Snuggles The Symbiote
I shot a cone of hellfire-enhanced dragon breath down they've tunnel, slagging the robots that stood in for the slug women from this game. I mean, yeah, they weren't turning around to attack me yet, but it was obviously a trap. I'd get to the end of the tunnel and they'd all swarm me at once. It was exactly what this piece-of-crap game would do.
"Ashley? Perhaps you should calm down?"
"No, I will not calm down! This whole thing is a load of—" I roared out my frustration instead of finishing.
I lifted up into the air and floated over the melting slag down the tunnel and found myself on a beach at night. It would have been really pretty if not for the rotting squid carcass laying right in the middle of the sand...
Wait... that wasn't a squid, that was... A really messed up, giant mermaid? With a pulsing part near her middle and...
"Ew! Ew ew ew eeww! What the hell is...? EEEEWWW!"
With a bunch of super gross squelching sounds, the giant dead mermaid gave birth to something that ripped out half of her bones and organs while it came out. Horrible, horrible disgusting things peeled off of what I could only describe as a tall, bone-thin blue man holding a giant placenta who stood, looked up at the moon far int he distance and made a sound that started as a baby crying before morphing into a grown man choking on something.
"What the fuck! Who the Hell makes a game that shows dead mermaid giving birth to a giant undead man-baby!?"
Said giant undead man-baby turned around, screamed at me, and jumped in my direction swinging the giant placenta like some kind of weapon. I parried with a slash from All-Love.
"You'd better be the Endboss," I muttered.
Snuggles The Symbiote
One second, Peter Parker was assisting Professor Connors to give his biology class a presentation of the differences between standard mutation and the types of mutations that grant someone superhuman abilities, using Connors himself as an example of the latter. The next, he was being dragged from the room by the arm by a topless Johnny Storm who was muttering incoherently about how there was a situation.
Five minutes later, Peter realized that he'd probably have to deal with rumors about the illicit secret affair between disgraced former CEO Peter Parker and superhuman dreamboat Johnny Storm for the next year. He wondered if he could arrange for Johnny to be very publically seen out on a date with his new alien girlfriend while he was out on the other side of town with Mary Jane. He didn't want to exploit her fame as a model and movie star like that, but...
Hopefully, Logan would never find out. He'd never hear the end of it.
That had been an hour ago. For some reason, when Ashley and her friends from Earth Bet suddenly vanished in a teleporter accident followed by a worldwide announcement from Arcade and some newbies who he'd hired to be the other two Stooges that those kids were now contestants in his latest Murderworld, everyone else who'd been sent to Earth Bet was busy and it was up to Spider-Man to head back and serve as the line of communication between the two worlds and help coordinate the response between both worlds.
And that's how he found himself in the middle of an all-purpose room in a building in another Earth's Los Angeles standing between Alexandria and that Miss Militia woman while watching a live feed of Ashley fighting something called the Orphan of Kos and cursing up a storm while Arcade and his Merry Gamergaters laughed at her frustration.
"Someone's going to have to sit her down and talk to her about appropriate language," he observed, "though I have to agree with her. This is not at all an appropriate game for someone her age. Arcade should have made more considerate choices."
"Would you please take this seriously!?" Ms. Militia snapped
"I should have never approved this excursion," Alexandria added. "You people are lucky that our people have been able to isolate the broadcast to the PRT's private network. If the details from Bonesaw's simulation were leaked to the public..."
"The details of you giving a traumatized child soldier a fair chance to get better or the details that you've committed a bunch of horrible crimes?" Alexandria didn't respond, but Miss Militia jabbed him with the butt of her magic glowing gun.
"Look, Arcade does this every couple of months. His track record speaks against the kids being in any real danger," Spider-Man explained. "I mean, you send them out to fight crime, right? They've got to be decently well trained."
He was met with silence in reply. "Well, that's concerning."
"Anyway," he continued, "we've got the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Agents of Wakanda and the X-Men and even a few of your 'Thinkers' scouring the planet for them. They're going to be fine."
The Interdimensional Ear Piece that Val had provided him with before he was shoved through the portal clicked to life, with Reed's voice on the other end.
