Collin Cooper had been taking things apart for as long as anyone in his family could remember, usually because he wanted to understand not only how they worked, but why they worked the way they did. Even as a child, he had a habit of treating machines as complete systems rather than collections of parts. He wanted to know where energy traveled, why one component failed before another, how heat moved through a structure, and whether a machine could be made stronger, safer, or more efficient with a different approach. His father, Kyle Cooper, encouraged the practical side of that curiosity, while his mother, Evelyn, made certain Collin never confused intelligence with entitlement. She taught him early that being capable of solving a problem also meant accepting responsibility for the solution.

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As he grew older, Collin’s interest in engineering became more focused. He developed a particular fascination with the technological advances of the Second World War, especially the way engineers had been forced to solve immense problems involving aircraft, armor, ships, communications, logistics, and industrial production under extraordinary pressure. It was not the warfare itself that fascinated him so much as the ingenuity behind the machinery. That fascination eventually became a career. Collin studied mechanical engineering, later specializing in thermodynamics, advanced materials, powered mechanisms, robotics, and mechatronics. By the time he entered the defense industry, he had already built a reputation as an engineer capable of understanding not just individual components, but the complicated relationships between power, heat, structure, and human operators.

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His career, however, was never the only thing in his life. Collin married Lekisha, and the two eventually built a family with their children, Collin Jr. and Lora. Their household was busy, occasionally chaotic, and reassuringly normal. There were school schedules, bills, errands, family commitments, and the familiar expectation that a professional engineer should somehow be able to fix every appliance in the house. Collin was ambitious, but he never intended to become the kind of man whose work consumed everything else. That balance became much harder to maintain when Acton Manufacturing offered him the project that seemed certain to define his career.

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Acton had a reputation for taking on defense contracts that other companies considered too expensive, too ambitious, or too dangerous. Collin eventually became one of the senior engineers responsible for one of the company’s most difficult classified programs: a next-generation mechanized infantry assault armor system. The concept was appealing on paper. The suit was intended to provide enhanced strength, heavy protection, advanced communications, integrated weapons, and the ability to operate in environments that would overwhelm conventional infantry. In practice, the project quickly became dominated by a single problem—heat.

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The armor had to survive fuel fires, industrial infernos, incendiary weapons, directed-energy attacks, and other extreme thermal conditions. Protecting the exterior was difficult enough, but Collin recognized that the greater danger came from inside the suit. Motors produced heat. Electronics produced heat. Power systems produced heat. The operator himself produced heat. Every joint, actuator, cable, seal, and mechanical interface became another pathway through which thermal energy could accumulate. Before long, Collin understood that the central engineering challenge was not creating armor strong enough to survive the environment. It was keeping the person inside alive.

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Years of testing followed. Prototype after prototype failed to meet requirements. Cooling systems saturated, heat exchangers lost efficiency, actuators expanded under stress, seals degraded, and internal temperatures rose beyond safe limits. Collin repeatedly argued that the system needed more development before a human operator was placed inside it, but Acton management was becoming increasingly impatient. The program had consumed more than two hundred million dollars and was in danger of becoming one of the company’s most expensive failures. Eventually, management authorized a controlled manned test.

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Collin did not believe the armor was ready, but he was the lead designer and his name appeared on the final engineering certification that allowed the test to proceed. What followed became the defining trauma of his professional life. A cascading cooling failure overwhelmed the suit’s heat exchangers, emergency systems failed to compensate, and internal temperatures rose catastrophically. The release mechanism did not disengage properly, and the test engineer died before the armor could be opened.

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Acton terminated the program almost immediately, and Collin was dismissed soon afterward. The company wrote off the project, sealed the technical records, and allowed much of the responsibility to settle on the lead engineer. Within defense circles, Collin Cooper became associated with a fatal technological failure. His security status became more complicated, prospective employers grew cautious, and the career he had spent years building collapsed almost overnight. More painful than any professional consequence was the knowledge that a man had died inside something Collin had helped create.

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For a time, Collin tried to rebuild his life quietly. He searched for new work, attended interviews, and attempted to convince employers that the Acton failure did not define his ability as an engineer. During one trip to New York City for another job interview, however, his past found him in the most impossible way imaginable. A superhero battle erupted nearby, and Collin initially intended to remain clear of it until he saw the armored attacker fighting Major Deej.

