They ate in silence, a rather unusual occurrence for the sisters. Usually, what served as Luna's breakfast and Celestia's dinner was filled with conversation. They would discuss events of the day, or occasionally make plans for outings together. Princess Celestia had, in the past year, taken up a habit of consulting Luna on most larger decisions given to her, probably to include her more and make her feel appreciated. She had learned from the mistakes of a millennium ago.

Today, Luna had been ready to share a remarkable dream with her sister. Although she herself walked in the fantasies and fears of their little ponies, her own dreams were left to themselves, and tonight she had dreamed of death and destruction, of epic battles and fearsome villains and countless lives lost. But even more so, she had dreamed of lives saved, so many that they blurred together in a way that the deaths refused to. She had dreamed of love and loss and heartbreak and rage, and occasionally, moments of pure joy. It was a magnificent dream, and at the same time a terrible nightmare. And it had ended with a voice calling for help.

She would have shared all of this, but Celestia was occupied.

Volumes of paper cluttered the Princess of the Sun's side of the table, some new, some ancient, most somewhere in between. Celestia poured through these papers obsessively, making notes on blank paper with a quill that hung suspended in her magic's grip. A talisman was clearly visible on the topmost page, and Celestia sat adding to the spell with a fervor that Luna hadn't seen in months. After a while, though, the scratching of her quill slowed, then, after a moment of biting her tongue, stopped. She set the quill down, and the soft gold foglike aura around it dissipated.

Luna cleared her throat. "I had an interesting dream today, sister. There was a spider—"

Celestia looked up at her sister, staring at her with an age she rarely let surface. "Luna, may I ask you a hypothetical question?"

Luna opened her mouth silently for a second, puzzled, before answering. "I see no reason why not."

As the pages around her side of the table began to magically sort and straighten, Celestia rested her hooves on the edge of the table. "If there was a pony—a stallion—who had lost nearly everything he loved. Who had spent the last few years fighting for the lives of others, and had won most of those fights, but lost more than either of us would care to think about. If this stallion had seen so much death, and deliberately shouldered the guilt of all of it, that he saw his own life as nothing of consequence and his ambitions as pointless, but had saved so many ponies. If this stallion, maybe, was about to die young—far younger than anyone deserved—and you had the opportunity to give him a completely new chance, leaving everything behind–the monsters he fought, but also his family—would you do it?"

There was a long, confused silence at this. Finally, to lighten the mood, Luna asked, "Would this hypothetical stallion be handsome?"

Celestia snorted, then considered. "Not especially. If he bothered to take care of himself, possibly."

Luna chewed on a croissant, pondering. "Would he be happy?"

"If I knew that," Celestia said matter-of-factly, "there would be no question. Even if he would, he'd have to work very hard to achieve it. He would live in a world that didn't need ponies like him."

"Not this world, then," her sister replied, "because this world and its inhabitants will always need ponies like him. And he would need them. Nopony is so damaged that they cannot be given happiness through friendship, and to not try to give him a satisfying life would be a greater act of cruelty than even the most satisfying death."

Celestia and Luna stared at each other for a while, before the former smiled. "Thank you, Luna," she said, rising from her seat. "That was precisely what I needed to hear. I know now that I am about to do the right thing."

Taking the papers with her, Celestia set off, not for her bedchambers above, but for the stairs to the garden. Luna quickly stuffed a whole English muffin into her mouth before standing and practically galloping to her side. Celestia gave her a look, but said nothing, glad of the company and privately quite excited to show Luna what she had been asked to do.

"Would this hypothetical stallion happen to have a name?"

"Yes," Celestia said without breaking stride. "It's Peter. But that's not what he's most commonly known as."

By the time they reached the balcony just above the garden, Celestia had quickened to a fast trot, urgency in her eyes. The instant the door was closed behind them, she set the spell flat on the ground, and, examining it, began making a few deep marks in the stone beneath them. Runes quickly took shape on the floor, as did the beginning of what promised to be an extremely complicated talisman. Celestia, who had paused earlier to grab her phoenix and several magical objects, levitated an hourglass in front of her, and, shattering it in her magical grip, drew several letters, numbers, and symbols with the sand inside the rapidly-forming circle.

