Eternal Rains (IC) [M] - Closed

[Mel Dragonkitty]

Penny hung back, rechecking her weapon and allowing all the heavy-hitting creatures to get in range of the garbage thing first. Destruction was what creatures did best. The pair of cubi were evidently dividing up the thing's soul, if it had one, for their dinner. She shook her head and tried not to pay any attention to the disgusting conversation but the troubling sensation in the back of her head seemed to increase. Great. She must be pretty boring for the voices in her head started shushing her to eavesdrop on others.

[techmaster-glitch]

   As Paige jumped into the engine room, the first thing that hit her was the acrid rust-metal smell. Already, it was smelling unnervingly like...Arcwelder's original scrapyard.
   The next thing, of course, was the look of the place itself. The room wasn't even halfway converted yet, but there was enough rust around to make it uncomfortably reminiscent of the scrapyard, too. There were even a few straggling sparks of green electricity scurrying around.
   And finally, there was Arcwelder himself. He popped up behind a large pipe across the room, spotting Paige. He froze on the spot, then twitched a little, his green light-eye shining brightly. Suddenly, his hands flew up to his head as he screamed; "NOOOOO! Leave me alone!" He then darted off, instantly vanishing in the labyrinth of machinery, his voice still echoing. "Go away! Why can't you ugly fleshies just leave me alooooone?!?"

[Tapewolf]

"You are damaging the ship," Cross called out.  "Pandora's property.  Can't you feel the vibrations?  The shuddering?  Whatever you are doing is impairing the ship and we will all die if it malfunctions."

He paused.

"So I must ask you to stop.  If you don't, I must ask you to stop living.  And I can be very persuasive on that argument."

[techmaster-glitch]

   About the only word that Cross had said in his entire admonishment that actually got through to Arcwelder was 'Pandora'. Instantly his tone changed, his disembodied voice echoing around the room, sounding something along the lines of...worry?
   "Uhhh...D-did you say...Pandora? Y-you mean that crazy fleshie who I sometimes trade scrap with, but hurts me if I get too close to her? Um...nope! Don't know any Pandora! Nuh-uh! Not me! Never heard of a Pandora before! Don't know who you're talking about! Pandora-Pandora-Pandora, nope-nope-nope!"
   There a momentary pause, then Arcwelder screeched, "GO AWAY!"

[Tapewolf]

"Stop screwing up the engines, and then we'll go away," Cross suggested.

[SpottedKitty]

Fal'taq made another of those noncommittal "hmph" sounds, glanced at Epyon, then — rather anxiously this time — over his shoulder at the room where Cogidubnus slept. Peacefully and extensively, he hoped.

Just then the mole blinked as a thought occurred to him. One that he didn't much like, if the look on his face was anything to go by. "Wait a moment," he murmured uneasily. "Pandora left that Gryphon at the controls of this contraption... how well could he use them? Is he flying us into the sea...?" Not quite running — at least, not until he was out of Epyon's sight — Fal'taq hurried along the corridor and up the stairs.

The airship seemed to be stable for the moment after all the lurching, but if it were about to plunge out of control, Fal'taq would at least like to know what was happening. As long as he didn't have to look out of the windows again at all that water, much too far below. He slowed to a fast walk as he neared the top of the stairs, and looked around with a carefully disguised worried look on his face.

[techmaster-glitch]

   Everything else Cross said was utterly lost on Arcwelder, drowned amid cackles, babbles, and whimpers.

(OOC: reason it took me awhile to get this single line up was because I couldn't decide on this or something else)

[Tapewolf]

"Any suggestions?"  Cross said, glancing at Paige and Pandora.  "Fun though a little violence can be, I prefer to leave it as a last resort.  And I daresay the body would be tricky to dispose of without compromising the hull.  Unless anyone has a Warp-Aci handy?"

[e_voyager]

Epyon was grateful to be out of the moles sight. he knew that he was probably older then the mole as he he had been dead for some time but still he felt unnerved but talking to the old being. witt unnerve him too but for different reasons that relates more to losing body parts then and elders disapproval. quite forgetting what he was after he resumes walking down the hall forgetting that it's the dame all the others took to reach the engine room and the junk monster.

