16. Martin Johnson - Iron Panther (Marvel - Earth #202202)

This is the character history for a Marvel RPG game my friends started towards the beginning of the year. He's a super smart, young, activist, type with an Iron Man suit. I guess I'm back to the blog after a really shitty two years. I'm going to start out with posting my character journals from this game. Fair warning, this one is long. Hope you enjoy! 

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So... My therapist told me that I should write out my life story. Life story? I’m seventeen years old. Seriously, how much “life story” can I possibly have? It’s not like I’m Tupac or Danny Trejo or even Phoenix. There’s no weird trauma or abusive family or jail time. Nobody in my family was killed by a mustache twirling villain. I wasn’t thrown out of the house for growing a third eye or second dick. I am the opposite of a Mary Sue or Larry Stu. I do not have Hollywood or comic book style pathos.

My mom is a Nurse Practitioner at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital here in Oakland. She’s worked there since before I was born. Mom started there as a CNA, living with her parents. With the hospital’s and her parents’ help, she worked her way through college and eventually bought the little house we live in now. This was before Oakland started getting invaded by the melanin deficient tech bros, who blew up housing costs. They hadn’t finished making the gays homeless in San Francisco yet.

My dad is Sir Not Appearing in this Picture. He had been a massage therapist in the hospital’s physical therapy department. Mom says he was quite the lady’s man, getting around the nursing staff. He sailed out of Mom’s life as fast as he sailed in, moving on to a different job and different women. I’ve never met him, and his name isn’t even on my birth certificate. Mom doesn’t think he deserves credit for making me. She doesn’t even know where he is now. Neither of us have really bothered looking. If he’s not interested in us, we’re not interested in him. I suppose I’ll just yank his employee file from the hospital’s records and track it to his medical history at some point. That way, I know if I’m gonna die of some weird genetic disease at 30.

As you can see, I come from pretty regular people. Most of the kids I grew up with came from single parent homes. My family figured out that I was the not normal part of our lives pretty early on. The moment I found out that my family thought I was strange is a weirdly clear memory of learning to pee somewhere other than into my own pants. My aim was pretty bad, which was totally normal. Mom was upset while cleaning, and I wanted to make her happy. I recited the Spanish and English alphabets that I’d learned on Sesame Street, which was totally not normal. I’d always spoken in complete sentences and used words beyond my age, but the family had just rolled with it. Those alphabets somehow crossed a line. Mom stopped what she was doing and had me repeat myself. I thought she wanted to know more, so I drew the letters in the air with my fingers while I sang them out.

I didn’t really understand all the excitement when she took me out to the living room and had me repeat it again for my grandparents. They gave me a crayon and paper to write the letters instead of drawing with my fingers in the air. I did as they asked. I even wrote some of the words I’d seen on TV, not all of which were little kid appropriate. Condom and beer ads were and are a thing. Mom got one of my bedtime books out and asked me if I could read the words in it. I could and quickly read the book to the family. Mom and MawMaw kept bringing me books while I sat on Pops’ lap. After going through all my books, they ran into a book with words I couldn’t read. It was one of Mom’s school books that MawMaw had grabbed randomly. They didn’t teach medical terminology on PBS Kids. I’m pretty sure that they still don’t.

With this halt in the excitement, Mom knelt in front of me and asked if I knew my numbers. I nodded and asked her if she wanted to hear. She shook her head no and told me that she was very proud of me, but I had to be careful about letting people outside of the family know how smart I was. I could let people know I was smart, but not how smart. With that, she coordinated with my grandparents for me to stay with them instead of going to daycare. She didn’t want me freaking out the other kids and then their parents asking questions. Mom was convinced that some villain would try to kidnap me.

MawMaw and Pops continued to let me watch whatever I wanted on TV. I ended up less on PBS Kids and more on the Science Channel or Discovery or History Channel. This was pre-Ancient Aliens. History Channel was still about history. I can still quote details about WWII that make me sound like one of those unwashed dudes with thousands of minis in a basement in Nebraska. They also started bringing home books for me from the local second-hand shops. The first one MawMaw gave me was a dictionary. I read that thing like it was the best novel ever. It had the pronunciation guide in the front where it taught the International Phonetic Alphabet used by dictionaries. I learned not only how to spell the words and what they meant but how to say them. To this day, unless I’m code switching to speak with the neighbors or classmates, I sound like a dictionary pronunciation guide. 

It was obvious that I liked the science and technology shows best. MawMaw added old math and science textbooks to the ones she got at the second-hand stores. She would trade in books I was done with towards new ones. Despite her making the rounds to all the charity stores and used book shops, the sales people got to know her enough to start slipping her discounts. They didn’t know why she was burning through so many books but did see that she was far from wealthy. She also got a library card and regularly hit their check out maximum. They decided to channel my interests into healthier directions after Pops found me in the living room with one of the lamps completely disassembled. He started letting me stand on a box to watch him repair the family car. People in the neighborhood used to laugh at him, explaining complex car repairs to a little kid. Pops just ignored them and kept on showing things to me. Any time I looked ready to fire back at the bullies, he would tell me to remember my promise to Mom.

When it came time for me to enter school, Mom managed to get me on independent study through the local public elementary. California put that into place mostly for kids with medical or behavioral issues that make classroom time impossible. Mom convinced them that I wouldn’t do well in a classroom and that the family would make sure I stayed on track. I had to check in with a local teacher every week or two, proving that I was doing my work and functioning at grade level or above. That was mostly an exercise in not telling too much. Mom and MawMaw would practice with me before each trip how much knowledge I could show. I was no actor, and I was still just a kid, even if I was a smart one. This resulted in stilted performances for my check-ins.

My teacher’s name was Mrs. Wilson. She was an old, white, hippie lady. She told Mom that I should be assessed for Autism. Mrs. Wilson said that my weird speech pattern, odd behavior, and antisocial tendencies were all possible signs of the disorder. Mom was clear that she didn’t want me to have any more labels than my gender and race already gave me. I just needed to be allowed to keep learning my own way. After a little back and forth that got close to using the words that I wasn’t allowed to say, Mrs. Wilson backed off.

Mom started putting me into extracurricular programs to give me exposure to other children in a more controlled environment than a public school classroom would offer and to give me things to do other than read books. The local Boys and Girls Club had a bunch of sports and a computer lab. I immediately fell in love with that computer lab. Being small for my age, I sucked at sports. Sucking at sports and talking weird resulted in me getting bullied, despite the Club staff doing their best to prevent it. It got bad enough that they let me flee to the computer lab, which was my real love. That was the first place I ever had largely unsupervised access to the internet. They had safety filters, but there wasn’t anyone hanging over my shoulder. We didn’t have the internet at home. Most people in our neighborhood didn’t have it. There were parts of town that weren’t even wired for it yet. Hell, there are still a lot of people without it in the old neighborhood. It’s Oakland, after all, not Silicon Valley.

Mom’s response to the bullying wasn’t to scold me for being weird; it was to enroll me in Karate. She didn’t put me into one of the local kid dojos or one of the hippie dojos in Berkeley. Mom used the family car and took me all the way up to Albany on the other side of Berkeley to the Shotokan dojo. Sensei Hanshi was, and still is, a world champion, a refugee from Iran, and famous for being a great teacher. He was also a really nice guy and would let Mom do her homework in his office while I was in class. Due to that dojo and it’s teachers, Karate was the first sport that I learned to love. I still love it, attending the JKA Shotokan dojo here on campus and going back to my home dojo a couple of times a month.