At last, she stepped back and examined her work, nodding once in satisfaction. Luna cleared her throat behind her. "Sister," Luna started.

"Ssh." Celestia closed her eyes, her horn glowing with the intensity of fire. "I need to concentrate."

Each line of the spell circle began glowing, various subsections of the design humming as a resonance was created between them and...something. The air warped palpably, and a noise, like a key dragged down a piano string, sent Luna's ears twitching. If Celestia needed to concentrate, Luna would let her, but she was growing increasingly bewildered and concerned. Whatever this was, it was more power than either of them had used in centuries, and written talismans this complicated were needed for more focus than could be contained inside a brain.

Quite suddenly, a shape formed in the air above the spell circle, at first appearing to be made of Celestia's magic, then stabilizing into a translucent solid appearance. It was evidently an animal, lying on its back, but Luna had never seen a creature like this before. Bipedal, tailless, with a pair of thin but dexterous-looking arms terminating in five-fingered hands. All but hairless and a soft beige, except for a mane of short brown hair covering its (his) entire cranium. This one was covered from the neck down in a skintight, tattered red and blue suit with a symbol clearly meant to resemble a spider on the chest.

This one was also dying.

Through holes in the costume Luna could clearly see enormous wounds and burns, and in fact there was a point on the left side of his abdomen where something appeared to have punched all the way through. A stringy compound of some kind had been applied as a crude bandage, but judging by the way it was soaked through and dripping blood, this being should have been dead an hour ago.

"It's okay," said his breathless, trembling voice, right hand stretched up and grasping something neither of the princesses could see. "I did it."

His eyes were having difficulty staying open. Celestia, eyes focused but desperate, called out, seemingly to nothing, "Is this him? Is this the right one?"

"How should I know?" Luna retorted, but then stopped short as Celestia was answered in the positive—not in words, but both of them, without question, felt an external presence and the sensation of a hurried, ardent YES in their minds. Celestia nodded once, then focused on the dying human, her horn and eyes shining like her sun.

"Don't you see...it's okay," the human said, voice hitching. "I-I did it." For a moment, several of his bodily systems—cardiovascular, digestive, skeletal, muscular, nervous—shone gold, one at a time, as Celestia committed each of them to magical memory. Then, for another moment, he was unable to breathe.

"I didn't save him," he whispered to something, and tears were forming in his eyes. "U-Uncle Ben. I didn't save him, no matter what else I did." A barely perceptible sob racked his chest, the first visible breath in nearly ten seconds. "B-But I saved you." A smile formed on his face, even as tears started flowing freely. "I did it." His eyes were no longer willing to stay open, and gradually his frame went completely limp. "I...did..."

The hand dropped, the sound of it hitting the ground barely audible but seeming to echo all the same. Luna took a shaking step backwards, eyes wide and wet, but Celestia narrowed her eyes to slits, horn like a supernova and every muscle in her body so tense she trembled.

"Celestia!"

"Shut up!" Luna would have taken offence to the reply, if the human's image had not started glowing gold.

Magic began wafting away from the image like so much smoke, and on Celestia's cue, her phoenix Philomena fluttered off of her back, hovered over the human's image, and, despite the image having been apparently not real, alighted on its chest. Philomena inhaled deeply, head craned backwards, wings unfurled, and chest beginning to glow like a coal. In response, the glow of the human's heart pulsed brightly once, his skeleton momentarily in shadow and the wisps of energy shimmering and growing larger, brighter.

Luna had already caught on, the question of earlier echoing in her head as her brow rose. "No. Surely you do not intend to—"

All at once, Philomena burst into magical, omnidirectional flame, and the human, too, seemed to explode.

