Most users of the Infinity Stones operated through a vessel. Ronan wielded the Power Stone through his Universal Weapon. Loki channeled the Mind Stone through his Scepter. Malekith used the Reality Stone through his own body—flesh pressed into service as a conduit.
All of them were treating the Stones as energy sources. Nothing more.
But rare exceptions existed—beings whose bond with a particular Stone ran deeper than simple use. Adam Warlock and the Soul Stone were the clearest example: even after Thanos physically seized the Stone, Adam retained access to a portion of its power. The connection persisted through the taking.
As a transmigrant of a certain disposition, Deputy Director Daisy had a pronounced possessiveness about the Stones. If she could have branded every last one of them with her name and guaranteed no one else could ever claim them, she'd have done it in an instant.
Unfortunately, no one seemed capable of commanding the Space Stone at the moment. The only one the Tesseract appeared to favor—tentatively, possibly—was probably Baldy, who had once grabbed it with bare hands. Daisy wasn't fully certain. Fury had too many secrets to rule anything out.
If she tried to force the issue herself, the Tesseract might classify her as a threat and deposit her in some obscure corner of the cosmos. That would be a disaster.
She was deadlocked from both ends: she needed the Space Stone to reach the Power Stone, and the Power Stone to break through to the Space Stone. Direct impasse.
She tried again regardless. String resonance. Psychic probing. One attempt after another. Every one failed.
Daisy let her gaze drift casually across the room, taking quiet inventory of the security cameras. Then she curled two fingers. A pair of pliers slid silently across the floor on a thread of gravitational pull and came to rest directly beneath Victoria Hand's foot.
The sharp heel of Hand's shoe came down on the pliers. Her balance vanished. Hawkeye lunged, but he was too far away and came up short. Hand went down hard with a thud, flat on her back.
The room scrambled. Everyone converged on her.
Daisy turned her back to the cameras, curled her fingers, and discharged a significantly stronger vibration pulse into the Tesseract's interior. Simultaneously she flooded it with psychic energy and reached for any reaction she could sense.
The Tesseract offered no resistance. It also didn't submit. Two pulses—absorbed, neutralized, gone. Her psychic sense caught a sliver of the surface before being forcibly ejected.
"Well. That's rude." She pressed a hand to her forehead.
The feedback had transmitted a staggering volume of information—an overwhelming influx that blew past her real-time processing capacity entirely. The cognitive weight was immense. She immediately applied Professor Xavier's psychic cage technique, locking the data torrent down tight, sealing it away to be parsed piece by piece later.
She watched the others help Victoria Hand to her feet, asked the standard questions, and concluded the visit in due order.
On her way out, she found a pretext and spent fifteen minutes dressing down Dr. Selvig. The old man had appeared perfectly professional: plaid shirt, seated upright at his instruments, fully engaged in his work. Then you noticed he wasn't wearing pants. A pair of white briefs, sitting there as if this were the most natural arrangement imaginable, on the stated grounds that it promoted clearer thinking.
Calling that out was the only reasonable response.
If he quit in protest, Daisy was fine with it. If no one was going to study the Tesseract seriously, she would take it home herself.
She kept her finger pointed at his nose for a full fifteen minutes, tone unsparing throughout. Whatever her actual reasons, she'd genuinely served as a pressure valve for the entire facility staff.
She made it home on willpower alone, told everyone not to disturb her, and fell face-first onto the bed.
Exhausted. Need to sleep... The world softened, and she sank into unconsciousness.
When she opened her eyes, she was back in the space where she met Dark Phoenix—white flame in every direction, stretching as far as she could see.
Thanks to Shou-Lao's power, she always carried some memory of this place across the boundary. The disorientation of her earliest visits was mostly gone by now.
She had barely arrived before she was shouting. "Sis—come help me!"
Dark Phoenix had mellowed over time. Jean Grey's inherent goodness had been exerting a slow reverse influence, and Daisy's occasional sessions on moral reasoning had done their part.
Existing in the boundary between the real and the unreal—in the gap between the material and the immaterial—Dark Phoenix was genuinely conscious. She had her own thoughts, her own perspectives. Eternity spent in this in-between space with nothing to occupy herself was deeply tedious. Her desire to reduce worlds to ash had always come down, at least partly, to not knowing what else to do. Now that Daisy dropped in every few days and gave her something to discuss, existence felt marginally less like a sentence.
She looked up from the chaise longue she had constructed for herself, surveyed the situation, and lay back down. "Minor issue. Handle it yourself."
Daisy was not about to let her off that easily. In this space, reduced to pure psychic form, her comprehension ran at a significantly higher capacity than in her waking mind—but parsing the data the Tesseract had dumped on her was still a strain.
She applied herself to wearing Dark Phoenix down, alternating persistence and appeals until she'd managed to offload a substantial portion of the cognitive burden. With that handled, she could focus on the interpretation.
Dark Phoenix yawned. She gave the data a passing look, then extended a hand. Daisy took it. Their psychic energies merged.
A flicker of interest appeared on Dark Phoenix's face. "What is all this? It's a mess."
Daisy didn't know yet. She managed the questions from her very curious companion while working through the data herself.
They were deep into it when Dark Phoenix suddenly announced: "This planet—I've been there. Hideous people. And they reek."
"You've been there?" Daisy blinked. Dark Phoenix never went anywhere. "When?"
"I don't know... I suppose I must have?" The answer was thoroughly unhelpful.
"You mean the Phoenix went there," Daisy said, frowning.
Still no improvement.
The moment she knew she was looking at a planet, a great deal of what had seemed like incomprehensible noise snapped into focus. She'd suspected spatial coordinates from the beginning—but the format bore no resemblance to anything in her reference system. No baseline, no way to translate into Earth's measurement conventions. Impossible to read without an anchor.
Now she had one.
"How far is this planet from Earth?"
"What's it called?"
"How long ago did the Phoenix visit—does it still exist?"
The questions came in a rush.
Jean was not the Phoenix's only host. As the current vessel within this universe, she was the heir to an unbroken chain stretching back through countless prior incarnations—among them Fongji Wu, the former female Iron Fist of K'un-Lun. With that many hosts across so many generations, some would inevitably have been extraterrestrial. Their memories remained accessible to those who came after.
Dark Phoenix had no concept of deception. What she said, she meant.
Daisy cross-referenced the figures through one calculation after another until her head throbbed, and arrived at a rough answer: at minimum, 300,000 light-years from Earth.
Looking at the countless similar data points scattered through the mass of information, she reached a conclusion: the Tesseract had given her a star map.
Dark Phoenix helped confirm the coordinates of several more planets and star systems. The picture took shape. This was the current universe—not a parallel dimension, not some alternate continuity. Whether the map covered the full cosmos or only a portion of it remained unknown.
Either way, it would be a great help when she went after the Power Stone.