Flint Marko, technically William Baker, aka the Sandman. Adrian Toomes, aka the Vulture. Some of the first villains that Spider-Man had ever fought.

In my world, Flint was a low-level criminal that BRIDGE was keeping an eye on. Adrian was up to something that had Coulson ready to pick him up, but was otherwise not a priority.

Things had clearly taken a different path in this version of New York.

“Can I ask you something, squawk!?” I dived around a fist of sand, fired through a brick wall that tried to block me, then flew upside down to avoid a green blur. “Do you get itchy? Because you were human, now you’re sand. Did you have to get over the human impulse to feel itchy around sand?”

“Stand still!” Flint Marko roared. “Why do I keep fighting smart mouths that keep moving around?!”

“Good question! Let’s go over your life and find out where things went wrong! Squawk!” I blasted through a spiked mace of sand in a wave of blazing emerald light and came to a sliding stop on the asphalt. “What was your relationship with your father like?”

“GRAAAAGH!” Hearing sand roar is an odd experience. Like a scene from The Mummy with Brendan Frasier, the sand formed a giant face and rushed towards me with bladed weapons.

I rocketed upwards again to dodge the sawblade of sand, then twisted through the sky.

In the streets below, I could see civilians escaping. Good. The last thing I wanted was to have someone get hurt. Despite what you would think, I tended to prioritize saving people over having grudge matches with idiots.

Focusing more on the fight, I narrowed my saurian eyes at Vulture. He was swooping around pretty damn fast. Granted, not as fast as me, but he hit a sweet spot between my Astrodactyl fast and Big Chill controlled. His turns were quick and controlled, moving with a hell of a lot of agility for a septuagenarian.

Like Sam in his more recent Falcon suits. Which was insanely impressive.

Right. He had some kind of gravity harness. Probably explained a lot.

“Come here!” Vulture dive bombed me. I shut off my rocket, twisting around and firing it again to launch upwards. Before I could hit him with a blast from one of my gauntlets, he disappeared from my sight. A pair of booted feet smashed into my back. Vulture crowed. “Ha! Take that you simpleton!”

Simpleton, huh? What a classic insult. Better than people calling me an asshole or bitch all the time. Homophobic ones were popular too.

I smashed down onto a rooftop, rolling briefly. Before I could get up, sand surrounded me, wrapping about my body. Tendrils of grainy stones grinded against the scales of my arms, legs, and neck, squeezing and pulling all at once. Surrounded in a cocoon of sand, I squawked weakly, lungs squeezing for air..

“L-Let… GOOO!”

I fired off everything I had, blast after blast of emerald energy erupting from me as the sand was driven back.

Briefly.

“Not going to work!” the sandstorm crowed, Flint Marko’s face surrounding me in duplicate across the sand. “Not for long! Die you-”

The second I had enough air, I roared. “GOOP!”

Flint had enough time to be confused before I flashed with green light. Orange scales, hardened bones, and the power within stars all faded away for the simpler form of a man made of green fluid.

Sand wrapped around me, then flowed uselessly through me. Flint made a motion that could only be described as the elemental equivalent of a stumble. “What the-”

I stared out at the sandstorm. The UFO part of me grabbed onto my body and I flowed out, flying in to merge with him.

From the outside, it must have looked like a tornado on a building suddenly gained a glimmer of glowing green through it. In terms of sheer mass, I couldn’t match Sandman. He must have been collecting sand for days before this fight. But I was just as fast, and even more untouchable.

“I can’t touch him!” Sandman called out to Vulture in alarm.

“Annoying fighting someone who isn’t solid, isn’t it?” I teased in my slimy sounding voice.

“Little pest-” Vulture was crowing as he swooped past, only to be cut off by an unholy sound.

A sandstorm screaming.

“RaaAAAarraGGGGGAAA!!!” the grinding sand squealed. “Wha-wha-?!”

“Acid!” Was all I said, almost smug. That’s right. Goop had a whole host of powers. But one of the best was the ability to go full acidic. The sand that had been fruitlessly trying to grind me away began to melt. Flint tried to run, to float away, but I dived into and out of him, a spot of green in an ocean of brown.

I couldn’t guarantee I could find and contain the single sand grain supposedly holding Flint’s… consciousness? Soul? Whatever. But I could melt three hundred pounds of it at a time.

