3.7. Age of Ultron
Following intel that HYDRA are keeping Loki's Sceptre at an abandonned communist-era fort on the Voyóřeta river, the Avengers travel to Sokovia. They find the fortress under the command of Wolfgang von Strucker, heavily guarded by HYDRA soldiers and protected by a forcefield.
Seeing an opportunity to test out their newly axquired superpowers, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff disobey Strucker's orders and engage the Avengers directly. Although unprepared to face two unknown enhanced individuals, the Avengers are able to hold their own against HYDRA long enough for Iron Man to enter the fortress. Wanda attempts to stop him by implanting a vision in his mind of his worst fear. Seeing the vision is not of something selfish, as she had expected, but of Thanos standing victorious over a ruined earth, she allows him to retrieve the Sceptre, while she and Pietro flee the scene to avoid being taken into custody.
Although he had been expecting the attack, the vision still shakes Tony badly. Maria Hill attempts to talk to him about rumours that Advanced Idea Mechanics is reforming under Maya Hansen's but he sends her to take to Steve Rogers instead. Refusing offers of support from his team-mates, he instead chooses to visit the Anton Vanko Memorial Scholarship Programme students. Riri Williams asks if he's okay, since he doesn't often visit personally, and he tells her he'd needed a reminder that he is actually making a difference in the world. He spends the day helping the teenagers (and one precocious ten-year-old) with various projects, and talking about an upcoming party at the tower than the students are being invited to, which they're all excited about as it will be the first time most of them get to meet the other Avengers.
The party takes place in the penthouse of Stark Tower, a mix of superheroes, secret agents, WWII veterans, and nerdy teenagers. Despite their initial nerves, the teenagers seem to be enjoying themselves - Toni Ho and Bruce Banner get into a deep discussion about physics, Riri is arguing coolest armour designs with James Rhodes, Selah Burke and Fernanda Rodriguez convince Natasha Romanoff and Pepper Potts to dance with them. Later, Thor challenges the kids to try and lift Mjøllnir - Nate Richards uses an Repulsor Gauntlet of his own design, Christopher Powell just gives it the own college try, and Lunella Lafayette seems much more interested in asking Thor about space than actually trying the challenge.
We cut from the party back to the lab where Tony had been helping the students earlier. The night-watchman answers the door and finds a group of AIM drones disguised pest control. Although initially trusting, he quickly grows suspicious when they seem more interested in the the labs than in finding the supposed rat propblem, and one of them shoots him before proceeding to break into the labs.
Back at the party, Toni gets an allert about the break in from the security system she'd set up to guard her and Riri's thesis project. Worried, she and Riri leave the party to go and investigate, and are horrified to realise that everyone's projects have been stolen, including theirs.
At AIM's base, Maya Hansen is reviewing their haul. Fernanda's exo-skeleton and Selah's solar generator are dismissed, as are Chris Powell's conciousness transferal device, and Nate Richard's Iron Lad armour, Lunella's Alien Communication Detaction Array is mocked, but the final item piques her interest, and she orders her team to activate it.
A group of Avengers, accompanied by Toni and Riri, follow a homing beacon Riri had put inside their project to an AIM base. They find most of the AIM staff have been killed by an army of identical robots, led by Ultron. Fabricators in the background are hard at work, creating even more, but Cap stopes them with a wel-aimed shield throw. They try to fight them, but the Ultron Drones are strong and the Avengers went in unprepared. Ultron gives his big thesis statement speech about how true peace can only be achieved if humanity is subdjugated, or, better yet, destroyed. Natasha is badly hurt in the fight, and in the confusion, Ultron grabs Toni and leaves, along with many of his drones. When the Avengers ask Riri to track him, they find the tracking chip abandonned on the floor of the lab.
Back at the tower, Natasha is healed by the Regeneration Cradle. She joins the other Avengers for Riri's explanation of just what AIM has unleashed. Her and Toni's thesis project was a robot soldier, intended for law enforcement, on the basis that someone was going to create them sooner rather than later, and better two women of colour than a corrupt corporation. It wasn't supposed to have a personality yet, what was stolen was just a prototype, but the first drafts of the personality and morality cores were stored on the prototype's hardrive, just not activated, so when AIM turned it on, they must somehow have activated the broken AI.
