Marvel Universe, Earth-XXX — February 12, 1993
Queens, New York City, New York State
Town Center Science & Technology Middle School — Biology Lab, Entrance Interview
Maya set the scalpel down with practiced ease and swapped it for the forceps on the tray beside her. With careful, deliberate movements, she lifted the tiny crucian carp's pancreatic intestine and drew it free, then arranged it neatly on the dissection board. Starting at the fish's head, she pressed small label tags — each no bigger than her pinky nail — into their designated positions. Gills. Ventricle. Atrium. All the way down to oviduct and urogenital opening. Every structure of the fish's anatomy, marked in order.
When the last tag was placed, the girl in the blue-and-white plaid uniform — the words "Manhattan Public Elementary School No. 9, New York" printed across the chest, her dark-gold hair loose around her shoulders — raised one rubber-gloved hand.
"Sir," she said clearly. "I'm done."
The middle-aged man behind the desk, his hairline beginning to thin, checked his watch before rising and walking over. He examined her work carefully. Then his expression settled into satisfaction.
"Ms. Maya Hansen." He straightened up. "You completed this in half the allotted time. Remarkable work. As the Head of the Biology Department at New York Science & Technology High School, it is my pleasure to formally notify you: you have been accepted. Congratulations. You will also receive a full scholarship of $35,000 per year."
Two bright spots of color rose on Maya's pale cheeks. The composure she'd worn throughout the exam melted away entirely. Beneath her long lashes, her wide green eyes lit up with barely contained excitement.
She turned and gave a small bow. "Thank you, Mr. Li. I'll keep working hard."
Outside the New York Science & Technology High School, Maya couldn't help it — she hopped twice on the spot.
Yes! Finally! The legendary high school everyone talks about — and I got the full scholarship. The hardest one to land. I wonder what tier of scholarship little Peter Parker will get when his time comes.
Thirty-five thousand dollars in the nineties was no joke. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly $78,500 in today's money — serious scholarship money by any era's standards. Even for an institution as well-funded as Town Center Science & Technology, fewer than three incoming students this year would walk away with a first-tier scholarship.
Obviously, Maya Hansen had been reincarnated.
In her past life, she was a programmer named Jia Baoyu — an orphan, and a top university graduate. He'd never even kissed his first girlfriend before she ran off with some rich kid. That kind of breakup was normal enough — people fall out of love, they move on. What wasn't normal was what she did before she left: she'd taken out a ¥300,000 high-interest payday loan in Jia Baoyu's name. After that, she vanished, and he couldn't reach her. All he could do was grind away at his job to pay off the debt.
Then, one night, pulling an all-nighter to write code for a mobile game — he died. Overwork. It was almost cliché.
His soul crossed over and was reborn in the Marvel Universe, in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, New York, in the early 1980s.
Hell's Kitchen wasn't exactly crawling with wealthy residents — Maya wasn't sure about that. But she knew one thing: it was absolutely crawling with bad people. Her biological father, Tom Hansen, was a textbook example. The moment he finished the legally mandated twelve years of public school, he and Maya's mother Jennifer fell head over heels and got married. University wasn't part of the picture. By the time little Maya had just learned to walk, she'd already stumbled across Tom in the bathroom — eyes glazed, snorting white powder.
The honeymoon phase burned hot and fast. By the time Maya was three, she regularly witnessed Tom storming out after a fight, slamming the door behind him, while Jennifer curled up on the bed with a bruised face and cried.
Maya didn't feel particularly sorry for Jennifer, either. She might've been three years old, but she wasn't blind. She'd seen Jennifer bring strange men home more than once — and the street-gang boyfriend Tom had his informants. Domestic violence was basically inevitable. Maya theoretically supported Jennifer leaving him; Tom was genuinely no good. He didn't just tolerate Jennifer's infidelity — he brought his own string of heavily made-up women back, sometimes with a group of tattooed lowlifes for all-night drinking sessions.
From the age of three, if Maya wanted to eat, she had to take money herself and go buy bread and milk. The only reason she didn't get snatched by traffickers was that Tom had enough of a name in the neighborhood that people left his daughter alone.
But the inevitable came regardless. At age seven, Maya stepped off the school bus one afternoon to find her apartment building surrounded by police, yellow tape stretched in a wide ring. Her heart hammered. She pushed through the crowd. Sure enough — there was Tom Hansen, struggling as two officers shoved him into a patrol car.