"We found the Murderworld," He said, "it seems to be a dome on an artificial island in the middle of the Celtic Sea. Excalibur is already on-site making their way in."
"Good news!" Spider-Man declared before relaying Reed's announcement to the others.
"Who or what is Excaliber?" Alexandria asked neutrally.
"They're an X-Men affiliated team based in England," Spider-Man explained. "They mostly handle magic stuff. They're usually led by Captain Britain, right now that's Betsy Braddock and if she's anything like her brother then the kids are going to be fine." Spider-Man wracked his brain for a second to try and remember who the other current members of the team were. "Gambit and Rogue both used to be criminals but that was a long, long time ago and they've been heroes ever since... Never did congratulate them on their wedding... Jubilee used to be one of Wolverine's sidekicks, uh, not the Wolverine that was here, her father. He won't admit it but he's basically one of my best friends, I trust his judgment when it comes to people... I don't really know much about Rictor and... Oh."
He'd just remembered one of the more... Controversial members of the current Excaliber roster.
"Oh.. crap."
Snuggles The Symbiote
"That's right! Scream in terror!" I said as I stomped on the giant screaming undead man-baby. "This is what you get for trying to beat me to death with a placenta!"
I finished the stupid, ugly, gross, screaming thing off with a slash from All-Love, taking its head off from its shoulders.
Honestly, that was a lot easier than I figured it was gonna be. Which meant it was probably a trap.
I turned around and saw something black and smokey forming near the dead mermaid. "Oh no, you don't!" I shouted and dispersed it with a photonic blast.
My spider-sense finally stopped tingling and I took a second to breathe. One of Arcade's portals opened up I marched through it, "about freaking time..."
On the other side of the portal was an old fashioned town with all of the signs in Japanese. It seemed to be winter, kind of cold, and...
"Okay, where the heck are the others? There's no way I was the first one to finish..." I took to the air and started looking for the others.
I was flying for a good five minutes when I realized that the others were on the other side of the building I'd spawned un next to. I had the strangest feeling that Arcade was laughing at me.
I landed and then, noticing how badly Grace was shaking, enfloofened and embiggened an arm so she'd have something warm to snuggle with... But she didn't come over. Instead, she just kind of stared at my chest. "Are... Are you okay?" She asked.
I looked down... Yeah, the pentagram was still burning. "Yeah. we're gonna have to head to Philadelphia and try to find Mania after this, but I'm fine."
I wasn't okay. I'd never be okay again after watching a dead mermaid give messy, violent birth to a screaming corpse-man, but I was fine.
Weaver was walking over to me, but whatever she was gonna say was interrupted by a big gate forming and a holoscreen appearing in the air.
"Congratulations, Apocalypse Girl, on beating the estimated All-Bosses speed run for Bloodborne: The Old Hunters by a little under half an hour," Arcade said in a way that made me think that he didn't actually mean congratulations and he was just going through the motions. Uber and Leet were starring at two different things offscreen. "I fully expected you to die to Ludwig. Most people get stuck there and, in real life, there's no respawn function. But no, you clear through the whole scenario including the optional bosses at a decent speed. I haven't even gotten to my second martini yet."
"Putting gin in a martini glass doesn't make it a martini," I corrected him becuase why the Hell not at this point.
"I prefer them dry," Arcade said defensively.
"It has to have at least a little vermouth to be a martini. At least swirl some around to coat the glass."
"I find it disturbing that someone your age knows that," Arcade deadpanned.
"You murder people!" I shouted
"Yeah, she knows a lot of weird stuff," Grace added. "I made a Silence of The Lambs reference and she corrected me that Chianti doesn't go with liver."
"Can we not do this?" Lisa said while pinching the bridge of her nose.
"Yes. Of course," Arcade agreed, getting back to the point. "Please proceed through the gate to face the final challenge."
"You said we'd get eight hours to rest and prepare!" Taylor shouted while pointing accusatorially at the screen.
"Mister Snuggles?" I thought. "You said that the common genes I have with Apocalypse mean that you could adapt super fast to the bit of his DNA that we got from the sample of his blood, right? And that I'd get all kinds of cool stuff from it?"
