Snuggles: 2099

I was twelve. It was late in the year 2099, and the Spider-Man of my time had taken the good fight to Alchemex. I was never really religious, but my family had been raised Thorite, and the Thorites believed that the Spider-Man of the Heroic Age was herald and counsel to his holiness. Between that and the corporation's corruption, well...

I'm a Mutant, by the way. It's been in the family, coming and going. for generations, variations of chemical generation. I can puke up small globs of napalm and spit it a good 250 feet before my accuracy begins to suffer. Got the eyes to match, too. That'll be important in a minute.

So, me and a couple of other Thorite raised kids, uh... I was the baby of the bunch, actually. The next youngest was fourteen and I was mostly there for my powers-

Snuggles: 2099

"Wait," Ashley Noir interrupted. "I'm confused, what's a Mutant? I think I saw something about that in a talkie once, but you don't fit with them."

I rolled my eyes. "I'll explain later."

Snuggles: 2099

Anyway, an older boy, maybe sixteen, whose real name I never caught-The other kids had called him Sledge-had gotten us all together because he'd found an old storage facility where Alchemex had kept a bunch of things that even they didn't want getting out, and Sledge had been convinced that Thor would want his children to aid his Herald in his fight by denying the enemy some assets.

In hindsight, I think I'd been talked into joining a street gang. I hadn't considered it at the time, but well, Mom was long dead and Dad was never around so it's not like I knew better.

So anyway, we snuck out later that night and made our way to a building in the old part of NYC, full of refitted buildings that'd all been there since the Heroic Age, at the least.

I was there mostly as a lookout, in case the cops or Alchemex security guards came around since my eyesight was so good, but it turned out we needn't have worried about that. Though considering what we found... Honestly, it should have had all the security in the world.

Snuggles: 2099

"Well, if that isn't ominous," Ashley Noir quipped.

"You have no idea..."

Snuggles: 2099

So, some kid whose name I forgot, gonna call him Lock since he could pick locks, got the side door open. We all piled in and started exploring the building. I'll be honest, I was expecting a warehouse but it was really more of an office building that hadn't had people in it in decades.

Rachel-uh, I forgot to mention Rachel. Rachel was my... She was my best friend back then, the fourteen-year-old I mentioned. Her older sister Ruby was dating Sledge, and that's how the group found out about me... I'll be honest, everybody else in the group was kind of a blur, this was almost seven years ago and I didn't know them very well.

Anyway, Rachel pulled me to the side and told me that Ruby'd said they didn't need a lookout once they were in the building, so if I wanted she could take me home... I'll tell you, I wish I'd taken up the offer but I was stupid when I was a kid. I figured they'd meant that I'd be too scared to stay and I wanted to prove I was a big girl... Everything would have turned out better if I'd left.

So Sledge directed everyone down to a stairway... After he'd smashed the door down with his hammer.

Snuggles: 2099

"He had a hammer?" Ashley Noir asked.

"Yeah, a sledgehammer," I explained. "It's why he was called Sledge."

Snuggles: 2099

So, Sledge busted a door down and led us all down to the basement floors. The first couple of basements were full of just regular boxes, but Sledge said that his source said the best stuff was down in a vault in the lowest down sub-basement.

So we made our way down and got to the vault... And it was the most modern looking thing in the whole building if I'm gonna be honest. Lock got to work on the, well, locks, but after twenty minutes he told us we had to call it quits.

The vault was much more advanced, he'd said, than anything he'd dealt with. This was surprising, he'd said, because it seemed to be at least twenty-years-old and probably older still. He'd been able to disable the surprisingly still functional alarm, but the lock itself was designed to unlock to preprogrammed biometric signals that Lock couldn't fake.

And biometric means like handprints and blood tests. I saw that look in your eye, you were going to ask.

So Lock says that the only way we were getting into the vault was if somebody melted through the console that would have been used to take the biometric data. He said with the alarm disabled, there were fifty/fifty shots of that either locking us out forever or unsealing the vault.

Sledge decided that he liked those odds, and besides, this was an asset denial mission, and then looked back at me, knowingly.

I told everyone to stand back and coughed up a big ol glob of chemicals, rolled it around in my mouth a bit, and spat it up onto the console which quickly burst into white-hot flames and-

Snuggles: 2099

"So... Why didn't your face burst into flames?"

I blinked. "Shock if I know."

Snuggles: 2099

So anyway, I set the console on fire and then we have to jump back upstairs and basically let it burn for the next half an hour. Couldn't stay and watch it because burning plastic lets off deadly gasses and stuff, so we had to wait those out. Ruby pulled out an old-fashioned paper deck of cards and taught me how to play some caveman era game called Klondike, which was kind of fun.

