sixthiterationlogs | mingle post

The slow but steady march toward winter means Jess has to get in all the early morning runs he can before the weather takes a turn (and what a miserable fact that is, that he has to think about the future here as a given, not a 'maybe'). His route takes him around the perimeter of the town this side of the river, then back toward the inn where he can clean up and get on with the start to his day.

That's the plan, anyway. As Jess slows to a walk as he comes up around the back, and the aforementioned plan abruptly implodes once he's in actual eye sight of the inn's back stoop.

"What the hell?" he hears himself utter, and the exclamation in his own voice rings strangely, not being a person usually prone to outbursts.

Between a strong stomach and the last couple of days giving him a crash course in mutilated animals, Jess doesn't quite gag when he nears the back door and sees the blood-soaked fur and ravaged remains lying there like a parcel left on the step (and it definitely hadn't been there last night, he'd think he'd have noticed a dead bear of all things), but if he were the type he easily could from the overpowering, coppery stench of fresh blood.

Someone's going to open the door and step in it if they aren't careful, Jess realizes. He steps around to a window by the kitchen and raps loudly on the glass with his knuckles. They're going to want to see this.

On second thought, they're not going to want to see this, but they need to.

Instead of being upstairs in the spaces she's claimed as her own, Raven's in the kitchen sitting at the table. Bent over an old clock, one she hadn't found with Jess' unhelpful assistance, she's trying to pull it apart without letting it break to the rust that's weakened its metal.

The rapping at the door makes her jump, and she almost slices open her hand again where he'd patched her up. Perhaps Raven shouldn't be using a knife to pry open the stubborn clock. Throwing the knife to the table in a fit of frustration, Raven balls her hands into fists to prevent herself from shoving the damn clock away from her.

Turning around to glare at where the sound come from, it's not a shock to her to find it's Jess Brightwell that's the source of her aggravation. There's something about him that spurns it on inside of her and makes Raven want to hurl a spanner at his head.

Angrily, she yells out, "What?"

His knock is met with a reply in the form of a muffled scream--not one of surprise or horror, as someone might if they'd come across an animal torn to shreds on their back porch--but one of irritation.

Raven, of course.

The girl doesn't have to come to the window to be recognizable, she just has to raise her voice. Coming from anybody else, Jess might have been more concerned about the angry tone, but Raven's short fuse is well-known. He makes a gesture to come closer from the other side of the window, the better to keep this some semblance of lowkey. Guess what, Winnie the Pooh's dead, isn't something he wants to start shouting about.

God, he's annoying.

Raven wants to make sure he knows it. With an aggravated groan and a roll of her eyes, she stands and begins to make her way to the back door.

But Raven doesn't quite make it.

With the need to spite Jess and also her general lack of patience, she comes to the window he stands at and taps the glass viciously to get his attention, even though she could yell or even open the window. Rather than unlatching it, she speaks loud enough to wake the next town a thousand miles over. "This better be good, Brightwell!"

Edited (passive aggressively edits) 2016-11-26 06:01 (UTC)

Jess isn't a type to bang on windows and draw attention to himself without a damn good reason for it, and that becomes infinitely clear when she comes close enough to make out his face and the set, tightly-controlled expression he wears. Underpinning it is a tension that turns both his lips and his shoulders into a hard line, eyes sharp with the macabre nature of the scene he'd walked up on.

If Raven doesn't want to get up from the table, he can guarantee he wants to be standing out here, feet away from a bloody carcass, even less.

The bear had been tortured like the other animals, there's no getting around that stomach-churning conclusion. Mangled and staged at their back door like a prop. A living thing, reduced to blood, and meat, and implied threats. If it'd been alive for the butchering, it would've suffered immensely before dying; that, more than the warning its presence at their door represents, sends a hot, sick feeling rolling through him.

It's such a waste. If the people holding them prisoner want to see blood and incite fear so badly, they should just get on with it and attack them instead, not these go-betweens. Jess would clench his fists if he weren't under scrutiny.

