The Daughter of Tony Stark

Chapter 7

   Even though we had stayed up throughout the night after the attack and the Avengers were pulling all-nighters, I hurriedly found my room so I could try to get some rest. After the nightmare vision I had experienced, all I wanted was sleep. The only problem was that I never knew my sleep would get plagued as well.

"Talk," a girl snapped. Her long brown hair was somewhat matted as she pushed it over her shoulder, and her dark makeup made her eyes seem piercing. Next to her was a boy around her age with dark roots turning to blond hair. A throne was centered in the middle of the room, turned so that they and I couldn't fully see the figure sitting. "And if you are wasting our time-"

"Did you know this church is in the exact center of the city?" the figure interrupted. "The elders decreed it so that everyone could be equally close to God. I like that. The geometry of belief." His voice was rough, almost gritted in a sense. The girl's eyes narrowed at his words, and a red aura seemed to flicker around her fingertips. The figure chuckled. "You're wondering why you can't look inside my head."

That comment shocked me, and I glanced back down at the girl's fingers, no longer emitting the aura. "Sometimes it's hard," she admitted. "But sooner or later, every man shows himself." The figure chuckled again as he rose from his seat, causing me to stumble back with a shocked gasp. It was Ultron, no longer a robot made from loose scraps and wires. He towered over the two people in the room with him; his body built in comparison to an athlete's. The girl looked shocked herself, but she managed to stay more composed than me.

"Oh, I'm sure they do," Ultron smiled, a glint in his glowing red eyes as he stepped toward them. "But you needed something more than a man. That's why you let Stark take the scepter." Take? It was given up willingly?

"I didn't expect," stated the woman, looking over Ultron's body to hide the hints of fear leaking into her voice. "But I saw Stark's fear, I knew it would control him, make him self-destruct."

"Everyone creates the thing they dread. Men of peace create engines of war, invaders create avengers, people create..." Ultron paused, thinking of an answer to his own philosophical truths. "Smaller people?" Uh...children! I lost the word there. Children. Designed to supplant them, to help them...end."

"Is that why you've come?" asked the young woman, a smirk growing on her face. "To end the Avengers?" The boy was eerily silent, glancing up at the robot as if he wanted to ask him a question.

"I've come to save the world. But also, yeah." Ultron turned to face the boy, realization dawning on his face. "But I know the real reason why you let him continue with that god's weapon. I saw her." The girl gasped, covering her mouth with her hands as tears collected at her eyes. I stood frozen. Who was her? Who was the person that convinced her to let the spiral of events occur? "You just have to convince her to come home."

I woke up with a painful gasp, clutching my throat in pain. It felt raw from screaming in my sleep, and my head was killing me. I glanced over at my clock, surprised to see barely only an hour had passed since the argument in the lab. I pulled my legs into my chest as I took large breaths to try and soothe myself, but my door was thrown open unexpectedly and caused me to scream in surprise.

"Isabel?" my father said slowly, his hands raised in the air when he saw me shaking in the corner of my bed. "Hey, hey, hey," he soothed, coming beside me and wrapping an arm around me. I involuntarily flinched at his touch. "It's okay."

"What happened on that mission that convinced you to create Ultron?" I asked him with a rasp. I felt my dad freeze at the question. "What did you see?"