Andy did as instructed, landing safely was pretty high up in the list of things he wanted to do. It was the same policy he used as travelling by plane, listen to the instructions of the flight-attendants. Still, even though it was obvious their situation was perilous and he might very well die here, he rather enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness. Strange how such a minor detail could be prevalent in such a dangerous situation and he hoped it wouldn't be the last thing he'd ever experience. Should he be afraid? Probably so and he was worried about the situation, but a strange, calm feeling came over him. As if he had excepted his faith, whatever the outcome would be. There wasn't anything he could do aside from not moving, which meant he did all he could.

All he could do was float and hope. Was there any unfinished business? Noting came to mind, although that didn't take away the fact he'd rather live for a while longer. He hoped everyone was smart enough to follow the simple instruction.
The question if they would ever get to the place where they needed to be crossed his mind, this obstacle course really wasn't funny anymore.

This time Luca did not do exactly as he was instructed.

The pair of escorts had advised a complete lack of movement. To Luca, this seemed rather poor advice -- they were not, after all, 'weightless,' because nothing was ever 'weightless' in the sense that matter retained mass and so on and so forth. They were simply in freefall, sharing coincidental momentum with the 'slug' vehicle in such a way that their rate of motion had attained equilibrium with the vessel simulating a lack of gravitational force. But an actual absence of gravity was completely out of the question, totally beyond the realm of possibility.

These principles rattled around in his mind, and because they so rattled, Luca immediately forgot all his feelings of moron-hood. Immediately he was the all-knowing, all-understanding genius in a pod of Melvins. He should have thought, "boy, the bedrock principles in this realm are a bit loosey-goosey, I should probably take a cue from the people who live here." Instead, the zero-G sensation made him feel at home, and he acted upon instinct that were -- perhaps, it might turn out -- more appropriate for the universe from which he came.

Thus, rather than heed the warning of the two knights, Luca slowly and precisely maneuvered his limbs into a crash-ready position. He used the spinning shield as an axis of reference and oriented his ankles, knees, and hips in the manner prescribed by his factory-issued safety manual. He used his arms as calculated counterbalance to control for rotational velocity, and when he was satisfied with his impact-distribution ratios, he moved his arms -- slowly, like an underwater ballerina -- in opposite rotational patterns until they shielded his upper chest and head.

All this movement may have appeared rather more than was necessary to assume his ready-position, but each fraction of a degree of motion was calculated. By virtue of his counter-movements, he gathered no angular momentum whatsoever. It was a net-zero closed loop of movement, which, frankly, was the sort of simple math Luca thought a baby ought to know how to do. Regardless, he considered himself ready for impact.

Safe at last, or at least under the illusion of being safe, Luca's self-doubt returned. Oh, god, I hope I didn't just break everything. I probably just broke everything. Luca, you giant flipping idiot....

As the feeling of weightlessness overtook him, Fortune opened his eyes briefly in order to see what was going on... and immediately closed his eyes again as he did what he believed was the sensible thing under the circumstances and kept his eyes closed while staying very still while pretending that whatever was happening around him wasn't.

Ariett stiffened at the orders, in an attempt not to move—though sometimes it is harder to stay motionless with tense muscles rather than loose ones. She did notice Donny pulling out a cigar, however, and muttered at him between clenched teeth. "Something tells me we don't have air conditioning in here. Could you wait until after we've left the vehicle before lighting up?"

Donny brought his watch up and began staring at it. The others might notice the hitman absently shaking out a cigarette and lifting it to his lips as he counted each second.

Five whole seconds passed. The tiny dot that was New Nemea below grew larger. The halo of light around it expanded to become the still massively distorted but not faintly recognizable morning horizon. The sun was long, thin, oval-shaped beacon shining to what must have been the East, assuming anything about the crazy geometry held true to what was familiar. The light it cast was so very curiously cold...

"Hiecro, why's ma shield breaking up?" The male pavise knight practically shouted the question with barely restrained panic, the fingers of his gauntlet jerking while his appendages twitched in barely controlled terror.

"Redistribution by volume, not surface area!" Hiecro shouted back, eyeing Donny's movements like a hawk. A hawk in cardiac arrest. "But that doesn't matter because nearly all of it is being contacted across one side and there's too much force to spread! It's also supposed to link with our armor, but that requires contact!"

