SATe [✔]

[8] cerise

When I first saw her, I did think she must have been a woman of great stature; I was short for my age and didn't have a proper growth spurt until my mid-teenage years. So, when we met again, my image of her was both enlightening and disillusioning; she was indeed a tall and stoic woman that evoked a sensation of power and elegance in equal footing. However, now she sank a few inches shorter and the sense of dominance I'd felt as a child being in her presence, seemed oversaturated and nonsensical.

That being said, when I found her again in the alleyways, I hadn't quite expected for her to have pinned down a creature against the cobblestone ground beneath our feet. The thing that was struggling to fight against her was a disturbing creature of large proportion. The initial size of the beast is what had distressed me first, but that was long surpassed when I realised that this thing was draped in the skin of a human being. That very skin was slowly peeling away from the flesh of this creature, leaving in its wake a horrifically bright pink oozing substance that stuck to both sides indiscriminately.

The creature was releasing torturous sounds of pain as it wrestled beneath her frame; it was a helpless scuffle because the woman didn't seem to budge an inch against the movement. She was focused on placing an arch-shape metal mechanism around its neck; which as it got closer to the flesh began to change its own length to match its captive. As it pressed against the ground directly below it, a subtle clicking sound was heard, soon followed by the sound of the ground cracking and conforming to the mechanism.

The woman rose from the creature and took a step towards me. I watched as the creature struggles against the metal but can't seem to lift either its head or the rest of its body from the ground. I toiled over the idea that a piece of metal could defeat such a large creature; and more so, could be defeated by the woman beside me. She was clearly an honour-driven and dedicated person who could handle herself, but this would be a tremendous task on your own. Which left me with the impression there was something I had missed about the interaction.

As I looked at her, I realised I had a lingering sense of respect for her. When I first remembered this woman, I felt obligated to her, like I had a debt to be repaid. There was not a single doubt in my mind, that if this woman hadn't been there when she was, I would have found myself in a graveyard, in a plot next to my mother and father, possibly in a coffin that settled above or below the sister I didn't remember.

"You were at the base, right? It's cool, huh!" The first real words she had spoken were completely dismissive, but the woman now had transformed into a gushing figure of peace completely ignorant to the creature behind her.

I hadn't thought about it at the time, other than its unnerving size; of which was hidden underneath the sizable acres of wood just outside the city. It nestled in a region that would give the team ample travel distance to anywhere they saw fit within the city but was hidden enough to repel public visitation. The colour palette of the building hadn't necessarily come to mind; the bright whites of the outer walls were complemented by neon blue pillars and inner walls that shone in different light sources. The technology that I'd briefly taken in was out of my own league, miles beyond what was on the market. When I left, I didn't get to glimpse at any of the rooms hidden beyond doorways, only briefly seeing a fully functioning morgue, that I'd managed to hear Darwin treated like his own child.