It being the twenty first day of the month, many in Leiben were surprised with the cloudless sky upon waking that morning.
Despite first appearances, however, over the course of the day cycle the city was wracked by powerful gusts of wind, the squat, aerodynamic buildings that dominated the capital channeling those gusts into its streets and alleys, effectively turning them into wind-tunnels. By early afternoon, most commuting was being conducted via the metro system and subterranean walkways that interconnected the buildings, and as a result very few citizens were topside when the solar flare alarm began to sound. The few up top who did hear the intermittent blare found it all quite odd, not so much due to such flares being a rare occurrence, but because of the peculiar manner in which it all happened.
There was a sudden, intense flash from the sky above, and all those who happened to be looking up were momentarily blinded, feeling sudden warmth on their faces they hadn’t known over the last few days. Many kept their eyes to the sky a moment longer, finding it strange that the quickly dissipating flash had originated separately from the red sun further south, a few of them wondering whether it was some strange atmospheric phenomenon due to solar wind striking the upper atmosphere.
Even those citizens, however, soon found themselves bounding towards the nearest building or underground access point as the alarm’s urgent blare began to make itself heard. No one wanted to be caught topside once the flare’s full force hit the planet. The alarm had choked momentarily before singing out with all its might, something else those who had heard it before didn’t remember having ever happened. By the end of the first minute after the event’s onset, every window in the city had been shuttered and every citizen evacuated to a safer place, all except for the ATS users.
Almost every transport vehicle of the Automated Transit System inexplicably sputtered to a complete stop, their panicked passengers being forced to use the manual overrides to exit their allotted cars, some even having to shatter the side windows with little glass-breaking hammers. The few hundred ATS commuters scurried towards the nearest refuges, the unforgiving wind buffeting them violently as they hurried along like drunks in a footrace, some glancing to the sky with barely-suppressed panic while others laughed at the unexpected adventure.
By that time, almost every alarm system crammed inside a cramped room within the Anti-Air Threat Artillery Command Center had been muted, their overwhelmed operators struggling to take stock of the situation.