Peter threw back the last of his mashed potatoes, while Aunt May and Uncle Ben were still halfway through their meals.
"Do we have any more, Aunt May?"
"I'm afraid not sweetie. You've taken the last of what I cooked."
Uncle Ben looked suspiciously across the table at him.
"What's with your appetite? You've been devouring huge portions of everything lately."
Though both his great-aunt and great-uncle were in their early sixties, Aunt May hit her husband in the arm with the force of a younger woman.
"Shush. He's a growing boy, it's perfectly natural for him to have an appetite."
Peter was pretty sure this appetite wasn't natural.
He removed the measuring tape from around his bicep, and picked up the pen on his desk. It was the last of his measurements, and, like the others, he was noticeably changing.
It was now just under four days since he was bitten by Tiny, and not only had both hands sprouted microscopic hairs, but his body was becoming more toned. He was skinny and flabby to begin with, so the changes were all the more noticeable. His appetite seemed to have increased – he'd found himself eating what felt like double his normal portions at the dinner table. It made sense – his body couldn't increase its size without getting the energy from somewhere.
Having said that, there was the creature known as 'The Incredible Hulk' that had torn across middle America when he was a little boy, and seemed to change its size from hour to hour. But, as far as Peter knew, that was the only creature in the world to have broken the basic scientific principle.
Peter had chickened out of telling Connors about the changes he was going through, and hadn't mentioned them to his doctor. (He imagined this would be beyond his doctor's experience.)
Nervously, Peter removed his trousers, and felt the bristles that had grown beneath his knees. He placed both his hands and knees against the wall of his bedroom, and began climbing. As if that wasn't remarkable enough, he was soon upside down on the ceiling. With the blood rushing to his head, he began to feel dizzy, and climbed back down.
He wasn't sure if he was imagining it, but the dizzy spells seemed to be getting less severe.
Peter had been reading scientific papers on genetics and mutations more regularly since working with Doc Connors. Connors had recommended a number of papers he might find interesting, and while a number of them were incomprehensible, he'd learned a lot.
Doctor Xavier's Mutations and The Future of Evolution, focused entirely on natural adaptions, didn't seem to apply to his own changes. Peter found more practical help in Genetics at the Subatomic Level. Written by Banner and Sterns, it was an unfinished work based partially on their own experiences at Los Diablos, and the changes undergone twenty years earlier by the team of astronauts known as the 'Fantastic Four'.
Peter had trouble with the technical language, and his understanding wasn't helped by the fact that the pair passed away before they could complete their work. Nevertheless, it was the closest to an understanding any scientists had been able to work out.
It seemed, based on Banner and Sterns' work, that these spiders had some sort of access to subatomic genetics, that he was being altered in the same way that the Fantastic Four and the nameless individual who became The Hulk had been.
He desperately hoped that his changes would turn out to be more akin to those experienced by Reed Richards than The Hulk.