well here we are at last. hum. one final THANK YOU to everyone who reviewed this, mailed me, or added it to their lists etc. i think that without you lot i'd still be noodling around somewhere in chapter three. and my god, kat.
this is the first full length story i've ever finished, so I feel all glowy. now all i have to do is to figure out what the hell i'm going to do with the rest of my life now i'm not writing this every day. probably have the teenage equivalent of a midlife crisis and take up duneboarding. okay enough with the yap now.
fasten your seatbelts. I guess.
Part Thirteen- Hero
'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Orpheus Theatre. Tonight's premiere performance of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream will commence in a few moments. The management would like to request that all cellular phones and pagers remain switched off for the duration of the performance. Thank you, and enjoy the show.'
The house lights dimmed around the packed auditorium. Programmes rustled and phones beeped as the audience leaned back into their folding seats, an expectant hush settling over the space. The heavy red brocade curtain rose into the cavernous space above the flies, revealing a golden-lit stage. It was dressed like a Greek palace, with large cushions strewn across the boards and tall white pillars against the backdrop, on which some manically enthusiastic scene painter had gone completely overboard on murals, trick-perspective architecture, and a window view onto a summery garden before he could be disarmed and led away.
As the lighting faded up, into this classical set-piece strolled an imposing-looking man with an equally imposing-looking beard, followed by a woman in a flowing dress and a bevy of attendants. His character's name was Theseus, Duke of Athens, and he was clearly intending to live up to the title.
'Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace.' he boomed, his words relayed to the big speaker stacks by either side of the stage from the radio mike concealed carefully in his toga. 'Four happy days bring in another moon; but, oh, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!'
In his seat, nearly in the dead centre of the auditorium, Peter watched the stage in anticipation. In the past week, he had rehearsed MJ's part with her so many times that he was nearly word-perfect on every scene which featured her character, to the extent that he was having trouble stopping his lips moving as the actors spoke. Any moment now…
'Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child.' said one of the other men, who in the part of Egeus had a one-scene role and therefore an inferior beard. 'My daughter, Hermia.'
And there she was, the backlight catching her entrance in a soft glow, her fiery hair piled in floating ringlets around her shoulders, the arc lights lending a dazzling radiance to the flowing folds of her simple white dress. It seemed to Peter that the other actors receded into the background as she entered, and even though she hadn't spoken yet she claimed the stage from the moment she stepped out onto it.
She doth teach the torches to burn bright, Peter thought. It was a line from quite another play altogether, one that he had only encountered in high school literature class, and had never remembered or fully understood until this moment. He had felt the same way when he had watched her play Cecily at the Lyric Theatre- like his heart was working far too hard with pride and devotion, so much so that it was almost painful to watch her. He saw that she kept her glance roaming above the audience's heads, looking at everyone and no-one. It was an old professional trick, invented to free actors from the rather stunned look that could result from staring down into the glaring spotlights that ringed the stage.
I'll look at you once, tiger, she had told him, just a few hours before. Watch me, and you'll see.
Peter watched.
The back entrance of the theatre was located in a small concrete courtyard at the end of an alley, wide enough to allow delivery trucks to back in, though, as it was discovered after a couple of small disasters, not to turn around. There were no streetlamps, but a bulb above the door cast a mellow pool of light down the steps and across the yard. It illuminated a stack of old crates, some weatherbeaten posters of past events, and an actor who had stepped outside for a surruptitious smoke.
There was a clatter, just beyond the light. The smoker looked up with mild disinterest as a bike arrived at some speed, followed a second later by a kid whose left foot was still caught up in the pedals. He watched as she struggled to extricate herself, finally letting the bike sag against the wall and straightening up, self-consciously tugging down the hem of her stripy hoodie.
'Whoah there.' he said, sharply, as the girl started to walk up the steps. She stopped.
'What?'
'Where d'you think you're going?' The actor was not inclined to be polite. His part required him to spend most of the second half with his head stuck up inside that of a stuffed donkey's, the anticipation of which wouldn't improve anybody's temper. The kid looked up the steps for a moment, then turned and treated him to a look of the utmost disdain.
'You mean they didn't tell you?' she said.
'Tell me what?' He held out a hand. 'Look, kid, I'm gonna need to see a stage pass before I let you through there. It's cast and crew only.'
'Oh, for heaven's sake.' she snorted. 'I don't know anything about stage passes, mister. All I know is that my agent called us up about an hour ago and said that they urgently needed an extra woodland sprite for Act Four, Scene 1, and to get down here as soon as possible.'
'You're kidding.' The actor glanced inside the doorway. 'They changed it again? No-one told me.'
'I wonder why.' said the girl, the picture of stage-school precociousness. 'Now, are you gonna let me in, or do you want to spend your interval explaining to the director why he's one sprite short?'
'No, uh, that's fine.' he said, hurriedly. 'Off you go.'
The girl gave him a quick, exasperated nod, and walked up the steps. The door banged shut behind her.
It was nearly a whole minute before the actor managed to clear his brain enough to say 'Hey, what the hell just happened?' But by that time, Escher was well inside the building and travelling really, really fast.
The play was going well. The audience sat in spellbound silence, listening with rapt attention as the actor's clear voices rang out from the speaker stacks. As the first half drew to a close, it would have been difficult to find a pair of eyes that had managed to tear themselves from the stage for more than a few seconds.
There were, however, two exceptions. In the middle of the right-hand block, separated from the middle seating area by a broad aisle, a tall blonde in a slim-fit purple jacket leaned forwards in her seat, an elbow propping her head. Her head turned a fraction, and if anyone had been watching her instead of the play they would have seen her lips move in an almost indetectable whisper.
'Schaf, are you receiving?'
On the far side of the hall, Schafer lounged back in her seat, picking at the threads on her armrest. She did not, as a matter of fact, like Shakespeare.
'Loud and clear. Can someone tell me if there's going to be a car chase in this thing?' She, too, spoke almost without sound. The tiny thing that looked like an ornate jet stud in her ear picked up and normalized her voice, transmitting it straight to the identical studs owned by her colleagues.
'Don't think so. You see the hit?'
'Straight away.' Schafer looked along the rows, down the curving well of the seats to where their target was sitting. Never mind Spring's photographic memory, there was no mistaking those glasses, not even from the back. 'Where's Murph?'
'Right here.' The voice in her ear was a low hiss. 'Just got to get set up back here, then I'll go look for a clear line. Don't go anywhere.'
