Vault dweller, he's seen her coming a mile down the road; technically, he supposes if you want to get down the brass tacks of it all, he's one, too, in a broader definition, but he never had the misfortune of wearing the blue and gold jumpsuit, and he's actually kind of glad. It's like a target out here, people assume anyone still wearing one of those things is fresh faced, naive, and ready to be taken advantage of, too eager to ingratiate themselves to the people scraping by on the surface while peddling high handed ideals of a world long dead. She says she's had a week, and he takes her in a moment thinking even for a week on the surface she's still entirely too clean to be mistaken for any scav.

So, yeah, she's probably right. It's probably been one hell of a bad week. God knows his own first week thrust into this new reality, coming to grips with the world he was looking at is not a happy, fun-time memory. And he'd been a seasoned superhero, once upon a time; she's barely more than a kid.

He pauses, where he's been making his way up the 95, back home to Novac, leading a cobbled together and hastily reprogrammed assaultron (an assaultron, here, in the Mojave, wonders never cease), her whirring and clicking loud next to him as she clomps to a stop, pincer hands clamping together, just the once. In the distance there's the muffled sound of gunfire, up Copper Mountain way.

He's not sure, considering the rifle slung across his back, the assaultron, what about any of that has made her decide he, of all people, looks friendly.

"If you're talking to every stranger you meet on the road, kid, yeah. I can." That's a lesson he'd learned quick, out of the gate: The majority of people just want to live their lives, and that's fine. They don't want to get tangled up in other people's business, which is...Also fine, but less than ideal. But there are a lot - more than is comforting - that'll slit your throat on the chance you're carrying a bottle cap with a star inside, or because you dared to make eye contact while passing by. Or just because they feel like it. The wasteland is not what he'll call a friendly place, and you either adapt, or you die.

A week out of the vault isn't enough to determine which way that'll go.

tony doesn't travel much at night. obviously, this is probably a wise choice, you know, given...everything about the wasteland. but he doesn't travel at night, because he's still toting the rt implanted in his chest (for the comic-unfamiliar, it's like the arc reactor but not, it actually runs tony's brain because he's suffering from a massive tbi that affects the autosomal parts of his brain - you know the parts that do things like remember how to breathe and swallow) and it's basically, for all practical purposes, a captive manmade star just sitting there. couple that with the fact that wasteland clothing is probably more threadbare patches than original material, and it's like a bright target that screams please shoot me at night.

A tinny voice from somewhere in the badly dented helmet he held in his lap spoke up . "Orbital rim fracture, shallow. Nasal fracture, edema detected. Mandibula hairline fracture-"

And you know, it occurred to him - a bit belatedly, maybe - that disabling that little voice might actually be a very good idea. Especially since it had apparently decided, all on its onesies, to take it upon itself to happily parrot the results of the scan he'd run on himself to just any Tom, Dick, and Harry that had something to say about the black and blue mess that was his face.

you're an escaped synth that needs to be moved to a safehouse / the memory den / far harbor / a location of your choosing: tony's taken up as a heavy in the railroad, so he's got you covered. he's also a little bit of a maverick in that respect and chafes against des and carrington, so if a synth tells him something like "i don't want to have my memories replaced" he's going to do his damndest to get them gone without their memories getting erased. he's, uh, very sympathetic and sensitive to the idea, for obvious (canon-based self-memory wipe) reasons.

you're a fellow railroad agent: since he, you know, works with the rr, he does show up in hq occasionally, so you got that going for you. which is nice. he's there for a good time, not a long time, his to do list is as long as your arm because he has not one - but two - alter egos in the commonwealth other than his rr work. he'll help you move a synth, get surveillance on the institute (or the bos, if you're feeling naughty), and help you navigate the tricky landmine of the conspiracy theories of tinker tom. often found in the back room arguing with pam.

you're with the minutemen: maybe the general has you looking for him for some errand or something. maybe you're new here and don't realize he has full run of the castle as needed (like he'd be kept out to begin with, he has a lab in the castle tunnels). maybe he's tagged along on a patrol because he's headed in the same direction and you're moving through sketchy territory. or maybe you got assigned to the trading hub being established in nahant and he's kind of the defacto guy in charge. either way, the fact that he's always around has caused your paths to cross, and may god have mercy on your soul.

