Snuggles the Symbiote

I, Taylor Hebert: Wannabe Superhero, sat patiently, occupying myself by counting the ants and roaches in the walls, on a repurposed infirmary bed as a doctor or male nurse fussed about my arm. He didn't seem to know what to do with the burnt silk or the burns it was stuck to.

"...Miss," he said after a moment, "I'm… I'm afraid that I don't have the equipment to treat burns of this severity on hand… I'm not even sure how it's possible for you to have only surface damage in some spots and third or even fourth-degree burns elsewhere. Honestly, now that I think about it we should probably have a dedicated burn ward on site."

"Does this mean that she's… Is she gonna…?" asked the room's other occupant in a strange, echoing voice. A little girl, maybe nine or ten, who I'd met earlier tonight. She wore a bizarre metallic costume, gold marbled with dark blue, that tightly covered her whole body except for the shoulder length black hair that clearly hadn't been washed in a while. There were two wide oblong shapes on her otherwise featureless mask that seemed to correspond to her eyes.

"Oh no, your friend will be fine," the medic reassured, "now Miss…?"

"I'm still working on a name," I admitted.

"Well young Miss," he continued, "you have two options: I can call the Dallon residence, get Panacea out of bed, and Brandish will yell at me, or I can have you admitted to the hospital where you'll likely be at the top of her list once she starts her shift." I'm not quite sure how he managed to read my expression through my mask. "So before I go to get chewed out by someone I don't even work for, are you in any pain at all?" He actually sounded a little confused.

"Kinda," I admitted, "like, when I first got lit on fire, I didn't really feel anything except hot, but after a bit, it hurt like hell. On a scale of one to ten, I'd give it maybe a four and a half."

He blinked at that. "Oh...Okay, well, that's good. Pain this late means that the parts of your arm that aren't charcoal aren't completely dead. Normally I'd offer you a painkiller, but I'm sure they're going to want to talk to you. I can, however, give you something for that," he said gesturing to the hole that had been melted through the abdomen of my costume and the chemical burn underneath. I tied to repress my irritation that three or so months of work, farming spiders and weaving silk, had been ruined in one night.

The doctor or whatever went to some sterile looking stainless steel cabinet and started tugging on a drawer. He muttered something about it being due for a replacement, then managed to unstick it with a pull forceful enough to spill some of the contents.

"Da...arn," he said, then bent down, coming back up with an almost comically large syringe, and then came a commotion.

I turned suddenly, wincing as I jarred myself, to find that the little girl I'd met earlier was no longer standing where she was. I looked up and saw her, hands behind her back, legs straight, clinging to the ceiling by her palms and soles. The eye ovals had collapsed to two dark blue lines, giving the impression that her eyes were closed tight, and her head was tilted away from the doctor.

"Okay then," the man said, then put the needle away and approached me with a large toothpaste type tube. "This is an all-purpose ointment for just about any kind of burn you can think of," he said as he began applying it, "some tinker in Jersey figured out how to make it in huge vats. There's not enough for everyone and it expires in less than a month, but the PRT likes to have it on hand in any site with tinkers on board. It won't do anything for a burn as bad as your arm, but..." By the time he trailed off, the chemical burn was gone. "One of the unmentioned perks of working with us," he said with a wink, "now Armsmaster should be back any minute, so sit tight while I step out and get myself yelled at by Obi-Mom Brandnobi." Okay, I got the 'funny' doctor. Great.

He left to make the call, and I looked back up at the little girl. "So, are you afraid of needles?"

She looked right at me, made a tsst sound, and said "noo" with a little too much emphasis.

"Okay then," I replied.

The girl tensed up all of a sudden, her mask simulating a look of realization, and slowly she flipped and adjusted herself so that she was crouched upon the ceiling instead of merely hanging from it. Honestly, it kind of brought to mind a spider. "...I can wall crawl," she said slowly and with all of the reverence of a small child finding out that she was about to meet the real Santa Claus.

"Yes," I said, "you can."

She then flipped down so that she was standing on the ceiling, shot her arms out at an angle towards an empty corner of the floor, and shouted: "go webs!" Nothing happened, and the girl looked at her hands, which were held with her pinky and index fingers extended straight, ring and middle folded in, and her thumb at a right angle. Devil horns or something, I'd seen people flash it at rock concerts. She pulled her arms back and extended them again, "stick'em!" Nothing. She sighed, then slowly extended one hand, fingers forward: "Thwip!" Still nothing. "Aww," she moaned with disappointment. I said nothing, not quite sure about what it was she was trying to do, but I did smile for a moment: However she'd gotten her powers, it must have been much more pleasant than being trapped in a locker full of rotting tampons and biting insects if she was so happy about them.

