Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change With the Light

Chapter 61: Dream And Nightmare

The month of June was when summer came into full blossom, filling the trees and the grass with life. The sun's bright, shining light made people begin to relax and enjoy themselves. They planned vacations, went on picnics, enjoyed the sense of warmth and restoration that summer offered.

Some days were entirely different, of course. On days like that, the wind howled and the sky screamed with the roar of thunder, as lightning snaked across the sky in harsh, jagged patterns. The thunderstorm had been bad all day, and only got worse as night fell, until it seemed almost as if Hell itself was manifesting on Earth.

The streets were completely deserted, as not even the city's most hardened criminals cared to be out on such a night.

It was well after midnight, and almost everyone in the entire city was asleep.

Alone with their dreams.

SPIDER-WOMAN #61

"DREAM AND NIGHTMARE"

Jackson Arvad, alias Will O' the Wisp, slept silently in his cell at the Raft, the superhuman wing of Riker's Island Penitentiary.

Will O' the Wisp was a star-literally. The center of his own universe, the sun that all of the planets in his life revolved around. There was his hated ex-wife Maureen (now a dead world) revolving closest to him, his family members (mostly distant and cold, he rarely touched them with his light), his hated superhero nemesis Spider-Woman (a gas giant, a budding star in her own right, and one that he loathed for impeding his goals), and many of his ex-coworkers at Roxxon (taunting, hateful worlds who had leached off his hard work) and their families (the moons and satellites that revolved around these planets).

The Wisp radiated contempt, and then hatred.

Slowly he began to expand, going nova.

Maureen was the first to explode, being ground into dust-he had already snuffed her out.

His family members went quickly-the Wisp did not care about them much.

Spider-Woman was brutally destroyed, shattered into a million pieces for interfering with his progress.

His Roxxon coworkers and their families suffered the most, slowly and painfully vaporized as they withered and died under his hate.

In the women's wing of the raft, J. Olivia Yanizewski, alias Joystick, was sleeping in her cell.

It was like Las Vegas on an acid trip. Huge buildings were everywhere, covered in multicolored lights that glittered in a rainbow of colors. The buildings had canals carved into them through which champagne flowed in bright, bubbly rivers and waterfalls. Fabulously decorated Christmas trees sprouted at random, dropping presents that were full of drugs and syringes. People of all shapes, sizes and genders fornicated in the streets, doing things that would have put most pornographic movies to shame.

Joystick sat on a throne above it all, gazing over her kingdom as she was waited on by a bevy of handsome and buff young men, each of whom was wearing nothing more than a Speedo. One of them fed her grapes by hand, another fanned her, and two more were giving her pedicures, one on each foot.

At a snap of her fingers, all of the men stopped what they were doing and lined up in front of her.

Joystick only smirked.

It was suppertime.

Polestar lay slumped in the corner of his cell, the flesh and blood part of his body sleeping as the mechanical parts of his body had shut down for the night.

There he was, surrounded by all of them. Originally, they'd all mocked him as sad-sack Thomas Duffy, the loser who could never get it together and who had long served as life's crap bucket.