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When Spidey Met Oracle	By : littleblackduck Category: zMisplaced Stories [ADMIN use only] > Spiderman Views: 37996 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: The Spider-Man universe and characters are owned by Marvel. The Oracle universe and characters are owned by DC. I make no profit from this work. This is a sequel to "When Spidey Met Batgirl." I think you should read that first, but that might just be

Chapter List
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CHAPTER THREE: The Secret Life of the Amazing Web-Slinger
Because of his preternatural senses, Spider-Man wasn't used to being blindsided. It didn't hurt that in his life as Peter Parker, he'd picked up on a fairly common pattern to his day-to-day routine: It's going to get worse. It's always going to get worse.
"Jesus," Oracle had said. "Are you always this whiny, Peter?!"
When he did find himself confronted by an actual, genuine surprise, the web-head didn't always handle it so well. In this case, he miscast his web-line and found himself freefalling a good fifty stories toward the intersection of Chambers and Broadway before he recovered and fired off a safety web.
"You know who I am?!" he shouted on the upswing. "You can't know who I am! Who are you, Oracle?!"
This is bad, he realized. This was impossibly bad.
"I told you, I'm an information expert specializing in the superhero set," Oracle said. "I know the true identities of hundreds of heroes." It was hard to tell with the voice filter, but Spider-Man almost sensed an undercurrent of panic in Oracle's response.
"That's not really an answer," he sulked, as his wild swing carried him to the side of the Woolworth Building where he stopped to catch his breath.
"I… I can't tell you," Oracle replied.
That was definite panic.
"Okay," Spider-Man concluded, trying to get control of his own anxiety. "If you can't tell me who you are, then at least tell me how you know who I am…"
"That's a long story," Oracle told him. "We… we just don't have time…"
"Are you kidding me?!" he yelled.
"No," Oracle said firmly -- in charge once more. "I understand that this might change things for you, Parker, but it doesn't for me. I have a missing operative and I need to find her. Your help would be appreciated, but it's not necessary. I can do it on my own if I have to. It's your decision."
The urge to just cut and run was overwhelming. Spider-Man didn't like working with this Oracle guy to begin with, and now his secret identity was an issue? No thank you. Peter had gone to great lengths to avoid exactly this kind of situation. If he was smart, he'd turn around, head straight for Avengers Tower, and tell Steve Rogers all about this rogue hacker who was playing god with a black ops agenda…
But there was still the Black Cat to consider.
Even if Felicia had gotten into this mess all on her own, she had asked for his help. That meant she was his responsibility… and in the world according to Peter Parker, that meant everything. He had to do whatever it took to make sure she was okay. Whether he liked it or not… especially if Osborn really was behind this. Because Spider-Man had the kind of enemies who would suspend him from church bells or bury him alive to prove a point, and the Green Goblin was the most vicious and depraved of the whole rotten lot.
Norman Osborn had discovered that Peter was Spider-Man years ago and it'd been an absolute nightmare. Norman's mental instability had been a blessing at first, because that whole year after he'd learned the truth about Peter, Norman couldn't even remember that his greatest enemy was living with his son, Harry. But when Harry started up with the drugs and spiraled out of control, Norman just kind of went with him. But unlike his son, Norman never really came back. It was all Goblin all the time after that. Norman killed poor Gwen, then, he seemed to kill himself while trying to kill Peter, only to come back crazier and more devious than ever years later. Eventually the crazy outbalanced the devious, and Spider-Man finally had no choice but to take him down publicly.
Of course, there was no way Osborn could just let it end there. The first time Norman had been incarcerated, he'd arranged for the Scorpion to kidnap Peter's aunt as part of an elaborate plot that left poor May Parker buried alive for weeks...
And hadn't Felicia been there for him when it happened? Wouldn't Aunt May be dead right now if not for the Black Cat's help? Thanks to Doctor Strange, Osborn wouldn't go after May now, because Norman didn't know she was practically Spider-Man's mother. Spidey's relationship with the Cat, on the other hand, was public knowledge. If Osborn wanted revenge on Spider-Man again, she might just seem like the best option…
"Last time he was in jail, Osborn had a contingency plan in place," he finally said. "I know most of the people who've worked with him got locked up after the siege, but maybe he's still got an agent out there doing all this."
