The Effects of the Serum and Becoming an Avatar

Pain. Jesus Christ the absolute pain.

Worse than torture. Worse than anything I'd ever experienced in both my lives. Just constant nerve-twisting, bone-crushing and muscle-rending pain.

I felt my muscles reorganize themselves and their composition, becoming something stronger, lighter, and overall better. I felt my nerves melt down and rebuild themselves, I felt the signals blasting along them, going faster than I thought physically possible. I felt my bone structure snap into new places, becoming as structurally perfect as possible while also becoming as hard and durable as metal.

My skin ripped apart and my blood vessels followed suit, muddying the gel I was in, turning it into a dark orange* sludge-like substance that encased me in a cocoon like amber hardening around an insect.

I don't know how long it took. Nor do I know the exact process of what was happening to me. It had varied too far from the expected parameters that what was happening to me now was beyond what I had thought would happen.

But if I had to guess, I was becoming the perfect fusion of spider and man.

Unlike Kaine who became too much like a Spider or the original Peter who stuck too close to staying as a Human and rejected his spider side...I was becoming the perfect balance for both.

And I rejected neither side. I accepted them both with open arms despite the pain that flooded through my entire being as I did.

My goal was to become strong. My goal was to become strong. My goal was to become strong. My goal was to become...strong! And become strong, I would! I could feel it. That this process would either kill me or allow me to burst forth with power beyond what I'd expected.

Obviously, I refused to die. So, evolve it is, I guess.

The incredibly invasive process was becoming less painful by the second...before eventually the pain stopped. My bones stopped cracking and snapping into new places, settling in place and becoming immovable and hardened beyond belief. My muscles stopped tearing and reorganizing their structure, now filling with unimaginable power and durability. My skin stopped ripping and became an unbreakable and impregnable shield to keep out attacks from my enemies.

I flexed. A simple flex, meant to try and see if I could move in this amber-like substance that was a mixture of my own blood and the nutrition gel.

But what happened was that the brittle substance practically exploded away from me, along with the metal tube I was in. The pressure from my flexing was enough to push away everything encasing me. Like it was but brittle chalk that could be snapped and crushed under the softest of pressure.

Even the metal for the 'bath' had blown away like it wasn't metal but instead cardboard.

I sat up, pieces of the amber-like substance falling off of me as I looked around.

I knew the room was pitch black. The lights were out and there was no natural sunlight because I was in a lab underground. Yet, despite this, I could see perfectly clearly. Everything I looked at, I could see with perfect clarity. Beyond that, I could see it even clearer than I usually could. Even with my glasses. The clarity and sharpness of my vision...shocked me. Enough to make me softly gasp as I looked around the room, being able to practically zoom in on things like my eyes were telescopes or digital cameras with a zoom function.

Beyond my eye sight, I could...feel everything in the room. I didn't need to look around to see that there were exactly 103 pieces of the amber-like substance scattered around the room. I could just tell there were.

...Ah. This is...spider sense, right? A sort of ESP ability that isn't just a danger sense but rather all my senses working together to give me an extremely acute understanding of my surroundings.

Not just spider sense but also my sense of touch. I could feel the air currents around me. Despite there being no draft or wind in this area, I could still feel them. This is an ability of the Huntsman Spider, isn't it? The hairs across my body can pick up the flow of air currents around me.

Even without spidey sense I could probably walk around this room with my eyes closed and just using this ability to sense air currents.

Suddenly, I keeled forward, feeling a pain spreading outward from my stomach. But it was the same pain as before. This pain was...

"What...? I...I'm hungry?" I questioned, confused. Should the gel have sorted that--Wait. The nutrition gel would have covered for the original transformation. But being Empower by the Other and having my DNA changed even more forcibly? I hadn't covered for that in my calculations, so there wasn't enough. It also seems that my blood leaking into the gel turned off it's activated state, so there's even less of an effect on me.

So, my body's on the brink of starving to death. Huh.

Reaching for a block of the amber, I brought it to my mouth and chomped down on it. Despite it being made of nutrition gel and blood, it didn't taste half bad, actually, and as soon as it hit my stomach, the pain got a little more bearable.

So I kept eating. And eating. And eating. I kept eating every little bit of the amber I could find. But even when I'd done that, I still felt hungry.

"Karen?" I called out, wondering if our back-up generator was knocked out by whatever knocked out the main supply of power. The speakers crackled a little before Karen's voice came through.

[Yes *bzzt* bo*pzzt*ss?] it crackled in and out, interrupting her words but I gathered that she was there. Even if she was speaking a bit too load for my newly enhanced sense of hearing. Like seriously, everything sounds like it's coming through a megaphone right now.

Sighing, I pulled one of the supply lines from the broken 'bath' I'd just been in, "Activate the flow of nutritional fluid through this pipe. Keep going until I tell you to stop," and once I said it, the green gel began to flow out of the pipe and into my mouth as I poured it in there. I drank and drank and drank. At some point, I actually started to feel full and I took the pipe away from my mouth, "Okay, cut it off now, Karen. Thanks," I thanked her, getting what sounded like a joyous beep in reply as the flow of gel came to a sudden stop.

