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P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Jaqui
OOC Journal: storyinmypocket
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope! I'm 31.
Email + IM: jaqui@livingthestories.com / storyinmypocket (AIM + yahoo)
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None whatsoever.

C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Tony Stark
Canon: Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (Marvel Earth-555326)
Original or Alternate Universe: He's an AU/possible future of Earth-616!Tony, with backstory that ties into comic canon.
Canon Point: His appearance in the comics: Avengers v4 #6. He's just been shot through the shoulder by Kang the Conquerer. In canon, he'd have just enough time to turn around before getting shot through the head, but before that happens, he'll be getting snatched up by the CREEPIEST. SPACESHIP. EVER.
Number: 043

Setting: Marvel wiki entry on Earth-555326

It used to be a world much like modern Earth, but with superheroes. Tony's setting, however, is the dystopian future of that world. Robots control everything, and NYC's been replaced by Ultra City, a robotic nightmare city that wouldn't look out of place on Cybertron (to steal an example from a completely different canon), with Ultron's robotic citadel smack-dab in the center. The remaining human population lives in the ruins of the old city, in caves, or in other remote areas where they can hide from Ultron's robots. Bruce Banner survived by hiding in the desert for a while, for instance, and Europe had only recently fallen at the start of the movie, but it's strongly implied that most of the human race is either dead or under siege.

History:

(Note: due to Tony having literally decades of backstory before his canon gets AU'ed into the animated movie, I'm trying to keep the emphasis on things that had a significant impact on Tony's personality, and am leaving out his girlfriends, a lot of stuff that happened with the Avengers, et cetera; this is more "Tony Stark's Greatest Hits" than an in-depth record of his superhero career.)

As a young boy, Tony dreamed of being King Arthur, and fantasized about building robots -- much to the disappointment of his father, Howard. Howard was brilliant, but also an abusive alcoholic. He shamed Tony for being a "little sissy boy," and bullied a four year old Tony into drinking single-malt bourbon. In response, Tony became even more quiet and withdrawn, and focused on building things with his Erector Set, preferring the simple, logical world of mechanics over his father's unpredictable moods. Howard sent Tony off to boarding school at age seven. At age fifteen, Tony was enrolled at MIT, pursuing a double major in engineering and physics. After graduating, he went to work for his father at Stark Industries, a powerful weapons manufacturer. While Howard kept pushing Tony harder and harder to take the job seriously, Tony clung to the life of a millionaire playboy, devoting all his time to high-speed hardware, gorgeous women, and the best booze he could get his hands on. But then Tony's parents died in a car crash, supposedly caused by faulty brakes in their car. Suddenly, Tony was the head of Stark Industries, and his first act was to buy the manufacturer of his parents' car, and completely overhaul their brake designs. (What Tony didn't know was that the "car accident" was nothing of the sort, but rather deliberate sabotage by one of his father's competitors.)

While he could come up with limitless inventions, however, the daily grind of running a company didn't interest Tony at all. Stark Industries had the best patents, but from an administrative standpoint, they were falling apart. Luckily for everyone, a secretary by the name of Virginia "Pepper" Potts caught an error in a government contract that crossed her desk, and corrected it, then sent a copy on to Tony, saving the company half a million dollars. Delighted, Tony promoted her to his executive assistant, and, incidentally, left most of the burden of running the company with her.

During a weapons test in Vietnam Afghanistan (Go go Gadget RETCON!), Tony was injured by one of his own landmines, and taken prisoner by terrorists who, it would later be revealed, were working for a villain calling himself the Mandarin. All Tony knew at the time was that he'd sustained a fatal wound, with shrapnel pressing against his heart, and that, if he lived, he'd be expected to build weapons for the terrorists who kidnapped him.

Held captive with him was Ho Yinsen, another scientist, who convinced Tony to use the week he had left to live to strike back at the terrorists, instead of just giving up in despair. Together, instead of building weapons for the terrorists, Tony built a rough prototype of something he'd been working on in the back of his head for some time, already: the Iron Man suit. And thanks to Yinsen's expertise, the chestplate of that suit did more than provide power to run the suit's weaponry -- it held the shrapnel away from Tony's heart, keeping him alive. Unfortunately, the terrorists were alerted to their deception before the suit could finish powering up, and Yinsen's attempt to buy Tony more time ended in his death. Unable to save a man who had become his friend and mentor in their brief time together, Tony unleashed the full might of his suit on the terrorist camp, setting fire to everything he could -- especially the piles of Stark weapons they'd stockpiled.