Luna threw a hoof up, shielding her eyes even as they slammed shut, but Celestia, who was invulnerable to both heat and light anyway, barely noticed the blinding light barely a meter in front of her eyes. After a moment, Luna lowered a hoof slightly, peeking with difficulty at the spectacle before her, and saw the human figure, completely whited out by the sheer amount of yellow-gold energy it violently radiated, writhing and trembling in sharp, horrifying movements—and as it did so, very visibly changing shape.

A snout. A tail. Legs and arms rearranging severely, shifting into new positions. The lengthening and shrinking of bones, an obvious change in size, fingers and toes merging. Muscle forming, fitting the new frame. Luna's eye widened painfully as she watched this change, and then the light went out, and a beige Earth pony lay unconscious in the fried spell circle before them.

Celestia hadn't been kidding when she had said this Peter was young; by Luna's reckoning, the stallion couldn't have been older than eighteen. Curled around the newly-formed phoenix egg as he was, Luna couldn't see his chest or stomach, but what she could see of his forelegs, face, and side had a few ugly-looking scars dotting them, almost concealable by fur. His flank sported an Erlenmeyer flask, half-full of a (probably fictitious) dark blue potion, imposed in front of a brass gear. After a moment of absolutely nothing happening, a gently glowing gold vapor slowly blew from his nose and mouth, accompanied by the almost-inaudible sound of exhalation. Celestia's ears twitched at the sound, and when it happened again—same sound of breathing, same breath of magic—it was like all the tension in her body suddenly relaxed.

"He's alive," she called, seemingly to nothing. "He's alive. Cassandra, we did it."

A pause.

"Cassandra?"

Luna cleared her throat. "Who exactly are you talking to?"

Celestia glanced at her sister, then closed her eyes and concentrated hard for a moment, searching for the presence she had allowed in her mind for the past several hours. After a moment, she opened them again, looking and feeling slightly annoyed. "Apparently, no one." She turned back to the unconscious stallion when, with a soft groan and a scraping of hooves, he began to stir.

His left forehoof moved first, finding the ground beneath it and gently pushing. Then his right shifted slightly, the beginning of the same motion, as Peter blinked his eyes open. Shutting them again quickly, he rather easily pushed himself to an odd crouching position, then cracked his eyes open again. Immediately, they crossed and the brow furrowed, focusing on the muzzle occupying the bottom of his vision. Slowly, a hoof reached up to feel it...then just as slowly, the hoof pulled back and he stared at it, eyes widening. Immediately, he brought his other hoof up, staring at it as well as he rose into something resembling a bipedal stance. In the process, it should be noted, he completely ignored the limitations offered by a pony's flexibility and distribution of weight.

Celestia took a slow step forward, but it was more than enough to get Peter's attention. His vision snapped from his increasingly-trembling new hooves to the white alicorn before him so fast that she leaned back slightly, letting her right front hoof return to where it had been.

There was a long, loud silence.

"Do you need a moment, Peter?"

Peter's eyes had already been as wide as they could comfortably go—which had given the sisters the opportunity to realize that his irises and pupils were perfect circles, as opposed to the ellipsoids that formed those of most ponies, and not nearly as shiny as one would normally see. Seeing a horned, winged horse form a coherent, English sentence had sent them even wider, and he took a step back, still bipedal, and bumped into the balcony's railing. He looked behind him to see what his legs had collided with, then craned his neck after a moment to see what was below it. With a quick, cautious look at the alicorns, he placed a hoof on the rail and effortlessly vaulted his entire body over it backwards.

"Ah!" Luna sprinted to the edge, looking down; and whatever she had expected to see, it was not the recently-made stallion sprinting into the gardens a hundred feet below. First he ran on his hind legs, then overbalanced and fell forward. From there, he half-sprinted, half-stumbled until he found cover under the trees and bushes of the gardens, and Luna could no longer see him.

Luna looked straight down for a second considering the height and wondering how Peter had survived the fall, then looked to her right as Celestia met her at the edge. "...Should we send the guards after him?"

"The guards? Mother, no; he'd hospitalize them so quickly. And I don't want him to be more frightened than he already is." Celestia looked up at the sun, low on the horizon. "I still have half an hour before I have to lower the sun. I'll find him and give him an explanation."

