Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“In an awe-inspiring turn of events that will shock the world, Mayor of Lübeck for only one year, Morgan Strauss, has officially done away with the legislation ordered by her predecessor, the ruthless Mutant criminal, Ojo, that outlawed the continued legal interference of our city’s very own Unbreakable Netz…”
“Put your phone away, idiot,” Griped a louder voice, the hiss of metal slipping into a sheath following a clip of ammunition loading into a handgun, “we only got a couple hours to do this!” The man whisper-yelled. He was tall, and was wearing enough black that his face couldn’t be seen without direct light, which he had a hood over to ensure was borderline impossible.
Chaos vibrated in the air, a buzzing energy of joy and rage meeting in the streets like high-pressure and low-pressure weather systems, and the subsequent hurricane that followed was as real as the light mist weeping from the sky. Shouting ricocheted off of high walls, thumping against windows and roaring like the tides of a beach as the night was electrified by the news that the city of Lübeck, Germany, would once again be welcoming of Mutants.
That news sparked discourse, and where there was disagreement, there was discord, and where unsettled energy boiled like water in a kettle, there needed to be some semblance of responsibility. Someone needed to be responsible for what people did when they were excited, the crookedness in the hearts of some individuals when the chance to take advantage of a situation arose; when six people dressed in black thought that, perhaps, because of the rioting and partying in the streets and in homes, there was a window of time in the night where they could score.
Glass shattered in the distance, and smoke billowed into the air. Screaming and clapping were as common as the wind. Disarray was everywhere, but there was only one place at a time for a person to be. Wherever that was, was where responsibility followed.
The news story was cut off as the glowing rectangle in a woman’s hands went black and she shoved the screen into her pocket. “Act like you’re the boss…” She muttered, listening to the man who told her what to do anyway, even though she seemed to think she shouldn’t have been made to. “Ojo goes away and all of a sudden, what, you wanna take his place?”
One would imagine that many were having that thought right then; the thought that they could be the next big man in charge of the criminal underbelly of Lübeck. One would not be wrong, but then again, one had no reason to be worried, as far as one was concerned. These six were the eighth aspiring successors of Ojo that had crossed paths with one in just the last two months, and there were for sure going to be more.
It was one’s responsibility to stop them.
With backs turned to the long, black van the six people had since piled out of, none of the criminal masterminds were aware of the sleek, white shape dropping onto the roof of the extra-large vehicle. Landing in total silence, the figure’s white leather painted shiny with icy rain sprinkling down from dreary clouds stood out against the darkness of the night. The figure’s right leg was crunched inward, bent at the knee so that the foot directly under them could hold the weight of their landing, and their left leg kicked out to the side to widen their stance and increase balance. Their left hand touched the surface of the van, and their right arm was thrust out behind them, once more, to balance the stance and make settling into a crouch even easier.
Both legs came inward, now, allowing the white figure to sit on the toes of their white running shoes. Like the figure had an exact map of the alley between two buildings that the van had been tucked away in, their two arms were stretched out in front of them and their fists were balled with their wrists bent. There were two stupid morons directly in front of the figure, and the other four had begun to waffle away, acting as though they were on the lookout for anything dangerous that might disrupt their juvenile attempt at a bank heist.
So, of course, there went somebody to disrupt their attempt at a bank heist, completely unnoticed, with a squelch and a wall of ivory. Nets like a hunter’s came spraying from the backs of the white-clad figure’s hands, two cones of yellow-white string pillowing as air caught in the tightly-woven fabric and provided just enough resistance to the parachutes that they flapped open and covered the two bodies they had been aimed at. With quiet grunts, the two targets were shoved against the wall they stood in front of and covered in tacky, sticky silk, with their faces pinned against a concrete wall and their weapons clattering to the cobblestone below.
Immediately, the figure covered in white knew enough to leap backwards, their crouched position giving them the leverage needed to spring up and toward the wall behind them, which they backflipped to face with their frontside as they jumped. Fingers wrapped in white athletic gloves gripped flat, brick wall and rubber soles of white shoes clung above them. Facing downward on the surface of the ninety-degree wall, the figure waited and listened.
“Huh…?” A voice hummed in the dark. “What the—?!” He gasped. “Webs! Julian and Crystal are trapped in webs!” He seemed equal parts terrified and frustrated. It was understandable; all the places that one could have been on these busiest of nights, and they were here? Lucky chance, right?
“Netzknochen’s here!” Called out another voice, loading a firearm and waving it around in front of her. “Find her!” The crook barked out orders as if she, too, thought she was the boss, stepping away from the two people plastered on either side of the still-locked door that they hadn’t even managed to pry open before their plan went awry. She glanced around in a frantic way, but she couldn’t have seen the single strand of webbing squirt from the dark to snatch her up by the back of her neck and yank her up and away from the rest of her team.
One was Netzknochen. Netzknochen reached out the same hand, her right hand, that had pulled her next target up and into the privacy of the shadows with a sticky, ivory bungee cord and clapped it over the criminal woman’s mouth. Holding the woman at an arm’s length, Netzknochen’s large, round-triangle lenses of black glass and mouth made from stitches became visible to her. With wide eyes and a string of curses into the tough, thin fabric of the hero’s glove, the crook raised her gun to Netzknochen’s head and had zero hesitation to pull the trigger.
A pop and a flash gave away the position of the two women, high above the heads of the remaining three robbers. Smoke from lit gunpowder rolled up and backwards from the barrel as Netzknochen slowly crept her head back into the way of the hot, chrome cylinder after her lightning-quick reaction- almost like she knew there would be a shot fired before the gun was ever even raised- saved her life. She’d craned her neck to the side moments before the flash and heated cone of pressure cracked a small, circular divot into the wall behind her, and as her head returned to cover the smoking bullet hole, the sound of a sigh left her masked mouth.
“You just made this so much harder on both of us,” Netzknochen muttered, her head lowering and shaking as voices from below reacted in shock to the gunshot. She leapt off the wall behind her, a source of torque from her ankle spinning her around so that she could drag the gun-toting woman in a half-circle and- whilst airborne- crack her head and back into the wall with all the force her twirl had emparted. The burglar let out as loud a noise as she could’ve with a gloved hand still clasped over her mouth, and as her body recoiled from being slammed, the trigger of her pistol was flicked.
Missing Netzknochen by a wide margin without her express need to even avoid it due to the simple fact that the shot was involuntary and not aimed, the next bullet sailed off into the distance at the same time as Netzknochen touched the wall again with the toes of her shoes, bounced off, released the unconscious criminal as she dropped her gun, and aimed both of her outstretched arms at the sleeping crook.
A blanket of strings pressed the would-be bank robber against the brick she’d been thrust into, securing her just a meter below where a tiny, coin-sized trickle of her blood glittered in the moonlight. A line of red ran down her face from her bleeding scalp, but she was just fine as she slept snug in a cocoon of spider silk, and Netzknochen flipped backward through the air away from the gunshots of fear and panic from the ground below.
