The main purpose of a symbiote colony is to spread. Venom had mostly left this objective behind, content enough to just stay with eddie.
Still- being spontaneously pulled into a universe devoid of his species, well- he couldn't deny fate. So, there on the bar table they'd manifested in, he left an insert seedling of himself- ready to spread. Good thing, too; no sooner had he placed it then he began to fade, his own being and memories pulling him back to his home universe.
No! the seedling hasn't had time to sprout yet!
Venom and Eddie dissapear from this world. But what of the seedling, yet to be given the time to bond to this places energies?
One thing about the type of universes that hold superheroes and supervillains; they like to preserve a canon. This means- snipping out anything that doesn't fit. A boy erased by an ancient spell, rendering his very existence contrary to the story painted by every grain of memory engraved into the cobbled fabric which makes up the world's reality? Not exactly canon compliant. An unbound bit of alien goop with no traceable in-universe explanation?...
If someone's eyes had been on the vigilante when the memories were all erased, if someone had spotted the symbiote seedling on the table; if they'd been percieved, in that moment- perhaps that perception, that quick commitment of memory, the firing of those neurons, like quantum mechanics; could have acted as a string- A pulley, to hoist them back into being.
Unfortunately for the two anomalies; nobody was watching, as tends to be the truth in a persons moment of need. Peter Parker doesn't have more than a moment to grapple with the familiar feeling of being erased before he's vanished, tracelessly.
The symbiote doesn't even have a moment to understand it exists. Wiped off the face off the earth before it could even break from its inert state.
Still- things don't just go away. Souls, memories, all that floaty stuff that makes s person up- it doesn't like to let go of it's familiar shape. It has to go somewhere.
And it just so happens that another property of superhero-type universes is that they love to take in outside visitors. Contradictory, yes, but it makes the story interesting. When have we ever had any consistency anyway?
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Sometimes, a soul leaves a body early. This usually coincides with what is medically pronounced "brain death". The heart may keep beating, none the wiser to the fruitlessness of it's efforts, still pumping its sweet sweet mana- oxygen, that is- up to an ever still wakeless brain. Quite like a son helplessly performs compressions on his fallen mother chest, painfully unaware that it will already be too late to revive her once the paramedics arrive. Unaware that he'd never even had a chance at starting her up again.
Brain-death preserves just enough function to keep those cycles going. The body is propped up, intubated, turned into nothing but the mindless yet still beating heart of a high-effort and inevitably futile nutrient cycling machine; More a component than a person. They are left a system, without a conciousness. Like a bug's headless body, wandering its last few minutes, completely unaware of what it's lost.
Peter Parker comes to being; a flash like a supernova; blooming in a blinding white-hot pain. This is how he spends the first eternity, soul and it's transposed memories desperately attempting to cling onto a previously abandoned, withering brain. These mental millenia are a violent bashing together of those clinging attributes which create someone's overall personhood- the fates still deciding whether this patient on this lab table, strapped down and tubed up, is similar enough to this lost soul that they might assimilate and become one.
Meanwhile, a symbiote becomes born; clinging to the tissue of this living yet lifeless form. It knows nothing yet but this, though soon its act of symbiosis will unlock the personality hid deep within the code of it's inorganic DNA; In this moment, it is new. This is how a seedling becomes different than its source. Through this initial symbiosis, there is a moment where the symbiote is nothing but an extension of the host's mind, shaped in perfect harmony with their being. For a moment, they are simply part of the system.
In this moment, Venom is nothing but pain and a swirling static vortex build on conflicting flashes of two different memory banks. They war with each other, with him- these possible realities crash against his blurry beginnings of consciousness. Pressing him all at once into a dozen possible shapes, or telling him to he nothing at all.
Just as the cells of the boy's body fight over wether they're meant to mutate or not, the very fabric of venom's being fights over wether he actually exists; both of these phenomena suspended in a lack of any active consciousness or present thought to decide that they both truly exist. Nothing exists in that moment which is coherent enough to prove that they are, in fact, real.
That is until, finally; something distantly unlocked in Venom tells him that he is. And in this moment- a consciousness is born. Born, to this world. Born to this table, to this room, to this body. It is in that birth that a final, strong connection is formed with this realm at last.
In that moment- Venom becomes something that belongs here.
