Jason leaves the rum bottle alone for now and absent minded puts a hand on his Shackle underneath the shroud.
You have sudden hallucinatory visions of the past. Of gameshow stages covered in gore, of too bright lights shining in your eyes, of screaming and blurred faces of a laughing crowd. You feel pain and excitement and terror and cold shock of bloodloss. And, then, as the flash of memories and emotions not your own pass, you suddenly have a transient feeling of bodily skill. Your muscles move with automatic ease, and you miss the weight of some kind of weapon in your hand. You feel the desire to swing a blow and to duck and weave away from the return.
The ship takes off without any visible signal from anyone and steve hovers into mid air as gravity falls away. He curls in weightless flight and lands feet first on the ceiling, tip toeing across it using the slight force of the ship's increasing momentum to hold him there.
>Here's the deal, friends. Our interpreter has gone AWOL. He was supposed to go take a look at the situation and report back but, well, something must have happened to him. In any case, I'm going to act as the translator and interpreter, at least for the short time you'll need such things. Once the mission is complete, we'll all just meet up here at the ship and leave, as per usual. Simple, right? Oh, if anyone asks, I'm just another inmate like you, but one that happens to speak the language. Coincidence and all that. Say nothing about me, or I'll make sure you don't say anything ever again. A half an hour or so later, once the shuttle had landed and Steve had stopped walking on the ceiling, he again addressed the group.
>Oh, and try not to talk back. I'm sure we're going to see some things you find objectionable today, but for your sake and mine, please keep your mouth shut. Understood?The hatch opened as he said the last word and a blinding wall of light, burning wind and choking sand poured into the ship. Beyond the ship was an expanse of light colored sand, and, nestled amongst the dunes, is a city. It looks like nothing more then a great expanse of tan boxes, stacked and crushed into close proximity, with a larger, stepped structure near its center. The structure at the center is, you would assume, the home of the king, judging by the sloped blue roofs and tall bronze spires set in ovoid domes. From here, in the great distance, it looks like a cluster of slightly malformed,bulbous aqua colored fruit punctuated with glittering thorns. The city, is quite small, all things considered, maybe a mile in radius, tightly packed, and crisscrossed with cuts that were no doubt thin roads and paths. It gave the impression of a single, hard clay brick that had been randomly sliced and the pieces only slightly separated, so that the whole stood now in a mildly exploded form, but that, if pressed back toward the center, it would all fit together seamlessly like a great puzzle.
>We have a short walk ahead of us.
Steve was already walk off across the dunes toward the city.