EVERYBODY LOOK DOWN, IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND

By Mattise Mozer

 

THWOK!

Squirrel Girl clobbered The Inventor! She’d launched her entire body behind her one, desperate fist, and it’d hit home so hard, Doreen winced.

The Inventor might have been part-bird, part-machine, but his head was most definitely all organic. He collapsed and tenderly touched his beak.

“My face,” he cried.

His demeanor melted away, almost bleeding out of him, and his hurried breaths became deep, enraged growls.

Squirrel Girl tumbled along the rooftop, her body cast airborne from her attack’s momentum. She dug her heel into the concrete, and it absorbed most of her weight, only cratering a tiny bit. (Versus, cratering enough to bring the school down. That woulda been bad!) Squirrel Girl stood up and prepared for another blow…but there was a sharp, faint pain in her fist. Bright blood dripped onto the ground…her blood! She’d cut herself on The Inventor’s beak!

“Aw man, that blows,” Squirrel Girl drawled. Her stomach turned. Nothing made a superhero fight worse like breaking off parts of the bad guy. “You’re about to start flashing and doing double damage, aren’t you..?”

His voice was a quiet, furious whisper. “You broke my face…”

“Jeez…you’re supposed to restore a gal’s HP before you go into your Boss: Phase 2 mode.”

The Inventor took off his jacket, revealing suspenders and a white dress shirt that strained against sinewy muscles and jagged, mechanoid joints. The jacket fell fast. (Not even it wanted to be near what was about to go down.)

The Inventor’s beak was cracked and chipped where she’d hit him. Beak shards littered the ground beneath him. Suddenly the cut on her hand didn’t look too bad.

“Yikes. That looks kinda painful,” Squirrel Girl said. “Hey, if you call off the whole evil attack thing, I can help you get that looked at. Stark Industries has a–”

“You broke my face!”

The Inventor moved with lethal force. In the blink of an eye he closed the distance between them.

The Inventor dug his feet into the cement, bracing himself. He unleashed a fusillade of strikes, so fast that his sleeves whistled against the air. Squirrel Girl ducked and weaved, slapping away a fist whenever the chance came up, but he was just so doggone fast. Any second he would–

Yep, there’s that second.

POW!

The Inventor’s feet dug into the concrete, absorbing the recoil from the wide right hook!  Squirrel Girl’s entire face lit up in a shock of pain.

Thinking fast, she rolled with the blow, tumbling backwards and coming back up with her fists raised, ready for round two. She shut out her screaming nerves and went in for another sortie.

…But it was no good! She ducked another wide haymaker, caught his follow-up in the sloppiest wristlock she’d ever tried, and then WHAM! The Inventor kicked out, into, and damn near through Squirrel Girl’s abdomen. She was up on her feet almost immediately, but…Squirrel Girl looked a little dizzy.

They bounced around the rooftop like this, Squirrel Girl taking her licks and trying to create some distance, but The Inventor chasing her, unrelenting. How long was she supposed to keep this up?

And where the heck had Tippy-Toe gone?

Squirrel Girl shook her thoughts away. If her mind went anywhere but the present, this fight would be over. She needed a strategy. Squirrel Girl pushed off the ground with her tail and every ounce of strength in her squirrel-powered thighs. Maybe if she tried to turn this into an aerial battle, she could slow him down…

“But why do I feel like I’m forgetting somethi–THE HELICOPTERS!”

Squirrel Girl flipped away before she landed square onto the spinning rotors of the Daily Bugle Now news copter! She landed gingerly on the area between the rotors’ base and the cabin windshield. Inside, the pilot shook his head, shook his fist, and screamed at her. “Hey, I’d be mad too,” Squirrel Girl joked, her words muffled by the roar of the rotors. “The one time you get a good look up a superhero girl’s skirt, and she’s wearing spats. Talk about rotten luck, huh?”

The Inventor crouched, just slightly, enough to get his bionic limbs to make the leap.

