First Reply A Dire Star's Repose

[Ives]

"Don't you ever wonder?" Wirtram slurred the words through breaths so acidic and pungent they might have put a wookiee to sleep.

"Wonder what?" Ives asked, holding his nose regardless of if the older miner would get offended.

"If you'd walked through that other door, if you'd still ended up dancing in the muck with us down here," Wirtram managed to, for once, develop the thought to a complete one.

He'd been a good friend, though somewhat timid, which made for a strange sight. The older miner stood at almost twice Ives' height and had a build that allowed him to carry one of the ore-carts by himself. And yet, when he had to open his mouth he became more awkward than a rancor on a ballroom dancefloor. Never judge a datacron by its cover, Ives supposed.

Usually that meant he kept quiet in some corner. But today he'd picked a spot at the bar. Next to Ives. And it seemed he had nothing better to do than dig into matters that weren't his business.

"And what's the point of wondering that?" Ives replied. "Seems a waste of time, if I'm honest, Wirt."

Wirtram considered that a moment, staring into the orange, bubbling contents of his mug. He sniffed once.

"Suppose you're right, four," Wirt said finally.

Four. A nickname on account of the fact none of the crew were able to pronounce Ives' name properly.

Ives watched the taller miner for a few moments. The man looked to be deep in thought. The miner normally lived up to his stereotype. Despite being a tall, silent type he usually lacked the 'brooding' part. Tonight was different, it seemed. Ives rarely saw the man so despondent and lost in thought.

The air hung quiet between them. An awkward silence seeped in. More awkward than a conversation with Wirt usually was. Ives shifted in his seat attempting to shake the discomfort seeping under his skin. Something was clearly troubling the older miner, and Ives had the sense the question, about past decisions, had been meant to open up a deeper conversation. That he'd meant to gather a new perspective on a problem he'd been pondering for a while now. Some mistake that Wirt regretted making or some decision that had led him down the wrong road to end up among the dregs of civilization. Heavy shit.

Ives hopped off the barstool.

"Well, I've got to go. Difficult shift behind me, I want to catch some shuteye before the next one," Ives said. He gave Wirt a pat on the shoulder, and headed off.

—

Ives steped off the surface-access elevator and headed up the path along the crater to the plains. Getting free elevator access hadn't come cheap, but that investment had been worth it. He took a deep breath of the air up on the surface, a refreshing contrast to the stale, recycled-to-barely-breathable, company-approved air down in the mines. The stars shone.

This far in the outskirts there weren't any cities to pollute the night sky. The mine, situated on some obscure moon orbiting an equally obscure gas giant, wasn't unimportant. By no means, it was a rhydonium mine. Precious fuel was pumped through the pipelines daily. It was just that no one sane wanted to settle near a rhydonium mine. Bless their hearts for it, because that meant that clear night sky didn't belong to anyone else.

Ives felt around in his pocket for a cigarette and pulled out a crooked, crumpled thing. He straightened it out, lit it, and took a drag. The smoke from his exhale was barely visible.

Unbeknownst to him, down below, an old artefact of dark power would be unearthed.

// This is pretty scattered, I do apologize. First time back to writing something proper in a hot minute. I dig horror-adjacent things and thriller-type themes. Feel free to make things the heck up, tho. I know I will.

 

[Milla]

She didn't put overmuch thought into where she was going these days. She followed a scent, an urge, a lock of hair that looked worth collecting. Sometimes she bought a ticket. Sometimes she stowed away. Sometimes she bullied someone into bringing her to the next port. The next planet. It was the existence of a shadow, or a weak breeze, rather than a life lived true and with intent. Meaningless, really, never knowing where she'd sleep that night or what face she'd peer up at the next day.

Milla was loving every second of it.

A new place, a new thing to collect, to ferret away. No one telling her Milla go here. Milla get this. Milla you're in the way and you are creeping me out.

Wonderful, truly.

Granted, she wasn't doing much DIFFERENT. Just. On her own terms. Untethered.

So when the last ship had brought her to a backwater mining world, she hadn't blinked. There was always something there, for one with the curiosity and lack of manners necessary to take it. Milla had both in spades. And a freeing lack of weight from their life before, except for the occasional, irritating words, bouncing around the back of their skull. But that was, usually, easy enough to ignore.

