When they passed the giant road sign indicating what borough they were entering, Spider-man's otherwise so adventurous mood dropped like an anvil.
"Brooklyn. Of course it had to be Brooklyn."
"What's wrong with Brooklyn?" Jackpot asked.
"What's NOT wrong with Brooklyn?" he asked her back.
The two heroes followed the signal from the tracer to a badly tended neighbourhood, and soon they landed on a rooftop, looking down on a apparently abandoned warehouse.
"New york never seem to run out of those." Spidey joked.
"Where did Menace go?" Jackpot asked, looking around.
"Wait." Spider-man said and pulled her back. Down on the ground, coming out of the building, Menace opened the large door and locked it behind him. He then leaped away without noticing the two young heroes hiding on the roof.
"Okay," Spidey said. "let's get down there and check it out."
They jumped down to ground level and inspected the door, it was locked with a large and heavy padlock.
"Rip it off." MJ urged.
"Wait." Peter told her. "If he comes back and find a broken lock it might ruin our surprise. We better find a smarter way to get inside."
The two teens looked around for a moment, searching for an alternative entrance, and soon Peter came across something.
"We'll crawl in through that vent."
Mary Jane looked up at the ventilation opening that Peter had found. It was narrow, but probably large enough for a grown person to squeeze his head through.
"You're telling me we gotta squeeze ourself through that thing?"
"Yeah."
"Are you even sure you can get your head in there?"
Spidey looked at Jackpot. "What do you mean with my head?"
"Well... You do have kind of a big head on a skinny body. You're basically shaped like a lollipop."
Spider-man looked at Jackpot in silence for a long moment before he went; "Let's just get this over with." and then climbed up the wall, ripped open the vent and started to crawl in inside the ventilation shaft.
Jackpot shook her head as she saw her boyfriends legs and feet disappear into the wall.
"This job is getting less and less glamorous by the day." she said before she herself lifted herself up on the wall and squeezed herself into the dark opening.
However, as the two heroes made their way into the building, a pair of eyes were watching them from the other side of the street. The man in disguise reached into his pocket and pulled out a small handheld transceiver in which he spoke into.
"Call Captain Quaid, things are starting to heat up down here."
It was the night duty at the Triskelion security room. Several SHIELD-agents were sitting in front of hundreds of monitors with their cups of coffee and wished they were rather somewhere else.
"Hey Sergeant. Can you come over here for a moment, sir?" one of the agents on duty suddenly called out in the middle of the great boredom.
"What is it agent?" the SHIELD officer asked while sipping coffee from his mug.
"I'm picking up something on the motion detectors. But... I can't make out what it is. It's not giving off any heat signals."
The higher grade agent looked at the monitor in front of him with confusion equally that of his subordinate. "What the hell...? Give me visual on that thing!"
The security agent tapped a few buttons on the keyboard in front of him and the monitor change into a black and white picture. Before the agents eyes a picture of a strange metal object appeared, the alien object looked like it was combined by several pieces of junk. Then suddenly the object reached out an arm towards the camera and then the picture changed into static.
"Sergeant!" another agent called out. "I'm picking up the same thing in sector twelve, five and twenty-eight."
"In sector thirty, ten, eleven, and forty-one too!" one more agent yelled.
"Sector one to nine and twenty-seven!"
"Sector forty and... My god, there's hundreds of them..."
All the agents stared at the wall in horror as all the monitors before them turned into static noise. The superior officer yelled out to his subordinate agents;
"Get me Director Danvers on the line! We're under attack!"
Spidey broke off a broken fan that was in the way and called out to Jackpot that was right behind him. The echo in the ventilation shaft caused his words to linger around them.
"How you doing back there, sweety?"
"Oh I'm not complaining." she called back sarcasticly. "I've only swallowed a mouthful of dust, all I can see are the soles of your feet and I now have the interesting knowledge of what it feels like to be toothpaste. By the way, you stepped in gum."
"My, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Hold on, we're almost out."
Peter slammed the vent hatch in front of him open with his fist and wormed himself out and down to the floor. MJ followed him shortly after.
"See, that wasn't so hard." he said after standing up om his legs and brushing of some dust from his suit. "You know, this job require a lot of sneaking for people wearing such colorful outfits." He then turned around and noticed that MJ was still trying to squeeze herself out of the air duct, having stopped when she was halfway through. From the hips and down she was still inside the wall.
"What are you waiting for?" Peter asked her.
"I'm stuck!" she whined.
"What?"
"I'm stuck. My butt is stuck." she went again.
Peter had to cover his mouth to stop himself from starting to laugh. "Really...?"
"It's not funny!" MJ snapped at him. "Help me out of here."
Peter gave out a sigh as he took MJ by the hands. "There's never a batch of chicken grease lying around when you really need one. Okay, clench!" he told her and then pulled with all his strenght. After some effort, Mary Jane's lower rear finally got free from the too small opening in the wall and she came flying out the air duct and into Peter's arms.
