Flight of the Brightsmile

[Dvyniai]

What. What the fuck.

Vessyr stared blankly up at the sky, where he could see the swirling, molten red and dark grey ash clouds erupting from the still ejactulating volcano, through the armpit of one of the many clones that had served as their lifeboat.

Never, in his millenia, had he experienced anything like what had just happened. He had fought in the Great War with the Elves, and the Great War of Elves (two very different things); he had killed many creatures with his bare hands, creatures he didn't even have names for; he had kissed a goat. But the sheer absurdity, the complete pandemonium… and the fucking sword.

As soon as he finished this godsforsaken job and hitched a ride from the nearest mode of transportation, he was finding whichever superior had assigned him this case and he was gutting them from crotch to tits.

"Eeys. Eeys," he mumbled in his mother tongue. "Eeys o' ass."

It had been going so pleasantly. He had the drunkard had found a window to watch the volcano, without anyone else around, and had just been about to tell him that he did, in fact, know a bit about magic and perhaps he could help him out? when they were interrupted by the entrance of two more passengers. One of them had a skull painted on his face, not unlike Zazzy himself and the other was a young woman trying to sell him a sword. (A sword Vess recognized but that was neither here nor there.)

And that's when things went to shit.

"Izzit just me or does it look like we're getting a bit too close to all this?"

"Ye-" Vess started to respond before the ship rocked hard, and what looked like a ship crashed through the ceiling impaling the second skull-man, who went berserk. Zazzy threw himself over Vess in an attempt to protect him, which he found highly ironic.

He very much did not want to grab that sword, thank you. But as the captain arrived, with a young girl, two time travelers in tow and a strange woman with a stick up her ass, things got increasingly chaotic. 'Fucking hell,' he thought wildly, wiping blood and viscera from his eyes. He grabbed the sword.

Just in time to attempt to ward off the strange clone-women, only they didn't back off from his very sharp, and mildly cursed weapon, instead quickly surrounding the group in some sort of strange mesh of bodies and then -

He ended up here. Staring up at the sky, through one of the Karen's armpits.

And he was just - he was going to lay here for a while. Even though he was pressed up against way too many breasts for his liking, and he was pretty sure that he had been impaled on the sword during the fall.

It was fine. It was all fine. He just needed a breather.

Easy mission, his ass.

Through his little window, a figure came into view, looming with long, monstrous features and - oh wait, it was that fucking girl. He watched her lug what must have been masks of some sort, across the ground, for a few minutes before he gathered the strength to push the bodies off of him and push to his knees.

He was absolutely covered in blood (the blood that was his own, shimmered gold when the light caught it right) and guts, and - yep, that was a sword sticking out of his abdomen. He let out a long-suffering sigh. What was it the youth said, nowadays?

Oh yeah. Fuck his life.​

 

[AshenAngel]

Azazel 'Zazzy' Croft​

Zazzy slowly comes around, his throat and lungs feeling raw and his ears ringing. There was weight pressing down on him, adding to his struggle to get in a decent breath of air. His movements felt sluggish, and it took way too much effort to convince his limbs to work in order to pry himself out of the heap of dead bodies. Once he's free, he simply lays there, giving his body the time it needs to mourn the fact that he still wasn't dead yet. The ash and small pieces of debris around him floated lightly, drifting around him.

The ringing slowly fades away. After a good minute he pushes himself up, taking in his surroundings. The various items drop to the ground as he focuses on the pipsqueak in a gas mask. Or more accurately the fact that she had more of them. He really didn't like masks, considering how the last time he put one on went. He undoes his tie and tosses the ruined fabric to the side. "You hurt, kid?" He asks before his brain puts together the fact that she was already way better off than he was considering she'd gotten up and grabbed the gear while his sorry ass was still sitting on a heap of dead bodies. "Did ya find anyone else?"

He looks around again to see if anyone else made it. There was another clone body shifting and tumbling to ground. He carefully gets up, the bodies he was on making his so-so sense of balance that much worse. A few stumbles here and there, but he was keeping it together. That was until he processed the fact that the bloody mess he was looking at was in fact the smarmy blond. His exasperation finally breaks through. "... When I said grab the sword, I didn't mean like that. How are you even alive?"

His thoughts scrambled into a rat race of how to help a human shish kebab followed shortly by this guy wasn't exactly human. He'd heard of angel's glow before but that shit happened a lot later and was supposed to be blue. The ash and pieces of debris floated around him once again.​

 

[Dvyniai]

"... When I said grab the sword, I didn't mean like that. How are you even alive?"

Vess huffed out a laugh, turning his head to find Zazzy, wobbling, but on his feet a bit behind him. Ah, good. "Glad you're alive too, Zazzy," he responded with a half-hearted smirk. Although he was glad for an entirely different reason.