…And if he followed her up, Squirrel Girl knew that there was no way the helicopter inhabitants would survive. But if she flew at him while he was already in the air…

“I can totally Goku this thing,” Squirrel Girl told herself. “I’ve just gotta time it just right…just…right…”

The Inventor took off, the excess energy cratering the ground beneath him–

“…NOW!”

Squirrel Girl bounded off the Daily Bugle Now helicopter. She dived through the air and met The Inventor halfway through his leap, fist first!

KAPOW!

Squirrel Girl’s fist buried so deeply into his right cheek that she felt literal screws against her knuckles. The Inventor’s body whipped in the air, the momentum from the blow knocking whatever he had for a nervous system out prone.

..But only for a second! The Inventor and Squirrel Girl tangled, each punching and kicking the other in the descent. The instant before they hit the broken and blasted battlefield, Squirrel Girl kicked The Inventor in the crotch–she was not proud of it!–and tried to jump away. But the Inventor’s limbs were still faster! He grabbed onto her tail, crumpling her bushy fur and shocking her entire body from the inside-out. He threw her with all his force, limbs quivering from the structural damage.

CRUNCH! Squirrel Girl’s body made a wet slapping noise as it bent the rooftop access door. She slid down onto the ground, unmoving, and struggling to breathe.

It was a long minute that followed. It wasn’t an Avengers-worthy threat, but it was certainly a sight for Jersey City: Spider-Woman laid out, Squirrel Girl shaking as she tried to move, The Inventor breathing slowly and steadily…

And, of course, The Inventor stood to his feet.

“Figures,” Squirrel Girl coughed.

The Inventor’s nice dress shirt was shredded in the chest and torso, reducing it to ribbons that dangled around his bruised, feathered biceps. His dress pants, matted in dirt and dust and oil, reminded Squirrel Girl of desert military fatigues.

His cracked beak tied the whole look together.

“It wasn’t that Kamala girl at all,” he spat. “You’re the problem, aren’t you, Squirrel Girl?”

Squirrel Girl could only crawl. Her legs howled, the agony running deep into her bones. “Being a superhero sucks sometimes,” she grimaced. Did she have to get beaten to a pulp every time she did this?

“That other girl didn’t even wear a mask,” The Inventor continued. “But you…with your cute little outfit and your irritating disrespect. The Tinkerer could have finished Kamala. I would know: The Tinkerer was perfect. But when you arrived, the tide turned.”

Squirrel Girl’s eyelids weighed somewhere into the metric tons. But if she fell asleep, she’d be on a one-way trip to Coma Town.

She heard the slow, calculating, predatory footsteps as they came near.

The Inventor hauled her up by her ripped shirt collar. He held her up high enough that her feet dangled, and her tail dragged along the ground.

The Inventor snarled. “I can come back for the brown girl. But you, my buck-toothed friend?” The Inventor cocked his fist, the knuckles already split and red with both of their blood. “You broke my face. I get to break yours. Then we’ll talk about your body.”

His fist came for her–

CLANG!

A metal blue hand gripped The Inventor’s wrist, his fist a hair’s breadth from Squirrel Girl’s swollen features. The Inventor struggled against it, but the blue hand peeled his fist away with a can opener’s ease.

“You know,” the high-pitched voice emanated from inside the tall, red-and-blue mech. “It’s rude to call people things like ‘brown girl’ and ‘buck-toothed’.”

Five minutes earlier, outside the school’s emergency exit.

Kamala couldn’t leave Doreen behind. She couldn’t abandon Doreen. But she also couldn’t guarantee Mike’s safety…was Mike supposed to go to the authorities, on the other side of the building? What guarantee was there that Mike wouldn’t run right into Terminators?

Hell, Kamala couldn’t guarantee her own safety.

“Kamala, you’re a superhero, right?”