[Sunblink]

...Keaton, Paige, and Pandora:

After Paige burst into the engine room, Pandora and Keaton decided to take that as a signal to enter as well. Concerned with the state of her beloved ship's engine room, Pandora forced her way in first, charging rather ungracefully almost immediately behind Paige with her rifle drawn and angled down. Keaton waited for everyone else who chose to follow them, or who elected to enter the engine room, to filter inside, then barreled in behind them.

Almost the instant they entered, Keaton had to shield her oversensitive ears from Pandora's exclamation of pure horror as she noticed a rather unsightly patch of bristling amber coagulating on an enormous gear closest to the door. Much to her visible chagrin, other patches of rust had developed elsewhere, too, collecting in ugly patches over the churning mechanisms. To Keaton, she realized there was a certain similarity to Arcwelder's earlier habitat in the junkyard – as she was not a scientist, she had no explanation behind this phenomenon.

At the moment, Pandora simply didn't care. While Arcwelder took advantage of Pandora's horrified, stunned state and scrambled off behind the labyrinthine machinery, and Cross momentarily exchanged dialogue with the junkyard-dwelling necromancer, Pandora attempted to recollect herself. Some detached part of Keaton found her exaggerated horror almost hilarious, but the rest of her got down to work, preparing Catastrophe as she awaited any further action from Arcwelder. Deep down, she hoped that he wouldn't interpret Cross's negotiations as any further antagonizing.

When Arcwelder shouted something about Pandora, she seemed to snap her out of her stupor. Looking rather indignant, she shook her fist at the collection of machinery which sufficed as Arcwelder's camouflage. "Hey, who're ya callin' a crazy fleshie?!" Mind you, Pandora had no idea what that actually meant, but it sounded insulting. So, in her mind, that gave her reason enough to be angry. "I'll -"

In the middle of a potential insult, Pandora quickly took a moment to calm herself down before trying to communicate with Arcwelder again. "The wingy is right, Arc!" she shouted just loud enough for Arcwelder to hear her over the clunking machines, "At this rate, th' ship'll crash." Utilizing what little negotiation skills she possessed, Pandora attempted to reason with the necromancer in a more agreeable way. "Takin' both you an' th' engine room wit' ya. An' ya don't want tha' t'happen, d'ya?"

Meanwhile, Paige drummed her foot impatiently against the floor, looking rather irate. Noticing that Keaton was standing restlessly beside her, she leaned toward her Succubus brethren and whispered in her ear. "Ugh, this is taking forever. I say we charge right in. C'mon, what to do you say? I'll split the soul with you..." Paige looked thoughtful for a moment, then reconsidered, still keeping her voice far too quiet for Arcwelder to hear. The last thing anyone wanted was for him to fly into a murderous rage or a fearful fit. "Though I doubt he'd taste very good..."

Keaton, surprised by Paige's frankness, perked her ears and glanced at Paige incredulously. She wasn't one for idle conversation, and she was easily disarmed when she encountered someone who wasn't bothered by her soul-stealing habits. Keaton simply wasn't used to conversing so casually about that topic. Somewhat reluctantly, Keaton whispered back, "That would make things much easier, but I think we should only do that if worst comes to worst. I don't want Pandora to throw us off the ship... especially when we're in mid-air."

Paige 'hmph'-ed irritably, folding her arms underneath her bosom. "Well, you're no fun," she retorted in a whisper.

~Keaton the Black Jackal

[Cogidubnus]

Click!

The small, innocuous sound somehow managed to echo throughout the engine room, despite the heated conversation and thrumming of engines that nearly made it impossible to hear one's thougths in one's own head. Anyone who turned their head would have noticed the small, mild-mannered fisher from before leveling her crossbow across one arm and aiming carefully into the jumble of engine parts. There was a steely glint in her eye - wether it had been there before would be difficult to say. Certainly no one seemed to pay that much attention to the smal, dark-furred theif.
She only aimed a moment, the glass-tipped bolt swirling with some dark, eldritch liquid, before squeezing the trigger and firing neatly at the rust monster's head.

At that very moment, the entire ship shuddered violently. Arcwelder himself was knocked aside, and the bolt hit the wall and shattered - acid ate into the metal wall harmlessly, and dripped not-so-harmlessly into various engine components beneath it. The ship groaned again, the metal of the superstructure voicing its unknown distress. The engine itself, suddenly put under duress, began to emit a high-pitched, earsplitting whine.

