Politics is like a river... no, that’s not right? Politics is like a cess pit... closer, but no. Politics is... is... I have no idea, I guess? Maybe we’ll get an answer to that question eventually, huh? Events unfold including but not limited to: John screaming, Metal walls being dented badly, and Hannah gets distracted at a bad time.

 

“For the last time, I’m not letting you ‘just have a look’ at the wardstone controlling this plane while we’re mid-flight Han, for Powers’ sake!”

A frown played across my lips and I rolled over slightly from my current sprawled position, just so happening to roll my head partly into his lap, so I could stare up at him with the widest, most enthrallingly ‘cute’ expression that this new face of mine can manage.

“Oh come on, please?— I promise I won’t break it.”
He huffed in frustration and looked away from my pouting lower lip as if it physically hurt him to do so, but he also didn’t cave to the cuteness in all its glory either, annoyingly.
“What if you come with me? You can hold me back, make sure my arms don’t come near it and everything. I just want a peek!”

...A nice tight, warm restraining hug from him and cool stuff to look at, good idea...
Exac—I mean, no!... Whatever!

Just let me see the damn wardstone, John-Boy! I’m curious, and we’ve got a long flight ahead of us.

If you showed it to me, then I could spend that flight breaking down what makes this floating magical oddity ‘tick’, instead of using my time more productively to read all the dusty old, factually incorrect when it comes to Normals, books that Edith assigned me to read in her letter, supposedly to help me regain my Golden ‘diversion’ magic once more, like I’d planned to do today, despite them all being such dry and boring reads!

“Han, I seriously can’t chance letting you near the wardstone at the moment. You’re a lightning mage and the ‘stone’ is made of metal, one wrong move and you could zap our ‘pilot’ runes to all hell, pulling us all out of the air just from excitement alone.”
B-but I want to see it!
...Getting whiny here...

Oh Powers’, that came out so whiny, didn’t it?

I sounded like a little kid being told they can’t open their Christmas presents two weeks early after finding them hidden in a closet downstairs.
...Not that we’d ever know what that sounds like from personal experience or anything...

Sarah started it— and anyway, that’s beside the point!

======

“Sorry, John. I got a bit carried away there. I think there may be a few lingering personality effects hanging around from the months I spent on my potions or something.”

...Ah! Good old, reliable drugs-abuse!...
The perfect excuse to avoid awkward questions about any odd actions you may make in any given situation.
...It’s like the victim card that just keeps on giving, apparently!...

“That’s okay, Han. Honestly, it was kind of cute watching you get so flustered like that for a while— silly, but cute— just like you...”
His lips formed into that same Powers’ damned grin he always gives off when he successfully teases me and, like clockwork, my cheeks went from Arista-pale to full blown tomato-red seconds later.
“When we land, I’ll let you go back and check out the stone, okay?”

I could have answered him, but my blush and his sudden use of the dreaded C-word, has left me feeling highly aware of the fact that I have my head resting in his lap, and that any further comment from me is likely to only make things worse, given the obviously teasing mood I’ve put John in now. Judging by the look in his eye and the emotions I can feel flickering through his magic from my current position I’m lucky he’s kept it in as long as he has honestly.

Instead of even chancing it, I let off the briefest of nods before quickly sitting myself up in the extended sofa chair I’d been resting across since I started trying to get information out of him properly.

As I settled myself back into an ‘adult’, meaning mature and respectable, not pervy and ‘John-like’, position, I couldn’t help but glance around us and cringe slightly at the mix of awed, confused or just downright amused looks I got in return for my troubles.

Apparently, I made a rather big spectacle of myself without really thinking about it for a while, there. Even Eris is watching me with a grin on her face instead of focusing on that silly bowling ball of hers, like she’d been doing when I started!

“If this thing’s magical, how long is it going to take us to fly from Oregon to New York, by the way?”
I don’t even know how long the flight would take on a domestic airline honestly, let alone on a private jet, but it’s always good to know how long it will take when you’re on such a long trip— and it gives me a handy change in topic as well, luckily.

“About another four hours. I could have set us up to fly faster but that means we’d face some turbulence and appear more than a bit suspicious to anyone watching the skies, seeing as we register on radar still and normal jets don’t go over Mach one in most cases.”

