Son of MV1 Presents:

SPIDER-GIRL 4: STATUS QUO

 

(x^2-3)(4y+x)=0

 

May Parker, commonly known as Mayday, stared at the equation glumly. She had a serious problem with algebra – it was boring. It took too much time she’d rather be spending with her friends. And these days, she had more important things to think about.

Like where the hell she was going to get a costume from.

See, it works out like this:

May Parker’s father, Peter, had been bitten by a radioactive spider when he was not much older than she was now. Somehow, the mutagenic charge to the spider’s bite had given it a jolt. It had bonded with Peter’s system, granting him incredible powers – spider-like abilities.

He became a hero – one of the first of his generation, the Spider-Man.

And then, years ago, before Mayday was really aware of the world around her, something happened to Peter. His powers were no longer active. May didn’t know much of the details; it had happened too long ago and her father didn’t like talking about it. He’d had to stop being Spider-Man.

Of course, by that time, there were Spider-Folk everywhere you looked; two Spider-Women had been active, at one time both members of the same team, before… But no one was very clear on the details of what had happened to the second founding of Force Works.

There had been the Scarlet Spider, too – something her father; otherwise happy to talk about Spider-people once May knew his secret, had still been reticent about. May got the feeling that there was something else there, but she’d have to wait for her dad to tell her.
And there’d been a Spider-Girl for a brief time.

Poor, mysterious, dead Spider-Girl.

Mayday was fairly certain, however, that the Black Widows had had very little to do with spiders. Venom couldn’t be counted a good role model.

No, when she thought about it, she decided quite quickly that Spider-Girl, far too young though it clearly was, was the only name that was really open to her, if she went into the hero business.

And she fully intended to; her father had lost so much by not immediately using his powers for good.

“With great power,” she had been told when her father had seen her inherited powers, “comes great responsibility.”

She wasn’t sure she agreed with that. But enough did to make super-villainy far too stupid a career option, and her powers were there to be used, after all.

And – funny thing – there weren’t many employment opportunities for superhumanity outside of the crime and punishment bracket, or not advertised, anyway.

Mutant prejudice; legally, it was over. But like every other prejudice, it lingered in people’s hearts long after it should be dead, and made getting jobs that little bit harder.

Which was another thing.

Mayday had inherited her powers. Technically, she was a mutant, and she was going to have to figure out what the hell that meant for her some time.

The equation now entirely forgotten, Mayday sat back and thought, doodling on a pad.

A superhero who still lived with her parents. Well, she was sure it wasn’t a first. The new Avengers might well be older than her, but with the exception of Shieldbearer and possibly Mainframe – about whom you really couldn’t tell under that armour – they weren’t really older by much.

A-Next, as SCN called them, wasn’t off by far at all. They were part of a new generation of heroes, relieving the burden the Defenders and Warriors had carried as the only remaining superteams.

And May figured she should be, too. Her dad had been part of that first wave; why shouldn’t she be?

She’d already taken down Doctor Octopus. The first one, too – not that weird fangirl who’d taken over while he was dead…

While he was dead?

May’s mouth wrinkled in disgust. This was going to be a lot to get used to.

So, anyway. A costume seemed in order.

The doodling ceased for a moment. May sketched out a rough representation of her figure instead. Starting from the basics, then… She outlined a spider, pretty much the same stylised version her dad had used, in the centre of her chest. No reason to meddle with a winning formula that way.

To set it aside from her father’s costume, however, she left the spider white.

That tickle at the base of her skull started up again, but gently. She rested her hand over the doodles and started scribbling down the steps of the equation.

Mr Hamilton walked past, glancing down, and nodded as he saw her hard at work. As soon as the tickling subsided, May uncovered the doodle and went back to it.

A white spider, yes… What about the rest of the outfit? Black? Too much like Venom and Spider-Woman. No, red and blue would be a better choice. Lay claim to her heritage. Or, actually, maybe just blue… Would that work?

Maybe not. Just red, then? Nah. It’d riff off too many different heroes. Although… if she left the webs in…

She sketched in the network of lines that had adorned her father’s costume, and considered the effect. Yeah.

Yeah, that worked. And if you extended the web all the way across the suit, it looked better.

And the eyes…

May spent another five or ten minutes sketching in eye shapes and rubbing them out. It wasn’t exactly easy to find something that worked…

It was the mask, she thought. You have a full-face mask, and then the shape of your head to some extent defines what you can do for eyes. And you need to be able to see clearly out of the corner of your eyes…

Dammit, she was trying to set her outfit apart from her father’s! She sketched in his eye design, too, and resolved to ask him about the white stuff he’d presumably been able to see through.

It worked. She decided not to mess with it anymore. Instead, she’d just have to see about making it…

At least her father didn’t seem to have too much of a problem with her becoming Spider-Girl. She figured it was the way she’d taken down Doc Ock… or maybe Mary-Jane had got there first, and told Dad a few home truths.

Spider-sense again; back to the equation.

***

After school was easy, today; nice and quiet. Not like a week ago, when Doctor Octopus had abducted her to get at her father…

She stopped that train of thought abruptly. Weren’t superheroes just supposed to collect enemies of their own? Why did she have to deal with the geriatrics who’d fought her dad?

Which was another thing. Dad had been, maybe sixteen when he started out. And these guys had been mid-thirties, forties, possibly sixties in the Vulture’s case when Dad ran up against them. So how the hell could they still be active?

