----
Hope gasped as the lab doors burst open and her father, Hank Pym, was shoved through them.
He was restrained, arms bound behind his back with shimmering energy bands.
"Caught him trying to sneak in," Max said, dusting himself off as he handed a bag to Nolan. "Nearly got clipped by one of his toys. Shrinking cars midair. Pretty sure one belonged to Sandman... the poor guy's gonna cry when he finds out."
Nolan opened the bag. Inside were Pym-tech discs loaded with the infamous Pym Particles. He twirled one thoughtfully in his fingers.
"These little toys again."
Then he turned to Hope, his tone dead serious.
"Here's the deal. Either you return to full size voluntarily... or I kill your father. Choose."
Before she could answer, two small figures popped into view Hope and her reluctant tagalong, Scott Lang.
Scott avoided eye contact. Again.
Then suddenly, all three of them, Hope, Scott, and Hank, clutched their temples and collapsed.
Nolan didn't even look up. "You brought this on yourselves."
---
When Hank stirred awake, the first thing he noticed was the headache. The second was the smirk on Nolan's face.
"Dr. Hank Pym," Nolan greeted casually. "Been meaning to meet you. Shame it's like this."
"I've read your work too, Dr. Nolan," Hank said dryly, trying to sit upright despite the restraints. "Though... is this how you Easterners greet your guests?"
Hope and Scott were still coming, too. Nolan, meanwhile, was focused on a series of monitors, examining something with a device that hummed with arcane energy.
"Your tech is impressive," Nolan muttered, eyes locked on a shrunken object under his lens. "Altering an object's mass and volume through quantum manipulation? Not bad. Though it makes more sense from a mystical perspective than a physical one."
"You stole my research," Hank snapped. "You want to lecture me on ethics? If you hadn't taken the Pym Particles, I wouldn't be here."
Nolan didn't take the bait. He was too focused.
What he saw through his mystical instrument astonished him more than he'd expected.
---
The Pym Particle was supposed to shrink and enlarge objects by altering their molecular spacing. But the way it actually functioned was far stranger.
It wasn't just subatomic separation. No, this particle displaced matter into another dimension.
Not in theory in practice.
Ant-Man standing on an ant? A tank on a keychain? The physics didn't line up unless the mass was transferred elsewhere. If mass stayed constant, shrinking something small would turn it into a walking singularity.
This wasn't just physics.
It was dimensional interference.
"Changing size and weight is the shallow explanation," Nolan said aloud. "What you've really done is create a transdimensional tether."
Hank scoffed. "That's your theory?"
"No. That's the conclusion," Nolan corrected. "The Pym Particle doesn't just modify atoms. It splits them and threads some of their quantum states into an adjacent dimension. And when you grow? That dimension feeds kinetic energy back into our own."
Hank fell silent.
Nolan turned to face him. "It's not about shrinkage. It's about migration. You've created a bridge to a parallel space an unclaimed one. A raw dimension with no consciousness of its own. And you hold the key."
Hope and Scott were now fully awake, listening in stunned silence.
"You… figured that out in a few hours?" Hank asked, the disbelief clear in his voice.
Nolan grinned. "I skimmed the surface. Quantum sight helped. You know… magic."
---
The room quieted.
For Hank Pym, a man who had spent his life on science, to watch someone connect his life's work to mysticism and be right was jarring.
But Nolan wasn't done.
"Also, your math's inefficient," he added casually, spinning a hologram of Hank's formulas in the air. "I optimized your equations. Should improve particle extraction rates by about 200%. Still slow though. Must be leftovers from your youth."
"That's impossible," Hank muttered. "You rewrote decades of work in a day?"
"If time mattered," Nolan said with a shrug, "we wouldn't need geniuses, would we?"
There was no malice in his voice only fact.
For Nolan, solving impossibilities was simply routine.
----
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