This became my life for the next few years. I watched TV and read at home with MawMaw and Pops. I proved I was on track to Mrs. Wilson, every week or two. I attended all the Karate classes that Sensei Hanshi would allow. I hung out in the Club’s computer lab, finding a wide world of stuff once I got past their filters. Pops also started bringing things home for us to fix together: small appliances, electronics, and even other peoples’ cars. Anything we couldn’t figure out on our own, I’d look up on the Club’s computers. That stuff was Pops making side hustle money for the family. Either it was a paid repair, or it was something he’d found on the street and sold once it was fixed.

Between Pops’ side money, both his and MawMaw’s Social Security, and Mom’s new wages once she was done with school; Mom was able to get us a little house, away from the projects. It was still a Black neighborhood, but it was a nicer Black neighborhood. The house had a garage for the car and a small concrete pad in the back that we could put a grill out on. It also had a basement, which isn’t super common in California. Best of all, we all got our own bedrooms. No more sharing my mom’s room. No more hearing neighbors through paper thin walls. No more dodging hookers to get into our apartment. 

We didn’t have much to move since we weren’t bringing anything with us that couldn’t be properly fumigated. In the projects, bugs of all kinds were a constant battle. A few old, wooden family heirlooms were about the only furniture that came with us. Mom’s coworkers, folks from the dojo, and a couple of the staff from the Club helped us get what we wanted to take with us over to the new house. Anything we didn’t take with us, MawMaw and Pops gave it to neighbors who needed it more than we did. Our old furniture, clothes, and even toys I never played with got snapped right up by the community. People from the neighborhood seemed happy for us but also a little confused. Not many folks leave the projects and those that do almost never do it the way white folks do; by being smart enough, savvy enough, and lucky enough to get a better job and save their money. Mom was all those things.

With grants from the hospital, government grants, and scholarships, Mom didn’t really have student loans to pay off. Between her really good debt to income ratio and the huge downpayment she and Pops had put together, Mom got a mortgage with some extra for remodeling and new furniture. It wasn’t a huge house, but it sure felt like it to me. I missed this part, but MawMaw told me about it later. Mom had set up the primary bedroom, the one with it’s own bathroom, as MawMaw and Pops’ room. There was apparently quite the argument over it. Eventually, Mom accepted it as her room. MawMaw and Pops thought she should have it, being the working woman and all. I agreed with MawMaw and Pops. I got the smallest of the three rooms, but I didn’t care. I had my own room!

Mom had set up the washer and dryer in a hall closet so that nobody had to go up and down the stairs with baskets of laundry. She said this was to save MawMaw’s knees. MawMaw said it was to let Mom set up the basement for me. Mom had gotten us the Internet and had a coworker of hers set up a computer area for me in the basement. There was also a work table and chairs. The walls were lined with shelves full of books, electronics kits, lab equipment that I was sure came second hand from the hospital, and even a diy robotic arm for me to build and program. I wasn’t the only one who got my own space. The garage was big enough for the car, and for Pops to have the workshop, Mom had the remodelers install for him. We also got new roommates. MawMaw had always wanted a cat, and pets were banned in the projects. Mom took her down to the animal shelter, and MawMaw picked out two black kittens that she named Malcom and Bobby.

Even though we’d moved to a new neighborhood, I was kept on my independent study program. Mom didn’t think I’d be able to conceal my enthusiasm for knowing the answers to things, and she was probably right. I still struggle with that. With the move, I did get a new teacher. Mr. Davis was the complete opposite of Mrs. Wilson. Where she was a soft, flighty, white hippie; he was a hard-nosed, tough, black former military man. Rather than fighting Mr. Davis over the Autism test, Mom pulled him away for a private chat. When they came back into the room; it was pretty obvious, even to me, that she’d let him more into our secret than she had Mrs. Wilson. Mr. Davis sat in front of me and explained that I would do the minimal paperwork I’d been doing with Mrs. Wilson for the school district, but he wanted to do extra work with me off the books. He said that even really smart people needed guidance. They can be misled into bad behavior by their own curiosity. Mom and I agreed.

Mr. Davis was not joking about the extra work. Mom let him come over to the house for our lessons, to avoid people at the school asking too many questions. He assessed where I was in my knowledge and found big holes. I was doing great on the STEM subjects, less well with social sciences and arts. Mr. Davis admitted to me that some of the more technical things I was interested in and knew were beyond him, but he wanted to make sure that I had a more well rounded education. Mr. Davis started bringing me stacks of books to read about government, history, culture, and art. Mom was also told to sign me up for art and music programs through the Club. Karate and it’s connected exercising were good for my physical activity, but I needed more enrichment. Mr. Davis said that he wanted me to be less Steve Urkel and more Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I discovered that I didn’t mind drawing or sculpting. Those could be used to design things I wanted to build. Luckily, I didn't suck at dancing. This saved me from a lifetime of mockery. I still can’t sing to save myself, though. I didn’t mind almost any musical instrument, but my favorites were the trumpet and guitar. Pops was extremely excited about my interest in the trumpet. He pestered both Mom and Mr. Davis to get me signed up for a Jazz music program. Like any kid learning a musical instrument, I went through my killing an animal phase and Mom got real cranky with Pops over it. She made me practice in Pops' workshop in the garage. If Pops wanted to support me, he could listen to me.

My interest in guitar was fed by a neighbor down the street. Mom had let me start riding bikes with the Lopez kids, since they weren't involved with gangs like some of the other neighbors. It also let me practice my Spanish with real people. She didn't want me sounding like a Youtube video. Their family had a mariachi band and Mr. Lopez had all his kids practice instruments with the band. They taught me a bunch of different kinds of guitars. The only one I couldn't get the hang of was the guitarron. It's a huge instrument and I'm not a big dude. I just couldn't get my arms around it right. The men in the band were all amused by the fact that an African American boy was learning both their language and their music.

The local gangs were always trying to recruit us smaller kids to run errands. There was a perception among them that we could slip past the cops and other gangs easier. Mr. Lopez kept his kids busy with the band and his store to keep them out of that kind of activity. My family, Sensei Hanshi, and Mr. Davis kept me up to my eyeballs in activities for the same reason. My little group of friends were also extremely careful about not wearing clothing that could mark us as flagging for any of the gangs. This didn't stop the Lopez kids and I from getting harassed by the thugs. I've lost track of the number of times I got called a square. The only thing that kept them from stealing from us or physically harming us was the fact that Pops fixed everyone’s cars, Mom would patch people up without asking questions, and Mr. Lopez ran the bodega that the entire neighborhood depended on.

Despite saying that he didn’t understand my technical and scientific interests, after working with me for about a year, Mr. Davis started bringing me STEM materials and projects. These weren’t textbooks or even college assignments. They looked like photocopies of some place’s internal documents. Anything identifying where they came from was gone. Mr. Davis said he didn’t know the source, that he got them from a friend. Parts had been removed and my task was to fill in the blanks. At first, these were as easy to solve as any of the other homework I’d been given. The more of these that I completed, the harder they became. I could tell that I was also getting newer documents too. The first ones I’d gotten had handwritten parts and WWII era manual typewriter fonts. Those fonts shifted in official paperwork over the years with changes and improvements in typewriters, then the move to word processors, and later to computers. A lot of them were the math from NASA’s early rockets and even later things like the moonshot or shuttle program. Others were the principles behind new elements that seemed to defy normal physics as energy sources. I’m also pretty sure that I redesigned a helicarrier engine.

