Snuggles the Symbiote

Spider-Man: One of the longest active heroes, around since the beginning of the Heroic Age. Possessing physical attributes between four and twenty times peek-human capability and a 250 IQ, an all-around asset as long as you can put up with his sense of humor.

X-23 and Honey Badger: Opposite-sex clones of Wolverine with variations on his power set, making them the best there is at what they do. With claws, high-end regenerative healing factors, martial arts training, and enhanced senses, they're the ultimate spies and assassins-X-23 more than Honey Badger, but Honey Badger makes up for her youth and relative lack of training with a stronger healing factor and nanites that remove her ability to feel pain.

Deadpool: The Regenerating Degenerate. The Merc With a Mouth. And a bunch of other titles… Basically the ultimate in hired muscle.

Mania: Hellfire manipulation, demon summoning, and she's wearing an exact clone of the Venom symbiote with all the raw power that entails. In lieu of the traditional 'demonic spider-man' look, she's elected for armor, belts, and anime hair.

Agent Anti-Venom: Literary Agent Venom-with his decorated career in the united states army-with healing and anti-symbiote powers. Came in with Mania.

Ms. Marvel: A Human/Inhuman Hybrid who has undergone Terrigenesis, resulting in a combination of Mister Fantastic, Giant Man, and Mystique

Energizer: Of the Power Pack, with the ability to absorb energy, slowly generate energy, discharge energy in the form of kinetic force, and convert matter into energy. She's been a superhero since she was only five years old.

Gwenpool: Origin unknown. History is unknown. Powers unknown. Just knows things. Some kind of reality warping abilities speculated to be sorcery. Doesn't wear pants for some reason.

And me, Brainstorm: The smartest girl in the universe and future Sorcerer and Scientist Supremes

"We are assembled here," the now teenaged Valeria Richards said to the gathered heroes as they stood in the lobby of what appeared to be an abandoned office building in a suburb of New York City, "because you're the only ones who answered my E-flyer." She did her best not to sound discouraged and managed to stand proud in her silver unstable molecule uniform.

"Yeah," Gwenpool began, "I'm gonna admit I didn't read the whole thing. I just saw that Richards needed help with something and signed up."

"Valeria?" Energizer asked. "Didn't I used to be older than you by a lot?"

"So from your perspective, my family and the Future Foundation were only gone a year but it was five from our perspective."

Energizer, or rather Katie, held up her fingers. "That math doesn't add up."

"Don't think about it, kid," Deadpool interrupted. "It's comic logic."

Spider-Man facepalmed. "Here we go..."

"And for the record," Deadpool continued, "the real reason we're all here is because we're the Ratman's favorites."

"Whose favorites?" Gwenpool asked, bent over inquisitively.

"I'll explain later," Deadpool replied. "Besides, it doesn't matter why we're here. I'm not saying no to an adventure with my bestest friends," He finished as he pulled Spider-Man into a side-hug and patted Honey Badger's head.

"Wade," Spider-Man said. "Do we need to have the personal space talk again?"

"Probably," Deadpool said cheerfully without releasing Spider-Man from the side-hug.

"You know," Agent Anti-Venom commented, "Spider-Man and Deadpool… That's the most unlikely friendship I could ever think of."

"There's a good person deep down inside him," was Spider-Man's only reply. "Very deep down."

"Spidey makes me want to be a better person," Deadpool answered more seriously.

Agent Anti-Venom cocked his head slightly. "You know what, me too."

"Deadpool has a point," Ms. Marvel said. "I'll be honest, some of you wouldn't be my first choices but a team-up between heroes that don't normally work together is bound to b interesting-"

"I know, right!" Gwenpool interrupted. "We've got Spider-People and X-People and Fantastic Four affiliates and an inhuman all working together. If we only had a Hulk this would be the perfect super adventure. I'm sure there's at least one person would there who'd like a story about something like this."

