A/N: Thanks ShadowShock. you were right - I had made a mistake! I had the word mixed up with 'celestial' for some reason… it's really 'clerestory'. :)

OK, on we go…

Cheers,

Apteryx

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Chapter 27: Little Things

"Aergh." Erica rolled over on the couch and groaned as her side made contact with the cushions. She became conscious of the sounds of someone busy in the kitchen, she blinked and opened her eyes; it was full daylight. She remembered literally crawling in during the early hours of the morning, but that was about it. Erica pushed the blanket down as she carefully sat up, and was disconcerted to see she was still in costume, apart from the boots, gloves and mask.

"Aw, jeez…" she muttered when she saw the state of her front. She couldn't believe she hadn't even cleaned herself up and seen to the cut. That fight must have taken more out of her than she expected; and she possibly had an even tougher one coming up, and with a broken rib, no less… A voice cut in on her introspection.

"Oh great, two walking wounded. What a pair you make!"

Erica looked up to see Mary-Jane standing over her, a spatula in one hand. She at least looked as if she'd had a good night, she looked so fresh, wearing a simple shift dress in a pale green and ivory slides on her feet; a contrast to Erica's dirty, bloody, smelly self.

"I-it's n-nothing," she stammered, embarrassed, cheeks pink.

"That's what Peter always said too." MJ sighed, and sat down next to Erica on the couch. Erica gave her a sidelong glance - thinking MJ sounded sad, but she only looked thoughtful.

"But?"

"Well most of the time he was right; it was nothing. But I still worried he would…will… get hurt bad, or… killed."

"Yeah, that's understandable, though I wonder… is it that he'll get hurt, or the manner of his getting hurt? I mean, well… he could be seriously into an extreme sport, or horse-riding or something, and face risks of injury that way. I even heard of a guy who used to skate along the road on Fifth Avenue on his way to work - dodging vehicles the whole time… Lord, I don't know if I'm putting this right, but… what if he had a hobby that took up heaps of his time and was really risky, but it wasn't being Spider-Man? Would that be different?"

Mary-Jane was absolutely stock-still; Erica hoped she hadn't said the wrong thing and offended her, but it was something she had always wondered about their relationship, and she was curious.

"Yes." Although her reply was blunt and definite, MJ still didn't sound sure. She got up with an apologetic smile. "I've got to see to breakfast, I don't want it to burn."

"Uh, right… I'll have a shower once Pete's up."

Erica slowly stripped out of the Spidey costume and into the shirt that was her night-wear. The gash on her chest was closed and beginning to heal already; a broken rib she knew from her time on the sailing ship, would usually take a couple of weeks before normal activities could resume. It would be different for her, but could she heal in just two days?

Sitting at the table, she ate the breakfast Mary-Jane supplied, hungry. "How long d…" she began, but broke off when Peter padded into the living area, attention bent on kitchen, food and Mary-Jane. He took the cup of coffee she offered and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek in exchange, sniffing appreciatively at MJ's perfume and her cooking.

"I don't know which smells better, you or the food…"

An admonishing finger was waggled under his nose. "I'd hope there was no competition!" Mary-Jane grinned, and shoved Peter gently out of the kitchen. He came over to the table, regarding Erica as he sat down.

"How'd it go last night?"

"Got them all - your antidote was a great help, thanks. I… there were more of them then I thought…"

Peter looked unsurprised. "Nine of them," he said.

"How did you know that?" Erica was shocked; had he known all along and not told her? No, not Peter…

"Guessed," Peter took a deep slurp from his cup. He had more movement in his right arm today, Erica noticed. "If it's some militant religious cult, nine is a nice mystic number."

"Hmmph. Anyway, Hudson's got them all now. I might pop in later and find out their raison d'être. But right now… I'm going to get clean as!"

Both Erica and the Spider-Man costume were now clean, and Erica was feeling a lot better as a result. The costume had to be too, after she had repaired the cut in it; and her cut was almost healed, though she applied a plaster to it out of habit.

Fully dressed, she left the came out of the bathroom, leaving the outfit hanging up to dry and came into the lounge rubbing her hair dry with a towel. Mary-Jane and Peter were sitting at the table, talking over the remains of breakfast.