During his escape, he encountered a stranded Marine by the name of James Rhodes ("Rhodey"), who, after a somewhat rocky start brought about by perfectly reasonable alarm at the sight of a metal man, helped him get back to civilization. As a reward for helping "Iron Man," Tony offered Rhodes a job as his personal pilot.

Upon returning to the United States, Tony immediately set to work upgrading his armor, a process he'd obsessively continue for years, eventually developing a set of armor for just about every possible situation. He began to use the armor to fight crime and attempts at sabotage by his competitors, telling the press that Iron Man was his bodyguard.

Tony's love of fast pieces of tech almost killed him more than once -- after deciding to race his own stock car, and crashing it, his life was saved by retired boxer Harold "Happy" Hogan. Following the pattern set by his offer to hire Rhodey, Tony gave Happy a job as his chauffeur and bodyguard. Of course, that backfired a bit when Happy fell hard for Pepper Potts... and though she initially was aggressively uninterested, the degree of secrecy Tony maintained to protect his identity as Iron Man alienated them both, and drew them closer together. Eventually they got married, which sucked for Tony, as he himself had been in love with Pepper for some time.

He was a founding member of the Avengers, a team first assembled to put a stop to one of the Hulk's rampages. Made up of Iron Man, Ant-Man (Dr. Henry Pym), Wasp (Janet Van Dyne), and Thor (the Norse god of thunder), they found themselves working with the Hulk when it became obvious the Hulk's apparent mindless destruction was part of a ploy by Loki, Thor's brother and the god of chaos. The Avengers continued working as a team whenever a threat emerged that no one hero could handle alone, and shortly after their inception, they discovered Captain America (Steve Rogers) frozen in ice. They thawed him out and he joined the team, eventually becoming one of Tony's best friends.

The Avengers roster would change frequently, with Tony quitting and rejoining the team several times, but no matter how many times he left, he always found his way back to the team.

Tony was also instrumental in equipping S.H.I.E.L.D., the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. He built several of their best toys, including the iconic S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, but would later stop providing them with technology when he decided to get out of the munitions business. This led him to have a somewhat rocky relationship with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s director, Nick Fury, who both immensely respected Tony Stark (and Iron Man) and yet tried more than once to take control of Tony's company in order to get his hands on Stark weapons technology.

After Earth got caught in the crossfire of a war between two alien species, the Kree and the Skrulls, Tony realized that if different factions of superheroes had communicated more -- if there had been a group of people who could trust each other, share information, and make decisions for their respective groups -- Earth's involvement in the war might have been averted entirely. With this in mind, he created a group consisting of himself, Namor, Professor Xavier, Reed Richards, Black Bolt, and Doctor Strange. Together, they became a secret, ruling council which came to be referred to as the Illuminati. One of their first actions was to go to Kree and Skrull leaders and let them know that involving Earth in their wars wouldn't be tolerated... which sort of backfired on them, but more on that later.

Of course, there were other, more mundane threats to Tony... or more specifically, Tony's business. In addition to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s interest, there were a few other competitors who wanted Tony's company (then going by Stark International) to go under. First there were Justin Hammer's attempts to sabotage Tony when Stark International stood to gain a contract with the country of Carnelia that Justin wanted for himself: he had one of his employees build a device that allowed him to take control of Tony's armor, switching Tony's repulsor on at just the right moment to kill the Carnelian ambassador. With Iron Man branded a murderer, Tony found himself drinking more than usual just to get through the day... but eventually, the employee that had designed the device confessed, Iron Man was cleared, and Bethany Cabe, Tony's then-girlfriend, convinced Tony to stop drinking.

That wasn't to last, however. After Justin Hammer came Obadiah Stane, who systematically destroyed Tony's life. He had a team of chess-themed agents attack Tony's business, set up a woman for Tony to fall in love with and later break his heart, and engineered events so Tony would start drinking again, thereby making things worse. With his company in shambles and his personal accounts frozen, Tony began living on the streets, perpetually drunk and prone to blackouts, unable to stop Stane from taking over Stark International and renaming it Stane International.

Tony only sobered up after a woman he'd been involved with gave birth to a baby in the middle of a blizzard, only to die in the cold a few minutes later. Tony kept the baby alive, and in protecting its life, realized the value of his own. He moved to California with Rhodey (who'd taken over as Iron Man once Tony could no longer stay sober enough to operate the suit safely) and the twins Clytemnestra and Morley Erwin. Together they started a new company, called Circuits Maximus, only for Stane to bomb the building they were working out of, killing Morley and leaving Cly to blame Tony for her brother's death.

