Now that Quirk of Fate is finally finished, I fully expect my Loyal Minions' reviews to start pouring in. Keep your eye on this story (preferably while not using the computer to do homework, you slackers) because it's only going to get more interesting from here!

Say it with me--whether old or new, read and review!

Chapter 10: When Spiders Strike

Octavia woke up with a start. At first she thought it was a dream—a slender superhero in red and blue hanging over her bed on shimmering threads of spider web.

Entirely unfortunately, it wasn't a dream.

"You—"

"Shut up!" Spidey hissed to her, swiftly clapping a hand over her mouth. "You want to wake everyone up? You're not making my spidey-sense go off very loudly, which means you don't want to kill me—yet. But I can feel your distrust of me."

"What are you doing here—in my home? Did the government send you after me again?" Octavia jerked his hand off her mouth; her tentacles wriggled free of the sheets.

"Ow!" Spidey yelped. "My wrist is still bad after the last time you and I met. Look, if I'm risking my ass to save your life, can you at least have the decency to let me explain?"

"All I need to remember is that you and the CIA agents came after me and my—"

"Progenitor? You have to understand. I was acting under duress. I knew what these guys were doing was wrong, but I didn't have the courage to refuse them, and I'm sorry. I was only helping Cindy Cypher because she threatened to expose my secret identity—the only thing protecting my wife and children."

"You're—a father?" Octavia was dumfounded. Spidey didn't tell her that he was paid a princely sum for his part in Operation Apollo.

"Yes, I have two kids. But you were acting under duress, too, weren't you, when you fought me at Oscorp?"

"Yes. He made me—" She, of course, was lying. She had willingly fought him, and relished the swift victory.

"They're coming after you, again. They won't rest until they have your body on a slab in their laboratory, do you understand?"

"Oh my God—"

"Do you know Anthony Nicholas?"

"Yes, this is his house—"

"They're tracing your address from the internet server on his blog. They plan to come here, right now. You know what you were created for, but now they realize there are certain defects in your chromosomes. They can't use you for their super-soldier breeder, so they're going to get rid of you. Understand? You're no longer of any use to them."

Octavia let out a strangled gasp. "What about Mack—"

"Mack who?"

"He's another clone—the clone of the Scorpion."

"Oh no," Spidey moaned to himself. "Those CIA guys are cloning them right off the assembly line! Just come with me, and for God's sake, shut up and trust me."

The resident of Pier 56 was tired. Exhausted, in fact. He would feel safe here; the only time anyone noticed him was when he—er, liberated—the equipment or money he needed for his various experiments. He sank down on a newly—er, liberated—futon, too tired from the day's battle to lift a tentacle pincer.

He'd nearly made off with some equipment from an otherwise unoccupied warehouse in downtown Manhattan; what he didn't realize was exactly who owned it. He found himself getting whipped from one end of Manhattan to the other by the Fantastic Four a short time later. He'd hardly ever battled against those heroes before, and when he did, it was likely in partnership with their usual arch-nemesis, his old friend Dr. Victor von Doom.

By contrast, he had faced off numerous times with Spider-Man; he knew the standard modus operandi and every other piddling detail about the accursed arachnid like the back of his left hand. He could out-smart, out-strategize, and out-fight the little bug with half his brain and two arms tied behind his back to make it even; it seemed sheer dumb luck that the bug kept beating him.

The villain wondered how the little teenaged girl had so easily succeeded in handing the wall-crawler's ass to him when his own much more capable efforts had previously failed superlatively. No mere woman was the equal of Doctor Octopus. But that particular mere woman was his clone so, he grudgingly admitted, she came pretty damn close.

On the counter lay a box of pepperoni pizza; fortunately for his appetite, which happened to be almost as formidable as his tentacles, the pizza shop's zit-faced employees didn't ask too many questions when he ordered it wearing a long trench coat and paying with cash. There were still three large slices left, and a super-villain could work up quite an appetite robbing laboratories, thumping on superheroes, and getting thumped on in turn by a hero who both looked and hit like a two-ton pile of tenement-quality bricks. He was too tired to get up to get it, too tired to concentrate at the capacity needed to control his tentacles, and too tired to make the effort, despite his stomach's loud protests.

The mad scientist gazed at the box; he was so hungry and tired he could almost taste it. He glared at it with a white-hot intensity.

Then something very strange happened. The doctor would have never expected this.

The box slid to the edge of the counter. Slowly slid entirely off the counter, dangling in thin air as if on invisible strings. It slowly—excruciatingly slowly—floated three feet toward him. The sheer effort of will pained and exhausted him further, past the breaking point, plopping the box back to the floor. It was, however, close enough to bend over and reach. He gratefully ate, planned his next move, and resolved to study this strange, new phenomenon further.

Nancy Melitta, in the New York laboratory of the SDSI-CIA, was really hitting her stride now. "Octavius was chosen precisely because we thought he lacked mutant abilities. Even our best scientists couldn't predict the effects of mutancy on a human clone. But—and this is truly fascinating—what if he was a mutant a la Jean Grey of the 'X-Men', a latent telepath and telekinetic?"

Cindy Cypher looked, if anything, thoroughly bored. Melitta had once been a most formidable biologist and genetic engineer; however, that formidable brain was a little too obsessed with its role in Project Octopus. Cypher thought she desperately needed a hobby or boyfriend. "There's no record of Octavius demonstrating any ESP abilities before his laboratory accident. Certainly not in childhood or puberty—"

Melitta was openly disdainful. "That is neither here nor there. Theodore and Mary Octavius are certainly not around to agree with you. Perhaps that accident, his greatest experiment, his magnum opus literally blowing up in his face, was merely the mental shock needed to shake his hidden psychic abilities loose. Perhaps what had been previously called brain damage was merely his brain rewiring itself to facilitate psionic control over the arms."

"I don't think Octavius has demonstrated any ESP abilities other than control of his mechanical arms—"

"No. He doesn't. But there have been instances—documented instances, mind you—where this man has been put in prison, his arms surgically removed—and he telepathically—oh let's just say calls them to him, and they breakout of whatever holding box they're being stored in and come to him like a puppy and break their master out of prison! That's how he always escapes! The last instance was when he broke out of the Asylum a couple years ago—"

"Then perhaps it would be wise to melt the tentacles down." Cypher, for all her faults, had an unpleasantly acute ability to cut through anyone's b.s. and get straight to the point.

Melitta was not fazed. "Now if he were to discover his telekinesis wasn't even limited to the tentacles—if that limit was merely a psychological block rather than a physiological block—"

"Spider-Man is pretty much screwed," Cypher acknowledged.

"As is the rest of New York," the Director dryly added.