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Guards and staff alike all sat around a card table in the employee lounge, enjoying beers and a quiet poker game. Occasionally they checked on the legends in the lounge in the other room via a camera feed. Determining that no one was fighting or tearing the place apart, they got back to their poker game as they enjoyed the peace.
“When was the last time we had a fire drill?”
They all groaned when they heard the voice of their Chief of Safety. She was staring at a calendar, paging through it and noticing that there were no fire drills on the schedule anytime before the current date, which meant their leisure time was inevitably about to be interrupted by fire alarms.
“I dunno,” one of the guards answered. “Wasn’t it when Rampart joined a few seasons ago?”
The safety chief looked shocked at the confession. “That long ago?” She shook her head and marked something down. “Well I think it’s time we have one now.”
Staff and security alike looked defeated as they put their cards facedown on the table and started grabbing their coats while she walked over to the fire alarm and entered the code into the system for a drill. At once, the sound of a blaring fire alarm echoed through the entire dropship, down the halls and through every room and corridor.
“All the legends are in attendance today, so make sure we account for all of them as they leave. Let’s see how long it takes them to evacuate.”
“Starting the timer now,” one of the guards said as he hit the start button on his stopwatch.
One minute everyone in the lounge was relaxing, playing video games, reading, talking to one another, enjoying a snack, the usual. The next, they all were looking up as the fire alarm started blaring. They looked at one another as though the very concept of a fire alarm was foreign to them somehow and they didn’t know how to react.
Crypto shook his head. “Octane probably pulled the fire alarm again.”
Octane looked uncharacteristically offended as everyone in the room began staring at him. “No I didn’t!”
“You didn’t?”
He held his hands up to show they weren’t covered in dye, like they would have been if he pulled the alarm. “I would own up to it if I did it!”
Catalyst suddenly looked panicked. “Wait, if you didn’t pull the fire alarm, then the dropship could actually be on fire!”
Vantage squeezed Echo, trying to stop her bat from fleeing due to the loud noise. “What are we supposed to do if the ship is on fire? No one ever told me!”
It slowly started to occur to everyone that no one had explained to them what the procedure for an emergency evacuation was, and if they had, they hadn’t been paying attention. When was the last time they even had a drill? It had to have been when Rampart was new here, because she’d gotten annoyed at the alarm going off and disabled it so she could go back to sleep.
Mirage jumped up and started screaming, “Oh my god, we’re all gonna die!”
Revenant sat up from the couch abruptly and excitedly shouted, “Finally!”
The entire room erupted into chaos and mass panic as the few who remembered procedure tried their best to navigate through the sea of flailing bodies. Caustic waited at the emergency exit, refusing to leave until the one person he cared about found her way over, Nikola held firmly in her arms.
“Oh good, you managed to get your cat,” he said as Wattson followed him down.
She winced from the sound of the alarms and tried to keep her cat from freaking out and leaping out of her arms. “Oui, he was already in my lap.”
Wraith gently led her out. “It’ll be quieter outside, let’s go,” she reassured her.
Ash watched everyone running in circles like headless chickens. “Well I’m not burning alive in here with these idiots,” she said before following them out.
A couple other legends had the common sense to follow them out. A few of the other legends, however…not so much.
Loba stood over Valkyrie and shouted, “Kairi, what the hell are you doing? The fire alarm is going off!”
Valkyrie continued to sit in a lounge chair, shielding the nachos in her lap like a gremlin. “I’m eating!”
“So bring your food with you! We have to go!”
“No! Then I’ll have to share!” she said as she leisurely ate another chip.
Crypto was halfway down the stairs when he suddenly looked like he realized something and then charged back up.
“Where are you going?” Horizon asked.
“I forgot my laptop!” he shouted.
“Don’t go back for…” She threw her hands up in exasperation when he was already beyond earshot and continued following Gibraltar down the stairs.
Fuse stared at the fire alarm going off overhead and looked at the lit cigarette in his hand. There was no way that little bit of smoke set off the alarm…could it have? Bloodhound always called him on it whenever they caught him smoking on the dropship. The no smoking signs weren’t there just for show, they always said. One of these days it’s going to set off an alarm, they always said.
“Walter Fitzroy!”
He jumped and tossed the cigarette into a trashcan behind him just as Bloodhound rounded the corner. They looked displeased with him when they saw him.
“Yes, love?” he said, trying to charm them with his smile.
“Did you set off the alarm smoking in the dropship?” they asked.
