A/N: This is a collaboration between myself and Courier999, author of the fanfiction Spider-Man: Partners in Crime, which more recently he's rewriting in the form of Partners in Crime: Remastered. It also contains characters created by the authors SuperHeroFan3245, venom rules all, Ohfortheloveofpete, Red Witch, as well as a friend of mine nicknamed Gearbird. You'll see those Spiders once the framing device is set up.
The origins of this idea actually begin back when Spider-Verse was underway, when I was thinking about how much of a wasted opportunity the idea was: a whole bunch of Spider-Men hanging out together? That's prime sitcom material, right there. In its current form the story's plot also heavily borrows from both the character study and cosmic horror genres, but the basic idea is the same.
This first chapter is mostly written by me. Courier helped with the editing.
Earth-61610
It's unfair to call New York City "The City that Never Sleeps." Not because it's untrue—the dark of night had a stain of light and sound blasted into it, as millions of humans worked and played in cheerful defiance of conventional logic that one should rise with the sun—but because it seems to imply that this particular city was alone in that regard. No city ever sleeps; that's arguably one of the criteria for being a city.
But fair or not, the title belonged to New York, from its antique, narrow, perpetually half-flooded northernmost region, the power lines sparking and casting their flickering flashes on the brickwork, to the enormous sculptures of metal, glass, and light making up Midtown Manhattan. Take that skyscraper, for example. No, not that one; that one.
OsCorp
It's a tall building, but then what isn't in Manhattan. At 1,521 feet, it's far from the tallest, but it's a respectable part of the skyline, resembling a knife as it stabs into the sky. Light reflects off the glittering black on either edge of the sharp oblong shape, and a soft green glow illuminates the recessed windows along the wall between. The skyscraper looks sinister at night. Like a demon had once made a home in it.
In point of fact, something like that had happened. But the Green Goblin had been dead for several weeks, and the Board of Directors were rather eager to ensure that no one so mad would set foot in the tower again. Of course, accomplishing that goal would require the immediate termination of their entire R&D department, so they weren't being particularly proactive about it.
February 16, [DATA CORRUPTED]
The night wasn't dark; it was New York, after all. It wasn't particularly stormy, either, although the dark stormclouds hanging over the city, just brushing the tallest needle, were definitely giving a downpour some thought. In fact, the night was a rather pleasant one. It was the sort of night made for the young and in love.
Well, the young and in love would just have to wait. Within the bowls of OsCorp tower, a chamber began a low hum, and a mile and a half away a young man's skull began humming with it.
He gasped, flinching and banging his head against the roof of the metal shell he was crouched halfway into. As he clutched the point where his cranium had hit the now-dented surface and blurted obscenities, he jolted out of his spot under the desk and kicked himself away from it wildly. His back hit the opposite wall and he stopped, staring at the cannibalized speaker amp, before glancing a few times at the mess of wiring and silicon in his hands, as though checking for fire. There was nothing. His shoulders slumped, and he took a deep breath and tossed the experimental part onto the surface of the desk.
Without ceremony, his feet briefly pressed against the floor, stuck there as though glued, and he pulled himself to his feet. A scarred, stained hand ran through his short brown hair as he made a quick survey of his room and the equipment therein. The chemistry set lay inert as always, MJ's guitar sat on his bed innocently, and the mess of papers covering his desk displayed no hint of menace. He looked down and focused on his sense of touch—his bare feet felt every pulse and tremor in the building, and aside from two showers and a small child jumping on her bed three floors down, there was nothing remotely out of the ordinary.
Still, the humming persisted, and he was starting to get worried. Ordinarily a hum wasn't much cause for concern; a hum was potential danger—something could pose a threat, but probably wouldn't. But the difference between no danger and potential danger was still quite a difference, and to transition from one to the other with so little warning was…alarming. Add to that that it was apparently out of range of any of his other senses, and he was already more than a bit on edge.
Quickly, he crossed to the window, climbing onto and over his bed just beneath it in the process. Pulling the window open, he popped out the screen and tossed it aside carelessly—considering the large holes in the mesh where something had hit it or melted through at various times, he didn't know why he still had it, but never mind. He rested his hands on the windowsill and stuck his head out. He looked down at the alley thirty-odd stories below, then up at the rooftops another six stories above. He quirked a brow at nothing in particular, then pulled his head back inside and dashed out of his room and to the living room window.
