It was commonly said that some people were natural performers. True of Hill, true of Daisy — but nowhere was it more gloriously true than with Gwen Stacy, who threw herself into every scene with the kind of commitment that made the rest of the cast look like they were phoning it in.
The frozen shock of coming face to face with a T-Rex. The scream. The desperate, stumbling sprint from a pack of Velociraptors. Gwen hit every beat with precision, even when there was nothing behind her but empty jungle and a camera operator. She'd look back at exactly the right moment with exactly the right expression of raw terror, the survival instinct and blind panic woven seamlessly together.
Peter Parker was a different story.
The kid was too sharp. However hard he tried to play the role, what came through on camera was always, unmistakably, Peter Parker. You couldn't lose him in the character.
Fortunately, most of his scripted scenes were action-heavy, and action covered a multitude of acting sins.
The T-Rex sequence involved the dinosaur shoving a tourist vehicle off the road. The vehicle went over — and only three people were inside: the two kids and Grant Ward's male lead character.
The vehicle was lucky. It caught on the trees below the embankment.
The task for the lead was to get both children from the vehicle down to the ground.
"That kid moves like an athlete," Coulson murmured, watching Peter on the monitor. He glanced sideways at Daisy. "Natural talent?"
Spider-Man can't climb trees? Daisy kept her expression neutral. "Born with it, I think."
In practice, you couldn't actually hang a real vehicle above actors' heads — not even with a crew of trained S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives. What you could do was position one adult and two teenagers around a tree with a trunk roughly six and a half feet (2 m) across and spend a full day filming them climbing up and down it from every conceivable angle.
Grant Ward — a man who'd once scaled a structure comparable to the Statue of Liberty as a warm-up exercise, who could time a free-climb to the second — had no issues. The problem was Peter. The kid was nervous, and when Peter was nervous, his timing became a mess. Too fast on one take, too slow on the next, never quite locking in the rhythm the scene called for. Which meant poor Gwen was also stuck doing it over and over, scrambling up and down that trunk half the afternoon.
By dinner, Gwen had a great deal to say to Peter and chose to say none of it.
Daisy didn't have the bandwidth to track teenage relationship drama. She had her own mountain to climb.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy coursework. The Yale curriculum. A pile of business decisions that required her personal attention. The official Jurassic Park novelization needed to hit shelves before the film released. Merchandise rollout needed to hit full saturation.
And above all of it: she needed to get stronger.
Physical enhancement and equipment upgrades — both tracks could run in parallel.
The most effective route for physical enhancement was clearly the Super Soldier Serum. But the original formula was gone — lost to history.
Gamma radiation was immediately off the table. She had no interest in becoming a large green muscle.
The Extremis Virus was actually viable in terms of raw results — exceptional regeneration, serious power boost — but the whole "spontaneous combustion" issue was a dealbreaker.
The Venom symbiote, the stuff they'd given the Sentinels — unpredictable processes, unknowable long-term effects. Too risky.
The one option she kept coming back to was Wakanda. Specifically: the Heart-Shaped Herb. The thing that made the Black Panther.
The old stories claimed only royalty could take it. Daisy found that hard to accept. The five tribes had been intermarrying and feuding for centuries — were they all related? M'Baku of the Jabari had said his people hadn't laid eyes on a king in generations, yet he was still apparently eligible to drink the herb's extract. What, exactly, constituted "royal blood" after that many centuries of separation?
In her reading of it, the "royal lineage" requirement was a political fiction — a story Wakanda told its own people to consolidate power and keep the succession orderly. A piece of state mythology.
The real obstacle was finding Wakanda in the first place. The border was ringed with landmines. The outer perimeter ran a high-tech electronic barrier that was sophisticated enough that Daisy couldn't rule out the possibility of it interfering with her teleportation. She needed to go in through a known access point.
Which brought her to Erik Killmonger.
His father was the late king's brother — a prince who'd been cast out. The man had kept a journal. A detailed one, apparently: routes in, locations, everything he'd known about the hidden kingdom. In the film's timeline, the notebook was still in the old apartment, behind a panel in a hidden compartment.
The address wasn't hard to reconstruct. Oakland, California, 1992. A neighborhood. Middle-aged man found dead. Cross-reference those data points and you had a house. Daisy had already sent the housekeeper to scout the location.
That said, she doubted the notebook was still there. A secret in a neighborhood with that much foot traffic would have a short shelf life. More likely it had been moved — or taken.
The cleaner play was to find Killmonger himself. Get the information from the source. She could study that "royal bloodline" distinction firsthand while she was at it.
The problem was his current status. He was deep in a classified black-ops unit — answerable to a single general, completely off the books. Her hacking skills were considerable, and her S.H.I.E.L.D. clearance opened most doors — but this particular door had no handle on the outside. She was reduced to triangulating from fragments, calculating probable positions, waiting for the picture to sharpen.
Physical enhancement remained unresolved. Which made shock absorption all the more urgent.
The underlying principle of the damping device was simple enough that she could sketch the design from memory. The limiting factor was always materials. The rarest component she needed was also the best one available.
Vibranium.
Fitz and Simmons had eventually built her a damping bracer — she'd seen it happen, in the other timeline. But even their version had been only middling in effectiveness. The problem had always been the materials. With the right substrate, the device would be transformative. With inferior alloys, it was a nice thought.
Vibranium was the ideal. Its electrons don't migrate under stress — which makes it the most structurally stable substance in the known Marvel world. It doesn't just resist impact; it absorbs and redistributes force without degrading. For her purposes, it was as close to perfect as any material she could name.
The catch: Vibranium was in Wakanda.
The only other piece in the world was Captain America's shield, and she wasn't going to melt that down. The theft alone would be a nightmare; she'd spend the same effort more productively stealing the Tesseract.
She had a vague memory of a Vibranium fragment being housed in a London museum — but no matter how thoroughly she searched, she couldn't locate any documentation to confirm it. It was probably sitting in some private collector's safe deposit box.
The fallback option was Adamantium.
Adamantium came in several grades, all of them produced by blending meteorite alloys with Earth metals.
Proto-Adamantium — the original formula, irreproducible. The one actual product of that process was Captain America's shield: Vibranium mixed with terrestrial steel, unique in all the world.
True Adamantium — liquid at room temperature, the substrate used in Wolverine's skeleton. Dense, virtually indestructible, and almost impossible to source.
Secondary Adamantium — the version various national laboratories and top-tier research institutions had been stumbling toward for decades. Every team had their own approach, their own combination of rare-earth metals and recovered meteorite fragments, and the results varied wildly. Quality control was a generous term for what most of them produced.
If Daisy went shopping on the open market, she'd end up paying a fortune for something unreliable.
The sourcing problem was delicate enough that she couldn't ask Hill — maintaining their convincing public rift meant keeping Hill at arm's length for now. That left Sharon Carter as her best channel. She quietly put Sharon on it.
Two tracks of development, running side by side.
Meanwhile, Daisy had put in a full day at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy's underground training facility. Her strength, speed, and endurance had already blown past the threshold of normal human performance — but the training center was a public facility, and she had to keep her numbers inside a plausible range. A three-meter (roughly 10 ft) standing jump would raise questions she didn't want to answer.
Squat, snatch, deadlift, bench press — all artificially capped during shared sessions.
What she needed was a private space. A place with no witnesses, no ceiling on what she could test, and no reason to hold back. Somewhere she could push her body's actual limits and learn what they were.
Finding that space was the next problem to solve.