SPIDER-GIRL 3

“Showdown”

 

***

The Goblin Glider flew out of the shadows into Octopus’ lair, and was met immediately with a whip-fast steel tendril that struck its rider in the stomach. Peter Parker tumbled backward as the Glider flew on, to be smashed into a wall by a second tentacle.

“Ungh,” he muttered as he sat up. “I never was much good flying that,” the mutter continued. “I guess wearing Gobby’s costume didn’t help, in the end.”

At the opposite end of the lair, Mayday sat up. If the Green Goblin was here, whether he’d been taken out or not, surely the Warriors couldn’t be far behind…

And there was no way Ock, in his weakened state, could take on an entire superteam.

Or had the evil Goblin made a comeback, yet again?

The Goblins were always Spider-foes, after all… and so was Ock. It wasn’t inconceivable that they would be in touch, that they would plan a comeback at the same time.

But as the Goblin shook his head, clearing it of blurry vision, and his gaze rested on her, her hopes were dashed.

“May?”

Distorted as it was by the electronic filters within the electronic mask, Mayday would know her father’s voice anywhere.

“Don’t worry, May. I’ll deal with this…”

He accompanied the declaration with a pumpkin bomb, flung savagely at Ock’s head.

Doctor Octopus laughed.

And swatted the bomb aside with one casual wave of a tentacle.

***

Perhaps that lack of care was a mistake. The pumpkin burst against the bank of monitor screens, the resulting explosion shredding Ock’s link to the security systems lining the approach to his lair.

But it didn’t seem to matter. Ock, balancing himself on one tentacle, planted another on Peter’s chest, pinning him to the floor. The remaining two tentacles scooped up a double-barrelled shotgun and a box of cartridges.

Mayday tensed further. Surely she wasn’t going to see this? Wasn’t going to have to watch her father shot?

Something creaked again.

***

Pain. Damn it. MJ screwed her eyes up tighter as consciousness dawned – the palms of her hands were scorched raw and her head wasn’t too happy, either. It felt like all the pain messages she should have been getting since she was knocked unconscious had just stopped outside her head, lit up and waited, and now they were all stubbing out their smokes and marching into her brain, demanding immediate attention.

And she couldn’t remember where she was quite yet. Why did the air reek of sewage?

Oh, crap.

MAYDAY.

She opened her eyes experimentally, and then squeezed them shut again. Too damn bright. After a few more moments, she shakily got to her feet, still not willing to open her eyes fully. She could see – she had just enough light to do that and not enough to overwhelm her now – but… but Octopus had been waiting for her.

And by now Peter was probably in there already.

Not a good outing, in any way.

A complete failure, in fact.

She stumbled along the path, clutching the gun. No way in hell was she going to let her family down further by not seeing if there wasn’t still something she could do.

***

A foot crossed an electronic eye’s beam, and the alarms in Ock’s lair went off. “What?” he asked sharply, turning to the monitor bank – and being met with thirty shattered, burned-out plasma screens of various sizes. “What’s happening?”

The shotgun went clunk, and his attention snapped back to it. What we had here was evidently a situation known in the trade as a ‘cartridge shoved into the gun in completely the wrong manner because the operator wasn’t paying attention and isn’t experienced enough to feed ammo into the gun if he isn’t paying attention’.

Or, as it’s also known, what happens when you force a shell in backward because your tentacle’s strong enough to allow you to do so.

And, behind him, Mayday tried to move her arms further apart.

***

The steel restraints on the chair had been designed with a human in mind. But Mayday, it seems, took after her father – who had the proportional speed, strength, and agility of a spider. In practice, this meant he could lift up to about ten tonnes.

May Parker, known as Mayday; also had the proportional speed, strength, and agility of the spider. Admittedly, she wasn’t quite the size of her father – ten tonnes might be asking a little much. But she was still the size of an adolescent human, and a spider that size is a pretty effective strongman. For that reason among others it would make an excellent circus star.

The long and the short of it was that suddenly Mayday was sitting on a buckled mass of metal missing what had once been arms to a chair. She ripped the remaining metal off each arm in turn, and then bent to tear off her ankle restraints.

***

Meanwhile, Peter Parker was back to doing what he had once done so often; dodging flying steel tentacle. It was nowhere near as easy as it had been; the loss of his spider-powers included both the loss of much of his once-fearsome agility and his vaunted Spider-Sense. Still, that wasn’t necessarily a problem; hadn’t Octopus disappeared last time after going toe-to-toe with the Punisher?

Of course, the Punisher had come to that occasion bearing gifts of projectile weaponry… Peter began to think that perhaps unskilled operation of pumpkin bombs might not be enough.

But it couldn’t hurt…

Diving out of the way of a swinging tentacle, his hand dipped into the Goblin’s satchel. Drawing out a bomb, he pressed in the primer and hurled it at Ock as he hit.

