Back at the house he dropped everything unnecessary in his room and carried the components down to the basement, which had been developing into a functional workshop over the past several weeks.
Chemicals arranged on the workbench in a system that made sense to him even if it would have made anyone else nervous.
Various salvaged materials in boxes along the far wall.
A drawer of old wristwatches that the previous Peter had collected and never found a use for.
He looked at the workbench.
"I hope this takes me less time than the other Peters," he said, and got to work.
The web-shooters needed to be lightweight, practical, and designed with enough internal space to accommodate future modifications because he had no intention of building these once and leaving them as they were.
He removed the straps and clock faces from the watches, keeping only the spherical metal cases.
He had a clear image of what he wanted and he had a brain that could hold that image with complete fidelity while his hands worked toward it.
------
Three hours later he set the finished devices down on the workbench and looked at them.
"This is perfect," he said. "Andrew Garfield's web-shooters, with modifications."
He turned one over in his hands. "I added a small indicator light for low cartridge warning. There is nothing more embarrassing than swinging between buildings at forty meters above the street and then suddenly not swinging because the cartridge ran out."
He set it down. "Now for the formula."
The web fluid was the more complex problem.
The chemical chain needed to produce a liquid that was stable under normal conditions and became solid on contact with open air, developing both adhesive and tensile properties on solidification, with an elastic structure that was close to unbreakable under ordinary stress loads.
He had committed to memory a sequence of chemical information that everyone around him at the time had confidently described as useless.
He was going to enjoy this.
He grabbed chemicals and started working.
The theoretical framework for the chain came first, which took most of the morning and a significant portion of the afternoon.
May came down twice with food, because she understood without being told that interrupting a chemical process mid-sequence could produce outcomes that nobody wanted in an enclosed basement space.
The solidification method was heat.
He heated the finished liquid until it reached the correct consistency, filled the cartridges, and sealed them.
He added the grenade modification he had planned, a secondary mechanism in the cartridge casing that allowed them to function as dispersal devices in appropriate situations.
He would have liked the full web-grenade design from the comics but the components for that were not available in the basement today.
He put a cartridge in each web-shooter and strapped them to his wrists.
He pointed his right hand at an empty can on the corner of the workbench.
Twip.
The web connected.
He pulled his hand back and the can flew toward him. He caught it before it reached his face.
"This is so ....cool," he said.
He fired a second web at the far wall and left it there, then waited.
Forty-five minutes later the web had dissolved into what looked like fine dust.
"Good dissolution rate," he said. "About forty-five minutes. I need to get it to two hours, which is where the Homecoming version stabilized, but that requires specific stabilizing agents I do not have right now. I will address it later."
He looked at the basement window. The light outside had gone from afternoon to early evening without him noticing.
He looked at the time.
Then he suddenly seem to be remembered something important.
"Damn," he said. "I forgot about the suit."
He looked around the basement. Then at the boxes along the far wall. Then back at the workbench.
"I will have to make do with what is available." He started opening boxes. "But first. Voice modulator. I do not want anyone recognizing me by my voice."
The modulator took a few minutes. He tested it when it was finished.
"Hello, mike check! check! mike check!."
He listened to the output and adjusted the calibration.
"Perfect."
He went back to the boxes.
What he found inside them gave him considerably more to work with than he had expected.
Various materials, some old, some salvageable, enough to work with if he was selective about what he used and creative about how he used it.
He spent the next hour constructing something that was not the suit he would eventually build but was functional for tonight and captured the spirit of one of his personal favorites.
By the time he was done it was 10:30 PM.
May was asleep already. He could hear the silence from upstairs that meant the house had settled for the night.
He looked at himself in the reflection of the basement window.
Not bad for a first attempt.
He set his departure for 11:00 PM and sat in the dark for thirty minutes, thinking through the evening's logistics.
....
At 11:00 PM, May Parker was asleep in her room and a silhouette emerged from the shadows of a Queens bedroom window, climbed out onto the ledge, and moved up to the rooftop without a sound.
Peter stood on the roof of the house and looked out over the city for a moment.
The skyline was doing what New York skylines do at night, which is to make everything seem both very large and very possible at the same time.
He breathed in.
He breathed out.
Then without any hesitation he jumped off the roof.
The web connected to the nearest building before he had fallen two meters, the shooter mechanism responding to the trigger pressure exactly as calibrated, and then he was swinging.
The first few swings were calibration. By the fourth one he had found the rhythm of it, the timing of the release and the arc and the next connection point, and by the sixth he had stopped thinking about it because his body had taken over and there was nothing left to think about except the city moving beneath him and the wind and the lights and the particular sensation of being thirty meters above the street and moving through it at speed.
The adrenaline was immediate and total and completely addictive.
He swung for several minutes without any destination, because the destination could wait and this could not, and then he descended to land on a rooftop ledge near the edge of a neighborhood that had been, according to the memories of the previous Peter, somewhat inconsistent in terms of how safe it was after dark.
He crouched on the ledge and listened.
This required a moment of explanation.
One of the abilities that the other Peter Parkers had developed over time was an exceptional range of hearing, not quite at the level of Wolverine's but operating in the same general category, and dangerous in combination with the spider-sense because the two systems together could produce sensory overload if not managed carefully.
Daredevil had the same problem and had developed specific protocols for managing it.
Peter had been thinking about what those protocols would look like for someone with his specific combination of abilities and had not yet arrived at a complete answer.
For tonight, he simply listened.
He heard it within two minutes.
Not a dramatic sound.
Two men talking in an alley below, the specific tone of people who are in a good mood about something they should not be in a good mood about.
He looked down.
A young woman was walking through the street below, adjusting her glasses, moving with the particular speed of someone who is nervous and trying not to look nervous.
Light brown hair.
She looked about sixteen, maybe slightly older. She was new to this neighborhood. Everything about her posture said so.
She turned into an alley.
The two men followed.
No need to say more Peter was already moving.