Chapter 3
Petra makes a mental map of the Cave throughout M’gann’s tour. She nods and comments when necessary, keeping a friendly smile on her face to match the Martian’s cheery attitude, but she also focuses her attention on the problems at hand. She makes a step-by-step plan on what she needs to do during the next three-ish months she's stuck in this world.
- Get a laptop
- Make a program that will let her know when it’s safe to pop back to her earth
- Find out where to get the materials she needs to make the transport
- Set up a business to make enough money to buy said materials
- Create an identity
- Get a bank account
- Ransack the Cave until she had what she needed for a holotable because, yeah, it was 2011 in this world but she was not designing anything on paper.
- Design a sleeker version of the transport and adjust materials needed
- Buy, build, leave
Then there are some other things she wants to do but in no particular order:
- Optimistically, say hi to Jason. (No, she hadn’t googled him. She didn’t want the kids checking the search history and seeing that she’d looked up the second Robin by name. Also, she is going to have a talk with Bruce Wayne at some point to figure out what Tim is doing in the costume.)
- Try some new foods
- Make some friends
She feels satisfied with her plan and notes every room she saw that had some form of tech in it. She’ll go back to scavenge through them when she wants to build the holotable.
“So.” M’gann claps her hands together out in front of her waist. “This hallway is where the rooms are.” She stops at the third door down on the right. “You can stay in this one.” She swings the door open and Petra follows her inside. “Zatanna, Conner, and I live here too. The others come and go when they want, but they don’t live in the Cave. Bathroom’s through there-” M’gann points at a door on the far side of the room- “and that about covers it. If you need anything let me know! Us girls can all go shopping in the morning, it’ll be a lot of fun. There are some cute stores around.”
“I don’t know if it’d be smart for me to use my currency here.” Yes, she has somewhere around $500 in her wallet, but this dimension could already have bills with the same serial numbers or her money could look different and be taken as counterfeit.
“Hello, Megan! Of course. We have a budget so don’t worry about it. Okay, this is the end of our tour. I need to go clean up dinner. Um, everybody else is probably in the lounge. Would you like to come with me or stay here and settle in?”
“How about I get my stuff,” she almost calls it shit but this is a kid she’s talking to, “off the counter and bring it here, then I can chill out with everyone.”
M’gann agrees and starts leading the way back to the kitchen.
“Tim said you’re a hero, right? Spider-Woman?” M’gann asks. She walks beside Petra comfortably like they’ve been friends for ages. Petra finds it kind of cute how eager to please the Martian is.
“Vigilante, but, yup. That’s me.” Petra corrects lightly.
“Do you have any powers? I can pass through solid objects, shape-shift, fly, I have telekinesis, oh, and telepathy. But you already knew about that one from earlier. How did you notice my presence right away?”
How is this girl able to warm up to strangers so fast? “I have a friend back in my world. The Scarlet Witch. She does mind stuff too. She’s practiced a lot on me, so I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when someone is trying to mess around in my head. And how to block it.” Petra explains just for the sake of conversation. “As far as powers go, I have a few. They don’t call me Spider-Woman for nothing.”
They pass through the lounge and, sure enough, the other kids are spread out on the floor and across couches with a movie Petra doesn’t recognize playing on the TV.
“Hey, Miss M. We already cleaned up.” Tim informs. He has his laptop open on his legs and his back against the couch.
“Aw. Thanks guys! Petra is going to put her stuff up and then come hang out.”
M’gann follows her the rest of the way to the kitchen and offers to help Petra carry her things. Petra accepts and hands M’gann some of the non-sharp items. She slips her knives back into their pockets and grabs her badge and wallet.
M’gann blushes at the condoms.
“How old are you?” Petra can’t help but ask.
M’gann’s blush deepens. “Forty-eight, but, um, human biologically speaking I’m sixteen.” Her eyes dart to the condoms. “How old are you?”
That’s a hard question to answer. Mostly because she doesn’t really know. “You asking legally, physically, or how long I’ve literally been alive for? Because those all have different answers.”
M’gann wrinkles her eyebrows together. “How does that work?”
“Well, I was born in August of 2001 and the day I left my world is March of 2019, so legally, in my world, I’m seventeen. Physically, my best guess is a little over nineteen. Sometimes the people that hire us as bail enforcement give us tech that doesn’t let us age while we’re hunting down their fugitives, so I’ve lived longer than my body has aged.” That’s the simplest way to explain it.
“Oh. Okay.”
M’gann makes a gesture to encourage Petra to start walking. Instead of carrying the items, M’gann opts to use her telekinesis to make them float right behind them.
M’gann chatters about the team, telling Petra what feels like their entire history, but she listens and asks questions to make sure M’gann knows she’s paying attention.
And, holy shit, if Pepper ever came to this earth, she’d tear up every superhero for child endangerment. They are using teenage kids to run covert ops for them for Christ’s sake.
