XXIX. Transformation

After the battle, Peter instructed Gwen and Mary Jane to tear apart the mechanoid scorpion and scour the parts for labels, serial numbers, anything they could use to track it down. The girls got down to business ripping through its steel armor; and Peter went off to find Curtis Connors.

He swung a few more blocks until he came to an apartment building, where he clung to the wall and rapped on the window. "Hello? Anybody home?"

It was actually Curt and Martha's son, Billy, who came to the window and opened it up. "Whoa! Spider-Man!"

"Heya, kiddo. Is your dad around?"

"Yeah, sure," said Billy, more than a little star-struck. "I'll go get him. Hey, Dad! Spider-Man's here!" While Billy ran off to find his father, shouting at the top of his lungs the whole way, Spidey crawled inside through the window and made himself comfortable in the Connors' new living room.

Curt and Martha both came into the room a moment later. "Spider-Man," said Curt. "Is there something I can help you with, or is this a social call?"

"If only," said Spidey. "I… jeez, I don't even know how I could explain, so I'll just ask. Do you have any of that 'gene cleanser' stuff on hand?"

"My adaptive anti-mutagen?" said Curt. "Yes, as a matter of fact I always keep some ready, just in case I were to… well, you know. How much do you need?"

"Just one dose should be enough for now," said Spider-Man. "It's for… um, a friend. Who had a small accident."

Doc Connors went to his kitchen refrigerator and pulled out a tray of stoppered vials, each containing a bluish liquid. He took one of the vials, fitted it into a hypo-injector, and came back out to the living-room. "Here you go," he said.

"Thanks, Doc. This'll be a big help."

"Think nothing of it," said Curt. "Considering what I owe you."

Martha asked, "Spider-Man, is there anything more you can tell us about this 'friend'? Or about what happened?"

"No, not really," said Spidey as he climbed onto the window sill. "Sorry; super-hero professional courtesy. We have a thing about secret identities." Hypo-injector in hand, he jumped out the window and went to meet up with MJ and Gwen again.

• • •

Back at the site of the recent battle, Peter landed on the rooftop. Mary Jane and Gwen stood there waiting for him, along with the scrap-pile that had once been a giant mechanical scorpion.

"Check it out," said MJ. "Practically every part with a label on it came out of Fisk Enterprises."

"Fisk," said Peter. "The Kingpin… this must be that Spider-Slayer that J.J.'s been banging on about in the editorial pages."

"There's gonna be 'slayers' after us now?" asked Gwen. "Not cool."

"Well, after us, anyway," said Peter. "But not you. I got the cure." He held up the hypo and said, "Do you want it now, or should we go home first?"

Gwen shrugged. "Might as well take care of it now. Like peeling off a band-aid, you know?"

"Give me an arm," said Peter. "You've got plenty, after all…"

"Couldn't resist, could you?" said Gwen. She held out a hand and said, "Here, I'll do it." She took the hypo-injector from Peter and hesitated, sighing. "I wish this woulda worked. I so wanted to be you guys' partner."

Mary Jane and Peter didn't have anything to say to that, but MJ took Peter's hand and held it tightly while they watched.

"I guess it's for the best," said Gwen, finally injecting herself in the arm. "I mean, what if I didn't take the cure? Then I couldn't go back school, or go to the dance with Flash on Monday, or… or ever do anything normal, right?"

"Yeah," said Mary Jane. "Doing the super-hero thing is cool, but it's not worth it if you have to give up everything else in your life."

"I s'pose not," said Gwen, who looked down at her arms and waited for the changes to reverse themselves. She wondered what exactly would happen. Would the extra arms just shrink back inside of her? Or would they shrivel up and fall off? Maybe they'd just disintegrate into powder… "Whoa," said Gwen as her arms started to change color.

"Um, is it me, or is Gwen starting to get kind of… hairy?" asked MJ.

"It's not you," said Peter, staring.

Black bristles started to sprout all over Gwen's arms, and chitinous plates emerged through the skin. Gwen tore her mask off and screamed—she now had eight beady spider-eyes on her head, and her jaw was growing mandibles. She tried to say something, but it came out as a wordless gurgle. Her body also grew in size, tearing through her costume.