Like right now, there were things to find, and while things were no longer the same, Milla had always had a nose for the esoteric, the strange, the - frankly - upsetting. Whistling to herself, in a atonal rhythm more like a bird's call than a true song, she scrapped an interesting fungus from a rock at the entrance to a crack in the surface, peering over the edge of the crater beside her. A sniff at the air and her nose wrinkled. Something of interest was.... near by. Something she wanted. Following an innate urge she couldn't have resisted even if she could have named it, she lurked along the inner ridge of the crater, trying to figure out -

"You know, those stink." Came her voice, seemingly out of nowhere, as the smell of the tabacc caught her nostrils. The top of her head poked up over the rim of the crater, giving Ives a bit of a baleful glare, as if her opinion had any weight with a total stranger. "And its distracting."

 

[Ives]

"You know, there's a simple solution to that," although he did his best to sound tough, but his Ghor accent came through on that first vowel of "there", detracting from the tough-miner persona he was trying to summon.

Undeterred by his self-conscious slip, Ives took the step(s) and a half to close the distance and crouched down to put himself face to face with the stranger-well, almost. From his vantage he still looked down at her. Without much ceremony, he exhaled a lungful of the lifespan-reducing tabacc right in her direction.

"Do your thinking somewhere else."

Mmm. An instinct hit him with a cold shiver. Perhaps...perhaps that hadn't been the greatest idea.

Now that he actually looked at her, that scrawny, small, and surly varmint she looked to be, he didn't recognize that face at all. The part of him that was still sensitized to conventional, polite society recoiled with anxious energy. That city-boy shadow of himself squirmed under the uncertain tension of guessing at how this absolute stranger might respond to his knee-jerk rudeness, cursing the foul social habits he'd adopted from the other miners.

The rest of him, the "I just got done breaking my bones for twelve hours straight" part, didn't much care for those idle worries.

"Who even are you?" He rasped, watching her like he might still, somehow, recognize Milla . "Your face doesn't fit."

 

[Milla]

His slip, fortunate for him at least, was lost on the woman squinting up at him. She didn't recognize one accent from the next- everyone spoke in a slightly strange accent as far as Milla was concerned, but that also made her own difficult to place. Just a few degrees off of anything it could possibly be.

The only thing that saved her from a completely lungful of smoke was that Milla's head moved back like there were magnets attached to them both, but pointed in the wrong directions. Already making a screwed up ew gross face as he leaned in, reflexive and without any thought to how rude that sort of thing could be.

It wasn't enough to avoid it completely, mostly because in her wildest dreams Milla had never even considered someone would do something like that. A sharp breath through her nose in surprise- which sucked the smoke right up in against her sinuses, sharpish and acrid- leading to a series of hacking coughs.

Right back into Ives face.

Snarling wet coughs, and no, Milla didn't cover her mouth.

"Wild-" hack "biological-" wheeze "response." The last word more than a little strained. "Felt that all the way-" clearing her throat, wetly- still in his face, following him even if he'd tried to move back, climbing out of the crater if need be- "Into my diaphragm. Why don't you-" hack "Cough when you breath it in, hmm?" A sniffling, throat slapping snort into the back of her throat, and then spitting the phlem out on the ground. "Oh even that's a little grey now. No particulate processing? Worthless," muttering the last part more to herself than to him.
I'll show you worthless you ridiculous little shi-
"My face fits FINE- your face doesn't fit," defensively.

Somewhere below them? Something was happening. In the moment at least, Milla was too distracted by the other person in front of her to notice, but it wouldn't be long before the hairs on the backs of their necks would start to rise. But for now nudging the spit on the ground with the toe of her boot- too large on her foot- checking the viscosity absently even as she gave the young man (human? maybe. probably, close enough) in front of her a bit of a glare.

 

[Ives]

The response to his rude little stunt came in the form of a disgusting spray of unwelcome snot directly to the face.

The response to that response came as an intrusive—though undeniably pragmatic—instinct. Kick her down the crater's edge. Kick her and she won't be coughing in your face anymore.

Ives instead stood up, hoping to escape, though to his dismay she simply followed him. He grit his teeth and closed his eyes through her coughing fit. It wasn't easy, but he ignored the building desire to do something. Part of him still could act rationally, despite the aching in his back and the hazy headache building, so he endured the coughing.

After she'd finally concluded her onslaught with a disgustingly impressive snort, he waited a moment to confirm that an attempt at cleaning his face wouldn't result in another attack (he gauged she'd be that sort of petty). With her attention focused on...her snot of all things, Ives pulled the tattered remains of a rug from his back pocket and began to clean the detritus of a devastating, if brief, biological war.

