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There were children in the lobby of the Midnight Mission.
Last time Marc had checked, they hadn’t even had a lobby.
He eyed the walls of the Mission, but they didn’t offer any commentary on the fact that their doors now opened up into a large open room… or why that room was full of middle-schoolers. The kids lounged around on their phones, backpacks and notebooks scattered everywhere. Moon-emblazoned windows let in plenty of moonlight, as well as the yellow flickering glow of that one streetlight out front.
“Oh shit, it’s Mr. Knight,” one said looking up at Marc. He held up his phone. “Bro, smile, I’m taking a selfie!”
Marc stared into the camera as the kid grinned and put up a peace sign.
...It honestly wasn’t a terrible picture.
“Thanks, dude!” the kid said, and went back to texting at lightning speed. The other half dozen children ignored him.
Marc tried not to sigh. He picked his way through the morass of backpacks and notebooks and assorted cords- the Mission had also sprouted an array of electrical outlets that appeared to be perfectly up to code- and made his way to what had once been the entrance hallway, and around the corner into what had once been their reception area.
There were also windows in this room. They showed the same view to the outside, flickering streetlight and all.
“Huh,” said Marc, “that’s pretty weird.”
“What, the new lobby?”
Reese sat behind the reception desk, sipping casually from a blood bag. She raised a carefully manicured eyebrow meaningfully.
"Yeah," said Marc. "I don’t remember having a lobby. This is new, right?
Reese shrugged. “It was like this when I got in.”
“Weird,” Marc said. “And these windows-”
“Yeah, no, what the windows are doing is pretty weird. But you know what’s even weirder?” Reese said, leaning one arm on the table and making meaningful eye contact. Marc suppressed a wince. “For some reason, there’s a bunch of middle-schoolers just hanging out here for the rest of the night. Why are there kids here? You'd better not have been hiding a bunch of secret children, Marc, we're not some sort of daycare."
“...I’ll get back to you on that one.”
“Marc,” Reese said, threatening, but Marc turned right around and went back into the… Lobby. The Mission had obligingly decorated the walls in an Egyptian motif that more or less matched the rest of the building. Marc noticed a handful of his plants artfully aranged in the corner. He narrowed his eyes at a long-haired girl who was sitting precariously close to them.
“Okay kids,” Marc said, clapping his gloved hands. The middle-schoolers looked up at him. “I’m gonna need to ask you some questions."
The kids seemed to take this as an invitation to interrogate him.
“Hey Mr. Knight, is it true you killed a man?”
“Did you really rip a guy’s face off?”
“Is it true that there’s a second, cooler Moon Knight? Are you ever gonna rip HIS face off?”
“Hey, so what would happen if someone cut your hand off, would Khonshu regrow it or would you just not have a hand or WHAT?”
Marc frowned at the middle-schoolers, but they seemed immune to the force of his glare.
“...If I answer your questions will you tell me why you’re hanging out in my lobby?”
The selfie-taking kid scoffed at him. “It’s not your lobby. It’s the Mission’s lobby, and it made it for us so we could hang out here and stuff.”
“When did you even talk to- no, no, go back to why you’re hanging out here in the first place.”
The girl who had been hanging out by the potted plants brushed her long hair out of her face, and said shyly, “My cousin Angela was worried about us being home alone after school, cuz there’s been so much crime in the area lately.” The other kids nodded in agreement.
Mr. Knight frowned.
“What sort of crime?”
“I dunno, muggings and stuff. My cousin says it’s really dangerous right now and we should be careful ...shouldn’t you know more about crime than we do, Mr. Knight?”
Marc just knew Reese was laughing at him in the other room, and scowled.
"Uh-huh."
“Anyways, school told us we had to go home after a while, but we wanted to find somewhere safe to hang out, so we came here!”
“...Here,” said Marc. “To the Midnight Mission.”
“Yep,” said the selfie kid.
Marc stared at him. “...You realize we got blown up like a month ago, right?”
“Yeah, obviously,” said the kid. “It was kinda a big deal.”
