"OW OW OW!" Lucky screamed.

"Honeybee, what do you think you're doing?!" Blue screamed.

"I'm trying to get the bullets out…"

"There's the problem. Once the bullet is embedded in the body, it's usually pretty much harmless. When you're doing first aid, leave the bullets in until you get the patient to more thorough medical care."

("'M gonna be like Andrew Jackson," Scarlet mumbled half-coherently. "So many bullets in me I rattle.")

"I…I didn't know," said Honeybee.

"You've never been shot before?" Blue asked.

"Yes, I've been shot before! I was following a lead on a gunrunner, it turned out COBRA was behind it, and the Baroness got the drop on me!" Lucky yelled.

"Pipe down, Lucky. I was talking to Honeybee. Although now that you're talking, what the hell is COBRA?"

"Back home, it's some kind of paramilitary organization with really deep pockets and bleeding-edge tech!"

"How deep are their pockets?"

"Deep enough to afford to field an air force, if what I've seen on the news is anything to go by!"

Scarlet winced as her costume rubbed against the burns on her back. "Okay, let's think about it. Right now, we're currently in no shape to fight, and I'm not even sure we'd be able to get back to Specs' place in our condition."

"You don't have healing factors?" Blue asked.

"We've got them. It's just that it takes time. Time that, if we're being honest, we don't really have."

Honeybee turned her attention to Lucky. "You okay?"

"I'll live. As for Scarlet, we just need to give her time for her burns to heal."
Honeybee bit down on her lip.

"Er…what's that on your hands?" Scarlet asked.

"Honey. Well, my honey. Scarlet, would you mind if I had a look at your back?"

Scarlet sighed as she shucked the upper half of her costume, revealing the black sports bra she had on underneath. Blue immediately looked away, scratching the back of his head as he pointedly ignored the girls.

"You mind looking away too, Lucky?" Honeybee asked, pulling her gloves off. "I'd like it if we had some privacy."

"It's nothing I haven't seen before," said Lucky, but he obeyed and Honeybee got to work running her hands over the burns.

"Okay, this is kind of weird. I mean, I've heard that rubbing honey on burns works-" Scarlet began.

"Quiet, please. And stop squirming."

Scarlet nodded and then felt a tingling sensation on her back, as if the burnt skin was suddenly and rapidly regenerating. She shuddered at the sensation.

"The sky's grey," Lucky noted suddenly.

Everyone glanced skyward. "Yeah," Blue said, looking back down at the aged buildings around them. "You didn't notice that? I noticed as soon as I went out."

"I noticed; I just assumed it was overcast," Lucky replied, still staring upwards. "But look, you can see the sun." He looked left and right a little, as though searching for differences in shade across the sky. "…I think this is just what it normally looks like."

"Oh, yeah, I noticed that," Blue said hurriedly, as though trying to save face. "I just…how do you think that happened?" He folded his arms, looking around. "…How could they possibly have let the environment get this bad? Did you see the big wall around the edge of the island? I swear the ocean is, like, thirty feet higher than it is back home!"

"This isn't a good world," Scarlet muttered, feeling the pain of her back gradually shrink inwards. "…The honey's working pretty well though. I feel—"

"Done. Good as new."

Scarlet looked round at Honeybee disbelievingly, then ran a hand over her back.

"…Certainly feels good as new," she pronounced. "It feels like the burns were never there!"

Blue whirled around, skittishness forgotten, and stared at Scarlet's bare back. "How'd you do that?!" he demanded. "Honey can't do that sort of stuff!"

"Mine can, for some reason. I don't know why."

Blue looked about to launch into a rant. Hastily, Lucky put his hands up and said, "What matters is that it can close wounds, meaning we can take those bullets out now." He looked over at Blue. "Alright, Mr. Superior?"

"…Yeah. Let's do it."

OsCorp

Most of the webbing had been cleared from the stairwell by now. The corpses of the alien spiders had, for the most part, been placed in sterile containers and were currently chilling in refrigerators in the Bio labs. And now a team of biologists buzzed around the floor of the Physics department's test chamber, amidst two crumpled, hairy spider legs the size of trees, while 900 feet above them a smaller group of biologists had a single spider corpse the size of a small car laid out across a ridiculously-sized lab table.

"Preliminary analysis of the exoskeleton suggests a molecular structure similar to chitin," muttered a scientist as the square-inch sample he had taken from its cephathorax dissolved in a sealed beaker of nanotechnology in a hydrofluoric acid solution. "There's a high carbon content, though. And something it doesn't recognize."

