SON OF MV1 PRESENTS:

SPIDER-GIRL 5: Meet The Magus

 

The car pulled in to a space just outside a late-night deli. Peter smiled at it fondly as he got out. “I love that place,” he said cheerfully. “Best salami in New York.”

“This is why we’re here?” May asked.

“No, just a fringe benefit. We’re headed across the street…” May turned. Across the street was a row of three-storey red brick buildings, each with a discreet brass plaque by the door announcing the professions practised inside.

“Don’t worry,” Darkdevil cackled behind them. “I’ll take good care of the car, Petey my boy.”

As they turned to look, the car swung out of the space and shot off to find itself a new home.

“I never even gave him the keys…” Peter muttered, then shook his head.

“You get used to Darkdevil,” he continued as the crossed the street. “More or less, anyway. I just wish he hadn’t picked up that warped sense of humour…”

He took May to the central building. On this closer inspection, the plaque read:

RICHMOND & WALKER:

IN MEMORIAM
ASSOCIATES

 “Associates?” May asked.

“That’s fairly accurate,” Peter said. “You could never exactly call these guys friends. But they work together well, and for the most part they seem to figure that’s enough.”

May gave that a few seconds to settle in. “Dad, what are you getting me into?”

Peter rang the doorbell.

“The Defenders, honey,” he said.

May blinked. “But… didn’t they break up? Twice?”

“About six times so far, actually,” Peter said, grinning. “It’s pretty much a hobby for them. But they reformed a couple of years ago; just haven’t got back into the public eye yet. Makes me wonder what SCN are playing at these days… Evening, Bruce.”

This last to the tall, green-haired boy of about May’s age who opened the door.

“Hey, Mr Parker,” he said. “What’s up?”

“What I’ve been calling about for the last few days,” Peter said. “Bruce, this is my daughter Mayday. May, Bruce Samson.”

“Uh, hi.” She smiled. He was kinda cute, actually…

He returned the smile, shook her hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Mayday. Come in.”

The door closed behind them and Bruce let them through the hall, up two flights of stairs, and into a room lit by something like a hundred candles. Half a dozen figures were gathered in the room, and May took them in one by one.

A tall, black man looking much like Laurence Fishburne had during the filming of the Matrix, clad in a long, flowing cowled cloak that moved restlessly despite the lack of wind. He at least was easy to identify; this was Cloak. Up close like this, though… well, SCN had somehow never managed to catch the haunted, lost look etched into that face.

Next along was a petite woman with long blonde hair and orange snake’s eyes. She wore a mottled green and blue spandex jumpsuit with white, curved blades protruding from her wrists parallel to her hands.

May vaguely remembered an item on her aiding the Green Goblin not all that long ago, but SCN hadn’t known her name.

She caught May looking at her, and smiled. It had probably been intended to look welcoming, but the elongated fangs made that rather problematic.

May stepped back instinctively, and turned to the next figure.

This guy looked old. Old like Moses; long, shaggy grey-white beard, Fu Manchu moustache. And eyes that looked right through you, heavy-lidded, never more than half open.

May wasn’t sure, but she thought he probably plucked his eyebrows.

“Peter,” the man said, nodding to her father. “And May.”

“Stephen,” her father replied, nodding in return.

May smiled sheepishly. “Uh, hi,” she said, and looked nervously across to the next figure…

Another man, here; tall, and seemingly carved out of jade. A green stone statue of an angel clad in a loincloth. Onyx eyes met and held her gaze steadily. Stone lips quirked into a smile.

This one May recognised; he called himself Kingfisher and, for someone who appeared to be a living statue, he was an incredibly fast flyer. An Inhuman, by his own account at least.

Seated beside Kingfisher, holding a hand of cards and looking shrewdly at the table in front of her, sat a blue-skinned pointy-eared brunette wearing a green scale swimsuit and sporting a pair of tiny wings on each ankle.

The other cardplayer had his back to May, but this again was one of the new wave of heroes to have made some name for himself, and the name, self-given, was Alloy.

