(Currently juggling three ideas, one which already gets a mild tweak. (And tempted to do WWII Resistance Supers Kicking Nazis In The Face as a side project.))
I went with the Spidey spin... Spider-Woman and the Web.
And now I'd be tempted to do it as a game.
"Alright, let's do this one last time."
"The squad were going to blow off the science field trip, but since Flash had dumped Kelly last week she didn't want to go anywhere with him, and my lab partner Peter was really keen on the whole thing so we went. And then Flash shows up to try to make a point to her. She's not having any of it, Peter steps in so he shoves him out of the way, I step up to tell him to back off - and then I feel this sting on my hand. This spider just dropped off the supercollider thing and bit me."
"I wake up in hospital the next day, and I feel - actually, I feel great. Like I could jump up to the cheer pyramid from a standing start. Then a car backfires outside and I jump up and stick to the ceiling."
"Peter figures out that I now have spider-powers, and says 'hey, you could go fight crime like the Invaders', and sure, that sounds kind of fun. Until he gets shot by a bank robber while I'm chasing after his accomplices."
"It stopped being fun. It became a serious thing. I went into criminology in college, did gymnastics instead of cheer... still ended up with an archenemy in one of the sororities... I think half the campus kind of knows but nobody asks me about it."
"And now I've been doing this long enough that I have a team. Which feels like this great responsibility."
"My name is Liz Allan, but the Bugle insists on calling me the spectacular Spider-Woman."
(OOC: Liz Allan was an early member of the Spider-Man supporting cast, starting as an unnamed extra in Spider-Man's origin story, so she just missed out on going to that fateful science exhibit and ending up as Spider-Woman. Partially because Gwen and (in the first What If...? story I ever read) Betty have all gotten the bite...)
 |
| Spider-Girl (Peter's daughter) as the baseline for a close costume. Marketing will want something more distinctive but we'll workshop it later. |
"There are some fairly high-profile students at Empire State U. The physics program, that big STEM scholarship, and a couple of Applied Superhuman Energy majors who came from one of the schools for gifted youngsters upstate. Which is how while stopping somebody stealing a portable quantum isolator, I met Bobby Drake."
"I mean I'd seen him on campus - hard to miss the guy who makes ice sculptures by waving his hands and is at every party ever - but I wasn't expecting him to respond to the alarm and help out."
"He's still figuring out the limits of his cryokinesis - am I saying that right? Okay, good - but he can do some pretty clever things with it already. When he's not showing off. Which is always."
"So he goes by Chill, and don't get me started on that."
(OOC: Bobby Drake, aka Chill, alumnus of a school for supers that may or may not feature mutants. Taking the nickname Chill from a one-shot villain from a promo comic for a water company, described as....
--
"So, yeah, Applied Superhuman Energy majors. Ange and Bobby go back a ways from when she was learning to control thermal induction. She says she's not a blow-up-mountains pyrokinetic or anything but she can start or stop a fire in line of sight. And she was in the fire safety team, so her showing up to that alarm was less of a surprise than Bobby."
"She'd been curious about where this all comes from as she was born with a power and she hadn't met anybody who got one from outside exposure before. She's minoring in history and doing a full-marks-for-the-year paper on superhuman appearances in world history and mythology, which I fully intend to read when she's done."
"She tried out a bunch of callsigns before deciding to avoid anything with 'fire' because, y'know, Firebird does that and they're both redheads - have you met Firebird? She's cool. Which I guess is ironic. She finally went for Aurora."
(OOC: Angelica Jones is Aurora,
This is a double connection because Ultimate Liz Allan is Firestar. Which I didn't know until looking up Firestar's Wikipedia page half an hour ago.
This concludes my core team, with a couple of support characters and a team name to follow. And a good idea for a villain and a terrible idea for a villain.)
--
"And in order to work as a team we need comms - not so easy when one of you melts stuff by looking at it and another one can freeze things solid by touch - and somebody to alert us when there's a problem. That's where Ava comes in."
"Genius hacker, very strong opinions about power and how it should be used, figured out my secret identity the day after the first time I got in a super fight at ESU."
"So that's how we work. If my Spider-sense doesn't alert me to something, Ava does, and we can ping the others. Also, I didn't have a good idea for a team name, so she suggested we go by the Web."
(OOC: Ava Starr, alias The Ghost, as "the guy in the chair" for The Web.)
--
"So the quantum isolator gets IP-claimed by this tech company Alchemax - cos that doesn't sound super evil or anything - and about three weeks later I get this spider-sense flash that's so consistent I can track it back to their lab."
