Sue Storm Aborts Porkum's Bastard

Seated on the toilet, Sue Storm used her powers. The unnaturally pale skin of her distended abdomen faded away. The lay of subcutaneous fat that hadn't been there vanished. Muscles. Blood vessels. Integument. To reveal the swollen pink balloon of her womb. Not too big. Not yet.

Her blue eyes were very cold as it turned invisible.

The fetus didn't have a head. Sue Storm's jaw worked. She had a miscarriage once. Her genes, mutated by cosmic rays, made conception uncertain, pregnancies unreliable. Yet she was glad to see that the tiny embryo was clearly deformed, nonviable. It made what she had to do next easier.

Just a small invisible force field, scraping away at the point where it attached to her uterus. She grimaced as she dealt with the rest of it. Forcing her cervix open. The pain helped her focus as she carefully voided it. A part of her knew she should pray, as she flushed it away.

Yet her faith was another casualty of her ordeal.

Sue did not move from the toilet. She stared out, and the walls disappeared. Porkum was turned away from her. Didn't see his skull go suddenly transparent. It would be so easy to cause a simple aneurysm. Just a little pinch. Her lip twitched, curled.

Porkum's brain exploded.

The lair became invisible to her. Sue Storm found money, clothes. She thought for a moment of going home—and then she looked down at her flabby body. At the blood that trickled down her thighs. Her face twisted into a grimace.

Doom. Reed. She had been caught in the middle of their idiotic rivalry, and had paid the price.

"Fuck you both," she said as she left. An invisible blade cut the gas pipes in the kitchen. A spark caught. The whole pork packing plant went up in a fireball.

Sue watched it burn. Then turned away.

Twelve weeks later, Sue Storm admired her toned body in the mirror. The transformation of her body didn't come out of a pill or a shot. Strenuous exercise and dieting, with her superhuman metabolism, had regained most of her former shape. She was still a little heavier than before, in the hips and breasts, but she had a six-pack abs again, and her skin was no longer deathly pale, thanks to sunbathing sessions on the roof. She had dyed her blonde hair black to help prevent recognition.

The newspapers had stopped asking where the Invisible Woman was.

Missing. Presumed dead.

A part of Sue thought she should leave New York. But fake IDs and passports cost money. She had no job. Much of Porkum's filthy lucre had gone to an illegal loft apartment, new clothes, a gym membership. She needed to do something for money...

Standing on the corner on her way home, waiting for the light to change, dressed only in a skin-tight athleisure outfit. A car rolled up to her, the window rolled down. Inside, a man looked her up and down.

"How much?" he asked.

Sue Storm fought the instinct to ignore him. This could be an opportunity.