Sean O'Leary sighed when he got a text telling him that his wife had made it home.
He double-checked that Ashley was sleeping soundly... Well, she was sleeping as soundly as she could, and she turned her air cleaner up to max so she wouldn't hear if she woke up.
Yuri had made it to the apartment by the time he got back to the living room. She had her baseball bat, a lacquered solid oak custom job with "a girl's best friend" written on the cloth wrapped around the handle.
Yuri said she preferred the bat to a gun for self-defense purposes. Sean tried to ignore the blood and what looked like green fur on the bat.
"I got the serum," she said evenly. "I also kept the money and got revenge for my cousin who died during the Spider-Island incident."
Sean had never asked if his wife or father-in-law had organized crime connections, but every so often he had to wonder.
"Okay, we have the infinity formula, regen serum, Skrull adrenaline compound, the blood of Apocalypse, and now a serum made from the venom of..."
"One of the mutant spiders that Captain America gave birth to when he was forcibly turned into a giant mutant spider," Yuri finished.
Sean had to take the time to blink. "You know, they say that, out there in the infinite multiverse, there's a reality where things like that don't happen outside of comic books. It must be nice."
"Yeah, but that universe is screwed if they ever get invaded by aliens, so," Yuri made a balancing motion with her hands, and Sean had to agree that she made a good point.
Dr. Tam was a good doctor. He did his best to help them find a way to save Ashley, but it'd gotten to the point that all he could think to do was hope that she had a secondary mutation that would stabilize Ashley's powers into something that wouldn't hurt her.
When they pressed him, he did say that, in theory, if they could find a viral agent that bestowed superhuman powers, or a chemical, or cocktail of chemicals, that did the same and was potent enough to overcome her chemical resistance...
He stressed that such a thing would be unethical and that he had to advise against it, but in theory if they gave Ashley a potent enough healing factor or improved her condition enough...
And then Yuri did another one of those things that made Sean wonder if her family had ties to organized crime.
"I've got leads on where to get a stray piece of the Toxin symbiote, a dose of the Connors formula, and a dose of the Goblin formula but the bad news is I don't think the Hobgoblin will fall for the bat upside the head trick." Sean was very careful to never ask his wife where she got these leads.
A month later.
The good news is that, after properly mixing the unholy blend of drugs, viruses, and other substances and giving it to Ashley... After the brief moment where she had a seizure and then turned into a Lovecraftian monster before regressing back into a more humanoid form, Ashley was in good shape and livelier than she'd ever been.
She'd spent four hours straight chasing her reptilian tail before collapsing, reverting to a completely human form, and falling asleep where she laid. She woke up, still human, and was fine. There was no sign that she'd ever been sick. With a bit of experimentation, she was able to shift to and from reptile form, grow and ungrow extra pairs of arms, produce webbing, and manifest a layer of whatever it was that symbiotes were made of and then spent the whole afternoon crawling around on the ceiling.
The bad news is that Yuri had been caught fighting her way through the Hobgoblin's villain franchise and, even though she hadn't killed any of them, she now had a reputation as "Lady Punisher." They were doing their best to keep Ashley from finding out about that.