A Different Man
Automatically, locating Strange was next to impossible. He knew that without even knowing anything about magic. The only way that he could detect the Sorcerer Supreme was if he made himself a threat and relied on his spider sense to protect him, but that was only if the attack was actually coming his way; if his ally was in an illusory world, then even if he believed that Spider-Man was a threat, there would be an illusory version of himself to represent the threat.
He had developed a disruptor and an optic deflection array for the suit to protect himself against detection, but he still had no heat scanners, not that he could confirm those would work against someone trapped in a magical illusion. At least it seems like Zalmoxis has retreated for the moment. I know he needs time. He wants to swap himself with someone from another world, and he’s going to swap several other people in an attempt to mask it. We would need help from someone on the other side if we were to narrow down his new body.
Finding he was out of web shooter fluid, there was nothing to do but go and resupply while he was trying to think of a solution. The Parker residence was on the way to Greenwich Village, where there might be another sorcerer or some artifact that could be used to locate him, else there might be an alarm that notified him of an intruder. Carefully listening to his spider sense while he was flying, he cursed himself that he had not reverse-engineered the web fluid yet.
Basically, after learning that there was still a supply of it, he put it low on a long list of priorities, and he was on the fence about replacing it entirely. It was useful both as a movement tool and as a method of restraining enemies, and as long as he kept Spider-Man’s branding mostly the same as Peter had it, he could avoid rousing the suspicion of the Avengers. At the same time, he felt more at home with spiked gauntlets, he really wanted to add an electroshock device to them, and there was only so much space. There was also the chance that he was simply stuck in the new body, and at that point there was no point in keeping the branding the same, others would eventually figure out that it was a different man under the mask one way or another.
Reaching the small house, he wondered what the old lady had done with the donation, but chances were she was waiting for her nephew to resurface before making a decision. The elderly had a tendency to go with low-risk investments unless they were bored out of their minds and turned to gambling, but that was a stereotype, for the most part. He crawled in through the window to find the light on, but there seemed to be no one in the room. She must be out of it or something.
Crawling in, he found a few of the canisters, and the moment he thought he was making good time, a pair of arms went around him. He had never sensed any danger.
“Peter, where were you?” It was the voice of a woman much younger than May Parker.
“You know, then.”
“Know what, that you’ve been running around as a hero and- Of course, I know, how could you hide being Spider-Man from your wife?”
“I’m not the one you know,” he said, kicking himself. He had never guessed that Parker would have been married; it seemed foolish to allow someone else to suffer that amount of risk. It was ridiculous, actually, when he considered all the people who would probably use her as leverage against him if they knew, and if a baby came out with arachnid abilities, how was he going to hide that? How was he even going to keep the kid from pulverizing the other preschoolers?
“What?”
“I’m a friend. I’ve been disguising myself as Spider-Man so that no one would realize he’s missing. The city would be vulnerable-”
“Wait, you know that he’s- he didn’t tell me about you. He’s really good at keeping secrets; how do I know you’re not some evil-”
“He didn’t tell you about me because he didn’t want to worry you,” he said, though really it was more like something he would do; he could hardly say how plausible it would be for Parker to hide the truth from loved ones. “He’ll explain this when he gets back.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in another world.”
“Wait, so are you some alternate version of Spider-Man from a parallel timeline?” she asked. Has she dealt with that before? There was no point in lying; she would find out the truth from her husband, since apparently he told her literally everything.
“No. I’m not from a different timeline, not unless the only reason these worlds are different is because of Zalmoxis messing around four thousand years ago. I came here because I needed web fluid, but I got another idea. This is going to work- the next time you see me-”
“I know. I don’t trust you, but I trust my husband to come back. Is this his fault?”
“No. It’s mine,” he said, jumping out the window and getting back on the glider.
He was lying to spare his counterpart from a lecture, but he really did feel like he had done something on his end, since it seemed the only mistake Spider-Man made was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. All the same, the fact that the Parker women were meeting in the same house painted a distressing picture. Harry Osborn must have been a friend of his as well, but he wouldn’t have been invited to wait by the phone in tears. The wife must have thought that he would first call his aunt to assure her that he was okay, and decided it was a better place to wait than wherever they live now.
