Tonight's rain
was getting heavier and heavier.
Tonight's wind
was also growing stronger by the minute.
A luxurious stretch sedan was parked outside an otherwise unremarkable apartment building. Hardly anyone lived there, but inside one of the lit windows, someone could be seen moving around, completely unaware that they were being watched from the car below.
"Finally done!"
Leonard looked like a man who had just gone three hundred rounds with a beautiful woman, drenched in sweat. In reality, all he'd done was tidy his room and put his comic collection back in order after it had been turned upside down.
For most people, that would not count as strenuous exercise.
But he was Leonard, a fragile scientist.
That bit of cleaning had practically cost him half his life.
"Now Sheldon won't be able to nitpick me to death."
The only reason Leonard had spent so long cleaning, of course, was because he lived with a roommate whose obsessive-compulsive tendencies had long since reached inhuman levels.
He stepped out of his room.
Just as he was about to show off to Sheldon, he saw a girl sitting cross-legged on the rug eating chips, while Sheldon sat on the couch weighing their takeout on a digital scale.
"Hey, Penny."
Leonard instantly lost that proud peacock swagger.
"Hey, Leonard."
The girl kept eating chips and watching TV without turning around, which gave Leonard a chance to dart into the bathroom, fix his appearance a little, and then come back out.
"The person who called you earlier was that genius comic artist, right? You tore your whole room apart because of it."
Sheldon kept recording the weight of his food as he spoke in an incredibly certain tone.
"I already cleaned my room."
Leonard immediately tried to salvage his dignity.
A little too proudly.
Unfortunately, Penny was not interested in that. What really caught her attention was Sheldon's hearing.
"You were literally playing video games in front of the TV just now, and you still managed to eavesdrop on Leonard's call? Don't tell me you installed spyware on his phone."
Penny was very pretty. She was the neighbor of the two eccentric scientists, and Leonard's dream girl.
"Hm?"
Sheldon lifted his head like a startled prairie dog.
"Good idea, Penny. I never expected you to have flashes of insight once in a while. Maybe you won't have to be a waitress forever after all."
His tone was full of sincere amazement.
He was not looking down on his friend specifically.
He just enjoyed discriminating equally against everyone's intelligence. Theoretical physicists tended to come with at least a little superiority complex built in.
Hearing that,
Penny expressionlessly put down her chips.
"If you're really that smart, shouldn't you know better than to insult the girl who brings you your food?"
She turned to look at Sheldon, and the threat in her tone was impossible to miss.
"..."
Sheldon did not dare argue.
Instead, he turned toward Leonard and forcibly changed the subject.
"So what did the genius comic artist want? Let me guess, don't tell me yet... Ah! He must have read the thousand pages of suggestions I hacked into his computer and called you to have you thank me on his behalf!"
The blue eyes of the theoretical physicist shone with childlike anticipation.
Unfortunately, Leonard's answer shattered that fantasy on the spot.
"No, he didn't mention you. And those thousand pages of comic suggestions... actually, the kid just asked me some questions about superhero comics."
Leonard put on the face of a man who considered himself the supreme authority on comics.
Still, that failed to impress the girl.
He looked a little deflated, but pressed on.
"I think our genius comic artist is looking for inspiration... Also, maybe because I doubted him at first, he made a point of telling me that someone very close to Bruce is his angel investor."
"An investor who gave him a full ten million dollars with no strings attached."
At that point, even Leonard couldn't help sounding amazed. That kind of money was so huge it existed outside the limits of his imagination.
"And you actually believed that?"
Penny rolled her eyes.
She had always believed her neighbors had simply run into a middle schooler who loved making things up.
"He said he doesn't like lying... I think that makes him pretty believable."
Leonard sounded a little guilty.
Really, he just wanted to radiate some male charm by association.
"Then you're hopeless."
Penny's evaluation was completely sincere.
"What do you think?"
She looked at Sheldon too.
But the peculiar nerd had absolutely no interest in that.
"He didn't mention me? Not once at all?"
Sheldon's voice instantly jumped an octave.
"Not even something like that annoyingly tall physicist?"
The grown man sounded deeply aggrieved.
"That's right. Not once."
Leonard answered helplessly.
He couldn't lie. If he lied, Sheldon would catch the contradiction instantly. No one understood better than Leonard how impossible his roommate could be.
"Good. Then I understand. That means he isn't as much of a genius as we thought!"
Sheldon viciously attacked the meat in his takeout container with his fork, as if those innocent pieces of food were the comic artist who had betrayed his expectations.
He shoved a piece into his mouth and started chewing furiously.