Deadpool, having since released Spider-Man and Honey Badger, pounded his heart with a fist and made a peace sign. "We miss you, Stan."

"I hate to say this," Val said once the conversation lulled, "but I doubt this is gonna be a fun adventure, so..." She stepped behind the receptionist's desk and typed something into the computer.

Immediately the whirring of machinery kicked to life. Mania had to leap as the segment of the floor she'd been standing on began to move out of the way, revealing a staircase.

X-23's nose wrinkled, but she didn't say anything.

Honey Badger was less polite. "It smells like a bunch of spoiled meat farted."

"Yeah, there are a couple hundred corpses down there," Valeria admitted. "I was doing some basic dimensional fabric studies, noticed an anomaly here and… I'm smart enough to admit when I'm out of my depths."

With concern and a more somber mood, the assembled heroes descended downstairs at least three sub-basements down before coming down to a vault door that was still open.

Spider-Man went in first…

And stopped when he came across the corpse of Peter Parker floating in a tube. "This is never a good sign."

Deadpool came up behind him. "Why would anyone want to clone that loser?"

Spider-Man didn't reply. Instead, he said aloud, "clones… Why is it always clones? I hate dealing with clones."

"Hey!" Honey Badger shouted, clearly offended. "Clone, right here. Clone of a clone even," she said with a gesture to X-23.

"Sorry, that's not what I meant," Spider-Man replied apologetically. "What I mean is that I hate the people who make clones." He turned back to Valeria. "So, who is it? Jackal? Sinister? The High Evolutionary?"

"I don't know," Valeria admitted. "I..." She seemed to be somewhere between fear and embarrassment. "When I found this place, I was just expecting a rift into the Negative Zone or a remnant of the Secret Wars, not..." She gestured further into the room.

There were hundreds of cloning tubes. Some intact. Most broken open."

And hundreds of corpses on the ground. Most of them were nude, obviously clones, but a handful seemed to be paramilitary and a few more were in lab coats.

"This is so far outside my frame of reference… I thought I could handle it on my own… Until I found bodies of clones of Dad and Uncle Doom arranged in a way that very much looked like a mutual kill. Something big happened here. I need to figure it out, and I need help."

Spider-Man walked away from the tube with his own dead clone floating in it back to the entrance where Brainstorm still stood and kneeled so to be on face level with Valeria.

"Val? Why did you send out an E-Flyer instead of asking your family for help?"

Valeria averted her gaze from Spider-Man's eyespots. "Uncle Ben and Alicia are getting married. Everyone's been busy working on stuff for the wedding… I didn't want to ruin anything."

Spider-Man hummed. "Val, take it from someone who's been superheroing since he was just a few years older than you are and has run into a lot of situations like this. When there's something like this, something in the community that's got you upset, it helps to talk about it. If you've got someone close to you that's in the know, it's best to try to talk about it with them. When we're done investigating here, you should really tell your parents about this."

Valeria wanted to say something, something to deny it, but she couldn't think of anything. "Yeah… You're right. Thanks..."

"If you want to thank me," Spider-Man said in complete seriousness, "get me an invitation to the wedding."

"I'll see what I can do."

The others had spread out and started searching the cloning lab while Val and Spider-Man were talking. Their attention was drawn by someone shouting "NOOOOO!"

Immediately they sprinted to the sound of the scream. Spider-Man, being faster, made it there a moment before Val.

They found Honey Badger kneeling before a tube with the submerged body of a clone of X-23. "I could have had another sister..."

Everyone began congregating around this cloning tube, summoned by the distress in Honey Badger's cry.

X-23 pulled her side-kick up from the ground and placed a hand on her shoulder. She said something, but Val didn't hear it before Gwenpool walked out from behind an invisible wall in the middle of the group at that exact moment and spoke up.

"So, yeah, I just found a room full of transfusion bags labeled 'Mutant Growth Hormone,' " she said while holding one up. "I don't know how much this stuff sells for, but I'm pretty sure the people here could have flooded the market if they'd wanted to."

