Formulation 29-A-03, initial test sequence started 03:12 June 19th...
Peter carefully noted down the latest web fluid batch number in his notebook, adding a few thoughts on expected performance, then flipped it shut and stuck it in his costume's hidden pocket along with the pen. Plucking the cartridge of fluid out of the protective foam lining the small box, he pulled up his right sleeve to expose the web projector and snapped the thing into place. Once he'd repeated the process with the left one, he adjusted both sleeves, nodding to himself. The flat box joined the notebook and pen, then he walked over to the edge of the roof and peered over, looking some seven hundred feet straight down a glassy canyon wall to the street far below.
Even now, he found the sight mesmerizing, and just a little scary. Sure, he could probably survive the fall if things went badly wrong, but it would definitely sting a lot. And the embarrassment factor would be pretty off the scale too. 'Spider-man face plants on sidewalk!' the headlines would shout. And Jameson would laugh like a hyena, which would make the entire thing even more painful.
"Probably best not to do that, then," the young man said to himself a little ruefully, thinking back on other events in his relatively short career so far as a superhero. Not all of them had ended well…
Which was why he was doing his testing at three in the morning on a weekend, since there were somewhat less people wandering around at the moment. If he fucked it up, with any luck no one would notice.
This latest formulation of his web fluid should, if he'd got it right this time, not only be stronger than the last one by nearly two hundred percent, but also stretch close to eighty percent more without any problems. That would store more elastic energy allowing him to swing further and faster without using so much, making the entire process more efficient. And hopefully mean he didn't run out so fast, since the stuff was expensive to make and money wasn't exactly the sort of thing he was rolling in right now. Some superheroes were also billionaires and could afford fancy suits of power armor and all the toys they wanted. Him, he had a limited budget, most of which had gone on his costume, and could barely afford to make the fluid in the first place.
So nearly doubling the amount of use he could get out of a cartridge was something he was very interested in.
Assuming that it worked this time, unlike the previous two times. He still remembered the nasty sensation of snap! as the strand parted under his weight, right at the point where it made impact with that window inevitable…
He sighed, remembering the shouting, and the apologizing, and the police, and the running away. It had not been his finest moment. Even though he'd managed to anonymously pay for the repair later, he still felt guilty about it.
'I wonder if Iron Man ever flew through someone's shop window?' he mused as he prepared himself. 'At least he could pay for it without having to end up eating ramen for three weeks...'
Shaking his head, he stopped dwelling on the past and mistakes that might have been made, tensed, then jumped. Fifty feet down he aimed his right web projector and triggered it, smiling when the shot whipped out at high velocity and stuck to the window ledge he'd been going for with a faint splat. Keeping his finger on the trigger for the estimated amount of time to get a line long enough to work, he grabbed the end with both hands as it finished extruding and hung on. His fall turned into an arc as the line hit the point it began to stretch, his path moving out from the building at an angle.
The line kept stretching far past the previous limits, the ground below coming closer pretty damn fast, and the other side of the street likewise. His smile of triumph slowly turned into a look of worry as his eyes widened, the line continuing to stretch although it was doing so more and more slowly. "Oh, shit!" he yelled, seeing the windows of the building across the street rapidly approaching.
Just as he was bracing himself for the shattering of glass and another irate Daily Bugle headline, he felt the web strand reach the limit of elasticity, causing his arc to tighten suddenly and swing him across the face of the skyscraper at high velocity. He found himself running sideways over the glass, frantically trying to keep from going out of control. Moments later the strand started to recoil, yanking him away from the building with considerably more acceleration than he'd expected and flinging him back to the other side of the road and upwards.
"Gahh!" he screamed in shock, letting go and launching another strand back the way he'd just come from barely in time to stop himself being catapulted right through the front of the building next to the one he'd jumped off. Again, he overcooked it a little, not yet having calibrated his reflexes for the much springier new web material, and found his face being smacked pretty hard into the window with a solid thud, although luckily not hard enough to break the toughened glass. A second later he was twanged off it and away once more.
'Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck!' Peter thought, frantically trying to get himself back under control. He swung back and forth from side to side of the wide street, once going low enough that he had to pull his legs up to his chest to stop them hitting the pavement. His ass dragged along it for a second while a yellow cab slammed to a halt just in front of him with an irate cabbie leaning on the horn and gesturing rudely at him, then he was ascending again.