Instead, he squints against the early morning light reflecting off the glass and the dark-haired girl behind it. "There's been another animal attack. It's a bad one. Don't open the back door if you're squeamish."

Fortunately for them all, Raven isn't squeamish anymore.

She's been to hell and back, seen her own blood pool around her as she remained sitting in it, unable to move, let alone breathe without it somehow growing deeper around her. She'd seen dead kids she'd played games with pinned to trees and with spears in their bellies.

The recent animals attacks plaguing the town hasn't frightened her. The barbaric, quiet nature of the attacks do.

Her expression shifts from being annoyed to flattening out into a look that perhaps Jess hasn't seen on her face before. Raven's in survival mode, ready to take charge even though she's never been the one to fall into that role. There's nothing to be frightened of. Raven refuses to let anyone see her scared ever again. A man from Mount Weather had died with half his ear bitten off because she refused to let fear tackle her and take her ability to fight from her.

"Okay," she says loudly, attitude aside. "Let's deal with this." She doesn't make for the front of the inn, instead moving quickly toward the back. A dead, mutilated animal doesn't scare her, but leaving Jess out there by himself for another minute makes her uneasy.

Forgetting to inform him of what she's about to do, she moves to the back door and opens it as quickly as she arrives. There's nothing to gain from dwelling on what could be lying out on the porch for her to see.

Jess can't very well stop anyone at the inn from crowding around the back porch, even if he were inclined to try. Tell someone not to open a door and of course they'll do it anyway, that's basic psychology. Curiosity killed the cat.

But when the suggestion comes with a warning--"by the way, there's a hacked up animal behind that door"--he can only think most people know their limits and would avoid the sight if they couldn't handle it. When Raven makes a beeline for the door without further ado, he follows suit, meeting her around back.

Like he'd said, it's a bad one.

"Watch your step." It's slick, and not with frost.

Opening the back door, Raven pulls a face. It's disgusting. The sight of the bear stirs uneasiness in her stomach, and the rich, tangy scent of blood hits her gag reflex and causes her to try and focus on anything but the smell.

She's seen worse. She's been the bear. But it still doesn't mean she's grown as immune to it as she wishes to be.

"Oh my god," she wrinkles her nose and lifts her hands to press against her nostrils, wanting to block the scent from reaching her. She looks away from the mutilated bear, still pulling an uncomfortable, disgusted face. Her hand remains near her nose, making her voice sound nasally when she exclaims to Jess, "What the fuck?"

Raven automatically recoils with a repulsed grimace, looking on the verge of adding her breakfast to the puddles of bodily fluids on the stoop. Told you so, he thinks a bit hollowly, no humor or disparagement involved in the thought. There aren't any warnings that could account for how grisly it is to find a living anything arranged like this near the place a person sleeps, especially a young animal.

"There aren't any tracks or signs of a struggle that I've been able to find. It was like this when I got back," he explains with the same cultured calm as before, clamping down on his own urge to back away. He can relate to what Raven's reaction because he'd had it himself when he'd first realized what he was seeing.

"You should let the others know about this if they're up already." It's something she can do that gives her an excuse not to have to look at the body. It an option, at any rate, which is more than their captors had given them by staging the carnage here where people are guaranteed to stumble on it.

Raven may recoil from the sight of the mutilated dead bear, but she's not the type to turn her back and run away with her tail between her legs.

She gets a hold of herself, as Raven's often prone to do, and gets her head back in the game. There's a dead bear on the porch that needs to be moved somewhere far away from the inn. If they don't relocate it, it means that other animals will come out, having caught on the scent of blood. It also means someone else with a lot weaker stomach will stumble upon it, and possibly deem the inn a dangerous place to be.

She shakes her head. "Later," she dismisses. "Did you see anything?"

No, and that that's the worst part. The kill's right at their back door and he hadn't seen or heard a single thing.