Dropping the pipe, I sighed sitting down on a nearby stool. I closed my eyes and did a quick mental check through, trying to find more differences with my body.

I quickly found the first - my canines on both the top and bottom were both elongated and sharp as hell. Cut my tongue on one of them and with the upgrades brought by the Burstein Process and how unbreakable most of my body should be, that shows how sharp they are. I discovered the second very quickly after biting my tongue when within about a dozen seconds, the cut stopped bleeding and healed over soon after.

So, fangs and a healing factor. Nice, I guess.

Then I moved onto the rest of my body. Certain parts of my body felt odd...like there was something new there. My fingers felt like there was something else inside it and upon concentrating on them, I found new muscles I hadn't had before.

Pulling on that new string, I felt my new finger muscles contract and each finger became adorned with a talon. It didn't hurt when they came out - like this was something that was supposed to be natural for me. I looked over them and was surprised that they looked a lot like Miguel O'Hara's spider talons that let him climb up walls and whatnot.

Feeling somewhat scared I'd miss out on the 'stick'em' powers, I retracted the claws and walked over to a wall before stretching my arms as high as I could and placing them against the wall.

I understand how the stick'em powers work.

Basically, exposure to the mutated spider venom induced a mutagenic, cerebellum-wide alteration of the original Peter's engrams resulting in the ability to mentally control the flux of interatomic attraction (electrostatic force) between molecular boundary layers. Basically meaning he can mentally control whether he sticks to things.

This overcomes the outer electron shell's normal behavior of mutual repulsion with other outer electron shells and permits the tremendous potential for electron attraction to prevail. In layman's terms, instead of things repulsing each other when they touch, they attract and stick together. Like a magnet.

So, if I mentally will my hands to stick instead of being repulsed by the wall I'm touching, it should work.

I pressed firmly against the wall and held my mind steady and even as I willed my hands to stick to the wall. I left all the science mumbo-jumbo out of it and just thought one thing - Stick to the wall, hands! I really want stick'em powers!

Upon doing everything I knew I could, I pulled myself up like I was doing a chin-up.

...And it actually fucking worked! Hahahahaha! I have stick'em powers!--And no, I will never call them anything else! At the very least, I may call them wall-crawling power but if anyone asks how I do it, you can bet your ass that I'll say 'I don't know, I just have stick'em powers'. Even if I do completely understand how I do it.

What? I'm young at heart, so I'm naturally mischievous.

Dropping back to the floor and looking at my hands, I laughed as I once again reached out and touched the wall again. I stuck to it again but this time, when I pulled back, I didn't deactivate my powers.

My bare feet stuck to the ground and my hand stuck to the wall. As I pulled, I felt my blood begin to pump quicker and my muscles began to fill with power.

Sadly, before I could even work up a sweat or fully flex my new and empowered muscles, the wall groaned and creaked before a chunk broke from the wall, coming back with my hand.

Letting the chunk of the wall fall from my hand, I nodded in joy that such an ability was available to me. Could be used in many, many different ways. Interesting ways. Torture-y ways. But also in fights to take people's armor off of them. I vaguely remember the original Spidey doing such a thing to Iron Man.

Which is why I'll always disdain the use of mecha and super-armors. What's the use in such an ability when it can simply be torn off of ya by someone with sufficient strength? Plus, it's an external strength. After all, you can't always be in your armor.

Not unless you develop nano-technology. But at that point you might as well just use nano-bots to empower your body itself rather than use them to make armor.

Ah, whatever, fruitless thoughts for another time.

Suddenly, the lights came back on and I, for a second, thought I'd been flashbanged.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" I gave a surprised shout as I clamped my eyes shut, covering them with my hands when even my eyelids closing still felt like I was looking directly into the bloody sun, "Karen, either dim the lights to 10% or shut them off completely!" I gave another shout.

Within less than a second, the lights were at 10% of their maximum intensity and I could finally open my eyes. Even then, the lights seemed a bit...bright.

"I always thought characters were playing it up when they reacted badly to sensory information after they'd gained super-senses...but damn, I was so goddamn wrong," I rubbed my eyes, getting rid of the tears that had flooded my eyes after such a sensory overload.

Looking around with squinted eyes, the pain still echoing about in my head, I sighed before feeling something spring out from the center of my chest. It flowed up my neck and through my head until it reached my eyes. Once there, a soothing feeling spread throughout my hurting eyes, taking away the pain.

Huh. This must be the Other's Dimensional Energy.

"Karen, turn the lights up to 40%," I said, bracing myself for this plan to either work or backfire massively. The lights flashed up in brightness and I flinched slightly, squinting my eyes ever so slightly, ready to slam them shut if needed.

But the pain I expected never happened and the light, while still seeming bright to me, was miles better than what I expected it to be.

Then the energy stopped flowing from my chest to my eyes and the pain began again.

"Argh! Goddammit!"