Chapter One of Bonded is out now on AO3! It's a sequel novel to Bubbles, Netzknochen's origin novel

“In an awe-inspiring turn of events that will shock the world, Mayor of Lübeck for only one year, Morgan Strauss, has officially done away with the legislation ordered by her predecessor, the ruthless Mutant criminal, Ojo, that outlawed the continued legal interference of our city’s very own Unbreakable Netz…”

“Put your phone away, idiot,” Griped a louder voice, the hiss of metal slipping into a sheath following a clip of ammunition loading into a handgun, “we only got a couple hours to do this!” The man whisper-yelled. He was tall, and was wearing enough black that his face couldn’t be seen without direct light, which he had a hood over to ensure was borderline impossible.

Chaos vibrated in the air, a buzzing energy of joy and rage meeting in the streets like high-pressure and low-pressure weather systems, and the subsequent hurricane that followed was as real as the light mist weeping from the sky. Shouting ricocheted off of high walls, thumping against windows and roaring like the tides of a beach as the night was electrified by the news that the city of Lübeck, Germany, would once again be welcoming of Mutants.

That news sparked discourse, and where there was disagreement, there was discord, and where unsettled energy boiled like water in a kettle, there needed to be some semblance of responsibility. Someone needed to be responsible for what people did when they were excited, the crookedness in the hearts of some individuals when the chance to take advantage of a situation arose; when six people dressed in black thought that, perhaps, because of the rioting and partying in the streets and in homes, there was a window of time in the night where they could score.

Glass shattered in the distance, and smoke billowed into the air. Screaming and clapping were as common as the wind. Disarray was everywhere, but there was only one place at a time for a person to be. Wherever that was, was where responsibility followed.

The news story was cut off as the glowing rectangle in a woman’s hands went black and she shoved the screen into her pocket. “Act like you’re the boss…” She muttered, listening to the man who told her what to do anyway, even though she seemed to think she shouldn’t have been made to. “Ojo goes away and all of a sudden, what, you wanna take his place?”

One would imagine that many were having that thought right then; the thought that they could be the next big man in charge of the criminal underbelly of Lübeck. One would not be wrong, but then again, one had no reason to be worried, as far as one was concerned. These six were the eighth aspiring successors of Ojo that had crossed paths with one in just the last two months, and there were for sure going to be more.

It was one’s responsibility to stop them.

With backs turned to the long, black van the six people had since piled out of, none of the criminal masterminds were aware of the sleek, white shape dropping onto the roof of the extra-large vehicle. Landing in total silence, the figure’s white leather painted shiny with icy rain sprinkling down from dreary clouds stood out against the darkness of the night. The figure’s right leg was crunched inward, bent at the knee so that the foot directly under them could hold the weight of their landing, and their left leg kicked out to the side to widen their stance and increase balance. Their left hand touched the surface of the van, and their right arm was thrust out behind them, once more, to balance the stance and make settling into a crouch even easier.

Both legs came inward, now, allowing the white figure to sit on the toes of their white running shoes. Like the figure had an exact map of the alley between two buildings that the van had been tucked away in, their two arms were stretched out in front of them and their fists were balled with their wrists bent. There were two stupid morons directly in front of the figure, and the other four had begun to waffle away, acting as though they were on the lookout for anything dangerous that might disrupt their juvenile attempt at a bank heist.

So, of course, there went somebody to disrupt their attempt at a bank heist, completely unnoticed, with a squelch and a wall of ivory. Nets like a hunter’s came spraying from the backs of the white-clad figure’s hands, two cones of yellow-white string pillowing as air caught in the tightly-woven fabric and provided just enough resistance to the parachutes that they flapped open and covered the two bodies they had been aimed at. With quiet grunts, the two targets were shoved against the wall they stood in front of and covered in tacky, sticky silk, with their faces pinned against a concrete wall and their weapons clattering to the cobblestone below.

