Emissary | T'Challa

1 - Tremors

Curses slipped from Sophia Sloane's mouth as she hurried through the halls of a SHIELD base, the high heels that she was wearing making it impossible to go the speed that she wanted to go. Of course, the bundle of files, papers, and books in her arm, the bag hanging off her shoulder and the cellphone pressed to her ear didn't make the walk any easier.

"No, Blair," Sophia said, "don't give up on this."

"Ugh, but it's so much effort," the other woman complained.

"You paid for that gym membership, at least use it for the month you paid for it," she told her.

"But-"

"No buts. If you don't use it and don't go back, then they'll just charge the next month, and so on and so on. You have to go back," Sophia explained simply.

Blair made a sound of defeat, "fine, fine. I'll exercise for an entire month."

"And you should go at least three times a week. That gym membership was expensive and if you're not going to keep it, you need to get your money's worth."

"Oh I hate it when you're right, Soph," Blair complained.

"No you don't," Sophia responded easily.

"No, I don't."

"Okay, I gotta go, I'll talk to you when I get back," Sophia told her friend and former roommate, laughing.

"Okay, I'll talk to you then."

Hanging up the phone and dropping it in her pocket, Sophia hurried along down the hallway, headed in the direction of the hangar. Checking the clock inside one of the offices she passed, Sophia realized she was almost late. Hurrying, the dark-haired girl cursed her choice of heels today.

She broke into the hangar with only a few minutes to spare and saw her plane and her two friends and the other SHIELD personnel milling about. One woman who had copper-coloured hair and blue eyes, spotted Sophia and raised an arm.

"You're late!" she scolded.

"You try running in these shoes, Briar," Sophia said, "and carry all this stuff."

Briar King rolled her eyes, "Cam is already inside, ready to go."

"Okay, okay," Sophia said, walking into the quinjet with Briar.

Sitting in the pilot's seat of the quinjet was Camden Armstrong. He was a stocky man because of his love of working out, something that Sophia wished he would pass to her friend Blair. He had brown hair and brown eyes, and was one of the kindest people she'd met working for SHIELD over the past three years. And he was a damn good pilot.

"Soph!" Cam exclaimed, pushing himself out of the chair to greet her.

"Hey, Cam," she said, and accepted the hug he gave her. Cam was a hugger, that's for sure.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked her.

"Yeah," she told him, "got all my books and all the files."

"Great! Let's go," Cam said, beaming.

*

The flight was smooth, and Sophia's bosses had told her that it would be as such after checking the weather to be sure that they would make it to their destination safely. For the majority of the journey, Sophia sat in her seat, going through her book, learning the last bits of the language of the native people that they were visiting. She almost had a grasp on the language, and had been working on it for the week already. It was a hard language to learn.

Then there was a tremor that shook the quinjet and sent the book flying from Sophia's hands. The woman looked to the pilot's seat where Cam was sitting and saw storm clouds surrounding the quinjet. This confused Sophia.

"Where did this storm come from?" she asked. If there was a storm on the horizon, Cam would have set them down away from it or gone around it.

"I don't know! It came out of nowhere!" the man said.

With another tremor, Briar was awoken and looked around, alarmed.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"Freak storm," Sophia informed her friend, then turned to Cam, "you need to set down the quinjet, really soon."

"I don't know where we are! The storm is messing with all the instruments and I can't see out the windows! If I try to set it down, we could go right into a city or a forest or a lake," Cam informed the two women.

Sophia cursed, "we can't stay in the air!"

"How close are we?" Briar asked.

"Last time I checked, we were just entering the country!" Cam shouted back to them, "and that was twenty minutes ago."

Sophia started running through their list of options. There weren't a lot of them but they had to figure something out otherwise they would not end up in a good place. They could set the quinjet down, figure out what to do from there. They could try and tough out the storm, but that didn't guarantee they would survive. They could try and find their way out of the storm, but they had no idea where the outside of the storm was.

Whatever they did, they had to figure it out soon because the storm was only getting worse.

"We can't stay in the storm, Cam!" Sophia said.

"I know!" he replied.

"Figure something out, please!" Briar begged, clutching to the seat with white knuckles.

"Set it down," Sophia said suddenly.

"What?" Cam asked.

"Set it down."

"Soph, I have no idea where we are, if I try to set down the quinjet-"

"I know you could hit a city or lake or forest! But we need to get out of the air!" Sophia explained, turning her head to look out the rest of quinjet.

It seems that Cam agreed, despite his lack of response. He tipped the quinjet downwards, and the two women slid in their seats a little with the new angle of the quinjet. They came out of the clouds and into torrential rain that still made visibility a dream.

Watching nervously out the front window of the quinjet, Sophia saw that a mass of green - a forest - suddenly became visible through the rain. There was a small break in the green exactly where they were headed. Sophia hoped that it was a clearing.

The impact jolted through the quinjet and Sophia and everything went black.