The Protectorate was present, and it wasn’t just the locals, but the big guns.  Armsmaster, standing a little taller and looking more confident than I’d seen before, with not one but two Halberds connected to his back, was having a quiet conversation with Miss Militia and Legend.

Oh hey, that’s two out of three!

And Armsy is looking ready.

It took me a second to absorb that picture.  That was the head of the Protectorate, the leader of the largest team of capes in the world.  What’s more, he was right in front of me, having a conversation with someone I’d talked to.  Ridiculous as that sounded, it affected me.

Taylor may not be the type to get overly giddy about specific people (anymore), but she’s absolutely a fan of some of them.

Legend sported a skintight blue costume with a design in white that fell somewhere between flame and electricity in style.

Hm, interesting. Sounds… energetic.

He had a perfect physique – one I didn’t mind giving a second glance-over –

hehe

a strong jaw and wavy brown hair.  If Alexandria was the flying bruiser that just about every other flying bruiser strove to match up to, then Legend was at the head of the pack when it came to being flying artillery.  His firepower was on par with Purity’s, if not outright surpassing her, and he was far, far more versatile.

Sounds awesome. I’m guessing part of his repertoir is shooting fire and lightning, but there’s probably more if he’s that much more versatile.

The kids from New Wave were near the Wards -Glory Girl, Panacea, Laserdream and Shielder- but they weren’t really joining in with the conversation the Wards were having.

Bit of a schism there.

I could see Glory Girl and Gallant standing together; she was holding his hand.

Well – with an exception or two.

Panacea was sitting backwards on a chair just beside where Glory Girl stood, her arms folded over the chair back, chin resting on her wrists.

Probably going to be a lot of people who need healing today.

She glared at the two of us, though the look was mainly directed at Tattletale.

Haven’t forgotten Agitation, eh?

Oh

Oh man

I just realized we might get Clockblocker and Taylor interacting

Maybe she actually gets a chance to make good on that apology she said she’d give him…

Near Panacea, the adults of New Wave had pulled the folding chairs into a rough circle so they could sit while they talked in a bit of a huddle.

And then there’s a camera stuck into the huddle but you can’t hear what anyone is saying anyway and then the timeout is over and they all go out to kick a ball around again

He clapped one heavy hand down on my shoulder as he passed me and offered me a tight smile.

Well(d) then, we’ve got another boy smiling at Taylor. 😉

I’m not going to straight up ship them just yet, but I’m not gonna lie – Taylor deciding to remain a villain but ending up in a romance with a hero could get interesting.

It seemed we were allies, at least for the time being.

Ah, yeah. But assuming this is Weld and I’m not being stupid, he’s gonna be sticking around after this… better not get too attached if you’re gonna be a villain, eh?

Tattletale and I followed his group into the building.

Folding chairs had been set into rows and columns in the center of the lobby, facing a trio of widescreen television sets, which in turn were backed by a series of large windows overlooking the beach.  Through the windows, we had the perfect view of the looming storm.

Dragon just stays out in the mech and talks to them through one of the TV sets.

As daunting as the approaching clouds were, what drew my attention was the crowd.  There were people filling the lobby.  Only a few were local.

I.e. we’re getting lots of new characters!

Her team – people I recognized but couldn’t necessarily name – followed behind her in a loose formation.

Ah, alright, I guess it’s not three umvirates, but one of them and her personal five-person team.

Fair enough!

Only one man in a blue and black uniform and cap stayed behind in the middle of the parking lot.  He looked around for a few moments, then disappeared with a crack and a whoosh, smaller than the one that had brought the entire group there.

…four-person team. Alexandria, her four-person team (not counting her), and a parahuman taxiporter.

Tattletale and I circled around the parking lot, to avoid getting in the way of any incoming teleporters.

Sounds like taxiporters are fairly common. I wonder what kinds of variations we find between them.

