“God, she was annoying,” Flora grumbles to herself, walking down the street back towards F.E.A.S.T. to lie down after finding a place to hide her bags between the dumpsters she’d rested by. “This has gotta be the shittiest couple of days I’ve ever had.”

“I believe you are simply just upset now. I have noticed joy and excitement within you multiple times since joining with you.”

“Whatever! Just need something to cool down, I guess… UGH, this sucks.” With the lunch rush near its end, the streets had become a little bit clearer as the citizens in the area returned to their jobs and lives off the roads and sidewalks. It almost felt calm, for as calm as New York could be in the middle of the day.

Passing by an alleyway, she feels her ear twitch. Something sounded like a gun being pulled out. Looking in the direction of the small noise, she sees exactly that, a pistol being pointed towards a woman who happened to take the wrong shortcut at the wrong time on her way back to work.

Flora turns away to move on.

“Do you not wish to intervene?” Vice pipes up.

“S’not my problem, sucks that it happened but she’ll probably recover.”

“And yet you seem to be avoiding a good opportunity to ‘cool down’, as you put it.”

She pauses for a moment, looking back. Flora groans, “ugh, fine, you’re right. Hope that guy’s hardier than he looks.” She runs back to the scene, changing her form when she’s sure no one’s looking. Throwing out a tentacled arm, she knocks the gun out of the mugger’s hands and pulls it towards her.

“Not so scary without a weapon, are ya’, tough guy?” She stomps towards the man, cracking her knuckles and stepping on the firearm; crushing it beneath her foot. She jumps in between the two of them, grabbing him by his neck and pressing him against the wall.

The woman hurriedly puts away the money she was taking out from her purse and begins to move away, shouting her gratitude to Flora, “thank you so much for saving me!”

“Get the hell out of here, dumbass!” Flora yells back, “Didn’t do this for you anyway.”

She stares into the thief’s face, tightening her grip slightly, “I’ve just had a really shitty day and I’m lookin’ for a good excuse to beat the crap out of someone.”

Reeling her fist back for a punch, she continues looking into his terrified face and for just a split second, she sees the terrified face of her parents in his. She throws the punch, narrowly missing his head and creating a large rupture in the wall, as the wicked grin on her face dissipates.

She throws the man to the side and begins to stomp a nearby trash can; almost flattening it from the force, “GOD! FUCKING! DAMMIT!” She looks back to where she tossed him, leaving him on his back. “You wanna die?! Get the fuck out of here!” she roars at him, causing him to scurry away in fright.

With all eyes off her, she morphs back to her usual self.

“Feels like I just can’t have one goddamn thing in this shithole city!”

“I do not understand why you hesitated in your violent actions. You wanted to hurt someone to ‘cool off’, no?”

“I did, but fuckin’, I don’t wanna be seeing my dead dad in people while I’m kicking their asses!”

“Did not you dislike your predecessors? Were they not terrible to you?”

“I mean, sure, but… I wanted to believe that they’d become better one day… That I could be their daughter who they loved… They won’t even get that chance now…”

“Your species continues to vex me.”

“Yeah, humans are dumb like that.”

F.E.A.S.T., around 3:30pm

Finally having made it back, she slumps onto whatever seat she can find. After being in a fight with someone with super strength, she really needed to relax. 

Unfortunately, due to her newly heightened sense of hearing, she can’t help but hear the TV on the wall playing the afternoon news.

“Breaking news! New masked vigilante on the streets? Or simply an uncommon criminal? This morning, a store was robbed by an individual with a purple face covering right after the building mysteriously lost all power. Police are still investigating the scene, however witnesses report that they had their faces covered with a ‘sticky, purple goo’ that trapped them against the wall. Hours later however, our on foot reporters discovered another case.”

The cameras change to a familiar street with a woman Flora had recently met. “I dunno who it was, but some lady in a green and purple costume saved me from being held up by a guy with a gun! Had this big, freaky smile on her back, real weirdo, but at least I don’t have to worry about that guy shooting me now!”