"I'll check if any of his known associates are still out and about," Oracle replied. "I take it that means you're still in?"
"Yeah, I'm still in," he confirmed.
Oracle sighed one of those deep, creepy sighs. This time in relief. "Thank you, Peter."
Besides, Spider-Man figured as he started to climb Woolworth Tower, the longer I stick with you, the better chance I have of figuring out who you are, Oracle.
*
Nice going, Gordon, Barbara admonished herself as she ran a search of the Green Goblin's former hirelings. She was making stupider and stupider choices. She realized that.
Just working with Black Cat had been the first. Deciding to contact Spider-Man when he showed up at Felicia's apartment had been spectacularly stupid, too. And while letting it slip that she knew who he was hadn't really been a choice, bluffing to keep him working with her certainly had been. She should have just let him swing off in a huff. And she would have if not for the fact that her first dumb mistake was still lingering out there. She'd brought the Black Cat into this fiasco, so Barbara had to do everything in her power to get Felicia back. Even if it meant working with Spider-Man.
That said, Barbara couldn't afford to let the web-head know anything else about her. She realized it wasn't exactly fair -- especially since she knew so much about him -- but that was just the way she needed things to be. It was the way things would always need to be between them now. She was pretty sure he still didn't know that Barbara Gordon used to be Batgirl, but he really couldn't blame her for figuring out that Peter Parker was Spider-Man.
They'd agreed not to share their true identities at the start of that night they'd spent together all those years ago, but after it happened it seemed indecent not to share their first names. When she drove him to the train station the next morning, all she really knew was that Spider-Man was (probably) a guy named Peter from New York who was pretty good with his hands. After seeing him off, as she drove her father back home to their townhouse in Gotham Heights, she hadn't been all that concerned with figuring out much else about Spider-Man. She was much more worried about making sure her dad never found out she'd had a gentleman caller while he was away.
Looking back on it now, after all these years, it all seemed so silly. Back then, though, Barbara had expected some kind of serious fallout after her night with Spider-Man. Despite all the precautions and cleanup, she still thought her dad would step one foot in the door and spot some last, forgotten clue she'd neglected.
That didn't happen.
The Commissioner just mumbled something about not getting much sleep in New York the night before, then took a long nap on the couch -- during which she thoroughly re-cleaned the guestroom and their shared bath.
Later, when Batgirl met up with the dynamic duo in the Batcave for the Dark Knight's nightly instructions, she was still apprehensive, but she didn't need to be. The Caped Crusader just barked out an order that she'd be covering Devil's Square, Gotham's West Quadrant, before he went on his gloomy little way. Surprisingly, the only tiny consequence of her discreet one night stand came from the Boy Wonder.
"You don't seem as tense or uptight tonight," Robin observed, once his mentor was more than halfway to the Batmobile. Batman was presumably out of earshot, but you never really knew with him…
The Dark Damsel had been far more worried about Batman noticing something than she was about Robin. Bruce Wayne was supposed to be the world's greatest detective, after all. But it was Dick Grayson who came closest to calling her out…
"You don't seem as dense or immature tonight, either," she said, strolling toward her Batcycle. "Maybe I'll see you around, pixie boots..."
And that was the day Barbara Gordon finally and truly realized that there really wasn't a "casual sex" police out in the world, just waiting for two consenting adults to have at it so they could make their bust. And right then and there she was determined to forget the whole crazy, impetuous thing with the wall-crawler ever happened.
But a week later, curious about this strange boy she'd met in the weirdest possible way, she found herself going over the Spider-Man coverage in the Daily Bugle archive during a slow shift on her job at the Gotham Public Library. Years of reading the Gotham Gazette had prepared Barbara for a certain lapse in journalistic integrity. Gotham political candidates were very quick to pay for the right slant in an article, but J. Jonah Jameson's take on Spider-Man was almost laughable in its muckraking.
Spider-Man: Threat or Menace? Really? And supposedly, he was "in cahoots" with every supervillain in Manhattan. But that insane editorial linking the wall-crawler to a spate of canine-molestations was just disgusting.
The more she went through the Bugle, the more she realized this was all more or less par for the course. It wasn't until she got to the front page article accusing Spider-Man of cavorting with the Rhino that she noticed the photo credit. And when she looked back, she realized that all of the Bugle's exclusive Spider-Man photos were credited to this "Peter Parker".
When she'd first spotted the camera clipped to his concealed utility belt, Batgirl assumed it was a crime-fighting tool, like maybe he used it to document evidence or something. But now she had to wonder. After all, if you didn't have a relationship with the local police department, working at a major metropolitan media outlet was probably your best bet of hearing about a crime as it was happening. At the time, Barbara wondered if any of the other superheroes had thought of that kind of thing… And it wasn't like vigilantism paid the bills. Hell, she was lucky she had a wealthy benefactor. When she'd been fighting crime without Bruce Wayne's considerable bankroll backing her, the equipment costs alone had maxed out her credit cards. The way Spider-Man had talked that night they spent together he was barely making ends meet. Selling photos of himself fighting crime seemed like his best bet at keeping his head above water.
It was almost too obvious.
Although, you had to figure there were a dozen other papers in New York City where he could sell these exclusive photos where they wouldn't be used to paint him in such a bad light. Was it just self-loathing or was that part of the cover? The idea that Peter Parker couldn't be Spider-Man because Spider-Man would hate Peter Parker for selling all those "incriminating" pics to the Daily Bugle? Was that really any more outlandish than Bruce Wayne's whole dimwitted playboy act?
There wasn't nearly as much public information about Parker as there was about the web-slinger. She came across a blurb about Midtown High's science fair winners on a slow news day, but there wasn't a photo. Then she found the article about Ben Parker's murder in Queens. How he was survived by his loving wife May and nephew Peter. How the burglar who'd shot him had been apprehended by Spider-Man in his first act of crime-fighting -- the web-head had been a TV entertainer until the elder Parker was shot.
It all fit the profile.
She hadn't been sure until she found the picture of Peter at his high school graduation. Jameson had been the commencement speaker, which is the only reason she could imagine why the ceremony actually made the paper. Parker was featured for his unprecedented academic achievement at Midtown High. The dark brown hair… The muddy hazel eyes… That sloppy smile... As grainy and unfocused as the photo was, she knew it was him.
After that, she tried to keep tabs on Spider-Man. Especially after her whole world became keeping track of meta-human activity. But by then it was less of a curiosity thing and more of a job. She hit most of the highlights: When he switched to the black costume… That strange period when he partnered up with the Scarlet Spider before changing costumes completely… Joining the Avengers… And of course, the day he revealed his identity in public to support of the Superhuman Registration Act.
Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Barbara had to feign shock at the news with the rest of the world, but she'd known for years. Then about a month after the press conference, she woke up one morning and realized she no longer remembered who Spider-Man was, and for a woman with a photographic memory, that didn't do at all…
*
The observation deck at the top of the Woolworth Building had been closed since 1945, but in a town filled with costumed adventurers that defied gravity, it still managed to host the occasional visitor. It had long been one of Spider-Man's favorite places to stop for a bit of peace and quiet and a chance to think when he found himself in downtown Manhattan with a dilemma.
There's no way Oracle can know the truth, Spider-Man concluded from his shady perch under the tower's Neo-Gothic pier. Sure, Peter had played a little too fast and loose with the secret identity thing in the past -- like that time he let Tony Stark talk him into unmasking on national television during that whole brouhaha over the SHRA -- but Spidey found a way to fix that. Or at least Doctor Strange had. Peter wasn't clear on all the details, but Strange had done him the epic favor of getting the world to forget that Peter Parker was Spider-Man.
He heard that kind of thing was frowned upon by certain members of the Justice League, but it's not like those guys could really understand. It's not like they actually had to deal with any of that Civil War nonsense. Congress had gone out of its way to ensure that the Registration Act didn't affect the pre-existing Justice League Charter, which is why S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't invaded Metropolis or Gotham City. Guys like Batman and Superman got to sit on the sidelines while New York was tearing itself apart, free to feel all high and mighty about things like mind-wipes. How many Justice Leaguer's could honestly say they watched the woman who raised them gunned down right in front of their eyes? Peter thanked God every day that Aunt May had survived the hit the Kingpin of Crime had ordered on his family, and he thanked Stephen Strange that his secret was safe again.
