"Hey, Peter."
Morning sunlight slipped through the gap in the curtains and spilled into the kitchen. Aunt May and Uncle Ben were both already sitting at the table for once, with fried eggs, bacon, and slices of golden toast laid out in front of them. Peter rubbed the sleep from his eyes and immediately sensed that something about the mood was off. Uncle Ben was looking at him like he wanted to say something, but hadn't decided how yet.
Uncle Ben cleared his throat and spoke in a deliberately serious tone.
"Peter, listen, we've got something to tell you..."
"What? Did something happen?" Peter's drowsiness vanished instantly, his fingers tightening around the edge of the table without thinking.
"Don't mind your uncle acting dramatic." Aunt May cut in at once with a smile, patting the back of Peter's hand. "An old friend invited us to stay with him for a few days. Considering your schoolwork, we decided not to bring you along... so you'll be staying home by yourself for a while."
"I was just messing with the kid!" Uncle Ben burst out laughing and ruffled Peter's hair hard. "A fifteen-year-old ought to know how to change a light bulb by now, right?"
"Of course. I can take care of myself." Peter grinned, his eyes drifting toward the crowded breakfast table. "So... can we eat now?"
The whole table broke into laughter.
After breakfast, Aunt May pulled Peter into a tight hug, while Uncle Ben leaned in and lowered his voice with fake solemnity.
"Sorry we can't take you to school on Homecoming Day... though I do have to wonder which girl you're planning to ask to dance."
"You'll find out next year." Peter winked.
"Stay safe."
Uncle Ben pressed his thumb into Peter's shoulder. There was a message hidden inside those two simple words that only the two of them understood.
Peter watched the car drive away down the street, then immediately sprinted back to his room. He pulled the spider-disc out from under the bed, activated it, changed into the new suit, slipped out through the second-floor window, climbed onto the roof, and took off toward school with his backpack on, running and swinging the whole way.
"What a weird day. Or maybe a weird few days. No Avengers, no Uncle Ben, no Aunt May... like all of New York has been left to Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Of course, nobody cares about Peter Parker."
"Hot dogs Spider-Man loves! Hot dogs Spider-Man loves! New York's one and only officially Spider-Man-approved hot dog!"
Spider-Man dropped down in front of the one and only officially approved hot dog stand again. This time, wearing his new suit, he had planned to show it off a little to his old acquaintances. Instead, he noticed that there were way fewer customers than before.
"Hey, Miller, business looks rough today?"
"Your hot dog's where it always is, little spider." Miller didn't even look up, just pointed with the spoon toward the top of the umbrella. "You don't spend much time online, do you? There's a video going around of you beating up some punks and taking their money afterward. A lot of people think it's real."
The new lenses on Spider-Man's mask shifted dramatically, one larger than the other, perfectly showing his confusion.
"Yesterday afternoon? I spent the whole afternoon building this suit."
"I can tell. So your eyes move now?"
Peter realized there was no point trying to explain his suit upgrades to him, so he just webbed the hot dog down into his hand.
"Sounds like somebody's impersonating me and causing trouble. Weird. Where was the video shot?"
"Hell's Kitchen."
"That's odd. I barely ever go there. I should check it out. Maybe I'll catch whoever's behind it."
"Hey! Spider-Man! Is that really Spider-Man?!"
A voice cut into the conversation. Spider-Man turned and saw a young student, taller than he was by a good margin. Not quite Carl King's ridiculous height, but easily around six-one. Under his jacket, the kid was wearing a full Spider-Man costume.
"Oh my God, it's really you, I actually met you, I really met you." The guy was so excited he could barely get the words out. "Y-you changed your suit, oh my God, the colors are brighter, it looks way better, the web pattern's spaced wider, and your spider symbols changed both front and back..."
"Uh..." Seeing that his first real fan had somehow paid more attention to his suit than most of the people he'd known for years, Spider-Man decided that too many words were not a blessing. He cut in fast. "Buddy, breathe?"
"What? Oh. Right."
The giant took a deep breath and seemed to calm down.
Then he opened his mouth again, and Spider-Man instantly knew he had been wrong.
"My name's Eugene Thompson, I go to Midtown High, I'm your biggest fan, look, under this jacket I'm wearing a Spider-Man costume, today was our school theme day, we were all supposed to dress up as superheroes, so I got this custom-made as fast as I could..."
