I am just so incredibly motivated to write this fic right now! It's very fitting that it gets the final update of the New Year.

Can't wait to see you all in 2022! I hope there will be many more wonderful fics and fic updates to come!


Emily was up early on Wednesday, feeling groggy, hungry, and deeply confused. She had already been up, getting a little bit of last-minute studying done, when her best friend called the Um line.

"Good morning, Shores. You're up early."

"Yeah, well, Basil is about to go to work."

"Oh, you're with Basil." Emily would have wiggled her eyebrows at him if this were in person or over video chat.

"Yeah," Shores sounded like he was about to swoon.

"That's nice. So why'd you call me?"

"I just… I had to tell someone, Em. He just makes me so happy. He calls me dear and makes me breakfast and holds me close at night…"

"That sounds lovely, Shores. I'm happy for you both."

"Um," she thought, "Call off the background check on Basil Worth." Her friend trusted this guy and that was enough, right?

"Are you sure? It was almost finished."

"Well, put it on the back burner for now."

"Alright, Emi."

"Em? Are you listening?" She hadn't been.

"Sorry, Shores. I have a test in a few hours so I'm a bit distracted…"

"Oof, good luck. Hey, I'm in town, do you need anything? I was gonna see if Daniel could drive me back."

"Oh, yeah! See if he'll bring Noah to campus. I need help with a… Project. Oh, and Rhino. I wanna see my baby."

"Cool, yeah, no problem." She could hear the hesitation in his voice.

"Is everything okay, Shores?"

"Yeah. I've got a couple of projects of my own that I'm not looking forward to."

She didn't blame him for that. He hadn't exactly chosen to be a business major, he hadn't really had a choice.

"If everything's less crazy we should hang out this weekend," Emily said. She wanted to put this whole multiverse mess behind her and get back to her normal life with her normal best friend.

"Oh, absolutely. I can always make time for my best friend." She heard a voice in the background calling him.

"Do you have to go?"

"Yeah, sorry, Em. But we'll talk later. I love you." There seemed to be some hesitance in his voice when he said that, too, but he'd hung up before she had time to question it, and she had to get back to studying so she quickly forgot.

"Did you ask her?" Basil asked as Shores pulled himself from the bed. He'd already showered and gotten dressed in borrowed clothes but he had been lying around while he called Emily. He was making himself at home in his lover's bed.

"I couldn't do it. She's so busy right now, with her own crap. But I have another idea."

"Don't tell me you're thinking about breaking in and stealing the supercomputer."

"Stealing? No. Breaking in? Barely. I just need to start thinking like an Osborn." He threw his denim jacket on over the shirt he had borrowed and produced a glasses case.

"I didn't know you wore glasses," Basil ventured.

"I don't. This is mom's invention. It thoroughly scans things to replicate them later. I'd only really be stealing intellectual property."

"That's a big no-no in the design community," Basil commented warily.

"Well, it won't be a big deal between best friends. I'll tell her all about it later when we've gotten our answers. This is going to help both of us." Shores gently stroked Basil's face, making a promise with his eyes that everything would be okay.

He'd had performance issues last night, trying to get the robotic tentacles to work again while Basil sat on the cabin porch and gave him suggestions. The first time was a fluke, Shores couldn't command the tentacles and it was frustrating. They'd devised this plan, to adapt the tentacles with nanotech and get their hands on one of Emily's supercomputers to help him control his father's machine. Like a sort of secret collab between the late Robert Allen and the very much alive Otto Octavius.

"I'll leave the tentacles here for you to play around with and next time we have a date night maybe we'll actually get somewhere."

"I don't know if I feel comfortable with all of this. Seems like we're breaking a lot of rules."

"Rules have to be broken if we want to figure things out. I'm going to get control of these tentacles and then we are going to get answers about your past." Shores spoke more confidently now than he had about anything in his life.

"Are you sure all of that is necessary?"

Shores hesitated. He didn't want to go behind Emily's back and he didn't like keeping secrets, but he had the feeling he wasn't the only one keeping secrets. He'd tell her everything soon enough, he just needed to work out a few more kinks.

"Baz, I'm not sure about anything. But what can it hurt, borrowing ideas from my best friend?"

"I just don't want things getting dangerous. I don't want you or anyone else getting hurt."

"We'll be careful," Shores promised, leaning up and kissing Basil, "Emily isn't dangerous."

