Descent

John had been in many dangerous situations in his life before and yet this one felt surreal. There were still the soft sounds of films playing over headphones and the chuckle of those that were reacting to whatever comedic bits there were. At the same time, he could hear the growing commotion in the seats on this side of the plane. Bit by bit, people realized what was happening and unrest turned to panic.

“This is your pilot speaking!” a forceful voice echoed over the speaker. “We have a technical malfunction and will go for an emergency landing. Please remain calm and in your seats! Listen to the plane personnel!”

Said personnel were already streaming out of the areas near the cockpit to make sure panicking people were not doing anything stupid. A glance was all that he and Rave needed to be given. They were staying right where they were, seatbelts on.

John was trying to find something he could do, but any idea he came up with ended with him getting smote by Gaia. He grit his teeth. All they could do here was hope that the failsafes of mundane technology let them reach the first available landing site.

A catastrophic shake went through the plane. John did not have to look out of the window to know what had happened. One wing removed, the plane quickly lost its controlled trajectory. People all around shouted, their panic now entirely uncontrolled. The workers hurried back to their safety seats. Any attempt to control the situation was futile, now there was only preparing for the inevitable.

John and Rave awaited it with a grim calm.

The plane crashed into the ocean. The whistling of the wind was replaced with a roaring splash. All bodies were snapped forwards. Luggage poorly secured and small hand items flew forwards while the front of the structure audibly shattered.

For a confusing moment, the structure was weightless, hanging beneath the waterline. Then the buoyancy of the plane kicked in, causing it to violently right itself.

John and Rave tore off the seatbelts while that was still ongoing. They got to their feet, then began to move. For now the air within the plane kept them afloat, but they did not have long. Water was as hard as concrete at the velocity they had met it and the aluminium hull would not have survived all that intact. If there were holes, then they were going to sink inevitably.

There was clear motion in the worker’s area of the plane. Sluggish motion of people who had little experience but enough training to do what was correct anyhow. The majority of passengers were still dazed when John and Rave checked on the progress there.

Through a miracle of clever steering, the pilots of the vessel had survived and were currently in the process of making things work. Emergency boxes were ripped open, survival equipment and inflatable rafts pulled out, and the access hatch opened manually. One of the pilots fixed her gaze on John and Rave. She saw two able-bodied young people of sound mind and made of that the best she could. “Can you help get the people up?”

“Yes,” Rave answered and John followed. They quickly checked on whoever was closest, helping up older people, children, mothers, and whoever else most needed it. For everyone else, they only had some quick talking to spare.

Adrenaline was rushing through everyone. Some reacted to this better than others. A few people were in a total, unworkable panic and John just had to leave them in their seats, hoping they would calm down enough to be moved while he helped others. Some turned from panic to rage and were actively lashing out. Most, thankfully, had their head screwed on tight enough that they managed to follow orders.

The plane was steadily sinking. John did his best not to call attention to that fact. Once ferried to the front, the people that could be trusted to be able to swim were told to get in the water and hold onto the emergency escape slide or one of the inflatable boats they had. The survival kits were hastily loaded on, distributed across the boats evenly. After that, those that were able helped those less or not so to make it into the boats.

It was all surprisingly straightforward and simple. Plenty of panic, yes, but John had imagined it all to be messier. Then again, perhaps he was just too used to worse. The two corpses that they left in the plane barely registered to him.

“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?!”

That shout had been echoed repeatedly. Even now that everyone who had survived was ‘safe’ on a boat, the pilot deemed it best to gloss over the question. An approach that John agreed with. Nothing good would come of unsatisfying answers. “Before we get locked down talking, we need to get moving. There is an island southwest of this position. We should be able to get there in 2 hours.”

An enthusiastic estimate. The lifeboats and the (now detached) inflatable slide that they were using had to be tied together and then all they could do was paddle. John was part of that shift. Rave had to watch him work there. Among mundanes, it was the expectation that she, even as a fit woman in her twenties, would be outperformed by one of the similarly aged men. To prove them wrong would have raised eyebrows. John had to already pretend to get exhausted.

After three hours, they made it to the shore of the island.

It was surprisingly large. John estimated it to be several kilometres across and it was covered in dense vegetation. A jungle of some description was separated from the calm, blue ocean by a thick strip of sand. Off to the sides of the main island were craggy stone pillars. It was an impressive sight, but something felt extremely off about all of it.

“Where are we?” John quietly asked the pilot, once they had their feet on the sand.

She looked at him and Rave. There was a clear calculation going on behind her eyes, which told John what the answer would be before she gave it. “I don’t know. Honestly, there shouldn’t be an island this big on this route.”

The alarm bells in John’s head only rang louder hearing that. Humanity had not explored every corner of the world yet, but this was a large body of land on one of the most important sea-routes in the world. It should have been spotted by someone in the last 600 years. Why hadn’t it?

That was in addition to the much larger issue: John had lost contact with the Creator Puppet.

The connection he had with that extension of himself should have been impossible to mess with. Given his level and the soft rules of magic on what was and wasn’t impossible, this meant that either a god or a Latebloomer was weighing in on this situation. “I see,” he told the captain with a militaristic nod. “I will keep it to myself.”

“Thank you,” she responded, then marched over to the rest of the crowd, who were seeking shade under the trees.

John, for his part, sought a place where he could esoterically gesture without anybody raising an eyebrow. “I’ll put up a barrier,” he warned Rave, then did it. Once inside, he pulled up the Harem Comms.