On the other side of the table, another scientist paused from her work inserting small electrodes into key points along the spider's anatomy to glance at him. "That's strange. Think it's a new element?"

"No," called a third scientist halfway across the room as he glanced away from an electron microscope readout. "If it was, it'd break down once it reached this reality and we would all die of radiation poisoning. The reanimated cells, by the way, are replicating at an accelerated rate."

There was silence at that. The second scientist took a step towards him. "Accelerated like how?"

"I'm seeing telophase about every five and a half minutes. There seems to be a latticework developing between daughter cells. Your mystery compound, maybe?"

The first scientist had crossed the room and was now peering over his shoulder at the computer readout. "...Might be. Hard to tell right now." A fourth scientist bumped into him in a quest to get a look at the monitor as well. "Let's get Chem on it. Rachel, how's neurology coming?"

The second scientist—Rachel—had pulled two semicircular machines out from the tabletop and was now typing on the touchscreen between them as they hummed and began to slide down the table on either side of the spider corpse. "Its nervous system is…pretty similar to that of terrestrial life." She furrowed her brow at a particular reading. "Although, it looks like the nerve cells contain large amounts of iron. The brain is significantly more complex than that of a terrestrial arthropod. There's a possibility that it was capable of a low-level sentience."

The others slowly turned to face her properly when she said this. She looked up at them, her eyes alight.

One of them took a few steps back towards the lab table, examining the body again, looking for significant damage before meeting Rachel's eyes. "It can think."

She nodded. "Its cells regenerate at an accelerated rate."

"We've got more than enough blood to fill whatever's been lost."

The room was silent, the air practically crackling with restrained excitement.

Rachel finally said it. "Wanna try for a reanimation?"

The others were silent for exactly one second before one of them said, "Yes."

The Parkers' Apartment

"Oh come on! Let's see Hyperbolic Vanguard Corps!" Teresa begged.

"You've spent most of the morning watching that. We have a whole new world of film at our fingertips, and you're interested in seeing some cheap '80s mecha movie?"

"It's not just some cheap '80s mecha movie! It's a glorious lovechild of Aliens and Mobile Suit Gundam!"

"You were watching it for the shirtless Michael Biehn, weren't you?"

"No!" snapped Teresa. "One, I don't care. I'm not interested in that sort of thing. Two, you make that name sound like I should know it."

"He was in the original Terminator and in Aliens!"

Teresa rolled her eyes. "It's not like he ever won any Oscars—"

Ollie looked from a tablet on her lap. "According to this version of IMDb, he did. Won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Titanic."

The two teenagers stared at her as she continued reading through the Database. "Okay…" said Drake slowly. "Anything else different?"

Ollie cleared her throat.

"Tons! Apparently, in this universe, Kurt Russell and Sigourney Weaver were the stars of Jurassic Park, and Lance Henricksen played Muldoon."

"Please, continue filling us in on cinematic differences in this world," Drake snarked, sinking back into the couch. "Maybe then we can decide what to watch."

"Or you can just roll some dice. That's what we do back home when it's movie night."

"What sort of dice do you use?"

"d20s." Ollie replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"What sort of family do you live in?" Teresa asked.

"One composed of a rag-tag bunch of misfit mutants that live and work with some of the world's finest soldiers. They're called GI Joe, and they're as nuts as we-"

"I thought GI Joe was a cartoon from the '80s." Drake said, one eye squinting slightly.

"Well, it isn't where I'm from."

Drake's eyebrows rose a little. "What the hell," he said flatly. "Your universe sounds so much cooler than mine."

Ollie shrugged.

"So, Drake…what's your story?" Teresa asked.

"Story?"

"Yeah, story. How'd you get your powers?"

Drake scratched his head with one finger. "Where'd this come from?"

"I meant to ask earlier," Teresa shrugged, "but you were looking for this world's you. I got to wondering after you talked about getting your costume from SHIELD."

"Oh." Drake gestured vaguely to his right hand. "I got bitten by a genetically modified spider. You?"

"Also a spider bite. I don't know if it was genetically modified, but…" she rubbed her neck. "It must've been. I don't know how else it could have given me powers. Ollie?"

"I'm a mutant," Ollie said, with a sort of aggressive casualness as she looked up at them from the tablet. "I was born looking like this, and one day I just woke up with the powers." She gave a smile that silently dared one of them to say something prejudiced. "Satisfied?"

