Marvel: Tomorrow MAX (Chapter 9)
Title: Marvel: Tomorrow MAX
Chapter 9: My Faith, Your Damnation
Author: V5_Vendetta
Fandom: Marvel Universe
Disclaimer: Crapsack future mine, general universe template Marvel's
Principal Characters: Audrey Hopkins/Arachne (OC), James "Logan" Howlett/Wolverine, Kaine, Karin Kusanagi/Fearless (OC), Callisto/May Parker
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Wolverine tells Arachne a story.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Wolverine stated, completely seriously.
“Oh, goodie!” Deadpool cheered. “I love stories! You gonna tell us about the time you shanked Cyclops in the Savage Land so you could get with Jean?”
“What universe did that happen in?” Wolverine growled.
“Earth-1610,” Deadpool answered glibly.
“Never mind,” Wolverine grumbled.
“Hey, what’s this Earth called?” Arachne asked, out of sheer morbid curiosity.
“I don’t know. The kid who wrote this garbage never thought to name it, although according to him it’s basically Earth-616 fifty years accelerated, barring certain unsettling revelations like . . . Hank Pym and Jessica Drew are dirty anal Skrulls!”
“Anal Skrulls?” Arachne raised one eyebrow in perturbed disgust.
“Don’t encourage him, kid,” Wolverine advised. “Not that he needs it to be the way he is.”
“How did he get that way?” Arachne asked.
“Same way I got the way I am. Weapon X.”
“Weapon X.” The spider-girl began to shudder internally, as a thought occurred to her. “You mean to tell me that how I got the way I am, how a lot of us new-gen superheroes got the way we are . . . was basically the same way you and Deadhead got to be . . . you and Deadhead?”
“Deadhead!” Deadpool repeated. “I actually nicknamed a guy I worked with that once. Shame what happened to him. Poor bastard.”
“Wade? Shut up,” Wolverine warned. “You’re not exactly right, but you’re on the right track. Much of the mindset behind Weapon X was in play when the Superhuman Registration Act really got going. Harvesting people with powers - mutant, alien, or empowered human - and using their DNA to create an army of controllable super-soldiers in the employ of the military was their endgame. What did your high school history books tell ya, kid?”
“The basic stuff. Stamford happened, people got scared, people demanded something be done, government pushed SHRA, some superheroes actually got out in front and enforced it, other superheroes got in front and tried to stop it, Iron Man led the enforcing side, Captain America led the opposing side, big brawl, Cap surrendered and died ‘in disgrace,’ Stark became the new Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and ‘all was good’ . . . barring World War III, of course.”
“‘In disgrace’ was right,” Deadpool chimed in. “Ok, so I was pro-reg, but I can admire a guy who stands up for what he believes in and stands with it to the end. Rogers went out like a pansy-ass bitch.”
“Wade. You really wanna shut up,” Wolverine cautioned gravely.
Deadpool whistled. “Wow. You’re getting dangerous, Wolvie.”
“I’ll take him off your hands,” Wirework’s voice said, just before her tendrils ensnared Deadpool and yanked him away.
“See? I knew it! Ladies love Deadpool!”
“Shut up, Wilson.”
“Do I wanna know what’s going to happen?” Arachne asked.
“You’re better off not knowing. Wade’s quite . . . not right. Wirework? She’s good people, but she . . . let’s just say people explicitly not me would be scared of her.”
“You’re trying too hard, you know that?”
“I don’t need to try. I got this way from cold, hard experience. If anybody’s trying too hard, it’s you.”
“Me? What do you mean?”
Wolverine looked at Arachne. “You’re a recently-turned-sixteen-year-old girl with Parker’s powers and Parker’s inability to accept the fact that life is gonna suck for people with powers so long as people like Gyrich are in charge. So what do you do? You cut your ties to pretty much anybody and everybody you ever called friend or family and run around acting like a bad rehash of that time Parker started wearing black again. But that’s teenagers for ya, always trying to act like they don’t need anybody and they’ve got everything figured out. But you don’t have everything figured out, hell, you don’t even know what you don’t know.”
Arachne glared. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”
“Yeah.” Wolverine poked her chest with each successive word he spoke. “You’ve. Been. Acting. Immensely. Stupid.”
Arachne grabbed Wolverine’s finger on the last poke. “Quit it.”
“Telling it like it is, kid. Telling it like it is.”
“Do I even want to hear this story of yours?”
“Oh, yeah. You do. Have you been paying attention to the news?”
“Haven’t bothered. I’d just smash the TV after about a minute of vapid talking heads.”
“Try to rein in that temper of yours,” Wolverine remarked with a note of amusement in his voice. “Here’s the deal. Were you watching the news a month ago?”
“Yeah. That woman. Cuayin. Her and her justice legion.”
“‘Justice’ ain’t the right word. Granted, pretty much all the bastards whose paths crossed theirs had it coming, but this is Magneto all over again. All she’s gonna do is justify the norms’ fear of people like us.”
“You don’t think she’s got the wherewithal to do it?”
“Wherewithal, yeah. The will, too. But even if she does beat down every single organized authoritative body in the world and set up shop as Supreme Loving Goddess of the World, what’s gonna happen after? What kind of world’s gonna be left?”
“Sometimes, the old world has to be destroyed to make way for the new.”
