Kamala had taken the train to Connecticut because, annoyingly, Lockjaw had run off to go hang out with...someone. Possibly his giant magic dog friends, though she wasn't actually sure he had those.
She was on this pilgrimage because her program, C.A.R.R.I.O.N, had turned up something really interesting. Carrion, in this case, stood for 'Catch And Record Relevant Information Or News', and she was really proud of the acronym. What it had caught was a series of blurry but utterly awe-inspiring videos of the Vulture, landing on the tiled roof of a colonial-style house in Redding, Connecticut. He'd popped the wings down and hopped off the roof like it was nothing, then the camera lost him, every time.
Maybe going all the way to Connecticut was a bit of an overreaction, but Kamala didn't really have any other options. She'd been getting total radio silence from Spider-Man, which was both extremely worrying and extremely annoying, and it wasn't like she knew anyone in Connecticut who could look for her.
Spider-Man was in the best hands possible. He was going to be okay.
Kamala squinted at her phone. She wasn't in costume, because Ms. Marvel going to Connecticut was a much bigger deal than some random highschooler going to Connecticut, and she was trying not to tip people off. Google Maps was her guide and saviour, right now.
The train ground to a noisy stop in Redding. After the stupidly long and complicated journey, Kamala really wanted to seek out the nearest fast food place and eat as many fries as she could legally obtain at once, but she had places to be. She passed a newspaper stand - which she hadn't realised were still a thing - and glanced her own costume on the front of a magazine.
She looked up from Google Maps. Her name was in the headline. She'd been linked to Spider-Man's disappearance, as had pretty much everyone else. She'd seen a masterpost of theories on a blog - her current favourite was the that Tony Stark had paid to have Spider-Man kidnapped to Siberia, because Iron Man was being overshadowed in the media. Some people just couldn't seem to buy that an injury had temporarily pulled someone out of the most dangerous career in the world.
The address hadn't been difficult to work out, mostly because there was nothing in Redding. It was the kind of place that certain people called 'scenic', and Kamala, as a person who lived in a city, called a building-dotted void . It took her almost an hour to get to her destination, and she had several near-misses with cars. There was a total lack of sidewalks in most of the town, which made walking around it a nightmare.
When she finally arrived at the building from the video, she was both relieved and disappointed. The address belonged to a blue, two-story colonial house, with white-framed windows and cutesy fake shutters. The bottom floor was dedicated to a toy/souvenir shop, which proudly proclaimed that it was established in 1881. A jaunty paper sign in the door announced that the shop was open. It didn't look like the kind of place that a supervillain would be interested in.
Kamala pushed the door open, and a small bell dinged. Her eyes immediately gravitated towards the roped-off set of stairs at the back of the room. It could be living space. Or it could be really evil living space, where the Vulture kept his stuff and (possibly) hoarded teenagers.
She wandered around for a bit, feigning interest in the postcards and snowglobes and generic wooden buckets of bouncy balls. There were a few interesting-looking action figures under a big sign that said "exclusives", but besides that, there didn't seem to be much. Kamala selected a striped Redding-themed lollipop from a bucket of similar candy, and took it to the counter.
The cashier was an old man, with tufts of white hair sticking out from under his hat, which had the name of the store embroidered on it in gold letters. Kamala gave him $2.50 for her lollipop, then formulated a plan.
There were no convenient alleys to hide in, like there would be in the city, but the house backed onto a clump of woodland. Kamala strolled calmly out into the trees until the house was out of view, and shed the clothes she'd been wearing over her costume. She shrank down, then, after walking for what seemed like forever, returned to the toy store.
This was gonna be so gross.
Kamala oozed under the door, then to the left, so the shelving hid her from view. She spent a horrible moment in full-body contact with a carpet that had decades of dust and something suspiciously sticky ground into it, then darted along under the shelves to the staircase. Getting upstairs was fairly easy - if she was roughly the height of each stair, she was still too small to be seen over the cloth that covered the banisters. It felt like climbing a mountain, but the kind of mountain people took their kids to so they could introduce them to hiking.
