THE MORE WE DO [ACTIVE/CLOSED]

[screw_askew]

Characters: Dr. Stein, Fran Madaraki
Content: Time marches on, Stein gets his hands dirty, and sins against nature are committed in the name of SCIENCE
Location: Madison Square Park <--> Rockefeller University Hospital
Time of day: A few hours after the [Mazoku Hamel Fight]
Warnings: Mangled corpses, gore, desolation, abominations of medicine and

Comments

[screw_askew]

Keeping a brisk pace and wheeling down and through a number of faceless halls and junctions, Stein replied with the same galvanized manner as before. "No such luck I'm afraid," regarding her earlier inquiry of survivors, rhetorical as it may have been. "From what I had seen, it appears the victims of the event either walked away on their own, or not at all." The condition of the corpses he had deigned to retrieve could attest to that soon enough. They were the fortunate ones.

He soon found himself greeted by a pair of ominous steel doors. Sliding around rear-forward, he backed into one door as Fran pushed open the other, spilling into an examination room adjacent their final destination: the morgue (Ha ha! Deep)

Thankfully the facility had not been in use during the alleged cataclysm that had befallen this simulacrum of Manhattan, leaving both the refrigerant untouched and the morgue itself free of any long-forgotten and terribly spoiled surprises. Stein had taken to bringing it to working order shortly after first arriving; it was just unseemly to store such things in the consumer-grade appliances scattered about. Aside from the various viscera and appendages of parasites stored here and there within certain preservative containers, the room had been devoid of true utility until now.

Assisted once again in all matters entry via Fran, the popping of an airtight seal heralded his return to the environmentally-controlled meat locker known as the Rockefeller University Morgue. A brisk chill and the faint scent of preservatives and bleach lingered in the air from autopsies and examinations long past; an inviting, if not overtly pleasant smell. Mmmm. Discovery. There and done, the trip at its end, but it was only the beginning of another journey. Slogging one random body bag upon the table like a sack of meat that it rather truthfully was, he began to unzip the package from head to toe.

"I would call it something of a grand unveiling, but there's not much to see. Literally." This particular bag had contained his first find, missing only its head and a portion of the upper torso. "The other two are worse off than this, a young female nearly bisected via massive abdominal bite wound, and a male torso missing everything below the waist and no small amount above it." With equal parts dismay and curiosity, he began to describe the circumstances from which they had been found. "These were the most intact specimens amongst more than a dozen victims, if that tells you anything. The bite marks and other injuries are inconsistent with everything have on record."

It wasn't much, but it was something to occupy themselves with, for better or worse.

[patchwork_phd]

Oh my. Oh my, oh my, oh my. Stein was certainly right about one thing: This damage was unlike anything they'd ever seen. No doubt inhuman. The power limiters (or whatever the colloquial term was) placed around the city (or in its inhabitants; again, whichever was the leading theory) would prevent any sort of human from doing this kind of damage. But what could have been the cause? "One attacker, I would imagine," she muttered, deducing what she could from the corpse in front of her and the descriptions of the others. And on the inside, she laughed -- when had she become the forensics expert? This wasn't some sort of crime scene investigation in New York; this was science. (And of course, the answer was obvious: Fran had always been a forensics expert.)

"Well. I think we can safely deduce that whatever was there isn't there anymore. I rather think we'd have seen something about it on the network if it were rampaging the city." Or, of course, it might have come here. And there was also the likelihood that it would have attacked Stein, and since he showed no signs of a struggle, that put that theory right out the window, didn't it? Mm, besides, what had caused it wasn't particularly of interest, now, was it? The mystery brought half the interest. (The other half was being carried by that mystery: Just what could be done with the bodies now presented to them. One man's trash...)

"My guess is something with enormous jaws," which was obvious enough, "but also delicate hands and a large amount of control. These wounds are incongruous with what I would expect a Cloverfield bite victim to suffer. Its jaws are too powerful; there would be no near bisection in such an attack." It was a guess based on the description, but it wouldn't be the first of such an injury she'd seen. Though bisections were rare, they still happened. Trainyard accidents, mostly. But this wasn't a train's fault. Again, obvious. "Probably humanoid in nature. The local fauna are less than capable of handling their food, as it were."

Hm. "A mutation?" No, too much like the comic books. "Oh well. It's not entirely important, I suppose. Though if we could capture whatever did this..." She trailed off, but a devious glint shone in her eye. It should have been very familiar by now.

It didn't disappear, but it did fade a little as she continued into less terrifying matters. Well, potentially less terrifying. "What do you suppose we can do with the remains?" she asked, her mind already racing with possibilities. "They're just humans. We wouldn't learn anything from exploration, unless we decided to search for residue from their assailant." Still, they didn't exactly have DNA samples on hand. It would probably end up fruitless. "I don't think I'll be able to bring them back to life." And she couldn't do that anyway. The best she could do was to create a mockery of life, one that no living person would ever call normal or even bearable. But if it kept them alive, well, she had to do it.