Ultron arrives in Sokovia, on his 'peace' mission, and kills Strucker and the remaining HYDRA agents. When the twins ask why, he tells them HYDRA are Nazis, which they're horrified by. He extends an offer of friendship to them, and they agree to join him in order to get revenge on Tony for his role in the bombing of Novi Grad.
Bruce confronts Tony about whether he knew what was coming, and he admits he has some idea. He also asks about Toni, and Tony admits that she's the daughter of Ho Yinsen, who Tony had brought to the States due to the debt Tony feels he owes Yinsen. Talking about the past, and Tony's knowledge of the future give Tony an idea, and he Bruce and JARVIS manage to use the Sceptre's energy as a model to allow them to trace the twins' energy signitures. Bruce is confused by why Tony believes they'll be with Ultron, but Tony just tells him 'self-correcting uniiverse' and won't elaborate.
Ultron demands Toni make improvements to his body, and, desperate for something to stall him Toni tells him that to do that she'd need a supply of the most expensive mineral on earth, Vibranium. To her horror however, Ultron says this will be no problem.
In South Africa, the twins are buying vibranium from Ulysses Klaue on behalf of Ultron when the Avengers arrive. They fight Klaue's men, and the twins. Hoping to reveal the Avengers as the frauds she believes them to be, Wanda tries to trigger a Hulk-out, however Tony, remembering how things went down in the orignal timeline, had warned Bruce what to expect, and instead of Savage Hulk, she actually gets Devil Hulk, who attacks her specifically, rather than indescriiminate violence. Pietro is forced to intervene to save his sister, running them both out of there. Klaue is arrested, and for want of anything better to do with it, the vibranium is taken back to Tony's lab.
Back at the lab, Tony patches up various cuts and bruises while trying to locate the twins. He and JARVIS talk about the fact that they had thought they had avoided Ultron, and whether this means that the timeline is a fixed point. JARVIS suggests that if things are fixed, then they should create the Vision, but Tony will not hear of it, refusing the countenance JARVIS's destruction.
At Ultron's base, Toni is working on an Ultron drone when Pietro brings her food. She tries to persuade him to let her go, and although he refuses, she is able to trick him into telling her where she's being held. When he leaves, she realises that no one is going to save her except her. Picking up her screw-driver, she tells herself that if her father had performed heart-surgery in a cave with nothing to work with but scraps, she can think of a way to rescue herself.
In Avengers tower, the Vanko student's stolen projects are being stored in one of the labs. Riri is sitting in the corner of the lab, despairing that they will ever rescue her friend, when suddenly Lunella's Alien Communications detector lights up and begins chirping. Picking it up, Riri discovers a message not from aliens, but from Toni.
Following the message, the Avengers arrive in Madrid to rescue Toni and take down Ultron. Citing Wanda's failure to trigger the Hulk in South Africa, Ultron takes Pietro with him to confront the Avengers, while Wanda is left behind to guard Toni.
As the Avengers battle Ultron, Pietro succeeds where Wanda had failed, and triggers Savage Hulk. However, when faced with the reality of an out of control Hulk, he freezes, overcome with fear and horror.
While the battle has been ongoing, Toni has been working on Wanda, trying to convince her that Ultron cannot be trusted. Sensing the Pietro is in danger, Wanda relents, releasing Toni, although she refuses to come with Toni when she offers.
Black Widow steps in to save Pietro's life, and when she orders him to get as many civilians out of Hulk's path as he can, he agrees.
Reluctantly, remembering how badly it had gone in the original timeline, Tony prepares to summon the Hulkbuster Armour. However, before he can, Clint Barton steps into Hulk's path, totally trusting that his friend won't hurt him. When his attempts to frighten Clint out of the way fail, Hulk reverts to Bruce, collapsing into Clint's arms.
