Chapter Text
"Hey guys, remember you have a test tomorrow. Yes, I know it'll be a Friday. No, you can't talk me out of it. Please at least bring a pencil."
A groan sounded through the room over the sound of pencil cases being thrown into bags.
"You've known about this since the start of term. You even know what's on the test. You'll all be fine."
"Is it open book?"
"It is not open book, but you can use a calculator. Which reminds me, please bring your calculator! If you don't have one, talk to your year advisor; sooner rather than later please. And why are you all standing up, the bell hasn't even—" He was interrupted as the school bell screeched through the room, followed quickly by more screeching from chairs and tables being pushed across linoleum floors.
"Goodbye Dr. Grace!" "See you tomorrow!"
He gave them a wave as they left, but their voices blended together underneath the scream of the bell. Grace rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to breath through the pain cutting through his head. It was a few moments after the ringing stopped that he finally looked up again.
He needed to get rid of the fluorescent lights in here. He flicked his wrist, red webbing thwipping against the switch and plunging the room into darkness. Yeah, some halogen bulbs sounded really nice right now
My name is Dr. Ryland Grace, I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and I'm San Francisco's one and only Star Spider.
He was pulled out of his daze as his phone buzzed from under a pile of worksheets. He rubbed his eyes as he checked the incoming tidal wave of messages.
"Why is Grace heart rate elevated?" Came the first text. "Grace in trouble? Grace need rescue?!?"
"I'm fine, buddy"
"Then why Grace not answer my texts?!?!?"
"I've got another class coming in soon. We'll talk later." The next bell would sound soon, bringing with it a new wave of pain with its noise.
"Rocky can see Grace panicking on monitor. Grace cannot lie. Grace must calm down." Grace dropped his phone on the desk as the typing dots continued to show. He had students already waiting at the door and bright red webbing on his light switch, not a great look. He stared down the clock as he braced for the bell.
You know the story, saved some kids on a field trip and got swept up by the 24hr news cycle that refused to spit me back out. Met my new best friend on an online forum, earnt myself a 'worlds best teacher' mug from a class of seventh graders and got given top secret clearance to a government lab. Dr. Grace, America's least graceful superhero. His current worst enemy? The bell at a middle school.
"Grace is terrible superhero."
"Yeah, well, you're preaching to the choir here, buddy." Grace said into his headphones as he cycled across town to job number two. "Look, if you can find a fix for these damn powers then I'll be thanking you forever."
"Rocky is engineer, life research is Grace's job." He could hear the eyeroll.
Getting these powers out of him was the first thing he wanted once he started changing. Sense going haywire, bright red goo coming out of his wrists? Yeah, no thank you. Half his time in his lab job was dedicated to figured out what the hell was wrong with him while Rocky was playing Q over Skype.
Grace's evening job was ridiculously kitted out, it almost seemed a shame to let half the gear go to waste. Especially since he was currently the only one allowed within the lab's sterile environment. No way anyone would no if he took some personal projects for a spin in the centrifuge while he waited for mass-spectrometer results.
"Good evening, Dr. Grace." His boss stood in the foyer, large coffee in hand, as he took off his helmet and locked his bike.
"Hi."
"We have a new satellite sample for you. It landed in early this morning so we're hoping to get some cleaner results." Grace had long learnt not to attempt small talk with Eva Stratt, she cared about the job and the job only. It was refreshing in a way.
"The satellite was secured before re-entry. The carrier is waiting for you in the lab. Do you have any questions?"
"N-no. Same old, same old, right?"
"No, not same old, we are hoping for some quantifiable results this time. Please do your best. Thank you." She stopped as they reached the first air-lock door to his lab, leaving him to go on alone.
"Not same old, got it." He swiped through the first door, ready to be doused in decontaminate spray and whatever else Stratt's department decided was necessary to keep the satellite sample clean.
Stratt worked for some top secret wing of the government, the kind with a weird acronym that normal people didn't know existed. Grace's government clearance had grown exponentially since he started working in Stratt's lab, not that he actually knew anything that was the dangerous sort of top-secret. At least not that he knew of.
He was recruited by Stratt herself to analyse an unknown substance that had come to Earth on the backs off a NASA probe. The was four months ago. Since then, he'd figured out a lot of things that the substance wasn't, but it was still largely a mystery. He nicknamed it 'Lumaphage' due to its strange property to consume all light that he threw its way. Stratt had nodded when he'd said it, and a few of her entourage scribbled in their notepads, which was always concerning. He had no idea what she did when she wasn't monitoring him.
The new sample was, as promised, on a workbench in the centre of the lab. Alongside it were printed copies of all the information they had from various sensors both before, during, and after the satellite's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. There would be a digital copy on the lab's PC, but both he and Stratt were old school, paper was faster.
He'd done this before, taking satellite samples and putting them through the wringer of whatever equipment he could find and google well enough to use. Whoever built this lab had really shelled out, there was every type of equipment, every type except for actual scientists.
Today was all taking sample and loading them in. And if he loaded a few samples of, I don't, his blood, who would know the difference. Stratt wasn't a scientist. or a lab tech and Grace was pretty sure no one else came in here. He grabbed an armful of swabs and set to work.
Three podcast episodes later and he was wrenched from his work by a voice over the speakers.
"Dr. Grace, have you found anything?"
"These machines take—"
"Time, yes, I know, but you are not a machine and you have had almost three hours now. What have you found."
Grace sighed, leaning back from his microscope "How long did you say these have been in containment for?"
"Approximately seventeen hours."
"They should have stopped moving by now." He murmured to himself, looking through his notes and biting the end of his pencil.
"What was that?"
