Was it really any wonder that Spider-Man didn't want to come out tonight?

Just recently, he'd had to take on a dangerous creature called the Goblin, who'd turned out to be the father of Spidey's best friend, and had only survived that through sheer luck and ineptitude.

And now? Well, he doubted either quality would be very effective against hunter robots the size of small buildings. And one was chasing him. 'Sentinels' he had heard them called.

"Okay, okay!" he shouted breathlessly at the Sentinel as he shot a webline from the mechanism on his wrist towards the side of a building. It stuck and he used it to swing away at an insanely high speed. "I get it! I've learned my lesson: never stay out past curfew! Geez, who actually thought they'd get around to enforcing that rule?"

The robot didn't reply. It merely kept up with him, firing energy beams from its enormous hands. In fact, its cold silence was rather nerve-wracking.

Spider-Man twisted in midair, narrowly avoiding the beams, and let go of the webline, letting his momentum carry him to the street below. Staying high above street-level only made him a target. An easier target, anyway. He landed with a thump on the roof of a sedan, leaving a large dent in it with his feet as he backflipped off, deciding that he could change direction a lot easier than the purple robot.

Poor guy.

While overhearing this, Spider-Man completed his backflip and dashed into an alley. "Way to go, Parker," he chided himself, "just go ahead and put everybody in danger just so you can save your sorry webbed--"

Up ahead, the Sentinel lowered its thruster-propelled chassis into the alley. Amazingly, it fit with room to spare, and blocked off Spider-Man's exit. "Uh... uhmm... uh..." Spidey stuttered, backing up. "...you're not actually... going to ask me for my autograph, are you?"

The robot aimed its palm blaster right at Spider-Man's head.

"Uh, y'know... I know I'm a motormouth here, but could you, like, say something? So I don't feel so intimidated? Anything? Like, 'surrender, mutant,' or 'resistance is futile,' or... or even, 'Prrrrrkrrr' like the Goblin did..."

The robot methodically took aim.

Spidey briefly considered turning and running back out the way he came, but enough was enough. "Ok, fine. You want to take me out, fine." He raised his hands. Readied his webshooters. "I'm takin' you with me. Yeah, I'm exactly that nuts."

A flash of red light washed over the alley, causing Spider-Man to flinch. "Oh, sh--"

Yet when it passed, he found himself still standing. In one piece. He hadn't been zapped after all. "--it?" The robot was still standing as well. Only it was missing a head and wobbling slightly.

"You know," said a voice behind Spider-Man, "you are goddamn lucky that the Sentinel actually took its time to aim and fire at you."

The wallcrawler barely heard the voice over the herculean pounding of his own heart, which seemed to be performing Tae-bo in his chest. He turned slowly to face the speaker, a man on a stationary black motorcycle, wearing an equally-black leather jacket. The bike was parked at the mouth of the alley, its motor still running, while its rider at Spider-man through bizarre gold eyewear. "Most times, they just target and fire," he continued. "Maybe this one was just waiting for you to shut up."

"Thanks?" Spider-Man replied, unsure of his own voice. "Yeah... thanks for the... y'know... whatever it is you just did"--he jerked a thumb back at the still-standing robot--"that gave him a lack of a head."

The man smiled slightly, the effort cracking his face into an ironic caricature. "No problem. Guess this mean you really ARE a mutant, if those things detected you. Or maybe swinging all over the city in red-and-blue spandex was the tipoff."

This guy is just full of comments, Spidey thought. "You making fun of my fashion sense, Geordi LaForge?" Now that the shock was wearing off, he was starting to find his sense of humor again, at least beyond nervous babbling.

"Hunh." The stranger shook his head and revved his motorcycle twice. Then he pondered for a moment and reached into his jacket with a free hand. Removing a large gold object, he tossed it at Spider-Man like a throwing star.

Appropriate, the wallcrawler thought as he caught it, since he's riding a Ninja. He looked at the object: a high-tech-looking affair with two black stripes crisscrossing a circular sea of red in the center. Come to think of it, the stripes looked like an "X."

"It's a cloaking device," the stranger told him. "Clip it to your clothing, and it'll emit a frequency that renders your mutant gene immune to the robots' scanners." The stranger paused and gave Spidey a once-over, evident even behind the visor. "Maybe you should invest in a belt, or some clothes that are saggy enough for the device to clip onto?"

"Mutant gene? Hold on..."

The man with the visor revved his bike some more. "Listen, as sparkling as this conversation is, I have someplace else to be. I'll see you around." He began to back out of the alley, his strong legs pushing the bike and his combat boots scuffing the cement.

"Wait... I'm Spider-Man!"

"I know; I read the paper."

"Uh, the Daily Bugle? They say some stuff that--"

"The New York Times. Don't have a subscription to the Bugle." Another wry smile. "Why, should I get one?"

"No... not really."

"You're a gifted conversationalist, y'know that?"

"Hey, I'm new to this superhero thing! I was just chased around the city by a big purple pencil sharpener with delusions of grandeur! If you think I'm bad at conversation, you should've seen the other guy!"

The stranger regarded him for a second with his head titled to the side. He managed to strike a bizarre balance between being as relaxed as a reclining cat, and as rigid as the machine under him. In fact, he gave Spider-Man the impression of a machine. A killing machine. A honed weapon, like a katana. He obviously wasn't a combat novice by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet he seemed... young somehow? He looked to be in his twenties at the oldest, with spiky brown hair and stubble like a teen heartthrob, or a movie star fully in-character as a leather-clad ass-kicker. "Well, Mr. New-to-the-Superhero-Thing if you stick around and live long enough, you might learn a few tricks," the stranger remarked.

"Okay, this is going to sound like the lamest question since 'Who Let the Dogs Out,' but... who are you, anyway?"

