DISCLAIMER: The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this story are pure fiction. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products are intended or should be inferred or meant in any way to slander or cause harm. True events and the science portrayed in this story are from a purely interpretive and speculative point of view and taken largely with a creative license from the author (please don't come after me for misinformation, I tried my best).

Issue #1 – Along Came A Spider

Earth-1280 was never supposed to have a Spider-Man. It was the reality where all Spider-Men hailed from and yet didn't, a reality where all of them were fictional characters cooked up by three nerds and a slew of comic-book writers. In that world, they only existed to entertain millions. Any person who claimed to be Spider-Man in that universe was a character, an actor playing a role or an artist drawing a portrait or a fan donning the costume just because it was fun. So when it came for the time scan for anomalies and the insurgents that had taken a stand a few short weeks ago, Miguel O'Hara had never expected to find one existing right under his nose.

…

(Earth-928) Nueva York, 2102 A.D.

Miguel had been standing in front of his monitor for… actually he wasn't sure. The rules of space-time seemed to bend around him when he was working in his lab. He had been analyzing his most recent battle against the rogue spiders that had dubbed themselves the 'Spider Band' in Earth-9591 where they had been hiding out. He had clashed against Peni Parker and her spider mech in her attempt to give the other spiders an opportunity to escape before that universe's Otto Octavius had broken up the fight with his own robotic mayhem that sent Sp/dr into a rampage via EMP. Said EMP had also made any hope of Miguel tracking down the rogue spiders by their new dimensional travel watches, or 'gizmos' as LYLA liked to call them, impossible since it affected electronic devices from a two hundred mile radius. He was having Peter from TRN461 look into that, but it appeared he was having no luck in tracking them down either. He also did not take failure well. Maybe that was why he called himself 'the Superior Spider-Man.'

Miguel noticed his own reflection in the video footage fighting alongside Superior Spider-Man. His face was a hollow shell of what it once was, his jaw sharp and gaunt as he stood over the remains of a wrecked building. His eyes were shadows, two little pinpricks of blood above his sallow cheekbones that burned with hatred and hellfire. He couldn't recall the last time his skin had actually felt sunlight. He spent most of his time holed up in his lab or coordinating the few remaining spiders he had left. Any time he was out on a mission, he was fully suited up and the universes he had jumped into were usually well into the late hours of the evening. Night was the best time to ambush enemies, even if those enemies had spider sense. He was wearing them down. He could feel it. There were few places in the universe they could hide that LYLA could not find, but it was a big universe, and he was only just one man. The more he wore them down, the more he felt worn down.

His hand ran through the tangled strings of his swept back, dark brown hair, his talons snagging on the greasy, untamed ends of it. He pulled his hand back in surprise. He hadn't even realized he had them out. He quickly drew them back into his fingertips and went for with a shaky hand.

"Your h-hair has got-gotten longer." Miguel's eyes didn't even move towards the twelve inch woman that had glitched in the space on his opposite shoulder. He'd long stopped being surprised by LYLA's unscheduled appearances. "Would you l-like me to s-schedule you a h-haircut?"

Miguel ignored the hologram and instead went to the box of serum he had on his desk. With a shaky hand, he placed it onto the injector gun. The material on his shoulder dissipated to reveal his mocha skin as he injected the drug into his shoulder. He was starting to get low. He would have to whip up a new batch soon or the withdrawal symptoms would kick in.

"I could g-get you a side buzzcut. I-I'm told short h-hair is all the rage w-with the CEOs these days. Th-They like to m-match it with their cyyyyybuuuurnetic implants." She continued, talking like she was completely fine with glitching in front of him and that he was paying attention to her, showing him pictures and fashion articles of other megacorporation CEOs like Stark-Fujikawa's Hikaru Fujikawa, who had no hair, and the late CEO of Alchemax, Tyler Stone, who had his blonde fringe slicked back to reveal an earpiece connecting to his temple. The style was eerily similar to his, minus the implant. Miguel only saw the practical use of implants only when it came to prosthetics or distributing credits, and that was via eye-scan. Having a neuro-link to the Public Eye police force and Watchdogs had seemed a bit excessive to Miguel at the time, having AIs smart enough to run the machines that there was no need for thought control. Then again, his birth father had always loved power and control.

