After leaving Oscorp, I needed somewhere to work, and I decided to set up my temporary base in the Osborn Mansion, where I had spent the last two days working. After all, in less than a week, Oscorp would have to vacate the Oscorp Tower—which sounded rather amusing—and then I could finally return as the rightful owner of the entire building. While the Oscorp Tower was just the headquarters for Oscorp, housing only part of its assets, my newly created company would fit entirely within it, with plenty of room to grow.
A major advantage was that the people I had poached from Oscorp wouldn't have to relocate or adapt to a new workplace. But I'm getting ahead of myself—first, I needed to create the company.
If someone thinks that starting your own company is easy, they're deeply mistaken. While working on this with the active help of my butler, Bernard, and my secretary, Wanda—who, of course, left Oscorp with me—I once again thought about hiring an assistant. After all, despite Wanda being quite intelligent, she lacked the qualifications (and perhaps the desire) for this kind of work. But this time, I decided not to stop at just thinking about it. I needed an assistant more than ever to manage the new company.
"Wanda!" I called my secretary, who was currently sitting at a temporary desk set up outside my office.
"Yes, Mr. Osborn?" she asked, almost running into the office.
"Wanda, I'm looking for someone to fill the position of my personal assistant again. Start collecting resumes and organize interviews in three days. That should give Arthur enough time to conduct background checks on the candidates," I ordered Wanda, noticing an incredible amount of enthusiasm on her face. She seemed to dream of offloading most of her current responsibilities onto someone else.
"It will be done, Mr. Osborn. I'll start selecting candidates right away and begin by sending requests to various recruitment agencies," she said with an incredibly joyful smile. For a moment, I even wanted her to eat a lemon.
"At least don't be so... enthusiastic," I said, shaking my head.
"As you wish, Mr. Osborn," she said, still with the same smile, before rushing back to her new workspace.
To my surprise, just two minutes later, she returned with a phone in her hand, its microphone covered by her hand.
"Mr. Osborn, Christopher Cooper wants to speak with you, and I thought you'd want to talk to him," Wanda said in a tone as if this Cooper were the President of the United States. I knew for a fact that the president had a different last name.
"And who is this Cooper?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. I had no memory of this person at all.
"You don't know? He's the mayor of New York," Wanda replied, and I understood why I didn't remember him. The original Norman Osborn had met this man at one of the receptions, but the meeting lasted about ten seconds and was completely forgotten. Only now, when Wanda told me who Cooper was, did I remember that encounter.
"Give me the phone," I said, not intending to debate whether I remembered or not.
"Hello, Mr. Osborn," Cooper greeted me.
"I'm very glad to hear from you. I was just thinking about you recently," I reciprocated politely.
"Oh? Really?" he asked, slightly surprised. "Never mind. Mr. Osborn, I wanted to inform you that in five days, a charity ball will be held in your honor at the Metropolitan Museum."
I must admit, his words surprised me—I hadn't expected this at all.
"In my honor? A charity ball?" I began repeating him in surprise.
"Yes, in your honor. After all, you personally neutralized a criminal and thus prevented him from harming a lot of people. And that's not even considering the whole story with radiation contamination right here in New York. The least I can do as the mayor of this city is to organize a charity ball in your honor," the mayor informed me. In reality, a ball was a very unusual reaction to someone catching a criminal. In a normal situation, the person who did such a thing would just get a pat on the back, or at most, some police officer would present them with an honorary certificate printed on their office printer.
"I'd be happy to attend this event. But why is the charity ball happening in just five days? Usually, organizing such events takes at least two or three weeks, not just five days," I decided to ask about what seemed a bit suspicious to me.
"Well, I couldn't leave a hero without the attention he deserves, ha-ha-ha," the mayor replied, laughing very unnaturally. "Besides, I had some help organizing this event," he added and fell silent, as if he had accidentally revealed too much.
"I understand everything, Mr. Cooper. We'll meet in five days. Our secretaries can handle the details regarding the exact time and other specifics," I told the mayor, after which we said our goodbyes.
