In a shadowy corner of an underpass on 805 southbound, just north of San Diego, California, a portal quietly emerges.  It blends in really quite excellently.  The cars don't notice it.  The passengers, unaccustomed to doing their own driving, certainly don't notice it.

Cars within fifty feet get a little passenger.  Not all of them.  The extra passengers are extremely careful to avoid setting off any sensors on the bottoms of the cars.

Each one deftly and rapidly exposes conductors on the bottom of the cars.  Each one sinks its vampire-tap teeth into the exposed conductors.

And each and every one of of them does nothing.

On the beaches surrounding the San Diego Bay, some people report breached monsters. There's a miniature ribbon seal in Lisa Frank colors. There's a tiny deer tottering out of the surf, with moose antlers only as long as a thumb and a fluffy squirrel tail. There's something that's more like a stuffed elephant than a real one, snorkeling its way along the beach with a delicate little trunk and then upending seashells with its pearlescent little tusks. There's a crab, cartoonishly cute eyestalks and simplified mouth that isn't as creepy as a real crab mouth, detectable from a respectful wildlife-observing distance as a monster only because it has fewer legs. A sea otter with fawn-like dapple spots and extra legs.

Some people don't report monsters. They seem harmless. Sometimes a dungeon will have decorative fauna the same way they sometimes have normal-ish plants and rocks, right? That's probably what's going on with that penguin; it's just a tiny penguin, waddling along, chick-fuzzy but with adult emperor markings in royal purple. That cat could be someone's pet, if they dyed it, and you could dye a cat pink if you felt like it. This dryer-lint looking owlet might have fallen from a nest and you're not supposed to disturb birds that fall from nests, are you, especially if it's not injured, and it's not, look at it hop along. The tiny fairy dragon is so adorable, look, it will pose in a teacup for your Instagram, if it were a dangerous monster it wouldn't do that. Look, the itty bitty beaver will eat pencils and makes cute noises! This is some kind of weasel and it winds around the ankles just like a kitty, so soft, it wants scritches. Oh my god is that a baby dolphin that wants to play? This is your lucky day!

The farther they spread, the harder it is to figure out where they came from.

The cuter they are, the more of them people will pick up, and the less they look like each other, the less anyone will be able to discover that they're all one phenomenon, with known behavior and precedence.

The more harmless and affectionate, the longer it will take before someone panics. Panic, of course, is what makes a Menagerie monster go for the eyes, what makes the fuzzy gremlin with its cunning fingers gore you in the face with its little horns, what makes the pint-sized panda-spotted tiger claw open an artery, what gets a toddler startled by his new bunny friend's sudden movement eviscerated like a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Who's going to tell them? You'd better be very careful how you go about it.

There's a procedure for this. Explain to the civvies that it's just procedure, everything will be just fine.  They just need to take the little dungeon buddy in for observation and to keep it safe.  Most monsters don't survive the death of a dungeon, and to make sure each little critter has the best chance possible at survival, they need it in a lab.

(NOBODY is to so much as think the word 'Menagerie' in the presence of the monsters.  That sets off a panic spiral, and from there it's a fight for your life.

There's a software-based pinboard for tracking portal appearances.  Unfortunately, the best they can do is 'somewhere in this ten square mile area, based on Instagram posts, probably'.  There are DRT teams dispatched.  They're combing the beaches and surrounding environs in full tactical gear, which doesn't really help people not panic.   But no squad out there is willing to go out in their civvies to try and contain dungeon monsters.  That's what espers are for, and you don't use espers to canvas by hand.

A sensor or two to find the portal would be lovely.  Unfortunately, their sensor squad is currently otherwise occupied.  It's a fair-sized city.  There are lots of dungeons out there, and sensors don't grow on trees.

It's during the frantic-but-attempting-to-seem-relaxed search for dungeon monsters to reclaim and a dungeon portal to find that the earthquake hits.

Californians are less terrified of earthquakes than the typical American.  But there's still a startle reflex, buried deep in the reptilian part of the brain.

That's two for flinching.

Menagerie monsters are faster, stronger, and sharper than they look. A big earthquake can make somebody fling themselves on the nearest soft furniture, fall on the nearest hard floor, or just drop their new cuddly chinchilla-with-four-tails. You can set down and walk casually away from a Menagerie monster and it will let you go with no more than a sad rejected chirping noise, but suddenly distancing yourself from it, while in a state of alarm? Well, the chinchilla can't actually tell the difference between the realization that you're holding a bloodthirsty monster, and a quake.

It leaps for the throat.

(It wipes the blood off its nose with the nearest glass of water and its little paws, before it heads out again looking for a new friend.)

There's more of these, all over the beaches, all through the city.

Okay.  This is - pretty bad, actually.  They got some of the monsters before the quake, but now everyone's understandably on edge.  Infrastructure's taken a hit.  Some roads are damaged.  Almost every building is still standing, but there are a fair few that suffered damage.  We need some help - a dungeon break on top of an earthquake is a potential disaster in the making.

Starting around 15:21, some whacko on Twitter begins allcaps posting alarmism and misinformation.  They get muted pretty quickly for spreading false information about dungeon breaks.  One example tweet is as follows:

DNO'T FUCKIGN GO ALOGN WITH THE OFFICIALS!  THY'ELL TAKE YOU AWAY!  I SAW IT HAPPEN TO A NEGIHBOR!

The crank switches to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Youtube comments section.  Every social media platform.  They're banned pretty quickly on each of them.

Say, how many of those DRT reinforcements are taking 805 southbound?

Not an overwhelming number of them.  But there's a pretty decent-sized convoy going through, along with firetrucks and ambulances and the like.  They called in resources from elsewhere to deal with the earthquake.

Excellent.  Some of them get little passengers, attached to the underside of their vehicles.  The little spiderbot passengers burrow quietly into the internal wiring of the a few ambulances and firetrucks.

On the northbound side of 805 leaving town, there's an awful lot of traffic leaving town.  Between the dungeon break, the crazy internet rumors, and the 7.9 earthquake, nobody wants to be in San Diego right now.

There isn't as much potential [FOOD] coming through anymore.  Time to make a move.  The spiderbots, in a very real sense, are the brains of the vehicles.  Like a deranged futuristic version of ophiocordyceps unilateralis, they fully control these cars now.  Every vehicle that has a spiderbot passenger and enough space to get to triple-digit speeds does so.

Even the firetrucks?

Especially the firetrucks.

Okay.  As of 16:21, the State of California declares this to be a statewide emergency.  California is officially requesting additional esper support from anywhere that has espers going spare.

Please.

As of November 6th, 2036, 17:33, a state of national emergency has been declared.

Excerpt from a verbal report given at 1810 PST:

"So in summary, we have on the order of two hundred vehicles doing their best Indy 500 impression in earthquake-struck San Diego.  Four of them are firetrucks, three are ambulances, twelve are DRT vehicles.  Roadways in San Diego are functionally unusable until we can clear those up, and they're not shy about hopping the curb, either.  Menagerie's broken containment, again.  It looks like there are about the same number of vehicles spreading out in the rest of California.  Highways are being shut down to prevent accidents.  We're extraordinarily lucky that whatever's controlling the cars hasn't had a single crash yet, somehow.  Rescues in the absence of four hundred teleports are going to be pretty fraught.  And of course, the usual issues associated with an earthquake: losses of power, building collapsed or damaged, damaged or destroyed roads and bridges, flooded buildings and loss of water, telecommunication outages.  The usual.  The only stroke of luck is that there aren't any major fires to speak of."