I walk EDEN's main boulevard the way a parent walks through a birthday party they spent way too much money on, half proud, half waiting for something to catch fire.
A woman stops dead in front of the plaza fountain and just stares up at it, the way you'd look at something in a museum. A kid tears past me chasing a floating lantern, laughing loud enough that three strangers turn to grin at him. Off to my left, a small crowd has gathered around Gabumon, and one of them is trying to pet him like he's a large dog at a farmer's market, slow and careful about it, like he might spook.
Gabumon lets them. He looks thrilled about it, honestly.
I don't say anything to any of them. Don't need to. I just get to stand here and watch people fall in love with something I spent eighteen months and every spare dollar building, and that alone is worth more than the user count ticking up in the corner of my vision.
That's when I clock the guy who isn't smiling.
He's standing near the edge of the plaza, off from the flow of foot traffic, and he moves like he's still figuring out where his own feet are. A passing airbike gets a look like it personally offended him. When someone brushes past his shoulder, he flinches like he expected it to hurt.
Older guy, I decide. Somebody's dad, dragged in here by his kids and left to fend for himself in a world made of light and floating UI elements.
I've fielded enough of these. I head over.
"First time?" I ask, keeping it light.
He looks at me like the question surprised him, then nods once. "Something like that."
"You're doing better than most," I say. "Most people faceplant into a wall in the first five minutes. You're just standing there being confused. That's basically expert level."
That gets something out of him, not quite a laugh, more like the ghost of one. "I'll take it."
I walk him through the basics: how to actually look at something instead of turning his whole body toward it, how the movement here reads intention more than muscle, so he doesn't have to fight his own limbs just to get anywhere. He listens like I'm handing him something that matters, not explaining a video game to a confused stranger, and that should've been my first clue. Nobody listens that hard to tutorial small talk.
"So what brought you in?" I ask, mostly just making conversation.
He's quiet for a second, like he's deciding how much of the real answer to give me. "Somebody suggested it might help. Get a feel for how people actually live now."
"Now" comes out with a weight I don't understand yet, like the word's doing more work than it should.
"That's a very roundabout way to try a video game," I say.
"I've been told I do things the roundabout way lately."
There's something underneath that I can't place. Not sadness exactly. More like a man carrying a suitcase he hasn't figured out how to set down yet.
I keep talking anyway, filling the space the way I always do when a conversation gets too quiet for my taste. A few landmarks get pointed out. Which food stalls are decorative and which ones actually serve something. That the floating lanterns were Peter's idea, and he'll never admit how proud he is of them.
He asks a question about the lanterns, simple and direct, no wasted words. Something in the phrasing of it, some rhythm underneath the sentence, snags at a memory I can't quite place yet.
I glance at him properly for the first time, really look this time: the set of his jaw, the eyes, the way he's standing at parade rest even when nobody told him to.
Oh.
Oh, no.
My brain runs the math about four seconds too slow, and then it hits like a car crash I saw coming and couldn't swerve out of.
I am currently giving a beginner's tutorial to Captain America.
Every instinct I have wants to short circuit right here. I want to ask a hundred questions, tell him I've seen documentaries about him, ask what the ice was like, ask if he's actually met Tony yet and how that conversation went. The fanboy in me is already halfway out the door, sprinting toward the exit marked say something embarrassing.
I don't let him out.
Because the thing is, nobody in his life right now is treating him like a normal guy who's confused about a video game. Everybody's treating him like a monument, some symbol who got thawed out and handed a flag. He doesn't need one more person doing that to him in the middle of the one place he came to feel less lost.
So I don't. I just keep walking him through it, same tone as before, like the last four seconds didn't happen.
"The lanterns follow a pathing script," I say. "Peter'll deny he coded a whole aesthetic feature just because they looked pretty in a mockup, but I've seen the commit history."
He almost smiles at that. Actually almost.
His shoulders ease down half an inch, like he clocked exactly what I just chose not to do.
"It's strange," he says after a moment. "Trying to catch up on eighty years in the space of a few conversations."
"Eighty years is a lot to cram into small talk," I say. "I'd start with snacks. Snacks have gotten genuinely better."
"Noted."
"And phones. Whatever you've heard about phones, it's worse than that."
That gets a real laugh out of him this time, short and caught off guard, like he wasn't expecting to have one today.
We talk a while longer, nothing heavy, nothing that needs a headline. He asks about EDEN's purpose, why I built it, and I give him the honest answer instead of the pitch-deck version: that I wanted to build something people could just be happy inside of, for once, without needing to survive it first.
He looks at me a beat too long after I say that. "That's a good reason to build something."
"Better than most of mine," I say. "The rest were mostly spite and stubbornness."
"Those work too."
The conversation runs its course the way good ones do, without either of us forcing an ending. He tells me he should probably head out, mentions something vague about needing to be somewhere, the kind of vague that tells me SHIELD's fingerprints are on his schedule somewhere even if he didn't say it outright.
"I'll probably see you around," he says. Not a promise. Just a fact, stated plain.
"Looking forward to it," I say, and I mean it more than the words sound like they carry.
He gives a short, economical nod and logs out.
I stand there in the middle of my own city for a second, replaying the whole conversation, still not entirely sure it happened.
I just gave Captain America a tutorial on how to walk.
I log out laughing to myself, and I don't stop the whole walk back to my desk.
***
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