Chapter Three

The Daily Bugle.

J. Jonah Jameson was screaming into the telephone at an advertiser who had a problem with one of his recent controversial editorials, peppering his speech with adjectives that would certainly never be printable in his or any other newspaper.

Joe "Robbie" Robertson cautiously entered the office of the temperamental editor in chief. "Jonah?" he said. "A minute of your time?"

Jameson held up his index finger as he finished chewing out the man on the phone. He slammed down the receiver, and shifted his attention to Robbie as he lit a cigar. "What is it, Robbie?"

"Chloe Sullivan is here, sir."

"Who?"

"The girl who won the Writers of the Future essay contest?"

Jonah's face lit up. "Send her in!"

Robbie left and returned with Chloe and Clark. Jonah sat with his feet on his desk, puffing away at his cigar.

"Chloe Sullivan! Congratulations, my dear! Your essay was positively brilliant, young lady! Let me shake your hand!"

Chloe, embarrassed but smiling, stepped forward and shook Jonah's hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jameson. This is my friend, Cla-"

"You're a woman after my own heart, Miss Sullivan! Straight! To the point! Not afraid to tell it like it is, call it like you see it, cut the crap and lay it all on the line!"

"Um… well, thank you sir, I'm flattered that you think-"

"Yours was the only essay that had the guts to say what I've said from the very beginning!" Jonah got to his feet and spread his hands as if envisioning a headline.

"Spider-Man! A Criminal! A Menace To Society! A Masked Plague On The People of New York!"

"What? But, Mr. Jameson, I didn't-"

"I like your style, Miss Sullivan! Keep it up and there'll be a job for you at the Daily Bugle one day!"

"Mr. Jameson!" Chloe said, firmly. "I'm sorry, but… apparently you didn't get the point of my essay."

Jameson's cigar drooped to one side of his mouth. "Eh?"

"My point was that we should be ashamed to live in a society where heroes like Spider-Man feel they need to hide their faces behind masks, to protect themselves… not that he's a menace for doing so. I'm afraid you didn't see my point at all."

For once, Jameson was speechless. This only lasted a moment, however. "Robbie!" he bellowed, turning his back on Chloe. "Get that advertiser back on the phone, I wasn't through with him!"

"Jonah," Robbie said. "Chloe and Clark are here because the prize for the essay contest was that they get to follow a reporter around for a day and see how he does his job."

Jonah tapped his foot impatiently. "Robbie, I don't have time for this."

"I was just wondering who you'd like to send them on assignment with, sir."

At that moment, a man burst into the room, past Robbie, Chloe, and Clark and slapped a note on Jonah's desk.

"You killed my Daredevil story!" the man yelled.

"Take it easy, Urich. Can't you see I'm busy?"

"Jonah, I am really close on this one, just give me a little more time… you can't kill this story on me, not this time."

"I'm not wasting any more copy space on unsubstantiated rumor, Urich."

"Daredevil is real, and I can prove it. You know, the Post doesn't think my stories are trash. In the last three weeks alone I've gotten offers-"

"Then go work for the Post for all I care, Urich. You can chase Daredevil on your time, not mine."

Urich turned away in disgust and walked out of the room. "Asshole," he muttered under his breath.

"I heard that."

Jonah puffed cigar smoke into the air. Then he noticed Clark and Chloe still standing in front of his desk, looking awestruck at what they'd just seen.

"Urich! Get back in here!" Jonah boomed.

Urich poked his head back into the office.

"I may have an assignment for you after all..."

. . . . . .

Back in Smallville, Lex and Lionel sat in the back of the helicopter that was flying them to the airport, where their private jet was being fueled.

"You know, dad," Lex said, running his finger casually down the side of the window. "I don't suppose you expected me to convince Harry to sell OSCORP to you purely out of the goodness of my heart?"

Lionel grinned. "You're a Luthor, son. I never even entertained the notion."

Lex slowly rolled his head from one side to the other. "What is it this time, dad? Bribery or blackmail?"

The elder Luthor put his hand over his heart, as if wounded. "Such terms… I was merely going to suggest a business proposition, son."

Lex folded his arms and looked at his father, expectantly.

"CADMUS Labs," Lionel said. "You and I have been butting heads over what to do with that particular piece of property for months now. For some reason, you seem insistent on keeping it running, while I have no use for it and would rather see it shut down and sold. Since we have equal ownership of CADMUS, we seem to be at a stalemate."

"I know all this. Get to the point," Lex said, flatly.

"If you convince Harry Osborn to sell his company to me, I will sign over full ownership of CADMUS Labs to you, no questions asked."

Lex stared straight ahead. He had been funding a private research team out of CADMUS for months, analyzing his findings from the caves beneath Smallville. He was sure his father didn't know what he'd been doing with the lab, only that he was putting it to some personal use. Yet, Lionel had been trying unsuccessfully to shut it down almost from the beginning. Why would he give it up so easily?

"Do we have a deal, son?"

Lex turned and looked his father in the eye. He knew the gleam that he saw there all too well. His father knew something about OSCORP that no one else did… and he wanted it very badly.

. . . . . .

Harry Osborn walked through the abandoned sub-basement of the OSCORP factory. Tables had been overturned, papers and broken glass littered the floor. In the center of the room was an empty chamber, large enough to hold a man, with the front totally blown out of it. Inside the chamber was some kind of vertical slab, with straps on it that seemed designed to hold someone down. Various machinery that seemed to have been once used for monitoring vital signs were laid to waste, broken and beaten in like the rest of the equipment in this deserted laboratory.

"This is where you did it, isn't it dad?" Harry said aloud. "This is where you became the Green Goblin."

Harry started digging through some of the rubble. He lifted up a large shelving unit that had toppled over. Underneath it was a rack of glass vials. Most of them had shattered and broken, seeping some kind of putrid green ooze all over the concrete floor.

One of the vials was intact.

Harry picked it up and slowly turned it over in his hands.

"This was the serum you were working on… the enhanced strength serum, that was supposed to get you that defense contract…" He looked up at the broken frame of the glass chamber. "That's what turned you into the Goblin…"

Harry rose to his feet, and walked inside the chamber.

"I can almost feel what you must have felt… the power… the strength…" He ran his hands over the straps of the hard metal operating slab. "You were going to show them all, weren't you? Show them not to mess with Norman Osborn… that they couldn't shut you down…"

Unbeknownst to Harry, as he was walking through the chamber, much of the equipment in that lab was still functioning, acting to specifications that Norman Osborn had set shortly before his death. Harry's weight was being measured by a hidden pressure-sensitive mechanism in the floor. Sonar devices were recording his voice patterns. A video unit with a facial recognition program was trained on his every move.

Once the systems in place had confirmed Harry Osborn's identity, thick steel walls slid down from the ceiling, enclosing the chamber inside an impenetrable cube.

"What the-!"

"Harry," Norman Osborn's voice boomed through a loudspeaker in the ceiling. "Welcome to your destiny, my son."

Gas seeped in through a grate in the floor. It began to pour in rapidly, filling the chamber. At first, Harry recoiled in horror. Then he realized that this was just what his father went through… the very transformation that he was about to go through as well. His horror became a rush of excitement.

Harry fell to his knees, shaking in fits of violent, uncontrollable laughter.