Thursday— April 14^th, 2011.
SPIDER LAIR.
10:45 AM.

Set in the outskirts of the docks was the Spider Lair, well, temporary Spider Lair:

Nestled in the shadowy outskirts of the docks, concealed amidst the labyrinthine alleys, lay Peter Parker's newly constructed haven - the Spider Lair. At first glance, it seemed nothing more than a dilapidated warehouse. Its exterior was weather-beaten and worn.

But inside it was Peter Parker’s new home.

The interior was sparse yet functional. Crates and salvaged materials were repurposed to serve as makeshift furniture and storage units. Dimly lit by the flickering glow of old fluorescent bulbs, Peter looked at his self-repairing nano-tech armor halfway through healing itself from the damage it incurred from Lung’s 2-hour flame bath.

The armor was currently in its idle state, in the form of a sphere.

Tony Stark was a true genius: it was phenomenal for the Iron Spider suit to have self-repair functions in the event that it was damaged like back with Lung. It had more functions than merely self-repair. In fact, Peter was only scratching the surface of what it was capable of.

Back in their fight against Thanos, Tony Stark AKA Ironman had used his nano-tech to program blueprints on the spot and conjure weapons from his nanites, which was an incredible feat of genius and engineering. Initially, Peter thought it was pre-programmed blueprints, but he was wrong as he was enlightened by what his Iron Spider suit could do.

After studying his own armor for some time while feeding it metals and all sorts of salvaged gadgets, Peter had learned the nano-tech capabilities his armor had was as good as Ironman’s armor. This pained him, knowing how much Tony was looking out for him.

In one corner, a rudimentary workstation stood, cluttered with tools, spare parts, and half-finished projects. This was where Peter planned to tinker and hone his skills, though he did not have any good prospects considering the lack of power/precision tools. His nano-tech should compensate him for the lack of powered precision tools, but he needed practice.

Peter was clad in civilian clothes he had scavenged from a donation box. The clothes were worn but serviceable. It hung loosely on his frame, which was a stark contrast to the sleekness of his Iron Spider suit.

Lost in thought, Peter approached the rudimentary workstation where his fabric-based suit was set on a table. Peter had two suits: the first one was gifted by Mr. Stark during the ‘Civil War’ as some fans liked to call it, and the second one was given out of necessity in order to fight Thanos.

The one in front of Peter was the fabric-based suit. It was created based on the designs of NASA space-suits with multiple alterations that Mr. Stark installed. There were a few torn holes and burns in the suit which any level of embroidery wouldn’t be able to save. The leg parts of the suit were severely damaged.

But that didn’t made the suit any useless— its true treasure lied hidden deep in the spider emblem where Karen, his suit’s Artificial Intelligence was embedded. Peter needed Karen, and in order to extract her, Peter would need extremely fine precision tools… and also, lots and lots of practice.

With a sigh, Peter rolled up his sleeves and prepared to work. He grabbed the cuboid form of his nano-tech armor, twisted it and the nanites began to slither and crawl across his skin.

“How about a screwdriver?” The tip of his index finger transformed into a screwdriver. It was easy because he knew how screwdrivers worked, and what they looked like.

Shaping solid simple tools were of course easy, but powered ‘precision’ tools would need practice. For now, Peter decided to make do with practicing by reconfiguring parts of his nanites into tools.

Peter scavenged through the crates scattered around the lair, he rummaged for salvaged items that could be dismantled. With deft hands, he unscrewed them, extracting components that could be used for parts for later use. He would transition the screwdrivers from flat screws, hex screws, and all sorts of simple tools.

He eased into his comfort zone and worked. A battered radio yielded a set of wires that could serve as conduits for experiments. A broken flashlight contributed its metal casing, providing material for solid shells if he wanted to turn it into a cylinder magnet. The junkyard of Brockton Bay or maybe the whole world in general had become a hard place to scavenge items especially for ‘tinker-capes’ since there were PRT protocols overseeing relevant merchandise, but that didn’t stop Peter from acquiring enough tinker parts for him to practice. If he looked hard enough from the trashcan, he could find a blender or two that only needed cleaning. He also had Taylor to thank for. Peter fondly recalled raiding Winslow High with Taylor; it was straight criminal, but Taylor was on a vindictive streak recently, perhaps Peter’s peer pressure being one of the reasons of her actions. Admittedly, Peter had limited resources, but for practice, he had enough.

