networkinthenight | first experiment; 9:53 PM

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first experiment; 9:53 PM

For our more vampiric population, I come to you with a solution for your dietary problems.

I've invented artificial blood. A substance you can consume without harming others, but that will sustain you much as food and water. I owe a debt to Elena for helping me test them.

Unfortunately, it cannot yet be used in a medical sense-- for blood transplants, which are, by the by, a very important part of medical knowledge, which makes up the second part of this announcement.

If you do not know your blood type, come see me, and I can at least determine it. Blood types are a vital bit of information in a place where one routinely gets cut to bits. Transfusing blood-- that is, the act of giving one's blood to another-- can save a life in many cases. However, if the wrong sorts of blood interact, the result can be deadly.

Many of you do not know your blood type. This will, inevitably, come back to bite you.

So. I suggest you come by my lab within the next few days and find out, before you nearly die of an injury, manage to make it back to town, and then die of your original blood sensing the invader and killing off the cells that came to theoretically heal you. What a horrible, ironic death that would be.

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[ he pauses and looks down at her; the action's slightly exaggerated and punctuated by a slight tilt of his head. he mulls over his answer for one moment, then two, then: ] Not this time. [ he admits. ] Role reversal, kind of. [ beat. ] I was on a school trip — a demonstration in radiology. [ he glances at her, or at least, that's what the sudden movement of his head seems to imply. ] There was a spider, some things happened, and here we are: proportionate strength and abilities of a spider.

Good lord.

[She takes a step forward. There's a lot of questions she has for him, but the first is--]

How old are you?

What? [ the response is immediate and the intonation is sharp, almost like he can't quite decide if he's baffled by the question or not. then, a beat of silence and though his expression isn't visible, it's clear that something softens and there's a moment of— ] Oh, right. [ he shifts his weight a little and glances up at the ceiling; there had been that time he'd asked doc strange about having a conversation with a spider (regrettable), and he'd been informed that the average life span of a spider was a year.

one year. he thinks about making a joke about how many times that he is, but then he looks back at rosalind, mentally guesses her age: she's older than he is, by a few years. he thinks of beacon, thinks of how many adults there are and thinks of how many there are that are close to his age. he groans. ] I can see why you'd ask that, but I'm a little shy and I have an identity that the [ he waves a hand at his mask ], does a pretty good job of keeping secret, and—.

We can leave it at: old enough to joke about not staying up late on a school night and think it's a little bit endearing.

Edited 2019-12-11 09:29 (UTC)

[So likely younger than her, but not by much. Certainly not older. Interesting, and she notes that for later. There aren't too many people in this town, after all, and there's two of them running around with masks on.

God. Of all places.]

And so you're worried that your mutant blood won't be compatible.

I'd still like to study it.

It's not. [ he answers. ] It contains a degree of radiation that can and will prove lethal to the average human. [ don't ask him how he knows — or do, maybe. alas, poor aunt may.

and also mj in that one alternate future where spider-semen killed her, but we

don't talk about that. ]

Why do you want to study it? [ peter can count on one hand the number of people he's willingly let near a sample of his blood. to say it's not his favourite idea is an understatement. ]

Because I don't understand it. I'm a scientist first and foremost.

Add to the fact that here, in this halfway place, our blood may be shifting more than we realize. Who's to say? Perhaps your blood will hold a clue.

[ he gets it, he does, but for all the best intentions in the world he doesn't want to open that door unnecessarily. no-one he knows has turned up here yet — although bucky's name on the obituaries had earned a second glance (the bucky he knows absolutely isn't here) — but that doesn't mean they won't, and he's not interested in having a vial of his blood just lying around for any interested parties.

the only flicker of hesitation that occurs is the small voice that says 'but morbius had wanted your blood to look into a cure', and—

who knows? maybe it could help, but to date none of the vampires here had harmed anyone (had they?), and rosalind had already succeeded in creating synthetic blood— ]

Listen, you get some proof that backs that theory up and says my blood can help us here and I'll be back, but I'm not interested in doing it for a maybe. [ beat. ] Once bitten, twice shy, you know how it goes.

I do.

[And surprisingly, phrased like that, she can at least, if not respect it, at least tolerate it. She knows very well what it's like to be betrayed for something that's inherently a part of you, even if her own problem wasn't nearly so innocent.]

Will you allow for other questions?

[ he shifts his weight a little, and eyes her, just for a second. a breath of a pause and he lifts a shoulder in a loose shrug. ]

Sure. [ a beat. he thinks, briefly, of ezekiel and the spider-totems, of the web of life and of madame web and how it — all of it — isn't quite as simple as 'got bit, suddenly! spider powers.' (of course, it was, kind of, but&mdash.

the magic aspect is a little beyond him.) ] I can't promise I can answer them, but you can ask.

Why the mask?

[She takes a seat, one leg crossing over the other. It's easier than standing and staring up at him.]

I can understand in a larger population, given your uniqueness. But here, we've less than a hundred of us. And frankly, you can't possibly be worried about scientists-- I should think even if I tried to dissect you, there'd be an outrage. But there's two of you running about in masks, so clearly there's a factor I'm missing.

[ there's a pause and then a laugh — it's not at the question, not as such, but the comment about dissection and about scientists (he is one, after all, a point he'd normally make a point of mentioning if there were more of them, but as it is: she's right, there isn't many of them, and even fewer of them are scientists, so—

nah.)

she's not wrong, not really: it's not a numbers thing. he can't speak for whoever else she's referring to, although he can guess who she means, but for him it's a comfort thing he's disinclined to entirely admit to. habit and familiarity. ]

You're a smart woman. You know we have no way of knowing who turns up here. We also don't know what happens to anyone that disappears: could the people that die here — like, really die here — stay dead, or is there something else to it? I don't want to make a guess at that. I don't want to be wrong, because when I say I've known people who've died before and it's had trouble sticking, I'm not just making a play on words.