Another ten seconds passed. The tiny dot bloomed into a sphere with elevating contours and ridges. The horizon started to rise up around the slug like a bug-catching net, and the sun began to shrink and fatten.

"You still have your shield!" The pavise knight yelled, craning his head to give Hiecro a curious look. A look filled with apprehension...and something else. A hint of calculation. "Can you do something for if the sphere doesn't slow us down when it sheds?"

"I don't know!" Hiecro yelled back angrily. "Don't get any stupid ideas! Even if I survived and we made a ring, we'd still be spinning..." Her eyes wildly glanced about. "...too fuckin' fast for Mercury godsdamnit! The acceleration would kill us all!"

Another ten seconds had passed. The contoured sphere's edges began to eerily curve upwards and outwards from an unseen space behind the universe. The horizon enveloped the whole of the slug and snapped shut behind them, the iris of space above vanishing and giving way to the whole of the sky. The morning sun was approaching its original shape, though it was still below them for the moment.

@mdk
"Don't need to ring-up before we slow down! Just need to wait until the spin winds down! You there, gearhead!" The male pavise knight turned his head towards Luca. All traces of fear had evaporated, replaced only with a grim kind of desperation. "You could survive the acceleration! Push her into the wall, grab on, and let your feet hang out behind you! Once the walls start to slow down, we can all grab on and ring up..."

"You fucking bastard! You don't know that the slug won't shed our velocity! We're still inside it, that part should still work! It's gravy, not a fucking bungee cord!" Hiecro shouted, fury blooming across her features. "Don't do it gearhead! Even you can't calculate how my bits and pieces would be affected! They could fly back inwards and kill us all!"

A whole twenty seconds passed during the exchange. The rest of the world below bled up from nothingness, the sphere widening out to become a disc with edges obscured in the distance, as it should have been. Below, the world was gaining fine nuance and detail - they were still a little too high up to make out individual buildings, but blotches of organized color and meaningless vague, clustered shapes were beginning to form. There we virtually no clouds in the sky, with the few that were present looking more like small slices of static on a computer screen than anything natural.

@Terminal

Kael continues to do nothing. Apparently these knights weren't the mages responsible for their own magic...they barely had any idea how it worked themselves, and couldn't agree between the two of them. Of course, if his mentor were here, he could do any number of things in this situation...not least be assuredly the one most likely to survive the experience. But the elf ranger wasn't here, which meant that Kael was now at the mercy of someone managing to figure out how to not die, assuming they were in fact in danger of dying, which didn't seem certain either.
Two options then. Either wait in as calm a manner as possible, or...well, Kael wasn't stupid enough to consider any other options, actually.

"... You there, gearhead!" The male pavise knight turned his head towards Luca. All traces of fear had evaporated, replaced only with a grim kind of desperation. "You could survive the acceleration! Push her into the wall, grab on, and let your feet hang out behind you! Once the walls start to slow down, we can all grab on and ring up..."

"You fucking bastard! You don't know that the slug won't shed our velocity! We're still inside it, that part should still work! It's gravy, not a fucking bungee cord!" Hiecro shouted, fury blooming across her features. "Don't do it gearhead!"

Luca started moving as soon as the Pavise knight made it clear what he was asking for. By the time Hiecro voiced her concerns, he was already moving -- in the same slow, calculated manner he had used to brace for impact, which is to say taking his sweet time. He didn't know where it came from, but something was egging him on from within.

" Even you can't calculate how my bits and pieces would be affected! They could fly back inwards and kill us all!"

"We were sent here to suffer, right?" he said, sounding so tart that he surprised himself. No.... that's not me. But he was reaching for Hiecro all the same. She's right, I have no idea what will happen -- I have no idea what this technology is, I have no idea what ANY of this is! But I do know one thing.

"Hang on," he said. He gave Hiecro a look with something deep and meaningful and probably a little bit confusing behind it.

I know me.

