Iron Dawn [Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel CU]

Cereburn · May 6, 2024

I'm posting this as a request for thoughts and ideas to help me get past some indecision I've got with this story. I'm fully expecting to re-write this a few times based on feedback.

Disclaimer - All characters owned by someone else aren't mine, this is not for profit. Plot idea is mine though; if you want to use it, please ask.

More authors notes at end.
---

Iron Dawn

Chapter One: Prologue

The battle is over, but the pain sure as hell wasn't. Tony stumbled over to a piece of rubble to sit on and slumped down, leaning back against something that had a worse day than him. The stones were still on his right hand, but the power they'd released when he'd used them to defeat Thanos and his alien army had played havoc with his body and his armor. The armor around his right arm and right side of his chest was burned and damaged in ways the battle hadn't accomplished.

The tiredness was overpowering but did not stop Tony from thinking to himself. Clearly, dying in a blaze of glory didn't happen yet—If Thor puts me on a burning boat I'm gonna bring his mom back from the other side to haunt him.

He faded out a bit but could hear voices around him. Peppers' voice draws him up from the settling fugue, "It's okay, we'll be fine." He is still trying to focus on her face and hearing those words realizes she is trying to let him go, but that doesn't let him rest easy. Raising his little girl is still his job.

Trying to speak, but mumbling instead, "I know, but I'm not gonna get cheated out of a daddy-daughter dance."

In his hazed mind, he decides to try to snap again to save his life. Although he isn't thinking very clearly he definitely notices that trying to move his right hand isn't happening. Just more pain.

He calls to his AI assistant F.R.I.D.A.Y. who had replaced J.A.R.V.I.S. a while ago."Friday, we gotta go again, move the stones to the left hand."

All the people collecting around the dying man are surprised he's still alive, much more trying to keep going.

The A.I., Female Replacement Intelligent Digital Assistant Youth responded, "Boss, I've got critical failures everywhere, we can't take another burst like that, everything is shutting down already, including your organs."

Struggling to get his left hand working, he wiggles his fingers as he replies, "I can fix it, just get the stones on the working hand."

"I'd like to, but we need more power to reconfigure again"

Looking up, Tony blurrily see's Steve, still carrying Thor's hammer.

"Capcicle, I need you to hit me with some juice."

"Stark, are you nuts?"

"Probably, but that doesn't mean lightning from that hammer won't jumps start my suit, so please everyone back off and hit me."

Steve looked over at Thor who looked between them and shrugged then said, "Perhaps start small?"

Steve took up the hammer and focused, and as he swung his arm back, the hammer gathered small arcs of lightning over its surface and then he brought the hammer forward, underhanded and shot a bolt of blue-white lighting along the ground and up into Tony's feet. The bolt left a glowing red trail in the dirt that was quickly cooling.

In the suit however, the energy brought the arc reactor's radiant glow back up amid sparking on his right side. He heard Friday's surprise, "Boss it's working, power is back up over 200 percent although we're bleeding a lot of juice to damage."

"That's okay, just build me a gauntlet for the other hand and move the stones over."

As he said that, he tried to brace himself against the rubble he was leaning on then reached over with his left hand towards his right even as F.R.I.D.A.Y. moved nanites from broken parts of the suit to rebuilt a left-handed gauntlet around his hand. As soon as he touched the back of his right hand, the stones moved to his palm and started shifting around to the back of his hand, moved by nanites to the proper spots required for them to work together.

"Boss, we got the stones, but we still aren't going to make it through another burst. Are you sure you wanna do this?"

"Trust me, it's not like it could get worse."

Tony then tries to imagine himself healed, but these thoughts of being healthy are mixed in with other random memories of their fight to travel time for the stones, then other memories of his younger life watching bad 80s sci fi shows of time travel with dinosaurs, girls in deerskin bikinis and robots. He shakes his head, trying to focus on being a strong dad for his girls then with mind a' whirl; he snaps again, and the world goes white. During the flash, the stones heal him but the feedback fries a lot more of the nano-particles of his suit surrounding the stones causing the particles and the stones attached to start falling away-further dissolving the nanite made glove; but the process of his semi-coherent wish is still ongoing and as the flash fades he disappears leaving the stones to drop from the now non-existent glove into the pile of broken nanites and dirt.

----

Tony wakes up in a field of tall green, turning to slightly yellow grass. He checks himself and finds with relief that he is healed.

In his excitement, he shouts "Now so inevitable now you purple skinned smurf reject!"

It then occurs to him he can see his hands and skin, a rather youthful looking skin in fact. Looking down, he notices much of the upper half of his suit is gone, leaving essentially the center neck and chest of the suit leading down to the stomach and legs being left covered, but both arms, shoulders and helmet are gone, even his watch. Stones? Turning around and looking down shows no flashy universe altering gems laying about or under him.

His attention turns again to his surroundings; the area is fairly warm and appears to be a clear mid-morning or early evening. He isn't sure if the Sun is currently in the east or the west yet. He is in a grassy plain and he can make out a body of water, maybe a river on the opposite direction of the sun. Nothing about his surroundings look much like a recognizable landmark, although there are what are probably mountains further out on the other side of the water.

He tries to remember what happened before the flash and has glimpses of his friends, the end of the battle and the crazy things he thought of before his second snap.

"Friday, you awake?"

His young digital assistant doesn't respond.

Moving carefully, minding the sharp edges of the damage on his suit, he gets up and looks around, again observing the lack of aches and pains, like when he was young. He looks down and sees through the holes in his armor there are bits of charred shirt showing through and the light on the front of his suit is flickering and a bit dim. Hoping that isn't too indicative of the state of his reactor, he uses his neural interface and is able to get the suit to disassemble and retract into the storage space of his reactor leaving him in tattered upper clothes; burnt black shirt and undershirt. His black pants and shoes seem incongruously fine. Stark reaches through the hole in the side of his shirt and with a slurping noise takes the reactor off his chest and looks at the back of it, revealing a small status display. He can see it is in low power/repair mode, Friday is disconnected-no signal and her backup local copy is offline. The suit systems should have tried to use some of the recovered nanites to try to fix the reactor, but the power level is down to around 10 percent now; about 8 percent more than the minimum needed to keep it going. He has a gut feeling with all the weird infinity energies that were hitting his system that it needs realignment/timing adjustment to get the reactor working near full again.

He puts the reactor back on his chest to enable the neuro-interface and brings out enough nanites to create a pair of Augmented Reality glasses and puts those on. With those, Tony connects to the suit diagnostics suite and is able to see more information about the issues in the Arc reactor; a misaligned electron impeller coil and a few blown capacitors in the primary exchange buffer, but the backup buffer is working. Unfortunately, he can't use the nanites to fix the impeller while it is running as the field around the coil will kill the loose nanites if they get too close. To fully fix it will require shutting the reactor down entirely, which means the nanites aren't going to be doing any powered work while it is offline. He commands the system to use available nanites to replace the blown capacitors on the primary exchange buffer, which is far enough away from the coil to not be a problem. That repair doesn't fix the output capacity issue, but he at least has full buffering back in place in case he gets hit with any other power surges in the future. Fixing the rest will mean finding or making some very small tools, shutting down the reactor then opening it up, manually repairing the damage, which will hopefully be just a misaligned field guide for the coil and not the coil itself, then putting it back together and hoping he can get it started again. The trickiest part will be restarting it, which will require an external power source.

For now, he is leaving it in low power mode so he can use the limited tools that gives him.

He looks down at his hands again, takes his glasses off his face and spins them around to look at himself then taps the side near the hinge to take a selfie. He puts the glasses back on and has a look at himself.

"Well, hello you handsome devil, it's been a while since I've seen this face."

Looking at the image a now younger Tony fits together the scattered bits of what he can remember of the end of the battle and thinks he must have been thinking of himself when he was a teenager in the 80s as he imagined being healed. In the recorded image, he sees himself at about 15 years old, but looking healthier than when he was originally at M.I.T. at that age.

Ruminating to himself outloud, "How the heck is Morgan going to deal with a dad that looks only eleven years older than she is? Will she think it's creepy? At least it won't be as weird when I watch cartoons with her."

Looking around again and remembering Thundarr the Barbarian, he says to himself, "There better not be actual cavemen around here. Hmm…I wonder if Thundarr and Thor are related?"

Tony doesn't know it yet, but he is still on the east coast, in what was once New York state, physically the same place where he snapped before. For purposes of this story, Avengers base is in upstate New York southwest of Grassmere farms, east of the Hudson river. West of highway US-9.

Iron Dawn

Chapter One

The battle is over, but the pain sure as hell wasn't. Tony stumbled over to a piece of rubble to sit on and slumped down, leaning back against something that had a worse day than him.

Clearly, dying in a blaze of glory didn't happen yet—If Thor puts me on a burning boat I'm gonna bring his mom back from the other side to haunt him.

He faded out a bit, but could hear voices around him. Peppers' voice draws him up, "It's okay, we'll be fine." He is still trying to focus on her face and hearing those words doesn't let him rest easy. Raising his little girl is still his job.

"I know, but I'm not gonna get cheated out of a daddy-daughter dance."

He decides to try to snap again to save his life, although he isn't thinking very clearly he definitely notices that trying to move his right hand isn't happening. Just more pain.

"Friday, we gotta go again, move the stones to the left hand."

Everyone around him is surprised he's still alive, much more trying to keep going.

"Boss, I've got critical failures everywhere, we can't take another burst like that, everything is shutting down already, including your organs."

"I can fix it, just get the stones on the working hand."

"I'd like to, but we need more power to reconfigure again"

Looking up, Tony blurrily see's Steve, still carrying Thor's hammer.

"Capcicle, I need you to hit me with some juice."

"Stark, are you nuts?"

"Probably, but that doesn't mean lightning from that hammer won't jumps start my suit, so please everyone back off and hit me."

Steve looked over at Thor who looked between them and shrugged then said, "Perhaps start small?"

Steve took up the hammer and focused, and as he swung his arm back, the hammer took on lightning over it's surface and then he brough the hammer forward, underhanded and shot a bolt of lighting along the ground and up into Tony's feet.

The energy surged through the suit and brought the arc reactor back up amid sparking on his right side. He heard Friday's surprise, "Boss it's working, power is back up over 200 percent although we're bleeding a lot of juice to damage."

"That's okay, just build me a gauntlet for the other hand and move the stones over."

As he said that, he tried to brace himself against the rubble he was leaning on then reached over with his left hand towards his right even as F.R.I.D.A.Y. rebuilt a left handed gauntlet around his hand. As soon as he touched the back of his right hand, the stones moved to his palm and started shifting around, moved by nanites to the proper spots.

"Boss, we got the stones, but we still aren't going to make it through another burst. Are you sure you wanna do this?"

"Trust me, it's not like it could get worse."

Tony then tries to imagine himself healed, but these thoughts of being healthy are mixed in with other random memories of their fight to travel time for the stones, then other memories of his younger life watching bad 80s sci fi shows of time travel with dinosaurs, girls in deerskin bikinis and robots. He shakes his head, trying to focus on being a strong dad for his girls then with mind a' whirl; he snaps again and the world goes white. During the flash, the stones heal him but the feedback fries a lot more of the nano-particles of his suit surrounding the stones causing the particles and the stones attached to start falling away-further dissolving the nanite made glove; but the process of his semi-coherent wish is still ongoing and as the flash fades he disappears leaving the stones to drop from the now non-existent glove into the pile of broken nanites and dirt.

----

Tony wakes up in a field of tall green, turning to slightly yellow grass. He checks himself and finds that he is healed, but his hands and skin look younger. It then occurs to him he can see his hands and skin and notices much of the upper half of his suit is gone, leaving essentially the center neck and chest of the suit leading down to the stomach and legs being left, but both arms, shoulders and helmet are gone.

