After parting ways with Captain America, Daisy headed home to bring her two charges up to speed and teach them how to be normal people.
And right now, the two of them were anything but normal.
Wanda was a total shut-in. She had no idea what she was supposed to do, and would just sit on the bed hugging her knees, staring into space.
Miss Drew, while she didn't share Spider-Man's fondness for talking upside down, had plenty of other spider-like habits: hugging the wall when she walked, hating to have other animals in her territory. All in all, a very strange person.
Daisy had to teach them, bit by bit, what normal life in current human society looked like.
Starting with the basics: clothing, food, shelter, and getting around.
Clothing came first. Step one: how to get dressed, how to put on underwear.
Wanda had been a prisoner the whole time and had never even seen underwear. Drew was even further gone; to the understanding of a seven-year-old girl, she didn't even know what the things on her own chest were.
Luckily, both were extremely bright. With an on-the-spot demonstration, Daisy got the two of them to learn how to put on underwear.
Eating was the second lesson. Daisy sat the two women down at her own dining table and ran through all the dos and don'ts.
Daisy often wolfed her food down, but when she wanted to be elegant, she could be elegant.
Wanda would only eat what was directly in front of her. Daisy told her to be bolder; they were all family here. That one was easy enough to fix.
Miss Drew, on the other hand, was a touch horrifying. She liked to crouch in a corner to eat. She could control her own bioelectricity, and would spit out some glistening green substance, acid-like, to corrode her food, then suck the softened food back in like paste.
"That's a no. Come here, do what I do. You're a person, not a spider. Pick up your knife and fork!"
After the by-the-book corrections came lessons in all kinds of knowledge and common sense.
Over the next few days, she carved out time here and there to fill the two of them in on modern society, and drove them around New York for a tour.
She also bought a big stack of books for them to read.
Miss Drew was a genuine academic disaster; science and general academic subjects, she couldn't follow any of it. But she was fiercely competitive, and her mind was maturing at a remarkable speed.
Compared to academics, where she had zero foundation, she was far more interested in the training the maid and Elektra did. With her extraordinary physical gifts, she picked up hand-to-hand combat by leaps and bounds.
The witch was relatively normal. Daisy told her not to use magic, and she dutifully stayed in her room reading, wandering around in her free time. With her naturally gentle, unthreatening nature, she actually grew close to Tangbao, which had Lorna loudly cursing the lion for a traitor.
A week later, Viper finally got her hands on the Darkhold. Poison, ambush, and a brute-force assault; even so, even with three times the enemy's numbers, Kaecilius wiped out more than half her people.
Sorcerers held too great an advantage against ordinary people.
Even Viper herself took a blade to the gut from Kaecilius. Just as he was about to finish her off, the Chthon pact replenished her life force.
The surge of magic terrified Kaecilius, who was on his way to becoming Dormammu's lackey. He knew of this god of dark magic, and he knew it was a power even greater than his own would-be master, Dormammu.
Then, watching the sheer force with which they seized the Darkhold, Kaecilius went cold to his fingertips. He decided this had to be the will of some higher-dimensional being, and if he stood in its way, would he live to see tomorrow's sun?
"Don't pursue them. Let them go." He hurriedly reined in his subordinates, true to his word with almost comical rigidity. He'd said no pursuit, so there was no pursuit, and he didn't budge an inch.
Viper and Kaecilius were locked in a standoff, each as scared of the other as the other was of them. Neither pressed the matter further, and she fled with the Darkhold all the way to Salem, Massachusetts.
Daisy needed to bring Wanda to rendezvous with her.
"You can feel the power inside you, can't you?" She wanted to have a frank, open talk with Wanda.
As a mutant, as a sorcerer, Wanda hadn't acquired her powers just yesterday. Chaos magic had been with her since birth, and that turbulent magic threw her thoughts into disarray, as if several minds were tangled together inside her. That she hadn't fractured into multiple personalities said something: beneath that fragile exterior, Wanda was a very strong woman.
"My friend needs you to heal her. That's the reason I came to rescue you." The words were harsh, but they were the truth.
Wanda nodded. She wasn't an idiot. With no ties of blood or friendship, who would rescue a complete stranger for nothing?
"I don't know what'll happen. I don't even know whether there's any danger..."
She was still choosing her words when Wanda cut her off. "I want to help you. No matter what happens."
The woman's sincerity left Daisy a little embarrassed. "There shouldn't be any danger. There's an old woman over there who seems to want to take you on as a student."
"Then can I still come back?"
Daisy had no idea whether the old witch's curriculum came with summer and winter breaks, but she nodded all the same. "Of course you can."
She held out a hand, and the Scarlet Witch grabbed it eagerly, almost bouncing on her toes, as if it were the one and only treasure in all the world.
When they reappeared, they were standing just outside the old witch's door. After a short wait, Viper came over, her expression grim.
From Viper's account, Daisy privately counted herself lucky. This Kaecilius was a good deal stronger than she'd imagined, and much of his magic was deeply bizarre: spells that worked on the mind and the will.
If even someone like Viper, who could hold out for half an hour under Daisy's vibrations, found it a real test of willpower, then a certain someone of famously shaky resolve figured she'd have an even harder time of it.
They pushed open the door and walked into the wooden cabin. Agatha Harkness was still toying with her black cat. Her gaze lingered a moment longer on Wanda, something deeply complicated in it, before dissolving at last into a sigh.
"In the end, none of us can defy our own fate. Where's the book?" Her clouded, yellowed eyes turned of their own accord to Viper, as if she knew the book was on her.
Viper drew an old book from the pack at her side—black-covered, its surface tracery faintly threaded with red, like veins of blood—and handed it to the old witch.
Daisy took the chance to glance at it. Couldn't make heads or tails of it; that was her first reaction. To her senses, in the realm of frequencies, the book may as well not have existed at all; that was her second.
She tried again with super vision and psychic sight. Agatha had plainly reached out and taken the book, yet to all of Daisy's senses beyond plain eyesight, the Darkhold simply could not be perceived.
"Don't waste your effort. You have no affinity for magic."
Agatha laid out the fact with brutal bluntness, leaving Daisy thoroughly embarrassed.
Wanda, who'd lately been schooled by Daisy like a child and had never once seen her come up short, broke into a smile, then, embarrassed, quickly turned her face away.
Viper had no such reservations. She laughed merrily, her chest shaking with it.
Agatha leafed through the Darkhold as though gazing at some dazzling, many-splendored treasure. Her expression was rapt, and her clouded eyes shone with an uncommon light, now nodding in excitement, now shaking her head in disappointment.
"Can you sense that book at all? What? You too?" Daisy asked Wanda first, and the witch said she could feel boundless power coming off it. Then Viper said much the same. In their eyes, the book was a priceless treasure.