Tony, undaunted, started over again, founding Stark Enterprises and resuming his role as Iron Man after a long absence, only to discover that Spymaster had acquired some of his armor designs, and had sold them to Justin Hammer, who passed the tech on to supervillains. Tony went a little crazy in his pursuit of his tech, plagued with guilt at the harm his inventions might have caused.

Then he discovered that the modifications made to his armor were causing irreparable damage to his central nervous system, and, after multiple attempts to compensate for the damage, he finally faked his death and placed himself in suspended animation until he could be cured, with Rhodey running both Stark Enterprises and the Iron Man suit. The fact that he neglected to tell Rhodey that his death was just faked caused them to part ways on the worst possible terms later, once Tony came back.

And then, things got weird.

The villain Immortus (otherwise known as Kang the Conquerer) started corrupting Tony, brainwashing him to be his agent on Earth. Tony Stark found himself becoming a remorseless killer, and the only way to stop him was to recruit another Tony Stark -- this one ten years younger and from an alternate timeline. The adult Tony had one last act of heroism in him, sacrificing himself to defeat Immortus, and the younger Tony took over as Iron Man until he himself was apparently killed fighting Onslaught, a psionic entity born of the suppressed urges of Charles Xavier, and the negative emotions of Magneto. However, it turned out that, rather than being killed, Tony and several other heroes had been transported to a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards, Reed Richards' son. When Tony came back, he was once again an adult, and possessed the memories of both his younger self and the adult Tony who was killed by Immortus. Comics, man. What the hell.

Some time after that, Tony found himself fighting against a right-wing extremist who'd been infected with something called Extremis -- a virus of sorts which rewrote the part of a person's brain which contained a template for repairing the body when it was damaged. Extremis, for the few who survived the processes, could be used to make someone inhumanly strong, tough, and possessed of fun super-powers like the ability to breathe fire. With even his newest, shiniest set of armor utterly outclassed, and suffering injuries which would undoubtedly be fatal, Tony infected himself with a modified version of Extremis, which granted him a set of nifty powers all his own, as well as the ability to store the underlayer which his suit needed to function within the hollows of his bones. (Later, he'd upgrade himself even further, allowing the entirety of his armor to be stored inside his body.)

The Illuminati, continuing their streak of bad ideas (except for Namor, who wasn't having any, and Professor Xavier, who was missing in action), decided to trick Bruce Banner onto a spaceship and shoot him into space, hoping the Hulk find peace on some nice, uninhabited planet somewhere. This would come back to bite them later, as instead the Hulk's ship crashed onto a world on which he was enslaved and used as a gladiator. Oops.

The real trouble came when Tony was shown a copy of the Superhuman Registration Act being considered which would force all superhumans to register with the government and be formally trained in the use of their powers, or be declared outlaws. The public had become a lot less trusting of superheroes, and Tony knew that all it would take for people to grab their torches and pitchforks was for one young hero to make the kind of mistake that got innocent people killed. He hoped that by encouraging the superhero community to voluntarily come forward in support of the act, a lot of bloodshed could be prevented. He wasn't able to gather the support he needed before his worst fears came to pass -- the New Warriors, a young superhero team with their own reality tv show, tried to take down a group of supervillains in a suburban neighborhood. The resulting explosions destroyed several blocks, including an elementary school.

Suddenly, America hated superheroes, and the superheroes themselves were split, with Captain America leading the anti-registration side, and Iron man on the pro-registration side. All-out war broke out, with the pro-registration heroes trying to capture anyone who wasn't registered, and the anti-registration side trying to continue fighting crime while being hunted down and imprisoned. Meanwhile, Tony was making a lot of bad decisions: a secret prison in which anyone who didn't comply would be detained indefinitely? Sure, if it makes the world safer! Cloning Thor? What could go wrong? ...Other than the Thor clone being completely uncontrollable and killing Goliath with a blast through the chest. And not only was Tony fighting his friends, but also getting his other friends killed. Happy Hogan was left in a coma after fighting off Spymaster, who meant to use him as bait to get to Iron Man, and Pepper begged Tony to use his Extremis abilities to shut down the machinery keeping him alive, knowing that Happy wouldn't want to be kept alive in a vegetative state.

Eventually, the superhero civil war ended for one reason: Captain America saw that, even though his side was winning, they were destroying everything around them -- most importantly, the public's trust. He surrendered, and the Fifty State Initiative, giving each state its own superhero team, was launched a few weeks later. Tony was appointed Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and everything seemed to have settled down... Until Captain America was seemingly assassinated. (Spoilers: he got better.)