* * *

Outside the ship, along the portion of the nose that contained the lighter-than-air lift gas, green electricity sparked and flashed. The front of the ship, slowly but surely, began to aim down towards the ocean beneath them.

[techmaster-glitch]

   When Pandora's voice went around the engine room, all of Arcwelder's sounds suddenly ceased. Only the engines could be heard as Pandora spoke. Unbeknownst to the party, Arcwelder was now slowly making his way towards them (not aggressively), but before he rounded the last corner to put himself into full view, someone shot at him! By some crazy twist of cosmic fate, the ship gave its worst lurch yet, throwing Arcwelder out of the way of the projectile, and right in front of the party. The projectile continued on and hit one of the engines, spilling its corrosive contents all over it. This, combine with the sudden stress on the superstructure of the ship, was more than the engine could handle. Even--or rather, especially--Arcwelder couldn't ignore that.
   "M-m-machine?" Arcwelder said, turning away from the group and looking at the now-damaged engine, quickly on its way to worsening. "N-no! Not my machine! Not my machiiiiiine!" Arcwelder got to his feet and rushed over, his signature electromagic gathering in his hands. Reaching the spinning engine, he cast his hands forward, suddenly enveloping the whole engine in massive lightning bolts. "No, no, no, NO! Hold together, machine!" There was a sudden small explosion, and a cascade of sparks. Arcwelder was thrown back and to the ground, but the engine was still going. On its way to a total overload. "No! Need more metal! Must fix machine!" The mad monster jumped to his feet again, and started casting bolts of green lighting around. Loose panels and spare parts flew towards Arcwelder. He focused his magic, reshaping them, and of course, rusting them all as well. In a few moments of intense work, he was done, and rushed the 'new' parts over the the engine. Using his magic the parts integrated themselves into the engine, along with the largest infusion of his own magic yet. "HOLD...TOGETHER...MACHINE!" He yelled, the lightning shooting all over the place. Finally, he jerked his hands back, unable to sustain the magic any longer. With a loud POP!, the green lightning from him ceased.
   The engine was running. But it was a very different engine now. The whole thing was rusted brown-red, yet it was definitely going faster than it used to. A very interesting thing was that, like Arcwelder's zombiebots from before, the engine now had its own green electricity sparking around it in circles, complete with a nice green glow from its core. It had been totally converted.
   And, of course, was giving off more power than before. The bow flight turbines got a boost, keeping the ship somewhat level, offsetting the ballast leaking. However, it would not stay that way for long, and that little piece of work had almost completely drained Arcwelder of his power.
   Arcwelder admired his handiwork for a moment, then turned around, as if to go do something else. However, when he did turn around, he froze up completely, as if seeing the crowd of people for the first time. However, his eyes suddenly locked on one person in particular: Pandora. He looked at her almost as if she was from another planet for a moment. He took a few very slow steps forward, his mouth working up and down soundlessly. Eventually, he managed to make something out; "Pan...dor...a?"
   Suddenly, he started convulsing a little, and went rigid. His body seized up, and he spasmed. It wasn't as if he was internally fighting something, but more rather, he was just simply locked up, as if he was getting an "invalid input fatal error" or something. A lazy little green spark traveled up his right metal arm as he jerked, then suddenly dove right into his head. He suddenly snapped, but not necessarily in a completely bad way.
   "Ah! Pandora! There you are! I was just looking for you, I swear!" Arcwelder spoke very quickly, and as if he had completely forgotten all the other people existed. "Look, um, please don't hurt me, I know you don't like me leaving my scrapyard and visiting you in your home, but this is an emergency! Well, um, y'see, this huge bunch of people, they tresspassed in my home! I would have taken care of them, but they had led these...these...these monsters in behind them! Big slimy, spikey meatbags! And then, Zap! Boom! All my friends dead--all of them! Except for my bigger friends, of course. So, they took over my home, and I had to come here to your shack to find you, because I really really really reeeeally need your help! Y'know, we go back in, kill the evil monsters, I get my home back, and I don't have to bother you again until our next scrap trade! So, wha'dya say? Huh? Help me, yeah, yeah, pleasepleaseplease?"
   The whole time Arcwelder spoke, he was still twitching quite badly, but not so much being locked up more as a bad case of conscious epilipsy, and had an utterly broken, maniacle smile on his face.

[Tapewolf]

"Well, well," Cross told the fisher, levelling the gun at her face.  "You may very well have killed us all.  I hope you're happy."