This window screen he removed less often, so he set it aside with much greater care. Cautiously he peered out, just in time to watch a man climb out of his parked car and begin connecting it with an insulated cable to a silver hydrant on the curb. His gaze flickered between the faces on the sidewalks, as though searching, before his brow furrowed and he glanced up, to the left, and did a double-take.
The clouds overhead, as they were wont to do, were illuminated by the lights of the city below. Generally this meant that they had an odd reddish tinge, but a circle a mile or so off was a light green that, as he stared at it, grew brighter and bluer. He thought he could smell ozone in the air—more than usual, I mean. Then, all at once, the light vanished. The humming in his head jumped in pitch and his right eye twitched in response, but his shoulders slumped and he sighed.
Oh jeez, he thought. Is it freak accident o'clock already?
He darted back inside and closed the window in one motion. Vaulting over the couch, he darted into the bathroom so quickly that he seemed to jump from Point A to Point C without passing through Distance B. A pair of rimless round glasses were set on the counter by the sink, and his hands pulled open the container of his contact lenses and applied each to a hazel eye. He spent a few seconds blinking at his own thin face, dotted with small scars, before he turned on his heel and started for his bedroom again.
His turtleneck sweater was thrown aside before the door closed. His other shirt was already on underneath—a skintight ensemble with a dark red chest, stomach and shoulders; a sort of faded black for the back and sides; a large black spider logo on the chest and identical red one on the back; and black seams forming the framework of a drawn-on web pattern. He quickly rolled the sleeves down to just beneath his elbows.
Diving for his desk, he pushed away the papers that had been scattered on it in the last several hours and found two watchlike devices, both fixed on the center of watch straps. He tightened one around his left wrist, one around his right, and flicked both wrists. The disclike trigger of each device jumped forward and came to rest high on his palms.
Quickly he pulled a dark red backpack off of the bedpost it hung from. The zipper was open and his arm was up to his elbow in it, and he rooted around for a second before removing two small cartridges, each about the size of a container of mechanical pencil lead. Glancing at what he deemed the top of each cartridge, he smiled at their intact caps, before swiftly turning them into far less intact caps using the sharp valves barely concealed within the perfectly-shaped gaps at the back of each of the devices on his wrists.
It took a second for him to slide out of his jeans and reveal the skintight, technically black leggings and dark red boots he had been wearing underneath. He paused to crack his toes, the thin black rubber soles flexing as he did, and his hand snatched the backpack and pulled it onto one shoulder. He crossed momentarily back to the desk, scooping up a pair of red gloves and pulling them on so hastily that he nearly got them backwards, only the realization that the black palms were to go on the inside saving him. The devices fitted neatly through holes near the wrists, and his black-clad fingers scooped up a red mask as he darted to the window.
The teenager pulled on the mask, his tense-looking hazel eyes and the bags under them concealed by a pair of convex, reflective, silvery-black lenses. Then Spider-Man, for of course it was he, jumped out the apartment window and stuck to the wall opposite.
He only remained there for a second. Darting up the wall, he jumped back across the alley upon reaching the top and alighted on the parapet of his own apartment building, crouching there for a second as he contemplated whether or not to go back and grab his coat, before shaking his head and deciding it wasn't worth it. He stood and cracked his neck, and then he broke into an impossibly fast sprint until he reached the other edge of the building and jumped.
The jump carried him all the way across the street and into the alley opposite. His hands grabbed the edge of a fire escape and he kicked his legs up, vaulting over it and twirling in midair. He kicked off the nearer wall and bounced off the other one, somersaulting over a clothesline before sticking to the wall and hurling himself forward. He came shooting out of the alley, threw a hand to the left, and flicked his middle and ring fingers into his palm.
From the device on his wrist, along with a cloud of carbon dioxide and barely-visible residue, exploded a strand of artificial spider silk, barely an eighth of an inch thick and moving at almost eighty meters per second, which smacked the corner of a brick building and stuck there. Spider-Man grabbed and stuck to the line with both hands and his entire body jerked outwards as his momentum made the webline snap taught and stretch slightly, but then he kicked both legs forward and hurtled down the street.