His body was, literally, bronze; his hair a mane of rusted-iron dreadlocks. He claimed to be a magically animated metal sculpture.

Even with all that taken into account, there seemed to be something wrong with his appearance…

Beside her, Bruce chuckled. “Hey, Scuba,” he said, “Alloy’s looking at your hand again.”

The blue woman – Scuba, presumably – glanced casually over her shoulder, then turned back to the table, eyebrows raised.

A humanoid shadow slid along the wall from behind Scuba to Alloy, where it touched… and May realised what had seemed to be missing.

Alloy had no shadow.

“Deal again?” the statue said, humour in his voice.

“I’ll pass,” Scuba muttered, setting her hand down firmly and looking across to the group at the door. “Thanks, Bruce,” she said.

“No prob,” he said. “Needed to get your attention anyway for May here.”

“Indeed,” the old guy – Stephen something – said, in what May thought unnecessarily grave tones. “I gather, Miss Parker, that you wish to follow in your father’s footsteps?”

“I got the power,” she said. “I don’t see that there’s a choice.”

“I dunno,” Bruce said. “Dad managed to stay out of the hero biz most of the time. It was mum who was always getting involved.”

May heard a sigh, and glanced around the room. No one’s expression seemed to have changed…

Weird. She put it down to hyped senses imagining things on her and went back to the actual conversation.

“Yeah, well…” She shrugged. “I don’t think you can stay away from superhumanity once you’ve been touched by it. Dad’s told me enough stories about people who tried, really tried…”

Yeah, she thought. Like Doc Connors, poor guy…

“Anyway,” she continued. “I figure I’ll skip that stage and the losing a mentor or someone close to you stage and go straight to making the streets safe.”

“Bit lowlevel thinking, isn’t it?” Scuba asked, arching an eyebrow. “Just the streets?”

“Hey, I’m still a teenager,” May grinned. “Give me time to work up to the world.”

“That was the one thing I never got about you, Peter,” Kingfisher said. “You had a hell of a lot more power than Cap. And by the end, you must have had as much experience. But you stuck to the streets.”

“I tried the Avengers,” Peter said calmly.

“You did?” May said, looking at him in amazement.

Peter Parker smiled at his daughter. “I did,” he said. “Didn’t work out. I didn’t quite join the Fantastic Four way back when I started out… Although I ended up working with the Torch often enough. But, no, the streets were where I fitted.”

“Fair enough,” Alloy said, his voice a mix between flute and drum. “And you, May? Where do you fit?”

“I’ve fought one guy,” Mayday said. “And he was dying. Let me find my feet, OK?”

Stephen laughed. “An excellent suggestion,” he said. “May, you know your mind and anticipate your limits, rather than trying to overstep them and being brought up short. This is commendable, and so I do.”

He wet his lips briefly, and continued. “However, this being the case, you may or may not feel you are right for this team. If that’s the case, then we will respect your decision – and should you rethink your decision at some point in the future, we will be willing to have you in our ranks.”

May didn’t know what to say. From ‘Welcome to the team’ to ‘Maybe later’ in under two minutes. Her face went shellshocked.

Peter gave his daughter a worried look, and put a comforting hand on her arm.

On the other side, Bruce did the same, and suddenly May didn’t know what to think. Keeping her face straight forwards, she flicked her eyes across for a glance at his face and the insight that that might bring.

His face was a picture of concern and sympathy. But… she’d only met him a few minutes ago…

“Maybe you could run with us sometime,” he suggested gently. “We’ll watch your back, and you can decide whether you fit with us or not.”

Peter looked across at him. May felt the gentle pressure of Bruce’s hand on her arm vanish abruptly.

“I… Sounds good to me,” she said. “Not until I’ve got my costume made, though.”

“I was wondering,” Scuba commented. “Not many of us who’ll go out in civvies, even now.”