Abruptly he lowered the weapon and, without turning, called out to the others.

"I see the monster is quiescent.  Keaton, Paige, it might be best if you put him into a coma.  A temporary coma," he added, remembering Paige's predilection for souls.  No doubt she and Keaton had been planning to divide the spoils.

"Now, Pandora... the bow," he said.  "Whatever is keeping the bow up is failing.  We need to repair it, and fast.  What must we do?"

[SpottedKitty]

As he came up the last few steps, Fal'taq barely had time to notice Aixyne and Aisha were the only ones still in the room, before the airship shuddered again and tipped forwards. He staggered, reached back to grab at the rail he'd just stepped away from, and just barely managed to wrap his fingers around it.

A look of pure horror flashed over the mole's face as he clung tightly to the rail. The view out of the forward windows slowly but inexorably dipped, the vista of the much-too-far-away horizon giving way to the much-too-far-away-for-comfort-but-getting-closer sea, the surface of the waves glittering in the moonlight. Fal'taq glared angrily at Aixyne. "Do something, Gryphon!" he shouted. He ignored the black-furred feline Demon for the moment, twisting round until he could grab the rail with his other hand as well.

The airship shuddered again, and just at the bottom edge of the window, the mole could see a familiar greenish light flickering over its structure somewhere up front. It took only a moment to realise where he'd seen it before: during the attack in the junkyard. "If that creature is the cause of this," he muttered under his breath while his stomach did flipflops, "I shall dismember it — slowly and with great relish..."

[Cogidubnus]

 As the towering grey wolf raised his firearm away from Penny's head, the little fisher, normally quite nice in disposition, gave the incubus a dirty look as she shifted on her feet. A tiny, barely audible sound clicked from her foot, the mustelid setting it on the ground slowly, and set another dart in her gun. Despite the sudden tilt of the floor beneath her, she backed up to the ladder behind her, and began to scamper up it quickly.
I'll just let you figure out the engine is working and the monster is stopped, Mr. King-of-Seven-Kingdoms. she thought, climbing deftly up the rungs, before nearly falling off as a massive explosion rocked the ship.

* * *

As Fal'Taq stared outside at the disturbingly eerie sight of a wall of water getting inexorably closer to the ship, it was ironic that it would be the mole's rather poor eyesight that revealed a sliver of hope. Far in the distance, a distinct, dark outline could be seen just peeking over the horizon.
Land. If they could just keep the ship level, they might have a chance at surviving.

Fal'Taq was still looking at it when the landscape and the sea below disappeared, obscured by what seemed to be a sudden fog. The mole would have cursed, had he not remembered that they were far to high for fog of any sort.
Clouds, however, were a different story.

A black cloud seemed to have encompassed the ship. A bright flash erupted somewhere within the dark mass, and moments later the deafening boom of thunder rocked the ship, literally shaking the Perihelion as it descended quickly downwards. Brief sparks of green still crawled up the ship, visible through the darkness only as lurid phantoms in the fog.

[SpottedKitty]

As Fal'taq clung tightly to the rail, he opened his mouth for a blistering swearing streak that would have left Witt sitting down to take notes. Then the first explosion rocked the airship from end to end.

"..."

Totally upstaged by the minor matter of the increasingly likely destruction of the airship and everyone in it, the mole closed his mouth again. Histrionics could wait, for the moment survival was more important. This chamber was on top of the airship, so there wasn't much of the structure to come crashing down on his head. Unless that idiot Gryphon managed to flip them upside-down...

Fal'taq cast several layers of his strongest shield spell about himself, then padded the interior of the shield with cushions of immaterial force. Hopefully that would be enough to soften the blow of the inevitable impact. He was in the middle of searching the walls and ceiling for structural members to act as anchors for his shield, when he happened to glance out of the window, up near the horizon.

"Land!" he shouted over the noise of the airship shaking itself to pieces. "Land! Is that land up ahead?"

[Aisha deCabre]

In the control room, looking at the darkness out of the windows and enjoying the relative quiet, Aisha had almost fallen asleep where she stood.  Her hearing was still very much alert, since Jakob and some of the others had gone down to the engine room to see what the commotion was.  Certainly, if it was that monster of a machine-thing, Aisha wanted to have her share of the wrath.

