OOC: ©table code and image to jacoby: For orin
WC 441
She wedged her shoulder up against the door and helped Niro shove at the aged wood with all her might. When the rust finally cracked from the hinges and the door gave way, swinging in a wide arc, she tumbled into the darkness next to her brother. She did a somersault, and came to a stop on the ground on her side. She quickly rolled onto her stomach and stared up, wide-eyed, at the strange, twiggy thing that gaped back at Niro. “Wow!” She scrambled to her paws and was at her brother’s side in an instant.
This peculiar, unfamiliar skeleton wasn’t as alien to Orin as it had been to Niro. The majority of books she had read had been written about and by humans, and many of them had illustrations to accompany the text. It hadn’t been long before Orin was able to recognize drawings of humans – men, women, and children alike. And certainly in some of the more macabre tales she had read, there had been paintings of creeps and ghouls and skeletons too.
Her nose worked, sniffing at the bones but once again only finding the dusty scent of age and no trace of what a human may have smelled like. “It’s a human,” she informed her brother as she nudged at the ribcage and jostled the thing. She cringed and leaped as the skull rolled off of its precarious perch and clattered to the ground. “Or, well. . . it was a human. Look at how much smaller it is than we are in Optime. . . even me. I didn’t know they were that litte.”
She wanted to inspect the remains more, but was distracted by the interior of the lighthouse. Her eyes wandered as she took in the deep stone walls that had kept this little abode safe; there were broken shelves full of gear and old supplies, much of it still recognizable in its shape. Above there was no ceiling, only a winding spiral-staircase that took the occupant up into the lantern room. There was a living space off through a small hall, and she wandered towards it. She nudged the door with her muzzle and this one swung open freely. Inside, through the filtered light that came through the windows, she could make out moth-eaten furniture and the silhouette of another skeleton in the bed. She frowned, intrigued and disgusted by the bones all at once.
“There’s another one in here,” she said offhandedly to her brother as she trotted back. “Is there anything you want to keep?” And with that, the twisting stairway snagged her attention, and she began the ascent.