'This might be a little too efficient!' he screamed in his mind, flinching as he swept past a flagpole sticking out at an angle from one of the buildings and missing it by inches. The sight of another one coming up directly in his path made his eyes widen again under his mask and he let go of the current web line, dropping under the obstruction before launching another tether upwards.
"That was close," he said out loud, looking back. Moments later he found that this was a bad move as he slammed into a billboard that had sneakily placed itself directly in his way. The impact knocked the breath out of him, and just as he managed to recover and open his eyes, the now-taut web line he was still holding decided to be difficult.
"Oh, no," he managed to whisper in dismay, then he was flying backwards at ever increasing speed. Once more he missed a flagpole by inches, bounced off the corner of one of the buildings with a crunch, and was launched sideways in a flat spin as he let go of the line in desperation.
"I'll laugh about this when I look back on it," he assured himself as he plummeted groundwards. Spotting a small girl staring out at him from one of the windows he passed, he waved, then fired off another web strand. A second later he was heading back the way he'd come from while behind him the girl waved back.
Some five or six very exciting minutes later he finally managed to gain a semblance of control over his new webs as he became accustomed to the vastly springier material. It proved to be far superior to the previous formulation, he decided, although that initial training period was a bitch.
"Woohoo!" he yodeled as he swung down the street, now able to enjoy himself, rather than shit bricks.
"Wheee!" an unfamiliar voice yelled, making him jerk in shock and look to the side. "This is fun!"
"What the fuck?" he yelped. The tall slender lizard wearing what looked like a copy of his costume, although with the colors inverted, waved gaily at him as it swung past upside down, hanging from a strand of webbing that seemed to be attached to its long tail.
"Hi!" the thing called, "Nice night, isn't it?"
He gaped in shock. The voice seemed to indicate the reptilian thing was female, and it sounded in a very good mood. But… Lizard?
Quickly glancing ahead he shook himself out of his momentary distraction, firing the next web line and transferring to it. When he checked, the lizard was now on his other side, also on a new line. He had no idea where she was shooting them from or how they ended up attached to her tail, since there was no sign of any mechanism.
"I should do this at home," the reptilian female said, clearly audible over the whoosh of air past them both, and the sounds of traffic three hundred feet under them. She released the line, somersaulted twice, then produced another one from her hand somehow and flipped the right way up, waving with her free hand. "It's a cool idea."
He absently noticed she was even wearing a copy of his own mask although it was modified to fit over what was clearly a non-human head.
"What… Who… How?" he muttered, still trying to work out if he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.
"Building," she called.
"What?" Peter said, befuddled.
She pointed past him. "Building!"
He looked. "Oh, hell." A moment's rapid action had him swinging away from the collision course he'd been on. Taking a breath of relief, he looked around, not seeing the lizard woman on either side.
"That was close," a voice said from right above him. He flinched, looking upwards quickly, to see she was neatly paralleling his own course about twenty feet further up. "You really have to keep your eyes open doing this, don't you?"
"Who are you?" he shouted, releasing his current line and firing another one, then altering course to aim himself up to the roof of the latest skyscraper. She followed easily. As he passed the roof-line in an upwards arc he let go, somersaulting three times and sticking the landing perfectly, then straightening up with a hidden smile.
She somersaulted four times, landing in a classic superhero three point pose with her tail out behind her, then chuckled.
"Sorry, I couldn't resist," the lizard said as she straightened up. "My name is Saurial. I saw you passing and thought I'd join in. You seemed to be having so much fun, bouncing around all over the place like that. All the screaming was a nice touch."
Peter sighed. He wasn't sure what was happening but it was getting weird. Before he could open his mouth, she added, "We were just in the area seeing some friends and I decided to go exploring." She shrugged. "The last few times we've visited we didn't really have time to look around all that much." Glancing to the side where the Avenger's tower rose above the familiar New York skyline, she went on, "Tony seems to have fixed his place up, though. All those broken windows were a bit of a mess."
Looking at the distant building, then back at the reptilian figure, he finally said, "You know Iron Man?"
"Oh, sure. We've met several times. Just after that mess with the aliens invading, when he was having trouble with an upset robot, stuff like that." Saurial shrugged. "We pop in from time to time to see what's going on. Doctor Banner is an interesting guy, we've talked quite a lot. There are a few people around the place we keep an eye on." Turning back to him she looked him up and down. "I wanted to meet you, actually. I'm impressed with your work so far."
Feeling that he didn't have a clue what the fuck was going on, Peter stared at her for a few seconds. As he watched, the inverted variant of his costume disappeared, being replaced with a trench coat and fedora like something out of an old noir movie. He twitched but managed to suppress his shock.
