4934/Bad venting

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Bad venting
Date of Scene: 29 January 2021
Location: Bronx
Synopsis: Much advice and training will be given after saving from thugs
Cast of Characters: Shannon Davis, Peter Parker




Shannon Davis has posed:
There's extremely loud sounds of shouting, cries of pain, hitting, metallic noises, curses and feminine but very animalistic growls of pain. It echoes through the alleys and moves around a lot, occasionally there's a very distinct and loud THUNK, as if someone had just fired a pressure weapon. Along the alleyway are couple criminally-leaning young men, bleeding mostly from the face, some with strange dents in their bone structure, particularly around the jaw and forehead, also absolutely annihilated noses. Some are doubled over clutching their chest or stomach. Further ahead the feminine noises grow steadily into enraged cries.

Peter Parker has posed:
Yep, it's Friday Night Fistfight, ladies and germs, and Spider-Man has picked the Bronx as tonight's field of dreams...or nightmares.

Right now, as the disturbance call pinpoints an area of trouble, Spidey is getting the feeling that the CheerBoyz aren't the ones on the giving end as planned, but the receiving end.
Guess they picked the wrong person to have fun with.
As he passes the groaning, huddled masses of meanness, he was webbing them down as he closed in on the Main Event.

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis is in the middle of circle of thugs, she's smiling savagely, her eyes are bloodshot, her pupils are shrunk and focused like a predator. She's also visibly very upset and there's an emotional pain about her that does not seem related to her predicament. Which, by the way, was mostly getting hit a lot. She gets kick and punched around, she lands in rolls and often grabs onto a thug with both hands. The familiar THUNK echoes and the man goes flying backwards, coughing as his chest is accelerated and pressures his internal organs.

On her right hand is a large lead weight disk taped very tightly, on her left is a loose one connected to rope for ranged attacks. She fires it occasionally when she sees someone pull out a knife or some kind of weapon. It flies with the force of a baseball pitch of the highest degree, but is a very dense metal and causes great pain and possibly damage.

She's not in a good shape still, bleeding a lot from her face, her lips busted, right eye swollen and covered in bruises and several cuts along her arms. Still every time she gets knocked down it's like it just urges her on, the adrenaline she was feeling was almost akin to the fabled berserk state, but it wasn't quite that. It was simply the unnaturally massive amount of adrenaline ehr body produced and what caused the greatest problems in her life. She gets knocked down and they start kkicking her all over, but still she accelerates the metal on her right hand and it hits squarely into a nearby knee, dislocating it.

Peter Parker has posed:
Oh, yeah. This was the Main Event. Problem was the odds weren't too good for the lady with the makeshift flail.

So, time to make the odds a little more even.
The first few, no one noticed because they were mostly in the rear, waiting their turn. It was getting pretty loud, so who notices a few guys suddenly yanked back and up into the concealing darkness, never to be seen again until the cops show up to see their cocooned bodies hanging from the fire escape.
However, at some point, people start to notice that the mob was getting progressively smaller, one at a time.
The leader, Brick (because of course his name is Brick) looks around and sees that Mike, Robby, Trav, and Richie were no longer with them...and they weren't the type to just bail.
It was when Sal was hit with a webline and pulled up into the dark like a yo-yo that it all clicked.

"Holy crap IT'S SP...SP..."

A voice, wry and amused, is heard as he slowly lowers on a webline into sight.

"SPIDER-MAN. Say it LOUD and say it PROUD."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis took the time to get her bearings and stumble to her feet. She appears behind the terrified Brick like a spectre of vengeance, her eyes were burning with a very dangerous level of aggression. She says nothing but her smile and expression says it all. Her hand raises high in the air and then THUNK. IT smashes into the back of his head, the metal cutting a gash into his scalp and concussing him, throwing him face-first into the ground. This causes the girl in question to chuckle to herself. "Fucking fuck piece of fuck." She curses under her breath before falling on her ass.

She looks at Spider-Man with an upset expression. "I didn't need your help. i don't want your powers. You can't even freaking help me. What do you even HAVE? Web-shooters? I don't need that." It was only half-coherent, mostly since she didn't offer him any context. She just stares at her hands bitterly.

Peter Parker has posed:
Yeah, this sounds a little like shellshock. Or, the trendy name for it these days, PTSD.
Best to tread lightly.

Spidey drops to the street, holding up his hands, and opts not to get any closer. "Hey, take it easy...this wasn't a private conversation, after all. It was too LOUD to be private. Just...take a few deep breaths, okay?"