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He recognized the machine immediately.

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The proportions, joint architecture, panel layout, service access points, and internal geometry were unmistakable. It was based directly on his Acton design. More disturbing still, the armor worked. A system that had supposedly been buried after a fatal failure was now being used successfully by a criminal in the middle of New York.

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Collin did not have powers, armor, or weapons of his own, but he did have intimate knowledge of the machine. Seeing Major Deej being overwhelmed, he ran toward the fight and climbed onto the rear of the hostile suit. Hidden beneath a service panel was an emergency maintenance interlock carried over from the original Acton prototype. Collin opened the panel, exposed the control junction, and disconnected the system that synchronized the suit’s actuators with its main control network. The armor seized into emergency shutdown, giving Major Deej the opening he needed to recover.

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That moment changed the direction of Collin’s life. For the first time, the skills that had contributed to one of his greatest failures had directly saved someone.

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In the aftermath, Major Deej and G.U.A.R.D. took Collin’s account seriously. Acton Manufacturing quickly claimed that its classified storage facility had been burglarized approximately a week earlier and that plans, components, and digital files from the old armor project had been stolen. Collin knew at once that the explanation was impossible. Even with complete technical documentation, no engineering team could have taken his failed prototype, corrected its thermal problems, fabricated a complete suit, tested it, and fielded it in combat within a single week. The operational armor had to have existed before the supposed burglary.

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Someone was lying.

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Collin returned home increasingly convinced that the Acton program had never truly ended. Soon afterward, two men arrived claiming to represent federal intelligence. Their credentials appeared legitimate, and they knew terminology and classified details that ordinary criminals should not have possessed. Still, Collin sensed that something about their story was wrong. The jurisdiction did not fit the nature of the compromised defense technology. Before leaving with them, he quietly told Lekisha that if he did not return within a day, she should contact Major Deej.

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That precaution saved his life.

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Once inside the vehicle, Collin was drugged and abducted. When he awoke, his captors made their position clear. They wanted him to correct vulnerabilities in the stolen armor. If he refused, his wife and children would suffer. Collin had spent his career calculating risk, but there was nothing to calculate in that moment. He cooperated.

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The facility where he was taken revealed the true scale of the conspiracy. It was not a temporary workshop hastily assembled after a theft. It was a fully developed illegal manufacturing operation filled with advanced machine tools, engineering stations, partially completed suits, fabrication equipment, and finished components. Some of the hardware was already being prepared for organizations such as the Gold Syndicate, and other evidence suggested additional hostile buyers. Collin understood immediately that the operation had been active for months, perhaps longer.

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The supposed one-week theft had been a cover story.

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Whether Acton itself was complicit, whether corrupt executives had independently supplied the designs, or whether an internal criminal network had been operating without the knowledge of senior leadership remained unclear. What mattered to Collin was that his engineering had become the foundation of a weapons program intended for criminals and hostile organizations.

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For several days, his captors forced him to work on the armor. They wanted the maintenance vulnerability he had exploited during the Major Deej fight eliminated. Collin outwardly complied, but quietly began building a shutdown system into the designs. His intent was not to kill the operators. He wanted unauthorized weapon activation to lock the weapons, interrupt power routing, seize major actuators, dump coolant, and force an emergency shutdown. Once the suits were disabled, he planned to erase the technical files and destroy the fabrication capability entirely.

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The plan did not unfold exactly as intended.

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Two completed suits were activated for final testing, and the men running the facility planned to use Collin as part of the demonstration. His hidden shutdown routine activated correctly, but the criminal engineers had already bypassed several safety interlocks to maximize performance. Those modifications interacted catastrophically with Collin’s shutdown sequence. Coolant flow destabilized, weapons systems overheated, and the armor entered thermal runaway.

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For Collin, the sight was horrifyingly familiar. It was Acton all over again, except this time the safety systems had been deliberately compromised.

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The warehouse erupted into chaos. Collin attempted to escape and reach the facility’s data systems, but he did not have to finish the fight alone. Lekisha had followed his instructions and contacted Major Deej when he failed to return. Major Deej, the Challengers, and G.U.A.R.D. eventually traced him to the facility and launched a rescue. Collin survived, and the illegal operation was dismantled.

