President Maya's home was in Midtown West, not far from Times Square in the heart of Manhattan. Without all these skyscrapers blocking the way and the constant urban noise, a good shout from Times Square might actually reach her apartment.
With her shadow-stealth mode active, President Maya spotted that tasteless green-hat Spider-Man in under five minutes.
He was still gleefully swinging between buildings, occasionally swooping over the heads of the street-level gawkers at barely 7 or 8 feet (about 2–3 meters) above them, triggering waves of shrieks and cheers.
President Maya didn't reveal herself right away. Instead, she lurked in the shadows, watching him continue his outrageously flashy aerial acrobatics.
At first she'd suspected someone was deliberately impersonating Spider-Man to lure her out—a classic movie setup, after all.
But now she wasn't so sure, because this green-hat Spider-Man who was clearly having the time of his life was someone she recognized. Someone she knew very well.
Alright, most of you have probably guessed it already. It was New York's most famous playboy—Tony Stark.
Honestly, President Maya was a little disappointed. Not disappointed that it was Tony Stark specifically. After all, there were only a handful of people in New York capable of replicating ODM gear, and even fewer who'd be this flashy and attention-hungry about it. Discovering it was Tony was surprising but also felt inevitable.
What truly disappointed her was the absence of the authentic gas-powered system from Attack on Titan. Tony's ODM rig was undeniably high-tech, but it fell well short of sci-fi black-tech territory.
So what was the deal with those silver boxes on his waist?
Honestly, once you knew the answer, it was nothing remarkable: vectored turbine thrusters.
Think of it this way—Tony would invent the Iron Man armor in about a decade, right?
Remember the flame jets in his palms, on his back, and under his feet? Those silver boxes were essentially the same principle. The only special thing was the fuel inside.
The exhaust it produced was low-temperature and colorless, which was why nobody on the ground could see any thrust flame.
As for the steel-cable-tipped projectiles Tony was firing? They weren't actually pulling his body through the air. The real motive force came from the waist-mounted turbine thrusters. The cables served only as directional tethers.
To use an analogy everyone would understand—think of a train.
Tony's waist thrusters were the locomotive. The cables anchored to building walls were the railway tracks.
And as for the green hat on his head... heh. Now that was interesting.
Other people couldn't hear it, but President Maya with her perception ability had no trouble picking up the audio.
The truth was, Tony could pull off all those flashy aerial maneuvers largely thanks to Jarvis backing him up behind the scenes.
Yes, Jarvis. But not the AI version. The real, flesh-and-blood Edwin Jarvis, the Stark family's loyal old butler.
That green hat was a signal relay hub. All those green LEDs were data collectors. First, the helmet transmitted real-time environmental data—surrounding terrain, wind speed, angle, flight velocity—to Stark Industries' supercomputer.
Then the supercomputer crunched the numbers and spat out optimal maneuver instructions, beaming them back to the helmet.
Finally, the helmet adjusted the waist-mounted vectored thrusters' output and thrust angle, steering Tony through the air.
In other words, Tony was just a glorified railway worker. He controlled where the cable anchored, and the supercomputer used that anchor point to calculate his next move.
Rinse and repeat, and Tony's ODM rig came to life.
Old Jarvis played the role of Batman's Alfred—monitoring equipment, feeding Tony real-time news updates, and making the occasional adjustment.
For instance, here was a snippet of the conversation President Maya was currently eavesdropping on:
"Hey, Jarvis—how many TV stations can see me right now?"
"Sir, all five major American broadcast networks plus local New York news outlets are running live coverage of your flight. Let me check the numbers... goodness! Over fifty million viewers nationwide are watching your feed right now. That's more than last year's NBA Finals audience when Jordan won his second consecutive championship!"
"Ha ha ha ha! Well, obviously."
"Sir, I must remind you—the purpose of tonight's outing was not to court public attention." Jarvis's voice turned stern.
"Easy, easy! Jarvis, I know why I'm out here. But the real Spider-Man hasn't shown up yet—what am I supposed to do? Have you spotted him?"
Jarvis scanned the surrounding screens again. "I'm sorry, sir. Four satellites and three hundred twenty-seven cameras have found no trace of Spider-Man. Furthermore, I should inform you that several TV stations have dispatched helicopters. Also, our tap into the police dispatch channel indicates at least eight squad cars are converging on your position."
"Shit! It's been almost half an hour—where the hell is that idiot Spider-Man?!" Tony was getting antsy.
"Sir, perhaps we should try again tomorrow. Tomorrow's the weekend—he should have free time then," Jarvis suggested.
"Give it a few more minutes. Maybe he's on his way right now. I just want to ask him one thing—how does he control those cable-tipped projectiles to change direction mid-flight? I've been working on it for a week and can't crack it. Whipping my body around does change the trajectory, sure, but the body movements are too complex and nearly impossible to control precisely. His gyroscopic system must be incredibly advanced—there's no other explanation for that kind of agility."
Tony grew genuinely wistful as he spoke. He'd soldered his first circuit board at five, designed an advanced combustion engine at seven, and graduated from MIT at seventeen. Even this ODM rig had only taken him a few hours to DIY. Yet replicating Spider-Man's fluid cable control was proving nearly impossible.
The only workaround would be mounting vector thrusters on the projectile tips as well, but that would make both manufacturing and control more complicated, not less. He'd need compact, high-output next-gen power sources and a faster microprocessor. The current helmet-relay data exchange was already too cumbersome and slow.
The whole reason he'd come out tonight cosplaying Spider-Man was to pick Spider-Man's brain about solving those exact problems.
This wasn't because Tony was naive enough to ignore the possibility of superpowers. It's just that, in his mind, since he'd been able to cobble together this rig on short notice, it was perfectly reasonable that someone else with more time could refine the concept further. Given enough time, Tony himself could replicate Spider-Man's performance exactly.
Besides, this era had no super-heroes or super-villains. Mutants—aside from Magneto's brief rampage a few years back—generally hid from the public. Who among them would put on a cape and rescue the ordinary humans who despised them?
Tony wasn't alone in this line of thinking. Most people assumed the same.
You couldn't blame them for lacking imagination. The future Marvel world was simply too insane. Once they'd lived through alien invasions and survived Thanos's Snap, then their minds would be open enough to consider anything possible.
It was the same in our world. If someone showed up wearing powered armor and flew across the sky tomorrow, would you assume they were a real-life super-genius engineer, or that they had Magneto-style superpowers?