Cannibal, Cannibal

[Ada Wong]

As always, Stefanie Gordon’s morning began with a styrofoam cup filled with the most bracingly-hot coffee Coruscant had to offer. She blew the occasional puff of air over the molten brown drink as she walked down the hallway, her legs reaching in long strides and her eyes never once leaving the screen of the Dataverse device resting in the crook of her elbow. A clipboard stuffed with loose sheaves of paper fluttered on the opposite arm, the pages filled from corner to corner with Stefanie’s chicken-scrawl handwriting. Her wavy blonde hair appeared dead and pale under the severe artificial lighting, straw-like strands falling over her withdrawn eyes and the brightly-illuminated screen.

Dark bags were smeared under her eyes like bruises, the direct result of too many consecutive late nights spent processing data, hunched over and pecking at her keyboard in the labs. But, if building her résumé meant starting small, and if starting small meant being the equivalent of a data monkey for Drs. Myers and T’Jung, then Stefanie would become a goddamn data gorilla.

Glinting glass doors parted before her with a silent hiss. Marching purposefully inside with her lab coat swirling behind her, Stefanie cast a quick glance around at the maze of glinting metal tabletops, sharp dissection utensils, microscopes, and other finely-tuned instruments that emitted the faintly pungent scent of thorough sanitization. Glowing screens were spread both far and wide, each one flashing streams of precious, irreplaceable data; she could hear the myriad yelps, chirrups, and whines of the beasts these computers were monitoring echoing from the rooms behind the test center, the metallic dirge of nails clicking across icy-cold cage floors sounding like music to her ears.

Strangely, Stefanie’s co-intern Viola Burns was conspicuously absent from her operation table in the corner of the room. She had been very diligent in her study of a certain strain of lab rats, of which all but one had expired upon being injected with tranquilizer powder and other drugs. Stefanie was surprised that she would miss out on any observation time whatsoever, even to sleep, but brushed it off. There had been a rather nasty bug going around, after all.

In the center of it all was Chief Assistant Dr. Daveed Myers, gloves on and elbows deep inside the gaping, lividly-colored chest cavity of a Vorticon.

CA Daveed Myers had a strange sense of fashion and an even more questionable sense of what was acceptable clothing to wear in the workplace. Aside from the literal rose-colored, heart-shaped glasses he wore that day, he had on a dark red velvet jacket and matching pants under the starched white of his lab coat. Stefanie often wondered if Myers wore such garish things in an attempt to irk Dr. T’Jung. She recalled a specific incident where, at the turn of the year when Coruscant was still young but standing in all its glory, he had worn a pair of tinsel-laced glasses to commemorate the occasion. It had almost seemed like T’Jung was going to have a fit— in her own quiet, distinctly Vulcan way, of course.

Yet despite his silliness, Stefanie liked CA Myers. He was a pleasant enough man, a brilliant scientist, and never, ever flirted with her as some of her former superiors had done before. The two treated one another with a mutual respect born of excruciatingly long hours spent poring over tissue samples and the endless data sheets produced by Dr. T’Jung. It was nice, almost freeing to have someone in such a cutthroat environment that she didn’t have to always seem perfectly capable around. And, judging by the amount of postmortem dissections he had fudged up around her before (on one memorable occasion severing an artery and sending cascades of blood everywhere,) he likely felt the same way. She might even venture to say that they were friends.

This familiarity between them was the main reason why Stefanie noticed the man’s unease. Despite his flamboyant clothing and cheery attitude, some of which was very true to the man himself, it was possible to dig deep into the sugary coating and uncover the more genuine, less needlessly saturated emotions he liked to conceal from sight, revealing whatever private concerns he might have about, say, changes in staff or the lingering, always noticeable presence of the Imperial guard in their research laboratory. Stefanie noticed these things all the time, but she was in no way prepared for the bone-deep terror she detected on the man now.

