Adventures in Babysitting ↠ Peter Parker [1] ✓

03 | Flashlight

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ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING
iii. FLASHLIGHT

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   RILEY USUALLY FORGOT SHE was considered "famous". She wasn't necessarily a regular celebrity, either. She wasn't an actor like Leonardo DiCaprio or a musician like the boys of One Direction. MJ liked to describe her as a Kardashian with superpowers sometimes.

   Not only was Riley Stark a celebrity, but she was known across the entire galaxy as a hero. She had saved an entire universe, after all, and Riley was more than aware of it. All the nightmares, the trauma, and constant celebration of her and her colleagues reminded her more than enough.

   See, the thing she oftentimes forgot was the fact that people knew her by her real name now.

   She had grown used to people talking about Valor over the years, so it made sense that she was taken aback just a bit whenever the general public would talk about "Riley Stark" and her growing legacy. And the craziest part was that everyone hardly blinked an eye at the fact that she was a Stark! Everyone just cared about Riley, including her peers at camp.

   Since no one at Camp Mirkhaven had their personal devices on them, they were all left to gossiping about Riley behind her back rather than online. Now that Riley was thinking about it, she suspected that Tony had something to do with that little coincidence. The entire camp shared the inciting secret of the valiant Valor's whereabouts.

   Everyone wanted to get to know Valor and her life on a more personal level. Everyone knew who Captain America and Hulk were, but who was Valor? That was a popular question on everyone's minds, even several months after the war. This, naturally, resulted in Riley being faced with dozens upon dozens of questions every single day.

   She was trained to answer PR questions a specific way, so whenever she was confronted by her peers at camp, she was prepared to answer the usual questions she anticipated, such as "What's it like being an Avenger?" and "How did you keep your identity a secret for so long?" However, the questions her fellow campers ended up asking her were certainly more... unique than anything she could've predicted.

   "Who would win in a fight: Thor or Mary Poppins?"

   "Can the Black Panther speak to all cats or just panthers?"

   "If Quicksilver ran fast enough, could he travel through time like that one episode of the Suite Life of Zack and Cody?"

   "Can you please tell Hulk to stop dabbing?"

   Sometimes she would be begged to use her powers of ultraviolet ray manipulation on others. When Riley emphasized that if she did, she would definitely harm them (which wasn't something she wanted to do), almost every single person responded with something along the lines of: "Riley, most of us already died. We can take it."