Valeria Richards slowly pried open her eyes, then laboriously levered herself up from her bed, swung her legs out into the abyss, before thumping to the floor, feet firmly planted and shuffling off towards her mirror as had become her new morning ritual.
Even five days on from the incident that had so profoundly altered her life, Val still felt alien in her own skin, like she was wearing a bulky, to large set of clothes...nothing felt right, every sensation just perceptibly off kilter.
As she made her way across the room, she thought back on what had happened. A “super-villain” had kidnapped her (she still had no conscious memory of how) and sealed her inside a container. The villain had already targeted various celebrities, the villain (no one knew their sex) identified themselves as “The Beautifier” and was obsessed with bring out the “true inner beauty” of people, and had decided to start with people in the public eye as they made a public display of their “art” so others might aspire to it.
What that actually meant wasn’t know at the time, as any of the celebrities involved immediately went into hiding after whatever happened, happened; this was so universal, and the efforts they went to hide themselves so complete that no one really knew who had been hit and who hadn’t.
The only thing that was know about the MO for these events is that the victim would either be kidnapped, ambushed or sent some form of booby trapped item.
The Beautifier obviously wanted to raise his/her profile, the container he had placed Val into was a transformation pod one set up so that an image of what was going on inside was being broadcast across the world via the web, as was his/her ultimatum; The Fantastic Four had 24hr find her, or the pod would auto-activate and her “true beauty” would be revealed for all the world to see.
Understandably, her family (and indeed the entire New York based Superhero community) began to tear the city (and indeed the world) apart looking for her; but their opponent had been canny; leaving no clues...no clues that is accept his other victims. This is when Val’s Auntie Alicia step forward, revealing that in her role as a famous artist she had already been targeted and transformed, and it was here that Val’s parents first saw the Beautifier twisted idea of “true beauty”...
Val had come too, with only a few hours left on the clock and had (much to her own chagrin) proved incapable of extracting herself, and it was with only moments left that it was discovered that she was being held in a shielded room beneath the Baxter Building itself, a frantic dash later and her family arrived...just a moment too late!
With that Valeria hefted herself up the step, and looked into the unforgiving surface of her mirror...