My teen years did not start off on a good foot. We lost Pops in his sleep shortly after my thirteenth birthday. MawMaw was the only real church goer in our family. Despite this, we had a big church funeral for Pops. It was for her. He didn’t care anymore. MawMaw’s church friends and Mom’s coworkers were all there. Folks from the projects and folks from our current neighborhood came. Lastly, people Pops had known from all over the world came. Pops was a much more interesting person than he’d ever let on to me when he was alive. I learned that he’d served in the military special forces for years. He’d gone to Vietnam, Israel, the Congo, and loads of other places that his military friends wouldn’t tell me. After he’d left the military; Pops had been a roadie with a Jazz band, drove a bus in New York, been a bartender in Mexico, a mechanic here in Oakland, and more. All those friend groups of his met each other and me for the first time at that funeral. The only people unsurprised by Pops’ wide ranging history were MawMaw, Mom, and for some reason... Mr. Davis.

After Pops’ funeral, his old military friends took turns sleeping on our couch. Whenever I asked why they were there, they told me it was for MawMaw. If I asked questions about Pops, they would just tell me the same handful of dumb bar stories that they’d already told me. Mr. Davis was also around a lot more than usual. He seemed to know the military guys and, like them, wouldn’t answer my questions. After several days of this kind of frustration, I fled out to Pops’ workshop. I could take my pent up feelings out on stuff that needed hammering. Pops had taught me how to use all of his tools and there were unfinished things he’d promised to the neighbors. I found some of Pops’ old RnB tapes and dug in on those projects, losing myself to the sounds of the tools and the music from his old boombox. 

I only stopped when the sweat got so bad that I couldn’t keep my glasses from sliding off my nose. Searching around for a string to tie them into place with, I saw a couple of those old military guys watching me with shocked expressions on their faces. My confusion must have been obvious. One of them pointed behind me. I looked where his finger was aimed and saw that I’d finished all of Pops’ projects. What would have taken Pops a week or more, I did in a few hours. The other one let out a sharp calling whistle and Mr. Davis, who must have arrived after I went out to the garage, came running out of the house. The one that had pointed to the finished work reached over me and turned the boombox off. I suddenly felt extremely awkward; standing there covered in sweat, pinning my glasses into place with a finger, with those three men staring down at me.

The uncomfortable silence was finally broken by one of the military men asking Mr. Davis questions about me, except the man was calling him Colonel Davis. Mr. Davis told me to stay put and didn’t look ready for me to question him. I stayed where I was while he took the two men out of earshot of me. I could see him talking to them for a bit and it seemed like he was scolding them for some reason. The military men went into the house and Mr. (Colonel?) Davis came back into the garage. He sat down on one of Pops’ stools and pulled the other one over across from him. I’m not an idiot, I knew he meant for me to sit there. Once I was settled in place, Mr. Davis sighed and started talking.

“You and I will have a long chat.” He paused for a moment and looked at all the completed projects, “More like, I will be talking for a long time. From the looks of what you did here tonight, there will be no stopping you from getting information when you want it.” He waited for my nod of acknowledgement before going on, “Let’s start with that rank those men were using. I’m retired Air Force. I worked on stuff that I can’t tell you about, due to security clearances. I can tell you that my project group was teamed up with N.A.S.A. and S.H.I.E.L.D.” Mr. Davis didn’t even pause for my “wow” reaction at the mention of S.H.I.E.L.D, “I never worked directly with your Pops. He was in the Army Special Forces. Your Pops and some of his service buddies crossed paths with me over the years, but we never teamed up.” My mind was reeling. Not only had my Pops been in the military, but my teacher had been involved with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Pops had somehow been involved with them as well.

Mr. Davis opened one of Pops’ drawers, pulling out a plaque with a ton of military ribbons pinned to it. He started telling stories about Pops’s service years, pointing out which ribbons came from which events. Pops was much older than I ever knew. He’d served in WWII and had worked with Isaiah Bradley, before that man had been unjustly imprisoned for stealing Cap’s uniform. Everyone in the Black community knew about Black Captain America, everyone. Pops, my Pops, had worked with him. After the war, my Pops had stayed on as a lifer in the military. He’d been included in a different experiment than the Super Solder one and he had to stay in the military to keep getting the treatments associated with it. A lot of the men who quit taking it, died suddenly without it. Mr. Davis told me stories about Pops’ activities all over the world until he officially left the service. Mr. Davis was clear that officially didn’t mean really. Part of why Pops had worked some of those odd jobs and traveled like he did was he’d get contracts and little more of his medicine from different agencies. It wasn’t enough to entirely halt his aging anymore, but it was enough to stay more than normal. He didn’t fully retire and stop taking it completely until I was born. Pops wanted to stay home and grow old with Maw Maw.

We sat there in silence for some time after Mr. Davis had finished his stories. Our quiet was broken by a sharp knock at the door. Looking up, I saw Mom standing in the doorway and she did not look pleased. Mr. Davis started to tell me to go into the house, but Mom cut him short. She wanted me to hear what she had to say. Mom angrily tore into Mr. Davis. She, Maw Maw, and Pops had all kept me away from those old stories for a reason, the same reason they’d kept me out of the school system. Black people were used and experimented on. They knew the government would find some excuse to take me away from them and I’d become a lab rat to be poked and prodded. I’d end up like all those Black men who hadn’t been as lucky at Bradley or Pops. Hell, most non-Blacks had no idea that there had even been the military’s experiments on Black people or that Bradley even existed. Black people only knew about him through word of mouth due to his secrecy being a condition of his pardon. Pops’ secrecy was a condition of his retirement. White America just couldn’t handle the idea that there had been a Black Captain America or a Black version of the Howling Commandos had existed. America was not a good place for Black people of any kind, especially unusual Black people. If she knew how, she’d apply for asylum for me with Wakanda.

When Mom finally ran out of steam, all three of us noticed that Maw Maw and Pops’ military friends were standing on the back porch watching Mom. Maw Maw quietly pointed out that half the neighborhood probably heard Mom yelling at us and that we should just come into the house. We sheepishly trooped past Maw Maw into the house, along with the visiting men. Maw Maw followed us in and stood, with her arms crossed, staring at us in judgment. Once we were all seated around the living and dining room, Maw Maw set leftovers down in front of us. While she was setting out plates, Maw Maw was calmly telling us that Pops had told her everything and she also knew that this meant that both Mom and I were probably not completely normal. My intelligence and Mom’s ability to work 12 hour shifts on end were both good signs of this fact. All we could do was protect each other and fighting amongst ourselves was not doing that. Properly shamed, we all ate our dinner in silence and went to our respective beds.

Over the next few days, we all stepped around each other carefully. Mr. Davis stayed away from the house to let Mom cool off. I returned the completed projects to their respective owners and they all paid me what they’d promised Pops. I also spent more time with Pops’ friends. That night had created a shift, where Pops’ friends opened up to me about their time with him. Mom wasn’t happy, but she didn’t interfere. Every time she looked like she was about to, Maw Maw would just clear her throat or make a comment about not being able to put that genie back into its bottle. I hung Pops’ medals up in my basement area. Maw Maw gave me the first real smile I’d seen from her since his death when she saw them hanging above my computer. She went up to her room and came back down with some framed pictures I’d never seen before. Up went Pops’ awards signed by long dead Presidents, photos of him with Isaiah Bradley and their WWII commando group, along with one of him with the elder Nick Fury, and more with people I didn’t recognize. One of the men had gotten the flag from Pops’ funeral folded and framed as well. The entire wall above my computer became a memorial to the career of the Black hero that had been my grandfather.

We slowly went into a new routine without Pops. His friends stopped staying with us, but they did start dropping by periodically for some of MawMaw’s cooking and to bang around in the workshop with me. We’d work on things for people in the neighborhood, like Pops had done. I split the money with them, but I’m pretty sure they just handed their half off to MawMaw. My schedule of  karate and music classes resumed, as well as Mr. Davis started turning up for my regular education. Mr. Davis kept bringing me those weird assignments of his and he also started taking me out. We went to museums, on public tours of different tech companies, and he swung private tours for a few of those companies. The one thing we did that I wasn’t allowed to talk to Mom about was the fact that he and Pops’ friends took me to the firing range. They were all sure that I needed to know how to fire every weapon that they could get their hands on. Their veteran status got us past many of the range owners’ and other customers’ suspicions around our skin color. I turned out to be a pretty dang good shot.

