A/N: I meant to upload this yesterday. Whoops.

I'll be updating this every two weeks, keeping with the whole "this is a comic book" idea. I decided to play with Peter's power set a bit, the first example of which being that I've taken apart spider-sense into what I think it would logically be made up of.

New Marvel: The Amazing Spider-Man

Genesis- Part Two

"Evolution"

An alarm clock starred ringing, and Peter's hand had already shot out and crushed—crushed—his own before he realized that the sensation was coming from through two walls and a great deal of space. He twitched violently as a multitude of movements hit him and fell out of bed, the material of his clothes rubbing against his skin and the vibration of the alarm putting him on edge.

His own heartbeat was a steady, rhythmic pulse that his nerves refused to ignore. The heartbeats some twenty feet away were almost as bad. He twitched as he felt, both through the floor and the air, Uncle Ben's feet hitting the floor, the sensation deafening for lack of a better word. He felt Uncle Ben start moving around, felt the material of the carpet rubbing on his cheek and arm, felt the air current under the door seven feet away, felt the second hand of his wall clock move once, felt the wall and window vibrating as it absorbed the force of the wind outside. Peter clutched his head in his hands as all this and much, much more hit him and he absorbed it all.

Simultaneously.

Peter was paralyzed, every air current, ripple in pressure, and vibration feeling like a tornado. Everything was catching his attention at once, every last fiber in this stupid carpet. Peter twitched as he felt Uncle Ben walk down the stairs. He had no idea how to move when every last current of air was pressing on him with a force of what felt like at least seventy newtons.

On the nightstand above him, a fly started to lift off.

Peter moved on instinct and reflex, leaping up, twisting in midair, reaching out one hand and grabbing the fly between finger and thumb. He stayed like that for a moment, crouched with his right hand stretched out, the fly hazy in his nearsighted vision but clearly discernible as it buzzed weakly in his grasp. Gradually, he released it, and it fell to his nightstand, one wing crushed.

Okay. As disgusting as that was, Peter was slightly glad. He now had learned how to (sort of, kind of) focus on one thing in particular, although he was still paying attention to everything at once.

Peter stood, grabbing his glasses and hastily pushing them onto his nose. He twitched as the second hand of the clock ticked again, then he turned towards it as he realized that that second took a strangely long amount of time to pass. He focused on the clock, waiting for it to tick again, and found himself waiting way longer than expected. Just when he thought his clock had stopped, he jumped at the (very, very loud) tick. His own watch had ticked while he was waiting, but he could feel the source of that tick had been both smaller and located on his nightstand. Peter turned, staring at his wall clock, ready to conduct a test. The instant the second hand moved again, he started counting in his head.

He had reached forty when the second hand finally decided to move.

The same had happened with his watch, which meant that they probably weren't slow. Peter shook his head slightly. The best way he could think of to describe this was "like slow motion, but not." It made no sense, but there you were. He saw things as they happened, but he was thinking and... keeping up faster than normal. Way, way faster.

Apparently, forty times faster. Huh.

The clock ticked again, and Peter forced himself to ignore it. Instead, he turned to his alarm clock, or rather the mass of broken plastic and circuitry that had been his alarm clock. He looked at his own hand, then back at his clock, very perplexed. Hoping that it was nothing more than a fluke, something to do with last night's illness (Which would almost explain things), Peter attempted to shake off his completely justified anxieties and turned towards his door. A quick glance at the clock on his way revealed that barely twenty seconds had passed between waking up and now. He raised his eyebrows. Okay, he thought, reaching for his doorknob. I'm going to have to get used to my brain going this fast. Is there a word for this? Besides insanity? Lessee, accelerated cognition...hypercognition? Is that a word?

He stopped thinking about this as his hand finally reached his metal doorknob, and it crumpled in his hand like a piece of paper.

Peter was, by now, thoroughly terrified. Increased strength, hyper awareness, hypersensitivity to vibration, and hypercognition (Note to self: look up later) were not something he had expected or wanted, and if it turned out he was a mutant his entire life would blow up in his face. He could imagine everyone in Midtown High attempting to lynch him already. Peter tried to let go of the doorknob, only for it to tear off the door as he moved. He stared at the former doorknob stuck to his palm, then attempted to pull it off with his other hand.

No dice. The metal just deformed more. Peter thought for a moment, then jumped as the clock above him ticked once. The knob fell off his hand.

Peter, desperately trying to keep his head, pushed the door open with his foot, careful not to break anything else. He grabbed his backpack and left his bedroom, starting down the stairs.

"Hey, Pete," said Uncle Ben, smiling as Peter entered the dining room. "Feeling better today?"

Peter shook his head. "NoIreallydontIdoubtIcangotoschooltoday," he said, as fast as his mouth could form the words (far, far faster than normal, but still lagging so far behind his brain the words kept tripping over themselves).

