Spider-Man: Close To Home
Chapter 8: Spider's Webs
Peter took a cautious look around the chemistry lab as he sat towards the back. He'd managed to sneak the components that he needed to his station, and now he was just doing his best to mix them without attracting attention to himself.
As his chemistry teacher blabbed on and on about something unimportant that he didn't care about, he was busy putting together a formula that he'd found on the Stark Online Archives for a sticky tensile cord material;
The sort of thing that a spider spins its webs out of.
"Mr. Parker!" The teacher called out suddenly. He flinched in surprise, quickly taking a moment to mix what was in his beaker and close the drawer before sitting up fully.
"What? Uh, yeah? Yes?" He stuttered.
"Could you please read the box on page 153 for the class?"
"Yeah. Yeah, sure." Peter answered, clearing his throat and beginning to read…
As he began to read, he glanced down and noticed some strange gurgling sound coming from inside of the drawer. He slowly nudged it open with the toe of his shoe. His eyes widened as he saw that his concoction was beginning to bubble, and he needed to mix it.
His reading voice began to falter as he tried to reach down for the stick he'd been mixing it with. He slid the book with his right hand, tipping it towards him off the edge of the table so that he was able to look at what he was reading while he mixed slowly with his left hand.
He glanced down again and saw his slow mixing wasn't working. He began to mix vigorously, taking his attention away from his book. The book slipped away from his hand despite his sticky hands and fell to the floor with a loud and sudden bang.
"Sorry! Sorry…" Peter said, ducking under his desk to grab his book while his fellow classmates chuckled at him a bit. He grabbed the book and quickly mixed the webbing concoction to satisfaction before getting back up in his chair and finishing his reading with a relieved sigh…
Now with his webbing safely stored in his bag in a beaker taped shut, Peter just had to take it home so he could figure out how to properly utilize it. He started to make his way out when all of a sudden Ned caught up to him and stopped.
"Hey, Pete! Where are you going?" Ned asked. Peter raised his eyebrow in confusion.
"Um, home?" He answered with a tilt of his head.
"We were gonna stop by the Robotics Club real quick first, remember?" Ned reminded him. Peter didn't remember talking with Ned about that, but with everything going on, it was very likely that he just missed it.
"Uh, oh! Yeah, man! Heheh, sorry. Lead the way, let's go now real quick." Peter said, cursing under his breath as Ned led him back into the depths of the school and to the class where the Robotics Club was always held.
As Ned and Peter stepped inside, they began to look curiously at the different mechanisms that the students were working on. Peter's attention was caught by some of the bigger looking robots resembling arms and cranes.
"You know, dude, this is actually pretty cool." Ned said with an approving nod.
Peter hummed in agreement, and his eyes fell onto a strange mechanism that included a spray bottle as one of its key components. He approached the girl who was working on it.
"Hey, what're you working on there?" Peter asked curiously. The girl glanced up from her work and adjusted her glasses.
"Oh it's nothing really. Just an automated arm that I hooked up to a little spritzer thing. I wanted to make a remote way to water my flowers." She explained the purpose of her project. Peter hummed with intrigue.
"Ha, what a girl." One of her classmates commented from where he was working on his project. The girl just rolled her eyes.
"Huh, that's pretty cool." Peter said to make up for the insult before making his way back to Ned.
"What do you think, dude?" Ned asked.
"I think we should definitely try to get in next year. It'll be cool." Peter decided with a nod.
"Awesome!" Ned said.
"Yeah, now I gotta go!" Peter said, quickly darting out of the classroom and making his way out. Before Ned could even protest, Peter had already disappeared around the corner.
"Alright, let's see how this turned out." Peter said, opening up his backpack and pulling out the webbing that he had mixed together. He set the beaker down on his desk and proceeded to look it over.
Exactly as the instructions had said, the mixture was bound and had solidified into a stringy material. Peter reached in and pulled it out, beginning to tug on a particularly long strand.
In addition to being very sticky, it was also very strong. He couldn't pull it apart too easily unless he really put effort into it. He nodded in approval, thinking back to the girl's design that he had looked over.
If perhaps he could find materials to pull together, he could make something capable of shooting out these webs. Surely a material like this could have many potential uses…he just had to figure out what they would be.
But he would worry about that after he made the web shooters…