Strangely Heartless
May had just driven Peter and Osborn to the Bleecker Street Sanctum. Alex and Mia were following them on motorcycle. May drove the truck near the Masters of Mystical Arts' Manor.
"Thanks, May. Hope to see you again." said Osborn as he exited the truck.
Peter was delighted. His aunt had been able to clean his suit. So good for him.
Shortly after the man left, May turned to her nephew.
"Hey. He trusts you."
The Queens' hero knew that his aunt was referring to Norman Osborn and their earlier conversation about helping villains.
"And so do I." she added warmly.
Peter, not knowing what to say, replied:
"Thanks for cleaning my suit. I'll see you later."
Peter, Alex and Mia took Norman Osborn to the crypt where they found Ned and MJ who were still searching for visitors from other worlds by browsing the information on the internet.
Peter made the introductions, awkwardly:
"Guys, this is Mr. Osborn."
"Hey, it's Doctor." rectified Osborn.
"Sorry. Um... Dr. Osborn, these are my friends, Ned and MJ."
Ned waved to the doctor, while MJ stared at the newcomer with astonishment.
Norman Osborn looked at her with frown.
"Mary Jane?" he said to the girl.
"It's Michelle Jones, actually." corrected MJ.
"Who is Mary-Jane?" asked Mia, puzzled.
"I've no idea." replied Alex shrugging.
Osborn nodded with understanding as he kept staring at MJ, realizing that he was in a completely different universe with a different Spider-Man.
"Fascinating..."
His attention was then drawn to the visitors imprisoned below them.
Intrigued, Ned turned to MJ.
"Do you think there are other Ned Leedses?" he asked.
And he sat down in front of his computer avidly, hoping to find some doppelgängers of him.
Osborn looked around and noticed Doctor Octopus in his cell.
"Octavius?"
The latter turned and squinted before staring at him with incredulity and stupor.
"Osborn?"
"What... What happened to you?" asked Osborn confused.
"What happened to... You're the walking corpse!" declared the surprised scientist with tentacles.
"What do you mean?"
"You died, Norman! Years ago!"
Peter and Alex looked up, having heard everything.
"You're insane!" said Osborn in denial.
"God, I love it here." says Dillon with ecstasy.
Peter and Alex joined Osborn in front of the prisoners in their cells.
"Remember, Peter, Earth – 962's Spider-Man told us that Obsorn was dead." the woman told the young hero from Queens.
Then it was the turn of Green Arrow to join them.
In the confusion, Peter gestured to Norman as he looked at the imprisoned enemies.
"What are you talking about? He's standing right there. He's not..."
"Dead." declared Sandman from his cell looking at Osborn and Octavius. "They both died, fighting Spider-Man."
Shocked, Osborn turned his head to Peter, who was as stunned as he was.
As if nothing had happened, Flint Marko said:
"It was all over the news." (Looking at Norman Obsorn.) "Green Goblin, impaled by the glider he flew around on." (And he looked at Doctor Octopus.) "And a couple of years later... you. Doc Ock, drowned in the river with your machine."
Stunned, Alex then looked at the three concerned: Obsorn, Octavius and Marko.
"So... you three, are you from the same Earth?" (And she looked at both Obsorn and Doc Ock.) "And you two, are you dead?"
"That's nonsense!?" said Octavius furious with disbelief. "Spider-Man was trying to stop my fusion reactor. So I stopped him. I had him, by the throat... And then, I... And then I was here."
"That's what you were doing before arriving in our universe." Mia assumed as she looked at the tentacle man.
"Oh, please. Let me tell you something!" said Dillon sarcastically.
All eyes turned to him, as he told with amusement:
"I was whooping Spider-Man's ass. He'll tell ya. And then he caused an overload. I was stuck in the grid, absorbing data. I was about to turn into pure energy, and then... And then, uh... And then..."
He interrupted himself realizing, scared.
"Oh, shit! I was about to die!"
"Max, do you know? Do I die?" asked Lizard with concern.
