I didn't wait for her to question it. I reached out with my bare left hand, wrapping my fingers around the thick, corroded metal clamp. With a small, precisely controlled flex of my vibranium-laced muscles, I squeezed.
The crust of corrosion shattered instantly, falling away in a cloud of white dust. I twisted the clamp slightly, using the sheer friction of my grip to scrape the lead contact perfectly clean, before forcing it tightly back onto the battery post. I practically cold-welded the metal into place with my thumb, ensuring the connection would never slip again.
"Try it now," I told her, wiping a minor smudge of grease off my thumb with a napkin from my pocket.
Haley looked highly skeptical, but she leaned into the open driver's side window and turned the key.
The engine sputtered, caught, and roared to life, settling into a rough but steady idle.
Her face lit up, a massive, genuine smile breaking through her teenage angst. "Oh my god! You fixed it! You just... squeezed it and fixed it! Thank you so much, Arthur. You are literally a lifesaver."
"Happy to help, Haley," I replied with a small smile, closing the hood with a solid thud. "Drive safe."
I walked back across the street, heading toward my garage. I could feel her staring for a brief second before she excitedly climbed into her car and drove off.
I let out a soft huff of amusement. The contrast was perfect. Over there, a corroded battery terminal was a world-ending crisis. Over here, I was wearing a ring that could single-handedly topple a small country. The mundane, low-stakes drama of the sitcom world was exactly what I needed to keep myself anchored.
I stepped into the underground garage. The matte-black 1969 Mustang Boss 429 sat in the center of the pristine space, looking like a sleeping panther.
I slid into the driver's seat. The zero-point reactor purred to life with a deep, resonant bass note that vibrated in my chest.
"Atlas," I said as the hidden garage door smoothly angled up to the street level. "Set a route for Zenith Logistics. Keep the repulsor flight offline; we're driving analog today."
"Route set, Arthur," Atlas replied. "Traffic is optimal."
The drive through Los Angeles was effortless. The car's kinetic shielding absorbed every bump and pothole, making the ride impossibly smooth. My enhanced reflexes navigated the chaotic city traffic with the casual ease of a man walking through an empty park.
Forty minutes later, I pulled into the industrial district. It was a sprawling grid of massive, corrugated steel warehouses, chain-link fences, and heavy diesel trucks. It was loud, ugly, and perfectly anonymous.
I pulled up to a massive, standalone warehouse at the end of a dead-end street. The heavy steel roll-up doors were rusted shut, and the perimeter fence was overgrown with weeds.
I killed the engine and stepped out.
"Atlas, kill the perimeter cameras," I murmured.
"Local security feeds looped, sir. You are invisible."
I walked up to the heavy padlock on the front gate. I didn't bother conjuring a key or picking it. I simply pinched the thick steel shackle between my thumb and forefinger and twisted. The metal sheared off like warm putty.
I pushed the gate open and walked up to the side entrance door, doing the same to the deadbolt. Stepping inside, the air was thick with dust and the smell of old motor oil. The space was massive—at least twenty thousand square feet of empty concrete floor beneath high, steel-beamed ceilings. Stacks of wooden pallets and forgotten industrial junk littered the corners.
'A blank canvas.'
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small, metallic cube. It was the secondary cluster of the microbot swarm I had fabricated that morning. I tossed it lightly onto the concrete floor.
"Clean it up," I projected the thought through the neural lace.
The cube dissolved into a hovering, shimmering black mist. The swarm expanded outward with a soft, hungry hum. They swept across the floor, devouring the dust, breaking down the wooden pallets into carbon gas, and scrubbing the concrete until it looked newly poured. In less than two minutes, the entire warehouse was spotless and utterly sterile.
I walked to the center of the vast, empty room.
I needed a factory. I couldn't spend hours hand-crafting every piece of technology I wanted. I needed automated, highly precise assembly lines capable of working with exotic materials.
I closed my eyes. I pictured the automated manufacturing arms from Tony Stark's Malibu garage, but upscaled for heavy industry. I added the molecular-compilation technology of a Star Trek industrial replicator to rapidly forge base materials, and powered the entire grid with a centralized, subterranean arc reactor.
The cheat activated. The fugue state slammed into me.
The air in the warehouse crackled with displaced energy as raw materials dropped into existence. Massive blocks of steel, spools of heavy-gauge copper wire, sheets of reinforced glass, and tons of unrefined palladium.
I moved. I didn't walk; I flowed across the concrete. I used the microbot swarm to lift the multi-ton steel girders, welding them into place with microscopic precision. I assembled the subterranean arc reactor first, burying it safely beneath the concrete floor and routing the superconducting cables up to the surface.
I built the fabrication arms—sleek, highly articulated robotic limbs equipped with laser-cutters, plasma welders, and molecular binding tools. I constructed the compilation chambers, heavy quartz-glass vats where base elements could be rapidly 3D-printed into complex parts.
When my vision finally cleared and the fugue state receded, my chest was heaving, a thin sheen of sweat on my forehead.
The empty warehouse was gone. In its place was a state-of-the-art, fully automated Tinker fabrication plant. It hummed with latent, limitless power. The robotic arms hung from overhead tracks, dormant but ready. The compilation vats glowed with a soft, sterile white light.
"Facility online, Arthur," Atlas's voice echoed through the warehouse's newly installed speaker grid. "The arc reactor is stabilized. Fabrication protocols are ready for your input. We have achieved full industrial capability."
I walked over to the main control terminal—a sleek, holographic interface projecting from a solid vibranium pedestal.
I rested my hands on the console, a deep, predatory smile spreading across my face.
The sitcom world could stay outside. In here, I was a god of industry.
"Atlas," I said, my eyes scanning the pristine, humming factory. "Begin drafting schematics for a localized, low-orbit satellite network. I want eyes on the entire globe, completely blackboxed and untraceable. If this world has a S.H.I.E.L.D., I want to know exactly what they're doing before they even know I exist."
"Drafting schematics now, sir."
I leaned back, crossing my arms. I had the fortress. I had the armor. I had the factory.
Now, it was time to make sure nobody could ever touch me.