>>118659 Might still turn this into a CYOA. We'll see how the schedule works out. Also, I got bored tonight. No screencaps due to massive image trawling laziness.
******
The sensation was delirious, indescribable. A gradual sense of the unexpected meeting the unknown was prevalent. Blue as far as the eye can see. A majestic orb of yellow-white burning in its golden intensity hung far above the piercingly clear heavens, and small
things flew away in a flocked formation some distance off in the clean skies, sent into a panic from our unannounced arrival. White fluffs of curiously shaped stuff hung suspended everywhere, reminiscent of balls of cottons seen only in old history books.
For one singular moment, I felt as if we were floating, but that sensation vanished soon enough. Whatever was holding us aloft disappeared with the last traces of the dissipating probability field. Gravity re-assumed control instantaneously, pulling us back to the green earth miles below in a deadly plunge as Newton’s Law took effect. Amidst the lurch in my stomach, I watched dumbstruck as we pitched downwards in the heavy VTOL and commenced on our impromptu nosedive, breathing off a single exclamation. ‘Holy…’
‘SHIIIIITTTT!!’ Len completed with a scream from behind, the rest of her panic summarily lost to the onrushing air.
Frantically, I dug about the exposed cockpit for some sort of parachute, only to remember nobody ever put those things in Pegasi. Most times if they were going to crash, it was more than likely that the pilot would be dead enough for the VTOL vehicle to be losing control in the first place. And obviously, none of the original designers had the foresight to imagine our present issue. For some unfathomable reason, I started to look for an umbrella after that.
Fortunately for me, Len had a far sounder mind than I did at the moment, lurching past me in the cramped cockpit to pull at the release lever which would flip the twin rotors open the same way she had seen Mister CEO’s men work them. I caught onto her line of thought almost instantly, reaching towards the lever secreted to the side of the pilot’s enclosure to help with her tugging amidst desperate grunts. With one final wrench, we practically tore the lever free in our hands and Len stared at the snapped bar of iron in disbelief. Nevertheless, the interlocking gear work had managed to rotate into place, deploying the twin rotors all the same with a loud bang and a rain of loosened bolts. Our descent slowed slightly as the rotors gave us some additional drag.
But nothing enough to break our fall as Sir Isaac Newton kept pointing and laughing.
I wouldn’t need to look up to see that we were almost a mile short of impacting the ground in a gory mess. Hammering on the ignition repeatedly, I finally coaxed the engines to start and between the roaring winds in my ears, I could hear the groan of the rotors’ spin to life. Taking hold of the pitch and yaw controls, I shoved them about aimlessly, trying to get some sort of maneuverability out from the Pegasus. For some reason, the controls wouldn’t jimmy in the slightest and it was only when I paid attention to Len’s screaming that I remembered why.
‘The tail segment’s still compacted!’
Eight hundred meters or so left. Wordlessly gesturing at the cranks above my head, I signaled for her to start turning it as I tried to stop us from rolling over due to the uneven pitching. Without the tail rotor, we couldn’t be able to achieve equilibrium but at least the roaring side rotors pushed beyond the point of nominal operations now could manage our roll somewhat, further slowing our fall considerably. Len kept at her handiwork with intense concentration and in a loud clank, the omni-bird’s tail finally extended into place and I gave the controls another twist. It worked this time; we broke to a jarring stop for all of the three seconds we hovered in place, still pitching precariously.
Until the starboard rotor erupted in an inglorious display of fireworks and smoke.
The two of us glanced sharply at the grinding metal blades screeching to a stop as one, filled with dreaded disbelief. ‘Give me a break,’ was all Len had managed to utter before going back to her screaming when the omni-bird pitched violently to one side. The worst came to pass as our tenacious equilibrium finally gave out. In the space of a single breath, the world grew lopsided and once more, we continued to lose precious altitude in an ever-widening spiral.
Subconsciously, I had instantly reached out disengage the fail-safe mechanism which had toggled at our engine failure before going for the manual fuel injection pump, hoping to force the dead engine back on despite the certainty that the uncontrolled sparking would invariably set it on fire. It was a calculated risk. Partially dizzied and ignorant to my efforts, Len reached forth to tug violently on my shoulders in a hoarse shout, ‘We have to jump before this thing rolls over!’
