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_{[Karis is, of course, still a zombie. She hasn't aged all that much, just by looking at her. A few bits here and there are gone, but she's still Karis. Still kicking, still lurking around the ship, occasionally badmouthing people and still being an unholy terror when she gets the chance.

She trusts the crew more. Thinks of them as allies, a few of them even as friends.

But she's bitter. Very bitter. She gets to watch them all age and moveo n with their lives and from her point of view, she's stuck in the same damn place. Not that she ever really lets on to that, of course.

She still hates it.]}

Anwei wasn't quite certain when she had discovered when Karis and herself had similiar dietary tastes. Had it been in a restaurant on an away mission, where their eyes met across a Carnivores-Only table? Or on a battlefield where one or the other of them went back for seconds?

Well, now that Anwei was well embedded in Medical, she had the opportunity to do some organ growing on the side. And of course, if someone had to have something amputated, it seemed a shame to let the flesh go to waste.

She caught Karis' eyes and silently mouthed, Meat?

Karis liked Anwei, about as much as she liked anyone. Gave her someone to bitch to about vegetarians, at least. Besides, the woman could give her a relatively endless supply of fresh meat. Not like anyone was lining up to donate.

She caught the little message and nodded with a little shrug.

Why the hell not?

Anwei cut her eyes to one side and went walking into the city, a cooler swinging casually in her hand. She looked like she might be going for a picnic. But instead she turned left, then right, went down a narrow alley, then stepped through a holographic wall that looked quite solid.

Behind the wall was a leaf-strewn courtyard, very private. The sky above it flickered grey; another hologram, to prevent the flying members of the crew from peeking in. An air scrubber would take care of the smoke. She and Karis had met here before, so while she waited she fired up the hibachi.

Karis flopped down against a wall, armor clanking. She tilted her head back against the wall and waited in silence for a few moments.

"...you'd think we were horrible people for having a certain kinda diet."

"You're what you are, and I'm what I was raised to be." Anwei smiled lopsidedly - these days that made the whole side of her face slice open, skin hanging loose. She raised her pitch and spoke in the reedy whisper that was her best imitation of her mothers: "You are a Daughter of the White Line, of the rulers of the Living People, and it is beneath your dignity to eat anything but sentient meat! She coughed, then continued in her normal voice, "It's just this stupid Earth culture that everyone here decided to follow. Lots of sentients eat their dead, 'stead of burning them or letting them rot."

She had tried not being a horrible person. That landed her here. And none of their efforts to reverse Karis' curse had worked out.

The hibachi was hot, and she fished out the skewers. Everything here would have to be sterilized once they were done, of course; too many people with talents on board, who could see a clump of ash and read its DNA. "You want yours warmed, cooked, or charred?"

Of course they couldn't reverse it. It was magic. Magic and plague and a curse, all wrapped and twisted so far into her soul that it seemed like nothing was ever going to free her from its grip. Except perhaps final death. She kicked out a leg with a surly little shrug.

"Warmed. Just warmed."

She tilted her head back, tapping her skull against the wall. "They don't get it. They don't understand. It's good. Warms me up like nothing else ever does. Keeps me going. No, no, no... they just see the meat as coming from something besides some dumb animal and think it's evil."

She threaded the skewers and set them above the coals. One eye turned to watch them - she actually liked hers a little charred - and the other watched Karis. The other woman was a fine fighter, but Anwei had little experience with zombies. She had seen ghosts that could not leave their bodies, but they were glum. Not bright and fierce like Karis.

"Remember XaXing, ten years back? All those people running around asking to buy body parts - and some people did sell. What did they think was going to happen to 'em, eh? Dried and used for jewelry? Or dropped into a support vat and grown into consumables?"

There were a couple of crew members that she wouldn't mind taking a chunk off of, even now.

One skewer was gently steaming, and she raised it and passed it to Karis. "Here you go. Prime human."

"Too right. And if the person is dead, it's not like they need the body anymore, anyway. Assholes-"

Her little rant was cut short as she raised a hand to snag the skewer. Just the way she liked it. She bit a large, ragged chunk out of the skewer and swallowed it without bothering to chew all that much. Like always, it was sweet and warm and delicious. Unlike everything else she tried to swallow.

"They can't judge me. None of 'em can judge me."

Anwei wasn't human. That was a point for her in Karis' book.

Her meat wasn't quite burnt enough, but she pulled off one piece with her fingers and ate it anyway. "Some cultures," she licked a smear of fat from her lip with her narrow tongue, "some cultures believe that the greatest gift the dead can give is their flesh, to give life to the living. Plenty of Earth cultures practiced cannibalism, too. It's just everyone here is tryin' to follow one set of codes, and they're diverse on THIS and completely locked down on THAT. And I want THAT." She took her skewer and went at it.