Tony wasn't in the greatest of mental states, but managed to hold it together for a while, even helping to set up a new team of Avengers. Of course, on the new team's first day out, a robot called Ultron got involved, because that's how things go when you're a superhero. Although Ultron was originally designed by Dr. Henry Pym to preserve law and order, he'd decided the best way to do so was to destroy humanity, and while the Avengers had faced him and defeated him through multiple upgrades, this time Ultron's latest upgrade was Tony himself. By exploiting security holes in Extremis, Ultron was able to take over Tony's body and reshape it as he saw fit, turning Tony into a silvery, naked copy of Janet Van Dyne, Dr. Pym's ex-wife. Because that's not Freudian at all. Eventually, Ultron was defeated, and Tony got his body back, but it was clear that with the new armor came brand new dangers, as well.

The Hulk, meanwhile, had gone from gladiator to king of the world he'd crash-landed on. He'd married a beautiful woman, was expecting a son... And then, he was betrayed by one of his Warbound, who'd sworn loyalty to him, but who wanted the Hulk to remain a warrior, not a king. The planet was wrecked in what was made to look like a deliberate act of sabotage by the Illuminati, and the Hulk's wife was killed. In response, the Hulk took his Warbound and headed back to Earth, where he started hunting down Illuminati members, and anyone else who'd betrayed him in the past. Angrier than ever before, the Hulk was all but unstoppable, and he attached obedience disks to the superheroes he defeated, forcing them to fight as he had in his days as a gladiator, and another of Tony's bad ideas came back to haunt him in a big way. The Hulk was only defeated when, after he showed mercy to an old friend of his, Miek, one of his Warbound, revealed that he'd been the one to cause the explosion that sent Hulk to Earth seeking vengeance.

And then there was the Skrull invasion, in which shapeshifting aliens infiltrated society at every level. Superheroes were revealed to have been Skrull infiltrators, and a virus was unleashed that shut down all Stark technology, everywhere. Not just Tony's suit and his Extremis-influenced system, but all Stark consumer goods -- and there were a lot of Stark consumer goods -- and all his remaining military hardware, including the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier. Suddenly, the name Stark was synonymous with failure, and when Norman Osborn fired the shot that killed the Skrull Queen and definitively ended the invasion, Tony found himself out of favor with the government. (It really didn't help that it was most likely the Illuminati's meddling that made the Skrulls decide to invade in secret in the first place, but at least the general public wasn't aware of that screw-up.) He lost his position as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and S.H.I.E.L.D. itself was replaced by H.A.M.M.E.R., an organization under the direct control of Norman Osborn, America's new darling.

Realizing that the superhero registration database would be too much for the former Green Goblin to resist, Tony erased all copies of the information, becoming a fugitive in the process. But thanks to the effects of Extremis, his mind had become something very like a hard drive... and that hard drive contained the last remaining copy of the registration information. So Tony did the only thing he could think of to keep that information safely out of Osborn's hands -- he erased his own mind a piece at a time, gradually becoming less and less intelligent. In the end, the entire world watched Osborn nearly beat Tony to death while Tony himself was barely functional. Osborn's true colors had been revealed, but not without a cost -- Tony himself was left effectively brain dead, unable to so much as breathe on his own.

Tony, being Tony, had planned for this, too, though. A repulsor battery he'd had installed in Pepper's chest after she'd been almost fatally injured contained just enough machine code to tell his body how to function, and as far as his mind... Well, the nice thing about hard drives is the ability to restore your data from a backup copy.

Unfortunately, Tony's last backup had taken place before the superhero civil war, and so when he came to, he had to learn the hard way just why everyone hated him. Undaunted, he founded yet another new company, Stark Resilient, and chose to stop his military work (again), focusing instead on bringing the world free, clean energy by the use of his repulsor technology, starting with electric cars. He was astonished to learn that Steve Rogers still wanted him as an Avenger, and joined the newest version of the team.

And this, right here, is where timelines definitely diverge. In this Tony's reality, the Avengers brought about a time of peace, during which the founding Avengers could settle down and have children... all except Tony, who was much happier building his babies than breeding them. The irony there would not be lost on Tony when Ultron, with some tasty new Stark tech upgrades (Headcanon note: this is the only way I can reconcile actual comics history with Tony telling the kids he built Ultron -- he felt responsible, and also didn't want to give Pym a reason to hate his father.) decided to try yet again to take on the Avengers -- and this time, he won.

Before he died, Steve Rogers asked Tony, whose armor had been damaged in the initial attack, to take the kids to safety. So Tony grabbed James Rogers, Torunn Thorsdottir, Azari T'Challa, and Henry Pym Jr. and bundled them into the quinjet, taking them to an Arctic safehouse. The one child he wasn't able to save -- Francis Barton -- was presumed dead.