Sandman fought back, smashing into me with massive mace hands, blades, and walls. I was buffeted and battered, even briefly getting my UFO slammed into the roof by an errant hit to send me splashing across the sandy surface.

But I’d been hit harder. I reformed through him, over and over. Coming back no matter how many times he smashed and sliced me into paste, and each time I took a little bit out of him.

“S-Stoooop!” Flint screamed in pain as he desperately tried to fight me off, ironically only getting more and more of his sand melted every time he touched me.

“Marko you fool, let me help you!” Toomes shouted from outside our shrinking battle.

Too late. I punched and flowed until Flint was backed up against a wall. He shrank down to his human form, one hand raised in terror. “P-Please. Please, stop.”

“I don’t know,” I said, staring at him in my fluid form. “I get the feeling you might try to attack me while my back is turned.”

A… feeling, some kind of instinct inside me, was reaching out to Flint. I felt like I knew him? Or like… I knew more than I should have? What-

Something swooped down out of the sky. A claw wrapped around my UFO and pulled it hard, leaving my gelatinous half to splash on the ground.

“Ha!” Toomes shouted, sliding to a stop on the rooftop in the birdman version of the Akira slide. “You see, Marko! You should have realized the weakness of this disgusting creature sooner! It was practically advertising it! An anti-gravity device much like my own, yes, to control your gelatinous half? Simple enough to figure out.”

“Nice deduction,” my voice said from the UFO.

“Indeed! And an ingenious design, I must admit. I look forward to picking it apart and finding out how it works,” Vulture said smugly. “But first, who are you? Why are you interfering in our work!?”

“Well to that, I have a strong response. Four Arms.”

“Eh?”

A flash of green. The goo on the floor zipped back to the UFO and merged with it faster than light. My body shifted, ripping open Toomes’ grip. He let out a gasp of sound.

“What-!?” He stopped and stared upwards. “The…”

I leaned down and smiled through teeth like pale-grey tombstones.

“Devil?” Toomes squeaked.

He spun around, ready to run. I grabbed his foot in my lower right hand as he took off, preventing him from flying off, while the left ones raised up.

BOOM!

Toomes passed out from a relatively light tap with two alien fists, merely knocking him out rather than turning the old man’s bones into dust. I grabbed his gravity harness and ripped it off in a shower of sparks, crushing it in my hands.

“Now, Flint-” I turned, only for there to be no sign of him.

Gone. Just disappeared.

A quick look around had me spotting the lingering remains of some sand diving into a nearby storm drain before totally disappearing from sight.

“Damn,” I muttered as I jumped down back onto the street with Toomes hanging limply from my arms. “Well, you gotta respect the instinct to cut and run when you know you’re outmatched, if nothing else.”

“You should have done the same!”

Ozone. Yellow light. And sudden pain.

“GRAAAAAGH!”

Lightning. It ran through me, hitting my nerves like knives through butter. I dropped Toomes and fell to my knees, screaming.

“Ha! Considering how big you are I was thinking I’d need to hit you with even more juice, but you’re a total lightweight!” A very whiny sounding voice said as a pair of yellow boots stepped in front of me, electricity dancing off of them.

“Yeah, well, at least I’m not the one wearing stupid green and yellow PJs,” I said through gritted teeth, which just earned me even more of a shock. “AHHHH!”

“Hahaha!!!” Electro (Come on, we all knew it was Max the second the electricity hit) gloated. “Come on, Adrian, you let this punk beat you!?”

I grit my teeth and whispered.

Electro leaned in. “What? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over me cooking your ass!”

I glared up at him. “NRG.”

Green. Two arms disappeared, with my body replaced with a massive metal suit. My height shrank, but not by much, while my bulk increased massively.

More importantly, the lightning that had been cooking me instead flowed into my suit, hitting my true radioactive form instead.

I didn’t even flinch. In fact it felt weirdly nice. Like a warm bath.

“What the-?! The hell are you?!” Max panicked and fired most electricity at me, which did fuck all. As I stood up and stepped towards him, he kept shooting. “And why aren’t you going down?!”

“I am the Russian Nuclear Winter!” I said in NRG’s accent. A single punch was thrown, Electro barely dodging it. He blasted me again, and backed off when it did nothing.

“Damnit!” Electro shouted. “We don’t have time for this! Spider-Man-!”

