What If...The Wasp Waged A War Across Worlds?
Here's another older What If...? scenario idea for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania from last year that I thought I would share with you guys. I know this is probably outdated given Marvel's current status, but I thought it would still be fun to share either way.
Apologies again for the lengthiness and I hope you enjoy it!
-----------------------------------------
In this universe, Kang's attack on the Pym van Dyne family resulted in Scott Lang, Hank Pym and Hope van Dyne being killed brutally by the Conqueror. In response, a vengeful and grieving Janet van Dyne murders Kang, stabbing him in an exposed part of his helmet and killing him. She also kills M.O.D.O.K. by using Pym Particles to crush his body inside out.
After burying what was left of her family and taking Kang’s armor off of his corpse, she decides that she cannot let his conquest destroy any other worlds. Upon portaling into the Celestium and freeing Cassie - and informing her and taking her to the site of their family's death - she sends her granddaughter home, while taking Kang's ship out of the Quantum Realm for herself.
-----------------------------------------
Five months later, Janet and Cassie have stayed in close contact with each other via Cassie’s Quantum Satellite. Cassie has buried herself in her work to distract her from her grief, while also modifying her suit to be more akin to late father’s, taking on the moniker of Bullet-Ant.Â
One day, after Cassie got home from protesting the homeless displacement, she was shocked to find Janet in her home. After a bittersweet reunion, Janet informs the young girl about a potential Kang variant she needs her help dealing with.
-----------------------------------------
They travel to an alternate advanced Earth in the early 31st Century, where Janet sends Cassie down to infiltrate the facility that should be housing this world's Kang: the Baxter-Benefactor-Academy. Upon arriving and infiltrating the Academy, she spies around for anyone who could be the Kang variant in question, before seeing a young man getting chased by a bully named Morgan and his crew of few bullies across the hallway.
She followed them outside, where they continued bullying and mocking him for his invention. As Cassie attempted to step in, they shoved her aside, which angered him. As Morgan taunted him, the boy secretly activated a hidden shocker in his device which sent the others running away. The boy then went over to help Cassie up, introducing himself as Nathan Richards. Cassie admires his little invention, accidentally confusing it for an Ant-Man figure. Amused and intrigued by her history knowledge, Nathan explains it is something similar: A Growing Man stimuloid, which can absorb Kinetic Energy and redirect it to multiply its artificial cells, causing it to grow in size.
Cassie is intrigued by Nathan’s intellect, wanting to know more about his ideas. Nathan then gives her a pamphlet, inviting her to a seminar he's holding regarding temporal traversal. As he leaves, Cassie starts to correctly suspect that he may be the Kang in question, but decides to wait and see if he's as bad as then who killed her father.
-----------------------------------------
Later that night, Cassie attends the seminar, watching Nathan talk to the students about the lessons of temporal wonder, showing them images of the multiverse including the Sacred Timeline. As he talks about his ancestor's studies and research and how to safely traverse said timelines without suffering any side effects, he then brings out his latest project for helping said problem, a red and silver Iron-Man-like suit of armor that he says was specifically designed to handle problems like timeslipping and spaghettification due to quantum instability.
Nathan then demonstrated the suit and its capabilities to the audience, which he nicknamed the "Iron Lad", claiming that it would help pave the way for Multiversal travel and communication. As the audience cheered, he welcomed his audience to the future and bowed, as Cassie looked concerned, yet also with a strange curiosity.
After the seminar, Nathan walked outside though the crowd, his suit retracted and folded in his side. Soon Cassie approached him from behind, asking for a moment to talk. Their conversation was interrupted by a flying fist from Morgan, who pummels Nathan to the ground, telling him it's payback time.
Cassie tries to tell him to leave Nathan alone, only for him to shove her aside, prompting Nathan to summon a gauntlet from his suit and shoot a stun blast at Morgan, knocking him back a few feet, but leaving him alive.
As he helps Cassie up, she's surprised to see that this version of Nathan is a lot more compassionate than the Kang she knew. As Morgan's compatriots show up to try and gang them, Nathan tells Cassie to hold onto him as he summons an energy platform for the two of them, levitating them far away into the sky.
Cassie hangs onto Nathan for dear life, only opening her eyes when she sees the two of them are floating high above the futuristic version of New York. Initially terrified, she soon becomes mystified by the sights of the skyline, saying it looks beautiful.
Nathan then tells her that's not all he can do, as he reveals his suit also has propulsion jet boots like Stark's as well, taking Cassie on a midair trip flying through the city. As she enjoys the flight, Cassie begins to see Nathan may not be as bad as the Kang she once knew.
-----------------------------------------
Both Cassie and Nathan then returned to his apartment with the Iron Lad armor in tow. While she was there, Cassie got a look at the new technology he had designed and developed. Among these designs, Cassie finds the prototype for what would become the Multiversal Engine Core, the very thing that got her father killed.
Nathan saw that Cassie looked concerned about his design, to which he asked what was going on. Cassie attempted to shrug it off, but Nathan said that if she was worried about the designs, she was allowed to say anything about it. Cassie was hesitant to tell him the truth, worried about his future as the Conqueror, but figured maybe letting Nathan know of his future of Kang could prevent him from becoming the warlord.
