Bump.

"Careful."

"I am being careful," Lucky hissed, as Specs' sling bumped into the edge of the window again. Scarlet waited just outside, sticking to the wall and holding her side of the sling with more than a little impatience.

Lucky kneeled on Specs' bed, just beneath the window, and was attempting to edge back on his knees, the end of the webbing closed tight in both hands. He shifted backwards with some effort, and Specs groaned as he hit the sill. Then he was in, and Scarlet darted through after him and set his head on the bed's pillow, peeling off what was left of his mask and goggles, as Lucky went to close the window.

"Hey!" Blue's hand caught the edge of the window halfway down, pushing it back open. "Come on, man. I'm out here too."

"Okay, he's in," Lucky said, ignoring Blue. "Ollie, you know any first aid?"

"Yeah, a little," came the reply, as Ollie set out a small black bag and unzipped it. "I've picked up a few things from Lifeline. And we found his first aid kit. Oh, wow, he was right, this thing is really good."

"Can you set a broken jaw?"

Ollie nodded, still looking down at the kit. "Well, probably," she amended. "I've seen it done."

"Good. Let's get to work. First order of business- Specs, on a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?"

Specs stared at him through the one eye that wasn't completely swollen shut. He mumbled something that sounded like "nine," then tried to move. "Agd! Tn! Fg!"

"Hey, remember the part about don't try to move?" Scarlet snarked. "Okay, what've we got for painkillers?"

Ollie held up a small brown bottle, peering at the label. "I don't recognize this name," she said, "but the label says it's a painkiller." She dug around in the kit for another second, eventually finding a hypodermic needle. "Aaaannd we're golden. The bottle says the recommended dose is ten CCs…with the increased metabolism we're dealing with, let's go with…fifteen?"

"MR!"

"He just said 'more,' Blue clarified.

"I think I could've figured that out by myself, thanks. Sorry, Specs, but I'm gonna play it safe for now." Ollie pushed the needle through the rubber center of the vial's cap, slowly pulling back the stopper and filling the syringe.

Lucky turned around. "Where's Honeybee?"

Teresa leaned against the doorframe. "She's in the shower," she said, with more than a little cynicism in her voice.

"What?"

"She didn't take one earlier, and she was complaining. Want me to go pound on the door?"

"Yes!" Scarlet and Lucky said simultaneously. "Please!"

Outside the warehouse in the Narrows, Arachnolord was lying flat on his back and barely conscious, his mind racing at breakneck pace as he processed what had just happened.

Nearly had that son of a bitch I was this close to doing him in would've finished the job if his friends hadn't crashed the party they're all going to pay when I get the chance

Just then, he heard two pairs of footsteps approach him. He looked and saw a duo of familiar punks walking towards him.

"So, there's the big shot who killed our friend! Listen buddy- payback's a bitch!" one of them yelled, pulling out a Ka-Bar knife.

Just then, the other punk tapped his friend's shoulder and pointed to a nearby aircraft.

"Oh shit! It's SHIELD!"

The two bolted away and ran off into the night just as the SHIELD team landed.

"And…done!" Ollie proudly announced. "Jaw's set, and he should be capable of intelligible speech again."

"Intelligible? Don't you mean 'coherent'?" Scarlet asked.

"Considering he's hopped up on painkillers and lost a lot of blood, I'm pretty sure he's going to be babbling and rambling for a while."

"'Still hopped up?!'" Specs groaned, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. "I burn through six times as many calories as a normal person, and you think that dose lasted more than ten minutes?! (Aaagh it hurts to talk.) Where the hell is Honeybee?!"

"Here! I'm here!" Honeybee gasped, pushing past Scarlet and dressed in a pair of dark jeans and short-sleeved, button-down blouse. "I was looking through those boxes of clothes. Fashion here is weird. Sometimes it's normal, sometimes it's like this steampunk film Noir version of normal. Sorry! Where do you need me first?"

"Ribs," said Drake bluntly from next to her. "Look at them, for god's sake!" He looked down at the brown bottle in his hand, hesitantly reaching for a sterilized needle. "Um—guys? This is a prescription bottle. And whatever it is, it's definitely not morphine."