He pushed himself to his feet with a groan. While the wound wasn't going to kill him, it still hurt like a bitch. "It's not iron," he said as an answer to the drunkard's question. Then with a wink, he grabbed the hilt and pulled it from his stomach.

"Hmm." Vess glanced down at his abdomen. Immediately, the hole had begun to patch itself. "Can't really pass off as a human any longer, no?" he asked, giving up on the generic "human" accent he had been sporting previously and dissolving into his natural one. He was fed up with the charade anyways, especially after all that had happened.

He turned to face Zazzy, shifting the sword in his grip expertly. While he may have been reluctant to pick it up initially (because it was fucking cursed) he figured he may as well use it now. Ironic too, considering Zazzy had been the one to tell him to pick it up.

"You're one funny motherfucker," Vess conceded, picking his way out of the pile of clone bodies before he could stalk closer. He eyed the objects that began to float around Zazzy carefully.

For the moment, he ignored the child. He would deal with her later. Same with the captain, if he was even still alive. "I actually quite enjoyed your company. And this definitely wasn't a boring job. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you now, Azazel Croft."​

 

[Asmodeus]

And if that wasn't exciting enough...


A set of fangs, golden-hued and stretched wide in a scream, appeared next to Zazzy and Vess. Perhaps it was an image from a malfunctioning projector... or the last illusion cast by a dying wizard.

Then the symbol vanished, and the final pile of compacted, crushed and cremated Karen clone corpses subsided. Like a scuba diver who had just escaped a shark attack (exactly like that), Caelcrust jolted upright among a mound of bloody flesh. The eight foot tall concierge looked around before rising. His indigo cloak resumed its pyramid-shaped fit, and concealed all sense of his anatomy.

"I am vexed," he murmured, casting his single eye across the burning wreckage of the Brightsmile. "This is vexing." He noted how the wreckage looked like a well-stuff sandwich clutched in the hand of an arm-wrestling champion (exactly like that).

He turned to see the cow-eyed blond, pulling a sword from his belly, and the skull-faced octopus-apologist. Also, the little girl was there (the one the lizard woman had cruelly entrusted to him), and thankfully her hideous face had been covered by one of the onboard respirators.

And.... that was it... There was no one else hauling themselves from the wreckage. The impact had reduced everything and everyone to shards... unless they were encased in a crash-bag of health inspectors. It was a terrible way to survive...

"Zazzy," he said while drifting through the wreckage (or at least appearing to drift, since his legs were covered by his cloak), "If the saboteur doesn't kill you, please keep an eye out for pyroclastic flows. They look like clouds, at ground level, and kill everything. Much like dire-flumphs."

He picked up Eolanthe and put her atop a barstool - the only barstool that had survived the crash and now stood like a petrified giraffe among the ashes. "Don't drink all the oxygen." Then he continued onwards, and started digging through a specific part of the rubble near the prow of the ship. It appeared to be the remains of the Brightsmile's bridge, where countless poorly-characterized skeletons were strewn.

"Riya, this is vexing," he told the coffee pot which he eventually pulled from the debris. He held up the strange glass vessel, and shook it, making the odd lump of cake-like material inside it rattle. The lump reacted to his presence, and formed into a face, the generic ooze assuming colour and form inside the confines of the coffee pot.

"This wasn't me, Crusty," the face told him. "All the readings spiked right before the eruption. If I hadn't been tracking time portals and arguing with the Starcutter, I might've been more prepared. There was just too much happening at once."

"Is it the Koberax? Has it regenerated?"

The cake-face inside the coffee pot turned a different shade, flickering. "Impossible to say. But there was a cultist onboard, praying to it."

"Oh yes. The floating one. We shot him."

"I'm not exactly designed for prayer-detection, Crusty. But if I were a gambling gal, I'd say there's some bad juju in these mountains. Also, lava."

Caelcrust formed a wavy question mark over his head, and narrowed his eye. Then he rose up and turned to see Eolanthe watching him. He shook the coffee pot violently, and the face of Riya dissolved back into an inert lump of material. The captain then tucked the pot away inside his cloak pocket, and rejoined the others.

"This crash site will soon be invaded. Either by the orcs, or by the pyroclastic flows. We cannot negotiate with either." He noticed that Vess and Zazzy were still eyeing one another.

Oh yes, the death threat. That hadn't been resolved yet.

The captain steepled his fingers together, and watched the encounter play out. Whoever killed the other, he would befriend them... and make them babysit Eolanthe.

 

[AshenAngel]

Azazel 'Zazzy' Croft​

Azazel lets out a small laugh, relaxing with Vess' easy going attitude about this. Either shock, or again the fact that he wasn't human, and that answered itself all on its own. However, the shift in accent as all this was sorted out had begun to set off the warning bells in his head. "No, I suppose you can't, but I don't really get what the acting was for anyways. They let a bunch of octopus revolutionaries run the aft-pub, being human and non-criminal wasn't exactly a requirement to be onboard."