Shores wasn't so sure about that statement when he found himself in Robert Allen's old lab. He'd been there once before, with Emily when they'd put the first supercomputer into her brain. But it looked different now like it had been in use very recently. As his glasses scanned he saw things he'd never seen before, ideas for some kind of portal to another dimension, something called a webshooter, and weirdest of all, the design for the suit worn by the superhero known as Spiderling. But… That couldn't be Emily, right? He didn't give himself time to think about it, quickly thumbing through all the files trying to find the blueprints on the AI system and desperately hoping that that was enough to make all of this worth it. He'd probably scanned a bunch of stuff he was never going to need but it didn't hurt to have the excess information on hand.

He didn't like keeping secrets from his best friend, but now he knew for certain that she was keeping a lot of secrets from him.

"Damn, you look good," Daniel said, catching him off guard as he crept down the hallway away from the lab and the bathroom he'd said he was using.

"Ah! I mean thank you. Thanks." Before Basil, Shores would have been melting from the approval of his childhood crush. Now he was just nervous about being caught snooping around.

"Yeah, I like the glasses. And the shirt."

"Oh, the shirt is my partner's! He designed it." Now Shores felt a little more at ease, directing the attention away from himself.

"I didn't know you had a partner," Daniel and Noah said at the same time. Noah kind of creeped him out, Shores got the sense that he was keeping a lot of big secrets too, and he wondered how much Daniel knew.

"Yeah, well, it's a fairly new relationship."

"And you said he's a designer?" Daniel made small talk while they headed out to the car.

"Mm-hm. His name is Basil Worth, I don't know if you've heard of any of his designs, I don't know much about the nanogarment industry."

"Oh, no way! Em and I wear his designs all the time. His clothes are super easy to mod for different body types." Like people who had six arms, Shores thought, feeling more sure than ever that Emily was Spiderling.

For the whole trip, Shores stared dismally out the window, wondering how to confront his best friend about her secret identity or if it was even worth confronting her over now that he had secrets of his own. Rhino sat in his lap, affectionate and oblivious to Shores' moral dilemma, and Daniel played the Beetlejuice musical soundtrack for Noah who had apparently never heard of any good musicals before last week, despite being from New York. Shores remembered the multiverse machine plans that he'd seen in the lab and wondered if Noah had tripped out of someone else's New York. What the hell was even going on anymore? He'd completely lost the plot.

Shores was tasked with holding Rhino's leash, because the boxer didn't trust Noah either, and Daniel and Emily stepped to the side.

"Is everything okay, Em?"

"Yeah, I think so. I think I've figured out a way to get Noah home."

"Oh, good!"

"Why? Did he drive you crazy too?"

"No, he's a lovely young man. But he misses his family and his Eve."

"I thought his family was- oh yeah never mind he talks to ghosts."

"He what?" Daniel looked as surprised as Emily had felt when she'd found out that tidbit.

"Uh, never mind."

"You gotta cool it with the secrets, Em."

Emily glanced at where Noah and Shores were awkwardly standing trying not to stare at each other.

"Yeah… I'm going to tell him soon. Hey, did you go in dad's lab today?"

"No, why?"

"I could've sworn I got an alert that someone was in there…"

"Well, it wouldn't have been Noah, he was with me the whole time."

"Do you think mom went in there?" Emily asked in a moment of panic. Lainey Allen did not know about Spiderling and Emily intended to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.

"You know she hasn't been in there since before dad…" Daniel trailed off, studying his shoes.

"Right, well, I'll check the security cam footage later, but it's probably nothing. I'm probably just paranoid, what with everything going on."

"If Noah is going home soon, I'd like to spend one more afternoon with both of you. Is that one coffee shop in the library still open?"

Emily checked her watch, "It closes in an hour. Shores! You want to get coffee with us?"

Shores looked like he was about to break out in hives and quickly shook his head.

"I have a lot of work to do, sorry Em!" He passed her Rhino's leash and ran off.

"Huh. I wonder what's going on with him?"

"Shores is always that jittery. Hey! You know his boyfriend designed the jacket we mod for your suit?" Daniel commented quietly as they headed to the library.

"Partner."

"What's the difference?"

"I don't know, it's the word Shores uses. You know, I almost did a background check on Basil? I can't believe how worked up I got, I mean, if Shores trusts this guy then I trust him. It's not like Shores has anything to hide." Still, he had seemed pretty nervous, and Emily hoped she'd be able to get to the bottom of that as soon as the multiverse was returned to order.