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The yellow Midtown School of Science and Technology bus smelled like damp wool, stale Cool Ranch Doritos, and the distinct, ozone tang of bad heating coils.
Peter Parker sat by the window, his forehead pressed against the vibrating glass, mentally calculating the structural integrity of the Queensboro Bridge's rusted cantilever trusses. It was a habit he couldn’t turn off anymore. Ever since the spider bite—and more acutely, ever since a certain billionaire had handed him a suit with more computing power than NORAD—Peter viewed the physical world as a series of stress vectors, load-bearing joints, and potential disaster sites.
"If you press your face against that window any harder, your brain is going to squeeze out of your ear," Ned Leeds said from the seat beside him. Ned was holding a stack of laminated index cards, shuffling them with frantic, greasy-fingered efficiency. "Okay, hit me again. What’s the primary function of the third-generation palladium-alternative micro-arc core?"
"Magnetohydrodynamic power generation using magnetically-confined plasma," Peter muttered into the glass, not moving. "Ned, please. It’s eight in the morning."
"It’s not just eight in the morning, Peter! It’s the morning of the SI Applied Sciences Invitational Tour! This is the only tour Midtown has gotten in four years. Mr. Harrington had to sign an eighteen-page waiver promising we wouldn't touch the localized gravity wells!"
"There aren't localized gravity wells," Peter sighed, sitting up and rubbing his cheek, which was imprinted with the dusty grid of the bus window wire. "That’s... that’s just a myth from the 2012 battle. Mr. Stark says people think anything with a blue light is gravity tech."
"Wait, did he actually say that?" Ned leaned in, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial hiss. "When did he say that? Was that during a Spider-Man thing or a... a regular thing?"
"It was last Tuesday," Peter whispered, looking around nervously.
Three rows ahead, Flash Thompson was loudly explaining to Betty Brant why his father’s hedge fund had almost invested in Stark Industries’ clean-energy wing back in '13. Flash was wearing a tailored blazer over his school polo that looked aggressively expensive and mildly itchy.
Across the aisle, Michelle Jones didn't look up from her paperback copy of The Myth of Sisyphus. "If you two whisper any louder, the driver’s going to think you're smuggling illegal hamsters again."
"That was one time in eighth grade, MJ," Ned said defensively. "And Kevin was a guinea pig."
“He had the spirit of a hamster,” MJ said flatly, turning another page. Peter glanced across the aisle. She was already back to reading, one knee pulled against the seat in front of her, like she'd completely forgotten the conversation existed. Then her eyes flicked up. “You look like you’re gonna throw up, Parker.”
“I’m fine.”
MJ stared at him for a second. Peter held her gaze, trying very hard not to look like someone who was absolutely not fine.
“Okay,” she said, dragging the word out. She turned another page. “Did you eat May’s loaf again?”
“It’s not a loaf. It’s a galette.” The answer came out way too fast. Peter immediately regretted it. His stomach gave a sharp, traitorous twist at the memory of Aunt May’s latest attempt at French baking, and he pressed an arm across his middle.
MJ noticed. Of course she noticed.
“And I’m fine,” Peter added quickly. “I’m totally fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?” MJ’s eyes narrowed over the top of her book. “Because you’ve been twitching for, like, forty blocks.”
“I have not.”
“You have.”
“I—”
She pointed at him with one finger, not even bothering to look away from the page. “You’re doing it right now.”
Peter immediately stopped moving.
MJ’s mouth twitched.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
She finally looked up, and whatever she saw made her pause. Her eyes dropped. Peter followed her gaze. There was a long, horrible second where neither of them said anything.
Then he looked down at himself. The faded grey science-puns T-shirt he'd thrown on that morning was, unmistakably, inside out. The seam ran straight down the middle of his chest, the tag sitting proudly beneath his chin like it had been trying to expose him all morning.
“Oh, fuck me.”
A couple of heads turned from the seats ahead. MJ calmly lowered her book. “Language.”
“My shirt is inside out.”
“I can see that.”
Peter grabbed his backpack, hauled it onto his lap, and frantically unzipped the main compartment. Taking his shirt off to fix it on a packed school bus was a level of public exposure he was not mentally prepared for, so he reached into his bag and yanked out the oversized grey hoodie he’d stuffed at the bottom—the one Tony had accidentally left on a stool in the workshop two weeks ago.
He dragged it over his head in one swift, awkward motion, popping his face out of the collar with a flushed, desperate triumph.
“It’s a fashion thing,” he insisted, pulling the ridiculously long sleeves past his knuckles.
MJ’s eyes slowly dropped to the oversized sleeves completely swallowing his hands, then flicked back up to his face. “You’re very obviously just trying to hide it, but okay. Sure.”
“I’m not hiding it. It’s... it’s high fashion.”
“Sure, Parker.”
“It is.”
MJ gave him a long look. Peter stared back. “It’s called deconstructivism,” he added, because apparently his brain had decided dying with dignity was no longer an option.
"Right. Deconstructivism," MJ said, returning to her book. "Well, stop deconstructing your spine. Harrington looks like he’s about to cry again."
At the front of the bus, Mr. Harrington was indeed dabbing at his forehead with a crumpled napkin while struggling to keep his balance against the bus's erratic braking.
"Okay, scholars! Listen up!" Harrington called out, his voice cracking slightly. "We are five minutes away from the Stark Industries Manhattan Logistics and R&D Hub! Now, I don't need to remind you that we are representing Midtown. That means no touching equipment unless invited, no asking the engineers if they know Iron Man personally—they are busy professionals—and strictly no leaving the designated tour path. The administration and I have signed legal affidavits, and frankly, my landlord already thinks I’m a flight risk."