He pushed her, and grabbed her by the wrist. He let his feet hang out behind him -- but Hiecro wasn't the one moving. Luca calculated everything as well as he could. He drifted backwards towards the spinning wall, with Hiecro acting as his anchor towards the center of the.... slug, was it? It didn't matter. He did the best he could. If it all worked out, then he'd wind up planting his feet on the revolving shield -- that might reduce the initial friction, or it might cause some spontaneous nuclear explosion. It might slow the rotation of the vessel, or it might splatter his bits all over the compartment like a Bycroff mine in a kindergarten. Oh well. This is all I got, he thought.

Fortune didn't know what he could do to improve the situation he was in; In fact he barely understood what was going on beyond the fact that they were moving at high speeds towards what appeared to be the ground and making contact with it was honestly likely to result in death. He lacked the spark of magic within himself (those boys who did have it were taken at a young age and never seen or heard of again) and he doubted that one could charge the ground to make the impact any better.

Instead he reached under the gap between himself and his breastplate in order to grasp two amulets that he kept there, holding one the first (a small symbol of a shield and spear) tightly as he softly prayed "Myrmidia, please do not allow one of your servants to perish in such a dishonorable manner as this." before grasping at the second talisman (a white dove in flight) and muttered a different prayer softly under his breath. "Shallya, please show your servant mercy and protect those who travel with me from harm."

It wasn't much, but it was all he could do; All one could do in a situation like this was pray and hope the gods were listening.

Andy watched the ticking boy move and follow the instructions of the male slug-driver. Okay, maybe slug-driver wasn't the right term, especially since he didn't seem to be in control anymore, but it was the title he had generously decided to give the man. He still adhered to the order not to move, not just because it was given by people should have experience with this slug. If the Discovery channel had taught him anything, it was that moving in a weightless situation wasn't as easy as those astronauts made it seem and he didn't want to accidentally bump into the wall.

We were sent here to suffer, right?, that was what the man with the knee in his arrow had said as well, that he was sent here to just suffer and he mentioned bets and that 'they' didn't care about the man. He also recalled the thug had mentioned 'they' also didn't care about him. Whoever 'they' were in this case.

He looked at the world below. They would crash there soon if this plan wouldn't work. He closed his eyes for a brief moment. This was definitely not the way he wanted to go, but what could he do? Except for wait for that moment when the wall would slow down so they could ring up. He watched the ticking boy move towards the wall and tried to get ready to move in the right direction so he could grab Hierco or whoever was there before him and form that ring.

Okay. This was terrible.

They were heading downwards, the craft around them spinning frenetically while the ground below was gaining in details and swallowing them as they entered the reality, and Amelie realized that even if everything went fine they’d likely die upon contact with the ground if the laws of physics still worked as they should. Okay. Nothing else to it, then? She’s the magical one. She had the power to potentially stop it. Then, she supposed she had to get to work.

She stretched out her hands to do her magic. Nevermind that her supposed limit in diameter of effect was supposedly two meters. Nevermind that when she created it in a situation like this it shouldn’t be anchored to anything and vanish. Nevermind that she had barely any idea of how these new variables affected her magic and she barely could control her power last time. Nevermind all that. Let’s just do. There’s was no trying here. Her magic wasn’t what she had thought it was, anyway.

Amelie erected her sphere of power and anchored it to herself to prevent it from flying off, and she took in the slug and the other passengers into it. As to prevent their immediate death by slamming into something, she drastically slowed down the speed of their descent and the rotational speed of the slug, by manipulating the objective measure in relation to themselves. The intention was to slow it down enough for it to no longer be lethal to all of them in order to hit the ground softly, eventually. This while also slowing down the rotation to that of a gentle carousel, to ensure impacting it would not injure anyone. All for the sake of saving everyone from a mess she might be partially responsible for.

"We were sent here to suffer, right?" he said, sounding so tart that he surprised himself.

Hiecro's eyes widened, shock plain on her face as she whispered a single word.

"Proxy..."

He pushed her, and grabbed her by the wrist. He let his feet hang out behind him -- but Hiecro wasn't the one moving. Luca calculated everything as well as he could. He drifted backwards towards the spinning wall, with Hiecro acting as his anchor towards the center of the.... slug, was it? It didn't matter. He did the best he could. If it all worked out, then he'd wind up planting his feet on the revolving shield -- that might reduce the initial friction, or it might cause some spontaneous nuclear explosion. It might slow the rotation of the vessel, or it might splatter his bits all over the compartment like a Bycroff mine in a kindergarten.

