Chereads / "Caught in the Web of the Spider." / Chapter 41 - Chapter 41: The Cat's Mark

Chapter 41 - Chapter 41: The Cat's Mark

The next week and a half was weird for me and my life. I was now officially a part of the Baxter Foundation. I spent most of my time there these days coming home only late in the night. May and Ben didn't approve of it at first, but once they found out the work I was doing could have lives they begrudgingly understood.

In reality however I actually spent an hour or so with the FF before going off on patrol as Spider-man, Sue understood though, after all that was part of the deal. This way I got to be a hero and a scientist. Ha, and Peter always said this was hard.

I still remember the first day I came to the Baxter Building as Peter Parker and not Spider-man. I had to fight through the giant crowd gathered outside and into the lobby. And even then the guards wouldn't let me go up, so Johnny had to personally come down and cler me through.

I'm pretty sure my picture was going to be in the front page tomorrow though, 'Mysterious Boy enters Baxter Building?!' hopefully they didn't get a good enough shoot.

"So Peter, how did your aunt and uncle take it?" Johnny asked.

I shrugged, "as well as you can expect. I think they are still mad I lied to them but the fact I got a job here seems to make them happy."

"Good man, heck maybe one day you should come clean to them you know? Tell them who you really are?" Johnny lead me through the elevator doors into a large hallway.

"Yeah, not going to happen. They freak out if I'm late from a friend's place, can you imagine what they could do if they knew I was Spider-man?"

Johnny shrugged, "if you think so," he stopped before a door and pressed his hand on the palm scanner next to it, "welcome to your new home."

My eyes went wide, "woah," I blinked as I looked around the large nearly empty room. I had a large monitor and computer system up against one wall, a table and a few tools, but other than that it was completely empty, "this is so cool!"

Johnny grinned, "I thought you'd think that. Anyway make yourself at home, my lab is just three doors down and Sue's is right opposite to yours. Reed's further down the hall but, ah, maybe don't go there unless he gives you permission. Guy is freaky when it comes to personal space."

I nodded as I put my bag on the chair and took out my notes, "this is great Johnny, I have many things I want to test out...hey, do you think you can help me out?"

Johnny blinked, "me? What do you mean?"

"Well last night I came up with a theory on how your powers work, I want to test it out," I explained as I looked around my lab, god it feels weird saying that, and found a geiger counter. It was a complex one with a customizable setting, I would need to change its internal working though for it to detect the energy signatures I wanted it to.

"Wait what? You think you know how my powers work? That's crazy man! Even Reed can't figure that out!"

I shrugged, "it's only a theory man, chill out," I began working on the geiger counter, adding a thin filament of nickel to the counter. The people on my Earth had a theory, that Johnny's powers, and the rest of the FF for that matter, we're dimensional energies. And their accident allowed them to control that energy. And since it looked like I was dealing with the Ultimate FF, who gained powers from teleporting that looks to be the case now as well.

If I recall correctly Johnny's powers were once super charged by a place called the Negative Zone, it allowed his flames to grow so powerful he couldn't switch them off. But that was just a theory, and now I would need to test it off.

I pointed the meter at Johnny, "go flames."

"It's called Flame on," Johnny grumbled as he turned up the heat, covering himself in flames.

I looked at the geiger counter and watched as the reading grew, and I smiled, "perfecto!"

"So? What did you find out?" Johnny asked switching off his flames.

"I think you're powers are coming from another dimension, and your body right now is serving as some kind of portal, well not portal, more like a reverse sponge."

"Wait, how could you possibly know this? What did you do to the geiger counter?"

"I added a layer of nickel to it," I pointed at the nickel patch, "this detected the amount of heat you gave off. And the counter to detected your fire, which is radiating outwards, but not in harmful amount. So you're power bursts out, and irradiated, you're not absorbing anything out here in the air, so it must be coming from inside you, and when it reacts with our atmosphere it explodes, behaving like fire. You're not a fireball, you're basically leaking white phosphorus like radiation."

Johnny blinked, "woah, that's-that's amazing! Holy shit Peter that was so freaking cool! Here, this is Reed's email ID, send your theory to him I'm sure he would love to hear it!"

I nodded to Johnny and did just that. Honestly Peter's mind was amazing, I had the theory, but Peter's intelligence made it all happen.

After that I meet Reed, Ben and Sue for dinner. We talked a bit about the things I would work on and how I could help. Reed took a look at my findings and needless to say he was impressed, though I could detect a hint of distrust in his tone of voice which honestly confused the hell out of me.

As the week went by the legend of Spider-man only grew in time. Thanks to my timings at the Baxter building I was able to go out on patrol on nights. I must have stopped three muggings a day, on top of all the other things.

People talked about me like I was an urban legend, of the things Spider-man was rumoured to have done. They had correctly guessed that I was the one who took out the GST block party a week ago and that I had something to do with their arrest, but the rest of the rumors were all pretty weird.

Some thought I was a demon from hell out to punish the wicked, I'm pretty sure that one was a troll just making waves for fun. But others thought I was a mad man with a box, one theory suggested I was a member of the FF that didn't like publicity and got my powers the same way they did.

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