"Excellent," said Luna drily. "And when you're finished with his, I would appreciate a more thorough one as well. You've yet to elaborate on your intentions."

"I know. I'll explain everything once I've brought him back. For now, go prepare to raise the moon." Before Luna could begin to do so, Celestia easily jumped off the balcony, wings unfurling, and began a slow glide down to the ground.

"There isn't much to prepare!" Luna called after her. "I'll just sit on my balcony, horn alight, doing nothing for half an hour, shall I?"

It had only taken a few minutes to figure out how to walk on four legs. Peter had, in the last three years, obtained plenty of experience moving on all fours, and while most of that experience had also involved vertical surfaces, it wasn't hard to apply the same basic step combination in order to comfortably walk in this new body.

New body.

He was more than a little embarrassed that it had taken nearly a full minute to put that together, but it wasn't one of those conclusions a normal brain would want to come to. Even as he silently skittered from cover to cover, from shrub to tree to flowerbed, he felt the beginning of an anxiety attack clawing at his mind and threatening to compromise all reason. He froze for a second, clinging to the underside of a tree branch as though glued there, to get his thoughts in order. He had, less than ten minutes ago, woken up on a castle balcony overlooking a massive garden, right in front of two creatures that bothered his spider-sense with mere proximity. He had found himself in a body that he hadn't recognized, one that from his viewpoint appeared to be that of a small horse. And yet, he found, he had retained the abilities that he had acquired three years ago, the ones that he had come to identify as irrevocably him. Also retained were his scars—souvenirs from skirmishes that had been too close for comfort. There were the Lizard's claws on his chest, there was the shrapnel of the pumpkin bombs...and there, a bit to the left of his navel, was the armor-piercing bullet that the Punisher had sent through him.

Peter had been trying to ignore the fact.

He had died. He knew it. He had bled to death in his aunt's arms, his last thoughts desperation to make sure she could find some form of comfort. By all rights, he should have died of his wounds (made even worse by his fight against most of the Sinister Six) long before the semitruck he had used as a club exploded in his face. The only reason that he hadn't just fallen over until he did was that he still had work to do. But then the fight was over, and Aunt May and Mary Jane were safe, and he had finally, finally succumbed to his wounds.

And now he was here, he was a horse, he was confused, and he was very, very scared.

It takes a lot of doing to put out of mind the circumstances of one's own death, and Peter had spent the last few minutes not so much cautiously running and hiding as aimlessly wandering, looking for something to take his mind off of it. He found it in the form of a large marble fountain, happily gurgling to itself as clean water overflowed from all but the bottom bowl. It was in the center of a clearing near a maze; Peter peeked out of the bushes cautiously, scanning for any people—or horses, I guess—nearby. He couldn't see anyone in the orange light, and even with what he had noticed was a slightly wider field of hearing, he couldn't hear anything but the flow of water and a gentle breeze. Cautiously, he took one last look around—always a good idea out of costume—and then, winding up slightly, seemed to vanish from the spot, leaving two horseshoe-shaped rents in the ground where his back hooves had been.

Instantaneously, and with a slight thoom of displaced air, he reappeared at the edge of the fountain, holding out a front hoof to help himself stop and in the process breaking off a piece of the lowest section into the water. Wincing slightly at the damage, he slowly lowered the hoof. He probably hadn't actually needed to flash step—move maybe twenty feet faster than the eye could follow—but it was a good way to see just how well he had adjusted to his new shape. Breathing deeply for a second (moving that fast was hard), he hesitatingly brought himself to throw a quick glance at his reflection in the water's surface. Immediately he looked back up. So immediately, actually, that he hadn't seen much beyond the nose. His eyes narrowed, and his mouth silently formed the word "what?" as best as it could. After another second, he gave his reflection a better look.