I gave the spinning vista a quick glance, numbly noting how we still had half a kilometer left separating us from ground level. There was always the tiny and improbable possibility we might live through the fall, but I couldn’t even entertain the insane notion of simply hopping out of the cockpit mid-air as much as I dreaded losing the Pegasus. Furiously, I kept going at the knob-like protrusion, forcefully feeding volatile fuel into the malfunctioning rotor. ‘Wait, wait! I can still save this!’ I rattled back at Len to stop her from doing anything stupid, such as sky-diving without speed-breakers.
‘THIS PIECE OF JUNK’S NOT WORTH OUR LIVES, YOU IDIOT!’
Rationality running dry, I still wouldn’t give up on the rotor as I screeched angrily at both Len and the crashing VTOL. ‘Yes it is! DAMN-YES-IT-IS!’
A sudden jerking reverberated throughout the omni-bird before we could pitch all the way vertically. The malfunctioned engine croaked momentarily and went into a stall for a few chest-bursting seconds. At the point of giving up all hope it finally chugged up again, sluggishly at first until an additional pumping motion forced enough gas into the fuel lines for it to churn back to life. Between my growing surge of hope and the adrenaline from our expected introduction to the ground below, I managed to throw us back onto a horizontal plane as our equilibrium gradually stabilized.
The airframe grumbled loudly from the strain of slicing through the skies in a speedy tangent, control back in hand once more. I groaned, sighed and then laughed senselessly as I collapsed back to the cramped seat, amazed by how we had managed to scrape out of crashing. Easing on the flight controls to regain the lost altitude, I turned back to give Len a silly grin of relief. ‘There, you see? It’s not so bad.’
The deflating tension on her face was close to amusing to behold, but her sudden panic attack in the next second had me puzzled. ‘EYES AHEAD!!’
‘Wha-‘ was all I managed to utter before I could turn and look at what she was pointing at.
Suspended in the very air before us was Something unusually out of place in the clear skies, a smallish figure billowing with both hair and unconventional clothing as it hung there without any apparent support. I would never get the chance to look at whom or what it was; our subsequent aerial collision threw all introductory formalities out of the window as the figure hit our port wing hard. We dragged It along for the few disbelieving seconds both me and Len took to stare at It before the stunned Thing was sucked into the gyrating mincer that was our port rotor. Almost a déjà vu of our earlier crisis, the rotor instantly fouled in a mangle of flailing limbs, uncommonly long hair and a flourish of unidentifiable fabrics.
I couldn’t even take my eyes away from our road kill as we started pitching the other way. ‘Okay, that’s bad.’
To accentuate our wonderful situation, the starboard rotor finally caught fire and flames broke out in a small cloud of orange and black smoke. Lost to sudden despair, I could no longer find any traces of panic or horror in my voice as I glanced its way. ‘Well that’s
really bad.’ I sighed inwardly in resignation. Guess the Big Man up there finally decided I had lived long enough. My grip on the controls slipped away.
In contrast, Len refused to give up. Unbelievably, she had started climbing towards our port rotor despite her leg and the dangerous angle we were being forced to fly at and I found myself repeatedly screaming at her to get back to her seat. Even her lamed leg couldn’t stop her determination to live as she extended one arm towards the mangled Thing caught in the rotor, which continued to twitch occasionally. Her left hand gripping onto the omni-bird’s support struts for dear life, she actually managed to grab hold of the single billowing sleeve-like object fluttering out of the rotor and began tugging at it desperately in an attempt at freeing the jammed propeller.
Seeing her efforts, I went back to the controls with renewed determination, sheepishly reminded that while I might have given up, she most certainly hasn’t damned well done the same. It was a lost cause all the same; with both rotors barely functioning now, I was unable to provide the necessary thrust to break our acceleration towards the sea of green below. If Len couldn’t coax the body free from the port rotor, it wouldn’t matter much if I had control or not.
A subsequent explosion on the starboard rotor forced the omni-bird to buckle hard. With a loud yelp, Len was thrown clear off the wing, her hold on the wing violently torn away and in an act of self-preservation, she struck out to grab the billowing sleeve her other hand clung onto. The combined burden of our road kill and Len dangling from its sleeve sounded our death knell. Any moment now, we would finally roll over and lose any means of righting the Pegasus back to an even plane.
In a single timeless moment, she gave me a piercing stare from her precarious position. An unspoken exchange passed between us and the expression of fear on her face softened and she suddenly started heaving at the sleeve she had gripped in her hands with a new purpose. I experienced a sudden, sinking feeling in my heart as I realized what Len was trying to do.
