Snippet #1415488

He stared as one of the team members, a blond male with spiky hair and a weird looking earing, shaped in what Derr supposed was a sword, jumped from the open hatch. Derr looked down at the pack in his own hands uncertainly. It was a standard issued type used by the air forces, made from plasmically enforced Bynema coated with resins and sealed between two layers of polyethylene film and laces from titanium threads, making it as strong and resistant as a bullet restraining vest, but which also meant there were a number of ways of manufacturing a better and more secure parachute. So why did he have to use this one? And why did he have to jump at all? What was the purpose of this exercise if it was obvious that not everyone in this group was a trained soldier? Bonding? Surely not. What ever the case, he wasn't convinced that this was the only way to get to the starting point, but for now, as he had no way of checking, he decided to ignore his desire for knowledge and resign to investigating it later.

As he was a naturally paranoid guy, he took a quick look at the captain's parachute, making sure it was the same, then scanned his for anything that seemed out of place or shouldn't be there. Zey vill not brink us all zee vay here just to get rid of us, for vee are too faluable, but I cannot exclude zee possibility zey vant somesink ozer zan zee appointed. He looked curiously around him only to see everyone else already getting ready. "Zis is ridiculous. Zey cannot expect me to jump..." He muttered to himself, but started strapping on the parachute. He would gain nothing from delaying the inevitable. And besides, as much as he complained, he had gotten himself into this; there was no point in regretting it now. He tched, and as he worked on tying it around his leg, he noted that it fit his body perfectly, which made him wonder if they were custom made. And if they were, where had they gotten his measurements from...

When the last safety clicked in place, he saw a young woman, a girl more like it, stand by the door, considering something, then guard her hat in a pocket and jump as effortlessly as if she did that for a living, even though he knew she didn't. He chuckled. Perhaps zis trip vill not be a total vaste after all. She seems quite interestink, zis young one. Though he himself wasn't particularly old, he surely felt that way most of the time.

He removed his glasses, stood up, and keeping one arm firmly on the steel bar embedded into the wall, made his way toward the hatch and looked down. And wished he hadn't. The ground looked awfully far away. The amusing thought to him though, was that he knew all the laws and theories about a falling object and could explain them at detail anytime, but actual jumping from thousands of feet had never been on his to-do list. One just shouldn't make a scientist sky-dive... He double checked everything once again and yelled, "Zis sucks!" Then threw himself from the opening before he could think of more ways of why he shouldn't.

Air rushed past him as his body plummeted straight down, though unfortunately, not the way he had hoped. He spun this way and that, doing involuntary flips in the air, his body falling uncontrollably, making him lose the little orientation he had. He needed to get the hand of this and fast, for he did after all, have only so many feet before he ran out of track. He bent his limbs, hugging them to his torso to decrease the spinning and spent almost a full twenty seconds finding the pattern to it, then spread his arms and legs wide at the precise moment he was looking toward the ground. It hurt and for a moment he thought his shoulders were going to bent the other way, but he gritted his teeth and maintained the position, correcting his course with his body, until he was sure it was the right time to open the parachute. And when he did, it unfolded over him immediately, for a second giving the sensation it was pulling him upward, and the fall slowed down to less than eight miles per hour, which compared to the previous a hundred and fifteen, was a bliss. He was further relieved to find that handling a canopy was much the same in reality as it was in theory. Not before long, he neared the landing site.

He landed hard on the concrete surface and his weak legs buckled under him. He groaned in pain and frustration as his head hit the floor with a final thump, but quickly reached into his pocket and withdrew a metal cylinder the size of a small pen. Still lying on the floor, he rolled up his coat and shirt's sleeve and positioned one end of the cylinder against the bare skin of his forearm and pressed the other with his thumb. But a second later, he threw the thing away and took a few deep breaths before calming down and undoing the straps, letting the pack fall from his back. He stood up shakily and rubbed the back of his head. "Ow, ow, ow." He complained, then suddenly a smile spread on his face. "Someday, someone, somevere is goink to pay for zis."