The next day:
I sat down for lunch. Classes had been tedious in the way only school could manage — technically educational, functionally just waiting. I picked up my fork and began eating.
Then Tandy walked in.
Only this time she was surrounded by a new group — the cheerleaders, which apparently she had joined, because she was wearing the uniform. She was laughing with them, sitting across the cafeteria from me. I watched for a moment, then went back to eating. I was surprised, but happy. It was past time she built herself a wider circle.
Then MJ came in. I was about to call her over when she turned right instead and walked to Mark, who was sitting a few tables down with the rest of his band. They immediately fell into conversation.
Then Liz and Flash arrived. I was sure they would come over, but Harry appeared behind them and pulled them aside before they got to me. The three of them sat together and caught up like old friends, animated and easy with each other.
And just like that, I was alone again.
I hadn't realized it until that moment, but...I remembered exactly how much I hated this feeling. Loneliness in the middle of a crowd — being surrounded by people and entirely invisible to all of them. When Felicia was here I was never alone. When she left she gave me two friends. Now the first was occupied with her boyfriend and the second had been pulled back into Harry Osborn's orbit.
This was how my life had been before Felicia.
I couldn't do it. I got up and left. I didn't care about the rest of the school day — I needed space and I needed to be somewhere useful.
I got into my car and looked at the message Tony had sent me. Johannesburg. Roughly a sixteen-hour flight. I had time to burn, and a city of responsibilities to ignore for a few days.
I called May and Ben, told them I had been invited to a particle physics conference in Switzerland, and asked Sue to cover for me while I was gone. She agreed. That bought me four days — more than enough to get there, complete the job, and get back.
"Doc," I said, pushing my seat flat to stretch out, "set a course for Johannesburg."
---
Sixteen hours later:
I set down my SA and stretched as the car began its descent. I had used the flight time productively — finalizing the designs for my vibranium suit, completing the Goblin Killer specifications, and drafting schematics for a new experimental weapon I had been turning over in my head.
"We are approaching your destination," Doc announced.
"Thanks — switch to manual." I straightened up, took the controls, and brought the car low. Below me, the salvage yard spread across the landscape: discarded tankers rusting in rows, everything lit by arc lamps and the moon. Somewhere down there Ulysses Klaue had a very impressive metals collection I intended to significantly reduce.
I set down in a patch of darkness a reasonable distance away and opened the trunk, pulling out my backpack. I slipped into my costume and retrieved the bag of infinite storage. I was going to need it.
The time was the dead of night. I activated stealth mode on the suit, cutting all powered systems, blacking the whole thing out. Then I approached the salvage yard.
Getting in was absurdly easy.
The harder question was which ship was the right one. I looked around carefully — observing, eliminating. One ship stood out. It was cleaner than the others. The walkways had footprint marks going in and out of it. Jackpot.
I wall-crawled up the side of the hull and reached the first guard on the deck. He was scanning the horizon. I detached both hands from the hull, reached forward, grabbed him by the ankle, pulled him back and slammed him quietly against the ship's side before webbing him in place. For good measure I put two web lines across his eyes and mouth.
"Sexy — thermal vision," I murmured. The view shifted, the world rendered in heat signatures. Twenty guards were actively patrolling the deck. More below — mostly stationary, likely asleep.
I cracked my neck.
---
Half an hour later:
It took some patience, but I had managed to neutralize all twenty deck guards without making any significant noise. One proved louder than the others, but I used that to my advantage — his outburst drew five more to investigate, and I took all five down in the same location.
I dropped inside and navigated the interior rafters, thermal vision still active. I located the hidden stash of vibranium quickly — Klaue had concealed it behind a false wall section in the lower cargo deck, accessible only through a sealed door.
Opening that door would generate noise. I needed a distraction first.
I moved to the far side of the ship and planted three wads of expanding explosive foam around a specific section of the steam lines at structurally optimal points.
Then I moved back to the concealed room and gripped the door handle. "Sexy — trigger the room."
"Working now, Spider."
The concealed room's internal mechanisms began to shift and grind. Someone would wake up from that. People would come to investigate. Right on cue — I pressed the detonation trigger.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The satisfying sound of controlled destruction. Steam began filling the ship's interior corridors, a dense fog rolling through the passageways.
"The steam lines are gone! Get someone down there!" I heard a voice shout in the distance. The room finished its rotation and the door opened before me. I stepped inside and pulled it shut behind me.
