A run down public restroom was not the kind of place many people appreciated waking up in. It certainly wasn’t something the young woman who had just picked herself up off the floor had enjoyed. Between the somewhat slimy feeling it left on her skin and the migraine pounding in time with her heartbeat, this was easily the worst wakeup call she could remember…
That she couldn’t seem to remember why she was in a restroom in the first place was another point of concern, but it was pushed out of her mind in favor of dragging herself to one of the sinks lining the wall and turning on the tap.
After a quick rinse got the worst of the slimy feeling off, the young woman looked into a slightly dirty window and realised several things at once. First her face and hair was distinctly not what she remembered them looking like. Second, despite the rather pretty new features, she looked like hell with pale skin and circles under her eyes so dark they were almost bruises. Third, she actually recognized the face in the mirror.
“Why do I look like Gwen Stacy?” She rasped to her reflection, her voice sounding rough and dry.
Naturally her migraine picked that moment to step up the intensity a level. It felt like three separate lifetimes worth of memories were jockeying for dominance in her mind. One was obviously the mind of Gwen Stacy, AKA Spider-woman, given the memories of swinging through cities on lines of silk shot from special devices given to her by Janet van Dyne and after a disastrous encounter that left her depowered, an imitation silk created by a klyntar symbiote.
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Another was a rather intelligent engineering student, also a Gwen Stacy as it turned out, who had been a rather normal life overall. She was smart enough to reach the top of her classes with diligent study but lacked that ‘spark’ that let her break out and stand apart from the masses. There was more but digging deeper caused the young woman’s migraine to pulse harder, making getting more details an impossibility for the moment.
The last, and somehow the dominant personality, was of a nameless person from an Earth with absolutely nothing special about it. Memories of hours spent enjoying the adventures of comic book heroes be it through books, movies, games, ect. easily came to the front of the young woman’s mind. But any hint of personal memories remained absent. Names of friends or family, where they lived, hell even just the name and gender of the person these memories belonged to were just absent.
With a groan Gwen- if two out of three memories were convinced her name was Gwen she would roll with it -dropped her head into her hands and allowed the rush of memories to settle. The sooner thinking stopped feeling like a hot poker to the brain the better.
A small eternity later, her migraine settled into a dull throb and Gwen decided to stumble out onto the streets and perhaps find a bench she could rest at instead. The smells in the bathroom were not helping her recovery.
Thankfully it was evening outside, so despite being in the middle of a city somewhere there was almost no traffic going by. That said, she didn’t recognise her surroundings at all. The dreary beaten down feel of the city was a large contrast to most of the cities Gwen remembered. Between the jumbled up memories, new city, and killer headache she was starting to get an unpleasant idea as to what happened to her.
A police car screamed past her, lights flashing, but Gwen simply continued making her way down the cracked sidewalk.
She eventually managed to find a nearby newspaper stand and couldn’t help but curse.
“Dammit all, I was ROB’d.”
Sitting innocently in a display case was a newspaper with ‘The Gotham Times’ boldly written across the top.
Well, at least it's not Brockton Bay.