On the afternoon of the Shocker's heist, Captain George Stacy stood in the dimly lit hallway of a decaying Harlem apartment building. He took a slow, heavy breath. The mottled walls were spider-webbed with deep plaster cracks, looking like physical scars carved into the city's forgotten underclass. He knocked. His knuckles rapped softly against the chipped, peeling paint of the door.
The woman who opened it was Herman Schultz's mother. Her gray hair was pulled back into a frayed tie. Her eyes were completely flat, like stagnant water that had long since surrendered to gravity.
"Mrs. Schultz. I believe you already know what your son has done."
George kept his voice soft, but it still felt like a knife cutting through the suffocating quiet of the apartment. The cramped space smelled of stale coffee and rotting floorboards. He hadn't sent a squad car to drag her into the precinct. He came himself. His officers were waiting down on the street, heavily armed and bracing for a localized earthquake, but George knew Herman wasn't coming back here.
"If you're looking for my son, Captain, I don't know anything." The old woman numbly rubbed the frayed edge of her apron. Her voice ground out like dry sandpaper. "I never asked where my boys went, what they did, or if they were going to die on the street."
She looked past him, staring at the peeling wallpaper in the hall.
"My husband died in a gang shootout. My brother caught a stray bullet. My oldest son was killed by a patrol cop. My second son bled to death in an alley with a punctured lung."
"...I am so sorry, ma'am."
"I'm not blaming you, Captain. That's just the weather around here." Mrs. Schultz finally looked up at him, her eyes cloudy. "But Herman... Herman was different. He always thought he was better than this place. He wasn't one of us. We didn't even speak the same language anymore. So tell me, Captain, do you really think he'd tell me where he was going?"
George held his pen over his open notepad. He didn't write a single word. Outside the grime-caked window, an ambulance siren wailed in the distance, crested, and faded away into the city noise.
"I can't give you anything." She turned her back on him, shuffling slowly toward a rusted stove. Her spine curved like a dead tree bent under heavy snow. "Because Herman... Herman finally got everything he ever wanted."
George clicked his pen shut. He glanced toward the cramped kitchenette. A thick, banded stack of hundred-dollar bills sat on the counter, hastily shoved half-behind a cereal box.
George looked at the money. He looked at the old woman's hunched back. He silently closed his notepad, nodded to the empty room, and stepped backward, pulling the door shut behind him.
Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the dusty blinds of the Midtown High club room. The official roster of the "Super Detective Agency" boasted over twenty students. In reality, only four people were sitting around the pushed-together desks.
Peter reached out, slid a DVD copy of The ABC Murders across the table, and pulled a cheap USB flash drive from his pocket.
"I have a new proposal," Peter announced. "How about we try to catch the Shocker?"
Jessica nearly choked on her Coke. She slammed the red can onto the desk, coughing. "Are you out of your mind? You want four high school students to arrest a supervillain who actively blows up concrete overpasses?"
"I didn't say we're going to physically arrest him! It's a club activity. We just run the deduction profile." Peter leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. "Come on. What could possibly be a better test of our skills? The NYPD is totally lost. The Avengers haven't caught him either!"
"We don't have any actual evidence," Jessica retorted, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "What are we supposed to deduce? Are we just analyzing J. Jonah Jameson's blood pressure spikes on live TV?"
Peter grinned. "I have a friend. Her dad is the Captain of the NYPD precinct handling the case."
It was a perfectly constructed lie. He didn't actually pump Gwen for information. Peter Parker couldn't get crime scene data from Captain Stacy, but Spider-Man had a front-row seat to the whole thing.
Jessica's eyes narrowed, suddenly intrigued. "Wait. Are you telling me you actually have leaked internal police files?"
"I can't get everything," Peter said smoothly, plugging the USB into the club's beat-up laptop. "But I got this."
The projector hummed to life. A harsh blue square illuminated the whiteboard, displaying a mugshot and a rap sheet for Herman Schultz.
Internally, Peter couldn't help but complain. Before he actually took a gauntlet to the jaw, he barely remembered the Shocker existed. Out of all of Spider-Man's legendary rogues gallery, who actually cared about the Shocker? He didn't get a cool origin arc in the '94 animated series. He was just a random thug with a crossbones-painted glove in the Homecoming movie. Even in the Insomniac game, where he had a massive boss fight, they skipped his origin entirely and didn't even put him in the Sinister Six!