'Aww, but it's nearly the interval.' murmured Schafer mockingly, her voice a brattish whine. 'Can't I get a soda?' The man in the next seat glanced around, caught her eye, and privately resolved not to do so again for the remainder of the evening.
'Hell no. Sit tight. Over.'
Schafer opened her mouth to reply, but as she did so the people around her started clapping. She followed suit, turning back to the stage, where a temporary end of some sort seemed to have occured. After a minute or so of warm applause, the house lights slowly faded back up, and a large number of the audience started to get up and mill in the direction of the lobby, chatter filling the air like a swarm of relaxed bees.
Escher was well and truly lost. The backstage areas of the theatre were made up of a succession of corridors, small rooms, narrow staircases, and rehearsal spaces that tangled in on each other like a giant rabbit warren. She kept on having to hide as groups of actors and stagehands hurried purposefully past, making her dive into empty rooms and broom cupboards and badly upsetting her sense of direction. The only thing she was sure of was that her random direction choices were slowly directing her upwards. Even this was difficult to judge, because the building had had so many stuctural alterations over the years that it was full of pointless staircases, passages that sloped gently in both directions, and other disorientating features which, she couldn't help thinking, would have made her namesake proud.
Escher hurried on, driven by urgency and a sense of nameless dread. She was pretty sure that, whatever it was that Doctor Octavius intended to do in this place tonight, he hadn't started yet. She guessed that she would have heard the screams. But on the other hand, every nerve in her body told her that there was danger here…
She pushed open a door, and found herself in a huge room full of, well stuff. Shelf units lined the floor, stacked with objects of every concievable type. To her immediate left, by the door, there was an entire shelf full of different kinds of fake pot plants, right underneath another stacked with cuddly toys. Larger items of furniture, from armchairs and tables to bits of old sets, hung from the shadowy ceiling. The shelves formed a labyrinthine series of passages, through which glimpses of other aisles and their contents could be seen.
Escher turned and looked at the door again, feeling a pressing need to reassure herself that she had not just stepped into some alternate dimension. There was a sign on the elderly wood, hand painted in loopy capitals.
PROPERTIUS
She took a few more steps into the room, and nearly jumped out of her skin as a voice, muffled but still audible, suddenly echoed around the cluttered shelves.
'Helen…it is not so.'
'Disparage not the faith thou dost not know, lest to thy peril thou aby it dear!'
Escher stood in the dim light from the corridor outside, trying to calm down. Snatches of dialogue continued to float through the floor, and she realised that this huge room must be directly over the auditorium, the sound-conductive walls turning it into a giant sounding-board for the stage below. The interval was over, and by the sound of it some confusion-based Shakespearian argument was taking place. Escher's knowledge of A Midsummer Night's Dream was sketchy at best, based on one brief summer of drama classes. It had been just about enough to fool a rather stupid adult into believing that she knew what she was talking about, but now she could only vaguely guess that there was at least another hour to go.
There was another, paler light source from somewhere up ahead, casting bright slits across the shelves. She advanced, carefully, picking her way through the aisles, passing cutlery and hats and weapons, twisting and turning between the shelves. She was just beginning to wish that she had some chalk to mark her path, or at least some bread crumbs to scatter, when she heard the other voice.
It came from the direction she was headed, the direction of the light, where she could just see through the gaps that the shelves petered out into a clear space.
'No, I told you, we're staying where we are.' The voice was so quiet, so deliberately soft, that it was impossible for Escher to make out any familliar features. She moved closer as the the whispered words continued, still apparently talking to someone who couldn't be heard.
Or someTHING, thought Escher, triumphantly, edging along with her back to a shelf full of assorted ornaments, past a badly-stuffed bear that had been mounted on a stand and didn't look too happy about it. Its teeth gleamed as she gingerly inched past.
'No, not yet, but I can see-'
The voice stopped abruptly. Escher had stumbled slightly on an uneven board, and although the sound her foot made was tiny it was obviously not tiny enough. She froze, cringing, but when the voice failed to reoccur after nearly a whole minute, she started to feel a little stupid just standing there in the silence like she was a prop herself. Taking a deep breath, she summoned her remaining courage and walked to the end of the final row.
Beyond the shelves, a short series of steps descended into an area that was curved like the prow of a boat. Here, part of the theatre dome had been surfaced with glass, creating a long, tall window which reached nearly to the high ceiling and flooded this part of the room with moonlight. The area was free from clutter and had clearly been built to act as a sort of crude light well for the rest of the room. The fragmented sounds from below were loudest here, appearing to emanate directly from the five or six shallow steps where, she guessed, the floor was thinnest.
Escher frowned. This was definitely the place that the voice had been coming from…but there was no-one there. Leaning cautiously on the end of the final shelf unit, she cleared her throat.
'Uhm…Doctor Octavius?'
Click.
Escher felt something cold and hard touch gently against her skull, and looked slowly sideways into grey eyes and a wide, wide grin…
'Guess not.' said Murphy.
By the time Escher had first found the prop room, the last audience member had been shooed politely back into the auditorium for the start of the second half. The man who had been responsible for most of this shooing had latched the big swing doors carefully behind them, and stood the red velvet queue-rope in front the doorway. Then he moved into his position by the side of the rope, and settled back into the vague switchoff mode that served to quickly pass the time between halves.
You didn't need a good imagination to be an usher. There was no 'thinking creatively' in the job description alongside 'showing people to their seats' and 'kicking out latecomers'. If this particular usher had been given a Rorschach personality test before he was handed the bow tie and the little torch, he would have been revealed to be the sort of straightforward, plain-thinking person who called a spade a spade, a shovel a shovel, and a mess of inkblots a bloody waste of time.
So when an impact of ground-shaking force in the street outside made the lobby floor jump and set the pendants in the chandeliers dancing in sympathy, the usher paid little attention. He looked up for a moment, but lacking the invention to guess what had caused the disturbance, soon lost interest.
He found it again pretty quickly a few seconds later, however, when with a noise like a small grenade two of the outside doors errupted inwards in an implosion of glittering splinters and bits of carved wood. Outlined against the wrecked entrance, a terrifying, eight-limbed figure stalked (for there was no other fitting word for movement so full of predatory intent) into the lobby. Gaping, the usher was unable to form a single coherent thought as the intruder strode across the floor in a path that aimed right at the auditorium doors.
'Whhhhhh.' said the usher, who at that moment was about as mobile as one of the heavy brass posts that held the queue-rope in position. He was rooted to the spot, which would have been fine if the spot in question hadn't been right in front of the doors.