"I'll wash up." Erica dropped the towel and took the used dishes into the kitchenette, glancing out the window as she passed it. It promised to be a fine day; the misty cloud from yesterday had rolled away, leaving the buildings she could see, if not exactly gleaming, at least seeming cleaner and more luminous for the sunlight. She heard a peal of laughter over the sound of the water running into the sink - MJ laughing at something Peter said - and sighed as a sudden bubble of homesickness rose within her. Well, hopefully, it was only a few more days until she got back home…

The last fork was left to drain. Erica plonked herself down on the couch. "What now, kiddos?" she asked. She pulled out from behind the cushion she was sitting on, the miniature camera. "I set this up last night, but I don't know that they'll come out at all; it was pretty dark in there."

"It's got a built-in flash…"

"Now he tells me!" Erica passed the camera over to Peter, who flashed a glance at Mary-Jane.

"Oh no you don't," she said, "You are not going in to the Bugle. Besides, how would you explain how you took those pics with an injured arm?"

Peter sighed. "Yeah, you're right…"

"I'll take them in," said Erica. "I need to go in and do some work anyway. I'll hand them over to the lab, and say I took them; they'll believe that for sure when they see the shitty results."

Peter threw her the film which he had removed. He threw the camera back as well. She caught both in the same hand, showing off.

………………………………….

"Hiya!" Erica pushed open the door as she spoke, giving plenty of warning to those inside. Peter was alone however; Mary-Jane had gone out to see some of her New York contacts, networking.

Peter had promised to stay indoors, "…I'm still tired from last night too, I guess." He was slouching on the couch, watching TV with a can of soda in one hand and a bowl of salted nuts sitting on the couch next to him.

"Hey, you're allowed to vege out if you want too." She dropped her backpack on the floor. Then she dropped a bombshell. "I've found Ray-Man."

"What!?" Peter sat up suddenly, sending the nuts flying, "How? Where?"

Erica grinned widely as she bent down to pick up one of the nuts and held it up. "His name's Griffin Dealy. He's a certified nut case."

Peter groaned and swatted it out of her hand. "C'mon, give!"

"He's that guy I told you about; by the Court and the lift downstairs, y'know, 'Mr Bassett'. I placed a tracer on him and found him yesterday on Fifth Ave leaving a jewellery shop and followed him as far as the train station. Well, after I came back and got my clothes, I went and saw the photographer Barrowman and, um, he said Dealy was asking about special lenses, thought he seemed a bit weird…"

"What sort of lenses?"

"I don't know, I didn't ask. Look, I don't think he would have said much more, eh - I was only there to borrow some tea-bags…"

Peter's eyebrow shot up. Erica blushed.

"Anyway, I went to the shop on Fifth, one of those ones that has heaps of small booths? I started asking around; pretending that Dealy was my uncle and he had Bi-Polar syndrome and I wanted to make sure he wasn't up to anything too silly. And uh, he was wanting to buy a high quality ruby and an alexandrite, whatever that is…"

"Oh, that's interesting… but how do you know he's 'Ray-Man'? And how did you find out his name?"

"I'm coming to that… One of the owners was more tolerant or something, and talked to him for a while. Said he'd claimed he was building a gun that altered people's reality, and something along the lines of '…you'll be able to tell your friends you met Griffin Dealy!' blah, blah, blah."

"Yeah, he wasn't exactly humble when I met him before. It may be him…Or you could be putting two and two together and making lemonade."

"It's too much of a coincidence for it not to be. Of course the dealer was amused. He remarked that a gun was one way of altering your reality, but most people went for drugs. Speaking of which…" Erica looked grim suddenly. "Even though we've found Ray-Man, we still have to stop Otto Octavius.

"Why not let your friend at the NYPD do it?"

"You know why…"

"Yeah, I know." Peter had always had a difficult relationship with New York's Finest, both as Spider-Man and himself; as a result he was pretty ambivalent towards them. He was glad though, that Erica was having a more positive experience. He went over to the table and picked up his notes with his good arm, and waved them at her.

"I finished reading Ock's lab notebook. But I don't think it was Ock who wrote them, it was Whithead."

"Why's that?"

