Shame. That was Daisy's first reaction when she saw the items strewn across the desk.
What was all this garbage? Spreadsheets, financial stamps, invoices—from a distance, someone might mistake her for an accountant.
She picked up one document and studied it carefully. She remembered this one: a procurement plan for pressure relief valves. Market price, eight thousand dollars each. She'd been planning to report them at twelve thousand...
The arc reactor involved a lot of materials. Back when she'd built one for Obadiah, he'd covered labor and supplies himself, leaving her very few angles to exploit. In the end, all she'd managed was walking off with a finished unit.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was a completely different story. Procurement, design, construction—she was responsible for the entire pipeline. The more steps in the process, the deeper her involvement, the bigger her cut.
You dream about what you dwell on. The calculations her subconscious had been running during the day were now projecting themselves into the mindscape.
"Is this what my life's come to? Working all day, then working in my sleep?" She scoffed at herself. "I'm S.H.I.E.L.D.'s model employee at this point." She glanced over at Dark Phoenix, who was still putting on her usual performance, then turned back to the documents and started crunching numbers.
"My earlier estimates were way too conservative. Pressure relief valves come in all grades of quality. You tell the client they're getting top-of-the-line units, but Andy Company's valves work just as well..." Her pen flew across the paper, nodding as she went. "And if I lower the output power for smoother operation, I can cut the valve count too. Reduce by a fifth—shouldn't affect performance at all."
Between the markup and the reduction, she estimated she could pocket six thousand dollars per valve. Satisfying.
While she worked overtime in the mindscape, Dark Phoenix finished her tantrum and gradually found herself drawn toward the person who was so thoroughly absorbed in her task. She wandered over, watched for a long time, and realized she couldn't make sense of any of it.
"What are you doing?" Dark Phoenix called out from a distance.
Daisy looked up and saw her standing right at the edge of her psychic space—one step away from crossing into it. Her heart clenched with sudden tension.
Dark Phoenix wanted to take that step. But the part of her that was still Jean—the original Jean's fundamental goodness—held her back. Without that restraint, the Phoenix Force could have made the impossible possible. Daisy's flimsy psychic barrier might as well not exist in the Phoenix's eyes.
Daisy kept her guard up. Dark Phoenix, however, didn't seem to notice anything unusual. Or perhaps she simply didn't care.
She circled around the outermost boundary. Even drawing on Jean's memories, Dark Phoenix still couldn't figure out what Daisy was doing. Practicing arithmetic?
"What are you doing?" she asked again, curiosity making her sound like a teenager.
"Work."
"What kind of work?"
"Uh... a form of wealth redistribution. Or you could call it capital plunder." Daisy's finance vocabulary wasn't deep. She was scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
At the word plunder, Dark Phoenix's eyes lit up. Killing, destruction, burning—those concepts resonated with her on a primal level. And plunder sounded like it belonged in the same family.
"How does that work? What's the process? Do you destroy first and then rebuild?" The questions came rapid-fire.
Daisy thought about it. "You could frame it as destruction followed by rebuilding," she said, not entirely certain. "But I prefer to call it a structural adjustment of society."
"Here's how I think about it..." Seeing Dark Phoenix's intense curiosity, Daisy didn't mind spinning some nonsense. She'd judged that the entity couldn't hurt her—a miscalculation that would push events in an entirely unexpected direction.
In places beyond her perception, the cracks in the walls began spreading more slowly. The flames that had been consuming everything paused their advance. For the first time, the repair effort held the line.
Daisy knew none of this. The small house hovering between existence and non-existence lay beyond her comprehension. The human brain simply couldn't receive that kind of cross-dimensional information.
When she woke, she'd forgotten the encounter entirely. What did excite her was a slight increase in her psychic power.
Humans had no method for developing psychic abilities. The few psychic-capable individuals had all acquired their powers through mutation—whatever level they started with was what they had for life. That total fluctuated slightly with physical condition, but on a macro level, the numbers were stable. Significant growth or decline simply didn't happen.
The anomaly puzzled her briefly, but she chalked it up to the natural boost from three days without sleep and the intense stimulation. Novels were full of that kind of thing.
"You seem a little different today." At headquarters, over breakfast, Sharon studied her from multiple angles.
"Different how?" Daisy delicately placed a piece of bread in her mouth and took a bite.
"Your vibe."
"Better or worse?"
"Neither, exactly. I'd say you're more... ladylike. You used to be a bit feral." Sharon felt it was her duty as a friend to mention this.
As if anticipating disbelief, she pulled out her phone and opened a video. "Look—this is how you used to eat. And now? Keep it up! You can do even better!"
Daisy forcibly deleted the video from Sharon's phone. The audacity of keeping embarrassing footage like that. She'd only eaten that way because she'd been physically starving, so her table manners had suffered a little. What was the big deal?
She finished her meal, changed into her work clothes, and headed back to supervise the reactor construction.
Meanwhile, at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.
Jean Grey woke up feeling different too. Her body felt lighter—barely perceptible, but she could sense it.
The noose that had been tightening around her neck, her slide toward the abyss—there was a pause. A momentary reprieve.
She couldn't talk to anyone about it. Watching her condition deteriorate by the day, the pressure Jean carried had reached its absolute limit. Keeping distance from everyone was the only thing she could do.
But this morning, when she opened her eyes, something genuinely felt different.
Her mastery of psychic forces was leagues beyond Daisy's, but in the Phoenix's eyes, there was no distinction between them.
The long stretch of nightmares had conditioned her to reject dreams entirely. She didn't want to remember what happened in there.
Every night, Jean entered the mindscape to patch the cracks, but she didn't retain any memory of the nameless space between dimensions, either.
She took a quick shower, changed, and walked out of her room with a light step.
Maybe it was her parents looking down from heaven. Maybe God was showing mercy, giving her a moment to breathe. The weight hadn't lifted—but today, something new was at work, and she felt inexplicably happy.
Jean Grey radiated vitality. She greeted a few students with a smile, and rounded the corner to find Storm.