Emissary | T'Challa

Prologue

Like any smart organization, SHIELD recruited the best, or those that showed promise of becoming the best, given the resources and the opportunities. Of the people they recruited, there was one young woman who stood out from all the rest.

Sophia Sloane had a natural gift for language. What might take someone three weeks to learn would take Sophia a day, maybe three days if it was a particularly hard language to learn. She wasn't gifted, SHIELD had checked for that. She was just an ordinary girl.

As soon as the girl was out of college, the agency swooped in to recruit her.

*

Sophia had been dreaming of what she would do once out of college for the entire time she was in college. And now that it was the day after graduation and she was laying in bed, she couldn't help but anticipate the alarm that had been set so many months ago to wake her up to get to her lectures on time.

The oddest part about it was that Sophia had turned the alarm off before bed last night and she knew it. But her body still anticipated it.

The dark haired girl turned her head to the side and looked at her alarm clock. As it ticked to eight o'clock, Sophia let out a sigh and pushed herself out of bed. There was no getting back to sleep, there was no lying there till a more decent hour. She would lose her mind just lying there.

After a quick shower, Sophia dressed in a pair of yoga pants, a loose t-shirt and a cardigan, grabbed her purse and headed for the restaurant down the street from her apartment. Knowing that her roommate, Blair, was still asleep, Sophia pinned a note to the fridge explaining where she was going and that she'd bring something back for her.

The little restaurant was mostly empty at this hour, and Sophia took a seat in one of the booths and waited for someone to take her order.

"Early riser?" a man asked as he slid into the booth across from her.

"Excuse me? Who are you?" Sophia asked.

He was a black man, like her (well, black like her, she was not a man), bald, with an eyepatch over one eye and a long black coat. He was a stranger to Sophia, which made her wonder what the hell he was doing in her booth.

"My name is Nick Fury, I work for an organization that likes to recruit people with special skills and abilities," he explained. "People like you."

"I don't have any special skills or abilities."

"Your resume tells me differently," Nick Fury said.

"How do you have my resume?"

"You can speak ten different languages fluently. I don't know about you, but I would call that a special skill," Nick Fury told her.

"I'm interested in language, that's why I learn so many," Sophia defended.

"In a fraction of the time that most people can learn them."

"So I learn fast, what of it? I dedicate myself."

"Three days and you learned to speak Mandarin fluently."

Sophia had no defense for that. Sure, she had spent a Friday that she had off and an entire weekend learning the language, but still, that was the only time she had to learn the language to be able to speak without issue to someone who had spoken the language for her whole life. Maybe she didn't want to admit it, or hadn't wanted to admit it before, but there definitely was something there now that she thought about it.

"Alright, so I have a skill for learning languages," Sophia admitted, "why would that be of any interest to you or your organization?"

"We're global, Miss Sloane, having someone who could learn any language within a week would be very valuable to us," Nick Fury explained.

"And what it is your global organization?" Sophia asked.

"It's called SHIELD. Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."

"That's a mouthful."

"That's why we shortened it."

"So why are you here?"

"I want you to come work for my organization, Miss Sloane. We are interested in utilizing your talents to make you an Emissary. Your ability to learn and pick up languages would make you our most valuable asset," Nick Fury explained.

"Asset? Is that all I'd be?" Sophia asked.

"No, Miss Sloane, it is not."

Sophia wasn't quite sure that she believed him.

"What do you say, Miss Sloane? Are you going to join us?"

She looked down at her menu, and thought about it. Using her talent for language to travel the world and meet and help people? That didn't sound so bad.

"Yes."