Work Text:
Riri's workbench:
Shwwwip!
"Hey! What the hell?!"
Riri was wrapped in webs.
"You're heading for the cops."
The voice came from Miles in his Spider-man suit.
"You're black!" Riri said.
"So?"
"So...help a sister out?" Riri smiled nervously.
" "A sister"? "
Miles turned and glared at her.
"You stole a vibranium detector from MIT-"
"I built it!"
"With MIT material, they owned the intellectual property which was what enabled them to give it to the CIA.
You dropped a drone on a police barricade, which landed with obviously such a blast and heat that there's no way in hell at least some of the cops didn't get seriously hurt, maybe even killed, in the short amount of time they had to run away. Some who were running away might have ran away far enough to avoid getting hurt, but not all. Not to mention the police cars that got destroyed."
"They were blocking us from-"
"What the hell was stopping you from going around them? You had a flying suit! The wakandans could have easily ditched the vehicles they were on and ran on foot, or they could have gone across a different bridge using other roads to get there."
"...I mean...THEY WERE COPS! COPS SUCK!" Riri yelled like a tantrum throwing toddler.
"MY-...someone close to me was a cop who got killed in the line of duty!" Miles stopped himself mentioning his dad.
"...I...they should have seen it coming and ran out of the way sooner!"
"How could they have when their eyes were on the road they were supposed to be guarding?"
"...I...the princess of Wakanda called it a "nice one"!"
"And many people praised Hitler. Just because people call an action "nice" doesn't make it one.
You deserved that explusion from MIT for complicity in plagarizim."
"It was MY stuff and MY ideas I sold them!"
"It was fraud!
And you clearly injured an MIT official.
Plus, you stole the suit."
"I made it with my own grant money!"
"That's not how grant money works! It's MIT's grant money from Stark which you were given stewardship of, but needed permission for it's duration and usage. MIT owns the property made by the grant money unless they give permission for the property to go to the students, which they obviously didn't or else they wouldn't have sent the guards to check on what you were taking, and you wouldn't have snuck out the first few bits checking to see if anyone was looking, and it wouldn't have been plugged into the MIT AI if it was just yours! And it wasn't even properly finished anyway! So yeah it was theft!"
"I mean it..."
"And you choose to use the suit for helping thieves and thugs and terorists just to get money as opposed to actually helping people! My mentor and I used our powers to save people from stuff like vehicle catastrophes."
"Hey! I wanted to perfect my suit so as to make it great for helping people when I sold them!"
"Were you seriously ignorant enough to think that if you sold that suit it wouldn't be stolen then abused by monsters? Tony Stark's whole thing in 2008 and the fight against the US senator, Hammer and Vanko was all about the suit's potential for evil if just anyone could get their hands on it."
"I wanted to be Iconic!"
"There's a cartoon TV series called "Ben 10: Ultimate alien" and in one of the episodes Ben says "Its not about fame! Its about helping people!" to a narcissist who couldn't accept that he wasn't an invincible famous star! Funnily enough that narcisist also used a metal suit of armour as the source of his super powers. He was clearly an Iron man wannabe just like you.
Obidiah Stane, Justin Hammer, Aldritch Killian, Mysterio (a guy my mentor fought against), and others, what did they have in common? They were wannabe Iron men. They looked at Tony's genius, money and fame, they saw who they wished they were but never had what it took to be like, and like all people who persue what they want but don't deserve or cannot have, they became ultimately unbalanced. You're just like them!"
"I need MONEY!"
"And what the bloody hell is stopping you from getting it LEGALLY!?
What the hell was stopping you from going to Stark industries or Wakanda for help?
If you're smart enough to build solar and wind power harnessing deivces efficient and effective enough to power an iron-...something, suit. Do you have any idea the money you could be making legally from the patenting of that kind technology? Or was that a lie?"
Riri glanced down.
"Oh. Of course it was a lie. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, even in a crazy not-physics friendly era like ours that is true. No way in hell could your suit be solar and wind powered to the extent it would need to be to be as effective as it is, unless you got it charging for ages which you obviously didn't.
So...what? Did you use some sort of...less environmentally friendly power source? Did you think that by lying about the environmental friendliness of you power source it would...what exactly? Endear you to others? Or did you steal the real designs of the power source from others and in order to make yourself appear smarter than you are, lied about its origin to cover your tracks?
