#MC/PETER PARKER POV#
A liquid pearl white substance slides over my knuckles, swallowing my tattered street clothes into a pristine, pearly white...until black markings also appear on the suit...
The empty, cold weight in my chest is drowned out by an unfamiliar rush of pure warmth that spreads through my veins.
I sigh deeply as I finally get what I have been working for over the past two weeks since I arrived here... my own Anti-Venom Symbiote.
Being self-inserted into Peter Parker a few days after he got his body back from Doc Ock was jarring and trauma-inducing enough. But the timeline—at least, this one—is completely different from what I remember from the comics.
First, Parker Industries is gone...destroyed...mostly.
When the Goblin Nation attacked, they hit all the buildings I owned—even Parker Industries HQ, which is where I am at the moment.
I am currently in the subterranean levels of it, given that most of the top is just rubble now. The only reason I was even able to get underneath it all was because of some secret passageways Otto made when he designed Parker Industries HQ.
I thankfully still own the buildings—or rather, their ruins. Given that I had to pay massive restitution and pay healthcare for my former employees, if I hadn't liquidated my own personal wealth and that of Parker Industries, I wouldn't even own the ruins and the land they are on. I also paid all of my workers three months' worth of salary until they can find a new job.
I am practically, by all legal terms, nearly bankrupt.
If I don't find a way to actually remove and clear the rubble, and rebuild, I will be forced to sell some of the properties, which I cannot let happen.
They are far too valuable to me...
Given that no one else really seems to know about the subterranean levels, I may find tech that I can use—like the stuff here at PIHQ.
Some portable micro-fusion generators, biometric neural-link scanners, multi-spectrum hard-light projectors, miniaturized chemical centrifuges, and some leftover spider-drones... plus the stuff I needed to extract enough of my white blood cells and the cells with traces of Venom to make my own Anti-Venom by mixing the tiny pieces of Venom and my white blood cells...and I found out the color of a vial of white blood cell...a pale yellowish cream color...ugh...
Plus, the synthesizer that replicated Mr. Negative's inverse energy, a mix of Lightforce and Darkforce, has now been burnt out.
But still, it gave me my greatest tool of all.
Looking around the room, I decide to gather everything of value. As much as it pains me to leave this place behind, it is structurally compromised, making it nearly impossible to experiment and research here.
I sigh and stretch, feeling my Anti-Venom finish healing the wear and tear on my body. That persistent pain in my back from all the swinging is gone now.
Damn, I didn't realize it would be like this...man...I feel like brand new already...
I shake my head and focus on taking the stuff in, using a not-yet-known ability of the Symbiotes: the Symbiote Pocket Pouch.
After picking up everything of value, I look to the collapsed wall where rubble can be seen. I nod to myself as I walk forward.
Raising my arm and aiming at it, a tendril extends between the gaps in the rubble. I walk closer to the rubble, feeling around it to see if I can find any machines or materials that might be useful, wrapping around them.
I try to look for a fabricator around here.
I want to use my Symbiote tendrils to go underneath the ruins, feel stuff out, cover the machines or materials buried under the rubble, and bring them out using my Symbiote Pocket Dimension.
I hopefully want to find a fabricator I can use—or maybe find more than one so I can fix one using the components of the others.
After a couple of minutes of sweeping through the dark, twisted rebar and collapsed rubble, my tendrils brush against the familiar, heavy chassis of advanced manufacturing hardware.
I come across three separate Parker Industries Model-4 Industrial Fabricators, all trapped under tons of debris.
I wrap my symbiote around the fabricators and pull them inside my Symbiote Pouch—S-Pouch, for short.
I bring them out to see the state they are in.
The first has a completely crushed frame, but its primary quantum-printing matrix is intact.
The second was burned by fire, but its sub-atomic material hoppers and feed-lines are intact.
The third has a fried motherboard, but its power regulators and structural lasers are good and ready to go.
I pass my hand over my face as I make the Symbiote recede, and I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
I put them away for now, as I want to get somewhere safe and secure before I begin working on them.
I begin to look for more tech and materials buried under the rubble, using my knowledge of the building's blueprints to search specific areas.
Over the course of an hour, I find six canisters of stable Polymerized Web-Fluid Base and a crate of Isotopic Catalysts, which will let me synthesize specialized webbing that can neutralize fire, electricity, and possibly very low-level magic (from what I remember Otto working on).