His shoes made contact with the invisible spinning wall first, and it was then that Luca was shown just how awful an idea this was. Without appreciably affecting his own momentum or trajectory, the invisible walls tore the soles straight from his shoes as though they were damp tissue paper, the rubbery mass proceeding to disintegrate and scatter across the interior of the sphere as little wisps of what looked like chewn-on off-color gum.

Then his actual feet hit the invisible spinning wall, rewarding him with but a split instant of pain and the realization that he was going to die. The flesh along the bottom of his feet was ground into a liquefied visceral paste instantly, and the moment his momentum carried something a touch more durable than mere flesh into the wall, his entire body was rocked by a massive force that instantly spun him head-over-heels, pinwheeling him just like the pavise had been. His actual trajectory did not change though - so they next thing to make contact with the invisible spinning wall was his head, roughly face-first.

117A9 Luca died then and there as the entirety of his head exploded in a stringy mess of gore entwining mechanical components, most of which were instantaneously broken apart, chipped, or shattered from their own impacts with the wall - right before they hit the invisible wall a second time and were flung out into the slug's interior. Thankfully, most of them immediately collided with the fully armored Hiecro - and completely stopped in place to float listlessly in the air, the whole of their velocity robbed. Hiecro herself, aside from her looked of dazed confusion, was utterly unharmed - though it did appear that the impacts had affected her trajectory somewhat, as she was now drifting back towards the center of the slug's interior.

The remainder of the metallic parts shot right past the passengers without hitting any of them, largely thanks to Hiecro having acted as a shield for most of them. They hit the internal wall again, and this time most of them were caught and adhered to it by the centrifugal force keeping the pavise in place and started to orbit the passengers along with it. A few, however, rebounded and shot off in new directions with additional velocity. The outer boundaries of the slug became filled with bits of flying shrapnel and metal, soundlessly impacting the unseen barrier around them all and then tearing through space with an audible sound akin to a razor slicing through air. Every few moments, one would bounce off at a particularly odd angle and shoot through the space the passengers occupied, with three near misses occurring in the first five seconds.

Instead he reached under the gap between himself and his breastplate in order to grasp two amulets that he kept there, holding one the first (a small symbol of a shield and spear) tightly as he softly prayed "Myrmidia, please do not allow one of your servants to perish in such a dishonorable manner as this." before grasping at the second talisman (a white dove in flight) and muttered a different prayer softly under his breath. "Shallya, please show your servant mercy and protect those who travel with me from harm."

@Bright_Ops
Fortune was struck by an epiphany.

Not everyone could be saved.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl for him as a piece of metal drifted in front of his visor, doubtlessly careening through the slug faster than his eyes would normally have been able to follow. For that split instant of time though, he could see every edge and detail of the piece of metal as it flew straight past him. He could even tell where it was headed.

Amelie erected her sphere of power and anchored it to herself to prevent it from flying off, and she took in the slug and the other passengers into it. As to prevent their immediate death by slamming into something, she drastically slowed down the speed of their descent and the rotational speed of the slug, by manipulating the objective measure in relation to themselves. The intention was to slow it down enough for it to no longer be lethal to all of them in order to hit the ground softly, eventually. This while also slowing down the rotation to that of a gentle carousel, to ensure impacting it would not injure anyone.

As the sphere was erected, Amelie discovered several complications. The slug they were all traveling in appeared to be some convergence of multiple, layered, spatial forces akin to her own abilities. The invisible walls carrying the pavise shield around the interior, the ghastly remains of the bird the slug had collided with, and now Luca's mortal remains - each of them was bending space and time in a particular way. The relative velocity of the slug was actually incredibly slow. It was moving no faster than a leisurely pace. However, the walls were contorting space in such a way that its velocity relative to everything outside the affected area was super-sonic.

That was both bad and good. On one hand, it meant she did not have to worry about the slug's velocity. The moment it hit the ground, assuming the fields fell apart, the passengers would hit the ground with all the force of having missed the last step on a staircase. Hiecro had apparently known what she was talking about.