The face revealed under the hat was definitely reptilian in nature, blue scales covering a short muzzle, topped with a pair of glowing yellowish eyes similar to those of a cat, which were watching him with an amused look. "It's nice to finally meet, Spider-man."
"How did..." He stopped, then waved a hand at her a little ineffectually. She looked down at herself, then back at him, grinning and showing a number of very sharp teeth, which again made him flinch just a little.
"Oh, that's just an old Family technique," she replied, "don't worry about it."
He could literally hear the capitalization in the word 'Family' although he had no idea quite how she managed it.
"Like I said, I'm Saurial." She held out a hand, which after a few seconds of befuddlement, he shook, not really knowing what else to do. The reptilian female appeared friendly if nothing else. "No, I'm not a mutant, or a metahuman, or any of the other types of powered people you guys have, before you ask."
"Are you an alien?" he found himself saying.
She waved a hand a little dismissively. "In one way, yes. In another way, no." Grinning, she added after a moment, "I was born on Earth. Just not this Earth."
'Parallel worlds,' he realized with amazement. 'One where dinosaurs evolved into intelligence? Bizarre.'
Saurial walked over to the edge of the roof and looked out at the city. "Your version of New York is even bigger than ours is," she said after a moment, sounding mildly impressed. "Mind you, we had a lot of trouble a while back that took a long time to properly fix. Got it sorted now, but it was pretty bad for a time."
"Oh," he managed, still wondering what on earth was going on.
"Yeah, alien invasion, basically. Worse than yours, and more insidious. But we handled it in the end and made sure it wouldn't happen again." Turning back to him, she continued, "Got some useful things out of it as well, so in a weird way it wasn't all bad. Not ideal even so, though."
"Alien invasions are never helpful," he quipped, deciding to just roll with it.
She chuckled. "Not really, no. It's best to head them off before that point if you can. Sorry about that whole Chitauri thing, if we'd known in time we might have been able to help. But it worked out all right in the end thanks to Tony and his little club. And a few other people."
Peter nodded, wondering what she meant, but not sure how to ask. Walking slowly around the roof perimeter with her coat flapping in the breeze, Saurial examined the scenery, while he followed, watching her and thinking.
"Have you ever thought of joining the Avengers?" she asked after a little while.
He glanced at her, then at the tall building in the distance, the signature symbol on the side brightly lit and easily visible even at this range. "Not really," he replied having thought about it. "I'm not sure I'd be a good fit, aside from anything else. And I doubt they'd want me. I mean, I'm just one guy, an independent. What would I have to offer them?"
"You're very smart, you've got some serious skills and your abilities are impressive," she remarked, looking at him. "And unlike most of those guys, you understand ordinary people. People without super-powers. I'm not sure they do. Maybe Captain America, but he's often kind of out of his depth, he was stuck in that ice for a long time. The world of today isn't what he's used to and it causes him issues. Tony is brilliant and he means well, but he's also a complete asshole in many ways. And kind of a womanizer, and a bit of a drunk, and irresponsible, and..." She snickered, shaking her head.
"He's not the sort of guy a girl's dad would like her bringing home, put it like that."
Peter found himself laughing a little. If the stories in the papers were even vaguely correct, she had a point.
"Then you have a Norse God who doesn't really get humans that well, a rage monster who, while he's actually a nice guy, has impulse control problems at times, an archer guy who never takes anything seriously, and an ex-assassin. Who takes everything too seriously." Saurial smiled at him for a moment. "I mean, I'm hardly one to complain about not taking things seriously, trust me, but you get the point. Most of them are sort of out of touch with the public. High profile, powerful, and usually running around after the big problems. You deal with the little stuff, but it's the stuff that actually matters to the average person in the street. Maybe they could use your down to earth attitude. And you could use their resources."
She fell silent and kept wandering along with him trailing behind her, considering her words. Eventually, he shook his head. "I still don't think I'd fit in that well. I can't explain why, really."
"Fair enough. It was just a thought." Saurial shrugged. "I'm certainly not going to try to persuade you, you're the one who would know. I was just curious." She grinned sideways at him. "Maybe one day you'll start your own group. Spider-man and his Spider-friends."
Again, Peter found himself snickering. "Yeah, I don't think that's likely to happen." She gave him a look of amusement but didn't say anything.