In addition to the assignments from Mr. Davis, I started figuring out some of the older Stark Tech that got posted to the internet. Mom still wasn’t happy, but she seemed resigned to the fact that I was more Reed Richards or Tony Stark and less Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan. She stopped trying to prevent me from pushing into weird tech. The first unusual thing I built was a white noise generator. It took some fussing around, but I managed to get it so that we could talk openly in the house without worrying about people snooping on us. My second project was figuring out how to generate fully interactable holograms. They didn’t take up as much space as monitors and would speed up my ability to design things. Once I got the holograms sorted, I started building a heads up display targeting system. That ended up looking like a cracked out version of Google Glass. The white dudes at the shooting range laughed at me until it lit up and I hit every bullseye. Mr. Davis chewed me out for showing my tech like that, but I was just thrilled it worked and I can still hear their asses pucker.

When Mr. Davis (the Colonel) wasn’t looking, Pops’ friends gave me high fives for making the rednecks think twice about messing with us. The owner of the place did come over and make sure everything was okay. He checked our weapons to make sure that everything was legal, but couldn’t kick us out over my glasses. There’s no law or range policy about targeting systems. Mr. Davis just sighed, and the others snickered, when I promised the overly nice man that we wouldn’t test new weapons at his range. After he left, a couple of the other folks got over their shock and came over to talk to us. They wanted to know how Mr. Davis made my targeting system and if he was gonna sell it. Mr. Davis gave up and told them to talk to me, since I was the one who’d built it. Their eyes glazed over when I tried to explain the math behind it. On the sales end, they were extremely disappointed when I told them that nobody could sell it. It’s based on a Stark Industries equation that had been released on the internet. They could download the equation and preliminary tech schemas to build their own though. None of them seemed overly interested in pursuing that option. I didn’t bother explaining that this was extremely out of date tech, as it came from the Mark 41 Iron Man and Tony Stark was up to a Mark 70 suit.

I never took an experiment to the range again. Mr. Davis expressly forbade it. The rednecks there were a lot more polite to us from that day forward, though. There were no more snide comments or passive aggressive behavior like hogging better ranges. There was also a reduction in the number of confederate flags around. It got through their red hatted heads that the kid wouldn’t miss, much less all the ex-Special Forces guys I was hanging with. The “tiny-fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing, shitgibbon” might be squatting in D.C., but he couldn’t save them in the moment if they decided to be jackasses to us. Man, I still think the Scottish have us all beat in the insult game. I wouldn’t put it past that whole country’s ability to kick 50 Cent’s ass in an insult rap battle.

A few months after the targeting system incident, an old building a few blocks from my house got bought up by the Wakandan government. Apparently they decided to build educational outreach centers in select cities around the world and Oakland got picked. Not only that, but right in my own neighborhood. I couldn’t believe the luck! I was over there almost every day watching them work on the building, along with a ton of other folks. These people were the epitome of Black excellence. They were everything we wanted to be. During the day, it was people looking for day labor on the job site or the hoods who were skipping school that hung around. In the evenings, when working people were off, it had an almost carnival atmosphere. People were BBQing and dancing in the streets. Around that building, we were safe from not only the gangs; we were safe from the cops. Wakanda policed that area and the neighborhood reveled in that feeling of safety and freedom.

The Wakandans hired laborers and tradespeople from the immediate area, giving good jobs and good pay to people in dire need of exactly that. I was too young to get a job, but they didn’t chase me away when I’d go down there during school hours when people lined up to get one of the day labor jobs. They let me just hang around and watch, unlike the hoods. Those guys got their piece taken away and then lectured or chased away. I have no idea what the Wakandans did with all those pistols and knives, but they developed quite the collection. It took a couple weeks, but the hoods just stopped showing up. They stayed outside the area that the Wakandans had taken to “walking around” in. My family’s house was inside the Wakandan zone, so the sounds of gunfire became a much more distant thing for us and I stopped getting hassled when out with Lopez kids.

One of the nights when I was out in the workshop banging away at a repair for one of the neighbors, there was a knock on the door. This was pretty normal. That’s how folks dropped things off or asked for help. So, I just yelled my usual “Come in!” I met my first Dora Milaje covered in dirt and sweat, wearing a t-shirt with a huge pan-African middle finger on it. They were and are unmistakable. Her appearance at my garage door shocked me enough that I dropped the wrench I’d had in my hand. She just calmly stepped in and looked around before focusing on me. “We’ve been told by some of those we hire that you help people around here.” I just dumbly nodded in response. She walked around our old car and poked at the projects I had going until she stopped in front of one of my hologram projectors, flipping it on. After she finished examining the technical schematics that had popped up from the projector, she told me that I was invited to participate in the Wakandan educational outreach without going through the application process. The building wasn’t done, but I was expected to start coming down on Monday. With that, my first Dora Milaje left and I hadn’t said a word.

I was startled out of my state of shock by MawMaw’s voice, “Sounds like an order to me.”

It was. I quickly learned that. When Mr. Davis showed up the next morning, he told me that the Wakandans had requested my transcripts from the District and Mom had approved the transfer. They had also reached out to him directly for any off the record information he had. It looked like if Mom couldn’t get me asylum in Wakanda, she was going to do the next best thing. Mr. Davis found out that she had marched down to their construction site and badgered them until she could speak to “the one in charge.” When they tried to remove what had looked like a crazy woman from their site, it took four of them to even move her and her grip had left a dent in the door jam. That gave them enough pause for her to tell them what she was after. I was officially transferred as a student from the Oakland Unified School District to the Wakanda Tech Center.

The rest of that week and weekend, Mr. Davis and I poured over what is known about Wakanda and its people. I even found some online lessons in Wakandan, Housa, and Yoruban, which are the main languages of Wakanda. I didn’t expect to hold conversations with the folks at the Center in their native tongues, but I wanted to understand when they talked to each other. I’d overheard enough Spanish shit talking to know that it happened. This had driven me to pick up basic understanding of a bunch of languages. My command of the swear word is pretty immense. Jarvis might have me beat. That way I knew who was worth my time and who wasn’t. If you talk shit about me behind my back, I’m not giving you my hard earned money. Mom might have seen Wakanda through rose colored glasses. I did not, especially after reading through their history and cultural info. They were just as flawed as any other people. They just lucked out by sitting on a huge Vibranium deposit and through that avoided colonization.

Duly prepared for the worst in humanity and unsure of what materials I should bring, I loaded up one of Pops’ old rucksacks with my laptop and some school supplies. I’d never been in a real class before, so I just pulled a list of what schools in the area ask their students to bring and rounded up something close to that. Mom made me wear a button up shirt and tie. There I was, trooping against the flow of other kids heading to the public school. They were in their street clothes with their clear backpacks and I was in slacks, shirt, and tie with an old army rucksack. To say that I got made fun of would be an understatement. The rude comments only stopped when they watched a man at the Wakandan building open their door to let me in.

Even under construction, the inside of the building was beautiful. The architecture was completely alien to anything usually found in the U.S. They’d filled it with a mix of their country’s art and African American art. When the security guards went to take my rucksack, the man who let me in waved them off and gestured for me to follow him. He explained that the classrooms weren’t ready yet, but even when they were; I wouldn’t be joining the standard students in their classes. It’d been arranged for me to remote learn with the Wakandan School of Alternative Studies. I’d never heard of this school and said as much. It was explained that it was Wakanda’s version of the Avenger’s Academy, where their nation’s exceptional young people learned more than just their ABCs. He stopped and explained that my mother had been very insistent that she didn’t want me in any program managed by the U.S. government and due to my family’s history, the Wakandan government understood. This is why I hadn’t been referred to the Avengers’ program and I didn’t qualify for Xavier’s school.