This was shaping up to be one big old mess. His tie was ruined, and judging by the subtle personality shift in Vess this really was not turning out the way anyone at all was hoping. On the bright side, there was the captain, alive and well enough. He'd punch the shit out of him later. "Right, I'll keep that in mind after this. And for the record he's a cockroach, not a fucking sabo-whatever." He calls over at Caelcrust with a slightly peeved tone, trying the word out but hitting his fuck-it point halfway through.

The floating material wavers with his growing focus on Vess. "I try my best." He flashes a little grin at the compliment. "Now, whoever gave you this job must really not like you that much. Ya could've saved us both some time if you gave it a shot before everything went to shit. But, here we are, both alive through excessive means. Now, that's funny."

He snags his flask out of the air before it falls and takes a swig. He needed to sew a damn button on that pocket or something. He sizes up the blond and the sword. "Oh, what are you gonna do, stab me? Give it your best shot and try not to tear the fabric too much, it'll be a bitch to sew up later." He spreads his arms in a welcoming gesture, no signs of aggression, just a pure, done with this shit note to his voice as he offered a clear opening. "You can give it your best shot now, but afterwards we've got important things to deal with."​

 

[Asmodeus]

In the tense silence that followed, Caelcrust reached out and gave a little shove to the skeletal barstool that Eolanthe sat on.

Better she not witness the fey-cockroach fellow battle the drunken human fellow (was Zazzy human? He would have to consult the logs).

Eolanthe drifted in a slow circle, and ended up facing the gory mound of obliterated health inspectors instead.

Much more suitable.

Caelcrust then formed a steady horizontal line over his head while watching Zazzy and Vess.

"I suppose I'll keep an eye out for the pyroclastic flows."

A captain's work is never done.

 

[Dvyniai]

He - he had a point. About the accent. Which was vexing. Vess was vexed.

His gaze briefly flicked to the captain as he passed, considering stabbing him too. Azazel came first though.

"Cockroach?" He muttered with a growing scowl, unsure if he was amused by the comparison or further vexed.

Zazzy seemed remarkably blase over the fact someone was trying to kill him. It threw Vess off. He was used to begging, and panicked death threats. Not - whatever this was. He squinted, turning the sword in his hand. "Yes, well, I plan on gutting them after I get my gold for killing you."

"Stab you? You think that's the worst I can do with this?" he asked, bewildered. He lifted it a bit for emphasis. It wasn't a fucking knife, he could cut Zazzy's head off with this, he could - whatever it didn't matter.

Because he was fucking done with this situation. Plus his arm was getting a little tired from holding the damn thing. It had been a long time since he had last trained with a sword.

If Vess had actually stopped to think about it, he would have realized, based off of Zazzy's words, how shitty of an idea this was. But as it stood, he was tired, covered in blood, and just wanted to finish his job and leave.

So instead of questioning the man further, he finished the distance between them, and in one smooth motion, ran the sword through Azazel's stomach.​

 

[AshenAngel]

Azazel 'Zazzy' Croft​

Azazel just watches Vess' reactions, shrugging when questions went his way. After all, Vess wasn't looking for answers. He was just doing his job. He holds still as Vess comes along to land his blow.

After all, if he moved then there'd probably be a larger area of fabric that needed to get stitched up and Zazzy sucked at sewing.

He curses softly when he feels the blade run through him, and his legs nearly buckle from it. "N-Nah, I think the worst you could have done with t-this is shove it up my ass. Pretty sure this thing's a dud." His voice is a bit rough, to be expected of a man that has become a shish-kebab, but he has a small grin on his face.

He grabs the hilt of the sword with one hand in a tight grip, and forcibly shoves Vess back with the other, making some space. "There was your one shot. Now, like I said, we've got more important shit to deal with." He says more clearly. He winces as he removes the sword, a ragged breath escaping him as he does so. The wound closes itself with a dark purple substance that slowly fades into his skin tone.

He tosses the sword aside a little ways away. "Our next move is getting out of here, right?" He asks Caelcrust, not exactly thrilled at the present company, but what could you do?​

 

[Asmodeus]

A golden M-shape (the jagged kind, not arched in any way) formed over Caelcrust's head.

"Why is everyone immune to swords?"

He turned to Eolanthe, and nudged her barstool on another half-circle, bringing her back into the conversation. "Are you immune to swords?"

The volcano (which was also immune to swords) then did this:

The golden 'M' broke into three exclamation marks, and Caelcrust pointed uphill (or as uphill as you can when the hill is rapidly losing its up). "Pyroclastic flow. I told you this would happen. We've wasted precious time."

The cloud raced down from the burning caldera, reaching velocities of 400mph as it incinerated trees and coated all things in bone-grey annihilation. It would reach the crash site in minutes...

"We should find a shelter. Made of rock."