"Hello." he said to her, hiding a amused smile behind the mask.
"That was so embarrassing." Mary Jane grumbled after coughing out a smaller dust ball.
"And to think, you complained about the size of my head. Well Red, your butt is bigger then my head."
"Please. Can we leave my butt alone for the moment?"
"But it's such a nice butt."
Jackpot slapped her joking boyfriend over the arm and pointed out into the room to get his attention elsewhere. It was then he noticed what they had crawled into.
The room was large and with a high ceiling, with several pipes moving along the walls. The space was mostly empty, except one corner of the room where someone had placed several tables, on which many electronic devices were placed, accomplished by vails, jars, bunsen burners, large vats filled with various chemicals and scratch papers in unsorted piles. The only light came from a single, dim lightbulb and the blue mechanical light from the equipment on the tables. The whole place reminded of a unconducted crime lab.
"Wow this place is sooo creepy." Jackpot said. "My womans intuition are tingling."
"That wasn't funny."
"What is all this?" she asked as the two of them stepped closer to investigate.
"Looks like a chemistry lab to me." Spider-man answered while inspecting a laboratory centrifuge standing on a table.
"This must be where they made the OZ."
"Yeah, but where's..." He stopped talking when he saw a large refrigerator standing against the wall. It's door was transparent, and inside there washundreds of glass jar filled with an orange liquid.
Jackpot walked up next to Spider-man to look at what he was looking at. They stared at it with tense feeling in the air.
"Is that...?" Jackpot asked.
"Yep," Spidey answered without showing any emotion in his voice. "that's the whole reason our lifes are so damn miserable."
Jackpot stepped a little closer and opened up the fridge. When the door was wide open and a slightly cold breeze from the fridge washed over her, she picked up one jar with the serum and inspected it. She had a hard time imagine that she had this strange ooze-like thing inside her body, it was even harder to understand that someone would actually kill for something like this.
"Okay, put that down." Spidey told her. "We need to get out of here and call someone."
MJ put the jar down and closed the refrigerator door. "I suppose you don't have a direct number to SHIELD, do you?"
"No, but we got Johnny's number and... uhm... heh, cold in here honey?" Spider-man asked as the redhead turned around to face him.
"It's a little bit chilly, yeah. Why?"
"Well, um, heh, 'cause right now you kinda look like you're smuggling gumdrops." he told her with a small snigger.
MJ looked down at her suit and then noticed that the cold had have a visual effect on her anatomy. Her cheeks blushed beet red and she quickly wrapped her arms around her breast.
"Oh man. First my ass and now this. What is it with me? Why does my body always have to be the butt of all jokes?" she whined while rubbing the heat back into her torso.
"How ironic that you would use the term 'butt'." Peter said, still sniggering. "Now put those away, girl, before you poke someones eyes out."
"There wouldn't be a risk for that if you took your eyeballs out of my cleavage once in a while." MJ cracked back.
"Never!" Peter stated firmly.
MJ gave out a sigh. "You think this is hilarious, don't you?"
"Maybe."
"Could you remind me again why I put up with your jokes?"
"Because you love me?"
"Yeah, but that's not the reason."
"Okay, maybe it's because you're a little crazy?"
"Girls don't get crazy. We get hormonal."
"Ah, the ever returning excuse."
Mary Jane just shook her head at Peter and walked pass him. She stuck her arm back into the same air vent she just recently had problem squeezing herself out of and pulled out her tiny backpack. She had been forced to worm herself out of the shoulder strap while inside the shaft, otherwise she would have been stuck inside it. She opened her backpack and pulled out her cellphone. She then dialed the number to Johnny Storm.
"Hope Johnny's not asleep." MJ said as the call connected pass several of the Baxter buildings security systems.
"He's not." Peter answered, knowing that The Human Torch never go to bed until after 2 AM. And rarely alone.
After the tone had ringed for a few times, Johhny finally picked up his phone.
"Johnny, it's MJ." Jackpot spoke into her phone. "Listen, we need your help, we tracked down Menace and we're in his hide-out right now. You think you can wake up the others and get over here?"
As MJ talked with their friend over the phone, Peter continued to look over the place, checking out all the equipment in the room.
"This is pretty highly-advanced stuff, they must've cost a fortune on the black market." he thought. "But what's he planning on doing with all this OZ? I don't see-"
He stopped in his thoughts as a familiar tingling returned to the back of his head, and it was getting larger and larger. He quickly ran up to MJ and snatched the cellphone out of her hands just as she was giving Johnny directions to their position.
"If you head south from the Brooklyn bridge and- HEY!"
"He's coming back! Find somewhere to hide! NOW!"
MJ turned off her phone as fast as she could and the two young heroes dove in behind a small pyramid of empty boxes and crates. They cowered behind the crates and made themself as invisible as they could as they heard the sound of a heavy lock being unlocked and the heavy door slowly opening with a long creak. The moonlight cast a long eery shadow of the large monster over room.