"I heard someone was imitating Men in Black 3 and driving a giant monocycle to celebrate the grand opening of the Raft today."
Iron Man's boots hit the pavement with a heavy metallic clank. Tony's faceplate retracted as he looked over the smoking, web-covered wreckage of Jackson Weele's contraption.
Peter hung upside down from a nearby brick wall. "I think it was going for more of a Ferris wheel aesthetic, just with a lot more machine guns."
Tony scoffed. "Anyone can call themselves a supervillain these days. What's next? A guy stealing purses on a rocket-powered skateboard?" He gestured vaguely at the NYPD dragging Weele away. "Steve and Bruce are already hauling the Abomination out to the new facility. But we've got a backlog to clear out. Your old buddies, the Shocker and Mysterio, are due for a room upgrade."
Tony glanced over at Cindy, who was quietly securing the last of the Big Wheel's loose plating with her silk. "Plus, Fury will sleep a lot better knowing a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent tagged along for the ride. Let's move."
The temporary holding facility wasn't tucked away in some dark black-site; it was directly beneath Avengers Tower. Hank Pym was currently running the detention block, which meant the conditions were thoroughly humanitarian. Tony complained about this the entire elevator ride down.
"I designed the Raft from the ground up," Tony grumbled. "Architecture, security protocols, the works. I pulled the disciplinary models from international maximum-security frameworks. Giving these guys premium cable and video games isn't rehabilitation, it's a vacation."
The elevator doors chimed open. Herman Schultz and Quentin Beck occupied separate, transparent holding cells. Beck lay rigidly on his cot, completely hidden under a gray wool blanket. At the sound of the doors, he pulled the blanket down exactly an inch to peer out, then yanked it right back up over his head.
Herman, however, practically jumped off his mattress. He walked right up to the reinforced glass. "Hey! Spider! Little Spider, over here!"
Peter hopped down from the ceiling and walked up to the glass. "Long time no see, Herman."
Herman crossed his arms. "I've been tracking the days since you joined the big leagues. Been locked up down here for what, two weeks? And this is the first time you come down to visit."
"I only officially joined the Avengers last Sunday," Peter said, scratching the back of his neck. "And then I had to fly out on a mission outside new york."
Tony tapped a sequence into the holographic keypad next to the cell. The electronic locks disengaged with a heavy thunk.
"You're getting transferred to a permanent facility today," Peter added as the glass door slid open. "So we're probably going to see even less of each other."
Herman nodded slowly. He looked at Peter, the tension in his shoulders dropping a fraction. "Thanks for asking if I was okay, Spider-Man."
"Of course I did. You were my first real supervillain, buddy," Peter said. He took a pair of heavy, Stark-tech suppression cuffs from Tony and held them out. "Listen, when you get out of here, you should look up Stark Industries. You've got the engineering chops. Just... stop building things that blow up city blocks."
Herman held his wrists out, letting Tony secure the cuffs. "I'll keep that in mind."
The Raft wasn't some island fortress on the Hudson. Tony's design was a massive, submerged metallic monolith adrift in international waters, plunging deep into the ocean over four hundred kilometers from the nearest coastline. Because the Avengers lacked official global law enforcement authority, the facility fell under the administrative jurisdiction of the World Security Council. S.H.I.E.L.D. handled the administrative authority. The United States had zero administrative reach here.
As their Quinjet touched down on the rain-slicked landing pad, Tony didn't waste a second bragging about the specs.
"We're running on twelve localized arc reactors in redundant triads," Tony shouted over the roar of the ocean wind. "This place has enough juice to stay operational for a century. We only need three online to keep the lights on."
Tony led Peter, Cindy, Herman, and Beck down the main loading ramp into the cavernous interior. "We analyzed energy signatures from the Cosmic Cube to build a molecular displacement disruptor. Nobody is teleporting anywhere within a five-kilometer radius. We also rigged a localized demagnetizing field into the hull plating. Even Magneto couldn't bend a paperclip in here."
Steve Rogers waited for them just inside the primary airlock, a datapad in hand. Tony walked up, clapping his hands together. "How's the intake going, Cap?"
"Smooth so far," Steve said. "Blonsky is secured. Ulysses Klaue is processed. Now we've got Schultz and Beck. But Tony, this place is entirely populated by super-threats. If there's a localized breach, we're talking about an uncontainable riot."
"We're over four hundred kilometers out into the ocean, Cap. Any gear is confiscated the second they step onto the platform. High-risk targets like Abomination are in specialized containment."
Tony tapped the side of his own head. "Besides, human guards can be bribed or intimidated. Hank and I designed a completely automated, highly intelligent robotic security force to handle the cell blocks. I built the hardware; Pym wrote the behavioral architecture."
A cold knot formed in Peter's stomach. "Mr. Stark... what did you name these robot guards?"
Tony waved a hand dismissively. "Ultron. Version two. Why?"
Peter's spider-sense didn't tingle, but his pulse spiked anyway. "Is there... any chance of a machine uprising? Like, an artificial intelligence deciding humans are the real problem?"
Tony gave Peter a look reserved for flat-earthers. "Don't be dramatic, kid. This isn't a sci-fi movie. It's a non-self-iterating system with a closed-loop behavioral architecture. Its operational logic is strictly capped below JARVIS's baseline. It's perfectly safe."
Perfectly safe. Peter filed that exact phrasing away. He made a mental note to pull the specific directive language from the Raft's servers later and have a very long, very detailed conversation with Hank Pym about it.
Cindy nudged Peter forward, and they escorted Herman and Beck down into the detention block. Stripped of their gear, they were placed in standard containment. The cells were three-by-five-meter boxes lined with transparent, reinforced polymer, keeping them completely visible to the patrol drones at all times.
"Keep your head down and do the time, Herman," Peter said, leaning against the glass. "I'll swing by whenever it's my turn to run transport."
Herman looked over at the cell next to his, where Beck was currently curling into a tight, miserable ball on his cot.
"Don't worry about it, Spider," Herman said, knocking his knuckles against the transparent wall. "I'll keep an eye on the theater kid. We're all here because of you anyway."
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