Okay, so I've been mulling over ways to rework my post, and I think the villain section is fine since that takes place separately. In the first part, I'm thinking of rolling back the arrival of the emergency services and the feds and removing the reference to Luke and Donny going towards Caty and David. Instead of moving the overall narrative at a faster pace, I'll slow it down to give the characters more time to interact in their three current smaller groups. The emergency services will still show up since 911 is being flooded, but I'll hold off on the news cameras and feds coming until a future post. To prevent myself from pushing us forward too fast again, I will no longer be writing the really long posts like I have. I will restrict myself to two or three paragraphs per character and leave it at that. I won't introduce new major plot elements until we've exhausted all possible small talk/individual character interactions so that no one feels cheated or rushed.