The coin problem got solved faster than Michael expected.
There was an antique dealer on West 47th Street who took one look at the coins, got very quiet, and offered Michael four hundred dollars for three of them. Michael said five hundred. The dealer said four-fifty. Michael took it.
He didn't know what the coins were exactly. Old Greek, maybe. The dealer's hands were shaking slightly when he counted the cash out and Michael decided not to ask questions.
Four hundred and fifty dollars. In New York. In 2016.
That was not a lot of money.
He found an apartment in Queens the same evening. Craigslist on a library computer while Atalante stood invisible behind him and he tried to act normal in front of the other library patrons. The apartment was four hundred and twenty a month. Tiny. Third floor walk-up. The landlord was a tired-looking man named Mr. Petrakis who said he needed first month plus deposit.
Michael had enough for first month only.
He and Mr. Petrakis stared at each other across the doorway for a moment.
"I can have the deposit to you by end of next week," Michael said.
Mr. Petrakis looked at him. Then he looked past him at nothing, which was where Atalante was standing invisible, and something about the nothing made him frown slightly.
"End of next week," Mr. Petrakis said. "Fine."
He handed over the key and left.
Michael stepped inside.
The apartment smelled like old carpet and someone's dried cooking from three tenants ago. The walls were off-white and scuffed. One window faced a brick wall eight feet away. A radiator sat in the corner that looked like it had opinions. A bathroom with a shower that had two settings: scalding and off. A kitchen counter barely long enough to fit a cutting board.
Atalante materialized next to the window.
She looked at the room. Then at him.
"This is very small," she said.
"I know."
"Do humans normally live like this."
"Some of them yeah."
She said nothing else. She walked to the window and stood there looking out at the brick wall with the same expression she'd used to scan the tree line in Central Park. Cataloguing. Filing. Deciding the brick wall was not a threat.
The smell of this place is unpleasant, she thought. Old food and something synthetic in the walls. But it is enclosed and defensible. I have sheltered in worse.
Michael went back out and found a bodega two blocks down.
He spent the last twenty-eight dollars on rice, eggs, bread, instant noodles, a jar of peanut butter, bananas, and a cheap bottle of dish soap. He carried the bags up three flights of stairs and set them on the kitchen counter and stood there looking at them.
He was very tired.
He was also, he realized, kind of hungry. He hadn't eaten since before Danny pushed him in front of a train and he'd technically died and woken up in a different universe. That was a sentence that existed now.
He cooked rice on the electric stove. Plain rice. He put a fried egg on it. He ate standing at the counter because there was no table.
Atalante watched him from the window.
"Do you eat?" he asked.
"I do not need to," she said. "Servants sustain on mana."
"Right." He ate another bite. "Which comes from me."
"Yes."
He thought about that. He was currently the mana source for a Heroic Spirit. His body was doing something it had never done before. Developing circuits the book said would come. He didn't feel any different. Maybe slightly tired but that could also be getting run over by a train.
He finished eating and sat on the floor because there was no furniture. He put his back against the wall under the window and opened the book across his knees.
Okay.
What the fuck was he actually doing.
He stared at the ceiling for a minute.
He was in the Marvel Universe. Civil War was three weeks out, give or take. He knew the broad strokes. Tony and Steve fight over the Accords. Airport battle in Germany. Steve goes underground. Tony finds out about Bucky and Howard. Siberia happens. Avengers fractured.
That was the main event. But around it, running parallel, was everything else. Strange was still a surgeon at this point. Guardians were in space. Thor was dealing with Asgard stuff.
And scattered across this entire world were objects that could function as catalysts.
He pulled the pen from his pocket and found a blank margin in the book.
He wrote: CATALYST LIST.
Then he sat there.
Okay. Think. The Fate system connected Servants to things tied to their legends. Physical resonance. An object that had been part of their story or their world or their era.
Thor's world was Asgard. Asgardian relics could theoretically pull Norse mythology figures. Odin's vault had objects from across the nine realms. If even one of them had a connection to a Heroic Spirit from Scandinavian legend there was a summoning in there somewhere.
He wrote: ASGARDIAN VAULT — ODIN'S RELICS. HOW TO ACCESS???
Museums. New York alone had the Met. Natural history. There were objects in those collections from every civilization on earth. Greek. Roman. Egyptian. Japanese. Celtic. Objects that had sat in cases for decades that nobody had touched.
He wrote: MUSEUMS. RESEARCH SPECIFIC COLLECTIONS.
SHIELD had black sites. He knew from the movies that SHIELD had confiscated alien and enhanced tech for decades before Hydra took it. Some of those confiscated items had to be old. Pre-SHIELD old.
He wrote: SHIELD BLACK SITES — AFTER HYDRA FALL ACCESS???
He looked at the list.
Three leads. None of them easy. All of them requiring him to go places he had no business being, touch things he had no right to touch, and do it all without getting arrested or shot by someone in a suit of armor.
He was a twenty-three year old ex-grocery store worker from Chicago.
With a cat girl standing at his window.
He was enormously, completely screwed.
But then again he had a book that didn't end and a Servant who could put an arrow through anything she pointed at, and he knew what was coming for the next three years of this world's history in broad enough strokes to plan around the worst of it.
That was something.
He looked at Atalante.
She was still at the window. The streetlight from outside was coming in at an angle and it caught her hair and the line of her jaw and the curve of her ear and he thought, not for the first time tonight, that she looked genuinely unreal. Like the kind of image that ended up on the front page of a cosplay subreddit with sixty thousand upvotes.
He had literally never been this close to a woman this regularly in his entire life. It was making his brain do something inconvenient.
He looked back at the book.
Catalysts. Focus. Catalysts.
He wrote: NEED MORE COINS FOR DEPOSIT. FIGURE OUT TOMORROW.
He closed the book, set it beside him, and pulls a blanket from the grocery bag he'd had the sense to grab from the free pile outside the building's entrance, wraps it around his shoulders, and sits there on the floor making plans while the radiator in the corner clicks and hisses and the city moves loud and indifferent fourteen feet below the window.