Late into the morning, the sun begins to crest over the skyscrapers. As the light drifts over her eyes, Flora begins to awaken on a rooftop halfway across the city. In response, she turns herself away, trying to avert her eyes and return to being passed out from fleeing in the middle of the night from a crime scene.

“Your star is in view, it is time to rise.”

“Oh good, you’re still here, not a bad dream, fantastic,” she groans to herself.

“We must seek sustenance. Where do we get more of the bitter tasting liquid and dry leaf tubes?”

“It’s too early for beer and cigarettes, dude,” she says as she sits up, “you’re not supposed to eat those anyway…” “It is never early for pleasure.”

“Whatever. God, I feel like shit, where even are we?”

Peering over the building, she looks around to get her bearings and sees down the street Columbus Park. China Town! There’s a F.E.A.S.T. here! Her identity has given her trouble with homeless shelters local to where she lived, but this one has a good reputation! She would’ve gone here sooner if it was closer, but with no money and no way to travel there, let alone get food, it was just out of reach.

“Oh thank god, somewhere I can get a bite to eat,” she says, sighing with relief, “now I just need to get there and find a place to change back into myself so that people don’t see me walkin’ around as some purple weirdo.”

“I was given the understanding that you were fond of our combined form.”

“Oh yeah, absolutely, it was great but like… I don’t want people freakin’ out and like, callin’ the cops or some asshole in a dumb costume to come take out the freaky, scary alien person.”

“It seems like you are ashamed of what we are.”

“No, no, I’m not, just… I wanna keep a low profile, especially after what happened last night…”

Shifting back to her new powers, she makes her way to the homeless shelter, F.E.A.S.T.

F.E.A.S.T., 10am

Flora enters the building, feeling a stark nervousness. She’d heard good things in the past about this place online, but after her other experiences she still worried that she would be kicked out or forced into keeping quiet for being trans. But everywhere she looked, the faces she saw were friendly and accepting. Finally after weeks of being cold and hungry, she was able to sit down with something to eat. The meal wasn’t exactly extravagant and the seat was pretty uncomfortable, but it was a hell of a lot better than sitting out in the cold with nothing to eat.

“Hi! Sorry to bother you, but do you have a moment to spare?” asked a voice who had approached her. Looking to the voice, Flora sees a sort of geeky looking woman with glasses and a pixie cut, wearing a casual looking suit and overcoat.

“Oh, uh, sure, what do you need?” she replies, still getting her voice back from waking up.

“Okay, so I’m doing interviews with the local homeless population for a story I’m writing for the local paper and I haven’t seen you around, so it seemed like a perfect chance to get a fresh view! Did you know that New York City alone has over 100,000 people living without a home? And with all the supervillains we have running around these days and the invasions that have happened, many homes and people’s workplaces and methods of transport are destroyed on a weekly basis, leaving even more out of a job!” Flora looks over the woman without a word, barely having taken in any of what she just said beyond working for the paper.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she continues, “I’m rambling, may I ask your name?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s, um, Flora. And you?”

“Paige Parker, journalist for the Daily Bugle, nice to meet you!” she says, offering her hand to be shook. Flora hesitates, but meekly gives her own hand and slowly shakes.

“Right, isn’t that the one that seems obsessed with doing any and all stories about that ‘spider-girl’ or whatever?”

“Spider-Woman! Yes, we get asked to do a lot of stories on her. Seems she’s a popular character around the city!”

“I guess, I dunno, I don’t really read the news. I’ve just heard that it seems like she can’t take a shit without them wanting some story about how she’s puttin’ chemicals in the sewer system to make super spider babies or whatever.”

“Aha, yes, that uh, there’s obviously going to be a lot of rumors about her… Anyway, about that interview?”

Above the city, Flora ponders as she looks down across the various stores that would have booze and cigarettes, “how in the hell am I gonna get more stuff for you?”

“Why do we not simply take it, as we did before?”

“We can’t just do that, societal rules of commerce an’ shit”

“I do not understand several of these words. We should just take what we desire, with force if need be.”

“No! I don’t wanna just hurt random people like that! God, I should’ve taken some money from the apartment before I left…”

“Do we have any way to get this ‘money’ quickly?”

