East Queens, New York, September 8–14, 2012
The abandoned construction site in East Queens had been abandoned for exactly three years, four months, and twelve days.
Peter knew this because the following:
He used it as a shortcut to the library.
He had accidentally hyperfixated on local zoning records last summer.
Being weirdly informed about abandoned infrastructure was apparently part of his personality now.
The lot sat between two half-finished apartment blocks like someone had started building a future and then wandered off midway through.
Rusting steel beams.
Concrete skeletons.
Scaffolding exposed to the weather.
Temporary fencing surrounded most of the property, though one corner had a gap wide enough for a skinny fourteen-year-old to squeeze through sideways if he angled his backpack correctly and accepted minor emotional damage from chain-link fencing.
Peter had been coming here every afternoon for six days.
School.
Fake library excuse.
Spider experiments.
Home before dinner.
Repeat.
Honestly?
As secret identities went, it was surprisingly manageable.
So far.
DAY ONE
The vertical jump test.
Peter stood in the middle of the lot staring upward at a steel beam roughly twenty feet above him.
Ned held the notebook.
"You sure this is safe?"
"No."
"Cool. Love that confidence."
Peter bent his knees carefully.
Every movement still felt strange inside his own body.
Like someone had secretly upgraded all his settings while he slept.
Strength pooled in his muscles instinctively.
Potential energy.
Tension.
Release.
Peter jumped.
The world vanished downward.
For one horrifying second, he was way higher than expected.
He shot upward past the beam entirely.
Twenty feet.
Twenty-one.
Twenty-two—
"Oh COME ON—"
Gravity remembered him.
Peter came down hard.
BOOM.
Concrete cracked beneath his sneakers.
Dust exploded outward.
Silence.
A pigeon flew off a nearby beam in offended terror.
Ned slowly lowered the notebook.
"...Peter."
Peter looked down at the fractured concrete.
Then at his legs.
Then back at Ned.
"I may have overcommitted slightly."
[CHIBI PANEL]
Tiny cartoon Peter rockets into the sky screaming.
CHIBI PETER:
THIS FEELS SCIENTIFICALLY UNSAFE.
Tiny cartoon Ned calmly holds up a scorecard.
SCORE:
8/10
POINTS DEDUCTED FOR SCREAMING
DAY TWO
Wall-crawling refinement.
Peter discovered quickly that climbing wasn't actually the difficult part.
The difficult part was convincing his brain that gravity no longer had jurisdiction.
His adhesion ability wasn't normal grip strength.
It wasn't friction.
It was something deeper.
Microscopic contact.
Molecular attraction.
His body wanted surfaces.
Concrete walls became ladders.
Steel beams became pathways.
The side of a vertical support column became, somehow, walkable.
Peter sprinted halfway up a wall before instinctively stopping.
Because human brains are not designed for this.
His hands and feet held effortlessly.
He looked down.
Immediately regretted looking down.
"NOPE."
He flattened himself against the wall like a panicked gecko.
Below him, Ned tilted his head upward.
"You know, from down here this looks extremely stupid."
"That is not emotionally supportive!"
"You are crouching horizontally!"
"I'M ADAPTING!"
DAY THREE
Reaction testing.
This was where things became genuinely unsettling.
Peter tied a blindfold around his eyes.
Ned stood twenty feet away holding a bucket of miscellaneous objects.
Tennis balls.
Batteries.
Half a sandwich.
"Why is there a sandwich in there?"
"I got hungry."
"Ned."
"I regret nothing."
Peter exhaled slowly.
"Okay. Throw something."
Ned threw the tennis ball.
Peter caught it instantly.
Not because he heard it.
Not because he saw it.
He felt it.
A strange tingling pressure spread through his body half a second before impact.
Like his nervous system received a warning before reality finished happening.
Another throw.
Catch.
Another.
Catch.
Faster.
Catch again.
Peter's body moved automatically.
Instinct overriding thought.
The world slowed around incoming danger.
Ned stared openly now.
"Dude."
Peter removed the blindfold slowly.
"I know."
"No, like—"
"I know."
Ned grabbed his phone immediately.
Rapid Googling commenced.
After a moment, he looked up excitedly.
"Spider sensory systems!"
Peter blinked.
"What?"
"Actual spiders can detect vibrations through microscopic sensory hairs before direct contact happens. Air displacement, pressure changes, substrate vibrations—"
Peter's eyes widened immediately.
"My nervous system adapted predictive environmental processing."
Ned stared.
"...English."
Peter started pacing.
"It's not precognition. I don't think. It's probabilistic sensory analysis happening subconsciously at accelerated speed."
"...Still English."
Peter gestured wildly.
"My body detects danger before my conscious brain processes it!"
Ned pointed triumphantly.
"THAT ONE. THAT WAS THE ENGLISH."
Peter stopped pacing.
Then grinned slowly.
"...That's incredible."
Ned looked mildly alarmed.
"See, I would've gone with horrifying."
"I prefer incredible."
DAY FOUR
Swing testing.
Or as Peter would later classify it:
The Beginning of Several Extremely Poor Decisions.
The rope system itself was solid.
Thirty feet of industrial climbing cord salvaged from a storage crate.
Proper knotting.
Weight tolerance calculations.
Secure anchor point.
Scientifically sound.
The problem was the human attached to it.
Attempt one ended with Peter over-rotating and slamming shoulder-first into a concrete pillar.
Attempt two ended with him letting go too early and landing in a heap of rebar tubing.
Attempt three—
—was catastrophic.
Peter released at completely the wrong angle.