Maybe it’s a bit hypocritical for Petra to disapprove. She’s a crime fighting teen too, afterall, but in her world she is, like, the only one. They don’t even let the kids in the X-Mansion go out to save the world. Plus, she was never a regular kid to begin with. How could she be when she had a mad scientist father that had tested his modified-spider-super-soldier-serum on his own daughter? Then, S.H.I.E.L.D. killed her parents after they tried to sell the serum to Hydra and instead of putting Petra in foster care, she was passed around from agent to agent because, “having a kid paints an undercover image way easier than anything else”. It wasn’t until Deadpool threatened Nick Fury that she was finally sent to New York. So, no, she’d never been a regular kid. She doesn’t know if these teens have histories like hers, but the fact that they all have matching mentors that look like they’re grooming these kids to take their place, well, it rubs Petra the wrong way.
It’d rubbed her the wrong way when Jason had told her about it, too, but seeing it first hand makes Petra want to call Pepper and start a lawsuit.
They get to the room and M’gann uses her telekinesis to set Petra’s stuff down neatly on the desk and set her boots down next to the door. Petra lays out her knives, wallet, and badge on top of the dresser.
“You mind if I take off my outer layer real quick before we head back down?” Petra gestures to the dark red and blue metallic aramid she’s wearing. M’gann nods and Petra unzips the front of her suit, not that anyone would ever know there’s a zipper there. Again, thank you, Tony Stark, for the design. She slides it down until it piles around her feet and then steps out of it.
Underneath, Petra is wearing a simple black jumpsuit that she may or may not have stolen from Natasha. Hey, it’s a comfortable jumpsuit and she needs something between her skin and the enforced fabric, unlike her spidey suit, which she barely wears anything under (it provides virtually no protection but it’s very comfortable).
She catches M’gann looking her over.
“You’re very pretty,” the Martian tells her.
“Thank you.” Petra makes sure it sounds genuine even though she usually responds to compliments like that with ‘I know’. There are several reasons the media calls her Spider-Woman not Spider-Girl and almost every single one of them is appearance based. She lets the kid feel appreciated though.
She grabs her smartphone. “Ready.”
“So, do you have a team back in your world?” M’gann asks as they begin walking back to the lounge.
“God, no.” Petra can’t even imagine herself getting a group of heroes together. “I’m a vigilante. There are some people I team up with pretty often, but, like, I’m not on a team. I like to do my own thing and if somebody needs my help, they have to cash in a favor. Not always. I help the Avengers for fun. Their missions are usually a good time. But like one time I helped Wade, another vigilante or antihero or whatever, fight some… actually, I’m not sure how appropriate that story is. Uh, anyways, a week later, I’m supposed to have date night and Carnage, one of my baddies, is out running around and I call up Wade, cash in my favor, and he takes care of it while I eat Italian.”
“What if you ever need help and nobody owes you?”
“Then I’ll owe whoever gives me a hand.”
M’gann doesn’t appear convinced.
“Look, when I say I owe someone it holds a lot of weight. They know I’ll never ask them to do something they wouldn’t be okay with and I only ask for things that are of equal or lesser value. They do the same when it comes to what they ask me to do. And we never renege on favors,” she explains.
“Isn’t that lonely? I mean, the Team is always here for me. I can’t imagine not having them around.”
Petra puts on a look of soft understanding. “I have other people I spend time with. I have friends and whenever I want to hang out with other heroes, I go to Avengers Tower. There are a lot of people in New York. It’s kind of hard to be lonely there. Speaking of which, where exactly are we?”
“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! We’re in Mount Justice, just outside of Happy Harbour, Rhode Island.”
“Happy Harbor?” That sounds made up. She wrinkles her face up at the name.
M’gann laughs at her expression.
They enter the lounge and M’gann floats over to the couch to take a seat next to Conner. Petra decides to sit on the floor in front of the couch next to Tim. The same movie from before is still playing on the TV. Petra has no idea what it is. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen commercials for it either.
She opens her phone without verbal commands to Karen and thanks whatever deity that the AI had gotten her service. Even if it was illegal. “Do you guys have wi-fi?” She whisper-asks Tim. That way she could stop feeling bad about using a service she wasn’t paying for.
Tim holds his hand out for her phone. She gives it over and notices him check it out again before entering in the wi-fi information. He passes it back to her.
“Thanks.” She means it.
She starts googling the materials she needs for the transport. Which was technically step three of her mental plan, but it’d be a waste of time not to do it now. She starts a list in the notes application of each item, their cost, and links to where to make the purchases from. Things are going pretty smoothly until she looks up ‘vibranium’. No results. She then tries ‘reverbium’. No results. Okay. Fine. It’s fine. She has her custom vibranium knife set with her. She can use those.
She really does not want to use those. They were beautiful with little spiders on the hilts. They were a one of a kind set: six throwing knives, two fixed blade karambits, and two fairbairn-sykes. Using one of them for the transport would be a tragedy.
She’ll do what she has to, though.