The meat was smoking as she bolted it down, little black crusts crunching under her teeth Salty-sweet and moist, with that slight overmoistness of vat-grown meat. It made her think of funeral feasts and battlefields, and food served by her mothers, sliced hot from the bone just for her, for their little Anwei.

"It's just one thing, and it makes you happy. All you've given them, the least they can spare is some meat that was just goin' to be thrown out anyway." Well, rather it would be thrown into one of Stacy's disposal chutes, where she strongly suspected it might get turned into food anyway. Slop.

It didn't have the same taste. Although she'd never tasted it when she was alive, but she suspected it wouldn't have been the same. Now, it was wonderfully sweet, with a hint of salt and so good. It was like a furnace had been lit in her belly and was happily devouring the fuel she was giving it. For a little while, she could feel warm again.

"It's not my culture. Not anymore. And in my culture, we eat our dead enemies. We eat the flesh. Because it's good and it helps keep us going. It's... Hmmph. I dunno how to describe it. It's what we do. If that makes us evil, I don't wanna be good."

Anwei could almost see Karis relax, her muscles unknotting, her tendons slackening as she ate. She ran her cleaned skewer through her teeth to get off the last bits of char, put it aside to be cleaned, and started loading up a new skewer with meat. They only had the one small hibachi, she didn't want to cook too much at once. The airscrubber might miss some of the smoke, and the smell might be familiar to certain people.

"My culture taught that everyone was to be eaten - all aliens, and any of our own species who was unfortunate enough to fall in status. And really," she set the skewers across the coals, "I do seem to get in a better mood when I eat food that reminds me of home."

If her AI had been here, he would have been screaming at those words. Home was everything bad for Anwei, and if she was thinking fondly of it...but he wasn't here.

Karis slurped down the last of her kebob, finger-bones twitching slightly as she sucked the juice off of them.

Not quite as good as fresh off of a warm corpse, but still delicious. Still enough to make her happy for a few minutes. Sometimes she wondered it that was deliberate; whether the Lich King had created zombies like her and built their pleasure centers to respond to human flesh and only human flesh. Well, not just human. Flesh of the sentient, of the sapient. Interesting thought.

"It's better than the slop they feed us, that's for sure. Not like I can hardly taste anything else, either."

Anwei didn't really think a lot about tastes, anymore. Her years of virtuous self-denial had really paid off: she couldn't remember the taste of fresh plums, or the smell of warm grass, or the sight of real blue skies.

Or maybe that was just age creeping up on her.

"Seconds?"

"Yeah, sure. Don't get this that often - not with other people watching," Karis shrugged.

She was starting to hate the ship. Well. Not starting.

Anwei shrugged back. "Well they told Medical, come up with human muscle that's omni-transplantable. So we did. And we store it, and then the stores need to be rotated. Should I just let Stacy take them away? I bet she turns them into slop anyway. That is, if she doesn't eat them herself."

Another steaming skewer for Karis. "So what I got, I share."

Karis is a zombie, but she's not an N5S drone... and she'll also be around for quite some time. Which is to say that Zouichi eventually got around to talking to her, and that he was a little harder to bait than many of the human crew members.

So he occasionally drops by to see how she's doing.

"Hello, Karis. Blown up any good buildings lately?"

"Just the one," Karis drawled in reply. She wasn't sure why Zouichi bothered to try and get to know her. Far as she knew, they had nothing in common.

"Killed anyone interesting?"

"Not since last month. Unless you count the Sensoriums." Zouichi did not.

"Actually, I came to ask you about Anwei. You two meet up every once in a while, don't you?"

Karis eyes narrowed into a suspicious glare.

"Yeah. Occasionally. What of it?"

"I'm... worried about her. She's been withdrawn for quite some time, always some project or other, but this seems different. It's like she's given up. Not just on finding her AI or seeing the end of the war. On everything."

"Yeah, so? I wouldn't blame her. Life sucks and it's gonna keep sucking. War, war, war, kill, kill, kill, fight, fight, fight. Who gives a shit anymore?"

Karis threw a hand up with a shrug.

That sudden switch from suspicion to Karis-as-usual was a little suspicious, but it wasn't his issue right now.

"So in other words, you haven't noticed anything different about her lately?"

"No. SHould I have?"

Well, maybe a little. But as long as Anwei kept her company and provided meat, she could do whatever she wanted.

"I don't know." In fact, he wasn't quite sure why Anwei and Karis had started getting along in the first place. Maybe it was the nihilism. Or...

"I suppose not. Sorry to bother you."