"Listen, you two really need to believe me..." Penny was trying to say something else, but her words were cut off.
Because Sheldon suddenly leaped up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.
"Cherry pit! Cherry pit!"
His face turned red as he grabbed at his throat.
"Damn it, you only ate cherry meat! The Chinese restaurant didn't put an actual cherry pit in there!"
Leonard complained even as he rushed over to save his roommate.
Penny hurried to help too.
After a chaotic but very practiced rescue effort, Sheldon was finally okay again.
"I swear, the fact that this guy has survived this long is the best proof I've ever seen that God is real."
Penny sighed while patting Sheldon's back and helping him catch his breath.
"This is not my fault. It was the cherry pit. I was never going to win against it. To me, it's like Superman facing Kryptonite."
Sheldon weakly protested after he could breathe again.
The only response he got was two perfectly synchronized eye-rolls.
"You can even make this about superheroes? They wouldn't get taken out by a cherry pit!"
Penny was trying to pull him back to reality with ruthless logic.
"Penny's right. And besides, it wasn't a cherry pit. It was a pea."
Leonard had gone to wash his hands, and the water still on them made Sheldon recoil in disgust.
"I ordered cherry meat. There wouldn't be a pea in that."
Sheldon corrected him very seriously.
But neither Penny nor Leonard was willing to accept his argument.
"It was a pea!"
Leonard insisted again.
So Sheldon thought for a moment.
"No. It wasn't a pea. I ordered cherry meat."
He still refused to admit it, even when Leonard held up the pea Sheldon had choked on.
"It just looked like a pea. That doesn't make it a pea."
Then Sheldon lowered his head and started poking at the takeout again, though he no longer dared put any of it in his mouth.
"That is literally self-delusion!"
Leonard was gritting his teeth at this point.
"What kind of person keeps food their roommate coughed up? You two are unbelievable."
Penny stood up and straightened her clothes, still marveling at the weirdness of both men.
Her mouth moved strangely, like she had a sore in it.
"You know, I used to think you two obsessing over comic book superheroes while being too scared to chase real-life ones was already crazy enough."
Before she could finish,
"And now?"
Sheldon automatically chimed in.
"And now?" Penny grabbed her coat and casually scooped something off the table. "Now either I'm the crazy one, or you two are, because there is no way this whole world is the insane one."
"Seriously, forget everything else. Just the fact that you believe some fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid really has ten million dollars and actually knows Bruce. If I were a scammer, I could strip you two down to your underwear without even trying."
"Believing that is less believable than me walking out the door right now and running into Bruce trying to flirt with me."
Penny was genuinely trying to save her two friends from falling for some obvious rich-kid fantasy.
But she noticed that neither of them said a word.
"One day you're both going to end up homeless. Still, I'll take care of you. Who doesn't like keeping pets?"
With that, Penny opened the apartment door and stepped out toward her own place.
Click.
The door shut behind her.
The two nerds stared at each other.
After a moment,
"The fact that Penny can even recognize that she herself might be insane is astonishing."
Sheldon looked at the closed door and gave an earnest assessment.
"No kidding. Honestly, she wouldn't even need to scam me. I'd happily hand over my underwear if she asked."
Leonard pulled his lovestruck gaze away and lowered his head, ready to enjoy his late-night meal.
Only to realize the table was empty.
"My takeout?"
He immediately remembered the thing Penny had casually grabbed on her way out.
His tone turned horrified.
"Leonard, Leonard, I told you before that you should always order three portions. You can refuse to believe in math, and you can refuse to believe in me, but you really should believe that our neighbor will perform exactly the way she always performs."
Sheldon kept poking at his untouched food with his fork, speaking in a tone full of pity.
Leonard looked defeated.
But even now, he still had some stubborn pride left.
"This was part of the plan. Sooner or later Penny will become dependent on my food, which means she won't be able to live without me, which means she'll eventually marry me."
The fantasy life of a nerd.
Leonard looked completely fired up.
"See? This is the chance she left for me."
He had noticed the phone Penny had left behind on the table. He grabbed it proudly and ran toward the apartment door.
The moment he stepped into the hallway,
he saw Penny still standing near the door for some reason.
Was she waiting for me?
Thinking that, Leonard hurried over.
"Br... Br... Br..."
Penny stood there stiff as if Medusa herself had looked at her, her lips trembling as she repeated the same syllable over and over.
"Br what?"
Leonard walked up to her in confusion.
Then,
"Br... Br... Br..."
He became a stuttering repeater too.
They were even stammering in perfect sync.