"It's a painkiller!" Specs snarled up at him, then coughed violently. Lucky pushed his shoulders back down.

"I can see that," Drake snapped back, "but I don't like the sound of injecting someone with a cocktail of drugs I've never heard of! What the hell even is—" he looked down at the bottle again. "—Opiorphin? It sounds like a super-refined form of morphine."

Lucky looked up at him, slightly puzzled. "Opiorphin? Isn't that that painkiller they found in human saliva?" He looked down at Specs. "You guys have synthesized that stuff?"

"What, like it's ha—aaagh!" He scrabbled at Honeybee's hands as they pressed against his chest, pushing his broken ribs back into place. "Fakakta—schvantz—goym—pisher! DRAKE!" he screamed, straining the jaw sling Ollie had put in place. "PLEASE!"

Drake winced. Drawing a large dose of opiorphin from the bottle, he found Specs' artery and slowly injected the needle's contents. Specs' face gradually relaxed and his head lowered back down to the pillow. He sighed in relief.

"Ollie, you and Honeybee keep at what you're doing," said Scarlet, picking up a pair of tweezers from atop Specs' dresser. "I'll see if I can get out some of that shrapnel, okay?"

"There are tampons in the bathroom cabinet," Specs wheezed, still staring upwards, "for plugging the holes."

"That's pretty clever," Scarlet commented, but it was drowned out by Lucky, Blue and Drake all cringing and gasping. She and Teresa both glanced around at them, annoyed but not surprised.

"Really, guys?" Specs said flatly. "Scared of compressed cotton balls. Fuck's sake."

"As I was about to say," Scarlet said, pushing past Drake with the tweezers, "that's clever, but Honeybee's honey should work fine. Look what it's already done for your ribs."

Specs tried to raise himself up to look, but with a gasp of pain he settled back down. "I'll—ach—I'll pass, thanks. Just…be quick."

Scarlet nodded. Glancing up at Honeybee, checking to make sure her alternate self was ready, she slowly reached into the nearest gash in Specs' flesh. Her tweezers bumped into something hard, and she carefully pinched it. "Okay…three, two…one."

Shlick "AAGH!"

"Sky One," the SHIELD ground team's leader radioed, "this is Agent Gorman. We've found contacts."

"What's the sitrep?"

"Marvels—three of them. One of them looks to be human, while the other two are giant robots. Do the powers that be want us to haul them to the Brooklyn facility?"

"Last I checked, that was SOP."

"In that case, prep an aerial crane for the 'bots. As for the humanoid, we'll handle it."

Gorman turned around to another member of the team.

"Dietrich, give that guy his meds. 300 cc's of thorazine should probably keep him sedated long enough for transport."

"Yes, sir."

Honeybee slowly, slowly stepped away from the bed, her face pale and her hands outstretched in front of her as though she was trying to keep them as far away as possible. "Okay," she said, "I've decided that a medical career definitely isn't for me."

"Same," Drake said simply, wiping his hands on a paper towel. "Well, it's done at least." He turned and tossed the paper towel into the wire-frame trash can under Specs' desk. "Now what?"

Scarlet sat on the edge of the bed, holding a blood-soaked paper towel containing the PVC shrapnel she had dug out of Specs. Lucky joined her, the bed creaking slightly as he dropped his whole weight on it at once and slumped, weary. "Now," he groaned, "someone should probably keep an eye on him during the night. Make sure he doesn't do anything stupid or go into shock or something."

A quiet, gurgling laugh from behind him. "You thought I might do something stupid," croaked Specs' slurred voice, amused, "before you thought I might go into shock? I wonder if I should be insulted."

"I vote we take shifts," Scarlet said, ignoring him. "There's no reason why one of us should stay up all night while everyone else is resting. Any volunteers?"

Another laugh, as Teresa and Lucky both very hesitantly raised their hands. "Y'all's insomnia game is weak. If I wasn't about to die from blood loss, I'd be working on some new tech ideas and making more web fluid until dawn. It'd be great, just me and the coffee pot. Oh, and working on MJ's amps. Shit, I forgot to finish those today!"

