poor 🌸 is so constantly bedeviled by the fact that we have identical wardrobes

Random Idea: “Portia” Spider-Man AU

I haven’t actually seen Into The Spiderverse myself, but I have read that it has started a trend towards people coming up with their own Spider-Man AUs. More specifically I read that there’s a lot of people lashing out against that for some reason, which I don’t get.

I also watched a walkthrough of the PS4 game, which actually motivated me to work on a completely different project.

I might as well state right now that I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of Spider-Man in particular, or the Marvel multiverse in general, much less the exponentially greater possibilities that come from a huge fan base. To the best of my limited knowledge, I don’t think I’m treading on anyone’s toes, and if it turns out somebody had the same ideas before me and reads this, I promise I’m not trying to steal your thunder.

The Origin: Pyotr “Peter” Parker is second generation Russian-American living in the Big Apple. He’s a scientific prodigy, and he was well on his way to getting a scholarship that would launch him to dizzying academic and technical heights when his life was demolished; his mother, father, and uncle were all killed in some sort of crossfire between different mob families. His academic performance and social life were also casualties, first from grief, and later from the impotent rage burning inside him from seeing nothing at all happen to find and punish those who had done so much harm. The kid who was on a fast track to following in the footsteps of such scientific visionaries as Tony Stark, Hank Pym, and Oswald Octavius did the bare minimum of work needed to keep his teachers and Aunt May (his only living relative) off of his back; the rest of his days and much of his nights were spent in an angry haze of revenge-based daydreams and fantasies.

The Transformation: Peter does not remember exactly how, but one morning he woke up with a painfully swollen spider bite. After a day or so, the swelling went away, but it was replaced by other “symptoms” that were decidedly more permanent. In no particular order, he could stick to various surfaces, detect motion nearby, and found that his strength and agility were dramatically increased. Most dramatic of all, he could jump much, much farther than any human being had any business jumping. To an angsty, hormonal teenager who had fumed and raged inwardly as he watched the injustice perpetrated on his family go unpunished for years, it was like Christmas morning. (It was actually Arbor Day, but that’s not really important.) With barely enough sense to get gloves, a ski mask, and goggles to hide his identity, he set out to to do by himself what the police and the courts could not, or would not, do through proper channels.

The Defeat: Superpowers or not, a teenager is not a match for multiple, competing organized crime families. Peter was shot four times, twice in the left leg, once in the right shoulder, and one glancing blow to the skull that would have punched his clock if not for his Spider-Sense based reflexes. With a concussion, a leg that couldn’t support his weight, and a whole lot of lost blood, Peter was forced to back off to some place safe, call 911, and nearly collapse right after tossing his “costume” in the closest dumpster. Emergency surgery and a blood transfusion saved his life, and while his recovery was almost miraculously fast according to the doctors and nurses keeping an eye on him, he still had to convalesce.

The Lesson: The time spent in bed, with nothing to do but mull over his defeat, forces him to reconsider what he is doing and why. He was about ready to throw all his dreams of revenge out the window and move on with his life... when the assassins showed up. After all, gunshot wounds are reported to police, and not every officer who swears to uphold the law actually keeps that oath. The assassins try to smother Peter while he pretends to be asleep; for their trouble, they get kicked with the same amount of force that previously launched Peter across streets and up the sides of buildings. Fortunately for them, they are in a hospital already. With a paranoia that has nothing to do with his new danger-detector in his head, Pete leaves the hospital without being officially discharged, makes it home, and discovers that his Aunt May ended up taking out two home invaders... and instead of the invaders being carted off, Aunt May is the one being held on trumped up charges. Peter has the consequences of his actions thrust into his face, and he angsts over his irresponsibility for all of five minutes before he has an epiphany that few Spider-themed superheroes ever figure out: Not everything bad that happens is automatically his fault.

The Comeback: While only a few days older, Peter is now much wiser, and begins a methodical plan of attack. The forces arrayed against his family cover the city like a web, but he’s learned a lot about spiders recently. Between phone calls, letters, and Duck Duck Go, Peter maps out the people he has to fight. These include a hanging judge, an attorney general living beyond her apparent means, and a couple of cops who have some black marks on other people’s social media, if not their professional records. With a new, thematically different costume, some cheap smartphones, and gadgets put together from dollar store specials and dumpster diving, Peter starts collecting evidence of corruption and leaving flash drives and SD cards in the mailboxes of the people who seem to be trustworthy. The gears of justice start to grind, while the gears of corruption have sand thrown into them. (What actually happened is that Peter found the AG was in the mob’s pocket, kidnapped her, called her “handlers” and played back some carefully edited sound bites recorded from a rival family’s conversations. Her “execution” was interrupted, but her home and worldly possessions went up in flames at the same time. She suddenly has much larger problems than she did before.)

The Arch Enemy: Aunt May’s two counts of justified self defense are properly rendered as such by a court that does not have multiple actors in somebody’s pocket. Turns out a whole lot of internal affairs investigations have opened up, and a laundry list of cold cases have been opened, in addition to the conflicts already set in motion. What keeps May and Peter safe, though, is what happens to a mover and shaker way up in the food chain (known as “Hammerhead” to his subordinates because of his shark-like ferocity). Hammerhead gets a mysterious visit from a masked figure who kicks his ass three ways from Sunday, and who lets him know that he’s taking his time to make him suffer for killing the masked figure’s brother. Three bullets are put into Hammerhead with his own sidearm, but the bullet that would have gone in the man’s skull misses, apparently because his guys finally showed up to help him. Hammerhead falls for the ruse hook, line, sinker and compressed air tank, and all the resources dedicated to finding this spider-themed vigilante get aimed in different directions, including the ones that had been sent after this Pyotr Parker kid, since he’s an only child. (The guys sent after Parker don’t have much to say, because his kicks packed a wallop and also because nobody contradicts Hammerhead when he’s angry.) This lays the foundation of a mutual hatred that lasts for the next decade at least, and “The Hammerhead versus The Spider Man” becomes a popular topic of discussion and speculation in the criminal underworld, law enforcement, civilian social media, and the hero community.