"Hey, Parker!" Flash called out over the seats, turning around with a sneer that didn't quite reach his eyes—there was too much naked anxiety in Flash’s posture for his usual bravado to land cleanly. "When we get to the gate, are you going to show us your super-secret clearance badge, or did you 'leave it in your other pants' again?"
A few kids laughed—mostly out of nervousness.
Peter felt the familiar, hot prickle at the back of his neck. In a more convenient universe, this was the part where he’d whip out an all-access alpha-clearance card and watch Flash’s jaw hit the floor.
Except Peter didn't have an all-access card.
Because Tony Stark wasn't a cartoon character, and Stark Industries was a defense-adjacent multi-billion-dollar conglomerate with strict federal oversight. Peter’s actual access to the building consisted of a temporary biometric profile coded into FRIDAY’s private server, restricted exclusively to the Sub-Basement 3 Workshop and the Penthouse residential elevator—and even then, only between the hours of 3:00 PM and 9:00 PM on designated lab days, or when Happy Hogan manually overrode the gate after picking him up from an alleyway in Queens.
If Peter stepped up to scan his pass right now, one of two things would happen: either the system would flag him as an off-hours unregistered minor and ping Happy’s phone with a low-priority security flag, or FRIDAY would cheerfully greet him over the lobby PA as "Peter Parker, Guest Designation: Underoos," instantly blowing his cover to thirty classmates and Mr. Harrington.
"I don't have a badge, Flash," Peter said, trying to keep his voice level, aiming for 'bored high-schooler' and hitting 'guy trying not to swallow a bee'. "Interns don't get permanent badges until they finish the summer rotation."
"Right," Flash smirked, though he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, tucking his own neatly printed visitor clearance slip into his blazer pocket. "Sure, Parker. Whatever you say."
Ned leaned over. "You know, if you just texted Mr. Stark—"
"I'm not texting Mr. Stark, Ned!" Peter hissed. "He’s in Geneva! Or... Zurich, or somewhere! He said he had three days of Accords compliance hearings with the UN subcommittee. He explicitly told me, and I quote, 'Kid, if you ping my phone while I’m listening to a Swiss diplomat explain cross-border drone liability, I will reprogram your web-shooters to dispense warm mustard.'"
Ned shuddered. "Mustard? That’s... that’s oddly specific."
"He was eating a pretzel when he said it," Peter muttered, sinking deeper into his oversized hoodie. "He was very stressed."
The bus pulled into the subterranean transit bay of the Stark Industries Manhattan Hub—a towering, glass-and-titanium monolith on the East River that had been partially converted into clean-tech R&D after the main Avengers operations moved upstate.
The transit bay alone looked like a set from a sci-fi film. Sleek white delivery drones hummed along ceiling-mounted track systems, carrying color-coded crates to automated freight lifts. Staff members in sharply tailored suits, high-visibility lab coats, and dark grey security uniforms bustled across polished concrete floors that were so clean Peter could see his own reflection.
"Whoa," Abe Brown whispered, stepping off the bus stairs. "It smells like... new carpet and rich people."
"That’s ionized air filtration, Abe," Cindy Moon said, crossing her arms as she stared up at a massive, three-story LED screen displaying real-time global energy output statistics from Stark-sponsored solar grids. "It removes 99.9% of urban particulates."
"Yeah, well, it smells like rich people," Abe insisted.
Mr. Harrington gathered the class in a messy semi-circle near the visitor intake kiosk. "Okay, stay together! Badges out! When your name is called, step up to the scanner, clip your visitor pass to your lapel, and—"
"Midtown Science and Technology?"
A woman in her early thirties with a crisp dark-blue blazer, a lanyarded badge that gleamed silver-grey, and a headset resting around her neck walked toward them. She had the brisk, no-nonsense stride of someone who drank three espressos before dawn and didn't have time for teenage drama.
"I’m Brenda," she said, not bothering to wait for Harrington to finish fluttering his papers. "Lead Tour Coordinator for the Applied Sciences division. We’re on a tight schedule today because Floor 42 is running a live calibration on the micro-plasma conduits at eleven. You lose your badge, you sit in the security office until your parents pick you up. You touch a glass enclosure without my permission, you get escorted off the property. Questions?"
Silence fell over the class. Even Flash looked slightly intimidated.
"Great," Brenda said. "Line up."
Peter shuffled toward the back of the queue, Ned hovering at his elbow like an anxious wingman. One by one, the Midtown students stepped up to the acrylic security pillar.
BEEP.
"Welcome, Eugene Thompson. Guest Pass: Level 1. Temporary Access Granted." FRIDAY’s cool, synthetic voice echoed from a small ceiling speaker—smooth, detached, and utterly standard.
Flash preened, straightening his collar as he walked through the turnstile.
BEEP.
"Welcome, Michelle Jones. Guest Pass: Level 1. Temporary Access Granted."
MJ passed through without breaking eye contact with her book.
Peter’s turn was approaching. His palms were sweating. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his printed paper pass—the one Mr. Harrington had handed out on the bus. It had a temporary QR code stamped on it.
Just scan the paper, Peter thought frantically. Just scan the paper like a normal high school kid. Don't look at the camera. Don't look at the optic sensors.
"Next," Brenda called out, tapping her tablet. "Peter Parker?"
