"Tony, what are you going to do with this old Arc Reactor?"
After Mark left, Pepper picked up the Arc Reactor they had replaced and asked him.
"Destroy it!"
Tony said it without a second thought and hopped down from the lab chair.
"That would be such a waste!"
Pepper shook her head. In the end, she didn't destroy it. She put it in a glass case in the workshop and kept it as a display piece.
After Pepper left, Tony began designing and building his second-generation suit of armor.
Limited by the materials and tools available, the first suit had only been half-finished. Tony had stripped it off at the military base in Afghanistan and left it there.
Now that he was back at Stark Tower, Tony intended to build a combat suit that could truly sustain long flights.
Meanwhile, in a secret underground base not far from Stark Tower...
Obadiah stood before a crude-looking suit of armor. "This is what Tony spent three months building?"
The suit had been made from the wreckage of discarded tanks and bombed-out armored vehicles. It looked like a complete patchwork job.
But Obadiah had contacted other Ten Rings leaders and learned that Tony had used this junk heap to kill dozens of armed terrorists.
As soon as he heard, Obadiah had used his position as vice president of Stark Industries to demand the suit back from the military.
"How long would it take you to replicate this suit?"
Obadiah turned to an engineer beside him.
"Mr. Stein, based on our assessment, perhaps three months."
After a moment's thought, the engineer added, "But it's missing its most critical component: the power source. We can't do anything about that."
"The power source? I'll handle it!"
Obadiah thought of the Miniature Arc Reactor in Tony's