The transition from Midtown High student to masked vigilante usually involved a cramped, remarkably unhygienic dumpster enclosure. Today, Peter didn't even have to unbutton his flannel shirt.
He stood in the shadows of a narrow brick alleyway just two blocks from the school. A single, focused thought sent the Venom symbiote spilling out from under his collar. The black, alien biomatter cascaded over his shoulders and down his arms, devouring his street clothes in a rippling wave of liquid shadow. Within seconds, the sleek black suit sealed over his face, the large white eye lenses snapping open.
A few feet away, Cindy Moon didn't need an alien parasite to bypass a phone booth.
She stood perfectly still, her hands a blur of practiced, microscopic movements. Thick, luminous white threads extruded directly from her fingertips, wrapping tightly around her body to form her suit. It was mesmerizing to watch.
"I've always meant to ask," Peter said, his voice slightly modulated through the symbiote's mask. "Does that stuff actually hold up in a fight? I mean, it's basically just really strong pajamas, right?"
"It's bulletproof," Cindy replied, her voice muffled slightly before she pulled the red face-covering over her mouth.
Peter blinked, the white lenses of his mask widening in genuine shock. "Wait. Really?"
Cindy nodded. She raised a hand, her thumb and forefinger parting to reveal a complex, braided strand of silk that looked distinctly metallic in the afternoon light. "I can alter the chemical composition and structural density of the webbing as it leaves my spinnerets. Bulletproof. Thermally insulated. Highly conductive. Radiation-proof. It just depends on what I need."
Peter stared at her. His own spider-silk was an engineering marvel, but making it radiation-proof would require him to wrap himself into a giant, immobile cocoon. She literally just spins Kevlar out of her hands, he thought, a twinge of nerdy jealousy hitting him. "Uh. That's terrifyingly cool."
He reached into one of the symbiote's concealed pockets and pulled out a small, sleek black earpiece. "Oh, by the way. Before we hit the rooftops, can you run a quick S.H.I.E.L.D. background check for me?"
Cindy paused, pulling a heavily modified Stark-tech smartphone from her hip. "On who?"
"Sergei Kravinoff. The Russian guy from the museum last night. I want to know if he was ever affiliated with the KGB. Specifically, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service."
Cindy didn't ask questions. Her thumbs flew across the encrypted screen, sending the query directly to a secure S.H.I.E.L.D. data-mining server.
"While we wait on that," Peter continued, tossing her the earpiece. Cindy caught it effortlessly. "Oscorp finished wiring the new server racks at the lab yesterday. This comms unit connects directly to Harry and Amadeus at The Web. I know S.H.I.E.L.D. probably issues you guys earpieces that can hear colors or whatever, but... this is ours. For strategic support. When we're operating as a team."
Cindy looked at the small piece of tech resting in her palm. The faintest hint of warmth touched her dark eyes. "Thank you, Peter."
She slotted it into her ear. Before Peter could say anything else, his own phone buzzed violently in his pocket.
He pulled it out. The caller ID was a string of twelve zeroes. He held the screen up for Cindy to see.
Cindy glanced at her own phone, reading the encrypted intercept. "It's Director Fury."
Does the Director of a global intelligence apparatus really have nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon? Peter wondered. He tapped the screen and brought the phone to his ear. "Hello?"
"How did a teenager in Queens connect a Russian aristocrat to the KGB?" Nick Fury's gravelly voice barked through the speaker, bypassing any form of greeting.
Peter leaned against the brick wall, a smirk creeping onto his face under the mask. "Why don't you take a guess, Director?"
Fury didn't answer. The silence on the line was heavy and dangerous.
"Fine, I'll lay it out," Peter said, dropping the joke. "The Kravinoff Estate upstate has been sitting empty for two decades, but the perimeter is completely locked down. No squatters, no graffiti. That means it's a secured asset. Then there's Nikolai Kravinoff, Sergei's dad. He started a massive portfolio of highly profitable, totally disconnected shell companies in the eighties, then suddenly liquidated them all. That is textbook money laundering. Spies use shell corporations to fund local operations so they don't leave a paper trail leading back to Moscow."
