Before Sue Storm Can Answer, The Timeline Shifts

The Invisible Woman was about to answer. To confess to her youthful indiscretion.

Then the photos changed.

The other woman in the photos with Sue Storm was now much closer.

The redhead woman in the photos was now blonde. Hair almost as yellow as Sue's, but from a bottle. Fuller lips, bigger breasts. Mae Miller. A bit of a party girl, Mae. A bit touchy-feely. Always hanging around Sue, ever since she had arrived at university. Inviting her to parties. Always pushing the young woman a little further than she was used to.

Memories flooded Sue Storm. Strange memories. Color flooded the Invisible Woman's cheeks as she recalled how she had been drunker than she thought. The taste of those lips. The way her heart had hammered as Mae's hand had touched her naked breast.

Sue bit her lip. Now the memories came back to her, crystal clear.

SSR: They're real. I did a glamour shoot when I was young and stupid.

JVD: Oh wow. I didn't know you had it in you! What was it like to kiss another woman?

SSR: It was...nice. I was a little drunk at the time.

In the Fantastic Four's hanger, a little alarm began to ping. Ben Grimm, who currently held the Fantasticar above his head as Reed Richards fiddled with the engine on the underside of the vehicle, looked over at the noise.

"Hey stretch?" The Thing grumbled. "Wassat?"

"Hmm?" Reed's neck elongated over to the alarm, like a rubber band over-stretched. "Oh my. That's the Flux Chronometer."

Stony brows ground against each other.

"Like BACK TO THE FUTURE?" Ben grumbled.

Mister Fantastic chuckled. "It's not a time machine, Ben. It's a device that monitors when changes are made in the timeline. I designed it to provide some notice when Doom uses his time machine in the past to affect the present."

"Right. Okay," Ben said. He shifted a little, his legs still set wide apart and steady...but there was an itch on the bridge of his nose. "So what changed?"

"I have no idea," Reed said. "The flux chronometer registers the change because they propagate forward in time from the point of change, so there's a momentary discrepancy as the quantum states struggle for superposition. I suspect it leads to an awful lot of deja vu."

"Wunnerful," Ben said, as his nose crinkled. "So somebody's muckin' wit' the past, but we got no idea who they are or what they're doin'."

"These pictures are wonderful!" Mysterio crooned to the holographic representation of Doctor Doom. The illusionist sat at the seat of the new and expensive computer terminal that Doom had set up, the better to facilitate his electronic trickery. The theatricality and pettiness of the lesser villain irked Doom. Yet he was determined to see if there was any merit in his approach. He had never considered to attack the Fantastic Four in such a way.

"It's only a pity the photographs weren't more...explicit," Mysterio said.

Doom said nothing. The limited scale of Mysterio's imagination was so strange. He honestly thought that Doom had simply found the photos of Sue Storm's youthful indiscretion. Mysterio had no conception at all of Doom's true capabilities and resources. With a thought, a coded signal was relayed through an extratemporal probe, into the past. Where the loyal Latverian agent under the alias Mae Miller was ordered to make those more explicit photos Sue Storm's new reality.

The flux chronometer pinged again—and before Sue Storm's eyes, the photos shifted, and with them her memories.