Judging by the amused grin on his face, John knew exactly what I’d been trying to do there and he was just ‘indulging me’ because he felt like it or something with his long-form answer.
I’m not complaining or anything. At least we can move on to new topics now, if nothing else!

Slowly, I settled myself down into a more comfortable slouch as conversations started up around us on any number of topics that didn’t involve me, at last, much to John’s continued and obvious amusement.

Honestly, I’m still not feeling properly ‘awake’ yet, despite all the fun we’ve had so far on this trip. It’s probably got something to do with a certain lack of breakfast this morning more than anything.

However, seeing as we have a few hours to go and we’re not in a tube of metal being tossed through the air from highly compressed explosions for once, I might actually be able to sleep through a flight entirely— if I try hard enough at least.

That thought in mind I rolled over slightly to face the window and let my eyes shut as they’d been vaguely hinting at me to do for a while now.

I’m not sure how long I lay there with the buzz of conversation around me to keep me company, nor at what point John decided to drape that damn blanket of his warm magic over me once again, but
eventually I drifted off into a deep sleep that I so desperately needed, at long last.

======

One minute I was arguing with a rather annoying leprechaun who kept demanding I let down my hair so he can climb up the side of my tower and steal my lucky charms, and the next reality snapped back into being as I jerked awake in my seat due to a surge of emotions I felt burst into being around me.

A moment later, while I was still trying to get my bearings, John’s now worried magic dropped away from me and someone started yelling loudly somewhere ahead of me.

That was enough to finally bring me fully back into the waking world with a bump and I found my eyes instinctively scanning the area around us in seconds, as the noise level began to rise significantly.

Apparently even Pauly’s soldiers, who have naturally taken up defensive positions around the others with the obvious exception of John, were already moving back down the length of the plane, leaving John to stand defiantly in the gangway, and me in my seat, for more obvious reasons.

Their worry and quick steps were slightly more understandable when you factor in the rather large Chinese man in traditional robes near the front of the plane, who appears to be gesticulating wildly with a glowing black staff of some sort, while being flanked by two gargoyle-like demons of some description, that are currently perched on the back of the first row of seats available at the front of the plane in a rather intimidating way.

I can’t understand a word the Chinese guy’s saying, unfortunately. I never was very good with Mandarin, assuming that’s what he’s speaking.

John can obviously understand him, judging by the increasingly angry-looking glare on his face and the minor body twitches he’s letting off to show just how close he is to snapping and abandoning his post to go attack the guy instead.

Slowly I eased up to my feet and made my way over to John’s side.

He barely seemed to notice me at first but the Chinese man definitely did, judging by the way his voice went up in volume slightly and he started waving his staff around again while throwing out a few words that sounded vaguely like ‘Max’ and ‘Arista’ to me, although it’s kinda hard to tell with how fast he was speaking, honestly.

“John, what the hell is going on?”

His hands twitched a few times into tight fists and his eyes didn’t leave the Chinese guy for a worryingly long few seconds, as if he were trying to decide if even answering me would be too much of a distraction at the moment.

“This guy, his name’s Wu Xian, he used to be a ruler to his people but things got messy and in the end he blamed Arista for it all. Apparently, seeing as Arista is ‘dead’, he’s here to avenge himself on me in her place while he can... although I’m still trying to work that one out at the moment.”
His piece said, John switched over to the same complicated and overly fast form of Chinese that this ‘Xian’ guy has been using so far again.

That left me standing there feeling more than a little bit awkward. As a precaution more than anything else, I turned away from the now rapidly arguing pair to stare at the others, bundled up behind us, with a thoughtful stare.

When my eyes made contact, first with Sarah’s obviously scared face, and then down to Eris’s own wide, frightened eyes, my decision was made pretty much instantly. One way or another things have already reached past the point of ‘dangerous’ here.

I don’t care if it sets us back a bit on our journey, the politicians can wait. My family comes first, damn it!

“Pauly! Get everyone huddled together. Everyone, grab your stuff, count heads, and then wait for my signal.”
Surprisingly, the gruff old leader that I’m used to getting more than a little bit of pushback from, in his own way, didn’t even question my order in the slightest.

