When you pivot to snap your last shot, the lead glider is almost upon you - the reliable snap of your pistol dispatches another bullet to that finds its mark. The goblin shrieks, curses you in its black heathen tongue, and loses enough momentum in its pained recoil from the shot that all it can do is snarl and howl up at you as it dips toward the ground to smash into a hill somewhere behind you.

But the last goblin, the one with the pistol ball in the shoulder who has maintained form by sheer desire to cause you misery on its lunatic final flight, is still with you. Just a few feet away, losing speed as you gain it but perhaps not fast enough. You look behind you at Bella in her pod, and reach for Leonardo...

...But the seamstress, overwhelmed with the tasks of receiving firearms and trying to reload them while a flying machine swerves and dips and gunfire goes off two feet away from her, is not done. She is trying to work the ramrod but her movement is restricted in the pod and the reload isn't complete -

"WAAaaaaaghhhh AHAhahahha!"

Releasing his grip on his flappy wings, the goblin does what no doomdiver has done before - survives impact with his target. Dirty green digits snatch on to one of the the flying machine's larboard wings. Immediately, the pumping revolution of those wings judders and stalls as the greenskin is pulled up and snarled between the revolutions of the wings on those sides.

Bella finishes her reload and is ready to hand off the weapon to you, but you can't fire the blunderbuss at the creature on the wing - the scattering shot would tear the light wood and canvas to shreds, dooming you all.

"Get off, you-" Cestié cries, one hand holding the yoke as he fumbles for his sheathed short sword with the other.

All of this calamity is compacted into a couple of horrible seconds that you will remember in perfect detail for the rest of your life. Cestié has stopped pedalling so the wings are set and gliding, rather than stressing the frame as the wing assembly on the larboard fails to rotate with its hanger-on. The goblin hangs on to the wing with fingers and bites on with teeth, and then all at once the wing's construction gives way. The machine is a lightweight design; it relies on its slender dowels and waxed canvas and minimalist design to defeat gravity, but is not designed to stand up to intentional damage. The canvas on the wing gives way, and the goblin slides back snapping dowel after down and slipping free completely; cackling and howling as he spins away to the ground leaving one of the larboard wings jammed, the other mangled and stripped, and half the teeth of his upper jaw embedded in the frame.

Immediately, the flight of the machine loses integrity, and you begin sharply descending.

"Bloody- damn! Damn, we're going down, girls! Brace! I'm going to try to... glide us in!"

It's a rugged, terrible descent. Maso tries to bleed off speed by yoking up the nose of the machine but he is hard pressed not permitting the wounded machine to go into a spin.

You almost get away with it; but the machine is travelling a little skewed as it touches the top of a Carcassonne hill, and still too fast. The contact hits the wheels at an incline; the front wheel rips off right away. You remember the tumult, and the ripping crunch of the light woods you helped cut and sand splintering and smashing; and one tremendous burst of pain.

And then nothing.

Spoiler: OOC:
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It is the fate of heroes to experience terrible reversals in their march towards a greater destiny.

Also I must go to bed. But I invite you to offer Taalia's dream/coma fantasy while she's out cold.