After the jet lurched to the left in response to the starboard turbine suddenly exploding, it immediately reversed direction and went into a spin. While the spin slowed its descent, it also ruined any chance of controlling said descent.
In the cabin, Malcolm was slammed to his right but stayed in his seat due to his seatbelt being in place. His limber joints did not suffer much from this abuse and it was quickly shrugged off. Such restriction during a stressful moment was unacceptable to him, so he shifted slightly, sprouting claws, his eyes going cat-slitted but his skin did not sprout fur and his feet remained human and his tail did not grow in.
His clothes shifted, linked to him by primal magicks. He no longer looked like a bodybuilder that wore the clothing of an executive that read GQ and/or Esquire. He now wore a sleek sleeveless body-suit patterned in the colors of a snow leopard, with white strips of cloth enrobing his clawed feet.
He sprung his talons and slashed off the restricting nylon bands and was flung from his seat…and hung in mid-air. Even a werecat prince could fly and he’d learned how from his former king.
He propelled himself forward and tore the door from the cabin into the cockpit, as he heard swift, clawed footfalls against the outside of the fuselage. The explosion’s sound hadn’t been as bad here, even to his sharp senses. But sound quickly became an issue as the exterior door to the cabin was ripped open, causing explosive decompression in the tight space. The air evacuated the cabin with a tortured howl, a short row of yellow cups and air-bags dropping and flapping, almost merrily as if shouting ‘Wahoo! TIME TO DIE!’.
Mal turned his attention to the cockpit and took a deep breath. The pilot and co-pilot had abandoned their futile attempts to regain control and noticed they were both conscious. Captain Tomescu nodded at his co-pilot and the junior officer ejected, his whole chair shooting from the jet.
The pilot engaged emergency thrusters that would slow their descent and turned. Upon seeing Mal there and in his superhero costume, nodded and hit his own ejection button. It, unlike it’s companion just a moment earlier, misfired. A hatch right above him did blow out, though.
The simple expedient was for Tomescu to open his seatbelt, grab a parachute from a nearby hatch, as Mal himself took a breathing apparatus and donned it. He toggled on its communications system and set it to transmit. As he did so, the pilot buckled on his parachute and gave the thumbs up.
Mal grabbed him by the harness and lifted him out the hatch that had opened and sinuously wriggled his torso through. He made sure that he wouldn’t release the man into any hazards from the falling vehicle and only then released him, just as his ankle was grabbed and he was pulled back into the wildly spinning vehicle. A chute opened nearby and Tomescu signaled back, reporting the coordinates of the attack.
Malcolm, however, was pulled into the pilot’s chair by a man also with cat-slitted eyes, though his were green-gold with a bloody, baleful crimson in the corners. His talons went right to Mal’s neck, closing with an unexpected strength from his wiry, lean frame.
The wind howled through the plunging, spinning aircraft as a Jaguar King began squeezing the life out of the Snowcat King. Mal managed to grate out around the grip on his throat, loud enough even to be heard above the chaotic howl of the wind, “Hell…o,…Gabri…el.”