Peter stepped forward. He reached out his hand, aiming the paper QR code at the red optical glass.
He was three inches away when his spider-sense gave a tiny, subtle thrum at the base of his skull—not the violent spike of an incoming punch, but the strange, prickling sensation he got right before an elevator door closed on his bag or a storm cleared the air.
A faint blue ring flickered around the scanner glass.
The system wasn't reading the QR code. It was reading his retinas.
Oh, come on, Peter thought, freezing. FRIDAY, don't do this—
The security pillar didn't beep. Instead, it emitted a soft, melodic chime that sounded distinctly different from the harsh BEEP everyone else had gotten. The overhead lights above Peter’s turnstile shifted from cool white to a warm, soft amber.
"Welcome back, Peter," FRIDAY’s voice chimed—not from the ceiling speaker, but from the localized speaker on the pillar itself, her tone instantly dropping its generic, flat customer-service cadence and adopting that slightly dry, familiar Irish lilt she used up in the workshop. "Boss noted you were on the manifest for today’s tour group. Would you like me to notify him that you have arrived on site?"
The entire intake lobby went dead quiet.
Brenda stopped tapping her tablet. Her eyes snapped from her screen to Peter, then down to her tablet again, where a set of red-and-gold clearance flags had suddenly overridden the Midtown guest manifest.
Flash stopped three feet past the turnstile, turning around so fast his sneakers squeaked against the floor. "What was that? Why did his scanner sound like that?"
Mr. Harrington blinked nervously. "Is... is there a problem with Peter’s pass, Miss Brenda? He’s on the list, I have the parental consent form right here—"
Peter felt every drop of blood rush out of his face and pool somewhere around his socks. "No! No, it’s fine! FRIDAY—I mean, system! No notification! Do not notify anyone! I'm just... I'm on a field trip! I'm a visitor!"
A two-second pause hung in the air.
"Understood, Peter," FRIDAY replied, her tone laced with what Peter could swear was automated amusement. "Suppressing automatic notification to Mr. Stark. However, please be advised that your ambient stress metrics are currently elevated. Should I deploy a cooling protocol?"
"No! No cooling! I don't need cooling!" Peter practically squeaked, his voice cracking horribly. "Just... Level 1! Give me Level 1!"
Brenda stepped forward, her sharp eyes narrowing as she looked at Peter, then at her tablet, then back at Peter. She didn't look angry; she looked utterly baffled. She tapped her screen twice, trying to pull up his file, but the screen merely displayed a high-level corporate seal and the words:
CLEARANCE RESTRICTED - CONTACT OFFICE OF THE CEO.
"Kid," Brenda said slowly, her voice dropping an octave. "Who are you?"
"I'm Peter!" Peter said, waving his hands frantically. "I'm just Peter Parker! From Midtown! I... I did an internship. A regular internship! Mostly filing things. Sorting inventory. Running errands. Totally normal intern stuff."
Beside him, Ned buried his face in his hands, muttering, "Stop talking, oh my god, Peter, stop talking."
Brenda stared at him for two agonizing seconds. Then she looked back at the rest of the class, who were all gaping at Peter—Flash looking like he’d just watched his own bank account evaporate in real time.
"Right," Brenda said carefully, the polished smile of someone who'd handled one too many executive disasters sliding into place. She tapped her tablet, forcing a manual override. "Internship. Of course. Moving on." She cleared her throat louder, raising her voice for the group. "Class, follow me to the lift. We’re heading to Floor 14—Consumer Tech Innovations. Keep your badges visible."
As the class began to move, Flash fell back, stomping over to Peter with a face redder than a fire hydrant.
"How did you do that?" Flash hissed, his voice trembling with sheer, unadulterated disbelief. "Did you hack the scanner? Did Leeds write a script for your phone? That’s illegal, Parker! You can’t just hack Stark Industries!"
"I didn't hack anything, Flash!" Peter whispered urgently, trying to walk fast enough to blend into the middle of the group. "It’s just... the system remembers people who have been in the building before! It’s an algorithm!"
"Algorithms don’t ask if you need a cooling protocol, Parker!" Flash spat, his voice unusually unsteady, more shaken than angry.
Ahead of them, MJ walked beside Ned. Without looking back, she said, "For future reference, 'I'm just an intern' only works if you stop talking after the word intern."
Peter groaned, slumping his shoulders as they stepped into the massive glass elevator.
He glanced up at the small optical lens in the corner of the ceiling. The tiny blue LED was pulsing rhythmically.
Please, Peter prayed silently to whatever higher power was listening. Please let Mr. Stark be stuck in Switzerland.
Nearly four thousand miles away, sitting in a soundproofed conference room overlooking Lake Geneva, Tony Stark was bored out of his skull.
A man in an impeccably tailored grey suit was giving a forty-minute PowerPoint presentation on the environmental impact of high-altitude thruster emissions, complete with pie charts that were entirely the wrong shade of blue.
Tony was leaning back in his leather chair, a pair of dark-tinted glasses resting on his nose. To the Swiss delegation and the UN representatives sitting around the mahogany table, he appeared to be intently reviewing the digital schematics displayed on his tablet.
In reality, he was reading a real-time diagnostic feed from the Manhattan facility, overlaid on his glasses' heads-up display.
A small notification flickered in the bottom right corner of his vision.