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis angrily throws herself to a standing position, nearly falling over but holding on to a dumpster. "I AM BREATAHING. You *can't* help me, Spider-Man. This problem you can't save me from. All you heroes think you can just save the day saying a few pretty words to me and telling me to take it easy and be responsible and all that bull-shit. I don't need that, I don't need borrowed powers either, not that you could even get me any. I need me, Shannon, the hero." She grits her teeth at the end a bit, a tear sliding down her cheek, but she sniffles her crying back in. "Why am I so weak? It's not fair." She adds breathlessly at the end.

Peter Parker has posed:
Yeah, this is running a little bit deeper than expected.

Spider-Man doesn't get any closer. Instead, he sits down on the rather dirty street, firing jets of webbing at any thugs trying to get away but running, limping, or crawling.

After a moment, he speaks. "Hello, Shannon. I'm Spider-Man, but call me Spidey, or Webhead if you prefer." He pauses again. "Tell me what's going on with you. I promise I won't interrupt or give you any pithy knee-jerk advice."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis punches the dumpster hard, she had a lot of pent up anger but this was more like a spiral of psychological mechanisms. She didn't see quite the reason to even explain but she her nothing better to do. "I can't do anything. Look at this.' She points around her and then at herself. "This is terrible, awful, pathetic. I'm so ridiculously incompetent. I can't fight, I'm not smart, I'm not rich, I don't have mystical powers, and my mutation might as well barely be there during a fight." She beats on the dumpster multiple times to vent before finally stopping and breathing deeply.

"All I can do is steal other people's accomplishments. Put an ant-man suit on me and suddenly I'm a great hero because someone else did all the work and handed it to me in a platter? FUCK that. That is nothing, that is worse than nothing, it's practically villanous."

"I want to be me, myself. Shannon the hero. I want to do awesome, amazing things that make me feel like I'min heaven, like I'm truly an amazing person in the world. But all I have is this." She holds out her hand and shoots the ranged weight, it goes pretty fast but it's something a very well trained person could match. "You can count the number of heroes that can actually teach and grow their craft to others on your fingers. None of them go around doing that 'because it's dangerous, responsibility, secret, blah blah blah'. I should consider myself the luckiest person just because I have Hank's support but I don't want to TAKE his work. And I CAN'T be like him. I'm not genius. And how long would it even take, years of study, college, all that stuff. I can't wait that long."

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man winces slightly. Yeah...powers like that can come with their own set of problems.

"Well, Shannon...it sounds like you could use some help. It's not Avengers-membership help, but..."

He leaned forward a little. "I have a place that I train at. It's a junkyard that was abandoned, and I...re-purposed it. My signature thing is that I stick to stuff. Kind of a niche power, but I learned how to use it to my advantage. But it took a lot of faceplants before I got it to work well."
He moved a little closer. "What if I offered to help you with your powers, to learn how to use them effectively? We could brainstorm stuff, sort out the range and capabilities of this power, how to use it to best effect?"

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis was now breathing in short, more relaxed breaths. "I wanted to make them grow as hard as possible, as fast as possible. I was going to keep fighting people until they started growing." She crosses her arms thoughtfully. "I've been doing training with Hank, I think Beast is going to give me a hand too. Maybe if I practice and train with as many different people as possible I'll be able to reach a decent state soon." She bites her lip, seeming very worried and a fair bit hurt. "I can't help but feel just my slowly tiny growing powers won't be enough though. They're so problematic and I need to cover other bases. Like if someone draws a gun I'm dead."

She stops and grows a bit darker. "And if someone like a bad avenger-level dude shows up what do I do? I might as well be a civillian then." She turns to the spider and stares into his weird ass white eye things. "I want to beat them, Spider-Man, I want to crush them. How do I do that with so little?"

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man nods. "I...kinda know the feeling about wanting to crush people. I haven't...but I know about wanting to do that."

He takes a deep breath, then says, "A wise man once told me not to fight with the tools I want, but with the tools I have. And from my own experiences, I can say a few things. One...a major power used poorly can be beat by a minor power that is used well. If you know exactly what you can do, it opens all the possibilities. Two...there are skills you can learn to avoid situations like people drawing a gun on you. Subtlety, stealth, surprise. Like I did. Note most of the guys left were taken care of before they even knew I was here. Because I like to get shot at ALMOST as much as you do."