Peter paced a few steps down the alley. "Plus, think about the timeline. Sergei's great-grandfather fled Russia during the revolution. His kids were basically toddlers. They grew up in America. They didn't hate the Soviet system because they never actually lived under it. They just saw the Soviets turn their homeland into a global superpower that crushed the Nazis. A lot of deep-cover assets aren't loyal to the politics; they're loyal to the motherland."
Peter strategically left out the biggest piece of the puzzle: the fact that Dmitri Smerdyakov, the Chameleon, was Sergei's half-brother. Based on purely public information, Peter shouldn't know that.
A long, agonizing silence stretched across the line. Peter could actually hear Fury taking a slow, deep breath through his nose.
"Where exactly did you acquire this intelligence, Parker?" Fury finally asked, his tone dangerously flat.
"Wikipedia," Peter replied cheerfully. "And county property records. The Kravinoff mansion is a really popular topic on amateur ghost-hunting forums. The president of my high school Detective Club handed me a printed dossier on it about an hour ago."
Far away in Washington D.C., inside the heavily fortified Triskelion, Nick Fury violently rubbed his lone eye. The kid cracked a generational Soviet spy ring using a high school club project and Wikipedia. "Why are you looking into this?" Fury demanded.
"Are you telling me you don't know?"
"Am I supposed to know every damn thing that happens in the five boroughs?" Fury snapped.
"My bad," Peter said, holding back a laugh. "Last night, I was tracing Kingpin's black-market supply lines. I dropped into the Fisk Museum of Natural Art after hours. Sergei Kravinoff was there. Ten o'clock at night, getting a private tour of smuggled African ivory. I figured the guy who likes hunting lions might be supplying Fisk."
"Right. The museum," Fury muttered, the pieces clicking together on his end. "Yes, we are tracking Kravinoff. A Russian super-soldier stepping foot on American soil, even under the guise of diplomatic immunity, puts him on my board."
Peter stiffened. "Wait. Super-soldier?"
"Yes, Parker. Super-soldier," Fury confirmed. "He and his brother both received extensive Russian augmentations. The Chameleon Dmitri Smerdyakov got the bio-synthetic facial reconstruction. Sergei received a refined variant of the Soviet strength serum. We assume he is here to investigate his brother's death. But since you didn't pull the trigger on the Chameleon, you don't need to worry about him."
Peter winced behind his mask. Technically true, Peter thought. But the Punisher blew a hole through his head right in front of me. If Kraven finds that out, I'm definitely on the menu.
"If S.H.I.E.L.D. knows his father and grandfather were KGB," Peter asked, shifting the subject, "why weren't they arrested years ago?"
"Because catching KGB spies operating inside the United States is the CIA's headache, not mine," Fury replied bluntly. "S.H.I.E.L.D. is an international peacekeeping force. Furthermore, the World Security Council has a permanent Russian seat. I don't kick over hornets' nests unless the hornets are building a nuclear bomb."
The jurisdictional red tape made a depressing amount of sense.
"We will keep an eye on Sergei," Fury continued, his tone shifting into something strictly professional. "Do not engage him. Oh, and for the record, S.H.I.E.L.D. cyber-division has reviewed the architecture of your new Oscorp-funded laboratory. The firewalls are adequate. Consider the facility approved."
Peter rolled his eyes. Like I needed your permission to hang out with my friends, he thought. S.H.I.E.L.D. always loved pretending they were in control of everything.
"So," Fury asked, the faint sound of a keyboard clacking in the background. "What the hell are you planning to do now?"
Peter looked over at Cindy. She had finished adjusting her mask and was stretching her legs, ready to move.
"I'm going to swing around the city with Cindy and see if anyone needs help," Peter answered simply.
The line went quiet for three seconds.
"Well then," Fury said, his voice entirely devoid of its usual sarcasm. "Have a nice day, Spider-Man."
Click.
Peter pulled the phone away from his ear, staring at the blank screen in utter bewilderment. He looked at Cindy.
"Did Nick Fury just tell me to have a nice day?" Peter asked, thoroughly unsettled. "Is the world ending?"
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