A flash of light.

Peter's getting real sick of these flashes of light. He's not exactly a seasoned pro like Captain America or Wolverine, but he's beginning to connect a pattern between bright flashes of light and strange side-adventures that generally end with him limping home and covered in bruises.

This one won't be any different. He's going to be plenty bruised once he stops tumbling and hits the ground. That may sound confusing, but that's because Peter is also confused. One minute he's being reamed out by Fury for goofing off during training, and the next he's falling into a coarse, brown mesh of something. It keeps shifting under him, rolling and molding itself until he finally, finally, hits a rough, solid floor.

He doesn't get up immediately. Maybe if his spider-sense was tingling, he'd be more inclined to hotfoot it away, but it's quiet and his body is a mess of strange sensations that's putting his brain in a blender. The intense itching he'd felt before is replaced by a strange, effervesce feeling, like thousands of bubbles rolling across his skin. Tiny pin-pricks of yellow light pepper his eyelids and he groans, rubbing them hard.

Faintly, he hears a clamber of feet coming at him. Paparazzi, probably. Lady Gaga was wrong. He does not live for the applause. There is never any applause. Just a lot of mean questions from even meaner reporters. Questions he does not want to fend off right now.

He rolls onto his back with a groan, and pries open his eyes, squinting left and right. There's a large span of ocean to his left and a giant monstrosity of a building to his right. He'd landed on a large, circular slab of concrete with a giant H in the middle. A helipad then. He sits up slowly, brushing sand off his shirt.

That explains the weird brown mesh he'd been trapped in in a way that doesn't actually explain anything at all.

"Spidey!" someone calls, alarmed, and Peter turns, squinting at the people running at him. Too many people. Too many unfamiliar people.

Instincts or social anxiety kicks in, he's not sure which, but he rolls back onto his feet and jumps a safe distance away, crouching low in preparation for the first punch. He scans the array of masks and bare faces he doesn't recognize. They'd stopped their pursuit of him, but were now looking at him in confusion.

"Wh-where am I?" Peter demands. "Who are you? I'm known to bite if I feel cornered, so...so just take that into account."

"Whoa, easy there, Spidey," a blonde girl in a white bodysuit holds up her hands, palms up. The sun gleams off her suit, making her hard to look at. "Flint caught you before you hit the water, but you still took a pretty nasty hit. Are you okay?"

He does not feel okay. His head hurts. The bruises he can feel blossoming on his skin hurts. He feels like he'd been scrubbed down with a wire-sponge and tossed in a cocktail shaker. Her costume is way too bright, and it's absolutely killing his eyes.

Peter looked away to give his retinas a break, rubbing his hands over his mask in lieu of rubbing his eyes. The name snags onto his jumbled thoughts. "Flint?" He inwardly seeks where he'd heard that name before.

"Sorry about the rough landing," a voice says in front of him. Although, there's no one actually in front of him. Peter's pretty sure he's hearing voices until the mound of sand between him and the strange group grows, amassing into a piling pillar that sculpts and hardens into a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man who smiles at him sheepishly. "That wacko caught me off guard. You didn't hit your—"

He doesn't finish before Peter is flinging backward like a spooked cat, shooting two webs into Flint's face, yelping.

"Sandman," he sputters. "What are you doing off your island? You brought me here didn't you? So not cool, man. And very, very creepy?"

Flint shifts the grains of sand in his face, sucking the webbing in and resurfacing it in his hand. "Yeah, I don't miss that," he mutters, discarding the white, lumpy mess on the ground. "And what's this about my island?"

Peter crouches low again, heart hammering. He's too busy looking for the quickest escape route and calculating his—unlikely—chances of beating Sandman on his own, that he doesn't notice as someone lands behind him, cast in a glowing blue aura.

"Chill out, Bug Breath," a voice laughs, clapping their hand on Peter's shoulder. "Don't tell me Ms. Sparkle-Hands knocked some brain cells loose. You need those."

Peter nearly jumps out of his skin, and if not for how strangely familiar the voice is, he would've jump kicked him all the way to Manhattan. He whirls around, falling on his butt as he stumbles back.

He's suffering from brain damage. He has to be. Or he's lost in one of Dr. Strange's weird portals. Yeah, that's gotta be it, because anything this strange has to be connected to that man.

"Nova," Peter gawks, hands hovering, uncertain whether he should throw a punch or pinch himself to make sure he's not dreaming. "What—" Peter looks him up and down, eyes wide. "What happened to your suit?"

Nova tilts his head, planting a hand on his cocked hip. "Huh, maybe she did knock something loose. Are you feeling okay? If you're not..." he pauses, recoiling slightly, and then leans forward. "Wait a second...did..." he moves his hand from the star on his helmet, to Peter's forehead, and back again. "Did she shrink you?"

"No," Peter snaps on reflex, batting the hand away. Though now that he was looking, Nova did look a little taller, which immediately makes him want to grind his teeth. He'd literally rather die than live in a reality where Sam is taller than him. "Who is "she." Why do you look like that?" He throws his arms out, gesturing to everything around him. "Where am I?"

Sam's frowning now and it's vaguely unsettling how genuine his concern looks.

"Easy, Spider," a smoother, honey-like voice says, and to further blow Peter's mind, Iron Fist steps out of the mass of people collecting around Peter,--which is so not cool, they should go somewhere else right now . Only this isn't Iron Fist. Or, it is, but it's not the Iron Fist Peter knows.

The voice is the same, if deeper, but the suit is different. The base color is still green, but the black dragon on his chest has been replaced with a flashy new golden one, with equally flashy gold accents on his boots.

"You're with friends," new golden Iron Fist says, holding out his hands as if to soothe a frightened animal. "No one will harm you here."

Peter's eyes flick back to Sandman. "Uh-huh..."

"Amadeus," White Tiger says, and Peter needs a moment to just sit down and collect his thoughts, maybe dunk his head in the ocean a few times, because her suit is changed too. Was he absent the day SHIELD was handing out superhero makeovers? He didn't know how it was possible for White Tiger to look more predatory than her last suit, but somehow she'd managed it. The stripes in her costume are blacker, sharper, and the cat-like ears on her mask look more narrow, like a tiger pinning back its ears, growling, and ready to pounce.

"Do you know what the magician was doing?" White Tiger is saying, turning to a person in red and gold...

Peter balks, pointing. "Is that my armor?" 

"It was," an unfamiliar, and somewhat cocky, voice chirps from inside, as he taps on a holographic display coming from the wrist gauntlet. "But not anymore. I've analyzed the energy she was emitting. It's similar to the energy out-put of the Siege Perilous, but different. More like a manipulation of energy that's—"

"I know you're about to go on a long-winded explanation that no one will understand," interrupts a deep voice belonging to a large guy wearing a black, army-esque bodysuit with a large white spider in the middle. There are spikes on his shoulder pads. "So can you just give it to us in the simplest terms possible?"

Peter's armor huffs, folding its arms. "She was messing with the time stream. This Spidey," he gestures to Peter, "is from the past. Our Spidey swapped places with him. Is that simple enough for you?"

All eyes snap to him and Peter suddenly feels very, very small.

His brain is short-circuiting, running a screaming mantra of "time stream, past, future, what???" in his head as Powerman—thank god his costume was the same—a bigger, stronger version of Powerman, if that were even possible, grabbed Peter's shoulders in two meaty fists and lifted him up, plopping him back on his feet.

"Welcome to the future, little Spidey."