The squib who became Iron Lad... In DC

My lives have been one hell of a rollercoaster ride ! Yes. Lives, plural. As in, more than one.

Imagine being born in a poor household… It must not be hard for most people, but for those who have no idea : imagine having to eat the same thing day-in, day-out for a month because you can't buy anything other than pasta, or rice… or some other cheap food. Season it with either grated cheese or butter and switch it up sometime with a ready-made sauce. Or ! You can imagine having to cycle between the few outfits you have because you don't have money to buy new ones and sale season is not for a long while… Imagine that, while you're a child and you can't do anything about it. You can't help, you can't very well ask for things since you know your parents can't buy them…

Now, a few years have passed and imagine being successful for the first time ! And not only successful, you're a genius, in fact ! Science, maths and pretty much everything else in school comes easy to you. Soon you're on a full scholarship and your studies are going very well ! Sure, because you're in the city now, living on your own and it's expensive, you continue to eat and wear the same things…

Though, those things are different, of course ! You won't eat your clothes or wear something made of rice grain, obviously !

Anyway, imagine finishing college at the top of your class and already having great plans ! You start off your new company. And, sure, you struggle for a few years, but then it takes off ! Thanks, in part due to a few capable people and friends you made along the way. One of them ends up becoming your partner.

Now, imagine, your company is really starting to become something great ! You eat new things every day and often times, you even eat in famous and expensive restaurant. You even invite your family and friends… share the wealth as it were.

But then, imagine the greedy motherf… Imagine your partner wanting more ! Wanting your company ! He kills you, or rather has you killed and there's nothing you could have done since you didn't even see it coming !

Thankfully, all is not lost since you've been given a second chance !

Imagine, being reborn in a Wizarding family ! Like in the novels, Harry Potter ! Imagine growing up surrounded by magic… You just can't wait to go to school, to learn magic and make friends in this fantasy world !

Only now, imagine your 11th birthday. Soon, you know the letter from school will be coming. Unfortunately, your family as well as yourself are uneasy… You've never manifested magic. Something every young child have done at least once before they reached 11 years old. When the letter never comes, you understand…

Imagine, learning at 11 that you're a squib. A wizard-born unable to use magic. And imagine that the world you're in is not only one where Harry Potter exists… Superman does, too !

You can imagine how I felt, right ?

At first, I was depressed. My family's reaction didn't help any since they were now treating me differently. Not bad, per se… I mean, my parents and my big sister weren't bigots and they didn't care about their image like some purebloods in the novels did. Although they were purebloods, they were good people. But, they still treated me as if… I was less. Like I was a cripple or something. My sister, in particular, was like this.

She'd started to attend Ilvermony 2 years before I celebrated my 11th birthday. We'd talk about the school, the classes, the magical creatures she studied about and most importantly… magic ! Unlike her, who was a little blasé about it all, being born in a magical family and having experienced the culture her whole life, I was excited about it ! Passionate, even. When it was revealed I wouldn't be able to use magic of my own, she looked at me with pity.

Perhaps because she felt guilty, she stopped talking about the school to me or her life there. And when she did, by accident, during dinner with our parents on her holidays, she'd often stop short to look at me with a look… This insufferable look ! Like : Damn, I messed up. Will he throw a tantrum, the poor thing ?

She probably didn't mean all that with her expression but that's how I took it.

As if I'd give up ! I mean, sure at first, I was depressed ! But it's not like my lives have all been sunshine, rainbows and unicorns ! I think we've established that, right ? Remember all the imagine earlier ?

Besides, it could be worse. I could have been reborn in Marvel's Ultimate universe. You know things are going to shit when a Superhero becomes your president… Or it could have been Earth-3 which in this multiverse was called the cradle of Evil. Which makes me idly wonder if there's an evil version of myself over there…

Anyway, I might not be able to cast magic… But I have something else. My mind ! I've always considered myself a genius. In fact, everyone around me seems to agree that I'm rather smart. The fact that I'd graduated high-school at 6 and gotten my first PhD before the tender age of 10 was another proof, if you needed any ! And unlike my former life, here my family is rather well-off. Not Richie rich, level of well-off, but enough for us children not to worry about money.

So, in part to earn myself my own money in the future, and especially to protect myself and my family in the future, I started a project…

Now, people ! I have a confession to make. In the world of comic books, there are two heroes I liked… Blue Beetle, because I liked the idea of an alien suit of armor for some reason. Even though, normally, the suit takes the host over and makes him do unspeakable thing to his own species… And Iron Man ! Because Iron Man, isn't an alien with power over lightning, hasn't been injected with an experimental serum, or bombarded with radiation… He doesn't even have any kind of military training. All he has are his wits and his resources !

You see the parallel I'm trying to draw with my situation, here ? Yes, in this life, I've decided to become the Detective Comics equivalent of Iron Man… It helps that I bear the name Stark too ! Though I don't have the right first name… My parents called me Edgar. Ned Stark… Like the dude who got killed toward the end of season 1 in Game of Thrones… Let's hope I don't have his luck ! Moreover, who names their sons Edgar in this day and age ? Well… Probably people stuck in the victorian era.

Anyway, for 4 years now, I've been working on making my own suit of armor. The only difference with my other Stark namesake was… I wasn't ready to give up on using magic ! So, like he did for medical reason, I decided to build myself a small reactor but able to harness and use magic ! A Mana Reactor, if you will !

