"Ah, my back..."
Peter groaned, his eyes snapping open as a sharp, agonizing cramp seized his lower spine. He blindly reached behind him, digging his knuckles into the knotted muscle.
It is a standard soft-tissue strain, Venom rumbled lazily in the back of his mind. Your bio-mechanical leverage was utterly atrocious when you tried to physically pry open the reptile's jaws. You pulled a lumbar muscle.
"I have the proportionate strength of a spider and a healing factor," Peter grumbled, sitting up slowly. "How does Spider-Man pull a back muscle? Wait a minute..."
The freezing wind ripped through his hair. Peter blinked, his vision clearing. He wasn't wearing his suit. He was sitting on a cold, stone ledge high above the city, wearing his standard civilian jeans, a t-shirt, and his jacket. He looked out over the sprawling, neon-lit grid of New York City. The geography was right, but the branding plastered across the skyscrapers was entirely wrong.
"Did we jump realities again?" Peter asked, rubbing his eyes.
Yes, Venom replied, a dark, amused purr echoing in Peter's skull. We are in a brand-new universe. Specifically, the one where Gwen Stacy brutally beat you to death on a gymnasium floor. Surprise.
Peter let out a long, exhausted sigh. For someone who already understood the horrifying context of Earth-65, the revelation wasn't a shock; it was just a massive logistical headache.
He leaned his forearms against the cold stone, watching the unfamiliar police blimps drift over the skyline. He was starting to map out the underlying logic of the Web of Fate. The multiversal network didn't just randomly kidnap him. It only acted like a magnet when the Spider-Totems of different realities directly intersected.
Back on Earth-700, the Kingpin had fired up a super-collider, physically punching a hole through realities to drag the Universe-42 spiders across the void. In the apocalyptic Wasteland, the mystical Spider-Gods had actively sent emissaries to recruit Ashley Barton. Even the Marvel Zombies universe wasn't the Web's fault; that nightmare was the result of Reed Richards blindly broadcasting an inter-dimensional signal.
This time, the Web had pulled him directly to Earth-65. Venom recognized the stark white-and-black suit from their brief, hallucinatory visions. Earth-65 Gwen Stacy was a Spider-Totem. Which meant she was currently standing directly in the crosshairs of whatever multiversal threat was hunting them.
"Alright," Peter muttered, pushing himself up to his feet and wincing at the dull ache in his back. "Step one: find Gwen. Step two: try not to give her a heart attack by showing up alive."
The red and blue fabric rippled outward from his chest, consuming his street clothes in a wave of glossy black. Fully masked, Spider-Man dove off the skyscraper, firing a web-line into the dark.
If the multiverse held true to its baseline rules, his variants usually inhabited the exact same geographical spaces. Which meant the Stacy family lived in the exact same house in Queens.
Ten minutes later, Peter touched down silently on the branch of an old oak tree in Forest Hills. Across the street, the familiar two-story Stacy residence was brightly lit. He had spotted Captain George Stacy leading a police blockade back in Manhattan, so the Captain definitely wasn't home yet.
Peter dropped to the sidewalk. The symbiote receded, snapping back into his civilian clothes. He walked up the concrete steps, took a breath, and knocked on the front door.
He heard frantic, muffled voices inside.
"Wait a second, someone's at the door," a voice called out—it was Gwen, but the tone was sharper, guarded.
The deadbolt clicked. The door swung inward.
Earth-65 Gwen Stacy stood in the doorway. She was wearing an oversized green jacket, her choppy blonde hair pushed out of her face. When her eyes locked onto Peter, her entire body went completely rigid. The color drained from her face so fast Peter thought she was going to pass out on the welcome mat.
"Hey," Peter started gently, raising a hand. "I know this looks—"
Before Earth-65 Gwen could even process the ghost standing on her porch, a blur of motion appeared behind her.
"Peter!"
A second Gwen Stacy—this one with long, perfectly styled blonde hair—pushed past the paralyzed punk-rocker. Earth-616 Gwen threw her arms around Peter's neck, hugging him so fiercely he stumbled back a step.
Peter instinctively caught her, completely bewildered. He looked from the Gwen hugging him to the Gwen staring at him in sheer, unadulterated horror.
"Gwen?" Peter asked, gently pulling 616-Gwen back by the shoulders. "How the hell did you get here? I didn't open a portal for you."
"I used my ghost power," 616-Gwen said, her blue eyes wide and frantic. "I sneaked through the portal Doctor Strange opened."
Peter rubbed his temples, a migraine beginning to pulse behind his eyes. "Wait. Back up. Doctor Strange? Doctor Strange opened a multiversal door?"
"He tried to," 616-Gwen corrected quickly. "He said Earth-65 was completely quarantined. He said there was some kind of massive mystical barrier protecting this specific universe, and absolutely no one could get in or out."
