Interlude #86
The fridge beeped.
Jake stood in front of it with the door open and one hand on the handle and his eyes on the shelf where the milk had been, was supposed to be, had at some point stopped being without him noticing. The fridge beeped again. He closed it.
The apartment held its silence around him. Not the bad kind -- the kind that came from a place that knew you. Comics on the floor by the couch in the specific arrangement of someone who sat there regularly. A jacket on the back of the chair that had never made it to the hook by the door. On the windowsill, next to the glass that looked out on the city at nine-fifteen on a Thursday night, a brochure for the jacuzzi company folded open to the maintenance page, and beside it a mug with something in it that had stopped being tea some days ago.
He should call his mum.
He opened his phone instead. Started a message to David, got three words in, closed it. Opened an app. Closed that. Opened the message again.
'Hey, you up --'
He closed it.
The thing she'd said kept arriving when his hands were idle. It had been doing that for five days. 'I don't think you're actually here.' He wasn't angry about it anymore, which was maybe the problem -- he'd skipped straight past angry into something quieter and harder to name, the feeling of someone who'd been told a true thing by the wrong person at the wrong time and couldn't unknow it.
He pulled the fridge open again. Still no milk.
'When did I run out of milk.'
Three knocks at the door.
He crossed the apartment and looked through the peephole and saw the three of them standing in the hallway wearing expressions he clocked immediately and did not want.
He opened the door.
"Stop doing whatever you're doing with your faces," he said. "It's weird."
Mike opened his mouth. Sarah got there first.
"We're not doing anything with our faces."
"You're doing something. All three of you." He looked at David. "Especially you."
"I'm just standing here."
"You're standing here like that." He stepped back and let them in. "I'm fine."
"We know," Mike said, in the tone of someone who did not know but had agreed before arriving that they wouldn't say so directly.
They came in carrying bags -- David with the chips, Sarah with the drinks, Mike with the specific energy of someone who had organized this and was not going to admit it. Jake watched them move into his kitchen with the ease of people who had been in this apartment enough times that it was partly theirs, and something in his chest shifted and settled.
"Dani was wrong, by the way," Sarah said from the kitchen.
"Nobody asked."
"I'm saying it anyway. She was wrong and she was boring and her opinions about--"
"Sarah."
"Her opinions about everything were limited and she wore the same three outfits on rotation and--"
"Sarah."
"--and I never liked her and I should have said so sooner, and I'm saying it now because someone has to, and also she was wrong."
Jake sat on the couch. "She wasn't wrong."
The kitchen went quiet for a second.
"She was wrong," Sarah said, quieter. "About the important part."
He didn't answer that. Mike came out of the kitchen and dropped onto the couch beside him and grabbed the controller off the cushion and turned on the console with the reflexive motion of someone who had done it a hundred times in this exact seat, and the quiet broke open into the sounds of a loading screen, and Jake found he was grateful for it.
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They played for two hours.
Jake won the first round and lost the next four in a row, not because he was distracted -- he was locked in, genuinely locked in, the part of his brain that tracked patterns and made fast decisions running hot the way it only did when the stakes were low enough to enjoy. He saw the moves three beats out. His hands just didn't always agree with the timeline.
"You had it," David said, watching Jake's character fall off the edge of the map.
"I had it and then I didn't."
"You jumped before you looked."
"I saw the opening."
"There was no opening."
"There was an opening for about half a second--"
"And then there wasn't, and you jumped anyway."
Jake set the controller down. "I'm aware of what happened."
Mike was laughing. The good kind, the kind that wasn't at anyone, and Jake felt it come up through him too despite himself -- the specific loosening of an evening that had started tight and was now something else. Sarah threw a chip at him from the armchair. He caught it without looking.
"How did you do that," David said.
"Do what."
"You weren't looking."
"I heard it."
David looked at Mike. Mike shrugged. It was an old exchange, the shape of it worn smooth from use.
