Owner	Pose
Peter Parker	The bank alarms are going off full tilt and the front of the building is mostly on fire. Well, not burning-- someone's dumped a bunch of fuel and accelerant in a big pile in front of the heavy bank doors, creating a ten-foot fire barrier hot enough to dissuade anyone from getting close to it. Inside the bank, the Scorpion hammers on the vault doors with his fists. "Argh! Why do I always have the *worst* luck?" he demands of a clearly cruel and uncaring God. Acidic venom drips from his tail unit, which lashes behind him like a writhing snake. It looks like he slathered the vault controls with it, and when that acid failed to work, he started spraying it at the vault door bars to try and melt them instead. Several empty duffel bags near his feet suggest that things definitely aren't going as planned. Behind him, a half a dozen employees are huddling in the manager's office. It seems Mac's 'foolproof plan' to knock the bank over was stymied by the branch manager being out to lunch. Outside, the cops are trying to form a plan of attack. The bank is a bank; it's MEANT to be impregnable. There's no accessible egress except for the main doors, which are locked, barred, and (as aforementioned) on fire. The best they can do is form a perimeter and hold back the civilians. "<All units, all units, we are 10-20, 10-33 at the Fifth-Third bank in Midtown,>" comes the crackling cry over the police scanner. Peter, perched against a wall with a churro in his hand, stops eating and snaps his gaze over to Midtown. "<Possible meta on site. Witness says it looked like Scorpion, but we haven't gotten eyes on him.>" Before the call even finishes, Peter wolfs his churro down in two bites and launches off the wall into free space. He tugs his mask down with one hand and THWIPS a webline out with the other to start carrying him midtown. En route he pings the crime to the Spider-Net and notes he is en route. Anyone else queued into the system would see his approximate positeion and time to target, as well as the local police frequencies so they can listen in.
Cindy Moon	Okay, so.. yes. Cindy Moon said she was going to move. And she is, but that was only a couple of days ago. You can't just completely upend your life that quickly, even if you did have control of when SHIELD might assign you a bunk. Which, Cindy didn't. Even if she /did/ move.. could she really stop coming to NYC to patrol? Was it fair for her to stop just because she was a distraction to one of her friendly neighborhood Spider-ken? Granted, he wasn't just /any/ Spider... if he was, she wouldn't be having any of these problems. It's just a stupid chemical thing because it's the same spider that bit them. It's not that she even /likes/ Peter Parker outside of that, right? He's too... everything. Too nerdy. Too awkward. Too boyish. Too... sweet. ...Right? As if she didn't have enough on her mind, then there's a stupid bank robbery interrupting /that/ whole process. For a split second, she wonders if she made the right choice to swing over. She'd seen the ping on Spider-Net and knew Peter was on his way. She wasn't far away, but part of her wanted to just avoid him at all costs. Of course.. 'all costs' didn't actually mean letting him tackle Scorpion alone when she was perfectly capable of helping. So, off she went, running across rooftops and jumping, swinging, getting closer and closer until she's landing lightly on the roof of the bank. High above the chaos, the building's skylight offers a different perspective on the bank's beleaguered interior. The large square of glass acts as a window to the maelstrom below. There's an almost surreal quality to it; the pulsating alarms, the dancing flames at the front, and the Scorpion's frantic and frustrated movements as he attempts to breach the bank vault.
Peter Parker	Spidey swings around on a line in both hands and *splats* against the wall next to Cindy, grabbing on with toes and fingers and arresting his momentum in the space of a few inches of movement. "Gargan's parole officer isn't gonna be happy," Spider-Man mutters to Silk. "Here I heard he was actually taking it seriously this time. Guess he won't make his next Knitting Club meeting." Spider-Man points a finger at the rooftop. "The skylight's the fastest way in. Gargan's dangerous, but he's cocky as get out. And super sexist. I'll go in through a vent entrance first, see if I can get the civilians out of there. Once I'm in the walls you can crash the glass and get his attention. He'll probably do something that'll make you want to punch him, and he'll underestimate you," Spidey assures Silk. "Then I'll come out of the corner and we'll take him down together." Spidey is absolutely *not* looking at Silk, but there's a sense of his head panning just a few degrees towards her position next to him. "Can you do that for me?"
