Peter's head was swimming. He felt like he was going a million miles an hour, in all directions. And if it weren't for the pounding in his skull, he might've thought someone had slipped him something. He didn't think he was even seeing colors right.
"Peter? Is that you?" A voice. A woman's voice. Familiar. Black... Felicia? "Jesus, it is. I never forget a body—at least not in spandex."
Yeah. Felicia.
Peter forced his eyes open and tried looking around. Everywhere, formless, featureless metal, much like the lab before the explosion, though his vision was too blurry to be sure. Not that there was much mistaking Felicia's outline. She was bent over him, checking his pulse. Maybe even just his pulse. Peter resolved to check his wallet the next time he could move without giving himself a migraine.
Wait... the explosion... how was everything so clean if everything had just blown up? It hadn't been a small explosion, either. His body was still tingling and his head felt like he'd taken a Sunday punch from the Juggernaut. Had they moved him? Yeesh, hadn't they ever heard of spinal fractures?
"Cat—what's going on? Where am I?"
Felicia's face started going from SD to 4K as he focused on her, despite the do-it-yourself lobotomy going on somewhere in his frontal lobe at the effort. "Spider. God, baby... this is going to be a little hard to explain. It's the future."
"Yeah, I know, you can buy Oreo stuffing without the cookies, it's nice—"
"No, Peter. The future. As in, The Jetsons..." Felicia's face was coming into view. It looked... different. She was still young, still beautiful, but her eyes... her eyes had changed far too much for the few days since he'd seen her last. "It's the year 2099."
***
Flying car. He was in a goddamned flying car.
Maybe that should be 'gorram' flying car...
"What's the last thing you remember?" Felicia asked him. She was about the one thing that could distract him from the scenery—his city had become frickin' Blade Runner!
"I don't know, it's all fuzzy... feels like I took a bong hit from Mysterio's helmet... I was chasing Venom and we were in a lab, fighting... crap, is he here too?"
"There've been some sightings," Felicia reported crisply. "That's why I came looking for you."
Her costume almost could've been the old one—the mask was right—but so much had changed. Instead of being unzipped, now it had a plunging neckline right down to her pelvis, the separated halves of her costume only staying on by some adhesive quality of the latex itself. Future fashion.
It was like an arrow moving straight down from her nonexistent neckline to her crotch, pausing only to curlicue about her breasts, which were almost exposed except for a pair of cupping projections that rose from the underlying fabric and stopped just over her nipples, revealing all but the tips and undersides of her cleavage.
The catsuit was also backless, its halves only coming together at the back of her neck in a collar, a reverse halter—he guessed even in the future, costuming had its limits. The rest of it was the familiar skintight latex, just with a high-tech twist. The fur lining had been replaced with jets of blue plasma from some interior process, her boots and gloves replaced with some kind of clawed exoskeleton. Cybernetics? She looked like she could go toe to toe with Iron Man.
And the costume was tight, too. Even tighter than it had been back in the day, despite there being less of it. It caught every dimple, every hint of rib in her waspish waist, every luscious curve on the rest of her hourglass figure, and rendered it into unwrinkled, uninterrupted darkness, so dark it shone. Christ, it was like she was cocooned in the stuff.
Peter tried to focus on business. "So... 'while you were out'?" he prompted.
"The usual. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. I kept myself in the former category, as best I could," the bullshit smile Felicia had when she didn't want to smile had gotten weaker, more fraught, but it probably fooled a lot of people who didn't know her. "Alchemax mass-produced ol' Nick's Infinity Formula, at least for the wealthy and powerful. I qualified, somewhat. Thanks to a few deals I cut..."
"Alchemax? They're the start-up company Venom was at... the lab where we were fighting..."
"The two of you disappeared in 2017," Felicia said. "Everything turned to shit after that. At least that's how it seemed."
"Mary Jane?" Peter asked hesitantly, not wanting to hurt Felicia by asking, but needing to know.
"Died in her sleep, a long time ago."
"You didn't give her the formula?"
"She thought you were dead. She wouldn't have wanted it. And it's not like we kept in touch, without you in common."
Peter clenched his jaw. "It doesn't matter. As soon as I find Venom, I'm dragging him back to the 21st century—"
"This is the 21st century—"
"You know what I mean. I'm erasing this possible future." He noticed Felicia's eyes on him. "I mean... you don't have kids or any..."
"No, go ahead, retcon it," Felicia told him. "It's been a bullshit century without you. As many times as I cursed your name—hated you for ruining a score or throwing me in jail—I don't really work without you. If I go out, I'm going out with you."
"Jesus, Cat... it's been eighty years. I mean, I know everyone wanted to skip ahead a few years from 2017, but—"
"I said what I said," Felicia insisted. "C'mon, we're here."
The hovercar had parked itself at one of the gigantic towers that seemed more like a city in itself than a skyscraper. They had barely stepped off it before it flew off—even in the future there was no parking, it looked like. And they had barely laid their feet down when the floor moved, whisking them down an endless corridor at a speed that would've whipped them right off their feet if some quasi-magnetic process hadn't held them down. Before Peter knew it, he was at the mouth of another corridor, a smaller offshoot with room doors on either side, the numbers looking like the calorie count of a Happy Meal.
Felicia arrived at one of them, waved her hand where the doorknob should've been, and with an affirmative beep, some biometric process Star Trekked the door open. She stepped inside. Peter followed her in. And then that simple sentence became an impossibility, because there were two more hers to follow.
They both were Felicia, every curve, every nook and cranny, even the same latex catsuits, just in white and without the precipitous necklines. No, these covered all but their heads, outlining their breasts from underside to the uppermost slope, rendering every jiggle like it was no more than bodypaint. Peter automatically bit his lips. Either Felicia had had twins or...
"Clones," Felicia said. "Oh, and trigger warning. Peter, meet Kat and Kitty."
Their hair was different too—cut a bit shorter than Felicia's magnificent mane, and a florescent blue-white instead of the more natural ivory Felicia sported.
