The Deal: I pitch movies set in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes. Also other things. This pitch is a direct sequel to Young Avengers 1.
The Pitch: Miles is our POV character. Peter, in costume, drops Miles off at Kate’s condo, which is being used as a headquarters for the Young Avengers (we can sub in Eli’s place from the Cap show, if that’s preferable- it could be fun to have granddad rattling around being crotchety, but also there as a cautionary tale- and I imagine the bushy-tailed optimism of Peter would contrast hilariously with his worst-case-scenario realism). Miles feels like he’s being dropped off at a babysitter’s. Peter mentions his uncle Aaron reaching out after his accident, and him seeming like an okay dude; now he feels sorry about ruining his ice cream.
Ms. Marvel, the old new girl (nobody counts Black Widow, who most of them assume is a plant from the older Avengers to keep an eye on them, a babysitter, essentially) introduces him around; “Personally, I like her. Before Yelena got here, everyone assumed I was Carol’s spy. But it’s not just that she’s taken my place as the team’s assumed narc- she’s actually really cool once you get to know her. She’s got a big, lovable dork side, you just have to be patient enough for her to show it to you.”
We follow Yelena as Miles and Ms. Marvel continue the tour. She moves like a spy, surreptitiously glancing behind herself as she makes her way outside, where she says, “I feel like babysitter. I don’t change poopy underoos.” She meets with a man we won’t recognize, yet (unless he does show up in Iron Man 4/the Riri Williams show), but he’s Ezekiel Stane, Obadiah’s son.
“Something stinks here. Dad wasn’t always the, uh, most ethical businessman, but his intel was always on point. Stark left these kids a lot of money and a lot of tech, tech that, frankly, didn’t belong to him to give away. Sure, he invented some of it. But so did my dad, and his teams, and researchers like me. But unlike dad, it’s never been my style to go off-half-cocked. That’s why I’ve got you watching them, so I know what we’re up against.”
“You are at least half a cock,” she tells him. He legitimately can’t tell if her English is screwy or if she’s screwing with him (I have my theories…).
We cut to Kate telling Teddy she kind of set something up for him, through Clint, calling in a favor. Kate was talking to Nadia, his mom, and she seemed to imply that she and Emil hadn’t been intimate since he was irradiated, and, now that she’s got him on hold she realizes maybe this is the kind of thing she should have asked Teddy about first but she’s got his birth father on the line and it’s probably already rude to have kept him on the line this long while she spirals, so she connects him to Bruce Banner (depending on how game Ruffalo is it could just be a phone appearance), or we could do video, hologram, etc. (Also, why doesn’t everyone call Ruffalo Hulk Buffalo?).
“Doctor Banner?” she asks awkwardly.
“Hello? Clint wouldn’t tell me what this was about. Is this one of those sick kid things?”
“Well, he is a kid, and he’s green, so…”
“Green? Oh. I’m not sure what you’ve heard, but my condition mostly keeps me from, uh, that.”
“I, er, Clint mentioned some, uh, difficulties,” Kate winces.
“Not the conversation I pictured meeting my biodad,” Teddy also winces.
“But you remember Mrs. Blonsky?” Kate asks.
“Blonsky, Blonsky. Oh, crap. Nadia. Nadia Blonsky. Oh… we connected after what happened to Emil. I was trying to help him out. Get control. At least get him to start wearing pants- it was seriously riling their neighbors. Nadia was really sweet. Loved Emil, but… it hurt her, what he’d become. We were working together, under constant threat of discovery by SHIELD, or one of his mood swings. She always told me her son was Emil’s.”
“That’s… uh, not what she told me. So, uh, Dr. Banner, this is Teddy.” They both give a kind of awkward, broken smile and a half-wave and hold it. “Okay, I can totally see the resemblance right now.”
“Kate,” Wiccan says, pushing her towards the door, “remember that conversation we had about how it stops being help past a point, so you really need to make an earlier exit?”
“Yeah, but I still have trouble realizing when- oh, you mean now,” she finishes as the door shuts in her face.