Realistically, he can't be in all places at all times--if the tree had fallen in the forest and made a sound, he'd been out on his run and hadn't been around to hear it--but he feels like he should have noticed something. Feelings have a logic of their own, independent of the actual facts.

"You're seeing the sum of what I saw," he admits with reluctance. There should be more--more signs of a struggle, more signs of where it came from. These bodies aren't just moving themselves.

Just as reluctantly, Jess forces himself to approach the corpse, holding his breath against the smell, and bends a little to see better by. "It looks like it was gored. But deliberately, like some of the wounds on the other animals that turned up."

She makes a disgruntled noise, either at the smell, Jess moving toward it, or his words. She doesn't know what disgusts her more., or if there's anything about the situation that could be more disgusting than what's presented right in front of them.

Taking a step so she's slightly closer to the mutilated bear, Raven gives Jess enough room to pull back if he so wishes to. Despite being used to the stenches of so much in camp, she's never grown used to the smell of death. It's one she hopes she never becomes acclimated with as the Grounders have.

"Do you see anything ... distinctive?" She doesn't know what questions to ask, if there's any that are appropriate for the situation at hand, but she can't allow the silence to linger like the stench. "A claw? A tooth?"

Aside from there being a bloody carcass at all, she means? That's pretty distinctive all by itself.

"These look like claw marks, but I've never heard of an animal attacking another this way."

His fingertips emphasize what he means by these, hovering over a visible gouge extending along the bear's back, almost close enough to touch but not quite. It'd been a vicious attack, by any measure, but at the same time... still too clean somehow. Animals attack out of self-defence or to eat, or out of other instinctive urges; the damage here looks too thought out, like someone had wanted it to look like an animal attack but had deliberately calculated each wound.

Raven's heard a story from Clarke, about a gigantic gorilla attempting to strike down her and the Commander. In hindsight, she wishes the gorilla had done them all a favour and taken the leader of the Grounders out.

Unlike Jess, she can believe an animal would attack another this way. The viciousness reminded her of the unkindness of people, particularly the Mountain Men as they saw bone marrow when they should've seen kids. Though this town seems to be so absent of Mountain Men or oversized and even mutilated animals, Raven hasn't pushed it out of the realm of possibility.

"We should move it," she says. She leans away from the dead animal, disliking the smell. "Or burn it. Get rid of it before it stinks up the place and attracts whatever killed it to come back."

Sam was a regular visitor to then inn since it was where they kept all the logs and maps for the village and surrounding forest. Although, recent events had shown that the maps were more or less useless, but that didn't stop Sam from checking on from time to time. He wanted to keep tabs on things and the inn was the best place for it.

Sam wasn't expecting much that morning, things had been quiet aside from the disturbing animal corpses being found. It was only by chance that he was coming in from the rear -- he helped cook sometimes and he wanted to see if Miss Kate had anything he could use to make a quick meal before heading out. His stomach dropped, however, when he found a sight straight out of a horror film. There was blood everywhere and Sam stood stock still for a second processing this. His hand twitched for a weapon, but there was none to be had at the moment. He was going to have to investigate barehanded.

He cautiously approached the back door's steps, eyes darting from the pools of blood and back up for signs of attack or a fight. Nothing happened and that was somehow worse. It was another one, another of those disfigured and dismembered animals that had been popping up. This time it was right there at the inn, just waiting for someone to stumble over and fall into a mass of bloody fur and organs.

Sam swallowed, only slightly relieved that it wasn't a person. That didn't make the scene any less disturbing though and he was glad he wasn't alone in coming across this either. "What...how long has that been there?"

Edited 2016-11-14 04:13 (UTC)

Having strategically placed himself on a plot of grass near the body untouched by blood spray, Jess stood next to the stairs, waist-level with the carcass. He looked up at Sam's approach, frowning somberly (still frowning, something he'd been doing for a while already). "Not long. It's still fresh. I found it like this just a little while ago."