Somewhere in the middle of the alley, Netzknochen’s two arms sprayed lines of webbing to her either side, connecting her to either building and suspending her midair while she worked to stretch the two lines over her head and connect them. Tensile and elastic, the web strings made for a workable tightrope that the white-clad spider climbed on top of with a powerful kick from her legs that sent her flipping up and over where she hung by her hands. Crouched atop the perch of her own making, Netzknochen watched the last three bank robbers calm themselves into stopping their aimless shooting.
“Not hittin’ anything!” One of them shouted over the chaos of the city around them and the sound of ringing that was likely to be bouncing around the shells of his ears. “C’mon, Spider, where are you…?!”
Netzknochen didn’t have night vision per-se, but she was able to count herself lucky enough to have five superhuman senses on top of her sixth, inherently inhuman sense. She could see the three people bumbling around in the darkness with some minor difficulty, details fuzzy and the occasional shape blending into a shadow, but the important part to her was how much more clear she knew her sight of them was than their sight of her.
Looking through her black lenses, she had a flawless vantage point for pointing two outstretched fists at the backs of two individuals. The two men, built tall and heavy, were little more than paperweights against the pulling force of Netzknochen’s two slender, leather-covered arms as she snatched them up and off the ground with gasps and yelps of surprise. Using the same well of physical strength that had held the female gunman out at arm’s length moments before, she threw the two men over her head and released the webbing she’d grabbed them with only to string two more lines to either of their heads.
Hard enough to knock them unconscious but never enough to seriously injure them, Netzknochen yanked the two people toward one another so that their heads clacked together like the steel balls of a Newton’s Cradle. They both dropped their weapons and groaned, and when they began to fall, Netzknochen spun a jacket of webbing around them both, weaving them together in the same silk cocoon and hanging them by a single, final strand from her web-perch. They dangled like an ornament, split-open skin on their foreheads bleeding onto one another's shoulders as their weapons clattered to the ground and the final remaining crook whipped around on his heels.
“I’ll… I’ll give you a cut, Spider!” He yelled into the dark. “Just let me get in and get out and I swear I’ll give you half!” He attempted to bribe Netzknochen as she rolled forward off of her web and somersaulted before hitting the red cobblestone without a sound.
Falling about six meters was light work, though she felt the bones in her legs stress under the pressure before the compression leggings she wore under her suit eased away the strain. Staying low, Netzknochen slithered along the ground like she did over the wall, so that she could approach her final target in the cover of darkness.
He was too busy looking up to think to check right below him, and by the time his field of vision leveled back out from skyward, Netzknochen had already stood up and slipped off to his side where he couldn’t see her. Standing between him and the wall, Netzknochen knew that she could have simply overpowered the man, but she also knew that she wouldn’t have to hit him quite as hard if she got him off his balance first, like she had all the others; the goal here was to incapacitate, not to maim these people. She saved her real power for the ones who could take it.
Netzknochen touched the man’s shoulder, and like liquid, melted away from his view to follow his back as he whipped around and fired his pistol at the wall. Now between him and the black van they’d all piled out of, Netzknochen hopped up and onto the hood. The vehicle bounced under her light weight, but her low center of gravity as she crouched kept it from making much noise. Her hands sprayed more silk, two arms made of webbing latching onto the man’s two shoulders and pulling him backward off his feet.
The crook flew about two meters through the air, parallel to the ground, before his back crunched into the front fender of the black van, thumping it like a drum and leaving a person-shaped dent as he crumbled to the ground with a gag. Netzknochen somersaulted again as she dismounted the car, squirting a net of tacky webbing over the man to keep him restrained against the cold, wet, dirty ground.
Conditions weren’t very pleasant, but she didn’t suppose she should have felt all too bad for them, either. She looked up at her handiwork with pride, bundles of her silk staying intact thanks to the Human body heat wrapped inside them, and the strands that were exposed to the cold, wet air ticking down with a biological clock set for about three hours. At that point, the web line strung between the two buildings would snap at its strained points, dropping the hung-up men to a fall that may well have killed them, if not for the soft, padded silk they were wrapped up in. That wasn’t going away unless it was vigorously washed with cold water, or unless Netzknochen herself ripped them free.
Which, of course, she wouldn’t dream of.
The wailing of high-pitched sirens sounded off not too far away from Netzknochen, and she knew that the police were on their way. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of what she did, or that she believed she should have been in trouble, but she had grown accustomed to running from the police over her three years as Netzknochen. Either they didn’t like her much, or they were very loyal to someone who didn’t; regardless, it was almost always violent when law-enforcement caught the leather-wrapped vigilante in the middle of her superhero work. By the sense that sizzled in her skeleton, Netzknochen had a feeling that the police were arriving on her scene with intent to start trouble, so she saw it fit to make her exit swift.
A strand of webbing spat from her right hand, a ‘D’-shaped hole on top of her glove, to stick to the very top of one of the buildings she’d used as props for her heroics and allow her to fling herself up from the ground. Her webs were elastic and strong, which made them ideal for navigating the not-too-tall buildings of Lübeck with motions that were as much slingshotting herself as they were swinging; a sort of mix of the two that provided unparalleled speed and maneuverability. She flipped backward over her heels as she was thrown airborne by her ivory string, and it wasn’t long before her white shoes found the top of the building and she landed upright in the cover of both the dark and the altitude.
Truth be told, she could have hung out up there and watched the police bumble about her work done to stop a robbery for them, but she knew in her bones that it would be safer to just leave. Having arrived for just a second on the rooftop, Netzknochen’s departure was stopped by yet another source of buzzing in her head, separate from the approaching police. She’d turned to run and leap off the building and swing off, deeper into the city to find more trouble, but it felt like trouble had found her…
Where was it…? The feeling was weak, so there wasn’t any immediate danger, but it was more like she was being… watched? Stalked? That was alarming; her Skelett Summen was that late in warning her? What if she’d taken off her mask for a quick break?
To her right—
“You get people hurt all the time,” Began a woman’s voice, raspy and tired sounding, but still full and commanding. “You run around as if due process of law is some kind of suggestion, like you’re an exception to the lowlives you stop because you’re doing it in a mask…” Footsteps, and though the buzzing in her head failed to increase in intensity, Netzknochen couldn’t help but to grow on-edge. There was no danger, it seemed, but… “And after all the shit you put her through last year, my sister pardons you,” Warm, white headlights and cold, flashing blue came from the ground, and the added artificial light lit up a hard, stony face cracked with stress lines. A woman stood less than two meters away from Netzknochen, a dark-blue windbreaker jacket worn over a thick, bulletproof vest and a button-down police shirt making her profile stealthy and matte, and her right hand rested without shame on her belt where her firearm was holstered in plain view. “Now… how does that make sense?”
Netzknochen knew this face and this voice, and she knew this vendetta. “Hi, Officer Strauss…” She sighed, the leather coating her arms squeaking against her closed-up leather jacket as her posture straightened out and she realized who it was she was speaking to.
