By every investor's account, after Reed's team was hit by the cosmic radiation, Doom Industries' stock set a record for the fastest decline since the Great Depression—bar none—and in some respects even surpassed the Stark Industries collapse. It wiped out Victor Von Doom's life's work, drove him into bankruptcy, and sent him home to rebuild from nothing, rebranding himself as Doctor Doom along the way.
Losing that badly, and she was supposed to throw her money into the same pit? Not a chance.
She did know, though, that money existed to be spent. Otherwise it was just a string of numbers on a screen.
She arranged her expression into something thoughtful, paused a moment, then replied: "You know, Mr. Richards—ever since I was little, my dream was to be an astronaut. My health just wasn't up to it."
She let that hang for a beat, maintaining composure despite the absurdity of the lie.
"I fully support your project. Here's what I propose: I'll waive your supercomputer fees entirely, and donate an additional ten million dollars to the Baxter Foundation personally—to be used however you see fit."
She wasn't putting in real investment capital. But she needed a foothold for what came next, and the approach had practical merit too: donations like this could offset tax liability. Her S.H.I.E.L.D. income was off the books, but Skye Data and Skye Pictures still had to file. When you ran the numbers, she wasn't losing much at all.
The waived fees alone were a relief to Reed—he'd been quietly dreading that conversation. The donation, though, struck him as on the small side. Ten million dollars wouldn't last them long.
Still, something was better than nothing. They couldn't even come up with ten million right now. He ventured carefully: "What do I owe you in return? Naming rights? A percentage of project revenue?"
Daisy waved her hand. Neither interested her. Revenue? Go ask Doom how that worked out—ten years of his life, gone in an instant. Was this project ever going to generate revenue?
And naming rights on what history would remember as one of the most catastrophic investments of the modern era? She didn't need future students citing her case study.
She smiled. "Actually—my legal advisor, Miss Matsumoto—you met her—she has the same dream I do. Neither of us will ever make it to space ourselves. Could you bring two spacesuits printed with our names along with you? As a stand-in. It would feel like we'd been there."
She thought for a moment and added: "The same model as the ones your team will wear, if possible. It makes me feel more connected to it."
She remembered that the special-fiber suits Doom had provided had been engineered to hold cosmic radiation particularly well—even after reentry through the atmosphere, the residual energy barely dissipated. Get those suits back, and she could extract a usable sample.
"Just that? That's the only condition?" Reed looked almost disbelieving. The condition was so easy it barely qualified as one.
With Daisy's nod of confirmation, he immediately committed. "No problem. I'll carry them myself. Personally. Nothing will go wrong."
A superhero's word was worth trusting. She countersigned the free-access agreement on the spot, then handed him a check for ten million dollars.
After Reed left, she called in the maid. "Maki—start mobilizing our liquid assets. We're going short on Doom Industries."
They'd done it once already. Running the same play a second time was nothing new. The maid nodded immediately. "How much capital?"
"All of it."
She was going all in. In Daisy's view, the station getting swept apart by a cosmic storm was a certainty—already written. For the bet to go wrong, you'd need some combination of: the storm arriving on schedule but the Fantastic Four never being created, Reed's experiment succeeding brilliantly, and him and Doom burying the hatchet on their decades-long rivalry. The probability of all that aligned was so vanishingly small it wasn't worth calculating.
If it did happen, she'd take the loss.
In the maid's mind, Daisy had long since transcended ordinary judgment. Whatever she said was right—full stop. Two hundred million dollars in capital was mobilized quickly, sitting in position, waiting for the moment to enter the market.
A week later, the news broke: Doom Industries was launching a mission to observe cosmic radiation. The market response was lukewarm. The project was entirely self-funded by Doom Industries, with no outside capital allowed in—a decidedly un-capitalist move that didn't inspire confidence.
Daisy's contribution hardly counted as investment. Her ten million dollar donation was incomparable to Doom Industries, which was supplying the space station itself, all observation equipment, and every bit of logistical support.
The International Space Station had cost $150 billion to build. Doom's station was smaller, but the price tag still exceeded 20 billion yuan. Factor in the payload, observation instruments, transport costs, launch fees, crew training, Reed's custom-built cosmic radiation shielding chamber—the specialized alloy chamber alone, from fabrication to orbital assembly, ran about one billion yuan. All told, the total came to nearly 20 billion yuan.
Doom was betting everything. He trusted his old rival—and former competitor for Susan's affections—wouldn't lead him into a disaster. He pushed all of it in: his company's assets, his personal fortune, every resource he had, and every expectation for the future.
As a foundation donor, Daisy received an invitation from Reed about a month later to watch the shuttle launch from Kennedy Space Center.
To sell the "fragile" persona she'd established, she dressed the part. A powder-blue chiffon blouse, a light gray skirt, strappy heels. She even did her eye makeup—a light dusting of pink eyeshadow—and went with a warm red tint on her lips. The maid had told her the glossy finish made it look alluring.
Daisy had stared at her reflection for a while without seeing it. All she could think was that her teeth looked very white against the red.
The maid, outside, kept her usual New York lawyer aesthetic: white button-down, black blazer, thin-framed glasses, eight-centimeter (roughly three-inch) heels.
"Welcome. I'm Susan Storm, Director of Genetic Research at Doom Industries."
A young woman walked toward them from across the Kennedy Space Center floor. Tall, with a sweep of luminous gold hair and fair skin. Her lips were a striking red, and a single smile of hers could stop a heart.
She wore a form-fitting suit made of the special synthetic fiber—the fabric managed to be both technically functional and precisely flattering.
Daisy looked her over from head to toe, entirely without meaning to. This woman had real magnetism. She had men like Reed and Doom completely under her spell—and even the Silver Surfer, a being who had laid waste to countless worlds, was practically redeemed by her smile alone.
Purely on appearance, Susan Storm was in the same league as Black Widow. But where Natasha's allure was something shaped by long training and unconsciously projected, Susan's charm came from something simpler: a genuinely warm smile. For women, a smile like that registered as almost too sweet. For men, it registered as everything.