Her family and the world at large believed that the Malice part of her persona had been an anomaly caused by Psycho-Man, and that it had eventually been expelled from her and destroyed. They thought she had gone back to being meek, mild Susan Storm-Richards.
The fools! How could they believe that she could ever suppress the dominant part of her own personality? Psycho-Man had merely helped her to embrace the true self that she’d been suppressing all her adult life. She had kept it locked in a cage, and that cage had been shattered. The repressive chains of morality had been stripped away and at last she was able to revel in the darkness that had been seething within her, a fierce lust for sexual dominance and sado-masochism.
When Psycho-Man had first freed her and given her the choice of new costume to adopt, it hadn’t taken her long to decide on her new Malice guise. It had been important for her to conceal her identity, but that was only half the reason she chose to wear the tight leather cowl with its steel spikes. Secretly Sue had yearned to dress this way for years but had never admitted it even to herself. Now all the wicked sexual fantasies she’d been ashamed of could be real!
When she first saw herself in her full Malice costume, she’d felt a boiling lust that could not be contained, and had fucked Psycho-Man within an inch of his life, laughing wildly at the thought of her beloved Reed and how he would react to seeing his prim and proper wife transformed into an S&M slut.
When the Malice entity had finally been “destroyed”, Sue knew she had to pretend that that part of herself was dead. But almost immediately, she knew that the darkness still waited within her and that eventually, it would need to be freed, or she would go mad. She began to form a plan, and asked Reed about the possibility of using his technological genius to create a device that could generate perfect disguises that could be switched on and off instantly.
It didn’t take much goading for his inquiring scientific mind to grapple with the problem and came up what an answer. A machine that could re-arrange the surface molecules of a person’s body so that the features, pigmentation etc could be altered. This would be a flawless disguise because the physical form was truly transformed. The original pattern could be stored in the machine so a person’s original form could be restored at any time.
Once the machine had been successfully tested, Sue realized that now she could give full reign to her malice personality but store a version of herself so that she could return to it at any time. The machine would be like her own “Picture of Dorian Gray”, allowing her to revel in sin but retain an outward appearance of purity. But every so often she would wear her true form and let Malice out to play, to satisfy the evil passions that boiled within her all the time she played the part of the good and virtuous superheroine.
She had to keep her activities a secret of course, because if word got out that Malice was back then Reed and the others would soon find out and would cause all sort of boring complications. So she had to be careful about how she indulged her appetites.