Disoriented, Alex tried to put her ideas back together and then stared at Osborn and the other prisoners.
"Okay. I understand, now." she said. (To Osborn, Octavius and Sandman.) "You three come from the same Earth..." (To Lizard and Dillon.) "And you two, you come from another Earth. Two different Earths with two different Spider-Men."
"And not at the same time." added Mia. "You, guys, have all been teleported from your universes by the time Spider-Man manages to defeat you all!"
"So I died where I came from." declared Lizard.
MJ and Ned joined Peter, Alex and Mia, alarmed by what they had just heard.
"It's crazy!" exclaimed Ned, stunned.
A golden portal appears from nowhere. Dr Strange came in with an elaborately designed puzzle box, the corrupted spell trapped inside. He noticed Norman Osborn.
"Oh, great. You caught another one." he said, satisfied.
But Peter wanted to stand in the way of the wizard.
"No, wait. Strange, he's not dangerous..."
But Strange disregards this and portals Norman into the last remaining cell.
Dazed and anxious, Osborn shook his hands in his dungeon.
"It's okay." Peter reassured.
Then, the latter noticed the box of riddles that the sorcerer held in his hands.
"What is that?"
"It's an ancient relic. La Machina di Kadavus." explained Strange indifferent to the turmoil of Osborn in his cell. "I've trapped your corrupted spell inside, and once I finish the proper ritual, it'll reverse the spell. It send these visitors back to their universes. And send Mia Queen back to her future."
"And then what? We perish?!" said Octavius.
"Nah. No thanks, I'll pass on that." said Dillon.
"Let me out of here!" moaned Osborn having a panic attack. "Peter!"
"Strange, wait!" interjected Alex. "We can't send them back yet!"
"Why?" asked Strange.
"Some of these guys are gonna die." replied Peter.
"Parker." replied Strange coldly. "It's their fate."
"Not if we show them another way where they don't have to die!" replied Alex firmly. "And we cannot send these people to their deaths! After all we fought! Thanos! Anti-Monitor! Tyrant Superman! How can you turn your back on that? That's not who we are, Strange! We cannot decide who lives and who dies!"
"We have nothing to decide, Alex." replied Strange, always firmly. "It's in in the scheme of things. We can't go against that!"
Peter was stunned by the sorcerer's lack of empathy.
"Come on, Strange! Have a heart!"
Strange continued, still coldly:
"In the grand calculus of the multiverse, their sacrifice means infinitely more than their lives."
Alex approached him gently, raising her arms with a pleading look. She addressed him with sympathy, hoping to reason with him.
"Stephen, please listen to me! Stephen, I understand that you want to protect our reality and that it is your duty as much as ours. But we can't send these people to be killed! That's not who we are! If we do that, we are no better than those we fight! Stephen, please!"
Strange softened gently, but shook his head.
"I'm sorry, Alex. If they die in their worlds, they die."
Dr Strange turned to solve the corrupt spell. Peter turned to Alex, Mia, Ned and MJ, not knowing what to do. Even Alex seemed helpless.
A golden light began to cover the visitors in their cells.
"Peter!" cried Osborn panicked.
"Alex, I can't let him do that!" the young man says in a low voice to his friend who was as helpless as he is.
The visitors reacted, nervous and uncomfortable, while the golden light around them shone more and more strongly. The box was almost solved. A triangular button appeared at the top. As Strange was about to press on, Peter wrapped the box around him with one of his webs.
"Don't." said Strange severely.
Peter removed the box just as he magically wrapped Dr Strange in Flint Marko's cell.
"Dude, what are you doing?!" said Ned, stunned.
"Parker, what are you doing?!" added Mia with astonishment.
"Peter, you gotta go. Go!" MJ told him, urging her boyfriend to escape the crypt.
"She's right." added Alex, pushing the young man to leave. "Get out of there! Fast!"
While Peter fled, Strange broke free from Sandman's cell.
"This is why I never had kids." said the annoying sorcerer as he left the cell.
He easily exited the cell, while Marko crashed against the transparent wall.
