“So…why here?” Gwen couldn’t help asking as she poked at the greasy mess pretending to be a burger. Don’t get her wrong, she was fine with a little grease and all. But there was a difference between a little grease and so much that the bun fell apart like wet bread when touched or leaked the stuff like a saturated sponge.

“Honestly? I haven’t been here in a while.” Barbara admitted as she pushed away her own nearly untouched meal. “I remember their food being way better than…this.”

Well that was a shame, because Gwen had been looking forward to trying out all the specialty burgers on the menu. But if this is what she had to look forward to every time…well there were other places she could clog her arteries without needing to drink her burger.

Maybe she would come back later and see if this was just an off night some other time.

“So now what? We could–” Gwen started as they walked out into the shopping center before a low beeping interrupted her. For the first time, the scanner she had borrowed from Dr Khan had found one of the escaped rats in the area.

The two girls looked at each other and silently came to an agreement. Gwen quickly reached for the scanner and started heading towards the direction the source of the signal was coming from with Barbara following close behind. Somewhat concerningly was the fact the signal was getting stronger heading towards the center of the shopping center than one of the edges.

Spontaneously self-igniting rodents seemed like a bad thing to mix around a lot of people.

Unfortunately, the scanner could only give them a vague direction and whether they were getting closer or further from the source and the one Barbara had on hand was actually worse, only detecting something in a radius without direction at all. So both girls needed to discreetly investigate every nook and cranny around them and most of the time hope that the escaped animal wasn’t somewhere inconvenient like behind a locked door…or inside a wall.

Eventually they checked out and ultimately dismissed most of the buildings on the shopping strip only to come across a likely place for the labrat to be hiding…

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” Gwen complained.

Barbara weakly patted her on the shoulder. “I mean, it kinda makes sense?”

“Whatever, let’s just get this over with.” The blonde muttered and entered the store.

A cheerful tone rang out as the doors opened and a mostly disinterested worker turned to greet them. “Welcome to Pet Palace, do you need help finding anything today?”

Gwen smiled awkwardly and was about to say they were just looking around when Barbara took the lead and walked right up to him.

“Yeah, hi! My friend there recently lost a pet rat and we’ve been looking all over. Has anyone brought one in? Or one shown up suddenly?” Barbara asked in the same cheerful, friendly way that had effortlessly made her campus princess at college. It certainly had the same effect on a minimum-wage cashier jockey, because suddenly he was all smiles.

“Oh that’s terrible, do you have any photos or a description?”

No, she didn’t. Because Dr Khan didn’t think to photograph the lab animals or if he did, he hadn’t given them to her.

“Um, it’s a normal looking rat,” Gwen bluffed. “But they are chipped, I was worried about them getting out. I even got this scanner for it just in case…”

“Really? I didn’t know they made scanners for pets like that.” Thankfully the guy didn’t sound suspicious. More like he just wanted an excuse to keep talking to them. “I can walk you around and show you our rodent section if you want.”

“Thanks, that’d be really helpful.”

It wasn’t a particularly big store, so they were finished much faster than the cashier probably wanted but none of the animals were the one they were looking for.

In fact, the sensor was now showing the labrat was moving further away from them.

When Gwen mentioned this their new cashier friend was kind enough to call the other worker still at the front and ask if anyone had just left with a rat. No one had, but someone had just purchased some rat food and walked out. Luckily, the other cashier noticed they had a lanyard for an animal hospital around their neck which gave Gwen and Barbara a possible lead. Unfortunately for them, the cashier didn’t make a note of which one it was.

The two girls thanked both workers for their help and rushed out the door in hopes of catching whoever was just in the store in the parking lot since the labrat was probably in their car…but no luck. And since neither of them had any idea what the car looked like, Gwen couldn’t duck out for a quick costume change and look that way.

“Well, you know what this means, right?” Barbara asked, coming to the same conclusion.

Gwen had an idea of what her friend had in mind, but in a desperate last effort of defiance said, “It’s time to split up and see if we can catch up to them on the way to whatever animal hospitals that are around?”

“You have a way to store the little guy if we find it with you?” Barbara asked.

Gwen sighed and looked skyward, regretting her lack of personal vehicle right now. “...no.”

“Then come on. I’ve got a cage in my car just in case I managed to come across one. We’ll head over to the closest animal hospital and we can talk on the way.”

“...sure, sounds great.”

-o-

Gwen was going to die.