"That was before some intruders decided to try and ruin the game," Arcade said bitterly while glaring back.
"Yes, but... While it would make your abilities significantly more powerful when you're older and your body is more mature, in the short term the increase to your existing abilities would be slight to negligible. It would give you new abilities and make you truly needless, but in terms of the strength you desire—"
"Will adapting to it give me his technopathy?"
"The Chinese chick with the fireworks just blasted a hole between the Left 4 Dead room and the Resident Evil room," Leet said. "the zombies are comingling and the ambiance is ruined by the mixture of runners and shambles."
"And the British Flag Armored woman with the purple hair and the purple lightsaber is just tearing through the Castlevania scenario," Uber added.
"Yes. Why?"
"Becuase the X-Men are here to interrupt Arcade's game. Leet just described Jubilee, who apparently got her mutant powers back, and apparently Psyclock is Captain Britain again. That means he's gonna get desperate. If he can't keep them from interfering with us and can't trap them in the game, he'll do something like release all of his murderbots on us at once while he makes a break for it. I want to take control of the system so he can't flip the table or escape justice."
"Ashley? Are you okay? This one has been growing somewhat worried about your mental state recently and your previous reluctance to exploit this sample... Are you sure?"
"Yes. Just do it."
"...As you wish. You may feel a slight tingling sensation as our molecular structures are altered to incorporate the symbiotic techno-organic particles and as our energy-storing minerals adapt to the slight influx of cosmic power."
"Thank you. Love you."
"Why shouldst we continue to play thy game?" Dean was asking in an old-timey voice while occasionally swinging Mjolnir like a good and proper Thor. "It seems that the hour of thy defeat is at hand. Perhaps if thou surrender, thou will be given leniency?"
"I don't think that's grammatically correct," Lisa muttered.
Suddenly, it was like a huge surge of electricity coursed through me without warning. I stumbled back and yelped, but managed to right myself before I fell.
Almost instantly, Taylor was by my side holding my hand. Taylor was a good big sister. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," I said. "I just... I'm a little sore from getting tossed around pretty bad earlier. I stepped wrong, things acted up. I'll be fine, I just need another minute to finish regenerating the damage."
"Mask off," Taylor said. "I'm checking your eyes to make sure you're not concussed."
I rolled my eyes, then unmasked and made a point of being extra careful to follow her finger with my eyes so that, like, she wouldn't get the wrong idea if my mind started wandering.
"By the way, if the 'Chinese chick' is who I think she is, she might be a vampire," I shared when Taylor was done. "If she is, don't stare at her teeth. It's rude."
"...This fucking universe," Missy mumbled.
"Ashley, why lie to Taylor?"
"Because I don't want Arcade to know what I'm planning and he's listening. Now you said it would be a slight tingle?"
"Ashley, this one just elevated you from functional agelessness to genuine biological immortality, removed our need to eat, drink, breathe, or sleep for anything other than pleasure or psychological benefit, and converted you into a cyborg at the molecular level using technology that this one barely understands all in less than a minute. We have gone from being a perfect blend of flesh and living abyss to being a perfect blend of flesh, living abyss, and living machinery. This one is tempted to suggest finding and eating a Flora Colossi just so we can claim to be animal, mineral, and vegetable simultaneously."
"...You didn't use to joke like that."
"You're rubbing off on me. The point is, you're lucky I was able to do it without you immediately passing out from the pain."
I was starting to be able to feel the circuitry and stuff around us. Soon enough I'd be able to...
"As I was going to say before the brat's sudden health scare," Arcade said on the other end of the Holoscreen, "I have, through my many contacts, managed to acquire a particularly powerful wendigo. Apparently, whoever it was was high on PCP mixed with Mutant Growth Hormone when he killed and ate whoever he ate. Unrelated," he said while looking right into the camera, "I'd like to take a moment to thank Roxxon Pharmacology and the Roxxon Corporation in general for sponsoring this stream." Yeah. That was totally unrelated. "Anyway, if you don't step through the gate and face the final challenge, I'll throw the hostage into its cage and then when it's good and riled up by the taste of human blood I'll have it teleported to your location. Either way, our viewers at home get to see a final boss for the challenge, but if you refuse to play along that poor girl's death is on your hands."