“Chief, now,” Chief Strauss said, her brown eyes somehow tracking the green ones she couldn’t have any way of seeing through big, reflective, black lenses. Netzknochen’s white hood blew the same direction with the wind as Chief Strauss’ brown hair, and the Polizeipräsident shook her head. “Fuck you. You know that, Spider? Fuck you,” She spat venom, and Netzknochen took it on her chin. “I’ve been chasing you around Lübeck for three years! I’ve been trying to get an answer for what you did to my sister since 2021, and now, she makes it to where I don’t have the legal credence!” Her fists were balled, but she didn’t reach for her gun. She was angry, but- a good thing for Netzknochen- not manic.
This wasn’t very professional of her.
Wow, that was mean.
“I… I know this is personal for you, but,” Netzknochen said, looking down at her white shoulder shimmering with dampness, “I didn’t want Morgan to be hurt,” She explained, her mind’s eye going back to that day; the day she learned how it really felt to lose. When she learned that acting like an idiot when she put on her costume was how she got treated like an idiot, left to die in an abandoned building with the life of an innocent woman in her incapable hands. She was lucky that all ended well and that Morgan Strauss survived; lucky that Psy-Op was a moron and lucky that Ojo wanted to keep Netzknochen alive as a scapegoat.
Luck got her through her first year. Learning not to count on that, how to be better than the odds of the theoretical multiverse, that was what got her through her second year; how she beat Ojo and his omniscient eyes. Another year down… She wasn’t sure what lesson she’d have to learn, now.
“You should’ve saved her!” Chief Strauss pointed a stern, accusatory finger right at the embroidered spider logo on Netzknochen’s chest. It was white, like the rest of her suit, and its eight legs were made from bones while divots like eye sockets were cut out of its big, round abdomen. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? What you’re supposed to do?” The question was rhetorical, but the insinuation begged for answers. “I thought I was going to lose my sister while she was in her coma, because you couldn’t save her from the mess you made!”
By now, the Polizeipräsident’s officers down below had filtered out of their vehicles; four of them, in two cars. They looked up at the two women, searchlights atop their cruisers trained on Netzknochen and Chief Strauss, as the police chief acted like she wasn’t getting emotional. She loved her sister, that much was clear, but why did she insist on acting like it was Netzknochen’s fault?
“I was tricked,” Netzknochen argued. “It’s no excuse, and whether you believe me or not, I know a thing or two about responsibility…” What was the use in preaching? She trailed off as her initial thoughts morphed into something else; something that was less of a claim to moral high ground. “Why don’t you ask Morgan?” At the risk of escalating the situation, she brought up the mayor of their city. “She was there, too. She’s giving me the green light to be a hero because I tried to help her.”
“But you failed,” Chief Strauss said, and what followed was a long pause. There were several beats in the conversation that lacked sound, heated quiet being exchanged in a rapid duel. Then, the chief scoffed. “You’re on first-name basis, huh?” She asked, the subject of the conversation seeming to have shifted during their silent, motionless dance. “She hasn’t called me since Christmas, but you call her by her first name.” Chief Strauss nodded one slow, knowing nod. “Alright… Does she know yours?”
Not even the hum in her skeleton could have prepared Netzknochen for a punch like that one. What the fuck was she supposed to do? This, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t her problem! But… she remembered the last time she thought that to herself, too. She remembered running away, leaving a young man to die on an abandoned hospital operating table because what happened to him wasn’t as important as what happened to her. Being Netzknochen changed things. Netzknochen stood for better than that.
“I…” She looked away again, the chaotic night still raging, though it was all harmless, as far as her danger sense could tell. Her Skelett Summen couldn’t pick up on anyone in peril, or any situations nearing cataclysm. “She just calls me Netzknochen, when we work together,” The Spider said. “She hasn’t asked about my identity, which I appreciate.”
“And how often is that?” Chief Strauss sputtered in what seemed to be disbelief. It was like she couldn’t fathom how a complete stranger- a vigilante- had more contact with her sister than she did. That made Netzknochen feel bad. “Just how often do you work- extrajudicially- with the Mayor of Lübeck?” The police chief presented an aggressive question, but still her posture remained non-threatening. It seemed that she knew the law, and wasn’t about to try and fight the Mutant superhero… or maybe it was for her own safety.
“That’s a loaded question—” Netzknochen stumbled and tripped, the way that the question was phrased getting her off-balance. It was ironic that there was still a way to surprise her even with her Skelett Summen; just use words.
“How often do you have to face zero accountability for the damage you cause?” Chief Strauss asked again, the same question, in essence. Her legal immunity was only getting wider, it seemed, that much was true, but…
“I don’t cause damage,” Netzknochen argued from a blind perspective, not bothering to think back on that claim because she knew it wasn’t true. “I make sure damage that’s already being caused is lessened.” A white finger gloved in thin fabric wagged, and when a tiny spot of blood on her glove became visible to her, she put her hand down.
“Wanna tell that to the officers you put in the hospital?” Strauss nodded downward, past the Spider, to the ledge of the building. As Netzknochen turned around to stare down at the four police officers from three stories over their heads, Chief Strauss continued. “I’m positive that they’d love to hear how you lessened their broken bones, or shortened the time they spent recovering instead of helping protect the people of Lübeck by flipping their cruisers and sending them all crashing into one another at over 120 kilometers an hour,” She half-yelled at Netzknochen as the events of the previous three years were dredged up like wet dirt at a construction site. “Go ahead, Netzknochen,” Her name came out with a scorching intensity, “I wanna hear that, too, actually.”
Netzknochen let a long sigh leave her chest as she looked at the four people looking up at her. They all seemed expectant, but for what she wasn’t certain. A fight? Netzknochen recalled winning the last battle she had with the police, handily. An apology? Sure, she would give one of those… When she was pretty sure saying ‘I’m sorry’ wouldn’t make Chief Strauss try and push her off the roof.
“You seem to be getting along with Morgan,” Chief Strauss shook her head and spoke calmer after she, too, took a breath. “You’re friends, now, or whatever; I can’t stop you. The law’s the law,” She took her hand off her gun, finally, and let it rest at her side as her shoulders fell and her head hung in some form of defeat in a fight Netzknochen wasn’t even aware they were having. “Just because I don’t like you doesn’t mean you’re a criminal. Legally, you’re within your right as a Mutant to… do Mutant things.” The hand that had been resting on the butt of her pistol came up to rub her angular, bony face between sentences. It looked like stress was keeping her from sleeping well. “But I have to ask, since you know my sister so well…” Strauss paused. “Do you know my first name?”
They had just been on the topic of names, and Netzknochen hadn’t thought to ask. Did she even need to? Chief Strauss’ name was public record, she could have just looked it up at some point if… if she cared to. She supposed, then, as a respite of silence led to the Polizeipräsident choking out a dignified, disappointed laugh, that may have been the point.
“Go,” She scoffed, waving Netzknochen on. “Get the fuck out of here before I arrest you for disturbing the peace or something,” Chief Strauss offered a suggestion as she rolled her eyes.
