2702/Of Shrunk Cities and Rulers

Of Shrunk Cities and Rulers
Date of Scene:	31 July 2020
Location:	Pym residence, New Jersey.
Synopsis:	Nadia sets up returning the Genoshan bottles to Lorna and the two have a lovely chat about Science.
Cast of Characters:	Nadia Pym-van Dyne, Lorna Dane

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Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
It is a beautiful day in the beautiful suburb of Creskill, New Jersey. Peaceful, quiet, and removed from the chaos that is New York City and its myriad problems. The houses in this quaint residential are not the biggest, but by no means small either, and all quite well maintained.

It is here that one finds the Pym residence, home of one Dr. Henry "Hank" Pym at least when he isn't sleeping in his lap, and more recently his long estranged daughter Nadia.

It is the latter Pym scion who is waiting on the front porch for Lorna to arrive at their arranged meeting. The ever smiling girl is sitting one one of those swimming benches suspended by chains from the ceiling, swaying gently forward and back.

The young teenager is dressed simply but fashionably in a reddish-pink bomber jacket, over a black V-necked T-shirt, with a short red and black plaid pleated skirt, and stompy looking boots that lace up to her knees.

Next to her on the bench is what appears to be a still warm plate of chocolate chip cookies.

Lorna Dane has posed:
A purple portal opened up from the other side of the world, and deposited the Genoshan royal on the front steps of suburbia. All it had taken was a text message, a picture, and Blink was able to make sure Lorna got to where she needed to be. Which was useful in the extreme, even if it shattered the illusion of calm and quiet the area projected.

A small wave behind her followed, and the portal snapped shut. The green haired woman was tall, but wore an understated tan skirt, and white top. It was plain. Boring. It fit in. Or would've if not for the color of her hair. A large pair of oversized sunglasses perched on her nose and she looked over them as she checked the house number before approaching it.

Her sandals tapping softly up the walk as she came to the porch and caught sight of Nadia. "Hope I didn't make you wait too long." She offered, her voice in a flat tone that suggested that she was tired and trying her best to be polite about things.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
The opening of a portal on the front lawn is kind of hard to miss! Nadia's eyes light up at the sight, it's far from the first portal she has seen but it never ceases to be fascinating, particularly as her mind races trying to figure out a single universal principle behind them all whether magic, mutant, or theoretical physics, it is that potential for a single unifying thread that drives her curiousity.

Hopping off the swing bench she picks up the plate of cookies and half walks half skips across the lawn towards Lorna with a big smile on her face. This kid seems to know no fear, it isn't even that she's not intimidated more like a singular determination to be friendly to everyone she meets.

"Hello! I'm Nadia. I'm glad you got my message. Cookie?" she holds out the plate of still warm cookies, "I've been experimenting with cooking, it's like tasty chemistry!" she beams.

Lorna Dane has posed:
Someday Lorna would eat something offered to her and doubtlessly come to regret it. Sushi in Atlantis and now cookies in New Jersey. A slow if hesitant smile is returned as she reached out to take an offered cookie. "Hi, I did... please just call me Lorna. I can't stand the rest of the pomp and circumstance of whatever comes with titles." She muttered, and paused to take a nibble of the cookie.

A glance was spared for the porch and the shade that came with it, but she didn't press Nadia to get out of the sun either. It was hot per usual come summer and she wanted to get to the meat of things.

"These are good.. Thanks."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia beams at the compliment, a regular ray of sunshine in her own right, "Thank you! I'm still trying to get the recipie right. I altered the sugars on a molecular level to try and blend better with the cacao." she says in the same way a normal cook might describe a new innovative recipie twist like adding sprinkles.

"Would you like to come inside? This humidity is the /worst/. Or we can sit in the swing." a pause as she catches herself getting off topic, "Sorry you didn't come all this way to discuss cookies and weather." she turns to walk back towards the house while listening to see if there is a preference for their ultimate destination. "I know what it's like, at least a little. Being seperated from a father and wanting to help them. I crossed the world to find my father, only to discover he was on a Parallel Earth, and only recently got him back. I want to help you get your father back, too."

Lorna Dane has posed:
A blink followed, at the talk of the sugars and tying them to the cacao on the molecular level. "Huh, I can't say I ever thought of that.. but I guess it's not so different than my fusing metal alloys to fibers. Not that many people think about how to do that either." Her smile warmed slightly, and she nodded to the house.