Teresa nodded as she processed the newly acquired information. Her smile becoming genuine, Ollie cleared her throat as she set the tablet on the small table between the couch and recliner. "Next question—why did you guys decide to…you know, be Spider-People?"

The teenagers glanced at each other. The atmosphere in the room had grown still suddenly, both hesitating and allowing the other to go first.

When it became obvious that Drake was no more eager than she was, Teresa sighed, drawing her knees up to her chest. "A purse snatcher killed my mom. I could have stopped him, but I didn't."

"Oh," Ollie said, suddenly regretting her question.

"His name was Rodrick Kingsley. Since then I've found out he's a major player in my world's organized crime. I'm going to find him, and when I do I'm going to bring him to justice. But until then…Nobody's going to suffer like I did. Not on my watch. Drake, how about you?"

Drake clenched and unclenched his fists.

"My older brother sold drugs to take care of me. He wanted out. The people he was working for didn't accept resignations. I'm taking them down, for his sake at least. And you, Ollie? Why do you do it?"

Ollie bit down on her lip.

"Didn't really get to know my parents. My uncle raised me for most of my life, until he got killed…"

"And then what?"

"Spent some time wandering around, ended up in rural Nevada, and then GI Joe and the Misfits—that's their mutant "team"—found me and took me in." She smiled a little. "Everything's been pretty good since, albeit pretty crazy."

Teresa hummed a little, resting her chin on her knees contemplatively.

"It's weird. We're all from broken homes." She paused as that set in. "Moving on, have we reached a consensus as to what we're going to watch?"

Silence.

"Damn it."

"Language, Terry."

"It's Teresa! How many times do I have to make that point?!"

Just then, Ollie whistled.

"Look, if we're not going to agree on anything, how about we go out for some fresh air?"

"Good idea. Problem is, we need somebody to hold down the fort until Specs or the others get back." Teresa replied.

"I'll do it." Ollie groaned.

OsCorp

It took a second for the hollow needles to break through the corpse's carapace, but once they did bluish blood began to flow through the tubing as a contraption resembling a dialysis machine hummed slowly.

Circulation's going steady," said one scientist as she typed several commands into the device. "Holding at eighty-five cycles per minute. Incorporation of isolaldehyde went off without a hitch, raising adenosine triphosphate levels in three…two…one."

As a high-pitched whirr briefly sounded from the machine, another scientist on the other side of the table—Hector—watched the progression of the X-ray photographs with a gradually furrowed brow. "…Looks like there's a lump of something hard in the cephalothorax."

"Is it interfering with any organs?" Rachel asked, looking up from her work implanting small electrodes at key points along the corpse.

"Doesn't look like it. It's kind of just sitting there. Looks kind of like a, a calcium buildup or a clot—"

"Or a tumor?"

The scientists collectively looked around as the one who had made the comment walked through the door, thin face and blue eyes set off by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Several of the scientists sighed and returned to their work as Richard Parker came up to the table and looked over the spider corpse secured there.

"Hello, Richard," said one of the scientists dully. "What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be experimenting with shark growth hormones or something?"

"I am. I've got the myostatin 22-86 hormone pumping through a cancerous stem cell sample; I'll have to check on it in abooouuutt…" he checked his watch. "…seven minutes. Plenty of time to come check out this thing's alleged regenerative abilities."

"Wait, how do you know about that?" snapped the scientist who had made that discovery, whirling to face him. "We just found out five minutes ago. And nobody's left the room since then!"

"Come on, Izzy," Richard replied amusedly, "you know me. I've got spies everywhere. Now hurry up, I wanna see if this thing can stay alive on its own."

"We'd probably go a lot faster if you would get out of the way, Dr. Parker." Rachel's hands reached past him and implanting a final electrode at the joint of the spider's backmost leg. Richard stepped back, raising his hands in surrender as he let the team work.

"Alright, we've got all the major nerve clusters wired up. Good to go?" she asked, looking towards Izzy. "Good to go?" she repeated, looking at Hector. "Alright." She typed at the keyboard briefly. "Stimulating nervous system…now."

The corpse jerked. A strangled sound, very definitely made by some sort of vocal cords, scratched at the ears of all present as the twitching slowed. Richard's eyebrows shot up as he took a step forward. "Responsive already?!"

