Reed Richards Notices Some Odd Charges from Sue Storm's Credit Card

It is possible, as many people have discovered, to satisfy a human being's basic nutritional requirements by diving into the dumpster at the back of the bakery. Why pay for what you need to eat, when with a little time and effort you can scrounge up a meal for free? It is the basic hunter-gatherer instinct at work in a contemporary setting, and the same basic impulse applies to porn-seekers everywhere. Porn is so freely available, so widely pirated, throughout the internet that all one really needs are time, patience, and a good search engine.

Yet like a few hungry people that that go into the bakery and hand over their credit card, sometimes it's easier and simpler to simply pay for a cream pie.

As Sue Storm delved deeper into her hobby, she found it easier to pay for new and higher-definition videos than it was to squint at the same old videos on the publicly-accessible sites. Charges which, discreet and modest as they were, flagged the interest of Reed Richards.

The brow between the greying temples furrowed as he examined the charges. While each member of the Fantastic Four had a private credit card, the monthly bill was paid out from the Fantastic Four's shared account. So while he could not see exactly what Sue was charging or to whom, he did see that she was charging more—a substantial uptick over the last few weeks.

On top of which, he'd noted a corresponding increase in her data usage. Hundreds of gigabytes of streaming data, as if she was downloading entire movies.

Something about that worried Reed as he went ahead and paid the bill. Sue had been...not distant, exactly, lately, but she'd been spending more time in their bedroom. Especially at night and in the early morning, which coincided with the periods of increased data traffic. His genius intellect, which was so easily able to understand particle physics and the complex calculus of mapping dimensional folds and rifts, was stymied when he tried to imagine what Sue might be doing at these odd hours to consume this much data—and what it might have to do with this increase of charges.

"Maybe she's binging a new show?" he mumbled to himself. Reed hesitated to ask her. He didn't want to pry into his wife's privacy. Yet he didn't like that she hadn't shared this with him.

He brought it up over dinner. It was fried chicken, tonight, and Johnny, Ben, and the kids were in front of the television watching a Skrull jazz trio being beamed in from several light years away. It was just the two of them at the table, and Reed broached the subject.

"Darling," he said. "I noticed your data usage on the internet has been increasing lately. And there's been some odd charges on your credit card."

Sue froze in mid-bite, and swallowed quickly. She reached for a napkin to wipe her mouth, and Reed continued.

"I know you have a new hobby," he said gently. "And I don't want to discourage it. I don't know why you haven't shared it with me—whether you're embarrassed—but I want you to know that I support you in everything. And I'd like to be a part of it—to share in your enjoyment, spend some more time with you."

The Invisible Woman sat for a moment, utterly poker-faced. Then she said, very quietly, almost guiltily:

"Okay."