Dissection (Solo)

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock remained in solitude for most of the rest of the work day, getting her designs done without any need to talk to anyone. Her apprentices bugged her from time to time, but they seemed to easily pick up that she wasn't in the mood to talk today, and so they mostly kept to themselves and focused on the tasks she had assigned them. By the time she went home, the surge of depression had passed, at least for the time being. She dove right back into her work, not wanting to let her thoughts stray enough to lead her down the dark and lonely path again. Better to keep busy. Keep working. Diggy was making decent, steady progress on his task. She set him back to it as soon as she got home, watching with a soft smile as he rolled down into the hole via the ramp he'd left himself. She'd taught him enough that he knew how to not get trapped in his own holes, and she was very proud to see him doing such a good job. Choppy continued taking down trees, though there weren't that many on the parcel of land she'd bought. Still, it was enough to replenish a lot of her stockpile. Though she'd need to take another trip outside the city soon if she wanted enough wood for the whole building. Most of it she was planning to use brick, for better durability. She'd still need wood for the floors, roofs, and doors, though. The wolf she'd been dissecting was mostly a mangled, useless mess now. Her flawed, amateur techniques at cutting it open had left many of the remaining body parts in poor shape, which was not to mention two full days of decay. So she stripped most of the remaining rotting meat from the bones and threw it in with the waste for disposal. The bones themselves she kept; later, when she had more time, she would take the rest of the meat scraps off them and set the bones out in the sun to bleach. In the meantime, however, she needed to get what she could out of the second corpse, before it decayed too much to be useful to her. With the first wolf out of the way, she laid the second one out on the workbench, clamping its paws down to hold it in place. She followed the same process as before for the skinning, rubbing the preservation salts into the hide and laying it out on the table next to the other one to cure under the sun. She repeated many of the same measurements and sketches, knowing she'd get slightly different numbers, but wanting as broad of a sample as possible for when she started the actual designs. Between these wolves and the live one, she should be able to average out the numbers, and compare them to anatomical diagrams in the library books for some more concrete numbers. Once she had a new set of measurements done, she started on the organs, except this time she wasn't preserving them. She was cutting them open. First the eyes, which she held one at a time as she sliced into them, trying to make sense of how they worked. Mostly they just seemed to be goo. But she peeled apart the different layers, taking notes on what the interior looked like, how the nerves seemed connected out the back, and everything she could determine about the shapes of the pupils and other parts. Mostly though, it was just gross. The heart was a bit more interesting. Slicing it open showed her where each vein and artery connected, and she found the multiple chambers inside rather fascinating. She made detailed sketches of the intriguing muscle, including measurements of the size of each chamber and how much fluid capacity each one had. The insides of the lungs didn't make much sense to her, but she sketched them out anyway, wondering what all the little holes and channels DID with the air once it was breathed in, and why it was different when it came back out. Now that she thought about it, suffocation didn't make any sense... After you breathed in, you breathed back out. So you returned the air you'd taken. So if someone was locked in a box, why did the air run out? The only answer she could think of was that the air you breathed out was bad somehow, like how water turned into pee. But as much as she poked around the lungs, she couldn't figure out WHAT in them made the air go bad. Maybe it was all the blood and gunk inside. She made some notes about that; maybe if she made clean leather lungs WITHOUT all the white gunk she'd found in her prodding, she could make Monty a cleaner, better pair of lungs that wouldn't make his air go bad. Bad air on the way out would explain all of his coughing, so logically, if she made him cleaner lungs, she could stop him from coughing on all that bad air.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

By the time she began losing daylight, Tock felt like she was about out of worthwhile things to study from the corpse. Most of the other organs inside she didn't even know the purpose of. There were some odd little things in the abdomen that she could guess were related to the fact that this was a female wolf, maybe something to do with where the babies would grow if it were pregnant, but the specifics of such things eluded her. Likewise the intestines seemed like nothing more than a mangled mess. She almost threw up when pulling them out. She couldn't figure out why they were so petching long. They seemed to stretch out dozens of feet, when all they had to do was connect from the stomach to the anus. Whoever among the foolish Gods had designed such a complex system could have made them much shorter, and used all that extra space in the body to put something more interesting. Left with nothing but mangled meats that didn't make sense, Tock stripped the rest of it away and threw it in the waste. That just left the bones. She headed inside, taking her babies with her, while making mental notes of the progress they'd made on their tasks. She'd need to get her hands on some bricks soon, to start building the walls of the foundation Diggy was digging out for her. Meanwhile, she had the rest of the night to clean, polish, and study the two wolf skeletons. After bringing her table and chairs back in, she laid out the bones in the same arrangements they'd had in the body. One at a time she began trimming the remaining bits of meat off, stripping them down until nothing was left but bare bones. Then she scrubbed them down and polished them with a cloth, taking extra care with the more delicate ones so as not to break them. For the rest of the night she worked on measuring each one and sketching diagrams of them. She made notes about possible modifications, such as thickening a few of the flimsier bones for increased strength. And maybe she could replace the useless intestinal track with extra layers of armor plating. Once she had most of the bones carefully measured and sketched, she set them in the corner with the jars of preserved organs, making sure to lay them out as close as possible to their proper arrangement. Soon she'd need to take more measurements for molds, and begin work on creating a better set of steel bones. There were a lot of improvements to be made on the Gods' designs. She considered their work to be no more than a first draft. Hers would be a masterpiece.

[Cascade]

Adventurer's Loot Tock : Skill XP Reward Animal Husbandry +1 Observation +2 Drawing +1 Embalming +2 Skinning +1 Carpentry +2 Construction +2 Medicine +1 Lore: Buying Land in Zeltiva The Deed to 1/4 Acre of Land A Wolf's Anatomy Dissecting a Wolf Emotional At Work Items or Consequences: 1/4 Acre of land (10,890 Square feet) -250 GM Blank Book -3 GM 20 Glass Jars (1 GM each) -20GM Knife (For dissection) -5 SM Embalming Preservation Salts -10 GM Total -283 GM 5 SM Where is Tock going with this? Just to be clear, husbandry is for dealing with the live wolf. Not the corpses. Also, I'm quite unsure where to put XP for the dissecting that she did, seeing as she doesn't have enough medicine XP to do what she did as successfuly. I know you did a hell lot of dissecting, but I hope you understand that due to the circumstances, I can't give you more XP for it. I liked the thread, though (as usual). She's turning out to be a mad scientist! If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to PM me!