He wasn't about to let Daisy play him that easily. After a quick mental calculation of what he considered a fair number, he slid a bank card across to her. "Remember — this is coming out of my own pocket. Nothing to do with S.H.I.E.L.D."
Daisy nodded quickly and took the card.
Business concluded, Fury opened his car door and drove off without another word.
She watched his silhouette disappear into the night and smirked. His own pocket? Right. Who was going to believe that?
S.H.I.E.L.D. had built over a hundred covert bases worldwide under the World Security Council's jurisdiction. But beyond those, Nick Fury had personally established countless safe houses of his own across the globe — only to have them seized by the government, raided by HYDRA, or blown sky-high in a string of disasters. By conservative estimates, at least thirty of them were gone.
And these weren't your average studio apartments. Missile silos. Helipads. Full training facilities. Weapons and ammunition of every variety. Blast-proof, gas-proof, proof against a dozen other things. "Safe houses" in name only — military bases in reality.
Thirty-plus secret military bases, quietly constructed. He was a salaried director. Where did all that money come from?
The answer was obvious: Nick Fury was the single greatest embezzler in the entire Marvel universe — past, present, and future. Even HYDRA, with all its resources and all its moles working in concert, couldn't match what one man had skimmed on his own. It was no wonder the World Security Council wanted him replaced. His spending had grown so astronomical it was straining the budgets of multiple member nations.
Nobody knew how many contingency plans he had stashed away. Even his most trusted lieutenants weren't fully read in. He kept his cards close to his chest with everyone.
The whole conversation had never touched on the subject of powers. Daisy could only assume the worst — that Fury knew, and had deliberately chosen not to say anything, turning it into a secret only he held.
She could, of course, try to silence him. But she had no confidence in the outcome. Nick Fury wasn't the second-rate operator he sometimes appeared to be on screen. As a former member of the Brotherhood of the Shield — one of the Zodiac — he had survived more ambushes, betrayals, and close calls than anyone alive. He'd have contingencies layered upon contingencies. If she tried and failed, if he managed to walk away, the fallout would haunt her for years.
There was no reason to go down that road. Taking a little of his money would keep things civil between them — at least that was how she chose to see it.
She pulled out her phone and checked her balance. Fifty thousand dollars. That would go a long way toward solving her cash flow problem.
She didn't rush to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy right away. The next day, she gathered her small team and sat down to talk strategy on rolling out their big data platform.
James Wesley had ultimately come around to her offer. A dropout teenager wouldn't have interested him — but a person with powers was a different story entirely. It tipped the scales. At his core, he was still a believer in the underworld's oldest law: strength commands respect.
That gave her a working team: James Wesley, mob consigliere turned company operator; David Lieberman, an exceptionally patient tech guy who would handle the engineering; and Ms. Matsumoto, who had come within a hair's breadth of becoming the kind of lawyer you didn't want to cross.
On paper it looked like a thin roster. In practice, all three had serious futures ahead of them. James would one day serve as the right hand of the man who ruled New York's underworld. David would become a former NSA analyst known as "Micro." Ms. Matsumoto would evolve into a cold-blooded assassin — Lady Bullseye herself. The potential in this room was anything but ordinary.
All Daisy had to do was channel it. Fortune 500 wasn't out of reach.
"Everyone," she said, setting the tone, "I pulled in another round of funding last night — fifty thousand dollars, no strings attached. I've already moved it into the company account." As the founder, watching the company scrape by was painful enough; parting with the money hurt even more. But it had to be done. "Our big data analytics platform has cleared the development phase. I want to hear where everyone thinks we go from here."
Ms. Matsumoto spoke first — as the closest thing they had to a trusted aide, she felt the weight of the responsibility. "We have no reputation yet. Maybe we start with small-to-mid-sized businesses? Lower revenue per contract, but we build goodwill. Referrals follow."
She had clearly been turning this over for days. And since she'd been a practicing attorney back in Japan, her framing was methodical — though a few of her English terms landed slightly off. She repeated the key points in Japanese to be sure.
Daisy had been around her enough to catch the gist. Wesley, for his part, spoke Mandarin, Japanese, English, Russian, and several other languages with professional fluency — a skill set that had helped him broker New York's black-market alliances.
He listened to Matsumoto and responded with a dismissive half-smile, in Japanese: "Why bother with small fish? If we're doing this, we go straight to the major players."
The condescension stung. There was a sharp shing — Ms. Matsumoto's hand had already found the knife in her bag.
Wesley startled and glanced back at Daisy.
Daisy stifled a laugh. A few days of training and the woman was already showing her edge. Maybe she wouldn't reach the heights of Bullseye-Lady someday — but she certainly wasn't going to stay a wallflower.
"Easy, easy — we're all friends here," Daisy said, smoothing things over. "Maki is a very gentle person, really."
Matsumoto immediately switched modes, bowing with polished humility and apologizing to Wesley and David — who had also gone pale. The moment passed.
