Ant-Man (Earth-199999)

Ant-Man, born Scott Lang, is an American hero and former engineer and professional thief from San Francisco. Using the Pym Particle technology and accompanying bodysuit invented by the original Ant-Man, brilliant scientist Hank Pym, Lang can change his physical size at will, growing or shrinking to remarkable degrees.

Biography

Becoming Ant-Man

Convicted felon

Well, technically I didn't rob them. Robbery involves threat—I hate violence. I burgled them. I'm a cat burglar.

— Scott Lang

Scott Lang spent much of his youth in San Francisco making a successful living as a professional thief, stealing from wealthy businesspeople. He met and married a woman named Maggie, and after the two had a daughter named Cassie in 2007, Maggie encouraged him to pursue a more stable life. He attained a master's degree in electrical engineering and by 2009 had become a security tech at Vista Corp. In 2012, Lang noticed an anomaly whereby Vista Corp was overcharging customers on their transactions, resulting in millions of dollars of illegal profits. He fixed what he assumed to be an error, but CEO Geoff Zorick quickly chastised him and told him to switch it back and focus on his own work. Lang took his findings to human resources, but they exposed his attempted whistleblowing and he was fired. Maggie pleaded with him to move on and get another job, but Scott reverted to his old ways, desperate to right the wrongs that Vista Corp had committed. He broke into their headquarters and hacked into their security, transferring the money they had stolen back to customers' accounts and posting the bank records online as evidence. In a vindictive follow-up move, Lang attempted to burgle Zorick's home while he was away, driving his car into his pool for good measure. He was caught, convicted, and sentenced to five years at San Quentin Penitentiary for breaking and entering and grand larceny. Maggie divorced him and soon married a police officer named Jim Paxton, but Scott remained close to his daughter Cassie.

While in prison, Lang met a man named Luis, and the two became fast friends. Luis was released in 2014, and Lang the following year on July 17—two years early for good behavior. Scott was adamant about staying away from crime, determined to provide for Cassie in an honest and dependable way, but his criminal record made it difficult to hold a job. For the time being, he would stay in Luis's apartment. Luis introduced him to a couple of other ex-cons, Kurt and Dave, intending to get him back to his corporate-thieving ways with a promising heist opportunity, but Scott refused. Scott later showed up to his daughter's eighth-birthday party uninvited, and though Cassie still loved and looked up to him, Maggie and her husband Jim insisted that he needed to figure his own life out and pay child support before he could be a part of Cassie's life again. Scott later calculated that even with a standard, steady income, he wouldn't be able to rent an apartment and pay Cassie's child support for over a year. Desperate, he returned to Luis and asked about the heist he'd mentioned earlier. Luis told him that he'd learned of a retired billionaire who would be away from home for a week and who kept a large, advanced safe in his basement—one that was bound to hold something extremely valuable. Lang agreed to the job, and the four ex-cons set to work prepping for the burglary. Once the others had taken care of various precautionary measures, Lang infiltrated the house in the dark of night. He successfully broke into the safe, but inside found only what he believed was a full-body motorcycle suit, including a strange helmet. Believing the heist to be a bust, Lang took the suit anyway.

Hank, Hope, and Janet

Scott, I've been watching you for a while. Ever since you robbed Vista Corp—oh, excuse me, burgled Vista Corp.

—Hank Pym

The next day, Lang examined the suit more closely. He found that it contained pockets that held vials of a mysterious red liquid. He donned the suit, stepped into the bathtub, and pressed a button that he found on his right glove, causing him to instantly shrink to the size of an ant. Suddenly, he heard a man's voice through the suit's helmet, informing him that this was a "trial by fire." Luis came in and began to run a bath, forcing Lang to escape the quickly filling bathtub. He fell through the floorboards of Luis's bathroom and experienced a gauntlet of gigantic threats to his diminutive form, including getting sucked up by a vacuum cleaner and getting accosted by a rat. Eventually he returned to his standard size after landing on the roof of a man's car outside. The man speaking through his helmet encouraged him to keep the suit and said that he'd be in touch, but Lang was so upset by the experience that he instead decided to return the suit. He again entered his target's home and put it back where he had found it, but upon exiting he was met and arrested by the police. He was taken to jail, where Jim Paxton saw him and was disappointed on Maggie and Cassie's behalf. To Lang's surprise, a police officer told him that his lawyer had come to speak with him: when he went to the conference room, the "lawyer" was in fact legendary scientist and estranged founder of Pym Technologies, Hank Pym, who had been speaking to him through the suit. Pym had deliberately orchestrated Lang's theft of the suit, having paid off Luis's source to deliver the tip. Pym knew a great deal about Lang's personal life, and seemed to want him for some greater purpose that he would explain later. For the time being, he encouraged Lang to accept his help or else spend the rest of his life struggling in and out of prison. He told Lang to return to his cell and await further instructions. Later, a small group of ants arrived in his cell carrying the small suit, and they activated its growth mechanism to return it to full size. More ants arrived, and they imitated a countdown clock to encourage Lang to don the suit and escape. He did so, turning to ant size a moment before an officer arrived to check his cell. As a manhunt ensued, Lang met a group of ants outside the building, whom Pym called his "associates." Pym had him board a winged ant, which tried to carry Lang to Pym's destination. Lang couldn't take the excitement and passed out.