The argument going on behind me progressed, gaining more volume as time went on, but I ignored it in favor of watching for Pauly to finish making sure he had everyone together. Finally, as Private Ellis moved into a defensive position on Eris’s left, he turned around and gave me the briefest of nods.

I let off a tense breath through my clenched teeth.
There are so many ways this mess can go wrong!

While I’m not completely sure about my abilities to warp people at the moment, let alone a huge group like this, I know of one technique that will work reliably, if nothing else.

There’s the potential of them all getting a bit of a fright along the way if my magic attracts the attention of a passing demon, of course, but better they be stared at by one demon than ripped apart by the two standing guard behind me when John inevitably fails in his attempts to end this whole thing ‘diplomatically’.

That said, I dipped sharply into my lines, not even hesitating to pull lose some threads of magic from my new Locus Point ‘core’, despite the worrying crackle of lightning that seemed to shimmer off of those threads as I did so and my previous worries over my magic use in general.

This is definitely an emergency situation, if ever I’ve seen one, so caution can go fly in the wind for all I care.

With a mental shove I dumped all four threads into individual lines leading to my feet, head and lungs, respectively. Two for movement, one for the idea and one for the void— how such a powerful force as ‘shadow magic’ can be so elegantly simple in its casting, still mystifies me to this day!

“Hold your breaths!”
With my warning given I rose my hand up, fingers spread and sparking with little flashes of lightning, despite the spell I’m casting having nothing to do with lightning at all, before closing them down into a tight fist and letting my arm drop.

The shadows around the plane all moved in towards the group before me and my fist shook slightly as I kept it tightly in position for the time it took to bring enough shadows together to encompass everyone at once.

Just as the last soldier began to sink into the oily depths of my manipulated shadows, something screamed loudly behind me, only for the sound to be cut short a moment later as a shield of blue sparks formed up around me.

Presumably that same ‘something’ slammed heavily into it behind me moments later, bouncing away from me at speed, just like Maven’s magic did when facing my Golden magic back at the Hub from what little I could feel of it all.

I did my best to ignore the what, how, and why behind all the noise and lights, focusing entirely on the group in front of me for those precious seconds more, even as John belatedly turned towards me and let out a horrified yelping version of my name, fear obvious just from his tone alone.

At long last the spell finished connecting and, with a water-like ‘splash’, the shadows collapsed in on themselves, taking their cargo of civilians, family and soldiers away to relative safety.

The moment they were truly gone and I felt my connection to the spell snap, I spun on a heel to find out what the hell was going on behind me, only to come face to face with a rather comically weird situation where I’m apparently the main point of interest on all sides for some reason.

My eyes first focused on the crumpled form of the right-hand demon, a form that appeared to have been launched across the plane so harshly that its head had actually embedded slightly into the metal of the far wall leading to the crew cabin and front exit, painfully.

From there they trailed to the Chinese staff-wielder, Xian, who’s jaw had dropped as he stared at me with obvious confusion apparent on his squat face, then over to the almost nervous looking left-hand demon, before settling on a rather relieved looking John.

“How you do dat?”
I jerked in surprise, snapping my eyes away from John’s growing smile to focus back on the previously only Chinese-speaking Xian instead.

There were a few English words thrown in after that, including dual casting, bad, and lost interspersed with almost frightened-sounding Chinese that went completely over my head, unfortunately.

His grasp of English obviously leaves a lot to be desired, but I think I get where he’s coming from on this one, vaguely, at least. Shadow magic requires a lot of power and focus to pull off correctly, after all.

The idea that someone can cast it while also blindly defending against a lightning-fast attack, from behind at that, must be a rather worrying thing for most people to witness the first time.

My eyes drifted away from Xian’s worried face again and down to my own hands, thoughtfully for a moment, as I tried to work out how it happened as well, because, honestly, I have no idea how I could have automatically cast a ‘bubble shield’ of any kind against a physical attack I can’t see otherwise—
Unless…?

Oh— oh, there’s no way I’m this lucky, is there?
Okay, think Hannah! How do I test to see if I’m right?
Ah hah! I’ve got it!