Immediately, the figure covered in white knew enough to leap backwards, their crouched position giving them the leverage needed to spring up and toward the wall behind them, which they backflipped to face with their frontside as they jumped. Fingers wrapped in white athletic gloves gripped flat, brick wall and rubber soles of white shoes clung above them. Facing downward on the surface of the ninety-degree wall, the figure waited and listened.

“Huh…?” A voice hummed in the dark. “What the—?!” He gasped. “Webs! Julian and Crystal are trapped in webs!” He seemed equal parts terrified and frustrated. It was understandable; all the places that one could have been on these busiest of nights, and they were here? Lucky chance, right?

“Netzknochen’s here!” Called out another voice, loading a firearm and waving it around in front of her. “Find her!” The crook barked out orders as if she, too, thought she was the boss, stepping away from the two people plastered on either side of the still-locked door that they hadn’t even managed to pry open before their plan went awry. She glanced around in a frantic way, but she couldn’t have seen the single strand of webbing squirt from the dark to snatch her up by the back of her neck and yank her up and away from the rest of her team.

One was Netzknochen. Netzknochen reached out the same hand, her right hand, that had pulled her next target up and into the privacy of the shadows with a sticky, ivory bungee cord and clapped it over the criminal woman’s mouth. Holding the woman at an arm’s length, Netzknochen’s large, round-triangle lenses of black glass and mouth made from stitches became visible to her. With wide eyes and a string of curses into the tough, thin fabric of the hero’s glove, the crook raised her gun to Netzknochen’s head and had zero hesitation to pull the trigger.

A pop and a flash gave away the position of the two women, high above the heads of the remaining three robbers. Smoke from lit gunpowder rolled up and backwards from the barrel as Netzknochen slowly crept her head back into the way of the hot, chrome cylinder after her lightning-quick reaction- almost like she knew there would be a shot fired before the gun was ever even raised- saved her life. She’d craned her neck to the side moments before the flash and heated cone of pressure cracked a small, circular divot into the wall behind her, and as her head returned to cover the smoking bullet hole, the sound of a sigh left her masked mouth.

“You just made this so much harder on both of us,” Netzknochen muttered, her head lowering and shaking as voices from below reacted in shock to the gunshot. She leapt off the wall behind her, a source of torque from her ankle spinning her around so that she could drag the gun-toting woman in a half-circle and- whilst airborne- crack her head and back into the wall with all the force her twirl had emparted. The burglar let out as loud a noise as she could’ve with a gloved hand still clasped over her mouth, and as her body recoiled from being slammed, the trigger of her pistol was flicked.

Missing Netzknochen by a wide margin without her express need to even avoid it due to the simple fact that the shot was involuntary and not aimed, the next bullet sailed off into the distance at the same time as Netzknochen touched the wall again with the toes of her shoes, bounced off, released the unconscious criminal as she dropped her gun, and aimed both of her outstretched arms at the sleeping crook.

A blanket of strings pressed the would-be bank robber against the brick she’d been thrust into, securing her just a meter below where a tiny, coin-sized trickle of her blood glittered in the moonlight. A line of red ran down her face from her bleeding scalp, but she was just fine as she slept snug in a cocoon of spider silk, and Netzknochen flipped backward through the air away from the gunshots of fear and panic from the ground below.

Somewhere in the middle of the alley, Netzknochen’s two arms sprayed lines of webbing to her either side, connecting her to either building and suspending her midair while she worked to stretch the two lines over her head and connect them. Tensile and elastic, the web strings made for a workable tightrope that the white-clad spider climbed on top of with a powerful kick from her legs that sent her flipping up and over where she hung by her hands. Crouched atop the perch of her own making, Netzknochen watched the last three bank robbers calm themselves into stopping their aimless shooting.

“Not hittin’ anything!” One of them shouted over the chaos of the city around them and the sound of ringing that was likely to be bouncing around the shells of his ears. “C’mon, Spider, where are you…?!”

