venom

What’s more important? The setup, or the punchline?

Your superpower is always seeing the humor in a situation. Well, no. You’re a spider-person, so you have the expected heightened senses and physicality but in your eyes, it is your glowing personality that really makes you a stand-out hero. That stupid spider could take as much away from you as it wanted, but by hell would it ever get your laughter. It’s how you’ve been able to cope with this life. You have to find the fun in it otherwise you’ll get caught in your webs.

The purple and green woven into your suit is ever so slightly toxic, emanating a dim glow that seems brighter under Nueva York’s neon lights and heavy rain. The city is overall slow tonight; it’s a Tuesday, so you stopped a bank robbery, carjacking, and an attempted mugging, leaving you with the downtime you desperately need.

You’ve spent months looking for any trace of that stupid bat boy and tonight you finally think you’ve found him. Flash fucking Thompson, your ex-boyfriend and co-writer on your second final doctoral project. He mixed his DNA with a bat’s in an attempt to outshine Venom—that’s what you call yourself, it’s an old gamertag you used to hack into Alchemax so when you were bit adopting the moniker was only natural.

Well, Flash is an ex-boyfriend for a reason and was successful in making himself a pseudo-vampire but in not surpassing you. Nueva York loves Venom. They are a hero, saving people, and sometimes the world, with their inhuman powers and being a true leader in improving the city. That includes tracking down serial bloodsuckers and psycho clowns. Your initial searches left you with hundreds of dead ends; you even considered asking Peter. He might have some insight but you discarded that idea when you remembered his most recent explicit laden refusal to see you.

You rid yourself of thoughts of him by refocusing on the microscope before you. Toxicology is your strong suit; you discovered so while studying botany in undergraduate school, then had this reaffirmed in graduate school upon receiving a Master’s in Biochemistry and again when awarded a Doctorate in Toxicology. Your dissertation on the application of poisonous toxins in the treatment of depression and PTSD won you a few minor awards, but you pride yourself on the application of toxicology in heroics.

Just the right amount of toxin renders your targets immobile. Not paralyzed though. More like a laughing gas type of immobile. A non-addictive opioid-like substance that excretes from your saliva and now, unfortunately, your fangs. During your first run-in with Bat-Thompson, or as he calls himself: Batman, he bit you. He had the sincere audacity to bite you. You bit him back, of course, but the damage was done. His blood mingled with yours while he laughed his way into darkness.

You haven’t seen him since.

You need the perfect setup for the punchline to hit.

You need a web to trap your stupid little bat.

Not just a literal web, but a metaphorical one too.

You are going to draw out Thompson and punch him square in the jaw.

At least you were going to until a broody Spiderman left him tied up in red webs with a note waiting for your thank you.

Fucking joke.