In the bustling streets of New York City, three months before Tony Stark would board a plane to Afghanistan for his fateful Jericho missile demonstration, lived a guy named Alex. Alex wasn't a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. He wasn't even a mildly competent barista. No, Alex was the kind of person who once tried to microwave a foil-wrapped burrito and ended up inventing a new way to start small fires—by accident, of course. He had no plans, no clue about the world around him, and common sense? That was something he thought was a type of currency in a board game.
Alex worked as a pizza delivery guy for a joint called "Hero's Slice" in Queens. Or at least, he tried to. On this particular Tuesday, he was zipping through traffic on his beat-up scooter, helmet askew, with a stack of pizzas wobbling precariously in the basket. He had no idea that the address on his next delivery slip—Stark Industries' R&D lab—was about to change everything. "Stark? Sounds like a potato brand," he muttered to himself, weaving through cars without signaling. Miraculously, he didn't get hit; drivers swerved just in time, honking as if applauding his chaos.
Arriving at the massive Stark Tower, Alex wandered in through a side door that was clearly marked "Authorized Personnel Only." He didn't notice the sign because he was too busy trying to balance the pizzas while texting his buddy about last night's video game. "Hey, this place looks fancy," he said aloud to no one, stepping into an elevator that whooshed him up to a restricted floor. Security cameras whirred, alarms blinked silently, but somehow, the system glitched—perhaps from the stray pepperoni grease dripping onto a sensor. Alex emerged into a high-tech lab where engineers in white coats were tinkering with prototypes for Stark's latest weapons tech.
"Uh, pizza for... Tony?" Alex called out, squinting at the slip. The room fell silent. A burly security guard approached, hand on his taser. "Kid, you're not supposed to be here. This is classified." Alex blinked, then offered a slice. "Want some? It's pepperoni. Extra cheese." The guard hesitated, then sneezed violently—turns out he was allergic to the oregano wafting from the box. In the commotion, he tripped over a cable, unplugging a holographic display that was projecting schematics for the Jericho missile. Unbeknownst to anyone, including Alex, that display was being hacked remotely by a shadowy organization called the Ten Rings, who were spying on Stark's designs. The unplugging severed their connection just as they were downloading critical data. Crisis averted, all because Alex thought free samples were good customer service.
The engineers, mistaking Alex for some eccentric intern (Stark hired weirdos all the time), shrugged and grabbed slices. "Hey, this guy's got the right idea—brain food!" one said. Alex, still clueless, wandered deeper into the lab, munching on a crust. He bumped into a workbench, knocking over a vial of experimental alloy. The liquid splashed onto a nearby circuit board, which sparked and fused in a way that accidentally stabilized an unstable repulsor prototype. "Whoops," Alex said, wiping his hands on his shirt. The lead engineer gasped. "That's... that's brilliant! We've been trying to fix that for weeks!" They high-fived him, and Alex just grinned, thinking they were excited about the pizza.
Word spread quickly. By the end of the hour, Alex had "invented" three more fixes: He tripped and rerouted a power surge that prevented a mini-explosion, absentmindedly doodled on a whiteboard that inspired a new encryption algorithm, and even "suggested" a design tweak by spilling soda on blueprints, blurring lines that revealed a hidden flaw. No one questioned how a pizza guy knew this stuff—Stark's team was used to chaos. "You're a natural, kid!" they cheered. Alex nodded sagely. "Yeah, I watch a lot of sci-fi movies."
But the real trouble started when Alex, trying to find the bathroom, stumbled into a secure vault. Inside, he found a suspicious device humming ominously—a prototype arc reactor that had been tampered with by an insider mole working for Obadiah Stane, Stark's treacherous business partner. The mole had rigged it to overload, potentially blowing up the lab and erasing evidence of his embezzlement. Alex, thinking it was a fancy coffee machine, pressed a big red button labeled "DO NOT PRESS." The device whirred, then stabilized, the sabotage code overwriting itself in a freak glitch. Alarms blared elsewhere in the building, alerting security to the mole, who was caught red-handed trying to flee.
Tony Stark himself showed up, fresh from a board meeting, eyebrow raised at the scene. "Who the hell is this guy?" he demanded, eyeing Alex, who was now juggling empty pizza boxes like a circus act. The engineers raved about Alex's "genius interventions." Tony, ever the showman, laughed. "Kid, you've got no idea what you just did, do you?" Alex shook his head. "Nah, but the pizza was hot, right?" Tony slapped him on the back. "You're hired. Consultant or whatever. Just... keep doing that."
Three months later, as Tony prepared for his Jericho demo, the stabilized tech from Alex's blunders made the missile even more impressive—and ironically, set the stage for Tony's own transformation. But Alex? He quit the pizza gig, became Stark's unofficial "luck charm," and succeeded at everything from accidentally winning poker games against executives to foiling minor villain plots by sheer dumb luck. He never had a plan, never understood the Marvel Universe's web of heroes and villains swirling around him. But hey, why question success when it just... happens?
And so, in a world of gods, mutants, and iron suits, Alex Dumbfort proved that sometimes, the greatest power is having absolutely no clue.