All the changes in personnel around didn’t explain why Peter looked a little dazed. I had a pretty good idea what was going on. “Yo, webhead!” I knocked on his skull politely, and he jumped. “If you’re just gonna zone, go home. There’s stuff to do.”

“Oh, right. No, no, I’m fine.” I rapped on his head again. “Hey!”

“How many fingers am I waving? Uh-huh. Go home. You look like someone who just discovered Greta Garbo or something.”

He immediately went pink. “Hey! I’ve seen beautiful women before!” he spluttered.

“And I imagined you’ve kissed a few and gotten to second and third base, too, and you can impress us all with your sexual experience.” There was a crash in the next room as the eavesdropping Gwen and Cindy fell over something.

He got even redder. “Well, she was totally hot and gorgeous and sexy! I am permitted by my red-blooded male license to drool!”

“No, you’re not. Otherwise I’ma have Cindy walk in here and totally reduce you to a drooler.” He yiped, and hopped away from the door as Cindy, grinning ear to ear, slowly leaned way back into view. Not looking at him, I started setting up for the next run of perfumes. Coincidence? Nope, Cindy’s pet project.

“Fine. Dish on the sexy dream who caught the fabulously geeky eye of Spider-man.”

He appropriated one of the chairs, while Cindy and Gwen made no attempt to hide their interest, and Mort came in from the other room, where he was running some tests on the biochemicals from his skin in Frogger form. He and Pete got along surprisingly well, actually, and if Pete was another tier of power higher, they actually had decently similar powers on a physical level.

“Uh, I caught her breaking out of a penthouse uptown. Turns out it belongs to one of the richer criminal defense attorneys in the city, and I just got lucky, she didn’t even set off the alarms. I, uh, was going to nab her, and well, everything just started to go wrong...”

“Wrong?” I asked for everyone, as I was laying down different scent runs.

“Well, I ended up webbing up a swarm of bats when I first tried to web her. Then I nearly landed on a cat while I was chasing her. My webshooters ran out at the same time, and I only had one refill! Then one of the walls I was anchored to collapsed, and I nearly pancaked, and I almost had her when I bounced off a fire escape, it totally fell apart, and I went pitching deep into a garbage bin...”

We all gave him looks of disbelief at that summation of the chase. “She got away?” Gwen piped up, amazed.

“She could MOVE!” he blurted out. “She was fast and graceful and controlled, using some sort of living steel lines to swing around, as good as any of us, and that black catsuit, wow, it left nothing to the imagination, and there was a lot of imagination food there!”

“Another spider?” I asked him pointedly, ignoring the tail-chasing look in his eyes as the girls rolled their eyes, and listened even closer.

He shook his head urgently. “No, no, she, she didn’t move like one of us. We have this kind of instinctive precision thing going for us, y’know? Always spinning and moving into the right pose or posture, even if we throw some flourishes into it. She was more... flowing? I dunno if it was skill or practice or something profound, but it seemed very... catlike, and her outfit didn’t help. Hurt, I mean!”

“Uh-huh. An attractive woman all in black. You sure it wasn’t a Widow?” I asked pointedly. Russia’s lady spies famously dressed in a lot of black.

“Uh, no. She was kind of mocking me, and she called herself the Black Cat...” he mumbled. “And she had white fur on her, uhhh, and white boots and gloves! Although they were really hard to see, come to think of it. With really long white hair!” he finished triumphantly.

“And a cute little black mask with cat ears for her big green eyes?” I went on, rolling my eyes and turning away, while his ears went beet red again.

“M-maybe...” he admitted, not daring to look at anyone except Mort, who had a big smile on his face and a double thumbs-up.

“Oh, my stars and garters!” McCoy’s voice spoke up on the intercom. “Does the great city of New York now have a properly vaudevillian lady thief?” he conjectured, adding to the atmosphere. “Black Cat, now, was it? Surely you know that nom de guerre has all sorts of connotations of adverse happenstance attached to it, Peter...”

Peter looked like he’d had an epiphany. “Bad luck!” he blurted out. “Wow! That would have explained why everything kept going wrong...”

“Did you seriously go out webslinging with only one reload?” I asked archly, glancing at him.

“Uh, no... I found my reloads scattered over the roof of the building where I webbed the bats and they got all over me...”

Everybody snickered despite themselves, picturing his frantic attempts to snip off his webs and clear off the bats no doubt screeching frantically as they were stuck to him, and all his reloads getting pulled off with them.

“Did you call up SHIELD and report her, yet?” I went on. “It might be interesting if no theft was reported at that location.”

He was starting to get embarrassed again. “Um, no...”

“Why don’t you do that, and maybe one of them will generously fly on by and pay a courtesy call to the man... after getting some surveillance assets into place.” I fixed him with a hairy eyeball. “And since you know where the place is, and where she came out of, why, I can’t imagine someone else who might be better at getting the appropriate little bugs into place than a spider with something to prove, right?”

“During the day?” he protested reluctantly.

I rolled my eyes. “Wow. It’s like we have stealth suits for no reason at all. Let us all conveniently forget they exist when we want to stay moon-eyed over a hot villainess.”

“I’m on it! I’m on it!” Hands over his ears to escape the laughter, he fled for one of the equipment closets, where some bracelets that could roughly duplicate the invisibility powers of Susan Richards were available, NOT to be worn on general romps around the city.