Later they moved to the jacuzzi -- the four of them, the water too hot the way it always was because Jake ran it too hot and nobody ever said anything about it. The city sat outside the window in its nighttime version, the skyline doing what it did, the lights carrying the specific distance of things that were happening somewhere else to someone else.
It was Mike who asked.
Not directly -- Mike never directly. He said, "you haven't been in, have you," and left it open, and Jake looked at the water and said no.
"How long."
"Few days."
Sarah and David exchanged a look across the water. Jake saw it.
"It's not about Dani," he said.
"We know," Mike said. Same tone as before, and this time he meant it.
"It's -- I don't know." He leaned his head back. The ceiling had a crack in it that ran from the light fixture toward the window, and he'd been meaning to say something to the super about it for eight months. "You ever feel like you're running the wrong race?"
Nobody said anything.
"Not like -- I'm not depressed. I'm not having a crisis." He looked at them. "I just mean. You know how it feels when you're in the wrong gear. When you're pushing and it's not that nothing's happening, things are happening, it's just." He stopped.
"It's just what," Sarah said.
"It feels like it doesn't count." He heard himself say it and knew it was true and wished it wasn't. "Like whatever I'm doing right now is not the thing I'm supposed to be doing, and I don't know what the thing is, I've never known what the thing is, and I'm twenty-three and I still don't--"
"You're twenty-four," David said.
"What?"
"You turned twenty-four in March. We had a party."
Jake stared at him. "I forgot how old I was."
"You forget everything," Sarah said, not unkindly. "You forget to eat. You forget to call us back. You forgot Mike's last birthday, which I'm noting for the record--"
"He sent something," Mike said.
"He forgot," Sarah said. "He sent it three weeks late."
"I sent it."
Jake was laughing again. The crack in the ceiling hadn't moved. Outside, the city did its city things, indifferent and ongoing, and inside the water was still too hot and his three oldest friends were in it with him and the evening had turned into something he hadn't known he needed until he was in the middle of it.
He tried to keep them after.
"You know you don't have to go," he said at the door, and they smiled in the way that meant they did have to, and Mike had a six-thirty, and Sarah had the thing, and David -- David just hugged him, which was unusual, and it landed.
"Get some sleep," Sarah said. "Go back to work. It's not the wrong gear forever."
The door closed.
The apartment was twice as large.
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He didn't sleep.
He sat on the couch with his phone and started twelve things and finished none of them. A forum thread about potential and how to find it. A video he'd seen linked somewhere. A message to an AI app at one in the morning: I keep feeling like there's something I'm supposed to be doing but I can't figure out what it is and every time I start something I lose the -- and then he closed the app, because what was he going to do with the answer.
He put on a show he'd seen before so he didn't have to track it.
At some point the show was still on and his eyes were closed, the phone on his chest, the city outside doing its last few hours of night in the way it always did, the crack in the ceiling going wherever cracks went in the dark.
Biology won.
He was asleep before he knew it was happening.
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The smell was wrong first.
Then the light -- the color of it through his eyelids was wrong. Then the sound, which was not the sound of his city, not the register he'd lived inside for twenty-four years, some lower and meaner frequency underneath everything.
He opened his eyes.
The television was on. A local channel. A news anchor behind a desk with a lower-third that read VIGILANTE ACTIVITY IN THE NARROWS in block letters, and behind the anchor a photograph of a city that Jake recognized from the wrong side of a screen.
He sat up.
The room was small and stale. Wallpaper at the corners pulling away from itself. A window with a view of a fire escape and, beyond it, a sky the color of an old bruise. The bed beneath him had the specific give of a mattress that had hosted too many people and remembered all of them.
He looked at his hands.
Then the light came.
Not from the television, not from the window -- from inside his vision, a warmth that arrived behind his eyes and spread forward until it was sitting in the space between him and the room like something that had been waiting for him to wake up.
It assembled itself with patience, gold threading into structure, and then it was there: an interface, transparent enough to see through, decorated with a web motif that he recognized immediately and could not yet bring himself to name out loud.
Text appeared.
🕷️
Welcome, Jacob Cross.