He curled his legs up as he neared the end of the swing and jumped off the webline, his right hand firing a new one at the opposite side of the street. As he fell into the swing he pulled himself further up it and narrowly avoided hitting two cars at the bottom of his arc. Releasing the line with one hand, he fired a new webline at the top of the slightly shorter building in whose shadow he now hung. Then he pulled hard on both weblines, released them, performed a complicated-looking flip in midair and managed to land on the corner, jumping off of it with so much force the concrete parapet cracked.
For a second, he hung in midair, almost calm despite the increasing hum in the back of his head. It would have taken too long to grab his camera from his backpack, and that really was a shame, because the view from his current point in space was gorgeous. The skyscrapers were artfully laid out around him, sculptures of glass and steel and brass and brick, and through the gaps between them he thought he could see glimpses of the wall constructed around Manhattan keeping the ocean from spilling forth and flooding them. He could see down the street all the way to Central Park, although not quite to the Narrows beyond it.
It all seemed so still from up here, and for a moment his mind was at peace. Memories—people being turned to charcoal by arcs of lightning, being blasted apart by pumpkin bombs, hitting the ground so hard they shattered—death bearing down on him a thousand times over—can't do it, can't save them, no—seemed to be washed away by the wind, and he looked down with a small smile beneath the mask as one hand reached out…
When the webline jerked his path into a curve, the stillness shattered. One hundred and seventy-two civilian deaths burned themselves back into the space behind his eyes and the self-loathing rose like bile. He ignored both, tucking his knees to his chest and kicking off the webline, and hurtled through the city two hundred feet above the ground.
At the speed he was going, it took less than a minute before he saw the building at the end of a street and instinctively knew it was the cause of the humming in his head. He wasn't surprised. So many terrible things had come from OsCorp Tower by now, he probably wouldn't have been surprised to learn that it would eventually be responsible for the extinction of man. As it was, his instincts were confirmed when, just as he released a webline and landed on the side of a water tower, a bolt of violet light surged from its needle to the nearest skyscraper. It lingered for a few seconds, flowing like a lava lamp as he watched, equal parts stunned and fascinated, and when it faded out it left in its absence a long rope of material between buildings. He leaned forward, his eyes wide and brow furrowed beneath the mask. It looked like a strand of spider silk.
The side of the water tower cracked from the force of his jump; Spider-Man flew through the air for a full second before hitting the ledge of a building's side already sprinting. He covered the hundred feet in under a second and leapt into space again, firing a webline; when another bolt of violet jumped from OsCorp Tower to a neighboring building, he had reached the sidewalk beneath it before the light had faded.
Ignoring the copious graffiti covering the ground floor of the exterior, he strode forward towards the door and wrenched it open. The reinforced quartz of the door cracked and broke instantly—Norman was dead, Harry hadn't inherited shit yet, and the Board of Directors could afford to be annoyed. As he stepped inside, the red light of the emergency lights casting bizarre shadows on him, the humming in his head became an insistent tingle and a hissing sound behind him made him turn slightly.
The section of the quartz that was still locked into the doorframe and the section that made up the door had come into contact, and the crack between them was steaming and frothing—and being patched. It took only a second as chemicals that had been exposed to each other by the break had fully reacted to each other and formed a rough patch resembling a scar.
Spider-Man's eyebrows rose. That's new, he thought.
"WELCOME," said an automated, friendly voice on the intercom in the meantime, and Spider-Man's eyes widened as the tingling in head began to rise in volume and pitch. "YOU HAVE ENTERED INTO OSCORP TOWER WITHOUT DETECTABLE IDENTIFICATION." There was the sound of machinery, and without looking Spider-Man could feel something cylindrical extend into the lobby from the ceiling. "PLEASE REMAIN STILL TO RECIEVE A SAMPLE OF OUR RESEARCH. IF YOU HAVE AN IDENTIFCATION THAT WE HAVE FAILED TO DETECT, FEEL FREE TO FILE A COMPLAINT WHEN YOU REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS. THANK YOU, AND HAVE A NICE DAY." There was a sound like an air gun—
—The ringing in his head was punctuated by a high, sharp note of move—
Spider-Man dove to the side, dodging the first tranquilizer dart easily but in a slight panic.
He hadn't forgotten about this, per say. He had simply (he jumped again, flipping to dodge the second and third dart before sticking to the ceiling) never actually seen the security turret do anything useful, and had automatically ignored it. And yet, here it was, a small, gas-powered dart gun that had popped out of the ceiling and was now swiveling to follow him after each miss.
