No vats of anything, although I did get sprayed with hazmat foam once. It got up my nose, [Pepper recalls, faintly amused.] Tony needed a distraction while we were infiltrating a high-security building.

[The matter of Erskine's past doesn't seem quite settled, but she feels the tug back to lighter ground and goes with it.]

It all started when Tony came to the Tomorrow Academy - that's our high school.[Skipping the part about his dad supposedly dying and it being Gene's fault, whoops.] He was friends with Rhodey, who was sort of my only friend at the time, and so we all ended up together, more or less. And right around then there was this armored superhero that showed up called Iron Man - stopping runaway trains, catching villains, that kind of thing. [She's glossing over some of the less pretty bits of the story.] Anyway, I was pretty sure Tony and Rhodey were up to something and that Tony was Iron Man, and once he actually did the big reveal I started helping them out. Mostly I was operating suits remotely since I didn't have my own and it took me a little while to learn how to fly in one, but the three of us basically started doing a bunch of supervillain-catching and world-saving and whatever. A little while before I got brought here, Tony gave me my own armor and that was that.