“Is here!” A cheery voice. A flash of red and black. A spandex covered foot smashing into Electro’s stupid yellow star faced mask. “Heya, Maxie! Look at you, fighting someone else for once! Are you trying to make me jealous?”

“Spider-Man!” Electro roared as he recovered from the strike and electricity blasted out of his body in anger.

“I thought we established that already,” I replied, stepping forward to intercept the blast. “Jeez, Spidey, how hard did you hit him?”

“Hey, I don’t know my own strength sometimes!” Spider-Man landed next to me.

That’s when I noticed how different he looked. Red and black, rather than the blue along the arms and legs I knew. I’d said his foot was spandex covered out of habit, but the stuff actually looked similar to the BRIDGE gear Nat used. Tough, but still fairly flexible. More advanced.

Maybe he was an Avenger already? If so, props to you Peter, you deserve more.

“And it's nice to hear a Russian accent that doesn’t belong to someone who’s trying to kill me for once. How you liking the Big Apple so far, tourist? Enjoying our American energy system at work?”

“I am an American,” I deadpanned in my heavy Russian accent, which just made Spider-Man look at me with what I was sure was a raised eyebrow underneath his mask. Wait, his eyes moved somehow? Cool.

“Uh, you sure?”

“It is complicated, comrade!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, there’s two of them,” Max mumbled.

“Truly a dire situation,” another voice said.

Spider-Man dodged a final lightning bolt and landed on my armored shoulder. I lifted my fists, facing Electro as more people joined him.

The clanging of metal on concrete, tentacles crushing a car as they carried their passenger, a slightly overweight man with goggles over his eyes. Following him was another man, this one floating on jets of smoke, a purple cape fluttering behind him, the whole thing almost mystical. Except for the stupid fishbowl on his head, obscuring his face entirely.

Another man landed on a car nearby, large in stature but also lean with muscle. A very familiar man.

“I was wondering what was distracting Flint and Toomes,” Dr Ock said in an annoyed tone of voice. “It seems we have an unwelcome interruption to our personal business with the arachnid.”

“Ah, see! He is classy, knowing you are arachnid!” I commented.

“I always loved that about the Doc. Not afraid to get overly technical and scientific about things. I can respect that about him, which helps since I don’t respect anything else he does,” Spider-Man added.

“Dear lord, there truly are two of them,” Mysterio grumbled beneath his fishbowl head. “And while I’m normally always up for an audience, this is an exclusive performance.”

“No performance worth a damn is exclusive,” I said. Mysterio seemed almost pleased by that response.

“I can’t fry the big guy,” Electro said, looking frustrated.

“Then we shall simply trade opponents,” Kraven said, lifting a knife in a very familiar way. “I’ll take the Spider.”

“The arachnid is mine!” Doc Ock snapped, his bowl-cut vibrating. “I have worked too long to

simply-”

“We even waited till he was alone, damn it,” Mysterio grumbled again, still sounding more pleased than irritated.

While they bickered over who got to fight Spidey, I eyed Electro. He was the most dangerous present in terms of sheer power. Even with my immunity, he could cause a lot of damage… So he was first.

I just wasn’t fast enough to catch him. Spider-Man was fast enough, but he’d have trouble not getting zapped. So mix things up.

“Hey Spidey,” I whispered to one of the greatest heroes in existence. “You don’t suppose Electro is weak to wrecking balls, do you?”

Peter’s bug-like eyes widened, then his face shifted under the mask. “Give me a sec.”

“On it.”

I raised my palms and blasted out beams of powerful energy. The radioactive power sliced through the air, forcing Electro and Kraven to dodge. The Russian hunter rolled to a stop by Doctor Octopus. Electro, on the other hand, stopped by a parked car.

A web landed on my suit, followed by something tugging me up into the air as I fired another pair of blasts. One disappeared into a burst of smoke thrown by Mysterio, fading away without a trace. (Okay, how in the hell did special effects do that?)

The other Electro intercepted with a lightning bolt, his faster projectile destroying mine and turning it into an explosion of fire, obscuring what Peter was doing to me.

A tug, a twirl. Inside my armored form I felt the very strange sensation of over a ton of metal being treated like a paperweight on a string as Peter brought me around then back.

The look on Electro’s face when I came swinging out of the fire he’d made, fist raised. Priceless.