With barely a twitch from me, magic started to converge on three of my fingertips and I moved them down to tap just above my left hip, almost casually.

The moment my fingertips made contact with the runes hidden on my hip, a tiny pulse of magic burst out of me, one so light that it probably wasn’t even noticeable to John right next to me, given that he wasn’t specifically watching for it.

It was tiny, and kind of useless, considering where we are, but it would have been perfect for me to use in getting the ‘lay of the land’, normally, if I couldn’t see in a dark space, for example.

Oh, Felix—oh, little buddy, you are the best familiar ever!
The silly little guy grabbed me the wrong suit!

I thought the seams were a little too easy to seal up on this one, it didn’t even cross my mind that it might be because this suit has the prototype ‘improved’ sealing mechanism I came up with, for testing purposes, built into it.

Felix must have seen and grabbed my ‘combat platform prototype’ suit, in his rush to get back to us, so he could move on and inform the other imp’s that I’m not dead!

In a lot of ways this suit isn’t that different from a normal suit, in general use at least, but on the other hand there are so many little tweaks and throw-away ideas embedded in this thing, I barely even know what to do now that I have it!

About forty to fifty percent of the available material on one of my ‘normal’ suit would contain rune arrays; mostly ones centered above major lines of the body to make activation easier in a pinch. This suit— this suit has constantly evolved over time, when I came up with new ideas, good or bad, and added them on to see what reactions could happen from putting them all together into one unit.

Eventually, I stopped working on the suit, not because I lost interest or because I was ‘done’, but because I actually ran out of space to fit things on here without literally having to design some way to layer the runes over themselves somehow instead.

I lost track of it at some point, shortly after it stopped being useful as a test-bed rune assessment platform, progress being my main priority at the time thanks to my drugged-state, and probably leaving it in one of my many cluttered workshops, like I did my voodoo dolls, until Felix in all his Impish genius, found it at last!

======

Slowly, my eyes drifted back up from my hands and I couldn’t help the dangerous little smirk that played across my lips as I did so.

With a few deft finger movements, the kinetic shield that had formed up around me using my now lightning-element based magic when the suit detected the demon’s intentions and picked up a fast-moving ‘object’ coming towards me—
...probably using an experimental, compressed, ill-intent ward somehow...
—deactivated, just as I’d designed it to do in the first place.

An ill-intent ward and the same deflective shielding spell, with some minor tweaks from me, that Arista used to block Edith’s earth magic back at Crater Lake, merged together to create the magical equivalent of an ‘airbag’, for emergency use only.

That’s brilliant!
...I think we can officially mark that one up as a successful test run...
I wish I could take full credit for that idea at this point, but even I wouldn’t have thought of it if I wasn’t drugged out of my mind for days on end first of all!

...Is it bad that I’m starting to think we need to go on depressed drugs benders more often now?...
I can already feel the storage runes for the shield recharging from my magic while we’re standing here, give it another twenty seconds and it will be ready for deployment once again for Powers’ sake!

...That all being said, don’t count your chickens until the demon summoning staff-wielder is dead...
Oh, yeah! There’s an inevitable fight kicking off still, isn’t there?

======

“John, if you could be a dear and make your way to the rear emergency exit of the plane, I’ve totally got this one handled.”

In his usual style, when it comes to leaving me in harm’s way, John hesitated.

To really nail my point home, I brought both my hands up to eye level before clenching them down into tight fists and slamming them together, knuckles first. My magic pulsed and a slight, almost unnoticeable, magical drain started up on several points across my body.

It barely took a full three seconds to reach the necessary activation power levels, and suddenly little metal plates started forming up across my still-clenched fists in scale-like gauntlets that fit almost impossibly well to the contours of my hands.

The magic kept going from there. I could feel its activation signal pulsing its way up my arms, leaving trails of thin sparking blue magic along the inside edges of my arms as they went on, first aiming for my shoulders then down to my back before looping around my chest and finally pouring into my legs.