My intuition told me that this whole situation with the charity ball smelled very bad, and I suspected that Adam Hall and the people behind him were somehow involved. But even suspecting something like this, I simply couldn't miss the charity ball in my honor. All the cream of New York society would be there, meaning additional opportunities would arise that I could take advantage of. But that was for the future—right now, I needed to focus on the current work.
Despite the fact that the company registration process had been underway for some time, the most important thing—the thing without which the company simply couldn't exist—hadn't been done. Or rather, a name hadn't been chosen.
In the end, I narrowed it down to five options:
OsTech Industries
OzCorp Enterprises
Norman Technology
OZ Innovations
GenTek Corporation
After some thought, I discarded the first three options. The first one reminded me too much of Stark Industries, the second wasn't very different from Oscorp, which could lead to some legal issues, and using my name, as in the third option, I considered unnecessary.
When I started checking databases for the fourth and fifth options, the fifth one also fell out of the running, even though I liked it the most and was inclined to choose it. But no, two brothers from Nebraska had already registered a company with that name and were producing something at a small plant in their town. I could have contacted them and bought the company name, but why bother when the fourth option was just as good and, by a happy coincidence, wasn't taken?
Decided: OZ Innovations. It was a simple and memorable name that clearly reflected the company's focus on innovation.
Just as I finally settled on the name for the new company, I was visited by the Schultz brothers, who had decided to accept my offer and join me. They only came to me after Quest Aerospace, like locusts, had descended on Oscorp, intending to take the juiciest pieces to strengthen their own company and auction off the rest. The Schultz brothers, who had worked as leading lawyers at Oscorp, decided it was better to try their luck with me and become the foundation of my emerging legal department than to end up being laid off in the worst case or becoming ordinary lawyers at Quest Aerospace in the best case.
Karl and Erich Schultz, despite their German names and surname, were born in the United States. Their father had come from Germany forty years ago and established his own law firm, which was inherited by their older brother. I didn't know why they didn't want to work for their brother and instead went to Oscorp, but that didn't matter now. The important thing was that I now had a pair of truly top-notch lawyers.
After officially hiring the Schultz brothers, I immediately sent them to handle the further paperwork, consulting with them on a few matters first. I took out some drafting paper and began making rough sketches of Tony Stark's repulsor technology, painstakingly recalling all the possible details I had seen in the Iron Man movies or even read in the comics.
In the movies, repulsor technology was first used by Tony Stark not during the creation of the Iron Man suit, as many think, but in the Jericho missile. To my surprise, although such a missile existed in this world, it didn't use repulsor technology—at least, there were no patents on the subject. This meant I could patent this technology for myself; the main thing was to do it before Tony Stark did.
But despite the fact that I was a genius with a very high IQ, I simply didn't have the necessary education. The original Norman Osborn was a doctor of chemistry and biology and was very knowledgeable in genetics, and those were the skills I possessed. What was needed here was someone with incredible intelligence and technical skills, like Tony Stark or Otto Octavius. And what a coincidence—Otto worked for me. It was for him that I was making these sketches, and I continued to do so until the aforementioned Otto entered my office. I was so absorbed that I didn't notice it was time for our meeting—the time I had set myself.
"Norman, did you want to talk to me?" Otto asked, entering and sitting on the guest sofa.
"Yes, Otto, I'd like to discuss several issues with you right away," I replied.
"Let's start with something more personal for me—the glider. I really enjoyed flying on it, and I'm curious why it stopped working at a very inconvenient moment for me. If that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have been hanging from a lamppost in Spider-Man's web like an idiot," I said, involuntarily wincing as I recalled this fact.
"It's simple—the problem is with the batteries. The ones in the glider you were flying couldn't fully replace the nuclear batteries, and their reliability leaves much to be desired. They simply burned out when trying to power the engines," Otto explained to me. He had managed to study the glider before leaving Oscorp.
