Gape Characters: Tony, Misty, Colleen? Claire?, OTA? Setting: The wormhole activity site in Queens, early morning Content: Monster fight! Summary: The best kind of science is the kind you can stick your head in. And punch.
Progress had been slow for the last hour, so when Tony found himself snapping his hand back from the vicious business end of the soldering iron, he thought it was about time to really indulge in a body shaking (oh, muscle pulling, ouch, worth it) yawn, singed hand held out delicately until he could blink the blur out of his eyes and squint at his watch. Maybe it was about time to turn in. Rubbing his ribs where he had definitely indulged in that yawn too hard, he slowly pushed away from his cluttered workbench until the back of his chair hit the desk. Before he had turned around, the monitors had lit up to display his progress for him, as well as the collection of ongoing projects and constant streams just at the edge of his vision while Tony lazily spun enough to find the tube of Alocane he knew he had around here somewhere. Over the scattering of bandage wrappers that Tony deduced after vainly shuffling them around could not possibly be hiding his cream, he spotted a blinking message on his screen, which might have explained that weird pulsing he had determined as a headache ten minutes ago. He paused his search, frozen as he absorbed the alert, hand still held aloft. The electromagnetic pulse that thrummed through the barrier was fluctuating again, collecting tightly over Queens like a pinched nerve. It didn't look like those fluttering false alarms caused by the storm throughout the week, this looked like the real deal, and it was a cluster. Abandoning the desk, Tony quickly shot off a data dump to Bruce in case he missed it as he stalked toward the dregs in his coffee pot, pouring them vainly into his stained mug with a hopeful shake of the pot to slam them back without hesitating to let the taste linger. S.H.I.E.L.D. was already mobilizing, he could see that. None of them were going to get as close as Iron Man would, not as fast. He had some real processing to do.
The sun still wasn't up by the time he came tearing out of the hangar of Stark Tower, but the light of his repulsors was barely a speck in the muddy haze of the city lights, dispersed through the wintry chill hanging in the air. Iron Man shot up high over the skyline, eyes on the dome through the readouts on his HUD as his sensors struggled to map the energy flow, like a fuzzy MRI of a panicked patient. Maybe it was panicking, Tony didn't often enjoy having holes ripped through him. Far above New York, at the edge of their mysterious bounds, it was magnificently quiet, like the edge of space. Iron Man flipped onto his back as he accelerated toward the peak of the barrier, gathering momentum to cut engines and throw himself into a graceful, weightless arc along the electric ceiling, watching it and the arrays closely, listening for something new through the muffled whistle of wind. Geez, she was coy. Tony had fallen several hundred feet before giving in and kicking the jets back on, shooting across the sky toward Queens.
The boots were ever on the ground, the wagons circled, etc, and Iron Man ignored the blockade of S.H.I.E.L.D. armament and poorly mapped air traffic as he darted through their operation straight for the tear in the barrier. Ops on the ground were immediately calling for his attention, but Iron Man tuned it out, letting them shout into the radios until they made themselves hoarse. He was hovering in front of the forming wormhole, taking in as much as he could until he let himself nudge forward and grasp the edge of it like he would pull himself through. A thousand different warning erupted in front of his eyes, shunted to the side like the S.H.I.E.L.D. voices for Tony to squint into this new reality. Of course he wasn't reading through the barrier, not anything useful, anyway. It was dark. There was a magnetic charge. Iron Man twisted his head to try to see the barrier on the other side, and caught the light from his mask bouncing off of something just above him, not reflective but...
Iron Man gave a flailing kick as the wormhole seemed to close around his head, until he saw enough through his surprise to shove his hands forward and concuss himself backwards, away from the yawning maw that had just chomped down on his helmet. He yanked a slimy tooth out with him, sending it hurtling down onto one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. vans below to leave a solid dent that didn't seem so consequential as the rest of the beast came pouring out through the hole, faster than Iron Man could have recovered. It opened it's mouth wide again, crashing into Iron Man who grabbed its snout and wedged a boot against its mandible as it went roaring toward the ground. "Mayday! Uh, incoming!" he finally acknowledged the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew, who were already scrambling to clear the way for impact.