"The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances." - Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express.

--

10 Downing Street, London

It had dissipated as quickly as it had appeared. It was the only thing Stewart could think about, as all around the middle-aged Scotsman, neatly-dressed civil servants scrambled to make sense of what had just occurred.

Only minutes ago, the earth beneath them had trembled with such vigour that it wouldn't have been a far leap for someone to call it an earthquake. But an earthquake? In the centre of London? It sounded unlikely even to think it, although less likely things had happened.

"Sir!" A young woman's voice broke Stewart from the sanctum of his imagination.

"What is it?" He replied, distant, but returning to reality quickly as he turned to look over at a woman his still theory-riddled brain recognized as Mia, one of his many aides. With shoulder-length brown hair, and a freckle-saturated, but sun-kissed face, the girl was pretty enough for most of the old guard to remain ignorant of how talented she really was. Something Stewart had taken advantage of when he hired her straight from university three years prior.

"It's the Home Office, they want you over at Whitehall." 

--

Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall, London

"Deputy Prime Minister." Home Secretary Christine Wright greeted Stewart with, the latter only nodding with a small smile in acknowledgement, his focus more upon the room she, himself, and a dozen other suited and uniformed leaders were now standing in.

This was a COBR meeting.

"You called a Cobra meeting?" He asked, not hesitating regardless to make his way to the front of the room's central long table, where he sat down to give the others their cue to follow. Christine sat across from him, like him near the front of the room, where the other top-level ministry heads and three representatives of the Armed Forces were present.

"I did." The lights in the room dimmed as the wall of interconnected television monitors in-front of the table filled the sudden void with their own, blue artificial light. 

"Did the PM sign off on this? Do you even have contact with him?" Stewart asked, frustrated with the failure of his own team to connect him to Robert while he had been on his short trip to Whitehall, under a police escort that was more hurried than usual. The wall-encompassing collection of screens beside him showed a familiar sight, statistics and red lines.

"We don't. No one does. In-fact, we don't have contact with anyone beyond British soil." 

What?

"What?" Stewart reiterated, to himself more than anyone else in the room.

"The internet is down nationwide, Stewart. Heathrow have lost the readings of all aircraft outside British airspace. The Armed Forces are unable to communicate with their satellites, and UKSA can't find anything in orbit." 

The room was deathly silent, a fact that was not lost on the Scot, his attention strained between the wholly negative facts being shown on the screens to his right, and the wholly negative facts being spoken to him on his left.

"What do you mean? What happened?" Can an earthquake do all that?

"We don't know. But we will." The Home Secretary stated.

--

Borderlands Airspace, Principality of Qua Toyne

To think his father had wanted him to go into the family business. Kolban Erata didn't stray from letting his emotions be known to all who could hear from down below, yelling happily as his wyvern gracefully rode the waves of clouds above the border-adjacent farmlands of his home country.

It was his first real-world mission today, and even if it was only a routine patrol, the contrast between knowing it was for training as a cadet, and knowing it was for the true protection of his homeland, and his countrymen as a qualified knight made all the difference in the world, or to his world more specifically.

The little cuts of wind that slid between the openings of his helmet felt freeing.

The sheer expanse of the sky, unhindered by clouds or the manmade light of torches was breath-taking.

The small twists and turns of the fearsome beast he rode on was empowering.

And if it had been up to him, he never would have come down.

Unfortunately for Kolban, it wasn't up to him.

Damn near sending him out of his harness and flailing to a perilous death below, the young man was violently awoken from his childhood dream by a sudden, powerful gust of wind that sent his wyvern off course. Though it had little effect when compared to the noise that followed. A terrifying screech filled the air around the boy and his winged companion, the latter spiralling into a primal panic at how loud the offending sound was.

"Come on, boy! Stay with me!" Kolban cried, stroking the top of the wyvern's head to soothe it, with his own heart beating in rapid succession from beneath his chest plate. Neither he, nor his wyvern had ever been trained for something quite like this. 

Whatever this was.

--

Wyvern Control Tower, Maihark, Principality of Qua Toyne

Manel Saron had taken his job for the peace, for the wage as well to be sure, but mostly for the peace. Both his elder and younger brothers had joined the army, eager to make father proud by dying in some muddy, bloody battlefield on the outskirts of a village no one they knew had ever heard of.

But Manel intended on living past his thirtieth birthday.

He had never intended on being the first man in all of Qua Toyne to lay eyes on a metal beast, however.

"Emergency report! This is Sixth Wyvern Squadron!" His magicomm abruptly blared from it's place on the desk next to him.

Manel stood at the window of his control tower, the others had taken a break for lunch, and so he was alone. He was alone, and he could see it. Although given the noise, he was certain that the others would hear it by now, even from where they were.

"Emergency report! Come in, tower! This is Sixth Wyvern Squadron!" The magicomm repeated.

It was slightly larger than a wyvern from how far away it was, but it was grey and it's wings did not flap. In-fact if they hadn't been stretched from either side of it, Manel wouldn't have even thought to call them wings, given that they were pushed backward at an unnatural angle.

Why was it so loud?

