Gladio had sat on the train ride, feeling ... oversized and out of place. His seatmates for the journey were both small and quiet and Gladio was too uneasy himself to try to put them at ease. Normally, he didn't mind being big, but once in a while when he was surrounded by tiny people who looked at him like an explosive that might go off, it bugged him.

Then again, everything bugged him just now. Most of all that he didn't understand why he was here, what here even was, and that he didn't know what had happened to his Prince or his friends. Was Ignis somewhere, listening to Ardyn be a blowhard at him, blind and stuck in that fortress trying to find Noct and Prompto on his own? Was Prom even there? Was Noct still alive? Was all this even real, or was Gladio just going nuts all on his own?

He didn't know, and he didn't like feeling clueless and helpless at the same time. They let him off the train in a place they told him he lived now. Gladio didn't have any intention of staying there without getting a feel for things, but for now, he could at least look around. Maybe climb back on a train after that. For the moment, he began a wary trip toward where they'd said his housing was - not intending to go in yet. He just wanted to get a lay of the land, see what it was they wanted him to do. Gladio would decide if he wanted to play along with what they wanted later, for now, he'd just look and see.

[perfection of the digital - for brocodes]

Gladio wasn't sure how he'd gotten here. You'd think after the tombs and dungeons and pitch-black forests he'd been navigating lately, one city wouldn't be that damned hard. But this place made no sense, and he kept getting distracted by the people. Gladio generally liked people. He got along with most of them, if they weren't terrible or so damned stuck up they couldn't take a joke. But the people here, they didn't make sense to him. They all just walked around, obeying the rules that the place set up, like it was normal. Like there wasn't a thousand things wrong with it.

Some of them walked around on leashes. Gladio had gotten glared at more in the past couple of hours than he had in a year just because he kept getting caught gawking at one or another scene that made no sense to him outside of the kind of cheap novels he wouldn't have let anyone know he read, when he was bored and out of history books.

So yeah, he kept getting distracted. Who could blame him? (Other than him blaming himself, which he was going to do no matter what.) However much people wanted to act like this was normal, it wasn't. Not to him, not to anyone he knew. Even Imperials, who he had a hard time understanding most of the time, wouldn't just walk around this city without blinking.

He'd taken a train, Gladio knew, and meant to go back to the place they said he was supposed to stay - to case it out some more if nothing else. But instead he found himself somewhere way more uptown, after another train ride he evidently shouldn't have taken. There were milling people - some of them wearing less than him, and it wasn't like he piled on the layers most days. More leashes and collars and people with marks like the ones he'd ended up with. And some kind of market. He let his stomach tug him toward the market. Gladio was rarely NOT hungry.

Turns out, wasn't the kind of market that had food. Or at least not the part he was at. He reeled back from the edge of a crowd that was watching a couple of pretty-faced people getting screwed by ... machines?

Ancients, he wanted to go home. Or wake up, right now, and never have to tell anyone about this dream. Home wasn't a picnic, but at least the chaos there made some kind of sense to him. LIEs and programs and other worlds dumped in this one - that didn't. And the people putting on a show had looked awfully glassy-eyed. It made Gladio worry that they might not know just how MANY people were watching them.

And who the fuck built machines for that, anyway? It was the kind of job you should want to do yourself, not farm out to a machine.

He retreated rapidly, before he did something stupid like try to break up the crowd when for all he knew, it was the people getting watched's idea in the first place. Gladio meant to head back the way he came and retrace his steps, but he ended up not doing that either, and grunted at his own lack of direction. Put him down in the wilderness with trees and rocks and he'd find his way. A city full of people he didn't understand, and he went in circles, he guessed. Figured. Ignis couldn't see now and he'd probably still have found his way around better.

He stopped, trying to get his bearings again and turn back when a familiar flash of color caught his eye. He jerked his head in time to see hair shaped like a bird-butt, bright blond and spiky, freckled face recognizable a second later. "Prom?" Gladio said. He broke into a grin, relief at SOMEONE familiar breaking through him. (Even more so that it was Prompto, who had just been missing, to him.) "Prompto," he yelled this time, starting to shove his way through the crowd toward his friend.

Which was when he noticed that Prompto was about one step away from bare-assed naked. His hands were bound behind him and he had a collar around his neck and and older man impatiently tugging him along toward a nearby posh looking tent with guards standing alongside.

Gladio had a temper, but he wasn't a brute, however often people took one look at his size and assumed he was. He could be thoughtful and strategic, and he didn't like to take on fights if he couldn't win them. But he was protective. With Prince Noctis, it was his job, but it was just who he was, too. As they tugged a silent and unprotesting Prompto away in this alien place, Gladio swore and then just charged forward, grabbing for the chain to rip it out of the outraged overseer's hand. "Prom, come on," he said as the guards started to rush forward. Prompto just stood there though, looking blankly at him.