Disclaimer: I own nothing that you recognise (and I'm borrowing a couple of things you may not recognise from sources you simply may not be familiar with); be assured I'll identify anything relevant when it comes up.
Feedback: Always appreciated
AN: With some of the other heroes on Peter Two's world established, we now go back to Wanda's interaction with Peter Three as she learns more about his world.
Also, on a practical note, the Six's plan here was inspired by the Sinister Six trilogy by Adam-Troy Castro, which also introduced a very particular character who featured briefly in the last Peter-Three-focused chapter and will be explicitly introduced later on. I can confirm that this character already cameoed in Garfield's films, so this can be considered a suitable use of relevant existing material.
Scarlet Witch and the Three Spiders
"So…" Peter looked curiously at Wanda as she sat opposite him in the small room that served as his main lounge area. "You… you really think you've split yourself in three somehow? Because of a dream?"
"You doubt me?" Wanda gave the young man a critical look. She told herself that it was unfair to expect a relative stranger to have so much faith in her when they had literally only just met and as far as he knew she'd spent the last few hours in a deep sleep because he felt she needed reset before he gave her a more detailed explanation of recent events, but when he was the only person she could talk to about any of this it still felt awkward to be 'rejected'.
"It's not that I doubt you- I don't exactly know what magic could do so I'm not in any position to say what you couldn't do with it- but it just all feels like a really freaky…" Peter shrugged and waved his hands, clearly lost for anything else to say.
"I know that it sounds strange, but…" Wanda shook her head in frustration, once again wishing that Vision was still with her with some of his own deeper speeches. "Have you ever experienced something where it all makes perfect sense to you, but when you try and explain it to someone else you cannot find the words?"
"Not directly, but… yeah, I've read about that kind of thing," Peter nodded cautiously at her. "It's like this one book I read a while back where some Victorian scientist got a bunch of alien knowledge stuck in his head. He was able to build an engine for a spaceship using that knowledge, but he couldn't actually explain how any of it worked to anyone else because the language he knew didn't have the background context to explain it to everyone else… does that work?"
"…That sounds like this," Wanda nodded, wondering if she should have taken Vision's advice and expanded her reading and viewing material (with the obvious exception of the Darkhold). "I cannot explain to you how I know that the other two are still… me… but I know it."
"Then… well, I'll go with that," Peter nodded cautiously at her before he sat back in his chair, a thoughtful expression on his face. "So… does this give you any ideas about… shall we say, pulling yourself back together?"
"At this point I cannot even say how this happened, never mind how it might be undone," Wanda observed. "I am sure that the three of me will attempt to find a way to bring myselves back together, but for the moment… I believe you were going to tell me more about these 'Sinister Six'?"
"You're sure you still want to know more?"
"I am an Avenger, you are the alternate of an Avenger, and these people are a danger to the innocent; it seems obvious," Wanda replied, hoping that her light-hearted smile would be enough to convince Peter to accept that explanation. "You mentioned they carried out a 'Day of Terror' yesterday; what did that involve?"
"It was… their sick way of taunting me with some of my bigger failures," Peter explained, sighing as he sat back in his chair. "They wanted to basically rub my old losses in my face, so they went around town picking out cases where I'd failed to save people in the past and setting up plans to attack me or other people if I didn't get there in time. A jewellery store where the thieves and some innocents were killed in a shoot-out while I was trying to catch them, a bridge where Doctor Connors went on a rampage, a power plant on the city's outskirts, an OsCorp facility where I accidentally triggered a mass outbreak of monsters, the old OsCorp building where I nearly failed to save the city from being mutated into lizards…"
"They chose a near failure?"
"I think… well, I have a theory that the scale of what the three mes did to change history had such an impact on the timeline that some people still have some idea of what happened before everything changed even if it didn't actually happen any more."
"What do you mean?"
"Before I went to your world… well, I think I mentioned that one of my father's old colleagues mutated himself into a giant lizard by accident?"
"Yes…"
"Before my trip to your world, the Lizard ended up killing Captain George Stacy before I managed to cure him."
"Captain George Stacy?" Wanda repeated, wondering if she should know that name.
"He's the father of…" Peter began, pausing to swallow as a saddened expression took over his face. "His daughter was… very important to me."
"Oh," Wanda said, the reaction putting Wanda in mind of the way she always dodged around talking about the Vision since she came back unless she absolutely had to discuss him for some reason. "What… happened to her?"
"She… got killed trying to help me," Peter said, shaking his head in frustration. "I could save so many other people because of my trip to your world, but I couldn't save her…"
"What do you mean?"
