When
the Madbomb went off, New York was plunged into violent madness and it took
Captain America and the Falcon to put a stop to it. The human toll was
staggering and the city needed a long time to recover. But in the slums of the
South Bronx, no help was forthcoming: the neighborhood just kept crumbling into
ruin and despair. Felix Waterhouse, a teenage tech prodigy whose brother died
in the incident, had to give up his dream of college to continue working in his
father’s TV repair shop. Then one day a representative of Advanced Idea
Mechanics (A.I.M.), having heard about Felix’s expertise with electronics,
stops by the shop to offer him a high-paying job with the firm, assuring Felix
that the stories he’s heard about A.I.M. being a supervillain organization are
exaggerated. Felix is skeptical and continues working in his father’s shop.
Then, when he hears Captain America on television talking about how “the nation
stands” while his neighborhood as been abandoned, he smashes the TV and accepts
the job offer with A.I.M. And so, Felix goes to work, finding it challenging
and rewarding. Then he is asked to look at a problem with their biggest
project—which he recognizes as a Madbomb. He accepts their assurances that they
have no intention of using it. After talking with his family about the original
incident, Felix goes into work quietly and sabotages the Madbomb to emit an
electronic feedback pulse but he is caught and about to be killed when he
triggers the pulse, which affects much of the area above A.I.M.’s lab under
Manhattan. Cap, Falcon, and Iron Man team up to invade the A.I.M. lab, defeat
the baddies, and rescue Felix….
A
few days later, Tony Stark arrives to offer Felix a job with his company; Felix
declines, seeing that as no different from his offer from A.I.M.; what they
need is for someone to fix the neighborhood. A short time later, Stark is
building in the area and Cap talks to Felix, thanking him for reminding Cap
that a broken world doesn’t need heroes…it needs repairmen….