4614/Babes in Toyland

Babes in Toyland
Date of Scene:	05 January 2021
Location:	Alleyway
Synopsis:	Vorpal has a really bad day and meets Ant-Girl in an alley. After being toyed with, he manages to rabbit hole himself away to get help.
Cast of Characters:	Terry O'Neil, Nadia Pym-van Dyne

---

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Lois. Lois Lane was a Doppelganger! Terry had to change into Vorpal and leave the area as soon as possible. He Rabbit Holed right to his mother's place and, after makng sure his mother was still gone at the hotel and nobody had moved in pretending to be her, he walked around for a bit.

And then, he felt as if he were being... observed.

Looking around, the Cheshire cat frowns. There were birds on the trees, even in winter. Was one of them green? Hard to tell. There was only one real way to know, however...

He turned the corner into an alleyway. There were no trees there. A bird following him there would be... weird.

Fiddling for his phone, he decides to also send a notice to some of his team members of what he had found out.

To Nadia: <<Where is the ink dot? Dlete this answer from your phone after you send it>> - if Nadia answers correctly, Vorpal stops walking to send the following message:

<<Lois Lane Doppelganger sighted. Kian is currently verified by me. Beast Boy, however, is suspicious. Watch your back around him carefully. Will coordinate with Donna. Any updates on your end?>>

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
The answer comes back from Nadia. <<I am not sending that to a phone that might be compromised.>> Operational Security is a hallmark of Red Room training. Though moments later the correct answer is sent over the special designated encrypted frequency to Terry's T-Comm instead. Followed by <<Still working on detection technology, portal location should be up and running soon, scientific doppleganger verification efforts still ongoing.>>

While Terry is looking down at his phone however, something does drop down from above that is neither a bird nor a plane, it's an Ant-Girl? If Terry has ever seen the Ant-Man suit, this looks a lot like it, except its form fitting nature shows a more femine physique than Scott Lang or Hank Pym might possess, shorter too, dimensions that just might fit ...Nadia.

"Hi!" She exclaims with a friendly smile, waving at Terry. "Are you lost?"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
The Cheshre cat's head snaps up and glances at the figure that hails him.

He has been getting steadily more and more paranoid over the last twenty-four hours. His heart begins to beat quickly. He slips his phone into his vest, with the heart-themed buttons, and clears his throat.

"Ahem. Hello. No, I'm not lost," he says evenly, eyebrows lifting slightly, "You from around here? You must know this neighborhood very well."

He tries to catch any familiar details, "Have we met before?"

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Ant-Girl pulls off her helmet, still beaming. The face under the mask is unmistably Nadia or possibly Alice Liddell to Terry's Cheschire mind, but a girl who looks uncannily like his teammate nonetheless. "Of course you're not lost, because I found you." Her smiling expression widens into a grin as she regards Terry.

"I don't think we've met," she shakes her head. "But you seem like a lot of fun. Do you like games? I love games! Want to play a game?" She asks taking a step forward.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
His blood runs cold. Of course, he is a chaos node. Of course, he would start finding doppelgangers left and right.

Of course it would be Nadia.

"While I am... sure you must love games, I am afraid I have to pass. My religion forbids me from partaking in games with young women in high-tech armor without first at least four previous encounters and an auspicious solstice conjunction." He takes a step back, "You do remind me of someone, though..."

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
That high tech armor, it doesn't look exactly like the ant armors. Perhaps troublingly, it resembles Nadia's custom improvements to the Waspette armor, including her gauntlets. One of which is suddenly pointed at Terry, "No, no, no, no." She shakes her head, "I've already decided we are going to have a lot of fun together. Toys don't get to choose." Apparently this version of Nadia never learned what consent is.

There is a flash of light as a beam shoots out of the Doppleganger Nadia's gauntlet an envelopes Terry within an energy field of Pym Particles. It is a trippy experience, perhaps not unlike drinking things in Wonderland, as Terry finds himself getting smaller and smaller and the world around him larger and larger, until at the size of a large ant the floor of the alley becomes a vast plain, Nadia's boots an unassailable mountain, and Terry's story more Gulliver in Brobdinag than either Wonderland or Oz.

"There that's better, now what shall we play first?" Ant-Girl wonders aloud as she squats down to retrieve her prize from the alley floor.

"Hope, where have you gotten off to?" Comes a woman's voice with a Hungarian accent from somewhere above accompied by what sounds like the buzzing of a very large pair of insect wings.

"Coming Mom!" 'Hope' calls towards the 'Mom' voice, momentarily distracted as she looks up, "I just found someone interesting for my collection!"

Terry O'Neil has posed:
"OH for fuck's sake can we just /not/--"

But Vorpal's protests are in vain, as he soon becomes the size of a smurf's pimple. He isn't immediately freaked out by this, because he does come from Wonderland. He knows that there are drinks and concoctions that could fix this... if he could get to Wonderland. He has been having problems leaving realms, so that is out of the question. The most important problem is the fact that Hope is grabbing him, and he has very little space to get away.