Aclysia: Master, are you able to read this?

That was only the latest among a number of messages in his inbox, all received over the past few hours. “The Harem Comms still work,” he reported with some relief. Evidently, that magic was made from sterner stuff than what connected him to the Creator Puppet.

John: Yes, I am. Our plane crashed. We’re somewhere in the Pacific.

Scarlett: Does your phone work?

John pulled it out of his inventory and clicked his tongue. Even this fully Abyssified technology did not have a signal. “Yeah, something definitely pulled us here,” he mumbled, before writing that to the Harem Comms.

John: No signal and no map data. We did manage to take an emergency radio with us, but I won’t expect that to work. I’ll chart the stars tonight to see if I can triangulate our position that way. If that does not work, I’ll have to rely on all of you to find us.

Aclysia: May I teleport to you, Master?

John: You may attempt to.

Aclysia: …It is not working.

Aclysia: I will shred whatever is keeping me from you.

Aclysia: What dares?

Aclysia: Who or what dares?

John could feel a lot more strongly worded thoughts behind those typed messages. He was circling his jaw. Blocking the teleportation cooldowns of his maids was something he had known was possible in theory. In effect, it was quite bothersome. Still, John was not too worried about his own safety.

“You’re all still here, right?” he asked aloud.

Elemental power consolidated around him sixfold. Gnome’s body formed from the soil, Sylph manifested in a storm of green gusts, Siena rose from his shadow, Undine shaped herself out of a spontaneously spawning water cluster, and Salamander burned her presence into magical reality. The five elemental women were joined by one tiny crocodile who, so far away from the Guild Hall, could only grow so large without being fed mana. The Celestial Devourer had opted for the size of a hatchling, poking his head out of John’s breast pocket.

“Summoning works as usual,” Gnome assured him.

“Good.” He shot her a smile, then returned to giving the rest of his harem updates.

John: The elementals are here with me, as is Jane.

John: In other words, survival is not the issue. Finding me, however, is. In a **** gambit, we could just swim, but I wouldn’t know where to start with that.

Scarlett: I have your last location data. I’ll set things up.

Momo: We’ll go back to the Guild Hall to make sure things stay stable enough.

John: I’ll be in contact then. I have to make sure the other survivors don’t wonder where we are.

“So how bad are things?” Rave asked, once he dismissed the window.

“Pretty terrible,” he confessed to her. “Not quite sure where along the road we got caught up in a scheme, but the chances of all of this being an accident are so astronomically low I can safely discount them. In other words, someone is keeping us trapped for a reason and I can only speculate on what that reason is.” He looked around. “I’m afraid we will find out eventually.”

“For now?” Gnome asked.

“For now, we can do very little else than to keep together and wait.” The in and out of waves crashing on the shore were a constant reminder of their prison. John was fairly confident that he could cross the Pacific with his elementals if he had to, but if he had no way to navigate, then that would not work out.

“Let’s get back out there then,” Rave said.

John nodded, the elementals returned to their incorporeal state, and they stepped back out to the wider crowd. No reactions from them, besides some relieved glances from the pilots. “We thought you had wandered off into the forest?”

That was a way to rationalize their absence.

“Just went to take a quick leak,” he explained.

“Best to stick together,” his first fiancée agreed. “Ya know how it is.”

The female half of the pilot duo nodded. “You two seem pretty calm about all of this?”

“We are hobby survivalists, among other things,” John gave a believable lie. “Truth be told…” he lowered his voice slightly, “…I am a self-made billionaire. Not a particularly well-known one, but I got friends in the right places. I expect a lot of private efforts to join the general search parties.”

“That’s good to hear,” the pilot let out a worried sigh. “The people haven’t been taking the explanation I gave them well. I hope they will manage to stay busy after we put up the shelter.”

John followed the efforts of unloading the survival equipment in the background. There were several large tarps that would give them shade and shelter from the rain. Because they had made such an orderly evacuation, they had everything with them that the plane had been stocked with. Not enough for everyone to be comfortable, especially when it came to blankets and food, but enough that they would survive for two to three days.

“The people may be more agreeable to their situation if they’re occupied,” John suggested. “I know this goes against the standard survival guidelines, but I am going to venture into the forest to look for resources. If I find something, I can take the young men and women and keep them in motion.”

In any situation of prolonged waiting, it was chiefly the young that had to be kept moving, lest they stir up trouble purely for the sake of something happening. The older people around, John trusted would know to be patient or, at least, to keep it to grumbling.

The pilot regarded him with a long stare. “I do not condone it,” she said slowly, then stepped away. It was the proper response for her position. She knew she had to say that and that she could not stop him either.

With their tracks covered, John was a lot happier to begin his experiments. The first one he considered was to try and set out in a random direction to try and leave the range of the dampening effect. That was a plan he quickly discarded. They had already been under the influence when they had crashed, which was a fair distance from their current location. To go beyond that would be difficult and whoever had put this together must have had precautions against that.

Which left John with another route: into the island. Whatever was radiating the magical interference had to be located somewhere. The esoteric laws of the Abyss rarely allowed for someone to project their influence over such a vast distance and even then it was unheard of to be so overt without a beacon.

“We’ll try to locate the heart of our troubles,” he told Rave. “Ready to go jungle diving?”

“Sure am,” she assured him with a smirk.