"Well, that glider is no longer available to us since it's the property of Oscorp. But the rights to it aren't so straightforward. The rights to sell it belong to Oscorp, but the rights to use it belong to both Oscorp and you, as the one who designed this glider. So if you create a glider and, say, gift it to me—specifically to me, as an individual and a friend, not to my company—then I can use it. So I'm asking you as a friend: create this glider for me. Of course, I'll cover all the materials," I asked Otto. I simply didn't see another way out of this situation—or rather, another way to bypass the patent owned by Oscorp.
"I don't mind. I can also try to fix some of the glider's problems. But where will I do this? The Oscorp workshops are no longer available to me, and the workshops for your new company haven't even been created yet," Otto said, puzzled.
"Don't worry about that. There's a private workshop that, while very expensive to rent for its equipment and facilities, is of the highest quality. Some of their equipment wasn't even available at Oscorp," I informed Otto of information that even surprised me a little.
"Then I don't see any problems with that. What else did you want to discuss with me?" Otto showed curiosity.
"Not so much discuss as show you this," I said and took from the folder on the table the drawings, sketches, drafts, and even just sheets of paper with what I thought repulsor technology looked like, and handed them to Otto.
"Hmm..." Otto hummed, initially glancing without much interest at what I had given him. But as he studied the provided "material," it was clear that his enthusiasm grew stronger and stronger.
"Where did you get this?" Otto asked with burning eyes. "This is a real breakthrough! This technology can be used for both flight and weapons. It's incredible!"
"These are my own sketches. And although I believe this technology has a great future, it has its drawbacks. And I think you've already figured out what—or rather, which—one."
"An incredibly high energy consumption," Otto said, nodding in understanding.
"Yes, and until a compact energy source appears, this technology can only be used in stationary objects. Which, of course, isn't bad, but the full potential of this technology won't be realized," I said, sadly shaking my head.
Tony Stark's arc reactor would help here, but there wasn't even a rough understanding of how it worked. We would have to wait until it was created and then start looking for options.
"And what exactly do you want from me? Do you want me to come up with such an energy source?" Otto asked, who had recently been thinking about something similar himself.
"No, Otto, we need to start small. As you can see, this technology is currently just a few not very clear drawings on paper, and I need you to turn these drawings—these ideas—into something functional, something that can be presented to the patent office. It's not necessary to create something working; the main thing now is to collect and formalize as many technological solutions as possible so that our patent cannot be bypassed," I explained Otto's task. As a scientist and inventor, Otto had often dealt with various patents—both when patenting his own inventions with the help of Oscorp's lawyers and when trying to bypass others' patents to create something new.
"Okay, Norman, this is a very difficult task, but I think I can handle it if you provide me with a good patent lawyer. It's a shame Malcolm didn't decide to leave Oscorp; I think no one works with patents better than him," Otto said, sighing regretfully. And I was even more sorry. That balding fifty-year-old lawyer was truly an incredible specialist, but I hadn't been able to convince him to leave Oscorp.
"Yes, Malcolm is a good patent lawyer, but I'll soon hire someone just as good. Preliminary negotiations are already underway with several people," I told Otto.
"Let's hope the new specialist is no worse. By the way, what's going on with Oscorp? Have they left the tower yet?" Otto decided to show curiosity, realizing that we had finished the main business.
"Not yet, but I've already officially sent them a notice that they must vacate MY tower within a week," I replied with a smile.
"I can imagine how angry those turkeys from Quest Aerospace must be. They expected to get all of Oscorp's employees, but not only did you deprive them of many key employees they were counting on, you also essentially took away the symbol of their victory—the Oscorp Tower," Otto said with a smile, receiving the same smile in return.
"You should have seen how angry Adam Hall was when I told him I was terminating the lease on the Tower. He was practically stomping his feet in rage," I told Otto, recalling this moment that was pleasant for me.
Thus, our business conversation smoothly transitioned into a chat over a couple of glasses of wine. The future looked bright, but I simply couldn't imagine the storm that awaited me ahead.