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The investigation that followed uncovered evidence far more troubling than anyone had initially expected. G.U.A.R.D. forensic engineers found unauthorized changes in the original Acton technical records, along with procurement activity and fabrication work that had never been disclosed as part of the official program. Financial trails disappeared into intermediaries and shell organizations. Two Acton executives were eventually prosecuted, but neither Collin nor G.U.A.R.D. believed they represented the entire conspiracy.

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The network had been too sophisticated, too well funded, and too established.

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The true architects of the illegal armor program remained unknown.

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With Acton under scrutiny, government authorities used classified contract provisions to remove the company’s ability to exploit the powered-armor technology. The original technical material disappeared into restricted custody. Collin did not regain ownership of the project, but his professional reputation was partially restored, and G.U.A.R.D. offered him work as an engineering specialist supporting advanced superhero and tactical systems.

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That period changed his thinking more than any formal education had.

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At Acton, powered armor had been an engineering requirement. At G.U.A.R.D., Collin worked on systems used by real people under unpredictable conditions. He saw damaged equipment return from missions, watched systems fail in ways simulations had never predicted, and came to understand that no amount of engineering could guarantee that failure would never occur. The more important question was what a machine did when failure finally came.

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That philosophy became the foundation of Iron Works.

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Not long afterward, Collin was approached by an elderly man whose disguise was so bad that it almost became insulting. The stranger wore an ill-fitting white wig, an oversized fake mustache, a fedora, and clothing that looked as though someone had designed an outfit by consulting a catalog labeled “retired civilian.” Collin recognized him almost immediately as Major Invader.

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Major Invader was deeply irritated by this.

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Once Collin agreed not to dwell on the quality of the disguise, the legendary hero explained why he had come. G.U.A.R.D. had no intention of allowing the original Acton armor program to return to circulation, but Major Invader believed Collin deserved a chance to prove that the engineering itself had not been the real failure. He offered Collin access to a legally structured research trust capitalized at up to one hundred fifty million dollars, restricted for the development of advanced protective technology.

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The money was not a personal fortune. It could be used for research, facilities, equipment, fabrication, salaries, security, and testing, but the new technology had to represent something fundamentally different from the Acton system. Whatever Collin built next had to be designed first and foremost to protect people.

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Collin accepted.

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Major Invader also supplied him with a classified federal cover identity: Frederick Edward Works.

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Fred Works.

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F. E. Works.

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Fe.

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Iron.

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Collin suspected Major Invader had been waiting for him to notice the joke.

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The new arrangements gave Collin access to a secured industrial property near Kittery, Maine, which he transformed into the Works Applied Systems Laboratory. The facility became part research center, part fabrication shop, part armor bay, and part personal sanctuary. Every system Collin designed there reflected the lessons of Acton. Critical functions received redundant backups. Emergency shutdowns had physical overrides. Cooling systems had alternate pathways. Release mechanisms were designed to operate even if software failed. No single failure point would be allowed to trap an operator inside a dying machine.

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When Collin finally began designing armor again, he stopped trying to fix the Acton suit. He started over.

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The new design revolved around the very problem that had once destroyed his career. Instead of treating heat as an unavoidable threat, Collin built the system around controlling it. Thermal energy could be absorbed, stored, redirected, vented, or deliberately released. The armor evolved around large rotating annular shoulder heat exchangers, redundant torso and belt cooling systems, powered strength, magnetic boots, reinforced rescue systems, a projected shield, and a thermal Fireblade generated directly from the right gauntlet.

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It was not sleek or elegant. It looked industrial because Collin thought industrially. The armor resembled something built to survive furnaces, shipyards, mechanical failures, collapsed structures, and the worst environments an engineer could imagine.

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That was exactly the point.

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Collin spent months learning how to use the Mark I safely. He had to learn movement, balance, force control, emergency shutdown procedures, powered combat, and the difference between lifting something and lifting it without causing the rest of the structure to collapse. Eventually, circumstances forced him into increasingly public action. Industrial accidents, armored criminals, and mechanical emergencies made the new hero difficult to ignore.

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When the public finally demanded a name, Collin used the one that had been hiding inside his cover identity from the beginning.

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Iron Works.

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Maine embraced him quickly, particularly after his increasing association with the Kittery and Portsmouth area. New Hampshire occasionally tried to claim part of the hero’s regional identity because of the Portsmouth connection, only for Maine residents to repeatedly point out that Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is actually located in Kittery. The argument became a minor regional joke that Collin never had much interest in settling.

