Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, and/or their otherwise respective owners.

Author's Notes: Hi, guys! Today's chapter is shorter and less dialogue-focused, but I had a lot of fun with it and hope you do too! :)

As previously stated, the chapter title comes from Helena Beat by Foster the People.

Anyways, until the next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis


~the spinneret saga~

~birth of a heroine~

~chapter 4: helena beat~


Of course, Penny didn't actually act on the idea that afternoon, because there was a clear expectation for her to get home in a certain timeframe (provided that something didn't happen like the subway spontaneously breaking down) from her mom, and not meeting that expectation would undoubtedly cause her to become suspicious. For the same reason, she didn't on her plan the next afternoon, on Friday, either.

But Friday night, when it was past midnight and she could tell by the breathing and heartbeat patterns of her mom and uncle that they were asleep, she struck. Putting on a black hoodie over the grey tank-top and black workout leggings that she had bought earlier that afternoon with her allowance savings, having gone in and out quickly of a fitness store that would've been on her route to the subway station if she hadn't figured out taking the alleyways was so much faster, she picked up her backpack, which she'd purged of all things academic-related for...other things that evening. Then, going over to her window, she pulled it open slowly, making sure it made as little noise as possible, and stepped out onto the fire escape, closing the window to all but a crack behind her. She paused to listen, just in case there were any unusual sounds in her family's apartment. When there weren't, she grinned again and made her way down the fire escape, jumping down onto the ground at the last level.

She kept that spider sense of hers – it was what she had taken to calling the warning system – hyper-vigilant as she walked down the streets to the subway station, and the hood of the jacket that was named after it up. It was night, after all, with the only lights coming from the street lamps and buildings, and as she'd said before, New York City could be a dangerous place for a fourteen-year-old girl. It was dangerous for pretty much anyone walking alone at this time, even in a relatively safe neighborhood like hers.

But her spider sense didn't go off for her entire walk, and she was able to get to the subway station safely. She paid for the fare with cash rather than swiping the pass that her mom had given her; she didn't know how often her mom checked the history of transactions on the pass, but she didn't want to find out. She garnered a few weird looks on the ride to her usual stop from the sparse amount of people that were also in her car, but she kept her eyes straight ahead and pretended to listen to music on her phone, not looking at them once.

From her stop, Penny made her way to that abandoned warehouse. She looked around to make sure that nobody would see her walk through the opening of the wire fence, and once assured, in fact did. She used a bobby-pin that she'd found from an unopened pack – getting her hair to do anything except exist in its natural state was a chore, hence why she kept it as a bob – in her bathroom to pick the lock on one of the warehouse's entrances, pulled the door open as quietly as she could, and walked inside.

The warehouse was dark, naturally, but with her enhanced eyesight, she could see everything inside it as if she had come here during the day. It was one of those kinds that was pretty much open through all three of the floors this side of the building, the other half having the different levels for storage. It was also mostly empty, with it having some equipment here and there, but not much, and all of the equipment that it did have obviously hadn't been turned on in years and would most likely have to have a lot of work put in to get it all working again.

It was perfect.

She walked into the center of this half of the long room, placing her bag down on the floor. Exhilaration ran through her veins as she took off her hoodie, letting it fall down to the ground. Next, she opened up her bag and took out a variety of things from it: black wrestling wraps for her hands, bandaids, gauze and Neosporin, a speed bag, and more. All things that she'd also bought at the fitness store, minus her wattle bottle that her mom had gotten as part of her school supplies for this year.

But Penny didn't touch any of them for now, instead taking out her phone from her hoodie and the pair of wireless earbuds that she had but never really used out of a fear she would break them. Because she was – had been, the spider bite had seemingly mostly fixed that – clumsy, and they were Stark Industries wireless earbuds, which meant that they were expensive but also made by Tony Stark's company. He was the adoptive father of one of her best friends, so maybe she needed to tone down her fan-girling of him and the other Avengers sometime soon for when Harley inevitably invited her to the Tower to come meet them, but come on. The Avengers had saved the world. They were heroes. Her personal heroes – and for reasons more than just the 2012 Invasion.

She remembered the 2010 Stark Expo very well, the day that the Hammer Industries robots had attacked everyone. She'd spent weeks trying to convince her mom and Ben to take her there, and she had honestly been surprised when they'd given in. It wasn't like her mom to do that. Maybe she'd only done it because the first anniversary of the car accident would be the next month, and she'd wanted Penny to have something to take her mind off from it. But whatever her mom's reasoning, they'd gone to the Expo that day, and they'd had their fun. Ben had even bought Penny one of those huge Iron Man asks, which he'd laughed at and taken a picture of her wearing because of how comically big it had been on her, along with some fake repulsers.

She'd been wearing that mask when the Hammer Industries robots had attacked. She'd been separated from her mom and uncle because of the robots. But she hadn't been scared. All she'd felt was bravery, as she'd stood up to one of the robots, her palm with one of the fake repulsers raised like she'd actually been Iron Man himself.

