Throwing Caution to the Wind

Chapter 3

Spiderman didn't go out for the rest of the week. Peter wasn't gonna take any chances with the Avengers. Which is why on Saturday he and Ned gathered  in his room to start what would later be called project Avoid All Avengers, or Triple A batteries for short.

"Do you think we can do what you did with the police cars with the Avengers suits." Asked Peter.

"The only reason that worked, is cause all the police cars are hooked up to the same frequency on the radios."

"Maybe we could connect the security cameras and use your software to be scanning for their suits."

Ned thought about this for a second, but eventually shook his head.

"It's too risky. If the city notices something weird with the security cameras, they could trace it back to us, especially since all the information will eventually funnel to our ip addresses. But," Ned got a thoughtful expression on his face. "If we could make mini trackers, and have them run on an unused FM frequency, we could find a way to stick them to their suits use that to track them."

"That's brilliant" Peter said excitedly.

Since they were at Peter's, and May wasn't due home till the early morning, they spent the better part of the night working out the details
It was near 2am when the dream became a reality.

"Dude," Ned said suddenly. "We need a name for this"

The coke and gummy bears were talking at this point. The had originally called it 'Avoid the Avengers at All Costs'. But then Ned proposed Avoid All Avengers. To which Peter proposed 'Triple A Batteries'. After a laughing fit that had them going at it for more than a few minutes. They calmed down enough to get back to work.

"Triple A Batteries it is." Peter said whiping a tear from his eye.

With their work done for the night, having already made the devices and the casings to be in their 5th period manufacturing class the next Monday, they hopped into bed.

**********

Peter woke up cursing himself for the second time in a week. At least he got sleep in this time. But since it was Saturday, and with all their homework having been completed the previous day before their little late night shenanigans. So that was a plus. He checked the clock, 10 o'clock. He figured that that was a good time as any to wake up.

After trying unsuccessfully for a fee minutes to wake up Ned, they got out of bed and started breakfast. After successfully not burning down the apartment they looked at the previous nights work making sure that their sleep deprived brains didn't miss anything obvious or calculated something wrong. After a few minor adjustments, they were ready to start on the blueprints for the casings. They needed a light metal so aluminum was the best option. They figured a few small air holes were best in case it started overheating. They also added a small red light to reroute the extra energy as a preventative measure for overheating. Then May came home so they covered up the blueprints with their binders and pretended to be working on their English.

"Hi Peter, hi Ned." Said May from the door.

She walked in holding what looked to be this weeks groceries. Peter went to give her a hand. After all the groceries were away, they put all the Triple A blueprints to rest.

He and Ned instead went to upgrade the Guy in the Chair's trusty sidekick. Yes, the sidekick's sidekick. The laptop had been made using spare parts from everywhere in the city. The large carbboard box of old computer parts in the school included. It was a bulky piece of tech and weighed about the same as 3 textbooks stacked on top of eachother. But when they had started the blueprints for it, they had both agreed that they couldn't risk it being a desktop. They had tried creating a pseudo start up menue, but with all the programs they had planned out, the pseudo start up would take up too much of the computers processing power.

Their last piece of genius was trying to get the laptop to monitor Peter's vitals. Peter had protested vehemently against this addition, but after he had gotten shot, Ned had put his foot down.

The old apple watches and fitbits the had collected had been dissected and the all the monitors had been removed. Ned was trying to comfertably integrate them into parts of the suit.

Eventually the night came and they put on a random movie as background noise to their work after May went to bed.

They decided that this would be a great time to go in and work out the kinks on the older tech. Since it was made pretty much from scratch with questionable part scources, the boys found themselves doing this more often then they would like.

"We could do so much more if we had better tech and more time" Peter said.

"We could," Ned agreed. "But we don't have either and were doing pretty good for ourselves."

"Ya, but like, imagine if we always had the right sized wires. And of we could always weld whenever we needed instead of trying to find screws small enough or drills powerful enough for the metal we're using. Heck, half the laptop is being held together with craft glue." Peter said vehemently.

"We don't have the budget. I would love to have a soldering iron ready to go at any time, or not have to reconfigure an entire circuit whenever the wire sing the turn size, bit we can't. Us doing our bi-weekly dumpster days helps a ton, and they're pretty fun, helps a ton though. Looking at the stuff we've got, we would have gone bankrupt several times over even if we had gotten it at used electronic stores. We have to be reasonable" Ned sighed, clearly as unhappy as Peter that he had to say these things. But he had to say them.

After that, the conversation went back to the laptop and craft glue situation. They decided that their best bet was getting something along the lines of gorilla glue, but that wasn't feasible with the current budget. Eventually they settled for stealing screws off the door hinge collection Peter seemed to have acquired. It was a strange one, but the hinges were great for keeping things together, and they often found themselves stealing the screws for other projects.

The night continued like this well into the morning. They found a problem, they figured out the ideal solution, and they found a low budget alternative. By the time Ned had to go home, they had worked through most of the old tech. Eventually at around 3AM, they fell asleep.