"Gwen?! Holy crap…" breathed Peter.

MJ stepped forward and reached out a tentative hand. "Gwen… are you… okay…?"

Gwen answered by rearing up on her hind legs, spreading out all of her clawed arms, and roaring at the sky. Then she blasted webbing from spinnerets in all six of her claws and her brand-new spiders' abdomen, all over Peter and Mary Jane, and sticking them the rooftop. Neither of them had felt any warning from spider-sense, and now they discovered much to their dismay that Gwen's webbing had become incredibly strong—they struggled, but neither one of them could break out of it.

Gwen—or the monster that had until recently been Gwen—roared again and leapt off the rooftop. She fired another thick blast of webbing and went swinging away. Peter and Mary Jane were left there, stunned and helpless, and horrified at what had become of their friend.

• • •

In was more than an hour before Gwen's super-webbing had dissolved enough that Mary Jane was able to break free. She quickly freed Peter too, and they both went straight over to Doc Connors' home again. Peter knocked on the window and shouted, "Doc? Hey Doc! Doc Connors!"

Curtis came to the window a moment later and opened it up. "You're back… what's happened?"

Spidey and Scarlet crawled inside. "It didn't work!" said Peter, his voice full of panic. "The cure, it just made things worse, and now our friend is—Doc, you've gotta help us!"

"Okay, slow down," said Curtis. "I still don't even know what's going on here, so I think you'd better explain things this time." He cast a sidelong glance at Scarlet Spider, who he'd never met before, and who remained disturbingly silent during this exchange.

"Uh—okay, it's like this. Me and Scarlet Spider, we have this friend who's in on our secret identities and knows that we have powers, and who I guess got a little jealous. Without my knowing, she took some of my blood and made a serum and tried to give herself spider-powers, and it kind of worked for a while, but then we gave her your 'gene cleanser' and instead of curing her, she's mutated into this, like, giant spider-monster thing!"

"Exponentially accelerated mutation," said Curtis quietly, sitting down on his living-room sofa. "Spider-Man, can you tell me how you got your powers?"

Peter didn't want to divulge too much here, since it was Doc Connors' own super-spiders which had been responsible. "Uh… well, spider DNA spliced into mine by a retrovirus," said Peter. "We're pretty sure the same thing happened to Scarlet Spider here."

"Nice to meet you, by the way," said MJ.

"Likewise, I'm sure," said Curtis, who was now too deep in thought to pay her much attention. "And any serum that could be made from your blood would also have whatever remained of the same viral matter, plus your own DNA, which may very well have adapted to the presence of the original mutagen as your own mutation stabilized. In which case, my anti-mutagen would have no effect whatsoever on you—and a completely unpredictable effect on your friend. But it sounds like, from what you're saying, your friend's mutation was still unstable, in which case the cure was actually able to combine with the original mutagen to create a mosaic virus with a much more powerful mutagenic effect."

"So what can we do?" asked Peter.

"Nothing, until I can see a blood or tissue sample," said Doc Connors. "Without seeing the effects of the mutating agents first-hand, I'm afraid there's simply nothing I can do to work on a better cure."

Peter thought fast. "What if… I were to give you some of my blood? To experiment on? See what happens when you make a serum from it, combine it with normal blood, and treat it with your cure?"

"Hm…" said Curt, stroking his chin. "Well, that would be more data than I have now, but I could still only go so far without having DNA from the subject you want me to cure."

"All right," said Spider-Man. He rolled up the sleeve of his costume and said, "Take as much as you think you need. Then we'll go find you that tissue sample."

"And stop our friend before she gets hurt," said MJ, "…or hurts somebody else."

• • •

And so Doc Connors took what he needed to begin his tests, and he went over to the ESU labs. Peter and Mary Jane took to swinging around the city, looking for any sign of Gwen. But after hours of searching with no luck, it became apparent that the trail was cold: the creature that Gwen had turned into knew how to hide—and apparently, she didn't want to be found.

"Ugh, I can't believe that Gwen's turned into a monster again," said MJ.

