When Spidey Met Oracle

"Oh! Oh! Almost!" he panted, still drilling her sphincter.

"I -- uhn! ah! -- nuh-know what you waaaant." She pulled his shirt up to his neck, exposing his torso. "Spider loooooves kitty's titties." Felicia fell forward, smashing her breasts into his chest. "Cum for kitty's sweet titties," she whispered into his ear, rubbing his nipples with hers.

Who was he to refuse? His dick pulsed as his boiling load spewed out.

"Good little fucktoy," she murmured when he was done, patting his head as she tenderly squirmed off of his cock. Now that she'd had her way with him, she cuddled up against his chest and dozed off. Content to feel her soft skin pressed onto his and exhausted, Spider-Man let himself fall into slumber. At that point, the two of them had been hooking up fairly regularly for a couple of months, but this was one of those rare times that they actually slept together...

Steady on, Spidey, he told himself in the present. Felicia's not here, which means she's probably in trouble.

Spider-Man checked the bathroom, and sure enough, there was that marble-tiled shower enclosure. He'd woken up alone that next day, which was typical for a morning after with Felicia, but this time, he heard the shower running. Neither his spider-sense nor the apartment's actual tenants were screaming, so he figured it was her, which he thought was weird at the time. He carefully crept out of bed to investigate and found her lathering her long legs with soap. "Good morning, sweetness," she practically sang when she saw him.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"If you really don't know, we might need to have a serious discussion about personal hygiene, man-friend," she teased, foaming up her flat sexy tummy.

"Shouldn't we hightail it out of here?" he asked, only slightly distracted as she started running the bar soap over her chest.

"Trust me, nobody's coming to interrupt us," she assured him. "It's Sunday morning, Spider. What's the rush?"

He really didn't have anywhere to be. He'd just gotten fired. But he couldn't really just hang out here with her in someone else's place, could he?

She seemed to sense his indecision and turned toward him then, leaning against the transparent shower pane. "Help me shampoo my hair?" she asked, her soapy tits pressed against the steamy glass. "If you're good, I might even make you breakfast."

"You know how to make wheatcakes?" he asked stripping out of his costume. The mask had to stay on, which would eventually mean a lot of damp breathing, but she liked it that way.

"I'm an eggs and sausage kind of girl," she informed him. "Now let's clean that dick first. Kitty's got needs..."

They got around to washing those long blonde tresses eventually, and afterward, true to her word, she started making breakfast, going so far as to brew them some coffee. Peter's guilt about eating out of another person's refrigerator was tempered by the all too distracting sight of Felicia padding around the kitchen in only an apron.

"I'll tidy up," she told him after he finished eating. "Don't worry, Spider. When I'm done, no one will ever know we were here."

"Do you need any help?" he asked as she took his plate to the sink.

"Nope," she smiled. "Feel free to swing off at your leisure."

It was one of his favorite memories of their recent time together. A titillating mix of their emotionally-detached screwing and her mocking sexpot rendition of the kind of domesticity Peter Parker had grown up with and yearned for. At the time, he'd thought it was the Black Cat trying to meet him halfway. Now he realized that it was probably just Felicia maintaining her usual morning routine of coffee and breakfast while keeping him in the dark. He could hardly blame her. It's not like he'd ever taken her back to his place, after all.

Honestly, that's what kept things between them so... charged in his mind. That constant tug and pull between complete transparency and unspoken expectation. It went both ways between them, each of them both fulfilled and denied in a dozen different ways at the same time from the same exchanges. If Ms. Marvel had invited Peter Parker to spend the night at her apartment, it would have meant one thing and one thing only. But for the Black Cat to bring Spider-Man back to her place after a scorching hot team-up -- all the while faking that it belonged to someone else -- made it something else entirely...

But he was getting distracted. He needed to find her, and clearly he was wasting his time here. He was all set to take off when he heard the beeping. A high-pitched tone coming from one of her dresser drawers. He yanked it open to find it bristling with a throng of panties. "Yikes!" Spider-Man said, slamming it closed. For all his worldly experience, at his heart he was still May Parker's prim and proper young gentleman. But there was still that infernal bleeping. He gently reopened the drawer and rooted through its frilly, satiny contents until he found something akin to a sci-fi Bluetooth headset. "The hell is this?" he wondered aloud.

