Venice sat on a shallow lagoon four kilometers off the Italian coast. It was a sprawling network of one hundred and eighteen small islands stitched together by four hundred bridges. With over a hundred and seventy waterways replacing standard roads, boats were the only reliable transit.
It was breathtaking. It was also a tourist trap of biblical proportions.
The Venetian Republic's medieval glory had faded, leaving behind a permanent population of barely sixty thousand locals. They were entirely drowned out by the three million tourists flooding the streets annually. Finding an actual native Venetian felt like a scavenger hunt.
Peter stood in the center of St. Mark's Square, peering through the viewfinder of his father's old Canon film camera. This was the beating heart of Venice. It housed St. Mark's Basilica, the Doge's Palace, and roughly ten thousand incredibly aggressive pigeons. Renaissance cosplayers mingled with street musicians. For a photography enthusiast, it was an absolute goldmine.
Click. Whir.
He caught Cindy sitting on an iron chair outside the Plaza Cafe. A dozen pigeons pecked at the cobblestones around her boots. One flapped its wings, launching into the air right as Peter snapped the shot. Perfect framing.
"I thought you'd be out on a boat with Jessica," Peter said, lowering the camera.
Felicia Hardy leaned against a stone pillar nearby, looking thoroughly unamused. "Turns out I get violently seasick. So, I'm standing on solid ground." She crossed her arms. "Besides, Jessica is operating on a terrifying amount of manic energy. She wants to see everything. She wants to touch every brick. I can't keep up with that level of frantic tourism."
Peter understood exactly what Felicia meant. Jessica Drew was racing a ticking clock. Her mysterious illness was aggressive. If she didn't travel and see the world now, she likely believed she'd never get another chance.
Peter wasn't worried. He knew her canonical destiny. Dr. Jonathan Drew would eventually finalize his Savage Force spider-serum. He would inject his daughter to save her life, and Jessica Drew would become Spider-Woman. She was going to survive. Felicia, however, didn't have the benefit of multiverse foresight. She was just watching her friend deteriorate.
Peter kept that knowledge strictly to himself. Letting Felicia worry kept her grounded. It kept her anchored to her friends instead of spiraling completely into her lethal vendetta against her father's killers.
"Speaking of Jessica," Felicia said, her tone dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. "She basically has your entire profile mapped out. She knows Spider-Man is a Midtown High student on this trip. Worse, Mary Jane Watson is digging into the same timeline for the Daily Bugle. I fed them some heavily doctored false leads, but your operational security is currently garbage. You should have swapped aliases for this deployment."
Peter adjusted the focus ring on the lens. It was a valid tactical concern. But Peter had been studying under Doctor Strange. He was currently modifying a localized Kamar-Taj cognitive spell. It wasn't a catastrophic, reality-breaking mind wipe. It was a subtle perception filter. It effectively made people subconsciously dismiss the connection between events.
The world would still know Spider-Man fought Elementals in Europe. They just wouldn't care enough to connect the dots. The human brain would simply glaze over the anomaly. Peter wasn't losing sleep over it.
"Noted. Thanks for running interference," Peter said. He brought the camera back up, aiming at a guy dressed as a plague doctor. "Speaking of you and Jessica. I still don't get the dynamic. You two are polar opposites. And you completely froze up when you saw Dr. Drew's spider-modification files at Osborn Tech."
Peter snapped the photo, winding the film lever. "That doesn't exactly scream 'casual high school friendship'."
Felicia stiffened. Her jaw locked. She stared at the basilica, entirely unresponsive.
Peter lowered the camera. He didn't push.
"You aren't even going to interrogate me?" Felicia finally muttered.
"I'm incredibly curious," Peter replied, capping the lens. "But prying isn't going to make you talk. You'll spill it when you want to."
Felicia let out a long, frustrated exhale. She slumped back against the pillar.
"Fine," Felicia grumbled, her guard slipping just a fraction. "Freshman year. My dad had been gone for a while. Money was tight, so I ended up at Midtown High. I didn't know why he died. I just found his old safecracking gear. I was angry. I thought... I thought acting out made me cool."
Peter leaned against the cafe railing. "Let me guess. Grand larceny?"
"I was fifteen, Parker. I wasn't pulling casino heists," Felicia scoffed. "I swiped cash out of rich kids' lockers. I used the money to buy cheap booze. I genuinely thought I was untouchable."
Felicia cracked a dry, humorless smile. "Then club recruitment week rolled around. I walked past the Detective Agency booth. Jessica took one look at me, pointed a finger, and verbally dissected my entire morning. She deduced exactly how much I drank the night before just from my posture and the scuff marks on my shoes."
"Her social skills definitely lack a filter," Peter noted.
"She has zero emotional intelligence," Felicia agreed. "I was furious. But then the paranoia hit. If this random senior could figure out I was drinking just by looking at me, how long until she deduced I was the one robbing the locker rooms?"
The fear of getting caught and disappointing her mother had terrified her. Felicia joined the Detective Club purely for self-preservation. She wanted to learn Jessica's deductive methods so she could reverse-engineer them into counter-surveillance techniques. She learned how to hide her tracks by understanding how a detective thinks.
That tactical shift changed everything. Using those new skills, Felicia started digging into the strange blueprints and gear her father had left behind. She pieced the clues together.
"If I hadn't met Jessica, I would have spent my entire life believing my dad was just some deadbeat who abandoned us," Felicia said softly. The defensive edge completely vanished from her voice. "I have to thank her for that."
Felicia offered a small, stunningly genuine smile.
Click.
Felicia blinked, startled by the mechanical snap of the shutter.
Peter lowered the Canon, returning her smile. "That's a good look on you, Hardy. Keep it."
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