Alien Territory

A Stroke Of Luck

Peter Parker had dealt with many strange and crazy characters over the last two years since he first emerged on the scene as Spider-Man, some more dangerous or stupider that others. But this so-called masked villain pretty much was up there for taking the cake in what was perhaps one of the strangest villains that Peter had ever come across.

It had been a day after Spider-Man had humiliated the Hollywood special effects artist and Spider-Man critic Quentin Beck at quite literally his own game when he challenged the web crawler at a manic obstacle course at Madison Square Gardens in which Spider-Man won without much fuss. To say Beck was left with egg on his face would be an understatement and Spider-Man might have thought that would be the only sort of trouble he would have to deal with.

Then a night later, Peter was ordered by his boss Jonah Jameson to get photos of a press conference hosted by Quentin Beck that was to be taking place at a theatre on the other side of the city. Peter might have been thinking that it would be about what excuses that Beck would have for his loss and how he was going to get over his failure; however none of that prepared him when he arrived at the theatre to see police, ambulance and fire trucks stationed outside with what looked like scenes of panic and confusion. Whatever was going on, it looked like the news conference wasn't exactly going to happen.

It was only when he went inside that he soon saw what had taken place; another crazy masked villain had caused chaos inside the theatre turning into a blazing inferno with Spider-Man having to get on the act to rescue all of them. However what was more crazier that the wasn't a bunch of muggers causing the destruction, rather, floating bronze robot things with laser guns that had caused the fire and were quite vicious and dangerous and to top it all off, the masked villain in question was, apparently, a space alien called Mysterio who wanted to take over the world. What else?

However, to Spider-Man's surprise, Mysterio was in fact just an enlarged hologram that seem to just spout out his various jargon about wanting to enslave mankind and all that. Haven't heard that before. Anyway in the end, Spider-Man saved all the reporters and destroyed the flying alien robots before being told by the hologram that the crazy masked megalomaniac had taken over the Statue of Liberty and had replaced the statue with a large version of...himself. Talk about vanity.

Nonetheless Spider-Man managed to get himself over there (curiously enough the first time Peter had actually been on the island), destroyed the machine that was putting out a hologram image on the statue of Mysterio to restore things back to normal. Not before however we would hear a booming laugh stating the follow:

"IT SEEMS YOU ARE A MORE FORMABLE OPPONENT THAN I HAVE GIVEN YOU CREDIT FOR. I WILL HAVE TO DEAL YOU PERSONALLY, TRY AND FIND MY HIDDEN FORTRESS AND THERE I WILL DEFEAT YOU ONCE AND FOR ALL!"

If only Spider-Man knew where to find him...

XXX

A crowd of stunned onlookers all faced towards the Statue of Liberty as they watched the alien spaceship hovering over it make what seemed to be a deliberate dive into the New York Bay as if to try and not fall into enemy hands and the rumour mill went all around the city that that short space of time of the past events and what had just occurred out on Liberty Island with stories of aliens, near deaths, flying robots and Spider-Man rushing in to save the day.

The masked hero though wasn't feel all that good as he leaned on a railing on a rooftop looking out where he had come from and was only coming to terms of the strange turn of events he had just been part of. He had seemed many crazy idiots trying to cause terror in this city, but none more so that what this so-called alien from another world was trying to do. Peter though was no fool and was certain that Mysterio was not an alien that the glass dome villain claim to be but that didn't mean to say that this villain had quite the impressive artillery at his disposal that would've made all of Spider-Man's previous opponents green with envy; and that wasn't a pun on a certain Green Goblin.