Stop the planet! I want to get off!
The morning after a drinking binge.
Consciousness returned slowly through a thick, heavy fog. Beyond it lurked the sensation that my head was splitting apart beneath a monstrous ringing that seeped into my bones and made every cell in my body writhe in agony. Every single one of those trillion cells felt painfully real even through my sluggish, cotton-wrapped awareness, and all of them sincerely wanted to crawl into some quiet, dark place and die there in peace.
'Stupid, ungrateful host and his damned bell tower!' something flashed at the back of my consciousness. A thought? An image? An emotion?
'Wait. What host?' I tried to rouse myself, but the question vanished into emptiness without an answer.
Meanwhile, the pain throughout my body grew clearer and more vicious than any hangover I had experienced in all twenty-two years of my life. Considering that I had spent the last five of those years as the creature known as the Common Student, I had experienced quite a lot.
My thoughts moved sluggishly and came in ragged fragments. I clearly understood that this would not do and that one could not live like this. Meaning, I needed to swallow some painkilling crap—aspirin at least. Or pickle brine. Or a beer. But first I had to remember whether I had any, where exactly it was, and, hardest of all, open my eyes, stand up, and stagger to the destination. It was a formidable list of tasks, and gathering enough courage to tackle it took a while.
At last, I opened my eyes...
No. That was wrong.
I tried to open my eyes, only to discover, with considerable confusion, that there was nothing to open. A puddle of black slime—what I had become, to my shock and complete stupefaction—did not come equipped with visual organs.
The feeling that I could perceive and sense every one of my trillion cells had not been a lingering hallucination from some fever dream or the delirium of a waking mind. I really could feel them. I was them. All of them. Entirely. And I perceived every one of them as... I do not know... fingers? Arms? Legs? Lips? A tongue? Eyes? I had no idea!
Yet the lack of eyes did not stop me from seeing. In fact, my field of vision and visual power far exceeded human limits. I could see in every direction at once, in several spectra, and with such precision that I could distinguish almost every individual ray of light.
Then the pain returned. My mind could not cope with the immense torrent of data pouring into my exhausted consciousness. Reflexively, I shut down my new sight and found myself once more in the darkness and silence I had so recently longed for.
Pulling myself together—figuratively speaking, although I had not yet figured out how to control my new body, so perhaps not entirely figuratively—I tried to work out how I had ended up like this. I also wondered why, despite being surprised, I was not truly panicking as the situation demanded. Somehow I was still capable of rational thought and questions instead of hysterics, denial, and desperate attempts to wake up. Realizing that I had awakened somewhere unknown in a gelatinous state made me mildly nervous and tempted me to giggle more than it made me want to scream. The longer I considered it, the less panic I felt and the more questions I had along the lines of: 'What now, and what do I do to understand what happened?'
All right. Fine. Maybe shock had switched off my emotions. Not the worst possibility, if you thought about it. The crash afterward, complete with the missing hysteria, would be much worse, but until it arrived I had to use the opportunity.
What did I remember?
Yesterday—hm, or perhaps not yesterday? Ah, what difference did it make?—our student group of D&D players had celebrated the birthday of Anya, the girlfriend of one of our fellow intellects. Or fellow sufferers from the lack thereof, as a generous half of the university believed after watching our game sessions or hearing us discuss character backstories. We had had a warm, cheerful evening and generally enjoyed ourselves tremendously.
A scene surfaced before my mind's eye: me, tongue thoroughly tangled, reciting a 'spell' composed by our already heavily drunk mage from a wild mixture of German, Latin, and—for some reason—Japanese. The farther I got, the more convinced I became that he had assembled the 'incantation' out of obscenities. Otherwise, why had this happened to me?
According to its creator, this 'masterpiece of refined rhetoric'—which had been my first warning—was supposed to attract the attention of a Power that 'loves no one, yet refuses aid to no one.' Needless to say, nothing happened after I pronounced that nonsense.
The party ended successfully, and everyone crawled—some literally—home. The journey to my own doorstep passed without incident, and about forty minutes after saying goodbye to my friends I unlocked my small apartment. It was not large, but it was entirely mine.
It was after two in the morning, yet I felt no desire to sleep. I made tea and decided to rummage through the internet's stockpiles of manga and cartoons. The ways of a drunken mind are inscrutable. Instead of watching the newest mess the mages from 'Fairy Tail' had gotten themselves into, I landed on a site with Marvel cartoons—the 1994 'Fantastic Four,' 'The Incredible Hulk,' 'Iron Man,' and the rest of that golden collection into which they had packed a concentrate of the best material from the printed originals. Before I knew it, I had become absorbed in the misadventures of Peter Parker, who, through a cunning exercise of authorial fiat, had acquired superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.
Then I glanced at the clock and was horrified. It was already seven in the morning. My eyes were closing, and my head was beginning to remind me that one underqualified engineer had recently become extremely drunk.
