Meanwhile, in the Multiverse

[READER BEWARE! If you haven't seen Spider-Man: Into/Across the Spider-Verse, this might not be the stroke story for you! Spoilers abound! Not just for those flicks, but for Marvel lore at large and the Little Black Duck's other Tales to Admonish!]

SPIDER-GWEN
Issue No. 121
"SPOT Checks & SILK Stalkings!"

** SELF-EDITOR'S NOTE: This scene takes place during the events of Spider-Gwen #65, "Team Up with the ULTIMATE Spider-Man!" -LBD **

"That costume is pretty tight," Miles Morales said to Gwen Stacy once they'd been on the Hudson Valley Explorer Express bound for Queens for all of fifteen minutes.

"Excuse me?" she scoffed.

As Spider-Woman, Gwen had just bailed this absolute newbie and his has-been quasi-mentor out of a disastrous raid on Alchemax, the research facility that had built the collider that'd flung her into this off-kilter slice of reality. Nothing young Mr. Morales had done out in the woods during his superhero debut had really inspired a lot of confidence... and now he was, what, hitting on her? Again?!

Okay, sure, when Gwen had first met the guy back at his bizarro Brooklyn version of Visions Academy, she might have been a little flirty, but that was just to gain his trust until she could figure out what the heck was going on with the whole different universe thing she was going through.

No, wait. That sounded so mercenary. Gwen wasn't like that. Mary Jane Watson, the lead singer in her band, was like that.

It's not like Miles wasn't funny. And maybe even kind of a little bit cute in a twenty-first century Urkel sort of way. But she'd thought that before she had to shave off a huge swath of her hair because he couldn't stop sticking to it. And way before someone told her that he was a friggin' freshman!

Gross.

Seriously, what was a freshman doing in AP Physics II? And the way the kid always stared at her. That constant hopeful gleam since she'd laughed at his awful joke about relativity. Gwen didn't need him getting the wrong idea.

When they boarded the bus after fleeing Alchemax's undeniably beautiful Saratoga County campus, she'd only sat across the row from Morales because she didn't want to sit anywhere near that other Spider-Guy. It was weird enough that Spider-Woman was a dude in this universe, and even crazier that Spider-Man was some version of her best friend. Seeing blond, studly, superhero Peter Parker all over the news in this demented dimension was a trip. Seeing sad, middle-aged, kind-of-given-up Peter Parker in the flesh was something else entirely... A little too unbelievably real.

For over a year, Gwen had woken each morning with the fervent doomed hope that she might see Peter Parker's face one more time. So of course, that could only come in the form of some warped monkey's paw wish. Classic Stacy luck.

"That costume's tight," Miles told her again. "I mean, it's dope, you know?" He frowned. "Does that mean something different where you're from?"

Oh.

"No," Gwen said, unclenching a little. "It almost means the same thing."

"Love that black and white thing you got going," he went on. "And the fuchsia and robin egg highlights? Chef's kiss. For real."

"Thanks?" Nobody had ever complimented Gwen on her spider-suit before. At least not that she knew of. All the comments on the Daily Bugle articles about Spider-Woman on her world ranged from vulgar death threats to uncomfortably sexual assertions about her body, so she'd learned pretty early on to stop reading them. The headlines were bad enough on their own.

"Don't get me wrong," Miles continued, looking down at his cheap store-bought Spidey Halloween costume. "The red and blue is classic for a reason, but when I'm Spider-Man, I'mma do it different. I'm thinking, like, all black, but with these big white eyes, and this wraparound white spider on my chest and back."

"That could be cool," she agreed.

Sure, back then, Gwen was still mad about her hair, but that was before she made it back home thanks to Miles, and everyone, even her dad, told her how cool and "punk rock" it looked and she just pretended like she'd done it on purpose. Besides, it wasn't really the hair that was bothering her back on the bus. What actually cheesed Gwen off was that she'd realized he was trying to put some stupid move on her back at school when the whole thing with her hair got messy. Ned Leeds had tried that same shit with her once back at her Visions Academy, and he'd ended up flipped over her head, too. And that was before Gwen had been bitten by a radioactive spider.

Whoever told Miles that crap would work on women was either an idiot or the smoothest criminal...

Miles had tried Uncle Aaron's dumb shoulder touch thing, and not only had it failed to work, it'd been a complete disaster. The F in fiasco. How could he have known he'd get his fingers stuck in the hot new girl's hair? How was that a thing he was dealing with right now?

