Over breakfast, Daisy made small talk with the hotel staff and casually mentioned her concerns about local safety. The concierge recommended a gun shop.
$1,100 later, she walked out with two compact Glocks and two boxes of ammunition. Easy to conceal — one in the waistband at the small of her back, one tucked in her bag, kept strictly out of sight. Theoretically, that was enough to handle most ordinary trouble.
Over the next few days, she immersed herself in local legends, oral histories, library archives, and internet forums, hunting for anything connected to an ancient city.
She made three consecutive visits to the San Juan Police Department. Her cover story: she'd seen an online post about a couple who'd lost a baby girl in Puerto Rico eighteen years ago, and she'd come to follow up on the lead in search of her birth parents.
The department gave her US passport a second look and decided to cooperate. Three full days of records searches, all without complaint.
The birth parents story was, of course, entirely fabricated. The real purpose was to give herself a visible, legitimate reason to be in Puerto Rico — and more practically, to plant malware in the department's systems.
From the police database, she pulled the architectural layout plans for Old San Juan. She wasn't an architect or engineer, and a lot of the documents were beyond her technical reading. But combined with her existing knowledge and a fair amount of guessing, she narrowed it down to several key points.
Castillo San Cristóbal was a formidable fortress the Spanish built to defend Old San Juan and command the Caribbean. Over centuries, it had held off Dutch, English, and American incursions in turn.
The Inhuman ancient city was definitely somewhere beneath that fortress, deep underground.
Any large organization conducting a search would follow this with a sweep and clearance phase — heavy machinery, high-speed cutting tools. She knew S.H.I.E.L.D. had used industrial cutters. HYDRA went further with plasma drills. And then there was Daisy, who didn't have a single helper, let alone a shovel.
She briefly entertained the idea of buying a shovel and digging a tunnel herself — her own private grave-robber adventure. She discarded it immediately. That was not happening.
Brute force wasn't her way in.
Daisy spent the next stretch of time buried in the San Juan public library, crawling through historical documents. Pressure, it turned out, was an excellent Spanish teacher — her reading and writing improved dramatically under deadline, even if speaking was still a stumble-heavy process.
Buried in local folklore, she found something. A story that read like a piece of creepypasta.
Legend said there was a sentry box — La Garita del Diablo — on the northern side of the fortress, facing the sea, where no soldier had been willing to stand guard for a long stretch of history. Eleven disappearances were on record. The locals said something ancient and evil lived beneath it.
Daisy paused on that. Were there actual demons in the Marvel universe? She knew the answer was technically yes — but not here. Not like this.
The records noted that the missing soldiers were never found, neither dead nor alive. That told her everything: there was a passage directly connecting the tower to the underground city below. Soldiers without Inhuman bloodline went in and never came back.
For someone going in alone, that was actually reassuring.
August in Puerto Rico was brutal. San Juan itself was a compact city with narrow streets. The chaotic firefights she'd half-imagined never materialized — the locals were relaxed, propping up sunshade umbrellas along the roadside and selling things without anyone bothering to stop them.
Daisy gathered her supplies methodically. Rope. A combat knife. Several glow sticks. She remembered the underground city had a special magnetic field that shut down all electronics, so she packed a flashlight anyway — it would work near the entrance at least, even if only as a one-time-use item.
Compressed food and water. The show's underground sequence ran forty minutes on screen, but how long it would actually take on foot was another matter entirely. This was a full underground city — walking it alone could take days.
Remembering the misery of a military training camp she'd once attended, she added a bulk pack of sanitary pads. Useful as shoe insoles in a pinch, and currently useful for other reasons too. Absolutely non-negotiable.
The current city maps were nearly useless for navigating underground, but she hand-drew what she could and kept it on her. The laptop and phone stayed at the hotel.
Her outfit for the descent: a pale linen button-up over a tank top, sleeves rolled to the elbow, jeans, running shoes, a mechanical watch on her wrist. Jacket crammed into the backpack. It looked sweltering. It was sweltering. But she was confident the underground city would be cold, and dirty, and she'd rather have too many layers than too few.
Fed, rested, fully equipped, Obelisk secured — on a bright and sunny afternoon, she slipped into the legendary demon-haunted sentry box.
No counter-surveillance skills, but the logic held: in broad daylight, if anyone was tailing her, she'd at least have a chance of spotting them. Nighttime offered no such advantage.
She took a quick turn onto a side path. The sentry box had been abandoned long enough to lose even its gate. Inside was cool shadow and ancient dust. She pulled on her jacket immediately.
She searched methodically. It didn't take long to find a hollow in the floor, buried under a mound of dead weeds. Handgun raised, she descended stone steps into the dark.
A wine cellar. Of course. The bored soldiers stationed here had apparently dug themselves a private storage space for their liquor — somewhere out of sight and easy to forget.
She worked along the walls and floor, tapping stone by stone. On the west side, near the base, she found a deep recess in the wall. The last soldiers had patched it up, but the work was sloppy at best. A few good blows opened it right up.
She'd read enough tomb-raiding novels to know better than to rush in. She stood at the entrance and held out her hand — and felt it. A gentle current of air moving past her fingers. The faintest drift of cool from somewhere below.
She braided her long hair into a ponytail, slotted her flashlight into a miner's helmet, strapped the helmet on, and began crawling into the passage.
The soldiers had clearly dug this themselves — treasure hunters, most likely. The passage was narrow, uneven, clearly made by human hands chasing a dream of gold.
She crawled for a full hour. An absolute slog. She was already regretting not buying a proper sports bra for this trip; crawling through a tunnel for sixty minutes in ordinary undergarments was a specific kind of discomfort she had no words for and no desire to revisit.
But the passage was short, relatively speaking. After sliding down a rough incline, she emerged into open space.
A broader, smoother downward slope stretched ahead.
The flashlight died exactly on cue.
Daisy — now coated in dust and grime — knew she had crossed the threshold into the ancient underground city.
The passage ahead was absolute darkness. She felt the weight of it press against her. And somewhere under that dread, faintly, something that might have been excitement.
She didn't reach for a glow stick. Instead, almost without thinking, she grabbed the Obelisk.
The previously smooth surface came alive — a network of glowing amber-orange lines bloomed across the metal facets. She'd spent days studying San Juan's layout, and she recognized the patterns instantly: it was a map. All the lines converged on a single point. Her destination.
The Obelisk was still glowing, still warm. It sent her something that felt less like a signal and more like a pull.
Follow me.
The feeling arrived from nowhere and meant everything. And now, in its faint amber light, she could finally see the immediate area around her.
At her feet, no more than a meter (~3 feet) ahead, lay seven or eight sets of bones. They had been taken the moment they crossed the city's boundary, and they had died here.
More skeletal remains stretched into the distance — Spanish soldiers in rotted uniforms, indigenous remains, the small curved bones of animals.
She fixed her direction and followed the Obelisk deeper into the city.