He started off downhill, dragging Eolanthe along on her barstool. Then he paused and looked back at Zazzy and Vess, suspiciously.

"You're both immune to pyroclastic flows, aren't you?"

 

[Zarko Straadi]

The pile of bodies started to move. No, not the bodies, someone under them, who must still be alive. The blonde-haired man! No, wait, apparently he mustn't still be alive, what with a faintly-glowing sword transfixed through his body. A necromatically-charged revenant then, as the Adventurer had been in her last moments.

"I'm very sorry sir, but I think it is time to let that body go--" Normally, Eolanthe did not attempt to counsel the dead, even if the ones that loitered tended to get annoying after awhile, losing their minds and floating repeatedly down hallways and such. However, by dint of clinging to flesh somehow, this one was sure to start to stink, then to rot, then to get the local gendarmerie, torch-wielding mobs, or perhaps 'holy' enforcers of some brand or another all in a bother, and then they might go about torturing and killing random harmless old women for being 'witches.'

But before she could complete her argument for why it was perfectly reasonable for the blond man's spirit to release its attachments to life (or whatever a dead person was supposed to do, Eolanthe did not quite know for sure) and sail off for the Undiscovered Country, another voice spoke.

"You hurt, kid?" It was the man with whom the Blonde Dandy had engaged in the fake brawl before everything turned to excrement. "Did ya find anyone else?"

"Well..." Generally, attempts to talk to anyone else, especially grownups, about her encounters with the dead had never gone well. And this was an unusual encounter, even by her standards. There was no time for her to find a way to explain the situation in small, easily-understandable words before Mr. Skull-Face spotted his faux opponent.

"... When I said grab the sword, I didn't mean like that. How are you even alive?"

"Wait...he's alive?" Eolanthe said. "Well, I suppose that might explain a few things, but...how are you even alive?" The Blonde Dandy ignored her. Instead, with remarkably modest expressions of displeasure, he drew the sword out of his body and raised it into a fencer's guard.

Then he spoke to Mr. Skull-Face, whom he referred to as 'Zazzy' or 'Azazel Croft,' in the usual sort of confident banter one might expect in the prelude to a swordfight. Eolanthe blinked in surprise when he said one particular multisyllabic word. She would be punished quite severely for using said word. In fact she had been when she'd employed it some time ago after overhearing it (by accident, as the Adult who'd said it had not known she was within earshot). It had seemed to be a most potent insult, and thus capable of few better uses than as a weapon against one Tobias Jacobson, a truly unpleasant boy who liked to pull her hair and attempt to shove slimy amphibians down the neck of her dress.

Children were expected to live to a higher standard than Adults could, even though they usually tried when children were present. But not the Blonde Dandy, apparently. Then he went and announced his intention to kill Mr. Croft! Because of course grownups could not be expected to limit themselves to shoving slimy amphibians down the necks of one another's clothing.

Before Eolanthe could even decide on the merits of wagging a finger and telling the boys to stop fighting (during recess, it was regularly necessary for someone to tell boys to stop fighting; really, they were only marginally more sane than grownups, so perhaps it ought to be girls who were in charge of everything), the Captain emerged in rather dramatic fashion and started talking to Zazzy about 'pyroclastic flows.' He really did come through with the best words! She might just forgive him for the 'dectriennial' thing. Pyroclastic! Added to vocabulary inventory! However, as she listened to the Captain's explanation, it seemed that a 'pyroclastic flow' was not a thing to encounter up close.

The most expeditious possible departure seemed to be in order, but before Eolanthe could come up with a plan beyond wondering if the Brightsmile might have had lifeboats which, being lifeboats for an airship, ought to be able to fly, an iron grip seized her and planted her on a bar stool that was somehow virtually the only thing standing.

"Don't drink all the oxygen," the Captain's alien voice snapped.

"But--" Ignoring her attempt to protest, the Captain's towering form plowed onward, perhaps not so much unlike one of these 'pyroclastic flows' he had been on about. She had brought the extra masks to share, though her fellow survivors seemed to have neither interest in nor need for them. So why shouldn't she drink up all the oxygen then? But now the Captain was talking to a glass coffeepot--no, a pretty genie-lady in a glass coffeepot! If I set her free, could she give me three wishes? Eolanthe wondered.

The Captain's baleful cyclops gaze fixed upon her, and as if he had some intuition about her interest in the genie-lady, he shook the vessel and stowed it.

For his part, Mr. Croft did not choose to respond logically to the Captain's warnings about pyroclastic flows or Orc invasions. Instead, he riposted against the Blonde Dandy (or Cockroach, depending on one's viewpoint) with cocky taunts of his own. Which, Eolanthe supposed, might have been proper duelling etiquette, though it didn't seem sensible either in their current situation or in the absence of ability to riposte with a sword.