None too sooner than she thought that, than the ship had suddenly taken a turn for the worse.  The noises came back, louder and more unpleasant than ever...grumbling, screaming, whining metal, and the ship's lurching about, causing a frenzy of panic with the gryphon and Fal'taq nearby.  Aisha however held onto the railing and engaged her claws, snarling loudly as the ship started to descend.

Then, as an explosion rocked the ship and nearly knocked her off her feet, she immediately felt that feeling of vertigo.  "Dammit, what the HELL is going on...?!" she roared, looking back to Axiyne.  She decided to take off the bracers, letting her black-spotted wings loose...they would be of much use if they were indeed falling.

She was just about to rush out into the halls to look for the others when she heard the mole yelling...about sighting land.  Eyes widening, the demon turned and flapped back to the windows, holding onto the railing with both hands and crouching with her feet pressed and holding hard as she did, looking through the clear glass.

"...By gods, it looks like it, unless we're seeing what we want to see before most of us are dead..." she turned back to the pilot.  "Is there anything we can do to keep this hunk of junk level?  Else I'm going to break the nearest window and get out of here."

[Boog]

The ship's first lurch nearly sent Ty into the dissolved engine bits. The situation was quite thoroughly beyond his control. True, simply wading in and using his patented hold-the-offending-party-off-the-floor-by-their-shirt-until-they-stop-causing-trouble would have been fast, but woefully lacking in elegance and decorum. Shooting somebody out of nowhere, now that was subtlety. Or at least that was what he assumed the fisher had been going for, he most certainly wasn't any expert. Seemed a little out of sorts with the overall spirit of negotiation though... Another lurch brought him out of his thoughts. Ah, right. Crashing.
"Pandora, I sincerely hope there's some manner of parachutes or escape devices on this ship!" The mythos half-shouted as he focused on keeping his immense bulk exactly where it was in such a confined space.

[e_voyager]

Epyon was so disoriented that he wanted to cry. the world was going crazy. and the ship seemed to has stared to fall. her heard someone cry out landed and thanked the heavens that they were going to land soon. or maybe they saw land. either was would be fine with him with him as long as the ship stopped lurching.

[Tapewolf]

"Think!" Jakob barked.  "We are over the sea, the domain of the Mer!  It is under their control utterly! If the ship goes down, if we attempt to bail out, they will have us."

"No, we must keep the ship in the air somehow...  we have to put down on land, or not at all."

[Mel Dragonkitty]

Penny felt as if she was coming out of a fog as she was scrambling up the ladder. It was worrying that the funny moments seemed to be getting closer together. Even in her stunned state and with the whole ship shaking the climb was relatively easy for her. In her profession she climbed far worse on a regular basis.

Once she reached the top she forced herself to pause for a moment and think. It looked like the ship was going down. If it did they would have to abandon it. Up was the direction to go in case they hit the water. As she retraced their previous journey through the corridors and ladders she came across the mythos heading towards her. The last time she had seen him had been near the room where they had stashed the resting wolf. That gave her a guilty start. Cog would not know the ship was going down. She addressed the mythos, Epyon she thought she heard him introduced as, "We need to wake up Mr. Mithome. It looks like we're going to crash. Come on." She continued her rapid walk up the hallway back to where they left Cog.

[e_voyager]

Epyon nodded and grabs the wall following the fleet footed girl before him he " then where' going to land" he asked not sure what he would do.  as he followed the thong about what the mole had said and don. the magic jesters the were locks he thong. or maybe seal but he could be wrong. " the mole er... Fal'taq i think you produced his name. he said to let him rests and i thing i say him magic locking the door. i'm not 100% as locking , sealing magic is not my forte but i know a spell when i see on and he was definitely casting one."

[Tapewolf]

"Must I do everything myself?" Jakob said, and disappeared.  In the cockpit he materialised, took a small cube of soul-energy from his pocket and began to eat.

As he ate, his fingers worked the air and a large blob of latex or some similar material began to extrude from his hands.  When he had finished, the floor was covered by what looked like a large number of very crudely-manufactured airbeds.   The stressful part came next.

Closing his eyes tightly he concentrated and the first airbed began to inflate.  As it did so, it gently rose towards the ceiling.  Helium was dead easy to make, but creating this much of it left him badly drained.

"This won't keep us in the air forever," he told the gryphon, as he gazed out at what he hoped was solid ground in the distance, "But with luck it should turn a crash into a rough landing."

