The Unstoppable Wasp

It was that Wednesday. The Wednesday Nadia had also promised to help Taina with her Like Minds project.

At the same time she was supposed to be watching Revenge of the Sith.

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Which was the same time she was supposed to be taking a driving lesson.

“Janet…I’ll talk to you when you get here, okay?” Nadia switched off her comms before her machekha could respond.

Nadia tucked her phone away and decided the best course of action at the moment was to ignore the entire situation entirely. That usually solved things, right? She reached forward and tugged open the zipper on the agent’s JanSport.

The backpack, full to bursting, spilled its contents all over the pavement in the alleyway and across the unconscious agent’s back. It was a glut of different tech, all still in their packages, security tags still visible.

“Someone went on a five-finger shopping spree,” scolded Nadia. The agent didn’t respond, because she had kicked him until he wasn’t awake anymore. A.I.M. involved in petty theft? To what end? Nadia sifted through the items: a new iPhone, a few Fitbits, several heart-rate monitors, and…

“VERAs.” Nadia picked up a box with the familiar gold outline. Looks like A.I.M. was as desperate to get their hands on HoffTech’s new virtual assistant as everyone else.

And Nadia had one in a box at Pym Laboratories, untouched.

VERA.

How had she forgotten so completely about Janet’s name day gift? She’d packed it up with the rest of her belongings at Hank’s house and shipped it to G.I.R.L. weeks ago. But, like most of the boxes she’d sent over, it was still sitting in her room, sealed shut. She was going to get around to it…sometime. Soon! Definitely. But she hadn’t had the opportunity yet.

Nadia heard the telltale sounds of a S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical unit pulling up on the street outside Pym Philanthropy. Standing, she pulled her phone back out. Missed messages from her driving instructor, Janet, Taina, Ying, and, for some reason, Dedushka. And the journal and its list still waited on Nadia’s desk back at the lab.

VERA was the answer. Nadia was certain of it. It had to be. Because she wasn’t going to be able to balance all of this by herself.

* Mr. Stark always paid his taxes. Nadia had hacked into his financials when she’d first started on the Like Minds project just to be sure.

* Nadia would never forget the first time that Janet had showed her a Devo music video. She’d been amused by it, but it also made her feel like there were parts of American pop culture that she was never going to understand.

* Regular people should not have flamethrowers, for the record. Even the “garden-variety” non-military kind.

* Fancy ballet-speak for “jump,” not to be confused with a particularly delicious treatment of vegetables. With both your feet flat on the floor, bend your knees, then push yourself straight up into the air. Don’t forget to point your feet on lift-off!

† No one besides Nadia has used this term since 1850. It’s like a more vintage “drat.”

Nadia sat at her desk at Pym Labs the next day, staring at the white-and-gold package in front of her. A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled newspapers and kitchen utensils sat open next to Nadia on the floor. Its still-sealed counterparts were stacked in two other corners of the room. Nadia had slowly started to unpack, but that was just how it went—there was always more mess before it was tidy again.

Or so Nadia hoped. Dearly.

She could hear Taina out in the lab, hammering something aggressively. Priya hadn’t been around much lately—she’d either been at the shop or out in nature, trying to figure out the limits of her new powers. Shay and Ying popped in and out, but they were sort of…orbiting each other in a way that excluded all other heavenly bodies. Nadia found it endearing.

At least from a conceptual standpoint. Mostly. But she did miss her friends. Especially lately. Not that she saw friendship as transactional, but she certainly could have used help from the other G.I.R.L.s with the amount of work on her own plate. More than that, though, Nadia had come to depend on the G.I.R.L.s as a kind of stabilizing force. They each played their own valuable role in the lab: Nadia, the leader; Ying, the enforcer; Taina, the pragmatist; Priya, the dreamer; Shay, the spark that kept them all going. When even one of them was missing, it threw the entire balance off. With almost all of them missing, Nadia felt…adrift. Unmoored. She had more than enough to keep her occupied, of course. But she missed them. Priya’s big plans. Taina’s sardonic wit. Shay’s inventive spirit. Ying’s (occasionally alarming) dry humor and fire. What is a leader if she’s alone?

Still, Nadia didn’t want to begrudge her friends their happiness. She wasn’t selfish like that. But she was allowed to miss them. And she was allowed to seek balance from other places.

With that in mind, she popped open the small box in her hands and slid out the gold metal rectangle. She had put her Wasp suit on beforehand, just in case. She was never one to shy away from risk, but in moments like this, she often found herself erring on the side of caution.

Maybe it was because her own father had once accidentally invented a machine intelligence called Ultron, who was kind of Nadia’s brother-by-proxy, who became extremely evil and tried to destroy the entire planet, and therefore she had a difficult time trusting AI?

Could be.

But machine intelligence was also responsible for Nadia’s “nephew,” Vision, and her adorable “great-niece,” Vivian Vision. So she knew AIs weren’t all bad on principle.

Still. It never hurt to take some precautions.

Nadia poked around the HoffTech box for the instructions—none. They must have gotten lost in the chaos of the move.