By the time they'd circled the entire roof and ended up back where they'd started, he'd found to his confusion that he had stopped thinking of this strange reptilian woman as a possible threat and was actually enjoying her company for some reason. He didn't know why, but there was no denying that she somehow radiated an air of calmness that was unusual, like she knew her place in the world and was entirely content with it.
He slightly envied that.
"So, you're really an alien from another reality or something?" he tentatively asked.
She glanced at him. "More or less, in a way. That's not entirely accurate but it's kind of complicated to explain properly. It's not a parallel world like science fiction would put it although it's something in that general idea. My home is a version of this one, but things are pretty different in some ways." She looked around at the skyline, then back to him. "Even though quite similar in others."
"And people in your world are all lizards?" He really was wondering about the likelihood of a civilization of reptiles evolving on a variant Earth and still ending up with New York. It seemed implausible in the extreme.
"No, not at all," she smiled. "Most of them are as human as you are. But we live there too and have done for a long time. We get on fine, although right at the beginning some of them were a little puzzled. Everything worked out pretty well in the end though. And we have a lot of people with superpowers there too. We call them Parahumans generally, although that doesn't actually fit in our case. We're… slightly different."
"Huh." He found the entire idea fascinating. And the concept that he'd be casually chatting to a self-professed alien lizard woman was certainly not one he'd considered before a short while ago.
They stood next to each other watching the city go about its business for a while, neither saying anything, until she spoke quietly. "I've got a little advice for you if you'll accept it, something gained from a lot of experience." She met his eyes for a second, then went back to watching the cars go past far below. "Don't try to fix everything all by yourself. Trust me, it doesn't work. I know more about you and your circumstances than you might expect, and I understand a lot of what drives you. But one person can't do everything. Not even in my case, and I've got more power than I know what to do with. Same thing goes for all of us. My best friend nearly killed herself trying to repair every single problem she found, and even though she saved more lives single-handedly than anyone else I know, she couldn't do it all."
The lizard woman turned her head to regard him as he listened. "My own father told me the same thing right back when I decided I wanted to help out too. He was right. You need to live your life, not just spend it in a futile effort to do everything yourself. All that will do is make you die tired, and there will still be things left to fix."
He was silent, and after a moment, she continued, "I don't mean don't help people, not at all. You make a big difference, despite what some newspaper editors might say. But take some time for yourself now and then, don't just live for the mask. I've seen what happens in that case, and it's not good. One guy I met..." She sighed. "He got carried away and we had to persuade him to back off a bit. Again, he meant well, but he was too invested in trying to fix the unfixable to the point he was missing the obvious. It happens. Human nature being what it is, if you go looking for trouble you'll always find it. And it can take over."
Returning her gaze to the city, she stopped talking, while he thought. Neither said anything for another few minutes.
"I can't not help," he finally said. "I got these powers by accident, but I need to use them responsibly."
"I'm familiar with your motto," she replied with a faint chuckle apparent in her voice. "And for the most part I agree. But it's a guideline, not a universal constant. Which are more flexible than you'd expect, as it happens, but that's not important right now. There's wiggle room that still allows for a personal life, and some time off here and there. Everyone needs a break. Even superheroes."
She snickered. "Even supervillains in some cases, for that matter. So do your best, but don't get hung up on the fact that no matter how hard you try you won't save everyone. It'll drive you nuts sooner or later."
With a shrug, Saurial added, "You don't have to listen, of course, it's not really any of my business, but it's something I've learned over the years. It might help."
Peter sighed a little, nodding. "Yeah, I understand. I think."
With a last look towards the Avenger's tower, she said, "I'm going to have to go in a minute, I still have a few things to do tonight. But I've got something for you that might help your career in spandex." The lizard grinned at him as he looked curiously at her, then was holding a box that hadn't been there a moment before. Handing it to him, she said, "Here. Have fun with it."
Taking the box after a couple of seconds, he inspected it in the dim light coming from the ever present sky glow. "What is it?"
"Just some useful tools and equipment that your basic friendly neighborhood Spider-man might find useful," she said with a wink. "Read the manual first." Moving backwards she stepped up onto the parapet around the roof and waved to him. "See you around."
As he watched, she gracefully back-flipped off the roof and disappeared downwards, her face showing a mischievous grin as it dropped out of sight. Somehow her fedora stayed on her head in the process.
By the time he got to the edge and looked over, she was nowhere to be seen.
Some while later, he shook his head in bemusement, made a quick harness for the mysterious box and webbed it to his back, and went home.
When Peter finally worked out how to open the box, he found some really cool toys...