Peter Parker was having one of what he had taken to call "Parker days". It had begun with Scorpion breaking out of jail and deciding to rob a bank, as one does. Still in the middle of chugging down a cup of coffee, Peter caught the news on the TV, sighed, stuffed his mouth with a cookie and ran to suit up. He would, of course, be late for work, if he could make it at all.
"Remember to call the plumber, as you promised you would!," screamed his wife Mary-Jane from the bathroom, with the characteristic shrill voice of someone who is suffering through a 4 degrees Celsius shower. "The hot water is still giving trouble!"
Peter, or now one should say Spider-Man, shouted a grunt of acknowledgment, then out of the window and off web slinging amidst the skyscrapers of New York. Ten minutes later, he was at the scene of Scorpion's robbery.
"What's the situation, Captain Stacy?[1]"
"Serious but stable for now, Spider-Man," responded the old cop in his gruff voice. "He's barricaded inside with hostages. He knows he can't hurt them, but he's looking for a way out."
"Let's see if I can make him one... bound and gagged," replied Spidey.
He was just crawling on top of the bank's ceiling, looking for a vent or some other entrance to sneak in, when his Spider-Comms device started ringing (meaning, he just received a notification from a news site on his smartphone).
"Rhino is on a rampage on the Brooklyn Bridge? Captain, I'm sorry, I have to go!"
"Very well, Spider-Man. We'll take care of this then."
"No, wait!," shouted Spider-Man, alarmed. "If you rush in, Scorpion is sure to risk hurting someone. Just keep him calm and delay! I'll go deal with Rhino and then come back to tie him up!"
"If you say so," replied Stacy, unsure. "We'll wait."
Spider-Man rushed all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge, where Rhino was charging cars and tossing them off into the East River - luckily with no occupants on board any more. He jumped in, landing a first surprise punch as a way of greeting.
"Long time no see, big guy!," he exclaimed cheerfully. "Doing anything fun? I would say I missed you, but I think I hit you just fine."
"I'll wipe that smirk off your face, Spider-Man!," growled Rhino.
"How would you know if I'm smirking? I have a mask," said Spider-Man.
"I... uh... you know what I mean! Get here, damn you!"
"Hey, why would I? Unlike someone I could name, I'm not stupid! Man, those punches look like they hurt. Good thing I'm not the road pavement. What did the poor thing do to you?"
"You did! You did the- I wanted to fight you! I drew you here!" Rhino grinned. "You walked into my trap!"
"Oooh, I feel all trapped already," said Spider-Man, zipping from one pylon to the other. He loved fighting on the Bridge - with all its pylons and cables it offered him the best manoeuvrability he could hope for. "But not as much as you will once you're in ja- one moment."
His phone rung again. Good thing he wore a earbud with microphone for these occasions.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled, after listening a bit to the excited and irritated voice on the other side. "Sorry, uh, I really have a situation and - I know I couldn't make the first period, but I swear that - no, please, there's no need to call a substitute. I am just a bit late, I promise that-"
The car wreck hit Spider-Man in the side, sending him tumbling; it took him a moment to recover his bearings and use a quick web to pull up before he crashed into the ground. The headset though had been broken beyond repair.
"I guess that's it for that call," he said to himself.
The sudden boom rattled the entire bridge. Spider-Man wondered if it had been Rhino's fault - but no, it was too far, and Rhino seemed as surprised by it as anyone else. It came from the direction of the Baxter Building.
"Whoa." mumbled Peter, after turning.
Above the skyscraper hovered a giant face wearing a purple helmet, seemingly emerging from a crack in space time itself. Around it zipped in the air a silvery, slick figure standing on a surf board.
Spider-Man looked at it alarmed, then turned to Rhino.
"Hey," he said, "is there any chance that you'd just sit here and wait quietly for me to deal with that and come back?"
"What? Even I know Galactus is Fantastic Four stuff! Let 'em deal with him! You're mine! I'm not letting you go without a fight!"
"You do get that if he eats Earth, you too will die and we'll have no fight?"
"He was here last week. He never eats Earth! Are you saying you think Galactus is a bigger menace than me?" roared Rhino, furious.
Spider-Man blinked so hard even his mask creased a bit.
"Noooo," he said, finally. "It's just that, huh, he's going to be a bit distracting, don't you think? We can't really focus on our little fight-"
"Our big fight," corrected him Rhino.