“I, uh, don’t know if you might be interested in some pizza,” Eli says to Kate. At the mention, Lucky the Pizza Dog bounds into the room, her leash in her mouth.
“You said the ‘P’ word- but not any of the usual ones. So we’ll definitely have to get her one. I don’t know if I should… or I might have to let out my costume, or at least abuse some Pym particles.”
“How about we agree to go for a run to jog it off after?” At the suggestion, Lucky gets even more excited.
“I have to go with you, now. Contractually obligated. You do not want to see her disappointed.” Kate scritches Lucky.
They pass by Miles and Ms. Marvel, and we stay with them. “I, uh, heard a rumor that your, uh, boss, I guess, went out with my Spider, er, mentor?”
“Yeah, she flew him across a battlefield once, which, I guess is sort of the superhero equivalent of aerial spooning. She said it was like cradling a slightly large baby.”
“He’s definitely not the largest Avenger,” Miles agrees.
“But no. Didn’t happen. And even if it had, it’s not like the two of them making out would mean we would have to make out through some weird superhero transitive property.”
“Uh,” he freezes.
“I mean, we could, if you’re bored or something.”
“Uh.” He is broken. She has broken Miles.
“I am messing with you. But it’s… actually not any fun when you’re this gullible, like punting an exceptionally vulnerable baby, like drop-kicking a baby Kal-El swaddled in a kryptonite diaper.”
“Thank God. My Spider-Sense was going insane.”
“You don’t call it your Miles Tingle?”
“No. Why?”
“Just what I heard.”
“I actually was trying to figure out how to broach that…”
“Troubling segue, but go on. Absolutely worst-case I slap you with phenomenal cosmic power.”
“In our itty bitty living space?” They share a conspiratorial smile, before Miles blurts this all out very fast. “Okay, so I am an anxious bundle of radioactive puberty. I have to carry my laptop in front of my lap between every other class because I wasn’t in control of my body before I was mutated and half of the reason I wear a mask is because I am constantly making horrified and stupid faces, even as I try to hide my nerves by telling jokes like Peter… Serafinowicz, the live-action Tick guy, I am a , uh, super big fan.”
“Okay, that was… that was a lot. I think it would be easier for us to make out than try to deal with all of that?”
“Really?”
“No. I was just stalling for time. But I will tell you something true: we are all in over our heads. All of us Young Avengers. We are trying to fill shoes that… aren’t fillable. I’m never going to be Carol. You’ll never be Peter… Serafinowicz. Riri will never be Tony Stark. But you can be Miles. And I can be me. And if all of us are the best ‘us’es we can be, hopefully that’ll be enough. And… if it’s not, at least we’ll get to face those who fell before us with our heads up high, and we’ll fail amongst friends.”
They pass by Yelena, who was listening, and it gives her pause.
“You’re not developing a case of feelings on me, are you Belova?” we hear from her earpiece; it’s Stane, watching her on hacked security cameras.
She holds her thumb up between her pointer and ring fingers in a fist (it’s called a Shish) at the camera and says, “Stuff your half-cock.” She tears the wiring out of the back of the camera, before noticing she is no longer alone. “I don’t like Big Brother.”
“I don’t like mine, either,” it’s Speed. “Just because he got the cooler name, and the cooler costume, and the more versatile power-set, doesn’t make him better. His hair might. I am jealous of his hair, just a little- not the color, just what he can do with it. I didn’t actually know you had an older brother; everybody knows about Black Widow, obviously, I can’t forget a woman in a catsuit. God bless whoever invented the catsuit-“ he’s gone and back in a flash, “Andre Courreges, apparently.”
“It’s expression,” Yelena says, somewhat annoyed by him. “From 1984. Orwell?”
“Never re-” he’s gone and back again, “read it, and bleak. But I totally get why you hate Big Brother. Seems like a knob. Speaking of… Riri tends not to take kindly to us destroying her cameras, our torrenting on her supercomputers or microwaving fish in the communal microwave. Or maybe it’s just me she’s got a problem.”
