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Don’t old white men love whiskey?
Instead, what she found was something entirely…normal. A bedframe made of a dark wood with a deep-red duvet on top. A dresser in the same dark wood against the nearest wall, a mirror balanced on top. Two nightstands and two lamps. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, but nothing sinister lurked in the dark. Just dated décor that would have been right at home in the Red Room. Nadia closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in the stale air. It smelled different from the rest of the house—musty, sure, but something harder to place. Perhaps something more individually Hank that clung to the edges of his most personal space, even after it’d long since dissipated from the rest of the house. She imagined she could still see her father, ignoring his bed entirely to keep working on an important project.
Nadia smiled. It was something she knew they had in common, no matter the cause.
She opened her eyes to an empty room.
And then she got to work, like she always did.
Nadia danced back down the stairs and then right back up again, this time hauling a stack of
flat-packed boxes. She found herself wondering, as per usual, if there was a more scientifically expedient way to pack up a house. Perhaps some sort of robotic aid…? She dragged the flattened boxes into the bedroom and they landed on the floor with a thud, kicking up dust in their wake.
“Eugh!” Nadia coughed, waving the dust from her face. Perhaps I should have come in here sooner, at least to clean? Nadia shook her head. Who had spare time to dust when there was G.I.R.L.?
Nadia used a heavy-duty packing-tape dispenser to fold the top box into shape. The door open, now, music filtered in from the hall. Nadia got up to move toward the dresser, moving to the beat—and caught her foot on the unfamiliar bedpost.
“Whoa!” Nadia went flying forward, right into the dresser. The mirror tottered precariously, and Nadia used her Super Hero senses to catch it just in time (okay, she was just lucky. She was not Silk, here). But as she balanced herself with one hand and the mirror with the other, Nadia spotted something.
The first thing in the room that made any sense to her.
It looked like a teeny tiny hole in the wall.
“Privet,” Nadia said to the hole. “Kem ty mozhesh’ byt’?”
Hello, there. And who might you be?
Nadia picked the mirror up and gingerly set it down on the bed, disturbing the otherwise smooth covers, sending up a cloud of dust in the process. She moved her face closer to the wall. It was a different color where the mirror had been, the rest of the wall paint faded from sunshine and time. Her face perilously close to the thick layer of dust bunnies on the dresser top, Nadia saw that she was right—it was a hole.
Not even a hole—a tunnel. A tunnel for someone very, very small.
She didn’t even waste a moment. The boxes forgotten on the floor behind her, the music now only background noise, Nadia traded her clothes for her suit, her wings springing from her back with the touch of a button. And with the press of the button, she was feeling that feeling, her favorite feeling in the world, as her feet lifted off the ground and Hank’s room fell away. She was unburdened, if only for a moment, before gravity caught up with her.
Nadia landed on the dresser, the dust bunnies now as tall as she was. She tried not to look too closely.
NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!
Dust is actually made up of many different things, none of which you would probably like to see up close. It is essentially a collection of particulates, including pollen, soil, clothing fibers, insect waste, and, of course, human hair and skin. Your own cast-offs, close up! It is as disgusting as it sounds, and I have a pretty high threshold for disgusting things. And don’t forget about the dust mites! Have you ever seen a female dust mite lay eggs? I would recommend never doing that, if you can at all avoid it. 0/5 stars.
As quickly as she could, Nadia jetted forward across the slippery surface of the dusty dresser. The tunnel was short, even by her current standards. Nadia ran, sliding forward on her butt to make it through the gap in the wall.
I hope this is an intentional hole in the wall. Nadia swallowed. Or I’m going to be meeting a very surprised spider in her home in a matter of moments.
Breaking and entering was still breaking and entering, even if human laws didn’t strictly apply to arachnid dwellings.
Nadia slid out the other side of the tunnel…and she was not disappointed.
It was something.
Everything Nadia had half expected to find in her father’s old room, she found here. She flipped on the light attached to her suit, and—in this makeshift, in-wall Ant-Cave—Nadia found herself looking at what must have been her father’s secret laboratory.
Nadia swallowed. This…was awesome. Who doesn’t hope their dead father’s ancestral home might have a secret room? In most of the old books* Nadia had read in the Krasnaya Komnata, usually these rooms were located behind a rotating fireplace or a hinged bookshelf.
But she would take a tiny hole-in-the-wall laboratory just the same.
Ancient Ant-Man prototype suits lined one wall, their associated helmets on the floor in front of them. Ant farms lined another wall, floor to ceiling. Nadia was shocked to see an entire glass storage unit filled with vials of what could only be Pym Particles. Lab stations snaked their way across the floor, each worktop covered in some half-finished project. Nadia could relate. A third wall was just bookshelves. There was a lot. This was a lot.
You couldn’t know a person through their things, not entirely. It was an impossibility. Things would never tell you how someone sounded when they laughed or even what they would find funny enough to laugh at. They were impressions; shadows. You could interpret them in whatever way suited your idea of a person best.
