MidReal Story
Spiderverse Unleashed
Scenario: Peter Parker Spiderman joins miles Morales Spiderman
Create my version of this story
I was bitten by a radioactive spider.
And for the last twenty-two years, I thought I was the only one.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s start at the beginning.
I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for the last twenty-two years, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Man.
I’m sure you know the rest: great power, great responsibility, Uncle Ben, yadda yadda yadda.
But what you might not know is that being Spider-Man is a lot more than just punching bad guys in the face and swinging between buildings on strands of webbing.
It’s also about helping people in any way you can, even when you’re not wearing the mask.
Which is how I found myself here in Brooklyn on a Thursday night at 10:47 P.
standing on a rooftop with a kid who was about to jump off it.
“Hey,” I said to him as I approached slowly, my hands up in front of me to show that I wasn’t going to hurt him.
“What’s your name?”
I asked him.
“Can you tell me that?”
“M-Miles,” he said shakily.
“Okay, Miles,” I said, stepping closer.
“Now do you want to tell me what you’re doing up here?
Or do you want me to take a guess?”
“I’m not a good guesser,” I said.
“I’d much rather hear it from you.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and I saw that they were red and puffy like he’d been crying.
“I-I’m trying to get something,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Something that’s in that building over there.” He pointed toward the building next to the one we were standing on.
The building that happened to be owned by Fisk Industries.
“The one with the sign on it that says ‘Fisk’?”
I asked him, a pit forming in my stomach.
“That’s the one,” he said.
“Okay, Miles,” I said, stepping back and holding out my hand for him to take.
“You don’t have to do this.
“It’s okay if you can’t get it.”
He shook his head.
“It has to be me.It’s the only way.”
I sighed heavily.
“You’re gonna make me tell him, aren’t you?”
I asked, looking up at the sky and closing my eyes.
“I really don’t want to tell him.”
He grabbed my hand before I could say anything else, and I looked down into his scared brown eyes.
“It has to be me,” he repeated.
“Okay,” I said with another sigh.
“All right, kid.You go get it.”
Miles’ job was simple: climb up the side of the Oscorp Tower in Manhattan, across from where we were on the Brooklyn side of the East River, and retrieve an item that I had left there for him earlier in the evening so we could test out his Spider-Sense.
I stood on a rooftop across the street from the tower, watching him with my binoculars and listening to him talk to himself as he made his way up the building.
Just like we’d practiced earlier that day at the safe house, Miles had his full costume on so he could test out all of his new powers at once: super-strength, wall-crawling, invisibility, and his Venom Blast.
The last one was the most dangerous and the hardest to control, so we’d been working on it a lot in the last week or so since he’d gotten his powers from that spider bite.
But it was really the first one—the invisibility—that had been causing him the most trouble lately.
It kept activating involuntarily whenever he got nervous or anxious or scared, and he couldn’t figure out how to turn it off once it did.
So even though he knew that he could do this if he stayed calm and confident, his self-doubt would always get the better of him, and he’d start freaking out and go invisible.
“What are you doing?”
I asked him as I listened to him gasp and groan over the comms in my ear.
“I know you can do this,” I told him.
“And you know you can do this too.You just have to believe in yourself.”
“It’s not going away!”
He sounded like he was starting to panic even more now that he knew I was watching and listening to him.
“Just take a deep breath,” I told him as I held my binoculars steady on him through my scope.
“Count back from ten.”
I watched him close his eyes and take a few deep breaths as he did what I told him, and within a few seconds of starting the countdown, he reappeared under my binoculars and continued up the building.
“The worst thing you can do is panic,” I told him as he got back into the rhythm of things and kept going higher.
“That’s when you lose control.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” he said as his voice started getting higher again.
“You can,” I told him.
“You’re doing it right now.”
“It’s not the same!”
“It’s exactly the same,” I said to him.
“I know it is, because I’ve been where you are now.I know how it feels to be scared, to be unsure of yourself, to not trust your own powers.”
“What are you talking about?”
he asked, sounding confused.
“What do you mean, ‘been where I am’?”
I paused for a second, not sure if I wanted to tell him what I was about to tell him.
But he needed to hear it, especially if he was going to do this.
So I took a deep breath and did what he’d just done a few moments ago: I believed in myself.
And then I started talking, “A few years ago, when I first got my powers, I thought I was invincible.
I thought nothing could hurt me.
And because of that, I got careless.
And I let a bad guy get past me.”
“That bad guy went on to hurt the person who meant the most to me in the whole world,” I continued.
“And because of that person, I became a better Spider-Man.
A smarter one too.
Because even though I did everything I could to protect him, in the end, it wasn’t enough.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Miles said as he listened to me talk.
“It took me a long time to realize that,” I told him.
“But once I did, I made a promise to myself not to let anything like that happen again.To learn from my past mistakes.To always trust my instincts, even when things get tough.”
“Are you okay now?”
he asked me.
“I’m getting there,” I told him.
“But what’s important is that you need to understand something: It’s okay to have doubts.
It’s okay to be scared or nervous or anxious or all of the above at once.It’s okay to feel like you’re unprepared.”
“But the only way you’ll start feeling like you’re ready is by doing what you’re doing right now.
“Believe in yourself,” he repeated as he looked up at me.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
I winked at him.
“Don’t overthink the superhero stuff.
You’ll go nuts.” Then I clapped my hands together and rubbed them as if that was going to help him.
“Now go get that doohickey thingy and let’s see what you got.”
He rolled his eyes and laughed before stealing one last glance at the building across from us.
Then he turned around and started to walk away.
“Wait,” he called out to me a few seconds later.
“What do you mean by ‘doohickey thingy’?”
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled innocently.
“I have no idea.”
Then I waited until he was out of sight before taking a seat on a metal fold-up chair that was resting against a door that led into the building.
A moment later, my phone buzzed in my pocket and when I took it out, there was a text message from Nick Fury telling me to keep an eye on him.
As if I needed a reminder.
When I looked up, I saw Miles standing on top of a building across from me, staring at the ground below as he prepared himself for what he was about to do.
He took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled.
And then, in one fluid motion, he jumped off the building and shot a webline toward the building across from him.
He swung over and hit it just like he did before, except this time, he didn’t hit it face-first.
When he reached the other side, he stuck out his hand and released the webline, watching as it retracted back into his wrist before turning around and looking at me.
I raised my fist and pumped it in the air in celebration, and he threw up a peace sign before returning his attention back to what he was doing.
Miles swung from one building to another for about an hour before he finally made his way back over to where I was waiting for him.
“How did I do?”
he asked me as he approached.
“Not too shabby,” I said with a smile on my face.
“I think you’re ready.”
He looked at me with doubt in his eyes once again, so I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly.
“You can do this,” I told him.
“You already are.”
We stood on top of the building and looked down at the city below, waiting for something to happen.
Which was funny because when I first became Spider-Man, something was always happening.
There was always some bad guy causing trouble or some huge disaster about to destroy everything.
And if I wasn’t busy stopping them, I was busy trying to figure out how I was going to stop them instead.
But as time went on and I settled into my role as a superhero, things got easier.
They got more manageable.