“You kids. Wannabe revolutionaries who think they can ‘transform the world,’ but you know something? Revolutions are dirty business. People die. They die ugly. The good, the bad, the innocent, the guilty . . . nobody’s spared. Think about that next time you start spouting crap like what you just said.”
Arachne bristled internally, but beneath the bristle was a deep shudder of acknowledgment. This man . . . he looked young - older than her sixteen years, but still young - but his eyes had the soul-chilling glassiness of an old man who had seen and done entirely too much to be forgiven or forgotten. Seen and done more than either she or anyone else in the Knights or New Warriors ever had.
“All right . . . what’s the story behind this Cuayin?”
“For the full context, you’ll need to hear how it all started.”
“Sure, and one more thing.”
Wolverine raised an eyebrow. “What, kid?”
Arachne looked at him, her eyes hard. “I’ve seen what they do to people. The way they dehumanize people with powers. The way they reduce them to hunted or caged animals. Don’t tell me I don’t know anything.”
Wolverine sighed sadly. “You remind me a lot of her.”
“Her who?”
“Laura. When she was your age. Angry young girl, with a hella lot of skill at making things hurt.” He looked away for a few seconds, and then turned back. “But never mind that now. It started 35 years ago, when World War III broke out.”
“What started it?”
“The rest of the world got scared of us. With most of the super-powered people being here in this country and being under the control of the government, the rest of the world got scared that the government would sic their shiny new super-soldiers on them. Force regime change, undermine resistance or independence movements hostile to their interests, and just generally beat them down with superior firepower. Some of them decided to do something about it.
“Within the space of five years, the world was caught up in the middle of a superhuman arms race. Starktech armor production went up, including the Scarlet Spider project, and the rest of the world answered with their own armored soldiers. Ways of replicating the power sets of superhumans they’d gathered data on were tested and retested until they were sure they’d gotten it right. The ones that worried the government most were in the Middle East.”
“Why?” Arachne asked.
“Terrorist havens hostile to democracy and freedom, or so the party line went. The Middle Eastern nations just answered with, ‘You’ve already got the strongest military in the world and now you got super-soldiers on your military’s payroll. What, you wanna be the only ones with Superhuman Armed Forces or something?’ Lotta people in the U.N. agreed, which pissed off a lot of people here, like, ‘F#$& it, we gotta look out for ourselves, f#$& them terrorist sympathizers.’”
“And things just got worse from there.”
“Hit the nail on the head, kiddo. I guess you got Parker’s brains, too. When it came down to it, nobody really knows who made the first move. The historical line is that it was the Middle Easterners, with backing from guys like A.I.M. and HYDRA, but there’s still some people arguing in the underground that it was the North Americans who lashed out first. Either way . . . war. The first war to be fought primarily using superhumans and super-tech augmentations. We had another name for it, though.”
“What?”
“The Neo-Crusades. The religious fundamentalists on both sides were going on about how the Crusades had started again and ‘God was on their side and it was time to cleanse the earth of infidels.’ That kind of crap.”
“What does this have to do with Cuayin?” Arachne asked.
“I’m getting there. At some point during the war, the U.S. government created a six-person team of superhuman covert operatives simply called . . . the Six.”
“Who were they?”
“Assassin. Iron Maiden. Atalanta. Jingo. Harrier. Stingray.”
“Interesting names.”
“Assassin was a Spider-Man emulator. A dose of nanobots encoded with the DNA of several species of spider rewrote his own genetic code to mimic those spiders’ abilities. Iron Maiden was created using a combination of Ezekiel Stane’s ‘bio-upgrades’ and Starktech cybernetics. Atalanta had Doc Samson’s DNA re-sequencing hers plus a helpful dose of gamma rays. Jingo was the first subject of the Captain America treatment since Rogers himself died. Harrier was bonded with Northstar’s X-gene, and Stingray had some Atlantean mixed in.”
“What were they supposed to do?”
“Infiltrate and destroy the enemy’s PDT labs. Best part? Plausible deniability, if they got caught, the U.S. government and military would disavow their existence or their employment.”
“How did it go?”
“They were a huge part of the reason the U.S. won World War III. But it was ugly business, and their success simply meant that they’d be used for more of the same. Some of them couldn’t take it, snapped under the strain. At least one of them’s dead. The ones left are either in military asylums with their powers permanently inhibited or have just slipped completely under the radar.”
Arachne looked at Wolverine questioningly. “Did you know any of them?”
“Not really,” Wolverine admitted. “Except one of them; he told me everything when I visited him in the asylum, everything he remembered from those days.”
“Who was he?”
“Can’t say. Made a promise.”
Arachne shrugged. “Ok.”
“Although the reason they went with Assassin was very simple. They couldn’t use Parker’s kid.”
Arachne’s expression was one of shock. “Spider-Man had a kid?”
“Yeah,” Wolverine confirmed. “A daughter. But Osborn had her kidnapped and switched out for a stillborn. He was gonna use her as a weapon against Spider-Man, raise her to hate her old man and all. But S.H.I.E.L.D. intervened under Stark’s nose and, in exchange for leadership of the Thunderbolts, took the kid off Osborn’s hands. When that didn’t work out so well for them, they wiped her memory and locked her in a simulated reality interface.”
“I thought they were evil already, but this . . .”
“Yeah. I was pretty skeeved when I found out, too. In a twisted way, it made sense; Parker had one of the most versatile known power sets, but he was a fugitive. Now, S.H.I.E.L.D. lucked into this moldable young girl with pretty much the same abilities. You think they were gonna pass something like that up? Especially since they wanted to replace Parker when he got unmanageable?”
