“Quiet.” Tule’s tone didn’t brook argument or discussion. Everyone had relaxed too much since they had left the BioPrison in half-decent shape; if one didn’t count the increasingly feral-looking Tule, the traumatic-brain-injury Jonah, the missing-foot and broken-boned post-surgery Leanne, and Jack carrying the mother of all dangerous unknown catalysts inside his body. Relatively good shape as the four were concerned.

No one noticed as Tule squeezed his head between his hands and Jack and the rest took time to take in the room they found themselves in. It was circular and large, they had been dropped into a place on the side of it. Above them, in the domed-room, were ports. As they took it in they saw the occasional port open and deposit light bits of assorted trash into different piles around them.

“The trash. Does it look arranged to anyone else?”

Now that Jack was looking for it, he did agree with Leanne. It looked like small seats were arranged under each grouped section of chute exits.

Tule searched around the piles as he poked mounds of trash with the Toothpick. Their surroundings ruffled and shifted in increasing frequency. Tule slashed and plunged himself forward, a manic hunger gleamed in his eyes.

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“Tule. Was... that a rat?” Jonah managed to question. They had just watched Tule dive headfirst into different piles of trash around the room.

He finished up the first half and wordlessly launched his mouth into the second half of what was now, seen clearly in the dim room, a bisected rat. Rats weren’t an uncommon thing in the Labs, but they weren’t common either. It did seem to be pretty oversized when compared to their memories. Tule heedlessly ripped large raw chunks out of the dead rat with his teeth. When he finished with those bisected portions he scrambled and continued the process of rummaging through trash and devouring the rats he was able to find mostly whole and each one, raw.

The three not obsessed with consuming rats all stared in stupefied disgust as Tule continued his rummaged feast. The last thing Tule found was a nest of hairless, baby rats, comparatively sized to large potatoes.

“Are you done?” Jack felt his gut twist. Even crab looked more appetizing than that. Even worse, it was making him hungry. Jack pulled a ration bar out of a pocket and started eating it.

Leanne’s face scrunched up, “How are you eating right now?”

“Yeah sure, Tule’s being super gross but that doesn’t make me less hungry.” It did, in fact, make him less hungry but he needed to eat. The battle inside him was burning calories. He didn’t want his electricity to start having to make up the caloric difference. There wasn’t enough excess electricity to go around.

“Also where did you get that? Do you have more?”

“From the Security Locker and yes I have more and no you can’t have any. Figure you pigged out enough at the crab feast to last you for a while anyways.”

Leanne’s mouth gaped open. The level of disrespect Jack casually tossed her way was perhaps the most aggravating part of interacting with him. Moreso even than the occasional bouts of insanity. Well… she reflected on the state he had been in as he stalked and chased her through the BioPrison. Maybe not worse than that.

Apparently Jack had been thinking the same thing, he was holding the bar extended uncomfortably close to her face, “Here, you can have a bite.”

“Uhhh no thank you.” She slowly pushed it away from her face.

Jack shrugged, “Whatever, just don’t complain to me if you get hungry later.”

Tule walked up to them, a horrible, bloody grin on his face.

The three recoiled. Copious blood and flecks of what looked to be rat hair, flesh, viscera splashed around his mouth and over the top of his suit.

“Tule, what in the holiest of pods was that.”

“Apologies, my actions shame me and lacked dignity but I desperately needed to feed.”

Jack, mid-chew on his ration bar, casually asked, “Don’t you mean ‘eat’?”

Tule’s head rocked back as the smile was wiped from his face. Still, Tule being Tule it was a subtle thing. The fact that it was visible at all reflected the impact the question had on him.

“Ah yes, I needed to eat to repair my skin.”

Jack saw that Tule’s skin had started to darken again. The filmy layer that had covered him had thickened and hardened. He didn’t correct Tule’s word choice this time from ‘skin’ to ‘chitin’.

Jack narrowed his eyes momentarily then visibly relaxed, “Well we have to get to the Arcology section so let’s look around and see if we can find out anything.” He threw the wrapper onto the floor and pulled out another ration bar and looked at it as he walked away from them.

“Oh? Peanut-butter flavor?”

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They scoured the room but no one was eager to dig through the trash like Tule had been. Not particularly strong in the first place, Tule’s showing had decreased their enthusiasm even further to dig through trash. Even Tule himself wasn’t enthusiastic to repeat his performance.

Leanne walked up to Jack who was staring at the wall. She stood next to him as he loudly chewed through his second ration bar. She looked at the wall next to him in the dim light. It looked like something was carved into it.

“Do you see that?”

Jack raised an eyebrow at her, it was the one that had been clipped in half by the crabs much earlier in his journey. “You don’t think I’d just be staring at a wall like some nut-job otherwise yeah?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Jack thought better of his question, “Don’t answer that. Yeah it looks like some sort of carving. Can’t quite make it out.”

Leanne rubbed her hand against it to make it more clear.

“Doesn’t help, already tried that.”

Leanne turned from the wall, to him, to Jonah. “Jonah, over here! We found something?”

Jack raised another eyebrow at her at the ‘we’ but left it alone.

“What did you find?” Jonah answered his own question as he twisted and tapped against his goggles. He peered closer at the wall. He tried a few different energies over the surface in frustration then finally burned a wide-beam of some blue-white energy that flashed over different sections. Jonah continued to the left for a bit then flashed another energy so quickly they didn’t catch..