His attention turns again to his surroundings; the area is fairly warm and appears to be a clear late morning or early evening. He isn't sure if the Sun is currently in the east or the west yet. He is in a grassy plain and he can make out a body of water, maybe a river on the opposite direction of the sun. Nothing about his surroundings look much like a landmark, although there are what are probably mountains further out on the other side of the water.

He tries to remember what happened before the flash and has glimpses of his friends, the end of the battle and the things he thought of before his second snap.

"Friday, you awake?"

His young digital assistant doesn't respond.

Moving carefully, minding the sharp edges of the damage on his suit, he gets up and looks around, again observing that he feels very good, like when he was young. He looks down and sees through the holes in his armor there are bits of charred shirt showing through and the light on the front of his suit is flickering and a bit dim. Hoping that isn't too indicative of the state of his reactor, he uses his neural interface and is able to get the suit to disassemble and retract into the reactor nano-storage leaving him in tattered upper clothes; burnt black shirt, undershirt. His black pants and shoes seem incongruously fine. Stark reaches through the hole in his shirt and with a slurping noise takes the reactor off his chest and looks at the back of it, revealing a small status display. He can see it is in low power/repair mode, Friday is disconnected-no signal and her backup local copy is offline. The suit systems should have tried to use some of the recovered nanites to try to fix itself, but power level is down around 10 percent now; about 7 percent more than the minimum needed to keep it going. He has a gut feeling with all the weird infinity energies that were hitting his system that it needs realignment/timing adjustment to get the reactor working near full again.

He puts the reactor back on his chest to enable the neuro-interface and brings out enough nanites to create the AR glasses and puts those on. With that, Tony connects to the suit diagnostics suite and is able to see the issues in the Arc reactor; a misaligned electron impeller coil. Unfortunately he can't use the nanites to fix it while it is running as the field around the coil will kill the loose nanites if they get too close. To fully fix it will require shutting the reactor down entirely, which means the nanites aren't going to be doing any powered work while it is offline. To fix it will mean finding or making some very small tools, opening it up, manually repairing the damage, which will hopefully be just a misaligned field guide for the coil and not the coil itself, then putting it back together and hoping he can get it started again. The tricky part will be restarting it, which will require an external power source.

For now he is leaving it in low power mode so he can use the limited tools that gives him.

He looks down at his hands again, takes his glasses off his face and spins them around to look at him then tabs the side near the hinge to take a selfie. He puts the glasses back on and has a look at himself.

"Well hello you handsome devil, it's been a while since I've seen this face."

Looking at the image Tony fits together the scattered bits of what he can remember of the end of the battle and thinks he must have been thinking of himself when he was a teenager in the 80s when he imagined being healed. In the recorded image, he sees himself at about 15 years old, but looking healthier than when he was at M.I.T. at that age.

Looking around again, he says to himself, "There better not be actual cavemen around here."

Tony doesn't know it yet, but he is still on the east coast, in New York state, physically the same place where he snapped before. For purposes of this story, Avengers base is in upstate New York southwest of Grassmere farms, east of the Hudson river. West of highway US-9.

----

Chapter 2 Preview

Half an hour later, Tony figured out a few more things about his situation. One, the sun is going higher, so it's morning and the river is to the West. Also, this field is more than just grass, he sees several other species of small bushy plants, some with berries even, but botany was never his specialty; he could dance around a conversation on microbiology and nano-anatomy, but farming for him never made it past the tractor motors.

Moving towards the river, he was also going through his tool inventory in his glasses on what he could make with the few nanites and little bit of power he had left. Specifically, he needed to survive and find civilization; so knives and sensors.

Luckily he had some nanosized electronic signals equipment in his reactor, mostly to talk to F.R.I.D.A.Y. and his other equipment, but no reason it can't be configured to find other signals. Funnily enough, there were plenty of those. He even found signals that looked like GPS, but judging by the error message he got when trying to use it, the communication protocol wasn't the same as either American or European civilian GPS. It did have closer relations to American military encrypted GPS, but he did not want to dedicate too much of his current meager power to decrypting that yet. Maybe later if it becomes more critical.

Right now, old school seems to be the way to go – follow the river.

He was still pondering the other signals he was intercepting though, many of them were small packet bursts, but judging from some of the closer ones, perhaps a mile on the other side of the nearest hill, they were moving around. Some of the packets being intercepted were definitely starting with the same headers, either destination or sender; he wasn't sure yet. He really wished his A.I. assistant were online to help with this; but it did keep his mind busy while he walked.

After about 30 minutes, he arrived at the edge of a fairly wide river, it much reminded him of the Hudson actually. Looking around the shoreline, he spotted some signs of civilization, colored bits of plastic showing through, but buried in the dirt. He grabbed several bits, but the parts closest to the surface crumbled as he pulled. He dug down a bit more and managed to get out a bigger piece, but it wasn't really recognizable as any specific thing; could have been anything from a part of a chair to a piece of car dashboard. He flung it back down towards the water where he saw the edge of a rectangular something colored a mixed green and rust. He walked over to it and pulled, it was stuck a bit, so he ended up kneeling in the moist, sandy dirt and dug around it recognizing the shape to be what looked like a road sign. As it came up, he was able to read some of it.
Attempting to decode it; What have we got here, an 'M' then 'c'or maybe an 'o' , 'r', 't'. Hmm, next letter seems caved in but oh, an 'n', a space; is that a P or an R? And a d. Mcrnted? Morted? Tony realized what this was, "Morton Road." He dropped the sign in shock then Tony spun around again, yup, mountains to the west of the river which was to the west of us. "My God, I'm still in New York." Morton road ran up to and through part of the Avenger compound next to the Hudson. Tony thought to himself, but if I'm still here, where the hell is everyone else? Or, this thought chilled him, when are they?

----
Going back to his glasses, he brought up saved maps of the area around the Avengers compound in upstate New York. Looking through options on where to go; New York is at least a days walk maybe more, Rhinebeck village, that's just a few miles north east; assuming it's still there.

Several miles later where he was hoping to find a village, he found nearly nothing remaining but grass and dirt mounds. A few of those had what used to be bricks or concrete poking out of the dirt, but nothing else. The electronic signals he'd been tracking earlier and moved further north west while he was going north east.

Oddly, he did find some tracks in some areas that reminded him of big chickens; this caused him to snort until he remembered that chickens ultimately were descended from dinosaurs; and these tracks would be chickens the size of Shetland ponies.

Looking through his tools, he decided to use the nanites to remake a glove he'd invented for Morgan. A fingerless glove with metal detectors built in for combing the beach for jewelry and coins. Hopefully he can find some metal left over to make a weapon or two.

Cereburn · May 6, 2024

Additional notes:
This is also crossposted to AO3 Iron Dawn
Spoilers

The arc I had in mind was for Tony to hit the HZD world pre-space virus.
He finds some working ruins with power to get his reactor working and then boots up a backup copy of F.R.I.D.A.Y. stored in his arc reactor. He also finds a Faro Focus and manages to dig into how that works.
Next he starts really working on getting new nanites made for his suite then interacting more with the people around him and the machines.
He eventually gets into a cauldron and talks to Gaia via her sub-function Hephaestus who isn't a separate AI at that point. They also get introduced to Friday
Because he isn't one of the kids born from Eleuthia, she reasons she can communicate with him openly and doesn't fall under the restrictions for the re-born humans.
Not long after they get to talking, the virus hits, but Hephaestus, now awake remembers Tony and asks him for help. Tony and Friday help Hephaestus get better control over himself instead of being set to make killer machines to defend his part of the system. They then discuss what is left of Gaia and what they think happened. Hephaestus doesn't know about what was started with Eleuthia.
Tony ends up trying to get into other sites Hephaestus knows about, but some are blocked because he doesn't have clearance and while Friday says she can hack the doors, it'd take a few years.

I haven't mapped out when Tony and Aloy meet, but I figure to write several "just missed" scenes where one was there just before/after the other. Just getting Tony into Nora lands without being attacked will need to be a bit of a plot point. When they do meet, I figure Tony wlll be about 32(he is de-aged to about 15 now) and Aloy will be right before or after the proving.

Them joining forces allows alot of skipped scenes from HZD as I'm planning that Tony will have dug into alot of that already.

I've not yet mapped out Sylenz and Tony interactions or when they'd become aware of each other.

ArsMagna1337 · May 6, 2024

Cereburn said:
snip

You should put this in a Spoiler.

The code: [spoiler=title here][/spoiler]

Cereburn · May 7, 2024

ArsMagna1337 said:
You should put this in a Spoiler.

The code: [spoiler=title here][/spoiler]

done

Yeetboi · May 10, 2024

Interesting start. I'm looking forward for more.

Cereburn · May 11, 2024

Ok - I've done a bit of a re-write on Chapter one and started Chapter two.

Constructive feedback appreciated.

Cereburn · May 11, 2024

Author notes - Warning spoilers

After a bit of evaluating - I'm aiming the Aloy relationship to eventually be father/daughter. They will fill in for missing Rost and Morgan. No Aloy/Tony shipping

I'm also sticking with the original origin on East coast - This is starting a few years before the signal and 18ish years till the proving and probably they meet a month later.
This is, of course, up in the air. I'm also considering Tony gets there earlier and setting him up with Rost on his death seeker quest then they rejoin later after Rost adopts Aloy.
Alot of this is going to depend on how I put together a pre-signal Gaia and Tony meeting and how that changes the story downstream.

gaouw · May 11, 2024

Very nice.

Thank you for the re-write.

Tho maybe next time keep the old version, and post a new one.

Can't wait for the next chapter.

Keep up the good work.

Cereburn · May 11, 2024

Chapter 2

Half an hour later, Tony figured out a few more things about his situation. One, the sun is going higher, so it's morning and the river is to the West. Also, this field is more than just grass, he sees several other species of small bushy plants, some with berries even, but botany was never his specialty; he could dance around a conversation on microbiology and nano-anatomy, but farming for him never made it past the equipment.

Moving towards the river, he was also going through his tool inventory in his glasses on what he could make with the few nanites and little bit of power he had left. Specifically, he needed to survive and find civilization so knives and sensors.

Luckily he had some nanosized electronic signals equipment in his reactor, mostly to talk to F.R.I.D.A.Y. and his other equipment, but no reason it can't be configured to find other signals. Funnily enough, there were plenty of those. He even found signals that looked like GPS, but judging by the error message he got when trying to use it, the communication protocol wasn't the same as either American or European civilian GPS. It did have closer relations to American military encrypted GPS, but he did not want to dedicate too much of his current meager power to decrypting that yet. Maybe later if it becomes more critical.

Right now, old school seems to be the way to go – follow the river.

He was still ponding the other signals he was intercepting though, many of them were small packet bursts, but judging from some of the closer ones, perhaps a mile on the other side of the nearest hill, they were moving around. Some of the packets being intercepted were definitely starting with the same headers, either destination or sender; he wasn't sure yet. He really wished his A.I. assistant were online to help with this; but it did keep his mind busy while he walked.