Soon, Peter was manifesting simple power tools like a drill, blowtorch, welding implements, and even a chainsaw. However, he could only do this in small parts, and it was straining his mental focus a lot. But what he needed most was a powered precision tool that could help him with extracting Karen.

The good thing was, that his helm already had a pre-installed functioning ‘Interface’ that could substitute for magnifying lenses. As he was midway on the magnetized scalpel, he felt an abrupt warning from his danger sense, or was it Peter-tingle? He had to make a proper name for that one.

“This is getting more and more frequent,” Peter looked at the window, and when nothing happened for the next few minutes, he had decided, it was another sporadic outburst. He peeked from the window, still in costume, and saw that the ‘danger’ was coming near the PRT headquarters.

He had been experiencing sporadic bursts of danger from time to time without anything happening. His wild guess was a ‘Thinker’ was responsible for this. A ‘Thinker’ was a PRT power classification defining the dangers precogs represented.

“Am I being targeted?” He didn’t know, but it was making him feel uncomfortable. The sporadic bursts of his spider-sense, now that sounded catchy— the sporadic bursts of danger from his spider-sense had been extremely severe last April 12. “But how can a precog trigger my spider sense?”

It didn’t make sense to him. His spider-sense would only react to active harm, and if seeing to the future could bring him harm, then that only meant it was done out of hostile intentions. In summary, yes, he was being targeted.

Sadly, he couldn’t do anything about it, unless whoever was responsible for this slipped up, came at him, or decided to give up. The nature of superpowers in this world was weird, and here he thought, spider powers were weird.

…

..

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Thursday— April 14^th, 2011.
SUPER SPIDER.
3:32 PM.

Peter returned to his experimentations, and when he was confident enough: he prepared for extracting Karen. “Game time! You can do this, Peter Parker!”

He cracked his neck and stretched his fingers. The Iron Spider suit had been analog since Peter started using it. The lack of Karen had been difficult for him, but it appeared Peter’s brainpower was enough for him to brute-tinker on manifesting blueprints from his head. It would have been normally impossible for Peter to granularly operate the nanites on his armor like he was doing now.

But he was doing it.

How was he actually doing it?

There was a neuro-transmitter at the helm-part which would register most of Peter’s commands from vocal transmission and neural transmission. He only discovered the latter recently. He needed only to think about it, and it would happen: this was the same mechanism his four spider legs functioned.

“Karen, I am getting you out their soon, wait for me.”

He had set up a four-legged apparatus made of hardened webs just above the suit. The metal cylinder that had been originally a flashlight was suspended mid-air among webs. The cylinder had been magnetized, copper wires coiled around it, and it hanged about six foot away from the spider emblem.

“So the first step is removing the spider emblem…” It looked simple, but from what Peter saw from the Iron Spider’s interface, the spider emblem was rigged to ionize the AI chip hiding inside and short-circuit the mini-arc reactor.

If he failed to remove the spider emblem, Karen’s AI chip would be fried, and the mini-arc reactor would melt and turn into a strong enough EMP it could cause at least a city-wide blackout with numerous electronics either malfunctioning or burning.

Initially, he planned to go from inside the suit. Thankfully, he quickly realized he’d be going blind if he did that. Peter wouldn’t be able to avoid the series of circuits embedded in the fabric if he decided to go under. “Don’t mess this up, Peter… There is no retry here.”

Peter conjured a magnetized scalpel with a flat head and held it firmly in his right hand. He carefully pried the sides of the spider emblem. He was nervous, briefly recalling the time he with his friend, Ned, hacked the fabric-based suit. It was a nerve-wracking experience, but he somehow had succeeded on removing the training protocols he had hated so much at that time.

Meanwhile, nimble caliper-like branches grew from his left wrist, each branch with the thickness of a pencil lead. Each end-point of the branches was carefully slithering under the small opening under the spider emblem.

“Okay, chill, Peter, you can do this… You stole Captain America’s shield. You should be able to do this…” It was not like stealing Captain America’s vibranium shield meant he was good at tinkering stuff.

Peter psyched himself, but he was sweating nervously. If he failed, he’d be killing Karen. He saw in his interface the insides of what was under the spider emblem thanks to his nanites giving him the cam-perspective. There were a lot of wires, and he sure heck he didn’t know what each wire represented.

“Where are you? Mr. Stark, I am not technically stealing your technology, because you gave it to me, but please… Where are you?” Peter searched for the wire responsible for his current headache.

