Off to attend to my loyal minions:

To K9: You could say Mr. Nicholas is NVN's comic relief; but he is also the only one who actually has an inkling of what the government's really up to.

To Agent Silver: I thought you also had my name on your author alert list and NVN on your C2 manager's alert list. Oh well. No, I'm not going to watch "Goblet of Fire" right now; my podunk town has no movie theater. The good news is that my parents have finally dragged themselves out of the Stone Age and bought a DVD player. Now if only Spider-Man 2 wasn't sold freaking out at the wal-mart, I'd truly be happy. And besides, if Jesus really did marry Mary Magdalene and had a child, what would be so wrong with that? Most of religion's greatest prophets had families. True love is, after all, God's greatest gift.

To LadyKayoss: Actually, it was Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh who first said the government put a computer chip in his butt. I'm not the first conspiratist who came up with that.

Now comes the debut of Green Goblin in an NVN story! Read and review, my friends, and good-bye for now!

From her secret lair, The Trickster

Chapter 9: Give the Goblin His Due

"Where will he go now?" Agent Cypher, of the Subdivision of Scientific Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency, asked.

Just outside the ruined Convention Center shrieks and sirens filled the air. Spider-Man, the superhero in reluctant partnership with the secret agent, scratched his head, listening to an all-too-familiar crunch-crunch-crunch sound of metal on cement. "The answer is closer than you think."

The phone rang at the Parker house.

"Parker residence. Mary Jane speaking." The redheaded beauty listened to the voice on the other end.

"Just the woman I want to speak to." The hideous cackle chilled her to the bone. The Green Goblin.

She nearly dropped the phone. But what Osborn had to say would prove to be very important.

Across the city, a strange brown-haired girl surveyed the chaos her model had wreaked of the convention center.

"Right now, we're going to run. We have too many things to do, and no time to waste. There are police all over. The only way out—is straight up."

The super-villain clasped Octavia, the brown-haired girl, with one of his famous tentacles. She seemed surprisingly heavy to the doctor, but he did not know she had a set of her own.

"I cannot climb as well with only three arms, but you are much too valuable to lose. Come on."

"Norman, what do you want?"

"Some cretin stole a copy of a blueprint out of Oscorp headquarters, along with journals of nuclear physics and biochemistry research. I'd like them back."

"Sure. I'll grab them from my invisible hole in the basement."

"Don't be sarcastic, girl. The blueprints were for Octavius' remote manipulator arms and the journals were for his nuclear fusion experiments and my super-soldier project. I happen to know the fat freak who calls himself 'Doctor Octopus' stole them. Your miserable wretch of a husband is pursuing Octavius, who has taken a hostage tied into some very strange business. The patents for all of that stuff are mine. Octavius stole them, and I want them back."

"What do you want me to do?"

"He goes home every night, right? Talks to you—confides in you about his superhero exploits?"

"Sometimes, but mostly he wants to protect me."

"You have my number. It showed up on your caller id. Spy on him for me, tell me everything he tells you—about Octavius, his strange hostage, the CIA agent with him…"

"And why should I help scum like you?"

"Well, I could do something simple. I could drop you straight off a bridge like I did to the blonde ex-girlfriend. She was a devil in bed. Too bad she had to die."

"You'll rot in hell for what you did to Gwen." Mary Jane's teeth were gritted.

"Or I could do something of medium effort, like go after Peter's aunt in Queens. She's babysitting your older child, your boy Ben, right? Two birds with one pumpkin bomb.

"Or I could do something which could totally rip your perfect little marriage apart."

"Come again?" Mary Jane feigned innocence. She knew, and so did Norman.

"Don't take me for a fool, you clever little minx. You cheated on Peter. You had an affair with my son. You birthed his child—and abandoned her."

The child would be only a few months older than May now. All Mary Jane had seen was a blur of auburn hair and ice blue eyes before it was snatched from her.

"A girl, Mary Jane. A daughter, named Noreen Harriet Osborn."

"How do you know what her name is? I gave that baby up for adoption. She'll never know the legacy of the Green Goblin. Never."

"Right. Guess who's a proud papa now?" A baby squalled in the background. "Don't worry, angel girl, I have your bottle right here," Norman cooed to the baby. "Noreen, say hi to Momma." Another round of hideous cackles, and mercifully, he hung up.

Octavia had never seen Pier 56—the main hideout of her biological template—before. It did not look as she expected. Octavia intellectually understood Sam Raimi's need for the dramatic effect of a mad scientist's dank, dark secret lab (with accompanying spooky Danny Elfman symphony—a must for any superhero movie), the derelict front was all a sham. The laboratory inside was magnificent, built from scratch from stolen money and scientific equipment.

If two monsters chanced to meet, would they recognize each other?

Octavia knew she was not fully human, just a monster that took the form. Anything that goes against the laws of nature and of nature's God was unnatural and consequently a monster. She was a handsome girl in her own way, but there was no escaping that fact. She was not born of man and woman, but grown from the cells of one man, her captor. She was not birthed from a woman, but plucked from a tank. She began life, not from the union of sperm and egg, but cultured in a Petri dish.

Octavia knew she didn't have a life of her own, not like her friends Jordan and Daisy did, not like the rest of the six billion people on earth did, but she feared death. Being created by man and not by God, she had no eternal soul, and so was irretrievably doomed and damned.

For on the sixth day God created man (with two arms) and created woman from his rib, and bade them be as one, and become fruitful and multiply. And on Friday, August 8th, 14 years ago, man mocked God and created woman of another man's blood cells.

For the life of the flesh is in the blood.

Her magenta-trimmed tentacles stared at her, not knowing what to do or say. Their artificial intelligence program was not meant to handle questions of a metaphysical nature. She was uniquely alone.

"Octavia?" Her father called. "I made dinner. Okay, it's TV dinners heated over a Bunsen burner, but…Octavia? Are you all right? Octavia?"

He opened the door, and saw. He sucked in a breath. "Well, this changes things a bit."