Chapter 23:

Still without lights, they try to make their way through the darkened hallways. It was like Cassian told Mike, there wasn't really much there for them to find. Any papers down there were practically ineligible by this point in time by how long they were down there, alongside other means. Whatever the case was, they weren't finding anything. The most interesting thing they did eventually find was near the end of it in a closed room.

Inside the said room, there was a desk there. There were a few more things in there, but they weren't of any real importance, nothing there really was. It was instead what was in front of the desk. It was a dead corpse in a chair in front of it, the rotting corpse stinking up the room it was in, but also seemingly withering away into dust with the state it was in.

"... I want to poke it," Mike admits to the others, to which Pat initially jokes about it, saying he might as well get up close and observe it. Alex, however, has a different response. "Do it." He said jokingly, but in a tone that was almost as if it was him telling Mike to actually go through with this idea of his, and that was when Pat decided to back down on the decision. It wasn't to outright stop the idea of poking it, but instead to just poke the body with something like a stick or something.

Though, since they were all the way down there, there wasn't really a stick anywhere, instead just some pieces of rubble and old pieces of metal lying around that they could use. And that is what Mike decides to use. He goes back through a few rooms to find a metal rod to poke the corpse. He decides to poke the arm of it, expecting it to have some type of substance so that it would stop him. Instead, it basically went straight through. Leaving a hole right there, alongside dust coming from the hole.

Alex and Mike backed away from it, and so did Pat, but his reaction was different compared to the other's. "Oh, so that's what they meant about the whole soulblight taking you out from the inside." The other two looked at him, wondering what he was meaning by that, and he looked back with a genuinely intrigued face. While the other two had gotten the general idea about that disease, they had basically thrown it away from their minds for the most part as it hadn't ever really affected them at all during their time.

Meanwhile, Pat, being the way that he is, had decided to read up about it and everything, but had never seen it first hand. He takes the rod from Mike and decides to use it to turn the chair around to try and observe the corpse a bit better. He stands as close as he could while also trying to not be right in front of the corpse to gather as much of a look as he could of it. He looks back at the others and asks them if they could perhaps contact someone from the Union to see if they can try to analyze the corpse.

They oblige and use their devices to see if they could perhaps get something about it. While waiting, they all leave due to the smell of the rotten corpse finally getting to them. Eventually they did get a response back and were told to leave a marker there for an examination team to find their way there, but to also go ahead and leave the area because the body was likely one that had soulblight, and they were at risk of getting infected by the disease.

So they left the area, going to a different area of the barren wastelands using the teleporter to kill some demons and get some money from doing it alongside messaging Cassian about it, which he left them to do as they needed. They do that alongside taking some time to just hang out with one another, wasting a few hours doing so. It was only then when they got a message back from someone from the Union, a message from someone they didn't know, that they found the body and had confirmed about how they died.

They found that the person's corpse, whoever they were, had been suffering from soulblight, making it where when they died, it would have free reign over the body to make it crumble to dust, but when including the environment of it being down there, it allowed the body to stay in contact to some degree, but if anything were to happen to it afterwards, it would likely have turned to an automatic dust cloud of sorts, which is what they saw first hand.

When Mike asked back about how long it must've been down there for, they were still determining that as they speak. It wasn't an easy thing to figure out, that was certain. They could only confirm now that the soulblight progression could maybe tell them how long it might've taken, but that would still take a while to figure out. They then tell them to go ahead and leave it to them to deal with this matter while they can return to doing whatever they are needing to do.

So they did, going back to go ahead and hang out with one another, leaving them to do whatever they were needing. It wasn't much else for them to deal with outside of doing this, but a thought passed through the mind of Pat. He remembers how the Admin told them that there were likely other things similar to the one they were at out there, and he suggests to the others that maybe they can go find some more.

Not only for the hell of it, but maybe they could find something while they are out there. It could maybe help them, it might not. They didn't know entirely, but it wouldn't hurt them to go out to check these types of things. So they agreed that every so often when they had the time to do so, they would go searching for some of those abandoned places.