He laughed awkwardly. “No, of course not! Why would I keep doing it after you told me not to like twelve times?”
They seemed to be leaning to try and see something behind him. Looking straight at Fuse, they said flatly, “Walter, the bin behind you is on fire.”
He grabbed them by the shoulders and turned them around, pushing them down the hall and away from the smoldering can. “It’s just the northern lights, Houndy!” he reassured them.
Pathfinder stumbled upon the burning can next. “I found the fire! What do we do?” he shouted.
Maggie strolled over calmly. “Here, you just do this,” she said before dumping an entire bottle of rum directly on the trash. Fueled by the rum’s high alcohol content, the flames immediately flared up. “There, now the fire’s better,” she said before turning and casually walking away. Pathfinder put his hands on his head in shock as he watched the burning metal can full of discarded food and paper towels burn higher.
Vantage was busy trying to wrangle Echo from one of the lights. Catalyst answered her ringing phone and said in a calm voice, “I can’t talk right now, I’m in a burning building.”
Newcastle spotted Rampart heading down into the lower storage area and called to her, “Rampart, where are you going?”
“I’m going to warn the ghost that lives down there that it should probably evacuate so it doesn’t die in the fire!” she said as she disappeared into the dark.
Newcastle turned around when he heard a scraping sound and saw Loba and Bangalore both struggling to move the chair Valkyrie refused to leave towards the exit.
Bangalore stopped a second to catch her breath. “Maybe we should just carry her instead of moving the whole ass chair.”
“In these heels?” Loba replied as she tried to push. Valkyrie just continued eating her nachos.
Mirage shouted as he flapped his arms and started running in circles. “What do we do? What do we do?”
Revenant kept a straight face as he suggested, “We should barricade the emergency exit, that way the fire can’t get us.”
Octane started pushing a heavy table towards the door. “That’s a great idea! Help me move the furniture!”
Lifeline spotted what he was doing and ran over, screaming, “NO!”
Down on the tarmac, staff took attendance as legends emerged from the dropship. Of the 22 of them, apparently the only ones that had the common sense to get their asses off the ship were Horizon, Seer, Ballistic, Caustic, Ash, Gibraltar, Wattson, and Wraith. Everyone looked at each other in disbelief as the stopwatch indicated that it had been forty minutes and everyone else was still inside.
“What are those idiots doing?” the safety chief asked.
She whipped out a tablet and tapped into the feed of the camera from the lounge, immediately witnessing them all being embarrassments to humanity. Lifeline was struggling to drag Octane towards an exit. Loba and Bangalore looked half passed out on the floor while Valkyrie was finishing off a plate of nachos and casually got up from her chair to throw the trash away. Revenant looked like he was barricading one of the emergency exits with furniture.
The legends and some of the staff all gathered around, curious as to what was taking them so long, and they were just as dumbfounded as she was.
Seer shook his head. “If we did this drill while we were in the sky, they would all be jumping from an open door with no parachutes.”
Horizon sighed. “What I hate the most about that statement is that it’s one hundred percent true.”
Ballistic noted Mirage tripping over pure, unobstructed floor, and Crypto tripping over Mirage. “I think you probably should have run these drills more often.”
Wattson squinted at the camera feed as it started to get smoggy in the lounge. “That isn’t actual smoke, is it?”
Ash groaned. “Please tell me my asshole boyfriend didn’t start a real fire.” She wouldn’t put it past Revenant to discover that the ‘fire’ was just a drill and then become so disappointed that he set the dropship on fire for real.
Pathfinder ran into full view of the camera and seemed to spot one of the three fire extinguishers in the room. He yanked it off the wall and disappeared from the camera feed.
Gibraltar sounded relieved when he said, “Finally, someone’s doing something smart for once.”
Just a few seconds later, they heard the sound of shattering glass as bits and pieces rained down on the tarmac. The fire extinguisher used to break the window sprayed foam everywhere as it struck the hard ground and rolled away.
Pathfinder hung out the window shouting, “Help! There was a small fire, and Maggie made it a big fire, and then Revenant barricaded the doors, and we don’t know what to do, and also Octane told me to tell you that Lifeline is picking on him!” He then leaned out the window too far and fell two stories onto the tarmac on his head. “Ow…”
Caustic covered his face. He couldn’t bear to watch this any longer. “How did they actually manage to turn a fire drill into a real fire?”
Wraith shook her head. “I’m getting secondhand embarrassment just watching this.”