[FRIDAY: LOCAL OVERRIDE DETECTED - MANHATTAN HUB]
[USER: PARKER, P. - CLEARANCE: UNDEROOS]
[EVENT: MANUAL ACCESS SUPPRESSION REQUESTED]
Tony’s eyebrows twitched beneath his glasses. He didn't move a muscle, but his thumb tapped twice against the side of his pen.
"FRIDAY," Tony thought, activating the silent neural-link interface built into his glasses frames. "What’s the kid doing at the Manhattan hub on a Thursday morning? He’s supposed to be in AP Physics learning things he already knows."
"Mr. Parker is currently participating in an authorized educational field trip with Midtown School of Science and Technology," FRIDAY’s quiet audio feed chimed directly into his right inner ear. "He has requested that I refrain from alerting you to his presence."
Tony's faint smirk flickered and vanished before the French delegate sitting across from him could notice. "Suppressed my ping, did he? Fearing the mustard threat. Good. He’s learning self-preservation."
He flicked his finger across his tablet screen, pulling up the live security feed from Floor 14 of the Manhattan building.
There was the kid.
Peter was wearing that ridiculous, oversized grey hoodie Tony had accidentally left in the kid's locker at the workshop two weeks ago—the sleeves dragged past his knuckles—and he was practically trying to vibrate himself into another dimension to avoid standing next to a sharply dressed teenager with slicked-back hair.
Tony zoomed in on Peter’s face.
His eyes narrowed slightly behind his dark lenses.
The kid looked pale. Not just 'anxious about high school social dynamics' pale, but the specific, drawn tight-around-the-eyes look Peter got when he was operating on three hours of sleep and a severe calorie deficit. Tony noticed a slight stiffness in the way Peter held his left shoulder—a subtle protection mechanism, subtle enough that a school teacher wouldn't see it, but Tony had spent three years analyzing armor telemetry and biological stress points.
"FRIDAY," Tony thought silently. "Pull up his suit telemetry from last night."
"Accessing local cache," FRIDAY reported. "At 02:14 EST, Spider-Man intervened in a robbery involving three individuals utilizing modified high-pressure hydraulic demolition tools near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Structural collapse of a secondary brick wall occurred."
"Impact metrics?"
"Minor force trauma to the left scapula and rib cage. No fractures detected, but soft tissue bruising is high. Mr. Parker did not report to the medical bay."
Tony’s jaw tightened slightly. He shifted in his seat, tapping his pen against the table with a slow, deliberate rhythm.
Kid drops a wall on his shoulder at two in the morning, doesn't mention it, and then drags his bruised bones onto a school bus for a field trip to my building.
"Mr. Stark?"
Tony blinked, bringing his focus back to the conference room. The French delegate was looking at him expectantly.
"Is there something about the thruster dispersion metrics on Slide 8 that you find inadequate?" the delegate asked, a faint edge of aristocratic annoyance in his tone.
Tony adjusted his dark glasses, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table. "Slide 8 is fine, Henri. What’s inadequate is your assumption that my micro-turbines use standard jet A-1 combustion logic. They don't. They run on localized magnetohydrodynamic displacement. Zero fuel, zero carbon combustion. The particulate emissions of a four-hour flight are literally zero—you’d produce more particulates by lighting a single birthday candle."
He stood up, buttoning his jacket with one fluid motion.
"Which brings me to my next point," Tony continued smoothly, picking up his leather tablet case. "My legal team—sitting right there—will handle the remaining clauses regarding airspace transit rights in Sector 4. I have an urgent technical audit to perform."
"Mr. Stark, we are in the middle of a voting session—"
"And you have my proxy," Tony said, flashing a blinding, camera-ready smile that contained zero warmth. "He’s the guy with the expensive tie sitting next to the door. Don't touch his bottled water, he gets touchy."
Without waiting for a response, Tony walked out of the conference room, his dress shoes clicking sharply against the marble floor.
As the heavy mahogany doors swung shut behind him, he touched the frame of his glasses.
"FRIDAY, prepare the transport."
"The Quinjet is fueled and ready on the pad, Boss. Estimated flight time to Manhattan: thirty-eight minutes."
"Good," Tony said, stepping into the private elevator. "And FRIDAY?"
"Yes, Boss?"
"Keep a close eye on Floor 14. If the kid so much as breathes sideways, I want to know about it."
Back on Floor 14 of the Stark Industries Manhattan Hub, Peter Parker was currently trying to die of embarrassment.
"This is the prototype display for our commercial smart-glass technology," Brenda was saying, gesturing toward a large, seamless sheet of clear paneling set into the wall. "Utilizing microscopic electro-chromic layers, this glass can transition from fully transparent to opaque in under four milliseconds while simultaneously harvesting solar photovoltaic energy—"
"Hey, Penis Parker," Flash muttered, leaning in from behind. "If you're such a big-shot intern, why's that panel humming at 120 hertz instead of 60?"
Peter blinked, looking at the display. He hadn't even realized he was listening to it, but now that Flash mentioned it, his enhanced hearing picked up the faint, high-pitched zzzzzz coming from the bottom edge of the frame.
"It’s... it’s not driver frequency, Flash," Peter murmured back instinctively, keeping his voice down so Brenda wouldn't hear. "It’s a ground-loop oscillation. The installer probably forgot to isolate the secondary grounding wire behind the mounting bracket. It’s harmless."
Flash squinted at the panel, then at Peter, looking annoyed that Peter actually had an answer that sounded precise. "Whatever. You probably read that on a forum."
"I didn't read it on a forum," Peter muttered. "I helped fix three of them in the Sub-Basement last month."
