In the aftermath of Fear Itself, The Thing had carved a wide swath of collateral damage across Europe. A court in Latveria was moving to prosecute the Fantastic Four—Ben Grimm specifically.
Reed, as it happened, had friends and former professors scattered across the continent. He'd been overseas for weeks playing mediator and had completely missed the climax of the whole Asgard situation. Daisy made some inquiries and established quickly: no casualties. That made this considerably simpler. You break someone's property, you pay for it. The idea that the other party should just forgive you because you're sorry—go tell that to someone else.
"Reed, I get it. I'll handle the legal side immediately—just get back here as fast as you can." To free up the genius she needed for the anti-Magneto robot soldier project, Director Johnson used S.H.I.E.L.D.'s authority to post bail for The Thing and arranged an interest-free loan for Reed to cover the civilian damages from the battle.
Time was short. Also—she'd come to think of S.H.I.E.L.D. as basically her house by now. No embezzlement this time; the loan was disbursed in full. Reed was profoundly grateful. He didn't even ask what the research project was or whether it fell within his expertise. He just got moving.
By the following morning, the prodigious Mr. Richards was back in New York. Ben Grimm came with him. Susan and Johnny—the more photogenic pair—stayed behind to build goodwill, help clear rubble, and assist with medical relief.
"Thank you. Really—thank you." The Thing and Daisy didn't have a long history together, but they knew each other well enough. He rumbled out the words with characteristic bluntness.
If not for Daisy's intervention, he'd still be sitting in a Latverian holding cell. The cell itself couldn't hold him, obviously—but looking at the wreckage he'd caused, the displaced families, the women and children left with nothing, he felt awful. The compensation money would meaningfully improve their situation. Ben Grimm was genuinely grateful.
Daisy didn't linger on pleasantries with Ben; she walked Reed straight to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s research wing.
"Just magnetic resistance?" Reed absorbed the specification and visibly relaxed. Not difficult at all—at least not for him.
Daisy's response was simple admiration. A genius-tier super-scientist operated on a different level entirely.
Which was precisely why she'd chosen Reed over Stark. Stark had an ego the size of a battleship and a corresponding collection of personality defects. Reed Richards, by contrast, was mild-mannered and encyclopedic—the sort of man who'd mastered every scientific discipline humanity had developed, with a theoretical imagination wide enough to park several aircraft carriers. On raw research capability, he had Stark beat by a clear margin.
Not that Mr. Fantastic was without quirks. If you turned him loose with no constraints, left to chase his own intellectual fascinations, roughly nine in ten experiments ended in some kind of incident. Subterranean civilizations. Pocket dimensions. The time he accidentally destroyed Doctor Doom's space station. The list was long. Stark's research cost money; Reed's cost lives.
Daisy's method was to give him a defined target and a hard boundary. Tell him what you need built, nothing more and nothing less; within that scope he produced excellent work. The problem: he found directed research unstimulating and didn't particularly enjoy being given homework.
Right now, Daisy had done him a significant favor. Whether he found it stimulating or not, he owed her. He came.
With the hard science delegated to Reed, Daisy sent a team to search Ellis Island. Nothing. Magneto had never made it there, and without the man, there was no device to find.
Days passed.
Three days into summit preparations, agents tracking Senator Kelly finally caught up with him. Kelly had been the loud voice in Congress calling for mutant crackdowns, imprisonment, and military action—and he'd been on the wrong end of one of Magneto's field experiments.
Daisy's honest opinion on Magneto targeting a senator: hard to know what to say. Senators are mirrors of their constituencies. If the voters want mutants celebrated, the senator celebrates mutants; if the voters want mutants eliminated, the senator calls for blood. Going after any individual senator was, strategically, almost useless.
But the thing was already done. She couldn't turn back time—and even if she could, she wouldn't waste the ability on this particular pig-headed legislator. She and the assembled heads of the world's major intelligence services stood together and watched Senator Robert Kelly's genetic structure unravel, watched him slowly resolve into a pool of water.
Irreversible. Anyone Magneto had gotten his hands on—leader, dignitary, whoever—was dead.
The fault lines that had been quietly building cracked open. The world's human leadership and the mutant population now stood on opposite sides of a widening divide.
Perhaps Magneto had his logic. Coerce the world's leaders; achieve mutant dominance through threat rather than negotiation. From a certain angle: low cost, high return, potentially viable. Politicians are naturally inclined to fold under pressure—with the right kind applied, a mutant homeland wasn't out of reach. Carved-out living territories, at minimum.
Magneto's error was his refusal to compromise. Not a single concession. Not an ounce of horse-trading. Pure coercion. Even genuinely terrified politicians had to dig in against an opponent who offered them no exit.
On that point, the old man came up short compared to Doctor Doom. Doom demonstrated a cleaner grasp of both strategy and human nature.
Doom simply ignored the outside world entirely. Say what you liked about him—he didn't care. But if the outside world reached into Latveria, he responded with absolute, annihilating force. However many came, that many fell. No dialogue. No concessions. But crucially, he never emerged. He violated every rule of international engagement by never engaging in it at all, and sheer force of will let him run a nation on exactly those terms.
Magneto wanted more—mutants above humanity, while simultaneously staying inside the familiar rules of the game. He was trying to bully the world into obeying his preferences through threat alone. Pure wishful thinking. A hand full of aces, played into a loss.
Daisy had no commentary to offer. Within the existing framework, her position generated advantages ordinary people couldn't imagine, and nobody objected—the position was enough. She had zero inclination to put herself on the line for mutantkind.
Quietly, without visible urgency, security preparations tightened as the world's leaders converged on New York.
Among the familiar faces arriving was an old acquaintance of hers.
Wakanda's elder king arrived at the summit representing what appeared, by any surface measure, to be a third-tier agricultural nation. He'd invested significantly in African Union connections just to secure a seat at the table—and even then, the summit gave him almost no speaking opportunity, barely a recognized presence, and functionally served as a chance to be seen.
None of the major powers formally recognized Wakanda yet. They treated it as a regional entity, not a real state. The old king didn't seem to mind. He'd swapped his ceremonial robes for a Western suit—exactly what many African heads of state wore—and in halting, unpracticed English, he worked the surrounding leaders in conversation while their eyes conveyed undisguised condescension.
As Wakanda's "old friend," Daisy had both reason and obligation to extend goodwill.
Through S.H.I.E.L.D. and certain HYDRA-adjacent channels, she quietly made introductions—connected him with the leadership of two other African nations. Whether it accomplished anything substantial was unclear. But at least the old king no longer looked quite so conspicuously alone.
"Thank you." Black Panther T'Challa—standing at his father's side in a suit, officially present as staff rather than dignitary—watched his father gradually find his footing in the conversation circle, and turned to Daisy with unfeigned gratitude.
"Don't mention it. You and Ororo are both friends of mine—and your father is a great man. A deeply wise one."