When the commotion died down and she got back inside, the apartment had been ransacked. Even her little pink Superman quilt had been slashed open, the stuffing scattered across the floor.
A month later, the verdict came down: Tom Hansen was sentenced to 500 years in prison on more than ten counts, including murder, armed robbery, drug possession, and assaulting a police officer. It wasn't a typo — five hundred years, not fifty. Even Wolverine would rot before seeing the end of that sentence.
Jennifer filed for divorce through her lawyer the same day.
When Maya watched her mother packing her bags without calling for her, she understood what came next: she would be handed off to the foster care system.
Another transmigrator might have felt relieved. More freedom, right? Maya couldn't even manage a hollow laugh. Two lives had taught her the same lesson: even neglectful parents, at their worst, would still sometimes remember you and give you something real. But the kindest nun in an orphanage might still send icy drafts through an already frozen heart. There was an old saying: only a mother's love is true; without her, a child is nothing but a weed.
Tom was locked up. Unreliable as Jennifer was, she was still the only person left.
The evidence was everywhere. Years later, Skye's story would prove the point: even after discovering her birth parents were worse than Tom and Jennifer combined, she'd still fought to take back the name they'd given her — Daisy — because the only time she ever felt truly loved was when they called her by that name.
Maya refused to be a weed.
So she marched on her little legs to her room, retrieved the property transfer document the lawyer had sent, and handed it to Jennifer. Tom's father had left him a small apartment. Now, from prison, Tom was passing it on to Maya. The logic was simple: if Jennifer kept Maya, she'd manage the property as her legal guardian. If Maya went to an orphanage, the deed would be held in trust until she turned eighteen.
Jennifer looked at the document. Then she looked at her daughter's round, childish face. Then she grabbed her and sobbed.
Later, Jennifer resumed her career in the Broadway scene across the street — well, "career" was generous; she was mostly playing background roles in stage productions. She changed her last name again. Now she was Jennifer Thompson, because she'd remarried: a Hollywood writer named Jack Thompson.
Truthfully, it was Maya who'd pushed Jennifer toward him.
Jennifer had a habit of bringing different men home to spend the night. Sometimes Maya would get up at midnight to use the bathroom and nearly walk into some stranger standing naked at the open fridge. Men of every description — built, scrawny, tall, and short. After one too many of those encounters, Maya started going to the bathroom before bed, then locking her bedroom door from the inside.
Even that wasn't always enough. Jennifer had a habit of getting loud in the living room. Maya would have to pound on her door in the middle of the night just to get them to take it elsewhere.
She understood, rationally. Jennifer was approaching thirty. She lived alone. She had needs. That was fine. Maya just couldn't live like this anymore.
On a few visits to the Golden Lion Theater to drop by Jennifer's rehearsal, Maya had noticed a man quietly watching her mother from a distance. When she asked, Jennifer flipped her hair and said, "That kid's had a crush on me forever. Too scared to say a word. Thinks I don't know." Then she laughed.
Maya did some quiet digging. The man named Jack had a film direction degree from a respected university — but he was floundering. He was thirty years old, barely scraping by on uncredited script-doctoring work. He hadn't directed a single independent film; no one would invest in him.
Clearly, Jennifer was his dream girl. Understandable, honestly. Jennifer had kept chasing her Broadway dream all these years, which meant she'd kept herself up: striking looks, a great figure, a certain artistic flair from years of stage work. That's what had attracted all those one-night-stand partners in the first place.
Over a few conversations, Jack proved surprisingly attentive to Maya — he answered every question she threw at him about filmmaking without talking down to her. She even read a couple of his scripts. They were... sincere, but thin. Too self-indulgent, not enough story structure. She suspected the studios had quietly blacklisted him.
Maya delivered her verdict to Jennifer: A beautiful woman in the last years of her youth, on the verge of losing her looks, should lock down a decent, steady man — not end up old and alone.
That logic persuaded Jennifer. She had her own baggage, after all — a young daughter wasn't exactly a selling point.
A month later, Jack Thompson moved into the apartment, beaming. He used nearly a decade's worth of bachelor savings to completely renovate the place. Maya had personally specified what she wanted done. Finally — her bedroom was fully soundproofed.