You had to be there.

Oh, it's easy to look back now and say, "Hey, what an odd plot development that must have been ... for Alicia to turn out to be a Skrull!" But to have been collecting a run of the Fantastic Four that spanned before the time of John Byrne made this a difficult thing to swallow. Many felt that the character development Byrne bought to the characters and the all too human failing of the characters of Johnny and Alicia to fall for each other so unexpectedly, yet so naturally, was a hallmark of the end run of Byrne's work on the series.

Of course, nothing's that easy in the Fantastic Four and so it turns out that way back during the Secret War, the Skrulls kidnapped Alicia and replaced her with "Lyja the Lazerfist." Paibok the Power Skrull, the craggy chinned mastermind of these shenanigans, inexplicably kept Alica alive and in a tube while Lyja pretended to be her in order to betray and destroy the Fantastic Four from within. Plot complication: Lyja has actually fallen in love with Johnny by the time she is revealed to be a Skrull. From there, things simply become more ridiculous. Lyja has an egg she claims is really Johnny's baby, although it turns out to be another one of Paibok's schemes. (Of coruse, Reed commented that humans and Skrulls were genetically incapatible for reproduction, but no one seemed to listen to him.) The whole idea is rather ludicrous. The Skrulls are reptillian. Have you ever heard of a mammal and a lizard reproducing?

More ludicrous is that ol' Ben starts giving Lyja the eye toward the end of Fantastic Four volume one. Ben, she's a steenkin' lizard! Okay, so you're a pile of rocks. Oh, I give up. Never get involved in comic book romances.

Whatta revoltin' development.

Forget that in his own series, the Thing seriously considered himself separated from Alicia already. Forget that Johnny and Alicia unintentionally made that permanent by sleeping together. Forget it all! It was the devious work of those shifty Skrulls! The next time you note that someone in your life is maturing and growing in new directions, assume that person to be an alien shapeshifter cast upon the earth to bring woe upon your house!

Lyja the Lazerfist (what a stupid name) was a supporting member of the Fantastic Four through the end of volume one once her true identity was revealed. There are no plans currently to bring her back into the Fantastic Four, so she is wandering the earth with other bad ideas like She-Thing.