“I am,” Kamala said to Mike. “B-but it’s more complicated than that. I was supposed to be a bad guy, but then there was this thing with the Avengers, and some evil organization and–”

“No!” Mike interjected, not shaken in the slightest by the admission. “I mean, there are guys with guns everywhere and an earthquake happening on the roof, and the smartest place to be is probably right next to a super person! And preferably you.” Mike waved her hand to the blue and red mech.”Not that you’re not a cool dude, miss robot person! It’s just that Kamala and I are already friends.”

“No, I get it,” Peni said, her voice crisp through the SP//DR suit speakers. The LED display flashed an exclamation mark. “I’ve got a lock on my own friend. You guys don’t know Gwen Stacy, do you?”

Kamala hated this. How was she supposed to talk shop in front of Mike?

Kamala mimed the iconic web-thwipping hand motion. The SP//DR display winked again. “Yep! That’s the one!” SP//DR moved gracefully, passing Kamala and Mike while staring at the roof. “She’s sorta unconscious…oh, geez. There’s a squirrel mutant fighting a bird dude by herself. What is it with this time period?”

Doreen was ‘sorta unconscious’..?

Kamala ran.

She raced back inside the school. She found the staircase and climbed it two, three, then five steps at a time, her legs growing longer and longer the more urgently she moved. Behind her, Mike called for Kamala to slow down, but she couldn’t, and she wouldn’t.

The staircase shook, as though something hard and heavy had been thrown against the school roof. Kamala’s stomach sank.

The rooftop access door had cratered inward. Kamala’s foot grew, and she kicked the door outward.

The scene spoke for itself. Unconscious and/or wounded fighters, exploded concrete, torn clothes and distant on-lookers…And the attacker was none other than a grown, tall man with a green cockatiel’s head. He held Squirrel Girl by the front of her shirt, her limbs dangling lifelessly.

“This is…like…something out of Dragon Ball Z,” Kamala remarked.

SP//DR had gotten to the roof the quickest way a mech could: by jumping. It landed gracefully and caught the green bird man’s fist as he was about to clobber a thoroughly-beaten-down Squirrel Girl. SP//DR said something, but Kamala couldn’t make it out.

The man broke free of SP//DR’s grip and aimed a punch at its chest.

GONG.

The sound rang out for a long, dissonant moment. The Inventor’s body vibrated as the force of his strike reverberated back through himself. His hand seized open, and Squirrel Girl dropped lightly.

SP//DR sighed at the Inventor. “Not,” she said, “Impressed.”

SP//DR’s limbs moved like cobalt liquid. Its attacks flowed from one strike to the next, alternating between open-palm strikes and tight, pressure-point attacks. The bird man was becoming visibly frustrated as he backed up again and again, trying and failing to land a blow on the new opponent.

“I…I am not to be beaten by some little girls!”

The Inventor punched out, his entire body’s weight and momentum behind the attack. SP//DR stepped to the side effortlessly…then she caught his outstretched arm, and THOOM!—SP//DR’s knee shot up and into his torso. His back arched. Gears up and down his spine tore through his skin.

She threw him to the side like so much refuse. The battle was over.

The Inventor attempted to stand again. “I am The Inventor. Do you hear me?! I! AM! THE! INV—“

THWIP!

Spider-Woman dropped her wrist, the last of her energy spent. Her webline hit The Inventor in his broken beak, shutting it, and knocking him back down onto the ground.

“You talk too much,” Spider-Woman said weakly.

Mike hated stairs.

Mike hated running.

Mike hated running up stairs.

And when Kamala’s legs started stretching and growing so she could take the stairs to the roof in the blink of an eye, Mike threw in the towel. She wasn’t a robot, or an Inhuman, or whatever a Squirrel Girl was.

Mike sat on the staircase and caught her breath.

It hit her in the back of the head, like a parent reminding her of the big picture. Kamala was a superhero.

Jersey City wasn’t New York City, or Los Angeles, or heck, it wasn’t even Tokyo! Nobody came to Jersey City to end the world, and nobody came to Jersey City to save the world. Right?

