Fort Adamant

Reading Foote's excellent thread on the Void got me thinking about Fort Adamant.  Recent materials have really pushed it as both creepy and important.  What's the deal there?  I took a look at everthing we know surrounding that event, some time shortly after Progeny's assault.  Here's what I was able to reconstruct:

The fight against Progeny played out across Freedom Five #763-767.  We don't actually get the Southwest Sentinels numbering for that timeframe, but we do know that "after responding" to it, they spend several days in training (which is probably a montage taking a single issue or less), and then get attacked by Chokepoint across Southwest Sentinels #30-36.  Depending on whether the suspiciously low-numbered Southwest Sentinels came out monthly or bi-monthly, and whether there was an issue between Progeny's attack and Chokepoint's arrival, that puts us at Freedom Five somewhere from #774-783.  Wait a minute...

In Freedom Five #783, Unity built Omnitron-U, because she "finally" had what she needed, "plundered from the twisting back alleys of the Omnitron IV structure".  The finally part implies to me that this is a recent event.  And that's really interesting because of Termi-Nation's Incapacitated sides.  Zero is having his tech torturously stripped away by Chokepoint, of course (since he doesn't wear his suit as Termi-Nation AZ, maybe that's actually the "origin" of his new design?), but Unity and Bunker have a different problem.  Unty's card shows the creation of Golem Unity (whose skull-face is already hidden with "skin" here, but visible on Golem Unity's Incap side), whilst Bunker's has a piece of armor being examined by... Omni-Tron!?

So, Termi-Nation heads out to examine this shady research facility, which has hovertanks and glowy energy panels and so on.  They face threats from Omnitron, and someone builds an Omnitron-style skull-faced robot.  And within a few issues, a member of Termi-Nation has spare Omnitron parts.

Fort Adamant is Omnitron.  Maybe it literally transforms into Omnitron IV, maybe it was merely being run or manipulated by an Omnitron MCP.  But in either case, its true purpose was to gather powerful technology which 'Tron could use to rebuild lost power.

In Chokepoint's deck in the artwork of Stripped Resources we see her encountering Unity and Omnitron-U while the flavor text references Freedom Five # 773

Cosmic Concurrence # 19 is referenced twice in Chokepoint's deck with Newfound Power and Material Upheaval.  In Newfound Power the art would seem to be her accepting the device left by Deadline and with Material Upheaval she is taking in the Ft Adamant Sentinels in the artwork.   

In all of those cases the artwork would seem to match up with what the flavor text which isn't always the case.  

I wouldn't be surprised if Omnitron IV has some link to Ft Adamant but I would think it is just pieces or components.  We can see from artwork in Omnitron IV that we have a normal Idealist in Techno-Purserer and normal Omnitron-X in Omni-Drone so my guess is that Omnitron-X blew himself up within Omnitron-IV which leads to Unity trying got rebuild him.   It's just too bad we don't get issue numbers on the environment.   

Yeah, if I had to guess, Omnitron-IV is largely unrelated to Fort Adamant.  Fort Adamant is probably "merely" the center of sketchy-but-not-outright-villainous government experimentation with dangerous superhuman-related technology.  Call it the modern incarnation of the program that created the Bunker Armor in WWII.

I do wonder whether its connected with FILTER, though, or whether FILTER and Fort Adamant are largely independent, and perhaps competitive/hostile towards each other.  Doubly so if my "FILTER is secretly controlled by Oblivaeon followers" theory is true.

Christopher said in last Fridays Q&A that FILTER and the US Defense Dept/Ft. Adamant are "too close" in their relationship.

Yeah, but for F.I.L.T.E.R. being "Too close" could be having a single agent in the car pool in Hawaii!

Gtgbigfoote: How close is FILTER with the US defense dept and Ft Adamant

GTGChristopher: @Gtgbigfoote Too close.

I feel I should remind people. According to the Comic in the download section of the website when we see Vance talking to the general, they are stated to be in Ft. Adamant.

So Adamant was behind the Bunker suit, and actually that would mean they worked closely with the FV over the course of all the comics.

Which organization is more like S.H.E.I.L.D. then, Adamant or F.I.L.T.E.R. or are they two sides of the same coin?

Depends.  Who's writing S.H.I.E.L.D. this week?

They feel like 2 sides of the same coin, Fort Adamant is the public face of S.H.I.E.L.D., training heroes for a better tomorrow and containing dangerous technology like Omniton.

F.I.L.T.E.R. on the other hand is the other side, the side of allies assigned to help heroes but also to be the first ones there with a knife in the back should they prove a threat and who reassemble the dangerous tech they recover to attempt to remove the need for heroes like the Freedom Five.