LESS THAN 90 MINUTES AGO
"See? What'd I say?"
"Shut up."
"What'd I say? Richard Dean Anderson, baby!"
"Shut up."
"MacGuyver is Colonel O'Neil. MacGuyver's gone shootin' aliens now.'
"Okay, okay, I got it, shut up. You win, all right?"
"French toast and bacon tomorrow mornin'!"
Two security guards made their way down the hall past the tour group that was wrapping up in due order. The large gaggle of mostly teenagers were making their way to the gem chamber.
"Dude, this tour is so lame," whispered one of the teenagers to his friend, a relatively large bald kid.
"We got outta school today, though," replied the bald kid.
"Man, I'd rather be in study hall sleeping, man. Seriously, when we were at that mechanics lab thingy, I was like, ready to collapse in boredom."
"Dude, what time is it man? Don't we like, have practice today?"
Flash Thompson glanced at his watch. "It's just past two. At this rate we won't be back in school until three-thirty."
"Coach is gonna be pissed," Kong iterated.
"Would have been out of this lame-o tour sooner if Parker would've shut the hell up!" Flash said, stressing the "shut the hell up" on his phrase, before directing his attention at a scrawny brown-haired boy, holding hands with a red-headed girl. "Hey Captain Nerdy-Pants, next time you open your mouth, I'm gonna pelt one to your head!"
Peter Parker leaned in slighty towards his somewhat-serious girlfriend, Mary-Jane Watson. "Hey, you hear someone talking?"
"No," MJ replied, "all I hear is 'blah blah blah, I'm an idiot' followed by farting noises."
"Yeah, what I thought."
Flash raised an eyebrow. "Wow, really clever for a buncha dwee-"
"FLASH THOMPSON!" barked an adult from the rear of the tour group, "This is the second time I've had to warn you about your behavior. One more word from you and I swear I'll give you detention, game weekend or not!"
Flash dismissively rolled his eyes as he became silent.
The tour guide, meanwhile, motioned the tour group into a halt before she spoke again. "Well, it seems like we have a big surprise for you today – it seems that one of our lead engineers will be visiting us today and show you all one of our working samples of the Plasma-Gem! Ladies and Gentlemen, one of the chief engineers behind Questor's Plasma Gem, Doctor James Sergill."
"Aw man, sweet!" Peter exclaimed quietly.
"Great, fantastic," Flash muttered softly.
A middle-aged man in a fairly expensive business suit approached the group, slinging a while lab coat over himself.
"Good afternoon," Dr. Sergill said, "Every once in a while I get to have some time to show off my – show off Questor's – new toy. Since we cracked this design almost a year ago, I've been showing off this Gem almost every other week. But I can tell you right now – I am always excited to show off our new toy. I am glad to show you the Gem behind these doors and talk about how it all works."
Sergill smiled heartily as he slipped on his safety glasses. "Now, if you all can follow me through these doors, we can all check out the Plasma Gem."
As everyone filed into the room and surrounded the main spectacle in the middle, it was apparent pretty much everyone in the tour group – everyone – shared the same look on their faces.
The look of awe.
Before them, encased in a transparent, glass-like chamber, was the Plasma- Gem, glowing fiercely in its orange-red glory, surrounded by a diffractive beauty of blue.
It was a blue and yellow universe, with a red heart at its core.
"Whoa!"
"Dude!" Kong remarked.
"Wow!" MJ said
"Amazing!"
"No way!"
"Awesome!" Peter exclaimed.
"Okay, now THIS is actually cool," Flash said.
Sergill kept his hearty smile. "Folks, I'm happy to present to you, the Plasma Gem. A stone capable of storing tens to hundreds of Mega-Joules of energy, almost completely in kinetic form due to its stored plasma state. A work of art that is requires so much precision in engineering, design, and fabrication that each gem costs millions to produce, and is dangerous to make during the process. A diamond that, in final form, is nearly impossible to break due to its diamond shell, yet if ruptured could cause an explosion equivalent to the size of a small nuclear bomb, but has the capability of powering current machines for almost decades in just one run.
"But through all that, if you look at it, it's just one beautiful baby."
Moments of silence passed before someone managed to raise his hand.
"Yes?" Sergill pointed at the hand.
"Doctor Sergill?" Peter began.
"Oh, that's it," Flash muttered.
"Diamonds are bound together by extremely strong molecular geometries that defines their extremely rigid and stiff material properties – they'd fracture if you apply a strong enough force rather than break, right?"
"That is correct," Sergill replied.
"Well, given all that, how are you – er, how is the gem able to contain excited particles in plasma form without the particles slamming into the diamond case geometry the wrong way and say, accidentally fracture and blow up in our faces?"
Flash balled up his tour pamphlet and began to take aim.
"Whoo man," Sergill sighed in delight, "good question. You sure you're supposed to be in high school, Mister –"
"Parker. Peter Parker," said the brown-haired boy, "and I think so, though sometimes other people make me think otherwise."
"Dweeboid!" Flash blurted, firing his paper-wadded ammo towards Peter's head. Oddly enough, Peter dodged the shot, which ended up hitting the back of a blonde-haired woman's head.
"Hey! Jerk!"Gwen Stacy shouted, annoyed at the paper shot.
"Flash Thompson, you're talking to me RIGHT after this tour," barked one of the adults in the tour group, obviously one of the teachers.
Sergill patiently waited for the brief scene to end before continuing. "Well, Mr. Parker, diamond geometries are surprisingly easy to manipulate, since they obviously tend to be planar. So, basically, the trick to this is not designing the container around the energy system, but design the energy system within the diamond."
