BOOM!
A flash of emerald light streaked across the night sky, a fleeting meteor that caused a few pedestrians to look up from the bustling streets below. It was gone as quickly as it came, and most dismissed it as a trick of the light. After all, what were the chances of seeing a planetoid soaring over New York City?
But Gwen Stacy knew it wasn't an illusion.
Because just a few seconds ago, as she was bracing for an impact that would have turned her and the mysterious falling boy into a Jackson Pollock painting on the pavement, he had suddenly erupted in that same green light, transforming into a colossal, sentient planet. He had his own moons, his own atmosphere, and most importantly, his own field of gravity, which he had used to gently halt their terminal velocity from a distance.
Now, she was trapped in that very field, an unwilling satellite caught in a slow, disorienting orbit around him. Below them, the city lights twinkled like a distant galaxy. With the cover of night, the massive, rocky being that was Ben floated them towards the dark expanse of Central Park, gently setting her down on the grass before the green light flared again, shrinking him back down to human size.
The moment her feet touched solid ground, the world began to spin. Gwen ripped the lower half of her mask off, bent over, and was violently sick.
Ben stood there, watching her retch. "You know, that hurts my feelings a little."
After a moment, Gwen straightened up, wiping her mouth with the back of her glove, her face pale. "Sorry," she coughed, pulling the mask back into place. "Got a little… planet-sick." She paused, her eyes, hidden behind the wide lenses of her mask, studying him with intense caution. "You have your own orbit. What are you? What was that glowing light? And why did you appear falling out of the sky?" she demanded, her voice a rapid-fire burst of questions.
As she spoke, her body subtly shifted into a defensive stance. It was a slight adjustment, but to Ben's own enhanced senses, it was as loud as a gunshot. She was ready to web him to a tree at the slightest provocation.
Go ahead and try, Ben thought with a flicker of amusement. Gravattack isn't afraid of a little webbing, but it's a nightmare to clean off these rock plates.
He decided a more direct approach was needed to de-escalate. He was still connected to Gravattack's calm, planetary consciousness. He simply raised a hand, and a ripple of dark green energy pulsed from his palm.
In an instant, gravity intensified a hundredfold.
Gwen gasped as an invisible force slammed down on her, buckling her knees and pressing her flat against the soft earth like a bug under a thumb.
"Calm down, Gwen Stacy," Ben said, his voice as patient and unhurried as a shifting continent. The Galvan species that Gravattack belonged to possessed lifespans measured in eons; they were not prone to impulse or anger, and Ben could feel that profound calm influencing him.
Gwen, however, was anything but calm. The crushing weight was one thing, but the fact that this creature knew her name sent a spear of pure terror through her. He knows who I am. What if he hurts my dad? Her mind immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion. This had to be a trap. This monster had targeted her from the very beginning.
"I… I don't know who you're talking about," she grunted, the words forced from her lungs. It was a pathetic lie, and she knew it, but it was all she had.
Ben sighed, realizing his "friendly" attempt at immobilization might have been a bit much. The sheer power of a Gallilean was difficult to fine-tune. "I think there's been a misunderstanding," he said, sensing her panic. From her questions about the glowing passage, he was piecing it together. She was just as lost as he was.
He had only seen the animated movies once or twice, but he remembered the basics. "This is a parallel universe, isn't it?"
He let the thought settle. The Spider-Verse movie took place on Earth-1610, the home of Miles Morales. That universe's Peter Parker was a blond, successful, happily married hero who had everything… until he died saving the city. If he was right, a quick look at this world's Peter Parker would confirm everything.
And if I remember correctly, he thought, a slight frown creasing his brow, the temporal distortion from the collider explosion meant Gwen arrived here a full week before the main events of the story. Things are about to get very messy.
Events involving time travel and multiversal paradoxes were a headache he didn't need. He knew Kingpin was the villain behind it all, but if he acted prematurely, he could cause the very collapse he was trying to prevent, a domino effect that could threaten more than just this one reality. Dealing with Enara and Ouyana for access to Alien X was a debate every single time. It was better to play it safe.
I'll wait for the main event to kick off, he decided. But now that I'm here, there's no way I'm letting this universe's blond Peter die. He had a soft spot for all the Peters. One was his cousin; all of them were his responsibility. He felt a brief pang of sadness for the monstrous Lizard-Peter from Gwen's home reality, then looked back down at the girl currently being pressed into the soil. She looked like a wriggling white grub.
"Oops, sorry. Forgot about you," he said, scratching the back of his head as he cancelled the transformation.
The moment the green light faded and Ben returned to his human form, the crushing gravity vanished. Gwen felt the release as a sudden, dizzying lightness. She saw him standing there, unguarded, a normal-looking teenager. It was her chance.
The sky had cleared, the rain had stopped, and Gwen felt she could do this all day. She launched herself forward, a strand of spider-silk shooting from her wrist.
The triumphant capture she envisioned, however, did not happen.
Ben sidestepped the web with casual ease. In the same motion, he raised his own hand and fired three rapid-fire shots of webbing. The first two expertly gummed up the mechanisms of Gwen's web-shooters before she could even think to fire again.
The third one, with humiliating precision, hit her squarely in the face.
The force of the impact snapped her head back, sending her spinning through the air before she landed in an undignified heap on the grass.