She had gone toe-to-toe with Killer Croc, lived through the Riddler’s deathtrap, and even survived getting impaled by Metallo. But this was it. This was the end of the line.

“Red light.”

“I know.”

“Red light!”

“Gwen, relax!”

“Ohmygod, brake. Brake!”

After going through the strict defensive driving courses her father insisted on, Gwen could admit she wouldn’t ever be the fastest driver on the streets. Barbara, on the other hand, had decided to go the other route and learned exactly how far she could push her car to go without doing anything blatantly illegal. Being in the same car Barbara was driving was terrifying before Gwen got powers and she avoided it whenever possible. Now it was nightmarish as her Spider Sense seemed to go off every five seconds and there wasn’t much she could do about it except just hold on and hope they didn’t hit anything.

A long, white knuckled trip later they arrived at Memorial Animal Hospital and Gwen had to hold herself back from dramatically throwing herself out of the car and kissing the solid, unmoving pavement at the miracle of making it there unharmed. She managed it though, if only because any sudden movements risked her losing her lunch. It had been bad enough the first time, she wasn’t about to see what it was like the second go around.

“We’re here. Let’s check the place out and see if they have our rat.” Barbara said casually, as if she hadn’t nearly killed them both several times on the way here. Gwen quickly followed after, eager to get away from the four wheeled deathtrap. “Too bad we didn’t get a chance to talk about what to do with Dick. I forgot how jumpy you are with cars.”

Gwen glared at the redhead’s back. She wasn’t jumpy, Barbara just drove like she was in an action movie. Unnecessary close calls and all.

“We can do that later.” She said instead. “Let’s just hope this is the place. I’d like to avoid a hospital going up in flames because of a superpowered rat. I don’t think their insurance would cover that.”

“It might, you never know.”

Unfortunately, no one at the hospital had come in with a rat and the scanners hadn’t picked up anything either. It was possible that they simply missed the person by getting here before them or they were heading home rather than the hospital itself, but it was currently their only lead which meant it was currently back to the car and off to another in search of their target.

It took another two tries before they picked up the signal again and by that point the sun was sitting low in the horizon, which shouldn’t have mattered since this one was a 24 hour place. But they were getting stonewalled by a receptionist that was refusing to even let them inside without proof of ownership or records of exactly what they were looking for.

Which was something of a problem when they didn’t have anything like that.

“Well, now what?” Barbara asked as they headed out into the parking lot. “We can’t exactly call in the cavalry here without letting everyone know what’s going on. But I really don’t want to just hope our rodent friend just stays calm enough to not burn the place down in the meantime.”

Gwen shrugged. “I mean, we tried it the nice, proper way. I think now we try being a little more direct.”

-o-

“You know I would have gone in with you. Wouldn’t be the first time I needed to break into a hospital for something.” Barbara’s voice crackled in Ghost Spider’s ear.

The spider-themed hero stayed silent until the people passing under her turned a corner. “True, but why bother when I can scope out the whole place while invisible? Besides, if something goes wrong you’ll be in perfect position to help out without someone asking awkward questions.”

Barbara grumbled at that but couldn’t come up with a counter so Ghost Spider continued crawling along the ceiling, periodically checking rooms and other hallways for changes in the scanner.

Several minutes of snooping around later, Ghost Spider found what looked like a kennel with a rat sleeping in a cage. A quick check of the scanner confirmed that this was one of the labrats they were looking for, and soon after that Ghost Spider was out the window carrying her target in a pet carrier she found in the room and on her way to Barbara’s car.

“For being such a pain in the ass to track down at least you’re a heavy sleeper.” She told the little guy as she stowed it in the back seat.

One rodent down. Several more to go.

-o-

“Oh good, you found one!” Dr Khan cheered as he nervously fluttered around the cage.

Remarkably, it seemed when the rats were comfortable they were incredibly lazy things. Unless it was just this rat in particular. But Ghost Spider wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even finding this one had been more luck than anything.

“Yeah, one down, some number of them left to go.” She said as she passed off the tiny arsonist. “Speaking of…how many of these things are out there, doc?”

“Hm? Ah, with this one only nine others are still out there.” The man said distractedly, most of his focus on the sleeping rat. “And please hurry in finding them. The sooner, the better. If someone else finds them…”

“Yeah, don’t worry. We’ll find them before they can cause a panic.”

“...yes, that is important too.”