After about 30 minutes, he arrived at the edge of a fairly wide river, it much reminded him of the Hudson actually. Looking around the shoreline, he spotted some signs of civilization, colored bits of plastic showing through, but buried in the dirt. He grabbed several bits, but the parts closest to the surface crumbled as he pulled. He dug down a bit more and managed to get out a bigger piece, but it wasn't really recognizable as any specific thing; could have been anything from a part of a chair to a piece of car dashboard. He flung it back down towards the water where he saw the edge of something mixed green and rust colored. He walked over to it and pulled, it was stuck a bit, so he ended up kneeling in the moist, sandy dirt and dug around it recognizing the shape as what looked like a road sign. As it came up, he was able to read some of it. What do we have, an 'M' then 'c'or maybe an 'o' , r, t, next letter seems caved in but oh, an 'n', a space; is that a P or an R? And a d. Mcrnted? Morted? Tony realized what this was, "Morton Road." He dropped the sign in shock then Tony spun around again, yup, mountains to the west of the river which was to the west of us. "My God, I'm still in New York." Morton road ran up to and through part of the Avenger compound next to the Hudson. Tony thought to himself, but if I'm still here, where the hell is everyone else? Or, this thought chilled him, when?

Going back to his glasses, he brought up cached maps of the area around the Avengers compound in upstate New York. Looking through options on where to go; New York is at least a days walk maybe more, Rhinebeck village, that's just a few miles north east; assuming it's still there.

----

Several miles later where he was hoping to find a village, he found nearly nothing remaining but grass and dirt mounds. A few of those had what used to be bricks or concrete poking out of the dirt, but nothing else. The electronic signals he'd been tracking earlier and moved further north west while he was going north east.

Oddly, he did find some tracks in some areas that reminded him of big chickens; this caused him to snort until he remembered that chickens ultimately were descended from dinosaurs; and these tracks would be chickens the size of Shetland ponies.

Looking through his tools, he decided to use the nanites to remake a glove he'd invented for Morgan. A fingerless glove with metal detectors built in for combing the beach for jewelry and coins. Hopefully he can find some metal left over to make a weapon or two.

Fortunately, 'printing' the glove from his remaining nanites at the correct size for his hand instead of Morgan's took little time to setup through his AR glasses. The designs were already in storage, just a little tinkering to get the features he wanted into an existing framework and he'd be good to go. Looking at the designs he found no need to remove the sonic disabler or the flash emitters. He also layered in another set of EM multi-wavelength antennas, a system from his regular suit into an arm bracer connected to the glove and a sleeve to connect it up the arm then over his chest and into the reactor for power. His previous watch had a micro-reactor, but he did not think he had enough power onboard to start another micro-reactor.

Using his new metal detector, Tony started walking around the former village again occasionally finding rusting bits of sheet metal or rebar below a few inches of dirt or behind some crumbling concrete sticking from a few of the dirt mounds. Remembering that the town had a boat dock and some boating workshops that way, he headed back to the Hudson hoping to find some buried tools.

On the way there, he found himself standing on the remains of an old stone small bridge going over a small drainage ditch. The ditch itself was almost completely filled in, but the bridge looked like it'd fallen in recently, some of the stones showing fairly "fresh" sides without as much weathering.

Going down into the ditch, bypassing the fallen bridge, which once would have been deep enough to help deal with season flooding, but now was only about 4 feet deep and 10 wide, his glove metal sensors started going alerting him to a nearby large mass of metal. His EM sensors also registered very small amount of some power source in the rubble.

He reached down and started shifting some of the ancient stones, one at a time until he found something unexpected a few bricks in, something that looked like a metal tail. Poking at the tail a few times elicited no reaction from it. He hovered his bracer over the tail and while the emissions from the power source were stronger, waving it seemed to indicate that was deeper in the rubble.

Continuing to excavate a brick at a time, he eventually found a metal foot that matched the tracks he'd seen. The foot was not entirely metal, clearing the debris further revealed the ankle and lower leg where he made out what appeared to be muscles and tendons, but made of what appeared to be metalized plastics. Bits of powder around the crushed knee also looked like crushed ceramics that had been coating the joint. This was definitely an interesting bit of technology and moved along lines of research he had done in the past for his suit and other technologies.

After about an hour, he finally had the whole carcass revealed. It appeared to be a robotic biped with digitigrade legs and claws, a low slung trunk and a flexible neck with a large armored lens for a head. The lens itself was crushed along with parts of the neck. Doing a bit of an improvised autopsy, Tony found a small power source attempting to drive a pump, but it was burning out with no more fluid to pump as many the 'muscles' being fed by that pump were ruptured and had leaked whatever fluid was being used by this thing for blood. Tony closely examined the power source, which looked like a chemically powered reactor slowly burning away the last of it's fuel. The fuel seemed to be glowing green. He was alarmed for a moment, but the radiation detectors in his reactor shell did not show any dangerous levels coming from his current location. He did recall noticing earlier they were elevated from what he considered normal at home, but even here next to the glowing stuff it wasn't higher than what he'd seen from where he'd woken up. Taking a bit of a risk and smelling the a bit of it on his finger, he thought it smelled a bit like guano mixed with jet fuel. Wiping his finger off in the dirt, he resolved to be careful about sparks around the glowing soup leaking from the chemical reactor in this thing. Speaking of potential sparks, he followed the output power lines coming from the reactor towards the spine of the creature and found it branched much like he'd expect to see in other terrestrial animals; clearly this thing's design was inspired by living creatures. Eventually he found that behind the 'eye' of the unit below the head armor was what looked like a processing system, but instead of a brain, he found a bit of a cuboid lump, a bit like several old school processors built into a boxy 3D processor surrounded by power and data lines coming from the eye and the body into an interface for the 'brain'.

Intrigued, he traced the power cable from the brain back towards the body a bit until he found where it had been crushed and severed. Quickly looking up and generating a sharp cable cutter from his design bank, he traced back to an undamaged section of cable and cut through it cleanly. He then dissected the cable and found a mix of wire and fiber optics bundled together. He opened a notes file in his glasses and taking pictures and annotating them, he documented what he could find of how the body worked as well as likely operating voltages. While doing this he also found that some extra lines in the spine seemed to act as antennas. Measuring them he made some educated guesses as to the radio frequencies this guy was likely using to communicate on and added that to his notes.

Again going through the corpse of this metal beast, he commented excitedly "Hey there you little beauty!" Found in the dissected pump, he found titanium seals around the pump, which he was able to strip. "Now let me find a little gold and I can start harvesting this to make more nanites!"

Finally before leaving the corpse, he also found a few small bits of armor that looked like guitar picks. Having no guitar, he decided to keep them anyway as they were the right size to use a small cutting or scraping edges instead of messing up his nails. He put those into the pockets of his pants along with the titanium seals he found from the 'heart.'

Finally arriving at the beach, he started walking back and forth along the shoreline waving his gauntlet back and forth hoping to find buried trea…er…tools.

While doing this, he managed to scare out his first sight of wildlife, getting too close to a bush and a flash of furry jumping led to a startled yelp from Tony and a medium sized black rabbit leaping away quickly.

"Was dat a Wabbit" the cartoonish jump scare struck him as funny until his stomach rumbled, reminding him it was getting well out of the morning and towards noon. Calling after the rabbit, he should "Just you wait my hopping McRibs, I'll get you yet"

It was also about this time that Tony realized he did not know how to actually catch a rabbit.

----

Chapter 3 Preview
Catching lunch took new importance over searching for tools as did making clean water.

The clean water part didn't seem overly complicated, get some water from the river and boil it. While he did not have anywhere near normal power, he could certainly crank out enough to do that, thank God he had a reactor and not a battery as long as he was in a place with strong enough gravity, his reactor would turn it into power. That being said, there's no reason he couldn't just get some wood and start a regular fire like proper campers. Speaking of camping, he'd also need shelter soon. He definitely did not have enough nanites to put his suit back together, although he could do an insulated pancho. That might have to make do.

Tony's brought his mind back to the rabbit, no carrots equals no bait so it's time to figure out how to hunt.

Cereburn · May 11, 2024

Ok, Chapter 2 fleshed out and a bit of Chapter 3 for ya.

Daonexus · May 11, 2024

Cereburn said:
Ok, Chapter 2 fleshed out and a bit of Chapter 3 for ya.

Great chapter

Cereburn · May 12, 2024

More notes on Arc reactor
Don't really consider this a spoiler

Iron man 1 reactor was estimated by Tony at 3 gigajoules / second
That math works out to roughly 10.8 Terawatts/hour
1 Joule/s = 1 Watt/sec
3 GJ/sec * 3600 seconds = 10800 GJ/hour

Average microwave uses 1 kw/hour
Average 2-ton home central HVAC uses about 1.3 kw/hour
For comparison, commercial nuclear reactor capacities in the US spread between 500 to 4000 MW/h
An average double AA is 2.4 W/h (or 2400 miliW/h)
---Just for the joy of absurd math - if you could make it work with no inverter loss, about 542 AA batteries would run one 2-ton HVAC for one hour. A 65 WH laptop battery would run it for about 3 mins if you could squeeze all the watts out that fast without it catching fire.
---side note, 2022 Global power usage in terawatt hours was about 25,530 TW/h

Wiki's all agree IM2 suit with new element is more powerful, but none agree on how much.

For purpose of this story, I'm going to say it's 150 percent more juice which means 4.5 GJ/S or 16.2 TW/h. Or 0.6% of 2022 global power usage.

Something else I saw in IM 1 is that the connections from the reactor to the things plugged into it(with the exception of the magnet in his chest) all used a "glowy' wire. I've found no references to that online so I'm going to borrow from startrek and call them electro-plasma conduits; only smaller than the source material.

Cereburn · May 12, 2024

Chapter 3

Catching lunch took new importance over searching for tools as did making clean water.

The clean water part didn't seem overly complicated, get some water from the river and boil it. While he did not have anywhere near normal power, he could certainly crank out enough to do that, thank God he had a reactor and not a battery as long as he was in a place with strong enough gravity, his reactor would turn it into power. That being said, there's no reason he couldn't just get some wood and start a regular fire like proper campers. Speaking of camping, he'd also need shelter soon. He definitely did not have enough nanites to put his suit back together, although he could do an insulated pancho. That might have to make do.

Tony brought his mind back to the rabbit, no carrots equals no bait so it's time to figure out how to hunt. Looking back into his design inventory, he regretted never getting a closer look at the Wakandan spears those Dora Milaje folks carried. Not that he didn't try, but Shuri's a sharp little kid and a bit too quick with the energy blasters.

Thinking again about some of the bits of rebar he'd seen helped him decide on his choice of hunting tool; it'd be adapting a design he'd built for something much more sophisticated back home, but the bones here could work wonders with what he had available. However it wouldn't work without some additional tools so he went back into the design editing suite in his glasses and got to work on putting together a pellet mold with a built iron smelter that could be powered by his reactor.

While doing this he started walking back towards the dirt mounds with exposed concrete and rebar. Most of the rebar was worn down to the stone, although he did see a few that appeared to have shinier ends than the others less rusty and possibly recently ground off. As his new friend under the bridge did not have any grinding tools, he reminded himself to keep watch for any other models of odd robo-dinos.

With a bit of kicking and smashing loose stones against the concrete he could get at, the old brittle concrete finally crumbled away leaving access to some quite rusted, but still useable rebar.

He quickly setup a more standard gauntlet on his other hand with a cutting tool and proceeded to cut off three 10 inch sections of rebar from the broken concrete wall. He then recovered the nanites from the sensor hand and then printed the iron pellet maker with built in smelter he'd designed while walking to the dirt mound. The cylindrical pellet maker had an electro-plasma conduit leading from the unit to under his shirt which started to glow blue as it began heating up. On one end of the cylinder he fed in one of the rebar rods and watched as it began to glow orange as it fed closer into the hole in the induction powered smelter side of the pellet maker. In the other end he could hear the new pellets dropping into the screw on hopper on that end. After one bar, the yield on pellets ended up being about 20 half inch pellets, each about one quarter inch in diameter, shaped much like a .22 caliber bullet. He then shut down the pellet maker and recalled the nanites again and checked his power levels.