The moment the pulse reached the tips of my toes there was a sudden rush of power that left sparking trails of electricity flowing over my suit, and all the storage runes I’d carefully crafted into this suit one night after a bad set of nightmares about a certain demon I once faced whose only weakness was non-conjured silver, burst into life, disgorging well-fitted sheets of scale armor across what a mage would consider my vital areas, as they went.

I originally used pure silver over an acceptable alloy due to its ability to also burn on contact quite a few species of creature I don’t want to fight empty-handed, along with its high-gloss shine being perfect for some possible distraction techniques that I was working on, and its high conductivity being useful in general.

Unfortunately one of the reasons I scrapped the idea of this summonable armor in the end, was the opening that same conductivity left for lightning mages, or even just electricity in general, to become a rather bad enemy to me while using it all.

Luckily that initial mistake is going to play right into my hands now!

By the time it was finished, I could feel that the clothes I’d had on over my suit were in tatters and, more importantly, see that my all-black bodysuit was now visible due to an annoying problem I ran into where the I-don’t-exist runes, tend to fail under high-release rune activation situations, sadly.

That’s one problem even a drugs-binge can’t fix apparently, but that’s all made up for by the frankly pretty ‘badass’-looking set of gauntlets, spike-tipped metal boots, neck-to-belly chest-plate, bulky shoulder pauldrons, and wide belt with an attached scale skirt that came with the rune-set’s completion and the suit’s reappearance.

It all comes together in a look that, in my mind, makes me seem like some kind of fantasy warrior-woman from pretty much any online video-game out there these days.

Intimidation was always an issue for Al, it’s even worse now for me with Arista’s stupid face and height, the hope behind the armor’s design being to make me look at least slightly ‘dangerous’ compared to usual, if nothing else.

“...I can’t believe that actually worked?...”
I seriously thought at least one part of the armor would appear a meter away from me by mistake or something. I can’t actually remember fixing that ‘minor’ problem in the slightest, so I guess ‘drugged’ Hannah fixed it in my place for me.
“As I said, John-Boy, I’ve got this. Who needs a sword, when you’ve got enchanted silver armor at your beck and call, huh?”

For a moment or two, John seemed almost as lost as our ‘guest’ Xian did, but luckily he seemed to finally make the connection, either just between his brain and ‘how to work’ or hopefully between my ‘sword’ comment and my new lightning magic instead.

I’ve not had a chance to use my new lightning magic properly before. This is all new territory for me and, I’ve got to be perfectly honest, now that everyone but me and John are safely away from things, I’m starting to feel pretty excited for the chance to test out so many of the new magical and technical options that have fallen into my lap with my third, and hopefully final, elemental change at last!

As John moved back down the cabin of the plane, I stared at Xian, my eyes twitching at every movement he or his two pet-demons made as the right-hand demon pulled itself free from the wall with a pain-filled cry of displeasure at last and whipped around to glare at me in fury.

The tension grew with each passing second until finally the elastic snapped and the right-hand demon lunged towards me, claws outstretched and a roaring snarl on its lips.

The moment it moved even a single inch, I threw my hands up across my chest and let my magic loose properly for the first time since we discovered my new element at all. As I’d hoped, lightning covered not just my gauntleted hands, but started building up and sparking off all the other armor parts on my body at the same time due to just how much magic I was releasing into my aura at once.

By the time the demon was almost within reach of me, I felt like my final theory had been proven true by just how much electricity I had dancing around me at the moment, without any of it actually hitting me in the slightest.

As an ice mage I was pretty immune to cold temperatures, as a fire mage it took a lot to burn my skin at all... and now as a lightning mage I’m hard to hit with electricity!

My finger twitched and the magic built up in my new armor burst out of me in all directions.
Some of it arced out to strike the metal hull of the plane, making an almost web-like corona of blindingly blue light around me in all directions, effectively blocking the path between Xian and John entirely, while the rest of it, mostly the electricity from my gauntlets, dumped itself into the nearest available path to ground, with a little help from me of course.
...That path being the demon itself, naturally...

First the gargoyle-beast froze, letting off an almost silent sounding scream of pain from just how much power I was dumping into its monstrous body. But even that stopped after a few seconds, as it started to physically glow from the inside with just how much lightning was running through it, until finally it burst into flames like an overloaded fuse, collapsing to the ground as a dead husk moments later, much to Xian’s obvious horror.