On the other hand, the interior of the slug was quickly filling to the brim with death, and if she could not find a way to slow down the spinning of the interior wall then they all might die from the shrapnel being thrown around anyway. That would be difficult though - it already appeared to be slowing down somewhat, and the speed of its rotation was apparently linked somehow to the external distortion of space. If she slowed it down now it might leave the slug to start falling at terminal velocity in regular space. Or it might cause the slug to vanished entirely somehow. Just to complicate things further, the interior wall's rotation was being affected by the movement of the layered walls between it and the exterior wall, meaning that even if she tried to slow it down, the other walls would keep it at a relatively stable velocity. So in order to slow the whole slug down, she would need to slow all of the layers of the slug at once, according to their different relative velocities. Which would be tricky, as they were not even actual objects but some strange ephemeral force tha-

Amelie never even saw the piece of metal that flew straight past Fortune's head before it shot straight through hers, exiting the back of her skull and causing a spray of hair, torn skin, shattered bone fragments, gray matter, and visceral fluid to surge out, most of it making contact with the interior wall and starting to create a wet, fluid cascade of gore-soaked debris continuously rebounding and spinning around the passengers.

Fortune's own perspective was still crawling along, slowly. As if time itself had deigned to show him the finer details of curious moments like this one. He had been forced to watch as the ballistic shard of metal had torn through the air and impacted Amelie's head.

The epiphany came to him again. Not everyone could be saved. Nearly everyone who remained within the damned, invisible carriage could be saved by the grace of his faith. Nearly. He was then burdened with a singularly divine decision. It was his alone to make.

One of the remaining passengers could not be saved. All but one of the remaining passengers would live.

Who would he permit to die?

Morr had been presented with two more souls to watch over and protect.

Death and hardship were a day to day part of life and while Fortune felt a large degree of regret at the loss of the beautiful maiden Amelie, he had lost people he had been far closer to in more brutal, drawn out ways; Shallya had at least ensured that her death had been quick. He hadn't been sure what the other guy had been trying to do... but it was clear that it had absolutely failed... or been successful if his intention had been to kill himself in a stupid fashion. It was too late to ask him now...

It was hard to say how he knew it, but there was a moment that seemed to last forever where Fortune felt the weight of the world on his shoulders and was presented with a choice; To decide who lived and who died. Someone had to die...

He decided on the female knight that had taken delight in executing the helpless and tried to kill Amelie earlier; If her own gods refused to protect her for her dishonorable behavior, that was on her and no one else. The choice made, he closed his eyes and continued to pray.

@Terminal

Donny had curled up his side, covering his head with his arms like how children are taught to position themselves during an earthquake. No witty tricks now, only waiting out the storm as best he could. The fancy armor wouldn't protect them, and neither would trying to escape. Donny had a vague idea that perspective could influence reality around here, but he was most likely incapable of utilizing the advantage properly. Donny was practical to a fault, and as such his ability to force himself to believe the impossible was virtually nonexistent, he had to see it first. Even he was aware of this, and this exact meta-awareness was what kept him from being able to use said reality warping perspectives, because he'd know he knew he was using them. He could trick others, but he couldn't trick himself. He was too tricky for himself. At least, that's what he figured, and because he figured that it-...

Donny found himself in the grip of a headache, suddenly. He was probably going to die any second, and to top it all off he had a migraine.

"Fawk mah life."

Andy stared at the mechanical boy as it became obvious going to the wall himself hadn't been the best of ideas. A piece whizzed past him and he paled. That could have been him. Just a moment later Amelie's head seemed to explode as blood, bone and brain exited her head. He closed his eyes for a moment, he didn't have to be a doctor to know that was instant death.

It wouldn't be long now and he took in a deep breath, followed by a slow exhale. Was he ready for the impact? Not at all, but if it had to happen he'd rather have it happen sooner than later.

He decided on the female knight that had taken delight in executing the helpless and tried to kill Amelie earlier; If her own gods refused to protect her for her dishonorable behavior, that was on her and no one else. The choice made, he closed his eyes and continued to pray.

