The first thing she felt inside the wrecked station was the heat.
Scorch marks had eaten into every surface. Precision instruments throughout the facility had liquefied, then re-solidified into alien shapes of half-melted metal. Whatever those machines had been worth before, they were scrap now.
The second thing she felt was the dark. Even with her suit's built-in lights running and her own low-light vision, the footing was miserable—uneven floors, debris everywhere, every step an uncertain one.
She didn't have long. A rescue team would arrive within the hour at most.
The station's residual radiation was severely disrupting her vibration power. She'd memorized Susan's frequency beforehand, but that didn't make the search easy.
"Ugh—"
She hit something with her foot mid-search and stumbled.
Normal circumstances: no issue. But she was in a full spacesuit—padded, rigid, and sized like a small vehicle. No amount of reaction speed compensated for that.
She looked at the floor. Nothing there. She crouched and felt around carefully. Something was on the ground, and it was invisible. She ran her hands up slowly—hair, pinned up, hard to read. Kept going. Face, lips, throat. About sixty percent certain. Continued further—and then she was certain.
The soft, particular form under her gloved hands confirmed it.
The invisible woman on the floor was Susan Storm.
Finding the synthetic suit—the one that was rightfully hers—was the next task. Given the choice between waiting for Reed to hand them over or recovering them herself, she chose the latter. Reed, being who he was, would run radiation tests on everything the moment he regained consciousness—and there was essentially no chance he'd hand over radiation-bearing material without a full analysis first.
She pulled at the suits. They didn't move.
Caught on something? She worked her hands along Susan's body, head to toe, twice. The suits were wound around her—two fallen metal struts had Susan pinned. The metal had absorbed a faint trace of her invisibility, but not the synthetic fiber's structural properties, and was already becoming visible.
Brute strength was the obvious solution, except that spacesuit gloves the size of oven mitts made precise grip nearly impossible. Ten tons of lifting capacity didn't help when you couldn't get a proper hold.
"For the record—this isn't personal." She muttered it to no one.
She wrapped both hands around the two struts and activated her vibration power. The goal was to shatter them. Some of the force would transfer into Susan—no way around it.
"Mhm—mm—"
Under the rapid vibration, Susan Storm became visible. Her skin flushed in a way that had nothing to do with heat. Her lips parted slightly, and a series of involuntary, unambiguous physical responses played out around her. Daisy kept her eyes ahead and pretended not to notice any of it.
One minute and fifteen seconds later, she shattered both struts—made of some special alloy Reed had used—and dragged the still-unconscious Susan free.
The two synthetic suits were largely destroyed. She lifted them from Susan carefully and sealed them in the containment case. Then she reconsidered, peeled two additional fragments from Susan's own suit, and decided that was enough.
The bag they'd been stored in was already half-ruined when she got there. Her vibration had reduced it further. She scattered some unidentifiable fragments across the area for effect—sell the damage, make the condition look worse than her involvement.
In for a penny. She made her way to Reed, then Johnny, and pulled a few material fragments from each of their suits. Ben Grimm she passed on entirely—the man was charred so completely he'd gone nearly carbon-black. Nothing useful left on him.
With the samples secure, she headed for the central control room. Her intention: end the Doctor Doom problem early, before he had a chance to become one.
Luck was not on her side.
Reed had built a heavily reinforced alloy observation chamber for the cosmic radiation experiment. Doom was unconscious inside it.
The interference around the chamber was too strong. She couldn't jump in. Using the rings to cut through the door—she thought about it, then put the thought down. Once separated from the body, the ring wouldn't work. With the suit on, the only way to use them would be to cut a hole through the suit itself and face the residual cosmic radiation directly. She wasn't that desperate.
"Count yourself lucky." She caught the distant sound of rotor blades through the hull. She didn't wait.
She jumped back to New York.
First: the decontamination room. Spacesuit off. Quick shower. Full change of clothes. Then she stood outside the sealed experimental chamber she'd had built.
Through the glass, she spoke: "Danger—run radiation index checks on the recovered materials. Then cross-reference with my genetic profile and model viability for enhancement."
Using a set of mechanical arms, Danger opened the containment case and extracted the synthetic suit fragments. Significant radiation—a lot of it. Danger would need extensive comparative analysis before the cosmic radiation's composition could be properly characterized. Only after that would it be safe to run exposure trials against Daisy's genetic samples.
She left Danger to the work and went back out to deal with the Doom Industries position.
"A lot of capital entered the market. Our returns will take a hit." The maid had been running numbers all day. Financial modeling wasn't her specialty, but she had a team for that—her job was to bring Daisy the summary.
"Can't be helped. Keep tracking it. We'll have results by tomorrow." Daisy turned her pen between her fingers, resignation in her voice.
The station had gone down exactly an hour before market close. That was the problem.
When Stark had held his press conference to announce the end of the weapons program, the news had reached institutional capital and retail investors at the same moment. Front-running that had been nearly impossible. This situation was different. Ordinary people had no idea something had just crashed into the South Pacific. Many were still holding Doom Industries positions, waiting for the good news that Doom's media team had primed them to expect.
The broad market had been steady—a slight upward drift. But several well-connected institutional players had already learned what happened. Their calculation: Doom himself might well be dead. Their capital moved all at once, shorting the stock aggressively, staking out position ahead of tomorrow's open.
"This morning we had a bit over thirty million of our capital shaken loose," the maid said. The number clearly hurt.
They'd entered short in the middle of a rising market. That always cost something.
Daisy accepted it without much expression. The stock market was beyond her frequency range. Her vibrational powers didn't extend to financial markets. She could calculate cosmic rays and spacetime coordinates—but Reed Richards, a man who could calculate almost anything, had been wiped out by the stock market every single time he'd tried his hand at it—all in hopes of supplementing household expenses. If Mr. Fantastic kept getting blindsided by volatility, that was all the argument anyone needed to stay out without an information edge.
The smartest thing most people could do with the markets, absent inside information, was stay far away.