Lucky laughed at this last bit. "I think, Specs," he said, "you've managed to take enough painkillers to get loopy. Congratulations, you did it."

"Woo-hoo. So this is how it feels to be a champion."

Teresa winced visibly, slowly lowering her hand. "Ooooh…is it too late to un-volunteer?"

"Yes," Lucky snarked good-naturedly. "But I'll stay up with you, so you'll have someone coherent to talk to. No, no need to thank me." He turned and gave Scarlet a peck on the cheek. "Night, Red. I'll turn the shift over to Drake at about midnight."

"See you then, Tiger," Scarlet said. She returned the kiss, before standing up and beginning to escort the others out of Specs' bedroom.

"Who am I going to chat with?" Drake asked no one in particular.

Blue raised a finger casually. "I'll do it. Just wake me up."

"Thanks, man."

"Hey, Olivia?" Specs' strangled voice called after them. When Ollie ducked her head back into the room, he said, "You seem to be the most tech-savvy one here. Can you take my phone and email some of those photos to the Daily Bugle?"

"Sure," she said, grabbing the heavily modified OsPhone.

"The PIN is 6251747. And the email address you're looking for is rconway at dbmail dot com. A-and the software is loosely based on Linux—"

"I think I can figure it out," she interrupted. "And, um. I don't mind being called Olivia, but I'd rather you called me Ollie. Or Spyder…" And with that, she disappeared from the door.

"But I like the name Olivia," Specs said, half to himself. As Teresa eased into the desk's chair as though into an uncomfortably warm bath, he returned his gaze to the ceiling. "…I really do need to make more webbing…"

"Oh, yeah, that's right," Teresa said suddenly, standing back up just as she had started to sit. "Webs aren't one of your powers, I forgot!" She crossed over to the bed, looking down at Specs' wrists. On each of them, obscured by a mess of gold-tinged lines of residue, was a crushed machine with a nozzle and a trigger that rested on his palm. "So you…make it?"

"Yeah," Specs said, a note of pride just barely audible in his voice. "I invented a synthetic spider silk, just as strong as the real stuff. And I built machines to fire it." His slight smile faded. "Course, it's expensive. And the webbing deteriorates into uselessness in an hour. And I run out a lot." He raised his right arm to look at his wrist and scowled. "And my shooters keep getting smashed. And—"

"Here," said Lucky, leaning forward and carefully reaching for each web-shooter. Specs was right; after over an hour of being exposed to air, the webbing that had exploded across each device had decayed into something that practically fell apart as he touched it. Lucky carefully removed them and moved over to Specs' desk, rummaging through the drawer until he produced a screwdriver.

"There's spare parts in a box in the closet," Specs said weakly. Silence filled the room for a few seconds, before Specs tried to jerk up. "Hey! You guys—AAAGGH, regreeeetts." He slowly lowered himself back down, clutching his ribs and grimacing. "But you guys—ow—you guys have organic webbing, don't you?"

"Um," said Lucky, looking at his own wrist as if checking, "yeah. Why?"

"How's it work?"

Lucky gradually stopped rummaging through the closet. " ..Sorry, what?"

"Could you come over here? I wanna see."

Lucky began to roll the chair over to Specs' bedside, but Teresa was already sitting on the edge of the bed, and she pulled off her glove and showed Specs the underside of her wrist. In the space just to the side of the tendon rested a small slit in her skin, barely visible to a casual observer. She made a motion with her fingers and, with a loud THWIP! a pencil-thick line of white silk shot from the slit and splattered against the wall. Specs reached up, with a bit of difficulty, and plucked the webline like a banjo string.

"Bizarre," he commented. "Is it the same for all you guys? Hey, Lucky, come over here!"

The chair's wheels rolled across the bedroom floor until the backrest bumped into the mattress. Lucky, who had already removed his gloves for the improvised surgery, flexed his wrist to show Specs the horizontal slit there. He pressed his middle and ring fingers into his palm, and a similar line of silk jumped across the room and stuck to the wall.