That first day was getting me my own pass-card to get in and out of the areas that I needed, establishing my biometrics in their systems, assessing where I was academically and physically, as well as determining if I had any powers without my tools. I was much further ahead academically than they expected and they had high expectations. I was above normal physically, but had no powers. They did classify me as a human mutate though. I have genetic irregularities, but no X-gene. It’s enough to flag me as weird, but not enough to put me on any anti-Mutant lists. Apparently whatever the U.S. government did to Pops passed down to Mom and I. So, Mom and I are normal humans that have been changed by an outside source. I’m classified in the same category as Captain America, Nick Fury Jr., Black Widow, Luke Cage, Spider-Man, and their own Black Panther. My changes just seem to have gone more to my head, literally. That fact seemed to interest them, since those kinds of changes have historically always been physical, as in strength or stamina or dexterity or even stuff like seeing in the dark. I was the first person they’d run across who’s end result was super intelligence.

After my new classmates had taken the opportunity to ask me all sorts of questions about America and I’d gotten to pepper them with ones about Wakanda in return, I was put to work. Work it was too. The teachers forced me to stretch myself, not just coast on my natural intelligence. When the others were doing physical training in Wakanda, I wasn’t let off the hook. When I tried to make the excuse of not being there to participate, I got a tap on my shoulder from behind. I looked up to see the face of the same woman who’d come to my garage that night. My regular ass kicking by a member of the Dora Milaje began. I just laughed at anyone who complained about their P.E. class at the public school.

Over Mom’s objections, I stopped dressing like a poindexter after that first day. I wore what I was comfortable in, since my classmates were all dressed how they wanted to be and there was no dress code. I didn’t really have gym clothes for my unique version of P.E. I ended up wearing my karate gear for that until Mom got me actual P.E. clothes. Some of my classmates started sending me clothing in their tribal patterns and treats from their families. These little care packages would arrive in shipments with the building’s supplies. They all thought it was great when I mixed and matched things, making fun of each other a little when I accidentally combined two tribes that didn’t like each other. The treats were also all great. Some of the treats kind of reminded me of some things that MawMaw made. As an African American, there was little chance of knowing what tribe or tribes my people came from. Thus, they all adopted me.

The only time I ever saw the kids in the regular program, once it opened, was at lunch and during field trips. The Wakandans provided lunch for all of us and it definitely was not mystery meat or chicken nuggets. On field trip days, I got excused from my classes to go with the other students to the museum or historic site or university tour. I’d never worked so hard in my life as I did those years in Wakandan School of Alternative Studies, both mentally and physically. Other parts of my routine did remain the same, though. I went to karate and my music classes. Mr. Davis came over to check up on me. Pops’ friends and Mr. Davis took me shooting. I fixed things for folks in the neighborhood. I rode bikes and shot hoops with the Lopez kids. Mom and MawMaw still made me clean my room and eat all of my vegetables.

I was rather oblivious to exactly how far ahead of the other kids I was, due to the fact that my teachers didn’t make a big deal about it. They just pushed me to do my best, praising and coaching me based on my personal successes and failures. Each of my classmates in Wakanda was so radically different, with such varied strengths and weaknesses that comparing myself to them was just not even an idea. I didn’t spend enough time with the students in the regular program to think about making that comparison either. It wasn’t until I went with the regular program on a tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that I started thinking about where I fit into things. I usually kept to myself during the field trips, because they didn’t exactly trip my trigger. The almost 7 foot tall drag queen in the Castro was kinda fun and so was Lucasfilm, but I didn’t really care about paintings by old white guys or symphonies or smelly, white hippies. That trip to the J.P.L. was different. I got sucked into it and was so excited that I forgot myself. I peppered those guys with so many technical questions that they asked me to slow down for the rest of the class. I was not only losing the other students, I was losing some of the engineers. The biggest question I got in return from the engineers was about where I was going to college. They all told me about their colleges and what degrees I needed to work for something like the J.P.L.

The college question sat on me all the way home that day. I hadn’t thought about it. I was learning so much in my current program that college wasn’t even on my radar. People went to college when they were 18 and I wasn’t even close. My thoughts buried me so much that I didn’t notice how the other students had distanced themselves from me on the bus. They’d always known I was different, but that day they learned how different I really was. I was so lost in thought that I hadn’t noticed that we were back at the Tech Center until one of the chaperones tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention. The bus was empty except for the driver, myself and the one chaperone.

It was after my class hours, so I went inside long enough to grab my backpack and then headed home. Mr. Davis was sitting with MawMaw having coffee when I walked in. They were chatting about stuff in the neighborhood; who was marrying who, which kid got busted for being in a gang, who got what jobs, etc. I grabbed a drink and snack from the fridge; then hid out in the basement, killing pixels on my computer, and trying to figure out how to ask about college. The sounds of video games were only interrupted long enough for me to yell a hello up when I heard Mom come in the back door.

Not knowing how to approach the subject, I just blurted out that I had to go to college to work for N.A.S.A. while we were dishing up dinner. Mom stopped and looked at me, then asked me if I really wanted to work for N.A.S.A. I dove into all the neat things I’d seen at the J.P.L. and how the engineers talked about the college requirements. Those rockets and rooms full of computers with satellite views and getting to talk to the I.S.S. from their control room all excited me in a way that nothing else really ever had. Mom again asked me if I was sure about this. Her hesitancy gave me enough pause for me to figure out that it was less N.A.S.A. and more about that level of technology and outer space. I wanted to work on cutting edge tech and go to space. Mr. Davis laughed and commented that every kid wants to go to space, but I had a better chance than most. MawMaw just pointed at my untouched plate and said that even spacemen needed to eat their dinner.

After dinner, all three adults sat down with me and explained that it was best if I waited a bit for college. My experience would be less Sheldon Cooper and more Riri Williams. I had a tendency to run ahead and do things in a way that Sheldon would never do. They showed me the whole mess Riri got into with MIT and the chaos of her life. I didn’t see the mess so much as I saw that she’d built her own armor and was a Black superhero. All the while Mom was talking to me about how she wanted me to be a few years older before I went to college; I was studying and trying to figure out Riri’s armor design. Mr. Davis saw the look on my face and tapped my arm to get me to focus on him. He was very clear that he agreed with my mom, in that I should be older and more mature before I went to college. Mr. Davis also promised to get me a tour of Stark Industries if I would patiently wait on going to college, like my mom asked me to do. Mom groaned in resignation as I readily agreed to that deal.

I kept on at my existing program of time with the Wakandans, my extracurricular activities, fixing stuff, and playing with the Lopez kids. Since each of us in the Wakandan program had different focuses and I was in such a radically different time zone, I spent most of my time on guided independent study. This gave me the ability to fine tune a few of my half-baked projects I'd built in the garage. I was attending one of only a half dozen schools on the planet where a 14 year old building automated targeting and hand held energy shielding was not only allowed, but encouraged. When my schedule matched up for any time with my classmates, we all showed off our personal projects to each other and gossiped like any group of teenagers. In this group we could ignore our tails or fur or fire projection or disturbing levels of intelligence. We could just be dorky kids together.