We were nearly to the door when we heard another group arrive behind us, the same way Alexandria had come.  Teenagers, this time.  I couldn’t place them, but the brighter colors of their costumes led me to suspect they were heroes.

Heroes and villains: Color coded for your convenience!

Hm… Wards from a different city?

The man who’d teleported them in said something I couldn’t make out over the the wailing air raid sirens, and they quickly set to marching in our direction.

Are they coming over specifically to the Undersiders, or just going the same way? It feels like the former.

Leading them out of the parking lot was a shirtless, muscled boy with metal skin, eyes and hair and a strange texture to his shoulders and spine.

Weld, I presume? That would confirm my lowkey suspicion that this other city might be Boston.

Among other things, I noticed the tines of a fork sticking out near his neck, and what might have been the wires of a chain link fence half melted into his opposite shoulder.

Huh. Well, certainly sounds like the result of welding.

But where that strange half-melted-metal texture didn’t cover him, his metal body was exceedingly detailed and refined.  His ‘skin’ was a dusky dark gray metal with the slightest of swirls of lighter metals in it, and his ‘adonis’ musculature was perfectly etched out in the metal, with silver lines tracing his muscle definition like veins of metal in raw ore.  His eyes, too, were silver, and two lines ran from the corners of them down his cheekbones and to the sides of his jaw.

Like what you see, Taylor?

I saw what she was watching.  A stormcloud in the distance.  It hung over the water with an opaque curtain of rain descending down from it.  It was gradually getting closer.

Ahhh, hello there.

We meet at last, Endbringer.

As we approached the parking lot, a squad of PRT officers blocked our way.  I felt a moment’s trepidation.  Were any of these the same people we’d attacked at the Protectorate’s fundraiser?  I couldn’t tell, with their helmets and tinted faceguards covering their faces.

Hehe.

“Uhh, sorry about kinda sorta attacking you that one time…”
“It’s cool, miss. We’ve got bigger problems right now.”
“Ah, righ-”
“But if we didn’t, I’d be foaming your ass right now.”

…

shit, bad wording

With a sound like a muffled thunderclap, a half dozen people appeared in the center of the empty lot.

Ahh, did you perhaps arrive by portkey? Wait, no, this isn’t the Harry Potter AU.

Still, this does seem like some sort of teleportation. Did Trickster replace the air in the space with himself and his teammates? That would explain the sound.

When I saw who they were, I was awestruck.  That wasn’t hyperbole or whatever, I was using the word awestruck in the original, zero-embellishment sense of the word.

…not Trickster, then. And not the Triumvirate (alone, at least), there’s too many. But evidently big shots.

Alexandria stood at the head of the crowd that had just arrived.  Her head turned from one side to the other as she surveyed her new surroundings, the long, straight black hair that spilled from the back of her helmet sweeping from one side to the other.

Eyyy! Finally we meet her. I’ve heard about Alexandria for so long now.

That’s one out of three Triumvirate members accounted for, so I guess the other two – Legend and Eidolon – are among the remaining six as well. But then who are the three with them? Other big shots?

She was everything that made you think ‘superheroine’; athletic, tall, muscular, but still feminine.  Her costume was black and light gray, with an image of a tower in the center of her chest, and she featured a wide, heavy cape that flowed over her shoulders and draped onto the ground beside and behind her.  Alexandria.

Hey! Now that I’ve gotten a physical description of Alexandria, I hope you’ve got that fanart of giddy nine-year-old Taylor in an Alexandria t-shirt ready! I swear, that has to exist, and I want to see it.

Past the hill and to the left was Dragon, in a mechanical suit that was as large as two PRT vans put together, four legged, with what looked like a single jet engine on top, still smoking from her recent flight.

Oh hey! It was someone we already knew, and she’s not trapped in TV land!

Unless of course the suit is a robot and she just shows up on a screen on the front of it.