"Okay," she said to herself, "we can shapeshift right? We did that earlier with the Meany… So we should be able to…" She thrust her fist straight down and shouted: "Embiggen!" prompting her arm to stretch about an inch or two. Honestly what she'd done earlier against Lung was much more impressive, but she seemed satisfied with her result judging by her happy exclamation of "close enough!"

"Embiggen, huh?" I asked in an attempt to make small talk.

"It's a perfectly cromulent word," she replied in complete seriousness, and I felt my eye twitch. My mother the English Professor must be turning in her grave right now.

I heard her skitter across the ceiling and came up close to me before flipping down again, "um, I have a question."

"Shoot."

"Uh," she began with a tone that practically dripped awkwardness, "the doctor called you my friend earlier. I've never really had honest real life friends before. I mean, I've got Mister Snuggles now, but that's not the same, so… a-are we friends?" There was something desperate in her voice.

"Yeah," I answered, "we're friends." The eye-marks on her face widened and shifted. It took me a second to comprehend it, but it was in a way that implied that under her mask, she was giving a big, goofy smile.

A few fruit flies out in the hall were disturbed by heavy footsteps. Moments later, Armsmaster, in his blue powered armor, stepped into the room. "Alright," he said, "now this is a little unusual, but because of the hour Director Piggot herself..." he trailed off when he saw the young girl hanging from the ceiling. "Okay then," he continued, "well the director will be here shortly."

"Actually, I have a question?" the girl asked: "where is here?"

"This is the Parahuman Response Team Headquarters for the East-North-East Region, located in the city of Brockton Bay," Armsmaster explained patiently, if not giving perhaps a bit too much detail.

"Uh… I don't know what any of that means," the girl admitted. "I'm from Manhattan and I've never heard of Parahuman Responder Teams or a city called Brockton, so..."

"Well," I said slowly, "you're from Manhattan, in New York City, right?" She nodded. "Then you'll know about Legend and the Protectorate?"

She shook her head. "Sorry, no."

I noticed Armsmaster grimace. "Young miss," he asked, "could you slowly turn all the way around?" She did so, managing to avoid unsticking from the ceiling by only moving one foot at a time. "Can you tell me what your earliest, clear memory is?" he requested when she was finished.

"Hmmm," she hummed as though in thought, "I was maybe three or four. I think the air conditioner in our apartment was broke or something because it was hot and the windows were wide open. Mommy said to stay away from the windows, 'cause we lived on the top floor of a really big building, but I didn't listen and when she wasn't looking I fell out. It was really scary, but then Spider-Man caught me before I could hit the ground and carried me back up."

I'd never heard of a hero called Spider-Man before. I'd have to look him up to make sure I wasn't infringing on someone else's brand. Still, it was weird to think that she could have grown up in New York and never have heard about Legend.

"What year is it?" Armsmaster asked.

"2016," she answered, "er, maybe 2017."

I snapped to attention. "What?"

More flies were disturbed by someone hobbling down the hall. Shortly after a portly woman supporting herself with a cane entered the room. "Alright now," she declared, "I understand that there are two skilled young wom..." she noticed that the young girl was still hanging from the ceiling. "Why is a prospective Ward standing on the ceiling?"

"If you just found out you could walk on the ceiling," the girl said, "wouldn't you want to do it?"

The woman looked thoughtful for a moment. "Well, you're not wrong, I suppose."

"Director," Armsmaster interrupted, "the situation is a bit more complicated than I initially thought."

"How so?"

"The younger one is an atypical cape. A rudimentary initial investigation suggests against Case 53, she doesn't have a visible mark on any part of her body I'm comfortable examining and she seems to lack amnesia, but I suspect that case 81 isn't a hypothetical anymore. Case 72 might also be in play."

The woman went from stern and serious to bug-eyed and shocked in less than a second. I wasn't sure what those case files were, but… I looked up at the girl.

"Little girl?" The director asked, "Who is the most famous hero in the world?"

