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“You’re not Peter.”
“...Should I know who that is?” the girl, currently dangling by one foot from one of Doc Ock’s metal claws, asks. Definitely not Peter, despite the red getup and the superpowers. She’s far too young – elementary school, not college - and no spider, instead having darted out of the way in the air before he’d caught her. “If you’re looking for someone, I don’t think destroying the city is the right way to go about it.” The girl folds her arms, shaking her head disapprovingly as if he’s the child here.
“Well - you know, honestly, I’m not sure.”
Dr. Otto Octavius - currently moonlighting (and daylighting) as a villain under the name of Doc Ock - takes a better look at his surroundings now that the dust of their impromptu fight has settled. The stream of consciousness he shares with the metal appendages on his back still hums in his mind, the reactor and revenge and the power of the sun in the palm of his hand on repeat like a thrumming chorus. This city is smaller than New York, much more so, a gathered crowd of townspeople staring open-mouthed as their hero dangles precariously in the air above them. There’s a park nearby where Otto had once been looking at the grand sprawl of the ocean. The sky is clear and blue overhead.
“Do we need to keep running around and screaming for help?” one of said crowd asks. “Or, uh, are you guys done fighting?”
“Are we done fighting?” the girl asks him. “I mean - I’m guessing you’re a villain, but if you don’t come from around here, maybe we could talk things out? Avoid the whole ‘beating each other up and then I drag you to jail and then you break out of jail and then I do it again for a month’ thing?” She folds her hands politely, giving what Otto can only assume is her best superheroic, diplomatic grin.
The monkey on her shoulder does the same. (Why in God’s name does this child have a monkey?)
Otto weighs his options. There’s no use, he reminds the voices buzzing in the periphery of his thoughts, in doing anything more until they can get back to New York from wherever this is. The reactor and its components are still there. The reactor is going off without him, and he won’t very well be able to make use of the results if he isn’t there to see them in the first place.
His metal appendages chitter and buzz in thought as their considerations play back to Otto in fragments; no Peter means no vengeance and this is not what we wanted and this is not what you wanted and they could help us get it back and get back what we rightfully deserve.
“No, no,” Otto grumbles, aloud now, rubbing his temple with a thumb and forefinger, “one at a time, I can’t - you know this is making it more difficult than it needs to be.”
“Is something wrong with your arms?” the girl interrupts. Otto can already see the maybe that’s why he’s so angry gears turning in her head. He dreads the thought of becoming a multiversal charity case. Thankfully, the four of them turn their oculi towards her at their mention, a quartet of warning red pinpricks. They’re more than detected the threat to their being, wether or not Otto had a say in the matter, and there’s a flash of light and a crash of metal, and -
- ah. They've been incapacitated, haven't they.
"Look, it's the best idea I've got," the girl sighs, dragging Otto by the one arm not tied around him like a makeshift bow. "I'm supposed to be able to save the city no matter what happens, including inter-dimensional interlopers."
She turns from the monkey on her shoulder to Otto. (Otto is beginning to appreciate the lack of little girls who talk to monkeys in New York's crimefighting catalogue.) "Y'know, usually, when I say stuff like that, bad guys usually ask me what I mean," she notes, sounding genuine in her curiosity.
He’d rather not say something that would crush her spirits as an answer - for all he knows, this girl could be exponentially smarter than he is and her powers could come from being bitten by a radioactive dictionary. Instead, he gives a solemn nod, attention still focused on the interrupted task at hand. He’ll need to get along with these people if he wants any hope of returning back from whence he came, but quite frankly, getting along is something neither he nor the voices in his mind are entirely keen on.
Ah, well. Better than being shoved in a glass box and studied like some kind of novelty case.
Said idea arrives in the form of a giant metal foot cracking the pavement in front of them with grand aplomb. “Well, well,” a voice calls down from atop it as more monstrosities of the same ilk follow in its wake. “Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Tobey,” the girl grimaces, floating up in the air to get at eye level with the source of the voice. Said source, as it appears, is a blonde boy - Tobey, apparently - with oversized glasses that looks exactly as smug as his tone had conveyed. The girl is familiar with him, Otto considers, based on the way the boy seems all-too-proud at her asking for his help with Otto’s particular predicament. “Don’t get used to it.”
Despite her warning, Tobey grins, kicking his legs happily over the front of his transport. “Wordgirl, asking for my help,” he giggles to himself, giddy at the prospect, before folding his hands and turning his attention to Otto. “What is this, your first attempt at a robot? Not bad for a first try.”