The web fluid was old, which he should have figured since it was probably left over from when the old room was still inhabited, but it would work. He dialed Daredevil on his ‘Matches’ phone as he flew.
“Matches?”
“It’s Spider-Man, for now. I need your help with something.”
“Is it the Avengers?”
“No, it’s one in particular, and we need to help him,” he said, annoyed that his distrust had shifted his focus on how to respond to the superhero team. “Doctor Strange is trapped in an illusion, and he might get out soon, but it’d be too easy for Zalmoxis to hit him again with the same thing. I’m positive he was trying to trick me into following him.”
“Wait, Zalmo-”
“I’ll explain on the way. I need someone with another sixth sense,” he said. “Mine isn’t right for the job.”
He did explain right when he got to the house in Greenwich village, guessing from the sounds from the other end that Matt Murdock was putting on his costume somewhere. When he tried to open the door, though, it led right back out to the street. He must have some way of folding space to bar intruders from getting in. Crawling up to the circular window with the phone still to his ear, he tried to open the window, but found it only rotated out of the way whenever he reached for the latch. If I simply keep on making disruptions, perhaps he’ll notice even if I can’t get inside.
“How are you and I going to deal with Zalmoxis?” Daredevil asked eventually. “Have we thought that far ahead?”
“We have to rescue Strange. He’ll be better at dealing with this than either of us. The enemy’s expecting me to do it by myself.”
“What about the people who get swapped in the meantime?”
“We’ll sort that out later. We need to deal with the sorcerer first.”
“I’m missing something, does it take a long time for him to use spells?”
“I was thinking that too. I’m pretty sure he’s got something else to do, but he wasn’t letting on what it was. I can only think that we’ve forced his hand and he’s having to act earlier than expected, so he wasn’t prepared to switch to his next body.”
“I see. I’m in Hell’s Kitchen right now. Where do I need to be?”
“I’ll pick you up. The enemy went in the direction of greater Long Island, and that’s also where I lost track of Strange.”
“Where are you now?”
“Greenwich village- our friend has this place locked down.”
“You’re trying to break into his house?”
“I broke into Oscorp a few days ago and the place is running better than it ever was before. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“What are you planning on doing with that, by the way? If the real Spider-Man comes back-”
“I’m getting the idea that he wouldn’t have any interest in maintaining the persona. At this point it makes the most sense to just say that someone from the Avengers created Matches Malone as a way of fighting the organized crime of New York City. They could keep the asset if they wanted it.”
“He’s not really part of any team, but I think Moon Night could have done it. From what I’ve heard, he creates new personalities whenever he breathes. If you were actually one of his personalities this whole time, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“I don’t think he could replicate the spider powers. The point of handing the Avengers the credit is because I doubt anyone would try to go after their family members, especially not if no one knows who Malone is specifically.”
True to his word, he picked up Daredevil. He could not say that it would be as simple as he hoped, because he was still unsure of where Strange was, but something that was definitely not going to be simple was figuring out how to get him out of an illusion, but he was doing his best to stay reasonably optimistic. I may not know how magic works, but I know how basic logic works. For a sorcerer to fail to realize that he’s trapped in an illusion, it has to be able to counteract his other ways of knowing things apart from seeing and hearing them. He mentioned long-distance scrying. Can the illusion feed him incorrect information even when he’s using magic, or is he still able to use his powers to find Zalmoxis, even while in an illusion?
There was a chance that the black magician had been lying or misleading him, but he had said that the good doctor was in a false sense of security as well, meaning he also believed he had won against Sandman and Rhino, and perhaps he had, perhaps they both had, unless the illusion was of a larger scale than either of them had believed. The secret lies in the fact that I was able to see through the illusion before Strange, even with his extensive knowledge of magic. Zalmoxis might have been more worried about him, and made the illusion more robust, but most likely, he didn’t know about the spider sense, or he didn’t know how to counter it. Even though we need another magic user to get us out of this in the long term, what we need to beat him is something different, something he wouldn’t see coming even with four thousand years of memory.