"Captain America!" the girl exclaimed, giving the name of someone I've never heard about. "He's been around since before World War Two when the government was running top-secret experiments with Super Soldiers. He's been around ever since fighting for liberty and justice: I even read that he punched Adolf Hitler in the face during the war! How do you not know that?"

The director and Armsmaster looked at each other. "Miss… What name are you going by?" the Tinker asked after.

The girl went quiet for a little bit, clearly thinking over it, and then exclaimed: "We're Snuggles!" I blinked. She'd mentioned a Mister Snuggles before… Why did she keep switching between I and we?

"Alright then, Snuggles," he said with a small hint of incredulity, "have you ever heard of the concept of alternate universes?"

"Oh yeah!" She said happily. "I heard that the Fantastic Four used to tinker and explore those all the time and Slothbaby on Freakin Awesome thinks that the black and red Spider-Man that's with the Champions is from an alternate universe but I think he's a clone since the real Spider-Man's already been cloned like a bazillion times. Besides, what does she know: she ships Spider-Marvel when Spider-Man's True Love is obviously The Black Cat. She just needs to stop being evil first."

I think I understood what Armsmaster and the Director were getting at now. Honestly, it was kind of comforting to know that Cape Geeks were a constant of the Multiverse.

"Well, Snuggles," Armsmaster began, "you've mentioned people, events, and what I think is a website that, to my knowledge don't exist. You're also off on the date by about five or six years. You don't seem to be lying or mentally ill, which brings me to conclude that you're what we call a Case 81: an empowered refugee from another, unknown universe."

"...We don't know how to feel about that," Snuggles admitted after a moment.

"Don't worry," The Director said, "while rare, we do have technology capable of traveling between universes. It'll take time, but we should be able to get you home to your family."

"...My family's dead." Snuggles said quietly. "Grandpa Patrick passed away a few years ago and some bad men with guns killed Mommy and Daddy and took me… A long time later I met Mister Snuggles and he helped me escape but people were fighting and there was a boom and I woke up in an alley off a street where all the buildings had bars in the window."

"I'm terribly sorry," the Director comforted.

"How long ago was it that you woke up here?" Armsmaster asked.

"About a week, I think." Snuggles replied, seemingly happy to be changing the subject. Wait, last Sunday night there had been some weird lights in the sky…

"What's Case 72?" I asked, curious and wanting to keep the discussion going away from…

"Time Travelers," Armsmaster explained, "it's rare but it does happen every so often."

"Alright, well," The director said with the tone of someone wanting to finish the task at hand, "Armsmaster has told me that the two of you were a big help earlier and were interested in joining the Wards program?"

I felt my stomach clench. Honestly, I didn't want to join, but I wasn't sure how to refuse now that I was already here.

"I'll join if she does," my new young friend said while pointing to me… She was a homeless orphan. If she doesn't… If I don't… damn it.

The director looked like she was about to say something, but there suddenly came a loud gurgling sound from the vicinity of the stomach of the little girl on the ceiling. "Hehehe," she laughed, "Sorry. It's been a few days since I've eaten anything."

"Well, I'm sure we can find you something to eat," the Director said, and then… Where's Doctor Landis?"

"He went to call in a favor from the Dallons," I said, "to get Panacea to fix my arm." I'd have raised the arm in question, but it was still severely burned and… "Actually, I think the sleeve is going to have to come off and this is black widow silk, so if there are any bolt cutters in the building it'd be a good idea to bring them up here."

Armsmaster produced a device from a compartment in his armor, resembling a buttonless TV remote with a pair of miniature shears at the end. I blinked. Was it weird that he just had those on him?

"Well then, we'll see about getting… Snuggles some food," the Director said, "and then we can talk about what happened earlier tonight while we wait for our friend from New Wave."

I nodded but noted that the Director didn't seem to have much experience talking to minors as though they were minors.

Snuggles the Symbiote

"...And then I was all like 'oh my gosh, I get to be a superhero!' 'cause it really hadn't come to mind that I could be a superhero now, and then I asked 'ooh, can we be heroes together?' and my new friend was all like 'sure, why not?' and we started walking together." Snuggles explained in a normal voice. Then she stopped to eat yet another donut. They'd had someone from the skeleton crew that worked here at night bring down half a box that was left over from some department's break room and Snuggles was practically inhaling them. Something I hadn't needed to know: Her costume was part of her power and a piece of her mask melted and oozed it's way up her nose to free her mouth to eat the donuts. "And then we stumbled up to this big muscle guy with a metal mask and lots of dragon tattoos and he was all like 'Muahahaha! We're gonna kill all the kids and maybe kick a few puppies!' and my new friend was all like 'not today!' and suddenly he was covered in bugs."

