Chapter 6: Keeping the Neighborhood Chaotic
Manhattan. Street level.
Matthew walked at an easy pace in civilian clothes. Eleanor moved alongside him, both arms wrapped around a large brown cardboard box that was doing its best to be inconvenient.
Traffic ran on both sides of them. A cold wind came through the gap between buildings and made the pedestrians around them pull their coats tighter.
Eleanor did not need to look inside the box. The weight was enough, and the faint trace of tobacco drifting from the gap in the flaps told her everything else.
"Sir," she said carefully, "I don't believe you smoke."
Matthew kept walking. "You're right. I don't."
"Then what is all this for?"
"Benefiting the people," he said, without a moment's hesitation.
Eleanor processed this.
"Benefiting... the people. With cigarettes."
"Is there a problem with that?" He glanced at her. "Different people have different definitions of happiness. Yours might come from shopping, or a raise in salary. Some people's comes from a packet of cigarettes. That's all it takes for them to have a good day."
He looked ahead.
"Like them."
Eleanor followed his gaze.
Along the stretch of sidewalk ahead, scattered across benches and tucked into corners, were the people who lived on these streets. Matted hair, worn clothing, surrounded by bundles of old possessions. A few flies moved in lazy circles around them. The people themselves paid no attention.
Just looking at them, Eleanor thought she could almost sense the smell from where she stood.
"Ross." Matthew's voice was even. "Is this not benefiting the people?"
He took the box from her arms and walked toward the nearest bench.
Eleanor hesitated. The instinct that said this was not how charitable giving typically worked lasted for about three seconds before she followed him.
As it turned out, Matthew's theory held.
Everyone had a different threshold for happiness. Which meant that generating happiness or System points, by extension, was considerably cheaper than he had assumed. A person with ordinary concerns might need a meaningful sum of money before their situation registered as improved. The people on these streets operated on a different scale entirely. A few cigarettes and the System counter started moving.
He did encounter a handful who took what he offered and gave nothing back — no reaction, no acknowledgment, nothing that registered as gratitude or satisfaction. Matthew's policy on these cases was simple and immediate.
He took the cigarettes back.
He had not built up any surplus of charity to spare on people who couldn't be bothered to appreciate it. Gratitude was part of the transaction. Come back when that was on the table.
By midday, the accumulated total was sitting at two hundred System points, up from thirty. The additions had come in small amounts continuously, but the sum was substantial, more productive than the lump-sum approach he had tested with Arthur Bell.
The Pass had also delivered: five Alpha Hunters, three Lickers, and one Gravedigger, all deposited into System storage. The next milestone threshold had moved up to three hundred points.
Giving away large amounts of money worked. Giving away cigarettes to the right people worked better. Matthew found this genuinely satisfying in the way that operational efficiency was always satisfying.
Eleanor, walking alongside him as he worked through the box with increasing enthusiasm, had a growing list of questions she was not asking.
Her employer appeared to be enjoying this enormously. He was handing out cigarettes to homeless people with the expression of someone who had discovered a favorite hobby. She could not work out what the enjoyment was actually coming from, and the uncertainty was beginning to bother her.
She also found herself wondering quietly, and without voicing it. Whether distributing tobacco products to the most vulnerable people on the street actually qualified as improving their situation, or whether it was going to make an already difficult neighborhood considerably worse.
She kept walking. She helped where she could. She said nothing.
Across the street, at the base of Stark Tower, Tony Stark stopped mid-step.
He had been walking with a young woman on his arm, the kind of afternoon that didn't require much planning, when something across the street caught his eye. He pushed his sunglasses down with one finger and looked.
The new head of Umbrella's security division was standing in the middle of a cluster of homeless people, handing things out of a cardboard box, and appeared to be finding this extremely entertaining.
"Happy." Tony looked over his shoulder. "Is that actually the guy? The new Umbrella security director?"
Happy followed his gaze. The man across the street was giving something away by the handful, whatever it was, the people around him seemed interested, and the expression on his face suggested he had just invented the best idea anyone had ever had.
"...Could be he likes helping people," Happy offered.
"Helping people." The woman on Tony's arm laughed lightly. "Probably just putting on a show. Otherwise his hobbies are genuinely very strange, don't you think, Tony?"
Tony went still.
A moment passed.
He took his arm from around her shoulders.
"Sorry," he said pleasantly. "Head home. I'll be honest, what you just said killed my appetite entirely."
Happy had a cab flagged before she could respond to that, and had her in the back seat before she had worked out what was happening. The cab moved off into traffic.
Tony watched it go, then sighed.
"A fly in the food," he said, to Happy. "Found it before I started eating, which I suppose is better than finding it halfway through."
"I'd say so," Happy agreed. "Realizing you've swallowed one is a lot worse than spotting it first. All things considered."
"Fair point." Tony looked across the street again, where Matthew was still working through the box. "Fair point."
While the two of them were talking, the situation around Matthew changed.
The crowd that had gathered thinned fast, not because anything had wound down, but because of the voice that cut through it.
"Matthew Lawrence." The sound of someone who had been looking for him for a while and was not in a good mood about it. "I have been looking everywhere for you."
The people around Matthew cleared back instinctively.
Matthew turned.
He placed the face immediately. Pete, a low-level enforcer and loan shark working for the Magia Gang. He was the one who had extended the original twenty-thousand-dollar loan to the previous owner of this body, supposedly for tuition.
The original debt should have been repaid by now under any normal calculation. But gang loans did not follow normal calculations. Interest stacked on interest, fees accumulated on fees, and the number Matthew actually owed had long since climbed past the original principal. People who didn't pay had options available to them, none of which were pleasant. Running product was the routine one; the more creative options involved considerably more permanent consequences.
That math, specifically, was what had made Matthew sign the inheritance agreement without looking back.
Pete clearly had not heard about the change in circumstances. That explained the confidence.
"Matthew." Pete pushed a homeless man out of his path without looking at him and came to a stop close enough that the smell coming off him, stale, chemical, the particular odor of someone living hard hit Matthew before the words did.
"Didn't think you'd have the nerve to be out here giving things away. You've got money to burn but somehow nothing to cover what you owe me?"
Behind Pete, the rest of the crew had spread out into a loose ring around Matthew. The arrangement communicated a clear message: the conversation ended one of two ways, and only one of them involved Matthew walking away on his own.