Spider Gwen's Bad Field Trip, Chapter 7.

Beta Reader: ChocolateOwl.

I didn't like Parker's tone, but it was a good question nonetheless. How did I misplace Gary the fashionable gangster anyhow? Did he grow a spine and go home or was he abducted by a big bad ninja accountant?

"See any cars that belong in Staten Island?" I asked Parker, trying to find something we could go on.

"Yeah," Parker said. "I see a few."

I turned to him. "Where?"

Parker snickered. "In the nearest scrapyard."

Funny, sure, but not helpful, Parker.

"Any ninja accountants you see?" I asked him.

"He was here?" Parker sounded surprised.

"Uh huh," I said. "He was getting takeout from the barbeque place."

Parker grimaced as he looked down. "We went there once. Never again."

"Why?" I asked him. "Can't afford four dollars?"

"Angry vegans outside," he muttered. "Then some idiots tried to hold the place up and I had to change next to their ovens."

"And you're worried they know who you are."

"Yep," he said. "Shame too. Their food was to die for."

My stomach growled. Borgar Queen clearly isn't very filling these days. Very disappointing.

"Your phone is ringing," Parker informed me.

I looked down and, sure enough, the brick of a phone the gangster gave me along with those sweet sweet Benjamins had a glowing screen but no vibrations or sound. Probably broken by the Underground jerks.

"Gary?" I asked when I accepted the call. "Where are you again?"

"No. " The ninja accountant's voice was very plain and neutral, though it didn't stop me from almost dropping the phone in the process. "I was wondering who this phone belonged to."

"It's the ninja accountant," I whispered to Parker before going back to the phone. "So uhh, thanks for finding Gary's phone?"

"Miss Spider," the ninja accountant continued, his voice very annoyed. "May I have some privacy to eat dinner without being spied upon?"

Fuck. Clearly Gary and I weren't very good at sneaking.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," I lied. Lying to boring ninja accountants is funny.

"Then we have nothing to discuss," the ninja accountant said. "Good day."

Then the bastard hung up on me.

I looked over to Parker, who even with his mask on was probably a few seconds away from trying to strangle me. "Call him back," Parker said in a voice that made it clear I would be in for a world of hurt if I said no.

I hit the call back button. Because I'm not stupid- and also faster than Parker, for that matter.

The phone rang one, twice, then the phone went to voicemail. This is Gary Chen, please leave your name and number. I'll try to call you back as soon as I can.

"Gary Chen?" I asked out loud. "Seriously?"

"Call him again," Parker growled.

I pushed the call back button for a second time, and to my surprise, it didn't go to voicemail.

"Who is this?" Olivia Octavius asked into the phone.

I did what I should have done; namely, I dropped the phone and almost crapped myself. First Gary sent a cryptic message, then the ninja accountant picked up the line, and now Doc Ock was on the other end of the line. Who was next? Kingpin? Were they all sitting at a little table playing poker?

"Doc Ock," I hissed at Parker, slashing at my throat with the intensity of a cartoon character. He ignored me as he picked up the phone from the ground.

"Hello?" Parker asked cheerfully into the phone. "Gary, where did you go, man?"

I heard a little voice from the other end of the phone say something.

"Nonono," Parker said. "Gary's my boyfriend. He was supposed to meet me in Chinatown, but he never showed up."

Now that was a mental image I did not need. Parker and Gary. Holding hands, skipping through Central Park, singing stupid love songs to each other. Nope, not enough brain bleach in New York to wash that away. Not at all.

"Could you say that again?" Parker said, still sickenly pretending to be a cheerful boyfriend, a sight so terrible, I'll carry it to my grave. "Something cut you off."

"Parker," I hissed, glaring at him until he handed the phone back to me several seconds later, a strange look on his face.

"It's over anyhow," he scoffed. "They're on a- why are you looking at me like that?"

"Gary deserves better than you," I muttered.

"You break my heart," Parker said, placing an offended hand onto his chest. "Now, how will I ever recover?"

I rolled my eyes. "Where's your boyfriend anyways?"

"My heart belongs to Mary Jane and Mary Jane only," Parker said. "Your date tonight, on the other hand, is on a big truck somewhere, probably still in this area."

I looked at Parker funny. How the hell did he get that much information from a phone call? Black magic? Outright bullshit? Hard to tell with a man with a mask on his head.

