Professor X saw that she was about to leave and could not resist sharing a few secrets with her.
What secrets? They concerned Thanos. Professor X had read a great deal of fragmented information from Supergiant's mind and organized it afterward. He had no channel for passing intelligence to the human leadership, so for now he could only tell Daisy.
The information was chaotic, and much of it was mixed with imagination. For example, in Supergiant's memories as Charles saw them, Thanos was a towering giant. How tall was he exactly? How enormous? The old professor supplied a number on his own: five hundred meters (about 1,640 feet)!
Combining Supergiant's memories with his own imagination, Professor X's final image of Thanos became a five-hundred-meter giant like a mountain, capable of destroying planets with a wave of his hand and shattering stars with a kick, commanding countless subordinates, with figures on Supergiant's level far too many to count.
Daisy: ⊙_⊙
This is Thanos? You think I don't know any better? That's Galactus!
"In short, humanity is in serious trouble. Mutants or ordinary humans, it makes no difference. To face the disasters of the future, what we need most right now is unity."
What could Daisy say? That the Thanos in Supergiant's mind had been exaggerated beyond all reason, and that you, Professor, had compounded one mistake with another until Thanos had been elevated into something absurd?
In the end she could only let out a long sigh and say that she would inform the higher-ups.
At the same time, she understood Professor X's intention. He probably wanted to use this information as bargaining material with the human leadership, using a common enemy to ease the mutants' current crisis. That was what he meant by "unity."
Still, he did not object to Daisy's plan either. Killing Stryker benefited everyone. In the face of a five-hundred-meter Thanos, one more or one less Stryker hardly mattered.
After leaving Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Daisy resumed her coalition-building. A joint enforcement operation first needed scale, and second needed secrecy. Both demanded extensive connections and strong execution.
Her own network was not enough. Fortunately, Stryker had done an excellent job making everyone hate him. Senior officials, lawmakers, and wealthy people with mutant children all gathered together, cooperating across party and regional lines.
Contacts were linked, resources were shared, and a Mutant Parents' Alliance came into being.
Warren Worthington II contributed the most. Worthington Industries was a Fortune 500 company, and his only son had been taken. Every day felt like a year to him. Fortunately, he still retained enough reason not to rush into a rescue attempt.
The old man was from the same generation as Obadiah Stane and had an enormous network, but he had no combat ability and could only cooperate with Daisy. One supplied resources, the other manpower, making the two of them the alliance's central figures.
While mobilizing people and resources, Daisy also confined Lorna to the villa under extremely tight protection, waiting for the enemy to give itself away.
Two days later, Professor X notified her that Stryker had begun the final stage of his deployment. Someone displaying the traits of a mutant teleporter had entered Washington and appeared to be planning to visit the White House as an ordinary tourist.
As for the practice of letting ordinary people tour the White House, Daisy had no idea whether it was democratic or not. If anyone dared tour her office, she would personally shoot them full of holes.
The attacker would not make his move the same day he arrived in Washington. He still needed to do some reconnaissance and preparation.
Her good relationship with President Obama's family now became useful. Daisy spent two consecutive days at the White House.
She had a good relationship with President Obama's wife and daughters. Every time she visited, she brought luxury goods from the Frost Group as little gifts between friends. She obviously could not just hand them over openly, so she always claimed she had bought them from a street stall. Designer handbags, luxury cosmetics—everything cost five dollars!
Where did she buy them, you ask? Daisy would tell them there was a fat man named Kingpin in Hell's Kitchen who specialized in selling these "counterfeits." If you had a death wish, you could go ask him yourself.
President Obama appreciated this transparent act of self-deception. Daisy grew closer and closer to his family. Many politicians looked down on her methods, but because of their gender, they truly had no way to copy them.
A woman giving gifts to another woman was perfectly acceptable. But a group of men in their forties and fifties giving designer cosmetics, shoes, handbags, and clothes to another man's wife and daughters? One only had to think about it to know how unrealistic that was.
At noon two days later, Daisy was chatting with President Obama's eldest daughter when gunshots suddenly sounded downstairs. She knew the guest she had been waiting for had arrived.
"Lock the door. I'll go take a look." With that, she pulled the door open and walked out.
Downstairs was in chaos. Panicked tourists, the gunfire of White House security, and scattered screams all mixed together.
To prove that she had known nothing in advance, Daisy was not wearing an agent's combat suit. She was dressed entirely in ordinary clothes: a beige long dress and a pair of pointed kitten heels were all the equipment she had.
On the way, she asked a guard for a handgun, an ordinary Glock. After checking the magazine, she took the lead into the combat area.
Using superpowers would make people wary, but using a handgun was another matter. If her marksmanship was good, no one could object.
Leading several guards into President Obama's Oval Office, she found more than a dozen guards gathered inside, along with two politicians who had apparently had the same idea as Daisy and had come to "save the president" while earning some prestige.
The attacker moved through the room like a ghost, appearing anywhere he pleased and leaving bursts of black smoke behind him.
With Daisy's powerful eyesight, the enemy's movements could not hide from her at all. Blue skin, yellow eyes, a triangular tail like a demon's—teleporting anywhere within visual range seemed instinctive to him. Whenever a guard took aim, he teleported away from the bullet's path. His elusive movements let him pass through the storm of gunfire as if no one were there.
"Mr. President, get down!"
"Mr. President, there's an enemy over here too!"
President Obama was being shoved and dragged around by several men with hands on his head. Anyone who did not know better might have thought they were hauling him into a struggle session.
Everyone ran around like headless flies, completely thrown off as the attacker darted unpredictably from place to place.
"You, you, and you. The three of you stand back-to-back and cover this area."
"You two guard the door."
"The rest of you form a circle around the president."
The moment Daisy entered, she took command. The White House guards all knew her. With her long list of titles—senior agent, colonel, deputy director—behind her, the guards, who were at most special-forces operators, chose to obey.
With a whoosh, the attacker appeared hanging from the chandelier in the office. He bared a mouthful of white teeth, apparently very dissatisfied with Daisy's arrangement.
Daisy sneered. I'm not afraid of your father Azazel or your mother Mystique. You think I'd be afraid of a kid like you?
She watched the enemy's teleportation pattern. The innate ability was almost identical to Azazel's, while the blue skin had clearly been inherited from Mystique. He simply lacked her ability to change shape freely.
A teleporter was not enough to trouble Daisy.
Daisy kept her genetic signature purely human, while deliberately suppressing her outward physical attributes to only slightly above ordinary human levels.
"Who sent you?" she asked. Unfortunately, the enemy only bared his teeth and teleported into a full assault the next second.