Speaking of some of those projects, my P.E. teachers were happy to help me test them out. Having a shield doesn't help much if you don't have the physical strength to hold onto it under assault. I'm just not a big dude, as you can see. I'm fit and even extremely strong for my size. Sadly, I just didn't get Mom or Pops' bulk. My dad must have been a skinny dude or MawMaw's family are small. Either way, I started building compensation for this defect. I didn't need a giant truck with rubber nuts. I did need an exoskeleton of some kind. So, I started building and testing it. Boy was it ugly, but I stopped dropping the shield when it got hammered on by spear point.

Mr. Davis came up to the Tech Center during one of these practice sessions. I didn't notice him until I saw the camera flash. When that day's teacher immediately flipped to rushing him, Mr. Davis just backpedaled away from her and cried out that he wanted proof for my mom that his planned trip to Stark Industries was not the cause of me building some kind of super armor. She stopped dead in her tracks and wheeled back to face me, peppering me with questions about the planned trip and why we were doing it. I ended up babbling about the J.P.L. trip and college and going to space. She started laughing and said that Stark was an okay option for that. I was not to pick up "that man's" attitude towards women though. If I did, I'd have my teacher and her sisters to deal with; if my mom and MawMaw left anything for them.

Once I’d reassured my teacher that I wasn’t gonna turn into some kind of misogynistic man-whore, she wandered off and left me to Mr. Davis. He wanted to meet me at school about it because the whole thing still made Mom nervous, even though she’d agreed to it. He also had to make advance arrangements with the school for my absence. Mr. Davis talked over the plans with me while I stripped out of my exoskeleton and packed it into its crate. In a couple weeks he would pick me up from the house and drive me over to the Stark Industries Silicon Valley complex. An old colleague of his who worked for Stark Industries now arranged for a private tour for the two of us. Mom and MawMaw were also invited, but they’d declined. Mr. Davis didn’t know who our tour guide would be, but his friend assured him that it would be someone who could answer my more technical questions. They also said that lunch would be provided and had asked about our food preferences or allergies. I don’t have any allergies and as to my dislikes; it was highly unlikely that Stark Industries would try to feed me the flavorless, cheap, canned food you get from the food pantry.

The arrangements with my school went fine. My classmates all joked that I needed to come to Wakanda to see the Panther Cult’s labs. That way I’m not just spending time with a “colonizer” and I could see “real” technology. I agreed that it would be great to visit, but Wakanda wasn’t within driving or BART distance. Stark Industries was. I joked that I’d have to stow away on one of the Tech Center’s shipment flights. The teachers only stopped our joking when my classmates started trying to give me advice on the best places to hide. We were all sternly told that as a non-Wakandan, I’d get in a lot of trouble for trying to sneak into Wakanda and that was before my own mom got a hold of me for running away. They assured us all that I would be able to visit in due time.

The next couple weeks were the most agonizingly slow of my life. I had a much better idea of how kids feel at school waiting for summer break to start. My teachers at the Tech Center gave me something to wear on the tour, a dashiki with the Wakandan School for Alternative Studies crest worked into the embroidery on it. They said that they wanted me to represent the school well. Even my oblivious ass realized that they were telling Stark Industries to play nice with me. I still have that shirt, even though it no longer fits. It’s probably the nicest piece of clothing that I’ve ever owned. It was made from the softest black material, custom fit, high collared, and all the embroidery done in metallic purple and silver thread. Mom got me some nice shoes and slacks to go with it. 

Mr. Davis took me down to the barber shop for more than just a basic trim and clean up. He sat me in the chair and told the barber to make me fit to “show up some rich white folks.” While the barber was working on my hair, the men chatted Mr. Davis and I up. I’d been allowed to tell them a little about my school and that I was going on a tour of Stark Industries. Details about my classmates being mutants and other “super” types was off the table, but I could tell them I was in special classes for real smart kids. The men at the shop usually made a little light fun of me, as was normal for the kids coming in with their moms. This time, they included me in their jokes. I was treated like one of them, rather than an oddity they only saw when my mom decided that my afro was getting too big or when they came by the garage to get something fixed.

On the big day, MawMaw helped me get ready. She made sure that all the twists in my hair looked nice and helped me do all the buttons on the dashiki. With my new clothes and hair, I looked like an African prince. MawMaw gave me a pair of Pops’ dog tags to wear under my shirt for luck. Mr. Davis was dressed up in a nice suit when he came to pick me up and he’d gone to the barber too. We were a couple of sharp looking Black dudes out for a day of fun. Traffic was traffic, the usual mess in the Maze. This didn’t dampen my spirits as I sang along with Mr. Davis’ cheesy oldies on the car’s radio. These were the real oldies, not grunge or rap from the 1990s. Mr. Davis liked RnB, Disco, and Funk from the 1960s and 70s.

When we pulled up to the Stark Industries complex, it was gated and guarded the same way the J.P.L. had been. If anything, security at Stark looked more serious. We pulled up, the gate guard checked Mr. Davis’ ID and asked if I had a school ID. The closest I had was my Tech Center security badge. So I showed that. It seemed to satisfy their need for ID. The guard gave us very specific instructions on where to park and that someone would be waiting there to get us into the building so that we could sign in and get our visitors’ badges. Mr. Davis carefully followed the instructions and there was a red haired woman waiting for us at the parking spot. I didn’t recognise her, but Mr. Davis did. He didn’t spill the beans though. She just introduced herself to us as Virginia and led us inside.

Virginia took us to the security desk and got us checked in. The visitor badges were on branded lanyards and Virginia told us that they would deactivate after our visit. It was apparently a standard souvenir item that all visitors got to go home with. I’d classify it as cooler than the usual pens most companies give people. She led us to a small boardroom that was set up with breakfast, saying that she hoped we hadn’t eaten anything. I don’t know about Mr. Davis, but I’d been too excited to eat that morning. We were encouraged to load up plates and sit down, since our tour guide would be joining us for breakfast. There were all the usual suspects like bacon and sausage and eggs and muffins and fruit. There were Spanish churros and chocolate, Portuguese linguica, and weirdest of all; mandazi, an African pastry that MawMaw sometimes made. Virginia encouraged me to take a little bit of everything. Mr. Davis and I happily followed her guidance. That was the fanciest breakfast I’d ever had.

Our tour guide showed up when I had my mouth stuffed with churros, of course. Now knowing the man in question, he did it on purpose. I got to meet Mr. Anthony E. Stark while trying desperately to finish chewing and swallowing. Mr. Davis was much more prepared than I was, since he knew who Virginia was. Ms. Virginia “Pepper” Potts was Mr. Stark’s personal assistant. Mr. Davis happily let me hang myself with the churros. All of the adults had a good chuckle at my expense. Despite all of this, Mr. Stark was very nice to me and even complimented my appearance along with my ability to chew fast. He filled up a plate and sat down next to me, asking me about my schooling and favorite subjects. When we started talking about tech and science, Mr. Davis and Ms. Potts both just rolled their eyes and dug into their own breakfasts. Boy did we talk about tech and science. I straight up geeked out with Tony Stark. Initially he seemed to be quizzing me, but it very quickly became us bouncing ideas around and debating theories and finishing each other's equations. After a couple times of us drawing on napkins, Ms. Potts surfaced with a couple of holo-projecting tablets. We were off to the races... that is until Mr. Davis cleared his throat and pointed out that we were there for a student tour, not to help Mr. Stark fine tune his armor’s physics problems.

