By the time the two of them actually got moving, though, their little crew had doubled in size without their say-so.
Jessica Jones—a girl with a real knack for detective work who'd always gotten on well with Lorna—caught the pair red-handed just as they were about to slip into the Principal's Office.
This Jessica hadn't been through her car accident yet, so she wasn't yet as tough and tomboyish as she'd one day become. Her manner and her tone were no different from any thrill-chasing American middle-schooler's.
And Peter Parker, who'd been secretly watching Mary Jane and lingering far too long, got spotted by the three of them right after.
The little team was officially formed.
As the rich kid of the group, Lorna always had an outsized say in things.
The food at Daisy's place was excellent, and Lorna had grown a bit taller than she had in the original timeline. Among the women at the villa she still looked like a child, but among kids her own age she was already fairly well developed for her age—more so than both Mary Jane and Jessica Jones, at least!
A better figure, more cash on hand, and magnetism control held in reserve as her trump card—naturally, she had a certain edge when it came to sheer presence.
The Magneto blood in her veins was starting to surface. Without the power to back it up, it's just posturing; with the power behind it, it becomes swagger. Lorna was a long way from real swagger, but cowing a few kids her own age was no challenge whatsoever.
Seeing that Jessica and Peter both wanted in on the operation, she copied a certain someone on the spot and swept a grand hand through the air—everybody comes along!
Of the four, Peter and Mary Jane were both news-lovers with a strong itch to know things; Jessica had a sharp eye and the makings of a born detective; and Lorna was in it purely for the curiosity. With a shared goal between them, a bit of discussion settled it: the Girl Detective Squad was holding its very first group outing!
The mission objective—a nighttime raid on the Principal's Office.
Coulson's easygoing image surely won him plenty of affection from the boys and girls, but it didn't leave much room for authority, which was exactly why a handful of reckless kids dared to come poking around after dark.
Try putting Kingpin in the principal's chair instead? The students would clear out the second the last bell rang.
Aside from Peter, who was still a touch nervous, the other three were completely at ease, strolling in like they owned the place.
Jessica and Mary Jane went to dig through the paper records, leaving the electronic side to Lorna, whose hacking skills were a cut above.
All that time spent soaking things up around Daisy had made Lorna a formidable hacker. She slipped into Coulson's computer without the slightest trouble.
There was nothing in the office files, but she soon found the S.H.I.E.L.D. network access port that Coulson hadn't hidden all that well.
Several methods in a row failed to crack the S.H.I.E.L.D. network. Lorna shot a sidelong glance at the others, and seeing that none of them was paying her any attention, she rattled out Daisy's name at the login screen.
As S.H.I.E.L.D.'s network supervisor, Daisy had clearance to view the office computer of any agent ranked Level 8 or below.
This wasn't some hacker's backdoor—it was a perfectly aboveboard regulation.
A name alone was useless, though. Without the password, there was no getting in.
Daisy had deliberately built herself an elaborate password. It was a tangled thing, and it changed every single day. Certain key parameters were known only to her—her birthday, say, or a few specific digits of her bank account, or even her menstrual cycle.
She'd figured that made it airtight. What she hadn't reckoned on was that you can guard against a thousand outside threats but never the thief living under your own roof.
With nothing better to do and boundless curiosity to spare, Lorna had brute-forced her way clean through the password.
If Daisy ever found the time to check, she'd discover that the little clip of the wave and the towering mountain from when the cosmic rays enhanced her had already been viewed six times...
Lorna pulled out a small notebook and matched everything up one item at a time. Before long, a twenty-eight-digit password went into the computer, and—practically cheating—she was inside the S.H.I.E.L.D. network.
Lorna knew where to draw the line, though. She looked only at Coulson's section and quickly found her answer.
She transferred the data to her cell phone, called her three companions over, and had them look at the screen. On it was a pencil sketch. "This is the guy he's looking for."
The portrait showed a man with a square jaw and a full beard, an extraordinary air about him, with a note off to the side indicating he was blond.
This was the likeness Sif had drawn by hand when Coulson asked what Thor looked like. By the Asgardians' own account, it was at least ninety percent accurate.
Learning it was a manhunt, Lorna felt a little let down. Where was the challenge in finding a person? Had she known, she'd just have gone home.
In contrast to her disappointment, the other three thought it was a fine assignment. They had no idea Lorna was a mutant, much less one with a power as fearsome as magnetism control. All three figured this was doable, and Lorna couldn't very well refuse the lot of them, so she went along with it.
They left the school and talked over where to begin.
Since Lorna hadn't mentioned S.H.I.E.L.D., the others assumed Coulson belonged to some secret intelligence outfit—the FBI, maybe, or the CIA.
"If an organization like that can't track him down, then we start small." Out of the school, Peter's nerves vanished. His intellect flat-out crushed the other three; even without powers right now, you could already tell he'd be something remarkable someday.
Peter ran the analysis on his own. "They've been searching a full day, and Coulson still isn't back, which means the work's ongoing. They'll have already swept the big public gathering spots. Since we can't go too far afield, I say we focus on the three blocks closest to here."
Feeling she'd been upstaged, Lorna crossed her arms. "And how exactly do we do that? Ask people one by one?"
Peter quickly laid out the key points. "Bars, convenience stores, parks—those are the places I think we should check."
Privately, he figured the red-light district was a strong possibility too; the man in the portrait was extremely handsome, and going out for a good time late at night would hardly be unusual. But that part he couldn't say out loud. Lead three girls into the red-light district? Peter was fairly sure Uncle Ben would beat him within an inch of his life!
The three girls didn't think it through nearly so far. Each of them had a mind of her own, but when it came to actually getting things done, they fell well short—giants in thought, dwarves in action, the lot of them.
Going by distance, they hit the convenience stores first. Coaxing information out of people was Mary Jane's specialty; cheerful and outgoing by nature, she was wonderful at talking to anyone.
Several convenience stores turned up nothing, so they moved on to the bars. Being minors, they couldn't get in, but they could question the doormen.
Midtown High sat in a wealthy district, and the bars here were fairly respectable. The doormen, seeing how well-spoken the kids were, didn't shoo them off, and under Lorna's dollar offensive they took a good look at the photo.
The first bar was a dead end. So was the second. But at the third bar, a passing customer happened to glance at their phone, gave the photo some thought, and handed them a lead.
Earlier there'd been a brawl, and the drunk who'd been hemmed in and beaten at the center of it had looked a lot like the man they were after.
Overjoyed, they thanked the stranger and headed for the alley he'd described.
It wasn't far, just rather out of the way. In a blind corner of an alley they found the blond man—reeking of liquor, sprawled in a pool of blood.