“Does Kaine know?”
“No. If he finds out . . . I have my suspicions about that woman in red who was with Cuayin.”
“Woman in red?”
“Yeah,” Wolverine answered. “Judging by the spider symbol and her abilities, I’d say that is Parker’s daughter.”
“Then that’s just going to make the upcoming fight harder,” Arachne mused.
“Uh-huh. Keeping Cuayin and her ladies from tearing up the country, keeping the government from completely going to town on everyone, and keeping innocent people from getting caught in the crossfire. Not gonna be easy at all, especially if Parker’s kid is on Cuayin’s side.”
“Oh, s#$%.”
“What?” Wolverine asked.
“What are we going to tell Spider-Man? ‘Gee, your daughter’s really alive, she’s just totally mind-warped and under the influence of a near-godlike female supremacist who would make Magneto look like a hairier Professor Charles Xavier’?”
“Way Parker is nowadays, I imagine he’d go off half-cocked and try to knock some sense into his girl’s head. Problem is, genetic paternity doesn’t make real fatherhood. He never knew her. He never had the chance to know her. He can’t really appeal to her morality in a way that’s gonna make her wanna listen.”
“Then we’re just gonna have to kick the crap out of her, along with the others.”
“I guess that’s what it comes down to.”
“Hey, you two done with your powwow yet?” Deadpool’s shout echoed through the chamber. “Wire’s killing me!”
“Oh, shut up, Wade,” Wirework’s voice answered good-naturedly. “You love it, you damned masochist punk.”
“Eh, there is that . . .” Deadpool could be heard contemplating. “And you are quite sexy, even with those freaky porcupine things sticking out of you . . . Hell, I’d say the porcupine look is a real turn-on.”
“Shut up before I start hurting you for real,” Wirework hissed.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do I even want to know?” Arachne asked.
“No, you don’t,” Wolverine replied. “Like I said, they have a very disturbing relationship. On the one hand, she acts like she can’t stand him. On the other hand, once she’s sure none of us are looking, she’s all over the bastard.”
Arachne had a look on her face that only hinted at the levels of mixed horror, fascination, and shock roiling through her psyche. “Wow.”
“As long as you don’t think about it too hard, you shouldn’t have any nightmares.”
Just then, Kaine could be seen stalking out of the shadows, moving toward Wolverine with what had to be murder in his masked eyes. “Logan . . .”
“Yes, Kaine?”
Kaine punched him so hard Wolverine flew into and through a wall. Fortunately, the other side did not have Deadpool and Wirework doing whatever it was they were doing. Wolverine came back, lunging at Kaine with his claws out, only for Kaine to grab him by the forearms and toss him. Wolverine twisted in midair, landing on the ground, and came at Kaine again, who simply punched him once he got close enough. Wolverine rolled with the punch and sliced Kaine’s hamstrings, thus severely reducing the taller, stronger man’s mobility.
Kaine healed, though, and went after Wolverine this time. Suddenly, dark webbing entangled both Kaine and Wolverine, inhibiting their ability to continue the fight. “Somebody want to explain just why you’re fighting?” Arachne asked.
“He knew! He knew! He knew where she was!” Kaine roared.
“No, I didn’t. I knew what they did with her, but I didn’t know where they were keeping her,” Wolverine retorted. “Not that I couldn’t have found out, but how did you expect us to make it through a rescue mission against S.H.I.E.L.D. alive?”
“And yet when your sister went to you asking our help in saving her -” Kaine stared accusingly at Arachne “- you were more than happy to drag us into it!”
“We had an operation there in the first place. Getting the girl was just a bonus.”
Kaine’s muscles strained against the blackened webbing that bound him, his rage giving him tremendous reserves of strength. With a yell of pure, undiluted wrath, he tore free and lunged at Arachne, pinning her. “You can never take her place. Never, you hollow shadow.”
“Get . . . off me!” Arachne screamed, her symbiote exploding into sharp, needlelike spikes that impaled Kaine and threw him off her.
Kaine rolled to his feet, his wounds healing at a very rapid pace. “I’m going to find her, and I’m going to make her see.” He stormed out.
“Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, Spidey!” Deadpool shouted glibly.
Wolverine had just managed to tear himself free of Arachne’s webbing. “He’s always been a good hider. I should have been paying more attention.” He went to Arachne. “You all right, kiddo?”
“He’s . . . he’s just like . . . they both . . . they . . .”
“It’s ok, kid,” Wolverine whispered.
Arachne looked at Wolverine, tears in her eyes. “It never ends, does it? This world . . . it ruins people. It ruins their lives, ruins their hearts, ruins their souls, ruins everyone around them . . .”
“I wish I could say it won’t always be like that, but I can’t. That’s how the world works. It’s a predator that crunches the weak between its jaws. You wanna survive, you’re gonna have to learn how to prey on that predator. You think you’re up for it?”
Arachne breathed deeply, gathering herself. “Yeah.”
At that moment, Ravenclaw emerged in her armored state. “Wolverine. Arachne. Are you two all right?” she asked in her unnaturally deep voice.
“Yeah,” Wolverine replied. “We’ll be fine. But we’re gonna have to start combat training for this girl.”
“I’ve already had combat training,” Arachne protested.