"Oh, yeah. Just call me Cyclops."

"D'you have two eyes or one?"

This actually took Cyclops off guard. He recovered quickly with, "I'll let you guess." Two more revs, and the man in leather departed. By then, a crowd of onlookers had gathered at the mouth of the alley: some tourists, some locals. And a cop.

"Hold it!" Spider-Man heard the cop shout as he skittered up the wall. He glanced down to street level and saw the policeman pull his gun, but was over the top ledge before the officer could do anything. He heard the astonished cop mutter something to the effect of, "...the hell did he do to this thing?' He guessed the "thing" in question was the Sentinel, and thought that was kind of funny.

"You met Spider-Man?" Bobby Drake shouted, making Scott Summers immediately wish that he hadn't shared that bit of information. "Cool!"

"Actually, it wasn't," Scott replied, rolling his eyes behind the gold visor he wore and taking off his jacket to toss it absent-mindedly across the back of his favorite chair in the mansion's rec room. He then plopped into the chair, a bit annoyed that the younger boy was blocking his view of the television. "The guy looked like a deer in the headlights the whole time."

Bobby gaped, turning his ballcap around so that it faced backward. "He did? I thought he wore a mask? Or did he show you his face?"

"He kept that big-eyed mask on, Drake, but I could tell."

"How?"

Scott let out a losing-patience sigh. "The same way you can tell when I'm giving you The Look, even though you've never seen my eyes."

"Uh... like you're doing right now?"

"Bingo. It has to do with body language. Spider-Man's just a scrawny kid with a cracking voice and a stuttering problem. Sorry to disillusion you."

Bobby was incredulous, as if he'd just been told that Jackie Chan didn't actually do his own stunts. "But... he was a wrestler! He was in the UCW! How could he--?"

"It's never occurred to you that wrestling could be fake, has it?"

"Now wait a minute!"

"Can you leave me alone, Drake? I'm trying to watch the news." He punctuated this by grabbing the remote and changing the channel from some MTV documentary to CNN. He ignored Bobby's subsequent protests.

Bobby finally calmed down long enough to ask, "What did you two talk about?"

Scott studied the screen--some report on the president's daughter starting a new semester at college. To his teammate, he answered in a monotone, "Global warming."

Bobby threw up his hands in disgust. "God! This is why I hate talking to you! I can't even get any simple information out of you!" He stormed out of the room and into the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters' expansive hallway.

"If I see Spider-Man again," Cyclops mentioned while Bobby was still within earshot, "I'll be sure to get his autograph for you."

Drake stopped in his tracks and spun around to face the leader in the chair. "You will? Really?"

Scott's ruby quartz gaze never left the TV. "No. Not really."

It didn't hit him until he was safely back in the suburban confines of his room. Then Peter Parker smacked himself in the forehead for being an idiot.

"THAT'S where I saw that guy before!" he said mostly out loud as he changed out of his red-and-blue bodysuit and into a loose-fitting shirt and jeans. "He was in the news a few weeks back!" He recalled the first night the Sentinels had started to patrol the New York area, the night after his uncle Ben had died. He recalled seeing footage of a small group of mutants dismantling the robots while placing the bystanders in danger.

The mutants had worn black leather jackets. And one of them had beheaded a Sentinel in a flash of red light.

Peter had noticed before that as brilliant as he could be in science, he could be alarmingly slow on the uptake in mundane matters. He remembered thinking how ludicrous the Sentinel idea was in terms of public safety, and how cool it was that some mutant citizens had decided that enough was enough and they were going to do something about it. He was impressed, because it meant he wasn't the only superhuman in town to grow a social conscience.

And now he'd just met one of them, and hadn't even realized it. "Maybe I should've asked him for his autograph," Peter muttered.

Then he remembered the reason he'd been able to meet one of the "X-People," as the media had dubbed them: a Sentinel had started pursuing him for carrying arguably-mutant DNA.

"So now I'm a target?" he asked the air, tossing his mask onto his bed in disgust. "Here I was, hoping I wasn't a mutant, but I guess I am, because some wannabe Transformers can detect me." He then realized his aunt May was sleeping in a nearby bedroom, so he decided not to vocalize any more of his thoughts.

Okay, they can detect me, and they can detect X-People, Peter thought, trying to make sense of it all. What about all the rest of the mutants? They go after all of 'em right? They were made to go after mutant terrorists like that Brotherhood group... but they don't stop there, do they? I mean, there's got to be mutants who are just like regular people, who hang out at the mall, pay taxes, and buy groceries, right? People who just want to fit in, but don't want to put on a costume. What about them?

Forgetting his vow of silence as his train of thought reached the inevitable, ugly conclusion, he whispered, "The Sentinels kill them too. And nobody gives a shit. Nobody but the X-People. Well, maybe I should, too."

His gaze alighted on the gold X-device on his bed. A gift from Cyclops. Hmm.

Grabbing the object, he slipped out of his room, using spidery stealth to get to the basement without waking his aunt. Then turning on a light and placing the cloaking device on the table, he grabbed a screwdriver and got to work.

An hour later, the device was completely dismantled. Peter couldn't believe how many tiny pieces made up the palm-sized object, but he quickly realized that Bill Gates would kill and castrate for this kind of technology. He also realized that only half of the parts were necessary for the cloaking device to work, so far as he understood the principle. Just as he'd suspected from the outset, the device actually had two functions, and the rest of the parts contributed to the second function:

It was a long-range communicator, like a Star Trek commbadge. Cool.

Peter reassembled the gadget (getting it wrong twice, and having to take it completely apart each time to start over), and briefly considered calling his friend Mary Jane Watson to test out his new "cell phone." He decided against it, and instead triggered the device's default frequency.

With any luck, he'd reach the X-People's home base.