=====Texturally Meat-Like=====

[CW: Insects; animal gore.]

The night is frigid, and Devin is running late. You stand stock-still in the silence, the night sky starless under the thickness of clouds, goosebumps erupting on your arms. The weight of your armour -- the frame of interwoven metal that you used to measure species density on the ground not twenty minutes prior, knowing you had time before Devin arrived -- is your sole company as you stand a few feet out from the border of the Bastion, facing the dip in the ground where the cage sits, empty, its maw gaping open and yearning for flesh. 

You think over the results of your investigation to distract from the chattering of your teeth. The grass thickened with distance from the centre, which of course was obviously explicable; Rhys' much-loved dandelions, both syrup-yellow and ghoulish white, peppered the ground fairly evenly; and, nearer the outskirts where the foliage grew less tame, in the direction of the zombie approach and vaguely pointing toward the mountains not quite so far away, the beginnings of the fungal growth of the forest. Thick slabs of mushroom, texturally meat-like, so thick they could trick a meat-lover into veganism. You'd seen them before, in the course of prior investigations and during your studies, but no book had quite managed to capture the gluttony intrinsic to their appearance, and upon second thought, your //last// investigation hadn't, either. Flesh-pink and glossy like the moist, inflamed gums of a beast's slavering jaws. Your mouth waters deliciously.

Devin is here. You watch his teeth flash white amidst the shadows of the night as he speaks and you hear none of it. He drags a bundle, one telltale limb flailing under cover of net and tarpaulin, behind him, affixed to a makeshift sledge. Your gloves glisten with the wet seeping through the tarp as you heave its legs, Devin pushing its upper half with considerably less effort, as though well-practised with lifting and constricting human-sized weights, into the ditch. Now for the interrogation. Which cannot, of course, happen before it is set free. You have thought of just the thing -- Devin drops his gift to it first, as prime a cut of venison as can be found nowadays, which is to say no insects are making a home of it yet. You wait, both with bated breath, but it does not stir. You forget to breathe as you dig into your pockets for a failsafe. A squirrel, headless, the burst of its neck dried enticingly along its matted body. Enough to make any predator happy. You toss it in a short and beautiful arc, and again, you wait.

In vain. The creature stirs, the whole side of its body twitching erratically, but not for the meat. Devin looks frustrated, but you have no time to confer before the thing twitches loose its only leg and kicks up a panicked stray of birds and their shrill alarm seems to trigger something in it so it tears its trap at the seams and lunges halfway up the ditch in pursuit. You stumble back, your body's flight system kicking into gear with almost too much familiarity, scrabbling hopelessly on the ground and achieving not much distance but at least kicking some dirt in its face. Devin slashes the rope and the cage falls hard -- the //crack// of its vertebrae echoes for a long few moments after its head falls to the ground, the scent of fresh and pungent, already-rotting blood from the body of a fledgling and a beast mingling in the air. The experiment has been a failure. You breathe hard, back-first on the cold, hard soil, for a long time, smelling its blood on the air, sensing Devin's tense silence.

The pursuit of knowledge is a path paved by intuition. What, if anything, is the point in stopping short at a failure? If you cannot get anything out of a creature while it is still alive, you can, at least, extract as much value as possible from one which is dead. There is no memory left in the muscle of the bone-thin specimen you have collected and stored. Devin knows -- he sourced it, after all -- but he doesn't know what you plan to use it for, and you prefer to keep it that way. You wait till he's gone. Then, carefully, painstakingly, pinning a small warm rodent body to the table with a nail for extra protection despite the weight of the quadrat keeping the box intact, gloved up to your elbow, you inject it -- even as it squeals -- with whatever inky extract you manage to find in the now completely dry veins of the zombie arm. The animal screams. You push down on the box, hard, adding your weight to that of the metal frame to prevent its escape. 

It does not fall silent. It does not cease to move. But it twitches, muscles spasming in a manner that you recognise -- one that makes your skin crawl. It appears that a smaller body is vulnerable to a quicker spread, or else that whatever is spreading is spreading on the outside before it spreads on the inside. A curious change to that observed in infected humans.

It does not die.

Or, maybe, it does.

{[]}{{tag>writeup3 gm_tara complete}}