I’d flippantly suggested inviting the entire neighborhood. It had made sense to me to give everyone the opportunity to weigh in if we were going to be discussing things that would affect them, but I don’t think I’d realized what a production it would be.

Colonel Zwerinski arrived about twenty minutes after I’d contacted him. He didn't send out an announcement immediately, instead coming to my street and carefully perusing it.

“It’s still early afternoon,” he’d told me. “It’s going to take a while for the farthest-off people to arrive, and they’ll have spent a long time in the sun when they get here. If we can’t offer them shade and ensure they have water, we’re going to have continual medical crises.”

He ended up making a series of announcements. Fortunately, synergies had given him a powerful Announcement ability, which offered him a little more information and granularity in how he could use it. He knew he could now reach about two-thirds of a mile, so he asked for everyone beyond a certain point to head out first, then those slightly less far, and so on.

He’d suggested everyone bring water and begged anyone who had a pop-up awning or beach umbrella to bring it with.

The far end of Lavender Lane - the one that intersected with Azure rather than Russet - rose in a steep hill. A two-story house on the corner would provide shade for a good portion of it, and that’s where the colonel had us set up, taking advantage of the natural amphitheater provided by the uneven landscape. Figuring out how to give people shade without blocking anyone’s view was a challenge, but not one I was part of figuring out. I provided an extra pair of hands to help set up when people requested it, but I stayed out of the discussions and debates.

Finally, about two hours after Colonel Zwerinski sent the call out, the final attendees were trickling in. We had over 300 people present by Pointy’s count, and they were largely clustered in what shade we had or could cobble together, with one noticeable exception: two men had taken the same Armored Skin that Priya had, although their scales were green and red, not yellow. They were both sitting in the sun, completely unconcerned by the scorching summer heat.

The folks with Armored Skin weren’t the only ones who looked unusual. There was a teenager whose skin slowly shifted to match his surroundings, taking on the gray of the street or the green of the grass. Several people sported claws, and there were even four with something like a porcupine’s quills protruding from their back, head, and parts of their arms and legs. Those people stood out quite a bit, since their augmentations made it difficult to wear normal clothes. One had managed to wrestle shorts on, but the other three just had a cloth wrapped around their waists, and none of the three had figured out a truly normal upperwear situation. The best was a woman who’d cut a sheet into a modified halter top, and even she looked uncomfortable. Understandable, as I had no idea how you could fasten a bra with a back full of quills. The porcupeople had drifted together and were talking in their own little island in the crowd, everyone else careful to leave lots of space around their painful-looking spines.

A lot of people seemed delighted to be there: extroverts, I assumed, just happy to be out of their homes and around other people. Many others looked uncomfortable, unsettled by the monsters that occasionally appeared even in the midst of the dense crowd. With so many people, anything that popped up was instantly peppered with dozens of attacks, so the monsters didn’t pose a serious threat. Even the few minor injuries were quickly healed.

But it did make waiting a bit stressful, and I couldn’t blame people for wanting to be indoors, where - so far - monsters didn’t spawn.

As the owner of the shop, I was standing up in the front of the crowd, along with Cassie and Pointy, the teenage girl with the Insight ability, and a man who had Analyze.

I was glad Cassie was out with me. After the incident earlier, we’d divided the children up by number of abilities and were letting them play indoors only with similarly powerful children. This was a bit rough on Cassie, who was by far the youngest child with three abilities - Samar and Gavin were the next closest to her age.

I’d had a serious talk with Cassie about what had happened and made her sit through a brief timeout. Surprisingly, Pointy had backed me up, and also promised to help remind Cassie of nonviolent options. I was glad to have the AI’s cooperation. Pointy seemed calmer in general, these days. I wasn’t sure if that was due to my efforts to reach out to the AI, or simply because Cassie’s new abilities had made her less terrifyingly vulnerable. Maybe some of both.

At any rate, Cassie had been punished and talked to, and now she and Pointy were down in the center of the circle along with me and Colonel Zwerinski, and my three-year-old was having an absolute blast. She was ignoring the bucket of chalk I’d brought for her to play with in favor of hamming it up for the crowd. She was strutting back and forth, showing off her spinning, singing five-minute solos about the amazing and wonderful Pointy Turtle, and generally loving every second of the attention. I’d have to shut her down when we started talking in earnest, but for now, I was just keeping an eye on her, making sure that her antics didn’t carry her too close to the potentially-vulnerable front row of the audience.

Strange to think that my three-year-old was likely stronger than many of the adults.

Actually, being in front of the crowd was invigorating me, too. I wasn’t full of songs and dancing like my daughter, but standing in front of rows of seated people triggered something in my brain. I found my back straightening. My feet slid out in the stage-appropriate “cheating out” pose, keeping an eye on the colonel while still keeping my body mostly faced toward the audience.

My mom had gotten me into theater as a kid when I’d been in a bad place, emotionally. I hadn’t known how to deal with the bullying and cattiness that erupted when my classmates started tip-toeing into the early stages of puberty. I’d been a bit behind the curve hormone-wise and painfully naive, which had made me a spectacular target for children with a little bit of cruelty and a big need to feel they had power over someone or something. It had been easy to make me cry, and I’d spent far too much energy trying to understand why so many people had said such horrible things.

Spoiler, for any of you who haven’t figured it out: it was because they were assholes.

