Earth-65, Home of the Haunting Ghost-Spider
She looked down on her catch from her perch and sighed.
Dressed in her black, white, and pink costume, she jumped down from the lamp post in front of the man currently wiggling inside his new spider web custom-sized onesie. Others might be forgiven for thinking it was closer to a cocoon. They would be wrong of course. Only intelligent creatures like moths used cocoons. And the gentleman was anything but intelligent.
That didn't stop him from noticing her at his side. "Hi, Gwen!" he exclaimed.
"Alright, man. Real talk? Like, real talk," Gwen said with her head uncovered, her face and shoulder-length messy blonde hair plain for anyone to see. Because who the hell kept count of secret identities by that point anyway, and especially in this economy.
No, she wasn't frustrated that the entire world knew her civilian identity. No sir, not at all. Uh-uh. Nope.
Ok, maybe just a bit. The same bit that made her take the decision to attend college in a different dimension.
Gwen crouched, both hands up as if in the middle of an explanation. "I'll level with you. I've fought thugs and ninjas. I survived a war with multiversal soul-sucking immortal vampires. I had the cops raising hell after me. Another war with an army of multiversal electricity dudes. I almost lost my father to a coma. Then another war with the multiversal vampires. You might have noticed the word 'multiversal' a lot there. So a year in jail, receiving sucker punches from every other intern like I was a ragdoll? Doesn't even register in comparison. You? You are just a nuisance.
"You saw me on the other side of the street. You saw me. I shook my head at you. You saw me shaking my head. A universal sign of, 'no', by the way." She brought her hand to her face. "Do not pass go. And still, you went ahead to rob those ice-cream sa — "
Suddenly realizing something, she looked below her foot. Yup, she had just stepped on an ice-cream sandwich.
"Ew," he said. "Sorry about that."
"It's cool," Gwen replied, as she peeled the plastic wrapper off. The sole of her costume opened up and swallowed the stuck foodstuff.
Symbiotes. So convenient. And it was hungry, so everyone's happy.
They stood there, staring at each other in uncomfortable silence for a while.
"So, the hospital let you go," she said. "I'm glad."
He smiled warmly. "Yup. And you kept your promise to keep thwarting me."
"Hey, told ya I was your nemesis, didn't I?" Gwen smiled at the throwback, but it didn't last. "Did Pine Cone show up?"
"Nope." Mirth gave way to sadness.
Gwen nodded in sympathy. "I asked my dad, but no one in his precinct has seen him."
Pine Cone had been her pet hamster, until she'd gifted him to the Bandit when his dog died. They'd become inseparable. And then one day the Bandit went to buy something for once. Seeds for Pine Cone. And he'd met actual robbers. They'd put him on a hospital bed, and Pine Cone was nowhere to be seen.
Maybe that could look like going too personal. And that hamster might not be Gwen's anymore, but she had cared for him for years. And the Bandit was an idiot, but he was her idiot nemesis. Damn right it was personal for her.
"Sorry. I know I promised to find him, but it's been crazy times around and…"
"Don't worry." He shook his head with resignation. "It's been weeks anyway."
And Gwen knew that the worst part was that the Bandit truly cared for that fuzzball.
"Oh well, going back," Gwen continued as she leaned back on the lamp post. "Every time you pull this crap. And every time I'm around I have to ground your ass. It's boring and demeaning for both of us. And I'm not even going to ask how the hell you always get your father to bail you out of jail before the day ends because I suspect the answer to that question might drive me to insanity." Finally, she threw her hands up in the air. "But why, by Kingpin's red jerk shades, why do you keep doing this!?"
He blinked for a moment, as thoughts were surely put for the most insightful reply she'd ever get from such a wise man.
Finally, he smiled. "I'm your greatest arch-nemesis!"
Gwen stood in silence for a moment, looking at his self-satisfied expression.
Wow, what pride, many neurons, so success, such clever.
At that point, she couldn't resist anymore and covered his mouth with a shot of her webs.
"You are still the worst, Bodega Bandit." Gwen shot a web line up to the lamp post and swung away from the scene.
Landing on a roof, Gwen held the pendant hidden by her costume and nicked a finger with her amulet. A portal opened in front of her, sucking the air around. She then stashed the pendant back in its place, unconcerned by the bleeding or the pain. She'd heal fast enough for it to not matter.
'My life is so stupid', she thought as she jumped through the dimensional hole, leaving her homeworld of Earth 65 behind.
And in that street, the Bodega Bandit crawled to a wall, still cocooned, and hummed to himself while waiting for the webs to dissolve, or the cops to show up.