"And oh," Parker added. "He's probably tied up right next to your ninja accountant. Whatever his name was."

I tried to figure out how Parker could have pulled a definitive answer out of such thin information, but my mind was blank. Bullshit it was.

"Not going to ask me how I know?" Parker asked.

"Black magic," I replied with as much sarcasm as I could muster. "Or you've somehow sweet talked Olivia Octavius into spilling the beans, which also suggests black magic."

Now that I said it out loud, I sincerely hoped it was black magic that got him his information. I do not want to imagine the alternative, because a pool of brain bleach the size of North America couldn't wash away that particular stain.

"I heard them hit a pothole on the way over," Parker said. "Given what you're telling me, I doubt they're going to be driving along in a minivan."

"May they hit every pothole in the state," I grumbled as I tried to scan the area around us. There was no big car or truck with two annoying men tied to the back in sight. "Where to?"

Parker paused. "Let's keep to bigger streets," he finally said. "And I think they'll be headed back to Harlem, and with a truck you don't want to wake up half the city by driving through residential areas."

"Roxxon?" It was the obvious location, but it was just a little on the nose, being a radioactive no-go zone, after all.

"Where else?" Parker asked. "Think! You're a supervillain. Where else would you go?"

He had a point, but I had a joke idea, because I should always have the last word, as stupid as my ideas can be. "Fisk Tower."

Parker sighed. "Roxxon literally hosted an event there with the media- wait a second."

I was joking, of course, but now Parker looked like he was about to flip out.

"Oi, Parker." I muttered, suddenly realizing what my words meant for the both of us. "How about we split? Or for that matter, get Miles to check in on Fisk Tower?"

"Good idea," Parker said after a moment of awkward silence, because of course it's awkward with Parker. "I'll make the call. You head over to Harlem, yeah."

"Why make him go all the way?" I pointed out the obvious to Parker. "He lives down the street from Roxxon."

Parker turned his head to me before he jabbed a finger into my shoulder. "If you spoke sense all this time, then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation."

"Don't blame it on me," I muttered, trying to think of a distraction that got Parker off my back. "Here, Miles doesn't know what Gary looks like, so one of us will have to head over to Roxxon to make sure we don't get the wrong guy."

"So you want to check out Fisk Tower," Parker muttered. "Alone."

"I have to test these out on someone," I pointed down to my new, fancy platform boots, paid for by Gary Chen's sweet sweet gangster money. Nevermind that I had already introduced them to the last idiotic group of Underground, but hey, practice makes perfect.

"No," Parker said. "If you're going, I don't want you fighting anyone. Got it?"

What a party pooper. Parker is no fun. He's never any fun.

"Fine, Parker," I sighed in my most dramatic tone. "Now go save your boyfriend."

Parker flipped the bird before he leapt away toward Harlem. I leapt to the safety of a nearby apartment block before I melted into a giggling puddle of stupid. Parker and Gary, the latter probably tied up… Well, I regret looking at Mary Jane's search history for a reason, you know.

I recovered reasonably quickly from my yaoi-brain bleach induced thoughts, and I made good time across the city when, once again, like a creepy boyfriend, Parker called me again.

"Air duct cleaning services," I chirped happily into the phone, pausing perched high up on a skyscraper while I took Parker's annoying little call. "How may I help you?"

"Go to hell," Parker muttered. "We've made it to Roxxon, but there's nothing here."

"Keep waiting," I told him. "New York has enough traffic without the kidnapping of two oh-so-handsome damsels."

Parker promptly killed the line like a mafia snitch, and I continued my trip over to Fisk Tower. To my delight, there was a way to access the building without going through the front door and all of the hazards and unwanted attention that came with it.

Granted, I had to climb a series of questionably placed and very icy construction equipment to do it, but at least the ice wasn't actively trying to kill me, like say, a Roxxon security guard or Underground hoodlum.

The roof looked, in all honesty, kind of suspicious, especially once I tripped over a heavy metal door I suspected had once been in use before it had been blown off its hinges. But the roof was almost nice in comparison to the empty, unlit corridor that lay beyond.

In hindsight, I probably should have called Parker or Miles, but I knew they were halfway across town and would take a very long time to make it over to me, so I decided to play the knight to Gary and the accountant's damsel.

