Johnny Storm didn’t like being watched. Not by fans, not by hovering tech drones, and definitely not by some overqualified intern with a clipboard and a press strategy.

You weren’t exactly thrilled about it either. Your job, officially, was “PR liaison in training.” Unofficially? You were stuck following the Human Torch around like a glorified babysitter, trying to keep him from accidentally setting the media or an actual building on fire.

He didn’t protest much because the Foundation required interns now, some mix of optics, outreach, and “cultivating the next generation” nonsense that Sue had championed. But if Johnny Storm was going to be assigned a PR babysitter, he was going to make it your problem.

The first day, he offered a live interview without clearing it with Reed, and introduced you on camera as his personal hype technician. The footage got two million views in an hour. Great for numbers. Awful for credibility.

So you scribbled in your notebook, rewrote his interviews, put out social media fires, and tried— God, you tried—to make him look polished. But the truth was, Johnny Storm wasn’t any of those things.

He was a wildfire on legs, barely containable and completely unwilling to be shaped into something clean. And maybe that was the whole point. He was your frustrating problem. And maybe he had a point. Clearly he did when you heard a knock on your office door.