you're with the brotherhood of steel: considering tony has less than favorable opinions about the bos, being civil to you guys is really, really hard. some of his best friends were robots back in the day, or giant, green, and angry, and he still has friday, which he will not be telling you about. he's very overprotective of ghouls. he doesn't trust the bos, he doesn't like the bos, and while he might not immediately come out of the gate swinging, getting anything but politely veneered (or outright and open) suspicion is going to be an uphill slog for you. as long as you're not making like a good little tin dalek and have exterminate on repeat, he might be willing to extend a tentative olive leaf - but he's not going to help you acquire tech. good luck.

you're with the institute: look, he can admit what you guys have done with tech in the wasteland is impressive, sure. but he's equated you with aim in his head because he sees you as a think tank with the possibility of doing so much good gone wrong, and he's not going to ask a lot of questions before getting to the punching side of things. now...if you're someone that's looking to defect permanently to the surface, that's another story, and he can and will bat his ridiculously long disney princess eyelashes at you to make it so. ask @shespy and @involuntaryspy how effective that is. he's also been stealing and reprogramming gen 1 and gent 2 synths, so feel free to call him a thief.

you're a raider: enjoy your new lockup suite at the castle. seriously, though: tony still treats the sanctity of life the same as the avengers always (generally - the supreme intelligence is grey area) have, so he's not going to take the mindset of kill 'em all and let god sort them out, because it's not what they do. raiders he tries to take alive, so expect to eat iron knuckles and wake up in the castle tunnels jail. or maybe he's fucked up and been captured. not to be that guy, but considering being captured and burning the fucker down is basically his origin trauma, godspeed to you. he doesn't take it very well. is, however, absolutely available and willing and has connections to get you out if you're looking to leave the raider life behind.

you're a settler: maybe you wanna make nahant home. maybe you need a, you know, physical building to call home. maybe the plumbing he's managed to get going in some settlements is backed up again because john finklesmith three houses down won't stop flushing shit he shouldn't. whatever, tony's the commonwealth handyman, and he's the guy to go to if you need help with getting a roof over your head, getting set up with a physical building for a shop, or taking care of raiders just around the corner (read: across the fucking commonwealth).

there's spooky eldritch shit afoot: so why are you coming to the tech guy? oh, right, because he hates magic and magic won't leave him alone. sounds legit. look, he's not really, like...the guy to talk to about this stuff, but if you need someone to delve into somewhere spooky and see if there's a monster under the bed or whatever, fine. but he's gonna complain about it the whole time. if you are, in fact, the one to cause the eldritch whammy / problem / haunting / invasion, he's going to be very disappointed in you.

you need help breaking into an old prewar building / military installation: well, you'll have to be vetted, obviously, he's not going to let someone he doesn't know or trust into buildings with possibly destructive tech, but he thrives on information - even old information - so he was probably going to end up breaking into wherever anyway. as long as you're on tony's 'okay' list, he's game.

. earth-616 / mark i (codename: prime earth) » heavily leans on modern characterization notes from iron man vol 4 and invincible iron man vol 3. does not include secret empire, tony stark: iron man, the iron man 2020 event, or iron man vol 6. tony's woken up from his coma and life rolls on: the avengers reform and he gets dragged back into the fight, they have a baby with the power of a starbrand now, steve's finally stopped sitting on the fence and confessed his feelings, and tony's retired from the civilian working wor- wait, back up one. post-starbrand baby being born, tony's been forced to look inward and do some work on himself - thanks to his memories starting to trickle back in from the mindwipe - and his relationship with steve, which opens up uncomfortable new avenues of honesty and transparency, because much to his shock, terror, and delight, he finds himself sitting in what he'll call his own happy fairytale ending. everything's not perfect, there's still work to be done as both an avenger and as a man, but he's getting there. he's healing. viewed through the lens of silver age nostalgia, as an exploration of redemption and learning to love yourself through being honest and vulnerable with yourself and with others, even if you have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do it. verse is singleship with @shieldslinger. includes @servitored in canon. [MORE]

