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A Spotty Record	By : keithcompany Category: Marvel Verse Comics > Crossovers Views: 1777 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or setting of the Marvel Universe. I make no profit from this fanfiction.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Miguel's wake was about the worst part of my time at Grab A Dream. Close second was Tamika. I wanted nothing to do with being alone in the room with a dying child ever again. But one day, I had to introduce the Tinkerer to a child. That sucked.
It started well enough. I got the request, made contact, worked out the visit. We rendezvoused in the Maternity waiting room. Probably looked like somebody's grandpas. Then went down a couple floors. The Tinkerer was a crotchety old guy. An inventor who alternated between trying to kill Spider-Man and building weapons for other villains. He muttered continuously. He didn't like the Muzak in the waiting room. He didn't like the lighting. "This could be motion-sensitive. All of it. Dark when no one's moving. Save all sorts of electricity." He thought the elevator should be voice-activated.
I hope he didn't start taking the kid's bed apart in mid-visit.
As usual, I stood watch out in the hall while he went in to meet Mary Torres. And came out forty seconds later. He glared at me. "I will NOT be MOCKED!" he shouted.
"Keep shouting in a hospital, you're gonna get knocked to the ground by a nurse that's worked the drug ward," I hissed. "What the fuck is the problem?"
"That's what I want to know," a new voice said. Ten feet away from us a nurse stood with hands on her hips. No, I noticed, her fists rested on her hips. "And I was a nurse in Afghanistan, if that works for you two idiots."
"Sorry," Tinkerer grunted. Then he turned and stomped to the elevator. The nurse turned to me. I raised my hands, palms out, showing I had nothing but the cane. She shook her head and went back into another room. I went to see Mary. She was crying.
I resolved to remind Marcia that I had never wanted to be on the kids' side of the charity, then stepped forward, picking up a piece of paper on the floor beside the bed.
----------
The inventor's home was a decrepit old building. Bricks missing from the façade, a graffitied alcove where a doorman hadn't been stationed for thirty years, stairs worn by millions of steps. But the elevator was voice activated. I lugged the sack aboard and asked for The Tinkerer's floor. I saw a little window open and something scanned me. The elevator moved, then let me out into a hallway.
There was only one door up here, the rest had been boarded over. I knocked. A floating sphere launched from where the peephole would have been, asked me how I found him. "I offered a thousand-dollar reward for your address. Seven people asked why I was offering money, I hadn't before. When I explained you made a little girl cry, three of them told me to keep the money and gave me this address." Prowler had even offered to go beat the guy up, a freebie. I told him to wait until after this meeting, maybe I wouldn't need him.
There was a long silence. "What do you want?"
"I offer an apology, and an explanation," I listed. Then lifted the bag. "And dinner."
"Is it Kosher?" the globe asked.
No one had mentioned dietary restrictions with this character, so I just assumed he was fucking with me. I shrugged. "It's Thai. I have it on great authority that it's the best Thai in the borough. I can get deli if you're prefer."
There were seventeen clicks and the door opened. Tinkerer was bent over a workbench, soldering something that was vaguely insectoid. He nodded towards a table and I set out the food.
Over dinner, the crusty inventor just looked at me, grunting every so often. Finally, he opened the toasted coconut cookie and read his fortune. Another grunt. "Did you have anything to do with this?"
"Nope," I said, reaching for my own rolled cookie.
He read it to me. "Nothing is so great as accomplishing that which someone has said you cannot."
"Mine," I said, "It is as honorable to accept help when you need it, as it is to offer help when you can." I slipped it into my pocket. "My coworker collects cookie fortunes. I'll leave this on Wilma's desk, when she's out, or she'll explain the latest trends in fortune writing."
I put the plates and containers back in the bag, along with the unused condiments. He watched without moving. "So," I finally asked, "you want the apology? The explanation? Or the invitation, first?"
"The kid said that everything I do is a game," he spat.
"And there's a reason for that," I said. He didn't encourage me, but he didn't sick any self-activating weaponry on me, so I continued. "You may have noticed that she's seven." He nodded. "Well, I guess at one point two years ago, she witnessed a superhero fighting a supervillain. She was really scared. Her daddy explained that it's a kind of game."
"A game?"
"Yeah. It's an entertainment. Like television. Or, pro-wrestling. Guys and gals get put on teams, they wear costumes, and they throw each other around for a while, so people can pick sides, and go 'Oooh!' and 'Aaaah!' Cheer and scream and hope and despair. One big dramatic soap opera on and above the streets of New York."
'And she believed this?"
"She was five," I reminded him. "These are people that believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. It made-"
"I've met Santa," the inventor said, but softly. Not dismissively. Okay, whatever.
"It made sense to her. So, when she got put in the hospital, she sat in her bed and thought of things to do. She designed a Spider-Smasher."
"She wants me to smash the Spider-Man?"
"Mary thinks that YOU don't want to actually smash the Spider-Man. Just score points in your spandex-league. She doesn't like the armored suits.   She thinks the essence of Spider-Man is him dancing around on webs."
"He certainly does that," he grumbled.
"And webs are how spiders catch flies. So her Smasher launches lots and lots of flies."
"He's too agile," he complained. "And he has eyes in the back of his head. Can't sneak up on him." He rubbed his chin. "But I suppose, if I threw enough at him…"
"Anyway," I said. "Before you go out and kill yourself a superhero, could you at least discuss the design with Mary? You don't even have to promise to build it, just say you'd evaluate it."
"Okay," he growled. He fidgeted with the fortune for a bit. "She only has one arm."
"She has a degenerative nerve disorder. She didn't feel the cut on her arm, even when it became necrotic."
"Necrotic?" he repeated. "Gangrene? In this day and age?"
