Daisy's hand closed on something in the empty air to her right.
Her fingers were long and slender—nothing about them suggested years of combat training. Tapered tips. Soft skin. Soft except for what she was now holding, which was somehow softer still.
Round. Yielding. Her fingers gave an involuntary squeeze. More elastic than expected.
The realization of what she was holding hit her and her brain briefly stalled, that extraordinary reaction time of hers suddenly running at a tenth of its usual speed.
Susan Stone had not been prepared for this either. Caught completely off-guard, her expression cycling through shock and mortification in rapid succession, she lost her grip on her invisibility and materialized in the middle of the crowd.
She didn't dare scream. She could only crouch, trying desperately to shield herself, though a certain someone still had hold of her sensitive spot.
She pushed. Twice. Her strength was nowhere near Daisy's, not even close. Push once—nothing. Push again—still nothing.
Daisy came back to herself. She took a fast inventory of Susan's frame—slightly shorter than her, noticeably taller than little Lorna—and in one fluid motion stripped off her own suit jacket and draped it over her.
She was wearing a mandarin-collar blouse underneath, so the situation was salvageable. She'd dressed up this morning to help Lorna show off, which meant a full suit and blouse; had it been any other day, this would have gotten awkward very fast.
"Come to my car," Daisy murmured. "There are clothes in the car."
Susan hadn't recognized her yet. Her mind had gone completely blank. She bent at the knees and followed Daisy backward through the crowd on autopilot.
Lorna, being a mutant, had slightly faster reflexes than a regular person—enough to register that a fully unclothed woman had just materialized out of thin air before Daisy ushered her away. She considered her options—an extremely unusual-looking rock monster on one side, a very naked adult woman on the other—and decided to follow Daisy.
Susan slumped in the passenger seat and exhaled. The one unfortunate detail was that the car was a convertible.
She pressed her hand to her chest, waiting for her heart to stop hammering, then did up every button on Daisy's jacket and pulled on the sweatpants that were handed to her. Only once she was more or less covered did she look around.
"Hi," Daisy said pleasantly, replaying the texture of what she'd grabbed.
That was when Susan recognized her. "Oh—Ms. Johnson. Thank God. That crackpot Reed—I can't believe he told me to use my ability in a situation like—" She couldn't quite finish the sentence.
Even by Western standards, what had just happened to Susan Stone was mortifying. She was not, by any stretch, the kind of woman who shrugged these things off.
With the immediate crisis resolved and her clothes back on, Susan turned on Reed with everything she had. Daisy was inclined to agree with her: there had been no reason for any of this. A group of people squeezing through a crowd was not a situation that required an invisible naked woman. Susan's ability absorbed light—she wasn't actually turning into air. She still occupied space. Reed had made a spectacularly bad call.
Susan was usually composed and soft-spoken. Right now she was a mess. Under Daisy's questioning look, words tumbled out in fragments: something about how the four of them had woken up; something about Ben Grimm's transformation, the shock of seeing his face, how he'd bolted. She was barely coherent.
Even Daisy, who already knew the story, was getting dizzy following along—let alone Lorna. There were only two seats in the car. Lorna was currently the third occupant, wedged in beside them. Luckily none of them were large—Lorna in particular looked like she subsisted entirely on air—and they'd made it work.
It didn't take long. Reed Richards and Johnny Stone found them quickly—Reed had spent his life with books and computers—his eyesight wasn't especially sharp—but Johnny knew what Daisy's car looked like, and a sports car stood out in a line of sedans. They came jogging over with Susan's clothes in their arms.
Johnny spotted his sister beside Daisy and exhaled with visible relief. The situation was too uncomfortable for him to do anything clever; he tilted his head away and passed his shirt to Susan without a word. Reed handed over the pants and underwear without meeting her eyes.
Reed meant well. He quietly said "put these on" and inadvertently detonated something.
"Do you think I wanted this?!"
"You completely humiliated me!"
"Why don't you take your clothes off and let several hundred people watch you—"
It was obvious Susan rarely lost her temper. Even now, seething, her voice stayed relatively controlled. Reed and Johnny stood there and absorbed it.
Lorna shot Daisy an innocent look. Daisy shook her head slightly. Nothing to say right now. She'll get it out of her system.
Susan went for five straight minutes and then finally remembered they still had a job to do. They needed to go get Ben.
She changed back into her own clothes. Daisy put her jacket back on. She made no offer to help—what the Fantastic Four were about to do looked foolish from every angle, and she had no interest in having her name attached to it.
What followed played out roughly the way it did in the films. A fire engine arrived and nearly slid off the bridge; the Fantastic Four combined their abilities to stop it from going over. A crowd of New Yorkers who had apparently decided this was all very entertaining stood on the sidelines applauding. As though the fire engine was supposed to fall—and now that it hadn't, these four people were genuine heroes!
Standing in the middle of all that applause and praise, Daisy felt oddly lonely. She didn't understand the psychology. None of this would have happened if Ben hadn't thrown a tantrum in the first place. Who was categorizing this as an act of God? Who was expecting the insurance companies to sort it out? Was the city going to foot the bill?
For some reason the fire captain—possibly in a bid to escape any liability—staged a press conference on the spot. The supposedly frantic, perpetually busy citizens of New York apparently had enough time to crowd onto the middle of a bridge and attend a media event.
Johnny Stone's face lit up in front of the cameras. "A new age is here," he announced to the assembled press. "This is the age of the Fantastic Four."
Mister Fantastic Reed Richards. Invisible Woman Susan Stone. Human Torch Johnny Stone. And finally, the Thing, Ben Grimm. That was what the press was already calling them.
They were fundamentally different from Tony Stark in the way they captured public imagination. Stark was a billionaire. Ordinary people might admire him, but they couldn't project themselves onto him—without both the money and the engineering genius, there was no version of the Iron Man story that belonged to you. there wasn't much room for ordinary people to project themselves into it.
The Fantastic Four were different. They'd started as regular people. Their powers were visible, tangible, accessible to the imagination. And the team had its own face for the cameras: Johnny Stone handled 97% of the media interviews himself and promptly brought up his distant family connection to the Captain once again.
The media caught fire immediately. Descendant of a legend. Superheroes back among ordinary people. Headlines like that were already landing on every major outlet's homepage.
Overnight the Fantastic Four became the darlings of the New York press. The NYPD, looking to improve their own public image, piled on with their own praises.