REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 108: Pass It On: Matthew Is Gay
"Jessica. The joke I asked you to prepare yesterday. You did prepare it?"
"I'll be doing a spot check this morning."
The voice reached Natasha in a tone she had developed a strong personal reaction to over the past several days.
Her internal response was not for external consumption: I hate jokes. Especially jokes told to idiots.
That was how Natasha had categorized Matthew at this point in her assessment. A complete idiot. A person who had stumbled into a considerable amount of money and was making the most of it in terms of personal conduct. After everything she had observed, she had not found a single quality worth noting. What she had found in abundance were qualities worth finding annoying. The entitled manner of someone who treated people around them as furniture. Was this workplace harassment? Because she had always assumed that particular behavior was concentrated at lower levels of corporate hierarchy. She had not expected to encounter it from a company director.
She arranged her expression into something professionally pleasant.
"I had the joke ready last night. Would you like to hear it now?"
"Of course. First thing in the morning is the perfect time for a joke." Matthew sat back on the sofa and poured himself a cup of red tea.
Natasha looked at him with the expression she kept carefully out of her actual face.
"Do you know what logic is?"
"I've heard of it. What does it actually cover?"
"In simple terms: the ability to reason from a small amount of information to a much larger conclusion." Natasha provided an example. "For instance: do you own a lawn mower?"
"No."
"Good. Then I can reason as follows: no lawn mower means no lawn. No lawn means no yard. No yard means no house. No house means no wife. No wife means." She let a brief pause land. "You're gay."
Matthew stared at her.
"...What? How does not having a lawn mower make me gay?"
"Is this supposed to be funny?" His face had gone flat.
"It's not funny? Don't tell me you actually." Natasha left the sentence where it was. Her tone did the rest.
Natasha had scored a point.
Ada, at the fish tank, was experiencing something she hadn't expected: she was watching Matthew get outmaneuvered for the first time. The view from outside the game was considerably more entertaining than playing in it.
Matthew backed away from the territory. "Fine. Not funny. You're banned from jokes going forward."
"The joke requirement has been removed from your duties." He delivered this as if genuinely offended.
The atmosphere in the office had returned to something pleasant.
Then helicopter rotors came from somewhere outside.
Everyone turned toward the window.
The next second: "GIVE ME BACK MY MOTHER!!!"
An enraged roar tore through from outside the building. A figure wrapped in tattered cloth launched off the helicopter and hit the office wall face-first. Like a projectile fired from something enormous. The exterior wall disintegrated on contact. Expensive objects and paintings throughout the office shattered as the concussion hit them. Debris bounced through the smoke like shrapnel.
Ada and Natasha had both found cover before the dust settled. Matthew stood where he was.
"WHERE IS SHE!!!" The voice from inside the rubble carried a particular quality, a certain intellectual simplicity operating at the limits of its capacity. "GIVE HER BACK! GIVE HER BACK!"
Matthew identified the voice and the demand simultaneously.
Salvatore Moreau. One of Miranda's four lords. The only one who hadn't come to New York with her. The reason was straightforward: he was a failed experiment. His adaptation to the Cadou had been too poor, and the result was something that could only be described as a disaster. His back had grown thick tumors resembling the head growth on a lionhead goldfish. He had developed partial aquatic characteristics. His appearance was grotesque in a way that produced a visceral physical reaction in most observers. Despite all of this, among Miranda's four lords, he was the most loyal.
Miranda had clearly contacted him through the mold. There was no other explanation. Left to his own devices, he would never have found this location.
Good, then.
Miranda, this is an interesting move.
Matthew's fist tightened slightly. He looked at Salvatore pulling himself out of the rubble, and something cold moved through his expression.
Nemesis, who had been positioned in front of Matthew before the crash even registered, seemed to sense the change in his principal's intentions. He looked down at Salvatore, who had managed to get approximately halfway upright, and launched him into the air with the casual efficiency of someone kicking a soccer ball. Then, at the apex of that arc, one punch.
The air took shape for a fraction of a second.
Salvatore Moreau felt a force he had no framework to process, and then he was moving very fast across a significant amount of open space. He connected with the exterior wall of Stark Tower on the other side of the street and created an impact crater there that was primarily green.
The splash radius was considerable. Pedestrians on the street below received some of it.
From behind the sofa, Natasha had seen all of this.
What she had not seen was Nemesis. What she saw instead was an invisible force lifting the creature off the ground and sending it into a building wall at what her instincts assessed as a velocity that no human being had produced.
Telekinesis.
Exceptionally powerful telekinesis.
Fury, she thought, had an unusual ability to identify people. She had been about to write Matthew off entirely. What she had just witnessed was not what ordinary wealthy people were capable of. This required complete reassessment: not just a capability evaluation, but a full multi-dimensional picture.
When Matthew turned his head toward her, she converted her expression to something approaching alarmed bystander without any visible transition.
"What was that?" she asked, with appropriate shock.
"Something that didn't know what it was getting into."
Matthew had barely moved to go downstairs and deal with the Miranda situation when a figure in Iron Man armor came through the hole in the wall at significant speed.
"Matthew! Are you all right!"
Tony looked at Matthew, completely intact with no visible damage, and something relieved passed through his expression. Then he looked at Natasha, who was emerging from behind the sofa.
"...Why are you here?" The question arrived on instinct.
Tony worked it out almost immediately. His expression shifted to something knowing. "Oh, Natasha. What name are you using this time?"
He said this at a volume that the entire office could comfortably hear.
Matthew arranged an expression of appropriate surprise. "Natasha? I thought she was Jessica. And you two know each other?"
Tony confirmed this without any apparent consideration for the ongoing undercover operation. "Of course. We've had quite a memorable time together, actually."
Natasha's tone was measured. "Mr. Stark. Please don't phrase it that way. I was employed under you for a period of time."
"Employed. Your assignment at Stark Industries was a surveillance operation. You were there as a spy."
Tony looked at Matthew. "What name is she going by for you? Natalie Rushman? Natasha Barbara?"
***
30+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces