The guy they call death

What went down on shiloh part 3

Stephens was inching his way through the cramped rock tunnel now.  

He felt like an overgrown parent who'd gotten stuck in a kid's playground tunnel whilst in panicked search of his child. 

Memories of the shallow caves, underground and on mountains, in various locations where he'd been trained to adjust his breathing rate to fit the oxygen density of his location, rushed back. 

Memories of the rusty, cobwebbed vents he'd had to crawl through and the long tiring low-crawls under barbed wire. 

Memories of the painful drills were he'd had to crawl through bushes, briars and any other number of sharp obstacles in such a way that his body received as few scratches on his face -or other obvious places like the arms- as possible. 

All of them were coming back to him in full force now that he was here in this tube like area surrounded on all sides by stones. 

Every time he moved, the small rocks in the formation would claw and snag at the smooth pliable material of his uniform, if he raised his head even an inch from its crouched crick-inducing position it banged against the hard and jagged ceiling of the tunnel. 

It was too enclosed for him to move his arms or even his elbows fully, so he could only -agonizingly slowly- use his shoulders and chin against the dense floor to nudge himself forwards, the tunnel felt a lot longer than it had looked when he'd found it.  

He prayed absent-mindedly that no rats would come scurrying up to him. Then he snapped his tired body and mind, his dulling attention span awake. 

Take note of everything, even the things you can't sense with your eyes. 

Don't lose focus even for a moment.  

You are never completely safe when you're a pirate. 

If your attention lapses for even an instant while on a mission, even a second, as a pirate you may as well be dead. A pirate breaks the rules but that doesn't mean you shouldn't follow the useful ones. 

Take risks but be safe. Make thinking a habit. 

Notice the things that will save your life later. 

The advice and mantras that were pumped into all pirates under Sonny Blackbones raced around his mind. They always seemed to come back to him whenever he was on a mission, he didn't know when or how it had started, he'd just unconsciously begun to think of them as a part of being a pirate, the repetitive advice he'd once learned to hate during training was just another part of who he was now, a part of the guy he'd become, the phrases the trained pirates had heard so many times just another thing the pirates used to keep themselves alive, if they didn't race through his head when he was in danger he wouldn't feel able to look after himself.

It smelt of damp stone and old air, both were scents he wasn't accustomed to finding in Shiloh.  

From the musty scent of the air he judged that no living thing had taken up root here in quite a while, and so long as there weren't skeletal rats with an urge to move about and put on red cloaks nearby he was safe. He sighed regretting it immediately from the dust his breath kicked up, coughing irritably he wondered how the skele-corpse had made it out so quickly and where the dampness had come from.  

The rocks were unusually cold to the touch. For some reason that one fact niggled at his brain, telling him from trained partnership of instinct and observation that there was more to it than what he could consider at the moment.  

Two things were becoming abnormally clear though.  

-There was some form of moisture down here in the Shiloh dessert - the place where liquids are generally understood to be pretty hard to come by.  

-and there was something more to that animated skeleton than met the eye. 

. . . Stephens manfully resisted the urge to pinch himself and make sure he wasn't having overly realistic dreams or drug induced hallucinations.

Finally, he saw a small grey light revealing an exit up ahead he moved his aching shoulder muscles, ordering them to ignore the cuts and speed up, so that he could find out what this place was and why the surprisingly active dead skeleton had known about it  

'Sonny.' said Corso at last breaking the silence. 

The leader of the pirates seemed to come alive again, 'Is this video live right now?' he addressed this at Artie, who'd interrupted their meeting to show them the clip on the holopad. 

Artie shook his head 'it was live when i saw it a few minutes ago but i replayed it from the top for you guys' 

'Sonny?' Corso turned to him again. 

He paused before responding, 'Have the... effects on the players in the match here stopped or lessened since this video was posted?' Artie took the holopad away slightly touching the search option lightly and checking while the sitting Corso and Sonny exchanged a look. 

'Yeah, whatever happened seemed to fade after a few minutes, most of them were sedated after the footage got cut off and the technodroids rushed on but the ones that are awake are lucid and remember everything that happened to them' 

'We can't be sure about this, it could be something like the netherball fiasco all over again Sonny.' 

Sonny leant forward in his seat, thinking carefully. 

'Artie, I need you to-' before Sonny could finish his order he was interrupted by the beeping of the screen to their left. They looked up,  

'what now?' Sonny heard Corso mutter in bad temper and hid a knowing smile. 

--Incoming-- Incoming transmission--