[for Chase and Jane] The cavalry.

[notawastedlife]

It paid to remember that an experiment that didn't go the way you expected was not necessarily a failure. That having a hypothesis disproved or a calculation revealed as off-the-mark -- not that the latter often happened to him -- was valuable in itself, provided its own way forward, its own set of data

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[sciencefact]

Jane spends time poking around the scrapyard as much to keep tabs on what everyone else is working on as to find parts for her own projects. Tony Stark likes playing things extremely close to the vest, she's found, but if she overhears something, what of it? The man may be secretive, but he's also loquacious. If he won't work directly with her (yet), she'll keep tabs in whatever way works. That she's in the scrapyard today is not at all unusual.

What is unusual, however, is that what used to be a plain wall now contains an oval-shaped portal rimmed with flickering blue. That this isn't anything like what she's seen before matters very little, and a surge of jumbled emotion hits her in a rush. Astonishment, jubilation and uncertainty are indistinguishable, and for the space of a few seconds, she's overwhelmed at the mere sight of the thing. When her brain kicks in, it's just in time for Stark to drop in out of the blue.

"How did you produce enough negative energy to create a bridge and manage to stabilize it?" she demands as she

[apoorupbringing]

Old Lace came out from behind a large stack of metal and plastic scraps to push her head past the tiny human woman's shoulder and frown with perceptible dinosaur worry at Iron Man.

Whatever was going on, it was troubling, and bound to attract her human's attention.

"Whaaaaaaaaat," Chase said, wiping his hands off on an oily rag before shoving it into his back pocket, hair sticking out at odd angles beneath an Angels cap, as he followed the dinosaur over.

"The hell is all this, now?"

[notawastedlife]

"Didn't," Tony said, ripping a panel off Terrible's side with a single motion. The robot was already in bad shape, on its side and completely inert, and he didn't have time to go gently. He retrieved a small chip, snapping it into a slot that briefly opened on the arm of the gauntlet.

That was Peter, all right, in the last of the video feed, now playing back in his HUD.

"Initial reaction is self-sustaining, once you get it running, but then the vibrational frequency we added to make it less of a quantum tunnel and more of a quantum... tear rips it apart. Which will happen in about... we need more time," he muttered, reaching the computer console sitting atop the portal device and typing rapidly.

"Chase," he said, without looking away to acknowledge someone else had arrived, and had in fact been there for part of that. "Got your gear?"

[sciencefact]

"We? Who's we?" Not the blonde kid, that was for sure, as he looked entirely too confused for that. "You and Parker?" Who else could it possibly be? Walter apparently had some experience, but it wasn't his specialty.

"You can't keep it open," Jane says as she peers over Stark's shoulder. "Even if you could compensate for the energy fluctuations and get the tear permanently stabilized on our end, without a stabilizer to properly receive it, it would eventually take whatever's on the other end apart."