"I can't believe she did it to herself," said Peter. They turned their web-slinging in the direction of the Baxter Building. "Let's go find Johnny and see if he'll help us look. If we tell him it's to help Gwen, I'm sure he'll be all over it."

But when they arrived at the home of the Fantastic Four, they found to their great dismay that New York's famous foursome was absent. The placed looked deserted; for all they knew, the FF might have even been out of the country—or, heck, knowing them, off the planet or in another universe. You never could tell with those guys.

"Now what do we do?" asked MJ. "Do you think SHIELD could help us?" She and Spidey remained clinging to the side of the Baxter Building as they discussed their options.

"Honestly, I'm a little worried about what they might do to Gwen if we ask," said Peter. "No, let's keep trying to find her on our own." Then Peter's cell phone rang. "Uh-oh; it's Aunt May."

Peter answered the phone. Sure enough, May was calling them to get an update on their progress—she'd seen their fight with the Spider-Slayer on the evening news, and she wanted to know whether they were all okay and whether Gwen had been cured yet. Peter tried to be evasive with his answers, but naturally, that didn't work with May. And so, on pain of verbal drubbing from his aunt, Peter was forced to explain everything that had happened. Gwen was a mutant creature now, they were searching for her, and they couldn't find her. May's response was eminently practical: come home for now, even super heroes needed to eat dinner, and Gwen was sure to turn up eventually. Neither Peter nor MJ were all that keen on giving up the search, even temporarily, but May was right—there was nothing they could do until Gwen chose to resurface.

• • •

Around that same time, Dr. Curtis Connors finally finished with his initial tests at the ESU genetics lab. They weren't promising. Without knowing precisely how Spider-Man's mysterious friend had made a serum from his blood, Connors was working blind. He ran a few preliminary tests—Spider-Man's blood had some truly amazing properties—but what he learned was disheartening. The combination of a basic mutagenic serum with his own anti-mutagen compound resulted in a highly unstable mosaic virus which caused the DNA from the invading species, spiders in this case, to completely overwhelm and overwrite the host's human DNA. If there was a way to cure that, he was at a total loss.

It was still possible that with a blood or tissue sample from the patient, he might be able to figure something out. But as of right now, he wasn't very hopeful—and that would be the disappointing message that he would have to deliver to Spider-Man the next time he saw him.

As he cleaned up his equipment and prepared to lock up the lab for the evening, he looked down at the stump where his right arm was missing and sighed. His attempt to heal that had been a dismal failure too—no, more than that, it had been a disaster. He'd unleashed an unnatural genetic terror on the world. This situation was just another example of the thing that had become his greatest fear, come to life: that his own work in cross-species genetics could lead to another person losing their humanity, becoming some horrible thing that inflicted pain and misery and death on the world. Curtis Connors couldn't stand the idea that that might be his legacy.

But if he couldn't even fix this spider mutation-disease which had afflicted Spider-Man's friend… well, there was no point in giving up hope yet, not until he had all the data. He finished his tasks and left the lab, taking his samples and results with him.

After a while, Michael Morbius came out onto the laboratory floor and turned the lights on. He sighed with relief; he'd been worried that Connors might have decided to stay in the lab all evening, in which case he'd miss his own chance. He went over to Gwen Stacy's locker—he'd come prepared with a crowbar—and busted it open. The cooler was still there. The Stacy girl had been doing something curious; Michael was determined to find out what. But the girl hadn't left any lab-notes with the samples of whatever it was that she'd injected herself with.

Michael brought the samples over to a work-table with a microscope and computer. He pulled out a tape-recorder and switched it on. "Beginning initial assessment," he said. "Michael Morbius, graduate student in pathology and epidemiology. I came to New York City to join one of the world's most advanced genetics labs… out of hope." As he spoke, he worked, taking samples of the blood, the isolated DNA, and the finished serum, and examining each. "All my life, I have suffered from anemia. It was only after I became interested in medicine that I learned the full truth—my particular disease is genetic. A progressive hemoglobin deficiency, which will kill me in five to ten years—unless I discover a cure."

He completed his initial examination of the mysterious blood-sample. "Oh, my," he breathed. There was… promise here. Something that might just possibly prove extraordinary. He had no idea where this blood had come from, or what gave it its unusual properties, but they were… a ray of hope. The beginnings of a miracle.

