"Hawk, check the data on terminal seven."
"Reading one hundred and eight."
"Hawk, I'm heading to the SL lab. Can you collect the documents on my desk and file them?"
"No problem."
"Haw…k…"
Twenty days. For twenty long, mind-numbing days, this had been Hawk's life. He had successfully infiltrated Oscorp, only to become a ghost in its corporate machine. His summer internship consisted of an endless loop of menial tasks: verifying data streams, collating research notes, filing paperwork, and making coffee.
He still hadn't gotten anywhere near Dr. Connors's lab. He hadn't even left the Bio-Electrical Engineering department. From the moment he clocked in to the moment he left, he was a glorified office assistant, a fact that was beginning to grate on him.
And yet, he wasn't in a hurry. As he walked over to another engineer's messy desk to tidy up a stack of scattered documents, he reflected on his own surprising patience.
On one hand, the perks were undeniable. The pay was excellent—eight hundred dollars a week, tax-free. His savings were steadily replenishing, the financial wound from renting his new apartment already beginning to heal. And the employee cafeteria on the eighteenth floor, with its free, all-you-can-eat buffets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, was a luxury that the old, perpetually hungry Hawk would have considered a slice of heaven. He was rebuilding his resources, playing the long game.
But on the other hand, the real reason for his patience was a deeper, more personal one. He was stalling.
Although he had cynically considered robbing a bank last month, the thought had been a fleeting, dark fantasy. In the harsh light of day, he was still trying to cling to a single, fraying thread: his moral bottom line.
He knew it was a line that was destined to be broken. His quest for the Saint Cloth would inevitably demand that he steal from a sovereign nation, and likely fight, or even kill, to do so. But he wanted to delay that moment, to remain on the lawful side of that line for as long as he possibly could.
Because he was afraid.
He didn't know what he would become after he finally broke that line and embraced the true, amoral freedom his power offered. Transmigrators, he mused, were creatures with terrifyingly flexible moral compasses. Their inherent detachment from their new world made it dangerously easy to see other people not as living, breathing souls, but as NPCs in a video game—obstacles, tools, or irrelevant background characters.
He was no exception. It was why he avoided socializing. Sometimes, when he looked at his classmates, at the people on the subway, he felt that profound, chilling sense of alienation. A feeling of being the only sober person in a world of drunks, the only "real" player in a simulated reality.
The only thing that kept him anchored, the only reason he was still willing to follow the rules, was the ghost of the person he used to be. The education he had received in his past life hadn't demanded that he be a hero, but it had instilled in him a fundamental principle: don't be a villain.
If it were any other transmigrator, they might have awakened their Cosmo on day one and declared themselves a god on day two. But Hawk was still trying, desperately, to just be a person. A kind one, even. But he knew, with a grim certainty, that the day was coming when that would no longer be an option.
Having finished organizing the documents with practiced efficiency, he was placing them in the filing cabinet when the office phone rang.
Before anyone else could move, Hawk preemptively answered. "Bio-Electrical Engineering."
A familiar, bright voice came from the other end. "Hawk?"
He raised an eyebrow. "Gwen?" He hadn't seen or heard from her in the twenty days since she'd brought him here. He knew she was even busier than he was, working directly with the increasingly obsessive Dr. Connors. Rumor had it the man wasn't even counting his lab mice individually anymore, but by the box-full.
"It's me," she confirmed. "Listen, the voltage in our lab is fluctuating all over the place. Dr. Connors is about to have a meltdown. He needs someone from your department to come take a look, now."
"Okay. Right away."
Hawk hung up and relayed the message to the department supervisor, a completely bald man in his fifties with an air of perpetual detachment. The supervisor sighed, looking around the nearly empty office. "All the labs are reporting instability today. It's probably that main resistor again. We just replaced it yesterday… Never mind." His gaze fell on a quiet, unassuming engineer hunched over a schematic in the corner. "You. Take Hawk and go to Dr. Connors's lab. Get it replaced."
Hawk followed the supervisor's gaze and looked at the future Electro. Max Dillon was the definition of an honest, diligent worker. He was a ghost in the corporate machine, the man who did twice the work for half the recognition. In the twenty days Hawk had been here, he'd seen Max arrive first, leave last, and solve problems no one else could, all without a single word of complaint or a shred of acknowledgment from his superiors. He was so used to being called "you" that he didn't even flinch. He just gave a quiet nod and headed to the supply warehouse to get the parts.
A while later, Hawk stood waiting at the department entrance as Max walked over, carrying a heavy-duty resistor. Hawk gave him a small, respectful nod. "Mr. Dillon."
Max's body physically trembled, and his head snapped up, his eyes wide. His pupils seemed to contract in shock. "You… you know my name?" His voice was a hoarse, trembling whisper.
"Of course, Mr. Dillon," Hawk said with an easy smile. He had no intention of getting deeply involved with the future supervillain, but that didn't mean he couldn't show the man a basic human decency that everyone else in this building denied him. Being kind to others is being kind to oneself, he thought.
Max looked like he was about to tear up. Hawk broke the emotional moment. "Let's go. Dr. Connors's lab just called again to rush us."
"Right, right, let's go," Max said, nodding repeatedly, his entire demeanor a little brighter.
Hawk chuckled internally and followed him towards the elevator bank. Finally. After twenty days of dead ends, of scoping out security and realizing the lab was a veritable fortress, the opportunity had simply fallen into his lap. He had calmed down, let things happen naturally, and the universe had provided. Mindset is everything.
The elevator doors hissed open on the top floor. Gwen was waiting in the lobby, tapping her foot impatiently. The moment she saw them, her eyes lit up and she rushed forward.
"Hawk! What took you so long? Dr. Connors is losing his mind."
Before he could speak, she had grabbed his arm and was eagerly pulling him down the corridor, completely ignoring Max, the actual engineer holding the equipment. Hawk was momentarily stunned by her grip.
But at the same time, as he was pulled towards the heavy, bio-sealed doors of the lab at the end of the hall, his heart couldn't help but stir. His Cosmo, the universe within him, pulsed with a sudden, faint resonance.
Something inside that lab was calling to him.