Both of us sheepishly stopped nerding out. We finished our breakfasts under Mr. Davis’ stern gaze and Ms. Potts’ little smirk. When I offered the tablet back to Ms. Potts, Mr. Stark took it from me and dropped it into the small backpack I’d brought along. He told me to keep it as one of my souvenirs. Mr. Davis frowned slightly and Ms. Potts just shrugged. Clapping his hands in an almost childish glee, Mr. Stark hustled us all out of the boardroom and started the tour in earnest. He showed us all kinds of cool labs and experiments going on. He even took us to areas that the regular student tours didn’t go to. When we came across some of the energy experiments, Mr. Stark was like a kid with a toy. I kinda felt bad for the scientists and engineers trying to work. He kept getting in their way and interrupting them. Probably the rudest thing he did was ask me to look at some of the equations with him. The boss sending corrections is one thing. The boss having a 14 year old kid make the corrections in front of everyone is something else entirely. Mr. Stark wouldn’t accept me deferring either. So, I apologized to the nice folks for interrupting and looked at the numbers with their boss. I really enjoy working with Mr. Stark. He’s a lot of fun. Unfortunately, he’s also pretty socially oblivious. He really doesn’t understand how much of a dick he can be to people he doesn’t identify with. Luckily, Ms. Potts rescued both those folks in the lab and me by announcing our lunch break. I thanked the men and women for their time on my way out.

Apparently Mr. Stark has a favorite shawarma place in New York and he had it shipped to San Jose. I’m not sure exactly how, since it was still piping hot and tasted fresh. So it wasn’t reheated. Mr. Davis and Ms. Potts stepped out with their plates, leaving Mr. Stark and I to our own devices. This very quickly turned into us playing VR video games and shit-talking each other. Okay... video games might be the wrong word. It was his flight and fight simulator for the Iron Man suit. It was way more complicated than any video game I’d ever played. I got blown up several times before I got the hang of it. Once I figured out the controls and capabilities of what I had, I held my own. We played as opponents in some rounds and teamed up against super villains or aliens in other rounds. I discovered that I was more physically fit than Mr. Stark. His health issues weren’t just a tabloid rumor. This helped balance out my lack of experience with fighting as Iron Man, vs his decades of experience with it.

Mr. Davis and Ms. Potts came back in while Mr. Stark and I were eating what was left of the food and swapping stories about our perspectives in the simulator. Both of them gave us the biggest frowns I’ve ever seen. Neither Mr. Stark or I really understood why they were angry. It’s not like we’d gone out in real suits or faced real bad guys. We’d basically played Flight SImulator, Iron Man style. They weren’t interested in explaining it to us either. Ms. Potts just moved us on to the rest of the tour. I got to see the computer rooms and meet JARVIS. Ms. Potts also took us to what Mr. Stark called the boring part of the complex. She showed us the administrative areas and explained what each of the groups of people at their desks did. It was there that we got to meet Mr. Davis’ old co-worker. Apparently, Maria Hill was working for Stark Industries and she was waiting for us in Mr. Stark’s office. He’d wanted to stop there to get us all drinks. She was very nice, but perfunctory as she took Mr. Davis off while Mr. Stark mixed up beverages for everyone. I was set up at the desk with the desktop computer. All of the adults took their beverages and stepped into a side room to talk. I enjoyed my “mocktail” and playing games on Mr. Stark’s computer. JARVIS was nice and even let me win a couple.

I spent quite a bit of time playing games before the adults came back into the main office. JARVIS and the games and the parts of the Stark systems I managed to get into entertained me enough that I wasn’t fully aware of how much time had passed or that they had come back into the room until Ms. Potts set a plate full of dinner in front of me. She told me that they’d called my mom, so that she wouldn’t worry. Ms. Hill just laughed and said that I was as oblivious as the boss when my nose was buried in a computer screen. Blushing; I tried to hop up and give Mr. Stark his chair back. He told me to stay where I was, while he joined the others on the couches around the room. Parked in the CEO’s seat, I ate my seafood dinner and excitedly talked with them about the day. I also told them about the bug I’d found in some of the software I’d been poking at. This peeked Mr. Stark’s interest. He came over to the desk and had me show him what I’d found. The two ladies passed money over to Mr. Davis. Apparently he had won some kind of bet. Mr. Stark just patted me on the back and told me that I’d passed the test. When I was ready to go to college, I’d have a scholarship waiting for me.

After finishing dinner and some photos (Yes, there is one of me sitting at Mr. Stark’s desk and he’s giving me rabbit ears in it.), Mr. Stark headed off to work on something of his own and Ms. Potts and Ms. Hill walked us back out to Mr. Davis’ car. In addition to the tablet, we left my tour with as much schwag as we could carry. Some of it was the usual stuff you get from corporations, except it was a mix of Avengers, Stark Industries, and S.H.I.E.L.D. logos; hats, shirts, mugs, pens, business cards, and so on. Some of it was much less normal; Avengers action figures, educational software, schematics for me to play with, Junior S.H.I.E.L.D. agent badge, and so on. Mr. Davis was also given a file folder for my mom.

It was past dark and I’d had a long day. I slept in the car on the drive home. Mr. Davis nudged me awake when we got to the house and helped me carry all the stuff inside. Mom and MawMaw listened to me babble about meeting Iron Man and all the cool things I’d seen. When Mr. Davis showed Mom the folder, they went off to talk while MawMaw helped me stack the stuff in my room. MawMaw left me to myself once everything was in the room and told me to go to bed. I fell asleep playing with my new tablet.

Instead of my normal alarm, the tablet woke me up with some kind of red alert sound. Which is good, I’d forgotten to set my alarm. I hustled to get ready for school, so that I could get there in time to overlap with my Wakandan friends. I wanted to tell them all about my tour. Mom was already gone for work and MawMaw could tell how excited I was, so she didn’t give me too much gruff for scarfing my breakfast. She did tell me that I should leave the tablet at home and only take it after I got the Tech Center’s permission to take it with me. I reluctantly did as she said, but realized that it was better than possibly making the Wakandans mad at me. I quickly loaded some of the photos onto the cloud, so that I could show them to my friends. Running, I made it early enough to catch them before they logged off for the day. As much as they’d made fun of Mr. Stark before my tour, they did seem impressed with the photos I showed them. I also got a lot of compliments on how sharp looking Mr. Davis and I were too. Permission to bring the tablet to the Tech Center was denied. The adults said it was a potential security issue, since the Avengers and Wakanda didn’t always get along.

My life was forever changed after that tour. I did keep going to my regular school, shooting with Mr. Davis and Pops’ friends, playing with the Lopez kids, and going to my karate and music classes. The big change was the fact that I started getting personal invites to things like science lectures, technology demonstrations, engineering conferences, hackathons, robot battles, and more. Mom, Mr. Davis, Pops’ friends, and MawMaw took turns going with me until they realized that there wasn’t any kind of weird trap. They were just tickets that let me hang out with other nerds. My weekends and evenings got really busy. Mom only insisted on an adult joining me for anything that involved a plane trip or overnight stay. Since most of these things were in the Bay Area, I got practice with public transit. The Lopezes took turns coming to things that they were interested in on my “plus one” pass. They liked the robot battles and the chance to meet someone famous like an astronaut or Neil deGrasse Tyson. Anything too academically involved, they’d tap out and I’d go alone. Since my tickets always included meals; if I didn’t have a plus one with me, I’d get the second meal to go. I’d either share it with someone who looked particularly hard up on the bus ride home or outside the venue.

After going to a few of these things, I kept running into the same handful of people at all of the events. Since I was there on a Stark Industries pass, I was always seated with their corporate group. There were a few folks from other big tech companies and some from universities. I was the only teenager who was there regularly. There were a few who went to the robot battles and hackathons, but not the more academic things. At first, some of the other companies made jokes about the Stark folks being babysitters. That is, until we started whooping their butts in the team competition events. I quickly earned my place at the table and I enjoyed doing it too. Despite the age difference, I even started making friends at the events. Obviously I couldn’t “go out for drinks” with them, but I kinda became the nerd mascot. The recruiting people kept trying to sell me on their companies or schools, but the nerds just wanted to talk shop with me and I was totally fine with that. The recruiters only backed off after they annoyed Mom at one of the out of state events. She took a couple of them outside of the room and when they came back, they looked shook. I never had a problem with them again.