[Sunblink]

...Pandora and Keaton:

The ship gave a violent lurch and quaked violently, and, unlike Ty, Pandora could not keep herself upright. With her bizarre proportions and gangly build, she was hardly of the stature to remain perfectly still, especially when the ship was in such a tumultuous state. Scrambling on her knees, the woodpecker went down like a falling tree, her body smacking the immaculately polished floor. Overhead, she could hear the machines comprising the engine room sputter, belching great gouts of sparks into the electrified air. Underneath even Arcwelder's efforts to sustain the engines, the damage to the machines was too great – but not outright combusting thanks to the junkyard necromancer's desperate ministrations. Pandora heard, out of the edge of her hearing, Keaton shrieking loudly and nearly come tumbling down as well.

Keaton's hands gripped Catastrophe tightly and drove it down, embedding the spiked end into the floor with a resounding clang. Although a brutal method, it was effective, and enough to anchor Keaton in place – at least until the state of the ship presumably exacerbated. Keaton paled, hyperventilating – her mind was reeling, the voices in her head chattering excitedly until only their screeching cacophonies filled her brain and she couldn't distinguish them from the sounds of the engines. One hand nearly relinquished its grip on Catastrophe for the purpose of fisting in her hair, but she kept both hands firmly planted on Catastrophe's pommel, using it as support to heft her to her feet. Keaton cursed in her head, the obscenity resounding beneath the banshee-bawling of the struggling machinery, and tried to remain steady, her neck craning around as she peered nervously at Pandora.

Pandora was back on her feet, thanks to the assistance of a twisted bar of metal which once sufficed as a rail protruding from the floor. She glanced to Cross as he asked her what to do, apparently after menacing Penny with his gun. "I - " Pandora was uncharacteristically stammering, her eyes wide and pupils tiny, making her appear almost on the verge of hysterics, as her mouth attempted to formulate and shape the stillborn attempts at speech, but failed every time in-between her babbling. Once or twice she got out a few vowels or consonants, and her hand fisted in her hair, her eyes shifting to the unstable machinery. After a moment, she squeezed her eyes shut, sucked in a great gulp of air, and managed to compose herself, although she still looked shaken. "I dun... dun't know. Gahta' figure somethin' ou'... g..."

Pandora seethed a little, drawing in air again. Again, she seemed on the verge of panic. Keaton assessed her somewhat critically, although, to an extent, she could empathize with the normally eccentric pilot's near-breakdown.

(Panic attack, most likely)
(Can you taste her fear?)
(Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!)
(She tastes good...)
(Wonder if she's a bleeder...)
(Shut up.)

Emotionally kicking down her panic attack, Pandora breathed in, repeating the exercises she had studied regarding preventing such occurrences. Finally, she forced out her first command. "All o' yah, find someplace safe. Given th' state o' th' shi'... it ain't gonna last long without some kinda repairs."

Off to the side, Keaton felt her eyes widen, and she would have interjected if Pandora, somehow aware of her potential complaint, hadn't replaced the silence with another command, this time in the form of a bark. "Th' shi' might be goin' down! hurry th' FUCK u--"

A moment later, Cross, after uttering a sardonic remark, disappeared - quite literally. Pandora took this as her cue, and quickly dashed to the self-destructing machine, drawing her wrench from its holster at her overstocked and tool-encumbered belt and starting to assess the damage. Keaton watched Penny dash out of the engine room out of the corner of her eyes, then swallowed, and decided to follow suit, abandoning the engine room and looking for Cog.

---

...Axiyne:

Axiyne was hardly idle during the ship's plummet. He was wrestling with the controls, juggling his attention between the steering and the emergency notifications illuminating the dashboards. Pressing any buttons seemed haphazard to him at this point, as he was afraid he would overwhelm the straining and struggling engine, or even worse, accidentally deactivate the whole ship. The Perihelion was magically-powered, but even that had its limits. Aisha, and more visibly Fal'taq, were caught off-guard by the ship's disorientation, and Fal'taq was at the edge of his patience. Axiyne would have been gnawing nervously at his talons and chewing on the skin on his wrist with his beak if his hands weren't already thoroughly preoccupied.