The room was remarkable. State of the art equipment everywhere — monitoring systems, climate control, vibration dampeners. Vibranium ore was stored in individual sealed glass canisters, each with its own set of monitors and wiring. Dozens and dozens of them.
"Sexy — disable all monitoring in this room," I said, plugging my helmet's data port into the main terminal.
"Done. You can safely remove the vibranium now."
I grinned. "Perfect." It took me five minutes to transfer every single canister into my bag of infinite storage. The quantity in this room alone was staggering — I needed roughly two canisters to construct one full suit. I walked away with over a hundred.
It suddenly made a great deal more sense how, in that other world, Ultron had enough to build two new bodies and a weapon capable of elevating an entire country.
When I was finished I found a pen on the desk and wrote on the wall: *Thanks for the metal. I needed it to build the Death Star. Love — well, me.*
Heh. That would drive him absolutely insane.
I had Sexy switch back to thermal and confirmed that most of the crew had migrated to the other side of the ship to deal with the ruptured lines. I eased the door open, slipped out, traversed the salvage yard, and reached my car without incident.
I threw my bag in the back, started the engine, and was in the air before the lights on the ship had fully come on. I could hear shouting in the distance as I banked north.
I threw my head back and laughed. Who needed a social life? I had just stolen a city's worth of vibranium. No wonder Felicia loved this line of work — I was starting to understand the appeal.
---
Another sixteen hours later:
I parked in the Baxter Building garage and rode the elevator upstairs, immediately bolting to my room and locking the door.
Total elapsed time: thirty-seven hours. I had technically missed an entire day of school — and I still had three days of cover remaining. It was just past one in the morning. Sue, Johnny, and Reed would be asleep. Good. I needed to work in peace.
I started by placing orders for the materials I would need to produce the unstable molecule fabric. My current liquid funds sat at approximately three hundred and twenty million dollars — enough to begin procurement. I transferred payment, estimated delivery in three days.
With that handled I turned to the question of keeping the stolen vibranium secure. A bag of infinite storage was convenient but not safe long-term. And that was when I realized I needed to expand my magical knowledge. The handful of tricks Strange had taught me before I returned home wasn't enough anymore.
So I opened the texts the Ancient One had passed to me — the red and blue volumes — and began to read.
I started with the blue text, being the first volume. It concerned the life of Kal Cole, leading up to his discovery of the Web of Life, and more importantly how to recognize and access it.
It was a long read. When I finally set it down and absorbed what I had learned, the word I wanted was 'strange' — but the pun was too much even for me at one in the morning. So: odd.
The Web was an interdimensional source of energy — the same category of energy that sorcerers channeled, just in incomprehensibly larger quantities. It flowed between worlds, and riding its current were the dimensional energies of countless other realities.
If a sorcerer could become powerful by redirecting individual cars on a road, what power might come from directing the road itself?
The Web was the connective tissue of space, time, and life. It crossed dimensions, bridged time, and ran through living things — specifically through the life of a Spider totem. No wonder the Inheritors had dedicated themselves to hunting us down. We Spiders were quite literally generating the fundamental energy that held the multiverse together.
And so I began to train. First: simply becoming aware of the Web. Accessing it was too far ahead to attempt — just being able to perceive it had to come first.
I meditated. For a full day, I stayed in that state. The first few hours were impossible. My body kept fidgeting, my mind kept dragging itself back to everything pressing in on it from the outside. But then I remembered a small technique Kal had recorded in his notes.
Most people believe meditation means emptying the mind. That's incorrect. True meditation, as Kal described it, was the hyperactivation of thought — the mind becoming so comprehensively active that it could no longer focus on any single thread, producing a state of diffused, almost radiant awareness.
So I let it all in. I thought about everything — the full, exhausting complexity of my life, the problems I was managing, the ones I didn't know how to manage. And as I did, I felt my body begin to hum gently.
At some point I went numb. My body, my problems, my anxieties — all of it receded. My eyes were closed, but I knew that even open, they wouldn't be registering anything external.
And then I felt it.
A trickle. A current of energy flowing through me. No — not through me. From me. No, not from me either. To me. From somewhere immeasurably far away.
And it was powerful.
I opened my eyes.