It was him, that much was obvious. The coat covering his entire body was the same color as his skin had been, perhaps just a little darker. His hair was the same shade of brown as it had always been; quite possibly the same style, too—long enough to comb, short enough to be comfortable under a mask, messy and flat like his hair tended to be (he halfheartedly ran a hoof through the mane, straightening it slightly and parting the bangs). His eyes were just as hazel as they had always been, just as bagged, just as tired, just as staring. Yes, the reflection was definitely his, but…

It was a horse. The hair was a mane and a tail, and a pair of large ears stood twitching on either side of the former. The few small scars dotting the edges of his face had been stretched and distorted into bizarre, freakish shapes. And the eyes and the bags under them were all the more horrifying for their expression's familiarity, for something in him instinctively knew feelings like that didn't belong in a body like this. Peter sat on the ground, still staring at himself, and slowly hunched his shoulders and curled up as terror began to overwhelm him.

Abruptly, his panic was interrupted by a sudden flash of light behind him and an equally sudden hum in the back of his neck—not a buzz, not a tingle, just a hum. Ordinarily, a hum wasn't much cause for worry. A hum was potential danger: something could hurt him, but probably wouldn't. But the difference between no danger and potential danger is still quite a difference, and to transition from one to the other with no warning was almost as alarming as to transition from potential danger to OH SHIT RUN.

So Peter acted on instinct, leaping up and forward at a speed that would make a cheetah green with envy. He stuck his front hooves to the top of the fountain on his way over it, and there he stayed, whirling even as he landed with a splash and huddled, tensed, in the topmost bowl of the fountain. His mind, so clouded with fear only a second before, was focused and primed for danger. After focusing on the silent humming and judging no escalation in its intensity, he carefully peeked over the edge and beheld an enormous white winged unicorn—the same one that had addressed him, in English, by his first name several minutes ago.

Now she (for it was unquestionably a she) was looking up at him; even more reason to worry. Despite how he had perceived it, Peter's moving from the ground to his current position was almost the same speed as his earlier flash step, which meant that it was very nearly too fast to actually see. So for her to have followed the motion meant that her speed of motion perception was on par with his own—that is to say, blatantly superhuman. Superequine. Whatever.

The winged unicorn smiled at the sight of his eyes peeking over the edge of the bowl. She began to take a step forward, but stopped when his eyes narrowed all the more. "Peter," she said, rather alarmingly speaking English despite being a horse, "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Aoh naw th—" Peter stopped trying to talk suddenly, his mouth closing with a click. Slowly, he pulled his right hoof out of the water and felt the shape of his muzzle, then ran his tongue around his teeth, feeling their new shape. After a moment of muttering random words to himself, he tried again. "I knw that," he said. "But it desn't mean yr nt...going to try."

Celestia raised her brow at the retort. "That's a bit boastful of you, isn't it? Rest assured, Mister Parker, I have no intention of attacking you. Come down here. I'm sure you're very confused."

"Just a little, yeah!"Peter hopped down, standing on two legs again. The position was fairly uncomfortable. What he had always known as the arches of his feet were now taking up a sizeable portion of his back legs, and after glancing down at how his legs were positioned he reluctantly shifted into a quadrupedal stance. "I'd like to know how and why I've been turned into a horse, thank you very much!"

"Pony."

"Right. Pony. Whatever." Peter paused for a second, only now processing the word. "Aagh, that's even worse!"

Celestia tilted her head slightly. "Really? How so?"

"Ponies...are like...y'know, girly and...stuff." Peter had suddenly gone rather shifty, glancing down at his front legs, at the ground, the bushes...really, anywhere except at the creature in front of him. "...I've been turned into something...on the Christmas list of little girls everywhere. I mean, no offence, but this is kinda embarrassing."

Celestia hummed. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Sorry." Peter rubbed his front leg nervously."...Where am I?"

Celestia stepped forward, then sat on the ground. "You're in Canterlot, the capitol city of Equestria."

"Hmm. Seems I was absent for that geography lesson."

"This is a parallel universe."

"Ah. See, you should've said that first." Peter sat awkwardly, matching Celestia's position after a second of observation. "I assume you brought me here?"

"Correct."

"...If you're a deity, I wanna talk to your manager."