There are people back home whose safety relies on other people not knowing who I am.

[ sure, those people might not turn up, but demasking and having a public identity had, for a time, managed to be one of his worst mistakes. he'd managed to make it right, but even that hadn't been without its cost — felicia, even mj. he's thought a thousand times about how things might have been different if he hadn't gone along with that, if may hadn't been shot, if he hadn't had to ask strange for help. ]

Besides, maybe I just like being a man of mystery. Adds to the charm.

You had me until the end.

[She says it dryly, but that's more just to respond than a proper answer.]

What made you decide on this? On--

[She gestures at all of him.]

I can understand hiding it. But what made you decide to race about in a costume saving others?

[ he scuttles along the ceiling a little bit further before dropping down to the ground; he lands near noiselessly, and if he's aware just how much like a spider his movements are, it's not reflected in anything else, no self-consciousness or apologeticness. when otto had taken over his body, he'd been taken by surprise at the muscle memory, the way that peter gravitated to ceilings and to walls without really giving it a second thought.

he doesn't do it to unnerve rosalind, then; doesn't even consider that it might (she's seen stranger, surely?). instead, he does it to buy a couple of seconds of time, to think about his answer.

it hadn't been to save others, not originally. that hadn't been anywhere near his first, second, or third thoughts. he'd gravitated towards figuring out how he could use it to make money, to support may and ben, to look out for himself and no-one else.

that had backfired in just about the worst way possible, and so had being cavalier about his powers. being arrogant and thinking he could save everyone. ben and gwen represented the worst of his choices and his mistakes, and he's not sure how much of that he wants to elaborate on.

so what he settles on is: ]

Someone important to me once told me that with great power there must also come great responsibility. [ a beat. ] I didn't get it until it was too late. There are a lot of people out there who can't do what I can do, which means if I don't do what I can when I can, when the worst happens, it's on me as much as it's on the bad guy.

If you can do something to make a difference, you do it. [ he eyes her, just for a second. ] Why are you a scientist?

There's nothing else I could possibly be.

[What an odd question. It's personal in a way that she isn't usually asked, but she doesn't mind it. Really, it's the way he moves that throws her off; there's something inherently animalistic about it, something that speaks more of a spider than a person.]

It's . . .

[How to explain this? She's never had to before.]

I don't do it to make a difference. I'm not a savior. Don't misunderstand. But . . . I suppose in a way, it's a variation on your own reasoning. With great intelligence comes a duty to invent and discover, because there's no one else who can.

Right, [ he says, when she says 'there's nothing else I could possibly be', but he waits for her to finish before adding anything else. ] Because it's a part of who you are. I was a kid when this happened to me and now, doing what I do—. [ or did, before he ended up here, he supposes — there's not a whole lot of opportunity to spider-man here, in truth, and it's left him antsy.

it's one of the reasons he was so thrown by being asleep for two weeks: being protected when he could have made a difference played at his sense of guilt, and the awareness that it was all because of a poor choice to eat some food. he's tried not to think too much about what it means as far as his sense of self goes, because he's not sure he'll like the answer.

being peter parker without being spider-man is like losing a part of himself, one that he'd admittedly lost in a very literal sense earlier in the year (thanks, isotope genome accelerator), but—. ] I can't imagine not doing it. [ he's stopped, on occasion. he's not been spider-man for periods of time, but he's always ended up getting pulled back into it because someone or something needs him; and in some way, he needs to be doing it.

it'd been the stumbling block in his and mj's relationship for so long, and just as they were finally — finally! — working through it, he'd found himself here.

(parker luck, eh.) ] And sure, making a difference might not be your reasoning, but you have made a difference, haven't you? To someone. That's what discovery does.

I suppose.

[But she's no hero, and she never wants to be mistaken for one. She's seen too many idiots rich off their own false stories to want to go down that road. But yes. She's made a difference. Whether or not it was a good difference is down to the specifics.]

Speaking of which . . . so long as you're here and unwilling to donate your blood, you can help in other ways. How strong are you?

[She still has quite a few questions, mind. But she can put him to work while she asks them.]

And is it just you, back in your world, or are there others who wander around in masks?

What? [ ugh, what is she going to try and get him to do? there's a moment where he looks around, trying to work out just where that's leading and if he wants to be involved. at home, as soon as it approached the 'clean up' side of things, he'd duck out, suddenly needed elsewhere and—

well, if this leads to anything he doesn't want to be involved in, he can always do the same here. ] One-hundred sixty-seven pounds, proportionate strength of a spider, so say we're talking the grip of a jumping spider, we're talking one-hundred seventy times that. You do the math, Do— Madam Lutece. You're the scientist.

[ grumble grumble. ]

There are others. Good guys, bad guys, a few guys in between. Why?

I'm curious, and I'm doing my best not to demand answers you'll refuse to give.

[More importantly: that's a very precise answer from him. A scientific answer. Did someone else do that for him, or did he do it himself? Hm. She heads to the back, tugging at the tarp, revealing an enormous device half-built.]

I need you to lift up that long iron bracer, please, and hold it while I screw it in place. Who's another "good guy"?

[God, you can just hear the quotes around the words.]

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first experiment; 9:53 PM

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