The entrance hallway reminded me quite a bit of both the Mason garage as well as the community centre. The former for how cluttered it was, with no shortage of bright purple paint that marked it as Underground territory. The latter for how it was dead silent, with only the gusty wind coming through the doorway behind me providing any source of sound at all.

Did I mention there were no functioning lights in the first corridor? And the fact I needed to use the phone's flashlight feature to even see? Yeah, like I said before, I probably should have called one of the others.

There was only a single way the corridor ended, and for the first time, I saw flickering light that didn't come from my phone. To my disappointment, it was only a dead blue screen coming from a few cracked desktop monitors scattered across the next hallway, including, oddly enough, monitors hanging from the ceiling.

Still, I headed forward, and for once, the room cleared out into something slightly less claustrophobic. Though for the first time, I caught the smell of old spilled blood in the air. Not good. I'll take tight spaces over blood any day of the week.

This room was better lit than the hallway before it, and it had more than just a few cracked computers that provided lighting. Instead, a few long, spindly constructs that reminded me of a dead spider glowed with that weird purple light that signified some sort of relationship with Phin Mason and the Underground, illuminating other, broken constructs bent into shapes that I was pretty sure they weren't supposed to bend to, or outright having been riddled with bullets.

It wasn't hard to find the source of the blood either. I almost tripped over a dead Underground when I passed over to the centre of the room. The poor bastard had obviously been dead for a while, but it was still a disturbing thing nonetheless, especially since just a cursory glance around the room saw at least five other bodies sprawled on the ground, each as dead as the first guy.

It was among the dead bodies of the Undergrounds, that my phone rang again, and I saw Parker's number on the screen again.

"Parker?" I asked.

"Pete's busy," I heard Miles reply. "Heard you were heading to Fisk Tower."

"Yeah," I said, looking down at the dead body at my feet. "It's not looking good."

"What have you found?" Miles asked.

"Six dead Undergrounds," I said, pausing for a minute to think of the bodies I saw. "I think they shot each other."

"Fuck," Miles muttered. "There's been a lot of Undergrounds shooting each other these past weeks. But no sign of Gary?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. "I'm not sure where I should go now."

"I've been in Fisk Tower before," Miles said, his voice a little lower than before. "Do you see any double doors?"

I looked around the room, trying to rely on the light the surviving machines were giving off and trying my best to not look at the ground beneath my boots. It was slow, difficult work, but toward the end of my sweep, I found myself staring at a pair of doors that matched the description of what Miles was saying, with faint white light visible through two panes of broken glass.

"I think I see a set of doors," I said into the phone. "Have you seen anything on your end?"

"No," Miles replied. "Parker's out looking, but we can't see either of the guys we're trying to find."

I nodded, even if Miles couldn't see me. "You know a place where someone would want to stash a couple of kidnapped guys?"

"Never got to explore the whole place," Miles admitted. "Even this afternoon, well… you probably saw the news conference."

"So I'm on my own then."

"There's an air duct system you can access through the emergency stairs if you want to be quiet," Miles offered. "And on the first floor there's a statue that leads to a vault in the basement if you web it the right way."

"Thanks. I'll call you back when I find it," I said to Miles. Once I disconnected the call, I headed over to the dual doors.

The doors, at the very least, were working fine despite the broken glass. Even the building looked like any other tower in New York despite the obvious damage, with far too much glass and shiny stone.

I reached the railing of the floor I was on and looked down. Nothing was moving. No lights that signaled any trouble. No guards, no janitorial staff. Nothing.

I considered jumping from the balcony, right down to the ground floor, to get into the secret vault that Miles mentioned, but I thought against it. If I were to trip over something in freefall, then I would be in for a scrap, and Roxxon would know I was here.

So that left the sneaky option of going through the vents, or the conspicuous option, going down the stairs. Which, of course, in reality meant that I only had one option, lest I ran into a hapless janitor halfway down the stairs.

The vents were spacious as far as vents went, but it was still a painful, awkward climb through them, especially with how

And more importantly, Miles was right. The vents got me to a small platform that was far closer to the ground floor than the first balcony had gotten me to, and one that allowed me a far better vantage point than before, this time a small balcony that jutted out from the walls.

I had been wrong about the lack of guards, as I probably should have been. There were a few guards standing around the ground floor, each dressed in a Roxxon uniform and wielding guns, but certainly it wasn't a literal stroll through the park as I hoped it had been looking down from high above.