The landing led to a hallway, which in turn led to four separate rooms. Framed photos on the wall displayed a girl with dark ringlets and blue-grey eyes, as a chubby-cheeked baby and an older kid with two faint, circular chickenpox scars above her right eyebrow. The first two doors on the landing revealed a linen closet and a small bathroom, and the third, a bedroom.
Kamala decided to snoop. Going by the starry carpet and Spider-Man bedspread, it wasn't exactly the kind of place an evil bird guy would hang out, but she couldn't afford to miss anything.
There was an NYU flag on the wall, above the neatly-made twin bed. The room didn't look exactly well-used. There was a handful of hair ties on the desk, tangled with dark, curly hairs, but they were covered in a thin layer of dust.
Avengers memorabilia was scattered around the room. Action figures abandoned on the shelves, a poster of the Avengers beside the window, and Spider-Man stickers in the corner of the corkboard above the desk. A white bookshelf held several of the new Captain America comics, and a lot of books, including the entire Harry Potter series. Two of its shelves were crowded with trophies, for fencing, dancing, karate, only a few that had actually placed. It was disappointingly ordinary.
The window looked out over the garden, where a rusting swingset dominated half the lawn, and a sprawling vegetable garden took up the other. A paved path snaked between the two, and there was a tree in one corner, its gnarled roots snaking under the fence and around what looked like a manhole cover.
Which was glowing.
In the shadow from the tree, Kamala could see the tiniest gleam of light spilling from the cover's edges.
She fought with the sticking latch, then unlocked the window and carefully slid the pane upwards, just enough for a slightly-smaller version of herself to slide out. Her falling-off-things strategy of becoming as tiny as possible cushioned her faceplant into the grass perfectly, and once she'd scrubbed the mud out of her eyes, she made a bee-line for the metal slab. She poked her head through one of the holes clearly intended for thumbs, and looked around. She was a little bit concerned that it might just be a septic tank, but it quickly became obvious that it was no such thing.
"Woah," Kamala whispered.
Falling onto brick seemed like a bad idea, so she used one tiny hand to keep a grip on the outside of the cover while she lowered herself down into the space below. Her landing sent up plumes of dirt.
She was standing in a cavernous space, with seemingly endless arches of brick, about ten feet apart. Dim, ruddy lighting cast a sickly glow into the corners of the space, the exposed wires duct taped to the ceiling, trailing up the arches and into the lights from a massive generator hulking in one corner. Moisture was collecting in the corners, staining the wall in places. The room looked like something from Harry Potter.
Most of the space was dominated by the vast skeleton of another wingsuit. The wings were fully outstretched, as if the suit was on display in a museum. Accessory turbines erupted from the back, visible through the gaps in the metal. In the centre of the wings, an exosuit dangled. Oddly complete leg bracers and metal gloves hung limp, the helmet dangling by thin leather bands securing it to the wingsuit.
Kamala took out her phone, and started walking towards the centre of the wings. She had a horrible sinking feeling about those hands. Turning one over, thankfully, didn't reveal a repulsor, but the armoured look of the gloves- gauntlets, really- suggested there was more to them than met the eye.
This wasn't the same metal as the others, she realised. The skeletal parts of the wings looked like something more… ordinary. Steel, maybe, shining like polished silverware. That was just odd - Spider-Man hadn't been able to punch through the original set, so it couldn't have had any hollow parts. And the scale was different, if only slightly - the gauntlets would have fit her hands. This design was new.
In the looming shadow of the wingsuit, Kamala explored more of the room. There were benches scattered throughout, most of which were covered in the dissected parts of weapons she didn't recognise. She didn't feel safe, there, breathing the stale air of place she shouldn't be in. The room seemed to stop at two steel doors, which looked incredibly out of place in the crumbling stone wall. Kamala decided not to touch them, namely because they were the only thing in the place that looked sophisticated enough to be equipped with an alarm.
The wingsuit was still her main focus.
She had to tell Tony Stark about this.