Part 1 - Chp 2
There are records, if a person knows where to look, of beings classified as superhuman--not mutants, like Xavier and Lehnsherr, but something other.
Stronger, to start with, and able to do things even more inexplicable than even the most powerful mutants. Things that don't seem to need food the way others do; tests suggest they consume essence, almost parasitically, off of human thought.
It's a theory.
They claim to be gods, the handful of times that anyone ever interacts with them.
Publicly, there's little more than rumour and speculation--which is good, because actual knowledge of them might cause more panic than the X-gene already does.
If Tony didn't have his hands directly on SHIELD records to the contrary, he wouldn't even believe they were real.
In 1972, the same year that SHIELD “took” the Tesseract from Howard, there was an incident reported as a comet to the public. In point of fact, it wasn’t a comet—it was a god crash landing with enough force that people believed the comet story. He was the first superhuman being that had been documented since the late ‘60s when someone claiming to be Thor surfaced briefly, half-destroyed a town in New Mexico, and left.
The god--referred to as L--babbled, constantly, hands tangling in both the air and anything that came in reach. He was unresponsive when spoken to but that didn’t seem to make him cause less damage. Figuring out a way to keep him from making people spontaneously freeze or catch fire was the first order of business. That, in turn, revealed that L’s babbling--which didn’t sound like anything in particular--was causing those who heard it to devolve into babbling the same nonsense.
When he started to pull himself together, things got worse.
There were a half-dozen escape attempts over the following three years that resulted in several suicides, L talking people into worshipping him, and a fire that burned down half the compound. Most of the records about those early tests were lost in the same fire.
It wasn’t quite locked up and key thrown away, but it was close.
***
SHIELD supposedly still has this god in custody.
They also have the Tesseract.
One of these technically belongs to Tony and getting the cube back is what he mostly wants to do; he doesn't like what it seems SHIELD is researching with it, doesn't like the way records aren't lining up inside the organization. Instead of take chances, he's just going to take back what's his.
But he's curious about the being they've held onto since they first 'borrowed' the cube from Howard, supposedly picked up not too long after it was uncovered. Other than records of having the being and various minor tests, it doesn't look like there's much else they've figured out in the intervening decades.
There is a note about failure to cooperate, over and over again. Whatever SHIELD--or the strange double he keeps coming across inside the organization--had planned for the being they picked up, it's been benched a long, long time.
Tony's curious. The Tesseract isn't stored so far from the supposed godling.
Why not?