The yellow taxi screeched to a halt outside the imposing glass doors of Oscorp Tower. Peter's scrunched-up hundred dollar bill jumped out of her tiny clutch the instant Gwen popped the clasp and she handed it over absent-mindedly, fishing around for her security pass, not waiting for change before she slammed the car door behind her and rushed into the empty foyer. She half-skidded to the elevator in her kitten heels, pressed for the floor of the intern office and, after what seemed an interminable ascent, rushed breathlessly to her locker. Fumbling through her combination she thanked her lucky stars that she had lacked the motivation to ever actually use the gym clothes she had, in a fit of good intentions, brought to work that day, months previously. She grabbed the gym bag, kicked off her heels, threw them in her locker and purposefully made her way through the all but deserted building to the thirty-fourth floor conference room that she had been working in two nights previously when Peter first encountered this hideous new enemy.
Gwen dropped her gym bag and ran first to the window to see if there was any sign of Spiderman or the bird creatures. The gentle flurry of snow seemed the only movement on the sky line. She scanned as far as she could but knew that time was ticking away.
She hurried to the credenza that extended along the length of the room and pulled out of the orderly drawers a large sheet of paper, a roll of tape, a manila folder and a Sharpie. In a style like that she had seen used at Oscorp before, she scrawled "HAZARD" in official looking letters on the paper and taped it carefully over the one glass panel that looked out into the corridor beyond. She'd seen the HAZARD sign utilised for its proper purposes and to allow a couple of her fellow interns a little time to themselves but either way, no one at Oscorp opened a door marked HAZARD unless they were properly kitted out in the HAZMAT protective suit and headgear. The other two walls of the conference room were home to various screens and monitors and the back subsisted of the floor to ceiling windows looking out across New York.
Once satisfied that no one would see in or gain access from the corridor, Gwen yanked the now painful pins out of her up-do and threw them in her bag, then reached around to unzip her gown, letting it shimmy to the floor while she rummaged for her t-shirt. She threw on t-shirt and sweat pants and jammed her feet into her tell-tale spotless joggers, hurriedly but carefully hanging her gown over the back of a chair.
Carefully propping the conference room door open with the roll of tape, Gwen grabbed the manila folder and moved quickly into the Oscorp Central Laboratory on the same floor. It had been here that she'd caught Peter hiding amongst her group of interns so long before. She slid open the cupboard beneath the closest work station and scanned the supplies until she located the smallest beaker she could see, about the size of a shot glass.
Across the floor of the central lab she strode and along the glass-walled corridor, the surface on which she walked falling away to her left into the cavern between skyscrapers below. She half-jogged down the dark brown panelled hallway to a door marked with the red double zero symbol and a prominent plaque that read Biocable Development Unit. Her hand flew straight to the neon-lit key pad, the swipe combination to which, despite its regular updates, she'd had many opportunities to unobtrusively learn. The heavy door clicked and the handle responded easily to pressure. She slid surreptitiously into the brightly lit white room, pulling the door carefully behind her.
Mechanical arms clicked and whirred and conveyer belts hummed, ferrying back and forth little pallets of the silver pellets she recognised as those scattered across the surface of Peter's desk. She strode without hesitation to the glass door, emanating its purple glow and, ignoring the enormous lettering that proclaimed access to be restricted, slipped into the dimly lit lab beyond. Gwen took a moment to exhale. She cautiously entered the maze of webbing over which presided thousands upon thousands of tiny genetically-enhanced spiders glowing white and turquoise under the black lights.
"So beautiful," she breathed. Her brief moment of wonder passed and Gwen very carefully set to work. She was determined not to disturb the webs in any way. She carefully extended the corner of the manila folder toward the first arachnid in the web. In an instant it clambered onto the card and Gwen moved decisively to trap it with the beaker. She didn't have a moment to lose. Carefully, before the spider had time to feel particularly threatened, Gwen held the folder above her head, her two hands still applying pressure to either end of the beaker. Moving fast, she pressed the beaker and folder against the precise point of her vertebrae that Peter had shown her on the nape of his own neck. She wasn't sure how important the contact site would be but she didn't want to take any chances. She took a deep breath to steady herself and then, like a conjurer whipping a table cloth out from under a fully laid table, yanked the manila folder away. The creature instantaneously reacted. A sharp sting and she was bitten.