“And then we got attacked by a supervillain?”
“I know, we couldn’t cut through this street for like a week, it was really inconvenient.”
“My receptionist is a vampire.”
“Oh come on,” the kid said, “Reese has lived here even before she was a vampire. She babysat half of us back when we were kids, she's half the reason we’re here in the first place.”
Marc looked at the half dozen children making themselves at home, in a space the Mission had made specifically to keep them safe.
“...What’s the other half?”
“Eh,” said the kid, “You’re Moon Knight. It’s not like you’d let any of that shit happen again.”
—---
Mr. Knight walked the children home. They were travelers at night, after all, and under Khonshu’s protection.
More importantly, they were under Moon Knight's protection, and Khonshu could suck it.
Then he changed into his traditional robes, told Reese he was headed out for a while, and went into the night as Moon Knight, cape flaring behind him.
—---
The next day the kids were back.
“I see we still have a lobby,” Marc said to Reese, having picked his way through the minefield of backpacks and children and arrived at the former (current?) reception room.
“I see we still have an unusual amount of children,” Reese replied.
“Yeah, I’m working on it, I think,” Marc said.
“Work faster. These windows are tripping me out.”
The streetlight flickered outside the window, and Marc winced.
“Yeah, I get that.”
He went back to the lobby. There were chairs now, somehow, white and plush and scattered around the room, although most of the middle-schoolers were still sprawled around on the floor anyways.
Marc looked around, and raised his voice so everyone could hear him. “Why are you still here? I punched a lot of people last night. That usually works for this kind of thing, it should be much safer out right now.”
“He did punch a lotta people,” one kid said, “My dad heard about it on the news!”
The girl with the long hair shrugged, doing something on her phone. “No, we need to stay here. My cousin says it’s still dangerous out.”
Marc frowned down at her. “...Right, okay, who is your cousin?”
—
The cousin is a young college grad named Angela who just started at her first big job. She works for a perfectly normal company.
She tells him this, sitting with him at her kitchen table, and glancing nervously around like she expects someone to be watching them.
“I’ve just been stressed,” she said, crumpling a napkin. “It’s nothing to worry about, Mr. Knight. I didn’t know I was worrying the kids. This company just isn’t-” she blinked, hard, “It isn’t quite what I expected. That’s all.”
“You’re sure?” he asked.
She nodded. “Sorry for causing problems, Mr. Knight. I just wanted to look out for the kids.”
Marc put down the cup of coffee he’d been holding just for something to do with his hands. (He couldn’t drink it with his mask on, but for some reason people always poured one for him anyways.)
“What company did you say you worked for again?”
“Oh, nowhere, nothing important,” she said, glancing at the hooks by the wall where her lanyard and nametag hung, for a company called Myrmidon Industries. “...It’s late Mr. Knight, and my shift starts first thing in the morning.” She stands up, and he takes that as his cue to wander with her towards the door.
“If you need me, you know where to find me,” Marc says, making eye contact as meaningfully as he can manage.
She laughs weakly. “Oh, I know that,” she says. “We all do.”
—
“I’m not sure much will turn up,” Steven says, sitting in his executive chair in.. whatever mental space they’re in. Steven seems to be in his old office, with broad windows and a gleaming wooden desk. “-But I can take a look.”
“You know this business stuff better than I do,” Marc says, from whatever version of the Midnight Mission his brain pulls up whenever they talk like this. “I might miss something obvious. If you could ask around, see if there’s anything… off. That'd be great.”
“And I suppose you just want me to twiddle my thumbs?” Jake says, from the flashing lights of his dance club.
Steven raises an eyebrow. “Is business really your wheelhouse, Jake?”
Jake leans back and folds his arms. “If something is off, it’ll show up in my haunts just as much as yours, Grant. Don’t get snippy.”
Marc shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “You’ve got until tomorrow night, then I’ll check things out myself. You guys in?”
Steven and Jake glance at each other, through whatever abstract mental space they are all connected in, then nod, more or less in unison.