He sat back from the microscope and considered his options. He could pack everything up and wait, ask the Stacy girl where she'd gotten the blood from. They might even be able to collaborate on his experiments. And he knew that she'd been working on this after hours, trying to keep it a secret from the two Doctors Connors—he'd have that to hold over her if she refused.

On the other hand, here was his chance to try something radical. Five years… that was his timetable. It really wasn't all that much time—certainly not compared to the slow and sporadic advancement of medical science. In times like these, risks were necessary. Still, Michael Morbius was concerned with mainly one thing: preserving his live. Saving his life. He wasn't about to put his health at risk on a chance. Miracle-cures had failed him before.

He spent a long time staring at the little vial of finished serum that he held in his hand. What would this do to him, precisely, if he were to inject it into his bloodstream, as Gwen Stacy had done? By all indications, the person that the blood originally came from should have possessed some remarkable healing and regenerative capabilities. Perhaps it was mutant blood. Was Gwen Stacy secretly a mutant? Was she trying to cure herself of a mutation? Michael couldn't begin to guess.

Overhead, he heard fluttering and squeaking. He laughed aloud and said, for the benefit of his tape-recorder, "Ah. One of our other graduate students here, Debra Whitman—a very charming girl, I should add; I like her very much—studies the common vampire bat. But her specimens have a tendency to get loose from their enclosures. It seems that I must set my work aside for the moment and catch her stray pet."

Michael set down the vial of serum and climbed up onto the table. "You know, it is funny. One of our young interns—Parker, I think his name was? He caught the last one, but—clumsy child—fell onto a table and cut himself." He saw the bat flitting overhead and reached up a hand. "Here we are… come here, my little—YAHH!" The bad suddenly panicked and dove at Michael's face, chirping, fluttering, scratching and clawing. Michael fell backwards, landing right on top of Gwen's samples, smashing the vials and test-tubes underneath him. He hit his head and lost consciousness.

The vampire bat fluttered down to the table and started lapping at one of the open wounds where Michael had cut himself and the blood was flowing freely.

• • •

That night, Harry Osborn sat at the desk in his father's study. The desk was strewn with newspaper clippings—headlines, pictures, articles. Some of them were more than a year old; some were fairly recent. "Who is Spider-Man?" "Masked Menace Webs City!" "Spider-Man vs. the Green Goblin!" "The Goblin Unmasked—Norman Osborn!" "Osborn Cleared—Green Goblin Attacks Party." "Scarlet Spider, Webbed Woman of Crime!" "Gang War: Big Man, Kingpin, Goblin!" "Scarlet Spider, Electro Jailbreak." "Spider-Man and Scarlet Spider, Partners in Crime?" "Who is the Hobgoblin?" And underneath more than a few of the pictures: "Photography Credit: P. Parker."

Harry had pinned a few of the articles to a bulletin board that he'd hung on the wall. He added colored yarn, so that he could draw lines between the stories, to help him make connections—help him think it through. As the articles filled the board and then spilled over the edge, the lines of yarn became a web of interconnections. There was something there, something that Harry was missing… and he couldn't see it.

Suddenly enraged, he pushed the pile of newspaper clippings off his desk, strewing them messily all over the floor. This wasn't going to accomplish anything. It certainly wouldn't bring his father back. But then, that's not was Harry was after. He just wanted the truth. And if you wanted to learn the truth about a secret, that meant hiring someone to investigate until they dug it up.

He sat back down at his father's desk and sighed. What could a private detective possibly learn about the likes of Spider-Man or the Green Goblin? These were super-heroes and super-villains, people with powers and resources… well, thought Harry Osborn, he had resources too. Or, he would, when he turned eighteen and could finally take the reins of his father's company, his assets. Unless… he picked up the desk phone and dialed a number. "Hello, Menken? It's Harry. When's the next board meeting at Oscorp? … Thanks. Yes, I am going be there—I'd like to speak to the directors in person. … Well, that's a little surprise. For me to know and them to find out." He hung up and started looking through his father's contacts. He was going to need a damned good lawyer.