“Yeah, but you can always use some more,” Wolverine remarked. “Never think you’ve run outta things to learn, because the moment you stop learning is the moment you stop living.” He stared Arachne in the eyes. “What do you say? Wanna see just how good you’ve yet to be?”
Arachne smirked, the taunt awakening the sleeping tiger within her. “I think I might surprise you a bit.”
“Sure, kiddo.”
Back in New York City, Fearless, Tarantula, and Scorpion had arrived in the Forest Hills neighborhood where Peter Parker grew up. “How do you think we ought to announce ourselves?” Fearless asked.
“There’ll be guards,” Scorpion replied. “We’ll need to take them out. Quickly but silently.”
Tarantula pouted. “That means I can’t hear them beg me for mercy.”
Her voice sounded like a pouting child, but the malice underlying it chilled Fearless to the bone. To tell the truth, she’d been chilled past her bones by Tarantula since first laying eyes on her and that chill was only sinking deeper. Fearless considered herself good at reading people, both thanks to her senses and to her life experience from her dabbling in theft, and the read she got off Tarantula was akin to what she’d seen in some particularly nasty pieces of work. Those people hadn’t been in it for the money or for the power; they just liked hurting people.
“Sorry. We can’t indulge your predilections right now,” Scorpion answered.
Once the guards outside the Parker house had been taken down, the three women slipped into the house, heading for the basement. “Hey, is that you . . . ?” a man’s voice could be heard asking.
“No. Sorry,” Fearless replied coldly, spearing him with the energy lance from her baton. He fell back down the stairs in a ruined heap, Fearless bounding over him to attack the nerve center of Mr. Negative’s operation. Almost immediately, several thugs pulled out handguns and started firing at her. Some hung back, though, one of them shouting a warning to watch the “goods.”
Scorpion dashed into the fray, unarming the thugs that were shooting at Fearless while Tarantula went after the thugs that were guarding the drugs. She extended the blades on her arms, using them to knock the thugs’ guns out of their hands . . . and take a bit of flesh or finger with those guns. She smirked cruelly at the thugs. “Now, what exactly are you doing with these drugs?”
“What do you want to know for, bitch?” one thug asked.
“For my boss,” Tarantula replied coyly. “Now, you wanna tell me, boys? Or do you need me to get rough with you?”
“F#$& off,” another thug grunted.
“Oh, that sounds nice . . .” Tarantula mocked.
By the time Fearless and Scorpion had finished with the thugs that had actually been shooting, Tarantula had managed to scare up some information out of the thugs who’d been guarding the drugs. “What did you find, Tarantula?” Scorpion asked.
Tarantula smirked at Scorpion with bloodstained lips. “They sang . . . they sang so prettily for me.”
“What did they tell you?” Fearless inquired.
“It was MGH,” Tarantula answered. “They were sieving MGH from the drugs.”
“MGH? Damn it. What do we do?”
“Torch this place,” Scorpion answered. “Stall their operation.”
“You sure? This is Parker’s house.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Thus it came to be that the three women rode away from a burning Forest Hills house. Certainly, someone would call the FDNY to stop the fire before it spread, but by then it would be too late. The drugs would be incinerated, as would the thugs who had occupied the house for the purpose of purifying the drugs. It was certainly nothing Fearless would have countenanced, once upon a time, but things changed. Things freaking changed.
The three women did not get away unobserved, though. A figure crouched on top of a power post, much like a spider in human shape. The faint illumination provided by the moon reflected off the figure’s metallic dark blue sheath, with the brighter illumination of the flames marking its dark red piping. The figure would intercede on behalf of the thugs inside, if not for the fact that the flames would certainly kill him. No, it was better to keep an eye on the women for now, particularly the one who called herself Fearless.
In Latveria, Lady Doom sat in her War Room, looking at the globe-shaped surveillance screen that took up the room’s center. She poked a particular sector of the screen, and the screen expanded to show a diagram of New York City. She eyed specific spots in the city, specifically Stark-Kurosaki Tower, the base of the Avengers, and Camp Rebirth, the New York Initiative training camp. She switched out to other states, looking at the bases of the Initiative teams in each state. She began mapping them out on the screen, eyeing each base specifically for weaknesses in their security that could be exploited.
“Don’t you sleep?” Callisto asked from behind the armored woman.
“When utterly necessary,” Lady Doom replied, turning in her chair to face Callisto. “But perhaps we should turn the subject of conversation to you.”
“What do you mean?” Callisto asked.
“Do you know anything of your real origins?” Lady Doom asked. “Who were your real parents? How exactly you can do what you do?”
“No.” Callisto looked away. “I can’t tell which of my memories are the real ones and which are the implants, but . . . at times I see a man, a man in a mask. I see another man, but he’s . . . he’s in shadow.”
“Can you see them clearly?”
“No.”
“Very well.” Lady Doom turned back to the screen. “You may go, Callisto. I will turn in shortly.”
“Hopefully,” Callisto murmured as she departed.
Lady Doom looked at the maps, pondering Callisto’s situation as she did. Poor girl, to be denied her true family and turned into someone else’s weapon - Osborn’s weapon, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s weapon, Cuayin’s weapon. There was something about Callisto that tugged at Lady Doom’s heartstrings, as implausible or outright impossible as most of her enemies found that to be. She was sure Cuayin cared, too, in her own way, but the woman of mass psionic destruction was too obsessed with her crusade to really do anything with those feelings. It would just have to be up to her, and when the world could be properly remolded, she would turn her efforts and talents to Callisto.
