Whoever he was, he was going to regret what he did. When I caught up with him, he’d be sorry he stabbed an old pony in cold blood. It wasn’t just anypony, but my Uncle Ben, the kindest old pony I knew. Because of this burglar, he was gone.
After the cops told me what happened, I went inside to hug Aunt May. I’d never seen her look so heartbroken and distraught in my life. We didn’t say a thing, just held each other as we both wept for Uncle Ben. After a few minutes, I went up to my room, saying I’d like to be alone and cool my head. I shut the door, opened the backpack and had the suit back on within a matter of seconds. I wasn’t going to just sit and wallow in my grief. Not as long as I had the power and the will to see that my uncle’s killer got what was coming to him. I opened the window and crawled down the side of the house, sticking to the shadows. Luckily, before I could take off in a blind, unguided search, I heard one of the cops mention that the burglar had fled east and was holed up in an old bayside warehouse.
I galloped a lot of the way there, brushing past a lot of confused looking ponies, but as fast as I could move now, it wasn’t quite fast enough for my taste. It was when I ducked into an alley to catch my breath and looked up that I had a much better idea. I scuttled straight up the side of the building I was leaning against until I was at the roof. I looked over the edge, watching the direction that the police were headed. What I was about to do was probably suicidal, almost abysmally stupid, as I hadn’t even thought to see if it would work yet. I took some steps back, closed my eyes, drew in a deep breath, and exhaled. I repeated those actions two more times, then broke into a run and leapt off the edge.
I allowed myself to plummet for just a second, feeling the wind breeze past my head, before I put out my right forehoof and shot a stream of webbing toward one of the buildings in front me. I felt the vibration of the web’s impact on the wall, held on, and allowed it to swing me forward, with the momentum of my fall being redirected and sending me flying once I let go. It was definitely a rush like no roller coaster could ever hope to quite reach. The fact that I am protected from falling to my death by only my abilities kinda helped that feeling along. With having invented the webswing as my own means of getting around, I quickly snapped my attention out of my new discovery, and back to the reason I was out: Get a hold of Uncle Ben’s killer before the police could, and make him pay.
It wasn’t long before I made it to the warehouse. There were a few cops already on the scene trying to get him to surrender peacefully, but didn’t seem to be having much success. Sneaking into one of the broken side windows was no problem at all. He was on the third floor, and not very difficult to find, with all his nervous stomping from window to window, watching Manehattan’s finest gather outside. I slowly crept up towards him from the ceiling when he came to rest between some large crates, hiding from the floodlight shining into the room.
“You might hide from them…” I dropped, kicking the knife from his teeth (and with some of his teeth, actually) and towards the wall, webbing it up once it landed. “But there is nowhere in the world you can hide from me.”
He was having trouble talking through the blood he was spitting up and the teeth he had just lost, but I understood what he said well enough.
“No, please, just let me go! Don’t hurt me!” The pleading only served to make me beyond livid.
“Don’t hurt you? Don’t hurt you?! YOU JUST MURDERED MY UNCLE, YOU WORTHLESS PILE OF GARBAGE! GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON I SHOULDN’T BREAK YOU LIKE A TOOTHPICK RIGHT NOW!” I only heard him whimper.
I grabbed him and flung him straight into the ceiling above my head. I caught him when he fell, and dragged him by the tail to a window, which I smashed open with his face. It seemed to have gotten the attention of whoever was working the floodlight, because they shined it straight at us, and I got a good look at him. Suddenly, it was like somepony just held me down so a herd of buffalo could trample my head into the dirt.
“No… Not you… My fault…” And that was all I could bring myself to say. It was the thief from before, the one I could have stopped, but didn’t. Just to get some smug sense of satisfaction, I had let him go. Uncle Ben was dead because I couldn’t see past my own selfishness enough to simply stick out a hoof and trip some crook. Hearing the cops making their way up the stairs snapped me out of my stupor long enough to cocoon the thief to the wall and slip back outside unnoticed.
I was about halfway home when I stopped to rest on a rooftop overlooking the city. I pulled off the mask and promptly broke down, tears clouding my vision. What had happened tonight was my fault. “How could I have let this happen?” I thought, “Uncle Ben would be sitting comfortably with Aunt May in the living room by now if it wasn’t for me! This power of mine… it should have been what saved him…” And the words he had told me that very morning came back into my head. “Not to lose sight of myself, he said. And that with great power, there must also come great responsibility…” His words always made sense in their own way before, and I understood them well enough, but they never hit me with the kind of clarity that they had at that moment. I looked down at my mask. I just stared it, with a solemn thought in my head, growing in its own intensity: “Never again. For as long as I live, and as long as I have this power, I’ll never stand by the wayside and let any evil befall anypony else ever again, no matter what it takes.”