"...What?"

Peter took a deep breath. "Sorry," he said, deliberately slowing himself to roughly the speed he heard Ben talking at. "What I said was, I don't really feel better. I don't think I can go to school today."

"Really?" said Ben. "Are you sure? You look fine to me."

"Yeah, but I feel weird." Peter had thought about it, and he decided that weird was probably the best way to put things at the moment. He found himself scared of the notion of telling Aunt May or Uncle Ben that he might have become a mutant overnight.

"How weird?"

Peter scratched his head. "Weird."

"Well," Ben said slowly, "I'm not going to force you to go to school, so I suppose you can stay home." He set his fork down. "Pity, though. You said in the car that you were running tests at OsCorp today; I really was hoping you could tell me how that went."

Peter shut his eyes slowly (well, by his new standards). "Right," he muttered to himself. Uncle Ben always took the only car when he went to work, which meant that the only way Peter could get to OsCorp was from school. And yes, they were running tests today. "Never mind," Peter said gloomily. "I'm going to school today."

"Sorry, kiddo," said Ben, meaning it.

"Whatever," Peter said, no emotion in his tone.

"Good morning Peter," said Aunt May, entering the dining room with a plate of chocolate-chip pancakes. "Are you feeling better today?"

"No," Peter said simply, grabbing the fork in front of him and pulling three pancakes off the plate, "but my appetite's back."

This was absolutely true. It was back with a vengeance.

OsCorp, later

Norman Osborn stood up slowly, drawing himself to his full height nearly 6 inches above Dr. Connors'. Slowly, and with a voice that was as hard and cold as steel, he said, "Define...'disappeared.'"

Dr. Connors cleared his throat nervously. "Disappeared. The spider's gone. We came in today and found the container labeled Tegenaria duellica, variable, empty. We don't know how it got out, but now it's gone."

Norman rested his fists on the surface of his desk, closing his eyes, clenching his jaw, and trembling with rage for just a moment. "How," he said, with obviously forced calm, "would a spider escape a sealed container by itself?"

"Well, for its size it is one of the fastest land animals on—"

"Shut up. When you find out who is responsible, fire them and report them to me...not in that order. Until then, I am holding you personally responsible. And thank whatever god you worship that you're irreplaceable."

"Yes, sir." Dr. Connors' forehead was starting to sheen.

"Also, find that spider. If that thing gets out of the building with the Oz virus in its system, whatever happens after will be both unstoppable and entirely your fault. Understood?"

Dr. Connors was nodding like a bobblehead. "Yes, sir."

"Good. Get out of here."

Dr. Connors was gone in less than three seconds. Norman exhaled through his mouth for a moment, and then brought both fists down hard onto the surface of his desk. The mahogany buckled and broke like styrofoam, and he stared at it briefly.

He had known, of course, that he was plenty strong enough to do that. Oz was not the result of OsCorp's first foray into the super-soldier arms race, but the serum that they had developed five years before had proved utterly fatal to anyone and everyone without what had turned out to be a dormant X-gene. Cells spontaneously died en masse. Promising for cancer patients, possibly, and his wife's condition had been what had caused him to fund it as much as he had. Alas, Emily had died, and although his mind was startlingly clear now, Globulin Green simply had not panned out.

The Oz virus was something else entirely. At this point, it wasn't guaranteed to work, but even if this draft didn't, the headway they had made, so far ahead of schedule, had been extraordinary. And if he lost that spider, if someone else found it...

He didn't like to think about it.

Taking his cell phone off the floor from between the two halves of his former desk, he called maintenance and instructed them to come up and start clearing away the desk's remains. He made a mental note to better control either his temper or his strength. Otherwise, he had the potential to lose a lot more desks soon.

Midtown High School, meanwhile

This was a bad idea.

Peter sat in class, fourth seat to the left in the second row, frozen in place as a hive of information hit him from all directions. He could see the individual flickers of the florescent lights. His skin, he had concluded, was more sensitive to movement now than his eardrums. This in itself would have been irritating (HIS OWN MOVEMENT AAARRGH) if his skin didn't also happen to encompass three hundred sixty degrees. As it was, he could feel everything.

Seventy-three heartbeats from seventy-three different people (the twenty in this room, the forty-three in the rooms adjacent, and the nearer half of the room across the hall) reached his skin in the form of vibrations and subtle ripples in air pressure, feeling like seventy-three different extremely small bass speakers. The more pronounced movements of nearly everyone, right down to the subtle shifting of position, were nearly deafening. It was a testament to... something... that Peter was able to even move, what with all the movements, vibrations, and air currents he felt simultaneously. His hypercognition certainly helped, keeping events more separate and allowing him to cope in less time, but even so, Peter was very nearly overwhelmed by all this.

