Now, to the reviewers!

To Teckla: Yes, I really seem to have an affinity with bad puns.

To Agent Silver: Yes you did explain too soon, since the Ultimate Six novel is the one I have at home...

To Crys Skywalker: Happy reading, and make sure you also read "The Octopus' Spawn" and "My Only Love and My Only Hate". This one is the third in that series, you know.

Now, on to the story! Chapters 4-8 will explore the lives of the other members of the New Sinister Six. I have only a limited knowledge of comics, so if I make a mistake, let me know. And read and review!

Chapter 5: Electric Spark

Miranda Dillon thought she was just another New York City girl. She was rather tall and gangly, with shiny light red hair and piercing blue eyes. Her mother was dead, her father, Max, whom she knew nothing about, was in jail (again, damn it) and she kept bouncing from foster home to foster home. She was an exceptionally bright student, and for some odd reason, her nickname at school was Sparky. Nobody at the time knew just how true it was.

When she was seventeen, she quickly learned she was anything but ordinary. She was going to her prom, and she was wearing a beautiful, shimmering green dress, trimmed in gold. Her date (she couldn't recall the name) was coming to pick her up. The guy came to her house to meet her foster parents, and he pinned a rose corsage to her dress. Everything went just fairy-tale fine, until Miranda's foster dad told her to hold hands with her date for pictures. Miranda didn't know why he bothered, especially since it was no secret she was not his real daughter, that honor belonging to her foster sister, Diana.

Miranda held out her hand to hold her date's. She barely touched the guy's gold class ring when something startling, remarkable, electric happened.

Bright arcs of electricity shot from Miranda's fingertips, aiming straight at her date. The date, mortally electrocuted, fell instantly, and hopefully painlessly. A second burst of electricity shot from her hands, frying her dad's camera into a molten mess.

The next thing Miranda remembered, she had collapsed on her date's roasted corpse, screaming, "Oh my God, what did I do, what did I do? How did that happen!" She knew nothing of her biological father, and it was impossible to guess how without that information. Her "parents" were screaming at her, "You killed him! You killed him!" and Miranda was screaming, "I don't even know how I did it!" They kicked her out of the house. The police found her and arrested her soon after, but Miranda still maintained she didn't even understand what or how it happened. The judge was lenient with her; she was a good girl, a first time offender, and a straight-A student. She got a year's probation.

Still, she never used her powers again after that. It was crammed into her subconscious.

She was now a freshman computer programming major at Empire State University, trying to fit in and still bearing the scars of her memories. It had come back again recently, had freaked her out when those electric things had come out of her hands and fried her laptop. She'd had to work two jobs to buy a new one.

She never used her powers…until the knock on her dorm room door. She peered out the door and was greeted by a tall auburn-haired woman in a goblin mask and a skintight green suit.

"Hello, Sparky," she said.