Chapter 230: Hell's Kitchen's Vulture, and the Suspenders Kid
Ethan didn't know everything Reed had been thinking on that call, but he had a reasonable outline. He filed it under problems that will develop on their own schedule and turned his attention back to the man in front of him.
Adrian Toomes, engineering professor, Hell's Kitchen Community School. First wave faculty. One of the people who'd shown up when showing up meant something.
"Professor Toomes," Ethan said. "I've been meaning to say this properly — thank you. Coming here when you did, when the neighborhood was still what it was. That wasn't nothing."
Toomes shook his head immediately, with the slightly flustered energy of someone who hadn't prepared for gratitude. "Mr. Cross, no — it's the other way around. You and Principal Fisk gave me somewhere to land when I had nowhere." He paused, and something more honest came through. "I was in a bad spot. Someone tried to have me framed. Fisk pulled me out of it." He glanced around the office. "I was half-expecting Hell's Kitchen to be worse than what I was running from. Turned out to be the opposite."
Ethan watched him. He knew a version of this story — different universe, different sequence, same underlying shape. A man with real capability and real ambition and no institutional protection, and a system that had decided to use that against him rather than for him. It was a recognizable story in this neighborhood.
"And the research?" Ethan asked.
Toomes's face changed. The professional warmth became something more personal. "Still going. That's the other thing I didn't expect — the people here. Hank McCoy runs circles around me in biochemistry, but in materials engineering we're almost peers. Otto has ideas about mechanical integration I couldn't have gotten anywhere else." He shook his head. "I thought my wing project would be a footnote. Here it's — average, apparently. By this faculty's standards."
He said it without bitterness, which Ethan respected.
Magneto, from the side of the room where he'd been listening with poorly disguised interest, raised an eyebrow.
Ethan looked at Toomes.
"I have a question for you," he said. "And I want you to think about it seriously before you answer."
He had the system notification still running in his peripheral attention:
「Congratulations, Host! Adrian Toomes has been added as a friend!」「Congratulations, Host! Adrian Toomes's Friendship Level has risen to ★★★★★!」
One step away from Family. And Ethan had been sitting on this for months, waiting for the right moment, or maybe just for the man in front of him to feel real enough that giving it felt right rather than transactional.
"Do you want to actually fly?"
The room went quiet.
Magneto's expression, which had been professionally neutral, developed a very specific quality of attention.
Toomes stared at him. "What do you mean, actually—"
Ethan reached into his coat and set the Devil Fruit on the desk between them.
It sat there. Small, improbably colored, looking approximately like something a prop department would source for a children's television program.
"Devil Fruit," Ethan said. "You've probably seen what Fisk can do. This is where that comes from." He pushed it slightly closer. "This one is the Bird-Bird Fruit, Model: Vulture. You eat it, you can transform. Full flight. Your own wings, your own form, your own sky." He paused. "Your call. I'm not selling you anything."
Magneto was looking at the fruit with the expression of a man recalculating several things simultaneously. So that's how he's been doing it.
Toomes reached out. His hand was not entirely steady. He picked it up, turned it over, set it back down, and then picked it up again.
"It tastes terrible," Ethan said honestly. "Fisk described it as — actually, I'll let you form your own opinion."
Toomes ate it.
His face cycled through several stages of reaction, none of them pleasant. He chewed. He swallowed. He sat with it for a moment, eyes closed.
Then the transformation came.
It was not subtle. Wings — enormous, brown-tipped, the real architecture of a raptor scaled to human size — emerged and spread. His frame shifted, broadened slightly through the shoulders, adjusted. The feathers caught the light coming through the window.
Toomes stood in the office of the Hell's Kitchen Community School as something that was recognizably himself and also something that had never existed before, and looked at his own hands.
Then he went through the window.
Not recklessly — he found the latch, pushed it open, stepped onto the exterior sill, and launched. Clean. Instinctive. Like someone who had been practicing something in his head for so long that the body already knew the motion.
Ethan and Magneto watched him clear the roofline and bank left over Hell's Kitchen.
「DING!」「Congratulations, Host! Adrian Toomes's Friendship Level has risen to ★★★★★★!」「Congratulations, Host! Adrian Toomes has become Family!」「Host currently has 24/25 Family members. One slot remaining — system update incoming. Keep going, Host!」
Twenty-four.
Ethan watched the silhouette of a man who'd wanted to fly his entire adult life, flying, over the neighborhood he'd chosen to stay in.
One more.
Separately — not something Ethan was thinking about yet, but something that would become relevant — the home-universe Peter Parker, aged eleven, had just watched a large winged figure appear from the direction of the school and arc over the rooftops.
He stared for a long time.
Then he wrote something in his notebook.
Cool.
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