I stood up and looked down to survey the suit once more, and that was when I saw it. “That wasn’t there before…” There’s no logical explanation I could conceive, no plausible reason I could even begin to muster. How could I? I mean, it was just a suit I picked up in a costume shop, not an actual part of me or anything. But there it was, as plain as Princess Celestia’s day: A bold, red spider resting on the blue flank of the costume. As strange as it seemed, it looked as though that Spider-Mane had earned himself a cutie mark.
That very weekend, which should have been a nice, fun fishing trip for the three of us, was when Uncle Ben’s funeral was held. After the service, and the other mourners had left, Aunt May and I stood beside each other at the foot of the grave. It was there that I silently made a promise to him that I would do right by him, not matter what it took, and the both of us bade him goodbye. Later in the night, after Aunt May had gone to bed, I was back in the suit. I wasn’t much in the way of a tailor, but I had done the best I could to add to the suit a bit. I had lined the red exterior with an intricate web pattern, and fixed a black spider to the chest. I figured it would help get the message across what I was all about, and when I looked in the mirror, I knew this was how it should be. Satisfied, I headed out into the night.
It wasn’t long before I happened upon a young mare getting her purse snatched from her. The punk who tried to run off with it didn’t get far, of course. From a street lamp, I caught him with a line of web and zipped him back towards me. An easy conk on the head was enough to knock him out as I let him dangle from the neck of the light. The lady ran up to find her purse resting at the base of it, and I had left a polite note inside that read “Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Mane!” So it began.
The following month was when all of Manehattan steadily became more and more aware of Spider-Mane’s existence. From random muggings in the night, to a full blown bank robbery, I was there to put a stop to them all and keep everypony out of harm’s way! I never gave anything less my absolute best and, granted, some folks were more grateful than others, but I knew I was doing the right thing. But you know, there really are just some whom you just can’t convince, no matter what you do. The newspaper I picked up on the way to school proved to me just that.
The front page story was of me, the headline reading “Who Is Spider-Mane?” The story itself read as some slanderous drivel, claiming I was some kind of criminal, that I was no better than any of the scumbags I’d caught for the police. Oh, and speaking of the police, they’d put out a warrant for my arrest. “What the…?” was my reaction to the artist’s rendering of me that I saw at the end of the article, portraying me as some kind of equinoid spider-monstrosity. Not what I’d seen in the nightmare before, that would have been weird. No, the drawing I saw was just downright silly. “Well, at least they got the colors right…” Below that was an offering of reward money for anypony who could bring in any decent picture of Spider-Mane to the Daily Bugle, the place who printed this rag I was reading, and practically felt the idea bulb click itself on in my head. I had a camera that had some decent quality, so I brought it with me on patrol once the sun went down.
I found a neat little group of 5 thugs who’d fled from a jewelry store they’d broken into. I followed them into an alley, set the camera up on a fire escape with the automatic timer set, and then laid into the lot them. I managed to get some pretty good shots, in my opinion: two heads bashed together, one guy flipped onto his back and webbed to the ground, another winded with a kick to the stomach, and the last one, the leader, I assumed, just sort of gave up and I stuck him to the wall (I had a good laugh at that guy's expense). The camera got it all. I had each picture printed the next day after school and headed over to the Daily Bugle to get my reward money. I gave them all a good look over before I went in their front doors and got a bit of an ego boost from how good they looked. No way could anypony look at these shots and not like them!
“Kid, these are absolute crap!” So spoke J. Jonah Jameson, my new favorite pony in the whole world.
“I-I’m sorry?” Needless to say it was kind of jarring to hear.
“You ought to be! I could get better shots from a blind monkey! And I wouldn’t even have to teach it how to use a camera!” Ow, my ego!
He set aside the folder and looked at me. “I’ll give ya 100 bits for the lot of them.”
“Uh, that sounds kinda low…”
“Take it or leave it, kid, it makes no difference to me! Just hurry up and make your mind if you want it or not, I got a business to run!” I took the money. It was better than nothing, and I just couldn’t argue with what he said next. “Great, now get outta my face. I expect to see you back in here same time tomorrow with some new and better stuff!” I did a double take, unsure of what it was I’d just heard him say.
“Tomorrow? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you don’t need an afterschool job, huh? Great! I can get somepony else with a better work ethic!”
“NO! Uh, if that’s an honest to goodness job offer, sir, I’ll gladly take it!"
“Fantastic. Talk to Ben Urich on your way out, he can probably give you a better camera to work with.”
“Will do.” I couldn’t believe my luck!
“What, you’re still here? Beat it!”
That really wasn't so bad, all things considered. When I left Jameson’s office, I asked around for Urich and got pointed towards his desk.
“Can I help you, kid?” He seemed like a cool, friendly kinda guy.
“Uh, yeah, Mr. Jameson said you might be able to help me out with a new camera?”
“Why? Wait, don’t tell me. He’s actually hired you on as a photographer?”
“It seems that way.”
“Got him some Spider-Mane pics, I assume?”
“Best I could.” I still say they weren’t that awful.