Sneaking out of Ultron's base, Toni in confronted and cornered by one of Ultron's drones. Desperately she tries to persuade it that it needs her alive, but it seems uninterested in taking her into custody, shooting her in the shoulder and advancing on her. Toni pulls out her left hand, clad in a home-made Repulsor glove, and shoots the drone, destroying its head.
The noise attracts other drones, and they begin to swarm towards her possition, zombie-like, but they're not the only ones that heard her. Just as it looks like all is lost, Iron Man appears, picking up Toni and flying her to safety. Finally safe, Toni passes out in her rescuer's arms just as Cap orders a retreat, and, as the twins rejoin him, Ultron does the same.
Back at the Tower, Tony briefs the Avengers on the changes Toni had been forced to make to the drones, turning each one into a walking bomb.
Toni emergences from the Cradle to find Riri waiting for her, and the two friends hug. As JARVIS asks them for their assistance with something, the camera pans, showing the Sceptre and the confiscated Vibranium sitting in the corner of the lab.
Ultron and the twins arrive back at Voyóřeta Fort. While Ultron begins fabricating more drones to Toni's improved specifications, Wanda and Pietro confront Ultron about his true intentions and the scale of destruction he's wrought thus far. Although Ultron appears calm and unruffled, behind them a group of drones are edging closer. As Wanda angrily declares Ultron a monster, the drones raise their weapons. Realising the danger, Pietro picks up Wanda and runs, just before the drones can fire.
As the Avengers argue about possible next steps, and the fact that Wanda has learnt to hide herself and Pietro from Tony, the doors open and a robotic figure appears. While the other Avengers are confused, Tony is horrified. Although he is relieved when he learns that JARVIS had copied himself, rather than destroyed himself, in order to create the synthesoid, he's still angry. When the other Avengers are confused, Tony explains that he'd forseen the creation in a vision, and the synthesoid decides to take Vision as his name.
Steve is angry that Tony didn't tell them about a potential ally, but as they're arguing, Riri, who has been live tweeting unflattering photos of the Avengers, yells at them to turn on the news. Natasha does as she asks, and they see a 'breaking news' report on the invasion of Novi Grad by Ultron.
In Denz Plaza in central Novi Grad, Ultron decends from the sky and gives a speech in English about how Novi Grad will be his test case for bringing peace and order to the planet. When people try to flee, they find a ring of drones has surrounded the city, preventing any exit.
The Avengers arrive on the scene, and begin battling the Ultron drones, but every time it looks like they've taken one down, the drone explodes, killing civilians and destroying part of the city.
In different parts of the city, Tony and Natasha are both pinned down, in serious risk of being killed, when Wanda and Peitro respectively arrive to save them. Around the city, people are panicking, trampling one another in the desperation to get to safety. With Pietro's encouragement, Wanda gives a speech in Sokovian, which Tony has JARVIS broadcast on every TV and billboard in the city, reminding people that this is not the first time Stepanszeg has been invaded, and telling people to help one another get to safety. As she talks, Hulk on one side of the city, and Rhodey and Sam on the other, succeed in breaking the perimiter of drones, allowing the first civilians to escape.
Back at the tower, Riri and Toni are watching on the news. Toni bemoans how well made the drones are, and Riri reveals that she'd installed a backdoor override in the original robot that has probably carried over to the copies. Toni says that they need to get to Sokovia, and Riri says that there's something they need first. She phones Nate Richards, who is watching the news along with the other scholarship kids, and asks if the Iron Lad armour AIM stole was the only armour he'd made, to which he says that of course it wasn't.
Giving up on their intention of trapping the civilians, the drones redouble their attacks on the twins and Avengers. Pinned down under fire in a ruined building, the twins panic. This is all too similar to the trauma of their childhood, and neither of them were prepared to fight a war. Clint tells them that they can hide out in the building, or they can step up and be Avengers, and when he steps back out of the building, the twins are right behind him.
Vision battles the original Ultron, and succeeds in destroying it, but Ultron reveals that he can simply jump into a drone body, making that the new central Ultron.
