Scans_Daily

(#3'd been Sue and Peter.)

Peter'd swung over to the Baxter Building, having gotten a text from its comm systems.

He learnt that none of them had sent it - yet there it was, on his phone.

With nothing else to do, he asked Ben if he could get some poker tips.

Ben agreed. They sat down to cards -

" Ah, Spider-Man. You answered my summons. "

- and a very familiar looking armored figure in green warped in.

The other three arrived. There was five against the intruder, with " The kids? "

" Safe in the panic room. "

" All right, Victor. " said Reed. " If you're this eager for a fight- "

" ' Victor '?

" Heh. Oh, Dr. Richards. Really.

" Could ' Victor ' bypass your defenses so effortlessly? Would ' Victor ' know the layout of your headquarters intimately.. "

The figure tapped his mask, and it opened.

" .. because he once lived here? "

" Kristoff? "

( Spider-Man took Kristoff Vernard's face in. )

(#1'd been a story in the '60s.)

It concerned the symbiote Spidey'd picked up on Battleworld.

The alien costume, kept in the Baxter Building after Peter'd learned something of its nature, was freed from its containment by a strange drone.

The symbiote left, seeking its jailer - Reed Richards, out with his son and wife.

It wanted Franklin. Sue left to take him to safety, leaving Reed to contend with the symbiote.

The symbiote took Reed. The resulting merger sensed Spidey nearby, and went for him.

It came to Pete while he was thinking about the goings-on of his life.

" Oh, this is all I need.. the symbiote got away from.. "

( Realization hit. )

What 'it' is, though, is the instrument of a driven man's desire.

Where it is is the fourth of Christos Gage and Mario Alberti's Spider-Man/Fantastic Four series.

Three seperate stories've passed, in earlier days- Spidey and Johnny in the midst of Doom and Namor, Peter and Reed versus a certain symbiote escaping its confines and taking unwilling hosts, and a little more of the New Fantastic Four's dealings with the Skrull mindwhammier De'Lila.

Each of them has had a linking thread- a familiarly armored, extratemporal figure who shows up after each fact, to steal a little piece of the story, that they may be knit into a dangerous whole.

The fourth issue, then, answers the implied question:

( What could a man with Doom's intellect build given the best of the Latverian monarch's occult libraries, a snatch of symbiote, and Technotroid scrapings? )