New York Metropolitan Hospital, intensive care ward. The old professor, Curt Connors, who lived apart from his wife and family, lay alone in his hospital bed. A row of life-monitoring devices beside him measured and recorded his vital signs, making the scene seem especially desolate.
Oscorp learned of Curt Connors's car accident and hospitalization immediately. It sent people to the hospital and readily paid the bill. Compared to the value a senior researcher could produce, such medical expenses were negligible.
However, Oscorp's people only handled the administrative procedures. This old professor's prized students and capable assistants had yet to receive news of his accident and hospitalization.
As for his estranged wife, she was unwilling to go out in the middle of the night, and his children were too young. Naturally, no one came to visit or care for the severely injured old professor.
In the hospital's single room at night, only machines kept Curt Connors company. The nursing staff merely glanced at him during their rounds before hurrying on to the next room.
But when Claire Temple, an intern nurse still at the CNA level, made her midnight rounds, she found an empty bed and scattered instrument wires. The feisty young woman of South American descent had only one thought:
It was over.
A moment earlier, Curt Connors had awakened in the middle of the night, naturally feeling wrong all over. Worse still, the composure and calm he usually took pride in seemed to have been thrown out the window.
Pain scattered his focus, and his mind was filled with chaotic fragments of information. The circumstances before the accident, his research,
his former comrades, and the explosion that had cost him an arm—
Regeneration Serum!
The term that suddenly flashed through Curt Connors's mind froze there. For that brief moment,