Madame Menace's History
Sunset Bain was born and raised in San Diego, California. She has a genius intellect and is an expert in advanced technology. As a young girl she met robotic genius Dr. Abel Stack, and was impressed by his brilliance. She attended M.I.T., where she seduced undergraduate Tony Stark into revealing the security codes for Stark Industries. Shortly thereafter a force of masked men invaded and stole several prototypes. Within a year, Baintronics Incorporated was founded and Sunset broke it off with Stark. While Baintronic maintained a spotless reputation, Sunset assumed the Madame Menace persona and sold high-tech weaponry to criminals through an underground seasonal catalog of armaments.
When Machine Man lost an arm while fighting Baron Brimstone and the Satan Squad, Madame Menace bought it. Her plans for reverse engineering the limb were interrupted when Machine Man came to re-claim it. Despite her electromagnets and sonic disruptor cannon, Machine Man prevailed, and Sunset had to blow up her yacht to escape. An accidental run-in with Alpha Flight members Aurora, Northstar, and Sasquatch eventually persuaded her to set aside her Machine Man machinations for a while.
Sunset next showed up in a meeting with Tony Stark which was interrupted when a damaged Machine Man showed up with the head of Jocasta after losing a battle to Terminus. Stark changed into Iron Man and brought the damaged androids to Baintronics, where under the guise of assistance, Sunset created knockoff duplicates of the robots. When the repaired Machine Man left, Sunset managed to give him the fake Jocasta.
As Madame Menace, Sunset teamed up with the New Enforcers in their plot to take over the fallen Kingpin's crime cartel. Ostensibly, Bain did this in order to study the New Enforcers technology, including Dragon Man, Dreadnought, and the Super-Adaptoid.
Having failed to decode the intricacies of Jocasta's A.I., Sunset decided to hire Tony Stark to investigate. As Stark was already employed elsewhere, Sunset hired the new War Machine to destroy his current employers. After Iron Man defeated Fin Fang Foom, Baintronics took the contract for transporting the beast's massive bulk. Using this as an in, Sunset asked Tony to work for her again. Growing suspicious, Stark accepted in order to learn more. Stark then freed Jocasta and persuaded the new War Machine to stop working for Sunset Bain.
Later, Sunset hired Taskmaster to sabotage a Stark Enterprises operation. In lieu of paying him, she betrayed him to the police. In retaliation, the Taskmaster instigated a war between the Triads and Baintronics. He even managed to shoot Sunset in the shoulder. Afterwards, Baintronics fell on tough times. Parnell Jacobs and Sunset both tried to use Stuart Clarke to get each other's half of the War Machine Armor as Jacobs had the body and she had the head. She seduced Clarke into shooting Jacobs, but when she found the location of the rest of the armor she knocked Clarke out. In retaliation, Clarke sent the Punisher on Sunset's trail, and he shot her.
Sunset appeared to have survived the Punisher's attack. Fueled by her obsession with Machine Man, Sunset tried to lift him up when he was going through an existential crisis so that she could antagonize him again, unaware that the current Machine Man was an impostor. Bain tracked him to State 51, a giant flying fortress with staged environments where Aaron was using androids of different superheroes to simulate scenarios for him to reminisce to a robotic therapist. Sunset and her mercenaries interrupted Aaron's session, hijacked State 51, and attempted to make it land on top of Bombay. Aaron used the androids to try to stop Bain's mercenaries and evacuate the city, but was pushed to assimilate the entirety of the fortress, turning it into a giant-sized version of himself temporarily in the process. Machine Man contacted S.H.I.E.L.D. afterwards and had Sunset detained. Sunset rejoiced in the fact that she helped Aaron mature as a person and kissed him. She was subsequently taken away, but her transport's pilot appeared to be in league with her.
Baintronics and Sunset returned to Tony Stark's radar when he discovered her company had used illegally-acquired Stark tech to develop an advanced military vehicle called the Manticore. As Iron Man, Stark confronted Bain and convinced her to hand over the Manticore. Not long afterwards, Bain became associated with Tony's adoptive brother Arno Stark. When Tony Stark launched to the public a virtual reality called the eScape, Sunset allied herself with the villain the Controller. The Controlled hijacked the eScape interfaces used by consumers to enthrall and leech off their mental energies, and employed a Baintronics manufacturing and fulfillment center to send them real-life weapons all over the world. Feigning responsibility, Sunset sent her security team to help take down the Controller. Under the pretense to offer help, she also requested partial access to the eScape's network, which was used by Arno to gain full access and steal data.
After Tony Stark became convinced that he was an artificial being and a simulation of the real, late Tony, Sunset and Arno colluded with Senator Miles Brickman to question Tony's status as a real person. When Sunset learned that Arno had found a way to create artificial bodies, and planned to use them to bring back his dead parents, Sunset asked if he could use the technology to remove a scar she had received from Ultron. Instead, Arno created an A.I. duplicate of Sunset and placed her in stasis. In the end, Arno helped de-legitimize his own brother, and took control of his company, Stark Unlimited. Afterwards, he and the duplicate Sunset merged S.U. with Baintronics.
After Arno revealed to the duplicate that she was a copy of the original Sunset Bain, the duplicate decided that she was no longer Sunset Bain but instead Sunset's persona of Madame Menace, and since Menace never put up with competition, the duplicate fired at the stasis pod containing the original Sunset with an energy handgun, killing her.