On the tail end of an early morning run, he'd only beaten Sam to the rear entrance by maybe ten or fifteen minutes. The sleeves of his shirt were still rolled up to his shoulders, cooling sweat having added a curl to the fringe of his brown hair.

That time had given him a chance to do all his processing. What was left was a stony severity, which he aimed at the body in another look. "We know it couldn't have been killed here. The others were inside the whole time."

Sam made a face -- a mix between disgust and worry. It was a difficult expression to describe, but it did involve the scrunching up of his nose and a deep frown. These had been appearing for awhile but the fact that one was so close to the inn, freshly killed, and no one the wiser.

His eyes flicked up to the inn, "Has Miss Kate or anyone else seen this yet?" He looked back over his shoulder, "Or are there any signs of it being moved here? A trail of some kind to follow?"

It was really too early in the morning for this.

Despite leaving the back door open, Raven still barged through it like a force to be reckoned with. In her hands was a metal box, one she'd haphazardly put together some time ago for the sake of tossing nails and other smaller bits inside. The sides dripped with water she'd kept in a bucket near her room, some of it sloshing over by how her touch wasn't as delicate as it should've been. There was a rag thrown over her shoulder, something that was dirtied with mud and grease and incredibly discoloured.

Standing at her full height with her hands splayed on the small of her back, she inhaled deeply and regretted it immediately. She hated the stench of blood; it took her back to the basement of Mount Weather where the tanginess of her own blood had flooded her mouth and nose. "As much fun as it is to stare at the dead bear, we're going to need to move it away from the inn. Blood's not a dull scent, boys."

"I've been looking, but... it might as well have appeared out of thin air for all that I can see." And he's confident of that, albeit in an uneasy way because he'd thought the same thing Sam's thinking now--there should be some kind of trail to follow. Under normal circumstances, even the most skilled assassin in the world would leave evidence behind moving a body this messy.

He'd looked for one in both directions, and was still rather hoping his eyes would catch on something he'd somehow missed, but so far the trail seemed to start and stop at the top of the stairs like the bear had crawled up there and maimed itself.

The only logical answer was that someone was dumping these animal carcasses closer and closer to their living quarters without leaving a trace and that... was almost more unsettling.

"We let them know. It's not exactly the most subtle ornament," Jess was in the middle of saying in response to Sam's first question when the other half of the aforementioned 'we' returned with bucket in hand, prompting him to shrug, hands on hips. "Oh, loads of fun, this is definitely better than a shoebox."

A glance at Sam preceded what he said next. It went without saying that moving the thing would be a two-person job.

"I've got gloves inside. You up for some heavy lifting?"

It was hard not to jump when you were staring at a mangled corpse of a giant bear. Sam manages to keep his composure though when Raven comes storming outside. At least she isn't coming out empty handed. Sam's pretty relieved to see a bucket and water ready to wash this mess away. He glanced down at the body, "Yeah, no kidding, we're either gonna start repelling the others from coming to the inn or attracting things we probably don't want." Something that could do this to a bear was not really something Sam wanted to encounter.

Ever.

"Well, it's not like I can pretend to suddenly have an important phone call," Sam conceded. It looked like he'd been selected for dead bear removal duty. This was going to be another one of those things he'd never thought he'd have to do.

Raven's brows furrow at Sam's quip, not quite understanding its context. It's a question for another time, perhaps another town. She understands his meaning, however, and appreciates the fact he's another good guy in town who's ready to carry his weight when it's needed.

Even though she and Jess have this reasonably under control, there's no telling whether something else will arise to make the situation worse. The more they work together, the better. That's a lesson she learned from camp with the kids.

She looks to Jess, eyebrow arched. She's unsurprised; there'd been boys like Jess back at camp, speaking around her as though she wasn't capable of helping lift something heavy. "This bucket's for you, Pretty Boy."