But after half an hour it seemed like everything had settled down and we went back down to the vault. My flaming loogie had burned clean through the console and the vault door had popped open.

Everyone congratulated and praised me. Rachel gave me a big hug and Sledge ruffled my hair. I beamed... Like I said earlier, Mom was dead and Dad was never around, I wasn't used to that kind of thing.

So then with the door popped, it was easy enough for Sledge-who was a big guy-and one of the kids I don't much remember to force it open enough for us to get in. We were expecting it to be full of tech and stuff. It wasn't.

It was full of blood.

Snuggles: 2099

"Blood?" Noir asked, incredulously. "Who in Hell keeps a vault full of blood? Nosferatu?"

"Okay," I said with a chuckle, "I was just being dramatic. There was blood in vials, but that wasn't the only thing there." I stood up and stretched. "You know what DNA is?"

She shook her head.

Snuggles: 2099

So DNA is the building blocks of life. It's made up of genes and alleles ad peptides and junk, which are things you get from your parents-you get half from Mom and half from Dad, and some of them you only need to get from one parent for them to show up and others you need both, but the gist is if you've got all of someone's-or something's-DNA, which you can find in blood, or hair, or skin, then you can find out what makes them tick. I said I was a mutant? That means I've got extra genes that let me do things that other people can't.

And if you're good with the science, you can take someone's DNA and use it-someone with my genes could give other people my fire spit, or just make a bunch of copies of me and raise them how they wanted.

And Alchemex had the blood of skin or hair from a bunch of different people in an old vault, and judging from the labels it was all from people with special powers because most of them had Super names. Like, maybe a dozen vials upfront. I saw ones labeled 'Daken' and 'Ai Apea-something,' and I heard Ruby asking who the shock 'American Son' was.

Sledge said he'd figured that Alchemex had forgotten about all this stuff because there's no way they'd just leave what was clearly Heroic Age Super DNA laying down in an old office if they'd known it was there. Just in case, he started smashing vials with his hammer and soon enough there was mixed super-blood and other samples in a big puddle on the floor. He asked me to spit on it to make sure it was all useless, so I burned it up good and then we went deeper in the vault.

There wasn't any more blood past the beginning, which made Ruby say that maybe the most important stuff was all in the back. Past the first layer, there were more vials, but these weren't blood. It was all labeled things like "Extremis" or "Legacy" or "Technorganic." Sledge pocketed a bunch of those vials after he read one I didn't see and said that it sounded like a virus he'd read about. Said it was too dangerous to smash them, in case they spread through the air.

Further into the vault, there was more tech. It looked like weapons and junk, an old armor with faded red and blue paint, and a vial of something green labeled "Super Goblin Soldier Serum Mark V." Sledge dumped it out and had me burn it, then he and the others each pocketed a couple of guns and smashed up everything else. They offered me a gun, but the smallest one was too big for my hands, so...

And soon enough, all that was left was a tarp.

Snuggles: 2099

"If you're trying to be dramatic again," 1930s Peanut Gallery said, "it's not working."

"Quiet, you."

Snuggles: 2099

So we pull the tarp back, and at first, we think it's more blood. But it's not in a vial, it's like... It's a glass canister about your size if I'm gonna be honest. And it's inert, not moving, so we figure that it's just a really big blood sample-like, from maybe a giant, like Thor and his kin did battle with and occasionally wed. Just, a giant-sized needle to take a giant-sized blood sample.

So, not wanting Alchemex to blaspheme if they remembered this stuff was here, Sledge smashed it and as the blood flowed and pooled, he asked me to destroy it.

I coughed up my napalm and spat... And then the blood flowed up and around, choking out the fire.

And then it jumped at me and forced its way down my throat. It felt like I was drowning and being stabbed from the inside-throat, chest, stomach, everywhere, all at once. My veins started burning, and as the burning flowed up and reached my brain...

Lifetimes of violence and sadism... Cletus Kasady. Norman Osborn, among others... Thousands of murders, years of madness, and so. Much. Blood.

And then years of captivity after being ripped from the Goblin Childe, occasionally experimented on, and...

And over everything, one sentence, over and over and over again.

Snuggles: 2099

"Carnage. Rules."

"You say that like it should mean something to me," Ashley Noir said. "It kind of reminds me of what happened when I bonded with The Venom, Andrea, but... Wait, Andrea," she said quickly, "you said you went by Gold Goblin... Goblin Childe..."

"The last people to host Carnage went by Red Goblin and Goblin Childe," I explained. "And before he hosted Carnage, Osborn was The Green Goblin. I learned that he used to run Alchemex, but back then it was Oscorp..."

"I repeat: I have no context for any of this."

