Marvel-ous Ninjutsu

00127. Exploring the quantum realm.

It didn't take long for their ship to make it into the quantum realm, since the quantum tunnel acted like a direct portal into it. Once inside, Hank landed the ship on the first flat surface he found, which ended up being right below the ship. It was a weird flat area of gray and purple stuff that looked like grass. In the distance from where they landed, spread throughout the grass were many small and large piles of rocks.

The sky above them was painted from purple to dark blue in color. Each color highlighted the next almost like some kind of crazy impressionist painting, but if you looked closely you would see the colors moving around themselves slowly in a swirl type pattern.

Hank turned to the rest of the group as he said, “I'm not sure if we should use the ship to travel around with. If it became damaged, we would have a hard time getting back out.”

Agatha smiled at Hank as she said, “I can still feel a connection to magic here. We should be able to use our emergency exit if needed. But I'll want to test a few things first.”

“Meowww, meow meeooww.”

Agatha reached over and scratched behind Ebony's ear as she said, “Yes dear, that's fine. But just remember to stay close by.”

“Meow!”

Agatha looked back at Hank as she said, “I'll go outside to test while you tell Steve and Peggy about Kang. Once we're done, we can start looking for your wife.”

Agatha tapped a rune on her suit and a second later a helmet popped out, covering her head. As she moved towards the airlock with Ebony, Hank started to share the information he was given about Kang with them. 

After Agatha stepped out of the ship, she moved a small distance away as Ebony took off in a different direction to explore. Once a safe distance away, Agatha began to cast minor spells. After the first few worked correctly, she tested a few more advanced spells before she opened a portal.

The other end of the portal opened up a few hundred feet from her. She then kept the portal open as she tested it with different spells. Once she was satisfied it was stable, she picked up a few weird looking rock type things from the ground and moved them through the portal with magic. Then she brought them back through the portal and examined them.

While she tested out her magic, Ebony was running through the weird grassland exploring everything they could. Within a few minutes they were over a mile away from the ship and checking out an outcropping of rocks a short distance away. Ebony came this way first because they smelt something interesting in this area. As Ebony slowly crept through the grass towards the rocks, the smell became more potent. 

Around halfway to the rocks Ebony froze in place as part of the rocks shifted. It was slight, but all the rocks shifted just a tiny amount, almost barely noticeable. Ebony, more cautious now, moved to the right before it moved in closer to the rocks. Again Ebony froze in place as the rocks shifted again, this time it was more pronounced then before.

Ebony shifted its position lower before it took another step forward. When the rocks didn't move, Ebony took another step forward. Again the rocks didn't move so Ebony stepped forward cautiously again, but this time the rocks shifted. All of the rocks seemed to shake slightly for a few moments before it stopped.

Ebony slowly laid down on the ground as it studied the rocks. As it watched the rocks, Ebony lightly tapped the ground in front of itself with its paw. The second its paw touched the ground, all the rocks shook again. Ebony was about to test the rocks again when a portal opened up next to them.

Ebony turned to look at the portal and saw Agatha standing next to the ship with the others as she said, “Come along Ebony, we’re going to set out.”

Ebony pointed its paw in front of itself as it said, “Meow, meow meeooww meeeow.”

“You ate before we left.”

“Meowww meow meeoowwwww.”

Agatha crossed her arms over her chest as she said, “I don't care how good it smells, you are not eating the first thing you found here. Now come along.”

Ebony glanced back at the rocks one more time before it jumped into the portal which snapped closed behind it. A second later the rocks moved again, but this time they expanded out into a rock covered creature. The creature looked like an animal, some rocks and possibly plants were all combined together. The creature was confused as it looked at the spot where its next meal was and found nothing. After a few moments of looking around, it returned to its dormant state and waited for its next meal.

After Ebony landed in front of the group Minato said, “If you give me and Tobirama a few minutes, we'll scout out the area around us.”

“It's fine, I came prepared.” Hank said as he touched some buttons on a tablet he was carrying.

A few seconds later ten drones about the size of large dogs shot out of the top of the ship. They extended wings before they flew off in different directions. Minato smiled slightly as he pulled out a handful of kunai and said, “We were about to do the same thing.”

Tobirama nodded in agreement as he showed a handful of kunai himself. Hank glanced at the kunai in curiosity as he asked, “Are those some kinda special sensors?”