Finally, Fal'taq pointed out something which made Axiyne's ears perk upright, and a certain sense of hope inflate inside of him. "Th-That's perfect! Perfect!" Axiyne yelped, seizing the steering mechanism again, "We can land there! As long as we land, we - "

Suddenly, Cross materialized into the cockpit, and Axiyne let out a startled squawk. Cross quickly devoured a small cube he produced from his pocket and started to weave something in mid-air with his fingers, ambidextrously creating a large blockade of airbeds over the door, which floated to the ceiling. Almost impulsively, Axiyne checked the readings. The helium, to an extent, was going to mitigate the potential crash, as Cross had put it. This would minimize the damage to the ship, most likely. This would be useful. Gripping the controls again, Axiyne watched as the rapidly-approaching spit of land in the distance started to swell and increase in size as they flew toward it, revealing vibrantly green trees crowning and fringing the land to the point everything else on the terrain was indistinguishable. Axiyne jerked up on the controls as he watched, out of the corner of his undamaged eye, the readings begin to falter, and shouted to the control room's occupants.

"Everybody hang on!" Axiyne said with a level of volume he never thought he was capable of, and pulled. The land was coming fast, but with the helium supplementing the ship's flight, and Axiyne at the controls, it prevented the ship from taking a nosedive into the earth.

The bank and the trees, clearly of a tropical climate, rushed toward the window as the ship ungracefully descended. Giant, frilled leaves and other tropical flora buffeted the window, slapping against the glass, sometimes plastering them to the surface, sometimes peeling away and disappearing. All around the ship there was a certain turbulence, the shuddering and the quaking rocking the ship's foundations as its belly palpably skirted the earth –

-and then the ship stopped, parked amidst a broken, crumbled nest of trees, with an immense shudder. Behind the ship was a visible path of destruction, marked with obliterated and upturned soil in a rough divot and some of the trees snapped like toothpicks. The Perihelion warbled and let out a unified groan.

---

...Pandora:

The lights had gone out, apparently from some sort of power failure, leaving the whole ship drenched in an impenetrable darkness. Around the engine room, however, the darkness was slightly alleviated. Intermittent splashes of light occasionally flared up from the engine at the heart of the chamber, sporadically and sparsely illuminating the engine room. From what could be assessed, the engine room had sustained minimal damage from the crash – at least the threat of exploding no longer seemed imminent. The vestigial sparks started to die down to a few sputters, briefly casting sickly green light over Pandora, on the ground. She was clutching her arm due to an unseen wound and seething and cursing openly, her wrench discarded at her side.

After a moment, Pandora groaned, lurching to her feet, and stumbled, looking blindly around the darkened engine room. After a stuttering heave of pain, she tried to call out, "Who's no' dead? Sound off."

~Keaton the Black Jackal

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

As the ship pulled to an abrupt stop, a voice from behind Pandora cried out "oh...", dopplering forwards to end with a sudden, sodden thump against the forward bulkhead, as the lights died.

Pandora: "Who's no' dead? Sound off."

From a point about three inches short of six feet off the ground - slightly higher than usual - Witt's voice completed the request "... Like you got a pair." He coughed, then spat. "Ow. Dammit." A clanging noise, as he dropped the bar he'd been holding on to - and that had sheared off in his paw - onto the floor, followed by another one from the other paw. He heaved a big sigh. "One of these days I'm gonna find myself on my feet after a crash. Yea, and the heavens will open, and gods-damned bloody spirits will come down and take us all the fuck away, because Götterdämmerung will have arrived, and the end of the bloody world will have happened. And I'll have yet another bloody headache. Damn hangovers."

He paused, shuffling in the dimness, then sighed. "Who else is still around in this bloody great cluster-fuck?"

[Tapewolf]

When Cross came to, everything was dark.  A moment later the cockpit was filled with the brilliant light of a collection of small globes which floated above his hand, illuminating his somewhat haggard face and casting harsh shadows.  Axiyne lay in the cockpit chair, Fal'taq on the ground.  They were breathing, at least.

In the distance he heard a call.  It sounded like Pandora's voice.  Realising that his work in the cockpit was done, Cross made his way back to the engine room on foot, assessing the damage as he walked.

"Johan Cross reporting for duty," he told Pandora shakily, realising the slip only afterwards.
"Axiyne and the mole guy seem to be alive," he added, and proceeded to summarise what he had seen.