"A bag that size would sell for anywhere between twenty and eighty bucks. Depends on what powers it gives you, how watered down it is, and if it's been laced with anything. Could be as much as a hundred twenty if it's a really good power set." Deadpool explained with surprising coherence.

Everyone turned to look at him. "What? I'm a mercenary. You learn these things."

"May I?" X-23 said with a gesture to the transfusion bag. Gwenpool tossed it to her without fuss. X-23 made a small opening in the bag and sniffed it a couple of times.

"This is almost pure MGH," she said. "There are some impurities, some adrenaline, insulin, traces of blood plasma, but this is mostly MGH..." another sniff. "Rough estimate, ten percent saline, and other than trace impurities the rest is MGH. And it's organic. This was pulled out of someone's veins."

"Eighty a bag, minimum," Deadpool finished while randomly playing with an automatic pistol.

"Then that room's got a couple million in MGH, at least," Gwenpool concluded.

In response, Deadpool dropped his gun. It went off, shooting Honey Badger in the left shin.

This prompted X-23 to glare at Deadpool. Simultaneously, Honey Badger carefully hopped down so that she was sitting on the floor. "I'm okay," she said as she extended the claw in her right hand with a 'snikt,' "I don't feel pain. I heal. I've just gotta get the bullet out." She then rolled up her pant leg and starting digging through her own flesh.

"She's way too casual about this," a somewhat green around the gills Ms. Marvel said.

"She cut off her middle finger and gave it to me once," Deadpool shared.

"First," Spider-Man interrupted, "Wade, give me your guns, you can have them back at the end of class."

"Oh, come on Webs, it was an acciden-"

"Now, Wade."

Reluctantly, the mercenary parted with three automatic firearms, before Spider-Man stopped him.

"I just realized,".he said, "I don't have anywhere to put these. Just… Just keep the safety on."

Deadpool took back his firearms and made a show of fiddling with the safety switch of each one.

Then one of them went off and hit Honey Badger in the right forearm as she stood back up. She rolled her eyes, extended her other claw, and casually popped the bullet from her arm. "Are we done now? With the shooting?"

"Anyway," Spider-Man continued, "Uh… Gwenpool, right? Can you take us to where you found the MGH?"

"Yeah," Gwenpool replied. "It's this way."

The pink-and-white, pantsless mercenary led the assembled heroes off away from the main area full of cloning tubes and corpses down to a hallway. "By the way… I noticed you were a bit uncomfortable a bit ago, Spider-Man… Uh… I'm not Gwen Stacy. I'm not even an alternate Gwen Stacy. My name actually is Gwen Poole… My tailor misread an application and I just rolled with the 'Girl Deadpool' look."

"How did-"

"I mean, the Night Gwen Stacy Died was major news for a couple of weeks," Gwenpool explained perhaps a little too quickly, "and I really, really like Superheroes so when I looked up some facts about you it just kind of-"

"She comes from an alternate universe where we're all comic book characters." Deadpool interrupted. "She knows stuff because she's a colossal Comic Book Geek. Her life is basically an SI fanfic IRL."

"Oh," Spider-Man said. "Why didn't you just say so?"

"What?"

"You'd be surprised how often stuff like that happens," Spider-Man with a handwave. "I met up with the Web Warriors once. Apparently, they tried to recruit Spider-People to fight an army of Electros and absolutely shattered the perception of reality of a guy who plays me in movies. Just don't give out anyone's secret identities and there won't be any problems."

"Oh… Kay. You know there's cartoons about you, too. One in the 90s ended with you coming to the 'real world' and having a talk with the guy who created your comics."

"Sounds nice," Spider-Man said with a nod.

"And since everything's out in the open, Mephi-"

Deadpool put a hand on Gwen's shoulder. "Kid. You can only do so much at once."