"PLEASE REMAIN STILL TO RECIEVE A SAMPLE OF OUR RESEARCH," the intercom said again, as Spider-Man dodged a fourth tranq and glanced at his web-shooters. On the face of each of them was a recessed circle that now glowed an angry red, which he decided meant he only had a couple shots to get this right. He looked back at the turret and fired two web shots at its muzzle; the needle of the next dart pierced the webbing, but went no farther. While the turret buzzed and glitched as it tried to clear the jamming, Spider-Man hopped under it and fired webbing into the mechanism until both shooters were empty—which only took a few seconds.
The motors whined as Spider-Man relaxed and darted back to the front door. He bent down and picked up the first tranquilizer dart, its needle tip bent from where it had hit the doorframe, and stuffed it into one of his backpack's side pockets.
There were footsteps from below; faster than a walk, but slower than a run. They continuously came nearer, and Spider-Man began strolling towards the door leading to the stairs. He reached it just as the footsteps did, and he opened it to look into—
A pair of hazel eyes, very similar to his own.
Spider-Man took a surprised step back as the middle-aged, white-coated woman recoiled in shock. "You," he said, suddenly cautious.
"You!" she echoed. She readjusted her grip on the scientist whose arm was draped limply over her shoulder. "What the hell did you do?!"
"Me?" Spider-Man replied. "All I did was open the front door! It didn't cooperate. And your free-samples robot got a bit enthusiastic. Why, how did I ruin everything this time?"
"Oh god, it's you," said the man over her shoulder, managing to look up briefly despite being only half-conscious.
"You tell me!" the woman snapped back after pausing to check on him. She glared at Spider-Man. "There's only so many ways a physics experiment can result in a horde of—"
"Wait!" Spider-Man held a hand up, leaning forward aggressively. "Aren't you a chemist? You're a chemist. He's a biologist! What were you doing watching a physics experiment?"
The woman looked confused for a moment. "When we got off of work, we heard that the physics department was on the verge of a breakthrough and would be finishing it tonight. They were opening a portal to another reality! It sounded interesting, so—"
"OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS!" She recoiled as Spider-Man exploded. "IT'S TEN-THIRTY AT NIGHT! YOU CAN'T JUST—no. No." He held his hands up, looking down and taking a deep breath. "I'm not doing this with you two right now. Just…just go." He stepped to the side as she started for the front door, dragging her male companion with her. As she began to push it open, she looked back at him to see him staring at her, his expression unreadable behind the mask.
"…How'd you know I was a chemist?"
"…Good question…'Bye." And with that, he darted into the stairwell, trusting that the woman to get herself and her charge to safely.
He was still upset as he vaulted over the banister and let himself fall two flights, only stopping as he passed another group of fleeing scientists. "Hey, do you guys know which floor the physics department is on?"
They screamed, not pausing in their mad sprints up the stairs and out of sight. He could hear the door slam.
"…Okay, thanks! Which floor is Level AAAH?!"
Spider-Man paused, remembering, to swap the empty cartridges in the back of his web-shooters for a full pair from the red elastic strap sewn around his waist. Then he dropped down another two levels and recoiled in surprise as he saw a scientist lying on the stairs, silk swathing his entire body and a pool of blood spreading across the floor. Slowly, hesitantly, he pulled himself over the rail and stepped closer to the corpse—that was definitely what it was, otherwise he'd be able to feel the heartbeat through the floor. He crouched down silently, laying a hand on the body, taking a strand of the silk in his gloved fingers and plucking it. Then he gently rolled it over and looked it up and down. The pins-and-needles sensation in his head pulled his attention towards the head, and for a few seconds paranoia and curiosity battled for dominance before he reached out both hands and cautiously pulled apart the webbing obscuring the face.
move
The corpse's mouth was wide open in a permanent, silent scream, and as Spider-Man jerked away a hand-sized, mandibled, eight-legged thing leapt out and at his face. His hand jumped up and he grabbed it out of the air from behind, trapping its body and pinning its head between his index and middle fingers. It hissed, a steaming venom dripping from its mouth as it clawed at him with a pair of forelegs.
It wasn't a spider, but you could be forgiven for thinking it was. Spiders didn't have abdomens that curved down and came to a point like a wasp's. Spiders could be black, but not this oily color that bristled and seemed to defy light. Spiders didn't have these stark white eyes that seemed to look at him with a kind of demonic intelligence.