“It isn’t,” Riri says from the doorway. “I would have a problem with anyone doing those things. You just are the only person who does literally everything that pisses me off. It’s uncanny, and impressive. But Blonde Widow, if you want, I can have you black-listed from the cameras; they’ll turn off when they see you. But otherwise we need our security operating on all cylinders.”
“Then you need to secure your network,” Yelena says, squaring to Riri. This is a tense moment. Yelena’s new, so is Riri, both trying to live up to a legacy that would crush a lesser person; but Riri is better than Tony. She doesn’t see a rival- she sees an opportunity.
“You are a spy,” she says, beaming. “Plenty of companies hire people like you to find the holes in their security. You should do that for us. I know we’re both… kind of the new girls, around here. I want to show the older Young Avengers I can pull my own weight. And… what better way than to show that we can work as a team just as well as they can?”
Yelena’s touched. Her entire story to this point has been searching for belonging, so having someone reach out to her, even in this small way… it’s a big moment. Yelena follows Riri back to her lab. Yelena’s kind of impressed; Riri has taken apart some really beefy weapons (like a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle), and Yelena makes an idle comment about wanting some armor of her own. Riri admits she’s been thinking along those lines- she never really understood why Tony didn’t build armor for everybody. Certainly a Hulk might not get much benefit, but imagine Hawkeye’s aim but with the draw-strength of an Iron Man suit. There’s the issue, maybe, of putting too many eggs in one basket- maybe if there’s a single technological vector that can be attacked the Avengers would be too vulnerable, but systems could be designed completely independently, if that’s the concern. She thinks Tony just liked being the only Iron Man- War Machine notwithstanding- that he needed to feel special. “I think I’m damaged in the other direction; I don’t know if I could handle knowing someone on my team got hurt, and I could have prevented it if not for my pride.”
“And you start with me?” This question is more dangerous than it appears at first blush; on the one hand, Yelena is pleased to be included, but on the other, Riri could be intimating she sees Yelena as a weak link.
But Riri is smarter than she is, smart enough to see the interpersonal pothole and step gracefully over it. “You asked,” she says with a smirk, that both says that she brought it up to begin with, and she’s not about to get pulled into drama like that. “So what can you tell me about spying?”
“Spying is the art of discovering what everyone is hiding.”
“And what are you hiding?” Riri asks.
“Lots of things. All of the things I did in service to the Red Room. Most of the things I did training to join the Red Room. Almost everything I did after leaving. How I feel about most of these… children around us; I feel like recruit to Mickey Mouse Club. Come along, sing a song, join the jamboree.”
“You’re not hiding that last one so well,” Riri says with a smile. “But I hear you. I thought some of the same things, when I first heard about them. I was special- a prodigy- as worthy a successor as Tony Stark was likely ever to find. Then I started pulling down footage of their fights, their work. There are no kid gloves, here; a terrorist or an alien dictator decide you’re not going to stop him, and he doesn’t stop and ask if you’re an old-looking fifteen or a young-looking twenty-something, he just tries to kill you. And yeah, sometimes I wonder if Speed and Teddy have two brain cells between them to rub together.”
“I thought it was Hulkling and Wiccan who rub together.”
“You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”
“I am,” she says, pleased with herself.
“But watch them in a fight. When the chips are down. When someone they care about is in danger, or just when they know they can make a difference. It can be a lot, I’m not going to lie- pimples, puberty and, er-”
“Premature ejaculation. Last Action Hero! Good line, great movie. Schwarzenegger can be really funny.”
“So why did you join the Young Avengers?”
“Nyet. Too harsh. Bonding? Good. Excellent. My guard comes down, I don’t think of you as coworker, or powersuit woman. I think ‘friend.’ But you must ease in, like, almost, seduction.”
“I’m serious, Yelena. I wasn’t certain I belonged here, at first, so I get that inclination. But I also got over it. And I get the sense that isn’t you. And I’m not asking because I’m assessing the level of threat you pose, I’m asking because I want to get to know you, Yelena, the person.”