When he awoke, he was laying in bed in Pym's home, being observed by a young woman. She pointed out the dangerous bullet ants covering the floor, designed to keep him from doing anything unexpected. Lang gingerly walked out, allowing the ants to form a path for him, and went downstairs to speak with Pym and his daughter, Hope van Dyne, chairwoman of the Pym Tech board. Pym revealed that he had been watching Lang ever since the Vista Corp job, using small cameras attached to his ants to observe and assess his aptitude for a particular job. He explained that he could "speak" to the ants by using "electromagnetic waves to stimulate their olfactory nerve center" by way of a device on his ear that resembled a hearing aid. Further, he introduced Lang to his miraculous invention, the Pym Particle, which allowed him to change the distance between atoms at will, and this particle comprised the red liquid that made the size-changing abilities of his suit possible. Though he didn't mention it, Pym had also worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., not only as a scientist, but also as the clandestine hero known as Ant-Man, along with his wife the Wasp. Pym had kept the particle away from the public eye, recognizing its high potential for catastrophe. He told Lang that the current CEO of Pym Tech, Darren Cross, had been trying for years to recreate the particle, and was getting dangerously close. He had also developed an Ant-Man-like Yellowjacket suit that he planned to sell to Mitchell Carson, former defense head at S.H.I.E.L.D. and currently a rogue agent involved in a number of conflicts around the world. Pym needed Lang to break into Pym Tech, steal the Yellowjacket, and destroy all of the research data relating to Cross's imitation Pym Particles. In return, Pym would ensure that Scott could see his daughter again. Scott didn't believe he was up to the task, and Hope agreed, insisting that she do the job instead. She and Hank argued, but Pym would not be budged, as he needed Hope to stay close to Cross. In the end, he convinced Scott to take on the job and become the new Ant-Man.

Hank and Hope put Scott through a diverse training regiment designed to prepare him to best deploy the various abilities of Ant-Man. Hope explained that the Pym Particle caused energy to compress, causing a punch from Ant-Man to be potentially fatal. As such, she gave him a crash course in martial arts to teach him to fight competently. During the training, Hank claimed that his wife Janet had died in a plane crash—Hope didn't believe this, and had given up trying to figure out why Hank wouldn't tell her how she had actually died. While examining the suit, Lang found a regulator that he believed he could remove to improve the suit's efficiency. Hank warned him not to do so, as compromising the regulator could cause the suit to shrink infinitely, winding up in the Quantum Realm where laws of time and space cease to function. Pym provided Lang with a set of small discs that, when thrown at a target, would cause it to either shrink or grow, depending on the disc. Scott also became familiar with the various breed of ant that would be helping him on the job: the painful-biting bullet ants; crazy ants, capable of conducting electricity and useful for causing shortages; fire ants, with their aptitude for constructions made out of their own bodies; and winged carpenter ants, which Lang had already met. Lang in fact was reintroduced to the ant that he'd first flown on, and decided to affectionately name him Ant-thony. Hope grew more bitter throughout the training, as tension with her father began to boil over. In a private conversation, Scott told her that he had been chosen for this mission because he was expendable: because Hank wasn't willing to lose her like he had lost Janet. Hope revealed that she had called the police on him when he'd returned to Hank's home, but wouldn't have done it if she'd known he had a daughter. As the two developed an understanding, she helped him to successfully use Pym's device to communicate with and command the ants. Later, Hank explained to Hope and Scott the truth behind Janet's death, linked to her past as the Wasp. In 1987, he and she were on a mission from S.H.I.E.L.D. in Soviet Kursk, where separatists had hijacked a nuclear missile and launched it at the United States. Hank intended to go subatomic to penetrate the missile's otherwise impregnable titanium casing, but his regulator had sustained too much damage. Instead, Janet entered the missile and deactivated it, causing it to land safely in the ocean and apparently leaving her to die in the Quantum Realm. For the next ten years, as Hank set Hope off to boarding school and grew distant from her, it was because he was studying the Quantum Realm in hopes of getting her back. He told Hope that he had kept the truth from her to try to protect her and keep her from following in her parents' footsteps. Hope forgave him and mended their tumultuous past. Over time, Scott became proficient in the many skills required to be Ant-Man.