And the conversations were annoying to have to listen to.

"Hey," whispered Sally Avril to Liz Allen in the back of the classroom, "I think Randy looked at you."

Someone who sat in the front of the class in the classroom next door coughed.

A small spherical thing flew through the air in a projectile arc, aimed directly at Peter's head. He immediately leaned back to avoid the spitball, which completely missed him.

"Hey, I'm gonna kick your ass in Call of Duty this afternoon."

"What's that smell?"

"Yeah, I opened the email and my entire computer went ppphhhfftt."

"Seriously? Are you sure?"

"Dammit."

"Haha, fat chance."

"Bad luck, man. That bites."

SHUT UP! Peter wanted to scream. He pressed his palm to the surface of his desk, immediately hearing cracking. EVERYONE SHUT THE HELL UP! I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID LIVES! I DON'T WANT TO HEAR THIS!

"For simplicity's sake," said the teacher (the one in front of the room he was in, Peter was almost absolutely sure), "we're going to round Pi to 3.14. Could anyone tell me how to calculate the volume of a sphere? Parker?"

Peter, who had been pressing his forehead to the back of his hand, looked up. "Hmm? What?"

VVVVVVVVVVVVZZZZZZZZZZZZ

"AAAAGH!" Peter screamed, jumping, flinching, and falling out of his desk at the same time as the cell phone in someone's pocket five feet away vibrated. His desktop snapped violently in half, part of it remaining stuck to Peter's palm as it came away. He pushed himself to a sitting position, staring at the former desk, then stood as he tried to pull the laminated plastic off his hand.

"Whoa!"

"Jeezus, Parker!"

"What the hell?"

Flash Thompson, who had lowered his straw upon seeing this, laughed. "And for my next trick," he said, imitating Peter's voice (badly), "I shall actually trip while sitting down!"

Peter shot a glare at Flash, and the piece of desk stuck to his hand fell off immediately. He glanced at it, kicking it away from where it was leaning on his leg, then turned to the teacher. "...four-thirds of Pi times the radius cubed."

"Parker!" The teacher said, walking down the aisle, astonished. "How did you—"

The teacher's fingers touched Peter's shoulder, probably the beginning of an action to turn Peter towards him, but the sudden(-ish) movement, plus the sensation of something solid in contact with him, caused Peter to perform a very violent flinch.

"JEEARGGHH!" Peter yelled, jumping and falling away from the teacher. He landed on his shoulder, not at all hurt, and looked up at him. There was a few seconds of silence.

"Can I go?" Peter asked. "Please? Now?"

In the bathroom

Peter cupped his hands together, letting them fill with sink water and plunging his face into the makeshift bowl. The sensation in his face was jarring, but almost pleasant in a way. He shook his head, resting his hands on the side of the sink and forcing all other input into mental periphery, focusing on his own wide-eyed, trembling refection.

"So," he said to his reflection, forcing calm on himself. "We should probably get some things worked out."

He was not a mutant. He was, by now, 93% sure of that. As far as Peter was aware, there were no mutants, ever, that had demonstrated more than two abilities. Hell, there were only like three mutants that had displayed more than one (Jean Grey had telepathy and limited telekinesis; Hank McCoy had superhuman strength and agility; and Logan, last name unknown, had a healing factor and claws). Already today he had discovered at least five. No, he probably was not a mutant.

What is this, then?

It crossed Peter's mind that he might still be sick. His increased strength and hypercognition was likely a result of massively increased adrenaline levels. His hyper awareness and extreme sensitivity to vibration was harder to explain off the bat, but he was sure that such things were occasional symptoms of a neurology problem. Peter didn't know much in the way of disease symptoms, but it seemed the most likely cause of all this.

The bell rang suddenly, and Peter flinched both at the abruptness and the volume of the thing. He threw a glare at the bell through the wall, lifting his hand off the sink, grabbing his backpack, and walking towards the door.

A small cracking noise and the piece of ceramic he felt on his palm informed him he had a passenger.

Peter stared at the piece for a moment as though trying to set it aflame with nonexistent heat vision before rolling his eyes and dropping his hand. As he took another step, he felt the ceramic fall off of his hand and huffed slightly. The sticky hands was a question that had been plaguing him for a little while, as was how it tied into the rest of the symptoms he had. So far, he had drawn a blank.

In hindsight, Peter would later realize he had been explicitly avoiding another possibility.

Peter started down the hall, listening in on all nearby conversations while at the same time trying not to focus on any one of them. He kept his eyes straight ahead, focused on the stairs some distance in front of him. His next class was upstairs. He could feel the teacher's footsteps above and to the right of him.

He could also feel Flash Thompson approaching him from behind.

"Hey, Parker!" he called.

"What?" Peter snarled, turning towards him.