Netzknochen didn’t need to be dismissed twice, not from a situation this awkward. She turned around again, stepped past Chief Strauss and placed one of her white shoes on the ledge of the building off to her right, poised to send her launching over. She lingered for a second, and then she decided she would just ask.
“Do you want to tell me?” Netzknochen proposed a question that should have been easy to answer. A yes-or-no question, which required no outside information. It was simple. So, why did it take the better part of forty seconds for the police chief to say anything?
“It’s Greta,” The Polizeipräsident said. “I can get down from here the same way I came up, no need to save me, hero.” Her words were patronizing, but they did highlight the fact that Greta Strauss had managed to almost slip by Netzknochen’s Skelett Summen. She supposed there was some sort of reason for that, like some loophole of Greta not actively watching Netzknochen until the very end, therefore not activating the sense in her skeleton that told her things like when she was being watched.
“I know you won’t believe me, Greta,” Netzknochen said, rolling her wrists and loosening up their muscles for her upcoming traversal, “but all I want is to be better for Lübeck. I may be a Mutant, but I live here, too, and I care about these people.” She stared at the back of the police chief’s head. “I’m sorry for how the beginning of my career got you and Morgan involved. I would go back and do it better, if I could, but my powers stop where a spider’s do.” She couldn’t time-travel, as helpful as it would have been to fix the messes she made.
Then, the muscles in her thighs twitched, and with a swooping sound through the air, her body shot off the rooftop and about seven meters up and forward in a diagonal, and her right hand spat a string that she grabbed and rode with a pull toward another, shorter building. Her back came centimeters from the paved road she flew through like some sort of pendulum, her feet kicking out in front of her as her left arm bent at the elbow and her right arm gripped her web higher up, using one of the many small knots in its ivory length as a handle.
What was all this, then, about Morgan Strauss legalizing the actions of Netzknochen? The Spider remembered a conversation where that had been teased as a possibility, but she remembered, too, thinking that it was either a joke or something for the distant future. She remembered laughing. She remembered Morgan moving on from the topic, as Netzknochen sat crouched in her windowsill…

Chapter Text

“Hello?”
With a thud, no attempt at being stealthy whatsoever, white leather wrapped over a body built lean and slight hit the wooden frame of an open window. The building was long and made from red brick, an architectural staple of Lübeck’s Old Town, with gothic spires of washed-out green that reached to the partly-cloudy sky that saw peeks of blue trickling down. The building sat atop archways of brick and cobblestone, tall and pointed at their apexes like daggers, coming down to form pillars of brick in-between.
Many of the windows were decorative, but where a person was expected to spend hours and hours grooming through legislature and law and making peace amongst citizens, there needed to be some sort of way for fresh air to get in. One window was open in the entire cathedral-type building, and inside that window, sat a woman wearing a sharp suit colored a pale pink, with a black undershirt and a much darker pink tie. This woman’s hair wasn’t too long but it came past her shoulders, a wavy brown that accentuated a round face with pronounced cheekbones as it turned toward the voice.
“Netzknochen!” The Mayor of Lübeck called out a name with a cheerful squeal, whipping around in her chair at her desk and leaving some document open on her computer behind her. “You… you came,” Morgan Strauss said. “I— I didn’t think you would come!”
Netzknochen recoiled just a bit at the energy that was being blown over her like a storm’s gale. Positivity was one thing, but it was too early in the day for her to be this happy. Was she a morning person? Maybe Netzknochen was just grumpy because she was running off of close to two hours of sleep.
“Of course I did…?” The Spider half-asked. “I saw that you wanted to speak to me again on the news,” She referenced a story from an increasingly more prevalent American journalism group in their little, German city; the Daily Bugle. What they were doing here was anybody’s guess, but Netzknochen assumed- with all of their stories about Lübeck including Netzknochen somehow- that she was the common denominator.
“I… never got to thank you,” The mayor said with her smile shrinking into something more resembling solemn gratitude instead of joy.
“I put you in a coma,” Netzknochen reminded Morgan, the moment when she allowed for Psy-Op to throw the advocate for Human-Mutant relations against a brick wall hard enough to swell her brain up like a balloon. Just because the mayor made a spectacular recovery, didn’t mean that Netzknochen wasn’t responsible.
“Stop it,” Morgan scoffed, “you sound like my sister.” She sat back in her chair, and Netzknochen leaned her back into the window frame as she crouched sideways just inside it. Making herself little was easy, and keeping her balance was even easier when she could make her whole body sticky. “If that’s what you think, let me put your fears to rest; I’d happily pardon you for all that. I’d even go as far as to overturn Ojo’s law that made your work illegal.” The mayor wagged a long, bony finger, seeming to hope that her big swings in lawmaking language got the hero’s attention. “What happened in that church wasn’t your fault. I’m the victim here, and I don’t think you did anything wrong.”
Her being the victim of the situation was an inarguable amount of leverage to have in a battle like this one. How could Netzknochen tell Morgan how things went when it was her that was hurt in the exchange? She was the innocent one who was wronged for no reason, and if she didn’t feel wronged by Netzknochen, then…
No. That wasn’t how it worked for her. Not anymore.
“With great power, comes great responsibility.”
“What?”
“It’s…” Netzknochen sighed. “It’s a philosophy. It’s my philosophy,” She explained, emphasizing herself with a gloved hand touching her bust. “I had— have these powers, the ability to save you. To help you.” Her hooded head shook. “With this suit, this persona, I use powers that could do really serious damage not only to property and infrastructure, but to people, too. I have to be responsible with them,” Netzknochen said. “What I did that day wasn’t responsible. Sure, I tried to save you, but that wasn’t good enough; I ran in without a second thought, like I was unbreakable, and almost got you killed because I didn’t have a plan.”
“It looked to me like you had the best plan you could make with such a bad set of circumstances,” Morgan shrugged, her brown eyes seeming to search for any sign of humanity behind Netzknochen’s large, dark, glass lenses. “Find the bad guy, stop him, and save the hostage. Technically,” She continued, “you did that. You succeeded.”
“The thing is, though,” Netzknochen spoke up again, “that quote… it’s not always accurate.” That surprised even her. What did she mean by that? Oh, she knew exactly what she meant by that. “It sounds nice and it was meant well and it got me through a hard time,” She remembered finding the strength in those words to stand up off of her deathbed and fight Ojo as her clock counted down, “but it… it got something wrong.”
“Didn’t you just…?” Morgan began to question, but Netzknochen’s voice ran her over.
“I still live by that, generally,” Netzknochen interrupted her. “But sometimes, real life forces us to make some… nuance out of a black-and-white photo.” The Spider thumped the back of her head into the metal railing making up the windowsill behind her. “Responsibility doesn’t come with power innately. To someone like me, who already breathes the statement like air, there’s no functional difference; I got my powers, and needed to meet the responsibility head-on,” She continued with her speech, hands flashing to emphasize words as she explained her brain. “But I figured out after I put Ojo in prison… that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. There’s a moral obligation to uphold that responsibility, but some people choose not to.” She stared forward at the windowsill in front of her, the metal beam splitting her view between the city street outside and the mayor’s office inside. “I’m responsible for that, too. If somebody else powerful doesn’t uphold their obligation, then I’ll do it for them.”
