....
Behind them the crowd was already talking, phones still up, replaying the footage with the specific enthusiasm of people who had just witnessed something they did not expect to see today.
Peter did not look back.
He was hungry and he wanted to sit down.
They arrived at the cafeteria, collected their trays, and found an empty table toward the back. They had barely sat down when someone appeared at the edge of the table.
A blonde girl with blue eyes, looking at Peter with an expression that had started as surprised and had been very quickly replaced with something more carefully neutral.
"Excuse me," Gwen said. "Can I sit here?"
"I do not have a problem with it," Peter said, and looked at the girl beside him. "And you?"
"None at all," she said with a smile. "The more the better."
"Thank you." Gwen sat down, shook hands with the girl, then with Peter, a smile steady on her face throughout. "My name is Gwendolyn Stacy. You can call me Gwen."
"Missy Kallenback." the girl beside Peter said.
"Peter Parker," Peter said, shaking her hand. "And I have to ask, what made you want to sit near the person who just spent recess humiliating Flash and putting him on the ground?"
Missy listened with visible interest for what Gwen would say to that.
Gwen considered it for a moment.
"I am usually against violence," she said. "But Flash has treated people the way he treated that kid for a very long time. You did the right thing by teaching him a lesson. It was about time someone brought him down from the pedestal he had built for himself." A brief pause. "Protecting the kid was brave of you. Stupid, but brave."
"Thank you," Peter said. "I genuinely enjoy being praised and insulted simultaneously. It is a very efficient combination."
Both girls smiled.
---------
While they ate, the conversation moved across different topics, the girls suggesting most of them and Peter contributing where he had something worth saying and staying quiet where he did not.
At one point Gwen mentioned that she wanted to work as a scientist at one of the major companies, and Missy said she did not have anything planned yet, but Peter stopped tracking the conversation at that point because his mind had moved somewhere else entirely.
He had started thinking about Peter Parker 616.
In the comics, the real 616 comics, Parker was considered one of the most gifted scientific minds in the entire Marvel universe.
Reed Richards himself had acknowledged that Parker at his age had been smarter than Richards had been at the same point in his life.
Peter had access to everything that version of himself had learned over a lifetime, every equation, every formula, every framework, stored in a memory that was nearly perfect and a mind that could absorb and apply any subject it was pointed at, scientific or otherwise. That was not something he intended to waste.
The other asset was combat.
The 616 Peter had been an expert level fighter by any reasonable measure, and with the Ip Man techniques the One Above All had given him already living in his muscle memory, he had a foundation to build from.
He would need to add other styles over time because depending on a single style too heavily was a liability, and a predictable fighter was a vulnerable one, something he wanted to avoid because in this universe a predictable weakness could be fatal in ways that went far beyond a bruise.
Then there was the money problem.
The money problem was something he had been turning over since that morning.
The Parkers had always been poor, and Peter Parker specifically had always been broke at the worst possible times. He had no interest in continuing that particular tradition.
The most practical solution was a combination of a paid internship somewhere useful and the strategic patenting of inventions before anyone else could develop them independently.
That would generate income, provide access to proper equipment, and give him the infrastructure he needed to build his suit without doing it in a basement with borrowed tools.
Three options sat at the top of the list.
Stark Industries was at the top of the list in terms of prestige but he dismissed it almost immediately because Tony Stark was not going to take a meeting with a high school student nobody from Queens, not yet.
That connection would come eventually, likely around the Civil War timeline when Tony started investigating enhanced individuals, but trying to force it before then would probably do more harm than good.
So Stark Industries came off the list for now.
Oscorp was the obvious alternative and the obvious disaster.
It had the resources and the talent, including Curt Connors, Max Dillon, and very likely Otto Octavius somewhere in the building, all brilliant and all sitting on the edge of catastrophic accidents waiting to happen, overseen by Norman Osborn who was himself a catastrophic accident waiting to happen.
Walking into Oscorp voluntarily was essentially choosing to stand inside a building that could explode at any moment without warning, and he had no interest in being inside it unless there was no other option.
That left Baxter.
The Baxter Building, which was, when he thought it through carefully, actually the best option on the list.
It had the resources, the funding, the scientific environment, and enough separation from the immediate chaos of the other institutions to allow him to work on personal projects with some degree of privacy and independence.
Reed Richards was difficult to work with but brilliant in ways that would be genuinely useful, and getting a foot in the door there early would open possibilities that would be much harder to access later.
The bell rang for the end of recess and the three of them got up and headed toward their respective classrooms.
As he walked Peter was already putting together the outline of a plan, because once he got home he needed to research everything he had missed and start working out exactly how to get himself through the door at the Baxter Building.