New York's night breeze carried moisture from the Hudson River through Staten Island's neatly arranged rows of townhouses.
Dave Lizewski sat cross-legged on the pilled wool rug in his bedroom. The picture on the old CRT television in front of him flickered with snowy static from signal interference.
The news anchor spoke at a rapid clip, with towering flames and shrill police sirens in Harlem behind her.
Dave clutched a half-eaten bag of corn chips, making the packaging crackle in his grip.
"This is an exclusive live report from CBS. The military has refused to disclose the monster's origins, but according to eyewitness accounts, several unidentified masked individuals have intervened in this disaster..."
The screen cut to shaky footage recorded on a bystander's phone. The resolution was low, but it was clear enough.
A figure in a red-and-blue bodysuit hung upside down from a streetlamp. The gray-green behemoth swatted him away, sending him crashing through a brick wall on the corner. He climbed back up, dusted himself off, and shot out a white strand to swing back into the fight.
Dave stopped breathing. Crumbs fell onto the rug, and he didn't even bother picking them up.
A few months earlier, when Tony Stark had faced the world's microphones at a press conference and said, "I am Iron Man," Dave had been sitting in front of this same television. He had been so excited that night that he hadn't slept, sketching over a dozen suit designs on scrap paper.
Once the frenzy faded, reality delivered a resounding slap.
Stark was a billionaire and a genius inventor. He had an Arc Reactor and Stark Industries' production lines.
Dave Lizewski, meanwhile, was a nobody in Senior Class 2 at Midtown High School. He had just twenty dollars a week in pocket money, and