Mike remembered yesterday. She remembered seeing the webs on that video on her social media…and then later that night, how that one event downtown got crashed by terrorists. (The Internet said they’d been red ninjas, but come on. Ninjas?)

There were so many things that weren’t supposed to be in the life and times of Michaela Gutierrez Miller. But here she was…friends with a superhero.

A cacophony of tire screeches, people tumbling out of vans, and clattering equipment filled the staircase. Mike looked out the small window and saw news vans, all coalescing around something on the wall.

She went downstairs, ignoring the protest in her thighs, and through the exit. Mike eventually made it to the sidewalk, where she saw what had the news people so enraptured.

A beaten-to-hell-and-back man, wearing shredded clothes, covered in bruises, and with a green bird head was tied up in white ropes, was left dangling in front of the main school doors.

A note had been attached to his front. Mike peeked over a cameraman and read it to herself.

Sincerely, the Rising Girls.

…

Once things died down, Kamala called her parents to check in, and it was a breeze to get permission to stay at Doreen’s for one more night. Kamala was regretfully learning that it was easier to lie to her parents if she used half-truths.

Yes, she was staying at Doreen’s.

No, there weren’t any boys.

And yes, Doreen’s friends were an engineer (albeit from the future) and a foreign exchange student (technically).

But once Kamala hung up the phone, her life descended back into its now-routine madness. SP//DR had webbed up The Inventor and left him for the police. It had been a whole process. The girls had had to wait for Spider-Woman to be able to stand again before her and SP//DR could swing back to Doreen’s dorm. SP//DR was able to carry Squirrel Girl’s unconscious body in his arms and still swing, but there hadn’t been enough room for Kamala.

She had had to walk the way she and Doreen had come this morning.

She was able to squeeze past the paparazzi, who were snapping photos of the school and interviewing the frazzled sellers and vendors from the Robo Toy Fest event.

Kamala spotted Mike, holding her Ninjor figure and talking to a reporter. The blue-haired girl caught Kamala’s eyes, and she mimed a zipper running along her wide smile.

Right, Kamala remembered. She had brought someone else into her increasingly-large superhero circle, and this person wasn’t even a superhero. Mike knew Kamala’s secret. What was supposed to happen now? Did Mike become their “guy in the chair” or whatever?

Anyway.

Once Kamala got to Doreen’s building, the weight of the last few hours came back with force.

Gwen sat on the beanbag chair. She was a mockery of the energetic, sarcastic girl from the night before; Gwen was splayed out, her head thrown back and dangling. She nursed a can of soda with frail fingers.

Poor Doreen made Gwen look like the picture of health. Doreen lay sprawled out on the bed, a folded wet towel on her forehead. Her sport bra’s wire had torn and poked out from the side, and her very-slightly-pudgy stomach was riddled with bruises in every shade of the rainbow. Her miniskirt was a collage of blood and oil.

“I had to get her shirt off to use SP//DR’s bone-healing tech,” said a familiar voice…Kamala turned her attention to the petite girl in Doreen’s computer chair. She wore a sleeveless pink tank top, and her skirt tapered off above her knees. She sat on her hands and leaned in, her black twin tails moving in kind. “The good news is, Doreen should wake up before the end of the night. Bad news is, she’s probably out of the superhero game for a day or two.”

The girl smiled at Kamala’s confusion. “You don’t recognize me outside of the suit. I’m Peni Parker. But you can call me Peni.”

“I call her a life saver,” Gwen said from across the room. She flailed an arm out in a weak wave. “Really, Peni. Thanks for coming when you did. That dude was…oh man. Kamala, you guys fight fellas like him often around here?”

Kamala shook her head. “I don’t know who he was,” she said. She explained to Gwen and Peni how she’d been at the event floor with Mike when the attack happened, and that Doreen had gone off on her own. “Next thing I knew, there were gunshots in the gym, and people trying to fight me.”

“Brutal,” Gwen said. “You know, Kamala, yours isn’t the hardest origin story in the world, but it’s pretty up-there.”