The shoulder touch hadn't worked, so, with the shocking revelation that they were both spider-powered people out of the way -- some obvious common ground -- Miles was going with the Rio Morales Method: "Just be yourself, little man," his mom would say. "Don't be like every other brother out there, always playing, always hustling. You know what works? Truth. A connection."

Miles was choosing to ignore the rest of that conversation.

"So that's how Dad got your attention?" he'd asked her. "He was just himself?"

"Exactly, mijo," Rio insisted. "No games, no moves. He just strolled up to me all confident, put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Hey.' And the way he looked at me?" His mother smiled at the memory. "That was it. I fell in love."

So Miles had told Gwanda -- No, Gwen. Her real name was Gwen, right?-- that he dug her costume, because he did. Now he was trying to think of something else to say. Something else true. All he'd come up with was, "Hi, I'm Miles Morales. I might pee my pants if you don't talk to me." That probably wasn't going to fly. "So there's this doughnut place in Bushwick on Humboldt..." he started to tell her instead, shooting his shot.

Oh, god, he's asking me out, Gwen panicked. "So, what was on this computer that you two needed from Alchemax so bad?" she asked, fending him off. But what she really wanted to know was how he knew how much she loved doughnuts.

The kid took it as well as he could. Miles just told her about the collider and this override key that apparently 80s-baby Spider-guy had broken somehow, so they needed to make a new one. Then he told her he was sorry about Peter... Her Peter. The one who'd died on her world. The reason she didn't make friends anymore.

Gwen had forgotten she'd even told him about all that. It was just so weird being in a place you didn't belong. When nothing made any sense, you could say anything. Miles seemed to understand that, which made him easier to talk to than she liked to admit.

Things happened pretty fast after they got off the bus. New spider-folks, surprise villain attacks, et cetera. Standard Spider-Woman stuff, really. Except for Miles. Gwen had always thought that he had potential, but he really stepped up. When everyone gave up on him -- everyone who should have given him a chance... everyone who should have stood by him... even her -- he still pulled it together, showing up out of nowhere to save the day in this repurposed red and black costume -- not the black and white he'd described, but it was still pretty cool.

Which is why, after it was all over and she returned to her universe, safe and sound more or less, it didn't even take a whole week for Gwen to find herself wishing she'd just gone to that doughnut shop. She still felt that way four years later.

** See? All characters are 18 or over for the upcoming sexy bits! -LBD **

Gwen was always a little wary of these autonomous multiversal jumps when she got the chance to really think about them. So many members of the Spider-Society were nerdy scientists, and there was a running theory that every time you punched one of these divets in the space-time continuum, there was a trifurcating quantum shift that split you into up to three different variants of yourself that would all co-exist in fragile parallel lives until or unless one version of events stabilized. So, there was a one-in-three chance that you'd end up in some tiny bubble universe with subtle changes you wouldn't even notice, a temporary triplicate of yourself in a flashpoint transience of unlikely possibility that could cease to be at any moment. But in the face of Canon Killers, ending up in one of these fractal anomaly-natured finite inter-cosmoses -- there had to be a shorter name for that, right? -- was a relatively minor concern. It wasn't a prevailing theory or anything, and hypothetically, if it happened, you wouldn't know until it was too late.

Besides, Gwen had smaller, but much more annoying fish to fry.

"Jessica gave you the 1610 job?" Silk jeered at Gwen when she almost bumped into her on her way out of the assignment bureau on Earth-928, Nueva York. Cindy Moon, the spider-jerk of some dimension Gwen couldn't remember -- or was she the tertiary spider-person of one of the over spidered-strands that made her redundant? -- never just said "Hi," to her. It was always some accusation. "I assume you're backing up Agent 138," Cindy sighed. "Do we really need two spiders on that?"

"No, Hobie's not partnering with me on this one," Gwen asserted. Only Moon would call him "Agent 138." You didn't really need all the universal designations with the non-Peters. First names were usually fine.

"So Ghost-Spider's going on her first solo mission..."