"Okay, Eugene, stop. I can call you Eugene, right?"
Peter hurried a couple of steps away, already preparing to swing out and get out of there.
"Thanks, seriously, but I've got something to do. I need to get to Hell's Kitchen and catch the guy pretending to be me. See you."
As Spider-Man swung off, Thompson shouted after him at the top of his lungs.
"I know that wasn't really you, little spider! Go beat the crap out of those fakes!"
Finally free of Thompson, Spider-Man couldn't help sighing at the intensity of Thompson's enthusiasm. But he quickly focused again and headed for Hell's Kitchen.
That place was one of the highest-crime areas in New York, but also one of the lowest-reporting ones. There were barely any cameras, which made the fancy new system he had built almost useless there.
Still, sometimes you didn't need precision tools to find what you were looking for. A guy swinging through Manhattan's skyline was just as easy to spot from the same height.
"The other spider... or Mysterio?"
Spider-Man landed on the side of a wall and watched the impersonator in his old suit drop into the street below and start beating people up. He switched on the infrared mode in his tactical lenses and immediately noticed that there was only one real heat signature. The people getting beaten were fake.
So he flipped cleanly down into the middle of the scene, only for the photonic projection to swallow his image completely.
"Photonic light manipulation. The reflected light off my body is being replaced by the preloaded scene. Which means I'm invisible to him?"
Chameleon, still in the middle of acting, heard a noise but couldn't see a thing. He immediately asked his support team through the comm.
"What just happened?"
"What happened," Spider-Man said from nowhere, "is that you never paid me for using my image."
Before Chameleon could react, a punch drove into his chest and sent him flying. Because he had been knocked out of the preset scene, even his own body was now hidden by the projected light.
It didn't matter.
Spider-Man could still see him through the lenses.
"What the hell?!"
"I don't know... Spider-Man's here, but he got inside the reflection field?"
Chameleon was on the verge of losing it, staring into the empty-looking illusion zone.
"How can he see me?!"
"I don't know!"
"You'd think before impersonating someone, you'd actually study their image properly. This is some very unprofessional work for an impersonator. Honestly, I'm hurt."
Webs shot out from nowhere and stuck to Chameleon, yanking him forward and straight into another punch that sent him smashing into a wall.
Spider-Man kept talking the whole time.
"Quentin Beck, right? Mind telling me who hired you?"
"He knows who I am?!" Quentin's terrified voice came through the earpiece, while Chameleon cursed and roared:
"Turn off the projection!"
"But he knows..."
"Turn the damn thing off!"
The fake scene vanished, revealing the real street again and Spider-Man standing there with both hands on his hips. Chameleon immediately saw the new suit, then looked down at the old one he himself was wearing, and cursed again.
Only then did Spider-Man realize he wasn't fighting Mysterio at all, but a real person wearing his old suit, someone built differently, but close enough in shape to pass at a glance.
"So you're not Quentin. He's just the tech support?"
Spider-Man spotted one of the little spheres on the ground, webbed it over, and stuffed it into his pocket. The impersonator, meanwhile, pulled a knife from somewhere.
"Stop talking about Quentin Beck!"
"So what, you want to introduce yourself instead? Master of disguise? Copycat extraordinaire? Discount actor?"
"Shut up, you damn bug."
With a tactical knife in hand, Chameleon lunged forward and stabbed. Spider-Man slipped aside, and Chameleon instantly released the knife, caught it with the other hand, and followed with a brutal elbow strike.
"I was trained by the KGB! I was the top operative in foreign intelligence! I've killed more people than you could count, I..."
Spider-Man kicked him in the stomach so hard he flew backward, slammed into the wall, collapsed to the ground, and got wrapped up in webbing like a dumpling before he could rise again.
"And now you're fighting someone who held up an elevated train line for two minutes. Sorry, man. That kick had a little personal frustration in it, but you'll live."
Peter slung the webbed-up Chameleon over his shoulder and decided he'd have to take him directly to one of the NYPD precincts himself. This was Hell's Kitchen. If he called local cops here, there was no guarantee they'd be trustworthy.
"All right, Mister Fake Spider-Man, if you're willing, we can talk about your boss on the way."
(End of Chapter)
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