Nuray sits up from where she'd been thoroughly flopped over Akira, yelping.

"What the hell?"

"Something might be wrong..."

He sits up, too, and heads for the door.

Nuray follows.

Allura's voice echoes through barely-visible speakers.

"Everybody up! Zarkon's attacking! The Castle's about to be destroyed! Go, go, go! We need Voltron now!"

He picks up his pace, running for the Lions.

Further down the corridor, Keith and Shiro are emerging from their own rooms and doing the same. Both are fully dressed, Shiro in his Paladin uniform and Keith in his own clothes, even though all five Paladins were given Altean pyjamas to sleep in last night. 

—is that a knife half-hidden under Keith's jacket? 

Eh, their own business... Still, he might ask later.

Shiro disappears around the corner, heading for the nearest access to the Lions. Keith follows close behind. 

There's no sign of Pidge, whose door is still closed. 

Uh, knock on the door?

It slides away beneath Nuray's hand. 

"I'm up! I'm up!" Pidge yelps. He stumbles out into the corridor, still in his Green Lion-coloured pyjamas and without his glasses, and joins the general rush. 

Right. Onward, then!

As they draw closer, Coran's anguished voice can be heard around the corner.

"What is it, Allura? Speak to me! Oh, speak to me!" 

And then they round the corner to see Allura, not a hair out of place, standing next to Coran and waiting for them. 

"You can stop now, Coran. It's over." 

Coran has thrown himself to his knees in a pantomime of grief. "Uaaaagh! If only Voltron had been formed—oh!" 

He spots the last few Paladins stumbling into the room and freezes.

"Time!" The alarms cut off. 

"...The hell?"

Shiro, who's the only one of them in full uniform, gives Coran and Allura a flat look. 

"I'm guessing this isn't an actual attack." 

"And it's a good thing it wasn't! That took you...Coran, what was the count?" 

Coran consults some unreadable glowing symbols on a screen. "Four doboshes and twenty-three ticks precisely!" 

"—well, it was too long! The Galra could strike again at any time; you must always be ready to do battle." Allura is really hitting her stride with the lecture now. "Look at you! Only Shiro is in uniform, none of you thought to fetch your Bayards, and—yes, Pidge?" 

Pidge, who had his hand raised, puts it down. "What's a dobosh?"

"Sixty ticks, or one-sixtieth of a varga!" 

"What are—"

"That is not what's important right now," Allura cuts in. 

"The point is, Coran and I have been up for hours getting the Castle back in order. We had to run a test on the alarms, and we decided to test you as well. Guess which one failed."

She scowls. "Usually we get some training in local layouts and procedures before getting dumped into surprise drills!"

"We don't have time for you to ease into this gently," Allura responds.

"You have to understand the stakes of our mission. Over the last 10,000 years, the Castle picked up distress beacons from thousands of planets invaded by the Galra. We have to assume that Zarkon has conquered almost the entire known universe!"