The month passed in a blur of rehearsals, envelopes, and quiet, steady growth.
By the time the crew for *Dreamland Kids’ Park* was ready to fly out, *Duskbound* had cleared eleven thousand dollars, the checks arriving with enough regularity now that Mark had stopped bothering to count them by hand and simply had Alice tally the totals from scanned copies.
He’d started a second title in the gaps between rehearsal sessions, something smaller and faster to build, determined to keep the momentum going while the first game was still selling.
**[Sunlight Points: 4,200]**
He’d also, in that same stretch, pushed Super Brain up to level nine.
The jump had been staggering.
Concepts that once required careful, deliberate study now unfolded in his mind almost the instant he encountered them, whole fields of knowledge collapsing into intuition.
He suspected level ten, the threshold for whatever came next, was close now, close enough that he found himself glancing at the sky more often than strictly necessary, mentally counting down the points.
But for now, New York took priority.
“Sweetheart, are you sure you packed everything?
It gets cold there, not like California.”
Rosalie fussed over his suitcase for the third time that morning, still riding the particular anxious energy of someone about to headline her first real film.
“I packed everything, Mom.
I checked twice.”
Mark had, in fact, checked six times, though not for the reason Rosalie assumed.
Buried at the bottom of his bag, wrapped in a spare sweater, was a small hard drive loaded with everything he couldn’t afford to leave sitting in an empty house for a month: Alice’s core files, his game development tools, backups of every line of code he’d written since the CAA incident.
If anything happened to the apartment while they were gone, he wasn’t losing months of work to bad luck.
The flight itself was uneventful, three hours of Rosalie running lines under her breath and Mark pretending to nap against the window while actually working through a physics textbook in his head, page by remembered page.
He’d learned, over the past year, that the appearance of sleep was one of the easiest disguises available to him.
Nobody questioned a sleeping baby.
Nobody questioned a sleeping child much either, not when the alternative was a five-year-old staring blankly into space for four straight hours.
They landed at JFK to a gray, overcast afternoon, and a production assistant with a clipboard and a harried expression hustled them straight into a van bound for the crew’s housing near the shoot location.
New York hit differently than Los Angeles.
Mark had expected the noise, the density, the sheer press of people, but what caught him off guard was the light.
Even overcast, even filtered through a canyon of buildings, the sunlight here felt somehow sharper, colder, more honest than California’s endless golden haze.
He found himself watching the sky through the van window more than the skyline.
*Somewhere in this city, Stark Tower’s probably visible from a dozen different angles.*
He didn’t say it out loud.
Rosalie had grown more comfortable with the whole situation over the years, distant enough from her old resentment that she rarely brought Tony up unprompted anymore, but Mark suspected the closer proximity might stir something back up regardless. You are reading on novelping(.)com, the official source.
Best not to poke at it unnecessarily.
Filming began two days later, and it consumed nearly every waking hour that followed.
Dreamland, the fictional amusement park at the center of the story, turned out to be a real, mostly-defunct boardwalk park in Coney Island that the production had rented out and dressed up for the shoot.
Mark spent his mornings in hair and makeup, his afternoons hitting marks and delivering lines that Alice’s simulated footage had helped him rehearse to a near-flawless polish, and his evenings watching Rosalie do the same, her performance sharper and more assured with every take than it had been the day before.
Caleb, watching playback between setups, couldn’t stop grinning.
“Rosalie, that take, right there, that’s the one.
That’s exactly the read I wanted.” He turned to his assistant director, practically giddy.
“Tell me she’s not the most natural first-time lead you’ve ever seen.”
“She really is good,” the assistant agreed, glancing down at his notes.
“And the kid’s uncanny.
Never seen a five-year-old hit blocking that precisely.”
Mark kept his expression carefully, believably five years old, letting a little of his usual mischief bleed through between takes so nobody mistook competence for something stranger.
He’d gotten good at that particular performance, a performance layered on top of a performance, the boy who was talented but still, underneath it, unmistakably a boy.
The days blurred together, familiar in their rhythm even as the setting changed around them.
What he hadn’t expected was how much he’d start to enjoy it.
There was something almost meditative about repetition, about hitting the same mark a dozen times until the timing settled into muscle memory even his overclocked brain didn’t need to consciously track.
It was, he realized somewhat wryly, the closest thing to a childhood he’d allowed himself since waking up in this body.
He was in the middle of one such quiet moment, sitting on an overturned equipment crate between setups while Rosalie got her makeup touched up nearby, when a man in a well-tailored suit that didn’t remotely belong on a boardwalk sat down on the crate beside him.
“Quite a production they’ve got running here,” the man said conversationally, not looking at Mark directly, eyes tracking the crew instead like he was cataloguing exits.
“You’re Mark, I take it.”
Mark went very still.
The man wasn’t crew.
He wasn’t press either, not with that posture, that stillness, the faint bulge under his jacket that a normal person wouldn’t have clocked but Mark, with a level nine Super Brain cataloguing every detail in the periphery, absolutely did.
“Who’s asking?”
“I work for a government agency you’ve probably never heard of.
I’m not here to cause trouble, for what it’s worth.
Just wanted to put a face to a name we’ve been curious about for a little while now.”
Mark’s pulse spiked, though he kept his own face carefully neutral, carefully childlike.
*SHIELD.
They found me anyway.*
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.” He let a note of genuine five-year-old wariness creep into his voice, the kind any child would show a stranger who sat down uninvited.
“I should go find my mom.”
“That’s probably wise.” Coulson didn’t move to stop him, didn’t so much as shift his posture.
“For what it’s worth, kid, whoever’s been running interference for you online, they’re good.
Really good.
Better than anything we’ve got in-house, and we’ve got quite a lot.” He paused, letting that sit.
“Someone that capable doesn’t usually bother protecting a five-year-old’s homework projects.
Makes a person curious.”
Mark slid off the crate, doing his best to look like a startled child putting distance between himself and a stranger, and not like someone running probability calculations on how much Coulson actually knew.
“I don’t know any Jarvis,” he said, deliberately, testing the name like a live wire.
Something flickered behind Coulson’s carefully composed expression, brief and gone almost before it registered.
Interest, maybe.
Confirmation.
“Never said Jarvis,” Coulson replied mildly.
“Have a good shoot, kid.”
He rose, straightened his jacket, and walked off into the crowd of crew members without another word, vanishing as unremarkably as he’d appeared.
Mark stood frozen for a long moment, heart hammering in a way his enhanced mind couldn’t quite talk down, before forcing himself back into character and hurrying toward his mother.
*He knew.
Or he suspected enough to fish for it, and I just handed him the confirmation on a plate.*
Somewhere above the boardwalk, thin winter sunlight broke briefly through the clouds, and for once, Mark barely noticed the points ticking upward at all.