"Well, little things…. As the notes continued, there was more prescriptive rather than descriptive notations; I got the strong sense of Whithead's disapproval of certain procedures. Oh, and they fixed the problem with the degenerative neural function, so the victims now can come out of their comas as good as new. Reading between the lines though, there's got to be something more than that… And I don't think the notebook is complete either…"

Peter put the papers down and waved at the still animated TV. "There was a news report earlier. Several more coma victims; the authorities are starting to get extremely worried. The Public Health Department is setting up an educational campaign to warn people of the symptoms. Epidemiologists are of course, stumped, but they're not admitting that in so many words - they don't want mass panic to set in."

"And the victims?"

"Apart from one non-descript, they were all influential persons in New York - this time the count includes a financier, one of the police chiefs, and a commissioner of Public Utilities. The very fact that such high-powered people are the ones succumbing to the virus must make people suspicious - surely?"

Peter stepped back and heard a crunch underfoot as he stood on one of the nuts.

"Oh, here, I'll clean those up for you; we don't want you tripping on them and injuring something else." Erica knelt down and started sweeping the nuts back into their bowl using her forearm. Peter looked down at her back, and noticed her slightly awkward movements as she swept.

"Are you hurt?" he asked, with a sudden thump in his stomach as he became frightened and covered it up with annoyance.

"A wee bit," admitted Erica, without pausing, "Only a large bruising - she'll be right."

Peter bit his tongue; he could tell it was more than that, with all his experience. And he also knew that Ock would be able to tell as well, and take advantage of any weakness.

"Have you been able to test the foam webbing?" he asked.

"Not yet. I'll do it tonight."

Erica stood up and faced him with the bowl in one hand. Their eyes met and held; Erica's extreme pale irises seemed to be transparent, like glass with the light shining on it, reflecting her thoughts, and Peter could read her total trust in him, but also some caginess, something else she was holding back. Either she was learning to lie better - she wasn't flushing - or she was unaware herself of it. He wondered what she was seeing in his eyes.

But she said only "I'm going to go back down that tunnel again…" She paused, suddenly amused. "I feel like Bilbo Baggins, about to face the dragon, heh."

"Except it'll be no dragon you face…"

"I know that, you dill. That's later. After I've had a bite, I'm going to try and find Griffin Dealy, talk to him. He's not in the phone-book; I looked. I looked his name up on Google and nothing. The Bugle morgue only mentions him twice; a birth notice and a small piece about an engineering works in New Jersey. He was one of a number that got laid off when the works closed. That was six years ago. He's still got a tracer on him though.

"That could take hours…"

"And I could get lucky again. Besides, what else am I going to do until dark?

Sitting down at the table, Peter had his hand supporting his bowed head. 'Think, damn you!' he told himself. Here he was, a man, an ordinary man apart from the one talent he was born with; his innate scientific smarts, bordering on genius level. If he couldn't come up with a workable hypothesis by the time Erica came back from her hunt, then he had better trade in his college degree for something more useful… a digital camera maybe.

He gathered together in front of him all the notes that he and Erica had accumulated over the last few days, pulled over a pad of paper and started going through them all once again.

………………………………………………

"Just as Peter predicted," Spidey muttered, thoroughly pissed off. It was early evening and she had been swinging around New York City for several hours, searching for a trace of signal and getting nothing. "He's probably not on Manhattan at all - probably lives in New Jersey still." Her search had been made slower by the broken ribs she had suffered the night before; the continual dull ache was annoying, but the sharp pain when she forgot to brace herself and the tug from the webline in her right hand as it attached to a building surface had her gasping and having to rest momentarily each time while the pain subsided.

She circled around until she got back to the alley where she had stashed her backpack. Dropping down, she threw on her clothes, and emerged into the street, on the hunt now for a takeaway. Erica figured with the amount of time she had spent on her webs, and the rest of her plans for that evening that she should pick something up for herself and not bother Pete and MJ for dinner. After buying, not without some difficulty, a container of noodles and a can of fizzy drink, she came out of the shop with a rather flushed face. The man behind the counter had been very rude to her, at her temerity to ask for change - stereotypical New York she supposed, but she hadn't struck it until now.

A phone. Spying one down the street, she made for it, intending to let Peter know of her plans. Erica held her bag of food under her chin while she pulled out a handful of change, and stood in front of the pay phone sorting through the coins in her palm to find the correct one. The shelter of the phone stopped her from being jostled by pedestrians, but there was a pair of eyes the other side of the sidewalk watching her actions. Erica dialled and got the answering machine. Where was Peter? "Uh, hi Pete. I'm grabbing some dinner for myself and then I'll do those couple of things I talked about. Expect me back late. Cheerio." She hung up, and involved with her own thoughts, didn't notice that she was being followed.

