Peter Parker pushed away from the computer. 'Ugh. I spent way too much time on the web.' Well, kids nowadays called it 'the internet', or 'online', but for him it would always be the web.
Peter glanced at the clock as he shut the PC down – it was 2 am. 'I guess that's what happens when you spend 4 hours talking a bunch of over-idealistic idiots out of doing something that they will regret'. They called themselves the Reformed Order of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – that was a mouthful, so he (privately) just called them 'The Idiots'. They had wanted to blow up a bunch of police stations in Sri Lanka to make 'Some Point'. It was about something political and important and deserving of capitalization. But he didn't bother to keep track of exactly what it was: these things rarely made sense except to the people involved. It basically boiled down to 'We have no jobs, it's somebody else's fault and we're angry about it'.
And in this case, it probably was somebody else's fault, but he didn't really care. As soon as he got an inkling of what they were planning, he contacted them, and convinced them that the cops knew all of their plans. That was the easy part. The hard part was convincing them to go through legal channels to get their grievances redressed – Karen Murdoch still had contacts at the UNDP that could investigate corruption.
Peter paused in the living room on his way to bed – Mary-Jane always got up around 1am to get a drink of water, so she would sleeping lightly right now, and if he went upstairs, he would wake her up. So instead he paused in front of the mantelpiece holding the gold plated web-shooters. Mary-Jane had given them to him at a huge party when he had retired in '85. 'Heh. She didn't throw me a party when I retired back '87. or '93 or '95.' 1995 had been the real deal. He hadn't put on the Spidy suit since. Except for emergencies, like pulling people out of the Trade Center building on 9/11.
It was after he retired that he started to really work on his spider sense. When he was younger, he took it for granted, but it was honest to god precognition. He had even gone to train with Dr. Strange. Now… He fought crime the old fashioned way, over the web. He wasn't some amazing hacker like Tony (though he was way better than your average boomer). But he had his spider sense, and it was enough: he had found the Reformed Order of Idiots because he had gotten a tingle while he was reading the news, and everything else had sort of just flowed.
Peter yawned. 'I really should get some sleep. I have a mentoring session with Morgan at ten'. Who knew that Tony's grand-daughter would turn out to be such a disaster. The only reason she wasn't in jail was because of Tony's millions. That and the fact that Pete had pilfered some of Tony's tech and was training her on how to use it. 'One of these days, she's do her grand-dad proud.'
He leaped up to the ceiling and stretched down towards the floor, letting gravity do its magic on his back – one of the draw backs of having spent most of his youth fighting crime. Even with Spidey powers, he had more aches and pains than most guys his age - before climbing up to join Mary Jane in bed.