“Yeah, well… I’ve already seen what can happen when people know your identity,” May said. “If that wasn’t the sort of stress that kicks in mutant abilities, I don’t know what would have happened.”

Bruce laughed.

“So we’ll see you around?” Alloy asked.

“I’ll drop by when I’ve got this costume thing sorted, yeah,” May said.

“Cool,” he said. “We need more heroes.”

“Indeed,” Cloak commented. “The number of supervillains continues to increase, but the number of active heroes has diminished hugely from what it was during the early part of my career.”

“He always talks like that,” Bruce whispered in her ear.

“You have got to be kidding me,” May muttered. “No wonder SCN never do interviews with him…”

“Well, that and Dagger’s death,” Bruce said. “He never got over that. Mind you, neither did Dad.”

May replayed that last sentence in her head in the vague hope that it would make more sense this time around.

Nope.

“Sorry?”

“I’ll tell you some other time,” Bruce said, looking away. “Sorry… I keep forgetting people don’t know. But then, if Dagger was a second-stringer, Dad was a curiosity.”

“Who was your dad, then?”

“Doctor Samson,” Bruce said.

May took a moment to remember. Then it came to her. Psychiatrist to the superhuman set. Deliberately exposed himself to gamma rays in… something to do with the Hulk, but the exact details changed with the telling. Either he wanted to get inside Big Green’s head, or he wanted to restrain the guy, or he was testing his whole personality-directing-power-development theory – or he’d just been stiffed on a bunch of payments recently and wanted to stop that happening again.

Still, it explained his green hair.

“…Oh,” she said.

He looked down at the floor quickly. “Yeah, well,” he said, and glanced up. He flashed her a smile, and reality seemed to flicker for a moment. May blinked, suddenly, rapidly. “So I’ve got a shrink for a dad. You got the Spider-Menace.”

Peter chuckled. “Ten years ago, Bruce… Ten years ago I’d have kicked you across Manhattan for that. But, hey, JJJ finally shut up about it, so…”

“I always did wonder what it would take,” Stephen said quietly. May looked back toward him, startled. It really should have been a joke, another line in the bantering tone that had suddenly filled the room. But his voice…

Well, by now, May wasn’t sure it actually could contain any humour. The guy gave her the creeps. Although her Spider-Sense wasn’t going off. In fact, it seemed to be doing the exact opposite; she felt like she ought to be much tenser. But that itch at the back of her skull was easing her, lowering the levels of adrenaline her nerves were calling for, telling her that Here Be Good People…

“Look, you don’t have to decide now,” Alloy said. “Like Bruce said, drop by sometime when we’ve given Pete a call and come out with us. See if you’re up for our stuff, or whether you want to follow your dad’s footsteps.”

“The streets are in need of protectors, also,” Cloak intoned. “It is just as honourable to watch over them as to watch over the world, for if the streets are not watched, they who guard the world shall one day look down to see that it has crumbled beneath their feet.”

“He’s in training,” Alloy said, faux-confidential. “Put in an application to write the next book of the Bible.”

May grinned.

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I’ll be here.”

“Cool,” Bruce said.

Stephen just nodded. “We shall await you, then.”

***

“He’s always like that,” Bruce said, walking downstairs with them. “I wish I could say otherwise, but… shyeah.”

Peter shrugged. “I always figured that was why he recruited you and Alloy,” he said. “Make sure there was a balance for him and Cloak. Poor Stephen…”

“Sorry, Mr Parker?”

“I knew Stephen Strange back before he took to calling himself Doctor Magus,” Peter said. “Back before he let the cold inside him finish swamping his humanity…” He shook his head. “Cloak was different. Cloak jumped into the cold from the start. He felt it was the only way…”

May felt his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t do that on me, honey,” he said.

She squirmed free, acutely conscious of his last word. “You got it, dad…”

***

LETTERCOL

Listen to the tumbleweed…

Ah, well. Who cares?

But seriously, guys, if you like what I’m doing, give me a note to say why. Those going to [email protected] will be received, while others will puzzle random people.