Snuggles The Symbiote

I'd wanted to escort Ashley to her homeworld for her third therapy session like I had the last two weeks, but director Piggot had been quite insistent that if she is paying us as much as she was, that we had to work... Technically, she didn't have a leg to stand on, the Wards aren't required to do anything, but I didn't want to confront her on anything in particular until after I had collected enough evidence to have her ousted entirely.

Idly, I wondered if I could unionize The Wards, but regardless I found myself patrolling the streets down near the docs when I'd really rather be at Shadow Base...

...I wonder if the Government of Earth Bet has anything like that hidden in our Area 51.

It wasn't a full loss, however, because I managed to get Missy to agree to go. Missy wasn't much older than Ashley, but... Honestly, if anything goes wrong Missy would probably kill the problem.

She joked about asking Ashley's therapist about some weird dreams she'd been having, but really, what's so weird about dreaming about a green door?

Gang activity near the docks had been... Iffy ever since Ashley had beaten the shit out of Lung the second time. With Lung and Bakuda safely in the Bird Cage and Only Lee seemingly vaporized in a reality-ripping burst of Gamma Radiation, the Azn Bad Boys had splintered into like a dozen sub-gangs that were constantly fighting amongst themselves and with whatever was left of the Merchants after Skidmark got eaten by a vampire.

Fuck my life, sentences like that are starting to sound reasonable.

So I walked through the area, my senses aligning with every insect, arachnid, worm, snail, and crustacean within several blocks of my position giving me a clear view of the entire area-clearer and clearer as my many invertebrate minions followed me on my march, increasing in concentration as my area of control passed over more and more of them.

In the hour I'd been patrolling the area, I had broken up two gang fights and a mugging by making a cloud of insects swarm around threateningly. One guy pissed himself and dropped a piece of steel pipe that looked like the end had been sharpened.

A few minutes into my second hour of patrolling, about when I realized that I really should have had a partner for this, it started to rain. Gently at first, but eventually it started to come down heavy. Some of my bugs were starting to struggle as their wings got wet. I wasn't too concerned for myself, the lab techs had treated my costume with something that made water just roll off like a duck's back, but if I couldn't get a swarm going...

I was about to go find somewhere dry to stand and call in for further instructions where what was left of my swarm noticed a red man burst into existence in a puff of smoke, like Nightcrawler, and then immediately vanish again...

A pulsing tickle in the back of my head told me that I needed to investigate, so while I let my swarm disperse and drew my baton, I walked over to where I'd seen... Azazel? We were only told his name once, I'd have to double-check with Ashley. I mean, he was just a clone so he might be using a different name, but...

Arriving at the location and looking around a bit, I noticed an alley that I couldn't see the end off, not in the rain. I was just about to step into it when another pulse compelled me to jump to the right to avoid what appeared to be a knife made of something a yellowish off-white.

Marquis was a handsome man once, his face framed in long brown hair, but either age or his time in the Birdcage had begun to put lines in his face. There were dark circles around his eyes... Though, though I could see the family resemblance between him and Panacea.

I don't think he'd been taking care of himself since escaping. He was still wearing a tattered Birdcage prisoners uniform. Dirty dark grey cotton wasn't a good look.

I let my spider-sense guide me and raised my baton—reinforced since I was technically a brute now—to block a scythe of bone as the man charged me...

And then the knife I'd dodged earlier exploded, the pulsing in my head giving me just enough time to jump away. My costume, made from the ultra-durable silk of my special spiders, stopped any of the shrapnel from getting into me, but it still winged me pretty bad.

This was bad. Marquis had a decently strong power and was a very experienced fighter... And judging from the spear I was forced to dodge, which also exploded behind me, I wasn't going to get time to call in backup...

"So, where's the Red Guy?" I said after landing from my most recent dodge-jump.

"Azazel cannot remain in this realm for more than a short while, and my contract with him only extends to being given the opportunity to avenge my child." He said that whole sentence in one breath while at the same time bone grew out from the cuts across his body and encased him, head to toe, in thick plate armor.

He charged again, this time trying to punch me with a spiked gauntlet, but I was able to dodge and bash him, to no effect of course, but...

"Bullshit. What's this really about?"

Judging from the half a dozen spikes that erupted from his chest plate and almost shishkabobed me to death, that was the wrong thing to say.

"No, seriously," I said between dodging various physical blows and ranged projectiles, "from what I heard, you had her for a good while before the Brockton Bay Brigade kicked in your door." While I spoke, I summoned a handful of spiders from vents in my scalp. "If you actually cared about your daughter, you'd have taken her to some other city, vanished into anonymity, and never let her find out what a piece of shit criminal scumbag you were."

He was getting angry, which also meant he was getting sloppy. I was able to leap clean over him on his next charge and as my hair whipped around a dozen of my spiders landed on him and began scurrying around him, trying to find a way through his armor of bones to the flesh underneath.

About ten seconds later, as I was winged by yet more shrapnel from an exploding bone spear, I concluded that, while there were seams in Marquis's armor, they weren't large enough for me to get a bug through.

