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(no subject)

Who: Hickey & OPEN!
What: cave visits, exploring around town, making some booze!
When: through the month of December
Where: in town, Misty Falls Cave.

Content Warnings: Hickey's god complex, animal death & mutilation, usual warnings for the Terror boys (possible talk of body horror, gore, cannibalism, etc.)

in town
Hickey makes a point to be a good neighbor. Moving something? He'll help! Chopping wood? He can help with that as well. The more useful and helpful he is, the more he ingratiates himself with everybody, the more likely he'll have people on his side whenever one of the rest of the crew of the Terror decides to actually say something about what happened back home.

When he goes out to hunt, occasionally he'll return with a rabbit or a ptarmigan, something he'll happily cook up for whoever wants any. This time is different. He's brought back an animal, a rabbit that looks off, burns on the flesh but nothing more. He makes sure to drop it away from his house (we're not going to contaminate the food) before carefully, in the middle of what passes for his yard, Hickey starts to carefully vivisect the rabbit. It's certainly a sight, and he looks up at whoever might be passing or walking by.

"Have you noticed some odd tracks out there? Out in the woods, just outside of town."

Misty Falls Cave
You're exploring the cave. It's dark, cold, there's a moment where you think you might be the only person in here. It's trapped, kept away, a small, solitary place cut off from the rest of the world—

And then you hear a loud "What the hell?!"

It's Cornelius Hickey, further down one of the paths. And he's just run into a dead end. And is very annoyed about that.

closed prompt for March
There's a loud pounding on March's door, the sort of pounding of someone who obviously doesn't really care about things like 'social conventions' or 'the fact that people might be asleep. Hickey continues knocking, but as he does so, he calls out,

"Oi! This is March's place, yeah? I brought some sugar for the alcohol."

Turns out that horrible trip in that cave had some results!

wildcard
( Hit me up if there's something you want to thread that's not on this post! )

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As Goodsir works, Hickey watches the surgeon with rapt interest. After all, this is Goodsir as Hickey's never seen him before. This attention, this focus, it's like Hickey isn't even here to begin with. All there is, it's just Goodsir and the specimen.

Idly, he wonders if Goodsir looked like this when he butchered Billy. If he was this calm, this methodical. Remove the organs, lay them out around the corpse, work with the knife marks in Billy's back. Hickey certainly thinks Goodsir must have been. That whatever part of his brain that recognized Billy as a person just shut off. It was a corpse. Like this rabbit.

Hickey doubted that Goodsir, with all his morals, could have survived if he couldn't ignore that part of his conscience.

Not that he survived long anyway.

The question jolts Hickey to pay attention before, "I think I've got something like that? Give me a moment." He rushes back to the inside of his house. And really, Hickey has absolutely nothing close to a small saw. But he returns with a pair of loppers, like one would use to prune a plant, as well as serrated knife.

Goodsir regards the tools with mild dissatisfaction, but it will have to do, if he wants to get a look inside the poor dead rabbit's skull.

It's a bit like opening a very messy walnut, and by the time he's done Goodsir is not happy with his work, but he has enough—he thinks—to examine for any irregularities.

And now that he's got everything where he can see it, he takes out a handkerchief to wipe his hands, and then takes out his notebook and a pencil. He then begins to go over every organ carefully, looking for any features of note, jotting down his observations as he goes.

Edited 2023-12-15 18:57 (UTC)

Hickey watches with rapt fascination, keeping an eye on Goodsir as he just dissects the damn thing.

And...he's not talking to Hickey about this, is he. So don't mind Hickey as he adjusts his position sot hat he can rudely look over Goodsir's shoulder, looking over his notes as he writes them.

Goodsir scarcely pays him any mind. What he'll see, in Goodsir's scratchy handwriting, is as follows:

Brain - largely intact
Liver - damaged by attempted autopsy - inconclusive
Heart - normal
Stomach digestive system et al - normal, some damage from attempted autopsy
Blood in the lungs — inconsistent with pneumonia or drowning — corrosive chemicals?
Damage to corneas — same cause as lung damage?
Missing patches of fur, some burns — acid or caustic chemical rather than fire

Hey, attempted? That was a perfectly fine autopsy!

Like a small dog that wants to have attention paid to it, Hickey decides to get in Goodsir's face. He moves his hand in front of the man, to get his attention, before pointing to the stomach entry and the missing patches of fur entry.

"It couldn't have been acid. There weren't any footprints near the body. And it hasn't snowed today, so it's not like anything could have covered it up." Sure, there were animal tracks, but it's not like animals could spew acid. Right?

Goodsir frowns at the interruption, but decides to give Hickey's ideas something like a fair hearing.