While Ultron began the slow but inevitable path to world domination, Tony did his best to raise the kids. He turned the story of their parents' deaths into a kind of fairy tale, trying to leave them with the hope of being the ones who could follow in their parents' footsteps and defeat Ultron. Even as he explained, over and over, how his friends had died, he never let on that he'd been Iron Man... or, in the bedtime story version, the knight. In the climate-controlled world of the Arctic base, Tony did his best to give the children as normal a childhood as he could -- they had books and toys and games, and family meals -- while still putting them through the rigorous combat training they'd need if they were going to survive in the outside world, let alone defeat Ultron. Meanwhile, he also worked on his own projects in a secret lab beneath the base, when the kids were otherwise occupied.

Then, of course, everything went really wrong, really quickly. The Vision, one of the few remaining Avengers, had been serving as Tony's eyes and ears in the outside world, but due to damage by Ultron's robots, he appeared, not in the lab, but in James' bungalow, giving the kids their first hint that Tony was keeping something from them. Although Tony promised them answers in his own time, the kids, being young and curious, followed Tony as he helped the Vision to his secret lab. While poking around, they discovered robot doubles of their parents, which Tony had dubbed the Iron Avengers. While Pym and Azari went after Tony, James was transfixed by the sight of a robotic version of his father, wondering if Iron Captain America had his father's personality as well as his looks combat abilities. As he tried to talk to the robot, he accidentally set off the automated launch sequence, and the Iron Avengers set off on their programmed task of tracking down Ultron.

Meanwhile, Tony was busy putting the Vision back together in his lab, and listening to the entirely unexpected news that Francis Barton was still alive, when he discovered Azari and Pym eavesdropping. Moments later, the Iron Avengers' launch alert began to sound, followed by the appearance of James and Torunn. Knowing that Ultron would be able to detect the launch, he ordered the kids to take the Vision's head and get in the command center -- really, the quinjet. Knowing that Ultron would take over the unfinished Iron Avengers quickly enough, he put on his armor and went out to face Ultron as Iron Man, hoping to buy the kids enough time to escape to the Savage Land.

It was only after he'd been taken prisoner and tortured that he discovered that he was merely the bait in a trap meant to lure the kids to Ultra City, so Ultron could destroy the last remaining superpowered threats. The kids took the bait, but, with help from Francis Barton (now calling himself Hawkeye like his father, and leading a ragtag group of human rebels called the Scavengers) they were able to successfully rescue Tony, only to hear Tony take the blame for having built Ultron in the first place. Francis wasn't exactly pleased to hear this, but was won over in part by the fact that Tony clearly had known and worked with his father, years ago.

It was Betty Ross, who'd been living with the Scavengers another former Avenger who'd survived Ultron's purges: Bruce Banner, who was living in the desert, trying to keep the Hulk at bay. Bruce was less than thrilled to see Tony, however, ordering Tony and his kids to stay away, and refusing to help in the fight against Ultron, out of fear that he'd turn into the Hulk again. In response, James decided that if they couldn't bring the Hulk to Ultron, they'd bring Ultron to the Hulk, and give Bruce no choice but to change. He activated a signal that alerted Ultron to their location, and led the fight against Ultron and the Iron Avengers that were now under his control.

During the battle, Pym successfully goaded Bruce into becoming the Hulk, and, after it seemed even the Hulk was no match for Ultron, continued to goad him until he got up and ripped Ultron in half, at which point Torunn flew both halves into space, tossing them in opposite directions and nearly dying in the process. Rescued by her father, who finally decided to get off his immortal ass and do something, she was given a chance to stay in Asgard as a goddess, but instead chose to return to her real family back on Earth.

While the Hulk carried Betty Ross away, the newly (re)formed Avengers didn't have much time to enjoy their victory: Ultra City was still full of Ultron's forces, and there were a lot of robots left to destroy. Still, it seemed things were looking up for the world.

Unfortunately, things really weren't what they seemed, in this case. Within two years, Ultron had come back (possibly from an alternate universe, thanks to time-fuckery, or possibly because all Ultron's creations are programmed with the urge to rebuild him, which is the explanation I'm going for), and this time Kang the Conquerer decided to try his luck in a battle against Ultron at the height of his powers. Kang would assemble an army, be defeated, go back in time, get another army, and try again. This caused significant damage to the timestream, and trapped Tony, the Hulk, the kids, and a future Spider-Girl in a time loop with an older version of Kang, who was unable to stop his younger self from continuing to break time for the sake of the ultimate battle.