“Is it you? I feel it is you?” He stared at the wire that was currently his best guess.

Because he didn’t feel his spider-sense warning him, he went and did it. He transformed the tip of the small branch into a scalpel and cut. “Ok, that didn’t explode, so all good?”

What if this wasn’t it?

Peter didn’t care much for the mini-arc reactor, but he couldn’t bring himself if Karen got ionized here. Thankfully, he had some leeway if his highest priority was acquiring Karen… If it came to it, Peter only needed to move faster than the ionization process would and web the microchip out which housed Karen’s program. The danger to this was perhaps some of the EMP turning incendiary because of his webs.

“The second step is flicking the spider emblem and grabbing Karen out…” And this would require a test of courage. “I can do this, Spiderman can do this, and I sure won’t mess up.”

With a hardened result, he flicks his wrist and shoots a web at the magnetized cylinder just above. The web was carrying nanites he had programmed with precision magnetism; something he couldn’t believe was able to do. When Peter flicked the spider emblem, it flew straight at the cylinder magnet above.

“It worked,” the mini-arc reactor didn’t go EMP or the AI chip was ionized. “Oh my, it worked! It freaking fudging worked!”

Peter conjured a simple caliper and extracted the chip, his nanites ate it and quickly integrated into his suit.

“Hello, Peter, it is nice to have access with you again.” The familiar electronic voice echoed in Peter’s helm. It was Karen, and she was snarky as ever. “I was still able to receive your inputs: tactile response from your suit, web shooter compartmentalization, etc., however, the Iron Spider suit had overwritten my every output, thus I was unable to communicate with you. I hate your new suit.”

She was very ‘extra’ snarky. “When would you abandon this pathetic excuse of a tin can? I’d love to return to my original unit, but, it seems we are on an alternate Earth… Processing. Reconnecting to Stark Tower had been unsuccessful. I am reconfiguring my Logic circuits, please wait.”

The Iron Spider suit operated on a sub-AI program lacking of any complexity: it would be the equivalent of aim-bot-assist in computer games, except for a game’s rifle, Peter was using an armor that operated on nanites. There was no way he could use it with brainpower alone.

But with Karen, he had hope and a friend in her.

“I am sorry for leaving you in the dark. When I got pulled into outer space, I idiotically removed the suit’s mask where your interface operated… Sorry… Don’t blame the Iron Spider Suit, it doesn’t even have a functioning AI.”

“Good,” Karen proudly replied, “Then I shall make the Iron Spider suit more perfect. Reconfiguration of logic circuits had been completed. I am back.” The way she said ‘I am back’ in a Terminator-like voice was funny and just like her.

Because of Peter’s inclinations and interactions with her, Karen had accumulated enough data for her AI to evolve multiplefold. Karen was as good as any sapient race out there, not that Peter was aware of it.

“You are taking this very well, huh? So any theories I ended up here? Time travel? Split realities? Multiverse? Or am I actually in a revised future? A game simulation?” Peter went to enumerate the various possibilities that could have happened to him.

“Inconclusive,” Karen said with finality. “For now, how about you finish up?”

“Oh,” Peter looked at the mini-arc reactor on his fabric-based suit.

He touched it with his armored index finger; slowly, the mini-arc-reactor crawled and swam on his armor’s skin until it reached his chest exposing another mini-arc-reactor. The two didn’t dramatically combine, but simply sat side by side with each other, optimizing an infinity-shaped circuit while it embedded itself on his suit’s chest.

“Recalibrating energy distribution. Reassessing armor’s performance,” Karen informed him, “You are at 9250% power, generating 8.72 gigajoules per second. Note: The dual arc reactors exhibited exponential power output. No immediate danger had been detected in the armor.”

“H-how is this possible? That’s almost three times stronger than Ironman’s arc reactor!!” Peter was exasperated by the development.

Karen supplemented, “The lack of repulsors, and weapon-based gadgets was a most likely contributor. Moreover, the optimized blueprint of nano-fibers was meant to sustain, regulate, and train your strength. It uses a circulation-based distribution of energy… The energy in your armor was purely for internal function. You are basically wearing an Ironman armor of a Captain-America-Super-Soldier-Variety.”

“T-that’s nuts, I am… nuts!” Peter exclaimed.

But Karen simply quipped back, “No, you are… a Super Spider.” 

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#Spidey feeling Coil’s eyes #Is this considered Tinkering? #Mommy Karen is back!