The Stingers

If you ever find yourself in a meeting room at the Avengers compound — sitting at the big round table where the world's mightiest heroes go over mission plans — and you happen to be sitting across from Hope van Dyne, do yourself a favor. Look at her gauntlets.

Most heroes wear their best weapon out in the open. Captain America carries his vibranium shield on his arm. Thor carries Stormbreaker in his fist. Iron Man wears the entire armor. You can see what they're packing the moment they walk into the room.

Hope's best weapon is a pair of small emitter rings on her wrists. You barely notice them. They look like jewelry. They look like decoration. They look like part of the suit.

They are not.

The little rings on her gauntlets are bio-electric stinger blasters. Hope designed them herself, in the engineering laboratory at Pym Technologies, during the years she was waiting for her father to trust her with the suit. She had spent her teens and her twenties studying combat with private instructors. She had spent her late twenties studying weapons engineering. She had spent the years right before she became the Wasp combining both — designing a blaster that could fire at any size, with surgical precision, drawing power from the same Pym Particle reaction that ran the wings.

The result was the stinger.

Here is how a stinger works, in plain terms. Inside each gauntlet is a small power cell, charged by the suit's micro-Pym reactor. The cell builds up an electric charge, like a tiny thunderstorm in your wrist. When Hope flicks her thumb against the inside of her palm, a sensor inside the glove fires the charge through the emitter ring, focusing it into a thin yellow arc of lightning. The arc leaves the gauntlet at an enormous speed and hits its target almost instantly.

But what makes the stinger remarkable is not just the lightning. It is the calibration.

Hope can dial the stinger to four different settings. The first setting is the smallest pulse — a non-lethal stun, designed to drop a guard without hurting him. The second setting is a longer pulse — enough to short out a security camera or weld a door shut. The third setting is a sustained beam — a sustained burst that can punch a perfect circle through a steel plate, or melt a heavy lock, or carve a panel out of a wall. The fourth setting is rapid-fire — three or four pulses per second, perfect for clearing a moving crowd.

The genius is that the stinger works at any size. When Hope shrinks down to ant-size, the gauntlet shrinks with her. The little emitter ring becomes microscopic. The yellow arc becomes a thread. But the targeting computer in her helmet adjusts the aim. So a Hope the size of a peanut can still pop a security camera fifty yards away with the same precision as a Hope at full human size.

Her mother, Janet, had stingers on her original Wasp suit too. Those older stingers were bigger, slower, and pulsed in a bluish-white tone. Hope's newer stingers are smaller, faster, twice as accurate, and pulse in a bright yellow-gold. When the two of them fight side by side, you can tell their bolts apart by color in midair.

But the stingers, as wonderful as they are, are only half the secret of being the Wasp.

The other half is the wings.

Hope's wings are two pairs of clear, glassy, almost weightless panels that fold out of little housings on the back of the suit. When she wants to fly, she presses a button on her shoulder, and FWUMP — the wings unfold. The fold and unfold mechanism is one of the most delicate pieces of engineering on the suit. The wings are thin enough to slip through tight spaces and strong enough to lift her at high speed. They vibrate faster than the eye can track. They make a soft hum that Hope finds, frankly, beautiful.

The wings let her hover, dart sideways, change direction in midair, and dive on a target at speeds the ant-riders of the world could only dream about. Hope can fly at any size — ant-size, normal-size, or somewhere between. The wings scale with her.

Compare this to Scott Lang's Ant-Man suit, which Hope sometimes does, fondly, when she is teasing him. Scott's suit has no wings at all. To get into the air, Scott has to find a willing flying carpenter ant — usually his old friend Ant-thony — climb onto its back, and hold on for dear life. It is charming. It works. It is also embarrassingly slower than what Hope can do. Hope just lifts off. Done.

But here is the real secret of the Wasp's combat style. The secret nobody figures out until they have already lost a spar.

Hope combines everything.

The wings, the stingers, the shrinking, and the growing — Hope uses all four at once, in patterns no other Avenger can match. The result is a fighting style that looks, from the outside, like watching a hummingbird shoot lightning while doing calculus. Witnesses describe it in different ways. Sam Wilson once said that fighting Hope was "like trying to argue with a bee that knows kung fu." Bucky Barnes once said it was "like getting beat up by a magic trick."

Hope's signature combinations include:

The Shrink-and-Strike. She shrinks down to thimble-size in midair, drops on an opponent from above, grows back to full size at the very last instant, and lands an elbow to the back of the neck. The opponent never sees what hit them.

The Tunnel. She shrinks down to ant-size, flies between two attackers in a blur, lands in the gap behind them, grows to full size, and elbows one while stinging the other. By the time both of them figure out where she went, both of them are on the floor.

The Sniper. She shrinks to a dot in the corner of the room. Nobody can see her. She lines up a stinger shot through her helmet's targeting reticle. One single yellow arc lights up across the room and drops a guard fifty yards away. The other guards spin in circles trying to find the shooter.

The Mother-Daughter Crisscross. This one only works when Janet is with her. The two of them fly past each other, stingers firing simultaneously, the yellow and bluish-white bolts weaving into a kind of woven net of electricity that fills a whole room. It is the prettiest, most effective two-person fight pattern Hope has ever seen, and she is enormously proud of it.

When new Avengers come to train at the compound for the first time, Hope is one of the instructors. She loves teaching. She is very patient. She is also, in sparring matches, totally undefeatable. Every new recruit makes the same mistake the first time. They watch her wings and forget about her stingers. Or they watch her stingers and forget about her size. By the time they figure out which Hope to look at, the bout is over, and Hope is standing on the mat with a tiny pleased smile, offering them a hand up.

Once a new recruit, a young soldier named Joaquin Torres, asked Hope after a sparring session how she stayed so calm in the middle of doing four things at once. Hope shrugged.

"Practice," she said. "I started training when I was eight years old. By the time I was twelve I could do all four things in my head. By the time I was twenty I could do them in my body. Now I just do them."

"That sounds like a lot of work."

"It is. But it is also the most fun I have ever had."

She walked off the mat. Her wings folded with a soft hum. Her stinger gauntlets cooled with a soft tick. And somewhere in the back of his mind, Joaquin Torres made a private vow to train harder.

The Wasp is small. The Wasp is fast. The Wasp is beautiful in the air. But the secret of her power is none of those things by themselves. The secret is that Hope van Dyne is the most precise fighter on the entire Avengers team — small enough to be invisible, sharp enough to hit a single bolt on a moving target, calm enough to do it all while making it look easy.

That, in the end, is the Wasp.