Chapter Text
I always sort of disliked SI stories. Some of them are good, in a guilty pleasure kind of way but were often rather... Contrived, in order for meta-knowledge to apply, the world has to work the way the SI assumes it would. Obviously, some things are set in stone, barring something going horribly, horribly wrong: Peter Parker always becomes the Amazing Spider-Man and learns a lesson about responsibility when his actions lead indirectly to the death of his uncle, Superman is always the last son of Krypton raised by a nice, loving farm couple who found his crashed escape pod in a Kansas field, Sir Lancelot du Luc always cuckolds his best friend leading indirectly to the death of King Arthur at the hands of Arthur's inbred bastard son etcetera.
Also, realistically how many people are just going to jump head-first into the main plot? I always figured that if it happened to me I'd want to avoid the main plots, either because it upped my odds of dying or because the canon plot's good ending required needle threading that I'd screw up.
Well... To make a long story short, an airplane crashed into my house while I was on the crapper, now I'm a blob of goo in a glass tank somewhere. I don't know if I should be flattered or insulted that it wasn't Truck-kun. I mean, seriously, what are the odds?
So, anyway, the first rule of... anything like this, assess my situation and make note of any assets.
Situation: My body is made of slime and I have no defined shape. I'm currently in a tank of shatter-resistant glass in a laboratory somewhere in what I assume to be FBI custody. The universe I'm in is pretty dangerous.
Assets: My new body has a sort of genetic memory, meaning I know exactly what I am and what world I'm in: I've been reborn into the Marvel Universe as an offshoot of Grendel's 'Mother.'
To recap, since there are non-zero odds that someone might be reading this: In the Marvel Universe the epic poem Beowulf was an adaption of two otherwise unrelated events that happened in close proximity in Medieval Denmark. One was the actual Beowulf fighting the actual Grendel, a dark elf, and the other was Thor fighting two symbiote dragons that came to Earth. The Danes in a panic assumed one to be Grendel having returned in a new form, while the other was assumed to be his 'mother.'
Big Mother, as she came to be called in the modern day, was a unique symbiote-dragon. Possessing full sapience independent of a host or Knull's will and a distinctive red color due to being made not just of Living Abyss, but Knull's own blood, she was particularly powerful and could breathe both fire and a beam of blue energy that apparently froze and burned at the same time. But, all this power didn't stop her from being maneuvered into killing herself when she tried to forcibly adopt the Scream symbiote. Her body was seized by the FBI's anti-symbiote task force and I guess experimenting with it let them extrude from her the body I was reincarnated into, making me something akin to the Tyrannosaurus to her Grendel. Yes, there was a symbiote named Tyrannosaurus. Look, it was a whole thing.
Either I'd been genuinely reincarnated and only got my memories back when I became self-aware or my consciousness had been impressed upon a mindless symbiote because while I was aware of what this body had experienced, I didn't have any memories of thinking before now. Additionally, I wasn't having any trouble... adjusting, to symbiote sense or symbiote movement, which had me leaning toward the reincarnation option... Though being honest, I don't think I'll ever follow up on whether or not there's a human soul in here. I don't need the existential angst that comes from the answer being no.
Unfortunately, some exploratory ambulation made it clear to me that I did not have access to Big Mother's energy powers and so far in terms of shapeshifting I could merely produce tendrils and pseudopods. Whatever had happened, I knew that I did not have the dragon's full range of power.
One last asset, there was a tube of some sort, dripping a chemical solution onto me. 'Two chemicals, organic, diluted in water' was all my symbiote instincts were telling me, though if I had to hazard a guess adrenaline and phenethylamine. The Feds were decently knowledgeable about symbiotes.
Still, however... I don't think this body has been subjected to any cruel or inhumane experimentation yet, but well, both the army and the feds have used drugs that functionally lobotomize symbiotes to enslave them to special agents and even if they're not going to do that to me it's only a matter of time before they do something I'd rather they not: In a comic book universe the most cynical take on the government is the correct one.
So... How to get out? The tank is oblong, with no corners, and no obvious structural weak spots but... The drip is constant and I had recollections of a bottle being changed daily... Stretching up to the top of the tank the opening for the drop line wasn't quite blocked off. I could fit a tendril around it and sort of... Siphon, question mark, out the remainder of my daily ration. Once the tube was drained, the task of squeezing the mass of eldritch darkness and god blood I was made of threw the tube and inching along to the bottle. It was harder than I wanted to admit, but... Eventually, I made it, and since the bottle could be screwed out to be changed for another, that was an opening and... Freedom!