My birthdays and Christmas also got a lot more interesting. I learned that Mr. Stark is basically three kids in a trenchcoat trying to pretend to be an adult. The whole family came home from MawMaw’s church barbeque once to find the backyard stacked with boxes full of workshop tools and computer equipment. There was a note attached, “Mr. Johnson, We were supposed to set this up in the garage for you, but a very insistent bald lady with a spear recommended strongly that we leave the crates here for you. Sorry - S.I. Deliveries” He also sent random things to the Lopez kids and myself. Thanks to him, we had Oakland’s most epic Super Soaker and Nerf fights. Mom and MawMaw weren’t left out either. It was never anything crazy, but they did get things like spa day passes and flowers for birthdays, anniversaries, and Christmas. I’m pretty sure that was Ms. Potts’ doing.

When I was putting my growing action figure collection up on shelving, I realized that I’d met a few of the people portrayed. Ms. Potts has a Rescue figure and of course Iron Man. There’s also Buzz Aldrin and Neil deGrasse Tyson figures. I decided to put the date I met them on the bottom of the stand for any person I’d actually met in person. It took the place of most geeks’ autograph or celebrity photo op collections. I was already weird enough. I didn’t need to add being an autograph hound to the list.

As my sixteenth birthday approached, I asked Mom about getting into a driving course through one of the private schools in the area or the local high school. That wasn’t exactly something offered through the Tech Center. Mom kept putting it off until MawMaw actually got mad at her about it. MawMaw felt that getting a license was a normal rite of passage that every American child should get the chance to do. Mom caved to MawMaw and called Mr. Davis. She asked him to get me into some kind of driving class. I’m pretty sure that Mom knew exactly what the end result of what she was asking would be, too. Mr. Davis’ idea of a driving class was nothing even remotely close to what you get in high school or at one of the little driving schools in the neighborhood. After I easily passed the written test and got my learner’s permit, he taught me the basics of how to drive both an automatic and manual. After I’d survived traffic in the Maze, Mr. Davis booked time at a law enforcement driving school used by both police and the military. By the time I showed up to the DMV on my birthday for my final driving test, I was qualified to drive through a combat zone.

That night, my new license in hand, I was greeted by more than a birthday cake. Mom was holding a stack of college applications. She said that she didn’t want to keep holding me back any longer. Mom wanted me to apply to Berkeley, since that’s right by the house. She said that Mr. Stark had sent the application for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’d support me going there, but didn’t like the idea of me being all the way across the country from her before I was an adult. Lastly, she had applications for Stanford and the California Institute of Technology down in Pasadena. Stanford and CIT both did a lot of work with the J.P.L. and Mom knew that I was interested in pursuing that kind of work. She also said I could apply at other schools, but she didn’t want me applying outside of the continental United States. To Mom’s disappointment, I opted against Berkeley. They were a great school, but they weren’t even in the top ten for the kind of engineering I wanted to do. To Mr. Stark’s disappointment, I opted against MIT because I didn’t want to be that far away from my family. I picked Stanford as my first choice and CIT as my second choice.

In preparation for the application process, I took the schools’ required admissions tests through the local high school and I opted to do the essay portions. The Tech Center hadn’t gotten their instructors authorized as proctors for the ACT or SAT yet. It was my first time in the high school building and boy did it have a funk. I also found that their desks were seriously awful, uncomfortable and sticky. I recognised a couple of the kids in my test group from around the neighborhood. You’re apparently allowed to use a calculator for these tests. I didn’t own one, since I just always used my tablet or computer for any calculations that got beyond me. When I read through the guides for these tests, I determined that I didn’t need to buy one for them. This meant that I was the only student in the room without some kind of calculator. It was also all analog. You literally fill in bubbles on paper. They also broke it up into sections with breaks in between, so I couldn’t just do the whole thing all at once. This meant that I either had to sit quietly at my awful desk until the break, or I could leave the room without coming back until all tests had been collected. I opted for the latter, that way I could play on my tablet in the school library while I waited for my re-entry time. The proctor tried to talk me out of this option every time I took it, convinced that I couldn’t have finished in the time that I did. To nobody’s surprise, except maybe the test administrators and the public school, I got perfect scores on both tests. There’s a good reason I was kept out of public school.

I was accepted into the colleges I applied for and my test scores elicited scholarship offers of all kinds. Mr. Stark promised Mom that I had a full ride; classes, books, housing, and food. I’d be enrolled into the Stark Industries Internship Program. Due to this, I declined the other scholarship offers so that they could go to students without the backing of Stark Industries. With that, I was scheduled to enter Stanford University as a freshman. I stayed at home and did the long commute for my first couple of quarters, since I was entering during the middle of the school year. The administration also wanted to wait until I was seventeen before I lived on campus. I’d get my dorm assignment for my first fall quarter.

College academics really weren’t as challenging as I thought they’d be. College social life, on the other hand, was a totally different experience. Nobody knew who I was or how old I was. This was my chance to not be “the kid genius” for the first time in my life. Sure, I was a little young looking for a freshman. This could be explained away, though. I had a new project, digging immediately into what was and wasn’t normal for a freshman. I did my homework on my commute and spent the time at home, when I wasn’t actively doing other things, learning stuff like fashion and music and dating and pop culture. Mr. Stark even offered me some pointers about college life when I talked to him at the company party for the new scholarship interns. I wanted to be ready to dive right in when it was time to move into the dorm. My new roommate didn’t need to know that there was anything weird about me.

The college administration tended to batch the scholarship kids together in dorms. There had apparently been a bullying issue when rich students got roomed with poorer ones. Usually they didn’t room freshmen with sophomores or juniors, but I did. I was told that my roommate got picked because he was seen as safe for me, an underage student, to share with. This student wouldn’t open them to liability issues due to partying or nudity or any of the other things that my age created special legal issues around. They also said that I might be able to help give him a little local culture, as he was from rural Kansas. Basically, I was informed that I was getting a boring, poor, hick as my roommate. Oooohhhh boy was I in for a surprise.

My new roommate may have been poor and a hick, but he sure as hell was not boring. No, he didn’t party or date. Nope, my new roommate was an extremely enthusiastic superhero fanboy who cosplayed and went to comic book conventions and played tabletop role-playing games. In other words, my new roommate, Nick, was a huge geek. There was no hope in hell of me passing myself off as a normal freshman with him in my corner. The social dynamics of college meant that whoever your roommate was, that kinda stuck itself to you. No matter how cool I tried to be, even with getting Nick to buy beers for me, I could not shake the link to the guy who did parkour dressed up like Spiderman and wanted to show off his superhero autograph collection to anyone who came into our room, including people I brought in. The worst part, I couldn’t really be mad at him. Nick’s a complete dork, but he’s a genuinely nice guy.

I kinda gave up trying to make friends with the cool people and just started working on my personal engineering projects. I’d started my own version of Iron Man at home and brought it with me to school. Swiping some supplies from the robotics lab and on my visits to Stark facilities, I put together the most complicated part. If Mr. Stark could build his miniaturized Repulsor Node in a cave, I could build one in Stanford’s robotics lab. I also finished my drone spies and some random defensive equipment, like sound barriers. While test flying my armor, I quickly figured out that Nick wanted to be a superhero himself. I caught him parkouring his way around the campus in one of his cosplays and fighting muggers. Dude totally rolled up on me asking for an autograph and I hadn’t picked a name yet, so I signed his book with the name “Bob.” After that, “Bob” stayed in the closet and I stuck to following Nick around with my drones.

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