Temper Characters: Iron Man, Madams Masque and Hydra Setting: Coasting around NYC. Content: An explosion. Summary: Someone has to test the waters and see how serious this new land law is.
It had been quiet for two days. Not good quiet-- tense, horribly tense, and Tony didn't know if it was just him or a whole specialized fragment of the population was navel gazing or watching each other for the first spark to fly. One of them was going to have to move beyond hypothesizing, power up and start collecting data and it wasn't Tony's style to philosophize. Besides, trying to concentrate was exhausting and he'd already made six as yet unnamed devices specifically designed to lacerate Justin Hammer's ugly face. Any more and he might start thinking about using them. He crumpled up the fresh sketches he had told himself to tackle, just in case a longer range was necessary, and finished the fifth mug of still-hot coffee to the last drop, tapping the bottom over his mouth until he couldn't justify occupying his hands any longer. Nothing on the radio. Nothing on TV. Nothing in the S.H.I.E.L.D. networks about significant superpowered activity. Not even the usual supertech burglary attempt-- even the bad guys were tucked in their holes, watching for the heroes to shoot themselves in the foot instead of taking advantage of all of this quiet or worse. Maybe they knew something Tony didn't. Tony hated when he didn't know things.
At first he was cautious, feeling unnatural and unfamiliar in his own suit because of it, not used to hugging the wall at the school dance. He kept to the fringes of the city, shipping yards, industrial areas, keeping away from the big crowds. But that wasn't him and that wasn't getting him anywhere. Iron Man flew higher, letting himself relax and revel in the freedom of the flight as he picked up speed and let himself drop back into the heart of the city, tumbling with ease toward the treetops of Central Park and laughing off the days he wasted bent over in the workshop with his feet on the sturdy ground. What did Justin Hammer think he could do? Wicked with her megaphone had a better chance of coaxing him out of the air than any of Hammer's half-baked plots. And no one Tony knew, to the best of his knowledge, had taken the idiot up on his offer to bring them into the fold; he must have been twiddling his thumbs or witnessing a veritable parade of underwhelming D-listers who thought changing the TV channel with their mind was a superpower. Iron Man let the people in Times Square crane their necks and point as he darted around the highrises, blending in to the jumbotron and some celebrity's massive, pore-free cheek and bursting out again a flare of red against the dull, grey sky. He wasn't much of an optimist, but he was starting to wonder if anyone was even going to bite; Hammer, another hero, or Stilt-Man jonesing for a broken jaw. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just him and his city, life at large unaffected by what felt like the dawn of a new reality for a horrible, gut-twisting second, and marching, honking and laughing along in the grid of streets below him. Still, he searched; any sign of the sticky residue from Spider-man's webs to show he had been through here recently, drawn to the beat of red-blue-red-blue of police lights only to circle around idly while an officer read some punk his rights.
It was laughable to think Hammer could have possibly known what he was doing, but the fallout was a certain peace in New York City that Iron Man didn't think they had known since the Human Torch lit up that once clear night sky. Days without metahuman dust up: 2.