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.

I suppose the first goal is going to be reuniting with the rest of the Undersiders.

The crush of bodies was a tide that Tattletale and I had to push through.  There were a thousand or more scared people in our immediate area, surging against and around us.

Quite natural, given the weight these sirens have. People are scared enough in this city when the sirens aren’t blaring.

Even our costumes didn’t give people much pause or reason to give us space.  Thoughtless in their panic,

The panic alone is gonna kill people before the Endbringer even arrives.

the crowd was guided only by the barricades of policemen and police cars that had been established at the intersections to guide the masses to the shelters.

Oh, good to see they’re not completely unguided.

Everybody had been informed, in the pamphlets that came in the mail and in schools, about emergency procedures.

I have a feeling that in a world like this, people take emergency procedures a bit more seriously than in ours. Hopefully.

There were multi-level shelters spaced around the city, enough for people to hunker down in for a few hours.  They’d all been told that they could bring our larger pets if the animals could be trusted to behave.

“if the animals could be trusted to ignore” seems like a guideline most people would ignore.

Taylor’s narration is mixing “they” and “our”, here, and that’s despite the fact that she doesn’t personally have a larger pet. This could either hold some kind of meaning about Taylor’s view of herself relative to the rest of the people, or be Wildbow changing “we” into “they” and forgetting to make the “our” reflect it.

They could bring only necessary medical supplies and what they could have on their person.  People weren’t allowed to use their cars, unless they were in one of the areas on the periphery of town.

Last thing you want is a traffic jam or panicked flattening of equally panicked pedestrians.

Too easy for there to be an accident in the panic and hurry, leaving everyone else stuck in a traffic jam when disaster arrived.

Exactly. Don’t panic and drive, folks.