The blonde young woman who'd carried Panacea all the way here then turned from Snuggles to me. "You seriously just attacked Lung out of nowhere?" Glory Girl asked incredulously.

"I got burned for a reason," I answered, "I mean, honestly, what was I supposed to do? He was going to kill a bunch of kids." Panacea had her fingers in the convenient hole in my costume from where the acid melted through it.

"Ee-yah!" Snuggles shouted her agreement around yet another donut. She swallowed and continued: "Heroes are supposed to stop things like that."

"Next time, maybe think things through before attacking the most dangerous villain in the county," Panacea snarked, "third-and-fourth-degree burns are a pain and a half to fix. By the way, for the next week or so you're going to have to switch to a high protein diet if you don't want your muscles to atrophy. A lot of your flesh isn't salvageable and the new flesh has to come from somewhere. Seriously, I'm not even sure how you're conscious right now, are you a brute or something?" I gave the best approximation of a shrug I could manage.

"If we're giving advice," Glory Girl added, "since your costume is ruined, maybe go for something a little less edgy than solid black with a bug-face for a mask for the next one? Honestly, if I hadn't been told you were a hero I'd have had you pegged villain on sight and that would have been really embarrassing if we'd crossed paths patrolling at night or something." I nodded in agreement to hide my gulp.

"Hero vs Hero stuff always sucks," Snuggles chimed in. Then she muttered something about someone called Captain Marvel. "Anyway, the big meany had this fuzzy naked blue spider-lady with him and she spit on my friend and I was like 'spitting is rude' and then I sprouted a tail." A long lizard or maybe alligator like tail suddenly protruded from the small of her back. She thumped it on the floor and continued: "and I didn't know I could do that but I didn't let that stop me and I kersmacked the spider-lady and we kept helping to fight the bad guys even when the meany turned into a dragon and started using all the scary fire, because there's no way that Spider-Man would let a bunch of kids get killed by a bad guy, and we fought for a bit, and then Mister Armsmaster showed up and stabbed the meany with a needle that was in a big ax and then he fell asleep and then we all attacked the spider-lady at once and she ran away. And then he brought us here and that's everything that happened."

Armsmaster and the Director had been silent the whole time, just letting Snuggles talk and Panacea do her thing, but I got the feeling that Armsmaster was recording Snuggles' explanation.

"That's not quite what happened," I added, "but it's close enough."

"And done," Panacea declared. I looked down at my bare arm which, other than being perfectly smooth and hairless, looked exactly the way it had before.

I flexed a few times and waggled my fingers. "Good as new. Maybe a little better. Thank you."

"Yeah, there were a couple of poorly-healed microfractures and stressed ligaments, like if you punched something too hard or if your arm was suddenly wrenched and you didn't get a chance to rest it like three or four months ago." I had a good idea of what that had been. "Your bones were a little burnt, and it was easier to fix the whole bone than just the chard parts." the healer explained.

"Well, thank you again," I said. I'd have smiled, but she wouldn't have been able to see it through my mask.

"While I'm here," Panacea said with a turn to Snuggles, "you want me to take a look at you?"

"Uh," the girl said before licking some donut jelly off her chin, "we didn't get hit much and we heal fast, so..."

"Actually," I said, thinking her admittance that she'd spent a 'long time' being held captive and not eating for a few days, "it might not be a bad idea. It can't hurt you if she just takes a look, and you might be more hurt than you think you are."

"Okay I guess," Snuggles said, "so… you have to touch my skin?"

"Yeah," Panacea confirmed, "any skin will work-that bit of uncovered face is good enough. Do I have your permission?"

"Yeah, okay."

Panacea placed a few fingers on a bit of Snuggles' exposed cheek, and the immediately recoiled, stumbling back and falling on her ass with an exclamation of "Jesus Christ!"

"What's wrong!?" Snuggles shouted, "are we gonna die!?"

"You've got some kind of parasite! Like, your lungs and GI tract are filled with some kind of living gunk, there's more in your blood! That!" she gestured to the girl's costume, "is more of it, and there's a chunk latched into your brain stem! I could sense more of it bonding to your other organs before my eyes." Panacea was shaking, "you should already be dead! I don't even know what the fuck that thing is!"

