The first thing to transfer was the vibration ability. Rogue's cells processed it effortlessly—like file conversion on a fast drive—and had it fully integrated within seconds. The sensation was a wave of tingling numbness across half her body, and certain places that decency forbade naming gave a faint, ambiguous response. Not overwhelming. Manageable.
What came next was considerably more substantial.
The pseudo-Eternal gene that Mystique had copied—imprecise as it was—proved, in its own strange way, perfectly absorbable. Rogue's power caught it, converted it, folded it into her cellular architecture.
Daisy's own gene was still dormant, waiting for the right moment to fully emerge. What Mystique had replicated was barely the outermost echo of it—a copy of a copy, a structure built on air. And yet Rogue, improbably, made it real. A genetic pattern that had no business existing inside a human body found itself not just lodged there, but integrated.
Absorption. Conversion. Storage. A torrent of something that felt almost like Eternal gene energy rushed into her, filling her to bursting. Even accounting for the fraction of Captain America's power she'd quietly carried since before, the sheer volume was almost too much. Her ability metabolized it, reshaped it, remade it into something she could actually use.
The energy cleared. Then came the information.
Rogue felt as if her gaze suddenly reached the horizon. Countless microorganisms materialized in her field of vision. The world unveiled itself in a form she'd never experienced—then a sharp, needle-like pain hit both eyes, and the next instant it felt like something was erupting outward. She squeezed them shut.
Right behind that came sound. Voices, arguments, gunshots, the hiss of exhaust—a thousand sounds stacked inside her skull, all of them demanding analysis simultaneously.
A lock of hair at her forehead went pale, dry, and white in seconds. Her brain was burning through resources it couldn't replenish fast enough.
Mystique could only replicate the physical layer. What Rogue had absorbed was only the physical layer. Without the core foundation to sustain it, the super-sensory development stalled at under one-tenth and was forced to stop. The energy, still moving through her system, redirected into cellular repair instead.
Life flooded back into the single white-bleached lock—but it didn't go dark again. It settled into silver-white. Whatever had been scorched there wasn't coming back.
The damage was healed. But the flood of information remained, hovering in her mind, refusing to dissipate. It would never fully leave—she'd only stop receiving new signals from outside; the backlog still needed processing.
Rogue shook her head hard, trying to claw back to clarity. It didn't work. The overload was too fresh.
Mind unguarded, the vibration ability picked that exact moment to reassert itself. Mystique—who had stopped shaking the moment her power was drained—started up again right alongside her.
Mystique could shift between sexes. The anatomy was always real. The sensations were always real. In terms of lived experience across every conceivable configuration, there was simply no one in the known Marvel universe who could match her accumulated expertise.
Rogue wasn't remotely in the same league, but she wasn't uninitiated either—she'd had a boyfriend before her powers manifested and understood the basics. Now every sensation was amplified to an absurd degree, and she was having genuine difficulty keeping it together.
Warmth. Tingling. An itching sensation she couldn't place. Their hands were still in contact. Mystique's palm was growing warm. Both of them were breathing faster than the situation warranted. Their eyes met—briefly—and both looked away immediately.
"You—your clothes?"
Rogue released Mystique's hand. Her cells needed time to rebuild their charge. Mystique, meanwhile, had automatically reverted to her baseline human form. Well-proportioned. Objectively beautiful—if one overlooked that she'd spent the past several minutes rolling around on the pavement in agony, and was currently not wearing anything.
Through the skin-to-skin contact, Rogue had received an involuntary highlight reel of a substantial portion of Mystique's life. She knew now exactly why Mystique had kidnapped her. But she didn't hate her for it. This was a pitiable person. Like Rogue herself—deeply, quietly pitiable.
She handed over her green jacket. Rogue put her gloves back on and helped the still-unsteady woman over to the wall to rest. She planned to wait until Mystique recovered enough to move, then go find Magneto and have a word with him.
Daisy had no idea any of this had unfolded while Mystique was wearing her face. In another timeline, the two women had something resembling a mother-daughter bond. Now there was a slight shift between them—not entirely the same dynamic, but not entirely different either.
Mystique had temporarily lost her powers. Rogue was running hot with energy she'd never felt before. Both had disappeared off White Queen's Cerebro grid in the same instant—Rogue's energy surge making her register as something completely unlike a mutant.
The residents of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters—it needed to be said—weren't particularly invested in Rogue. Ships passing in the night. Their priorities lay with Jean.
But however Emma searched, Jean's signal simply wasn't there. Daisy couldn't exactly explain that she needed to get punched unconscious to access Dark Jean and ask where the real one had gone. They had to pivot to the Magneto problem.
Sabretooth and Toad, apparently anticipating Cerebro use, had started moving unpredictably around New York; Cyclops and Beast went to intercept them while Storm held down the school. Nobody asked Daisy for help with that, and Daisy had no particular interest in joining them. She had a backlog.
Without Daisy absorbing half the Cerebro load, Emma removed the control helmet as well—afraid of losing herself in the machine. The X-Men had their own concerns about exactly that outcome.
The two women left Xavier's School together.
"Shall I give you a lift?" Emma Frost navigated the school's gravel path in heels without a single wobble. Watching her made Daisy tired just standing still.
"No need." Still imperious as ever. Her eyes had taken on that telltale gleam—she was running active telepathy, undeniably.
"My car is already on its way." A small curve at the corner of her mouth. Directing ordinary minds was, for Emma, a form of simple pleasure.
Daisy waved. "Then wait for it. I'm heading back." One step, and she was standing in her office at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters.
The X-Men, the more she thought about them, were not a reliable foundation. She needed her own solution to Magneto. S.H.I.E.L.D. would develop its own response.
She gathered the entire science division and put the question to them. The honest answer: not much. Ceramic rounds. Anti-magnetic weaponry. Against Magneto—basically useless.
Their brief clash had been instructive. If powers could evolve, hers were evolving, and so were his. Daisy had been working through the math: Magneto had almost certainly pushed past simple magnetism into unified-field manipulation by now, with gravity control as a derived ability grown out of electromagnetic force.
Bringing down a man operating at that level with conventional assets was, to put it charitably, a challenge.
Her solution: do what Tony Stark had once done. Combine the best available science and build anti-Magneto combat robots.
To avoid friendly fire—Lorna had a similar magnetic signature, and Daisy herself wasn't entirely dissimilar—she'd hardcode the targeting parameters. One specific profile: about 1.8 meters tall (five-foot-eleven), lean as a post, face like an old orange peel, massive magnetic-field signature. Any detection of that profile within the engagement perimeter, the robots auto-respond and pin him down for a thorough beating.
The catch: manufacturing the carbon-nanotube composite needed for magnetic resistance was not a trivial engineering problem.
So she brought in Mr. Fantastic—Reed Richards.