“I came in like a-!” I sang in NRG’s exotic accent.

“NOOO!” Lightning splashed across my armor, errant bolts destroying the electrical systems around us.

“WREEEECKING BALL!” My fist slammed gently into Electro’s belly. Gently for NRG thrown by Spider-Man, anyways. There was an explosion of power around him, saliva erupting from his mouth. I threw him back about twenty feet, leaving him to crumple against the ground.

“Dillon!” Mysterio called out.

“Damn you!” Kraven snapped. “Who are you!? We even waited until he was alone!”

“Well, sorry to ruin your attempt at group murder. I was going to say ‘gangbang’, but the internet has ruined the original meaning of that term-”

“The what?”

Kraven easily dodged a blast of radiation with a confused look on his face while a car smashed into me, thrown by Doctor Octopus and his tentacles.

“Kraven, stop messing around! We need to kill the arachnid before the jammers shut off!”

That explained the lack of cops then. The car that hit me crumpled. I ripped it off of me, thinking furiously.

NRG had been fine to negate Electro, but I just wasn’t fast enough to deal with the rest. I could shoot at them more, but that would be a lot of radiation I’d have to clean up in the middle of a heavily populated area even with me holding back. These guys were too speedy. Almost like they’d spent a lot of time fighting a speedy fucker.

Spider-Man dived into the fray, briefly meeting Kraven in the center of the street. The two traded blows at insane speed, Spider-Man showing a lot more martial arts skill than I would have thought at this time. Still taking advantage of his natural flexibility and agility, but there was a polish there that Steve would have approved of.

Thoughts for later. I needed to be faster. Easy enough. Fasttrack.

I tapped the Omnitrix. It flashed green. My armor disappeared, replaced by blue fur stretched across a lean frame. I expected that.

What I didn’t expect was the extra arms, eyes, and the tail.

In that busy street, mid-leap as I dodged through the two tentacles that tried to take my head off, I crowed out a new name.

“SPIDER-MONKEY!”

Webs shot out of my tail and wrapped around a pole, swinging me in to join the fight Kraven and Spider-Man were having. Mysterio shot out gas canisters, surrounding the three of us in a circle of pink.

Kraven, Spider-Man, and I started throwing fists. I bounced around a kick, Peter swinging around me to throw a punch. Kraven ducked that, only to block one of my punches, leaving him vulnerable to one of my lower fists.

Faster and faster, Spider-Man and Monkey moving in near synch, trading blows with Kraven. He kept slicing, kicking, dodging, but we kept at him.

Every once in a while, a tentacle would shoot from the smoke, trying to help him. I got tagged a couple of times

I leaped impossibly high to dodge a tentacle that shot out of the smoke around us, grabbing Peter’s outstretched hand as he passed.

With a heave, I swung Peter directly down at Kraven. He fired a web back at me as he flew down, one of my hands grabbing it.

Peter slammed his fist into Kraven’s face while pulling me in so I could follow up with two fists of my own. The two of us landed behind Kraven as he stumbled, spinning in unison.

“BAM!”

Three fists landed at the same time on Kraven’s solar plexus, sending him flying into the smoke. He left a path through the smoke and rolled to a stop.

“You know, I should really be threatening to sue you for copyright infringement right about now,” Spider-Man noted as he looked me over.

“It’s cool, I’m a distinct property. Monkey, not man.”

“But what is a man, if not a monkey with good hair?”

“A being who isn’t afraid to show off their nice ass in public.”

Our banter was cut off by a loud groaning. “Oh dear lord, there truly are two of them!”

“A shapeshifter of some sort,” Doctor Octopus noted with interest as he walked into view. “One with a variety of forms and abilities to match any given obstacle it faces. Quite impressive and annoying.”

“No matter,” Mysterio said, his New York accent fading into that over the top dramatic voice he seemed to favor. I kinda liked it. Very 1950s movie villain. “For my formula will take effect soon enough.”

“What do you-” Vertigo hit. All of a sudden, I could barely stand. I winced, dropping to all six limbs while looking around. The hell? “...Ah fuck.” The smoke.

A hand grabbed my shoulder. I almost swung before the image of a spider calmed me.

“Don’t listen to him,” Peter said as he helped me up. “His helmet does something to his voice, makes it hypnotic.”