As the thing got closer, the hideous mechanical limbs that extended from its back arched around, their heads opening malevolently. The usher shaded his face automatically from their scarlet glow with a quivering hand, and saw that their host was wearing goggles, thick, round-lensed radiation protectors. And at the centre, between the lenses, there was a fifth glow. It was slightly smaller, but it was of the same bloody shade as the tentacle's heart lights.
Then an arm snapped round, catching the usher in the chest and sweeping him aside as if he weighed less than a feather. The man hurtled backwards across the lobby, where by a stroke of luck he collided with a large display of plastic ferns, the cushioning leaves of which broke his fall but not his neck. The intruder didn't even turn to regard its handiwork. As the unconscious usher stopped rolling in a flurry of broken neopropyl stems, two more claws snaked out with balletic ease. This time, they were aimed straight for the auditorium doors.
'Puppet!' screamed MJ, advancing across the stage with enough apparent wrath for a small army. 'Why so? Aye, that way goes the game! Now I perceive that she hath made compare between our statures, and with her personage- her tall personage- her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him!' Her co-star, a elf-like Helena with white-blond hair, cowered away from her vengeful approach. Behind her, Andrew, as Lysander, leapt to restrain her as she curled her fingers spitefully. 'How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak! How low am I? I am not yet so low but that my nails can reach unto thine eyes!!'
As this vicious Shakespearian version of a catfight continued, MJ found herself seperating, something she sometimes did when in the middle of a particularly demanding scene. Her character, Hermia, screamed, simmered, and finally allowed herself to be calmed down into stony silence as the dialogue progressed, but MJ watched herself as if from outside, controlling her performance like a sculptor working on a complex maquette. Finally, as she stood ready to exit, she caught her breath, looked out over the dazzling footlights, and found him.
'I am amazed…' she said, 'and know not what to say.' Yes, Peter was exactly where she had judged he would be. She couldn't stop herself smiling, for it was obvious in his expression that he really had been watching for the moment when her face would turn to his.
Peter saw MJ look towards him, and his heart skipped a beat as their eyes met.
Then-
Then the world went slow and stretched, and his ears filled with a desperate rush of mental static, dragging his head into a rapid reflex twist that nailed his gaze to the double doors at the back of the sloping auditorium.
Which exploded.
People scattered, screaming, diving out of the way of the hail of chunks of wood and metal that rained down across the aisles. Peter ducked as part of an ornate brass door handle travelled over his head, burying itself in the back of the seat in front, then lifted his head cautiously and peered over the headrest.
His eyes widened as they took in the nightmare shape that stood silhouetted in the light from the lobby. It was a shape he knew, all right, but there was something else about it, something new and very worrying. As he watched, a tentacle flicked out, moving with a ghastly grace that he'd never seen before, and thudded into a bank of seats, grabbing the whole lot and tearing them from the floor. The claw snapped around, ramming the bank into the remains of the doors and neatly walling them off. The audience's fleeing screams doubled in volume.
'Oh boy.' he murmured. Behind him, MJ clambered off the stage and fought through the stampeding crowd to his row.
'What happened?' she gasped, clinging to him.
'It's Octavius!' Peter had to raise his voice over the racket, pulling her into the footwell beside him. 'Stay there!'
MJ grabbed his arm as he started to climb onto the chairback.
'Be careful!'
'Stay - there.' he repeated, urgently, taking her hand and pressing it back against her chest. Then he flipped into the air, landing on his feet in the middle of the red carpet about halfway up the centre aisle. In the general mayhem, this stunt went largely unnoticed. Then again, Peter could have probably morphed into a space alien at this stage and attracted no attention from the panicked crowd. That was the thing about people, as he had discovered very early in his life as Spiderman. On their own, most of them were smart, observant, and calm. Stick them in a room with five hundred other minds, however, and give them something to fear, and the result is guaranteed make a herd of hunted wildebeest look level-headed and sedate. Especially when the only way out is blocked.
Peter looked around desperately. All he needed was a hidden corner and a handful of seconds in which he could change. As always, he wore his suit under his clothes…all he needed was a moment-
He wasn't about to get one. Heralded by a life-saving crack of static in his head, a tentacle bore down on him and would have laminated his ribcage across the plush carpet if he hadn't have thrown himself flat. He felt the lethal fissile blade trace a white-hot line across his shoulder, and rolled just in time to avoid another claw, this time an 'overarm' blow that made a small crater in the floor by his head. He jack-knifed upright, landing slightly off-balance, and looked up into the scarlet heart light that burned between his enemy's glass-shrouded eyes.
'Doctor Octavius?' he said, desperately. Fearing the answer.
A claw whipped out behind him. He twisted and dodged, leaning back straight into the embrace of another, which closed carefully, irrevocably, around his neck.
'No.'
Peter choked, struggling as the claw lifted him off the ground.
'Much more.'
In the gloomy cavern of the props room, seperated from the auditorium by nothing more than a thin ceiling, the commotion below was very clear. Escher, however, barely registered it. She had problems of her own.
The initial impact had shaken the room, filling it with a mulitude of strange noises as hundreds of bizarre items resonated or knocked against each other, and also demonstrating that whoever had originally stored the stuffed bear next to which Escher had paused had not been paying proper attention to their job. It had been leaning solely on its curved stand, and the tremor that ran through the floorboards finally proved too much for its delicate balance. This was why, barely two seconds after feeling the icy barrel of a Benelli MP90 marksman pistol against her temple, Escher felt it removed again, to the accompaniment of a creak, a surprised oof, and a heavy thud. Somehow she goaded her feet into a run, turning left and right and left again through the forest of shelves, sprinting with singleminded precision in the direction of away.
Pushing the weighty monument to Bad Taxidermy off his chest, Murphy stood up and shook his head, carefully screwing the silencer back onto the muzzle of his gun. Idly, as he started to prowl down the nearest aisle, he wondered how long it would take the kid before she found the door again, and how much longer before she realised that there was no handle on the inside. There was no need to rush. Whatever was going on below, it could wait. Murphy had absolute confidence in his two teammates to handle whatever it was, and besides which it was not in his personality to ever pass up the chance to indulge in a little fish-in-barrel target practice.
'C'mon, kid…' he called, slipping around the edge of a rack filled with umbrellas. 'I'm not gonna hurt you.'