Spider-Man rushed out with the Box and flew to a series of portals that appeared from nowhere in front of him. He came out of one of them and landed right in front of the Sanctum. Dr Strange stared at him.
"Give me the box." he ordered gently with a firm tone.
"No!" exclaimed Spider-Man, raising his fist towards him.
He tried to throw a magic web at Dr. Strange, but his shot failed and then disappeared completely.
Spider-Man flew quickly holding the Box in his hand. But his web flew into a portal, then into another, wrapping its own foot. He was stuck, hanging between the two portals, in trouble.
Using an Eldritch Whip, Dr. Strange pulled Spider-Man down and knocked his astral body out of his physical body.
Ghostlike, Spider-Man's Astral Body in the form of Peter Parker, floated nearby.
"Oh, my God. I'm dead!"
"You're not dead." explained Strange. "You've just been separated from your physical form."
"My physical... What?!"
Spider-Man's physical body stood there, apparently lifeless, holding the Box. Strange reached out to La Macchina Di Kadavus, but the physical body of the hero drove him away. Somehow, Astral Peter controlled the physical body of Spider-Man.
"How are you doing that?" said Strange, both stunned and impressed, trying to rip the Box from Spider-Man's physical body.
"I have no idea." replied Peter as stunned as he was.
"You should not... be able... to... do that!" Strange was furious trying to take the cube, but Spider-Man's physical body moved too fast for him.
"This feels amazing." said the astral form of Peter with ecstasy.
The astral form of Peter swam back to reenter his physical body. Spider-Man was thrown on the road. He stood up before the sorcerer.
"That might be one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me, but don't ever do that again."
Spider-Man webbed off with the Box. Strange sent his Cloak of Levitation after him. The Cloak clung to the shoulders of the hero and held him forcefully in the air.
"Hey… Get off of me!" Spider-Man fought with the Cloak.
The Cloak sent Spider-Man back. With a wrist movement, Strange sent him crashing on an exact replica of the city, but separated from the real one, so that they could fight without being seen and without hurting anyone.
Spider-Man freed himself by clinging firmly to the Box. Strange flew after him, the Cloak now floating behind his back.
Strange manipulated the Mirror Dimension that a department store folded on itself. Spider-Man began to weave, navigating skillfully through the building as he bowed around him.
He rushed out the window, crossing Central Park, still clinging to the Box. Dr. Strange waved his hands to create a magic clothesline. Spider-Man was thrown back, directly onto the path of a subway train, coming out of a gate opened by Strange. La Macchina Di Kadavus landed on the roof of the train. As the Master of Mystical Arts set off to seize it, Spider-Man wrapped the Box in a cloth. Strange sighed. The hero of Queens crawled onto the roof of the train.
On Bleecker Street, Alex and Green Arrow joined the outside.
"Do you see them?" asked Alex, looking at the sky.
"I don't see Parker or Strange." said Mia looking around.
"But they couldn't have disappeared magically." replied Supergirl's sister, puzzled.
"What is this place?" asked Spider-Man.
"The Mirror Dimension." replied Strange. "Where I'm in control."
Strange waved his hands, changing the Mirror Dimension again. The skyscrapers of New York City folded, bending to the peaks and valleys of the subway that ran through the two worlds of New York and the Grand Canyon, now fused together.
Spider-Man and Dr. Strange were standing on the roof of the train, each separated by several meters.
"Strange, stop! Can we please just talk about this?" asked Spider-Man with a pleading tone.
Strange sighed annoyed.
"Peter, don't you realize that in the Multiverse, there are an infinite number of people who know Peter Parker is Spider-Man? And if that spell gets loose, they're all coming here!"
"Look, I know. I get it. But we can't just send them home to die. Alex is right, this isn't who I am!"
"It's their fate." insisted Strange trying to reason with the boy. "You can't change that any more than you can change who they are."
"But what if we could? What if we can change their fate?" suggested Spider-Man.
Strange altered the Mirror Dimension again.
"Whoa, what are you doing?" said Spider-Man.