Wally slides off of the couch and onto the floor beside her. “Are you not a big Harry Potter fan?” he asks with a tilted smile.
She’d caught on that Harry is the main character of the movie. She assumes 'Harry Potter' is also the movie's title. “I’ve never heard of it before,” she replies, quietly, because at least three people were shooting them death glares.
“You’ve never heard of Harry Potter?”
“Must not be a thing in my world.”
“Okay, what about The Matrix?”
She shakes her head no.
“The Shining?”
“No.”
“That’s a classic! How can The Shining not exist in your world?”
Petra shrugs. She’d had a similar conversation with Jason when he’d told her he’d never seen Star Wars before. She’d made him watch all of them with her on the big screen at the Tower.
“Hey, do you guys have vibranium on this earth?” She changes the topic.
“Have what?”
Petra explains the properties and the make up of the metal.
“We don’t have anything like that,” Tim speaks up from her other side. “How badly is that going to set you back?”
“It won’t,” she assures him. “It just means I have to break up my knife set.”
She finishes all that she can of step three and moves onto step four. She dives deep into the web. Getting a fake identity is a pain in the ass.
Tim leans over to look at her phone. “What are you doing?”
“That depends. You a nark?”
He gives her an unamused look but she thinks she sees a smile pull at his lips for a second. “By the definition.”
“Then buzz off, kid.”
“So whatever you’re doing is illegal. You’re two hours into an alternate dimension, surrounded by its heroes, and you’re breaking the law right next to them,” Tim states like he’s informing her she’s an idiot.
She raises a brow and glances up from her phone, challenging him to tell her off. “Yup,” she says, popping the ‘p’.
“And you think we’re just going to let it slide?”
“Look, kid.” Tim clenches his jaw, obviously not a fan of the moniker. She isn’t going to stop calling them kids no matter how much any of them hate it. “I need an identity for while I’m here and there's no legal way to get one. It’s seedy, and a bit deplorable in all honesty, but it’s done how it’s done.”
The kid blinks at her. “We can set you up with one.”
“So it’s okay for you to do illegal stuff but not me.”
“Yes.”
“Nah, kid, that’s not going to fly with me. I’ll get a dead kid’s SSN without help from the tiny, Robin Hood esque vigilante. Afterall, I wouldn’t want to corrupt the next generation of heroes on this earth.”
“You’re full of shit, lady,” Artemis says from the far corner of the couch.
“Either hook her up or let her do it herself, but choose now because the giant chess scene is coming up and it’s my favorite so I’d like it to be quiet,” Zatanna tells Tim.
He frowns and is silent for a beat. “Which way are you doing it?”
Petra scoots closer to him and angles her phone so he can easily read it from beside her. Tim watches for a few moments then turns his attention back to the files he has pulled up on his laptop.
For a while, the only sound in the room comes from the movie. The rest of the kids had taken Zatanna seriously when she’d said she wanted it to be quiet.
Petra works out all the kinks for her new identity. When the end credits of the movie play, she informs the kids she needs to be at the corner of Earl and Morton on Thursday at noon to pick up her ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card.
Tim is giving her a strange look: part admiration and part curiosity.
“Did I just see you pay from a bank account used by Lex Luthor?” he asks.
“That depends. You a nark?” she repeats what she’d said earlier with a wink and a grin.
A few different versions of, “we hate Lex Luthor,” chorus from the other kids.
Except for Kaldur. “Thievery is typically not condoned among us.”
He is good at making Petra feel like the child. She’ll give him props for that. “Borrowed. He’ll get it back. But technically the account doesn’t even exist and I don’t know if you can steal from something that’s not real.”
“How did you find it if it doesn’t exist?”
Petra responds by widening her grin.
The kids start doing the silent communication thing again.
Wait.
M’gann’s powers.
“Are you guys using telepathy right now?” A few guilty looks. Mostly from M’gann and Wally. The others are either blank faced or looking at Petra like they wouldn’t mind killing her. Actually, only Artemis is giving her that last one.
“Sorry,” M’gann apologizes. “We use the mindlink a lot.”
“Uh. Okay… Another question: do you not have any adult supervision?”
“Currently, members of the League are on a rotating schedule to watch after us,” Kaldur answers.
“Who is supposed to be here today? Because I don’t want somebody coming in later, thinking I’m a threat, and starting a fight.”
“Due to pressing League matters, we are on our own for tonight. Tomorrow afternoon, our scheduled caretaker will be back.”
“Cool.”
There is another moment of silence while the kids all talk telepathically.
She’s got to get Wanda to learn how to do that when she gets back.
Wally zips away from the room and Artemis opens a cabinet and pulls out two movies. They must decide through the mindlink which one they want to watch because nobody speaks the whole time. Artemis puts in the disk.
Wally comes back holding a huge blue bowl of popcorn. He flops down into the couch next to Artemis and holds the bowl out towards her.
The title The Goonies appears on the screen. Another movie she’s never seen.
She sets her phone down and decides to pay attention to the screen.