Celestia chuckled, then abruptly became serious. "You remember what happened to you in your home universe?"

"Yeah..." Peter looked down at himself, specifically at the bullet's scar. "And that makes this...Valhalla?"

"No—"

"Hell, then. I understand." Peter became silent for a moment, staring at the scar. "...What cemented my position here? Which death? I mean, it must have been one of the deaths, everything else pales in comparison—" He paused, his breath shuddering as his eyes became wet. "No, no, no, it was Carradine...and B-Ben...and..." He looked on the edge of tears. "...I'm sorry, okay? I know I was horrible, I tried to make up for it...I tried so hard..."

He felt a hoof on his chin, gently raising his vision to meet Celestia's eyes. She had a small, reassuring smile. "You're not dead, Peter. And when you finally do die in full, believe me when I say; you will sit with the gods." She stood up. "Walk with me."

So he did. As Celestia traced her favorite path through the garden, Peter followed just behind her, settling into a rhythm of light, almost spiderlike steps.

"A few weeks ago," Celestia began, "a student of mine—you might meet her later—crossed into a parallel world in search of an artifact that had been taken from us. She succeeded without significant incident, but the event in question sparked my interest. For the last few days, I've been casting my mind into the multiverse, just to see what I could find. And do you know what I found today?"

"A universe made entirely out of money."

"A message." Celestia stopped for a moment, waiting for Peter to draw level with her. "I found a series of memories. The last three years of your life. And with them, there was a plea." She turned and looked him dead in the eyes. "'Spider-Man is dying. Please, please help.'" Her gaze softened. "Cassandra cared about you very much, you know. You had a valuable ally in her."

"Cassandra? Who's Cass—oh." Peter's lips drew thin for a moment as he looked away. "I don't know if she told you this, but Madam Web and I don't exactly see eye to eye. Probably because only one of us can see at all. But there's no way you were the only one to find that message. Why here?" A horrible thought occurred to him. "Are there a trillion copies of me running through the multiverse now?"

"There were already," Celestia commented. "But no. I conversed with Cassandra, during which she explained who she was and the circumstances of your death. From what I understand, there were many, many universes who were willing to offer you a second chance at life. Most of those offered such things as glory in battle, ultimate knowledge, deification...but she seemed to like what this world had to offer."

"Which is?"

"A home." Celestia smiled at him. "Friends. Confidants. Maybe some semblance of a family. This world—" she gestured away from them, to the view of the kingdom below "—and its residents have more love in their hearts than in nearly any other. You deserved a place to live in peace."

"Frankly, I think it would've been better all around if you had just let me die."

She looked at him, disturbed but in no way surprised. The casualness in his voice was rather at odds with the content.

Peter shrugged at the look. "Well, if they're really so fantastic, then they've got nowhere to go but down. And, frankly, I tend to inspire quite a bit of problematic...stuff. I mean, either I'm going to get very bored, or whatever evil that's in this world is going to escalate in response to what I do. Is there crime here?"

"Yes," Celestia replied uncertainly, "but not very much. The problems you're thinking of tend to be more...monstrous in nature."

"Then we both know I'm gonna be butting heads with it. And we both know that neither me or the monsters are going to just give up. As a result, the monsters are going to get more powerful. That's just how it works. And..."

Celestia sighed. She had gotten a pretty good idea of Peter's line of thinking from the memories of his life that she retained, and she knew what was coming.

"I've done things. Horrible things. I've beaten people almost to death...more times than I want to think about. Osborn. Carter. Octavius. And then..." He shuddered. "All those battles...people died in the crossfire. I saved some of them, but seven hundred and thirty-four people are dead because I was...reckless. Or paranoid. Cared too much about my own safety. Wasn't strong enough. Didn't move fast enough. Why do I get a second chance when none of them do...?" He looked at her, not quite able to cover up how much this bothered him. "If all of them are dead, don't I deserve to die too?"