“Save from robbing a place? Not that I can think of…”

“Then we should go and claim our bounty! Upend your doubts and get what we need!”

“I guess… we don’t have much of an option right now… I just don’t want to draw attention and like, what shitty thief goes into a store in broad daylight just to rob a place’s drugs?”

“That would be us, so it would seem.”

Flora crouches down, groaning into her legs. “Can we at least try and do it quietly? Do we have anything we can do to like, disable the cameras or something?”

“There may be one way, if you get me access to their power supply.”

She thinks for a moment, looking down the various pathways by the emptiest convenience store she can see. A power box! And only a couple of people in the building! Having found her target, she makes her way down.

Checking her surroundings to make sure no one is looking, she approaches the box and puts her hand near it, allowing the slimy creature inhabiting her to enter through the tiny openings and cracks. Vice crawls through the walls of the building biting through the wiring and cables before returning to its host. “It is done.”

Flora removes her coat and beanie and enters the store, turning her face away from everyone there and ducking behind some shelves. Covering her face and hands with Vice, she runs out from her hiding spot, covering the mouths and eyes of everyone inside with purple tentacles; trapping them against the walls with the sticky substance. Dashing towards the checkout, she forces open the door and quickly does the same to the person behind it.

Grabbing several plastic bags, she begins to shovel lighters and cigarette cartons into one and then running through the store, she grabs a bunch of sandwiches until she reaches alcohol section; grabbing everything she can fit into the remaining bags before she sprints back to her discarded clothing, grabbing it with a tentacle and rushing up the wall and jumping across the city.

Hiding on the backside of a billboard, Flora collapses with her back to the sign to catch her breath, the mask and claws receding back to normal. Feeling the cold creeping onto her arms, she dons her coat and hat again.

“Ho- holy shit… We did it.” Unable to wait any longer, Vice forms a toothy mouth extending off from Flora’s side and bites the tops off of a bottle of wine and chugs it down. “Aah, finally. Truly this is a wonderful beverage, every chemical within rushing through our being. This is a delight!”

“Yeah, fuckin’ haa… you’re welcome or whatever… just don’t devour it all at once… hoh Jesus… I would like if we did that as little as possible…”

“You lie to yourself. I feel it in you, the thrill of adrenaline flowing through you. This has left you more alive than you have felt in years.”

“Dude, yeah, but like… I still feel shitty about hurting someone’s livelihood like that… there’s gonna be a better way to do this.”

Vice bites into a carton of cigarettes, trying to swallow them all down. Flora slaps them out of his mouth, “not all at once, man! We gotta make these last. Look, like this.” She takes out one of the smokes and a lighter to light it. “Here, put the brown part in your, uh, mouth thing and do whatever you can that’s like breathing it in.”

Vice bites the end of it and takes in the fumes. “Ahh, I understand. So this is how you maximize the intake of pleasure. We will take this into account going forward.”

“Yeah, yeah, just… keep it slow, the longer these last, the better.”

“And just what kind of scene are you planning to make? Can’t just let you do that if it’s gonna hurt the people in there” Spider-Woman protests.

“I don’t know! Just something loud! Something to get them out of there!” Spider-Woman thinks for a moment, before having a bright idea.

“I know something that might work, but I don’t know that you’ll like it!”

“Well? Spit it out!”

“If you insist!” the hero says, sticking Flora with strings of webbing, swinging her around before flinging her towards the front of the F.E.A.S.T. building.

Flora scrapes across the ground on landing, leaving claw marks in the road. “I’LL MURDER THE BITCH!” she screams out, alerting anyone who wasn’t already looking at her.

One of the men in suits looks out to see what was happening, seeing Flora and alerting the other 3 inside to come out, while Flora is busy ripping a street light out of the ground to use as a weapon.

The 4 men rush out to the street to see the purple monster, taking aim at her. Flora is barely able to calm her blood rage enough to hear the clicking of guns pointing in her direction. Loathe as she is to admit it, it did work in their favor, so putting off her urge to kill her nemesis later, she walks towards the group, carrying the large metal pole over her shoulder.

