2019-09-26 - Swarm another day.

Summary:

Swarm is trying to rob Macy's for diamonds… and Anon stops them! Shuri is a little late…

Log Info:

Storyteller: None
Date: Thu Sep 26 22:02:05 2019
Location: Midtown

Related Logs

None

Theme Song

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anonshuri

.~{:--------------:}~.

Thursday evenings is when Macy's in house jewelry department gets a regular visit from the security company. Then, two gorillas in Suits and an elderly man with a heavily armored suitase in tow enter the building through a side entrance, and once the man reaches the counter he starts to unload the new delivery, handing it to the sales staff. Of course, the store itself is locked down since a couple hours then and other security has made sure that people have been escorted out of the building. On the floor should be only two employees of Macy's, the old courier and his two guards.

Not so today. Because today, in the first days of autumn, there was someone more. Or rather, one entity that was distributed on a multitude of minuscle bodies. A true hivemind, so to say. Or rather, a swarm of south american bees that once had become quite intelligent and in an attempt to save themselves from being manipulated by a certain Fritz von Meyer devoured the man… only to absorb his mind and merge him into their hivemind and making him the dominant expression. Now, Swarm, as they called themselves, had managed to ship himself into the building as an exhibit of bees in a glass cylinder to educate peope about bees dying. Now, the beehive started to strike.

The cylinder suddenly burst open, blown apart from the inside, and within a couple seconds, the Swarm started to float up through the center column of the building to the jewlery section. Seconds later, the alarm on the building starts to sound.

Macy's is a bit too rich for Celerity's blood, even if it were still open; instead, she's spent the last couple of hours shopping in a cheaper department nearby, trying to find something to help make a good impression among her classmates. But then an alarm started up, catching her attention immediately. Celerity can go shopping later.

Instead, after a lightning-quick change of clothes, Anon blurs towards the side entrance, only to find it aleady locked down — the security procedures working against them now. So she tries for something higher up, racing along the wall to reach an air duct. Even her crawling speed is fast, and soon, Anon drops down through a grate, to see what the situation is now.

Inside the Jewelry department, the swarm is slowly floating up to the group of five, the two musclemen having pulled out their guns fire, but the .45 APC pass throgh the swarm of bees. Well, mostly harmless, as some end up squished, but what damage could a couple of bullets do to a swarm made up of a couple hundred thousands?! Soon the two gorillas are screaming as the bees engulf them and force them to the ground, the guns lost, hands swollen and some bees hovering right in front of the eyes. "Now behave you humans… you are going to put all the diamonds and diamond jewlery into a pile on the counter."

Meanwhile, Shuri sighed as distant alarms disruped her late afternoon walk. Not that she was *forced* to look after them and nobody had asked the avengers for assistance yet, but she changed the course of her movements anyway, calling in for her car to pick her up and give her a chance to change - and snatch a few equipment items. Maybe she just felt that somethign was off.

Oh jeez, that's a lot of bees. Thank goodness Anon's not allergic, at least, though she can't be sure the same is true for the others. She zooms past, pulling the gorilla-suited men along with her to a zone some distance past the Swarm, hopefully somewhere safe. "I'm Anon. Hang back, and leave it to me." On her way back, she takes something from one of the fashion sections — one of the longer, cheaper dresses, held in front of her almost like a loose net. On the first pass, she tries just to grab a bunch of those bees together and bundle them up, going for capture rather than squishing. "Hey! What do bees need with diamonds, anyway?"

The gust of wind does move a couple bees away as Anon dashes past, allowing her to resuce the men. However the attempts to catch some has interesting results. The caught bees are bees after all. Small, flying and each armed with a stinger. And some of the caught bees use this natural weapon on the hands Anon uses to hold her improvised net, controlled by the hivemind. "Zis iz nozing of your conzern. Zis confizcation of diamondz iz for ze breater good of ze inzectz of ze vorld!"

Shuri meanwhile hops into the car that her driver had brought along, startign to slip into the panther habit on the backseat… in the cover of the closed internal wall and the mirrored windows.

Ow ow ow. Anon drops the bundle, her hands stinging, beginning to swell in places. Okay, so capture with hand tools like that is a bad idea, but what else can she do? She really needs some more tools — whether a proper net, or a bug-swatter. She blinks at the swarm. "Good of the insec… how do you expect diamonds to get rid of carbon emissions?" She, uh, may not quite get the real goal just yet. But she does keep the Swarm distracted, and make some time for Black Panther to arrive.

"Izn't it obvious? Getting rid of ze humanz iz ze key!" Swarm claims while some groups of bees keep the other workers in check, forcing the three to work on stackign the jewlery while the humanoid swarm of bees eyes Anon with literally billions of tiny eyes. Thousands on each of the hundred thousand bees. "Eradicating ze polluterz ztartz ze age of inzectz!"