"Right. Sub-Basement," Flash scoffed quietly, though there was less venom in it now—more of a sullen, defensive confusion. "Where they keep the imaginary interns."
Ahead of them, Ned leaned close to Peter’s side. "Dude," Ned whispered urgently. "My dad’s text messenger just pinged. He said there’s a rumor on Twitter that Iron Man’s private transport just left Geneva."
Peter’s stomach dropped into his shoes. "What? No. No, that’s... that’s just internet noise. He’s in meetings all day."
"I’m just saying," Ned squeaked. "If he comes here—"
Before Peter could respond, a strange, shuddering vibration rattled through the floorboards.
It was very faint—so faint that none of the Midtown students noticed it, and even Brenda barely paused in her presentation. But to Peter, whose senses were tuned to the structural resonance of steel and concrete, it felt like a heavy, dull thud deep beneath their feet.
Like something massive dropping onto a concrete deck four floors down.
Thump.
A split-second later, Peter’s spider-sense didn't just prickle—it gave a sharp, cold jab right between his shoulder blades.
He froze.
"Peter?" Ned whispered, noticing the sudden change in his friend’s posture. "What’s wrong?"
"Shh," Peter said softly, his head tilting toward the ceiling.
Above them, the recessed LED lighting tracks flickered—just once, a micro-second dip in voltage—before returning to full brightness.
"As I was saying," Brenda continued, oblivious, "the electro-chromic panel—"
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
A low, pulsing chime echoed through the room. It wasn't a fire alarm—it was too low-pitched, too controlled.
The glass doors at the end of the display hall quietly slid shut, their heavy magnetic locks engaging with a heavy CLACK.
"Attention occupants of Floor 14," FRIDAY’s voice sounded over the ceiling speakers. Her cadence was once again smooth, professional, and completely devoid of emotion. "A localized containment protocol has been initiated in Sub-Level 4 due to an unscheduled pressure drop in the experimental pneumatic transit tubes. All visitor tours are temporarily paused. Please remain in your current sector while automated diagnostics are conducted."
The Midtown students looked around, murmuring with a mix of excitement and mild confusion.
"Ooh, a lockdown!" Abe exclaimed. "Is it aliens? Tell me it’s aliens."
"It’s not aliens, Abe," Mr. Harrington said hastily, though he looked visibly pale as he patted his coat pockets for his inhaler. "It’s just... administrative diagnostics! Miss Brenda, this is standard, right?"
Brenda was staring at her tablet screen, her thumb swiping furiously. Her crisp, professional composure showed its first tiny crack. "It’s... it’s unusual," she admitted, her headset crackling with low static. "Sub-Level 4 is the heavy prototyping floor. The automated safety grid should have isolated a pressure drop in under two seconds. Why is Floor 14 locked down?"
Peter didn't listen to her. He stepped away from the group, moving toward the edge of the display hall where a large structural pillar housed an environmental monitoring panel.
He leaned against the pillar, placing his bare palm against the smooth composite surface.
Through the material, he could feel the vibrations clearly now.
It wasn't a pneumatic pressure drop. Pneumatic tubes rattled at high frequency.
This was a heavy, rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack—the unmistakable resonance of an automated heavy-duty industrial drone array cycling through an uncalibrated thrust loop. And underneath that, the distinct, sickening smell of scorching copper wire rising through the HVAC ventilation shafts.
Sub-Level 4, Peter thought, his mind racing through the facility schematics Tony had made him memorize during his first week as Spider-Man. Sub-Level 4 is where they test the experimental heavy-lift cargo chassis—the ones powered by high-density arc capacitors.
If one of those capacitors overheated and blew its primary containment coil... the thermal arc flash would melt the physical fiber-optic bus running along the wall, severing FRIDAY’s direct sensor link to the lower sub-basements and locking down the physical security gates automatically as a hard-wired safety precaution.
Which meant FRIDAY wasn't running diagnostics down there.
FRIDAY was blind down there.
Peter felt a sudden cold sweat break out across his forehead. His bruised ribs gave a sharp, throbbing ache as his muscles tensed.
"Ned," Peter whispered, stepping back toward his friend.
"Yeah?" Ned looked terrified.
"I need you to cover for me."
Ned’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. "Cover for you?! Peter, we’re locked in a room with glass doors! Where are you going?!"
"The ventilation maintenance hatch behind the smart-glass display panel," Peter said under his breath, leaning close so MJ wouldn't hear—though she was already watching him with those sharp, terrifyingly observant eyes. "There’s a blind spot in FRIDAY’s optical sensors right near the ground-loop wire I mentioned to Flash. If I can slip behind the panel—"
"Parker," a voice cut in.
Peter jumped.
MJ was standing two feet away, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked at him, then at the locked glass doors, then down at the slight tremor in his hands.
"If you throw up back there, I'm not cleaning it up," she said quietly.
Peter blinked. "What?"
"Go," she muttered, turning her back to him and stepping directly into the line of sight between Brenda and the smart-glass panel. "Harrington!" she called out loudly, raising her hand. "Is the air filtration system in this room compliant with municipal safety codes? I’m feeling a distinct lack of oxygen, and I think Flash is about to faint."
"I am not about to faint!" Flash yelled instantly, drawn into the distraction like a moth to a flame.
Under the cover of the sudden shouting match, Peter moved with terrifying, silent speed. He ducked behind the display panel, pop-sliding the small, unlatched maintenance grate with his fingertips, and squeezed his shoulders into the dark, narrow service shaft before anyone else in the room even noticed he was gone.