The Hulk, who had merged with Banner sometime in the past two years, had Kang go back in time to the days before the Ultron holocaust, and recruit the Avengers from the "modern" day in standard comics continuity. While in the past, Kang showed the younger Tony a doomsday device that Tony'd only just thought of designing, and warned the Avengers of the grave danger to the timestream -- danger which, he explained, was caused by their children, who would also kill him.

With wacky broken-time shenanigans happening all around them, Wolverine took Tony to meet Noh-Varr, who was operating under the name "Protector", and who knew a few things about time travel. Noh-Varr was able to confirm both the future in which the Avengers' kids existed, and the damage to the timestream, and he and the younger Tony threw together a machine that would take a small team to the future, to fix whatever was wrong with the timestream.

Tony, Wolverine, Captain America (Bucky Barnes), and Noh-Varr headed for the future, where they got to watch the latest iteration of the Kang vs. Ultron fight. While Bucky!Cap considered killing Kang outright and solving their problems that way, they suddenly found themselves attacked and rendered unconscious by the Next Avengers (or, as Tony would call them, the little Avengers). Once they came to, they found the Hulk, who was delighted to see them, and Kang, who was less so. But the biggest shock was yet to come: the younger Tony met his older self.

Knowing that Extremis just left his younger self vulnerable, Tony had the Hulk hold him still and pry the visor of his armor off, while Tony's extremely low-tech armor sprouted some nasty-looking surgical implements. It was quick and brutal, but Tony quickly patched the holes in his younger self's security, let the Extremis-enhanced healing do its thing, and then shut down anything technological inside him. The younger Tony was somewhat traumatized by this, but Tony explained the necessity, and then set to work explaining the time loop, urging his younger self to find a way to fix things, pointing out the spot in time in which it had to happen. Then the time loop restarted, throwing the "modern" Avengers back to the past, and leaving Tony to hope they'd done enough.

They had: the younger Tony and Noh-Varr immediately went to work on building the time machine for the second time, and when the Avengers made their way back to the future, it was to convince Ultron to lose when Kang came for him, for the sake of all of time. Although Ultron initially didn't see the problem, knowing that he'd obviously win against any force Kang could bring to bear, eventually they made him understand the danger to the timestream, and he elected to allow his current form to be destroyed by Kang's army.

Once the Avengers went to report back, Tony pulled his younger self aside and warned him that Ultron was going to take over the world, and the younger Tony had to stop it at all costs. He handed the younger Tony the doomsday device -- too little, too late in the current time, but possibly useful in the past -- and sent the younger Tony on his way.

With the timestream fixed, his younger self warned about Ultron, and the current version of Ultron destroyed again, one might think things were finally looking up for Tony and his kids... But then Kang decided to betray everyone, and shot both the Hulk and Tony with energy beams. The Hulk went down right away, but Tony only took a hit to the shoulder, and had just enough time to turn around before being shot in the head being snatched up by a creepy spaceship, whee!

Personality:

The first thing you have to understand about Tony Stark is that Tony/self-loathing is, was, and always will be the ultimate OTP. Oh, sure, he's been in love with Pepper Potts practically forever, has dated/flirted with/sexed up countless women, and one could most definitely put a shippy spin on his relationship with Steve Rogers, if one were so inclined... but all those relationships pale beside the perpetual flame of Tony/self-loathing. From his father's early abuse, to the realization of the harm his weapons were doing, life's conspired to teach Tony that he's just not good enough. He can pretend not to care: he's awesome at pretending, ever since his teenage years and his stubborn desire to be the billionaire playboy when his father wanted him to buckle down and work (hey, even negative attention's attention, and if he can't make his dad proud, he can at least be a disappointment with style), but deep down, he's still punishing himself for not being good enough. It's why he assumed responsibility for Ultron, why his solution to the problems of the superhero civil war, World War Hulk, and the secret Skrull invasion involved the slow deletion of his own brain, why he's always the first to take the risks no one else will. It's why he will, again and again, throw himself in harm's way -- because he's inherently wrong, because if there's a problem, it's his fault, and the most self-destructive way of solving that problem is all that he deserves.

On the other side of that particular coin, though, there's the immense hubris of which Tony's capable. He's one of the smartest men on the planet, and he knows it. And, considering his role as a futurist, he feels he's one of the people best equipped to decide the fate of the world. He'll do it with the best of intentions, and he'll torture himself for ages about the choices he makes, but he never for a moment seems to doubt that he's the one who should make them. Of course, just because he's correct in his predictions, it doesn't always make the actions he takes warranted (or, y'know, moral), and that's come back to bite him several times over. But even when his hubris ruins his life, he'll get back up and do it again, with more self-loathing, but just as much conviction that it has to be him to do it. His mistakes are his to fix, after all. Tony's trust issues also play a huge role here: as the adult child of an alcoholic, Tony's expectations of people have been shaped by his father's mood swings and unpredictable behavior, as well as a history of the wrong people getting their hands on his technology and doing terrible things with it. Best to keep the power in his hands, and in the hands of people closest to him.