"When I joined the other mes in your world… like I mentioned earlier, we were trying to find a way to… cure our villains so that we could avoid them dying once we sent them back," Peter explained. "For me, that meant turning Doctor Connors back to his human self from his lizard self, and draining off Max Dillon's electricity so that he was human again. I'm not sure how it works in terms of the temporal physics of it all, but when I came back here, I found that my actions had managed to change things so that Captain Stacy wasn't killed by Connors this time around, and Max was still alive and getting treatment in a good mental health facility…"
"But Captain Stacy's daughter is still dead?" Wanda finished.
"I'm not exactly sure how it all happened, since my own memories didn't actually change even if everyone else's did, but as far as I can tell…" Peter shook his head. "The way it happened originally was that Gwen followed me to the power plant where I was confronting Max so that she could help me drain off his energy before he destroyed the city. After we drained Max into the power grid in the original timeline, Harry attacked, he took Gwen prisoner, and… while we were fighting… he dropped Gwen off the top of a clock-tower."
"Oh," Wanda said, sitting in silent as Peter bent over for a moment, his head in his hands as he was clearly overwhelmed by difficult memories.
"I still see it every time I close my eyes," he said at last, his voice cracking as he continued speaking. "Every time I replay it in my mind I do everything I can to force Harry back… I try to catch Gwen with my webbing… I keep jumping after her… but she just falls too fast and I can't do it…"
"I keep reliving Vision's death."
"Vision?" Peter looked at her for a moment before he nodded. "Oh yeah… you had to… I mean, he was…"
"I had to watch him die twice over," Wanda nodded grimly. "And the worst part is that I do not know which is worse; having to kill him myself to try and save the universe, or having to watch Thanos undo that sacrifice and make it all for nothing before killing him again."
"…Yeah, that would suck," Peter nodded. "You know, I kind of envied Peter One when he told us he was part of a team rather than doing it all himself, but if your world has to deal with stuff like that… maybe there's something to be said for not having to worry about alien warlords and all that."
"The Avengers were… complicated, but we were not as bad as all that," Wanda observed. "There were ups and downs, but we did our best for the world…"
She shook her head and looked at Peter with a more focused stare. "In any case, we cannot dwell on that when there is a more immediate problem; did the Sinister Six do anything else during this Day of Terror apart from taunt you?"
"Well…" Peter began, his expression almost unreadable as he tapped his chin thoughtfully for a moment, "there was this bit where it turned out that the Vulture on the bridge was actually one of Mysterio's drones, and the Rhino didn't turn up until the big confrontation in Times Square at the end of the day, but he's never been subtle so he'd have probably drawn attention if he was anywhere in the city. The problem is that I still haven't been able to figure out what bubble-head was doing with that switch…"
"Bubble-head?" Wanda repeated.
"Oh, right, you haven't seen it yet…" Peter said, smiling as he reached over and picked up his phone. "Just a moment… there you are."
Looking at the image on the screen, Wanda could only raise her eyebrows at the sight of a man in a strange green costume with a long purple cloak, elaborate gold gauntlets, and what looked like a mist-filled fishbowl covering his head.
"How can he see anything in that?" she asked.
"It's got some kind of elaborate sensor network in it," Peter explained. "He might look like an idiot, but he's got some interesting tech in that suit; I just have to-"
The image on the screen vanished as the phone started ringing, but Wanda only had time to glimpse 'Captain' on the display before Peter had turned the phone back to himself and answered it.
Captain George Stacy appreciated that he was in an unconventional position in the department ever since his confrontation with Connors and Spider-Man on top of the OsCorp tower. He obviously couldn't tell anyone why he had gone from trying to arrest Spider-Man to basically tolerating the vigilante's activities, but at least the rise in what was essentially superhuman criminal activity made it easier to acknowledge that there was a necessity for the web-slinger to remain in play rather than trying to arrest him. Despite the protests of sources such as the Daily Bugle, George had persuaded his relevant contacts to agree to leave Spider-Man to deal with things his way, on the understanding that this policy would change if the vigilante ever clearly crossed the line.
Granted, even if that happened George would be prepared to give Peter a chance to put his case forward and argue he had been acting in self-defence or just didn't have another choice if he wanted to stop something worse from happening, but he knew that it would seriously impact the young man's reputation in the department. In any case, he officially stuck to the idea that Peter would be at least facing arrest if he did kill someone to give the young man that extra incentive to stay on the right path, which made him feel better about the situation even if he didn't want to ever find himself in that situation…
The now-familiar sound of webs being launched prompted George to look up, but his immediate smile shifted to a confused stare when he saw a woman in a strange red outfit literally flying alongside the red-and-blue vigilante. She had some kind of strange red energy around her hands and feet, and she had tan-dark skin and long dark hair.