I was almost tempted to steal a line from a pretty terrible movie about ‘what happens to frogs in lightning’, just to really rub it into Xian’s poor unprepared looking face, but you have to at least try to be the ‘bigger person’ when facing obviously amateur bad-guys like this one!
...It’s only fair, after all...

It really does seem wholly unfair that John gets THIS kind of idiot as his ‘enemy’ to deal with, while I get lumbered with actual thinking, plotting and complex enemies like Storyteller, Handyman and Arista, now that I think about it?

As if the world didn’t already enjoy throwing its middle finger in my face quite often, just because it can, knowing that I really am the only one dealing with my level of insane ‘villains’ is more than a little bit galling honestly, so—

=====

“Hannah, focus!”

My head jerked upwards at John’s shout only to fly backwards as my whole body moved automatically into a backflip and a, suddenly not so frightened, Xian’s mud-brown magic-covered fist flew just over my head a second later.

Not one to give up a free shot when given it, but also cursing myself because I just knew that my whole ‘drifting off’ thing would almost get me killed one of these days, I kicked my leg up as hard as I could, embedding the spiked tip of my all-silver boot into Xian’s upper thigh moments before pumping a pretty large surge of electricity into it for good measure.

He screamed and fell away from me to land in a twitching pile of robes on the floor, a pile which I took as a good signal for me to get started on sorting everything else out at last, considering I really doubt he’s going to be getting back up any time soon from that one!

I moved back several steps from him to go regroup with John at the rear of the plane when my eyes landed on Xian’s final demonic follower, a demonic follower who quickly became my final threat of the day by default.

The demon honestly didn’t appear to be in any rush to go anywhere near me at this point though, amusingly.
Between its burning husk of a partner and the twitching form of its assumed summoner, I think it made the right choice when it slowly eased itself back off the chair it had been perched on for most of our short fight, in an obvious sign of submission.

Just when I thought we were finally done here and I actually got more than a few steps towards John again, the plane, as a whole, gave one very violent jerk in the air that practically launched me up to the ceiling before sending me crashing down to the floor again with a pained groan.

“...Oh, crap...”
The words had barely left my mouth before John echoed them with a string of choice phrases in several languages that all meant pretty much the same thing at the end of the day.

As the plane gave another, almost gravity defying jerk in the air, it didn’t take a genius to work out what was happening. John warned me about the wardstone on this thing being made of metal, after all.

In order for it to work at all, it would have to be fitted to the ‘foundations’ of the plane, and I just pumped a hell of a lot of magical lightning into the inner-hull of this thing in my excitement to finally ‘play’ with my new element, completely unhindered in the slightest.

“John-Boy! Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is!”
Despite my hopeful cry, I still staggered back to my feet and turned away from the downed pair with their single remaining conscious friend in order to practically sprint down the aisle to John's side anyway.

In what felt like seconds I was throwing myself heavily against the wall beside his current position, stood holding tightly to the handle on the emergency exit door dividing the front and back ends of the plane.

“You did precisely what I told you not to do earlier and zapped the hell out of everything. So now the runes are trying to decide if they want to just give up or keep fighting to stay in the air.”
I knew he’d say that! I just knew it!

“What’s the plan then?”
His eyebrow twitched in frustration but at least he didn’t yell at me for ruining his big shiny flying toy, if nothing else.

“We wait and see if the plane stabilises, if it does then we’re all good, if not then we warp out of here to safety.”

Well, that’s a better plan then the one I had at least. I was thinking ‘jump out the emergency exit and leave Xian behind as a guinea-pig to see if the plane lands in New York without us’, honestly.
...Not one of our finer plans but—...

With practically no warning whatsoever, something at the front of the plane exploded and suddenly everything started tipping forwards until we were in a pretty obvious nosedive.

As if that wasn’t enough, something else decided to explode at the front as well, but instead of being nice and distant about it, the explosion turned into a massive fireball which came roaring up towards us at frankly terrifying speeds.

There was no time to think, no time to warp out.

