The Winter Wraith

Chapter 8

Stark Tower

A brunette teenage boy was tapping his right foot impatiently in a high tech elevator. His mind was being pulled in all different directions, thinking about his latest math test, what he would have for dinner, and an obscure Star Wars theory that Jar Jar Binks was actually a Sith. While the teenager shook his head at the theory his friend had told him about, the elevator doors finally opened. Walking out of it, he readjusted his grip on his backpack strap and went to find his mentor.

After a few short minutes of searching, the boy found his mentor in the usual spot in his lab, bent over at a messy table covered with various mechanical parts and tools.

“Hey, Mr. Stark!” said the boy, greeting his mentor.

“Hey, Peter,” Tony Stark responded back, not looking up from his work. “I just finished fixing up your web shooters. I added a few upgrades here and there. It should be all good now.”

“Thanks, Mr. Stark,” Peter Parker said while catching the expensive tech that Tony Stark carelessly threw to him. 

Peter thought that his web shooters had been working perfectly fine, but Tony had insisted on tinkering with them. This caused Peter to miss out on two whole days of Spider-Maning, and he desperately wanted to get back on the job. Although he felt guilty for not patrolling, Peter had been able to focus his full attention on school, a luxury he hasn’t had in months. He had been able to go to school with a full night’s rest and was prepared by having all his homework done. He even had time to study for his upcoming assessments.

Despite all these positives that came with taking a short break, Peter Parker was more than ready to get back to patrolling. 

“Kid, how was your past few days? You said you had an upcoming math test, right?” Stark asked as he got up from the cluttered table and moved to his holographic computer station, continuing to work.

“Oh, yea, I aced it. This week was nice. I had time to go to the library and hangout with Ned,” Peter hurriedly replied, itching to go out patrolling.

“Run facial recognition through all available cameras, please,” Stark directed towards his AI Friday, who was wired into the high tech tower.

“Running facial recognition now,” Friday responded.

Peter watched as multiple security camera recordings appeared on light blue holograms above the large silver desk. One after another zoomed into a face and then showed an error message that read ‘No match,’ before restarting the process again and again.

Forgetting his need to patrol, Peter curiously asked Stark a question.

“Who are you looking for? Can I help at all?”

“Ah, probably not,” Stark replied, while pulling up another light blue hologram.

This hologram had a picture of a teen girl with long brown hair. She was dressed in combat gear with a black mask covering the lower half of her face. The picture showed that she was in action when it was taken. It was a shot from a recording Tony took in his Iron Man suit when he was fighting the enhanced girl.

“This is who we’re looking for. I didn’t get a shot of her with the mask off, but Capsicle saw her full face and described it to me, or well, Friday, who then constructed this,” Tony said, pulling up a hologram of the girl’s full face, based on Steve Roger’s description of the brunette teen.

Peter froze for a second when he saw the reconstructed hologram. It looked just like…It couldn’t be, he thought, shaking his head, though the hologram does sort of look like her.