Mae Has Become A Pornstar

Instinct told Sue to wait until she'd left the Baxter Building. The kids were doing their online schooling, and Ben was watching them. Johnny was out buying clothes and flirting outrageously with anything in a skirt. She'd kissed Reed on the cheek and he'd mumbled something about quasi-neutrinos. That should keep him busy until dinner.

Out of the Baxter Building. Away from all the security software that would track her every google search. Sue knew that Reed didn't care about what Ben and Johnny got up to in their own time, but she didn't feel like sharing the secret of her glamour shots just yet. So it was down at the internet cafe, with a pair of sunglasses and a mask and a ballcap, where Sue began to look up her old college friend Mae.

Ten minutes later, she had real reason to be glad that she hadn't done this search at home. Mae had been busy.

College yearbook records cross-checked with city directories, marriage and divorce decrees, and some mixed business records. The Invisible Woman frowned as she discovered what Mae had been up to all these years. Apparently the glamour shots were just Mae's dipping her toes into very deep waters. The biology student who had dreamed of being a nurse had become a pornstar.

Tess Tempest, the blonde bombshell, had her own website, her own production company. Sue blushed and looked around as the page came up, her former friend dressed in nothing more than a transparent one-piece bikini. There was the usual work that had been done—the breasts were too round, too spherical; the ass much bigger than Sue remembered. An exaggerated hourglass shape squeezed into the clear spandex so that her dark nipples were squished and the fabric was taut and strained. Sloe-eyed, Tess stared at the visitor to her site boldly, wantonly.

Sue quickly navigated away from the main page. What her friend had done with her life—the Adult Video News awards, her sex toy line—she didn't really care about any of that. It wasn't her business. Who was she to judge, after all? The cosmic accident had set part of the course of Sue's own life, but she had embraced that life and made it her own. She didn't regret any of the decisions she had made. There was no reason for her to think Mae—or Tess, whatever she called herself now—regretted hers.

And yet...

The blonde scrolled through a long list of pornographic titles that Tess Tempest had starred in. She blushed when she noticed several that were quite obviously parodies based on the Fantastic Four. Those were inevitabilities—the same way presidents and movie stars attracted pornographic parodies—and another reason why Susan had to warn Franklin early about not googling his parents. Sue had never bothered to watch any of those videos, but she had no doubt they were the typical sleazy thin excuse for a plot followed by a lot of hard pounding and bad language.

There but for the grace of God and a burst of cosmic rays, go I, Sue said to herself.

It echoed oddly true. Sue could only imagine what might have happened if she had followed Mae's path in life. It was almost like she looked at another version of herself, a version where she hadn't become a wife, mother, and superheroine. Where she'd sold her body and her name and...

The Invisible Woman shook her head. It was ridiculous to think like that. She hadn't spoken to Mae in over a decade. She had no idea why Mae had become Tess Tempest or a pornstar. There could be a thousand reasons, and it was none of her business. All she wanted to do was reconnect with Mae and get the name of the photographer, see if she could take those damn photos off the internet.

It wasn't easy. Tess was a semi-public figure, and her personal phone number and email were unlisted. Sue could call S.H.I.E.L.D. and ask for the information—but then she would have to explain why she wanted it. The superheroine drummed her fingers on the countertop, the minutes of internet access she'd bought ticking away...when she found an address for Mae's home and the production studio she owned.

Both were right here. In New York City.

What are the odds of that? Sue thought as she scribbled the address down. She took a deep breath and checked her time. Barring an emergency—in which case Reed or one of the others would contact her—she didn't need to be home for hours. Plenty of time to drop in on Mae, catch up, and hopefully wrangle that bit of information out of her.