He didn't mind the situation. After all, that girl needed someone harmless to forget for a moment the real monsters and criminals.
Earth-001, Loomworld, home of the Web of Life and Destiny
"Hi guys," Gwen called out when she came through the other side of the portal.
From behind a computer station equipped with plenty of monitors and keyboards that she had no idea what they were for, two of her friends worked tirelessly.
"Gwen, hi!" Octavia Otto greeted her with a smile. "So glad to see you!" The orphan girl was a version of Doctor Octopus who'd joined a heroic group in her world instead of turning to villainy and had now taken residence in this place after Gwen rescued her. While her green robes currently lacked the cybernetic arms typical of other Doc Ocks, she was still a genius and few people knew more about alternate dimensions than she did.
"Hi Gwen," Pavitr said cordially as he focused on building a small drone, dressed in what was a fairly common blue-black and red spider costume that also included a split gray skirt. The Hindu boy had received his powers from some holy men, unlike Gwen's bite from a radioactive spider, and was an engineering prodigy who also had his fair share of experience in monitoring the multiverse. "Didn't know you'd come here to Loomworld today."
Loomworld. Earth-001. The cities and population of the planet were varied, a salad of different cultures across space and time, as they had come from many other dimensions.
And was until recently the seat of power of the Inheritors, a family of rejects from Anne Rice's vampire books who had spent the better part of eternity hunting and feeding on the spider people of the multiverse. And other animal people too, but particularly spiders. Well, until she and other spider buddies had kicked their asses. Most of them had been cloned into babies, their impulses to feed on totems scratched out from their DNA.
But none of that was what gave the world the name of Loomworld. That honor went to the Web of Life and Destiny, residing in a giant palace smack dab in the middle of the biggest city on this Earth. A literal web of vast proportions, each thread representing a different universe.
Among the spiders, there were some sort of mystical avatars that affected how the Web worked. The Other, the Bride, and the Scion. They'd lost the Other. But one of the youngest spiders, Annie, had turned out to be another one called the Patternmaker. She was now capable of repairing the Web and making it stronger.
While communications with the bracelets were restored, it would take a long time yet for other spiders to use their bracelets to actually travel. But Annie was capable of opening new portals to and from Loomworld as needed. It allowed the spiders to keep frequenting Loomworld and guarding the Web, and Annie's parents were really proud of her progress in her superheroing career, but they had imposed ground rules to make sure she didn't skip her life back at their Earth.
It seemed like today those rules were taking a backseat to other matters, though.
"Yeah, I understand Anya wants to see me," Gwen said.
Pavitr nodded, returning his focus to his work. "Yeah, she went out with Mayday and Annie for a break. They found something about the Web. A big something."
"Does it have to do anything with me being able to jump around worlds on my own? Because I know Annie can open portals too." Gwen raised an eyebrow. "But how big are we talking?"
"It's not what you're thinking. You know how we've always talked about the multiverse in infinite numbers?" Octavia said. "While Annie was repairing the Web, she found a cluster of universes that no one knew about. At least, not recently."
"Tavia, remember that I'm a drummer Gwen, not a scientist like others. Explain it as if I was eight years old."
"Right. So we thought there were infinite worlds out there, yes?" Octavia turned a screen around. On it, a schematic recreating what they knew of the Web was visible; it included a count of all universes they knew something about, or at least those with one spider or more currently living in there. A smaller image of the schematic had been attached to a corner of the bigger one. "All this time, it was actually infinity plus a billion."
"Ok. Ok," Gwen said. "I guess the question is, how were those worlds hidden all along, and was it by accident or intentional? And are there any spiders in need of help?"
Pavitr leaned back on his seat, leaving his work on the table, and typing in a keyboard. "Oh, there is totally a spider in one of those worlds. Annie tried to open a visual window to find them, you know, like Karn used to do, but couldn't get a bead on them. Something in that world is interfering with our capacity to gather information. But she managed to find the location where they received their totem status."
A photo came up over the schematic on the screen. It was the image of a high school locker. Ihe implication being that, whoever the new spider was, they got their powers in the room itself.
Gwen raised an eyebrow in confusion, thinking about the implications. "Wait," she said as she blinked in disbelief. "What. Seriously? You mean, inside that locker? Is the locker actually made of spiders or something?"
Gwen's life was stupid, so it wouldn't be surprising, she thought, if that was actually the case. After all, Spider-Ham was a spider who was bitten by a pig. With her luck, who was to say weirder things couldn't happen?