"AC sounds good. My hair always turns into a rats nest if I hang out in the humidity too much." She finished off the cookie, patting her hand off on her skirt as she made to follow Nadia.

Her smile faded however as the other woman spoke of fathers and missing them. "I thought he was dead until a short while ago. Along with everyone else. And a lot of people couldn't care less if Magneto returned to the world, but yeah.. it matters to me." She exhaled a breath, shoving her hands into the pockets of her skirt.

"For all that he didn't raise me, he's still my dad." She added softly, her green eyed gaze swinging back to regard Nadia. "That's brave of you to do that."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
"You can do what with what?" Nadia is instantly intrigued by the idea of fusing metal alloys to fibers. But she files that away in her brain to ask about later for the time being. "Okay, let's go inside then."

She leads Lorna up the porch stairs and pushes open the door.

The Pym residence while not filthy per se is not exactly neat and orderly either, particularly since Nadia moved in. Projects in various states of completion abound. The kitchen is a warzone of her latest cooking efforts. But the entire place is blissfully cooled by Central Air.

Nadia leads Lorna into the living room where a big comfy sofa and a couple of laz-e-boys form a semi-circle around a giant flat panel TV.

The conversation about fathers continues as they proceed through the house, "People say a lot of things about my Dad, too. The only reason they didn't think he was dead is randomly disappearing isn't even unusual for him. Some of them genuinely seem to wish I'd left him in that other world."

She sets the cookies down on the coffee table and flops down on to the sofa sinking into the cushions, gesturing for Lorna to sit wherever she'd like. "The first time I met him was on that Parallel Earth, strapped into a machine by his parallel self fused with his worst creation. I was actually raised in a Russian Gulag, it's a long story, but he's still my Dad and I had to help him, had to meet him." She takes another cookie and offers the plate to Lorna again.

Lorna Dane has posed:
Lorna trailed along side, "It's using the charge of the various alloys with a mixture of my own magnetic bonds.. and well.." She shrugged and let the subject fall as they stepped inside the house. Her eyebrows shooting upward slightly as she gazed about. Her father was the exact opposite when it came to maintaining his space. Critical in the extreme and with an eye for anything out of order with a hyper awareness of it all. Part of that came with a palace entirely made of metal, and the other, she was sure.. was just her father's upbringing and a result of what he'd gone through.

Still, she didn't comment as she followed to the living room and she settled in the available seat carefully. Her legs folding as she took up as little space as possible in the room. It was a family home in a ways that Lorna hadn't seen in years. And it panged some part of her memory and twisted her gut. For all the grand palaces, and Mansions in her life, she hadn't had access to something quite so //normal//.

Her gaze swung back to Nadia, and she blinked in surprise. "I met my father when I was let's see.. seventeen.. I'd been with the X-men for a year training my powers. It was during the take down of Genosha's Magistrates, and the slave estates..." She trailed off, "I ended up staying in Genosha more and more after. I wanted to know if he was everything they said he was. A terrorist. A killer. Some people there love him, and worship him for what he's done for mutants.. But most of the world hates him." She pursed her lips. "I suspected he was my father before that, but.." She shook her head.

"He left me to be raised when I was child by the Danes.. my mother's husbands family." She forced a weak smile and she glanced back to Nadia. "But in the years that I've spent with him I've learned a great deal about who he really was too."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia nods her head listening as she munches on her cookie. It is refreshing in its own way, perhaps even theraputic to talk to someone whose experiences at least loosely resemble her own. "That must have been hard." It's empathetic, she doesn't ask about the truth that Lorna found.

"I want to help you, I knew I did after listening to you in that meeting, and I do even more now. Whether it is just making sure the miniaturized sections of Genosha are returned to you, or whether it is with my science and technology. I can get you in there if you want to talk to him in person. Whatever you want."

Lorna Dane has posed:
Lorna exhaled a breath, as she shifted in overly plush chair, and she considered Nadia. "Not any harder than the last six months of my life." She mused, and she shook her head. It was odd how both of them seemed to have been ditched by world famous, or infamous, fathers and only later in life reconnected with them. But she would accept it nonetheless, particularly as it meant Nadia's aid.

"Thank you. I am sorry I was short there. I was just.. I was frustrated. People I didn't know were making mandates that would put my father and my people at risk. I trust Stark, for all that he's an ego driven ass sometimes.. he is brilliant and has worked with my siblings. So when he said your father was the man to talk to, and you by extension.. then that's what it is. I only have a degree in geophysics. Not shrinking and resizing things or people." She added, and grimaced faintly.