Morgan narrowed her eyes at Netzknochen and the tongue in her mouth seemed to tease her teeth with the intention of saying something. “Because you… actually are unbreakable, aren’t you?” She asked, a knowing specification to her words indicating that she was aware of Netzknochen’s ability to take physical damage. She knew what she was asking, and she knew what the answer would be.
“The one and only.”

A city in chaos.
People celebrated in their homes, or protested in the streets.
Netzknochen blazed past a group of civilians all shouting and waving banners and signs that read various things, most of which were motivated by racial discrimination. They called out horrible things to her back as she swooped in-between them at ground-level, but she didn’t react; not that she didn’t want to, but… What would she do? Beat them up? It wasn’t hurting anyone to protest, even if the way they protested was advocating for unfair treatment of Muantkind.
It had been a busy night. Between groups getting too rowdy and dangerous and needing to be pacified with webs and a little humility, and the people out to actively commit crimes amidst the chaos, Netzknochen was frayed. Swinging out from an alley barely two meters wide, the Spider hit the wall of what looked to be somebody’s home and took a heavy, taxed breath as she slowed down for a moment.
Greta. What, was she seventy-five?
She supposed she couldn’t make fun of old lady names too much, she was named after her grandmother, after all. Not that she wanted to make fun of Chief Strauss anyhow, it was just… it was almost like being spiteful was in her nature. Call it a consequence of her early life, she guessed. She felt bad for Greta, and to be honest, she felt bad for Morgan, too; the hardship placed on the sisters was, no matter what Morgan told her, Netzknochen’s fault.
She’d only tried to explain herself to Greta because she knew how it felt to be angry and bitter. She knew that if she at least tried to be a human to Greta, the angry Polizeipräsident might realize how angry she was and decide to handle it in a way that didn’t include picking a fight with a Mutant who could hang her like laundry. Netzknochen had to nearly die of both a terminal disease and of severe skeletal trauma multiple times for her to take the initiative to sort out her major depressive tendencies, and even then, when her first instinct was to make fun of somebody who was suffering, it was clear that she wasn’t past it all the way.
There was a warning in her head, then, as she rested for a second. It was different from her danger sense, more along the lines of the feeling she got when she was being watched, or when somebody was approaching her personal space. The feeling of her Skelett Summen had become something she’d needed to learn to be intuitive with over the years; at the beginning, it all sort of just felt like pins-and-needles inside her bones, but the more important that she realized it truly was, the more she began to understand that it was a language. It existed throughout her entire skeleton, telling her which parts of her body needed to move and in what direction, and the feeling of fingertips on the surface of her mind- right then- was as good as fingerpainting a message. It was good at drawing her attention to the right area, and as it scraped warm, metal prongs over the fused plates of her skull, she realized what was setting her sixth sense off.
It was her phone.
She’d received the message in total silence, not a peep from the device kept snug in a pocket inside the chest of her costume. It wasn’t long after she knew Netzknochen was here to stay that she began to notice why she’d stopped using her phone so much, and it was because- in all honesty- it stressed her the fuck out. She’d gotten tired of receiving notifications twice; once in her bones before the message actually pushed through, and then once again when it did. So, she’d begun keeping it on silent, every notification completely turned off. If it was something urgent, her Skelett Summen would tell her about it.
Pulling the slim, black rectangle out from the collar of her white jacket after she received a message by choice when she could have drawn the device beforehand, Netzknochen sighed and tapped the screen twice with her right thumb to wake it. Over her lockscreen, which was a terrible photo of two women; one, an employee at a bank with a tired expression and features familiar to Netzknochen, and the other, a brown-haired girl with blue eyes who was only halfway in-frame as she snagged what may have been the world’s worst selfie with Sabine Schüler, either oblivious or taking herself too seriously to bother posing. Netzknochen smiled at her friend and her mother, and then she looked at the text message she’d received.
“your mom ordered pizza, if you’re ever going to come home from the lab,” The text read, and the person who sent it was named Mandy. Netzknochen knew this girl well; she was her best friend. The text had an energy to it that Netzknochen didn’t need a sixth sense to get a feeling for, that being the fact that Mandy was growing impatient, waiting for her friend to finish up whatever it was she was doing and uphold another set of responsibilities with her close circle of people. She didn’t know that one only had so much of herself that she could spread around.
“Sorry,” Netzknochen texted back, the night letting her phone’s screen shine bright and her body blocking the rain from wetting the sensitive technology. “I missed my bus, but I’ll be there soon,” She tapped ‘send’ on a message full of lies, and then slipped her phone back into her jacket as she looked up at the city laid out before her. It was getting late, and even the troublemakers of Lübeck were beginning to grow tired and head home for the night.
As it turned out, when one was a superpowered Mutant with a metabolic rate so comically high that just a handful of hours of sleep could hold you over for days, you found that there was a point at which crime did in fact sleep. There was a point at which the city became a ghost town, ruled over by those like her, whose batteries lasted a supernatural amount of time, and who could call these dead hours their own.
The city wasn’t there yet, but that was a few hours from now. It wouldn’t be long before 9:30 PM turned into midnight, and after midnight, everything not Mutant or otherwise inhuman began to slow to a crawl. By two o’clock in the morning, nothing but shadows slithered through Lübeck, and Netzknochen usually felt okay to head home and take about three hours to rest. Once the dead of night became the wee, sleepy hours of the morning, crime was back on its regularly-scheduled programming. Netzknochen was patrolling her city by five o’clock every morning, no later.
In any case, things were still at the moment. Power, responsibility, all that was true; but she didn’t have an obligation to keep the costume on when there was no illicit activity to interfere with that she was aware of. Perhaps it was time for Netzknochen to retire for the night, and for the girl underneath the leather persona to peek her head out from the hole in the sand that she buried herself in when she was a superhero.
“Can I help you?” Asked a voice, coming from a mouth attached to a head that was peeking out a window with startled eyes and lips ajar. A man leaned outside, letting frigid, humid air into his home from his window as he stared down the woman dressed in leather who had just slipped her phone back into her jacket.
“Äh,” Netzknochen laughed, her gaze snapping to the man in his window on the second floor of the red, brick building. “No, I’m sorry. I was just catching my breath.”
The man, his tone fearful, though with the way he looked like he could dip into his home for cover, he couldn’t be too afraid, opened his mouth to speak once more. “Can you… can you get off my apartment?”

Mask hair. No matter what she did, it was always damp and matted up there when Netzknochen’s symbiotic grip was peeled away from the flesh of her host.
In silence, Ilse Schüler slithered into her bedroom window and crawled onto the ceiling of her room, white and barren. Her right leg extended backward behind her, the toe of her athletic shoe catching the sheer, glass window pane and the Van der Waals forces inside her skeleton helping her to pull it closed along its tracks. Mask gripped in her right hand and blonde locks curling downward the same direction as her hood, the Spider undisguised crept along the white ceiling before, after listening for a moment with both her ears and her Skelett Summen, she detached from the ceiling with all of her limbs.