"-right, our massive, epic fight, while all that, uh, all that is going on."
...out of a space time fissure came screaming the legions of one thousand lost species into the sky of New York; the blazing fire of a supernova exploded towards the sky; machinery of unfathomable purpose assembled itself in shapes forbidden by Euclidean geometry...
The big villain grunted and sat down for half a minute deep in thought.
"Fine," he said, finally, sitting down, arms crossed. "You have one hour. Make me wait longer, and I start busting heads."
"Don't worry, Rhino. It won't take a minute."
It did, of course, take a minute. It took a lot longer than a minute. It had been a Parker day indeed. At the end, Galactus' minions had mostly kicked his ass and the entire thing had only been solved when Reed Richards, in a masterful stroke of librarianship, had managed to dig out an ancient alien treaty that bound the world-eater to give an additional reprieve of two millennia to Earth. In the meantime it had taken for that, and for Peter to pick himself up from the puddle of blood and pain he had been mashed into, Rhino got impatient and started rampaging again. Good thing Iron Man was passing by on his way to the Baxter Building himself; it had ended up with only three injured civilians and no fatalities except Rhino himself, summarily dispatched by a blast to the head because Tony Stark had been too much in a hurry to properly control his power.
The robbery had not gone so well. Amidst the panic, Scorpion had ended up trying to force his way through, carrying his hostages with him. He had been captured alive, but not all hostages had been so lucky; two had died.
At school, the kids had been without a teacher in the room when Galactus had appeared less than two miles away. There had been panic, and in the ensuing chaos two had managed to escape from the school. They'd been found later unscathed but their parents were not happy and were already demanding that whoever was responsible lose his job. Peter had a feeling about who that would be.
He could not even relax with a shower because, of course, the hot water circuit was still shot, Mary-Jane had trusted him to call a plumber, and amidst all the chaos, he'd forgotten to do that. So he ended up suffering through a rain of icy needles instead.
Cold and depressed as he hadn't been for a while, Peter Parker huddled on his couch and wanted to cry.
That was when the ghost of uncle Ben appeared.
"Hiya Peter," he greeted. "Bad day?"
"Awful," replied Peter, too tired to consider the metaphysical implications. "I couldn't even manage to teach children, stop a robbery, fight Rhino, defeat Galactus and call a goddamn plumber."
"Well, duh," said Ben. "That'd be too much for anyone."
Peter looked at him confused. "I thought it was you who told me that from great power comes great responsibility."
"Yes, but the opposite is also true," replied his uncle. "If you assume a great responsibility, you must possess a great power to match it."
"But if I don't do that stuff, people die! I'm the one who can take it, and the police, heck even some of the other heroes, simply can't. Not as well."
"But you still don't do that stuff, Peter. You're not omnipresent. You can't just clone yourself."
"Actually, uncle Ben..."
"We do not talk about that. It was just a figure of speech. Look, the point I'm making is, you do not exist in a hypothetical world in which there's a million of you ready to solve all problems simultaneously. You exist in the real one, where you need to pick a problem and solve that, and trust others to deal with the rest on their own. Otherwise you're not helping. You're just stopping others from solving their problems the best they can, which might not be as well as they would if you were available, but is certainly better than nothing at all, which is what they get."
"Heh. That sounds like a lesson."
"It sure is, Peter. I'd say it's a lesson that could apply to a lot of things, from working in a team to what are the reasonable limits of government regulations. I mean, imagine for example if someone made it illegal to do something without passing a certain approval procedure, while also committing so little resources to those approvals that they become a massive bottleneck stopping anything from being done at all."
"Sounds like even worse than having to deal with Galactus!"
They had a hearty laugh.
"By the way, uncle, I don't mean to be indelicate," said Peter, still chuckling, "but, uh, a ghost? How does that work? Are you real?"
"Of course I'm not real," said uncle Ben, with a smile. "Oscorp was just given a contract to manage the city's aqueduct, and Green Goblin has poisoned the reservoir with a hallucinogen that makes everyone see their departed loved ones so they'll lose touch with reality. Now you snap out of it and go kick his saggy ass, my boy."
As of now, this officially takes place in Earth-131, Less Wrong Spider-Man, where Captain Stacy never died because Doctor Octopus read up on AI safety principles and never built his extremely misaligned robot arms.