Even with diplomatic flags, the black car Shuri travels in has to fight through the traffic… which takes a couple minutes.

That makes Anon blink. She can see the logic of the plan, but… no. She glances away from the swarm, looking around the area for something she can use. The security guards' guns had squished some of the bugs, but that's not enough, and it's not like she's trained in firearms anyway—

Ah ha, there. She dashes off to the side, to grab a fire extinguisher. She pulls the pin, aims the nozzle, and lets out a spray of foam.

There's one problem with the plan of Anon: it's not a foam extinguisher, nor a powder one. It's CO2 one. A cold cone of gas is thrown at the swarm and surprisingly that is quite effective: With some agonizing screach, the swarm starts to collapse to the floor, the bees curling up. It's forcing them into hibbernation.

Anon blinks. Her fire safety class had not prepared her to find a CO2 extinguisher in a clothing store. Someone will have to talk with Macy's fire safety officer, because they need new extinguishers.

But for now, she just focuses on spraying the bees to sleep, including zipping to catch any stragglers that try to dart away. She'll figure out containment later; right now, she just needs to make sure they're in a state that can be contained.

The Swarm ends as a pretty large pile of bees, pretty much at the same time the black limousine stops in front of Macy's at the side of soe police cruiser. In the back, a window lowers. "What's going on in there?" - "We don't know yet. We're still securing the perimeter, Ma'am."

Anon looks out towards the side, through a window down to the street. She can see the police cruiser at least, and that's enough to catch her interest. She gives the remaining workers an awkward smile. "Look after these for me?" She tosses the extinguisher to them, so they're at least armed, and runs out.

As she approaches the cruiser and limo, she asks, "You guys have any way of containing a lot of bees? Like, a box or something? I don't think handcuffs would work." Because that's clearly the best way to start a conversation.

The door to the building is still kind of under lockdown, but Anon manages to get out the same way she came in. The cop she aproaches - a black man in the late 50s with silver hair and serious creases in the face - looks puzzled. "Bees? Uhm… should I call a beekeeper or something? A box…" he looks to his partner, who looks equally surprised. "Eh, an evidence folding box?" the younger man, a redhead, suggests as he moves from the black car to his cruiser to search the trunk for one and pull a paper box and an evidence bag out, before eying Anon twice over. "Uhm, you're a new one yes? I mean… never seen yea before. Do I need ta call SHIELD for picking up or something?"

Anon nods. Yes, she is new. "I'm Anon." Her lips purse. "I don't think a box like this would hold. The bees… er, they're some kind of mind-linked swarm that were stealing diamonds that, somehow, would help them eradicate humanity. Supervillain stuff." 'Supervillain stuff' covers a great many weirdnesses. She still takes the box in both hands. "Thenk you…" And then she notices the limo. "Hey there! Do you have, like, some kind of sealed box I can borrow? Something tough, but which we could put air holes into?" She looks over her shoulder. "I really should get back in there, there are… like, three civilians and two security guards. The guards got stung." That's said for the police to hear as well.

The window of the car starts to move up again while the elder of the two cops calls for an ambulance. The younger one eyes Anon again, then points to the door. "How you know? You can see through walls or something?" he asks pointedy.

"She probably fought said swarm of bees." comes a female voice from behind. Shuri had exited the car on the street side, then strode around the two discussing the containment question, only now chiming in. "Judging by the stings on the hand that is. I believe SHIELD should be best to haul those off."

Anon nods to the other voice, looking the Black Panther up and down. Behind her mask, her eyes go wide, perhaps a little starstruck or otherwise nervous. That's an Avenger. "Uh, y-yeah. I fought them. They're out cold now, but…" She nods, looking to the police. "Could you call SHIELD for me? I need to go and" She lifts the evidence box. "box them up." With that, she blurs away, ascending the wall to get back in through the window.

Shuri looks a little struck as Anon dashes away just after the statement, reacing for a cellphone and calling the mansion. "Ah… can someone send a cleanup crew to Macy's? Some kind of beeswarm was assaulting people. Got stopped by some young woman. Golden leotard, some kind of speed power."

The cops start to get someone to open the door for them

And Anon returns to the group of civilians she'd left, giving them an apologetic smile. "SHIELD is on route. En route? Some nice police officers are helping." She's not quite sure about the pronunciation. "On the way." If the bees are still unconscious, she piles them up into the box she's carrying.

Luckily, the bees are hibernating well enough… but they fill the box and then some more. After all, a couple hundred thousand bees take their space.

Some minutes later, some SHIELD crew will arrive with containers to store the beeswarm and bring it to some storage site or prison, but Shuri has done her part, slipping back into traffic after calling in the right authority.

Anon dutifully guards the bees and the civilians, keeping constantly in motion to check every entrance as well as the sleeping bees. Once the doors are open and SHIELD arrives, however? She's gone, vanishing into the night.

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