So far the last few changes in creating and recalling the nanites had used up about one percent of the output from his reactor, but it was recovering back quickly so he saw no need to slow down right now. He then switched to the other design he'd worked on, a gauntlet with bracer that had a 12in barrel attached to the bracer surrounded by miniaturized electro-magnets and a series of capacitors with a small magazine about 5 inches long for the pellets pointing at a tangent from the bracer, relatively down when his arm is pointing forward.

With this on his right hand, he ejected the spring loaded magazine with his left then started loading it from the pellets he dumped from the hopper. The full magazine had 16 pellets leaving four to put in his pocket for later and make a reminder that the next magazine should be an inch longer. He then held out the gauntlet and started working on tying the aiming system into his AR glasses instead of the helmet he did not have at the moment.

After a few test shots at another bit of crumbling brickwork on another mound, he was happy with the results. Nearly 700 ft/s according to his sensors. The soft iron would never be a great armor penetrator, and couldn't be accelerated too aggressively to avoid it deforming in the barrel, but it should be plenty for the rabbit, or now named, future lunch.

Sadly, on a clear day such as this one, turning on IR mode on his glasses wasn't super helpful as everything was washed out with the light from the sun. He'd need to be still and watchful. Honestly, not his best skillset, but he was hungry, so he waited. Then he started browsing his notes again and wishing for his lab to take apart the materials on the giant robo-eyeball he'd found. When he finally noticed movement again, it was already too late. As soon as he turned his head, the rabbit was off again. The few shots following the bounder found the ground instead of fur. Disappointed, he looked around for another spot to camp and watch from, this time picking a spot behind a bush on one of the hills. And so he waited. Again. And refused to get distracted by pulling up his notes again.

After about an hour and a half, he spotted movement from the corner of his eye, but this time, not a rabbit. Ok God, if you let me make this shot, I promise I'll restart the Thanks Giving holidays. Slowly, Tony took aim at the cautious big black and brown feathered turkey wandering into the low area between the mounds. As the Turkey bent over to peck at a bug or something in the grass, Tony shot twice and hit both times.

"Yes!" His sudden shout scared former-lunch out of a bush, but that's fine, lunch was being replaced by turkey dinner, amen!

While Tony had never been a boy scout, he had spent some time at Barton's farm and seen how they turned chicken into chicken dinner; so he attempted to do the same. First he built a fire using found wooden branches from around the area, even a few small logs which he got started by hitting it with a little plasma from an EPS conduit. He also used a few branches to make a spit over the fire. He then used his nanites to make a metallic bag, filled it with water and hung it over the fire until it boiled. He pulled the bag off the fire to the side and put the bird into the bag for about 30 seconds then pulled it back out again and started pulling feathers. You know, I wasn't expecting your size to be mostly fluff, he thought at the now much smaller bird in his hands. Next, he used a nanite made knife to cut off the parts of the legs he wasn't going to eat, the head/neck and then opened up the back to empty out the organs into a pile well away from where he was going to continue cooking. Next the bird went into the bag again for a rinse then onto the spit and over the fire. While the bird started cooking, he emptied the bird sized bag of water and then resized it using the nanites to one with about a gallon of volume then refilled it from the river and set it on the edge of the fire to boil again, but this time for drinking water. Sadly, no coffee.

Even without butter, salt and pepper, hunger, he found, made the best spice. It was delicious, parts were a bit burnt; he could have been more consistent with the turning the spit thing, but for a first attempt, not bad at all. He ate about half the small turkey and then cut the other parts into thin strips and set them on rocks on the edge of the fire to dry out and hopefully become jerky. He wasn't sure if it'd work without salt, but he had to work with what he had. It did occur to him to make a vacuum bag from his nanites, but he might need those nanites at a less convenient time.

While waiting for the jerky to dry, he reloaded his pellet gauntlet and began thinking again about where to resume his search for buried tools or if he should move on to another site.
---

Chapter 4 Preview
Tony ended up staring at his map of the town again and trying to fix his position on the map by comparing the dirt mounds to where buildings had previously been. Then walking to where the boat shops used to be, he found himself walking into the water. Clearly the Hudson had shifted and swallowed up the shore-based shops.

He briefly considered designs for a diving mask but gave up on it as the Hudson was still too murky to consider attempting underwater salvage with the tools on-hand. It's time to find another possible location, so he looked at the map again and reconsidered a trip to New York. It'd be a bit more than a day, but with some food with him, he could make it.

He reused some nanites again to make a backpack with three compartments, one for the water he'd boiled and the other for the two rebar rods and odds and ends he'd picked up and the final for the dried turkey jerky he'd made next to the fire. He threw dirt over the fire to put it out then As it was now late afternoon, he got ahead and started walking south towards where New York should be.

Cereburn · May 12, 2024

Chapter 3 is up.
As some folks might have noticed from my other comments, I'm trying to be faithful to Ironman MCU canon on what his abilities are, but not making his tools OP. With the nanites and that reactor, even in low power mode, it's going to end up as a mcguffin and I'm trying to avoid that.
Anyone have ideas in that direction?

Cyrus2 · May 12, 2024

Definitely an interesting fusion, I feel like Tony would enjoy some of the tech from HZD once he really gets set up.

Aspriles · May 12, 2024

If canon mcu makes Tony overpowered, then maybe increase the power of Zero Dawn? A Thunderjaw with all it's firepower should by all rights be like a god on earth, yet people with bows and spear can take one down? Even enhanced with Blaze, or shock, or cold. It still stretches credulity.

gaouw · May 12, 2024

Aspriles said:
If canon mcu makes Tony overpowered, then maybe increase the power of Zero Dawn? A Thunderjaw with all it's firepower should by all rights be like a god on earth, yet people with bows and spear can take one down? Even enhanced with Blaze, or shock, or cold. It still stretches credulity.

Aloy is literally the clone of the Mother of the Creator Goddess.

And I'm quite sure that Gaia also optimize her DNA and made her the equivalent of "natural born" Captain 'Murica

On the bows and spear taking down robots, there's myriad of elemental attack and traps to hold them.

And they're supposed to be hunted by a group of the most badass hunters with weeks of planning. At the very least.

Again, the MC Halo that Aloy had is making her literally the strongest, most capable hunter on the planet.

After all is said and done, the Rule of Cool said so.

Cereburn · May 12, 2024

Aspriles said:
If canon mcu makes Tony overpowered, then maybe increase the power of Zero Dawn? A Thunderjaw with all it's firepower should by all rights be like a god on earth, yet people with bows and spear can take one down? Even enhanced with Blaze, or shock, or cold. It still stretches credulity.

This is one of several soap box items I also climb up on when looking at the tech in HZD/HFW. The inability of Hephaestus to come up with real killer robots, especially when the unarmored originals were already quite skilled at killing humans, IE lions, panthers, alligators. We don't have any statistical data on how effective dinosaurs would be at killing humans, but I think most agree many dinosaurs have the tools to do it well.
One of the other soap box items I've got is why the heck is all that old tech still floating around when many of the machines are specifically made for recycling metals yet all they pray on are themselves and not all the rusty tanks, scarabs, khopehs and horuses(hori?) sitting around?

Generally, the cross over stories I enjoy most are those where the frameworks of the existing stories aren't changed, just the character, so that is definitely influencing my approach in this story, however some of the interactions I'm planning will definitely change how effective some of Hephaestus' future creations can be.
Touching back on the HZD/HFW tech that doesn't make a lot of sense, why the heck would anyone design power capacity for stuff like a blackbox to last 1000 years? In HFW you find these all buried, almost none of them in places with access to sunlight, so they are getting power only from an internal source of some kind. Given how bean counters work, I can guarantee when someone looked at how long they'd last there would have been conversations about cutting down the longevity to save money on ever single thing we find in HZD/HFW that has power that isn't plugged into geothermal or solar.
Even their magic capacitor batteries can't seem to take being exposed to air very long after being charged so why the heck are so many still showing signs of life.
I'm going to have to come up with some other mcguffin tech for HZD to try to explain it in this story. I'm thinking for black box type stuff, I'm leaning on well sealed miniature radioactive power cells of some kind. the other stuff will likely be a variably permissive electron inhibiter field or some such mcguffinry. Basically materials in a charged state are prevented from discharging when in the field and the field is powered by the minimal discharge allowed. Or something like that.

I've blathered on a bit, but did I actually address the idea? I think I put enough in there to show what I've currently got in mind, but is it enough or is Tony going to end up lasering his way through every locked door he runs into.

Oh back on the black boxes and similar- Shutting down Gaia prime's door was critical to make sure no radio waves leaked to lead the swarm there - so again, how the fuck are so many radio sources still alive 1000 years later when the swarm should have destroyed all of them? Arrgg

Cereburn · May 12, 2024

gaouw said:
Aloy is literally the clone of the Mother of the Creator Goddess.

And I'm quite sure that Gaia also optimize her DNA and made her the equivalent of "natural born" Captain 'Murica

On the bows and spear taking down robots, there's myriad of elemental attack and traps to hold them.

And they're supposed to be hunted by a group of the most badass hunters with weeks of planning. At the very least.

Again, the MC Halo that Aloy had is making her literally the strongest, most capable hunter on the planet.

After all is said and done, the Rule of Cool said so.

I've seen the DNA optimization idea touched on in other fics before and it seemed plausible, but I'm not sure about it being to the level of the super-serum/ Captain Peggy.
I actually consider a bit of it canon as one of the scans scenes indicate she is not actually a %100 percent match. just 99.9something. I tried to find the scene in youtube, but failed. When I play it again, i'll try to keep an eye out. It's entirely likely I'm remembering something that didn't happen, but till I'm proved wrong I'll hope anyway.

Gandora · May 14, 2024

Are you going to have it where he is in a hzd and marvel fusion so you can have some interactions with Tony and finding abandoned avenger buildings also it would be interesting if this was a had and marvel fusion you can have it where the world ends up like it does because of ultron

Cereburn · May 14, 2024

Gandora said:
Are you going to have it where he is in a hzd and marvel fusion so you can have some interactions with Tony and finding abandoned avenger buildings also it would be interesting if this was a had and marvel fusion you can have it where the world ends up like it does because of ultron

Nope, this is just Tony and his arc reactor transplanted into HZD/HFW. The MCU doesn't go into the future much, but the comics do and I've got no stomach to try to reconcile the Comic versions of 2060 to 3020 with HZD.

My hope with this cross over is to have fun introducing Gaia, Aloy and other characters to Tony and Friday and their tech and seeing what cross-pollinates from there. From the story I've posted so far, we are beginning to see that start with the stuff that he has seen with the watcher carcass. The I'm expecting the bigger hurdle for Tony though, is one of the same ones he's had throughout MCU, which is that he may be a genius, but he's usually an A-hole about it which rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
Writing that mix of charming and a-hole is something that is going to be a challenge for me and I'm honestly expecting feedback to send me to the drawing board with it a few times.

Thanks for your feedback and ideas.

Cereburn · May 15, 2024

Next chapter is not ready yet, Tony's going to finally run into people, and I've got to write them and enough notes to keep them separate in my head.
Making OC people is harder than I thought.
Should have something post-able by this weekend.

Also, I've gone back and added more edits to previous chapters, will likely be reposting those when I get ready to do Chp 4. Mostly typo fixes, but also added a little more content in chapter 1. If you don't re-read, you won't be missing much; but it was important to me to add it.