Netzknochen didn’t have night vision per-se, but she was able to count herself lucky enough to have five superhuman senses on top of her sixth, inherently inhuman sense. She could see the three people bumbling around in the darkness with some minor difficulty, details fuzzy and the occasional shape blending into a shadow, but the important part to her was how much more clear she knew her sight of them was than their sight of her.

Looking through her black lenses, she had a flawless vantage point for pointing two outstretched fists at the backs of two individuals. The two men, built tall and heavy, were little more than paperweights against the pulling force of Netzknochen’s two slender, leather-covered arms as she snatched them up and off the ground with gasps and yelps of surprise. Using the same well of physical strength that had held the female gunman out at arm’s length moments before, she threw the two men over her head and released the webbing she’d grabbed them with only to string two more lines to either of their heads.

Hard enough to knock them unconscious but never enough to seriously injure them, Netzknochen yanked the two people toward one another so that their heads clacked together like the steel balls of a Newton’s Cradle. They both dropped their weapons and groaned, and when they began to fall, Netzknochen spun a jacket of webbing around them both, weaving them together in the same silk cocoon and hanging them by a single, final strand from her web-perch. They dangled like an ornament, split-open skin on their foreheads bleeding onto one another's shoulders as their weapons clattered to the ground and the final remaining crook whipped around on his heels.

“I’ll… I’ll give you a cut, Spider!” He yelled into the dark. “Just let me get in and get out and I swear I’ll give you half!” He attempted to bribe Netzknochen as she rolled forward off of her web and somersaulted before hitting the red cobblestone without a sound.

Falling about six meters was light work, though she felt the bones in her legs stress under the pressure before the compression leggings she wore under her suit eased away the strain. Staying low, Netzknochen slithered along the ground like she did over the wall, so that she could approach her final target in the cover of darkness.

He was too busy looking up to think to check right below him, and by the time his field of vision leveled back out from skyward, Netzknochen had already stood up and slipped off to his side where he couldn’t see her. Standing between him and the wall, Netzknochen knew that she could have simply overpowered the man, but she also knew that she wouldn’t have to hit him quite as hard if she got him off his balance first, like she had all the others; the goal here was to incapacitate, not to maim these people. She saved her real power for the ones who could take it.

Netzknochen touched the man’s shoulder, and like liquid, melted away from his view to follow his back as he whipped around and fired his pistol at the wall. Now between him and the black van they’d all piled out of, Netzknochen hopped up and onto the hood. The vehicle bounced under her light weight, but her low center of gravity as she crouched kept it from making much noise. Her hands sprayed more silk, two arms made of webbing latching onto the man’s two shoulders and pulling him backward off his feet.

The crook flew about two meters through the air, parallel to the ground, before his back crunched into the front fender of the black van, thumping it like a drum and leaving a person-shaped dent as he crumbled to the ground with a gag. Netzknochen somersaulted again as she dismounted the car, squirting a net of tacky webbing over the man to keep him restrained against the cold, wet, dirty ground.

Conditions weren’t very pleasant, but she didn’t suppose she should have felt all too bad for them, either. She looked up at her handiwork with pride, bundles of her silk staying intact thanks to the Human body heat wrapped inside them, and the strands that were exposed to the cold, wet air ticking down with a biological clock set for about three hours. At that point, the web line strung between the two buildings would snap at its strained points, dropping the hung-up men to a fall that may well have killed them, if not for the soft, padded silk they were wrapped up in. That wasn’t going away unless it was vigorously washed with cold water, or unless Netzknochen herself ripped them free.

Which, of course, she wouldn’t dream of.

The wailing of high-pitched sirens sounded off not too far away from Netzknochen, and she knew that the police were on their way. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of what she did, or that she believed she should have been in trouble, but she had grown accustomed to running from the police over her three years as Netzknochen. Either they didn’t like her much, or they were very loyal to someone who didn’t; regardless, it was almost always violent when law-enforcement caught the leather-wrapped vigilante in the middle of her superhero work. By the sense that sizzled in her skeleton, Netzknochen had a feeling that the police were arriving on her scene with intent to start trouble, so she saw it fit to make her exit swift.

