Chapter One
Impact
"Get back here, Krystal!" The Wolfen, though it's pilot skilled, fumbled along with its grip on a flight path to the white and blue modified Arwing that blended painfully easily into the harshly swirling snow. The red and black machine's pilot clenched his teeth together, all attempts at speeding up to catch the runaway had just given the relentless winds more jurisdiction on his movements. Her modifications had given her more maneuverability than the Wolf had previously found necessary, but now was a little late to regret the choices. His steely eye flitted through the snow; she had slipped out of his sights. "Where d'ya think you're going? I know you can hear me, princess!"
In the seat of the Cloud Runner, Krystal was immersed in what could barely be heard. A weak distress signal had punctured through the devastated atmosphere of this planet. In a memory of Sauria, she had left post-haste. She was in flurry of emotion, but focused herself on finding the signal again. Decent only yielded rougher winds, to which even her well-off ship couldn't handle a straight track. A gust wrenched her to the side and she held the controls with a surprised expression, but quickly got a hold of herself and pulled a horizontal loop.
The Wolfen had just barely missed the Cloud Runner, and Wolf took the opportunity to lock on to Krystal's trace through the swirling ice. Her plane took off spiraling from the Wolfen's own trail, and his ship jerked to follow hers. Swiftly he gripped the controls and wrenched his sights off of her, watching her exhaust. His eye widened, seeing a painfully visible danger. All the exhaust from her modded Arwing was completely freezing, leaving vast chunks of ice hurling towards himself. He dodged as best he could, growling with his ears perked completely up. Adrenaline was all that could even keep him steady. "Our ships are gonna to freeze in the air if we keep going down! Quit being so stupid!" A chunk of ice knocked hard on his wing and made him bank left, in a short glimpse he saw the freezing starting on the edges of her wings and thrusters.
Krystal's eyes flicked through the clear covering of her Arwing, the winds were rocking her plane harder and she was losing control by the second. She yanked on her controls, but was finding the reactions to be less and less. "Please, if you're the one who sent the distress signal, respond! Respond, I'm here to help!" She tried to suppress the fear of losing control of her flight pattern to sound clear.
"There's no one out there! God damn, we need to get out of here it's only colder as we go down!" Though the heat was more centralized in the Wolfen, freezing was beginning as well. Wind sheared the pair of ships, sending both downwards in irregular spirals from the safety systems trying to do a recovery. A small collision occurred between the two ships, knocking off all the systems in the Cloud Runner and clipping a wing tip from the Wolfen.
Without anything to force the Arwing upwards, gravity decided to have its fun with the helpless vixen. Wolf witnessed the beginning of her plummet, his tail bristled as options flung through his head and he plummeted his plane down to follow the tousled decent of the Cloud Runner. "Engage your emergency thrusters!" His voice took on an angered tone, "You'll be nothing but a spatter if you hit straight on like this!" Her communicator was off and she continued to struggle with the controls panicking at the complete lack of use they now bore. Believing it was a power failure, she shut down other systems only to find there was no effect. Her breath became visible and left a frost pattern on the cover of the ship. Her eyes widened at the instant display.
"Shit, losing the heat trace on her... Too close to the ground. Arrg!" His tail beat around in anger, but a quick surveillance gave him a possible solution. He cut off his thrusters, and swerved to the side from the gusts. His bionic eye was able to keep a trace on Krystal better than his Wolfen, and though he disliked to, depended on it. His brain became encumbered from the mechanics of the eye, giving him a horrendous headache. With his muscles recoiling from so much adrenaline pumping through, he made his turn and hit the thrusters.
The Cloud Runner fell fast, tossed around in the wind, wings quickly and completely frozen. Krystal's tail had poofed out completely from fear mixed with adrenaline. Bitter cold was creeping into her cockpit, her existing clothing wasn't handling it too well. She looked frantically around, but was greeted by wildly flinging snow and ice. The spinning lack of control was making her stomach wish to relieve itself.
The muscles were twitching under Wolf's sleeves as he gripped the wing controls hard enough to add to the bend he'd already forced on them. The craft was a good 12 years old and was showing its age more and more as of late. He had already taken his final turn; the ice had completely frozen what it could. Keeping the thrusters up, the Wolfen was propelled on a declining curve against the ground. His muscles began to lock in their positions, preventing the ship from tipping down further, as the subsystems of his mechanical eye pulled more and more of the processing to track the wildly descending Arwing. Closer and closer the two drove nearer.