"Perhaps it encountered something in the environment," he points out. "Some contamination in the ground? In which case I should very much like to know where you found it."

"I can show you if you want," Hickey shrugs. There's a moment before he continues, "Though there's not much to see. I literally found it in the middle of the woods."

"I should like to see it nonetheless," Goodsir says. He looks back down at the remains of the rabbit and after a moment's consideration, takes out his handkerchief and carefully gathers it all up into a bundle. If he can find alcohol spirits, he will try to preserve what he can later.

Hickey can't help but grimace as Goodsir puts all of the viscera and innards into a bundle. Yeah, gross, he's not touching that. In fact, Hickey noticeably sticks his hands in his pockets to show Goodsir just how much he's not touching the innards more than he has to.

"Then follow me," said with a nod. "Once you've packaged up your leftovers, of course."

"I mean to preserve them if I can, to study later," he says, a mild touch of exasperation in his voice. His task complete, he rises, cleans off his hands again, and nods to Hickey.

"Show me."

"Just leave them in the snow," Hickey points out, as he gestures for Goodsir to follow him. He's moving through the cold a lot easier now than he did before. Those deerskin boots from that deer god and the coat the holiday boar puked up for him are doing marvels.

"It's certainly cold enough to keep things preserved. It'll freeze all of that viscera right away."

Sometimes the worst person you know is right. Goodsir grimaces, then arranges the bundle under a small mound of snow, with an improvised cairn to mark the spot for later, before following where Hickey leads.

Hehehehe he's absolutely right and the smartest boy in the world.

The smile on Hickey's face is downright insufferable as Goodsir buries the remains. That insufferable smile continues as they head to a spot further into the woods.

"Here," he says, gesturing to a patch of snow. The animal itself is obviously gone and the snow disturbed due to Hickey's own walkabout. But there are other, worrying signs that something bad happened. There's a long, thick groove in the snow, like that of a snake, but a few feet wide. And, just off in the distance, barely still in eyesight, is yet another animal corpse.

Goodsir frowns and bends down to examine the groove in the snow. Tracks? But they're enormous. He looks up and sees the other animal corpse, considers it and the mark in the snow thoughtfully.

"Was this here before?"

"No," Hickey says, frown on his face, as he moves to examine the groove himself. It's...smooth. There's no signs anyone dug this, none of the tell-tale signs of a shovel, this is like a tree fell down and somehow magically lifted itself up again.

"I'd have mentioned it if it were," he points out. "You can't overlook something like this."

Goodsir nods, then takes a few steps back to get a bit more perspective on what he's seeing. Then he stops and frowns.

"This looks like the tracks of a snake."

Hickey vocalizes what they're both thinking as he asks, "What snake is that big?"

"There are snakes in the jungles of South America that are said to be twenty or thirty feet long," Goodsir says, sounding a little distant as he tries to extrapolate the creature's size based on what he knows. "But I've never seen one, and in any case this must be ... five, six times that size? That—good God, how is that possible?"

"You're the biologist," Hickey points out, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "How d'you think it's possible?"

Because Hickey sure as shit doesn't know. As far as he's concerned, all the gods here? All the gods in this world? Sure, one of them might be a big fuckoff snake.

Goodsir thinks a moment, then ...

"There have been discoveries of fossilised bones," he says, "remains of ancient creatures far bigger than any that live now. Some have been taken for the bones of dragons."

He doesn't look or feel very happy about the conclusion he's coming to.

"Perhaps creatures such as those still live in this land. But ... snakes are cold-blooded creatures. In this weather you'd expect to see them in torpor. So if this is a serpent—it's like none known on earth now."

He frowns at the damaged animal corpse. "And it is clearly very dangerous."

"Then it's looking more and more like whatever this is, it's not part of your taxonomy."

A snake the size of an ancient creature? Something cold-blooded that's still alive, still moving around? Still attacking? The more Goodsir talks, the less this sounds like an actual creature and more like tuunbaq, like that deer. This isn't a snake. It's something more.

"This is something else entirely. Something more."

Goodsir doesn't like the way he says something more.

"As much as it pains me to say it, Mr. Hickey, I suspect you're right."

Please ignore the look of absolute smugness on Hickey's face as he teases,

"Careful. You might start to think I'm right in other regards as well."

Goodsir just gives him a look; the remark deserves no further response, to his mind.

"We ought to warn the others," he says. "Perhaps someone else will have seen something more of it."

"Good idea," Hickey says, with a little nod. There's a pause before he points out, "Though there's one thing for certain. If it's attacked anyone here, it's succeeded. Nobody's come to you with those sorts of injuries, yeah? Nobody horribly mauled."