Three months had passed since the confrontation with Cletus Kasady and the first night out as Spider-Man.
In those three months, two names had been spreading through New York with approximately equal velocity and for entirely different reasons.
The first name was Spider-Man, or more specifically, Spider-Man Noir, which was the name the city had settled on after enough footage of a figure in black swinging through darkened streets had accumulated on enough phones to make anonymity impossible.
The reactions were varied.
Many called him a hero.
Others called him a vigilante, which was technically accurate.
A certain newspaper editor whose name did not need to be mentioned yet had been calling him a menace with the consistency of someone who had decided on an opinion before looking at the evidence and was not inclined to revise it.
The title that filled Peter with the most genuine satisfaction, however, was the one he shared with one of his favorite DC characters.
The Dark Knight.
He would not be keeping it permanently.
Once he started daytime patrols, the aesthetic would need to evolve.
But for now, it fit, and he was not going to complain about it.
The second name was Peter Parker.
This one was spreading for entirely different reasons.
The cancer treatment had launched approximately six weeks ago, after the Baxter team had run the necessary trials and confirmed the results that Peter had already known it would produce because he had done the math before walking through their door.
For the first week the skepticism had been loud, because a seventeen year old being the primary architect of a working cancer treatment was the kind of claim that attracted criticism before it attracted acceptance.
Then the results started coming in from the trial participants and the skepticism went quiet very quickly, replaced by something that ranged from cautious optimism to the specific, tearful gratitude of people who had been told they were running out of options and had just been handed another one.
A great many people had hugged him in the past three months.
He had learned to accept this gracefully while hiding the fact that it was not his preferred form of human contact.
On the school side of things, the friendships with Gwen, Missy, and Mary Jane had continued to develop.
A certain low-level tension had also developed, involving Missy and May respectively, which Peter had been observing with the patience of someone who had decided to see who moved first rather than force the issue.
Neither had moved yet.
Both were clearly aware of the situation. It was, in its own way, more entertaining than almost anything else currently happening in his life.
At Baxter he had built something that resembled a second home.
His relationship with Franklin Storm had deepened into something that functioned like mentorship on Franklin's side and genuine affection on both, and Susan had become a constant presence in his daily routine, someone who came to him with problems because she trusted his judgment and stayed because she apparently found his company difficult to leave.
He had helped her work through a long-standing issue with self-comparison to Reed Richards, which had been a genuine problem eating at her quietly, and watching that particular weight lift had been satisfying in a way that most of his work was not.
Reed Richards himself was exactly as advertised.
Brilliant in the specific way of someone who has so much going on inside their head that the external world registers only intermittently.
When Peter had first been introduced to him, Reed had nodded once and made a sound that indicated acknowledgment and then returned to whatever calculation had been interrupted by the introduction. Peter had found this both familiar and mildly infuriating in the same way that watching someone waste a perfectly good chess opening was mildly infuriating.
Of the other two members of the Fantastic Four, Susan had confirmed that Johnny was as described in the film, fast and loud and completely aware of it.
Ben he had heard nothing specific about. He hoped for the latest film version of the cast rather than the 2015 reboot version, for reasons that he would not be elaborating on but that anyone who had seen both films could probably infer.
His lab on the sixth floor had become the second lab, the public one, the one where the cancer treatment work was documented and the Baymax units were developed and tested.
Baymax had launched alongside the treatment and had been received with a warmth that surprised him only in its intensity rather than its fact.
The design helped.
There was something about a large, white, inflatable medical robot that made people immediately comfortable in a way that more conventionally designed medical equipment did not.
He had built a second unit for the house, with a modification he had not announced publicly, which was a comprehensive martial arts combat subroutine designed to function as protection for May in any situation where he was not present.
May, for her part, had not questioned the robot's presence. She had named it.
Beneath all of this, in the parts that were not visible to anyone who was not Peter Parker specifically, a different set of projects had been advancing.
STEM had been the first of them.
Three weeks of construction and calibration and constant supervision, because an AI developing inside the device without the builder noticing was not a theoretical risk but a documented one, and he had no interest in producing an Ultron by accident.
He monitored STEM the way a very attentive parent monitors something they love but do not entirely trust yet.
The memory-copying helmet had been the second.
This one had taken a month and a half and had killed several people during development, which was not something he had planned but also not something he had grieved extensively, given that the development subjects had been child molesters, traffickers, and murderers selected from his night patrol activities.
The breakthrough had come in the second-to-last week of the third month, when he had managed to keep a subject alive through the full extraction process, seen the memories, and confirmed the device was functional.
He had then killed the subject because the subject was a child molester and he had already gotten what he needed.
The final flaw was a time constraint.
The more knowledge the device attempted to extract, the longer the process required, and there was an upper limit beyond which the subject would not survive regardless of the device's other improvements.
He had tested this limit on Reed Richards.
This had required knocking Richards unconscious in his own laboratory, which had been easier than it should have been because Reed's awareness of his physical surroundings was approximately minimal when he was focused on something else, and Reed was almost always focused on something else.
The extraction had taken ten hours with a thirty-minute cooling interval.
Ten hours of sitting in Richards' lab next to an unconscious genius hoping that the one person in the building who practically never left his lab would continue his streak of practically never leaving his lab.
He had.
The process completed without incident.
What came out of Richards' head was, in a word, extensive.
Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, electronics, chemistry across every relevant subdiscipline, all levels of physics from classical through quantum, robotics, computer science, synthetic polymers, communications, and more besides.
Peter had needed several hours after the fact simply to integrate the new material with what he already knew and establish the organizational structure in his own memory.
He had also, while in Susan's lab for a separate reason he would explain later, acquired her knowledge in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biochemistry.
This had been straightforward.
Susan trusted him enough that access to her lab was not an obstacle, and the acquisition itself had been handled without her awareness.
Everything was stored in STEM, waiting.