Five shelves away, Escher stared incredulously at a sheaf of dried flowers. In her mind, cocking a gun at someone's head was not a demonstration of a trustworthy nature. She made a guess at the direction of the voice, and altered her route accordingly, backing up two rows and pausing momentarily by several stacked boxes of what looked like scarves. Who was this maniac? Escher had a limited knowledege of the theatre, but she had a shrewd notion that stagehands did not usually go armed. Trying to breath silently through her mouth, she took another right turn around a shelf full of candlesticks and continued to creep along the claustrophobic aisles.
Peter could feel his consciousness starting to slip away. The claw was still tightening, little by little, around his neck, and his feet were thrashing helplessly at thin air. The thing that had only half an hour before been Doctor Otto Octavius watched him impassively, the other three smart arms opening their heads to monitor their enemy's last moments. Black spots started to dance in Peter's vision. As if from a long way off, he heard MJ's hysterical voice. Through the dull mists of suffocation, he turned his head and watched as his girlfriend half-walked, half-ran down the aisle, scattering frightened people and pushing past a tall blonde woman that appeared to be rooted to the spot by row K.
'Let go of him! Peter! Let g-'
He saw an arm swipe out, in the direction of the voice. Terror giving an edge to his movements, Peter jerked his legs upwards, managing to hook one of them around the tentacle. Barely six feet away, MJ dived for cover as the diverted arm whistled over her head, and Peter felt some of the strain leave his neck, his foothold taking the weight. Using this leverage, he managed to get his hands up around the gripping claw and tried to pull the digits away. He might as well have been trying to shift Mt. Rushmore for all the effect this had. However, the slight release of pressure did give him the use of his vocal chords back.
'Don't…do…this…' he choked. 'That girl…Escher…she told me what you…hgg…what you've been doing…hhkkkhow you f-feel…' His shoe slipped on the tentacle as it bucked, nearly losing his foothold entirely. As amazing as his wall-crawling ability was, it unsurprisingly didn't work through a leather sole. The thing which he was starting to realise was pure Doctor Octopus didn't react, to the talking or to the scrabbling. The claw tightened a fraction.
'I told Jameson the truth…he di-didn't listen…aghhh…just wanted to sell…don't…' Peter searched his mind for something, anything, that might have an effect.
'She said…she said you might not be too far gone.' Wrenching at the tentacle's iron hold, he stared searchingly past the goggle's light into the dark lenses. 'Don't…prove…her…wrong.'
Meanwhile, Murphy was getting more than a little annoyed. He could hear the sounds of the girl trying to be quiet clear across the room, but the layout was so confusing that even his fine-tuned sense of direction was struggling. He stopped, pistol at the ready, by a large picture of a fleet of ships in a gilt frame that he could have sworn he'd passed twice already, and decided to wait until his target blundered closer. As he did so, Spring's voice hissed in his ear, crackly and far from calm.
'…all going to hell down here, Murph! Got some…freak robot guy with four giant tentacle things coming right out his back trying to do our job for us!'
'What?'
'Went straight for Parker! Kid's got more nerve than I thought- he's trying to talk to the guy. Getting squeezed pretty good, though. What do we do?'
Murphy gritted his teeth. 'I'm busy here. Some goddamn kid saw me. Just take him out!'
'Which one?'
'Either one! Both! Whatever you do, get Parker!' He ducked as he caught a movement between the shelves to his left. Crouched on the floor, he peered through the units and spotted a patch of stripy cloth in a gap three rows away. He levelled the Benelli and took aim.
Escher had just recognised a shelf that she knew was somewhere near the door when there was a thin crack somewhere behind her, and a plastic-crystal decanter by her side shattered. It took her a second for her to realise what had happened, in which time another shot hit the shelf by her head with a small spak noise. Escher did what any other sensible, level-headed person would have done under the circumstances. She screamed at the top of her lungs.
In the auditorium below, Escher's scream was barely audible. Peter heard it, though he couldn't place its origin- his amplified hearing was a little distracted by the whole half-strangled thing. And, in the methodical processor of Doctor Octopus's brain, the high-precision audio signals from the smart arms were rapidly cross-referenced against memory data, and threw up a result.
It was probably impossible to guess what happened at that point. All that remained of Otto Octavis was an intellect, his brilliant intelligence intergrated into an organic extension of the smart arm A.I. There was nothing in the resulting being's intentions that would have justified removing attention from Peter's demise for so much as a second, not even when the owner of the scream was identified. Against everything that Doctor Octopus planned to achieve by killing Peter that night, it was unimportant.
And yet-
The head turned, blank lenses angled at the distant ceiling. Peter gasped for breath as he felt the claw at his throat loosen. It was only for a second- but a second was all that was needed. Grabbing a mechanical 'finger' in either hand, he yanked the distracted claw open and dropped to the ground. His blood roared in his ears as his feet hit the floor, and for a moment he thought that he might just pass out where he stood. Then instinct took over, powering him towards the figure that hung supported between the two lower tentacles.
Doctor Octopus turned back to his target, and just registered that it had gone when Peter arrived travelling upwards at a rate of about 10mps, the heel of his hand aimed straight at the red light at the centre of the goggle's bridge. There was a solid crack.
Landing in a crouch, Peter didn't wait to see the impact this had. Shaking some life back into his hand, he turned and sprinted up the aisle towards the blocked entrance, scrambling with ease over the twisted mass of chairs and through the narrow gap at the top. A sharp-eyed observer would have spotted him ripping at his shirt as he ran.
Oblivious to this escape, Doctor Octopus stood transfixed. In the intricate pathways of the goggle's circuitry, something had just gone badly askew. The Mindmap chip, protected by the thick shield, was still conducting its scans, but Peter's blow had done something critical to the link between the chip and the rest of the goggles. As the information flow to the electrodes petered out, the brain they infiltrated started to flare and spark with neuropeptide reactions once again…
Murphy darted around a shelf, trails of cordite smoke streaming behind him from the muzzle of his weapon, and with a final lunge of one well-built arm grabbed Escher by the hood as she turned to run.
'He's gone! Parker just bailed on us!' yelled Spring in his ear. He growled incoherently at this, dragging the struggling girl backwards into the area beneath the big window. Restraining her against his chest, he placed the Benelli's silenced barrel beneath the angle of her jaw. He was just about to pull the trigger when, down at floor level, Mrs. Trainer suddenly met up with Mr. Shin. Caught entirely off guard, Murphy yelled and actually dropped the gun, and Escher twisted loose, kicked it across the floor, and ran.
