The slight bump in psychic power didn't mean much to Daisy in practical terms. Her total reserves were too low. Where it used to take three days to mentally dominate Rhino, it now took one. That was the extent of the difference.
In gaming terms: she had a mana bar now, but no skills.
Professor Charles only kept personal reflections in his computer files. He wasn't about to write an instruction manual for psychic abilities—complete with illustrations, organized from beginner to advanced, running tens of thousands of words.
When Jean sealed Dark Phoenix, she'd shared part of the methodology for constructing a psychic prison. The problem was: who would Daisy imprison? She had absolutely no use for it.
Useless or not, watching a stat tick upward still felt good. For several days running, she drove Lorna to school and picked her up in the afternoon, enjoying that small boost.
About a week later, Daisy spotted Coulson in the school's underground parking garage. The affable agent was dressed in plain work clothes, pliers in hand, wrestling with a motorcycle.
"Well, well—Coulson. I thought you were into vintage cars. When did you switch to bikes?" Daisy had nothing better to do and struck up a conversation.
Coulson didn't seem bothered. He wiped the sweat from his neck with his towel, glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot, and lowered his voice. "Sharon says Captain America is out of danger. Could be a few months before he wakes up. I remember he liked motorcycles, so I found one online. Great specs—the Captain's going to love it."
Daisy murmured an acknowledgment. She didn't have any particular feelings about motorcycles or cars, though her mechanical engineering background let her recognize that the parts on this bike weren't cheap.
Then it occurred to her: Coulson didn't share Fury's "director's mindset." He lived on a government salary. Buying a luxury motorcycle like this might leave him eating instant noodles for months. Afraid he'd come asking for a loan, Daisy waved goodbye, hit the gas, and peeled out of the garage.
Meanwhile, Cyclops and Jean had already started living a low-carbon lifestyle. In fact, you could say the entire Xavier School had been forcibly dragged into it.
Grey Order No. 1 wasn't an ending. It was a beginning. The reforms had now progressed to Grey Order No. 5. Five bulletin boards lined the cafeteria wall, impossible to miss.
The students gave Jean a wide berth these days. But the school's finances had improved dramatically. The financial management team overseeing the Xavier family estate had endorsed every single one of Jean Grey's measures. Both sides reached a consensus: these policies would be maintained over the long term.
Daisy poured all her energy into the reactor construction. She was diligent, at least—spending every day in the underground facility, troubleshooting technical issues, supervising the build.
With a large crew of experienced workers on the job, construction picked up pace daily.
"Miss Johnson is truly dedicated." The always well-regarded Director Pierce—a few extra wrinkles on his face, but otherwise the picture of grandfatherly warmth—arrived for a personal inspection. Daisy set down her blueprints and went to make small talk with the old man.
Victoria Hand's botched Hulk capture mission, Daisy's Afghanistan operation, Coulson's Stark liaison assignment—three consecutive operations had produced heavy casualties. External criticism of S.H.I.E.L.D. was mounting.
Faced with the Pentagon's sharply worded inquiries and pressure from both the White House and Congress, Fury had been playing dead through all of it. Each time, it was old Pierce who went out front to explain—or, less charitably, to take the beating.
A man willing to absorb that kind of punishment was indispensable to S.H.I.E.L.D. at this stage. The old man had sacrificed his dignity, standing there while politicians and generals a decade or two his junior jabbed a finger in his face. The payoff was sky-high internal prestige.
As long as he didn't self-destruct, no one would suspect him of being a mole. Daisy had to show him respect—on the surface, at minimum.
"You're too kind, Director. It's really our people who deserve the credit—the skilled workforce here has this reactor ahead of my projected timeline." She didn't know what the old man wanted, so she defaulted to the safe, bland answer.
Pierce chuckled. "Just passing through. Thought I'd stop by for a look. Nick has high hopes for you. I trust his judgment."
Daisy didn't believe a word of it. Fury's judgment was better than most, but hardly infallible. The man had a building full of HYDRA agents right under his nose. That was on him.
She kept her expression neutral, neither accepting nor deflecting the compliment.
The old man got to his actual point. He arranged his words to sound casual: "Can this reactor really lift a carrier into the sky?"
"Not one alone, obviously. My plan calls for two—one fore, one aft. Turbine engines handle the rest, and up she goes." She rambled through a lengthy technical explanation, then saw him off.
As Fury's most trusted old friend, Pierce had access to every classified file inside S.H.I.E.L.D. Daisy's arc reactor blueprints were naturally within his reach.
But science didn't tolerate shortcuts. Working from the blueprints alone, HYDRA could only build an oversized reactor—they couldn't miniaturize it. They were missing the derivation steps.
That evening, inside a discreet villa in Washington, Director Pierce was conferring with his people.
The attendees included Crossbones, Sitwell, and several high-ranking government officials—all of them HYDRA.
Two items dominated the agenda: Stark and Daisy.
Pierce pulled up Daisy's oversized reactor blueprints and pinned what appeared to be the most critical schematic to the wall. The full documentation was a thick stack—no one in the room could read any of it. The display was purely for emphasis.
He pointed at the schematic and opened the discussion. "Senator Stern, these are the blueprints I was able to access. Nick Fury hasn't detected anything unusual."
"Director Pierce—this is the nuclear reactor?" Senator Stern was a man of considerable political clout: soft, pale, sporting a well-fed belly. He didn't belong to Pierce's faction. He was his own faction, really—a classic politician who leveraged HYDRA's resources to climb the ladder.
S.H.I.E.L.D., Iron Man—none of it was supposed to be his problem. He didn't want the entanglement.
But multiple HYDRA factions had pressured him simultaneously, demanding he obtain the Iron Man armor. Blueprints would be even better. For that task, he'd pulled every string he had, assembling a congressional inquiry committee targeting Stark specifically—all to extract the suit's technical secrets.
Now that the reactor blueprints were in hand, he figured half his assignment was already done.