After the good doctor had pulled that rabbit out of whatever magic hat, Mary Jane was the only other person on the planet who knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man. He decided not to tell May again. She'd spent enough of her life worrying about him. Eventually, he let a handful of people in on his secret: the Fantastic Four, some of the Avengers, but that was it. Hell, he hadn't even told the Black Cat -- not that she displayed the least bit of interest in anything under the top half of his costume.
"There are only so many people who know who I am," he said, thinking out loud but knowing Oracle was probably listening. "Johnny? Is that you? Is this all some ridiculous practical joke, Storm? If so, you got me good..."
"I'm not the Human Torch," Oracle sighed.
"Mr. Fantastic?"
"No."
"An artificial intelligence created by Mr. Fantastic to process information that somehow gained sentience and will inevitably attempt to destroy us all?" he suggested.
"I'm only going to admit that I'm human because that sounds exactly like the type of ridiculous thing that would happen," Oracle told him.
"Are you Wolverine?"
"Just stop," Oracle begged. "You're embarrassing yourself."
"Um, Mockingbird?" Spider-Man guessed. He heard that she and Hawkeye got up to this kind of kooky spy stuff in their free time.
"I'm not Bobbi Morse, either," Oracle said, "but that gives me an idea..."
"Bucky Cap?"
"Drop it."
"Bobby Carr's mystery girlfriend?"
"Now I don't even know what you're talking about," Oracle said. "Do you want to hear my idea or… Wait. Do you mean Bobby Carr the actor? From One Last Kiss?"
"In addition to the acting he moonlights as a bit of a tool," Spidey grumbled.
"Why would I be his 'mystery girlfriend'?"
"I lead a very interesting life."
"I bet," Oracle muttered. "Doesn't Spider-Woman get jealous?"
"HA!" he laughed. "Now I know that you only think you know everything about me. I haven't met a Spider-Woman yet who doesn't kind of hate me. Except for Skrull-Jessica Drew, but that's a whole, weird sexy, evil alien empress thing I don't want to get into. I don't come out so good in that story…"
"Probably for the best I don't hear it," Oracle agreed. "Just like it's best you don't know who I am. But I swear you can trust me."
"And I'm supposed to just take your word for that?" Spider-Man scoffed.
"Haven't you ever been in a situation where somebody didn't know you very well and you needed them to have a little faith?" Oracle asked.
"None come to mind," he lied.
"We both know that's not true, Peter," Oracle said. "I trusted you."
"So we've definitely met before," Spider-Man gathered. "You're not just some stranger who stumbled onto my secret?"
"Um, not necessarily..."
"Oh, you can't go back on it now, Oracle," he teased. "A few more slips like that and your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man's going to work it out. We are in the same friendly neighborhood, right?"
"I'm not giving you anything else."
"Worth a shot," he sighed. "What's this idea of yours?"
"There's more than one Mockingbird," Oracle said. "I need to check on something. Give me ten minutes, okay?"
"Sure," Spider-Man agreed. But whoever Oracle was, they'd already signed off.
*
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Barbara muttered, shaking her hair out in frustration as soon as she killed the audio feed. She was better than this! She didn't make dumb mistakes! She couldn't afford to! But Bruce had been right about her lack of sleep. She'd been burning the candle at both ends for weeks and now she was slipping.
She was rusty. It'd been years since she'd played this kind of anonymity game as Oracle. The kind where she was working with someone she knew who didn't know her. She'd first tried it with Power Girl, but that was a disaster. Somehow she'd made it work with the Black Canary until she had no choice but to tell Dinah the truth. Ever since Huntress had broken into the old clocktower, Barbara'd been fairly upfront with her operatives about who she was. Had she gotten too used to working with people who knew who she was? Who she used to be? Had she become too trusting? Or had Peter Parker just picked the worst possible time to come back into her life?