She got nearly five feet before a nasty little complicated ka-klik froze her to the spot. She turned, dreadingly, to see the assassin standing in the pool of moonlight, still grinning, with the barrel of an even less friendly-looking gun trained straight at her heart.
Murphy hefted his never-miss Galil SAR and closed one eye. 'Any last words, kiddo?'
At the risk of ending her life on a cliché, Escher took a deep breath.
'SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!'
Otto stumbled as the smart arms folded up around him, dropping him to the floor. As self-awareness dawned, it brought with it the withdrawal-nausea and complete disorientation. For a moment, he couldn't remember where he was.
Then he heard Escher's scream and snapped into focus, the urgency of the sound overriding the flood of confusion that accompanied his returning personality. His tentacles shook themselves out, recovering quickly and catching on to his intent. The sudden loss of perfect union with their host left them with a void where their purpose had been, and in their confusion they went along with his will without objection.
Two arms latched on to the overhanging balcony seats that ringed the auditorium, drawing him up into the air until he was level with the small VIP boxes on the stage side. These, and the upper level, were deserted, the audience up here having had the luxury of a pair of unobstructed doors, of which they had all had apparently made free use. Claw over claw, the smart arms ascended with incredible speed to the very top box, stretching out against the ceiling towards the place the scream had come from. A pause of maybe a second, during which a lower arm curled around with foresight to protect Otto's body from debris- because in a moment there was going to be debris in abundance- and then the two upper claws closed, tensed, and shot upwards.
In the props room, Escher was still staring straight at Murphy, and so had the satisfaction of seeing his smug expression drop off his face before the row of shelves behind her bounced upwards once, settled momentarily, and then vanished in an expanding cloud of wood and plaster. She spun around just in time to see the two shelves that had been standing on the spot cave outwards, hitting the pair next to them, which hit the pair next to them…
A red glow grew through the flurry of falling dust and turned into the shape of a claw, rising through the remains of the floor like a fast-growing tree. It started to rain ephemera, hundreds of objects toppling from the stricken shelves and hitting the floor around Escher. Shielding her head as a motheaten badger in a glass case smashed by her foot, she ran towards the hole, punching the air.
'Yes!' she yelled. Relief made her reckless. She turned to Murphy, who had just managed to get up again, brushing splinters from his shoulders.
'Any last words?' she mimicked.
Murphy was a basically uncomplicated man. Under stress, he tended to be a little slow on the uptake, but when it came to shooting things he operated along very simple lines. Unexplained floor erruptions were confusing. You knew where you were with shooting things. And the Galil was still in his hand.
'You're dead.' he snarled at Escher, aimed-
Spitting like a viper, a tentacle snapped out of the haze of settling masonry and grabbed his arm. The assassin looked up in shock, and Otto stepped into the moonlight, the other arms forming a stiff tryptich of menace around his shoulders. Even with the goggles obscuring his eyes, his expression was clear and spoke of barely controlled rage.
'You were saying?'
Murphy mouthed soundlessly for a moment, and then made a bad mistake. Otto's eyes narrowed beneath the goggles as the camera eyes alerted him to the slow inch of the assassin's finger back on the trigger. He made a slight shrugging movement, and the gripping claw twisted with surgical precision. There was a crack like a gunshot, and the Galil clattered to the floor.
Otto waited for Murphy's scream to die away, and then leant in, close to the man's suddenly white face.
'An…unarmed…girl.' he said, calmly. 'I'd like to be able to say that not even I would do that.' He glanced sideways, to where Escher was standing against the steps. 'But then, things have been rather…complicated, recently.'
'He was talking to someone else.' said Escher, quickly. 'I think…I think they're here to kill Peter Parker.'
Otto looked back at Murphy, an eyebrow arching quizzically.
'What, you too?'
With the source of the audience's panic apparently disappeared, the atmosphere in the auditorium was calming slightly. Some of the more level-headed people, including several actors who hadn't yet managed to vanish backstage, were starting to try and disassemble the wreckage that blocked the doors. The stage was now completely deserted, the huge wooden forest set-piece that had been errected for Act Two leaning over slightly forwards, having not coped too well with the repeated tremors that had wracked the building. The rest of the audience milled around, a babble of alarmed voices rising up towards the crack-frayed hole in the far ceiling.
MJ shoved through the throngs, searching wildly for one face among hundreds. Halfway down the narrow left-hand aisle, she stopped, scanning the rows.
'Peter!' she yelled, urgently.
A hand wrapped in strips of black cloth clamped over her mouth, dragging her behind a pillar with frightening strength. She caught a glimpse of purple nail polish and the cloth's odd skate-wax smell made her gag before a sharp hiss in her ear froze her thoughts.
'Watson, isn't it? Looking for someone?'
Schafer was very quick on the uptake.
'PARKER! I think this belongs to you!!'
Outside in the lobby, Peter stopped dead in his tracks as an unfamilliar voice from the auditorium called his name. He had spent the last few minutes looking for another way in that didn't involve the main doors, guessing that to go in that way would be to leave himself horribly open to anything that his enemy had planned in the meantime.
He stood there for a moment, uncertain. Then he heard another voice, a frightened scream that dripped raw horror into his chest and threw him into a sprint towards the shattered doors.
'MJ!'
The people working on unblocking the entrance stopped and stared upwards as a red flash burst through the gap at the top of the doors, tumbling upwards on a silvery line to land in a crouch against the vertical surface of the balcony.
On the other side of the auditorium, Schafer vaulted onto the stage, pulling MJ roughly up after her.
'One false move and you'll never play a walk-on role again.' she murmured into MJ's ear, positioning a practised hand at the base of her hostage's spine.
Over to the far right of the seats, Spring stared at the tensed shape that clung to the far balcony.
'What in the hell is that now?' she croaked. Shrugging her jacket from her shoulders, she extricated a scissor katar and two of her throwing knives, tucking one into the holder band sewn into her shirt. Rapidly, she wound the leather straps of the katar around her right arm, so that her palm was strapped into its simple grip-mechanism. She snapped the blades experimentally open and shut a couple of times, then began to head for the stage, talking quickly and viciously into her earpiece.
'Murphy? Can you still hear me, you dumb bastard? What in the name of God have you got us into here? Parker's gone AWOL, Schafer's gone nuts, and now some kind of guy who sticks to walls just bust in here on a bungee rope! Where are you? Get your-'
'Let her go!' shouted the masked figure, dropping into the main row of chairs and advancing, seatback by seatback, towards the stage. At the sound of his voice, Spring stopped in her tracks, dumbstruck.
