Beyond Responsibility

Chapter 10: Trigger Part 1

"Did you get in trouble for it?" Harry asked.

"A little, but I avoided the worst of it."

"Well that's good," Harry stretched out as he yawned from his side of the video chat, glancing at the time as he did so. A crestfallen look coming over his face. "Hey listen Pete, it's been great catching up with you, and congratulations again on your quirk, but I lost track of time and need to leave. We'll talk again soon, promise."

"Don't sweat it, I've got a bunch of stuff to get done over on my end too. And I'm not even running for Class President..." Actually come to think of it, he did have to finish up that project to win class representative. "But yeah, get some rest buddy, I'll see ya later."

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Later the next morning, Peter was tinkering away with his webshooters at his desk, his Hero Support textbook laid open in front of him. He had already finished a prototype of his tracers and had a receiver for them, unfortunately that was all that he had managed thus far. He would have liked to try and attune them to his spider-sense, but the time for that would have to come later. For now, he wanted to modify his webshooters to accommodate their original design function of shooting the tracers. Because he didn't want to go through the hassle of adding an entirely separate second launcher just for the tracers, that involved a lot of careful intricate adjustments to the web shooter spinneret and nozzle. Once he was done with that, he just needed to add a compartment to store a cache of tracers and load them into the chamber, and presto, his webshooter could now shoot more than just webs.

A little bit of testing showed his webshooters to be fully operational. The device was a cuff that wrapped around his wrist where he loaded the webbing canister and tracers, web fluid was released from the canister with a valve where it would then go through a spinneret and then through a nozzle equipped with an aperture, and then finally the web would shoot out of the barrel of the webshooter. The device was operated with a lever that extended from the wrist and into his palm with a button on its end. Getting all the different functions to operate using only a single button as the trigger was quite the clever stroke of ingenuity, Peter was pretty proud of himself for that one.

If he wanted to shoot a web, he just pressed down on the button and the web fired once he stopped adding more pressure. To fire continuously, he had to release slowly by easing his fingers off the trigger without fully letting go.

Adjusting the type of web was as simple as changing the amount of pressure he put on the button. Pressing down on the button caused the spinneret's nozzle to dilate, so a light tap would cause a webline to whip out of the narrow tube. And then the longer he waited to take his fingers off the button after that tap, the longer the resulting web cable would be.

A proper press made the aperture wide enough to allow a full net of webbing to be launched through instead, and then he could ease off the trigger to cause the spinneret to contract while still firing, allowing him to create a net connected to the end of a cable.

Pressing down on the button harder would spew an adhesive goop for the cases where he was more in need of glue than a web.

If he wanted to shoot a tracer chip instead, he pressed down on the button until he felt a click in the lever the button was situated on. That click meant that the shooter had switched tracks and loaded one of his tracers into the barrel rather than drawing from his webbing canisters.

Peter practiced his aim by firing at various objects around his room, and to his delight, the tracer chips stuck to their targets securely and discreetly. Though he did notice his aim was slightly off. Must be the weight, he thought. The chips are a bit heavier than the webbing, I'll have to adjust. Peter continued his target practice until he fired at a picture frame on his desk. Instead of a small chip, a glob of webbing shot out and shattered the frame.