But the presence of guards also meant I had been right, at least about the fact that something was about to go down. Just what exactly, I wasn't sure.

So I waited from my vantage point, putting the phone Gary gave me on silent. No point alerting the guards to my presence.

It wasn't long before I heard a distant roar and what sounded like a fog horn echo through the building. Looking down, I noticed the guards below snap to attention, their hands on their weapons as they stepped to the sides of the hallway they stood in, now in neat military lines.

I took a risk and leapt from my vantage point, scrambling to another balcony halfway across the building when I heard whatever was outside slow to a groaning halt. The new position was much closer than the first, but it also meant that I was a lot further away from the vents if I wanted to make a run for it.

But as far as I could tell, the move paid off, and from my vantage, I could see a large, hideous statue at the end of the hallway, holding some sort of a very spinnable-looking spear, just as Miles had told me.

And sure enough, I caught sight of the guests of honour. Olivia Octavius, the Roxxon accountant, and a Underground gangster in a dark hood, all walking toward the statue.

"It's getting late," I heard the gangster, a woman and clearly not Gary, say. "Can we get this business over with?"

"We have our agreement," Doc Ock said after a moment. One of her mecha-tentacles was spinning around the metal blade of the statue as if it was the world's most bizzare wind-up toy. "You tell us where the man in the back-"

"Chinatown," the Underground lady scoffed. "He's a former Inner Demon. Not hard to find."

Inner Demon? That wasn't a term I was familiar with, but I figured I would bring it up with Miles and Parker.

"He took something of ours," Doc Ock said. "We want it back, and we would like it back now."

The Underground lady nodded. "Fine, but if you miss a cent of the ten million I toss the whole thing into the Hudson."

"You do that-" Doc Ock growled before the ninja accountant cleared his throat.

"Enough threats, if you will," he said, glaring down Doc Ock. "Miss Octavius, a word, in private."

I held my breath as the Roxxon guards and the Underground lady walked out, until the sound of the main doors to the building slamming shut faded into a distant echo.

"To hire dangerous criminals with your budget is rather frowned upon in this line of work, Miss Octavius." I heard the ninja accountant say. Despite his words, he sounded like he was describing the weather or some dry economic theory. "I'm not sure Simon would appreciate his budget going to such ends."

"We had an agreement," Doc Ock growled.

"I do not believe Simon would have agreed with murder in his agreement," the ninja accountant replied. "Nor will Roxxon shareholders, who I represent, for that matter."

Murder. Oh dear. I had a nagging suspicion they meant Gary. Not good. Not good at all.

"He gets his Nuform," Doc Ock continued. "He gets a way to make more of it, and the reactors continue to work."

"Rather difficult to do when Nuform's inventor has been dead for half a year."

That was an excellent point, I had to admit. Well played, the most boring man in New York.

"You haven't seen the vault yet, have you?" Doc Ock asked, arrogance dripping from her voice. "Why don't I show you?"

I had heard enough. But as I rose up from my position, I was interrupted by the sound of the door to the outside opening again. It was followed by a gust of loud wind that made it impossible to listen in anymore.

"I thought I told you to dump him in an inconspicuous place," I heard Doc Ock say when the wind died down again. "Then the computer."

I stayed crouched until I watched Doc Ock and the accountant activate the bad statue. They disappeared into the little elevator I saw at the bottom before I made my move and climbed back through the vents and past the abandoned Underground base.

The 18-wheeler that I could see parked outside of Fisk Tower was still idling along, but I could see the last of the Roxxon security guys climbing into the back, giving me a minute at most to get a call in.

"Miles," I hissed into the phone when the ringtone faded. "They're going after Phin's computer."

"What?" Miles sounded shocked. "How did they find that out?"

"Doc Ock is bringing in Underground support," I said. "They're going to hit Chinatown soon."

"Damn," Miles muttered. "How many?"

"I don't know," I said as the 18-wheeler began to move. "They grabbed Gary and they're out to kill him. I'll call you back when I know more." Before Miles could respond, I cut the line and jumped from the rooftop, swinging around the city as I followed the 18 wheeler with Gary inside.

What a night this had turned out to be.

AN: Chapter 7 is complete! Yes, sorry for the two month hiatus, but I've been busy with my other two works and honestly juggling three stories is a pretty bad idea. Still, expect this work to be done by the new year (it's going to be significantly shorter than both of my other works).