Flora leaps into the air as the group fires on her, throwing the broken light down towards them like a spear; embedding it in the ground as they dodge out of the way of it. Upon landing, she begins to swing her tentacled arm around, catching two of them and wrapping them around the implanted shaft, before she detaches it, leaving them trapped.

She rushes the other two, ignoring the bullets shot at her and grabbing them both by the middle of their shirts, slamming them both down on the ground multiple times like they were dolls. Turning back to the other two, she grabs one of them by the scalp.

“And just what do you shitheads want with me?”

“Y-you are under arrest under the authority of the federal government!”

Flora sighs, bashing their heads against the metal pole and knocking them out. She destroys their radios and takes a couple of the weird things they were waving in people’s faces, swinging away back to the rooftops and back to Spider-Woman, who had enjoyed watching from atop the building.

“You tryin’ to get killed, you piece of shit?!”  Flora shouts, advancing towards her adversary with her spiked arm.

“I knew you had it in you! And good job on not nearly killing them!” the spider replied cheekily, “I didn’t even need to jump in to stop you from doing that this time!”

“Grraah! Whatever, shut up! I’ve got worse things to worry about like being wanted by the fucking government, I guess!” Flora manages to get out, once again quelling her desire to kill the hero in front of her, if barely. “Just take these, you can probably figure some shit out about them, I’m getting out of here” she says, casually tossing the devices to the ground.

“Wait, for real? The hell’d you do to piss off the government?”

“I dunno, maybe I fuckin’ ruined their bestest, most favorite convenience store, maybe they just don’t like me, maybe even it’s just because I’m-”” She stops herself. She turns away from Spider-Woman. “I’m leaving.”

A pair of web strings fire out into the alley, grabbing the two men behind Flora and pulling them away to relative safety. Tying them up to a nearby lamp post, Spider-Woman jumps down to Flora’s level. “Geez, really did a number on these guys. Never heard of overkill?”

“And what of it? They were attacking ME!”

“What, couldn’t have ran away? You did pretty good at that last I checked!”

“Quiet! Why save these assholes anyway?! They’re only here to steal and hurt people!”

“Right, because you’re much better than that, eh?”

“Maybe I should be killing you instead!” Flora yells, pointing her arm spike towards the hero and stomping towards her, receiving a web covering her face in her frustrated distraction, soon finding herself on her back as her legs are swiftly kicked out from under her by the spider.

“You’d have to catch me first!”

Flora rips the snare from her face, just in time for her to see Spider-Woman leaping away with her captured foe, now free from his confines. “Hey! Get back here!” she bellows, watching the webslinger carrying him over to the other two. Turning her arm into a funnel once again, she shoots off several pellets at the fleeing costume, all missing their target from her frustrated aim and hitting against the building across from her. Spider-Woman grabs the other two criminals, swinging away into the city.

“GRAH! That BITCH!” Flora screams, throwing the nearest dumpster at a wall and rustling her own hair in anger. Shifting back and crouching down in a huff, feeling powerless again after being run around by her nemesis again.

“Why did you not give chase?” Vice pipes up, slithering over for another bottle.

“Look, I forgot that I even could, okay?! Was like, stuck in the mindset of trying out new shit or something, I don’t know!” “There is still time to hunt for her.”

“And do what?! Get my ass kicked again? Let her just keep telling her stupid jokes? I’m completely useless against her…”

“You are letting her use your quick temper against you.”

“I know that! Doesn’t make it any easier! Just shut up for a while, would ya?”

“If that should please you.”

“Annoying god damn slug…” Hours later and exhausted from her anger, Flora passes out on the floor again, under the cold, starless night; finally ending the worst day of her life.

A couple of days pass. Now with a collection of substances stashed away and better prepared for Vice’s call, she spends most of her time able to keep a low profile while staying at F.E.A.S.T. With little else to do, she actually goes to schedule an appointment at the nearest job centre, hoping to be able to earn money to stand on her own two feet. 

While the smokes she took helped keep her needs at bay, she still went back to her usual spot once or twice a day to get her companion a couple of drinks and restock on cigarettes if she needed them. However, this would not last.