He was starting to wonder if someone wasn't trying to scare them off from the inn--or just scare them, period. Senseless animal killing pissed him off, but what really had him frowning was the show of power behind it.

We could reach out and do this to you whenever we want was the message the body sent, and it was disturbingly easy to picture one of them in place of the bear.

Like Raven, Jess didn't know what a phone call was, either, but the gist of it was clear and he managed a faint, wry smile in the man's direction. "Sorry." Manhandling roadkill wasn't the way he'd planned to start his day any more than it was Sam's, which was why he merely rolled his shoulders in a shrug at the girl in their midst. "Hey, you want to walk through that mess and be picking innards out of the soles of your boots later, be my guest."

There was no way anyone going up or down those steps could avoid getting splatter on them; picking the body up would mean stepping in it no matter whether they started from the top or the bottom. Not the most glamorous of jobs for either gender.

It'd be even worse bare-handed. Gloves were a must. "I'll grab them. Give me a sec." And he jogged off toward the front of the inn, headed for the front door.

Making jokes like that could always be hit or miss around here, Sam had come to accept that. At least they were staying focused and not making him explain the joke. Instead, Sam looked over his shoulder, scoping out the surrounding area. While Jess went back in for gloves he turned his focus on Raven, "You got somewhere in mind to move the body? What's going to be considered a safe distance?" They were out of his realm of experience now, but Raven spoke like she knew what she was doing. Sam wanted to have some idea as to how far he was going to be expected to drag this thing.

Truthfully, Raven was talking out of her ass.

When one of the kids died, they buried them. Said a little prayer, wished them luck, felt fear swell and sit heavily in their bellies, but they'd laid them to rest. She wasn't too sure if that was the way to go with the dead bear, but she felt that getting it away from the inn was the first step.

Wasn't the scent of blood always so ripe?

She watched Jess go, letting her gaze linger as she thought it over.

"Far enough," she said. "Get it away from the inn. That way, it won't attract ants and other predators we don't need right now. Maybe we can dump it out in the trees or sacrifice one of those bungalows no one likes."

Fortunately, getting from Point A to Point B fast was a part of Jess' genetic code. It didn't take him long to bound in through the front door, take the stairs up two at a time, and bound back out with two sets of work gloves he and others at the inn had scrounged up while they'd first been taking stock of the town,scavenging usable supplies.

"Got it!" comes a cry. The vowels, rounded with a British accent, announce Jess' return.

In a perfect world, this would be all just a terrible dream and he'd walk back to a pristine lawn, a clean back porch--

And he wouldn't be in Mystery Town X at all, for that matter, he'd be running back to the barracks at the High Garda compound, or better yet, to Ptolemy House. To Thomas and Morgan and Khalila and Glain and even Dario, all crowded around the common room arguing about some obscure point in Immanuel Kant's Metaphysics of Morals.

... But that was the dream, not this. This was wearying, dismaying reality. The peeling paint, Sam and Raven's sober expressions, the trophy kill... All real and all still waiting for him.

Jess' face displayed only a willingness to get down to work as he walked up on them and tossed the extra set of gloves Sam's way. "Good to go?"

Sam caught the gloves without any trouble. He pulled them out without complaint, though of course he was NOT looking forward to this job in the slightest. He glanced in Raven's direction, "Sure. But let's just put it in the woods. I really don't want to see what a rotting bear corpse does to a bungalow and that's still a little too close to the village for my liking." It might invite other problems if they started putting corpses inside buildings -- animal or not. He'd prefer they just take it back to the woods and let nature take its course.

Although, the more immediate problem was moving it at all, "Are you sure we're going to be able to move this? It may be ripped up, but I swear I read somewhere that some of the bigger bears can weigh over 900 pounds."

Raven puffed out her chest, standing taller. It didn't matter whether she was a girl or not, three might have been a crowd elsewhere, but right now it appeared to be a godsend of a solution.

