The situation room was often the hardest room to get to in the building, if it wasn’t in a seemingly unintuitive spot, like the Wards’ meeting spot being in the PRT basement. It was the room in the center of the building, with no windows, thick walls, and a resulting claustrophobia. Take that claustrophobia, add people, in a quantity where there aren’t enough chairs and some have to stand, but where it’s not crowded, exactly. Just awkward in that sense where that too-small space couldn’t ever be comfortable, no movement could be made without some consideration for who might be in your space.

Those people would include people you’ve never seen before, because things are intense enough that there need to be intern-level clerks and secretaries to run to grab something from a printer, filing cabinet or office, and people to take notes, and others with specialized knowledge. Making the awkward the awkwardness of the unfamiliar, of class and power.

Take those people, then, and account for the fact that some don’t know where to stand in this space that doesn’t feel like it gets enough air for the number of people within. Police officers or scientists who have never been here, but aren’t high enough status or enough a part of the meeting to get a chair. Interns who’ve never been in a situation like this. For the people who do have chairs, who do have places to be, take them out of their seats, because they’ve been here long enough they can’t sit anymore, they’re stressed, they’re pacing or standing behind their chairs. People in suits have pulled off their suit jackets. People in masks who’ve decided they’re in trusted company have removed those things.

All gathered in a space that feels like it’s smaller than the concrete and steel insulating and protecting said space from the threats outside. Like dolls in a shoebox diorama, surrounded by a foot of concrete on every side.

That was the atmosphere here, that the televisions and movies hadn’t ever captured for me.

One long table, like a conference table, with chairs all around, except at the end, because they needed to be able to see the screens at the front of the room. There were four desks split between the two sides of the table’s length, each with that Teacher-base, Cauldron aesthetic of being set in concrete, each with too many people crowded around.

Narwhal was there, standing with arms folded. I saw Armstrong, sitting at the long table, papers in front of him. Off by one desk, there were two of Goddess’s clustermates. Golem’s girlfriend, her name escaped me in the moment. Dinah Alcott stood by one of the other desks, a man in black beside her that could have been Wardens security or her security.