Having now kept her head down for about half a week since the night she was attacked, she managed to feel somewhat relaxed in her situation. It wasn’t good, but she was at least getting food and a place to sleep. Vice was starting to cause an itch in the back of her head again.

She travelled back to the regular drinking spot, but when she reached it this time, she found that her bags had gone missing.

“No, no, no, no, no! Where is it?! Where did it go?!”

Searching around, she finds nothing. The trash around the area had all been cleaned up too. The dumpsters had been emptied and it seems whoever took what they contained had assumed that her bags were to go with them.

As Flora is pocketing a couple of cigarette cartons and a lighter, she hears a group of footsteps walking into her hiding spot, along with the sound of metal slapping against someone’s palm.

“Lookie what we gots here, boys. Some tramp makin’ a mess on our turf.”

She turns away from the approaching thugs walking up to her, trying to stop them from seeing her face.

“Aw, come on, drinky, no need to be scared,” says one holding a lead pipe over his shoulder, “just give us whatever valuables you gots left and we’ll be right as rain.”

“You really think someone like me would have anything you want?” Flora snarks at the group, “You must be real dumb then.”

“Ooh, cutting. Well that just won’t do, ya’ see? We gotta make sure you don’t come back somehow, be a real shame if we can’t do it, eh, amicably.”

“Oh, you want amicable?” she replies snidely and while giving them the finger, “then maybe take one a’ these and get bent.”

“Oho, we got a funny lil’ hobo right here. Such a shame I don’t really like jokes and you’re lookin’ like a real clown right about now” he says attempting to threaten her, slamming the head of the pipe down next to her. She doesn’t respond, but feels Vice stirring and twisting around inside of her head as the metal object collides with the ground.

“What’s wrong, clown? Don’t got nothin’ funny to say? Maybe you’ll getta laugh outta THIS!” he says, swinging the pipe at her head, landing with a solid thwack!

Purple membrane creeps out from where the pipe landed, shielding her from the damage. “Ya’ know, I’ve had a really, really shitty day” Flora says, rising from her hunched over position, her body quickly changing into her other self, “just one thing after the other! But hey, maybe I’m not the one who’s made the worst decisions today!”

She turns to look over the trio, now towering over them, barely able to make out their expressions of fear in the darkness. “G-get that creep!” yells the pipe wielding goon, backing away for his inferiors to attack her instead. Both of them hesitating, one of them lashes at her with a flick knife, slicing at her stomach, but simply scraping against her skin. A terrible smile creeps onto her face, teeth like a shark’s bared towards her attackers.

“Let’s test out more of what this power can do,” she hisses out as her braid lunges towards the knife-wielder’s wrist, across it and forcing him to drop his weapon. With her attention away from him, the third of the men throws his large fist wrapped in brass knuckles to her face. Unshaken by this, she grabs the hand that hit her. “Hope you’re fond of those shiny pieces of shit!”

She begins to crush the metal around his fingers, as he screams in a horrific pain, the rings of the weapon crushing his bones as they begin to match their size. The one who had a knife attempts to flee, but is pulled back towards her by a long tendril wrapping around his ankle. Throwing him against a wall, she stomps his leg into the bricks and mortar, shattering it as it gets forced through the concrete.

This feels incredible.

BANG

A sharp pain hits against her head, as a bullet from the first mobster drops down to the floor. Flora turns to him, letting go of the second and throwing the first to the floor. “You know what? You’re right. I am thinking a little bit too simply.”

Her arm morphs into a thin tube, aiming it towards the man who just shot her. She fires a small, gooey pellet at him, quickly bursting into a large tentacle from the point of impact; sticking against a wall and throwing him to it, trapping him in a thick, violet mucus.

Retrieving his pipe, she bends it around, putting it around his neck and piercing it through the brick and mortar behind him; stapling him to it. “J-just what the hell even are you?!”

“We are Vice. And we seem to remember you saying something about ‘making sure you don’t come back’?”

Her arm transforms once again, now ending in a sharp spike. “Maybe I just need an example.” She reaches her arm backwards and…

Stops. She hesitates. This guy just tried to kill her and have his lackeys kill her too! She should want to do this, right?