"I liked your father's idea, of getting out the people first if at all possible. I'm.. I won't pretend that I'm not scared of something going wrong."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
"Are you sure you don't want another cookie?" Nadia asks offering the plate again, her second cookie having completely vanished now.

"I don't think you have anything to apologize for. Your father, your people are in the hands of strangers, completely at their mercy. It is hard to imagine something more stressful than that. I think Donna was just trying to help in her own way."

She makes a face when Lorna brings up Tony Stark, "Yes, I think he is all of those things. I didn't really know what to expect when I met Tony, he was nice enough and ordered pizza while we were working, but I really didn't like the way he talked about my father." She gives a little shrug like it can't be helped though.

"That idea, restoring the people seperately is worth exploring. But there are some very real complications to consider. This is probably classified and I'm probably going to get a lecture from a stern man in a suit for telling you this," By the sound of it, it won't be the first time. "But there was a bus that was miniturized along with Bushwick but escaped the radius of the alien spatial transferrence beam. I was there when SHIELD recovered it while performing scans of the area for Tony. I helped them restore that bus and its occupants before we had recovered Brainiac's technology. We did it using Pym Particles, the my own beam technology, and the entire New York City power grid. Power supply will definitely be an issue but my father did have a theory he said that would help with that. Time is also a factor, but maybe it will still be okay for Genosha. We can run some tests." She seems quite optimistic but also realistic about the options.

"Also I really do want to hear about how you bond alloys to fibers later, it's just really easy for me to get lost on tangents and I'm trying really hard right now!" She apparently has at least a modicum of self-awareness.

Lorna Dane has posed:
Lorna smiled and shook her head in regards to another cookie. "No thanks, I just ate not too long ago." She exhaled a breath in regards to her apology. And a small shrug followed, "I sometimes have trouble figuring out if I'm overreacting to things or not. I have a temper.. and if I'm on a manic streak, I won't notice that I'm lashing out." She grimaced briefly, which was then just as rapidly twisted into a laugh at the comment about Tony.

"He can be nice, but he'll say the wrong thing and be utterly confused about it later.." She shook her head again, and bit back the urge to sigh. The news about the bus that had escaped Brainiac's attack earned her interest and she leaned forward slightly.

"I don't trust a bunch of strangers using tech that is alien to bring back my people, for starters. We don't know what it can or can't do, its limits. It's problems. None of it. I don't want my people as an experiment." She pursed her lips together, and held out her hands to Nadia.

"I'm quite literally the world's strongest electromagnetic battery right now. If you can figure out a way that I can not blow your power circuits, I can give whatever you want a boost. More or less with the right structures, and converters, in theory at least.. I can control anything on the spectrum from infrared to gamma rays.. or at least, manipulate the magnetic fields around them to do what I want. It's not perfect. Not like Stark's reactors." She exhaled a breath.

"But I can act as a backup or something." Her eyebrows creased as she spoke, and it was clear just how desperate she was to help out in some way.

"You're doing a good job focusing."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
A third cookie is taken for herself, Nadia doesn't seem offended at all by Lorna's refusal, she just likes cookies and wants to share them.

"I can understand your reluctance. A lot of progress is being made in understanding that technology, I've filled at least ten notebooks, but it shouldn't be tested on your people first. It shouldn't be tested on any people. We're going to do some tests before Bushwick to make sure it is safe, too many lives hang in the balance, it kind of makes my head spin thinking about thousands of lives riding on everything I'm doing. I can't make even a small mistake, everything has to be perfect." she suppresses a slight shudder there, there really is a lot resting on the shoulders of this girl of barely sixteen years.

But then Lorna speaks about her powers and Nadia's worries are momentarily forgotten as her eyes light up, "You can do what?! That's SO cool. It destroyed my gauntlet the last time we did it but my gauntlet was never designed to take that kind of power load. I could build a slightly scaled up version with extra heat sinks, insulation, and dampeners, and then you could power it. That could work! Then we would just need a way to get the people out of the bottle, though it shouldn't be hard to shrink some sort of Aerial Transport with PymTech and fly them out for resizing, do you have something we could use?"

Her mind is racing as she games out the possibilities of a new and completely unexpected variable for her equations. The scientific applications of it are also staggering, and really she just thinks electricity powers are really cool. Sometimes it is almost like she forgets she has powers of her own.