The service shaft was hot, narrow, and smelled heavily of heated dust and ozone.
Peter pulled his grey hoodie over his head to keep the fiberglass insulation out of his hair, squirming through the square metal duct with practiced, fluid agility. His bruised ribs screamed in protest with every pull of his arms, but he pushed the pain into the back of his mind.
Focus, Peter, he told himself. Identify the threat. Neutralize the threat. Don't break Mr. Stark’s expensive stuff.
He reached a vertical junction and dropped down three levels, catching himself on the internal ladder rungs with barely a whisper of sound.
He popped the ceiling vent grate on Sub-Level 4 and dropped lightly onto the polished concrete deck.
The air down here was thick with white, acrid smoke.
Sub-Level 4 was a massive, high-ceilinged testing bay filled with heavy CNC machinery, robotic assembly arms, and row upon row of storage crates. The main overhead lights were off, replaced by the rotating red pulse of emergency strobes.
In the center of the bay, suspended from a heavy-duty ceiling crane track, was a twelve-foot-tall automated cargo chassis—a massive, yellow-and-black steel frame designed for moving heavy shipping containers.
It was currently completely out of control.
One of its primary high-density arc capacitors on the rear assembly had suffered an internal short-circuit—likely due to a faulty coolant valve—and was spitting bright blue arcs of high-voltage electricity into the air. The arc pulse had fried the drone’s secondary logic board, locking its heavy hydraulic limbs into an automated 'clearing loop'.
The chassis was wildly swinging its massive, steel-reinforced loading arms through the air like a blind, enraged mechanical gorilla, smashing into nearby equipment racks and severing the main power conduits running along the wall.
THWACK!
A steel arm slammed into a heavy storage crate, obliterating it into a cloud of splintered wood and aluminum scrap.
"Okay," Peter muttered to himself, ducking behind a steel support pillar as a spray of blue sparks showered over his head. "Okay, bad news: no suit. Good news: no civilians down here. Great news: I don't have to explain to Mr. Harrington why my shirt smells like burnt copper."
He looked around quickly for a manual override box.
There—fifty feet away across the open, spark-lit deck—was the primary breaker panel for Sub-Level 4. If he could pull the physical shunt lever, it would cut the hard-wired power grid to the crane track, shutting down the chassis instantly.
The problem was the chassis’s perimeter sensor. Even with its logic board fried, the automated safety proximity sweep was still active—meaning the moment anything moved into its strike zone, the heavy steel arms would automatically whip toward the target at eighty miles an hour.
Peter didn't have his web-shooters. He’d left them in his backpack on Floor 14 to avoid setting off Brenda’s metal detectors.
"Right," Peter breathed, pulling the sleeves of Tony’s oversized grey hoodie over his hands to give himself a bit of grip. "No webs. Bare hands. Bruised ribs. Just a normal Thursday."
He took a deep breath, braced his feet against the concrete deck—
BOOM.
The heavy blast doors at the far end of the Sub-Level 4 loading bay didn't just slide open. They were blown off their magnetic tracks with a sharp, pneumatic CRACK, sliding back into their recessed alcoves with terrifying speed.
A tall, red-and-gold figure stepped through the swirling smoke.
The Iron Man Mark 47 armor stood in the doorway, its sleek repulsor units glowing with a cold, steady blue light. The golden faceplate reflected the flashing red emergency strobes of the bay.
Peter froze, his hand still resting against the support pillar. "Mr. Stark?"
The suit didn't run forward. It didn't raise its repulsors. Instead, the faceplate cracked open with a mechanical hiss, sliding back into the helmet structure to reveal Tony Stark’s face.
Tony looked impeccably groomed—dark hair neatly styled, a dark tailored Italian suit jacket visible beneath the opened neck structure of the armor—except for his eyes, which were narrowed into two sharp, dark points of absolute, razor-like focus.
He didn't look at the thrashing, twelve-foot steel cargo drone spitting blue electricity twenty feet away.
He looked directly at Peter.
"Kid," Tony said, his voice quiet, calm, and utterly lethal. "What did I tell you about entering restricted test bays without a supervisor?"
"I... I didn't!" Peter stammered, stepping out from behind the pillar and waving his hands defensively. "I mean, I did! But there was a pressure drop! And the display panel hummed! And FRIDAY lost her optical link because the fiber-optic bus fried, and I knew if the capacitor blew it would lock down the building and—"
"FRIDAY," Tony said, cutting Peter off without breaking eye contact. "Kill the bay grid."
"Manual override accepted, Boss," FRIDAY’s voice chimed from the suit's external comms. "Disengaging primary capacitor circuit."
With a low, dying whine, the arc pulse died instantly. The massive yellow cargo chassis went limp, its heavy steel arms dropping four inches before locking into their mechanical safety stops with a heavy CLANG. The rotating red emergency lights shut off, replaced by the steady, bright white illumination of the suit's shoulder-mounted floodlights.
Silence fell over the sub-basement.
Peter stood there, his sleeves draped over his knuckles, looking like a teenager caught sneaking downstairs for a midnight snack—if the snack room was an industrial disaster zone.
Tony unclipped the gauntlets of his suit, stepping out of the leg assemblies as the armor settled into its autonomous standby mode behind him. He walked toward Peter, his leather dress shoes stepping cleanly over the burnt metal debris littering the floor.
"You're bleeding," Tony noted, stopping three feet away.