For a split second, the screeching of the mechanics in Wolf's thought patterns shot through to Krystal. On her ship's turn, the two cockpits were facing each other and Krystal saw the definite colors of the Wolfen reflected through the frosted film. The mercenary's calculations had been close, and the Cloud Runner was knocked from the vertical fall to a horizontal stumble. The impact sheared off one of the wings at the bend in the middle, tossing the blue thruster out to the wind. She spun off and glanced off the ground, still going more horizontal than vertical.
The Wolfen didn't come through untarnished either, and earned a spin scraping the wings on the frozen ground. He hit the ground, bottom first and slid across the icy surface. It was dark from the thick clouds, and he was little better than blind from his bionic eye. Not knowing what to expect, nor having much to be able to do about it, the grey figure braced himself as best he could. It was too dangerous to eject at such a low altitude going so fast. With a whumph, the ship hit a snow bank and tossed itself over. Wolf held to his immobilized controls to maintain himself, as the Wolfen lurched over and came to a stop upside-down. A few moments passed, just to be sure there wasn't anything else due to add to the bad day. Surveying the situation, he found that nothing was working to flip the unit over. "Well, that's just dandy..."
He opened the hatch, and let go with one arm and lowered himself on the ice. Snow quickly caught into the exposed fur of his face and tail. He rummaged for a bag in the Wolfen, and tore it open while pulling it out. Emergency blankets and jackets were caught up in the wind and jerked from his grasp, "Raawrg! Can't anything work for me today?!" He quickly shoved on a thick jacket and gathered up the blankets he could from the torn bag. He set off running; logging in his head what the area had looked like that he had abandoned his Wolfen at.
Meanwhile, the clipped Cloud Runner flung itself into and through the snow, drift after drift. The spin it held was on the main axis, tearing the wings further every collision. Krystal squinted her eyes closed, still finding no control despite her movements. Tossing and turning, white ground and dark sky shifted back and forth in the mad ride she was enduring. With an onslaught of a headache brought on by the destruction of her balance, she could do little more than hold on as her vision blurred and clouded.
Several more turns flung chunks of the Arwing in all manner of directions. When the graceful piece of equipment met its match with a larger snowdrift compiled at the top of a hill, the shock made Krystal quickly forced her self from the cockpit. Despite the subzero temperatures, she lurched out and her body's reflexes took hold. She vomited into the snow, her nose starting to run badly due to the cold and retching. It took few seconds to reduce her well-kept face to one of misery from sickness. Luckily, she was going with the wind and maintained her relative cleanliness.
She pulled herself up, but was knocked to the side by a gust of wind. Snow and bits of ice clung to her fur, cold seeping through her semi-tropic coat. She tucked her arms together, wincing. It felt like she had been through a rough fight and taken several punches all over. Cold was quickly numbing the fresh bruises and scrapes, which was a positive and negative tradeoff. She stumbled away from the fallen Cloud Runner, balance torn asunder from the crash and the searing winds. A ringing in her ears dulled the noise of everything else, the chaotic patterns of snow began to seem surreal to her.
She gripped her headset, and she recalled what she was there for. Her brow furrowed, and she looked down beginning to trot down the hill she had crashed into, "The distress signal, I can almost feel it..." Her pace quickened, the frigid air burning in her lungs and nose. "Is anyone out there?" She called out to the snowy maelstrom, coming closer to the bottom of the hill. "I heard a distress signal, and I'm here to help!" Ice quickly formed around her mouth from her breath as the winds whipped her words away.
"'Ey! Princess! I told you there was no one out here!" The Wolf looked a little silly in his thick puffed jacket, but much better off than the nicknamed. Shivering, the blue vixen turned to him. Blankets were quickly smothered on her, which she quickly accepted. Still unsure of the former enemy, she wasn't even sure to muster a 'thank you' to the very enraged looking mercenary. One was uttered, but was caught by the wind before the ear could get a grip on it. "Where's that signal?"
She was quickly succumbing to the cold, attempting to pull the blankets closer. "It's over this way, from what I can tell. It's weak."
"Fine. There better be shelter there somewhere." His face remained stern, completely focused on getting to a safe location. The winds tore at their clothes and Krystal's blankets, but they trudged on building up a good pace to keep their bodies functioning.