While he wiped, he kept his retort rattling inside his mind, choosing instead to think angry words at her while glaring, rudely.

What did she mean by his face didn't fit, anyway. His face looked perfectly fine on him. Better than fine. With the right lighting, he looked downright handsome.

He cleaned up enough to look—for the circumstances—presentable.

"You don't fit because you're not part of the crew," he amended his previous observation.

He flipped the cloth onto the side he hadn't used and held it out in a silent offer to Milla . It had seen plenty of rock-dust, grime, and dirt in its months of use, but it had done its job in making Ives look a bit cleaner, somehow.

"And since you're not part of the crew, company policy is I have to ask you who you are. Mostly so I don't lose my job if you decide to report me for not following said policy in case you're an inspector," he continued.

"And especially so I don't become obligated to call security about a trespasser."

 

[Milla]

Ives

Milla cleared her throat once more. No, twice necessary to stop the acrid burning still coating everything, though the smell still lingered, high in her sinuses in a way that dulled her sense of smell a little and make she rub at her nose roughly with the back of a fist.

She was immune to the nasty looks he was giving her, she'd had worse leveled in her direction, this scarecrow's ire meant little to nothing. It honestly didn't even occur to her that it could be anything else. Being liked, appreciated was alien, not the looks he was giving her. Rudeness was like breathing. Anything else was strange and uncomfortable.

"Whose crew? Your crew? Shows what you know," she retorted, again, like a ten year old in a school yard squabble more than as a coherent argument against his point.

Eyeing the cloth for a moment, and it looked like she was about to do the sane thing and dismiss it. Who in their right mind would accept a handkerchief that was half covered in something wiped off of someone else's face- even if it had mostly originated in their own sinus cavity.

But then she reached out, hand fast and sudden, snatching it. She looked at it critically, confirmed, why yes, there would certainly be flakes of his skin on it, and unceremoniously stuffed it into her bag without looking away from him as he continued talking. Milla had no particular intentions for it at this time, it was the act of collecting that was impulsive and unrepentant. She wasn't so far impressed by the specimen in front of her, but one didn't look a genetic gift horse in the mouth.

"I have every right to be here, you wanna know why?" Breathing in and about to tell a whooper of unprecedented proportions.

The problem with that however was that while the two of them had bickered like siblings, the unfolding events had continued, perfectly apace with a thin, unwaning indifference to the two beings at the crater's edge. As Milla breathed in to summon the words she was sure were about to get her out of any possibility of trouble, there was a loud CRACK, plummeting into a disgusting SQWELCH.

The crater gave out beneath them, rumbling crackling of stone and dust intermixed with the wet sound of something unsettlingly organic and disturbingly WET as the two dropped into the darkness beneath their feet.

 

[Ives]

She stole his rag of cloth right out of his hands. Ives's eyebrows arced up in surprise.

What the fu—

Ives barely had time to register that, as Milla moved on to what would have been an explanation for her presence here, if they hadn't been interrupted by the ground falling away beneath their feet.

A yell escaped Ives as gravity abruptly took away his agency, and he was forced into a free-fall. He managed several moments of panic before something struck his head and darkness crept in.

———

Ives woke to a lungful of dust and stale air. The world didn't appear when he opened his eyes.

He'd lost a few moments. A moment ago he'd stood on the surface, arguing with some reprobate, and now he was back down in the mines, trapped in utter darkness, lying on the—strangely warm—stone floor.

He groaned, registering the dull pain coursing through every part of his body. Pain, but seemingly nothing worse. His satchel hadn't been lost during the fall either, its weight rested on his chest.

The only casualty, so far, seemed to be a few seconds of awareness and his cigarette.

Bummer.

Ives sat up and rummaged around in his satchel for his torch—mercifully spared from breaking in the fall. He flipped the activation switch, but it produced no light. An anxious pang moved up his spine. Being trapped in one of the tunnel mines, in complete darkness, had been a recurring anxious thought while he worked.

Fortunately, the particular model of torch he worked with was a sturdy one. Whenever it didn't work he just had to—he struck the housing with the palm of his hand. It flickered with dim light, the battery inside sputtering back to life. The light barely managed to break a few paces into the darkness. Beyond that, the void swallowed the light. Ives breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless, clinging to what small glimpse of the world around him became illuminated.

His surroundings turned out to be mostly rocks and rubble, interwoven with something he couldn't quite place. Dark lines of a glistening, black substance coiled between the rocks and traced arcs along the ground, away from where he'd landed, into the darkness beyond where the torch could reach. An oil spill?