He looked up when she walked in, the lenses of his heart-shaped glasses flashing and his bronzed face falling into an open-mouthed look of alarm. His arms ripped out from the corpse with a disgusting squelch. “Gordon! What are you doing here? I sent out a message to all interns to remain outside of the labs today. You shouldn’t be here.”

He was trembling, the blood on his gloved fingers spilling off from his shaky hands and flecking the floor with dark droplets. Beaded sweat sparkled on his brow and shone in his short black hair, the crimped curls even more distressed than usual; it was as if he’d been raking his fingers through his hair again and again, tearing at his scalp in agitation. Even as he peeled the gloves off from his hands she could see his jagged, shortened fingernails, each one gnawed down to the quick. To make matters worse, the purplish-brown discoloration under his eyes was even worse than Stefanie’s, and that was saying something.

A half-filled ceramic mug sat on a surgeon’s side-table littered with cutting tools nearby, sticky brown stains trailing down the sides from where his jittery hands had beckoned the coffee to spill over. Stefanie’s eyes widened; CA Myers never drank coffee.

“Dr. Myers…? What’s wrong—“

The stare he fixed her with in that moment, his rounded eyes damp and begging for a reprieve, would have been more than enough to immediately convince the intern that something was deeply, profoundly wrong. The sound of the doors bursting open behind her only confirmed it.

What looked to be an entire battalion of Stormtroopers marched in through the glass doors, heavy boots clomping intensely over the tile flooring and their white armor gleaming in sharp flashes. Dr. T’Jung was at the front of this horde, her robes undulating around her in a torrent of sunshine-yellow fabric. Her pale skin and sharply-angled features appeared almost bone white in color, her pointed ears and dark hair making her seem statuesque, not exceptionally feminine nor masculine but most certainly a being to be obeyed.

She stopped just after entering the room, her nebulous black eyes flicking first to Chief Assistant Myers, taking in his distressed appearance. Then, her gaze filled with such seriousness Stefanie hadn’t known a mere mortal could be in possession of, her eyes landed on Intern Stefanie Gordon. The blonde-haired intern immediately felt bare, stripped of her sense of belonging and safety.

The vulcan’s mouth thinned a touch more, her eyes tightening around the corners. Her unblinking stare returned to CA Myers, her hands folding neatly together behind her back. “Science Officer Myers. I can only begin to think that this is another one of your so-called ‘practical jokes’— unless, of course, you have knowingly placed Intern Gordon in harm’s way.”

“Wait, what?” Stefanie stared, mouth gaping like a door thrown open by a windstorm. She glanced uneasily between the two scientists who seemed to be polar opposites, subconsciously shifting out of the way.

Dr. T’Jung had said ‘practical jokes’ as if it were the vilest of profanities, the words sounding uncouth and bitter rolling off her tongue, but that wasn’t what Stefanie focused on. Oh, no. Her brain focused on ‘in harm’s way’, the phrase repeating itself over and over again to her ears, echoing and distorted in the scientist’s crisp tone of voice until it lost all meaning except for the one emotion it inspired: fear.

Myers cast her a hurried glance, the lenses of his pink glasses slipping down an inch, his eyes silently willing her to be quiet. He then turned fully to look T’Jung in the eye, his shoulders hunched in a defensive slouch and his hands flexing unconsciously at his sides as his agitation grew.

“I would never do something like that! There must have been some interference with the memo I sent out— and besides, the contamination may have occurred here, but the… the contaminated specimen is gone.” Myers gestured helplessly with one arm, staring around at his surroundings as if his whole world had been turned on its head.

And, well. Stefanie supposed it had been. She felt a rush of compassion for the man, but T’Jung was speaking before she could say anything to stave off the self-hatred that was obviously beginning to consume him.

The vulcan’s eyes flashed. She greatly disliked the drama these humans so loved to surround themselves with. “Which specimen, Dr. Myers?”

Wincing as he spoke, Myers looked with anxious eyes at Viola Burns’ desk in the room’s corner.

“The rat.”