"Excuse me," Earth-65 Gwen interrupted, her voice cracking slightly. She gripped the edge of the doorframe, her knuckles white. "Hi. Hello. This is my house. And I am currently having a severe psychological break. Can we please take this inside? Before Mrs. Kravitz next door calls the cops because I'm hosting a clone convention on my porch?"
Peter and 616-Gwen quickly stepped inside. Earth-65 Gwen slammed the door, locking the deadbolt and leaning her forehead against the wood.
Once they were in the living room, 616-Gwen rapidly caught Peter up on the chaos he had left behind.
When Peter vanished from the docks, he didn't leave a trace. Cindy Moon had arrived seconds later. She could feel Peter's presence through the Web of Life, but the signal was terrifyingly weak. Panicking, the Avengers had dragged a furious Doctor Strange to the river.
Strange cast a tracking spell, locating the tear in reality. But when he tried to stabilize a gateway, he hit a reinforced, multiversal firewall blockading Earth-65. The Sorcerer Supreme declared the dimension impenetrable.
"But you got through," Peter realized, staring at her.
616-Gwen nodded, tapping the fabric of her trench coat. "My power. My Ghost power don't just hide me from thermal cameras, Peter. It scrubs my conceptual footprint. The magical barrier didn't register my existence. So, when Strange's portal sparked, I just walked right through the firewall to make sure you were okay."
Peter let out a harsh breath, running a hand through his hair.
"And Dr. Connors?" Peter asked, his tone darkening. "Is he secured?"
"No," 616-Gwen shook her head. "Strange analyzed the residual energy at the docks. He said your dimensional jump flared out of control. It created a localized vacuum. It dragged Dr.Connors right through the tear with you."
Peter's eyes widened. "He's here."
His mind instantly shifted into tactical overdrive. Back on Earth-616, the cure had stripped away Connors' reptilian DNA, but the underlying Erskine Super Soldier serum had locked his biology into a massive, seven-foot-tall state.
"Wait. If our Connors is trapped here, that means this universe has its own Curt Connors," Peter muttered, pacing the living room rug. "If this universe's Connors is just a normal, baseline human, we can synthesize a clean blood sample from him. We can build a localized retrovirus to fully cure our Connors!"
Earth-65 Gwen finally turned around from the front door. She crossed her arms over her chest, staring at the two interlopers like they had crawled out of an asylum.
"Okay, timeout," Earth-65 Gwen snapped, her voice trembling slightly beneath the bravado. "First of all, who the hell are you people? Second, Peter... if you aren't a giant lizard, who is? And third, I literally just watched a giant lizard fall out of the sky and crash into the Hudson River an hour ago. Is that the guy you're looking for?"
Across the city, deep within the sterile, brilliantly lit sub-levels of a private corporate research institute, Cindy Moon was working late.
Earth-65's Cindy Moon was twenty-six years old. She was a billionaire super-genius who had secured her first doctorate at sixteen. She possessed everything money, influence, and intellect could buy. But standing in front of her massive holographic monitors, reviewing the blurry, leaked footage of Spider-Woman swinging through the city, Cindy felt a cold, hollow bitterness.
She knew exactly what the radioactive spider was capable of. She knew what power she had missed out on when it bit the Stacy girl instead.
Cindy pressed a blinking button on her secure comms console.
"Report," she demanded, her voice clinical and flat.
"The target is secured, Ms. Moon," a gruff S.H.I.E.L.D. operative that was actually one of the many spies Moon had develop crackled over the speaker. "A massive, reptilian humanoid fell from atmospheric altitude directly into the river. Our extraction teams have him contained in a high-density holding cell. We are continuing to monitor—"
Static abruptly cut the transmission.
The ambient temperature in Cindy's laboratory plummeted. The fluorescent overhead lights flickered, buzzing violently before shattering in a shower of sparks.
Three feet away from her desk, the air tore open. A jagged, hexagonal portal composed of glowing orange energy expanded into the room.
Cindy didn't scream. She coldly reached into her desk drawer, her hand wrapping around the grip of a customized plasma pistol.
A figure stepped out of the portal.
It was a man, built like an armored tank. He stood easily over seven feet tall, his chest completely bare, displaying massive, gamma-irradiated green muscles. A stark black spider emblem was branded across his chest.
The green giant didn't attack. He simply raised his massive right arm, spreading his fingers. And in his finger, there was a ring with spider emblem.
"Cindy Moon of Earth-65," the massive, green Spider-variant rumbled, his voice vibrating the glass beakers on her desk. "You possess the intellect to control your own destiny. If you truly yearn for the power of the Spider Totem... join the Spider Legion."
PS: Marvel Fun Fact!
While our Cindy Moon (Silk) is a heroic ally to Peter, her Earth-65 variant took a completely different path! In the Spider-Gwen comics, Earth-65 Cindy is a brilliant, ruthless billionaire villain who actually engineered the radioactive spider that bit Gwen. She leads the sinister spy organization S.I.L.K., making her one of Gwen's most dangerous adversaries!