Tony's Tech: The Employee Handbook

Welcome to Tony’s Tech, the world’s only Iron Man Armor™ manufacturer. We’re happy to have you in our testing facility to ensure that every set of armor is produced with high-quality materials and the most up-to-date automated protocols.

Mr. Stark is seeking to always have an expansive arsenal of armors on hand in case of another world-ending threat that may crop up (which, let’s be honest, we’re due for any day now), so it’s our job to ensure they won’t fall apart on the battlefield before he even has a chance to use them.

But in order for you to do your job to your peak ability, let’s introduce you to our 3 core staff members that help keep this facility running day to day:

Black Widow is the face of our team, and effectively acts as a bouncer, turning away bad business before they cause any issues. She can turn away anyone who threatens to disrupt our operations, but we’ll need to be selective regarding who we spend our efforts diverting. Mr. Stark does tend to attract a lot of… dissenters to our establishment. She gets paid modestly and up-front, so don’t blame her if some other riffraff gets through the door while she’s dealing with whomever you’ve assigned her to.

Nova is the young up-and-comer who’s looking to hustle as hard as he can to prove he’s worth keeping around. Every time someone hassles Tony, he gets very defensive, shooting a couple of energy beams to try and scare them off. We supply him as much energy as he wants and he’ll keep shooting, and with energy as cheap as it is in this facility, we’re happy to offer him a lot of it.

Both of these employees should be contacted at some point during your test flights, and once you make contact with them, there’s no reason to shoo them away unless things get truly desperate. These folks are here to help you for the long term, and you should treat them with the respect they deserve.

When you take an armor out for a test flight, you’ll obviously need to start by assembling the dang thing. This should, on average, take about 2 hours of labor; any more than that and the boss might get cross, as it doesn’t look great on our threat threshold metrics system. You should prioritize some of your core armor pieces, like the Arc Reactor and one of your Rocket Boots, as well as the Ingenuity protocol for the automated systems. This is what helps to give the armor Mr. Stark’s signature charm, and without it, you’ll find yourself struggling on the battlefield (or so he claims). If you miss it when you’re initially in the shop, you may need to take a pitstop mid-flight to install it later, though you may be able to get by without with some clever planning (don’t tell the boss I said that, though).

Once you launch your armor, the goal is to never return to the shop until your test run is complete. With enough armor pieces at your disposal, you’ll have plenty of energy at your disposal to fuel this impressive machine, and with the help of your Ingenuity protocol, the Quincarrier Mr. Stark has on stand-by, and the business acumen of Ms. Pepper Potts, you should be able to easily pay our permanent employees a fair wage for their efforts, giving you a ton of flexibility.

Now, sometimes you’ll find that a piece of your armor is becoming a little rusty. Maybe it’s a Forcefield Generator that’s barely hanging on by a single bolt, or you may just find that you’ll need to eject one of your Powered Gauntlets for an extra push for whatever hurdles are in front of you. Armor comes and goes (have you seen the pile of pieces in the warehouse?!?), so we’ll be able to send you out some replacement parts in due to time, so don’t feel shy if you need to Repurpose some of them when in dire straits. While these can become key for your final push to finish the test flight, you can also use this technique mid-flight to ensure you don’t get caught unawares.

A pro tip: if you find yourself facing down a particularly dangerous situation, you can always boost your suit’s DEF, getting ready to THW some nasty scheme at work and then saving yourself some trouble and avoiding needing to return to the shop early. It’s infrequent that this comes up, but who knows, it might save your life someday.

Once you get enough of your resources online, you’ll be able to start really flexing, shooting off an impressive Repulsor Blast to show off to any onlookers. By this stage of the game, the amount of energy you’ll be able to freely siphon through your gauntlets is substantial, and even when you whiff, you’re likely to see the opportunity arise again sooner than you’d expect. Between these, a mean Supersonic Punch, and a couple of last-minute Repurpose opportunities, you’ll be landing your armor safe and sound before you know it.

Thank you for joining us at Tony’s Tech, and remember: Arc is the MRK of success!