One of the main false ideas people have about photographic memories is that they work on sight alone…
Spring started to run, pushing past knots of people and leaving a trail of panic as they spotted her weapons. She reached the stage just a few rows ahead of the hero, grabbing for the edge of the sagging setpiece to haul herself up.
'Schaf!' she yelled, urgently, as her colleague turned to face her, pulling MJ around in a semicircle as she moved. 'That guy! It's Pa-'
Twonnng.
Twonnng.
…creeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaak…
Finally giving up the ghost in the face of such unexected strain, the cables that held the reinforced timber setpiece snapped free, allowing the structure that relied on them to keel gently forwards. Spring, Schafer, and MJ looked slowly up as the shadow cast by half a ton of rustic woodland scenery fell across them, eclipsing the bright stage lights and making everything in the growing patch of shade suddenly look very, very small...
'…ah.' finished Spring.
'…oh.' said Schafer.
MJ opened her mouth, but before she could make a sound something hit her hard in the small of her back and yanked her backwards with all the force of a fairground catapult ride. She shot clear of the stage as if propelled by a powerful elastic band. The rows of chairs shot past underneath, but MJ was still moving, rising, her waist safely encircled by Peter's arm as he swung powerfully upwards on a long thread of web that was anchored on the edge of the balcony above. Behind them, a cacophonus splintering whoooooooomph announced the arrival of the set on the surface of the stage.
'Where did he go?' Peter asked her, dropping her onto the last row of seats and balancing, heels together, on the chairback.
'Through the roof.' said MJ, pointing rather redundantly at the very obvious hole. Peter looked up it thoughtfully, and said; 'Hmm.' Then he turned back towards the area around the stage, where people were making a good job of picking up the panic where they left off.
'Stay there.' he said, and then shot out a line that snapped him up over the pandemonium towards what was left of the set. As he tumbled away from her, she caught his last words.
'And I mean it this time!'
Sitting on the shallow steps in the wreckage of the props room, Escher started as the sound of the set falling rolled up into the disturbed air like a tide.
'What was that?'
Otto looked up from his three-armed search of the man for concealed weapons. He didn't really have to restrain Murphy as such. Someone holding onto somebody else's broken arm has all the control they need. He shrugged, somewhat uneasily, and went back to his search.
'I…we…caused a fair amount of damage down there.' he said. Absently, his upper left tentacle plucked the other sniper pistol from Murphy's gunbelt and bent it into a half-circle. The assassin moaned softly.
'You…you didn't…um…' Escher trailed off.
'No.' Otto said, shortly. 'There's an usher who's going to have a headache when he wakes up, and I imagine some people have splinters and so on, but no, I didn't.' But I might have, he thought. I remember wanting to. He was glad for the goggles that hid his eyes.
'I didn't think you would.' said the small voice behind him. He turned, and caught her watching him with a kind of hesitant pride. Despite himself, he smiled.
'You just don't give up, do y-'
THWAK
Otto almost fell, the solid blow aimed at the side of his skull nearly knocking him off balance. The smart arms swung round, counterbalancing him, and gaped their claws as the balled fist of Murphy's uninjured arm soared over their host's head. The assassin screamed again as the claw that still held his broken arm twitched, and when Otto turned to face him he punched him again, as hard as he could, agony and fury lending force to the already professional blow that landed, as luck would have it, straight between the lenses of the goggles.
Connections connected. Circuits closed. Tiny relays fired in the nerve centres of the goggles, sending the flood of trapped information surging towards the electrode heads once more.
On the outside, however, there was only an unpleasant little electrical noise, and a gasp. Murphy's fist fell to his side as he looked up, feeling cold metal touch his skull in three places, and stared straight into the heart of a small, scarlet sun.
'Oh, no.' said Escher, getting up fast. 'Doctor Octavius! Hey! Look at me!'
But the figure with the glowing light between its blank eyes didn't so much as glance in her direction. It was a singleminded machine with a man's head held in its claws, a man who had just tried to thwart its purpose, and as such it required no further input to act. Its arms clicked as they started to apply pressure-
-and a paperweight hit it on the back of the neck.
Doctor Octopus snapped round, one claw keeping hold of Murphy while the others sought this new threat. One of the heads closed just in time as a small ornamental weather clock bounced off the contracted digits.
Escher backed off, looking for other suitable things to throw. Not that it seemed to matter, anyway- everything she hurled was fielded neatly by the smart arms, which swept the objects to the floor in between snatching cautiously at her. Far from being frightened, however, she found that she was furious.
'I know you can hear me!' she yelled, ducking. 'Stop it! Snap out of it!' She threw an elderly tap shoe and took advantage of the second this gave her to dodge in close, into the glare of the lights. 'You think I'm a threat? Well, you're right! I'm not going to let you kill this moron!' She hurled herself under the reach of the arms, placing herself in between the stunned assassin and the searching heart light of the goggles. 'You're better than this! All you need to do is decide! If you're so smart with those things on, decide! Either let go of him,' she nearly screamed, 'or kill me.'
Then her nerve gave out, resolve draining from her mind like someone had pulled the plug out as she looked up into the dead, glassy lenses. Screwing her eyes shut, she folded her arms over her head, and waited.
And waited.
Nothing happened.
It continued to happen for quite some time.
In the orange-shot world behind her eyelids, Escher could still see the red glow, but instantaneous gory death seemed to be failing to happen. Cringingly, she opened her eyes.
Doctor Octopus was just…well…standing there, completely still, as still as a (highly unusual) statue. The smart arms were hovering above her, their claws open but unmoving. The claw that was gripping Murphy's skull didn't seem about to act either. The general impression was one of switchoff…or deadlock.
Fraction by fraction, barely daring to breathe in case she tipped some precarious invisible balance, Escher raised her hands. The figure still didn't move as she reached up, standing on tiptoes, stretching her arms up past the tensed shoulders and around either side of the goggles.
'I knew you could do it.' she whispered, and pressed the studs.
ssshhk.
Otto shuddered as the electrodes withdrew from his skull, stepping away from Escher's hands instinctively and pulling the Mindmap goggles off with something like revulsion rising in his throat. He tugged at the interface tube, and a tentacle dipped helpfully to disconnect it, which it did rapidly with a sound like someone suddenly letting all the air out of a bike tyre. As the goggles came fully loose from his spine, he brought back his arm to throw them away…and then stopped and stuffed them wearily into the pocket of his trenchcoat.
