NOTE: I recommend rereading Chapter 5 if you read it on the first draft. All 5 of the first chapters were rewritten, but that one took the most changes. Otherwise, hope you enjoy Chapter 6. Chapter 7 will be released whenever the edit and rewrite are complete on it (hopefully not too long).
A young woman with a perfect oval face and innocent blue-green eyes stood quietly, looking over the ocean. She wore pink and blue, a uniform of some kind and she waved a staff with purpose. Tidus reached out a hand to her, tried to touch her, but she looked right through him. After a few moments she dropped her staff and began to cry. Tidus wanted to help her, to tell her not to cry, but she couldn't hear him. She turned her head up toward heaven. She brought her hand to her mouth and she whistled.
"Wake up new guy. Time to learn you're job," Hershey said. The rest of the room was still sleeping, or at least pretending to. Tidus sighed. People down here didn't like to look him in the eyes. Maybe it was because he was new, but they just didn't trust him.
Tidus stared at his would-be-friend for a long moment. He'd been dreaming. A face... he could remember a face, a girl. No name or anything to go with it, but it was something... something not gray or rank or vile. If he could remember her name, maybe he could remember who he was. The fear and panic were barely noticeable now, not because he was detached from them, but because he'd found a totem, something to occupy his thoughts. The girl from his dream, was she his sister or a friend? Were they lovers? Not enemies, he was sure of that. "No clue who I am, how I got here, and I have to learn a skill, lovely." When Hershey didn't reply, Tidus sighed and sat up. "Okay, what first?"
"We cover survival first. We're mining under water. Can you swim?" Hershey asked. "If you can't, there's no point in continuing. You're screwed."
Tidus shrugged. "I think I can. I hope I can." He shut his eyes and chewed on the word, swimming. The memory of strong strokes, tumbling balls, and sliding through salty fluid flashed behind his eyes. "No wait, I remember swimming, definitely. Clear blue water, yeah I remember."
"Clear blue, huh? I imagine you weren't out mining G3 grade sludge. When we get out to the mine, you aren't going to be able to see five inches. It's the most horrible black mess I've ever had the misfortune to have to deal with. Always follow the guidelines. They glow and they run from station to transport. You're never lost as long as you're on the line." Hershey pulled out a small chrome canister with a facemask attached. "This little device let's us breath when we need to. It's Al Bhed. It turns the air you breathe out back into good air to breathe back in. Don't ask me how it works."
Tidus took the canister and pressed the mask against his face. "How long do we stay under water at a time?"
"Longest I was ever under, twenty hours. It gets so you feel like the sludge down there is eating into your brain." Hershey paused and grinned. "Not for much longer though," he whispered. "I have a plan. You my friend are going to help me get out of this hole."
Tidus shrugged. "We mine outside? I don't see what's to keep us from just swimming away when no one's looking. They can't watch us all the time."
Hershey laughed. "You got spirit. That's good. There are three reasons we don't just swim away. First one is visibility," Hershey said. "If you can't see where you're going, how do you know where to run."
"And the second reason?" Tidus asked.
"That would be the armored machina patrolling just out of sight. I guarantee, they don't have trouble spotting runaways, and they cause a lot of hurting without impairing your working ability," Hershey said. "I like the third reason best though. Even if you could get away, there's nowhere to go. We're in the middle of the ocean."
"But you have a plan?" To Tidus, a man who didn't even have his own name, Hershey seemed like a godsend. "I want to escape too," Tidus blurted suddenly. "Not just help you." The girl in his dream, maybe he could find her. No, he had to find her. She'd know who he was. Tidus had a strange feeling that she could tell him everything. "Will your plan work with two people?"
Hershey didn't answer right away. "Let's get you through day one first, okay?"
Tidus listened to Hershey's careful instructions about his job's intricacies, its dangers and oddities. It was all he could do to stay focused on this man and his lessons. Tidus couldn't quite put the dream girl completely out of his mind. The longer he thought about her, the more certain he became that she wasn't a sister or even a friend. She was his, a part of him. Finding her was important. It was everything. If he could get out of the rattrap he'd awoken in, that is.
When the overseerers came around with their guns and their full body armor, Tidus felt pretty prepared for the mine. One of them took him aside and went through an abbreviated version of Hershey's early morning explanation. He was quickly ushered into a line and packed with thirty-nine other souls into a shuttle.
Tidus felt the first twinge of claustrophobia he could remember. The little silver canister he'd been handed didn't seem very reliable and his shuttle mates barely grunted. "They're dead," he thought to himself. "The only live men in this whole camp are me and Hershey. If we don't get away, we'll end up the same as them, oily, dead, automatons." When the water started filling the shuttle, Tidus gasped and covered his nose. The smell was worse than he'd imagined possible, rotten potatoes and sulfur. He lifted his foot out of the viscous black fluid and tried to imagine what it was going to feel like on his skin. The old miners laughed at him. The new guy was getting his feet wet. He didn't have to wait long to get the full effect. The shuttle took only a few minutes to fill.
At first Tidus couldn't bring himself to open his eyes. When he did, they burned like fire. Hershey had been right. You couldn't see five inches. Heck, he couldn't see the man sitting next to him in the shuttle. The doors screeched open and two at a time the miners were swallowed by the blackness. When Tidus finally made it to the door he barely had time to locate the glowing cable the overseer was indicating before he was being shoved out the door.
Tidus found that time in the mine was slow and immeasurable. There was no sun, no clock or lunch break, only the glowing line and the next station, the next task. Finally, loaded back into the tiny shuttles where the black water drained away leaving it's touch on everyone and everything, Tidus felt a million years old. The oil and grime clung to him weighing him down. He couldn't even bring the girl from his dream to mind.
"You made it man," Hershey said. He squeezed onto the bench next to Tidus. "First day is the hardest. Thought I was gonna go crazy. Then I started working on my plan."
Tidus shivered. He'd almost forgotten, there was a difference between himself and the other men here. He was getting out. Hershey had a plan. "I don't want to die here," he said quietly. "There's this girl. I dreamed her... She was dancing for me. I want to find her."
Hershey paused and laughed a low chuckle. "A dancing girl, huh? We're getting out of here, buddy. But first, I've got a present for you." Tidus frowned. He didn't want anything from the nasty hole they just left behind. The tacky film of oil and god knows what else covering his entire body was sufficient souvenir. "If you made it through the day, I knew you'd need a name. We can't keep calling you new guy. You're a veteran now, after that shift." Hershey paused and smiled. "I had a big brother. He died when he was eight, forest fiend. He had a great name though, Vernon, Vern for short."
One of the old men snorted. "Hell, Hershey named the new guy Vern."
"I thought he liked the new guy," another man replied.
While Hershey defended his choice in names, to the jeering of the shuttle, Tidus leaned his grime covered head back and shut his eyes. He could see her again, the sad girl from his dream. He had no way to perceive the cloud of death, which clung to his spirit. He couldn't know how strongly the specter of death could sense the despair he had almost surrendered to. In his ignorance, he clung to his hope, and the specter of death lost him from its sights.