"You deserve to die," Celestia agreed, "of old age. After living a long, happy life, and leaving the world changed for the better. For although seven hundred thirty-four people died because you couldn't save them, three thousand, six hundred and nineteen are alive and happy because you could. If you didn't mourn and regret the dead like you do, it might be different, but you've counted them, just to give yourself more reasons to feel bad. Yes, you deserve to die, just like anything else does. But first, you deserve to live like you'd like to."

Peter looked away from her, staring at the horizon and the blood-red sun sitting just above it. He still wasn't convinced that this was a good idea. He would never see Aunt May again. Or Mary Jane, whom he had just been getting back on good terms with. He had a whole new body that he needed to learn to use. He would have to start from scratch—although he could probably borrow some stuff from the pony in front of him. He would ~~probably~~ be finding himself leaping right back into the fray, defending everyone even remotely threatened from these supposed monsters. And he would have to forge a completely new life for himself. New friends, new family. And even if it was doable, and as satisfying as she had implied, he wasn't sure he wanted to let go of what he had had.

But maybe it would be worth it. For that reason, he decided he would be willing to give it a chance.

"Oh, hey, I almost forgot," Peter said suddenly, turning back to his companion. "You didn't mention: who are you?"

She smiled at him. "My name is Princess Celestia of Equestria." She turned to glance at the sun. "Now, excuse me for a moment. I have to attend to my duties."

Her horn glowed, and her eyes narrowed slightly. Tensing ever so subtly, she brought her head down, and the sun came with it. In fifteen seconds, the red circle had vanished below the horizon, and the moon rose to take its place.

Peter looked from the horizon where the sun had disappeared, to Celestia, back at the horizon, then finally at the waning gibbous moon. After several seconds of dead silence and widened eyes, he turned back to Celestia and informed her, completely calm:

"Nope. I've had enough for today."

His eyes rolled back in his head, his legs went limp, and he was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Author's Note

(God, I need to rewrite this prologue)

A few things to get out of the way before the story begins proper

-This is an alternate universe of Season 4 and beyond. I began this fic between seasons 4 and 5, and a lot of the ideas required for Acts 2 and 3 of this fic contradict things established by seasons 5 and 6. So I'm gonna ignore them. While most of the S4 differences will be a result of Peter's presence, the few established details we got of the Princesses' backstories have been revised because the version offered by canon left me disappointed. Assume nothing established by canon after Season 4 to be a given. Especially in regards to changelings and the Background Six. Speaking of which...

-Cast expansion. Maybe it's just to be different, but the Background Six is featured as or more prominently than the Mane Six within this story. The Background Six--a subjective term--is used here to mean Vinyl, Octavia, Lyra, Bon-Bon (definitely not Agent Sweetie Drops, what were they thinking...), Derpy, and Time-Turner (definitely not a Time Lord). As I said, feel free to completely ignore what S5E9 gave us about them.

-The format is slightly more episodic than, say, Spiders and Magic, but there is an overarching plot. It's just sneaking up on the characters while humming the Jaws theme. Maybe it's bold to keep the main plot so subtle when I update at the speed of a snail employed by Valve, but I have a plan. Spiders and Magic was, from what I understand, basically an attempt to give Peter a happy ending in light of the never-ending stream of misfortune he's given in practically every form of Spider-Man media in existence. Posthumous Life is an attempt at that in-universe that's continually jeopardized by who our hero is, and it mainly focuses on his character development. On that note:

-Peter here's both a composite of a couple different interpretations--mostly pre-Clone Saga 616, Ultimate, and The Spectacular Spider-Man--and a deconstruction of himself. Most of his backstory is derived from one of those three, with occasional references to other adaptations. His characterization also (hopefully) draws from all of those, but especially the Lee-Ditko era. Also: deconstruction. Those classic superpowered battles level buildings sometimes. There's no conceivable way the body count is lower than three digits. That and countless near-death experiences could easily have left Peter with post-traumatic stress disorder, which needs explored, and he's always had trouble accepting his own limits, regardless of interpretation. In other words: this version's meant to be a hot mess. That develops into a hot...slight disorganization. We'll see how it goes.