Flash stopped. "Jeez," he said after a long pause. "Who the hell pissed in your Cheerio's?"

"What do you want?"

"What was that thing about in class?"

"What thing in class?" Peter replied innocently.

"You know," Flash said bluntly. "Out of nowhere, you were all like 'AAA HEART ATTACK' and ripped your desk in half!"

"And now you're here to flick shit at me for it?"

"Well, not yet." Flash chuckled. "So what was that?"

"I," Peter said, "do not know. Now drop it. I'm dealing with enough right now without—ah, crap."

"Hey, what's goin' on?" said Kong, stopping next to Flash. "Whatcha doing talking to Parker?"

"We're not talking," Peter said. "I was just leaving."

"He had a seizure and ripped his desk in half in the middle of class."

"You what, Parker? Hey! He left in the middle of our conversation!" And indeed, Peter had turned and was walking towards the stairwell. "I should kick his ass for that."

"Go ahead. Kick a field goal for me."

Peter felt the disturbances in the air of Kong moving towards him, and between that and the conversation he had witnessed, he knew what Kong intended to do. He stopped walking abruptly, letting Kong approach.

To hell with this. I'm gonna exploit my superpowers while I have them.

Because these are totally superpowers.

Peter quickly (really quickly, he noticed) moved out of the way as Kong's foot swung up, and he caught it by the heel, pulling it forward and sending Kong off-balance. He dropped his backpack into his other hand, whipping it around and hitting Kong in the face with it. Kong went falling into the middle of the hall, landing hard on his shoulder and ending up winded. Probably the first time he or any other member of Flash's little clique had ever done so.

"No goal," Peter said dryly, pulling his backpack back onto his shoulder. "Personal foul, fifteen yards. Knock it off, Kong." He smiled to himself as he finally, finally got to the stairs, trotting up. He had made history for the class of 2017: he had knocked a popular guy on his ass. Peter silently thanked his powers (for that was what he was going to refer to them as for now). Because of them, perhaps he and the rest of the nerds that dotted Midtown's halls could walk just a little taller.

Happily, Peter opened the door to Advanced English 9, slipping inside just as the bell rang.

OsCorp, later

"Hey," Peter said to Dr. Connors as he pulled on his lab coat, stopping right next to him. "Sorry I'm late. I stopped at this corner store on the way here, grabbed a snack." He held up the box that had held six Pop-Tarts and now contained nothing but empty wrappers and crumbs.

"You're not late," said Dr. Connors, glancing at his watch. "Actually, you're fairly early."

"Oh."

"Incidentally, I'm glad you're here earlier than normal, Mr. Parker. The spider we were using for the Oz virus went missing, and we need everyone to keep an eye out for it."

"...Oh."

"So while we're running tests on human stem cells, could you look for it? It's a giant house spider; about 65 millimeter legspan, brown with yellowish spots. You'll know it when you see it."

"Okay," Peter said weakly, very pale. "I'll, uhm, I'll get on that, then." He speed-walked back to the coat rack, crouching down and searching for spider remains. Nothing. The custodian must have come in during the night.

Peter took a deep breath, trying not to panic. In hindsight, he really should have figured this out sooner. Of course he had been infected by the Oz virus. They had already finished developing the prototype, and he had heard someone mention that they had already begun a test on several different orders of animal. Spiders were supersensitive to vibration. So was he, now. Spiders had insanely fast nerve conduction velocity. He also did. He wasn't positive that spiders were hyper aware, but he was pretty sure that they were a good deal better at focusing on many things at once than humans. Eight legs plus eight eyes plus pedipalps and all.

For God's sake, the adhesion should have been a dead giveaway.

The adhesion also made it clear just how terrified Peter should have been. He had grown nanohairs overnight. Quite obviously, each and every one of his cells either were right now undergoing a massive overhaul, or they already had. Peter knew that the virus had been designed so that the change would happen pretty much immediately, but that didn't mean that it was even close to finished. A horrible image of a cancerous human-spider hybrid, venom dripping from its fanged mouth, formed in Peter's imagination, and he desperately looked around for an unused computer fitted with a gene mapper.

He sighed in relief as he saw one in the corner for Transgenic Research. Quickly making sure no one was watching, he inconspicuously walked to it and found a Petri dish treated on the bottom with an odd-colored material. Peter reached a finger into his mouth and scraped the inside of his cheek, wiping the translucent slime of cells on the bottom of the Petri dish and repeating the process several times. That done, he closed the small dish and slid it into the slot on the hologram projector. The vibrations of multiple fans started, and Peter gritted his teeth in discomfort.

After a few minutes (at least, that's what it felt like, what with hypercognition and all; it was probably only a few seconds), a holographic human body appeared, and Peter tapped his foot irritably. After a few more seconds that felt like long minutes, green letters appeared just above Peter's eye level.

