The jet touched down in New York just long enough to drop off Storm, T'Challa, and Batroc. Storm invited Daisy to visit Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters whenever she had a free moment — Daisy smiled politely and said she'd try to find the time. She had no intention of doing so.
The Panther Goddess, taking in New York, found herself unable to look away. Wakanda's technology was extraordinary, but its population was small; in sheer, chaotic vitality, it could not begin to rival a city like this. And she had been looking at the same landscape for millennia. She was, frankly, bored of it.
She informed Daisy that the film could wait. She hadn't left Wakanda in a very long time, and the outside world was full of things she hadn't seen in ages. She intended to go and look at some of them. She would find Daisy when she was ready.
Daisy wasn't especially worried about the goddess traveling alone. The list of things capable of threatening a divine avatar was short.
She piloted the jet back to Washington. She needed to debrief Fury on Wakanda, and to deliver his "gift from an African friend."
The problem was that she couldn't walk a rhinoceros through S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. The animal was skittish by nature — easily spooked — and if startled, its instincts could take over. With civilians in the building, she wasn't about to be responsible for anyone getting trampled.
She called Fury and asked him to come to her instead.
Thirty minutes later, Nick Fury arrived at the address she'd given him: her Washington residence. It had a garage, and with some effort she'd managed to get both Juggernaut and the rhino inside.
When Fury arrived, Daisy was sitting with the lion cub.
The cub had found herself in yet another unfamiliar environment and was clearly miserable about it — eyes wide, nose wrinkled, every muscle tense, head swiveling as she tried to take in her surroundings.
"Tangbao," Daisy decided, running a hand through the cub's thick fur. "That's your name from now on."
The cub blinked at her, uncertain whether this was a name or something else entirely. Daisy nodded firmly. Yes. That's what you're called.
The cub was acutely sensitive to dangerous energy. The moment Fury walked into the garage, she bolted behind Daisy and peered out cautiously from around her.
Daisy moved quickly to calm her down.
Fury's gaze drifted past the rhino and the lion without much reaction — a man who'd spent decades in field operations had seen stranger things. What did give him pause was Juggernaut: nearly ten feet tall and built proportionally, the man looked less like a human being and more like an architectural feature.
"What couldn't be said over the phone?" he asked first, then his gaze settled on Juggernaut. "And what is this thing? Some kind of gene-therapy experiment? Nobody naturally gets that big."
Daisy walked him through what she knew of Juggernaut's abilities. She was fairly certain he wasn't a laboratory product, but she had no hard evidence to support the claim, so she kept it brief — she mentioned Storm's impression that there was something dark inhabiting the man, something that didn't belong to him.
Fury wasn't particularly interested in dark spiritual forces. "Any chance we can flip him? Work with us instead of against us? You said he wasn't especially bright."
Daisy hesitated. "We never actually spoke. First time we met, we went straight to fighting. So… maybe? I don't know."
Whether the control the entity Cyttorak had over Juggernaut was the kind you could buy your way around — nobody could say. The man had taken a mercenary contract once; presumably his loyalty wasn't ideological. Daisy filed it under Fury's problem and moved on.
Fury's one eye settled on the rhino. Then on the rhino's small, placid eyes staring back at him. He still couldn't quite work out why one of his agents had a rhinoceros in her garage, but he'd seen enough field agents develop strange coping habits under stress that he was prepared to let it go. He asked, carefully: "And the rhino?"
Daisy lit up immediately. "A welcome gift," she said cheerfully, "from a fellow African."
"A fellow African?"
"That's right."
The phrase jogged something in Fury's memory. He'd run operations across the continent for decades. You crossed paths with people — things happened, connections formed.
Fury's face, by conventional standards, was not what most people would call distinguished — he had, Daisy had always privately thought, a somewhat egg-like quality to his features. But some of the women he'd encountered during operations in Africa had apparently found a different set of things to admire: a man of mature authority, a hint of menace from the missing eye, exceptional physical capability, and the unmistakable bearing of someone used to wielding power. He had, apparently, made a few friends along the way.
He ran through a short list — a tribal leader's wife from Zambia, a general's daughter from Zimbabwe — and Daisy shook her head at each one.
"Just tell me who sent it," he said flatly. "I'm done guessing."
"The royal family of Wakanda," Daisy said.
Fury processed this. Something surfaced from old intelligence files. "The golden kingdom? From the old Ethiopian records?"
That piece of history was news to Daisy — she could only say: "A nation with very advanced technology."
Fury quietly set aside the phrase very advanced technology as wishful thinking. An isolated nation staying hidden for centuries — how cutting-edge could it realistically be? Though something else did occur to him: "S.H.I.E.L.D. records show that a shipment of advanced weapons entered Ethiopia during World War II — weapons that couldn't be traced to any Allied power. Was that them? And who were they working with — the British, or the French?"
Daisy stared at him. She hadn't expected Fury, so thoroughly American, to have a detailed working knowledge of African colonial history.
Ethiopia was one of the few African nations to have successfully repelled European colonization — though admittedly their opponent had been Italy, which made the claim easier to support. Still. She knew the history. She just had never thought to connect it to Wakanda.
She wasn't sure whether Wakanda had been involved, so she sidestepped: "They did have indirect involvement in the Second World War. The raw material for Captain America's shield came from Wakanda."
The mention of Captain America snapped Fury back to the present. He thought for a moment. "I've come across references to a hidden nation in Africa in older records — most analysts wrote it off as mythology. You've actually been there? You just came from there?"
"Yes."
"Resources? Rare metals? A resource-based state?"
"Not exactly — they've used their resources as a foundation, but what they've built on top is…"
"How developed?"
Daisy searched for the right words. Wakanda's social structure was genuinely strange — scientifically extraordinary, economically lopsided, with a civilian population that still lived largely traditional lives while a narrow technical elite sat atop capabilities most nations couldn't dream of.
Then it came to her. She reached into her bag, pulled out the cloak, and draped it around her shoulders. She gave it a toss — and a faint blue energy shield bloomed in the air between them.
"An energy shield."
That genuinely surprised him. Fury hadn't expected that from an isolated African nation that had spent centuries off the grid. "How is that possible? S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own energy-shielding research is still in early-stage development — how does a country with no external contact end up ahead of us?"
Daisy, keeping to her cover story — stumbling upon Wakanda while looking into her father's background — walked him through the full account, omitting only what couldn't be said.