The next morning, the Midtown High cafeteria was less of a lunchroom and more of a full scale debate hall.
The blurry television footage of the Spider-man had dropped and the student body had split into many different vocal opinions.
“I’m just saying” Sally Avril loudly declared to a table of seniors, gesturing wildly with a carrot stick “whoever designed that suit need a medal, the material is so tight and sexy.
Did anyone else zoom in on the bodega footage?
Because the crotch area is…
well, it’s a statement”.
“A statement?
It’s a work of art” Kevin, a senior from the drama club, chimed in leaning over the table with a dreamy sigh.
“Forget the crotch, have you seen the arch of his back when he’s crawling on the ceiling?
That man has a five-star ass.
Whoever he is, he clearly squats and I, for one, support our new local vigilante”.
“Oh, please” Gwen muttered from three seats down, drawing a stark jagged caricature of a giant spider wearing tiny, ridiculous underwear.
“He clothing design is a cry for help.
The police are right to want to question him.
Vigilantism is just privatizes law enforcement and zero accountability”.
“Are you crazy?” Flash Thompson yelled from across the aisle, nearly choking on his chocolate milk.
“The guy saved people!
The cops are just mad that they can’t show off.
Spider-Man is a hero!
He’s just wildly misunderstood”.
Peter sitting right next to Ned Leeds calmly bit into his ham sandwich.
Unlike the Peter Parker of his old universe who would have been sweating, stuttering and blushing bright red at the mention of his own anatomy but this Peter won’t.
“You know” Peter casually interjected, his voice steady and completely relaxed “I also agree that he need to change his clothing, it looks too tight.
He need better materials”.
Flash scoffed, pointing a finger at him.
“Shut up, Parker.
What do you know about superhero’s suits?
Go back to your thrift-store hoodies”.
“Just offering my own opinion, Flash” Peter smiled, totally unfazed.
Flash Thompson was holding up his sleek smartphone, surrounded by a crowd.
“I’m telling you, the guy is a total acrobat!” Flash laughed, replaying a viral video clip.
“Look at him go!
Imagine his core strength!”
As the clip goes viral as Peter grimaced slightly after hearing Flash’s statement and peered over the shoulder of his best friend, Ned Leeds.
On Flash’s screen, a morning news segment from The Daily Bugle digital network was playing.
The headline scrolling across the bottom read with another title “THE RED AND BLUE ONESIE VIGILANTE EVADES THE LAW.”
The news anchor, a stern man with an aggressive haircut was speaking over grainy footage of Peter’s escape from Officer Higgins.
“NYPD officials confirm the costumed nuisance successfully thwarted a robbery but fled the scene.
Police described the suspect as ‘highly uncooperative, wearing tight, brightly colored Onesie and possessing a weirdly loud hissing wrist-spray.
Citizens are advised not to ask him to sign autographs.
We must not support this type of vigilantism behaviors”.
“Man, the Bugle is destroying the guy” Ned whispered to Peter, leaning in.
“Indeed!
Spider-man can never catch a break!
” Peter blurted out defensively.
Ned blinked, confused.
“What?”
“I mean…
yeah.
I mean that guy can’t catch a break” Peter corrected quickly, clearing his throat and rubbing the back of his neck.
Harry Osborn walked into the room, dropping a cardboard tray of premium expensive iced coffees onto Peter and Ned’s desk.
As the son of a billionaire, Harry didn’t usually care about street level news but even he was amused.
“Did you guys see the Onesie Guy?” Harry asked, sliding a vanilla latte toward Peter.
“My dad’s security team at Oscorp was analyzing the footage this morning.
They think his wrist devices are compressed pneumatic dispensers.
My dad called it ‘glorified backyard plumbing’.
Peter took a slow painful sip of his coffee.
Peter thought to himself ‘Backyard plumbing?
That is partially true since I spent three weeks scraping printer parts for those nozzles’.
Just then, Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson joined the huddle.
Gwen had her tablet out, already looking at the chemical analysis speculations on a science forum.
