It started off small. Everything always does. It was nothing more than a splinter: a momentary sting and an irritating prick that she could hardly be bothered to notice or identify mixed in with all the other aches and hurts in her body. So she shrugged it off and ignored it, and soon enough forgot she'd felt it at all. 

And after all, how was she to notice? The kitchen was so overrun with the signs of Demeter's passing that it was impossible to tell what it was meant to look like. The hangar had been arranged to please her. Birmingham's Grave had been arranged to bury her. The endless hallways were alien and took most her attention to navigate until she'd pulled her body back together. There were projects, endless distractions, that she'd chosen so carefully to pull herself away from her thoughts. All of it was exactly as she meant it, by her design. 

But like any other wound, when left untreated it started to fester. The splinter twisted inward, and it rotted inside of her. It bubbled sickeningly inside of her and greedily filled in all the spots left behind by her other retreating hurts. Hunger, weakness, boredom, and malaise all ebb away as if drawn out by a syringe only to fill painfully back up with the ache of the infection, which was called Obsession. She could not work. She could not sleep. She couldn't do anything until she found the evidence that would pluck the splinter from inside her.

Her shadow prowls from place to place, retracing all her steps. Her footfalls are as silent as they might have been on... that other ship, but the growl building in her throat seems to echo off of everything. She winds her way from hall to hall, and this time takes nothing for granted. Her claws dig grooves into the walls where she passes in three uneven lines. Her two blunted fingers itch for the kiss of new talons, and the chance to join in.

The kitchens are unchanged since her last visit. Long stretches of countertop run through the room near the garden in orderly rows, broken up by stoves and ovens and the occasional pit for fires. Every element is familiar to her, but the placing is wrong. Her fingertips slide smoothly along the marble as she searches for the stains and specific carvings that prove each station is designed with a particular kind of prep or cooking. She sniffs about for the telltale signs of greens and herbs or the pungent whip of a spice grinding station, but each spot shows mixed traces of everything. All of it separated, but wasted.

She closes her eyes, and the image washes over her. Dozens of cooks, bordering on hundreds. They work on dishes in a system of total chaos, plucking what they need as they need it from the gardens and the waters and even other chefs' stations, and only sometimes with permission. It's noisy and disorganized; people talk and shout at each other almost as much as they dice or fry or bake, and twice as loudly. It's anarchy. A system with no hierarchy except the one loosely pounded into place by a string of failures and successes. 

A battleground. That's what this is: a place of war and competition, where food is a weapon and its purpose is as much to bury rivals as it is to keep the ship moving and happy. It's a ruthless place that leads to failure as often as success. She opens her eyes again and sneers. Stupid. Pathetic. Imagine, being stupid enough to let that kind of mess run wild every evening and then daring to put whatever slop came out of it onto the plates of the nobility? She'd be flayed alive if she tried it. She must have made a mistake. This is just a Coherent kitchen; she'd find another, separate one just down here where [i]proper[/i] chefs cooked for the real people aboard the ship.

The girl stalks the ship to the point of exhaustion, and finds two other kitchens before the burning in her legs forces her to rest, but neither helps her cause. Whether she turns her imagination or her Auspex to the task, the only differences she finds prove these places are more of the same. 

Impossible. Absurd. But the dining halls, such as they are, tell the same story. The girl looks through one horrified eye at uneven scatterings of tables arranged into pure chaos. There are small ones tucked into corners and huge benches and cramped booths and simple chairs sitting over nothing. None of it suggests a social order. No adjoining rooms fix the problem. This is a place for protecting secrets, or collaborating on new ones, sharing gossip, or eating in stony silence. This is a place for hiding and for showing off. This is a place with no head.

It takes her hours to stumble back to the rooms. She picks through each one of them in turn, lifting silly mundane treasures from stupid, pointless lives in her hands and smashing them into walls. The splinter called Obsession falls loose in the commotion. Now there is nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Now there is nothing. Even the figurines, baubles, and blankets she tears to pieces confirm the story. Where she can find the hordes of the Magos everything becomes nicer, but not in the correct way. It's more... more. 

And there are no little beds, for silly pets. There are no mass piles of worn out sheets to serve large groups of workers. There is secrecy and individuality in every room and that same sense of loose hierarchy that might slip up or down at any moment on the back of a new accomplishment. Communal. Competitive. Chaotic. And entirely free of any signs of a Servitor class. Or a slave caste to replace them.

Her heart has forgotten how to beat. At long last, tears bead up in the corners of her eyes, but do not fall. Her jaw clenches and her fingers curl permanently into fists that tear huge feathery tufts out of the pillow she'd been holding. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Impossible. This was impossible. Everybody lived that way. On Tellus it was so, and Tellus was the heart of Empire, and therefore life. In the distant territory of the Azura it was very much so, every book agreed. They hadn't bred their perfect workers for every job, but all of the Princess' books went on and on about pleasure slaves and workers worth less than dirt. Two groups as different as can be, but they agreed on this, because it was a simple truth of the universe that it had to be that way. Even n the Ship That Sailed Away it was so, despite the whole crew being made of Servitors. The Kaori made a sort of noble class that pushed the Lanterns down and made servants of them all, until she, until Bella had come and...

She throws her beret to the ground without thinking about it. Her arms reach up to tear her dress off. Something makes her be gentle about it, instead. She carefully folds the coin-patterned dress into a neat square that she sets atop a pillow. Her tail curls around her leg while her hand pulls at her other arm. Hollow. Her entire heart is hollow. Everything is a blur of awkward motion as she stumbles from chamber to chamber.

But here is what she knows. She has stolen every pillow and blanket she could find. She has dragged them to a room with a large, flat wall. And other things, but these are pointless. She destroys them, to make room for the blankets. She has built a nest around her self-made clothes, a place where sunlight cannot reach her and she will never need to leave. She will not need to be seen, not ever again. She has found a projector, which is good because she also found that stupid fucking movie. And this bullshit anarchist farce of a community couldn't possibly have made a single thing worth watching. That's the only reason she's winding the film in now, to prove once and for all that a place like this and a people like this aren't worth a single extra second of her time. She can prove how stupid and godless this whole fucking place is through their idiot movie.

She knows the lingerie she stole is, at best, a half size too small for her build. She knows she's not taking it off anyway, because she knows that black is a flattering color for her fur. She doesn't know why she cares. She knows the projector is ready, and that the wine is plentiful despite her very best efforts these many eternities. 

She slips inside her nest, and watches the heathen wall.