Cassie then explained everything, about a Multiversal War caused by his variants, Janet's history with Kang, and how she oversized it with Pym Particles to keep Kang from escaping. She then explains how she built a Quantum Satellite to study the Quantum Realm, unaware that Kang had hijacked the device to summon them all there to get him the core back to escape and conquer the Multiverse.
Nathan asks what happened to the rest of her family, to which Cassie sadly reveals that everyone died because of Kang the Conqueror except for Janet, who killed him and took his suit and power for herself to stop the rest of his darker variants.
Nathan got emotional at the concept of him being a world-killing tyrant, realizing that Cassie was sent here to kill him to stop him from becoming Kang. Cassie tries to apologize for hiding the truth from him, but Nathan says that she had every right to, saying she was just trying to protect the multiverse from what he would become.
The young Richards then slumped defeatedly against the wall, horrified by the realization of what he was destined to become. Cassie then reassured him that he was not his variant, and that what Kang did does not have to define them. She says that while he can't fully undo the damage Kang had done, he can still make things right.
Their emotional conversation is suddenly interrupted by a radio call on the comms by Janet, who tells Cassie she has her location and that she's on her way. Cassie tries to shut off the comm signal, but it's too late, as the Celestium roars right above them, knocking out the power to the apartment.
Nathan and Cassie manage to grab only their suits and escape through one of Nathan's portals, landing on the nearby ground outside before the Celestium opens fire on the building, razing it to the ground.Â
-----------------------------------------
The duo takes in the destruction before them for only a moment before another portal opens below them, bringing them into Janet's Celestium, with the Wasp ready to imprison or eliminate Nathan from the timeline.Â
Cassie tried pleading for her to stop, that Nathan wasn't like the other Kangs, but Janet refused to listen, unleashing her power onto Nathan, who managed to block it with a force field. She ran around the blasts and tried to reach Janet only to find she too had a forcefield protecting her. Thinking of something else, she grabbed two of her resizing discs - one for growing, one for shrinking- and threw both of them at Janet simultaneously, causing a Quantum feedback effect that knocked her back into the walls.
Once she helps Nathan up, the two attempt to escape through one of his portals, only to find that Janet's Celestium is firewalling his armor's teleportation abilities. Thinking quickly, Cassie grabbed Nathan and shrank the two of them through an air vent, landing into another one of the rooms.
-----------------------------------------
After catching their breath and their footing, the two look around the room they've landed in, discovering it's a trophy vault filled with the preserved corpses of Kang variants who had been captured and killed from different timelines. As they examined the horror show, Nathan took notice of their universe designations, finding them quite peculiar and familiar.
He brings up a multiversal holo-display, showing and matching a wave of destroyed timelines, and each one listed matches each of these deceased Kang variants. That's when Cassie and Nathan put two and two together: Janet wasn't just capturing and exterminating versions of Kang, but she was also destroying the timelines they came from to keep them from respawning.
Nathan then hacks into the records from the ships' database, finding what Janet used to do it: An Immortus Engine, a device powered by the temporal energy of all the Kangs she's captured that can reshape or erase entire timelines, and Nathan's is the next to die.
As Cassie reels in horror from the revelation, an alarm goes off as Janet's troops arrive on the scene, prepared to end the pair. Nathan manages to blast them all back with his repulsors and Cassie shrinks and enlarges like a bullet, taking each of them out one by one.
After using one of the fallen Kang variant's weapons, they manage to blow out a portion of the nearby wall, escaping as they plan to take this whole operation down before any more worlds die, including theirs. That's when they hear the rumbling shake the ship, informing them that they need to hurry.
-----------------------------------------
They two of them eventually made it to the ship's center, finding within it the Immortus Engine now affixed to it. Their attempts to deactivate the engine prove futile however, as unfortunately they were then interrupted by a vengeful Janet, who used her armor's abilities to hold Cassie in place, before tossing Nathan around like a rag doll.
Cassie managed to drop a resizing disc on a sharp piece of debris which almost hit Janet, disorienting her, allowing Cassie to break free and escape. The duo fight Janet more some as Nathan begins to deactivate to engine, which primes itself as it the floor underneath it opens, revealing Nathan's timeline as the Engine prepares itself to rain fire.
-----------------------------------------
As Cassie and Janet fought each other, the latter then used her power to infiltrate Cassie's mind, trapping her in an illusion of the Pym Family Residence. In the illusion, Cassie sees her late father Scott Lang there once more. Cassie stood silent as the vision her father approached her, reiterating about how she mistreated Scott even though he helped save the world.
Cassie then broke down, admitting that her harsh feelings toward Scott were because she blamed herself for being unable to find him in the five years he was gone, and then again for losing him permanently at the hands of Kang. An emotional Cassie tells him that all she really wanted was their old life back and to be free from the pain.
The illusion of Scott attempted to sway Cassie, telling her that she could finally be free of the pain, that this could bring their family back, so they could do all that Cassie said she wanted her late father to do, together. Cassie got sad for a moment, but then noticed the strange sky in the distance; she then realized it was an illusion, calling out Janet for the facade. Janet revealed herself and tried to blast Cassie, only for her to dodge and hit her with a resizing kick.