Cindy Moon	"I kind of already want to punch him in the face, so your plan's working /great/ so far," Silk mutters darkly, her voice lightened only a shade by the faintest hint at humor. She /was/ looking at Peter, her dark eyes shifting over to him as soon as he'd landed like someone had shot him out of a straw. Truth be told, she and Peter hadn't really spent much time together outside of their awkward interactions. Maybe this was just who she was as a person -- a little brooding, a little bitter. She studies him for a moment, trying to read anything she can from his masked face and noting the way he seems to be avoiding direct eye contact. The familiar mix of anxiety, excitement, and confusion bubbles up within her, and the distance between them, both physical and emotional, feels like a chasm despite being just a few inches. "Yeah," she finally says, her voice soft but determined, "I can do that for you."
Peter Parker	Spidey considers her acknowledgement and nods slightly. Just once. Is there a beat of hesitation before he launches himself into the air again? A space where he is considering the best path down to the bank roof, or contemplating adding a more personal note to their terse battlefield discussion. Either way the moment's gone as fast as he is. Spider-Man webs down to the top of the bank and tears off a chunk of roofing. It allows him to slip into the crawlspace between the walls-- good old New York construction-- and he starts scrabbling around inside, almost comically compressed by the narrow quarters. "Come to the coast, get together, have a few laughs," Spidey mutters to himself. "Way to stick your foot in your mouth, Parker. Would it have killed you to--" Spidey slaps himself and grunts. "Ugh. No. Stupid sexy Cindy. Focus on the hostages," he whispers to himself. It doesn't take him long to find another vent. This one he pries loose very carefully and webs it up so it won't fall to the floor. Gargan can't be more than thirty feet away. When he starts kicking the vault door in frustration, Spider-Man dashes across the wall and over the ceiling, to drop right into the middle of the pack of office workers. "Shh. Here to help," he assures them. "If I distract him, can you guys make it to the fire exit?" One of them nods, her face drawn tight and pale with fear. Spider-Man gives her arm a squeeze. "Awesome. Okay. Just wait for the signal-- you'll know it when you see it."
Cindy Moon	Cindy didn't actually expect Peter to say anything else. They were here. They had a job to do. There were people in danger. And... there wasn't really anything else to say to each other -- he'd told her she was just a distraction, she agreed to leave. Behind that red half-mask, though, she pursed her lips, her eyes actually crinkling in amusement as she listened to Peter rambling into his hot mic. She /so/ wanted to comment on his Die Hard reference, but before she could, he'd already transitioned to 'Stupid sexy Cindy,' and that made her feel /all/ kinds of ways... 'Stupidly sexy?'.. 'Stupid and sexy?'.. 'Stupid that he thought she was sexy?'... UGH. WHY?! Why did she even care?! Of course, by the time she realizes she'd spent too much time processing that, she'd almost missed her mark and had to scramble up to the skylight in a hurry. She /was/ 'the signal,' after all. Silk raises a hand, gathering a web bundle in her palm, and with a swift, precise motion, she flings the concentrated ball of webbing towards one of the skylight panes. There's a sharp, echoing crack, and the glass shatters, leaving an open space. Without wasting another moment, Silk dives gracefully through that hole, following the broken shards of glass down towards the floor. Almost to the floor, she arrests her fall with a *thwip* of webbing up to the frame of the skylight and flips twice, gracefully landing between a few of those shards. "Hey, Bud," she begins, her voice carrying a playful yet authoritative tone. "You probably didn't realize this, but the bank's actually closed for renovations. You wouldn't believe this, but somebody actually set a fire out front." She thumbs over her shoulder towards the front door. "Plus, they're replacing a broken skylight, so we're going to have to ask you to come back another day."
Peter Parker	Scorpion whips his head around at the first words from Cindy. His face is almost entirely concealed by his helmet, but it's impossible to miss the disbelieving sneer on his face. This close to Gargan it's easy to make out the individual scales of the suit. Each moves independently of the others as if it's a second skin. Gargan's tail whips around in lazy circles and ends up hovering menacingly over his left shoulder, looking less like a proper scorpion's still readiness and more like a serpent's hypnotic swaying. "I told you to--" he breaks off. "You're not one of the office workers." Abruptly his sneer turns into a teeth-baring scowl and he crouches a few inches, arms coming up. "You're a *Spider*!" he accuses Cindy. "Did Spider-Man send you down here? I bet he did. Doesn't have the chops to take me on himself. Has to outsource it. To a /girl/," he growls. Gargan starts pacing around Cindy, claws on his fingers clacking against his armor with each boot step he takes. "You're a bitty little thing, too. Smaller than that punk Spidey was the first time I kicked his ass. We don't have to fight, pumpkin," he entices her, and stands up straight to flex a little. He's certainly built like an athlete. "I gotta wait for that acid to melt through the bars. Whattya say? You, me, back room, five minutes. I'll leave with my money and you can leave with my phone number, when you're ready for round two." Gargan starts slinking towards Cindy, reaching out with his gauntleted hands.