Socially, Tony has a history of being charming and flirtatious where attractive women are concerned, and immensely snarky the rest of the time. He spent a long time being a sexy rich genius who was all too aware of all of the above, and it showed. These days, he still possesses some charm, but it's buried beneath a distinctly grim exterior, only peeking out here and there. Maybe it's because he hasn't had anyone to really be charming at for over a decade, maybe it's just that his world got the bad ending in the video game metaphor of life. The world ended, and it was his fault -- now all he can do is try not to screw the younger generation of Avengers up too much, in the hopes that they'll make things better.

Despite his new grimdark bent, Tony loves his kids a lot -- and yes, he does consider them his, having raised them this long, although he's reluctant to say as much to them. He's just "Tony," never "Dad," and he's okay with that. After all, it's his friends who were the kids' real parents, and he wouldn't dare try to replace them. He confesses to Betty Ross that he feels he didn't do a good enough job raising them, and really, that's his biggest fear: that he's screwed them up as much as his father screwed him up. He tries his best to be the kind of parent the other Avengers would've been (except for Thor, and his decision to abandon his daughter -- given Tony's own background, my headcanon is that Tony's desire to not give the kids reason to think badly of their parents is all that's kept him from a few angry rants on that topic, considering his own daddy issues), and works at finding ways to let the kids have fun while he teaches them what they need to know to survive in the world.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

• Genius-level intellect: He's smart. Very smart, particularly when it comes to math, physics, and engineering. He can build a fully-functional set of battle armor in a cave with a bunch of scavenged weapons, just as an example, and with a full lab, there's not much he can't build.
• Extremis/Armor: Sometimes described as a virus, sometimes as merely a process, Extremis is a nanotechnology serum which gives Tony the ability to hack the part of his brain that controls how his body heals itself, and to what specs. With Extremis active in his system, he and his Iron Man armor really are one, as the armor itself is stored in the hollows of his bones, can mimic clothing, and is controllable with a thought. The armor includes jet boots, repulsors on his hands that act both as flight stabilizers and offensive weapons, the ability to fire a similar, stronger repulsor blast from his chest plate... oh, and the armor can be reconfigured into guns, laser swords, or whatever else Tony needs it to be at the time. And since the armor's designed to interact with other systems it encounters, it effectively makes Tony a technopath, able to hack systems with his brain. He also gets enhanced strength and rapid healing, in the bargain. At the moment, however, the armor and Extremis enhancements are dormant in Tony's system for one very simple reason: the brain-hacking works both ways. A virus or hacking attempt that can get into his suit (inhumanly difficult, but not impossible) can also shut Tony himself down, or take him over... and when you live in a post-apocalyptic future ruled by an AI with a personal vendetta against you, the risks outweigh the benefits. It's implied he can still turn it on and off at will, especially as he was somehow able to patch the security holes in his younger self's armor before shutting it down, but it'll take him a while to get comfortable with the idea of having all his enhancements up and running. (Also, the nanites Tony gets when he arrives are more than welcome to mess with his system however the mods see fit. I'd like him to have his armor in an emergency, but if its capabilities are limited, that's fine by me.)
• Hand-to-hand combat: In addition to his abilities in the armor, Tony was also taught to fight by Captain America. While not a spectacular fighter, he's more than capable of holding his own against a human opponent.
• Alcoholism: Tony may have been sober for years, but once an addict, always an addict. Before the Ultron holocaust, staying away from alcohol was still a daily struggle, and even in his Arctic base, Tony undoubtedly had some very serious thoughts about fermenting fruit juice. Of course, just one drink leads to just one more drink, and then another, and before he knows it, he's waking up after a blackout with no idea what he did in the past twenty-four hours.
• Repulsor battery: There's a glowing disc embedded in the skin beneath Tony's chest, and it's all that's keeping him alive. Where once, he had to keep the chestplate of his armor charged to keep shrapnel from his heart, the current battery contains just enough machine code to tell his body how to do basic things like breathe and keep his heart beating, as he erased that data (along with everything else) from his mind a while back.

Inventory: Reading glasses, and all the tech he's got inside him. That's about it.
Appearance: Tony's on the tall side (6'1") with unkempt white hair, blue eyes, a goatee, and a decent amount of muscle for a guy his age. It's obvious he used to be handsome, but the years and the strain of living in a post-apocalyptic hellhole have taken their toll. He can sometimes be seen wearing reading glasses, particularly if it's been a while since he fired up Extremis.
Age: Canon timelines are maddeningly vague, but my best estimate is that he's around 65.

