The ordinary people of the Border Tribe had no access to any of the benefits enjoyed by other Wakandan tribes. They couldn't feel the original weight of their ancestors' ambitions anymore — only the shape it had left behind. The resentment and sense of abandonment had taken root.
Daisy noticed it. She didn't comment.
She was here for the Heart-Shaped Herb and Vibranium, not to start a revolution. If the old king and T'Challa were willing to hand those over voluntarily, she'd help them put down a Border Tribe uprising — machine guns, gas canisters, whatever the situation called for. She had no particular feelings about it either way.
She pointed at some text carved into the wall of a Border Tribe structure. "What script is that? Ororo — can you read it?"
She already knew the Wakandan script. She'd crammed it in the days before leaving. But Killmonger's father had written his journal with Wakandan-English translation and no phonetics — she could read it silently, but she couldn't speak it. She needed to hear it spoken.
The real world wasn't a movie. You couldn't walk into a foreign nation and assume everyone would accommodate you in English. If she wanted to get anywhere in Wakanda, she needed the language.
Storm and T'Challa were close enough that she'd naturally picked it up. She hesitated, then admitted she could.
"Could you teach me?" Daisy smiled warmly.
It was a reasonable request, and Storm couldn't think of a principled objection. She knew what the old king and T'Challa wanted — they hoped to open Wakanda to the world, to be understood and accepted rather than feared or coveted. But they also feared what outside attention might bring. What they needed was a bridge.
Daisy was low-ranking, maybe. But it was still a start.
Storm began teaching. She didn't know that Daisy had already taught herself most of the written system — she attributed the speed of learning to the kind of intensive training S.H.I.E.L.D. put its agents through.
The language lessons slowly helped them get to know each other. Ororo presented as serious and composed on the surface, but there was something genuinely restless underneath. The proof was in her history: she'd left Kenya as a teenager for Egypt, spent time as a street thief, lived rough and free. She didn't like fixed things. Her personality ran like the weather she controlled — following its own current, not asking permission.
Professor Xavier had given her structure, and she'd accepted it. But the core hadn't changed. She liked risk. She liked movement. When Daisy described leading a team through a Nazi compound, she could see the interest light up in Ororo's eyes.
They went from strangers to acquaintances.
Not quite friends. They were the kind of people who, if they met across a battlefield someday, would still exchange a few words before the fighting started.
By the second evening, T'Challa still hadn't returned. When he finally landed, he was clearly pleased to find Daisy working through Wakandan pronunciation.
"I apologize for the wait. There are genuine threats moving through our border. My father wants to meet you." He offered both women a place on the aircraft and flew them into the mountain basin.
There were at least three security layers — Daisy counted them as they went through. An electromagnetic barrier, a stealth field, and something that felt like a microwave-band disruption tuned against psychic scanning. The aircraft's internal systems carried clearance codes that passed all three without stopping.
Then Wakanda opened.
T'Challa and Storm watched her with sideways glances, measuring her reaction. Daisy let the right amount of wonder onto her face. The pride it produced in them was obvious. She let them have it.
Her own surprise was partly real.
The mountains ringed a river basin that caught the setting sun and turned it gold, a curtain of light running down from the peaks. Following the river inland, a city resolved out of the landscape — and it looked like nothing she'd seen.
The architecture was its own thing: an ancient frame, the bones of something built in another era, overlaid with technology. Ceremonial forms wrapped in fabricated metal and luminous surfaces. The past and the future occupying the same walls without apology.
Wild and civilized. Tribal heritage and precision engineering. That was Wakanda.
Their technology had developed in unusual directions. Laser-capable weaponry, mostly configured as spears of all things. High-speed rail threading through the city's arteries, while ordinary citizens preferred to walk with baskets balanced on their heads. Holographic projection fully mature as a medium, existing alongside ancestor-worship ceremonies unchanged for generations.
Daisy estimated the overall technical level at perhaps fifty years ahead of the global average, with about a thirty-year lead on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s catalog.
"How did you develop technology at this level?" she asked, knowing the answer.
T'Challa smiled serenely and said nothing. She let it go.
She could already see the shape of it. Vibranium's energy-absorption properties had been turned into a resource base. Power generation, transportation, weapons, the entire city's infrastructure — all running on Vibranium. An energy source that didn't run out had removed one of the core constraints on technological development.
But the development that resulted was lopsided. Military capability was high — necessary for maintaining royal authority. Civilian quality of life had been much less prioritized. The street market below the flight path looked no different from Puerto Rico. Most people were still engaged in trade and subsistence agriculture.
She kept that assessment to herself and let an appropriate degree of wonder show on her face. No reason to waste what they'd worked to show her.
The aircraft landed in the palace precinct. Daisy's first view of the royal guard: all women, all shaved to smooth scalps, dressed alike in red, each carrying a spear fitted with a laser emitter. It was a clever design — anyone staging a rebellion with conventional weapons would bring blades and blunt instruments through the gates and get taught a very fast lesson about the gap between their assumptions and reality.
There were two rows of them, identical in appearance. After two seconds, Daisy gave up trying to tell them apart — something she suspected was a common experience for anyone encountering a group in matching uniforms and identical haircuts.
"What's the protocol for meeting your king?" she asked T'Challa quietly as they entered.
Storm had hung back at the palace gates — whatever was going on between her and the royal family apparently put her on the outside of this particular threshold.
T'Challa smiled easily. "We don't stand on ceremony for things like this. This isn't a formal audience, Ms. Johnson. Please — be comfortable."
Daisy was fine with that.
Inside, the first person she encountered was the king's wife — the queen. She was accompanied by a girl of seven or eight: T'Challa's younger sister, Shuri. She was a child now, and yet Daisy knew what she'd become — an intellect that could match Stark in a straight comparison, a superhero in her own right.
At the moment she was just a curious kid who looked Daisy over twice before being steered away by her mother. The queen was wearing a headdress that somehow recalled a chef's hat, and her expression was not warm. Lips pressed, eyes cool, directed generally at the category of outsider rather than at Daisy specifically.
T'Challa knew his mother's disposition. He smoothly opened a topic about Wakandan history, split her attention, and guided Daisy further into the palace.