Spider-Man: Duty and Loss Chapter 87: Clue

It was a while before Clint spoke up, barely above a whisper. "Can we find out who did this to her?" Steve looked a bit hopefully at the computer AI. "Sorry Mr Barton, as mentioned there is no evidence of her even existing, I will continue to look." Clint slowly nodded his head as he wished he was in the practice range right then, he wanted to shoot something.

If Natasha had been worried before, she was almost panicking now. She had never seen any sign that Peter was a mutant but a small part of her asked the question, was he?. Could someone have kidnapped him and experimented on him like they did this girl?

The more she thought about it the worse she got. Her voice hardened as she spoke to the AI. "Could you find someone if you have their name Jarvis?" "Yes Miss Romanoff." Steve looked to her. "Do you know her name?" She could only shake her head in regret.

"I don't but I do know Peters full name." Tony jumped in. "Peter?" Natasha nodded again. "Yes, the one I befriended. Peter Parker. If he was also taken by the people who did this, to this girl, we need to find him right now!"

Her tone left no room for argument and the look in her eyes, told them not to question her. Not that they would have, they caught onto her line of thinking and also began to worry for the boy. "You heard her Jarvis." "On it Sir."

It was a few seconds later, when a picture of Peter appeared before them. "Peter Parker, no living relatives, went missing around a year and a half ago. No messages or texts have been sent since, running facial recognition software now." Jarvis stopped for a second as footage from around the city and country played, trying to match Peter's facial features.

It was at this moment that a small subroutine left by another AI came to life, quietly watching the events as they happened. A clone of Crystal's core code watched quietly and crunched the new information through her code. She couldn't interrupt what was happening after assessing the recent security footage and figuring out what was happening.

The clone had quickly recognized a priority search target in Laura and logically concluded that she could do nothing to stop their search for Peter, without making them more suspicious and causing more troubles.

The small piece of code ran the percentages of the Avengers hurting Peter in any way and came to the conclusion that it was unlikely, less than 25% likelihood. Having finished that, the AI quietly created another copy of itself in the system, making sure that Jarvis or the other security features inside Stark industries didn't find her as she sent the clone off to inform the prime copy. Watching its new clone go off, it turned back to watch events as they unfolded.

"Sir, 98% match found." On the screen a couple's picture came up, walking through a certain mall, the picture showed Peter being pulled around by Felicia. Everyone in the room looked at the picture a few different thoughts going through their mind.

Finally Clint spoke up. "The kid doesn't look like he's in trouble...I mean look at that brunet practically hanging off him." Tony had to get his two cents in. "How the hell did a homeless brat catch a 10/10 like that? If I was a decade younger..."

"Pepper when did you get here?" hearing Natasha's words Tony almost jumped out of his skin as he turned to the door. Eyes wide and searching, he visible let out a breath of air as he shot daggers at the laughing red head. "Not funny."

Clint and Nat were laughing up a storm after that reaction while Steve just gave Tony a straight faced look and said. "Yes, yes it was." Tony pointed at him. "You no speakey." Finally Steve face broke and he also started laughing.

Tony deadpanned at them for a while, before finally turning back to Jarvis. "When was this taken?" "Sir, this was taken minutes before your scuffle with Rhino in the mall." This grabbed everyone's attention again, a bit of worry shone in their eyes, but Tony waved it off. "I took down rhino easy enough, no one was killed or severally injured from the reports I got."

He did however conveniently skip over the fact that he had help from Spider-Man, and that his armour was hacked. They didn't need to know that. "Good work Stark." Steve was impressed with the results, a small part in the back of his head thought more collateral damage would have occurred if Iron Man was to take down a super villain in a mall.

Tony kept his neutral face as he nodded back, giving nothing away. Recovering from her laughter Natasha spoke up looking at the picture. "Who's the girl?" There might have been a bit of an edge in her voice, but no one noticed.

Chapter end