“You have the weirdest villains,” I grumbled.

“Hey, I don’t ask these guys to-”

A beam of heat came out of the smoke. Peter pulled me out of the way, the laser almost cutting me in half. A metal fist came swinging at us before I let a web out of my tail to zip us away. My web was sliced mid-flight, leaving us to tumble before Spider-Man barely dodged a trio of blades.

When we came to a stop, I stared at the three who had attacked.

“Logan?”

Wolverine snarled at me, his stance low. Behind him, Cyclops stepped forth, his red visor glowing lightly. He was different from the one I knew. Older, much more muscular, with more frown wrinkles. Behind the pair, a massive man of metal smashed his fist into his palm. Colossus.

“Oh no, he found out about his motorcycle,” Peter whispered in horror as Logan snarled at him.

“I doubt that-” before I could say anything, the three rushed us. I jumped out of the way of a laser blast the second I saw Cyclops charging a shot. And then I almost threw up webs.

Whatever Mysterio had done sucked ass. I felt like the Earth was upside down. Like I was sparring with Agatha in those weird maze rooms she made Fantasma and Wanda train in.

Colossus took the moment of confusion to hit me. Weakly. Well, not weakly, but weaker than I expected.

Still, it was enough to make me stumble. A laser blast joined, tossing me back. Instead of smashing me through three buildings. Cyclops’ blasts were not that weak.

Still good enough while I was dealing with vertigo.

Spider-Man was doing better against Wolverine. “Wolverine, buddy, I swear, we put it back the way we found it! We just had to borrow the cycle for a day or two! The fate of the world was at stake!”

Logan roared, slicing madly at Peter. The arachnid avenger slipped around the claws, yelping just a bit. “Okay fine, it was to impress Firestar, but-”

Logan punched at Peter claws first. Peter’s eyes narrowed before he punched the shorter buffer man first, moving with blistering speed. He fired webs at Logan, wrapping him briefly in the fluid. The Wolverine sliced at the claws. And I noticed that it took him way too long. He ripped at them, trying to get loose, while Peter stepped back.

“It’s not the real ones!” I yelled.

“I figured that out when Wolverine didn’t turn me to mincemeat in two seconds!” Peter shouted back. Then he stumbled.

Fucking vertigo. We had to deal with that. I thrust an off-balance punch at Colossus, denting his metal shell, then ran towards Peter. We needed a new edge. Peter was dealing with the vertigo better than I was. More used to it, or had some kind of answer to help him. So I had to have his back.

And I had a damn perfect way to do it.

I jumped towards him, almost throwing up at the sensation of my brain flipping through my head. Peter glanced at me, eyes wide. “Uh, what are you?”

“BLIGHT!”

Blue fur gone. And the black ooze appeared. In mid-air, I flowed outwards, slamming into Peter’s chest. He yelped in shock. I entered through his suit. And we became one.

Our eyes opened. We stared at the world. We felt our bodies as one. I flowed into Peter’s cells, enhancing and strengthening him. It was easy. Very easy.

“What-?”

Before Peter could finish, Not-Logan sliced his way out of the webs. Not-Colossus threw another punch.

We grabbed the fist and crushed it in our hand like a plastic cup, gears and servers popping out around our black and green fist. Our other hand punched the solar plexus of the Not-Colossus, ripping through it in a wave of black tentacles that grabbed Not-Cyclops on the other side, wrapping around him.

“What the heck is going on!?” Peter crowed in my mind. He sounded both elated and confused. “Why do I have goo tentacles!?”

Oh shit, this Spider-Man hadn’t met Venom yet? That was going to make things weird in the future.

“It’s a power of this form. I can enhance biological beings by joining them in a symbiotic-”

Before I could explain further.

The Not-Cyclops tried to shoot through the black ooze, briefly separating it from his face. The rest of the tentacles tightened around the bot then lifted it up, pulling it into the Not-Colossus. Together, we smashed the bots into the ground, then expanded the tentacles into spikes that shredded the steel.

Together, as the two robots crackled on the ground, we looked at Not-Logan. Poor bastard must have had horrible software, because he rushed us.

“I can make blades too,” I said through the mental link I had with Peter.

“Do you also make Julienne fries?” Peter said back through the same link.

