Beyond that, she hit a wall pretty fast.
She'd been a disaster at science in school. Whatever she'd once learned about physics had been thoroughly forgotten — returned to the teacher and never retrieved. The original Daisy was even worse off. Church school had kept her busy with Bible passages, hymns, and sermons. Modern physics wasn't hated the way Darwin was, but it wasn't exactly prioritized either.
Same energy as gym class getting hijacked by another subject. In Daisy's memories of the original body, she could picture it perfectly: the physics teacher calls in sick, a theology teacher strolls in and cracks open the scripture.
Standing in front of concepts like vibration, frequency, transverse waves, string resonance — neither version of her had the faintest idea what she was looking at. Combined, their knowledge didn't add up to one diligent middle schooler's.
Learn math and science well, and you'll never go hungry. She finally understood what that phrase actually meant.
She'd have to go back to basics.
Fortunately, it was the internet age. As long as you weren't hunting for classified cutting-edge research, almost anything could be found online. How much of it she'd actually absorb — that was on her.
She skimmed a handful of academic papers and came out thoroughly confused. She'd need to dig deeper back home.
She closed the laptop and lay on the bed, and the next problem surfaced: her genetic defect.
Take Black Bolt, king of the Inhumans. One word from him could level a city. One shout could send Thanos tumbling. His defect: zero control. To avoid causing devastation, he spent all 365 days a year playing mute.
Daisy had already identified her own version. Her vibration hurt her as much as it hurt the target. Force was mutual — she generated the shockwave, and the shockwave pushed back. In the original timeline, overuse had given Daisy hairline fractures in her arm bones. She'd eventually needed special medication just to keep using her ability without her body falling apart.
She didn't have a direct comparison, but after running all the way back through those tunnels, she was fairly sure this version of her was tougher than the original. Maybe that was the benefit of having the entire Terrigen Mist to herself.
She also suspected her control was sharper than the original's.
And that precision had unlocked something extra: she could sense the vibration frequencies of the people around her.
There was a self-help author — David R. Hawkins — who claimed he'd mapped the vibrational energy level of everything in the world on a scale from 1 to 1,000. The average person sat around two hundred.
Negative emotions — malice, apathy, fear, anxiety — dragged the number down. Positive states — optimism, happiness, peace — pushed it up. The reason a genuinely good person could make you feel comfortable just by being near them, and a genuinely evil one made your skin crawl, had a scientific basis. In his framework, the highest-frequency person ever recorded was Mother Teresa — a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Even if you had no religious belief, being in her presence reportedly produced an inexplicable warmth. In humanistic terms, that was charisma, selfless devotion. In physics, her vibrational frequency was simply far above the norm.
Daisy could now read that frequency in the people around her. Like a game flagging enemies red and neutrals yellow.
Precise control had another perk: she could cancel out recoil.
With her lighter frame, Daisy would normally have needed a two-handed grip to compensate for kickback. Now she could neutralize recoil entirely. The vibration required was tiny, the strain on her body minimal, and it was good practice for fine-tuned ability use besides.
Her baseline physical stats were already exceptional. Post-activation, her speed, reflexes, and endurance had all jumped significantly. Her shooting was improving fast — hitting a moving target at a sprint was still a challenge, but placing in an amateur marksmanship competition? No problem.
She was still in the early stages, where every use of her power cost her. The goal was precision: accomplish the most with the least. She needed efficiency, not power.
But down the road — once her body was strong enough — things like Black Bolt causing the air itself to vibrate, or parting the sea? Not out of reach.
Or maybe she'd crack quantum mechanics someday, go full DC's Vibe — cutting dimensional corridors, sensing locations through touch. All theoretically possible.
The future was bright.
Puerto Rico was wrapped up. She spent two more days playing her role — grieving, sticking to the missing-parents story, staying in character — and after the local police assured her they'd contact her the moment they had a lead, she boarded a plane.
The two Glocks she'd bought never saw use. She sold them back to a gun shop, bullets included, at a loss. American passports made dealers cautious; the buyback price wasn't terrible. She walked away with seven hundred dollars, pushing her savings back above four figures. She boarded the flight to New York in a good mood.
No weapons on her. But this time returning to New York felt completely different.
She had powers now.
She could already produce short-range concussive blasts like the original Daisy — but that felt clunky to her, heavy on the body, and purely for show. The real work was in the precision.
Walking the streets of the city, surrounded by a sea of "yellow-flags," she felt — for the first time since arriving in this world — genuinely safe.
Back at the apartment, her roommate Angela was hunched over a fashion magazine, studying makeup techniques.
She had to hand it to her original self: picking Angela as a best friend was inspired. The thought made her sigh.
"That color doesn't work on you—"
Angela had headphones in. She was humming along to something, completely oblivious to Daisy walking in.
"DAISY! You're back!" She yanked out the headphones, dropped whatever brush she'd been holding, and wrapped Daisy in a hug.
Angela was dark-skinned. But she was also Daisy's only friend in this world.
Daisy patted her on the back. "Did those guys give you any trouble while I was gone?"
Bullying existed everywhere. Captain America, Spider-Man, even Superman and the Flash across the way — all of them had been tormented by peers when they were kids. The culture here didn't push back against it. If anything, it quietly encouraged it.
As outsiders, Daisy and Angela were easy targets for some kids with nothing better to do. The original Daisy had been fighting that battle since the orphanage — experienced, battle-hardened. Angela, as a new immigrant, had struggled badly when she first arrived. It was the original Daisy who'd stepped in for her, and that was where their friendship had started.
Daisy fully expected to come home and hear that Angela had been pushed around again.
Angela's answer surprised her.
"No, no, they've all been... busy lately." Her tone shifted, turning serious. "Daisy, did you hear? Our school might be shutting down."