The Bees

"Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see"

- The Bees

The Bees, A.K.A. The Buzzing is a force in the M.M.O. The Secret World. The Bees awaken powers normal people, granting them various super-human properties including the use of magic, improbable weapon use, the ability to jump their own height, immortality and enlightenment about the world around them.

TRANSMIT
At the start of the game, The Secret World, a bee will fly in through the window of a person's apartment. A news report is going off in the back-ground about a recent chemical bomb in Tokyo, resulting in the Kaidan district being closed off, despite the report, the apartment owner is asleep in bed. The bee flies into the open mouth of the person. Upon entering them, the person is haunted by waking dreams, two figures, a woman in white and a man in black. Both tell the person to be mindful of the voices that will whisper in their sleep. Both mirroring the other's words, speaking nearly in unison, except their speeches deviate with the woman warning the person that the dreaming voices are not to be trusted and the man encouraging the person to listen to the voices, since they speak truth. Both figures project a swarm of bees at the person and they wake-up, gagging on the swallowed bee. Upon reaching for clothing beside the bed energy flows from the person's hands, and they have awoken as the Player character. After a few days coming to terms with being some sort of magical being, with there being magic, with the laws of nature no-longer definitive, the Player will begin with experimenting with their new powers. After a few days the Player will receive a knock on their door. Depending on who the player choose during character creation it will either be a mysterious moral guardian, a slick agent, or a silent, tattooed monk. The moral guardian introduces the Player to the Templars, the agent introduces the Player to the Illuminati and the silent monk stuns the player with an electrical shock, drags them across an untold distances and throws them out on the streets of Seoul, South-Korea. The Secret Societies keep a look-out for anyone awakened by the bees to both keep an eye on beings with super-powers and have said powers applied for their organizations. The three societies are rivals but agree to allow each to recruit said awakened beings rather than just letting such world changing people roam free under their own prerogative. As the Player wanders through their factions hubs, they will encounter honey-comb icons, symbolizing back-ground lore. Picking up the lore prompts voices to talk to them in their head; The Buzzing Voice. The buzzing voice is the bees. The bees introduce themselves and the Player will get the first background of the game, who the bees are and what has happened to them. The bees address the Player with the familial nick-name "Sweetling".

Initiate Signal
The Bees are guardians of Gaia - the life-force of the Planet/Balance of the universe. The bees pollinate anima (Gaia's power in concentrated form), spreading it to normal mortals when Gaia is endangered. The worse the situation, the more bees pollinate, the more Sweetlings are awakened to protect her. The sudden explosion of Players is because the Gaia is facing dark times. The Bees act on Gaia's behalf and have gifted the powers to the Player as regardless of personality, saving the world is in their best interest. There are a few central premises of The Secret World, the first is that nearly every piece of folklore/mythology, tall-tale,/conspiracy theory is true. There are things that go "bump" in the night, there is magic, there is space-age technology, there is life in other dimensions, there is a Hell, there are/were gods and Secret Societies do control the world keeping it all a secret so they can continue to exploit the world in it's current set-up.The Templars want to police the world and destroy evil, the Illuminati want to hoard every single super-natural resource to live the high-life from behind the scenes, and the Dragon want to categorize the cosmos until they can control fate in real-time by mapping out all ripple effected actions. The Bees are content to let each of the factions map out their own agendas, as all three want to keep the world safe because of their investment in it, and at the end of the day all the Bees want is to keep the world turning.

RECIEVE
A vision quest that sends the Player to ground zero of the bombing in the Tokyo acts as the game's tutorial, with representatives from each of the societies as a Tokyo Response Team to guide the player through it. The "chemical" credited on the news is actually a primordial corrupting force of warped anima. The corrupted anima is called The Filth - the bees claim it is anti-Gaia, anti-life, anti-creation. In the tutorial The Filth is witnessed as turning all those exposed to it into rabid crazed creatures. Those touched by the Filth are aware of what is going on, but their minds are collapsing in on themselves, there is only just enough of their original selves left to be aware of their lose of identity and be tormented by it as they wildly attack even those near and dear to them. The Player is immune to the transformation because of the bee inside them.

Initiate secret syntax
The Tokyo bombing is a clarion call for the Dreamers, primordial beings of twisted horror so massive their mere presence would shatter creation. The cosmos vibrates at a precise frequency that keeps the Dreamers pacified, or as the Bees put it - Gaia plays a lullaby that keeps the Dreamers dreaming. The Filth the Dreamers dreams, it is their subconscious fighting to be free of the chains of creation, and so The Filth kills, corrupts and destroys. Since the bombing, Filth activities has raised all across the world, hence why the Bees have stepped-up pollination.

EVERYTHING IS TRUE
Gaia is considered both a collective spirit and a well oiled machine - a bio-computer. The nexus points of Gaia are called "The Gaia Engines". The Engines keep Gaia functioning,The Filth is constantly trying to get at the machines to shut off the lullaby. Gaia has a fail-safe if the Bees and their awakened can not save her. Gaia will reset if threatened, doing so restores Gaia to "factory settings"  - undoing corruptions and restoring all it's Engines. However restarting Gaia not only destroys The Filth, it wipes out civilization and memory, sending all life back to the stone-age. Gaia has had to do this no-less than three times and the world is currently in it's Fourth Age. The Third Age was a time when humans climbed to such heights that technology was advanced enough to where it overlapped with magic. Humans understood how to manipulate base building blocks of the laws of physics and could spontaneous create seemingly impossible phenomena. Folklore and mythology are actually repressed memories from the collective unconscious of humanity's previous age. People like Odin, actually existed as world-leaders, their divine powers in-fact just very advanced technology and scientific foresight. The Bees have stimulated the parts of the Player's brain so as to give them access to these repressed memories, thought the Player does not consciously know how this works, subconsciously they are excerpting this knowledge to manipulate the world around them, manifesting as "magic". Now with the bees, granting powers, ensuring their life, protecting their sanity and whispering information into their heads, the Players need to do whatever they can to keep Gaia from getting any worse and needing to initiate an Apocalypse to preserve itself against The Dreamers.