SEVERE MUTATION DETECTED

Yeah, yeah, I know about that, Peter thought. I want to know the extent of the mutation.

Mutation Stabilized

Hybrid: Homo sapiens / Tegenaria duellica

Peter tapped his foot. Okay. The virus's work is done. That makes sense. But is it done with me?!

After a few seconds, the words CONDITION STABLE and SPECIMEN HEALTHY appeared floating in midair at eye level, and Peter sighed in relief. Condition Stable meant that he was not changing further than he already had. The Man-Spider Scenario could be safely disregarded as a possibility. Specimen Healthy meant that he was not poisoning himself slowly. And between those two little phrases, every one of Peter's fears vanished.

I'm fine. I'm not changing any more. I'm fine. My mutation isn't progressing. I'm fine.

And. I . Have. Superpowers.

Peter breathed out, suddenly reveling in the fact that he was one of only six or seven non-mutant Marvels to ever exist. He cleared the display, removed the Petri dish, and threw it into the nearest sink. Flexing his right arm, he felt his bicep. Huh. No bigger, but rock hard. Wonder how strong I am. Obviously pretty strong, but I'd like to put a number on it. I'll have to figure that out later.

"Dr. Connors," he heard on the other side of the lab. "You may want to see this."

Peter turned his head, listening in on what was being said.

"What am I looking at?"

"The stem cells have released four hundred copies of the virus. And RNA for protein creation has already made its way to the ribosomes."

"...Incredible. Continue monitoring the cells for the next forty-eight hours and give me two hour updates. Also monitor the decay of the released viruses."

Peter grinned. They had hit the nail on the head. He thought about telling Dr. Connors about their first successful human trial, but held back due to what had been burned into his mind the previous day, simply because Norman Osborn himself said it.

The respective letters to Weapon X and S.H.I.E.L.D.

Weapon X was an incredibly secret government operation, one that was supposedly created for the weaponizing of mutants. Rumor had it that twenty years ago they had captured Logan last-name-unknown, applied an adamantium coating to his skeleton, and erased his memory. Peter had a feeling that they would be happy to have a mutate to experiment on. The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Espionage, and Logistics Division was an organization that, among other things, monitored attempts to create superhumans. Although Peter's parents had both worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., he wasn't sure he wanted them to know that he, Peter Parker, had become a Marvel.

And if he told Dr. Connors, Norman Osborn would be told, so both Weapon X and S.H.I.E.L.D. would know. No, this was his secret.

Peter walked across the lab, stooping over and making himself look busy nearby the table the spider's empty jar sat on. On a whim, he reached up and grabbed the jar without looking, pulling it into his view. He weakened his grip on it upon seeing the huge cracks originating at the placement of each finger, and resolved to get full control over his strength as soon as he possibly could.

Turning it over, he quickly memorized the scientific name of the spider. Tegenaria duellica. Peter nodded once, making a note to research the species at length later. Putting the container back, he went back to pretending to look for something that he knew wasn't there. As he pretended to look on the underside of the table, he felt Gwen approaching from the door.

"What are you doing?"

Peer looked up at her. "The spider they were testing the Oz virus on. It's missing. They wanted me to look for it, presumably because they didn't need many hands to monitor a bunch of cells on a computer screen."

"It's missing?!" Gwen repeated, aghast. "How'd it even get out?!"

Peter shrugged. That was actually an excellent question. "No clue. Somehow, it did. As it is, he wanted me to look for the thing. If you're not doing anything, I could use some help."

Gwen nodded. "Let me check if he wants me to do something else." She turned and approached Dr. Connors fifteen feet away, tapping him on the shoulder. "Is there anything you need me to do?" she asked him. "Or do you want me to help look for that spider?"

"Oh, hello Ms. Stacy. Yes, if you could try and find it, that would be great. Thank you."

"Right," she said. She went back to Peter, who had moved to the next table. "So where have you looked?"

Outside, later

"I heard you were fighting at school."

Peter winced as he buckled his seatbelt. "Ah, right. That."

"What happened?" asked Uncle Ben as he pulled away from the curb.

Peter scratched the back of his neck. "Well, it was like this. Kong—that's what everyone calls him—I was walking down the hall, and then he tried to, quite literally, kick my a—butt. So I knocked him down and left. That's all there was to it. No one was hurt or anything."

Ben smiled. "Well, Pete. Glad to know you're finally defending yourself. But, listen, if your aunt asks, I chewed you out and told you that you should've diffused the situation nonviolently. You know, with those "I feel" messages and... stuff."

"Gotcha. I'm not in trouble for this, right?"

"Probably not," Ben said. "Now, listen, when we get home let's get started cleaning the garage. I was thinking that we would work until dinner—"

"Ah, Uncle Ben," Peter said, "I was kind of going to do something really important when we got home. Could I blow off garage cleaning? I want to get on this, like, immediately."