A strand of webbing spat from her right hand, a ‘D’-shaped hole on top of her glove, to stick to the very top of one of the buildings she’d used as props for her heroics and allow her to fling herself up from the ground. Her webs were elastic and strong, which made them ideal for navigating the not-too-tall buildings of Lübeck with motions that were as much slingshotting herself as they were swinging; a sort of mix of the two that provided unparalleled speed and maneuverability. She flipped backward over her heels as she was thrown airborne by her ivory string, and it wasn’t long before her white shoes found the top of the building and she landed upright in the cover of both the dark and the altitude.

Truth be told, she could have hung out up there and watched the police bumble about her work done to stop a robbery for them, but she knew in her bones that it would be safer to just leave. Having arrived for just a second on the rooftop, Netzknochen’s departure was stopped by yet another source of buzzing in her head, separate from the approaching police. She’d turned to run and leap off the building and swing off, deeper into the city to find more trouble, but it felt like trouble had found her…

Where was it…? The feeling was weak, so there wasn’t any immediate danger, but it was more like she was being… watched? Stalked? That was alarming; her Skelett Summen was that late in warning her? What if she’d taken off her mask for a quick break?

To her right—

“You get people hurt all the time,” Began a woman’s voice, raspy and tired sounding, but still full and commanding. “You run around as if due process of law is some kind of suggestion, like you’re an exception to the lowlives you stop because you’re doing it in a mask…” Footsteps, and though the buzzing in her head failed to increase in intensity, Netzknochen couldn’t help but to grow on-edge. There was no danger, it seemed, but… “And after all the shit you put her through last year, my sister pardons you,” Warm, white headlights and cold, flashing blue came from the ground, and the added artificial light lit up a hard, stony face cracked with stress lines. A woman stood less than two meters away from Netzknochen, a dark-blue windbreaker jacket worn over a thick, bulletproof vest and a button-down police shirt making her profile stealthy and matte, and her right hand rested without shame on her belt where her firearm was holstered in plain view. “Now… how does that make sense?”

Netzknochen knew this face and this voice, and she knew this vendetta. “Hi, Officer Strauss…” She sighed, the leather coating her arms squeaking against her closed-up leather jacket as her posture straightened out and she realized who it was she was speaking to.

“Chief, now,” Chief Strauss said, her brown eyes somehow tracking the green ones she couldn’t have any way of seeing through big, reflective, black lenses. Netzknochen’s white hood blew the same direction with the wind as Chief Strauss’ brown hair, and the Polizeipräsident shook her head. “Fuck you. You know that, Spider? Fuck you,” She spat venom, and Netzknochen took it on her chin. “I’ve been chasing you around Lübeck for three years! I’ve been trying to get an answer for what you did to my sister since 2021, and now, she makes it to where I don’t have the legal credence!” Her fists were balled, but she didn’t reach for her gun. She was angry, but- a good thing for Netzknochen- not manic.

This wasn’t very professional of her.

Wow, that was mean.

“I… I know this is personal for you, but,” Netzknochen said, looking down at her white shoulder shimmering with dampness, “I didn’t want Morgan to be hurt,” She explained, her mind’s eye going back to that day; the day she learned how it really felt to lose. When she learned that acting like an idiot when she put on her costume was how she got treated like an idiot, left to die in an abandoned building with the life of an innocent woman in her incapable hands. She was lucky that all ended well and that Morgan Strauss survived; lucky that Psy-Op was a moron and lucky that Ojo wanted to keep Netzknochen alive as a scapegoat.

Luck got her through her first year. Learning not to count on that, how to be better than the odds of the theoretical multiverse, that was what got her through her second year; how she beat Ojo and his omniscient eyes. Another year down… She wasn’t sure what lesson she’d have to learn, now.

