It’s dark and quiet in the pocket dimension, and Irris doesn’t really want to think about what’s in that box, but - she can do this. And at least she’ll have a minute or two when no one can see her cry

Carissa will have to figure all that out later - It's obviously extremely important to her long term survival here but it's not very likely to be relevant in the next ninety seconds. Presumably people are signaling political affiliation in some way and it'll be tremendously fraught either to do it or not do it and there'll be assassination attempts from the wrong side, but she has an excuse for not having declared her faction yet and probably no one has the resources for an assassination right this minute. 

She waits patiently for orders.

"Placing your radio earbud," the comms person says, and shows Carissa something and taps his own ear to indicate what he's about to do, before - poking the thing into her ear? It seems to be made of flesh-conforming gel, and sticks there. "Will activate post-explosive charges. No controls -" there was no time to train her on them, "- bone conduction microphone, we can contact you and receivers will hear anything you say." 

The seconds count down. 

They are trying to do a very difficult thing, here, and it even had a 9 in 10 chance of working, but - sometimes you get unlucky. 

They're not going to make it to the go-ahead point. 

The specialist team piloting the plane remotely is not going to know exactly what went wrong. A lot of the plane's external sensors were fried by the initial impact, and they have satellite coverage but it's not that high-resolution. It could be any of half a dozen different additional mechanical failures, as some system that was more damaged than they had realized deteriorates further under the strain of the sort-of-unreasonable maneuvers they're demanding of the damaged plane. 

(It's, like, 10, seconds before the go-ahead point. They did still buy a lot longer in the air than they would have expected by default.) 

It takes less than three seconds after the sudden jarring jolt and drastically increased turbulence noticeable by Carissa, for the on-site pilots and remote pilots to be sure that they are no longer in control and have no realistic way of regaining control. Another second to make the final decision. A second longer than that for the communication to be relayed. Four, five seconds total. 

"Haste and Fly and ready for Feather Fall on cue," the comms relay volunteer snaps out to Carissa, and then "EVERYONE MOVE NOW!" as he dives for the cockpit area.

Carissa is, actually, not that stressed. She'd rather these people not die, obviously, especially if they turn out not to have afterlives, but she's not going to get worked up in a combat situation; she can be sad some other time, if there's anything to be sad about. Her part is far from the hardest thing she's ever done; she can cast some spells on cue while people are dying all around her.

She does Fly then Haste because she bets they forgot Fly has the longer duration by far. 

(If there were literally any time for communication, Exception Handling would be in agreement - they were unsure how much to model that Haste would improve her spellcasting. But also it was sort of taken for granted that she would switch the order if she thought that was best.) 

The situation is not ideal! Both their altitude and forward speed are a lot higher than they would ideally be. Feather Fall buys them about 110 meters of controlled "fall".

The original plan was to stall out on purpose, let the plane fall slightly, trigger the explosion, and trigger the explosion just a little above the max Feather Fall range. They would let the new aerodynamic forces on the capsule convert some of its forward velocity into upward acceleration (not enough to cancel out the falling speed but enough to decrease it, and with rough but non-literally-instantaneous acceleration) and cast the Feather Fall such that it would, within their bounds of error, give at most 2 seconds of free fall at the end, and from a starting vertical speed of at most 25 m/s. They do want to buy as most Feather Fall airtime as possible, for air resistance on the suddenly very un-aerodynamic cockpit capsule to cut their forward momentum.

Their current altitude is...more than that. Though they just lost like half of the remaining sensors, satellite coverage is from directly above so impaired in detecting the plane's exact height from the ground, and the new error estimate is more like 40m.

Their current fall speed - downward velocity - is around 10m per second. Feather Fall will slow them to a little over 3 m/s. That is a lot of sudden change. The hope had been that braking, sacrificing much of the forward momentum keeping them in the air at all, would cut that massively. But the plan was to do it somewhat closer to the ground. 

...The way that they've now lost control is sort of a very half-assed version of the braking maneuver, and the pilots are about to throw literally every control they still have until helping that along, while they still can. 