Ben looked slightly disappointed. "Sure. We'll attack it with gusto tomorrow."

"Absolutely."

The Parker Residence, twenty minutes later

Tegenaria ducellica, Peter typed into the search bar, carefully hitting each key in turn. The letters appeared on the screen extremely rapid-fire.

Did you mean: Tegenaria duellica, Google replied. Peter rolled his eyes, clicking on the link. He clicked Wikipedia's entry on the giant house spider, reading the entire article in three seconds. The article was fairly brief, describing the spider's appearance, habitat, toxicity, et cetera, but the thing that caught his attention was speed.

Evidently someone had considered the speed of this spider to be worth mentioning, as there was a section dedicated especially to that, and with good reason. With speeds clocked at 1.73 ft/s (0.53 m/s), the giant house spider held theGuinness Book of World Records for top spider speed until 1987 when it was displaced bysun spiders (solfugids) although the latter are not true spiders as they belong to a different order. Peter whistled, an impressed gesture, then scrolled back up to the section on appearance.

Lessee here,Peter thought. The males can range between 12 to 15 millimeters. .53 meters a second is 530 millimeters a second. So, going on Wikipedia alone, the male can move somewhere between 35.33 and 44.17 times its body length per second.

Peter bit his tongue slightly. Alright, the speed I've been moving at today shows some kind of superhuman speed here, so let's assume, for now, that I have its proportionate speed. Can I figure out exactly how fast I am? Probably not immediately, but I can form a hypothesis.

Because if I want to figure out my superpowers, I'm doing it scientifically.

Stealing the number from his hypercognition, Peter guesstimated that he was able to move at about 40 times his body length per second. The number didn't seem right, but then again it was a hypothesis. Peter resolved to test that later, then moved on to how strong he theoretically was.

A Google search produced information stating that most spiders could lift around eight to ten times their weight. I don't know, though, Peter thought. If I could lift only 1,350 pounds I don't think I'd be able to crush doorknobs like paper. I think I'm stronger than that.

Heh. "Only" 1,350 pounds. I crack me up.

Peter rolled his chair over to his bed, getting up and laying down with his head and shoulders under the bed. He pushed himself a little farther under the bed, before placing his left hand on the underside of the bed frame and bench pressing the entire thing with one hand.

Granted, this thing weighs probably only around 200 pounds, mattress and all, but DAMN if I don't feel like a badass right now.Peter set the bed down where it had been, grinning to himself. What kind of muscle mass do spiders have anyways? He returned to his laptop, asking the internet the same question. They extend their limbs hydrostatically? Really? I...never would have seen that coming. Peter wondered how exactly that translated into super strength for him until he read on and found that spiders did have some incredibly powerful muscles for overcoming said hydraulic pressure. Ah, there we are, he thought. Still, I wonder if my muscle cells are hydraulic somehow. He started typing something else into the search bar, his fingers flying too fast for normal human eyes, and then stopped.

Keys had been pulled off his laptop by his fingertips.

Peter stared at the keys stuck to his fingers for a moment, then closed his eyes for a second and felt a slight tightness in his hands relax and the keys fall off. Opening his eyes, he pushed each key back into place, then opened a new tab and typed, slightly more carefully, How do spiders stick to walls? and hit ENTER.

In the second result, Peter found an article on the adhesion abilities of jumping spiders, which he supposed was close enough. The article explained that spiders had small things called setules that adhered to surfaces via the van der Waals force, and Peter bit his lip as he stared at his own hand. According to the picture accompanying the article, each setule was one thousand nanometers wide at the tip, and the base was more along the lines of one hundred. Considering that a skin cell was about 30 square microns, 60 setules could comfortably fit on one of Peter's skin cells. Although the article claimed they didn't know how exactly spiders detached their feet from the walls, Peter had figured out what was important to him. It was a conscious choice, little more than a mental switch to flip if one knew how to do it.

Maybe I should get some experience then.

Peter stood up, closing his window blinds. He stared at his hands, then at the wall across from the closed and covered window. Recalling all the many times he had seen spiders walking across walls and ceilings, he placed his left hand against the painted plaster, and felt a curious sensation of the skin of his palm and fingers growing slightly taut. He repeated the action with his right hand.

Then his left foot.

Then his right.

Three seconds later, Peter was crouched on the ceiling, hanging there by nothing more than his fingers and toes. His adhesion ability was working through the threadbare material of his socks; that had surprised him. All the same, he was ecstatic. This ability, this superpower, was incredible on so many levels. This had happened to him overnight?! He chuckled to himself, giddy.

"Cool," he whispered.

11:30 p.m.