Also, I want to toss out a question to folks to invite feedback. How should pre-signal HZD creatures act towards people? Also, we know that some of the machines are only created post signal, the Sawtooth is specifically called out in canon as being new when Aloy and Rost are at the North gate village. Which creatures are the ones that always existed pre-signal?
My list of pre-signal creatures right now is:
Tallnecks, Watchers, Scrappers, Glinthawks, striders, grazers, broadhead, tramplers, shell-walkers, snapmaws, behemoths, lancehorn, plowhorn, widemaw, tide-ripper, sunwing, water wing, rockbreaker, scrounger
Post signal beasts:
Sawtooth, spikesnout, clawstrider, ravager, stalker, fanghorn, clamberjaw, bristleback, bilegut, slitherfang, dreadwing, stormbird, grimhorn, scorcher, shellsnapper, slaughterspine, tremortusk, fireclaw, frostclaw

I've probably missed some creatures from this list.

Thoughts?

gaouw · May 15, 2024

IIRC, pre-Aloy creature will still defend themselves when hunted.

So while there should be less purpose-built "hunter" robot, their programmed behavior shouldn't differ that much compared to post-Aloy.

This, in turn, will make it easier for you to write.

Just, don't make it too difficult for yourself.

Cereburn · May 16, 2024

Chapter 4: Rollin' by the River

Tony ended up staring at his map of the town again and trying to fix his position on the map by comparing the dirt mounds to where buildings had previously been. Then walking to where the boat shops used to be, he found himself walking into the water. Clearly the Hudson had shifted and swallowed up the shore-based shops near Rhinebeck.

He briefly considered designs for a diving mask but gave up on it as the Hudson was still too murky to consider attempting underwater salvage with the tools on-hand. It's time to find another possible location, so he looked at the map again and reconsidered a trip to New York. It'd be a bit more than a day, but with some food with him, he could make it.

Carefully considering the amount of nanites he had left and how much he'd used for his smelting, He looked through some existing designs, and not realy finding any, he set to work with the design tool to scavenge sections of other design to make what would essentially be a backpack. He copied the back inner frame from the suit, separated it from the powered frames and then added additional materials to make it rigid instead of flexible. Two stronger vertical pipe frames on either side of that back section then a cap on the 'out' side gave him enough room to now copy in the computer hardware needed there. Some additional tweaks later and he executed the command to redeploy some nanites again to make a modular backpack, the main support plate will have enough processing and RAM capacity to boot up F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s backup as well as several of the sensors and communication systems usually integrated with the suit. Normally these were distributed in the suit around his back and waist, now they'd be consolidated between the main support frames for the backpack with additional sensors in the straps that will go over his shoulders. The rest of the backpack will have three modular compartments, one for the water he'd boiled with a sipping tube and the other for the two rebar rods and odds and ends he'd picked up and the final part for the dried turkey jerky he'd made next to the fire. This left him with enough nanites for two sets of gloves and bracers and some thin greaves; maybe some low powered jump boots, but that'd be pushing it. He either needed to find enough materials to create new nanites or make some non-nanite based tools and equipment to hold his junk. Looking at his shiny backpack, he went back into the software again and applied a thin layer of nanite as flat black paint. He wasn't ready to be flashy yet.
With the backpack on, he started the process to get his young assistant online.
"Good afternoon, Boss." After a moment, she then said, "Have we now gone camping?"
He threw dirt over the fire to put it out as he started to respond to Friday then got a feather in the face that had been blown by the wind out of the pile he'd dumped them into earlier. Waving it off him, he continued his reply. "What do you remember from your last backup?"
As it was now late afternoon, he moved onward and started walking south towards where New York should be while Friday told him about her memory stopping right before he snapped after capturing the stones from Thanos.
"Well, what you're missing is that after the snap, the surge nearly killed both of us. I got Rogers to hit is with a bolt of lightning from Thor's hammer, then we setup a 2nd glove on my other hand so I could snap again to heal meh…er us. That worked, but keeping mental focus with using the stones is super important and I ended up drifting and remembering things from when I was a teenager. So when the stones healed my body, they also de-aged me and put us on what appears to be another Earth, but in the same physical location from before. It also appears that there was an apocalyptic event here. I found no remains of Avengers HQ. I found a signpost for the road that runs through our place on the west side, and old degraded plastic bits on the beach. Up at Rhinebeck, the place is a pile of stones and dirt."
"I'd like you to take a look through my notes and some signal captures of done. Someone here has made robots that kinda look like dinosaurs and despite me not seeing any other tech, there are encrypted data signals bouncing around. Speaking of which, take a look at the encryption on the GPS signals I found and see if you can get us interfaced with that. I'm currently locating on guess work based on old maps we've got saved. I'm hoping you might even find some satellites to get us live pictures of what is around us."
"On it Boss, I'm working on the GPS signal now I'll let you know when I've got it cracked. It will take a little longer with just the suit processors to work with; I'm getting no response from any of the datacenter connection protocols."
"Yup, I thought you'd say that. Keep on rolling, oh, and keep an eye on the output of the reactor, it's damaged but seems to be stable at the moment, if that starts to change, let me know."
Walking south was as tedious as he'd expected, although the view was nice; even before his trip, this area of New York had always been mixed large farms with small forest-y bits squeezed in here and there. Walking south kept him mostly in the river valley flood plain, but there were still a lot more trees now than he'd remembered before. Not surprising really. Recalling a documentary comparing how ancient forests reclaimed ancient cities in south America and Indonesia, he figured from what he'd seen so far it could be 400 or more years since humans had been messing around in this area. He was still considering how long humanity had been gone when he stepped around a tree and got another feather to the face, only this one was attached to an arrow.

His shock lasted a moment before his own sense of survival kicked in and he crouched and rechecked the area around him very carefully. Seeing no movement, he checked with Friday.

"Friday, you seeing this?"

"Yes Boss, I don't detect any enemies nearby, but my sensors are a bit limited."

He stepped back to the side of the tree to examine the arrow and tried to look at it while keeping an eye on everything else at the same time. The arrow, it turned out had been in the tree long enough that the wound in the tree was already starting to seal up. Puling the arrow out took a bit of wiggling back and forth, but it did come out and revealed a metal tip that looked a lot like the metal picks he'd pulled from the robo-dino he'd autopsied earlier, the rest was what looked like basic home made arrow, straight wooden stick, feathers fletched with some kind of string and glue, the only odd part was the metal pick, but he conceded that was a better tip than just burnt wood or stone.

Checking his map compass against the direction the tree was sticking out of the tree, it seemed to be going south and a little west.

"Friday, where are we at with GPS or finding a satellite?"

"I'm about halfway through the GPS signal packets we've captured; there is no longer contiguous coverage above us, but I did get a timecode decrypted. Boss, the year is 3016, June 1st."

"993 years in the future?"

"Yes Boss, but I as you suspected, I don't think it is our future. As we passed south from Rhinebeck I scanned the field in the place where our HQ should have been. Visual comparisons show an area remarkably similar to the same location on our Earth before we began construction. There is evident of erosion and river migration, but none of the artifacts that would be apparent from the basement levels we dug out for our HQ."

Carefully continuing to move south, he kept ponding this new information and confirmation on his thoughts. So if he was never part of this timeline before, maybe he can get back to his own timeline and his family?

"Friday, did you find any logged sensor data in the reactor from the two snaps?"

"Yup, but most of it is useless as the energy density was higher than the ability of the sensors to handle. I can see some high to low transitions and frequencies, but neither the upper or lower end of those signals. It won't be enough to try to recreate the pattern that got us here."

Tony, stopped and bent over as if he'd been gut punched. Now sucking in air and feeling overwhelmed at the possibility of his not being able to get back to his family. He slowly tried to reign in his breathing and get his mind under control. He dropped to his butt from his bent over position and ended up losing the fight, thinking of Pepper and his little girl, he cried.

---

After a while, he awoke to Friday calling for him. "Boss, if you're going to stop here, you should probably look at setting up a camp."

"How long was I out Friday?"

"About 2 hours Boss. Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah Friday, thanks. How much sunlight do you think we have left?"

"It's 5:52pm eastern time boss, You've got about 5 hours till dark."

"Ok, let's push on a bit, in about 2 hours we'll start looking for a place to set camp."

After about 100 yards, he ran into the remains of another bridge, but bigger and made of concrete going over a wide creek apparently. Near the road, he found another old sign sticking partly out of the road, the paint was long gone, but enough of the shape remained to let him know this was the old US-9 highway that went north and south through New York and east of Avengers HQ.

The bridge was, like the other one, collapsed, but the pile itself now covered in dirt and a few bits of greenery had made its own combination dam and bridge over the creek. Climbing down from the roadway, he crossed the 'bridge', making wide steps over the parts still passing water over it, then walked on the east side of where the bridge had been until he could find a place to climb back up to the elevated area where the road used to be. After getting back up and following south and then swinging west where there should have been another three-ish miles of road, it instead ended in more water; a large creek connected to an adjacent small lake or large pond. Tony wasn't sure how you defined the difference but more importantly, off to the west near the middle of the body of water was a cliff-sided island and on top of it was smoke and what looked like log and stone cabins. Wishing for a coin, he mentally flipped a coin, Humans or Ape people? If it's Humans, Heston will be so jealous.

---

Checking distances with tools in his glasses, the island was a little less than third of a mile away from the shoreline he was at. It seemed to be fairly oblong from this end, about 560 yards, about as wide from north to south as it was away from him. The area next to the road appeared to have been eaten by a wider creek that had undermined it in the past and from the flow in the water, was the exit for the water in this small lake. Looking further north then looking south, the lake could be seen to arc back to the west in both directions, so likely there was another creek on the other side likely fed from the Hudson.

Looking back at the downstream exit of the lake, he could see a few yards out it seemed to stay shallow without much drop from the lake side to the creek side.

He again pondered the cliffs of the island, it was a solid defensive obstacle, but what were they defending against, more robots or other people (please be people and not apes)?

---

Nialo had to sleep in the village for safety and to keep his mother, if not happy, at least less worried, but he always preferred to be away when awake. He was not a man of many words, he preferred subtler whispers leaves in the wind, the pattering of creek water falling on stones. Even the people he loved annoyed him, but he still loved them, so he would hunt, and guard the territory of his people, the Oosine.

Today was clear, the snap maws were still down the river out of sight since yesterday. He had left the village on the other upstream side of the lake, heading south. No other machines seemed to be in the area today as he looked for evidence of them or other trespassers on his way around. He stopped by a few bushes near the edge of the water, tied on some strings and threw the baited hooks and floaters out into the water. He would check on his fish traps when he came back.

Most of his people fished from the floating bridge they'd made to their island, casting with the flow hoping to get bites from fish swimming into the lake from the river.

He had crossed the downstream side of the lake a little while ago and was on the north side of the lake when he turned back and saw movement through the trees on the wider trail going north east away from their lake. He crouched in the shadows of the bushes and trees to wait to see if it came again. Sure enough, after a short time, he saw a pale man in a black shirt with a large black pack on his back. The man was also crouching near the downstream end of the lake, he did not know how he'd not seen him earlier, he was clearly not very good at hiding.

Getting his spear caster ready He decided to wait and watch to see what the man would do next.

Cereburn · May 16, 2024

Chapter 4 up, took some time away from other things to get this out. Tony and Nialo haven't actually met yet, but I think getting Friday back online was a nice surprise.

This now sets the timeframe for Tony showing up, about 4 years and change ahead of the signal from Nemesis.

For what I want to do, it's going to be a slow buildup.

Now I gotta get the Tony Nialo meeting down, but I also need to look at how visible Friday's signals will be to Gaia when she starts broadcasting; right now Friday is passive sensors only; but once she starts getting a handle on some of the signals going around, I'm expecting that to change a bit.
Per canon, currently Gaia is restricted from talking to any of the humans released from Eleutheria; when she figures out he isn't from her system, that should free her up to talk to him.
That is going to be fun and annoying.