When this was all over, Barbara was going to have to seriously re-evaluate how she operated as Oracle, but right now, she needed to get through this mission. She found herself wondering if all the effort she'd taken to relearn the web-slinger's secret had been worth it…
That morning when she couldn't remember who Spider-Man was had been a strange one. Barbara had an eidetic memory. She could remember everything, but somehow not this? She remembered meeting Spider-Man in that warehouse by the pier after Killer Moth had perved out on her. They teamed up for a late night crime fighting patrol and she ended up taking him back to her place for the night. She could remember sleeping with him, but she couldn't remember his name. Or his face! And that was just… unsettling.
She checked her files, and everything she had on his identity was gone. Someone had hacked her system! Nobody could hack her system! She did a complete diagnostic to find only the Spider-Man data had been touched, and when she did a little more digging she discovered traces of Extremis coding. That meant StarkTech. Why had Tony Stark been in her system?
So, for the first time in her life, Spider-Man became a bit of an obsession for her. She decided to start over from scratch. She'd figured it out once, hadn't she? She could do it again. But no matter how hard she tried, the pieces didn't fit. A whole week of digging and she was just going in circles. There was something else going on here... maybe something supernatural. And if that was the case, Barbara had to ask herself: did she really need to know this badly?
Yes. She did. She'd fucked this guy. And Barbara Gordon didn't want to be the kind of woman who slept with a man without knowing his name.
Just right then, she didn't have a lot of time for side projects. The Birds of Prey were in the middle of a move to Platinum Flats to stop a metahuman mafia, which meant she had to set up a new base of operations with a plausible corporate front for cover. There'd just been that disaster with Tabitha Brennan, the girl mobster with a giant robot that took out an entire city block in Metropolis… A disaster Superman had personally flown to Barbara's apartment to blame her for mishandling. But even while dealing with all of this, the Spider-Man mystery still weighed on her mind…
So Oracle called in some favors and got three different detectives working on different pieces of the puzzle. Renee Montoya, the new Question worked Spider-Man's connection to the Daily Bugle. Detective Chimp mapped out all of the web-head's reported sightings in an attempt to pinpoint his most likely base of operations. But it was probably having J'onn J'onzz probe the psychological profiles of the wall-crawler and his enemies that tipped things in her favor. Whatever was working against her puzzling this out was probably something akin to a psychic blind spot meant to baffle the mind, and if anyone had a shot of breaking through, it was the telepathic Manhunter from Mars.
After that, it was a matter of uploading the three different dossiers on three separate servers and running the data through an algorithm that dumped the relevant information onto an independent processor. Well, it should have been a simple matter, but somehow, executing the program fried all four systems. Ten thousand dollars worth of equipment crapped out on her in three seconds time.
In Barbara's only bit of luck, she'd been able to retrieve 48 kilobytes of data from that last server. Part of the program had been designed to generate doctored images of the top five likely candidates. And that single jpeg she recovered was a computer generated image of Peter Parker as Spider-Man.
And just like that it all came rushing back. Everything. The brown hair. The hazel eyes. The sloppy smile.
She was able to recreate her old Spider-Man profile entirely from memory. She even dug a little deeper into Peter's personal life this time around. The first time, she hadn't wanted to risk hacking the S.H.I.E.L.D. firewall to get the redacted files on his parents, Richard and Mary Parker, but they proved fascinating reading. And his college transcripts and attached aptitude charts were astounding. She'd briefly considered passing them on to Bruce. WayneTech was always looking for qualified candidates, but then she thought that would have only complicated things… And she had clearly been right, because now she wished she'd just left well enough alone.
Maybe there was someone else she could call. Stephanie could skip a day of classes at Gotham University, couldn't she? Batman was right, after all... New York wasn't that far away. If traffic was good, Batgirl could be there in a little over an hour. Assuming Black Cat had that much time…
No. Barbara couldn't afford to wait on another operative to get to New York any more than she could wait to piece this new mystery together. How sure could she really be that this was all down to Osborn? After all, Oracle had plenty of enemies. And it'd been almost two weeks since the last time Noah Kuttler, the Calculator, had made a desperate run at her. Wasn't he just about due for another?