“Sounds interesting,” says Steven.
“I ain’t passing up a chance for a scrape,” says Jake.
Marc nods. “Let me know what you dig up.”
—
Steven Grant, (former) billionaire, had a reputation to maintain.
A carefully cultivated history of eccentricity covers a lot, but disappearing suddenly for months, then equally as suddenly returning from a theoretical journey of discovery in the wilderness, only now only paying for goods and services in cash? People made assumptions about his accounts, is all he is saying... as well and his standing with the law. (They aren’t necessarily wrong)
But on the other hand, if people are already assuming things…
Steven leaned forward, swirling the scotch in his glass appreciatively. “And what can you tell me about Myrmidon Industries?” He lowered his voice conspiratorially, just so he could still be heard over the gentle murmur of conversation in the lounge. “I hear they’re up to some… exciting things these days.”
The man he was talking to, a local landlord in a suit somehow both expensive and grubby, laughed. “Really? I heard they’re bleeding money so fast they’re gonna burn themselves to the ground by the end of the year! Did you know, they tried to lease one of my apartment buildings? The whole thing! Where a startup company gets that amount of cash I don’t even want to know.”
Steven raised one carefully manicured eyebrow. “Oh? And what did you tell them?”
The man laughed. “Nah, I know better than to get involved in whatever those guys are selling. That's how you have Spider-Man coming down on your head. Or worse, Moon Knight.”
“Ah,” said Steven, “that ruffian.”
“But I'll tell you what-” says the man, leaning towards Steven as though confiding in him, “I did send them over to my buddy Rick. He might know what they’re on about. I know Rick has a building or two he was trying to get off the market, if you know what I mean." The man laughed, raising his glass in a toast. "Good luck to him, the sorry bastard.”
Steven chuckled artfully, raising his own glass, the scotch sparkling inside. “Good luck to us all.”
—
Jake tugged politely at his cap, taking a seat at the bar with a grin.
“Naomi,” he said to the bartender, her distinctive eyepatch only enhancing her unimpressed expression, “Lovely as ever I see!”
“Yeah yeah, Jake, good to see you didn’t disappear off to the ends of the earth yet a-fucking-gain. Whatchya looking for tonight, huh?”
“Maybe I’m just here to socialize! See all my buddies!” Jake gestured broadly at the rest of the bar, and the bartender raised her single eyebrow at him.
He smiled and leaned forward. “Ooor, maybe I’m here for a little bit of the usual."
She smirked. “Rum, or information?”
Jake laughed. He really needed to come out to the bar more often. “Why not a little of both? What’s been happening in these parts lately? I’ve been hearing something about a Myrmidon company mucking about, something about getting into housing?”
She gave him a meaningful look. “You want the deets or not, Jake?”
“Well, if you’re asking nicely-”
She raised her single remaining eyebrow. He grinned back at her, cocky, and slid a handful of bills across the bar.
“-And if I’m asking nicely…”
“Well,” she says, pouring him a glass, “You know they’ve been hiring up all the loose cannons as well, right?”
“Oh?” says Jake. “The ones that like to run around in masks and costumes?”
“All sorts. Normal goons, costumed goons, anyone with more muscles than sense, and a bit of debt besides. Paying em enough to get into all sorts of shit. Word is, if you need to turn over some quick cash, they’ll pay you, no questions asked.”
“What for?”
“Hanging around, apparently. Some sort of money laundering thing. Why, you looking to get in on the action?
“Nah,” said Jake with a snort, putting a 20 on the bar and pushing to his feet, “I’m doing just fine. Just want to hear what sort of trouble these suckers are getting into."
She laughed, toasting him with the bottle. “Yeah, you like to make your own trouble!”
“And don’t you forget it!
—
"P- please don't kill me Moon Knight" the man croaked out, hands raised and visibly sweating in the dim light of the alley where Marc had cornered him, "I'll tell you everything I know. Please don't carve my face off."
