Marvel's Fantastic Four have a new ally whose abilities are gaining surprising new uses. Sky is an alien superhero that Marvel's First Family met on a trip to the planet that was responsible for the group's powers. The new character has a strange, cosmic bond to Johnny Storm, as well as wings, a sonic scream, and the ability to talk to birds. In the new issue Fantastic Four #20, Sky learns that an unexpected creature responds to her powers as well: prehistoric reptiles!
Sky, whose real name is Keila, is from the world of Spyre, a seemingly utopian world filled with superheroes. But the planet also had a dark side: its seemingly magical ruler, the Overseer, used cosmic rays to induce superpowers in his people - and as a weapon that he fired on the Fantastic Four's ship, creating their original mutations! Reed revealed the Overseer's deceptions and destroyed his regime, but not before the Overseer's tool that matches people with their soul mate bonded Johnny Storm to a member of Spyre's own superhero team.
In Fantastic Four #20, Sky decides to accompany her betrothed to the distant and exotic planet Earth. After an initially difficult adjustment, Sky discovers that her kinship with avian animals works on Earth's birds as well as it did on her homeworld. She shows off her new friends, the "noble creatures" of New York, but Johnny and Susan Storm are less than impressed with her entourage of pigeons.
The second half of the issue takes the Fantastic Four (and Sky) to the home of Johnny's close friend Wyatt Wingfoot, the Keewazi reservation. The Keewazi had discovered they were living on top of a settlement of Moloids, subterranean humanoids that have mostly been enslaved by the Mole Man, who were displaced by oil drilling. The Moloids integrated happily into the Keewazi tribe, but a jealous Mole Man had been attempting to steal them away with his herd of attack dinosaurs.
As Keila helps defend Wyatt's family, she remarks to Wyatt's geologist friend that the T-rex she hit with her scream objected in the strongest terms. The doctor helpfully informs her that T-rex's can't talk and that the evidence suggests that dinosaurs are distant ancestors to Earth fowl. "So on this crazy world of yours..." Sky replies, "...giant lizards count as birds? Unbelievable."
But the hypothesis bears out in testing. Sky has a conversation with the crowd of T-rexes about colonial oppression and indigenous rights. The tyrant lizards see reason and refuse to carry out Mole Man's rampage. Wyatt and Johnny are both impressed by Keila's ability not only to bond with a family instantly but to convey the importance of that bond to other people - or to gigantic predatory animals, as the case may be.
Will Sky join the Fantastic Four as an official member? The jury is still out. It looks like we're unlikely to get an answer soon, especially with the Empyre storyline on the horizon threatening whether the FF as a team will even survive. Before Sky joins the FF on a permanent basis, we'll have to see how Spider-Man and Wolverine fare in it.