For a single second, the world was covered in golden webs. Every thread connected to every other thread — a vast, shimmering cocoon that phased in and out of visible existence, as if it inhabited the same space as reality but didn't quite belong to it. I knew instantly what each thread represented.
Some ran from the floor to every object in the room — gravity. Others hung loose across surfaces, and when I reached toward one, the thread came alive and attached itself to my fingertip. I felt the object it connected to — its warmth, its mass, the particular quality of its existence.
Each thread was a property. Size, shape, temperature, history. Together they composed everything that made an object real.
I sat with that for a long time. This was what I decided to call Web Vision. I tested it — turning it off and on several times, confirming it was stable and repeatable. It stayed.
Then I turned to telekinesis.
Strange had introduced it before I left, but I had barely scratched the surface. Sitting here now, I tried again — pouring my channeled magic into my brain waves, reaching for an object across the room. It remained stubbornly in place.
I almost gave up.
And then I had an idea. I activated Web Vision and watched the interaction between my projected energy and the physical world. I could see the issue immediately: my magical threads were extending outward but curving away from the target rather than connecting to it. They were deflecting.
With the visual reference in place, I could correct in real time. I watched my threads, adjusted their trajectory, and guided them to the object's web-threads. The moment they touched — contact.
The object moved.
With that breakthrough understood, I kept going. Excited now, genuinely curious about what else was within reach.
---
Three days later:
"Peter? Are you in there?" Sue's voice came through the door, followed by a knock. She walked in with a letter in her hand, "there are some delivery people in the lobby with rather expensive-looking equipment. You should probably come sign for it — Reed looks like he's about to start examining their truck."
She stopped.
I was floating in the middle of my room. No wires, no magnetic assist, nothing supporting me — just hovering, cross-legged, about two feet off the floor. I was shirtless, wearing jeans. I opened my eyes slowly and felt myself descend, drifting down to the floor with the kind of gradual control that told me how much had changed in three days.
I took a breath, rolled my shoulders, and turned around. "Just give me a moment." I grabbed a shirt and pulled it on. "Right — let's go."
Sue blinked. She hadn't moved. "Peter...what was that? How did you just — how?"
"A basic sorcery exercise," I replied as I headed for the elevator.
"That was not basic anything! What was that?!"
"Telekinesis," I said.
"Telekinesis?!" She was following me now, keeping pace with the energy of someone who had about twenty more questions and wasn't going to accept deflection. "Are you a mutant? Did you — did you use the spider mutation program on yourself again?"
"No, Sue." I pressed the elevator button. "Your mind can interact with the physical world through brain-wave manipulation via channeled energy. The same principle I apply through meditation and katas. Once you can do it, moving objects with focused will becomes a matter of practice."
Sue stared at the ceiling for a moment. "So...are mutants actually just using a form of magic?"
I smiled. "I asked my master the exact same question."
"What did he say?"
"He complained and called mutants cheaters," I chuckled. "The short version is that mutants have shortcut access to certain energy fields that trained sorcerers have to earn through years of study. So yes — it's a bit like cheating."
Sue hummed, turning that over. The elevator opened and we rode down to the lobby where the delivery team was waiting. We got everything unloaded and set up in my lab while Reed, Sue, and Johnny gathered at the door.
"What is all this for, exactly?" Johnny asked, looking at the assembled equipment.
I smiled and pulled up the schematics on the wall display — the self-transforming fabric project. "It's a solution to the global clothing problem. This technology would make disposable fashion obsolete. The fabric never tears, never loses its shape, and can transform into any design the user wants — simply by scanning an image."
I brought up the diagram. "Memory fabric technology currently in development combined with theoretical quantum alignment work coming out of Kyoto creates a new material that grows with the user, can never be destroyed, and with some additional engineering can adjust its structural density on command — including becoming ballistic-resistant if the wearer needs it. The applications are genuinely limitless."
"Except for one thing," Reed said, his voice shifting to that particular flatness I had come to recognize. "Who owns the patent?"
I had been expecting this. "You," I said simply. "I based the design on the unstable molecule framework you developed. It's yours by right."
Reed's jaw tightened. "I didn't design this, Peter. I would never have arrived at this in a hundred years."
"But you will," I said. "In one world or another, you will."
"Stop deciding what I will and won't do!" Reed snapped, his voice cracking open at last. "Stop mapping my future! Stop treating your knowledge of that other world like it gives you ownership over who I'm going to become in this one!" He shoved the holographic display aside and left the room.