Yeah, maybe I wasn’t the most fashionable, maybe I had other things about me that were subpar or silly, but so fucking what? There are basically two categories of people in the world; those who feel empowered by hurting others and those who don’t. If someone’s in the first category and picks you as a target, they’ll find something to be mean about. You can’t be cool enough or pretty enough or athletic enough or anything enough; all you can do is recognize their words and actions for the petty cruelty they are. If someone doesn’t get off on bullying others, you could be the most repulsive person who walked the earth, and it wouldn’t matter. They might not be actively kind to you, but they still won’t seek you out and try to make you feel bad about yourself.

That’s not an easy thing to realize, though, or it wasn’t for me as a young teen. Acting had been my salvation in many ways. It had given me a community of people who were themselves often a little bit odd, but fairly non-judgemental. It also gave me experience in putting up a front. Standing in front of an audience watching your every move might be scary, but the characters I was playing didn’t care about the audience, so I got practice in projecting one emotion while feeling another. Eventually, the terror of the large crowd became only a slight undercurrent of nervous adrenaline, and I grew to love temporarily becoming someone else.

So as I stood there, in front of hundreds of people, it was sort of restful for me. I felt like my brain had started working again for the first time in hours, and I remembered the commitment I’d made to myself, that I’d be ready the next time aliens tried to screw us over. This meeting was going to be important. I couldn’t afford to be wallowing in shock and self-doubt.

I took a deep breath. I was Meghan, Shop Owner and Community Leader. Confident and strong. Worth listening to. What would that Meghan do? What would she be worried about? What concerns would she have?

My brain rumbled into action like an ancient motor - with some fits and starts at first, but with increasing smoothness and power.

A long warbling blast of noise signaled the start of our discussion, courtesy of a teenage boy with an instrument I couldn’t name. Something that would fit a crossword puzzle’s prompt for “a small brass instrument,” like a trumpet or a cornet. The music created a lull in the rumble of discussions, and the colonel seized the opportunity.

“Quiet, everyone! Quiet, please! We’ve got a lot to discuss, a lot to decide. Everyone will get an opportunity to give input on each topic, but we’re going to need to be organized. People who speak out of turn or act disruptively will be removed from the discussion.”

I’d overheard the colonel earlier, talking with several high-point individuals about acting as enforcers. I didn’t much like the idea, but I had to admit he was right: with a smaller number of people, you could rely on social censure to keep people acting civilized, but with a crowd this large, some sort of penalty was probably necessary to keep order.

I was surprised when Colonel Zwerinski opted not to start off with any of the serious issues we needed to figure out. He did take a moment to go over his planned agenda for the meeting - revisiting Points Siphon distribution, possible assistance or training for new fighters, and the present housing crush around Lavender Lane, as so many wanted to live close to the food source the shop represented. Before he dove into any of that, though, he said he wanted to begin by reviewing the information we’d learned about the new monsters that had spawned today, the same blade-tailed fliers I’d faced in my farcical “race.” They hadn’t appeared all at once, like the rams, but followed a piecemeal pattern of appearance more similar to the leafenrats or the badblankets. I was surprised to hear that each of the new monsters gave 24 points and two Money per kill, twice as many as everything else we’d faced so far. The man with Analyze also weighed in: in summary, we could expect the new monsters to range over a much wider area, and they navigated based on a form of echolocation. Their wings were both their biggest target and biggest weak point - a large tear would prevent the beasts from flying, and they were relatively harmless once grounded.

The colonel asked if anyone else had any other information to share, and called on people to raise their hands. From this, we found out that someone had tested the pepper tea on the new monsters to little effect, and that they didn’t seem to be confused or incapacitated by loud sounds - at least not ones on the level of shouting.

“Alright,” said the colonel. “Seems like that’s all the intelligence we have on them at the moment. We can’t keep calling them the ‘new monsters’ forever, though. Raise an arm if you have a suggestion for a name.” He pointed at members of the crowd - many of them kids - and had them rise and offer their suggestions.

“Chiroptragon!”

“Bluey!”

“Bladetail!”

“Tear-o-dactyl!”

“Flappysword!”

“Gargoyle!”

“Dragonbat!”

“Babydragon!”

“Igbenadion!”

It went on for a while, some of the suggestions clearly better than others. When everyone who wanted to offer a suggestion had done so, he clapped his hands together. “Alright! I’m going to go through the names again. Just raise your hand in favor of any and all of the names you’re okay with.”

Pointy had asked Cassie to hand her up to me, and I held her aloft to give her a clear vantage. She would be working to tally the votes, her inhuman speed and precision making the process shockingly fast.

“Hey!” she squeaked, distracting me. “You, under the Roll Tide beach umbrella! Don’t think I don’t notice. You can vote once for each name, not multiple times for a single name!”

The man looked shocked and sheepish as he lowered the extra hand. It clearly hadn’t been innocent exuberance - he’d been leaned over awkwardly, trying to make the second arm look like it was coming from someone else sitting behind the person next to him. I doubted he cared that much about the name of the monster; he was probably just testing to see how easy it would be to fool Pointy.

The colonel was not amused. “That will be the only warning on this topic! Anyone who we catch trying to corrupt the voting process from here forward will be removed from it.”

I began to see why he’d started with the monsters. It was uncontroversial, relatively speaking. Almost everyone had probably learned something potentially useful, and we’d have already made one joint decision by the time we got to knottier issues. People were glaring at the Roll Tide Umbrella guy already; it was easy to imagine things getting violent if he’d decided to try cheating the vote on a more serious topic.

Majority rule steered us away from the more interesting suggestions and the innocuous and easy-to-pronounce “Bladetail” carried the vote, edging out “Dragonbat.” One of the sillier suggestions, “Flappysword,” did surprisingly well, but not nearly close enough to take the the vote.

Then the easy discussions were done.