Nadia was the daughter of Hank Pym and his first wife, Maria Trovaya, who was kidnapped during their honeymoon and subsequently killed by foreign agents, Nadia was raised in the Red Room in Moscow, Russia, where she was being trained to become a Red Room agent herself.
Her earliest memory is of a man with a star on his arm. When Nadia started to read, she showed great aptitude for science, so her handlers, believing her skills to be genetic, informed her of her famous heritage and began encouraging her to emphasize her studies more. Learning of her parentage only increased Nadia's drive to escape the Red Room, and she was eventually able to obtain a black market Pym Particle sample. Nadia had a young friend named Ying, who helped her in her study of Pym Particles and learned a way to use them; however, she disappeared suddenly and Nadia was told she was "reassigned" to another project. Nadia attempted to impress her superiors into bringing her back, but they never did. After studying the Pym Particles enough to master their size-changing properties, Nadia used them escape the Red Room.
After her escape, Nadia immediately made her way to the front door of Hank Pym's home in Cresskill, New Jersey, where she discovered that Hank had seemingly sacrificed his life to stop Ultron shortly beforehand. Crushed that her father passed before she could even meet him, Nadia decided to shrink down and break into his lab in order to learn as much about him as she could. Using old Ant-Man suit pieces and materials laying around, she crafted a new costume and decided to become the new Wasp, vowing to earn the admiration of her father's allies.
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Other Personas of Nadia Van Dyne
History
CREATORS: Mark Waid, Alex Ross