"...Fine."

"So," Mania spoke up, "are they cloning people just to harvest them for Mutant Growth Hormone? That seems kind of… horribly wasteful?"

"Maybe they didn't want to worry about missing person reports?" Honey Badger speculated.

"No," Val interrupted. "Mutant Growth Hormone is made of mutation factor, and mutation factor is only found in Mutants, Inhumans, and a handful of subcategories of mutates. Most of the clones, at least the ones I saw, were mutates who don't have a mutation factor."

They made it to a storage room, a large one, absolutely full of plastic boxes. One was open an filled with four transfusion bags of mutant growth hormone.

A quick check revealed that the other boxes, for the most part, had similar contents, five transfusion bags of MGH.

X-23 and Honey Badger each started sniffing around the room.

"This all came out of one person," X-23 said.

That… Didn't sound right. Val started doing calculations in her head. "Okay, even assuming maximum daily extraction under ideal circumstances and accounting for the loss of mass as the fluids are refined, it'd take ten years to extract this much from a healthy adult man..."

"Maybe they pulled it out of a guy with the same powers as Multiple Man?" Deadpool suggested. "Or maybe time travel? Or clones, since we are in a cloning lab?"

"I can smell whoever this came out of," Honey Badger said. "Come on, this way," she said, running out of storage room further down the hall.

"Gabby, wait!" X-23 called out as she ran after Honey Badger. "We don't know what's down here!"

A few minutes later, the rest of the group found the two be-clawed regenerators in what appeared to be an operating theatre. There was a metal table and some cabinets and drawers that X-23 and Honey Badger were searching, and what looked like a high-tech dialysis machine.

"Whoever the 'donor' for the MGH was," X-23 explained without looking as they came into the room, "they spent a lot of time in this room."

"Hey, Laura," Honey Badger questioned, "what was the name of that clinic the Sapien League burned down about a year ago? The one Dr. McCoy mentioned?"

The Tam and Coolah clinic. Why?"

"I just found a patient record from there," Honey Badger finished. "I don't think that was the Sapien League."

Honey Badger stepped back, holding up several papers. "Mutant, chronic health problems from a hormonal imbalance… Power of superhuman hormone production… And if she's still alive, she's ten."

You could hear a pin drop as everyone realized how all of the MGH could have come from one person.

And then Deadpool spoke up. "What are the odds that any of the people running this place made it out of here alive?"

"...Why?" Val asked.

"Because I want to introduce them to my new knives: Blanch. Rose, Sophia, and Dorothy."

Spider-Man cocked his head. "You named your knives after the Golden Girls?"

"I ran out of permutations of Bea Arthur's name, so I branched out."

"I found something else," X-23 interrupted. She stood up holding a document binder. She flipped it open. "It mostly seems like records of setting up the lab… Wait, here… 'Acquiring the subject...' They murdered a little girl's parents for this… 'Maintenance' They're not even... Here's something more substantial."

X-23 cleared her throat and read allowed.

"Subject was conscious during routine re-application of the extraction needles. Subject cried the whole time, begging for her mother. I reminded her that we killed her parents."

"So, I'm agreeing with Deadpool right now," Gwenpool added.

"There's another more descriptive entry," Laura went on. "Subject chided me for swearing after she bit me before calling me the rough Gaelic equivalent of 'mother fucker' and wishing that the Devil would shatter the bones of my back and use them to make a ladder with which to pick apples in the gardens of Hell in the same language. I did not tell her I understood what she was saying, nor did I comment on her hypocrisy."

X-23 flipped a few pages. "Patient woke up from a nightmare. Stated a belief that Spider-Man would find out about what we're doing here and 'beat our butts up between our ears' and rescue her."

Spider-Man became deathly still at that.

"We still haven't found what we're here for," he said after a few minutes.

"Guys," Mania interrupted, "my symbiote says it can sense a lot of dead symbiotes."