Marc stepped back, giving the man a moment to breathe, but fiddled meaningfully with a moon dart as he waited. He took a moment to appreciate how the moonlight glinted off the sharp edge of the blade. "I'm listening,” he said.
The man seemed to appreciate the sharpness of the blade as well, because he swallowed loudly, then blurted, "I've been cheating on my girlfriend for seven months, but it was an accident I swear!”
Moon Knight tilted his head. “I’m not interested in your relationship problems.”
"How- what do you want to know?"
Moon Knight took a step closer, giving his moon dart a quick spin. "Start with telling me everything you know about Myrmidon Industries"
The man did.
—---
When Marc breaks into the office space being rented by Myrmidon, the building is dark, lit only by emergency exit signs and the odd single fluorescent light here and there. Water fountains are blocky shapes at the far end of a bank of slightly grubby elevators, and behind a large reception desk, a carpeted hallway stretches down past frosted glass and nondescript doorways.
A poster on the wall boasts that Myrmidon employees are ‘busy as ants!’, complete with cutesy little cartoon ants marching around the border. Next to that is taped a somewhat ragged reminder about company privacy and safety policies, including an unusually detailed line about 'concealed weapons' that makes Marc raise an eyebrow.
He looks around, his hood and cape almost casting light in the darkened room, hoisting a pure white duffel bag at his side.
“Behind the desk,” Steven whispers inside their brain, “the receptionist always knows everything. You should start there.”
But as Marc slides open the drawers, the files seem innocuous. Meetings and appointments and notes about a brunch being planned for later in the week.
And a handful of locked drawers at the bottom.
He opens them.
Employee records, in a handful of color coded folders. One seems to be pretty standard- Printed certifications and employee profiles mostly of a handful of young grads at their first job- the cousin is in this file.
Then there is a larger file, with names and faces matching all sorts of local mooks, the same ones Jake is used to hearing about in his circles. 8-ball and Knicknack and Piledriver, and a dozen more.
“Aw hell,” Jake thinks, as they flip through the profiles, “They really did hire up everyone in the area.”
The last folder is the smallest, full of what seems to be upper management.
“That one runs a local gambling ring,” says Jake, as they flip through.
“This one supposed to be some sort of heiress," says Steven, "though I’ve never been clear on the details.”
And then there is the last file, the boss of the whole operation- with a face that Marc remembers as one of Mayor Fisk’s aides.
Marc sighs deeply, closing the files. “That guy was right. It does go all the way back to Fisk. Of course it does.”
He jams the files into his duffel bag and moves down the hallway. He spends a few minutes in each shadowy office poking around, but nothing seems amiss. Just normal piles of paperwork and knicnacks, and a break room with a couple of tragic looking folding chairs and a microwave. Marc spends a little time checking all the cabinets, but they are mostly full of random serving spoons and ragged bags of foam plates.
When he finally makes his way to the conference room at the end of the hallway, his duffel bag is much lighter, aside from a few interesting looking files he'd grabbed, but he doesn’t have much more information about what the company is up to than he started with.
He opens the door- it has no window, he notices, moments too late. As light spills into the darkened hallway, he knows he's messed up.
Inside is a well-lit, windowless, slightly claustrophobic conference room with a long table surrounded by chairs. And sitting in every chair- is a goon in a costume.
There is a moment of silence, then 8-ball says “Oh shit-” and stands to reach for his pool cue. A moon dart sprouts from his hand before he can grab it, and he falls back into his chair as two more goons take his place.
The largest one is a wall of muscle, covered in scars, grin ragged with missing teeth- he cracks his knuckles and laughs. “Who woulda thought, Moon Knight, walking right through our door!”
Marc is already up close, getting him in the neck with a punch, then twice more in the stomach for good measure. Then he dodges as the man grabs for him with a roar, but doesn't dodge the follow up punch.
Marc staggers backwards. He gets his stance again, take a few blows on his forearms, then gets in close, hooking the man over his shoulders and sending his head right through the wall with a loud crash.
The man slumps, body sticking out of the wall, and doesn’t move.