"Because they've fired it up again - and they're using it on human test subjects."
"I help bust their first success out, and when I take off the cybergoth-looking muzzle they've got her wearing she helps by knocking out the company security by screaming like a sonic cannon."
"Her name's Melissa, she's a runaway, and no she has this techno-mutant power she has to learn how to use."
"So for now she's putting her life back together, and... not so much a teammate as in witness protection..."
(Melissa Gold is just-borrowing-the-name Scream. Alchemax is me going "wait, what?" about Liz Allan being CEO of the modern basis of the evil megacorporation from Spider-Man 2099 in the current comics.)
--
"So, yeah, Alchemax. Yeesh. 'So what did you do at work today?' 'Oh, we created an unstable quantum field and then I poked it with a stick! I wanted to see if we could make a car battery that doesn't need as much nickel.' 'That's nice dear, wanna watch Trish?'"
"They haven't had a lot of luck super-powering people - yet - but if there's a laser gun or flying suit that wasn't made by aliens there's a pretty good chance they made it, or somebody made it using their tech that 'just happened' to get 'stolen' or 'go missing from their inventory'. Their security guards have those fancy multi-setting stunguns too, and sometimes you see guys with those seizing unknown tech."
"Anyway, their head of security in the city is an ex-cop, shows up on the news whenever there's a protest against Alc to say it's unfair or to stand behind the CEO when she wants to show off, loves chasing us off from their alleged robberies and while we can't prove that he plans swiping stuff he's totally that guy."
(OOC: First villain pick: MacDonald Gargan (Scorpion) and his Scorpion sting pistol.;As a villain hook, what would happen if a Shadowrun team had a recurring megacorp security antagonist.)
--
"Oh, yeah, my archenemy. Her name's Bonnie, she's in the running to be sophomore rep on the committee of her sorority, and she doesn't like the attention I get. I think she dumped a guy because he talked too much about how, ah, nimble I was when I saved a class from some guy with a jetpack."
"Hey, I've heard worse reasons for archenemies."
(Bonnie is... Bonnie.)
--
"Okay, slightly more serious campus enemy. She isn't actually that bad, just really, really annoying."
"You've probably seen one of the videos. She calls herself Screwball, and she's a vigilante internet prankster."
"Which was not my problem until she showed up at a killer robot attack and got in the way and bumped her views by making us look bad. So now... I think it's one of those things where we should really be able to work together, and I ask, but I think she just thinks it's funny."
Who is Screwball? That's a very good question. Prompted by my hearing about her while looking up the Scorpion, and finding that in the 2017 Spider-Man animated series she turns out to be - yes, folks - Liz Allan.
I don't plan to use Liz's current supervillain identity, but thanks to assorted universes I could make a whole team of good and evil Liz variants.
--
"So our pals at Alchemax have the quantum isolator up and running when one of the original creators steals it. And as we're catching up, he turns around and says he was hoping we'd come. So he can blast me with it. Because he thinks I got in the way of his life's work."
"He has it calibrated for my unique quantum state. All the ways the spider bite could have gone differently. But I have to try to stop him so I jump in and get right in the way of the beam."
"And I see a bunch of different versions of the day. The first one, I don't even go to the demonstration, some guy gets bitten and I never find out who. But every ripple gets closer, like this guy's trying to find the closest possible different version because that'll be easier to kill me in or something."
"And I see Flash shove me out of the way a split second sooner and he gets bitten instead."
"And the beam stops and it's the day I got zapped. I wake up on campus, but I'm not in my room. I'm in a sorority house - Bonnie's, no less."
"And I don't have my powers."
"I look Flash up and find he got them, and he tried to fight crime too, just like a big showoff - and he got killed in less than six weeks."
"So now I'm stuck in the version of my life where everything went normal. I’m majoring in Art History, I’m on the cheer squad, I have a steady boyfriend who is normally someone I barely know to say hi to, no weird power means no weird responsibility, it's all... nice."
"Except I know it's wrong. And with no Spider-somebody and no Web for them to connect, somebody's gonna destroy the world. Sooner rather than later."
"So I find Ava, who has no idea who I am and is very suspicious how I know about her hacking until I tell her I'm from another universe and then she's like "fine okay", and get her to help me find the isolator so I can... de-isolate myself and get back to my own timeline. Ongoing problems and all. Including this quantum physicist who wants to take over the world. Thanks, sense of responsibility..."
(Dr. Johnathon Ohnn is the Gateway.)
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