Falling just a little bit less than two meters, Ilse hit the floor without a sound and then stood up from her wide-spread position of all-fours. Her posture righted, and when she again felt no presence approaching her closed bedroom door, she was quick to fling her mask into the open closet at her left, adjacent to her bed across the room. With both hands free, her jacket was unwound by several internal buttons that needed to be pulled at just the right angle for the mechanisms to snap apart. Her gloves followed, velcro around her wrists coming apart without effort and her insulated, padded leather pants joining the rest of her outfit in a ball of white that slid across her carpeted floor with a tumble before smacking into the wall of her closet.
Dressing herself in clothing pulled in a haphazard manner from her closet, Ilse was decoupled from her high-flying persona in record time, a white shirt with a frilled design hanging down from the low-cut shoulders and skinny, black jeans just over her same white shoes. She figured if somebody recognized her as Netzknochen from the white athletic shoes she wore everywhere, then that person was smart enough to have figured it out by some other means anyway.
She approached her window and breathed a heavy breath. It was raining, and she needed to be wet. She just walked home from Lübeck University, didn’t she? Ugh. Not to mention, she needed to walk through the front door, not out from her bedroom. She pulled the window open again, felt a cold mist on her face, and frowned.
This was the double-life she chose.
Ilse vaulted out the window like only the most fit, decades-long trained athletes could ever attempt to, two hands on the windowsill and her skinny, black-coated legs swinging out and then curling upward as if she’d just swung off of her webs. Flipping her legs up and over her head, Ilse stood on the side of her home, parallel to the ninety-degree wall of beige, painted cinder block. Crouching, she pushed her bedroom window closed again as rain pelted her back and her hair stopped being the only part of her that was anything less than dry.
At least her spider-muscles still worked in the rain. After performing a maneuver that was intense and superhuman, yet still somewhat believable if the Human athlete was vaulting off the wall she stuck to, Ilse did something now that was in no justifiable way Human in any capacity. She jumped off her wall, flipping backwards again as she traveled out and up, before her right hand reached out to snag the eve of her roof. Swinging in an inverted pendulum from her arm and sticky fingers, Ilse swished in an arch from her wall to her rooftop, where she crouched and reeled her hand back in before her bent legs exploded with kinetic energy. She bounced off her roof, through the rain, conserving her momentum from her flip off the wall and in the same bound, backflipped one more time to sail over her roof and land right outside her front door.
A dangerous maneuver to pull off without a costume for sure, but she was lucky that she had a pesky sixth sense that could warn her of things like her being watched; much like it had warned her of Greta Strauss once she finally started to watch Netzknochen instead of just waiting overhead. Ilse still glanced around herself, half-expecting there to be a crowd of bystanders with mouths gaping wide, but she saw no one, nor did she feel anyone in her bones. She was alone, and her secret was safe.
That was when she opened the door, and let herself in.
“... und Ilse isn’t planning to help you move?” The voice Ilse recognized as her father’s asked a question that Ilse herself hadn’t considered. He spoke English to somebody else, which wasn’t exactly normal, but was something that Ilse had known for a long time was possible; it was just, she only knew one person whose German wasn’t the greatest, and who preferred to communicate in her native language.
“God, I wouldn’t ask her to,” Mandy scoffed out a tired expression of indignance. “My parents are my problem, I wouldn’t want Ilse to have to deal with that,” She said, a vulnerability to her voice that she was evident in trying to mask yet which was obvious to anyone with ears.
“I would still be there, if you needed me,” Ilse assured her friend as she entered the room with a raised eyebrow. “Moving in together isn’t just a financial decision; I’m your friend und I care about you.” She wasn’t even short of breath from her parkour display outside, but she was wet, and it was that dampness that she was busy brushing off of herself when her dad’s mass took her into a hug despite it.
“Ilse!” He cheered, and then he stepped back with a frog-like croak. “You’re… soaked.”
“Aw, dude,” Mandy’s trimmed, brown eyebrows curved upward on her forehead made visible by her head of straight, brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, “I would have totally come and got you if I’d known the rain was so bad.”
“Es ist fine,” Ilse replied, smiling as Mandy shied away from a hug herself, at least until her skinny, blonde friend was dry. Fair enough. “I could use the exercise anyway,” She lied, knowing in truth that she was more fit than anyone else she knew.
“Could you?” Ilse’s mother made her way into the room, a liquor glass in her hand as she, like her husband, pulled Ilse into a hug regardless of her dryness. “I feel like you’ve had so much energy lately; you’re hardly even the same Ilse, since your nineteenth birthday.” Sabine Schüler’s hair was blonde like her daughter’s, and was pulled back into a messy bun to let her natural waves do their job and provide volume. Her white, button-down undershirt was undone for the first few buttons- lower than she’d ever leave her house with- and her blue blazer was draped over the back of the couch where Mandy had sat back down just a cushion away from where Ilse’s father had been sitting before springing up to hug her.
“How could she not be happy?” Günter Schüler asked in a rhetorical way, his facial features wide and his straight, brown hair seeming to have mixed with Sabine’s upon their conception of Ilse, whose blonde locks were undercut with highlights of darker, dirtier gold. His green eyes were Ilse’s green eyes, and that was just about all she’d inherited from him, as far as physical features were concerned. “She’s alive, sweetheart. She gets to be twenty years old, a woman! That's all the motivation she needs to be bombastic. Right, Ilse?”
Well, maybe she got his winning personality.
“Right,” Ilse agreed with a small puff of air leaving her nostrils and her lips pulling into a tiny smile. At this point, if she admitted that she was Netzknochen, would anyone even believe her? The Mutant superhero in-disguise looked herself over, and then considered that, even though she’d just changed, Mandy and her parents didn’t know that; perhaps, for the sake of her cover and for her own comfort, she should change her clothes.
“Well, are you going to stand there and freeze to death?” Mandy asked, a jovial tone to her voice as she flicked her ponytail aside and sat back into the Schülers’ couch. Her blue eyes were trained on Ilse for a moment as she shrugged, her frame made sleeker by her choice in a black, long-sleeved shirt and skinny jeans. “I can’t start the new semester with a roomie-cicle,” She joked. She and Mandy weren’t just talking about it anymore. Ilse almost forgot sometimes that they were actually going to be renting an apartment together while they went to school.
“Alright, fine, fine,” Ilse scoff-laughed, joking back to Mandy with a grin and a wave of her hand. She turned from the three people in the living room with a smile on her face, taking squishy, wet steps over carpet with her shoes on- a little gross, but she supposed she’d need them in the chore to come- to slip into the hallway where her bedroom was adjacent to the bathroom. She opened her bedroom door and entered, making like the recluse she was and shutting the door behind her rather quick so that nobody could enter or start poking around. She had a secret to keep, after all.
