Chapter 14
Arriving at the address, I met Louisa, a warm woman in her mid-forties who was clearly running on fumes from the move.
She walked me quickly through the house, which was nearly empty.
Moving through the rooms where our footsteps echoed off bare walls, I felt not emptiness but potential.
The living room would become my relaxation and planning space.
The small room was ideal for an office.
But the real draw was the garage: spacious, with a separate exit to the backyard.
My future workshop.
Louisa explained that her family had essentially already settled into their new home in another state, and renting out this single-story house was simply the last loose end they needed to tie up before everything was fully resolved.
They'd originally listed it at $3,500, but calls had been slow; it was too much to ask for a one-story house, even in a decent area.
So that morning they had made the strategic decision to drop it to $3,000.
I was one of the first to call at the new price.
Luck had smiled on me.
It smiled even broader when Louisa looked me over, took in the neat appearance and unhurried manner, and seemed to find in front of her exactly the tenant she needed.
She didn't want a problem renter she'd have to manage from another state.
She wanted someone who would pay on time and leave the place intact.
My "introverted student" cover story worked perfectly.
Twenty minutes after I arrived in Bay Ridge, we were in her car on the way to a notary to sign the contract.
Louisa's family were in a hurry to close things out, and she left for her new home that same evening.
I spent the following Tuesday and Wednesday on the move.
It was exhausting.
First, I had to clear out my few but important belongings from the rat-hole in Hell's Kitchen.
Terminating the contract with the previous landlord meant writing off the $500 deposit old John had paid, since the landlord had no intention of returning it.
I absorbed that loss philosophically.
It was the price of leaving the past behind.
Then came the setup.
Hauling boxes, arranging equipment in the garage, buying the hundred small domestic necessities that always turned out to be more than you expected.
The constant taxi rides quickly taught me a hard lesson: even a well-padded wallet could bleed out fast if you were careless with transportation.
I realized it was time to buy a car, not just for convenience but as a genuine strategic asset.
Digging through my inherited memories, I discovered to my quiet satisfaction that I already had a driver's license, courtesy of John's foster mother, who had made aggressive use of every available social benefit, including free driving lessons for foster children.
Another unexpected gift from the past.
Part of Wednesday, alongside the household work, went toward finding a vehicle.
After going through listings on Craigslist, driving to scattered corners of Brooklyn, and personally inspecting several rusty candidates that failed on contact, I finally found what I was looking for: a 2007 Honda CR-V.
Understated, reliable, spacious enough without being conspicuous, and most importantly, the kind of car nobody looked at twice.
The perfect gray vehicle for my purposes.
The asking price was $7,200.
After a brief negotiation and a thorough once-over, I paid cash on the spot, took the receipt and the title, and registered the car in my name that same day at the Brooklyn Department of Transportation, picking up insurance at $100 a month while I was there.
By Wednesday evening I was sitting in my own garage, in my own folding chair, next to my own car.
I pulled the gate closed, cutting myself off from the outside world, and finally let myself take stock.
The cards I was holding: a reliable car, a comfortable quiet house with a year-long lease, 180 OP on my balance, since I hadn't let idle moments go to waste and had been knocking out small crafts whenever time allowed, and a tight roll of cash totaling $25,000, the proceeds from methodically selling the remaining gold bars across various pawnshops around the city.
Life was good.
I felt an intoxicating sense of control and security that I had been sorely lacking for longer than I could clearly remember.
But complete freedom still required a couple more steps.
Tomorrow I'd drop out of the Art College.
It wasn't a critical problem, but the obligation sat on my mind like unfinished business.
I also needed to pay off the $2,000 credit card balance and close the old accounts, to start entirely clean.
I spent another hour straightening up the garage, sorting equipment, and arranging materials on the shelves.
The monotonous work was satisfying in a quiet way.
In the pockets of downtime I knocked out another 20 OP on small crafts, bringing the balance to a clean two hundred, then went to bed.
Tomorrow's plan was clear and simple: drop out of college, earn another 50 OP, and unlock two recipes from the Arcanum simultaneously: the Muscle Stimulant and the Protective Field Generator.
With my current resources I was confident I could work toward building something from both, and each had its own compelling case.
If I needed more money at any point, I could assemble or simply buy a personal ore smelter and run it right here in the garage.
But all of that was for tomorrow.
The morning in the new house was different.
Quiet.
Peaceful.
The sunlight coming through the blinds carried none of the anxiety or the smell of damp that had accompanied every morning in the old studio.
It promised a productive day.
The energy coiled up inside me wasn't just the restlessness of a young body anymore.
I could feel it almost physically, something warm and dense sitting in my chest, pressing to get out, needing to make something.
Was it the hormones of this young body doing that to me?
Or was the System's so-called Spark of the Creator, about which I still knew practically nothing, genuinely kindling toward something larger, something that might one day become a true Flame of the Celestial Blacksmith?
I sat with the feeling for a moment.
