“Fucking fantastic. About time, if I’m frank.” She slips the ball and bone to Red and backtracks to grab her kit. “Guess you won,” she says. “Congratulations. Now,” she adds as she leans backwards out the window, getting a look at the window above them. “I believe the plan was ‘up.’”
She doesn’t, but she is the one currently hanging out the window. “Sure, alright. Give me a boost?” One foot on the sill, one hand grabbing the next story window — as usual, the kit goes first, flung overhead, and then Katters follows it, hauling herself up with both hands.
Katters, you catch a brief image of a young ket screaming, thrashing, trying to crawl towards the window with broken fingers, legs cut off below the knee. They scream at you for help, before fading back into nothing, leaving the room largely empty, aside from well-chewed bones and a ruined blanket.
Startled, Katters nearly lets go of the window, but she manages to maintain her grip and avoid falling to her death. Once she’s pulled herself all the way into the room, she turns and helps Red in, too. “Looks cosy,” she says. She picks up a bone and examines it, trying to determine its species of origin, and taking a close look at the toothmarks.
Red balances on the windowsill, staying crouched precariously, fingerclaws digging in. "...oh. oh boy. Can you smell that, or it is just me?" She eyes the bones. "...old, old death. Maybe we really aren't the first people here... fuck. At least that means i haven't been crazy in the whole 'not getting myself killed to get out' thing..."
The bones definitely belong to a juvenile Ket. With the knowledge of anatomy you have, you can determine it was a female. The tooth marks are.. odd. Like they're solid, almost beaklike indentions, large slabs of teeth...? Huh...
A ket. No, a tibia. A short tibia, with a mostly-intact semi-transparent blue cap on one end. A child. No. A bone. An artifact. A chunk of minerals that doesn’t belong to anyone, anymore. Detached, discarded, meaningless. It’s light, almost weightless, almost like holding nothing. Katters feels light, too. Hollow. She doesn’t hear Red, doesn’t hear anything but her own breathing.
Red hesitates, going quiet as she sees the stillness of her companion, eyes flicking from the bones, to Katters, then back. It's a minute before she cautiously touches Katters' shoulder. "...hey?"
Katters isn’t there, not really. She’s back in her first year anatomy class, crowded around a table with her lab-mates, trying to pay attention to the professor and ignore the heavy chemical smell in the air. The body on the table is large, in a word — not just big in an anatomical sense, but in the sense that it contains the Katters’ future, or so it seems at the time. Later, when they’re away from the professor, the students will try to guess at the prior lives of their cadavers, at what they did before they became projects for med students. Katters and her lab-mates will be divided evenly between lumberjack or bodyguard. He is muscular in a way that suggests his muscles were well-used, not for show or an idle hobby. This was a man who lived off his ability to lift heavy things, Katters thinks. He is larger than life, and next to him, Katters feels small. But she also feels alive. The professor cuts into his cadaver, tells the students to feel the area of the incision on themselves. Understand that the cadaver on the table was a person, just like they are — understand that they are the same. We are all, he says, human. But Katters is aware that she is not the same as the body on the table, and trying to find some middle ground between herself — a thin (freak), young (monster), female (abomination) ket — and the middle-aged man on the table only accentuates the distance she feels between them. The bone, though, that’s her. That could be her — that’s a bone that’s inside of her right now, and the bones scattered across the floor, those are inside her, too. Her scales have gone dark, and her breathing is coming deep but too fast. A part of her is aware that she’s going to faint, the rest of her is watching a classmate cut into the cadaver, pulling the layer of skin off his chest and exposing the pectorals underneath. She’s going over anatomical terms in her head, cementing their meaning by associating them with real-life examples. Pectoralis major. Rectus abdominis. Oblique abdominal. Tibia. She’s in an abandoned building. It’s dark, but light spills in from the window behind her, casting her and Red’s shadows across the floor. Fibula. Her breathing slows, quiets. The building creaks. Tarsus. The building smells like wood — old, well-worn, rotting sweetly in places. There’s another smell under that, sweet in its own way, but sharp. Metatarsus. She feels heavy, tired. Her mouth is dry. Her feet hurt. Phalanges. She is here. She exists. She puts the bone down, gently, back where she found it.
“Huh?” Katters asks, but doesn’t wait for Red to repeat her question. “You mean aside from being trapped in a nightmarish alternate dimension full of monsters who are eager to murder me and eat my flesh?” She shrugs. “Aside from that, I’m fucking peachy.”
"...eh. Answer enough for me." Red pauses, considers, then charges on blithely. "...Do you have an idea about what the bones came from? Because that was one hell of a thoughtful look on your face."
“No one I knew.” Katters starts on an examination of the rest of the room, skirting around the remains in the middle. “You spot anything interesting in here?” she asks. “Maybe coming up here wasn’t worth the trouble after all.”
Katters shakes her head. “We already knew we weren’t the only people here, and this bastard didn’t make it out. Not useful.”
"Well, I didn't know there was a body right upstairs." She sighs. "I don;t know. I mean... I feel like this is... useful? These toothmarks are weird... right?"
“Weirder than Ms. Knives-for-Arms? Yeah,” Katters doesn’t say so much as spit. “Something ate the person up here. Something tried to eat us — not news. Someone was up here, and you were here before I was — not news. There’s no exit, no more food, none of this is news!” She pauses, looking down at the bones. After a moment, she picks up the blanket and spreads it as well she can over what’s left of the ket. “All we’ve learned is where one body is,” she says. “I’m sure there are others.”