But Spider-Man seemed absolutely convinced this was down to Osborn, and if anyone was an expert on the man, it was him, right? If she couldn't trust her instincts, maybe she needed to trust his. Even if she could get another agent in the field, it's not like they'd know Manhattan as well as he did. Spider-Man had to have some contacts they could utilize if necessary.
What she really needed was more intelligence on the former Goblin's resources and she needed it fast. Barbara was pretty sure she knew how to get just that, but she was going to need leverage.
There was an old, largely obsolete government data stream Barbara had been accessing for years; since the beginning of her Oracle days, actually. It fell into disuse quite some time ago, but had recently started to receive traffic again. She always kept an eye out, but rarely interfered. There was a reason for that. Because if this data belonged to whom Barbara suspected, it could only lead to trouble. The very fact that she was now hacking the feed showed her how desperate she was, but she found what she was looking for.
"I think I found some of Osborn's free underlings," Barbara told Spider-Man after she reactivated his communicator. "How long would it take you to get to Queens?"
"Little less than an hour if I swing it," he said. "What's the plan, Oracle-wan Kenobi?"
"I need you to do what you always do, Spider-Man," Oracle explained. "I need you to beat up the bad guys."
*
Otto Octavius was dying.
On the fateful day one of his atomic experiments was sabotaged, causing an explosion that fused the state-of-the-art waldo enhanciles he designed to his body, Otto had discovered a clarity of purpose. This "accident" had inexplicably granted him the fantastic ability to control his technological tentacles with the power of his unparalleled intellect alone. On that day of days, Otto Octavius became Doctor Octopus, and he realized that his genius was meant for far greater things than forwarding the objectives of the military industrial complex. Oh yes. Given Otto's sacrifices, his mind could finally work toward advancing his own personal gain.
And so it did.
For nearly a decade, Doctor Octopus performed his great works, rising to the highest echelons of the criminal underworld. This, of course, put him at odds with all manner of so-called superhero -- brutish thugs too myopic in their child-like sense of morality to see Otto Octavius for the visionary he truly was. Otto refused to back down in the face of their super-powered meddling, so he made war with the gods and it cost him dearly. While his mechanical arms had all the phenomenal strength his highly sophisticated engineering could give them, Otto himself was still merely a man. In their zeal to frustrate his magnificent plans, these "heroes" had imposed their awesome might to ruin him utterly. Repeated meta-powered blows to his head eventually damaged his brain and nerves enough to place his life in jeopardy. He now found himself suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Such a tragic way for his story to end.
Yes, Otto Octavius was dying… but no, he was not done. Not yet. Hell. He'd died before. It hadn't stopped him then. Why should it now? There was still so much for him to do. Scores to settle... One last masterwork to complete... The Octohedral would be his lasting legacy...
The first step in his grand new endeavor required the construction of an entire fleet of giant octopus-robots intended to devastate New York City. He'd based the design for these macro-octo-bots on Tony Stark's Titanomech technology. Otto could have fashioned a better model -- Of course he could! His intellect was superior to that drunken braggart Stark's in every way! -- but why bother? These octo-bots were meant to serve as a mere distraction. Doctor Octopus didn't actually intend to destroy Manhattan, and his time was short. Stark's paltry constructs would serve his purpose much faster, even if they required an inordinate amount of titanium alloy. There were ways to secure that easily. After all, LexCorp's storage facility in Long Island City had plenty of raw material.
Otto had once worked with Lex Luthor years ago. It'd been an unprofitable disaster that brought him into conflict with the Last Son of Krypton as well as that blasted arachnid who had so often stymied his ambitions. Octavius figured that several tons of titanium was the least of what Luthor owed him for that fiasco. The only hindrance was moving the load from the LexCorp warehouse to Octavius' new secret base with minimal risk of detection. He, of course, had a solution. Before his diagnosis, Otto had been building a teleportation device. The work was unfinished and he'd yet to successfully transport a living specimen, but the machine should be more than sufficient for delivering the titanium ore. It was certainly much easier to carry the components for his teleporter into the plant than it would be to carry several tons of titanium out. Even so, it would necessitate a great deal of coordinated effort…
Long ago, Otto realized that the two arms evolution had given him weren't enough to accomplish the great many things he was meant to do in his lifetime, so he created his arms and gave himself four more. After he got his terminal diagnosis, as his body started to wither away, he'd reconfigured his tentacle harness into a life support system and increased the number of his tentacles to eight. When his last plan was thwarted by the eternal spidery-thorn in his side, however, he realized he needed even more limbs, so he acquired an additional ten by once again forming the Sinister Six.