Chapter 9: My Faith, Your Damnation
Author: V5_Vendetta
Fandom: Marvel Universe
Disclaimer: Crapsack future mine, general universe template Marvel's
Principal Characters: Audrey Hopkins/Arachne (OC), James "Logan" Howlett/Wolverine, Kaine, Karin Kusanagi/Fearless (OC), Callisto/May Parker
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Wolverine tells Arachne a story.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Wolverine stated, completely seriously.
“Oh, goodie!” Deadpool cheered. “I love stories! You gonna tell us about the time you shanked Cyclops in the Savage Land so you could get with Jean?”
“What universe did that happen in?” Wolverine growled.
“Earth-1610,” Deadpool answered glibly.
“Never mind,” Wolverine grumbled.
“Hey, what’s this Earth called?” Arachne asked, out of sheer morbid curiosity.
“I don’t know. The kid who wrote this garbage never thought to name it, although according to him it’s basically Earth-616 fifty years accelerated, barring certain unsettling revelations like . . . Hank Pym and Jessica Drew are dirty anal Skrulls!”
“Anal Skrulls?” Arachne raised one eyebrow in perturbed disgust.
“Don’t encourage him, kid,” Wolverine advised. “Not that he needs it to be the way he is.”
“How did he get that way?” Arachne asked.
“Same way I got the way I am. Weapon X.”
“Weapon X.” The spider-girl began to shudder internally, as a thought occurred to her. “You mean to tell me that how I got the way I am, how a lot of us new-gen superheroes got the way we are . . . was basically the same way you and Deadhead got to be . . . you and Deadhead?”
“Deadhead!” Deadpool repeated. “I actually nicknamed a guy I worked with that once. Shame what happened to him. Poor bastard.”
“Wade? Shut up,” Wolverine warned. “You’re not exactly right, but you’re on the right track. Much of the mindset behind Weapon X was in play when the Superhuman Registration Act really got going. Harvesting people with powers - mutant, alien, or empowered human - and using their DNA to create an army of controllable super-soldiers in the employ of the military was their endgame. What did your high school history books tell ya, kid?”
“The basic stuff. Stamford happened, people got scared, people demanded something be done, government pushed SHRA, some superheroes actually got out in front and enforced it, other superheroes got in front and tried to stop it, Iron Man led the enforcing side, Captain America led the opposing side, big brawl, Cap surrendered and died ‘in disgrace,’ Stark became the new Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and ‘all was good’ . . . barring World War III, of course.”
“‘In disgrace’ was right,” Deadpool chimed in. “Ok, so I was pro-reg, but I can admire a guy who stands up for what he believes in and stands with it to the end. Rogers went out like a pansy-ass bitch.”
“Wade. You really wanna shut up,” Wolverine cautioned gravely.
Deadpool whistled. “Wow. You’re getting dangerous, Wolvie.”
“I’ll take him off your hands,” Wirework’s voice said, just before her tendrils ensnared Deadpool and yanked him away.
“See? I knew it! Ladies love Deadpool!”
“Shut up, Wilson.”
“Do I wanna know what’s going to happen?” Arachne asked.
“You’re better off not knowing. Wade’s quite . . . not right. Wirework? She’s good people, but she . . . let’s just say people explicitly not me would be scared of her.”
“You’re trying too hard, you know that?”
“I don’t need to try. I got this way from cold, hard experience. If anybody’s trying too hard, it’s you.”
“Me? What do you mean?”
Wolverine looked at Arachne. “You’re a recently-turned-sixteen-year-old girl with Parker’s powers and Parker’s inability to accept the fact that life is gonna suck for people with powers so long as people like Gyrich are in charge. So what do you do? You cut your ties to pretty much anybody and everybody you ever called friend or family and run around acting like a bad rehash of that time Parker started wearing black again. But that’s teenagers for ya, always trying to act like they don’t need anybody and they’ve got everything figured out. But you don’t have everything figured out, hell, you don’t even know what you don’t know.”
Arachne glared. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”
“Yeah.” Wolverine poked her chest with each successive word he spoke. “You’ve. Been. Acting. Immensely. Stupid.”
Arachne grabbed Wolverine’s finger on the last poke. “Quit it.”
“Telling it like it is, kid. Telling it like it is.”
“Do I even want to hear this story of yours?”
“Oh, yeah. You do. Have you been paying attention to the news?”
“Haven’t bothered. I’d just smash the TV after about a minute of vapid talking heads.”
“Try to rein in that temper of yours,” Wolverine remarked with a note of amusement in his voice. “Here’s the deal. Were you watching the news a month ago?”
“Yeah. That woman. Cuayin. Her and her justice legion.”
“‘Justice’ ain’t the right word. Granted, pretty much all the bastards whose paths crossed theirs had it coming, but this is Magneto all over again. All she’s gonna do is justify the norms’ fear of people like us.”
“You don’t think she’s got the wherewithal to do it?”
“Wherewithal, yeah. The will, too. But even if she does beat down every single organized authoritative body in the world and set up shop as Supreme Loving Goddess of the World, what’s gonna happen after? What kind of world’s gonna be left?”
“Sometimes, the old world has to be destroyed to make way for the new.”
“You kids. Wannabe revolutionaries who think they can ‘transform the world,’ but you know something? Revolutions are dirty business. People die. They die ugly. The good, the bad, the innocent, the guilty . . . nobody’s spared. Think about that next time you start spouting crap like what you just said.”
