The Birth of Medusa
Toni was first kidnapped when she was only seven months old.
She has been kidnapped hundreds of times throughout her childhood, she didn't even remember most of them but she remembered Maria had been pissed.
Maria, to the media, was just pretty arm candy and a housewife to the brilliant and busy Howard Stark.
But Maria had extensive training from her time before her life with Howard and was an accomplished assassin from the Italian version of the Red Room in Russia. The only difference, the trainees could leave when they wanted and the methods leaned more towards the gratification of success rather than harsh punishment for failure. So at the age of 10, Toni was sent to an ‘elite private boarding school’ for three years in Italy, before she began her time at MIT. The kidnappings lessened significantly after that.
Not only was Toni snarky and insufferable according to the media, but she was becoming increasingly dangerous and more valuable. Not as a way to make a fast buck from a ransom, but as the source of money and power herself in ways the world knew about, and ways they didn’t.
Toni had made her first ‘real’ weapon when she was nine and had learned to use it from her mother. It had been an LMG that when compared to any of Howard's designs, humiliated them and her father had done his best to hide it from the world.
Toni’s record of new successful kidnapping became almost 0 a few years before Afghanistan, having decided to use her skills after she was kidnapped by a start-up illegal chemical weapons organization.
They had grabbed her out of a chaotic campus party and managed to get her all the way to the middle of nowhere, Montana. They had left her in a room full of advanced chemistry lab equipment and chemicals, where they ordered her to make them a sarin gas missile and instead, she had made Medusa. As soon as she had to agree to make the weapon they left her unsupervised which led to a very unfortunate power outage, a large explosion, and a lot of dead bodies. She had built herself a gas mask powered by a mini predecessor of her famous arc reactor, a smoke bomb, and created a sword that somehow managed to store and constantly replenish the surface supplies of poison. She had killed them all and returned home before anyone noticed she had been missing. She had always known how to make miniaturized power sources but had never made it public knowledge because they tended to be a little bit… unstable.
Eventually, she started selling some of her weapons to the government.
They would fight the battles she couldn’t and she would fight the battles they wouldn’t.
Her first weapons contract was when the world finally realized there was a Merchant of Death waiting in the wings. Just before her first deal, Medusa had captured the attention of organizations all over the world, the title came from an officer who was at the scene. Describing the body of Tiberius Stone as, ironically, ‘turned to stone’.
The kidnapping attempts stopped after she had become the CEO of Stark industries, not long after her parent's and Jarvis' deaths. She knew the truth behind their deaths, Medusa, after all, had made friends with their killer, who was clearly not enjoying what he was doing. She was still friends with him though, because her mother had died in the crash itself (which was genuine accident) and her father had gotten what he deserved.
She then spent a few years getting a few more PhDs and Masters and creating JARVIS, named after the man who had been more of a father than Howard ever could be. DUM-E, U, and Butterfingers came to life while JARVIS became connected to every intelligence agency, website, business, and resource in the world.
With her mind sharp and her poison strong, Toni started working, she turned the world upside down with her ideas and designs, while medusa cleared out the rotten underside.
She didn’t hate building weapons, they made a lot of money, and medusa dealt with who she could, but after Afghanistan and Stane, she decided she had bigger prey to hunt.
Much bigger.