He teleported him and dropped Spider-Man from one portal to the next, in a constant free fall. As the young hero fell in and out, again and again, the Cloak flew in and out, again and again. It flew inside and took the Box.
Spider-Man hugged the other side of the Cloak hanging them between the two portals.
"Give me that back!" exclaimed young Webslinger, fighting against the Cloak of Levitation.
As the Cloak and Spider-Man were fighting, Strange grabbed his cape and Box with a lasso, pulling them away from Peter, folding the two portals closer and closer together and eventually falling on each other.
Everything began spinning. The streets of New York kaleidoscopically folding into Grand Canyon rock walls. The Box flew. Strange, the Cloak and Spider-Man crashed in its pursuit.
The Queens' hero lands on top of a rock, noticing the rocky walls that seemed to spiral into the air.
"Wait a minute, is that an Archimedean spiral? The Mirror Dimension is just geometry? You're great at geometry. You can do geometry."
He weaved a web and flew away as Strange grabbed the box, his Cloak once again wrapped around him.
Spider-Man flipped in random directions, all rejoicing and came to weave multiple webs that clung to the floating rocks in the air.
"Square the radius, divided by pi, plot points along the curve..."
"It's over, Parker." declared Strange holding La Macchina Di Kadavus against him, not noticing the spider's webs of the young man on the rocks. "I'll come pick you up when it's done."
He opened a portal to the Sanctum, while Spider-Man continued weaving in random directions.
Rejoicing, he spoke to the sorcerer:
"Hey, Strange. You know what's cooler than magic?"
Strange's foot got stuck on one of the seemingly random Spider-Man's webs. Then the shifting of Mirror Dimension objects brings another web right into him. Strange looked around. Webs everywhere, approaching him as the rocks turned and turned while he was completely trapped in a giant web.
"Math." Spider-Man replied.
He dropped in front of him and seized the box.
"Don't do this!" said Strange, helpless and a prisoner, while La Macchina Di Kadavus was taken from him.
And Spider-Man also tore the Sling Ring from Dr. Strange's fingers to wizard's great indignation.
"I'm sorry, sir, but..."
He plunged through the portal with the Box and Sling Ring. He looked back through the gate.
"...I have to try." he concluded as the portal closed in front of Strange, furious and worried.
Back in the crypt, he was joined by Ned and MJ.
"Dude, what happened?" asked Ned in shock.
Then, Alex and Mia joined him.
"Peter, are you okay? Where's Strange?" asked Supergirl's sister.
"I just had a fight with Doctor Strange and I totally won!" replied Spider-Man overexcited brandishing the Sling Ring of Strange. "Look, and I stole his ring thing. I was swinging through the city, and then I went through this... massive mirror thing, and then I was back..."
"Peter. Peter." Alex gently says to him wanting to calm him down. "Where's Strange?"
"He's trapped, but... I'm not sure for how long." the young man replied by removing his mask.
"I wonder how Parker managed to defeat Strange?" asked Mia stunned.
The sudden arrival of Spider-Man was not unnoticed by the prisoners in the crypt. Octavius stared at the young man with a frown.
"You could've just left us to die. Why didn't you?"
"Because he is not like that." Alex replied firmly. "Spider-Man is not a murderer."
"That's not who he is." added MJ approving the gesture of her boyfriend.
Peter reacted to these words and turned to the visitors in their cells.
"I think I can help you guys. If I can fix what happened to you, then when you go back, things will be different and you might not die fighting Spider-Man."
"What do you mean, fix us?" wondered Dillon with skepticism.
Peter continued, ignoring his question:
"Look, our technology is advanced..."
"I can help you." said Obsorn with interest. "You know, I'm something of a scientist myself. Octavius knows what I can do."
"Fix?" grumbled the latter angrily as if the concept of fixing someone was a nonsense. "You mean like a dog? I refuse."
Peter, unaware of the tentacle scientist, replied:
"I can't promise you guys anything, but at least this way, you actually get to go home and have a chance. A second chance. I mean, come on. Isn't that worth trying?"