He had never seen anything like it before, but as it tried to wrench his fingers apart with its legs, he felt a vague sense of recognition. And, judging by the look in its eyes, it knew exactly who he was.
"Well," Spider-Man muttered, half to himself and half to the bug, "that explains why she thought this was my fault. You've got some explaining to do, Junior!" he added, leaning over it before pointing his other hand at it and firing a webline at its face.
It hissed loudly, clawing at the synthetic polymer as Spider-Man dropped it out his hand and fired another webline at its abdomen. Even as it managed to tear the webbing from its eyes, its back two sets of legs became ensnared in more of it. Spider-Man's hands were blurs, and the creature bounced between them wildly, increasingly ensnared. At last Spider-Man threw his hand to the side, and a hasty golden cocoon hit the wall and was plastered there by a web shot.
"And you can just stay there until I get back!" Spider-Man said, waving an authoritative finger at the cocooned creature. By now, residue from his web-shooters had accumulated to the point that thin lines of silk ran from his wrists to his waist, and he glanced at them briefly before he hopped back onto the railing. "I'm very disappointed in you. Now what's the larger story here…?"
He could feel, as he leaned forward into a fifty-foot drop, the scuttling of legs—dozens of them—and the rapid movement of spiderlike bodies. The tingling in his head was hovering at a bizarre pitch and frequency, one that made his skin crawl beneath the costume, but he somehow didn't think it was being caused by all these creatures—well, not just. No; there was something beyond them: something strange and unearthly and very, very big.
The rest of the climb down, though, was…surprisingly easy. Oh, sure, it was terrifying: Cobwebs big enough to fill a small swimming pool, corpses entangled in the strands and drained to husks, spiderlike creatures of increasing size crawling through the webs, the tingling in the back of his head growing more and more in intensity the further he descended. But the creatures, even the ones that turned to stare back at him as he passed by, paid little attention to him. It intrigued him, a little; the first one had been eager to bite his face off the moment it laid eyes on him. He found himself hypothesizing that the creatures had the same territorial nature as the spiders he was more familiar with, and the smallest one had attacked because of Spider-Man's intrusion on its web—but then, what was with all the bodies? Perhaps they had teleported in, and the fleeing scientists had unknowingly intruded on their territories? Perhaps they were protective of their kills? Perhaps—he froze, staring at one of the creatures, then at the husk it was spinning between its legs and wrapping with silk.
Perhaps they were protecting their offspring?
Spider-Man reached the bottom floor and was sprinting down the hall in less than a second.
It was dark down here; the emergency lights were caked in webbing and some were shattered. As he ran down the hallway, the tingling in his head rose and fell chaotically and he could feel the movement of spiderlike creatures hidden in the shadows. They were uneasy now. So was he.
He screeched to a stop, clutching the side of his head in sudden discomfort, as he ran by a side-hallway. The doorway at the end of it was a metal one resembling a blast door, and it was cracked open slightly. He could see a dark violet light spilling through and illuminating a strip of the floor leading to his feet. As he started walking towards it, the sensation in his head skyrocketed to resemble an air raid siren, and every instinct he had suddenly screamed at him to run. He cringed, goosebumps shooting down his arms, but kept moving forward without breaking stride. It only took a few seconds to reach the door: he wrapped his fingers around the edge—
move
—and jumped straight up, turning half a backflip and landing on the ceiling in a crouch.
The door had dented; beneath him was a spider-thing three times his size. It stepped away from the door, eyeing him, and hissed before pouncing at him again.
He was already leaping away before the note of move could finish ringing through his head. Firing a webline at the wall, he swung in a small semicircle and stuck to the wall, shedding his backpack and facing towards the creature as it raced across the ceiling towards him. "What gives?!" he demanded, dodging it—it was leaving behind a trail of silk, and he was careful not to step on it. "Got an attachment to purple? Your siblings were cool, I liked them!"
The creature hissed at him irritably, jumping down to the floor and then to the opposite wall. Spider-Man instantly recognized the framework of a web and made a quick line of silk between the floor and ceiling for later use.