They looked at the images carved into it, now clear metal and heavily-darkened carved portions. The contrast made it easily visible.

“Nice job Jonah.”

Jonah absentmindedly nodded as they studied the images.

The first set of carvings showed a series of rounded boxes that several Human-like figures were in the middle of emerging from.

The Humans were then shown to be picking up things on the ground and putting them into large piles.

A glowing man, larger than the rest of the Humans, had its arms outstretched above their heads with lines radiating outward from the giant’s head. His eyes were large and deeply carved.

The piles the Humans constructed became bigger, more organized than before. Some of them looked like buildings.

Sitting alone in a section was a rectangle with another, smaller square inside it, near the top of the rectangle.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

Jack recognized it, “A Terminal.”

The next image showed the smaller humans bowing and bringing things to the Terminal. The giant man was sometimes there, other times he was not.

The smaller men under the glowing giant became bigger, musculature and new greater stature now easily visible in the images. So there were Terminals down here.

The next one showed a circle and a textured cone leading from it toward an intricately carved rectangular shape. Well, it was easy to tell it had once been intricately carved but time had degraded most of the detailed etchings into a blurred mess. Inside the circle were… “Crabs.” Jack spat the words with venom that surprised him. He felt Tule’s eyes flicker over him.

The mural showed a man with some sort of hat holding a crab to the Terminal.

Leanne absentmindedly voiced an internal thought, “He’s wearing some sort of hat.”

Jonah turned back toward her, “Excellent observation, Sentinel.”

She turned to him then her eyes refocused as her brain caught up, “Well then hurry up, let’s see what’s next.”

The next ones showed crabs alongside Humans, moving large things for the Humans, Humans affectionately holding small crabs in their hands, large ones helping construct the buildings alongside the Humans, crabs clearing small tunnels the Men could not fit in.

There was the man with the hat again, now standing before the giant with a hand outstretched toward the many different types of crabs behind him. In the other hand was a four legged crab with Human-like hands.

Jack seethed, hybrids?

The following panel showed the giant Man striking down the man with the hat and an oversized giant finger that pointed further down the mural.

Jack had the least experience out of everyone in art, science, really anything. “Why the oversized finger?”

Jonah hummed as he tapped his chin, “Emphasis I’d think. A way to transmit extreme emotion.”

They continued. Other, hatless men took the crabs and brought them away.

The men looking forward killed the crabs. The men who looked back to the giant let them go. A man with a smaller, slightly different version of a hat was on a knee, releasing an intricately carved crab that had four legs and two human-like hands away from the other Humans.

Jack realized that verbalizing some thoughts would probably be more productive than keeping them as internal thoughts. Finally some good thinking from his EQ and not just more insecurity.

Leanne said, “The same crab as before.”

Jack realized that is what she had been doing before that Jonah had missed, she was verbalizing anything that might be useful. He kept the technique in mind as he supported her idea, “You’re right. See there? Some of them are looking back to their leader, the giant man, others at the crabs. The ones looking at the crabs disobeyed their leader?”

“Appears so, maybe some of them had been experimenting with crabs and Humans?”

Jonah’s musing deepened the silence. Jack resisted looking at Tule. He needed a clear mind right now, not clouded by rage.

The next few drawings were more of daily activities than anything else. Jack sped past these parts and thought as he waited for Jonah to move past them.

Were they using the crabs as pets? Did they originate here? No. Well, maybe.

“Jack…” That was Jonah, they could analyze them later, he hurriedly rejoined his position next to Jonah as he continued to clear the mural.

The scenes had shifted.

It showed a Human figure laying horizontally, a carved circle around their midsection and surrounded by other humans with question marks above their heads. This scene repeated several times until it showed one of the horizontal Humans surrounded by many crabs. There was some sort of demarcation vertical line carved near it and behind stood another Human, presumably hidden, looking over the scene with an exclamation mark above their head.

The same Human with the exclamation mark still above their head was shown in the next panel speaking to a larger group of Humans. A speech bubble above the head of the Human showed a smaller, less detailed repeat of the prior scene. Above most of the gathered heads were primarily question marks but there were a few exclamation marks present as well.

The scene repeated itself as more and more question marks turned into exclamation marks.

The Humans with exclamation marks above their heads went to the giant Human and pointed at the body of a crab. The giant’s arms were crossed.

“Crabs… started killing Humans. They didn’t believe it at first.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t, seems like a natural things for crabs to try to do. Looks like their leader was angry at them. You can take the crabs out of the Labs but not the…” Jack thought he had a saying there but he had lost it.

“Well, if they didn’t originate here in the first place.”

Jonah had voiced what he had thought, “That’s true.”

The next panel showed the Humans gathering more people together and marching with what looked like varied makeshift weapons. Few of the weapon designs repeated themselves.

The next showed a single Human running back and bowing before the giant Human. Inside an large text bubble was a drawing that Jack and the others studied for long seconds. It showed crabs on top of the corpses of a lot of horizontal Humans.

Leanne caught it, “the Humans here…” She referenced the prior carving, “They have the same weapons as the Humans before.”

Jack looked closer, she was right. He started to softly feel his heartbeat in his head. Faint enough that with his fascination with the story told through the wall carvings, his conscious attention hardly noticed it. Humans had made these, a long time ago.