After marveling over Mark’s looks for a while, someone in the crowd brought up his parentage.
“I heard this kid’s real father is Tony Stark?”
“No way, seriously?
Where’d you even hear that?”
“It was in the San Fernando Valley Entertainer.
Though I also heard they printed a retraction afterward.”
“Has to be fake.
Why would Tony Stark’s son end up shooting a commercial with us?”
“…”
Overhearing the chatter, Caleb’s face darkened and he barked out, “Hey!
Does everyone here have nothing better to do?”
Mark caught the whispers too, and a question nagged at him.
*How do these people even know about this?*
The Entertainer barely had any readers to begin with, and it had been long enough now that nobody should still remember it.
*Has to be that woman Emily from yesterday.*
Mark’s mind raced through the possibilities and landed on the obvious suspect.
Emily and Rosalie were bitter rivals, and losing this role to her on top of everything else would have been more than enough to send her running her mouth out of spite.
Mark filed away one more mark against her name.
At Caleb’s direction, Rosalie headed to the dressing room to change into something more homey, then stopped by hair and makeup for a soft, gentle look.
By the time she stepped back out, she radiated warmth, the picture of maternal charm.
Caleb was thoroughly pleased with how she looked and gave the order to start filming for real.
With Mark cooperating perfectly, the shoot went off without a hitch.
It took less than half an hour to wrap the main footage, and including a few pickup shots afterward, the entire thing was done in under an hour.
“Fantastic!
Little Mark is just incredibly smart!”
Caleb couldn’t stop praising Mark’s performance.
He turned to Rosalie.
“Leave me your contact info.
Rosalie didn’t hesitate to hand over her business card.
She said her goodbyes and left with Daphne, wheeling the stroller out of the building.
Per standard policy, Tenda Ad Company wouldn’t pay Rosalie directly; the payment had to go through a third-party payroll company.
It wasn’t until a week later that Rosalie finally received her three thousand dollars.
Around the same time, Lisa Formula rolled the finished commercial out across the internet, subway ads, TV spots, and print.
As expected, Mark’s rosy, adorable face on screen quickly won people over.
“Wow, this baby is honestly gorgeous!”
“If I ever have a kid this cute, I’ll be thanking God personally.”
“…”
Lisa Formula’s sales that month jumped by roughly thirty percent, largely thanks to the ad.
Word spread fast, and soon other baby product companies started reaching out to Rosalie directly: diaper brands, bottle makers, baby wash and lotion companies, stroller manufacturers, baby rockers, the list went on.
Rosalie began taking Mark around to various ad agencies, shooting commercial after commercial.
Compared to background work on film sets, commercial gigs paid far better and required a fraction of the effort.
By the end of the month, she tallied up her earnings and found she’d cleared over fifty thousand dollars, more money than she’d ever made in her life.
It was nothing compared to what actual Hollywood stars pulled in, but for Rosalie, it was a fortune.
“Baby, we can finally move out of here!”
Rosalie told Mark, practically bursting with excitement.
The very first thing she did with the money was start apartment hunting.
This neighborhood had never been safe, not for a baby like Mark, and certainly not for a single mother living alone.
After two days of house hunting, Rosalie finally found a place she loved in the Clyme district, about ten miles away.
She hired a moving company, and the two of them relocated to their new home that same day.
Compared to their old block, Clyme was worlds cleaner and better kept.
The neighborhood even had its own community association, which hired security to patrol the streets and keep out vagrants, gang members, and other troublemakers.
What pleased Mark most of all was the house’s private yard, complete with a grassy lawn that caught sunlight all day long.
He could sit out there sunbathing from morning to evening if he wanted.
The next morning, Rosalie picked up some fruit and took Mark door to door to meet the neighbors.
Renting in a neighborhood like this took more than just being able to cover the rent; you needed the neighbors’ approval too. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Cross the wrong people, and they could band together and have you pushed right back out.
As newcomers, Rosalie made sure to put her best foot forward and build good relationships from day one.
“Oh wow, is this little Mark?
He’s absolutely adorable!”
“Rosalie, I am so jealous.
What I wouldn’t give for a sweet kid like this!”
“…”
Unsurprisingly, Mark quickly won over every neighbor on the block, especially the stay-at-home mothers, who looked at him like he’d hung the moon.
Once they’d settled into their new home, Rosalie kept taking Mark out for more commercial work.
By now, every ad agency in the area knew about him: the adorable little actor who was also, remarkably, a dream to direct.
Job offers kept rolling in, and even ads with nothing to do with baby products started reaching out, so long as they needed an infant on screen.
Five years slipped by in what felt like no time at all.
As Mark got older, Rosalie stopped policing his sun exposure almost entirely.
His Sunlight Point collection rate shot up as a result, and over those five years, he leveled up Super Brain five times straight, pushing it all the way to level eight.
At level eight, Mark’s intelligence now sat at the very peak of human capability.
Even measured against someone like Tony Stark, a mortal man who stood shoulder to shoulder with gods as Iron Man, Mark was confident he wouldn’t come up short intellectually.
He now had a photographic memory and could absorb new knowledge at a blistering pace.
Books he’d only skimmed once in his past life, he could now recite word for word without missing a beat.
Whenever Rosalie was out of the house, Mark would sit at the computer and quietly work his way through advanced mathematics, classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, cell biology, computer science, networking, and more, all self-taught across disciplines.
Subjects that would have once read like gibberish to him now came together at a startling pace.
That afternoon, Rosalie came home from an audition for a major film role looking utterly crushed, an aura of defeat hanging over her.
“What’s wrong, Mom?
Did the audition not go well?”
Mark poured her a glass of warm water and set it in front of her, his voice full of concern.
After five years side by side, he’d come to think of Rosalie as his real mother in every way that mattered.
Seeing her like this genuinely pained him.