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An undetermined amount of time earlier

Colin was the fifth to jump, leaving only the shortest of the team on the plain. He'd only been sky diving twice, and it was still a freaky experience to hurtle towards the earth at terminal velocity. Saying a quick prayer, Colin would step one, two, tree, then once more into thin air. Tilting forward, he'd fall from the steely reassurance of the plain into the air before him, the wind rushing past him, deafening him from anything except the roar of the plane.

After waiting a good thirty seconds, Colin would pull the main chord to release his parachute.

Nothing.

Confused, he'd yank one more time.

Still nothing.

A third time, just to be sure.

This time he got something. A big tangled knot of string and 'chute. Wasn't this great. Just amazing. He was playing chicken with the ground, and now had streamers coming from his a**. This was a bad start to a covert mission.

Pulling the secondary chord, the smaller chute would deploy. The first didn't leave.

Double ********. Struggling with his belt, Colin would grab the handle of his knife. Of course, it was wedged in there pretty deep. Wiggling, he'd manage to get it free.

2,000 feet

Chord one went easy. the first parachute flapped behind him, bitching with the secondary about which would kill Colin first.

1,700 feet

Chord two and three were tangled around each other, making them easy to find but more difficult to cut. The damned things were rubbing and thrashing like a French whore in bed. Finally slicing through them, Colin would hear them snap back.

1, 300 feet

Well, crap. The last and most offensive chord was behind him. Blindly reaching back, Colin would feel three chords. Now, which was the one he had to cut. Deep breath in, out, in, out, and, with eyes closed, prayers racing through is head, he'd cut the one on the left.

And it was off, whipping away in a tangle of flailing string and tarp. The secondary parachute finally blew open and jerked Colin to a slow descent. His shoulders hurt, sore from the action, but at least he was alive.

~~~~~~

Slowly falling towards the earth, trees began to rise up towards him. Branches reached out, trying to take hold of his parachute, brushing at the edges of it. Below him, out of pure irony, his primary chute lay caught, tangled in the trees below.

And he was headed right for it.

Well, this was about to get really annoying. Knife still in hand, Colin would poke it through the chute as he landed on it and collapsed, the tarp giving way to his weight and falling the twelve feet to the ground, spinning and flipping with every snag on the branches below. Thankfully, Colin landed on his back, the pack cushioning his fall.

With a groan of annoyance, he'd cut loose from the two parachutes, stuffing them back into the pack and sticking it in a hollow of a tree.

Now, which direction to go?

....

On Lah comes, tromping through the Echo Woods from the Ascended Way. He seemed to be trying to conserve as much body heat as possible, while doing his best to inspect things around.

Not much happening yet.

And suddenly holograms began to kick up... Sit tight for a show.

They came out of the air with ghostly parachutes. A hallucination, a ghostly visit, maybe his eyes just playing tricks on him. But there were five of them, the first a regular looking solider, then a rather wartorn looking fellow, then a man with a stone arm, then a very large man and finally a soldier woman.

Immediately after the wartorn fellow started an argument with the large fellow.

It was just barerly audible but there was the ghostly sound of the transparent wartorn man saying:

""Sort of like a... force, one that disintegrates them, destroy their physical bodies but not leaving any sign of destruction."

The large man responded by a whistle in the wind. Though all the images didn't last long before heading off in the direction of worker's rest.

But before they got far, they all disappeared.

As much as he wandered, there would be no more ghosts.

No ******** it."

Shhk- FWWWWWW-KK! WHAM!

"GOD. s**t. Ah, damnit..."

Mr. Black clutched the back of his head and rolled a few times on the ground just to get the urge to shout out of his system.

Unlike the rest of the Kitten Hats team, James hadn't had such an easy time getting into the city. While they had all been airdropped into the woods via the stealth airplane, the complete secrecy of the operation had meant that the men from Kitten Hats had not even been briefed about their own team in full. While the others had landed safely and moved out into the city, James had gotten the short end of the stick and crashed straight into a tree on the way down into the Echo Woods.

Cut to five hours later, and James wakes up to find himself hanging upside-down by a parachute harness with a welt the size of a grapefruit on the side of his head. He'd decided to save himself the hassle of trying to get untangled by just cutting the straps... but being upside-down for that long does wonders for a man's ability to think things through ahead of time.

"s**t. Okay. Damnitall. I think I'm good."

And that was the end of that. Enough profanity makes any throbbing injury seem a little less important. Searching on the ground for the knife he had dropped, Mr. Black slid it back into the sheath and then moved out...

Where? The single most conspicuous place on the skyline. The Palace Dome.

Throughout the city, the people of Frostschild were coming home. Men, women, and children, knocked out of reality by a magical punch no one saw coming, were being nudged back into existence by the very same force. Eating, sleeping, shopping, working, they had been going about their lives, and to them no time had passed at all. Still, something was not right.

They were changed.

Metal. Jagged. Screaming and shrieking with inhuman voices, they returned skeletons of their former selves, grim visages of decayed bodies animated through the fusion of magic and robotics. They would go about their daily lives, clumsy brutal mockeries of what they once were, but lacking in human comprehension or understanding.

That is, until they saw someone alive, someone unchanged, someone who was still human. They turned on these people, watched them. Approached slowly, cautiously, sizing up the strange being. They would clang their metal teeth together threateningly, stretch out their claw-like fingers, and then...

...they would attack.