(To be clear, the “Dragon is trapped in video chat” theory is entirely a joke. I feel like I’ve made enough semi-serious but “out there” theories that I need to clarify that.)

On either side of the engine or oversized jetpack or whatever it was, were two shoulder mounted missile launchers, each pre-loaded with four missiles longer than I was tall.

Cool!

She was facing the water, unmoving, like a gargoyle standing guard.

Are you sure she hasn’t left the suit?

As we got close enough for me to wonder what direction to take, I saw the streak of smoke as an huge armored suit plunged down from the sky, just a block away.

Hi there. Friend?

Possibly a Protectorate member from out of town, or a member of the Guild. Or maybe a solo villain… lots of options here. I don’t think it’s anyone we know, at least – the smoke and flight doesn’t seem like Armsmaster…

It was clue enough for Tattletale to pull me forward to follow it.  Reaching the end of the street, we saw our destination on the other side of a nearly empty four lane road.

At first I thought it seemed a bit odd for such a high-bandwidth escape route to be empty, but then I realized that’s probably exactly why it’s empty – the people who needed to use it to escape may have reached their shelters already.

The building was fairly nondescript.  Six stories tall, it featured dark brown brick and dark tinted windows, and sat alone on a grassy hill.

It’s funny how you never really see “nondescript” as the only description for something in decent-quality literature.

I probably mentioned that back in 5.1, too, I guess. I seem to recall the villain pub (whose name escapes me at the moment) also being described as nondescript.

A nearly empty parking lot sat between us and the building, and a stretch of beach sat on the far end.  People in PRT uniforms stood guard around the parking lot and entrance, and four of the five vehicles in the parking lot were PRT vans, with turret-mounted hoses and armored exteriors.  As good an indication as any that this was the meeting place.

Yeah, looks like the right place.

We reached a trio of police officers, who had used their cars and yellow tape to cordon off two sides of an intersection.  I could see the eyes on the officer nearest me widen in recognition.

“Hi.”

He was about to say something, but the officer next to him put a hand on his shoulder, reached in the window of the police car.  He pushed pieces of paper into each of our hands.

Invitations to the cape meeting?

I glanced over it, found what I needed, and gave him a curt nod.  Tattletale grabbed my hand and pulled me away.

The paper, labelled at the top with the words ‘Parahuman Response’, contained a picture of our destination in black and white and directions on how to get there.

Yup. The truce is fully in effect – known parahumans being gathered, not to be arrested, but to help.

It wasn’t far – the area which divided the Docks and Downtown, a short distance East from the mall where Brian and I had gone.

Handy.

So are we going to seek out Grue, Regent and Bitch first, or hope that they too got this kind of slip and meet them at the PRT meeting spot?

I suppose they should call and agree on that, if they haven’t already done so between chapters.

The closer we got to our destination, the more the crowd thinned out.  We saw another crowd moving toward a different shelter as we got close, but we could avoid that by detouring around that particular set of streets.

Yeah, looks like we’re going straight there.

But people were stupid.  A chronic condition of our society, that so many people somehow thought they were special, the exception to the rule.

Yeeah, and those are often the reason we need the rules in the first place.

In this panicked crowd, every rule was being broken.  There were people with luggage on wheels, one kid carrying a lizard in a glass cage.

How big and heavy is the glass cage? I feel like that matters.

It’d probably be safer to have it in a closed pocket or something, though, if it’s a small enough lizard for that.

People were pushing and shoving, shouting and swearing.  Pets were reacting to the ambient stress with barks and snarls, dashing around and getting others tripped or tangled up in leashes.

Naturally.

Tattletale and I passed two cars that were even making their way forward in the midst of stampede, inch by inch, honking their horns the entire time.

At least they’re polite enough to not straight up drive over the pedestrians? It’s so rude when people do that.

Between the air raid sirens and the honking horns, I couldn’t make out the words people were shouting.  I could barely think.

Such a noisy scene. It’s a wonder we can even read the narration.