Aldrich and Seismic made their way to the nearest shelter where most of the crowd had fled due to Hat Trick's ridiculous manchild tantrum. The shelters were underground constructs that were essentially scaled down versions of the Panopticon Bunker that the Duds in the Southside holed themselves up in.

They were easy to find. Building tops marked with blinking white signal lights indicated the streets where they lay under, the thick plating of their round vault doors showing in the middle of the street.

Aldrich stood before the vault doors, waiting for them to open. Seismic hunched over a streetlight pole, punching his large fingers almost comically into a tiny control pad that manned entry into the shelters. Normally, people could just scan their way in via an Eye Phone app, but many heroes like Seismic could not easily carry around phones without them breaking, so they had to do things manually.

Seismic carefully punched in a seven-digit code to authorize himself and to open the vault doors.

Aldrich watched the doors rumble as they began to slide apart with a mechanical whir. While watching the doors, he reflected on how these shelters were used and who they were for.

Walled cities were designed with safety against variants in mind, and Panopticon building regulations stated that there be adequate shelter space for at minimum 50% of a city's total population to reside in. Every couple of streets had a shelter constructed underneath as a result.

An average person's gut reaction might wonder: why not a higher percentage? But 50% more than covered the Alter population whose powers were useless in combat or logistics. The rest of a city's populace was expected to contribute to the fight somehow.

Even if the average Alter did not have the multiple years of training that proper heroes and support did, they still had to by law register for a PRL (Power Regulation License) which, depending on its type and class, gave a citizen a set amount of authority with which to use their powers.

...