She wasn’t wrong. “Can I ask you guys something?” Kamala ventured. “The Termina—I mean, the cyborg goons that attacked me, they called me something. They said I was an ‘inhuman’. Do you guys know what that means?”

Gwen and Peni exchanged looks. Kamala couldn’t read them.

“I-is it bad?” Kamala added.

“It’s not bad, it’s just kinda complicated,” Peni said. “We should probably work on one thing at a time. Gwen needs help because she broke her dimension necklace again, huh?”

“Wait, hold on. My brain hurts.” Kamala connected the invisible dots between Gwen and Peni. “You’re from an alternate dimension. But you’re from the future. How do you two know each other? Shouldn’t there be, like, an Alternate Peni?”

“Ah! You’d be adept to hypothesize such!” Peni stabbed her index finger in the air, then brought her arm down and folded both of them, her head down in a serious thinker’s pose. “This isn’t dear Gwen’s first time here in our dimension. She actually warped into my time period once before, and needed her help for the same thing.”

Gwen interrupted. “I mean, yeah, but then I also helped you fight Ven#m.”

“That’s true,” Peni conceded.

“Venom?”

“No, Kamala, Ven#m. He’s like a robot, except with a symbiote. And it’s a robot that can think and feel pain.”

“Uh-huh,” Kamala said. “What year did you come from, Peni?”

“The year 3145.”

“Uh-huh,” Kamala nodded.

That night, across town.

The Inventor hadn’t put up a fight when the authorities hauled him into the truck. Breakouts weren’t about fighting off cops; they were all about timing.

Once JCPD had him outside of the main thoroughfares and surrounded by suburbia, he struck. The Inventor snapped his handcuffs off as though it were a child’s toy. He snapped the neck of the officer guarding him just as easily.

The truck toppled! Horns blared on all sides of the intersection.

The Inventor punched the back doors from the inside, shattering the lock and sending the bent metal doors swinging open. The cab skidded down the road and crashed into a low, brick wall. The officers inside were killed instantly.

The Inventor hobbled out of the truck. The night air was cool on his bruises, but it irritated the screaming nerves in his shattered beak. He staggered beneath the streetlights, ignoring the stares of onlookers and frozen drivers. The Inventor dived into the nearest alleyway, where he stopped to catch his breath.

That he had been reduced to hiding in the shadows…disgraceful.

Disgusting.

Disappointing.

But one thing The Inventor did not humor was denial. His operation had been foolproof. Even with the foresight to expect of Squirrel Girl and Spider-Woman and…that blue-and-red thing that had arrived at the last moment, The Inventor’s plan could only ever have led to that outcome.

He’d hired his best hackers. They were…interrupted by Squirrel Girl.

So, he’d brought his best augmented humans. They had been bested by JCPD.

He’d fought with an algorithmically-enhanced, simulated, and perfected martial arts style. Squirrel Girl was a little girl, but she was a fierce opponent. That he’d been beaten through sheer numbers did not change the fact that he’d been beaten.

His options were exhausted.

It was time to report to his higher-ups.

The Inventor hurried along the rooftops of the sleeping Jersey City. Once he was far from the overturned truck and the ensuing JCPD calvary, he dropped down onto the street level. A man had stood on the corner, talking into his smartphone. The Inventor snapped his neck, quickly and quietly.

He retrieved the phone and made a new call. “It is I,” said The Inventor.

The other line crackled. Even with this supposedly-groundbreaking 5G network, Earth’s phones could barely connect to extraterrestrial signals. The voice on the end was a curt monotone. “You are behind schedule. The city was to have been ours by now.”

The Inventor slinked back into the safe darkness of the alleys. “There have been complications. I might have…overpromised.”

A pause. “And you told us,” the voice said, “instead of running for your life to escape our wrath. Why?” And then: “No, really. Why? I do not understand.”