"A monster possessed me and filled my had with the memories of killers and angry people so I wouldn't be able to resist its control," I finished bluntly.

Snuggles: 2099

My head cleared up pretty quick. Uh, forgive me for speeding through this part, it's a bit painful for me to recall but it's part of the story... The Carnage symbiote took me over. It made me move, made me speak, I had no control. That's the only thing that keeps me sane when I think about how it made me kill everyone. How it made me eat everyone.

Rachel... My best friend... It looked it my mind and made me... She was last. She took the longest.

During the... slaughter, some of those virus vials that Sledge had pocketed broke, and instead of getting sick, it... After it finished eating my best friend, it started going for busted up bits of tech and licking residue out of vials...

I've done my best to... Repress what happened after all of that, because believe it or not being used as a puppet to kill my best friend wasn't the worst thing that happened, at least I've been told. All I remember is Carnage whispering in my ear about how good my mutie blood tasted and dissing Spider-Man as a poser compared to the Spiderman he knew. Eventually, we ran into Spider-Man, who defeated Carnage and got it out of my body... I honestly have no clue what happened to Carnage after that. I hope it's dead.

It was over... It was hard, but after a few months of bad dreams, I was starting to move on... And then I found out that the damn thing laid an egg in me, which hatched into another one of the shocking things.

At first, I was terrified. I, I wanted it out of me... but at the same time I was afraid to tell anyone-nobody knew that I was the one in the Carnage Suit. Even Dad didn't know what my bad dreams were about, so...

It wasn't doing anything yet, and I was able to keep it suppressed... And then it started talking to me. It had no idea why I was afraid... And then something clicked, from the memories that its parent forced on me.

Apparently, every couple of generations one of those monsters has to be careful when they make babies because chances are good that when one comes out, it'd come out crazy.

Which, for monsters like that, meant they come out good.

Eventually, we worked things out, I named him Mister Snuggles because I was twelve and that was the furthest thing from Carnage I could think of, and then we went out-Carnage was powerful, and the baby was just as strong. Maybe stronger, since it got a lot more out of the viruses and stuff from the Vault than the parent did.

We went out, used that power to do good deeds, which really made me feel better about... What Carnage made me do, and made Mister Snuggles feel better about being a monster's kid.

Of course, there was a great Space War with Captain America coming back, Miguel O'Hara gained the powers of Thor and a few years after all that everything started getting all peaceful. We did what we could to help, but when Doc and Cuddle cosmic contacted us about this we hopped right on.

Snuggles: 2099

"And that's how I got into the business of helping out Cuddlebugs," I finished.

"So.. that armored figure that looked like it was riding a demon from Hell was you?"

"Yep!" I said with a smile. It was basically just a form that wasn't evocative of Carnage when I chose it, but from what I've been told by other Cuddlebugs, it strongly resembles an almost solid gold Iron Man suit, with minor red accents at the joints, with a metallic red Goblin cap-My partner being partially techno-organic after all the stuff the monster ate. From asking around, all the weapons that we'd smashed up before everything went to Shocking Hell was goblin Gear and a backup Iron Patriot armor. Carnage ate it, and between that, memories of when it bonded with its last host's armor and weapons, and some things that were a bit too technological to be viruses, it was easy enough to make bio-mechanical versions of those bits once we had the practice

Not that Depression Era Ashley here needed to know that since that would be way over her head.

"I basically live here now. I go home every couple of days-I've mended things with Dad, now that I'm old enough to know why he was never around, but..." I waved my hand lazily.

"So," Ashley Noir said, "where is this specifically? Like, is this a hospital, or?"

"Nah," I said. "We took you to the infirmary and had you checked out," I explained. "Scans said there was no damage, you just passed out because you thought you were passing out." I gestured around. "This is my room. Brought you here to sleep it off after Doc magicked you into some jammies."

"Why your room?" the kid asked.

"There's not that many of us here full time," I explained. "setting up rooms takes time, and if you'd turned down the offer... Of course, this means you'll have to room with somebody till we get things set for you."

"Your room seems pretty nice. Fancy." I took that to mean that she wanted to room with me, so I gave her another hug.

"It's hard," she said, "for me to get close to people-connect to people I don't know," she explained. "Not counting myself, there are three people I care about and they're all dead."

Yeah. Doc had warned me about that. Said that people who are mutants in baseline realities tend to be sociopaths in what had been dubbed Noir timelines. Eh, the kid was young. If she wanted to change that there was still time.

"But this," she said as she snuggled up close into my hug. "I like this."

I smiled. I think she'll turn out fine. "Good," I said. "Because this is about half of what we do around here." Then a thought occurred to me. "Kid? Don't let anyone know that you almost got killed by a Mysterio. Especially not a drunken Noir Timeline one."