Uno and Fog: Crashing a Meeting

“What do you think, Juan?”  I jerk away from the reverie I had been in. My father is waiting expectantly at the front of the board room.

“Umm,” I’m trying to remember what he asked me but I can’t seem to recollect what the meeting was even about.  There’s a stack of reports, and a data pad in front of me and I tried to read them earlier but none of it made its way into my conscious mind.  My head has the achy feeling when you haven’t had any sleep, fought a number of faceless shock troops of either a giant conspiracy or a government black op after rescuing test subjects.  “Can you repeat that?”

My father frowns at me for a minute, “perhaps we will get back to marketing when they finish doing whatever research they feel is necessary to formulate and answer.”  I know I am going to catch hell from him later.  I’m his heir apparent and in typical trust fund style I’ve continued to convey the irresponsible veneer of a young man that would rather party than be responsible.

Malcolm from product development actually sneers a little bit, the CFO sighs inwardly, the rest of the room shuffles papers in sympathetic embarrassment for me.

I would like to say that this is a bad day for me.  When you live a double life, something always gives.

For a brief time the company stepped up enforcement of its antidrug policy with more random drug tests than the annual one they generally perform.  My father suspected that I was using something and instead of confronting it directly instead tamped down on everyone company wide.  He thought he could force me into some kind of treatment but all of my tests came back clean, even for alcohol, except for one and that showed the breakdown components for an experimental military hallucinogen (its a long and disturbing story).

That last made him doubt the abilities of the lab.

When he set a private investigator on me I spent a month filling my dance card with as many art exhibitions, charity balls, fund raising galas, opening plays and parties as I could find and tried to hook up with as many aspiring artists, actors, models, heiresses as I could.

I didn’t care if it crashed and burned.

Well, not too much.

They only criteria I had was to avoid anyone that the paparazzi would follow.  The last thing I wanted was to dance once with someone big enough that there would be a deep dive into who I was.

I even wrote checks to many of those foundations, even though as The Fog and I found very little, if any of it, goes to the charitable goals of the foundation, and is used primarily to keep the parties going, keep the people the foundations employed, keep the government involved through political activism and sometimes to fund criminal activities.

While there are real charitable groups that do good, the farther removed the organization is from the people its supposedly helping, the less money it spends on its public function.  Especially if it works primarily to “coordinate” resources or facilitate between charities.

The end result was a series of lectures from him over Sunday dinners over my irresponsibility, my disrespect for myself and the women in my life and getting Father Salvatore to pressure me to get right with God and go to confession.

The collapse of my business venture, Descent, was just more proof in his eyes that business acumen had not been one of the things I had inherited from him.  I expected him to cut me off in some way some day.

The discussion around the table dies down and I see everyone start to look out the window.

I look and see Luminary fighting someone in the air above the city.  Fists colliding and sending the other backwards, they moved back and forth, dodging each other, trying to land a knockout blow while avoiding the other.

It took me a moment to recognize Luminary’s  antagonist.  It was the angry man from the cells that that flown right through the ceilings and taken on the people above.  The one I thought of as Fury.

As their fight got them progressively closer to out building, people started to get up from their seats around the table and back away from the window.  Some even began to leave.

I saw Luminary land a spectacular hit on Fury sending the man spinning with enough knockback that he was headed in our direction.  While he was still recovering, Luminary hit him again sending him crashing through the window into the board room.

People shrieked and ran as glass flew everywhere, the man collided with the table sending it splintering into pieces.  I saw him shake his head clear and glance around.  For a second I thought he might grab a hostage.

Put then I saw his eyes light on me.  He paused just long enough that I knew that somehow he recognized me from the island.  I don’t know how, but he did.

He gave just the smallest of nods before heading back out to face Luminary.

Not good.

I saw my father on the other side of the room looking at me.  I hoped he was just gaging my level of cowardice, since I had neither shrieked nor fled the room.

I hoped he hadn’t noticed the brief acknowledgment Fury had of me.

 

 

 

 

 

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