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“Hello and welcome back to the 10 o’clock news. I’m Martha Prescott, and with me in the studio is linguist Gary O’Neal. Gary, what do you make of the viral video currently sweeping the internet? Is Spiderman actually speaking all of the languages the video claims he is?”
“Thank you, Martha. I have studied the video in question, and it is my professional opinion that Spiderman is indeed speaking 14 different languages in the compilation video.”
-----Two weeks earlier-----
“Ha, take that!” Ned shouted, lobbing a banana peel behind him.
“Nice,” Peter agreed, dodging a green turtle shell and grabbing a mystery box, “Luigi’s been on our tail this whole race; he totally had it coming.”
“No one stands between us and Mario Kart victory.”
The boys did a fist bump without taking their eyes off the screen, intent on setting a new record on Ned’s Wii.
They were just starting Rainbow Road when Peter’s phone went off.
“Ignore it,” Ned panted, “we need full concentration.”
“Dude, that’s my ringtone for Mr. Stark,” Peter countered, already digging out his phone, “the game can wait.”
“Iron Man is calling you?! Forget about the game; pick up!”
“Hey Mr. Stark,” Peter answered the call, “what’s up?”
“Hey Underoos. When you come for lab day tomorrow, can you stay the night? I already cleared it with your Aunt.”
“He wants me to stay over.” Peter hissed at Ned, whose eyes got huge.
“Sure I can,” Peter agreed, chuckling as Ned started vibrating with excitement, “any particular reason?”
“Actually yes,” the man answered, “the team has been asked to take on a mission in a couple weeks. I want your help developing some tech we’re going to need, and I need to brief you, because you’re coming.”
Peter barely contained a squeal of joy, forcing himself to sound relaxed.
“AWESOME! I mean, cool, I can do that.”
“Don’t explode on me, kiddo, I can hear your excitement from Manhattan.”
Darn it. Peter blushed.
“Sorry, it’s just been a while since I came on a real mission.”
“I know, bug,” Tony chuckled, “but try to stay calm, alright? We’ve got a couple weeks to prepare and we can’t have you burning yourself out, alright?”
“Alright,” the teenager agreed, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“You bet.”
“Bye.”
Dropping his phone onto the couch, Peter turned to face Ned.
There was about three seconds of dead silence before both friends erupted into excitement, interrupting each other in their eagerness to predict what the next weeks would hold.
“I’m here!” Peter shouted, dropping his backpack and bounding into the lab. “Where’s the mission? Washington? Siberia? Canada? What kind of tech do we need to make? Grappling hooks? Robot sled dogs?”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Tony held his hands up, “take a breath, kid.”
Peter made an exaggerated show of taking a deep breath.
“Oh, the sass I get.” the man complained, his grin taking any sting out of his words.
“As if you don’t dish out twice as much as you get.”
“You know me so well, kid.”
Peter dropped down onto a stool near his mentor. “Seriously, though, what’s the mission?”
Tony waved a hand, prompting Friday to pull up a hologram of websites, maps and data.
“Have you heard of the annual New York City Multicultural Festival?”
“Have I?!” Peter guffawed, “it’s only like, one of the best days of the year!”
“Really?” the older man questioned, “what about, like, summer break? Christmas? Halloween?”
“Well, yeah, maybe slightly below those,” Peter conceded, “but it’s still totally epic. It’s the best place for me to speak so many languages in a single day. I’ve been going every year for as long as I can remember.”
“Well, this year I hope you’ll be willing to go as Spiderman.”
“Of course, but why?” Peter worried, “is there going to be an attack? There are so many people there; it would be total mayhem.”
“That’s exactly what we’re hoping to prevent,” Tony agreed, “our mission is prevention.”
“Isn’t that a bit below the Avengers’ pay grade?”
“Usually, it would be,” the older man confirmed, spinning around on his stool to grab his coffee mug, “but the festival specifically reached out to us. Plus, the PR team begged us to take it.”
“Figures.”
“Yup. Anyway, as you know, there has been a small rise in racial hate crimes over the last month, and the organizers are hoping that having the Avengers walking around will be a strong enough deterrent.”
“It’s a good plan,” the younger male nodded, “I’ve been seeing more incidents on patrol lately. I’m not sure why, though.”