“You should’ve saved her!” Chief Strauss pointed a stern, accusatory finger right at the embroidered spider logo on Netzknochen’s chest. It was white, like the rest of her suit, and its eight legs were made from bones while divots like eye sockets were cut out of its big, round abdomen. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? What you’re supposed to do?” The question was rhetorical, but the insinuation begged for answers. “I thought I was going to lose my sister while she was in her coma, because you couldn’t save her from the mess you made!”

By now, the Polizeipräsident’s officers down below had filtered out of their vehicles; four of them, in two cars. They looked up at the two women, searchlights atop their cruisers trained on Netzknochen and Chief Strauss, as the police chief acted like she wasn’t getting emotional. She loved her sister, that much was clear, but why did she insist on acting like it was Netzknochen’s fault?

“I was tricked,” Netzknochen argued. “It’s no excuse, and whether you believe me or not, I know a thing or two about responsibility…” What was the use in preaching? She trailed off as her initial thoughts morphed into something else; something that was less of a claim to moral high ground. “Why don’t you ask Morgan?” At the risk of escalating the situation, she brought up the mayor of their city. “She was there, too. She’s giving me the green light to be a hero because I tried to help her.”

“But you failed,” Chief Strauss said, and what followed was a long pause. There were several beats in the conversation that lacked sound, heated quiet being exchanged in a rapid duel. Then, the chief scoffed. “You’re on first-name basis, huh?” She asked, the subject of the conversation seeming to have shifted during their silent, motionless dance. “She hasn’t called me since Christmas, but you call her by her first name.” Chief Strauss nodded one slow, knowing nod. “Alright… Does she know yours?”

Not even the hum in her skeleton could have prepared Netzknochen for a punch like that one. What the fuck was she supposed to do? This, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t her problem! But… she remembered the last time she thought that to herself, too. She remembered running away, leaving a young man to die on an abandoned hospital operating table because what happened to him wasn’t as important as what happened to her. Being Netzknochen changed things. Netzknochen stood for better than that.

“I…” She looked away again, the chaotic night still raging, though it was all harmless, as far as her danger sense could tell. Her Skelett Summen couldn’t pick up on anyone in peril, or any situations nearing cataclysm. “She just calls me Netzknochen, when we work together,” The Spider said. “She hasn’t asked about my identity, which I appreciate.”

“And how often is that?” Chief Strauss sputtered in what seemed to be disbelief. It was like she couldn’t fathom how a complete stranger- a vigilante- had more contact with her sister than she did. That made Netzknochen feel bad. “Just how often do you work- extrajudicially- with the Mayor of Lübeck?” The police chief presented an aggressive question, but still her posture remained non-threatening. It seemed that she knew the law, and wasn’t about to try and fight the Mutant superhero… or maybe it was for her own safety.

“That’s a loaded question—” Netzknochen stumbled and tripped, the way that the question was phrased getting her off-balance. It was ironic that there was still a way to surprise her even with her Skelett Summen; just use words.

“How often do you have to face zero accountability for the damage you cause?” Chief Strauss asked again, the same question, in essence. Her legal immunity was only getting wider, it seemed, that much was true, but…

“I don’t cause damage,” Netzknochen argued from a blind perspective, not bothering to think back on that claim because she knew it wasn’t true. “I make sure damage that’s already being caused is lessened.” A white finger gloved in thin fabric wagged, and when a tiny spot of blood on her glove became visible to her, she put her hand down.

“Wanna tell that to the officers you put in the hospital?” Strauss nodded downward, past the Spider, to the ledge of the building. As Netzknochen turned around to stare down at the four police officers from three stories over their heads, Chief Strauss continued. “I’m positive that they’d love to hear how you lessened their broken bones, or shortened the time they spent recovering instead of helping protect the people of Lübeck by flipping their cruisers and sending them all crashing into one another at over 120 kilometers an hour,” She half-yelled at Netzknochen as the events of the previous three years were dredged up like wet dirt at a construction site. “Go ahead, Netzknochen,” Her name came out with a scorching intensity, “I wanna hear that, too, actually.”