"Specifically dead ones?" Ms. Marvel questioned.

"There's a hivemind," Mania explained, "my symbiote can sense things that are part of the hive mind but that aren't alive. A lot…"

"Yeah," Agent Anti-Venom added. "I'm getting it too. I'll take point for now, if no one minds."

They moved on, further still down the hall. Val could hear Spider-Man mumbling about how it was looking like everything he hated dealing with was involved.

"So I've been wondering," Deadpool said as they walked. "Now, I heard about that incident with Maniac and all that. Last I heard, little missy here was down a symbiote." He gestured to Mania. "What gives."

"We were attacked," Agent Anti-Venom said without looking back. A dark-haired woman and a blond man, both in nice suits and both with the kind of movements that it takes years of training to instill in someone. They had the Mania symbiote in a vial but lost it in the fight. The vial shattered and the symbiote returned to Andrea.

"My symbiote says that the woman approached price in prison and stabbed him to death to get it," Mania added. "I think they threw the fight though. They just up and left through a portal after stabbing Flash once. There was a piece of anti-venom on the woman's knife."

Five minutes later they walked through a large room with the corpse of what appeared to be a clone of Abomination leaning up against a large glass cube with one of the side cracked open. At the far end of the room was a vault door.

A massive hole in the wall showed that the room full of clones was on the other side.

"So, did anyone notice that while we were in that room?" Gwenpool lampshaded. "I mean, it's a big room, but I feel like that could have saved us a couple of minutes if anyone had noticed it."

No one responded because Gwen's statement was immediately followed by loud, repeating clanging.

Everyone's attention was drawn to the vault, where Mania had formed a large blade from her arm and was trying and failing to carve it open.

"I think the vault is made of Adamantium," she admitted after her fifth attempt to carve it open. "Does anyone have class-100 strength, or do I need to break out the Hellfire and melt through?"

"...Why?" Spider-Man asked.

"The symbiotes are in there," Mania deadpanned. "Why else? Now, can anyone break the door down or do I have to be awesome at it?"

"You're being silly," Energizer said

This made Deadpool jump. "Forgot she was here."

"I get that a lot," the blonde in the yellow spandex replied. "If my sister wasn't dating one of the Runaways, I don't think anyone other than the Fantastic Four would remember the Power Pack exists. Anyway," she said as she walked up to vault door, "you don't need to smash or burn it, you've just got to..."

Energizer tapped the vault door a few times, and then placed a hand next to the wheel.

The vault door glowed yellow for a moment and then disintegrated, with the dust sublimating away into nothing.

She stepped back and turned away from the now wide-open vault and clapped once. "Tada!"

"...Has anyone noticed that the strongest superheroes tend to be the young ones?" Deadpool commented. "I mean, it's not something you think about very often, but… I mean, it even applies to folks like us. Back when Webs was a teenager he wiped the floor with the Fantastic Four and with a robot that had absolutely wrecked the original Avengers… But now that he's a geezer he'd probably never been able to pull that off again."

"I'm only in my mid-twenties, Wade."

"Still!?"

"So, anyway, there aren't symbiote zombies trying to eat our brains," Spider-Man said while ignoring Deadpool's outburst. He pulled up the shirt of his costume slightly so that he could fiddle with his belt, "so let's see what's in that vault."

With a click, the miniaturized spotlight that Spider-Man kept in his belt illuminated the vault with a stylized image of his mask.

The contents of the vault were not, in fact, symbiotes. The Scorpion had, in recent years, taken to augmenting his strength with powered armors. Sometimes those armors had claws like a true scorpion. Within the vault were ten armors modeled on those on racks, five on either wall. It was hard to make out in the light of the spider-signal, but it seemed that nine of them were solid black but the tenth was gold with blue accents.

Behind each rack was a mounted harness with several mechanical tendrils attached to it, each one matched the colors of the scorpion suit in front of it.