He looked around, then back to Shannon. "I'm willing to teach, if you're willing to learn. I'm willing to help if you want to BE helped. But you gotta say yes before I can do a thing. I'm not going to make you say it tonight. I want you to think about it."

He reached back into his backpack and pulled out a white card, handing it to Shannon. "That's a website and a phone number. Want to get in touch with me, use either. I'll teach you everything I know so you don't have to learn the hard way like I did. And maybe I can help you use your powers more effectively."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis exhales deeply, she takes the card and looks at it. "You can do that stealthy stuff a lot better though." She says with a bit of hesitation. Her face twists with a lot of pain, emotional pain. "I want to be the kind of hero who demolishes her way through every obstacle." She truly was a flashier type. "But I'll learn anything I can if it's available. I will absorb every single bit of hero knowledge there is that isn't safely guarded because stupid reasons. I will train with everyone and anyone." She replies to him, giving him a sad smile. Yet her eyes were burning. "I will become strong enough."

Peter Parker has posed:
Spidey nods. "Good, because powers are like any skill or talent. Even mine."

He smiles sadly under the mask. "You kinda suck at the beginning. But the more you train with them, the more suck you scrape off."

He looks around, then says, "When you call or visit the website, let me know what you want to try and train."
He pauses, then asks, "Listen, I saw how you propelled something that you could move. What happens if you direct it as something you CAN'T move...like the ground? Would it propel you upward?"

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis shakes her head. "No, it just pours the momentum into the big thing I'm trying to move. Let's say the eart. If I tried it then I'd just be pushing the entire Earth at a negligible amount of force towards a direction. THere's no blowback or opposing force, second uh, law of the dude." She replies with a brief hand gesture towards him. "And what do you mean call me WHEN I want to train? If you're awake and available then I want to train. Unless I'm doing something with Beast about the powers."

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man blinks (yes, the eye-lenses blink). "Well, then...if you are up for awhile, what say I show you the training area?" he says quickly. "The company is much better, and the cops will be here soon. I called it in."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis groans a bit as she walks towards him, now it was starting to hurt since the adrenaline was fading, but she was more than determined. "Yeah sure, take me there and let's see how it is. You can help me use the powers better, Hank can teach me combat, Beast can help me figure out how to....uh...exercise the powers efficiently like muscles." There was another one she had in mind to seek, due to a certain encounter with horrifying supernatural.

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man nods. "Well, we can take the subway, the bus...OR..." He grins suddenly. "...if you like rollercoasters, I can take you there myself."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis points to the scar on her forehead. "I spent most of my life climbing high places and walking ledges of tall buildings. This was from miscalculating a jump between two of them. Going with you will be no problem." She replies with a smirk.

Peter Parker has posed:
Spidey gives an exaggerated sigh. "ALLLL right..." he says, pulling a web-belt harness out of his backpack. "I use this for carrying people from Dangerous Point A to Safe Point B, but I also...OCCASIONALLY...show people what it's like to websling."
He hooks up the rig, then nods. "Okay, step up behind me and I will hook it up. I'll keep it simple unless you tell me you're okay with more...extravagant maneuvers. We'll start at *1*. *4* is Space Mountain at Disneyland. *7* is the 120-MPH one at Cedar Point. And *10*...well, I just hope you haven't eaten recently."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis was, at her core, an adrenaline junkie. It was what motivated her entire being. Her reason to be a hero. The reason to want to fight. And also why she almost died several times doing extreme parkour. She smiles so wide it's like a child in christmas. "You go as hard as you can, my spidery dude." She says as she takes position. She could hardly wait, it was going to be so great, perhaps even as great as fighting in a life or death situation.

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man locks the harness, testing it. He is as thorough as any skydive instructor.

"Okay, we're good. And in case you DO feel the need to, y'know, hurk, turn to the right and look up. Least chance of getting it on me."

He raises both arms, and twin weblines shoot out to hit the edges of the roofs of two buildings.
"Relax."
Then he PULLS and they launch up and out of the alley between the buildings as if they were fired from a circus cannon.

It's easy to see the rhythm. Fire webline, wait for it to hit before applying tension to it, swing until it is time to change speed or direction, then fire in another direction, and on they go.
After about a half-mile of this is when he cranks it up. The first is when he lets go of the last webline without firing another one and they go up and up in an arc similar to a thrown football...if the ball could travel at 80 MPH 150 feet off the city streets, between two skyscrapers...
...and then, on the downward arc, she hears a THWIPP! and the shift of strain as the webline goes taut.