By now, the lab is crowded with scientists. No- not scientists; goons of some sort. Piloting the body through a still crippled, entrophied brain- like a cordyceps fungus piloting the mostly dead body of an ant- the symbiote nevertheless understands the presence of threat. Everything is still vauge to him, like that moment right between sleep and waking when dreams and reality drip and melt together.
Symbiotes are meant to develop within a functioning host. They hijack the framework of their other half, borrowing pre-existing mental passages to grow their own. With only this brain to use- one both conflicting with itself and shriveled from dis-use; Venom is unable to reach into those more complex structured like moral code or memory. Instead, the creature does what instinct tells it to. It runs from the place which gave it pain, and rips through any barrier that tries to trap it.
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There's a moist chill in the air, blown in through a light but constant spattering of wind-swept rain. It's he kind of cold that makes you glad to have a coat and an umbrella. The kind of cold that blows right through the fabric of your clothes, skipping the skin and blowing straight through to seep into your bones; yet remaining just warm enough at night that you might avoid any shivering or spluttering with some good thick fabric and something to keep the rain off you.
A worker on the dock shivers desperately, robbed of his umbrella by a gust of wind; the gale being stronger here by the water. The cold is biting; water leeching away the man's body heat as it soaks into anything it lands on. Tightly hugging his coat to himself, he sits- slotted behind the partial cover of a heavy storage container placed against the side of a previously abandoned warehouse.
As a dock worker on this side of gotham- the man had been no stranger to illegal activity. In fact- he'd been one of the crew moving half this stuff. Unmarked boxes, barrels of unknown liquid, he'd moved it all. That was the job down here. Moving unmarked cargo from probably illegal vessels to definitely condemned old warehouses, Or rowing out to a boat offshore and rowing back with a little package and someone on board who would definitely shoot you dead without a second thought if you tried anything.
Jarren Woods didn't like assisting criminals, sure- but the job kept his debts quelled. He never saw what it was that he was moving, so he didn't have to feel so guilty about what it was he was contributing to. For all he knows, they're secretly working on curing cancer. Or making drugs. It's usually drugs. But it was either this or, probably, getting all his teeth knocked out & being left homeless and penniless on the unforgiving gotham streets. Maybe sometimes he'd almost prefer that. Maybe now he would.
Right now, Jarren was pretty sure he was about to die. Curiousity killed the cat; it was a stupid, stupid idea, coming and checking out the commotion. When you see grunt workers rushing in, you're meant to go the other way.
But- for once, there were bright lights on in the warehouse and, through escaping slivers of that light, he'd seen that they'd failed to properly board up a section of the window. So, the cat be damned, he'd taken a peek inside.
What he'd seen was- beyond him. It almost reminded him of clayface, the way that tar-like substance slopped off it's it's irregular figure; Looking at first glance as though it had been a person drenched in oil and black sludge, but moving in such a way that a few moments was more than enough to tell it was something else entirely.
The surface of the thing churned and jumped erratically, like magnetic fluid being pulled in different directions. It shifted, falling like slime and moving like solid framework all at once; as though the thing didn't quite have a handle on what to be. Like it was both alive and inanimate, all at once.
Parts of it would would fall limp as it's focus shifted off them; carved shapes of gunk bowing and dripping down like melting rubber, half a slow bend like tree branches weighed down and half a thick flowing, like cascading magma; before the thing would pull them back in- solidifying a fresh new limb to bat away a grunt worker, or a wide drooping wing to push everything near it away before melting into itself once again.
Jarren Woods only managed to spectate a few moments of this before suddenly a body was being tossed toward his little peephole. He scrambled back, observing in horror as the impact bent the metal t-frame of the window outward, a loud crack sounding out as wooden boards splintered and broke down the middle, leaving it as a stroke of luck for the man that any glass had long since been blown out the windows of the old structure.
Adrenaline high now, hearing the loud thundering of something bursting through the doors of the structure; Jarren Woods backed himself into the nearest corner, pressed himself up against the wall, and gripped a hand to his mouth.
Eventually, after a long stretch in which he heard no noise that could surpass the volume of his own breathing and heartbeat- Jarren did something he'd only done once before, something every common grunt should know not to do. He did the very thing that had gotten him into his first mess with the criminal world as a kid;
he called the cops.