"Spider-Man, this is Oracle," bellowed a slow, deep voice that sent chills down his spine. "If you want to see your girlfriend again, I'm afraid we're going to have to work together."

"There goes the friendly neighborhood," he groaned. "What do you know about Black Cat? Did you hurt her?"

"Hurt her? No!"

"Then why are you talking in kidnapper code?"

The voice from the machine sighed. A low, ominous sound. "I guess I can see how what I said before might lead you to that conclusion," it replied. "Felicia Hardy, aka 'Ashley Moon', aka 'The Black Cat' was working with me."

"Working with you?" he said. "Working with whom?"

"I told you," said the voice. "I'm Oracle."

"Never heard of you," Spider-Man replied.

"I'm a very private person," Oracle said. "In fact, would you please place the communicator in your ear so we can have this conversation a little more quietly?"

He took a long hard look at the device in his hand. "I'm not sure that's a good idea," he said. "I'm not even sure what this thing does."

"It's a communicator," Oracle told him. "I'm pretty sure I already mentioned that, Spider-Man."

"That's another thing," he said. "How do you know who I am? It doesn't feel like I'm being watched... My spider-sense would warn me if I was being watched..."

"I recognized your voice," Oracle told him. "Just put in the comm!"

"How do I know it's not rigged to explode or something?"

"Is it setting off your spider-sense?" Oracle asked, and Spider-Man slapped himself in the forehead. Why was he always so quick to gloat about how great it was to have an innate sense of impending danger? You've really gotta learn to keep that one under your hat, Pete, he admonished himself. It's been TEN YEARS.

The current calm of his spider-sense wasn't the most compelling argument -- it was notoriously spotty about just what constituted "impending danger," after all -- but he was running out of options. He slipped the communicator up under his mask.

"Okay," Spider-Man sighed once it was in place. "What'd you pay Black Cat to steal?"

"I didn't pay her to steal anything!" Oracle protested. "I just sent her on a mission that might have gotten her into some trouble."

"Right," Spider-Man replied. "What'd you pay her to steal?"

"She didn't steal anything," Oracle insisted. "She may, however, have appropriated some sensitive information belonging to a very dangerous man."

"That's just a fancy way of saying you paid her to steal something!"

"Do you want to talk semantics, or do you want to help me find her?"

"I can do both," Spider-Man said. "I'm an overachiever."

*

You're a smug jerk, Barbara thought. She couldn't believe she was having this conversation. She'd spent years trying to avoid this. And apparently, if she'd just asked Catwoman to make a Manhattan daytrip, she could have succeeded...

Spider-Man had never even heard of her?

Obviously, that was a good thing. There were too many people aware of Oracle's existence as it was. It had become a security risk over the years, so the fewer superheroes zipping around blathering about an information specialist on their side, the better. But Spider-Man tended to get around. She figured he would have heard at least a rumor by now...

"Just tell me what you see," she said, pulling herself together. "In the apartment."

"Uh, no signs of forced entry at the door or windows," he told her after what she assumed was a deep, cleansing breath. "No signs of a struggle..."

"Someone's been watching CSI," Barbara mused.

"I have a friend in the business," Spider-Man explained. "I've never been much of a detective, but I'm trying to get better."

Typical metahuman meathead, she thought to herself. Years of working under Bruce had tainted her against all these super-powered jocks who just punched their way through life. But as she brought the extensive dossier she'd compiled on Spider-Man up on one of her heads-up displays, she was reminded that he brought more than enhanced strength and speed to the table. There was a two-point difference in their respective IQs.

"Okay," she said, tying her hair up in a sloppy bun while she worked through the scenario. "So she probably wasn't taken from the apartment. But I'm guessing the communicator was stashed with her supplies. Any clues there?"

"Not really any clues there, nope," he explained. "No, bras either," he said a little bit softer.

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

"It was, um, in her underwear drawer," he admitted.

Of course it was, Barbara thought, rolling her eyes. She really might as well have gone with Selina. These cat burglar sex kittens were all exactly the same.

"And her Black Cat costume and gear's in a heap at the bottom of her coat closet," Spider-Man said. "Felicia's never been too traditional about the secret identity thing."