"Good thing there's three of us."

She looked to Jess, her look pointed. It was almost as though she was waiting for him to tell her to sit this out, to give her some sexist-driven reason why she couldn't help in lugging a bear from Point A to Point B.

Despite being a girl, Raven wasn't afraid to get her hands a little dirty, even if it was with bear blood.

"Come on. He's not going to move himself." She made a move toward the bear.

"It looks young. Closer to Baby Bear than Papa Bear to me," Jess mused, pulling on his own set of gloves. He did his best to look at the bear cub objectively as just an obstacle that needed tending to, like a sack of flour or a heavy piece of furniture. "Seventeen... maybe eighteen stone, I'd wager?"

As long as the job got done, how they did it didn't matter. Jess picked his way across the stained walkway and climbed the first two steps, taking up position at the body's side without another word.

His boots were sticking. He ignored it. He ignored everything except the immediate task at hand, which was getting a grip on the thing without anything... falling loose. (And he definitely ignored that thought. Pushed it as far down as it would go and slammed a lid on it.)

"Let's roll it. The stomach seems pretty badly gored."

Don't think. Just do this.

Sam eyed the two, feeling a lot like a third wheel himself. He certainly wasn't about to tell someone not to help carry a possibly 900 pound bear into the woods -- girl or not. He was pretty sure he knew several women who could kick his ass. "It is a good thing," he finally added. Since the decision was made, Sam approached on the other side, careful to dodge any...bits. But there was too much blood to avoid that completely.

"On three then..." Sam advised, figuring rolling it might take two. It would at least give them a feel for the actual weight of the creature. Sam glanced back at the inn to make sure no one else was coming out to see this. "One...two...three." He pushed on the bear to get it turned over, unknowingly following Jess's lead and not thinking about the fact they were rolling an animal corpse around in the snow.

Raven got into position, squatting so she wouldn't strain anything in her back. Had she had experience moving bears from one place to another? She couldn't say. It couldn't be any more difficult than shifting rubble off of someone.

Pulling a face, she tried to focus on anything but the bear. At the count of three, she pushed to roll it, and found that it was the most disgusting thing they could've done.

The bear smelled bad. It looked worse. Moving it would only make this all the more messier, but that was a fact of dealing with something as disgusting as this. He hands felt slick with something, but she paid it no mind.

"You know, it'd be easier if we could push it onto something." She breathed heavily, finding the effort to move such a beast to be tiresome. "Like a stretcher, maybe one with wheels."

Sam's suggestion got a nod from Jess. On three, then. When it came time to push, he bent his knees for leverage and heaved against the bear's side; it rolled like an overly large toy, all loose limbs and flopping head, still fresh enough that rigor had yet to set in.

Seeing up close the gashes bisecting its body like an angry artist had taken a razor blade and cut up a canvas in a moment of aimless temper threatened to fill Jess with a strange sense of... sadness? He didn't know why one dead animal bothered him so much when they were up to their necks in dead animals already. Maybe it was because it felt like another message he didn't know how to translate. Maybe it was because he'd found the thing, alone and discarded like garbage, and a part of him was afraid to be it one day.

"You're probably thinking of a wheelbarrow," he answered Raven dully. He looked between her and Sam, leaning back on his heels so his hands were no longer touching the matted fur. "Getting one will take more time. I say let's get it over and done with, but majority rules."

If the consensus was bring in added help, he'd wait. The body weighed as much as a hefty adult male; Jess couldn't very well lift it by hand without at least one other person.

Sam made an involuntary noise of disgust. He hadn't dealt with a corpse in a long time and certainly not like this. Not without the chaos of battle to keep him focused and on the job. Mission objectives, getting out of there unscathed, not having to roll it across the ground like a pile of garbage. It was very different and he couldn't believe he was doing this with a couple of teenagers no less. Good Lord this place was just awful.