Lorna Dane has posed:
Lorna shifted in her seat, "There's about one hundred thousand people in Bushwick last census, and Genosha before the Sentinels had sixteen million.. We have a few thousand survivors right now on the island. And I suspect there are at least as many from Genosha's bottles as there were from Bushwick. If they're all alive.. that is." She grimaced, and exhaled a breath, looking down at her hands.

A glance followed as Nadia got excited about her powers and what she'd said. "It's not electricity.. it's electromagnetism. Which is an added layer. Electric charges create magnetic fields, I'm not sure how I can create magnetic fields without it separately, and still manipulate straight electricity from a socket or if it's aimed at me.. but I can. You would need something that can handle the perpendicular magnetic fields that bleed off from the electrical fields I can generate in order to use it. It's like getting a magnet to light a lightbulb, you need to add a coiled wire to get it to work." She grimaced.

She held out her hands and a light green energy flitted through them in front of Nadia. "I've never tried to truly measure out how much power output I can generate that way, and it's chancy. So it's not something that we should rely on alone.." She murmured, and pursed her lips together. "It's all theory, I haven't actually tried to power anything, because not many electronics can take a hit and not be fried.."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia inhales sharply as the numbers bring her back down to Earth again. 'Thousands' in her mind was probably just shorthand for 'a lot' but hundreds of thousands, millions, that's some serious pressure right there. She doesn't shy away or buckle beneath it though.

"I can build something like that," she pronounces resolutely.

She watches the hands closely as she listens, like she is taking mental notes. "There's only one way to really find out what you can do, test your powers on things!" This prospect positively excites her, "So what if destroy a few machines in the process, that's just part of Science!" This girl clearly has very little concept of money and is definitely a Pym.

"If you don't want to rely on it yet, that's fine too. I bet Tony and Shuri can come up with something, still I think it would be good to test and figure out, you never know when it could be useful in the future!" Enthusiastic doesn't even cover it with this girl.

Lorna Dane has posed:
Lorna smiled faintly, and nodded as Nadia spoke. "With everything else.. that might work. It's something to consider. I am not averse to testing it out, but I also know we want to get everything done as fast as is safely possible too. It's a stretch, but I can be back up at the very least." She exhaled a breath. "But for the future yes, that's fine. I don't mind being part of a few dozen or so experiments if it helps anything."

She shifted in her seat, "That all said, I do want the Genoshan bottles back." She paused for a moment, turning her green eyed gaze back to Nadia again.

"There are other mutants that aren't so patient and without their return I can't promise they won't act. The Brotherhood is willing to do something stupid over all this.. and I promised I would make sure our people are in our hands too." She shifted and pulled out her cell phone from her pocket as she waited to hear from Nadia one way or another. She'd broached the topic in a roundabout way, and this was her straight forward attempt to get to the heart of everything in the end.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia freezes in place for a moment with sudden realization. She was trying /so hard/ not to get lost in tangents and in the end wound up there anyway, even if they were science tangents about helping people. She smiles sheepishly as Lorna cuts straight back to the real purpose of their meeting.

"Right, Genosha, and I want you to have them. That was really neat the way you arrived. If you can do that say, outside of the Titans Tower, I should be able to get all of the bottles from the lab and down to the entrance for pickup. Can I have your phone number? It will take me a bit of time to get there but I can send you a picture for the portal when I am ready." The sheepish smile turns bright again, she is quite happy to be helping with this.

Lorna Dane has posed:
Lorna smiled, helpfully flicking through her phone for the screen with her number in it, and holding it out to Nadia to take and program into her own phone. "It's alright. I get caught up in talks about science too. Not often mind you, because rarely does anyone want a lecture on the magnetic fields, or the way they interact with the Earth.. but still." She leaned back in her chair as she let Nadia handle the phones.

"A picture of where the portal needs to be opened is all I need and my friend Clarice can make sure they arrive where they need to be. I trust her with my life, and everyone I care for. Plus, you get to see her portal again and if you wanted to get any readings on it, that would be the time to do it."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
"I would love a lecture on the magnetic fields and the way they interact with the Earth from someone with your perspective!" Nadia is completely serious as she says this, while jumping to her feet as if for emphasis. The suggestion of being able to take readings on the portal is just icing on the cake that seems to dial her excitement straight to eleven.

"This won't take long!" a pair if bio-synthetic insectlike wings sprout seemingly from her back, "You can wait here in the air conditioning!" a pause, "If my Dad comes home just give him a cookie and tell him you're friend!"

And with that she zips off out the front door and into the air towards Metropolis!