"That fucking gearhead was a proxy!" Hiecro exclaimed, eyes wide in shock, her voice barely audible over the sound of metal shearing through the air, one piece of shrapnel impacting against her armor and flattening itself in its futile effort to continue in the direction it had been going. Hiecro turned her head to look at Donny and gave him a cross look. "They said he was with you, fucker. Is that how it is? That why you've been murdering every-"

There was a sudden lurch in all of the passengers' stomachs at the same time as their ears popped. The details of the city below exploded into focus as the slug continued to descend, individual buildings unstretching and gaining sharp relief to accompany their decompressing edges and corners. Directly below them was wide, raised platform that looked to be made of concrete, painted with yellow lines and ringed by red, domed lights. Clearly a landing pad of some sort. The slug's velocity had slowed down tremendously, and thankfully it appeared that what Hiecro had insisted earlier was true. As the invisible sphere of force began to slow, its occupants slowed along with it despite being suspended within its interior.

At least, most of the passengers. Ironically, the only person not to slow along with the sphere and the other passengers was the very individual who had declared it would happen. With a gasp as the wind and words were knocked out of her, Hiecro seemingly flew straight up into the slug's roof - and with a curious scraping noise like sandpaper wearing against stone tiles, flakes of her armor began to pour from her frame like a cloud of cinders, each one visibly glowing with heat. The next moment, Hiecro was gone - the inner wall's rapid rotation adhering her to its surface with centrifugal force, reducing her form to a blurred, black, humanoid form that was rapidly crumpling in on itself as a mist of powdered, superheated ceramic flakes began to circulate around the edges of the slug's interior.

A few scant moments later, the flying pieces of shrapnel, bone, and the cascade of grisly charnel all lost their momentum, as though the invisible spinning wall was no longer spinning so violently. The crumpled armor that had contained Hiecro - now so warped and twisted that there was no doubt she had not survived, was dribbling gore from every small crack in the plate and seeping through the surviving chainmail as it eerily began to slow. Like a rushing rapid, the various debris - organic and not - rolled and dribbled to the bottom of the sphere, leaving only Hiecro's body to continue being swung about the slug's equator like a stone in a sling.

The slug slammed straight down onto the landing pad, unleashing a concussive shockwave of force akin to the one that had been produced when Hiecro and her partner had first landed by the remains of the limousine, flinging out a cloud of embers and grisly rain in every direction. The debris clattered, slapped, smacked, and splattered against the concrete, leaving the passengers to collapse atop it all along with Luca's decapitated chassis and Amelie's lobotomized corpse.

Hiecro's body, though, was flung out from them just as the wall of force that had been suspending it vanished, the twisted, wracked coffin soaring out through the air like a blade. The landing pad was situated in the middle of a wide, grassy field - distant buildings brought into immediate focus while the intervening space was compressed in upon itself, reducing so much turf and grass into an incomprehensible pea-green line of mess drawn in a rough circle around the landing zone. There was a single cobblestone path leading away from the landing site, where four individuals dressed in formal suits were standing in anticipation around a single, hunched figure ensconced in a wheel-chair and towing an I.V. drip. Directly behind them past the influence of the compressed space was the soaring front facade of the New Nemea School of Engineering, the details of the structure hopelessly mashed together until it resembled nothing more than a wall of chaotically intermingled gothic stonework, including gargoyles merged halfway into the sides of buttresses and further engulfed by elaborate archways. In every other direction, a blurred chainlink fence had been ensnared in the distant structures of residences and streets that surrounded the landing area. The only firm detail that could be discerned was in the relatively small patch of space immediately surrounding the passengers, with a small finger of wavering detail drawn across the air and ground extending out to encompass their welcoming committee.

They received far more than they had bargained for when Hiecro's twisted corpse, all wrapped in her malformed armor, twisted through the air like some hideous insect. One of the flattened legs cleanly decapitated the man standing to the wheelchair's right, while the bulk of its mass slammed into the unfortunate bystander who had been standing just beside him, toppling them to the ground with a shout of dismay as the headless corpse crumpled to its feet, blood briefly spraying in every direction before turning to a gurgling dribble.