She’d been attending university almost as long as she’d had her powers; Netzknochen was older than her college education by only a handful of months. But, like most things, Ilse found, change came around eventually, one way or another; a new degree meant new classes, and new classes meant new responsibility. She’d finished her courses in the first two years that Netzknochen was in her life, and now it was time to move into something more specialized; something that she was more interested in, something that could help people. That responsibility- that fucking word would be the death of her- asked for new dedications, ones that weren’t as easy to do with so much distance from her home and her school. Mandy needed somewhere to stay, too, that wasn’t the Schüler house or her car, and the two young women together were able to pool enough money together through an independent research internship at their university so that they could afford monthly rent of a small place near campus. Perfect, for a budding, young Mutant, and her civilian best friend who was far too good for the ways Ilse mistreated her.
Ilse changed her clothes faster than even military regulations would have her do, her superhuman muscles twitching fast and her dexterity appearing inhuman with how liquid-like her movements were. She was used to needing to slip in and out of her leather-bound persona as quick as she was physically able, so changing out of simpler, lighter clothing with not as many layers of compression gear underneath was a breeze.
As a new, dry shirt fell down onto her shoulders- a tee shirt colored a muted, pink-orange- the feeling of a metal fork raking across the surface of her skull brought her green eyes flicking to her bedroom door. Somebody approached, but as the buzz of her skeleton hum died off, Ilse understood that the person wouldn’t be attempting to come in. Changing her pants, then, to jeans that were white, she heard the sound of Mandy’s voice.
“Did— Do you mean it?” She asked. What was she asking? “Could I count on you to be there when I move out of my parents’ place?” Mandy sounded apprehensive, at first. She sounded like she felt as though she shouldn’t have been asking, like it was a ridiculous question. Ilse tilted her head.
“Of… course…?” She half-asked. Ilse, herself, wasn’t even positive on why Mandy thought that question was a necessary one. “Ja, Mandy,” She spoke English to her friend, her accent thick and some phonetically similar words remaining German, “I would be there.”
“Really?” Mandy asked with a deep exhale. Again, this took Ilse aback. “You promise you won’t be, like, late, or something? You won’t blow me off to keep up your lab work?” She languished over these questions, her reluctance to be this confrontational with her friend obvious on just the sound of her voice.
“Mandy, I—” Ilse wanted to argue with her friend; how could she insinuate that? How could her friend- her best and perhaps only friend- imply that she was a poor turnout when she was needed? She was Netzknochen! She was the most responsible person she knew! With her eyebrows lifting over her forehead and her eyes shutting in a pensive, defeated expression, Ilse realized she’d answered the question for Mandy. It was Netzknochen that made Ilse unreliable.
“Because, you know,” Mandy cleared her throat, “they’re not exactly fans of my choices, but if I move out, they can’t control me anymore. That- to them- even worse than me being a woman,” She explained with an anxious whine. “Honestly, I was considering shoving some essentials in my backpack and just leaving without a word to avoid the fight, but if you’re there…” Ilse could almost feel the conflict in Mandy’s words as she weighed the options she had been given by her life. “I like some of my stuff. It’s just stuff, I know, but I’d feel better about being there and actually packing some of it up if you were—”
Ilse opened her door, and Mandy had been leaning against it while talking. Ilse was, of course, ready to catch her friend, so even though Mandy was taller and heavier than she was, the secret Mutant side of her was enough to place a wide palm on Mandy’s back and push her back to her feet without effort before she fell. The girl dressed in black let out a surprised noise and flapped her arms for a split second before realizing that she was, in fact, not going to fall. It was at that point when she whipped her head around on her shoulders, throwing her ponytail aside, to glare wide, blue eyes at Ilse’s uncharacteristic display.
“I’ll be there,” Ilse said, her words deterministic and her tone stone-like. She slithered around the side of her friend, to the front of her, and then threw a hug around the woman’s waist. Holding the hug just long enough for Mandy to huff out a small laugh from her nose and reciprocate, Ilse then melted out of her friend’s arms to make her way back out to the living room where her parents still sat, awaiting the return of the two girls.
“Oh, Ilse,” Günter sighed a bittersweet sigh, “I can’t believe you’re moving away…” He gazed upon his daughter with a sense of pride, and Ilse wondered, if that was how he felt about her right now, what would he think if he knew about Netzknochen?
“Cut it out, Günter,” Sabine rapped a loose fist of knuckles into her husband’s bicep, the tee shirt he’d been wearing under his uniform for his management position at a supermarket taking the brunt of her play-hit. “She’ll be, what, maybe fifteen minutes from here?”
By car, maybe. By web? Ilse could be home in less than five.
“With how sweet you guys are,” Mandy began with a soft smile still fixed on her face, “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was over here all the time,” She said. It was clear she quite liked Sabine and Günter Schüler, at least more than she did her own parents. Of course, that wasn’t a very high bar because Mandy’s parents were horrible, bigoted bums, but Ilse supposed that her friend was nice for saying such things to her parents.
Man, she needed to get that mean streak under control.
“Implying we see much more of her than you do,” Sabine chuckled, poking a bit of fun at Ilse about how much time she spent out. “Between nights at the lab and being a young woman with unchecked freedom and a friend to act young and stupid with,” She waved a hand at Mandy, who seemed unable to dispute that she was capable of acting young and stupid, “we might have to go there to see her!” She emphasized the point of her and Günter going to Lübeck university to see Ilse.
“Okay, okay.” Ilse felt her face get warm and brought her hand up to scratch the back of her blonde head when she was battered with jokes from her mom. The kind of jokes that weren’t really joking, ones that came from a genuine place but were dressed up in humor so as to not seem aggressive. “Let’s get packing, ja? We’re supposed to be moved into our place by Monday,” She said with a laugh. She knew she was never home, and soon, Mandy was going to start realizing that, too, but that would just have to be the way it was.
Netzknochen was here to stay, and there was no shot in hell that Ilse was going to put less time into being the Spider of Lübeck. Her friend and family would need to live with not seeing too much of her. They could get over it, she was busy.
Thank god for mental filters. She didn’t need to actually be saying things like that.
“You pack up boxes and we’ll haul them out here,” Ilse’s father gestured to the central room in which they all stood, the front door not far away and his shared bedroom with Ilse’s mother just behind them. “Tomorrow, we’ll load up the car and take you to your apartment…” His words trailed off in a pensive tone, as if he had just reminded himself with his words that his fragile, brittle-boned little Ilse was about to fly the nest.
Like, ten minutes away. God, she loved her dad.
Ilse stopped herself from announcing that the pizza had arrived, the words catching in her throat as she remembered that no one here was aware that she could feel future events in her skeleton. The web fluid in the hollows of her bones made an electrical buzz as it pointed her attention to the door, the sixth sense knowing no difference between a surprise with pizza or a surprise with a deadly weapon. A surprise was a surprise, and her Skelett Summen hadn’t let her be surprised since she was seventeen.