***

Mary-Jane made her way onward still, looking around warily. And then she became aware of a light hissing behind her.

She turned. A man was emerging from the sewer wall. At least, a figure – and maybe he wasn’t emerging from the wall. Because he couldn’t be, could he?

Only…

He was. She sighed inwardly. She’d thought, what with Peter’s old… night routine, and his current… job… She’d thought that she was done with getting freaked out by people’s powers.

Evidently not. It wasn’t something that was easy to get used to.

She shuddered as she recognised the newcomer. Of all the people Peter associated with, this was the man who gave her the creeps most. He wasn’t the pleasantest of superhumans to begin with, and then there was all that history Peter had with Matt…

“Darkdevil,” she said formally, keeping her voice level.

The figure, garbed in a darker red version of Daredevil’s old outfit, pallid grey of skin and holding a glowing white billy club, looked around for the source of the noise. “Ah, Mary Jane,” he said, smiling at her. “I had been sent to find your husband… But no, the sewer system apparently screwed up my navigation. Tell me, where is he?”

“Down there, I think,” MJ said, waving an arm down the tunnel. “Fighting Doctor Octopus.”

The glowing white eyes blinked, dark red lids – or part of the tunic, perhaps – taking their place for a moment. “Did he forget he’d lost his powers?”

“No,” MJ sighed, frowning at the hero before her. “Octopus kidnapped May.”

“Your daughter, or his aunt?”

“His aunt’s dead and you know it!” Mary Jane snapped.

“Death, my dear lady, is seldom permanent,” Darkdevil replied, with a faint smile. “Not in the circles in which I am privileged to move, in any case.”

Mary Jane frowned, and remembered when it was she was always edgier around the dead man when he was on his own. The edge of sarcasm in his voice set it off.

“If Magus was here, you wouldn’t be saying that, would you?” Mary Jane asked.

The Darkdevil flinched. “Please… do not speak of him.”

“Why were you looking for Peter, anyway?” MJ demanded.

“We did call,” Darkdevil replied, cocking his head to one side. The faint smile that commonly quirked his mouth had returned. “But no one was there. A situation has arisen that our little group has little experience in. Hence the call. When there was no reply, we were concerned. When, however, we discovered he had run a search through our database without consulting us…” Darkdevil shrugged. “Evidently something was up.”

***

Given the evidence thus far, Mayday was prepared to accept provisionally that, okay, maybe Dad was Spider-Man, dumb as it sounded.

The extra strength, the whole Ock thing, and Dad sporting the Goblin’s duds… Clearly something was up with the family. And (what was she saying?) Spider-Man as Dad made more sense than any of the other possibles.

So… If Dad was Spider-Man, and she’d just tapped into a major strength reservoir…

Well, chances were she had his spider-powers. Although he didn’t seem to have them too… She watched Ock’s tentacle send him cartwheeling into the wall, and winced at the thud.

But that meant she hardly had to take Ock on in a direct frontal assault…

She turned away from the combat, and sprinted toward the wall. In theory, just running up the wall the way Spider-Man kept doing on SCN retrospectives should be no prob-

Her feet skidded out from under her. Her back smacked down onto the floor.

So that hadn’t worked.

Why not?

Maybe without the shoes…

***

And so it came to pass that, quite without expecting it, Doctor Octopus found himself snatched up and swung at the ceiling by two of his tentacles. If it hadn’t been for the swift action of the other two tentacles, the fight might have been over in one single move, but they were there – holding him away from the ceiling.

And then he braced against them, and tugged at the tentacles Mayday held…

***

Falling wasn’t an entirely new experience for May. Falling upward – as it at first seemed, until her sense of gravity kicked in properly – was, but you quickly got used to that. There was something she was going to hit when the fall ended, and she was going to hit it quite fast.

Beyond those twin points most information about falling quickly becomes unimportant. When and how you’re going to hurt is always the most important thing.

So, impact minimalisation. First things first; let go of the freakin’ tentacles.

And that way, you found you’d got enough control over your orientation to flip over… and take it on your legs. Bend the knees on impact… let the enhanced strength do the rest.

Mayday found herself capable of using the momentum from Ock’s throw to push her forwards, powerful legs driving her into a dive toward the good Doctor even as she landed, wasting no energy or time.

The only slight snag, as her dad could have told her if there’d been time, was the angle of the dive; a little low.

Mayday barrelled into Ock’s legs, bowling them out from under him just as his tentacles set him down. The momentum shared between supervillain and superteen was enough to land him on his backside before his tentacles could steady him – but it left him unharmed and ready to retaliate.

“Dad, go!” May yelled, scrambling up. “I can hold him… I think…”

“No,” Peter said flatly. “This is my responsibility. You’re my responsibility. And I’m not going to sit back and let you risk yourself…”

The look of panic dawned on his face at the same time May felt the back of her skull tickle. It was an unpleasant, skittering sensation; and it seemed to be shrinking away from something… coming in fast…

May ducked, feeling tentacle grip slip through her hair, and gulped.

