Let me See!

Ignita nodded curtly to Vesper and loped heavily to the study, her nose moving the door aside, her eyes darting around the room with alacrity. She looked back to Vesper briefly to see what she would do as she got closer.

A large bucket sat on top of a table. She wondered if that was how Ollie was keeping the samples. She lifted the bucket and beheld the half-withered samples of old meat, a few sticks and leaves, and some bark. She wished she had been on the other side of the woods to obtain these samples fresh.

The leaves were brittle, damaged, and spotted. They looked more like mid-fall leaves than fresh spring growth. The scent was moldy, but not anything overly offensive.

"Vesper, Do you know if he's made any progress on the cure? Has he mentioned anything about what he's discovered?" Surely as the slave of the head healer, she would be listening to his mutterings even if he didn't outright tell her.

She picked up the slab of now dried meat and it looked frighteningly familiar. There had been an influx of new meat since spring started and she thought it was from the influx of prey after a long winter. Since it was her first spring in Armada, when she had noticed it had tasted a little different as she chewed on the store's meat, she had chalked it up to a spring flavor. Could they have been bringing in blighted meat for weeks already? The increased influx from hallucinating prey that looked healthy at the time? There was a slight orange tinge to the meat, imperceptible to the unpracticed eye. She had spent hours through the winter painting and practicing cataloging colors.

She licked it.
It had the same taste.

"Speech"