And just then,
"Leonard!"
Sheldon came rushing out in a panic.
"This is bad! My computer's finished! That comic artist's computer was full of viruses! He might actually be a genius! He predicted that I would predict him, and now my computer is totally dead!"
Sheldon sounded devastated.
Then he noticed that both of his friends were frozen in the hallway.
Before he could even ask what was wrong,
"What comic artist are you talking about?"
Bruce, dressed in an immaculate suit and carrying the aura of absolute success, stepped into view from beside them.
Sheldon's eyes went wide.
"Bruce!"
To his credit, at least his shock came out as a complete sentence.
Unfortunately,
it seemed to use up the entirety of his remaining strength.
"Oh... my... God..."
As a committed atheist, Sheldon rolled his eyes back and collapsed straight to the floor.
No matter what anyone said, friendship really was real.
Leonard and Penny both snapped out of it and frantically moved to catch him.
Then all three of them went down together, ending up in a tangled heap on the hallway floor.
"Sorry."
Leonard had no idea why he was apologizing to Bruce.
"Yeah... sorry."
Penny also had no idea why she felt compelled to apologize.
The simple truth was that both of them still felt like their brains had shut down. There was just no way to process seeing one of the world's richest men standing in the hallway of a cheap apartment building.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?"
Bruce was internally speechless, though on the outside he maintained a pleasant smile.
Leonard and Penny immediately nodded, scrambling to their feet and half-carrying, half-dragging Sheldon into the apartment like a hospital patient.
"Please, come in!"
Penny even leaned back out of the doorway to say it properly.
Inside the living room, Bruce elegantly stepped around a scattered pile of Star Wars figures. His eyes paused briefly on the walls covered in comic posters, while Leonard looked as nervous as a student standing in front of the principal.
His hand shook as he poured coffee.
"So, Ian, my nephew, really is planning to hire the two of you?"
Bruce accepted the coffee politely, set it untouched on the table, and got straight to the point.
His gaze shifted from Leonard to the unconscious Sheldon on the couch.
"Is there really no place for me in this?"
Penny couldn't help cutting in.
This was her first time seeing a top-tier billionaire in the flesh, and she was visibly awkward. She was trying to force some humor into the situation just to survive the pressure.
"There isn't."
Bruce turned to her and answered seriously.
"Uh..."
Penny immediately backed up a step. "Really? I mean... I'm actually very good at cleaning. No matter how high-end the company is, they probably still need excellent janitors, right?"
She gave a painfully awkward laugh.
"They don't."
Bruce's answer was brief and final.
He had no idea why that immediately made him think of the sterilized female janitor from Ian's other novel. He was starting to suspect those stories had done real damage to his own mental state.
"Okay then."
Penny scratched at her scalp, which suddenly felt itchy, and withdrew into the corner in embarrassment. She felt like she'd set herself up for humiliation. The whole room suddenly made her feel like a clown who had wandered into the wrong scene.
And as she stood there thinking that,
Bruce glanced at her again. She didn't assume it was because she was attractive. At this point, the world already felt too unreal to be trusted.
Who could ever have guessed that the bragging middle schooler her neighbors had met really hadn't been bragging?
Bruce had actually come looking for him.
The odds of that were lower than getting hit in the head by a meteor while walking down the street.
The more Penny thought about it, the more surreal it felt.
And Leonard felt the same way.
"Yes... Mr. Wayne, Ian really did say he was willing to offer Sheldon and me a new job. It's just that..."
"Excellent."
Bruce nodded and cut him off.
"Accept it. For my nephew."
The old-money billionaire spoke with complete seriousness.
"So this is an official Wayne Group hire?"
Leonard probed carefully. Like Penny, he still found the whole thing dreamlike. He even secretly pinched his own thigh.
"You could think of it as a private arrangement through me."
Bruce corrected him.
What he really needed was someone who could watch Ian constantly and make sure whatever alien technology he still had hidden away was safe enough not to create the kind of disaster neither Bruce nor Clark wanted to see.
"A private arrangement?"
Leonard's mind instantly began playing an entire Mission: Impossible montage.
"So we're corporate spies? That sounds... very different from our university jobs."
He started to waver.
No matter what, Leonard really didn't want to give up his university position. Scientific research wasn't just about money or status. It was also about helping humanity.
Just as Leonard was feeling proud of himself for that thought,
"American university professors earn around two hundred thousand a year on average. I'll give the two of you five hundred thousand a year. And that doesn't include whatever Ian is planning to pay you as well."
Bruce brought out the most unstoppable weapon on this planet.
Money.