“He isn’t a robot, Tobey, didn’t you hear?” the girl folds her arms. “There was a whole conundrum in the park just a couple of hours ago, there was this big portal for a second or two - ugh, look, can I just explain what I need your help with?”
Tobey gives a sort of go-on gesture.
"I don't have a place for this guy to stay. You have a knack for finding places to keep your frankly ridiculous amount of robots. Provided that -" and the girl grits her teeth on the words, puffing out her cheeks, "- you don't use this opportunity for any evil, I'll let you keep an eye on him while I try to find a way to get him back to wherever he came from. Deal?"
The boy watches cautiously as she offers her hand. It’s far from flattering, watching his fate be discussed by two elementary schoolers as if he were trading cards. His arms try to strain free from their binding, but it’s no use, and their annoyed muttering doesn’t exactly make for background noise that’s any less irritating. “Listen,” he interrupts, “I don’t need some boy genius toying around with anything that’s currently hotwired to my brain. Especially my own creation,” he adds, because maybe that’ll give these kids the hint that if anyone knows how to solve Otto’s problems best, it’s Otto. He doesn’t need to be fixed.
“Not quite a genius,” the girl corrects, a playful note in her voice. (Otto swears he sees a flash of something across her face when he mentions the lack of the inhibitor chip, but it passes too quickly for him to register.)
The boy rolls his eyes. The girl - ‘Word Girl’? - keeps her hand extended.
“Well?”
"Did you really create those?" Tobey asks.
Otto isn’t the biggest fan of being hidden away in the guts of a giant robot. It’s better than nothing, sure, but an apartment or some sort of secret hideout would’ve been far less demeaning. At least it’d been furnished (if a singular pillow and a minifridge counted as furnishing).
At this rate, he’s going to die without ever getting home.
“I did,” Otto answers, and doesn’t elaborate.
“Fascinating,” Tobey says, reaching for one of the arms as it pulls away with indignance. Don’t be impolite, Otto scolds it, not wanting any harm to come to the boy if he can help it. These were only children, after all, and even he in his bitter state knew better than to be unkind. “I do apologize for stuffing you inside of one of my robots, but -” he cuts himself off again as another of Otto’s mechanical creations tentatively examines the boy’s face, sending data running through Otto’s brain. “This is the most advanced technology I’ve ever seen! How do they - how do you - oh, I have so many questions!”
The excitement in his eyes reminds Otto, then, of the looks he’d seen so often in the eyes of his students. It’s a remnant of a life he’d long since grown distant from.
This might be the only chance he has to get a piece of that life back, he considers. Of course, he reassures himself and his mechanical compatriots, that won’t change the fact that he still has a greater goal to take hold of. He’d wanted the power of the reactor back when that life was real, too. He’s no stranger to such a circumstance.
What would a small robotics lesson hurt?
The other villains in this city are certainly no Green Goblin.
Being lugged around to numerous battles has left Otto with a headache from the sound of a veritable breakfast buffet against metal. Tobey, it seemed, had a habit of not always showing up alone to the sites of his various criminal attempts, subsequently picking arguments with whoever happened to be at said sites. Wordgirl had gone softer on him, if the way he rambled outside Otto’s makeshift lodgings was anything to go by, since Otto’s arrival, but that didn’t mean his fellow villains would do the same.
There’s a man who can shoot meat out of his hands. There’s another man who can shoot condiments, not out of his hands but out of condiment-bottle-shaped guns, and who apparently has a sandwich for a head. There’s yet another man who doesn’t shoot anything out of his hands, but seems entirely occupied with stealing various assortments of cheese.
Otto doesn’t entirely mind the cheese one. A fellow scientist caught in the middle of whatever experiments he’d been conducting, Otto would guess, if the man’s moniker and general disposition were anything to go by. He’s never had much time to get any more intel, not when he’s busy laying low and trying to keep out of the eye of the easily-terrified public, but he makes a mental note to do so when things die down a bit more.
If things die down, that is.
“Hotwired to his brain,” Becky Botsford repeats, laying upside down on her bed and staring at the ceiling. “For a second, I almost thought he might be like – er – you know.”
Bob chirps sadly in solidarity and nods. A familiar situation, indeed.
"This is kind of weird."
"Extremely."
"Do you really just live in that robot?"
Well, this is going absolutely nowhere fast. For all he'd been curious about with regard to finally talking with a fellow scientist, very little talking has actually been accomplished since he and the infamous Dr. Two-Brains had set out for (yet another, according to Two-Brains) abandoned cheese factory. There's a nagging sense in the back of his mind - surprisingly, not the sound of the arm's protest - that tells him there's something he should be talking about here.