I stood up, but I wasn't sure what exactly I could do. Glory Girl, Armsmaster, and even the Director seemed antsy, but… Snuggles frowned and covered her face back up again. "He's not a parasite. His name is Mister Snuggles and he's a symbiote. We're not hurting each other and we both benefit. My science book calls that mutualism."

"You shouldn't be able to breathe!" Panacea shouted hysterically. "Your lungs are full of living goo that I think is partially made of metal."

"We don't need to breathe anymore," Snuggles said casually.

"How does that even work?" Panacea asked. "How are you talking?"

"I dunno," Snuggles said with a shrug, "my homeschooling program doesn't cover astrobiology and other alien stuff until high school."

"Alien?" everyone asked simultaneously.

"Yeah, symbiotes come from outer space. Do you not get aliens in this universe?"

"This universe!?" The Dallon sisters exclaimed.

The director pinched the bridge of her nose. "...I will be very upset if I find out that… Snuggles' unique refugee status left this room. No one in this room will like it should I get upset."

"I'm sorry," the girl said. "But yeah. He's not a parasite. He's my friend. He eats my extra hormones and in exchange, he keeps me from getting sick and gives me superpowers that don't suck."

"...Okay, assuming that she's not being mastered or something," Panacea continued, "than other than the parasite-"

"Symbiote," Snuggles interrupted. "He can understand you and you're hurting his feelings."

"Other than her symbiote," Panacea corrected, "there are some substances in her blood that I'm not familiar with, no corona or gemma, a gene complex I've never seen before," Snuggles flinched, "a lot of extra hormone production to the point that I'd suspect powers if she wasn't completely without powered potential, and she's in remarkably good health all other things considered."

"Alright then. I think that's all you're needed for," the director told the sisters Dallon, "thank you for your time, and give my thanks to your parents for letting us borrow you so late and on such short notice."

The two left, with an apprehensive last look at Snuggles from Panacea, and Snuggles and I were alone with Armsmaster and the director again… Actually, the doctor had never come back and I wasn't sure if that was weird or not.

"What did you mean by powers that don't suck?" Armsmaster asked.

"Uh… I promised I'd never tell anybody."

"Powers have a different mechanism in your world." Armsmaster inferred, "something genetic, maybe?" The girl flinched again, "You don't have to answer, but I think you do have powers of some kind without your… partner, and that you were kidnapped because of them."

"Yeah..." Snuggles admitted while looking at the floor. "Please don't tell anybody, but… I'm a mutant."

"I take it that you mean that in something other than the strict biological sense," Armsmaster asked, "Technically speaking, things like red hair or blue eyes are mutations."

Snuggles groaned. "There are a bunch of different ways you can have powers where I'm from. People like Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four or the Hulk, they get exposed to some kind of radiation and it triggers a latent mutant potential, and they've got something special in them so they get superpowers instead of cancer. Other people like, like me..." She sighed. "The way my science book explained it, we're not technically the same kind of human as other people." I was starting to get mad on her behalf. "Like, humans are Homo sapien, right? My book says that, like, cavemen were Homo sapien neander-something and that regular humans are sapien twice, but my science book said that mutants are Homo sapien superior because of the natural superpowers that we're born with or just kick in one day… I don't feel superior though," she said bitterly. "When I was little, I started getting sick all the time. My parents paid for a lot of tests and found out I was a mutant. Normal mutants get cool powers like mind reading, or eye-blasts, or sharp claws that go snikt," she said with a wave of her hand-her fingers extended into claws, but without a sound. Maybe Mister Snuggles reacting to her thoughts? "But me? I get super hormones that mess up my immune system and I can't take medicine to keep from getting sick because my powers also make drugs not work." She seemed to shrink. "I don't know why, but a lot of people don't like mutants. I get all of that and don't even get powers to make up for it. But, it was okay. I never really felt well enough to leave the apartment anyway, and I had mommy and daddy and grandpa... but they're all gone now..." She finished quietly.

She sat down on the floor and curled in on herself. I felt something stir in my chest. I walked over, crouched down, and hugged her. I couldn't tell if she was crying behind her mask, but she hugged back, the tail she'd sprouted curling around me, and leaned up against my chest.

"So," I said, "we were going to talk about the Wards program?"