Synopsis / Summary / Plot
We open with the Mad Thinker in a straight jacket in a padded cell telling someone he needed no excuse to attack the Avengers.
In #3-6 the Avengers defeated the Ashen Combine, aliens who arrived in their Impossible City spacecraft. In return for being freed from the villains' control the AI City volunteered to be the team's base. Now we see the team contemplate the villains encased in amber within the City. Tony Stark finds the situation acceptable but Carol Danvers isn't happy with her team being long-term jailers. There has to be a way of rehabilitating them. And she points out in particular that Meridian Diadem contains thousands of imprisoned innocents.
Then Carol turns to another problem with the anti-mutant organisation Orchis who attacked Krakoa in the X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 1-shot. Stark is working closely with the mutants and they have a grand masterplan, but he's asked the Avengers to stay out of it until it's all in place. But Captain Marvel is getting impatient. (The Avengers will have their shot next issue.)
Discussion is interrupted by the arrival of Edwin Jarvis, the team's butler, with a hulking aide. He's been invited to make the new base more hospitable. Jarvis then walks away while introducing himself and his companion Mr Sweeny to the omnipresent AI. Sweeny seems to have a gastric upset which Jarvis blames on his bad diet. Jarvis impresses on the AI that while it is the Avengers' job to battle cosmic menaces it is their job to cater for their more human needs. It is possible that a sustaining sandwich might be the difference between victory and defeat. To that end the cartload of boxes that Sweeny is pulling contain the makings of the individual members' favourite foods.
Meanwhile in a private conversation 'practical' Black Panther suggests they just dump the Ashen Combine into the Sun. Thor fancies firing them at the Orchis Forge orbiting there. T'Challa tries to apologise to Thor. But the Lord Of Asgard says that kings don't apologise to each other, they come to a mutual understanding as equals.
Jarvis is teaching the City AI to make Scarlet Witch's favourite food Utica Greens. We learn that Sweeny is actually the bully Bruiser who Jarvis defeated in a fight in #201 of the original series, which apparently turned his life around. He's still suffering from indigestion, and we are shown Thinker saying that he had planted a Pym-Reduced Assault Payload in his corned beef sandwich. And that at this point he transmitted an activate order from his secret bunker. At which point Sweeny spews up his guts and a bunch of Man-Slayer androids expand from the result.
Ex-marriage partners Scarlet Witch and Vision are also having a chat. The synthazoid Vision admits he's hasn't been dating lately but suggests that Wanda Maximoff must be besieged by would-be suitors. It's her turn to admit that she almost had a date with Loki recently (#8 of her recent series). Vision pretends to vomit. And then they hear the AI's alarm message about the android invasion.
The Man-Slayers are chasing Jarvis and Sweeny. Edwin asks the City to defend them but the AI responds that it has many devastating weapons to aim at external threats but its former masters gave it no internal weapons in case it used them against themselves. But Thor's hammer Mjolnir intervenes followed by the other Avengers, including Stark in his current grey Iron Man armour. After a brief battle the plastoid Man-Slayers merge into 1 giant version.
Then the City mentions to Captain America (Sam Wilson) that if they got the Man-Slayer outside in space then it *could* shoot it. He sends the flying powerhouses Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Thor and Vision to propel the plastoid out of an airlock where the City blasts it with a ship-to-ship particle beam which disassembles it into it's component plastoids. The AI suggests that it could reprogram them as useful bodies for itself.
Meanwhile Jarvis deduced that the Thinker is behind the attack. He got the AI to track the transmission beam between Man-Slayer and MT's base. And he and Sweeny planned to take the attack to *him*. Sweeny found it appropriate that Thinker was a 'super-nerd' because beating up nerds used to be his speciality. Now the ship teleports them to MT's lair and they assault him with fists and a cricket bat.
Now we see that he's been incarcerated in the Ravencroft Institute for the criminally insane. And he's been talking to himself in a mirror. But he gloats that the Man-Slayer attack was just a feint. His true purpose was to find out where and how the Ashen Combine were imprisoned.
And the attack did also have 1 effect - the Utica Greens were ruined.