The ease with which he and his minions were currently infiltrating the LexCorp installation was all the evidence Doctor Octopus needed to prove the wisdom of this decision. Chameleon and Mysterio brought the right amount of subterfuge and misdirection to his multifarious machinations. In the case of this titanium theft, Dmitri Smerdyakov used his mastery of disguise to breach LexCorp's security station and Quentin Beck baffled the camera feeds with a bit of theatrical wizardry. Their trickery should keep Luthor's trained help from interfering as the rest of the team entered the warehouse and set to work.
The Rhino and the Sandman, Aleksei Sytsevich and Flint Marko, served his needs for brute strength, collecting the processed titanium into one location as Otto assembled the transporter around the pilfered goods.
"This is the last of it, Doc," Sandman told him, setting the final block of titanium within the teleportation array.
"Excellent," Doctor Octopus said, aligning the last of the eight matter fluctuation posts. "Electro, begin charging the battery."
"You bring the concentrate, I got the juice," Max Dillon assured him, crackling with pure energy as the teleporter hummed to life. Electro provided Otto with the raw power he needed and tossed in these enthusiastic non sequiturs for free.
Everything was going according to plan. "Our work here is nearly finished," Octavius announced with a small smile. "As soon as I've constructed the control console, we can depart…"
"Hold the phone, you mecha-manga miscreant," called a gravelly voice from behind.
"Chyort voz'mi," muttered the Rhino, the first to recognize the red garbed figure stepping from the shadows to confront them. "It's him."
"Spider-Man?!" Doctor Octopus shouted, ready once more to face his nemesis.
"Worse," the Rhino sighed. And he was right. It wasn't the wall-crawler. It was that brain-damaged mercenary, Deadpool!
And he wasn't alone...
*
"You've got to be kidding me," Barbara moaned. "Why is it always Deadpool?"
She'd plugged into the security feeds at LexCorp's New York storage facility, so she had eyes on the Sinister Six when the Merc with a Mouth had made his entrance. The onsite security office at the warehouse was still seeing the repeating loop Chameleon and Mysterio had set up for them because Oracle figured that Spider-Man's job would only get harder with a few trigger-happy police academy drop-outs rushing in to help, but she briefly reconsidered now that she could see what the web-slinger would be up against. Goddamn Deadpool...
Barbara was so sick of this guy. She'd only had a handful of direct dealings with Wade Wilson and there was nothing specifically dangerous about him. He was just a hired gun like any other. Wilson washed out of Canada's super-secretive Weapon X program -- the same institution responsible for the process that gave Wolverine his adamantium skeleton -- but by the time they booted him, they'd already given him an advanced healing factor that made him nigh unkillable. That was still par for the course with a superhuman soldier-for-hire, and Barbara should know. She'd been forced to utilize the occasional mercenary operative from time to time -- especially in the early days of her arrangement with Black Canary. Sometimes it was necessary to work with people who crossed the lines she never would, but Barbara had never considered hiring him!
Wilson had always been an unstable mess, but he'd actually managed to become crazier in the last few months. Ironically, being more obnoxious just seemed to make him a more fashionable choice of assassin in the circles that employed his kind of services. In her cursory attempts to keep track of mercenary traffic, Deadpool was everywhere now, and Oracle, for all her advanced understanding of statistical trending and analytics, just couldn't account for his newfound popularity.
Spider-Man would have his hands full with the Sinister Six alone, and Barbara knew before she'd dispatched him that the web-head was heading for one ugly turf war, but why did Doctor Octopus' opposition have to bring a certifiable whack job with them?
And had she honestly expected anything less from the Secret Six?
NEXT: Sinister / Secret
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When Spidey Met Oracle