Looking for somewhere to sit and eat, she decided that nearby Bryant Park would do - it was a nice enough place from her lunch there the other day. She roamed around in the gathering dusk, noting that most of the other people in the park where using it as a way to get from one place to another. Sitting on a bench in front of a group of trees where a noisy flock of sparrows were settling themselves down to roost for the night, she unrolled the top of her bag and began eating, feeling quite comfortable. She didn't pay attention to the rustling in the trees to begin with, presuming them to be birds, but when it continued, she casually put her food down and got up, as if to stretch. Looking out the corner of her eye, she saw a pale face peering at her. 'Oh no, not again,' she thought. What was she, a muggers' magnet? Then again, being alone in a park in New York after nightfall wasn't the smartest move either. Why hadn't her spider-sense been triggered?

Erica picked up her bag and placed it on the bench and pretended to look for something inside, so that she was facing the unknown person. In a few seconds, but what seemed like minutes to Erica, the stranger left the trees and came over to the bench. It was a woman, dressed in an old black bomber jacket and a lilac-coloured skirt with white geometric squiggles across it. On her feet she wore white sports socks and beat-up old sneakers. In fact, her wardrobe looked entirely put together from an op shop. Erica wasn't surprised to see she was also carrying a tote bag in each hand. She put them down by her feet as she peered searchingly into Erica's face, her blue eyes sharp in the face of indeterminate age.

"A Word to the Wise," she suddenly said in a loud voice, which made Erica jump. "Don't count your Money in the Open like that. You Never know Who is Watching."

"Uh, thanks. I won't." Erica fastened her bag closed and picked up her food. She had almost finished the noodles anyway. She slung her bag over a shoulder and walked off to the nearest rubbish bin, followed by the bag lady.

"Where Are You Going?" she boomed behind her.

Erica thought fast - she didn't want to end up being trailed around Manhattan by a crazy… no, that was unfair, she probably wasn't crazy, just lonely and unwanted, but she still didn't want her following. It would be easy enough to give her the slip though…

"To a toy shop. I want to buy a present for my nephew," she improvised. Actually, she had an idea for something to act as a distraction later that evening.

"I will Come With You," the woman announced.

"No, it's all right. You Stay… uh, stay here. See ya!" Erica took off at a fast walk, not looking behind her as she made her way across the park and intending to walk up Fifth Avenue. She could still hear the woman following her, her rattly breathing and flapping plastic.

Making sure the backpack was securely on her back, Erica waited for an opportunity to duck away unseen; again she was thankful that her red sneakers were slip-ons; it wouldn't slow her down to take them off to scale a wall. She nipped into an alcove and with a huge leap gained the top of a cornice two stories up, where she flattened herself against the stone. She had to hold her breath to stop from gagging - this must be one of the favourite resting places of the pigeons, the ledge was covered in their excrement.

'Oh great, now I'm covered in pigeon poo!' she thought to herself. She was certainly opening up to numerous new experiences taking on the role of Spider-Man. Not only pigeons, but general dirt and pollution on the surfaces of buildings from the traffic and streets below, although that was not as much of a problem the higher you went above street level. The weirdest thing she had encountered, when she first started web-slinging, was on the rooftop of one of the taller skyscrapers - the Metropolitan Life, she thought, though she couldn't be positive - heaps of spiders and their huge mass of cobwebs, set out to catch flying insects even way up there. She'd since come across more skyscrapers infested in the same way.

She heard a noise, and peered carefully over the side of the ledge. In the gap at the entrance of the alcove stood the silhouette of the bag lady, unsure of where Erica had disappeared to.

"Where Are You?" she called out, her voice gaining a slight quaver to it.

Erica felt guilty; it sounded to her as if the old woman were about to cry. But she knew she couldn't afford to have her hanging around. She waited a few minutes after the woman had moved on, then jumped down, brushing the white flecks off her jeans and the front of her jacket. She hoped she didn't smell too much; her nose was still filled with the stench. She peeped cautiously around the corner, making sure the woman was nowhere in sight, then hurried along the pavement, headed uptown, to make her purchase.

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