Even the Chameleon got a solo episode! Peter ranted in his own head. If I had actually read the comic books instead of just skimming wiki pages in my past life, maybe I'd know how to handle this guy.
Peter shook off his internal spiral and tapped the keyboard. "The Shocker. Real name: Herman Schultz. Born and raised in Harlem."
"Hold on," Harry Osborn interrupted, leaning closer to the projection. "It says right here he dropped out in middle school."
"Yeah," Peter nodded.
"So his tech was built by a third party?" Harry asked.
"Nope. He built the gauntlets entirely by himself. The guys he used to run with confirmed it."
The entire table stared at Peter with absolute skepticism. Peter sighed and pushed to the next slide.
"Look, he dropped out because of severe family issues, not because he was stupid. The guy is a mechanical savant. Before he put on the yellow armor, he tried to rob the exact same bank using a handheld prototype of his vibration tech. Spider-Man stopped him. The cops threw him in a holding cell." Peter tapped the whiteboard. "He used a hairpin to pick the lock, knocked out a desk sergeant and walked right out the front door."
Harry blinked. Amadeus Cho just stared. Nobody knew whether to be horrified by the NYPD's sheer incompetence or impressed by Herman's audacity.
"Then what?" Jessica asked.
"Then he shows up a week later, covered in gold-titanium armor, and kicks Spider-Man through a marble pillar."
Amadeus slowly took off his glasses. "Are you seriously telling me a middle-school dropout escaped police custody and built an exo-suit capable of matching Spider-Man's kinetic output in seven days?" Amadeus rubbed his temples. "Is the going rate for engineering geniuses really this cheap in New York?"
"Okay, look at the timeline," Jessica said, her voice sharpening as her investigative instincts took over. She stood up, pointing a finger at the board. "He breaks out of jail. He builds a multi-million-dollar weaponized suit in a basement. And his very first move is to go back to the exact same bank he just got busted at? Did he rob it?"
"Uh, well, no," Peter admitted.
"Exactly." Jessica crossed her arms. "Why? Why risk the exact same target?"
"Captain Stacy's file said Herman was actually totally cooperative when they first arrested him," Peter supplied. "But during the interrogation, he tried to explain the math behind his prototype. The detectives laughed in his face. They called him a street thug. He broke out ten minutes later."
"Megalomaniac with a massive inferiority complex," Jessica diagnosed instantly. "He feels inadequate because of his background and education. He wants the world to recognize his genius. The second someone disrespects his intelligence, he goes nuclear."
"So he went back to the bank just to find Spider-Man," Harry realized, his eyes widening. "He wanted revenge."
"Or he just wanted an audience to prove he was the smartest guy in the room," Jessica shrugged. "But what does this actually give us? The Avengers already know he has an ego."
"But they haven't found him," Harry countered. "If we know what he wants, we can lure him out."
"What if Spider-Man challenges him directly?" Peter suggested quietly.
Jessica looked at him. "What?"
"Think about the bridge," Peter said, tracing a finger across the desk. "Herman didn't actually beat Spider-Man. He collapsed the overpass, forced Spider-Man to hold it up to save the civilians, and ran away. He forfeited. If Spider-Man publicly calls him out... Herman's ego won't let him ignore it."
"Maybe," Harry muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "But how do we get that message to Spider-Man?"
"There's a forum," Peter smiled faintly. "A website where people post thank-you videos for Spider-Man. He probably checks it. If we post our psych profile and the bait strategy on that board... Spider-Man will know exactly what to do."
PS: Hey guys, I finally watched Thunderbolts and it was great, but I have two massive gripes! First, a giant crisis hits New York and Spider-Man is nowhere to be found. Again! Typical MCU scheduling conflicts. Second, John Walker (US Agent) is still running around with that same bent-up metal shield! Bucky clearly have connection to Wakanda, and Cap 4 just introduced Adamantium to the world. You're telling me Walker couldn't get an upgrade? Or at least hammer the dents out of his old one? Come on! See you in the next chapter!