***I hope you all had a wonderful New Year's Eve and a great New Year. Let's start off 2026 right. May you all have a wonderful year.***
Saturday Noon
Insight Headquarters, Newark
The newsroom looked half-asleep and half-electrified — like a machine warming up after a storm. Coffee cups crowded desks, computer screens flickered with half-written leads, and the smell of burnt toast and printer toner tangled in the air.
Ethan entered with a thin drive disk pinched between two fingers. His hair was still damp, collar rumpled, eyes rimmed with fatigue that looked almost deliberate — the kind that passed for "I've been up working, not lying."
He dropped the drive onto Peter's desk.
"Here," he said simply. "It's the 'data' that 'Mr. Maddox' promised us."
Peter looked up, meeting his eyes for just a second — a flicker of silent understanding passed between them.
"Good work," Peter said. "Let's get everyone together."
They gathered around the conference table: Danny Ruiz, whose tie looked like it had survived a bar fight; Clara Hensley, all focus and notebooks; Mark Donnelly, whose creative brilliance was inversely proportional to his caffeine tolerance; and Alison Price, photographer and self-described optical genius, whatever that meant.
The drive sat like a grenade in the middle of the table.
Peter plugged it in, the first file blooming onto the projector — Norman's smiling face beside spreadsheets of offshore accounts and sealed court documents. The room went utterly silent.
"Alright," Peter said, clapping his hands once. "Let's go through this and break it down as quickly as we can."
"Corporate structure's a mess," Danny muttered, scrolling through PDFs. "Oscorp's been shell-laundering funds through Latveria and Madripoor subsidiaries. Violations of the Stark Export Compliance Act, Foreign Powers Commerce Code, and at least a dozen international arms treaties. Norman's got his fingers in every jurisdiction that could land him on a no-fly list all over the world. I must say that's actually impressive."
"State, federal, and international. Good, if we go with the most glaring, we can assure he goes to jail for life," Peter summarized.
Danny nodded, jaw tightening. "Yeah. It's not just corruption. It's treason with better branding."
Across the table, Clara leaned forward, squinting at a document header. "The whistleblower signature reads Mendel Stromm, a pseudonym of the Oscorp exec Dr. Anthony Kelso. That's quite a high-level source. I'm surprised Maddox can flip someone like that. I must say our new boss has got pull."
Peter glanced at Ethan, who kept his face perfectly still.
Clara continued, "This guy's either suicidal or sitting on protection money. I'll contact my sources inside Oscorp — see if anyone's heard whispers. Maybe I can get a few people to cross-confirm before we publish."
Mark snorted. "Good luck getting any Oscorp lifer to talk right now. The company's about as tight-lipped as a submarine."
"That's what off-record sources are for, Mark," Clara shot back.
Peter turned to Mark. "Can you handle the draft. Keep it clean and digestible. We'll need something sharp enough to cut through Norman's PR machine but simple enough that even a morning commuter will get how bad this really is. Remember, if the people don't want Osborn to go down, they can use his connections to give him a slap on the wrist."
Mark rubbed his temples. "So, basically, make it Pulitzer-worthy in paragraph form."
"Exactly," Peter said, smirking faintly.
"And leave space for the ad copy," Ethan added from the corner. "Businesses aren't going to carry our papers if they can't make a buck off them."
Mark pointed his pen at Ethan. "Kid gets it."
Alison Price clicked through photos she'd already recently taken — Oscorp's HQ bathed in police lights, Norman at the gala podium, the glass reflection of his tower against the morning skyline.
"I'll need a new batch," she said. "Shots of the board members, facility fronts, maybe even some candid street-level stuff for a human angle. Norman's got that creepy 'family man meets tyrant CEO' aesthetic. The camera loves it."
Peter nodded. "I'll leave it to you. Do what you do best. I have to head home something up, so I'll be back soon."
"Always do," she said, grabbing her camera bag.
By midday, the energy in the room sharpened. Every keyboard click sounded like a bullet chambering. Clara's phone buzzed nonstop with texts from contacts; Danny scribbled legal citations across his notepad; Alison stormed in and out, trailing gusts of city air.
Ethan watched from a distance, expression unreadable. It was strange — seeing professionals dissect the data he'd organized for them so thoroughly. Sure, with his mind he'd be able to do something similar, but he doubted he could do it so efficiently.
His part was done — almost.
He walked to the printer, grabbed a stack of paper, and started feeding out flyers: a bold headline, "The Truth in Print — Get the Inside Scoop with INSIGHT."
The fine print detailed a simple deal, "Ad in the paper for a month, plus your first month's order — 300 copies a day — on us."
He packed the flyers into a satchel. His next battlefield would be bodegas, barbershops, subway station newsstands and kiosks, street vendors & food trucks, and delis — the veins of the city's gossip network.
While the journalists chased truth, Ethan was ensuring people would actually see it.
Meanwhile… Queens, Peter's Apartment.
MJ sat on the couch, her computer open to a gossip site. The photo glowed on-screen — Peter, disheveled in his tuxedo, walking beside Felicia Hardy. Her hand looped through his arm, her dress strap slipping off one shoulder. The flash bulbs made it look intimate, almost cinematic.
"MJ—" Peter started, stepping inside.
She didn't look up. "You want to explain this?"
"It's not what it looks like."
Her jaw tightened. "Then what is it, Peter? Because this looks like my husband walking out of a gala with another woman, both of you looking like you just—"
"—it was part of the cover," he interrupted, forcing calm into his voice. "We were escaping security. It had to look believable."
MJ stared at him, eyes searching. "Believable, huh? So how far did the act go?"
"Nothing happened," he said too fast.
The silence stretched, heavy and ugly.
MJ folded her arms. "You've been gone for days, barely home, constantly 'working.' You don't talk to me about what's going on. And now this?"
Peter exhaled. "MJ, please. Monday, it'll all make sense. I promise. I just—can't right now."
She turned away. "You always say that lately."
He hesitated, then stepped closer — but she didn't look back.
"I'll be home tonight," he said quietly. "We'll talk more about this when I get back."
The door closed behind him, the sound soft but final.
As Ethan was riding in the taxi, he thought about the headlines that would appear in two days:
THE OSBORN ILLUSION: INSIDE THE LIES OF OSCORP.
He wondered, the future would look like when the story came out. Would all future events change?