"So far as I can tell, the ship has no obvious damage to its main structure.  The engines could pose a problem, and I'm not sure what lifting agent you were using before, but at least in theory, we should be able to get it airborne again.  Assuming Cog remains quiescent."

[Aisha deCabre]

Not receiving an answer from the panicking Axiyne (though not really expecting one), Aisha simply held on to the bars as the ship started to go into a nosedive and the momentum started to speed up.  Her wings were flared, and she was determined to leave out the nearest opening if nothing happened...

And then, something did.  Jakob had returned quickly to the cockpit, and used a rather interesting amount of magic to line the length of the room with helium-packed rafts of sorts.  The demoness's wings had then retracted, to make room.  By the looks of things and the reactions of the few around her, the ship seemed to take the help very well.  All that was left was to brace themselves for the trip down.

The black sky disappeared in favor of dark green, vegetation slamming against the exterior of the ship.  They had made land, and in a very shaky landing, a survivable one.  It had however thrown Aisha against one of the windows, knocking her out of sight nearly of the others in the cockpit.

When she opened her eyes again, it took a moment for them to adjust to the darkness.  But everything had indeed stopped.  She craned her head up, listening to someone leaving the room.  Sighing and shaking her head as she stood, Aisha followed, hearing Pandora's voice.

"You forgot me, lobo," the demoness said upon arrival to the engine room, to finally see about getting everyone together again.  "I'm alive too."  She sighed and took her bracers from her belt, replacing them on her wrists.  The wings vanished, leaving her there to register the shapes before her.  "So now what?"

[Paladin Sheppard]

Having morphed her wings out just before impact, Paige was suspended in place by her tentacles, unharmed and apparently without a hair out of place. "I'm just dandy" she said smiling as she retracted her tentacles back into their wing shape.

She summoned a light in her palm illuminating the engine room. "Anyone hurt?"

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Witt shaded his face from the light. "Not yet, but if you keep shining that fucking light in my eyes, I'll see if I can fix that for you."

The rising light revealed his short stature, outlined on the wall. Upside down. Six feet off the floor, and embedded, spines first, into the wall.

With a grunt, he looked up at the floor, then glanced over at Pandora. "I hope you have nothing breakable in this bloody wall." He curled up, materialized a pair of knives from somewhere, and stabbed them into the panelling, then used them to apply force to peel himself out from the wall; after which, he braced his feet against the wall, pulled the knives out, and spun on the way down to land on his feet, with a heavy thump.

"So. Do we get this crate back in the air, or go by foot from here?" He glanced around. "And is anyone else spread over a bulkhead?"

[Cogidubnus]

Thunder and lightning raged as the ship went down, beneath a sea that suddenly boiled as though a thousand snakes writhed beneath the surface. White foam gleamed as dark, invisible waters gnashed hungrily in wait for the ship above it.
A bolt of thunder flashed, painting the Perihelion in stark black-and-white. It missed the prow of the ship by inches, plunging harmlessly into the sea instead. The air was still for a moment, thick with ozone as the airship itself sparked green.

All at once, the sky exploded, dangerously alive with electrcity. A dozen, two dozen bolts of thunder flashed all at once, a mesmerizing web of thunder and power that seemed to wrap about and cocoon the airship, although never touching it once.
The sky seemed to pause, another heavy lull. As the airship hurtled towards land, its nose just barely rising enough to make it to land, the sky above the ship seemed to part - a round circle of clarity that pushed the thunderheads back. Perhaps the mages had given up, although in the reflection of the moon on the water, one could almost see a pair of massive wings silhoutted against the silver orb before flitting away, and something glittering next to the rind-edge of the moon.

Regardless, the ship hurtled on, and in the on the jungle coast crashed.

* * *

In the darkness of his room, Cogidubnus continued to sleep, positioned comfortably on his head, upside-down, with his toes touching the floor. His bed, in a surprising revesal of roles, rested softly on the wolf, it's head leaning gently on the cold metal wall.
The wolf snored.

* * *

Unable to answer Pandora's call, the necromancer-machine Arcwelder lay beside one of it's treasures machines - knocked about by the ship's mid-air thrashings, next to such heavy equipment, was surely to be leathal to someone. His body lay beneath the open cooling fan on the man engine, the horizontally spinning blade just now stilling. A ragged, gaping wound where his neck used to be, and the greenish blood-oil staning the blades, spoke to what had most probably occured. His head was nowhere to be seen.