"They're moving, as if they still have stored energy. If it was left over from, I don't know, proximity with the sun or something, then it should have been released by now. Its clearly releasing some of that energy, we have it on the sensors, but they're still going, look." He punched some buttons and sent his microscope view onto a screen in the viewing area. "I don't know if they're alive yet, but either these are living organisms that are converting something into energy, or they have an incredible energy storage capacity. Like a city power station held in a button battery."
"Is that possible?"
"Well, unless this is an elaborate prank that you've built a multi-million dollar lab for—"
"This is not a prank"
"—then I don't think there's any other option."
"Thank you for your time Dr. Grace. Please send through your energy estimates and you may go home."
"Wait, I've still got more—"
"Do you not have school tomorrow? Surely there is a pop quiz for you to prepare for." Stratt left no room for argument as she turned around, leaving the viewing room and going who-knows-where.
"Its not a pop quiz, they all new about it months ago." Grace huffed. He had bigger things to think about than educational nomenclature; with a reaction like that, Stratt would be off in meetings for the rest of the night, leaving him to his own devices in the multi-million dollar lab.
"Let's party." He clapped and pushed himself via wheely-chair across the lab to begin his own experiments. As with the Lumaphage, he had no scientific basis to start his research on his own recent… changes. Even the vague spider-connection was barely enough to form a research foundation. Rocky had coined the term 'webs' for the crazy-high-strength substance bleeding out of his wrists, but it was the 6-o-clock news that first coined "Star Spider".
He wheeled over to a PC and pulled out a Solid State Drive. It held all his "Star Spider" related research and was the most secure way he could figure out how to work on it while in Stratt's lab. There had to be some connection between his Lumaphage research and his arachnid mutations. Grace had never been one to knock coincidence, but this was absurd. Even his danger-sense pinging whenever he thought about it.
They happened too close for there not to be something there, but all the tests were slow and he was only one guy trying to specialise in two very different, and very experimental fields. Sure, he had Rocky, but he was an engineer, not a doctor.
Luckily for Grace, the lab didn't just have every piece of technology on and off the market, but it had an incomparable library of scientific journals and research. If he was going to figure this out, it was going to be here. He just had to stay awake long enough.
"Time to go home! Time to go home!" The alarm on his phone chimed. He'd changed them all to speech alerts once his mutations made the rings hurt his head. He pulled his head up off the table, a piece of paper sticking to his cheek, to look at the clock. 1am, definitely time to go home. 8am homeroom was not going to be kind to him.
He did have to spend five minutes jiggling the lock on his bike —it used to be three on average, but now he had to desperately try not to snap the steel with his bare hands— but he didn't have to worry about traffic this late and the air was crisp as he rode. It gave him time to think over everything he'd found that evening.
He hadn't been lying when he said the Lumaphage was expelling far too much energy to be any system they knew of. He didn't want to outright say "it's alive!" until he had concrete evidence—no matter how much Stratt clearly wanted to hear it— but it had to be producing all that energy somewhere. It couldn't all be passively collected and stored. Lumaphage was either an organism, or a mechanism, and there was no evidence that anyone or anything on Earth had anywhere near the technological capability. And aliens weren't real, so that was a dead end.
Ok, aliens might be real, they were almost certainly real. Hell, he was willing to believe that the Lumaphage themselves were some form of alien proto-being! But there was a big difference between that and the idea that Lumaphage were micro-sized robots used by a highly developed alien species. A species that they had no evidence of despite them needing to be close enough for humans to find their robots accidentally. So not alien robots.
His subconscious buzzed, the part of his brain that alerted him to danger was tingling, leaving him massively confused as he looked around the empty streets. Despite the forewarning, he still jumped when he heard the gunshots.
His bike clattered to the ground as he ran after the sound, letting his danger-sense guide him —and hopefully pull him out of the way of more bullets, should they come.
"Look, I'm serious here, hand over the bag and the next one won't—"
"Take whatever you want," the young woman's sobs hit Grace's ears before he rounded the corner, alongside the sound of her bag being thrown on the ground. "I don't care, just leave me alone." The person with the gun was obscured by shadow and loose fabric as they jumped the bag like a rabid animal.
As soon as they took their eyes of her, the woman bolted. Grace could almost smell the adrenaline in the air. Could he do that?
"Hey buddy, you ok?"
"Get back!" The person waved the gun at Grace. Maybe this wasn't the best idea.
"How about you throw that gun away, no one wants anyone to get hurt tonight." His danger-sense was lighting his nerves on fire as he ignored it and moved closer to the figure. He really was a terrible superhero. "I don't have any cash, I just wanna talk."
"Just leave me alone!" They moved back into the shadows. "I don't want your help."
"What do you want, buddy?"
"What are you? A cop?!" The figure finally stood up.
"No, I just want to—"
"You can't help me. You're too nice, you don't have the stuff. Just go home!" The figure began to sob loudly.
"What stuff?" His entire body was on fire as his danger-sense begged him to leave.
"I just wanna feel strong again! Like I can do things, be someone! I need more Astrophage. Help me, hand it over!" They gripped their head as their emotions spun, sobs become growls of pain and rage. Grace could taste it in the air. He finally listened to his senses, moving aside just as the figure sent three shots in his directions.
"Help me!" They yelled again, punching the closest building and then running back into the shadows.
Grace breathed heavily, panic still alive and racing through his system. His hands didn't shake anymore, not with his mutations, but he could feel the webs pulling through his system into his wrists.
He should go after them, they clearly need help. Grace was distracted though, stepping forward to where the person just was. He placed a hand on the wall, feeling the new hole left in the bricks where the stranger had hit it. A single punch from a human didn't leave rubble, and if it did then the person didn't get to just walk away from it. What drugs would they need to cause this?
"What is Astrophage?"