With great power, comes great responsibility.

Mary Jane's the one who nominated me for council last May. Seems like a lifetime's passed since then. I remember thinking she was crazy. That there was no way I'd ever possibly win. With great power might come great responsibility, but my powers weren't something I actively sought out. Fate tapped me on the shoulder all those years ago, and I've lived with the consequences ever since. I never expected to get elected the first time, and I was equally as surprised by the second, even if the odds were, unbelievably, in my favor. After all, there were more seats to win than there were people to beat. The math was on my side.

There's a better turnout this year, even if half of the nominees either declined or didn't bother getting all the signatures required to move along in the process. I'd be interested in hearing their excuses if I cared what any of these people thought anymore. I'm not sure I ever did. Because let's be honest... How flawed does a system have to be that a guy like me can win not once, but twice?

Still, I had every intention of getting up here today, and delivering my piece straight. Maybe because I thought the distraction would do me some good. Maybe because I thought it's what Mary Jane would've liked, and I wanted to honor her memory with something better than just carving her name into a wall with the hundreds of others who've vanished from this place as suddenly as they arrived. Whatever the reason, it became completely and entirely irrelevant the second Fred Burkle had a nervous breakdown on stage before she was even two lines into her speech, paralyzed with fear because the Island saw fit to give her a reminder of the home she left behind.

My heart hasn't stopped racing from the earlier excitement, though it could just as well be the caffeine at this point. I've had more cups of coffee than hours of sleep this month. My skin's humming. By some strange stroke of luck, I'm the last person left to speak, but I can barely remember any of the points the other candidates have made -- not that it matters. It's all just variations on a theme, anyway, the same old rhetoric -- if can even be called that, none of us are politicians -- recycled from the last time, and the ones before that. The only thing that's new are some of the faces, but the words all the stay the same. Static. Unchanging. It's maddening. My usual nerves from public speaking are nonexistent, replaced with a white hot anger that's threatening to boil over... And probably will.

"My name is Peter Parker," I say, voice loud and much more confident than it's ever been at these things, and unable to stand still, I begin to pace. "Some of you are probably itching to leave, and really, who could blame you after what just happened to Miss Burkle, right? I mean, jeez, I'm supposed to be, what? Telling you to vote for me, like any of us are actually in charge of this slice of paradise? We all know -- we all know -- that someone or something else is calling the shots. At any moment, you can suddenly find yourself buried alive or in someone else's body... Mind-controlled or reliving the worst hours of your life, over and over again! Today's exercise in democracy is a joke. My God, we shouldn't be dreaming up ways to make our lives more palatable, we should be figuring out how to leave... To put this prison firmly in our rear-view mirrors, because subjecting ourselves to this kind of torture day after day, month after month, year after year—

"Breakthroughs don't happen overnight! Progress -- real progress -- takes work. Time. But how many people get told there's no way to leave of their own free will, and just accept that as fact? How many people actively try to get the hell out of here after the first couple of months instead of just waiting to vanish like everyone else? So, the records go back just over five years. So, what? Five years is nothing. You blink, and it's gone. Yet how many of you have given up hope, huh? How many of you have—"

I'm not looking for him, but Tony catches my eye from the crowd, and I come up short, snapping my fingers together as I change tack on a dime. It's not like I'm following a script; my cue cards are still tucked into my back pocket.

"Tony!" I call, waving him over. "Tony, come up here, pal. Tony Stark, everybody!"

He leaps up on stage, clearly not needing much prompting to put himself in the center of attention, flashing the crowd a peace sign held above his head.

"This is novel," Tony says, "I like it. No, you were on a roll, what can I do for you?"

"Palladium poisoning," I reply. "Tell the fine people of Tabula Rasa how long it took for you to find the cure."

"Two years," he declares, "and we had to stop a crashing space station." He turns to the crowd and adds a smirking, "You're welcome."

"And all of that research was conducted here, on the Island?" A beat. "Or, well, above the Island?"

"I had a couple of incomplete supplementary materials," says Tony, with a slight shrug. "But when don't we? All the practical work was done here. And— " he points upwards, "there."

"How would you say that time span ranks compared to, oh, I dunno... Let's say the eradication of smallpox?"

"It's— " Tony holds his fingers out less than an inch apart, "a bit smaller. It was declared eradicated in 1979 -- two hundred years after the vaccine for it was discovered -- and the earliest evidence we have of it is, oh... Three thousand years ago, so call it an even three thousand. If not ten. Took a while. They didn't have me."

Nodding, I clasp my hands together, and say, "Now, I teach math, among other things, so I already know the answer to this, but, uh... Just so everyone's on the same page... Three thousand years, that's longer than five, right?"

"Six hundred times longer," Tony says. "You could compare it to the difference between the lifetime of a human and an ant."

"Six hundred times longer!" I crow, with affected surprise. "Didja hear that, folks? Yet the majority of you seem prepared to give up after less than a fraction of that time. Hey, Tony, why don'tcha tell me how long it took to the find the cure for canc—" Cutting myself off, I shake my head a little, and suck in a sharp breath. "Oh, wait! We don't actually have a cure for that one yet, but hey, it's been over five years, so let's just stop trying to cure cancer.

"This island will eat away at your life -- your friends, your family, everyone and everything you hold dear. And you can fool yourselves into thinking it won't happen to you... That a promise and some blind hope will keep the worst losses at bay... That maybe you won't be subject to some new horror tomorrow... But this affects all of us. We're puppets. Playthings. And instead of wasting our time, fooling around with ultimately trivial concerns, we should be figuring out a way to stop this insanity, and take back control of our own lives!

"You want to put me on your council? That's your call. Win or lose, I'll be working with Tony Stark to get those of us who want to leave off this hunk of rock. And I don't know about you, but I like our odds. Know why? Look us up."

Breathless from what can best be described as righteous exhilaration, I look out at the crowd for all of a moment before jumping right into it, pushing my way through the throng with no mind or care.

"Peter Parker, everyone," says Tony, still on the stage, with his showman's flair. "Give the man a hand. And your vote! And we'll give you a way home. Any questions?"