Idea

Cairo Stark was born to the most remarkable life someone could be born into, with an equally remarkable name to prove it. As the daughter of Tony Stark, she was expected to be extraordinary, however, which took a toll on her. While she wasn’t adept enough with her emotions to fully parse why she was discontent, the fact that her brilliance was attributed to her father and his grandfather before him rather than to herself made Cairo desperate to prove herself. 

At fourteen, during her first French class, Cai created her alter ego, Antonia LaRue. (Her skills, which lie in STEM fields and engineering especially, are not geared toward language-learning, but she studied French vicariously because it was her only link to her mother.) From that day forward, she would pretend to be Antonia on the streets frequently. After a while, Antonia was less of an act and more of a natural part of herself that was stifled in her day to day life. Whenever Cai could lose the bodyguards her father assigned to her, she would wander the streets learning how to act normal, and furthermore, how to act like Antonia LaRue.

On her sixteenth birthday, Toni and her dad had The Big Fight. The Big Fight marked the first time Cairo was ever fully honest about her emotions, to Tony or herself, and raised a multitude of issues in their relationship. Tony’s attempts to conduct life as normal ultimately failed and Cai negotiated a compromise: if he let her go to a normal high school and live life outside of his shadow, then she would work with him to repair the damage wrought by The Big Fight.

Cairo flourished at the Bronx High School of Science. For one, she was finally normal there, even though she had to dumb herself down. The sudden normalcy of Cairo Stark allowed her to make genuine friends, the first she had ever had. (Previously, the Stark shadow kept her from friendship’s sunlight, too, and the closest she had to companions were the bodyguards she learned to dodge.) Thanks to some legal maneuvering on Tony’s part, no one at the Bronx High School knew the truth about her identity.

With her monthly allowance, Antonia rented a seedy little apartment in her favorite bodyguard’s name, which Tony was not a fan of. The apartment became instrumental to her mirage of normalcy: thanks to it, her friends could get much closer to the illusion before it dissipated. Additionally, it became a place for her to tinker without her father’s judgmental eye, helping her engineering skills grow exponentially.

Cairo hired a maid named Awa to clean the apartment, because, in spite of living there part-time, she didn’t have the motivation or time to clean it all on her own. Awa hailed from the Ivory Coast and often spoke French with Antonia, which caused her friends to assume that Awa was the chronically overworked Venice LaRue who Cairo claimed raised her in the single-bedroom apartment she called home. While this wasn’t exactly true, Cairo and Awa became very close, and Awa became a somewhat maternal figure to Antonia who helped her both hide her Stark heritage and tell the truth when it was time to. 

Her friends never suspected that she was Cairo Stark, who had enjoyed very little time in the tabloids, and was never disclosed to be a genius superior to her father when paparazzi pictures of her were published. However, when her best friend’s mom got into a car accident, Antonia couldn’t stand to watch idly and invoked the family tree she had hidden from to pay for Ms. Amato’s medical fees. Her friends forgave her for hiding her extraordinary double life fairly quickly and continued calling Awa her mom. Though life continued on basically as usual until graduation, the incident deeply changed Cai. She became obsessed with the idea of cyborgs and began obsessively working on robotic prothetic limbs. Cairo and her father bonded over this project, with Tony using it as an opportunity to teach his daughter what he had learned in his own forays into medical science, and in such a matter that his teachings weren’t condescending, a first in their relationship as father and daughter. Cairo Stark’s invention of limbs superior to the ones lost was not only a great achievement in medical science, it was the first time she held up her end of the bargain to fix their relationship after The Big Fight.

Antonia LaRue never went away, though. While Cairo was changing lives by changing limbs, Antonia was changing lives by fixing cars. After all, sleep is, as they say, for the weak.