Pink Panties

Sue Storm didn't need any more bonbons. Yet she was surprised to see that the small pink box from Mr. Porkum in today's mail had nothing edible in it. Instead, she opened the box to find a small, tasteful pair of pink panties, the material solid, with some kind of absorbent lining on the inside. Instead of an elastic band, a pink ribbon ran through the seams that allowed for a customized fit.

"H.E.R.B.I.E.," Sue asked as she had invisible hands hold up the panties and turn them around in mid-air. "Has this package been scanned?"

"Affirmative, Mrs. Richards," the robot said. "All-natural silk and cotton, impregnated with unstable molecules."

"Really?" she said, surprised at the last bit. The quality of the construction looked incredible. She didn't often accept gifts, however. She peeked inside and found no manufacturer's label, just a small patch of red and pink thread in the shape of a cartoon pig's head.

Which meant this was either bespoke, a one-off by some ardent admirer, or a very high-end fashion line. Maybe one of those secret brands she'd heard Jan go on about. Sue made a note to ask Janet van Dyne about it, as she set the panties back in the box.

There was a note in the box. Sue picked it up and read it. White paper, pink ink, which made the letters swim a bit in her eyes. It was Porkum again. He hoped she'd accept his gift, a gesture of his appreciation, blah blah blah.

She hesitated before disposing of them. The bonbons were one thing; they were a disposable item, eat or be wasted. Clothing Sue normally donated to charity. There were plenty of people that needed such things more than the Invisible Woman, with all the millions from Reed Richard's patents. Still...

The Invisible Woman reached down and felt the fabric panties. Real silk. And they weren't sexy panties. If anything, they were more practical than the things she sometimes wore under her Fantastic Four uniform. Still...she didn't really need them.

Sue was still debating what to do with them when the Baxter Building's intruder alarm sounded.

The sonic disrupters that blew out the windows of Sue and Reed's bedroom were not subtle. Glass covered the bed and carpet as the villain Skein, formerly known as Gypsy Moth, flew in. The mutant sneered as the power-enhancing implants she had been provided went to work, her specifically-tuned telekinesis unraveling everything within sight. All around her, every bit of cloth and fabric unwove itself. The bedsheets became a mass of threads, the carpets exploded into drifts of fuzz. The clothes and underwear in the bureaus and drawers lost cohesion and collapsed.

In moments, Susan Storm and Reed Richard's entire wardrobe had vanished into their raw component materials. Skein was about to leave the room when the door suddenly went invisible. Beyond the now-transparent slab of wood and metal, harsh to the mutant's psychic senses, she saw Sue Storm stand angry and defiant.

Immediately, Sue's clothes exploded off of her, billowed into a cloud around her. With a telekinetic control afforded by Doctor Doom's implants, the mutant twisted and shaped the threads into a cocoon that covered Sue Storm from head to foot.

Skein momentarily lauded her victory.

Until the cloth around Sue's eyes went invisible. Their gazes met, briefly.

The mutant Skein had never been hit by a truck. Yet the overwhelming invisible **** that smashed into her and tossed her out of the window, blood streaming from her notrils and ****, was the equivalent. Bones fractured in the raw concussive ****, and a few moments later the mutant might have been a bloody stain on the pavement of Four Freedoms Plaza—except that Sue retained the foresight to catch the villain in an invisible clamp and drag her back inside.

By the time S.H.I.E.L.D. arrived to pick up the injured and **** Skein, Sue Storm was dressed in her last costume—the one she kept in her to-go bag in the bay for the Fantasticar, rather than in her closet—and beneath that, she wore Porkum's pink panties. There was nothing else. Her entire wardrobe had been ruined, and it would take days for the unstable molecule loom to re-frabricate all of her costumes. The rest of it would require shopping. Lots of shopping.

"What I don't understand," Sue said to Maria Hill, as Skein was carted away to whatever super-prison they had set up for her. "Is why she attacked the Baxter Building? What was she after?"

"From the sound of things, it might have been a smash-and-grab," Hill suggested. "The Fantastic Four is known to be off-world, nobody's seen you active for a while. She might have thought to come in, grab whatever she could and get out. Even unstable molecule thread is valuable on the black market; the raw material of your old costumes might have been enough to cover those sonic disrupters she used to bust through your defenses."

"Maybe," Sue conceded. "But I want to know where she got those too."

Skein stirred as they loaded her onto the transport. She smiled. Within hours, Doom's lawyers would have her out on bail, then Porkum would pay her the rest of what he owed her. A lot of money to shred some panties, but hey, a job's a job.