The moment things started tilting John had let go of the exit handle and wedged himself against the partition wall next to it with his free arm looped around my waist to stop me from falling, which meant I was the only one left with a hand free to do anything.

In a moment of madness, only slightly improved by the knowledge that our suits both have my Icarus wings forming rune-sets embedded in them, that we can activate as parachutes, I leaned over and gave the exit handle a magic-assisted yank upwards.

The door flew backwards and the flames below us roared even louder with what I can only assume is the backdraft effect kicking in, to make everything so much worse in my book.

John’s mouth opened slightly but he didn’t have time to say anything before I planted my feet, kicking off from the partition wall, and dragged him along with me in my sideways dive out of the new opening into the much safer-seeming confines of an open freefall.

John’s grip on me slipped, which was probably a good thing considering neither of us can activate our wings while held together so tightly.

After a two-count to make sure we’d drifted far enough apart as the plane catapulted away from us at an unreasonable speed, towards what appears to be some kind of thankfully empty stretch of farmland below us, I brought my hand up to my right shoulder and placed three charged fingers across my upper bicep.

Almost instantly, all the armor on my suit was practically sucked back into their storage runes, a little trick I honestly can’t remember building into this thing but can’t find it in myself to be annoyed about at this point.

With the armor stored away, the rest of my runes kicked in properly at last, forming twin trails of blue magic that burned their way out from my chest and settled in a plate-like shape across my back.
A moment later my stomach jerked as a pair of truly massive, white-feathered wings burst out from the shoulder blades of my suit, their wingspan easily four times as long as my own reach.

In seconds, they’d both locking in position, both caught the wind, and I was catapulted sharply out of my freefall at blinding speed to float harmlessly in the sky, as I’d designed them to do in the first place.

My adrenaline was pumping now and I couldn’t help but let out a little whoop of excitement from the rush of it all, followed by a string of giggles as I used the wings’ manoeuvrability to turn and face— nothing but empty sky?

Slowly, I felt my eyes trail after the smoke stream left by the plummeting wreckage of John’s jet, until they latched on an equally plummeting shape that could only be, the soon-to-be-wreckage form of, John, himself.

...We forgot to tell him how to activate the wings...
I forgot to tell him how to activate the wings!!

My hand flew up to the same spot on my arm. With no hesitation, despite the fact these wings take hours to refill with enough magic to deploy again, I applied a few taps of magic to make my Icarus wings fold in slightly.

It took a moment or two for the magic to take effect fully but eventually the wind tore at the wings, making them fall away from my back as the spell maintaining their strength, shape and generally holding them in place deactivated.

I quickly moved back into a, thankfully much more controlled, freefall with my body now pointing almost straight down like a pencil on a collision course with John.

My adrenaline was pumping again and a part of my mind was screaming at me for doing something so reckless. But it’s my fault he’s falling like this, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to face an eternity with John reminding me of ‘that one time you pushed me out of a plane without a parachute’, if I can help it!

If he’s smart, he’ll have spread his body out to slow his fall somewhat.

If he’s smart, he’ll be trying to come up with his own plans, most likely some form of warping... although how much that can help when he’s moving at terminal velocity I have no idea.

If he’s— damn it!

My hand came up and with lightning flickering between my fingers, I sliced straight through the still flapping remains of my, previously really comfortable, baggy boat-necked red sweatshirt to let it fly off behind me and be lost in the updraft. With the deadweight ‘parachute’ of my loose clothing gone, I tightened my tuck in and started to move my magic around inside myself, trying to make a shield of some kind that could potentially be more aerodynamic then my already maximised little ‘bullet’ shaped profile.

I honestly have no idea how to manage that yet, but I’m working everything out on the fly, which is really not my strong suit when it comes to using actual spells!

I’m definitely catching up with him already, that’s something at least. He’s still really far away and the ground is definitely looking a lot closer now too, but I can hear one all important thing that tells me I’m making progress if nothing else: John’s frightened screams as he plummets to earth.

He’s apparently doing nothing to help himself slow down, or even stop tumbling in the air in the slightest sadly.
…Stupid John!…
I have to do bloody everything around here, I swear!

I’m coming, John-Boy! Don’t die from something as lame as gravity of all things, you stupid idiot!