Great, Barbara thought. She'd clearly picked a real professional for this job. "Any other leads you can think of?" she asked.

"She works with a team," Spider-Man said. "Sometimes with Misty Knight and her Heroes for Hire crew, but she has her own personal support, too. There's a computer whiz guy and a gadget girl. Maybe one of them knows something."

"I've already spoken with them all," Barbara informed him. None of them had been too pleased that Oracle knew who they were and what they did, but when she told them Felicia might be in trouble, they wanted to help. "None of them have heard from her in days, but they're asking around."

"Damn," he said. "I might be the last one she's been in contact with."

"She called you?"

"Text message," Spider-Man corrected. "She said she needed help with something. I was supposed to meet her but she never showed. That's why I came here."

Damn it, Cat, Barbara fumed. She'd specifically asked Felicia not to do that! "I'd prefer if you didn't involve anyone else in this," Oracle had instructed the Black Cat when she recruited her. What was unclear about that? But this might just be the break Barbara needed.

"What's the number for that phone?" she asked.

"I don't know what good that's going to do," Spider-Man said after he rattled off the ten-digit sequence. "She hasn't been answering."

"I'm not going to call her," she sighed. "I'm going to dump her phone log. Maybe even run a trace if we're lucky and the cell's still intact."

"You can do that?" he asked.

"That's the least of what I'm capable of," she answered, working the computer interface. "Got a trace!" she announced. "She's headed east on 23rd Street. I'll try to cross-reference the phone GPS with satellite imaging and footage from any available security cam with eyes on the street. See if I can see her."

"Satellite imaging?" he repeated. "What are you? S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"I'm part of an organization that's about to leave S.H.I.E.L.D. in the dust," she replied with a sense of pride she hadn't expected since Bruce had announced this "Batman Incorporated" insanity. "Get a move on."

*

Spider-Man was out the window and web-swinging his way downtown in a flash. He was a good forty or fifty blocks away from 23rd Street, but the way he moved, that shouldn't take him too long. Everything was happening so fast. And he still didn't really know who or what he was dealing with.

"So, who are you, Oracle?" he asked, swing down Fifth Avenue.

"You want to trade secret identities?" Oracle responded. "Fine. You first."

"I don't mean what's your real name or anything," he said. "I just want to know what your deal is."

"My deal?"

"You said you're not S.H.I.E.L.D., but are you with another organization? Is Oracle a new agency or something?"

"I guess you can say I'm an independent resource to the superhero community who can provide information and data retrieval with my specialized computer skills."

"So you're kind of a worldwide web-head..."

"Sure," Oracle responded. Spidey could hear her eyes rolling over the line.

"How'd the Black Cat get into all of this anyway?"

"I trust you're familiar with Norman Osborn," Oracle said.

"Duh," Spider-Man replied. "I was punching that jerk in the face before it was cool."

"Then I'm sure you can imagine the kinds of things he got up to with unlimited resources and an unchecked global mandate," Oracle continued. "He kept the truly awful stuff off of the H.A.M.M.E.R. mainframe, but I knew he had to have files stashed somewhere. Turns out it was all on a flash drive he secured in his private vault at Osborn Industries' corporate headquarters right before he attacked Asgard."

"It's always flash drives these days," Spider-Man murmured. "Whatever happened to microfilm? There was a certain touch of class to microfilm..."

"Do you want to hear this or not?"

"Sorry," he said. "Continue."

"I hired the Black Cat to recover--"

"I believe you mean 'steal'..."

"Fine," Oracle conceded. "I hired Black Cat to steal the drive."

"And now she's missing."

"No, the recovery -- er, theft went off without a hitch," Oracle explained. "She completed delivery last week."

"So how do you know her disappearance has anything to do with you?"

"I screwed up," Oracle admitted. "Osborn had locked up the drive... He'd encrypted the data... I didn't expect there to be any other countermeasures..."

"But there were," he guessed.

"A self-destruct worm," Oracle said. "As soon as I opened the files they started erasing themselves. I managed to stop it in time -- it wasn't that sophisticated, really -- but one of the files was corrupted. I recovered what I could, but all I really know is that it involves a facility in the New York City area. I contacted Felicia to see if she'd heard anything about it, and she volunteered to look into it. Free of charge. She was supposed to check in last night, but she didn't. Maybe she's working another job right now or lost interest, but I doubt it. She really seemed like she wanted to handle this one. She said it might make her look good for the Avengers."