"The lump expanded!" Hector cried. "Looks to be metallic in nature—try again!"

Rachel hit ENTER again, and the spider jerked again. The lidless eyes focused as Rachel cried, "We've got a heartbeat!" and Hector took a step away from the screen. "It's alive!"

"No it isn't!" Hector shouted.

"It's looking right at me!" It was also trying to stand, thrashing against the restraints pinning down four of its legs and both pedipalps.

"The lump's tearing into its brain! Oh my God, it's still growing!"

"What?!" Richard was already by his side, staring at the screen through glasses that had slipped unheeded halfway down his nose. "What is that?"

"Well it's not your tumor, that's for sure!" A violet light was building just under the chitin of the spider's cephalothorax as it made a high-pitched noise like a scream, shaking violently. On the screen, the X-ray image of the metallic formation was starting to form a distinctive shape, right before the entire table cracked under the spider's inexplicably increasing weight.

"Oh my God!" screamed Rachel. "Kill it! KILL IT!"

Izzy's hands flew across the keyboard, but then the spider's thrashing tore the tubes out of the machine and bluish blood began to spill across the floor.

The restraints that had been holding the spider down were long gone, torn from their anchors by the shattered tabletop and the spider's own weight. But it didn't seem to notice, instead lying in place, clawing at its own head and screaming, a high-pitched noise that made the scientists' hair stand on end. The exoskeleton of its cephalothorax began to deform and crack as light began to build in the abdomen. The floor began to sink under the weight, causing all the scientists to look down. Richard's eyes widened as he gasped.

"MARY!" he screamed, and bolted for the door.

The door, and the wall it was set in that separated the room from the hallway, were mostly transparent quartz, so even as Richard reached the stairwell he could see the spider finally rip open and—a metallic being, vaguely humanoid but easily fifteen feet tall, with spiderlike appendages protruding from its back, fell out and onto the floor. Three more humanoid shapes, far too large for the spider's body to have accommodated, began to burst from its abdomen, and Richard practically leapt down the stairs.

He reached the Chemistry lab on the floor below just as the ceiling caved fully and the Spider-Things fell into the lab. Most of the chemists were already out of the room and into the hall, and as Richard sprinted towards them a middle-aged woman looked towards him with hazel eyes.

"Well, that was unpleasant," said a voice, mechanized but distinctly feminine, from the Chem lab as Richard grabbed Mary's hand without breaking stride and pulled her after him. "Now where's the brat they call Spider-Man?"

"Agh!" Mary grunted, managing to kick her low heels off as Richard practically dragged her along. "Richard, let go! I know how to run without you holding my—" Half a dozen screams came from behind them, along with a sound resembling a flamethrower. She glanced backwards, just in time to see one of her coworkers have his head twisted 180 degrees by a man in a green and black version of Spider-Man's costume.

Mary gasped. Looking forward, she wrenched her hand from her husband's grip and sprinted alongside him. They got to the stairwell; as Richard pulled the door open, Mary glanced behind them again, and when they jolted into the stairwell Mary grabbed him and pulled him into the corner immediately behind the door.

They stood pressed together in the small space, silent save for their breathing and pounding hearts. On the other side of the wall, a spectacular shattering sound informed them that the Spider-things had gone out the window. After a few tense seconds, Richard peeked through the narrow window in the door.

The four Spider-things were gone. The hallway was filled with bodies, some badly burned, some otherwise mutilated, and the long window on the opposite side of the hallway from the lab was shattered. The winds of their altitude audibly swept through the hallway, billowing bloodstained lab coats. Richard pulled away from the window, sinking to the floor with a sigh of relief as Mary joined him sitting against the wall.

There was silence for a few seconds, husband and wife's hands tightly clasped together. Then Richard breathed, "We don't get paid enough."

Another pause. Mary laughed a little, and immediately felt terrible. "No," she said anyway. "We don't. The union should get on that."

Notes from Courier999:

-All of those anecdotes about who's cast in what movie (except Lance Henriksen as Muldoon) are based on real-life potential choices.

-Hyperbolic Vanguard Corps is a title borrowed from the Shadowrun 4E supplement "Attitude".

Notes from Brackets002:

-There actually was a legend in President Andrew Jackson's time that he had so many bullets in him he rattled. It's probably not true, but he did have a lot of lead in him, and anyway that's a really, really funny image.

-"Izzy" is Dr. Isaac Kleiner. Another Half-Life reference.