Mark II Complete

As Pepper prepared to leave, her gaze fell on the Miniature Arc Reactor that had just been replaced. It lay quietly on the workbench, giving off a faint glow.

She picked it up, turned to Tony, and asked, "What do you want me to do with this?" She gave the old reactor a little shake.

Tony barely glanced at it. "That? Smash it. Burn it." As he spoke, he tapped the brighter new core in his chest with four fingers of his right hand.

Pepper looked at the first reactor in her hand, a marvel of engineering. It was proof that Tony had survived a desperate struggle in that cave, and the creation that had changed the course of his life.

"You don't want to keep it?" she asked.

Tony shrugged. "Pepper, I have a lot of habits. Nostalgia isn't one of them." With that, he turned back to his work, leaving Pepper and the old reactor behind.

Pepper said nothing more. Gripping the still-warm First-Generation Reactor, she left the lab.

Tony's oceanfront villa in Malibu, California.

This was where Tony could lose himself completely in his own world. He already knew what he wanted to do next: improve the Mark I he had hastily cobbled together in the cave and create an entirely new Iron Man armor.

But before he began...

"JARVIS."

"At your service, sir."

"Store all the research, designs, and test data for this new project on my private server. I don't know who I can trust anymore. But I won't let anything I build fall into the hands of those people again."

Especially not Iron Man armor that could give one person extraordinary power. If its secrets got out, the consequences would be unthinkable.

For the next several days, Tony all but locked himself in the