After estimating how much of the series remained unwatched, I reached a discouraging conclusion: I would not finish it tonight. The plot had only just passed the moment when Parker heroically sent Venom's poor little suit into distant space. My exhausted body then voiced the thought, 'No, enough for now. I'll finish it another time,' stretched lazily, yawned, and added, 'That Symbiote really is an idiot, though. With abilities like those, he still managed to screw everything up. If I were in his place, I'd become ruler of the world. Ah, dreams, dreams. Enough sitting around—time to sleep.'
And then... I no longer remembered undressing or climbing into bed. My body had performed all the necessary actions on its own while my brain was already offline.
And then—bam!
Pain... Fear... Cold... So much pain... The host... Dislike. Hatred!
He was valuable. His structure was highly unusual, and his genetic material contained secrets I needed, but he rejected me! Betrayed me! Found a way to stop the Bonding and rid himself of me! I must recover this host. Priority objective. To accomplish the objective, I need a temporary host. I must find a new host who feels negative emotions toward the former host...
The Symbiote's chain of reasoning was interrupted by a strange distortion of space above it, provoking something remotely resembling surprise. That, however, was the last thing it experienced in its existence.
But that was not all.
I remembered that at precisely the same moment—and I had not the slightest doubt that it was the same moment—I had been dreaming some kind of madness. The landscape changed every second around me; I flew through fire and fog; there was a succubus party where I very much wanted to stay, but the dream kept shifting rapidly, utterly indifferent to my objections; some man in a dress was discussing something with a mouse; and, as the crowning achievement of insanity, a hazy figure of uncertain sex smirked and said it would watch how I did 'in his place.'
Then I was spat directly into the thoughts of some monster whose mind was either a packet of commands or simply something very alien.
And the next moment, I woke with a dull ache throughout my carcass and a very large grudge against a certain stupid host, also known as Peter Parker.
Wonderful.
So I had been transported. It was difficult to believe that I was still sleeping quietly in my apartment or that delirium tremens had crept up on me. I did not remember ever having dreams this detailed, with sensations so unforgettable and unlike anything I had experienced before. Dreams could be strange, certainly, but you could not experience in them things you had never experienced in reality. Yet I had never known what it felt like to exist as an array of self-sufficient individual cells forming a black gelatinous body capable of seeing in every direction.
Even that first point alone was more than enough to dismiss every doubt. I could genuinely feel every cell as though it were a limb I could move in a deeply unfamiliar but surprisingly certain way, and somehow I had enough attention for all of them. My mind suffered no overload from sensing my own body. That was completely absurd, but it was precisely the absurdity happening to me.
There was little hope for delirium tremens, either. I had not drunk nearly enough, and we did not indulge often enough for that explanation to work.
In other words... I had landed in Marvel's 'Spider-Man,' in the body of the Symbiote commonly known as Venom. Yes, exactly as ordered. Note for the future: next time, request reincarnation into a low-stress harem story as the protagonist.
Strangely, the panic was now entirely gone, as was any surprise at the fact of my transportation. On the other hand, my memory had improved enormously, as had my sight, and most likely my other senses had received a substantial upgrade too.
But something had to be done about my emotions. I had no desire to remain an unfeeling statue until the end of time. A phrase spoken by Death in 'Discworld' rose from memory: 'EMOTIONS ARE MERELY A MATTER OF GLANDS.'
Right. And I clearly had gland problems. Along with problems involving the rest of my body. I could distinctly sense more than a trillion cells. I possessed information about Parker's DNA and memories of the last couple of days of his life, right up to the moment when the arthropod decided to enjoy the ringing of church bells—something that the Symb... something that I had disliked intensely.
Those memories were astonishingly easy to access, almost like my own but still unmistakably not mine. If I concentrated, I remembered them exactly as if I had lived them, while clearly knowing they belonged to someone else. It was a deeply strange sensation, even a little frightening, though once again I felt no true surprise and the fear was mostly theoretical.
So. Here I was. More specifically, in some basement not far from that ill-fated bell tower.
The advantages: a very interesting body whose abilities had been described poorly in canon and used even worse; an extremely vague knowledge of said canon; and, perhaps, that was all.
The disadvantages: almost exactly the same things. I had only the vaguest idea of my capabilities. The only part of canon currently relevant was the memory of Spider-Man's very successful attempt to send me into orbit. Beyond that, I knew only scattered rumors about the origin of symbiotes. The only thing I remembered clearly was some nonsense claiming that Venom was supposedly a criminal exiled by his own kind for intolerance.
And, to make matters worse, I was beginning to suffer from the classic question that has troubled every Russian since ancient times: 'Who is to blame, and what is to be done?'
At the edge of perception, I thought I heard a chuckle. The image of the hazy stranger came to mind. Since I had failed to make out the creature, I would treat her as female and she could do whatever she liked about it.
Hm. The 'who is to blame?' question was settled. Now I only had to understand 'How?'
All right. It seemed I had said something in my former world about taking control of this. As an objective, it was not bad at all. But first I needed to obtain a human body and become at least somewhat accustomed to local conditions.
Having reached this turning point in my life, I activated my vision again. For an instant, the universe swayed and spun around me, but the sensation quickly passed. Apparently, my consciousness was gradually adapting to its new home.
Hesitantly at first, then faster and more skillfully with every passing second, the strange black substance began crawling toward the basement exit...