Peter slid back into the booth, doing his absolute best to look relaxed. He grabbed his fork, aiming for the paella, but before the tines even touched the rice, Gwen leaned across the table.
"What happened?" she asked, her voice dropping.
Peter blinked, feigning innocence. "What do you mean? The bathroom was exceptionally clean. Five stars."
Gwen didn't blink. She just stared at him, her eyes tracking the slight tension in his jaw. "You're wearing your 'I'm fine, please don't worry about me' face. It's a dead giveaway. Talk."
Peter sighed, dropping the fork. He awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck, his fingers catching on the collar of his shirt. "Okay. Someone contacted me in there. It was Cindy's boss."
Gwen processed that for a fraction of a second before her eyebrows shot up. She knew exactly who Cindy's boss was. S.H.I.E.L.D.
It was a running joke among the few people in the know. S.H.I.E.L.D. was technically a public agency. They had a sleek official website, a listed corporate mission statement, and even published a heavily redacted annual budget report. But because they didn't hold press conferences or leak to the Daily Bugle, the general public completely ignored them. They were the ultimate mystery organization—not because they hid in the shadows, but because they stood perfectly still in broad daylight in a grey suit, boring everyone into looking the other way.
"Did he... assign you a task?" Gwen asked, glancing around the restaurant to make sure no one was eavesdropping.
"Theoretically, the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. operate independently," Peter deflected, tracing the rim of his water glass. "But considering the scale of what he's dealing with, we should probably help out if we can."
It was a half-truth. He wasn't thinking about the Elementals. He was thinking about Richard Parker.
His father had been a gene-editing expert. He didn't have many concrete memories of his parents, just fleeting flashes of them hurriedly dropping him off at Uncle Ben and Aunt May's house before vanishing again. They had always kept him entirely in the dark.
Gwen waved a hand directly in front of his face, snapping him out of his spiral.
Peter jumped slightly. "What?"
"You just stared at a clam for two solid minutes without taking a breath," Gwen said, gesturing to his plate. "Eat."
"Right. Sorry." Peter finally scooped up a bite of rice. "Blame Nick Fury."
The Madrid leg of their trip was winding down, and Peter had genuinely enjoyed remembering what it felt like to be a normal teenager. He didn't have to suit up once. The most action he saw was subtly flicking a web to trip a pickpocket in a crowded plaza, walking away before anyone even noticed the guy had fallen.
But behind closed doors, he hadn't been idle.
On the first night after his ambush-briefing with Fury, Peter had locked his hotel room door, tapped into his sorcerer abilities, and open a portal straight back to the basement in Queens. He had retrieved the old, worn notebook his father had left behind.
Now, lying on his back on the hotel bed, Peter flipped through the yellowed pages.
He knew this notebook inside and out. It contained the original synthetic formulas for his web fluid. It was, for all intents and purposes, a survival guide on how to be Spider-Man, written from a purely scientific perspective. It mapped out web-wing glide ratios, tensile strength stress tests, and chemical degradation rates.
If I had to summarize it, Peter thought, tracing a faded diagram of a web-shooter nozzle, it's a manual on how to survive what the spider did to me.
He was looking for a code. A hidden message. He knew it was a long shot—Richard Parker couldn't have predicted the future before his final mission to Europe—but Peter checked anyway. He scoured the margins. Nothing.
He flipped to the section detailing the genetic subject itself.
Richard Parker had selected the Taranto spider as the baseline template. The notes detailed the reasoning: the Taranto tarantulas—often referred to generally as bird-eating spiders—were massive.
Peter read his father's cramped handwriting: A sufficiently large body mass is required to survive the extensive genetic modification payload. The baseline venom is relatively weak; through CRISPR-cas9 modification, the venom delivery system can be rewritten to act as a viral vector for DNA transcription.
Peter stopped reading. He frowned, staring at the ceiling.
He re-read the passage. Large body mass.
Bird-eating tarantulas were huge. They could grow up to twenty centimeters across. But Peter remembered the day at the Osborn Tech Expo perfectly. When Carl Culkin had snatched the escaped spider and dropped it down Peter's collar, it hadn't felt like a dinner plate crawling down his spine. It had felt small. Palm-sized, at best. When Cindy crushed the last surviving spider clone during the Carl King fight, it had been tiny.
Something wasn't adding up.
Peter sat up, closed the notebook, and open another portal.
He stepped out of the portal and into the sterile, humming environment of the Savage Force research lab at Osborn Technologies. Dr. Jonathan Drew didn't even flinch at the sudden drop in atmospheric pressure. He just adjusted his glasses and looked up from his microscope.
"Ah, Peter," Dr. Drew said mildly. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Peter walked over to the reinforced glass terrariums lining the far wall, watching a massive, hairy arachnid slowly climb a piece of driftwood. "Dr. Drew, quick question. Are all the spiders you breed here Taranto spiders?"
"Strictly speaking, 'Taranto tarantula' is a broad colloquialism used for the Theraphosidae family," Dr. Drew explained, his academic tone locking into place. "They're massive, docile, and highly resilient. Which makes them the ideal canvas for genetic modification."
Peter leaned against the counter. "Okay, but what about the specific spider my dad engineered? The one that was exhibited at the science expo?"
Dr. Drew paused, wiping a glass slide with a microfiber cloth. "Ah. No. That wasn't a standard tarantula. That was a true Taranto."
"What's the difference?"
"A real Taranto tarantula—the Lycosa tarantula—is actually a European wolf spider," Dr. Drew said. "Unlike the giant bird-eaters, they are much smaller, only about ten centimeters across. They aren't highly venomous, and they don't spin webs to catch prey. They are aggressive ambush predators. They chase their food down."
Dr. Drew shook his head, a look of professional bewilderment crossing his features. "I still don't fully understand why your father went through the trouble. Because they are so small, getting them to survive the gene-editing process required a monumental amount of foundational engineering. Just forcing their venom glands to act as a transcription vector was a nightmare."
Peter's pulse kicked up a notch. "Where did he buy the original biological samples?"
"He didn't," Dr. Drew replied, carefully setting the slide into a rack. "He insisted on capturing the baseline stock himself. He made a specialized field trip to southern Italy to collect them from their native habitat."
"Where in southern Italy?" Peter asked, though he already knew the answer.
Dr. Drew looked up. "Taranto."
Peter exhaled slowly. Madrid, then Valencia, then a boat across the Mediterranean. Next stop, Taranto.
PS: Marvel Fun Fact If you want to get technical about your arachnids, the Lycosa tarantula (the European wolf spider) is the species that originally gave us the word "tarantula"! The spider is named after the city of Taranto in Italy. In the Middle Ages, locals believed that if you were bitten by one, the only cure was to engage in a frenzied, manic dance to sweat out the venom. This dance became known as the Tarantella. Looks like Richard Parker took his research straight to the source!