He resisted the urge to wipe his brow. Who knew what it was covered with now and he'd rather keep it to his hands alone. "All right. But are we going to be able to push the wheelbarrow through the snow and how much time is it really going to save us?" Sam frowned down at the bear, thinking of other options that might be even less pleasant.

This is becoming a pattern. Ravi is fairly good at establishing patterns out of chaos, though normally it doesn't happen with animals quite like this, at least not without some kind of hunter. At first, the deer could have been explained by any number of larger prey targeting it and hunting it, though all the meat left on the bones had been strange. The bear, though, is harder to explain. There's relief, of course, in that the brains haven't been touched, so the pattern they're looking at here isn't one of zombies.

Right now, more than ever, he misses cameras. He wants to establish crime scenes and investigate cause of death. At this point, he's hovering a little, trying to figure out how he intends to pitch to a group of strangers that he wants the body.

"I know this is going to sound mad," Ravi begins, and when you start like that, it never ends well, generally, "but I really think that I should examine the body of the animal. I'm a medical examiner back home and while this is barely my pursuit," he deadpans, feeling like a little pun could never hurt anyone, "I still would rather learn just a little over nothing at all."

There. It's logical and it's matter of fact. Now it's time for Ravi to hear about how insane he is.

It's a good thing he's self-aware enough to know how mad he sounds. Raven regards him with an arch to her brow and a long, silent look as she waits for him to say he's joking.

She's witnessed the corpse of animals on the ground, alongside those she'd known personally. Though she's sure Clarke would understand the reasons behind his intentions, Raven's never been privy to any autopsies. Abby would've done a few on the Ark, she's sure, but given the nature of how closed-in the space station was, she's beginning to believe perhaps people who'd passed under suspicious circumstances had been released into space via the airlock for the sake of keeping everyone else healthy.

Folding her arms against her chest in a bid to cover how unnerved she is by the entire thing, she asks, "What's the inside of a dead body going to tell you?"

"Plenty," is his immediate reply, seeing as the idea that a body couldn't tell him anything is sort of more ridiculous than the idea that it's useless. "If it succumbed to any kind of disease, what sort of death blow was struck to it, how it died, how long it took to die, and even when it died," he rambles, though he has to wonder if he's going to be able to tell any of that without his usual supplies and kit.

He gives her an expectant, hopeful look. "Do you know where the body is? Can you take me to it?"

Raven looks at him, eyes slightly narrowed. She's scrutinising him as much as she's trying to picture everything he's mentioned. Can Abby do all of that? Is that something anyone can actually predict?

What she knows, though, is that she wants to see it. It isn't out of some possessiveness she feels over the dead bear. As far as she's concerned, he can have at it. But if he's capable of figuring out a few answers not even she can find, she wants to know how.

"How are you going to figure all that out?"

How is he going to figure this out? "Normally, I'd take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the liver, which would give us an indication of how long the body has been dead," he says, but he thinks that other than placing a hand on it and guessing, that avenue isn't going to work. "Luckily, I don't need a thermometer to estimate rigor mortis," he says, already eyeing the body and thinking that it's not like he's used to doing this with animals.

"But if I could start analyzing the remains, I could probably say how long it's been since the kill."

She makes a face during his answers, second-guessing her decision to even ask. This type of stuff isn't something she likes at all.

Looking at him with a slight arch to her brow, she attempts to stay in the present. How can any of that help them find out who's behind the attacks? Raven's waiting for the perpetrator to grow impatient by their lack of reading the clues and pounce, but she's come to understand this town doesn't operate as the Grounders had.

"Is that going to help us? Finding out when it died?"

"If we're even the slightest bit suspicious that someone did this, I would want to know what time it happened in case I need to start asking for alibis," Ravi points out, though he does hope against hope that it won't get to that point. He really doesn't want to believe that he's living with someone that could be this vicious of a murderer, and yet, people do surprise you in both wonderful and truly awful ways.

"What's the harm of more information?" he adds with a shrug.