Ives didn't touch the stuff. Instead, he kept looking.

There was no sign of the woman anywhere in his immediate vicinity. He didn't write her off as dead quite yet, though. The tunnel was wide and the torchlight iddn't even reach the walls. They'd probably been tossed different directions during the drop.

He stayed still for the moment, choosing to look around a little more. Darkness met him everywhere he looked. These must be the deeper tunnels, Ives thought, too fresh to have mounted wall lights. Except...in the distance, a small contradiction stood out. A faint light barely pierced the darkness. A red glow, far away, almost like the ones found on the signs attached to the "buildings" the company had provided down here. That suggested they weren't in the deep tunnels at all, but somewhere a lot closer to a surface access.

Ives breathed a sigh of relief. The lack of light, then, had to be the consequence of a simple power outage, most likely brought about by whatever had caused the collapse. The cause for that still eluded him.

A strange sense overcame him. He hadn't heard any sign of the miners yet. There were usually several crews in the mines at all times, up to roughly a hundred-and-fifty souls during shift change—which should be now. An area this close to the lifts should be teeming with activity, especially during an emergency.

Ives listened, but he heard no voices.

The only sound he could make out came from the direction opposite the red light. A quiet something, carried through the tunnels. Distinct, rhytmic scraping. A noise that repeated, again and again, with the steady sureness of a clock-hand. Something like bone—maybe chitin—scraped against an uneven surface. It struck one ridge, a second, and a third only to stop abruptly, pause for a few heartbeats, and start again.

Ives let out a nervous breath. A subtle tremor worked its way into his hand, making the torchlight tremble. That rhythmic scrape sounded miles away, and yet Ives felt a grasp of phantom claws around his rib cage.

He felt the urge to let a question slip into the near-silence, to ask if the woman—if anyone who might help—was there with him. But his voice couldn't make it past his throat.

 

[Milla]

For a moment everything seemed to freeze, the sounds of the ground crumbling beneath them taking a moment too long to parse to throw herself out of the way and onto more solid ground. Staring up into open air above her while the sensation of the floor falling away beneath her left Milla with the closest to a sense of peace she'd had in weeks. For a moment, the sensation of free fall was nothing more than a momentary familiarity, and one she knew only too well how to handle. It was like breathing wasn't it? As simple as rotating your face from the sky and spreading your-

Milla blinked.

Oh well shi-

Was all the time she had to think before a chunk of rock slammed into the side of her head and she blacked out.

*****

The next sound Ives would hear was much much closer. In the next pool of shadows at his feet. A low groan of groggy pain as Milla started to try to roll over and nearly immediately aborted the action as a wave of nausea swept over her. A concussion? Maybe. Hard to tell with how badly her head was pounding and her stomach was heaving - oh yes, definitely a concussion, she thought hazily. Reaching up to touch the side of her head which was warm and wet, fingers coming away slick but oddly no real pain where her head met the dirt beneath them. Strange, frowning, which made her wince. The pain actually tugging from the opposite side of her head.

Oh yes, that was where the stone had hit.... so why was this side of her face wet? She couldn't see, in that darkness, what was coating her fingers.

She only managed to get herself up to half sitting by the time his light swept over her. Looking up at him, squinting, blinking owlishly. A rapidly blooming bruise on one half of her face stark against pale skin, but of more interest was the black, oily substance on the other side of her face that glistened in the wane reflected light.

"I don't think the tunnels are up to structural standards," she mumbled a little bit inanely up at him.

She had not yet noticed the far off noise, too encompassed by the ringing in her ears and the sound of her own pulse.

 

[Ives]

Rrrretch.
Rrrretch.
Rrrretch. Beat, beat.

Even as he spiraled, Ives held gratitude for his ribs. They kept his heart contained and sheltered so it couldn't burst out and answer the clockwork echoes coming from the deep tunnels. He didn't want its attention. The echoes alone sent a wave of creeping legs crawling along his skin. What else would happen if he drew its—and he was somehow filled with a certainty that 'it' was the only way to describe the scratching's composer—attention to himself?

"I don't think the tunnels are up to structural standards,"

Ives' gaze flicked to the pale woman, seeing her for the first time though she'd already been there at the edge of the light. He didn't answer, silently listening for that distant sound. Had the woman made it aware of—?

Rrrretch.
Rrrretch.
Rrrretch. Beat, beat.