“I don’t know, Harry,” Gwen mused, tapping her chin with a pencil.
“The way he move from a low sweep into an aerial flip looks like a highly sophisticated blend of Capoeira and gymnastics….
his movement is so smooth that he feels like he is dancing”.
She giggled, pointing at a freeze-frame of Peter’s utility belt.
“Is that a car seatbelt buckle?
Why is he wearing a car seatbelt to fight crime?”
“Maybe he’s afraid of falling out of the sky, Gwen” Mary Jane joked, leaning against the desk with a smirk.
She looked over at Peter, who was trying to shrink into his oversized thrift store jacket.
“What do you think, Tiger?
You’re the resident nerd.
Would you wear a unitard to fight thugs?”
“Absolutely not” Peter said automatically “I mean, who would wear that?
And the chafing…
the chafing must be terrible.
It’s a terrible suit.
Zero out of ten”.
Flash Thompson slammed his hand on the desk, laughing.
“I think the cops won’t be able to catch him ever!
Seriously how is he able to climb the wall!
Imagine the things i can do if i can climb wall”
“Yeah, Flash” Peter muttered, a small genuine smile finally cracking through his exhaustion.
“Wonder what you will do with the power”.
The homeroom bell rang, forcing everyone to scramble back to their seats.
As Ned opened his textbook, he nudged Peter in the ribs”You okay, Pete?” Ned asked.
“Yeah” Peter adjusting his backpack, where his 3rd generation web shooters and his homemade utility belt were currently hidden beneath a bunch of half finished calculus homework.
“Just…
stayed up too late studying”.
The afternoon sun blazed through the high windows of the Midtown High gymnasium, illuminating dust motes and the thick smell of old rubber mats.
Today was the dreaded Physical Education Class, and Coach Wilson had laid out a sequence of blue foam pads, a vaulting horse and a set of parallel bars.
Thanks to the Daily Bugle broadcasting the “Onesie Runner’s” rooftop escape twenty-four hours a day, the entire class was obsessed.
“Alright, listen up ladies!” Coach Wilson barked, blowing his whistle.
“Today we’re working on core stability and spatial awareness.
None of that flashy superhero garbage.
I don’t want anyone trying to crawl on my ceiling”.
“Oh, come on!
Coach!” Flash Thompson yelled, stepping to the front of the line.
He had his gym shirt rolled up to his shoulders, looking proud.
“That Guy’s moves are easy.
It’s just basic street dancing mixed with a little kickboxing.
Watch this!” Flash’s ‘Spider-Style’ trotted toward the blue foam mat.
He attempted to mimic the fluid Capoeira rocking step that Peter had spent weeks perfecting.
Instead, Flash looked like a man trying to walk on ice while wearing bowling shoes.
“Check it out!
The Spider spin!” Flash shouted.
As he threw his hands down to transition into an inverted wheel kick.
But without Peter’s superhuman core strength or precision Gymnastic landing mechanics, Flash completely lost his center of gravity.
His trailing leg swung wide, clipped the edge of the vaulting horse and he came crashing down onto his back with a loud hollow THUD!!!!!!
The gym erupted into laughter.
Ned covered his mouth, snickering loudly, while Mary Jane didn’t even look up from her sketchbook, simply murmuring, “Stunning form, Flash.
A true artistic triumph”.
Flash scrambled up, his face as red in embarrassment.
“The mat was slippery!” he snapped.
He looked around the room, desperately trying to deflect the embarrassment, and his eyes landed on Peter.
“Hey, Parker!
Let’s see you do better.
Show us your spider-moves”.
With his enhanced reflexes and months of intense training, Peter could easily execute a flawless triple-twisting layout, sprint up the gymnasium wall and stick a landing on top of the basketball hoop.
But if he did that, his secret identity was dead before the final bell.
He had to use his incredible agility for the hardest task yet which is to looking slightly uncoordinated.
“Uh, I don’t know, Flash” Peter said, stepping up to the line in his oversized, baggy gym shorts.