Arachne bristled internally, but beneath the bristle was a deep shudder of acknowledgment. This man . . . he looked young - older than her sixteen years, but still young - but his eyes had the soul-chilling glassiness of an old man who had seen and done entirely too much to be forgiven or forgotten. Seen and done more than either she or anyone else in the Knights or New Warriors ever had.
“All right . . . what’s the story behind this Cuayin?”
“For the full context, you’ll need to hear how it all started.”
“Sure, and one more thing.”
Wolverine raised an eyebrow. “What, kid?”
Arachne looked at him, her eyes hard. “I’ve seen what they do to people. The way they dehumanize people with powers. The way they reduce them to hunted or caged animals. Don’t tell me I don’t know anything.”
Wolverine sighed sadly. “You remind me a lot of her.”
“Her who?”
“Laura. When she was your age. Angry young girl, with a hella lot of skill at making things hurt.” He looked away for a few seconds, and then turned back. “But never mind that now. It started 35 years ago, when World War III broke out.”
“What started it?”
“The rest of the world got scared of us. With most of the super-powered people being here in this country and being under the control of the government, the rest of the world got scared that the government would sic their shiny new super-soldiers on them. Force regime change, undermine resistance or independence movements hostile to their interests, and just generally beat them down with superior firepower. Some of them decided to do something about it.
“Within the space of five years, the world was caught up in the middle of a superhuman arms race. Starktech armor production went up, including the Scarlet Spider project, and the rest of the world answered with their own armored soldiers. Ways of replicating the power sets of superhumans they’d gathered data on were tested and retested until they were sure they’d gotten it right. The ones that worried the government most were in the Middle East.”
“Why?” Arachne asked.
“Terrorist havens hostile to democracy and freedom, or so the party line went. The Middle Eastern nations just answered with, ‘You’ve already got the strongest military in the world and now you got super-soldiers on your military’s payroll. What, you wanna be the only ones with Superhuman Armed Forces or something?’ Lotta people in the U.N. agreed, which pissed off a lot of people here, like, ‘F#$& it, we gotta look out for ourselves, f#$& them terrorist sympathizers.’”
“And things just got worse from there.”
“Hit the nail on the head, kiddo. I guess you got Parker’s brains, too. When it came down to it, nobody really knows who made the first move. The historical line is that it was the Middle Easterners, with backing from guys like A.I.M. and HYDRA, but there’s still some people arguing in the underground that it was the North Americans who lashed out first. Either way . . . war. The first war to be fought primarily using superhumans and super-tech augmentations. We had another name for it, though.”
“What?”
“The Neo-Crusades. The religious fundamentalists on both sides were going on about how the Crusades had started again and ‘God was on their side and it was time to cleanse the earth of infidels.’ That kind of crap.”
“What does this have to do with Cuayin?” Arachne asked.
“I’m getting there. At some point during the war, the U.S. government created a six-person team of superhuman covert operatives simply called . . . the Six.”
“Who were they?”
“Assassin. Iron Maiden. Atalanta. Jingo. Harrier. Stingray.”
“Interesting names.”
“Assassin was a Spider-Man emulator. A dose of nanobots encoded with the DNA of several species of spider rewrote his own genetic code to mimic those spiders’ abilities. Iron Maiden was created using a combination of Ezekiel Stane’s ‘bio-upgrades’ and Starktech cybernetics. Atalanta had Doc Samson’s DNA re-sequencing hers plus a helpful dose of gamma rays. Jingo was the first subject of the Captain America treatment since Rogers himself died. Harrier was bonded with Northstar’s X-gene, and Stingray had some Atlantean mixed in.”
“What were they supposed to do?”
“Infiltrate and destroy the enemy’s PDT labs. Best part? Plausible deniability, if they got caught, the U.S. government and military would disavow their existence or their employment.”
“How did it go?”
“They were a huge part of the reason the U.S. won World War III. But it was ugly business, and their success simply meant that they’d be used for more of the same. Some of them couldn’t take it, snapped under the strain. At least one of them’s dead. The ones left are either in military asylums with their powers permanently inhibited or have just slipped completely under the radar.”
Arachne looked at Wolverine questioningly. “Did you know any of them?”
“Not really,” Wolverine admitted. “Except one of them; he told me everything when I visited him in the asylum, everything he remembered from those days.”
“Who was he?”
“Can’t say. Made a promise.”
Arachne shrugged. “Ok.”
“Although the reason they went with Assassin was very simple. They couldn’t use Parker’s kid.”
Arachne’s expression was one of shock. “Spider-Man had a kid?”
“Yeah,” Wolverine confirmed. “A daughter. But Osborn had her kidnapped and switched out for a stillborn. He was gonna use her as a weapon against Spider-Man, raise her to hate her old man and all. But S.H.I.E.L.D. intervened under Stark’s nose and, in exchange for leadership of the Thunderbolts, took the kid off Osborn’s hands. When that didn’t work out so well for them, they wiped her memory and locked her in a simulated reality interface.”
“I thought they were evil already, but this . . .”
“Yeah. I was pretty skeeved when I found out, too. In a twisted way, it made sense; Parker had one of the most versatile known power sets, but he was a fugitive. Now, S.H.I.E.L.D. lucked into this moldable young girl with pretty much the same abilities. You think they were gonna pass something like that up? Especially since they wanted to replace Parker when he got unmanageable?”