He can't for the life of him deduce what it could be. Probably the fact that he should be far above such pointless pursuits as stealing perfectly-aged cheese.
“What’s it like, coming from another universe?” Two-Brains asks, poking at one of Otto’s arms. “The jet lag’s gotta be terrible.”
“It isn’t as bad as it could be,” Otto mutters, feeling rather foolish at giving such a question the dignity of a response. “Having my plans with the reactor put on pause is the worst part of it, if I’m going to be frank with you.”
“I thought you were Otto,” Two-Brains remarks, not a trace of sarcasm in his voice.
Otto rolls his eyes. It’s the girl’s job to correct these imbeciles on things like this, not his.
They fall into an uncomfortable silence. He wonders if it’s just a universal constant; scientists falling victim to their own hubris and becoming corrupted in the process. Perhaps that was what the flash in the girl’s eyes was about. Perhaps she was this man’s Peter Parker, in some roundabout way, and scientists and superheroes were just fated to have been family once no matter what world they came from. It’s an errant hypothesis, of course, but it’s one that’s only solidified in the time he’s spent concocting plan after failed plan on how to get back to where he wants to be.
“Y’know, if you ever need villains to hang out with that aren’t,” Two-Brains gestures vaguely, “some ten year old, you can always ask me and the guys.”
“I’ll consider it,” Otto nods, and he will.
All this talk of words has him thinking about Rosalie again.
Can it be possible to miss someone in two ways? She can't be any longer gone than she already is. Being a universe apart doesn't make the woman any more dead, any more gone from him than she already was, any less of a painful ghost in his memory that he and his uninvited guests have long since decided to stop at nothing to seek revenge for. He wonders what she would think of him now, spending time caring for a child he hardly knows and wallowing in his own self-pity when he should be taking the initiative and clawing his way back to his original goal, fabric of the universe be damned.
Rosalie had been an English professor. Perhaps she would have fit in better here, in a world where the savior of the day was a walking encyclopedia, than him, the abrasive man with the metal limbs.
The night sky looks clearer from the top of his makeshift home. It’s a nice vantage point when he gets the chance to make use of it; and certainly gives enough of a reason as to why Tobey enjoys looking down on the world below from it as much as he does. Pinprick stars and city lights alike dot the distance beyond him, and Otto all-at-once is struck with the sense that he might not be having such a difficult time getting used to the view.
A small tap on the back of his shoulder snaps him out of his reverie. Standing behind him again is little Tobey, hands behind his back, eyes downcast sheepishly. “Dr. Octavius?”
For the first time in a long time, Otto feels something kind in his chest, the voices of the arms quiet and low in the peripheral. Something parental, perhaps, though he’s long since lost the thought of describing himself that way. “Yes?”
“Say you wanted to impress a girl,” Tobey begins quietly, sitting down next to Otto and swinging his legs again over the front of the robot. “A hy-po-thetical -” (he sounds out the word slowly,) “- girl. Just - any girl, really.”
Ah, Otto knows exactly where this is going. “Any girl?”
“Right,” Tobey nods, gathering a bit more confidence. “Any girl.”
Otto taps his fingers together in thought, and the claws of his arms follow suit of their own accord. Ah, the irony of how well his earlier thoughts would lend to him now.
“When my wife was - still with me,” he says, and the sentence feels bittersweet in his mouth, “I would memorize poetry for her. T.S. Elliott, mostly.” Tobey is likely too young to have studied the poet in school, but Otto decides that a passing mention couldn’t hurt.
“She would like that,” Tobey says to himself, a scattered fragment of a thought, and Otto laughs. “Er - I mean, I’m sure your wife liked that. When you did that. For her.”
“She certainly did,” Otto smiles. “She was an English professor at the same school that I worked at,” he continues, gentler than he would’ve guessed himself to be capable of. We miss her, the mechanical chorus in his mind chants. “We would sit and talk about poetry and books and science for - God, hours.”
“So I should sit and talk, too, then?” Tobey asks.
“Oh - well, that’s always a good place to start.” He hadn’t expected quite so blunt of a continuation, but he really should have, he notes. The boy did have a task at hand.
“Why must romance be so fickle?” Tobey sighs wistfully, putting a hand to his forehead in a dramatic gesture. “Ah, well. Thank you for the advice, Dr. Octavius.”
“Of course,” Otto nods.
Tobey starts to stand, looking back at the window of his bedroom. He pauses. “Actually, could I stay out here for just a little longer?”
It has never much been Otto’s nature to be fatherly. This world, however, has not ceased to prove itself capable of testing what he would consider his nature.
“Of course,” Otto says again. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, my boy.”