#crossthicc!miles morales

[twitchesandstitches]

A Spider Weaves

Reyes took the document handed to him and read it solemnly. “Gather the squad,” he said eventually. “We got important business to deal with.”

Some time later, Shockwave sat in his favored form of a rocket-propelled helicopter jet, slightly modified so it had a pair of legs, crude manipulators, and a forward section resembling a head. In deference to his look, it had but one eye. “I brought everyone not attending to other duties. What’s the matter?”

Reyes regarded the avalilable team: Harley Quinn, sprawing her body over Poison Ivy in a way that blocked out all light from above with their hyper curvy bodies. Eddie Brock, looking poker-faced as Venom grew into a massive framework that Brock poked out of like a gremlin operating a mech far too large for it. Ranamon was there, looking polite and keen, and Widowmaker had managed to find time for them, for once! Even Blue Diamond, having summoned a duplicate to travel with them, was there.

As far as anyone knew, he thought as he glanced across the sleepy suburban town they were operating out of these days, they were just a commune of friends who lived together. It was a good cover, mainly because it wasn’t technically wrong. But he’d wondered for a while why one of the Senior Partners had worked so hard to get them assigned to this part of the multiverse.

Given the orders, innocuous as they seemed, he suspected they had been part of someone’s larger plan for a while.

“The mission’s simple; we have to establish oruselves as superheroes, and respectable ones, within the next five years or so. We got some identities lined up to look cool, if we don’t have better ones.”

Ranamon looked puzzled. “Um. But why?”

Reyes gave her the document. “Seems that there’s someone of interest growing up in this area and one of the Senior Partners is very keen on him having good role models to learn from.”

Ranamon read, “A boy named Miles Morales is growing up in the area, right now. It is VERY IMPORTANT that he see what real heroes should act like, right away. Make sure he gets the right idea. If possible, forge a friendly rivalry with a local inventor who is using high-spectacle villainy to get attention for his inventions; it may be possible to turn him to the hero side by building a connection. He goes by The Prowler; real name Aaron Davis, but is hiding under the name Hobie Brown.’”

“Huh.” Eddie said. “We gotta be role models?” He shrugged, and the symbiote chimed in, “Not precisely what we are best at, yes?”

Blue Diamond considered this. “Who authorized this, exactly?”

Reyes squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, you know Waller... she doesn’t like revealing her hand, and keeps the Senior Partner’s identities pretty close unless they TELL us in person who they really are. But whoever it was? They signed it.”

Ranamon held out the document.

Where you might expect to see a signature, there the image of a small, stylized spider.

---------

In the realm of the gods, there was a spider.

Perhaps he looked like a man; a man of oldest West Africa, certainly. Maybe he wore a fancy purple suit with canary-yellow gloves. Maybe he was dressed in ritual garments, his mask evoking a spider, and his body decorated in elaborate paints of red and black, lined so that he seemed covered in webs.

And perhaps, if you looked him right, you saw a spider. A massive spider taller than a horse, eyes shining like jewels, or a tiny brown spider hiding beneath a leaf. Perhaps even a tall mixture of spider and man; a man who dreamed of being a spider? The first spider, clever enough to walk like a man did?

He was a god of old stories. The distinction was not important.

Here and now, old Anansi the spider weaved together a mask, humming to himself.

The mask was black, linked with red and hints of blue.

“Power and responsibility,” he said softly. “One comes with the other. It always does. Let me tell you a story... once upon a time, a man learned that the hard way.”

He glanced into the aether, reflectively.

“Maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe you just need an example to follow up to.”