Spider-Man approached the nearest display and examined the tendrils… "Well, Otto's gonna be mad if he ever finds out about this."

"...Isn't he dead?" Energizer asked.

Spider-Man sighed. "It's a long story."

Agent Anti-Venom poked a black Scorpion armor, which caused it to start melting. "Technology made of symbiotes… Why does this seem so familiar?"

"Iron Man's Mark 50 armor, the Endo-Sym, was made out of building blocks taken from the Venom Symbiote." Gwenpool recited as though she'd memorized a wiki page. It was basically a mindless, fire and soundproof cyborg symbiote with Iron Man's gadgets and weapons put in it."

"And before that," Spider-Man added, "Iron Man and I busted up a company that pulled Carnage out of Orbit and were making prosthetics and knock-off Iron Man suits from bits of his symbiote… I wonder how Scorn's doing?"

"So, there's mass cloning… MGH harvesting… and biomechanical supervillain gear… And something" The gears were turning in Val's head… "We haven't seen what they were really up to, yet. This..." And then Brainstorm had a brainstorm. "All we've seen so far have been prototypes. I already searched the top building, it's just a shell… Did anyone see anything that might have been a main office? Or a security room? I've got a hunch that needs-Where's Ms. Marvel?"

"I'm out here!" the shapeshifting teen heroine called. "I never went in the vault. Uh… I know where they got the symbiotes they were working on… And it's a lot more complicated than just Symbiotes."

Everyone left the vault to find Ms. Marvel on the opposite side of the glass tank. From this angle, a filing cabinet they hadn't noticed earlier was visible. Ms. Marvel had opened it and was looking through some documents.

"Before I explain, uh..." Ms. Marvel began, "I was avoiding looking too closely at the bodies. How old did the scientist types look? According to this, they've been at this a while, but I think it's weird that so much of their records are still analog."

No one had an answer. Ms. Marvel proceeded to summarize what she'd read. "So, they captured a symbiote a while ago, when a bunch of them invaded the earth… You know, when there were two Spider-Men? Around that time? Anyway," she went on, "at first they were just experimenting on it to see what it could do, but eventually, they stumbled onto the organic technology angle… But a little over a year ago, their symbiote died after giving birth to a new one and they modified it to get better samples for their biotech… By splicing it with our DNA."

"Our DNA?" Gwenpool questioned.

"Well, not yours specifically," Ms. Marvel corrected. "But… From the super community. According to this, the second symbiote was spliced with Mystique's DNA… My DNA..." Ms. Marvel sounded particularly uncomfortable with that. "The DNA of the Lizard, The Thing, Sabretooth, Captain America-with 'the real one' in parenthesis-Kraven the Hunter, Colossus, Spider-Man," she gestured to Spider-Man, who said a swear under his breath, "Tippy-Toe, with a note that it didn't do anything and the scientist who suggested it was shot… Lockheed, Captain Marvel-Carol, not any of the other ones, She-Hulk, and The Leader. IT also says that they fed it one of the armors and a set of Tentacles that they made form its parent, which another document said had the Scorpion's DNA and Doc Ock's in them, that they got ahold of mystical energy from multiple Asgardians-it didn't say how-that changed the Osmium-Steel it got from Colossus into Uru when it was exposed to it-and they tested the magic absorbing abilities by exposing it to Hellfire from one of the Ghost Riders… They didn't say which one..."

"So, to recap, there's a dimensional anomaly here that we still haven't figured out," Spider-Man said as he began counting off on his fingers, "we're surrounded by dead clones of most of the super-community, and there's a horrifying Super-Symbiote completly unaccounted for. So, when does Galactus get here?" He questioned. "Or Dormammu? Does anyone know what Ultron, Thanos, or Apocalypse are up too? Because I don't know how this could possibly get worse, but I just know it will."

"It's uh..." Ms. Marvel flipped through the documents she was holding. "Probably not a super symbiote. The notes here say it was never as powerful as they expected it to be."