AU Clarification:

Although somewhat explained in previous sections, Next Avengers is basically the dystopian future of the 616 universe. Although it seems lighter and fluffier on the surface (Look at the cute kids and their wacky adventures!) underneath it's grim, dark, and utterly heartbreaking. This is a world in which Thor abandons his daughter without explaining why, so she can learn the virtues of self-sacrifice, and in which all of Tony's friends are either dead or assholes. It's the future where humanity lost, and Tony's been trying to make up for it ever since. Conversely, since it started in an animated movie, it's a 'verse in which Tony's been toned down a lot. No more one night stands, no threat of him drinking again... no threat of him cursing, even, because Tony very literally has to make himself suitable for children. That means a lot of the self-loathing is even more well-hidden than it is in the comics, and only comes out when he's interacting with other adults.

Certain events in the comics hint that Earth-555326 may have diverged from Earth-616 at an earlier point in time -- did 555326!Tony fail to recognize Noh-Varr because there wasn't a Noh-Varr on Earth-555326, or because he simply never would've encountered him as the Protector had Kang not started screwing with the timestream? Did this version of Tony really build Ultron, or did was he trying to spare Pym's feelings? You could argue either way, but for the sake of simplicity and a more or less coherent (HA!) backstory, I'm just going to proceed as if the timelines were identical until Kang broke time, thus changing 555326!Tony's past and sending Earth-616 in a different direction.

S A M P L E S
Log Sample:

It's only after the children are in bed that Tony makes his way down to the underground lab. For the moment, at least, he's alone with his thoughts.

Or close enough, anyway, he thinks, glancing at the robots around him. He's been building them for a while now, in secret, tweaking the failsafes, trying to cover all his bases as far as launch conditions go. If he's ever incapacitated, it'll be up to the Iron Avengers to either keep the children safe, or, as the name implies, avenge them all. ...Not that he'd planned on keeping them here forever, but now he has to wonder if it would really be that bad. He expected his loyalty to Steve to keep him going while he raised the Avengers' children, but what surprised him most was just how much he'd come to love them, and how much of their parents he saw in them.

That's another secret for him to keep, though. They've got enough to worry about without the fear that Tony only sees them as extensions of their parents' legacies. It's bad enough that they're so well suited to hand-me-down weapons and clever variations on old themes. James, for instance, doesn't need to know that Tony sometimes wonders whether he's more like his father or his mother in any particular moment, whether it's Natasha's cynicism or Steve's stubbornness coming to the fore this time. All of them deserve the chance to be more than the ghosts of their parents.

"I still haven't forgiven you for this. You know that, right?" He's talking to the robots again, and really, he should be worried... but it's not like it's new for him to talk to his creations. No, a small, traitorous part of his mind fills in, but it is new for you to be building doubles of your dead friends. You're turning into the creepy old lady with a doll for every stillbirth.

For the moment, though, he ignores the voice of reason, and keeps going. "They need someone who's good at this kind of thing," he tells Iron Captain America. "Someone who can be a father, not just..." He waves negligently at the mess around him. "I build things, Steve. I don't raise kids."

The robot doesn't answer.

"Shall I load a simulation of Captain Rogers' personality?" Jocasta asks. She sounds almost tentative, and Tony takes a moment to be impressed by just how well she was programmed -- but then, Ultron built her. It's to be expected.

Now that's irony for you... And he's tempted. Oh, he's tempted, to have Steve back, to have all of them, even if it's a pretty lie, even if it's just Jocasta with her metaphorical hand up the asses of a few robots. Keep it together. For the kids. For the future. You made a promise, remember? Out loud, he just says, "No, thank you, Jocasta," and his voice only shakes a little.

The kids will be awake in a few hours, and there's still work to be done.

Comms Sample:

[Is that Tony Stark? It seems to be, but this Tony's significantly older than either of the others who've been using that name around here before.] All right, everyone. I'm sure you're used to new people by now, so, to keep this simple, I'm Tony Stark. Yes, another one. [Just a hint of a smirk there -- he's been through enough time travel to find this all vaguely funny.]

I'll spare you the grandiose promises; if two of me aren't running this place already, one more probably won't make much difference. But the other Tonies would do me a favor and get in touch, I'd appreciate it. If nothing else, we can compare notes. And who knows? Maybe old age and cunning will end up being a useful addition to all that youth and skill we've got around here. [And now there's more than just a hint of a smirk, but can you blame him? It's been a long time since he had the chance to play to an audience.]