Behind him, the gripping claw flexed its fingers with a similarily distasteful flourish, and Murphy collapsed in a heap against the window.
Rat.
The smart arm's whisper was so apt that Otto couldn't help a short laugh. He felt lighter, unburdened, as if a lot more than a pound or so of metal and silicon had been taken from him with the goggles. Escher was watching him carefully, but she too was smiling.
'What?' she asked.
'Oh, nothing. We…just thought of something…funny.' he said. The word tasted alien in his mouth. Escher nodded, grinning, and started to try and shake some of the plaster dust from her hair.
'So, what happens now?' she said, from the centre of her own little chalky avalanche. Otto winced. He had been hoping she wouldn't ask that, mainly because he didn't want to think about it himself.
'I don't know. I…I suppose I should go and…go and…well…go.' He looked up. 'Peter told me…the same thing that you tried to tell me. I heard him- I heard you…it's just that I didn't- I couldn't- listen.' He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. 'Up until now, anyway.'
'It'll be all right.' said Escher, with quiet conviction. 'You'll be okay. You've come this far, right?'
Otto tilted his head. 'Thanks to you.'
Their eyes met. It was a nice moment, and in a perfect world it wouldn't have been spoilt, and especially not spoilt by an insensitive, pain-crazy assassin who had no capacity to recognize pathos. Unfortunately, this is not such a world, as Escher discovered when, a split second later, a gunbelt wrapped around her neck from behind and dragged her into the shadows.
The smart arm A.I, for all their perceptive comments, had failed to anticipate one thing about what they had decided was a neutralized foe. Certainly, the assassin was about as rat-like as something that walked on two legs could possibly be, but when thinking about this statement it is also important to remember what rats are famous for doing when they are cornered.
'Okay, hold it right there!' yelled Murphy, yanking Escher with him as he backed unsteadily towards the darkened, toppled shelves. His good arm was holding the cloth around her throat, the other tucked untidily into his shirt. His bloodless face was tinged with grey, and the grin had entirely gone, replaced with something altogether more feral. 'I swear, you freak, you move so much as a muscle and I'll-'
The edge!
'The edge?' repeated Otto. Murphy stared at him, redoubling his grip on Escher as he continued to step backwards.
'What?' he said, and promptly ran out of floor.
As was politely yet firmly stated on notices all around the Orpheus Theatre, recording equipment of any kind was not permitted in the auditorium. It was a rule that was strictly enforced, the violation of which usually led to ejection from the premises and/or a fine of up to fifty dollars.
However, that evening, a certain Texan tourist, name of Robin Montpelier, had somehow managed to slip through the net. This, as he would later swear to all and sundry, was due to him not knowing that there was a net at all, no sir, because he somehow missed all of the severe security notices and therefore had no idea that by bringing his state-of-the-art handheld digital camcorder to the performance he was doing anything wrong.
Mr. Montpelier was not a great fan of Shakespeare, although Mrs. Montpelier was. Therefore, he found the events of the later part of the second half much more interesting than the scripted drama beforehand, and ended up capturing the whole sequence in a manner and quality which would have probably have made Steven Spielburg quite jealous. The resulting tape was sold to a leading New York television news syndicate within three hours of its creation, and the high price certainly matched the exciting and photogenic nature of the scenes it contained.
After a bunch of muffled explosions and a lot of confused jiggling and screaming, during which time the camera appears to be avidly following the exploits of Mr. Montpelier's running left foot, the movement begins to calm down. For about five minutes, the tape documents in great detail a nosebleed sustained by Mrs. Montpelier, who, it transpires, has run into a wall while a little flustered. This part was intended to be evidence of the injury, shot in case, in Mr. Montpelier's own words 'we wanted to make something of it later.' It contains a great deal of close-ups.
Then, somebody yells, nearby, and there is the distorted sound of a crowd of people all catching their breath at once. The camera tilts crazily upwards, and focuses on a large hole in the distant ceiling, a high-contrast gash of black against the white plaster. There is a shape hanging from the dark gap, or rather two shapes, two human figures. One of them is smaller, and appears to be clinging to the other's leg. The other, who as the image sharpens is revealed to be hanging on by one arm, is trying, through a series of jerky kicks, to shake the unwanted passenger off.
At around the same time that someone close to the camera shouts 'It's a kid!' the larger figure suceeds. The kid (even at this distance, it is possible to make out the small, pale face framed by dark hair) loses her grip and starts to fall, tumbling with deceptive slowness from the high, high roof. A number of people in the audience react to this, and the camera is jostled momentarily as some inconsiderate person treads heavily on Mr. Montpelier's foot. By the time it re-focuses, the girl is nearly halfway to the auditorium floor, but up in the gap in the roof something else has also appeared.
More screaming, this time in reaction to the new shape, which launches downwards from the hole like an Olympic diver with more than their fair share of limbs.
Falling far faster than the girl, it twists face up like a cat, a movement unbelievably graceful for something so inherently bulky, and as they draw level one of the snakelike extra limbs curves up underneath her. With the ground imminent, the arm pulls her in towards the figure's chest, joining the other three as they curl around her, forming a protective embrace. It is just possible to see, in the grainy digital image, that as they fall the last few metres, even the man's two real arms move in to fold themselves across the girl's body.
The ground-shaking impact as they hit the floor jogs the camera angle right up into the eaves, where the first hanging man is no longer hanging, or to be more accurate is now hanging in a very different way. A large, gluey net of something that glistens slightly silver has appeared, spreadeagling the man against the ceiling. The last thing that the camera sees, before all visual is replaced by a freindly blue screen and a little sign that reads 'Please Recharge Battery', is a red-and-blue streak of a shape, small against the curving roof, but getting bigger with incredible speed as it swings towards the auditorium floor…
Escher heard someone sobbing. After a while, she realised it was her.
Hands pulled at her, helping her upright. There was no more screaming. Silence seemed to be spreading across the packed auditorium, expanding in a hushed ring from the point halfway up the centre aisle where gravity had finally claimed its own. A couple of spectators assisted her as she managed a few shaky steps, the memory of the fall dragging sickeningly at her mind.
Someone landed in front of her, a tall lithe shape outlined in bright red and midnight blue. She had to stare at the motif on his chest for a second before her dazed brain ground into gear.
'…Spiderman?' she said.
'I'm…sorry.' said the hero, his voice soft and leaden.
'What?' Escher blinked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Spiderman's masked face lifted, his unseen gaze fixed on something behind her.
She turned.