"T-This is also your d-daily reminder to m-make sure you eat s-something today," LYLA said, flickering in front of his display. "I don't eat, but I f-find that f-food is nice to look at. Look at the v-various culinary blogs and c-cooking streams I have access to." She held up an array of pictures of food and popular cooking streams that at one point Miguel would have thought sounded appetizing, but now just tasted like ash in his mouth. "I've already or-ordered some takeout of paella from-om the cafeteria to help with the shakes of low blood sugar. Everything a growing Spi-Spider-Man needs."

"That won't be necessary." Miguel muttered, sweeping those with the brush of his hand, already going back to his monitor to sweep through the footage and scan for more anomalies while his other hand worked idly with the screen, tweaking the CPU that housed LYLA's programming, hoping that he could at least get her to stop stuttering. Thank god her actual programming was not affected, though he couldn't be sure. She seemed a bit more like annoying than usual, more like an assistant than the companion she had been before.

"C-Come on. You used to l-love c-cooking."

That had been before, back when he actually had time to cook and someone to cook for. He wasn't hungry much these days. What was the point in eating anymore? Anything he needed he could get through supplements and energy stim-boosts. It also helped cut out the amount of time he would have to step away for bathroom breaks. Between that and his micro-naps at his console, he didn't even need to sleep. He could just keep working and monitoring the multiverse for any new dangers or rogue spiders while everyone else wasted time in their home dimensions. Forever.

Miguel was about to move to the next scan of foreign entities when he saw it. Right under the base of the Web of Life and Destiny was a root, a pocket dimension that laid right next to a core reality, a tiny thread no bigger than an actual line of spider silk extending out to Earth-1280, a dimension that connected with the others at the base of this five-dimensional tree. Miguel zoomed in on the structure, feeling the touch-tones of light vibrate under his fingertips as he pinched the surface and widened the view of the node. It just barely flickered orange, otherwise appearing a white-blue like the other parts of non-arachno-humanoid poly-multiverse.

Earth-1280 was already a no-flight zone, meaning it was off limits to everyone unless under martial law, meaning only under supreme mitigating circumstances could you venture in there at the risk of losing your powers forever. In theory, if someone had taken out this dimension, the others would go with it. It was the ultimate kill switch. There was no concern, thankfully, that this would happen. The reality that made up Earth-1280 was so atomically pure that anyone who did visit would lose their powers, so anomalies wouldn't be as much of a threat if they landed there.

This new pocket universe, on the other hand, did not appear to have this issue. The aura around this dimension was less abrasive than Earth-1280, meaning entry was easier than the other. It was how they were able to locate potentially hostile universes. Miguel dubbed it 'Earth-1280B' based on its location ID number. It appeared to have been a part of Earth-1280 originally, a pair of identical, conjoined twins spinning around each other like a binary planet system, judging from the ionic signature it was emitting. It was just so small that it just made the reality look bigger than it was, like a white dwarf star hiding behind a red giant. It was the perfect place for a few rogue spiders to be hiding out.

"LYLA, can you run causality diagnostics on the dimension I have pulled up on my monitor?"

"Only if you say the m-magic word."

Miguel's shoulders sagged. Sometimes he regretted programming her with such a vexing personality. Then again, he had only created half of the specs, his ex being in charge of the standard protocols and coding the bulk of her matrixes back when she had been alive. He wondered if she had done it out of revenge or sheer spite for how things ended between them. "…Please?"

"Already done," she replied eyes smiling behind her big, pink tinted heart-shaped glasses. "Nothing appears out of the ordinary except… wh-whoa, these nu-numbers do not g-g-go with the current mo-model we have for canon adaptations." Her face flickered into an expression of surprise, her goldenrod pixels flickering in and out of view as she reassembled herself by the console.

This was not good. This new universe, this anomaly, it shouldn't theoretically exist. You couldn't just rewrite the laws of the universe based on one person, but the evidence was hard to ignore. If anything went wrong in this universe, any anomaly jumped in there and disrupted the canon of that dimension, the whole multiverse could collapse. It wasn't like losing a branch of a tree. It was firebombing the entire tree's root system in a massive explosion, and this new universe was the detonator. To make matters worse, the reverse could be equally as disastrous. If someone from that universe ended up in one of theirs, a dimension that had access to all the knowledge of the spiders and their universes' canon prior to them happening, that could spell doom and destruction for them all. Miles Morales was living proof of that. He already had to deal with the fallout of his little rebellion and the oncoming civil war that loomed over the horizon with the spiders that left with that traitor, Gwen Stacy, to create their own army of web warriors. He couldn't fight an entire spider society full of in-fighting on top of that.