I also find a briefcase containing three Nanotech Mesh-Weave Spools—the highly durable, bulletproof material Otto used to make his advanced armored suits—and a master drone-control server rack, undamaged and loaded with the proprietary encryption keys needed to command an entire spider-drone network.
I try to see if I can shift my body while using the Symbiote to get between the gaps in the rubble to reach the chemical lab and, hopefully, the secure vaults. I can tell that they are still standing, thanks to my tendrils feeling some big open gaps inside.
I find the chemical lab first.
The blast doors are warped, but inside, rows of secure containment cabinets stand all perfectly preserved.
I find racks of unbroken glass vials, some containing experimental bio-reagents, neurological stabilizing compounds, and highly concentrated enzyme bases that I can use to refine medical cures or anti-toxins.
Not that I need them for myself, but they are good to have—especially the clean, unused vials.
I store the equipment in my S-pouch.
Next, I find the secure vault where Otto kept his most precious resources.
The vault room is dark but pressurized, which is probably what helped it survive the building collapsing on top of it.
Inside the lockers are several unmarked prototype gadgets and a crate of vibranium-infused carbon fiber sheets meant for heavy stealth armor, on top of four ingots of Vibranium weighing three pounds each.
"My god... Otto... Klaue... really... you..." I say as I remember that, yes, Otto bought Vibranium from Klaue.
Whatever...they are mine now...
I take everything I can into my S-pouch. As I am getting ready to leave, moving through the rubble, I find the mother lode: the main data processing core of the building.
As I liquefy my form once more to slither back up through the crushed foundations, my tendrils brush against a massive, heavily insulated bulkhead. I break through the seal and step into a hidden, pressurized clean room.
There it is...the Main Data Processing Core.
It's a beautiful, monolithic tower of quantum servers, humming silently on a closed emergency power loop.
Because it was completely disconnected from the outside grid, this core functioned as a time capsule containing everything I thought I lost
Complete digital schematics, AI source codes, and structural algorithms for every single suit, web-shooter variant, and gadget I or Otto ever designed.
Proprietary formulas for clean energy, advanced medical nanotechnology, and hard-light physics that the world thinks disappeared along with Parker Industries.
Deep-network surveillance data on criminal syndicates and underground tech brokers.
With this core, I don't just have an arsenal anymore—I have my brain back. Not literally, but whatever.
I command the symbiote to envelop the entire core, pulling the massive, glowing tower safely into my pocket dimension.
I am no longer just a Spider-Man hiding in the ruins.
I am fully loaded and ready to take the world by storm.
I return to my cheap apartment and bite my lip. I know I can't bring out everything I took from the ruins of the Parker Industries building here, nor can I set them up without requiring a massive amount of power or drawing attention I don't want.
So, I think back to my years as Spider-Man about several locations I can use to set up a base.
First, an abandoned subway substation deep beneath Chinatown—a forgotten 1940s transit hub. It has massive, heavy-duty electrical lines built to power high-voltage trains, completely isolated from the public grid.
Second, a condemned waterfront warehouse—a rusted, salt-stained shipping depot on the edge of Brooklyn. It has its own heavy industrial generators from the old days, and the constant crashing of waves would mask any mechanical hums. But it feels a bit too exposed for me at the moment.
And last, but certainly not least, a hidden smuggler's vault—a subterranean bunker in the Financial District once used by the Maggia crime family before I busted them years ago. It is heavily reinforced against seismic scans and hardwired into an old commercial backup grid.
I nod to myself as I make a decision.
I'll make all three mine.
I can make the subway station into a place where I can keep heavy machinery, material storage, a testing facility, and dedicated fabricators. I can make the waterfront warehouse my dedicated lab and main base of operations. Meanwhile, I can make the subterranean vault into a full-on dedicated bunker, which would be the biggest project of them all.
I also plan to turn it into a dedicated armory, given that I know the absolute bullshit that is coming my way.
"I need to automate the construction process," I whisper to myself, planning to turn the spider-bots into construction, maintenance, and fabrication drones for the bigger projects I have in mind. "I can use the master drone-control servers after modifying some of the spider-drones still out in the city, and then recall them back."