But at least the Captain was there now to tell the boys to stop fighting, so they could all get on with attending to matters of survival. Except...he didn't. Instead, he imparted a modest rotation to her barstool, to aim her at the bloody mound of dead Karens. Which was really quite gross, enough to make her turn around to see if the two men were seriously going to engage in a most poorly-timed combat, even though that might prove to be rather gross in its own right.

As if to provide her theory about the insanity of adults the most thorough possible confirmation, two things happened: 1) The Captain promised that he would keep an eye out for pyroclastic flows. But he had only one eye to keep, and it seemed to be directed toward the two fighting men. 2) After offering Mr. Croft a reminder that he was not limited to merely stabbing him with the sword (said prospect not seeming to alarm the man) and that he could decapitate him with the blade, the Blonde Dandy did, in fact, merely stab him, when he himself was living proof that his chosen attack might prove unsuccessful. Which, as she had almost expected at this point, it did.

"Why is everyone immune to swords?" the Captain said. Seeing his gilded helm start to turn her way, Eolanthe looked away--but not all the way away, back to the bloodied corpses. Best to just pretend that she had not seen the fight, and prevent herself from being isotoped or otherwise ending up on the receiving-end of unpleasantness from the Captain. But if a duel is too terrible a thing to allow me to see, why is it not too terrible a thing to do, or allow them to do? Eolanthe thought.

That settled it. Eolanthe resolved then and there to find any means possible to avoid growing up. That way lay gibbering madness.

Now, to practical matters: how to get down from this tall, teetering bar stool without falling, for she was on a slope littered with jagged rocks. "Are you immune to swords?" the Captain asked. That just didn't seem like a good question to answer. Say 'yes,' and he just might test that hypothesis. Say 'no,' and she would be the only one here admittedly vulnerable to sharp, pointy things.

She was rescued from the need to answer (if 'rescued' was an applicable term) by a low rumble that she could feel rattling her increasingly precarious perch and vibrating in her chest. And of course thrumming in her ears with increasing volume. The Captain's symbol was exclamation points now, and she turned to see a wall of billowing ash surging down the mountain, right at them!

"We should find a shelter. Made of rock," the Captain said.

"What--kind--of--shel--ter--would--stop--that?!" Eolanthe exclaimed as her bar stool bounced along, towed by the Captain. Then he stopped, and turned to the two men, his symbol switching to an icon of a suspiciously-glowering eye. (Insane. Stopping now, really?)

"You're immune to pyroclastic flows, aren't you?"

"Who caaaaaaares?!" Eolanthe cried. "Does your ship have any lifeboats that can fly?" Anything that could fly would have to be faster than running, and a working lifeboat was surely more likely to find than a convenient and safe rock shelter, wasn't it?

 

[AshenAngel]

Azazel 'Zazzy' Croft​

Azazel looks at Caelcrust with a level of disbelief that he'd never before been able to reach as he asks the small child if she was immune to swords. "This is just turning into a nightmare, isn't it..." He mutters under his breath.

Of course, the volcano served to prove him right. Because why not. He didn't want to end up like that guy that died with his ass stuck in the volcano. He tried very hard to not end up like the people that fall victim to his mockery. He goes running after the captain, and keeps running when he stops. After all, sort of drunk supposed-to-be-dead men have minimal breaking capacity while running downhill.

"I don't know and I don't want to find out!"

He supposed there were alternatives to dying, though realistically he'd still have his ass stuck in a volcano for all eternity, which would really really suck.

He does manage to apply the brakes at the kid's shout, his gaze frantically searching the lower slope for anything that resembled an appropriate shelter without much luck. He'd seen a movie once where they took shelter from an eruption in an abandoned mine, but he wasn't sure if it was possible or if it was movie magic. Feeling the bone deep rumble from the cloud of doom had him doubting it. He glances back at what was left from the Brightsmile to see if there was anything that could be scrambled together. A shitty toboggan would get them down the slope faster than running anyways, though they still wouldn't be going faster than the cloud of doom. "The kid has a point."​

 

[Dvyniai]

Oh, Vess was fucking more than vexed, at this point.

Who had given him this case? Tim? He was going to do much more than gut the fucker when he got his hands on him. He was going to make Tim wish he was never fucking born.

Vess watched in infuriated bewilderment as Zazzy pulled the sword from his stomach, and the wound was sealed with some sort of purple substance, before healing completely as if it had never been there. And then he tossed the sword away.

The whole situation made Vess want to scream in frustration, because what the actual fuck? He was told that it would be an easy case. Sneak on board, kill an ex-military drunk and sneak off. Except here he was, having fallen hundreds of feet after the ship was hit by the very fucking volcano it was supposed to be viewing, and now they were about to be roasted alive or whatever the fuck pyroclastic flows did, by the same fucking volcano. And no one fucking told him the drunk couldn't fucking die. That was sort of important information.