"It's probably because of your DNA," Val said as if it were a matter of fact.

"Excuse me?"

"You're an Inhuman," Val said. "A lot of the other samples came from mutants. Inhumans and Mutants are biologically incompatible-Quicksilver and Crystal's daughter came out as a normal human, other than the not-dying from having her latent superhuman potential unlocked by Terrigen. When Quicksilver tried to re-empower the post-M-Day mutants with Terrigen, most of them died."

"The other X-Men stumbled on a plot by Mister Sinister to create stronger mutants by mixing them with inhuman DNA," X-23 added as if remembering something, "A clone of cyclops with inhuman DNA and Terrigen melted down and exploded while they were fighting it..."

"And then there's the M-Pox," Ms. Marvel finished sheepishly…

"For all we know, the Symbiote's already dead from its own incompatible-Wait, what's M-Pox?" Val asked.

"A lot happened while you guys were gone," Spider-Man said to the young girl. "I'll see about getting you filled in later."

"Anyway," Val said. "I think I know what's going on. We need to find a main office."

Rather than go around the long way, the assembled heroes simply went out through the hole in the wall.

Val would never admit it, but she felt a little stupid when it took her ten minutes to look up.

About half-way up to the main room's high-vaulted ceilings was a catwalk that encircled the room.

And in the center of one wall, with a view of the whole chamber, was a large window. Next to it was an automatic door with a keypad.

"I found something!" She called out. "There's a door. Does anyone see stairs or a later or..."

Val was reminded that most of the group had superhuman physical attributes and/or the ability to teleport when she and Energizer were left in the lower levels while everyone else made it up to the catwalk.

Luckily, they didn't have to say anything. Ms. Marvel noticed and they had a somewhat pleasant giant-hand ride back up.

"Okay, so the password to open the secret entrance upstairs was-"

Val was cut off by Mania kicking the door off its track and into the room.

"This one wasn't Adamantium," the teen said smugly.

"Never mind," Val said with a sigh.

Inside the room was a computer with a large monitor surrounded by a dozen asymmetrically placed smaller monitors of various sizes mounted on the walls around it.

Val cracked her knuckles. "Everyone, stand back and give me five minutes."

Three minutes later, Val had cracked her way into every password-protected part of the computer.

"Okay, first, let's check the security footage from a few weeks ago, figure out what happened," Val said as she pulled up multiple time-lapse videos on the various monitors.

Everyone watched in silence as days sped before their very eyes, before one clone-no one could make out of who from that camera's vantage point, woke up, struggled, shattered his tube, and escaped, breaking more tubes and freeing more clones in the process, leading to chaos. Seemingly confused clones soon became a screaming mob fighting amongst themselves with many dying at each other's hands.

"Oh, fuck webs, they cloned our daughter!" Deadpool shouted, pointing to a blue, multi-limbed woman with a spider-mouth on one of the monitors.

"Don't call her that, Wade," Spider-Man said half-heartedly. In the corner of her eye, Val could see that his gaze was alternating between the camera feed of the gold and blue symbiote in the glass case and the one of the little girl hooked up to machine constantly harvesting her for the production of MGH.

The fighting among the clones, with armed guards joining the fray and other workers, scientists mostly, being killed in the crossfire was too chaotic to follow clearly until the end, when two young men each with telekinetic and energy manipulation abilities on display, one brunette and one blonde, clashed repeatedly, which distracted the surviving clones so that it was only the two fighting.

The transformed corpse of an abomination clone was hurled through a wall-on the display of the symbiote room, it was shown hitting the glass case, freeing the symbiote trapped within which slithered down the hall until it found its way to the little girl being harvested for hormones.

"Oh no..." Spider-Man said as the symbiote engulfed and bonded to the child, and the symbiote possessed child fled back into the hall and from there into the main room.