“Must have been with some right shotty equipment if Jonah’s sending you my way for one of my spares.” He opened a drawer stocked with a few of his extras, all looking somewhat more expensive than mine.
“You keep a whole desk drawer full of extra cameras?”
“Kid, I’m a reporter. I’ve made my career on being prepared for anything and everything, and keeping more equipment ready than is probably necessary. The drawer just below that one’s full of spare tape recorders, too.” That certainly made sense to me. With the new camera in tow, I headed back home to give Aunt May the good news.
“This is wonderful news, Peter! It’s good to have gotten yourself an afterschool job! And with a newspaper? That sounds like it should be very exciting! How’d you get a job with the bugle, anyway?”
“Well…” this part I was nervous to share. “I went and brought them some pictures of Spider-Mane…” I think that’s when the reality of what might come of being a photographer for a newspaper really hit home with her. She went as pale as a ghost.
“What?! When did you go and get… Peter, I don’t think I’d want you going to work for them if it means you’re going to be doing risky things like taking pictures of that criminal!”
“Aunt May, please, I’ll be fine. Look he’s not some lowlife thug or anything. He’s out there doing everypony a favor. He didn’t even seem to mind me getting pictures of him for a paper whose editor in chief isn’t very fond of him. Besides, you have to admit we could probably use the extra money!”
“Peter, no, this could be dangerous! I don’t want you putting yourself at risk just for the sake of our bank account!”
“Look, I can understand why you’d be worried… It’s only been a month since we lost Uncle Ben…”
She started to tear up. “I don’t want to lose my nephew, and especially not so soon after my husband.”
“I promise, Aunt May, you won’t lose me too.” I gave a smile and a chuckle. “I’m a big boy now, I can handle the other kids trying to take my lunch money.”
She smiled back and gave a mighty powerful bear hug, as if she figured that, if she didn’t, she’d never get another chance. Bless her heart. But I couldn’t help but think, if me being a photographer bugged her this much, how would she react to finding out just who Spider-Mane was?
“You have my blessing, Peter, but please; be careful out there.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, Aunt May. I got a feeling I’ll be able to handle whatever comes my way.” You just gotta love that naiveté in today’s youth.
In any case, it seemed like I was all set in my life; that I’d started doing what I was meant to do all along. Things were certainly different, now, and a little more complicated than I was used to, but it didn’t seem like anything could happen to make things more complicated.
Elsewhere, in the Ponyville library, a very ecstatic little purple dragon named Spike leapt all around the room wearing a mock Spider-Mane outfit he’d made, trying to emulate the Manehattan hero whom he’d become a huge fan of. The librarian, his best friend Twilight Sparkle, simply rolled her eyes and smiled as she read a fantasy novel that was just donated that day.
“I don’t care what anypony says, Twilight, there’s no way a guy like Spider-Mane could be just another criminal. You know he stopped a bank robbery all by himself? A lot of people said he was working with them the whole time, but come on, he beat them all down and didn’t even take a penny!”
“I agree. I sincerely doubt anypony who’d go out on a limb for others like that is much of a criminal.” “Even if he’s wearing an outfit like that,” she heard her friend Rarity’s voice say in her head. She couldn’t help but laugh at the thought. She put the book aside. It did strike her as odd, however, that this Spider-Mane had sprung up so soon after the incident at the science and magic expo she’d hosted. The memory of the pony who’d been bitten by one of the many spiders she’d experimented on was still fresh in her memory. She broke from that train of thought when she realized how late it was. She was about to tell her assistant that it was time for him to go to bed when he’d spewed out a puff of green flame. It was a new letter from her to her straight from her mentor, Princess Celestia.
“Ugh, for a second there I thought I was gonna puke.”
“With all of your jumping off of bookcases and shelves it’s a wonder that all you spat up was a letter from the Princess.” Spike gave a sheepish smile as he readied himself to write Twilight’s reply once she finished the new letter, which read:
My Most Faithful Student, Twilight Sparkle,
There is a bit of a matter over in Manehattan that I’ve gotten rather curious about. I believe you must realize I’m talking about this Spider-Mane fellow. I’d like you to head over to Manehattan to look in and investigate. I want to know more about Spider-Mane, and there’s only so much the local newspapers can tell me, so I’m asking you to learn more. Of course, I’d not send you alone; I’d like it if each of your friends went with you to keep you company, and to lend you any sort of help they can. I’ve arranged for a fairly spacious house for the six of you to share in one of the residential areas. Let me know if you think you’re up to this, and if you’re not, I understand.
Sincerely,
Princess Celestia
“Well, of course I’d be up to it, as long as we can all go together. Well, Spike, looks like we’re off to Manehattan!” No response. “Spike?” She looked over to find him out cold where he stood. The unicorn simply shook her head and smiled and carried him off to bed.
She can send a reply to the princess in a morning, and she might be pleased to hear that her student already has a good idea as to just who Spider-Mane may be.