Let's start at the beginning, one last time.
Your name is Olivia Octavius. You are a seventeen year old girl, a high school student from New York City. You're a pretty normal nerd, really. You have one friend who sort of barely registers your existence, a girl you have a crush on who hasn't even noticed you, and you're sleepwalking through your classes. You're going back to laser again,
finally, and it even looks like you're going to get back on the track team in the new semester against all odds.
The year, for the next eight hours or so, is 2029.
You're sitting in your living room right now with your mom, watching Netflix, just sort of hanging out. You'd spent a lot more time with her in the last few months that you have in
years: she'd been in school and then at work a ton, since the divorce. But you ended up remote schooling for the first two months of school, and she took as much time off as she could to help, and you'd really connected in a way you hadn't in years. Your mom was, dare you say it, actually kind of cool.
I mean, mom-cool. Millennial-cool, which was to say she was kind of a dork, but you were too, so...
"Oh my god, Liv, you'll love this." she said, flicking something over from her phone to yours with a gesture. You opened it to reveal a tweet telling Tucker Carlson to go fuck himself. A worthy tweet for any occasion, but what made it beautiful was that it was from Steve Rogers verified twitter account, which he had used only twice before (once to endorse the DSA candidate for house in New York City, and once to ask where he could get a decent hamburger in the future).
"Nice. What prompted this?" you asked.
"Says here Carlson did some stream about the CIA thing. Said something about what 'The Real Steve Rogers' would have done." your mom replied, scrolling idly through her phone, "Year had to go out with a bang, I guess."
"I hope 2030 tones it down a bit." you muttered, and your mom laughed.
"Yeah,
that'll happen. If the last eighteen or so years has taught me anything, it's that it can only get weirder."
"What happened in 2012?" you asked. You figured if the world had picked a point to go to shit, it was either 2020, 2016, 2001, or 1980. Maybe 1968. Or 1492. Probably that one.
"Nothing. Old meme." your mom waved you off.
"Well, now I have to know. I'm an internet historian. I know all about the bases, and who they belong to." After conspiracy theories sort of lost their fun when the SSR had turned out to be real, you'd spent a lot of your suddenly ample free time delving the depths of the Internet Archive. The old internet was
weird.
"Jesus, there's a reference." you mom said, looking kind of out of it a moment. "I remember when that was, like, a thing. How'd you find out about that one?"
"I dunno, compilation of old memes. People found some strange things funny thirty years ago." you said.
"Oh my god I'm old, let's stop talking about this." she said suddenly, looking back up at the TV. "
What are we watching?"
"It went on autoplay like an hour ago. I think this is, uh... a drama? I don't know." you said. It had an actress you vaguely recognized playing opposite a CGI recreation of an actor you also vaguely recognized.
"Oh, it's the Gotham reboot.
Nope." she paused it with a click and sank back against the couch. "Any idea what to watch?"
"Nope, I think we watched all the good stuff." you admitted. "You wanna rewatch a Star Trek or something?"
"Sure."
As the ridiculous guitars of Star Trek Enterprise started (your mom said it was the worst Star Trek, but it was comfort TV for her because she watched it a lot as a kid, and her rewatching it had made it comfort TV for you), she asked the dreaded question that she'd reasked every hour or so for the past four months.
"How are you feeling?"
Bleh.
"I dunno. Okay, I guess. A bit of pain." you said. You'd given up deflecting and defaulted to honesty, which honestly felt better. "Tired."
"I sympathize on the last part. How's the pain?" she asked.
"Four? Maybe five." you said.
"Have a cookie." she suggested. You saw her shift to get up and get them for you, but you beat her to the little tin on the coffee table. One thing you were absolutely tired of was people doing stuff for you.
"Oh, okay. You sure?"
"Yeah mom, it'll be good practice." you said, and you gripped the tin as best you could between plastic fingers and did your best to try and pry the lid off. You struggled with it for about a minute, keenly aware your mom was watching as your prosthetic repeatedly slipped off.
Finally, shamefully, you handed it to her, your arm moving with a jerk on the servos.
"It's okay. These things are tough." she said softly, prying off the lid and offering. You grabbed the largest looking cookie you could and started nibbling cautiously.
You weren't eating them for the taste. Chronic post-amputation pain was a real problem, even for people who had lost limbs in less traumatic fashion. For you, it varied between background radiation and almost unbearable. With Medicare 4 All still three months away from phasing in, your mom had taken one look at the drug prices for medicine to control the pain and offered to just buy some weed instead. Weed that, of course, she absolutely 100% didn't have or use before it became an issue for you, wink wink.
Again, your mom is really cool.
"We've got to get you a better arm." she said, and you nodded hopelessly. This was what insurance would cover, and it was still pretty good. You had independent control of all the fingers, and even a bit of touch feedback in the fingertips. Full range of motion, but it was awkward. Probably the worst part was lacking proprioception, a word you'd learned from its enormous absence. Having to constantly, consciously review where your arm was and what it was doing was incredibly awkward. Nightmarishly, it was something that your tech-sense
didn't handle. It actually managed the robotic legs you'd built for yourself better than it handled this, probably because you were already supposed to have a sense for this so it fell into some sort of bizarre shadow zone in the interaction between your nervous system and your powers.
Oh, right, almost forgot. You're a superhero, you call yourself Arachne. You have superpowers, added speed and strength and control over computers and an intuitive understanding of technology. You built an awesome rig of robotic legs and a cool suit and you fight crime! The reason you're missing an arm is because a goddamn defrosted Nazi ripped it off in the basement of a CIA facility in August, while you were busy foiling a coup. It was a whole thing!
Of course, you haven't done a great deal of superheroing of late. You've been undergoing the slow, painful process of rebuilding both your equipment and yourself, but you had shown the flag a few times, webbed up a few particularly odious people, that sort of thing. But only a half a dozen times or so in the last month. It was important, because part of foiling the coup was releasing footage of your fight with the Red Skull, though Athena had mercifully edited it down so people wouldn't see your arm get torn off. You had to show people you were still out and about, that New York wasn't without its friendly neighbourhood spider-girl.
"I'm working on it." you responded. Your mom had caught you rebuilding one of the Arachne arms on your 3d printer, a downside to her being home more often, and you'd passed it off as an attempt to improve your arm. It
was something you'd intended to do, but you weren't sure exactly how you were going to do it without giving away your powers, and that combined with how difficult
everything was these past few months had delayed you.
"You're going make something awesome, I know it." you mom said. "So... you didn't tell me. Any plans for tonight?"
---
[ ] Not really? You were just going to hang out at home. Have your own little party with your mom.
[ ] You managed to score an invite to a classmate's party. You didn't care much for him, but May Parker was going to be there...
[ ] You lie and tell your mom you're going to a party. Actually, you're going out as Arachne tonight: a lot of people need help on New Years.
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