Sergill continued his exposition on the plasma gem, which, afterwards about half showed signs of understanding. Batting .500 was good enough for Sergill.
Someone dressed in a white, plastic protection suit entered the glass chamber.
"Looks like one of our lab technicians is checking on the gem right now. Let's see how he's doing."
Approaching a microphone resting a control panel nearby, Sergill spoke, "So, how's the gem looking so far?"
The safety suit pulled a thumbs up towards the crowd as he hunched over the diamond. ". . . um, looking good so far, boss. Seems that everything is in order so far. I . . . wait, wait a minute . . . "
"What's up?" Sergill said.
"Er, um, I think –"
Fuff. Smoke suddenly filled the glass chamber rapidly, engulfing both the safety suit man and the diamond.
"Wh-what the –"Sergill uttered. "Hey, hey! You all right?" he screamed, white-knuckle gripping the microphone. "Oh god, oh god, I'll get someone over as soon as-"
The tour group began to become unsettled as they, too, began to wrestle around a little bit.
"DOCTOR SERGILL!"
A heavy-set woman in security garb burst into the chamber. "We have to get these people out of here, sir!" The woman pointed at the tour guide. "You, get this group out of here, right away!"
"Uh uh, okay!" replied the tour guide, obviously rattled by the situation. "Um, um, if you all could please follow me in a quick but – er, orderly fashion, I'll take you back to the entrance lobby. So, um, er, if you could, uh please follow me . . ."
"You should go along with them too, Doctor," said the security guard.
"Nonsense. I will stay here and help resolve the situation."
"But sir –"
"I WILL NOT LET THIS PROJECT OR ANYONE WORKING ON IT FALL WHILE I'M AROUND!!!" barked Doctor Sergill.
"Okay, okay, yes sir," said the security guard. She pointed at the rapidly escaping tour group. "But we must first get these people out of here!
As the tour guide began to herd the group out of the room as quickly as she can, it seemed only Peter had an eyebrow raised (which was not from panic or despair).
"Something's wrong," Peter said half-skeptically as he was being forced out of the room.
"No, you think?" Gwen Stacy uttered, shoving her way past Peter.
"No, I'm serious, something's . . . off."
--------------------------
"Hey Lyss, what's up? What's the rush?" remarked the receptionist, as the tour group hurriedly entered the lobby.
"Don't you know?" the tour guide cried out, "there's like, an emergency in Lab 8B?"
As Peter, MJ, and Gwen burst out into the reception lobby, Peter still couldn't wipe his look of skepticism out of his face
"Something's off," Peter remarked.
"What do you mean?" MJ asked.
"Just . . . the way things went down."
"You mean, your . . . sense-thingy went off?" MJ whispered, Gwen detached enough away from the two not to hear.
"No, but that's just it," Peter said, "if something hazardous did happen back there, I would have felt something, you know? But the whole smoke thing . . . "
As Gwen made her way towards the couple, Peter changed the subject somewhat as he continued. "The way the security guard just happened to burst in like, just seconds after the smoke thing happened, plus how the alarm lights went off but not the sirens –"
"What, you some sort of detective now?" Gwen said.
"No, I'm just saying – it feels kinda off, like it's been, you know, staged or something . . . "
A set of doors burst open as the heavy-set security guard woman dashed across the lobby with a wheel-stretcher in front of her, desperately trying to cut through the tour group in her way.
"Outta the way, outta the way!" said the security guard, as, just outside on the street, a red and white van came to a screeching halt, with white letters "EMS" etched on the side of the van.
"I'm going with Sergill!" barked the security guard.
Two medics exited the ambulance as the security guard burst through the front doors with what seemed to be Sergill on top of the stretcher. As she made her way to the back of the ambulance, all three helped the stretched inside the ambulance, and the security guard followed in. The two medics shut the back of the ambulance, dashed to the front, , and as quickly as the arrived peeled out into the road, jetting south as fast as the ambulance could take them.
"Okay, that's it," Peter said sternly as he yanked on MJ's arm, headed towards the restrooms.
"Hey, hold on, waitaminute –"MJ said as Peter took her away from the rest of the crowd.
"MJ, cover for me," Peter whispered.
"Cover for you? What's going on? What's –"
"There was only one escort with Sergill's stretcher, he didn't have a respirator, the ambulance came in like, pretty much almost impossibly too soon for New York traffic, and now they're going south when the closest hospital that handles Emergencies is blatantly north. Tell me that something's wrong."
"Something's wrong."
"Right." Peter creaked open the door to the men's restroom. "Listen, I gotta get out there soon before that 'ambulance' heads out too far. Cover for me?"
"Cover you through this? What am I going to say to Miss Barclay? Kinda hard to ditch the rest of the class during a school trip, you know."
"I dunno, make something up," Peter said.
"But I –"
"Thanks, MJ," Peter grinned as he pecked his lips onto hers, before boldly dashing into the Men's restroom.
"Well, that's just great," MJ remarked. She overheard the tour guide rounding everyone up when -
The heavy-set security guard kicked the back door to the lobby open. However, her uniform was missing, and her hands were bound behind her back, her ankles bound together as well. She blew away a half-dangling piece of tape on her lips as she shrieked in horror –
"THE GEM! THE GEM IS GONE!"
---------------------------
ABOUT AN HOUR OF WEBSWINGING LATER
"Hey, it's-"
"No way!"
"Huh . . . whuh –
"SPIDER-MAN????!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"And we cue music," Spider-Man cracked.