"Do you need to do that?" Specs asked. "The ASL love sign, I mean. I mean, when I do it, it's to, you know. Push the trigger. Is there a biological reason, or—"

"The spinneret," Lucky interrupted, "is wired to this nerve cluster in my palm. Pressure is put on that; I fire a webline. It's kind of a reflexive mechanism." He looked over at Teresa, waiting for her input.

She glanced back at him, then at Specs, and shrugged. "I'm not a scientist," she said. "I have no idea. This is just the only way I've figured out how to shoot webbing."

Specs attempted to move into a more comfortable position, wincing. "Agh—jeez, where has my brain been for the last twenty-four hours? Why haven't I thought about this? I've got a whole bunch of questions now!" He paused, but only for an instant, as though selecting his first question. "…For starters, where the hell are you getting all that mass? You can't just be pulling it out of your asses, right?" He considered this statement. "Hah! Out of your asses. Because, you know, spiders secrete silk from their abdomens—"

"I did get it the first time," Lucky said reassuringly.

"Kay, good. 'Cause you guys are using up huge amounts of protein, with all the webbing I've seen you use! And-and how are the glands producing so much at once?! Have you guys ever run out?"

"No," Teresa answered—but then her brow furrowed, and she looked at the webbing she had fired to demonstrate. "…But that's a good point. Where is all this coming from?"

"Do you guys ever go back and eat the stuff you've already fired?"

"What?" Teresa looked down at him like he had just spontaneously spoke Mandarin. "No! Of course not! That would be so gross!"

Lucky looked uncomfortable at this declaration. When first Specs, then Teresa, looked at him curiously, he rubbed the back of his neck. "…Kind of? I sometimes use it as dental floss."

"That's not what I mean!" Specs protested. He again attempted to sit up, again immediately regretted this decision, and again struggled to get comfortable. "Spiders—I mean, you guys have probably researched real spiders. You know they eat their old silk to recycle protein. How could you use as much webbing as you do, without doing something like that to replenish yourselves? How the hell are you not malnourished as shit?"

Lucky shrugged. "I don't know. I've formed a couple hypotheses, but nothing concrete."

"…" Specs chewed his lip thoughtfully. "How…do you suppose I could get that power?"

Lucky, about to return to repairing Specs' web-shooters, and Teresa, scratching at her spinneret with a furrowed brow, both looked down at Specs bewilderedly. "What?" asked Lucky. "You…you can't, can you? Not unless it was in the DNA that was spliced into you when…I don't know how you got your powers. Some kind of spider bite, right?"

"Maybe you'll develop organic webbing in the future?" Teresa suggested. "Maybe your powers are still developing."

"They're not." Specs put his hand to the wall by his bed, stuck, and, groaning through his teeth, pulled himself up until he sat with his back to it. "There we go! I got my powers through this bite that was carrying the Oz virus, containing genes from a couple different species of spider. It was an abnormal strain; OsCorp hasn't figured out yet exactly how to replicate it, thank god. Point is, those genes fully integrated themselves into me a long time ago. And the way Banner skotaphyll works means—"

"Banner what?"

"Skotaphyll. It's kinda like this man-made, stupidly complicated chemical based on chlorophyll. Kinda like how chlorophyll uses visible light to fuel the creation of sugars, skotaphyll uses gamma radiation to fuel the creation of proteins."

Lucky stared into space for a second, thinking. "…That makes…almost no sense. What?"

"I just know the basics. If you want to know exactly how the hell that works, I can't help ya. But it means that if I was gonna get organic webbing, I would've already gotten organic webbing. But just hear me out! Imagine if I took a few cells from your silk glands, some of your stem cells, and injected them into my forearm, right about here—"

"Are you seriously suggesting this?!" asked an appalled Teresa.

"Yes! If I could do that, maybe keep them alive with isoaldehyde cycles while they develop and some arteries are diverted to them—you look nauseous, Terry. You okay?"

"Please stop talking," Teresa said weakly. "Drake was right. You are a mad scientist."

