The Robbery of Charmont Jewelers was a planned heist by Sarge's Squad to steal from Charmont Jewelers.
Background[]
Sarge's Squad used piezoelectric gems to power their equipment, notably a piece of weaponry used to detect Shrike on a planet and the cloaking of their truck. However, upon arriving on Earth, they were deprived of such gems due to Tinker, who carried them in his pocket, being killed during his transfer to Earth, with the lower half of his body being trapped and turned into a concrete wall. In an attempt to locate more gems, the squad saw an ad for Charmont Jewelers in a newspaper and decided to head there to see if they could steal piezoelectric crystals from them.[3]
Robbery[]
Sarge and his teammates entered Charmont Jewelers, pretending to be regular customers, and while Pax and Snowflake feigned to review the exposed pieces of jewelry, Sarge approached the store manager, Dana. Initially, Sarge claimed to be a rich customer looking for something special, but he quickly announced his intention to rob the place, which caused Dana to worry. Before she could further react, Snowflake had then killed both Malcolm and Torres, and although Sarge had advised her not to do something heroic, Dana was able to alert the authorities.
Jaco accesses the vault
Still, Dana's life was spared as Sarge's squad needed her to access the vault. They entered it, damaging the door behind it so that no one could follow them. While Snow kept Dana under the threat of her knife, being ordered by Sarge not to kill her, Sarge used the Spray Paint Transporter to connect his truck to the vault, enabling Jaco to join them looking for piezoelectric gems. In the meantime, a S.H.I.E.L.D. team notably counting Melinda May, Yo-Yo Rodriguez, and Damon Keller arrived in the jewelry store, finding the deceased guards and the locked vault.
Despite not being able to access the vault, S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to have thermal imaging of the inside of the vault, which confused May as she saw five people in there when only four had been spotted entering the vault on the security feed. As Sarge's squad was aware of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s presence, Sarge asked Dana where they could find piezoelectric gems. Dana, who did not understand why the robbers were not interested in the valuable pieces of jewelry they had already found, was able to indicate a drawer containing several crystals, which seemed to satisfy Sarge.
Jaco prepares to fight Melinda May
Sarge returned into his truck along with Pax, leaving Snowflake and Jaco into the vault. Sarge then left to test his Shrike Detector, but in his absence, the truck was assaulted by May, who had figured out that Sarge's squad could be acting from a place where they had already been and had located the truck. Using her fighting skills, May promptly knocked Pax unconscious before being confronted by Jaco. Although his brute force was superior to May's, she was able to overpower him as well using her speed.
Jaco and Snowflake confront Melinda May
Noticing the portal created by the spray paint transporter, May accessed the vault, confronting Snowflake who still held Dana hostage. May attacked Snowflake, throwing her on the ground long enough to rescue Dana, bringing her into the truck and disabling the portal, thus trapping Snowflake inside the vault. May then instructed Dana to flee from the truck, but this in turn alerted Sarge. In the truck, May was attacked by Jaco, who violently hit her and put the portal back in its place, enabling Snowflake to join the fight as well.
Melinda May defeats Jaco
Despite being outnumbered, May was able to hold her own against both Jaco and Snowflake, cutting Jaco in the thigh and projecting Snowflake back into the store's vault. As she was on the verge of knocking out Jaco, however, Sarge returned, and May was astonished upon noticing that he looked exactly like Phil Coulson, calling him with Coulson's name. This distracted her long enough for Snowflake to make her trip on the portal. May thus fell back into the vault before Sarge disabled the portal. Rodriguez and Keller finally accessed the vault second later, only finding May, who admitted that she had lost the fight in the end.[3]
Aftermath[]
- "Eyewitnesses described a pattern in the sky, a grid. So, I was thinking, maybe they were making a map."
- ―Yo-Yo Rodriguez to Alphonso Mackenzie[src]
In the immediate aftermath of the robbery, Sarge drove his truck out of the shipping yard it had been parked since he knew that S.H.I.E.L.D. had already located it. During the journey, Jaco commented on how the name of Phil Coulson uttered by Melinda May had seemed to have an effect on Sarge, who admitted that the name did ring a bell in his mind.[3]
Sarge activates the Shrike Detector
With their stock of piezoelectric gems fully replenished, Sarge and his teammates used their Shrike Detector to assess how many Shrike were present on Earth. Detecting several of them in the United States of America, they immediately began to chase them down,[4] which would eventually lead them to their next victim: Harold Simcoe.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was alerted of the use of the Shrike Detector and interrogated eyewitnesses who described that the weapon had created some kind of grid in the sky, although it had not caused any significant damage whatsoever. Yo-Yo Rodriguez eventually hypothesized that Sarge and his teammates had mapped the Earth looking for something, but S.H.I.E.L.D. was unable to figure out what Sarge was after as they did not know about the Shrike at the time.[5]