Daisy blinked. They wanted to invest?
She had to hand it to Pepper Potts. The woman had no connection to the film industry, hadn't run any numbers on projected box office returns or audience demographics — and yet she'd walked right past all of that and zeroed in on the commercial upside with pinpoint clarity. The S.H.I.E.L.D. brass still thought Daisy was playing around, and here was Pepper ready to write a check.
Should I take the money? Obviously.
"Is the commercial upside really that significant?" Tony asked Pepper quietly. He trusted her read on business matters.
Pepper didn't say a word. She just nodded.
Tony cleared his throat and smoothly changed his entire tone. "We'd be happy to invest. What's your current funding gap?"
Daisy had to stop herself from laughing. Her production budget was more than covered. She smiled lightly. "I've already raised about fifty-five million dollars."
That number hit Tony like a wall. He had money — serious money — but at this stage, Obadiah Stane controlled the purse strings. Pulling significant funds required going through the board. A few hundred thousand, manageable. Seven figures started to involve paperwork.
Walking in as a minor investor at that scale? Not a chance.
Daisy could see the discomfort cross his face and had to fight the urge to pull out her phone and capture the moment. This was a version of Tony Stark the world rarely got to see — and wouldn't once Obadiah was out of the picture.
Happy Hogan, ever the loyal one, stepped in and smoothed things over.
"If I'm on set, who's protecting Mr. Stark?" Happy was tempted by the offer but clearly troubled by the thought of leaving his employer unguarded.
Daisy didn't want to knock his devotion — Happy was genuinely a good person. His protective instincts, though, were somewhat optimistic. She privately suspected Fitz and Simmons could take him in a fight.
Tony clapped him on the shoulder with theatrical generosity. "Go do something you actually enjoy. I'm heading to Asia for a stretch — the DoD has people covering me. You're off the hook."
With his employer's blessing secured, Happy's enthusiasm for the film gig finally won out. Daisy's offer of associate director duties sealed it. He said yes.
Tony left. Daisy sat down with Happy and Pepper separately.
Pepper hadn't given up on finding an angle in. If direct investment was off the table, she had another idea: merchandise. She wanted to get involved in the film's product licensing.
Daisy's respect for her sharpened another degree. Her own commercial instincts were strong, but Pepper's were in a different class entirely. The movie hadn't even been shot yet, and Pepper was already mapping out the ancillary market. The specifics would need to be hammered out post-production — too many unknowns at this stage — but they exchanged contact information and agreed to revisit the conversation when the time came.
One week later.
Negotiations with the Costa Rican government concluded without incident. The terms were straightforward: a lease on one of their islands for location shooting. It was, as cover stories went, approximately a thousand times more credible than the nuclear contamination and biohazard scenarios S.H.I.E.L.D. usually deployed.
The agents on the production took to it with genuine enthusiasm. The outside talent brought in were all high-caliber professionals, and within two weeks the team had found its rhythm.
The island itself still needed development work to match the script's requirements, but S.H.I.E.L.D.'s logistics teams moved at a pace that made commercial contractors look sluggish. Preliminary construction was on track to show results within a month.
Daisy left Sharon behind as a director's assistant to coordinate things on the island, then brought the main group to Yale University to shoot the interior scenes first.
Coulson and Happy — two men whose career paths had taken unexpected turns — were drafted as co-directors. As it turned out, both of them were actually good at it. Day by day, the pace of filming picked up as they got better at coordinating the moving pieces.
With nothing pressing that required her on set, Daisy started using the downtime to study under Pym.
The old man had used his honorary professorship to arrange her enrollment as a student at Yale. Complete the coursework, and she could legitimately claim a Yale education.
She dropped by the set occasionally, grabbed the odd lunch with her friend from the academy, but most of her time was spent in Pym's company.
"Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern science — and I mean the foundation of every discipline," Pym said, eyes brightening the moment the conversation turned scientific. He had the air of someone who'd been waiting a long time to say this to someone who might actually keep up.
"Contemporary chemistry, biology, medicine, the trajectory of our economic development — the electronic revolution that gave ordinary people access to computers — none of it exists without quantum mechanics. It is the language of the universe expressed as art."
The opening wasn't exactly gripping. Daisy had encountered similar statements in a dozen different physics books. She'd heard the sermon before.
Then Pym asked, without any warning: "What kind of ability do you have?"
The question landed like a small shock. She hadn't planned to keep it secret forever — but having someone name it so directly, to her face, still sent a small jolt through her.
The old man smiled. "I've known a fair number of people with abilities over the years. When you defeated Darren Cross using that unconventional method, I started to wonder. Pym Particles represent a lifetime of my work. If you didn't have a power specifically suited to countering them, there's no way you walk away from that fight."
What could she say? The older the wiser, apparently. Pym was one of the sharpest minds alive, and had been for decades. Getting seen through wasn't entirely surprising.
She scratched the back of her head. "It's a vibrational ability."
The old man's eyes lit up. "Vibration? What's the range? Broad area, or localized?"
"Theoretically either. But I can't fully eliminate resonance as a side effect, so for the sake of keeping the physical strain manageable, I've been focusing on precision and control."
Pym made a quiet sound of interest. He thought for a moment. "Max Planck's postulate proposed that the total energy of an oscillating system couldn't change continuously — it had to jump between discrete values. A lot of people at the time considered that too radical. Could your ability be used to demonstrate that principle empirically?"
Before she could respond, he was already moving: "Einstein introduced the light-quantum concept in 1905 — the idea that light propagating through space isn't continuous but comes in discrete packets. Could your ability work the reverse direction? Use known energy levels to infer frequency?"
He pulled out a pen and started filling a sheet of paper, barely pausing. "The energy of a photon, E, is proportional to its frequency, ν. The standard calculation brings in Planck's constant, h: E equals hν. You could flip it — divide the photon's energy by Planck's constant and solve for vibrational frequency. If that holds up experimentally, it would represent a meaningful step forward in our understanding of spatial mechanics."
He kept writing. Calculations cascaded across the page. He pushed his glasses up, verified several figures twice, then opened a notebook and dove into something else entirely.
Daisy didn't interrupt. She'd encountered many of these theories individually — she just hadn't stitched them together into a unified framework. She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair, amber eyes moving in small flickers as she worked through the implications with her own ability in mind.