"You're in a room somewhere above us, right? Like, this is a dome structure with each chamber filling out an octagonal space. This hub is in the middle of the ground floor and you're at the top of the dome?" Now that I was getting used to the new technopathy... Yeah, this was gonna work out just nice. I couldn't quite get a feel for everything, but... Click!
"I have no idea what you're—"
A giant vine burst through the wall and grabbed Leet right off the couch.
"And Klara's in a room right next to you? Yeah, have fun dealing with a high-alpha-level mutant with a busted suppression collar. You should have frisked her to make sure she didn't have any seeds, dumb-dumb."
The wide-eyed look on Arcade's face right before the holoscreen fizzled out was hilarious.
"So," I said with a clap, "I probably could have done that earlier but I wanted to put off adapting to my Apocalypse DNA for as long as possible but then after spending an hour struggling I decided 'screw it, if Arcade's this hard I'm gonna need the boost.' That was the real reason I yelped" I said while looking around. The others were looking at me more concerned than anything else. "Anyway, the portal's still open so who wants to go wreck his final boss anyway just to prove how big a loser he is? It's probably closest to the exit, anyway."
"Ashley, that... The... Ugh. Fine, whatever, but we need to have a long talk later." I think I broke Taylor. I took a second to give her a hug and then held her hand while we all walked through the portal.
The otherwise was a much, much warmer and more modern-looking city with some really big buildings. Shortly after coming in, my spider-sense started buzzing. And I guess so did Taylor's becuase she ducked and looked up. In the air above us were a ridiculous number of missiles all flying in your direction and then arching down. I could feel the circuitry in them so it wasn't that hard for me to slightly adjust the rocket and then with a small application of telekinesis make them turn around and fly into each other so they all exploded and then... Wait a second.
"Oh, darn it! I'm psychic. Those fights were all a lot harder than they had to be."
"How do you forget that you're psychic?" Missy asked, incredulously.
I was saved from answering by the arrival of a really big black and red chicken-walker robot with two really big fin-wings. Then, for some reason, some really loud rock or metal music started playing from like, everywhere.
" Rules of NATURE! "
And, and... Whoever was piloting the robot had two symbiote codices! I put my mask back up and licked my lips.
From the right-wing, the robot produced a really big folding sword thingy that looked like it was rapidly heating up, then he swung it down.
However, Dean was fast and managed to get under it and holding it back with his Thor-strength. It struggled against him for a moment, then tried to pull back. But Dean didn't let go. After a few moments of struggling against that and visibly straining the shoulder joint, it changed tactics: The head opened up light a flower. It made a roar that sounded like someone was trying to imitate Godzilla but couldn't get it right while something orange glowed in the back of its throat.
A beam of white-hot plasma with orange edges shot out at us, but like Dean before her, Missy was fast and on her A-game, jumping in front of the group with a fiery aura of radiation flowing around her and fought the beam in her outstretched hands. The Plasma melted and deformed around her and changed colors to match her aura and then when the robot was done shooting all of the energy concentrated into dark red balls around her fists that crackled with Kirbons at the edges.
"Aim just below the joints," Lisa added. "It'll make for a cleaner break."
Missy followed Lisa's advice and blasted both of the wings clean off of the robot, making it lean upward and stumble backward.
As soon as the bladed wing wasn't stuck to the robot anymore, Dean spun it round super fast and threw it at the robot, impaling it just above where it's groin would be if it wasn't a robot. This made the torso disconnect from the legs and tail and slide down the blade, where it crashed into the ground.
"Whoo, teamwork!" I shouted. Then I popped my claws as far as they went with a double snikt and jumped forward to tear the machine open and drag the pilot out into the open.
The pilot in a green banded suit and a dumb mask with a long mechanical tail.
"MacDonald Gargon?" I asked. "the Scorpion? Worst Venom? The guy that John Jonah Jameson Junior paid a buttload of money to give superpowers to becuase he's an idiot that thinks Spider-Man's evil but then you kept losing to Spider-Man even though you're stronger and also you're insane and eat squirrels?"
