Teach me your secrets

Scylla questioned the purple girl and the reason for the visit soon came to light. Ava wanted to learn about taxidermy and admitted to having tried it on her own with little success. Ava then happened to look at her paws and realization dawned on her that they were built a little differently. Scylla shrugged a speckled shoulder and gave her head a shake. "Just because your paws are bigger doesn't mean that you can't learn how to do this. You just might need to work on a larger scale." It would be easier for larger paws to work on a larger creature versus working on something as small and slender as a snake or a mink.

With one paw, Scylla waved Ava over to the bench. With practiced precision, the small fae spun a blade in her odd paw and began to slice down the center of the rabbit belly. She did the same down the inside of each leg, chopping through the bones just above the paw. It was difficult to recreate a paw and there wasn't enough meat in a rabbit paw to bother with, so she just kept them on there. "So the secret with skinning is to try and place your seams where they're less likely to be seen. You don't want to slice down the middle of the back, for example." Scylla continued removing the rabbit from its skin, tossing the corpse aside and holding the fur in her paw. She then moved across the room and took the lid off of a wide container. Placing the skin fur side down in a wide wooden dish, Scylla began covering the fleshy underside in a thick layer of salt. "Salt removes all of the moisture from the hide so you can avoid rot," she explained.

With the hide under salt, Scylla then took the handle of the wooden tray between her teeth and gently pulled the tray out of cave and into the sun. "Salt the skin twice, leave it in the sun for two days. Larger skins may need to be cured for longer." Mismatched eyes rested upon the face of the purple girl. "Questions so far?"

"Scylla"