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[h1][color=lightblue]Donnie[/color][/h1]
Location: The End
Word Count: 703
EXP: (18/60) + 4 (Overdrive) = [b]22/60[/b]
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Donnie didn’t have much time to celebrate his shots hitting home (albeit at Tora’s expense) when he saw the dragon’s black tail swooping towards him out of his peripheral vision. He jammed the collective lever as hard is at would go, sending the Flying Machine up into the air...but he’d only managed to clear the dragon’s tail halfway when he heard a horrific tearing noise underneath him.

He looked down...and saw that he was only flying half a machine. The undercarriage had been ripped off completely, leaving no way to actually [i]land[/i] the Flying Machine properly. And, to make matters worse, the fuel tank had been partially torn open, causing gasoline to rain from the bottom of the chassis.

The tail had struck diagonally upwards from the right, meaning that the Flying Machine was down its left engine too. Gravity began to take hold, sending the Flying Machine into a death spiral!

Donnie knew there was no way to save his autogyro. Without landing gear, in the middle of a fight, with the whole thing tilted downwards, it would only be good for salvage even if he tried his hardest to keep it aloft.

Thankfully, the remaining engine and the rotor on top were helping him maintain enough lift to slow his descent, giving him precious time to think. Risking a glance at the Dragon, he saw Jak going for a downwards slam of some kind. Hopefully that would ground the dragon, but it would complicate things.

He only had one shot at this, and he wanted to make the Dwarven Flying Machine’s swan song count for something before he bailed. It was already leaking fuel, and had a bunch of Boom Biters loaded in the chassis that thankfully hadn’t exploded. Two dangerous combustibles in one place.

And Tora might have given it a safety overhaul, but if there was one thing Donnie knew about Azerothian engineering, it was that if you knew a device well enough, you could always find a way to make it explode in a hurry.

He reached into the exposed wiring of the Flying Machine’s damaged components, thankful he was largely wearing leather armor with an insulated gambeson underneath, and quickly took the wire that led to the last remaining Drill Shield engine and hooked it up directly to the main battery, bypassing the resistors that would normally lower the current to something manageable.

Just as he suspected, he began to smell smoke as the wiring that led to the right engine began to fry under the increased current. Soon, an electrical fire broke out, and he knew he had to bail [i]now.[/i].

“JAK!” he yelled. “GOT A SPECIAL DELIVERY! GET OUT OF THE WAY!” If Jak looked up, he would see a sparking, flaming Flying Machine spewing smoke, with one engine and its entire undercarriage outright ripped off, plummeting in a death spiral that would end in a collision course with the dragon’s head--and by extension, him. And Donnie had made sure that when it collided, true to most Azerothian technology, it would explode [i]gloriously.[/i]

Donnie, for his part, wasn’t stupid. He’d packed a parachute just in case he had to bail. He was only about a hundred feet up, so there wasn’t enough time for the parachute to really slow his descent. The landing was a hard one. Not a lethal one, but he still yelled in pain as his right femur broke.

He couldn’t get a good look at the injury, what with the armor in the way, but casting Vivify once was enough to get the fracture to reset itself and mostly rejoin, and the torn muscle to heal, but he’d definitely still have some bruises left over and the bone wouldn’t be completely like new until at least another cast or two.

And he wouldn’t have that time, as the dragon would be feeling the impact of those attacks by now and it would be [i]pissed.[/i] He got to his feet, ready to dodge whatever else the dragon had up its sleeve once it hit the ground, and respond in kind with a kick to the eye from his good leg. And with his new speed boost, dodging would hopefully be a cinch.