“I’m not really built for…
physical stuff”.
“Just jump, Parker!” Flash sneered.
Peter took a slow breath.
He calculated the physics in his head in milliseconds.
He ran forward, making sure his steps looked slightly uncoordinated and heavy.
As he reached the spring-board before the vaulting horse, Peter deliberately mistimed his launch.
Instead of utilizing his superhuman vertical leap, he let his knees buckle slightly.
He flew over the horse and fall on the foam mat before dropping to his his knees and perfectly rolling into a pile of soft crash pads.
POOF!!!
“See?” Flash laughed, pointing at the tangled mess of Peter’s limbs.
“That’s what happens when a nerd tries to move!
Nice try, Puny Parker!”.
Ned ran over, helping Peter up.
Ned was biting his lip, trying to hide a massive grin because he knew exactly what Peter was doing.
“Whoa, Pete, that was…
a really aggressive fall.
You okay?”
“Yeah,” Peter wheezed, as he pretend to be embarrassed as he answered “I think…
my shoelace tripped me.
Gymnastics is a dangerous sport, Ned”
Behind them, Gwen Stacy was watching Peter brush his clothes.
She looked from the vaulting horse to the exact spot Peter had landed, a slight, analytical frown on her face.”You know, Peter,” Gwen said quietly as they walked back to the locker room lines, “for someone who just completely wiped out, you managed to completely avoid hitting your head or straining your wrists.
Your impact-redirection was actually…
pretty efficient”
Peter’s heart skipped a beat.
He gave her a weak, nerdy smile.
“Oh.
Well.
I watch a lot of safety videos on YouTube, Gwen.
Safety first.”
“Uh…Huh” Gwen replied unconvinced.
Later at night, Peter sat cross-legged on his bed and the door locked with a towel stuffed under the crack to block the smell of melting solder.
His laptop screen flickered with a spreadsheet of salvaged electronic components, while pieces of his 3rd Generation web-shooters lay scattered across a grease-stained towel.
He was analyzing his toolkit.
If he was going to survive this transmigrated life, he needed to stop reacting and start preparing.
“Alright, let’s look at the inventory,” Peter muttered, tapping his chin with his fingers.
He broke down his immediate upgrade needs into three categories.
The Mask HUD (Heads-Up Display) and swinging through New York at night with motorcycle goggle lenses meant zero peripheral vision.
Plus, keeping track of police scanner frequencies on a cracked smartphone taped to his wrist was awkward and dangerous mid-air.
He needed to harvest the micro-displays from a pair of broken Virtual Reality headsets or high-end drone-racing goggles.
By mounting them inside his mask’s eye-frames and wiring them to a tiny Raspberry Pi computer hidden in his suit’s collar, he could project a transparent map of the city directly onto his lenses.
He need to create a more silent type of webshooters.
The pneumatic HISS-CLICK of his current web-shooters was practically a dinner bell for criminals and the NYPD.
He needed to replace the heavy mechanical valves with piezoelectric ultrasonic actuators the kind found in high-end medical humidifiers or inkjet printers.
It could make the web deployment completely silent.
He need to create kinetic absorption soles.
Even though, his landings were perfect, but dropping from a five-story building still rattled his ankles, and his running shoes wore out every two weeks.
He planned to shred discarded memory-foam mattresses and layer them inside the soles of his boots with non-newtonian fluid harvested from high-end tactical knee pads.
The material would stay soft while moving but instantly harden into a shock-absorbing shield upon heavy impact.
“Does Spider-Man Need a “Batmobile?” Peter leaned back against his wall, staring at a poster of a classic black supercar.
As a comic fan in his past life, he knew Batman’s garage was legendary.
“Should I build a Spider-Cycle?” he wondered aloud.He ran the math in his head.
A heavily modified bike could carry larger equipment, act as a mobile power grid, and save his stamina during long trips across the bridge to Brooklyn.
But Queens traffic was a nightmare.
More importantly, he was a teenager with not that much funds.