“Finding the reason would be helpful, but for now the mission is to deter, and if necessary, protect.”
“I’m happy to help, but why wouldn’t the festival reach out to a security company or the police?”
“Good question. That brings us to the main reason we need you on the mission.”
Peter sat up straighter. “I’m listening.”
“The event apparently draws a lot of non-English speakers; or at least people who are only beginning to learn English. Recent immigrants, seniors, young children. If something does go down, it would be difficult for security to give instructions in that many languages. The Avengers are known polyglots; Natasha alone is on record as speaking at least eight languages.”
“I’m at ten, currently.”
“And that is why we need you. You speak more languages than the rest of us, plus you have good rapport with the people.”
“Count me in!”
“As far as tech goes, our goal is to develop a translator device. You and I have Friday and Karen, but no one else does, so they need to be stand alone and portable. We need a way to communicate with people when we don’t know their language.”
“So like the google translate app, but without a phone.”
“And way better.”
“I expect no less.”
“So, are you ready to get started?”
“You bet!”
The next two weeks were filled with preparations. Tony and Peter put their heads together and spent all of their lab hours coming up with a functional, intuitive, portable translation device.
Unbeknownst to Tony, Peter took mission prep to the next level.
If his language skills had the potential to save lives, you’d better believe he was going to take that responsibility seriously.
Since of course he wouldn’t be able to learn any new language in such a limited timeframe, he strategized. The young genius had Friday run an analysis on Avenger’s com recording to compile a list of the 20 most used words when the heroes interacted with civilians.
These were words and phrases such as “danger”, “run away” “go that way” “hide” and “stay calm, but hurry”. The teen then researched the translations of these phrases into multiple languages, and began memorizing.
He poured all of his spare time into language studies, having Karen quiz him while on patrol, and Ned quiz him while they built Legos.
Before he knew it, the day of the festival arrived.
The Avengers arrived at the festival grounds an hour before opening, giving them time to disperse and do a pre-sweep of the grounds.
They claimed quadrants based on language abilities. Tony would be patrolling the southern European quadrant, putting his Italian to use. Bucky took the section around the Russian booths. Wanda found a small Sokovian stand and claimed the surrounding area.
Because Peter would be able to travel most quickly across the grounds without causing panic, and had the best rapport with the public, he was assigned to rove around the entirety of the festival, keeping a bird’s eye view of the scenario.
The young web-slinger was thrilled with this assignment, as he was able to maximize his opportunities to converse with people.
He spent the morning moving from booth to booth, taking selfies with children and reveling in their joy when they realized Spider-Man could speak to them in their mother tongue.
But this was an Avengers mission, so of course it couldn’t go smoothly.
“Bomb. There’s a bomb in the Northeast quadrant,” Clint’s voice crackled over the comms, “evacuate, now!”
Springing into action, the team began calmly but firmly directing people off the grounds.
Peter swung rapidly above the crowd, looking for clumps of people who looked confused. Each time he spotted one, he dropped down beside them, figured out their language, and succinctly directed them to safety.
This , he thought, is why I need to know so many languages!
In the end, they managed to contain the blast of the bomb enough that it only damaged a few booths and half of the main stage, instead of leveling the whole complex. There were three injured civilians and no fatalities. But that wasn’t the headline on the news that night.
“After this afternoon’s near-disaster, videos have been flooding in of Spider-Man evacuating people. The remarkable thing is that he seems to be consistently speaking the language of whatever person he is interacting with. Gary, is he actually speaking these languages, or is it another one of Stark’s AIs?”
“Martha, it actually seems to be a combination of both. In this clip here, we can hear a female voice speaking Nizaa coming from Spider-Man’s suit. Eliminating clips like this one, we are left with recordings featuring our favourite hero personally speaking at least 14 distinct languages.”
“Is it possible for someone to speak that many languages?”
“It’s possible, though exceedingly rare. Only about 3% of the world’s population speaks four or more languages. Our web-slinger’s talents clearly extend far beyond heroics.”
“Thank you Gary. You heard it here folks, our beloved Spider-Man is a certified polyglot. Use the hashtag #HeSpeaksMyLanguage to share your experience speaking with Spider-Man. Coming up next: California wildfires and their impact on the economy. But first, here’s Micah with the weather.”