"Tower! This is Sixth Wyvern Squadron! We were giving chase to an unknown intruder heading for Maihark, but we couldn't keep up with it!" 

Freed from his trance at the elongated dispatch of information, Manel took two uneasy steps back from the window, and the grey dragon beyond it to return to his desk.

"Sixth Wyvern Squadron, this is the Tower. It's already here." 

--

Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall, London

"54 Squadron reports the same thing." Air Chief Marshal Douglas whispered to Alistair, the Minister of Defence from his seat next to him, across the table from Stewart, though the latter could hear them all the same.

It wasn't that the Marshal had been trying to keep that information from the Deputy PM, but rather that it would simply be next in the long, long line of nigh-irrefutable proof that the impossible had occurred. 

That the United Kingdom was no longer on Earth.

And unfortunately for the government, it hadn't been long after their conclusion, that members of the public had reached their own.

Major incidents had been declared by emergency services in cities across the country. A Premier League match between Arsenal and Chelsea had descended into a full-blown riot after panic turned to opportunism. The Territorial Army had been deployed to assist police in cracking down on rampant looting in Newcastle, and perhaps most importantly, Stewart's office had been overwhelmed with calls from the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as to what the hell had happened, and where the PM was. Robbing him of some now much needed sleep.

It had only been fourteen hours since the quake, and already the country was on the brink of collapse.

In those hours, the Royal Air Force had dispatched several reconnaissance squadrons, and even Typhoons to survey the country's new surrounding areas. Almost immediately noting that the Republic of Ireland had not been taken with them, yet Northern Ireland had been. The Border Force, in conjunction with HM Coastguard and the Royal Navy had been placed on high alert, intensifying their monitoring of British waters, and the Army had sent notifications out to it's personnel, warning them to be ready for imminent call-up.

None of that served to make Stewart feel any better.

Where's Mia when you need her?

"Sir." Christine spoke, drawing Stewart from his stupor of misery and disbelief.

"What is it, Christine?" He asked, his practiced 'understandable' media accent acquiescing to his native Glaswegian tongue as much of the energy he had woken up with this morning had since ceased to exist.

"I think.. Given the situation, it would be pertinent for you to visit Her Majesty." 

Don't you dare. He thought.

"Christine--"

"Stewart." She interrupted, in a strange sort of polite way. "We need the Emergency Powers Act." 

Like before, the room went deathly silent, but much more suddenly. In an instant, Stewart could feel the anticipation of two-- three dozen pairs of eyes, dart over to his stressed, tired form. The room was hot, and it was smelly. Half-eaten boxes of takeaway food and scattered documents littered the table he sat at, while the televisions on the wall now showed live news coverage of the country's deteriorating situation.

All commercial flights had been cancelled indefinitely, thousands of foreign nationals were stranded, crime was rampant, and now he was being asked to suspend democracy? 

He just wanted to go home.

--

Parliament Square, London

"Moments ago, the newly made Prime Minister, former Deputy PM and MP for Livingston Stewart Ferguson left Buckingham Palace, after a meeting with the Queen. On the agenda was this morning's alleged earthquake and the ensuing national disruption to communications infrastructure."

The sun had long since set on London, the city's world-renowned skyline lighting up against the backdrop of an unfamiliar moon. 

Across the gleaming metropolis of over eight million people, civil disorder persisted, though it had declined from it's peak in the afternoon in light of the government's limited military deployment to the capital, alongside Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

And while it had been insisted by the new Prime Minister as a temporary measure to assist the emergency services, it had undoubtedly left a sour first impression on the public.

Separated from the stresses of government, in the square just outside the Houses of Parliament, next to a statue of Winston Churchill, Aaliyah Akbal of Channel 4 News stood before her camera crew, shielded from the capital's ice cold February winds with a thick, padded jacket. 

Beside her, the BBC, Sky and ITV had all positioned their own respective reporters, each clambering to get the scoop on what was to be second in a long line of upcoming historic events. 

For a variety of reasons, their foreign counterparts had decided not to show up.

"According to a statement given to members of the press by Number 10. Her Majesty granted Stewart Ferguson the permission needed to give the government emergency powers during their meeting, a move that many in his party, as well as the Opposition have begun to view as necessary in the wake of today's nationwide civil disorder.

"In support of the PM's request, Scotland Yard has stated that the property destruction seen in the past several hours here in London is among the worst they've had to deal with since 2011. And from here, that isn't hard to believe.."

"Reporting from Parliament Square, Aaliyah Akbal, Channel 4 News, London." 

--

Author's Notes: 

Hey everyone, this is my first story on the site. I was pretty inspired to begin writing due to my own enjoyment of GATE in the past, and more recently NHS. 

Our first chapter here was to deal with the shock and immediate, chaotic response to the summoning. But soon, once the domestic situation is tamed, the Brits will be turning their attention more properly to the outside world, and the next chapters will have a broader encompassing, worldly writing style, where more gets done. Similar to what NHS readers are familiar with. I mostly wanted to have a more personal feel for the introduction, though this won't disappear entirely either.

If you enjoyed this, please let me know, and give a favourite so I know there's some demand/interest for this! 

Thanks!