Daisy chewed it over. Her own instincts said go big, go fast — land a major client, create a splash, and let the orders roll in. That was how New York moved. The Japanese philosophy of earning trust slowly, building repeat business brick by brick — it wasn't wrong, exactly, but it wasn't the city's rhythm.
Still, reputation mattered even here. And the problem was obvious: who were they, exactly? A dropout, a mob flunky, a quiet tech guy, and a Japanese "off limits" lawyer. None of them had the kind of standing that got you past the front desk of a Fortune 500 company.
The proof was in the Marvel universe itself. When Aldrich Killian — the main villain of Iron Man 3 — had attended Tony Stark's New Year's Eve party, Stark had stood him up. Left him on a rooftop alone all night in the cold. That was how big corporations treated people they didn't consider worth their time.
This group was arguably less impressive than Killian had been. At least he'd had a PhD, an actual scientist at a legitimate conference.
Their only real advantage was that they were all reasonably good-looking. In this day and age, that still counted for something.
She turned to Wesley. "Do you have any contacts we could leverage?"
He gave her a flat look. "If I had contacts, would I be here?"
Daisy bit back a sigh. So the current version of Wesley, before he hitched his star to Kingpin, genuinely had nothing to work with. His main value down the line came from Fisk's name — not his own network.
She'd have to find another angle.
After some thought, she hit on it. "Here's what we do — we run targeted advertising to mid-to-large companies. Get our name out there."
"We produce and distribute promotional booklets explaining our concept and what we can actually do for a business. The content almost doesn't matter." She paused for effect. "What matters is this: we coat the pages with fluorescent material. So even in total darkness, they're visible."
"Think about it. The first wave of booklets will get buried on desks and ignored — that's guaranteed. But picture some executive burning the midnight oil, or commuting home late. It's dark. And there, glowing on the table or in the passenger seat, is our ad." She spread her hands. "Are they really not going to pick it up and glance at it? Even if they don't need our service right now — does it leave an impression? That's our opening."
The room went quiet as everyone ran the scenario in their heads. It tracked.
"That's actually smart," Wesley said, a trace of genuine surprise in his voice. "You come up with this yourself? You've got a good read on people."
Daisy accepted the compliment graciously. She certainly wasn't going to mention that the idea came from a men's magazine feature she'd read in a previous life back in July 2011.
"Data analytics — building a vast network in a complex modern world, a web where every person and every event is mapped and quantifiable. We collect it, analyze it, act on it. This is uncharted territory." She let the words land. "Our ceiling is enormous. Who knows — we might even be running presidential campaigns someday."
Nobody in the room committed to the vision out loud, but they didn't dismiss it either. They dispersed to get to work.
David stayed on the code — optimizing, trimming the algorithm. Wesley took on company formation and external-facing business, his look better suited to the corporate-elite mold than anyone else's. Ms. Matsumoto began contacting printing houses and chemical suppliers — navigating the certification maze for promotional materials required someone fluent in regulatory law, and that was her.
Meanwhile, Daisy personally visited the principal of her old parish school, thanked her warmly for the institution's years of support, and donated ten thousand dollars toward academic resources. In return — completely above board, naturally — the principal used a quiet favor with a contact to bump their material safety review to the front of the queue. Perfectly legal. Just a small fast-track.
One week later, the booklets went out to corporations across the city. Of the fifty thousand dollars Nick Fury had "personally" donated, just over ten thousand remained.
Three days after that, their first inquiry arrived.
A mid-sized chain restaurant had launched a series of new combo meals and wanted a customer satisfaction survey — simultaneously farming the work out to several consultancy firms.
Traditional methods meant armies of surveyors, random sampling, printed questionnaires, data collation, weeks of turnaround.
Skye Data Analytics had none of those costs. They scraped social media, forums, review sites, and Twitter, ran the numbers, and produced a statistically precise satisfaction index in hours. The algorithm also categorized user complaints by frequency, isolating the top recurring issues and laying them out in clean, actionable order.
Skye delivered only the data. What to do with it was the client's problem.
When James Wesley walked into the restaurant's conference room and placed the report on the table, the executives stared at it in disbelief. Another firm had barely started conducting interviews. These people were already done.
The numbers weren't just fast — they quietly corroborated patterns the restaurant's own internal reports had been hinting at. When they adjusted their combo lineup that same afternoon based on the findings, same-store sales climbed three percent by the end of the day.
The lead executive was delighted. He called the other firm, terminated the contract on the spot, and wired Skye Data Analytics the full fee of seventy-five thousand dollars.
All it had cost them was a bit of electricity.
The following week brought two more contracts. Fifty thousand on one. Sixty-five thousand on the other.
Things were moving. Word was starting to spread in a small but growing circle. Several competing consultancies had already taken notice.
None of them would hire corporate spies over a few thousand dollars — but Daisy wasn't taking chances. It was time to make the trip to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. Whatever the future held, that knowledge base was something she needed.
She divided up responsibilities one more time among the team, then began packing. Fury hadn't given her the address directly — he'd told her to find it herself. Honestly? Not much of a test.