I turned to Sue. "I thought you talked to him."
"I tried," she said quietly, and followed.
I looked at Johnny. "What exactly is happening?"
"Honestly?" Johnny leaned against the doorframe. "I think Reed is jealous of you."
"Jealous? Of me? Why would the smartest man in the world be jealous of me?"
Johnny counted on his fingers. "You're an Avenger. You're not even an adult yet. You gave Ben back his human form — something Reed spent years trying to do. And now you keep building things he never thought of." He shrugged. "He doesn't feel like the most important person in the room anymore. That's a new experience for him."
I rubbed my temples. "Should I talk to him?"
"Give him some time," Johnny said. "He'll get there. But look — I've got somewhere to be. We'll talk later." He headed for the door, and once again I was alone.
I sighed. Was I losing the people closest to me? What had I actually done wrong? Be a hero? Do good science? I genuinely did not understand.
I shelved it and got back to work. I spent the rest of the day assembling the machine components into a functioning unit — essentially a large-format fabrication printer that produced custom fabric by the continuous feed. All I was missing was a quantum particle charge destabilizer to make the whole system operational. Which meant I would need another trip into the Negative Zone.
By five in the afternoon I was done for the day. I placed a protection rune on the lab entrance, the windows, and the fabricator itself — a barrier that would hold against accidental entry and alert me if anyone broke through. It wasn't much, but it was something.
I packed up, got in my car, and drove home.
"I'm home," I said as I walked in the door.
"Peter!" MJ appeared before I had taken a second step, and she looked angry in that very specific way that meant she had been waiting and letting it build. "You absolute idiot. Where have you been for three days?!"
"I told Aunt May — particle physics conference in—"
"I know what you told her! I'm asking why you didn't tell me!" MJ slammed her hand on the table and stood up straight, eyes fixed on mine. "You don't tell anyone — not Liz, not Flash, not Tandy, not me. You just vanish for three days and show up like nothing happened?!"
I looked at her. I thought about getting defensive. I thought about the whole train of justifications I could offer.
And then I realized — I didn't actually feel the urgency I once would have. Spending three days in deep meditation had done something to my sense of proportion. The loneliness at school, the petty social frictions — they had shrunk. And strangely, that made it easier to be honest.
"I'm sorry, MJ. I genuinely am. I should have told you. It was last-minute and it was something I had to do — and I didn't stop to think about the people I was leaving out of it. I'm sorry."
MJ stared at me. She had clearly prepared several follow-up arguments and now found she didn't need them. "Ah...what?"
"I said I'm sorry," I smiled. "Come on — let me tell you what I've been working on." I motioned to the table and we sat down. "How would you like a suit that couldn't be torn, never needed replacing, could change to any design you wanted just by scanning an image, and would become bulletproof on request?"
MJ's expression shifted from residual irritation to something approaching wonder. "What exactly are you building?"
"I'll show you when it's done," I said. "Now — catch me up. What did I miss?"
MJ considered, then: "Tandy got asked out by Harry Osborn. For Valentine's Day."
Every trace of the calm I had cultivated in three days of meditation evaporated instantly. I took a careful breath. I must not panic. "And?"
"She accepted," MJ shrugged. "As friends though — he made that clear."
Aunt May looked up. "Really? I had the impression she rather liked Peter."
"She does," MJ said, "but Peter had been off the grid all week, so when Harry asked she said yes. Friendly terms only."
I stared at the table. "This is complicated."
"If you liked her as more than a friend you should have said something, Peter."
"I don't like her that way," I replied carefully. "But Harry and Tandy together is...complicated for different reasons."
"Well then," MJ shrugged.
I exhaled. More problems. More things to manage.
Eventually the evening wound down and I made it to my bed. The moment my back hit the mattress, my phone rang.
Jean.
"Hey, Birdie. What's up?"
"Peter — did you hear? The Brotherhood of Mutants escaped." Her voice was quick and serious. "The Professor thinks Magneto will leave you alone for now, but we aren't certain. Please stay alert."
I stared at the ceiling. "Yeah," I said. "I will." I hung up.
I looked at nothing for a moment. I had half a mind to call Fury immediately and tell him exactly what I thought of his containment protocols. Honestly — did they put dangerous mutants in a cell or a hotel?