Oh, forgot the Chapter five teaser.

Chapter 5

Using his AR glasses to magnify the camera sensors, he watched what he could now see were wooden walls at the tops of the cliffs, but no heads were so far peaking their heads over those walls.

"Friday, are you seeing anyone watching over those walls?"

"No Boss, I am picking up some audio though, it sounds like they are speaking English, American English even."

"Are you kidding? Let me hear"

Through his neuro implants, he could hear the conversations Friday was picking up with her sensors, though fragmented as people were apparently moving around or he was moving his head shifting the target of the audio sensor.

He heard what was clearly faux concern in the tone of an older woman. "…You shouldn't feel it's your fault your son is not with mate."

The angry woman replied was positively soap opera-ish in it's intensity. "I never said it was, if your daughter had kept her legs shut she could have been here and mated instead off with that trader she left with!"

He shifted his head a bit and heard another conversation,

A tired older male voice, but still with authority; "…Very well, you knew it was your duty to flush the waste well, skipping it will not make the duty go away, you are now assigned two more weeks."

"Two weeks!?" came the astonished teenage reply.

"Would you prefer three?"

Moving on to other conversations, Tony was amazed, it was like he'd bugged an apartment building but with less cursing and blaring TV shows.

TheEldritchKnight · May 16, 2024

Thousand years in the future and people are still people.

Alax · May 18, 2024

enjoying what you have so far. that said the Stormbird is a pre Signal design meant to clean the atmosphere so it already exists at this point. it was altered into a combat unit post Signal. only bit of lore i remember about any specific machine type.

Cereburn · May 18, 2024

Alax said:
enjoying what you have so far. that said the Stormbird is a pre Signal design meant to clean the atmosphere so it already exists at this point. it was altered into a combat unit post Signal. only bit of lore i remember about any specific machine type.

How Aether works is something that we don't get much information on from the canon game. I had an expectation after the first Cauldron to see somewhere the remains of an atmospheric processing plant similar to Aliens but that never showed up. When I sat and thought about it, I figured most of the atmospheric changes were probably executed at sea with various forms of algae to help oxygenate and some system to change the water temp to encourage different currents to bring warmer or cooler water to certain areas which then affects the air temperature and humidity causing different air circulation.
That being said, using storm birds as cloud seeders is certainly plausible, and if they can fly high enough they could likely be used to generate different types of ozone to either pad the existing layers or thin them out.
I'm not sure how any of this is immediately useful to my story, but it's a fun little world thread to pull on.

Cereburn · May 19, 2024

Chapter 5: Beads or mousetraps?

Using his AR glasses to magnify the camera sensors, he watched what he could now see were wooden walls at the tops of the cliffs, but no heads were so far peaking their heads over those walls.

"Friday, are you seeing anyone watching over those walls?"

"No Boss, I am picking up some audio though, it sounds like they are speaking English, American English even."

"Are you kidding? Let me hear"

Through his neuro implants, he could hear the conversations Friday was picking up with her sensors, though fragmented as people were apparently moving around or he was moving his head shifting the target of the audio sensor.

He heard what was clearly faux concern in the tone of an older woman. "…You shouldn't feel it's your fault your son is not with mate."

The angry woman replied was positively soap opera-ish in it's intensity. "I never said it was, if your daughter had kept her legs shut she could have been here and mated instead off with that trader she left with!"

He shifted his head a bit and heard another conversation,

A tired older male voice, but still with authority; "…Very well, you knew it was your duty to flush the waste well, skipping it will not make the duty go away, you are now assigned two more weeks."

"Two weeks!?" came the astonished teenage reply.

"Would you prefer three?"

Moving on to other conversations, Tony was amazed, it was like he'd bugged an apartment building but with less cursing and blaring TV shows.

"Friday, you picking up any radio or other E.M. signals from there?"

"Boss, no active technology I recognize, but I am picking up occasional E.M. spikes that sound like someone shorting a capacitor. It is just a spike, no complex waveforms I can find in it."

"Well, sounds like it might be time to meet the neighbors. One of the intercepts mentioned a trader that apparently has a thing for giving young girls a ride. I just need an idea of what they need to trade for."

"Friday, gimmie a remote sensor we can put in one of these trees. I want you to keep an ear out for folks asking for stuff they don't have please and I'm going to walk back a ways to see if we can find some more exposed rebar or other metal resources. I think we're going into the blacksmithing business."

The requested sensor manifested in his hand, a small black circle about 2 inches across with a small screw on one side. Tony pulled back next to a tree and screwed the sensor in the joint between the tree and a branch, the open side still having visibility(and audibility) to the island village.

He then walked back towards the trail looking through his map again for likely sources of metal to be recycled.

---

The strange man got up, leaned against the tree for a bit, then left. Nialo relaxed slightly but then started heading through the woods to try to find a place to observe him if he comes back on the north trail. If he doesn't come back on the north trail, then he must be heading further south.

Knowing these woods very well, it did not take him long to find a tree observing the trail and to climb up it and wait again.

Only ten minutes later, he heard the strange man walking back up the trail when he saw him stop then bend over to get something from his bag, took a bite of it, then stand up again and keep walking. Nialo thought for a moment he'd been spotted, but as the man walked, he gave no indication he was even checking the trees.

He continued walking, occasionally whistling and occasionally mumbling to himself. It was very odd behavior for anyone who survived in this area alone. After some consideration, he was very glad this crazy man did not try to come to his village. Waiting a while longer to make sure the crazy man continued on his way, he climbed down and returned to his village to report what he'd seen, then he went to check his fishing lines.

---

Earlier, after Tony left the shore, Friday spotted their watcher taking up his tree hide location and let Tony know.

"Boss, we've got company ahead, there's a man climbing a tree, looks like he's either on watch duty or he's going to try to jump us." At the same time, she highlighted his position in Tony's glasses. In these trees, he was in shadow and not washed out by the sun like the rabbit was earlier. He could clearly see the infrared image of the person crouched on some branches in the tree near the trunk, apparently looking his way.

"Friday, we got enough juice and nanites for some of the Wakandan holo-shields?"

"Yes boss"

"Ok, I'm going to stop and dig in the bag, I want you to setup the shields on the pack straps in front and back and be ready to bring them up if he tries anything. Honestly we should have set this up earlier."

"On it boss, I'll be ready in about 30 seconds."

Twenty-nine seconds later, she announced, "Ready boss."

Tony then stopped, as casually as possible swung off the straps off his pack and turned to the side to dig in his pack and pull out a piece of the turkey jerky he'd dried earlier. As he did that, the straps on his back grew slightly thicker and wider at the level of his pecs when wearing it and a rounded bulge appeared in the middle of the pack facing the rear. Both new areas had what appeared to be black lines running through them, one long horizontal arc in back and two smaller lines in front.

Tony then re-shouldered the pack and kept on walking, taking a nibble of the jerky then kept on walking. He tried whistling as his nerves got to him, but Friday told him he was being suspiciously loud. So he quit and instead mumbled to himself thinking up ideas on things he could make they might want in the village while trying very hard not to look up.

Not long later, Friday chimed in, "Our watcher is leaving, he's dropped from the tree and appears to be heading into the woods and towards the lake Boss."

"Well that went better than I expected. Did we get a good look at him when he left?"

As before, Friday replayed the images she captured of the person climbing down the tree, taking another look his way then turning to head into the forest. Tony thought the outline looked rather masculine, so likely a man; Friday's sensor information overlaid on the image showed he was right and that the man was about six foot tall, well-muscled and not overly burdened with fat nor EM sources.

"Welp, no ape-men, so we lucked out."

"Boss?"

"Planet of the Apes, give it a watch when you get a chance. Um..the 70s version, the remake sucked."

"Sorry Boss, I don't see either in the onboard library."

"Hmm…what have we got with us?"

"Mostly your personal music playlists, your wife asked me to download all the Halmark movies starting with the word Love, the first season of Rick and Morty, and the youtube videos you had me locate and download while at the Barton's for living off-grid. Oh, I've also got a show Clint Barton said you needed, all 21 seasons of New Yankee Workshop."

"Well, those youtube videos might come in handier here than they did there. Any of them focused on fishing?"

"Yup, we've got a couple versions of making rods and line to fish with, fly-hook making, making nets and a couple of fish traps. I've also got a few boat making videos, from hollow logs to log mats Boss."

"Ok, give me a playback window in the upper right corner and start with the fish traps please. And keep an eye out for resources we can use to make stuff in those videos."

---

Tony kept walking for a while and watching the videos until he checked the map and confirmed with Friday it seemed to be the right area for the horse farm he'd planned to go to. Starting from the edge of where they think US-9 was, they started walking around the property looking for signs of previous habitation. Quickly, then did find some dirt and stone piles like what he'd found in Rhinebeck, but these were also grown through with good sized trees. Not too long into their foray, the metal detectors lit off and helped them find the remains of several old steel beams that had made up what was once a covered riding area or warehouse. With the cutting laser, he began shaving off long strips, a little thicker than the rebar had been before. In the end, he shaved off about 50 pounds of rusted metal and discarded about half of that has being too rusted while he went back and cut further hoping for more metal that had avoided corrosion.

Next he carved cut down a smallish tree, about 7" across the trunk at chest height, and reaching about 30 feet tall. The smaller branches he cut up into kindling and started a fire. Then he took sections of trunk about 13 inches long, cut them in half from end to end and set them standing around the fire with the cut face exposed to the flames. Not long later, those were now burning from the inside out. After about an inch of the inside was burning, he used his nanite knife to, one by one, cut out the charcoal embers of the trunk sections and set them back by the fire, although a little further out, charring the now hollowed out sides of the trunk sections and drying them.

Once they had about a quarter inch of char, he pulled them off the fire entirely and put dirt on them to stop them burning more.

As they'd been set aside to cool, it was starting to get dark, so Tony set about setting up a hammock tied between trees about 10 feet up. The height was a little deceptive though as it was also next to one of the dirt mounds, and only about 2 feet away from that.

After some more of the turkey jerky, and some water from his back pack, he climbed the dirt mound, took off the back pack and hung it from another nearby branch but with a cord still leading from the pack back to his reactor. He said good night to Friday and trusted her to watch over him while sleeping.

---

F.R.I.D.A.Y. watched over Tony while he slept and watched the rest of the world world through her sensors. Several more GPS satellites passed overhead and some others whose radios she could detect the edges of, but was not in the right position to get enough of the signal to convert to workable data. She also found some satellites that she observed visually passing, but emitted no signal she could intercept with the equipment she had. They were a mystery she hoped to solve later.

For now, she was still working on the GPS signals she could get, trying to dig into the more heavily encrypted parts of those signals. The encryption was more than she'd first thought, at least three levels of encryption. The first gave her the time code for the packets and another number that increased and decreased on a fairly regular basis from what she'd seen in the captured packets so far. The next encryption level was a rotating cypher based on an algorithm she knew from other systems in her own world. The information she found at this level of the GPS data was what she believed to be the satellite ID and what looked like recycled status codes from NSA Keyhole satellites. This was exciting as if she could get bidirectional access, she may be able to get live images of the earth and their current position, however this was also when she found there was yet another level of encryption to the data that also appeared to be based on rotating encryption.

While most of her attention was on the GPS encryption, she was also tracking several ground level radios moving around the area. Some came close enough that she almost woke up the boss, but their apparent direction of travel then took them away again. It seemed this area wasn't interesting to whoever owned those radios at this time. The signals from them were interesting, a mixed load of long-range omnidirectional packets that seemed to be a mix of beacon and probably status information judging from the amplitude, brevity and regularity of the broadcasts, then she caught some lower powered broadcasts that were likely to other, more local radios. They were also encrypted, but much more random in length and timing.