Netzknochen let a long sigh leave her chest as she looked at the four people looking up at her. They all seemed expectant, but for what she wasn’t certain. A fight? Netzknochen recalled winning the last battle she had with the police, handily. An apology? Sure, she would give one of those… When she was pretty sure saying ‘I’m sorry’ wouldn’t make Chief Strauss try and push her off the roof.

“You seem to be getting along with Morgan,” Chief Strauss shook her head and spoke calmer after she, too, took a breath. “You’re friends, now, or whatever; I can’t stop you. The law’s the law,” She took her hand off her gun, finally, and let it rest at her side as her shoulders fell and her head hung in some form of defeat in a fight Netzknochen wasn’t even aware they were having. “Just because I don’t like you doesn’t mean you’re a criminal. Legally, you’re within your right as a Mutant to… do Mutant things.” The hand that had been resting on the butt of her pistol came up to rub her angular, bony face between sentences. It looked like stress was keeping her from sleeping well. “But I have to ask, since you know my sister so well…” Strauss paused. “Do you know my first name?”

They had just been on the topic of names, and Netzknochen hadn’t thought to ask. Did she even need to? Chief Strauss’ name was public record, she could have just looked it up at some point if… if she cared to. She supposed, then, as a respite of silence led to the Polizeipräsident choking out a dignified, disappointed laugh, that may have been the point.

“Go,” She scoffed, waving Netzknochen on. “Get the fuck out of here before I arrest you for disturbing the peace or something,” Chief Strauss offered a suggestion as she rolled her eyes.

Netzknochen didn’t need to be dismissed twice, not from a situation this awkward. She turned around again, stepped past Chief Strauss and placed one of her white shoes on the ledge of the building off to her right, poised to send her launching over. She lingered for a second, and then she decided she would just ask.

“Do you want to tell me?” Netzknochen proposed a question that should have been easy to answer. A yes-or-no question, which required no outside information. It was simple. So, why did it take the better part of forty seconds for the police chief to say anything?

“It’s Greta,” The Polizeipräsident said. “I can get down from here the same way I came up, no need to save me, hero.” Her words were patronizing, but they did highlight the fact that Greta Strauss had managed to almost slip by Netzknochen’s Skelett Summen. She supposed there was some sort of reason for that, like some loophole of Greta not actively watching Netzknochen until the very end, therefore not activating the sense in her skeleton that told her things like when she was being watched.

“I know you won’t believe me, Greta,” Netzknochen said, rolling her wrists and loosening up their muscles for her upcoming traversal, “but all I want is to be better for Lübeck. I may be a Mutant, but I live here, too, and I care about these people.” She stared at the back of the police chief’s head. “I’m sorry for how the beginning of my career got you and Morgan involved. I would go back and do it better, if I could, but my powers stop where a spider’s do.” She couldn’t time-travel, as helpful as it would have been to fix the messes she made.

Then, the muscles in her thighs twitched, and with a swooping sound through the air, her body shot off the rooftop and about seven meters up and forward in a diagonal, and her right hand spat a string that she grabbed and rode with a pull toward another, shorter building. Her back came centimeters from the paved road she flew through like some sort of pendulum, her feet kicking out in front of her as her left arm bent at the elbow and her right arm gripped her web higher up, using one of the many small knots in its ivory length as a handle.

What was all this, then, about Morgan Strauss legalizing the actions of Netzknochen? The Spider remembered a conversation where that had been teased as a possibility, but she remembered, too, thinking that it was either a joke or something for the distant future. She remembered laughing. She remembered Morgan moving on from the topic, as Netzknochen sat crouched in her windowsill…