“Spider-sense,” her dad muttered.

“See, dad, I can take care of this!” she said, at slightly more modest decibels. “But I can’t deal with this if I’ve got to keep worrying about you…”

She turned to face the Doctor just in time to see a white, blazing billy club strike him on the back of the head and ricochet off. Octopus stumbled forward, stunned, and turned to face this new opponent.

“Darkdevil,” May heard her father whisper. “I didn’t-“

But May was not to learn what her father hadn’t, as the breath in which he spoke matched with the loud retort of a gunshot.

This time, the impact toppled Octopus again.

Mayday blinked. It sure looked like her mom was the only one pointing a gun…

“Um…” she said.

The Doctor was struggling to his feet, a large dent in one of the armoured plates he wore around his shoulders. “Oh, boy…” Mayday muttered, before stepping forward and delivering a coup de grace to the back of the supervillain’s head, who was knocked forward a couple of feet before finally failing to rise.

“Right,” Mayday said into the comparative quiet that followed. “Now, I think I’ve got some of this figured out, but I’d still like to know what the hell’s going on…”

***

LETTERCOL

OK. Spidey’s got most of the appalling arachnid pun lettercol headers tied up. Suggestions, anyone?

 

In any case, we kick off this lettercol with, not a letter, but a review, from the esteemed Mike McGee:

 

Hello. My name is Mike McGee. I have spent all day writing literary criticism for my classes. I now want to shoot myself in the face. Instead, I have decided to continue to write literary criticism in hopes of restoring myself to relative sanity. Let us move on, gentle readers, away from Carl Jung's musings on the shadow (which, although I wish I had not had to cram them down my own throat and regurgitate them all over my Word program, have been extraordinary useful in my future story plans), away from Nathaniel Hawthorne, away from the plight of the alienated teenaged girl in Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," and to...

"Spider-Girl?"

Oh, man, thank God, what a relief.

Tom Lynch has written the first two issues of a really fun, kinda light and cute and innocuous story here, a far cry from the occasionally grim happenings in his "Cloak & Dagger." Not that Tom's "Cloak & Dagger" is really all that grim or dark, but it sure is compared to his "Spider-Girl." In a nutshell we have a Peter Parker who has lost his powers and progenated, and his daughter is this kinda cute and precocious teenage girl that Joyce Carol Oates would hate but I have to admit I kinda like, personally. Doctor Octopus kidnaps her, Peter has to somehow save her even though he isn't Spider-Man anymore, and Mayday (the daughter, natch....pay attention) is starting to manifest some spidery qualities, which is a shock to her because she has no idea that her Dad was ever Spider-Man. And that's essentially it, because Tom's issues are pretty short, which is actually nice, I think, because they make for good brain breaks when you just can't take Jung anymore and have to read something else for five minutes.

Okay, this is not deep stuff here, but I must confess that I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I will be among the first to click on the MV2 section when the next one arrives there. Tom's Doc Ock is my favorite thing about the series, because he has to be like 70, and is constantly stomping around on his tentacles and shouting at an unimpressed Mayday and generally freaking out because his plan is *so* not working out here. I don't think that Tom intends for this story to be anything other than just fun, and it....well....is. So go read it, and write him an e-mail telling him that you like it, because you will. You will!

Mike McGee

 

Woohoo! Another favourable comment on another series from Mike! This guy’s opinion carries a certain amount of weight with me. Why? Well, have a look at his own series: Werewolf By Night: New Kingdom, Werewolf By Night, and the superb Ghost Rider ’57 over on our own Epic branch. (You’ll have to hunt around in an anthology title for GR ’57, but it’s worth it) and Nothingface at Frontier.

And since I’m also an Eng Lit student, being a relief after that kind of pretentious canon tosh (sorry, sorry… Villette by Charlotte Bronte was my last text. Lovely novel, sure, but I didn’t like it. It’s *good* but not my thing.) is a real compliment to me, and it seems the series has uses I didn’t think of.

Yes, Mike, it’s a pretty light series, as is the series it’s based on… but that doesn’t mean it’s gotta be less than good. MV2 is based on a reasonably light set of books; nothing says our versions have to be light, but nothing says they can be. However, they’re part of MV1, so I take exception to them being bad…

Anyway.

There isn’t much to reply to in this review (except to note that, yes, I’ve enjoyed playing with Ock too… he’s just got so much fun potential), but I hope I’ve hooked a few of you now. Who’s Magus? What’s up with Peter’s job?

James Hickson knows, as do I. But where can you find out?

Why, only in the pages of MV2, of course! Keep right on reading, True Believer, and let me know what you thought of the first Spider-Girl arc!

(And talk to Steve on A-Next, too… I’m sure he’s got some letters, but more is always fun).

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