Marc shakes out his hand (that man really is built like a brick house) and eyes the rest of the people in the room- then dodges a stapler as it flies right past his head.
A guy in sleeveless red spandex is expertly juggling office supplies- pencils and staplers and- a mug filled with coffee? A three hole punch? Someone’s brown leather shoe?
“Oops,” Knicknack says, grinning meanly.
“Funny,” Marc says, then tosses a moon dart, nailing the shoe to the far wall.
Knicknack dodges, swearing, dropping the three-hole punch as the only man in the room wearing an actual business suit- the one who used to work for Fisk- leaps up, yelling “Hey! Those weren’t cheap!”
“Why’d Knicknack end up with it, then?” someone mutters quietly.
The man ignores them. “How dare you, Moon Knight, waltzing into our offices during a perfectly legitimate business meeting-”
“It’s the middle of the night” mutters someone else.
“- Why, I have half a mind to call our lawyers. But first…" He raises a hand dramatically, and Marc braces himself as he sees the room come to attention. There really are a lot of them. "Myrmidons, attack!”
With a roar, the rest of the room springs at Marc, and he finds himself dodging, and punching, and throwing moon darts in a blur of frenzied activity.
An arm hooks around his neck, yanking him off balance and choking him for a long moment until he can grab the person’s shoulder and twist them to the floor. A couple of blood splattered punches later, and Marc is rolling off the unconscious body, dodging a sword that is cutting through the air right where he’d been.
Marc takes a stance, back to the wall- and faces a man in an iron-man themed Hawaiian shirt and a skull mask, holding a katana. The man yells, “I’ll show you what I’m made of, Moon Knight!" and lunges forward.
Marc grabs a conference chair to use as a shield- hissing in pain as a sword stabs through the side of it and catches him on the forearm- but with a sharp twist, he uses the chair to pull the sword out of the attacker's hand, then throws both the chair and the sword right into the face of the next guy. That guy staggers back to his feet and rushes forward- directly past a sidestepping Marc, and into the guy in the Hawaiian shirt, and they both go down in a tangle of limbs.
Knicknack stands up from behind the table, tossing a 6-inch binder threateningly. "Think fast!"
Marc dives forward into a roll, his cape flaring behind him, as the binder clatters onto the unconscious bodies.
"Oh come on now," Knicknack says, cheerily, "Don't be like that." He punctuates his sentence by tossing pens like daggers. "Just, stay, still for a moment, damn you."
Marc does not stay still, and as each pen sticks just a hair behind him, quivering in the wall, he lunges over the table, tackling Knicknack.
Knicknack gets him over the head with a coffee cup- Marc sees "No 1 Henchman" printed on the side right as it lands, but Marc gets an arm around Knicknack's neck, and after a few moments of flailing, he sags to the floor, motionless.
Reeling slightly, and covered in lukewarm coffee, Marc staggers upright, and turns to deal with the last of the people still in the room-
Which is when the man in the business suit gets Marc in the side with that goddamn katana.
The last thing Marc sees as he falls to the ground is the black and gold of Hunter’s Moon striding into the fray, his radiant white cape flaring behind him- a twin to Marc's own.
—
“My son,” says Khonshu, and Marc is floating in a void, the mythic figure of Khonshu looming large around him. “My foolish son, working so hard to fulfill my mission.”
Marc tries to remember for a moment why the sight of Khonshu fills him with just as much rage as it does longing.
“What-” he starts to say, then remembers. “You’re in Asgard,” he says. “You’re in prison. You can’t be here.”
“Calling upon me only when it is convenient? How faithless you are.”
“I didn’t call you.” There is a burning in Marc's side- pain, then numbness, then nothing.
“You didn’t need to," Khonshu says. "You are mine, and I will not let you go so easily. Besides- ” he says, and his skeletal visage seems to smirk in the darkness of the moonlit void, light refracting his image into the perfect orb of a full moon. “I have two fists.”
—
Marc woke up on the medical table in Badr’s clinic, groaning.