The Inventor swore…goddamn Skrulls. Strong-enough tech to take over a thousand Earths, and not enough combined brain cells to conquer one. “I have a back-up plan. I have an outside hire I can bring in.”

“…Explain.”

The Inventor hated this part. Including the Skrulls in his plots paid off in the end, when he was paid in riches beyond what human governments could fathom. Even supervillains needed funding, after all. He began speaking, but the Skrull on the other end cut him off. “Move to full view, Edison.”

The Inventor moved as far into the alley as he could, where it was dark enough to simulate death. He held the phone to his face. The password the Skrulls had given him was almost impossible for human mouths to say. For a bird-man, it was easy.

A blinding light seared into his eyes. The Inventor closed them.

He opened his eyes and took in the view of the Skrulls’ cruiser, orbiting high above the northern hemisphere. His body was a blue, glowing light that flickered in and out. Around him, the Inventor saw the purple and green humanoids rushing to and fro, projecting holograms from their wrist-mounted tech and working at supercomputer terminals. He couldn’t move–this was only a projection, after all–but each time he saw the ship’s bridge, the Inventor craved the chance to see the view from the windows. A scientist could only dream.

“It’s busy today, Edison,” said the crewman in charge, approaching the Inventor hologram with a practiced calm. “So, now that you can see what’s happening…why did you fail?”

“That’s a loaded question, Raksor,” The Inventor replied. “And it looks like your crew is themselves failing at this moment.”

“It’s the opposite. We’ve stumbled onto something that could turn the tide in our efforts.”

“Right, right. Subjugation of humanity.” The Inventor rolled his eyes. “That whole thing.”

“Walk with me,” Raksor said. He raised a pointed finger, and the Inventor’s hologram followed beside the Skrull commander. They left the bridge, moved through the crowded corridor, and came to a massive elevator. Raksor and the Inventor entered, and down they went. “You’re fighting children, right, Edison?”

“I…yes.” No need to correct him. Children sounded better than teenage girls.

“And…you lost?”

The Inventor gestured to his bruises, broken beak, and shredded clothes. “I didn’t wake up like this, Raksor.”

“That’s what gets me about Earth,” Raksor said. “Once you get past the human heroes, you get the infant heroes. And after them, you have to deal with Captain Marvel, or the Guardians of the Galaxy…but for once, luck shines on the Skrull empire.”

The elevator doors whisked open. The Inventor was awed by the sight of a blue-and-gold suit of armor that hung in a glass tube, rotating while sensors displayed all manner of information. His hologram continued to follow Raksor into a side room. Restraints lined the far walls, and Skrull soldiers stood at attention with their guns steady.

The Inventor was startled at the scene, and at their captive in particular. “Who’s this…boy?” He asked.

And indeed, the captive was just a boy. No older than Kamala or the Squirrel Girl. The slightest hint of facial hair peered out on his pointed face. He was shirtless, revealing a toned physique. (The Inventor had yet to meet an overweight superhero.)

But it was the boy’s startling gray eyes that caught The Inventor’s attention.

“My name is Sam Alexander of the Nova Corps,” the boy said. “And believe me, I’m going to kill all of you.”

“He’s been saying that,” Raksor said.

The Skrull casually crossed the room. He locked eyes with the prisoner, and then WHOK! A green fist dug deep into Sam Alexander’s stomach. The boy tried to keel over, but the restraints held him taut against the wall.

“Talos wants us to bring him to high command,” Raksor continued. “But if we’re going to take Jersey City anyway, maybe there’s a…what’s that word? Starts with an ‘s’. It means to fight well with the opportunities available?”

“‘Strategy’.”

“Right. There’s a strategy here! Gather what augmented humans you have left. We strike this afternoon.”

“My men won’t have a chance to prepare, Raksor.”

“Neither will those children,” Raksor countered. “Listen closely.”

The Inventor hung onto every word.

After their conversation, the Skrull snapped his fingers. The blue hologram vanished from his ship. With a startling flash of white, The Inventor realized he had been returned to his body.