"Do not call me that," Gwen replied. She hated that name. She was Spider-Woman, damn it. She hated that Ghost-Spider name almost as much as she hated Cindy Moon. Silk had joined the dedicated transdimensional network of spider-powered heroes multiversal Spider-Society that maintained the integrity of the Arachnohumanoid Polymultiverse maybe a month before she had, but Cindy always acted like Gwen worked for her or something. Sure, Moon had seniority, but the first time Gwen had been thrown into an incursion, she managed to enroll in a private academy and infiltrated a high-tech R&D complex facility without Lyla, the Society's all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hacking artificial intelligence in her ear the whole time. She'd done that crap with nothing but her wits and guts and a scant few pubescent feminine wiles... So, no, she didn't really feel like taking shit off Silk.

But in this case, for once, the accusation wasn't completely unfounded. Jess Drew, the top Spider-Woman, hadn't really given her the Earth-1610 mission, but Gwen had begged for it once she saw it pop up on Lyla's alert algorithm. Because maybe Gwen knew Jess' access codes the same way she'd always known Captain George Stacy's password when she needed to access NYPD networks back on her erstwhile home dimension of Earth-65.

And yeah, sure, maybe the original case officer Lyla assigned had been fucking Cindy Moon. What of it?

Gwen suspected that Silk's real problem with her was all about Spider-Punk, which was stupid. Moon had hooked up with Hobie a few times and got clingy in ways he felt spider-folk shouldn't. He didn't believe in monogamy or betraying unrealistic expectations of commitment -- which was clearly just his excuse to be a bit of a man-whore -- so he'd kinda ghosted her. But Hobie still worked and hung out with Gwen because they weren't like that, and Cindy got jealous. It was silly straight-up mean-girl bullshit she didn't have time for.

Spider-Woman had earned this gig. She'd given up everything for this team, and she'd definitely pulled her weight. Sure, she hadn't had much choice in the matter, but that hadn't made it any easier. She couldn't go home to her father. Not now that he knew she was Spider-Woman. Jess had said that maybe someday, if Gwen was good enough and if it came up, she could take a job in Miles' universe and maybe check up on him from afar. Possibly. Well, Gwen had finished that TVA nightmare on time's jagged edge practically single-handedly. Sure, Scarlet Spider had been there, too, but most of the time, even when Ben Reilly was there, he wasn't really there, you know? So the least she deserved was to see her one friend in the multiverse, right? Even if they thought he was dangerous.

And this was totally going to end up a simple observe-and-report mission. And if this Spot guy needed to be handled, she'd do it right. And if she happened to cross paths with a certain someone while picking up doughnuts on Humboldt, she had a hard time believing there'd be a total event collapse or anything... Everything would be fine.

Still, Gwen was glad Peter wasn't around. Peter-616 -- who seemed so much less sad and given-up these days -- didn't need to know about this just yet. "You can't see him or tell Miles about any of this," had been, like, the third big thing Peter had said to her when they reunited after she joined up. It came right after, "Hey, it's so good to see you again, you look great! Have I shown you a picture of my daughter yet?" Peter-616 was big about the baby pics. Even when the wall-crawling rugrat was right there to see. Everybody kind of hated him for it.

"Anyhoozle, probably better get dimension-hopping," she told Cindy. "Multiverse ain't gonna save itself, am I right?"

"Good luck, Ghost-Spider," Moon mock-saluted.

"Silk's a dumb name." There. Gwen had said it. "And I know all about you and Peter-67 in that photo lab."

Moon went white. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"He shouted 'Wallopin' web-snappers' right before he blew his load on your face," she told Cindy. That shut her up. "I saw the whole thing."

She wasn't surprised Silk hadn't noticed her. Gwen wasn't even sure why they still had dark rooms at the Nueva York compound -- even the least technologically evolved spiders who took pictures as part of their cover switched to the digital cameras on their watches eventually -- but they did. It'd become one of her favorite places to catch a few winks between missions since she was more or less unhoused at the moment. She'd just web up a cozy hammock for a quick one-hour nap. Her spidey-sense would go off like an alarm right before the webbing dissolved and she fell on her butt. It was practically a perfect system. Moon had been way too busy tugging Peter-67's tights down to swallow his cock to see Gwen tucked up in a corner, pissed to be roused.

But having finally said all that Cindy, Gwen knew she needed to hurry -- especially now that Silk was all butthurt about it. That thirsty bitch was such a little whiner -- but she still took time to freshen up before the big quantum leap of faith. She still hadn't figured out what she was going to say when saw him.

"Hey, Miles. Got a minute?"

No. That was so friggin' dumb. Gwen would definitely come up with something better.

MILES MORALES: SPIDER-MAN
Annual No. 4
"FINGERBANG on the Williamsburg Bank Building!"

