The most elementary application of sensing vibrational frequencies was spatial displacement.
Put into scientific terms, the ability mapped onto string theory — one of the few frameworks considered capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, including gravity, into a single coherent system.
String theory held that every piece of matter in the universe was composed of tiny, vibrating strings — unimaginably small, vibrating in different modes. These strings were the most fundamental units underlying reality as it existed.
In the aftermath of the Big Bang, the universe may have produced vast quantities of cosmic strings, with individual strands stretching across cosmic distances. Strings resisted direct observation — gravitational lensing was one of the more discussed indirect methods for detecting them. Daisy's working hypothesis placed cosmic strings within binary star systems, formed by the gravitational resonance of two masses orbiting each other. That resonance generated standing waves, and each oscillation of a string produced two stable nodal points. Daisy's teleportation functioned on this principle: vibrate a string at the right frequency and shift from one nodal point to the other.
She'd run experiments before. None of them had worked — not cleanly, not at all. But after sitting with Pym's calculations, several points that had been blocking her snapped into focus. The path ahead looked a great deal clearer.
Pym was still working through his equations. Daisy started cross-referencing his theory against her ability, running quiet estimates on her end.
Zzzt. Zzzt.
Her palm hummed. Vibrational waves brushed against the surrounding air, producing a soft rasping sound. She was probing frequencies, feeling for a string she could actually work with.
The unusual noise pulled Pym's attention up from his work. He watched her, curious.
A faint blue glow materialized around her hand — barely a flicker at first, like a small flame catching. It grew. Something shimmered behind the light, just barely, and before Pym could say anything—
BOOM.
A small fireball detonated in midair. Fragments scattered in every direction. A wave of sand and dirt swept across the room with them.
It happened in an instant. Daisy took the full brunt of it.
Pym lunged for the fire extinguisher, then realized there was no actual fire — just a lot of dust. His previously immaculate lab now looked like a room that hadn't been opened in years.
"Pft—" Daisy peeled herself up from the floor, spitting grit. Her outfit — what had been a reasonably presentable blazer and slacks — was now an unidentifiable shade of grey. Every strand of her hair was caked with sand. Her shoes were full of it.
"Yellow sand?" Pym crouched down and pinched a bit of the debris between his fingers — some had drifted in from the other side of the gap, some had shaken loose from Daisy herself. "Where did you connect to?"
Daisy combed her fingers through her hair, upgrading her appearance from disaster victim to disaster adjacent. She stared at the mess around her. "No idea."
She wasn't particularly vain, but this was objectively bad.
Pym looked at her with quiet amusement. "Could you use your ability to shake the dust off yourself right now? Basic application, I'd think."
"Easy to say." Daisy gave him a flat look. "Watch and tell me how easy it is." She channeled her ability into her hand, gave it two small pulses — and Pym immediately spotted the problem.
She could vibrate. But the direction of the vibrations wasn't under her control. Countless dust particles vibrated in scattered, random directions. When everything settled, the same dust was still there, just rearranged slightly — shuffled around on her hand rather than removed from it.
"Your control needs work," Pym said. "I don't know if you've ever looked into Magneto's ability, but the way he commands magnetic fields—"
"Magneto has had his ability for decades," Daisy cut him off. "In the beginning, he could barely do basic lifting. I've had mine for—" She stopped herself. "I also noticed something: you definitely made a calculation error somewhere. You should go back and check."
She walked briskly to the bathroom before he could respond, scrubbed herself down from head to toe, and emerged wearing a lab coat from the wall hook. Marginally more presentable.
Poor Pym — a man in his eighties — was left to sweep the lab. He also re-examined the full calculation from the beginning, and discovered that Daisy was right. There was an error.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely his mistake. It was more accurately a flaw embedded in modern quantum physics. He'd plugged in an established formula from the existing literature without catching that one of the constants shifted slightly during a particular step of the derivation.
Daisy tied her hair back in a ponytail. The chain of events earlier had been genuinely unlucky — of all the strings she might have tapped into, she'd somehow latched onto one connected to the middle of an active hurricane. That kind of probability wasn't something you planned around.
"When you adjust your frequency to a range between approximately 30,000 and 50,000 hertz," Pym explained, gesturing as he worked through it, "you need to apply this formula. It shifts as a function of target distance, target mass, and air resistance…"
He went on for a while. Daisy followed most of it; parts of it sailed over her head entirely.
This was clarifying in a different way. It wasn't just quantum physics she needed. She was going to need a significantly higher level of applied mathematics to make real progress.
"Try it once. Right here in this lab — see if you can open a stable connection across ten meters (about 33 feet)," Pym said. A test problem, but not a cruel one.
It was manageable. At that range, air resistance, magnetic interference, and most other complicating factors were minor enough to either ignore or correct for on the fly. Daisy ran the numbers in her head and landed on a value.
She raised her right hand and sent a shockwave into the air.
The pale blue energy struck the surrounding atmosphere and hit what felt like an invisible wall — met resistance for a fraction of a second, then punched through.
She felt it then: a string, just barely, the way you'd feel the pluck of a rubber band through a tabletop. She gauged the distance. At the right point, she struck a single pulse.
The string answered. It carried the vibration to the other side.
Visible result: a pale blue halo opened in the air before her, light rippling outward like rings on water. The center began to spiral — clockwise, faster and faster — until it resolved into a stable vortex standing roughly 6 feet (about 2 meters) tall and 3 feet (about 1 meter) wide.
Ten meters (33 feet) away, Daisy's brow furrowed with focus as she held the connection. A second vortex materialized there, spiraling in the opposite direction.
Pym picked up a book from the nearest surface and tossed it through Daisy's side of the portal.
It emerged from the other end completely intact. Thwack. It hit the floor.
"Spatial jumping!" Pym said, reaching for something else to throw — and then Daisy dropped straight to the floor and sat there.
"Okay— do you have any food? I think I'm about to pass out from hunger."
She was drenched in sweat, exhausted. Their calculation model still had problems. The connection hadn't been stable — it fluctuated constantly, requiring her to make real-time adjustments to the frequency the entire time it was open. That level of sustained mental calculation ate through energy at a staggering rate.
Pym was physically fit for his age, but he was still an old man. He didn't keep high-calorie emergency supplies in the lab. He called his assistant and had food sent over.
Daisy put away three twelve-inch pizzas. She could have kept going, but the greasiness was getting to her. A bowl of meat broth on top of that, and she was mostly back.
"That much energy expenditure?" Pym had held off asking until he was reasonably sure she wasn't in danger of collapsing.
"The consumption itself is manageable," Daisy said, wiping her mouth. "The real problem is the calculation overhead. Right now I'm burning most of my energy just running the math in real time. If we can optimize the formula, my effective ceiling goes up significantly."