Peter blinked, wiping his forehead. His fingers came away with a small smear of red from a tiny scratch he’d gotten crawling through the air duct. "It’s... it’s just duct rust. Mostly."
Tony reached out. Without a word, his hand hovered near Peter’s left shoulder—not touching, but close enough that Peter could feel the warmth of Tony’s palm through the fabric of the grey hoodie.
"Ribs?" Tony asked dryly.
"Thirty percent bruised," Peter blurted out automatically. "Which... which is basically fine."
"Right. Thirty percent," Tony said, his voice dripping with dry, sarcastic venom. He finally brought his hand down, resting his palm firmly on Peter’s uninjured right shoulder, pulling the kid half-an-inch closer. "Which explains why you squirm like a landed trout every time you take a deep breath."
"I don't squirm like a trout," Peter muttered, looking down at his sneakers. "I was fixing it, Mr. Stark. I was gonna pull the manual shunt lever."
"You don't have your suit, kid. You don't have your shooters," Tony said, his tone shifting—losing its sharp edge, dropping into that quiet, heavy register he only used when they were sitting in the shop at two in the morning after a bad night in Queens. "You crawled through a dusty air duct in an eight-hundred-dollar cashmere hoodie I left in your locker, with three cracked ribs, to tackle a runaway six-ton hydraulic crane with your bare hands."
"It’s not cashmere, is it?" Peter asked nervously, looking down at the sleeves. "Oh, man. I thought it was cotton."
Tony closed his eyes for a brief, agonizing second, pinching the bridge of his nose. "That’s... that’s what you take from this? The fabric composition?"
"I'm sorry," Peter said quietly, the bravado evaporating entirely. He swallowed hard, his posture slumping. "I just... I didn't want anyone on the tour to get hurt. Or... or for the building to go on high alert and ruin everything. Flash was already saying—"
"Flash?" Tony opened his eyes, staring at Peter. "Who the hell is Flash?"
"Nobody," Peter said quickly. "Just... a guy in my class."
Tony stared at Peter for three long seconds. He didn't ask further questions about 'Flash'—he didn't need to. Tony Stark’s mind operated on predictive algorithms, and it took him approximately 1.4 seconds to piece together the exact social hierarchy of Midtown High's junior class.
"Right," Tony said softly. He reached out, grabbing the back of Peter’s hoodie collar and gently tugging him toward the service lift at the back of the bay. "Come on, Underoos. Walk and talk. Before your teacher files a missing persons report and I have to buy his school to suppress the lawsuit."
"Wait, what about the tour?" Peter asked, stumbling slightly as he kept pace with Tony’s long stride. "They’re still locked on Floor 14!"
"Floor 14 was unlocked thirty seconds after I landed on the roof," Tony said, pressing his thumb against the service lift scanner. The doors slid open instantly. "FRIDAY’s currently rerouting your class to the executive cafeteria for free high-end catering and a personalized Q&A with our lead robotics engineers. They won't even remember you were missing until the ice cream bar opens."
Peter stepped into the elevator, resting his back against the cool brass wall with a long, exhausted sigh. "Ice cream bar? Really?"
"Sundae station with sixteen toppings," Tony said, stepping in beside him and pressing the button for the Penthouse. "I find that sugary dairy products distract teenagers from asking difficult structural questions."
The Penthouse floor of the Manhattan Hub was silent, sunlit, and smelled faintly of expensive espresso and cold air.
Tony walked over to the kitchen island, tossing his Italian suit jacket over the back of a barstool. He opened the low-profile medical cabinet set into the wall, pulling out a roll of high-grade flex-bandage and a cold-pack.
"Shirt off," Tony commanded, throwing the cold-pack onto the granite counter.
"Mr. Stark, honestly, it’s fine—"
"Parker. Shirt. Off. Don't make me have FRIDAY deploy the automated medical shears. They’re cold, and they have zero bedside manner."
Peter groaned, but he carefully pulled the grey cashmere hoodie over his head, followed by his inside-out science-puns t-shirt.
Tony stepped closer, squinting at Peter’s torso.
The left side of Peter’s ribs was a deep, mottled purple-and-yellow mosaic—a nasty, ugly impact mark from the brick wall collapse forty-eight hours prior.
Tony didn't gasp. He didn't make a speech. He simply reached out with surprisingly gentle, oil-stained fingers, pressing lightly on the edges of the bruised tissue.
Peter winced slightly, taking a short, shallow breath.
"No internal bleeding," Tony remarked, his eyes focused entirely on the injury as he unrolled the flex-bandage. "FRIDAY’s scanner says the bone density held up, but the intercostal muscles are sprained to hell. Wrap it tight, keep the cold-pack on it for twenty minutes, and you’re grounded from Spider-duty until Sunday."
"Sunday?!" Peter squawked. "Mr. Stark, Sunday is three days away! What about the neighborhood?! What if someone steals a bike?!"
"Then the police can do the revolutionary work of filing a police report," Tony said dryly, wrapping the flex-bandage around Peter’s chest with practiced, firm efficiency. "Tuck your chin."
Peter tucked his chin, letting Tony pull the bandage snug across his ribs.
"You're an idiot, you know that?" Tony muttered softly, securing the bandage clip with a sharp snap. "A brilliant, reckless, incredibly stupid kid."
"I was trying to help," Peter mumbled into his chest.
"I know," Tony said. He stepped back, grabbing the cold-pack and pressing it gently against the wrapped ribs. "That’s what makes it so annoying."
He walked over to the espresso machine, pressing a button to start a brew, his back turned to Peter.