The Inventor limped back onto the main street, his clothes stinking of the alley. He would make one final phone call. Then he would assemble his forces.

“Yes, sir?” The augmented human said on the other line. Their current base was located in an abandoned underground garage. It wasn’t a fancy starship. It didn’t have a prisoner’s quarters. But at least the Inventor’s augments knew what a strategy was. “We’re awaiting orders for the counter-attack.”

“Excellent. Keep the fighters on standby. I need some of our…acquired information.”

“Sir, the data from the high school was interrupted. Corruption from the process…”

“No, no. I need our contact from Control.”

The augment stuttered. “Control? I assume you wish us to contact him?”

“Of course. I’ll be at our base inside the hour. Have him waiting.”

The Inventor threw the phone to the ground and smashed it underfoot. A newfound confidence soothed his rage and filled him with purpose.

He knew how to beat them this time.

…At first, it was just Kamala and Squirrel Girl. Underestimated thorns in his side, particularly after that incident with the Tinkerer.

Then it was Kamala and Squirrel Girl, and another Spider-Person gallivanting around the Rand building…and now they had a machine that could best him in hand-to-hand combat.

The realization hit him: while Squirrel Girl was their leader and powerhouse, she wasn’t what made them so irritating. It was how they kept growing….like an infection. Like the Avengers and the X-Men and so many other teams, their strength was in their ability to make friends.

The Inventor cackled.

The so-called Rising Girls would be dead inside of 24 hours.

…

…

…

“It’s that signal again,” Peni said. “I’ve almost got it…gah! It broke off. This encryption is something else…”

Doreen’s room had been divided into three segments overnight: the far window where Gwen took in the view, the computer and screens where Peni typed vigorously, and the bed, where Doreen had lain unmoving the entire night. Kamala sat on the bed beside Doreen, hugging her legs to her chest.

Her phone stared up at her. The alarm was about to blare again. Kamala hit ‘snooze’.

Gwen took the last slice of cheese & pepperoni and chucked the empty box aside. “You know, if you don’t want to go to school, you don’t have to go,” she said.

“No lies told!” Peni wrang her fingers out and took a long breath. “I stopped going to school in the ninth grade. That worked out pretty well!”

“You don’t even know what I was getting at, Peni.”

“Sure I do, Gwendolyne, ole’ chum! It was about how school is the worst and dropping out to manage an indie tech company was the best–”

“No, that was the subtext. It was about not having to care about…everything, all the time.” Gwen waved a hand in the air. Her white costume transitioned into a plain white shirt, a casual pair of denim jeans, and black converse. “You’re just one person, Kamala. Something superheroes learn is that we have to pick our battles.”

“Oh! This is about battles. What, do you have a bully at school?” Peni asked Kamala.

Gwen ignored her and continued. “That reminds me, Kamala. We need to get you a mask if you’re gonna keep doing this. I wonder if…”

Kamala’s words were an angry mumble into her knees. Peni tilted her head in concern. “Kamala? I didn’t hear–”

“Are you two insane?!” Kamala shot to her feet. “Doreen’s been beaten half to death twice in like, seventy-two hours. There’s a bird-head guy out there leading an army of cyborg spies. I’m lying to my parents, and-and-and you’re just hanging out!”

“Kamala, you’re screaming.”

“I am screaming! You’re from a whole other dimension! You just formed your own clothes by thinking it!” She threw her arms in the air at Peni. “And I don’t even know what your deal is. How many super-people are in Jersey City?!”

Gwen and Peni watched as the adrenaline faded from Kamala’s body. She sat back down on the mattress and barely managed to hide her face before bursting into tears.

The computer’s screens came alive! Peni turned back to the mouse and keyboard, her keystrokes sounding like the pouring rain.

Gwen took a deep breath. A slow grin spread from ear to ear. “Hey, Kamala?”

“…What do you want?”

“I’m kinda hungry, actually. Wanna walk with me?”

Kamala was silent.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Gwen sang. “Just nod if you want to come along.”