So he let out a scream of frustration, and a long string of curses in fae-lish, as he stomped over to retrieve the sword. If he didn't he knew it would end up embedded in his stomach again later and he'd rather not go through that again. Fucking curse.

Vess actually was immune to pyroclastic flows, but it still wouldn't be a fun experience to get caught in it, he imagined, so he followed them. At the mention of lifeboats, he scoffed, and gestured to Calecrust with the sword. "Did you hear him earlier? There were no lifeboats. Because he's a shitty fucking Captain."

He could probably use magic to help them out somehow, but his pride was hurt and he felt like being a dick so he didn't offer. Yet. He eyed the approaching cloud with a calculating gaze.​

 

[Zarko Straadi]

"No lifeboats?!" Eolanthe said, her voice dripping with incredulity. The Blonde Dandy was giving the Pyroclastic Flow-Cloud of Doom a calculating look, but it was not the sort of look one gave to the rapid approach of certain and potentially agonizing death.

Of cooourrrrrse he would go and be immune to pyroclastic flows! she thought. Well...well...it would be quite dreadful for me to survive to this point being the only one here not immune to everything, only to die now!

"What about...an air dinghy or whatever one might call such a thing? Or...or a repair vessel for checking the ship over and bringing repair crews?" Even as she made the suggestion, she felt the cold grip of fear tighten. It was one thing to expect decent chances of finding one functional lifeboat out of many that the Brightsmile was supposed to have. It was something else entirely to count on finding a working secondary vessel if there was only one to begin with, or perhaps two or three.

Think...think...Someone has to!

"The magno-enturblement net launchers?" she said, turning her attention to the Captain. "You said they would be able to protect the whole ship. If...if one could be made to work even a little, could it protect just us?"

Naturally, Eolanthe had no idea how a magno-enturblement net launcher would work. However, she knew what a net was, and the 'magno-' bit implied magnets, which she rather enjoyed playing with. This in turn implied some sort of force that might be able to shield them if they were able to hide under one of the nets the way one might hide under one's blankets to protect oneself from the depredations of closet-monsters.

 

[Asmodeus]

As the pyroclastic death cloud of agonizing death rushed deathly towards them, the survivors of the Brightsmile decided to get very judgmental about stuff. It was unbecoming.

Caelcrust glared at Zazzy. "No she doesn't."

Caelcrust glared at Vess. "Captains aren't measured by lifeboats."

Caelcrust glared at Eolanthe. "Shut up."

The captain then about-turned in a roundabout way and got about the business of bounding aboundingly towards a nearby section of the crashed ship. It was the size of a stable (for a medium-sized pegasus) and was otherwise a smoking husk nestled on a bed of severed tentacles and mangled clones. Caelcrust was immediately accosted by a family of racoons as he entered through a gouge in one side. Various shrieking, scratching, rummaging and golden exclamations followed as the captain battled his way to a narrow crawlspace inside the hunk-a-hunk of burning junk.

Eolanthe, Vess, and Zazzy remained outside, with the freedom to watch either the rapidly-approaching pyroclastic puff, or the rattling of this hull-section.

Various tools, symbols and racoon fur was eventually ejected from a breach in the top of the wreckage. Then came a sneeze of black smoke. Then there was series of clunks, followed by a whirring sound which reminded them (all of them) of a gnomish jewelsmith being force-fed into a gorgon.

Caelcrust's head (with racoon-scratches) appeared in the gouge once more. He formed an urgent blinking symbol while calling to them from the juddering segment. "I've got the enturbler cranked to fi--OH NO!"

Eolanthe's barstool flew across the crash-site and slammed into Caelcrust, knocking him back inside the fuselage. The stool was followed by various metal fragments that had been floating around Zazzy. Then Vess felt his sword take on a life of its own and start tugging him towards that same wreckage. Forks, railings, food cans, belt-buckles, consoles and wires whipped past them at increasing speed before sticking to the fuselage where Caelcrust was.

A golden symbol... of a frantically beckoning hand... beckoned frantically to them as the hull-section warped and imploded. It was pulling itself into a spherical shape as the magno-enturbler generated a powerful gravitonic field. The crash site was coming together, building an armoured core around Caelcrust's hiding place, shaping and strengthening as the pyroclastic cloud rolled in.

Zazzy was about to get that shitty toboggan he had always dreamed off. But as with most things in life, it would more closely resemble a rusty hamster ball full of racoon shit and regret.

 

[AshenAngel]

Azazel 'Zazzy' Croft​

Azazel really felt bad for Vess, hearing him screaming and what could only be cursing. The poor guy definitely got assigned a job that boiled down to saying go fuck yourself, and he knew how that stung. He looks back at the cloud of doom and Vess, not sure what to do about either. He had admittedly missed that no lifeboats bit and was feeling every bit like the idiot he usually was as the kid spouted out words that probably made a lot more sense to literally anyone except him. He follows the sword gesture back to Captain Triangle, the ever so punchable, just in time to see him run off.