"Don't forget about that thing with your parents at the guidance counselor's office," Ganke Lee told Miles as he pulled on his spider-suit in their dorm room after Civics.

"I am all over that," Miles assured him, even though he'd forgotten.

"And you got the cake for your dad's party?"

"I am getting the cake for my dad's party," Miles insisted, loading his web-shooters. He'd remembered about that at least. He hadn't managed to order ahead of time, but that was fine. He'd make it work. His pops was getting promoted to captain. It was a big deal. "I'm just gonna grab a beef patty from that place up the block. I'm starving."

"I keep telling you to eat breakfast," Ganke said. "Most important meal of the day."

"Gracias, mami," Spider-Man sighed, webbing his way out the window.

Miles had told his roommate at Brooklyn Visions Academy who he was because they shared a teeny tiny living space, and keeping that kind of secret in those close quarters seemed like a tall order. It didn't help that the day he discovered his powers, Miles had ripped up one of Ganke's True Life Tales of Spider-Man comics, so he felt really guilty. The value of those early issues had really skyrocketed after the death of Peter Parker. But the fact Ganke was now living with the all-new wall-crawler should have made up for that, right? The guy was a little obsessed with his predecessor, so when Miles ran into Leap Frog or the Ringer, Ganke had the lowdown about how the original web-banger took those clowns down. Sometimes, he even found ViewTube videos.

But as helpful as that was, Miles had expected a little more from Spider-Man's amigo, who was rather insistent that he was never gonna be the webhead's "guy in the chair," whatever that meant. Sometimes, an anonymous call to the cops about some hood strung up on a streetlamp was treated like an impossible chore. That drove him nuts at the end of their second year together, but by this point, Miles had a much better attitude about it. His friendship with Ganke really wasn't about all the stupid Spider-Man stuff. Probably the reason for all the boundaries. And they'd been lovelorn losers together through their years at BVA, which is why the guy felt free to give Miles a lot of unsolicited advice about his lovelife.

"Bro, you got that rizz the ladies inexplicably dig!" the ever-never-reliable Ganke Lee had insisted at the beginning of the trimester. "Do you know how many girls come around here just to ask me about you?"

"Aw, man, I'm sorry," he said. He'd been digging through his junk drawer to find his long range spider-tracer detector so he could hunt down the Bombshells at the time, so Miles was only half listening. "That's got to be annoying."

"Are you kidding?" Ganke laughed. "Turns out having the behind-the-scenes deets about the mysterious Miles Morales -- whom I always say I'm pretty sure isn't a drug dealer -- is a great icebreaker. I'm doing fine. As for you..."

"Ganke, I ain't got time for girls, man."

"It doesn't take as much time as you think," he insisted. "Not when you make it quality time. It's a work-life balance thing, you know? And, uh, maybe you could focus less time on all the unavailable women you may or may not have met..."

"Gwen is real!"

"I know she is, buddy," Ganke assured him. "I'm almost convinced I maybe saw her that one time, but it's been a few years, and based on everything you told me, the only chance of you seeing her again is if someone tears a hole in the universe that could kill everyone and everything, right?"

"That's only kind of exactly the situation, yeah..."

"Call me selfish, but I don't know if the whole world needs to die just so some girl you haven't seen since you were a freshman might play with your dick," his roommate suggested. Miles knew he had a point... But Ganke had never really met Gwen. "Also, if you were a drug dealer, you could make a lot of money at this school. It's a serious problem. What about Barbara?"

"Barbara on the gymnastics team?"

"No, Barbara Rodriguez," Ganke explained with a guffaw. "Like you could get Barbara G... Barbara Rodriguez, however, doesn't think you're a drug dealer, she just thinks you're cute."

"Oh, Barbara Rodriguez." She was actually in his Civics class. And his mom would love her.

Miles had meant to try to make some time for Miss Rodriguez for a few weeks now, but that day, as usual, things got away from him. There was that villain-of-the-week at the bodega who could generate his own wormholes but wasn't smart enough to do anything clever with them. Dealing with that wannabe had made Miles late getting back for the meeting with the guidance counselor, which he had to duck out of for another stupid fight with the hole guy. One in which that dumbass actually kicked his own butt. Miles had gotten the cake, though, but he got slowed down punting the Armadillo off the Fifth Avenue Line, which just got him chewed out and grounded for two months by his parents for being late and missing his dad's big speech.