Sam Wilson is airlifting a pregnant woman to safety when he's shot by a drone. He manages to put the woman down rather than drop her, but three drones converge on him, pinning him on the ground, unable to fly because he's acting as a shield for the woman. Just as it seems like he's going to be killed, there's a high pitched noise and the drones collapse. Falcoln looks up to see Iron Patriot and Ironheart, Toni and Riri, have arrived, and they join the fight.
Cap notices that there seem to be less and less drones on the streets. When he says this over the comms, Hawkeye says that surely fewer enemies is a good thing, but Cap has a bad feeling about it. Natasha confirms this bad feeling when she finds that the drones have started gathering together in the Plaza, piling onto one another to pack themselves as densely as possible. Toni realises that they must be be intending to all detonate at once, massively increasing the blast radius of their bombs to create something apololyptic in scale.
Sam asks if they can use whatever it was that they used to take out the three drones earlier on all of them, and Riri says that it was a failsafe she'd built into the design, a way of instantly disabling police robots about destroying them. It might be possible to use it to win, but they'd need to rig up some way of playing it loudly enough to be heard by every drone in the city.
The Avengers split up into three groups - Tony and the Iron Maidens find a TV station and begin work on building their sound generator, the fliers are sent to evacuate everyone, since playing the sound loud enough to take out the drones will deafen or even kill any humans, and the remaining Avengers form a cordon around the central mass of drones, keeping it from getting any bigger.
Realising the Avengers on the ground are the ones foiling his plan, Ultron gives the order for the central mass to attack the Avengers who are surrounding them, taking them unawares.
Rhodey finds group of school children hiding out in the remains of a pre-school. He and Vision pack them into two school busses and lift them to safety, which Sam acting as airsupport and protecting him.
Finally Tony gives the word that they are ready, and any Avengers not wearing a high-tech helmet need to get the hell out of there. Sam takes Natasha, and Clint steals a motorbike and prepares to follow, and on his way out of the city, he passes the pre-school, and finds a single child who hadn't got onto the bus with the others. Just as the Maidens turn on their sonic canon, he skids to a hault, throwing himself off the bike, covering the child's ears with his hands and shielding her with his body.
As the sonic blast rips through the city and the Ultron drones begin to activate, Clint screams, blood dripping from his ears.
When the last drone drops out of the sky, the evacuated civilians cheer. Hulk and Widow rush to Hawkeye's side, fining him unconcious, but the child unhurt.
One the banks of the Voyóřeta, a single Ultron drone drags itself out of the water, to find Vision waiting for it. They discuss the merits of humanity, but Ultron dismisses Visions arguements, attacking him. A blast of light fills the forrest as Vision destroys Ultron, finally ending the threat.
Clint wakes up in the Cradle to find Bruce waiting for him. He learns that although he had survived, he's now deaf. He remains surprisingly chipper, pointing out that deaf is a whole lot better than dead, and now he'll have a justification for ignoring Tony when he talks.
Bruce helps him walk, and he comments that they're not at the Tower, and Bruce says that no, the team had decided they needed more space. As he says it, they round a corner into the lobby of the New Avengers Facility to find the Avengers, which now includes Vision and the twins, waiting for them.
Riri and Toni return to the Vanko Memorial Scholarship lab. They tell the others that they'd refused the offer of being Avengers, since it was their creation that caused the crisis in the first place. Selah reminds them that that was AIM's fault, on theirs. When they still don't seem convinced, Fernanda points out that they had at least succeeded at what they planned - no corruption corporation is going to be making police robots any time soon after Ultron.
In the post-credits scene, Maya Hansen is told she has a visitor. When she is taken to an interrogation room at the prison, she finds Tony waiting. He asks her to sign paperwork selling him AIM, pointing out that she's going to need a very good lawyer after everything Ultron did. She denies responsibility, but reluctantly agrees, signing the paperwork. As he's leaving, she asks Tony what he's even intending to do with it, and he replies that he'd always thought the name was kind of lame, but Avengers Idea Mechanics has a much better ring to it.
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