Cindy Moon	/You're a *Spider*!/ "You noticed!" Silk gushes. "What gave it away? Is it the suit? Is the webbing too on the nose?" Her eyes shift, taking in the rest of the room. Though she's focused on remaining the center of attention, she's also mentally calculating her escape routes. But then.. "Five /whole/ /minutes/?!" She practically purrs the words, voice dripping with sarcasm as her hands coming up to place over her heart, giving herself a little hug. "You're going to spoil me on our first date!" But those hands were reaching out and getting closer, and a moment later, Silk's webbing shoots out to the side, snagging a wall high up. She uses it to yank herself out of her spot and up into the air, flipping once and gracefully landing with her back on one of the bank's columns. "You know I have to play hard to get, though, right? Otherwise, what kind of girl would you think I was?" Her eyes soften, watching him. "While we're talking, though... how do you feel about being tied up?"
Peter Parker	What timing. Spider-Man is working the angles to get behind Gargan, taking advantage of Silk's fast retreat to scramble down the ceiling along another pillar. He hides, checks the terrain, then starts quickly walking towards Gargan in a low crouch, heel-toe, trying to get close enough to get a hand on the crook and start delivering a Grade A beat-down. Then Cindy asks Gargan about being tied up and Spider-Man chokes and falters. He steps again, misses his footing, and-- --shattered glass *crunches* underfoot. Gargan snaps his head around with lightning reflexes and bares his teeth at Spider-Man, immediately crouching in a combat-ready stance. "Okay, fir--" Spidey's got one index finger up to deliver his speech, but Scorpion doesn't even give him time to finish his second word. With that same unbelievable speed he twists and whips that heavy tail around like a chain. The armored appendage smacks Spider-Man right in the ribs and sends him flying thirty lateral feet across the bank floor. "I fuckin' knew it! I HATE Spiders!" Gargan roars, and snaps the tip of his tail in Cindy's direction. A globe of sizzling acid flies through the air right at her, fast as a major-league pitch! "Ngnhnhnngh owww," Spidey wheezes, clutching his ribs. "Gargan's definitely been eating his Wheaties."
Cindy Moon	"NO!" The cry is out of Cindy's mouth before she can even stop it, watching as if in slow motion as that tail whips around and lands, sending Peter flying sideways. Cindy jaw clenches, her eyes narrowing. "Well, the back room is /definitely/ off the table, now," she chides, and in the next moment, there's that glob of acid hurtling through space towards her. She leaps out of the way, avoiding getting caught in it, but the same can't be said for the poor pillar it begins to chew through. That wasn't an actual support pillar, right? It was just decorative, surely... "And that wasn't five minutes!!" At some point, Cindy was going to have to engage in this fight, but for the moment she seemed like she was content mostly to act as distraction and agitator, trying to keep his attention off of Peter to try to prevent a follow-up attack. Just to try to make sure that happened, she landed gracefully on a counter-top and shot a series of quick *thwip* *thwip* *thwip* *thwip* bursts of webbing, aiming for gauntlets and face.
Peter Parker	Like the mook he is at heart, Gargan puts his hands up to protect his face. For his trouble he catches one blob on his hand, seizing his fingers shut, and the other manages to stick his other hand /to/ his face. "Son of a--!" Gargan yells with a strangled cry. He stumbles a few paces while trying to figure out how to unstick one hand from his face without the other one getting more entangled, and ends up falling on his ass to try and wiggle his clawed boot tips up and cut through the webbing. Say what you will about Spider-Man, but he recovers fast when he gets knocked down. Spidey launches out of the shadows with a long jump, legs and knees all tucked up and his arms extended. He adds another spray of webbing to Silk's contributions, laying down a wider spread that's meant to slowly entangle Gargan and keep him at bay. That exoskeletal tail twitches and rips through the webbing attached to it, and he slashes the bladed tip through the webbing that keeps his hip pinned to the ground. With a grunt of effort Gargan twists violently and leaps to his feet, flinging acid in a wide but un-aimed spray. Spider-Man yelps and launches himself vertical, high enough to flip over and stick his feet to the roof. It buys Scorpion enough time to splash some excess fluid on his gauntlets. The bubbling acid makes short work of the webbing. "I'm gonna introduce you to a world of pain!" Gargan shouts at Cindy, and lunges at her with a skittering and disturbingly insect-like bear crawl. That tail of his lashes out ahead of him, swinging violently to try and skewer Cindy with the dripping hypodermic barb in the tip.
