Rust Belt

Dani Acevedo’s father ran Atlas Consulting, a heavy manufacturing company that stamped steel for every other factory in Ferroburg. As a child, she begged her father to take her on his inspections, and she would walk through factories with him, staring at the machines and the grease-covered workers who kept everything running. Despite her mother’s predictions, Dani never “grew out of” her fascination with heavy machinery. In college, she studied engineering, but left before her degree was complete; she was too restless to sit in class and exams gave her a headache. She returned to Ferroburg and started work at Ferroburg Steel. She loved her job: the camaraderie, the heat, the roar of the machines. Finally, she could get her hands dirty, and she quickly found she could fix just about anything. But Ferroburg Steel closed. And soon every other steel mill followed.   Dani eventually took a job as a building superintendent, spending her days fixing tenants’ sinks and loose window screens. She rigged security cameras outside the building as the crime rates in Ferroburg skyrocketed, and tried to look out for her tenants. She read about different heroes in Ferroburg and across the world, and she became curious to see if she could build gadgets that would help them. Dani worked day and night. She poured her heart and soul and grit into these inventions: boots, a glove, a flashlight. She had the tech and someday she would find someone to wear it.   Dani had spent months “borrowing” parts from her father’s factory—by then a half-empty ruin the old man managed alone. But one night she heard him beg as Natali Weston ordered the building burned to ash. Dani, enraged, tried to rescue her father, but Weston’s “Security Team” found her, beat her, and threw her into an alley. Dani went home to her gadgets. If she had been wearing them, she could have taken those goons easily. If she had been wearing them, she could have saved the factory and her father. So she started wearing them.