Where would a high schooler park an armored, rocket-propelled motorcycle without Aunt May asking why there was a weapon of mass destruction in the driveway?
“No vehicles!
Maybe i will come back to this topic much later when i have more capital” Peter decided, crossing the idea off his notepad.
“New York is a vertical playground.
The moment I get stuck in a traffic jam behind a yellow cab, the Spider-Style is dead.
My body is the vehicle” as he tried to reassure himself even though he wanted his own vehicles.
Before Peter could go downstairs, he had to initialize his greatest programming triumph.
He couldn’t afford a multi-billion-dollar Stark mainframe, but this transmigrated soul possessed modern coding knowledge.
On his desk sat a Frankenstein tower built from three broken PlayStation 4 consoles, a discarded server blade he found behind a bank, and a cooling fan ripped from a microwave.Peter tapped the space bar on his cracked monitor.
A line of green code scrolled down, and a soothing, slightly glitchy synthesized voice filtered through his cheap headphones.”System online, Peter.
Processing power is optimized at eighty-two percent.
The microwave fan is vibrating abnormally, but I am functional”
“Perfect.
Welcome to life, H.O.M.E.R.,” Peter smiled.
He had named the AI Heuristic Operations and Modular Environmental Recorder.
“I need you to sync with that Raspberry Pi inside my mask.
Monitor the police scanner frequencies and filter out any mention of ‘Onesie’ or ‘uncooperative acrobats.'”
“Understood,” H.O.M.E.R.
replied.
“I have also flagged a three percent discount on bulk fishing line at the local hardware store.
For your…
aerodynamic tailoring needs.”
“Smartass,” Peter muttered as he cursed before turning off the monitor.
With H.O.M.E.R.
watching the digital grid, Peter finally had the technical support he needed.
With H.O.M.E.R.
he can prepare to write a revolutionary compression algorithm based on his knowledge of modern cloud computing and smartphone tech.
As he will later packaged it be sold as a lightweight mobile browser optimization tool tech firm for money.
As he plan for the future, he drafted ideas to create a revolutionary solid-state battery.
With his knowledge of the future lithium-sulfur advances, he will be able to create a battery that held five times the charge of anything on the market, at half the production cost.
Now came the hard part, confiding in Uncle Ben.
The tech and innovation part was easy to solve but the human element was terrifying.
Downstairs, Peter could hear the floorboards creak as Uncle Ben walked into the kitchen to pour a cup of tea.
In this timeline, Ben was alive, healthy, and constantly worried about Peter’s sudden late-night “study sessions” and trips he made.
Peter stared at his red mask, the police were hunting him over bureaucracy.
The media was calling him Onesie-wearing fugitive.
If he kept keeping Uncle Ben in the dark, it was only a matter of time before a stray police report or an Oscorp drone tracked him right to their front door, putting his family in the crosshairs without his family being prepared.
“He deserves to know,” Peter whispered.
Ben wasn’t just an uncle, he was Peter’s moral compass.
He needed someone to talk to about the overwhelming stress of the Spider-Sense, the ridiculousness of the NYPD chasing him for autographs, and the terrifying weight of his responsibility.
He also need to help to his family financially so that Uncle Ben don’t come back from work dead tired everyday.
Peter packed his suit into a hidden compartment under his mattress, pocketed his web-shooter prototype, and took a deep breath.
It was time to go downstairs and have the hardest conversation of his two lives.
Peter walked downstairs into the warm, yellow light of the kitchen.
The smell of chamomile tea filled the room.
Uncle Ben was sitting at the table, reading a newspaper, his reading glasses perched on the edge of his nose.”Hey, Pete,” Uncle Ben said, looking up with a soft, tired smile.
“You look like you’re carrying the weight of the world on those shoulders.
Everything alright at school?
Flash Thompson giving you trouble again?”
Peter sat across from him, his hands shaking slightly.
“Uncle Ben…
we need to talk.
And you need to keep an open mind, because what I’m about to tell you is going to sound completely insane.
But this will be a secret between both of us only.