And then, just before the robot, in retrospect, had been about to kill her, Iron Man had come down from the heavens, defeating the robot with one shot of his repulser. "Nice job, kid," he'd said, before he'd taken off, leaving her in his wake, wholly impressed and amazed. Iron Man had told her she'd done a nice job.

Iron Man had saved her life.

(She hadn't told Harley about this, naturally. He didn't need to hear another sob story about how one of his adoptive fathers had saved one of the countless kids of New York City, personally or not.)

But, anyways.

Penny turned on some music on her phone, started a timer, set it on the ground, and got down on her hands (gross, the floor of the warehouse was absolutely filthy) and tips of her feet to see how long she could do push-ups before she tired out. Before the spider bite, the answer had been barely over fifteen seconds, but now...

Twenty minutes later, she called it the quits, because she was still going and hadn't broken a sweat – not that she'd expected to on the latter count, as once again, it seemed like she couldn't do that anymore. She'd lost count of how many push-ups she'd done, but it was something like at least one every second. So, twenty times sixty...the answer was somewhere around sixteen-hundred.

"Whew," she whispered as she panted, as she was winded even without sweating, impressed at her own abilities.

She took several gulps from her water bottle, then used some of the remaining water to wash off her hands. She eyed the things that she had at her disposal next, and not just the things she'd brought with her. There were some long chains hanging from the rafters; she wondered, could she – ?

She jumped up to grab at one of them, noting with amazement when she successfully had the chain in her hands, because that had been at least eight feet, and she'd done it with no problem! Climbing her way up the chain like it was one of those rope drills they did at school during Gym was easy, too. She'd struggled all her life with the rope drills at the schools she'd gone to before Midtown, as she simply didn't have the abdominal muscles for them. But now she did.

Then again, when she'd observed herself in the mirror last Saturday morning after the spider bite, she'd noted the barest traces of a six-pack on her now-lean stomach...

Penny swung the chain she was holding onto back and forth with her body weight, back and forth, until she got a good momentum going. She leapt from that chain to the closest one nearby, and was successfully able to catch it in her hands and not fall straight to the ground. From there, she jumped to the third one, then went back to the first one. Laughter bubbled forth from her throat as she used the first one to launch herself towards the wall, which she landed on and stuck to thanks to her sticky abilities. She gave a short run across the wall, laughing still, and ran up to the ceiling, crawling along on her hands and feet again. With a flip, she proceeded to land back on the ground, effortlessly and gracefully.

She spent twenty more minutes in total basically doing parkour all over the interior of the warehouse, until the timer on her phone went off again. When it did, now properly breathless after forty minutes – forty minutes – of strenuous activity total, she went back to her things and packed them all up, putting her hoodie back on. She wanted to spend more time here, she wanted to spend hours here, but she'd already been away from home for over an hour now. It would only be natural for her mom or uncle Ben to come check on her during the night when she was gone, given her Penny Parker Luck™ and all.

Getting back to her apartment building, she went back in the same way she came, going up the fire escape and entering through her cracked window. Her mom and uncle Ben were still sleeping. They hadn't even noticed that she was gone. She breathed a sigh of relief.

For this night, at least, she was safe.


Penny didn't go back to the warehouse that following night or Sunday night. She wanted to, but she wasn't wanting to push her luck, and she wanted to spend some time with her mom and uncle without being antsy anyways.

Saturday evening, after a day of them doing their usual Saturday routine of breakfast and a trip to the park (not Central Park) and watching yet another movie together, the three of them went out to their favorite restaurant, an Italian place called Bagnoli's – her uncle's idea. "We all deserve a treat," he said, his eyes shining with delight. "I just closed my biggest case of the year, you're getting straight 'A's'," he pointed to her, "and you were just telling me that your physical trainer said you've been doing a great job, Mare." Even though her mom didn't need physical therapy anymore, she was still working out two or three times a week with a trainer, maintaining her muscles and giving herself something to do outside of the apartment.

Her mom rolled her eyes. "Ben..."

"It's a reason to celebrate!" he insisted. "Come on, we're going."

So they went to Bagnoli's. Penny ordered the mushroom ravioli that she always did because it was her favorite dish at the restaurant, and got their specialty dark chocolate mousse cake for a desert, and overall had a fun time laughing with her mom as Ben told yet another funny story at the table. For the first time since the spider bite, she didn't think about all that it had done to her. She felt like she was well and perfectly normal.

Monday night, though, after an ordinary day at school besides the fact that Flash and Ned didn't seem all too keen on bullying her (maybe her avoiding the former so well when he'd tried following her after school on Friday had taken some of the fun out of harassing her?), she snuck out again. This time, she was better prepared: she'd made a camera and aimed it at her door from her desk, and connected it to her phone so that it would alert her of when it was activated, because it was motion-sensor. It wouldn't stop her mom and uncle Ben from realizing that she wasn't there, but it would let her know if they did go peeking into her room when she wasn't around. It would give her time to come up with an excuse when she came home for why she had snuck out...not that there was an excuse to give that would lead to her mom and Ben not punishing the hell out of her, but still. You got her point.