-----------------------------------------
A bitter and enraged Janet then activated the engine, which worried Nathan as he tried to shut it off, only for Janet to blast him away and destroy the console. The duo fought the Worldkiller Wasp in an ensuing battle, but it all ended abruptly as Janet tossed Cassie into the nearby wall, before using her telekinesis to pummel Nathan into a wall, slowly crushing him and telling him his future is over as the Engine prepares to fire onto his world
When all seemed lost, Cassie spotted one of Nathan's fallen gauntlets on the ground; thinking quickly, she grabbed it and hot-wired a red and blue resizing disc into the gauntlet, powering it up with the surge of Quantum Energy. Janet prepares to fully crush Nathan and kill him and his world, only to turn back as Cassie charges at her. She attempts to blast Cassie with the full force of her power, but using her father's wisdom, Cassie shrinks and leaps over it just in time, before resizing and punching Janet with a full-force Quantum blast.
The shockwave sends a massive burst of power outwards that sends Janet to the ground and damages the Immortus Engine, shutting it down and saving Nathan's world.
-----------------------------------------
Cassie then rushes to Nathan's aid, helping him up as the two embrace. A defeated Janet looks up at her granddaughter, and then down in her own reflection, realizing that all she's done was no better than what Kang did, seeing the true monster she's become as she breaks down in tears.
Cassies attempts to comfort her grief-stricken grandmother are interrupted as the Immortus Engine begins to overload, causing the ship to come apart. Cassie and Nathan try to figure out what to do, knowing the device will destroy the ship and take them with it, only for the two of them to find themselves trapped in a force-field bubble.
The two of them then see Janet holding back the explosion with all her power. Although Cassie attempts to tell her grandmother to stop, Janet simply opens a portal back to her world, telling her granddaughter to tell their family that she loves them. Cassie begs for Janet not to do this, only for her and Nathan to go flying through the portal back home, leaving Janet alone in the collapsing Celestium. Janet makes peace with herself, before using all of her power to isolate the resulting Temporal Explosion, sacrificing herself in the process as the Celestium explodes.
-----------------------------------------
Cassie and Nathan wake up safe in the Pym Family residence, finding things different, back to how it was before. She looks down at herself, finding her suit back to its original purple Stature design.Â
She checks the date on her phone, finding it as July 24th, 2026. As she comes to the realization of what's happening, the two of them are startled by the appearance of a now alive Hank Pym, who Cassie embraces wholeheartedly before asking where her father is.
Hank tells her that Scott's at the book signing at City Lights Bookstore, so Cassie and Nathan race off to meet him there. After arriving and changing into civilian attire, Cassie then spots her father Scott Lang still alive, reading from his memoir Look Out for the Little Guy! Cassie looks on in tears at the sight of her father, happy to see him again.
Just as Scott narrates the part to the audience about missing parts of Cassie's life, he then spots her standing in the window, excusing himself for a moment to talk with her. Scott barely has time to ask her why she's here before she hugs him so tightly, crying into his shoulder, glad to see her father safe and sound.
As the two Langs hugged each other, Cassie reconciled with her father, telling him it wasn't his fault for missing out on those 5 years of her life, and her father told Cassie that he meant what he said that she was his hero, and always would be. After a tearful hug, Scott then invites Cassie inside to her the last bit of the book signing; Cassie accepts, saying she'll be in a minute.
After Cassie takes a moment to catch her breath, she then asks Nathan the important question of how this is possible. Nathan then pulls up a display of Cassie's timeline, explaining that the Worldkiller Wasp's sacrifice rewrote their entire timeline, causing key changes like the revival of her family and Kang's demise in their Quantum Realm happening earlier than it originally did, preventing him from posing any threat in her present.Â
As the two of them process the information, Cassie then asks if Nathan would want to join her inside for the book signing, to which. he graciously accepts, excited to experience living history. The two of them walk into the Bookstore, listening to Scott narrate the last bits of his book together.
-----------------------------------------
By the time Christmas comes around in the new timeline, things have changed greatly for the Pym van Dyne family. Cassie and Nathan are now close friends, Scott and Hope are now engaged, and Hank and Janet have now retired, with the latter not displaying any memories of the original timeline.
As Cassie's mother and stepfather arrive for the holiday, exchanging gifts with the rest of the family. Scott gathers everyone for an important announcement, telling everyone that he and Hope were expecting twins. Everyone celebrates the news, with Cassie happy to now have two extra siblings to grow up alongside with.
The rest of the family and friends celebrate the holiday together, with Cassie assuring herself and Nathan that everything would be better now. Nathan reciprocates, with both of them looking ahead to this new future with hope.
---------------------------------------
Sorry again for the lengthiness - and outdatedness - of this scenario, but I thought it would still be an interesting idea to explore the possible potential of Quantumania, as well as also providing a possible means to introduce Iron Lad to the mainline MCU. I know it's unlikely to happen at this point, but it's still fun to think of what could have been.
IDK, let me know what you guys think! Hope you like it!