. earth-616 / mark ii (codename: prime earth) » heavy leans on and goes completely divergent from canon with winter soldier vol 2 and strikeforce. does not include: secret empire, tony stark: iron man, the iron man 2020 event, or iron man vol 6. bucky barnes has moved to his hometown in indiana, to get his relocation gig started. sometimes, he calls tony in for emergency repairs on his arm. and sometimes, he also drags tony to summer festivals in small towns someone like tony stark would generally never step foot in. or makes a point to spend time one on one with tony when he's in new york. or pulls him along on jobs. tony is generally unaware this is going places, being mistakenly under the impression he and bucky are entering a new phase in their relationship he likes to call friends with benefits. turns out he's the last one in the room to realize he and bucky are actually dating. the what if? of that infamous fireworks date from winter soldier vol 2, where instead of it never being spoken of again, tony finds himself happily nesting in a place he's never thought to call home, with a person he's never consciously thought of that way until he turned around and had his oh moment, all while finding a surprisingly domestic little hideaway where he's allowed to take himself apart to examine his trauma and heal a little. a story of two men accepting of each other's flaws and mistakes, using their pasts as a springboard to build a better future together. verse is singleship with @involuntaryspy. [MORE]

. earth-616 / mark iii (codename: fallout) » includes invincible iron man vol 1 through invincible iron man vol 3, retrofitted to the aesthetics and lore of the fallout universe. on october 23, 2077, the dream that is the avengers died. almost. steve rogers has gone missing. tony stark is in a coma after a rescue mission gone wrong. and at 9:42 on a bright, cool october morning, an exchange of nuclear weapons begins that lasts a total of two hours and ends civilization as we know it. some two hundred and change years later, steve, newly thawed from a vault located in the massachusetts commonwealth, pulls tony out of stasis, in the ruins of stark tower, and they get back to what they do best together: avenging. and maybe do something about that unspoken thing between him and steve along the way, like it didn't take the end of the literal world to make it happen. or: how to pick yourself up after the world has literally ended and strive to continue to try to make the world a better, safer place, one settlement at a time. verse is singleship with @shieldslinger. also includes @involuntaryspy and @wolverinetm. [MORE]

. earth-8096 / mark i (codename: earth's mightiest heroes) » includes the entirety of emh, picking up after s02e26, avengers assemble. there came a day, unlike any other, when earth's mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat. on that day, they became the avengers. they've had ups and downs, bumps along the road, and faced immeasurable odds as a supergroup originally brought together by a catastrophic break out at four super prisons and the threat it posed to the world at large. they've worked out most of their growing pains, found their equilibrium, and have grown beyond the original five members into something bigger than their original goals and themselves. a lesson in learning to play well with others and realizing there are people who will help you carry the burden in making the world a better place. [MORE]

. earth-trn814 mark i (codename: marvel's avengers) » includes the entirety of crystal dynamics' marvel's avengers. cherry picks from the prequel comics and novel. a-day was supposed to be a celebration of all things avengers with the unveiling of the new terrigen reactor of the avengers' helicarrier, the chimera. instead, what they get is a disaster of epic proportions: cap's presumed dead, the world turns on the avengers, the inhumans are awakened through the release of terrigen mist from the smashing of the reactor, and the avengers to ground, some to continue the fight from the shadows, some to wallow in their grief and to lick their wounds in private. tony spends five years in one of the lowest valleys of his life, having retreated to the last piece of property he owns - a family estate gone to ruins in the southwestern deserts of the us - until he's bullied back into the fight by bruce banner, a person at the very top of his personal shit list, and kamala khan, a teenage inhuman girl with a heart of gold. and, hey, turns out cap is alive after all. so now things get to be super awkward, considering tony still has steve's jacket hung like a personal talisman next to his bed. awesome. a journey of learning how to piece yourselves back together again after you've been shattered, even if they don't fit exactly the way they did before. [MORE]