The Cheshire cat... has had enough. He has been /niced/ at by Lois, the man he loves may be gone. And now... /this/.

He narros his eyes and suddenly slams his hands on the massive gauntlet that is holding him, as soon as a distraction from a mother who should be pretty dead comes to the rescue.

"NO!" can she even hear his tiny voice? "/I/ get to call the game... and the game is... dance yourself into the wall, you -" and here he lets out a very colorful curse in the dialect of Wonderland that would probably have made his mother force him to wash his mouth with soap until the next time Halley's Comet came around. A bright blast of purple light extends from him and into the gauntlets, and the power of chaos magic surges through Hope's armor, using pure, irrational, illogical magic to take control, albeit temporarily, over the suit and provide a terpsichorean distraction he could take advantage of.

No sooner has the armor started to dance, he takes a runing leap off the gauntlet and into the void.

Titan's Tower. Titan's Tower. Titan's Tower- he dan see his focus- the soft carpet of the area leading to Nadia's lab... can he stick it?

The Rabbit Hole, tiny to accomodate his size, opens up. It's going to be very narrow timing, if Hope's mother arrives in time to see what is going on.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
This isn't how it is supposed to go, this isn't how it is supposed to go at all! Hope practically growls in frustration, the smile twisting with momentary rage, as her armor, against her will, lets go of Terry and straights up to her full height in order to begin moonwalking into the alley wall. There is an audible thud as Hope impacts the wall hard and smacks the back of her head. "Ugh, that's not fair, toys shouldn't fight back." She murmurs in a bit of a daze.

"Hope? Do I need to come down there? We do not have time to linger here. No more distractions young lady!" The Hungarian woman's voice comes from above again, the sound of the wings a little bit louder, a little bit closer.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
Closer! Closer! Vorpal's heart is in his throat, until he remembers that it is he who commands the Rabbit Hole! Just by thinking it, the portal swoops to scoop him up, and closes behind him.

He doesn't land on the carpet, though... once on the other side, he uses a concatenation of Rabbit Holes in the style of a rollercoaster to get him from point A to point B- the inside of Nadia's lab. He had fortunately seen Nadia's lab multiple times, so Rabbit Holing there wasn't an issue.

The issue was that he was teeny now. And it was going to get some finagling to attract Nadia's attention to help him out.

"Man... fuck this day. Seriously."

He could never figure Mondays out.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
A lucky Vorpal manages to leave a distraught Ant-Girl behind in that alley. The Titans' laboratories however are not the safest place at the best of times given some of the next level SCIENCE! that goes on there. Things like electromagnetic pulse weapons and ion thrusters and resident scientists who may be prone to cutting a few corners on regular safety procedures at times due to the nature of their own powers.

The section of the labs that Nadia has taken over is currently filled with computers and screens and what look like antennas of some sort and large machine casings. It is a veritable jungle of assorted technological elements. What's more, it is currently filled with showers of sparks as Nadia is welding pieces of one of the antenna arrays together, while hovering several feet off the ground using her bio-synthetic wings.

Terry O'Neil has posed:
There is no way tiny little Vorpal is going to be able to get her attention. The Cheshire cat can only hope that his powers can help. Instead of trying multiple schemes, he decides to go for the most blatant and use his powers of illusion to summon---

An enormous marquee. It is definitely an old school movie theater one, with flashing lights and bold, black letters that read:

VORPAL GOT SHRUNK BY YOUR DOPPELGANGER, NADIA! HELP!

There would also be a second neon sign, an arrow helpfully pointing down towards the miniscule Cheshire cat, who jumps up and down in the hopes that he will be seen.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia's attention is quite focused on her welding, she is in fact quite good at not only the theoretical side of STEM but also actual physical construction. It's the blinking lights that are not sparks stemming from her torch which catch her attention though. Blink. The torch stops and one arm reaches over to pull the mask up. Nadia blinks a few more times as she reads the sign and then an expression of horror slowly takes over her face. She had really really been hoping she wouldn't have a doppleganger, this, this is a problem.

A few moments after that it finally occurs to her, "Oh right, Vorpal." She reaches into a pocket of her labcoat and suddenly has one of her own gauntlets in hand, which she pulls on. From another pocket she somehow draws forth her helmet with its sensors and HUD display and begins tracking readings through the room. The arrow of course is quite helpful, but she's not just going to fire an enlarging beam haphazardly in the lab, particularly when she's working on delicate projects. The sensors eventually do find a lock on the heat and electromagnetic signatures of the tiny Vorpal, though and for the second time today Vorpal is hit by a beam from one of Nadia's gauntlets. This time, however, the Pym fields work in reverse expanding Vorpal to his regular size once more.

Nadia is waiting for Vorpal to finish returning to normal with an intense expression on her face. "First prove to me this isn't a super elaborate ruse to get into lab, second tell me everything that happened!"