Things started floating around him once again as the raccoon battle kicked off. How did they get there? How did they survive the crash? He knew squirrels could walk off terminal velocity impacts, but was it the same with raccoons? Were the raccoons time travelers, too? How would that work? Eolanthe's stool joined the assortment of things starting to float around him, but he had enough wits about him to snag the child off the wobbling chair before gravity could claim another victim.

Caelcrust reappeared.

Then the stool was no longer innocently floating.

And it crashed into the triangle headed target Captain.

"Did I do that?" He asks, suddenly very worried about his floating issue possibly acting on one of the ten completely non productive ideas bouncing through his skull at Mach 3. He waits for a moment as other things that he'd seen floating around him fly off towards Caelcrust's spot, and becomes aware of the tug of his flask in his pocket. He ushers Eolanthe along to the mess that was in the making, and hesitates just the slightest bit at the idea of going into any sort of confined space. He glances back at Vess and his misbehaving sword, and the cloud of doom, weighing the alternatives briefly.

He steps into the rusty hamster ball of regret and steels himself for the worst. Maybe this time he'd manage to not white out. Just think happy thoughts, like punching Caelcrust as soon as the immediate threat was past.
​

 

[Dvyniai]

Vess would actually be impressed if Caelcrust managed to pull something off. He watched with bewildered curiosity as the captain disappeared, then reappeared. And as he was trying to tell them something, promptly hit by the flying barstool. He let out a startled burst of laughter.

"If you did do that," Vess said to Zazzy. "I woul-" before he could finish though, the sword suddenly jerked in his hand, hard enough he almost fell over attempting to hold on to it.

"Shit," he mumbled, grabbing onto it with both hands as it tugged him haphazardly towards the wreckage that Caelcrust had been working on. Should he let it go? While he didn't care if it went awry and stabbed Zazzy, or even Caelcrust, he could honestly say he was a bit worried for the child.

He glanced around for the girl, then back at the cloud of doom, before finally letting it slip from his fingers.

"Watch it!" he shouted, just to be safe. It hit the side of the steadily growing pile of metal (that almost looked like a hamster ball?) with a heavy clang. A moment later, he was following the others inside.

Crinkling his nose at the smell, Vess shuffled as far into the center as he could get, shying away from metal he couldn't immediately identify.

"This'll really protect us from that death cloud?" he asked, eyeing the walls of their little shelter somewhat nervously. His gaze lingered briefly on Zazzy, who seemed to be having a rough time. He sniffed derisively and looked away. "How long will we be stuck in here?"​

 

[Zarko Straadi]

Eolanthe glared back at the Captain. If one measured Captains not so much by lifeboats, but by the survival rates of their passengers and crew, then this one was faring quite poorly in her expert opinion. Unfortunately he said 'Shut up' before she could explain to him just how his Captaincy could be mathematically quantified.

But at least he bounded (aboundingly) off in a way that suggested he might be about to do something useful. He disappeared into the wreckage and apparently became engaged in a pitched battle with raccoons (because why wouldn't such a thing happen on this voyage?), then started some sort of machinery that sounded distinctly like a gnomish jewelsmith being force-fed into a gorgon.

"Wha?" The stool the Captain had perched her on (and from whence she was presently plotting to remove herself) started floating, which would surely make self-extrication more difficult. But then hands grabbed her and set her on the ground. She looked up at Zazzy and gave him a nod of thanks. With the racket from the enturbler and the fast-approaching cloud of pyroclastic doom, plus the gas mask to muffle her speech, conversation would surely prove impractical.

With the Captain's beckoning, Zazzy's ushering, and her own sincerely felt need for extreme haste, Eolanthe ran for the dubious shelter of the enturbled globe of metal. Inside, she found herself confined within a shell of raccoon droppings and regret. And she did indeed regret trying to tell Mother and Father about the involuntarily co-joined ghosts of gnomish jewelsmith and gorgon in the jewelry shop downstairs (it turned out that force-feeding one to the other was fatal to both), but they had gone into loop and she was the only one who could hear the continuous racket.

But perhaps if she had endured, or found some way to get them on their way to finding out if the Light at the end of the tunnel could remove one from the other, she would not have been on this ill-fated wreck of an airship in the first place.

"This'll really protect us from that death cloud?" the Blonde Dandy asked. It had better, Eolanthe thought, seeing as it is primarily my idea. But if it doesn't, I suppose I'll never know. She shuddered a little at that thought, and stretched out her hands, a gas mask in each, towards the two gentlemen.