“Does Kaine know?”
“No. If he finds out . . . I have my suspicions about that woman in red who was with Cuayin.”
“Woman in red?”
“Yeah,” Wolverine answered. “Judging by the spider symbol and her abilities, I’d say that is Parker’s daughter.”
“Then that’s just going to make the upcoming fight harder,” Arachne mused.
“Uh-huh. Keeping Cuayin and her ladies from tearing up the country, keeping the government from completely going to town on everyone, and keeping innocent people from getting caught in the crossfire. Not gonna be easy at all, especially if Parker’s kid is on Cuayin’s side.”
“Oh, s#$%.”
“What?” Wolverine asked.
“What are we going to tell Spider-Man? ‘Gee, your daughter’s really alive, she’s just totally mind-warped and under the influence of a near-godlike female supremacist who would make Magneto look like a hairier Professor Charles Xavier’?”
“Way Parker is nowadays, I imagine he’d go off half-cocked and try to knock some sense into his girl’s head. Problem is, genetic paternity doesn’t make real fatherhood. He never knew her. He never had the chance to know her. He can’t really appeal to her morality in a way that’s gonna make her wanna listen.”
“Then we’re just gonna have to kick the crap out of her, along with the others.”
“I guess that’s what it comes down to.”
“Hey, you two done with your powwow yet?” Deadpool’s shout echoed through the chamber. “Wire’s killing me!”
“Oh, shut up, Wade,” Wirework’s voice answered good-naturedly. “You love it, you damned masochist punk.”
“Eh, there is that . . .” Deadpool could be heard contemplating. “And you are quite sexy, even with those freaky porcupine things sticking out of you . . . Hell, I’d say the porcupine look is a real turn-on.”
“Shut up before I start hurting you for real,” Wirework hissed.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do I even want to know?” Arachne asked.
“No, you don’t,” Wolverine replied. “Like I said, they have a very disturbing relationship. On the one hand, she acts like she can’t stand him. On the other hand, once she’s sure none of us are looking, she’s all over the bastard.”
Arachne had a look on her face that only hinted at the levels of mixed horror, fascination, and shock roiling through her psyche. “Wow.”
“As long as you don’t think about it too hard, you shouldn’t have any nightmares.”
Just then, Kaine could be seen stalking out of the shadows, moving toward Wolverine with what had to be murder in his masked eyes. “Logan . . .”
“Yes, Kaine?”
Kaine punched him so hard Wolverine flew into and through a wall. Fortunately, the other side did not have Deadpool and Wirework doing whatever it was they were doing. Wolverine came back, lunging at Kaine with his claws out, only for Kaine to grab him by the forearms and toss him. Wolverine twisted in midair, landing on the ground, and came at Kaine again, who simply punched him once he got close enough. Wolverine rolled with the punch and sliced Kaine’s hamstrings, thus severely reducing the taller, stronger man’s mobility.
Kaine healed, though, and went after Wolverine this time. Suddenly, dark webbing entangled both Kaine and Wolverine, inhibiting their ability to continue the fight. “Somebody want to explain just why you’re fighting?” Arachne asked.
“He knew! He knew! He knew where she was!” Kaine roared.
“No, I didn’t. I knew what they did with her, but I didn’t know where they were keeping her,” Wolverine retorted. “Not that I couldn’t have found out, but how did you expect us to make it through a rescue mission against S.H.I.E.L.D. alive?”
“And yet when your sister went to you asking our help in saving her -” Kaine stared accusingly at Arachne “- you were more than happy to drag us into it!”
“We had an operation there in the first place. Getting the girl was just a bonus.”
Kaine’s muscles strained against the blackened webbing that bound him, his rage giving him tremendous reserves of strength. With a yell of pure, undiluted wrath, he tore free and lunged at Arachne, pinning her. “You can never take her place. Never, you hollow shadow.”
“Get . . . off me!” Arachne screamed, her symbiote exploding into sharp, needlelike spikes that impaled Kaine and threw him off her.
Kaine rolled to his feet, his wounds healing at a very rapid pace. “I’m going to find her, and I’m going to make her see.” He stormed out.
“Don’t let the door hit you on your way out, Spidey!” Deadpool shouted glibly.
Wolverine had just managed to tear himself free of Arachne’s webbing. “He’s always been a good hider. I should have been paying more attention.” He went to Arachne. “You all right, kiddo?”
“He’s . . . he’s just like . . . they both . . . they . . .”
“It’s ok, kid,” Wolverine whispered.
Arachne looked at Wolverine, tears in her eyes. “It never ends, does it? This world . . . it ruins people. It ruins their lives, ruins their hearts, ruins their souls, ruins everyone around them . . .”
“I wish I could say it won’t always be like that, but I can’t. That’s how the world works. It’s a predator that crunches the weak between its jaws. You wanna survive, you’re gonna have to learn how to prey on that predator. You think you’re up for it?”
Arachne breathed deeply, gathering herself. “Yeah.”
At that moment, Ravenclaw emerged in her armored state. “Wolverine. Arachne. Are you two all right?” she asked in her unnaturally deep voice.
“Yeah,” Wolverine replied. “We’ll be fine. But we’re gonna have to start combat training for this girl.”
“I’ve already had combat training,” Arachne protested.