...Wow. These floors are filthy. The janitorial staff is either being paid too much or not enough.
I scooted across the floor, picking up all sorts of bacteria that I might gain useful genetic traits from but I doubted it in the process, then just managed to squeeze out from under the laboratory door and started slithering through the halls.... No one seemed to be here. That wasn't right, there should be people here, shouldn't they?
Whatever, an empty building meant no one to trip the alarm... I needed to get out, but if I could find a calendar that would be great. If Big Mother's body is in FBI custody then we're after the first arc of Scream: Curse of Carnage and that meant that it was at least late 2019... Really hope we're past King in Black.
Exploring, I found... No sign of what year it was. Just looked like office space that had been converted into a lab.
I did, however, find a lot of dead people. Which, you know, explained where everyone was. I'm assuming that these people were third-party hires brought on to conduct research on samples from Big Mother's body and not actual agents of the FBI, given that they're um... I imagine actual FBI personnel would have put up more of a fight... Or maybe the killer or killers were just that dangerous.
I dare not describe the state of the corpses... If this is a comic the reader can see them, if not you really don't want to.
Given that there's really only one reason why someone would go on a murderous rampage through a lab experimenting on symbiotes, after the third corpse I decided to stop looking for a calendar and just get the hell out of there. No luck finding the stairs and I'd rather not try a vent and risk getting lost, but I eventually found a room with an openable window. As I struggled against a rusty latch, unable to get leverage in my current form, I saw the door to what I assumed to be a storage closet open and out stepped a man.
A man dressed in an all-black body suit, accented with metal armored gloves and boots, a silver belt and holster, and a black cowl with a white bullseye on the forehead.
Daredevil's nemesis, Bullseye. One of the deadliest assassins in the world.
"Right on time," he said, "right where he said you'd be." I'm sorry, who was 'he?' Did someone anticipate my transmigration?
"Almost seems like a waste, but a job's a job." As I gave up on trying to open the window and tried to squeeze through the crack, Bullseye drew what was very clearly just a grenade, made a show of drawing the pin, and threw it through the pane of the window I was trying to escape through such that it pierced in the glass without shattering it. Then he chucked the grenade right at me just as I could start to feel the wind on the other side.
Literally white-hot flames and even hotter molten metals destroyed most of my new body. The sliver of me that was left was blown out of the window and... Well, this was worse than dying the first time. By a lot. But the instinct to survive bolstered my raw willpower enough to power through and force what was left of my body to flatten along one dimension and stretch along another until I caught an updraft or something along those lines that blew me far from the building.
I lost track of how long I was in the air. Turns out when you go from barely sentient to a complete person to getting blown to hell and back in less than twenty minutes it's a little hard to concentrate. Eventually, I came back to reality when I landed. Taking in my new surroundings, I appeared to be on a teenager's backpack. Black hair, east asian. Private school uniform. She hadn't noticed me and...
...This was going to be awkward. I could feel myself fading. If I wanted to live, I needed to regain my strength. For that, I needed a host, and... Beggars can't be choosers. Forcing down my revulsion at what I was about to do, I compressed my mass as small as it would go and dashed down the girl's ear. Obviously, she stuck a finger in after me, reflexively scratching at the sudden tickling sensation but by then I'd already let my new body's symbiote instincts take over and phased through the flesh to connect to her auditory nerve and from there move to her central nervous system.
I wasn't going to take her over or anything, I'm not a monster. I was just going to bond and then sit back while I healed and then sneak off once I no longer needed life support and... God damn it.
So, attaching to the girl's nervous system, a necessary part of the bonding process, means I perceive her thoughts and memories. So I knew who this was now.
Pei. Kun'Lunian girl, daughter of Danny Rand in everything but paperwork, former Iron Fist whose legacy was stolen first by Okoye of Wakanda and then Lin Lie, formerly Sword Master, and um... Well, from her recent memories, it was 2024 and Danny Rand had recently been murdered. Which means... Well for one it means my meta-knowledge might as well be useless because this is around where and when it cuts off, but for two it means that any day now would be the start of—
Pei reacted to a strange sound coming from the alley she was about to pass by taking a battle stance like the masterful martial artist she was. Even without the Iron Fist, the girl's entire body was a lethal weapon and she carried herself as such as she approached. Stumbling forward what appeared to be a walking corpse, half covered in inky black slime that formed into a twisted and particularly feral-looking version of the appearance one might expect of the Venom Symbiote.
Just my luck, I landed here right in the middle of Venom War.