The hallways outside of the laboratory sector glowed with a dim florescence. Their intensity had been turned down, and every other stretch of filament was shut off due to the late hour. One of them flickered at random intervals with a 'clink clink' sound as it sputtered on and off. This was the only other sound emanating through the area, aside from the the static buzz of a blaring pair of head phones. They belonged to none other than the lab's lead technician, Cora. The noise fell on deaf ears however, save for her own. The technician's only companions that night were the two bodies that were laid out on metal examining platforms, but Cora didn't seem to mind so much as her head bobbed to the beat of the latest alternative rock hits album.
Cora had just spent long hours puzzling over the presence of neurotoxins in a spectrograph analysis of the human victim's blood. She grumbled to herself about the coroner who got to the body before her having washed away all the 'good evidence'. All she was left with were a few long brown hair follicles found on the victim. This did little good, considering that the other body in her care was that of an ape-like creature covered in brown hair from head to toe, awarding him the nick name "Big Foot" from the other lab workers. Cora didn't agree that his feet were disproportionate to his body, but she decided she'd just go with it. Unfortunately for her, it was already common knowledge that the man's death was a direct result of contact with the primate since the two had been caught during the struggle. And somehow the human came out of it with no serious injuries or ailments. "Except that he's deceased" she thought. Evidence of hairs on his body did her little good.
She had just resigned to sitting at the microscope and examining the hairs yet again under a higher magnification when she suddenly stopped. Something had taken her aback, and she bent down to take a second look. "Of course!" Flinging her seat backwards, breathless with excitement, she dashed to a cabinet and collected a load of supplies. Her work was just beginning.
About an hour later, Patrick Kim was walking quickly down the hall towards the locker room area, thinking about where exactly he had tucked away a particular scrap of paper on which he'd written down an important phone number. Though the locker room was down another hallway, it intersected with the one down which Cora was working, and Patrick couldn't resist seeing who in the world was working so late when he spied the light of a lab in full glow. When he made it to the open door, his jaw dropped.
Patrick's mentor was kneeling on the examination platform, wearing a giant gas mask complete with goggles and breathing apparatus, and huge black rubber gloves stretching to her elbows. And perhaps the most disturbing feature of what he saw was that the leg of a dead, half shaved, half covered in foam, Big Foot was slung over her shoulder, apparently so she could use both hands to shave the underside of knee, her headphones blaring as she bopped her head along with the stroke of each shave.
A moment later, Cora's head turned to see what it was she caught out of the corner of her eye, and noticed the newest intern. "Oh hello Patrick!" Her muffled voice emanated cheerily through the breathing grates of the mask.
After stepping down from the platform and making herself more applicable to conversation, she began to show Patrick what she'd been getting at. He sat at the microscope with Cora over his shoulder, contemplating what he was looking at. "This is very strange" He admitted. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like this." He'd been looking at the spiny shafts of the hairs found on the victim, a strange spindle like protrusion coming out of one end.
"Precisely! And judging by the shape of it, the functionality must be nematocystic in nature!" She marveled. "You don't see that anywhere
in mammals on earth."
"Nematocysts? You think these spindles are poisonous?" He suddenly realized what she was saying. This would explain how the victim had died, and he looked again. "Of course!"
"Yes! That is exactly what I exclaimed!" She continued to elaborate on what she'd found, slipping in a new slide for him to observe. It was similar to the first, except that the venom sacs were deformed and shriveled, the spindles were still in tact however. The ones from the victim had been expelled. "Notice how the venom sacs are withered? I need to run some more tests, but I postulate that post mortem condition of the Big Foot causes this venom sterility. I doubt its due to decay since he hasn't started to decompose quite yet, instead its more likely a direct result of the loss in sustained body temperature."
Patrick looked at her for a moment, not sure how that would help explain anything, until Cora finished her thought. "If that is the case, we might be able to deploy types of cooling techniques to sterilize these types of beasts if the should begin to appear again. But, I'd need to find sacs still in tact on hairs somewhere closer to the core of his body where the temperature hasn't dropped as severely"
Finally Patrick cracked a smile at her, and chuckled to himself. He understood the compromising position he'd found her in.
Cora wasn't sure what was so funny however. "What? Why are you laughing?" A mixture of curiosity for what it was and unease that it was she who'd done something worth laughing at.
"Nothing, Cora" He finally replied, still grinning. "You're brilliant."
Reassured by his compliment, Cora beamed again, flicking a stray blob of shaving cream off of her sleeve. "Well thank you, Patrick"
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