It came again, like clockwork, undisturbed by the woman's words. The sound in the distance continued, indifferent to them.

Ives let his breath go, losing a little of the paralyzing tension with it. He shone the torch over at the woman.

She'd suffered head trauma, blunt force, likely the impact of a rock during the fall. Bruising was already forming. She was awake, and she was talking. Cohesive sentences, that was good. The other side of her head was coated in a black oil of some sort. Machine oil? The mine collapse could have damaged the mining equipment. That would explain the black oil around them. Not immediately hazardous, but better avoided.

Ives sat up and moved up close. He swept the torch into Milla 's field of vision from one side then the other, watching for the reaction in her eyes.

"Do you remember your name?" Ives asked in a hushed tone. "What day it is, perhaps? Or how you ended up here?"

At the same time, Ives pulled his sleeve over his palm and made an attempt to clean the oil off her face, watching for further signs of injury and the overall state of her condition.

 

[Milla]

She could hear it, but it didn't signify. That rrretch. Beat, beat. Rrrretch. To her unlike clockwork, more like the beating of a heart that was less unfamiliar than it ought to have been. It wasn't registered on a conscious level, not yet, and certainly not with her head throbbing its own staccato harmony, the dull whoom whoom whoom of blood rushing in your ears.

Rrretch whoom whoom. Rrretch whoom whoom.

Soothing, almost.

Soothing enough at least to let the stranger move the torch in front of her face. Her immediate instinct was to bite, dulled fortunately by the sound filling her head. Closing her eyes in response to the dilation of her pupils in the light.

"Of course I remember my name," she mumbled a little. Which was, for a moment, a bit of a lie. A different name floated up, in the back of her mind like a corpse bloated by too many days in a river. Pushing it aside she found two syllables, hers, the ones she wanted.

"Milla."

But then he tried to touch her, and she squirmed her face, like a dog trying to avoid having their face wiped off of something gross but satisfying.

"And we fell down a hole," she grumbled, pulling her face back and wiping at it herself. Frowning down at her fingers, slick and black. "I don't have a concussion, you don't need to keep checking," absently, recognizing the actions for what they had been without thinking about it. How often had she been checked over for injuries, in that time before this one? Not as often as she'd needed it, surely.

But then she paused, contemplative.

"Not a bad one anyway."

She was erratic, but that was not new, even over the last five minutes. Perhaps the mild concussion would slow her down, allow Ives to follow from moment to moment. If there was a chance to start being able to follow her thoughts, her actions, this however was not the moment.

Milla brought her fingers to her lips and licked the black substance.

"Gross."

As though that hadn't been entirely predictable.

The moment, perhaps, couldn't get much grosser. Until Milla uttered two more words.

"Amniotic fluid."

This raised far more questions than it answered. Did Milla actually know what that tasted like? If so, then what had been birthed in these halls? How many, how large? WHY did she know what it tasted like?

"And what IS that noise?" She muttered, peering over down the corridor and into the darkness as she reached out and absently wiped her fingers on his pant leg.

Rrrreeeeeetch. Beat. beat.

Beat.

Rrrreeeeetch.

It was slowing down, the pattern of the sounds drawing, out of synch, with the fading whoom whoom of the blood in her ears.

 

[Ives]

Ives felt his features begin to knot up in open revulsion.

Why would she know...?

But he suppressed the instinct for disgust. He'd seen, well, admittedly not worse but more nauseating sights over the course of his medical career. There were ways to skip his—literal—gut reaction in order to use his time in a manner more productive than expressing disgust at someone who might actually take it as a compliment.

This type of black amniotic fluid didn't match any xenobiology he was aware of, though he'd only learned the basics of the field. The fluid coated the ground all around them, and had possibly cushioned their fall. He'd never encountered it before, and hadn't heard any of the other miners talk about it either.

Rreeetch. His thoughts came a little faster, more erratic.

The fluid's sudden appearance implied it was a) an extremely quick-spreading biological agent that had saturated the tunnels while he'd taken a smoke break—Rreeetch—or this stuff had been here and the company had unearthed it.

This substance must have been here already. But why hadn't they been warned about it? If they'd known about the weakened structural integrity of the tunnel's overburden, they might have—Rreeetch.

Ives nearly jumped at the brush of Milla's hand against his leg. He barely managed to keep the light steady, facing the corridor. Somehow it seemed like whatever made those sounds would slip by through the shadows if he didn't keep the mouth of that tunnel lit up.