OK, so Doc Ock wasn’t. But the Scorpion was still around, and so was the Rhino…

It wasn’t even like these were guys who used their brains to fight, either.

May shook her head abruptly, to clear it, and kept walking.

“You OK, Mayday?” Steph asked.

“Yeah… yeah, I’m fine,” May said. “Just… I keep remembering last week, you know?”

Steph, silenced, nodded.

May wished she’d got a better knack for cover stories than her father had ever managed. I mean, God, some of the lines he’d fed his aunt over the years…

She was doing it again, dammit. Once you got into a superhero world you couldn’t pull your thoughts back to reality.

She’d have to ask Dad for any tips when she saw him tonight. And then she’d find out what was going on with these secret phone calls he’d been making, and what this surprise he was setting her up for was…

Like she said, her Dad was no use at cover stories.

Which led to another question, and this one was most worrying of all.

How the hell had she not realised, all these years? How had she been so dim that she couldn’t see her father hanging on to the life he’d been forced away from?

God, she felt dumb.

***

It was about nine o’clock, and her dad was driving her through town. She was reasonably sure he’d never taken her this way before…

“Where are we going, Dad?”

“Greenwich Village.”

Not the answer she’d expected.

“What the hell’s in Greenwich Village?”

“You’ll be amazed.”

Mayday decided not to ask again for a bit. “Hey, I was working on a costume today.”

“What, in school?”

Caught out. “Yeah.”

Peter glanced across at his daughter. “What were you supposed to be studying?”

“Algebra.”

Peter smiled, and turned back to the road. “I see.”

Mayday took a couple of seconds to think about the fact that she apparently wasn’t going to wind up in trouble over this, or not yet anyway.

“What did you come up with?” her father asked.

May pulled a face. “There’s not much you can really do,” she said. “With a spider motif, I mean. Venom screwed up the black look, I still don’t know what the first Spider-Woman was thinking when she got dressed every day, the Scarlet Spider… Well, the costume with the jacket was stupid. The other one was OK. Spider-Girl… Well, she was blatantly wearing something off the catwalk, not something practical. Maybe that was the problem.”

Peter smiled. “I guess I did have a few more options open to me…”

May shrugged. “Anyway, in the end I went with a version of yours. All red, with the webs, white spider. How did you do the eyes?”

“Cloth, to start with. One-way plastic by the end… Give me some protection from being poked in the eyes.”

“One-way plastic?” May wasn’t sure if her father was joking or not.

“Johnny Storm got me some from Reed Richards. I don’t think he ever did anything with it publicly.”

“You knew Johnny Storm?”

“We keep in touch from time to time,” Peter said, trying to keep a casual face. The smile was close to breaking through, though. “Actually, Torchie was about the first hero I ever made real friends with… We teamed up probably more than anyone else.”

May shook her head in disbelief.

“But enough about the Fantastics. The people I’m taking you to meet are… a rather different crowd.”

“Who?”

Peter smiled. “You’ll be amazed.”

“How do you know them?”

“I work with them.” Peter smiled. “The only heroes active while I was Spider-Man who have more experience than me are the original Fantastic Four, Captain America, Thor and possibly Iron Man, and Cap and Thor started before me. As an advisor, I’m worth my weight in gold because I’ve seen it all before. Magic, technology, plain old idiots, mutants, clones – never talk to me about clones, Mayday – my own damn costume, of course… The names change. The challenges don’t; they just get harder. And the names change less than you’d think.”

“So… you’re an advisor.”

“That’s the basic idea, yeah… I used to think with great power comes great responsibility. Then I lost my power, and I realised. Responsibility is about using whatever you’ve got, and we’re all responsible the same way.”

Peter drew in a deep breath. “But, like I say, I’d lost my powers, and I’m not Cap or the Black Panther. Without my powers, I’m not much use in a costume. As a behind the scenes man, though…” He smiled. “It’s been worthwhile.”

May felt her Spider-Sense go off again. “Uh, dad…”

“Nice speech,” came a voice from behind them. May whirled around in her seat. Peter, having recognised the voice, glanced up to check in the rear-view mirror and frowned. “What are you doing here, Darkdevil?”

“Magus has me doing valet parking.”

May stifled a laugh. The man now sitting in the back seats looked like Daredevil if the skin of his jaw were to be leached of colour, and he looked probably as old as her dad – but the costumed man had let into his voice the sort of sulking note you expected from a teenager.

Peter chuckled. “Oh, dear. What did you do this time?”

Darkdevil shrugged. “I think I wrecked one of his spells somehow. He was pretty incoherent when he told me to come look for you. He’ll explain himself soon enough.” His glance slid over to the front passenger seat. “Gonna introduce me?”

“Sure. Darkdevil, the newest Spider. May, Darkdevil. Don’t ask.”

“Don’t ask what?”

“Why I look like Daredevil, why everyone’s edgy around me, or why I keep ending up doing menial work,” Darkdevil explained. “I’m not telling you the first, the second you’ll find out about, and the last is not something I like trying to work out.” He shifted. “God, I hate magic.”

***

LETTERCOL

A ringing endorsement of the last arc here from seasoned scribe Mike McGee…

 

I think Tom Lynch's "Spider-Girl" stories are what kept me from blowing my brains out when I was forced to read and then write about Joyce Carol Oates and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

 

And you do not get a better thank you than that in fanfic. Thanks for the kind words, Mike – and keep them coming, you and everyone else. Comments as always to [email protected]

 

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NEXT ISSUE: Meet Peter Parker’s students!