In their path there was a swirling mass that he could only assume was not real, considering Daredevil was not reacting to it; there was no effect on the environment the blind man could detect. If he learns that a simple visual trick is not enough, then he should respond accordingly. At the same time, this means we’re getting close. They passed through the illusion without anything happening and at no point had his spider sense warned him of danger, so he gathered that either they were not being lured into some spell, or the definition of danger the sense used was stricter than his own.
“Spider-Man, duck,” Murdock said. He felt it coming almost immediately after the warning, and he took the glider slightly under the danger that he sensed. “He’s right ahead of us, but he’s moving.”
“Strange?”
“Unfortunately, no. I don’t know where he is- the smell coming off this sorcerer is totally new.”
“You can smell magic?”
“I get used to smelling things that most people can’t; honestly I sometimes don’t know what counts as unusual. We shouldn’t let on that we know where he is.”
He’s realized that we’re after him, and he’s decided to come and stop us. Most likely, that’s easier for him than just trying to escape. It’s possible that Strange is already doing something. The next trap was not between them and the direction they were heading. Now he’s trying to see if we notice it. Proceeding straight at Daredevil’s instruction, he kept the other magical obstruction at the corner of his vision, noticing that his sense of danger was slightly off where the barely visible illusion was.
“He’s come up with another trick,” he said. “The visible obstruction was a matter of feet away from the danger that the spell presented. He’s trying to tell if we’re using our eyes or not.”
“We want him to think we are?”
“For now, yes.”
At the back of his mind, he was still thinking about Sandman and Rhino, though he knew that neither of them could do as much damage to anyone as the black magician. If it had not been the case that he and Strange had already taken care of them, they were most likely laying low for the time being. Trying to attack Oscorp when law enforcement was already set up and without the assistance of Electro was inarguably suboptimal. There were more effective ways of spending their time. If he had to advise them, he would have suggested that they keep laying low and get out of town, allying with someone else in a similar situation.
The next series of tricks they either avoided entirely, narrowly dodged, or pretended not to notice. Whatever Zalmoxis was gathering from their responses to his tricks, he was not learning that they could detect him. All of a sudden, they were surrounded; there were even some traps below them. He responded by webbing straight up, catching their enemy off guard and yanking him down to the glider as they moved up at the same time. Holding him in place, Peter called out his spells for Murdock, who could respond to them even at close range.
“It’s one of the soul displacement-”
“I know,” he said, ducking. It was already the third spell that had been announced, so it stood to reason that he would catch on at some point. He planted a foot in the stomach of the sorcerer as he twisted out of the way of something going at his head. Spider-Man almost wanted to switch jobs with his ally, but he would have had a hard time containing the force that he was using than someone who was clearly trained in a martial art, but had no additional strength over a normal human.
The next blow knocked him out, and he had a sense of relief that he could reasonably say was genuine. It seemed likely that even if the enemy knew what his spider sense was, he had no way of directly manipulating it. In essence, their plan had worked and they had won the battle of wits by allowing Zalmoxis to conduct his little experiment and mess around with their awareness, but never letting on that Daredevil was able to smell him and gradually getting a better idea of where he was. From what they had observed, none of his spells really had to do with physical objects, so they could reasonably infer that as long as they were close enough to hit him with the web before he could float out of the way, he would not be able to block or counter it.
“He’s unconscious,” Murdock said. “I’m sure of it. Where do we need to go to find Strange?”
“Nowhere.”
They both turned to the voice and saw the Sorcerer Supreme floating in the air.
“When did you escape from the illusion?”
“Only just. The illusory world in which I was trapped was more robust than you might be able to understand, more so than I am sure that I can explain to one unread in Volume II of Mugen-”
“We know,” he said. “We’re not under any illusions that we would understand.”
“We figured that wherever you were, you were doing your best to keep him from crossing over into the other world. We knew that you were trusting us to handle things on our end.”
Strange surprised him a little by smiling. He realized that was exactly what had happened, and the only thing that informed Murdock of that was an idea of his occasional ally’s character and ability. He had been concerned that Parker would not be able to follow what he was trying to do, or that something would fall apart in the process; he hoped he would remember everything, but he realized that he was a lot less concerned about what had happened in his own world. On the one hand, it was true that there was nothing he could do for his own world, but he had a sneaking suspicion that he had never been expecting much out of his counterpart.
