Chapter 4
Her thoughts had felt a lot like scrambled eggs recently. Because, god, she knew Peter got into some weird shit- the Avengers not even being the tip of the iceberg. This was a whole new depth, a whole new level of mindfuck. Peter had to have known it too given how pale he looked seeing Octopus or whatever his name was.
Still, M.J. tried to keep her head square on her pessimistic shoulders, someone had to out of the trio. Ned wasn’t an idiot, but he was absorbed by the fascination of it all, which made him at least look like an idiot. He wouldn’t shut up about the magic man or the wizard or whatever and his lair, and how ‘awesome’ it was. She figured it to be underwhelming, the lair was nothing more than a trashed basement, and all the magic did was bring a few crabby old men out of space-time. Peter she could forgive, he was dealing with the brute force of their little problem, but still annoying. A little too excited about it, or anxious. How did she feel? She didn’t know. It was interesting, would make for a great college ‘what I did over the summer’ essay prompt, but besides that she didn’t know what to feel. Dread was maybe the closest to home. Something’s gonna go wrong, always does. It’s just that now the whole world is at stake.
“Hey, M.J.?” Ned asked, an excited tone jumping at his words. She shook herself, trying to shrug the negative assumptions out of her body. “Yeah?” “Look at the back of that guy’s, uh, back-““Why?” Ned looked to her from his place at the edge of the platform, trying to look casual and failing horribly. “His thingies are inside him.” M.J. suddenly felt a little queasy at the words, the image of a thousand wriggling pinworms flooding her eyeballs. The arms, Michelle, he meant the metal arms. “What about it?” she asked, irritation slowly coming to rise. Ned shrugged but remained fixated on Octavius, bound by his own appendages like a lion held back by shoestrings. “I don’t know, I guess, it’s just kinda creepy.” He turned back to her at her seat in front of his laptop, arms crossed. M.J. sighed but eyed at the guy from her place behind the computer screen.
His back didn’t reveal much, hidden away behind a long black trench coat, The arms extended from what seemed to be a torn hole in the fabric. She was going to look away, brush Ned’s comments off to nothing but fanfare, just him being a geek. But then, the doctor turned just a little, the hole in his coat widening just a hair, the light cast just enough to where she could see what he meant. Her breath caught in her throat, and she swallowed.
There were pins, long metal rods, sticking out of the spine like sewing needles from a voodoo doll. Little white lights trailed down the extension of the false spinal column like a raceway or an airport’s landing strip, the flesh surrounding the mechanism sunken in and welded to the device like hot candle wax. In other places the skin was shiny like smooth plastic, blood vessels clinging to dear life at the base of the doctor’s neck, angry, deep, and purple. The little plastic square at the top of his spine flickered on and off sporadically, as if trying desperately to warn onlookers of the chaos contained within its host. M.J. looked away, shuddering. Pinworms. She resisted, but despite this she couldn’t help but imagine the pain, the twinge of muscles and nerves run through with rods, the sharp burning pain of her vertebrae being punctured and sutured back together by the arms like a sewing machine. Her stomach flipped.
“It looks like it fucking hurts him.” She spoke.