Whatever FitzSimmons would eventually become, right now they were two rookies who'd never left campus. First mission — supposedly arranged by the Director himself — and they'd shown up loaded down like they were moving apartments: instruments Daisy couldn't identify, detection arrays of every kind, one handgun each.
The way they were holding those guns suggested "has fired before" was probably the ceiling of their combat experience.
Daisy had picked up the Quinjet basics from Black Widow and Agent May's accounts of their own flying. She'd taken to it naturally. The aircraft's top speed of Mach 2.1 had them over the Costa Rican island in no time.
FitzSimmons, meanwhile, were still deep in a debate about parachute deployment mechanics and the nuances of air resistance.
"Hold off on jumping — there may still be hostiles on the island." Daisy listened to their argument for a full minute before cutting in. She activated the thermal imaging array and began a full island sweep. Nothing else besides the creatures — but that armored rhinoceros beetle from before had to still be down there somewhere.
While the scan ran, she could still hear FitzSimmons murmuring: It's your fault... hope this doesn't affect our grades...
The scan came back positive. Three rhinoceros beetles — not one. One large caterpillar. And one giant earthworm that had apparently been hiding.
FitzSimmons looked at the readings. Then at each other.
The Quinjet's onboard systems were mercifully reliable. Target acquisition, fire control, the cannon. Ten minutes of sustained fire across the island. Every surviving enlarged insect ended up in pieces. Daisy ran two additional sweeps before confirming no life signs and bringing the aircraft down on a high elevation point.
Black Widow had reduced the island's research facility to rubble — Daisy trusted the woman's work completely; the odds of anything surviving were near zero. Her primary assessment target was the island itself.
The vegetation was impossibly dense. Someone could have called it a primeval jungle and been believed. Everything — plants and trees alike — was trending toward unusual size.
FitzSimmons quickly assembled a field measurement station. Air composition, soil content, water quality — systematic testing began.
Daisy sat nearby and waited. Half an hour later, they came back with the summary: "Air composition normal. Minor variations in water and soil, but nothing harmful to humans."
"Then what's causing the plant growth?" She pointed at a stalk of grass approaching one meter (~three feet) in height.
FitzSimmons launched into a multi-clause explanation involving enough specialized terminology to make Daisy's eyes glaze over.
She knew her limits — quantum mechanics was one thing; biology was genuinely foreign territory. Just to be safe, she called Professor Pym and asked directly whether Cross's counterfeit particles would cause lasting environmental damage.
Hank was confident. His Pym Particles were clean and safe. Any mutation on the island was the result of Cross's inferior early-stage formula — a problem the legitimate technology had resolved long ago.
She hung up and turned to FitzSimmons. "I need you both to run a full island survey. Every corner. No gaps."
She spent the whole day on the island with them. Results: everything within normal parameters. Heavy vegetation, nothing else.
Back at S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy, Daisy tracked down her supervising officer Phil Coulson and greeted him warmly.
Both of them smiled.
"Hey, Coulson."
"Hey, Daisy."
She cleared her throat. "The Director tasked me with handling the Costa Rica situation. Did he brief you?"
Coulson shook his head. Daisy had to start from the beginning again.
"Can't you just use the standard approach?" Coulson said when she finished. "Coordinate with the local government, cordon the area for a while, ease the restrictions once the threat level drops. Why come to me?"
She pulled him into his office and gestured that this needed a real conversation. He poured her a coffee and waited for her to get to the point.
"The public has a pretty unflattering image of intelligence agents, right?"
"Right."
"And various governments are more than a little frustrated with S.H.I.E.L.D., yes?"
Coulson paused, then nodded carefully. "That's accurate. Though it tends to be a ground-level misunderstanding. The people who actually matter — senior government officials — understand the sacrifices S.H.I.E.L.D. makes for humanity and for the world."
Sacrifices. Daisy kept the thought to herself. What a lofty word. It didn't fit this era anymore. These days, anyone could stub a toe and spend a week building a sympathetic online narrative. Expecting silent sacrifice from a generation raised on oversharing wasn't realistic.
And those agents who'd eventually end up joining HYDRA — did they know about the Sacred Shield Brotherhood? About the dispute between Newton and da Vinci? The fractured Zodiac? The modern HYDRA's actual doctrine? They didn't. They had no idea.
They'd join HYDRA simply because they wanted change. What HYDRA believed, what grand vision of world domination HYDRA pursued — they didn't care. If S.H.I.E.L.D. gave them something better to fight for, most of them would never defect in the first place.
In her month at the Academy, Daisy had met enough people to estimate: over seventy percent of them would eventually point guns at their former colleagues.
It made her angry in a specific kind of way. Not for herself — for their talent, for the people who'd built S.H.I.E.L.D., for what humanity was about to throw away.
The best people would burn each other out in an internal war. And when the aliens arrived, the world would be left relying on a handful of superheroes to hold the line. That was a tragedy.
The Brotherhood of the Shield had a maxim passed down since 2620 BC: Our world was not meant to end like this. Generation after generation of Brotherhood members had fought — against aliens, against Galactus, had maneuvered the Asgardians — all to keep this world intact.
Daisy didn't have ambitions that grand. But she wanted to try something. If it failed, she'd move on. If it worked — maybe she could save more people.
She skipped past the "sacrifice" thread. "What if we worked more closely with governments? And at the same time, reframed how agents are perceived — shifted the image away from shadow operatives and toward something closer to heroes?"
Coulson's expression shifted. Something in today's conversation had put him on alert.
Daisy started from the angle she knew would hook him. "In his early days, Captain America starred in recruitment ads — rallied a generation of young men to the front lines. We could replicate that model now. Bring more people in."
The corner of Coulson's mouth twitched. Leveraging Captain America's propaganda films to recruit Americans was, in the historical record, a complicated legacy. But he couldn't say she was wrong. Facts were facts.
"Full public transparency would take time. But we could at least signal goodwill to governments."
Coulson was struggling to keep up. He thought it over. "You mean... advertisements?"