"Peter, can I talk to you please?" Mia said to him, lowering her voice and glancing into a corner.
Peter and the future Green Arrow stood in a corner, while the female archer spoke quietly to the young man.
"What are you doing?"
"We must try to save them." Peter said as if it were obvious.
"Save them'? Two mad scientists, one of whom has tentacles in his back? A giant lizard? A Sandman, huh? And an electric guy? Have you ever wondered if they actually can be or want to be saved?"
"You're suggesting to send them to death? Do you think you could live with that on your conscience?" asked Alex who had just joined them.
"I didn't say they deserved to die." Mia replied before turning to Peter. "But now you're playing with things you don't know. You have no idea what you're getting into and you're not sure it's going to work. And until they all get a possible second chance, it could end badly."
"Your girlfriend Robin Hood is right, Peter." declared Lizard. "Trust me, boy... When you try to fix people, there are always consequences."
Not wanting to be overwhelmed by the false hopes of Mia and Lizard, Peter replied to the prisoners:
"I mean, you don't have to come. But if you stay here... you're gonna have to deal with the wizard."
"Ah, so, we go along, or die. Not much of a choice, is it?" replied sarcastic Lizard.
"I just wanna go home." said Sandman shrugging his shoulders.
"Well, I myself don't wanna be killed." replied Dillon still skeptical. "Especially by a guy dressed like Dungeons & Dragons, so... what's your plan?"
"Don't worry. I have it all under control." said Peter.
He took Alex, Mia, Ned and MJ apart.
"What are we gonna do about this thing?" he said, showing them La Macchina Di Kadavus.
"Well, we need to find somewhere safe for it, right?" says MJ.
"Right, it's that Box that can send these guys home, and me in my future." added Mia.
Peter entrusted the Box to MJ.
"You got to take it. If something bad happens, I'll text you, and then you just push this and then it's all over, and they'll all be gone."
"We're not gonna leave you." said MJ.
"He's right." Alex nodded. "We can't leave this magic Box unattended."
"We're not going to leave Peter with them?" insisted MJ.
"Mia and I stay with Peter." says Alex. "You and Ned, go somewhere else, take this Box with you and wait for us to tell you what to do. We can't let you go with us."
"You can't come with me. It's too dangerous." Peter said as he looked at his two friends. "You guys have already done enough."
"Peter, we're in this together." added Ned with determination.
"I know we're in this together, Ned, but I can't do this if I know that you're in danger." Peter insisted, holding the Box out to his girlfriend. "So for me, MJ, please just take this. Please."
After some hesitation, MJ finally obeyed and came to take the box, much to Peter's relief.
"Fine. But Peter, I swear, if I don't hear from you, I'm pressing the button." she says to him with determination.
"Sure." Queens' boy replied.
Then she addressed all the locked-in villains with a voice strong enough to be heard by all, wielding La Macchina Di Kadavus.
"And I will do it!"
Some prisoners shook their heads. Dillon commented with skepticism:
"Yeah, we all believe you, Michelle."
"No way that's his girlfriend, no way." said the Lizard as he stared at her. "No way. I think that's Miss Robin Hood. And the woman in black, is his mom?"
"She'll do it." Peter said with confidence looking at Spider-Man's villains.
"Absolutely. She will." added Ned.
Peter turned to his best friend.
"See you later. Be safe."
"You too." Ned told him.
The two high school friends shook hands. As they were shaking hands, a spark sprang from Dr. Strange's Sling Ring. Puzzled, the two boys looked at each other with astonishment, then moved away.
MJ kissed her boyfriend.
"Be careful. Okay?"
"You too." he replied.
MJ and Ned left the Sanctum. Then turned to Alex, Mia and the prisoners in the crypt.
"So, uh... Who's coming with me?"
"Peter, I'm with you." replied Alex wanting to help the young man.
"You have my bow." said Mia joining him.
Osborn and Octavius looked at each other. Dillon announced with a sarcastic air:
"Well, I'm in. But, if this goes sideways... I'm gonna fry you from the inside out."