It was specific and unambiguously positive.
An itch in my fingertips, a pull toward tools and materials, toward turning a pile of raw parts into something that hadn't existed before.
This inner fire could push me toward all kinds of things, great and not so great.
Deciding not to get lost in philosophical questions about it, I had breakfast, opened the laptop, and started mapping out the next steps in my crafting agenda.
While I waited for the morning rush to thin out, I sat with my plans, and only once the traffic had cleared a little did I get into the Honda and drive to the College.
The task ahead was simple, if tedious: officially burn the bridges.
Submit the withdrawal application, fill out the form to exit the loan program, and sit through the mandatory consultation where someone would explain, with a weary expression, everything I had already looked up.
Then came the financial side.
A semester at the College cost $4,500, a full year $9,000, which was more than my car.
John had just completed a full year, so that was the figure I owed, plus $300 to $500 in charges for the first two weeks of the current term.
Fortunately the terms of the student loan were lenient: no interest, with payments deferred for six months and spread over ten years.
I wasn't going to drag it out.
I'd set up automatic payments and let this particular debt fade into the background like a bad memory.
Arriving at the College, I worked through the administrative offices efficiently.
The whole bureaucratic process took about an hour.
Each signature on each form felt like a clean snip, cutting another thread connecting me to John's old life.
When it was done, I walked out holding official confirmation.
I was no longer enrolled at this College.
I was still technically a debtor, but that was a minor detail.
In a genuinely good mood, I headed for the exit, my head already filling with plans: hardware store, full stock-up, an entire day in a crafting frenzy.
But the day had other ideas.
Walking directly toward me down the sunlit corridor was a familiar shock of red hair cutting through the crowd.
Mary Jane Watson, in person.
Beside her was a guy who seemed to be her complete opposite in every visible way.
Thin, slightly hunched, built entirely out of sharp angles and nervous energy, with a gaze that had clearly spent far more time on book pages than on people's faces, half-hidden behind round-rimmed glasses.
Green sweater, worn jeans.
No offense to the guy, but he was a textbook representative of the nerd faction, almost comically archetypal.
I had no intention of changing course or starting a conversation.
The girl spotted me and gave a brief nod with a slight smile.
I returned it, keeping my expression neutral, and we passed each other.
I had already taken a couple of steps back into my own thoughts about the upcoming crafting session when a fragment of their conversation reached me.
One word.
Or rather, one name, spoken by her, stopped me cold.
"...it's really not difficult, Peter, with your brains you'll fix that projector in no time..."
Whatever came after that, I didn't hear.
My attention had snagged on that single word and the rest of the world simply went quiet.
The name.
Peter.
My brain, suddenly running at an accelerated pace, began sifting through everything it knew.
Peter.
In Mary Jane's circle.
Thin.
Nerd.
Glasses.
The pieces came together in a single silent, deafening flash.
Peter Parker.
I looked at the back of that slouching figure and tried to reconcile his image with the legend.
There was no confidence, no concealed strength, not even the faintest trace of the quick-witted hero he was destined to become.
Just an awkward young man.
That was what the absence of a radioactive spider bite did to a person.
The real question wasn't who he was.
It was what I should do about it.
And whether I should do anything at all.
Case for intervention: at least two reasons, and both carried weight.
First: Peter Parker was a freaking genius.
One of the smartest minds this world had to offer.
I didn't know precisely how extraordinary this particular version of him was, but that could be gauged from even a brief conversation.
Second: his tragic future.
The Lizard transformation, which was practically inevitable in those versions of the universe where a spider-powered Gwen existed.
I wasn't a hero, but preventing the emergence of one of New York's most dangerous threats at the earliest possible stage?
That was at least worth considering.
All right.
Stop.
No rushing this.
Think it through.
Cold and in order.
The asset side of the equation: genius.
What did that mean for me specifically?
I was not a genius, not by any measure.
I was a practitioner with access to potentially extraordinary technologies, but I frequently didn't understand the underlying principles well enough to implement them cleanly.
Parker was a bridge.
More than that, he was a force multiplier.
A living supercomputer capable of taking blueprints from the Forge, artifacts from other realities that casually violated the laws of physics, and figuring out how to make them actually function in my garage with a soldering iron and parts sourced from a local electronics market.
He could explain the biochemistry of the Muscle Stimulant to me, optimize the mechanism for the Protective Field Generator, help with any programming requirements.
This wasn't simply about accelerating the OP farm.
It was a quantum leap in the quality and pace of my development.
Peter Parker was one of the rarest genuinely universal geniuses, and ignoring that asset when it was literally within arm's reach would be a particular kind of criminal stupidity.
The liability side: the Lizard.
On the other side of the scale sat his monstrous potential future.
To be direct about it, the moral dimensions of Gwen's heroic journey weren't my primary concern.
What I cared about was risk assessment.
Was Peter's transformation as inevitable here as, say, Captain Stacy's death?