Momentum launched him sideways.
He hit a sand pile face-first hard enough to briefly disappear into it.
Silence filled the construction lot.
Ned slowly looked down at the notebook.
"Attempt three," he announced professionally, "suboptimal."
Peter lifted his head from the sand.
There was sand in his mouth.
Sand in his nose.
Sand in places that raised deeply personal philosophical questions.
"I hate physics."
[CHIBI PANEL]
Tiny chibi Peter lies buried upside down in sand with only his legs visible.
Tiny cartoon Ned writes in a notebook.
CHIBI NED:
Subject continues surviving through unclear mechanisms.
Attempt four changed everything.
Peter grabbed the rope.
Ran forward.
Jumped.
This time—
He felt it.
The arc.
The momentum.
The invisible geometry of motion.
His enhanced reflexes mapped the pendulum swing instinctively.
Velocity.
Angle.
Trajectory.
The movement flowed through him naturally.
At the bottom of the swing, speed exploded through his body.
At the apex—
Release.
Peter let go.
And flew.
Not literally.
But close enough to rearrange his understanding of the word.
Weightlessness hit for half a second.
His body twisted instinctively.
Hands reached outward.
Feet hit the wall twelve feet above ground.
Stick.
Perfect adhesion.
Perfect balance.
Peter clung there silently.
Breathing hard.
Wind moving through the unfinished steel framework around him.
Below, Queens stretched outward beyond the lot.
Traffic.
Sunlight.
Apartment rooftops.
The entire city suddenly looked different from up here.
Accessible.
Reachable.
Possible.
And somewhere deep inside him—
Something clicked.
Not human.
Not entirely.
Something spider-shaped in his nervous system looked at the swing and said:
Yes.
This.
More of this.
Peter slowly climbed back down.
He was filthy.
Sweating.
Covered in dust.
And smiling so hard it hurt.
Ned looked up from the bucket.
"...That looked awesome."
Peter laughed breathlessly.
"Yeah."
He looked at his hands.
Still trembling slightly from adrenaline.
"We need a better system."
Ned blinked.
"For what?"
"Movement."
Peter started pacing again.
"The rope works but it's too slow. I need faster deployment. Better range. Better control."
Ned snapped his fingers immediately.
"Web-shooters."
Peter stopped.
"...What?"
Ned held up his phone.
Onscreen:
A comic-book image of Spider-Man swinging between buildings.
Peter stared at it.
Then at Ned.
Then back at the phone.
"...Ned."
"What?"
"You cannot compare my horrifying scientific mutation to comic books."
"You literally stick to walls."
"That is unrelated."
"You have spider powers."
"Scientifically enhanced arachnid-adjacent abilities."
"You almost said spider powers."
"I absolutely did not."
"You absolutely did."
Peter opened his mouth.
Closed it again.
Because unfortunately Ned was making a terrible amount of sense.
Peter sat slowly on an overturned bucket.
Outside the lot, a bus rumbled past.
Two pigeons fought violently over a pretzel.
New York continued being New York.
Peter stared at his wrists thoughtfully.
The pressure sensation was there again.
Subtle.
Internal.
Like something biological waiting to happen.
"The spider silk research," Peter murmured.
Ned leaned forward immediately.
"Oh no. That's your science voice."
"If the mutation transferred arachnid physiological traits—"
"Oh he's gone."
"—then theoretically it may have altered my internal glandular systems."
Ned blinked.
"...Can you make webs?"
Peter looked down at his wrist.
Focused.
Really focused.
And suddenly—
Something shifted internally.
Pressure.
Release instinct.
Peter flicked his wrist experimentally.
THWIP.
A pale strand exploded from beneath his wrist and shot across the construction lot.
It struck the chain-link fence forty feet away and stuck instantly.
Silence.
Both boys stared.
The webline glistened faintly in afternoon sunlight.
Thin.
Translucent.
Organic.
Peter grabbed the strand carefully and pulled.
It held.
Strong.
Flexible.
Tensile strength significantly beyond normal biological material.
Ned's mouth slowly opened.
"...Oh."
Peter stared at the web.
"...Yeah."
"Oh my God."
"Yeah."
"You can make webs."
"I can make webs."
"This changes everything."
Peter looked at the strand stretching across the lot.
Then slowly upward toward the skyline beyond the unfinished buildings.
And for the first time—
The impossible started feeling real.
[STAT SCREEN — SPIDER-MAN (DEVELOPING)]NAME:
Peter Benjamin Parker
Spider-Man (designation pending)
AGE:
14
WEB PRODUCTION:
██░░░░░░░░ ACTIVE
(2/10 — range ~40 feet, strength variable)
WALL-CRAWLING:
██████████ ACTIVE
(10/10)
SPIDER-SENSE:
██████░░░░ ACTIVE
(6/10 — reactive, not predictive)
STRENGTH:
████████░░ ENHANCED
(8/10)
AGILITY:
████████░░ ENHANCED
(8/10)
COMBAT SKILLS:
██░░░░░░░░ EXTREMELY BASIC
(2/10)
SUIT STATUS:
░░░░░░░░░░ NOT YET ACQUIRED
(Current equipment: hoodie, sweatpants, ski goggles)
WAY OF THE SPIDER — PROGRESS
☑ Basic wall-crawling
☑ Web production
◩ Web-swinging (IN PROGRESS — aesthetics questionable)
◩ Spider-sense mastery
☐ Combat application
☐ Suit creation
☐ Secret identity maintenance
☐ Naming himself without sounding ridiculous