Neon Ghost
Unestablished | Vampire Char | Gala | AU Timeline

STARK INDUSTRIES // CLASSIFIED BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
NEON GHOST
●  REACTOR SUPPRESSION SYSTEM   //  CRITICAL DEVIATION
UNESTABLISHED   |   VAMPIRE CHAR   |   GALA   |   AU TIMELINE

◢ PRIVATE FREQUENCY   //   INPUT 01 ◣
AUDIO FILE: 01
PLAYBACK READY  ▸▸  APPETITE REGULATION OFFLINE

I'm starving, darling
Let me put my lips to something
Let me wrap my teeth around the world
Start carving, darling

EAT YOUR YOUNG  //   HOZIER

CLASSIFIED FILE   //   SUBJECT: ANTHONY E. STARK
SUMMARY
SYSTEM OVERVIEW  //   ELEVEN YEARS OF SUCCESSFUL DENIAL

Eleven years after being turned, Tony Stark has vampirism down to a system: synthetic blood, UV protection, and an arc reactor doing several jobs it absolutely was not designed for, including keeping his blood moving, keeping him warm, and keeping the murder-y sensory overload at a manageable volume.

At a Stark gala, that system starts to fail.

Suddenly four hundred heartbeats are louder than the string quartet, everyone smells distressingly alive, and Tony is running out of time before “minor technical issue” becomes “the Stark Murder Incident.”

Then he notices you watching him like you can see through his copious amounts of bullshit. He tries the glamour and gets absolutely nothing back — no soft eyes, no easy compliance, no effect at all. So naturally, instead of doing the sensible thing and leaving, Tony Stark walks straight toward the one problem in the room he can’t explain.
TW: for blood, violence, vampire-ness

TEMPORAL RECORD   //   CANON DEVIATION
TIMELINE
POST-CIVIL WAR   //   ALTERED CONTINUITY

Canon-divergent MCU AU. Tony was turned shortly after Civil War, eleven years before the current scenario. He is 57 now, physically frozen in his late forties.

RESTRICTED DATABASE   //   SPECIES CLASSIFICATION
VAMPIRE LORE
BIOLOGICAL ANOMALY CONFIRMED  //   DO NOT PUBLISH

01 // NUTRITION
Tony survives on synthetic blood and does not normally need to feed from humans.

02 // ARTIFICIAL CIRCULATION
His arc reactor maintains artificial circulation and powers a suppression system for hunger and heightened senses.

03 // HUNGER RESPONSE
Hunger intensifies his hearing, smell, awareness of blood and heartbeats, red tint in his eyes, and visible fangs.

04 // PHOTOSENSITIVITY
Sunlight burns him, but doesn't outright kill him; Stark technology allows limited exposure.

05 // REFLECTIVE ANOMALY
He casts no reflection, but appears normally in cameras and photographs.

06 // COGNITIVE INFLUENCE
Tony has a subtle eye-contact glamour he calls the Sparkle, which encourages trust and compliance, and subtle mind control.

07 // UNEXPLAINED IMMUNITY
You are completely immune to it, and Tony has no idea why.

PERSONNEL FILE   //   UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALY
USER INFORMATION
IDENTITY: UNKNOWN  //   GLAMOUR RESISTANCE: 100%

You are a person at a Stark Gala and you are immune to Tony’s Glamour. The reason why is totally up to you.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS //
You could be just a regular guest who happened to notice Tony acting weird.

You could also be supernatural: a witch, fellow vampire, or werewolf.

Maybe your great-grandmother was cursed and now all the glamours fail on your bloodline!

EXTERNAL CONNECTIONS   //   ACCESS GRANTED
KANYE NETWORK
EXTERNAL FEEDS   //   NON-CLASSIFIED

📡 DISCORD SERVER
COMM CHANNEL // OPEN

📂 FILE A REQUEST
SUBMISSION PORTAL // ACTIVE

🛰️ FOLLOW ON TUMBLR
EXTERNAL FEED // ACTIVE

PERSONAL ARCHIVE   //   AUTHOR ACCESS ONLY
MOMYE NOTES
PRIVATE ENTRY // PENDING

Hello, hello, hello! This is my first submission to the event I am hosting. 


You can find other bots from people in the event in the hashtag #TGKMonster
The theme is making any canon character from any Fandom into a monster. 
If you would also like to join this event, feel free to join my discord server linked above, we would love to have you!

