First Cause • Spider-Man: Homecoming [Unedited]

02

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The next two days are a mix of experiencing the ins and outs of New York in its messy and vaguely hostile glory and shadowing the red and blue occasionally helpful blur whizzing between and over buildings and shops like a disembodied shadow. And it's a thrilling two days indeed. Gadea can't get enough.

This Spider-Man, just one of the many costumed vigilantes that have recently made a ripple in Earth's ever growing pool of super-powered protectors, operates mostly in the niche territory Gadea's aircraft dutifully hovers over. A crackle of wariness that carved fissures into her bones upon seeing him come to the aid of a prepubescent boy and shoot off into the horizon, one born of the fear that he might somehow interfere greatly in her plans, glossed over under this new sheen of interest. Interest and zeal.

Just the first day she'd spent with eyes glued to the windscreen, she found herself ooing and ahhing at his theatrics.

He stopped a bike theft in action and captured the would-be thief in such an elaborate way, Gadea nodded in approval whilst mumbling the less-flowery, more-efficient ways she would have done it. Two men on the side of a somewhat empty street proposed the masked hero do a flip, lounging languidly atop a building (always one to play it safe, this Spider-Man), and when he did, Gadea cheered alongside the men in amazement.

A foreign feeling in her chest spread like a drop of ink into a beaker of water, one she hadn't felt in the many years since her days as a younger child on the red sand beaches of Sitigog. A reminder she isn't as old as her current circumstance requires her to think she is in order to survive.

Life as a Hand is one that absolutely demands a higher level of thinking and decision making. It's rather easy to forget you still possess the capacity to feel like a child because you are a child.

Watching the Spider-Man get into all manners of hijinks and mischief sated her for that first day, but her appetite grew still. And on the second day, some few minutes after finding an abandoned basketball court sizable enough to house her spherical craft, she made up her mind to touch the soles of her black worker's boots to the concrete pavement of downtown, and see the robed sentinel in action herself.

A feat that has been proving itself quite easily accomplishable so far. According to her timekeeper, newly calibrated according to the Eastern Daylight Time, Gadea has spent ten minutes on Earth's soil. So far, she's been bumped into twice by a belligerent, nameless face, chased briefly by a stray dog, and has had the calves of her beige linen trousers splashed with puddle water by a speeding silver car.

Many times, Gadea has had to stay her hand and not reach for the particle gun hidden in the waistband of her pants, underneath her loose jacket, and blast the entire street to smithereens. But the next time a shop owner offers her 'the best sandwich in Queens'—

A hazy image of a bike helmet with its sides painted in a cartoony image of a flame, red tassels and a squeaky back tire zooms past Gadea's tense form on the sidewalk. In order to avoid the barreling kid on a bicycle, she is forced to jump to the left for cover, and a man in a dark suit a few steps down has to hightail it into a convenience store. That might have been it. It also might have been little Jimmy, sans training wheels. Still, a promise is a promise.