A few more clones had been killed in the crossfire of the fight between the two high-level psychics, which sparked fighting again as the symbiote emerged out into the room.

One last clash of raw power between the two created a vortex of blue light that created a black hole effect-everyone in the room that wasn't already dead was sucked in. Then the feed cut off.

Val searched through the computer a bit more. "It seems that the power went down and it took an hour for emergency power to come back on. In that time all the life support failed and the clones who didn't wake up died." Val stood up, cracked her neck, and sat back down. "So, the blonde looked like Mister Franklin-an older version of my brother from the future-and the brunette was pretty clearly Nate Grey's clone… Two high-end reality warpers in a fight… No wonder there was a dimensional anomaly, they basically tore the universe several new-"

"Val," Spider-Man interrupted, "is there a way to find out if anyone survived that or where they ended up."

"Yeah," the girl-genius said casually. "I can even build something to take people there if they ended up somewhere life-sustaining, but it'll take anywhere between a couple of days and a couple of months depending on if they ended up in this universe or a different one and where they are in relation to here. Why?"

"...A bunch of scared and confused people-one of them a little girl being controlled by a monster-got sent to who knows where. As superheroes, it's our responsibility to find them and bring them home, if only so they can't hurt themselves or others… I mean, clones are people, too… We can't just..." Spider-Man kind of trailed off, lamely.

"I'll see what I can do… After we talk with my parents," Val added when she remembered her earlier conversation with Spider-Man. She returned to work on the computer, searching its files for any final details about what this was all meant to be about. "And… Hunch confirmed," she said. "There's a mysterious backer funding the project… cloning's based on bootleg Jackal-Tech… And the end goal was mass produced super soldiers for sale on the black market… The normal clones were proof of concept, phase one. Phase two was hybrid clones-combining symbiotes with their hosts or mixing people with similar powers together. Phase three is kept below the main room."

Val typed a few things into the computer's attached keyboard, and then the loud grinding of gears reverberated through the complex.

Val stood up and approached the window to watch as the floor down below them split apart, cloning tubes and the corpses around them shifting away as a platform rose from below the floor.

There were now six cloning tubes that were each far larger than any of the others. Horrific, distorted, twisted things filled four of the tubes, some squished against the glass.

Even from this far, it was clear as day that something was wrong with them-one was a mass of arms and tentacles and other, harder to describe limbs. One appeared to be a large anthropomorphic cat-ape-wolf-thing with half a dozen malformed bone-blades at the end of its wrists and horrific, disproportionate limbs and bulging muscles. The third simply looked like the worst of The Abomination, the Thing, and Mister Hyde, while the fourth simply could not be described with mere words.

Everyone seemed somewhat disgusted... At least everyone whose faces and/or body language Val could read, except for Energizer but the Power Pack's history had left them exposed to a lot of Body Horror so Katie had probably built a resistance to it all.

"According to the documents on the computer," Val explained, "this was the final prototype. Each one of them uses Captain America as a base but uses symbiote DNA as a binder to merge in the genetic traits of other genomes. Abomination, Hulk, Thing, and Hide. Wolverine's family, Beast, Sasquatch, Feral, and Wolfsbane. The Squid, a slightly tweaked Spider-Man, and someone named Marcus, and too many to list off for the last one. If you look the bases, there's a bit more tech in their tubes than the other ones," Val continued, "they'd put MGH bags into the base and it'd infuse the nutrient broth with it. Constant exposure to steadily higher doses during gestation ensuring the activation of genetically based powers and enhancing them to an ungodly level… The people who ran this place where madmen. Geniuses, but madmen."

She gestured to the two empty tanks.

"All records of whatever was in there was erased, as was security footage from the day after everything went pear-shaped..." Val sighed. "Either someone survived and got out while they could, with whatever they could carry, and made sure to cover their tracks..." Val pushed a strand of hair out of her face. "Or I'm not the first person to find this place."