"Spider-Man?" Captain Stacy looked curiously at his lost daughter's lover, raising a curious eyebrow as he indicated the woman landing alongside the more familiar 'face'. "And who is this?"
"You may call me the Scarlet Witch," the woman replied, an unfamiliar accent to her voice as she looked at him. "I am an acquaintance of… Spider-Man… currently passing through New York, and I have volunteered my services to help you with the Sinister Six."
"I… see…" George said, looking away from the woman's face for a moment only to look back when he suddenly found himself unable to exactly recall what the new arrival looked like. He turned back in sudden confusion, only to find his memory of the face was perfectly clear the moment he looked back at her. "How is-?"
"For various reasons I would prefer if nobody knew what I looked like after this was over," the woman explained. "You will be aware of it as you already know who Spider-Man is under the mask, but anyone else who sees us will be unable to explicitly recall what I look like or question why they do not know this."
"You can do that?" Spider-Man looked at her in surprise. "I thought you said-?"
"It is a subtle mental manipulation; it was one of the first tricks I mastered," the Scarlet Witch cut him off before she looked back at George. "Please be assured that this is not a matter of not trusting you, but a matter of ensuring my own secrecy."
"I… understand," George nodded in acknowledgement. He wouldn't deny that the idea of his memory being 'tweaked' like this made him a bit uncomfortable, but if he allowed Peter to retain his secret identity he supposed that he could grant this young woman the right to her own privacy. "So… you're here to help?"
"For this threat, yes," the Scarlet Witch nodded.
"So," Spider-Man took up the talk himself, "with that in mind, do we have anything new to go on?"
"The Six attacked another facility last night."
"What?" the two new arrivals looked at George in shock.
"How did I miss-?" Peter began.
"It was a secret research facility a few miles outside the city; very few people even knew this place existed and it's not exactly in an area where people would just happen to drop by," George explained. "I only learned about it myself because our department was called in to offer our expertise regarding what the Six might have wanted with the stolen equipment."
"What did they steal?" the woman asked (and where was that damn accent from?).
"Some kind of field generator for an elaborate experiment involving manipulating adamantium to make it more adaptable."
"More adaptable?" Spider-Man repeated.
"Adamantium?" the Scarlet Witch said at almost the same time.
"Super-strong metal basically considered indestructible," George decided to answer the woman's question first, hoping that he had the science parts of the reports he'd read straight. "I might have just been raising a scientist, but from what I gather, the whole project was about adapting adamantium to make it more malleable and adjustable."
"Because when you're working with an indestructible metal it's hard to change anything about the finished product after the fact," Spider-Man observed, standing in a thoughtful manner even as he kept his mask on. "And this project found a way to change that?"
"Something about bombarding the adamantium with specially configured computer signals to make it change shape straight away," George shrugged. "They stressed that the process was still in its infancy and took a staff of hundreds to achieve a result that barely lasted more than a minute, so stealing this one component isn't going to help the Six do this experiment themselves…"
"Unless they just wanted that generator for some specific reason," Spider-Man said, his tone thoughtful. "What did it actually do?"
"Generated an energy field to make the adamantium more suggestible, if I read the notes correctly." George shook his head. "And the power supply of this thing is ridiculous… if Max Dillon hadn't lost his powers, I'd think he was involved…"
"Max is cured and staying that way; he's somewhere safe," Peter said confidently, before he shook his head. "But that doesn't mean the others couldn't do something about that; if all they need is power, Octavius, Toomes and Beck are intelligent enough to come up with something between them that could do the job."
"But what job?" the Scarlet Witch asked. "What is the point of stealing something that generates an energy field-?"
"Oh crap."
"What?" George looked at Spider-Man, whose body language indicated that he was shocked at something. "What is it?"
"EMP."
"EMP?" George strained his memory for a moment before he recalled a certain film. "Electro-magnetic pulse? Like what they used in Ocean's Eleven?"
"Basically," Spider-Man nodded. "But the thing you have to remember is that Danny Ocean and his team just wanted to turn off the lights in Vegas for a few moments, and that was in a film anyway. If I'm right about this, the Six are playing for even higher stakes… and a full-powered EMP could wipe the electronic records of every bank in a major financial capital."
"That… sounds bad," the Scarlet Witch observed grimly.
"Set something like that off in New York and we'd have a financial crisis that would make the Wall Street Crash look like a few people just over-charged their credit cards," Spider-Man confirmed. "But if you were prepared for it and had most of your money in something other than… well, money…"
"You think the Six took those kind of precautions?" George asked.