She began considering asking Tony to walk back to Rhinebeck to the robo-dino he found there, if she could interface with the processor and memory of that system, she may find the keys to decode the ground-based radio traffic, but possibly even the GPS systems. She decided to bring up the topic when he awoke after giving him an update on the GPS encryption.

In the meantime, the night temperature was turning a bit chilly for humans. She checked the nanite inventory and deployed an insulated blanket over Tony while he slept fitfully.

---

Morning came before sunup for Tony, the trauma of discovering he was over 900 years too late to raise his little girl did nothing for granting good dreams.

Friday then gave him the unpleasant news about the GPS encryption, while he could see the silver lining on the possibility of getting into a keyhole satellite, but he was a bit perplexed on why they were being so layered in their approach vs his world. Clearly this one went into some directions with information tech that may be very interesting to discover.

Friday's estimate, based on the time it took to break the other two layers was likely another 24 hours before she could see if this satellite had another nesting Russian doll of encryption inside.

In the mean time, he needed to finish working on making an inventory to trade with.

He re-collected his sleeping gear/nanites and with a now curved nanite knife started working on carving out the charred logs he'd made the evening before. Slowly he hollowed them out more to create oblong shallow divots lined with rough graphite. He then lined those up, worked with Friday on some mods to the smelter/pellet maker he'd earlier made, this time setting it up to use a crucible instead of a hopper. Next he fired up the induction furnace and started feeding in the scrap metal he'd carved off.

The smelting process was not quiet, the old material screamed and popped as it heated up, there was apparently a lot of trapped moisture in the rust. Luckily the system was enclosed, so the mess should be contained, and hopefully drain into the dross collector built in. Quickly after, he started pouring the hot steel into the molds. He ended up with 12 molds, after the first batch cooled enough to stay solid, he dumped them out and began again until he had 36 ingots.

Tony had figured he'd initially make a few items. First, some knives, 12 K-Bar style, carve some rough handles from some of the spare wood. He was considering leaving half the knives with no handle so they could attach whatever handle they wanted. Next he was going to put some ingots through again to heat and pull into wire, probably 16 gauge, about 1 mm diameter. It should be malleable enough for them to use for fishing hooks or lots of other things. Finally he'd make some leather working needles and maybe a net makers needle in half inch size.

First, the wire. Friday updated the smelter design again and not long later they were wrapping hot wire around another bit of log. They ended up with about 100 feet of wire then set it aside to cool.

Second, Tony started hollowing out his molds even more then packing them with sand. Next, on one side of the mold he used his cutting laser to drill three holes, one to pour and two to vent. He repacked with sand again then wrapped the two sides with bands of the wire pulled earlier to keep them tight. Finally he had Friday send in nanites to hollow out the sand into a K-Bar pattern and to clear the pour and vent holes. They repeated that 5 times, leaving two untouched ingot molds.

After that was done, they switched the smelter back to crucible mode and sent through the ingots again, this time they melted without much drama and poured into the molds fairly easily, although there was a bit of overpour and missed hole drama as this wasn't something Tony usually did in the forest. Caves, yes, forest, no.

After a few hours, Tony opened the molds and found several serviceable knives that would need a little clean up and sharpening, then a handle and they'd be saleable.

Tony and Friday repeated this process for the leather needles and net makers needles.

Next, for the polishing and sharpening, Tony worked and Friday worked on an attachment to his cutting laser to add a series of mirrors and motors to allow Friday to use the layer to act as a CNC.

He took the glove and bracer off, strapped it to a log then lined it up where Friday wanted it and used the wire again to secure it in place. Next he placed each item into the cutting area and she went to work on them, had Tony flip them then finish them off.

Not to miss a trick, he had Friday also cut out the handles for the knives using this method but with some recessed grooves in them. Then he bound the handles to the tangs, again with wire but in the grooves Friday made for him. None of the work was master knifemaker level, but for these guys, it was likely stuff they did not have access to.

The next problem was his pack wasn't setup to carry thirty-five-ish pounds of trade materials. After experimenting with several ideas, he decided not to try to strap it to his backpack, he did not want the extra weight. Instead he made a rolling travois, a slice of a log for a wheel, and axel lubed with scrapped off graphite/charcoal and two long branches for him to grip and then pull the travois behind him. However the cargo would also need a net or bag of some kind to stay on the travois. Fortunately, he was able to make some raffia webbing pouches from young sapling bark he stripped off several young trees in the area. Finally prepared, he started heading back down the road to see what they'd make of this new trader in the area.

Updated version:
Using his A.R. glasses to magnify the camera sensors, he watched what he could now see were wooden walls at the tops of the cliffs, but no heads were so far peaking their heads over those walls.

"Friday, are you seeing anyone watching over those walls?"

"No Boss, I am picking up some audio though, it sounds like they are speaking English, American English even."

"Are you kidding? Let me hear"

Through his neuro implants, he could hear the conversations Friday was picking up with her sensors, though fragmented as people were apparently moving around or he was moving his head shifting the target of the audio sensor.

He heard what was clearly faux concern in the tone of an older woman. "…You shouldn't feel it's your fault your son is not with mate."

The angry woman replied was positively soap opera-ish in it's intensity. "I never said it was, if your daughter had kept her legs shut she could have been here and mated instead off with that trader she left with!"

He shifted his head a bit and heard another conversation,

A tired older male voice, but still with authority; "…Very well, you knew it was your duty to flush the waste well, skipping it will not make the duty go away, you are now assigned two more weeks."

"Two weeks!?" came the astonished teenage reply.

"Would you prefer three?"

Moving on to other conversations, Tony was amazed, it was like he'd bugged an apartment building but with less cursing and blaring TV shows.

"Friday, you picking up any radio or other E.M. signals from there?"

"Boss, no active technology I recognize, but I am picking up occasional E.M. spikes that sound like someone shorting a capacitor. It is just a spike, no complex waveforms I can find in it."

"Well, sounds like it might be time to meet the neighbors. One of the intercepts mentioned a trader that apparently has a thing for giving young girls a ride. I just need an idea of what they need to trade for."

"Friday, gimmie a remote sensor we can put in one of these trees. I want you to keep an ear out for folks asking for stuff they don't have please and I'm going to walk back a ways to see if we can find some more exposed rebar or other metal resources. I think we're going into the blacksmithing business."

The requested sensor manifested in his hand, a small black circle about 2 inches across with a small screw on one side. Tony pulled back next to a tree and screwed the sensor in the joint between the tree and a branch, the open side still having visibility(and audibility) to the island village.

He then walked back towards the trail looking through his map again for likely sources of metal to be recycled.

---

The strange man got up, leaned against the tree for a bit, then left. Nialo relaxed slightly but then started heading through the woods to try to find a place to observe him if he comes back on the north trail. If he doesn't come back on the north trail, then he must be heading further south.

Knowing these woods very well, it did not take him long to find a tree observing the trail and to climb up it and wait again.

Only ten minutes later, he heard the strange man walking back up the trail when he saw him stop then bend over to get something from his bag, took a bite of it, then stand up again and keep walking. Nialo thought for a moment he'd been spotted, but as the man walked, he gave no indication he was even checking the trees.

He continued walking, occasionally whistling and occasionally mumbling to himself. It was very odd behavior for anyone who survived in this area alone. After some consideration, he was very glad this crazy man did not try to come to his village. Waiting a while longer to make sure the crazy man continued on his way, he climbed down and returned to his village to report what he'd seen, then he went to check his fishing lines.

---

Earlier, after Tony left the shore, Friday spotted their watcher taking up his tree hide location and let Tony know.

"Boss, we've got company ahead, there's someone climbing a tree, looks like they're on watch duty or may be planning to try to jump us." At the same time, she highlighted the position in Tony's glasses. In these trees, their watcher was in shadow and not washed out by the sun like the rabbit was earlier. He could see the faux-colored infrared image of the person crouched on some branches in the tree near the trunk, apparently looking his way.

"Friday, have we got enough juice and nanites for some of the Wakandan holo-shields?"

"No problem Boss"

"Ok, I'm going to stop and dig in the bag, I want you to setup the shields on the pack straps in front and back and be ready to bring them up if he tries anything. Honestly, we should have set this up earlier."

"On it boss, I'll be ready in about 30 seconds."

Twenty-nine seconds later, she announced, "Ready boss."

Tony then stopped, as casually as possible swung off the straps off his pack and turned to the side to dig in his pack and pull out a piece of the turkey jerky he'd dried earlier. As he did that, the straps on his back grew slightly thicker and wider at the level of his pecs when wearing it and a rounded bulge appeared in the middle of the pack facing the rear. Both new areas had what appeared to be black lines running through them, one long horizontal arc in back and two smaller lines in front.

Tony then re-shouldered the pack and kept on walking, taking a nibble of the jerky then kept on walking. He tried whistling as his nerves got to him, but Friday told him he was being suspiciously loud. So he quit and instead mumbled to himself thinking up ideas on things he could make they might want in the village while trying very hard not to look up.

Not long later, Friday chimed in, "Our watcher is leaving, they've dropped from the tree and appear to be heading into the woods and towards the lake Boss."

"Well that went better than I expected. Did we get a good look at him when he left?"

As before, Friday replayed the images she captured of the person climbing down the tree, taking another look his way then turning to head into the forest. Tony thought the outline looked rather masculine, so likely a man; Friday's sensor information overlaid on the image showed he was right and that the man was about six foot tall, well-muscled and not overly burdened with fat nor EM sources.

"Welp, no ape-men, so we lucked out."

"Boss?"

"Planet of the Apes, give it a watch when you get a chance. Um..the 70s version, the remake sucked."

"Sorry Boss, I don't see either in the onboard library."

"Hmm…what have we got with us?"

"Mostly your personal music playlists, your wife asked me to download all the Halmark movies starting with the word Love, the first season of Rick and Morty, and the youtube videos you had me locate and download while at the Barton's for living off-grid. Oh, I've also got a show Clint Barton said you needed, all 21 seasons of New Yankee Workshop."

"Well, those youtube videos might come in handier here than they did there. Any of them focused on fishing?"

"Yup, we've got a couple versions of making rods and line to fish with, fly-hook making, making nets and a couple of fish traps. I've also got a few boat making videos, from hollow logs to log mats Boss."

"Ok, give me a playback window in the upper right corner and start with the fish traps please. And keep an eye out for resources we can use to make stuff in those videos."

---

Tony kept walking for a while and watching the videos until he checked the map and confirmed with Friday it seemed to be the right area for the horse farm he'd planned to go to. Starting from the edge of where they think US-9 was, they started walking around the property looking for signs of previous habitation. Quickly, then did find some dirt and stone piles like what he'd found in Rhinebeck, but these were also grown through with good sized trees. Not too long into their foray, the metal detectors lit off and helped them find the remains of several old steel beams that had made up what was once a covered riding area or warehouse. With the cutting laser, he began shaving off long strips, a little thicker than the rebar had been before. In the end, he shaved off about 50 pounds of rusted metal and discarded about half of that has being too rusted while he went back and cut further hoping for more metal that had avoided corrosion.

Next he carved cut down a smallish tree, about 7" across the trunk at chest height, and reaching about 30 feet tall. The smaller branches he cut up into kindling and started a fire. Then he took sections of trunk about 13 inches long, cut them in half from end to end and set them standing around the fire with the cut face exposed to the flames. Not long later, those were now burning from the inside out. After about an inch of the inside was burning, he used his nanite knife to, one by one, cut out the charcoal embers of the trunk sections and set them back by the fire, although a little further out, charring the now hollowed out sides of the trunk sections and drying them.