"Her parents were going through a messy divorce," I shrugged. "She didn't want to bother them and they had other things on their mind."
"Does she need a new arm?" he mused.
"Ask her," I suggested.
He glared at me, then relaxed. "I guess I could."
----------
The second visit, I went into the room with him. I'm not sure who I was there for, exactly. I was supporting Mary, of course, heading off any more tears. But The Tinkerer was terrified of that nurse coming in. I leaned against the inside of the door.
Kid and crook both started apologizing the instant their eyes met.   I let them work that out themselves. Each took full blame for the miscommunication before. Then Mary asked for the folder on the nightstand. Inside was the Spider Smasher, Versions 1 through 4.
They discussed the pros and cons of such a weapon, what the battle would look like, how close to success it might get. She understood that the good guys are supposed to win, but there had to be some reward for the villain team, didn't there? He winked at her. "I only have to win once," he said. "But when I do, I win everything."
Mary thought that was cool.
The old fart then turned the page, expecting to find Version Five. Instead there was another invention. "What the hell is this monstrosity?" he burst out.
"That's a waldo," she explained. "A remote-controlled arm-"
"I know what a waldo is," he snapped. "What's it for?"
She pouted, just a tiny bit, at his reaction. He didn't seem to notice. He just leaned over her bed. "Seriously, this thing is horribly busy for a robot arm." He pointed at the drawing. "What's that?"
"It's to go on the side of the hospital bed," she said, pointing her remaining arm across her body. "Right there. Where I don't have an arm. So I can use that to reach the nightstand and the phone and the window drapes and the dinner tray…"
"But THAT! What is THAT?" he pressed.
"It's a water fountain. So I don't have to bother the nurses when I need a drink of water."
"Stupid," he said. He whipped out a pen and found a blank sheet of paper. "You put the reservoir UNDER the bed, with a pipe leading up to the wrist. THAT way the arm doesn't have to support the weight of the water tank. AND you can add an integral cooling system."
"A fridge," I translated at her confused look. She looked interested. Tinkerer sketched madly.
He glanced up, searching the room. "Plenty of wall sockets." Then he slapped himself on the forehead. "Duh. The bed plugs in. What's that?" Whatever it was, she didn't want to tell him. He moved on. "What's this, then?"
"Hands. Depending on what I want to pick up with it, I have a human grip, and an octopus grip, and a vise grip."
"Too complicated," he dismissed. "You make one hand, with six fingers that have octopus suction cups AND you make it as strong as a pipe wrench."
They played around with the design for half an hour. Finally, he went back to the little shelf on the top. "You never told me what this is."
"It's where my teddy bear rides," she said. She said it very softly, expecting another angry dismissal. "He likes to look out the window."
"Then it needs a teddy seatbelt," he said, sketching one in. He also whipped out a laser measuring device and scanned Wisconsin, the Teddy Bear. He noted the waist size and made marks on the sketch. "Have it for you in a week," he said, gruffly. He started to walk out. Then he turned around, sifted through the versions of the Spider-Smasher. "This one has promise," he said, taking one. Then we left.
In the manual-operated elevator, I asked him, "Are you really going to build a Spider-Smasher? I'd hate for the kid to grow up and realize she helped you kill-"
"I'll only make a prototype," he said. He held his hands about six inches apart. "It'll kill any fly in her hospital room, but that's about it." He turned to face me. "I have grandkids. I would not make them accessories in my felonies, either."
----------
Amy Antov was visiting Grab A Dream about once every 8 months. She brought in a case of cookies that she'd made and handed them around. She gave cookies to staff, volunteers, applicants, an electrician fixing the lights one time, and once even offered a cookie to Captain America.
Part of the ritual was watching her eat one, then we all dug in. She didn't have to swear, first. Dad's idea of profanity-eating kinda ticked the therapist off, trading one programmed eating response for another. Instead, she just ate a cookie. But the swearing wasn't completely prohibited. Doc did like the confidence Amy got from her mastery of the profane, the vulgar, the scatological, and all the other ways humans have expressed their displeasure with the casual operation of the universe.   Any attempt to insult her would trigger a litany of well-chosen obscenities, confidently delivered and precisely aimed.
Therefore, she fucking indulged, and her parents cheered her right the fuck on.
"I need a new swear word," she said, sliding a chair over to my desk and sitting.
"You're in high school," I pointed out. "You know all the words."
"No! I don't! I know, you know, a LOT, but I need something no one else has heard!"
"Then why come to me?" I asked.
"You were in prison." She whispered it, so as not to embarrass me.
"First off, everyone here knows. It's no secret, and there's no shame. Second, inside they mostly use the F-word. Over and over and fucking over." She smiled a tiny bit. "Seriously, it's fucking this, fucking that, fuck you, son of a fuck, and fuck the fuckers." Which was true, as far as it went. They also used the N-bomb and the C-word, but I wasn't going to go there.
Gordon piped up from his desk. "Ask him about the Navy, though."
"You were in the Navy? Does the Navy use any good words? Or bad words? I mean, any good BAD words?"
"Well, yes. There's one." I checked the distance from us to where her Dad was talking to Rodney. "Sockfucker."
"What?" she asked, shocked. Dad looked over at the sound of her outrage. I waved, nonchalant, he went back to his conversation. "What does that mean? Or refer to? Or…is it a fetish? What?"
I spoke really fast and really low. "When boys masturbate, they catch the emissions in a sock, so they don't stain the sheets. I've only EVER heard it used on submarines."
"And high school, starting a week from now," Gordon chortled. Amy smiled.
"I'm going to get She-Hulk to break your desk again," I told the helpful idiot. No one shivered in fear.
- 8
- 9
- 10
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A Spotty Record