"Radical scientist! I am not crazy!" Specs looked from Teresa to a visibly uncomfortable Lucky. A slightly frantic demeanor had come over him. "Lucky, help me out here. If the implant succeeded, it'd be a hell of a leap in stem cell research, right? The growth of two entire new organs in the host's body! Organs that laugh in the face of Conservation of Mass! And I could—"

"It's an interesting idea to toss around," Lucky said slowly, holding up a hand to stop him, "and I'm not gonna call you mad. But in practice? That's a terrible idea. Call me squeamish, but I'm not a huge fan of when the scientist runs experiments on themselves. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single time that's ended well."

"Yeah, but—"

Specs stopped abruptly, his mouth still open as if he had stopped himself before his mouth had realized. He slumped a little lower against the wall, his hands clasped in his lap and his eyes distressed and downcast. He took a deep breath, looking away from the two.

Lucky leaned forward. "Specs?"

Specs seemed to gather himself before beginning to speak again. "But do you know how useful it'd be? To have freaking bottomless webbing supplies? To have webbing—" he grabbed the end of the line Teresa had shot, holding it up. "To have webbing this thick? A spider-silk cable this thick can theoretically stop a 747 in midair. This could catch a falling bus. Guys, imagine how many more people I could save if I had organic webbing! How much easier it would be to beat super villains! I mean, I've already got two hundred seventy-six ghosts, I bet I could—could—"

Lucky and Teresa had both started when Specs rattled off a number, and now Lucky held up a hand sharply. "Wait! Go back!" When Specs looked at him confusedly, he set his hand down. "Two hundred seventy-six? What-what-what do you mean?"

Specs stared at him, his lips slightly parted. He looked as though he was internally debating whether to divulge. "…That's how many bystanders have been killed in the crossfire of my battles." His voice was flat and miserable. "Including that apartment one today. Before it was a hundred seventy-two."

Teresa glanced at Lucky; the expression of horror that was creeping across his face mirrored her own. Turning back to Specs, she shakily said, "You…you count the casualties?"

"Course I count," Specs breathed, looking at neither of them. "Those bodies are on me. That blood's on my hands. I get reckless. Or paranoid, or I panic. Not strong enough, fast enough, smart enough…" He drew his knees up to his chest. "Don't tell me I couldn't have saved them. I apparently had enough in the tank to get myself out alive, so why not them? And—and Uncle Ben—he's dead because I did nothing. And Gwen…if I had just…" He stopped, gritting his teeth and holding back a sob as his eyes squeezed shut.

Lucky slumped backwards in his chair, staring at his counterpart. Teresa reached out a hand to take Specs', but his eyes snapped open and towards her as she got closer. She stopped just before touching him and, after a moment of uncertainty, pulled away awkwardly.

"I can't do this," Specs growled suddenly, sliding forward.

"What?" said Teresa, confused.

"Can't do it. Can't just sit here. Agh—I have to make more webbing. I need—to—" His feet touched the floor, stuck there, and he pulled himself into a standing position sharply and immediately almost fell forwards. He caught himself, but his knees trembled and his eyes had lost focus.

"Oh, God," he breathed, and collapsed.

Teresa and Lucky both lunged forward to catch him before he hit the ground. "Stubborn kid," Lucky muttered as the unconscious teenager in their arms still seemed to slump away from the bed. Teresa moved over to his legs, and with some awkwardness they moved him back to the bed and lay him on top of his sheets.

"Lucky?" Teresa asked as Lucky turned around, an uncharacteristically weary expression on his face. "Are you okay?"

"I…don't really know. You got a moment?"

"Yeah, I do. What's eating at you?"

Lucky leaned against the dresser. "It's Specs. He scares me." He looked over at the battered teen on the bed. "I don't know if it's just because we're alternate versions of each other, but I see a lot of me back when I was his age in him."

Teresa looked down at Specs, then up again. "I'm not sure I see it."

"Well, I'm older now. Believe you me, you are not gonna be the same person you are now by the time you reach college. By the time I got bit and became Spider-Man, I was living on my own, and doing pretty well I think. I grew up before I ever got powers." Lucky looked down at Specs, who had rolled onto his side, curled up slightly, and brought his slightly-shaking hands to his chest. Teresa touched a hand to his shoulder reassuringly as Lucky continued, "I mean, obviously, this kid's seen some nasty stuff. But if I had gotten powers at fifteen like he did…I don't know. It just scares me."