The heist

Did you think you could stop the future with a heist?

It was never just a heist!

—Darren Cross and Ant-Man

As the "final phase" of Scott's training, and the first step of getting into Pym Tech, Hank needed him to retrieve a signal decoy from an old storage facility owned by Howard Stark in upstate New York. The decoy would be needed "to counteract the transmission blockers" in the Futures Lab where Cross was keeping the Yellowjacket. Unbeknownst to Pym however, that facility and the surrounding area had recently been repurposed into a base of operations by the Avengers. Ant-Man and his small legion of ants stowed away in a plane and airdropped above the compound. Hank and Hope, observing from San Francisco, told him to abort the mission upon learning that the Avengers had taken over the facility, but Lang landed on the roof of the central building and was soon confronted by the Falcon. Lang politely introduced himself and asked to borrow the signal decoy, but Falcon was suspicious and tried to apprehend him. Ant-Man apologized and resisted, and managed to use his unconventional tactics of shrinking and growing to get one up on the relatively experienced hero, eventually shrinking inside his winged suit to fry his technology. Along the way, he successfully snagged the decoy from the warehouse in question and retreated on winged antback. When he returned to the Pym household, the three allies discussed matters in the kitchen. Hank stepped into another room to find that Darren Cross had quietly entered the house. Darren invited Hank to the public unveiling of the Yellowjacket tomorrow while Scott used his command of the ants to hide the nearby blueprints to the Pym Tech building. Shortly after Darren left, he called Hope and told her that he was going to increase security for the event tomorrow. With their planned infiltration method shot, Scott suggested getting in through the water main instead, which would require lowering the pressure. With Hank and Hope occupied at the event itself, they would need further assistance. Hank and Hope begrudgingly agreed to recruit Luis, Kurt, and Dave: the three would, respectively, play a fake security guard to depressurize the water; hack into the power system to deactivate the laser grid protecting the Yellowjacket; and act as the getaway driver. Scott, Hank, and Hope explained the specifics of the situation, including the capabilities of Ant-Man, in preparation for the job.

On the night of the burglary, the plan went largely as expected, for a time. Luis depressurized the water from inside, allowing Ant-Man and a huge army of ants to enter the building through a sink faucet. Scott went on to lead the crazy ants in shorting out the database, wiping all backup data on Cross's knockoff Pym Particles. He then planted a set of explosives (grown to full size) near the company's supply of makeshift Pym Particles and set them on a timer. By this point, the police had realized that Pym had posed as Lang's lawyer, and Jim Paxton and another officer showed up at the event to arrest him at the door. Seeing this, Dave stole their undercover police car and crashed it nearby, giving Pym time to enter the building scot-free. With help from Luis, Hope installed the signal decoy, narrowly avoiding being spotted by Darren himself. Darren led Hank and Hope into the Yellowjacket display room, where the sale of the technology to Mitchell Carson was set to take place. Carson and his allies arrived, and Cross explained that they were with the nefarious Hydra, but claimed that they had reformed their ways. He openly mocked Pym, earning a punch to the face. The police found Dave and Kurt in their operations van and arrested them just as Kurt managed to turn off the laser grid above the Yellowjacket, giving Ant-Man access. But as Ant-Man rappelled down to the suit, it was removed from its case by Cross himself. Cross had been a step ahead of the plan, and knew that Scott Lang had taken the Ant-Man mantle. News of the Avengers compound infiltration had spread, allowing Cross to sell the Yellowjacket to Hydra for twice the price. Furthermore, he had come to Hank's house last night to kill him, but called it off after he realized that Hope was there—now he was prepared to do it. Desperate to find a way out of Yellowjacket's seemingly indestructible case, Ant-Man hurled a growth disc at its wall and caused it to implode. He sprung to action and began taking down Carson's Hydra cronies. In the fight, Cross managed to shoot Pym in the shoulder, taking him down, but Hope and Scott used their ants to take control of the battle. As the bullet ants attacked Cross, Carson escaped with a vial of his particles. Cross soon escaped himself as Hope and Scott looked after Hank. Elsewhere, Luis pulled an alarm, catching the attention of the police, allowing Kurt and Dave to evade capture, as well as clearing civilians from the building in preparation for the explosion.