. unknown earth number / mark i (codename: starfield) » takes heavy inspiration from invincible iron man vol 1 and iron man vol 4. tony stark was a prodigal child of the stark industries empire, a leader in the development and manufacture of war munitions and technologies for the united colonies leading up and through the colonies war. toward the end, nearing the ultimate climax of confrontation on niira, his eyes are opened to the horrors the things his brain can create and he steps into bring things to as peaceful a close as possible at that point between the freestar collective and uc especially. afterward, he disappears from public life entirely for several years, hitting rock bottom, finding sobriety, and working as a miner in the oldest mine on mars, earning the tell-tale red eyes before popping back up eventually in the company of the group known as constellation, finally remembering that, at his heart, he's more than just a dusty digging up iron out of the red martian dirt. a story circling around the themes of reinventing yourself more than once to find your way back to who you really are, and reclaiming your legacy in order to make it something for the ultimate betterment of mankind, despite whatever bloody, misguided origins it may have. [MORE]

. unknown earth number / mark i (codename: elder scrolls) » takes heavy inspiration for characterization from iron man vol 4. tnathas is a dwemer. this isn't necessarily an interesting fact about him in his own mindset, no, but considering he's apparently overshot his projected exit from his lab in a pocket plane of oblivion by...several...thousand years, and his entire race has otherwise vanished under somewhat mysterious circumstances, it's kind of a big deal. which is why, once he has his wits enough about him, after taking in the situation of the current skyrim, and tamriel as a whole, he generally keeps that information to himself and lets people assume what they want about him: that he's an odd looking dunmer/altmer/bosmer. he has bigger fish to fry, first and foremost when he first reenters the world being discovering the cause of the disappearance of his people. when he frustratingly hits all dead ends on that front, he turns a more critical eye to the wider state of the world, and has to make a decision how he, the last (that he knows of, anyway) dwemer is going to leave his mark on the world. oh, and trying to find ways to wrangle his fuzzy once a month significant other as sven manages to make himself thane of every hold west of the throat of the world. a story of finding new purpose after your entire world has ended in a cataclysm of exactly one. verse is singleship with @shieldslinger. [MORE]

"Yeah. Well." Theoretically it should be somewhat eye-opening, perhaps, a reinforcement of the shift things have most definitely taken since the bombs dropped, to have anyone think this has been anything but an abject failure on his part.

It's like this: He'd been given a simple milk run of an errand, being available and being unfettered as he is, generally, in his movements, to strike out Tenpines Bluff way to touch base about a new group of raiders in the area sniffing around, obviously thinking the settlers there are easy pickings, as isolated as they seem to be. It's not even been something he's dusted off the old thumbprint lock briefcase for, because sabotaging a new group of raiders in a shitty makeshift camp in the foothills hasn't exactly been something he's considered to be Iron Man caliber; it takes too long to charge the suit components these days by generator, it just hasn't seemed worth the expenditure, and would have wasted time getting out here, besides.

And that...While maybe not exactly a mistake, is still something he feels more than a pang of regret over. To be clear, no one's died. There's nothing damaged that can't be fixed with a little elbow grease and spackle. But it's him getting a nice little wake up call in the form of them managing a small ambush on the little homestead - little more than a scouting party testing the waters of the Minutemen-flavored defenses - to remind him this isn't like the days of yore, where this kind of seemingly easy task wrapped up with the Wrecking Crew or Paste Pot Pete (well, Trapster) in jail for the night, the week, the month, without having to break much of a sweat and no real hit to the wallet, when it's all come down. Those days seem almost quaint, compared to viciousness of the raiders of the Commonwealth.

"Didn't do much good, either." What he wants, as he drops himself onto a rock down the steep hillside from the settlement, away from the bridge, is a nice, quiet place to brood in peace. He should have brought the briefcase, as one point of self-flagellation. The fact that Tenpines is isolated enough for raiders to try and set up in their backyard for another. He's going to have to move up the timetable for making something out of the old disposal grounds, see if he can't upgrade and reprogram the defective sentry bot lurking in the yard. Zimonja could use the extra security, as well; it's just as vulnerable to even small time raiders as far out as it is from anything else but Tenpines.