Peter pulled off each of his socks with the big toe of the opposite foot, flipping the switch to activate the homemade electronic lock on his door. He turned off his light and walked to the window, opening it and removing the screen, then climbed out hesitantly. Sticking to the outside wall of the house, he closed his window all but a crack. Then, slowly (to him), he climbed down to the ground.

Walking to the backyard, Peter flexed one of his legs experimentally. If his fingers were capable of crushing a steel knob like tissue paper, he wondered what feats his legs were capable of accomplishing. He licked his lips, then crouched as low as he could and jumped straight up, as high as he could manage.

"HOLY SHIT!" he screamed, finding himself nearly a hundred feet off the ground three seconds later.

He braced himself for hitting the ground, spending at least half of what seemed like two minutes holding his breath. Finally landing on his feet, Peter was shocked to find that, far from being reduced to a bloody mass of dead, he landed quite easily, as though he had jumped two feet. He rocked on his heels. Holy shit! he thought, laughing. That was awesome!

So that's how powerful my legs are. And apparently I'm made of freaking iron. How about my arms?

Peter jumped again, this time little more than a hop, and alighted on the roof of his house. He set his sights on the sidewalk, jumping and landing perfectly where he had aimed, right next to a small car. Putting his hands against it, Peter pushed lightly, and the entire car tipped up onto the opposite two wheels. I'm pushing half a car into the air. I can do this without any effort at all. Obviously I am stronger than 1,350 pounds.

He let it down, then, deciding to run a quick speed test, got into a terribly unprofessional runner's stance. Heeding an imaginary gunshot, Peter broke into a full-out sprint, moving just a little less than five feet seven inches a second relative to him. In ten seconds, he had run almost a half the 4,000 foot length of Ingram Street, then his pace started to fail. Peter wasn't surprised at all. The cheetah only ran 65 miles per hour, and could do it for maybe thirty seconds. Skidding to a halt, Peter put his hands on his quadriceps, feeling the massive amount of heat that had been created.

Okay, that hurt. But it was awesome.

And look at that. My heart rate's already gone down again.

Peter stretched, then set off in a sprint again, turning on a dime and running down 71 Avenue. As felt his pace start failing again, his exhausted muscles simply unable to keep up their speed, he turned again and jumped as far as he could—an almost 600 foot leap.

He landed on a car parked at the curb, accidently smashing its roof in before the car alarm blared loudly. Peter yelped in surprise and discomfort as the sound waves hit his skin, then quickly recovered and jumped to the top of a nearby streetlamp, just out of the light and thus shrouded in shadow. To the irritated neighbors who looked out their window a few moments later, he was an all but invisible mass of black.

The shock of the car alarm had left Peter thinking. He had, for the most part, gotten a handle on his hypersensitivity to vibration, learning to discern both movement and the position of living (breathing, with a constant beacon of a heartbeat) creatures. He had learned to pick out extraordinarily fine detail from ripples in air pressure that he wouldn't even have felt before. He had also learned how to shunt most of this into periphery, still fully aware and acknowledging it yet devoting actual thought and focus to one or two (or more) things at a time.

Sudden, comparatively loud vibrations, like the noise of that alarm, were another matter. All the way through his walk from Midtown High School to OsCorp Tower, he had been thrown off by the horns, the yelling, the acceleration of objects with nearly thirty times more mass than himself. He really, really wanted to get it under control.

And now, if he jumped, he could very easily see the Queensboro Bridge, and beyond it one of the loudest, most overwhelming cities on the planet. It was some six miles away, but if he played his cards right he could reach it quickly, with a lot of gas left in the tank.

Peter rose from his crouch, cracking his back in preparation. There was no fear and no hesitation in his next movements. He jumped to one of the many trees planted along the sidewalk, then the next, bouncing from tree to tree as fast as he could. He soon found himself settling into a comfortable pace, something between a jog and a series of jumps, bouncing across streetlamps and trees and houses alike. Every leap was a single sprinting pace, and there was ample time between steps to recover slightly. He was headed towards the bridge at over a hundred miles per hour.

He reached it in less than four minutes. Jumping from the smokestack he stood on to the bridge's support beams, he stuck, climbing up to the top of the nearby pylon and jogging to Manhattan, the run taking forty-five seconds. Hopping to the smokestack immediately to his left, he jumped to the side of the skyscraper nearby. Peter slowly detached his fingers from the wall, stood and sprinted up. Upon reaching the ledge, he jumped straight up, executing a surprisingly elegant front flip and landing with ease on his fingertips and the balls of his feet.

The city stretched before him was magnificent. The Chrysler Building was visible in the distance, the Empire State Building not far behind it. Peter closed his eyes as the horns and yells and moving cars washed over his senses, getting used to the sensation of a multitude of objects just that big moving constantly. He smiled as he felt the traffic beneath him start moving. He had it.