He responded by whipping his tail around and using the tip to douse me in acid. I just used my symbiote powers to absorb the acid because I hadn't forgotten I could do that.
"So what are you doing here?" I asked. "I know you mostly do minion-work but piloting a giant robot in one of Arcade's Murder worlds doesn't seem like your style. Why work for a bigger loser than you?"
"Five million dollars and a symbiote," he replied as though that was obvious.
"Where was he going to get a..." and then it clicked in my mind. "That son of a...!" He was planning to kill me and give Mister Snuggles to this loser.
Scorpion swung his tail at me again, this time to stab me. So I let go of him so I hand my hands-free to grab his tail.
And then I swung him by the tail, spun him around a little, and then smashed him into the ground half a dozen times. When I stopped, he was groaning.
I popped my claws again and slashed off about half of the mechanical tail, and then I reached into the stump and sort of... Merged my arm into the wires and stuff using Mister Snuggles and following it down right to where the circuits joined to his spine.
And then he started screaming. "Ahh! The hell are you doing!?"
"Ripping the leftover bits of Venom and Mania out of your spine so I can eat them and gain your power," I said evenly. "Well, I already have your power so I won't get that much from it, but every little bit helps."
And then I pulled. In the next second his cybernetic tail shattered completely, he screamed bloody murder, and I had two black symbiote codices in my hand.
I turned back around, crushed he two codices to absorb them, and let the power and memory flow over me... The Venom codex was weaker than most of the ones I'd already had, which I guess made sense since Venom would have been a lot weaker when it was bonded to Scorpion, but the Mania codex nice and well developed with a bit of..something Biomechanical? Yeah, and some demonic undertones from Mania's Hell-Mark, so like it'd left her, bonded to him, then gone back to her? Something to figure out later.
When it cleared up I saw that everyone was looking at me with looks that verged between concern and horror.
"Ashley," Missy asked slowly, "why did you do that?"
"What? Take the codices? Cause I need them." That should have been obvious.
"Ashley, the ones that that Black Panther guy gave you were supposed to fix the instability problem," Taylor said.
"And they did," I answered back. "But that's not why I need more. I need more so that—God Is Coming—enough to make sure no one gets hurt."
"What the heck was that!?" Grace shouted. She looked really worried for some reason. Honestly, I was a bit confused. I'd spoken clearly, hadn't I?
"That was me explaining that I need to be—"
I was interrupted by a flash of light and Arcade materializing in between me and the others. His clothes were torn, he was badly bruised, and he was covered in scratch marks like you might see on someone who was crawling through rose bushes. and his eyes... Yeah, he was mad.
"Okay, brats... this could have been fun, but between your blatant disrespect, and the X-Men interfering, and your refusal to play by the rules... Well, guess what, you've unlocked Sudden Death!"
He held up a small remote with one red button positioned so he could press it with his thumb.
"With a press of a button, I can trigger this facility's self destruct function while bypassing the normal count down. I've also activated a Deadman's switch: If I am killed, or if this remote is destroyed or deactivated, that will also trigger the self destruct. We're going to play a little... Trivia game. I'm going to ask you ten questions. If you answer all ten correctly, you get to leave. But even one wrong answer and we all find out if you'll be as disrespectful to Mephstio when you're a guest in his home."
"First question: What caused the sudden collapse of civilization in Mediterranean Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in the Late Bronze Age?"
I was about to point out that that was a trick question becuase nobody knows that answer when a loud cracking sound drew my attention up to the sky... Well, the ceiling. Something burst out of it and then something dark blue and moving fast shot out of the cloud of dust and smoke the breakthrough caused before landing right behind Arcade and grabbing him in an oversized, gauntletted hand.
The new arrival glared at Arcade, greyish skin framing a blue mouth and glowing red eyes twisted in contempt from the imposing, blue armored figure to his sudden captive.
This? I thought as I glared at him, my eyes drawn to the large 'A' on his chest. This was why I needed to be stronger. World Wide Level supervillains coming out of freaking nowhere was why I needed to be stronger. I started charging a photonic blast in case the X-Men didn't get here in the next few seconds.
"I did," Apocalypse answered through a sadistic grin.