“Very nice execution. I am Russian, we do not trust easy, but you I want to trust.”
Riri touches her hand. “You don’t have to tell me now, or even ever. But if you ever want to, Yelena, I want to be a friend.” She lets her go, and we see a pensive Yelena, and we see her make the choice to open up.
“I felt I owed it to my sister. We had so little time, but I knew she wanted me to find something of my own, a family, like she found.”
“I thought the two of you reconnected with your… adoptive folks.”
“Eh. I love Alexei as far as you love something so stupid. And I love Melina as much as you can love someone so manipulative; I want family with no asterisk-”
“Or without feeling like having one is exposing your ass to risk? None of our families are perfect, but it’s hard to beat the family you forge yourself. Not based on proximity, or genetic happenstance, but who wants to be with you, who cares about you, and who sticks through.”
“I think that’s what Natasha wanted. Hawkguy told me she died to save me. She wanted to be there for me, but when she couldn’t… I think this is where she would want me to be, so I’m trying to be here.”
At a pizzeria down the street, Hawkeye walks through a crowd balancing three slices of pizza. She gives one to Eli, one to Lucky, and then sits down with the third herself. “I’m jealous,” he says.
“Of my jalapeno-pepperoni-olive? You should be, it’s really good.”
“No. You got to work with Clint. I’d… I’d give about anything for a chance to suit up with granddad. I still can’t tell him this is what I do… he’d… absolutely crap adamantium bullets- and I don’t just mean the ones Winter Soldier shot into him in the eighties.”
“It was…” I’d probably sizzle-reel from the show, but Kate recognizes the moment, and tones down her own excitement, “okay. Was that why you wanted to get pizza?”
Eli’s caught flat-footed. “I definitely didn’t do it because I want to spend time with you as a person.”
“Okay,” she says, putting together what’s happening, “so I’m definitely unhappy to be spending time with you as a person, too. And if you want you can even have a bite of my slice. The pizza, not- I’m just going to suggest we never talk again, do whatever we can never to be in the same room. Maybe I should go be a West Coast Avenger, and you can handle this coast.”
“Part of what I like about spending time with you is your uncanny ability to say the wrong thing in every situation, but always in a way that leaves me feeling good.”
“I’m relieved I make you feel good- okay, I’m just, I’m not talking anymore.”
We cut to a rooftop, where Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel land gracefully. “Nobody around here likes to patrol,” she says. “Apparently they expect Kang to just ring the doorbell. I mean, technically he did, last time, but still.”
“Patrolling is probably the only thing about this that I like,” Miles says. “I mean, some of that is that literally everything else there’s a good chance there’s a psychopath who wants to murder me, likely because of something Peter, um, a lot of people really take loving or hating Peter Serafinowicz very seriously. I once had to kick Morbious through an Apple store over an argument about Shaun of the Dead.”
“You know I know his actual name, right? I mean, you absolutely need to tamp it down. But your Serafinowicz dodge isn’t fooling anyone. And I even really dig the guy. He was the fun kind of odd in Running Wilde.”
“I’m going to, uh, hang upside-down for a little. It’s a Spider-Man thing. It’s not a shame-hang.”
She leans down to talk to him. “Buddy?”
“I told you, it’s not a shame hang.”
“Good. Because like I said earlier, all any of us can be is the best us possible. You’re a wide-eyed little goof who has trouble keeping his mouth shut; you’re going to have a lot of fun with Speed, when he’s not being a tempestuous jerk. And I’m sure Peter Serafinowicz, wherever he is right now, is proud of the Spider-Man you are right now, and even more proud of the Spider-Man you’re going to grow into.”
“You, uh, you want to do an upside-down Spider-Man kiss?”
“It’s definitely on my bucket list. But watching Teddy and Billy, I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to ever worry that my personal life could wreck being a part of this team. They fit together like they were designed to, like I could never even imagine one without the other. So yeah, at some point, I want to have an upside-down kiss- not necessarily with a Spider-Man- but only with someone who really means it, and isn’t just a roiling ball of hormonal angst.”
