Thor had gone very still, squinting in a specific direction across the compound.
Then he apparently made a decision about something, rubbed his face once with one hand, and composed his expression into something approximating approachable.
(Not cowardice. Just—a natural and entirely characteristic gentleness.)
The assembled heroes followed his gaze and got a front-row view of a streak of black light punching through the cloud cover and converting, in the last hundred meters, into a controlled descent that ended in a perfect hero landing on the lawn: one knee, one fist, the particle-effect dispersal of the Hero suit rising off Jordan's shoulders in shards of gold light as he straightened and walked toward them.
Tony gave him a long look.
"I remember," he said, spreading his hands, "you said you were going to find an interesting machine." A pause. "You appear to be empty-handed."
"I found it," Jordan said, raising one finger. "I just carry things differently than you do."
He snapped his fingers.
The heroes flinched.
Several people's hands moved before they caught themselves. Rocket's ear went flat. Rhodes's right gauntlet had half-activated before his rational brain caught up with his nervous system and talked it down.
"That's Thanos's fault," someone said, which was accurate and solved nothing.
Jordan's snap had been purely theatrical—F-boy had done the actual work. The Stand produced a card from thin air, released it, and the card materialized on the lawn as a full-sized vehicle: an old, visibly modified van of ambiguous vintage, sitting in the afternoon light with the energy of something that has seen better decades.
Jordan made a presentational gesture. "There it is."
Silence.
The assembled heroes looked at the van. The van sat there.
"Please," Rhodes said slowly, "tell me we don't have to drive through time like in the Back to the Future."
Banner pushed his glasses up. "I don't believe so."
Despite its appearance, something about the vehicle had caught both Banner and Tony's attention simultaneously—the kind of catch that happens when two very good minds recognize signs of serious engineering hidden under deliberately unremarkable bodywork. They converged on it without discussion, moving to different sides, peering through windows, running hands along modifications.
The inspection took about three minutes.
"Everything on the outside looks shabby," Tony said, mostly to himself, "and everything on the inside is—" He opened the rear panel and went quiet for a moment. "—considerably less shabby."
"I can't immediately determine the operating principle," Banner said, crouched near the undercarriage, "but the apparent function involves reducing objects—or people—to microscopic scale. The mechanism for doing so, and the power source driving it, I haven't identified yet."
Tony was already ahead of him. He stood up, tapping his chin. "Pym Particles."
Banner looked up. "Say again?"
"My father worked with a researcher named Hank Pym. Discovered a subatomic particle capable of altering the size of objects—named it after himself, obviously." Tony turned, something assembling itself in his expression. "If this machine runs on Pym Particles, it could theoretically open access to the quantum realm. A subatomic dimension no one's explored in any systematic way." He paused. "A few years back, didn't your team bring in someone who could change size? Used Pym Particles for the mechanism?"
Steve Rogers's expression did something complicated.
"...I'm not particularly familiar with him."
Banner stood, dusting his knees. "So it's possible—time travel through the quantum realm, the way Jordan suggested?"
The two of them pivoted back toward each other with the focused energy of people who have just found a shared problem worth solving, the conversation accelerating into terminology that respected no audience's ability to keep up.
Steve Rogers, who had the highest level of military and tactical expertise in the room and the lowest formal education, absorbed about thirty seconds of this and made the decision to say nothing about it.
English would be appreciated, he did not say. Plain, direct English.
"We can work out the theory in the lab," Jordan said, stepping between them and opening the driver's door. "Let's get it running first."
"Hold on—" Tony started.
"We haven't mapped the startup sequence—" Banner said simultaneously.
"—if there are conditional initialization requirements—"
"—we could destabilize the quantum channel before we understand what we're channeling into—"
Jordan's finger hovered over a large red button labeled START.
He looked at them.
"Is this how you start it?"
The two brilliant minds absorbed this question. Looked at the button. Looked at the dense nest of wiring connecting the driver's console to the modified machinery in the back. Processed the implications of its design philosophy.
Tony shrugged. "...Press it."
(Jordan, who was aware from his meta-knowledge of the original timeline that a rat had activated this system—a rat, operating by complete accident, with no technical understanding whatsoever—was not particularly worried about adverse consequences and become the unsung hero of the MCU)
He pressed the button.
Indicator lights came on in sequence. Music played, briefly and inexplicably, from somewhere in the dashboard. Then the machinery in the back of the van powered up with a rising hum, layers of luminescence building outward as the quantum realm channel opened—light that moved in directions that didn't quite correspond to any of the available three, casting shadows that went the wrong way.
A tremor ran through the chassis.
Something small and dark shot out of the channel and hit the lawn, rolling twice before it stopped—and then expanded rapidly as the Pym Particle compression released, a small figure inflating to full human scale in about a second, ending up flat on his back in a red suit.
"Ow. My back." A pause. "Hope? Hope, you should have—"
Scott Lang sat up and looked around.
The Avengers looked back at him.
"...Who are you people?"
Then his eyes started moving through the assembled faces and the names began arriving—he could see recognition hitting him in real time, processing speed clearly struggling to keep up with the scale of what he was looking at.
"Captain America. Iron Man. Black Widow. Thor. War Machine." He scrambled to his feet. "Oh my god. Are you—am I—is this real? We met before, remember? At the airport? Leipzig?"
"We remember," Steve said, with the patient tone of someone managing a person whose nervous system is slightly ahead of their brain. "You are—"
Scott grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. "Scott. Scott Lang. Captain, I am a massive fan of yours—"
"Scott." Steve held up his free hand, which was still being shaken. "What I'm about to tell you may be difficult to process. I need you to stay with me."
The handshake slowed.
Scott looked at Steve's expression, which was not the expression of someone joking.
"...Okay."
The explanation took about ten minutes. Scott's face went through a remarkable number of configurations during this period, cycling between disbelief, horror, and the specific expression of a man who is doing math he doesn't want to finish.
At the end of it, he sat down on the grass and stared at the middle distance.
"So." He pressed his fingertips to his temples. "I went into the Quantum Realm. Thanos snapped his fingers. And now..." His voice trailed somewhere. He brought it back. "Hope is gone. Dr. Pym is gone."
He said it like someone testing whether the words became real when spoken aloud.
They did.
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