Gotham Spider

Chapter 1: I'm Spider-Man

So I have a tiny secret. My family had a sense of “genetic science” if you ever met them. My mom and dad were scientists before they were killed in a break-in. My brother was naturally born with spider powers. No rhyme or reason, he just was. I was given a bit of his blood because my parents thought that it would give me his powers. For years, we all thought nothing happened. Then I wake up to discover that I no longer need my contact lenses to see. After nearly getting shocked by a detached power cable, I found out that I have some sort of danger sense. Like my brain gets a slight ping in a certain direction that tells me something's coming. Like for example, if I’m facing towards a camera and a car careens out of control to the left of me, my brain will get that signal telling me “WATCH OUT ON YOUR LEFT” and then I look and see a car out of control, then I move out of the way. Then after that I move so you know, I don’t get hit. I also found out that I have the ability to I guess stick to stuff. After I drank a soda and tried to put the can down, the odd thing is that I wasn’t able to let go of the can. Not that my hand was still clenched around the can it's just that my hand literally would not let go of the can.later I learned I could use this ability to stick to walls...like a spider can. So...it worked? My brother’s blood actually did give me spider powers? Ok, maybe I shouldn’t be freaking out too too badly. My parents weren’t normally wrong when it came to their genetic experiments.

So now here we are, about 5 days away from graduating out of Cornell University as a valedictorian. Top of my class in Biochemical Engineering and Technical Engineering. So now what, what am I gonna do next? Hmm...I know I can’t shoot webs out of my wrist, that where I learned how to climb up walls. Gave people one hell of a scare at that too, the nearly falling didn’t scare people. It was the sticking to the walls and windows of the building I was next to part that freaked people out. A lot of people sent videos of me climbing up walls to YouTube and it even got on Billschannel Real Or Fake series. He called it “Fake” and said that it might have been some clever editing, mostly because most of the videos show just a tiny speck crawling up a building. I’ll give him that, the videos were all pretty low quality. Ooh! I know! I thought as I pushed my chair over to some chemicals on a lab table. I wrote down some chemical formulas as I went and I came up with a substance that has exact characteristics of Spider’s silk. Now I just need to find a way to let me shoot it. I looked around the lab and then I saw some white blueprint paper. I went to a clean table, got a pencil, took measurements of my wrists and start drawing.

Ignoring the fact that the paper is ripped, I managed to not only sketch out some rough blueprints on the big piece of paper, I managed to redo the sketch on a smaller piece that you can see above. The general idea for this is that I’ll pressurize and compress the web-fluid into small cartridges (more or less the size of CO2 cartridges) and line a whole bunch of them (at most 15) along the strap like the bullet belt of a minigun. Once one cartridge is empty, it’ll autoshift to the next one in the cycle and auto-load itself into the webshooter mechanism. After examining the spinneret patterns of silk spinning spiders, I designed a self-shifting nozzle that’ll spin the fluid into whatever signals from the trigger are sent. Now onto the actual trigger, the trigger itself will be at the center of my palm and be pressure triggered. Depending on the amounts of pressure I put on the trigger at a given moment will determine the spinneret nozzle formation of which to spin the webbing. For example, I programmed it so when I give a double tap with my two fingers (like a double click on a laptop mouse pad) that will send a signal to the nozzle saying “Make a thin web line” and the nozzle does just that. If I give a tap and hold down the trigger, then that will send a signal to the nozzle saying “Make a widespread webnet” and it will do that, and so on and so forth.

It was midway while I trying to put the web fluid into the cartridges that I realize that my senses have been cranked to like a 20 out of 5 so I get a headache from so much sensory input. I actually had to put on dizzy goggles to finish working because they were able to dial my eyes back enough to where I didn’t get a headache. By the time I was done, I was so tired that I straight up fell asleep in the science lab.
My friends eventually found me passed out in the lab, and instinctively they took a picture of how “Peaceful” I looked. Judge me however you wish, my friends always mess with me. Anyways, I thought I would just make the webshooters and then I would be good.

Nope, because I wanted to be like the Spider-Man, before he mysteriously vanished. My brother and I when we moved to New York had heard about Spider-Man. My brother Matt saw Spider-Man as a role model. Like if someone put the time and effort into it, they could be just like Spider-Man. We would sit around and read every issue we could find. Matt was a fan of the dark reflection of Spider-Man, Venom. I personally liked the quipping, web thwipping, butt kicking fun guy that was Spider-Man. The comic writers shaped the newer generations’ view about Spider-Man. People say that the Spider-Man is actually Parker Industries owner and multi-billionaire genius, Peter Parker because of the fact that Peter Parker is always stated to be the identity of Spider-Man in the comics. I always tell them “He’s too busy running a billion dollar company to be Spider-Man.” So I thought to myself “What should my suit look like?” I thought on it and decided that I should go for a rough vigilante style suit. Something that says “I’m doing this to protect my home,” and I eventually got the perfect idea.

The day is over and the weekend is here and I still have 4 more days until I graduate. Becoming the new Spider-Man should be a cinch. I rummaged through my closet until I found some clothes. I took a can of black spray paint and sprayed the iconic black spider on my outfit. I grabbed an old red ski mask, threw it into the washer for a wash cycle, threw it into the dryer to get rid of the water, cut eye holes that looked like Spider-Man’s into it, put the dizzy goggle lenses into the mask and sewed it all together to make a Spider-Man mask.

After rummaging through my closet for like an hour, and putting together my webshooters which took 6 hours, I have the costume you see above. I got the idea of the design from the spinoff series in the comics “Web Of Scarlet Spider” where a clone of Spider-Man ended up becoming his own superhero. I drew myself in the style of that comic series “Spectacular Spider-Man” because the designs are awesome. I added a utility belt so I could reload some cartridges in case I ran out before I could refill them. The belt has an extra 60 cartridges (6 web cartridges in each of the larger capsules and 10 of the larger capsules around the belt). I decided to test out the tensile strength of my web fluid. I fired a line onto the ceiling and put all my weight onto it. The line held up great and didn’t even feel like it gave at all under the weight. With that in mind, I climbed up to the top of my apartment building and jumped off. I fired a web line onto a lamppost and grabbed on. The line gave me enough of an arc to build up energy and when I let go I went flying through the city, swinging from building to building, block to block. That’s when I saw a woman being backed into an alley by a shady looking guy and his group of friends. I swung over them and crawled along the side of a building nearby.

The moment I saw a gun get pulled, I knew what to do. I started picking off the guys one at time, starting with the guy farthest back in the group. I webbed his mouth shut and held him around the neck until he was unconscious, then I webbed him to the wall. I then grabbed the next guy from behind and put him into a sleeper hold. I held his mouth so he couldn’t scream and held until he was unconscious. Now the guy with the gun started getting worried, he turned around to see his friends knocked out and a Spider-Man right there staring at him. He tried turning the gun on me, but then I webbed the gun out his hands and threw it to the wall. I shot some weblines at him and used them to whip him into the wall and webbed him up. The lady was thankful that I saved her, but before she could thank me I shot a webline onto a street lamp and swung away. I did a lot of things as my first night out as Spider-Man, even stopping an armed bank robbery. So I had a nice back and forth going on here, I’m normally Mark Slater but when danger calls I’ll become the new Amazing Spider-Man!