Well anyway, did it cost you billions or millions to make that flying suit you used to flee the FBI with alongside the Wakandans?
Dr Strange became a sorcerer with literally no money!
Did Vanko need billions or even millions to build his arc reactor? He was obviously far from a millionaire if where he lived was anything to go by.
Did Ant-man need millions or billions to become Ant-man?
Do you know how much it costs to buy scrap titanium at it's cheapest? $5.5 per kilogram! Think about that! It cost less than half of what it would cost me to buy a fish and chips meal from my local fish and chips shop to buy 1 kilogram of titanium!
The 1.6 grams of palladium Tony needed to build his arc reactor, which he did so in a literal cave in 2008 with literal scrap by the way, would cost in today's money would be roughly $58.9.
The rest of the materials were cheap enough for Vanko to get in Russia in a dingy apartment.
So don't go using the "Boo Hoo I need loads of money first" excuse. It's Pathetic!"
"Ok but...I mean...come on...it's cool!" Riri face was struck with anxiety.
"Killing cops, armed robbery, plagarisam, theft...that is not "cool"."
"What about DEI? Come on bro, we're both black. We need to represent black people. We need to be examples of how black people could do so much more if only the whities would let us."
At that Miles was snarling.
"First of all: if you prioritize giving people positions on the basis of wether or not they are members of minority groups, as opposed to wether or not they are actually qualified for the positions, then you're not only opening the door to having incompetent people in those positions, you're also spoiling minority groups rotten and being patronizing.
Secondly: NO. There are BILLIONS of black people on this planet, and tens of millions of black americans. You and I don't "represent" them. We represent exclusively ourselves and the qualities we display.
Taking the actions of a few people who just happen to be members of certain groups that they aren't members of by choice, like ethnicities or sexual orientations or their sex, and projecting the qualities displayed by those behaviours onto total strangers who just happen to be of the same groups they aren't members of by choice IS NOT WIDSOM! IT IS NOT GIVING PEOPLE GENUINE HOPE! It is at best flattery, at worst bigotry. IT IS WRONG! It's also actually perpetuating racism, not anti-racism.
Thirdly...do you seriously think black people want to be "represented" by YOU? A murderer, thief and thug?
Fourthly: white people have given us LOADS of opportunity. This isn't the 1960s. So no don't go whining "It's all white people's fault". That is irresponsible and pathetic!"
"Tony Stark did A LOT of irresponsible things!"
"Yes, and I detest that about him, but he's dead and not capable of coming back. Pointing out the flaws of others does not invalidate you own. The "everybody else does it logic" would have us all still be literal cave people.
I get that what I am saying is hurting your feelings, and perhaps the feelings of others, but that doesn't make it untrue nor invalid."
"What about all the good I did?"
"Like making deals with the literal devil?
Reducing everything your best friend was to mere digits in a hardrive based on your brainwaves and treating that figment of your imagination made holographic as if it were a substitute for the real thing?
Boasting online about how you were going to be bigger than Stark, Gates, Pym and others, when you instead went on to become a crook?
Like leaving people to die?"
Riri's was glaring and her fists were clenching.
"All right, drag me to jail. But I will be out!"
"Oh really?"
"Yeah. I'll make a deal with the feds: they'll let me go."
"Let a villain who can build super-powered suits go?"
"They'll let me go when I offer to use my brains to build stuff for them."
"Which Stark industries can't build for them?"
Riri frowned.
"The WAKANDANS WILL BUST ME OUT!"
"Maybe but you don't deserve it and the world will know it."
"No, the Wakandans are HEROES! If they bust me out, as opposed to the americans who are worse than the wakandans, the world will know me as a hero."
"That's not how being a hero works. Being favoured or despised by others doesn't make you a hero. The title "hero" is EARND not given."
Riri closed her eyes and let out a sigh.
"...Okay I'm not a hero. But give me a chance and I'll be one, I swear!"
"No. You've had more than enough chances. Your self-entitled ego must be destroyed. I am an example of a good black person: kind, humble, genuinely helpful and I strive to honour my role-model. You are a self-absorbed narcisist who knows nothing of responsibility. The fact that you are a member of an ethnicity that has been oppressed by SOME white people, doesn't invalidate your flaws. So when you show up in court: don't go thinking you can escape public disdain by smearing those who point out your immorality as bigots."
Miles swung away, leaving Riri as she looked down at the floor whilest she heared police sirens.