"And, okay, I'm sorry that I webbed up your little brother." move "Sister." move "Whatever. But in my defense—" He very nearly dodged into one side of the rapidly-forming web and froze, counterbalancing furiously, then had to dodge again, taking a risky dive through a hole in the web and leaving a small patch of red fabric stuck to a line of silk. "In my defense, it was being a colossal twerp! You know how it is!" The creature tore through the failed web furiously, then darted towards him again.
This time, stupidly, he dived over it, placing a hand on its abdomen to vault towards the ground. It worked, except that as he cleared the spider-thing he felt a slight twinge and the feeling of something small jetting towards him. An instant later it hit his shoulder and he jerked to a stop, the line of silk running from the creature's spinnerets to his shoulder. He grabbed the webline and pushed a foot against the bottom of the abdomen, ripping off the piece of costume that had been snagged, but it was too late: deceptively fast, the creature had curled down and grabbed both of his legs with its hooked forelegs.
He found himself on the ground, pinned there by a spider leg on the small of his back. When he pushed up he could feel it begin to break skin, and then the creature swept a leg under his arms and he dropped back down. The tingling in his head was something like a scream, and he could feel the creature's fangs descending towards his back.
"No!" A hand shot forward, firing a webline at the blast door. Pulling hard, he could feel the spider leg tearing fabric and skin on his back as he zipped away and rolled upright to face the creature, who had wound up headbutting the metal floor. It hissed at him. He glared back, clutching his bleeding back and breathing hard.
It charged. Spider-Man leapt forward too, but instead of letting it snatch him he grabbed the webline he had created earlier and threw his hand forward, his fingers already on the trigger in his palm. The combination of the speed he moved at, the speed of his arm, and that of the webline added up spectacularly, and when it hit one of the creature's eyes there was a small splat and a loud shriek.
The spider-thing threw its front legs up, scrabbling at its wounded eye, and its legs squealed across the polished metal floor with very little change in speed. Spider-Man easily dodged, and the creature hit the blast door hard enough to dent it even further.
Immediately transparent, faintly gold shots of artificial spider silk pinned two of its legs there. Spider-Man lunged forward, punching it as hard as he could, and the creature attempted to hit back with one of its legs. Spider-Man dodged it, punching again, and he could feel the metal of the blast door groan under the continued pressure put on it. The creature tore one leg free and managed to tear a large, bleeding wound into his shoulder, but he ignored it, punching a third time.
MOVE
The creature tore its final leg free, and its fangs came rushing at Spider-Man's face at a speed that for anyone else would have been blinding. Spider-Man instinctively jolted backwards as hard as he could, and his hand instinctively found his webline. Swinging around it, he hurled himself at the spider-thing and kicked it with all the strength he had.
The metal door, he decided, was not a blast door. If it had been a blast door, it probably wouldn't have buckled and broke like it did. As it was, he and the creature went sailing into the enormous, cylindrical room beyond, and while Spider-Man landed on the catwalk the door had led to the creature flew several feet farther and tumbled off, falling to the ground far below.
Far, far below.
The room was distorted, Spider-Man realized as he looked around wildly. He didn't know how big the room was ordinarily, but it probably wasn't the size of a city block, and the edges of the room seemed to stab him in the brain when he tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
Three huge, curved pieces of technology hung from the ceiling, sparking and humming furiously. There were no bulbs or LEDs on them, but the space between them emitted a harsh violet light that seemed to spill into shadows in spots. Spider-Man tried to look at where the machines were mounted on the ceiling, but his view was blocked by—
A web, spanning the entire width of the distorted chamber.
An enormous shadow, divided into two segments, the size of a building.
Eight titanic legs, spindly and hairy, hanging onto the web.
A pair of chelicerae, ending in two huge fangs that dripped a hissing black liquid.
A thousand huge, mirrorlike eyes, all standing out from the shadow and all staring at him.
It spoke. Not in words—it hissed when it saw him, a high, shrieking noise that jumped up his spine even as the panicked ringing of danger jumped down it from his head. But it spoke. He could hear the slow, rasping word in his head, drowning out what little rational thought he had left and burning its echo into its memory.
…PAAAARRRRRKEERRRR…
A/N: ...sigh...Y'know, when spider-sense goes move it's supposed to be in small caps, not just bolded and italicized. I'm not surprised the site doesn't support small caps, otherwise I would've seen 'em in a Discworld fic or two. Ah, well. It stands out enough, I guess.
The next chapter's a continuation of this one, only this time with more Courier999. Which I think improves a chapter 100%.