Chronicles of the Spider

The First Supervillains

15 Years Ago

Earth Prime

Peter swung desperately towards the Waldorf. He moved faster than ever before, using his new speed to devastating effect. It would barely take him a few minutes to get there, but he already worried about who could be hurt in the rampage.

"An evil FF?" Peter asked himself incredulously. "Wow, my luck is bad. Alright, Pete, think. You need to contain and stop them. How would you stop the Fantastic Four?"

Peter remembered everything he knew about the Fantastic Four. Reed's elastic body, Ben's powerful rock-like body, Johnny's constant flame output, and Susan's force fields made them a very dangerous enemy for anyone, just ask Doom.

"TUESDAY, give me everything we have about the attackers," he commanded his personalised User Interface. Peter was working on making TUESDAY a full fledged AI, but he needed a lot more time for that. While TUESDAY wasn't as sentient as JARVIS, FRIDAY, or Peter's old AI KAREN, she would grow.

"Searching," came the mechanical voice from his comms. "Three suspects have been identified as Josh Spaken, Kim Landry, and Sam Landry. Dr Spaken appears to have a controllable elasticity, while Dr Landry has invisibility and telekinetic field creation, and the younger Mr Landry can ignite himself at will, and throw balls of fire."

"How did this happen?" he pressed.

"From the answers given by Spaken Labs, it appears something went wrong with the particle accelerator, and Dr Spaken, Dr Landry, Mr Landry, and a large man by the name of Toby Keller went into the central core to fix the error. However, when the particle accelerator exploded, all of them emerged in their current forms."

"So the Thing lookalike must be Toby Keller," Peter mused. "Okay. I can work with that."

As he approached the scene, cars were launched into the sky at the helicopters circling them. Peter webbed three of the cars and swung them back onto the ground, forming a makeshift barrier between the super-powered scientists and the police. He landed with little sound on top of the central car.

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" he shouted, drawing all the attention onto himself. The police stopped firing, but didn't lower their guns, not knowing what the Spider planned to do. The four, too, stopped attacking for a moment.

"Alright," Peter continued calmly, after a minute of silence. "Now then, let's talk about what and why you're doing this."

For a moment, no one spoke, but Josh slowly stepped forward. "Spider," he started, looking around warily at the assembled force. "It's an honour to meet you."

"Thank you, Dr Spaken," Peter replied in kind. "I'm a big fan of your work as well. Which begs the question about why you're hurting people."

"We don't wanna hurt anyone," the large rocky mass grumbled, drawing gasps from the assembled audience. The reporters didn't want to miss a minute of this thrilling exchange. 

"The man who did this," Josh spoke hurriedly. "The man who messed the particle accelerator up enough to cause the explosion. He's in there. Everyone who's hurt tonight, is hurt because of him."

"Alright," Peter spoke calmly, trying to deescalate the situation after seeing that they didn't, in fact, want to fight. "Why don't we let the police enter the building and find him? He'll be tried under a court of law, and if he's found guilty, he can be put in jail."

"No!" Kim screamed. "He needs to pay for what he's done to me. To us! He's turned us into monsters, and for that, I'll kill him myself!"

"Whoa whoa whoa!" Peter exclaimed with his hands up, slowly inching towards their position. "You're not monsters, Dr Landry. You have strange abilities, yes. So do I. But a monster is only defined by their actions, not their appearance. You attacking the cops, throwing around cars? That makes you scary, but you were emotionally charged after a horrific accident. It's okay. So let's all just calm down okay? We can talk this out without fighting anymore."