“I’m not sure I’m ever going to not be that.”
“Then you and Speed are going to be very fast friends.”
“I see what you did.”
“In the meantime, might I suggest a cold shower for your mouth.”
“I… am confused.”
“Ice cream. I meant us getting ice cream, and bringing it back to share with everyone.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“Wishing you had your laptop right now?”
“Only all the time.”
We cut back to Teddy, Billy and Speed, watching TV and snacking. “I think Kate likes me,” Speed says, zipping from one side of the room to the other as he eats from several different plates of food.
“I thought you were into Yelena,” Teddy says.
“I think they both like me.”
“What’s not to like?” Billy asks. “You’re arrogant.”
“You ate all the bugels,” Teddy complains.
“There’s always more bugels,” Speed says, returning with a full bowl.
“Withdrawn. And that is pretty cool.”
“I teleported you to Tibet to watch your favorite band play,” Billy complains.
“That was also cool. And I’m also not interested in getting in the middle of this outpouring of brotherly love.”
Speed sits down. “It’s not my fault all of you move at the speed of frozen molasses. By the time a girl even shows interest it’s like a romance shoe-horned into the end of the Lord of the Rings- the extra extra long version. I don’t care if you killed the Lich King on a technicality, we’ve barely said ten words together over the course of years.”
“Yeah, you really need to get out more,” Billy says.
“Slash stop hitting on our coworkers,” Teddy adds.
“Or, at least, you know, learn subtlety.”
“Oh, God, you want me to go slower,” Speed whines.
“No, we want you to stop treating girls like a slot machine, putting in a quarter, and pulling the arm and moving on if it doesn’t pay out immediately.”
“I need to get nachos.” Speed leaves the room.
“Too harsh?” Billy asks. Teddy holds up his fingers to say a bit.
Speed enters the kitchen, nearly running into Stature. “Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there,” he says.
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Usually when I’m half an inch tall…. but whatever.”
“No… I know what that’s like, feeling overlooked.”
“Yeah?”
“I know I can be… a lot. When I was younger, I’d find diaries or whatever of people around me and read them… because I wasn’t mature enough to understand the violation that was. It means I don’t have a lot of… illusions about how people see me, what it’s like to be around me. Sort of wish I did, but honestly even still I’d probably have come to the same kinds of conclusions, just less… conclusively. All of this is a circuitous way of me saying I’m sorry I made you feel small… and if we could, I’d really like to start over with you. Try to be a friend, first, and a teammate second, and someone who has potential for more only if and when you want to consider that.”
“I think I’d like that. But there’s one problem…” Stature starts to grow. Tommy’s eyes grow wide, and maybe for an instant in her shadow we see her becoming something with a different shape than Stature, before cutting away.
We cut back to the TV room, where Teddy and Billy are cuddling. They hear a crash from the kitchen. Teddy starts to get up, but Billy waves him off. “Let him take some of his frustrations out on our cookware.”
Kate and Eli arrives back home. Eli says, “I’m going to wash the sweat and pizza grease off.”
She frowns, and he sprints away for a shower. Kate rounds the corner into the kitchen, where a ticked looking Yelena is staring daggers at her. “I don’t like you,” she says.
“That’s not true. We had that whole awkward macaroni conversation.”
“I mean I am angry with you.”
“Oh. I get that. A lot.”
“Why you take Eli?”
“He took me out for pizza…”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Do you even like him? God, this is so high school…”
“I don’t know, but I do know that’s not your business.”
“Then maybe I should make it my business. What is it? The gauntlet is thrown.”
“No,” Kate says. “There’s no gauntlet. Eli asked me out. You want to ask him out, it’s a free country.” As Kate’s about to leave the kitchen Yelena grabs her wrist, and we realize it’s about to get heated as we cut away.