"There isn't," Raven answers. More information is often better than having little, but she also knows it can be overwhelming. Had she wanted to know what the Mountain Men hunted the Grounders for? Though she was better equipped to understand the way of life on the ground, she thinks she could've done without having her eyes opened.

"Except how can you tell the time?" Her brows rise a little as she questions him. It isn't done to be undermining; for someone who's found an old grandfather clock and has been trying to fix it, she hasn't been successful in figuring out the hour and exact minute just yet. "You've got a working watch that you know is correct?"

"Sunlight, daylight, really only the natural things around us to give any indication of time," he says, and just in this moment, it's a working watch that he wants more than anything else. This morning, it had been a good plate of fried eggs, biscuits, and coffee. It changes by the hour and he'd actually know what hour that was if he had a watch to tell him what time it was. "It just seems like it would be stupid to have this piece of evidence and just ignore it," he says, staring down at the animal.

Yes, he doesn't have his supplies and yes, he doesn't know what time it is, but it's right here staring him in the face and he hates to ignore it.

Raven doesn't understand how he's going to go about completing such a mission, but she's faced worse. At least he has some semblance of experience with what he intends to do, even though she doubts he's ever experienced not being with his supplies.

Rather than peer at this as though it's a waste of time, she sees it as a learning opportunity.

Pulling her shoulders back, her entire demeanour shifts. "Okay," she says with a decisive nod. "What do we do?"

"Get the body somewhere out of sight and where I can do some work," he says, thinking that it will be the best thing. "Maybe someone will want to deal with the scene, look for evidence? Generally, I leave that to the detectives and provide evidence when they come asking for it," he clarifies.

"Well? Ready to roll up your sleeves and bear through this," he jokes.

Despite recognising his joke for what it is, she does just that: rolls up her sleeves as she regards him with a furrow to her brow. Although there's so many questions still swirling inside of her head, Raven knows when to get to work. Put all that energy she's using to muster up thoughts into pushing a bear over to the side so the animal doctor can get stuck into it.

Perhaps literally. That's a gruesome thought she tries not to shudder at.

Still, she asks, "Detective?" She looks to the bear, eyebrow slightly cocked toward it, before she realises perhaps it's not the bear he's referring to. Nonetheless, she bends down, ready to move the bear.

"You know, someone who can analyze the site and deduce what happened, when it happened," he says as he sweats and grunts and gets through his crouch to start picking up the animal, groaning and wheezing. "I do not do near enough weight lifting to be prepared for this," he insists, but he's still determined to get it somewhere. "We just need a flat surface," he says. "And then I'll find a knife and I can get down to my work."

As much as Raven likes to dictate how Wick goes about attacking his own projects, she's always been one to give a professional their space. She doesn't know the best way to angle a scalpel, after all, and she's not intent to pretend otherwise. Standing back, she watches Ravi, eyes darting to the bear as if expecting it to come to life and maul him.

Looking him over, she comments kindly, "You're kind of scrawny." It's the Raven Reyes seal of approval, having her say something that may be taken offensively.

With a sigh, she glances around, then back down to the bear. "You're going to have a lot of trouble finding a flat surface. The ground wasn't made to be the perfect table." Shifting her foot against the ground, she let her eyes survey the land around them. With a sweep of her arm to her left, she suggests, "Maybe we can roll him up there?"

"It's a lean scrawn," is Ravi's proud reply, patting his stomach with a hand as if he's intentionally worked himself into this shape instead of working the sort of hours that lends yourself to a diet of mostly protein bars, energy drinks, and the reliable take-out of Seattle. He looks to where she's gesturing, and figures at least it isn't too far.

"So long as no one minds an outdoor autopsy." It's already out of the question to expect a clean crime scene, so Ravi will just have to work with what's he got.

mingle post | open

Discovery | Closed to Raven

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Either of them; set prior to any kind of substantial clean up

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OTA

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