And there, after about ten seconds, was the knock. “I’ll get es,” Ilse said the instant that the sound was heard. She’d been waiting on the door to be rapped on by a delivery driver’s knuckles for ten seconds, so of course she was punctual in addressing it when it happened. She was already across the room by the time the remaining three people all turned their attention to the front door, and by the time everybody came to the realization that their food had come, Ilse was already turning back around with two boxes and bumping the door closed with her hip.
Years ago, that probably would have broken it. Now, it only strained; a warning that, much more pressure, and her bones would have cracked like glass. Ilse came back in despite the pain she’d put herself in by nudging the door with what was a rather bony part of her body without her thick, padded suit on to make things like that easier, her gait unchanged as her superhuman immune system got to work isolating and healing away the bruise that she undoubtedly gave herself in what would equate to just over a half-hour. She healed much faster when she slept, but she still had some factor of regeneration during the day.
“Be careful, Ilse,” Sabine murmured, showing a muted amount of mothering concern for her daughter, “you may be moving away like an adult but you’re still fragile. The last thing we need tonight is a trip to the hospital, okay?” She flashed her green eyes into Ilse’s, then followed her into the kitchen just to the right of the door when one walked inside.
“I know,” Ilse whined a fake amount of concern for herself. “Aber, when was the last time I broke a bone?” Like, last week? “When I was in high school?” Did the ones that healed over four hours of sleep even count?
Ilse placed the two slender, stout boxes down on the window connecting the kitchen to the living room, and then- as she was right there- took the liberty to open the topmost box and fish out two slices of the hot, savory pie for herself. Cheese stretched in arms like her webs did- now that she knew that her webbing was made out of collagen and fat and calcium, the family resemblance made sense- and Ilse pretended that that fact wasn’t abhorrent to think about as she took a hungry mouthful of a horrendously unhealthy dinner.
It had come to her attention that, the more time she spent as Netzknochen, the higher her metabolic rate was, which was ultimately a good thing; when her body was metabolizing fast, she healed faster, produced webs faster, and was all-around stronger. It had also come to her attention that when she was performing at her best, she was too damn hungry to care what it was she was putting into her body; she needed calories like a diesel engine needed fossil fuels, and as long as she kept up with her unreal consumption of dairy products, she felt fine. Great, even. Her vitals were all perfect.
“Don’t you dare drink milk with this, you— you… weirdo,” Mandy, between bites of her first slice as Ilse moved on to her second, watched her friend meander toward the refrigerator. “I swear to god, Ilse,” She grimaced as the blonde girl glanced over her shoulder with a smirk, popped open the refrigerator, and withdrew a gallon jug of low-fat milk, “there’s something the matter with you.”
There sure was; she could jump fifteen meters in the air and toss around a couple thousand kilograms with the same amount of struggle that her father took to lift the couch when he and Sabine lost the remote for the TV. Not exactly light work, but she also hadn’t had the practical opportunity to see how much more than that she could pick up.
“Mandy, dear, don’t censor yourself because of us,” Günter spoke, seeming to weigh his options before shrugging and heading for a second slice of pizza as Ilse, without apology, took a third and fourth. “Whatever you wanted to call Ilse, I guarantee she’s said worse.”
The blonde girl, head back and mouth filling with milk, made a noise of contention at what her father said. She knew she looked like a psycho, eating more than her father who was over twice her size and chasing the greasy, salty meal with basic, fatty, white milk, but she had to allow herself to be vulnerable somewhere, and around these three people was the one place she felt that was okay.
“Oh, really?” Mandy laughed. “There’s a toxic side to Ilse that I’ve never met?” She raised a brunette eyebrow, shooting a glance to her friend as Ilse worked to eat one slice of pizza at a time even while she held two in her left hand.
“There ist not!” Ilse protested. Damn right there was, but she did her best to suppress it. She thought it’d go away once she was happier, in a better place instead of being terminally ill and under pressure to save her city before she died. It didn’t.
“Well,” Sabine began, helping herself to a slice of pizza from the second pie, seeing as Ilse had already eaten half of one pizza to herself, “I suppose we should get to work, right?” She ate in smaller bites, not even close to as skinny as Ilse but still the second-thinnest person in the room, except she didn’t have Mutant powers demanding thousands of extra calories every day. “Eat in-between packing, I don’t want to be doing this at midnight,” Ilse’s mother said in a half-joke, her tone jovial and lighthearted but her intentions genuine.
Ilse took the instruction loud and clear, swallowing the last of her fourth slice of pizza and knowing for a fact that she wasn’t done for the night. She didn’t take a fifth and sixth slice quite yet, not for concern over what her parents or friend might think, but because Sabine was right; standing around, talking and laughing and eating wasn’t going to pack her things away. Ilse needed to get that ball rolling herself, and so, she did.
Boxes were folded up in a stack of flat, brown sheets in the corner of the living room, and Ilse picked one up from the top on her way from the kitchen, through the central area, and into her bedroom. The door didn’t shut behind her, though she did nudge it a bit further toward closed as she entered, aiming to get Netzknochen’s damp, white-leather costume bundled up in a webbing cocoon somewhere inside her closet out of the way so that no one could see it whilst she packed her remaining things.
That being the first thing she did, Ilse wasn’t taken off her guard or at all concerned for her secret identity when her Skelett Summen informed her of an approaching person. A disgusting sound left her hand as silk squirted from it, following the bundle of leather up to the ceiling of the closet in the corner by where the door’s hinges would roll to slide it shut; out of sight, out of mind. Snatching something else out of her closet- civilian clothes- Ilse stooped to her knees and got to looking like she had been packing her box the entire time.
“Hey,” Mandy announced her presence as if Ilse hadn’t known she was coming since before she even turned down the hallway. She stepped into Ilse’s bedroom, shot a glance around it, and then sat down on her friend’s bed with her hands folded in her lap and a squeamish expression on her face. “Tomorrow, 1:30, come to my parents’ place,” She wasn’t demanding, she was informing. Ilse had already agreed to go. “I’ll text you the address, it’s not far from here. My mom and dad should be at work, but I just—” Her right palm ran up and down her left forearm as she stared at Ilse’s carpet between her feet covered by her socks. “I want you there.” She wasn’t being transparent with Ilse, and she was pretty sure she didn’t need superpowers to deduce that one. It was okay, though. Ilse knew a thing or two about keeping secrets, and she knew that sometimes, people had good reasons for telling little, white, spider-shaped lies.
“I wouldn’t miss es for the world, Mandy,” She reassured her friend in a tender tone of voice, her green eyes having followed the girl dressed in black all the way across the room where she’d eventually stopped to sit. Ilse made a promise, months ago, that she would balance life between Ilse and Netzknochen better than she had been. People in her life like Mandy didn’t deserve only half of her, half the time. She was absent as a daughter and unreliable as a friend, and that didn’t feel good to get reminded of by her friend and family during the times when she did manage to show up and be present. They threw it in her face, sometimes dressed as a joke and other times presented on a vulnerable, sheepish platter of raw emotions; she couldn’t blame them for that. “If you need me, I’m there.” She placed more things in her box, ready to ship off to her new home away from home the next day. “As your friend, es ist mein responsibility.”