This isn't the world they wanted to be in! 

There would have been small improvements in the injury odds on the prediction markets if this had gone as they so desperately hoped it would. About a 2% decrease in risk of minor injuries, 3% in major injuries.

But, correspondingly, there are some large negative updates now. 

Major injuries

Safest 22 people

Moderate injuries 48%

Major injuries 37%

Middle 37 people

Moderate injuries 78%

Major injuries 42%

Least safe 29 people

Moderate injuries 93%

Major injuries 52%

This is getting to a point where they really cannot expect to have enough able-bodied bystanders to treat all of the lethally injured casualties with even the most basic first aid. 

But, although this wasn't the world they wanted to be in, Exception Handling has nonetheless planned for it. 

They still have a last-ditch braking maneuver. They think it's 60% likely to at-least-sort-of work. 3:2 odds. 

If it works, and sacrifices forward speed for lift, both of these things are actually working hard in their favor, and it will buy them around a 2% decrease in minor injuries and 4% decrease in major injuries across all groups. If it doesn't work, though, they're looking and 3% and 6% increases respectively. 

....This plane is in really terrible shape. No, it cannot super do a braking maneuver right now. Something happened but it's not, like, helpful. 

Well. It was only slightly more likely than not to work. 

They're going to trigger the explosives now. They're still too high. They're still moving too fast. However much they manage to cut the falling speed, they then...need to fall to a height where they can cast Feather Fall and expect it to last until they hit the ground. 

The plane is less in control than it would have been. This maneuver was, like, 95% likely to work basically like in the simulations under the hoped-for (if not ideal) conditions. These...are not those conditions. It's, like, 80% likely to work. 

It's not really going to change the odds of minor injury much. Exploding a plane at this speed is going to, by itself, be a cause of significant minor injuries! Say, like, a 0.5% decrease in risk (or a 2% increase).

Major injury is a bigger deal, though, because "exactly how fast are they falling when their magic user casts Feather Fall" is such a huge input. It's going to affect the most thoroughly and safely secured cohort the least, though. Maybe a 1% decrease versus 4% increase. The medium group will see a bigger impact: the predictions (made in advance, they're not fast enough to update in real-time now) are of a 3% decrease or 12% increase. The worst-hit group - most of whom are, in fact, not really super secured at all - a 5% decrease or 20% increase. 

The doors to the cockpit slam, hiding the last remaining scramble of people inside. 

The overhead plane intercom makes its last announcement, for Carissa's benefit; to reduce the low-but-not-nonexistent risk of an electrical spark disabling the earbud and microphone setup that the comms volunteer gave her, they're going to remotely switch it on after the explosive charges go off. 

"Brace for explosive charge, tick five*." 

*Tongues makes it pretty clear that this is a countdown. 

Carissa took off and hovered as soon as she cast Fly; it's just less stressful than trying to keep her footing on the shivering quaking airship, and as soon as the shivering quaking airship explodes she's going to need to get clear of it and stay close enough to the fast-moving cockpit section to Feather Fall it. 

She doesn't know what she's going to do with her thousands of slaves but she does feel that she has very much earned them, here, if she gets them all landed. 

The explosion is close enough to Carissa to be deafening. It's actually very contained; she can see a brief sear of blue-white sparks in a ring just behind where the cockpit doors closed, feel the heat momentarily on her skin, but it doesn't even come close to injuring her. 

- and then the whole world is spinning and the rear of the plane is crumpling, metal screaming, torn away by gale-force winds, and unless Carissa very quickly dives away - like, in under a second - she's going to end up slammed against the closed doors and then flipped around, as the cockpit section, neither aerodynamic nor with any form of propulsion, starts to slow and flip its nose toward the sky. 

There's open air all around her. It's not actually cold, in this region, but the wind is practically sandblasting her. The ground feels simultaneously too close and very very far away. 

As far as the Exception Handling remote tactical team can tell, working from simulations being fed their really limited plane-sensor data plus a live-updating satellite feed of the crashing plane from above, that....worked? That sure is a plane coming apart. The cockpit and nosecone section looks intact, and is spinning away from the sacrificed, now-fragmenting remainder of the plane. 

