A year after the events of The Hulk, Bruce Banner, Rick Jones, Betty Ross, and Leonard Samson arrive in Brooklyn, where Bruce and Rick stay with Bruce's cousin Jennifer Walters, as Samson and Ross stay in a hotel where they use Banner's blood to try and develop a "Hulk suppressant". Bruce reunites with his cousin, and the two bond over childhood memories, but Bruce ends up having traumatic flashbacks to his mother's suicide and the ensuing abuse from his father. At the abandoned government base in Nevada, Samuel Sterns sits in his newly rebuilt lab, using the remains of the original gamma control machine to piece together a device to amplify his mental abilities. He connects wires from the device to his head, and turns on the machine. The machine starts to generate gamma radiation, as Samu