She didn't hesitate. She came straight through the coffee shop door, crossed the small room with determined strides, and slid into the booth across from him.
Mike looked up from the classified job listings, his brow furrowing.
"What exactly are you so afraid of?" she asked, keeping her voice low and tight.
"I'm sorry?"
"You're hiding," the young woman stated flatly. "I want to know why."
He studied her for a long, heavy moment. "I'm sitting in a public coffee shop reading a newspaper. That's not hiding, kid. That's a Tuesday." He calmly folded the paper and set it down on the table. "Who are you?"
"Skye." She said the single name like it definitively settled something. "And you're the Hooded Hero from the local news. The cellphone video's been running on a loop all morning."
"I think you've got the wrong person."
"I stood there and watched you punch literal handholds into a solid brick wall and climb four stories like a spider." She casually picked up the folded sticky note from the corner of the table—he'd been using it to mark the warehouse listings—and held it up briefly. "You are desperately looking for work. Which means you are not officially registered, you're absolutely not collecting the Fraternity's enhanced individual stipend, and you are actively, aggressively avoiding the official channels that would make your life significantly easier."
She placed the yellow note back exactly where she had found it. "That kind of absolute anonymity doesn't happen by accident."
Mike leaned back slowly in his chair, the plastic groaning under his weight.
"Everything takes time," he said quietly. "I'm not ready."
"Did you just suddenly awaken? Because if you did, I'd genuinely like to see—"
"I'm not ready," he repeated, cutting her off. His tone was perfectly even. Firm, but not unfriendly.
Skye shifted in the booth, leaning forward. "Okay. Fair enough. But here is the thing, Mike—staying completely unknown doesn't actually protect you. It just means you are highly visible to the absolute wrong people, and completely invisible to the right ones. Anyone with a mass-produced scouter in this city can read your combat level the exact moment you use your abilities. Los Angeles is not rural Montana. You already showed up on someone's phone camera today. Once you show up in the mainstream media, once there is an actual name and a face attached to the power, anyone in the shadows who wants to move against you has to aggressively calculate the geopolitical cost of doing it publicly."
He didn't answer immediately. He just looked at his empty coffee cup.
"New York," Skye said softly. "That's exactly where I'm heading next. The Paragons, the Avengers—they are organizations that have actual, protective structures for people in your exact situation. If you genuinely want to come out of this sideways, paranoid existence you're living, that's the place to start."
"I have a kid," Mike said, his voice hard. "I can't just randomly point at a map of a city and move."
"I have a car," she replied simply. "It's a van. My mobile office. Plenty of room for both of you."
He stood up, grabbing the newspaper and rolling it in his fist. "Thanks for the generous offer, kid."
Skye stood up with him. "The offer stays permanently open. No pressure on the timeline." She stepped aside, giving him space as he moved toward the door. "Hope we get the chance."
He walked out through the front door, the bell jingling. She watched the glass door swing shut behind him.
Then, Skye looked down at her own hand.
She held the laminated work ID she had smoothly lifted from his pocket when she "accidentally" bumped him on her way past his chair. Standard, cheap laminated badge, a grainy photo in the corner, a name printed below the barcode.
Michael Peterson.
She smiled, slipped the stolen ID into her jacket pocket, and walked out the back exit into the alley.
At the sprawling Fraternity compound in New York, Fox sat heavily across from Bulma in the primary operations room, staring at a digital list that was getting significantly longer by the day.
"Ajak, the Prime of the Eternals," Fox listed off, rubbing her temples. "Ying Li, requesting a status update. Maria Hill desperately wants to talk about the New York resurrection debrief. Tony Stark has already called twice and explicitly says he has a separate, highly urgent matter. Secretary of State Ross left a very tense message through official channels."
Bulma let out a frustrated sigh and turned her tablet face-down on the glass desk. "He fired off that apocalyptic aura burst over the island and then completely vanished into thin air. I can't reach him on a single comm channel I have."
"He's definitively not fighting anyone on Earth," Fox noted clinically. "An engagement at that staggering power level would immediately show up on our planetary sensors. The whole damn planet would physically feel the shockwaves."
"I know that. But not knowing exactly where he is makes every single one of these diplomatic conversations infinitely harder." Bulma tapped her manicured nails on the desk, thinking rapidly. "Tell them all he is in deep seclusion. High-altitude training. Tell them when he is officially out of seclusion, he will follow up with them directly."
Fox nodded, highlighting the list. "That vague excuse works for most of them. Tony is absolutely going to push back."
"Tony can push all he wants," Bulma said firmly. "The answer is still exactly the same."
Fox put the digital tablet aside, leaning back in her chair. "I just sincerely hope it's not much longer. The longer he is completely unreachable, the more geopolitical pressure violently builds on both ends—external contacts who desperately need answers, and internal staff who start quietly wondering whether the long silence means something catastrophic happened."
Bulma looked across the sleek room at the seven Dragon Balls resting on the secure display shelf. They were a dull, lifeless gray, entirely inert stone.
"He'll be back," Bulma said softly.
She said it in the exact, specific way you say something when you are roughly ninety-five percent certain it's true, and the remaining five percent of terrifying doubt simply isn't worth examining.