Luckily for her, the rigid parts were made of Bakelite rather than metal, otherwise she might have been enturble-splatted to the side of their shelter. As it was, she'd held on to them primarily because they were all she'd had to hold onto. But now at least they (and by extension Eolanthe herself) might prove useful. Less so to the Captain, since she'd only barely been able to carry two (plus the one she wore) with their oxygen tanks. But then, he already had a face-covering helmet, and who even knew what (or if) he breathed?

 

[Asmodeus]

A sigh of relief, was what he breathed. That's all anyone needed to know. Once everyone was inside the rapidly shrinking sphere of scrap metal, Caelcrust formed a thumbs-up sign above his head. He would have used his actual thumb, like a gentleman, were it not currently pinned under the barstool which had collided with it, along with his arm, torso, and head.

...which is to say, the barstool collided with his arm, torso and head... not that a barstool, arm, torso and head collided with his thumb.

Such clarification would have been redundant, were there not a plethora of loose arms, torsos and heads currently rolling around the crash site.

What was the collective noun for cloned body parts? A plurip? Now was not the time to think about such things, especially with the child watching.

And so, pinned to the wall by a magnetized barstool, Caelcrust could only brace for impact while scowling down at Vess. "You ask an annoying amount of questions for a person in a crisis situation. You should be more like Zazzy." He pointed to the man who was currently plotting to punch him in the face. "Impaling one another earlier should have brought you into alignment. And while we're on the subject of alignment, you should--"

What Vess should have done was left unspoken, as the pyroclastic cloud swept across the crash site, swallowing and vapourizing the scattered pieces of the Brightsmile. The enturblement field crackled as a repelling force mounted exponentially. It was like being fired from a cannon, but with less spandex. The twisted ball of wreckage shot across the crash site and bounced down the mountainside ahead of the cloud.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh..." screamed a chimpanzee that was watching from the next mountain over. This was unrelated to current events.

"Ow... ow... ow..." Caelcrust did his best to press his body to the curve of the spinning wreckage, using himself to shelter the coffee pot stashed in his robe. Riya didn't like to be rushed; and rolling down the side of a volcano fell broadly into that category.

Speaking of falling broadly into things... the sphere smashed into a treeline further down the mountain, pinballing between the sides of gorges, demolishing lesser rock spires, flattening weird arrangements of branches that had been set up in pagan cross shapes along a pathway of WAIT, WHAT???!

Calecrust squinted through a window at the brief flash of idolatrous scenery, before it was replaced by a prolonged flash of mud, leaves and rubble. They had crashed into an old river bed and were now rolling along it. This was good, he thought to himself. A river trail would take them all the way to the lowland, much like a gutter for a bowling bo--

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH..." screamed a furniture maker in the next city over, who had stubbed his toe at the exact moment that the sphere containing Caelcrust, Zazzy, Eolanthe and that other guy dropped through the floor of the riverbed, which was revealed to be a thin and pierceable crust hiding something deeper below.

The dented sphere rolled into a narrowing tunnel deep beneath the mountainside, gradually nudging to a halt as it shed various pieces of metal, blood and paintwork. Then it steamed a little... as the enturblement field gave out.

That released the barstool seat-belt that Caelcrust was wearing. So he dropped strategically on top of Zazzy, smothering him in the folds of his weird indigo robe.

"It's exceedingly more painful without health inspectors," the captain remarked, in a muffled choking-on-blood kinda way.

 

[AshenAngel]

Azazel 'Zazzy' Croft​

Azazel glances at Vess at his question, noting his nervousness but not quite sure what part of this situation was setting him off, considering that he'd been just fine outside... Discounting meltdowns and the whole laughing bit. He glances to the captain for the answer, though it really wouldn't mean much at this point. He waves off the kid's persistent offering of the mask, not wanting anything else restricting his personal space, and again, not wanting anything to do with another mask. He was breathing fine enough, anyways.

He snags the kid, trying to protect her from the first impact. The following bangs and bumps had Zazzy KO'ed briefly once again as they came to a stop. He wheezes when the captain drops down on him, curling in on himself partially against the pain. Truly the worst wake up call he'd had in a long time, -10/10, never again.

He coughs weakly as his body starts recovering from the injuries he's collected. He glares up at the triangle headed prick, swatting away his stupid ass cloak thing before he started to freak out again. He was going to punch him as soon as he found the will to get up.

He glances around, checking to see if the kid was alright and if his would-be assassin buddy was still alive or if he'd gotten himself impaled again. This really, really sucked. He glared up at the captain, grits his teeth, and wheezes out a threat. "Get off before I kick your ass."​

 

[Asmodeus]

Wait...

Wait wait wait...

Wait...


Caelcrust rolled to one side, then peered over at Zazzy.

"Wait..."

He narrowed his single eye, as a trembling question mark manifested over them, skewed at an angle.

"Zazzy..."

A piece of machinery dropped between them, sparking as a power cable snapped. It illuminated them both.

"....do you not like me?"

One of the walls of the sphere fell off, crashing onto the cave floor.