Cindy Moon	There's a lot to be said about the Spiders and their various unique abilities. Peter and Cindy got their bites at almost exactly the same time, and yet they'd manifested so differently. Cindy's webbing was made by her own body and came out of her fingertips, and her Silk-Sense, not unlike Peter's own nearly precognitive abilities, was dialed up to fifteen. Both of those things had blessings... and curses. She never forgot to refill her web-shooters! Unless she wasn't eating or sleeping well.... And why would THAT be the case? She'd just nearly been killed by AIM after placing a bid that she couldn't afford on a real live human being, then been subsequently recruited into an international spy agency with /no one/ to talk to about either of those things, and when she was finally desperate enough to try to approach the one person she innately trusted so much she had to agree to leave him alone, she screwed it up so badly she actually had to find a new place to live. ...why would that keep her up or make her forget to eat? "Dude, we've gotta work on your mid-fight one-liners," Cindy chides. With Scorpion's tail lashing out menacingly, Silk narrowly evaded, spinning to her left and shooting a web strand towards a coin-counter machine. As the mechanism lurched towards her, she swung it directly at him -- luckily, she was already on target by the time her web-line snapped from the weight of it, and it was still flying at him hard enough to cause a mild explosion of coins on impact.
Peter Parker	"Woohoo, go team! Hit him till candy comes out!" Spider-Man catches Gargan when he stands up, swinging over his back once and neatly catching the haft of his tail when he raises it to shoot acid at Silk again. Spidey tucks his knees and whips around it twice, then uses another webline to violently redirect his inertia at a right angle. Between the elasticity of the web and his deceptive strength it's enough to yank Gargin backwards and leave him partially dangling from his own tail tied up above him. "Mac, I was just saying to my friend here: I really hope you had CHANGEd." Spider-Man lands on another pillar, upside down and looking at the crook with a bemused expression behind his eyelenses. Watching Scorpion trip and skitter over a pile of loose coins is comedy gold in and of itself. "Maybe knock some... cents into you?" "No? No one? OK, withdrawn, that was pretty lazy punnery," Spidey apologizes.
Cindy Moon	Silk waves dismissively from where she'd jumped up and clung to another pillar. "Don't worry about it. It's hard to coin a good catchphrase," she calls back to Peter, watching the Scorpion dangle. She stretches a hand out like she was going to throw out some of her own webbing, but what ends up coming out is thinner and weaker. It lobs more than it /shoots/, and even then it's easily broken. Maybe Peter notices. Maybe he doesn't. Either way, Silk is hurried to look down at a watch she's not wearing. "Okay, hey.. I need to run. You've got the rest of this, right? I wouldn't want to steal your thunder or anything, anyway..." Despite the slight playfulness in her tone, there's also a hint of worry.. and more than a little haste. "Nice to meet you, Sergeant Stinger.. or.. whatever your name was. Sorry you didn't make it through your bars, but on the bright side of things, there's plenty of them where you're going..." There's the briefest glance to Peter, and then Cindy's racing up that pillar towards the ceiling, running across it upside down and then grabbing the hole in the skylight she'd made to flip herself up. "Yipee-Ki-Yay, Spider-Guy," she calls back back behind herself.
Peter Parker	"Oh, uh-- I--" Silk takes off again, leaving Peter flat footed once more as he tries to process her abrupt departure. The issue with her webbing definitely didn't go missed, and he watches those anemic strands float down and break apart under their own weight. Those eyelenses narrow at Silk's departing path; while he might not know exactly what the problem is, the weak webbing is definitely something he recognizes as a symptom of Trouble. Gargin grabs the coin machine's big motor and whips it at Spider-Man while he's seemingly distracted. Spidey leaps out of the trajectory, jumping over Gargin, and shoots two weblines down near the Scorpion's shoulders. The last thing Scorpion sees before the lights go out is Spider-Man floor-pulling himself down to kick Mac square in his unprotected chin. The crook goes down with a groan of pain, and Pete quickly climbs around and over him to roll him up in a nice package suspended in mid-air for the cops to collect. The doors to the bank heave and groan as Spider-Man rips the damaged locking bars away, and by pushing them open it scatters the fire into a larger, much cooler pile of burning debris spread up and down the stairs. "Scorpion's down, and the hostages are safe," Spider-Man tells the police, hands on his hips. "Watch out for his tail-dealie, it's still dripping with the, umh--" he holds a hand up like a periscoping snake and makes spitting noises. "Acid-y. Good luck!" he says with a two-fingered salute. It turns into a webcast to the skyline overhead, and Spider-Man yanks himself aloft to go webbing in a direction that is-- for now-- not intended to intercept with Silk. At least, not consciously.