His bones were superhumanly hard. Even though it was reinforced so I didn't break it with my enhanced strength, my baton wasn't strong enough to break through the plates of bone he'd covered himself in. If I was gonna win this, I'd need...

I was only a few blocks away from that mugging I'd stopped. I sent roaches and ants and large spiders, bugs that were hardy enough to deal with the rain, to swarm the area and drag the sharpened steel pipe to somewhere where I could run and get it.

"And don't get me wrong, you are a despicable piece of shit," I continued. Keep him focused. Keep him angry so he makes mistakes. "I'm Marquis," I mocked, "I'm so honorable, I don't kill women or children, I just murder their husbands and fathers often leaving them scarred for life or in troubling financial situations due to the loss of a provider." I knew what happened when a loving, table home suddenly lost one of the parents. With seconds of hindsight, I think taunting him on this was a mistake. It was making me angry. "You fucking hypocrite."

This time he just threw a goddamn scythe at me. "I never claimed to be a good person," he said. Huh, it was obvious that he was pissed off but he didn't sound like it.

The swarm managed to drag the pipe close enough that I could run and grab it, so I did. I leaped over Marquis with a summersault, landed on my feet, and burst into a sprint. Periodically, I had to dodge one of Marquis's projectiles but other than a near-miss with an exploding spike that I wasn't able to just duck under there were no problems. A baseball slide in the general direction of a storm drain let me scoop up the pipe and then immediately catapult up, flip, and land facing marquis. I was even able to put my baton away before I landed. Getting bitten by that psycho-spider-lady, in hindsight, was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

"Of course," I began, "even that bit of so-called honor is gone now. I'm a fifteen-year-old-girl and here you are trying to kill me. You're breaking both of your rules in one go."

"You don't know!" He shouted. "You're not a parent. You don't know what it's like to see a small child, know that she's your responsibility, do what you think is best for her... How the whole world shifts on its axis. You don't know the regret of a fatal mistake. Or the burning rage when someone hurts her. When someone takes her from you. When the people you trusted with her life failed. You can't possibly understand how that makes your priorities change. How anything seems reasonable if it gives you even a chance to make things even."

Suddenly... Suddenly something clicked in my mind.

Marquis's little rant had left him off balance. I began running at him full tilt concurrently with filling the pipe with more of my special spiders. Marquis braced himself, clearly planning to take my hit and then bring something big down on me—was he growing wings? But, regardless, I wasn't planning to let him have the chance.

The spiders from earlier with still skittering around his bone-plates. I used their senses as a guide and between my strength and moment was able to jab the sharpened edge of the pipe's pointy end right into one of the seams on Marquis's exoskeleton with enough force to break through and impale him, the steel sinking into his chest.

The spiders in the pipe surged forward as soon as the pipe broke his skin, getting inside his chest cavity and biting anything fleshy they could get their hands on, saturating the man with their fast-acting venom.

"The thing is, Marquis? I do know. Not that long ago, I took responsibility for a girl a couple of years younger than me. Bit of an anger problem, but the sweetest little thing... Which is... Unfortunately for you. See, what happened with Panacea was a terrible freak accident. And you coming out here to 'make it even?' Yeah, I have no doubt in my mind that my little foster sister could kick your ass, but... Having you blaming us, her in particular, for that freak accident? Her having to fight you in the first place? That would hurt her, so... So... since you've already proven that your buddy Azazel can get you out of the Birdcage, I'm just gonna have to make it even."

Marquis collapsed, and the reaction he was having to the venom of my special spiders, the twitching and writing, caused him to retract the bone-armor back into his body. The cuts were healing up, but that didn't matter.

I wasn't sure if he'd heard me. Honestly, for his sake, I hope the reaction put him too out of it to be aware as I had the swarm of ants and roaches and other hardy bugs, still close by after dropping off the pipe, engulf the convulsing villain.

After dropping Marquis's bloody bones down the storm drain where the rain would wash them into the bay, I called in, reported that no major incidents had happened on my patrol, and went back to HQ.

You'd think I'd be more upset at killing a man in cold blood, but... It was like Joe had told me last week. Ashley wanted to be a Big Name, Symbol of Hope and Peace Hero. If I'm gonna be parenting her, then the best thing for me to do is make sure she can do it... And if I have to take care of a few problems that could break her spirit? I hope I don't have to do this again, but... I can live with this.

Snuggles The Symbiote

Ashley hadn't gotten home yet by the time I got back in, so I used the little gadget we'd been provided with to head over and pick her up.

I found Ashleys's therapist holding a skinny green man with a grotesquely enlarged skull and cranium in a full nelson while Dr. Banner—no, grey eyes, that was Joe—repeatedly punched him in the stomach.

Ashley and Missy were sitting off to the side, eating popcorn.

One look at my foster sister was all it took to get her to start explaining. "It started when who I initially thought was Rick Jones showed a bit of interest in Missy, then my Spidey-Sense started tingling. Then Missy accidentally opened up a portal to Cosmic Mega Hell—"

I cut her off. "All I need to hear."