“Yeah, but you can always use some more,” Wolverine remarked. “Never think you’ve run outta things to learn, because the moment you stop learning is the moment you stop living.” He stared Arachne in the eyes. “What do you say? Wanna see just how good you’ve yet to be?”
Arachne smirked, the taunt awakening the sleeping tiger within her. “I think I might surprise you a bit.”
“Sure, kiddo.”
Back in New York City, Fearless, Tarantula, and Scorpion had arrived in the Forest Hills neighborhood where Peter Parker grew up. “How do you think we ought to announce ourselves?” Fearless asked.
“There’ll be guards,” Scorpion replied. “We’ll need to take them out. Quickly but silently.”
Tarantula pouted. “That means I can’t hear them beg me for mercy.”
Her voice sounded like a pouting child, but the malice underlying it chilled Fearless to the bone. To tell the truth, she’d been chilled past her bones by Tarantula since first laying eyes on her and that chill was only sinking deeper. Fearless considered herself good at reading people, both thanks to her senses and to her life experience from her dabbling in theft, and the read she got off Tarantula was akin to what she’d seen in some particularly nasty pieces of work. Those people hadn’t been in it for the money or for the power; they just liked hurting people.
“Sorry. We can’t indulge your predilections right now,” Scorpion answered.
Once the guards outside the Parker house had been taken down, the three women slipped into the house, heading for the basement. “Hey, is that you . . . ?” a man’s voice could be heard asking.
“No. Sorry,” Fearless replied coldly, spearing him with the energy lance from her baton. He fell back down the stairs in a ruined heap, Fearless bounding over him to attack the nerve center of Mr. Negative’s operation. Almost immediately, several thugs pulled out handguns and started firing at her. Some hung back, though, one of them shouting a warning to watch the “goods.”
Scorpion dashed into the fray, unarming the thugs that were shooting at Fearless while Tarantula went after the thugs that were guarding the drugs. She extended the blades on her arms, using them to knock the thugs’ guns out of their hands . . . and take a bit of flesh or finger with those guns. She smirked cruelly at the thugs. “Now, what exactly are you doing with these drugs?”
“What do you want to know for, bitch?” one thug asked.
“For my boss,” Tarantula replied coyly. “Now, you wanna tell me, boys? Or do you need me to get rough with you?”
“F#$& off,” another thug grunted.
“Oh, that sounds nice . . .” Tarantula mocked.
By the time Fearless and Scorpion had finished with the thugs that had actually been shooting, Tarantula had managed to scare up some information out of the thugs who’d been guarding the drugs. “What did you find, Tarantula?” Scorpion asked.
Tarantula smirked at Scorpion with bloodstained lips. “They sang . . . they sang so prettily for me.”
“What did they tell you?” Fearless inquired.
“It was MGH,” Tarantula answered. “They were sieving MGH from the drugs.”
“MGH? Damn it. What do we do?”
“Torch this place,” Scorpion answered. “Stall their operation.”
“You sure? This is Parker’s house.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Thus it came to be that the three women rode away from a burning Forest Hills house. Certainly, someone would call the FDNY to stop the fire before it spread, but by then it would be too late. The drugs would be incinerated, as would the thugs who had occupied the house for the purpose of purifying the drugs. It was certainly nothing Fearless would have countenanced, once upon a time, but things changed. Things freaking changed.
The three women did not get away unobserved, though. A figure crouched on top of a power post, much like a spider in human shape. The faint illumination provided by the moon reflected off the figure’s metallic dark blue sheath, with the brighter illumination of the flames marking its dark red piping. The figure would intercede on behalf of the thugs inside, if not for the fact that the flames would certainly kill him. No, it was better to keep an eye on the women for now, particularly the one who called herself Fearless.
In Latveria, Lady Doom sat in her War Room, looking at the globe-shaped surveillance screen that took up the room’s center. She poked a particular sector of the screen, and the screen expanded to show a diagram of New York City. She eyed specific spots in the city, specifically Stark-Kurosaki Tower, the base of the Avengers, and Camp Rebirth, the New York Initiative training camp. She switched out to other states, looking at the bases of the Initiative teams in each state. She began mapping them out on the screen, eyeing each base specifically for weaknesses in their security that could be exploited.
“Don’t you sleep?” Callisto asked from behind the armored woman.
“When utterly necessary,” Lady Doom replied, turning in her chair to face Callisto. “But perhaps we should turn the subject of conversation to you.”
“What do you mean?” Callisto asked.
“Do you know anything of your real origins?” Lady Doom asked. “Who were your real parents? How exactly you can do what you do?”
“No.” Callisto looked away. “I can’t tell which of my memories are the real ones and which are the implants, but . . . at times I see a man, a man in a mask. I see another man, but he’s . . . he’s in shadow.”
“Can you see them clearly?”
“No.”
“Very well.” Lady Doom turned back to the screen. “You may go, Callisto. I will turn in shortly.”
“Hopefully,” Callisto murmured as she departed.
Lady Doom looked at the maps, pondering Callisto’s situation as she did. Poor girl, to be denied her true family and turned into someone else’s weapon - Osborn’s weapon, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s weapon, Cuayin’s weapon. There was something about Callisto that tugged at Lady Doom’s heartstrings, as implausible or outright impossible as most of her enemies found that to be. She was sure Cuayin cared, too, in her own way, but the woman of mass psionic destruction was too obsessed with her crusade to really do anything with those feelings. It would just have to be up to her, and when the world could be properly remolded, she would turn her efforts and talents to Callisto.