Looking at the way Peter was currently trailing behind Mary Jane, ready to do whatever she asked, it seemed unlikely that he and Gwen had any close relationship at this point.
His eventual act would most likely be driven by envy of the superheroine, assuming he already knew about her, and a desperate need to prove something to a world that hadn't noticed him yet.
Classic profile.
And a weakness that could be worked with.
But I needed to move.
They were about to disappear around the corner and the window was closing by the second.
The first step in any strategy was data collection.
I needed to speak to him.
Assess him.
Understand what I was actually dealing with: a future Nobel laureate, a future monster, or simply a badly beaten-down teenager who hadn't found himself yet.
This was also the simplest and most obvious move.
I'd build from there.
"Hey, MJ, hold up!"
I called out, keeping my voice as casual as possible.
They stopped.
Mary Jane turned, a flicker of surprise crossing her face before settling into easy friendliness.
"I overheard something about a spotlight."
I closed the distance, deliberately choosing the word "catastrophe" when I added, "What catastrophe exactly has befallen?"
It worked.
Mary Jane threw her hands up, theatrical distress entering her voice immediately.
"It's simply awful! The main spotlight broke on one of the rehearsal stages! And to get it officially repaired we have to submit a request and wait three days, you know how that red tape goes. The girls and I have a performance in a small theater tomorrow and we absolutely need a final rehearsal today!"
She paused and tilted her head proudly toward her companion.
"Fortunately, after a conversation with the department, I managed to bring in an independent outside expert."
I shifted my attention to Peter, who appeared to shrink visibly under that title, looking like he was considering merging with the wall behind him.
"An expert, you say?"
I let a slight smirk show and extended my hand to Parker.
"He looks more like a theorist than a practical guy to me."
"He can absolutely handle it!"
Mary Jane shot back immediately, while Peter shook my hand with a certain awkwardness.
"Peter is the smartest person I know!"
"And can the smartest person," I pretended to search through options, though I had already chosen the test beforehand, "build a Marx generator, for example?"
Mary Jane looked at the guy beside her with no idea what I was talking about.
But Peter changed.
Up until that moment he had been carrying himself like Mary Jane's shadow, lost and peripheral.
At the words "Marx generator" something shifted in him.
He straightened slightly.
The gaze behind his glasses sharpened and focused on me, and a spark of genuine, alert professional interest lit up in it.
"Played around with one in high school," he said.
His voice, previously quiet and a little deflated, found a slightly more confident register.
"Getting identical high-voltage capacitors is the real challenge, though. I had to build my own out of foil and plastic bottles."
"Respectable," I said, nodding and feigning mild surprise, though internally I was barely keeping the satisfaction off my face.
Test passed with flying colors.
"Where are you studying, if you don't mind me asking? Or working?"
"NYU. Biochemistry, genetic engineering track."
He scratched the back of his disheveled head a little awkwardly.
"I work on the side too, part-time."
Bingo.
Coincidences like this didn't happen.
But I needed one more confirmation.
"Dr. Curt Connors doesn't happen to work there, does he?"
Parker's eyes went wide with genuine surprise.
"He does. I actually assist him a little, part-time for now, but..."
He shrugged, a small smile appearing.
"No complaints. Getting even limited access to a lab at that level, and to that quality of knowledge, is an incredible stroke of luck."
Jackpot.
"Boys, can you maybe save the science talk for later?"
Mary Jane cut into our exchange, placing her hands dramatically on her hips.
"There is a spotlight that is not going to fix itself."
"Yeah, right, sorry, we should go," Peter agreed, visibly guilty.
I realized this moment couldn't be left on the table.
"Can I get your number?"
I addressed him directly.
"Having the smartest person according to Mary Jane Watson in my contacts seems like a better state of affairs than not having him."
A light flush touched Peter's cheeks, but he nodded.
"Uh, yeah, sure, go ahead."
I wrote down the number, said goodbye, and left the College in an even better mood than the one I'd carried through the dropout paperwork.
I hadn't just shed an unnecessary obligation.
I'd acquired something considerably more valuable.
Getting into the Honda, I pulled out onto the avenue feeling genuinely in control.
The world was full of opportunities.
The euphoria didn't last very long, though.
Between the unfamiliar feel of this body and this car and the particular demands of American traffic law, I was, as I had been the day before, giving the road my full and careful attention.
And it was exactly that concentration that let me notice something unwelcome.
A black SUV had been sitting in my rearview mirror for several blocks.
A Toyota Land Cruiser, tinted as dark as legally possible.
I turned right onto a quieter side street.
A beat of delay, and the Land Cruiser turned with me.
A cold trickle ran down my back.
I took another turn.
It was still there.
This was no longer coincidence.
"Damn it," I hissed through my teeth, my grip tightening on the steering wheel.
"I really hope this is just paranoia, and that this particular black box on wheels just happens to share my exact route, turn for turn, entirely by chance."
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