You have been selected.
🕸️
He read it twice.
More text came, arriving in the measured way of something that had been written for someone who would need a moment between sentences.
🕷️
You have been brought to this world with a purpose. The abilities of Spiderman are now yours -- web generation, wall adhesion, enhanced strength and agility, and a threat-sense that will develop as your bond with this world deepens. These are not gifts. They are tools. They are yours to master.
Your mission: collect Totems. Objects tied to the figures of this world, carrying the symbolic weight of their owners. Totems fuel your abilities and your time here. Without them, your bond with this world weakens. When it fails, you fail with it.
You have been given 72 hours to collect your first Totem and establish your place in this world. The clock is running.
Do not let it run out.
🕸️
A beat. Then:
🕷️
[Headstart Bonus Awarded]
Bundle of Cash
Time Bank: 01:11:58
🕸️
The interface held for a moment, then folded back into the edges of his vision like it had always lived there.
Jake sat on the bed in a room in a city he recognized from comics and forums and late-night arguments about power scaling, and he said, out loud, to no one:
"I got isekai'd."
He waited to feel something other than what he was feeling, which was a grin spreading across his face that he had absolutely no intention of stopping.
"I got isekai'd." Quieter. "With Spider-Man powers."
He stood up too fast and the room tilted and he caught himself on the wall -- and his hand stuck.
He looked at it.
Pressed his palm flat against the wallpaper and lifted his feet off the floor and hung there, horizontal, his own body weight held by one hand against a wall in a motel room in Gotham City, and the grin became something beyond what faces were really designed to do.
He dropped. Landed. Held his hand up and looked at it the way you looked at something that had just changed categories.
Okay.
He tried the webs next. Aimed at the wall across the room, felt for whatever mechanism governed it, and fired. Something shot from his wrist and hit the wall with a wet thwack and he pulled against it and it held and he said "okay" again, louder, because that was genuinely the only word available.
The second shot went wide and hit the television. The third went where he pointed it. By the sixth he was getting the feel of it -- not mastery, nothing close to mastery, more like the first hour with an instrument where the sounds you're making are finally starting to resemble intention.
He stopped when he put a strand across the door by accident and had to spend two minutes getting it off.
He found a mirror in the bathroom.
His reflection looked back at him.
Brown eyes. A jaw that hadn't seen a razor in a few days. A scar on his shoulder visible above the collar of the shirt he'd apparently been transported in, the one he always got asked about and always said 'long story' because the actual story was that he'd been nineteen and had decided for about four seconds that he could jump further than he could jump. Hair that needed a cut. A face that was, by any honest accounting, ordinary in the best way -- the kind of face that moved through the world without snagging on anything, that could sit in any room and belong there passably.
He was still himself.
He looked at his reflection for a moment longer, at the face that had spent twenty-four years not quite fitting the scale of what was moving behind it, and thought: well.
'Now what.'
The answer came before he finished asking. It had been waiting longer than the interface had.
He thought about swinging between buildings. About the red thread of a navigator pulling him through a city at speed. About the gap between a web catching and the next one firing, the specific math of momentum and height and the moment you let go.
His hands flexed at his sides.
'That's what.'
He found a hoodie in the closet -- dark, oversized, left behind by whoever had lived in this room before him -- and pulled it on over the shirt. Checked his pockets. The cash from the headstart package was there, folded, more than he'd expected. He put his shoes on and stood at the door and took one breath of air that was recycled and stale and still somehow better than what was waiting outside.
He opened the door.
The smell hit him first. Something underneath Gotham's nighttime that wasn't any single thing -- rot and industry and rain that had given up halfway through and something chemical underneath all of it, sitting in the air like a warning that had stopped expecting to be listened to.
Jake stood in the doorway of a motel in Gotham City with Spider-Man's abilities in his hands and seventy-two hours on a clock he couldn't afford to waste, and he thought: the forums always said it was bad.
He walked out into it.
And found out.
It was much, much worse than he'd expected.
~MimicLord
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