Trick Arrow 1

It started with a package from Clint. After their last adventure together, he’d decided she deserved to be better prepared for dealing with things in New York.

Her apartment had been repaired while she was out of the city - Clint had talked to a couple of people in the city and convinced them to be more grateful to her. Now she had a bedroom again, a freezer filled with an alarming amount of pizza for a certain dog, and a small range for target practice upstairs.

Kate took the package upstairs, peeled off several dozen ‘handle with care’ stickers, and immediately started grinning when she opened the box. It was the size of a laptop, but rather than electronics, it was filled with dozens of slim boxes, each labelled, and all with an arrow visible on the inside of the clear covering.

‘USB.’ ‘Explosive (Small).’ ‘Putty.’ ‘Explosive (Large).’ ‘Tracker.’ ‘Shock.’ ‘Explosive (Hulk)’. ‘Trip-rope.’

Oh, this was going to be fun. Leaving the box open on a table near the shooting range, Kate hurried downstairs. She made sure the front door was locked, then poured herself a glass of water and pulled a pre-made sandwich wrap out from the fridge, before heading back upstairs.

Then she pulled up a chair, putting her snack and drink just to the side.

“Alright, time to see what I’ve got,” Kate said. She was still grinning in a way that was very excited, and very unnerving to anyone that knew just how much damage some of those arrows could do.

For the next few minutes, she sorted them. There was a pile for niche or small-scale arrows, a pile for ones she might want to play with more, and a pile for ‘I hope I never have to use this but it would be so cool if I did.’

Her apartment was quiet. She’d turned off her music to focus on the task at hand, so the silence was just broken up with occasional murmurs.

“Cool… Cool… Kinda lame, not gonna lie. Ooh, now that one’s awesome… Holy shit I am so using that…”

She slowly sorted through the slim, individually packaged arrows, until she reached one that was in opaque packaging. Kate frowned, turning it over.

“Huh, now what do you do?” she murmured.

With a lot of curiosity, and a touch of recklessness, Kate turned the box over until she found where it opened. When no flap presented itself, rather than be patient, she pinched one side and tried to tear it; the arrow inside rattled. When at last the box tore, the shaft slid out, the head bumping into Kate’s hand as she was roughly handling the box.

There was a flash of red. Just for a moment, the rather subtle labelling on the box caught the light, and Kate read the word ‘Pym.’

Then there was no Kate. Her purple and black costume crumpled up onto the floor, and the box and spent arrow landed on the table.

Down on the floor, her outfit lay in an awkward pile. For a few minutes, it was still - then a tiny, bug-sized hand poked out from the neck. A few seconds later, and the fabric wriggled and writhed, and a gasping head poked out from the discarded costume.

Kate took a deep breath. Kate looked around her apartment, suddenly so much bigger than she remembered - the stairs down might well have been the edge of the earth, and the hexagonal pattern on the floor looked like football fields. Then she looked down, and realized just what it meant that her costume hadn’t shrunken with her.

Now only inches tall, the very naked Kate Bishop went bright red and crossed an arm over her chest.

“Oh fuck,” she squeaked.