As Hope tended to her father, she encouraged Ant-Man to chase after Cross. With help from Luis, Ant-Man fought his way through Pym Tech security and trailed Cross to the roof, where he was taking off in a helicopter with allies from Hydra and the Yellowjacket suit in a briefcase. As he flew Ant-thony in a swarm of carpenter ants, Cross fired into the swarm with his pistol and unbelievably hit Ant-thony, killing him. A distraught Ant-Man climbed onto another ant and boarded the helicopter as it took to the sky. After Hope, Hank, Luis, and everyone else had evacuated the building, the charge exploded, activating the volatile Pym Particles and causing the building to shrink to an imperceptibly small size, utterly obliterating all of Cross's work. The infuriated Cross inadvertently killed the men from Hydra trying to shoot Ant-Man. He soon donned the Yellowjacket suit and began firing powerful lasers in a blind rage, killing the helicopter's pilots and sending it spiraling into the bay. The shrunken Ant-Man and Yellowjacket found themselves inside the shut briefcase as it fell out of the helicopter and into a residential swimming pool. They fought around the pool, and a grown Ant-Man batted the shrunken Yellowjacket into a nearby bug zapper, incapacitating him for the time being. Officer Paxton arrived, and Scott revealed his face and surrendered, but Jim tased him anyway. When he came to, Scott was in the back of the cops' undercover car. He implored Jim to take him back, but Jim angrily brushed off his "delusions." Suddenly, an alert came over the CB radio of a disturbance at the Paxton household. Jim hurriedly drove there and investigated, insisting that Scott stay in the backseat. Knowing that Cassie was in danger, Scott managed to sneak the Ant-Man helmet back on, shrink, and enter Cassie's room to find her in Yellowjacket's arms. Ant-Man tossed a shrinking disc at him, and the shrunken foes fought among Cassie's toy train set, along with Scott's ant allies. During the battle, a deflected growing disc made contact with an ant, growing it to the size of a large dog, and it fled from the house. Paxton attempted to arrest Cross and rescue his stepdaughter, but only drew the Yellowjacket's ire. Ant-Man realized that the regulator of the Yellowjacket suit was protected inside a titanium fixture on his back: in order to tamper with it, like the Wasp before him, he would have to go subatomic. Knowing that it could kill him, or worse, he turned off his regulator, jumping into the suit and destroying the electronics inside as he continued to shrink. As a result, Cross also shrank imperceptibly, but seemed to be mangled severely by the suit's uneven shifting in the process: whether he survived this event remains unknown. Ant-Man emerged in the Quantum Realm, continuing to shrink across bizarre, unreal landscapes. Finding that he couldn't grow normally, he installed a growing disc in his regulator to bring himself back to full size, becoming the first person in history to return from the Quantum Realm. As he emerged, he and an overjoyed Cassie embraced. Having seen sufficient evidence to prove that Scott was a hero, Jim allowed him to escape as other police arrived.

The next day, Scott spoke to a recovering Hank, who was blown away that Scott had returned safely from the Quantum Realm—unfortunately, he remembered none of what he'd seen there. Nonetheless, Hank's hope that Janet was alive—and could return—was renewed. While he was there, Scott and Hope had a moment together, ending with a brief kiss that was awkwardly interrupted by Hank stepping in from the next room. That night, Scott had dinner with Jim, Maggie, and Cassie, and Jim told him that he had fudged the records of Scott's arrest so as to effectively pardon his latest break-in. Cassie had, apparently in secret, also taken the giant ant as a pet. Scott received a call from Luis and met up with him across town. Luis told him that, through a series of contacts, a member of the Avengers—the Falcon, as Scott inferred—was looking for Ant-Man.