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis closes her eyes and breathes in a calm, relaxed way, in sharp contrast to the crazy movements they were doing. She feels deep, stinging envy. This is what she would have loved to have, it truly made her brain spark in all the right ways. The flood of her addictive chemicals was dripping in and it was just the right pace to be relaxingly stimulating. Sometimes she lets out an 'ahhhh' of satisfaction when they do a particularly sharp movement or a sudden drop. "Holy crap, man, this is amazing. This is like, the best thing I've ever seen." She shouts over to him as they go towards their destination. She was fairly resistant to a number of things thanks to her experience with adrenaline-inducing things, height sickness, pain and panic were three of them.

Peter Parker has posed:
Okay, here's where it REALLY gets interesting.

On the next arc, Spidey does what is apparently a quadruple-somersault, narrowly missing a flock of pigeons by ten feet. Then the wide swings as they go across the bridge for Route 678, doing an aerial slalom between the spires of the suspension bridge, which appears to be a wonderful show for the commuters below.

What is soon apparent is that Spider-Man has an extreme amount of stamina and physical strength. The upper-body strength alone to do this just on this trip would have to be monumental.
And the consensus is that he is seen all over the city, so this is a literal Olympic event the entire ten minutes of the trip...

He would do more, but it looks like they are closing in on the scrapyard located near the waterfront. The name on the sign is rather ironic:

KING'S LANDING SCRAP YARD
We Recycle Aluminum/Steel!

From overhead, the yard has an odd look to it. There are vehicles around, yes, but the pathways and courtyard are actually pretty clean. It's dirt, but dirt without glass bits or trash.

Spidey swings in low, lets go, drops twenty feet, and lands as if he just stepped off the crosstown bus. He turns the dial, presses a switch, and the harness pops open, releasing Shannon from the rig.

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis seems to be in heaven for the most intense parts of the trip, like someone who just injected themselves with something. When they finally land she lets out a sigh of satisfaction and steps back, but her expression is one of extreme envy. She was well aware of his physical attributes, being so physically fragile and weak was one of her greatest self-esteem breakers.

"I kinda wish you did taxi services now, this would make my life a lot more fun." Little did she know it would be only a way to increase her tolerance level and make her addiction even worse. "Now uh. What exactly do you do here?" She looks around the desolate, grimy place, kicking a bit of metal around. She even takes a small screw and fires it off across the yard, waiting to hear it clink into a car in the distance.

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man nods, then says, "Lemme give you the ten-cent tour."
The first area to the right shows a set of three heavy bags...well, two heavy bags and one that looks like a plate of steel a foot thick.

"The one on the left is a standard heavy bag. I use it to control my strength when hitting human-normal opponents. If I hit someone normal with all my strength, I'd kill them. So I had to train myself to hit decisively without having it be lethal." He walks over to the middle one, heavier canvas and secured with a heavy chain instead of rope. "This one is filled with lead shot. For the stronger, more durable ones." He moves to the one on the right and says simply, "For the toughest opponents. Battleship plate. This is more to punch effectively without breaking my hands in the process."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis felt another pang of envy at the start, but soon smiles as it dawns on her that this was extremely useful for her as well. She had never really trained controlling the force of her shots, she just usually winged and improvised it. Hank did say there was a good chance of her killing someone, but this was for humans, normal people. The other two bags were definitely out of her league.

She sighs with some sadness, placing a hand on the battleship plate, logingly even. She longed to be able to shoot right through the metal with unmatched power. Such was the way her addicted and power-hungry brain worked. Yet at the very least, her heart was full of goodness.

She takes a carborator from the ground and aims it at the normal bag, holding tight with both hands as she focuses and shoots as hard as she can. THUNK. The bag swings backwards wildly like someone had tackled it then goes still. "Not...very good as you can see."

Peter Parker has posed:
"That is what practice is for, Shannon." Spider-Man points to a rather ripped-up heavy bag in one corner, sand spilling out of it. "Carl, there, took the worst of it when I got angry."

