A week later, Peter Parker was swinging through the city one night in his Spider-Man costume, when he noticed something moving on one of the walls of the buildings. It looked like a man in a black outfit, with a white spider emblem on the back.

“Maybe some guy with suction cups wants his own cartoon show,” thought Spider-Man, “It should would be much quicker to draw and colour hundreds of frames of his outfit than all the detailed black web lines on the red parts of my outfit.”

Spider-Man swung into the side of the building.

“Hey there, pal. I guess I just lost my monopoly on wall-crawling. What will my fans think of me now?”

The man made a strange noise, and turned his head towards Spider-Man, and gave him the shock of his life.

The costume was empty. There was simply nobody in it. He couldn’t see inside it, but it was simply flat and couldn’t possibly have a human body in it.

“Bond with symbiote, Spider-being,” it said.

With that the costume climbed onto Spider-Man’s back.

“I’m sorry to be rude to the headless Spider-Man, but I’ve just started the romance I’ve always wanted, and I’m not really into male bonding … You are male, aren’t you?”

The costume said nothing. Apparently it was where it wanted to be.

“Alright, I’m also a science student. I’ll take you home and analyse you later when I’ve got time,” he said, and swung back to his own neighbourhood, through the window and into his room.

He took the empty costume off his back.

“I’ve got it,” he whispered, “Jameson paid Stilwell to invent a remote controlled self inflating Spider-Man balloon and sent it out to discredit me. The nerve of the guy, when he’s the one whose moustache makes him look like Adolf or Saddam. It’s my underwear drawer for you. I always thought my foes were becoming more empty headed every day.”

He put the costume in his drawer, locked it, took off his own Spider-Man costume, slipped into a pair of pyjama shorts and climbed into bed. It wasn’t cold enough to wear anything else, and he felt more comfortable without clothing after spending half the night exerting himself in tight leotard like material.

In the morning, Peter Parker awoke to find that he was wearing the black Spider-Man costume, and remembered its request to bond.

“Looks like I’ve made a friend,” he said, “But I can’t go to school like this.”

Suddenly the costume seemed to pluck the image of his college clothes from his mind and actually changed its appearance to resemble them, leaving nothing over his head where the mask had been. It was as if the mask had retracted down to become nothing more than the neck of his sweater.

Peter went to school, and was on his way home at the end of the day, when he saw the Black Cat swinging through the city on some lines that she shot from a device on her wrists. She could retract each one in turn and fire it again after the other had been used. Police cars were following her.

The Black Cat had just robbed a jewellery store of a fortune in tiny diamonds, which would not take up much space in the small bag she had tied to her belt.

Darting into an alley, Peter willed his costume to take on its black Spider-Man outfit appearance, and then began web shooting his way after the Black Cat. Both of them soon lost the police completely, and the Black Cat tried to speed up to lose Spider-Man. Yet the costume seemed to make him stronger than before, and faster too.

He was soon within a meter of the Black Cat, and about to put out his free arm to grab her in mid air, when the costume suddenly shrank him down to the size of a real spider. He was still a human being, but a very small one.