Doctor Octavius lay on his back in the centre of the main aisle, his two lower tentacles still folded and draped limply across his chest. The other two were splayed from underneath his shoulders, reminding her once again of the bare spines of a pair of massive wings. There was no movement under the claws that fell over his ribs, claws which were half-shut in a manner similar to what a hand does if it is turned palm-up and allowed to utterly relax. His eyes were closed.
Escher stared at the still body, which, in death, seemed surrounded by a serene aspect of peaceful dignity. She felt a sense of finality gather over her like a stormhead, waiting to break as she stood over the man who had saved her life and watched while a very thin trickle of blood started to seep from the corner of his mouth. Around her, she heard the crowd's muted murmur, though for all it meant to her the background noise might as well have been miles away.
'Come on, kid.' said a well-meaning actor in a grey toga, attempting to steer her away. 'I mean, who could have survived a fall like that?'
Survived…
From what I remember…
…I certainly didn't expect to survive.
Escher shook the man off and ran forwards, dropping to her knees by the nearest claw and trying to heave it off the ground. It was incredibly heavy, a dead weight of cold metal. She gave up, and instead prised the digits fully open, the various joints and articulators sliding unresistingly under her hands.
'Hey!' she yelled, tugging the head so that the empty 'eye' at the centre was pointed directly at her face. 'Hello? Wake up! Do your job!'
'Escher-' started Spiderman, starting forwards. Beside him, a pretty young woman with a white dress and piled red hair was watching her, biting her lip in sympathy.
'They did it before!' Escher poked at the claw with an oil-stained finger, and then, when this had no effect, kicked it. This did have an effect…on her foot. 'In the river! This is a picnic compared to that. They just need-to-wake-up!!' She punctuated each of these last few words with a kick, then scrambled to her feet and glared at Spiderman. 'Help me!'
'I would if I could, Escher.' he said, gently.
'He saved my life!' Furious wasn't the word. Escher was incandescent with rage, white-hot anger against the whole stupid unfair world that had let this happen, and especially the part of it that was standing in a red-and-blue suit in front of her. 'Do something!!'
Peter sighed heavily. Unlike the girl, he had seen the impact very clearly. He felt sick inside just thinking about the force with which Doctor Octavius had hit the ground, with all of his mechanical limbs curled around on top of him, where far from serving as cushioning protection for his back they were just more weight. He, of all people, knew that you just couldn't cheat the laws of physics; if you tried, they came back and kicked you in the teeth every time. He knew that, and he also knew with absolute certainty that Doctor Octavius had understood it too. And, knowing it, he had still decided to fall.
Now, shaking his head, Peter stepped past her towards Otto's body, over the folds of the trenchcoat that spread out in dark tatters around him. He knelt, and reached a hand out for the doctor's wrist, his mind already searching for the right words with which to gently remove Escher's deluded hope.
'I can't-' he began.
skreeeek.
With a flexing rattle, the claw which just a few moments ago Escher had been trying so hard to move lifted slowly from the floor, a light flaring at its centre. Starting as a flicker no stronger than that of a sick firefly, the heart glow faded up as the claw scanned the crowd, then appeared to focus on Peter. The young man withdrew his red-gloved hand with exaggerated care, leaning back on his heels in an attempt not to communicate any hostile intent. The crowd breathed in as one, moving backwards and expanding the clearing in the forest of watching people.
Then the other three arms twitched, discovering themselves arranged uncomfortably underneath their host's back. The lower claws opened, gaining purchase on the carpet to push up under his body and arch across to nudge him into an upright kneeling position, hanging from the upper two tentacles with his head drooping forwards as the lower claws gently pushed and posed him like a doll. When he was arranged to their satisfaction, they stopped and hovered around him, waiting in a manner that those watching would have sworn was expectant.
Otto opened his eyes.
As the harsh gasp of his resumed breath burned in his throat, all he could see was a lot of coloured blurs, a shifting nonsense haze of confusing lights and shades. A couple of blinks resolved the blur directly in front of him into a shape he knew, the quickly standing-up figure of Spiderm- of Peter. Beyond that, he got a vague impression of a wide ring of astonished faces, all watching him with a variety of expressions on the theme of admiration, fear, and respect. Sensing his consciousness, the smart arms extended, helping him get to his feet.
Did we really-
Yes.
Standing upright was problematic. He felt as if the parts of his brain which were supposed to release pain-blocking endorphins in situations like this had decided to go on strike, perhaps as a firm reminder that they didn't appreciate being switched on and off like a set of Christmas tree lights. As a scientific explanation, this left a lot to be desired, but it would have explained a lot. His ribs, shoulders, and back above the spinal brace were a single mass of agony.
Peter was still standing in front of him, in a completely non-confrontational way which still accidentally on purpose placed MJ securely behind him. Otto fixed his gaze on the concealed eyes of the young man who he had intended to kill, and slowly raised his hands in a gesture as unhurried and calm as any movement made by a man whose back felt as if it had been doused in petrol and set on fire could reasonably be. Behind him, the smart arms retracted, their heads closing as they dipped towards the floor. It was not in their design to look friendly, but at least they were making the effort.
'Well, you caught me.' he said, quietly. He could hear the crowd muttering, ripples of sound spreading around the hall.
Peter straightened, dropping his defensive stance and breathing a huge inward sign of relief.
'Me?' he said. 'It looks to me like you've caught yourself, Doctor Octavius.' The mask moved slightly when he smiled.
'Just in time.'
Otto stared at him, his arms still held up in a textbook Surrender Pose, Fig.1. He had been entirely- if unhappily- resolved to face whatever Spiderman, allied with the forces of justice, intended to do with him. This new development left his keen but battered powers of cogitation floundering like a beached tuna.
'You don't…you're not going to…'
Further attempts to articulate his shock were cut off as a new sound filtered in, faintly, from the partially cleared lobby doors. It was quiet for the moment, but the growing siren quality was unmistakeable.
The smart arms started to stir with a modicum of urgency. Disregarding them for the moment, Otto continued to look straight into his former enemy's hidden eyes. As the crowd started to look away in the direction of the noise, only Peter saw the smile.
A faint dink rang in the air as someone rapped on the trailing head of Otto's upper left tentacle. He turned, to find Escher standing directly behind him, her freckled features lit up with a grin as bright as a pinball machine that had just hit the top score.
'You're dry this time.' she said, and hugged him.
…whoah hold up there that's not quite it. it nearly is. soon. i promise. arrgh.