After much deliberation, it was determined that Lana would be permitted to return to her own room. She was permitted. Lana loathed that. Who were they to decide whether or not she would be permitted to leave Nat's room? The redheaded pseudo-ninja woke up at three in morning, every morning, to practice some difficult martial arts that Lana didn't know the name of. And that wasn't even the worst of it; she had to get up too! Early mornings had never been her forte, and they never would be, no matter how much one former Russian spy tried to change that fact. And after this final morning of being woken up before dawn, Lana had decided to finally take her leave from the company of Nat.

Shaking her head, Lana's eyes narrowed as she entered her room. The curtains were drawn back to reveal the watery, early morning light shining down on an already busy Manhattan. Half expecting to smell flambeed skin, she took a sniff of the air, and relieved to only small the light fresh scent of mint.

The bed was expertly made, with nary a hint of dust about them. Everything in this room was as it should be. Nothing out of place, just the way the pale girl liked it. The only difference in the room since she had last left it were the doors. Replacing the thick sturdy elevator-like doors that had stood there before were a set of rather flimsy wood ones. In the off chance she was ever trapped in this room again, these doors would be her salvation. The doors were so breakable, even she, a weakling, could break through them in an emergency.

Leaving her door opened - a position she would probably leave it in for the foreseeable future - she plopped down onto soft bed, letting out an involuntary moan. Oh, how she had missed the sweet, sweet solace of an actual bed! Weeks sleeping on a couch in Nat's room had caused knots all over her back. The largest one beneath her left shoulder blade had been named Agent Romanov. Letting herself fall back, she breathed a sigh of content, and closed weary bloodshot eyes, hoping to take a nap before Pietro came to look for her, demanding to go get pancakes.

After his one night stand had left a few days earlier, The silver speedster had been acting very sheepish and apologetic, as he should have been. His way of making up the event to Lana had been going to local diners that served stacks of pancakes taller than her head. Pietro had very quickly become a temporary replacement for her friendship with Wanda. The witch and Vision had left very abruptly for a clandestine mission a few days prior, leaving Lana still curious about much of Vision. But it could wait. All of it could wait, if only for just for a few minutes as she got a bit of shut eye-

"Lana". She jumped out of bed, forgetting that she had been clutching a walkie-talkie tightly in her hand. Stark had insisted on a mode of communication for everyone in the building as precaution. Even Loki had received one, although Lana suspected that by now, he had long since disposed of its 'inferior' technology. Though FRIDAY's systems were unlikely to be tampered with again, it was always a chance that wasn't worth taking.

"You scared the hell out of me, Stark." Her voice came out shaky. "And what are you even doing awake? Didn't you and Pepper go out drinking or something?"

"Yep. But I bounce back quickly." Had Lana's eyes rolled back any further into her head, her retinas would have detached. "But that's not what I called about. We figured out what exactly that sludge was."

"What was it?" Stark and Banner had already discovered it's radioactive nature, so what else was there to know? In Lana's unwritten handbook to life, radioactive equalled bad. Every. Damn. Time.

"Come down and see." It couldn't hurt. Lana most likely wouldn't understand a lick of what they said, but it was worth the company, she thought to herself, looking at her empty room, beginning to miss being in the proximity of another person. And it's not like she would sleep now, not since the sun was up.

"Okay." She was about to let go of the talk button when she felt a wave of gratitude wash over her. "Hey Stark? Thanks for making sure these things work."

"No problem, kiddo." Maybe Stark wasn't so bad after all. Annoying, arrogant, but not so bad.

"So," Lana started, wincing as her shoes made obnoxious clacks in the otherwise silent lab. "What is it?"

"Do you want the real version or the dumbed down version?" Stark asked, turning towards her. The only response was a sigh of annoyance that could have caused small children to cry in a far away foreign land.

"Got it. Well, at first, we thought it was ununpentium-"

"Stop making up words." She snarked. It sounded like he had been reading too much Harry Potter lately and was trying his hand a making spells.

"He's actually not making up words." Banner interjected, re-centering his wire-framed glasses with a finger. "It's a theoretical element. Or was until a couple years ago. Some physicist made it." Because scientists making something impossible always ends so well.

"But it's confusing. While this element has many properties of ununpentium, like the proton and neutron count, it's stable. We shouldn't have even been able to detect it, but we were."

"What do you mean?" Her eyebrows furrowed. While she had been able to recognize things involving radioactivity due to growing up around because of her father, she was hilariously out of her depth now.

"All radioactive elements and their isotopes have half-lifes." Lana's eyes looked like lost puppy eyes. Seeing that, Banner changed the example.

"Basically, that means how long it take for it to rot. If you have a bag of spinach, how long does it take for half of it to rot and to be no longer edible? Maybe a week or so. I'm not that kind of scientist. But that's how radioactive elements work. They all have half lives, some of them very long and some of them very short."

That made more sense, but Lana was still grasping at straws as Banner continued his explanation, with Stark behind him picking at his nails in boredom.

"The main reason that ununpentium was only theoretical for so many years was because it has a very short half life. In anything other than perfect lab conditions, it would have broken down so quickly that it would never be detected. It takes under 30 milliseconds for half of it to rot away. All trace of it should be gone within a second or less. Which is why we're confused." Things rotting away really fast. 0.003 seconds fact. But she couldn't help but wonder why.

"Why?" Stark cut Banner off before he could answer Lana's question.

"Because we can still detect it. An inherent quality of anything radioactive is that it's unstable. It will always be decaying. But this stuff? It's stable. It's not decaying and it's defying the known laws of physics. If this was spinach, it'd be perfectly good spinach that had been sitting in the fridge for a decade. It still has 115 protons weeks after we took the sample." Protons, neutrons. Sounded like a children's television show to her. Unfortunately for Lana, it was like trying to explain the color green to someone who was colorblind. She probably wouldn't get it.

"Couldn't you just have started with that? 'Lana,'" she tried imitating Stark's voice, and failed miserably, "'It's a mysterious thing that we don't understand". You could have saved the three of us, like, five minutes. Although I do appreciate the spinach example."

"Well, that's boring." More boring than having a bunch of useless knowledge thrown at you that you can't make sense of? Lana wanted to say. But she decided to try to be adult.

"So where does this leave us?" A worrying thought popped into her mind. "Also, am I at risk? Am I going to get cancer from it touching me?" She didn't need some horrible, radioactive caused cancer affecting her life. She already had a non-radioactive cancer stuck stubbornly to her side in the form of Pietro.

"Eh, probably not. We'll tell you more when we know more." How reassuring.

"And honestly, Lana, it leaves us more questions than we had before. We're seeing something that doesn't even make sense. I can talk to some old colleagues, but I don't know where that will leave", Said Banner. His stoicism was appreciated in these difficult times.

"Okay. I'm going to have to recommend that you tell everyone else the really shortened version of all of that." Lana anxiously pulled on the ratty sleeve of her red cardigan. She couldn't decide which was worse; not understanding the science of the impossible element, or understanding just how impossible it was? Both scared her equally, but a small part of her wished her brother was here to see this. An impossible element? That would have been right up his alley. He'd taken after their late father, a physicist who had been assigned to a nuclear power plant when they both were very young. But wishes don't make horses, nor do they bring back the dead.

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