"Your friend," Tony said off-handedly as the machine hummed. "The big one with the index cards."
"Ned?"
"Ned. He’s sharp. Noticed the ground-loop frequency before the tour guide did."
"Yeah," Peter said, a faint smile touching his lips as he held the cold-pack against his side. "Ned’s really smart. He helped me build the Death Star."
"Right. Lego," Tony said, grabbing two mugs from the shelf. "And the girl with the book who looks like she’s planning a bloodless coup."
"MJ. She’s... she’s just like that."
"She’s observant," Tony corrected, turning around and leaning against the counter, holding a mug of black coffee in one hand and handing a glass of orange juice to Peter with the other. "She covered your exit behind the display panel. Didn't even blink."
Peter took the glass, staring at the orange juice. "She did?"
"FRIDAY has high-res security feeds, kid. I watched the playback on the flight over from Geneva," Tony said, taking a sip of his coffee. "She raised her voice to draw your teacher’s attention the second you pulled the vent hatch."
Peter swallowed hard. "Oh."
"You’ve got good people, Pete," Tony said softly. The sarcasm had completely left his voice now—replaced by that dry, grounded reality that anchored Peter whenever the superhero world got too big, too loud, or too heavy. "Don't sell 'em short. And don't think you have to do every single rescue run solo just because you've got sticky fingers and weird reflexes."
Peter looked up, meeting Tony’s gaze.
Tony wasn't smiling. He just stood there in his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, grease stains on his cuffs, looking at Peter with that steady, quiet presence that made Peter feel like the ceiling was never going to crash down on him again.
"Okay," Peter said quietly. "Okay. Thanks, Mr. Stark."
"Don't thank me," Tony snorted, turning back to the counter. "Thank the ice cream bar downstairs. Which, by the way, you’re about to join."
Peter blinked. "Wait, what? I’m going back down?"
"Of course you’re going back down," Tony said, grabbing a fresh, clean Midtown High t-shirt from a delivery box on the side table—one he’d clearly had FRIDAY pull from the school store inventory twenty minutes ago. He tossed it at Peter’s face. "Put that on. Right-side out this time. You’re gonna walk into that cafeteria, sit next to Ned and the scary book girl, and eat three scoops of mint chocolate chip like a normal teenager."
"What about... what about Flash?" Peter asked tentatively, pulling the soft blue shirt over his head.
Tony picked up his coffee mug, taking a slow sip as a faint, dark smirk touched the corner of his mouth. "Flash Thompson is currently being given a very detailed, three-minute personal lecture by Pepper’s chief legal liaison regarding the strict corporate non-disclosure agreements attached to SI visitor passes. By the time he leaves this building, he’ll be too terrified of getting sued to spell your name out loud, let alone call you a liar."
Peter’s jaw dropped. "You... you set Legal on him?"
"I didn't set anyone on him," Tony said smoothly, walking toward the private elevator. "Legal operates on autonomous threat assessment. A visitor questioned the authenticity of an official SI intern badge. We take brand protection very seriously."
He held the elevator door open, gesturing for Peter to step inside.
"Now get down there, Parker. And if you spill ice cream on that bandage, I’m wrapping your whole torso in duct tape."
The yellow Midtown bus rolled down 2nd Avenue, bathed in the soft, orange glow of the late afternoon sun.
The bus was quiet—a heavy, sugar-induced coma having settled over thirty high school juniors who had spent two hours eating gourmet catering and exploring interactive engineering labs.
In the back row, Ned was sound asleep, his head resting against the window, clutching a glossy Stark Industries field-trip tote bag filled with free promotional gear.
Across the aisle, MJ was still reading her book, though her eyes flicked over the top of the pages every few minutes to look at Peter.
Peter sat quietly, his back resting comfortably against the seat cushion. The cold-pack in his ribs had done its job, and the tight flex-bandage held his torso stable against the bumps in the road.
Flash Thompson sat four rows ahead. He hadn't said a single word since leaving the building. Every time he looked back toward the rear of the bus, his eyes brushed past Peter and instantly snapped back to his lap, his face pale and his hands tucked neatly under his knees.
"Hey," MJ said softly over the engine hum.
Peter looked over. "Yeah?"
"Your shirt’s right-side out," she noted flatly.
Peter looked down at the bright blue Midtown Science logo on his chest, smiling faintly. "Yeah. Found a spare."
"Right. A spare," MJ murmured, turning a page in The Myth of Sisyphus. "You know, Parker... the catering was actually pretty good. The espresso machine was Italian."
"Glad you liked it, MJ," Peter said, leaning his head back against the vinyl seat.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Peter pulled it out. It was a single text message from a contact listed simply as T.S.
T.S.: Kid. Left a spare shooter module in your locker. Don't touch it until Sunday. I mean it. FRIDAY is watching.
T.S.: Also, tell May the galette was terrible. I had to throw half of it in the incinerator.
Peter stared at the screen for a long second, his thumb hovering over the glass. A small, stupid, unstoppable grin broke across his face.
He typed back quickly:
Peter: It was supposed to be a plum galette, Mr. Stark.
The response came back almost instantly:
T.S.: Whatever it was, it breached the Geneva Convention. Go to sleep. See you Tuesday.
Peter slipped the phone back into his pocket, a quiet smile still tugging at his mouth as the bus crossed the bridge back into Queens. He let his head rest against the glass, letting the steady rhythm of the city drown out the rest of the day until the sharp thrum in his ribs finally settled into nothing.