He finished reading and stood quietly for a long moment with the letter in his hand, his expression having cycled through several distinct emotional states before settling somewhere between disbelief and the particular kind of exhausted acceptance that comes from realizing there is no version of this situation that makes logical sense, so fighting it is simply a waste of energy.
He read the last line one more time, then set the letter down carefully on the sink.
"Heh. I never thought a regular person could actually surprise a god and a fundamental law of the universe...Fate."
He looked at his reflection properly this time, without the identity crisis getting in the way from before.
"Well, I am Peter Parker now. I have to see what differences exist between this world and the Marvel I know and figure out what gifts the One Above All actually gave me."
He rolled his shoulders and straightened up. "Let us get to work."
----------
The computer on the desk was old enough to have personality of its own and new enough to be useful.
He sat down in front of it and opened the search bar.
He typed "Tony Stark" first because Tony Stark was always the right place to start.
What came back was exactly what he had hoped for, which was news about his scandals and new technologies, a man with sharp eyes and sharper wit who looked exactly like Robert Downey Jr. and showed absolutely no signs of having recently survived captivity in Afghanistan.
There was no mention of an arc reactor and no mention of Iron Man and he appeared completely healthy.
"As expected," he said, making a face of astonishment while a small smile worked its way onto his face. "No Iron Man event yet, no kidnapping, nothing. This helps me enormously since several major events have not been triggered."
He leaned back slightly. The clock had not started yet, which meant he had time to work with.
He typed methodically after that, moving from name to name in order of importance, skipping anything related to SHIELD since searching those names would risk alerting Fury before he was ready for that particular complication.
"Bruce Banner" gave him gamma radiation research and academic papers and a quiet bespectacled man who looked like Mark Ruffalo and had clearly not yet had the accident that would make him considerably less quiet.
He tried "Fantastic Four" and got nothing, but "Baxter Building" gave him a hit, and "Susan Storm" gave him another one with a face that looked like Kate Mara, which told him a great deal about which branch of the multiverse he was operating in.
"Well. With this I have a place to work. But the question is how." He shrugged.
"I will think about that later. Do the Fantastic Four follow the plot of the 2015 movie, or maybe not? And I barely even remember that one completely."
He moved on.
"Mutants" was a search he approached carefully because he did not want to put any well-known name into a search engine and risk drawing attention, so he simply searched the general term and found an enormous number of manifestations and incidents that confirmed their existence without any doubt.
Then he typed "Charles Xavier" and found a book titled The Mutant Gene, and the author photo showed a young sharp faced man who looked like James McAvoy.
He made a note in his head that the mutant situation was the one he intended to interfere with the least, partly because he barely remembered the details of their storylines and partly because the telepaths among them required a specific kind of protection that he would need to figure out, and it was not going to be a helmet or a reliance on his future spider sense.
He needed something more reliable than either of those options.
He typed "Danny Rand" next and found him listed as deceased along with his parents, which was entirely expected because Danny Rand always returned from the dead eventually, and when he did he would bring the Hand with him, which was going to be a serious problem for someone to deal with at some point.
He made a mental note and moved on.
He saved the worst for last and typed "Norman Osborn" with the reluctant energy of someone who already knew the result was not going to be pleasant.
Scientist and founder of the impressive Osborn Enterprises.
Peter sat up straighter. The building in the photographs was the Oscorp tower from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, modern and corporate and enormous on the Manhattan skyline. And Norman Osborn himself looked like Chris Cooper.
Now here was the important distinction, the one that mattered for everything that came after. In the Sam Raimi trilogy, the trilogy belonging to Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man, Norman Osborn had been played by Willem Dafoe.
That Norman had been the Green Goblin himself, armoured and cackling and entirely willing to terrorize everyone Peter Parker had ever cared about. The father as the villain. Dafoe's performance had been a landmark.
But in this world, the Amazing Spider-Man universe, Norman Osborn was Chris Cooper.
A man already dying of a genetic disease, cold and brilliant and estranged from his own son. And the Green Goblin here would not be Norman.
It would be Harry. Young Harry Osborn, played by Dane DeHaan, his father's illness inherited and accelerating through his blood, his childhood friendship with Peter pulled apart at the seams by desperation and the belief that Peter had chosen not to save him.
"Shit," he said under his breath, staring at the photograph. "The company is from the third film but the man looks like the second film's Goblin. That means I have the older and more unhinged version instead of the younger one, and that is going to cause me serious problems in the future if I do not address it soon."
He minimized the window with more force than was strictly necessary and did one final search almost as an afterthought. "J. Jonah Jameson."
The man's column loaded immediately, practically vibrating with self-righteous fury about something Peter did not bother reading past the headline.
He looked at that familiar furious face and felt something that was almost fond, in the way that one can feel fond of a headache that has been around long enough to become a constant.
"You son of a bitch, you are still alive," he said, without any real heat in it. "Acting exactly like the version from the second film.
Well, that will not last long. If the Green Goblin is not active yet then Jameson would technically be Spider-Man's most persistent problem, so I will deal with him before I start my actual work."
He pushed back from the desk and stood, rubbing his eyes, and assembled everything into a working picture of exactly where and when he was.
This world was a fusion of the Marvel films and comics, with Earth-19999 as the designation the One Above All had given it, which suggested the events of the comics also persisted here in some form and if that was true then this world was even more complicated than he had initially estimated.
Tony Stark was the MCU version rather than the comic version, which was a significant relief because the comic version of Tony made the MCU version look like a picture of emotional stability by comparison.
The same applied to Osborn, and he genuinely hoped the personality of everyone here matched the films rather than the comics, because the 616 universe at its worst was a place where the so-called heroes caused enough chaos and destruction that the villains genuinely seemed more organized and rational by comparison, and he had no interest in navigating that particular dynamic.