"They wouldn't have stolen something this big if they didn't need it for something equally big," Spider-Man nodded. "Building a giant battery to generate the kind of power needed to turn that thing on would be tricky but definitely something they could do, but building something capable of generating an EMP on this scale would have taken a lot of work that they couldn't have guaranteed being able to build."
"Cut out the middle man and take it from someone who already has one," the Witch nodded. "That makes sense."
"It might also explain something else I've been trying to figure out," George said, feeling a need to retake control of the conversation. "My men and I managed to work out the reason for the whole bait-and-switch thing last week with Mysterio's drones posing as the Vulture and the Rhino staying underground."
"Which was?"
"While the rest of us were busy elsewhere dealing with the more obvious threat, they used that time to break into an old OsCorp storage facility."
"Toomes to get them inside and Rhino to carry something big away?" Spider-Man observed. "And I take it this place wasn't exactly in the city?"
"The facility's main security was that it was outside New York and not many people knew about it, but once we started thinking about it, the only problem was identifying what they stole," George said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a post-it he'd scribbled the relevant number on earlier. "I was able to get a warrant to access the records and confirm what item was missing, but I wasn't allowed to access the database and confirm what this thing actually does… can you do something about that?"
Spider-Man nodded as he took the post-it. After he had looked over it for a moment, he nodded again and looked back at George.
"Scarlet and I need to check something out, but we'll be right back once that's done," he said.
George nodded in response, understanding Peter's reasons for staying quiet. Considering the nature of Peter's status as a vigilante, there were certain things he could do that would have required a warrant if George pursued them himself, and facing villains like the Six often meant that there wasn't time to find a judge who would agree with what he was after. In essence, he accepted the philosophy of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' when dealing with some of these questionable parts of Peter's actions; if he didn't explicitly ask what the younger man was doing, he wouldn't have to lie when confronted about it.
"What are we doing?" Wanda asked as she and Peter returned to the apartment, her red-and-blue clad ally pulling off his mask and heading for his laptop.
"Accessing OsCorp's private database to determine what the thing the Six stole actually is," Peter explained, turning on the laptop and waiting as it booted up.
"You have that kind of access?"
"From what I've been able to figure out, Gwen's access codes and Max's knowledge of the system helped me set up a back door after I… got concerned about everything the company was up to," Peter explained, his fingers moving rapidly over the keyboard as the laptop finished booting up. "It can only give me limited access for a few minutes at a time if I don't want to tip the wrong people off, but if I know something specific about what I'm looking for… there we are."
Wanda stood in silence as Peter copied the document he'd found into another file before logging out of the system and terminating his access. Vision had been able to do something similar by his very nature, but it was something else to see a human doing this kind of work this quickly. She supposed that a solo vigilante dealing with foes like the Six had to develop a wider range of talents, compared to how Wanda had come to recognise her main contribution to a team was power over specific skill, but it was still impressive to see what he could do…
"So… what is it?" she asked, as Peter studied the results.
"Some kind of catalyst…" the young man said, eyes going over the screen before he groaned. "Oh, this isn't good."
"What do you mean?"
"According to this, the thing the Six stole was part of some weapons research project a couple of decades ago. It was intended to be used if an enemy government had to be crippled in some future conflict; the Catalyst is a highly unstable gas that breaks down when exposed to oxygen and bleaches all inks and dyes in its path."
"Inks?" Wanda repeated, confused for a moment before she snapped her fingers in understanding. "Which would basically destroy the paper records that might have been a substitute for whatever was lost in the EMP…"
"Oh yeah," Peter affirmed grimly. "Sounds like it's only a danger if it actually gets out of the container, and they'd need to release it at a high altitude for it to actually affect the city on the kind of scale they'd need, but any kind of private plane could do that…"
"Which means they have everything they need to cause a complete financial collapse in one of the most important cities in the world," Wanda said grimly. "I do not know much about economics and politics, but that does not sound like a good plan for anyone else."
"Yeah," Peter nodded grimly. "This… seriously, I don't even want to think about bad things could get if both of these go off."
"So we find them," Wanda said resolutely.
This might not be her world, but after what she had done to those other heroes in an insane quest to steal children who would never have truly been hers, what better way to atone than by saving another world? This might not be an alien invasion or a killer robot attack, but it was at least similar to what Hydra and that 'Killian' person had attempted in the past, which in Wanda's book made it an Avengers-level threat with only two 'Avengers' to stop it.
"OK," Peter nodded in agreement. "And on the bright side, there's only so many places they could set the EMP off to have the right effect, which means we still have time…"