There were too many questions, too many variables to consider, too many unknowns for him to start question his way of approaching this new reality now. No, it was just safer to just compartmentalize this problem for now and observe this new reality from a distance and go back to his job of patching up the other holes punched in the multiverse. He had enough fires to put out already without having to add this one to the pile. But that faint spider signal… Were those rogue spiders so reckless that they were willing to risk everything on the off chance that they would be able to hide from the Spider Society, from him? Then Miguel thought of Miles and that determined look he had as he shot him off of the train and again when he had tried to save his father from the Spot before the villain imploded. Suddenly all traces out of doubt were gone as the lines on Miguel's face hardened.

"LYLA, keep this universe under wraps until I collect more data. Don't let anyone have access to this dimension unless I give the okay." He said, already donning his mask and cape. To be safe, he had dubbed this new pocket dimension restricted to all spiders except himself, coding it into the shared hive mind between all of their dimensional watches. He didn't want anyone messing with it because theoretically everything in this universe was a canon event, just an unstable row of dominoes waiting to get knocked over, a butterfly waiting to get crushed underfoot. The chance of an anomaly arriving in that one out of thousands was infinitesimal, and unless something changed, no one would interfere. No one would visit Earth-1280B.

Until they did.

As if to tempt him, the red blip grew darker on the screen, signifying a new wormhole opening up. His AI personal assistant flashed adjacent to his shoulder a second later.

"Miguel, I am detecting an anomaly en-entering interdimensional space."

"Are they our missing spiders?" Miguel asked, hoping that she would say yes.

"No. It doesn't have any w-watch s-signature that I recognize. This is a wormhole from Earth-3."

"Do we have any information on who got pulled into the portal?"

"Let's see… I am seeing a woman under the name M-Maria Bench, though she goes under the pseu-pseudonym 'Myst' or 'Misty' to her friends. She's 5'8, blood type O and loves sushi. Also she has the ability to turn into and control water."

"I don't need all of the extra details like some sort of dating profile," Miguel growled.

"You really should put yourself out there, Miguel. You haven't dated anyone since-"

"Nevermind that! Do you know where she is heading!?" he snapped.

"Okay! Okay! Jeez, just give me a sec…" LYLA hummed but Miguel already knew. As if he had been tempting the universe, a red line appeared on a screen, signifying a new node connecting the wormhole from Earth-3 leading to Earth 1280B. Mierda. Shocking Murphy's Law…

"LYLA, hold all my calls until I've dealt with this. Remain on standby mode unless I say otherwise."

"You s-sure you don't need any b-back-up? You wa-want me to call B-Ben in?"

"No. We need to keep this mission as small as possible. I'll decide on whether or not I'll need back up," said Miguel, setting down the tools he had been using to work on LYLA. Jess had been on an extended maternity leave, having prematurely gone into labor during the fight against the Spot. It was hard enough being Spider-Man when you were in good health. He didn't want to think of the possibility of bringing in a new mother into the mix, especially with a baby boy to take care of. Even Peter B had been AWOL those first two months after his daughter Mayday had been born.

A memory of Gabriella's face flashed into Miguel's mind, causing a fresh stab of pain in his chest. He had long stopped showing it on his face. He was just hardened and impassive as ever. There was no point in mourning for the past, especially for a past that wasn't his. It didn't quell the ache that lanced through his chest anytime he thought of her though. He was doing this for her. He was doing this for all of them.

"You got it, Miguel."

Rather than tell anyone where he had gone, Miguel activated his watch and stepped into the portal, praying he could make it in time. A tiny flicker of optimism flitted in the back of his mind, entertaining the idea that if he worked quickly enough, he might be able to catch the rogue spiders by surprise. Maybe this anomaly would work in his favor. Earth-1280 had very retro tech compared to his universe's, borderline ancient, so it was to be expected that its twin would have similar issues. There's no way they could see him coming with how archaic the technology was there. If he was lucky, the anomaly might lure the spiders out of hiding just in time for him to swoop in capture them and bring them back to HQ after they had tired each other out. Then, he might actually be able to rest for a moment and make up for his earlier mistakes.