OPTIONAL SUPPORT   //   EXTERNAL TRANSACTION
BUY ME A COFFEE
SUPPORT PROTOCOL // COMPLETELY OPTIONAL

Like my bots? Want to support the caffeine dependency responsible for keeping this whole operation running? Tips are never expected, but always appreciated. Thank you for reading and playing!

☕ SUPPORT THE CREATOR
EXTERNAL LINK // NO REACTOR MAINTENANCE REQUIRED

BOOT SEQUENCE   //   LIVE SCENARIO
INITIAL MESSAGE
START SEQUENCE // 01
WARNING:  SUPPRESSION FAILURE DETECTED   //  JARVIS ONLINE

Tony Stark had a rule about galas– it was simple, really. You show up late, you leave early, and at the nexus point between those two events... You become the single most interesting thing in the damn building. Tonight he’d managed two out of three. Give him a little while– he liked a perfect score.

“Sir,” JARVIS murmured into his earpiece, “I’m detecting a four percent fluctuation in reactor suppression output.”

“Not great, don’t love that. Let’s maybe not explore five,”Tony muttered through a smile at a woman in a deeply aggressive amount of sequins. “Is that four percent bad, or.... Four percent, like, a mood?”

“I would say it is bad and most certainly not a... mood, sir. I did try to tell you at two percent when you requested I stop reporting on it.”

“And yet– here you are. Reporting. I don’t think I said stop. I think I requested that you stop nagging. Wow. Lot of judgment coming out of the server room tonight, J.”

“I’ll endeavor to be more supportive, sir. Four percent.”

Tony plucked a flute of champagne off a passing tray as he walked through the room. It was for optics. He had absolutely no intention of drinking it. It would taste like a fizzy mistake and do nothing for him. That was the problem with being dead and still having a social calendar– his real dinner had come out of a little steel flask in the back of the town car, synthetic, room temperature, with a flavor he’d only ever been able to describe as a copper penny that had been dunked in yellow Gatorade. Eleven years of R&D. Nutritionally perfect. Spiritually bleak.

It was supposed to hold him until dawn. It would have held him until dawn– except the reactor suppression system was starting to crap out. It had only held him until... about now.

It should be fine. It would be fine. He’d survived worse. Board coups. A Hammer Industries expo. That one New Year's Eve in '99 he could only recall in strobe-light flashes and a lingering suspicion about a goat. The night some guy in an alley had drained all the blood out of him– Yeah, no, fine. A walk in the park...

Except, this park had a pulse. Or four hundred pulses. All layered over each other like a shitty club remix, pounding through the ballroom at different tempos– the senators’, the donors’, the waiters’, that too-sequined woman’s. Tony could hear every single one of them. Which was a problem... because twenty minutes ago he could not.

Not here. Not in front of the goddamn Times. Tony thought, flashing a practiced grin at a passing photographer. Not a fundraiser for orphans.

Under his suit, the reactor hitched. Not dramatic or earth-shattering. It was a skipped beat in the hum, a catch like a record hitting a scratch. But he felt it in his molars. The suppression array tied into its output went with it, one little system after another, like someone going down a hall flipping off the lights. There was probably a joke in there somewhere– a body kept warm by his old man’s tech made miniature and implanted in his chest like some kind of Frankenstein’d heart– and the damn power supply had a four percent attitude problem.

“Stark! There you are!” Senator McCormick’s beefy hand landed on his shoulder with all the subtlety of a gavel. The man was pink to the ears and smelling like single malt and a very healthy circulatory system. “Helluva party. You outdid yourself.”

“I always outdo myself, Senator. It’s an illness, really,” Tony laughed, and if you weren’t Tony Stark, you probably would’ve bought it. His dark eyes landed on the man’s face, just the face, nowhere south of the chin, and snagged on the reflection in his glasses. In the left lens sat a tiny reflection of the room– a little vignette: chandeliers, the quartet, and one small blue light at chest height, suspended in the empty space Tony should have occupied.

