The fire on fourty-third street had spread quickly, nearly engulfing four stories of an apartment building before Spider-Man arrived on the scene, swinging around the corner and landing in front of the blazing structure. Firefighters had arrived a few minutes earlier, their hoses doing nothing to put out the flames. As Spider-Man prepared to charge into the building, a firefighter caught up with him.
"There're eight people in there, two on each floor! You'll never get them out in time!"
"I have to try", he responded.
Just as he was about to run into the burning building, a dark shape swung overhead, landing on top of the fire truck nearest to the building. Spider-Man looked at the person. It was definitely a woman.
She was wearing a costume made out of spandex, mostly black with red web designs, much like those Spider-Man was wearing. Her mask covered part of her face, a long, spider-like shape encasing her eyes. Her long black hair fell in a braid over her right shoulder. Perhaps her most striking feature was the design that stretched across the entire upper-half of the front of the costume: a large, creepy-looking Black Widow spider.
In her right hand, she held something that shouldn't have surprised him; a web-line, exactly like the kind he produced: funnel-shaped, glistening, and nearly invisible to the naked eye. She dropped it as she jumped onto the ground, looking him in the eye, almost as if she could somehow see beyond the mask to the eyes themselves. She put one hand on her hip, an inquisitive posture.
"Well, what are we waiting for?", she said, and rushed into the blazing inferno. Spider-Man followed, hoping that the building wouldn't collapse before the people inside could be saved.
The next few minutes were a haze of black smoke and scorching heat as the two of them ran in and out of the building, each of them bringing out another coughing resident each time.
Finally, Spider-Man heaved the last person, a teenage boy, onto his shoulder and ran out the door just as a staircase collapsed, blocking the entrance. He set the boy down against a fire truck, and turned to see the spider-like woman comforting a little girl holding a partially-burnt teddy bear. The girl's mother pushed through the crowd to her daughter, picked her up and hugged her, murmuring muffled thank-yous to the woman. The small family was guided toward an ambulance by a medic, and the woman turned back to the burnt-out building, surveying the damage. Then she suddenly turned around, running, and jumped.
She glided gracefully through the air and – surprise, surprise – stuck to a brick building on the other side of the street, climbing quickly to the roof, and disappearing over the ledge. 'Who is she?', Spider-Man thought. Someone who had the same abilities as him? He needed to know, and ran after her. She was fast, and he pursued her to the top of a corporate building, when she finally seemed to notice him, and stopped.
"Wait!", he called.
The woman crossed her arms and waited as he caught up to her.
"Who are you?", he asked when he was close enough.
"I can't really tell you that. But I'm sure your good friend Jonah will be happy to give me a bizarre yet predictable nick-name in tomorrow's paper. Probably 'Spider-Woman', the most obvious thing he'll think of. I'd prefer 'Black Widow' myself, but it's already taken."
Spider-Man smiled. He liked this woman's sense of humor, so much like his own. She started to turn toward the edge of the roof.
"Just one more question before you go", Spider-Man said.
The woman nodded.
"Why did you help me?", he asked.
The woman shrugged, then put her arms out in an eagle-spread as she stepped backward onto the ledge of the roof.
"Because I can", she replied, and hopped off the roof, doing a flip in mid-air as she released a web-line from her wrist.
Spider-Man watched with fascination as it attached itself to a nearby building, and the woman swung off into the sunset.
