Gwen POV:
The soft hum of holograms filled Peter's workshop. Incomplete blueprints hung in the air like ghostly scripture while a towering combat walker, a swept wing aircraft bristling with missiles and three engines, lattices of an alloy that seemed as if made of the darkness itself were on the floor.
I sat cross-legged on the workbench, idly drumming my fingers, eyes flicking between Peter and the impossible tech flickering around us. My patience snapped first.
"Okay. What did that extra-dimensional dipshit give you now?"
Peter didn't even look up as his fingers moved across the console. "An EXO-45 Patriot battlesuit. Basically a walking tank. An F-302 fighter interceptor, light bomber, works in and out of atmosphere. An alloy called Lithium Triteride. Technically stronger than vibranium, theoretically stable for a brief moment under a supernova. And… an energy-to-matter converter. Turns raw energy into food, materials, medicine, weapons. Anything."
I dropped my head into my hands. "Peter. Why is that thing insisting on you walking the path of weapons development?"
His hands stilled. His voice came quieter. "Because it knows what I know. There are threats to this world. Some from Earth. Some… maybe not."
My head snapped up, frowning. "Not? As in extraterrestrials? You serious?"
He finally turned toward me, his face set. "Dead serious."
I barked a nervous laugh but it cracked halfway. "You've got to be kidding me."
Peter shook his head slowly. "I wish I was. While aliens are speculation the terrestrial threats, not so much. I've been monitoring orbital data for months. Weird signatures. Faint. Consistent. Everyone else dismissed it as background radiation. But it never fluctuates like random noise. So I dug deeper. I used MUOS channels to pull raw satellite sweeps, then cross-referenced them with old myths. African oral histories. Mesoamerican, Yucatán records. The energy spikes… they line up with the stories."
My eyes widened. "Stories of what?"
"Wakanda and Talokan." His voice dropped. "Hidden in Africa. Not poverty-stricken like the world believes. Advanced. Way beyond us. Cloaked in plain sight. The other in the Puerto Rican trench."
He paused, eyes darkening. "And Talokan. Somewhere under the Atlantic. Stories of gods, of monsters. But they read like eyewitness accounts when you match the timelines to the energy readings."
I stood slowly, as if my legs weren't sure they'd hold. "You're saying there are whole civilizations… watching us. Hiding. Waiting."
Peter exhaled hard. "I can't prove it absolutely. But the evidence keeps stacking. Too clean. Too loud to ignore also the sudden radiation spikes are quantum cryptography signature. Only me and Hank have the tech to intercept and decipher their signals. And if... when... they step into the light, the world is going to shift. Maybe for the better. Maybe into war. And if that happens, we'll have to choose sides. Everyone will."
My lips parted but no words came. I thought being Spider-Woman meant fighting crime, stopping the occasional lunatic with gadgets. Multiversal chaos had stretched my sense of scale but this… this was different. This was not grand on a cosmic scale but it was tectonic for it concerns our home.
My voice broke when it finally emerged. "And your tech. Your weapons. You're building them… for that?"
Peter's eyes met mine. Weary, unflinching. "If the worst comes, someone has to be ready. No matter how much we claim that they're our brethren from the same evolutionary line, the truth is they're arrogant no matter how humble they may seem. Someone has to give humanity a chance to stand. And right now… that someone is me."
I stepped forward, my hands trembling as it landed on his. My voice was raw but steady. "I used to think your R&D was just you being restless. Playing with toys, trying to keep me and us safe. But this isn't tinkering. It's survival. And I hate it. I hate that you're the one carrying it. But I finally understand why."
Peter swallowed hard, his jaw tight. "Because if I don't…"
I cut him off, fierce. "Then I will. Because you're not alone in this, Peter. Not anymore."
For a long moment, the hum of machines was the only sound between us. Then, slowly, his hand closed over mine and the weight shifted. Not vanished but shared.
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