Just a casual move
was enough to blast the poor scientist into stunned silence.
"Five hundred thousand!?"
A scientist with ideals had just taken a direct hit from brute financial force.
His and Sheldon's salaries weren't bad, but neither were their student loans.
In America,
the higher the degree, the bigger the debt that came with it. That was the glorious freedom of the market. For most highly educated professionals, the first twenty years of income went straight into repaying the cost of becoming qualified in the first place.
"Leonard, oh my God, you're going to be rich! You two are going to become the richest... nerds I've ever known!"
Penny's gasp of disbelief hit like a perfect assist.
"The richest nerds..."
Leonard suddenly seemed to feel his male competitiveness awakening. Scientific ideals? Humanity's future? Meaningless. Reproduction was clearly the ultimate human mission.
"I'm in! I'll babysit so hard it'll shake the world!"
He threw off his glasses and made the declaration with absolute determination.
"That was a useful assist."
Bruce pulled out several bills and slipped them into Penny's hand as thanks.
Then he turned, glanced at Sheldon still unconscious on the couch, and smiled faintly.
"Someone will talk him into it."
After leaving those words behind,
Bruce rose without touching the coffee and headed for the door.
"You're leaving already?"
Leonard and Penny hurried to escort him out.
Far too enthusiastically.
Einstein watched it all from a framed portrait on the wall.
Another scientist corrupted by capitalism.
Just like him.
...
Gotham's rain always carried the smell of rust.
Metropolis rain, on the other hand, smelled like lemon cleaner diluted too far.
Alfred stood beneath a black umbrella outside the apartment building.
The angle of the umbrella was perfect, letting the rain slide neatly off the folds of Gotham's richest man's custom-tailored suit without touching a single strand of that carefully arranged hair.
"Back to Gotham, sir?"
The old butler opened the car door as he asked, his tone calm in the way only someone who had seen everything could be.
Though he himself was already old, and Bruce was long past youth, and had even become a father in his own way, Alfred had never changed the way he addressed him.
"Not tonight."
Bruce loosened his tie and casually tossed aside the remaining two pounds of the ten-pound listening device he had secretly brought up into the apartment building.
"Ian is still just a student. He can't fly, and he's only just started awakening his abilities. So his secret base must be somewhere in Metropolis."
Bruce was analyzing things rationally.
Yes, the reason he'd had that sudden revelation earlier at Ian's house was because he believed he'd caught an important clue.
Some cosmic machine god?
Wasn't that basically just artificial intelligence?
The whole thing was eerily similar to Clark's own childhood experience.
The parallels were too strong to ignore.
That was also why Bruce had suddenly returned all the items to Ian.
He had realized that Ian, like Clark once had, might have a Fortress of Solitude that didn't belong to Earth.
"You seem very invested in young Mr. Kent."
From the rearview mirror, Alfred could see the excitement flickering in Bruce's eyes.
It was that same look he always got when he thought he'd uncovered a new mystery.
"So, will young Mr. Kent be heading to Arkham?"
The butler had his own curiosity about that. After all, he'd also seen Batman's psychological assessment of Ian.
"Why would I reward him?"
Bruce didn't even look up.
"Arkham doesn't need a second king."
"Could Mr. Kent simply be from Krypton too?"
Alfred drove smoothly on. He always liked to talk to Bruce when he had the chance.
As one of the people closest to him,
no one understood better than Alfred that Bruce himself was the greatest lunatic Gotham had ever produced.
"If it were only that, I'd actually be delighted. The truth is probably stranger, and more complicated."
Bruce kept scrolling across the tablet in his lap.
"What exactly are his powers..."
He paused.
"Soon enough, I think we'll have the answer."
On the tablet were photos he had secretly taken of the Sentry comic, and even of the Homelander comic.
Sentry's torn golden suit.
Homelander's twisted grin.
For a boy to be so obsessed with creating work like that, Bruce was convinced Ian's motives ran deeper than simple greed or creativity.
He believed he had already grasped the key.
And that he was closing in
on the hidden truth behind Ian Kent.
"Power drawn from fantasy... could that really be possible..."
Bruce felt like he had found the central thread, though even to him, the theory sounded absurd.
Of course,
absurd didn't mean impossible.
It just meant he'd have to wait for time to prove it.
And before then,
"Start by searching around his school for the secret base."
The car rolled through a puddle.
Bruce made his late-night battle plan.
Very seriously.
Though no one could say for certain
whether he wasn't also using it as an excuse to delay going back to Gotham, where the nightmare waiting for him would simply continue.
(End of Chapter)
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