He walks over to a stack of cars, many of them flattened, and then he points to a set of metal cubes made from crushed cars. "Each of those has different weights. 1.5 ton, 2 ton, 3 ton, 5 ton. I am willing to bet a Morgan dollar that the more you practice the stronger you get. A club might do the job, but a knife, with the proper skill, is much more effective. The difference is precision and skill. We're going to work on both."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis nods a few times. "I've been planting my hand on walls and accelerating them as hard as I can for a bit now. This might be better since I can actually see the results. There's an issue though, the momentum builds constantly, so there will come a point the cube will start moving unless it's held down by something." She tells him with yet another nod. "Normally I get exhausted before I'm able to rip the wall off the building since I do it in HAnk's lab and it has all sorts of fancy construction work."

She stops in front of the smaller cube, planting a hand on it. Her arm tenses and a low swishing sound can be heard as she pours the momentum in. It accelerates almost magically there's no impact, it just appears within the cube, every half second or so another equal measure of acceleration is poured in. After a while it starts sliding forwards.

Peter Parker has posed:
Spidey nods as he watches. "The good news is, this is all junk. Apart from the structures, you can trash or melt or bend what you can. The bad news is, you're going to have to do homework. Track your progress. Write down your observations. You may have your own measurement setup, but stay consistent with it. Like, how many units of force did you use to move a 1.5-ton block?"

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis does a pained expression, she did not expect schoolwork to be involved in this. "I don't...remember, Hank said how much the base launch force is but uhhhhh, I can't remember. I don't know what the rate of force per second is when I'm charging the thing either. I'd say it would probably be about...what...uhh...15-20 times the base launch maybe?"

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man chuckles. "You are talking to EXACTLY the right person to help you with that. I'll post some formulae on the website under Resources that you can use."

He sounds suspiciously like he knows EXACTLY which ones to use.

"I suggest you keep a journal. Track how you are progressing, see where you are in relation to the past. Being a hero can take a lot of work. Not everyone can be Thor."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis has an almost violent reaction to the mention of Thor, she half grunt-growls. "RUghhr, Thor is the worst. I detest all the super powerful aliens." She snaps, before realizing it might have been kind of improper and rude and presses her lips together.

She takes out her phone and looks over the formulas, using a piece of metal to draw on the dirt. It takes her a good 30 minutes but she finally comes to Professor Parker with a result. "So uh, I think, about this much is what would be needed to move the block. Hank said something like, kinda, 100mph so I just went with that. It's why it works better with small objects, they charge up super fast and go like bullets. But I still need some way of holding them down to charge them."

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man nods, checking the math. "Yes, that's right. Hey, you're pretty good at this. That'll help." He paused for a moment. "Maybe if you could train yourself to charge them within your hands. I wonder if special gloves that make contact with the skin could help you charge up, then discharge through the gloves. A superconductor could be the trick..."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis blinks dumbly at what he said, but gets the general idea. "Oh yeah, if I could store it up and then discharge that would be good. But I dunno how it actually happens on like, a physics level, it's why I'm going to Beast. What I can tell you is that it spreads based on density. If I wear light gloves and try to do it, it'll blow into the gloves just enough to move them. Then the rest of the force will transfer into whatever is behind the gloves. I'm talking normal cloth here, though, so something like metal would probably absorb it all. Or your fancy super gloves."

Peter Parker has posed:
Spidey hmms. "We can see. One of my bad guys, Shocker, uses a set of gauntlets that project compressed air that is vibrated up to extreme levels. I can see what I could sort out about it." He looks up. "It's getting a little late. Listen, if you go around to the back, you can get into the yard through the yellow bus door. So, even if I'm not around, you can come here and train any time you want..."

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis nods, she was going to do so at all times, constantly. However, she crosses her arms. "No, no, you're missing the point here. It's fine to theorize for the future and see what kind of stuff would help. But I told you this right off the bat. I don't want your powers. I don't want your huge PhD brain to just build up something that'll directly grant me power and hand it over to me. I'd be doing nothing, it's not even mine, it's stolen from someone who has the ACTUAL ability to create it. I want my own powers. But still, I appreciate you putting in the theoretical work, once I get a good point with my mutation I will start seeking equipment and stuff.

Peter Parker has posed:
Spider-Man has to hand it to her. She really wants to do this on its own merit.

"How about this. If I think of something, I'll send over the concepts, the relevant science...but it will be up to you to see what you can do with it. If you have access to a machine shop, then great. If not...I know of one you can use, but you will still put in the time and fabrication work. How does that sound?"

Shannon Davis has posed:
Shannon Davis she nods firmly. "That sounds good, I'll keep them and treasure them for when they are truly needed. If I can't get where I want no matter how hard I try, thank you for all the help, very much, really." She says with a smile, giving him a thankful nod.