The man in the wheelchair looked between the jumbled mess on the landing pad and the collapsed heap of the fallen men entangled with Heicro's remains to his right in a mixture of shock and horror. He was an elderly individual who had the relative fortune of having kept most of his shock-white hair, keeping it slicked back in a wavy mane. He wore a modest, spark-like beard that looked to have only recently grown in, covering lips that were so red and wet it was as though blood was dribbling from them. His left eyelid hung in a peculiar fashion, as though paralyzed, atop a permanently quirked left cheekbone. He wore a plain button white-shirt, with a jungle of tubing and plastic braces running through it, connecting the man to the I.V. drip and running to more discrete areas along his wheelchair. The man's upper chest was wholly exposed, revealing a gleaming patch of silver running like a jagged scar down from the man's right shoulder and across his collarbone before blooming like a flower in the center of his chest.

"What is happening?!?" He cried out, his voice pained and filled with shock. His eyes were wide, but had an unfocused look to them that suggested them were always that way. "Wilkins, Berter, are you two alright? What is going on? What is that thing - get it away..."

@Cruallassar@Doc Doctor@Holmishire@WiseDragonGirl

Ariett stumbled onto the landing pad, eyes flickering open only to be faced with a scene far more gruesome than that which Donny had priorly left behind. She quickly averted her gzae skyward, but then slowly forced herself to look back.

Once the vessel had started spinning wildly and people had started dying again, she had been quick to close her eyes and curl up in a ball, hoping that she would not be next, listening in horror to the shrapnel flitting about them.

Three more dead, children among them.

There were two ways to rationalize such extreme flirtations with death. The first, and most rational one, is to realize one's own mortality, and that death could strike at any moment. The second, perhaps misguided path, is to focus on one's own survival against all odds, and to infer from that a blessing of luck and safety not granted to the common man.

As Ariett's eyes swept their surroundings, hollow and numb, it was the latter which had rooted itself into her subconscious.

The small woman stepped towards the suited men, her legs weak and uncertain at first but quickly stiffening. Upon reaching them, she heaved Hiecro's body of the man still gifted with the attachment of his head. Without turning her eyes from the prone man as she checked that he was alive, she addressed the man in the wheelchair, who appeared to be the leader of the five—now four. "I don't know what twisted world you've dragged us into, but a lot of people died to get us here, your man included. So I beg of you, please, just tell us what we need to do to get out of here." Though monotone at first, her words were filled with anger by the time she fell silent.

That... was unpleasant to say the least. Andy slowly got up from the pile of debris and dusted himself off. From the looks of it there weren't any additional fatalities, no limbs in weird angles, no gaping wounds. He looked at the deceased passengers as he plucked a piece of metal from his hair, but soon looked around so he could see where Hierco had ended up. Hierco's end had been a gruesome one, he had never witnessed anything like that before. The sight of blood didn't bother him, but even thinking back to it had a nauseating effect.

With everyone safely on the ground the slug wouldn't be able to claim any more lives. More then anything he felt relieved, it was over and he had survived. Death, as terrible as it was, was a part of life he was familiar with. While he felt sorry for the people that had died, even though he barely knew them, he didn't linger over their deaths. The main priority now was to make sure the pile of bodies wouldn't grow. And that meant he had to focus on the living.

He noticed how one of the passengers walked towards the group of men and after a final check to see if his help really wasn't needed here, he followed her. The weak and uncertain steps caught his attention and he wanted to be ready to help her, but as the steps grew more confident he decided she probably wasn't hurt after all. By the time he reached her she had already heaved Hierco's body away from the unfortunate man it had collided with. That was impressive. He looked at the man she helped as he listened to her words, he was ready to step in when needed.

"I'm kinda wondering the same thing," he said with a calm voice right after Ariett fell silent, frowning at the bodyless head. "Things went bad pretty much from the beginning and it has been going downhill ever since," he added and he looked at the man in the wheelchair, noticing the eyelid, the drip and the tubes. "Are you the one who called for us?"

It was over. His feet were back on solid ground and... whatever it was that they had been transported on had claimed all the lives that it was going to. While most people would have felt bad for picking someone to die in the manner that he had done so, Fortune didn't feel that sense of guilt; Sure he wasn't exactly thrilled about what appeared to be the extremely brutal manner in which the female thug in armor had met her end, but she had spat on everything that she was meant to represent and tried to murder innocent people.

The people her corpse landed on... that he actually felt bad for, but he was beaten to offering his assistance before he could offer it. Without much in the way of words, he walked forwards to join the rest of the group as he waited to hear who the man in the wheelchair was... all the while wondering what was going to happen next.