"Lucky, how old are you and Scarlet? You said you were going for your Bachelor's earlier—"

"Twenty." Lucky grabbed the back of the chair and slowly pulled it back to the desk. "Scarlet turns twenty-one in a few months. And you?"

"I'm fifteen," she replied. She looked back to Specs. "…And I'm starting to feel like that shouldn't be old enough."

"Subject is coming around."

Arachnolord's eyes fluttered open. Above him was a harsh fluorescent light. He sat up, looking around. A pair of thick handcuffs encircled his wrists. An eight-by-eight metal cell greeted him, one wall partially made of a foot-thick pane of reinforced glass with metal wiring running through it. On the other side of the glass sat a brunette woman in a dark blue jumpsuit with a tablet and stylus, legs crossed and a slightly disdainful look on her face.

Arachnolord growled and lunged at her. His spider-sense tingled an inch away from the glass, but then his fist connected and a jolt of electricity surged up his arm. He yelled, dropping to his knees in pain. The air smelled of burned fabric from where the electricity had jumped from his ankles through the pant legs to get to the ground.

"That was the warning jolt," the woman's voice called casually through twin speakers in the corners. "High voltage, but relatively low in amps. Relatively. Next one's gonna be fatal."

Arachnolord stood with a bit of effort, glaring at the woman.

"Who the hell are you?" he snarled.

"Agent Chambers, SHIELD." She didn't even look at him as she said it, instead focused on the stylus she twirled between her fingers. "We've got some questions for you."

Arachnolord sighed through his nose. He turned away, sauntering back towards the bed set into the back wall, and sat down on it. "Fire away. It's not like I'm going anywhere."

"What's your name?"

"Peter Palmer, but you can call me Arachnolord."

"Right," said Chambers condescendingly, typing on the tablet. "…Peter…Palmer. And where're you from?"

"Queens." Arachnolord paused. "Well, a Queens. A different version. Mind loosening the cuffs a bit, babydoll—"

"If you call me 'babydoll' again," Cambers interrupted bluntly, "I will personally see to it that you'll be eating nothing but gruel for the next six months. The cuffs stay where they are."

"Women! All the same!"

Chambers, who in this time hadn't looked up from the tablet, raised her eyes to flash him a dirty look. "Be grateful my job description doesn't include dishing out feminist speeches, because if it did we'd be here till dawn. You said you were from an alternate version of Queens. Care to elaborate?"

"Not really."

Chambers sighed, setting the tablet aside. "We know you're from an alternate reality," she said, rubbing her eyes. "We know you came to this one by bursting out of the reanimated corpse of one of the arthropod-like organisms that invaded OsCorp last night, which we've named FAO-91. If we don't know anything about where you're from, we have no way to send you back."

"Fine by me."

"And you'll be locked in this cell for the rest of your life. Which won't be long, since you'll probably be dissected." Chambers raised a single eyebrow, sharp as a sword. "Interested in chatting now?"

Arachnolord cleared his throat. Chambers gave him a fake smile and picked up the tablet again.

"I don't know the 'number' of my world," he began. "Back home, there was a change in management in DC about five or ten years ago. Some general named Joe Colton overthrew the government with his private army known as 'GI Joe'."

"…GI Joe." Her stylus slowed to a stop. "If you wanna stay off a lab table, it's in your best interest to not make stupid jokes."

"Who's laughing? Well, he and his new regime made contact and then teamed up with some dictatorial alien robots called the 'Autobots', and then—"

"Okay," Chambers interrupted, "now I know you're shitting me. My kid brother watched that cartoon. If you don't start cooperating, Palmer—"

"Do I look like someone who wants to get dissected? I'm telling you exactly what happened. Nowadays Colton's trying to unify North America under his banner…everything except the Northeast US."

"Why's he not trying to take in the Northeast US?"

"Because it's not worth it. From Boston to Philadelphia, the Northeast belongs to the underworld. We, the scum of the earth, own that territory. Every major city there's a perpetual battlefield between the gangs. It's law of the jungle there…and I wouldn't have it any other way."