Teddy’s phone goes off. Then Billy’s. It’s the alarm app that Riri built for them. Teddy growns. “Uggh. Hasn’t anyone told crime it’s not allowed to happen when I’m bloated from too many nachos?”
“Apparently crime didn’t leave a forwarding address. And you can shapeshift around your bloat.”
Teddy does, but still looks pained. “Sure, but I still feel bloated. And logy.” They look for everyone else, but can’t seem to find anyone. “Do you think this is revenge, because we’ve been on the couch all day?”
“Whatever it is, we can’t just not respond just because everyone else went out for pizza.” Lucky pads into the room, hopeful. “Nope. Sorry, girl; I’ll have to owe you.” The dog hangs her head, disappointed.
We pan through the floor, into Riri’s lab. Her helmet starts to make noise, and she silences it, as Yelena slides back into the lab. Yelena’s ticked off. “Everything okay?” Riri asks, barely looking up from her soldering.
Yelena lets out a frustrated sigh. “Feeling like I don’t belong,” she says.
“Oh?” Riri says, setting her tools down. “What happened?”
“It’s too high school…” she covers her face and sighs, before saying, “Hawkgirl went for pizza with Captain Junior.”
“There’s only one Hawkeye on the team, you can probably just call her that, and… you’ve got a thing for Eli?”
“Why not? I like the way he fits in suit.”
“Fills out.” Riri is starting to get suspicious; Yelena’s English is idiosyncratic, not outright bad, and she’s right, this is too highschool. “I’m not sure I get the appeal. Don’t get me wrong, he’s cute, but ‘Patriot.’ The name’s been problematic since at least they named a missile that. I could see Speed keeping up; right now he’s a puppy who hasn’t been house trained, but…”
“I don’t want to talk about your love life- I don’t even want to talk about mine.” Yelena uses her frustration as an excuse to close the distance.
Riri holds up a gauntleted had. “Stop it right there,” her gauntlet hums and glows. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you aren’t Yelena. And you take one more step towards me-”
“Clever human,” the Super Skrull says, closing on her. She fires, and the Skrull shifts his chest into orange rock to absorb the shot. Riri manages to get her mask up, but he’s stretched his hand inside of her suit, covering her airways, essentially drowning her in his skin as we cut away.
Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel return, bearing ice cream. But there is no one there to eat the ice cream.
We cut away, where Billy and Teddy have responded to a call for help. There isn’t anyone there, so they’re discussing maybe making a date of it. Billy realizes they aren’t alone, and attacks a piece of furniture that turns back into a Skrull. “How did you-”
“With my mom, you kind of get used to staying vigilant about things that might not actually be there.”
“Roger.”
Yelena shows up at the mansion. She’s weirded out because everyone else besides Miles and Kamala are gone. “Not, like, walked out for a bite. But… just not here. I checked Riri’s recordings. Only Bill and Ted left like normal people.” They are bemused that she mentioned them as Bill and Ted, when in walks another Yelena. This one plays coy, says that the other Widow must be the imposter. It’s a humorous scene, because they know almost literally nothing about her, while both of them know a lot about Miles and Kamala. Eventually, Yelena speaks Russian, and the fake her tries, but her accent comes out pretty Boris and Natasha, and Kamala points out, “She’s speaking Klingon.” Miles had already gotten behind her, and zaps her, and the Super Skrull reveals himself and attacks. Big superhero kitchen fight.
They’re able to hold him off long enough for the others in Riri’s lab to wake up and escape, turning the tide. Super Skrull flees, leading them to Teddy and Wiccan, who are barely holding their own against a couple of seemingly normal Skrulls. They aren’t. They were just pretending.
Just to give it a little flavor, there’s Super Skrola Classic, who has Fantastic Four powers, an Avengers Super Skrull (this guy will likely be the biggest bruiser, with a Hulk Hand, a Thor Hand with his own Mjolnir, an Iron Man Unibeam in his chest, and just to make him extra nuts, he has two more sets of limbs, so he can wield a bow, Cap’s shield and a Widow bite) and an X-Men Super Skrull (to give the kids a fighting chance it’s the original five X-Men in their relatively underpowered days).