Eyes still closed, Peter easily made the jump to the next building. Sprinting across it, he opened his eyes, seeing the layout of the buildings in front of him and forming a plan of motion on the fly. Jump, Bounce, Vault. Land, Three steps of sprinting. Jump, Dive, Roll, Jump. Holy crap, he was agile. Swing on flagpole, Release. Stick.

Peter remained crouched on the wall for a moment, looking behind him and seeing just how far he had come in how little time. Grinning to himself, he climbed to the top of the building he was on, then jumped to the car park across the street from it.

The top level of the car park was nearly empty, but there were a few cars parked here and there. Peter examined each of them for an instant, before approaching the one that appeared lightest. He lay on his back, worming his way under the car until he was under what he figured was its center of gravity, put both hands on the Volkswagen's underside, and pushed up. Breathing deeply, Peter slowly and awkwardly sat up, taking the Beetle with him. He stood.

Peter "Puny" Parker, one of the least athletic freshmen in Midtown High School, was lifting a 2013 Volkswagen Beetle, which weighed at least one ton, over his head. Easily.

Peter grinned, then laughed. Shifting his hand position slightly, he dropped his left hand, proceeding to continue supporting the car above his head with one hand. His lone arm trembled in exertion and he felt himself tiring quickly, but he was giddy all the same. Switching to both hands, Peter bent his arms slightly, then hurled the car's weight forward. It sailed some fifteen feet as Peter sprinted past it, and he caught it again with ease. Carrying it back to its parking spot, Peter set the Volkswagen down, then hopped on top of it, grinning like a Cheshire Cat as he flexed both arms.

It was official, Peter decided. Not only was he a superhuman, he was the most powerful Earthly Marvel ever. Ever. He didn't know how much he could lift, or why he was that freaking strong, but the only other Marvels to ever demonstrate a feat of strength like that were Thor and the Hulk, neither of which counted in Peter's mind: Thor was quite possibly an actual god, and the Hulk was the Hulk. Physics majors hated him more than the entire military combined.

And no one, Earthly, "Asgardian", or otherwise, had ever been able to run as fast as Peter had run that night. His jumping was amazing. His agility, spectacular. His hyperawareness, hypersensitivity, and hypercognition were beyond extraordinary. His adhesion... while not exactly the coolest of his powers, was still pretty awesome.

Peter pressed his fingertips to the roof of the car, slowly and deliberately lifting himself into a handstand. He used his agility, hyper awareness, and cognition to adjust perfectly first on two hands, then one, then finally his right index finger. Wobbling slightly (Practice, he thought, practice makes perfect...), he bent both knees, maintaining balance fairly well, then deliberately fell back, landing on his feet next to the car and flipping up towards a streetlamp.

Grab. Spin. Release. Peter landed on the parapet of the nearby building, headed back to Queens. So, he thought as he landed on an air conditioning unit, denting it. The Oz virus (oops) works. Perfectly. We did it. I did it. We did it, first and foremost me. Yeah, that seems about right.

Peter jumped, flying over a building and landing on the smokestack next to the Queensboro bridge. He hopped to the nearest pylon, then started to run across the bridge. He grinned as he ran, imagining the frontier that they had just passed. He saw disease coming to an abrupt end. The regrowth of amputated limbs (Dr. Connors would like that, he reflected). An army of Marvels. Because of this virus, this one little carrier of genes, a new age had dawned quite literally overnight.

That's what I am now, isn't it? Peter thought, jumping off the bridge and onto a nearby rooftop. I'm both the creator and first member of a new world.

My name is Peter Parker. I'm the first non-Hulk mutate in twenty-four years, and the first Wizard of Oz (HA! Wizard of Oz! I like that!). And I changed the world.

Peter leapt across two streets, letting out a loud "WHOO-HOO!" at the apex of the jump.

A/N: First of all, I don't know exactly how Peter's as strong as he is. So don't ask; just go with his hypothesis.

Secondly, I decided he had to be roughly comicverse fast and strong considering both the sheer size of New York City and the power level of supervillains he'll be fighting. Yeah, he uses his brain to win, but he first needs to survive long enough to do that. Even now, he will barely be able to half the time.

The rule of thumb here is that Peter can bench press ~100 times his weight and flat-out sprint at ~35 times his body length per second, under normal circumstances. At the moment, that means he can press 6.75 tons and run at 133.2 miles per hour. He can only keep that pace up for about ten seconds, but he only takes one second to recover for another sprint. I think that when Peter's desperate (Not do-or-die type desperate, do-or-loved-ones-die, ASM#33 type desperate) he can push beyond the strength limit I gave here. How much remains to be seen, but in ASM#33 situations, probably quite a lot.

Please review! Excelsior!

(Yeah, he seems overpowered now, but it's like his scientific genius. Either he's in situations where it's barely useful at all, or he'll need every ounce of that strength. Bear with me.)