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Keeping his new life secret from Lekisha proved considerably more difficult. At first, she knew only that Collin had accepted highly classified federal work and was spending unusual hours at a secure laboratory. Over time, unexplained absences, injuries, restricted parts of the facility, and the suspicious timing of Iron Works appearances became impossible to ignore. Eventually, Collin told her everything.

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Lekisha was not amazed.

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She was angry.

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Collin tried to explain that he had hidden the truth because he wanted to protect the family. Lekisha reminded him that secrecy had not prevented their family from being threatened before and that deciding what she was allowed to know was not the same thing as protecting her. The confrontation forced Collin to recognize that the principle guiding his engineering applied equally to his relationships. Responsibility did not mean making every decision alone.

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Their marriage survived the revelation, but it changed. Lekisha became Collin’s closest civilian confidante and one of the few people who knew the entire truth. Their children still did not.

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Years later, when the United Canadian Empire launched its attempt to seize New England in what was later called the New Canada Incident, Collin’s unusual combination of technical knowledge and powered armor made him impossible for Minuteman to ignore.

Hunter Hollister had already studied Iron Works extensively before approaching him and seemed to know more about Collin’s background than Collin found comfortable. Hunter never directly admitted that he knew Fred Works was a cover identity. He simply gave Iron Works an assignment.

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​For Collin, the mission struck directly at everything his life had become about. Once again, someone intended to turn engineering failure into a weapon. Once again, uncontrolled heat threatened to kill people who had never chosen to be part of the experiment.

Minuteman had a plan, and Iron Works had a critical role in it.

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​After the crisis, Collin joined the Yankee Minutemen. The decision suited both his abilities and his life. Unlike a globally deployed superhero organization, the Yankee Minutemen operated primarily throughout New England, allowing Collin to remain near Lekisha, the children, his laboratory, and the home he had worked hard to preserve. There may also have been a more personal reason. Major Deej had met Collin Cooper, watched him disable one of the stolen Acton suits, and later participated in his rescue. Collin was never entirely comfortable testing how long it might take Major Deej to connect those facts with Iron Works.

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Whether Major Deej already knows remains unresolved.

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In the present day, Iron Works serves as one of the Yankee Minutemen’s principal systems engineers, armored combatants, thermal-hazard specialists, and technical rescue operators. The Mark II armor has become visually unmistakable, with bronze and copper-toned plating, scorched black understructure, hot orange thermal channels, large annular heat exchangers around the shoulders, a massive projected shield, and the gauntlet-mounted Fireblade. Every feature reflects Collin’s central design philosophy: power is valuable, but control matters more.

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Outside the armor, his life remains grounded in responsibilities no less important to him. He is still Lekisha’s husband, Collin Jr. and Lora’s father, and the man everyone expects to repair the dishwasher because anyone capable of building advanced powered armor should supposedly have no trouble with household appliances. He still struggles to balance superhero missions with school schedules, family dinners, weekend obligations, and the increasing likelihood that his son’s Cub Scout pack is eventually going to convince him to become more formally involved.

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His brother Adam remains an enthusiastic Iron Works admirer without realizing the hero inside the armor is his own brother. The children still sometimes think other superheroes are cooler. Lekisha considers this deeply entertaining.

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Beneath all the humor and machinery, however, the fatal Acton test still shapes Collin more than almost anyone around him realizes. Every cooling loop in the Mark II, every emergency release, every secondary radiator, every manual override, and every public safety perimeter around the armor exists partly because Collin remembers what happened when one machine failed and the person inside had nowhere to go.

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He knows now that no engineer can guarantee perfection.

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Machines break. Systems fail. People make mistakes. Technology gets stolen, corrupted, weaponized, and used in ways its creators never intended.

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Responsibility does not mean pretending those things can never happen.

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For Collin Cooper, responsibility means deciding what you do after they do.

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He cannot undo Acton. He cannot bring back the engineer who died. He cannot control every person who might misuse the technology he creates. What he can do is build better, design safer, correct what fails, and refuse to walk away simply because someone else caused the damage.

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That is why Collin Cooper became Iron Works.

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Not because he built the strongest armor.

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Because when something he helped create went wrong, he chose to stay and make it right.

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