She also had a small dark red notebook tucked into her bag when she went to the warehouse. It was one of those ones with a lock on it that only she knew the password to, so nobody would be able to snoop in it without breaking the lock – and then, of course, she would know somebody had been snooping in it. It was a birthday gift from Ben last year or the year before last; she forgot which one. She hadn't touched it since he'd given it to her, so there were plenty of pages for her to write down notes on the observances of her abilities and the changes in her body, which she had already. The page on her Notes app had swiftly been deleted from even the trash, so there was no evidence of it unless you went digging for it in the backup files, which would eventually be deleted too.

Penny took out the notebook when she was inside the warehouse, biting her lip as she wrote down the date, October 5th, 2015. It was the second page she'd done; the first one was aptly titled: Everything From September 25th, 2015 to October 5th, 2015. She wrote down her first notation for today's entry: The FitnessGram Pacer Test.

"Alright, here goes nothing," she said to herself when she was done, putting the notebook on top of her bag so that it didn't get dirty from the floor.

Shoving the wireless Stark Industries earbuds into her ears, she pressed play on the YouTube video she'd found. "The FitnessGram Pacer Test is multi-stage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues," the guy from the video began, in the same exact voice that she remembered from at her old schools. The Gym teacher at Midtown, Coach Wilson, was more partial to the Captain America's Fitness Challenge than he was the FitnessGram tests. He was so partial to it, even, that it was the only thing that they did. Every. Single. Day. Not the two times a year that they were supposed to.

Now that she had her powers, Penny was beginning to hate this even more than she had before. It was becoming an active effort to go through the Fitness Challenge at the same pace as she had before – although she couldn't bring herself to act like she was really struggling like then – so that nobody became suspicious and started to connect the dots. She couldn't let anybody find out what had happened to her – for their safety, not hers.

She lined herself up at her "start," which was basically the wall on one side of the building the shorter way. The first thing she'd done when she'd come here tonight was measure the length of the building this way, making sure that it was long enough. It was almost seventy feet exactly, which made it about four and a half feet longer than twenty meters, but it would do. It wasn't like her teachers in middle and elementary school had ever cared that much about the preciseness of it anyways.

When the sound to start went off, she ran. It seemed like an eternity had passed between the time that it took for her complete the first lap and the sound for its expected completion went off, and she hadn't even been running that hard. She'd only been doing a light job. The same went for the second lap...and the third...and the fourth...and the fifth...and the sixth...and the...

For the first time ever, instead of having to call it the quits before level twenty-five (the highest she'd ever gotten to, which she'd had to strain for. Her average was somewhere around eighteen), she completed all 247 levels of the FitnessGram pacer test, just under twenty-three minutes in total of strenuous activity. It was the first time she'd ever seen anybody finish the entire test.

She collapsed where her stuff was, out of breath and her mouth tasting like blood, but still not sweating. Grabbing her notebook, she shakily wrote in the number that it took before she'd begun to feel tired – 160. 160! – and that she'd completed all the levels of the test. She allowed herself ten minutes of a break, sipping at her water bottle again, before she turned on the next test that she was going to do, another of the FitnessGram ones.

By that Friday night, making it two weeks since she'd been bitten by the radioactive spider, using the FitnessGram tests as her scale as well as her easily picking up the various pieces of equipment around in the warehouse, Penny concluded that she was far stronger, faster, and durably than probably even Captain America. She could lift what had to be three tons with ease. She had to be more flexible than even an Olympic gymnast.

And it was insane. It was all insane. She could do these things without any problem. There was so much power now at her fingertips! What was she supposed to do with it? Although she'd said before that she didn't want to be a vigilante or a superhero, or experimented on by Oscorp or the government, her mom and uncle did have a saying. That saying. The same saying that she used at school a her reason why she didn't go to the teachers about what Flash and Ned did.

"With great power comes..."

...But, no. Penny knew she wasn't ready for that, not yet. If she was still thinking about this in the next couple of years, she would maybe revisit the idea then, but not now. She wouldn't even think of the terms "vigilante" or "superhero" in relation to herself again until then. It was simply too dangerous otherwise. Just because she had all these abilities, it didn't meant that she was any less vulnerable than that day at the Stark Expo, when she'd felt so invincible but had been about to be blown into pieces until Iron Man had come to her rescue.

Even as she thought this, however, she was already coming up with the name. Something like Spider-Woman or Spider-Girl wouldn't do. They weren't inherently bad, as they would do a decent job at explaining her powers even without everybody knowing her history with the radioactive spider, but she just didn't like them and how they made her gender (and age, in the case of the second one) so obvious. Unlike the Avengers, she wasn't all that interested in people finding out her identity.

Something like the Spinneret, on the other hand...sure, it would be naming herself after the organ that produced silk in spiders and other species, and that was kind of gross.

But in her opinion, it sounded a lot better.


Word Count: 3,401

Next Chapter Title: the magic number