“Shoo, Mort. No getting googly-eyed when you’re in your cute form.” A shatterproof glass vial bounced off his head, breaking his earnest examination of my profile, and he fled with a laugh back into his own lab.

The vial flitted back into its place as I kept working. Vier’s TK, ever-handy.

Cindy and Gwen slid over, Gwen picking up one of the racks of samples, while Cindy watched. Cindy was far more into the computers and programming stuff, and did a lot of that for money, working on custom interfaces and software packages for certain clients, as well as a lot of computer security. Her goal right now was her own operating system, and she was well on her way to developing it.

“It’s nice you can be so casual with him,” Gwen sighed, looking after Mort, and Cindy nodded.

“He knows you’re Spider Totems, and you react to him like he’s a predator of spiders. He might not be a Totem, but all the signals are the same. It’s cool, he knows. He’s a dangerous kid.”

“Really?” Cindy asked, blinking in surprise. “I mean, I’ve seen his physicals and performances...”

I gave her a lazy look. “Sure, you can beat him arm-wrestling. And then you’d fall over unconscious, or paralyzed, or hallucinating, or orgasming, or stoned, or maybe you’d just fall dead. If he wants it that way, touching him is virtually a death sentence, and that tongue of his has a twenty-foot reach. If you’re not immune to poison, Mort is fantastically dangerous.” I tilted my head in his direction. “It also means if he wants to be, he’s totally irresistible to women. One touch, he can light you right up, or dope you right out. That skin of his is soooo smooth to the touch, too, and he’s got all the flexibility you’re looking for.

“I’d suggest you give him a good long back massage just for the experience, but you’d end up drooling on the floor, so probably not a good idea.”

They were giving me odd looks. “What? Twenty-six different poisons I was exposed to when I did that. He’s totally safe around me in his Frogger form. I’m the only woman he knows who isn’t and doesn’t need to be afraid of him in his other form. Of course he’s got a crush on me!”

Their jaws worked at having that view turned around on them. They weren’t dangerous to him, it was totally the other way around!

He was fast, agile, could bounce nicely, swim with incredible speed, could partially breathe under water, had skin camouflage, and could cling to walls. The secretions on his skin made him virtually impossible to web or grapple, and touching him was dangerous, if not deadly... and his tongue gave him reach.

The Frogger was hilariously dangerous, regardless of what he looked like or was called. Shifting back and forth between his forms was also purifying and evolving his amphibian form, and he definitely wasn’t anyone who should be called The Toad...

----------

A bit later...

-Didn’t take you long, Felicia!- I /muttered over Marks.

-Hey, it’s been two weeks! He got lucky! That building is not on his regular patrol route!- Dupe Number Deuce /sniffed right back to me. -And it’s all MY fault I’m dead sexier than you others?!-

-You wear a literal catsuit!- Ace Dupe Sunny /snorted from over in France, where she had made quite a splash intercepting a heroin shipment and facing off an Askari bombing attempt in her debut. The European heroes were all pursuing her eagerly... and she was politely proving herself to be an extremely good team player and team leader, much to their astonishment.

-And I look fantastic in it, dear,- Felicia /replied smoothly, tossing back her ass-length platinum locks automatically. -That was very fun Hexing him in between the banter, of course!-

There was no Felicia Hardy in this world, the entire family did not exist... or at least, not by that name, or in the States. Which totally left the position open to be filled by the Melee/Scout/Ur-Mystic Theurge Reformatted Duplicate Deuce, while Dupe Ace had slid into the role and life of Sunstone over in Europe.

Unlike the original Black Cat, who was basically a highly-skilled and curvaceous normal human, using bad luck was totally possible for our Felicia, and she was totally superhuman both physically and skillwise, to boot.

-Speaking of which, are you still planning on Thrice taking up the priesthood for Thor?- Dealer /asked. She was in Monaco at the moment, at a very high-stakes poker tournament being attended by very wealthy people who all wished they were as magical and attractive as she was, and were tossing around lots of money trying to prove their superiority to her.

-If he’s open to the idea. If he doesn’t want a real priesthood, won’t do any good,- I /replied to them all. -And naturally enough, we have to be very careful of what we are going to do...-

-Alors!- Sunny suddenly /blurted out. -Speak of the devil and he shall appear!-

She had all our attentions, because this was a world where The Devil could actually pop up. Which one was arguable, of course... -Something happening?- I /asked calmly.

-That idiot Zeus just descended into Greece and is establishing a temple there!- Sunny /spat acidly.

There was a pause from the rest of us, and then we all began to laugh slowly and knowingly.

-Where do you think he got the balls to do that?- I /wondered to nobody, while fingering on the international news feed with an absent gesture. That stuff would be breaking around the planet like, now.

I had absolutely no doubts whatsoever that Briggs and Sama had information sources all around the world, all the time, too.

There was absolutely no fucking way The Hag was going to allow Zeus to start up a religion again. His mythical record spoke for itself.

-Were I a betting woman, I would believe that Hera has been uttering disparaging remarks about him being afraid of a mere mortal woman, and holding her equal to the Celestials,- Dealer /mused. -His libido would do the rest!-

-No bets!- the rest of us /chimed together, and laughed with schadenfreude.

The breaking news soon came across that Zeus himself had descended from Olympus in Athens, and was actively soliciting worshippers. I smiled and shook my head.