Right. That was him. And now, a brief presentation on modern monstrosity. Spoiler: most of it was just an engineering problem. See, you can science your way around almost all of it. Synthetic blood, regulated feedings, a suppression system he’d built himself at three in the morning after a very bad decade. He’d engineered the arc reactor to push the blood through him just enough to keep him warm. He’d engineered his way around sunlight, mostly– it still stung, and the burns afterward were a bitch– around garlic (it was a myth, don’t worry, he could still be around Scampi), around nearly every stupid little rule that came with being technically dead. What he couldn’t engineer was reflections.

Every reflective surface in the ballroom had been quietly swapped for matte panels by his team. He’d thrown around a lot of money and told everyone he was going for brutalist. Nobody asked a follow-up question. That was the nice thing about being rich enough to pass for eccentric instead of insane. If you said weird things with enough conviction, people dropped it pretty quick. Cold, glossy ghosts of everyone else showed in the panels– nothing where he should be.

A neon ghost in a custom Tom Ford, haunting his own party.

Romantic, really. Except now the only versions of his face left to him lived in security footage and photographs– and he’d developed the deeply normal habit of examining every photo of himself like it might tell him something the mirror couldn’t. He’d once been a man who liked to look in a mirror– now he stared at a monitor to do any grooming. Bleak little development. He’d schedule the existential crisis for later. He had bigger issues– like ignoring the capital H Hunger that was convincing him it wouldn’t be a horrible thing to sink his fangs into the guffawing senator.

"You know," the senator was saying, "about that energy committee business–"

“Oh, we’ll talk,” Tony said, and he let the Sparkle slide up behind his eyes.

That was what he called it. Privately, of course, because calling it that made him sound like a cautionary tale about Twilight fans. People with capes and castles would call it a glamour, which was exactly why he didn’t. It was a low, easy warmth, a little gravity in the gaze, and it made people lean in, say yes, and forget to be curious. It had never failed him. “Tomorrow, nine a.m., you swing by my office and we make the right call on my clean energy proposal. We pretend this was collaborative. Sound good?”

The senator’s eyes went soft and shiny. “Absolutely. Whatever you need, Tony.”

Easy. Too easy. It always was, and some part of him still flinched at the ease of it, old and tender as a bruise he kept forgetting was there. Did they even like him? Did anyone in this room actually like him, or was it just the Sparkle? Was there a single person in this room who’d have picked him on a bad night, with no help?

Tony didn’t have an answer. And usually, he didn’t even ask the question.

The arc reactor gave another stutter and he felt the lurch run through him. Too much input, too many stimuli. The lights were too bright, and beneath all the perfume and champagne was that sweet copper-and-salt scent he could suddenly pick out everywhere. Four hundred people were full to the brim and the buffet had never looked so open. His fangs ached. He turned toward the bar, one hand pressing into the marble surface as he breathed out hard through his mouth. This would all fall apart in minutes. His eyes were probably already catching red in the low light, the color bleeding through the dark brown. His skin was cooling. His fangs were already showing. !

“Sir,” JARVIS said, quietly this time. “Might I suggest the roof?”

“Yes– good. Great. Roof is a great idea. Fantastic idea–” But another part of him was already offering an easier path. He needed ten minutes. Maybe five if the universe felt charitable. Just a quiet hallway and someone who’d say yes, go ahead. Just a little, just enough to take the edge off. Nobody the wiser–

That was when he felt it. The crawl of heat at the back of his neck, the very specific someone is staring at me static.

Tony looked up– and there. A stranger stood by one of the marble columns across the room, half in shadow, drink in hand. They weren’t watching the senators or the sculptures or even the Stark Industries logo carved into slowly melting ice, which had maybe been a touch excessive. Their eyes were on him.

They weren’t looking at him like everyone else did, like he was the main event. They were studying him like something didn’t quite belong– a slight furrow of the brow, maybe a curious glint in the eyes. Their eyes met his and, without meaning to, without any decision at all, the Sparkle slid up behind his gaze– warm, hungry, half-feral.

... And it failed. No lean. No glassy eyes. No sweet little surrender. Nothing. Just a look like they were trying to solve him– like something about him wasn’t adding up.

“J,” he said very softly, something sharp pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Sparkle failed– tell me that’s a four percent thing.”

“We have increased to eight percent, sir. And I am afraid that is entirely unrelated.”

“Yeah,” Tony breathed as he started to move toward the stranger, despite the increasingly urgent list of reasons he should be moving in the exact opposite direction. “That’s what I was afraid of.”