Ives took a steadying breath. Opposite the scraping tunnel had been a faint light. Produced by something clearly belonging to the miners.

"It's a sign we should keep quiet," he whispered and reached down to grab hold of Milla's arm to pull her up and along as he stepped backwards. "There's a checkpoint the other way. We should go there."

Milla

 

[Milla]

There was a third, secret choice, one that Milla was simply assuming was a matter of course. She did not bother voicing it, as it seemed self evident and she assumed he and she were reading from the same page.

Milla generally was not even reading the same book as everyone else, but at least they were in better synch here, in this moment, than most others managed. As Milla was already starting to push herself up, his hand wrapped around her arm. A softly offended "hey" was all that the gesture elicited, still mildly concussed which was dulling the particular impulse to bap at him. Or bite him. Instead letting him tug her along, once she was on her feet. Milla was slight, light even for her appearance, there was no difficulty in the matter.

Rreeeetch.

She glanced back over her shoulder into the dark, back past where they had landed, even as she let Ives lead the way.

"I wonder if she's okay," she muttered, half to herself.

Reaching into her satchel, she pulled out a small vial as she stumbled along with him, paying far less attention to where they were going or even that she was walking, in order to focus on scraping some of the fluid into one of the empty vials. It wasn't easy, one handed, which made the going tougher for Ives as well due to Milla's distraction.

Distraction?

Compulsion.
You just can't help it, can you? Force you are such an imperfect tool.
Milla frowned, then reaching over to try to scoop some of what she'd wiped onto his pants into the vial as well. Waste not want not, right?

It wasn't until they were much closer that she looked forward, squinting into the dark toward the pale light they were heading towards.

"Is it supposed to look like that? Like something is draped half over it?"

 

[Ives]

The sound hadn't so much stopped as faded with distance.

"Draped half over wh—" Ives caught it with the flashlight mid-sentence.

The dead man's lower portion covered part of the neon. The body was stuck in a gaping hole where the second floor wall should be, hanging halfway out. Only the 'i—ary' of infirmary lettering remained legible. Legs and blood covered the rest. The neon shimmered a muted scarlet where the smears of blood had turned to dried flakes. No sound. The scene was silent.

"One dead."

There was a second smear of blood, beneath the sign, that created a trail along the wall. Ives swept the flashlight over the rest of the complex. Two stories. A prefab box design, with an elevated first floor three steps above ground-level. The blood belonged to another man, slumped over the stairs leading up to the doorway.

"Second, not breathing."

The observation seemed banal, given the sight.

"Body intact, no obvious cause of death."

Ives stepped closer, close enough to get a good look.

"Skin's infected. Some sort of aggressive rash, or...growth. I've seen this only in textbooks. Like Rakghoul plague mutation, but...not. He still looks human."

He switched angles, trying to get a look at the head. His free hand held the front-pocket of his jacket right above the heart.

"Like muscle started absorbing skin or somehow forced its way to the surface. No, rapid growth and decomposition at the same time—you see the bits of bone?"

The entrance door had been left ajar. The small crack allowed only a glimpse at the shadows inside. The windows didn't reveal much either. A thick layer of grime smears and dust blocked the light. No sound, still. It seemed increasingly clear no one here remained alive.

Milla

 

[Milla]

Milla crouched, inspecting the first body as Ives made his own inspection of the second. Not everything was actually there, was it? Parts were missing. The best parts, Milla groused. They had taken several of the juiciest organs, leaving only squelchy pieces behind. Reaching out, she surreptitiously pried a sliver of what looked like the remnants of a liver out of the cadaver's upper half and stuck it in her mouth. She chewed meditatively as she extracted a second, only to push it into a vial and into her bag.

"Someone was hungry, but didn't like what they tasted," came the muttered reply. "Died afraid, kinda gross."

Standing up to peer around his shoulder at first, she pushed past him in order to poke at the second body. "No one would eat THIS one." Cocking her head. "Dragged? Did some of the fluid get into the scrapes?" Glancing up at Ives and wondering if it was worth trying to run some sandpaper against his skin and slather the black liquid into the wound. Just to see what would happen. She put it aside just because it seemed like a lot of work if he wasn't surprised by it. She'd keep an eye out if he scraped himself up on his own, however.

Pulling out a small knife, she starting picking choice bits of the second body to put into its own vial.

"So whatever gave birth came from over here maybe?" Muttered more to herself than to him. "Gotta feed the babies something not terrified, makes the meat icky."

Like this was the most normal thing in the world.