Iron Man's a Maniac
Tony Stark is indisputably a maniac. Grim could see the death energy coming off him through the TV, and here he was, racing in a national race car tournament and stuff. Doing EXPOs and presentations and drinking heavily.
No wonder the world was wondering if he’d snapped. The man was checking off his bucket list in the darkest way in the world. Grim couldn’t even fathom what he’d do with infinite money and that situation.
Was someone poisoning him? Was he bleeding out? Rare medical disease? Why was the face of American Dream-whatever dying on live TV?
Grim chewed on his bottom lip as he watched the news over his foster parent’s shoulders, and wondered if he could pull off a plane ticket to Europe.
He didn’t in the end. Had a few ghosts -nurses, doctors, phycologists, concerned randos- watch over him just in case, and did a deep dive into poisoning’s long and dark history.
He passed it off as a morbid section of his chemistry interest just fine. That wasn’t the problem, none of that was currently the problem.
It’s just the ghosts wouldn’t. Stop. Screaming. About. Hammers. And a bird, and electricity, and fire, and needles, and something about Russia of all things. (human experimentation? Horrific kidnapping murder spree? A YA novel’s plot he was about to get smooshed into? Who knew? Certainly not him.)
Some ghosts really didn’t get the message all the way through their skulls that he really could hear them just fine, huh? Thought they’d have to yell and scream to get him to hear ‘em.
He invested in an army of dollar-store earplugs and splurged on sound-canceling headphones. He didn’t want to be rude, but he did want to sleep. And focus on literally anything. Not have a constant migraine while Kala tried to negotiate the terms of his sanity.
Tony Stark was possibly dying from something in his suit. The design wasn’t public knowledge, wasn’t even private knowledge, but he could guess whatever the h*ll he was using to get himself and several dozen pounds of metal reliably off the ground would have some adverse effects on the body after a hot second passed. He did the math, and the force needed to pull it off would be absurd. Impossible for anyone with a healthy respect for physics, really. Especially with all the shenanigans he pulls off casually.
So, Tony Stark could have I dunno, found a new chemical with extreme potential energy properties. That poisoned the human body by being within a certain distance. And Stark knows this. And has given up. Sure. Ridiculous, but sure.
But how on earth was he supposed to help with that?
Grim hadn’t wanted to show up to the last day of the EXPO, but his help-people side of his brain wouldn’t let him be, so here he was watching Justin Hammer (Hammer…?) show off something about the army and navy and robots. It was all very patriotic, but frankly Grim, as a child of the foster system and all the rest of America’s failings, didn’t have enough patriotism in his entire body to metaphorically make up a baseball, let alone be excited about this weirdness.
Ghosts were still yelling, bobbing in and out of the crowd. He had one ear un-plugged, and scanned the area whenever the pitch suddenly got worse. Nothing amiss. Excited crowd, fast food everywhere, lots of lights and dramatic sound effects. Strobe lights shone, and he felt a headache blooming behind one eye.
He nearly doubled in over in pure surprise and instinct when they all screamed in a note as high as they could go all at once.
Then the explosions went off. The Hammer bots started attacking, and Grim’s brain loaded far too late.
Hammer. Electric. Who knew what the bird thing meant, but the rest of the message was pretty out in the open.
He watched Iron Man zoom around the night sky, dodging fireworks and AI-driven death bots built to survive a war, and he cursed himself for what he was about to do.
He was the dumbest man alive. The most stupid person on planet earth. Even more so than Stark, because at least he didn’t go into an actual fire/missile fight without a plan or backup.
He literally just followed Iron Man and some other flying suit of armor holding a dumb*ss seemingly on his side decorated like the American flag and ended up in some glass dome park thing. He slid down an artificial beach down to a perfectly curved river, eyeing the bomb-bots that were closing in on the two as they… argued? Really?
Kala put a foot through one’s chest, then went corporeal. It shorted out terribly, sparking and stuttering like crazy.
He just pushed a bunch of them into the water, dodging lasers and Tony Stark and Co.’s yelling at him once they actually took in their surroundings for once. It worked fine, because apparently Hammer couldn’t design to save his life. They were built like tanks, all chunky and bold, but with obvious cracks in the armor where wiring was.
He put an army knife through different lines and found the magic spot along the neck.
Kala kept kicking and punching and occasionally hitting things with her ghostly baseball bat she seemed to take everywhere with her now since she stole it from his crummy, sexist gym coach last month.
Shots of light were everywhere where Iron Man, Friend and Hammer’s inventions went to war.
Stark had quit trying to shoo him away, now, which he appreciated. They’d have to drag him off by now if they wanted him away; he was way too invested and dumb for it to be anything otherwise.
He hurt all over, but that was nothing new. Dodging things meant to take down soldiers without armor or sanity to help him left him covered in bruises and welts.
He had had worse.
There’s an army of ghosts around him, now. They had always been interested in looking out for him, ranging from pointing him in the direction of their favorite restaurant at lunchtime to ‘taking care of’ bullies who thought he was a nutjob and they therefore did not need their moral compass when interacting with him.
He could conceivably just stand there, at this point, and watch, and later walk out in exactly the same shape. Though it did help that a bunch of soldiers from varying time periods were nearby and were more than happy to stretch their legs.
Some still had all their old war equipment on them, ranging from actual bayonets to rudimentary grenades and rusty machine guns along with the occasional molotov.
With the amount going down around him, that’s exactly what he did when all robots without knifing distance were down and half-submerged in the creek.
He ducks the occasional shrapnel piece, tried not to get in anyone’s way (living or dead) and does a mental catalog of events later for the police.
He’s in over his head, but when is he not?