Aunt May is not ready for what i am going to tell you”.
Uncle Ben set his newspaper down, his expression turning serious.
“Pete, you can tell me anything.
You know that”.
Peter didn’t speak.
Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the matte-black, scrap-metal gauntlet of his 3rd generation web-shooter.
He strapped it to his wrist, the car-seatbelt utility buckle clinking softly against the table.
“What is that?” Uncle Ben asked as he leaning forward in confusion as he continued “Some kind of science project?”
“It’s a delivery system,” Peter said quietly.
He aimed his wrist at the cabinet across the room.
He double-tapped the palm trigger with his middle and ring fingers.
HISS-SNAP!
A hyper-tensile line of chemical web fluid shot across the kitchen, anchoring flawlessly to the handle of the refrigerator.Ben gasped, jumping back in his chair.
“What the blue blazes?!”
Peter didn’t stop there.
He stood up, walked over to the kitchen wall, and smoothly placed his bare hand against the floral wallpaper.
He shifted his weight, lifted his feet off the ground, and walked horizontally right up the wall, transitioning into a casual, inverted squat on the kitchen ceiling.
He looked down at his uncle, hanging completely upside down.
“I’m the guy from the news, Uncle Ben.
I’m the Onesie Vigilante but i prefer Spider-man”.
Uncle Ben sat frozen for a full thirty seconds.
He looked at the thick web line stuck to the fridge, looked up at his nephew clinging to the ceiling, and then looked down at his cup of tea, as if wondering if someone had spiked it.
“Peter Benjamin Parker,” Ben breathed, his voice a mix of absolute terror and profound awe.
“Get down from the ceiling before your aunt walks in and has a coronary.”
Peter quickly dropped down gracefully, absorbing the kinetic impact perfectly in a low stance.
He unstrapped the web-shooter.
“I’m sorry I lied to you.
I got bitten by an altered spider at Oscorp months ago.
My DNA changed.
I have superhuman reaction, enhance agility and super strength similar to a spider, Uncle Ben.
I can sense danger before it happens”.
Uncle Ben rubbed his face, letting out a long, shaky breath.
He walked over to the web line, pulling on it.
It didn’t budge.
Uncle Ben turned around, his eyes locking onto Peter’s.
There was no anger in his face—only a deep, protective concern.”The police are hunting you, Pete,” Ben said softly, stepping forward and placing his hands on Peter’s shoulders.
“I saw the videos.
They’re treating you like a joke, but they’re also carrying handcuffs.
Why are you doing this?
Why put yourself in danger?”
“Because I can,” Peter said, his voice cracking slightly with emotion.
“In my…
in my heart, I know that if you have the power to stop a car from hitting someone, or stop a thief from ruining a shopkeeper’s life, and you do nothing?
The bad things that happen next are on you”.
Uncle Ben stared at him for a long time, before a fierce wave of pride breaking through his worry.
He nodded slowly.”You’ve grown up, Pete.
Faster than I wanted you to,” Ben said, a serious edge returning to his voice.
“But if you’re going to do this, you have to be smarter than the system.
The NYPD isn’t your enemy, but bureaucracy will cage you just as fast as a supervillain.
You need to stop running from them like a thief.
You need to give them a reason to trust you, even if they don’t know your name”.
“How do I do that?” Peter asked.Ben smiled faintly, pointing at the web on the fridge.
“For starters, figure out a way to make that gunk dissolve.
If the city has to hire a demolition crew every time you save a convenience store, you’re never going to get the police chief on your side.”
Peter blinked in surprise since Uncle Ben took it much better than he expected.
“It dissolving after a few hours.
I can have Homer recalculate the acid-base neutralization cycle to change the dissolving duration if needed”.
“Who’s Homer?” Ben asked in confused.
“Just…
my new a.i.
roommate” Peter laughed, hugging his uncle tightly.
For the first time in months, the weight on his shoulders felt a little bit lighter.
Now that Uncle Ben knows the secret, things will be slightly more easier.