|A Spider's Tale|

Ain't Nothin' But A Heartache: Chapter 34

"Alright, thank you Karen," Peter called, already leaping off the roof, "Please put that address into the GPS." 

"Already done"

The Klasická Postel wasn't far from their own hotel, about five minutes of web-swinging, and they were once again sitting on the roof of a hotel. 

"Chase, get into their systems and locate Beck's room," Peter quickly ordered. 

"I'm concerned about the legality of that action. " 

"Oh, come on!" Gwen said, "It'll be fine." 

'Fine. Accessing systems...Quentin Beck is residing in room 232 on the third floor. They logged him coming into the hotel earlier and he has not left, so he is presumably still in his room''

With that info, Peter and Gwen sailed downwards, sticking to the wall just outside the 3rd floor. Silently Gwen pried a window open with a little help from super-strength, and they were in. 

"We would make excellent spies," Peter whispered as they silently searched down the hallways. 

"Tell me about it! Did you see that landing? No noise!" Gwen excitedly whispered back. 

"Here's a tip: Whispering loudly about how quiet you're being is counter-productive to being stealthy." 

Peter and Gwen flipped around, coming face-to-face with one Quentin Beck. 

"O-oh... Hi Mr. Beck! Um, we were just trying to find your room..." Peter stuttered. 

"I can see that... why?" 

"Well Beck, Fury... well no, not really; Stark needs us to give you something, and well, we felt bad," Gwen said. 

"About the conversation at the bar? Don't worry about it, just some unhappy memories, that's all." 

"Well Mr. Beck," Peter said pulling EDITH's case out of his backpack, "I present to you EDITH" 

Beck's eyes widened as he took the case. Flipping it open, he stared at the glasses. Pulling himself together, he looked up at them. "What are these?" 

"They're an AI system. Mr. Stark wanted you to have them as a welcome gift, and we're currently dealing with a scary big monster crisis, so he thought they could help," Pete explained. 

"Huh, you said welcome gift?" 

"The Avengers have voted you onto their team, it seems," Gwen said. 

"Really?" 

"Yup. They held a meeting, didn't even tell Peter and me. " 

"Yeah...they really do tend to forget that we're Avengers," Peter said, sighing. 

Beck stared up at them. "So I'm an Avenger and I have EDITH glasses?" He laughed, " Well, send my thanks to the Avengers. " 

"I'm pretty sure that it was mostly Stark," Gwen said, shaking her head. Peter nodded next to her. 

"Well...to Stark then..." 

The conversation abruptly fizzled out. Beck started to leave. Peter and Gwen watched him go. He stared at EDITH the whole time, before turning a corner out of sight. 

They suddenly had a very uneasy feeling. 

---

Alright, that is the end for now. Things are going to be picking up quite a bit from this point, and that action will probably last until the end of this story. You could say that we're...in the Endgame now... :)

I've been reading through a lot of this fic, mostly looking for errors (found a ton...haven't fixed 'em thought) and I've come to a realization. I haven't written this story as I first wanted to. 

Now don't get me wrong, I really like how this story is working out. I finally have a solid plan for where I taking it, a broader plan for a sequel, and I'm slowly getting back into a habit of writing. It's just that when I look at the overall image of this story, I mainly see two things; 

1) Unfinished/unrefined work; Places in the book where I wish I spent more time on or rethought out so that it makes more sense with my overall plot. 

2) Humor: So jokes and puns have taken a big hold in this story. While I don't know if they're funny or not (humor lies in the eye of the beholder) I find myself including some sort of joke or quip every paragraph or two. Which in itself isn't a bad thing. The problem is that I didn't want the characters in this book to become jokesters all the time; I knew that joking and making fun of something is a core element of Spider-Man & Co, but I didn't want to lean into that as much as I find myself doing. 

So this leads me to a final conclusion: This story will be changing a bit. 

Now changing the core elements of a book this far in is a bad idea, so it won't be that noticeable (hopefully) but I'm going to start nudging this story in a more serious direction as I originally intended. I want my conflict to have some stakes to it, and my plot to be engaging. And hopefully, to all of you, it is those things, but I want to try and make it even more so. 

So here's to more writing, and more growing as a writer, and here now are some less important parts of the A/N: 

So just an interesting tidbit I learned while writing this chapter is that in the Czech language, the word the doesn't exist. At least in the way, English speakers view it. Now I learned this through google translate and a brief google search so don't trust my word on this. Just something I thought was cool. 

Sorry for how late things have been recent, It may not seem so on your end, but I'm actually very (very) slowly getting back into my old writing schedule, so hopefully in due time I'll be right back to a chapter or two a week which will be great. 

I have a lot of plans not just for this story, but countless stories to come. But I've learned to take things slowly, so those will have to wait till I complete other projects. 

And to end things off as usual, how did you like it? 

Thank you for reading, 

-RambunctiousCat