Minato tossed one at the ground and another a few hundred feet away before he disappeared in a flash. Everyone saw him at the other spot holding the kunai he just tossed before he reappeared next to them and said, “We can use them as teleportation beacons. They make scouting a quick task.”

“Wouldn't the range be limited by how far you can throw them?” Hank asked.

Minato shrugged as he said, “I've thrown them up to five miles before.”

“I’ve thrown them about three miles myself.” Tobirama added.

Everyone turned to look at Minato and Tobirama as Hank asked, “How is that even possible?”

Steve nodded in agreement as he said, “I don’t think I could throw anything even half a mile away.”

Hank glanced down at his tablet as Minato smiled and said, “You can with your new body, if you train enough.”

Hank tapped on his tablet a few times before he said, “Looks like one of the drones found something. Let’s head towards it and check it out.”

When the others agreed, Hank placed a disc on the ship and shrunk it down. As he placed the ship into a small pouch on his waist he said, “Alright follow me.”

The group formed up with Hank as the leader and started to move through the grass land area towards the drone. As they moved close to a small pile of rocks Ebony hissed out followed by a low meow. Agatha pointed at the rocks in the distance and said, “Ebony says those might be dangerous… and smell delicious.”

Ebony nodded its head before they licked their lips. The group glanced over at the rock formation as Hank said, “Let's just go around them for now.”

The others nodded in agreement and made sure to stay away from all the rock formations they found. It took a little while before they came to the location the drone indicated.  What they found was the edge of a cliff and hundreds of feet below them was a portal into another area which was a massive expense of land with what looked like a green colored river flowing through it.

Hank pulled up his tablet and started to check it before he said in a frustrated tone, “This is going to take a while. Two other drones found more portals.”

“I can scout this one, just hold on to this and I’ll be back when I’m finished.” Minato said as he handed a kunai to Hank.

Steve glanced at the portal before he said, “I don’t think we should split up, what happens if you run into trouble and can’t teleport back to us?”

Minato smiled and tossed a kunai through the portal as he said, “Well it's a good thing I don’t currently have a body. I’m expendable.”

A second later Minato disappeared and the others couldn’t see him through the portal at all. Tobirama shrugged as he said, “Honestly this is probably the best way to explore this place. I’ll take another portal and have a look around myself while you all stay here.”

The others couldn’t really argue with the logic of Minato or Tobirama so Hank pointed Tobirama towards another portal while his group explored the area around them. While Hank’s team started to explore the quantum realm, Ezekiel was busy with Fury going over a few things. Well at first it was just Ezekiel being berated for not sharing important information with Fury, but after that they had to figure out how to integrate the valkyries into the base and training for them.

Once Ezekiel finished with that, he went back home and changed back to his normal appearance. He let one of his clones cover for him at school today and it was about time they came back. So he moved to his work computer to wait for his clone to come home. While he waited for that he checked out a few things on Vibe and then moved to his website for his game. With the help of some people on Vibe and just dumb luck the game has sold over a million copies now and even gained some attention from a few game companies wanting to buy the game.

With all of Theo’s protections set in place no one knew he made the game or that the money was going to his parents account. That isn’t to say a few people tried to find out, but they were led in the wrong direction to a fake company and account. Theo had a couple clones working everyday just to keep people in the dark about him being behind the game. His plan was to sell it to Vibe after it became more popular and place the demo mode on all the tablets and phones Tony was making.

Speaking of Tony, Theo finally shared some of the alien technology they found on Sakaar with him. To say he was happy would be an understatement. Tony didn’t sleep for almost three days straight after the tech was dropped off. Since then, Tony has been testing and deconstructing everything, figuring out how it all works. Within a day he already figured out a new way to increase a cell tower's signal strength to cover almost twenty miles with a single tower. For a lower bandwidth frequency twenty miles is nothing, but they were using a higher frequency signal which normally traveled a lot shorter distance. Once Tony figured that out, he asked Theo to redo the coding the cell towers would use to handle the extra traffic and bandwidth.

With just that one little thing, Tony’s cellular service will be able to cover all of the US with no issue. Tony already had a new branch of Stark Tech building cell towers everywhere in the world and with the slight change to the technology it wasn’t hard to retrofit towers already in place. Actually it made less work for the company, since they mostly bought out towers already in place or bought some space on the tower itself, if a company didn’t want to sell the tower to Stark.