Not-Logan swung at us. Peter sent a signal through to me, and I responded in an instant. A single long blade erupted from our wrist, slicing through the metal claws of the robot, sending the trio of blades flying. Another swipe sliced the robot in half.

“I could get used to this!” Peter added.

“You say that now,” I replied ominously. “This power doesn’t come without drawbacks. Okay, you’ve got the pilot seat. I’ll support you.”

“Got it. Hold on tight.”

I worked overtime, pumping the poison from the smoke around us out of Peter’s body, keeping him at the top of his game. As one, we moved into the smoke. We could hear them. Sense them. Mysterio spoke, his voice echoing.

“So, you have defeated my meager replicas! Don’t crow over your victory for long! Soon, my improved formula will intercept your mind, forcing you into a world of-”

We dropped in front of him. Mysterio spun around, raising his hands up and blasting us with gas.

We jumped up, avoiding the blasts. Peter had been hit by the stuff before. It interfered with his spider-sense. Landing behind Mysterio, we fired a web behind us, attaching to his fishbowl head. With a pull, we smashed his head into the ground, cracking the fishbowl. A single kick to his exposed face finished it.

“Five down!” Spider-Man shouted, Peter grinning in the mind we shared. “Just one-”

A single tentacle swept out of the sky, ripping up the ground when we dodged it. We glanced up. Doctor Otto Octavius stared down at us.

The most dangerous member of the Sinister Six. Not the most powerful. The most dangerous. The distinction mattered.

“Well, Doc? You finally going to do your own work?” Peter said. “Doesn’t look good for you to just watch your goons get taken out.”

“Goons isn’t quite the word… though I admit they have proven as effective as them,” Doc Ock snarled, his arms behind his back. “I must say, your new ally was quite above my own. But I suppose that means I can enjoy your death for myself.”

“Try it, Doc, and I’ll rip your arms off and beat you with them.” Peter said. Damnit. I tried to tone down the increased aggression, but there was only so much I could do while still increasing his overall ability.

Doc Ock smirked. “Come and try.”

Two arms lashed out. So did ours. Black tentacles erupted from our back, hardening as they clashed with the bad doctor’s tentacles. Octavius immediately dropped to the ground, adding two more tentacles.

“I’ve got your back.”

As one, Peter and I rushed in. Doctor Octavius rushed in as well. We met in the middle. His tentacles were fast. Immensely so. His control was impeccable as well, allowing him to match my own stronger symbiote flesh with applications of physics to counter them.

A single tentacle speared at us. We dodged aside and threw a punch that he blocked on a tentacle, before he grabbed our ankle and tossed us back. We webbed the building behind him and came swinging back. The next tentacle he swiped at us like a whip. We jumped up, tapping our fingers on it to flip forwards and kick at him. Two arms crossed in front of him, taking the blow. He still got sent flying back, two arms grabbing the concrete to bring him to a screeching halt.

We were already moving, webbed the arms he’d blocked with together. He pulled his arms apart only for the webbing to snap them back together. In that moment of distraction, we rushed in.

“Are you holding back?” Peter asked me.

“Do you want to catch him or kill him?” I asked back just as pointedly.

“Trust me.”

Well. If you couldn’t trust Spider-Man…

I let go. Everything I had. I pushed him to his limits.

The sudden burst of speed made Doctor Octavius’ eyes widen behind his mask. One of the arms lashed out. We grabbed it and pulled, ripping him off his feet towards us. Another tentacle stabbed us, but we dodged with contemptuous ease while winding up the final blow.

Our fist flew towards Doctor Octavius’ face. For a moment, just one, I worried about his future. About a man who, in the future, would be so brain damaged he would see nothing wrong with destroying the world in revenge for the problems he himself caused.

Thank god Peter was smarter than me. Rather than giving him his next concussion, our fist became a ball of goo that Doc Ock’s face sank into. Controlling my form, I flowed down his chest and to his tentacles harness, removing the clasps there. Doc Ock screamed as we removed his tentacles, tossing them aside. Held in a black orb of goo, he screamed the last of his air out. The combination of our training let us choke him out.

Something tried to hit us. I grabbed it in the air with a tentacle, leaving Spider-Man to continue choking out Doctor Octopus.

The harness. It moved on its own. Three more arms lashed out, trying to smash us. I snapped out three more arms. On one side, Peter holding the doctor in a ball of goo. On the other, four tentacle arms with my Blight face poking out of Peter’s back to hold the metal tentacles

When he was finally limp in our arms, along with his harness, we let him go.