The girl was trying to pull that Thing free of the rotors using her weight. Len’s only intention now was to save both the VTOL and me at the expense of her own life.
I flew into a mindless rage at her line of thought. There was no way I was letting her take the half-kilometer plunge with that Thing in tow.
Reverently, I took hold of the crank for the omni-bird’s tail section and started turning the accursed thing for dear life, forcing the extended tail to start retracting despite the still-spinning propeller at the rear. Instead of reversing our thrust, I threw the throttle into full-forward, increasing our already-unbreakable acceleration. I’ve seen enough years behind me already. Len still had her entire life ahead of her.
Her eyes widened in shock as her attention snapped to my cranking hand and the gradually collapsing tail section. She mouthed a single word at me.
No! The turbulence intensified as the retractable tail folded in partway. Len started trashing harder as she hauled away desperately at the Thing, trying to shake it free. She knew what I wanted to do. ‘NO! Stop!’ she shrieked repeatedly.
One last shove was all it took for the tail section to jam violently in its irregular configuration. The spinning rotor sandwiched in its end instantly grated against the collapsible frame, throwing an endless fountain of sparks through the sky in our ever-plunging trail earthwards. In a few moments more, the entire assembly would probably splinter apart but forcing the tail to fold back and pushing the starboard rotor to maximum power had served their purposes. Our descent regained some semblance of equilibrium from the acceleration and the omni-bird’s shifted center of gravity. It bought us enough time to stay somewhat horizontal as the descent eventually brought us low enough to brush the torrential waves of green underneath. On the other side, Len still fought ineffectually to dislodge the obstruction caught in the port rotor.
Executing a deliberate swerve on the Pegasus, I brought the maimed vehicle teetering dangerously to the right, trying to shake Len loose to fall into the waiting embrace of the weaving sea of green a few feet under us. I hoped the actual ground wouldn’t be too far down to break her bones on impact but at least from this height, she had a far greater chance of survival compared to earlier. She kept to her voluble protests, screaming for me to take the jump as well. That was no longer a possible course of action for me. I couldn’t release control without instantly flipping the barely-navigable VTOL over. The jammed rotors and fouled tail-section promised to punish us mercilessly should I even dare relinquish my tenacious hold on the throttles and flight levers, summarily crushing Len beneath it as we tore into the greenery. It was already a monumental fight to maintain whatever stability was left to us, much less keep the vehicle level.
In an act of pure desperation from seeing Len’s stubborn refusal to let go, I risked a brief period of deceleration before forcibly dipping her into the greenery streaming past mere inches from her feet. Amidst her hoarse sobs, I turned to give her one last look, probably my last as I shouted cheerfully to her. ‘I’m sorry to have to leave you again, kid! Live strong like you always did, you hear me!?’
Whatever teary objections she had was instantly lost as her lower half dipped through the greenery. It took less than a fraction of a second for the drag to pull her underneath, along with the finally-obliging Thing caught in the port rotor. The two vanished beneath with barely a ripple in the green swallowing them. Almost immediately, the now-freed rotor blasted back to life in a triumphant roar of jubilant air. All manner of unsteady equilibrium was lost to the very winds as the omni-bird bobbed out of control, first left and right before weaving back and forth. If the tail section hadn’t been intentionally jammed, perhaps crash-landing the thing would have been possible, but not anymore. Astonishingly, I managed to keep it aloft for another few hundred meters before the entire thing righted over and took an instant dive. I watched the world turn upside down in slow-motion and the rushing green coming up to herald my end as well, still rigidly gripping on the defunct controls.
Unexpectedly, the field of green vanished at the lip of a jaw-dropping cliff as a new vista spanned overhead, a right side-up land of such aching beauty and flowing with life it was almost unnatural in comparison to Earth’s ravaged surface. So different from the hellhole on the other side, I thought numbly as I savored the glimpse of this relatively interesting final moment of my life. My last thoughts, prayers, and hopes were for Len to find a place and a far better life here in the seed-garden most could only dream of reaching some distant day. Paradise garden Gensokyo.
That was it. No fancy jumping from moving cars now. Trapped in the Pegasus-turned-deadweight barreling down into the valley far below, I realized the growing irony of calling it as such, so aptly named in light of the fate awaiting me.
Fuck it, at least the view’s neat.