While waiting for the char, he checked with Friday on the take from the tree sensor, she reported the conversation between their watcher, who was named Nialo and the chief of the village, Chief Hul'ka.

"Hul'ka? Does he sound like a short drill sergeant? I wish I could have you watch an '80s movie called Stripes."

"I'm sure it'd be funnier if I could Boss, I can't tell if he's short, but he does sound like an older male, apparently fairly sharp and good at asking for details."

"What details?" asked Tony, leaning forward with curiosity.

With more than a hint of mischief in her voice, Friday reported "Well ,apparently Nialo thinks you're nuts because you were whistling then talking to yourself. Told ya so, Boss."

"Noone loves you when you brag about telling them so Friday." Said Tony as he pouted. He then switched his attention back to working on his future molds and forgetting to ask about the other reason he'd put up the sensor.

Once they had about a quarter inch of char, he pulled them off the fire entirely and put dirt on them to stop them burning more.

As they'd been set aside to cool, it was starting to get dark, so Tony set about setting up a hammock tied between trees about 10 feet up. The height was a little deceptive though as it was also next to one of the dirt mounds, and only about 2 feet away from that.

After some more of the turkey jerky, and some water from his back pack, he climbed the dirt mound, took off the back pack and hung it from another nearby branch but with a cord still leading from the pack back to his reactor. He said good night to Friday and trusted her to watch over him while sleeping.

---

F.R.I.D.A.Y. watched over Tony while he slept and watched the rest of the world world through her sensors. Several more GPS satellites passed overhead and some others whose radios she could detect the edges of, but was not in the right position to get enough of the signal to convert to workable data. She also found some satellites that she observed visually passing, but emitted no signal she could intercept with the equipment she had. They were a mystery she hoped to solve later.

For now, she was still working on the GPS signals she could get, trying to dig into the more heavily encrypted parts of those signals. The encryption was more than she'd first thought, at least three levels of encryption. The first gave her the time code for the packets and another number that increased and decreased on a fairly regular basis from what she'd seen in the captured packets so far. The next encryption level was a rotating cypher based on an algorithm she knew from other systems in her own world. The information she found at this level of the GPS data was what she believed to be the satellite ID and what looked like recycled status codes from NSA Keyhole satellites. This was exciting as if she could get bidirectional access, she may be able to get live images of the earth and their current position, however this was also when she found there was yet another level of encryption to the data that also appeared to be based on rotating encryption.

While most of her attention was on the GPS encryption, she was also tracking several ground level radios moving around the area. Some came close enough that she almost woke up the boss, but their apparent direction of travel then took them away again. It seemed this area wasn't interesting to whoever owned those radios at this time. The signals from them were interesting, a mixed load of long-range omnidirectional packets that seemed to be a mix of beacon and probably status information judging from the amplitude, brevity and regularity of the broadcasts, then she caught some lower powered broadcasts that were likely to other, more local radios. They were also encrypted, but much more random in length and timing.

She began considering asking Tony to walk back to Rhinebeck to the robo-dino he found there, if she could interface with the processor and memory of that system, she may find the keys to decode the ground-based radio traffic, but possibly even the GPS systems. She decided to bring up the topic when he awoke after giving him an update on the GPS encryption.

In the meantime, the night temperature was turning a bit chilly for humans. She checked the nanite inventory and deployed an insulated blanket over Tony while he slept fitfully.

---

Morning came before sunup for Tony, the trauma of discovering he was over 900 years too late to raise his little girl did nothing for granting good dreams.

Friday then gave him the unpleasant news about the GPS encryption, while he could see the silver lining on the possibility of getting into a keyhole satellite, but he was a bit perplexed on why they were being so layered in their approach vs his world. Clearly this one went in some directions with information tech that may be very interesting to discover.

Friday's estimate, based on the time it took to break the other two layers was likely another 24 hours before she could see if this satellite had another nesting Russian doll of encryption inside.

"Friday, before I get started on processing the metal, what'd you pick up from the village for trade needs?"

"It turns out our village does a bit of hunting for local sheep, turkey and rabbit but most of their food is from fishing the lake and pulling in fish off static lines they drop from their floating bridge."

"Okay, so portable fish traps may be something they'd be interested in – I'll have to get a look at this bridge they've got and see if we can make something that'll work with that. Any idea why they went with a floating bridge instead of fixed?"

"It hasn't' come up in conversation yet Boss."

He re-collected the nanites that had been sleeping gear mostly recently and with a now curved nanite knife started working on carving out the charred logs he'd made the evening before. Slowly he hollowed them out more to create oblong shallow divots lined with rough charcoal-graphite. He then lined those up, worked with Friday on some mods to the smelter/pellet maker he'd earlier made, this time setting it up to use a crucible instead of a hopper. Next, he fired up the induction furnace and started feeding in the scrap metal he'd carved off.

The smelting process was not quiet, the old material screamed and popped as it heated up, there was apparently a lot of trapped moisture in the rust. Luckily the system was enclosed, so the mess should be contained, and hopefully drain into the dross collector built in. Quickly after, he started pouring the hot steel into the molds. He ended up with 12 molds, after the first batch cooled enough to stay solid, he dumped them out and began again until he had 36 ingots.

Tony had figured he'd initially make a few items. First, some knives, 12 K-Bar style, carve some rough handles from some of the spare wood. He was considering leaving half the knives with no handle so they could attach whatever handle they wanted. Next he was going to put some ingots through again to heat and pull into wire, probably 16 gauge, about 1 mm diameter. It should be malleable enough for them to use for fishing hooks or lots of other things. Finally he'd make some leather working needles and maybe a net makers needle in half inch size.

First, the wire. Friday updated the smelter design again and not long later they were re-heating the wire and pulling it through a 1mm die then wrapping the hot wire around another bit of log. Since they weren't heating the metal to liquid state, it was much less power intensive then the first run through. They ended up with about 100 feet of wire then set it aside to cool.

Second, Tony started hollowing out his molds even more then packing them with sand. Next, on one side of the mold he used his cutting laser to drill three holes, one to pour and two to vent. He repacked with sand again then wrapped the two sides with bands of the wire pulled earlier to keep them tight. Finally he had Friday send in nanites to hollow out the sand into a K-Bar pattern and to clear the pour and vent holes. They repeated that 4 times, leaving two untouched ingot molds.

After that was done, they switched the smelter back to crucible mode and sent through the ingots again, this time they melted without much drama and poured into the molds fairly easily, although there was a bit of overpour and missed hole drama as this wasn't something Tony usually did in the forest. Caves, yes, forest, no.

After a few hours, Tony opened the molds and found several serviceable knives that would need a little clean up and sharpening, then a handle and they'd be saleable.

Tony and Friday repeated this process for another batch of knives, then remelted the cut off, lft over metal into another two ingots made with the last of the ingot molds. After that, they repeated the sand mold making process for the leather needles and net makers needles. With some careful work, they were able to get about fifteen leather needles per mold and two netting needles in one mold. They ran one pour through all five molds resulting in three molds of forty-five leather needles total and two molds with two netting needles each.

Next, for the polishing and sharpening, Tony and Friday worked on an attachment to his cutting laser to add a series of mirrors and motors to allow Friday to use the laser to act as a CNC.

He took the glove and bracer off, strapped it to a log then lined it up where Friday wanted it and used the wire again to secure it in place. Next he placed each item into the cutting area and she went to work on them, had Tony flip them then finish them off.

Not to miss a trick, he had Friday also cut out the handles for the knives using this method but with some recessed grooves in them. Then he bound the handles to the tangs, again with wire but in the grooves Friday made for him. None of the work was master knife maker level, but for these guys, it was likely stuff they did not have access to.

The next problem as the Sun was finally coming over the horizon was his pack wasn't setup to carry thirty-five-ish pounds of trade materials. After experimenting with several ideas, he decided not to try to strap it to his backpack, he did not want the extra weight. Instead, he made a rolling travois, a slice of a log for a wheel, and axel lubed with scrapped off graphite/charcoal and two long branches for him to grip and then pull the travois behind him. However the cargo would also need a net or bag of some kind to stay on the travois. Fortunately, he was able to make some raffia webbing pouches from young sapling bark he stripped off several young trees in the area. He was still adding more pockets to his travois when Friday interrupted him.

With a concerned tone, "Boss, there are two signals heading to the village lake area from downstream coming from behind the sensor, apparently a patroller for the village has seen them and is stirring up the village. Apparently, they are called snapmaws."

Tony felt that sounded a bit ominous and told her to try to get some visuals when you can, I'm going to go ahead and head that way. If it looks too dangerous, we'll stop and see if we can find another way. I just hope it isn't too much bigger than the dino-robot I found before.

Finally, he finished the last pouch, loaded up his trade goods, re-absorbed the crafting tools and took up his backpack again. As prepared as he could be, he started heading back down the road to see what they'd make of this new trader in the area and what he'd make of the new robots.

Cereburn · May 19, 2024

Pretty sure Chapter 5 is my longest so far. I find that I have under appreciated the authors that have long chapter works posted.
When I'm looking for new fics to read I usually filter out any works less than 50k words, I'm barely breaching 10k now--Yikes.

Moving on, I'm hoping you'll see what I'm after with different behaviors of pre-signal machines in my next chapter, teaser coming shortly.
In this chapter, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make stuff with the tools Tony has. Keep in mind, his nanite are not setup to process materials into other stuff, they are made to reconfigure themselves into various tools that can be used to do almost anything, but the Nanites themselves are not alchemical miracle powder. The closest they get to that is when in suit form, they can process Tony's waste into drinkable water according to canon - not sure about poop, I'm assuming freeze dried poop nuggets ejected when no one is looking.

Here's the teaser:
Chapter 6: Not Lake Placid.
Nialo worked with the fishers to pull in the floating bridge back to the shore with a feeling of impending doom. Now he would be trapped with his mother, her friends and their gossip.

Earlier this morning, one of the other patrollers spotted the snapmaws coming back into the lake from downstream. Usually they were not a threat, but they would always tear apart any logs blocking the waterways, including their bridges. They had learned years ago that if they made the bridge on floating logs and pulled it out of the way before the maws came, they would ignore them. Any logs that ended up floating away from the shore would get frozen and shattered by the snapmaws.

He hoped this would be one of the times where they took a few laps of the lake then proceeded up stream. Sometimes, they could be seen to dig out the bottom of the either the river or lake in certain spots or just float, as if asleep. Leaving him stuck on an island that seemed to become smaller and smaller every time he was trapped on it.

Iron Dawn [Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel CU]

Making the rounds.

Iron Dawn

Chapter One: Prologue

Iron Dawn

Chapter One

Making the rounds.

(Unverified Oracle) (Unverified Omake Machine)

Making the rounds.

Guy makes worst spaghetti ever. Exiled to Gleba.

Making the rounds.

Making the rounds.

Banishumento, Zis Warudo!!!

Making the rounds.

Chapter 2

Making the rounds.

Seeker of the true Dao of waifus

Making the rounds.

Making the rounds.

Chapter 3

Making the rounds.

Versed in the lewd.

Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?

Banishumento, Zis Warudo!!!

Making the rounds.

Making the rounds.

Getting out there.

Making the rounds.

Making the rounds.

Banishumento, Zis Warudo!!!

Making the rounds.

Chapter 4: Rollin' by the River

Making the rounds.

From Outside of the Omniverse slowly breaking in

Not too sore, are you?

Making the rounds.

Making the rounds.

Chapter 5: Beads or mousetraps?

Making the rounds.

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