But first things first, I needed technology and magic to work together ! Something that, if you've read the novels, you know doesn't happen normally. That's something I've remedied the first year after my disappointment with Ilvermony. Well, at least in theory I had… I thought that using goblin silver for the circuits boards and to transfer energy instead of copper might do the trick. Unfortunately, I couldn't make my own silver and it was ridiculously expensive to buy ! Not to mention, I'd need a goblin to work on it for me…

So, the next year, I did everything I could to be apprenticed under a goblin smith of Gringotts. It was… hard would be an understatement. I had to share my theories with them, as well as showcase some working prototypes I had in the works and promise to give them a few in exchange… Not to mention, when I finally established my company, they wanted shares as well as a privileged business relation…

However, it was all worth it in the end if I could make my dream come true ! The next few years, I learned everything I could under a grumpy old guy by the name Gresket. Old guy, was another understatement. He was ancient and his body, as well as his head, weren't always in tip-top shape. In fact, he couldn't really work in the forge anymore and instead, had me work in his stead. This helped me in learning but… Well, Gresket was a real slave driver ! Not to mention he was really demanding !

It didn't help either that, unlike computer programming of which I had almost two lives worth of experience doing, I wasn't exactly a natural when it came to smithing. Mechanical engineering was another thing I had troubles with at first. But I learned. And I improved ! So much so that at some point, Gresket started to treat me with a little bit of respect. To an outsider, it wouldn't have been noticeable since he was always gruff and yelled a lot. But, to me, his long silence and the occasional grunts of approval were like heavenly choirs ! Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit…

So, for 3 years, I worked on a suit of armor. I won't bore you with the technical details… Suffice it to say that I used a blend of the bit of runesmithing the goblin taught me along with my own theoretical knowledge of how magic worked. Obviously, for this part I had needed help… Either my father, who despite working for MACUSA was rather interested in my projects, or my sister when I explained to her what the suit would do… I'm pretty sure she only indulged me but never really thought I'd make it work. After all, she knew I needed a power source I hadn't created yet…

About the power source, about two years ago, I managed to create a mana battery. It worked remarkably like a regular battery, albeit with goblin silver replacing the metallic parts, a solution brewed by my mother in place of the acid. Unlike electricity however, magic doesn't follow logical rules. To put it simply, a normal battery is composed of three parts : cathode, electrolyte and anode. Electrons try to flow from the anode into the cathode but can't because of the electrolyte, so they use the closed circuit they're connected to (a copper wire linking the two for example…) and in the opposite direction a positive charge, or current is created.

Magic was different. I've browsed a number of theoretical books on magic and energy and never really did find out how it worked. So, I observed and experimented. I observed my family and measured what I could measure when they used magic. I also studied enchanted objects and foci to better understand how magic flowed. That's when I discovered something that would make my reactor possible…

Magic was… everywhere ! It wasn't radiation, a wave or a particle. In fact, I don't think it was anything like we managed to discover and hypothesized to this day. The more I studied it, the less I understood. The only thing I could confidently say was that, magic was… like a source code. It shaped reality and wizards and witches, or homo magi, could harness and modify this code using tools, incantations, potion brewing or even their own body.

Of course, this alone didn't help with my energy or mana problem. With these findings, I didn't manage to discover the existence of any kind of energy inside the members of my family. But I knew it was there ! I will compare to something rather mundane but… You can't hack a system without using code. If magic was the code of the multiverse, it made sense that magic users used their own code to modify reality. In this case, a magic user's body is the hardware (or computer) while the wand and incantations, the program used to hack. In the same way, an enchanted object had its code modified by imprinting on it.

So, that made me change the way I got to the mana battery. It wasn't energy I was trying to manipulate : it was information. It took me a while to figure out and I don't plan to share my discoveries here… If ever. Suffice it to say that I managed to create something capable of harnessing this code. When I showed it to my family, they were… Well, at first, they understood very little of what I was talking about. In the excitement, I'd forgotten that I was the only one with any sort of scientific schooling. I lost myself in the theories and explanations… Finally, I explained succinctly that I could now, with the battery, use magic. Though in a much more limited way.

I had to create an interface linked directly to the battery to do anything with it… Just the operating system for something like this was… Well, it's still a work in progress. Unlike my parents who could use magic instinctually, I was paving a new way for magic. Everything they taught in Ilvermony, or any Wizarding School for that matter, didn't and couldn't apply here ! The hardware was different and so was the program. Whereas as magic users had intents, emotions and cognitive process to help them cast magic, my machines didn't have anything like that !

Unfortunately, despite having a way to use magic, it wasn't satisfying. The batteries were, not only to cumbersome, they had little power and capacity (comparatively speaking). They weren't near enough what I'd need for my fully enchanted and equipped suit of armor. So, I continued working on developing my mana reactor…

In the end, even though it took me a while, I found out how to shrink the mana battery to a manageable size and increase its output. The answer was rather simple : space expansion charms. And when I say simple, I'm only talking about the theory. The application was… a pain. First, you code something small for it to contain more than it appears on the outside, meaning the code inside differs from the outside. Then, you put inside the code needed to manipulate magic outside of the shell. To summarize, it was highly unstable until I finally found a way to stabilize it…

And here we are : Mana Reactor Mk. 1 ! Mk. 1, because like Tony Stark, I knew technology had to evolve. Much like my armor in fact… It was still considered Mk. 1 because I didn't have the means to field test it, yet. I'd run simulations. Hundreds of them, in fact… Or rather, my AI ran them. I just glanced at the reports.

Now, I'm standing in front of the armor, mana reactor installed into the chest plate. The design resembled Iron Man's first armor (or rather, second) in the movie with a different color scheme. Whereas his was mostly red and gold, mine was silver and blue. I much preferred mine to be honest… But that's a matter of preference, I guess.

Let's see… Okay, it's almost time. End recording, Mel !