Parker isn’t an incompetent that relies on his powers. He couldn’t have survived this long if slinging webs and hitting things were all he could do. I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s done on my side of reality. Though it sounded strange, even in his head, he genuinely hoped that his counterpart had learned as much from the experience as he had.
“What happens to Zalmoxis?” Daredevil asked. “I admit I’m not familiar with magical justice, or where all he is even wanted.”
“He’s wanted all over the world, but only by those who still believe he exists,” Strange explained. “I’m afraid the state of New York has no greater claim to him than anyone else, even in other dimensions. Only a magical prison would be suitable to contain him.”
That, he supposed, constituted another lesson. He knew that both he and his newfound ally would have wanted to insist on the law of the land, but the state probably lacked a law against traveling between dimensions, even if he was basically killing people in the process. There was some way that they could argue for multiple life sentences, but practically there was no way for him to serve them if he just vanished out of his cell one day. They watched as the good doctor cast several spells on the black magician.
“What does the process look like?” Murdock asked, perhaps simply interested.
“Well, he should have to plead his case before a magical tribunal, and then they sentence him.”
He checked the police radio and there was no word on Sandman and Rhino, so there was no way they were actively threatening anyone. It seemed that the lawyer was lost in thought.
“Suppose he argues that this was the only way he could live,” he suggested after a moment. “Suppose he argues that the reality of the grave forced him to choose between himself and someone else. Could he not use an equivalent of a necessity defense?”
“Magical courts do not recognize a right to survive,” Doctor Strange said. “In cases of death by natural causes, there is no fault to be found. In the circumstance of the Plank of Carneades, whoever sinks and dies is not experiencing death by natural causes, and practically has had no time to accept that reality. I am sure that no one wishes to experience any kind of death, and the manner of death is irrelevant in comparison to the fact of it, but the time is not.”
Though he had not appointed himself as a black magician’s defense attorney, he found that hard to contradict. Except for the suicidal, or those who had accepted their deaths, there was no one who saw the time of death as irrelevant. He had been about to wonder aloud what natural causes even were, and how drowning could not number among them, but that was not what the good doctor had been saying. The only meaningful difference between dying by natural causes and other causes, and what therefore defined them, was that one expected to eventually die to them due to the frailty of the human body. Over time, things like heart attacks and strokes would become more likely, and less survivable. As long as immortality was not something everyone could enjoy, then there was the sad reality that would always have to be expected, and someone who chose not to expect it by stealing the lifespan of someone else was effectively ducking a large part of what it meant to be human.
“I suppose, if magical terms are a challenge to understand, one could consider it this way. Suppose someone needs a kidney to survive kidney failure. Does that give him or her the right to take the kidney of another person?”
“No,” he said at length. “No authority can claim to have to consent of the governed if it forces its citizens to endure surgeries and subtracts their organs without their consent. No one is at fault if someone has kidney failure, so there can be no injustice in it; there is no one to punish and those with functioning organs have done nothing to warrant punishment. The kidneys that individuals possess are theirs to give to another or to sell if they so desire, and I should not like to think what else can be parted from people if their rights to their organs are not absolute.”
No one said anything for a moment. There was still much to do, but as the police radio confirmed, Sandman and Rhino were both in custody, however they got there. It seemed Murdock had already decided to see if either of them wanted a lawyer, because he held out hope that at least Marko could be reformed. Spider-Man wished him the best of luck without the slightest hint of ill will.
“It’s been a pleasure having you here, whoever you are,” Daredevil said after a moment. “I hope you regain your memories of your old life as soon as you return to it.”
“If my counterpart has questions, can I count on you to-”
“I’ve never handled wills before, but I should be able to fill in the gaps for him.”
“I like the half mask,” he said. “Your expression humanizes you.” He remembered a random thought from earlier as Strange was casting some spell he could not even identify after looking through the memories of Zalmoxis. “Considering your echolocation, though, it was a real missed opportunity, not calling yourself Batman.”
“Ah. Well, if I had your paranoia, I would have said that such a name would give away my abilities, but as it is, some of us just have different approaches and our own reasons for them.”
“I can tell,” he said. “If our paths ever cross again, it will be a good day for both of our worlds.”
“Agreed, Spider-Man.”