to something getting bombarded with EMP, too, even with hardening…

***

"Pepper." It's Tony's voice in her ear, this time. "You okay? Reha there? He took a dose of some nasty radiation, Jarvis can take care of him assuming we have some intact med-lab space." Which is almost a certainty— the burnt-out levels threaten a number of Tony's pet projects and the integrity and livability of his personal levels, but fundamental operations shouldn't be hard to acquire. "Friday can get you both back safe." Stark trusts the insulation in the suit to that degree.

There's a hint of regret in the words, but there's still a few other items on his to-do list. Maybe he could help in clean up— and maybe he can keep this from happening again. Iron Man rockets skyward, repulsors flaring as he pursues the TRINEbot space-ward. "Jarvis, paint me the location of the ghost sat you're detecting, first."

***

"Take it easy, Jim. You'll be fine." And… Pepper hopes that Jim can hear her, 'cause she's NOT about to ask Friday to open the helmet after he said something about 'hot'. "Friday? Can we carry Jim back safely?" She's having to completely trust the AI do to all the actual work. They do get him back, but Pepper feels like a marionette the entire time. Not exactly the most pleasant sensation.

***

"I'm really light, just bulky. Shouldn' be t' hard."

He doesn't fight being carried, though as noted, a bit bulky. He doesn't even raise a peep in complaint, though by the time he gets to a proper decon station in a med-lab he's moving almost akin to a zombie… not that he's turning into one, just.. that tired.

However, there's also a resolve that he's pretty sure that everyone involved in this shares, that this isn't over. Not by a long shot….

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