The Method: Unlike many Spider-Men, Peter isn’t explicitly an out and out hero. The last time he had ambitions of heroism, rushing in like Iron Man or Thor or Daredevil, he ended up in the hospital. To the contrary, by imitating the methods of his criminal prey, he achieved results far beyond his most optimistic predictions. In that sense, his spider-motif resembles that of the Portia Jumping Spider, a genus of spider species that hunt and prey on other spiders. His powers reflect this, with his impressive jumping abilities. Also like the Portia spiders, Peter stalks his prey and studies their strengths and weaknesses before developing the perfect way to take them down. Sometimes this comes from capturing sensitive information and delivering it to those who can do the most damage with it. Sometimes this means a more immediate response, like a kick that can ruin somebody’s whole day plus the rest of the week. What really sets Peter apart, though, is the “criminal” empire that he is growing using the resources he steals from his targets. Granted, his “Drug Labs” are churning out generic insulin at affordable prices, but it’s the principle of the thing. Likewise, the sex workers and street walkers in Spider-Man’s “territory” have seen a massive drop in violence once he cornered a particularly belligerent john in an alley and mentioned that a lot of male spiders have their sex organ bitten off by the female.

The Gadgets: Unlike most, if not all, Spider-Men in the multiverse, Peter never came up with the idea of web-shooters or web fluid. He has a number of other tricks up his sleeve, sometimes literally, that fill the vacuum when it comes to mobility, combat, and controlling the combat environment. The most complex of these would have to be his costume, which also diverges dramatically from what other Spider Themed Heroes use, in that it is designed to blend in rather than stand out. The basic suit color scheme is a grey-green mixture that’s hard to see under low-light conditions, and Peter has a number of optional “urban ghillie suits” that can look like grey concrete, brick, rusted steel, or other patterns. He’s also been known to take his enemy’s clothing, but it’s not clear how much of this is intended to help him infiltrate them and turn them on each other and how much of it is just humiliating his defeated foes. His mask incorporates multiple vision enhancement devices, from light amplification to infra-red to sonar and radar, and these give him a multi-eyed appearance in keeping with the spider theme. Defensively and offensively, he has arm-mounted weapons that incorporate compressed air guns that can fire chemical darts at range, and provide a close-range electrical charge to incapacitate people in close combat. (In the early days he carried a literal dart gun and stun gun but kept losing them during fights.) Finally, he carries a small arsenal of counter-intelligence tools designed to let him eavesdrop on targets, clone their cell phones, break into secure areas without leaving signs of forced entry, and jam or intercept enemy communications. All of them are incorporated into his suit. He has ambitions of getting an Octavius Harness, since extra arms would complete the spider motif and also make him far more dangerous in combat, but he can’t afford it and he’s years away from learning how to jailbreak the safety features that Doctor Octavius put on his technology to keep it from being stolen.

The Cover: When he’s not making life interesting for the criminal underworld of New York City, Peter works as a photographer. He’s done contract work for the Daily Bugle, including the occasional shot of this Spider Man character, but most of his income is from people needing photographs of their belongings for insurance reasons. After all, this is a world where superheroes and supervillains go toe-to-toe at least twice a week. He’s done weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, graduations, family reunions, anniversaries, baby gender reveal parties, and more. He’s also done some stuff that would normally be within the purview of a private investigator, despite the legal risks, in order to make ends meet. His social circle is limited to a handful of people who still tolerated him when he was lashing out at the world as a teenager, which is basically a handful of former classmates that have moved on to college, trade school, or something else, especially Miles Morales (who also lost family at a young age), Felicia Hardy, and Eddie Brock. His dating life is non-existant despite multiple attempts by both Eddie and Miles to play matchmaker.

The Rogue’s Gallery: The Spider Man has a long standing antagonism with Hammerhead, but has occasionally faced off against other supervillains and even some superheroes. On the villain side, Peter has defeated an electricity controlling lunatic named Electro, some guy in a rocket assisted flight suit the press called the Vulture, the enigmatic and theatrical Mysterio, and some one or something called the Sand Man. Unfortunately, Peter beat the Sand Man by fusing him into glass, and was not able to pull off the same stunt twice. The former Sand Man, calling himself Vitreous, had to be stopped by the Avengers, and The Spider Man’s role in the creation of a much more dangerous villain is what got him on the radar of so many heroes in the first place. For the most part, he knows he’s outclassed and doesn’t really want to fight people who, in theory, have the same general goals, so he tends to run from these encounters. So far he’s managed to evade Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Oswald Octavius in his superhero alter ego of Doctor Octopus. His encounter with Loki resulted in Peter getting the upper hand in classic trickster legend style, earning the God of Mischief’s respect. In other cases, Peter has not been so lucky; while he managed to escape each time, he’s been almost crushed to death by Giant Man, beaten to a pulp by Captain America, and drop kicked into the East River by the Hulk as if he was some sort of football. He has technically never fought Dr. Strange, but was involved in a fracas between the Sorcerer Supreme, Deadpool, and Dr. Doom that resulted in the Eye of Agomotto being lost for five years; everyone involved has agreed to never speak of what happened again. Finally, there’s the matter of Sean Gargan, an aspiring superhero with Scorpion themed powers who has sworn to bring The Spider Man to justice after his father, Mac Gargan, was injured while The Spider Man was fighting Electro.