Spider-Man: Earth-9576

Chapter 7: Second Spider

"Awesome, see you later, Gwen!", Jason said with a friendly smile, before running off for home. Gwen watched him go, her smile staying for a couple seconds before she looked visibly disappointed again, as she walked off.

Resuming her own walk home, now by herself, she mentally scolded herself. 'Stupid, stupid, stupid... why can't you just act normal around him when you have something big on your mind?', she said harshly in her own head.

'You're fine with behaving like a normally functioning human around him and anyone else when there's nothing out of the ordinary going on... but the second something big comes up that you want to tell Jason about... it becomes "Sorry, Miss Stacy's absent today, please try again later..." Pathetic.', she continued.

'What with the dance coming up in a couple weeks, the arachnid problem that's come up from a couple days ago... There's so much I want to tell him. It's not like he's not the same doofus as always.' She sighed as she briefly slowed down, looking at the street in front of her. "A cute and irritatingly lovable doofus, but still...", she grumbled pitifully.

Once she was sure that she was on her own, Gwen slipped into a dark alley, reaching into her backpack to pull out the white ski mask she'd kept on her for the last couple days.

Ever since that spider bite, she's been experiencing multiple strange new things and, in her intelligence, quickly came to the conclusion that she had gained superpowers, specifically a very familiar set of superpowers.

Her game plan starting today was to test out what she could, specifically the wall-crawling, given how she'd only narrowly avoided several times that one of her friends would've caught her stuck to something.

So, if she was now like Spider-Man, she was going to test how far that extended...

(Over an hour later)

It wasn't nearly as difficult as part of her had been expecting, as she quickly managed to be crawling on the side of her chosen building going any way she wanted, and only slipping from getting distracted a couple times.

After wall-crawling, Gwen decided to try out what enhanced physical capabilities she might have. Spider-Man could jump unnaturally high, so who's to say she couldn't, too?

On the roof of the building she'd been crawling on, she bent her knees to wind up, then pushed, jumping up significantly higher than she'd ever been able to before, letting out a soft yelp of surprise from the increased airtime.

"Holy crap...", she muttered to herself, "that's gonna take some getting used to." She kept doing it for a while, just to acquaint herself with the feeling of being airborne. Once she was feeling more comfortable with it, Gwen took things up a notch, by adding flips or rolls into the jumping. When that became more familiar, it was time to put it in full motion, as she ran for the edge, mustered up all her nerve, and leapt for the next roof, yards away.

She touched down, breaking the impact with a roll. She then kept running, jumping and flipping along the rooftops, while using her spider-grip to catch herself if she miscalculated her jump, or missed her footing.

After the following couple of hours of improvised maneuvers, Gwen felt good about this. She had the movement down, now the key was equipment. She needed to be able to shoot webs, but almost more so than that... she needed a suit.

'Wonder what MJ and the guys would think of me now... no, I can't tell them. If I decide to do this, they can't know who I am, they'll be in danger if I make enemies, and those enemies find out my friends know me.', she thought to herself.

Sneakily dropping down to the ground again, Gwen pulled off her improvised mask, smoothed out her hair as best she could, then walked the rest of the way home.