"That's… spider-silk," she sputtered, peeling the sticky substance from her mask, her mind reeling in disbelief. "How is that possible…" A familiar, tingling buzz suddenly erupted at the base of her skull—her spider-sense, screaming not with danger, but with a baffling sense of recognition. Her eyes went wide.
"Wait," she breathed. "You too?"
"You're just figuring that out now?" Ben asked, spreading his hands. "My spider-sense was screaming at me the whole time we were falling."
The realization dawned on Gwen, and the tension drained from her shoulders. "Oh," she said, an embarrassed flush creeping up her neck. "My spider-sense was just telling me I was about to become a crater, so I kind of tuned everything else out."
She scrambled to her feet, awkwardly picking bits of webbing off her suit. "I can't believe there's someone else like me. And that giant rock monster… How do you know my name?"
Though her guard was down, her mind was still buzzing with questions.
"Easy, one thing at a time," Ben said, holding up a hand to forestall the inevitable flood of queries. "My name is Ben Parker. And like you, I came to this universe through that portal."
Gwen froze completely, the name "Parker" hitting her like a physical blow. "What did you say?" she whispered. For her, the name was an open wound, an eternal pain associated with the death of her childhood best friend. She had become Spider-Woman but had failed to save Peter, a failure she believed had driven him to the desperate measures that had turned him into the Lizard and ultimately cost him his life.
Ben, sensing her pain, softened his tone. "I told you, we're from different parallel universes. In my universe, Peter Parker is my cousin. And we're both Spider-Man." He pulled out his phone, found a Daily Bugle article featuring a picture of the two of them in costume, and handed it to her.
Gwen stared at the screen. "Your phone works in a parallel universe?" she said, a note of wonder in her voice. "My phone barely gets a signal."
"Primus Technologies," Ben said simply. "We use quantum entanglement for our communication network. Distance isn't an issue."
She scrolled through the article, her surprise growing with every word. A world where Peter was alive, where he wasn't alone, where he had a cousin… it was almost too much to comprehend. The Peter in the photos looked different from the boy she knew, but seeing him smiling and alive still brought a painful lump to her throat.
"Wait," she said, looking up, a new horror dawning on her. "If Peter is alive in your world… what about me? Please tell me I didn't turn into a giant lizard monster."
"What? No," Ben said, looking genuinely confused. "In our universe, Gwen Stacy is just a classmate of ours. A brilliant one, but normal." He shrugged. "Parallel universes have similarities, but they're not exact copies. We might all be called the same, but our appearances, personalities, and experiences are different." This Gwen, for instance, was smaller and feistier than the one he knew back home.
She was a genius and understood the concept immediately. "But it seems… you don't exist in my universe," she said softly, looking around the unfamiliar park. The strange-yet-familiar environment made her feel small and nervous. She subconsciously took a small step closer to Ben, his calm demeanor a small anchor in this sea of uncertainty.
"That portal," she asked, her voice quiet. "Why did it send us here? Can we get back?" Because Ben had been so calm and knowledgeable from the start, she found herself instinctively relying on him.
"First things first," Ben said, his mind already working on a plan. "We need to find this universe's Spider-Man. I have a strong theory, but I need to see their Peter Parker in person to be sure."
Gwen nodded, then paused. "How are you so sure this universe's Spider-Man is Peter? Why not me? Or someone else?"
"In the vast majority of universes, Peter Parker is the anchor for the Spider-Totem," Ben explained. "People like you and me, we're the variations. The exceptions that prove the rule. I guess even the Web of Destiny needs a little diversity now and then to keep things interesting." He was fine with it; Miles Morales was a great hero. Spider-Man wears a mask because anyone could be under it, he thought. It was a sentiment he truly believed.
As they talked, they began to walk, and with a shimmer of nanotechnology, Ben's clothes morphed into a sleek, black Prime suit. Gwen's eyes widened with envy. She was a genius, but she was still struggling to balance her life as a superhero with being a normal person, let alone finding time to design advanced tech.
"I'll make you one when we have time," Ben said casually.
Two figures, one black and one white, swung into the New York sky, their movements a synchronized, acrobatic dance against the brightly lit cityscape. As they moved, Gwen noticed the details that made this New York so different from her own. For one, images of this world's Spider-Man were plastered everywhere—on billboards, on the sides of buses, on giant screens in Times Square. He was a bona fide celebrity.
"Wow," Gwen said, a note of bitter annoyance in her voice. "He's a superstar." In her world, despite everything she did, she was a wanted fugitive, a cop-killer in the eyes of the public and, most painfully, her own father. "Is it even legal for a Spider-Man to be this popular?"
"It's definitely not rational," Ben agreed, his eyes scanning the city, absorbing data. "I think it's because the Daily Bugle in this world isn't pulling its weight."
An idea, darkly humorous, began to form in his mind. As long as J. Jonah Jameson was on the job, no Spider-Man could ever get too comfortable. Ben had come to believe that Jameson's relentless antagonism was, in a twisted way, a form of cosmic protection. The curse of the Spider-Totem seemed to dictate that a Spider's life could never be too perfect, lest a greater tragedy befall them to balance the scales. Jameson's slander kept Peter grounded, miserable, and therefore, safe.
Ben made a mental note. When he got back to his own universe, he was going to buy the Daily Bugle, merge it with every other news outlet in the city, and launch an unprecedented, multi-platform smear campaign against his own cousin. It was for his own good.
As for this universe's Peter? He had nothing to fear. Because a new, far more effective class of protector had just arrived.
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