“...So who are you, anyways?”

Oh boy. This was going to be a conversation and a half.

Flowing away from Peter, I separated our minds and tapped the Omnitrix. Back in Spider-Monkey form, I sighed.

“That is a long story. How about we wrap these guys in enough webbing to lock down a nuke and we can talk?”

“Sure,” Peter said, still eyeing me with just a bit of suspicion. Then he looked around at the passed out villains around us, noticing one was absent. “Where’s Sandman?”

“Uh… yeah, about that…”

Wrapping up the Sinister… Five in a combination of organic and synthetic webs until they looked like five heads poking out of a cotton ball, Spider-Man and I were hanging upside down from a water tower nearby roof while watching the cops finally approach to arrest the group.

Of course I was still in Spider-Monkey form. Felt appropriate. Peter had grabbed two cups of coffee for us along with donuts, and the pair of us sipped from them upside

“That explains the song,” Peter said as I explained my arrival. “‘Came in like a wreeeeecking ball’. I was wondering where you got it from.”

“Yeah, it’s a future Disney star gets weird kind of thing.”

“Should you be telling me this?” Peter asked me. “I thought telling people about the future was generally a bad idea.”

“First of all, if the future depends on how a Disney child star gets screwed over by life, we are already doomed. Second, based on what I’ve seen, I think this is a multiverse thing, not time travel. Kraven is a good-... a not evil… He’s nominally an ally. Doctor Octavius is a member of our version of SHIELD. Flint is just a basic thug. It’s a version of a possible future. The multiverse is a big fucking place, and nothing exactly matches up with anything else”

“What about your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?” he asked with a grin. “Do I lead the Avengers?”

“Actually, you don’t exist in my home universe.”

“Aww man!” He slumped. I decided to stick with that technical truth. Peter was still a kid in my universe after all.

“Probably for the best,” Peter chuckled. “I can’t imagine dealing with alternate versions of me.”

“Or clones.”

“...That was way too specific of an example.”

“Was it? Just saying, clones are a bad cliche. Always give yourself a way to make sure you aren’t the clone.”

“Do I get cloned?”

“We all do, that’s the superhero life.”

“Okay, but do I-”

Down below, a forklift was brought in, stopping the conversation for a bit.

“...Thanks.” I looked over at Spidey. He was staring down at the group of wrapped up supervillains. “I usually have some friends to help me with big fights like this. I don’t know how it would have gone down if I was alone.”

“...You would have had some trouble. Then somehow get up and beat the living shit out of them.”

He chuckled. “Hopefully.”

“Definitely. Spider-Man doesn’t give up.”

“Thought you didn’t have a version of me in your universe.”

“Not yet,” time travel was weird. “But I’ve seen others. You’d have been fine.”

He still seemed unsure, but I was just happy. The goddamn Spider-Man dude! Finally! I’d wanted to meet him for so long! And I got to help him fight the Sinister Six! Once I got back home, this would be a fun story.

“Hm?” Peter looked around, his mask's eyes narrowing. “Something wrong?”

“Just realizing that it's gonna take a bit to figure out how to get back home. At least it won’t be the first time I’ve ended up someplace out of reach.”

“Well, I can help?” He said. “I know some guys. I mean, it would take a bit, but I can-”

He stopped, looking around. I knew what that meant. Spider-Sense. I dropped down to the roof, looking around as well. “What is it?”

“I don’t know? Feels-”

Gas canisters landed on the roof. An older design. Or for this universe, a current one. They exploded, the gaseous substance filling the air.

“Move, move!” The door to the roof slammed open. Dozens of big guys in armor ran towards us. From the sky, a helicopter dropped in. I coughed, the taste on my tongue familiar. Tranquilizer gas.

“Run!” I shouted to Peter, grabbing him and throwing him before he could talk. “Ru-”

The sound of gas escaping again, followed by two bits of piercing pain. Then electricity zipped through my body. I felt webbing fire out of my tail along with the involuntary spasming.

The last thing I saw before I passed out was the symbol on their armored chests.

An eagle with stars. SHIELD.

Well damn…

Author's Note:

In the meantime, stay safe, and consider supporting me on Patreon to see the next one early. Next is Neon Webs tho.