After a moment, Kamala nodded.

She hadn’t meant to blow up at Gwen and Peni. None of this had been their fault.

They weren’t the reason Kamala had been given these powers.

They weren’t the reason Kamala decided to try and make a difference with these powers.

And at the end of the day, those were the only reasons why she was walking in downtown Jersey City with a Spider-Person from an alternate dimension. It was something she chose.

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely you chose this,” Gwen said. “But it’s not like you deserve this.”

“Yeah, exactly! I…wait. What?”

“Didn’t see that coming, huh?” Gwen smiled. “You’re not a victim for letting it all out. These last few days have sucked. They have really, really sucked.”

“You’re not…wrong?”

“I’m really not.” The girls crossed the quiet street, and Gwen looked left and right to make sure they were alone. “So, I was bitten by a radioactive spider, right? Strength, agility, speed, wall-climbing, all that stuff. Right? But check this out.

Gwen touched her pointer finger to the streetlight. It came on and off, with no stickiness or resistance whatsoever. “That’s not me being neat, Kamala. I lost my powers once before, kinda almost-permanently.”

Kamala’s eyebrows shot up. “You did?”

“Yep. And before that, I was using tech from the bad guys to get short bursts of powers. This symbiote gives me my current abilities, and it’s kinda the best powerset I’ve had. What I’m trying to say is, this life is gonna get to you, and it’s gonna bring you to your knees. If you don’t vent and be nice to yourself, you won’t get to the part where it all makes sense.”

“Your life makes sense?”

“Hey, it makes sense to me.” Gwen and Kamala started walking again. “So, what makes sense to you, Kamala?”

Kamala laughed cynically. “None of this makes sense to me.”

“Well, I’ll put it differently. What can you live with? Because you can’t be someone’s daughter and a good student and a hero and who know how many other things.”

“…I can’t leave Doreen. She’s done so much for me, and now she’s hurt so badly…b-but I can’t miss school. Doreen wouldn’t want me to get in trouble for not going. She’s supposed to be my tutor.”

“Yikes. Must be some heck of a tutor.”

“Who are you telling?” Kamala joked.

He had followed behind them since they left the school the day before.

He’d watched the battle on the rooftop. The Inventor might have been overcome by literal teenagers, but they weren’t just any teenagers. They could work together, and they could fight. He’d have to watch out for that.

So instead of attacking, like the orders from the Skrulls had been, took the morning and he waited. And observed.

The blond one–Spider-Woman–and Kamala Khan went into one of the many hip and colorful coffee houses decorating this side of Jersey City. Kamala was different from when he knew her. She was walking taller. Looking baristas in the eye. Hell, she wasn’t afraid to pay for her own food anymore.

The two girls split some sure-to-be-overpriced muffins. Twenty minutes later, they were walking back the way they had come.

He took to the rooftops. Kamala wouldn’t notice him, but you didn’t underestimate a spider-person’s awareness.

“I think…I think I’m gonna be on my own for a little,” Kamala told Spider-Woman. They had stopped outside of an apartment building. He knew Kamala didn’t live there; he knew her address.

“Hey, no worries,” the Spider-Woman said. “Remember what I told you, okay?”

Kamala took a heavy exhale. “What you choose versus what you deserve. I got it.”

“Nah, not yet. But you will,” Spider-Woman said, with one of those knowing superhero smiles. God, it made him sick.

Spider-Woman went inside the building, and Kamala Khan was alone. It was time for his entrance. He let her go two block down the road–by an empty convenience store and a boarded-up retail space–and dropped down, silently.

“Hey there, Kamala Khan,” he said. He pulled his red hood down, revealing his small-but-mighty shock of an afro.

He saw the shock run through her body. Kamala turned to face him with clenched fists and bent elbows. She was ready to square up, for sure.

…She wouldn’t win. But that’s not what this was about.

“It’s been a minute,” he said.

“It has,” Kamala said. “…Hi, Miles.”

 

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