The kids take the Skrulls apart, and that’s when Super Skrull finally divulges the truth: Teddy is the son of Captain Marvel (the Kree Warrior) and a Skrull Prince. He originally brought Teddy there to be safe during the war between the Kree and Skrull, but his father sent him to fetch him, in the hopes that a Kree/Skrull royal would be able to help craft a peace where others could not. Kamala asks Hulkling if that makes them cousins or something, since he’s the son of the original Captain Marvel and she’s the sort of adoptive daughter, “Slash stalker” Speed adds unhelpfully of the second one.
Yelena says, “I believe we are found family.”
“That’s crazy,” we’re interrupted by Wiccan reacting to Hulkling. But Hulkling pulls him in close and intimate.
“Dude, I can’t just sit around eating bon bons while an intergalactic war I might plausibly be able to stop is going on.”
“I know. You’d get bloated, and you’d hate it.”
“You know what I mean. People are dying.”
“I’d die without you.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to come with me.”
We end on a gay kiss, as music swells, before we cut to black.
Beginning Credits Music. At first we can’t quite recognize it, because it’s kind of a distorted synthesizer version (perhaps playing with the start of the Baroque Hoedown). Riri leads the team inside, in a red and gold band leader uniform, and puts a blue sailor’s cap on Yelena. I’m otherwise not sure what’s funnier, but I think getting versions of classic Disney character costumes with open mouths for the actors’ faces to be visible through would be the best route.
| Viv |
| Pluto |
| Patriot |
| Pete |
| Hawkeye |
| Daisy Duck |
| Wiccan |
| Timothy |
| Speed |
| 3 Nephews/3 Pigs |
| Hulkling |
| Dumbo (Shapeshifting) |
| Ms. Marvel |
| Minnie Mouse |
| Riri |
| Mickey Mouse |
| Spider-Man (Miles) |
| Goofy |
| Stature |
| Jiminy Cricket |
Riri leads them in a choreographed rendition of the Mickey Mouse Club theme. In the places where Donald insists that the song be about him, Yelena yells, “Donald Duck!” enthusiastically. Note, that while Hulkling shape-shifts into Dumbo, he shape-shifts himself into a Dumbo suit similar to the ones everyone else is wearing.
“I’m in Hell.” Yelena says during a pause in the singing. It might be going too far to have Yelena try to pull her sidearm and pull the trigger, only for Speed to replace it with a water pistol, so she sprays herself in the face instead and say, “Hell is surprisingly moist.” But I’m leaving it in here, because I can, and at least right now it’s amusing me.
Mid-Credits Scene: Stane is on the phone with Yelena. A black widow spider crawls into his palm. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s adorable that you’re catsuit-spy with a heart of golding this. But pulling your chute is not an option. I don’t care how much these brats are starting to fill the role of surrogate family for you. I paid you an ungodly amount of money. Widows aren’t cheap- but they will be, if screw this up. Your business, and more importantly, your sisters’ livelihood, is only as good as your reputation, and right now I’m holding it in the palm of my hand. So you complete the job, or I squeeze.” He closes his hand around the spider and makes a fist, before hanging up. Yelena, angry, perhaps even scared, stares hatefully forward.
We cut back to Stane’s hand. “You sure that’s wise?” a processed voice says. “You’re threatening a very dangerous creature.” We pull back, and can see that it’s Prowler, speaking to him. I’m not going to spoil much, but my thought was that it’s actually Miles’ cousin in the armor- that it belongs to his uncle, but in the next story we’re going to use his cousin, instead, in the Prowler armor.
“I’m not scared of some Russian spy.”
“I meant the spider. I don’t like spiders.”
“Black widows get a bad wrap. They can kill a child, or a sick adult, but to everyone else, they just cause pain. Pain I can handle.” He wipes the smeared spider on his clothes, and we see two puncture wounds in his palm before we cut away.