"Hmmm." Chambers set aside the stylus, looking down at her screen. "And are your robot friends from this alternate universe as well?"

"Don't think so."

"Well, thank you, Palmer. This was…an irritating experience." She stood up, tucking the tablet under her arm. "In a few hours you'll be fed. Not gruel, well done. And don't try to escape, I've heard the aftereffects of the knockout gas are quite painful."

As she started sauntering towards the door, Arachnolord stood up and walked to the window. "You think I'm just gonna sit quietly?!" he shouted after her. His arms flexed, and after a few seconds the reinforced carbonadium bent and tore and he ripped the cuffs in half. "I will kill every single person in this complex! YOU, I will personally hang from the roof by your neck! JUST YOU WAIT!"

Tarantulas adjusted his sensors, switching from visible light to infrared to sonar. Somehow, when the SHIELD team had taken his incapacitated cohorts, he had managed to slip into the same sewer cave-in that he had emerged from hours before, and now he walked through several inches of sludge that may once upon a time have been water.

He knew that any plan he conceived was unlikely to be achievable alone. Blackarachnia may have been imprudent and dense compared to him, but she was one of the most capable fighters he had worked alongside, and Waspinator…

…was another set of hands.

All he needed to do was track down Waspinator and Blackarachnia's energy signatures, and he'd be off to the races as it were.

"So, Lucky—out of curiosity, what kind of hypotheses did you come up with about our organic webbing?" Teresa asked.

"Main one is that it's continually produced and thus always 'on tap'. As for where it comes from, I'm going to say the materials come from my diet, since I've been taking in a fair bit more protein than I did before getting my powers."

"Makes sense, I guess."

There was an awkward silence.

"So…I was kind of wondering about what kind of villains you and Scarlet go up against." Teresa finally said.

Lucky took a breath.

"First one we went up against was our iteration's version of Black Cat. After that, we had a run-in with some guy calling himself Doctor Octopus, followed by Scorpion, Shocker, and Electro—"

"Wait, you've got a Shocker and Electro? What're they like?" Teresa butted in.

"Shocker's basically a goon with some kind of vibrating gauntlets- he doesn't seem to have a lot going on upstairs. As for Electro…from what I've gleaned from our encounters, she's basically just a career criminal with lightning powers."

"Huh. Back in my iteration, Shocker was pretty much the first bad guy I went up against. He seemed a lot more competent. And as for Electro…mine's a dude who got lightning powers by being mutated by electric eels or something, and he's reformed now."

Lucky nodded.

"Anyways, after those two came the likes of Vulture and Mysterio, and then all the baddies I just mentioned teamed up to form some outfit called the Sinister Six. Well, almost all of them- Scarlet and I haven't seen Scorpion since that first encounter with him."

Teresa nodded.

"After we beat the Six, we managed to expose OsCorp's scheme, and then Norman himself came after us as the Green Goblin. Last I checked, he's in an insane asylum."

"So, what happened after you beat the Goblin?"

Lucky took another breath.

"Things got weird. Scarlet and I've been pursued by a mercenary outfit called 'The Pack' whose leader's some Russian weirdo who goes by the moniker 'Kraven the Hunter', fought a prizefighter who managed to get his hands on a mini-mecha and calls himself 'Rhino', and right before we were sent here, we were up against a cyborg mobster with a pair of light machine guns in his chest. And that's just the highlights reel. You?"

"My iteration's got a Rhino, but he's some kind of genetically-altered thing."

Lucky nodded before glancing to the nearby alarm clock.

"Well, nice chatting with you, but our shift's over. Want to pick this back up in the morning?"

"Sounds like a plan."

The two got up and approached the door before running into Drake and a not-quite-awake Blue.

"How's Specs?" the former asked.

"He's hanging in there." Teresa replied.

"Is he coherent?"

"Coherent enough. Let's just say he's a talkative drunk." Lucky said.

"…okay. Thanks for the update. See you all in the morning."

Notes From Courier:

-SHIELD agents Gorman and Dietrich are nods to two of the Marines from Aliens.