That was, like, 6-7 seconds all told. They're now not that far above the Feather Fall-able altitude, plus or minus way more error than anyone would prefer.

But the cockpit capsule is, in fact, flipping up so that the nose faces the sky, rapidly losing at least some of that forward velocity that they were really not supposed to have because the plane was supposed to have been able to brake, and it's...not quite at a standstill but they're not falling very fast at all, maybe at 1m/second. 

It's not going to stay that way for long at all.

Carissa has Haste up! Carissa can dive away VERY FAST! Carissa can dive with the cockpit to stay in Feather Fall range! Carissa wouldn't have been able to give you a probability she could do any of those things but they're, you know, combat wizard things, you don't live to 23 if you fuck up at them five percent of the time. 

If only she had two Feather Falls their lives would be so easy from here. 

Unbeknownst to Carissa, there have been some prediction market updates on odds of injury. A negative update when the plane failed to brake, then a (small) positive update when the explosive detonation went basically as hoped. 

Safest cohort

Moderate injury 50.50%

Major injury 42%

Middle cohort

Moderate injury 70.50%

Major injury 45%

Least safe cohort

Moderate injury 95.50%

Major injury 53%

From here, it's just math. 

The capsule is not quite accelerating at 1g. There is some air resistance. But not a lot of air resistance at its low initial speed. Also the sensors are really lossy right now and a lot of this is being estimated from a distance, using the mathematical models that they managed to cobble together in time. 

They're going to be falling fast enough that by the time they are in range, the tolerances are...not going to be very big. But their magic user has already demonstrated her magically-enhanced reflexes, so there is that. 

They fall. 

(Carissa's earbud crackles to life. "Stand by for Feather Fall." The voice is distorted and strange in her ear.) 

A second - 

- two seconds - 

"NOW!" 

She was also eyeballing it in case they failed to tell her or told her something obviously stupid. Cheliax like all responsible training programs has their wizards practice Feather Falling some rabbits or dogs or whatever until you get good at the timing and stop leaving splattered animal on the ground. 

Feather Fall is one of the quickest spells. It has to be to be useful at all, really; most falls aren't from this height.

Feather Fall.

"Now doing a Summon Monster, air elemental, and also I'll try to fly over to the cockpit and see if I can push on it any." Ideally it wouldn't be moving away from her at nearly her Fly speed, that's going to suck for the peasants when it lands.

It's going to be slowing down! Just. Like. Not actually that much, not in the 36 seconds they have. 

".....Acknowledged," the person says in her ear, after a delay of like five seconds, and it's sort of audible in his voice that he is at the very least in a lot of pain. "Please proceed." 

(The actual seats available for the pilot and copilot are...better...than the makeshift padding. More than enough to prevent lethal injuries at an equivalent "crash" speed of somewhere between 20 and 25 m/s and only in the vertical plane, but they're also, like. Not really designed for crashes only in the vertical plane.) 

He's got to be seconds from death because what kind of supposed professional sounds like they're in pain otherwise? That's just advertising your weakness. 

Does Summon Monster get her anything?

The spell seems to work! 

It doesn't feel the way that it normally would. It gets her...something. 

 Not what she's used to getting; this isn't a summoned air elemental pulled out of the Elemental Plane of Air, it's a lot more like...the construct is there and the mind didn't show up to pilot it? 

Normally that's a worse spell - she has to pay direct attention to it - but in this specific case it's basically fine because all she's doing with it is blanketing the capsule and trying to make it stop moving except for its relentlessly gentle descent. 

Cease your forward momentum, big falling metal box. It's slow enough now she can at least keep pace with it and get in front of it and push it, which feels somewhat stupid but in principle ought to help. 

...did she get the timing right? It should be obvious now, with twelve seconds to go, whether the spell is going to run out first or land them first.

Very close to right! Maybe a second or two too early, it looks like. (This is perhaps mostly on Exception Handling, who have sensor data and computer simulations, and made the decision on when to tell Carissa to cast Feather Fall.)