“Hello, Marc. How nice of you to join us.” Badr’s face was disapproving, but he was still gently wrapping bandages around Marc’s forearm.
“Badr.” Marc replied curtly, attempting to lever himself up to sitting. “Why do I keep waking up here?”
“Stop getting injured and I will stop repairing you.”
“How did you even find me? I know Jake and Steven didn’t tell you shit.”
Badr raises an eyebrow. “Reese called me. She said you might be doing something foolish on behalf of the local community. Something about a horde of middle-schoolers invading your temple?”
Marc groaned.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll walk it off, it’s nothing.”
“I disagree,” said Badr, tugging on the bandages and making Marc wince in pain. “It is not nothing. In fact, it might have been much worse, had I not been there to rescue you. It would be a loss to our Father if you were to perish in such a shortsighted endeavor.”
Marc touched a spot on his side that ought to have a nasty stab wound, but instead has only unbroken skin. “You know Khonshu isn’t gonna let go of me that easy.”
“And yet, you continue to antagonize him. Please, Marc, refrain from such foolishness in the future.”
Marc shrugged. “I make no promises.”
Badr sighed, tying off Marc’s bandages. “That is what I was afraid of.”
Marc stood up, finding his ragged, slightly bloodstained duffel bag sitting on a chair in the corner of the room. He opened it up, fishing out the detonator for the explosives he’d planted in the offices before he got waylaid in a conference room. “I’m going now. I’ve got unfinished business with a creepy company.”
—
The security cameras don’t pick up much on the street where Myrmidon Central rented its office. The footage is grainy, the coverage is spotty, and for some reason they don’t even look at the obvious entry and exit points of the street, or the buildings on it- especially that particular building.
So no one sees Moon Knight, walking stiffly, enter the office building sometime before 4am. No one sees him pull a fire alarm, then quietly leave again.
Minutes later as the handful of cleaners and night owls are standing confusedly in the street waiting for the all clear- the building bursts into a cloud of billowing smoke and flames, windows shattering and ash and debris falling into the streets… right as the fire trucks pull to a stop, sirens blaring.
—
“The bad news,” Marc says, sitting at Angela’s coffee table in full Mr. Knight costume, holding yet another cup of coffee he cannot drink, “is that you’ve lost your job.”
“What,” she says, sounding slightly shell-shocked.
“Yeah, Myrmidon Industries had a bit of a… mishap. A gas leak, probably, definitely, for sure.”
Angela holds her coffee cup like a lifeline. “I see.”
“The good news-” Marc says, then pauses. “Well, the real good news is that your former company is about to be too busy dealing with accusations of insurance fraud and money laundering to worry about former employees they don’t even have paperwork for.”
“...What?”
“Yeah,” says Marc, sliding her a stack of file folders. “Too bad the employee records didn’t make it through the fire.
She blinks at him, and he sets his cup down and steeples his gloved hands.
“The other good news, is that I’ve already found you a new job.”
“Th- thanks?,” says Angela, but it is definitely a question.
Marc nodded as reassuringly as possible. “How do you feel about medical offices? Because I know a local doctor who needs better management. And you come highly recommended.”
—
Marc walked into the Midnight Mission, and the reception desk was exactly where it should be near the entrance. All the potted plants were in their usual places, and there was only one set of windows looking out onto the darkened street, flickering streetlight and all.
It was very quiet inside.
“I see the middle schoolers are gone,” Marc said, a question as much as a statement.
“Yes,” said Reese. “Seems like someone's cousin told them things were safe again. Or as safe as they ever get around here.”
“Good,” said Marc, looking around the entryway. “That's good. ...What do you think Reese. Should we- hang some pictures? Move some furniture around?”
“They’ll be back on Thursday after school, Marc. Seems like they decided to make some sort of study club here.
“Ah,” said Marc, feeling inexplicably caught-out. “Well, I suppose that’s fine, every so often. If the lobby is any indication, the Mission would be pleased to have them around.
“Yes,” said Reese, “I'm sure it would make the Mission very happy.”