"Of course she did," Spider-Man sighed. Ever since Osborn had fallen and the web-head was now back on an officially sanctioned Avengers team instead of Luke Cage's motley underground crew, Felicia had been subtly hinting that she'd like to join up, too. He was actually glad because if she was doing legitimate superheroics it probably wouldn't leave her much time for burglary, but at the same time, he felt insecure enough on the team without his semi-crazy ex-girlfriend-with-benefits hanging around to break his spider-themed booties.

"Got a visual fix," Oracle told him. "The phone's in a cab."

"Which one?" Spider-Man asked, swooping down over 23rd Street around the Flatiron Building.

"First one stopped at the light on Madison Avenue," Oracle sighed, "but don't bother..."

He wasn't listening. He was already on the street, tearing the passenger side door off its hinges. "Cat?" he called out. But there was only the middle-aged cabbie and two frightened French tourists in the back.

*

Thanks to a feed from an ATM security camera positioned at the corner of 23rd and Madison, Barbara had watched the whole thing play out onscreen. "Gee, Spider-Man," she said. "I wonder how you get all that bad press in the papers..."

"Yeah, this was kind of stupid of me," Spider-Man admitted, still holding the car-door.

Barbara took off her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose for a moment before settling back into the work. "Okay," she said. "Tell Mr. Dickles that you're sorry and that money's currently being wired into his checking account for the damages."

"Who's Mr. Dickles?" Spider-Man asked.

"The cab driver," she answered. Barbara had pulled up his data as soon as she got a clear view of the taxi's license plate: Charles Dickles, Jr. No criminal record. Facial recognition software hadn't matched his DMV photo to any known felons. He was clean. "Now, apologize," she told Spider-Man. "Preferably while searching the back of the cab for Black Cat's cell phone. As I tried to tell you before you attacked that poor defenseless door, she's not there. Whoever took her ditched her phone in the cab to throw anybody trying to track her off the trail. Probably did so as a passenger. Find it."

While he was doing that, Barbara was funneling the appropriate amount of cash into Dickle's checking account from one of her discretionary funds -- including a hefty bonus for what she could only imagine was the absolute horror of dealing with the amazingly neurotic Spider-Man.

"Found it!" the web-head chimed just as she finished.

"Good," she said. "Now just web the door back into the frame so everyone can go on their merry little way. I'll stop holding the red light."

"Anyone ever point out that you can be a bit bossy?" Spider-Man asked, doing as ordered.

"Anyone ever point out that you can be a bit of an impulsive idiot?" she countered, watching him leap out of range of the ATM camera to web-swing away.

"My bad," he admitted. "I tend to panic when my friends go missing. Especially if Norman Osborn's involved."

"Osborn's in jail," she said. "We can't assume he's involved."

"We can't assume that he's not," Spider-Man insisted. "Where the hell is she?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," she sighed. "The whole point of dumping the Cat's phone was so that now, even if I backtrack through the GPS record since she disappeared, it's going to be a wild goose chase."

"Where was she when she texted me?" Spider-Man asked. "That's got to be better than nothing, right?"

"It might be worth a shot," Barbara figured, though she had her doubts. But like he said, it was better than nothing. It took her a moment to cross-reference the GPS history with the call log. "City Hall," she told him.

"Probably from her office," he replied. "Might find something there. I'll check it out."

Barbara sat back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment. It wasn't the worst lead, really. If Felicia had found something, she'd probably used her access to city records as Ashley Moon to get it. But Barbara wasn't sure whether she actually wanted the Black Cat not to be smart enough to know how to cover her tracks. Chances were this was just another dead end, and then what? There was just too little to go on. She needed more information...

And there was only one way she might get it.

*

J. Jonah Jameson wasn't anybody's damn fool. A bad ticker and a treacherous board of directors had ripped the Daily Bugle from him, but now he was the goddamn mayor of the greatest fucking city on God's green earth. It wasn't a fluke. It wasn't an accident. He was the right goddamn man for the job. Because he knew what New York really needed.