Truth be told, Medusa was a faction leader in her own right—second to one, above all others—and she didn't much care for Daisy's seemingly casual way of questioning her. Within the Inhumans, no woman could speak to her like that.
She would have preferred a little more deference, but strength was the foundation of all authority. She exchanged a few words with Black Bolt through telepathic communication, then began to recount the history of the Inhumans for Daisy.
It matched what Daisy already knew. The Inhumans had preserved their entire history and inherited a great deal of advanced Kree technology, on top of developing new tech of their own. In science, technology, culture, and history, they were ten thousand times ahead of the mutants—and whether by design or not, on the surface at least the Inhumans were highly unified, another edge over the every-man-for-himself mutants.
"The Kree? Earthlings? The Eternals…" A certain someone, who understood full well, played dumb, letting a flicker of dawning realization cross her face right on cue.
"To us, your genes are all but flawless. It's hard to imagine you arose naturally in a technological wasteland like Earth—it defies all reason." Medusa still voiced her doubts about just how formidable Daisy was.
Daisy was under no obligation to explain the road she'd taken to power, so she pretended not to catch her meaning.
Rebuffed gently, Medusa finally got to the point. "Attilan sincerely invites you to join our family. You are one of our brothers and sisters—of that there can be no mistake."
Daisy shook her head. "Sorry. I'm an Earthling. I won't be joining you."
Expecting me to sign on with nothing but pretty words? Dream on. Where are the terms? Where are the perks?
Gorgon the general grew a little anxious and seemed about to speak, but Medusa raised a hand to stop him and turned to confer with Black Bolt telepathically for a good while.
Just watching them communicate wore Daisy out. She had no idea what the Illuminati even got out of admitting Black Bolt, beyond using him as muscle. Surely he couldn't sit through meetings holding up two signs—"Agree" on the left, "Disagree" on the right?
She pictured the scene: Iron Man yammering on and on, Black Bolt raising a sign—Agree! Then Professor Charles Xavier launching into his own spiel, Black Bolt raising a sign—Disagree! Genuinely bizarre…
Daisy quickly pulled her thoughts back, because Medusa and Black Bolt had finished their discussion.
"Attilan can accept you as a member of the Royal Family, as…" Medusa checked twice more before she was satisfied. "As our king's younger sister."
She'd been terrified Black Bolt might mean to take another wife or the like, which would have left her—a queen a whole tier weaker in power—in an awkward spot. Fortunately, that wasn't his intention.
Daisy had harbored the same worry earlier and now quietly let out a breath of relief herself.
She thought it over—Black Bolt's little sister? That wasn't hard to accept at all. Never mind on Earth; even tossed out into the wider universe, Black Bolt counted as a top-tier player. And down the line there was the matter of Ronan the Accuser staging a coup, then stepping aside for the worthy and installing Black Bolt as king of the Kree.
Being that little sister was nothing to be ashamed of—but she wanted to gauge Black Bolt's true intentions first.
"This is a bit beyond what I expected. Could you open your psychic link, so I might speak with His Majesty the King myself?"
"You have psychic abilities too?"
Daisy smiled and said nothing.
Another round of deliberation followed. Black Bolt was once bitten, twice shy now—deeply wary of anything to do with psychic power. But to turn an enemy into a friend, to pull Daisy, one of Earth's key decision-makers, onto his side, a king had to shoulder some risk.
The two soon reached a decision. Medusa opened her psychic mindscape, and Daisy stepped inside without any trouble.
Crude, rudimentary, and impossibly cramped—as Daisy's psychic power entered Medusa's mindscape, the place felt faintly as though it couldn't bear the intrusion.
Her psychic power was only a touch above an ordinary person's, most likely forced open through some kind of high-tech trickery. Having seen the psychic powers of the White Queen and Jean Grey—if they were lakes and oceans, then this place, by comparison, was no bigger than a water cup.
Even half-baked as Daisy was, in raw psychic power alone she was well above her.
"Your Majesty." Daisy still gave Black Bolt a slight bow—he was stronger than she was, and this was how one showed respect for the strong.
"Inhumans generally don't have strong psychic power. Would you tell me how you trained yours?" In the mindscape Black Bolt could of course speak. His voice was rich and resonant, firm and ringing, like some instrument being struck, with a faint note of metal and stone to it.
Daisy gave a slight smile. "I never knew anything about the Kree—but I can shift into this form, and this one."
Without drawing on her Eternal genes, she cycled once through human, Inhuman, and Kree forms.
The Kree form left both Black Bolt and Medusa stunned.
"Can you do this in reality too? Or is this your Inhuman ability? No wonder you can live among humans…" Medusa gazed at her human form, a look of understanding dawning.
Black Bolt, meanwhile, gave her Kree form a second look. "A female Kree? The woman who captured me earlier felt a little like you do now."
Whether Supergiant was Kree didn't matter. What mattered was that the method Daisy offered was real and it worked.
She shifted back to her Inhuman form. "The Kree you speak of did indeed unlock my psychic power—of that I'm certain."
Daisy wanted to sweet-talk the Inhumans into hunting the Kree with her, then splitting the captured Kree fifty-fifty: she'd take half of them back to brew serum, and the Inhumans could take the other half back to study and develop psychic power.
As for whether the Kree were being wronged—she didn't care. Hadn't the Kree seized plenty of Earthlings for experiments back in the day? There was no right or wrong here; it was all for the survival of one's own kind, and nobody in the mix was some noble saint.
Black Bolt could tell what mattered and what could wait. He quietly filed away the matter of the Kree and formally extended his invitation to Daisy. "On behalf of the Attilan Royal Family, I invite you to join us and become one of our own. If you're willing, we can regard each other as brother and sister."
A certain someone declared her position at once. "The honor is mine, my royal brother—and Sister Medusa." They were family now, so there was no need for formal titles.
They withdrew from the mindscape. To claim they were close would be pure pretense, but at least most of the original hostility had melted away.
The Inhumans were pragmatic: the strong were honored, and Royal Family membership didn't rest entirely on blood. Those of pure lineage were the rulers.
Take Medusa: by marrying Black Bolt she counted, by the rules of propriety, as a member of the Royal Family—no question there. Her relatives, by rights, should have had nothing to do with the Royal Family; yet her younger sister Crystal was a member too.
The reason was that Crystal's ability let her control earth, fire, water, and air—making her one of the rare mage-type figures among Attilan's Inhumans.
Daisy, as a Royal Family member, went a step further still. In Attilan there was no distinction between the titles of Princess and Prince; so long as her strength remained ranked second, she could smoothly inherit the throne after Black Bolt's death.