Return to the Southern Continent

[Alberich]

Udo reached the ground with a "WhooOHahh!" True, his feet did seem to be stumbling a bit, and he might have laid the ladies down more gently, but - nothing was broken. Then he turned and sprinted back for the building. He played only a minor role in the remaining rescue work. A plump little lady with a talent for screaming screamed "CATCH ME!" and jumped. Udo's strong arms and ample body were enough to cushion her fall, but the endeavor left him on the ground and a bit out of breath. (He wouldn't remember it quite that way.)

On the upside, he didn't have to stay behind and explain what "the finest illustrated thaumo fic-fuck" actually meant.

[Jack Rothwell]

Tamina had hit the ground with a squeak and a forward roll that took her back up to stand on his legs which quivered like reeds in a strong breeze. With a whining noise, the kobold turned to look up at the tilting tower... and the falling people.

"NO!"

The maternal instinct that ran strongly in her people came screaming to the surface as the humanoid spotted a child, a boy of six or seven, lose his grip on a balcony and fall. The hummingbird spell launched her across the yards and into a dive. She snatched the human gah out of the air with a moment to spare.

OOC Is Khoo getting down ok? Feel free to hijack Tamina to use running/strength magic to catch him if not, Grey. After all, the waiter brought her fish and alcohol and that's enough to get into the kobolds good books /OOC

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Khoo will be fine. Just check out what his graduate education is all about...]

Debris was starting to rain down from the higher floors of the Tower, and the floor was tilting ever more crazily. It didn't require Khoo to have a towering intellect, so to speak, to realize that there was a time to stick around and see if all the diners had made it out, and a time to simply haul ass. He opened his Pocket Dimension and extracted his thesis project, which opened with a sproing.

The glider was a half-scale prototype of the thing he'd hoped to patent, because Professor Takatsuka had told him to. (He himself had no comprehension whatever of the wealth that might be coming his way from such a patent. However, Takatsuka did ... and had already informed his student that he too was going to be on the patent.) It accordingly had only half a dozen seats, rather than the capacity for half an airship's payload that the final glider would have. That didn't really matter, since passengers weren't exactly lining up to board the thing. It also wasn't nearly as tested and debugged as he would have liked. Under the circumstances, that didn't matter either, and he still had the Slow Fall in reserve.

He hopped aboard, and the glider zoomed off in the general direction of Udo, Drusia and Tamina.

[Drusia]

The maternal instinct that ran strongly in her people came screaming to the surface as the humanoid spotted a child, a boy of six or seven, lose his grip on a balcony and fall. The hummingbird spell launched her across the yards and into a dive. She snatched the human gah out of the air with a moment to spare.

I sit on the ground and watch as the tower begins to crumble. People jump from it and fall. Tamina and Udo save some. Others are injured. Others die. I could help.

Instead I sit, shivering, trying to breathe, trying not to see Malacia.

I thought I was fucking over this! It's been almost two thousand fucking years - I should be fucking over this! Granted, even during the war I wasn't in that many collapsing towers - and certainly not on a floating island that happens to be the sister city to Malacia. Being here in Tsuirakushiti usually brings back happy memories of my childhood. Not... this.

I rest my head against my knees and cry.

"It's not Malacia," I whisper, "It's not Malacia. So stop crying and stand the fuck up!"

I can't stand. I cry harder.

-- Drusia

[Graybeard]

Khoo brought the glider in for an only slightly bumpy landing near Drusia, Tamina and Udo, and the two small children he'd picked up on the way down darted away, to be lost in the milling crowd. Looking back over his shoulder, he could see beams of magic already being directed at the burning tower, trying to extinguish the flames and stabilize the leaning structure. Unfortunately, it was entirely obvious that they weren't going to be enough. Pieces of debris continued to fall from the upper floors -- debris and human beings, some casting Slow Falls that would surely not last long enough to save even the ones that were landing on the sky island itself, never mind the ones plummeting toward the earth a mile below.

He recognized the trio as the people (or whatever one would call the catgirl) he'd just served at the restaurant, and went to the tall, beautiful woman who was curled up in a ball, sobbing. Well, here was a problem on a scale he could handle. "There, there," he said, as though to a small child. "You're on the ground, you're safe now, you --"

"GET OUT OF HERE, NOW!" a man in a Homeland Security Uniform bellowed, interrupting his attempts (which didn't seem to be doing any good anyway; he would later reflect that he'd been so rattled himself that he was all but whispering, and the elf probably hadn't even heard him). "This thing could come down any second! You're right in the path of stuff falling! Move it!" As if to emphasize these words, a piece of girder landed alarmingly close to the quartet with a whump.

He made a rapid decision. "Climb on board this thing. We're heading for the surface."

[Jack Rothwell]

Tamina nodded at Khoo's idea and scurried over quickly to the crying elf. The kobold made a mewling noise halfway between sympathy at her comrade's state, and barely suppressed panic at the situation they were in. She reached down, took her arm, and hoisted the woman to her feet.

"Don't be sad Dru, fall's over. Gotta go, gonna get crushed!"

[Drusia]

"Don't be sad Dru, fall's over. Gotta go, gonna get crushed!"

There are hands on me. I let them lead me.

"It's not Malacia," I mumble to myself, "It's not Malacia."

And yes, once again I'm being led to saftey. It feels like Malacia.

Someone says something about the surface. I shake my head. "No, I wont' run again!" I insist. "Just... away from here. The Warp gates. We need..." I press my eyes closed and try to breathe.

-- Drusia

[Graybeard]

"We need to be somewhere else," Khoo finished Drusia's sentence. "Half the population of Tsuirakushiti will be trying to use the warp gates." (Never mind that 99.9 per cent of that population would be in no more danger from this tower than if it had happened on a different continent. Panic just worked that way.) "This way is better." He had no way of knowing about Drusia's prior experiences on Malacia, of course, but he wouldn't have said anything different if he had.

The problem, one which the emergency-response people understood all too well, was that a Slow Fall spell wasn't going to be much help here, even the particularly high-powered one that Khoo could cast. The distances involved were simply too great. Cast on the people falling or jumping from the top of the tower, the spell would wear off long before they reached the ground, with disastrous results. However, it also couldn't be cast on someone who was already falling, to soften the impact. Slowing someone from terminal velocity to the velocity of a Slow Fall was almost as likely to kill him as the impact itself would be. This just wasn't a situation where his air magic could be much help ... except for what it made possible for the glider.

"Come on, time's a-wasting," he said as he, Tamina and Udo guided Drusia into the thaumatic device and he prepared it for flight.

[Alberich]

Seeing the lovely kobold use her talents to save small children made Udo want to grab her up in his arms and pet and nuzzle her 'til Kingdom Come. Then again, he always wanted to do that, so maybe it didn't.

While he would've liked to help more, Homeland Security was on this one, and they seemed to be hinting that his presence on the scene was not desired. So he went along with the others. Happily, while he didn't have the broadest range of battlemage skills, he knew enough to throw up shields to keep the debris from hitting them or wrecking the stranger's machine.

Too bad they were going - 'cause being seen around Tsuiraku with a hot elf and a lovely kobold would be Udo-Heaven for sure. But he supposed paradise would have to be earned, just like in the fairy tales.

There was a minor-league version of those fairy tales when he was in school. There was a girl who was famous for her skill at "manually manipulating" her many boyfriends, and bringing them to ecstasy that way. But her services didn't come for free - you had to be there when she needed you, help her with her homework, walk her home from school, cheer her up when she was gloomy, and all that sort of thing. Her motto was, "No Palm Without the Dust."

[Jack Rothwell]

OOC What group exactly is the group getting on?/OOC