After waiting a moment, hoping against hope that her action would prove true, she swept the lip of the beaker firmly upwards against her flesh and banged the manila folder back on top. It had worked. The spider remained trapped in the jar but lay dead on the bottom. A thin line of web seemed to run from the rear tip of the spider's abdomen out of the beaker and up over her shoulder. Gwen began to feel faint. She knew from Peter's experience that she wouldn't have long. Still grasping the beaker and the folder, she made her way carefully out of the lab and back into the dark brown panelled corridor. Her breathing began to feel laboured, her feet felt clumsy and her head was beginning to pound. She soldiered on. As she returned to the glass-walled corridor, she had to press herself against the glass to remain upright. Gwen made the mistake of looking down and felt the bile rise in her throat as she found herself seemingly suspended over the abyss. Entering the central lab she hobbled, dizzy and sweating, from one work station to the next slowly making her way across the floor.
She stumbled back into the conference room, kicking the roll of tape away and the door slammed shut behind her. Gwen collapsed onto the floor, smashing the beaker beneath her, her last conscious thoughts of Peter.
ooo
Peter had awoken to the sharp sound of that same infuriating whistle he'd heard the previous night. He was lying on his back on a cold glass surface and he watched helplessly as his assailants circled, suddenly so high above him, and soared away into the night sky. A second or two after they disappeared from his sight he realised where he was. He tensed his body and flipped himself over into a push-up posture, staring down into what seemed like an enormous aquarium full of his formally-attired classmates. After a moment of open-mouthed silence they burst into relieved applause, fist-pumps and hoots of relief to see Spiderman recover from the terrifying fall and total inertia that they'd collectively witnessed. Peter quickly scanned the crowd. No Gwen.
He managed to jovially salute his audience below, which went over extremely well, and shot a web into the sky above, noting as he did so, the presence of an ill-fitting figure in the room below. It looked to Peter like Anthony Abbott, but where did that guy ever go without a huge entourage? He must have been in the court house and popped in to watch the fight above.
For the moment, Peter had much deeper concerns. Where were the birdmen now? Had they flown off to find another set of victims? If Gwen had left the court house, presumably that left her as potential prey out in the open. Peter immediately commenced one of his familiar tours of the city, eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary.
Once satisfied that there were no gruesome feasts taking place in any of the seedier parts of town, Peter began a dedicated search for Gwen. Dawn was approaching and she hadn't been answering his increasingly desperate phone calls. He allowed himself to get as close as he dared to Gwen's apartment block but he could sense, even from a distance, that she wasn't there. He tried zooming over his own place in case she'd gone there looking for him. Nothing.
Wracking his brains for ideas as to where she might be, he thought he might as well try Oscorp Tower. Something specific to do would help him hold at bay his fears that perhaps the creatures somehow knew who he was, somehow knew what Gwen meant to him and had somehow snatched her away.
Drawing closer he sensed an odd sort of energy faintly emanating from the tower. He circled the structure but noticed nothing out of the ordinary. As he had done the previous night, he landed, catlike on the glass and clambered up the side of the building, peering into the various windows. The boffins may have worked late on a Thursday but Friday night into Saturday morning had done a much better job of clearing the place. Only a very few researchers remained in their labs, a skeleton staff seemed to be cleaning or maintaining equipment and the conference rooms seemed universally empty.
Just before Peter crawled as high as the thirty-fourth floor, the odd energy he'd sensed seemed to feel more tangible. He peered more carefully into the darkened section of window he'd just clambered on to and felt as if his heart might stop.
There on the floor, surrounded by tiny shards of what was unmistakably broken glass, lay Gwen, face down, utterly inert. Was she breathing? Peter couldn't immediately tell. He hammered on the bullet-proof, triple glazed pane with all his might. No response. He had to get to her.
"Gwen!" he yelled, though he knew it to be pointless. "Gwen!"
In his frustration and fear, the fear that felt just like an icy fist around his heart, Peter slammed his forehead against the pane.
Instantaneously he sensed movement and another wave of that strange energy. He raised his eyes to look ahead. No Gwen. All he could see were the sparkling shards of glass. Something made him raise his eyes further. There above him, clinging to the ceiling of the conference room in her gym gear, her face obscured by her dangling blonde hair, was Gwen. And from the nape of her neck dangled an almost imperceptible silky strand. And on the end of the silky strand dangled a very familiar looking spider.
