TROUBLE, peter parker

vi. fire escapades

Maya was almost done with patrolling for the night, and she was sitting down on top of a rooftop near her building. She sat cross-legged with a device in front of her that was on the same radio frequency as police communication devices.

She technically didn't need to patrol outside, considering she could leave her window at any time (given her dad was out on his shift), but the cool air helped keep her awake, and she liked watching the city both simultaneously fall asleep and wake up.

She listened to the talking over the radio. She didn't like to take on smaller cases that she was at least eighty percent sure the police could handle. When she first got into the business of being a vigilante by night, she felt responsible to answer every single call from the police which made her sloppy and made her enemies with the police.

She didn't need to have superhuman hearing to hear the sounds of a group of men chasing after someone. Maya chased after the sounds, making her way across the blocks and buildings by swinging through fire escapes like they were monkey bars.

If it were Thanksgiving, she'd express how grateful she was for plentiful fire escapes in New York. Sure, they were great for escaping fires, but her ... affinity for metal definitely made them useful in clearing blocks in record times.

She arrived on the scene to find someone climbing up the rungs of a ladder on the side of a brick building and a group of several people chasing after them. Well that didn't seem fair.

The group realized that chasing after by making their way up the ladder single file would've been stupid (and ridiculous-looking), so they ran in another direction, attempting to cut off their victim in another direction.

Maya had no idea what the context was and who she was supposed to stop. All she did know was the cool metal underneath her hands and the wind blowing into her eyes, causing her to blink in irritation. As they ran, no one seemed to notice the teenage girl clinging on to one of the metal pipes running along the brick wall.

The group took off in the direction away from her, and she immediately spotted the slowest link. Using her affinity for metal and ability beyond average human capacity, she lifted up a metal trash can (with her mind, of course) and sailed it through the air.

It hit the slowest member on the back of the head—hard enough to knock them down, but not so hard it would cause too much damage (it was a bit of a learning curve to figure out the fine line between injury and unconsciousness).

Their body flopped down onto the ground, and Maya hovered the trash can over the ground before setting it down gently so it wouldn't make a loud clanging sound. She smiled to herself and gave herself a mental high five seeing that she hadn't let any of the trash spill out.

She managed to take out three more while chasing after them, using whatever was handy: pipes, trash cans, regular cans, etc. Of course she carried knives with her, but she didn't know which side to take yet, and she wasn't in the habit of stabbing random people.

As far as she knew, they could've been playing a really intense game of reverse tag.

She kept pursuing to find the victim dangling on the edge of a building while kicking away the three remaining pursuers who were jumping up to grab him as cats do with dangling strings.

Three remaining? That's not right, she thought.

The three had seen her, but before they could react or figure out she wasn't another one of their cronies, she used the metal lid of a trash can and made it fly through the air like a frisbee, knocking each of the three down in its path.

She made her way onto the rooftop the pursuee had got on top of and watched as they leaped over to the roof of one of their attackers.

So there's the last one, she thought to herself.